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If you think things are getting crazy in Arizona, just wait. They're just getting started.

As Adam Weinstein at Mother Jones reports, Crazy Sheriff Joe Arpaio is getting set to run for Gov. Jan Brewer's seat.

And he's already the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination:

He made arresting Latinos fashionable and, after many run-ins with the feds over such practices, was likely the main inspiration behind Arizona's new immigration code. In short, Brewer felt she had to sign last week's immigration bill, because she felt Arpaio's breath on her neck. She had to appear as tough on brown people as Arpaio does, lest he decide to challenge her in the GOP primary.

So she signed it. And guess what? Arpaio's still going to run against her. Sources in the sheriff's department, which will likely double as his campaign staff (no new thing there), say his paperwork's filed. And on his Twitter account - where you can read about his Washington Post interview today, or his "crime suppression/illegal immigration" operations briefings, or his anger about "out of town critics" - he recently tweeted that his wife wants him to run. And he's already the frontrunner in Arizona Republicans' minds.

So why not run? What does he have to fear? Latino turnout in the Phoenix metro area? Problem solved!

Here, then, is to Arizona: one of the prettiest states in the union, soon to be the first breakaway republic in the new confederacy of Inner America.

According to the Tucson Sentinel, current polling shows him handily beating Brewer:

Although Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff, is not running for governor, he is by far the most popular Republican in the state.

Likely primary voters view him favorably at 70 percent, to only 22 percent with a negative opinion, and he leads Brewer 33-25 as a prospective candidate.

All this news was put in perspective, perhaps, by the neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Movement who showed up today at an Arpaio press event -- he was announcing his handpicked nominee for the county prosecutor's spot -- and told reporters:

"Sheriff Joe is endorsing this candidate, and we feel strongly to support Sheriff Joe and his actions," the man said, "particularly with the illegal immigration situation here in Maricopa County and in our state."

As you can see from the report, Arpaio plans to announce his intentions in the governor's race today.

Both Arpaio and his puppet denied having anything to do with the NSM's presence; Arpaio even hinted that they had been sent out by opponents to try and discredit him politically.

But that doesn't exactly wash, particularly not in Sheriff Joe's case. Because Arpaio has been all too happy to court support from outright neo-Nazis in the past. Check out the video below, from a year ago:

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As you can see, Arpaio can't claim ignorance: the men he posed with were displaying neo-Nazi flags and symbols. A little further down the road, he did the same thing with a group of people openly waving a Confederate flag.

Indeed, Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times uncovered a working relationship between Arpaio's office and a clutch of local neo-Nazis.

Meanwhile, if you want to get an idea of the Arpaio approach to governance -- a preview of his governorship, as it were -- all you have to do is look at his record:

-- As Sheriff, his emphasis on immigration has gutted his office's ability to enforce the law, especially when it comes to investigating violent crime.

-- His office has been under steady legal attack (which has proved extremely costly) for rampant racial profiling and assorted civil rights violations, such as the time he forced a legal immigrant to give birth in shackles.

-- If you have the audacity to criticize him at public meetings, his deputies will arrest you.

-- Indeed, all of his critics, both in the press and in public office, have found themselves arrested by Arpaio's deputies -- a practice that has produced an FBI corruption investigation into his practices.

-- The ongoing DOJ investigation into all of these matters finally prompted ICE to strip him of all immigration enforcement powers.

Yep, looks like Arizona Republicans have another winner on their hands. A Governor Arpaio -- who does a mighty fine George Wallace imitation -- will complete the transformation of Arizona into an Old South segregationist state.

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This is a block buster. Former Sen.(D)Bob Graham, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee told David Shuster that he never was briefed about waterboarding by the CIA on MSNBC. He also said that he was never allowed to take real notes about the CIA briefings, but he did log the topics and the amount of times he was briefed. They don't match up with the CIA's version. And of course, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet's outfit never was wrong or misled us before. James Fallows backs up Graham's honesty and integrity by the way. And Graham also sees the real motives behind the smearing of Pelosi. As he says it's an attempt to shift the blame away the Bush administration and their use of torture.

Graham: David, when I was briefed about three weeks after The Speaker, the subject "waterboarding" never came up. Nor did the treatment of Abu-Zubaydah or any other specific detainee.

Shuster: And that's significant because by the time of your briefing and the Speaker's briefing we now know that Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, so again was their a requirement, was it incumbent on the CIA to tell you as the Chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee or a ranking member, was there an obligation on them to tell you what was going on?

