A week from today the Democrats will begin their nominating convention in Denver. This seems like a good time to recall the incitations to violence that were voiced last April by Rush Limbaugh:

Screw The World! Riot in Denver

Last month John McCain said that Americans are tired of the Internet. It's highly unlikely that he was actually speaking for all Americans, or even anything more than a small brood of Luddites. It is more likely that he himself is tired of the Internet, or perhaps just tired, period. He has never been particularly fond of it, even as he chaired the Senate committee responsible for regulating it.

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The national embarrassment that is our president once again raises its reddened face. In photographs from the Olympics in China, it appears that recovering souse, George W. Bush, is relapsing.

In one picture his face is flushed, his eyes droop, and his expression is dopey. In all fairness, that may be his normal expression. However, the bloody scrape on his arm suggests that he has recently taken a less than normal fall.

In the other picture, Bush appears to be having trouble remaining upright without considerable help. It takes three men to prop up the wobbly boozer-in-chief.

Don't it make ya feel proud?
 
 
 
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Almost exactly one year ago I published a comprehensive examination of the futility of appearances on Fox News by Democrats and progressives: Starve The Beast. The thrust of the article argued that...

"Every time one of our representatives appears on Fox, they are setting back our agenda. They are not just wasting a little time trying to confront the enemy in its lair. They are literally causing harm to the efforts of the rest of us who are fervently struggling to repair and improve our country."

It's a year later and new studies reveal that the landscape has changed only in the sense that the conclusions I drew a year ago are even more true today.

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Late last month artist Steve Powers installed a new amusement at New York's Coney Island - the Waterboard Thrill Ride:

photo: Tom Giebel (atomische.com)

This exhibit, which features a scene of an animatronic torturer and victim, will continue through the summer. Feeding a dollar through the slot in the front, will set the scene, viewed through jail bars, in motion.

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    Harmful If Swallowed
On the heels of his ad mocking Barack Obama as a Messiah-like figure, John McCain has now anointed himself as "The One."

This new ad declares that "Washington's broken" and "John McCain knows it." He admits that "We're worse off than we were four years ago." But without acknowledging the brazen hypocrisy, the ad asserts that McCain is "the only" candidate who can fix our broken nation. Then he goes further to seriously describe himself in the same manner he had sarcastically portrayed Obama:

"One is ready to lead - McCain"

Earlier this week I had a minor medical emergency. It was nothing life threatening, but it was not insignificant. The resultant encounter with the healthcare insurance system was nothing short of insanity. Had this been a more serious malady someone might have died, and no doubt some have.

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John McCain has made Barack Obama's alleged elitism a centerpiece of his campaign. In virtually every stop of the Doubletalk Express, McCain finds an opportunity to impugn Obama as out of touch with ordinary Americans. The press uncritically regurgitates this nonsense without even a hint of irony. They portray the wealthy McCain as an authentic man of the people despite the fact that the opposite is true.

Today we have more evidence of this hypocrisy. This time they've stepped right in it.

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Today's Wall Street Journal published an editorial castigating FCC chairman Kevin Martin. Normally, that would be an unexpected and pleasant surprise. Martin's tenure at the FCC has been a gift to Big Media, allowing them to consolidate at will and presiding over a deregulation fest that has benefited everyone but consumers.

However, the reasons for the Journal's pique are more typical of their reputation for greed and self-interest.

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In 1967, John McCain was shot out of the North Vietnamese sky, crash landed in a lake, taken prisoner, and held in captivity for ... 41 years, so far.

No one can dismiss the unimaginable agony of enduring six years in an enemy prisoner of war camp. It is surely a brutal experience both physically and mentally. It is the sort of experience that never leaves you and, indeed, it seems never to have left John McCain. His entire post-POW frame of reference is shaped by what he went through, and also by what he missed as a consequence of his incarceration.

A press conference was held today at offices of Fox News in New York. The purpose of the gathering was to deliver a petition with over 600,000 names to network executives calling for an end to the racist attacks against black Americans including Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. The petition is the work of Color of Change and MoveOn and asks Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to respond to the allegation that...

"Fox has developed a pattern of airing racially offensive attacks, then apologizing only after controversy erupts. Forced, half-hearted apologies do not demonstrate good faith when the larger pattern of offensive rhetoric continues."

John McCain's campaign is floundering and desperate. He is bankrupt both financially and intellectually. And nothing illustrates this more than his pathetic attempts at self-promotion through media manipulation. Rather than present his policies and personal attributes to sway a skeptical electorate, McCain has opted to beg for attention from the press and hope they favor him with some attention.

So Sue Me!

The great minds at the Republican National Committee are once again demonstrating their transcendent grasp of marketing, finance, and public relations.

In an action so preposterously witless as to scramble the common cranium, the GOP has sent a "cease and desist" letter to CafePress citing trademark infringement on the part of sellers using the term "GOP" or the elephant logo.

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Cliff Kincaid is an editor at the rabidly conservative Accuracy in Media and the president of America’s Survival, an anti-United Nations group. He is also the author of one of the most dementedly hilarious articles I've read all year.

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(Promoted from the diaries. Bush's nomination on July 10 of one of the worst neocon hacks to the board that governs US broadcasting overseas is just the latest damage he's inflicted on the venerable VOA and related institutions. Though these broadcasts are for many millions of people worldwide the public face of America, the Bush administration's disastrous record of manipulating the BBG has largely gone unreported here. KingOneEye's excellent diary looks to be the first and only discussion on line so far of the nomination of NRO blowhard Clifford May. - smintheus)

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is the federal agency responsible for all U.S. government and government sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting. Its affiliates include the Voice of America, Alhurra, Radio Free Europe, and Radio and TV Martí. If its mission was not originally intended to be a purveyor of propaganda, the Bush administration has seen to it that that is what it has become.

Now President Bush has made his latest attempt to further mire the agency in disgrace by nominating Clifford May to the Board. May is a former Republican National Committee communications director and the President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, whose list of directors and advisors reads like a who's who of neocon warmongers. He is an advocate of torture abroad, the suspension of civil liberties at home, and always the supremacy of America by virtue of its military might. As a writer for the National Review and a frequent guest on television news programs, he has a record of deliberately inflammatory and partisan rhetoric.

(More below the fold. -smintheus)

Politics in the Age of Information is markedly different from past eras. There is almost no expectation of privacy, and practically nothing can be said in confidence. What's more, everything, no matter how astute or embarrassing, is preserved in perpetuity. Just ask former Senator George "Macaca" Allen, or President George "major-league asshole" Bush, or now, Jesse Jackson. Jackson was unknowingly recorded making disparaging remarks about Barack Obama to another guest while waiting to be interviewed for a segment on Fox & Friends.

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David Carr of the New York Times seems to finally have noticed what has been obvious for years to any objective news analyst. Fox News has a long-standing scorched Earth policy when reacting to other media who dare to report on Fox News.

In his column titled, "When Fox News Is the Story," Carr confesses that just the thought of having to deal with Fox News as a subject in a story makes him and his peers nervous:

"Once the public relations apparatus at Fox News is engaged, there will be the calls to my editors, keening (and sometimes threatening) e-mail messages, and my requests for interviews will quickly turn into depositions about my intent or who else I am talking to."

The key tactic in Fox's PR strategy is to intimidate reporters and editors, and by Carr's own admission, it's working.

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has produced a radio ad for broadcast in 13 Republican held House districts. In the Philadelphia district served by Jim Gerlach KYW-AM is refusing to air this ad:

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