Colin Powell then:

"I'm not reading this. This is bullshit." (link)

Colin Powell now:

"Yeah, that stuff I read to the UN? That was bullshit."

Okay, that last one's not an exact quote, but that's essentially what he's saying here.

It seems Condi and Colin are going to take all the heat for all this deception we've been seeing for the last three years. They're both planning on leaving whether the president wins a second term or not, so they're now seen as expendable. The White House defense thus far on any issue has been to blame the folks that are leaving the administration for all the mistakes. The difference here is these two have yet to depart, but they're already being left to the wolves.

Bob Novak, you're a sophisticated guy, do you believe that President Bush has a problem with these African-American people, Dr. Rice and General Powell?

Drudge posted pictures of himself in celebration of the ninth anniversary of his site. For some reason I find them hilarious- it's either the late hour, my drunken state, or a combination thereof.

Here they are for posterity:


Doesn't he have a friend that could take these pictures? It's pretty obvious the first one is one of those deals where he held the camera out in one hand and snapped the picture. The second is an obvious timer shot- you can tell by the look of anticipation/constipation (not sure which) on his face.

Atrios pointed out Bill O'Reilly's suggestion for a "final solution" for Iraq the other day.

I caught ten minutes of him on the radio yesterday and he was talking the same line- empty the city, shoot anyone that has a weapon in their home on sight. He didn't get as specific as saying whether we should kill whole families or just anyone over fifteen, or just the males, but he did say he wants to put all the citizens in a camp where I suppose they could... um, concentrate. No, maybe that's not the right word... Oh well, in any event here's the video.

Let's be clear, what happened in Fallujah was heinous, but everyone in the city wasn't involved. I hate to think what would happen if the same rules were put to New York, where Mr. O'Reilly lives. Assuming he doesn't own a gun, he'd at least live, but who wants to be put in a camp every time the dregs of society do something evil?

(Feel free to mirror the videos... as always)

Here's the video of Dave's "yawning kid" analysis from Thursday , a transcript of which can be found here.

WTF?

The commission investigating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks says it wants to know why the Bush administration has withheld documents from the files of former President Bill Clinton.

A lawyer for Mr. Clinton, Bruce Lindsey, says Bush aides have turned over only a quarter of the 11,000 pages that Mr. Clinton was ready to offer the commission. The lawyer says that as a result, the commission may not have a complete picture of the Clinton administration's anti-terrorism efforts.

A spokesman for the commission, Al Felzenberg, says the panel is negotiating with the White House to determine what documents have been held back and why. He says the White House may have "good reasons" for its decision.

The New York Times cites former Clinton aides as saying the files contain highly classified documents about efforts to subdue al-Qaida, the group that carried out the September 11 attacks.

It's just crazy- they're holding back documents on al-Qaida from the Clinton administration so they can say, "See? They didn't do nuthin' either!"

How ridiculous.

The gist of it is Karl Rove may be in legal trouble for further disseminating the Valarie Plame story after Robert Novak had published his story outing her.

The memo argues that by repeating the leak to political consultants and journalists Mr. Rove was committing a crime separate from the original leak.

Mr. Rove made clear to the F.B.I. that he had only spread the story after Novak's column went to print.

Link

This conversation took place after Dave aired CNN's apology on tonight's Late Show with David Letterman

Dave: But this whole thing just smells, doesn't it smell a little bit?

Paul: Very confusing.

Dave: It just smells just a little bit, "we were told" and "it seems unlikely" and "probably they didn't" and "I'm being told to tell you that the White House really didn't" I mean it just all seems a little too tidy, just a little too neat. And now, the, the guy, the kid in Florida and his old man was really upset in the beginning- "Err what are ya tryin' to do this is my kid... what're you tryin..." Well now everybody down there loves it, everybody couldn't be happier, everybody thought it was hilarious, so you see it's just a little too tidy. Don't you see what I'm saying?

Paul: Well it's, uh... I, I...

Dave: Stuff like this never ends happily- certainly not happily for me. I was waiting for the lawsuit, I was waiting to be arrested, waiting to be beaten to a pulp. And now, oh, everybody's enjoying, oh couldn't be happier- and by the way tomorrow the young man, Tyler Crotty is his name, he'll be a guest on the show.

