"When I first read John Kerry's October speech on Iraq, I knew it was a turning point. He spoke with the same unwavering voice -- truth speaking to power -- as he did when I first heard him speak out about the war in Vietnam in 1971. John Kerry got it right last month when he said, 'Asking tough questions isn't pessimism; it's patriotism' and then answered those questions by offering a detailed plan to get the troops home."

Why would Hart smear himself with Kerry's lame Iraq politics? Maybe it was that Kerry's e-mail list is somewhere around three million. It's understandable that a politician would want to tap that. But there's no excuse for saying peverse pep-talk nonsense, like this:

"When John Kerry called for accelerated training of Iraqi troops, greater international involvement, and improved reconstruction efforts, you amplified his voice."

OR:

"...I am confident about what the johnkerry.com community is sure to accomplish in the future."

Does it get any less authentic than that? What's the point of sounding like a jaded, Vicodin-addicted high school principle at commencement? Hart comes off as insincere about exiting Iraq, which totally collapses the point of his missive. Full text of Hart's email below.

Don't forget, he was Clinton's bag man.

She's got access to a national mass media apparatus, but where's her authentic support base online?

snip...

"Finally, there's Prop 73, which would require teenage girls to get consent from their parents before they could have an abortion. The plan is that 73 will do for Schwarzenegger -- who is ostensibly pro-choice -- what the 18 gay marriage amendments on state ballots did for George Bush in 2004; function as a blooming, fragrant rose that beckons Christian conservative bees to come and vote their Leviticus as they pollinate his corporate agenda."

read on...

Among the things I hadn't seen before:

-Fred Flights, an assistant to John Bolton, is a named name who could be indicted.

-Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been suggested as replacements for Dick Cheney.

-Colin Powell told John McCain he showed the infamous memo with Plame's identity on it two just two people; Dick Cheney and George Bush.

-Fitzgerald is looking at the precedent set from the indictment of Tricky Dick's veep Spiro Agnew to pursue against Cheney.

That's red meat folks.

Text of the e-mail below the fold:

And he's making four colossal arguments:

--It will take 10 years to clean up -- not rebuild -- New Orleans and the toxic waste that it rests in.

--Cleaning up New Orleans means pumping all the toxic waters in the Gulf of Mexico -- a given at this point -- and could effectively kill it, and the massive fishing industry it supports. He estimated that dealing with that will cost as much as Iraq has.

--The indviduals who clean up New Orleans face potentially deadly health risks, which are currently unspecified.

--Unspecified because the Bush administration has suppressed the release of EPA test results as well as intentionally conducted too few.

In addition, here are two key quotes from the interviews:

From Air America:

HOST: So, Hugh Kauffman, Senior Policy Analyst from the EPA, you're telling me they have that information. The EPA office in Louisiana has that information, and you are absolutely sure that that information is horrendous, but they are keeping it under lock and key, because they don't want the people to know the truth of what's really going on down there on a toxic level?

HUGH: That's correct. And that's why the Society of Environmental Journalists are suing under the Freedom of Information act to try and get that information.

HOST: So the government is actively lying to the people about what's going on there, and that is their policy now.

HUGH: That's the policy as of last night at eleven o'clock when I went to sleep.

From Living on Earth:

Host:  Do we face the kind of scenario here that we had [on 9/11] if officials are not straight with people in Louisiana about the extent of contamination from this?

Kaufman: Well, I hope not. I did the investigation. At the time of 9/11 I was the chief investigator for EPA's ombudsman. And so I investigated that case at the request of Congress, and found that EPA lied to the public at the direction of the White House about those contaminants. And they botched the remediation, and that's why you have over 75 percent of the response workers very sick now and they're starting to die off.

The implications of this are enormous. It means we are in phase one of a major environmental disaster, the details of which are being suppressed by our government. The extent to which this is a health risk is also totally indeterminate.

So it's just bloody silly to talk about the reconstruction of the toxic waste cesspool formerly known as New Orleans at this juncture. There's a major scandal going on right now, live and in action, as big as the Bayou.

I loathe the reactionary moralizing on popular culture we've been submitted to over the past 20 years by the likes of Tipper, Joementum, and yes, Hillary Clinton.

Clinton's posturing on the Grand Theft Auto secret code feature -- which lets the player in on a fairly banal implied sex scene -- was to do this: "institute a financial penalty for retailers who fail to enforce the video manufacturers' voluntary ratings system rules. It would prohibit the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors and put in place a $5,000 penalty for those who violate the law."

Here's the FU back from the game industry exec, a piece of vicious, but civilized retort:

"Sen. Clinton is a fine lawyer and undoubtedly knows that her proposal is unconstitutional," he said in a statement. "The senator's proposal is politically savvy but will do nothing to help parents make informed choices about the video games their children play. In fact, by turning the voluntary video game ratings system into a cudgel of government censorship, Sen. Clinton's proposal ironically would likely lead to the abandonment of the ratings system."

I had forgotten about this: