Launch Monday

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President Obama launches his re-election campaign today.
Laura Bush is Todaying her book tour.
Tim Pawlenty is pushing his inner Mad Men.

So I've got a couple questions.

How much delay in the Mideast democracy movement was because of Bush's willful invasion and botched strategy for after in Iraq? The intelligence was not wrong. The intelligence-manipulators were.

When will the old media start looking at the botched economy Pawlenty left behind in Minnesota?

Must we wait for the historians?

crossposted at firedoglake/MyFDL

Prairie Recommends: Froomkin on Bush Lies

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Dan Froomkin lays out with potent force the craven lies of George W Bush — and those who go along to get along. His The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir is must reading.

As I reflected in an HP comment,
Having recently toured the Paris Holocaust Museum, it is fresh in my mind how ready nations and people are to deny their own history. Until that history is confronted and acknowledged, there is no honor in the country nor the man. It took until Chirac in France. How long will it take us?

Or will our dumbed-down America keep its blinders on because gosh darn, the boy's done a good job of selling the book, cite GHWB.
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Get Over It, You Lost

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Once again, Jon Stewart cuts through the Confederacy nostalgia claptrap and gets it right.

CW was 145 years ago. South lost. Get over it.

Happy Union Appreciation Month!

And the best part is, Happy Union Appreciation Month works for all kinds of occasions. Maybe the workers at the hotel where the RNC partiers are gathering could pass out commemorative buttons.
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Lieberman's Nature

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A short reminder:

A scorpion wanted to cross a river but could not swim, so he asked a fox to carry him across. The fox, demurred: You'll sting me. Not I, said the scorpion, for that would mean the death of me, too. Very well, hop on, said the fox.

Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the fox with a mortal wound. As the river sucked them both down, the fox said, you promised! Why did you sting me?

I know, said the scorpion. But it is my nature.

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Crossposted, with comments, at firedoglake's Oxdown Express.

The Pickens Effect

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On a quick roundtrip errand run this morning—carefully calibrated to make a circuit with no backtracking, no delays at train crossings watching the gazillion-car trains hauling North Dakota coal out East, and turns left far more than right, I noted a sign of the times: gas at the Holiday station store on the far southside: $3.58.9 a gallon.

Call it the Pickens Effect. Oh, I know the VVM [vapid vapors media] will spew the Big Oil friendly spin that it's people driving less that have brought oil prices down...or no damage from the latest tropical storm/hurricane to roll across the Gulf Coast... and that's part of it. But to say that's it as though that's all it is, is kinda like sayin' "the surge has worked...." while ignoring the gorillas in the room.

Because I'm convinced the real driver of high energy costs is the Chee-knee Energy Plan...cooked up in early days of the BushCo Administration with his Texas-based cronies. A plan to drive up demand...how's that tax break for gas guzzlers workin' out?

A plan to artificially diminish supply...crank up the deposits in the oil reserves, folks, oh, and while you're at it...cry whine and sheesh over the fewer refineries...and don't mention that the fewer refineries are bigger and...well, I almost said better...but that's subjective. But at least the fewer refineries can be taken off-line any ol' time a Texas heart feels like pumpin' a little more crude goudging and a little less crude oil.

And then there's the futures boys, from Wall Street to West Texas, speculatin' in tomorrow's cost of oil.

And if you've got one of their own sayin' he's been an oil man for all those years and "this is one crisis we can't drill our way out of" then you're going to have a whole lotta folks quiverin' in their high-priced Texas boots and Wall Street loarers.

And tomorrow's oil starts looking not so good. Because if you start aggressively developing—not just talkin' about—alternatives to oil, the futures are going to dry up and the costs are going to drive down.

There's plenty to look at. Wind energy, solar, natural gas, switchgrass, biodiesel, nuclear, magnetic...heck, there's probably energies we haven't even thought about yet.

