First Draft: How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned.

Our Future: The Department of Defense (DOD) now employs contractors to keep contractors in check in Iraq, under a new framework for war industry management solidified last month.

No Comment: Where's the Maher Arar report?

The KC Blue Blog: Attention values voters! Yet another Republican child molester added to the endless list of GOP criminals. Maybe asshats like this guy are part of the problem?

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis...One of the "smartest people" Fareed Zakaria knows...The incredible, shrinking newspapers...Hatred for sale...The press takes a look at the Strange World of Black People...Millionaire pundit values...Video and transcript of E&P's Greg Mitchell on Moyers last night...Rush says McSame isn't a real man...NPR's lazy, clueless coverage of Gitmo trials...Speaking of clueless coverage...

Don Siegelman sat down with Air America's Thom Hartmann yesterday and made very specific allegations of election fraud against Karl Rove and the Bush administration not covered in his interview on 60 Minutes. (h/t S for audio)

(37 minutes)

[Thom Hartmann]: Right. Now, in our conversation you have suggested that the original election that you lost to Bob Riley by a few thousand votes in the middle of the night may have been stolen. That is a part of the story that has been treated as if it was radioactive by the corporate press. It has, to the best of my knowledge, I have never heard that in any of the official corporate news reports. Have you asserted that before, have you been saying this all along, or is this...

[Don Siegelman]: Well yes, we have been saying it, we have been saying it since the night of the election. I mean, we won the election, the votes were counted and were declared and then in one county which is controlled by Republicans the, after midnight when everybody went home, when the poll workers were sent home, when the media was gone, they decided to electronically recount these votes and shifted the votes and certified the vote illegally the next day. The, interestingly, Karl Rove's client sepped in, the attorney general stepped in and said, 'if anybody tries to hand count these votes we're going to put them in jail'. We initially had a green light from the local Republicans in this one area that we could come in and hand count these ballots where the electronic shift occurred.[..]

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On his new show, Verdict, Dan Abrams celebrates the court reversal on hearing Don Siegelman's appeal and his subsequent release from prison in Alabama on Friday.

Showing that he is undaunted by his time in prison, Siegelman apparently spoke to Dan Abrams by cell phone on his drive home and fingered Karl Rove as the man behind this political hit job. This appeal should be something to watch to see if Bush's Brain actually gets held accountable.

C&L Contributer Heather has put a longer version of Abrams' segment on Siegelman, with Rep. Artur Davis and journalist Scott Horton of Harper's up on YouTube.

Legal Schnauzer (h/t Scarce) brings up a point that should convince you of the power of the larger blogging community and grassroots efforts to effect change:

Siegelman's release is a testament to the power of alternative media. Without the work of blogger/journalists like Scott Horton of Harper's, Glynn Wilson of Locust Fork News, and Larisa Alexandrovna of at-Largely/Raw Story/Huffington Post/Hustler, Siegelman would have little hope of being released any time soon. Without the work of Pam Miles and her e-mail listees, Siegelman would have remained in prison for the foreseeable future. It's impossible to overstate the impact of CBS and its 60 Minutes story on the Siegelman case. But that "old media" story would not have happened without the work of folks working in the "new media."

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DailyKos:

All roads lead to Rove. That was the message scrawled as an afterthought in the lower left-hand corner of the envelope I received in yesterday’s mail. It contained a letter from an old and dear friend of mine. His name is Don Siegelman. He is the former governor of Alabama and he is being held as a political prisoner of the Bush administration in a Federal prison in Louisiana.
They don’t allow Don the luxury of stationary so he must write his letters on whatever he can find. He wrote me on a xeroxed article he wanted me to see. [..]
When I first heard of Don being prosecuted for corruption my heart sank. I didn’t know what to think. It had been years since we’d spoken and the press made it sound awful for Don (what else?). Of course I had no idea what was really going on. Now that I do I am horrified...and furious.

Don is a formidable force in Alabama politics. His friends are loyal and his supporters enthusiastic. They re-elected him Governor in the midst of a bogus corruption trial engineered by the Bush Justice Department at the behest of Karl Rove who takes orders from you-know-who. Don campaigned for re-election throughout the early phases of the trial. On election night he was declared the winner, but Karl Rove’s minions stole the election overnight by manipulating the ballots in Baldwin County. It was classic Rovian/Republican election theft. They did it with computers and electronic voting machines. Don went to bed the re-elected Governor of Alabama, and woke up an unemployed defendant. [..]
Something that has not been reported is that they have been physically beating Don. I don’t know the extent of his injuries or exactly how many times it has happened – but it has been multiple times.
There are no words for the fury I feel. This is an outrage. And it is the most un-American thing I have ever heard. I cry bitter tears of frustration and rage.

Please everyone. We have to help Don, and we have to crush these thugs and put them out of the business of perverting our democracy. We must investigate and prosecute the responsible parties, not for political reasons, but to actually serve the interest of justice. The cause of justice calls upon us to hold these criminals accountable. We must bring them to justice and stop such travesties from ever again happening in our United States of America.

A new review of evidence suggests that an aligned group of Republican interests were pressing for -- and seeking to profit financially from -- the trial of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman on charges of bribery, according to Sam Stein of HuffPo.

Please contact Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairmen of their respective Judiciary committees and ask them to appoint an Independent Investigator. You can also donate to Siegelman's Defense Fund.

To be sure, the real outrage in the scandal surrounding trumped up charges against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) are the charges themselves. Local Republican officials, in apparent conjunction with Karl Rove, railroaded a sitting governor because he was a Democrat. It was political corruption at its most pernicious.

