KC Star's AP's Sam Hananel attempts a Full Kraske and sticks the landing!

We spend a lot of time mocking Steve "this is actually great news for the GOP" Kraske in our house. We know that mocking him is like shooting fish in a barrel, but what the hell? Don't offer such prime mockable fare, and we would have a tougher go of it.

If the media was doing it's Constitutionally protected job, we bloggers would be talking to one another and be totally bereft of influence. I was just at the state convention - I had the same access to the Congressmen and Senator who were in attendance as Jo Mannies of the St. Louis Post Dispatch had. The M$M might resent our influence, but the politicians know it is real, so the M$M can suck on it. If they get off their asses and return to their muckracking traditional roots, we would cease to matter. But as they are not going to give up their cushy gigs and risk causing offense, we aren't going anywhere. They can suck on that, too.

When a story in the Star gets massaged in a pro-GOP way, my husband and I have a name for it: "The Full Kraske."

But he has some competition!

Sam Hananel has managed to out-Kraske Kraske!

In a piece on Jim Slattery's challenge to Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, Hananel makes it sound like Slattery is out on bond or something, like all lobbyists are as corrupt as those republican mother fuckers like Abramoff and his ilk. Hell, he even manages to work Duke Cunningham's name into the article, too!

Let's start with the headline (although the copy editor probably gets the blame for this):

Lobbyist Defends Work in Run for Senate

"Slattery is a Democrat. We have to paint him in the most negative light possible: Let's make 'Lobbyist' the lead word in the headline!" That's how Pat Robert's refers to him, after all, and the Star has a full staff of GOP stenographers at the ready, so really this sort of thing is to be expected.

The revolving door between former members of Congress and lucrative lobbying firms usually leads one way. But Jim Slattery is trying to make a U-turn.

After spending more than a decade in Washington making millions of dollars at one of the nation's most prestigious law firms, the former Democratic congressman from Topeka is jumping back into the political arena in a bid to unseat Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.

Roberts' campaign has already gone after Slattery with radio ads calling him a "Gucci loafers and all" lobbyist who's out of touch with voters.

But Slattery has never been accused of any wrongdoing as a lobbyist. He left politics and became a partner in Wiley Rein, LLC after exercising the piss-poor timing of choosing to run for governor in that most republican of all years, 1994, and getting his ass handed to him, like so many other Democrats did that year. Slattery wasn't the only Kansas Democrat to lose in 1994 - so did Dan Glickman. Perhaps Mr. Hananel would like to email me and discuss the political climate that election? I would be happy to enlighten him - Both Glickman and Slattery were on the ballot I cast that November. If they weren't on his, he should maybe take me up on my offer, or at least think about applying a thin veneer of a pretense of objectivity, instead of the GOP-fealty that veritably drips from the article he posted.

Far be it from me to defend lobbyists, but I have to be honest - I have been a union member, and my union hired lobbyists to represent our professional interests. So blanket condemnation seems a bit hypocritical.

If Slattery had ever been accused of any malfeasance or wrongdoing, I could see the tone of the article. But he hasn't. He was not involved in the Abramoff or Cunningham scandals - he is a member of the opposition party that they openly stated they wanted to crush and eliminate from the process, for fucks sake! - so why did Hananel feel compelled to include the comparisons, and why did the copy editor not mark the hell out of it with his blue pencil and throw it back at his feet, quivering and dying a horrible death?

There is simply no excuse for this sort of overt GOP shilling on the part of the M$M.

But credit where it is due - the Full Kraske is a complex maneuver, and he did stick the landing. So Hananel's piece gets a 9.9 - woulda been a perfect 10, but the Russian judge is in a mood today.

When the Generals Lied - Part IV

The Newshour broke the M$M blackout yesterday.

Watch:



Can't watch video online? Here is the transcript.

Republicans can't be bothered to attend FISA meetings when there is political hay to be made...

I really resent the hell out of having crap like this waved in my face:

The Bush administration informed Congress on Friday that the government has “lost intelligence” because of the expiration of surveillance legislation caught in a political tug of war.

“We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress’ failure to act,” says an underlined passage of a six-page letter signed by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell.

Of course, the fear-mongering screed does not provide any, you know, details or anything, just banal assertions of impending doom.

I especially hate it when this sort of thing just flies right under the CNN/M$M line...

“The House and Senate met again today to produce a strong new FISA bill and once again, Republicans and the White House refused to come to the negotiating table. Despite the Republicans’ apparent insistence on turning this into a partisan issue, Congressional Democrats will continue to reach out in a bipartisan way to finalize a strong FISA law that protects our national security and our civil liberties.

