For the 4th of July, Ain't that America for You and Me: John Mellencamp and Pink Houses

Suggestions for tomorrow?

The Dukesters haven't had an open thread all week and they are busting the comments at the seams, so here's one for them.

Murray Waas breaks news in PlameGate today:

Bush told prosecutors he directed Cheney to disclose classified information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson.

However, Waas reports, Bush did not tell Cheney to leak Valerie Plame's identity.

Some snippets:

by Last Night in Little Rock

For years I wanted to read about the revered Eric Sevareid of CBS News (the reason why below the jump). I collected four books about him, and I'm on vacation reading them. The current biography is from 1995.

I find that in 1965, Morley Safer was covering the Vietnam War for CBS News, and they caputured on film a U.S. Marine using his Zippo lighter to set thatched huts on fire. Back in NYC, the CBS News hierarchy immediately realized the import of what they had, and it ran on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on August 5, 1965.

Johnson administration officials questioned Safer's loyalty to America and demanded that he be dismissed, but CBS stood by him. Yet it would be a mistake to remember the media's role as one of opposition to the war. For the most part, until 1968, the mainstream media shared the administration's goals. Only gradually did they question first the effectiveness of the means used, and then their morality.

Wikipedia is more blunt:

Safer's report on this event was broadcast on CBS News and was among the first reports to paint a bleak picture of the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Baines Johnson called CBS's president and accused Safer and his colleagues of having "shat on the American flag."

So, TL readers, is de rigeur for those conducting the war of the day to question the loyalty of any American who questions that war, whatever the time period. It belongs to no political party. Apparently never did.

Update: Lieberman must collect 7,500 signatures by Aug. 9, the day after the Democratic primary in order to run as an "unaffiliated candidate" on the November ballot. Coverage of his announcement: New York Times; CBS; Reuters

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Joe Lieberman is made a major announcement at 1:00 pm ET.

Lieberman is running as a Dem in the primary. But he's having staffers put out petitions in case he loses the primary so he can run as a "petitioning Democrat."

The AP reports here. The Hartford Courant here.

Update: The affidavit in support of the arrest warrant detailing the alleged crimes is here.

Update: Steven D. Green of North Carolina has been charged in federal court with rape and murder:

Federal prosecutors charged a veteran of the Iraq war with murder and rape Monday in connection with the killing of an Iraqi woman and members of her family.
Steven D. Green, a 21-year-old former private first class who was discharged from the Army, appeared in a federal magistrate's courtroom in Charlotte Monday.

More here.

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The Washington Post has new details in the case of the five U.S. soldiers charged with raping an Iraqi girl and killing her family in Mahmudiyah.

Abeer Qasim Hamza was 15 years old. It appears she had been targeted. After raping and killing her they tried to set her on fire.

Let's try this again. As New York Times editor Bill Keller said on Face the Nation yesterday, and the Boston Globe reported last week, Operation Swift and the Administration's war on terror financing was no secret. From the Globe:

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. ``A lot of people were aware that this was going on," said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.....

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.

Here is the U.N. report. Check out Paragraph 31: [Add: Link may not be operational this morning, it was fine last night.]

In 2004, in noting that one of Rudy Giuliani's last acts in office was to rename the Manhattan Detention Complex (better known as 'The Tombs') the "Bernard Kerik Detention Complex," I wondered if Rudy would ever live down his endorsement of Kerik.

On Saturday, one day after Kerik pleaded guilty to two corruption-related misdemeanors, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered Kerik's name removed from the complex. Within hours, it was physically stripped from the building, which will again be known as the Manhattan Detention Complex.

As for Kerik, he's "unfazed." [More...]

In honor of Bernie Kerik's name being stripped from the Manhattan Detention Complex, fomerly known as the Tombs, before it became the Bernard B. Kerik Detention Complex, here's Eric Burden and the Animals singing "The House of the Rising Sun."

Round the blogosphere today:

• Water Tiger at Firedoglake does the heavy lifting.

• Arianna has a Sunday roundup.

• Avedon Carol at Sideshow wonders if "Memo from Turner" from Mick Jagger's movie Performance is on YouTube. Right here.

Check out this news release from the Defense Department.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

The study will include, but not be limited to, researching blog patterns:

"It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what's important in blogs unless you analyze patterns." ...Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog.

They even have a unique moniker for the blogosphere: "Information Battlespace"

"The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts," Kokar said. "Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace."

James Carville and Mark J. Penn have an op-ed in today's Washington Post positing that Hillary Clinton is electable and that the key may be women voters.

The X factor for 2008 -- and we do mean X -- is the power of women in the electorate. Fifty-four percent of voters are female. George Bush increased his vote with only two groups between 2000 and 2004: women and Hispanics.

...Hillary's candidacy has the potential to reshape the electoral map for Democrats. ....with the pathbreaking possibility of this country's first female president, we could see an explosion of women voting -- and voting Democratic. States that were close in the past, from Arkansas to Colorado to Florida to Ohio, could well move to the Democratic column. It takes only one more state to win.

They discount her polarization factor ("some people say she is too liberal, some that she is too conservative") pointing out:

We believe that she is squarely in the mainstream of America.