by Glynn Wilson

Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a potential anti-war candidate in the 2008 presidential field, according to AP, urged fellow Democrats on Monday to show more backbone in challenging President Bush on his decision to invade Iraq.

“We must get out of our political foxholes and be willing to clearly and specifically point out what a strategic error the Iraq invasion has been,” Feingold told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Watch the re-run on C-SPAN on TV, or watch the video online here.

Feingold, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, said some Democrats in Congress gave in to “intimidation” by the Bush administration when they voted to authorize the war in 2002.

“If we do not show both a practical and emotional readiness to lead in the fight against terrorism, we will lose in ‘06 and we will lose in ‘08, just like we did in ‘02 and ‘04,” he warned.

Feingold called for the censure of Bush over the administration’s warrantless surveillance program back in March. So far, only two Democrats, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Barbara Boxer of California, have signed on as co-sponsors. Some on the hard left, and even some Republicans, have said censure is not the answer, impeachment is…

Feingold has also proposed that U.S. troops leave Iraq by the end of the year, rejecting criticism that such a move could lead to chaos there.

“I believe the situation would probably get better” if U.S. troops left, he said. “The lesson of insurgency is when the occupying power leaves, it tends to lessen, rather than increase, the level of violence.”

He said people ask him at every stop he makes out in the country, including Montgomery, Alabama, why Democrats won’t stand up publicly for what they believe - especially against President George W. Bush. This includes Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, rather than pursuing al Qaeda.

Iraq was not on the administration’s list of countries where al Qaeda was operating on 9/11, he pointed out.

“It was not even on THEIR list,” he said.

Feingold, who cast the lone vote against the USA Patriot Act in the Senate, also said he has no confidence in the assurances issued Monday by Bush’s new appointee to the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, that the NSA has not been spying on American citizens without warrants.

by Glynn Wilson

It’s blackberry winter in Alabama with cloudy skies and cool temperatures and there’s not much light for shooting bird pictures. Plus, the spring migration is about over anyway.

So it’s a good time to read and/or catch up on weekend programming on C-SPAN, where you can learn allot about what’s going on in the world beyond the suburbs.

It’s always funny and somewhat instructive to watch the annual White House correspondents dinner at the National Press Club building in Washington, D.C., especially for a credentialed Congressional reporter who has attended events there myself.

Last year on a trip there I met a lot of interesting people, including some of Hunter S. Thompson’s editors and friends - and the famous White House shill reporter and gay male prostitute, Jeff Gannon.

It was interesting to watch President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura flee the building as soon as the dinner program ended after the spoof conservative comedian Stephen Colbert reamed the president while pretending to support him as his hero. It was also seriously funny to watch Bush lookalike comedian Steve Bridges do Bush better than Bush.

Bush Faces Press With Comedian Lookalike

Earlier in the evening, however, there was an interesting program on C-SPAN’s Book TV, which featured MediaChannel’s Rory O’Connor interviewing Danny Schechter, who calls himself the “news dissector.”

Schechter’s new book When News Lies: Media Complicity and The Iraq War is billed as “an up to date indictment of the role media played in promoting and misreporting the war on Iraq.”

According to the MediaChannel.Org Web site, “It is an analysis of how and why the media got it wrong that pinpoints the failures of journalism and the collusion of media companies with the Bush Administration.”

“Most of the anti-war movement focused on the crimes of the Bush Administration ignoring the mainstream media, its far more effective accomplice,” says Schechter, a former network producer with ABC and CNN. “The government orchestrated the war while the media marketed it. You couldn’t have one without the other.”

With the book you also get a feature-length DVD of the prize-winning film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), which chronicles the media war fought alongside the military campaign and the struggle to stand up for truth and a foreword by acclaimed media writer and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, along with prefaces by independent Iraq reporter Dahr Jamail and information warfare specialist Colonel (Ret) Sam Gardiner, a war analyst for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

The film WMD, distributed on DVD by Cinema Libre Distribution, won top documentary prizes at film festivals in Austin Texas, Denver Colorado and Durban, South Africa.

For more information and to see the trailer narrated by Academy Award winner Tim Robbins, visit wmdthefilm.com.

Or check out Schechter’s media watchdog site, MediaChannel.Org.

It has long been my position that the media and the press need critics from the left as well as the right. As an investigative reporter who got into the news business at a time when then-President Ronald Reagan had the press on the ropes and the Moral Majority had the media on the march to the right, I have watched with great angst as this trend has continued under the fear-mongering Bush administration.

It is unclear whether the media and the press in this country will take up the call and respond to this criticism, or whether all the new alternative media sources will supplant them. But it is clear that large numbers of people are disgruntled with the mainstream media and turning to alternative sources for news online.

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the World Wide Web continues to grow as a source of news for Americans. One-in-four, 24 percent, list the Web as a main source of news. Roughly the same number, 23 percent, say they go online for news every day, up from 15 percent in 2000; the percentage checking the Web for news at least once a week has grown from 33 percent to 44 percent over the same time period.

We say long live the press, the Internet, the First Amendment and the United States of America. But the media critics are right. The corporate media is complicit in this war and the damage this administration has done. The public should hold them accountable and raise hell about it.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced strong questioning today by Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other members, in the attempt to determine whether President George W. Bush’s program to spy on Americans via the National Security Agency is legal - or not.

Gonzales Faces Tough Questions on Spying

If you care about individual liberties, watch it live on C-SPAN and make up your own mind as to whether the program is legal or warranted.

It is pretty clear to me that the president has already admitted breaking the law. He just doesn’t admit that what he did and is still doing is against the law. He is asserting, through the Justice Department, that he is above the law, while saying he is NOT above the law.

This is classic double-speak right out of George Orwell’s book 1984. This is Big Brother, and it is a mystery why anyone calling themselves a conservative could support the administration on this issue. I thought conservatives and libertarians wanted the government out of our bedrooms, not listening in on our telephone conversations, land lines and cell phones, and reading our mail and e-mail.

The misleading defense of this specific NSA program is that only calls to and from abroad are included. But that ignores the larger issue of other agencies of the federal government, including the Pentagon, spying on peace groups, environmental groups, journalists and yes even bloggers.

If the Senate Judiciary Committee wants to get to the bottom of how this administration has broken the law rising to the level of impeachment of the president and the vice president, the inquiry should be exanded to include the other domestic spying programs. The probe should not just be limited to an inquiry of the NSA’s sweeping program of searching for key words in phone calls and e-mails.

As has already been reported widely, most of the NSA’s requests for a followup investigation by the FBI have been dropped because the target was clearly not associated with any real terrorists or al Qaeda.

But what I have been saying over and over again since before this Web site was started is that the Bush administration is intent on characterizing as a “terrorist” any activist who disagrees with Bush’s policies.

Carefully read this post from Sept. 26, 2004, along with the links.

No One Likes a Critic; Democracy Demands Criticism

We suspect, although it is not yet coming out in the press, the media, or in the questioning of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that when administration officials say they are only looking at “al Qaeda” and “terrorists” and “their associates,” what they mean is any opponent of the administration, especially peace advocates, animal rights activists and groups and individuals who oppose the administration’s radical views that pose a grave risk to the national and global environment.

Watch it on C-SPAN 2: The U.S. Senate is about to vote to end debate on President George W. Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, Samuel Alito of New Jersey.

AP: Kennedy Leads Final Effort to Block Alito

Is anyone else up late watching the C-SPAN2 coverage of Rep. Conyer’s Democratic hearing on domestic spying (1/20/2006)? Fascinating…