52-17…
(and I have Santana Moss & Clinton Portis on my fantasy team)

Can they just play the 49ers every week?

If there’s any prosecution (fingers crossed), the “prosecutor is overstepping his boundaries” talking point is inoperative

Weeks after he took over the investigation 22 months ago into the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative’s identity, special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald got authority from the Justice Department to expand his inquiry to include any criminal attempts to interfere with his probe, according to a letter posted Friday on Fitzgerald’s new Web site.

I can hear the little brains over at RNC HQ mulling over another line of attack as we speak.

UPDATE: AS I said, the talking points are out. Perjury is just a “technicality” now, according to the Senator from Texas.

Bill Keller, the editor of the NYT has written a memo that tells Times staffers the paper was too timid to investigate its mishandling of the WMD issue, and that they shouldn’t have bought Judith Miller’s b.s. story.

But the Times fails again. This is an internal memo, more or less meant only for NYT eyes. The so-called paper of record needs a full-on mea culpa investigation of what it did to help this war along. We’re almost three years past, and still information is trickling out that the so-called bastion of the liberal press was doing no better than a two-bit impression of a White House flack.

>> The NY Times & Iraq

Jonah Goldberg says it isn’t true that Cons are smearing Patrick Fitzgerald… but they’re doing it on his mother’s website!

You listen, we decide.

The world is constantly changing. In this era, you blink and the rules of the game have completely shifted on you. In trying times like these, it’s good to know that some things never change.

Gaggle is still unfunny.

Previous:
>> John Roberts Has Garbage!
>> Gaggle: “This Is No Laughing Matter”

To see the after-action wiggling by liberals who were / are in favor of the Iraqi war. People who are my friends, people who I admire and people in high positions of power supported the war in Iraq… and yeah this may be putting it indelicately but… you were dumb.

The war was dumb. I’m as hawkish as the next guy - I supported the first Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. I supported them before and I support them now. The Iraqi War was dumb. I could see that from my apartment in Boston. I was waiting, waiting, waiting for one shred of reasonable evidence that showed me that Bin Laden was hooked to Hussein, one bit of non-RNC propaganda that even remotely said to me that the terrorists who killed our people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania were anywhere near Baghdad.

I was in Boston, working at a mortgage company, and I didn’t see it. There were and are millions of people higher and lower than me on society’s totem pole who supported the Iraq War.

Dumb move.

Moving on.

(Which is not to say I’ve never done dumb things in my life. Heck, every football season I go into it thinking the Redskins will win the Superbowl. 15 years straight and no cigar, but I’m dumb that way.)

This is what you get when you allow the Republican culture of corruption and cronyism to infect America. This is what happens when you let untrained moron lapdog friends of the idiot president run important government agencies

In the midst of the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, a
Federal Emergency Management Agency official in New Orleans sent a dire e-mail to Director Michael Brown saying victims had no food and were dying. No response came from Brown.

Instead, less than three hours later, an aide to Brown sent an e-mail saying her boss wanted to go on a television program that night — after needing at least an hour to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge, La., restaurant.

It’s all about the photo ops with this gang of jackals. They have no interest in actually governing our nation, just raping and pillaging it and taking their loot back home.

We can do better.

That the most secretive White House in history may be in trouble for leaking classified information for political points

But lawyers and others close to the case say he may be piecing together a case that White House officials conspired to leak various types of classified material in conversations with reporters — including Ms. Plame’s identity but also other secrets related to national security.

The Republican response might be along the lines of “but everyone does it!”. And the response should be “So, which other Republicans are leaking classified information, endangering our national security, in order to score political points?”

More importantly: Will I have more smiling Republican mugshots to add to my collection? Collect ‘em all, the set keeps getting bigger.

>> Fitgerald is no Ken Starr
>> The best take on this yet is from this moron on Free Republic:

I don’t know .. the whole thing is such a mess - I still say this “mess” has Hillary’s fingerprints all over it.

Yes, Hillary strikes again!
>> Jeralyn on the cover-up beat, and speculates that Rove/Libby will take one for Bush/Cheney. I think she’s right.

Previously when I wrote about race and the need for new black leaders, some commenters asked why I omitted conservative black leaders. Here’s why: because idiot jackasses like Mychal Massie get paid bucks from white conservatives to tell black people that they should be thankful for slavery

Mychal Massie declared to host Janet Parshall that African-American churches today “have succumbed to hatred” and “disobedience to God.” Massie went on to proclaim that “the black people today that curse America are cursing God because if God had not permitted the Ashanti and Dahomey tribes of ancient Africa to trap other Africans and sell them to Muslims, who sold them to Europeans, we would not have what we have today.” Parshall praised Massie for his “straight talk” — the name of a program Massie hosts on the conservative website Rightalk.com — and called him “brother.”

