More lies from Bush over Iraq. Time to blame Clinton

Washington Post

Baghdad's morgue almost tripled its count for violent deaths in Iraq's capital during August from 550 to 1,536, authorities said Thursday, appearing to erase most of what U.S. generals and Iraqi leaders had touted as evidence of progress in a major security operation to restore order in the capital.

It's hard to spin a dead body. Read the rest of this post...

Action Alert: Ask Disney Chairman George Mitchell to pull the partisan 9/11 show

From ThinkProgress:

Over 50,000 ThinkProgress readers have written ABC in the last 48 hours about “The Path to 9/11.” We’re going to keep the pressure on ABC, but we’re also broadening our focus today to the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC.

Disney’s Chairman of the Board is former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME). Senator Mitchell has a long and distinguished career both inside and outside government and he knows how important it is to accurately represent historical events.

We need to remind him that 9/11 was a national tragedy, and that politicizing and flagrantly misrepresenting the facts about 9/11 is wrong.

Senator George J. Mitchell
T: (212) 335-4600
T: (212) 335-4500
F: (212) 335-4605
george.mitchell@dlapiper.com

(Remember to be polite, and please copy us at tellabc@americanprogressaction.org so we can keep track your comments.)

Read the rest of this post...

GOP botched $3.7 BILLION in taxpayer funded loans

The AP study from earlier this year was correct and the administration has yet another failed program. Taxpayer funded loans were supposed to be handed out to businesses that suffered as a result of 9/11 but this new study sheds new light on who actually received it. The administration only wanted money moving and did not give a damn about the businesses that were actually impacted by 9/11. Only 25% of the $3.7B actually went to 9/11 impacted businesses. The rest looks iffy at best. Why does Bush and the GOP have those who suffered from 9/11? Is it truly impossible for the GOP to do one program correctly or is that too much to ask from a party that has complete control in Washington?

The government failed to ensure that recipients of terrorism-recovery loans were actually hurt by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allowing banks to spread more than $3.7 billion in aid to whomever they wanted, Senate investigators concluded Wednesday.

The Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee sharply criticized the Bush administration's primary terrorism relief loan program, saying it was so loosely managed that "conceivably every small business in the country became eligible to participate."

The findings substantiate an Associated Press investigation last year that found government-backed Sept. 11 recovery loans went to small companies that weren't hurt by the attacks and didn't even know they were getting help designated for terror victims.

Read the rest of this post...

Open thread, finally

Sorry it took so long. I had to kill a mouse. Read the rest of this post...

Senate Democratic leadership threatens Disney with legal and legislative sanctions

This letter was sent today by the entire Democratic leadership of the US Senate. This letter is such a major shot across the bow of Disney, it's not even funny. It is FILLED with veiled threats, both legal and legislative, against Disney. US Senators don't make threats like this, especially the entire Democratic leadership en masse, unless they mean it. Disney is in serious trouble.

Read it, then read my analysis of it below:

September 7, 2006

Mr. Robert A. Iger
President and CEO
The Walt Disney Company
500 South Buena Vista Street
Burbank CA 91521

Dear Mr. Iger,

We write with serious concerns about the planned upcoming broadcast of The Path to 9/11 mini-series on September 10 and 11. Countless reports from experts on 9/11 who have viewed the program indicate numerous and serious inaccuracies that will undoubtedly serve to misinform the American people about the tragic events surrounding the terrible attacks of that day. Furthermore, the manner in which this program has been developed, funded, and advertised suggests a partisan bent unbecoming of a major company like Disney and a major and well respected news organization like ABC. We therefore urge you to cancel this broadcast to cease Disney’s plans to use it as a teaching tool in schools across America through Scholastic. Presenting such deeply flawed and factually inaccurate misinformation to the American public and to children would be a gross miscarriage of your corporate and civic responsibility to the law, to your shareholders, and to the nation.

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

Disney and ABC claim this program to be based on the 9/11 Commission Report and are using that assertion as part of the promotional campaign for it. The 9/11 Commission is the most respected American authority on the 9/11 attacks, and association with it carries a special responsibility. Indeed, the very events themselves on 9/11, so tragic as they were, demand extreme care by any who attempt to use those events as part of an entertainment or educational program. To quote Steve McPhereson, president of ABC Entertainment, “When you take on the responsibility of telling the story behind such an important event, it is absolutely critical that you get it right.”

Unfortunately, it appears Disney and ABC got it totally wrong.

Despite claims by your network’s representatives that The Path to 9/11 is based on the report of the 9/11 Commission, 9/11 Commissioners themselves, as well as other experts on the issues, disagree.

