Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Following on yesterday's Michael Moore smackdown of Wolf Blitzer, Sanjay Gupta, and CNN specifically and the MSM in general, Moore and Gupta had it out tonight on Larry King Live after Moore fact-checked Gupta's so-called "Reality Check" from the evening before.

The Moore/Gupta appearance is below, broken into three parts...

Part 1

Parts 2 and 3 of the Moore/Gupta appearance on Larry King Live follow below...

We just saw Michael Moore's Sicko tonight in St. Louis, and so were pleased to return to our current home base, to find RAW STORY's video coverage of Moore's long overdue smack down with Wolf Blitzer and CNN from earlier this afternoon.

Go watch it. If only for Moore's taking Blitzer and his network to task for helping us into the endless and idiotic Iraq quagmire. (If you can't watch the video, the tull text transcript is now posted here.)

"Just apologize to the American people and to the families of the troops for not doing your job four years ago," Moore excoriated Blitzer after a "Reality Check" report on Sicko by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, which the filmmaker declared "so biased it's unbelievable."

"We wouldn't be in this war if you had done your job. Come on. Just admit it. Just apologize to the American people," he continued in just one choice selection of his rant against the CNN and the mainstream media failures that sent us into --- and have kept us in --- this mess. (After checking out the video, you can send your thoughts to CNN here.)

Thank you, Michael. Again.

As to the movie, go watch that too. We'd have more to say about it, but we're still pondering it all. We had hoped to go with a couple of doctors (our cousins) so they could tell us what was "wrong" with the movie. But for some reason, they weren't interested in going. We hope you will be. It was exceedingly eye-opening even if --- despite all the kudos Moore has received for "his most mature film to date" --- we think he pulled a few punches. Perhaps we preferred him when he was less mature, but maybe that's just us.

But if that was any drawback to his film, and it really wasn't, he made up for it --- in spades --- today with dead on-target ass-whooping to the hapless Wolf Blitzer and friends.

UPDATE 7/10/07: As promised, during his fracas with Blitzer, Moore has now posted a fact-filled refutation of Gupta's so-called "Reality Check". We'll see if CNN and Blitzer, as promised, issues the appropriate apologies and corrections in light of it. Also, well worth reading in response to all of those MSM'ers who so diligently "fact check" when it comes to Moore's film (hey, they need to hold "power" accountable, right? Might as well try to do it once every three years when a Michael Moore film comes out!) see James Clay Fuller's "Commenting on the Commentaries" from Twin Cities Daily Planet. Finally, Moore appears for "Part 2" with Blitzer tonight at 7pm ET on CNN's The Situation Room, and perhaps more notably, with Gupta himself on CNN's Larry King Live tonight at 9pm ET. Someone feel like counting the number of commercials for Health Providers and Pharmaceutical Companies during those two hours alone on CNN, just for yucks?

LATER UPDATES: Video of Part 2 of the Moore/Blitzer interview, aired the next day, now posted here. Video of the Moore appearance with Gupta on Larry King Live now posted here.

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis...

Golly, there sure are a lot of Right Wingers out there using Bill Clinton's pardons as reason to say that it's okay that Bush has commuted four felony convictions of the lying covert CIA-operative outer Scooter Libby.

"Clinton did the same thing when he pardoned Marc Rich and so many others," proclaim the Neo-Apologists.

"Where were you when Clinton committed perjury?" they ask (failing to note that he was never actually convicted of a crime, and, in either case, was said to have lied about a sexual matter in a civil case, versus a matter of national security in a criminal case).

In either case, we wonder when one of our brave media anchors will ask the obvious follow-up to one of these clowns. Namely, "Does this mean you now support Bill Clinton's use of pardons? Do you now believe that it was okay for Clinton to lie during a deposition?"

Seems to us they can't have it both ways. If it was wrong for Clinton to lie during a civil suit investigation, and wrong for him to let convicted criminals off the hook with pardons, then it is wrong for Libby to lie (to a grand jury) during an criminal investigation and for Bush to let him off the hook for it.

