"Path To 9/11" Redux. Bigger, Better W/Hannity On Top.

I must stress the fact that there has not been ANYONE more committed to exposing the hypocrisy of ABC News or Disney Entertainment than John at AmericaBlog. He is a whiz at co-ordinating boycotts, and he once again has ABC/Disney in his sites.

The rumblings from the ABC/Disney vs Spocko had lessened to a dull roar, when this was revealed....

Media Bistro

Hannity's America To Air Unseen Footage From ABC's "The Path To 9/11"

"Fox News Channel is touting the fact that it has obtained controversial unseen footage from ABC's miniseries 'The Path to 9/11' and is planning to air the video during 'Hannity's America' on Sunday night," according to The Hollywood Reporter.

"Fox News obtained the outtakes by taping a public talk that Cyrus Nowrasteh, writer and producer of 'The Path to 9/11,' gave to a World Affairs Council chapter last Friday at Cal State Channel Islands. Nowrasteh discussed making the docudrama and played several minutes edited out of the movie," the Los Angeles Times adds.

What scene you ask?



Think Progress

Richard Clarke Blasts Key Scene In ABC’s 9/11 Docudrama

The first night of Path to 9/11 has a dramatic scene where former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger refuses to give the order to the CIA to take out bin Laden — even though CIA agents, along with the Northern Alliance, have his house surrounded.
(snip)
In short, this scene — which makes the incendiary claim that the Clinton administration passed on a surefire chance to kill or catch bin Laden — never happened. It was completely made up by Nowrasteh (writer-ed).

So, Sean Hannity on his pathetic little show, is going to show clips of this Nowrasteh guys' lecture, that includes the debunked false scenes from the POS "Path To 9/11". Pretty sad, and in itself wrong.

BUT IT GETS WRONGER

In brief, the premise behind behind the dust up between ABC and a little know blogger named Spocko....

Media Matters

In 2006, a blogger named Spocko began spotlighting inflammatory rhetoric common to several talk radio hosts on KSFO, an ABC Radio-owned station in San Francisco. Spocko compiled a litany of examples on both his weblog, Spocko's Brain, and in numerous letters to corporations advertising on KSFO.
(snip)
...on December 21, ABC Inc., a subsidiary of the Disney-ABC Television Group, apparently issued a cease-and-desist letter targeting Spocko and his blog for copyright violation. Specifically, ABC alleged that by posting brief audio clips of various talk radio hosts on KSFO, the site was "in clear violation" of the station's copyright. The letter demanded that the owner of the site "remove the content immediately." Soon after, according to Spocko, his Internet service provider shut down his blog.

So, ABC/Disney must be UP IN ARMS over this UNAUTHORIZED usage of their film clips!!! Right?

LA Times (registration required)

"I can't imagine what the news is here," he said.

An early version of the miniseries that ABC distributed to television critics is readily available on YouTube.com and other websites.

Fox News does not have ABC's permission to broadcast the unaired footage, but an attorney for the network said officials there believed that the newsworthiness of the material put it under the fair-use exception to the copyright statute.

So, what would the final judgement be?

So Disney/ABC don't care about the truth, though we already knew that. And why pray tell have Disney/ABC and YouTube refused to take down the video of the show that is STILL on YouTube to this day? It's a clear copyright violation, and we know how overzealous YouTube is about its purported copyright violations. And Disney is NOTORIOUS for asserting its copyright rights, yet in this case, Disney doesn't care. And for some reason, YouTube isn't so zealous about enforcing its own policy about illegally broadcasting video when the target is a Democrat.

Isn't that interesting.

The more I pay attention to this stuff, the more it looks like a co-ordinated attack. Everyone is giving everyone else a reach around, so everyone is "happy".

One last tidbit

AmericaBlog

President Clinton contacting head of Disney over rekindled "Path to 9/11" controversy
by John in DC - 1/26/2007 03:05:00 PM

President Clinton's office has just informed me that they're "taking it all the way to the top at Disney to find out why they're not enforcing copyright" in this matter.

Ted Kennedy Goes Off About R's Against The Minimum Wage

TOOOOOO GOOD!!....