Richard Ben-Veniste, speaking for himself and fellow 9/11 Commissioners who recently viewed the program, said, “As we were watching, we were trying to think how they could have misinterpreted the 9/11 Commission’s findings the way that they had.” [“9/11 Miniseries Is Criticized as Inaccurate and Biased,” New York Times, September 6, 2006]

Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism czar, and a national security advisor to ABC has described the program as “deeply flawed” and said of the program’s depiction of a Clinton official hanging up on an intelligence agent, “It’s 180 degrees from what happened.” [“9/11 Miniseries Is Criticized as Inaccurate and Biased,” New York Times, September 6, 2006]

Reports suggest that an FBI agent who worked on 9/11 and served as a consultant to ABC on this program quit halfway through because, “he thought they were making things up.” [MSNBC, September 7, 2006]

Even Thomas Kean, who serves as a paid consultant to the miniseries, has admitted that scenes in the film are fictionalized. [“9/11 Miniseries Is Criticized as Inaccurate and Biased,” New York Times, September 6, 2006]

That Disney would seek to broadcast an admittedly and proven false recounting of the events of 9/11 raises serious questions about the motivations of its creators and those who approved the deeply flawed program. Finally, that Disney plans to air commercial-free a program that reportedly cost it $40 million to produce serves to add fuel to these concerns.

These concerns are made all the more pressing by the political leaning of and the public statements made by the writer/producer of this miniseries, Mr. Cyrus Nowrasteh, in promoting this miniseries across conservative blogs and talk shows.

Frankly, that ABC and Disney would consider airing a program that could be construed as right-wing political propaganda on such a grave and important event involving the security of our nation is a discredit both to the Disney brand and to the legacy of honesty built at ABC by honorable individuals from David Brinkley to Peter Jennings. Furthermore, that Disney would seek to use Scholastic to promote this misguided programming to American children as a substitute for factual information is a disgrace.

As 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick said, “It is critically important to the safety of our nation that our citizens, and particularly our school children, understand what actually happened and why – so that we can proceed from a common understanding of what went wrong and act with unity to make our country safer.”

Should Disney allow this programming to proceed as planned, the factual record, millions of viewers, countless schoolchildren, and the reputation of Disney as a corporation worthy of the trust of the American people and the United States Congress will be deeply damaged. We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program. We look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Sincerely,

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid
Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin
Senator Debbie Stabenow
Senator Charles Schumer
Senator Byron Dorgan

The Senate Democratic leadership just threatened Disney's broadcast license. Not the use of the word "trustee" at the beginning of the letter and "trust" at the end. This is nothing less than an implicit threat that if Disney tries to meddle in the US elections on behalf of the Republicans, they will pay a very serious price when the Democrats get back in power, or even before.

This raises the stakes incredibly for Disney. Read the rest of this post...

Hewlett-Packard stole reporters' cell phone records to find out who their sources were

And they did it within a few weeks of my reporting on the phone records scandal. The Republican Congress STILL hasn't fixed this problem. And now it's actually causing damage to American business, and to the American media.

But hey, the Republicans had to deal with horse meat eating this week (seriously), so it's not like they had time to deal with silly issues like privacy. Read the rest of this post...

Scholastic, Inc. distances self from Disney/ABC mockumentary about September 11

Scholastic is now backtracking on its support for the tv show. Though they're trying to cut the baby in half. First, they say their study guide is flawed and will be thrown out.

?After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues,? said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic.

Then they say that they still think kids should watch the tv show, and that they've created a new study guide to go along with the show, apparently in an effort to prompt a discussion about the merits of presenting false information to children.

First off, where does Scholastic get off saying "oops" after they've already sent the study guide to 25,000 teachers (Disney/ABC said it was more like 100,000 teachers)? Only now Scholastic does a "thorough review" of their teaching materials? Isn't that a bit like editing a paper only after you get an F on it?

But even worse, where does Scholastic get off suggesting that it's a good thing there's controversyry about the tv show being a disaster, and we need kids to discuss this too. Well, uh, maybe. But you don't show kids the disaster and then say "really kids, some of it wasn't true, let's talk." If that's the case, then let's give the kids a version of the tv show where Bush and Cheney were behind the 9/11 attacks. Sure, it's not true, but hey it would prompt a lively discussion.

Scholastic is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Either is supports giving our children fictitious political propaganda disguised as truth or it does not. Which one is it? Read the rest of this post...

The Path to Mickey, the movie.

Read the rest of this post...

Tell Scholastic to stop propagandizing to our children

No child should be forced to sit in school and have revisionist history forced down their throat - partisan and incorrect history that is meant to influence the child politically before he or she even knows it.

Call Scholastic, Inc. and tell them to stop distributing the error-riddled and politically-biased "The Path to 9/11" to our school children, or Harry Potter is going to be having a very bad final year at school (Scholastic publishes the Harry Potter books in the US).

