W's urge to purge... another peek < ò > < ó >

This story, which I originally found on C&L and read about further in a March 22 WaPo piece, floored me. What shocked me even more was that Chris Wallace explored this on his show yesterday.

It seems that the Bush Justice Department stuck its nose right where it should not have gone - right up Big Tobacco's tar hole.

The story's so unreal, I'm not even going to try to describe it - just read a few excerpts for yourself from the WaPo story:

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government's tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler and Keisler's deputy at the time, Dan Meron.

News reports on the strategy changes at the time caused an uproar in Congress and sparked an inquiry by the Justice Department. Government witnesses said they had been asked to change testimony, and one expert withdrew from the case. Government lawyers also announced that they were scaling back a proposed penalty against the industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.

WTF? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that someone is getting paid here. This was the government's chance to drop the hammer on Big Tobacco, which has been exploiting the American public for decades, including intentionally putting additives in cigarettes that made them more addictive.

Here's a cheerful thought - if this administration would do something like this with Big Tobacco, what kind of influence do you think Bush and Cheney, oil men both, have over what goes on with Big Oil? Read on...

Yesterday [March 21] was the first time that any of the government lawyers on the case spoke at length publicly about what they considered high-level interference by Justice officials.

Eubanks, who retired from Justice in December 2005, said she is coming forward now because she is concerned about what she called the "overwhelming politicization" of the department demonstrated by the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Lawyers from Justice's civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.

Eubanks said Congress should not limit its investigation to the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.

"Political interference is happening at Justice across the department," she said. "When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general's office, politics is the primary consideration. . . . The rule of law goes out the window."

Hey, where there's smoke, there's fire. I have no doubt in my mind that Bush, Rove, Cheney and their cabal played a big role in the attorney firings. Now it's just a matter of finding out for sure by uncovering the legal trail, and deposing witnesses, under oath and with a legal transcript.

Olbermann uncovers facts behind Gore Swiftboating

Speaking of global warming, I've been meaning to get to this one.

It took less than 24 hours for the smear mongers to come after Al Gore following his big night at the Academy Awards. Pretty impressive, actually. Unfortunately, pretty predictable, too. Haven't we seen this play before? John Kerry knows the answer.

By now, it's pretty obvious the neocons weren't about to let Gore enjoy even the slightest adulation without attacking him in some way.

Enter stage left - the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. On its Website, the TCPR presents itself as "an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to providing concerned citizens, the media and public leaders with expert research and timely free market policy solutions to public policy issues in Tennessee."

It takes less than 30 seconds of poking around on its site to quickly figure out that the TCPR is about as nonpartisan as Rush Limbaugh.

What really irked me about the Gore smear campaign is how it was reported as hard news (Read: fact) by so many new organizations. This is a case study about how a smear migrates to national news. A right-wing think tank issues a smarmy smear, which of course leads to Matt Drudge putting it on a plate and sopping it up with a biscuit. And the road from Drudge, a known right-wing shill for the Republican Party, to the national media is a short one. It's amazing how much credibility Drudge has. Funny how the stories he gets wrong don't seem to get reported, but that's another post for another time.

Anyway, media such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and a host of other highly visible, popular media outlets reported the "facts" without obviously doing much, if any, reporting, unless you consider reporting as reading what Drudge and the TCPR Websites published and presenting it as news.

Here's an example of tertiary reporting at best, which took me inside of 10 minutes: Drew Johnson (right), the president of TCPR, has this line in his biography on TCPR's Website: "Johnson’s work has appeared in over 300 publications including USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Human Events."

Any journalist who can find his rump with his own two hands should have raised a red flag when reading that in his online bio. Considering the coverage, I doubt anyone decided to read it. Does anybody actually investigate anymore, or is that something looked upon as quaint or old fashioned? One can imagine some of these "reporters" sniping, "That was something that Woodward and Bernstein did, but I don't have time for that - I've got deadlines to meet!"

USA Today aside, the other three publications mentioned in Johnson's bio are known right-wing publications; National Review and Human Events make Rush Limbaugh look liberal, and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page reads like a press release from the RNC.

One person who did bother to do some research was Keith Olbermann. If you haven't listened to the clip above yet, click on it and listen.

Olbermann ticks off some great facts about Johnson, highlighted by his work for the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank which denies global warming exists. The AEI has received funding from these credible, non-partisan sources: ExxonMobile and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Anyone familiar with the Clinton witch hunt in the 1990s knows the name Scaife.

The number that sticks in everyone's mind is that Gore's electric bill is "20 times the national average." Nevermind that the average home in the United States is about 2,500 square feet. Gore's house has 20 rooms, two offices and a guesthouse, as well as other security measures that are necessary as a former vice president. Why would a house like that use more electricity? It escapes me.

As usual, let's not let facts get in the way of a good 'ole fashioned Swiftboating.

This is PR 101, as well as a well-used page out of Karl Rove's playbook: Put out the smear, knowing that it might be debunked by anyone who bothers to perform 20 minutes of actual reporting. But, the lie will stick more than the facts that come out after the smear is widespread.

In a sick, twisted way, you almost can't blame the GOP and its supporters. This tactic has worked before - remember "I invented the Internet"?

My favorite part in the Olbermann clip is when he wonders how the global warming deniers get around the fact that even President Bush, one of our most anti-environmental presidents ever, has acknowledged that global warming is a problem, as well as evangelical clergymen.

What we are seeing here is the pathetic, last gasps by big business and its donors against a global problem that just about everyone who isn't to the right of Ann Coulter on the political spectrum has acknowledged - is that global warming is here to stay. And it really is an inconvenient truth to some.

Global Warming is the New Big Tobacco

Global warming is beginning to remind me of big tobacco. For decades, the cigarette companies denied, denied, denied and paid hundreds of millions to keep their big lie going. Eventually, the house of cards (or should I say, cash) collapsed around them, and they had to acknowledge what scientists had been saying for years - that smoking cigarettes kills.

I really hope Gore gets in the '08 race. I'd love nothing more than to see Gore settle the score from the 2000 race, and to trounce whomever the GOP nominates.

Urge Al to run by clicking Here.