…plans to “decide in about a month” on another third-party run at the White House. In addition to having done enough damage to our country already, Ralph is 74 years old—three years older than ancient ol’ John McCain—and really ought to be thinking about retirement.
C’mon, Ralph. Don’t you want to enjoy your golden years? Kick back—you’ve earned it. Don’t you wanna travel a bit, see the country…
Tell you what, Ralph, if you don’t run for president I’ll head up a fundraising drive to purchase you a nice car—perhaps a bitchin’ vintage ‘62 Corvair—for you to tour the country in. Whatdaya say, Ralph?
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.
Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.
Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.
The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.
Can’t you just see how Microsoft is going to market this? Oh…we’re just trying to Help make your office experience more enjoyable…
The saving grace of it is that any technology capable of producing tiny devices to monitor your every breath with is also capable of producing tiny devices to fuck with the monitoring devices. But still…this is beyond sad. It’s disgusting. Next time Bill, or anyone in the Microsoft boardroom is testifying before congress about something, someone should ask them if they plan to sell this technology to totalitarian states. Because of course, if a U.S. company doesn’t sell police state technology to police states, someone else will and that’s money out of our pockets isn’t it?
I sure hope nobody asks me to work on the software for crap like this. I’ll work on it alright…
Just so this is clear, if isn’t already, whoever the democratic candidate is this November, I’m almost certainly voting for them. I’ve basically been a yellow dog democrat ever since Connie Morella, an ersatz moderate republican from Montgomery County Maryland voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. That was when I learned that there is no such thing as a moderate republican. So whoever wins the democratic nomination…unless they do something really crazy and nominate Lyndon LaRouche or Mike Huckabee…I’ll be voting for them. I can’t say there’s a lot of them I like…and yes, yes, they’re mostly pretty lame on gay rights issues, and in particular on same sex marriage…but I have been convinced, ever since Connie Morella whined for the newspapers that same sex marriage was "too much" and "like the world turning upside down", that the only way gay people will ever achieve equality in America, is when the republicans are too weak to oppose it effectively.
What I’ve learned since George Bush was installed in the white house by a republican supreme court, is that it isn’t only homosexuals the republican party hates. They hate our democracy at least as much if not more then they hate gay people. The tut, tutting of the republican cocktail party set as to how they’re really all a very socially tolerant bunch they only want their tax breaks and deregulation is a pathetic charade next to the passionate vitriol of the grassroots, who are screaming for theocracy. Witness the horror of the republican establishment over Mike Huckabee.
Wealthy Republicans have a new political nightmare that may be scarier than Hillary Clinton: Mike Huckabee.
The former Arkansas governor has surged in Republican presidential-preference polls, winning the support of Christian fundamentalists while peppering his campaign rhetoric with jabs at the financial industry. He calls himself the candidate who isn’t a “wholly owned subsidiary” of investment banks, decries large executive-pay packages and says the party needs to shift its focus from Wall Street to Main Street.
In doing so, he threatens the uneasy if effective coalition Republicans have counted on for three decades: abortion opponents and other social-issue activists supplying foot soldiers, proponents of tax cuts and business-friendly regulatory policies putting up the money and getting the biggest economic benefits.
"Huckabee puts this long-simmering feud between the social-conservative wing and the country-club and business crowd into starker contrast," said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington.
Huckabee was asked on TV after running his Christmas ad, with it’s glowing cross resting on his shoulder as though he was annointed by Jesus Christ himself…
…if he was running to be president of all America, or president of Christian America. Of course he made noises about being president of all the people…even the aberrant homosexuals. But there’s no doubt about him. He is a republican to the bone. But what you have to understand is that so are his horrified cocktail party circuit critics.
I’ll put this in language even your tiny little Iowa brains can understand: What the f*** is wrong with you people?
The news coming out of Des Moines (literally, French for “tell me about the rabbits, George”) tonight is distressing in the extreme. 32 years ago, your Democratic brethren took one look at Jimmy Carter — the worst 20th Century President bar Nixon, and the worst ex-President ever — and declared, “That’s our man!”