Call 212-343-4563 and send e-mail to news@scholastic.com

Some early feedback from our readers:

I just called them. The woman who answered said they pulled her from her regular job to help handle all of the calls. She didn't sound happy about it.

I'm going to get my kids to call when they get home from school. They already emailed scholastic, ABC and Disney yesterday. They are very upset after I deleted all ABC/ESPN/E!/Disney/Lifetime channels from all of our TVs and explained why.

Read the rest of this post...

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid says Disney/ABC should pull error-riddled 9/11 show

Read the rest of this post...

The Path to Mickey

UPDATE: Don't miss "The Path to Mickey, the movie" - now live.)

(Disclaimer: The following blog post is a dramatization that is drawn from a variety of sources including actual historical photos and other published materials. The post is not a documentary. For dramatic and narrative purposes, the post contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression.)

The Path to Mickey

Mickey Mouse was a troubled rodent. He grew up in a home where he was neither wanted nor loved. His parents shunned Mickey simply because he wasn't like the other mice.



You see, Mickey wore pants. (He also sported horns, and his head had this nasty habit of rotating 360 while spewing green slime.)



Mickey's childhood rejection led to a troubled adolescence. He fell in with a bad crowd, where he and his like-minded mouse-friends chose all the wrong mentors. It was at this point in history that Mickey developed his profound dislike for Jews.



Jews were the cause of all the world's wars, Mickey believed. He also felt that Jews were unfit to hold public office, as they would "legislate sin." (Below, Mickey poses at a recent chi-chi Washington dinner with a Minnie impersonator.)



Mickey quickly rose in the ranks of infamy, and was a regular in the dictator cocktail circuit.



At the request of one of those dictators, Nikita Khrushchev, Mickey played a key role in the Kennedy assassination. He was quickly apprehended, and shot on sight, but contrary to popular belief, he survived and continued his life of crime and carnage.



Mickey's most infamous exploit was his role as co-hijacker of the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. Below, Mickey is caught with the Bonnie to his Clyde exiting the security check at Dulles Airport the day of the attacks.



Still, Mickey had a soft side. Even when it felt like the world came crashing down around him, he always saved time for the children.



Mickey lied, people died.



Again, Mickey thwarted the pundits' expectations and survived September 11, only to return with a vengeance last Labor Day.

Read the rest of this post...

Harry Potter caught in scandal

Guess who publishes Harry Potter? None other than Scholastic, Inc., the company that is disseminating Republican propaganda and revisionist history to millions of American school children, telling them outright lies about September 11.

Real dumb move, taking one of the most famous brands in world history and tarnishing it by making an info-tainment soap opera out of the lives of 3,000 dead Americans.

Almost as dumb as risking the world's most famous brand. Read the rest of this post...

Bill Clinton weighs in -- and he's NOT happy

The New York Post reports that Bill Clinton had his lawyer write a letter to the head of ABC blasting the falsehoods in their 9/11 movie:

A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to 9/11" grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

Clinton pointedly refuted several fictionalized scenes that he claims insinuate he was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to care about bin Laden and that a top adviser pulled the plug on CIA operatives who were just moments away from bagging the terror master, according to a letter to ABC boss Bob Iger obtained by The Post.

This scandal continues to engulf ABC and Disney -- it's a disaster for them. They are trivializing one of the worst events in American history for entertainment value.

Clinton knew Bin Laden was a major threat to America unlike his successor who ignored CIA warnings in August of 2001 that Al Qaeda was going to strike in the United States. It's hard to imagine that Bill Clinton would not have stayed on vacation after getting that kind of warning. But that's what Bush did.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent at TPM Cafe has the text of the letter from Clinton's lawyer, Bruce Lindsey. Read the rest of this post...

Disney/ABC admits 9/11 tale is fiction

Well there you have it. Disney/ABC just admitted that they made a Mickey Mouse version of the September 11 story. They fictionalized it. How do you fictionalize one of the greatest tragedies in American history, not to mention a tragedy that only happened a few years ago?

It's one thing for Disney/ABC to make up some scenes with fictional characters that no one has ever heard of. It's quite another to use REAL people's names and then just make shit up about them. That's defamatory and fodder for a lawsuit, not to mention total revisionist history. September 11 only happened five years ago. Some of us are still pretty freaked out by what happened that day. You don't just go make shit up, derogatory shit at that, about key players who are still alive no less. You don't market the TV show to children around the country as though it's fact. You don't put out statements claiming the thing is based on the September 11 report when it's also based on fiction. How are viewers supposed to know which part of the libelous broadcast is fictionalized?

I am simply blown away that Disney/ABC lied about September 11 to the American people. They libeled living officials of our government. And now they plan on pedaling this garbage to millions of Americans right before the election - an election that Disney/ABC is helping to throw.

That mouse is dead. Read the rest of this post...

