On Monday, RNC chair Ed Gillespie went berserk over an ad produced by a Moveon volunteer drawing parallels between two statements by Bush and Hitler. The RNC was so thrilled with its "find" that it copied the ad onto its server and made it available for the world to watch. Democrats.com linked to this page so readers could watch the ad and judge for themselves. Obviously Web users must have found the ad very persuasive! Why else would the RNC have SCRUBBED the video? They replaced it with a boring page that only includes the ad text (http://www.rnc.org/moveonvideo.htm) We can't show you the video, but we can show you Google's cached copy the RNC press release, with the now-scrubbed link to http://www.rnc.org/moveon2.mov. We will preserve this RNC-scrubbed page for history's sake. Goebbels would be most proud of his Republican descendants.

"It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history. White House officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this year that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay more than $1.7 billion to reconstruct Iraq -- which turned out to be a gross understatement of the tens of billions of dollars the government now expects to spend. Recently, however, the government has purged the offending comments by Natsios from the agency's Web site. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished... Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, administration Web sites have been scrubbed for anything vaguely sensitive, and passwords are now required to access even much unclassified information. Though it is not clear whether the White House is directing the changes, several agencies have been following a similar pattern."

On 11-25-03, NY Times reporter Jim Rutenberg caught Karl Rover scrubbing Bush's verbal stumbles from the first RNC attack ad. Now the RNC has released its second attack ad, and once again Rove's scrubbers betrayed the truth. Listen to Howard Dean's voice at the beginning and end, and you'll have no doubt that Rove either digitally altered Dean's actual voice, or used someone else's voice entirely. Call RNC chair Ed Gillespie at 202-863-8500 and tell him to stop SCRUBBING the truth! And call the White House at 202-456-1414 and tell Bush to fire Karl Rove!

"When Bush laid out the potential threat that unconventional weapons posed in Saddam Hussein's hands last year in his SOTU address last year, he became tongue-tied at an inopportune moment. The line read, 'It would take one vial, one canister, one crate, slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.' But Mr. Bush stumbled between the words 'one' and 'vial.' And when at the word vial, he pronounced the 'v' as if it were a 'w.' Yet in a new GOP commercial that borrows excerpts from that speech, Mr. Bush delivers that line as smoothly as any other in the address, without a pause between 'one' and 'vial,' and the v in 'vial' sounds strong and sure. Republican officials acknowledged yesterday that the change was a product of technology. The line, they said, was digitally enhanced in editing 'to ensure the best clarity.'" Now we know why Rove wants $200 million - to make sock puppet Bush appear human! Karl, you need BILLIONS for that MISSION IMPOSSIBLE!

Derrick Z. Jackson writes, "Bush has his eraser out again. The Justice Department recently released a commissioned report on diversity among its attorneys. Half of its 186 pages were blacked out... The blacked-out pages betray a Justice Department that does not want America to know what happens after people are hired. The full report is available on a Web site called the Memory Hole, which electronically lifted the blacked-out sections... The sections on 'stereotyping,' 'racial and gender tension,' 'harassment behavior,' and 'mentoring,' were completely blacked out. Asked if employees felt free to 'express differences that may be due to different cultural backgrounds,' 83% of white men and 73% of white women said yes. Only 56% of men of color and 42% of women of color said yes... With all these deletions, it was no surprise that all nine pages of 'Recommendations' were blacked out. Hear no problem, see no problem, solve no problem."

Fred Kaplan argues the Pentagon rejects intelligent analysis in favor of stupid brute force. "Two pieces of evidence shine all too glaringly: 1) an official, unclassified, and highly critical report on the U.S. Army's inefficient-to-shoddy intelligence practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, written by the Center for Army Lessons Learned in Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.; and 2) the removal of this report from the center's Web site, after the Washington Post published a story summarizing its contents... The Army will feel no great pressure to change this system as long as the Pentagon and the White House keep critical reports such as this one out of the public eye. The suppression of this report is but a piece of a broad administration policy that views secrecy as a default mode. After the Post published an excerpt of the Center for Army Lessons Learned report, the Army shut down the center's entire Web site. (It has since come back on, but the report was deleted.) "

