Author: catnip

With so many Republican scandals in DC these days, it’s hard to keep on top of all of them. The latest one that’s flying under the radar comes to you via real news, not propaganda.

Remember WH propagandist Armstrong Williams who pushed No Child Left Behind while being paid for it via a contract he had with the Dept of Education and Ketchum? Well, that major faux pas is far from being old news. Senator Frank Lautenberg has been on the case and he’s gotten results.

WASHINGTON, DC — The Inspector General of the Department of Education has informed United States Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) that he has referred the investigation into the payments by the Bush Education Department to journalist Armstrong Williams to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. The U.S. Attorney is now actively investigating the matter. The request for the IG to specifically investigate potential fraud in the contract was made by Senator Lautenberg.

Ironically (or not), it has also been announced that the Dept of Health and Human Services has just given Ketchum a big, juicy contract to manage the Bush Medicare Drug Benefit campaign. Ketchum – the company that not only spawned Williams but also produced those fake news reports last year with Karen Ryan. Ketchum has promised not to cross the line this time. It must be nice to be so blatantly corrupt and still get millions of taxpayer dollars as a result. I sense a pattern here.

more…

Grab the popcorn and join us as we watch Baghdad Bob’s distant cousin, Scotty McLellan, furiously spin the news faster than a Cat 5 hurricane. (Photoshop work by susanhu.)

Watch the storm live at 1pm ET via the Whitehouse, C-SPAN or WaPo.

One of PM Tony Blair’s advisers has revealed that in January, 2003 President Bush told Blair in a telephone call that he “wanted to go beyond Iraq” in dealing with the spread of illicit weapons, and mentioned Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in a list of countries posing particular problems” according to this article in the International Herald Tribune by Douglas Jehl of the NYT.

This might shake up those allies a bit…

Like synchronized swimmers in the media pool of spin, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have top stories in Friday’s papers about how the Plamegate scandal has affected the mood in the White House. Poor administration officials and staffers. Yeah – like we care. I hope they’re pissing in their high-paid boots until Fitzgerald is done with his investigation.

The NYT article, Jitters at the White House, is much ado about Karl Rove. Spare us NYT and get your asses onto writing the real story – what Judith Miller knows. We’re waiting.

The Washington Post article talks about the “toll” taken on Bush’s second term as a result of the culture of corruption. Most of us knew they were corrupt during the first term – where was the MSM then? Perhaps surprisingly though, what seems to have the White House most concerned isn’t Plamegate at all, according to former Republican congressman Vin Weber of Minnesota. It’s the Abramoff scandal.

As blksista informs us in her diary, New Orleans beating incident only one example of abuse and forced labor since Katrina”, AP has released a full-length version of video of the arrest of 64 year old Robert Davis in New Orleans.

Warning: The video is very difficult to watch.

Faced with that video tonite on CNN’s Aaron Brown show NewsNight, responding to some very tough questioning by Brown and Anderson Cooper (transcript), the NOPD officers’ lawyer Frank DeSalvo continued to assert that the officers acted properly given the situation. The only point that he conceded was the fact that, contrary to what he has maintained to this point – that the fall to the ground caused Davis’s bleeding – the video shows otherwise.

more on the flip…