Gary Abramson, posting as "reality bites back" on Kos (he was mentioned by MSin her post!) has a diary up on Kos.  You guys will like it!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/2/5/154255/4964

You know what to do.

Everyone,

I have posted but a brief portion of my full day with General Clark (a blogger meeting in the morning, a rally in the afternoon, and a fundraiser in the evening) for public consumption on Daily Kos--it's now a recommended diary over there.  Rather than copying the entire thing, I'll just give you guys the link.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/2/5/14345/52746

This only covers one small portion of the fundraiser.  I'll give you guys a fully detailed entry on this later on.  Be watching out for my next entry: "my day with General Clark."

Read about it here:

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/americablog-just-bought-general-wesley.html

Please don't--I repeat, DON'T--get angry at John Aravosis, the founder of AmericaBlog.  He is one of our strongest friends and allies.  John bought Clark's cell phone records from a private company that offers the service just to prove how easily accessible private records are to anyone in the country.

You'll find in the link I've inserted a scanned image of the records, with each numbe partially blacked out.  General, if you're reading this, please verify the authenticity of these records so we can call attention to the complete lack of privacy concerns on the part of this government and the telecommunications industry.

One of the most uplifting things about being a Clarkie blogger is knowing that Clark has the support of a large cross-section of the liberal blogosphere.  Take this most recent <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/poll/1132593322_EnxbHLJJ">straw poll</a> from Daily Kos as an example.

Clark has so far garnered 26% of the votes cast--a significant percentage with 9 other candidates in the poll, as well as an "other" and "I don't know" option--with Feingold coming in second at 19%.  Note that Hillary, who is considered by most pundits to be Clark's competition as far as fundraising is concerned, garners the support of only 6% of voting Kossacks--and with over 11,000 votes cast, it's a pretty respectable sample of Democratic activists.

Russ Warner is announcing his candidacy for CA-26--David Dreier's district--today at the VFW post in Monrovia.

Unfortunately, I'm unable to attend the event, so I can't give a first-hand report.  But I've spoken to Russ extensively on two occasions--one at the WesPAC fundraiser in L.A., and again at the anti-Arnold victory party in Downtown L.A. this past Tuesday evening, and I can tell you that Russ Warner is the real deal--and clean as a whistle to boot, according to local organizations that have done proper due diligence.

His website is also live, though some sections are not yet complete--you can find it at http://www.warnerforcongress.com.  And guess what picture he has on the front page?  The picture with his son, who just got back from Iraq, and General Clark--taken at the WesPAC fundraiser in question.

Cross-posted from my blog: http://hekebolos.blogspot.com 

 You gotta love the stuff you see on RedState sometimes. I know that my blog is becoming increasingly fixated on ridiculing the stuff I see there, but sometimes the material is too rich to pass up.

Take this diary, which was frontpaged by the admins. In a nutshell, it comes to the conclusion that the MSM is harming our efforts in the "war on terror"--or was that a "global struggle against extremism", I really can't remember--by reporting the existence of CIA-operated secret prisons in foreign countries. Given our history of extraordinary rendition, as well as the administration request that the CIA be exempted from anti-torture legislation desired by congress, it seems almost certain when you put two and two together that the CIA was using these facilities to extract information from detainees through the most unscrupulous means possible--something the general public would most certainly not approve of.

The diary argues that exposure of our agreements with foreign governments to use their sovereign territory for secret prisons will lead to decreased co-operation with allies in anti-terror intelligence-gathering because they'll be afraid that their information will appear on the frontpage of the American MSM, and that it will hurt our war on terror by detracting from America's image abroad. That argument, however, just goes to show how absolutely illogical at best and deluded at worst the right wing is on the issue of torture and intelligence-gathering.

First and foremost, we see a clear difference in methodology concerning America's image. My methodology for improving America's image is to stop doing all the stuff that would harm America's image, while their methodology is to silence the press from accurately reporting all the stuff we do that harms America's image. Just like the American south: just keep on preaching morality while you sweep all the divorce, illiteracy and teen pregnancy under the rug. Same seedy idea.

