The Staton Jones Report

May 24, 2006

The Anchoress is a Nazi — and Other Dubious Claims

It's almost certainly not true that The Anchoress is a Nazi, but she recently announced that "[she] will not be called a nazi," possibly unaware that just two days later, she'd be proven wrong. The article in which she makes this claim is a round-up of the recent streak of untruthiness in the blogosphere, including Jason Leopold's unfortunate claim that "Rove has been indicted" and Amir Taheri's claim that Iran had passed a law requiring religious minorities to wear colored badges.

The Anchoress correctly identifies Leopold as a reporter, not a blogger, so she doesn't take his mistake out on the left-wing blogs. In fact, the prominent left-wing blogs were skeptical about Leopold's revelation last week — lefty blogger Peter Daou took Leopold to the woodshed right away. The Amir Taheri story, on the other hand (as noted here), was accepted as gospel on the right. Even after being debunked down to the status of "flat Earth theory," they cling to it tenatiously. So, while the Anchoress' article talks about the need for skepticism — the title is "Caveat Emptor" — she spends much of it trying to find a way to vindicate the "badges" story. Unlike the other bloggers squeezing this story desperately seeking a drop of credibility, the Anchoress does not return to Amir Taheri for comfort — kudos for that — instead resorting to... well here's what she says:

Okay, maybe I’m thick, but if “all Iranians” are to wear these “standard Islamic garments” and if “standard Islamic garments” include garments of specific colors, stripes or markings for non-Islamists Iranians (this piece does not say it doesn’t) then is it not possible that maybe, just maybe, the story is not completely false? Just because a document “makes no mention” of something doesn’t mean a thing is not - under a definition of “standard” - implied. Why would a press that believes nothing from the mouth of the US Government simply take the Iranian government at it’s word? I’m just asking. The thing still seems nebulous - I am dissuaded by the quick assurance of the AP that all the Iranians mean is a rejection of Western dress. And I will not be called a nazi, as Alexandra has been labled for daring to consider that Clintonian-word-parsing and Orwellian Doubleplusgoodspeak exist in lands other than ours.

So this story could be true depending on what the word "standard" means. Nice Clintonian word parsing there, Anchoress. The law that the Anchoress is referring to is a law that was actually passed — is a law concerning fashion among Iranians. This law is about headscarves and other muslim dress codes and it does not mention religious minorities at all, much less mandate colored badges. Nevertheless, the Anchoress wonders why we should trust a fact-checked article from a news organization over an opinion piece published by Amir Taheri who works for Benador Associates, a public relations firm. I dunno, maybe because they read the actual law?

Still, I have to give the Anchoress due respect for her overall reasonableness and restraint. The same cannot be said for Micheal Galien over at Liberty and Justice. Like a junky running back to his dealer, he flogs Amir Taheri's hand-waving press release. Says Galien:

It is extremely difficult to get reliable information out of Iran. The best thing we have is Taheri - he has proven that he has some very reliable and knowledgeable sources. He is seldom wrong. We will see whether this story will develop in the direction we all feared or, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, Taheri was ahead of the news cycle.

Galien is a Dutchman in desperate need of an afternoon in a hash bar, and maybe an enema. Apparently, he pines for the days when the Netherlands was controlled by the Nazis, writing in another post, "I am probably a Nazi myself," and bragging that "my country is filled with blond, beautiful women." Sounds like he's cornered the market on the master race. Um... er... good for him. He probably quotes people out of context, too! Anyway, back to his latest post.

First of all, it's not "extremely difficult to get reliable information out of Iran." Despite their backwards politics, Iran is a fairly modernized country and new laws are posted on the Internet by the Parliament. AP didn't have any trouble getting a copy of an Iranian law. Amir Taheri is not "the best we've got" until the day that we no longer have the Internet and telephones.

And Amir Taheri is "seldom wrong"? I've seen two pieces by him in the past week, one of which was an outright fabrication and the other riddled with falsehoods and half-truths. I'll say it again: this guy works for a public relations firm. In all likelihood, someone is paying for these opinions. It's obvious why, as they resonate so deeply with the wingnut right.

I quoted his quote of Andrew Sullivan saying that Taheri was "ahead of the news cycle" because that was a reference to Jason Leopold's excuse for his story about the phantom Rove indictment. Sullivan is taking a "wait and see" position, similar to what many lefty blogs took on Leopold's story. His comment about the news cycle was a subtle jab at Taheri getting it wrong. Too subtle for our Aryan friend in Amsterdam, I guess.

DoctorZin at Regime Change Iran is widely cited by those desperately clinging to Taheri's tale, and he offers more of the same. He does make one comment worth noting:

It should also be remembered that the Islamic Republic seldom acts in a manner to anger vast numbers of Iranians all at the same time.

DoctorZin then warns, ominously, that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that more draconian legislation may be on its way. More speculation. His statement is true, however. For reasons I don't want to get into (this is long enough), 25% of the Iranian population is under 25. That's a lot of teenagers wanting to wear cool clothes. As I said, Iran is a modern country in many ways (not enough, but many), and its teenagers like to dress cool like teenagers in other countries. (Note to Michael: Nazi uniforms are quite cool looking, so you're covered.) Iran is already having trouble with its rebelious youth, so instituting a State Fashion Police is probably an impossible task. My prediction, for what its worth, is that this stupid fashion law will fade away, if it's implemented at all.

As for Taheri's dissembling:

Interestingly, the Islamic Republic authorities refuse to issue an official statement categorically rejecting the concept of dhimmitude and the need for marking out religious minorities. I raised the issue not as a news story, because news of the new law was already several days old, but as an opinion column to alert the outside world to this most disturbing development.

Huh? The Iranian government did, too, deny Taheri's story, officially and unofficially. If he means that they didn't officially deny the "need for dhimmitude," that's true, but that's not what his article said. It said that they'd passed a law requiring colored badges. Oh, and he published his column as an opinion column "to alert the outside world to this most disturbing development." Oh, not because opinion articles are not fact checked? I guess he's got a point, because publishing a fact-checked news article has never managed to "alert the outside world" about anything [eye roll].

Meanwhile, Taylor Marsh, guest-blogging at Firedoglake, raises some interesting questions about why the Simon Weisenthal center claimed to have verified this story.

Posted by Winston Smith at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2006

Calling People Nazis

Just recently, I was called on the carpet by some of the self-appointed luminaries of the right-wing blogosphere for comparing Princess Bottleblonde of "All Things Beautiful" to a Nazi. Quoth Charles at the Very Tiny Balls blog:

In all modesty, however, I must point out that I hold a unique position in the Nazi-obsessed world of the stalking left, since I’ve been called both “Hitler” and his mistress Eva Braun. Some guys have all the luck.

Well, it's easy to get lucky when you're dating your right hand, but I was a little puzzled at this reference to the "Nazi-obsessed ... left." Sure, you have fringe types like Ward Churchill calling people "little Eichmanns," but it seemed to me that it is the right-wing — and not the fringe right wing, but the mainstream right wing — that's enamored of Hitler analogies.

Sure enough, I didn't have to wait very long for a right wing commentator to compare a prominent left-wing politician to a Nazi. Oh, where's the outrage? Why didn't someone cut his mic, or at least tell him he'd gone too far? Maybe because Exxon-Mobile was paying him to say what he said. Gotta please the sponsors, you know.

The best part was finding this post by tristero at Hullaballoo, who rightly calls the guy an "unprincipled fuck." As I, tristero has come under fire for his angry tone. I have to agree with him though, that sometimes you have to call someone an unprincipled fuck, especially when they are by any reasonable measure, an unprinipled fuck. I really see no need to apologize for being outraged at the truly outrageous and expressing it in language that is appropriate for adults.

Posted by Winston Smith at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)

Inaccuracy In Media

Accuracy in Media ostensibly exists to correct the "liberal bias" in media — to "set the record straight." Yesterday, Cliff Kinkaid — and Roger Aronoff — decided to emulate Thomas Kincade and "paint some light" on a dark subject in a rather slimy article entitled "The Good News From Iraq. Basically, if an article with this title doesn't start with, "First of all, not everyone in the country has been found tortured, mutilated and shot in the head," then a red flag goes up. The article begins:

President Bush on Sunday hailed the formation of a unity government in Iraq, making the announcement in person so that at least some of the media covering the White House would be forced to pay attention to it. This is good news, of course, and there is much more good news out of Iraq. But there's no counting out the terrorists, who can always depend on the media to make them seem more formidable than they actually are. In this battle, one thing is clear: America must be able to neutralize the pernicious influence of Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV channel that now wants to expand into U.S. and Western media markets with an English-language broadcast.

Why must America, a country which codified freedom of the press in its Constitutional Bill of Rights, "neutralize" a "pernicious" news organization? Isn't the whole point of freedom of the press that you can battle a bad news organization with a good news organization?

There are three main pillars of the exposition in this article. The first is a "captured al-Qaeda document," which "indicates that the insurgency in Iraq is badly hurting," and mentions a "media-based strategy." The second is a collection of polling data showing how happy the Iraqis are and how unhappy the rest of the Arab world is. Finally, it combines these two elements to conclude that Al Jazeera — the Qatar-based news organization — is tantamount to a terrorist organization.

