Had enough of Palin yet?

As for those snotty cracks about Obama's being a community organizer (wasn't Jesus Christ a community organizer?) how's this for embarassing timing?

FIRST LADY LAURA BUSH TO PARTICIPATE AT SERVICENATION SUMMIT ON SERVICE AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN NEW YORK SEPT. 12 * * *September 8, 2008 [New York, NY] – First Lady Laura Bush announced that she will participate in the historic ServiceNation Summit in New York, on Friday, September 12, helping to kick-off a national campaign to expand voluntary community national service opportunities for all Americans. The two-day bi-partisan Summit will begin the evening of Thursday, September 11, with a primetime “ServiceNation Presidential Candidates Forum” at Columbia University featuring Presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama, who will discuss in-depth their views on service and civic engagement in the post-9/11 world. The following day, Mrs. Bush will join hundreds of notables attending the day-long Summit at the New York Hilton from the worlds of government, academia, arts, business, and not-for-profits, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton; Martin Luther King III; Bobby Kennedy, Jr.; Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan; Caroline Kennedy; Wendy Kopp of Teach for America; Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and many others (full program and list is available at: http://www.bethechangeinc.org/servicenation/summit/schedule). “We are excited to have Mrs. Bush join us at such an historic event,” Alan Khazei, CEO of Be The Change, Inc. said. “As someone who has promoted volunteerism and civic engagement for the past eight years as First Lady, Mrs. Bush has a wealth of experience that will make the ServiceNation Summit that much more meaningful and help us further elevate service as a core ideal of our democracy.” The Forum is being organized by ServiceNation (http://servicenation.org), a dynamic new coalition of 110 organizations that has a collective reach of some 100 million Americans and is dedicated to strengthening our democracy and solving problems through civic engagement and service. The two-day event will bring together some 600 leaders of all ages and from every sector of American life —from universities and foundations, to business and politics—to celebrate the power and potential of citizen service, and lay out a bold policy blueprint for addressing America’s greatest social challenges through expanded opportunities for volunteer and national service. The September 12 Summit Day will open with welcoming remarks from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and close with a Call to Action with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Hillary's Home Run

Last night, I watched Bill Clinton as he was watching Hillary speaking. I could hear this thoughts:

"I'm so glad I don't have to follow her tonight."

It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep ...

But Barack Obama was up late sending you a text message: It's Joe Biden! (Read about Joe ... he's a hero of the working class)

Okay, that one just cracked me up for about 15 minutes. What an incredible slap to the self-described mainstream media. The ultimate Who needs you?

And how do I know this is what he wanted to prove? My cell phone went off just after 3:00 a.m. with the text message. I cracked up at the "It's three a.m. ..." recall of Hillary's ad. After a minute or two, I put on MSNBC to head David Shuster say that MSNBC's reporting indicated it was Biden and that although the Obama campaign had said they'd announce by text message, it had not happened yet.

WRONG. Just plain WRONG. If not for the message, I'm not up watching TV. And, yes, that makes me wonder about everything I hear on TV. They got this wrong ... this simple thing. What else is wrong or misleading?

Great flex of organizational muscle, to show McCain, the old political machines, the old media ("our sources are telling us ... absolutely nothing") that Obama ain't just talking about "new politics" he is going roll out the new Democratic Party and he's going to to knock down the walls of convention in how he does it.

He can even make one of the safest and most conventional choices in a running mate take on the drama and suspense of choosing an unknown.

Finally, utterly brilliant to do it at 3:00 a.m. -- to rifff on the Hillary ad and to do so when their supporters are almost certainly NOT WATCHING TELEVISION.

Oh, my. We could have four very good years coming.

Can't say it any better

When Maureen Down gets it so right, there's nothing left to do but point and applaud.

The finger wag

Don't you hate summer re-runs?

This year it's the sequel to Bill & Monica ... John and that woman, Ms. Hunter. In Edwards' explanation, all we're missing is the finger wag --- he downplays "tabloid reporting" (hey, it's a tabloid story), he says that he's willing to participate in "any test" to prove he's not the father of this child ... but that he's only half of the test and he says that he did this, basically, because he could. Did he, like, just take that right out of Bill Clinton's book?

The whole thing makes me so sad, so angry. Most of all, it pisses me off that Elizabeth Edwards, the brains of the outfit and the courage in the family, won't be speaking at the Dems convention in Denver. Why the hell not? What did she do?

I hope that Obama finds a way to at least flash her picture up on the screen during the convention (highlighting women of courage in fighting breast cancer ... which killed his mother?) and give the crowd a chance to erupt in applause for her.

Paris Hilton for President

Yes, that was nearly the funniest thing I ever saw. You wait while she finishes reading her magazine story. You're happy to wait. We've waited eight years for a real president, why not wait 10 seconds for Paris to finish skipping over the big words?

Let me tell you what offended me about that dopey John McCain ad (the one that featured Paris and Britney and tries to lump them all into one big ball of superficial silliness). Here's the problem ... while Paris was born into wealth and privilege, the other two - quite conspicuously -- were not.

I will not be voting for Britney on my Mommy-of-the-year ballot, but unlike Sen. McCain, she's made every penny she has, she's met a payroll, bumped and ground her way to international stardom and great wealth. She wasn't born into the Navy and didn't marry a millionaire.

Hmm. there's a thought for an Obama ad ... John & Cindy McCain ... Who wants to marry a millionaire? John McCain!

Like Britney, Obama did not open his trust fund and find tuition money for Columbia and Harvard, but he apparently found his way in and out of those institutions, only recently paying off his student loans. He didn't marry a millionaire, but he did find his way to a distinguished Princeton (cum laude) and Harvard Law graduate, Michelle Obama.

And for the self-described "family values" crowd, let's recall that the McCains began their relationship as an extramarital affair while McCain was still married to his first wife -- the one who waited for him while he was a POW. Let's hope that sometime between now and November, in front of MANY cameras, someone asks McCain if he really thinks gay marriage is a bigger threat to the American family than heterosexual adultery.

Were you thankful?

When you gathered together, did you say thanks for your aches and pains? Were you grateful that you can still feel your aching back, your sore knee, your old football injury?

I will, sooner or later, need a couple of new knees and the really, really weird thing is that I feel really weird about getting the fix. What I mean is ... they may hurt, but they're mine. They're "natural." Is that weird?

Yeah, it probably is ... but when you think about how people hang on to bad relationships and bad habits IN relationships, it makes more and more sense. You return to the pain you know, because at least you know it.

So have some pie. Take some ibuprophen and try to get some exercise, I guess.

So, how hard is it to add an image?

Really, I'm figuring, how tough can this be?

I mean, if I can write a silly book called "Zero to Zen in 60 Seconds" then surely I can be clever enough to figure out how to put an image on my blog, right?

Apparently so.

Long time, no write

Yeah, I guess it's just too depressing. Too hard to watch. Too real. Too scary.

The Bush Administration.

Torturing people while indignantly fist-banging and declaring "We don't torture."
We know Saddam has had WMD (right ... we have the receipts from selling the stuff to him)... Official.
"The British Government has learned ..."
See ... that's the one that always got me. In the news business, when you have a source that you can't attribute, your story is weaker, so you say "NBC News has learned ..." making it sound institutionalized ... official.

And now comes the revelation that a justice department attorney had himself waterboarded so that he could produce a finding on whether or not it's torture. And despite all the safety protocols and all the control over the situation he had, Daniel Levin said, yep, it is. He thought he was gonna drown.

And his boss, AG Gonzales still said it was NOT torture and Bush continued his two-step.
And the media somehow doesn't see fit to shut down the Bush administration over this the way they shut down the Clinton administration over illicit sex between consenting adults.

Sorry -- that blows.

The Soul of NBC News--On sale now for 1,000 words

In the week following the so-called decency discussion over the pottymouth programming of Don Imus and NBC News' "discovery" of that problem (see Casablanca, gambling) we are presented with the same news divisions's claim that they "agonized" and "thought long and hard" (an afternoon) over the release of a killer's promotional material.

In both cases, NBC News has revealed a stunning disconnect and near desperation in their effort to remain relevant. Let's start with Imus. He would be on the air right now if it weren't for the advertisers demands and the power of the market in responding to public outrage. That's fine. He's an entertainer, not a journalist. His show was a commodity whose value vanished. It happens. Gwen Ifill properly called out Tim Russert and others for their silence over the week on Imus -- silent because they're friends and frequent contributers to the program. Like Bush and Gonzales, they served their friends instead of their professional mission and integrity. Too bad.

NBC, in the body of its president, pretended that the decision to dump Imus was a moral one, filled with agony. He was all over the dial, demonstrating his agony. Yeech. Get back to the Oprah set, your quiche is getting cold.

The decision to air this despicable footage provided by the Virgina Tech killer reveals NBC's deepest fear -- that another network will beat them? Yes, but mainly that anyone could post this stuff to YouTube and NBC's gatekeeping role would disappear.

Bulletin -- it's disappearing.

By jumping out into the village square and making a self-congratulating show of their second "agonizing" decision in two weeks, they have made it painfully obvious that they were willing to be irresponsible in order to demonstrate the need for responsibility. This is the kind of BS that we rely on Dubyah to drop into the cornfield.

Just as shameful as the wallpaper use of Anna Nicole Smtih's two best and bounciest assets while "covering" the saga of her burial site and surviving daughter's future, all the networks have exploited the tragic loss of over two dozen people because they had art (compelling new images). In bottom-dollar local news, this is why you cover a fire of an abandoned building instead of a school board meeting.

NBC should be far above those callous, selfish choices. Obviously, they're not.

Imus t'have missed it

With all the hot air about Don Imus' oral diarrhea, I surely missed the part that addressed the difference between this particular case of potty mouth and the 4 million previous examples.

To me, it's simple (and rather stunning that no journalist seems to mention it) -- it is that this time, Imus libeled his target. He didn't just say something generally insulting to a group of people, he met the standard for libel and probably even the N.Y. Times v. Sullivan standard for actual malice (defamation of a public figure).

Identification - Imus clearly identified 10 individuals, far different from saying something defamatory about a group -- like long-haired, slutty white men.

Defamation - I think it's pretty clear that he held these young women up to public embarassment and humiliation. Moreover, their injury is compounded by the followers of this rant in that they recevied hate mail and death threats.

Negligence - Imus clearly could have avoided this injury to his victims by exercising ordinary care.

Provably false - The statements about the promiscuity of these athletes is easily disproved through character witnesses.

Malice - The kicker -- the women are aguably public figures which means that the malice standard would apply. Imus would have to know that these statements were false and say them anyway. He's done this, essentially, in suggesting that this would be the basis for his "joke" being funny.

So for all the speculation of inpact in social policy and worries over a chilling effect -- no worries. Defamatory speech has never been protected. I hope those players sue Imus, CBS radio and MSNBC in a whopper of a defamation suit.

They'll just have to get in line behine those Duke LAX players to collect.

--Jean Bolduc

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Yes, it was once the battlecry of Doonesbury reacting to a Watergate-related verdict if I recall, but those wonderful words describe the first domino to fall in the re-writing of the Book of Iraq -- Dubyah's newest book of revelations.

The thing about Scooter and his boss (the Shooter) is their foolish, arrogant notion about controlling and spinning media. Even now, they're partly successful -- everyone's talking about the pardon vs. the sentence (not Scooter's wife, her quotable quote in response to the verdict -- "We'll fuck them"). The topic should rightly turn to the fact that now we have a proven case of liars and leakers who Bush said he'd rid the White House of if caught.

More important than all of that is the forming picture of a president who has lied his way into a disasterous war and has not the slightest apology for it.

Meanwhile, Lewis Libby gets a trip to prison with "Scooter" on his striped pajamas -- all because he was more loyal to his boss, Darth Vader, than to the American public.

Trial and Error

Are you enjoying the Veggie Trial? You know, it says LibbyLibbyLibby on the labellabellabel.'

This guy's defense makes O.J. Simpson look organized. He was busy. He was forgetful, but he did remember that Tim Russert told him that Plame was a CIA agent. Trouble is, according to Russert's testimony, he'd never heard of Plame on the day that LibbyLibbyLibby says he heard it from Russert.

Yada Yada. We've heard what we need to about all of this -- that the Vice President, by the sheer volume of meetings and many conversations on this topic, was obsessed with media perception of himself. More important, he was obsessed with having it discovered that he personally injected those 16 words about nuclear development into the State of the Union. And he thought he was so freakin' crafty by having the President of the United States make his case for war based on what "British Intelligence [had] discovered ..."

Am I the only American who choked on that when it came out of Bush's mouth? Why in the world would the President of my country think that this would be a basis for action? If it's so scary and certain, why isn't he citing our own intelligence? The big red flag went up fo r me that night -- at that very moment, yet Congress sat with its fingers crossed, held its nose and voted to authorize a war that was CERTAIN to be Bush's first alternative ... and Cheney's too.

This is treason, plain and simple. To sell out the interests of our country in what was clearly a move that has benefitted only big oil and Haliburton, the bad guys have sold us completely out.

