O'Reilly attacks the Daily Kos... again

Here's another piece of entertaining footage - Bill O'Lielly again going after Markos Moulitsas, the founder of The Daily Kos, an excellent liberal blog that's doing a great deal of important work.

The bottom line here is that O'Reilly can't handle criticism, and when prominent liberal blogs go after him for his lies and distortions, he gets his dander up, labeling them "hate sites." Of course, BOR can never get through a criticism of anything or anyone liberal without a Nazi or KKK reference - in this case likening Moulitsas to David Duke - which is pretty hilarious.

I got a good laugh out of O'Reilly and Mary Katherine Ham coddling each other about how disgusting the pictures are of Iraqi War casualties. Yes, they are disgusting, but it's violence that this administration has caused, period. So, I get a kick out of conservatives expressing horror and disgust whenever a liberal Website has the temerity to publish unpleasant images of the War in Iraq. Too damn bad - this is violence that your president has caused.

And Ham and O'Reilly, as usual, can't get through a criticism about a liberal blog without mentioning the comments section in any Website, either, be it the Daily Kos or The Huffington Post. Too bad O'Reilly allows many hate filled comments on his site, too, as detailed by some great work on the part of Crooks & Liars.

Bill W over at C&L probably makes the best point of all:

Somehow Newsweek shouldn't have hired Kos because of what other people say in the comments or post in their user blogs, but of course [O'Reilly's] okay with [Fox News] hiring Rove who has been involved in scandal after scandal. Who's more like David Duke? Kos, or the guy behind the robocalls [who] said McCain had an illegitimate black child? I'm just sayin'.

Sweet. I couldn't have said it better myself. More on Rove's role at Fox, as well as his status as a McCain consultant, in a bit.

Paul Szep - zomething different

I found this political cartoon on HuffPo today and loved it - it looks like I have another favorite political cartoonist to add to my list of many - Paul Szep. This one is spot on.

I just did a little reading on Szep and I'm kicking myself - where have I been? He only has two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, but more importantly he's a hockey fan from Canada, and a Boston Globe cartoonist. Solid credentials. I wonder if he's an Oilers fan?

Anyway, about the cartoon - sage indeed, except that tragically, (!) McCain made himself look like a bumbling fool, AGAIN. I'll have more on that in a minute.

Holy Spitz - NY Gov to resign

...And he should.

Wow - another politician undone by a sex scandal. You'd think that would-be politicians, especially ones who have made their bones by putting criminals in jail (and thereby making enemies in the process), would know one of the cardinal rules in politics - never take the bait, because you are going to be hyper-scrutinized. I guess soon-to-be-former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer never got that memo, or that lesson.

Spitzer shocked New York citizens, as well as the political world around the country, by copping to the use of prostitutes on over half a dozen occasions. It's a press conference we've seen all too often in the last 15 years - a disgraced male politician, with his wife standing by his side, no doubt humiliated on the inside, but putting on a brave face for the cameras.

Spitzer's tale is an amazing one, and not in a good way. (You can always count on the NY tabloid dailies to supply amusing headlines, and since it's a Democrat, of course the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post isn't going to miss an opportunity (left).

According to HuffPo, Spitzer will announce he will step down within the next day or so. Even if he doesn't want to, he probably doesn't have a choice - NY GOP legislators are threatening impeachment, a battle Spitzer would be sure to lose.

Two things bear watching from this scandal - 1. who will run for governor to replace Spitzer (my money is on America's Profiteer, Rudy 9iu1ian1), and 2. how New York and national Repubes will spin this about how Democrats are immoral and not with family values. Of course, going all the way back to the circus impeachment of President Clinton, Repubes don't even come close to representing the so-called "family values" they claim to uphold, but since most of the voting public has a memory span of about 15 minutes, it may not matter.

I don't believe this scandal with have much of an effect on the presidential election, though; New York is solid ground for the Democratic nominee, no matter if it's Hillary or Obama.

Anyway, it appears it's not the actual use of prostitutes that sparked the investigation of Spitzer, but how they were paid for. From The New York Times:

After a report that Gov. Eliot Spitzer had patronized a prostitution ring, officials in Albany greeted the news with shock, and some on Wall Street, a frequent target of his investigations as attorney general, were unsympathetic.

