WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.
The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.
… Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion," he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.
In a letter sent to Martin Wednesday, Boxer said she was "dismayed that this report, which was done at taxpayer expense more than two years ago, and which concluded that localism is beneficial to the public, was shoved in a drawer."
Martin said he was not aware of the existence of the report, nor was his staff. His office indicated it had not received Boxer’s letter as of midafternoon Thursday. In the letter, Boxer asked whether any other commissioners "past or present" knew of the report’s existence and why it was never made public. She also asked whether it was "shelved because the outcome was not to the liking of some of the commissioners and/or any outside powerful interests?"
The report, written by two economists in the FCC’s Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. The broadcasts were obtained from Danilo Yanich, a professor and researcher at the University of Delaware, and were originally gathered by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The analysis showed local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of "on-location" news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. It was part of a broader decision liberalizing ownership rules.
At that time, the agency pointed to evidence that "commonly owned television stations are more likely to carry local news than other stations."
And you just know that evidence was skewed to fit a pre-ordained ideological belief as opposed to any actual examination of the facts at hand. So when someone later on Did examine the evidence and saw what really happens when you let big media companies monopolize the local airwaves, that evidence was thoroughly destroyed. It wasn’t true, because it didn’t agree with the party line. It had to be destroyed. They probably danced in the paper shreds afterward.
Big corporate media monopolization is the single biggest reason why tv and radio are so worthless nowadays. Thank god for the Internet. And now that I think of it, that might be why the big media companies and news networks hate Al Gore so much.
(Wellington) As leaders of New Zealand’s Presbyterian Church prepare to vote on whether to ban gay clergy all 500 members of the body which will decided the issue have received bumper stickers in the mail declaring that "gays are a cancer".
Two versions of the bumper stickers were sent to all members of the Presbyterian Assembly – the body that sets the Church’s policy and direction.
One sticker reads "Gays aren’t welcome in our church, help us let New Zealand know". The other says "Gays are a cancer in our church, let’s keep them out of leadership".
No one has taken responsibility for producing or mailing them, but church leaders say they had to have come from someone with access to the names and home addresses of Assembly members.
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism"
and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient"
cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church
as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history:
Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
TPMmuckraker September 12, 2006 02:46 PM: WPost Taps White House War Salesman for Op-Ed Spot: The big story in the New York Times’ Sept. 8, 2002 edition was headlined, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." That infamous article, by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, told the now-debunked tales of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, through the voices of lying Iraqi defectors and anonymous quotes by Bush administration officials. Most folks who read it probably can’t recall the details of the article. But few have forgotten one comment from an unnamed "hard-liner" administration official, paraphrased by the reporters:
The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.
It was memorable then for being such a clever and powerful turn of phrase. It’s memorable now because we know it was baseless — yet oft-repeated. And it’s important to remember at this moment because the man who wrote it, Michael Gerson, just got himself a regular column in the Washington Post.
With no apparent sense of irony, the Post announced on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that Gerson — one of the men who worked hardest to dishonestly connect al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in the public mind, and launch an invasion of Iraq based on the horrible events of that day — will join its op-ed team.
In the release publicizing its selection, Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt calls Gerson "an eloquent writer and provocative thinker." Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Take, for example, this eloquent and provocative line from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own." (We know now, of course, that’s not the case.)
Yep, that was Gerson’s. He was, in fact, the only speechwriter in the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), created to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the U.S. public. He was responsible for nearly every misleading statement that came out of the administration — at least the ones that sounded good…
What is more despicable…a totalitarian state that shuts down the free press, or a free press that sells its country out to totalitarians?
Steve Irwin would have known very well, how dangerous a wounded animal is.
For all his daring, he was actually a very careful man, which made his sudden death some days ago all the more shocking and tragic. His margin of safety came from his love of wildlife: he knew the animals he filmed…he studied their ways carefully. You have to figure he knew the risks of getting stung when he approached that group of stingrays. But as anyone will tell you, getting a sudden spike just right through the heart like that was a one chance in a million thing. In retrospect it would probably have been the one in a million thing that got him, if anything was going to…because he was a careful man around dangerous animals.
SYDNEY, Australia —At least 10 stingrays have been killed since "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was fatally injured by one of the fish, an official said yesterday, prompting a spokesman for the late TV star’s animal charity to urge people not take revenge on the animals.
Irwin died last week after a stingray barb pierced his chest as he recorded a show off the Great Barrier Reef.
Stingray bodies since have been discovered on two beaches in Queensland state on Australia’s eastern coast. Two were discovered yesterday with their tails lopped off, state fisheries department official Wayne Sumpton said.
