September 18, 2004

Clinton allies reject her funding bill

Even though Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has raised millions of dollars to aid her Democratic colleagues and is a de facto party leader in Congress, the possible presidential candidate in 2008 failed to persuade her colleagues this week to fork over homeland security money for her state.
[Make no mistake: NY has already gotten plenty of money from the Bush Administration for terror attacks since 9/11, but Hilary has made getting more her cause célèbre, because she loves money and lots of it!--Jen]

Clinton made an impassioned plea in a closed Democratic Caucus meeting Tuesday for her amendment to direct that the Homeland Security Department follow a “threat-based” approach when allocating homeland-security money. Such an approach would send more aid to cities such as New York and Washington, where the terrorist threat is deemed greatest.

But Clinton was beaten back by senators fearful that their states would lose out under a system that guaranteed less money for each state, with more money based on such factors as population or level of threat. Since small states have outsized representation in the Senate, with two senators representing each state, Clinton never had much of a chance.
[Author Geoff Earle might want to get out his American Government textbook again and study both the Electoral College and Congressional representation, both of which were designed by the Founding Fathers to ensure that all American states have more or less equal representation, regardless of how "big" or "important" they judged themselves to be.
Hillary hates things like the Electoral College that give smaller, less populous states an equal voice and would love to do any with them if she were Queen!
Hitlery's Dimocrat colleagues in the Senate didn't go for this because they have to answer to their voters--some of them quite soon, like Daschle who's up for re-election and not looking all that good--and tell them why they didn't get more federal monies for their state in the event there's a terror attack there.--J.T.]

Even typical Clinton allies, such as Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), opposed Clinton on her amendment. (Plains states had a particularly good week, when the Senate tacked $3 billion in drought relief onto the homeland security bill.)

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and a Clinton confidante, opposed her amendment as well. All three senior Democrats come from small states that fare disproportionately well under the status quo.

Among top Democratic leaders, only Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.), whose state includes populous Las Vegas — a city deemed to suffer a relatively high threat of terrorist attack — supported Clinton’s amendment.

“There aren’t many places like Nevada that have a great big city,” Reid told The Hill, explaining why Clinton’s amendment was defeated. “You have a lot of places like Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota.”

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) tried to line up support for Clinton’s amendment among Republicans, many of whom come from low-population states in the West. But Ensign had even less luck than Clinton. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) all opposed the amendment, as did most Republicans.

Late Tuesday evening, the amendment was tabled, or killed, on a procedural vote, 54-39.
[Of course, sKerry and Edwards were to busy (campaigning) to show up and vote, but then they always are. Nor will they resign their seats in case they "win" the election." What a great couple of guys.]

After Tuesday’s Democratic Caucus meeting before the vote, Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) said he was undecided — although he gave indications that he would end up opposing Clinton (his eventual position). Dayton said he would have to be like a Texas politician and say, “Half my friends are for it, and half my friends are against it, and I’ll stick with my friends.”

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who often works closely with the Bush administration, this week found himself opposing the position espoused in the president’s budget: that a more threat-based approach should be followed. There were no indications Tuesday that the White House was actively whipping for Clinton’s proposal.

Nelson spoke at Tuesday’s caucus in opposition to Clinton and received a pat on the back afterward from Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), another powerful Democrat from a low-population state.

“Every state, small or otherwise, has high-value targets that need to be protected,” Nelson told The Hill. “We have refining areas. We have ethanol plants. We’ve got a number of pharmaceutical companies. We have our food-security risk of cattle and livestock.”

“It’s all on how you figure it,” Nelson continued. “It’s where you live.”

Clinton said that she “understands very well” the politics of the situation but that it was important to put federal money “where the threat is.”

“It was a tough vote for people,” said Nelson spokesman David DiMartino. “People don’t want to be perceived as parochial. How are you going to explain later on if a terrorist attack hits in the heartland of America?”

