by TChris

Katherine Harris is so deservedly unpopular that she has almost no chance of winning a Senate seat. Incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson claims to take her seriously, but no one else does, and her efforts won't be helped by news that an investigation into her campaign fundraising practices is ongoing. While Harris maintains she isn't a target, the FBI recently interviewed her former campaign manager, Jim Dornan. It's fair to think the FBI asked a question or two about the candidate.

The Justice and Defense departments are examining Harris' dealings with Mitchell Wade, who made illegal campaign contributions to Harris and later asked her to help secure $10-million in federal money for a company project. They have subpoenaed records from Harris' campaign office and have interviewed at least three former staffers: senior campaign consultant Ed Rollins, congressional chief of staff Fred Asbell and Mona Tate Yost, a congressional aide who later went to work for Wade.

TalkLeft background concerning the scandal can be found here and here.

by TChris

Sunday funny:

by TChris

A review of Inside: Life Behind Bars in America by Michael Santos:

Mainly, though, [the book is] a diary of "a gladiator school," "a walled city of madness." Guards act savagely -- a natural outcome in a culture where "the only thing lower than an inmate is an 'inmate lover,' a 'hug-a-thug.' " They can also be infuriatingly petty. "Guards are the only people I see throwing cigarettes on the ground," one prisoner says. "They walk across lawns and then order inmates to rake up behind them." Meanwhile, prisoners stab and rape one another and make weapons out of everything from a heavy pipe to a tube sock filled with combination locks. Violence, or the threat of it, permeates Santos's life.

Not surprisingly, Santos sees a need for change:

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

NYTimes' Jennifer Medina is caught by mcjoan of dailykos in one of the most blatantly dishonest news articles that I have seen:

The article then goes on to describe the contents of an e-mail Lamont had sent to Lieberman following his floor speech scolding Clinton. Well, partially describes the contents of the e-mail. Here's what the NYT says he wrote:

"At the time, Mr. Lamont wrote that he had 'supported the moral outrage' Mr. Lieberman expressed reluctantly because he 'thought it might make matters worse,' adding that 'unfortunately, the statement was the beginning of a process that has turned more political and morally offensive.' He urged Mr. Lieberman to 'stand up and use your moral authority to put an end to this snowballing mess,' and suggested that 'It's time for you to make up your mind and speak your mind as you did so eloquently last Thursday.'

'I'm the father of three and the thought that Clinton testifying about oral sex before the grand jury may be broadcast into my living room is outrageous,' Mr. Lamont wrote. 'This sorry episode is an embarrassment to me as a father and to us as a nation.'"

Some careful editing there.

More than just careful, dishonest and a gross violation of journalistic principles.Medina purposefully omitted the opening and closing sentences of the second paragraph, utterly changing the meaning of Lamont's "outrage." The full text (provided on the flip) of the Lamont e-mail makes patent the dishonesty in Medina's reporting - Lamont was urging Lieberman to criticize the Starr inquisition and to not allow himself to be an enabler of Republican outrages (sound familiar?) Of course, Lieberman did not heed Lamont' s call. But see for yourself on the flip.

by TChris

This news will upset the "America is for white Christians" crowd:

Muslims appear to be moving [to the United States] again in surprising numbers, according to statistics collected by the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau. ... In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents -- nearly 96,000 -- than in any year in the previous two decades. More than 40,000 of them were admitted last year, the highest annual number since the terrorist attacks, according to data on 22 countries provided by the Department of Homeland Security.

They believe in the ideal of freedom -- something they might find after the Bush administration is out of office.

by TChris

The NY Times explores the genesis of the Bush administration's secret prisons:

According to accounts by three former intelligence officials, the C.I.A. understood that the legal foundation for its role had been spelled out in a sweeping classified directive signed by Mr. Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. The directive, known as a memorandum of notification, authorized the C.I.A. for the first time to capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects, providing the foundation for what became its secret prison system.

And the genesis of torture:

That 2001 directive did not spell out specific guidelines for interrogations, however, and senior C.I.A. officials began in late 2001 and early 2002 to draw up a list of aggressive interrogation procedures that might be used against terrorism suspects. They consulted agency psychiatrists and foreign governments to identify effective techniques beyond standard interview practices.

Policy became practice in a Thailand prison, where the CIA concluded that the FBI's standard interrogation techniques weren't inducing Abu Zubaydah to tell all he knew about al Qaeda:

by TChris

We can speculate about Ronald Ferry's motive for lying to the FBI, but whatever his reasons were, they turned Abdallah Higazy into another victim of 9/11. Ferry, ex-cop turned hotel security guard, claimed he found an aviation radio in a hotel room safe with Higazy's passport while inventorying property left behind by guests when the hotel was evacuated. The radio had actually been left in a different room, but FBI agents believed Ferry and therefore disbelieved Higazy when he told them he'd never seen the radio.

Higazy, an Egyptian graduate student, was arrested as a material witness. He knew he was in trouble when he was locked up in a maximum security wing with Zacarias Moussaoui.

Being in Moussaoui's company -- and being strip-searched, shackled and insulted by guards -- was unnerving to a moderate Muslim who had never even read the Koran.

Higazy submitted to a polygraph, but his story didn't square with the FBI's understanding of the "truth," so agents coerced Higazy into telling a story they liked better.

I'm headed to the airport -- I will be on a plane every day between today and Tuesday Sept. 12 -- including the dreaded Sept. 11 anniversary. I'll be posting, and pushing your comments through, just a little less frequently.

So, pull up a chair, what's on your mind?

Unless the pressure on ABC proves too much to bear, The Path to 9/11 will air Sunday and Monday. Here's a new wrinkle.

In another complication, President Bush has asked broadcast networks to clear time for an address to the nation Monday night at 9:01 p.m., just at the start of the last hour of "The Path to 9/11" on the East Coast. ABC announced plans Friday night to cover what is expected to be a 20-minute speech before resuming the film.

The movie is a partisan distortion of history and now we have to listen to Bush further spin both?

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Just remarkable:

I think what they're trying to do is to take the fact the specific scenes portrayed were fictional and to try to refute the underlying reality that the Clinton administration just didn't get it. And by the way, before 9/11 neither did the Bush administration," - 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman.

Believe it or not, Bill Bennett gets it right on the principle, if not the conclusion:

Look, "The Path to 9/11″ is strewn with a lot of problems and I think there were problems in the Clinton administration. But that's no reason to falsify the record, falsify conversations by either the president or his leading people and you know it just shouldn't happen.

The point is simple - if you believe Clinton was faulty in his approach to terrorism and Al Qaida, then cite the FACTS to argue your case. Frankly, I think the problem is the FACTS say otherwise. That is precisely why fiction (or more bluntly, lies) must be used to smear the Clinton Administration's work on terrorism.

by TChris

Right wing commentators have been fond of the epithet "islamofascist" for some time, but the term broke into mainstream use when the president recently uttered a variant, "Islamic fascist." The term sweeps too broadly, and in any event, associating an entire religion with the doctrine of fascism is gratuitously offensive. The term is useful only as propaganda, and in that respect, it's disturbing to see conventional journalists adopting it, apparently without giving much thought to its accuracy or value.

But the "fascism" analogy has holes in it large enough to drive an Abrams tank through, and so its spawn, "Islamofascism," is also imprecise. Any political PR offensive relies on the airwaves and printed pages of the MSM for its dissemination. By reporting "just the facts" and on news-pegged events -- in this case the various speeches by the president and his cabinet members -- the press, whether or not it thinks the term "Islamofascism" apt, is helping to disseminate propaganda. ...

If editors had some boilerplate language to insert when appropriate that would give readers at least some sense of why the term is misleading, it could help repair some of the damage done by this type of propaganda.

Good for Harvey Keitel, who plays the lead in the ABC drama Path to 9/11:

Harvey Keitel, the lead actor in the film, said in a TV interview that changes must be made in the film. He said when he was hired for the role he was told the movie was a "history" but then found that certain facts were "wrong." This led to "arguments," he recalled. "You can compile certain things as long as the truth remains the truth," he told Showbiz Tonight. "You can't put these things together, compress them and then distort the reality....

"You cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event. Where we have distorted something, we made a mistake and it should be corrected."

If these are the only changes being made, they aren't enough. Keep the pressure on.