Another Black Friday

The Big Brother Broadcast is hard at work this fine Friday.

I spent the morning compiling links from the usual suspects--Rush, Ann, Sean--but decided I'd just be contributing to the echo chamber if I posted them here. And you already pretty much know what they have to say.

I'm somewhat dismayed (again) with The New York Times. If you haven't read "Political Issues Snarled Plans for Military Help After Hurricane" yet, take a look at it. Intentional or not, it's a classic case of Judy Miller journalism. NYT lets Bush administration types make all their talking points and reports them as real news. By the time the rhetoric makes its way around the info-sphere, it will be accepted as "truth."

The article shows no sign of fact checking or journalistic challenges to questionable claims of the sources.

---

Small Victories

I've written several e-mails to MSNBC about trotting out neo-conservative think tankers and introducing them as "news analysts." Apparently I'm not the only one who complained, because I haven't seen one of these Rove proxies on the network since Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation pulled a number on Ron Reagan.

---

Mister Bush has been seen on television more in the last week than during the whole 2004 campaign.

"9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11..."

I guess it's hard for the cable news networks not to air an address from... (Sorry. I can't bring myself to refer to the guy by his official title. You know who I mean. Him.)

There he is now.

"We're huntin' down the tourists... We're fightin' the tourists... We're fightin' their hateful tourism."

"Free nations are peaceful nations..."

Even the free nations that invade other nations on false pretexts?

---

HOLY SHIITE!

The sound of one head rolling...

Just heard it on MSNBC. Mike Brown got canned.

More specifically, he's "being removed from managing Hurricane Katrina efforts."

Some news. He was removed from that responsibility days ago.

He'll still be an undersecretary.

I wonder how soon he gets his Medal of Freedom?

---

Looks like they're putting Vice Admiral Allen of the Coast Guard in charge of the Katrina recovery. Probably a good choice, but an interesting one. Replacing an undersecretary with a military three-star.

---

Along those lines...

Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton's talking about what her department's doing to fix the Katrina related oil and refining problems.

Hmm. The Bush administration coming to the aid of the American oil industry. Necessary? Perhaps. But we need to keep an eye on this.

Remember the $15 billion bailout of the airlines after 9-11? We'll probably never find out how much of that went into bankruptcy-proof platinum parachutes for airline executives.

---

Taking a tour of the Gulf states, Dick Cheney says:

"If there's a place on the face of the earth that has the resources to deal with these problems it's the United States of America, and we're going to get it done... There's no question there were problems with respect to the evacuation in New Orleans. We've gotten around that problem now, and I think everyone's focused on the future."

So it looks like Katrina's in her last throes.

Mission accomplished.

We're problem solvers.

Trust us.