But while we're lookin', might be a good idea, too, to look at history. And who's got an incentive to destroy some energies—electric cars, anyone?—to save their own hides. And who do you trust.

So do I trust ol' T. Boone? Not as far as I can throw a Swiftboat.

He's going to be one of the first hogs at the trough for more tax breaks and loopholes and the whole business of socializing capitalists while starvin' consumers.

But we gotta get there somehow, and if we keep our eyes on the ball, and elect the people who will look out for the people's interests, call the media when they're shillin' for their advertisers instead of reporting facts, use common sense regulations so the outlaws can't take over and monopolize the whole effort...then we just might have a chance to reinvent not only energy policy but the whole energy of the planet.
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What Do You Do Now?

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Senator Jim Webb had to answer that question time after time in his service to this country and all of us over the years, but the most poignant moment, the one he himself says stays with him to this day, was during his Marine Corps duty in Viet Nam.

From his new book, A Time to Fight, excerpted Sunday in Parade magazine and at Parade.com:

A gray-haired man in white pajamas, probably a grandfather, was dead, having wrapped himself around a small boy to protect him from the blast. It was clear that his final thoughts were of the boy. His shocked, opaque eyes and his still-curled body were the very definition of love and human sacrifice. The boy was still alive, although barely....

The doc put the boy on a wooden box next to our command post. Over the next half hour, as I spoke on the radio, the boy lay near me quietly, never making a sound, all the while watching me. Nor could I stop watching him. And as we stared at each other, he slowly died.

Webb sees the state of the nation today, but also issues a challenge to each and every one of us.

Our country is in the middle of a profound crisis. This crisis has many causes, but much of it has been brought about by poor leadership decisions at every level of government. In addition, our electoral process is dominated by financial interests that are threatened by the very notion of reform.

Be as shrewd and ruthless in your demands on our leaders as the wizards running campaigns are in their strategies to get your vote.

This past week we saw a ramping-up of the Politics of Smear by George Bush and John McCain in their tag-team attacks on Barack Obama. Attacks that backfired as Democrats justly rallied around the candidate, including his only remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.

But this was an attack that goes beyond partisan politics. The history of the presidency itself has been smeared by Bush's craven desperation to inject himself into the campaign against Obama with his words to the Knesset. The best disinfectant and clean-up for such dirty politics is a good housecleaning... and that's going to take your vote.

Welcome to America

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Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

Emma Lazarus

An old man, tired, weary, a Baptist minister, flees danger in Haiti and comes to America, seeking political asylum. Instead of freedom, America greets him with a detention center, and, when he falls ill, deficient medical care, and finally, hospitalization, where he dies alone.

His family here in America are not permitted to visit him.

A young woman from Somalia, fleeing a country where her family were killed, comes to America, seeking political asylum. Instead of freedom, she is detained and put on heavy duty antipsychotic medicine until a human rights group can arrange for her care and release.

Watching Scott Pelley's 60 Minutes report last night, the old man's niece recounting his last days, the frustration, and ultimately the sorrow, I wondered again, what have we allowed America to become?

60 Minutes collaborated with the Washington Post's singular genius reporter, Dana Priest, to report on the detention centers the Bush Administration has set up around the country to house warehouse immigrants seeking political asylum. They are not pretty places.

A middle-aged woman sits awaiting a life-and-death determination of whether she'll be deported. Since last August. Meanwhile, the lump in her leg continues to grow. From the Post:

Harvill is one of 33,000 immigration detainees in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, on any given day. They are locked up in a patchwork of out-of-the-way federal detention compounds, private prisons and local jails. This unnoticed prison system was built for a quick revolving door of detainees -- into custody, out of the country. But often, people linger in detention for months or years.

These detainees, like other prisoners, are by law and regulation entitled to medical services if they are sick. But Harvill's journey through immigration detention provides a glimpse into a medical system that often fails those who need it most. It is an upside-down world where patients have no say, doctors and nurses on site have little power to administer timely treatment, and a managed-care system in Washington operates from a rulebook that emphasizes what is not covered rather than what is.

