The $87 billion question
Enough of this BS about Kerry not voting for the $87 billion. Did you know Bush was threatening to veto this bill, even though it was his own bill, if there were provisions where Iraq had to repay any of the $87 billion?

Wow. He must hate the troops.

Moore is to Goebbels what O'Reilly is to Hitler
John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and the head of the Center for American Progress, was on O'Reilly tonight. He was giving O'Reilly a hard time because he had compared Michael Moore to Joseph Goebbels. O'Reilly, with all the faux innocence he could muster, answered that he wasn't comparing them; he was just defining, in a very professorial fashion, what propaganda is.

Really, he couldn't be more of a jackass.

Podesta did alright but he looked like an uptight liberal as O'Reilly tried to laugh it off. I thought he should have asked O'Reilly if it was OK to compare Karl Rove to Joseph Goebbels since they're both propagandists.

My wife had a better one. Podesta should have compared O'Reilly to Hitler. You know, nothing personal, but they're both bullies. Let's see if O'Reilly would take that personally. I mean, it's just an illustration of what a bully is.

MSNBC dustup?
Was there some kind of on-air dustup between Joe Scarborough and Howard Fineman? If anyone saw this, drop me a line.

I agree with Joe Scarborough!
I sometimes wonder how much of a show these media commentators are putting on, especially when they're conservative. I mean, O'Reilly can't be like that all the time, can he? And there seems to be two Joe Scarboroughs, the conservative one with his own show and the more thoughtful one who provides pretty insightful commentary when he's on a panel.

I thought Kerry did well with his speech last night, although I was a little surprised that the media was so ga-ga about it. Scarborough pointed out afterwards that it seemed rushed, probably in deference to the one hour that the networks had allotted. Throughout the whole speech, I was saying the same thing. Brokaw afterwards said that NBC would have run over the one hour to stay with the speech. Did Kerry's people know that? Even if they didn't, they should have shortened his speech by 10 minutes. This was the climax of the convention and to deny the delegates and attendees the chance to explode at certain points of the speech was a minor mistake.

Still, it's not that big of a deal.

This morning, I saw Kerry and Edwards at a morning rally. I think they've boiled it down to this: their optimism and hope vs. Bush's constant fear-mongering. Will it work? I'm starting to believe it will. I think Kerry is underrated and I don't think he's lost an election in 30 years.

Bush. One term. Just like his old man.

Kerry's war footage
It's amazing that there are no checks and balances anymore when it comes to what get on the air. Last night on CNN, Jeff Greenfield quoted the Drudge Report as saying that Kerry brought his camera to Vietnam so he could have footage of himself as a war hero when he ran for office later. Drudge also accused Kerry of re-enacting war scenes to make himself look like a hero.

Here's the truth from www.mediamatters.org.

"On September 7, 2002, The New York Times' current executive editor and then-columnist Bill Keller took up the issue of Kerry's wartime films and debunked the reenactment charge, which he wrote that he believed at first: "[R]elying on a report in the usually dependable Boston Globe, I mocked him for pulling out a movie camera after a shootout in the Mekong Delta and re-enacting the exploit, as if preening for campaign commercials to come."

Simply not true, Keller found after sitting through 40 minutes of footage in Kerry's office. Contrary to Drudge's assertion -- which apparently quoted O'Neill's upcoming book -- that Kerry would "reenact combat scenes where he would portray the hero," Keller wrote:

The first thing to be said is that the senator's movies are not self-aggrandizing. Mr. Kerry is hardly in the film, and never strikes so much as a heroic pose. These are the souvenirs of a 25-year-old guy sent to an exotic place on an otherworldly mission, who bought an 8-millimeter camera in the PX and shot a few hours of travelogue, most of it pretty boring if you didn't live through it.

Keller also wrote that, according to the Swift Boat Sailors Association, "a group of veterans who manned" the kind of riverboat that Kerry commanded, "lots of enlisted men did the same." Former Senator Max Cleland (D-GA), a strong Kerry supporter who lost three limbs in Vietnam, told Keller that he has hours of film from his service in Vietnam, which, Keller wrote, "he has had edited into a three minute meet-the-senator video."

