Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

As the Washington Post reports, Rear Admiral William L. Schachte Jr., the man who claims Kerry was not under fire when he received his first Purple Heart, is a top lobbyist for a defense contractor that recently won a $40 million grant from the Bush administration. According to a March 18 legal filing by Schachte’s firm, Blank Rome, Schachte was one of the lobbyists working for FastShip’s effort to secure federal contracts.² On Feb. 2, FastShip announced the Bush administration had awarded it $40 million.³

Schachte has other connections to the Bush administration. The Washington Post notes David Norcross, Schachte’s colleague in the Washington office of Blank Rome, is chairman of this week’s Republican convention in New York.⁴ Records show that Schachte gave $1,000 to Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns.⁵ Additionally, Schachte helped organize veterans’ efforts against Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and for Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary.⁶

(CNSNews.com) - President Bush told Time magazine that the challenges the U.S. now faces in Iraq are the result of “catastrophic success,” a phrase that drew immediate derision from his political opponents.

Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards on Sunday said Bush is half right about the “catastrophic success.”

“It was catastrophic to rush to war without a plan to win the peace,” Edwards said in a press release. “It was catastrophic to ignore the warnings of the military leadership about the risks of an unstable post-war Iraq. It was catastrophic to dismiss warnings of creating chaotic terrorists havens as today’s New York Times accurately describes. And it was catastrophic to tell the American public that rebuilding Iraq would not burden the American taxpayers with a bill of $200 billion and rising.”

Edwards also accused President Bush of blaming the military for moving too fast before the enemy was defeated.

“Our troops fought magnificently in Iraq,” Edwards said. “Their efforts can only be described as an unqualified success. I didn’t think ’shock and awe’ was designed to move slowly.”

President Bush told Time that the U.S.-led coalition was “so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day.” Bush did not disparage U.S. troops, although that’s how Edwards interpreted it.

Edwards also accused Bush of taking the nation to war without a plan to win the peace.

The explosive comments from a central player in the National Guard drama — captured on video and available online — have received just cursory coverage in the mainstream media since it was brought to light on Friday. The shoulder-shrugging response stands in stark contrast to the media orgy that has greeted the hollow, secondhand allegations made about John Kerry’s Vietnam service by the Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has yet to make a single factual allegation stick about the circumstances surrounding Kerry’s five war medals.

During a May 27 appearance before Kerry supporters in Texas, Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, apologized for his role in getting Bush a safe, stateside spot in the National Guard. “I got a lot of other people in the National Guard because I thought that was what people should do when you’re in office, and you help a lot of rich people.” Recalling a recent visit to the Vietnam Memorial, Barnes added, “I looked at the names of the people that died in Vietnam, and I became more ashamed of myself than I have ever been, because it was the worst thing I ever did, was help a lot of wealthy supporters and a lot of people who had family names of importance get into the National Guard. And I’m very sorry about that, and I’m very ashamed.”

Earlier that evening, about 5,000 people staged a big Critical Mass bike ride in Manhattan. Surging up 6th Avenue, then across town and down to the East Village, they’d taken over the streets, blocking traffic, infuriating commuters and taxi drivers, and reveling in their own numbers. More than 250 people were arrested, but the thousands who weren’t were soaring on adrenaline.

AN DIEGO, Aug. 27 - With the nation’s first openly gay district attorney, a majority of Democrats on the city council and this week’s invasion by the Air America liberal talk radio network, San Diego is in danger of losing its image as a bastion of West Coast conservatism.

On Monday, Clear Channel Communications, syndicator of Rush Limbaugh and owner of more than 1,200 radio stations nationwide, started broadcasting Al Franken and his left-leaning Air America cadres on Clear Channel stations in San Diego and Ann Arbor, Mich. That makes five cities, including Miami; Portland, Ore.; and Santa Barbara, Calif., where Clear Channel broadcasts Air America. The company is expected to announce soon that a sixth station it owns will switch to a “progressive” format. Air America is also broadcast in 18 other cities, including New York, where it is heard on WLIB-AM (1190).

“Clear Channel is now the biggest affiliate group carrying Air America,” said Jack Messmer, executive editor of Radio Business Report, a trade publication.

he Fox News Channel, the highest-rated cable news network in the country, arrives this week at the Republican National Convention with an opportunity to serve up ample red meat for its core constituency.

A growing number of advertisers would like a piece of that audience, but The Nation, the left-leaning political magazine, will not be among them. Ten days ago, the ad agency for The Nation sent a 60-second commercial to the cable network promoting its brand of political news and commentary as free of White House influence and corporate agendas.

“Nobody owns The Nation. Not Time Warner, not Murdoch. So there’s no corporate slant, no White House spin. Just the straight dope,” the commercial says.