Mr. Spitzer received counsel from his advisers late Monday at his Fifth Avenue apartment, and had not emerged as of early Tuesday morning. A top administration official said Tuesday morning that no announcement had been scheduled. ...

Mr. Spitzer's family and his top assistants debated Monday morning at Mr. Spitzer's apartment about whether he should step down, a person who spoke to the governor said. Silda Wall Spitzer, who was among them, told her husband that he should not resign in haste; as did Lloyd Constantine, a senior adviser and a longtime friend of the governor. But most of his others saw no way for him to survive.

Seems pretty cut and dry - Spitzer is toast, and he deserves to be.

What's worse, the guy has three teenage daughters. I can't imagine the humiliation that they must be going through. Here is the text of his brief press conference yesterday:

Good afternoon.

For the past nine years, eight years as attorney general, and one as governor, I have tried to uphold a vision of progressive politics that would rebuild New York and create opportunity for all. We sought to bring real change to New York and that will continue.

Today I want to briefly address a private matter. I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong. I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public, whom I promised better.

I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas, the public good, and doing what is best for the state of New York. But I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.

I will not be taking questions. Thank you very much. I will report back to you in short order. Thank you very much.

I love how when politicians announce misdeeds, they never come out and say what they did. Probably because they don't want that footage replayed, over and over, on the likes of Fox News and CNN.

Maybe Spitzer and former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy can start up their own company - Govs Aren't Us.

Sheesh - here's hoping that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell hasn't had his hands where they shouldn't be, or we'll have a tri-state trifecta of gubernatorial idiocy.

More on Rendell later today...

O'Lielly: Huffington a "Nazi"

Bill O'Lielly is at it again - this time calling Arianna Huffington a "Nazi" and wondering aloud the difference between what the Germans did in the 1920s and 1930s and what blogs in America are doing today.

First off, and I've mentioned it many times - anyone who has to bring up Nazi Germany to make a political point has lost that political point. Period. I think now we can all finally agree - Nazi Germany has officially become the Titanic of political clichés.

You know what O'Lielly really hates about the Internet? That he's no longer free to simply make stuff up and have it believed by the masses. The Internet, and the blogosphere, are both equalizers to the propagandistic, intolerance-infested network that is State TV Fox News.

A major hat tip is due to Crooks & Liars, one of the best liberal political sites on the Web, for putting together this video, including the footage at the end that points out how BOR's Website contains just as much hate-filled tripe (and probably a great deal more) than The Huffington Post does. Let's face it, Bill - you're tried this trick before - whining and harping about a few comments on her site.

A site like Huffington's can't possibly moderate every single comment on every single day, especially considering the hundreds of articles and thousands of comments the site must surly receive.

By the way, what's to stop hacks from Fox News from putting the incriminating comments on Huffington's site? The answer is... probably nothing. Honestly, how long would it take to sign up for a Web-based e-mail address, then sign up for an account on HuffPo? Probably under 10 minutes.

It's not like there's not a precedent, either. After all, Faux News employees got busted for posting flattering information about State TV on Wikipedia last year.

h/t Crooks & Liars for the video

Dodd & O'Lielly battle; Dodd gets the KO

This one got my blood boiling, but not in a bad way. Sen. Chris Dodd, a Democratic candidate for president (who'd not doing so hot in the polls), really takes it to O'Reilly about his laughably absurd jihad against the Website Daily Kos. Watch the hilarity ensue as BOR's crossed eyes nearly go straight as he foams at the mouth in the wake of Dodd's calm, steady barrage. BOR gets even angrier when his usual tactic of shouting someone down falls flat.

Quite frankly, Dodd hits the nail right on the head - it's not the few offensive comments on the site out of tens of thousands that BOR is mad about, it's the site's prevailing political point of view. (This is the same reason O'Lielly hates Media Matters, The Huffington Post, too; they expose him for the serial liar he is, period.)