Remember, these were the same people who morphed war hero Cleland into Osama Bin Laden during a commercial.

To them, nothing is important except power. Honor never, ever even enters into the equation. And for the most part, they know they're lying and they don't care.

Truly despicable.

Convention wrapup
It's depressing watching these 24 hour news jackasses try to fill airtime. OK, granted, there isn't much real news that comes out of a political convention, at least not nowadays. But to allow spinmeisters to spit out their pre-scripted spiels without challenge is sad.

This morning on CNN, I saw Rudy Guliani and within the first minute, he accused the Dems of an "extreme makeover" and called Kerry and Edwards two of the most liberal members of the Senate. Rudy, we know you have a brain in your head. Please use it.

The "extreme makeover" line is a staple of the Republican attack on Kerry. And the most liberal tag is severely misleading, based only on last year's National Journal rating. A five year average from the National Journal paints a much more moderate picture.

I heard on the news this morning that for the second straight year, incomes have gone down in this country. Friday, it will be announced that we now have a record deficit. The White House is going to spin it that the projected deficit was much worse. That's pathetic but it's all they have.

It's understandable why Bush is not running on his record. That's because it stinks. The Republicans control the Congress and the White House. Their plans for this country have taken effect. We can all see the results.

I thought Edwards was good last night. He had a few bright spots and I'm looking forward to Kerry tonight.

To backtrack for one minute, is there a more sad group of losers than the folks on "Fox and Friends"? I don't even know their names, but they are a spineless collection of weenies who are so glad to be on TV that they will parrot whatever the Republican talking point of the minute is. This morning, they were ragging on Kerry's skills as a speaker.

Yo people! Your guy can't even put together a coherent sentence. And he's not interested in even the minor complexities of any issue. This is as complex as he can get: "They hate us for our freedom!"

Puke.

Teresa Heinz-Kerry's restraint
Since the mainstream media blows so bad, here's a little piece from Joe Conason about the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and its history of slandering Teresa Heinz-Kerry. Here it is:

"The innocuously named newspaper has long served as the weapon of Richard Mellon Scaife, its founder and publisher. His name is now synonymous with the campaign of hate and calumny focused on the Clintons during the 1990?s, but to Ms. Heinz Kerry, his methods were familiar long before he achieved any national notoriety. During the decades of her marriage to the late Senator H. John Heinz III, she knew Mr. Scaife as part of the rarefied circle of very rich local families whose names adorn museum galleries and university buildings.

Although both men were Republicans, Heinz tended to be moderate and occasionally even liberal, while Mr. Scaife was increasingly conservative, attracted to conspiracy theories and aggressive extremism. Years before her first husband?s death in 1991, Teresa Heinz came to feel that Mr. Scaife had misused his newspaper to punish her and her husband for dissenting from right-wing Republican orthodoxy. Since her marriage to John Kerry in 1995, the hostility of the Scaife press and the outfits funded by Scaife foundations toward her has been nothing short of vicious.

A few days after the Massachusetts Senator and his wife celebrated their second Christmas together, the Tribune-Review ran a column suggesting that Mr. Kerry had been enjoying a "very private" relationship with another woman. There was no byline on the story and no evidence to support the salacious insinuation. There was nothing to it, in fact, except pure malice.

When fresh accusations about her husband?s fidelity erupted earlier this year in the right-wing press, Ms. Heinz Kerry could scarcely have been surprised that the smear?s most eager purveyors included Internet sites financed by Mr. Scaife and his family foundations. Those "news sources" have also impugned Mr. Kerry?s patriotism, maligned his military service and distorted his voting record. They happen to be operated by the same discredited scribblers who once tried to convince America that Bill and Hillary Clinton were murderers and drug smugglers.

Meanwhile, Ms. Kerry herself is hardly exempt from the angry fantasies emanating from Mr. Scaife?s strange universe. Last spring, a Scaife-funded "research group" sent out a study that accused her of covertly financing violent radicals of various kinds, including Islamists, through the straitlaced Heinz foundations that she controls. There was absolutely no basis for that tale?as the right-wing sleuths could have learned by making a single phone call. The Heinz money they had "traced" through a San Francisco group had actually gone in its entirety to support anti-pollution projects in Pennsylvania.

