[. . .]
Da windiz of da fancy stawz.
Ya gotta tell da kids dat dere's no way ya gonna buy dem shit in doze staws though. There's perfectly good stuff for sale along the sidewalk, ya know?
Translation for idiots: Lovely windows at some of New Yorks finer retail establishments.
[. . .]
Bill Moyers Gets In the Last Word
By Tom Shales
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Bill Moyers has always taken the high road, but it got a little lonely up there. In a country where political discourse grows ever more shrill, his voice was more and more easily drowned out. Last night, at the age of 70 and on the eve of his 50th wedding anniversary, Bill Moyers took the high road home.
Moyers said not goodbye but "farewell" as he took leave of "Now," the program he has hosted for the past three years on PBS. The show will continue in a few weeks with another host, but Moyers's presence will be an irreplaceable loss. Watching the final program, which consisted of a report on the dominance of right-wing ranting in TV and radio and an interview with Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU, one may have felt guilty about not having supported Moyers more loyally as he kept fighting the good fight.
His is one of the few liberal voices left in broadcasting, it seems, and his insistence on being armed with facts to support his opinions left him at something of a disadvantage when dealing with people who think the way to win an argument is to scream the loudest. Moyers represented reason, deliberation, serious questioning of the status quo and, especially, standing as firmly as possible against government encroachment into Americans' private lives.
Moyers may not have helped his own image as something of a pontificator, however, by mentioning "Mein Kampf" in a cautionary note about the Pentagon's use of deception and disinformation against enemies, real or imagined, abroad. Piety is one of the sins most common to those on the political left, and Moyers's career has hardly been devoid of it. In the grand scheme of things -- if there is a grand scheme of things -- it wasn't much of a character flaw.
After the preliminaries and the listing of what sounded like 75 underwriting foundations, Moyers last night introduced the first report, "A Matter of Opinion," by recalling a car trip he and wife Judith Davidson Moyers (a partner in his business) took and how shocked they were when they started scanning the radio dial. What he heard, Moyers said, was "a freak show of political pornography" on a scale he found "malignant."
The report, produced by Kathleen Hughes, documented conservative excesses on the "public" airwaves. Sean Hannity, a bullying buffoon on the "fair and balanced" Fox News network, spent much of his time this year campaigning for George W. Bush, telling an audience in one city that a vote for Democrat John Kerry would help "Osama get his way."
Sinclair Broadcasting, a major owner of TV and radio properties, tried to force its stations to air what was clearly a free political infomercial for Bush until protesters forced company executives, loyal Republicans all, to back down. Sinclair fired one journalist, Jon Leiberman, for his protests. He told Moyers he was dumped for "refusing to toe the party line." The "documentary" was eventually cut into sections and passed off as news on the stations' newscasts.
Equally conservative and arguably more powerful Clear Channel Communications also went all-out in supporting Bush's reelection and Iraq war. A popular talk-jock at one Clear Channel station argued against the war on his show and found himself exiled to a remote time slot. "Management directed me to shut up about the war," he said.
Moyers naturally dealt with radio personality Rush Limbaugh and Fox's noisiest loudmouth, Bill O'Reilly, during the report. But he never mentioned the personal yet very public problems that the two men went through during the past year -- tabloid stuff that Moyers and his producer obviously found irrelevant to the points they were trying to make. During the second half of the show, the ACLU executive did mention Limbaugh's addiction to prescription painkillers but only in illustrating how even conservatives benefit from the ACLU's vigilance in defending the right to privacy.
In a long goodbye to his viewers at the close of the show, Moyers said: "I've learned from you not to claim too much for my craft, but not to claim too little, either. You keep reminding me that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy go hand in hand. Or as a character says in one of Tom Stoppard's plays, 'People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.' "
On "Now" and his other broadcast efforts over a three-decade career, Moyers has investigated subjects that mainstream media ignore, whether out of indifference or fear. We should have watched more often. We should have paid more attention. But Moyers can still leave "Now" with satisfaction and pride. He played by dignified and gentlemanly rules -- rules that now, alas, may be dangerously out of date.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans, according to a nationwide poll.
The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious. [my emphasis]
[. . .]
[. . .]
So, our Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, its checks and Balances, could be no more permanent than the Prussian Empire—or the Roman Republic. And evil, ever changing and never changing, reproduces by taking the human faces, and the human hosts, appropriate to its time. Leading me to recommend to you, once again, the work of M. Scott Peck: People of the Lie (POTL). In examining evil, Peck comes to three conclusions, which are certainly relevant when thinking about the thirties, and may be relevant today. (1) The evil can be recognized by their pervasive, promiscuous lying. Lying is central to their identity. (2) The evil, like all of us, surround themselves with people who are like them. They cluster. And, not relevant to the thirties, but perhaps relevant today, (3) the evil congregate in churches, as a form of protective coloration. (Not to say that all, or even a significant minority of the churchgoing are evil; indeed, it is because most are good that the evil find protective coloration there.)
And yet I love Berlin...
So, good night...
