Have a nice wallow...;) beats being a sell out! Any day of the week!

    

Off Ya Face Henry the Nose goes for a little stroll with his eyeballs – he has a funny scripted show communicated via radio microphone. The show includes a sneezing routine complete with hanky, bogeys and audience participation. This was a huge success at the Easter Show 2003 and Penrith Australia Day Regatta 2003.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Editor and Publisher has a piece up on ways in which McClatchy – formerly Knight-Ridder – has been shut out for their critical coverage of the Iraq War… something the pork chops – those would be the electeds on the Hill – don’t want to have happen to them.  No Sireee!

“It is because our coverage of Iraq policy has been quite critical,” Walcott told E&P. He added, “I think the idea of public officials barring coverage by people they’ve decided they don’t like is at best unprofessional, at worst undemocratic and petty.”

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called such assertions “absurd,” adding, “There is no basis of fact for that allegation. It is not true. There are always more people who would like to travel with the secretary than seats available.”

Jonathan Landay, a former Pentagon correspondent and one of the co-authors of McClatchy’s pre-war coverage, said he last traveled on the plane with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 to Istanbul, Turkey, for a NATO economic summit. Since then, he says, none of McClatchy’s people have flown. “It is unusual because we get aboard about two out of three trips [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice makes,” Landay said. “They have a different policy at the Pentagon. We are definitely being discriminated against.”

Drew Brown, who covered the Pentagon on several occasions between 2002 and 2007 before leaving McClatchy for Stars and Stripes, claimed he was never allowed to travel with Rumsfeld or current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who took over several months ago. “I asked a couple of times, and they gave me a non-committal answer,” Brown said. “The Department of Defense took the outlets they were able to influence, the wire [services] and the big newspapers. I don’t think they really care about anyone outside the Washington Beltway.”

Nancy Youssef, a former McClatchy Baghdad bureau chief who took over the Pentagon beat April 9, said Gates has been on four trips since she arrived and she has been denied access to all of them. “They just sort of brushed it off,” she said. “I bring it up every time, and every time it doesn’t happen.”

Too right, all about access.  8)

140 in the House and a handful… less than the fingers on both hands, in the Senate.

Yes!  Barney to the Senate!  By WH acclamation!  Why not.  He has a pulse. He’ll do.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

UPDATE,  2:07 AM

Arthur SIlber packs a wallop…  and scores a bulls eye:

[S]o to Kos, Joan Walsh (who believes that Michael Tomasky’s analysis — this analysis — is “smart”), and everyone else who mouths the same empty platitudes, the identical fundamentally false and thoroughly conventional phrases that spring from a perspective drenched in “American exceptionalism,” which views the United States as the highest possible point of human development and Americans as uniquely good and virtuous in the entire span of history, and which reduces all other peoples to fifth-rate bit players in an increasingly desperate global drama, I have this to say:

THIS IS NOT PRIMARILY, OR MOST IMPORTANTLY, OR IN ANY SIGNIFICANT WAY ABOUT THE MISERABLE, REPELLENT CALCULATIONS OF DOMESTIC POLITICS, OR ABOUT YOU OR ABOUT US, YOU NEUROTICALLY SELF-ABSORBED, IGNORANT DUMB FUCKS.

That was very rude. Extraordinarily rude. Yes, indeed it was.

On some occasions, there is just no other accurate way to address certain people.

**************************************************

About these ads