Link: http://www.pastdeadline.com/2006/09/five_years_late.html

...to get across your message when it appears that the current media reporting and political climate in the USA relies to a significant extent on passing off exaggerations and falsehoods as truth.
ABC (a subsidiary of Disney Corporation) is about to show a mini-series about the events leading up to 9/11. However, they do (based on well-documented reports about the preview copies of the mini-series) appear to be adhering to the old tabloid journalism maxim that one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
This evisceration of the mini-series by a Hollywood media blogger says it better than I can.
I wrote to the Dallas area ABC affiliate this evening warning them that if this mini-series is shown in its current form, not only will I not be watching WFAA or any other ABC affiliate again, I will also stop buying or consuming any Disney product or offering. They courteously acknowledged my email. I hope they realize that I was making a promise, not a threat.

Link: http://www.watleyreview.com/b

Link: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-seatbelt_02met.ART.State.Edition2.3ef3646.html

Theresa Dobbs happens to be Marsha's guitar teacher...this is what happens when The System gets confused. I would not wish this sort of ordeal on anybody, and I hope that somebody somewhere in The System is held accountable (although I am not holding my breath...)

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060829/ts_nm/crime_polygamy_dc

The self-appointed leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), Warren Jeffs, who had been on the run for over a year, was arrested in Nevada on Tuesday.
After the style of Al Capone (who, despite his long record of intimidation, violence and extortion, was ultimately convicted for tax evasion), Jeffs was actually arrested after being recognized when his car was stopped for having expired license plates. (#1 rule of being on the run - take care of the small legal stuff, lest it trips you up).
Jeffs heads a breakaway and highly sinister sect, whose key beliefs include keeping women in a permanent state of indentured servitude, and the perpetuation of welfare benefit fraud against states. The polygamy beliefs of the FLDS have been twisted away from the equitable treatment of women towards a mysoginistic use of women as domestic, sexual and reproductive slaves. Several rural towns in Arizona and Nevada are basically controlled by the FLDS, and only last year a policeman in one of the towns was suspended after it was discovered that he was an FLDS member with several wives.
The FLDS also operates in Texas, where it appears to be building a new headquarters.

Current Alaska Governor Frank Murchison was comprehensively beaten in the GOP primary election. It was interesting that this non-endorsement of a sitting representative, while mentioned in the media, did not immediately trigger a frantic discussion about 'wingnut Republicans', along the lines of the ratchet-jawing that followed Ned Lamont's defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary.
Murchison and Lieberman's defeats are representative democracy in action, no more, no less. No elected official has a right to be re-elected; they have to earn re-election. Ultimately the electors can (and sometimes will) remove officials from office if they are considered to be incompetent, arrogant, corrupt or engaging in malfeasance. Removal of an elected official does not mean that their party has been captured by Extremists, the Netroots, wingnuts etc. It simply means that the voters exercised their right to de-elect an elected representative.
The hand-wringing discussions in the media following Joe Lieberman's defeat were interesting in that they showed that the mainstream media does not know what to make of grassroots assertivess. The MSM has totally bought into the top-down command-and-control model promulgated by the current administration, and appears to be incapable of understanding any bottom-up voter-led initiative. Time for them to go back to school and refresh their understanding of the democratic process and the Republican system of governance. Until they do that, and show a renewed willingness to see past soundbites and start asking perceptive questions, you will forgive me if I continue to ignore most of the media prattlings.

