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?