Rising Hegemon: Another endorsement...

Steve Audio: More Rethuglican 'broken government' negligence. People, it's not mere incompetence, it's their ideology.

the field negro: Toby, I think you have a hit on your hands

Sadly, No! You probably remember that fringe-dweller's favorite, The Clinton Body Count. And if you're on the wingnuttiest email lists, you've been warned about the Obama Death List. Now comes the McCain - Obama Death List, a partial list of deaths of persons connected to both John NMA McCain and Barack HUSSEIN Obama during their time as presidential hopefuls in the United States.

Susie Bright's Journal: Going Off The Rails

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: 2 Political Junkies, Rustbelt Intellectual, Cagle's Cartoon BLog, Guys From Area 51

Chalk this up as a win for Deborah Shank and decency... props to the blogoshere and Keith Olbermann, who hammered Wal-Mart all last week as his "Worst Person" for their shameful treatment of a former employee. We've been exposing this horrendous story for a while now.

CNN: (h/t Andy K & Dr. Hussein Matt)

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) is dropping a controversial effort to collect more than $400,000 in health-care reimbursement from a former employee who suffered brain damage in a traffic accident.

The world's largest retailer said in a letter to the family of
Deborah Shank it will not seek to collect money the Shanks won in an injury lawsuit against a trucking company for the accident.

Whatever explains Wal-Mart's change of heart, this is great news for Mrs. Shank.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

Sen. Lindsey Graham, newly back from his Iraq trip with BFF John McCain, appeared on Face The Nation to reiterate that really, the surge is working. No, I'm serious. It really has.

But the big picture for me is I’m incredibly pleased with the performance of our troops and Gen. Petraeus. On the political front, we’ve had the de-Ba’athification law passed. What does that mean? That means members of the Ba’ath party, who ruled the country under Saddam Hussein are now allowed to get some of their jobs back. That means the Shi’a and Kurds are saying to the Sunnis, ‘come back in and help us run the country.’ They passed a $48 billion budget, where every group in Iraq gets to share the oil resources. There was an amnesty law telling the prisoners in Iraq that we’re going to let some of you go…go back home, stop fighting, help build the new Iraq and most important of all we’re going to have provincial elections in October. The Sunnis boycotted the election in 2005, and everywhere I went in Anbar Province the Sunnis are ready to vote and be part of democracy.

Yup, that looks really rosy, doesn't it? As long as you don't follow the links.

I have no idea where John Hussein Kennedy's lapel pin is or why there is no flag behind him, sorry.

Coming next Wednesday, March 26 to a theatre near you, a free simulcast featuring Michael J. Fox and Air America's Marc Maron, "Everything you always wanted to know about the separation of Church and State, but were afraid to ask." Cities are listed here.

On topic, Blog Against Theocracy is this weekend. Open thread below...

Anybody surprised by this?

ABC News:

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online.

Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."

Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."

ABC News obtained the comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism on Tuesday. Read the report's executive summary HERE.

The study, which was due to be released Wednesday, found no "smoking gun" or any evidence of a direct connection between Saddam's Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist organization.

The report is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.

Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.

UPDATE: According to ABC News, "[The report] won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online."

According to our great C&L commenters, it can be found here.

Pissedonpolitics.com: "The Militant Islamic Bush Cheney Administration" shows Pickles in her terr'ist outfit and Dubya's face worn reverently on the hindquarters of brown people. On topic, many of us bloggers are following Sully's lead in taking up the middle name of "Hussein" just for fun. (h/t Uncommon Sense). Signed, Blue Hussein Gal.

Open Thread below.

AttyTood:

As regular readers know, Attytood has been on the warpath urging the authorities in Iraq, under the thumb of the American military, to give Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Bilal Hussein a real day in court...or set him free. Our fear is that -- before broader awareness of the Hussein case mounts -- he will be found guilty in a kangaroo court, without the kind of due process that Americans would expect and that you'd think would be part of that "freedom" package that we delivered to Iraq:

Those worst fears are coming true, of course. Harper's magazine has the inside scoop. For example:

-- The Iraqi judge is also allowing the U.S. military to present evidence by witnesses through remote television hook-ups from undisclosed locations. This is done particularly to be sure that Bilal Hussein would not be able to cross-examine any witnesses.

