"He is a bad version of us!"

That's Michael Scanlon complaining to Jack Abramoff about Ralph Reed's billing practices and expenditure claims, according to the Washington Post.

Just asking: exactly how sleazy would you have to be for Scanlon to think you're sleazy?

Is there someone, somewhere on the face of this earth (or any other planet) that Reed would find too sleazy?

Semantics, semantics, semantics.  Not a day goes by without another headline about what "the people" think of the NSA domestic spying issue.  And you'd go nuts if you put all the headlines on a table and tried to reconcile their very different conclusions.

Which prompted me to collect several recent polls and try to make sense out of them.

It's all semantics.  With a touch of opinions based on nothing.  But mostly semantics.  

Unbelievable. Mike Wallace sits down congressman John Murtha....

Check out this piece by Alan Tonelson, a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation, which takes the WSJ to task for "Dishonest Cheerleading (Again)."

To the WSJ editors' claim that rising holiday sales mean "somebody must have money," Mr. Tonelson reasonably replies: "Of course, it's possible to make this argument with a straight face only by forgetting a little economic and financial concept called debt."

You know, if propaganda was water, those of us who hadn't already drowned would be swimming for our lives.

Countless shills for the administration keep harping on the "who could have known" song whenever they are taken to task for screwing up Iraq this badly.

Who knew there'd be an insurgency?  Who knew the Sunnis would act like this?  Who knew that we didn't have enough troops to occupy/pacify the country that we just "liberated" from Saddam who was worse than Clinton?

Well, the U.S. military knew, that's who. Probably some of the less irrational people in the administration, too, but definitely the military, in the form of Generals Zinni and Shinseki.

You want to talk about the media not reporting "good news" from Iraq?  Well how come they haven't exactly plastered the airwaves and newspapers with this speech by General Zinni at the Center for Defense Information in May of 2004?

Excerpts below.

Are you one of the millions who are deeply disturbed by what the government is doing with electronic surveillance?  Well, I assume that eventually common sense and the Fourth Amendment will eventually catch up to President Bush and the NSA (though certainly not without a hell of a fight).

But the Fourth Amendment has no application to private spying.  And you'd be amazed at what these little spies can do.

The Abramoff cesspool certainly has stirred up the usual frenzy for reform that follows every scandal.  In fact, Raw Story reports that Democrats are considering a plan that would ban all lobbyist gifts.

I have to say, I've lived through enough of these now that I have less faith in "bans" as a workable solution, but a growing belief that we need to make them--and I mean ALL of THEM (lobbyists, politicians, and anyone else buying influence) disclose every damn thing they do that could affect the public interest.

Disclosure--information--is a hell of a remedy.  Why do you think the Bush administration loves secrecy and hates disclosure?

This is just beautiful! Real proof that no two snowflakes are the same...

Cute. Seems the New York Times is pulling the plug on the public email addys for their writers...

Convinced that we knew where Ayman al-Zawahri was, according to news reports, CIA-operated Predator drone aircraft carried out a missile strike inside Pakistan.  Yesterday: much anticipation of consequences.  Today: consequences seem pretty bad.

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