While the ad will appear on Time Warner’s CNN, as well as NBC Universal’s MSNBC and Bravo, it will not appear on Fox News, a division of the News Corporation whose chairman and chief executive is Rupert Murdoch.

But Franken is less enthralled with the news media that will gather at Madison Square Garden this week, particularly 24-hour cable news, which he says failed miserably on the Swift Boat accusations against Democrat John Kerry.

“People have a right to speak out, but they don’t have a right to lie or smear. News organizations have an obligation to see if something is true. It isn’t enough to say these charges are being made. You have to see if charges are true.”

Charges by a group of Vietnam veterans first got a foothold in cable news earlier this month. Network news and print media followed, making it a dominant story.

Thursday — a week after Kerry first publicly blasted the ads — President Bush said he doesn’t think Kerry lied about his record in Vietnam. But he didn’t condemn the veterans’ TV commercial that charges Kerry won his war medals dishonestly. And Bush said he also has been hurt by ads aimed at him.

But none of them “did anything like the Swift Boat guys. They went after Kerry with stuff that has been disproven,” Franken says.

He blames the media for giving the charges credence. “It used to be that an accusation wasn’t the story. A story was there’s an accusation that seems credible. But now there’s so much pressure for ratings, to fill time, to go for the sensational.”

Franken’s advice to the news troops: “Work a little harder. Make sure your facts are straight. Don’t put stuff on just because it’s on (Internet gossip Matt) Drudge. The fact that it has been printed somewhere doesn’t make it valid, so use some of the stuff you learned in journalism school, if you went there.”

Starting Sept. 7, one hour of Franken’s three-hour radio show — now airing in 25 markets covering 25% of the USA — will air weeknights at 11:30 ET/PT on cable’s Sundance Channel.

Sundance chief Larry Aidem says he’ll test it for eight weeks to see if it has a following à la TV versions of radio shows hosted by Howard Stern and Don Imus.

Aidem hopes political junkies who catch Jon Stewart’s Daily Show on Comedy Central will tune into The O’Franken Report on Sundance for a daily dose of “irreverent, witty political humor.”

Franken says he’s always liked low-production-value TV and still recalls the time years ago when C-SPAN aired an anti-drug rap song by pointing a camera at a microphone next to a tape recorder which played the rap tape. “It was the worst TV I ever saw — and I was transfixed.”

mong the stoutest defenders of “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” the best-selling book arguing that Mr. Kerry lied about his record of service in Vietnam, is the columnist Robert Novak.

In his syndicated columns and on the CNN program “Crossfire,” Mr. Novak has lauded the book and referred to veterans who criticize Mr. Kerry - most notably John E. O’Neill, the book’s co-author - as “real patriots.”

Unmentioned in Mr. Novak’s columns and television appearances, however, is a personal connection he has to the book: his son, Alex Novak, is the director of marketing for its publisher, the conservative publishing house Regnery.

In a telephone interview, Robert Novak said he saw no need to disclose the link.

“I don’t think it’s relevant,” he said.

“I’m just functioning as a columnist with a point of view, and a strong point of view,” he added.

AUSTIN, Texas — Remember what it was like just before the war? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — Colin Powell told us to the pound how many tons of this, that and the other — Saddam had a reconstituted nuclear program, he had numerous ties to Al Qaeda, and he was an imminent threat.

As the president put it, we couldn’t afford to wait until the smoking gun was a mushroom cloud.

“To think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just another attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand the question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action; fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man… Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.”

The quote is from Thucydides, the Father of History, writing about the day in 415 B.C. when Athens sent its glorious fleet off to destruction in Sicily. I have not been re-reading Thucydides, but found the quote in a footnote in a splendid little book called “Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy” by Lewis Lapham, in my opinion the most incisive essayist in America.

When I began researching this story in October 2002, the media was reporting that electronic voting machines are fun and speedy, but I looked in vain for articles reporting that they are accurate. I discovered four magic words, “voting machines and glitch,” which, when entered into a search engine, yielded a shocking result: A staggering pile of miscounts was accumulating. These were reported locally but had never been compiled in a single place, so reporters were missing a disturbing pattern.

I published a compendium of 56 documented cases in which voting machines got it wrong.

How do voting-machine makers respond to these reports? With shrugs. They indicate that their miscounts are nothing to be concerned about. One of their favorite phrases is: “It didn’t change the result.”

But the vast sea of people gathered in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza on Saturday morning, and despite the heat and skin-frying sun, remained laid-back, cheerfully toting signs like, “No Bush In My Puss,” and “What if Barbara or Jenna were impregnated by Willie Horton?”

Three young women walked topless, their nipples covered by heart-shaped pasties. They attracted an imitator who ripped off her shirt and wrote “More tits, less Bush” on her bare belly.