Within this sleazy propaganda lies the answer to the question posed above. If Al Jazeera is painting a dim picture of the Iraq situation, it would be impossible to find a more-credible news organization to counter it, because painting a brighter picture — as evidenced in the article — requires a substantial degree of lying and misdirection. In case you're one of the wingnuts who's been visiting the site recently: lying and misdirection are not hallmarks of credible news organizations, despite what you see on Fox News.

The article contains two hyperlinks. One is to the translated Al-Qaeda document and the other is to a video they've put together — not surprisingly, their audience isn't particularly interested in things like "reading." They're also not interested — again, surprise surprise — in examining the details of the statistics referenced in the article because there is no link to those. No problem, I found some of them here.

First, the Al-Qaeda document. This was linked to a CENTCOM site and I could find no context about it at all. I'm calling it an Al-Qaeda document because I'm giving Cliff Kincaid and Roger Aronoff the benefit of the doubt — they claim it's an Al-Qaeda document, but I couldn't find where the document, or the military, say that. In any case, the AIM paper acts as if this document is somehow the voice of "the insurgency." Reading through the paper, I couldn't see that this was published by an organization with more than a few dozen people in it, and it sounds as if their successes are sporatic and minor. Considering the thousands who have died in just the last few months, this document can't have come from a particularly influencial faction.

The terrorist document is under a section of CENTCOM's site entitled "what the extremists are saying," which appears to be tracking the activities and statements of the extreme religious factions in Iraq. These are, by definition, fringe elements, and are not responsible for the massive sectarian violence that has swept Iraq in the last few months.

Suffice to say that this document is pretty flimsy evidence that violence is abating in Iraq or that "the media" is all that important an element in generating the stacks of bodies found daily in the streets of Iraqi cities.

Next up, the statistics. The authors cite a few different sources, and I was able to track down just this one from World Opinion.

Looking at the World Opinion data, you have to note one thing up front: this was taken in January of this year, right after the much-heralded elections and before the bombing of the Sunni shrine that touched off the ongoing violence. Still, at the rosiest of times, it isn't an entirely pretty picture. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that the civil war hasn't changed anyone's mind since January.

It's true, as Kincaid and Aronoff point out, that 77% of Iraqis polled said that it was worth it to be rid of Saddam Hussein. The authors also make this claim about the un-linked polling data:

The Iraqis want the Coalition forces to leave, but not immediately, as proposed by some Democratic politicians. They want us to leave over a two-year or more timetable, so that a democracy and security can be established.

This is, plain and simple, a big, fat, hairy lie, and you can see it if you actually look at the polling data they didn't link to.

In reality, only 35% percent of Iraqis desired a 2-year withdrawal. Another 35% preferred a six-month withdrawal. The report does not say what the remaining 30% wanted, but support for some withdrawal timeline was high (87%) and support for "stay until the situation improves" was low (29%). In the commentary, the World Opinion study references an Oxford International poll from the previous November in which 65% of Iraqis "opposed 'the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.'"

One interesting section of the polling data that Kincaid and Aronoff seem to miss is the part where 47% of Iraqis support the attacks on U.S. troops. That's nearly half of the country — and 23% strongly support these attacks. Ironically, 41% of those who support these attacks didn't support a near-term withdrawal. I guess that would be the segment of the population that realizes it will be harder to kill the American swine if they go back home. Actually, the World Opinion writeup links it to another phenomenon: a fairly large segment of the Iraqi population doesn't trust the Americans to leave at all — some, it might be conlcuded, think we'll need a little "convincing." Only 23% of Iraqis think that the U.S. will leave when it is asked to leave.

The AIM paper tries to use the bogus "77% wants a two year or more withdrawal" claim to make it appear as if we're wanted and needed in Iraq. Predictably, they don't bring up the 67% of Iraqis who believe that security will improve after the U.S. leaves, the 73% of Iraqis who believe that the government will strengthen on our departure, or the 67% who believe that basic services, such as electricy, will improve when the U.S. is gone.

It's also clear that the Iraqis know they need help — 64% favor an "international conference" to mentor the new government. The "international" part is key, here, too. A whopping 21% of Iraqis want to U.S. to be in charge of rebuilding Iraq, and 59% would prefer the U.N. to be in charge. While most Iraqis support U.S. non-military assistance, two thirds of those supporters think that the U.S. is doing a poor job. Sunnis are particularly unhappy with the U.S. non-military assistance, but over half of them would be more supportive if the U.S. would set a timetable for getting the fuck out of their country. In contrast, many Iraqis felt that Arab League efforts in Iraq have fallen short, but even among those who feel the most negative, 68% support ongoing efforts by the League.

So where were we? Oh yeah, "good news from Iraq." Apparently, if you care to dig deeper into what Kincade and Aronoff present, you'll discover that the good news from Iraq is that the Iraqis don't want us there, don't think we're helping and don't believe that we're ever going to leave. Luckily, some fringe terrorist group is having a difficult time finding weapons in Baghdad, probably because all of the people who are doing all of the killing are already using the weapons. But don't despair! As soon as we can get Al Jazeera (and the rest of the "MSM") to stop saying that things are going badly, then they'll be doing fine! Yay!

I should note that all of AIM's polling data is stale. It's hard to believe that Iraqi sentiments have not shifted due to the horribly escalating violence. I doubt that we'll see newer studies, however, because it's too fucking dangerous in Iraq to conduct an opinion poll. You're doing a heck of a job, Rummy.

Posted by Winston Smith at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2006

NM-3Y: "Iran-Backed Opposition Enters Iraq"

Three years ago today, NewsMax magazine quietly noted: Iran-Backed Opposition Enters Iraq.

Five thousand troops backed with heavy equipment and under the command of a longtime Iraqi opposition leader have crossed from Iran into northern Iraq, it was reported today.

The Financial Times, in an article reported from Tehran and Washington, said the Badr brigade of the Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al Hakim, who has been in Iran since 1980, moved into Iraq. Iranian officials told the newspaper the force was defensive.

The newspaper said the Badr brigade was equipped and trained by Iranian forces and could be seen as a proxy force of the Iranian government ahead of any regime change in Iraq.

Yeah, well, not to worry, the Bush Adminstration sent plenty of troops to Iraq to lock down the country and prevent Iranian-back militants from gaining control of the country.

Oh, they didn't? Uh, oh. Don't they read NewsMax?!

Posted by Winston Smith at 11:11 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2006

NM-3Y: "Peace Movements Don’t Prevent Wars"

Three years ago today, it was "pick on the protesters" day at NewsMax.

In Peace Movements Don’t Prevent Wars, Barry Farber plays "good cop":

Don't try to dismiss the demonstrators as "the usual suspects." The motleyness of many of them may have indeed inspired an agenda-free 8-year-old in New York to exclaim to his mother, "Mom, this place is filled with freaks!" But drop that line. There were also plenty of normal, sincere, employed, sexually untroubled, freedom-loving and pro-American members of those multitudes.

Live with it. You don't have to denounce them, demean them or question their wholeness as human beings.

And don't quarrel with their numbers; even though major media have a mathematical astigmatism that always – yes, ALWAYS – assigns greater numbers to liberal turnouts than to those right of center. Accept the count and accept the day as an effective registration of their indignation.

Those people who devoted their time, money, energies and bodies to the marches and rallies around the world are not necessarily communists, fascists, Bush-bashers, Saddam-lovers, America-haters, terminally idealistic, naïve or evil.

Thanks, Barry! And then Barry goes on to explain that the fact that America and its allies were going to war anyway despite the enormous opposition amongst their citziens is proof positive that democracy is no longer working, right?

No, he doesn't. He says this:

Peace movements do not prevent wars. Peace movements CAUSE wars. Peace movements, particularly those with good turnouts, convince dictators the other side has no stomach for a fight, even if attacked.

That's right, if millions of us hadn't stood up against the war, Saddam Hussein would have rid himself of the weapons of mass destruction he didn't have and we would have had to go to war to find out that he didn't have them. It's all our fault.

On the off chance that Barry Farber's retarded exposition didn't convince the typical rube that reads NewsMax for news, Daniel J. Flynn provides a comforting ad hominem attack in Are War Protesters Really 'Mainstream'?.

Short answer: "No, they're commies." Longer answer (in part):

CNN paraphrased its own on-scene reporter's observations that "the crowd was diverse, with older men and women in fur coats, parents with young children, military veterans and veterans of the anti-war movement." An AP story quoted a protestor at a Knoxville demonstration stating that he was "surprised it's not just the usual suspects." He maintained, "Bush must be really screwing up to bring out the mainstream."

But did the mainstream really turn out in Manhattan?

(Yes!)

"I almost feel sorry for Saddam Hussein because this is a big, bogus, fake, pretext thing," stated Big Apple resident Barbara Donaldson. "It has nothing to do with weapons of mass-destruction for Christ's sake. It has to do with the fact that we want a permanent base in that area. That's what it's about."

Golly, what a nutcase. I'll bet she'll feel stupid later when Iraq has no WMDs and there are 24 permanent U.S. military bases under construction. Yeah, she'll feel like a grade-A dummy (or DUmmy, as the Freepers say).

Reporters needn't have looked far to find reflexive anti-Americanism coloring the views of other activists in attendance.

Keith Olberman and Media Matters have been roasting Bill O'Reilly in the last few months by simply quoting what he says. No one can make the Falafel Master look worse than the Falafel Master himself. Funny you don't see Freepers digging up quotes like the one above to show how "wrong the lefties were." No, that wouldn't serve them well at all.