"It began when Dick Cheney refused to provide details of his energy task force meetings with energy companies, particularly top Enron officials. Then, came Bush's November 2001 executive order allowing the administration or former presidents to order executive branch documents withheld from the public. [The order] shields from public view documents from Bush's father's term in office that could be awkward now. The suspicion was that the executive order was designed to protect several current White House officials who served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations from embarrassment -specifically, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, and Mitch Daniels, Jr. Each official had brushes with controversial policies in earlier administrations - not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. The elder Bush, then-Vice President, maintained he was 'out of the loop.' Documents in the Reagan archives might contradict that version of history."

"The White House has edited its website to keep search engines from archiving pages on Iraq [by adding] virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines [like Google] would no longer list those pages in results or archive them. Why would the White House do this? Those pages are still public, and the White House search engine itself does index those pages, so users can still get to them. It's easy enough to understand the reasoning if you look at past White House actions. Earlier this year, the White House revised pages on its website claiming that 'combat' was over in Iraq, changing them to say 'major combat.' One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change - and were able to prove it - was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch." Impeach Bush Now!

The Busheviks are doing EVERYTHING in their power to block the appointment of a Special Prosecutor. That includes SCRUBBING a section of a NPR report by Nina Totenberg discussing the odds of Bush successfully blocking a Special Prosecutor. Totenberg mentioned the "heads-up" warning to the White House (giving Rove time to scrub damning documents), and the fact that "career" bureaucrats cannot make key decisions, only Ashcroft can. She concludes, "The temperature isn't that hot yet, despite that poll you cited at the beginning, but it could get that hot, and we just can't know right now whether the temperature will get that hot for a long time and make it impossible to continue the course that the administration now has chosen to take."

On May 1, 2003, after AWOL Bush landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the White House Web site headlined the event saying: "Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." But 100 days later, "combat operations" are FAR from over - and soldiers are dying at a rate of nearly 1 per day. TakeBackTheMedia.com discovered Karl Rove has engaged in big-time "revisionism" - like Orwell's "Ministry of Truth", the White House changed the May 1 web page on August 18 so it now reads: "Bush Announces MAJOR Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." Impeach Bush Now!

From the Memory Hole: "On 1 April 2003, the Los Angeles Times print edition ran an article headlined 'US Accused of Reckless Gunfire,' about the killing of a British soldier by an American pilot. Reader Evan Garcia wanted to link to the article from his blog, The Scope, so he looked for it online. What he found was a much shorter version of the article. This is a red flag. If anything, a newspaper will run a shorter version of an article in its print edition, where space is tight and every paragraph has to pull its own weight--and it'll run the full, uncut version on its Website, where room is limitless. To do it the other way around makes no sense."

From The Memory Hole: "While the fact that a big media outlet erased its own reporting to protect the powerful isn't a surprise (although it is still maddening), the big shock is that another tentacle of the corporate media called them on it. On 29 April 2003, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: 'Did the news media feel that it was unpatriotic to question the administration's credibility? Some strange things certainly happened. For example, in September Mr. Bush cited an International Atomic Energy Agency report that he said showed that Saddam was only months from having nuclear weapons. 'I don't know what more evidence we need,' he said. In fact, the report said no such thing -- and for a few hours the lead story on MSNBC's Web site bore the headline 'White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq.' Then the story vanished -- not just from the top of the page, but from the site. Say no more, Paulie. Below is the article that MSNBC buried, then yanked."

