This is not going to sit well with the party elders. According to right wing "blogger," Debbie Schlussel, Senator John McCain has removed Ali Jawad, a businessman who was convicted of mail and insurance fraud, from the Finance Committee of his Michigan campaign. Schlussel also claims (with no links or proof offered) Jawad has strong ties to Hezbollah:

And, unlike the Barack Obama who clings to anti-Semites and terrorism supporters, John McCain did the right thing: He dumped Ali Jawad--an open Hezbollah supporter and key agent of the terrorist group in the Detroit area. Jawad is also a federal insurance fraud convict. Read on... (warning: low intelligence, high-froth link)

You would think a hardcore xenophobe like Debbie would wish nothing but pain and scorn upon the aging Senator, but in fact, she does just the opposite. According to her, dumping a known fraud who supposedly has ties to Hezbollah from his campaign proves McCain is a Maverick:

I congratulate John McCain and his campaign because they proved that McCain truly is a maverick and independent of the Republican establishment who brought Mr. Jawad to his campaign.

Riiiight. Deb wasn't the only right winger to heap praise on McCain, Little Green Footballs got into the act;

Big LGF kudos to John McCain for dumping an open Hizballah supporter from his Michigan Finance Committee.

Shouldn't they be calling for his deportation or worse? I don't get it.

Nikke Finke:

Well, one insider says she was booked on Keith Olberman and Morning Joe to talk about her tome -- and then unbooked. "These are shows that call her regularly to come on. And then the word came from on high that she had to be cancelled."

Brave New Films:

It seems that Arianna Huffington has run up against the impenetrable wall that is Tim Russert's ego. Huffington, who is currently on tour for her new book Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, will be appearing on CNN, ABC, and CBS. She had been booked on Morning Joe and Countdown with Keith Olbermann as well, but those bookings were suddenly and inexplicably cancelled.

NBC confirmed that Huffington wouldn't be booked on any NBC-affiliated show to promote her book, but refused to explain why. Huffington's people say that this is Tim Russert's doing, that Russert is out for revenge because Huffington called him a "conventional wisdom zombie" in her book and devoted seven pages to faulting Russert for allowing his Meet the Press guests to go unchallenged (not to mention HuffPo's RussertWatch).

Oh, did the poor widdle WATB get his feelings hurt? Or were Arianna's words just a little too close for comfort?

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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(h/t Scarce)

This is video from last year when Rep. Henry Waxman asked Doan to resign.

The Politico:

Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, was forced to offer her resignation tonight, according to an e-mail she sent out this evening.

Doan was appointed in late May, 2006, becoming the first woman to serve as GSA Administrator. With 12,000 empioyees and a $20 billion annual budget, GSA has responsibilty for overseeing the thousands of building and properties owned by the federal government.

Doan became the subject of congressional scrutiny last year for allegedly using GSA to help Republican lawmakers win re-election. Doan denied the allegation, but her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was disastrous. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, called on Doan to resign over the allegations, but Doan refused to do so. Read on...

Doan was forced to go kicking and screaming, like most Bushies do. The corruption became so ingrained into the fabric of the Bush administration to the point where, I believe, these people actually didn't think they were doing anything wrong, or they just didn't care because everyone was getting in on the act. Either way, it really makes no difference -- it's just another GOP operative rat swept off the deck of the Titanic. More from TPM...

The Pew Research Center’s latest report notes, “Trends in the opinions of America’s youngest voters are often a barometer of shifting political winds.” If so, the winds are at Democrats’ backs, and will be for a quite a while. While young people shifted to the Democratic Party a bit in the 1990s, the bottom fell out for the GOP and younger voters during Bush’s presidency.

In 1992, Republicans enjoyed a slight edge in party identification among 18-29 year olds, 47% to 46%. Four years later, Democrats claimed a six-point edge, 50% to 44%. By the time of the 2000 election, Democrats’ lead had expanded slightly to eight points, 49% to 41%.

And voters under the age of 30 have been making a beeline from the Republican Party ever since. In 2004, Democrats’ lead among young voters’ party ID expanded to 11 points, 51% to 40%. And in 2008, the margin became a landslide — Democrats 58%, Republicans 33%.

What’s striking is not just the one-sided nature of young voters’ preferences, but the speed with which the change occurred. As recently as the 2002 midterms, voters aged 18 to 29 split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. In the 2006 midterms, they backed Democrats, 63% to 33%. Between 2004 and 2008, the party ID shift has more than doubled in Dems’ direction.

The change is also broadly based. From the Pew report:

In fact, the Democrats’ advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP — making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.