Sumpton said fishermen who inadvertently catch the diamond-shaped rays sometimes cut off their tails to avoid being stung, but the practice is uncommon. Stingrays often are caught in fishing nets by mistake and should be returned to the sea, Sumpton said.
Michael Hornby, the executive director of Irwin’s Wildlife Warriors conservation group, said he was concerned the rays were being hunted and killed in retaliation for Irwin’s death.
He said killing stingrays was "not what Steve was about.”
"We are disgusted and disappointed that people would take this sort of action to hurt wildlife," he said.
Now…this is perfectly pointless. They’re stingrays for Christ’s sake. They don’t know. The ray that killed Irwin was simply and doggedly reacting to what it probably saw as a threat. They’ll do that. They’re animals. The ray was probably just defending it’s own, just behaving like you would expect one to behave when it perceives a threat.
And yet…so do we.
Natural selection doesn’t sweep away the old to create the new. It builds the new right on top of the old. So the human line got the expanded brain cortex. So we were blessed with a capacity for forward looking rationality. The ancient passions move within us, the old tides pull and tug at us, and yet we can think. We can reason. We can choose our course. It has given us a great advantage over all the other creatures on this good earth in the struggle for survival. And it has given us great power. Power which we loose utterly, when the old passions well up suddenly within us, and turn us away from what we are, to what we once were. I know some folks just hate hearing this but we all need to face it…we must face it…squarely: We are human. We are primates. We are mammals. And…we are predators.
The wounded animal is in all of us. To reach a calming hand out to it, stroke it gently out of its rage, we must first acknowledge it. Or it’ll drag us right back into the wilderness we walked out of, time and again.
OBSCENE. Both the Times and the Post note this morning that Bush laid two wreaths at ground zero last night in the company of George Pataki, Mike Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani. The Post goes well out of its way to remark that the event “left aside the partisan rancor” that…well, that Bush & Co. have enforced on the country since about 9-14.
If this event was so nonpartisan, where were Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton? Neither paper makes any mention of their having been there. I’m told that in fact they were not invited (they were at St. Paul’s church, where Bush went after laying the wreaths — and where there were apparently no photographers!!). In what sense does an event that features four Republicans but excludes the two senators who were representing New York at the time of the event, but who happen to be Democrats, leave aside partisan rancor?
I was in NYC during 9-11 and for two years after, and I remember Chuck and HRC (and House members of both parties) attending virtually all previous such commemorations. Today’s New York Post carries this photo of the four Republicans arriving on the scene. That’s the photo the White House wanted. Can you imagine how Chuck and especially HRC would’ve mucked that up for them?
Back in July 2003, I wrote a column in New York magazine discussing how Pataki had wanted, at the time, to dedicate the cornerstone of a new ground-zero tower…during the 2004 GOP Convention. It was an appalling idea, and worse yet, The New York Times editorial page endorsed it! Read the column. It has real relevance as we head into the guts of this election season.
If you have any doubt, watch a movie called Baghdad ER. It’s run on HBO. The doctors and nurses there are among the bravest people you will ever see. They save lives, but they also tell teenagers, hard core grunts, that their friends have died. If you don’t think that requires bravery, well, taking away a bit of the world from a kid who would be in college if he had the money, you’ve never seen it up close.
There’s a line in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven:"When you kill a man, you take away all he’s had and all he’s ever gonna have."
Well, when those nurses and doctors tell a kid that their friend has died, it takes away a part of what they’ve had, and that part never really comes back. When the parents find out, whether they’re Iraqi or American or British, you have taken away much of what they hoped to have, their future.
Bush neither understands that nor cares. He doesn’t get that his war is wiping away the futures of families.
War corrodes lives. I was reading the paper the other day when a mother writing in for advice says that her son’s wife had taken up with another man and was pregnant. The girl refused to tell the kid that she had cheated on him and the mother was in a quandry.
Now, imagine this: you survive a year in Iraq and what do you get as a prize, your wife pregnant by another man. What is his mother supposed to do? Say "honey, your wife is six months pregnant and you’ve been gone ten?" Sure, he comes home in one piece, but that wife he had is gone, probably with his money and a bunch of his shit. Hell, she’s been sharing the allotment money with this asshole while people shot at him.
I’m tired of being bullshitted. Terrorists aren’t coming here with nuclear weapons. They aren’t going to set one off in Baltimore harbor, because no state, not even a Sadr-run Iraq, would permit such a basic threat to their national security. Osama isn’t a threat to they US. You know, most of the stores near Ground Zero were killed by a lack of business, not Osama. People still shop there, still live there, life continues. Who the hell would let crazy people set them up for a nuclear cruise missile attack?