Bill Berkowitz writes, "In another example of the administration's predilection for secrecy, Bush recently signed an executive order to 'delay the release of millions of historical documents for more than three years and make it easier to reclassify information considered damaging to national security,' AP reported. The 25-page executive order was signed three weeks prior to an April 17 deadline which would have lifted the veil off millions of documents 25 years old or older. Not so coincidentally, 'The reclassification provision applies to documents between 10 and 25 years old, which would include periods in which Bush's father, George Bush, served as president and vice-president.' ... These actions should be viewed in its larger context: the administration's systematic chipping away at the public's right-to-know. Immediately after 9/11, information-scrubbing became the order of the day at a number of government agencies. "

A Democrats.com member writes, "I was just watching Robin Cook in the House of Commons on C-Span. He was making so lucid and painting the true picture of this administration's real agenda, and they cut him off! They went to a still shot of the White House, then came back apologizing for the 'technical problem', but didn't go back to England. They went to Colin Powell to keep up the junta's mind programming." Another member writes, "Cook's speech was cut off with a slide that said 'Fox News', and then they went on to some other program. He had just started criticizing the Bush administration at that point. He said that if things were different in Florida, Al Gore would be president, and they would not be discussing this unnecessary war today." Send complaints to viewer@c-span.org and call during talk shows: Dems (202) 585-3881, Reps (202) 585-3880, Others (202) 585-3882 - and watch this powerful speech, which received an uprecedented standing ovation (video link on right).

Mother Jones reports, "People who live near chemical plants can no longer go online and find out which hazardous materials are stored near their home. Air travelers can no longer see FAA records on airport-security violations. Journalists and elected officials no longer have access to a string of reports pinpointing weaknesses in the nation's antiterrorism defenses.... [Bush] has used a string of laws and executive orders to reverse a decades-long trend toward government openness. The new measures are so broad, critics warn, it's impossible to say whether officials are protecting national security or simply expanding their power to operate without public scrutiny. 'An iron veil is descending over the executive branch,' warns Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform."

Laura Bush scrubbed "a poetry symposium out of concerns it would be politicized after some poets said they wanted to protest military action against Iraq. The symposium on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman had been scheduled for Feb. 12... 'While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum,' Noelia Rodriguez said Wednesday. Mrs. Bush, a former librarian... has held a series of White House symposiums to salute America's authors... But the poetry symposium quickly inspired a nationwide protest. Sam Hamill, a poet and editor of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, declined the invitation and e-mailed friends asking for antiwar poems or statements... He had expected about 50 responses; he's gotten more than 1,500, including contributions from W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti." You go, Sam!

WashPost reports, "When the White House Council of Economic Advisers explained Bush's $674 billion economic stimulus proposal on Jan. 7, the plan seemed to suggest only 190,000 jobs would be created in 2003. Economists and Democratic critics went wild, saying Bush should be 'embarrassed' to put forth such a plan, and pointing out that 1.5 million jobs have disappeared in the last couple of years... By Jan. 9, the CEA plan, which had been posted on the White House Web site, was nowhere to be found. It was gone... Visitors to the site where the original analysis was posted are told: 'The file you have attempted to access cannot be found. Please check the URL you entered to make sure there were no typing or copy-and-paste errors. You may also use our search facility to help you find the file you are looking for. 'Please note: many files associated with the previous administration have been removed from this server... ' Ah ha! It was Bill Clinton's plan!" Not exactly!

The Bush Administration wants to do away with the Government Printing Office, which would undermine the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA was enacted so that anyone could have access to government documents. After all, the politicians work for us! But Bush wants to preempt the FOIA, by having each individual cabinet agency monitor what information gets out, which in turn makes secrecy the word. For example, Dick Cheney would never have to release his energy documents. The LA Times writes, "Daniels would replace that system with a more secretive one in which individual agencies would manage -- and possibly sanitize -- their own electronic databases. Currently, a federal agency such as the Pentagon can't delete an embarrassing passage from a historical document without first going through the hassle of asking each reading room to obscure the passage with a black marker." Wake up, folks - it's "1984" in America!

When Montana columnist Pat Dawson exposed Marc Racicot's ROTC lie, the Orwellian Republican Party did what it ALWAYS does - scrub the truth from the Internet. But Google has an unscrubbed cache copy - and if the Google copy gets scrubbed, we have one too. Sorry, Racicot, you won't get away with this lie!