While more women voters in every age group affiliate with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP, the gap is particularly striking among young women voters; more than twice as many women voters under age 30 identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party as favor the Republican Party (63% vs. 28%).

Talk about your emerging Democratic majority.

On FOX News today, host Jon Scott followed up on a report that Secretary Gates is sending another carrier to the Gulf to serve as a "reminder" -- not an "escalation" -- to the Iranians by bringing in retired Special Forces Commander Tim Haake to comment. After Scott asks "why don't we just blow those little speed boats out of the water," Haake appears to conflate the Iranian boats with the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which was also committed by small watercraft, but had nothing to do whatsoever with the Iranians.

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Whether or not you believe the conflation was intentional and explicit, I think the clip speaks to a larger point. It's amazing that the FOX host can ask so flippantly "why don't we just blow those little speed boats out of the water"?

It's like saying "why don't we commit an act of war against Iran"?

It really goes to the heart of why our foreign policy is so screwed up. We station warships and hundreds of thousands of troops in other people's backyards and then threaten to attack them if they dare get close. Contrary to what many believe, we don't own the world. And idiots like this FOX host seem to think that there's no big deal with policing the world, "blowing out of the water" those pesky Iranians if they dare patrol their own neighborhood. Imagine if an Iranian news show was talking so openly about blowing up American ships. It would be treated as a full blown declaration of war.

And I'm sure that second carrier Secretary Gates sent to the Gulf as a "reminder" doesn't rattle the Iranians and increase tensions at all.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on the Daily Show Tuesday and was grilled by Jon Stewart about the media double standard when it comes to left-wing and right-wing religious figures, and the free pass given to McCain.

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Stewart: "John McCain approached Hagee for his endorsement...Falwell and Robertson said 9/11 was because we secularized our culture, yet they're still allowed to play the game. Don't you find that surprising?"

PERRspectives looks at the double standard in the media between Hagee and Wright.

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
A Citizen’s Call To Action

By Naomi Wolf

Fascism: Fast and furious in ten historic steps.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

Naomi Wolf says: Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps.

In the true spirit of Thomas Paine, Wolf takes her slender pamphlet/book (155 pages) to the streets of America. Our job is to read it, write about it and Revere it. Ride through the towns across the land yelling: “The fascists are coming. The fascists are coming.”

That is, if it isn’t too late.

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It's like Walter Reed all over again. The US defense budget last year was a staggering $439.3 billion dollars. Can't we spare a few bucks to ensure our soldiers don't have to live in such horrendous conditions? Magnetic yellow ribbons and flag lapel pins aside, "supporting the troops" means actually caring about them. Not only when they're off fighting your wars, but also when they come back. Kudos to the understandably outraged father who exposed the story -- via YouTube, no less.

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CNN:

The U.S. military is promising action to address conditions in a barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after a soldier's father posted images on YouTube showing a building that he said "should be condemned."

"This is embarrassing. It's disgusting. It makes me mad as hell," Ed Frawley said of the building where his son, Sgt. Jeff Frawley, had to live upon his return this month from a 15-month deployment to Afghanistan.

Frawley's 10-minute video shows still photos from throughout the building, which appears to be falling apart and filled with mold and rust.

Brandon Friedman at VetVoice has more...

On the same day he trashed The New York Times on his blog for covering petty and completely meaningless tabloid stories (and nominated Peggy Noonan for a Pulitzer Prize), NBC's Brian Williams runs a 2+ minute "report" on the latest "controversy" surrounding teen superstar Miley Cyrus and the pictures Annie Leibovitz took of her for Vanity Fair magazine.

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MediaBloodhound notes that Williams spent almost twice as much time on this nonsense than he did on the landmark Supreme Court voting rights case decided yesterday.

What's more, Williams and NBC poorly handled those eighty whole seconds they allocated to the Supreme Court ruling on voter IDs. They not only failed to present one dissenting viewpoint - whether from a Supreme Court Justice, legal scholar, civil rights lawyer or voters in Indiana - but also to point out how this ruling will impact the upcoming primary in Indiana, where, as the Associated Press reported yesterday, "more than 20 percent of black voters do not have access to a valid photo ID."

Glenn wants to know, What Liberal Media?

C&L's Jamie Holly weighs in:

I think the ones who look at that picture as sexual are the ones we should be concerned about. Of course Drudge had this headline Sunday night:

UPDATE: Glenn has a "response" from Brian Williams to the Pentagon propaganda story, something Williams and the entire elite media has refused to cover.

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