WHISTLEBLOWER ANDY COBB EXPOSES INSURERS CO. LIES
SICK FOR PROFIT
DeFOX AMERICA!
FOX ATTACKS!
Lady Gaga, you're in very good company it seems.
Last week, Reverend Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps of the Westboro Baptist God-Hates-You Church proclaimed, "God Hates Lady Gaga" too, at a St. Louis concert he was protesting of hers.
Well, have no fear, Headzup is on the story:
See more at http://headzup.tv
CNN's Rick Sanchez just Rick-rolled Nevada GOP Sen. John Ensign, who basically came on to continue bashing President Obama & to continue fear-mongering over the botched Christmas eve terror attacks -- as the good rethug that he is -- but Sanchez was having none of it.
Sanchez dove right in to Ensign's affair with the wife of an Senate aide, and the senator's questionable attempts to cover it all up.
Ensign was dumbfounded, to say the least.
A must watch (via TPM):
Sanchez: It behooves me to ask you...I know this is a very difficult thing for you...are you under an investigation right now by the Senate Ethics CommitteeAnd it only went downhill for Ensign from there.
Ensign:...I've commented all I needed to comment on that...
Sanchez: Hold on! Hold on! I gotta stop you there...Here, let me show the viewers what we're talking about. This is a picture of you and Doug Hampton. This is from the New York Times website. And the question has to be asked, Senator: did you help him get a job because you felt bad for him, or because you had been sleeping with his wife and you wanted to get him out of the way?
This clip was taken from Rachel Maddow's "2009's most geektacular moments!" segment on last night's show.
If you've never saw this, it is one of those moments that left Rachel in a stitches (she's easily embarrassed when it comes to anything of a sexual nature).
Here is the Daily Show's 2001 - 2005 "Decade in Review" video compilations (I posted 2001 - 2005 a month ago):
Decade in Review - 2006
2006: the year Jack Abramoff went to jail, Lance Bass came out of the closet and Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face.
Decade in Review - 2007
The Daily Show remembers the biggest stories of 2007, from Hillary Clinton to Don Imus to MC Rove.
Decade in Review - 2008
Jon and the Best F#@king News Team Ever cover the financial crisis, Rod Blagojevich and the election of Barack Obama.
Decade in Review - 2009
The Daily Show recaps Barack Obama's first year in office - from the inauguration to Sonia Sotomayor to the Iranian elections.
Rachel Maddow explains her show's mission but reviewing the best investigations of the past year.
TRMS Investigates, on a mission
Dec. 30: Rachel Maddow reviews highlights from the "TRMS Investigates" series in 2009 in which The Rachel Maddow Show helped expose secretive Washington groups, P.R. firms, astroturf organizations and assorted scammy quackery all in service of enlightening Americans and having fun.
Last night, Rachel Maddow took on Dick Cheney & Republican opportunists' illogical, hypocritical and easily fact-checked lies and attacks on President Obama's response to the attempted bombing of Flight 253, challenging our national media to start doing the same:
Shameless Cheney ignores own record to cast stonesAfter five days of Republicans owning the airwaves on this issue, doubling and then tripling down on politicizing this thwarted terrorist attack, with almost no opposition from the Democrats, the maestro of terror politics, Mr. Cheney, gave a statement to Politico.com today. Not decrying the terrorist incident itself, but instead using that attack as an opportunity to bash the president, to accuse the president of not keeping America safe.Now, as is often the case in politics, when attacks from one side go unanswered for a long time, when one side gets the platform all to themselves, that side can sometimes get over-exuberant. They can overplay their hand. Republicans, left to their own devices, have in this case excitedly launched a series of obviously baseless, factually incorrect, demonstrably untrue and hypocritical attacks.
[snip]
Again, my friends and colleagues in the media have two choices in covering this."You can just copy down what the Republicans and Vice President Cheney are saying, and click "send," call it journalism, or you can actually fact-check those comments and put them into context. Your choice. It’s your country."
Remember what Rush suggested that Sen. Ted Kennedy would be dead before health care reform legislation passed?
"Before it's all over, it'll be called the Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill"Rush Limbaugh is in serious condition after being taken to Honolulu Hospital with chest pains. Maybe God Has Had Enough?
I guess this is better than labeling a sex-scandalized rethug as a "Dem" like they do at Fox (h/t@dagsly):
David Shuster & the WaPo's Eugene Robinson, discuss the GOPers' sick attempt to cash-in on the botched terrorist attack to blow up a plane over Detroit:
Cashing in on terrorismAlso see Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra's fundraising attempts.
Before getting to the Dick Cheney smack-down from tonight's Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann, David Shuster reviewed the latest news on the underwear bomber with NBC terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann:
Details emerge on would-be terroristThen, Shuster is joined by Richard Wolffe, and both dismantle the bile being spewed by Dick Cheney against President Obama:
Specter of terror inspires bilious Cheney
Here’s a perfect example of how Bush/Cheney screwed up their so-called 'war on terror' to the point of catastrophe, while leaving it to others to clean up, just like the economy, the banking industry, the health care system, the auto-industry, the EPA, the FCC, the FDA, Guantánamo Bay, the VA health system, the Justices Department, etc., etc., etc.
Afghanistan army flunks Pentagon report cardUPDATE:
Dec. 29: A sobering assessment of Afghanistan's security forces has raised new questions about whether America's partners in the fight against terrorism are fit for the task. NBC's Richard Engel reports.
The historians say resistance to providing more robust resources to Afghanistan had three sources in the White House and the Pentagon.First, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had criticized using the military for peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans during the 1990s. As a result, “nation building” carried a derogatory connotation for many senior military officials, even though American forces were being asked to fill gaping voids in the Afghan government after the Taliban’s fall.
Second, military planners were concerned about Afghanistan’s long history of resisting foreign invaders and wanted to avoid the appearance of being occupiers. But the historians argue that this concern was based partly on an “incomplete” understanding of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
Third, the invasion of Iraq was siphoning away resources. After the invasion started in March 2003, the history says, the United States clearly “had a very limited ability to increase its forces” in Afghanistan.
The history provides a detailed retelling of the battle of Tora Bora, the cave-riddled insurgent redoubt on the Pakistan border where American forces thought they had trapped Osama bin Laden in December 2001. But Mr. bin Laden apparently escaped into Pakistan along with hundreds of Qaeda fighters.
The historians call Tora Bora “a lost opportunity” to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. But over all, they deemed the battle a success, concluding that even with more troops, the American and Afghan forces probably could not have sealed the rugged border.
Another light moment from Headzup:
After fighting against gay marriage, citing traditional Christian marriage, Karl Rove talks about his getting divorced from his second wife.On a more serious not, here's what Glenn Greenwald had to say in his piece, Rove: Champion of "traditional" divorce:
See more from Headzup at http://headzup.tv
Karl Rove is an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, citing "5,000 years of understanding the institution of marriage" as his justification. He also famously engineered multiple referenda to incorporate a ban on same-sex marriage into various states' constitutions in 2004 in order to ensure that so-called ""Christian conservatives" and "value voters" who believe in "traditional marriage laws" would turn out and help re-elect George W. Bush. Yet, like so many of his like-minded pious comrades, Rove seems far better at preaching the virtues of "traditional marriage" to others and exploiting them for political gain than he does adhering to those principles in his own life:
[...]
Rove obtained his divorce under Texas' "no-fault" divorce law, one of the most permissive in the nation. That law basically allows any married couple to simply end their marriage because they feel like it. Texas, needless to say, is one of the states which has constitutionally barred same-sex marriages, and has a Governor who explicitly cites Christian dogma as the reason to support that provision, yet the overwhelming majority of Texan citizens make sure that there's nothing in the law making their own marriages binding or permanent -- i.e., traditional. They're willing to limit other people's marriage choices on moral grounds, but not their own, and thus have a law that lets them divorce whenever the mood strikes. That's the very permissive, untraditional and un-Christian law that Rove just exploited in order to obtain his divorce.
read more...
I wonder if this is what Fox "news" had in mind when they came up with their new propaganda slogan, "Hard News. Real Reporting?"
Via TPM:
Rachel Maddow, along with The Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman, went after the GOP for their concerted efforts to politicize the botch terror attack, last night's show:
GOP sees opportunity in terrorismRachel then went after GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra, & GOP Sen. Jim DeMint for their role in not exploiting the attempted bombing, but in DeMint’s case, for blocking Obama’s nominee for TSA chief. She was joined in this segment by Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the Democratic Vice Chair of the Homeland Security Committee:
Hoekstra, DeMint put politics over security
Congressman Eric Massa ripped into Dick Cheney & the GOP's politicization of the botched terror attack, on The Ed Show:
Chris Van Hollen has finally taken out Dem's Louisville Slugger to deal with the hypocrisy and lies being spewed by the GOP, and Darth Dick, as they all try to politicize the failed terror attack in Detroit.
"In general, we are facing the consequences of the Bush administration's failures to deal with al Qaeda," Van Hollen told Hotline OnCall. "The Republicans have no business in pointing fingers at the Obama administration on terrorism and national security."
"The Obama administration has been much more aggressive about going after al Qaeda than the Bush administration, which turned its focus from al Qaeda to Iraq," he added. The Obama admin has "been on the offense in places where the Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball."
The White House hits back on the renewed calls (fear-mongering) to keep Guantánamo open by the chickenshit, chest-thumping war hawks -- like Senator Joe Lieberman.
Via Greg Sargent (h/t Jed):
(bold my emphasis)Lieberman and multiple Republicans have pointed to the would-be bomber’s training in Yemen to argue that closing Gitmo would be disastrous to our security because repatriating Yemenis housed there could let them re-join the terrorists’ war on the U.S.
But a senior administration official emails that plans to close the facility haven’t changed — and that the administration is sticking to its scheme of releasing some detainees and trying or indefinitely holding others.
The detention facility at Guantanamo has been used by Al Qaeda as a rallying cry and recruiting tool — including its affiliate Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As our military leaders have recognized, closing the detention facility at Guantanamo is a national security imperative.
The President created the Guantanamo Review Task Force to conduct the thorough work that the previous administration did not: to review the relevant information about each detainee, including the threat they pose, to determine whether they should be prosecuted, detained, or transferred. As he has said before, the President will not release any detainee who would endanger the American people. We have worked cooperatively with the government of Yemen to ensure that all appropriate security measures are taken when detainees are transferred.
...not to mention all the years Bush/Cheney wasted allowing the terrorists to regroup, relocate and reconstitute!
From Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director:
The Same Old Washington Blame Game
There has been a lot of discussion online and in the mainstream media about our response to various critics of the President, specifically former Vice President Cheney, who have been coming out of the woodwork since the incident on Christmas Day. I think we all agree that there should be honest debate about these issues, but it is telling that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the Administration than condemning the attackers. Unfortunately too many are engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer.First, it’s important that the substantive context be clear: for seven years after 9/11, while our national security was overwhelmingly focused on Iraq – a country that had no al Qaeda presence before our invasion – Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's leadership was able to set up camp in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they continued to plot attacks against the United States. Meanwhile, al Qaeda also regenerated in places like Yemen and Somalia, establishing new safe-havens that have grown over a period of years. It was President Obama who finally implemented a strategy of winding down the war in Iraq, and actually focusing our resources on the war against al Qaeda – more than doubling our troops in Afghanistan, and building partnerships to target al Qaeda’s safe-havens in Yemen and Somalia. And in less than one year, we have already seen many al Qaeda leaders taken out, our alliances strengthened, and the pressure on al Qaeda increased worldwide.
To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.
Second, the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President – who is this nation’s Commander-in-Chief – needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama. In his inaugural, the President said “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” In a recent speech, Assistant to the President for Terrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan said “Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the extremists we will defeat.” At West Point, the President told the nation why it was “in our vital national interest” to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to fight the war in Afghanistan, adding that as Commander in Chief, “I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.” And at Oslo, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the President said, “We are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.”
There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director
LMAO!
I guess the fact that they've been labeled everything but real "news" by the White House (see: Fox News Is 'A Wing Of The Republican Party' and White House officials on Fox News: 'It's not a news organization'), and by nearly everyone who doesn't sit mesmerized by their special brand of reporting, Fox "news" needed to come up with a new tag line to counter it.
Out goes "Fair & Balanced. In comes "Hard News. Real Reporting."
I'll give them this: Fox sure is has that propaganda thing down pat.
Countdown pays tribute to it's whack job of the year, Glenn "Lonesome Rhodes" Beck (2009):
Whack job: Glenn Beck
Dec. 29: On both his radio show and Fox News, Glenn Beck has continually told audiences about his fears for where this country is headed comparing Barack Obama to Hitler and even claiming that the president has a deep seated hatred for white people.
Very cool (via Scott Carmichael):
Christmas time at the airport is usually a time of doom, gloom, pushing and waiting in line. Portuguese airline TAP and the Portuguese Airport Authority decided to spice things up at Lisbon airport with a massive dance and music show. Bonus points for spotting the dancing Santa.
Digg it!
This is cool. The White House has put out a video to teach people about the Marines "who stand sentry outside the West Wing" as "The President's Doormen":
Ed Shultz take on Cheney's personal dick, Mary Matalin, in tonight's Psychotalk segment for actually having what can only be described as the unmitigated gall to claim that the Bush administration “inherited” the 9/11 attacks from President Bill Clinton.
Matalin presents President Bush as blamelessUPDATE:
Like Sarah Palin & Carrie Prejean, Countdown pays tribute to Rush Limbaugh (2009).
No letting Limbaugh off the hook
Headzup "reports" on Sarah Palin winning the "Lie of the Year Award":
After winning the "Lie of the Year Award" from Politifact for her "death panels" lie, Sarah Palin claims it wasn't a lie, but a metaphor.
A year in review from JibJab:
Octomom. Balloon Boy. Tiger Woods. If there's one thing for sure in this world, it's that as long as people are acting reckless, insane and just plain stupid (i.e. like people), there will always be plenty of material available for JibJab's annual "Year in Review" videos!
Victor/Victoria is on BBC-America right now and I just had to post this. Julie Andrews was brilliant:
This headline was on CNN's "World" news page about the woman who jumped the barricade and attacked the Pope (h/t @neilhimself):
Yahoo! This is your celebration
Yahoo! This is your celebration
Celebrate good times, come on! (Let's celebrate)
Celebrate good times, come on! (Let's celebrate)
There's a party goin' on right here
A celebration to last throughout the years
So bring your good times, and your laughter too
We gonna celebrate your party with you
Come on now
Celebration
Let's all celebrate and have a good time
Celebration
We gonna celebrate and have a good time
LOL.
Gen. McBrayer discusses how valuable homosexuals are, and why we must never put their lives at risk by allowing them in the military.
President Obama is joined by the First Lady as they celebrate Christmas in this week's Presidential Youtube-Radio Address:
From DKos' Christian Dem in NC:
This morning's (London) Daily Telegraph has a pretty explosive revelation--bin Laden came very close to assassinating Bill Clinton in 1996.
Former President Bill Clinton came within minutes of being assassinated in the Philippines by terrorists controlled by Osama bin Laden, a new book has revealed.
The US leader was saved shortly before his car was due to drive over a bridge in Manila where a bomb had been planted.
The foiled attack came during Mr Clinton's visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the city in 1996.
Clinton was on his way to visit a local politician when the Secret Service got word from intelligence sources that there was due to be an attack along the original route.
The account comes from Ken Gormley's new book, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs Starr. While it's made headlines so far for revelations that prosecutors were about to indict Bill and Hillary, this assassination attempt makes that revelation look minor league.
read more...
Ken Gormley's The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, set to be published in February, recounts an incident during Clinton's visit to the Philippine capital, Manila, in 1996 for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference. According to blogger Jamie Malanowski at True/Slant, moments before the president's convoy was to start down a route that would take it over a bridge in downtown Manila, the Secret Service was warned that an attack might have been planned on the bridge.
Malanowski reports:
During the 1996 visit, Clinton was scheduled to visit a Filipino politician. The route he was to take required him to cross a bridge in downtown Manila. As the motorcade was about to depart, Merletti received “a crackly message in one earpiece” informing him that intelligence operatives had picked up a transmission that used the words ‘bridge’ and ‘wedding’ in the same sentence. Since ‘wedding’ was known to be a code word for assassination, Merletti ordered that the motorcade be re-routed. An intelligence team then discovered that a bomb had been planted under the bridge. No estimate is given in the passage for how soon the motorcade would have crossed the bridge, but the implication is that the bridge was not far away.
Malanowski quotes Gormley directly implicating bin Laden in the purported attack:
The thwarted assassination attempt was never made public. ... It remained top secret except to select members of the U.S. intelligence community. The American government’s subsequent investigation of this plot to kill Clinton, however, revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan -- a man named Osama bin Laden.read more...
From Headzup:
Bob, a Budweiser Clydesdale horse, comes out and asks Anheuser-Busch to step down from the board on the US Chamber of Commerce due to the chamber's radical and extremist views on the environment and climate change.Apple has already quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its climate change position.
see more at http://headzup.tv
StopBeck is having their first big fundraiser! If you believe in the work Angelo does day in and say out on behalf of accountability in the media, please give whatever you can. If you're a progressive blogger that holds regular fundraisers of your own, there's NO excuse for you not to give. This guy is doing the real dirty work. Work I know I couldn't do. Please step of to the plate on this one.