Three decades later, and along comes Mike Huckabee. Same moral pretentiousness, same gullibility on foreign affairs, only-slightly-less toothy idiot’s grin. Then you so-called Republicans took a look at Carter’s clone and said, “That’s our man, too!”
And by a pretty wide margin. […]
Mike Huckabee? Really? We’ve seen this game before, and its name is… every other single stupid, un-winnable candidate you’ve ever picked — which is most of them.
So I repeat the question: What is wrong with you people?
All my love, you corn-sucking idiots,
VodkaPundit
He’s since taken that post down. Never let the vodka do your talking for you, eh? But as Brad at Sadly No says, Feel The Love…
Yes. Feel it. There’s the face of the republican party both these men share, right there. There is it’s "base" It isn’t fundamentalism. It’s Hate. Sometimes, that snarling pack of wolves turns on each other for a while, but never, Never mistake that as the party tearing itself apart. That’s how it gets stronger. Ever since Goldwater, excepting Ford and, maybe, Dole, the one who wins the republican nomination, is the one with the most ruthless machine. These pack fights the republicans go through during the primaries, are merely the warm up to the general election, when the one still left standing, the most vicious one, turns from the internal battle, and looks out at America.
To the degree that the defining characteristics of fundamentalism aren’t so much its piety as its loathings, its resentments, and its sullen sense of entitlement, Huckabee is certainly playing to the fundamentalists. To the degree that fundamentalist theocracies are nothing more at heart then degenerate oligarchies that claim God’s authority more brazenly and less sincerely then any king that ever lived, then yes, what they want is theocracy. But don’t mistake Huckabee’s support as being a religious movement, any more then the CEOs pouring millions into republican coffers in exchange for billions in tax dollars is a religious movement. These two sides of the republican party coalition are more in tune with each other then people think. They both hate American democracy. They both think the American dream of liberty and justice for all is an obscene joke. They both want to rape America to lifelessness: the one out of hate toward the hoi polli; the other out of hate for humanity.
Hate is their motive, and hate is their practice. For decades now, ever since Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and southern democrats began fleeing to the republican party, that party has been doggedly remaking itself from a co-governing institution into a movement that seeks nothing more then power, at any cost, by any means necessary, and to hell with the consequences for America. As Garrison Keillor pointedly observed after the 2000 election debacle, they are republicans first, and Americans second. Actually, I don’t think they regard themselves as Americans in the sense Keillor means that word, as a national identity we all share. Modern movement conservative republicans believe that America belongs exclusively to them…the rest of us just work here. Liberals… Democrats… Progressives… Gays… Uppity women… Uppity Negros… Trade Unionists… Urbanites… Intellectuals… Christians in deed as well as word… The working stiff holding down two jobs to pay the rent… The successful entrepreneur who wants everyone to have their own piece of the American Dream too… As far as the republicans are concerned, we are all illegal aliens.
For those of us who’ve been seeing that clearly since 2000, it makes the beltway pundocracy’s swooning over the virtues of "bipartisanship" particularly galling. Bipartisanship in the Bush era, is giving the republicans what they want. Here Glenn Sargent explains:
By now, you’ve probably heard that Michael Bloomberg and a bunch of retired politicians are going to hold a summit at the University of Oklahoma this week to talk about how desperately the nation needs a nonpartisan and independent leader like, you know, him to come in and lead the nation out of partisan gridlock.
This story, fittingly, was first leaked to The Washington Post‘s David Broder, a St. Paul-like figure who has long preached the virtues of the Beltway Gospel of Bipartisanship high and low across the land. Predictably, this planned gathering is already garnering the sort of awed and respectful coverage that greeted the formation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group nearly two years ago.
So here’s the question: When these bearded elders descend on Oklahoma later this week, will anyone ask them what policies they stand for, beyond "breaking partisan gridlock"? Will anyone ask them where they stand on the issues? Will anyone ask why we’re supposed to believe that their actual stances have any chance of creating "bipartisan unity" at all?
