Seatle Times

The T-shirt has become a must-have for summer wardrobes.

But not just any old tee.

This summer’s hottest top is cozy, made of organic cotton and touts worthy causes across the chest.

From Target to Macy’s, retailers at every price point are reserving a place on their sales floors for T-shirts made of environment-friendly materials, emblazoned with friendly phrases like “preserve Mother Earth” or “Do good.”

Whether you’re a tot or a teen, a male or a female, the eco-friendly tee is the must-have shirt of the moment.

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Celebrity Baby Blog

If you’re anything like us, you’re probably sick of hearing about “going green.” We are inundated with products and info on lessening our carbon footprint and helping to save the planet. I assure you, this is not a bad thing. The problem is in the information that’s presented — there’s just so much of it. And, the internet doesn’t help, there’s just too much information to process and it can be so overwhelming.

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TPM, Josh Marshall

Remember that woman from the debate last night who the moderators showed videotape of asking whether Barack Obama “believes in the flag”? Her name is Nash McCabe.

I remember thinking it was sort of odd to have a couple one-off uses of ordinary voter question when it didn’t really seem like it was part of the format. But I was too distracted by the general inanity of the debate to focus on this issue too closely.

Well, it turns out TPM Reader JL did give some thought. And he came up with something very interesting (see JL’s post at the DrexelDems blog). He did a little googling and found out Nash is pretty popular with the traveling press now in Pennsylvania. It turns out McCabe was featured in an April 4th story in the Times which begins like this …

Ask whom she might vote for in the coming presidential primary election and Nash McCabe, 52, seems almost relieved to be able to unpack the dossier she has been collecting in her head.It is not about whom she likes, but more a bill of particulars about why she cannot vote for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

“How can I vote for a president who won’t wear a flag pin?” Mrs. McCabe, a recently unemployed clerk typist, said in a booth at the Valley Dairy luncheonette in this quiet, small city in western Pennsylvania.

Mr. Obama has said patriotism is about ideas, not flag pins.

“I watch him on TV,” Mrs. McCabe said. “I keep looking for that lapel pin.”

Now, it does seem like McCabe is not a fan of Sen. Obama’s. And I think we can assume that it’s not a coincidence that McCabe managed to show up featured in the Times and also as the sole outside questioner in the ABC debate. Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let’s send a camera crew Obama and film her slamming Obama to his face. It’ll be great in the debate.

Now, as JL noted in his email to TPM, I’m not sure precisely what’s any less ethical about finding Nash at random to come on and slam Obama about whether he believes in the flag versus seeing her in the Times and saying, ‘Wow, this woman clearly has it in for Obama. Wouldn’t that make for great TV giving her a chance to crap on Obama’s head in front of a nationwide audience?

I think there’s something wrong with it. And part of it is that you usually assume that these citizen questions come from people who are at least partly conflicted about their support if not undecided. But it does reinforce my sense that the disgraceful nature of the debate wasn’t just something that came together wrong, some iffy ideas taken to far, but basically engineered to be crap from the ground up.

–Josh Marshall

Washington Times:

Two of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) top advisers and fundraisers “are among several Republican and Democratic presidential campaign officials whose lobbying firms have been paid more than $15 million by foreign governments since 2005.” The firms of McCain advisers Charlie Black and Thomas G. Loeffler “received millions of dollars lobbying the White House, Congress and others as agents of nearly a dozen foreign clients.”

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Host Borrin Onley explores issues of the day on “What’s the Point?”

In this episode, Borrin interviews Vice President Dick Cheney on the eve of the five year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The Vice President may have been a little drunk. Borrin also interviews Scamron CEO Rich Whiteman about the bailout his corporation received from the federal government; and Borrin returns to the topic of prescription drugs in municipal water supplies with Science Correspondent Ira Frodo and FDA Commissioner Anton Le Yummy.

This program was recorded live at killradio on Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 7:00 pm or so PST.

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Huffington Post | Rachel Sklar

Tonight, as promised, Keith Olbermann attacked Senator Hillary Clinton in a ten-minute “Special Comment,” saying that he was not endorsing Barack Obama but that “events insist” that he speak and stand against her “tepid response” to the controversial remarks of Geraldine Ferraro wherein she said that Obama wouldn’t have been as successful if he were not black. Last night Olbermann decried the statements as “clearly racist”; tonight, he followed up with a doozy in which he accused her of “campaigning as if Barack Obama were the Democrat and you were the Republican.” In so doing, said Olbermann — in letting the opportunity to forcefully oppose Ferraro’s comments pass her by — Olbermann said that Clinton had “missed a critical opportunity to do what was right.”

