Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this a.m. ran a clip from the Daily Show last night. Stewart apologized to Jeremy Scahill for his interview of the “Blackwater” author, and invited Scahill back on the show.

The KC Star has short comments from various KC area reps and MO/KS senators, reacting to Bush’s SCHIP veto. The best reaction IMHO comes from Claire McCaskill (D-MO): “Why would the president veto the Children’s Health Insurance Program but support Medicare Part D (the prescription drug benefit)? Simple . . . the insurance corporations and drug companies got a cut. . . . When big corporations stood to profit, the president had no problem expanding insurance coverage even for multimillionaires.”

She takes Bush’s jab about expanding government, and deftly turns it back on him, twisting the knife as she goes.

Pivot and attack. That’s how it’s done.

Bravo! Bravo!

ccmask @ 27

I was at a Security Convention in New Orleans a couple of years ago and Blackwater was set up a couple of booths away …

I wonder if they set one up for Bush somewhere so that he can feel like he’s a real tough guy and not just a pretend cowboy who’s scared of horses.

That raises a very nasty question: is Bush also afraid of Hummers?

Kathleen @ 35 -

i don’t want an official secrets act. that’s the kind of thing that prevents the pentagon papers from being printed (and would have sent daniel ellsberg to prison for 100 years). i want reporters like risen and priest to be protected.

somehow we’ve got to figure out how to differentiate between whistle blowers and propagandists. but so long as we can’t, i say protect them both and leave it to civil society (and not the legal system) to out the propagandists.

Patrick Fitzgerald also wants nothing to do with an Official Secrets Act. He went out of his way to avoid using the Espionage Act to prosecute the leaks of Valerie Plame’s classified CIA affiliation. [wigwam @ 108 - prosecution under the Espionage Act would have been far easier than under the IIPA - but there is a long-standing ‘understanding’ (by those of good faith) in DOJ that it will not be used as a de facto Official Secrets Act in the way that it technically (and inadvertently) does permit.]

What is so crucial for the Senate Judiciary Committee to internalize and factor in to this “Reporter Shield” debate is that we now have a corporate-profit-targeted (to the exclusion of the greater public good where that good conflicts with profits) news media.

The Judy Millers won’t be the ones getting “shielded” – the parent corporations of the employers of reporters will be the ones shielded. And those parent corporations have deep pockets. Rupert Murdoch now owns Dow Jones – the deep-pocketed entity that has been doing the heavy lifting in defending “first amendment press freedom” in court for years now. [Dow Jones filed successfully with an Appeals Court to have some more of the formerly-sealed government affidavits in the Plame reporter subpoena cases released this year, in the name of ‘the public’s right to know’ - and then promptly failed to publicly release the information it had paid attorneys to get unsealed. Instead, blogger Marcy Wheeler at TNH - at her own expense - did the leg work in D.C. to actually get the two newly-unredacted affidavits into the public domain, after Dow Jones (and all other for-profit members of the media) failed to do so.]

Many or most of these “first amendment” arguments are basically corporate bottom-line-protecting arguments and not in the least concerned with better informing the citizenry, in this day and age of FOX “News” and widespread propaganda. It is absolutely vital that our Members of Congress recognize and appreciate how corrupted the ‘public common’ of information exchange has become, at least where the vast majority of nationally-prominent “reporters” are concerned, because of the preeminent corporate profit concerns of the outfits that employ those reporters.

What gets missed in this debate is that a “Reporter Shield” law is (or should be) fundamentally about protecting honest, good faith whistleblowers from prosecution (thereby keeping their important leaks flowing to the media and thus to the public). It’s not about helping your partisan pals inside government get their preferred ’spin’ on selected classified information into the public domain. Right? So, in my opinion and in line with what Rayne indicates @ 79, it is the good faith whistleblowers who need and deserve this protection and exemption from prosecution – directly, not indirectly through a Reporter Shield Law that would exempt reporters from testifying to federal grand juries. It is “national security” (i.e., federal classified information leak) whistleblowing that must be focused on, and the protections for good faith exposure of wrongdoing are what must be strengthened dramatically – in tandem with a thorough review and overhaul of the extremely excessive amount of classification of information that’s being done by our federal government.

It is the over-broad classification of information that diminishes the import of classification in the most sensitive and necessarily-secret situations of government activity. If “national security secrets” were classified only when they actually needed to be – such classified information would be treated with much more respect and sensitivity when more rarely encountered, than is the case now, in the current ‘classified by default’ environment.

So, Congress: Protect the real heroes here – the honest whistleblowers in our federal bureaucracy – not the unaccountable corporations who want to exempt their reporter employees from testifying – as all citizens must now do, equally before the law – to federal grand juries who are investigating potential criminal activity about which those reporters may have pertinent information.

Dude doesn’t really look like him if you watch the video, but he does in that still image.

The original question was what’s catching your eye today, and I must say, since I saw this last night I’ve been kinda stuck on it and thought it could use a bump. Credit eBaum’s World, whatreallyhappened and TV42:

Texas legislators caught at voter fraud on video. http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/39986/

Rock on.
ChuckD

aquarius at 115 — Only a portion of the funding — for an increase in children covered — comes from an increased tobacco tax. The other funding comes from other governmental income streams and existing revenue. It’s not solely funded that way — by design — because the income is unpredictable. Because the Iraq mess is costing so much, to add more children into the program, there had to be income pulled in from a variety of sources, and a tobacco tax is only a part of that.

Thanks for clearing this up. Most articles would have you believe the cigarette tax is the sole funding. I still think it odd that any of this program comes from a tax on something the government wants to stop, but if the children receive health then I guess it is well worth it. And by the way, no one has still mentioned the fact that in addition to Bush’s veto, he authorized a bill which reduces child support payments. The National Defense Bill he signed in 2005 duns anyone receiving over $500 “to help reduce the deficit”. So in addition to not having insurance for your child, if you are receiving child support you also have a reduced income. Bush is one compassionate guy. (not)

So, is the new Health Care Plan going to the emergency room and saying “Bush sent me”.

I love it!!!!!!!!

albert fall @ 100

Re: Shield law.

If Ted Olson is for it, it is bad. He is part of the BushCo Gang that Hates America.

You can say that again. Judy Miller has also been pushing the Shield law. Lordie we do not need to give the Judy Millers any more protection to do serious harm to other people or to our National Security

The shield laws are designed to protect whistleblowers who leak Government misdeeds, but in Plame’s case BushCo turned the tables and leaked to punish a whistleblower. Because we don’t have a shield law, Judge Tatel was able to go against precedent and his own standard policies and jail Judy Miller in this unusual case.

Had there been an official secrets Act, Fitzgerald might have been able to prosecute more of the participants, but they’d surely have received a presidential pardon.

IMHO, the case of Mordechai Vananu is the sort of thing that would happen here under Republican administrations if we had an official-secrets act.