These questions are kind of relevant. Partisan gridlock happens because people — and by extension, political parties — disagree about stuff. One party wants to do one thing on a particular issue. Another party says No. The first party offers a few concessions. The second party still says No. That’s where "partisan gridlock" comes from — underlying disagreement on issues — and in our current case, the fault for our "partisan gridlock" isn’t equally distributed between the two parties. Rather, it’s almost exclusively the fault of the Republicans.
You aren’t allowed to say this, but it’s true. If you don’t believe me, ask the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. They proposed a bunch of solutions to Iraq. The Democrats largely embraced these solutions. The Republicans, by contrast, didn’t. As a result, the ISG’s proposals didn’t happen — even though they had been authored by a distinguished bipartisan panel. The Republicans have been the near-exclusive cause of gridlock on multiple other issues, too — issues upon which there is already majority agreement on how to proceed. In reality, the best way to end partisan gridlock is to further weaken the Republican Party, which is tying government in knots and preventing it from carrying out the will of the majority on a host of fronts.
This is how the republicans have managed to govern even when they were out of power, with democrats shuffling along to their tune out of a sense of national unity and co-operation that has been hopelessly naive, if not utterly reckless for decades. While democrats have been searching for peace in our time, the republicans have been waging all out political war on our precious democracy.
And that makes questions of any democratic candidate’s "electability" moot. Glenn Greenwald lays it out Here:
There’s a prevailing sense that Obama is not as offensive to the right-wing GOP faction as other Democratic and liberal candidates in the past have been, or that he’s less "divisive" among them than Hillary. And that’s true: for now, while he tries to take down the individual who has long provoked the most intense hatred — literally — among the Right. But anyone who doesn’t think that that’s all going to change instantaneously if Obama is the nominee hasn’t been watching how this faction operates over the last 20 years. Hatred is their fuel. Just look at the bottomless personal animus they managed to generate over an anemic, mundane, inoffensive figure like John Kerry. At their Convention, they waved signs with band-aids mocking his purple hearts while cheering on two combat-avoiders.
There will be more than enough of that intense hatred to go around if Obama is the nominee. For now, most of the racial commentary about Obama’s candidacy on the Right is confined to the sort of cringe-inducing, painfully condescending self-congratulations of the type Bill Bennett spat out on CNN Thursday night:
Barack Hussein Obama, a black man, wins this for the Democrats.
I have been watching him. I watched him on "Meet the Press," I’ve watched him on [Anderson Cooper’s] show, watched him on all the CNN shows — he never brings race into it. He never plays the race card.
Talk about the black community — he has taught the black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton. You can talk about the issues. Great dignity. And this is a breakthrough. And good for the people of Iowa.
But if Obama is really the nominee, and is the one standing in the way between the Right and ongoing control of the Government, the idea that there’s going to be civility and respect is pure delusion. Rush Limbaugh’s continuous race-based mockery of Obama and the types of "warnings" issued here by Goldberg and Reynolds of the social unrest "Obama supporters" will cause is but the tip of the rancid iceberg [just the other day, Reynolds promoted a post warning that an Obama win (like a Huckabee win) will mean "the jihadis will not have done too badly"]. From a Free Republic posting after Obama’s Iowa victory:
Is Hussein Obama the weakest Dem for the General election?
By sending forth Hussein Osama out of Iowa, Democrats have unwittingly weakened their general election prospects.
Hussein’s exotic mixture of radical liberalism, Kwanzaa Socialism, antipathy towards the unborn, and weakness against his jihadi brethren will all come back to destroy him against almost any Republican opponent, even the snake-grope from Hope. . . .
As defenders of this great Republic, and of the pinnacle of Western civilization that it represents, we should all come together tonight and agree on a common strategy that will keep the White House from becoming a madrassa.
As Andrew White, who also posted that Free Republic piece, wrote: "If Obama continues and becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee (and his chances got a lot better last night) it is going to get ugly. Real ugly." It would be just as ugly with Clinton or Edwards as the nominee, but that’s the point. Scare tactics and fear-mongering are all the Right knows, and their whole electoral strategy since Richard Nixon has been grounded in culturally tribalistic and racial appeals. The kind of subtle bile pouring forth from Limbaugh, and from Goldberg and Reynolds last night, is just a tiny preview of what is to come.
The fact is that the democrats could nominate Jesus Christ and two weeks into the campaign the Washington Post’s editorial page would be asking why he isn’t being candid with the voters about his horns, cloven hoofs and tail.
Which makes it tempting to simply vote for the candidate who pisses them off the most. Hey…why not Hillery…they just Hate Hillery… But that’s letting your anger do your thinking for you, and what we need to do is let our anger Inform our thinking, but not substitute for it. Whether or not a particular candidate pisses our enemies off isn’t important. What’s important is that they fight back. Thats what we should be looking for in our candidate. What’s important is that they’ll take the fight to the republicans. What’s important, is that they’ll swing right back every time the republican slime machine attacks, and keep right on swinging, Hard and Fast and Furious, no matter how loudly the republican corporate news media accuses them of “partisanship”, “negativism” and “political warfare”. What’s important is that they grab the other side by the throat and kick it in the ass, and keep on kicking it in the ass all through the election, and from one end of their term in office to the other, until the opposition either stops swinging and starts acting like civilized human beings again, or it can’t swing anymore, whichever comes first.
To which the Andrew Sullivan’s and Glenn Reynolds will say that all we democrats and liberals are interested in is waging a political war, rather then finding solutions to American’s problems. And the only proper response to that is: Kiss My Ass. No decent person goes looking for a knife fight. But the fact is we Are in a knife fight with the republicans. The fact is that America Has been in a knife fight with the republicans for decades now. And you don’t bring a handshake to a knife fight.
Most of the Western press had evacuated, but a small contingent remained to report on the crumbling Iraqi regime. In the New York offices of NBC News, one of my video stories was being screened. If it made it through the screening, it would be available for broadcast later that evening. Producer Geoff Stephens and I had done a phone interview with a reporter in Baghdad who was experiencing the bombing firsthand. We also had a series of still photos of life in the city. The only communication with Baghdad in those early days was by satellite phone. Still pictures were sent back over the few operating data links.
Our story arranged pictures of people coping with the bombing into a slide show, accompanied by the voice of Melinda Liu, a Newsweek reporter describing, over the phone, the harrowing experience of remaining in Baghdad. The outcome of the invasion was still in doubt. There was fear in the reporter’s voice and on the faces of the people in the pictures. The four-minute piece was meant to be the kind of package that would run at the end of an hour of war coverage. Such montages were often used as "enders," to break up the segments of anchors talking live to field reporters at the White House or the Pentagon, or retired generals who were paid to stand on in-studio maps and provide analysis of what was happening. It was also understood that without commercials there would need to be taped pieces on standby in case an anchor needed to use the bathroom. Four minutes was just about right.
At the conclusion of the screening, there were a few suggestions for tightening here and clarification there. Finally, an NBC/GE executive responsible for "standards" shook his head and wondered about the tone in the reporter’s voice. "Doesn’t it seem like she has a point of view here?" he asked.
There was silence in the screening room. It made me want to twitch, until I spoke up. I was on to something but uncertain I wasn’t about to be handed my own head. "Point of view? What exactly do you mean by point of view?" I asked. "That war is bad? Is that the point of view that you are detecting here?"
The story never aired. Maybe it was overtaken by breaking news, or maybe some pundit-general went long, or maybe an anchor was able to control his or her bladder. On the other hand, perhaps it was never aired because it contradicted the story NBC was telling. At NBC that night, war was, in fact, not bad. My remark actually seemed to have made the point for the "standards" person. Empathy for the civilians did not fit into the narrative of shock and awe.
