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Project for the Old American Century

Meria Heller
Tuesday, July 31st, the Meria Show begins it’s 8TH year on the net! 8 years of fabulous interviews with the best people on the Planet, real news, real views and lots more coming. This anniversary to celebrate 8 yrs of podcasting, Meria will make her special interview available at the free show link (as well as subscription server) for 8 hours - 11am Pacific to 7 pm Pacific. Her special guest is Jeane Palfrey - the “DC Madam”

Conservatives Refuse To Appear On Fox News To Publicly Defend Gonzales
On Fox News Sunday this morning, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) refused to defend Attorney General Alberto Gonzales against accusations that he may have perjured himself before Congress. “It’s very damaging…we badly need an attorney general who is above any question,” said Gingrich.
Click through to watch the video.

A bogus strory
[Saturday]’s UK Telegraph carried a story by Damien McElroy headlined “Iraqi Leader Tells Bush: Get Petraeus Out,” in which he alleged that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and commander of US forces in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus had stand-up shouting matches about strategy… Here is what Col. Steven Boylan, chief public affairs officer for Multi-National Force-Iraq told this writer on the record in an e-mail: “Gen Petraeus and the Prime Minister have never had a stand-up shouting match. This is a totally fabricated story.”

MTP: Harwood Likens Hillary’s Cleavage To Barry Bond’s Doping
Never mind that we’re involved in an unwinnable quagmire costing the country thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Never mind that we have an administration that is actively obstructing justice and has politicized nearly every department of government. Never mind that we have millions of people in this country living below the poverty level in the “richest country on Earth”. The thing that is REALLY important is that the female Democratic presidential contender has (*gasp*) BREASTS, and she wore a blouse one day that (*double gasp*) revealed ever-so-slightly that she is in possession of said breasts. Of course, for John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal, Hillary’s blouse was a calculated move…

Strike Up The Band
On the Stephanopoulos bobble head roundtable [Sunday] morning, Cokie Roberts raised the baton and started the drumbeat: the Democrats risk moving waaaaay too far to the left and that is going to be a biiiiig problem for them “just like it was in Vietnam.” Yes, she said it out loud. And David Gergen agreed whole heartedly. Does anyone recall these gasbags saying that Bush was moving so far to the right with his monarchic, fundamentalist, shock and awe presidency that it was going to be a biiiig problem for them?

On Chris Matthews Show, Borger falsely suggested Democratic Iraq proposals involve “withdraw[ing]” all troops “overnight”
[U.S. News & World Report columnist Gloria] Borger offered no examples of a leading Democrat who wants to immediately withdraw all troops from Iraq. To the contrary, the withdrawal proposal recently supported by Senate Democrats would have reduced troop levels in Iraq over the next nine months and would have retained residual forces in Iraq to conduct limited operations.

MSNBC graphic, report conflated “Al Qaeda” and “Al Qaeda in Iraq”
[I]n asserting that the U.S. military in Iraq is fighting Al Qaeda and uncritically quoting Petreaus making the same claim, MSNBC conflated the Sunni insurgent group “Al Qaeda in Iraq” with the group responsible for the 9-11 attacks, as the Bush administration has repeatedly done.

LA Times, AP asserted that Edwards tax plan allows GOP to call him an “incorrigible tax raiser[],” “tax-and spender”
[I]n their reports on Edwards’ plan, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press asserted that [John Edwards’ tax] proposal represents a political risk because it would allow Republicans to portray him as an “incorrigible tax raiser[]” or a “tax-and-spender in the mold of Walter Mondale.” Neither article explained how offering a plan to provide tax cuts and incentives for a majority of Americans would leave him open to such criticism.

Voter caging and how it works.
PBS’s NOW examined documents and evidence that point to a “Republican Party plan [in 2004] designed to keep Democrats from voting, allegedly by targeting people based on their race and ethnicity with key battleground states like Ohio and Florida of particular interest.” NOW revealed “e-mails between National Republican Party headquarters and Ohio State Republican Party officials” that talked about plans to compile voter caging lists.
Click here to go to the page that links to the video.

“You don’t tend to go to new highs and then immediately start a bear market”
Of course you do. The NYT must have gotten some very young reporters because they apparently don’t know anything about the stock crash that began in 2000. We went flying to new highs, remember the 5000 Nasdaq? We got there about 3 months after we hit the 4000 Nasdaq. About a month later the Nasdaq was plummeting.

Guardian investigators share BAE bribery exposé on the web
[David Leigh and Rob Evans] used the occasion [of the BAE bribery investigation] to launch a specially designed section of the Guardian Unlimited website, The BAE Files…. Leigh says he considered writing a book, but The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger persuaded him “books are old thinking – let’s do a website”… “We were able to lay everything out with no constraints of space and say ‘OK guys, here’s all the evidence’.”… The pair openly welcome help from journalists around the world and give it freely to anyone willing to take the story on – even their Fleet Street rivals. One of the most striking parts of the website is how their evidence is published for all to see –memos, faxes, emails and research passed on to them by other journalists and authors working on the story.“We’re trying to think our way towards a new kind of journalism”.
Sounds like what we activists have been doing on the web for years.  Thanks to Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine.com.

Bloggers Write Legislation
A blog launched this month has teamed with a U.S. senator in an effort to write new broadband legislation, and so far participants have given the process high marks.

Jesuits say take word of God to Second Life
ROME (Reuters) - Catholic missionaries have always trekked to dangerous parts of the Earth to spread the word of God — now they are being encouraged to go into the virtual realm of Second Life to save virtual souls.
I’m speechless.

Web site archives the dead of MySpace
Somewhere deep in cyberspace, where reality blurs into fiction and the living greet the dead, there are ghosts. They live in a virtual graveyard without tombstones or flowers. They drift among the shadows of the people they used to be, and the pieces they left behind.
I may remain speechless forever.

FACEBLOCK: Facebook Blocked by British Businesses
More than 70% of British businesses have supposedly restricted or banned Facebook and similar social networks… The … software also blocks MySpace, Bebo and Hotmail. British Facebook users spend an average of 191 minutes a month of the site, says the Telegraph, among its other findings.

Papers losing real estate ads to online
NEW YORK - It’s bad enough that a cratering housing market is leading to a slump in real estate advertising at newspapers, as a dreary series of earnings reports showed this week.