I was going to comment on this, but Kos beat me to it (which is why I read him & not the other way around). Here's the prompt:
Bush said, "A year ago I did give the speech from the carrier saying we had achieved an important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein.''"And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq."
As you might expect, that's bullshit.
More photos from the abused Iraqi prisoners story, the first I've seen them. "Disgusting" doesn't even begin to describe them.
Photographs of Abused Iraqi Prisoners
Screen captures from the CBS 60 Minutes broadcast of photographs of abused Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghuraib prison are available at memory hole. Others are floating around the internet that are even more explicit, and appear to involve forcing female prisoners to perform sex acts on male ones. There was also apparently coerced male on male sexual activity. The genteel mainstream news reports of this scandal (which have given it less attention than it deserves or than it will get in the Arab press) have not commented on the explicitly sexual message sent by the abusers, which is that Iraq is f**ked. [Juan Cole]
I'm mostly posting this because there's a link I want to keep track of, but it's also a fun read:
Your résumé of accomplishments is the most embarrassing and humiliating of any president in U.S. history. Examples: You know full well you gouged the hell out of the elderly over Medicare. You cut benefits for war veterans at the very same time you were busy waging a whole new war. Under your watch, 3 million Americans lost their jobs, you bankrupted the Treasury, the deficit skyrocketed, the U.N. became irrelevant and you set the record for government-spending increases. Oh, and your environmental record is the worst of any president in American history.So, a philosophical question: Which best describes your approach? Is it willful ignorance, like the Creationists? The Buddhist notion of (bad) karma? Descarte's mistrust of the flawed human senses? Or the Sartre concept of the petty bourgeoisie (that's you, Shrub), who wake up at 50 just in time to watch themselves die? All of the above?
The BBC has a story on the American soldiers who've been abusing Iraqi prisoners. They've got a still from "60 Minutes" of one of the prisoners...the pose reminds me of those paintings of Jesus showing the wounds in his hands. Anyway, this is the bit that struck me:
One of the suspended soldiers, Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick, said the way the army ran the prison had led to the abuse."We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things... like rules and regulations," he told CBS. "It just wasn't happening."
He said he did not see a copy of the Geneva Convention rules for handling prisoners of war until after he was charged.
This has to be one of the lamest excuses I've ever heard. Do they really need a rulebook to explain to them that its wrong to stack up naked prisoners, to threaten to blow their nuts off, and/or to tell them they'll be electrocuted? Please.
From CNN, a note about today's 9/11 Commission Bush-Cheney meeting:
And we all know it's a tag-team job -- a Bush-Cheney two-fer, with all the requisite drama. Dems say the veep's there to hold his boss's hand, and to make sure their stories jive. Republicans bristle, grousing that these are two busy people here, without a lot of time to kill.
My sources indicate that not only is Cheney there to ensure the jivety of the proceedings, but also the jiggyness and overall funkification of the inquiry, which has been seriously lacking in that regard. Given that this is the case, I think we can all agree that we're better off being shielded from that. We must all give props to George "Wigger" Bush on his foresight here.
More details on that poll I commented on yesterday. Apparently the overall numbers mask some pretty severe differences among ethnic groups:
Furthermore, sentiment often divides sharply along ethnic and sectarian lines. For example, members of Iraq's Kurdish minority are overwhelmingly likely (87%) to view the country as better off now (somewhat: 51%, much: 36%). However, only a third of Iraq's ethnic Arabs (33%) share this positive appraisal (somewhat better off: 27%, much better off: 5%).Similarly, perspectives and perceptions in overwhelmingly Sunni areas can differ dramatically from those in strongly Shiite areas. One particularly stark example is the fact that nearly three-quarters (74%) of those in overwhelmingly Shiite provinces and neighborhoods believe that the ouster of Hussein was "worth" any subsequent hardships, while only about a quarter (28%) of those in heavily Sunni areas share this assessment.
Headline on the CNN homepage right now:
Iraqis polled: War did more harm than good but worth it
Headline on the full story's page:
Poll: Iraqis conflicted about war, its impact
Subtitle below the headline:
Survey done mostly before recent cycle of violence
I didn't find the overall story to be hugely positive. Most Iraqis seem to want Americans out of Iraq, and they've got a low opinion of how American troops have performed. Considering that the poll data is about a month old (the surveys were conducted between 3/22/04 and 4/9/04), lord only knows what they think now. The thing I found kind of weird is how the article starts out describing Iraqis as "conflicted," but the more you read the more clear it is that the only good thing in their eyes is the removal of Saddam. Maybe this is buoying opinion somewhat now, but I can't imagine that sentiment can do anything but fade over time.
