but 90 days ago, I wrote: "it's just going to keep getting harder for the Bush Apologista to continue to character assassinating the critics when they start popping up in the most unusual of places, including increasingly closer to the White House." Well, you can't get much closer than Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary from 2003 to 2006. Apparently, he's been having trouble sleeping at night. An excerpt, released from his upcoming book, by his publisher:

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.



"There was one problem. It was not true.



"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."

It's interesting how the wingnuttia desperately prevaricate whenever their flimsily-crafted reality is suddenly challenged by someone they perceived as being from their own side. The fact is, it's going to be getting harder for them. The Plame scandal is not going to go away as more people start to really understand the treasonous implications of it.



Here is what former president George Herbert Walker Bush said about this very act back in 1999, when he was making a speech at the CIA:

“I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

[video]



Little would he know that a few years later, his son would be one of those traitors.



Fixed: George HW Bush, not George W Bush said that, of course. George HW ran the CIA for a year during the Jimmy Carter administration, and George W. can't pronounce insidious.

Episode 2 way too short?







Gnome Quest 2: Episode 2

Because I see shit like this time and time again.







This is what conservatives on the popular Free Republic website did to Andrew Stephenson, a man who's work uncovering voter fraud in 2000, 2002, and 2004 led him to national recognition.



This is what happens when you have a group of morons who have been convinced of a bias in traditional journalism that they've detached themselves from mainstream reporting. Instead, they derive all their "facts" from media sources that are not only purely biased reporting, but eschew any attempt at journalistic standards. Conservative journalists don't really research facts, they self-referentiate amongst themselves, if at all. They cite fellow conservative publications who sometimes even cite them back, rather than going to the actual source. Lies become bigger, bolder, more incredible lies. They rarely publish corrections or admit errors when they are found wrong.



Basically, publishing bullshit is what they do. They lie about things Cindy Sheehan said, about Valerie Plame's covert CIA status, about John Kerry's war record, about global warming, about children's healthcare, about WMDs, about the troop surge, about "sactity" of marriage, about Bill Clinton's response to the U.S.S. Cole attack, and everything else. In a conservative press, truth only happens by luck but lies grow out of proportion. These self-referentiating lies circulate through the conservative press grapevine endlessly, growing bigger in a giant feedback loop of bullshit, because conservative journalists are lazy frauds and not one of them actually picks up a telephone to even verify a source.



And I ain't talking about how stupid conservative right-oh-sphere bloggers are. Leftie blogs are holding a contest to find the most outrageous examples, but there's far too many . This one is accusing Willy Nelson of making kids gay wins. Conservative media is junk food, making people who get their news from these sources less informed, according to a University of Maryland study.



And so, here we have one lie that went completely out of proportion, that this man was somehow faking his own cancer to steal money from donations, and so this group of conservative douchebags decide to viciously attack this dying man, manage to get his surgery canceled, his PayPal donation account frozen, stalked his hospital room, and continue to post completely stories that his condition is phony even after he has died. This is a man who worked hard to restore our democratic election system, something we all should be grateful of, whether conservative or liberal, and this is how he was treated to his dying day because one party has to win by cheating the system and pit Americans against Americans.

Eric Clapton jazz improv!



It's not playing as embed for some reason,



so here's Ozzy's guitarist Jake E. Lee:







StSaunders has lots more!

I totally didn't realize the Vintage Computer Festival 10 is happening this weekend in Mountain View. I might make a drive up for that. They are screening some interesting movies including one on the Scanimate. I missed it last year but here is about a hundred photos I took at VCF2005.