DeMartino said that if Clinton’s amendment passed, Nebraska’s homeland-security funding would have dropped from $19 million to $8 million. “It’s going to be hard to go home and say, ‘We gave up all our money and sent it to New York.’”
[I know I'd be pretty upset if there's an attack here in Dallas or even in Texas!--J.T.]

In an impassioned floor speech, Clinton cited the conclusions of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which wrote that homeland-security funding “should not remain a program for federal revenue sharing.” The committee concluded, “Congress should not use this money as a pork barrel.”
[This means YOU, too, Sen. Clinton!]

One of the few senators to vote against his state’s immediate self-interest on the amendment was Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who is legendary for steering millions in federal aid to his state. According to Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin, Byrd thinks more funding should go to areas with the highest risk of attack. “He’s certainly worked to fund his state’s interest throughout the rest of the bill, too,” Gavin allowed.

Clinton also offered an amendment to increase, by $625 million, the amount of funding directed to high-threat urban areas. That amendment also was defeated on a procedural vote, as was an amendment by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to increase funding for rail security.

Hmmm.
The Hill doesn't say whether Chucky Schumer backed his fellow NY Dim Senator...I'll have to check it out!*
(*Did check it out. Turns out Chucky was a co-sponsor. But all it is not well between those 2 in the paradise of NY!)
I'm thinking that Hillary's political star has risen and fallen already and her inability to ram this bill through pretty much proves it.
Clearly for her fellow Dimocrat Senators, to forego their own state's funding and tender it over to Her Heinous was a "bridge too far," even for Clinton's wife and purported President in 2008.
She got 5 minutes at her own convention, introducing her hubby.
The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy painted her town Bush Red at their convention.
And now that the "meek" junior senator finally sponsors an amendment, it gets beaten like a bongo, even though she's had 3 years to muster support for it and to bug President Bush for the funding...loudly, in public and in front of the mikes.
Turns out Bush isn't to blame, but her fellow Dims.
Life is sweet of late!

 

September 17, 2004

Allies insist Iraq war legal

Britain, Australia, and a former US official, stung by criticism from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, insisted yesterday that their countries' military action in Iraq was legal.

All three governments face elections in the near future and have had to grapple with varying degrees of public protest about their decision to wage war against Saddam Hussein.

Speaking to the BBC Wednesday, Annan said the US-led invasion of Iraq was illegal as it violated the UN Charter.
[How could this be when the invasion was launched after the official U.N. acknowledgement that Saddam had violated 16 U.N. resolutions and they'd just passed another one saying the same thing?
Kofi was there.
As President Bush asked the organization at the time, was the U.N. just going to keep passing resolutions, doing nothing and become irrevelant?--Jen]

Asked whether he thought it broke international law, he said: ''Yes, if you wish. I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter from our point of view. . . . It was illegal."
[The nerve! And he's a liar to boot!]

The United Nations yesterday played down his statement that the US-led invasion had been illegal, saying Annan's position on the war had long been known.

''He feels it is no different from what he has been saying for more than a year, and that position is very well known to member governments," the UN chief spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said.

Not so, said Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, on the campaign trail ahead of an Oct. 9 election. ''The legal advice that we had, and I tabled it at the time, was that the action was entirely valid in international law terms," he told Australian radio.

Howard's view was echoed by Prime Minister Tony Blair's office, which said the British government's top lawyer -- Attorney General Lord Goldsmith -- had reached the same conclusion before the invasion was launched in March last year.
[And the Brits are very big on these "international law" things, don't you know?!]

Randy Scheunemann, a former adviser to US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said of Annan: ''To do this 51 days before an American election reeks of political interference." Blair is expected to call an election in May next year.

Yep, Kofi can't wait to make his "friend" President Bush and the U.S. look bad on the world scene, while trying to push the Oil-for-Food scandal (which implicates Annan's son) under the rug and stalling around about doing anything about the genocide in Darfur, where Islamist Arabs are killing black Christians and animists in the Sudan.
When, oh when, are we going to get the U.S. out of the U.N. and vice versa?