Geraldine Ferraro has stood by her comments and denied that they were racist, saying on “NBC Nightly News” tonight that they were response to a specific question about why this election was special, and saying that it was the Obama campaign that was playing “this type of a race card.” (See related video here.)

Olbermann chose to frame his comment in terms of bad choices on the part of Senator Clinton, stopping short of calling her inherently racist, instead casting the matter in terms of her receiving bad advice from the “tone deaf” and “arrogant” members of her campaign (”they are killing your chances of becoming president…[and] slowly killing the chances for any democrat to become president”). He characterized Ferraro’s remarks as “a blind accusation of sexism and dismissing Senator Obama’s campaign as some equal opportunity stunt,” and decried her comments both in this instance and historically, pointing to the “cheap, ignorant vile racism that underlines them.”

He also blamed her advisers for not pushing her to repudiate those comments immediately — unlike the remark by Obama advisor Samantha Power, who had called Clinton a “monster” and who was “gone by sunrise” from the Obama campaign. Olbermann specifically fingered (but did not name) Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams, saying that instead of repudiating Ferraro’s words — “words that should make any Democrat retch” — she was instead “letting her campaign manager bend them beyond all recognition into Sentaor Obama’s fault…thus giving Ferraro nearly a week to [send the dialogue] back into the vocabulary of David Duke.”

“Do you not see, Senator?” Olbermann asked. “Senator Clinton, this is not a campaign strategy. This is a suicide pact.”

Olbermann took the opportunity to mention a number of other matters (or, in recent campaign parlance, to ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at Clinton), criticizing her also for the “shell-game about choosing Obama as Vice-President,” as well as her husband Bill Clinton’s comments about Jesse Jackson after the South Carolina primary, the “racial undertone of the 3 a.m. ad” and the “moment’s hesitation” in her much-parsed answer on 60 minutes and said that after all the accrued episodes in which race had been implicated, people now “see a pattern” of racially-tinged remarks and associations with Clinton — though he carefully stopped short of definitively asserting its existence: “False or true, they see it,” said Olbermann.

He was far more definitive about Ferraro, and that’s where the comment returned in its final few minutes as Olbermann implored Clinton not to allow herself “to be perceived as standing next to — and standing by — racial divisiveness,” and once again brought it back to her campaign members and what they had wrought. “Grab the reins back from whoever has led you to this precipice before it is too late,” said Olbermann. “Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth….your only reaction has been to disagree and call it “regrettable.” Unless senator you say something definitive, the former congresswoman is speaking with your approval.”

Said Olbermann, in a callback to Clinton’s own stand taken at the last Democratic debate: “You must reject and denounce Geraldine Ferraro.”

He finished with “Good night and good luck.” OUCH.

by Eric Boehler, Media Matters:

The Associated Press last week got a preview of how this presidential season is going to unfold, and how online liberal activists aren’t going to stand down when the press takes cheap shots at Democratic front-runners.

After AP reporter Nedra Pickler wrote a news story highlighting how some fringe Republican operatives were raising questions about Sen. Barack Obama’s patriotism, angry readers dispatched nearly 15,000 electronic letters protesting the piece. Why? Because instead of providing balance and context, which is what good journalism does, the article simply offered a platform for Obama’s opponents to roll out their smears, to broadcast their dark doubts about the senator’s character.

That kind of media shortcoming has become predictable; reporters love to quote partisan Republicans about how deficient Democrats are. And in the past it would have likely produced angry denunciations online within the liberal blogosphere — a blog swarm, perhaps. In fact, within hours of the article being posted on the wires, John Aravosis at Americablog condemned the news agency for the way it regurgitated “right-wing lies about Obama lacking patriotism.” (Aravosis was simultaneously irked by an interactive poll posted at CNN.com that asked readers if Obama was sufficiently patriotic.) Even without an organized effort, it’s likely the Pickler article would have prompted scores of blog readers to send off a fistful of angry missives to the AP.

But nearly 15,000 letters sent in just a matter of days in response to a single news wire article? That’s something else entirely and could mark the dawn of a new era in progressive media activism. The phenomenon has received very little mainstream media attention (journalists probably don’t want to encourage this sort of thing), but make no mistake: It was a very big deal.

In part because it’s become clear that if there’s going to be an effective media pushback during this White House run, it’s going to have to come from online. Even progressive pundits within the mainstream press corps remain reluctant to step out and criticize their colleagues in any meaningful way. That is still very much a closed Beltway club.

Also, this White House campaign is going to be the test case to see whether the more fully matured liberal blogosphere is able to alter the mainstream media landscape at all, whether it’s going to be able to knock the press off some of its favorite, predisposed biases against Democrats. From the looks of the eruption the AP created, progressives have already made enormous strides since the 2004 campaign.

