Blog Round Up

Some items from around the blogsphere, and elsewhere, worth checking out this morning:

• Veredictum: The corporate media dutifully reported The President’s misleading remarks without correcting his misinformation. The Bush Administration is built on lies and, yesterday, Bush added another lie.

  MSNBC’s Countdown correctly points out that only specific parts of the NIE were leaked to a few sympathetic reporters. The leaked information provided a defense for statements the President made that exaggerated Iraq’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons. Other parts of the same NIE that was not given to reporters, show that the leaked information was false.

• AP: Phone Jamming Case Touches White House: The AP has a story this afternoon about James Tobin’s contacts with the White House around Election Day, 2002, the day that the New Hampshire GOP jammed the phones for Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts.

  [...]

  Tobin was in very close touch with the White House’s political affairs office around the same time that he helped plan the jamming. As we noted then, he called the White House twelve times on the big day.

  Democrats are pressing a civil suit against the GOP in New Hampshire, and they plan to ask a federal judge tomorrow "to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud."

• Gallup: Most Americans Critical of President in CIA Leak Case: NEW YORK A new Gallup poll released today finds that most Americans are critical of President Bush’s actions in the Plame/CIA leak scandal, but only one in four is following the matter closely.

  [...]

  The more closely people are following the issue, the more likely they are to say he did something illegal rather than merely unethical.

• Powell: U.S. mistakes hurting Iraq now: U.S. mistakes in the invasion of Iraq led to the current insurgency and sectarian fighting, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell says.

• Gingrich: Pull out of Iraq: Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, told students and faculty at the University of South Dakota Monday that the United States should pull out of Iraq and leave a small force there, just as it did post-war in Korea and Germany.

  "It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003," Gingrich said during a question-and-answer session at the school. "We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it."

• The New Yorker: The Iran Plans: The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

• TalkingPointsMemo.com: This post is, hopefully, nothing more than stating the obvious. But let’s just put down for the record that when President Bush calls recent reports of White House plans to attack Iran "wild speculation" that means absolutely nothing.

  It’s not just that the president has now earned a well-deserved reputation for lying. It is because he and his chief aides lied to the country about a more or less parallel situation — the build up to war on Iraq — only four years ago. We now know that the fix was in on the Iraq War as early as September/October 2001. And the president and his crew kept up the charade that no decisions had been made long after those claims became laughable.