(And of course, Kofi's and John Kerry's real pals, the French, have sided with him on the "illegal" question:

France backs Annan on illegal status of war
and this is trumpeted in Al Jizzeera, naturally.
Are we ever going to forget or forgive the French giving their word to SecState Colin Powell that they *were* going to back the U.S. on the use of force for Iraq, then publicly went back on their word?
I think not and continuing to back Kofi on the "illegality" of the war is just making it worse. Merde, froggies! You missed another opportunity to shut up again.) 

Update: Colin Powell and the nations of Poland and Bulgaria (part of the Coalition) joined their voices to Britain's and Australia's on the legality of OIF:
Powell rebukes Annan on Iraq:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday expressed strong disapproval of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's description of the U.S.-led war in Iraq as illegal, saying the comment was "not a very useful statement to make at this point."
[Colin's starting to sound like Rummy with his use of "helpful" and "not helpful."--Jen]

"What does it gain anyone? We should all be gathering around the idea of helping the Iraqis, not getting into these kinds of side issues," Mr. Powell said in an interview with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.
[The argument that a given war is "illegal" is, yes, a Leftist talking point and one they used to the very bitter end about Vietnam.--J.T.]
[...]
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Powell said the United States was determined to improve the security situation in time for national elections in Iraq; pledged to keep international attention focused on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan; and lamented the unwillingness of many in the Muslim and Arab world to take on Islamic extremists in their midst.

[...]
The U.N. chief had made no secret of his belief the United States and its allies should have sought an explicit Security Council resolution authorizing the war.
[Uh, Kofi, we tried very hard. The French stabbed us in the back and spoiled the vote on the resolution authorizing force, thuse ensuring that there would be a war.]
    
But he went much further in the BBC interview, saying, "From our point of view, from the [U.N. Charter] point of view, it was illegal."
    
Mr. Powell said the Constitution gives the United States the right to act in its own self-defense without U.N. approval,
[DAMN STRAIGHT!]
but argued that the Iraq war itself was justified by Saddam's "material breach" of a string of earlier U.N. resolutions on his weapons programs.
    
"What we did was totally consistent with international law," he insisted.
    
Officials in Britain, Australia, Bulgaria and Poland yesterday joined Mr. Powell in rejecting Mr. Annan's argument. Many allies would face severe political difficulties at home if the war was seen as lacking U.N. sanction.
[That's because these allies have sadly subjugated their national sovereignity too often in the past to the NWO-Gruppedenke of the U.N. and the E.U. of "peace at any price."]

Powell then goes on in this interview to address the security situation in Iraq, the crisis in Darfur, how we're handling the intransigence of Syria in Lebanon, the lack of religious freedom in Soddy Arabia, and the possibility of a popular revolt in Iran.
He is clearly on top of every serious situation in the world and the war and I'm delighted that he's going to be sticking around for President Bush's second term!

Democrats accused of ripping Bush signs

West Virginia man said yesterday that Democrats stole his family's Bush-Cheney campaign signs at an event featuring Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards.
    "They just pounced on us," said Phil Parlock, who took his 11-year-old son, Alex, and 3-year-old daughter, Sophia, to the Democratic rally at Tri-State Airport in Huntington, W.Va.
    Sophia became briefly famous yesterday when an Associated Press photo showing her in tears after Democrats tore her sign to pieces was posted on Matt Drudge's Web site, www.drudgereport.com.