I’m tired of the cowardice masquerading as patriotism. Osama isn’t coming to blow up your mall, not coming to poision your water or release a dirty bomb. Because they can’t. They couldn’t even make the liquid chemical bombs they wanted to. The American muslim community responded to 9/11 by enlisting in the military, not joining Al Qaeda. AQ gets the misfits like Adam Gahan, who was pissed off at his mom, and when Delta snaps him up, he will be blubbering like a small child who banged his knee.
Americans can do great things when asked. Bush has never asked. Not even to rebuild Ground Zero.
Bush wanted to remake the world, but never had the courage to say so. He uses fear to maintain his power because it is who he is, a man scared of the world. He is weak and thus must maintain power by the basest means possible.
But by doing so, he denied Americans the one thing they expected from him: a measure of justice. Not in of the dungeon or the gulag, but of the courtroom. And they have not gotten that. Not even Osama killed in a last stand with Delta troopers gunning him down. Just dungeons, gulags and the excuse that these pathetic men are so dangerous that not only did they have to be tortured like animals, but now he needs a kangaroo court to try and execute them in. As if his word should end the traditions Americans have died for.
Bush and Cheney do not trust the courts or Congress. They trust power and nothing else. Most of all, they do not trust the American people and that will be their downfall. They are not kings, but men elected by and accountable to the people. No matter how many laws they break or mud they toss, will that ever change. They rule as the weak rule, by fear, fiat and suspicion. And the weak will fail, because those who live in fear can never truly gain the trust and respect of those they attempt to lead.
Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.
All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.
And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.
And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.
However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds — none of us could have predicted this.
Five years later this space is still empty.
Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country’s wound is still open.
Five years later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.
Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.
It is beyond shameful.
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial — barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field — Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.
Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won’t.
Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.
And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.
And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.
Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.
History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President — and those around him — did that.
They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.
The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ‘something to do’ with 9/11 is "lying by implication."
The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."
Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.
Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.
Yet what is happening this very night?
A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.
The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.
How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you — or those around you — ever "spin" 9/11?
Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.
So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
That’s actually a really fascinating juxtaposition of Starry Night and Mona Lisa. See…most vandals have absolutely no imagination. A really cruel trick would be to find a thing of beauty on your car window that now you have to destroy.
A year after the World Trade Center towers fell, I attended a software developer’s seminar at Sun HQ in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks away from the big hole in the ground. Our classroom was well up one of those tall financial district towers and faced out toward the Statue of Liberty. On a hunch one afternoon during break I strolled to the other side of the building and sure enough, there would have been a glorious view of the twin towers there, had they still been standing. A little hesitantly I brought that up to our instructor, a young lady who seemed more then willing to talk about it. I guess a lot of people in that city still needed to talk about it then. Yes, she said, she had been at work there that day. Yes, you could see the towers clearly. In fact, she said, her co-workers on that side of the building saw the whole thing happen.
She sat at her desk in the front of our classroom during the afternoon break, telling us all this matter of factly. And as her story came out, what struck me was how little people know about what is happening to them, when they’re right in the middle of it. In the smoke and dust and confusion of the evacuation, as her and her office mates left the financial district to try and, somehow, make their way back to their homes when the streets were jammed, the bridges closed to traffic and the subways not running, nobody knew that one of the towers had already come down (they thought all the smoke and dust was from the fires), nobody knew if the attacks were still coming, and nobody knew which direction safety was. She told us that it was when she and her co-workers got to the Brooklyn Bridge, that it really hit her how bad their situation was. Some of her friends implored her to come with them to Brooklyn where it might be safer, while others feared the bridge itself would be the next target. She parted ways with some of her friends there, not knowing if she’d ever see them again.
It’s five years later, and many people in this country still don’t really know much about what happened that day. In all the anger over ABC/Disney’s right wing porn flick The Path To 9-11 (produced, unsurprisingly, by a secretive right wing network within the network…), I keep waiting for someone to preach a little fire and brimstone that ABC or any TV network, would dare produce and air a goddamned Docudrama on the anniversary of a terrorist attack that killed more Americans then died in Perl Harbor. A docudrama for Christ’s sake! Hey…how about…you know…a plain old Documentary? You know…one of those things where the events are recounted, Factually, and people who were there tell their stories, and some kind of sense is made of the chaos of the event? But then I must be living on another planet these days. Documentary? Factual? Oh good heavens no…we’re a Television Network…it isn’t our business to actually keep Americans informed about anything…
But it’s not as though Dear Leader has been anxious to keep us informed either. In fact one of the biggest sources of disinformation about 9-11 has been the Bush white house and the republican party. And that isn’t merely because doing that dispicably serves them politically. Joshua Marshall, writing about the relentless lying by Dick Cheney, posted this from a reader…
Speaking as a historian, no historians won’t be puzzling, not at all. A future historian might state, matter of factly, "Vice President Cheney, one of the administration’s most ardent advocates of war with Iraq, continued to maintain that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda long after the existence of such a connection had been disproved. Critics at the time noted that the Bush administration was unable to respond to changing circumstances in the Middle East because, instead of responding to new information, it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Subsequently historians have concluded this approach to problems was the chief reason for the Bush administration’s multiple failures, of which the debacle in Iraq is the most stunning – and, because of its lasting impact on America’s standing in the world – unfortunate example."
