Reality Check: Washington News or Important Gossip

I was reading Escatchon and saw this article from the New York Observer.

I'm just going to put the same excerpt Atrios did.

Ultimately, this episode reveals less about the Clintons than about the decaying culture of Washington journalism. Like the Bourbons, the Washington press corps forgets nothing, forgives nothing and learns nothing. They remain utterly oblivious to their own mean-spirited hypocrisy.

Is there a reason why the enduring, 30-year bond of the Clintons merits more withering scrutiny than the multiple unhappy marriages of ambitious politicians such as Senator John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani? Is there a reason why the marital privacy of elected officials should be violated, while media moguls like Rupert Murdoch can discard their wives with impunity?

Meanwhile, it is reassuring to know that Mr. Healy, at least, is a high-minded professional searching for significance. As the Times reporter told the American Society of Newspaper Editors a few years ago: "The media's future depends on journalists exercising this responsibility in a way that earns them the public's trust and confidence …. The most meaningful part of being a journalist, and the reason I chose that path, is the reward of telling stories about real-life, high-stakes matters of consequence, stories that will have an impact on real people."

That says it all.

If only a negative number of people existed

(CBS/AP)

You know what sucks? Unless Bush is impeached and removed before his term ends we’re eventually going to see an article that says “Bush’s polls bounce back". If it doesn’t happen because of some October surprise he has waiting for us (Though I would think America has become desensitized after watching 9/11, two “wars” and a vice president shooting a man in the face) it will happen because the man’s polls can only go as low as zero. Eventually, he will datamine his way back to 19 or 17 or 20 or whatever it is unpopular presidents of his caliber do.

Kill More Humans to Kill More People

Explosions Kill Two in Iraq

Mission Accomplished

The death of the U.S. soldier came as the United States marked Memorial Day. It brought to 2,467 the number of U.S. military members who have died since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Illegal Data Mining by the NSA

The NSA has secretly been collecting billions of phone call records with the aid of Verizon, AT&T and Bell South.

This man has taken advantage of the lives of thousands of people to push a program that is illegal, immoral and goes against centuries of what America has stood for. We are allowing this man to take away rights under the falsehood of protecting us.

If you allow this man to say he has inherent powers as president during this time of war (which is actually an occupation, "authorized use of aggressive force") then there is no limit to what he can do.

H

e is already allowed to hold people without trying them and wiretap your phone without a warrant for making a call outside of the United States and now the NSA has amassed a database unprecedented in size that keeps track of every call you make. What is being done with this information? Who has it? How do we know the people who have it are not corrupted?

Nixon left office because he broke the law. He broke into records unlawfully. Are we going to allow this president to do the same thing just because people don't have to physically open files to get the information they want? They have access to YOUR information.

On top of that, how far has this gone? All of these programs in the NSA are private. The NSA itself was private from the 50's till 1975 when it was forced into regulation under FISA in 1978. We found out Bush ordered the NSA to go behind FISA's back and wiretap U.S. citizens without a warrant last year. Now we find the NSA is dealing in shady business by collecting our phone records. What they have done is obviously questionable because Qwest's lawyers didn't give up their phone records even after being pressured by the treat of losing government contracts. Bechtel protected it's customers records from the 30's onward because there could be heavy fines for giving up phone records without warrant.

I'm repeating the article, just read it.