The facts didn’t fit the narrative…so the facts were jettisoned. This is how the corporate news media operates. I’ve asked this before…let me ask it again: what is more degenerate…a the puppet news media of a totalitarian state, or a news media in a democracy that sells out?
ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa’s apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "huge blot on a democracy".
"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," Archbishop Tutu said.
I take it you haven’t noticed yet that the Bush base here in America are the same folks who wholeheartedly supported Apartheid. And not just abroad…
Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog: So, people ask why, in The Conscience of a Liberal, I downplay the role of issues other than race in swinging the political balance in favor of the GOP. The answer, basically, is the math: once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn’t much left to explain.
In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:
Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.
White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.
Who would have imagined the the United States of America would one day piss on the Geneva conventions and laugh? The republican base…that’s who. The American gutter that came charging into politics after the hated Warren court told them to desegregate their schools, and allow their negros to vote. They’ve dreamed of it for decades. Reagan delivered that gutter into power. Bush told them they didn’t have to give a shit.
Bush and Cheney have broken the law consistently throughout their reign, often openly, and to the great detriment of our own country and others; when they obey it, they do so more as a matter of convenience than from any fealty to it or any fear of retribution. They’re pleased to use the legislature to achieve their ends when they can – as when Congress obligingly immunized administration personnel from prosecution under the War Crimes Act – and to ignore it when they can’t. Former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith explains the dynamic as described to him by Dick Cheney’s current number two, torture maven David Addington: "We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." They have, and that larger force has not materialized – and the administration have been at pains to ensure that the force, if it ever arrives, won’t do so in the person of the courts – and the result is a constitutional republic with its framework intact and its guts eviscerated. There is only one remedy, and that’s impeachment.
(Emphasis mine)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-George Washington
Washington was probably thinking about the democrats when he said that…
Mike Huckabee says he stands by his statements fifteen years ago about AIDS patients, though he concedes he might phrase them differently today.
How many different ways can you say "Death Camps" Mike…?
In some old candidate questionnaires the Associated Press has dug up, Huckabee suggested back then that AIDS patients should essentially be quarantined.
"Fifteen years ago, the AIDS crisis was just that. It was a crisis," Huckabee told reporters at a campaign stop in Asheville, N.C. this weekend. "There were a lot of questions back in that time as to just how the disease could be carried. There was just a real panic in this country."
A reader asks, “what’s the big deal?” After all, didn’t a lot of people advocate quarantine for AIDS patients early in the epidemic? Yeah, early in the epidemic some did advocate just that—and not just bigots salivating at the prospect of rounding up all gay people, diseased or not. But that was early in the epidemic, very early, 1984-86. By 1992 only raving bigots were still talking about quarantining people with AIDS or HIV. People like, you know, Mike Huckabee.
You need to pay attention to that, because even back in the early stages of the AIDS outbreak, people talking about rounding up and "quarantining" AIDS victims weren’t doing that out of concern with the spread of the disease itself, as with the ever growing visibility of the people they despised:
Huckabee said he also stands by his words that homosexuality is sinful.
What a coincidence, that. Huckabee was far from the only one still calling for an AIDS "quarantine" by the 1990s, and yes, the ones who were just also happened to have a bottomless bit of animus toward homosexual people. One they often dressed up in biblical rhetoric that was as cheap as it was transparent.
If AIDS had hit America in the early 1950s, the Huckabees of the world would have without a doubt gotten their wish and every homosexual the authorities could identify would have been rounded up and locked into concentration camps…and from there, isolated from the rest of the American community who didn’t have to see, didn’t have to care, didn’t have to know, a final solution to the sexual pervert problem would have been just one small step away. In 1986 William F. Buckley shocked even many of his fellow wingers by advocating the forcible tattooing of AIDS victims, once on the arm, and once on the buttocks, he claimed to prevent the spread of the disease via shared needles and sex. He only withdrew his suggestion after being forced to admit that the plan had an "unfortunate association" with the Holocaust.
AIDS didn’t happen in 1950, it happened in the early 80s, over a decade of gay rights activism after Stonewall, and the republican right wing theocratic base is deeply resentful to this day that they didn’t get their chance back then to let their hate run free and unfettered over the lives of all gay people, whether we had the disease or not, and gleefully stomp the human life out of us.
"According to Ars Technica, California testers have discovered severe flaws in the ES&S voting machines. The paper seals were easily bypassed, and the lock could be picked with a "common office implement".
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(Time Magazine Edition)
One of the things people were wondering about when Time Magazine hack and republican useful idiot Joe Klein published his column accusing congressional democrats of coddling foreign terrorists, was why the hell didn’t the democrats respond?
Well…as it turns out…they did. Time Magazine simply refused to publish their rebuttals…
The disgraceful behavior of Time Magazine in the Joe Klein scandal has been well-documented. But new facts have emerged that reveal that Time‘s behavior was far worse than previously thought.
First, Sen. Russ Feingold submitted a letter to Time protesting the false statements in Klein’s article. But Time refused to publish it. Sen. Feingold’s spokesman said that the letter "was submitted to TIME very shortly after Klein’s column ran but the letters department was about as responsive as the column was accurate."
Just to reveal how corrupt that behavior is, The Chicago Tribune — which previously published the factually false excerpts of Klein’s column and then clearly retracted them — yesterday published Feingold’s letter. As Feingold details — but had to go to the Chicago Tribune‘s Letter section to do it — "Klein calls the Democrats’ position on reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ‘well beyond stupid’ but without getting his facts straight." Feingold also said that "Klein is also flat out wrong" in his false claims that there was some "bipartisan agreement" on a bill to vest "new surveillance powers" that House Democrats ignored.
Second, Rep. Rush Holt — before he published his response in The Huffington Post detailing Klein’s false claims — asked that he be given the opportunity to respond to Klein’s false column directly on Time‘s Swampland, where Klein was in the process of making all sorts of statements compounding his errors. But Time also denied Rep. Holt the opportunity to bring his response to the attention of Time‘s readers.
According to Zach Goldberg, Rep. Holt’s spokesman: "Rep. Holt had an email exchange with Mr. Klein about FISA and his column. During the exchange, Rep. Holt made a request to respond with a Swampland post to clarify what is really in the RESTORE Act. Mr. Klein noted he already issued a public apology and did not accept the request."
Let’s just ponder for a second how lowly Time‘s behavior here is. It refused the requests of two sitting members of Congress, both of whom are members of the Intelligence Committees and have played a central role in drafting the pending FISA legislation, to correct Klein’s false statements in Time itself. What kind of magazine smears its targets with patently false statements and then blocks them from responding?
Go read the rest of it, for a sickening glimpse of how the corporate news media, in this case Time Magazine, deliberately pushes the republican party line while silencing the democrats. This behavior on the part of the corporate news media may have a lot to do with why capital hill democrats are perceived as being perceived as silent and mute before the Bush administration onslaught. They may look like they’re not fighting back, because the voters aren’t being allowed to see them fighting back.
Via Brad DeLong … Something to keep in mind as you read the news stories about intelligence reports indicating that Iran had stopped its nuclear program some years ago: When George Bush started rattling the saber at them over their nuke program…he knew there wasn’t one…
Robert Waldmann points out that corrupt Washington Post stenographers Peter Baker and Robin Wright know how to write an honest, factual lead paragraph–they just usually choose not to:
By Peter Baker and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 4, 2007; Page A01
President Bush got the world’s attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.
Now that is what I call a lead*. The contrast couldn’t be more sharp with Baker’s recent effort to thoroughly inform all readers who get to paragraph 8 that Karl Rove is a liar about which I posted at the linked post…
Oh…and here’s the pathetic Washington Post headline that Waldmann is referring to:
Rove’s Version of 2002 War Vote Is Disputed
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 1, 2007; Page A06
Former White House aide Karl Rove said yesterday it was Congress, not President Bush, who wanted to rush a vote on the looming war in Iraq in the fall of 2002
As numerous people on the net have pointed out…Rove’s version is a flat-out lie. To say it is "disputed" would, in any reality but a beltway journalist’s indicate that there is some way of honestly disputing it and there isn’t. It’s classic, vapid, idiotic, brain dead "he said, she said" journalism. How about "Death Of George Washington Over 200 Years Ago Is Disputed" What the fuck?
A mysterious group calling itself Iowans for Some Semblance of Christian Decency has begun waging a campaign against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, insinuating that not only is the Republican presidential candidate not a true conservative, he’s not a real Christian.
In fliers put under the doors of reporters at the Marriott in Des Moines, where Huckabee was staying Monday night, the organization, whose members are unknown, lays out its interpretation of how the former Baptist minister’s views run contrary to the Bible.
Huckabee’s support of educational opportunities for the children of illegal immigrants is portrayed, for instance, as "justification for violating the 8th commandment (stealing from U.S. citizens)." A lighthearted video clip where he pretends to talk to the Lord (watch HERE) is portrayed as "sacrilegious mocking of God for political gain."
From this cesspool the republicans will pick their presidential candidate. The one who wins will be the one that floats to the top.
I’m headed for bed, and not even going to bother watching the republican debate. But scanning the blogs that are following it live, I’m seeing that a gay (former) general asked a question concerning gays in the military and he was apparently roundly booed by the audience…
…so I just want to re-emphasize something I put up on my Twitter bar a few hours ago, for the sake of a few certain someones I no longer speak to, and one who I’m still very much holding at arm’s length: If you can still vote republican after all the gay bashing they’ve been doing, then we are not friends. It really is that simple.
Someone put a fork in the party of Lincoln, it’s done. And…I’m going to bed now…
In case you haven’t been following it…Time Magazine, courtesy of its columnist Joe Klein, has been giving the nation a textbook example of the problem with American corporate journalism. Some days ago Time columnist Joe Klein huffed that, basically, the democrats were once again coddling terrorists.
Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
Note that this verbiage has now been…altered…on their website since the netroots started blasting Klein and Time over the original text’s blatant, in-your-face-falsehood. In fact, the bill did no such thing as even a child with third grade reading skills could clearly comprehend. Glenn Greenwald has been on it relentlessly since Klein’s bullshit column hit the newsstands…
"Well beyond stupid" is a good description for what Klein wrote here. "Factually false" is even better. First, from its inception, FISA did not "protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." Its warrant requirements apply to all "U.S. persons" (see 1801(f)), which includes not only U.S. citizens but also "an alien lawfully admitted [in the U.S.] for permanent residence" (see 1801(i)). From 1978 on, FISA extended its warrant protections to resident aliens.
But Klein’s far more pernicious "error" is his Limbaugh-copying claim that the House bill "require[s] the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court." It just does not.
The only reason why Congress began considering amendments to FISA in the first place was because a FISA court earlier this year ruled that a warrant was required for foreign-to-foreign calls incidentally routed through the U.S. via fiber optics. Everyone — from Russ Feingold to the ACLU — agreed that FISA never intended to require warrants for foreign-to-foreign calls that have nothing to do with U.S. citizens, and thus, none of the bills being considered — including the bill passed by the House — requires warrants for such foreign-to-foreign calls. Here is Rep. Rush Holt, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the key architects of the House bill, explaining what the House bill actually does:
* Ensure that the government must have an individualized, particularized court-approved warrant based on probable cause in order to read or listen to the communications of an American citizen. . . .
The RESTORE Act now makes clear that it is the courts — and not an executive branch political appointee — who decide whether or not the communications of an American can be seized and searched, and that such seizures and searches must be done pursuant to a court order.
Under the House bill, individualized warrants are required if the U.S. Government wants to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans. Warrants are not required — as Klein falsely claimed — for "every foreign-terrorist target’s calls."