Finally, the inexplicable John LeBoutillier chimed in with a piece about rumors of what would become Air America Radio a year later. In No Lib Talk Radio John pronosticates:

Yesterday in the New York Times it was announced that a rich group of liberals – led by Sheldon and Anita Drobny of Chicago, longtime backers of the Clintons and Al Gore – are donating $10 million to finance a "liberal talk show network" around the country.

Their purpose?

To counter what they see as the conservative slant of talk radio hosts around the nation and thus to alter the 'political' trend to the right in this country.

Guess what?

This will be a total flop.

Guess what? It's not. It's beating some of the conservative giants in major markets and has been steadily expanding for the last two years when it started.

The revolution starts... now

Posted by Winston Smith at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2006

NM-3Y: "Coming Soon to Baghdad – The Preview of the E-Bomb"

WTF is an E-Bomb? Well, it's three years since NewsMax previewed the E-Bomb that learned about through "intelligence reports," so it should be old news, right? Well, it's forgotten news, as is best with so many NewsMax stories.

I can't really do justice to Coming Soon to Baghdad – The Preview of the E-Bomb without quoting the first few opening paragraphs:

It will begin with a sharp crack, like the sound of a bolt of lightning hitting its target. In an instant, Baghdad and its environs will go dark. Even though turned off, fluorescent lights and television sets will glow and the smell of ozone mixed with the odor of smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Palm Pilots will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Computers, and every bit of data on them, will be history.

Suddenly there will be a deadly quiet as internal-combustion engines shut down never to be restarted. No Iraqis will suffer any harm – they will simply be thrust back in time to an era where electricity and the electronics it made possible were non-existent.

Saddam Hussein will sit in his silent darkened bunker – suddenly stifling as all air intake systems shut down. With communication with his armed forces arrayed around the capital city no longer operating, he and his top generals will be rendered as mute as the troops in the field themselves. Only by carrier pigeon could be hope to contact his forces.

His missiles inoperative, his tanks without engines, his jet fighters downed, his radar installations useless, Saddam no longer has the instruments of modern warfare at his beck and call. He has been e-bombed back to the stone ages.

That’s the scenario for the opening of the invasion of Iraq if intelligence reports are correct. The age of the e-bomb has arrived and modern warfare will never be the same.

The E-Bomb, it explains, is a nuclear EMP weapons. It might as well be Dr. Who's "sonic screwdriver" for all the reality it has.

Not only did Saddam have no missiles, he had few tanks and no jets. Iraq was pratically in the stone ages when we got there. We just made it worse. Yay, us.

Posted by Winston Smith at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2006

NM-3Y: "Rumsfeld: Afghan Model for Post-War Iraq"

February 14^th-15^th, 2003, were slow, weekend days for NewsMax, and the most notable article was Rumsfeld: Afghan Model for Post-War Iraq.

The article is full of Rumsfeld bullshit, but you didn't have to wait three years to see that. By this date in 2003, the situation in Afghanistan had begun the deterioration that it is in danger of completing some time in the next two years. As the New York Times had reported, just two days before this article:

The senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said today that they were deeply concerned that elements of Pakistan's government were helping to undermine the stability of Afghanistan, including the possibility that they were sheltering Taliban fighters along the border.

"...sheltering Taliban fighters along the border..." — say, isn't that where Osama bin Laden is supposed to be?

Posted by Winston Smith at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)

Dan Hallagan is an Asshole

It's so predictable it's scary: find a pro-war site touting its objective, rational logic, and you'll find a cornucopia of logical fallacies. Witness Dan Hallagan's Logic Times. It's really tough to pick a good place to start because the site is so rife with fallacies that they're probably embedded in HTML tags. Despite the stiff competition, sinking to the bottom of this morass of arrogance, stupidity and brazen mendacity has to be the utterly offensive essay, Fuzzy Moral Math.

The math is fuzzy, the morals — simply missing.

In short, this sick, twisted piece of "logic" purports to show that the Iraq war is saving Iraqi lives. Prepare to be amazed by the audacity (numbers are taken as of December 5, 2005):

Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq on July 16, 1979 and was deposed in April of 2003. Over that twenty-four year period, Saddam Hussein killed between 600,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis and was responsible for the deaths of over 700,000 Iranians and Kuwaitis (here and here). Utilizing only the Iraqi numbers, this is an average of between 25,260 and 42,108 people a year, or between 2105 and 3509 Iraqi citizens a month. The United States toppled Saddam Hussein thirty-two months ago now. If Saddam had remained in power for those 32 months, between 67,360 and 112,288 Iraqis would have died...

First off: the numbers are wrong.

If you follow their second "here" link, you'll see a range of civilian casualties from 250,000 to one million. The largest figure with any supporting evidence, however, is 300,000. Where does Hallagan get a lower limit of 600,000? Fucked if I know.

It's certainly not from the citation in the first "here" link (did he even read this information?). The article found there tosses around some pretty big numbers, but those are casualties (mainly) of the Iran/Iraq war — war casualties are not civilians. In terms of civilian casualties, the article offers this estimated maximum:

Mass graves discovered following the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 suggest that the total combined figure for Kurds, Shi'ites and dissidents killed could be as high as 300,000.

Now, 100,000 of those are Shi'a who died in an armed insurrection in 1991, so it's debatable whether they qualify as civilian. We know this number really well because American troops stood on the sidelines — some of them in tears — and did what they were ordered to do: nothing.

But why quibble? According to the sources cited by Logic Times there might be up to 300,000 civilian deaths attributable to Saddam Hussein's brutality. Using the (bogus) calculation contrived by Logic Times, that would equate to an average of 1053 people a month, or a hypothetical 33680 Iraqis who would have died in Hussein's continued reign of terror.

According to Iraq Body Count, there were as many as 31088 Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the invasion at the time the article was written. Logic Times uses the absolute minimum number, 27569, in their calculation to determine that 84719 have been "saved" by the great humanitarian George W. Bush.

Using the maximum (31088) deaths from the U.S. invasion from IBC and the maximum widely-accepted number of deaths from Hussein's rule (300,000), and, again, using Logic Times' own calculations, you end up with roughly 2600 Iraqi's "saved." Not 84719, but 2592.

That's nearly one Iraq "saved" for each American lost. What a bargain!

So, we've spent a quarter of a trillion dollars, over 2000 soldiers killed, and over 16,000 wounded and we "saved" a net of 2600 Iraqis? That's it? Probably not even that. Remember, the "death by U.S." figure is the result of adding up figures from meticulously documented event reports. The "death from Saddam" number is based on a figure that was pulled out of someone's ass.

Given the steady reports of car bombings and executions coming from Iraq, wouldn't you expect that we'd have a net loss as a result of the U.S. invasion? Well, in reality there is a net loss.

If we're going to do this bullshit calculation of "average deaths per month", it should be done for the period after 1991. The Logic Times "monthly average" is bogus because it assumes that life in Iraq was the same during the entirety of Saddam's tenure as President. The fact is that after 1991, the U.S., Britain and France, imposed "no fly" zones in Iraq that effectively protected the Shi'a in the south and the Kurds in the north from large-scale assault by Saddam's military.

If you remember, this was the "containment" that wasn't supposed to be working. Saddam was ready to roll over the entire Arabian peninsula, Iran, and parts of the Pacific Northwest with his nuclear-capable war machine. No doubt that back in 2003, Dan Hallagan was chock full of factoids detailing Saddam's secret military death machine. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Saddam Hussein was no longer a threat to anyone, even the Shi'a and the Kurds.

If we take out the deaths that occurred prior to the U.N. sanctions, we're left with 50,000 to 60,000. These are totals over Saddam's entire term, so not all of them happened in the 12 years of containment. Still, I'm feeling generous so let's pretend they did. That gives an upper limit of 5,000 deaths a month, or 16,000 in the 32-month span Hallagan used for comparison.

That means that during the U.S. occupation — assuming artificially-high death rates under Saddam — over 15,000 additional Iraqi civilians have died than would have under the Hussein regime.

Finally, this sophistry is really indefensible. One Iraqi civilian was too many. One American. One dollar. This war should not have been fought in the first place. I could go on, but Peter Daou already put it perfectly:

This point is often made in the form of a challenge: "Would you rather Saddam still be in power?" But rhetorical questions can go both ways. Estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties range from the low tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Taking 50,000 as an arbitrary number, who tells those 50,000 families that they have to suffer and die to prevent 100,000 other families from suffering and dying under Saddam? Are Iraqi lives fungible? Who plays God? Without an iron-clad moral justification for war, aren't we callously and capriciously toying with matters of life and death?

Again, why Iraq? If the hyped up threat was bogus - which we now know it was - and it wasn't about self-defense, why are we there? What is it about the Iraqi people that requires Cindy Sheehan to give her child for their freedom? Why not liberate the people of Darfur or North Korea? Who tells them that an Iraqi deserves liberation but not them? Bush crows about "progress" in Iraq as though Americans had some unique obligation to ensure progress in that particular country. But if it's simply a matter of "doing good," why not spend $200 billion on cancer research or alleviating poverty or educating the uneducated or boosting safety and security at home so young girls don't get raped and buried alive?