CNN, Fox and other news outlets were showing Bush's Tennessee fundraising speech this morning as they were told that Bush was going to talk about Iraq and the enconomy. But instead, it was just a fundraiser for Van Hilleary, the GHP candidate from TN. What about equal TV time for the Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen? It is bad enough that our country is in a supposed Iraq crisis, a REAL economic crisis, and all Bush can do is raise money to trick the media to air free commercials. Right after the speech, CNN's Leon Harris complained out loud, saying "We were tricked into showing this.... but he is just talking about local Tennessee issues." CNN's transcript includes Daryn Kagan's reply, but Harris' complaint was SCRUBBED. Tell CNN to UNSCRUB their transcript: cnn@cnn.com

Rense.com reports: "CNN spiked Connie Chung's widely-publicized 'expose' on Yale University's Order of Skull & Bones, chapter 322, which counts among its membership... George W. Bush and his father and grandfather before him, and influential aide and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Brent Scowcroft, and Connie Chung ain't talking. The program--billed at CNN's Web site to air 8:00pm ET, September 4, did not materialize; in its place was a story of a murder trial in Florida. Contacted repeatedly at CNN studios, representatives of Ms. Chung and producers of Connie Chung Tonight were either 'unavailable' or had 'no comment.'"

The NY Times continues to have a "problem" with the truth about Al Gore's victory in 2000. Timesman David Stout reported on Bush's trip to the Midwest, and concluded with this: "Later, he was to travel to Iowa, which he carried by 4,000 votes, to campaign for Doug Gross, a candidate for governor." In reality, Bush LOST Iowa by 4,140 votes. Someone must have pointed this out to the Times, because the article now reads: "Later, he was to travel to Iowa." Scrubbed again!

Public Citizen, which tracks the flow of "527" soft money flooding into congressional campaigns, has found serious problems with the way the IRS is administering the disclosure system and specifically pointed to Katherine Harris' mysteriously blank records. "It's not clear if [soft money groups with missing records] failed to file or whether the IRS lost their reports; the IRS can't say with certainty. In other cases, reports on the IRS Web site appear and then mysteriously disappear without explanation. For instance, as of May 31, 2002, the most recent disclosure report for "American Values in Democracy Project, Inc.," [what a sense of irony these people must have] a group chaired by Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, showed nothing but four entirely blank pages." Is Bush's IRS scrubbing reports that would expose Katherine Harris' corruption?

"Nearly a month before Sept. 11, terrorism analyst Peter Bergen told a New York Times reporter that he should write about an al Qaeda propaganda videotape that Bergen had obtained. 'Clearly, al Qaeda was and is planning something,' [he told reporter John Burns]. Burns, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote an article that appeared on the Times's Web site Sept. 8. But Burns's prescient piece about Osama bin Laden never appeared in the newspaper, [which claimed it ran out of space - yeah right!], and the Times quickly expunged it from the electronic archives... Bernard Gwertzman, editor of Nytimes.com, calls the incident 'a bad screw-up.'" This "screw-up" cost innocent lives - if WTC workers had read Burn's warning on 909, they might have understood the significance of the first attack and left the building more quickly. NY Times readers deserve an APOLOGY from the editors!

On 5-20-02, Democrats.com exposed Condi Rice's Big Lie that no one ever expected the Pentagon to be hit by a civilian airliner. According to the official government Web site of the Military District of Washington (www.mdw.army.mil), the Pentagon ITSELF planned in detail how it would respond to just such a scenario from October 24-26 2000. And this was no low-level exercise, since it took place in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room! Folks, we must have found something REALLY EXPLOSIVE - because not only did Rove & Rumsfeld & Rice scrub this article, they scrubbed the whole Military District of Washington Web site! Luckily, we kept a copy of the article (see below). Call your Representatives (202-224-3121) and the media and demand the truth about the Pentagon's civilian airline crash exercise in October 2000!

In 1997, Shrub tried to hide his Gubernatorial crimes from prying journalists and historians by signing a law that allowed him to choose an "alternative repository" for his papers. Naturally, Bush decided to keep it "all in the family" by choosing Poppy's Presidential Library, knowing the librarians there would be too busy to reply to requests for Shrub's records. But the Texas Attorney General has foiled Bush's plans, at least for now, by ruling that Shrub's papers "remain the property of the state and are subject to the Texas Public Information Act." No doubt Shrub will fight this decision and do everything possible to keep his records scrubbed - just like Bush's role model, Richard Nixon.

