Nancy Soderberg, a former Ambassador to the United Nations and Foreign Policy Advisor under the Clinton administration, repeated the often-heard myth that President Clinton prevented Millennium attacks on the United States. Soderberg made the debunked claim as a guest on tonight's episode of The O'Reilly Factor (Thursday, February 9, 2006).

Soderberg's claim would refer to the arrest of terrorist Ahmed Ressam at the U.S-Canada border on December 14, 1999. It was later learned that Ressam planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on or around New Year's Day 2000. Clinton defenders have often falsely cited this incident as evidence that Clinton proactively and successfully defended the United States against terrorism.

Earlier this afternoon in an article written by Thomas Ferraro the media once again attempted to paint the conservatives as guilt ridden violators of the Abramoff scandal.

Forced to "regroup" in a retreat, it was questioned as to whether this party was capable of retaining it's current power.

Reid Aided Abramoff Clients, Records Show
JOHN SOLOMON and SHARON THEIMER, AP, Feb 9, 5:39 PM (ET)

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid wrote at least four letters helpful to Indian tribes represented by Jack Abramoff, and the senator's staff regularly had contact with the disgraced lobbyist's team about legislation affecting other clients.

The activities - detailed in billing records and correspondence obtained by The Associated Press - are far more extensive than previously disclosed. They occurred over three years as Reid collected nearly $68,000 in donations from Abramoff's firm, lobbying partners and clients.

Reid's office acknowledged Thursday having "routine contacts" with Abramoff's lobbying partners and intervening on some government matters - such as blocking some tribal casinos - in ways Abramoff's clients might have deemed helpful. But it said none of his actions were affected by donations or done for Abramoff. ...

Viewers of today's American Morning on CNN were treated to co-host Miles O'Brien's view of scientists who dare question the validity of global warming. In a debate between Reverend Jim Ball, director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and Reverend Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics commission, shortly after 8:15am, O'Brien revealed his beliefs.

Miles O'Brien: "You know, I know that science and religion are often at odds, but the scientific evidence is overwhelming at this point. Are you denying that?"

Reverend Richard Land: "There are scientists who deny it. There are scientists who've said -- "

O'Brien: "Scientists who are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually."

Land: "Well, not, not necessarily. I'm not going-"

O'Brien: "Mostly, yeah."

Via Romenesko, we learn New York Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove reported that retired CBS "60 Minutes" boss Don Hewitt finally decided that Dan Rather did in fact deserve the ax for that Memogate fiasco:

CBS legend Don Hewitt hasn't been shy about criticizing Dan Rather, but the grand old man of "60 Minutes" had stopped short of publicly recommending termination for the central figure in CBS News' painful 2004 Memogate flap.

Until yesterday.

"Should Dan Rather have been fired?" Time magazine managing editor Jim Kelly asked the 83-year-old Hewitt during a Court TV journalism panel at Michael's.

Ken Shepherd forwarded to me another piece of evidence that the NAACP has thrown its old attempted bipartisan stance, last seen in the Benjamin Hooks era, out the window. Reporter Hazel Trice Edney, a Washington correspondent for the National Newspaper Publishers Association ("The Black Press of America"), has this report in the Baltimore Times and other papers:

Although the head of the Republican National Committee and President George W. Bush have pledged to make a more concentrated effort to win over Black voters, 98 percent of Republicans in the House and Senate earned an F on the latest NAACP Civil Rights Report Card, compared to only 2 percent of Democrats receiving failing grades...

The liberals are ardent supporters of freedom. They publicly degrade the need to listen in on public conversations, read email or text of millions of Americans. The left defends their position with the Constitution which supports freedom rather than a socialistic government that has totalitarian powers. The party feels for the public and vows to fight for their rights.

Shortly after 9/11, al Qaeda began planning to use shoe bombers to hijack a commercial airplane and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles, President Bush said Thursday.

The details were the first about the West Coast airliner plot, which was thwarted in 2002 and initially disclosed by the White House last year, Bush said.

The plot was set in motion by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks, a month after those happened, Bush said. It involved terrorists from al Qaeda's Southeast Asia wing, Jemaah Islamiyah. ...

Lizette Alvarez reports from Denver Thursday on the Army’s drive to recruit more Hispanics in “With Charm and Enticements, Army Is Drawing Hispanic Recruits, and Criticism.”

She paints the drive in a negative light:

“In Denver and other cities where the Hispanic population is growing, recruiting Latinos has become one of the Army's top priorities. From 2001 to 2005, the number of Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent, and in the military as a whole, the increase was 18 percent. The increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years.

Imagine you're the host of a morning news show, and the head of the country's major opposition party has just invoked the danger of the President of the United States turning the country into a police state akin to Iran. Would you perhaps ask a follow-up question challenging your guest to substantiate his inflammatory remark? No, you wouldn't. At least, not if you're GMA's Charlie Gibson. For when Howard Dean made just such an allegation this morning, Gibson never blinked.

Discussing the NSA terrorist surveillance program, Dean stated:

"All we ask is that we not turn into a country like Iran, where the President of Iran can do anything they [sic] want at any time."

The gargantuan task of rebuilding New Orleans after hurricane Katrina is an ongoing news story -- but it doesn't have to be presented solely as a liberal narrative, with the Democratic local officials, Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco, assigned only the role of heroic pleaders to the racist Republican administration, while left-wing protest groups cheer on Barney Frank's claims that the administration is conducting "ethnic cleansing by inaction."

But that's precisely what Washington Post readers get today on the front page and beyond. Reporter Linton Weeks begins with Gov. Blanco declaring "It's time to play hardball, as I believe it's the only game Washington understands," and readers are told it represents "the fervor and frustration of someone living in Limbo Land." Mayor Nagin is contacting foreign governments for aid. They're doing this "because they say they need more money to rebuild New Orleans. They are trying to appeal to the federal government and also minister to impatient constituents. New Orleanians are angry that President Bush did not devote more of his State of the Union speech to the city and are concerned that Washington's attention is no longer on them. They feel as though they are living in the mean in-between." To Weeks, the story line is a deprived and neglected New Orleans, with no mention that President Bush says $85 billion has been committed to reconstruction.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1574937/posts

Click here for instructions on running Gaggle daily on your own site. There's also an archive of previous toons available here.

This is going to be controversial.

In an article written earlier today by Benny Morris and published by the UK's Guardian Unlimited newspaper, famous historian and civil rights activist John Hope Franklin had this to say regarding his home:

"This country is so arrogant, so self-certain," he says, asked whether the west is now engaged with the Muslim world in a war of civilisations. "I am not sure that is what we are confronting. [But I am also] not sure we have done what we ought to have done to cultivate the rest of the world. We're so powerful and so presumptuous that it makes us unattractive, almost unbecoming. We don't treat other countries and people right. Power without grace is a curse."

Press reaction – that Mideast imports are no big deal – is inconsistent with earlier assertions that oil is the reason for Iraq war.  Free Market Project

Since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, politicians and pundits have argued that America’s Mideast foreign policy was governed by oil. Such claims were quite common before and after the Iraq invasion in 2003. As recently as January 14, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked on “Hardball”: “Why is the President out there saying out of nowhere that it’s wrong to say that this war was about oil or Israel? I can see where the Israel part would be sensitive, but why is he denying that this was about oil? I mean, does anybody really think that we would go into Iraq if it was down in the Congo or if it was in Bolivia?”  Despite the oily hype and condemnation that has surrounded the Iraq war, the media have either dismissed or downplayed the president’s proposal to reduce U.S. reliance on Mideast oil.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” asked two different guests if this plan was just a “pipe dream.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post suggested that this could have “come straight from the mouth of Jimmy Carter. The only thing missing was the sweater.”

These same media outlets seemed to forget the “no blood for oil” drumbeat they had championed in the months before the Iraq invasion and largely since. Such reports normally focused on supposed cabals constructed by “neoconservatives” within the administration for the domination of the Mideast and its vast oil reserves, or simply to aid the profits of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company Halliburton.

The Case Against Mideast Oil
Such disturbing conspiracy theories ran rampant throughout the media the past four years. For example, The Washington Post published an article on Aug. 6, 2002, about a Pentagon advisory board meeting that depicted Saudi Arabia as America’s enemy and outlined a strategy supposedly concocted to take over the entire region: “This view, popular among some neoconservative thinkers, is that once a U.S. invasion has removed Hussein from power, a friendly successor regime would become a major exporter of oil to the West.”

USA Today published an article three days later concerning this same conspiratorial premise stating that “the administration is hearing from critics who support radical changes in U.S. policy, including ‘liberating’ the Saudi province that contains its oil fields.” And The New York Times ran an April 10, 2003, story discussing Vice President Dick Cheney’s position on the war: “He showed little reaction, they said, to protests around the world in which he was portrayed as the instigator of a ‘blood for oil’ war and was accused of using the conflict to benefit his former employer, Halliburton, the oil field services firm.”

That Was Then; This Is Now
All this makes the ironic response to Bush’s Mideast oil reduction platform more surprising. The New York Times devoted three stories on February 1 to the president’s address dealing with this proposal. Elisabeth Bumiller and Adam Nagourney’s article quickly dismissed it with “But even that goal was less ambitious than it might have appeared – the United States gets less than 20 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf.” They later emphasized this with “Energy analysts also said Mr. Bush's goal to replace 75 percent of America’s Mideast oil imports by 2025 was not as meaningful as it appeared because the bigger suppliers to the United States are Mexico, Canada and Venezuela.”