Why spend precious lives and money in Iraq? If the answer is freedom and democracy for the Middle East, one could easily argue that a cure for cancer would be infinitely more beneficial to humanity. Spending $200 billion to find a cure for cancer may be a long shot, but judging from the news, there's a distinct possibility that our $200 billion experiment in Iraq may leave it in a worse state than when we invaded. Wouldn't it make more sense to apply those resources to research that could potentially save tens of millions of lives? And we'd have thousands less Americans killed and wounded, and tens of thousands less Iraqis slaughtered.

The problem with the Bush apologists' reasoning is that using an infinite time horizon - which they are so fond of - virtually any action, no matter how egregious, can be shown to lead to some positive results. It's the bastardization of utilitarianism; asserting a causal relationship between a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation and all future good developments in Iraq and the Middle East may swell the hawks' breasts with pride, but it's a dubious and dangerous way to conduct foreign policy.

As the author, Dan Hallagan, might put it: this proves without any doubt that Dan Hallagan is a complete fucktard.

Posted by Winston Smith at 01:32 AM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2006

NM-3Y: "Bush May Have to Use the Atom Bomb"

Three years ago today, NewsMax opined: Bush May Have to Use the Atom Bomb. It's really hard to comment further on madness of this magnitude. The author argues that if Saddam Hussein is developing an atomic bomb, we should nuke him first, making it his fault for not stopping his program. Remember, at the time, Iraq's nuclear weapons program has been completely destroyed for 12 years.

The utter moral outrage of nuking millions of innocent Iraqis is beyond words. Of course, we'd never do that — it would fuck up the oil fields.

Keeping alive the retarded comparison to pre-WWII Germany is an article entitled "History Repeats Itself". Demonstrating no actual comprehension of history, the author repeats the sane "appeasement" strawman we looked at yesterday. The opening line is priceless:

It was hard not to be swayed by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s compelling presentation at the U.N. Security Council.

"Hard not to be swayed..." yeah... if you have the brains God gave a turnip.

Posted by Winston Smith at 12:00 AM | Comments (2)

February 13, 2006

NM-3Y: "Life on Planet Bizarro"

Three years ago today, NewsMax magazine columnist David C. Stolinsky, M.D. (A doctor? He must be smart!) whined about Life on Planet Bizarro. Dr. Stolinsky proves himself to be an expert on opinions that diverge from reality, all right: his own. The article provides a treasure trove of straw-man arguments that were dutifully repeated throughout the wingnut echo chamber during the run-up to the war.

In the world I grew up in, World War II was the greatest catastrophe in history. We learned the hard way that it is dangerous to ignore its lessons.

In my world, Hitler outlined his violent plans in speeches, but we didn’t listen. He scrapped the treaty that ended World War I, but we paid no attention. And we did nothing when he built up his military, reoccupied the Rhineland, seized part of Czechoslovakia, and then took the rest.

Finally he invaded Poland, and by then it was too late to stop him without a war that cost over 40 million lives.

But on Planet Bizarro, all that never happened. We never learned that we can’t appease violent megalomaniacs. So we try to appease Saddam Hussein.

Nice.

In my world, Saddam Hussein was a threat to nobody. In my world, Adolph Hitler took Neville Chamberlin on a tour of his tank factories. In my world, no one could find any WMD's in Iraq, even though the Bush Administration claimed to know where they were. In my world, only a raving nutcase would think that Saddam Hussein was in a position to start a world war that might cost 40 million lives.

But there ya go.

Of course, wingnuts who read Saddam's Arsenal would be convinced that Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth. True enough, he was armed to the teeth — prior to 1991.

Meanwhile, in case they had missed the now-discredited claim that Iraq was in league with Al-Qaeda, NewsMax induces pants-wetting in the pee-pee pants conservative cowards with U.S. Warns of al-Qaeda/Iraq 'Nightmare'. This article is just a re-hash of the previous day's Powell: Tape Shows bin Laden 'in Partnership With Iraq'.

Now, to be fair, there were banned weapons found in Iraq. They were however, found and destroy prior to our invasion. Of course, the fact that they were found is something that the wingnuts will never let war opponents forget, despite the fact that this discover proves that the weapon inspections were working.

Many a NewsMax reader wet his pants when he read: U.N. Diplomats: Iraq Rocket Exceeds Limit.

Iraq has missiles capable of reaching more than 112 miles, well outside the permitted range, diplomats from countries on the U.N. Security Council said Wednesday.

Isn't is about 112 miles from Baghdad to New York City? No? Well, Jerusalem? No? Tel Aviv? No?

The limit that these missles were "well outside of" was 93 miles. The new range allowed these missiles to go a little bit over the border into neighboring states. The largest threat would have been to Iran, which, at the time, was being ignored.

Speaking of ignoring things... while the U.S. prepared to immerse itself in a war against the paper tiger, Iraq, North Korea realized that it could just go nuts with nuclear weapons, since Bush couldn't get any allies to help stop it. NewsMax ran a UPI story on this: North Korea in Breach of Nuclear Accord.

If you read the original article, you'll notice a rather glaring difference in the NewsMax version. NewsMax inserts some rather inflamatory section headers:

Cowardly Europe Wants to Appease North Korea Too

...

Clinton's Idiocy Never Dies

God forbid that Clinton's idiocy — or, more precisely, the fervent belief in it — should die, or Bush might actually have to take responsibility for the fucked up shit that happened during his presidency.

Posted by Winston Smith at 09:25 AM | Comments (2)

February 12, 2006

NM-3Y: "Consequences of War With Iraq: An Interview With Robert Higgs"

Three years ago today, any suggestion that the war in Iraq would be anything but a glorious triumph that would lead to peace and prosperity in Iraq — and its neighbors — and cheap gas prices here at home, was met with venom and bile from a mob of rabid-right-wing nutcases.

Oddly enough, in the midst of this, NewsMax pulbished a short interview piece: Consequences of War With Iraq: An Interview With Robert Higgs.

I looked for a juicy excerpt, but I couldn't find one — the whole article is a juicy excerpt. There is not one single point Robert Higgs makes that is not entirely accurate.

Why aren't pro-war supporters mortally shamed by what they've wrought? Oh, right, that would require morality.

Indeed, in the same issue with this, was Powell: Tape Shows bin Laden 'in Partnership With Iraq'. Oh, yeah, remember the Al-Qaeda-Iraq links that never existed? Here's NewsMax reporting about a fucking "tape" that purports to connect the two. How convenient. The article contains politically charged text such as, "Will the Appeasers Be Satisfied?"

Will the Appeasers Be Satisfied?

If verified, the tape would go a long way in proving the Bush administration's assertion that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and bin Laden are now working in concert against the interests of the United States and its allies.

"I think when Secretary Powell went to New York and talked about the evidence we have of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, he did so on the basis of knowledge, on the basis of fact, and he would not have said it if he didn't mean it and if the United States government and others around the world didn't have cause to know it," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Tuesday.

"And so what the secretary has alluded to this morning gives further proof of the concerns that we have about Iraq and al-Qaeda linking up."

Appeasers. Heh. So, in one article, they show why patriotic Americans might want to opposed the war, and then they call them "appeasers." Oh, and what are they "appeasing"? A mad-man dictator with nuclear weapons! Well, except he didn't have any nuclear weapons.

Not that Ari Fleisher doesn't play the WMDs angle for all it's worth. "If verified" is thrown out pretty quickly as Ari cites, as fact, the load of malarkey that Powell coughed up in front of the U.N. "Verify" — now there's a word that the neo-cons don't need in their lexicon. We don't hear much about this "smoking gun" tape anymore for the same reason we don't hear about WMDs: it was all bullshit.

Posted by Winston Smith at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2006

NM-3Y: "Democrats Blast Ashcroft Surveillance Plan"

Three years ago today, NewsMax carried an article with great relevance to the debate today: Democrats Blast Ashcroft Surveillance Plan. The article was remarkably free of slant and rather matter-of-fact about a list of controversial provisions in P.A.T.R.I.O.T. II. Most of these went on to be defeated.

See if these two ring any bells:

• The U.S. Attorney General would gain new authority to conduct wiretaps for 15 days with no court oversight if Congress authorized a use of force or the president declared an emergency.


• Consent decrees that prohibit local police from engaging in spying could be eliminated.

Um, what?

Well, the second item is just plain scary, but the first item is very interesting. We now know at the time that the Federal Government was already conducting wiretaps without warrants. Recently, they cited the onerous FISA requirements that give them up the 3 days to conduct surveillance before getting a warrant. They wanted to expand that to 15 days. Why? Wasn't is legal for them to ignore that law anyway?

While the bill pushed to tear down the privacy rights of American citizens, it sought to elevate the secrecy of government:

• The bill would restrict public access to the risks posed by accidents at industrial facilities that companies are currently required to file under the Clean Air Act.

...

• Changes would explicitly restrict public access to information about government detainees under the Freedom of Information Act.

Remember, just because half the government is under indictment for corruption, doesn't mean you can't trust them! It's the part of personal responsibility, remember! That means you're personal business is their responsibility!

Posted by Winston Smith at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2006

Rick Moran: A Study in Incompetence

I stumbled across a post by certified imbecile Rick Moran the other day, and like corpses in the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, I've tripped over another one before I expected to.

