illumined horizon

One can only hope Dick Armey's reading of the Republicans losing hold on the House (and possibly the Senate) is blindingly driven by ideology. He thinks that if Republicans get back to the big issues (like slashing entitlement programs), that this will raise his party's sails back into power. On at least one thing he's right, the Democrats haven't strongly put forward what they're going to do with their presumed post-election day authority. It will be the success or failure of the Democrats concrete proposals that determine if he's right, that the country will once again be open for the GOP's taking, if his party can reorganize as he suggests.

I just caught this Wolf Blitzer interview with Lynne Cheney (the Republicans are going after Jim Webb as some kind of pornographic writer and her name came up because Webb mentioned some of her work as being sexually explicit), it was interesting to see she was trying to say CNN is a liberal network (well either that or a terrorist network presumably the two are the same to the far right). I didn't see the Broken Government program she was talking about, but I think the title of that program was just a reference to the president and congress's low approval ratings, not some kind of vast left wing conspiracy. I don't think CNN is a liberal network, I think it's a timid network. I think it definetly leans conservative, and I find it boring actually. I actually watch MSNBC normally, if and when I watch cable news; which also I think leans conservative. But of course they have Keith, and I know Chris Matthews takes a lot of heat from progressives but I think he's pretty middle of the road. It's a very watchable alternative to Fox, though not an antidote to the rest of the MSM.

The U.S. placed an abysmal fifty-third in Reporters Without Borders rating of press freedom.

This is pretty humorous piece, about a guy's misadventures with the 'man seeking man' feature on Sean Hannity's website.

George Allen, the once George W. Bush sycophant, is facing up to a tough challenge from Jim Webb. Now he's saying the situation in Iraq needs "changes in tactics."

This is a must read article, about some election thievery plans the Republicans have for November.

More evidence that the war on drugs is a badly constructed policy. Instead of coming down with an iron fist on marijuana, it appears relaxing penalities against its use achieves the desired outcome.

A MySpace page that included the words 'kill bush', resulted in a high school student being visited by the Secret Service.

One has to wonder if the GOP is putting on this face in order to get out the conservative vote. But at face value this is good news for the mid-term election.

Anyone following the 9/11 alternative theories will want to watch this video and see this unusual confrontation.

These clips are great, really good look at the all spin zone in action. O'Reilly has Bill Maher on his show to talk about how Katie Couric didn't allow him to talk about religion on the evening news (O'Reilly doesn't seem to be too worked up about it). Then he has a man on who was on the CBS evening news and advocated teaching Christianity in public schools and teaching Christian values to young people. The kicker is O'Reilly's mad that Couric said the conservative man's views were repugnant, but Bill Maher was not even allowed to voice his opinion at all! O'Reilly truly can't buy a clue on this one.

Google apparently doesn't support freedom of speech.

Jeff Cohen believes that Phil Donohue was fired from MSNBC because of his political views. Now that MSNBC plays host to the most liberal television commentary program, will Olbermann's show meet the same fate?

After the much bally-hoed Clinton/Wallace interview, I can't help but wonder, why Bush hasn't been more assiduously questioned about what he was doing in the eight months prior to 9/11. There are now voluminous conspiracy and otherwise theories out there about foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack. While hindsight is, of course, 20/20 the more this information mounts the more eagerly the Democrats need to latch onto it; and choose to either wholly blame or simply criticize Bush, for not defending the country prior to 9/11. There's no time like the present (it may already be belated) for the Dems to do this, so I say the Dems should circulate this meme while their surrogates make the rounds on all the beltway and talk programs.