While the government (in order to prevent abuse) must demonstrate to the FISA court that it is applying its surveillance standards faithfully, the warrant requirement is confined to the class Rep. Holt described. Klein’s shrill condemnation of the House FISA bill rests on a complete falsehood (that’s not surprising; the last time Klein wrote about FISA, he said that "no actual eavesdropping on conversations should be permitted without a FISA court ruling" and then proceeded to defend a FISA bill which, unbeknownst to him, allowed exactly that).
What Time Magazine did, essentially, was smear the democrats as terrorist coddlers in the minds of millions of Time Magazine readers, and if you think that was accidental or merely a case of slipshod journalism you are not paying attention.
Klein’s broader point is even more odious. Along with most of the "liberal" punditocracy, Klein has been singing the same song for years and years and years now. The salvation for Democrats lies in following Republicans on national security issues. He’s been warning Democrats from the very beginning of the NSA scandal that they had better stop condemning Bush’s illegal spying on Americans or else they will justly suffer the consequences, and he issues similar lip-quivering warnings about Iraq: Democrats better stop opposing the Leader’s War or else they will lose.
The big joke here you have to realize, is that Klein is Time’s Liberal columnist. The corporate news media has been playing this game for decades…dragging the American political dialogue ever further and further to the right, by pitting hard core movement conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and outright lunatics like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter against ersatz liberals like Joe Klein. Democrats and progressives are never represented in the corporate news media dialogue, and indeed are usually portrayed as extremists, while the likes of Ann Coulter are given plenty of time to spread their venom in the name of "Balance".
And in that environment, where the playing field is relentlessly tilted toward the right, actual policy differences between the republicans and the democrats have been consistently represented in a "he said, she said" format, where actual facts are never discussed, never even sought. For years now, the republicans have been able to push any damn lie they wanted into the public discourse, with absolutely no fear of being contradicted by the press. And this latest Joe Klein column has been a perfect example of how that not only works, but how the corporate news media remains doggedly determined to keep it working that way. After days and days of being raked over the coals for the blatant in-your-face factual inaccuracies in the Klein column, Time Magazine finally prints a…correction…but not…
Time Magazine has done a superb service for the country by illustrating everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media. After I emailed Time.com Editor Josh Tyrangiel asking why the online version of Joe Klein’s column remains online uncorrected given that — as Managing Editor Rick Stengel now says — the article contains a "reporting error," this is the "correction" Time has now posted to the article. Seriously — this is really it, in its entirety:
In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.
Leave aside the false description of what Klein wrote. He didn’t say "that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets." He said that their bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court" and "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." But the Editor’s false characterization of Klein’s original lie about the House FISA bill is the least of the issues here.
All Time can say about this matter is that Republicans say one thing and Democrats claim another. Who is right? Is one side lying? What does the bill actually say, in reality?
That’s not for Time to say. After all, they’re journalists, not partisans. So they just write down what each side says. It’s not for them to say what is true, even if one side is lying.
In this twisted view, that is called "balance" — writing down what each side says. As in: "Hey – Bush officials say that there is WMD in Iraq and things are going great with the war (and a few people say otherwise). It’s not for us to decide. It’s not our fault if what we wrote down is a lie. We just wrote down exactly what they said." At best, they write down what each side says and then go home. That’s what they’re for.
That our typical establishment "journalist" conceives of this petty clerical task as their only role is not news. But it is striking to see the nation’s "leading news magazine" so starkly describe how they perceive their role.
After watching our corporate news media passively allow the election of 2000 to be stolen by the republicans, after watching them cheer Bush on as he lied this nation into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, ruined our economy, and thoroughly trashed our moral capital, after watching them help Bush cover up the outing of one of our CIA agents in an act of cold, calculating political retribution, none of this should surprise anyone. Journalism is dead and rotting in America, everywhere but in the alternative press, and on the Internet, which, not coincidentally, is the one place corporate America cannot dictate the rules of the game.
You should go read Glenn Greenwald’s evisceration of this whole sorry episode, starting Here, and then moving on Here, Here, Here, and Here. You need to see, all Americans need to see, how the news media many of us grew up reading and watching, has bellyflopped itself into the gutter.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
