Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Yesterday, The President said that he "declassified the NIE" because he wanted people "to see the truth" about intelligence used to bolster the case for war on Iraq.

The corporate media dutifully reported The President's misleading remarks without correcting his misinformation. The Bush Administration is built on lies and, yesterday, Bush added another lie.

MSNBC's Countdown correctly points out that only specific parts of the NIE were leaked to a few sympathetic reporters. The leaked information provided a defense for statements the President made that exaggerated Iraq's desire to acquire nuclear weapons. Other parts of the same NIE that was not given to reporters, show that the leaked information was false.

In fact, the President had been informed multiple times that the information leaked from the NIE to defend his statements about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were "baseless". In short, the President knew that false information was being used to discredit Joe Wilson.

Yesterday, Bush knew that he was misleading Americans by saying that he released the discredited NIE intel because he wanted people "to see the truth." The same lie is being told over and over again and the corporate media refuses to call the President on it.

In this video, Keith Olbermann, Joe Wilson and David Shuster do not hesitate to point out the twisted intelligence, misinformation and outright lies of the Bush Administration. Playing time is about 10 minutes.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Wolf Blitzer interviewed former Ambassador Joe Wilson this afternoon during CNN's Situation Room. Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, have been victims of a Bush Administration effort to stop the American people from learning that intelligence was twisted and misused to lead the country to war on Iraq.

Bush ordered that parts of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) be used to rebut a New York Times op-ed written by Joe Wilson. Wilson charged that the administration had had purposefully used baseless intelligence to inflate Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

Today, during a Q&A session with students, Bush said that he had released information from the NIE because he wanted people "to see the truth". In this interview, Joe Wilson sets the record straight by pointing out that the President only released part of the NIE to rebut Wilson's charge. If The President had wanted the people "to see the truth" then he would have also released other parts of the NIE which expressed serious doubts about the information Bush used to rebut Wilson's charge. In fact, by releasing more information which he knew to be faulty, George Bush just fed Americans another lie.

This video contains Wolf Blitzers' complete interview with Joe Wilson. It runs about 10 minutes. Wilson does a great job explaining some of the nuances of the case. He talks fast so you might want to watch it twice.

Working on several items, so we'll defer to RAW STORY's coverage of the story.

Suffice to say, Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring "clean elections" in 2000 and 2004.

He singled out Mark F. "Thor" Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it's funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.

ACVR was the only "Voting Rights" group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a "longtime advocate of voter rights" in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney '04 Inc.

Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising "Photo ID requirements" at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)

The "non-partisan" Dyke went on to work for the White House to flak for John Roberts during his Supreme Court nomination, and now works out Dick Cheney's office.

Ney, who pushed the so-called "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA) through Congress in 2002 --- the bill which urges all States and Counties in the country to impliment hackable electronic voting machines by 2006 --- recently stepped down from his chairmanship of the House Admin Committee after being named in the on-going Jack Abramoff investigations. His former chief of staff, David DiStefano is Diebold's main lobbyist in congress, as BRAD BLOG reported in January, and Diebold has made thousands of dollars in so-far unexplained payments to Abramoff's old firm, Greeburg Traurig.

See RAW's story for Rove's comments about Hearne and the other "non-partisan" GOP attorneys over the weekend.

For more information on the "non-partisan" tax-exempt ACVR scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney '04 National General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG's full Special Coverage of the "American Center for Voting Rights" at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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On April 7th, Wired News first reported on a class action lawsuit filed against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). AT&T is accused of allowing the NSA to monitor phone and internet communications without a warrant.

An AT&T whistleblower, Mark Klein, has come forward with testimony and documentation. Klein provides specific details about how the spying program intercepted AT&T customer communications. The NSA installed "secret rooms" in AT&T switching centers throughout the country. Live communications signals are split off into the secret room. Powerful data-mining computers installed in the room can sift through the millions of live signals.

CNN put together this short video report including comments by an EFF attorney.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Today after giving another Iraq/War-on-Terror PR speech at Johns Hopkins International Studies School, President Bush took questions from students in the audience. When compared with recent Q&A sessions, the President appeared to be relaxed to the point of laughing off the some of the tougher questions.

Bush may have offered a little bit more information about his role in using the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for political retribution. He was asked how future intelligence employees could trust the Executive Office in light of the Plame Wilson case. Bush responded that he had declassified the NIE "for a reason" but refused to say much more.

This video has about 8 minutes of clips from The President's Q&A session.

-- TIME Mag covers here...
-- WaPo covers here...
-- MSNBC covers here...
-- CNN covers here...
-- AP covers here...
-- LATE ADDITION: Houston Chronicle offers more details, and DeLay's Political Obit in the early/late web edition (12:44am PT - Hat tip to Pokey A. in Houston)

From TIME...

What TIME didn't mention, but WaPo did...And which would seem to explain a lot more about his sudden exit after his bravado of the last six months since his indictment...

From CNN...

Says MSNBC...

And here come the bloggers. First in, from Josh Marshall who tends to know this stuff cold...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Windows Media and QuickTime at Crooks and Liars.

CBS News reporter Lara Logan appeared live from Iraq on CNN Reliable Sources on Sunday morning. She issued a stern rejection of the notion that Iraq reporters are biased towards negative stories.

Lara Logan's genuine outrage makes this a must see clip!

From CNN's trancript:

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Last night on MBNBC Scarborough Country, Joe Scarborough was surprisingly polite during his interview with peace activist Cindy Sheehan.

Cindy Sheehan is joining other peace activists today who are undertaking a 140 mile march to protest the Iraq war and demanding that Iraq war monies be diverted to Hurricane Katrina relief.

UPDATE: VIDEO - Peace Activists March to New Orleans

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CNN reports on the peace/anti-war activists who are marching 140 miles to New Orleans.

The video in this report is from yesterday's segment of the march.

One protester carried a sign saying "Make Levees Not War!"

Meant to post this yesterday...From Reuters...

Looks like our old friend, the indefatigably corrupt Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), is making news again.

St. Petersberg Times takes a front page look at the "allegations pil[ing] up" against Feeney. Here's some highlights:

So will Feeney disclose who paid for that trip to China last month, in which he visited the Chinese Space Agency and called for more cooperation with them? Perhaps he should, considering that NASA, where his wife also works, is in Feeney's district. Even more notably, Feeney spent years as the general counsel and registered lobbyist for the firm Yang Enterprises, Inc. --- which harbored an illegal Chinese alien eventually found guilty of espionage charges related to sending military missile guidance chips to China --- a firm that currently has lucrative contracts with NASA.

Full disclosure on this matter would seem to be particularly important, given the revelation of Feeney's lies regarding his continuing relationship with the Yangs and their company.

On a related point, here's an unfortunate little tidbit from the article:

The list of allegations against Feeney continues in the article, along with some ink for Clint Curtis' run for Congress against him:

Here's a complete list of Reps who received money from Duke Cunningham. Feeney is among those accepting the most, but has not returned the money at this time.

Hat-tip to Jesselee from Stakeholder, who has more on the St. Pete Times article.

Clint Curtis' campaign website, where he needs much financial and logistical support if he's to have a chance of taking on Feeney and the Florida Republican Machine is right here.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Mary Matalin appeared on NBC Meet the Press (transcript) to defend Vice President Cheney's handling of the shooting scandal. She attacked NBC White House correspondent David Gregory and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for their attention to the discrepancies in Cheney's story.

So, Matalin slips in the inflammatory "jihad" remark and then accuses Gregory of "saving up for that line"?

I created a video compilation of the exchanges between Matalin, Gregory and Dowd that is posted at Crooks and Liars. If you haven't already seen it, watch the clip here in streaming flash format or download other video formats at Crooks and Liars.

Matalin's performance is a popular topic throughout the blogosphere: Arianna Huffington, firedoglake, Think Progress, AMERICAblog, James Wolcott, Hullabaloo, Talking Points Memo.

We're told that tonight's 60 Minutes features a segment with Mike Wallace on "Wounds of War" featuring soldiers injured in Iraq. (60 Minutes' website now has coverage of the segment, with a video link, but it's not the complete segment apparently.)

The segment, third on tonight's broadcast, features an interview with Tomas Young, whose story we first highlighted during our special "Operation Noble Cause" radio broadcasts on The BRAD SHOW from on the ground at "Camp Casey" in Crawford, TX, last summer. Apparently footage of me interviewing Young is a quick part of the segment.

Army Specialist Young was paralyzed from the waist down --- on the same day and in the same city as Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey --- while riding in a canvas-covered truck through Sadr City during the uprising there.

Young is seen in the photo at right at Camp Casey with his new wife, Bree, requesting a meeting with Bush. They had come to Crawford on their honeymoon. Bush had refused a meeting with Sheehan at the time on the grounds that he'd already met with her. As far as we know, Bush has still never met with Young, who wanted to ask him why he was refusing to support Stem Cell research so that he might someday be able to walk again.

-- The initial BRAD BLOG item on Young from Aug. 29, 2005 is right here.
-- My radio interview from Camp Casey on that same day with Young is right here [MP3].

UPDATE: Have now seen the segment, and it was interesting. We'll try to get it up here. One thing I didn't know until tonight was that Tomas' brother is still serving in Iraq. So for those who suggest that what Young is doing --- in speaking out against the war --- is harming our troops...well...he made clear on 60 Minutes that's the last thing he'd want to do with a brother still serving there!