So, yeah. That’s why.

As if her campaign isn’t screwed up enough, Jeanine Pirro called Democrats friendly to child molesters

Yesterday, led by the RNC, right-wing blogs in Virginia tried to push along the rumor that Mark Warner didn’t want to be seen with gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine (never mind that Kaine is now surging on Jerry Kilgore). Fast forward all the way to today and Tim Kaine and Mark Warner are touring together on a whirlwind tour of southwestern Virginia.

The Cons lie. It’s what they do.

Republicans think that because their candidate is black, he can wave magic pixie dust over Marylanders (Republicans think that black people are incapable of making up their minds for themselves and are compelled to vote based on skin color, how insulting) and hide the fact that Steele is just another right-wing Republican far out of touch with the values of Maryland and the future of our state.

Prepare for war.

Rove Told Jury Libby May Have Been His Source In Leak Case

The account is the first time a person familiar with Rove’s testimony has provided clues about where the deputy chief of staff learned about Plame, and confirmed that Rove and Libby were involved in a conversation about her before her identity became public. This further undermines the White House’s contention early in the case that neither man was involved in leaking her identity to the media.

So Karl Rove didn’t tell anybody, wait he heard it from someone, wait he talked about it with Scooter Libby, oh wait he told it to Matthew Cooper sort of and the President had no idea what was going on wait he did know, he’s just been lying for two years.

Got it? Good.

Oh, and the Post kind of buries the lead:

But White House officials and lawyers are prepared for Fitzgerald to charge at least one official, and maybe more.

“Maybe more, maybe more… big money, no whammies!”

For a couple years now I’ve gone around noting the fact that when the truth about Jayson Blair came out, the New York Time went “balls to the wall” in explaining each and every instance no matter how miniscule of Blair’s deceptions. Contrast that to the Times’ mea culpa on their reporting of the WMDs in the lead up to the Iraq war - a quickie “our bad” on page A10 that took great pains to never actually mention Judith Miller’s name.

Jayson Blair may have been a horrible person, but nothing he did ever helped usher a nation into war and result in the deaths of thousands of people. Along comes news today about how Miller was a defacto member of the White House’s Iraq propaganda group.

Somehow I think that the Times still owes America, and the world, something better than an A10 tale.

Do you remember the ’90s? I remember.

Do you remember the media jumping up on its haunches and presenting it’s outrage for all the world to delve into, when it was “revealed” that “The Talking Points Memo” had been given to Monica Lewinsky? Never mind that said memo was innocous and contained information easily attained by anyone within the DC metro area - it was “The Talking Points Memo” and your mainstream media breathlessly announced that this was the smoking gun which would end the Clinton presidency!

Fast forward a few years and we learn that the President of the United States knew that his top enforcer was leaking like a sieve information about CIA agents to the media - the same media that was ready to nail President Clinton to the cross - and the president simply grimaced, sneered, and lied to America for at least two years.

And the outcry? The outrage? Silent. Why? You must remember the golden rules, friend:

It’s Okay If You’re A Republican.

Brent Baker, up for bias pimp of the month over at Media Research Center (He vows to make Brent Bozell “reckanize”) has alerted us to the lightning bolt moment, that which will truly unmask the liberal media for all of us to behold.

I present: ROSEANNE!

Actress/comedian Roseanne Barr, who claims to be a psychic (“I channel the higher mind, the higher universal mind”), used the made-up word “overcomeable” and employed teenage phrases such as “like” and “totally,” insisted on Monday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC that she would win a battle of intelligence with President Bush.

That’s right, y’all. The multimillion-dollar brains over at MRC have discovered that former sitcom star and ex-Mrs. Tom Arnold is not deferential enough to our bold, wise, and handsome Commander In Chief. Surely, its from Barr’s lips to the commiepinkos at the Associated Press, then on to the Glorious Reporters of The Revolution’s Progress at ABCCBSNBCABC!

Is there no end to this dastardly conspiracy against our America?????

Ahnuld can’t run away from Bush fast enough. Girlie man!

I always think its funny when the folks inside the establishment press tut-tut political hardball, because of the notion of preserving some mythical ideal that has never existed.

We have only occasionally had a press willing to question those in power, and it certainly isn’t coming back now. If anything, this episode exposes how the “liberal” New York Times and their fellow travellers worked hand in hand with the Cons in service of their precious “scoops”, leading to dead soldiers on the battlefield.

Could the falling popularity of George Bush cost Jerry Kilgore the election in Virginia? Possible.