The British equivalent of the RIAA is having a fit, largely because copyright law is working as intended — meaning Elvis’ “That’s All Right” is about to pass into the public domain (in January, 2005) after a reasonable period of exclusive copyright (fifty years). They’d like very much for this not to happen, just as Disney has managed to keep Mickey locked up with well-timed copyright extensions for years. Read this for more about why this is bad.

Or something. As you must be aware by now, over the weekend it looks like they burned another covert operative by being either careless or incompetant (it doesn’t look like there’s a revenge angle on this one). Bill Clinton made a great point (on Letterman last week) about the difficulties of gathering human intelligence in the Arab world when you’ve spend the previous 50 years trying to perfect the art of blending in behind the Iron Curtain, but surely we can do better than this.

On the other hand, perhaps this could be the problem.

Had Sen. Shelby had his way during the Clinton years, he’d now be looking at a felony charge and jail time.

Fafblog on recent Iraqi events, including the bizarre tail of an Oregon National Guard unit who found some Iraqi prisoners being “freedom tickled” by their newly-sovereign captors, intervened, and were told by their commander to “return the prisoners to their abusers and immediately withdraw.”

This, children, is how we spread freedom and democracy.

Or, they didn’t until recently. GOP backer, Washington Times owner, and cult leader Sun Yung Moon has sold his ex-soviet submarines to Kim Jong-Il. Freaking out yet?

I’ve been sitting on this link for days trying to find a way to explain it without going apoplectic, but I’m not sure there is one. Fafblog handles some commentary in their own inimitable way, of course, but I’d really love for someone to explain how this administration can appose the proliferation of WMDs so vehemently — hey, we went to WAR on the SUSPICIAN that Saddam had ’em — and yet also oppose the use of weapons inspectors, insisting verificationw as too expensive, too intrustive, and couldn’t guarantee compliance:

Administration officials declined to explain in detail how they believed U.S. security would be harmed by creating a plan to monitor the treaty. Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. Seattle Times

The Illinois GOP have selected Alan Keyes as their whipping boy, er, candidate to run against Barack Obama. As noted yesterday, Keyes does not now, nor has he ever, lived in Illinois; we don’t have a problem with this ourselves, but some people do:

I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness to go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there. So I certainly wouldn’t imitate it.

Know who said that? Yup: ALAN KEYES (Fox News, March 17, 2000; Chicago Trib story cites this here, use ih8logins/ih8logins to access). This should be fun to watch, in a taunting-the-afflicted sort of way. Josh Marshall has a fun post on the subject today as well. I’m still at a loss to figure out what, exactly, the Illinois GOP think they’re going to accomplish.

The GOP is going all-out with their “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” group whose central message is that Kerry somehow fudged his service record and, by inference, those troublesome decorations. Trouble is, none of these guys actually served WITH Kerry (NYT link sure to rot). In a cite sure to irritate Edgar, MediaMatters has actual citations of their somewhat troublesome relationship with the truth. Joe Conason in Salon has more on the subject from a May editorial.

On the other hand, the men who stood with Kerry at the convention represented 9 of the 10 surviving members of his two boats, a fact noted in the Wall Street Journal, of all places (here, but paid subscription required).

The really bizarre point here is, however, that the GOP is working to say Kerry’s war record isn’t all that, when you’d think they’d be avoiding this issue like the plague, given Dubya’s “service” in Alabama.

This year’s seen the debut of perhaps the funniest reality show yet, something we here at Heathen are calling “Who Wants To Be Obama’s Bitch,” but which the GOP calls “find a candidate to replace Jack Ryan who didn’t try to fuck anyone in public.”

They’re down to two candidates, having gotten “no” from such political luminaries as Mike Ditka. Bachelor number one is Alan Keyes, who’s never actually, you know, lived in Illinois (be not vexed; he can move there by election day and everything’s kosher); bachelor number two is Andrea Barthwell, who has a few interesting items on her resume.