I've written it before and it bears repeating - if Fox News is so Fair and Balanced, where was Billy's outrage when Rush Limbaugh accused the Clintons of murder on numerous occasions, when Ann Coulter accused 9-11 widows of enjoying their husbands' deaths, or when Dick Cheney and George Bush asserted on an almost daily basis leading up to the '04 election that "if the Democrats win, the terrorists win"? Of course O'Lielly was nowhere to be found, because calling out those agents of hate would have gone against his right-wing agenda. But, I won't let facts get in the way of a good Billy rant. It just occurred to me what BOR really is - the Jerry Springer of political talk shows. Both productions share similar traits: a few million watch, but each show enjoys about the same amount of nano-credibility; all but a few know the shows are staged bullshit to entertain; and even fewer say the words credible and either O'Reilly or Springer in the same sentence.

Hey Bill - aren't there some women you need to sexually harass? Better yet, go home and polish your Peabody Awards you didn't win (yet you publicly claimed you did).

Bill O'Lielly - giving hope to losers & liars everywhere.

BOR's latest phony boycott: JetBlue & DailyKos

Bill O'Lielly, the Misinformation Minister himself, is at it again. Even passive viewers of his nightly show, The O'Reilly Factor, can pretty quickly detect a pattern in his attacks against people, TV personalities, Websites, and just about everything else with a "D" associated with it (or, heaven forbid, the horrific LIBERAL label).

O'Reilly latest target? DailyKos, a very popular liberal Website that dares to take aim against the Bush administration's propaganda, lies, fear mongering and distortions, all of which BOR is a more than willing purveyor of. BOR's beef with the site? Some idiots who posted some disparaging comments about Tony Snow, Dick Cheney and others on the site. What BOR neglects to tell his viewers, many of whom will probably believe just about anything Billy tells them to believe, is that the offensive material he reads on his show are from comments following stories that appeared on DailyKos, not in the stories themselves.

To be fair, yes, the site should be more vigilant about taking hateful, inexcusable comments down. It's news to no one that there are nut jobs of all stripes in the political world, liberals included. Arianna Huffington weathered a similar O'Reilly rant earlier this year when some morons posted hateful things on her site, The Huffington Post.

But, you know what? ANYONE can post a comment on a Website like that after registering, which takes about two minutes, typically with the validation of an e-mail address. To take it a step further, any conservative (or staffer from Billy's office) could go on DailyKos, post something offensive, and VIOLA! - a story to slam another liberal Website.

This is such a non-story. By far the most interesting aspect of this is how BOR will pursue anyone with an agenda of uncovering his well-documented penchant for lying.

But, someone posting something hateful in the comments section of a Website is a far cry from a Website posting commentary that Tony Snow is better off dead or musing at America's bad luck that Dick Cheney wasn't killed in Afghanistan.

If you can manage to get through the entire length of the footage, you'll notice that not ONCE during the entire rant does BOR mention that these offensive opinions were in the Comments of the Website.

Typical. It's not like I'd ever expect the accurate, precise truth from a blowhard like Bill O'Reilly.

The best part? Another phony BOR boycott. The latest company that will feel no effect whatsoever? JetBlue.

O'Lielly is miffed the JetBlue, a fledgling airline, has sponsored a DailyKos event. I'm sure the CEO of JetBlue, David Neeleman, lost loads of sleep this week because of a Bill O'Reilly distortion that any educated person could see through after about five minutes of clicking and researching on DailyKos.

DailyKos is simply the latest Website to be targeted by BOR, who loves to call them "hate sites," because he cries that sites like Media Matters, the Huffington Post and DailyKos have the temerity to call him on his lies.

This story has caused me to do three things:

1. Check JetBlue's prices, and if possible, fly the airline whenever I can,

2. Visit DailyKos every day to increase the site's ad revenue,

3. and start recording The O'Reilly Factor to see who is sponsoring this Republican Party propaganda, and I'll boycott them (and of course, right about it). I'll let you know of my findings.

Arianna on who won the debate

I love Arianna Huffington - I really do - she's smart, witty, and best of all... that voice that I can't understand. This footage should come with subtitles.

Just kidding~ What I really do love about her is that she's beholden to no single candidate - if you visit her Website, The Huffington Post, on it you'll find many great pieces from many different progressives. Specifically, The Huff will praise a candidate one day, then slam that same candidate the next day. She calls it as she sees it and she speaks her mind. In other words, she's not a sheep. Her site is the best of the best for a liberal point of view.