FURTHER UPDATE: Here's the segment! Courtesy of the invaluable David Edwards!

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(Hat-tip Jesse of Stakeholder for the heads-up!)

Velvet Revolution's ImpeachMobile has so far received nothing but thumbs-ups and high-signs from those who've seen it! (With the exception of a few cops who have pulled it over to make sure all papers were in order. They are.)

That may change this week, as the intrepid Velvet Revolutionary drivers take the rolling billboard into a few less-friendly settings. We'll see!

In the meantime, we still (The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR) welcome and appreciate your contributions to the effort. They help to fill up the gas tank, as well as to pay for future billboards. Perhaps we'll not be so subtle next time with our message

Hopefully this will be my last words on the disgraceful incident involving the arrest, removal and detention of Cindy Sheehan, who gave the life of her child in defense of this country, just prior to Tuesday's State of the Union address.

This latest canary-in-the-coalmine story made the front page of WaPo today, and reveals quite clearly both the Media's and at least one Republican's bias against those who do not agree with the George W. Bush Administration...As well as the disregard for our Constitutional Freedom of Speech. At least by the Republican.

The WaPo article, written by Petula Dvorak, first reveals the pro-administration media bias and/or their consistent inability to fairly report on an unfair situation. Note this early graf:

In other words it's implied here that Beverly Young, the wife of Congressman Bill Young (R-FL), who was removed from gallery at some point during Bush's speech wasn't arrested because, unlike Sheehan, it didn't come to that. Mrs. Young must have been polite (she wasn't) requiring no arrest, while Sheehan must have been unruly (she wasn't) requiring arrest and hours of detention.

The fact of the matter, however, as clearly explained later in the article, is that Mrs. Young was never threatened with arrest at all, unlike Sheehan who was frog-marched out of the chamber and handcuffed from the get-go. And that was even with Sheehan being polite in every respect, by all accounts of the story, while Young was abusive towards the cops, calling them "idiots" (that night, and even later after their eventually apology) and, as WaPo points out, "Witnesses said her words for him were much saltier the night before."

As I mentioned yesterday in my article on "Cindy Sheehan's Unequal Treatment Under the Law", the Wingnuts who've been busy trying to equate Sheehan's treatment with Young's ("They were both asked to leave, so clearly there's no political bias here!" say the apologists) have also overlooked the fact that Young was asked to leave much later. After the cops already had an embarrassing situation on their hands. As WaPo reported...

It's clear that Mrs. Young would have been left alone with her "Support the Troops" T-shirt and would not have been asked to leave, had not the cops already had the Sheehan situation on their hands, and needed to cover their asses.

Finally then, it's revealed in the story that the hypocritical Congressman Young himself would likely not have said a word about Sheehan's treatment (which was much worse than his wife's) had his wife not been asked to leave. He admits as much:

So the woman actually arrested, detained, and perhaps even "roughed up" was no problem for Young's "standards" because he "totally disagree[s] with everything she stands for."

Welcome to the amazingly slipperly slope...as it gets still slipperier and slopier every damn day in this country.

Still unclear? See how Judge Anthony Napolitano --- who defended Sheehan on Fox News, ostensibly, once it became clear she broke no rules or laws --- reportedly contrasted Young's T-shirt with Sheehan's. Young's, said Napolitano, in regard to the "Support the Troops" T-shirt, was "a Republican T-shirt."

Fox happily took up the meme on their website:

The "opposite message"?!

It's a dangerous fucking line we're crossing here in America 2006. Pay attention.

ALSO... It's not just the MSM who get the story wrong in their rush for political points. Blogger Glenn Greenwald reports on tons of Wingnut bloggers who couldn't wait to lie about the Sheehan story to their readers...and then refuse to correct themselves after it was proven how incredibly wrong they were.

According to MSNBC...

As we pointed out previously, Sheehan was arrested and detained for hours for wearing the T-shirt she had been wearing all day prior to the State of the Union Address, while a Republican Congressman's wife who wore a "Support the Troops" shirt was simply asked to leave (even though she called the cops "idiots").

On moral and "Freedom of Speech" grounds, neither should have been ejected. Now, as it turns out, neither of them should have been ejected on legal grounds or even "rules of Congress" grounds.

Here's a photo of a statement by Republicans from last year that was allowed. Here's our minute-by-minute coverage of the shameful affair as it played out last night.

UPDATE: As of Wednesday evening, it looks like MSNBC has scrubbed their "We Screwed Up" article and replaced it, at the same link, with an article by AP. No explanation is given at the MSNBC website for the switcheroo!