Some dude is auctioning off his ex-wife's wedding dress, and is modeling it, to boot...thus earning the auction more than it's usual share of attention. My favorite section:
Seeing as this has turned into my little public forum, I just want to address a few of the emails that kind of left me scratching my head.I now have five marriage proposals. You would think my speaking of the ones I already got yesterday would have put a damper on it, but you women sure are persistent. One woman actually said she doesn’t want to marry me, but wouldn’t mind being my ex-wife. Hmmm. Let me think about that. Nope. No thanks, already got one. (Pssst. Didn’t I mention I had one? Who wants an ex-wife that can’t read? Now, I know what you guys are thinking - "If she can’t read, then the divorce would be smooth sailing." Well, that would be all well and good but I didn’t say her ATTORNEY couldn’t read. You following me on this?)
Hmm...one more reason to hurry home.
The link is to the sites front page where the link to the scans is listed. It may not be suitible for work.[ edited by Simon on 2004-04-27 20:07 ] [WHEDONesque]
Special message for Chandra: This is not the blog entry you want to read. You should look at this instead.
My Blogshares information. As Spock would say, "fascinating."
UPDATE: On further inspection, I learned that Cinema Minima is linking to my blog, although I'm not quite sure why. To further complicate things, mine seems to be the only blog in the list that displays with the strike tag. I'm assuming that the link was earned somehow from my linking to the CM site, but where the strikeout came from is beyond me. Should I be offended?
UPDATE II: I'm informed by my wife that the strikeout is because that's a site I had been to. I believe the operative word here is "duh." Oh well...
That string of obscenities you may have heard was in response to thecommentary on NPR this morning trotting out the line that:
There was nothing Dubya could have done to prevent the attacks on 9/11 because there wouldn't have been public or Congressional support for bombing the hell out of Afghanistan, assassinating any and all members of al Qaeda, or deporting every vaguely swarthy-looking person who was living in the country illegally. And besides, even if we had done all that, the 9/11 plot was too far along to have been stopped by that point, and if Dubya had taken all those steps the country would have blamed the attack on his aggressive anti-terrorism measures.
I'm paraphrasing here, but not as much as you might think. The guy spouting this garbage was Clifford May, who apparently makes a living doing this kind of thing. Anyway, the argument is nuts. It's kind of like arguing that we can't do anything about combating organized crime in the U.S. without blowing Sicily off the map or deporting everyone from Tony Soprano to Chef Boyardee. We all know by now that the FBI and CIA had information in various pockets that weren't acted on for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them was that anti-terrorism wasn't a priority. Move that up to the top of the list, and all of a sudden everyone's looking and asking for information, bringing in people to talk to them, connecting dots, etc.
Would that have prevented the attacks? Maybe, maybe not...but it would have had some impact. Peddling this notion that the only options available to combat terrorism are war, assassination, and mass deportation only serves to obscure other (possibly better) strategies available and to cover the administration's ass (and it's head up it) for being too complacent to see what was coming.
Regular readers (all two or three of you) might remember a post from a while back about some local voting problems, where voters received the wrong ballot but didn't realize it until too late.
Well, I got an email over the weekend from the person who triggered the article that I saw. Apparently the foul-up was ultimately due to a mix-up in the forms you filled out to declare which ballot you wanted. The "Independent" and "Democrat" forms were the same color, making it easy to grab the wrong one.
Anyway, if you're interested you can get a little more information here. Permalinks seem to be broken, so just scroll down to the March 6 entry.
Bush considers his "Magic 8 Ball" one of his most important advisors.
From the Dreyfuss Report:
With Iraqi sovereignty only 10 weeks away, and nary a plan in sight, it's now clear that the kind of sovereignty Iraq will enjoy will approximate that of the U.S. Virgin Islands, i.e., nil.Yesterday Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon Pentagon deputy secretary and his mini-me, Marc Grossman from the State Department, made clear that the transitional Iraqi government will be virtually powerless. It will have no ability to make laws and won't be able to interfere with U.S. military actions in Iraq. U.S. commanders will control all Iraqi army, police and security officials. The biggest change is that Czar Paul Bremer will be replaced by Czar John Negroponte, whose title will be "ambassador."
This reminds me of those kid's pages in the newspaper where one of the games was to look at two pictures and try to find all the differences between them. The pictures were always fundamentally the same, so you had to find all the little details that were different, like the plate of spaghetti that turned to a plate of french fries, or the girl wearing a skirt in one picture but pants in the other. Looks to me like nothing of any consequence is going to change in Iraq as of June 30, except for some ceremony that I'm sure will make lovely television. The only difference will be that the guy in charge is bald.
Courtesy Talking Points Memo:
"I request duty in Vietnam" -- the first line in one of the documents from John Kerry's service records, now posted on the Kerry website.
Of course, this is in stark contrast to George W. Bush's request, which went something like, "I request duty near the likker store."
With a quote like this:
I implicitly trust anything written by someone in a leopard-skin taffeta sack posing in front of the American flag.
How can you not want to follow the link, which eventually lead you to said taffeta sack?
As an added bonus, I learned a new word.
I'm told by Chandra that my volume of posts has dropped of late. I'm not quite sure why she should be concerned about that since she can usually just lean across the table and say, "Honey-schnookums, how was your day?" Ah, well. I suppose I should be flattered to be part of her work-avoidance behavior.
Anyway, the slowdown is probably due to a couple of different things:
Bush gets a kick out of making Colin Powell call him "Massah."
Article in Wired looking at using random play in your iPod:
Stuffy old listening habits -- like listening to albums from beginning to end -- are being thrown out in favor of allowing machines to choose songs at random, which often leads to unexpected, and magical, juxtapositions of music."There is something thrilling about setting the player on Shuffle and letting it decide what to play next," Ross writes. "The little machine often goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen."
Random shuffle is nothing new. It first became popular as a feature of CD players. But with CDs, shuffling tracks is typically limited to the tracks on a single CD.
Randomly selecting tracks really comes into its own with giant music collections: libraries that stretch to tens of thousand of songs. In a giant library, random shuffle is a good way -- sometimes the only way -- to hear music that would otherwise go unplayed.
I'm a fan of the shuffle feature myself, but I also find that it can be exhausting. My iPod has been known to jump from Norman Blake to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then to Värttinä, then to "Milkshake," then to "Strange Fruit." I'm all for variety, but if it jumps genres too many times in a row I feel like someone has taken my brain and stuck in in the blender on purée. So...for the last week or so I've compromised and set my iPod to shuffle by album. I still get genre hops, but they're not nearly as frequent.
In our house, that's shorthand for "Why in the hell do people keep prattling on about September 11?" I just read an editorial in the LA Times with this sentence:
As President Bush indicated in his press conference Tuesday, such atrocities [referring to the strung up corpses, kidnappings, etc.] won't sap U.S. will in the short run. They might only increase the determination of a nation still smarting from the agony of 9/11.
More and more, when I hear or read some media person talking about the "nation" and "9/11" in the same breath, I have to think "Who in the hell are they talking about?" I don't want to diminish what happened that day, but speaking for myself, I only think about 9/11 when it's brought up by someone else. Granted this happens all the freakin' time, but left to my own devices I'm more worried about stuff closer to home...or at least more contemporary events. I don't feel like I'm smarting from 9/11 any more than I feel the sting of the Alamo, or taste the salty bitterness of Carthage.
Surely I'm not alone in this.
In an e-mail sent to Apple CEO Steve Jobs last week, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser suggested that the two companies form a "tactical alliance" against Microsoft in the digital music business... [MacMinute]
Glaser also threatens to join forces with Microsoft if Jobs won't deal, which seems weird to me because he's spent years railing against the Beast. Still, I guess bidness is bidness. Personally, I'd like to see Real go the way of the dodo, but I'm afraid that if they went under all the sites that currently offer Real streaming would switch to Windows Media instead of QuickTime, which would suck even more than Real does.
Along with the usual news round-ups, Agonist has a picture of several flag-draped caskets loaded on a plane to head home. The weird thing is that my first thought was that the flags looked much crisper in real life than what I created in my "Failing the Dover Test" ad. They're also more square than I had thought they might be. Oh yeah, and there are actually bodies in the ones in the picture.
If you're not familiar with A3 (a.k.a. Alabama 3), I highly recommend you fix that. This is their latest, and it includes acoustic versions of a couple of my favorite tracks from "Exile on Coldharbour Lane," "Woke up this Mornin'" (which you may know from The Sopranos), and "U Don't Dans 2 Tekno Anymore."
Ah, sweet country acid house music.
 |  | Power in the Blood A3 |
I don't know what happened to the title on that last entry...apparently NetNewsWire and MovableType are having some sort of spat. I could probably fix it, but it would require more work than what I want to put into it. The entry's not showing up as editable, so short of blowing everything away or attempting to edit the database by hand (shudder) I'm kind of stuck. *sigh*
§Over at Daily Kos there's a bit about Dubya's tendency to personalize things:
What's depressing is this infuriating penchant for Bush to villify individuals, as though our battles can be won by exterminating a few well-placed leaders. We have seen this with al Qaida and OBL, we have seen it with Saddam Hussein, and now with our two latest boogeymen -- Sadr and Abu Musab Zarqawi.The enemies we face are bigger than one person. Killing Sadr would be as effective in ending Shiite opposition as capturing Saddam was in ending Sunni opposition (or killing his sons, for that matter). Killing or capturing Osama bin Laden would make us all feel good (especially killing him), but it wouldn't have any real effect on Al Qaida operations.
Yet the administration insists on creating the fiction that killing or capturing any one man can help us win our various wars. It's understandable, in a way -- a relatively easy way to prove progress to a domestic audience.
This is one case where I don't think Bush is really to blame. The tendency to focus on individuals is actually fairly common in American diplomacy. I don't remember the details, but this is something Kissinger covered in his book, Diplomacy. The point Kos makes is perfectly valid in terms of how focusing on individual personalities can be the wrong approach, but it's not necessarily a flaw of Bush's particularly (although I'll grant that his lack of attention probably exacerbates the problem). allow_pings 1 id
Bush typically responds to bad news by jamming his fingers in his ears and yelling, "Nyaa nyaa, can't hear you!"
I noticed this guy during yesterday's episode of Clone Wars and thought I was just seeing things. I guess it wasn't my imagination after all....
I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to follow this link at work...
The Second Annual Dingleberry Film Festival takes place at The Source in Taipei on 2004 April 11 at 4:30 pm. [The Taipei Kid] [Cinema Minima]
Between the last election and the inauguration, there was an episode of Saturday Night Live that included a skit with George W. Bush (Will Ferrell) and Al Gore (Darryl Hammond), having the following exchange in a Chi-Chi's:
WILL FERRELL, ACTOR: You're not the president, right?DARRELL HAMMOND, ACTOR: No, you are, George. Don't worry, no more lawyers.
FERRELL: Than it's official. I'm the president. This is going to be cool. Hey, maybe I'll start a war. Wars are like executions super-sized.
Did you ever start a war?
HAMMOND: No, George, I never did it.
FERRELL: I hope I can do it. That Dick Cheney's going to be one tough boss.
I tried to find the transcript for this show last spring, but wasn't able to track it down. This excerpt is actually from a transcript of a "Crossfire" show on CNN that aired December 18, 2000. The SNL episode occurred just a few days before. Eerily prescient, no?
From NY Times:
Ms. Jacobson said she had sought her mother's advice about taking a dance class. "She said, `Are you sure you don't want to take something more intellectual?' " said Ms. Jacobson at a meeting of the college knitting club.
college...knitting...club.
If you haven't seen it, Mr. Zimmerman is in a Victoria's Secret ad. I noticed that they were using a song of his a while ago, which was jarring enough, but seeing Bob himself on screen ups the weird quotient quite a bit. It helps that at least to my eyes he looks pretty amused at the chick in her underpants, but the whole thing is more than a little surreal. I wonder what his 1964 self would have thought of this...
As anyone paying attention to the presidential race probably already knows, things are already getting ugly. Bush has dipped into his campaign war chest, and has been going negative on John Kerry. The ads are only partially true, but that's not really the point. All he has to do is get the charges out there, and the truth of any particular accusation is almost beside the point. While Kerry is raising money and will be countering many of these charges himself, I feel that it is my civic duty to help him respond as well.
So...with that in mind, I am pleased to announce "Wrevelations," which will be a weekly feature on this blog until the election in November. Each Monday I'll be revealing some failing of George W. Bush's. Remember, it's not important whether any of these Wrevelations are true. All that matters is that we talk about them.
