My other headline would’ve been, “And in other news, Karl Rove continues to lie through his teeth.”

Apparently, his latest idiotic lie is to rewrite the history of the 2002 vote on the AUMF. His new lie is that Congress, not the White House, pushed for a pre-election vote. If you remember, the vote on this bill happened right before the 2002 midterm elections, putting a lot of (at least imagined) pressure on Democrats to authorize the war.

This is the worst sort of lie, brazenly false and key to understanding the history of 2002 and of this war. The war vote and the election are inextricably tied. In fact, this is a key aspect of the Bush White House. Major policy initiatives have ALWAYS been lined up against federal elections. It’s all they know how to do, win elections. Actually governing is a secondary concern to this administration.

Credit where it’s due, though. At least some former White House staffers are disputing Rove’s lie. This could mark some of the first honest moments for these people. Hopefully, these corrections will make it easier for the press to show Rove’s lie for what it is.

It’s amazing Rove would even consider trying this out. For example, all of this recent “well, I opposed the war, but didn’t say it out loud” stuff going on is really a reaction to the central reality of that vote: No one wanted to go into an election year on the losing side of a war vote that was a) going to pass anyway, and b) enjoyed at least lukewarm support (~45%) among the American voters. Rightly or wrongly (I believe wrongly), Democrats and some Republicans believed that not voting for this bill could cost the Democrats seats in that election.

Of course, we’ve already forgotten how unpopular the war was in 2002. It’s hard for me to forget the size and number of protests at the time, especially since several happened just outside my window.

Let’s not let a liar like Karl Rove rewrite history, please.

I’m being quite literal and quite serious here. His job is to cover the media and opine about their role in our society. He has written something yesterday that shows pretty clearly that he’s not fit to continue in that job. Here’s Digby’s take on Kurtz’s most recent column:

Howie Kurtz published a lengthy excerpt of my post of yesterday in which I indicted the press corps for being susceptible to the particular types of nasty little smears and tidbits the Republicans specialize in and those end up setting the agenda for coverage. The excerpt ended with this from my post:

“The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby used ‘the wife sent him on a boondoggle’ line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.Why we see so little of the same kind of feeding frenzies on the other side isn’t hard to fathom. Nobody is spoon-feeding them to the press with just the kind of cutesy meanness they prefer.”

His comment, in its entirety, was this:

I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.

Can everyone see what’s wrong with that picture? I knew that you could.

To lay this out in bullets so I don’t bore everyone:

• There’s no evidence that those leaks were from Democrats (unless Kurtz knows more than he’s letting on).
• More importantly, the Abu Ghraib, CIA prisons, and domestic surveillance leaks all were about government business and not gossip. The most reasonable explanation of them is that they were whistleblowing leaks aimed at stopping government overreach.

Even the best interpretation of the false accusations about the Frost family shows it to be a malicious leak and malicious coverage. It was based on falsehoods and assumptions. There was no public interest served in making those leaks public. Even if the Democrats “benefitted” from the coverage of CIA prisons and torture, there was an obvious public interest in covering those stories. (Digby points out evidence that the Bush DUI leak didn’t seem to originate with Democrats, nor did it originate with someone abusing their powers in the government).

Kurtz has no idea what the role of the press is. If he sees gossip and innuendo about a family as the equivalent of the Abu Ghraib leaks, he’s not fit to report about journalism. Get him covering the local Little League teams in the D.C. area. Politics and journalism are clearly out of his league.

Update: More at Pandagon…

Update 2: Even more at Greenwald’s blog at Salon, including a list of the sources for the leaks mentioned above. Hint: none are Democratic operatives…

Atrios posted this video of Friedman’s May 30, 2003 which is quite remarkable for it’s idiocy. Someone should ask him if he stands by his foreign policy advice of “suck on this.” He should never be taken seriously again.

I just got my copy of Fantastic Four from Amazon today, so I fired it up. The first thing I’m greeted with on this DVD I purchased legally was a long commercial telling me that buying pirated DVDs is a crime.

Cause, you know, I paid $15 to get a morality lesson. Stuff like this makes me want to stop buying DVDs.

Newsflash to Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly: Fox News is part of the mainstream media. When you’re on TV, carried on every major metropolitan area’s cable nets and have the highest ratings of any cable news network, you kinda lose your “outsider” status. Get it?

O’REILLY: … And you know, there are some people who hate this government, hate their country right now, and blaming Bush for all the terrorism and all the horror in the world. Here’s a question, Michelle. Do they have a right to this opinion without being scorned?

MALKIN: No, without being scorned, no. And I wouldn’t call it scorned. I would call it scrutiny. And the mainstream media is not doing it.

I mean, The New York Times editorial board is all too eager to prop her up as some sort of martyr and to buy her line when clearly her story hasn’t checked out.

O’REILLY: Yes, her story hasn’t changed.

MALKIN: And so I think - and I think that angle you’re emphasizing is absolutely right here, which is the mainstream media just lapping this up and perpetuating myths and inaccuracies when they know it’s not the truth.

Advice shared by Dr. James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, on preventing homosexuality in your young boy:

Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Riiiiiiight…. what a freaking idiot.

Found via Eschaton.

This past week the autopsy report for Terry Schiavo was released. Among the findings from the autopsy report were the following:

He also said she was blind, because the “vision centers of her brain were dead,” and that her brain was about half of its expected size when she died 13 days following the feeding tube’s removal.

…

“The brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain,” he said. “This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.”

So it would seem like those that argued that Terry Schiavo was responsive to visual stimuli and that she would someday recover were sadly wrong. A lot of politicians used this case to further their political goals and ambitions. The worst was Senator Bill Frist who hoped that his “leadership” role in this mess would cement support for him among the religious right. He got on the Senate floor and on TV to use his medical background (he’s a doctor) to add legitimacy to his otherwise politically crafted opinion. “She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” he said then. Well, these days he’s denying this to anyone that asks. I wish he would just admit that he was wrong.

Of course, then he wouldn’t be part of the modern Republican leadership, would he?

Speaking of Republican leadership, I have no words for what Jeb Bush did today:

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) — Gov. Jeb Bush asked a prosecutor Friday to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, calling into question how long it took her husband to call 911 after he found her.

In a letter faxed to Pinellas-Pasco County State Attorney Bernie McCabe, Bush said Michael Schiavo testified in a 1992 medical malpractice trial that he found his wife collapsed at 5 a.m., and he said in a 2003 television interview that he found her about 4:30 a.m. He called 911 at 5:40 a.m.

…

An autopsy released Wednesday concluded that she had been in a persistent vegetative state and revealed no evidence that she was strangled or otherwise abused before she collapsed

Yeah, you know, this guy hasn’t suffered enough. This family hasn’t suffered enough. It’s time to reopen this case based on two diverging accounts several years apart. It’s now been 15 years. For God’s sake, can’t we just let these people be? This posturing by the Republicans is absolutely pathetic and unprincipled. I can’t believe that this is what anyone on any side wants… are we reduced to seeking revenge now because the autopsy didn’t show what the religious right wanted?

(some of the links come via Atrios and Amanda’s post at Pandagon)