Okay, this has got to catch on.

This seems to me a potential tide-turning, Rice-resigning, chickens-home-to-roost, Republican-Party-annihilating moment. If this gets the play it deserves, it has the right elements to permanently change the valence of “Support Our Troops,” the phrase that did more to stifle dissent in the early days of the Iraq invasion than any other.

We know about fraud on the part of military contractors, but this is real proof that this administration sees its role as abetting that fraud, rather than protecting the troops.

Here is one of my favorite quotations, from Ted Hughes' "Famous Poet" (1957):

Stare at the monster: remark
How difficult it is to define just what
Amounts to monstrosity in that
Very ordinary appearance.

Yes, I'm going to play the "monstrosity" card. But I want to talk about the moment that the Clinton campaign's "very ordinary appearance" morphed into monstrosity for me. And that time was when, beginning March 3, the Clinton campaign went beyond negative campaigning and embarked on a deliberate strategy of coercion directed at the superdelegates and the leaders of the Democratic Party.

My one-man quest to follow in the footsteps of Samantha Power below the fold:

Okay, I’m not going to say that Tim Russert’s questions to Barack Obama about Louis Farrakhan are racist.  

Not directly, anyway.

Instead I’m simply going to ask you about a white religious leader who has been accused of anti-Semitism, and tell you whether primary candidates have been asked to denounce him.

You tell me in the comments whether you think there is a double standard.

In the wee hours of Superbowl Sunday, I sit here reading the freakishly partisan comments on some of the polling diaries and it makes me want to shout: “This is not a sports blog!”

In the comment zone of a sports site, you see people posting mash notes for their team, exalting in the fact that they can be completely partisan, as rude as they want to be, and profess a knowledge of the deeper realities of the sport that also happen to confirm that their team is going to annihilate the other team which will be too busy blowing goats to even score a point. Just in case I need to spell this out: Please stop writing comments as if this were a sports blog and you were just supporting your hometown team.

To drive this home, below the fold I offer “What football would look like if it worked like the Democratic Primary.” Read it and count with me the ways in which treating DKos like a sports blog is killing lady liberty.

It happens each Republican debate. Each rich Republican hopeful poses for pictures with it, a limp arm slung over the hopeful's shoulder.

Today, DailyKos has descended to a similar depth of Reagan necromania. But instead of propping it up, people are writing comments to a highly recommended diary that disparage, stomp on, and otherwise desecrate Reagan's corpse.

That's fine -- say where you stand with respect to Reagan! For me, it is a great litmus test. Anyone who lived through the 1980's and thinks it was "Morning in America" is certifiably insane in my book.

Now, let's talk about Obama.

I appreciate that everyone is looking for the holy grail of the campaign gaffe, but, people! There are comments to a recommended diary about Obama's remark on Reagan with 50 recommends that basically pound on Reagan's corpse and then say "See, Obama?"

The partisanship has been bad here for a while. IMHO it has reached its nadir in the last few days. With three frontrunners, we have a decision to make as a community. If we continue to go negative, then each candidate will be savaged in two thirds of the diaries posted.

Result: All the groundless accusations, tendentious distinctions, and false parsings the Republican nominee needs will be laid out for them on a platter. And the label they will put in each one will be: “Even the liberal Daily Kos said that. . .”

My solution: Go negative if you must.

But kick John McCain first.

There have been numerous diaries about the disparity between Obama’s poll victory and his loss in the actual election. People are still talking about a “Bradley Effect,” and Thomas Edsall’s recent piece on Huffpo revisits it as an explanation for the disparity between polls and votes cast for Obama in New Hampshire.

Why beat this dead piñata? Because we’re heading into new primaries with new polling, and also because I keep seeing a dominant obviously false argument being made about this and am tired of it. But I also want to ask: how can we test to see if the Bradley hypothesis is true in future races?

In a turn of events that seemed inevitable to many of us years ago, but is sure to cause all sorts of Neo-Con agitation, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak Al-Rubaie has declared that Iraq will not accept a permanent American military presence. The official goals of the invasion were debunked a long time ago, but now Cheney must be realizing that even his secret goals are not going to be achieved. One part of the story I really liked was how it says that “That message was delivered directly to Vice President Dick Cheney at the White House.” Eliminate the middleman, and all that.

Below the fold is how I imagine a brief conversation would go between Al-Rubaie, a neurologist by training, and Vice-President Cheney.

The denominationally-confused Reverend Cavendish has just published his latest Sunday Sermon, and it reveals that while railing against gluttony in public, he issued a secret opinion that supported gluttons. He says that he has always been against gluttony, and that he was merely clarifying what constituted gluttony.

The denominationally-confused Reverend Cavendish has just published his latest Sunday Sermon, and it is true to form:

Do you people even know what the Feast of All Hallows is? It is celebration of the saints, of all the saints who couldn’t have their own day! It is sort of like President’s Day, a generic day to remember martyrs for Christ! And today, the number of martyrs is growing astronomically. So, while putting pagan symbols on your lawn is blasphemous at any time of the year, it is doubly insulting to God on All Hallows Eve! So we need to recapture the spirit of the original holiday, before the forces of materialism and secularism ruin it.

His proposal is chilling:

Background: There have been several good diaries about the contempt for the Constitution and the bankruptcy of vision that the search for “War Czar” demonstrates. To say nothing of the fact that the “Commander-in-Chief” (or “Commaderish Chief” as Stephen Colbert put it) seems to duplicate the War Czar’s functions. Me, I’m wondering if this isn’t Karl Rove’s attempt to short circuit the pathetic Republican primary field and build up a military alternative to Giuliani and company. Well, I was thinking about this as I ran across a post by Ken from Ken’s Kitchen at Imissfaf, when it came to me.

In this diary I share my revelation with you.

The perfect Rovian choice for War Czar.

Bob Mugabe.

(Four strong reasons why Bob’s the man for the job below the fold)

This is a diary about Barack Obama’s stance on the Iraq War in November 2002. Since I first saw an interview he did at that time on Josh Marshall (then diaried here by Bobeltrash and jg82567), I’ve noticed some people have called it “obvious,” said that it “sounds like a hedge bet” or that “anyone with a brain and a heart arrived at the same conclusions.”

I remember November 2002, and I don’t think that very many politicians actually said what Barack Obama did. Below I let you compare some of what people were saying in November 2002 to what Obama says in that interview. I don’t think it was “obvious” at all – and I feel its prescience really deserves to be recognized as such. Please note I’m not an Obama supporter (yet) but this really does seem significant to me.

Today's article by Bob Woodward about Gerald Ford's reasonable but "embargoed" objections to Bush's foreign policy made me wonder how exactly we know that our news is not being censored. I mean, we're not North Korea, we have the internet, blah blah blah, BUT you don't have to paying very close attention to realize the effect that media concentration and private financing of elections have had on the information we get (or you can simply read Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber). If a former president feels he has to censor himself, and reporters go along with this even as major decisions about war and peace are being debated, it seems as if something is afoot.

But this leads to a conundrum. Given that we don't have real information, how do we know when we are sliding into a propaganda state? Below the fold, I have a thought experiment and a question: let's say that the Constitution has had the following two amendments secretly added to it. How would we know?

I got an email today that seems to me another nail in the coffin of the right's claim to be the Family Values party. Here is the opening:

Dear Mark,
Former Congressman Gerry Studds of Massachusetts died last week. Here is the account of his death as reported by Associated Press.
"Studds died at Boston Medical Center several days after he collapsed while walking his dog, his husband said."
On November 7, voters in Wisconsin will go to the polls to vote on a constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage. If the constitutional amendment is defeated, your children will grow up being taught to use "his husband" or "her wife."

I'm sure that these dangerous pronouns will usher in the end of civilization.

In Friday's Rose Garden press conference, President Bush provided an answer to a question that was a perfect summation of something that a number of people here have been talking about for a long time: George W. Bush's cynical squandering of any legacy we had of being a decent and moral country. This is a modest diary, in that it looks closely at the anatomy of his answer to a single question from AP correspondent Terence Hunt, but I think it is worth documenting what is really a perfect symbol of the damage this administration is doing to each and every one of us. My weekdays are spent teaching ethics, and I honestly think his answer gives us a glimpse into a completely amoral worldview.

There is a specter haunting the United States, and it is the specter of totalitarianism.

Or so a modern day Marx might have begun a manifesto written in the last twenty-four hours. Because Marx or any student of social theory today would know that terms like fascism and totalitarianism mean something, and that the powers of a corporatized unitary executive fit many of their connotations.

Yet our president has been applying these terms to OTHER areas of the world in ways that should make even a High School social studies student blush. It is easy to say he just doesn't understand the meanings of these terms. Hogwash. I will argue in this diary that reading recent comments carefully, he is invoking the rhetorical ghosts of World War II and the Cold War with a specific purpose in mind: demonizing Islam in preparation for an attack on Iran.

This is a diary about media coverage. I started thinking about this when I had to open up my local paper to page three to find out there had been an earthquake that killed many thousands in Indonesia.

That experience made me think about the way that the media covers the deaths of non-Americans. My method was simple, and hardly foolproof - I used LexisNexis to look into the coverage of two recent stories.

If the White House Press Secretary shows contempt for the press corps, what should the media do?

I have a solution.

My solution comes from Aristophanes, who put the following words into the mouth of Lysistrata in the 5th century B.C.E. (Rogers' translation):

For if we women will but sit at home,
Powdered and trimmed, clad in our daintiest lawn,
Employing all our charms, and all our arts
To win men's love, and when we've won it, then
Repel them, firmly, till they end the war,
We'll soon get Peace again, be sure of that.

In other words, the national press corps had better stop giving the White House any action if they want anything to change.

Below the fold, I'll try and show three things:

1. The White House and the press corps have an implicit contract: automatic coverage of White House spin in exchange for information
   
2. The White House has broken that contract by embargoing information
   
3. The only way the press corps can remedy this is to withold its favors: stop printing White House spin as if was automatically news