-- The Pentagon was particularly concerned about the prospect of Bilal Hussein getting effective defense from his lawyer, former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe. The judge was told to refuse to allow Bilal Hussein’s U.S. lawyer to participate in the case. The judge accepted this advice. Consequently, the U.S. military has a five-man team to press its case, but Bilal Hussein’s lawyer is silenced and not permitted to participate–and all of this has occurred as a result of U.S. Government intervention with the court. The irony of course is that under Iraqi law, the U.S. military has no authority or right to appear and prosecute, but Bilal Hussein’s chosen counsel has an absolute right.

There's a lot of good (as in "interesting," not as in "positive") stuff here, including confirmation that the military is using friendly right-wing bloggers to bypass the tradtional media. Reading this, there is little doubt that this award-winning journalist -- who risked his life to bring images from Iraq's front line to the world and is greatly admired by those who've worked with him, like my Daily News colleague Jim MacMillan -- will be found guilty by this kangaroo court and sent away for a long time. It's frustrating. If the American and Iraqi authorities have real evidence that Bilal Hussein is a terrorist, it should be presented in a fair and open courtroom.

Here's something else that's even more maddening -- America's journalistic community is not stepping forward to try to stop this disgrace from happening. Read on...

Continuing with my recognition of the intrepid bloggers who filled in so ably while I was away...
Politics in the Zeros: Money for nothin', chicks for free

Lance Mannion: If Democrats think that Hussein and Muslim and madrassa and black are dirty words, just think what fun the Republicans are going to have with them.

Shakesville: Liss has some reading recommendations.

The Largest Minority: The Palestinians are still under occupation, so throwing $7 billion at the corrupt Fatah government won't change anything.

Over at Steve Audio's place, we're reminded it's not just the week before Christmas.

Media Bloodhound: Big news for democracy aint big news at the Paper of Record.

The redoubtable Blue Gal--the blogosphere's answer to Chone Figgins--shares about her breakfast with Santa and 71 Kindergarten kids.

Tisk, tisk, tisk...The NRO tried a Friday night document dump to gloss over their own reporting scandal:

Dumped into the Friday afternoon cycle is this cryptic post on National Review Online from editor Kathryn Jean Lopez concerning material that appeared on their military blog, preposterously named "The Tank". The issue is that one of the bloggers on The Tank, W. Thomas Smith, was forced to acknowledge that his accounts of witnessing various Hezbollah activities were incomplete: giving the impression of being eye-witness accounts, but in fact cobbled together from eye-witness accounts, extrapolations, assumptions, and other unspecified sources' accounts of what they had seen...

This is the kind of "reporting" that has launched a thousand right-wing "outrages" when its subject matter is insufficiently good news from Iraq (e.g. Bilal Hussein). But even stranger than the quasi-apology is Smith's defence of his methods and actions in "reporting" on Hezbollah --read on

(h/t via Thers@Atrios)

Will Howard Kurtz check into this? I'm sure Malkin and her crew are poised to pounce on the NRO, aren't they?

And then there's this...

Kenner's response to the NRO spin can be read here. My summary of the charges here. The alleged factual inaccuracy - reporting 4,000 Hezbollah gunmen when they didn't exist - dwarfs any alleged incident Beauchamp reported for TNR.

Will Bunch thinks so:

A publication for photojournalists called Photo District News has been covering the heck out of the Bilal Hussein situation, and they ran a long and interesting piece last night entitled "The Man from Fallujah." Overall, it's a good read for anyone who's been following the story, but I found this piece of the saga especially troubling.

Did an anonymous blogger some 11,000 miles removed from the front lines stir up the probe of the imprisoned AP photographer?

Sure sounds like "Rusty" played a key role here in all of this:[..]

Last week, The Jawa Report said a military source e-mailed to thank the blog for helping in the case against Bilal Hussein. The source told the blog he was an investigator at Abu Ghraib prison who recognized Hussein (who was held there for a time) as the much-criticized AP photographer, and notified his superiors.

In an e-mail interview, the blogger known as Rusty (who refused to give any details identifying himself) told PDN why he initially thought Hussein's work was so suspicious. He said Hussein was producing photographs of two particular insurgent groups in Fallujah, the Army of Ansar al Sunnah and Tawid wal Jihad, or al-Qeada in Iraq.

"The groups, at the time, routinely murdered any one they believed to be a 'collaborater' or 'spy'. It was also when any foreigner they found they held hostage and then beheaded," the blogger wrote. "Yet Hussein was given free access."