Those are only a few brief examples among dozens. The Scaife disinformation conglomerate has churned out nastiness about Ms. Heinz Kerry by the carload for years, and finally she talked back. The guy she scorched last Sunday was meant to take that message back to his boss in Pittsburgh?a man who has deserved the brunt of such refreshing candor for a long, long time."

Jeez, it's a wonder she only told him to "Shove it..."

Obama and the space suit
* I just watched senatorial candidate Barack Obama's speech online at www.cspan.org. I couldn't watch it last night because I was putting my son to sleep. He really did hit a home run, especially with his "We are the United States..." spiel near the end.

Truthfully, most of the speeches thus far have been tepid. Obama's and Bill Clinton's have been the only two that have really stuck out. We'll see if Edwards changes that tonight. I'm betting he will.

* How vapid is the news that they took the Republican bait on those silly pictures of Kerry in the space suit? They're trying to pull a Dukakis on Kerry and here's why I don't think it will work this time. First, Kerry has a greater inclination to fight back and secondly, the stakes are too high.

In 1988, did people really feel the future of this country was at stake? Not like they do today. Unlike the elder Bush who was interested in building coalitions with our allies, GW has turned his soul over to the Cheneys and Delays of the world. When there's not much at your core, you're easy to fill up. I believe that's the case with GW Bush.

Think about it. Is there anything he feels passionately about? The only thing I ever hear him get worked up about is freedom. How about milk or apple pie? Could he really be as empty as he seems? Does it bother people that there is probably not one subject that affects people's lives that he can discuss with any depth?

It bothers me. And it should bother you.

Godzilla vs. Mothra
When I was a kid, I used to spend hours on Saturday afternoons watching "Creature Double Feature" on Boston's Channel 56 with my friend John Daley. It was always Godzilla vs. Someone.

Last night was the modern-day political version of "Creature Double Feature" -- Bill O'Reilly vs. Michael Moore. (Insert your shriek here.) Most of the guests on The O'Reilly Factor seem pretty intimidated. Last night, Ben Affleck, Jerry Brown, and Kweise Mfume of the NAACP spent a good portion of their time on the show nodding in agreement. I'm sure these same people watch from home and curse out O'Reilly. Affleck looked particularly ill-at-ease. Hey, it's easier taking on a killer asteroid when it's all scripted.

Moore agreed to appear only if the piece was aired unedited. It was fun to watch although the debate was pretty inane. O'Reilly's arguments were non-sensical as usual, as he asked the filmmaker if "President Moore would have acted against Hitler..." Come on.

The best line, I believe, was when Moore kept asking O'Reilly is he would send his children to secure the peace in Fallujah. O'Reilly wouldn't answer the question, saying "I would send myself."

Hey, Bill, that ain't what's happening. For the most part, the parents aren't going. It's easy to send some poor kid from Oklahoma or New Hampshire, but it's not so easy when you think about sending your own.

The Moonie Times!
Whenever I watch Fox or some other cable outlet and I see a reporter from the Washington Times, a voice goes off in my head that reminds me: Rev. Sun Myung Moon owns that paper and he's kind of nuts. Of course, no one ever mentions this, especially on Fox, which loves the right-wing looniness of the Times.

There was an event about a month and a half ago where Moon pretty much proclaimed himself to be the Messiah -- and it took place in a Senate office building. Here's the rundown from www.gadflyer.com. I included the whole thing because it's pretty funny.

"Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah ? with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building?

The Washington Post didn't think so. For a moment on April 4, a quote from the keynote speech was in the Web version of its "Reliable Sources" column. The speaker: Sun Myung Moon, 84, an ex-convict whose political activities were at the center of the 1976-8 Koreagate influence-peddling probe. That's when an investigation by Congress warned that Moon, after having befriended Richard Nixon in his darkest hour, was surrounding himself with other politicians to overcome his reputation: as the leader of the cult-like Unification Church, which recruited unwary college students, filled Madison Square Garden with couples in white robes, wed them in bulk and demanded obedience.