At Democrats.com, we've been the ONLY people hollering about the Bush administration's Orwellian practice of "scrubbing" official White House transcripts to fix Bush's frighteningly incoherent remarks. Now the Washington Post's least favorite reporter, Dana Milbank, has ever-so-gently reported on Karl Rove's standard operating procedure. Recent scrubs include the removal of interruptions by hecklers when Bush spoke in Knoxville, and adding a footnote when Bush proposed "making the death tax permanent." Milbank also noted Bush's market-rattling remarks in Japan about "the devaluation issue," and his claim the US and Japan had been allies "for a century and a half." Finally, he cites Ari Fleischer's warning Americans "need to watch what they say." But in the end, Milbank and the Post give Bush a big pass, especially since they were part of the media conspiracy that sentenced Al Gore to the political death penalty for HIS rare verbal errors.

The Washington Post quotes White House official Ann Womack as saying "we expect accuracy" in transcripts of the president's remarks. Good, that's what we expect, too. So is it the arrogance of power or the power of arrogance that gets the White House to try to improve upon reality by releasing transcripts that once again try to make Bush seem qualified to be president, -- when a clearer picture of his genuine ability to represent America's interests would show just how bad a salesman he really is.

On Sunday, Democrats.com called attention to a shocking Web poll on September 11 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which 46% of 23, 145 participants said "I think officials knew it was coming." Click the link now and the poll has been scrubbed - obviously Karl Rove also thought the poll was shocking, and ordered AJC to scrub the poll from its Web site - and replace it with Karl Rove's smear of Cynthia McKinney that appeared under Juliet Eilperin's byline in the Washington Post. Send your complaints to letters@ajc.com

"In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code. As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism... [In February], workers launched a 'scrubbing' operation in neighboring Pakistan to purge from the books all references to rifles and killing." So reports the Washington Post.

"The White House yesterday ordered all federal agencies to scrub their Web sites of sensitive information on weapons of mass destruction and other data that might be useful to terrorists, The Washington Times has learned. The move alarmed scientists and open-records advocates because the government is withdrawing thousands of documents that have been available to the public for years... White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card sent a memo to the heads of all agencies and executive departments ordering an 'immediate re-examination' of all public documents... [The memo] was written by Laura L.S. Kimberly, acting director of the Information Security Oversight Office, as well as Richard L. Huff and Daniel J. Metcalfe, co-directors of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy... 'We are moving very rapidly to a shift from basic democratic principles of right-to-know to one that is based on a need to know,'" said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch.

On 2-20-02, we reported that Bush scrubbed WWII from history by declaring "for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times." Our source was the videotape from the BBC, which remains unscrubbed. Today, Democrats.com member William Sterner discovered that Bush double-scrubbed history, by scrubbing the official transcript of his speech - which now reads "for half a century now." There is no footnote, no assertion that an "error" was made - Bush simply rewrote history, just the way it was done in Orwell's 1984. Unfortunately, Rove & Hughes are the Abbott & Costello of scrubbing, because they missed the printer-friendly version (thanks to Zenia Brickheimer) and the USIA writeup at http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/02021803.htm (thanks to Anthony Espinosa). (Don't worry, we saved copies.) We demand a full explanation from Bush himself, in his own unscrubbed words!!

According to Defense Week, "The Army today gave its reasons for editing nearly out of existence references to Enron in the Army secretary's official homepage biography. The redaction was done to save space on the page and to ensure that Thomas White's history included more words about the future, a spokesman said. Before the edit, White's bio included about 120 words near the top on his 11 years at Enron Energy Services. As of last week, all that verbiage had been trimmed to one small sentence-which was moved to the end of the page." That's the most ludicrous explanation we've ever heard - last we checked, there was NO limit on the length of a Web page. Now that the Pentagon is officially in the business of LYING, there's no reason to believe a single word they say.