Link: http://wcco.com/topstories/local_story_229144301.html

For many years it has been commonplace for people running for elective office to "optimize" their biographies to remove, well, those awkward things that they either did or said in the past.
Now that Wikipedia is becoming an increasingly important source of factual information, it was perhaps inevitable that politicians and their employees would be found to be "optimizing" Wikipedia entries.
And so we were introduced to the somewhat blatant attempt by Rep. Gil Gutknecht, (R-Minnesota) to replace his Wikipedia entry with his official Congressional biography, which somehow misses the interesting fact that when first running for election in 1995, he promised to server for no more than 12 years. He is now running for re-election, which, if my math is still valid, would mean that he would soon have served a lot more than 12 years. Golly gosh, I wonder why he would want that little factoid airbushed out of his past...
I always knew that a lot of politicians talked BS at least some of the time. However, just like the recent falsification of the Congressional Record, it seems that they now think that it is OK to retrospectively write their own "optimized" biographies. This is pure mendacity and BS of the worst kind. Rep. Gutknecht should be called out for the duplicitous little specimen that he is. If he has decided that term limits were not really a good idea after all, then let's hear a convincing explanation for why he has changed his mind, not this cowardly attempt to rewrite his own past.

Link: http://www.deadbrain.co.uk/news/article_2006_07_10_4106.php

...watch out in the UK...

Link: http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1264/article12985.asp

..is a lot lower than #1 in a whole bunch of areas. See this article for a compilation of some less-than-stellar facts...

Sitting Senator Joseph Lieberman has been defeated by Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic primary election.
Lieberman has conceded, but stated that he intends to run as an Independent. This must be causing conniptions in the Washington DC offices of leading Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
The Beltway Dems' worst nightmare is now staring them in the face. Lieberman, based on a quick reading of his concession speech, is still stuck in some sort of "It's my seat" entitlement mindset. My guess is that he may be threatening to "go nuclear" and join the Republican Party if the Dems try to take away his Senate committee roles.
All of which creates a king-sized headache for the Democratic party. Their biggest fear was that Lamont would win the primary, since, if Lieberman runs as an Independent, and privately agrees to caucus with the Republicans, then he will run with covert GOP support. I would not be surprised if the GOP actually either fields a "token" candidate or withdraws altogether to give him a de facto GOP endorsement. The whole objective would be to force the Democratic Party to commit more resources than it wants to defending the Connecticut senate seat.
Memo to Harry Reid: Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, meet rock.

One of the more interesting developments during the day was that the Lieberman campaign website went down. Lieberman spokespersons were quick to claim a DOS (Denial Of Service) attack, implying that the Lamont campaign was in some way playing dirty tricks.
The real truth, as discussed in this DailyKos article, is probably more mundane. The Lieberman campaign was only paying $15 a month for web site hosting. Anybody who knows more than squat about web hosting can tell you that this amount of money will not support a political campaign website for any national, state or local seat. I pay $13.90 for these blog sites, which receive a relatively small amount of traffic, while DailyKos pays $7k a month for hosting.
The error code (503) suggests that the hosting company's Apache server collapsed under the strain. Not only was the Lieberman site down, all of the 50+ other sites hosted by the same hosting company were also down.
Here is an article by a web developer explaining the likely cause of the Lieberman site outage, and also explaining why the official Lieberman campaign allegation of DOS is, to use an expression from an English friend of mine, a pile of cack...
STOP PRESS: A DOS Ping trace from the Lieberman website at 11.17 CST gave a round-trip server time of 5ms...the web site server is operational. Trying to access the web site via my web browser takes you to the page http://server1.myhostcamp.com/suspended.page/, with a message saying "site under construction". Everything about this shows that the site has been taken offline by the admins.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/7/154418/2616

As a school days victim of bullying, it has been very clear to me for a long time that bullying is the primary approach of the GOP at all levels in the context of the current administration. Everything I have read and seen convinces me that the administration tries to bully every party it comes into contact with - the House of Representatives, the Senate, government employees at all levels, the United Nations, the media - the list goes on and on. The bullying tendency also impinges directly on the general public via the (arguably) illegal practice of arresting people showing dissent at public meetings (I believe that in the future most of these arrests will be shown to have no legal basis).
This diary on DailyKos is an interesting attempt to frame the GOP and BushCo mode of operation in the context of abusive bullying. The most frightening comment in the document is the lifted quote from Christopher Dodd, which appears to condone bullying as a mode of operation. Somebody needs to ask Dodd whether he would respond favorably to being bullied...