That was before he launched the Washington Times ? "in response to Heaven?s direction," as he would later say ? and a 20-year quest to make his enemies bow to him. He has also claimed, in newspaper ads taken out by the Unification Church, that Jesus, Confucius, and the Buddha have endorsed him. Muhammad, according to the 2002 ad, led the council in three cries of "mansei," or victory. And every dead U.S. president was there, too ? because Moon's gospel is inseparable from visions of true-blue American power.

Now, this March, Moon was telling guests at the Dirksen Senate Office Building that Hitler and Stalin, having cleaned up their acts, had, in a rare public statement from beyond the grave, called him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

But not long after it appeared on the Post's web site, the paper erased the quote. Columnist Richard Leiby told me via e-mail that it shouldn't have gone out in the first place. The paper replaced it with breaking news about "Celebrity Jeopardy!" with Tim Russert.

So no one covered this American coronation, except Moon's own Times, which skipped the Messiah part. It wasn't in other newspapers, which only wink at the influence of Moon's far-right movement in Washington, when they cover it at all.

In fact, the only place you could read about the new king, unless you bookmarked Moon's Korean-language website, was in the blog world. There, dozens of the most CSPAN2-hardened cynics reacted to the screenshots with a resounding "WTF," the sound of dismay and confusion at a scene that news coverage hadn't prepared them for. The images might as well have come from Star Trek's Mirror Universe.

First, we're shown a rabbi blowing a ram's horn. Most Jews would hold off on this until the High Holy Days, but it probably counts if the Moshiach shows up in a federal office building at taxpayer expense. Then we see the man of the hour, Moon, chilling at a table at the Dirksen in a tuxedo, soaking all this up. He claps. He's having a ball.

Cut to the ritual. Eyes downcast, a man identified as Congressman Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) is bringing a crown, atop a velvety purple cushion, to a figure who stands waiting austerely with his wife. Now Moon is wearing robes that Louis XIV would have appreciated. All of this has quickly been spliced into a promo reel by Moon's movement, which implies to its followers that the U.S. Congress itself has crowned the Washington Times owner.

But Section 9 of the Constitution forbids giving out titles of nobility, setting a certain tone that might have made the Congressional hosts shy about celebrating the coronation on their websites. They included conservatives, the traditional fans of Moon's newspaper: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA.), Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Republican strategy god Charlie Black, whose PR firm represents Ahmed Chalabi?s Iraqi National Congress. But there were also liberal House Democrats like Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) and Davis. Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.) later told the Memphis Flyer that he'd been erroneously listed on the program, but had never heard of the event, which was sponsored by the Washington Times Foundation.

Rep. Curt Weldon's office tenaciously denied that the Congressman was there, before being provided by The Gadflyer with a photo depicting Weldon at the event, found on Moon's website. "Apparently he was there, but we really had nothing to do with it," press secretary Angela Sowa finally conceded. "I don't think it's quite accurate that the Washington Times said that we hosted the event. We may have been a Congressional co-host, but we have nothing to do with the agenda, the organization, the scheduling, and our role would be limited explicitly to the attendance of the Congressman."

The spokeswoman for one senator, who asked that her boss not be named, said politicians weren't told the awards program was going to be a Moon event. The senator went, she said, because the Ambassadors promised to hand out awards to people from his home state, people who were genuinely accomplished. When the ceremony morphed into a platform for Moon, she said, people were disconcerted.

"I think there was a mass exodus," she said. "They get all these senators on the floor, and this freak is there."

The last time someone declared himself Emperor of the United States, it was the Gold Rush's Joshua Norton, a sort of failed dot-commer of the 1850s. But he was broke, whereas a random sampling of Moon's properties might include a healthy chunk of the U.S. fishing industry, the graphic tablet company Wacom, and swaths of real estate on an epic scale. The money-losing Times is paid for by the $1 billion he's sunk into it, along with untold funding for conservative policy foundations like the American Family Coalition.

George Soros has recently gotten lots of coverage as a supposedly eccentric billionaire influencing U.S. politics. But Soros is no Moon. In Moon's speeches, a "peace kingdom" is envisioned, in which homosexuals ? whom he calls "dung-eating dogs" ? would be a thing of the past. He said in January: "Gays will be eliminated, the three Israels will unite. If not, then they will be burned. We do not know what kind of world God will bring, but this is what happens. It will be greater than the communist purge but at God's orders."

