Sen. Specter Asks: Who's This Jenna Jameson?
by Mary Ann Akers
Guess who got a V.I.P. tour of the Capitol Thursday?Porn star - no, make that former porn star - and big Hillary Clinton fan Jenna Jameson.Jameson, who quit the porn business and got a breast reduction last month, is in town with her boyfriend, celebrity mixed martial arts fighter Tito Ortiz. |
Cholera spreads to Iraq's southernmost city
by Katarina Kratovac
Cholera was confirmed Friday in a baby in Basra, the farthest south the outbreak has been detected. Officials expressed concern over a shortage of chlorine needed to prevent the disease from spreading.A shipment of 100,000 tons of the water purifier has been held up at the Jordanian border over fears the chemical could be used in explosives. Baghdad, which has doubled the amount of chlorine in the drinking water, now has only a week's supply. |
Feds Target Blackwater in Weapons Probe
by Matthew Lee
Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday. |
CEOs, Bush Rangers Rebuff Republicans on War, Widening Deficit
by Michael Janofsky
Dozens of corporate executives who backed President George W. Bush for re-election in 2004, including some of his top fund-raisers, are now helping Democrats running for president.John Mack, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., and Terry Semel, chairman of Yahoo! Inc., are among some 60 executives writing checks to Democrats such as Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, a review of U.S. Federal Election Commission records shows. |
Petraeus: A Failure by His Own Standards
by Larry Beinhart
Fog Facts are facts that are known. They've been published and are easily accessible. They are important enough that they ought to define the political dialogue. Yet somehow they are as unrecognized as if they were top secret. They're lost in the fog. |
Commanding Constitutional Disrespect
by Walter Brasch
George W. ("I demand an up-or-down-vote") Bush believes in the majority rule only when it favors his own beliefs. When it doesn't, he believes in something else.Something else happened this week when hard-core Republican functionaries twice blocked the Senate from protecting constitutional rights and the welfare of American soldiers. |
Telling the Truth
by David Swanson
Sam Provance exposed the torture in Abu Ghraib and as thanks had his career ruined, was threatened with prison, has had his wife leave him, and is now barely scraping by. He said Thursday evening that on a personal level his choice to speak out was not worth it. "But," he said, "this is not about me." And everyone in the auditorium where he was speaking knew exactly what he meant, because we had just heard Dan Ellsberg, Ann Wright, Larry Johnson, Coleen Rowley, Bob Parry, Akbar Ahmed, Peter Kuznick, Max Friedman, and Ray McGovern lay out the gravity of the situation this nation and the world are now in. |
Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports: It Ain't Easy Being Green
by Dave Zirin
There's an old cliche that the most popular college football team in the United States is whoever plays Notre Dame. Like the Yankees of New York and the Blue Devils of Duke, fans of the Fighting Irish believe winning is their birthright. Some programs see victory as being earned, Notre Dame sees it as being owed. |
Measuring the success of the surge
by Matthew Hubbard
So far, 2007 has been a much more violent year in Iraq than 2006, both for American troops and for Iraqi civilians. I use as my data source the website Iraq Coalition Casualties. Besides their excellent work, since January I have been segregating out by hand the news reports of deaths in Baghdad to see the levels of reported carnage in the city this year, since Bush made pacifying Baghdad a major goal in his nearly forgotten speech in January. |
Ahmadinejad's a Wizard, Don't Let Him Speak!
by Chuck Dupree
In a recent post, Josh Marshall mentions discussions with his readers about reactions to the President of Iran’s request to visit Ground Zero.Apparently most readers felt that we shouldn’t allow him the propaganda victory. Josh asks if he’s alone in supporting the idea that we should ignore him, that we’re bigger than that. “Why should we care what he says?” is Josh’s view, and I think there’s a lot to that. |
The Invincible "Wall of Spin"
by Bob Patterson
Legendary record producer Phil Spector added extra instruments and more volume to Rock’n’Roll music and overwhelmed the audience in a very contagious and profitable way. Someone (Karl Rove, perhaps?) seems to have applied the Phil Spector methodology to the concept of promoting the Conservative political philosophy. |
War Opponents Launch Grassroots Campaign Aimed at Larger Numbers
by John Christoffersen
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Fed up with the Iraq war, the peace movement is trying its own surge.After years of large-scale national demonstrations in Washington, New York and other cities have failed to end the war, activists are embarking on a campaign that starts Friday with more than 100 local protests around the country.0921 08 |
Rather: Government Influencing Newsrooms
by Samantha Gross
NEW YORK -Dan Rather said Thursday that the undue influence of the government and large corporations over newsrooms spurred his decision to file a $70 million lawsuit against CBS and its former parent company.“Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news,” he said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”0921 01 |
Legislature's compromise could keep PIP insurance alive
by Linda Kleindienst
Florida's no-fault auto insurance law may get a second chance at life, but with much tougher safeguards against fraud.Although set to expire Oct. 1, legislative negotiators on Friday reached an agreement to extend — likely by three months — the current requirement that motorists carry a minimum of $10,000 in personal injury protection, or PIP. |
Dems step up attacks on Hillary
by CaoitolHillBlue.com
Hillary Rodham Clinton is finding herself in her rivals' cross-hairs.Barack Obama and John Edwards try to paint her as a candidate of the Washington establishment and beholden to special interests. Chris Dodd questioned the former first lady's competence on health care reform. They have hinted she's too divisive to govern effectively as president. |
Iranian leader tells off CBS reporter: 'You don't represent 300 million people'
by Raw Story
In an interview with an 'objective' CBS reporter who continued to express opinions about his his visit to Ground Zero, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad returned fire. The interview is scheduled to air on 60 Minutes. Excerpts:Asked if he intends to press his request to visit the World Trade Center site, Ahmadinejad tells 60 Minutes Scott Pelley, "Well, it was included in my program. If we have the time and the conditions are conducive, I will try to do that." |
Supreme Court author: Justice Souter wept when he thought of Bush v. Gore
by Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane
When Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, appeared on Thursday's Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert grilled him about the meaning of the book's title. "Do they have secret handshakes? Is it like the Da Vinci Code? Are there bizarre sexual rites going on there?" |