But the next concept--the one about such reporting making foreign governments less likely to share intelligence because of reaction from their citizens or terrorist retaliation--is even more bogus. There is a strong difference between a) sharing intelligence, and b) allowing a foreign intelligence service to build a torture prison on your nation's soil. One would be a move that would be expected and approved of by your citizenry, and the other is something that you can expect your citizenry to be extremely unhappy about. One is completely normal and usual, and the other represents a complete lack of ethics on the part of your government. One is something that almost every free nation on earth does without significant reprisal from terrorist organizations, and the other is something you could expect some terrorist retaliation for BECAUSE YOU'RE ALLOWING THE YANKEES TO TORTURE THEIR OPERATIVES ON YOUR SOIL.

Furthermore, the supposed fear that will now be imparted to other nations concerning their intelligence being splashed above the fold of major MSM papers is also bogus. If you can name a single time that the American MSM endangered multinational cooperation to capture terrorists by revealing sensitive information relevant to an ongoing investigation, you let me know when that was. I can't recall such an activity. I can, however, name a couple of times in which the administration has done something similar to justify a purely political agenda. One was the public acknowledgment that Noor Khan was a mole--an admission made to justify raising the terror alert level during the Democratic Convention. Another was the leak of Valerie Plame's covert status to punish Joe Wilson for telling the truth about Iraq's ties to African uranium.

If I were a foreign government and I had to choose between trusting an American MSM newspaper or trusting this administration, I'd take the MSM any day of the week.

This isn't specifically about Clark, but it's about foreign policy in general--and it's another example of why hearing Clark speak on Friday night was so refreshing.  It's a cross-post from my blog: http://hekebolos.blogspot.com.  If you haven't stopped by to say hello, please do!

WAR ON THE CIA

Redstate.org is getting worse and worse. Examine the current front-paged article.

What really gets to me is this assumption on the part of Red-Staters that the CIA "provided flawed intelligence" and "went to war against the Bush administration." What utter malarkey. The CIA provided all sorts of intelligence of varying reliabilities, with the proper caveats attached, and as the Downing Street Memo clearly indicates, the Bush administration hand-selected and cherry-picked whatever intelligence it felt best made the case for the policy it had already decided on. And when the CIA did a double-verification of something it had already told the administration was a lying forgery, it's all of a sudden declared by these Republicans that the CIA is "declaring war on the administration."

But in this, just like in so many other political arenas of the day, we see the difference between a faith-based policy and a reality-based policy. In a reality-based policy, the CIA analyzes data and presents it to the administration for the administration to be able to make a well-informed policy decision. In a faith-based policy, the president "goes with his gut" and the administration spin doctors and strategists destroy anyone who dares to take a stand for the objective truth--namely, in this case, that a drunk named "curveball" provided most of the intelligence hyped by the administration, that Ahmed Chalabi provided the rest while on the payroll of Iran, and the declaration that Saddam tried to buy yellowcake from Niger was a forgery--and irrelevant in any case, because the international intelligence community knew that Iraq had yellowcake to begin with and they were completely unconcerned by it because of the difficulty of turning yellowcake into enriched uranium.

This is cross-posted from my blog, Far-Shooting Politics: http://hekebolos.blogspot.com.  I was at the WesPAC fundraiser in L.A. Friday evening, and attended the blogger meeting, together with MSinLA and a few others.

General Wesley Clark was in Los Angeles today for a WesPAC fundraiser at a private residence in Cheviot Hills. The event was supposed to start at 7:00, but Michael Webber of SoCalGrassroots prevailed on the General to meet with some bloggers as a preamble. So there we were, in a private room at a roundtable with the general. The bloggers in question included myself, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Mark Kleiman, MS_in_LA of Who's Counting, and Steve and Pam of SteveAudio. So essentially, seven bloggers, together with Wesley Clark and his wife Gert, all just having a conversation. Arianna Huffington was supposed to show up, but she had other obligations. Quite a forum, and a singular occurrence. I should be getting a picture soon from WesPAC--when I see it there I'll post it here.