    "She was crying; they were pushing and shoving her," said Mr. Parlock, a Huntington real estate agent. "She was scared."
    Sophia is the youngest of 10 children in a proudly patriotic family. The oldest two Parlock children, a 22-year-old daughter and a 21-year-old son, are members of the West Virginia Army National Guard, and a third Parlock — who recently turned 18 — will be sworn into the guard tomorrow, Mr. Parlock said.
    The Parlocks went to Mr. Edwards' airport rally yesterday "to support the president," Mr. Parlock said, and brought nine Bush-Cheney signs with them.
    "We stood there quietly while Senator Edwards went through the receiving line," he said. Then, as the North Carolina Democrat prepared to leave, Mr. Parlock said, "I took out a few Bush-Cheney signs, gave one to Alex, and Sophia and I held up one jointly."
    Immediately, he said, the family was set upon by supporters of Mr. Edwards and Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry — "mostly the painters union guys" — who "started stealing my signs." Soon, "old women and college students joined in the fracas," said Mr. Parlock, describing himself as "strictly a volunteer, grass-roots supporter" of the president. Mr. Parlock ran unsuccessfully for his local school board this year.
    After the family returned home from the rally yesterday, he said, a friend called to tell him about the AP photo on the Drudge site. "In the picture, you can see one of the painters union guys has a piece of one of my signs in his hand."
    A call to the Kerry-Edwards campaign last night was not returned.
    Anti-war demonstrators have complained in recent weeks that they have been manhandled by security agents at Bush-Cheney campaign events.

There's a difference between a rally for the sitting President in wartime (and the enemy is on our soil) where the Secret Service is protecting the Commander-in-Chief from potential enemies and a rally for the challenging opponent at which "supporters" are guilty of the roughing up a 3-year-old and her daddy because they just didn't like their Bush-Cheney sign!
Shouldn't those Union Thugs for Kerry signs say, A Strong Arm America begins at home?"
What went relatively unreported was the mob mentality at work here and the real fear this mob tried to instill in the Parlocks for holding different political opinions to theirs.
What a shame and a disgrace.

September 16, 2004

Kerry supports 'right vote, 'while decrying 'wrong war'

John Kerry yesterday said he now can see no reason why the United States went to war in Iraq, yet added that he still stands by his vote to authorize the war.
[What is wrong with this man?!
Can't he afford medication with Theresa's billions?
Even if I wanted to vote for him--which I most certainly do not--I wouldn't because I can't figure out what the hell he's saying!]
[...]
"I think it was the right vote based on what Saddam Hussein had done, and I think it was the right thing to do to hold him accountable," he told Mr. Imus, saying his position "can't be clearer."
   
 But Mr. Kerry's answers left Mr. Imus, who frequently describes himself on air as a Kerry supporter, flummoxed.
    "I asked him a number of questions about Iraq, and I can't tell you what he said," Mr. Imus said after Mr. Kerry hung up.
[Imus is an ass most of the time, but he has these rare moments when he's a real hoot and this is one of them!--Jen]
[...]
"The bottom line: Anyone who listened to Imus, anyone who reviews the transcript, now recognizes that on the most important issue facing our country today — the question of how we deal with global terrorism — John Kerry's position has deteriorated into complete and total incoherence," Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman told reporters on a conference call yesterday.
[...]
  At one point yesterday, after Mr. Kerry had criticized the Bush administration for failing to plan for the postwar period and not equipping troops properly, Mr. Imus said the senator might be to blame, citing his vote against an $87 billion bill to fund the war in Iraq.
   
 "They can't get this equipment for these troops if people like you won't vote for the funding though," Mr. Imus said.
    
"We did vote for the funding. We voted for the funding," Mr. Kerry responded. "I voted for the largest defense budgets in the history of our country. And I voted — this is long after the war, that $87 billion vote. The war had started. These people were sent over there without the equipment, and they still don't have the equipment."
[What kind of Clintonian parsing is this?!?
"I voted...that vote?"
This means he actually voted "Nay," but is too chicken to tell Imus he's right.
Whatta tool.--J.T.]

In yesterday's interview, Mr. Kerry said he has not read the book "Unfit for Command," the best seller written by fellow Vietnam veterans who served similar duty as Mr. Kerry on swift boats and who dispute his service record.
    