Today's knee-slapper was found by following a link from a Balloon Juice post containing more pouty "stop picking on King George" bullshit about why Bush shouldn't be held responsible for the failure of FEMA to adequately respond to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

The caterwauling amongst the wingnuts has resumed because of yet more evidence of Bush Administration incompetence. This time, it's in the form of an early warning from FEMA agent Marty Bahamonde. Moran's frenetic, sarcasm-laden "how dare you liberals expect the Federal Emergency Management Agency to actually Manage Emergencies" post is centered on this central theme:

To say that this could have been forseen in the dark, on Monday evening, by a PR “Specialist” is absurd. Again, taking nothing away from Mr. Bahamonde, but if you were Michael Chertoff and received a report that, if acted upon would have meant transferring millions – perhaps tens of millons of dollars of resources, wouldn’t you want that information coming from someone who was in perhaps a little better position to know? Especially when local officials were telling you something totally different.

Here's the problem with what Moran seems to think qualifies as a reasoned argument: Mr. Bahamonde isn't a "PR" specialist, he's a Public Affairs Specialist.

Among the many tasks a PAO can handle is dealing with the media, but that is just part of their over-arching mission to facilitate communication. A FEMA PAO is ultimately responsible for making sure that people know where to go to get help and that everyone — both government and citizen everyone — is informed. In addition, they are to act as liason between these entities and FEMA.

In this context, let's look at the question Moran poses earlier in his rant:

To briefly address the issue about the levee, it appears that the Times, in their continuing effort to blame the Bush Administration for the disaster, have cherry picked one report out of hundreds that were flooding into FEMA headquarters on Monday evening (the day of the storm) and offered it as “proof” that the Administration failed to act in a timely manner with regards to the levee break:

[newspaper excerpt mentioning Marty Bahamonde's Monday helicopter flight over New Orleans]

Mr. Marty Bahamonde, is listed in the FEMA Staff Directory as a “Public Affairs Specialist.” Not to take anything away from Mr. Bahamonde who I’m sure is a dedicated public employee but if the City of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, and others at FEMA who are more technically competent are telling me one thing and a PR “Specialist” is telling me something else, whose information do you think should be acted upon?

Before answering Moran's rhetorical question, I'd just like to say something about the "continuing effort to blame the Bush Administration for the disaster." Boo hoo hoo; let the facts speak for themselves, crybaby.

Now to answer the question: because that's the way FEMA is supposed to work.

Having "hundreds of reports flooding into FEMA headquarters" could sure hamper effective response efforts. Thus, FEMA has people who's job it is to act as a single point of contact to prevent exactly the kind of confusion that happened. The Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisianna shouldn't have been talking on the phone with Michael Chertoff — they should have been talking with Marty Bahamonde, and it's Michael Chertoff's fault if they weren't properly redirected. It was Marty Bahamonde's job to collected reports and observations and then provide an assessment to Michael Chertoff.

But Moran raises a compelling question: what about "others at FEMA who are more technically competent"? Well maybe they should have had Bahamonde's job because PAO's are also responsible for initial damage assessments, especially prior to official FEMA engagement. Specifically, they are tasked with assessing the scope of the disaster response. I don't think it would have helped if any of these hypothetical experts had been involved since Marty Bahamonde's report was entirely accurate.

By ignorantly painting Mr. Bahamonde as some kinds of "PR flack" or glorified spokesperson, Moran tries to excuse the Bush Administration for ignoring the information that he is officially assigned to gather.

Moran links to the FEMA site where readers can see for themsevles that Marty Bahamonde is a "Public Affairs Specialist." Rick seems quite proud of himself for digging up this nugget of information. Perhaps he could have done a little research into what PAO's actually do.

Holy fuck, these wingnuts are fucking imbeciles.

Posted by Winston Smith at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "Oil Prices May Drop with War"

Before the war, there was one things that above all would elicit self-righteous tirades if not apoplectic rage from wingnuts: just say, "No war for oil."

"The Iraq war wasn't about oil!" you would be told at 115db's with extra spittle. The war, we were endlessly reminded was about saving the world from Saddam's WMDs — and don't you forget it! At least not until early 2005. Since then, the war has been about liberating Iraq and bringing democracy to the Middle East. They had to switch the narrative because it turns out that if you go to Iraq, you won't find any WMDs. You won't find democracy either, but thank Jeebus, few Bush supporters are foolish enough to venture into the war-torn hellhole that we created in Iraq.

What passes for the democractically-elected government of Iraq has asked us to leave, but how about the rest of the Middle East? Well, Iranian moderates have lost power and the Palestinians are now represented by a hated terrorist origanization. Freedom on the move!

It really would behoove the Bushies to change their tune to "the war was about oil," because that's something that you can actually find in Iraq, and let's face it: that's what they all wanted.

After calming down from their "no war for oil?!" outburst, many wingnuts would gladly admit that — hey — who doesn't like cheap gas?

So no big surprise that three years ago today, NewsMax published a carefully-worded article: Oil Prices May Drop with War. Whoo-hoo!

The prediction was based on the ability of the Saudis to drastically increase production, as well as release stockpiles from the oil reserve. The stockpiles were released, but oil went up anyway. Why? Because the oil industry figured out something that most Americans couldn't: the Saudis can't increase production.

This prognostication was just more of the bullshit wishful thinking that NewsMax and its excreable ilk churned out in the propaganda war before the Iraq war.

Posted by Winston Smith at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2006

NM-3Y: "Poll: Hillary Would Win"

Thanks to the Republicans, and Karl Rove in particular, modern politicians no longer govern — they just campaign. Thus, although there was no election in 2003, it was still an "election year" for the party that things every year is an election year.

Polls that look at, say, a presidential election nearly two years in advance provide little information. Three years ago today, NewsMax ran the results of a poll asking about who people would vote for in a presidential election. Out of all of the possible Democratic challengers, all would have lost to President Bush, but Hillary Clinton would have lost with the least, garnering 43% of the hypothetical vote.

This poll was a little about Bush's re-election chances, but mostly about name recognition amongst prominent Democrats. It shouldn't be any surprise that more people knew the name "Clinton" than others, but what NewsMax never mentioned was that John Kerry and Dick Gephardt drew percentages (42%) that were within the margin of error (2.7%) of Hillary's total.

An honest article would have claimed "Clinton, Kerry and Gephardt Most Popular Democratic Presidential Candidates" or something like that. NewsMax entitled their coverage of this with the title "Poll: Hillary Would Win." Cleverly, they didn't say "win the election," because the poll showed Bush winning. The article explains that she would win the candidacy, so what's up with the title?

Well, if you've read any of this series, you've figured out that NewsMax isn't about articles, it's about titles. NewsMax "readers" are dull-witted rubes and probably don't read many of the actual articles. As I pointed out yesterday, wingnuts often cite articles that directly contradict them, making it obvious that they didn't read past the title, or the first paragraph.

The title — the most important part of a NewsMax article — raises the specter of something that terrifies wingnuts more than anything: President Hillary Clinton. These nutjobs can't obesses enough over how popular Hillary Clinton is. I kid you not, in 2004 I read a comment of Free Republic in which the author predicts a last-minute coup by the Clintons in which Kerry was replaced by Hillary. I swear to Jeebus that more than a few Freepers thought this was a likely scenario.

Personally, I don't like Hillary Clinton that much, and I don't know anyone who wants to see her oppose the Republicans in 2008. The wingnut pundits made noise about the fact that someone shouted out "our next President" after a Hillary reference at Mrs. King's funeral, and the crowd went wild. What these drooling goons "failed to mention" was Bill Clinton replying, "No, no, no." It seems like Clinton is testing the waters, but I doubt she'll get the nomination.

The concept of Hillary Clinton running for President is a galvanize the wingnut base against the Democrats, because statistically, not all that many people are for the Republicans, and Bush in particular.

On the same topic, NewsMax also ran a base-energizing piece,Bush Vulnerable in 2004?. In this, they report "concern" about Bush's low poll numbers. Oh, he should have such low poll numbers these days.

Posted by Winston Smith at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2005

Coming to an Airport Near You: Saner Rules?

The TSA (Transportation Safety Authority) is about to drop its ban on scissors on planes. Now the long nightmare for seamstresses on domestic flights will finally be over.

I swear, these guys are such fucking idiots it amazes me they are allowed to staff the airport security booths. Cockpit doors are now (finally) blade-weapon proof, so lift the ban on blades already. Why don't they screen passengers for black belts in Karate, for crying out loud? Or make Special Ops soldiers take special flights so they won't endanger the passengers? The line was drawn in the Stupid Zone and slowly, thanks to continental, I mean, governmental drift, it's being dragged back to Reality.

Best line in the article:

Screeners will spend more time checking for explosives under guidelines which will allow for more random searches.

Yeah. Do that. Look harder for BOMBS. Sheesh.

Posted by Steven at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2005

John and Judith, Sitting In Jail

Why is John Bolton, Bush's embattled U.S. Rep. to the U.N., visiting New York Times' jailed reporter Judith Miler? Could it be that he has some role in the Valere Plame affair?

“Bolton's visit raised some eyebrows in Washington,” the Post said. “A vocal defender of administration claims in 2003 that Iraq was seeking weapons of mass destruction, he could have had access to a State Department memo, parts of which were classified, that detailed Wilson's trip to Niger to determine whether Iraq was seeking uranium there and identified his wife as a covert CIA operative. Who saw or discussed the memo has been a central question for Fitzgerald.