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There's a third camp, those who would do nothing on Social Security because insolvency won't be a threat for a decade or more. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has privately questioned whether it makes sense to tackle Social Security now. After all, Republicans worked for years to gain control of Congress. Why jeopardize that by provoking a fight over Social Security?"
The Moose is not pollyannaish about a coming G.O.P. crack-up. Rather, he just wants to remind the donkey that he is not the only one with tsouris. The objective in the next year is for the Democrats to help heighten the contradictions within the Republican Party (my emphasis). For instance, seize the fallen standards of fiscal responsibility and military preparedness. Rising deficits and inadequately equipped troops cry out for a conservative party!
Maybe it can be the Democrats!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House gave a new vote of confidence on Friday to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld amid growing criticism of him from members of President Bush's own Republican Party.
"Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a great job leading our efforts at the Department of Defense to win the war on terrorism and to help bring about a free and peaceful Iraq, and the president is focused on working closely with him on those matters," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
[. . .]
Parallels to Iraq
Lest you think the mess in Fallujah has no precedent, The Nation re-runs a 1968 column on the losses caused by misdirected fire in the Vietnam War:
"Just before Saigon's police chief, Col. Nguyen Van Luan, was killed by a misfired American rocket, he noted bitterly that U.S. air strikes in the city's suburbs were helping the enemy more than hurting them. The Vietcong has no Air Force of his own so he uses ours," he said a week prior to his death--a remark which must be classed as one of the most ironic of the war."
No, America is not a starving nation--quite the opposite--but this "solemnization festivity," as Bull Moose points out, is an unseemly spectacle as the dead and wounded return from Iraq. "Somehow it is obscene for party goers to be dancing the Texas Two Step at the Black Tie and Boots Ball while across town young men and women are struggling to walk again at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval."
YISHAI ASIDO is an 11-year-old boy in Loudoun County who refused a class assignment last month to write a letter to U.S. Marines and, according to his teacher, said he wished that American soldiers -- and "all Americans" -- would die. His offensive remark led the county sheriff's office to dispatch two plainclothes officers to Yishai's home, where, according to Yishai's mother, they quizzed his parents on their political beliefs and asked whether they had taught him "anti-American values."
Perhaps the idea was to scare Yishai straight or to impress on him the indecency of his views. If so, there were probably better ways to deliver the message, starting with the teachers, guidance counselors, principal and other administrators at his school. Let the deployment of sheriff's deputies to a schoolboy's home be a last resort in the event of a specific, well-founded threat of violence.
The glaring contradiction between Bush’s praise for the three honorees and the disasters over which they presided—in Tenet’s case, within the US as well as in Iraq—points to an additional motive behind the awards. In the atmosphere of crisis and palace intrigue surrounding the Bush White House, the medals suggest a payoff to buy the silence of individuals in a position to tell tales that could prove highly damaging.
To this day the utter failure of the Bush administration and the CIA to take any serious measures to thwart an Al Qaeda attack that was known to be in the offing remains unexplained. Tenet, better than most, would know precisely who in the US intelligence establishment and Bush administration allowed the attacks to take place. The political motives for doing so were already clear in the way the Bush administration seized on the tragedy to implement both foreign and domestic policies of a far-reaching and reactionary character that would have been politically impossible, except under the banner of a “war on terror.”
If and when those responsible for the atrocity unfolding in Iraq are brought to justice, the latest Medal of Freedom recipients, and the man who bestowed them, will find themselves reunited in the dock of a war crimes tribunal, where they belong.
A short answer to the question of why we lost: Bush had more room for error. The Republicans had the stronger hand and played it well. The Democrats had the weaker hand and played it pretty well. The stronger trumps the weaker and well trumps pretty well. To put it another way, Kerry’s challenge was to do everything right. He didn’t. So he lost.
[. . .]
Wake the #uck up alreadyYeah.
When are the Dems going to stop being such deaf, dumb and blind dickheads? I don't know what pisses me off the most: the g-pukes who'll make shit up and stop at nothing, or the Dems who'll curl up quivering in a corner with #uck me painted on their asscheeks.
Former Kerry campaign manager says she may have underestimated the impact of the Swift BoatLiarsVets forBushTruth ads, and the incredible number of morons who fell for them, the Duh Institute reports.
Criminey.
BILOXI, Miss. (AP) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be replaced sometime in the next year, Sen. Trent Lott says.
``I'm not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld,'' Lott told the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday. ``I don't think he listens enough to his uniformed officers.''
I was saying this two years ago and I got called a commie and a traitor for my trouble.
Why does Trent Lott hate America?
Nearly 900 children have lost a parent in Iraq
Sad to the depths of his 4-year-old soul, Jack Shanaberger knew what he didn't want to be when he grows up: a father.
"I don't want to be a daddy because daddies die," the child solemnly told his mother after his father, Staff Sgt. Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger, a military policeman from Fort Pierce, Fla., was killed March 23 in an ambush in Iraq.
