Bruce Ivins, a bioweapons scientist at Ft. Detrick, Md. reportedly killed himself via overdose earlier this week.  He was about to be indicted in connection with the 2001 anthrax attacks (remember those?).  But there are pieces of this story that simply don't add up at this moment.

Don your tinfoil chapeau, and join me below the flip...

As if you needed a reason to avoid Slate altogether:

I've been following a John Edwards story for awhile now; it's a story that appears to be gaining traction in the wingnutosphere (not surprising), but now Slate's getting into the action?  Slate editor-at-large Jack Schafer begins his take on the story with with a hand wringing plea:

Q: Why the Press Is Ignoring the Edwards "Love Child" Story?

My answer after the flip.

I'm amazed at the reaction in the blogosphere today.

I'm more amazed at the excuse making for Barack Obama's total lack of leadership on FISA / illegal wiretapping / telecom immunity.

Did anyone really think he'd bite the hand that feeds him?

It's a bit early to say whether ABC's huge corporate mistake, "Path to 9/11", was a success or failure in the ratings, although overnight Nielsen results seem to indicate it was, at best, a tepid ratings success:

ABC's Path to 9/11 got a lot of pre-broadcast buzz for its controversial treatment of the Clinton administration, but it managed only a third-place finish for the night.

But that's not what I want to focus on in this post mortem - I want to talk about the Democratic Party players who didn't come to the table when they were needed...

Yesterday, the National Broadcasting Corporation was the antithesis of the American Broadcasting Corporation.  From Matt Lauer's testy interview with George Bush on the Today Show (Matt's been "unleashed" since Katie left the show...), to Keith Olbermann's stunning rant immediately prior to Bush's propaganda speech yesterday evening - NBC put their corporate balls on the table.  

On this fifth anniversary of 9/11/01, we can argue all day as to whether or not the U.S. is safer today than we were five years ago.  We can point fingers of blame to and fro, at Clinton and Bush the Elder and Bush the Lesser, and still not come to a national concensus.  Five years after the fact, it doesn't seem to me that it much matters anymore, and I'm not going to get into an insurance adjuster's mindset when it comes to assigning "blame".  What's the point, anyway?

But to answer the question "are we safer?", and (by extension) has the GOP made us safer, I'm not going to even consider terrorism in the equation.  Jump below to find out why...  

There's been a lot of grousing in Left Blogistan over the past few days regarding the GOP's stepped up rhetoric on TERROR TERROR TERROR.  I'm not sure what else progressives expected as election season approached - I mean, what else can the GOP use as a campaign platform?  And as long as they continue to occupy the bully pulpit of power, TERROR TERROR TERROR is all they have to terrorize the country with.  Think about it.

It's all they've got.

This is gonna be a short diary (well, by my standards anyway).

The pressure is working.  Variety, the venerable Hollywood insider's mag, is reporting this morning that ABC is considering spiking Path to 9/11 in its entirety.

I hate to waste my one diary for today on this breaking news, but link and excerpt below...I did a search and didn't see another diary on this but I'll delete this one if it's a duplicate.

Late this afternoon, Scholastic Books issued a press release as a response to its ill-considered corporate participation in catapulting the GOP / ABC propaganda being spewed by Path to 9/11.  In the press release (interestingly enough, issued after the closing bell at the NYSE), Scholastic announced that it was removing resource materials from its website that supported the crock-u-drama.  Well, sort of.

"After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues," said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic.

Horseshit.  A more accurate statement would have been:  "After hundreds of thousands of emails and phone calls, and after having to shift pissed off departmental resources to dealing with this fucking public relations nightmare, we had to make a decision.  How do we keep our financial backers happy, and not tank our business in the process?

It's time to loose the big guns...below...

Yesterday, I diaried about Scholastic Books catapulting the "Path to 9/11" propaganda.  More than 400 comments were made, the vast majority of them excellent suggestions for action, and outrage that Scholastic would be supporting this crock-u-mentary with propaganda reinforcement.

We flooded them with calls and emails of protest and righteous indignation.

Tonight, the material is no longer on Scholastic's website.  Poof.  Disappeared.

Jump below...

There have been a number of diaries on the upcoming ABC crock-u-drama Path to 9/11.  I haven't seen one yet that focuses on the propaganda reinforcement being done in school systems via the venerable Scholastic Books organization.