This week's Wrevelation:
George W. Bush reads at a third-grade level on a good day.
While Clarke was frantically waving his arms at the administration, Gary Hart was also trying to get their attention. Here's a brief excerpt from an interview with Salon:
Did you get a sense that the administration had made any progress on security since you first briefed her, Rumsfeld and Powell in January?No. I think she made some kind of gratuitous statements like, "We've taken your report very seriously, we're looking at it, we're thinking about it, we've asked people to give comments on it."
Reminds me of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones and Brody (?) were trying to get the government guys to understand what the Ark could do, and were pressing the government guys on what they were doing with it. All the government reps would say is that they had "top men" working on it, when in fact they had just sent the Ark off in a crate to live in a massive warehouse.
I saw this just now. Apparently "nonfarm payroll employment" went up 308,000 in March, and the unemployment rate is at 5.7 percent, which the report describes as "about unchanged." I wouldn't have thought anything of it, except for this comment:
...holy crap. I think if we needed proof that the Rovians have taken over the BLS it's in this press release. I cannot remember ever seeing a BLS press release report a .1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate as "about unchanged." This is astounding. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't normally pay a whole lot of attention to employment statistics, but that drove me to the original document, which has a table showing that the unemployment rate in January and February was 5.6 percent in each month (or, "unchanged"), and the unemployment rate in March was 5.7 percent (or, "changed").
From Daily Kos, a note on mercenary activity in Iraq and questions about the cover story of the four guys killed in Fallujah. These guys were apparently getting paid $500-$1000 a day, which the article notes is awfully high for someone protecting humanitarian food and supplies.
Check out the latest Krugman editorial:
A funny thing happened to David Letterman this week. Actually, it only started out funny. And the unfunny ending fits into a disturbing pattern.On Monday, Mr. Letterman ran a video clip of a boy yawning and fidgeting during a speech by George Bush. It was harmless stuff; a White House that thinks it's cute to have Mr. Bush make jokes about missing W.M.D. should be able to handle a little ribbing about boring speeches.
CNN ran the Letterman clip on Tuesday, just before a commercial. Then the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan came back to inform viewers that the clip was a fake: "We're being told by the White House that the kid, as funny as he was, was edited into that video." Later in the day, another anchor amended that: the boy was at the rally, but not where he was shown in the video.
On his Tuesday night show, Mr. Letterman was not amused: "That is an out and out 100 percent absolute lie. The kid absolutely was there, and he absolutely was doing everything we pictured via the videotape."
But here's the really interesting part: CNN backed down, but it told Mr. Letterman that Ms. Kagan "misspoke," that the White House was not the source of the false claim. (So who was? And if the claim didn't come from the White House, why did CNN run with it without checking?)
In short, CNN passed along a smear that it attributed to the White House. When the smear backfired, it declared its previous statements inoperative and said the White House wasn't responsible. Sound familiar?
If you haven't seen the Letterman stuff, you should really check it out. Krugman goes after CNN for their crappy behavior (and he's right), but what I find amazing is that the White House is so paranoid they'll try to discredit a harmless bit about a kid being bored at a W speech. How thin-skinned can you get?
This morning I see in our local paper that the dumb assholes our fine representatives in the state legislature have passed an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage, so now it will go to voters. Just what we need...another issue to bring out the redneck vote.
You know, that whole image of the South as being full of inbred half-wits really isn't true, but you wouldn't know that from some of the things that happen around here.
In more cheerful news, it looks like even Zell Miller's spokesperson thinks he's a grade A douchebag wrong about John Kerry.
Article in Wired looking at the cost of virtual schools:
In addition to offering the latest technology and allowing parents to be more actively involved in their children's education, virtual schools were also thought to lower the cost of teaching.Although her schools have no classrooms, desks, cafeterias or gymnasiums, they aren't much cheaper to operate than a traditional school, says Mickey Revenaugh, vice president for partnerships and outreach for Connections Academy. Revenaugh says that the cost of computers, printers and cutting-edge curricula offsets most of the virtual schools' cost savings from paying fewer teachers and minimizing building-maintenance fees.
This article looks at K-12 schools, but there are similar issues in higher education. In my experience, more universities are using technology as a supplement to traditional classroom experiences (with the exception of distance efforts), and part of the argument for doing so has always been cost and/or efficiency. I suspect that in many cases these arguments would break down under close scrutiny.