On that terrible day, Jack and his four siblings joined the ranks of the largely overlooked American casualties who, until now, have gone uncounted. Although almost daily official announcements tally the war dead, the collateral damage to the children left behind has not been detailed.
But, from Defense Department casualty reports, obituaries and accounts in hometown newspapers, and family interviews, Scripps Howard News Service has identified nearly 900 U.S. children who have lost a parent in the war, from the start of the conflict in March 2003 through November, when a total of 1,256 troops had died.
[. . .]
Where's Kerik?
This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my computer screen. First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States sent too few troops to Iraq.
One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue velvet ribbon with the ornate medal -- one failure after another, each now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a bestseller.)
The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?
To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it -- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal as any of the others.
Maybe next year.
But, hey, it's Christmas. Overcome with the spirit of giving, I'd like to give Rummy a lifeline to escape the flak over armor
They should take a lesson from their own playbook and reach out to corporate America. If Rummy can't adequately supply the Army, maybe I.B.M. and Xerox can.
Picture this: a truck rumbling across the desert on the evening news, completely armored and emblazoned with golden arches. Or a fleet of Visa Humvees. You know Donald Trump would love to slap his name on a few Chinooks. The 82nd Trumpborne.
And what about product placement? When soldiers give their Christmas greetings on Fox News or MSNBC, they could be holding cans of Pepsi or calling home on Samsung phones. Why merely send their love when they could be writing love letters in the sand on Apple computers?
Like athletes or Nascar drivers, they could sell every inch of their body: STP helmets, Nike boots, Staples "Yeah, we got that" dog tags, Starbucks M.R.E.'s, CamelBak canteens by Camels, Sony laser target designators.
All those old, out-of-shape reservists being dragged back by Rummy would be great pitchmen for arthritis medication. And Celebrex night vision goggles (emphasis so it's easier to read for us old farts. Don't forget Depends).
Rummy's a little distracted trying to get his silly space shield, which fizzled yet again in a test yesterday, and fighting hard for his job, so it may take him awhile to focus on privatizing. Meanwhile, we still have that pesky armor shortage.
So how about Tommy "Stop Writing Books and Finish the War" Franks, Paul "You Disbanded the Iraqi Army, Dummy" Bremer and George "Slam-Dunk" Tenet taking off those preposterous Medals of Freedom and contributing them. Just as Scarlett and Melanie took off their gold wedding rings for the Confederate cause, those medals can be melted down for a little Humvee armor.
With help like that and some corporate support - maybe Levitra could even sponsor his next trip to Iraq - Rummy could get the Army he wants and wishes to have sooner rather than later. Like, while we're actually fighting a war
Courts turn journalists into criminals
- Tim Crews
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
An American journalist today must be prepared to go to jail.
Newspapermen from the first days of this country would be saddened, but not shocked, to see 21st-century courts stampede to corral journalists, whether with the cudgel of subpoenas or fear of subpoenas.
Oddly enough, the press ought to have seen this coming and prepared for it. Even now, with reporters from Time Magazine and the New York Times held in contempt and facing 18-month prison sentences, the response from the mainstream American press has been tepid.
Few seem to know about -- or consider their legacy -- Benjamin Franklin Bache, who was beaten at the behest of President John Adams, arrested for printing news that the government did not like and for publishing documents that showed leading Federalists were lying about the "evil schemes" of France. Read: weapons of mass destruction.
Today, while more and more journalists are subpoenaed by federal investigators in connection with the alleged retaliatory "outing" of a CIA agent married to a critic of President George W. Bush, subpoenas are being used by defense attorneys and grand juries.
A few are standing tall. But the response of many in the press is predictable: Don't make waves. Death by self-censorship.
It's not just that reporters, photographers, editors and publishers have become very cautious or timid. Many have capitulated altogether and refuse to do any journalism that requires deep probing and sources to be protected. Consider that the New York Times' Judith Miller is being questioned about sources for a story she never wrote.
There is little doubt, from the acid poured upon my newspaper for publishing a send-up of the overzealous Patriot Act, that many are quite ready to silence a free press, ostensibly for reasons of security but really for reasons of having their self-deception disturbed (my emphasis).
It has come to a time, it seems to us, that journalists worth their salt must contemplate committing civil disobedience in nearly every issue. If we report that the county is misspending money or defrauding prisoners, we are cast as disloyal. "Get on board the bus, boy, or get run over" -- that's the message from Washington and Sacramento.
Virtually everyone doing eyes-open journalism courts a subpoena and then, if worth his or her salt, courts jail, financial ruin, even loss of family.
The deep disrespect by our elected and appointed officials for the free exchange of ideas is now seen plain in the higher levels of the nation's courts. The answer is to fill the prisons with reporters, photographers, editors and publishers.
For a nation that has given lip service to the ideals of free speech and a free press and that has long excoriated the Third World for imprisoning journalists, that is where we have come.
Tim Crews is editor of the Sacramento Valley Mirror in Glenn County. He spent five days in jail in 2000 for refusing to name his sources for a story he wrote about a former California Highway Patrol officer charged with stealing a gun.