"Do you have such disdain for hard-working Americans that you want to pile all your amendments on this? Why don’t you just hold your amendments until other pieces of legislation? Why this volume of amendments on just the issue to try and raise the minimum wage? What is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it? Something. Something! What is the price that the workers have to pay to get an increase? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"

Oh my

And apologies to AmericaBlog for skirting the edges of "Fair Use", but this is tooo good....

Markos reports the following, then read on because I have more and it's good:
In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president's minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new "way forward" for U.S. forces in Iraq.

"He's tried this two times — it's failed twice," the California Democrat said. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.' "

Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, " 'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."

Oh, it's better than that. When I was on the Hill on Tuesday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told us (on the record) the rest of the story. Apparently, Pelosi's final come-back to the president was the following:

PELOSI: He's tried this two times — it's failed twice. I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?'

BUSH: Because I told them it had to.

PELOSI: Why didn't you tell them that the other two times?

Gherkins of Info.....

(OH MY!!!!)

I'm still recovering from the BRUTAL thrashing the Pres gave us last night!!!

(wha? He wha? OH, That was JIM WEBB who thrashed? Nevermind.)

A couple of things really stood out to me today, starting with Churck Hagel...
Think Progress

Hagel Chides Colleagues On Iraq Vote: ‘If You Wanted A Safe Job, Go Sell Shoes’

This morning in his opening statements before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said, “The American people are far ahead of us” on what to do next in Iraq. “They’re not conflicted with the nuances of life. They understand what’s going on.” According to a recent Gallup Poll, 56 percent of Americans want a withdrawal from Iraq within a year.

Hagel chided his fellow colleagues for being too concerned about the politics of their Iraq positioning. “If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes,” he said. Hagel concluded that all 100 Senators have a responsibility to take a position on escalation. “We owe it to those men and women that we continue to send in that grinder.”

Or how about a Hagel BOMBSHELL he dropped in GQ Magazine

In an interview in GQ Magazine, Hagel reveals that the Bush administration tried to get Congress to approve military action anywhere in the Middle East — not just in Iraq — in the fall of 2002. At the time, Hagel says, the Bush administration presented Congress with a resolution that would have authorized the use of force anywhere in the region:

HAGEL: [F]inally, begrudgingly, [the White House] sent over a resolution for Congress to approve. Well, it was astounding. It said they could go anywhere in the region.

GQ: It wasn’t specific to Iraq?

HAGEL: Oh no. It said the whole region! They could go into Greece or anywhere. Is central Asia in the region? I suppose! Sure as hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything. It was literally anything. No boundaries. No restrictions.

GQ: They expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere in the Middle East?

HAGEL: Yes. Yes. Wide open. We had to rewrite it. Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I stripped the language that the White House had set up and put our language in it.

THIS really pissed me off today....

Company's anti-war e-mail sparks outrage

Response led to threats against the Muslim-owned business

Updated: 12:38 p.m. ET Jan 24, 2007
MILWAUKEE - An American soldier in Iraq who e-mailed a U.S. company to ask for a shipment of floor mats got a brusque reply: "We would NEVER ship to Iraq. If you were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq."

The response quickly circulated on the Internet and led to threats against the Muslim-owned business, including demands for a boycott.

Bargain Suppliers, an online retailer, shut down its Web site Monday and fired the unidentified employee who sent the e-mail, television station WTMJ reported.

You know for a DAMN fact that those Righty Boogers, erm Bloggers don't give a shit about anything but the fact that some MUSLIMS ARE AGAINST THE WAR!!! THE HORROR!!

And, as it usually goes with the mouth-breathers, there are death threats.
Way to win that community over to our side....

State of the Union Address..... The Prequel

Tucker Carlsons' Dad #1 In Libby Defense Fund*Ask MSNBC Why He's Commenting?!?!

I've stewed over this for quite a while. I had heard on and off the Tucker Carlsons' dad Richard Carlson was bff with Scooter Libby, and headed his legal defense fund. SO WHY IS TUCKER COMMENTING ON THE LIBBY CASE WITHOUT AT LEAST A NOTATION TO THAT EFFECT???

