When people tell you who they are, believe them.  

I was driving around listening to MSNBC's Race for the White House on Air America today and was puzzled to hear hostmeister David Gregory saying he was going to do the show’s "Gong One on One" segment with Rudy Guiliani.  

Hmmmm. I wondered to myself. That’s odd. The segment in question typically features a progressive voice (i.e. the inimitable smackdown queen, Rachel Maddow) paired with the GooPer du jour. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure how Gregory was going to conduct a credible interview since (IMHO) his ardent support of McCain is obvious to anyone with ears and eyeballs.

Well, well, well. Silly me. Here I was thinking I had achieved numbness at watching the crap that passes for coverage with the corporate traditional media, but this was a new low.

More of this, please!

Dr. Dean just showed 'em how it's done in an interview less than an hour ago with MSNBC reporter extraordinaire David Shuster. It's part of the media kickoff to the DNC's national Voter Registration tour that BarbinMD wrote about yesterday.

I know, I know.  We have MUCH larger issues out there.

But I'm on my last nerve with news "anchors" and "reporters" picking up on the sleazy GOP put-down of the "Democrat Party" and "Democrat" policy, etc.

It's one thing for brainstem blowhard pundits to use the slur, but I've been hearing it slipped in now and again by supposed journalists.

Heidi Collins was the latest perpetrator this morning on CNN and I promptly sent them a complaint pointing out that she was insulting more than half of America (according to the latest polls) and a good part of their viewership.  Plus, is it too much to ask for correct grammar from our esteemed Fourth Estate?

Yeah, it may be a little thing, but this type of persistent branding has an effect and these jokers should be called on (at least some of) their bs.

Here's the link to give your what-for to CNN in case someone out there gets as worked up about this as I do.

Vigilance!

They haven't started reporting on exit polling yet and the banner had no relation to anything the heads were talking about.  And nothing on CNN.com.

Did anyone else see this?  Is this just tin foil time?

It certainly was mucho bizzaro.

Am doing my part for GOTV today in beautiful, wet Seattle, so sorry to post and run.  But I shore would like to know what that was all about!!??!!

Any ideas out there???

* 911.911.911

* Axis of Evil

* Weapons of Mass Destruction

* Fight Them Over There So We Don't Have to Fight Them Here

* 911.911.911

* Smoking Gun/Mushroom Cloud

* (Photo Op. with Soldiers)

More Below

Their program this week on Net Neutrality was no exception.  And with the brew-ha to round up Netroots activism around the recent congressional votes, I'm surprised we haven't rallied around the ONE national media outlet that has given the issue substantive, serious coverage.

And that's what NOW does so brilliantly.  More below.

I was genuinely moved to hear him speak, to have the chance to personally acknowledge how much he is appreciated (three wildly cheering standing ovations) and to actually shake his hand.  One of these days they're going to have to invent a way for people to stop themselves from blurting out the world's dorkiest things when they meet someone they admire, but he didn't seem too phased that some lady just had to share the earthshattering news that she was born in Wausau (...Wisconsin ... Fellow Cheesehead, you know).

But wait, there's more!  Join me on the flip for some encouraging news!

CBS News has a regular feature called Assignment America, reported by Steve Hartman.  Every Friday, they present three possible stories and invite their viewers to vote for next week's pick. Well, slap-my-thigh-and-call-me-Martha, an actual PEACE group is one of today' choices!!  

More and a link to the voting after la flippe  ...

Here's the Bush administration with its own perfectly fine partisan media hackfest in its back pocket, but George and Dick and Donny can't do anything but complain about the press ignoring all the "good news" out of Iraq.  Those mainstream reporters sure are a bunch of unpatriotic weenies, eh?  How many more of them have to die before they get with the program, for godssake??

So please join me and call upon our good friends at Fox to do the right thing, answer the call their leader has sounded and suit up for a nice long tour on the Mesopotamian Love Boat.  Freedom's on the march, I hear, and the Tigris is sooo lovely this time of year.

Watching W. speechify is like buying into this crazy game of Polish Limbo (I can say that because I'm Of The Peopleski), where the contestant just keeps whining and blustering until the bar gets set lower and lower and then he just skips right over it and declares himself the winner.

Then the pundits all chime in and give the lunacy a bogus bouquet of legitimacy.

I try and come up with new ways to watch his speeches ...

Evidently, people at the Astrodome are STILL waiting in line in the hot sun (even though the CNN reporter had some information that they would not be distributed) and there was just a brief lockdown there because the folks in line are getting frustrated.

Incompetence or deliberate bait and switch?

His excuse for why they were so late getting to New Orleans was stunningly outrageous...

It has been widely reported that Mr. Bush's plans for war in Iraq began long before 9/11. Biographer Mickey Herskowitz quotes candidate George W. Bush: "One of the keys to being a great leader is to be seen as a Commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it ... If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it."

When a sadistic bully admits how much he likes to hurt people, believe him.  

When Donald Rumsfeld proposes Iraq as a battlefield because it offered "better targets" than the terrorists' real hiding place, believe him.  

When the Commander in Thief says he's going to invade Iraq when he has enough "political capital," you can change your name to Hal I. Burton and take it to the bank.