But despite not having read it, Mr. Kerry called it "an absolute pack of lies."
[Whadda ya wanna bet he's read it cover-to-cover, maybe several times?]
    
"It's been proven to be a pack of lies,
[Not quite, Sen. Ketchup!]
and I have no interest in reading it," he said.
   
 Author John E. O'Neill said there is "a simple reason" why the book remains the New York Times' best-selling nonfiction book for the fourth week in a row.
    
"It's all true," Mr. O'Neill said yesterday. "Neither John Kerry nor any of his campaign surrogates have come forward to refute a single word of my book."

The important thing is that because sKerry has now given a public statement about the Swifties and their book, it now definitely is a part of the campaign conversation at last!
When can we expect Jenghis John to address the substance of what they say, release his military and medical records and apologize for calling his band of brothers "baby killers" and "war criminals?"

Heinz Kerry Visits Hurricane Aid Center

Teresa Heinz Kerry, encouraging volunteers as they busily packed supplies Wednesday for hurricane relief efforts in the Caribbean, said she was concerned the effort was too focused on sending clothes instead of essentials like water and electric generators.

Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids," said Heinz Kerry, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. "Water is necessary, and then generators, and then food, and then clothes."

Is there a reason that Theresa always looks like a doomed character in the 2nd hour of a disaster movie, you know, the woman who'd be played by the attractive, but irritating actress Lee Grant?
(Other than that her "husband's" campaign is sinking faster than the Titanic?)
Add "...let them go naked..." to "Shove it!" and calling the American people "idiots" who don't want Kerry's plan to socialize American health care!

Click on over to Iowa Presidential Watch where the lovely (but feisty) Linda has come up with some killer graphics and a line of great merch for we bloggers!
(I've ordered a mousepad and a coffee mug, fer shure!)
There's also some great stuff about the presidential race in Iowa (which the Dims think is a "swing state." But we Men and Women in PJs know better!
Pajama People > Righties -- Cool Stuff for Conservatives | Pajama People

H/T La Divina Lucianne, who swears she's going to market the slippers! (Can't wait! My feet are cold!)

*We Right Wing Bushie war bloggers owe Jim Geraghty of NRO's Kerry Spot BIG TIME for his coining of the term "Pajamahadeen" for we mouse warriors and citizen journalists!

September 13, 2004

No Disputing It: Blogs Are Major Players

These days, CBS News anchor Dan Rather and his colleagues at the network's magazine program "60 Minutes II" are enduring an unusual wave of second-guessing by some of the public and fellow journalists.
For that, they can thank "Buckhead."
[Buckhead is the Freeper whose "hints" about what was wrong with the "60 Minutes" memos put web detectives on the road to discovery.--Jen]

It was a late-night blog posting by this mystery Netizen that first questioned the validity of documents Rather cited Wednesday as proof that George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard duty more than 30 years ago.

Buckhead refuses to further identify himself, other than dropping hints that he is a male who lives on the East Coast — preferring to proclaim that the scramble to verify the contentions in his posting marks an extraordinary achievement for a medium that has operated more as an underground world of ideological venting than a source of legitimate news.
[This is neither a fair nor an accurate description of the blogosphere; not only are there Liberal and Conservative blogs, but given the proclivity of the MSM to only report "news" that is favorable to their (Leftist) ideological agenda, it is often left to bloggers and Conservative talk radio to get out the "real news" to the American public!
The Media situation has deteriorated so much in the past 4 years, I'd say that it's the MSM that does the "ideological venting" rather than being the source of legit news and the whole Dan Rather scandal proves it!--J.T.]

But Buckhead is vehement about one thing: He acted alone when he posted, to the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, what was widely believed to be the first allegation that the CBS report relied on documents that could have been forged.

"Absolutely, positively, on my own, sitting at my computer in my bedroom just before midnight — but not in my pajamas," he wrote in an e-mail exchange with The Times. "But once I posted the comment to Free Republic I was no longer working alone, and that is the real point of the story about the story about the story."

