Success! Mostly.

Chalk it up to "one for the little guy"!

In the wake of our series of reports on the White House quietly removing embarrassing Audio and Video from their website, it seems the bulk of that material has now been restored online! Thanks, no doubt, to the adverse attention they received via wire reports and Washington Post articles that our reporting was able to spur, the Administration seems to have gone through thousands of web pages and restored the previously available media to them.

That alone seems to disprove the theory offered by Jim Gilliam, one of the creators of the excellent OutFoxed documentary, who reported being told by the White House at the time that there was a policy to remove old audio/media after a year. As we previously reported, there was much media still online well over a year old. If this supposed policy was done for storage-space reasons, the restoration of gigabytes of media now would seem to disprove that notion as well. Looks like the WH was at least victorious in selling their line to those filmmakers. Just another in a series of apparent lies and nonsense peddled, too often successfully, by this corrupt Administration.

So what material is still not restored to the publically owned and historical website?

Their removed "List of Coalition Members", which originally started all of this when it was taken down just after Dick Cheney accused John Edwards of not counting Iraq as part of the "coalition" during the V.P. Debate is still, unbelievably, not available. We caught them red-handed at the time. And as of this date, in the final days of a Presidential campaign, in the middle of a war, the Whitehouse.gov website still has no list or information as to who our allies are in that effort.

Beyond that, there is no way of knowing what else has been deleted, removed, changed, redacted or disappeared since the White House doesn't allow Internet Archive sites to index it's thousands of pages. Thus, it's nearly impossible to track everything that has been changed and deleted. For example, the "Secretary Paul O'Neil testifies about terrorism risk insurance" link in their special report detailing "America's Response to Terrorism" is still missing (as illustrated at right).

At this point, all we can do is hope the Bush Administration has any respect left for "the rule of law" since all of the documents they release on their website are "historical documents" that belong to the people. As we previously reported, their deletion or editing without approval from the National Archives seems to be in clear violation of the "Presidential Records Act".

But they'd never disrespect "the rule of law" at this White House. Right?

EnjoyTheDraft.com's new ad campaign (a couple of ads from it seen below) has been cancelled at the last minute by senior management at Yahoo. John Aravosis of AMERICABlog, part of the group that created EnjoyTheDraft.com, is reporting that management at "the highest levels of Yahoo" decided at the last minute to cancel the campaign after ads were bought, paid for, and set to go live today. The original announcement for their campaign, with more graphics, etc, is here.

{DISCLAIMER: EnjoyTheDraft.com is a paid BRAD BLOG advertiser. We're proud to have them as a sponsor!}

Who stands to benefit from the re-emergence of Bin Laden? The best spinners, I guess. I'm looking over the transcript of the video now, as posted on Drudge.

More on that as I go through it. But in the meantime, no doubt, the Bushies will spin this as proof that bin Laden supports the election of John Kerry. The Kerry team will spin this as proof that Bush took his eye off the ball, and use his statement that he was "truly not that concerned about him" to blast Dubya.

Now the Bushies are better spinners, in general, and have a far more sophisticated "spin apparatus" in place via their echo chamber control of the media. As well, this helps to get the awful al Qa-qaa news and the Administrations disastrous handling of same --- being remarkably flat-footed and ham-handed in their many responses --- off the news. So overall, I'm leaning towards Advantage: Bush on this one for the moment. But I don't know yet.

What are your thoughts? Other than it's the American people (and the world) who "lose" by bin Laden still being alive, who "wins" from today's news on this?

Story here. Video here (sorry, CBS-haters, the Fox version wouldn't download).

Don't let this worry you though, since our "President", as you may recall, was "truly not that concerned about him". So why should you be?

(Video tape of that statement available here, despite the White House's version of same having been scrubbed from their website).

UPDATE: Whaddaya know? Since our report on the scrubbing of that audio/video, and since The Washington Post's coverage of it, the White House has restored the Audio and Video from that March 2002 press conference that they'd previously removed!

Little wonder the Pentagon refuses to report or count Iraqi casualty figures.

We've been reporting that 28,000 Iraqi military (many whom were conscripted out of their village at gunpoint by Saddam) were reported killed at the end of "major hostilities" by various Pentagon sources at the time.

Since then, the best estimates we've been able to round up are that over 22,000 civilian Iraqis are estimated as dead. But apparently, we've been low-balling it!

This just out from The Independent:

By way of comparison to the "at least 100,000 Iraqis" who've been killed so far --- and had nothing whatsoever do with 9/11 --- the U.S. lost 2,973 on that fateful day. That'll show 'em!

Even the CIA won't play along with the White House anymore. The New York Times reported yesterday on the diplomatic "no thank you" the CIA took on rubber-stamping a White House-proposed report they hoped to release this summer subtly titled: "America Is Safer Without Saddam Hussein"

Say what?! What sort of judgement is it? An "emotional" one? A "political" one? Well, if it's up to this White House, I guess... Anyway, the report goes on...

heheh...

In reply to one of our "White House Website Scrub" stories, this comment was posted last night by someone identifying themselves as "Spakeh":

After posting that same message about 10 times, the same user (same IP address) then posted another comment right after that one using another name, "wEEwEE":

Wow. Talk about your flip-flops! Anyway, thanks for supporting the BRAD BLOG "Spakeh"/"wEEwEE"! I feel the love...All the way down to my WARM SPINCHTER.

Any more questions?

No clue on the authenticity of the flyer below that was scanned and sent to Kos as he reported today. Given the similarity in it's message to past known examples of such dirty tricks and flyers just like this, as well as the orchestrated voter suppression tactics beginning to emerge now in Ohio and Florida, I'd rather err on the side of vigilance.

Keep your eyes out for this kinda crap...I think there will be plenty of it (if the language in the hate mail I've been receiving of late is any indication).

(Reposting this from memory as best I can after something happened to the main index and this entry got killed somehow. Part of the hack/DDos attacks we've been getting today?)

If you've been listening to Rush this morning, you can tell what kind of panic they're in. He doesn't sound like someone who thinks he's about to win.

He's been going ape-shit all morning over al Qa-qaa. And for good reason. A new report this morning from KSLT Eyewitness News has an eyewitness embedded reporter who was on the scene --- with video and pictures! --- on April 18, 2003. And explosives were still there!

The video report shows footage from inside the bunkers:

Are these definitely the high explosives that are now missing? Don't know. But it doesn't look good, and Rush, Sean, Fox and the GOP are now officially in an all-out panic.

UPDATE: More on the above now from ABC. Looks like possible confirmation of the drums and the seals seen in the video:

Dead to rights?

Fin does it again! Check his latest (and final?) video of the season!

It rocks!

Then run out and give the link to everybody you know between now and Election Day! And tell them to give it to everybody they know!

Kick. Ass. We're almost there!!!

(If you can spare a few bucks so we can take out a few BlogAds for it, please DONE HERE NOW! Thanks!)

It's incredible, but right now at GeorgeWBush.com --- on the front page --- there is an ad for their "Closing Video". And the photo they're using to advertise it (which appears in the video) is a FAKE!

The version of the photo below is from Kos, who has the whole story. It shows the faked soldiers circled! Apparently, Bush was speaking on a podium where the soldiers have been pasted in with Photoshop.

Unbelievable. The kid with the flag looks faked to me as well, but I'll let you know if I can find the original photo to confirm that.

I do believe they've just jumped the shark!

UPDATE: They've just changed the photo to the ad on the front page of GeorgeWBush.com! I guess getting busted will do that to ya! Here's the photo they're using now...

Too funny. CNN's now on it as the Bush campaign says they're gonna recut their doctored video!

"Bush/Cheney '04: Whatever It Takes...Indeed"

UPDATE: And here finally, is the original photo that they created the fake from in the first place.

While Rush and Sean and Fox continue to try and convince their sheeple that "Kerry has been blaming the troops" for Bush's failure at al Qaqaa, Rudyactually seems to have done precisely that on TV this morning apparently! Atrios has the video.

Oops...looks like they're falling apart and off their usually brilliantly coordinated lock-step message. Stick a fork in 'em.

And now...Watch Dubya's very own Bozo Moment (like his Dad's in the final days) any second! It feels like it's almost here!

As more and more American troops are being sent back to Iraq for a second helping, the U.S. military death toll took a tragic jump up to 1111 today.

While a new Fin/What-We-Know video is set for release later today, here's a couple of quick hit videos in the mean time, courtesy of Brain Duffy's "No Bush in '04" from the past coupla days to a look at and pass around in the meantime:

· Bush finally manages to tell the truth!
· A Message from your Commander-in-Chief.