(applause)

Dave: But that's, um... I'm pretty sure that the White House contacted CNN. Here's what I think, the White House contacted CNN because the people in Florida were upset because their big huge fat Republican donors, "We've given you $4 million, what the hell? You put the kid on TV an' he's makin' a fool of himself, what're you tryin' to pull here for God sakes?" So now, like Bush don't have enough problems, he calls CNN and he says, well, you better stop that, clam that up, you know, stove-pipe that or... do they stove-pipe stuff?

Paul: I have... I don't know if they still do that...

Dave: That's what I think happened. And so now when they find out that dumb boy here gets wind of this, then they say [frantic arm motions] everything's fine, everybody couldn't be happier. That's, that's my theory.

If you feel like hosting a video clip of this exchange let me know. I'm out of the incredibly popular video hosting business for the moment.

Drudge is saying that Friday's NY Times will report that the CIA Leak investigation is expanding to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators.

Is this thing finally hitting the fan?

Update 11:01 PM:
Boy howdy, I think it is...

In looking at violations beyond the original focus of the inquiry, which centered on a rarely used statute that makes it a felony to disclose the identity of an undercover intelligence officer intentionally, prosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and for the first time raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself.
The expansion of the inquiry's scope comes at a time when prosecutors, after a hiatus of about a month, appear to be preparing to seek additional testimony before a federal grand jury, lawyers with clients in the case said. It is not clear whether the renewed grand jury activity represents a concluding session or a prelude to an indictment.

The broadened scope is a potentially significant development that represents exactly what allies of the Bush White House feared when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the case last December and turned it over to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.

Republican lawyers worried that the leak case, in the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, might grow into an unwieldy, time-consuming and politically charged inquiry, like the sprawling independent counsel inquiries of the 1990's, which distracted and damaged the Clinton administration.

Mr. Fitzgerald is said by lawyers involved in the case and government officials to be examining possible discrepancies between documents he has gathered and statements made by current or former White House officials during a three-month preliminary investigation last fall by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. Some officials spoke to F.B.I. agents with their lawyers present; others met informally with agents in their offices and even at bars near the White House.

The White House took the unusual step last year of specifically denying any involvement in the leak on the part of several top administration officials, including Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, has repeatedly said no one wants to get to the bottom of the case more than Mr. Bush.

But Mr. Bush himself has said he does not know if investigators will ever be able to determine who disclosed the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to Robert Novak, who wrote in his syndicated column last July that Ms. Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was a C.I.A. employee.

Gosh darn it, this is all the Bush White House needs!
/sarcasm

Al Franken on yesterday's O'Franken Factor mentioned that Air America will archive it's shows and allow them to be streamed.

This just gets better and better.

... and yet it's being railroaded through the Congress.

Republican FCC chairman Michael Powell and the panel's senior Democrat, commissioner Michael Copps, both said they are worried about exercising the authority Congress would grant the agency if the bills become law. Powell and Copps were attending an all-day broadcast industry summit to discuss the indecency issue.

"I understand it," Powell said, referring to Congress' desire to make performers pay. "But I have some reservations with the FCC going after performers."

Powell said artists have always enjoyed protection under the First Amendment governing free speech and slamming them with large fines would be "a very touchy area for the FCC."

Sign the petition if you haven't already. Talk to your Senator. The FCC's job is supposed to be administrating the airwaves, renew a license here and there, not scan the airwaves for disagreeable programming. Now the FCC wants to expand it's content regulation to cable and satellite programming. This is a huge power grab by a commission that really doesn't have much of a purpose anymore.

Here's the dirty little secret of the indecency bill- if someone were to broadcast President Bush's Adam Clymer comment ("Major League Asshole") Bush himself could be ordered to pay up to $500,000 by the FCC.

Anybody have any tape of Rush Limbaugh playing that clip? (I don't know if he actually did, I'm not a regular listener obviously.) If Rush played the clip unedited he could be fined personally and each of his 300+ radio stations could all be fined $500,000 each. Sure, the incident happened years ago, but It's not like there's a statute of limitations on this stuff. The FCC just fined Howard Stern last week for a conversation that took place three years ago. First it's a boob, then it's talking about a Cleveland steamer, next it'll be talking smack about the president that gets you taken off the air.

Ahh... nice to get a good rant off right away in the morning.

Missle defense was top priority pre-9/11 according to... Condi Rice. Okay, somebody's going to ask her about this during her testimony, that's just a given, so you just know there's a spin team deep in the bowels of the White House working on careful phrasing that Condi can use while testifying so she's able to give some form of non-denial denial.

Money quote:

The [undelivered speech] also implicitly challenged the Clinton administration's policy, saying it did not do enough about the real threat -- long-range missiles.
more...