That story began Wednesday, 19 minutes after the "60 Minutes II" broadcast began, when another FreeRepublic poster, TankerKC, noted that the documents were "not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF…. Can we get a copy of those memos?"

Less than four hours later, Buckhead pointed to "proportionally spaced fonts" in the memos, which CBS said had been written in the early 1970s by Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984. Buckhead concluded that the documents had been drafted on a modern-day word processor rather than a typewriter.

"I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old," Buckhead wrote. "This should be pursued aggressively."

And it was — with startling speed.
[This is the beauty of the blogosphere: there are literally thousands of patriotic Americans out there who can and will "fact check the a$$es" of the MSM and do it in real time. We've been doing it for years now!
And there's a certain synergy you get in the blogosphere that is found nowhere else, due to links and connectivity--we all "feed" off each other's ideas, if you will, and at lightning speed.
As the authors of the Clue Train Manifesto put it, "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies."
That would mean hierachies like that of CBS News and the L.A. Times editorial staff.
Further, Clue Train authors have this to say about today's Internet, which would definitely apply to the blogosphere and the outing of these forgeries in particular:
"We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings--and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it."]

Early Thursday morning, Minneapolis lawyer Scott Johnson was in his basement home office, preparing to link some morning news reports to the site he co-authors, when a reader sent an e-mail about Buckhead.

Intrigued, Johnson, whose online ID is "The Big Trunk," put a link on his site, PowerLine Blog.com, to Buckhead's post.

Then the floodgates opened.

"Thanks to all the readers who have written regarding this post," Johnson wrote in an early update. "Several have pointed out that the Executive line of IBM typewriters did have proportionally spaced fonts, although no reader has found the font used in the memos to be a familiar one or thought that the IBM Executive was likely to have been used by the National Guard in the early 1970s.

Reader Monty Walls has also cited the IBM Selectric Composer," he continued. "However, reader Eric Courtney adds this wrinkle: The 'Memo To File' of August 18, 1973, also used specialized typesetting characters not used on typewriters. These include the superscript 'th' in 187th, and consistent ' (right single quote) all parentheses in original used instead of a typewriter's generic {minute} (apostrophe). These are the sorts of things that typesetters did manually until the advent of smart correction in things like Microsoft Word."

Soon Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles musician-turned-conservative-blogger who hosts the site LittleGreenFootballs.com, posted the results of his own investigation. He wrote that he had opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Times New Roman and used the program's default settings to retype a purported Killian memo from August 1973.

"My Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as 'authentic,' " Johnson wrote, posting images of his creation and the CBS document. (The Times New Roman font itself predates computers; it was designed in 1932.)

Within 90 minutes of that post, the Power Line site was linked to perhaps the best-known conservative site of all — the Drudge Report, made famous when Matt Drudge took a lead role in the first reports on the relationship between then-President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
[I think it's a little generous to call Drudge "Conservative," but it does turn out the way usually, in the end. Matt does tend to pursue the most outrageous and scandalous stories, no matter whom they hurt or help.
Often, this doesn't work to Conservatives' favor--like pushing the Abu Ghraib non-story, another "60 Minutes" special, BTW.--Jen]

"That was a quantum jump in awareness," said Scott Johnson. "It was wildly circulating in the blogosphere until Drudge linked us. Then it was instantly known to a million people, and it was all of a sudden a legitimate story."
[IOW, it had "legs"--and all without the help, or in spite of, the mechanisms of Old Media.]

Suddenly, the story line shifted from the question Democrats had been trying to ask — whether Bush received special treatment in the Guard — to whether a network long detested by conservatives had been duped in its quest to air a report critical of the president in the midst of the reelection campaign.