I'm starting to wish I'd voted for Nader.

More war coming - oh, yah

Bush has hung it out there for Tony Snow to deny -- he's readying for Iran. Put a naval guy in charge of a ground war, sent in the fleet and raided a consolate.

It makes me miss Nixon.

Congratulations, it's YOU

Wow. How do you feel? You're on the cover of Time magazine -- the person of the year. Your mom must be thrilled! I do have one question, though ...
I watch a fair amount of CNN, owned by Time Warner and therefore pretty incestuous in its hyping of the announcement of the Person of the Year. There have been many "featurettes" on various "nominees" for the recognition -- would it be the Iranian president? Would it be George Bush? Donald Rumsfeld?
Makaka?
But I never heard about the prospect of this ... stunt ... and come on -- it's a stunt. Want to recognize the guy who created YouTube? Want to make it Google? I'd be fine with that. But this is really, well, okay, incredibly clever maybe, but more likely it might tell us how incredibly tough the magazine business is these days -- and oh, BOY it really is. Take the word of this retired publisher!

You thought Sept. 11, 2001 was an unforgettable date?

No ... the one to really look back on with regret is this one: Jan. 27, 2000

That's when Dubyah told the Nashua, New Hampshire crowd:
"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."

We were warned. We just didn't listen.

The Path to ... Libel

The most important lesson in journalism school is the one that teaches you how to avoid getting sued. It's pretty simple - print the facts. Flasehoods that do injury are actionable.

It's conspicuous when reading the letters of former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that they understand the standard for them is higher. They are public figures - they are famous. That means, for example, that they are very available targets for commentary - even for some degree of false accusation. In order to libel them, they'd have to prove that the accused (in this case, the ABC network) published information about them or their actions that they knew to be false and defamatory (doing measurable injury to the reputation, holding them up to public distain). If ABC airs "The Path to 9/11" next week and does not edit out the falsehoods that have already been documented, it would seem very clear that these two will sue their pants off. It's clearly documented to be false. There's little question that it would injure their reputations. If ABC runs it anyway, they will meet the malice standard -- they knew it was wrong and they did it anyway.

Oh, it's not news, it's entertainment, right?

No. Not for this. Real names. Real places. Real events. Real big lawsuit.

Couldn't have said it better

Thank you, Rep Jane Harman, for blasting the president's self-serving and inflammatory Let's Scare America To The Polls Tour. She's a well-respected, non-hysterical member of the House Intelligence Committee and she's tired of being insulted by her president.

At home recovering from surgery, I've had the opportunity (?!) to watch several of Bush's campaign kick-off speeches live and in their entirety. At this point, I think it's on the media ... they need to cut him off. CNN carries this stuff live each morning and it's nothing more than a 30 minute infomercial for the Darth-Vader-boo-scarey campaign -- you know -- the stuff that seems to come up whenever Bush's power is threatened.

We thought Willie Horton was rough? Geez. That was the good ole days.

Doncha wonder what it'll take?

"I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that. "

This inspiring words from none other than Donald Rumsfeld. If Bush hits 30% approval, maybe he'll get inspired to retire.

McClellan gets points for difficulty

Who would want to be Scott McClellan? It's starting to look like explaining Dick Cheney's sharpshooting skills would be easier than being the White House spokesperson. This week, Scotty surely asked to be beamed up, when the news came that Scooter Libby's court documents point directly to the Prez himself in the Plame affair. If that's not bad enough, the "explanation" is that the president reserves the right to declassify virtually anything.

Okay. We'll now simply ask this question ... does he get to declassify anything for any reason? Cause it seems to me that declassifying Valerie Wilson's undercover status was a collosal screwup. That rarest of public servants, she was and expert in WMD, well-connected in the middle east and she worked in secret. Her family, friends (except for her husband) didn't realize what she did for a living. She's a patriot.

And now, she's retired. We lose her services because she was a necessary political casualty, according to George II. She had to be lost in order to discredit her husband (though the mere suggestion that she might have had a role in sending Joe Wilson to Niger --oink, oink). So, if George II decides that it will discredit a political enemy, he can offer up a CIA spy to the press - I think to six reporters in total -- most of which did nothing with the information.

Wouldn't you like to be risking your life for this president? Feeling a little chilly out there in the field, I'd have to think. What exactly will this guy have to do to get impeached? Murder in the public square?

And the house of representatives -- both sides of the aisle -- is no better and they sit and scratch themselves, trying to stay out of it. Didn't they also swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution?