October 2005 - Page 225 of 234

G.A.O. – Buying of News by Bush’s Aides Ruled Illegal ¶ Covert Propaganda

Posted by Oui | Oct 2, 2005 |

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 – Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring Ketchum Inc.,a public relations company, to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

Ketchum PR ● Armstrong Williams and ED No Child Left Behind Act

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, “The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education.”

More to follow below the fold »»

Demockery in America – Part 2

Posted by Red Harvest | Oct 2, 2005 |

“The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.” -Pierre Abelard

First off, I just wanted to say thanks for the positive and encouraging feedback I received from my initial post. For quite some time I have sensed – and the comments seemed to confirm – that there is a growing feeling of unease and frustration among many on the left, a feeling that stems from their perception that the prescriptions endorsed by the leading voices of the liberal mainstream come uncomfortably close to satisfying that classic definition of insanity – i.e., doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

“The K Street Project?”

Posted by Patrick Lang | Oct 2, 2005 |

by Pat Lang

“DeLay is very different. He is the Republican paymaster, one of the authors of the K Street Project and the driving force behind a vicious, organised demonisation and attempted marginalisation of Democrats that for sheer, unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an advanced democracy. Politicians fight their political foes by fair means or foul, but trying to exterminate them is new territory.” — Will Hutton in Sunday’s The Guardian.

It may come to be that in the end the neocon Jacobins and the merely megalomaniacal like Rumsfeld will be thought of as having been “taken for a ride” along with the rest of us.

Rumsfeld has a certain owlish appeal in his self-assigned role as the “Grinch who Stole Christmas.” One could learn to appreciate his doddering curmudgeonly figure as a “talking head” infesting the Sunday Newsathons.

The neocons? It seems increasingly possible that these intellectual poseurs, now mainly roosting at AEI and elsewhere, have been duped by the Iranians in the greatest intelligence coup since Felix Dzershinsky ran the anti-Soviet underground from Moscow as chief of the Cheka. “Curve Ball?” Hah! This curve broke straight through the “strike zone.”

No. History will probably reserve a very special and perhaps unique place in one of the lower circles of the Inferno for the folk of the “K Street Project.” They deserve it for poisoning the well of American political life. They will get “top billing.”

It is odd how many Texans there are in this mess. “Lawyers, bankers and oil men. Lawyers, bankers and oil men.” A Texan told me that these are the categories of men who run Texas in our time. Forget the cowboys. Forget the Comanche. Forget everything but the money and power. That’s what a lot of them have done. I think their time is coming.

I guess we should add a fourth category to the list, former “exterminators.”

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Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)

“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2