Graham: Yes, they're obligated to tell the full Intelligence Committee not just the leadership. This was the same time, within the same week in fact that the CIA was submitting their National Intelligence Estimate or NIE report on WMD's in IRAQ which proved so erroneous that we went to war and that have had thousands of persons killed and injured as a result of misinformation.

David, I think fundamentally what's happening is there's an attempt underway to try and shift the discussion away from what's really important and that is did the US use torture? Was that within the law? Who authorized and what were the consequences of that. Those are the important issues. Whether The Speaker or anybody else knew about it is frankly sort of off on the edges.

Graham blasts the CIA for also misleading us in the IRAQ WAR, but they would never try to mislead Pelosi or smear her now. He also calls for a Truth Commission on Torture. Can Republicans now keep denying that we need a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of all this torture business?

Greg Sargent broke this story:

Former Senator Bob Graham, who received a classified briefing on terror detainees during the same month in the fall of 2002 as Nancy Pelosi, was not briefed about the use of either waterboarding or enhanced interrogation techniques during the meeting, he claimed in an interview with me.

Continue reading »

I have to give Howard Kurtz some credit because he hasn't backed away from the Military Generals scandal. He plays audio from one of the military analysts who was part of the propaganda scandal with the Pentagon and who lovingly praises Rumsfeld. It looks like O'Reilly was used in the same way that Dick Cheney used Russert in spreading their talking points to the American people. What say you, O'Reilly?

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Kurtz: The networks continue to ignore that New York Times story about TV's military analysts getting briefings and talking points from the Pentagon as they defended the Iraq war effort.

We reported twice on this program a huge batch of documents and e-mails show how cozy that relationship was. But now comes an audiotape of it, 2006 meeting between more than a dozen analysts and Don Rumsfeld, in which some of the retired military officers are giving the secretary advice on selling the war.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We would love for you to take the offensive and just go out there and just crush these people. You are the leader. You're our guy. You go on O'Reilly, and you've got him eating out of your hand because you're smart.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Eating out of your hand. And these men were presenting themselves to television viewers as objective military analysts.

Remind me again how the Republicans and the Bush White House are supposed to be stronger on national defense?

Telegraph UK:

Senior Pakistani officials are urging Nato countries to accept the Taliban and work towards a new coalition government in Kabul that might exclude the Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some Nato member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and Nato is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops.
Western ministers have been stunned. "Kasuri is basically asking Nato to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban," said one Western official who met the minister recently. Read on...

(h/t Rasputin)

BREAKING: Video shows Bush, Chertoff warned before Katrina

This is huge.

Federal officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief of possible devastation just before Hurricane Katrina struck. Six days of video footage from briefings and transcripts were obtained by The Associated Press. The warnings were that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in the New Orleans Superdome and overwhelm rescuers.A-P reports Bush didn't ask any questions during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on August 29th....read on"

(originally posted on 09/08/05) The are so many great TDS clips, but this one got the most votes on the threads that I posted

TDS-oh so subtle, oh so sweet-and oh so visciously takes apart those that were supposed to protect us during a time of crisis.

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Stewart includes talking heads as well.

Other TDS clips that you can go to:

The Daily Show slams O'Reilly over using a year old "DS" Christmas bit.

Deep Throat and the Men who loathe him

The Saga of Chalabi

The Daily Show and the Michael Jackson Verdict

Dino Ironbody-The New Reporter

TDS on Press Briefings

A Greenville Technical College official who twice referred to New Orleans evacuees in Greenville as "yard apes" has resigned, school officials said. Renee Holcombe, formerly an associate vice president for student services with a staff of about 40, told employees in two separate briefings last week that the school's aid for the mostly black hurricane victims staying at the Palmetto Expo Center would include sending yellow buses to pick up the "yard apes," said Barton and senior vice president Ben Dillard....read on

Racism at it's highest form. Sometimes it boils below the surface, but other times it erupts like Krakatoa.

TDS on Press Briefings

Jon Stewart takes us down memory lane and looks at the history of the press briefing.

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He's got the pecking order down. Good Looking TV types, the "goiter look" and lest we forget-the conservative gay hooker type. We see how the press is supposed to behave and then Jon illustrates the spin that the press secretary uses not to answer questions. He says it all with: "Lying is hard"

New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.

The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq.

The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient.

But over all, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon on the part of the Iraqi government, in terms of its ability to assert authority and to build the economy.

Together, the appraisals, which follow several other such warnings from officials in Washington and in the field, were much more pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush administration before the elections scheduled for Iraq next month, the officials said..........More

The CIA 'old guard' goes to war with Bush
By Phillip Sherwell in Washington

A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.

The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.

Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such "viciousness and vindictiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency.

John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: "When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequences."