Pass it on! Moveon.org pushing for 500,000 signatures on the Conyers letter today!

Look, I know that every reader of True Blue Liberal (except a couple of wingnuts and FBI spies) has already signed the Conyers Letter, but MoveOn has placed a mass mailing behind the drive to get 500,000 signatures on the letter today, so pass on the e-mail if you got it, or pass on this link:
http://www.moveonpac.org/tellthetruth/
At 12:15 est they have 181,389 signatures and they're being added fast.
Help spread the word!

(UPDATE: At 3:15pm est they're more than halfway there with 258,000 signatures, so they're receiving them at a rate of 25,000 signatures an hour! John Conyers' server was crashing under a much lighter load than that earlier in the week.)

The Next Fight (& A Caption Contest)

“There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.”

-- John R. Bolton, GWB's harebrained image of an
Ambassador to the United Nations

Who's he pointing at?
&What's he saying?

Here's a great reminder that The Downing Street Memo is not the only piece of evidence that US intelligence was "fixed" to match our war plans

PHXnews.com | From Richard Clarke: America's Own Downing Street Memo

Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan. --(CBS News, 3/21/04)

Also, the Democrats in Congress will be extremely derelict in their duties if they do not bring up the intelligence-twisting actions of John Bolton in his upcoming Senate confirmation debate, and tie those actions firmly to The Memo. The Downing Street Memo, if anything, is the simple straightforward summary by which a thousand other suspect actions can be framed. Where's the evidence of independent intelligence gathering that disproves or contradicts the observations in the memo? It starts to feel like this is another round between the true believers on both sides of the never-ending Evolution vs. Creation fight -- on one side there's a mountain of evidence and a theoretical structure to explain it; on the other side there's God (or at least the moron he talks to and uses to express his illogical and vengeful will on earth).

-TBL

Democracy For America is e-mailing this message about The Downing Street Memo this afternoon

They're sending an e-mail to this link with a facsimile of the full memo: Democracy For America : Downing Street Memo

Here's part of the text of their e-mail:

Read the memo for yourself -- the full-text is at the end of this email.

We all have to spread the word about the deceptions it reveals. Together, we can put the truth on our leaders' agenda.

But it's going to take a lot of work. That's why grassroots DFA groups across the country will be setting up tables, handing out copies, and asking Americans: have you read the memo?

When it comes to matters of war and peace, doesn't every American deserve the truth?

With TBL receiving e-mails about The Memo in the past week from MoveOn, DFA, and The Nation in my inboxes, the drive to publicize this smoking gun only seems to be increasing in speed and volume. I don't know about the other members of the Big Brass Alliance, but I feel proud to have played a small part in upping the pressure and the volume.

"Steve" asks Bush & Blair the big DSM question. Blair bullshits. Bush uh ah . . . "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power".

This excerpt from this afternoon's joint press conference is cut and pasted, without additions, deletions, added emphasis, or snarky asides (it wasn't easy), directly from the first official transcript at whitehouse.gov:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Steve.

Q Thank you, sir. On Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action. Is this an accurate reflection of what happened? Could both of you respond?

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Well, I can respond to that very easily. No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all. And let me remind you that that memorandum was written before we then went to the United Nations. Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me. And the fact is we decided to go to the United Nations and went through that process, which resulted in the November 2002 United Nations resolution, to give a final chance to Saddam Hussein to comply with international law.

He didn't do so. And that was the reason why we had to take military action.

But all the way through that period of time, we were trying to look for a way of managing to resolve this without conflict. As it happened, we weren't able to do that because -- as I think was very clear -- there was no way that Saddam Hussein was ever going to change the way that he worked, or the way that he acted.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I -- you know, I read kind of the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of his race. I'm not sure who "they dropped it out" is, but -- I'm not suggesting that you all dropped it out there. (Laughter.) And somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. There's nothing farther from the truth.

My conversation with the Prime Minister was, how could we do this peacefully, what could we do. And this meeting, evidently, that took place in London happened before we even went to the United Nations -- or I went to the United Nations. And so it's -- look, both us of didn't want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option. The consequences of committing the military are -- are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the President is to try to comfort families who've lost a loved one in combat. It's the last option that the President must have -- and it's the last option I know my friend had, as well.

And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a -- put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

I like that the whitehouse.gov transcriptionist put the "(Laughter)" tag in after Bush's first incoherent stumbles. But didn't George know this question was coming? Didn't they program an answer into the electronic box on his back? Isn't it embarassing that our President can't be as slimy and slick as their Prime Minister? And how long is it going to be before George calls on "Steve" again?

Just asking,
True Blue Liberal

TBL saw Democratic Undergound's Number 1 Conservative Idiot in person this morning (there were no crowds of Dean supporters around him!)

Click here and see how New Jersey Republicans find supporters: The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 200 - Democratic Underground.

In the past week I've seen 3 of the 7 candidates for the New Jersey Republican gubernatorial nomination in the flesh, Murphy & Forrester marching in a Memorial Day parade and Murphy & Schundler standing in the Hoboken train station. Their primary is today and my only regret is that only six of them can be losers. Brett Schundler may not be number one after the polls close tonight (the designated Republican sacrifice to Jon Corzine in November will probably be Doug Forrester), but I'm glad to see that Schundler was able to win the DU Number One Conservative Idiot title before his inevitable quick fade back into obscurity.

So what kind of crowd was around him at 7:45 this morning without help from Photoshop? It wasn't a crowd of enthusiatic Dean supporters. There were a few uniformed police and a couple of security types hovering (and probably a few more undercover), a young campaign worker trying to hand out literature and telling commuters, "Bret is right over there if you want to meet him!" and the man himself was standing alone as if surrounded by a force field that extended for 15 feet. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

--TBL

In case you missed this invitation on Sunday from the new NY Times Public Editor, Byron Calame

The New Public Editor:
Toward Greater Transparency -
New York Times, June 5, 2005:

"I also plan to make greater use of the Web. I intend to post more actual reader e-mails - with responses from Times editors and perhaps from me, if appropriate - on the Public Editor's Web Journal. My first commentary, posted there two weeks ago, questioned the Washington bureau's slowness in pursuing the significance of the so-called Downing Street memo on planning for the Iraq war. (My Web journal can be found at nytimes.com/byroncalame.)"

Let's keep on them until the Times and the rest remove the "so-called" prefix from the Downing Street Memo. Everyone knows that the only place to use the "so-called" epithet is before the term "liberal media."

--True Blue Liberal

Republicans and the Cheerleading Temperament

Have there been any serious published studies of this particularly American disorder of cheerleading and boosterism?

More importantly, are there drugs for its treatment?

If so, could this be why Republicans hate marijuana so much?

Just asking,
True Blue Liberal

Who needs Brylcreem?

Why post this?
Why not?

Get your free copy of the Quran from The Council on American-Islamic Relations. Give it a place of pride next to your Gideon Bible from Holiday Inn.

Have you requested your free Quran yet from The Council on American-Islamic Relations?