But if we also take a moment to consider the Alabama media, the decisions of WHNT, the CBS affiliate in northern Alabama, are almost comical in their ineptitude.

In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: “Sorry, Cable Trouble.” Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a “60 minutes” segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama’s former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year.

The report presented new evidence that the charges against Mr. Siegelman may have been concocted by politically motivated Republican prosecutors — and orchestrated by Karl Rove. Unfortunately, WHNT had “technical problems” that prevented it from broadcasting a segment (the problems were resolved in time for the next part of the show) that many residents of Alabama would no doubt have found quite interesting.

After initially blaming the glitch on CBS in New York, the affiliate said it learned “upon investigation,” and following a rebuke from the network, that “the problem was on our end.” It re-broadcast the segment at 10 p.m., pitting it against the Academy Awards on rival ABC, before Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar. As public criticism grew, it ran it again at 6 p.m. on Monday.

WHNT’s president and general manager assured viewers that “there was no intent whatsoever to keep anyone from seeing the broadcast.”

No, of course not, it was only the most remarkable set of coincidences in modern broadcast history.

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This story just reeks of propaganda and a sneaky agenda. The article mentions that these consultants were paid in part from private donations, and it would be interesting to know just who that is, because I have a feeling that would make clear the agenda working here.

I just hate how fundamentally dishonest this is with the people who will likely be risking their lives in the Middle East in the near future. I know Karl Rove tried to make it an insult that liberals wanted to "understand the terrorists", but personally, I find trying to lie to these students and make it harder for them to understand far more insulting.

NY Times: (reg. req'd)

The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.[..]

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Balkinization: AG Mukasey is as bad as Gonzo

The Arabist: Speaking of torture...

Secrecy News: The head of the 9/11 Commission was in frequent contact with Karl Rove and other Bushistas during the 20 month "investigation."

TPMmuckraker: Everything gets more complicated in the Bush Administration's hall of mirrors; it's all pots and kettles.

Making Light: Republicans in trouble...

HOLY CRAP: The Interfaith Alliance media roundup...The Sodfather, guru of doo doo..When authoritarians cry 'censorship'...888? awe-fully close to 666, isn't it?...Do we really care what the Pope says anymore?..."Kissing the Leper"...On the symbolism of Christian Nationalism...Is Huck the rightwing savior?...Jesus was a Liberal

Here we go again with the missing emails. Just this Tuesday a judge ordered the White House to come clean on its never-ending scandal over something like 10 million missing emails - including 4 years worth deleted by Karl Rove - and now we've got Missouri Governor Matt Blunt being accused of more of the same:

KC Prime Buzz: The former deputy legal counsel to Gov. Matt Blunt sued the governor and four of his top aides Wednesday, alleging a wide-ranging conspiracy to cover up the administration’s activities.

The suit, filed in Jackson County Circuit Court, describes schemes within the governor’s office to destroy public documents, to evade the state Sunshine law by sending text messages on personal Blackberrys and to fire a long-time state employee for political reasons. ...

h/t to Jamie who adds: "Can we label the entire Republican Party as organized crime yet?"

Good morning. I'm Lance Mannion and I can get it for you wholesale. Just show up at the back of the warehouse Saturday afternoon. Bring cash. And remember, we don't know each other. I'm Mr Clements and if the guy at the desk asks, you're a friend of Pete's.

Sorry. I shouldn't goof around like that. I'm just the guest host for this week's blog round up, after all. I don't goof around like that on my own blog. At my place we're very serious, my commenters and I. It's all high-minded discussions about Art, and Film, and the Meaning of Life.

The gang at Crooked Timber comes to my blog to have their questions answered and they go home, bewildered and ashamed of their own ignorance, to tear up their diplomas and return their Ph.D.'s.

Speaking of Crooked Timber, John Quiggin is saying over there that it's time to dive back down the memory hole and remember that the looting of Iraq was a part of the original plan.

The New York Times scoops the world on this one: A lot of Republicans don't plan to vote for Hillary Clinton! That comes via Oliver Willis. Also Oliver admits that when forced to choose between a real science guy and a well-known conservative idiot, he reflexively sides with the real science guy. Go figure.

Avedon Carol says that Venezuela is looking a lot more like a democracy than some other countries she could name.

The Armchair Generalist follows up on a story that I missed the first go-round, about a couple of characters who got caught trying to smuggle a pound of uranium through Hungary. Story had the makings of a great thriller, says the Generalist, except for one thing. The uranium turns out not to have been weapons grade material.

Ben Cohen of the Daily Banter reports that Karl Rove is offering campaign advice to Barack Obama and it turns out, says Ben, that advice is not half-bad.

And mystery writer Laura Lippman has been at work copy editing her latest novel and reports on the quotidian details of the process, except that she can't use the word, quotidian, because one of the things she found out while reading her own work is that she overuses it and it has to go, along with via and literally and the extra e that does not belong in acknowledgment.

Done for today. Send tips and suggestions to lance AT lancemannion DOT com. And remember. The loading dock. Saturday. Act casual. And wear a necktie so I'll know you.

"One of You Will Betray Conservatism" by Darkblack. Click image for larger, which shows, left to right, and according to the artist, "keeping in mind that they are not necessarily matched up to any disciple's biblical personality description": John Snow / Alberto Gonzales / John Bolton / Steven Hadley / Scooter Libby / Donald Rumsfeld / George W. Bush / Dick Cheney / Josh Bolton / Michael Chertoff / Condoleeza Rice / Karl Rove / and Ari Fleisher.

Open thread below, with the hopes that William Donohue gets a big ol' gander at this one.