The Scooter Libby Wingnut Talking Points, however, don't seem to go that many levels deep. Perhaps that's because the Neo-Apologists know that a well thought-out response to the Libby Debacle is not really necessary, seeing as how nobody on the teevee will likely ever bother to ask them such a seemingly obvious follow-up question to their lock-step, sound-bite-crafted response to Bush's commutation.

The 4th Estate fails again.

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis...

Supposed to be cooling my holiday heels a bit today, but couldn't let this one pass without comment. USA Today has an article this morning anointing psychologist Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, as the Democrats' new political rhetoric guru.

Nonetheless, in her article, headlined "Democrats get advice on how to talk about issues," reporter Jill Lewis can't seem to help but pass on the conventional wisdom (read: lies) of Republican rhetoric guru/liar Frank Luntz.

"Al Gore should have won" in 2000, Lewis unquestioningly quotes Luntz as telling her. "He lost because Americans didn't want him in their living rooms every night."

No. He "lost" because one vote on the Supreme Court determined that the man who won the national popular vote, as well as the electoral vote in Florida, should not have his votes counted as cast.

Had Lewis gone back and reviewed the findings of her own newspaper, who took part in a study of the ballots across the state of Florida, she likely would have discovered that.

While we realize that history is frequently re-written by the "winners," we see no reason why the corporate mainstream media need to participate in that charade. And yet, nearly 7 years later, and with facts now easily at hand, USA Today continues to do so.

We don't blame Luntz for lying. That's his job. Much as we don't blame Ann Coulter for being an unapologetic liar and hate-monger. We blame USA Today --- and other similarly irresponsible corporate mainstream outlets --- for giving him the platform to continue to pass on his lies without correction. Much as we blame ABC, NBC, MSNBC, et al. for giving Coulter a bully pulpit from which to spew her bullshit.

We need to begin to hold those who hold the keys to the kingdom responsible for allowing the charlatans inside the gates in the first place. Until we hold the media accountable and demand that they clean up their act, the Democratic focus-grouped advice of media message masters like Westen, and George Lakoff before him, won't mean a damn thing.

Blogged by Brad from "Thor" Country (St. Louis, Missouri)...

"Emptywheel" at Next Hurray has the details on the latest Republican front group to go missing on the Internets in the time-honored cowardly tradition of George W. Bush's cut and run vote-suppression capo Thor Hearne of the "non-partisan" propaganda outlet, "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR).

At least the latest GOP scam outfit to see their website set to "This site is temporarily unavailable," Italia Federici's "Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy," (CREA) had the decency to include the name of their party in the group's name. As well, unlike Thor and his buddies, the group --- whose major funder was the now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff --- waited until its President, Federici, had pled guilty to obstruction and tax charges before giving up their website's ghost.

Thor, on the other hand, got out as soon as the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal began to shine a spotlight on the "Democratic voter fraud" scam he had been perpetrating for years on a gullible nation and a pliant corporate mainstream media. If we ever find out who funded Thor's tax-exempt ACVR scam to the tune of more than $1 million, we'll not be surprised to see Abramoff's finger prints all over it. Pointing even more directly towards the White House, we've got reason to believe that James A. Baker and friends were also likely on the inside of the hoax set up by the man who was Karl Rove's top election "legal" eagle and, by no coincidence, Bush/Cheney '04 Inc.'s general counsel.

With groups like ACVR and CREA, the GOP helped raise the art of "astroturfing" to new, unforgivable heights of cynicism and criminal fraud. The CMSM let 'em do it for years, as most of us looked the other way in disbelief that the folks who ran this country --- by hook and mostly crook --- would ever be so blatantly disingenuous. They were. We fell for it. And it'll likely take years to undo the damage.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Filling in for Bill O'Reilly on tonight's Factor, Michelle Malkin ripped Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff for destroying the faith of the American people in our government's ability to enforce immigration laws. Later, she went after an immigrant advocate attorney who called for an end to the deportation of illegals, stating, "it is not a bumper sticker to say that we should enforce the laws that are on the books." Between the two, Malkin finds time to joke with "Democratic" Strategists, Kirsten Powers and Laura Schwartz, about Bush letting Scooter Libby "Off The Hook." Surprisingly, she appeared much less concerned with the law and order aspects of the Libby case.

UPDATE FROM BRAD 7/3/07: I believe it's worth underscoring Alan's point above. The two Fox 'News' analysts interviewed by Malkin, claiming that commuting Libby's sentence was "the right thing to do" are both identified as "Democratic" strategists. Incredible. Only on Fox...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Amy Goodman interviews former Marine spokesperson Josh Rushing on Democracy Now about his experiences serving at CENTCOM at the start of the Iraq war. In addition to sending over a Hollywood set designer to build a platform costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, Washington sent political operative Jim Wilkinson, who ran the media operation like a political campaign. According to Rushing, Wilkinson is also "credited with coming up with the line about Gore having invented the Internet," had his hand in the "Brooks Brothers Riot" during the 2000 Florida election recount, and was the guy handing George W. the bullhorn at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001.

Here endeth the news for this week...

There is no reason to scroll down below this item. Nothing else, other than this, that actually happened today (or this week) either happened or matters...

And speaking of credit where it's due, the New York Times and several other outlets today confirm the story of secret US prisons in Poland and Romania which our friend and courageous investigative journalist, Larisa Alexandrovna, reported exclusively long ago with former Polish intelligence officer David Dastych over at the news site RAW STORY.

As usual, the Times, Washington Post, AP, and the Guardian all failed to acknowledge or recognize RAW in any way, despite that the fact that RAW "provided each of the four news organizations with the" report that they are today reporting on.

It's a continuing pattern, for which those outlets always have some form of excuse ("we verified it independently, we didn't know about the 'Internet reporting' on it previously, we don't credit 'blogs'," etc.) Meanwhile, RAW, ourselves, and virtually every other Internet reporting outlet routinely credit such MSM sources when we follow up on their reporting.

Anyway, none of them credited RAW, so we won't bother linking to any of them. Here's RAW STORY's coverage --- the ones who had the story and had it right in the first place --- instead.

Guest Blogged by Howard Beale of Fired Up! Missouri

The Kansas City Star just can't help itself. When it comes to high-level reporting on the issue of the national GOP's attempts to politicize justice and steal elections with its phony "voter fraud" project, it seems there's no story that the Star's editors can't make mushier and more GOP-friendly.

Today the Star again does with a piece by Greg Gordon of news syndicate McClatchy what it did to a Gordon story from some weeks ago, refusing to print some of the most important facts underlying the lack of factual basis for GOP allegations of voter fraud.

Most notable in the Kansas City Star version of today's Greg Gordon piece for McClatchy is the treatment of the disposition of the Department of Justice lawsuit against the state of Missouri regarding voter rolls. Of the suit, Gordon writes (emphasis added):

The KCStar's rewrite of that graf rips out its substantive guts. The McClatchy-owned Star goes with this GOP-friendlier construction instead...

Guest blogged by John Russell, 2006 Democratic Candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida's 5th Congressional District

Just prior to the 1pm start of a recent U.S. House Administration Committee meeting, about which I had received third-hand notification that several contested Congressional elections from 2006 (including my own) were to be brought up and recommended for dismissal, I made several calls to House offices in the vain hope that I might be able to have our Constitutional rights protected and upheld.

Pragmatist that I am, I offered House Administration Committee Counsel, Tom Hicks, my thoughts, hoping that he would bring my concerns to the Committee’s attention. Understanding fully the genesis and context of this meeting --- held without notice to the contestants --- Mr. Hicks was apparently poised to enter one of those smoke-filled rooms we used to hear about.

Apparently, at that point, there was no citing of Constitutional rights convincing enough for this group of rascals to interfere with their plans to “slide our contests under the rug” and hopefully out the doors of Congress. I concluded my voice mail plea not to ignore our Constitutional right to due process by asking Mr. Hicks, “This is still America… is it not?”

The blatant disregard of the Federal Contested Elections Act and the U.S. Constitution by members of Congress exhibited in this meeting is beyond the pale. The Committee members’ audacity is only exceeded by the dearth of factual information regarding policy and political issues provided to the general public by the now defunct Fourth Estate, which has been replaced by the corporate media. As a candidate for federal office, I have now become completely acclimated to the ways and means of the liberally right-wing media in how candidates are at once dismembered, or accordingly contrived, by “The Establishment's” voice...