During her brief stint at the drug czar’s office one of her most noteworthy accomplishments seems to have been getting written up in a “hostile workplace memorandum” for “lewd and abusive behavior.” Talking Points Memo

The winner of this little contest gets to spend acres of cash to try and catch Democratic wunderkind and apparent real-deal Barack Obama, who has $10MM in the bank and was leading pretty-boy candidate Jack Ryan by a substantial margin before Ryan withdrew under RNC pressure. I suppose it would be too straightforward for them simply to cede the seat, but does anyone really think Obama can be beaten in November?

Federal investigators have identified Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby as the source of a leak of classified information — that showed up on CNN. Way to go, Dick!

We’re sure this will get just as much play as the Berger story, natch.

Check out Billmon’s summary of the Halliburton investigation, and then try to convince yourself Cheney isn’t in it up to his beady little eyeballs.

(Josh Marshall has more.)

1. Insist that, though you can’t be specific because it’s, you know, all secret and all, the Bush administration has prevented more than a hundred attacks against the US since 9/11.
2. Get all cagey when officials in DC — and in one of the states you say has been protected — express dismay at your bizarre pronouncements.
3. Finally, when called on it from all sides “express regret” without actually withdrawing anything.

Way to go, Harris! Now, if you could just master makeup in such a way that you no longer resembled a cross between a demented clown, Tammy Fay, and a hooker, well, you’d be on to something.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m Mister Fucking Pink, okay? Just take your picture and move on.” (Via Mike, but not from his blog.)

Fafblog on the Orange Alert.

Department of Justice attorney David Israelite told BusinessWeek that music “priacy” constitutes a national security risk. Oh boy.

While the mediascape was all atitter over the possibility that Clinton Adminstration National Security Adviser Sandy Berger took or destroyed some classified documents, no one appears to be in a hurry to point out that he’s been completely cleared of any wrongdoing.

Yesterday, we were accused of being overly cynical when we opined that we thought the new “terror alert” had much more to do with politics — and with Bush’s troublesome poll numbers — than with any real intelligence suggesting any increased danger in the northeast.

This morning, it’s widely reported that the information underlying this alert is primarily from before 9/11.

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terror plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

Fuck.

Think we live in a free market society? Think again.

1. Bush camp insists on knowing race of Arizona Star photographer assigned to cover Cheney’s appearance at a Pima Country rally. Charming.
2. Rumors — from more than one source, apparently — have Jerry Falwell giving the opening prayer at the Convention. In case you’ve forgotten, Patriot Boy gives us a list of some of his better quotes.

Stewart hosted a coffee for journalists at the convention. Then he let them have it:

Stewart, host of The Daily Show on cable’s Comedy Central, invited reporters for coffee Monday at the start of the Democratic convention. It was billed as an early morning yuk-fest, but it wasn’t all that funny. At least not for the reporters, who were the subject of his monologue. In a poll this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 21% of viewers ages 18 to 29 named The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live as places where they get news about the presidential campaign. Does it bother Stewart that so many potential voters are relying on a joke show for information? “I’m concerned about the incredible number of people who say they get the news from you guys,” Stewart shot back. Sensitive scribes scowled. The tightly wrapped comic’s harangue included a blast at the media’s “absolute acceptance of being stage-managed” and an attack on Washington as a city of “absolute self-delusion and arrogance.” When Howard Kurtz, who covers the news media for The Washington Post and CNN, protested, Stewart stopped him with, “Your network is silly.” Stewart blames boring coverage for low voter turnout. “We have wrung every ounce of inspiration out of the process because we are parsing strategy,” he said. He wouldn’t say how often he votes or whether he’s registered with a party. In the end, Stewart apologized for his own vehemence. He said that’s the way he and his staff begin the mornings when they are writing their show. “We spend our day trying to take the anger down and trying to turn up the volume of the humor.” USA Today/Kathy Kiely

Finally, someone slaps these lazy fucks around and tells them to do their job. It’ll do no good, but at least it’s been said.

Larry Lessig takes Bill O’Reilly to task in this open letter pointing out O’Reilly’s difficult relationship with what most people think of as “truth.”

