JimStaro asked me to post this information... he has already used up his diary allotment.  He thought the breaking news of the 50s era mass murders of Koreans and our military's silence in the matter chilling.

This Aug. 2007 photo, released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shows the remains of some of 110 victims of 1950 executions of political prisoners at Cheongwon, Chungbuk, south of Seoul, South Korea. The commission, which excavated the site, is investigating that and other mass killings in South Korea in 1950-51. A commission chief investigator estimates up to 7,000 were killed in the central city of Daejeon alone, and tens of thousands elsewhere. (AP Photo/ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission)

a collaborative writing effort by roxy, standingup, cho, and aaron barlow
Crossposted at ePluribus Media Community

As The New York Times points out, (subscription) United States Attorneys have been forced to try to create a voting fraud scandal when none existed.

But just beneath the surface of the multiple U.S. Attorney scandals lie hints and teasers of the Bush Administration's potentially more damaging politicization of the Justice Department.  Indeed, The Civil Rights Division appears to be morphing into a tool to manipulate elections. Control seems to be held by a "shadow" Civil Rights Division - populated by ideologues and their fellow travelers -- which has usurped litigation decisions, the hiring process, training and the Division's traditional civil rights agenda.

Six U.S. Attorneys were called on the exact same day shortly before Christmas, and according to  Dan Eggen in his Washington Post article Sunday February 4th, each was encouraged to resign in an apparently well-orchestrated housekeeping.

Although ePluribus Media researchers and writers have been compiling information about the resigning seven:  Carol Lam, Kevin Ryan, John McKay, Daniel Bogden, Paul Charlton, H.E. (Bud) Cummins, and David Iglesias, they've also been looking at who is destined for each of these spots and the possible reasons the traditional processes are being trampled.

On December 22nd, the first year anniversary of Iraq War Vet Joshua Omvig's suicide (see Ilona Meagher's summary of HR 5771, Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act), another Iraq war vet suffering from PTSD got a reprieve.

Lisa Chedekel's story -- Veteran Excused From Iraq -- in Friday's December 22nd Hartford Courant reported that Senator Dodd and CT Atty General Blumenthal requested that the Army grant Damaian Fernandez an exemption from serving a second tour in Iraq.

Details below the fold.

I don't actually agree with the aftermath of the election prediction in Colin Enroe's column this morning:

He'll [Lieberman] win the election and wind up as chair of the environment committee. We'll never see him again. He'll court national approval more than ever and barely keep a peg on which to hang his hat in Connecticut.

Funny thing, that. This is kind of a farewell tour, too. One of the lessons he might have learned this time, by losing a primary, is that he had fallen out of touch with his home people. He spent too much time seeking the national limelight and had a hard time even mounting a field operation here where he lives.  That might have told him he needed to water his roots.

More idle speculation below the fold.

Many of the @enron.com addresses were added during an early "clean up and redaction" of the original data set.

-snip-

Invalid email addresses were converted to something of the form user@enron.com whenever possible

Ed Buckham, Thomas D. DeLay's former Chief of Staff, "with a huge initial contract that DeLay secured from Enron. (The group also paid DeLay's wife a salary for several years).

Luapt is pulling together some of the great data on the energy stuff from all this digging. Diary on that soon too.

-------------------

See, all that time we were pursuing Mr. Jeff Gannon, ace White House reporter (yes, I jest) and his Talon News connections, we were tracking down the wrong TALON. Newsweek (via Raw Story) clears it all up for us in their January 30th piece The Other Big Brother.

How could we have been so mistaken?

2003 was just the year of the talon, so it seems. This TALON is a product of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.  

In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON -- short for Threat and Local Observation Notice -- that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents."  The data would be fed to CIFA [Counterintelligence Field Activity] to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

Okay, I know it's probably just coincidence that Jeff Gannon's news outfit was anointed TALON on March 29th, 2003, a bare month before Wolfowitz's version.

But odd coincidence... and intriguing.

Don't call the Times, or CNN, or Rupert Murdoch; call Baghdad.   There are a couple of Iraqi phone books available on the Internet, and plenty of interesting people willing to share their stories.

Seems as if the Swarthmore students are on the same track as a lot of us.  We will find out for ourselves,  thank you very much.

 more below the jump.

So a small party of about 6 neighbors huddled in the Autumn cold, looking through his telescope as well as his 70X binoculars on a tripod.

Photo linked to on the NASA site: Above: a Taurid fireball photographed Oct. 28, 2005, by Hiroyuki Iida of Toyama, Japan.

So I started counting.  Out of 22 photos, there were 7 photos of supporters of the Bush Administration.  There were 15 photos of the Marchers. (A couple showed the stereotypical protestor vs anti-protestor shout off.)   Seemed odd to me.  Almost one third of the total picture show is devoted to the Bush Supporters.

So I checked the WaPo's own estimates for crowd sizes.

400 Bush supporters  vs. 150,000 Protestors

Now this is too easy, really. I did a little math:

For the 400 Bush supporters: 1 photo for every        57 attendees.

For the 150,000 Marchers:     1 photo for every 10,000 attendees.

So is my logic faulty?  Or is this Faux-like fair and balanced?  

xposted at ePluribus Media Community WaPo's Balanced Photo Coverage

Too farfetched, perhaps?

Tonight I got a batch of forwarded emails from the childhood friends who voted for bush.  The litany is depressingly familiar:

Soldier in Iraq forbidden to pray.  Pregnant mom who is told there is no cure for the devasting defect of her unborn child, but she stubbornly persists, strong in her faith, a miracle occurs, and the baby is born perfect.  Woman in long term coma who suddenly awakens.  -- Essentially the religious right's talking points in chainmail tabloid fare.

But tonight's batch contained a real beaut that left me gasping.   I know in my gut, though I don't have one iota of proof, its purpose is to counter our sympathy to the victims of Katrina.  

It's below the fold, and if you all think I should delete this diary because this swill shouldn't be in the public eye, I am happy to do so.

In the seven or eight months since the Gannon Diaries first appeared on Dkos, I have thought a lot about the success of SusanG in those diaries, and how her model has been an inspiration that I see at work everywhere on the internet in these trying days after Katrina.

She asked a question and invited the Kossacks to help her.  "Who is this guy?" she asked. "Any one care to join me in finding out?" she invited.   They did, we did, and we found out - Jeff Gannon was James Guckert.

Many interesting things to be found in those updates, but something else jumped out. Notice the Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (Elevated) -- What? Only elevated? For a potential Category 4-5 Hurricane??

Here is the link for that update in case you can't read the threat level on the screen grab: August 27, 2005

Out of curiosity, I went looking at the Threat Level for every day since August 27th:
   Sunday August 28, 2005 = Yellow
   Monday August 29, 2005 = Yellow
   (landfall)
   Tuesday August 30, 2005 = Yellow
  Wednes. August 31, 2005 = Yellow
       Thursday Sept 1, 2005 = Yellow
             Friday Sept 2, 2005 = Yellow
       Saturday Sept 3, 2005 = Yellow
         Sunday Sept 4, 2005 = Yellow

The title, however, gives the article a spin that a federal program intended to help poor people with their electric bills is unfairly shortchanging the Sunbelt.

And just in case one misses the point, the WSJ editorial staff sees fit to include a little map, showing all those federal dollars going disproportionately to northern states.  (Bonus for the attentive:  the only Sunbelt state receiving more than 30 million dollars in this federal appropriations program that helps the poor cover their electric bills is, yup, Texas.)

"The program is just one example of how federal and state policies are focused on health risks posed by extreme cold, despite evidence that heat waves pose an equal or greater threat to public health."

"The President's chief of staff, Andrew Card, once said of the war planning for Iraq, 'You don't introduce new products in August,' but the rebranding of the war formerly known as the G.W.O.T has all the earmarks of a full-blown summer marketing campaign.  What's going on here?"

No surprises... Packer speculates... the pull out of American Troops from Iraq.

"It seems likely that the Administration will begin to withdraw American forces from Iraq early next year, well ahead of the midterm elections in November -- regardless of the realities."

Their diaries are here... Questions for Gannon

and here... Questions for Bobby Eberle

But now on deck is Karl Rove.

When my friend queried about the "client," he was told it was for Drudge.    

Grover Cleveland's diary this morning made me wonder if there is a connection (diary about Drudge suggesting ABC is sitting on a new video).

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/27/12588/571

Don't know if there is a connection, but perhaps the Kossacks should pre-emptively be on the lookout for any Drudge created video purporting to have a "news anchor" delivering some smear.

I am still a newbie here and I couldn't find it in the archives.  

So whenever I started getting sucked down into the malestrom of maniac/depressiveness that seems to afflict Kossacks, I head over to needlenose for this flash movie.

http://www.needlenose.com/win04/vote.htm

It keeps me focused.