Some more catching up…

Another hodge-podge post…

• What good could be done with 1.6 billion dollars? Hmm… Probably a lot more good than spending it on PR for terrible policies.
• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has a great post at dailykos.com on the Republican Culture of Corruption.
• How Greenpeace and public outcry prevented a toxic French warship from being sent to India to be torn apart (where due to lax/nonexistent worker protection laws, the waste would have harmed many).
• Peter Daou has a challenge for everyone who claims that the traditional media has a liberal bias… PROVE IT. Peter goes on to list in great detail exactly how the traditional media actually has a Republican bias.
• More great work from Glenn Greenwald on the illegal warrantless NSA wiretapping here and here.

Links Galore (or, catching up on the news from the past week)

Posts Galore today… missed a chance to post some stuff I thought was pretty important… gonna post it all now.

• One of the more pressing issues around right now… health-care, and making sure everyone is covered. Here's a post at dailykos.com explaining why single-payer health care is a good thing.

• Avian bird flu continues to spread… Is the US prepared, and are you?

• Ahh, those republicans… When one of your own is under indictment for money laundering and has been admonished for using the department of Homeland Security to track political enemies, why not put him on the House Appropriations committee? I mean, I'm sure he's learned his lesson, right?

• A retired top CIA official states that the "administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."

• Now that Samuel Alito will be our next Supreme Court Justice, South Dakota moves to ban ALL abortions. I'm sure they don't know anything that Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chafee, or any of the other Republicans who vowed to reject anyone who wouldn't uphold Roe v. Wade doesn't know. In fact, I'm sure they don't know anything more than anyone who voted against Cloture on Alito knows, do they?

• Dick Cheney is called out on both his misstatements about the economy as well as his statements on the power of the executive. More on his having shot someone over the weekend in a later post.

• We also now know that Scooter Libby is saying that his superiors (remember, he worked for Dick Cheney; who might his superiors be?) "authorized" him to reveal classified information in order to discredit political opponents and prop up the case for invading Iraq.

• More nonsense from the preznit on the so-called "War on Terror". A key quote from the article (by Larry Johnson), something you'll never hear from dubya:
  

  The facts are indisputable. Since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003, international terrorist attacks in which people have been killed and injured have almost quadrupled. The number of countries hit by lethal attacks has also increased to unprecedented levels.

• Brownie Strikes Back! Former Fema chief Michael "Brownie" Brown lets the administration have it.

• One take on the Muslim Cartoon Controversy in Europe, and what it says about the acceptance of outsiders in Europe.

• A fantastic article about "scandal fatigue", and the failure of the opposition to hammer home any of the scandals that the current administration is party to.

The Triangle…

And no, I don't mean the offense run by Phil Jackson's Chicago Bulls teams. Peter Daou has a great article regarding the triangle of grassroots/bloggers, Washington DC insiders (aka the party), and the media, and how the Republicans have mastered that triangle and the Democrats haven't. Even worse, he says, Democrats are allowing Republicans to frame every issue in the media, meaning they've lost the fight in the media even before they've had a chance to engage the Republicans. Great read.