"Hard to believe I was in America.'

Hurricane Katrina exposed a facet of United States reality that an ad-revenue-dependent media never shows. This clip from Countdown of a recent free health checkup in New Orleans does the same.

Do those who bellow against the 'evils of government-run healthcare' have eyes? Ears? Hearts? Or do they see the skin color of the US citizens shown in this clip -- men & women with jobs, families and, all too often, untreated illnesses -- and think rancid thoughts that would have made Ronnie 'Welfare queens drive Cadillacs!' Reagan proud?

I grew up with racists. Their words and opinions echo in my memories. What's shocking about the United States in 2009 is that nearly identical words and opinions to the ones that made me cringe at family gatherings are now expressed openly via the vast right-wing media.

This conservative, corporate media is beholden to insurance company and pharmaceutical ad revenue. The poor people shown above waiting in line for health checkups in New Orleans don't produce revenue for anyone but themselves and their loved ones.

They have as much chance as the 9th Ward had against Katrina.

A silent bomb.

While Aussie scribes breathlessly analyze whether PM Kevin Rudd gave The Miserable Failure a 'deputy sheriff' salute at NATO talks in Romania, a remarkable story goes unreported in the US. One that involves Sept 11, a previously unreported warning about the attack, and a US Attorney General who either doesn't understand the laws he's empowered to enforce or is making sh*t up about the most investigated event of the 21st century. Either way, US Attorney General Michael Mukasey -- successor to disgraced Bush lackey Alberto Gonzalez -- has spilled a grain silo of beans that screams for scrutiny.

Where's the tsunami of media coverage?

Keith Olbermann explained the blood-boiling details on Countdown (above) and Glenn Greenwald has been doing his usual outstanding job of banging the drum since Mukasey's speech in San Francisco last Thursday. There's more here, here and here. [Note: None of these sources are the MSM.]

Here's how the SF Chronicle reported his remarks:

Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, he (Mukasey) said, "we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that."

What????????? Huh????????????? Is the Attorney General of the United States claiming the US had a chance to learn about the attacks beforehand but didn't act due to a faulty understanding of FISA law?

The media's role in disappearing this startling pronouncement best described by Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media:

A truly extraordinary example of journalistic malfeasance is playing out right now. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told a San Francisco audience last week that the Bush administration was aware in the days before the 9/11 attacks that an Al Qaeda official was making calls from a 'safe house in Afghanistan' to U.S. but that our government failed to act on that. Mukasey said the U.S. lacked the legal authority, a flat falsehood as legal commentators have pointed out.

It's so easy and lazy and stupid and un-American to glaze one's eyes at the thought of another Bush administration scandal. So much cooler to pass it all off as partisan witchhuntery. Not this. Not when it involves 9/11 and a top Bush official exploiting the lives lost on that day and a nonplussed media that can't be bothered to do its goddamned job.

Terror-publicans

Rachel Maddow joins Keith Olbermann on Countdown to eviscerate the ludicrous leaps made by political and media terror merchants in today's increasingly unrecognizable United States:

They have to come up with super-human powers for Al Qaeda because they want to use Al Qaeda to justify a super-extreme agenda for the United States of America. If you really, really want to radically transform our government and radically transform who we are as a country; if you want East German style policing, and people informing on their neighbors, and you want to get rid of the Fourth Amendment, and you want endless wars conducted for profit; if you want to completely get rid of the safety net function and the regulatory function of the government; if you have an agenda that radical, you better have a really radical justification for it. And so they have to elevate this band of death cults, fundamentalist criminals into a threat that is greater than the Soviet Union ever was when they not only had a military but they had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at our country. They have to make Al Qaeda even worse than that.

Plus, as the US government slides deeper into an irrational abyss, Rosa Brooks of the LA Times says forget Congressional oversight -- have Bush & Cheney committed!