GOP stands by their man, Rummy

Between the growing Disney/ABC scandal and Bush admitting that the U.S. tortures people in secret prisons, it would be easy to overlook the strong support Rumsfeld got from the GOP Senators yesterday.

Rumsfeld is a disaster. Iraq is a quagmire. Afghanistan is falling apart as evidenced by NATO's plea for reinforcements today. But none of that matters to the GOP. Rummy is their guy and that's all there is to it (unless a member of the GOP is in political trouble -- they can tell the truth about Rumsfeld).

Yesterday, the Senate GOP made it clear they've got his back:

Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., submitted the resolution, which was the latest Democratic attack on the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war. "'Staying the course' is not a strategy for success," the measure said.

Republicans said the move was a political stunt and they stood by Rumsfeld. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, killed the resolution, which contained a nonbinding call for Rumsfeld's ouster. Stevens used a procedural move because the resolution was not germane to the pending Pentagon spending bill.

Read the rest of this post...

White House still says they're not being political

As Murtha always says, just because they say it doesn't mean it's true. It usually means the opposite. The Bush team is still telling the media that their current speech offensive isn't political:

White House officials have rejected the idea that the ongoing series of speeches are primarily political in nature, saying Bush has wanted to set the war in Iraq in proper context.

Sure, they have to set the "proper context" for Iraq right now. It would be better if the White House set the proper plan for Iraq instead of playing their usual political games. Because while they're setting the "proper context," Americans soldiers and Iraqis are still dying and there is no solution in sight. Read the rest of this post...

Olbermann to Bush, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

Read the rest of this post...

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Bush is on a roll with his terror speeches...admitting torture and secret prisons...are you scared yet? Read the rest of this post...

GOP losing another key support group

Now it is southern women, a key group who went against national trends and helped put Bush and the GOP in office. Fear only works for so long, no matter how many times you stir the pot.

President Bush's once-solid relationship with Southern women is on the rocks. "I think history will show him to be the worst president since Ulysses S. Grant," said Barbara Knight, a self-described Republican since birth and the mother of three. "He's been an embarrassment."

I couldn't agree more.

"In 2004, you saw an utter collapse of the gender gap in the South," said Karen Kaufmann, a professor of government at the University of Maryland who has studied women's voting patterns. White Southern women liked Bush because "he spoke their religion and he spoke their values."

Now, anger over the Iraq war and frustration with the country's direction have taken a toll on the president's popularity and stirred dissatisfaction with the Republican-held Congress.

Republicans on the ballot this November have reason to worry. A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that three out of five Southern women surveyed said they planned to vote for a Democrat in the midterm elections. With control of the Senate and House in the balance, such a seismic shift could have dire consequences for the GOP.

Read the rest of this post...

New polling, more troubling news for GOP

No wonder the WH is trying again to put the Democrats - and the majority of Americans - on the defensive. Sounds like we are past the tipping point on most issues:

• CNN... asked the public if the war in Iraq is part of the war on terrorism. Fifty-three percent said "no;" 45 percent said "yes."
• By 45 percent to 32 percent, people are more likely to think the best way to lessen the terror threat is to reduce, not increase, the U.S. military presence overseas, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
• Two-thirds said the U.S. is less respected by other countries these days than it was in the past, the Pew poll found. The Iraq war was mentioned by 68 percent as a top reason people are unhappy with the U.S.
• Six in 10 in an AP-Ipsos poll said there will be more terrorism in the United States because the U.S. went to war in Iraq.

Read the rest of this post...

NYT: Disney/ABC filmmaker admits they just made stuff up

Oh my God, could the Disney/ABC guy be any more flippant about this? This is September 11, for God's sake. He sounds like he's talking about a baseball game.

Mr. Berger’s character is also seen abruptly hanging up during a conversation with a C.I.A. officer at a critical moment of a military operation. In an interview on Wednesday with KRLA-AM in Los Angeles, Cyrus Nowrasteh, the screenwriter of the movie and one of its producers, said that moment had been improvised.

“Sandy Berger did not slam down the phone,” Mr. Nowrasteh said. “That is not in the report. That was not script. But you know when you’re making a movie, a lot of things happen on set that are unscripted. Accidents occur, spontaneous reactions of actors performing a role take place. It’s the job of the filmmaker to say, ‘You know, maybe we can use that.’ ”

Maybe we can use that? YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT SEPTEMBER 11, YOU FREAKS. You people sent this movie to 100,000 school teachers around the country and told them to show it to their kids. And now you're admitting you just made stuff up, and that's somehow okay?

We now have a Disney/ABC representative on-the-record admitting that parts of the movie have been knowingly falsified and that Disney/ABC has no problem with that. They knew the depictions were false and kept them in there. Albright, Berger and Clinton just had their defamation lawsuit handed to them on a silver platter. Read the rest of this post...