I've been listening to Randi Rhodes on Air America for a long time.  Her show is entertaining and Randi has usually had a solid command of the facts -- she likes to brag about how well-informed she is, and until recently that was reflected in her rhetoric. Which is why I have no choice now but to conclude that over the last several weeks she has been intentionally misleading her listeners with a barrage of lies and absurd speculation.

Randi finally admitted last Friday that she's supporting Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, something that had become obvious recently to even casual listeners, despite her frequent claims of neutrality. That's fine. It's her show and her perogative to support a candidate. But it's not okay for her to lie and mislead her listeners in order to bring down a Democratic candidate. Randi Rhodes is damaging her own reputation and damaging Air America.

Over the past several weeks, reports have surfaced that the Republican National Committee is commissioning "top-secret polling and focus groups" to develop "new code words" that will allow them to attack Obama and Clinton without being accused or racism or sexism.

Last night on Larry King Live, Kellyanne Conway, a top Republican pollster who is likely at the center of this effort, apparently decided to roll out some those new code words, stating that Clinton and Obama are arguing about

...whether she should let him sit on the back of the bus of her presidential ticket, or he argues whether or not she lied us into war in 2002.

For the same reason Hillary Clinton hasn't. Neither candidate is going to abandon a viable path to the nomination that takes advantage of agreed-upon rules built into the process.

Despite demands by Obama supporters that Super Delegates commit to backing the candidate who represents the "will of the voters" or has the "popular support from Democratic primary voters and caucus goers," Senator Obama has a more nuanced position. And I don't blame him.

I want to shine a spotlight on a couple of the lesser players in the Scooter Libby truthiness squad -- two second-string Gollums that slithered across my TV screen this week, defending Libby and Bush with a classic litany of Plamegate lies.

I should be immune by now to this crap. But sometimes I'm still astonished to hear a Republican prosti-pundit explain that Valerie Plame was not covert and that the CIA has never said that she was. Just how dead does your soul have to be to lie on national television about a matter like that? Lies so easily disproved.

The scene was media-whore central: Hardball. The right-wing hacks were two odd little men: Ron Christie, former adviser to Dick Cheney, and David Rivkin, former DOJ official under Bush 41. Both despicable liars.

The blaring headline a the top of tonight’s Drudge Report reads:

I SAW THE CLIMATE CHANGE

just below an unflattering photo of Nancy Pelosi.

The headline is obviously intended to read like a quote, or perhaps a close paraphrase. And it sounds like a nutty thing to say. However, as you might have already guessed if you're familiar with right-wing smear tactics, nothing like Drudge’s headline appears in the linked article. It’s a report on Pelosi’s visit to Greenland in which she was shown evidence of climate change. She didn’t say anything that sounded remotely stupid or ditzy, as Drudge’s headline implies.

This is no different than the infamous "I invented the internet," Gore slur. It’s an insidious technique -- intentionally misquoting a Democrat, then disseminating the distortion in a long-term effort to build a false narrative. Gore is a serial exaggerator because he said all those things that, well, he actually never said. And Nancy Pelosi -- she’s obviously a ditzy San Francisco liberal.

I had just finished watching a late-night replay of Al Gore on Larry King, when CNN's hourly news update came on. This was at 4:00am EST tonight. And it only took seconds after Gore finished discussing The Assault on Reason, for CNN to prove his point.

Maybe it's a small thing. Just a single word. But this quick report by the alleged journalists at CNN managed to epitomize the stupidity that infects so much of the mainstream media and our political institutions. In the short news brief, the anchor reported that Scooter Libby will soon be sentenced for "allegedly lying to investigators." Allegedly? Is that the word CNN now uses to describe a criminal conviction? This was a straight-up, 30 second, news update on the Libby case. I don't think it was a mistake. It think it reflects the core of CNN's false-balance reporting model, where facts, no matter how obvious, must compete with spin. The fact of Scooter Libby's conviction must be balanced with the claims of right-wing propaganda artists. And in CNN's world, each deserves equal weight. Thus Scooter only "allegedly" lied.

I was outraged when I heard than Democrats had capitulated to Bush on funding the occupation of Iraq. But, after sober consideration, I've come to the conclusion that congressional Dems chose their best option, and really their only politically viable option.

How does the Bush Administration react after being approached by congressional Republicans who are concerned about the situation in Iraq? It publicly berates them, of course. Just in from The Hill:

Top Bush administration officials lashed out at a pair of House Republicans at the White House yesterday after details about a contentious meeting between President Bush and GOP legislators were leaked to the media earlier this week.

Reps. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) attracted the ire of White House officials for allegedly speaking to reporters about a Tuesday meeting between Bush and centrist Republicans on the Iraq war. Details of the contentious meeting first emerged Wednesday evening and attracted Page 1 headlines yesterday.

Unbelievable. Read on...

Just returned from an afternoon of American folk music, featuring the exquisite ukulele stylings of Aaron Keim of the Boulder Acoustic Society. What does this have to with chickenhawks? Keim's set featured an old Phil Ochs tune, Draft Dodger Rag, that I think should serve as an anthem for our modern chickenhawk brigade -- the Jonah Goldbergs and Ben Domenechs who cheer on the carnage in Iraq, but won't step foot near an enlistment office.

I have no idea about Keim's political inclinations, but the song he played at this afternoon's house concert neatly ridicules an unfortunate American tradition: chickenhawk cowardice.

I hate [Saddam], and I hope he dies,
but one thing you gotta see
That someone's gotta go over there
and that someone isn't me
So I wish you well, Sarge, give 'em Hell
Yeah, Kill me a thousand or so
And if you ever get a war without blood and gore
Well I'll be the first to go...

Back in the dark days of 2000, before blogs and before there was any significant organized liberal presence on the internet (much less Democratic partisans), the traditional media acted as if they had nothing to answer for and little accountability for truth or fairness. And as bad as things often seem now, it was much worse then. As the Florida recount proceeded and talking heads blathered on about how Gore should concede for the good of the nation, Media Whores Online was launched.

I thought it would be fun to do a brief retrospective and tribute to the site that I woke up to every morning for a couple of years at the beginning of this decade...the site that "set out to bring the media to it's knees and found out they were already there."

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear...

I've had my problems with Bill Maher over the years. But when it comes to calling out Republican bullshit with common-sense incisive humor, Maher gives Jon Stewart a run for his money. And Democrats would be wise to emulate his approach.

Below the fold: On today's Hardball, Maher throws Rudy Giuliani an anvil...and ridicules the desperate Republican yearning for a new Reagan.

Joe Biden's performance on Meet the Press yesterday was, in a word, abysmal.

The senator from Delaware possesses a basic political weakness -- lack of discipline.

Biden didn't only hurt himself on Meet the Press, though. If I knew little of Biden and was only partially informed about what congressional Democrats are up to, I would have come away from this interview believing that Democrats have no intention of forcing a withdrawal from Iraq.

His appearance on Meet the Press should be instructive to the other Democratic presidential candidates: they should never be defensive about their intention to end the occupation of Iraq. And they should never concede that the invasion was anything less than a tragic mistake.

Much like Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz doesn't know when it's time to get out of dodge. From a report in Wednesday's New York Times:

Graeme Wheeler, the bank’s managing director, said...that the fight over whether Mr. Wolfowitz should stay on at the bank amounted to the "the biggest crisis in its history."

Is anyone surprised? Going far beyond revelations over the promotion and pay raise for Wolfie's girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, the real scandal is ultimately about attempts by Wolfowitz to bring Bush Administration "values" to the World Bank -- in particular an extremist ideology and the same culture of corruption we've become all too familiar with.

And now, despite outrage by vice presidents and staff at the World Bank, Wolfowitz is pulling a Fredo -- he won't leave.

Mitt Romney says the war is over...and we won!

Oh yeah, I remember now: George Bush. Aircraft carrier. Mission Accomplished. Apparently, the Great White Varmint Hunter is still eager to hitch his tugboat to Commander Codpiece.

Lashing out at Harry Reid for stating that the war is lost, Romney explained that understanding victory and defeat in Iraq is all about language and definitions. Sounds like somebody's been brainwashed by Karl Rove. Like father like son, I guess.

You see, we won the war, so Harry Reid is undermining the troops by suggesting otherwise. But it's okay for Mitt to say that the "jury is out" on the occupation rebuilding of Iraq.

Funny, though, why would Mitt bristle when asked if he's encouraged his five sons to enlist in the Global Battle Against Islamic Jihad?

Below the fold: Tbogg calls out Romney for wanting other people's kids to serve as sitting ducks in Iraq.

Did you know that Mitch McConnell, Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and Orrin Hatch all have a very low threshold for politicization and incompetency in the Department of Justice? Even the appearance of such.

In President Clinton's Department of Justice, that is.

Mitch McConnell wanted to impeach Janet Reno because she refused to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the accusation that Clinton and Gore had used the wrong phone for some of their fundraising calls.

Trent Lott called for Reno to resign because of "her refusal to provide information or answer questions by the Congress."

And Newt Gingrich, the man who shut down the federal government because President Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One, called for Reno's resignation because "she looks like a fool."

After the Jump: More Republican hypocrisy gone wild...and Orrin Hatch shows himself to be a partisan hack. Shocking, huh?

And the same goes for ABC, NBC, CBS, and C-SPAN. Comcast and DirectTV too. (FOX? Feh. They don't deserve to be included in a discussion about news.)

They thrive on fear and terror. They celebrate disaster.

But I'm not upset about something I saw. It's what I didn't see.

I didn't see Alberto Gonzales testifying on my TV Thursday. Watching important congressional hearings LIVE, piped into our living rooms, is an American tradition. The fodder of participatory democracy. But not any more.

And it's just a symptom of the larger problem -- an unwillingness to give busy Americans the news they need. And it's costing us in lives and justice and so much more.

After the damage he did shilling for Republicans during President Clinton's impeachment and during the 2000 elections, as well as fawning over Bush's theatrics in the years following nine-eleven, Chris Matthews had begun, lately, to function like an actual journalist. From his pursuit of the Cheney gang and their efforts to destroy Plame and Wilson, right up until a couple of weeks ago when he suggested that the neocons had committed war crimes, Tweety seemed to finally being taking his role seriously.

But media-whore Matthews was on the scene again Thursday following Alberto Gonzales' testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On a day when the Attorney General of the United States disgraced himself and the Bush Administration, Evil Tweety couldn't help but take some vicious swipes at the Democrats.

I have been working my way through Theodore H. White's The Making of the President 1968, and it is impossible not to notice some uncanny similarities to our current presidential contest. There are broad historical parallels that derive from the political climates created by the war in Vietnam and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. And there are amusing coincidences.

Some of the failed candidates vying for their party's 1968 nomination included a Republican Mayor of New York; a Senator from Illinois, "bright, eager, handsome...vibrantly attractive to young voters;" and even a Mormon candidate -- a hapless Republican named Romney. But beyond these superficial analogs to the candidates of 2008, some profound resonances, consequences of larger forces, may be lurking.

This post, the first in a series, will focus on Richard Nixon's early strategy following the Republican gains of 1966, and what that comeback campaign by a former vice president could reveal about a theoretical Al Gore candidacy in 2008.