Immigrants...detainees...the line is blurring as the bureaucracy and the social compact of this country breaks down under the combined weight of the Bush Administration/Republican way of governance, its policies and incompetence.

"You know that there are people watching this interview who are saying to themselves, 'Castaneda was an illegal immigrant. He had a drug conviction. The people of the United States owed him nothing,'" Pelley remarks.

"I'm sure there's people out there that think that," Doyle acknowledges. "But that's not what the law is. And that's not what a civilized society does. And you know, if it's true that you judge the degree of civilization in a society by entering its prisons, the United States has a long way to go on this particular issue."

It would be too quick, too easy to say "after 9/11, everything changed." Because really, 9/11 long since has ceased to be an event and instead become an enabling excuse. The Bush/Republican way of governance was etched in stone long before those Twin Towers crumbled that morning. That was just the shock and awe that gave Bush and his neocon Big Oil war machine cronies an opportunity to rape, pillage and plunder this country in a manner so brazen it is stunning.

Well, yes, but what does it matter, Prairie, if a few sick people who aren't even real Americans don't get medical care?

What does it matter, indeed. In a similar context, I wondered that earlier last week at the report that the Indiana voter fraud blocked a group of real desperadoes from voting—nuns in their 80s and 90s.

And another poem filled my mind:
They came for...

You know it. If you don't, google Niemoller, it's past time you did.

But after watching 60 Minutes last night, and musing on this whole business of Sundays, and Mother's Days, and then reading Dana Priest's first in a series "Careless Detention," another mother came to mind.

A young girl, pregnant, unmarried, forced to travel from one land to another to be counted. And the child she bore. Oh, there are loads of self-righteous fauxes who call themselves "Christian" and "compassionate conservative" and.... And they rule this land right now, they're entrenched in the bureaucracy of the government and the tony addresses on K Street, and the gleaming white bastion of SCOTUS.

And their prisons and their detention centers define them. And the rest of us. Never forget that. They define us, too. As Barack Obama has noted, "the fierce urgency of now"...it compels us all to be better than we have been.

Because, whatsoever ye do unto the least of my brethren, ye do unto me.

Artistic License

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This evening, toward the end of the powerful HBO miniseries John Adams, the aging former president is brought to view a magnificent wall-sized rendering of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Adams castigates the artist Trumble for his work, pointing out that there was never an occasion when all the signers came together in such a fashion, signing one by one. There was a war on already, and the signers came when they could, quickly signing the document and hurrying away over the summer.

Artistic license, asserts Trumble, it makes for a better picture. And thus was propaganda given one of its "grander" moments.

There's a lot of artistic license going on these days, too, what Adams decried as the fiction of modern history in HBO's narrative.

Artistic license played by media who call themselves tough but fair when they are little more than stenographers and tools of one-party rule. Or diggers into the same ol' garbage long after it's been debunked, like smelly rotted russet potatoes.

Artistic license by those who pose as respectable consultants or opinionizers only to be revealed as paid shills for special interests.

Artistic license on such a grand scale as done by Faux that it is breathtaking in its sheer audacity...as befits the propaganda arm of this most corrupt and fabricated of administrations.

There are a few, a very few who still remember what it is to be responsible reporters of modern history, the first telling as some call journalism. And they are worthy of noting...Moyers, Schieffer. You may know of others not weighted down by the corruption of their integrity in the name of "access" or "off the record...." or willful disregard.

The series ends with a soft-voiced notation by Paul Giamatti, in his magnificent Adams role, saying he hopes he doesn't repent in heaven the effort he put into establishing this democracy.

There is much to be learned from history, from understanding the Founding Fathers not as flat images clustered on a contrived wall portrait or selectively skewed for political policy partisanship, but as humans with their frailties and imperfections....and yes, accomplishments.