“Bolton declined through a spokesman to discuss his visit to Miller or his reasons for going. ‘This has nothing to do with his job here,' the spokesman said. 'He doesn't want to talk about it.’”

Miller will remain jailed for another month or more, when the grand jury investigating the Plame/CIA leak will probably disband.

Milner, it should be noted, wrote most of the NYT stories about WMD in Iraq. She's not on our side, folks, so don't feel too bad about her jail term (yes, it's bad for journalism that she's locked up, but she's a bad apple in the whole Iraq affair and may be one of the few Bush allies who does actual jail time).

Posted by Steven at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2005

A, B or C Players

Steven P. Jobs (of Apple Computer) is (in)famous for saying, "A players hire A players. B players hire C players." (The Machintosh Way, Guy Kawasaki, p. 31).

Looks like George Bush is a B Player.

Posted by Steven at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2005

Nice Shoot'n, Tex

FEMA sent evacuees to Charleston today. Officials in Charleston, South Carolina, scrambled to get ready for them.

They arrived in Charleston, West Virginia.

Nice shoot'n, Tex.

Posted by Steven at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2005

Need More Proof?

How about this, a naval vessel floating off the coast of New Orleans, completely immobile pending orders to actually start helping Americans on their homeland, for almost a week.

The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.

The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.

But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.

Jesus Jumping Christ! Thousands have died in New Orleans for lack of a decent hospital bed, and here lies the Bataan just offshore, equiped for just such a situation.

Still not convinced?

Impeach the whole damned lot of them.

Posted by Steven at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

Levee Repair Effort Merely a Photo Op for Bush

Bush toured (with LA Sen. Landrieu) the 17th St. levee two days ago, and showcased what looked like a major repair effort. A day later, the hardware was gone, gone gone.

"But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast -- black and white, rich and poor, young and old -- deserve far better from their national government.

It takes balls to start a fake repair effort and then remove it during a national crisis. Fortunately, VP Cheney has those balls, as does tax dodging mastermind Karl Rove.

Update

Icing on the cake -- when Bush was in New Orleans, the Secret Service cancelled all air traffic, effectively halting the evacuation effort. That probably cost a few more lives right there.

Posted by Steven at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

Utter, Staggering Incompetence

The Washington Post and almost all major media outlets are offering stories detailing the incompetence of the "Homeland Security Dept.", one of the Bush Adminstration's greatest cock-ups since the Iraq War.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.

Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.

Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.

But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the "ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwater breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic bomb had been dropped."

If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.

But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.

"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official whose office took on some of the preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and where the funding has been directed. The message was . . . we need to be better prepared against terrorism."

Words fail me here. These people let thousands of mostly poor and infirm Americans die while they waited for President Bush's handlers to tell them when to act to make the President look his best. Instead, they lost New Orleans through systemic depletion of funding to improve the city's chances against a hurricane, and then they lost thousands of lives for a political show that it appears the Mainstream Media is going to shove in their faces, finally.

Impeachment and firings are too good for these incompetent monsters.

Posted by Steven at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2005

Little Nero

Check out the nation's newest singer-leader:

If this photo, taken three days after the Hurricane struck the U.S., doesn't upset you, you're not paying attention.

Posted by Steven at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2005

Republicans, The Retread Masters

If the GOP is the "party of ideas", writes Michael Kinsey, then why are those ideas so unoriginal ?

It's true that the Republicans are the party of ideas and the Democrats are the party of reaction. Republicans set the agenda, and Democrats try to talk the country out of it. But the Republican Party is hardly the Institute for Advanced Studies. The GOP uses ideas like seasonal sports equipment -- taking them out when needed, then scraping the mud off and stuffing them back into the garage until they are needed again.

Remember term limits? The flag-burning amendment? The balanced-budget amendment? Each of these has had a moment or two of glory, when Republican politicians, conservative TV and radio hosts, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page all decided simultaneously that implementing this idea was vital to the survival of Western civilization. Polls soon showed a majority of Americans agreeing with them. The idea seemed unstoppable. It had the winds of history behind it.

And then the winds died, and the idea went away. I still can't quite figure out how we have avoided trashing the Constitution with an idiotic amendment against burning the flag. But the failure of all these hot-button issues, in stunning contrast to the success of the party that has ridden them to power, suggests that for the Republicans, ideas serve politics rather than the other way around.

The so-called flat tax is another hobby horse of the right that swept the nation, then got swept away. But someone forgot to tell Steve Forbes, the amiably blank-faced magazine heir who ran for president on the issue in 1996 and 2000. Now he has a book out, "Flat Tax Revolution: Using a Postcard to Abolish the IRS." It's getting the full fair-and-balanced treatment -- that is, unashamed, open-throated puffery -- on Fox News and other conservative outlets. So even though the idea looks pretty dead right now, a stake through its heart might still be prudent.

The flat tax is a game of three-card monte that deliberately confuses the issues of simplicity, fairness and the total tax burden on society. A simpler tax system would be a very good thing: good for the economy and good for our sanity. But progressive tax rates -- higher taxes on higher incomes -- aren't what make the current system so complicated. It's as easy -- even easier -- to multiply by 40 percent as it is to multiply by 17 percent. Multiple tax rates require one extra calculation, but it's only subtraction. Even Republicans can easily do it -- or hire someone to do it for them, if necessary.

Posted by Steven at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2005

Bush Government Tampers with Science

CNN is reporting that Bush Adminstration officials tampered with the scientific findings of government studies.

A White House official, who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, has repeatedly edited government climate reports in a way that downplays links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made changes to descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists and their supervisors, the newspaper said, citing internal documents.

How many more lies will the Bush Administration thrust upon the country? When Houston dissappears under the Gulf of Mexico, will there still be a statue to President Bush's father in the airport? Will it be an attraction that scuba divers visit?

Posted by Steven at 10:59 AM | Comments (1)

June 01, 2005

HP + Fascism

Oh goody. HP has jumped into the National ID fray with a "standards-based" solution built on Microsoft's proprietary .NET framework. This is certain to be a great boon to everybody, if, by "everybody," you mean HP and Microsoft.

Posted by Winston Smith at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2005

Putin Misses Real Dictatorship

Russia: We'll be a dictatorship again. Soon. Vladmir Putin "misses the USSR". He's also George Bush's good buddy in Russia!

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century.

Mr Putin's annual state of the nation address to parliament was broadcast live on Russian television.

He said the break-up of the USSR in 1991 was "a real drama" which left tens of millions of Russians outside the Russian Federation.

He also said Russia must develop as a "free and democratic" country.

But he stressed that Russia "will decide for itself the pace, terms and conditions of moving towards democracy".

I guess he and Bush both miss the glory days of dictatorship and are working ever closer to reviving them. I wonder what Putin really thinks a democracy looks like (perhaps where the GOP is taking America?).

Posted by Steven at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2005

Cynicism Buffet

From the NY Times:

Gov. Jeb Bush's last-minute intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, even after the president had ended his own effort to keep her alive, may have so far failed in a legal sense, but it has cemented the religious and social conservative credentials of a man whose political pedigree is huge and whose political future remains a subject of intense speculation.

Well, we're all glad that this burlesque show of candlelight vigils for the brain dead has helped Jeb's career. You almost wish some of this Left Behind bullshit were true. Anything to get these fucking people off the planet.

Posted by at 12:40 AM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2005

Orwell News Network

And that's the way we want you to remember it was. The Bush Administration is the worst abuser of fake news in the history of the nation, making The Daily Show look like The McNeil Leher Report. Read this New York Times article for more details.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.

Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.

Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.

It is also a world where all participants benefit.

I never thought I'd hear of government sponsored fake news as a kind of laundered drug-money product that the Bush Administration has to slip into the U.S. Media (Liberal Media, that is) like illegal drugs.

Why don't we just start calling it pravda?

Posted by Steven at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2005

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Science!

From MSNBC:

WASHINGTON - The voice of science is being stifled in the Bush administration, with fewer scientists heard in policy discussions and money for research and advanced training being cut, according to panelists at a national science meeting.

Speakers at the national meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science expressed concern Sunday that some scientists in key federal agencies are being ignored or even pressured to change study conclusions that don�t support policy positions.

The speakers also said that Bush�s proposed 2005 federal budget is slashing spending for basic research and reducing investments in education designed to produce the nation�s future scientists.

The nation's future scientists? What nation are they talking about?

Posted by at 10:14 PM | Comments (1)

February 08, 2005

Deep Throat to be Revealed Soon?

I'm waiting ... According to several sources (including the 18 1/2 Minute Gap), Woodward and Bernstein are going to reveal who "Deep Throat" is, as the individual is gravely ill and near death. This is the source they relied on to expose the Nixon White House connection to the "Plumbers", who broke into the Watergate Hotel and which lead to Nixon's resignation in the face of being impeached.

Synchronicity? According to CNN, the movie Deep Throat is being "re-released" in theaters on 2/18. Don't rush out to see it ... as pornos go, it was pretty typical for having a incredibly stupid and mysogynist plot.

Posted by Steven at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2005

Classic Bushit

Bush's word is not worth spit. A commentary by Mark A. R. Kleiman.

Well, that was quick, wasn't it?

Thursday, GWB gave a mighty pretty speech, all about freedom and how we were going to be for it from now on. A day later, that speech officially became a dead letter courtesy of one of the dreaded "senior officials" who makes official leaks, not for attribution: Bush Freedom Speech Not Sign of Policy Shift: Aides (Reuters); Bush Speech Not a Signal of New Policy, Aides Say (NYT).

