Bob Herbert Took Over Morning Joe this Morning
August 4, 2008 9:26 pm

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Barack: GOP takes "pride in being ignorant"
August 5, 2008 4:01 pm

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Paris Hilton Responds to Old Guy
August 6, 2008 5:18 pm

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Lynching Advocate Toby Keith: Obama "Talks, Acts, And Carries Himself As A Caucasian
August 6, 2008 5:32 pm

Max Blumenthal

Last week, I reported for the Huffington Post that country singer Toby Keith had performed a pro-lynching anthem on the Colbert Report, and would be playing the same song soon on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a slew of nationally televised talk shows.

The lyrics of Keith's song, "Beer For My Horses," which I transcribed, could hardly be less explicit -- "Hang 'em high, for all the people to see." In my piece, I also noted the racially tinged nature of the song's video and the forthcoming movie that Keith's song inspired.....

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How Washington's Right-Wing Wrecking Crew Robbed Us Blind
August 6, 2008 5:59 pm

By Thomas Frank

....It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.....

....Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

....When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulch millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.....

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Wal-Mart's Attempt to Kill Employee Choice Backfires
August 6, 2008 6:16 pm

It's delicious that they [Wal-Mart] show exactly why the Employee Free Choice Act is so needed. The mechanism of intimidation an employer has over an employee is so powerful that running a union election has become incredibly difficult, almost impossible.

When your employer can have a mandatory meeting and sit you down in a room for hours on end showing anti-union propaganda or telling you who they think you should vote for. And you have to listen to them because you can’t walk out of that room and not get fired. Those are precisely the conditions the Employee Free Choice Act is designed to remedy.

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The Forged Iraqi Letter: What Just Happened?
August 6, 2008 9:42 pm

Ron Suskind

What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization." ......

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The Gorilla for the Next President to Deal With
August 7, 2008 6:31 pm

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Obama "Too Fit" to Win
August 9, 2008 5:22 pm

Media Matters; by Jamison Foser

The eagerness with which the media have spread some truly bizarre criticisms of Obama confirms this theory. Just think about some of the things Obama has seen the media portray as weaknesses. He's too popular and respected. He's too well-educated. His great speeches are attended by many enthusiastic people -- just like Hitler! He's too fit.

Yes: The Wall Street Journal would have you believe that Barack Obama faces an uphill electoral climb because he may be "Too Fit to Be President." Journal reporter Amy Chozick devoted more than 1,300 words to exploring this pressing topic.....

.....Chozick apparently had some trouble finding people to support the crackpot premise that Obama's physical fitness might cause voters to question his fitness for office, so she turned to trolling Internet message boards in desperate search of someone -- anyone -- she could quote. As the blog Sadly, No! revealed, Chozick posted a Yahoo! Message Board thread on July 15, asking, "Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his 'no excess body fat'? Please let me know. Thanks!"

About three-and-a-half hours later, Chozick got her first response -- a post ridiculing her for her focus on "totally meaningless drivel." Nearly an hour after that, Chozick finally got the response she was looking for. A user posting under the name "onlinebeerbellygirl" wrote, "Yes I think He [sic] is to [sic] skinny to be President. ... I won't vote for any beanpole guy." Chozick quoted the post in her article -- one of only two quotes agreeing with the premise of the article. She did not, however, disclose that the quote had come only after she started a thread encouraging people to make such comments. After she got caught, the Journal acknowledged: "The article should have disclosed that the reporter used the bulletin board to elicit the comment."

There may be more to it than that. A post in a subsequent Yahoo! Message Board discussion thread devoted to Chozick's article noted that "[n]either Chozick nor 'onlinebeerbellygirl' has made any other posts on Yahoo before or since, and both profiles appear to have been created on 7/15, the day Chozick started the topics. It certainly looks like Amy Chozick constructed the whole thing."

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