Journalists at mainstream media outlets rushed to consult with experts to check the validity of the documents.
[Note the Big Story is that no-one at CBS News even bothered to do this before the story was aired on CBS, because they wanted it to be true, authenticity be damned!]
The claims of seemingly legitimate analysts posting commentary online could not be ignored.

"If the blog enthusiasts wanted to write a better scenario, they'd have a hard time coming up with one more spectacular than this one," said Jim Geraghty, host of the Kerry Spot blog published by the conservative National Review, whose e-mail queue was filled by font experts from across the nation wanting to weigh in.

Democrats point to the timeline as evidence of a right-wing conspiracy; Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe suggested to reporters Friday that White House political advisor Karl Rove might have cooked up the memos, presumably with the idea that they would be discredited. A Bush spokesman called the charge "nonsense."
[What can you say about this ludicrous assertion of McAwful's, except that the lunatics are running the Dimocrat asymlum and have been for some time...?--Jen]

"It was amazing Thursday to watch the documents story go from FreeRepublic.com, a bastion of right-wing lunacy, to Drudge to the mainstream media in less than 12 hours," said Jim Jordan, a strategist for independent Democratic groups opposed to Bush.
[How unfair to call Freepers "lunatics!"
Sure, like any political group they have their fringe who believe "tin foil hat" theories are true, but for the most part, they're a group of caring, informed Americans who love their country.
If you wanna see crazy, trip over to DemocratUnderground for a look-see!]

"That's not to say the documents didn't deserve examination. But apparently the entire thing was cooked up by a couple of amateurs on Free Republic. The speed with which it moved was breathtaking."
[Note the Dims' operative eagerness to ignore bloggers!]

By Friday, articles in The Times, the Washington Post and other news outlets were quoting some analysts raising questions about the CBS documents, and others saying it was impossible to judge the memos' authenticity without seeing the originals.
[SOP for any matter where the truth of documents is concerned, wouldn't you say?]

Rather opened his evening news broadcast Friday with a defense of his report, producing an "analyst"[Sneer quotes mine.--Jen] who vouched for the memos.

But at the same time, one man who Rather had said would corroborate CBS' report — retired Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, Killian's direct supervisor — told The Times that he did not think the memos were real.

Media experts said the role of the bloggers illustrated a significant development in the relationship between mainstream news and the still-nascent phenomenon of blogging.
[And where, pray tell, would we all be without "Media experts?"]

This was the first time, some said, that the Web logs were engaging in their own form of investigative journalism — and readers, they warned, should be cautious.
[It's the first of many, I would predict, too.
No stopping us now!]

The mainstream press is having to follow them,"
[BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!]
said Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston. "The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?
[How do we know who's doing the "60 Minutes" stories and putting the show together?
It's still not true!
Typical Liberal smear: Attack the messenger.
The snide remark about us doing it in our PJs was another straw man argument.
Look on the bright side: we might be naked!]

"And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate, but because there's been so much reporting about what's being reported, it has already taken on a life of its own?"

"All hail 'Buckhead,' " wrote one posting to Free Republic.

"Here, here," wrote another. "But how do we know Buckhead is really not Karl Rove…. "

Doesn't matter if it was Karl Rove, although if it were, that's interesting and funny because it means that Karl saw the potential of the blogosphere to bust the preexisting monopoly on the "news" of the MSM which is nothing but a Liberal machine spreading their "progressive" agenda and their propaganda disguised as "news."
That explosion you heard is the sound of Old Media ( Network TV and newspapers) imploding and New Media (blogs +Conservative talk radio + Fox News) gaining strength like the Incredible Hulk!
It doesn't matter "who" we are, whether we're wearing our pajamas when we post or if we're up in the middle of the night; in fact, that's the beauty of it!
Such is the state of the Internet, internet connectivity and software programming that makes desktop publishing (i.e. blogging) possible.
Into the void of "fair and balanced" news come the bloggers--the 21st Century and Information Age is well and truly born.
So, my fellow citizens, don your pajamas and get with the program!