“Meanwhile, in a letter to the Congress today, the Bush Administration repeated its claim that the expiration of the Protect America Act (PAA) has resulted in intelligence gaps. If the expiration of the PAA has lessened the willingness of telecommunications companies to comply with surveillance requests to protect our national security, the President and Congressional Republicans have only themselves to blame for refusing to support the PAA’s extension.

“The existing FISA statute provides a remedy: convert the surveillance requests to compulsory court orders. The Director of National Intelligence has admitted that the backlog at the FISA court that prompted the passage of the PAA last summer no longer exists. FISA court orders can therefore be issued even more quickly than they were in the past.”

So let's get this straight - administration minions can pen a letter in which they make broad assertions about how we are all, every last one of us, in peril, because the Democrats won't roll over for retroactive telecom immunity, but your Publican legislators can't be bothered to come to the table? And the mythical "lost intel" is the story for the media outlets that bother to report it? And the churlish fucks who refuse to negotiate get a pass?

Yeah, there's your so-called liberal media, folks. Holy Chocolate Covered Christ. I don't know which is more infuriating - the idiots who keep spouting the liberal media myth, or the banality of the corporate GOP shills among the M$M. Call it a toss-up. I hate them both with equal vigor and venom.

Why is everyone surprised at Huckabee's latest parry?

He is just doing what huckster bible-bleaters have always done.

They are masters at getting someone else to do the dirty work.

That negative add he is 'above running' is out there now, and it is getting barrels of ink and billions and billions of electrons.

Standing before a banner reading "Enough is Enough" and flanked by five large charts attacking the record of rival Mitt Romney, a haggard-looking Huckabee said that the fight to win Thursday's Republican caucus had gotten "out of hand" and "out of control" and that he would refrain from any more negative campaigning.

Huckabee's unorthodox media event comes as a barrage of new polls has battered his lead in Iowa and put his campaign at risk of crash-and-burn. Some of those surveys now show Romney regaining a lead he had maintained over most of the year until Huckabee began to surge ahead in recent weeks.

"Conventional political wisdom is that you must counter-punch," the former Arkansas governor said. "When you get hit you should hit back. And every bit of advice I have been given says that is exactly what we should do." Huckabee explained that he, indeed, prepared and produced a TV spot attacking Romney, sent it to local TV stations but had just given the directive to pull it from airing. "This morning I ordered them to hold the ads," Huckabee said. "From now we will run only ads that say why I should be president not why Mitt Romney shouldn't be president."

Then, amid loud gasps and laughter from the more than 150 reporters on hand, Huckabee announced he would show the assembled press the same ad. As dozens of TV cameras whirred, and after two false starts, the 30-second spot assaulting Romney's record was shown in full. The tag line of the spot ended with the narrator saying of Romney: "If a man's dishonest trying to get the job, he'll be dishonest on the job"

Of course, the room exploded at the seeming inconsistency, because the reporters just don't get Southern evangelicals. I've been a visiting outsider in their land, and this is right in keeping with what I would expect.

The man isn't educated, but he ain't stupid. He's the kind of preacher that figured out a long time ago that if he could string some words together that would make people who actually own pitchforks and hunting rifles willing to accept their limited lot in life while giving him ten percent, the lid can be kept on a while longer and he can live a good life without ever doing an honest days work.

And now, the M$M is spreading his negative ad for free.

Y'all have been had.

Let me make sure I have this straight…

Now Murdoch is the Anti-Christ, because he bought the Journal?

Before he took that notion, he was fine and dandy.

Now everyone is up-in-arms about Murdoch getting his grubby mitts on the oh-so-venerable Wall Street Journal. It is the end of western civilization and journalistic integrity just got taken behind the barn and shot dead.

So I just have one question…Where the fuck have these jackals been for the past decade or so? I sure haven’t seen anyone taking Murdoch to task for his perfection of the black art of yellow journalism. I have seen the blogosphere challenged, and written off as “moonbats” for calling it that way. I have seen presidential candidates smeared for refusing to appear at debates hosted by Fox.

In short – I have seen a lot of these people who are clutching their pearls now over the sale of the WSJ dismiss those same concerns they now express oh-so-plaintively when others called the Murdoch Media Mendacity Machine what it is –a propaganda catapult. Now that the Journal is the only authentic jewel in the counterfeit crown that includes the formerly credible Times of London and the New York Post, Fox News Channel and the Weekly Standard, suddenly everyone seems to realize that Murdoch is what we have been saying he is - a self-serving media thug.

M$M, you sanctioned him, and his Mighty Wurlitzer. Ultimate responsibility for this *travesty* rests with those of you who enabled him and legitimized him in the first damned place, so don't start sniveling in self-righteous indignation now, you self-serving hypocrites.