For if we fail to learn from history, then we, in this age, indeed give Adams cause to repent in heaven.

Basking Shark

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THE SETUP:
Basking in the glow of his own self-delusions and hypocrisy, Joe Lieberman told Imus this morning that Harry Reid has assured him he won't lose his seniority...essentially.

As for reports that he'll speak at the Republican convention, Lieberman says: "doubt I'd be a keynote speaker" but "if John McCain asks me to speak I'll go speak...I'm doing what I think is right and not worrying about the politics... I think it's going to be all right..."

"Harry Reid has said you're a member of the caucus, you've been a friend to me...he basically said 'No' they're not going to take Lieberman's seniority away."

THE TALKING POINTS:
On the media-McCain-Clinton conspiracy to drive the "elitist" argument on Obama: "let's hope it's inartful...The comment he made was, I thought, offensive, and will raise a lot of questions."

(Hmmmm. I find a man who refuses to hold hearings in the committee he chairs on the debacle of Katrina offensive...but that's just me. And I find offensive a man whose mixed "loyalties" are on daily display as he attacks Democrats on the days he says he's I-Conn, and then attacks liberals on the days he says he's ID-Conn. But that's me, too.)

Lieberman continues his ongoing McCainiacism by painting Obama as too liberal, anti-Israel, too naive/inexperienced....

THE OOZE:
Lieberman sucks up to Imus by bringing up BPA in order to mention Imus' wife's greening work—her latest book, Growing Up Green now out and available at bookstores everywhere. Will that mention make me an I-Fave?

THE HYPOCRISY:
Hyper-selective-religionist Lieberman apologizes to Imus and listeners before uttering the word "urine." Apologies for failing the NOLA-ites left to piss on the floor in the Superdome?...hmmm, I ain't hearin' it. Apologies for sending men and women into a war based on lies to get their bits blown off so they can never take a normal piss again? I ain't hearin' it. Apologies for turning ordinary American men and women into torturers on the knowledge and approval and micromanagement of the Current Occupant's team of Principals?

I ain't hearin' it from Joe put the lie-in-Lieberman.

THE TELL:
Midway thru the conversation, Imus asks: Lieberman the most bitter man in the Senate? "Well, yeah..."

Moyers on the Role of Journalism in Democracy

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If you haven't yet, consider these words by Bill Moyers from his speech upon receiving the Ridenhour Award. A prism through which to evaluate each and all of the people who are bringing you your information in the media these days:

Temptation to co-option is the original sin of journalism, and we're always finding fig leaves to cover it: economics, ideology, awe of authority, secrecy, the claims of empire.

In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were reminded of what the late great reporter A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press is "the weak slat under the bed of democracy."

The slat broke after the invasion and some strange bedfellows fell to the floor: establishment journalists, neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits, right-wing warmongers flying the skull and bones of the "balanced and fair brigade," administration flacks whose classified leaks were manufactured lies - all romping on the same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.

Five years, thousands of casualties, and hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the media co-conspirators caught in flagrante delicto are still prominent, still celebrated, and still holding forth with no more contrition than a weathercaster who made a wrong prediction as to the next day's temperature.

Only one thing else need be added to Moyers' words: shame on them for their shamelessness. Read the full text here.

UPDATE:
Devilstower at Kos has excellent thoughts, too, on the state of journalism these days.

History Lesson

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Three people deeply believe that each one is the only one fit to lead America starting in January. Three people.

One says don't look back, "stuff" is old news.
One says don't look into my background, just believe that I'm the experienced one.
One says together we can change America.

Lots of chaff is flying around these days, overt and under the radar. 'twill take the wisdom of Solomon to sort it out. Nobody will make that easy. Not the candidates. Not the campaigns and their surrogates. Not the bloody-minded media. Not people who can be manipulated by appealing to their fears... or their darker selves.

Today, let's take a breath. And do some homework.
1 Kings 3:16-27 would be a good place to start.