The Bush administration has moved to block lawsuits by consumers against drug makers when those drugs were approved by the FDA. This must be what they mean by “tort reform:” elminating the ability of wronged parties to sue for damages. We’re pretty sure this is a bad idea, but we must admit that the sheer balls involved in doing YET ANOTHER favor for Big Pharma after the Medicare drug bill is probably worthy of note. Or something.

As we get closer to November, expect the controversy surrounding electronic voting to intensify, particularly with stories like this one from Riverside, CA to fuel the fire, to say nothing of the ongoing controversy from our brother Jeb’s sunshine state, where a rule preventing manual recounts is being challenged.

Last night, Illinois state senator and US Senatorial candidate Barack Obama delivered a rousing keynote at the Democratic National Convention. He’s a serious rising political star, and appears to be the real deal. The New Yorker did a profile on Obama back in May which is well worth your time. In the meantime, here’s a bit of the speech:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

We’ve been busy this week, and at night we’re busy watching the DNC speeches, which have been pretty damned fine (where was THAT Al Gore 4 years ago?). President Carter came out swinging, which is great — what’s the GOP going to respond with? “Uh, that Nobel-prize-winning guy who founded Habitat for Humanity? Completely full of shit!” Right.

One of our favorite moments came during President Clinton’s speech:

For the first time ever when America was on a war footing, there were two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top one percent. I’m in that group now for the first time in my life. When I was in office, the Republicans were pretty mean to me. [Laughter] When I left and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. At first I thought I should send them a thank you note — until I realized they were sending you the bill. They protected my tax cuts while:

• Withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving over 2 million children behind
• Cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of job training
• 100,000 working families out of child care assistance
• 300,000 poor children out of after school programs
• Raising out of pocket healthcare costs to veterans
• Weakening or reversing important environmental advances for clean air and the preservation of our forests.

Everyone had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans, who wanted to do their part but were asked only to expend the energy necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts. If you agree with these choices, you should vote to return them to the White House and Congress. If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats. Quoted at Slacktivist

If it weren’t for term limits, this man would still be president.

Atrios’ proxy gave us the heads-up on this letter written by Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill to her Bush/Cheney counterpart Ken Mehlman, apparently partially in response to GOP whining about the recent NYC Kerry/Edwards fundraiser.

Dear Ken: Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry’s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers. Considering that the President has failed to even come close to keeping his promise to change the tone in Washington, we find your outrage over and paparazzi-like obsession with a fund-raising event to be misplaced. The fact is that the nation has a greater interest in seeing several documents made public relating to the President’s performance in office and personal veracity that the White House has steadfastly refused to release. As such, we will not consider your request until the Bush campaign and White House make public the documents/materials listed below:

• Military records: Any copies of the President’s military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service. For that matter, it would be comforting to the American people if the campaign or the White House could produce more than just a single person to verify that the President was in Alabama when said he was there. Many Americans find it odd that only one person out of an entire squadron can recall seeing Mr. Bush.
• Halliburton: All correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to the Vice-President’s former company. Some material has already been made public. Why not take a campaign issue off the table by making all of these materials public so the voters can see how Halliburton has benefited from Mr. Cheney serving as Vice-President?
• The Cheney Energy Task Force: For an Administration that claims to hate lawsuits, it’s ironic that the Bush White House is taking up the Courts’ time to keep the fact that Ken Lay and Enron wrote its energy policy in secret behind closed doors. Please release the documents so that the country can learn what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy.
• Medicare Bill: Please release all White House correspondence between the pharmaceutical industry and the Administration regarding the Medicare Bill, which gave billions to some of the President’s biggest donors. In addition, please provide all written materials that directed the Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress about the actual cost of the bill.
• Prison Abuse Documents: A few weeks ago, the White House released a selected number of documents regarding the White House’s involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq. Please release the remaining documents.

We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration. In light of the fact that the Administration began gutting the laws protecting the nation’s forests yesterday, we hope you will accept the paper on which this letter is written as an anniversary gift. (The one year anniversary is known as the “paper anniversary.”) Sincerely,
Mary Beth Cahill
Campaign Manager

The ACLU has a lovely and funny little animation about the dangers of surveillance nation. Pizza, anyone?

Once again, Slacktivist posts a winner. This time around, it’s all about Leviticus, the Old Testament book that Fundies tend to use to justify their homophobia. Of course, they conveniently overlook all the other prohibitions of Leviticus, such as — and I’m not kidding — eating shellfish. Why is this?

Fred explains, but the bullet is this: in Acts — an epistolary book after the Gospels in the New Testament — there’s an oft-quoted story about Peter getting a vision wherein God shows him that all food is okay. It’s no surprise that Fundies take this on its face and gleefully eat ham, lobster, etc., while conveniently missing the story’s greater context and message. I’m paraphrasing here, so go read the post.

Turns out, this year’s Florida felon list — the one that took a lawsuit to disclose — has some pretty suspicious problems, too. Check it out.

Adam Felber points out the inherent contradiction in the Administration’s message(s).

Murdoch’s New York Post ran an editorial on 12 July insisting that there is no evidence anyone was actually disenfranchised in Florida in 2000 as a result of the overbroad felon list. MediaMatters.org shows this to be a lie.

We like Mykeru.com a lot. This time, he provides a bit of commentary on Bush’s snub of the NAACP:

Bush to NAACP: Fuck you, porch monkeys
Yeah, you think that’s a little bit hyperbolic? Maybe you think the choice of language conflates between Bush and Cheney, which is easy to do if you’re the sort of person who always got Shari Lewis and Lambchop mixed up. But for a president who claims again and again that he’s a uniter, not a divider, despite loads of evidence to the contrary and the dead bodies to prove it, Bush’s reaction to the NAACP, where he is content to be the first president in 70 years to fail to address this, the country’s largest and most august civil right’s organization, is puzzling.

There is, of course, more.

They’ve been sued in California under a whistleblower statute.

One of the plaintiffs? Bev Harris. We love her.

Fred Clark does it again. We like the way he thinks.

It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife. Cornyn, advocating a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in a speech Thursday to the Heritage Foundation.

Via the Washington Post.

Homeland Security officials are looking into ways they can postpone the November election in the event of a terrorist attack on or near Election Day. (More coverage at Yahoo.)

Specifically, they have requested that such emergency power be granted to the newly created U. S. Election Assistance Commission, chaired by New Jersey preacher DeForest B. Soaries, Jr. More analysis at Agonist and Atrios, both of whom sum it up nicely. The biggest point is this, from Agonist, who first quotes Newsweek’s coverage: quoting and then commenting on Newsweek’s coverage:

The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a major factor behind last week’s terror warning by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Ridge and other counterterrorism officials concede they have no intel about any specific plots. But the success of March’s Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections–as well as intercepted “chatter” among Qaeda operatives–has led analysts to conclude “they want to interfere with the elections,” says one official.Newsweek

And then says

They’re gnashing their teeth over the “success” of the Madrid Bombings in influencing the elections. You bet they are. However, nowhere does Newsweek mention, that with all these warnings, they haven’t raised the threat level. Hmmmm . . . Makes you wonder: you think they might be a bit worried about their poll numbers?Agonist

This sort of thing reminds me of what Teresa Nielsen Hayden had to say (her line is the first comment, but read the entry, too) a while back: “I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.” Pay attention. The democracy you save may be your own.

Not of the GOP can help it. Paul Krugman compares the candidates on health care, as an example, and comes to this conclusion:

The Kerry campaign contends that it can pay for its health care plan by rolling back only the cuts for taxpayers with incomes above $200,000. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which has become the best source for tax analysis now that the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy has become a propaganda agency, more or less agrees: it estimates the revenue gain from the Kerry tax plan at $631 billion over the next decade. What are the objections to the Kerry plan? One is that it falls far short of the comprehensive overhaul our health care system really needs. Another is that by devoting the proceeds of a tax-cut rollback to health care, Mr. Kerry fails to offer a plan to reduce the budget deficit. But on both counts Mr. Bush is equally, if not more, vulnerable. And Mr. Kerry’s plan would help far more people than it would hurt. If we ever get a clear national debate about health care and taxes, I don’t see how President Bush will win it.

Some right-wingers up north have decided to market republican ketchup — and hey, why not; it is, after all, a vegetable thanks to Reagan — as an alternative to Heinz, which they view as “unpatriotic” due to its tenuous connection to Kerry’s campaign (his wife’s family holds only about 4% of the Heinz food company at this point, and has no management role at all).

Yeah, that’s it: to these people, supporting a Democrat is unpatriotic. Rove must love it when people are this stupid.

The next President could appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices. If you enjoy the implications of, say, Griswold, or you’re concerned about the degree to which copyright law is gaining power, well, you know what to do.

Microsoft is selling a DRM’d proprietary version of the US Constitution. For $2.99, you can download it; the license agreement prohibits printing it, and explicitly limit you to making two copies a year. (More here and here.)

Wacky, huh? Sure, this is pretty benign; the Constitution is widely available in a variety of forms, and free and un-DRM’d digital copies are, well, free. There are, however, interesting implications here; Groklaw has more analysis.

Pete McCloskey knows a thing or two about patriotism, having served in Korea and as a Republican member of ongress. Read what he has to say about it, about freedom, and about what’s really important.

The truth of the matter is that patriotism requires supporting the troops, but not necessarily supporting the foreign policy that sends them to Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan or Iraq. Patriotism is simply the willingness to fight, and if necessary die, for a cause reasonably believed to be in the nation’s interest. That is the patriotism July Fourth reminds us to honor. The word “patriot” is too precious to allow it to be used by the thundering rhetoric of politicians that patriotism requires not only “supporting the troops” but also supporting the foreign policy that puts them at risk.

It gets better.

Ironically, the politicians who most eagerly use the term “unpatriotic” have often declined to take the risks taken by Nathan Hale and the signers of the Declaration of Independence: facing hostile rifle and artillery fire, or worse, being hanged. Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay and George W. Bush somehow never chose to face machine-gun or artillery fire during the wars of their own youth. As patriotism justifies honor, it also requires honor on the part of those who would claim it.

Word.

J. Bradford Delong goes to town on a truly bizarre complaint by Nicholas Kristof (that we ought not call the President a liar). Read and enjoy.

(He also links to a great post by Tim Dunlop including “a handy list of what is important and what isn’t.”)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta quietly published new regulations concerning what Federally-funded organizations doing HIV-prevention work may say and do, and the rules run counter to virtually everything known about preventing AIDS. This LA Weekly article has more:

These new regs require the censoring of any “content” — including “pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula,” “audiovisual materials” and “pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings),” as well as “advertising” and Web-based info. They require all such “content” to eliminate anything even vaguely “sexually suggestive” or “obscene” — like teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they demand that all such materials include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs — in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don’t work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body’s judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus. Moreover, the CDC will now take the decisions on which AIDS-fighting educational materials actually work away from those on the frontlines of the combat against the epidemic, and hand them over to political appointees. […] This means that, under the new regs, political appointees will have a veto and be able to ban anything in those educational materials they deem “obscene” or lacking in anti-condom propaganda.

Perhaps, in his haste to emulate Reagan, Bush is attempting to ensure AIDS is once again the health crisis it was when the Gipper shuffled out of office. Yes, that’s inflammatory, but in cases like this, what are we to think? It gets worse:

Under the new regs, it will be impossible even to track the spread of unsafe sexual practices — because the CDC’s politically inspired censorship includes “questionnaires and survey materials” and thus would forbid asking people if they engage in specific sexual acts without protection against HIV. For that too would be “obscene.” (Questions about gay kids have already disappeared from the CDC’s national Youth Risk Survey after Christian-right pressure).