There aren't enough political pundits like her.

Gary Hart to Rudy: zip it

I don't like to copy/paste whole articles or letters, but this one is not very long, and I believe this one is important and hard hitting enough to bring it all to you.

The following is a letter from former Colorado Senator Gary Hart to GOP Presidential Candidate Rudy Giuliani. I read it on HuffPo a little while ago. Honestly, it's just another reason to love The Huffington Post - it's one of the best liberal blogs on the Internet.

Anyway, here it is. I've highlighted a few passages I feel are particularly strong.

Dear Mayor Giuliani:

Since you have based your presidential campaign almost exclusively on your reaction to terrorist attacks on New York City, and since you have recently accused Democrats of being on the defense against terrorism and therefore guilty of inviting more casualties, I have one question for you: Where were you on terrorism between January 31, 2001, and September 11th?

The first date was when the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century issued its final report warning, as did its previous reports, of the danger of terrorist attacks on America. The George W. Bush administration did nothing about these warnings and we lost 3,000 American lives. What did you do during those critical eight months? Where were you? Were you on the defensive, or were you even paying attention?

Before you qualify to criticize Democrats, Mr. Giuliani, you must account for your preparation of your city for these clearly predicted attacks. Tell us, please, what steps you took to make your city safer.

Until you do, then I strongly suggest you should keep your mouth shut about Democrats and terrorism.

You have not qualified [sic] to criticize others, let alone be president of the United States.

Gary Hart
(co-chair, U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century)

P.S. You might ask these same questions of George W. Bush while you are trying to find a better reason to run for president.

Not bad. This is a sound, valid criticism of Rudy Giuliani about 9-11.

I don't think that Giuliani could have prevented two airplanes from flying into both WTC towers on 9-11. For that, I blame the federal government and the president whose boots Rudy never misses a chance to lick - George W. Bush.

But, there's plenty of room to criticize Rudy, too. For instance, after it was recommended that NYC's emergency response center be put underground, why did he have it put in the World Trade Center anyway? (Especially in the aftermath of the 1993 bombing of the WTC complex.)

And, why didn't Giuliani take steps to improve and coordinate the city's various departments' response to a terrorist attack? It's well-documented that the radio system used by both the FDNY and NYPD were less-than-first-rate on 9-11.

We'll never know, but perhaps a better response would have resulted in fewer than the 343 firefighters lost when both towers collapsed. What's more, once the south tower collapsed, a more coordinated response may have saved more lives before the north tower collapsed.

I know what some might think - why go back and look at all of those things now? My response to that valid question is that Giuliani is cavorting from coast-to-coast, bragging and preening about his 9-11 leadership skills, so his actions as mayor leading up to and during 9-11 bear scrutiny. Republicans and Giuliani cannot have it both ways - if he's going to run on 9-11, he'd better be prepared to answer questions about some decisions that were made before, during and immediately after 9-11, all on his watch.

Does this line of thinking sound familiar? It should - it's precisely how Republicans justified their attacks on John Kerry in 2004. I certainly hope that Democrats (and organizations associated with the DemocratIC party) don't Swiftboat Giuliani like Republicans did to Kerry, but if Rudy is going to run as the "9-11 candidate," then his record should be examined and discussed.

And in light of his arrogant, inexcusable comments last week, he'd better be ready.

Only in Germany: drunk man & his horse sleep it off - in an ATM lobby

Even PETA can't quibble with this one.

From AP:

BERLIN — An early-morning German bank customer had a bit of a shock when he found a horse already in line at the automatic teller machine in front of him. It seems the horse's owner, identified only as Wolfgang H., had a bit too much to drink the night before and decided to sleep it off inside the bank's heated foyer, police said Tuesday.

The 40-year-old machinist told Bild newspaper he had had "a few beers" with a friend in Wiesenburg, southwest of Berlin, and decided to hit the hay in the bank on his way home.

"It was late, it was already dark and cold," he was quoted as saying.

Confronted with the lack of a hitching-post, he brought the 6-year-old horse, named Sammy, in along with him.

When a customer came across the horse and sleeping rider in the bank at 4:15 a.m. Monday, he called police, who then came and woke the owner up and sent him on his way.