…it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Yeah. That’s the republican party I know and love. Your Gay and lesbian neighbors of the Stonewall generation have been seeing it for decades. Hell, we’ve had our faces rubbed in it time and time again. Never mind the facts…here’s what we believe… But don’t just go by us. Ask the men and women of American science what it’s been like since the republicans took charge…
A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the space agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.
"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency’s 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA’s technical staff."
The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency’s 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.
And…about that age of the universe thing….
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
Of course. But…mind you…not a religious issue in the sense of…well…religion. But politics. The religion of the republican party is that it isn’t true, unless its in the party’s interest for it to be true. The god of the republican party, is the republican party.
Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.
I’ll tell you how. He was a party loyalist. No, no…don’t mistake him for a devoted creationist. That, he may well have been, but it wouldn’t have mattered. What mattered wasn’t his devotion to god, but to the party. That’s why he got the job.
The path to 9-11 didn’t start with Osama bin Laden. It didn’t even start at the signpost that read The Ends Justify The Means. That doesn’t get you there. There’s a turnoff from there marked We’re On The Side Of God, but that doesn’t quite get you there either. Somewhere down that road there is a signpost that reads: Truth Is What We Say It Is. Take that road and eventually you come to 9-11. And Iraq. And Abu Ghraib. And Guantanamo Bay. And Katrina. And our slowly warming planet earth. The Taliban are resurgent. Iraq is in chaos, and now we learn that Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who even thought about a plan for stabilizing it after the invasion. al Qaeda is more popular now in the middle east then it has ever been. Our military is stretched so thin it’s putting middle aged men and women back into uniforms they haven’t worn in years and recruting autistic teenagers. And as long as the Bush gang is in power, we are staying the course. Because truth is what they say it is. Except it isn’t.
The one supremely damnable thing about what the Bush gang has done to America is this: We had more then lies to fight the terrorists with, and yet they chose to fight with lies. But understand this one thing: lies were all they knew how to fight with. This serenely clueless mendacity on display didn’t just happen overnight. It didn’t even start with the stealing of the vote in Florida in 2000. Anyone remember the Brooks Brother’s Riot? For certain, there isn’t a single one of those "rioters" who couldn’t look you in the face, even now, and tell you that what happened was a spontaneous act of local voter anger, even as they know damn well it was orchestrated and performed exclusively by republican operatives. Truth is what we say it is… Or as one Bush gang member famously put it:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
What they did: Turn the moral power of liberty and justice for all into a dirty joke every tinpot dictator in the world, and even the Taliban, could laugh at. But that’s because they hated it too. The Bush administration is an American cultural catastrophe that was in the making for decades. Just ask your gay and lesbian neighbors. We’ve had to endure their single-minded march away from justice, away from reason, away from the reality based community, for decades.
I posted a link a little while ago to a delightful AIDS prevention video about an adorable gay youngling struggling in his search for love. There was, if you took a peek at the comments, a similar one about a straight girl in the same sad/hilarious situation. They really stuck in my mind, maybe because my own quest for love has been such a bust. Just for kicks and grins I decided to add the music to them to my iTunes collection. It took a little digging, but I finally found them. They are, for the gay guy’s video, Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes, and Baby, Baby (live version), by the Vibrators for the other.
Then I went on a wee shopping spree, searching for some more tunes from my teens and twenties. The frustrating thing about iTunes is that the record companies still hate digital music, so a lot of things I hear on Sirius still aren’t available. But oddly enough, the really obscure titles seem to be readily available. I found some favorite Ian Matthews tunes, Passion Puppets, Buffalo Springfield, Loving Spoonful, Jefferson Airplane, and amazingly, Captian Beyond, which I just looked up on a lark because I was certain it wouldn’t be there.
The music companies need to get a grip. I’ve bought more music in the past year then I had in the previous ten, and two things are responsible for it: My satellite radio and iTunes. I remember once being in a Tower Records many years ago and seeing that they’d released new versions of the old Sean Connory James Bond soundtracks. I never much liked the movies themselves, but I have a thing for John Barry scores. So I figured I would buy some CD copies because my LPs were getting a tad worn. I had five CDs in my hand and I was on the verge of checking out when I realized that the five CDs I held, at twenty bucks a crack, amounted to one-hundred dollars of merchandise. One-hundred friggin’ dollars! So I put them back.