Unfortunately the enemy probably wouldn't slap a GPS beacon on their missiles for us to track, like what we've been using for testing Star Wars...

If you're feeling charitable click the link to the left to help pay for today's bandwidth.

Robert Novak's moronic analysis (see earlier post) of Richard Clarke's motivations were chronicled on the Daily Show a few days ago- check it out.

Here's the Letterman clip from Monday's show

The White House claimed that as funny as the kid was, he was edited in to the speech by Letterman staffers. Here's Dave's reaction to that on Tuesday.


UPDATE:
Mirrors, we get Mirrors!

Mirror (First Video)
Mirror (Second Video)
Thanks Peter!

Mirror (both files)
Thanks Brendan!

Mirror (first clip)
Thanks Dubbya!

Thanks Ini!

Now where the heck are those darn WMDs?

Nope... not over here.

The Air America web site claims it's going to be streaming on the internet- I would like to hear the O'Franken Factor's first day on the air but these things always crash the first day...

Update- 11:00 AM:
It's working. Woo.

The Zero Spin Zone is on!
Why's it called The O'Franken Factor? "To annoy and bait Bill O'Reilly."

Update- 11:03 AM:
Okay- two minutes in and the stream died. It was fun while it lasted.

Update- 11:05 AM:
Was able to connect again- there's a chick. I love chicks. She claims she's a journalist, Al's an Infotainer.
Al vows not to use his program to sell his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

Update- 11:11 AM:
I'm getting dropped about every two minutes- so far it's been entertaining, if a bit disjointed. (joke) Here's hoping someone is ripping this on XM.

Last Wednesday Wolf Blitzer asked White House correspondent John King if White House officials were pushing any "weird aspects" of Richard Clarke's life which would hurt his credibility. There have been a lot of theories as to what Blitzer was talking about, mainly centering on Clarke being unmarried. When Paul Krugman mentioned it in his latest column Blitzer finally responded. He claims he was talking about an interview he had with James Wilkinson, Deputy National Security Advisor in which Wilkinson said:

Let me also point something. If you look in this book, you find interesting things such as reported in "The Washington Post" this morning. He's talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and how bin Laden has some sort of mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of "X-Files" stuff.

And what I'd say is, this is a man who was in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who was supposed to be focused on that. And he was focused on meetings.

I think he misspoke there at the end- the one thing Clarke couldn't get with Bush was a meeting on counter-terrorism.

As for the "X-Files" allegations- here's the quote from the book, the topic is the inevitable invasion of Iraq:

It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.'

In other words, attacking Iraq is exactly what Osama wanted. Anyone who reads that as Clarke claiming there was actual mind control going on is a moron. Yes, you heard me- James Wilkinson is a moron. Wolf Blitzer is just another empty headed anchor, regurgitating the revolting White House spin.

Condi finally changed her mind- she's testifying. I just heard a republican hack on CNN claim that this was the White House's plan all along, the delay was just a way of allowing Condi the last word. These people are true believers, aren't they? Ugh...

WASHINGTON (AP) - There is no ironclad legal doctrine buttressing National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's refusal to testify publicly before the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, law experts said Monday.

Rice already has spoken to the commission in private. But she says public testimony is protected by executive privilege. That principle says presidential advisers cannot be legally forced to disclose their confidential communications if that would adversely affect the operations of the executive branch.

It is rare for White House advisers to testify publicly before Congress or congressionally appointed panels like the Sept. 11 commission. But exceptions exist, and legal scholars say they poke holes in Rice's argument.

She also has spoken openly to the media about the attacks and the advice she offered President Bush about terrorism.

``The whole idea of executive privilege is that the president's advisers should be able to give advice in confidence,'' said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University. ``That means the advice should be kept confidential. But she's talked to everybody under the sun.

more...

I linked the words "hairy-knuckled" with Bill O'Reilly's web site a few weeks ago on our Lies of Bill O'Reilly section and I just noticed that if you type in the phrase in google O'Reilly is number one.

So, in that spirit, here are some links that seem appropriate-

O'Reilly Links:
blotchy
right-wing talk show host
balding right-wing talk show host
blotchy right-wing talk show host
balding, blotchy right-wing talk show host

Bush Links:
worst president ever
unelectable
coked up until his forties
pretzel
evil incarnate
dumbest president ever

You're right, can't forget
miserable failure

In unrelated news, Fox News also shut down...