Earlier this week, I sat with Granny Doc for hours on end and watched as more than 300 kossacks step for to Granny Doc's plea to help support Howard Dean and the DNC.

Those we stepped up to support have stabbed up in the back, with their quisling support of this FISA travesty.

Please read on. There's more beneath the fold...

You thought the oil industry was screwing the rest of us, and you'd be right, but that's not all.

Democracy thrives only when the flow of information is as perfect as possible, but this too is under attack today.

Buried on page C3 in today's Boston Globe is Time Warner to test Web metering.

More beneath the fold...

Regarding Granny Doc's plaint What Will It Take?.

A miracle, to put it simply. More specifically, miracles in education, miracles in economic opportunity, and a willingness for those who call themselves Christians first, and Americans second, those uneducated men and women who nonetheless built, through energy and determination,  successful businesses, and those who interpret their belief in democracy to mean that elitist intellectuals are to be distrusted because they simply don't recognize your democractically valid needs and lives.

More beneath the fold...

To begin, let me add my recommendation to plf515's excellent diary, If you want better media, support better media. Ah, I see it has been reclisted, a pleasure I have still to look forward to. I spend my daily diary here because I had more to share than would fit neatly into a comment.

For decades, I've listened to voices both learned and clueless lamenting the state of the fourth estate in the United States. No depth, too much fluff at the expense of substance, and my personal peeve, overly American-centric. We may rightly thank god now for the internet, as worldwide, newspapers have followed the American media example of creating an online prescence.

I include here some of the links to news outlets in the News folder in my favorites list. Only two links listed is of a news organization in the United States, The Atlantic Monthly and The Christian Science Monitor, both old, old favorites of mine.

More beneath the fold...

(Yes, Pat Buchanan. Believe it.)

On "A More Perfect Union". . . .

Dear Mr. Buchanan,

You may well wonder why this lowly Kossack with a relatively high UID takes (everyone here will say waste) the time to speak to you. But I recognize that you're a canny guy, Pat, and know national politics inside out.

Having said that, you're dead wrong about Senator Obama in this case, and I believe you know it.

Loyalty, courage, integrity, and a profound patriotism. Pat, you can try spinning this, but that dawg just won't hunt.

Please join me for more beneath the fold...

Be civil. Do not "call out" other users by name in diary titles. Do not use profanity in diary titles. Don't write diaries whose main purpose is to deliberately inflame.

It's the morning after and we're still back where we were on Monday.

Ok, fine with me. I'm an Obama supporter who would be satisfied putting Hillary Clinton in the White House. Proud of it, even.

Confessions of a Hillary-hater beneath the fold.

Full disclosure: I'm an Obama supporter, who has had some problems with HRC over time, but on the whole I think I'd be perfectly happy voting for her in the general.

I thought I'd never, ever, ever write a candidate diary, I hate them. This is as close to a candidate diary as I plan to get. I'd rather have several teeth pulled than read most of what's written about the candidates here.

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Being a true Yankee, with a proudly contrarian pedigree almost four centuries old, loathe am I to admit that anything concerning that metropolis of urban chaos and sheer iniquity called The Big Apple is any more welcome in my life than ten inches of heavy wet snow on the one hundred ten feet of my driveway when the left wheel on the snowblower is flat. Yet here I am warmly recommending to all the performance of the New York Philharmonic from North Korea, Maestro Loren Maazel conducting.

More beneath the fold...

Compound F's diary I'm Doing This For Your Own Good (I couldn't help but wonder who he was doing what for) raises the valid point that opposition to capitulating Democrats, including Pelosi and Reid is the only way a progressive agenda will ever occur.

True enough. It remains to be seen whether netroots has any actual effect on national politics. It remains to be seen if netroots can overcome their differences enough to truly organize into one voice, one mandate, one driving goal: Electing people who really believe in representative government.

Meet me beneath the fold, please...

Neither video nor transcript of the Rice/Paulsen announcement are unavailable at this time (10:14 AM) and I gotta run to work.

In a significant development breaking a few minutes ago, Secretary of State Rice and Treasury Sec Paulsen announced the strongest sanctions against Iran in decades. Specifically cited are three Iranian banks and the IRGC Quds force for sponsoring terrorist activities and alleged interference with the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq. The announcement appears timed to coincide with the president's trip to San Diego for photo-ops and meeting Republican supporters in heavily red southern California.

Not since 1979, in response to the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, have such strong sanctions been imposed against Iran.

More beneath the fold...

Yesterday, in this diary I posted on my first impression of Gen Petraues' testimony before the House, and the now-famous Moveon.org ad. My first impression was that he was credible and the ad was going to hurt.  Day two of his testimony is now more than half over.

Right now, he's before the Senate (Joe Biden closed the morning session with his usual plain-spoken assessment that he hadn't heard a single thing the American people needed to hear in a disgusted tone. God bless him.) Today, a sea-change. He's hesitant. He's parsing his answers. Instead of being engaged with the Senators, he's inside his head. And banging the "progress" drum incessantly.

He's less of a problem than I thought, but I still don't like that ad.

Now, if there's an ad like that concerning Lieberman, who at this moment is defacing my TV screen, I'd say run it.

Is there anyone else besides me (and Sen. John Kerry, yes I'm from MA too) who thinks this ad is over the top? Anyone out there who thinks that this kind of advertisement is worthy of a lying GOP pundit?

As I mentioned in comments, I watched him and found him sincere and credible. He delivered his testimony without dodging questions, like Gonzales. He acknowledged all the problems, and if he seemed at odds with his earlier statements, he stood by what he wrote and explained calmly what he meant then and how it has played out since then.

My point is, he's a big problem for us and I'm not sure ad hominem attacks are the way to go.

US Attorney Christopher J. Christie, GOP fundraiser and Bush administration appointee is expected to bring federal corruption charges later today in Trenton, NJ.

Have we here the unfolding of a long planned GOP election strategy involving the targetting of prominent democrats for well-timed prosecution? An example of the insertion of politics into the workings of the DOJ in action?

Take the jump...

Here's my thought:

Crafting a political platform, online, in the open and totally transparently.

Since it first occured to me, this idea just won't go away, so I want to float it for comment. I haven't been on Dkos long, and I've been immediately impressed by the community here.  People are well informed, have lots of different backgrounds, have access to diverse information sources, and the passion to get something accomplished.

I've traded comments with New Frontier and Bluetide about this, who tried this back in May: You Frame the Democratic Narrative Now.  He feels the need to raise the level of dialog, I feel the need for a project I can get my teeth into.  Both are worthwhile.

This diary is a request for comment, so please...

Take the jump...

Not my diary, but Wendy Doromal's second diary regarding conditions in CNMI, and legislation currently before congress.

S.1634 is currently before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and aims to bring border control under the administration of Washington.  Currently, the Senate version of the bill is being rewritten.  The major difference is that the house version contains a provision to create a CNMI delegate to Congress, like every other US insular territory already has.

Take the jump:

This is an awful bill.  Just plain dangerous, and dumb.  It's a roadmap for the Bush administration to legally start a war with Iran.

This is one of those times to write Congress and have someone slap Sen. Jim Webb [D-VA] upside the head for dumbness.

It's very short, and identical to this house version, sponsored by an equally asleep-at-the-wheel Rep. Mark Udall [D-CO}

At best we can only hope for a breather in the violence.  Insurgents may be killed in battles with US forces when they stand and fight like they did in Fallujah, but it won't make any difference in the long run.

When all is said and done, I think we’ll find that Israel may be the big winner here.  In destroying the largest standing army to the east of Israel, they can reallocate resources elsewhere, which they have, in fact, done.  However, anyone who says that this war makes America safer is being less than candid.  Nobody knows what lies ahead.  Anyone who says that this war and occupation is an effective way to combat terrorism is forgetting that the terrorist movement is transnational, and that the terrorists, like the insurgents in Iraq responding to the surge, have simply picked up and started elsewhere.  This has been the bloodiest August since the actual fighting ended, and those who point out that Anbar province shows gains from the surge, should remember that we’re seeing that in as little as 48 hours after our troops have redeployed from any particular location, the insurgents have returned.