Indeed, Sen. John Kerry’s former campaign aides must see this kind of rapid response and think about what might have been if they had an army of online activists ready to battle the press when reporters and pundits took cheap shots trying to defame the Democratic front-runner back in 2004. And poor Al Gore. Imagine if 15,000 letters to newspaper were dashed off the week the inventing-the-Internet fairy tale first began to take root in the press?

What prompted the organized outpouring of angst last week against the AP was when the website Firedoglake took action, embraced a new organizing tool, tapped into a wellspring of enthusiasm for Obama, and pointed angry readers not in the direction of the AP itself, but toward their local newspaper clients. Why? Because newspapers are more responsive to complaints filed by nearby readers, and because the newspapers pay the AP’s bills as newswire customers.
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Video Update: Crooks and Liars

Update: I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Ben Smith, at The Politico, flags that today CNN’s running a ‘online poll’ asking if Barack Obama has enough patriotism to be president

By Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

Does Obama have a patriotism problem?

The AP’s Nedra Pickler asks disgraced Republican dirty-trickster Roger Stone for his opinion. Stone you’ll remember is the guy who got caught making threatening phone calls to New York Gov. Spitzer’s (D-NY) elderly father and last month set up an anti-Hillary group with the acronym C-U-N-T.

Surprisingly enough, Stone thinks the answer is yes.

Republican Congressman Embraces Obama Hoax Email

Overtime, and pretty quickly now, it’ll make sense to keep a list of stuff like this. On Friday night’s Bill Maher show, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) claimed that Barack Obama refuses to say the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. This along with other bogus claims about Obama come from the hoax emails circulating on the internet.

If you see any local or national media outlets asking Kingston about this or if you get a word out of him, please let us know.

Of course, last night, the Associated Press signed on to the Obama hoax email train.

–Josh Marshall

Think Progress

The White House has experienced difficulties moving its ill-conceived national security priorities through Congress. Yesterday, the Senate passed legislation banning waterboarding, defying a Bush veto threat. Also, House leaders have said they will not approve the Protect America Act with immunity for telecom companies.After the Senate banned waterboarding yesterday, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino claimed the “left wing” was trying to overtake the intelligence community:

They’ll have to ask themselves, ‘Do you trust the intelligence community more than you trust Democrats who are beholden to their left-wing?‘ And that’s the debate that this country is going to have.

Perino also attacked Congress for holding a contempt of Congress vote on White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers instead of expanding Bush’s surveillance powers:

The American people will find it baffling that on a day that House leaders are trying to put off passing critical legislation to keep us safer from the threat of foreign terrorists overseas, they are spending scarce time to become the first congress in history to bring contempt charges against a president’s chief of staff and lawyer. … The ‘people’s House’ should reflect the priorities of the American people, not the fantasies of left-wing bloggers.

The line is a familiar one. When the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington revealed that the White House had destroyed millions of e-mails, Perino shrugged them off as the accusations of a “left-wing” group — but she later backtracked.

Congress’s priorities are reflected by the will of the public. A recent CNN poll showed that 68 percent of Americans said waterboarding was torture, and 58% said the U.S. should not use the technique. A January ACLU poll found 57 percent of likely voters opposed telecom immunity, compared to just a third who supported it.

Contracts with Unaccountable Private Vendors Like ES&S in NM and Elsewhere, Continue Taking Costly Toll on American Democracy…

On Wednesday, we covered some of the massive problems emerging from New Mexico’s Democratic Party Caucus on Super Tuesday. The razor-thin margin between Obama and Clinton remains in question at this hour after ballot boxes were discovered to have been kept overnight, uncounted, at the home of a party official; voters faced long lines at the polls; and some 17,000 voters (11% versus 4% in the last caucus) were forced to vote on provisional ballots.

NPR had reported on Thursday that the state’s Democratic party, which ran the election, as opposed to the state themselves, had decided to do a full recount of all ballots. Tonight though, John Gideon informs us the report was incorrect, and only “all qualified provisional ballots” are set to be counted by officials.

We had updated our previous story several times while covering the mess, before finally noting:

The most notable take-away from this story may end up not being the poorly run caucus process of the Democratic Party (as opposed to the state, who would run the general election in November), or even the “sleepover” ballot boxes. The most notable issue here may be the questions about what the hell happened to the registration rolls in New Mexico, as now maintained by the thugs and failures at voting machine company ES&S, since the last election.Remember, NM is where former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired because he refused to prosecute the bogus “voter fraud” charges made by the Republican Party there.

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