Last year, a Democrats.com reader caught the Washington Post scrubbing the photo and names of the rioters sent by Tom DeLay to stop the Miami recount. (Our reader's persistent efforts ultimately got the article unscrubbed.) Today, reader David Way caught the Post scrubbing once again, this time the headline - just the headline - of an article entitled "War Coverage Takes a Negative Turn." Why the scrub? Did Gen. Simon Worden of the Pentagon's evil Office of Strategic Influence call Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.?

On 2/7/02, Democrats.com revealed that CNN scrubbed its own "Quick Vote" showing site visitors want an Enrongate Special Prosecutor by an overwhelming margin of 73%-27%. This poll was obviously scrubbed because the corporate media does not want Americans to know how strongly we DEMAND a Special Prosecutor. We urged you to complain to cnn@cnn.com. Today we received an anonymous message telling us the poll was UNSCRUBBED. Obviously CNN heard our complaints! Now let's follow up with a couple of demands to CNN: 1) Maintain a complete index of ALL polls, with a easy-to-find link on the home page. 2) Report on the overwhelming belief among Americans that Bush is covering up Enrongate, and the belief that only a Special Prosecutor can find the truth, and 3) Tell the world how Democrats.com is mobilizing grassroots Democratic activists to take America back from the Bush Organized Crime Family, and 4) Give Democrats.com's founders as much air time as right-wing pundits! Write cnn@cnn.com

George Orwell Bush has repeatedly attempted (and too often succeeded) in scrubbing public records that are embarrassing or worse (see http://democrats.com/display.cfm?id=220). But here's the most astonishing scrub we've encountered yet - Bush is trying to scrub the ENTIRE RECORD OF HIS 6 YEARS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS! How is this possible? Back in January, Bush snuck ALL of his records into Papa Bush's Presidential Library. And now he won't let Texas archivists anywhere near them. Why is he hiding them? Perhaps there's proof of crimes committed during Funeralgate - and perhaps there are many other scandals we've never heard about. We demand an investigation!

If you listen to the recording of Ari Fleischer's press briefing on 9/26, you can clearly hear Fleischer answer the question about Bill Maher's remarks by saying: "they need to WATCH WHAT THEY SAY, watch what they do." (Click "Listen to the Briefing" and advance to 31 minutes 21 seconds.) But if you read the official transcript (click below), "watch what you say" has been removed. Once again, the White House is scrubbing official records to hide embarrassing behavior. We demand an investigation! If you listen to the recording of Ari Fleischer's press briefing on 9/26, you can clearly hear Fleischer answer the question about Bill Maher's remarks by saying: "they need to WATCH WHAT THEY SAY, watch what they do." (Click "Listen to the Briefing" and advance to 31 minutes 21 seconds.) But if you read the official transcript (click below), "watch what you say" has been removed. Once again, the White House is scrubbing official records to hide embarrassing behavior. We demand an investigation!

On September 24, MSNBC reported that Republican House staffers ordered C-SPAN cameras removed from Judiciary Committee hearings when Democrats called civil liberties advocates to testify. On September 25, this MSNBC article was re-written, and this section was completely removed. Here is the "scrubbed" version: http://www.msnbc.com/news/632335.asp - click below to see the original (fortunately cached by Google). And tell MSNBC (world@msnbc.com, phone 201-583-5000) to stop rewriting history to hide the truth about Republican censors!

This article suddenly disappeared from MSNBC's web site on February 9, 2001 - the day Democrats.com published a major expose on Funeralgate. This follows the disappearance of several other articles unfavorable to George W. Bush, most notably: a) the Washington Post article by Al Kamen identifying the Republican thugs who stopped the Miami recount (reposted following inquiries by a Democrats.com member), and b) the CNN Crossfire transcript where Larry Flynt charged Bush with helping his girlfriend get an abortion in the early 1970's. It took the Watergate scandal to expose Nixon's "plumbers" - it looks like Funeralgate will expose Bush's "scrubbers".