So: No condom message, and also no information gathering for public health purposes. I’m sure this is going to work out just fine. It’s not as those there’s not already ample science behind the efficacy of condoms in the face of HIV, and never mind what a bunch of virgin priests want you to think.

READ THIS ARTICLE. The agenda of this Administration is absolutely contrary to all good epidemiological science where HIV/AIDS is concerned, and they’re doing their very best to make sure all the good science gets quashed. The human cost doesn’t matter to these people; all they’re concerned about is ideological purity.

There’s a fax number and an email address at the end of the article. These new regs are in a period of public comment; let them know how wrong this is, and that it’s time to stop letting the Christian Right determine science policy. Let them hear you now, and make sure you let them hear you in November.

More: This October 2003 Salon story covers the trevails of Advocates for Youth, a national nonprofit that provides comprehensive sex education information. AfY was audited three times in a year by the Bush administration; they contend the reason is that they’re openly contemptuous of abstinence-only programs. AfY is not alone. Again, we have an administration here that is using ideology to try and trump science. Check your history books for what happens when leaders try this particular plan.

Somebody’s a little pissed off at Chris Hitchens’ little Moore-slamming bit. Actually, he’s pissed off at what passes for journalism these days, and Hitchens is just the most recent and most egregious example.

Get Your War On addresses Iraqi sovereignty, two days early. God love ’em.

Cheney booed at Yankee game. Maybe he should have just told the crowd to “go fuck yourself.”

According to the LA Times (registration required; see below):

The Bush administration has ordered that government scientists must be approved by a senior political appointee before they can participate in meetings convened by the World Health Organization, the leading international health and science agency. A top official from the Health and Human Services Department in April asked the WHO to begin routing requests for participation in its meetings to the department’s secretary for review, rather than directly invite individual scientists, as has long been the case.

So far, WHO has refused to play along, saying it could compromise scientific independence. One scientist, Dr. D. A. Henderson, said he could not recall ever needing to go through such a step in 11 years working for WHO, except in the cases of some “small, Eastern European countries.” For their part, the Administration says the WHO’s longstanding policy has “not always resulted in the most appropriate selections;” presumably, we should trust politicians for that selection over the scientific community.

As for registration, use BugMeNot.com, which will give you a username of “registrationsuxxx” and a password of “regsux” for the LA Times. They’ve got logins for everywhere. The Heathen love BugMeNot.

Irish RTE correspondent Carole Coleman submitted her questions three days in advance, and then got this interview. Bush faired predictably poorly, as you can see (8mb Real file).

The White House responded to this interview by lodging a complaint with the Irish embassy over Coleman’s “rudeness,” which in this case means “actually being a reporter who tries to get actual answers instead of the pablum US officials are used to providing.” RTE (Coleman’s employer) stands by their reporter.

At one point, we had real journalists who asked hard questions of officials in our country. Apparently, they’ve all moved to Ireland.

(More commentary at Madison’s Capital Times as well as at lies.com.)

Two items:

1. Illinois pretty boy and GOP senatorial candiate Jack “Not the Tom Clancy One” Ryan has had a bad week, as a media lawsuit to open his divorce record released statements from his ex-wife, Jeri “7 of 9” Ryan, complaining that he’d taken her to sex clubs in New York, New Orleans, and Paris and pressured her to “perform” with him in front of other people. We’re all about getting our freak on here at Heathen, but we’re also pretty sure the platform Ryan supports doesn’t include doing so in sex clubs. The only way this story would be better would be if he’d pulled these stunts at Trekkie conventions.
2. Watch for Cheney’s poeple to spin this one like mad, but yesterday on the Senate floor our esteemed Veep suggested to Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont that he should “fuck himself” after Leahy took Cheney to task for war profiteering through Halliburton and for calling Leahy a “bad Catholic” for maintaining a pro-Choice position. Classy move, Dick, and yet another example of the fine Family Values exemplified by the GOP.

The GOP is seeking to quash Chris Bell’s ethics complaints against Tom DeLay on a technicality rather than, say, judging them on their merits. DeLay is under criminal investigation in Austin as well; I wonder if they can quash that, too?