UPDATE: Late breaking news on Griffin's resignation from a Palast interview with Conyers Thursday night, now posted here...

As Tim Griffin, the former Karl Rove aide and "interim"-installed Arkansas U.S. Attorney replacement for Bud Cummins became the latest Loyal Bushie to take an indignant fall in announcing his resignation yesterday, the mainstream media --- well, Slate anyway --- finally stopped to take at look at what all this "vote caging" stuff is all about. You know, the stuff that we've been running around with our hair on fire about at least since Monica Goodling dropped her bomb in last week's House Judiciary testimony.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick asks this afternoon, "What the heck is vote caging, and why should we care?" Actually, though that's the story's headline, the title bar in our browser when viewing the article indicates the original headline was likely the more apropos, "What the heck is vote caging, and why does nobody care?"

Following up on Greg Palast's Exclusive at BRAD BLOG, on the heels of Monica's otherwise-unreported bombshell, and the noise that Palast has otherwise been trying to make about Griffin's vote caging emails for at least three years, Lithwick's candid self and media appraisal is refreshing and appreciated.

Sigh..."Nobody" may be an overstatement, as The BRAD BLOG scrambled to report the stunning revelation moments after Goodling's utterance. But perhaps we're still a "nobody" to Slate, even if we've been mentioned by name of late on their pages. And credit where it's due, that report was the first by an MSM-ish outlet to give the GOP's snake-oil front-group, the American Center for Voting Rights, its two-a-half-years-overdue due.

Still, given the rest of Lithwick's coverage today, we're happy to let bygones be bygones as slowly, but surely, the media begins to understand the import of so much that we've been reporting here --- with as much siren-worthy urgency as we could muster --- over these past many years...

And they say there's not a vast rightwing conspiracy?

Glen Greenwald at Salon details dozens of no-uncertain-terms statements from Fox "News" and the near entirety of the wingnut blogosphere asserting that Valerie Plame was "not covert" in her role as a CIA agent. Despite myriad evidence for years, Plame's own sworn testimony to Congress, the admission by CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, and a court-filing last Friday which included an employment record from the CIA stating that she was, in fact, covert at the time she was outed by members of the Bush Administration, the sorry bunch of operatives who control the mainstream media, and a huge chunk of the blogosphere, refuse to admit they were simply wrong from the get-go. Period.

Says Greenwald today:

Just a few of the dozens of examples (most linked to the original sourcing over there) supplied by Greenwald...

• Fred Barnes, Fox News Special Report: "She wasn't even a covert agent or anything."
• Mark Levin, National Review: "Despite all the hype, it appears that Plame works a desk job at the CIA...it didn't make her a covert operative when Bob Novak mentioned her in his July 14, 2003, column."
• Washington Times Editorial: "[W]hen columnist Robert Novak first mentioned in passing that Mrs. Plame worked for the CIA, she was not functioning as a covert agent."
• Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds: "[I]t seems as clear as anything in this affair that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent the day before Novak's column."
• Rich Galen, Republican strategist, CNN's Situation Room: "She was not a covert --- and we call them officers, not agents. . . We're arguing whether or not she was a covert agent at the time and I'm saying she was not."
• Alexander Haig, CNN: "[Plame] was really a bureaucrat and not a covert operator."
• John Hinderaker, Powerline Blog: "Scooter Libby mentioned the name of a non-covert CIA employee, Valerie Plame."
• Barbara Lerner, National Review: "[S]he was not a classified agent because she was not covert."
• Robert Novak, CNN's Crossfire: "Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative"
• Fox "moderate" Mort Kondracke, Special Report with Brit Hume: "[S]he was not a covert officer, she was not a covert agent"
• Laura Ingraham, Hannity & Colmes: "[T]hey knew that this was not a situation where Valerie Plame, at this point in time, at least, was a covert agent."
• William Bennett, The O'Reilly Factor: "When this information was supposedly leaked about Valerie Plame, everybody went nuts. Turns out she wasn't covert."

It goes on and on, but you get the idea. Do the retractions and corrections similarly go on and on? Hardly. We've yet to see a single one. It's appalling. Imagine the circumstances had John Edwards or John Kerry or Hillary Clinton exposed the name of a covert CIA operative to the media. Would there be calls for treason trials from the same wingnut apologist-sphere? You bet.

We'll also await the many trolling dopes who have posted comments on these pages over the years, claiming that Plame was "not covert," to post their retractions here. We'll not hold our breath.

None of this is really news, of course. At least to those smart enough to seek out real news here. But to the rest of the world, carrying on blithely ignorant of the historic treason that has been and is being carried out by our own Government, this all would likely come as a shock. Fortunately for the wingnuts, none of this will even be a story for our corporate MSM.

RELATED: Be sure to read Greenwald's weekend story about a more recent similar embarrassment for the armchair Sam Spades of the wingnut blogosphere, and the lack of apologies and retractions thereof when they were revealed to be wrong. Again. As well, please see Eric Boehlert's February article detailing how the Washington Post aids and abets the fact-challenged rightwing blogosphere truth-haters, like Michelle Malkin and friends, while almost completely ignoring those of us who actually bother to diligently take the time to base our reporting on independently verifiable reality.

*** Investigative Journalist Greg Palast replies to Internet commentary following his Exclusive Report filed here at The BRAD BLOG on Monica Goodling's testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee last week, including her admissions concerning "Vote Caging" by former Karl Rove aide, now Arkansas U.S. Attorney, Tim Griffin.

Saturday morning, when most sensible folks were unfurling flags or taking their setters and children for a Memorial Day frisbee toss on the beach, someone using the nom d’puter of “DRATIONAL” was in his big sister’s bedroom furiously typing, “Greg Palast is Dangerous!” on her iMac.

Drat is quite right: I am dangerous, though not for the reasons in Drat’s screed.

So while the twins are off with the dog, let me respond between bites of this bagel, beginning with this immutable distinction:

There’s two kinds of illiterates in this world: those who can’t read, for whom I’m entirely sympathetic — and those who CAN read but WON’T, for whom I have no sympathy whatsoever.

Drat is of the latter. He (she/them/it?) has mounted a full-scale assault on the seven-year-long effort of my BBC and Guardian team investigating systematic suppression of the minority vote by the Republican Party and our latest revelation: ‘caging voters.’ His “evidence” is 100% limited to snippets of my conversations on talk radio or phone interviews, second-hand reports on websites and some musings of one of my good researchers, Zach Roberts, posted to this site.

Nowhere does he suggest he’s bothered reading the one hundred-page description of the attack on voters, including caging, in the new edition of Armed Madhouse. Shame that. Law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., using the book as a source, verified by his own corroborative work, found the matter therein convincing enough to call for putting Rove’s right hand man, Tim Griffin, “in prison, not in office.”

Picking up a book won’t hurt you, Mr. Drat, at least until Patriot Act IV goes into effect...

Takin' it easy today (at least as far as you know) after a brutally exhausting and often dispiriting week. Whether or not that led to a different mood today during my weekly guest appearance on the Peter B. Collins Show I can't tell you.

Either way, as Guest Hosted today by our friend Tony Trupiano, we covered a few things I haven't gotten to speak much about lately, and also received an important good news update from caller "Chris in Salinas." Turns out action taken by Chris over the past week, after finding something troubling in a recent special election in Monterey County, CA, has led to a happy conclusion that will effect all voters in Monterey, and perhaps across this entire state.

That story --- and much else of what we chatted about on the show --- again, underscores the need for citizens to take control of their democracy because it will not be either the media or the government who restores our country. It will be you.

Enjoy...

-- Brad on PBC (Guest Host Tony Trupiano), 5/25/07 [MP3, appx 50 mins]

UPDATE: "Chris from Salinas" writes in to comments below with more details on precisely what happened in Monterey County, the action he took, and the changes that were made because of. Useful if you haven't been able to listen to the audio above (which I still recommend, in any case).