▪ And where was this three years ago?: The Times and USA Today reported different figures on the subject. As reported by USA Today on February 2, “Middle East countries account for about 22% of total U.S. oil imports, Energy Information Administration data show, or roughly 14% of the oil used in the USA.” If America did reduce Mideast oil imports by 75 percent and didn’t replace them with other sources of oil, this would represent a 16.5-percent decline in total imports. It would also mean a 10.5-percent cut in the nation’s oil usage, both foreign and domestic.

▪ Nothing new under the sun: The Times’ David Sanger dismissed the president’s call to reduce Mideast oil imports by suggesting it was a program whose only novelty was its name: “What was new was his Advanced Energy Initiative, though the increases he proposed in clean-energy research, better batteries for hybrid cars and new ways of making ethanol largely piggyback on programs already under way at General Motors and Ford, Toyota and Honda, rather than charting a new course.”

▪ Yeah, yeah: The Times continued its attack on this proposal with an article entitled “Call to Cut Foreign Oil is a Refrain 35 Years Old.” Matthew L. Wald and Edmund L. Andrews echoed much of the content of the prior two pieces, while suggesting the public not take it too seriously: “President Richard M. Nixon promised in 1971 to make the United States self-sufficient in energy by 1980. President Jimmy Carter promised in 1979 that the nation would ‘never again use more foreign oil than we did in 1977.’”

▪ Pipeline or pipe dream?: ABC’s “Good Morning America” decided to dismiss the seriousness of this proposal. While discussing the content of the address with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on February 1, Charles Gibson asked: “Talking about energy, talking about reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil by 75 percent in 20 years. Pipe dream? Doable?” Gibson later asked his second guest, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) virtually the same question: “You think the idea of using alternative sources to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil, 75 percent, 20 years, pipe dream?”

▪ Is anyone really ‘stable’?: Meanwhile, using a premise similar to that of the Times, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler downplayed the president’s point about reducing oil demand from countries that were somewhat unstable: “Only three of the 10 biggest suppliers are from the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Algeria.” Needless to say, it seems a bit disingenuous to minimize the significance of Saudi Arabia when talking about oil imports, or Iraq when it comes to instability. In addition, it would be a stretch to classify two of America’s other major oil exporters, Mexico and Venezuela, as “stable.” And, after the events of this past weekend, with riots throughout parts of Europe and Asia over a cartoon, who’s to say what represents stability?

▪ Alternative energy’s identity crisis: USA Today took a different approach to downplay the significance of Bush’s proposal. Bush proposed that a reduction in American oil demand will involve alternative energy – something that has been hyped by the political left for some time. However, in one staff article on February 1, USA Today wrote: “The former Texas oilman ticked off a series of alternative-energy initiatives, but the dirty reality is that most of the new technologies Bush is touting are costly, require taxpayer subsidies and are years if not decades from making any meaningful impact.” When did the mainstream media begin concerning themselves with such issues as cost and taxpayer subsidization? More importantly, nuclear energy, ethanol, wind and solar power are not decades away – most of these technologies have been in existence for many years and are already being employed at both the consumer and commercial levels.

Some speakers at Tuesday's memorial service near Atlanta for Coretta King used the opportunity to blast from the left the racial, budget and foreign policies of President George W. Bush, who was himself amongst the speakers. Yet Wednesday's NBC Nightly News managed to turn the event into an indictment of Bush and imaginary “deep cuts” in social programs, without mentioning the vitriolic hatred directed toward him by the very black organizations and leaders NBC's Andrea Mitchell suggested he has snubbed. Anchor Brian Williams noted how the service included “criticisms of President Bush's domestic and foreign policies.” But then he framed the story around how it supposedly “raised fresh questions about the Bush administration's record on race.”

Mitchell began with a back-handed slap at Bush: "It was an in-your-face rebuke rare for any President, especially one who doesn't often surround himself with critics." Mitchell at least pointed out how Andrew Young considered it an inappropriate forum for attacking a President, before she recited Bush's mistakes: “After five years in office, deep cuts in social programs, and searing criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush is still struggling to explain himself to African-Americans.” Of course, there haven't even been mild cuts in social programs, never mind Mitchell's ludicrous claim about “deep cuts.” Mitchell also relayed how “critics, often Democrats, remember that he has not attended an NAACP convention since taking office.” Maybe that's because a few months after he attended one in 2000, the NAACP produced a TV ad narrated by the daughter of James Byrd, the black man murdered by being dragged behind a pick-up truck, which charged that since “Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.” And Mitchell also skipped how just last week NAACP Chairman Julian Bond alleged that the Republicans' “idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side-by-side" and he asserted that “Republicans draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban wing of American politics." (Transcript follows, as well as video of the 2000 NAACP ad)