No charges were filed, but there might be some cleanup needed: Apparently Sammy made his own after-hours deposit on the carpet.

I got a kick out of this one. Hey, give the guy some credit - he didn't want to leave the horse out in the cold, or chance it that a stranger could make off with his horse or worse, so he brought Sammy in from the cold.

It's stories like these that make me smile at my German heritage. I'm glad someone got a picture of it before waking the guy up and sending him home.

I wonder if the man would have received a DUI-equivalent if police had caught him riding while intoxicated? Imagine having to explain that one to your significant other - that you're a convicted "drunk rider."

Hat Tip to HuffPo for carrying this story
Photo from AP

NBC misses branding-op for the ages

Evidently, I'm not alone in my outrage toward NBC for airing the videos and pictures from mass murder Cho Seung-Hui. As I blogged earlier today, what I found most revolting was how NBC's logo was all over every picture that was distributed from what NBC anchor Brian Williams described last night as "a multimedia manifesto."

I don't ever watch network evening news, but if I did, NBC would be my last choice. And if I had watched last night, It's not hard to imagine Williams blabbering something like this:

Tonight's big story: an NBC exclusive - mass murder Cho Seung-Hui, as you've never seen him before in all his psychotic glory...

Okay, I'm sure it wasn't quite like that, but who would be surprised if it was? I find NBC crass ratings grab sickening and revolting.

The above image is from a HuffPo entry by contributor Dr. Michael Shaw. His piece reads, in part:

What I'd like to ask NBC is, why the cold feet?

Having decided to identify yourself as "The Official Network of Deranged Homicidal Sociopaths," why did you stop half-way?

I mean, really. Do you think Mr. Cho would have had any problem if you had first passed these pics to your Photoshop guys, scoring a little more coverage with the logo across your boy's hat, his vest, on his shirt, on his glove?

Read the rest of Shaw's column Here.

Photo from HuffPo; Original image: NBC via nytimes.com

Huffington & Ham discuss blog hate speech

I've got so much to try to get to tonight, but I had to quickly share this piece of footage. I love Arianna Huffington, and I even liked her when she was a conservative. Her sketches with Al Franken on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect during the 1996 election were very funny and cool.

Her Website, The Huffington Post, (or HuffPo, as I refer to it) is a click I make every day when catching up on the latest political news.

Huffington recently appeared on Howard Kutz's CNN show Reliable Sources to talk about free speech and hate speech in the blogosphere, and conservative Mary Katherine Ham was also on the show.

It's amazing to me how Ham tries to politicize hate speech on blogs. Her Ham-handed attempt to paint Huffington with the well-worn brush from the conservative arsenal - being a purveyor of hate speech against this administration - falls flat. I guess when it comes to hate speech, familiarity breeds contempt, especially considering Ham's history with Michelle Malkin. Anyone doubting Malkin's intolerance credentials, click Here.

Ham tried to call out Arianna for some comments that were left on her site following Vice President Cheney's close call over in Afghanistan, when the front gate of a Marine compound he was staying at was attacked by a suicide bomber. A few morons on Huffington's site posted some ridiculous comments, expressing regret that Cheney was unharmed in the incident.

Of course, right-wingers went nuts, claiming that Huffington waited too long to take the comments down, etc. In the video above, Ham tries to make hay of it again.

Arianna was right to come right back over the top of Ham, who insinuates here that Huffington supported such speech, or the idea behind it. Lots of morons leave absurd messages on both sides of the political spectrum - no ideology or political viewpoint is exempt. Ham's whining about Malkin is also a kick - maybe if Malkin weren't so insanely intolerant, she wouldn't be such a lightning rod for nasty comments. I'm not defending people who call her the "C-word," but she brings a lot of detractors on herself. If you don't believe me, cruise on over to her Website and see for yourself. I think Malkin and Ann Coulter were separated at birth.

Where Huffington really makes sense here is when she refers to Websites' content; it IS absurd for people like Ham to try and paint liberals or people who read liberal blogs as "monkeys hanging from the rafters" when she's in the corner of the likes of Malkin and Coulter.

If you go by content, people like Malkin and Coulter lead the way in hate speech. When Huffington mentions this, Ham predictably swallows her tongue.