Anyone who's ever put a child through school is familiar with Scholastic Books.  But did you know that they are providing extensive "study resources" and teaching guides for Path to 9/11?  And that the resources are demonstrably false, misleading, and reinforce the GOP's attempt to rewrite history?

This is important...jump down below the fold for details and action points.

In the 1956 Philip K. Dick sci-fi short story Minority Report (later turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg), psychics known as "precogs" were utilized by police to preempt murders and other crimes before they happened.  As with many things in our post-1984 world, fiction is becoming fact - or at least desireable in terms of predicting future behavior.

The future has arrived, and it's farking frightening.  Below the fold, information on the leading advocate...

Hotel Rwanda was my first real exposure to the genocide that occured in Rwanda in 1994.  I was only vaguely aware of the atrocities that had occured during that period of time, thanks to the almost total lack of coverage by the U.S. media.  In retrospect, if anyone could point to a single huge failure of the Clinton administration, the most likely target would be the total lack of U.S. response to the preventable slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people simply because of their ethnicity.  

The Bush administration and U.S. corporate media are doing almost the same thing with the ongoing genocide in Sudan...  

It's hard to believe that nearly a year ago, we watched in abject horror as a disaster of historic proportions descended upon the Gulf Coast of the United States.  And no, I'm not talking about Hurricane Katrina.  I'm referring to the response of the U.S. government to the crisis.  

From Dubya's guitar picking in San Diego while thousands suffered and died at the New Orleans Convention Center, to Condi's shoe shopping expedition in New York City while 30 countries awaited clearance from the State Department to provide emergency relief, to the infamous "...doing a heck of a job, Brownie" and "Fuck you Mr. Cheney", it's a time for reflection on the greatest failure of Republican Party policies (in general), and Bush administration chutzpah (in particular).

Spike Lee's scathing 4 hour documentary When the Levees Broke begins airing tonight on HBO...

(more...)

Nothing real heavy tonight; just a little story from my weekend.

Heading down the center lane of Rt. 202 in Delaware this afternoon, I braked approaching a traffic light, and stopped next to a fairly new Honda Accord with Virginia tags.  The windows were down, and a middle age woman was behind the wheel.  A hyperactive Jack Russell terrier hung half way out the rear driver's side window, yipping and yapping at a couple of Harley riders to my left.  The bikers were staring down the dog, which only caused it to get more agitated.  The whole scene was like the setup in the opening montage of a Billy Crystal movie.  

As we inched forward in heavy traffic, the Honda edged a bit ahead of me, and I saw the following bumper sticker taped to the rear window:

(more...)

Five days isn't nearly enough time to make the rash assumption that the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah is going to hold.  It's almost like cheering the fact that the Hatfield's quit shooting at the McCoy's.  Maybe they're just reloading or maybe they needed a nip of moonshine or maybe - just maybe - Israel needed a way out and finally understood that they were pissing against a huge tide of global condemnation.

I've never understood Israeli aggression in that regard.  The country is literally surrounded by bad actor states - ones that have an inexhaustible supply of jihadists, car bombers, potential martyrs waiting for their virgins, and generally unfriendly tribes of Arabic descent.  Yet they take a sustained aggressive action against a non-state entity like Hezbollah, and dramatically shift regional (and in fact global) sentiment even further against them.  They drain their limited resources, weaken their defense, piss off their military...hey, that kind of sounds like the Bush administration's plan for the U.S. of A., doesn't it?

More after the jump...

This is really starting to make me ill.  First, CNN's Chuck Roberts smears Ned Lamont as "the Al-Qaeda candidate".  This morning, Don Imus' producer Bernard said the following on the air on Imus' MS-GOP simulcast:

On the August 17 edition of MSNBC's Imus in the Morning, executive producer Bernard McGuirk said that John Mark Karr, the man who reportedly admitted to killing 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in 1996, "looks like Ned Lamont, actually." McGuirk then asked: "Is that who you want representing you, Connecticut?"

A bit more follows the jump...

Yesterday, blogs for two separate major metro newspapers, Milwaukee's Journal - Sentinal and Philly's Inquirer, picked up on the terror debunking that I've been engaged in for the past couple of days.  

Eugene Kane and Dan Rubin both authored thoughtful articles on the topic.  Since each columnist was moved to reference All Spin Zone in their articles, I felt a personal reply was in order. When two major newspapers start to sniff around the edges of the Hellzapopin' at Heathrow story, I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe, just maybe, some headway is being made in our calls for critical media analysis of similar events.

(Below the fold: the email I sent to both Eugene and Dan...)