Oh, the national American media.

Can't investigate massive electoral fraud.

Can't investigate the big corporations and their rape of the environment.

But oh, can they air a sensational video made by a mass murderer--thus victimizing the survivors of his massacre and the families of the victims all over again.

No, I won't post the disgraceful video Cho Seung-Hui made and the mailed while in the middle of his killing spree...but I guess my natural reticence to air something so disgusting and gruesome disqualifies me to be a member of the esteemed Fourth Estate.

The hypocrites are out in force, of course--including Curmudgette on MyLeftWing, whose sensitivity to online threats and real world violence against women apparently doesn't extend to the pain of the survivors and families of the victims.

Just kidding.

The Democrats are doing no such thing.

But I had you fooled there for a second, didn't I?

But remember, no matter how bad the Democrats are, no matter how many of your fundamental human rights they surrender (never to be reclaimed),the Republicans are always worse.

So, uh, vote Democratic...so you can have bold, decisive leadership from Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Promoted by Steven D

Cross-posted from MyLeftWing
.

The quotes in the headline are from "The Real Fox News Democrats", the top feature story in today's Salon, by Alex Koppelman--and while I don't agree with everything he wrote, Koppelman  got me thinking.

Koppelman has attacked many of the Democrats who appear on Fox--the paid commentators, the "regulars"--as belonging to one of three types:

It sounds harsh, but think of most of the Fox Democrats, at least those who appear on the opinion shows, which take up half the network's airtime, as one of three types. They are either scary liberals, losers or enablers.

Harsh, but fair and balanced.

Newsweek reports that the GOP isn't all that thrilled with its recent "success" in getting abortion outlawed in the state of South Dakota:

Why such reticence to embrace glad tidings? After all, the abortion issue has been good to the Republican Party. It has energized Roman Catholic and evangelical grass-roots activists and allowed the GOP to paint pro-choice Democrats as cultural extremists, out of step with Main Street and the heartland. But a recent flurry of activity on abortion is making Republican politicians nervous. With states moving to restrict abortion and the Supreme Court drawing closer to the day when it might actually reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion, GOP leaders see big political risks.

They may be in the awkward position of getting more than they asked for. The South Dakota law, for instance, would allow abortions only to save the life of the mother, not in cases of rape or incest. That is further than most Americans want to go. By a roughly two-to-one margin, polls show, people want to uphold the basic abortion right enshrined in Roe v. Wade, even if they approve of some restrictions, like parental notification. "I'm pro-life, but you can't wear the thing out," says Clarke Reed, the legendary architect of the GOP in Mississippi. "I'm worried about it." With reason: his own state legislature is moving in a direction similar to South Dakota's.

There's a new film out entitled "V for Vendetta", and it has right-wing (i.e., pro-fascist) film critics like Michael Medved frothing at the mouth.

The whole theme of the film, V says that blowing up buildings can change the world. Is that really a message that we should welcome right now? We`re engaged in a war on terror. There are people who are exposing their bodies and their lives to terrorists every day to try to make us safer. Hollywood has yet to make a film about the heroic role of American counterterrorist activities. And yet they`ve made several films that express sympathy and in this case treat as heroic terrorist activity.

This actually could lead young people to vandalism at best and some real terrorist incidents at worst.

...V is for venal, vicious, vapid and verminous.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11857813/ (Interview with Medved by Tucker Carlson)

Recently, MaryScott O'Connor, the founder and proprietor of "MyLeftWing", has exhorted the blogosphere to "wake the fuck up" about the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Darfur, a region in southern Sudan.  MSOC cited with approval a recent New York Times article by the neocon author Nicolas Kristof, calling for more extensive American/European intervention in Sudan's internal political situation.

Quite frankly, and with all due respect to MSOC and her obvious desire to take action in the face of a human tragedy that has claimed the lives of between 30,000 and 300,000 people and displaced perhaps two million more as refugees, I am appalled at MSOC's uncritical acceptance of Kristof's proposals, and have undertaken to rebut Kristof's proposals one by one (or rather, MSOC's summarisation of them).
ON EDIT: I CORRECTED THE FIGURES ON THE NUMBER OF DEAD IN DARFUR TO REFLECT VARYING ASSERTIONS, WITH THE LOWEST PUBLISHED FIGURE BEING 30,000 AND THE HIGHEST BEING 300,000.

The American Taliban are climbing out from underneath their rocks these past few weeks:  First,they sought to outlaw abortions in South Dakota and Mississippi, and now uberwealthy American Taliban mullah Thomas Monaghan is seeking to build an entire town based on "Catholic principles".

The town, as Monaghan describes it, would be virtually indistinguishable from a village governed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Cross-posted at MyLeftWing (http://www.boomantribune.com) and The Blogging Curmudgeon (http://thebloggingcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/)

Andrew Young continues to disgrace himself. The former champion of social justice, who has been hobnobbing with Republicans in the past decade (because hey, our Andy wants to play for the winning team, and country club memberships and chauffeured limos cost money), has now run a sale on the remnants of his soul to Wal-Mart.

Cross-posted at Booman Tribune (http://www.boomantribune.com) and The Blogging Curmudgeon (http://thebloggingcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/).

Dick Cheney is my wife's hero.

It all started with my wife's car accident last week, just a couple of days before a drunken Vice President Dick Cheney shot Harry Whittington on a hunting trip in Texas.

Annie (who is NOT a good driver) knocked over one of our neighbour's flower planters. This is how I told her to break the news:

"Ultimately, I'm the woman who was holding the steering wheel of the car that rolled its wheel over the flower planter."

Because taking responsibility is the ADULT thing to do.

Well, she wasn't going to actually tell the neighbour directly--she was going to wait a few days and then take out a small classified advertisement on page sixteen and hope that the neighbour would eventually read about it.

I know, the "Dick Cheney's got a gun" story has been done to death (pardon the pun, and I wish Mr. Harry Whittington a full and speedy recovery), but the only way to eliminate temptation is to surrender to it.

I'm a teacher and I seek out "teachable moments"--and I found in Mr. Cheney's recent Elmer Fuddian misadventures a VERY teachable moment.

More below the fold.

Jonathan Schell nails it in the latest edition of The Nation magazine (online edition):

The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war ("war of choice," in today's euphemism) on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form. Until recently, these were developing and growing in the twilight world of secrecy. Even within the executive branch itself, Bush seemed to govern outside the normally constituted channels of the Cabinet and to rely on what Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff has called a "cabal." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported the same thing. Cabinet meetings were for show. Real decisions were made elsewhere, out of sight.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060109/schell