And ignoring every mainline Christian denomination's rejection of the idea of Jewish collective guilt, Moon's latest world tour calls on rabbis to repent for betraying Christ, the Jerusalem Post reported last week. Speaking in Arlington, VA in 2003, Moon said Hitler killed six million Jews as a penalty for this rejection. And he's frank about calling for democracy and the U.S. Constitution to be replaced by religious government that he calls "Godism," calling the church-state separation the work of Satan. "The church and the state must become one as Cain and Abel," he said in the same sermon.

Towards this end, Moon's "Ambassadors for Peace" have been promoting his goal of a "Religious United Nations" organized around God, not countries. In the June 19, 2003 Congressional Record, Rep. Davis joins Rep. Weldon in thanking Moon and the Ambassadors for "promoting the vision of world peace." He praises their plan to "support the leaders of the United Nations" through interfaith dialogue. Much of the dialogue has consisted of getting Moon's retinue of rabbis, ministers and Muslim clerics to hug each other, and be photographed handing out awards to politicians. The Ambassadors have addressed the United Nations and the British House of Lords. They have also honored at least one neo-Nazi, William Baker, former chair of the Holocaust-denying Populist Party.

And far from the free lunches that Emperor Norton received in San Francisco, Moon's groups have taken home grant money from the Bush Administration, which has given his anti-sex missionaries $475,000 in Abstinence-Only dollars to bring Moon's crusade against "free sex" to both black New Jersey high-schoolers and native Africans. The Centers for Disease Control briefly announced that another Moon foundation was the only group qualified to receive another, no-bid grant for HIV education in Africa. Only after a competitor raised objections did the CDC cancel the grant program entirely. Meanwhile, one of Moon's top political movers, David Caprara, has been appointed by George W. Bush to head AmeriCorps VISTA; and another former church VIP, Josette Shiner, was given a senior trade position.

Friends in high places

In the early stages of the Reagan Revolution that embraced the Washington Times and Moon's anti-Communist movement, it was embarrassing to be caught at a Moon event. Until George H.W. Bush appeared with Moon in 1996, thanking him for a newspaper that "brings sanity to Washington," famous guests often spoke at front groups that concealed ties to the Unification Church. Bill Cosby was horrified to discover he'd agreed to speak at one. The reputation of future "Left Behind" author Tim LaHaye suffered after his wife accidentally gave Mother Jones a recording of him dictating a fond letter to Moon's lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, plotting to replace Vice-President Bush with Jerry Falwell on the 1988 ticket. To many Christians, Moon was offensive, preaching that Jesus failed and that he would clean up the mess.

But now that he's forged unbreakable ties with conservative Christians, Moon has moved on to African-American ministers, and, through them, allies in the Democratic Party. This has been below the radar of the press, but not for lack of outlandishness. Moon celebrated Easter Sunday, 2003 by launching a coast to coast series of "tear down the cross/Who is Rev. Moon?" events, targeting pastors in poor neighborhoods. From the Bronx to L.A., Moon's people were convincing pastors to pull the crosses off their walls and replace them with his Family Federation flag. An old hymn was invoked: "I'll trade the old cross for a crown."

To Congressmen attending earlier stops in this roadshow, all this mysticism may have seemed too murky and exotic to understand. But the storyline is simple enough, if you take a step back.

Moon's newest followers were invited to tear down the traditional symbol of Christianity, told they could swap it for a crown. But unlike the crown in the hymn, it wasn't for them. It was the one that Congressmen gave, March 23 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to a wealthy right-wing newspaper owner, one described by Time magazine in 1976 as "megalomaniacal," not much of an exaggeration for someone who claims to be the Second Coming. Unless of course he actually is.

The next day, according to a speech posted to a Moon mailing list and Usenet by a Unification church webmaster, Damian Anderson, Moon said he was leaving the country. "True Father spent 34 years here in America to guide this country in the right way," he told followers. "Yesterday was the turning point." But you can't buy Moon's high opinion of your country so easily (he's called the U.S. "Satan's harvest").

America, he said, was on the road to its doom. Why? "Homo marriage."