Since I kinda like freedom, and think we mostly ought to be for it, I decided not to say at the time any of the snarky things that came to mind: about GWB's coziness with the Saudi ruling family, with the nuke-peddling Pakistani military theocracy, with Putin and his KGB cronies, with the Indonesian generals who have decided to prevent tsunami relief from reaching the people of Aceh, or with the Chinese government that runs the largest, and perhaps most successful (or second-most-sucessful after Singapore) tyranny in the world.

Naturally, I was skeptical that the President who has raised bullshit to an art form and erected it into a governing principle actually meant what he said. He addressed "all those who live in tyranny and hopelessness" and promised that "when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

Really? All? Forget for the moment about those who are standing for their liberty against Putin and the Chinese politboro and other rulers it would be expensive for us to alienate. There are people in Zimbabwe right now standing for their liberty, and people in Burma (I'm damned if I'll call it Myanmar just because the SLORC prefers it that way), and people in Iran, and people in Kazakhstan.

Are we "standing with them," or are we just standing on the sidelines lackadaisically cheering them on? Are we sending money? Communications equipment? Weapons, if that's what they want? Will we allow this country to be used as a base for revolutionary fundraising or a source of small arms purchased privately?

I think the right anwer to give to those questions is sometimes, but not always, "Yes." But it seemed to me that for the President of the United States, on a solemn occasion, to publicly offer a blank check that he knows is going to bounce, was pretty offensive.

Still, it would have been nice to think that, on the margin, the speech represented a genuine decision to give a little less support to the people FDR called "our sonsofbitches."

The war against Islamofascism is being played for lower stakes than the Cold War or World War II, so we can afford to be a little bit less cynical in our choice of means. Moreover, re-establishing ourselves as the global beacon of democracy might actually be a strategically sound move. Not only is it helpful to actually stand for something when you're trying to get other people to help you, but cynicism exacts its own price. It's easy to forget how many "realistic" policies, from backing the Shah in Iran and losing to backing the mujaheddin against the Russians in Afghanistan and winning, turned out sour.

[There is still much wisdom in the Norse myth JFK liked to tell: how Odin knew, by his magic, that the victory of the Aesir at the Gotterdammerung depended on his learning a secret known only to a certain witch. When the witch demanded his right eye as the price of the secret, he plucked it out and laid it on the table: only to be told that the secret of victory was "Watch with both eyes."]

Anyway, that's all obsolete now. The ink was barely dry on Friday's newspapers before Bush sent one of those dreaded "senior officials" to tell the New York Times, "Never mind." None of our tyrannical buddies need worry. The plan to hold (men-only) elections for local councils in Saudi Arabia means that Saudi Arabia is making progress toward democracy. The same goes for Pakistan, where a promise by Musharraf, who has already broken more promises than he can count, to hold elections two years from now, is plenty good enough. Freedom is coming, as an "end state," said the official, though it might take "generations to achieve."

Now I don't pretend to know what to do about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, where democracy could have disastrous consequences; as Wesley Clark remarked during the campaign, if Saudi Arabia held free elections, its new President would be Osama bin Laden.

But I'm heartily tired of being ruled by a man whose word isn't worth the spit behind it.

Well, four years isn't forever.

From The 18� Minute Gap.

Posted by Steven at 08:41 AM | Comments (1)

January 21, 2005

Bush's sound-proof asbestos suit

A recent Washington Post article provides us with climatologist James E. Hansen's perspective on life as a climate scientist under the Bush administration. It's hard to be a scientist these days, and that's sad. The reaction of an administration to the views and opinions of specialists who advise it, especially when those views and opinions don't mesh comfortably with other administration policies and goals, says a lot about an administration -- just like when the current administration ignored what certaqin specialists were telling it about Iraqi WMDs, the difficulties of war, troop strengths and how difficult the aftermath might be.

But, evidently Hansen hasn't figured out that this administration isn't likely to learn from its mistakes.

"You can't just give up," he said. "I remain optimistic, even in this administration, that the evidence is going to become strong enough so there's a chance there will be a change in policy."

Ah, it's refreshing -- if sad -- to see such optimism in today's political climate.

Posted by at 10:18 AM | Comments (2)

December 23, 2004

"Education President" Cuts Financial Aid

The Bush Administration's battle with the Congress over reducing the Pell Grant has ended ... with the poor and middle class taking it up the kiester.

College students in virtually every state will be required to shoulder more of the cost of their education under new federal rules that govern most of the nation's financial aid.

Because of the changes, which take effect next fall and are expected to save the government $300 million in the 2005-6 academic year, at least 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell Grants, the nation's primary scholarship for those of low income, according to two analyses of the new rules.

In addition, 89,000 students or so who would otherwise be getting some Pell Grant money will get none, the analyses found.

"Season's greetings from Uncle Sam," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which conducted one of the analyses and represents about 1,800 colleges and universities. "Your student aid stocking is going to be a little thinner next year."

Posted by Steven at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2004

Words Fail

Anti-perspirant -- moisturizing formula!

My head hurteth.

Posted by at 01:08 AM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2004

Well, this explains a lot!

But, I guess it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know...

Posted by at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)

Norwegian Homos Destroy the Earth!

Here's the latest from Mullah Dobson, courtesy of TPM:

Dobson warned those attending the Friday afternoon rally at Oklahoma Christian University that the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman must be protected. He cited examples of countries such as Norway that have allowed same-sex couples to marry as proof that fewer men and women get married. Dobson said 80 percent of children are born out of wedlock in Norway.

�Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage,� Dobson said.

�It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.�

So, I guess it doesn't matter that the arctic ice cap is melting. Homos are going to destroy the earth anyway.

Posted by at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2004

Gore: Bush is a Liar

CNN and the Washington Post (among others) are running stories about Al Gore's final major policy speech today (sponsored by MoveOn.

Former vice president Al Gore finished a two-year series of policy addresses yesterday by accusing President Bush of deliberately suppressing information about Iraq that would have undermined his case for war.

Gore said that he had previously resisted saying Bush intentionally deceived the public in the run-up to the invasion but that the evidence now shows "that in virtually every case the president chose to ignore -- and indeed often to suppress -- studies, reports, information, facts, that were directly contrary to the false impressions he was in the process of giving to the American people."

Echoing a campaign theme of Democratic nominee John F. Kerry, Gore told about 700 students and activists at Georgetown University that Bush is "arrogantly out of touch with reality."

"He refuses to ever admit mistakes, which means that so long as he is our president we are doomed to repeat his mistakes," Gore said, to applause. "It is beyond incompetence. It is recklessness that risks the safety and security of the American people."

No doubt soon you will only be able to talk to Al Gore through a chicken-wire fence in Cuba, but until that time, Go Al, GO!

Posted by Steven at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

This is your Newspaper on Drugs

It is not a big surprise that the Dallas Morning News is endorsing Bush for President. It is rather amazing, however, that they didn't even bother trying to come up with a plausible rationale for doing so, instead echoing cliches that sound like they came from a Bush campaign commercial.

Americans want and need a president with a backbone steeled by courage and a heart tendered by compassion...

I just want somebody who can dance.

Having been tempered by the most eventful and consequential four years served by any U.S. president since Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term (1941-1945), Mr. Bush has earned the right to hold firm to his charge for another term...

Earned the right? Did he earn this right by launching a pre-emptive war for reasons that turned out to be utterly false? Or did he earn this right by completely botching the occupation of this country that was no threat to us? Or, perhaps, by running up the largest deficits in history by giving tax cuts to the wealthy?

Though he has stumbled and fallen at times, Mr. Bush has always risen to fight the next round. It's called conviction. It's called sticking. It's called guts. The challenges of these dramatic days demand an American president with guts...

Aren't you guys supposed to be journalists? Why don't we just dispense with this reality thing altogether and nominate a cartoon character for President?

Mr. Bush inherited an economy slip-sliding into recession. Then came 9-11, followed by bruising blows from the cost of the Iraq war and occupation. Yet the economy has started to revive, thanks in part to his leadership on taxes...

The economy is reviving? Have you tried to get a job in the Dallas area recently?

That said, we have been disappointed by the president's refusal to rein in domestic spending. True, Mr. Kerry has no real plan to eliminate the deficit either, but that's cold comfort. In a second term, Mr. Bush would have to turn into a budget hawk. We trust that that would be easier for a Texas Republican than for a Massachusetts Democrat.

So, you're saying that Bush has a four year track record of utter irresponsibility on fiscal matters, but at least he's not a liberal from Massachusetts? Is that something right off the RNC feed?

Posted by at 06:36 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2004

CNN: The "C" is for Irony!

With its talking heads, subtitles, and text crawl, CNN uses a single television screen to deliver three times as much news as a screen with one third the news! It's impressive.

As an incomprehensible jumble of animated headlines has steadily consumed screen real estate like a blanket of video kudzu, some critics have opined that the "crawl" is actually a step backward in the delivery of news. Maybe it is, but that's obviously not the point.

I've long believed that its a Zen meditation tool, and I've finally found my smoking one-hand-clapping:

"PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER"

And I was enlightened.

Posted by at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2004

U.S. Ups Internet Censorship

The BBC and others are reporting that Rackspace, an Internet provider, has shutdown Indymedia's servers in London and handed over the hard drives to the FBI.