At iTunes prices, and convenience, it’s a no brainer. I hear something I like on Sirius and I go look it up on iTunes and if it’s there, heck at a dollar a song and ten for an album I just go ahead and click. So I’m blissfully listening now to Captain Beyond and there are no clicks and scratches and if anything it sounds better then the aging LP I’ve practically played to death.
Dancing madly backwards
Dancing on a sea
Racing on my memories
I’m glad I set my dreams
Tip toe, tip toe quickly
Forget about your cares
And remember underneath you
Is just a sea of air
Just remember underneath you
Is just a sea of air
Wishing on your wishes
Landin on a storm
Knowing when you are dancing
Knowing that’s so far
Dance, Dance, faster
Madly dance away
Cause remeber underneath you
Is just a sea of air
Just remember underneath you
Is just a sea of air
I still have a bunch of favorite LPs that can’t be found on iTunes. A really obscure Paul Kossoff one, Back Street Crawler, that has a whole side devoted to a really lovely guitar jam titled Tuesday Morning that I would just love to get a good digital copy of. In the meantime I bought an iMic that came with a copy of Final Vinyl that I can use to make decent copies off my LPs, and I pulled a copy off of it this afternoon. Now I can groove while I’m fussing with this new Solaris database software my branch manager wants me to test this week. In the meantime I’m having a blast here at Casa del Garrett listening to tunes I thought I’d never hear a clean copy of again.
See the bright chipper in the harbor, hey
Making irridescent waves
Need to try a little harder
On the voyage to better days
Sun and moon in the valley
At the same time
Bringing out the golden braid
Yes we’re gonna reach
The peak in no time
I think earth just a runaway
Well…not exactly. But I got a friend to take a few shots of me at the end of my 52nd year and I thought they mostly came out pretty good. I very seldom like the pictures taken of me. Yes…I will be 53 on Tuesday. No I will not cut my hair.
Me at 17 – 1971, in another universe before PCs,
Digital Cameras, and the Internet.
Wait…you just gotta love this. A Pennsylvania pro-family group… Later in the article you discover that it’s the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association. Agape Press is owned and operated by the American Family Association. So it isn’t merely "A Pennsylvania pro-family group", but themselves that they are are talking about here. They can’t even get the first sentence of their "news article" out without being deceptive. Not one single sentence into it and they’re already being deceitful. If there is an answer to all the wickedness in this world, a way out of sinfulness and toward redemption and hope, their religion sure isn’t it, is it.
But…anyway…
…suggests that the recent arrest of a University of Pennsylvania professor on child sex charges should cause the school to consider banning homosexual professors, just as the Boy Scouts ban homosexual troop leaders.
Considering how often heterosexual teachers have been caught recently in bed with their students, your reflex might be to just toss this off as yet another fart from the kook pews. But what’s interesting about this piece is that, for a change, they seem not to be relying on Paul Cameron’s junk science to back them up, but another guy who I hadn’t heard of before. His name is Gene Abel.
The AFA of Pennsylvania leader cites a study of non-incarcerated child-sex offenders by research scientist Gene Abel that found homosexuals "sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is occurring five times greater than the molestation of girls." Abel’s research reports that, on average, 150.2 boys are molested per homosexual offender, whereas 19.8 girls are molested per heterosexual offender.
Well that sounds pretty bad. Bad in the same way mind you, as Paul Cameron’s factoid that the average lifespan of a homosexual is 46 years sounds pretty bad. Right away, even before you look into it deeper, you just know that there is something a tad…er…queer, about it. If homosexuals are molesting kids at a rate several orders of magnitude greater then heterosexuals are, then even if we’re just a tiny fragment of the population as a whole you’d expect to see something like nearly every kid in America having been molested at least once in their lives. And since kids eventually grow up to become adults, nearly all adults alive today must have been molested when they were kids. And yet, that is just not the case. So you know something’s wrong here right away, and that something is either Abel, or Agape is distorting the work of another honest scientist.
But Abel, though he seems credentialed in a way Paul Cameron is not, is a crank. Maybe even a bigger uglier crank then Paul Cameron, because Abel actually thinks that most child molesters are other children, not adults. Paul Cameron is something of a pathetic figure. Abel, at least to the degree I’ve been able to find out anything about him so far, is horrifying.
You can tell that something’s not quite right about this man immediately, simply by doing a Google search on him. What you get, page after page of it, are cites by the right wing kook press and nobody else, until you’re very, very deep in the rankings. So that’s the first tip off right there. A little casual digging further, and you start running across his books, like Stop Child Molestation, and that’s where it starts getting interesting.
Abel thinks the average age of a child molestor is 13, which means that most child molesters, according to Abel, are children themselves. According to one reviewer at Amazon.Com, Abel blames that on…testosterone, accidental pairings of orgasm with thoughts of younger children, sexual victimization, or "biology that is deviant." Don’t bother looking up "deviant biology" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because you won’t find it.
Deviant biology. Deviant biology. If you’ve ever entertained the thought that finally convincing the homophobes that our sexual orientation isn’t chosen, isn’t an artifact of poor parenting or ungodliness, but that it is something hard wired into us either at or before birth, if you’ve ever thought for a second that convincing them of this fact would make them hate us a little less, you can disabuse yourself of that notion right now. Repeat after me: Deviant biology. Deviant biology.
There is much in that review of Abel’s book that is worth noting. The emphasis in the following is my own…
The first sign that something is amiss is his claim that one out of every twenty boys develops pedophilia, usually in childhood or puberty. He never explains how he arrives at this figure, one which cannot be found anywhere else in the literature. This 5% prevalence rate would mean that pedophilia is one of the most common serious childhood diseases in America, similar in prevalence to asthma.
A handful of influential therapists began promoting the belief in an epidemic of childhood sexual deviance about 20 years ago-at the same time that some of the same therapists convinced the public that satanic ritual sexual abuse was occurring at nursery schools across the nation, and that large numbers of women had been sexually abused by their parents in childhood but had repressed their memories of it. Both of these beliefs were eventually disproved by investigators and researchers, but only after thousands of children were traumatized and adults’ lives were destroyed. However, the myth of rampant childhood sexual deviance has survived, most likely because its believers-juvenile sex offender therapists-comprise an industry mostly hidden from public view and exempt from oversight by the mainstream mental health community. Sexuality researchers have noted that these therapists commonly label children as "sex offenders" for mutually desired sexual contact with each other, then imply that they are dangerous to other children.
Abel recommends that all parents question their sons at around 6th grade about their sexual fantasies. Any boy who is suspected of having sexual thoughts involving younger children, or who has been sexually touched by an older child or adult, is to be referred to a "sex-specific therapist" who will test him for pedophilic symptoms. The test should be either a sexual interest test (developed by Abel himself, in which the boy examines photographs of children and adults in swimwear while a computer measures visual reaction time), a lie detector test, or a plethysmograph connected to his genitals while he looks at or listens to sexually stimulating material.
The problem with such tests (aside from their intensely humiliating and stigmatizing effects) is that they have never been validated, a process which would require testing a representative sample of American children to establish norms. In fact, all researchers are agreed that very little is known about normal sexual feelings during childhood and adolescence. To make matters worse, Abel refuses to release data necessary for independent researchers to evaluate his test.
I’m still digging for a reliable link to this, but I see out there what looks like a news article noting that Dr. Paul Fedoroff (who is a staff psychiatrist with the Law and Mental Health program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and co-director of the sexual behaviors clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital in Canada), said that at least some of Abel’s studies might not be reliable because…
…they were conducted on sex offenders who were given certificates of confidentiality, meaning that they would not be turned over to the police, no matter what they admitted. To get the certificate of confidentiality, the offender had to admit something. The more they divulged, the better they looked in front of their therapists.
So Abel was apparently interviewing subjects who had a vested interest in telling him what he wanted to know. And since he doesn’t divulge his data, we cannot even know whether even this self serving source of information was enough to justify his conclusions.
But never mind. It isn’t science, if you’re not willing to publish your data along with your results. That one fact alone tells us all we need to know about Abel. He is not a man of science. This is why you see him being cited approvingly in the kook pews. And just like all his other neighbors there, while posturing as a defender of children, Abel shows a stunningly depraved indifference toward them.
However, the most chilling part of Abel’s book comes when he outlines treatment methods to cure "pedophilia" among boys: separation from other children (possibly removal from the family), monitoring of sexual feelings and behavior by family members and friends who report to the therapist (and sometimes by plethysmograph), high doses of sex drive reducing drugs, covert sensitization, and aversion therapy with ammonia. The last two methods are intended to eliminate particular sexual thoughts by pairing them with pain, fear, or humiliation. Any of these methods may be imposed on the boy for life by the therapist, regardless of his or his parents’ wishes.
Although Abel refers to them as "breakthroughs in testing, medicine, and therapies," students of history will recognize plethysmographs, sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, and covert sensitization as the methods used decades ago to "cure" homosexuality. Mainstream health professionals and the public (even those who disapprove of homosexual behavior) now consider them ineffective, dangerous, and unethical. Numerous accounts show they lead to nightmares, depression, chronic anxiety, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts among both gay men and children labeled as "deviant." And no wonder: Considering the fact that we know almost nothing about the development of sexual feelings, it is clear that such efforts amount to messing with something we don’t understand.
Like the "expert" doctors and therapists who justified their use on homosexuals, Abel shows no concern for emotional trauma and intense stigma these methods inflict on boys, instead rationalizing such abuse by writing that the protection of normal children takes precedence over the welfare of deviant children.
Especially disturbing is the apparent endorsement of this approach by some other leaders in the juvenile sex offender industry-an approach that would create a new class of lepers consisting, presumably, of 5% of all boys.
So with utterly no actual science grounding his notions of the developing sexuality of children, Abel proposes to subject any of them, as young as sixth graders, to having their genitals hooked up to a machine while they’re shown provocative images of scantily clad children and adults, and then perhaps a nice regimen of sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, covert sensitization and the occasional lungful of ammonia. Sixth graders mind you. And he figures some of them may have a "deviant biology" which makes them dangerous to the other kids. That…and testosterone. This is the man being cited by ersatz Christian publications as an authority on child molestation. Well…I guess so. Picture him shoving ammonia in a sixth grader’s face while the kid has his genitals hooked up to a machine and he’s being shown a picture of another kid in a bikini.
So by that logic, and accepting the premise (which I do not) that men who molest boys are by definition homosexuals, then we should not only keep gay professors out of colleges, we should keep gay students out of colleges too. And grade school. And you’d better believe that this is also on the agenda of the AFA too. Just…one step at a time please.
Eventually, it’ll be only Christian Nationalists who are allowed to go to school. Well…the straight boys anyway. The ones who pass the plethysmograph test. Because a women’s place is in the house, being gracefully submissive to her husband and bearing him as many children as he wants her to, so girls don’t need much of an education really. And the boys will only be taught by male professors, since women shouldn’t have authority over men. Remind me again…why did we bomb the Taliban?
WASHINGTON (AP) — Some moms and dads might want to take a lesson from their kids: Just say no.
The government reported Thursday that 4.4 percent of baby boomers ages 50 to 59 indicated that they had used illicit drugs in the past month. It marks the third consecutive yearly increase recorded for that age group by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
Hey…life is stressful.
Meanwhile, illicit drug use among young teens went down for the third consecutive year – from 11.6 percent in 2002 to 9.9 percent in 2005.
You don’t say…
"Rarely have we seen a story like this where this is such an obvious contrast as one generation goes off stage right, and entering stage left is a generation that learned a lesson somehow and they’re doing something very different," said David Murray, special assistant to the director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
You don’t say…
Overall, drug use remained relatively unchanged among Americans age 12 and older in 2005. About 19.7 million Americans reported they had used an illicit drug in the past month, which represented a rise from 7.9 percent to 8.1 percent.
You don’t say…
The increase was not only due to the boomers, but an increase was also seen among those 18-25, the age category that always ranks highest when it comes to illicit drug use.
You don’t say…
While drug use went up slightly in ’05, so did alcohol use. Slightly more than half of Americans age 12 and older reported being current drinkers of alcohol. That translates to 126 million people, up from 121 million people the year before.
Uh, huh… You don’t say…
Meanwhile, tobacco use held steady at about 29.4 percent, even though among youths 12-17, tobacco use did drop from 14.4 percent to 13.1 percent.
So…to recap. 8.1 percent of Americans are using drugs. Not counting the 30 percent of us who are smoking tobacco, and the more then half of us 12 and older who are drinking alcohol. The only places in this survey where drug use is down is that 12 to 18 age group. Which is good…they shouldn’t be doing any of that. But the rest of us are doing it more. That includes pot and it isn’t just boomers. The increase was not only due to the boomers, but an increase was also seen among those 18-25, the age category that always ranks highest when it comes to illicit drug use. So why are they bellyaching about boomers? Boomers don’t even rank highest in drug use anymore.
Goddamn republicans just never got over how badly my generation messed up their perfect 1950s world. But we didn’t do that. Just look at how their perfect George Bush world is falling apart all on its own. We found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, except they didn’t really exist and that’s not why we invaded Iraq, except it was, except it wasn’t, except they did, except they didn’t. Bill Clinton wouldn’t attack al Qaeda, except when he did the republicans accused him of "wagging the dog", except he really didn’t even though he was wagging the dog when he did and George Bush really took charge, except he was reading The Pet Goat at the time except he was in control, and the Mission was Accomplished just a few weeks after we invaded Iraq which wasn’t involved in 9-11 except it was except it wasn’t and the Mission was Accomplished except we’re putting reservists in their forties back into uniform and sending them to Iraq now because we’re running out of troops, except we have all the troops we need over there and everything is going according to plan except Iraq is falling into civil war now but we’ve brought democracy to Iraq and we’re defeating the enemy we already defeated a couple years ago anyway and every day more Americans die over there and hey let’s go start a war with Iran now too because the Mission has been Accomplished and anyone who says it wasn’t is giving aid and comfort to the enemy we defeated two years ago except we didn’t and now there are more of them.