CBS News

Libby Gets A Little Help From His Friends
More Than $3M Donated To Legal Fund For Indicted Former Cheney Aide

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby won't lack powerful friends or financial resources when he goes on trial on Tuesday. A private fund set up to pay the legal bills of the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney has collected more than $3 million since Libby's indictment 14 months ago.

(snip)
One of those friends is Dick Carlson, a former ambassador and Republican stalwart who has headed the Voice of America and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (Carlson’s son is Tucker Carlson, the conservative TV pundit.)

Like many of Libby’s well-heeled friends, Carlson wasted no time in coming to his aid. On the day the indictment was announced in October 2005, Carlson said: “I sent a check by courier to Scooter’s house in McLean with the assumption that he’d need it.”

That check was the impetus for what quickly morphed into The Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust. A source close to the trust said more than $3 million has been collected to pay Libby's legal bills. The public face of the defense fund is a cadre of Republican heavyweights that include Mary Matalin, Steve Forbes and Jack Kemp.

Back in March, it looks like Arianna took Tucker to the woodshed and dirtied the knees of his jumper. Musta pissed him off....

A nasty little propagandist

I didn't mention my father's support for Scooter Libby because it was irrelevant. Completely and utterly. Libby was my father's personal lawyer long before he joined the Bush administration. They're friends, and that has nothing at all to do with me. I've met Scooter Libby precisely once.

Tucker goes on to characterize Ariannas' column as ....." attempted character assassination by a nasty little propagandist. "

Ariannas' WONDERFULLY SOURCED COHERANT COLUMN HERE....

The Full Disclosure Tucker Carlson Isn't Making

I don't see how this could be anything but revelant. What, MSNBC doesn't have enough commenters that Tucker couldn't just bow out on this one?
Not enough semi-dirty stories for Tucker to cover?

It's called "Conflict Of Interest". He's on right now, making excuses for Libby.

dabrams@msnbc.com

Tucker just called it an "Abuse of Power".

New House speaker shows she's boss

AP

By ERICA WERNER Associated Press Writer © 2007 The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Sworn in just over two weeks ago as the first female
speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi wasted no time showing who's boss.

The California Democrat rammed six major bills through the House at
breakneck speed, stomped out smoking privileges near the House floor, partially
sidelined a powerful Democratic committee chairman and decided she liked
traditionally Republican office space so much she claimed it for herself.

By Democrats' timekeeping, she did it all in far under the 100
legislative hours she had allotted."We did what we promised the American
people we would," Pelosi declared on Friday, pledging it was "just the
beginning."

Pelosi's initial agenda, completed Thursday, included measures with
wide popular support: increasing the minimum wage, broadening stem cell
research, allowing government bargaining on Medicare drug prices, cutting
student loan costs, putting in place terrorism-fighting recommendations from the
Sept. 11 commission and rolling back energy company tax breaks.
Each bill passed with bipartisan majorities and Pelosi triumphantly gaveled down the
votes, at one point banging the gavel so enthusiastically that it left a small
dent in the podium.
(snip)
....In the view of many Democrats, Pelosi's opening performance bodes well. She seemed to recover from postelection stumbles such as backing the losing candidate in the contest for House majority leader.

She also is getting a honeymoon from the public. Pelosi is held in higher regard than the president or her colleagues in the Congress. An AP-AOL News poll taken Jan. 16-18 put her approval rating at 51 percent — much higher than that of Congress (34 percent) or Bush (36 percent).
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., a close ally, called Pelosis performance "spectacular."
"What the Democrats in the caucus are telling me is that this is the best three weeks of their life," he crowed.

Compare and Contrast.

CNN Dumbasses On November 16th

Situation Room onscreen text: Is Pelosi "Damaged Goods?"
On the November 16 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer asked "how badly is [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] damaged politically?" while the question "Damaged Goods?" was displayed on screen. Blitzer was referring to an "intraparty battle" among House Democrats, in which Pelosi backed Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA) to be House majority leader but Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) was ultimately elected.