" Just the Facts Mam " Dragnet

Don't confuse me with facts, my minds made up!
Todays Quote

..our administration believed that, one, it was important for people to know the facts as we see them. - George W. Bush
And there, in a nutshell, is the presidency of George W. Bush. There are facts, and then there are the facts.
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* Bush only learned about the NIE’s contents last week? Um, no: “[O]ne highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: ‘This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.’”
* On a related note, Robert Farley raises a good point: “For the last two years, we have justified putting a missile defense system in Eastern Europe explicitly around the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. In addition to the extraordinary financial costs, this project has resulted in increased Russian hostility to the United States and to Russia’s neighbors.”
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Israel Wants to Keep The Heat ON Iran

* The U.S. intelligence community is convinced, but Israeli intelligence officials are not: “Israeli officials, who’ve been warning that Iran would soon pose a nuclear threat to the world, reacted angrily Tuesday to a new U.S. intelligence finding that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons development program in 2003 and to date hasn’t resumed trying to produce nuclear weapons…. “It seems Iran in 2003 halted for a certain period of time its military nuclear program, but as far as we know, it has probably since revived it,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said.
______________________________________Doubletalk on war and peace is deadly serious. Yet Senator Clinton continues her doubletalk on Iran. Just yesterday, in an attack on Barack Obama, she claimed she was for "agressive diplomacy!"
"When it comes to Iran, I took a stand for aggressive diplomacy. One of my opponents made a different choice: He didn’t show up for the vote. He didn’t speak out during a presidential debate that night. And finally, he decided to play politics and claim that the vote he missed – a vote for diplomacy – was really a vote for war. Well if he really thought it was a rush to war, why did he rush to campaign and miss the vote.
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Why conservatives oppose universal healthcare
Posted December 3rd, 2007 at 11:10 am
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In a recent issue of National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry explained how Republicans can avert electoral disaster and get back on track. Conservative writers offer advice columns like these periodically, but this one included a concession we usually don’t see in print.
The plain truth is that the [Republican] party faces a cataclysm, a rout that would give Democrats control of the White House and enhanced majorities in the House and the Senate. That defeat would, in turn, guarantee the confirmation of a couple of young, liberal Supreme Court nominees, putting the goal of moving the Court in a more constitutionalist direction out of reach for another generation. It would probably also mean a national health-insurance program that would irrevocably expand government involvement in the economy and American life, and itself make voters less likely to turn toward conservatism in the future. (emphasis added)
This apparently, is the principal fear. Not just that Democrats will win, but also that they’ll implement a policy agenda. And it’s not just that the agenda is liberal, it’s that the agenda will discourage Americans from embracing a conservative agenda in the future.
Paul Krugman, responding to the Ponnuru/Lowry piece, noted:
I think that sentence contains a grim truth for progressives: the right will fight any health reform tooth and nail. They believe — and so do I — that the implications of universal coverage would extend far beyond health care, that it would revitalize the New Deal idea. And so they’ll do anything to stop it.
This isn’t an entirely new point, but it’s worth rehashing once in a while: the right will resist universal healthcare with all its might because, as a matter of electoral strategy, conservatives don’t have a choice.
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Media and Class Warfare

Below is an original submission from National AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff in light of nationwide protests taking place targeting the National Labor Relations Board for your consideration for publication. Please call with any questions, by contacting Bernard Pollack at 202-321-2025. In solidarity, Bernie, Nat. AFL-CIO.
A few decades ago, upwards of one-third of the American workforce was unionized. Now the figure is down around 10 percent. And news media are central to the downward spiral.
As unions wither, the journalistic establishment has a rationale for giving them less ink and air time. As the media coverage diminishes, fewer Americans find much reason to believe that unions are relevant to their working lives.
But the media problem for labor goes far beyond the fading of unions from newsprint, television and radio. Media outlets aren't just giving short shrift to organized labor. The avoidance extends to unorganized labor, too.
So often, when issues of workplaces and livelihoods appear in the news, they're framed in terms of employer plights. The frequent emphasis is on the prospects and perils of companies that must compete.
Well, sure, firms need to compete. And working people need to feed and clothe and house themselves and their families. And workers hope to provide adequate medical care.
The issue of health insurance is a political talking-point for many candidates these days. But meanwhile, unionized workers are finding themselves in a weakened position when they try to retain whatever medical coverage they may have. And non-unionized workers often have little or none.
With all the media discussion of corporate bottom-line difficulties, the human element routinely gets lost in the shuffle. In day-to-day business news and in general reporting, the lives of people on the line are apt to be rendered as abstractions. Or they simply go unmentioned.
The topic of war in Iraq is huge in the media. I can't say much for the quality of that coverage, but at least it keeps reporting that a military war is happening overseas. But what about the economic war that's happening at home?
Phrases like "class war" have been discredited in American news media -- tarred as too blunt, too combative, too rhetorical. But, call it what you will, the clash of economic interests is with us always.
Waged from the top down, class war is a triumphant activity -- and part of the success involves the framing and avoidance of certain unpleasant realities via corporate-owned media outlets. You don't need to be a rocket scientist or a social scientist to grasp that multibillion-dollar companies are not going to own, or advertise with, media firms that challenge the power of multibillion-dollar companies.
One of the dominant yet little-remarked-upon shifts in the media landscape over the past couple of decades has been the enormous upsurge in business news as general news. A result is that tens of millions of low-income people are seeing constant news stories about challenges and opportunities for well-to-do investors.
The reverse, of course, is not the case. The very affluent of our society don’t often pick up a newspaper or tune in the evening news and encounter waves of stories and commentaries about the dire straits of America's poor people and what it’s like to be one of them. And it's even more rare to see coverage of ways that a few people grow obscenely wealthy as a direct result of the further impoverishment of the many.
"Class war"? The nation's most powerful editors cringe at the phrase. But every day, millions of Americans are painfully aware that -- by any other name -- class warfare is going on, and they're losing.