When reality becomes a mass hallucination, getting away from it stops looking like such a bad idea. Some people do drugs to escape reality. Some people do them because reality has just stopped making sense. And my generation was only following the example of our elders and all their goddamn booze and tranquilizers. But we broke the rules by acknowledging what we were doing and that was unforgivable I guess.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head
Feed your head
Feed your head"
For a change the gay channel Logo had something on that lived up to its (Logo’s) potential. It was a history of the gay migration to Fire Island and The Pines, and it covered parts of the island’s history prior to Stonewall, as well as the changes that came after, and with the AIDS crisis.
There’s a reason why documenting the history of our movement prior to Stonewall is so important, while there are still people alive who lived it first hand. When I was a kid I’d heard about Fire Island…it was practically a byword for queerness. Back then Fire Island and Greenwich Village was where all the queers were. You didn’t go there unless you were queer yourself. Even Mad magazine, which was aimed at teenage males mostly, would toss out Fire Island jokes from time to time in it’s pages and magazines for teens weren’t supposed to so much as breath a word about homosexuality back then. But in those days we all thought Mad was cool, because it was something our parents hated. Two years after Stonewall, this is the image I was getting about gays from Mad…
Mad #145, Sept ’71, from "Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution" – "To A Gay Liberationist"
This is what the pop culture was telling me about gay people when I was 17. Three months later I came out to myself. I have to say in all fairness that Mad Magazine isn’t hostile to gay people now, like it was back when I was a gay teen struggling to understand myself. In fact, they’re positively amazing, even by today’s standards. I suppose they understand now that some of their readers are dealing with their own process of coming out. But the late 60s and early 70s were not nearly so tolerant and it’s hard to grasp now, when we’re to the point of fighting for marriage rights, how bad it was back then. Which is why histories like the one Logo was showing tonight are so important. There are a lot of people who would like to take us all back to those days.
And so here I am, 35 years later, watching this history of Fire Island on Logo raptly. I was too young to be part of the pre-Stonewall era, but not so young that I didn’t hear stuff about homosexuals. And now I’m hearing from them, the people, gay and straight, who experienced that first wave of gay migrations to the island what those times were like from their point of view…
…and I’m hearing about how a certain hotel/club got started there, called The Botel, and how it’s ownership passed into the hands of a gay man…and how the tradition of "Tea Dances" started there (late afternoon, when the dances were held, was called "low tea"…I guess it’s a New England thing…). And I learn that back in those days it was illegal for men to dance with men. Not illegal as in, get a ticket and pay a fine, but illegal as in get arrested and thrown in jail and have your life ruined when your name is printed in the newspapers the next day and suddenly your boss and your neighbors and everyone you know finds out you’re a faggot. That kind of illegal…
…so the male Tea Dancers would form a kind of cabaret line and find one woman…she didn’t need to be heterosexual herself…to dance with all these guys who were really dancing with each other but had to be careful about not dancing too much like they were dancing with each other or they might get arrested. The gay owner of the club would watch the dancers and warn them if they started being too obvious, and tell them they had to stop or leave…
…and there are several people in this Fire Island documentary explaining this as I watch and listen, and one of them explains that the police would regularly raid The Botel anyway, and another man says that sometimes the police would patrol the streets around the club and arrest random young men as they left. On those nights, this man says, the bartenders would get the word somehow and warn people not to leave the club alone, but go out in large groups. Another man says that the police had arrest quotas when then went on these raids. Typically, he says, they had to arrest at least twenty gays…
…and I listen to another man explaining that there was a large telephone pole near the Botel, and that it had a chain fastened to it…and the police would randomly arrest gay men as they found them leaving the Botel and cuff them to this chain…one by one…until they had their twenty for that night…and they would put them all on the boat back to the mainland and to jail.
This happened on Fire Island, in the 1960s, during a time when a lot of gay men and lesbians regarded Fire Island as a place they could go to get away from the oppression they felt in their daily lives. It was a place where could be "among your own kind", the people in the documentary were telling me as I watched. You felt like you were in a world apart, they said. Back home was the closet, the constant fear of discovery, the need to keep your head down. On Fire Island you felt like you were getting away from all that, they said. But you never knew when the police might grab you off the street, handcuff you to a chain with twenty or more other homosexuals, and take you by boat to a jail on the mainland. Because you were a homosexual.
And now you know another reason why Stonewall finally happened.
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