A FBI spokesperson told the AFP news agency that it was not an FBI operation, saying the order had been issued at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.

The seizure has sparked off protests from journalist groups.

"We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specialising in independent journalism," said Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists.

"The way this has been done smacks more of intimidation of legitimate journalistic inquiry than crime-busting."

The UK site of Indymedia is back up and running but several of the other 20 sites affected are still offline.

In the US, the civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said it was working with Indymedia over how to react to the seizures.

"The constitution does not permit the government unilaterally to cut off the speech of an independent media outlet, especially without providing a reason or even allowing Indymedia the information necessary to contest the seizure," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl.

More pre-election, post PATRIOT shenanigans ... in another country?

Posted by Steven at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2004

Republican Logic

Reported to us by Denis "Live Free or Die" Parslow.

Posted by Steven at 08:05 AM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2004

Kerry's Say the Darndest Things!

A staple conservative canard is that John Kerry is an effete intellectual who can't relate to "ordinary folk." The desired caricature is the kind of a know-it-all geek that any red-blooded Joe Sixpack would beat up and stuff in a gym locker — if not for the fact that this "geek" is a foot taller than him and has killed over a dozen people in vicious jungle combat.

Unfortunately, as last week's debate finally revealed, Kerry is plain-speaking, albeit well-informed, and confident.

Not geeky.

At all.

It's been widely reported that at least one Faux News reporter was so frustrated by Kerry's lack of non-guy-like behavior, that he simply made up some quotes in which Kerry gushed about a manicure. That was dumb, but hey, it was Fox, so whachagonnado?

A lesser-known story involves an older quote, in which John Kerry awkwardly pandered to the blue collar crowd with the rhetorical query, "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?" You could almost hear the lilting Beacon Hill accent that John Kerry doesn't have in that quote.

Oh, and John Kerry didn't say that either.

So, who made up that quote? Well, it first appeared in a smug, Kerry-bashing piece of New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd. You may remember her from the last Presidential race where she made up the story about Al Gore claiming that "Love Story" was about him and Tipper. Still employed four years later, Dowd is still churning out fiction on the pages of the nation's supposed "paper of record."

Luckily, Fox News has set new lows in expectations of journalists, so Ms. Dowd has an out: someone told her about the quote. The Daily Howler explains in gruesome detail that Ms. Dowd was told about the quote and reported it as fact.

How much did she trust the source? A lot!

We know this because Dowd possessed of a tape of Kerry's actual comments, but didn't feel it worth the effort to listen to it. The Howler follows the sordid life of this fabrication in Ken Burns-esque narative granularity, so read their article if you want a good laugh — followed by a kind of sick feeling.

Anyway, I don't want waste any more SJR bandwidth trashing Ms. Dowd. After all, she's just a journalist and it's hard enough for her to report the facts, much less verify them.

Posted by at 05:23 AM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2004

Kerry's Hometown Paper Endorses Bush

Well, "East Coast" Correspondent Skates scooped me on the Crawford paper endorsing Kerry, so it's only fair that I get to report that the Lowell Sun, the paper in Senator Kerry's home town has endorsed Bush. The geniuses on the edittorial board seize on the utterly retarded argument that Bush is resolute:

What might a lesser leader have done, faced with the daunting task of deciding America's course against withering, partisan attacks from Democrats, media propagandists, disingenuous U.N. officials and disloyal White House operatives selling their souls for profit during a time of war?

Yes, Lowell Sun, no matter how many people point out the disasterous mistakes of the Bush administration, Bush will "resolutely" keep repeating them. Oh goody!

The rest of the text reads like a Republican talking point pamphlet and couldn't have been written by someone who'd read a credible newspaper. Obviously, this isn't something that the editors of the Lowel Sun are in danger of doing.

What is really gauling is that Lowell is an old Massachusetts textile mill town which has suffered for decades from the offshoring of jobs that is now deflating the tech industry. The Lowell Sun couldn't have done a worse disservice to their community if they'd endorsed Charles Manson for President.

Posted by at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

Fox News: Oops, I Did It Again

I erred in my post about Faux News this morning. Yes, they published false information, but no, they didn't do it once, they did it twice. In a report on debate reaction, they inteviewed the satirical group Billionaires for Bush — and anti-Bush activist group — and the group Communists for Kerry, billed as a pro-Kerry group.

Of course, Communists for Kerry isn't a pro-Kerry group, it's an anti-Kerry group. Fox has amended its story:

In a version of this article that was published earlier, the Communists for Kerry group was portrayed as an organization that was supporting John Kerry for president. FOXNews.com�s reporter asked the group�s representative several times whether the group was legitimate and supporting the Democratic candidate, and the spokesman insisted that it was. The Communists for Kerry group is, in fact, a parody organization.

I'll grant that its hard to identify Communists for Kerry as a parody group because none of its materials are the least bit funny. But the fact that the "representative" for the group was 17 years old and can't even vote, should have raised a red flag (no pun intended). Also the easily-accessible "About" page on the site which states that the group is a satirical "527" activist group, well, that should have — maybe — sparked some skepticism in the reporter.

Fuck. I'm going to call Fox News and swear to god that I'm Laura Bush and that I'm voting for Kerry.

I'd write more, but the Daily Kos covered this quite well in this post. Enjoy.

Posted by at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)

Fox News: "We're Stupid, Not Malicious!"

After Kerry finished rubbing Chimpy face in the crap-pile he's left on the national carpet last Thursday night, Fox News campaign correspondent Carl Cameron posted an article on the Fox Web site that was chock full of completely fabricated Kerry quotes. When the Kerry campaign complained, Fox rooted out the source of the faux quotes: Fox New campaign correspondent Carl Cameron.

That's right, Cameron just made that shit up and posted it as news. The quotes portrayed Kerry as an effeminate metro-sexual and were spurred by a rumor that Senator Kerry had gotten a manicure before the debate.

Fox immediately retracted the article and issued the kind of excuse-laden apology characteristic of "repeat offenders." It boiled down to "Hey, we were just kidding... er, look, it was stupid, not malicious, it won't happen again!" Cameron was "reprimanded," but is still working the campaign beat.

Why no calls from concerned Republicans for a Congressional investigation? Well, mainly because no one expects Fox News to act like a reputable news organization. Read more in The New York Times.

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

Bob Herbert: A Visit To Bushland

Check out Bob Herbert's editorial in the New York Times today. He speaks to Bush's alternative reality, an "up is down" universe of dementia and denial.

There undoubtedly were many reasons for Mr. Bush's lackluster effort. But I think there was one factor, above all, that undermined the president in last week's debate, and will continue to plague him throughout the campaign. And that was his problematic relationship with reality.

Mr. Bush is a man who will frequently tell you - and may even believe - that up is down, or square is round, when logic and all the available evidence say otherwise. During the debate, this was most clearly displayed when, in response to a question about the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush told the moderator, Jim Lehrer, "The enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty to protect the American people, to do everything I can to protect us."

If you really, really back this man, you should do what he does and do (for you) what is the opposite of reality. And by that, I do mean voting for John Kerry.

You don't want to be a hypocrite, do you?

Posted by Steven at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2004

Resolute Incompetence

In a valiant attempt at defending Bush, David Brooks tries to sell us on the idea that competence is overrated:

Nonetheless, I suspect that the reason Bush's approval ratings hover around 50 percent, despite a year of carnage in Iraq, is because of the reason many of us in the commentariat don't like to talk about: in a faithful and moralistic nation, Bush's language has a resonance with people who know that he is not always competent, and who know that he doesn't always dominate every argument, but who can sense a shared cast of mind.

I don't even tolerate incompetence in my choice of plumber. Why should I tolerate it in the President of the United States? It's amazing to me that these guys can get away with this kind of argument.

Posted by at 01:22 AM | Comments (1)

September 19, 2004

Iraq Meltdown

It looks like Bush is taking some flack from his own party on his rosy view of Iraq:

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said Bush was not being "as straight as maybe we'd like to see" with the American people about Iraq.

McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday" that it was "a serious mistake" not to have had enough troops in place "after the initial successes" and that the mistake had led to "very, very significant" difficulties...

Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," Jon Kyl, Arizona's junior senator -- also a Republican -- said "hand-wringing" about the situation in Iraq would not win the war.

"War is tough, and there are casualties. And just before victory, sometimes, it gets most violent," said Kyl, chairman of the subcommittee on terrorism, technology and homeland security of the Judiciary Committee.

Appearing on the same program, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a fellow Republican, disagreed with Kyl that the United States was anywhere near victory.

"I don't think we're winning. In all due respect to my friend Jon Kyl, the term 'hand-wringing' is a little misplaced here," Hagel said.

"The fact is, a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies are required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where we finally lost.

"The fact is, we're in trouble. We're in deep trouble in Iraq," said Hagel, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees...

On ABC's "This Week," Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana and Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware both had critical words for the administration's handling of Iraq...

Lugar, who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said "the incompetence in the administration" led to only $1 billion spent out of $18 billion appropriated last year for reconstruction efforts.

If you think these guys are off the reservation now, just wait until after the election. There are a lot of this people in this country that are fooling themselves about what is going on over there. These senators know what is going on, and they want to be as far away as possible when that wall of denial comes tumbling down.

Posted by at 10:17 PM | Comments (0)