Wednesday June 30, 2004
Cheney was booed at a Sox/Yankees game last night. Note on a blog here, too. Via Eschaton.
Even rushing the transfer of power didn't seem to help.
Sunday June 27, 2004
Telling friends to see a movie gets you "blacklisted"
I jut read on Eschaton that Dale Earnhardt Jr. has asked his crew to go see Fahrenheit 9/11 (according to a Freeper who saw a report about it on Fox).
Below are selected comments from other Freepers responding to the news:
"Like it or not, America is a free country. If Dale Jr. thinks everyone should see Michael Moore's crap, so be it. If he agrees with a hatriot like Moore it is his perrogative to do so. He must however face the consequences of making such a statement. Many people do not agree with him."
"If we ruined the careers of the Dixie Chicks we can ruin the careers of Michael Moore and Dale Jr."
"I'm just saying that a trairotous attack shouldn't go unanswered. I can't just ignore this. People need to know the truth about Earnhardt Jr."
"DON'T WORRY ABOUT THIS. THOSE OL' REDNECK BOYS IN ALABAMA WILL STRAIGHTEN HIM OUT."
"It's gonna backfire on the kid. He's gotten way too big for his (and his father's) britches."
"Yo, Dale! You know what your daddy and Pink Floyd had in common? The last big hit either of them had was The Wall."
"This is Dale's Dixie Chicks moment. Why should we contribute one thin dime to a filmmaker who is literally cheering on terrorists who kill our soldiers? Patriotic my foot."
Saturday June 26, 2004
It's interesting that we see more about European protests against Bush than we see about our own homegrown efforts.
The Bush campaign has a new web video up, recycling images from the Bush-as-Hitler submission to MoveOn.org's BushIn30 contest. The video's name? "Kerry's coalition of the wild-eyed".
Sadly, the video is so poorly edited that one gets the impression that the GOP is actually promoting the Bush-as-Hitler image. And the comments of the "wild-eyed" Democrats are pretty tame, compared to Cheney's recent little outburst on the Senate floor...
Friday June 25, 2004
Hit and run: Bush plays putz on Irish TV
Bush gets run over by an Irish journalist -- Realplayer required.
Thursday June 24, 2004
President and Torture
The President, taking questions yesterday, talked about the "Abu Guh-raif" "situation". The first word came out so slowly that he had the opportunity to fix it before the last letter was even uttered. The second word came out after about 5 seconds of pondering what word could be used in place of "scandal".
As Jon Stewart said last night, the fact that the President placed an "f" at the end of Abu-Ghraib is not a sign of his stupidity. It's a sign that he just doesn't give a shit.
Wednesday June 23, 2004
Another quick note on Hitchens, because he pisses me off.
He notes that Michael Moore is "the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia".
I've heard this canard so many times... Has anyone actually seen the damn movie? Heston was perfectly lucid, and he hung himself with his own words. Just because he realized after the fact that he wasn't talking to a like-minded protectionist doesn't imply he was displaying signs of senility. And his feeble totter out of the room doesn't count, either, folks.
The man knew exactly what he was saying, he just didn't know his audience.
It's not surprising that Hitchens would try to make points off of this, but the question is, why? Is he so caught up in the war fever that has engulfed him that he is unwilling to confront honestly the facts before him? Can't we simply malign Hitchens as being as callow as he accuses Moore of being?
Sure we can.
And in response to a comment on a board that stated:
Um "Chris Nelson" is clearly out of his depth. He's the best you have? Barely any deconstruction at all and certainly none of the meaningful variety.
I don't have to engage in some deconstructivist convolution just because Hitchens obfuscates. His comments don't require it, failing to live up to simple requirements for effective argumentation.
Tuesday June 22, 2004
Sadly, if you can get past Christopher Hitchen's college-level vocabulary, you find that his argumentation would have trouble besting a high-school debate team's weakest entry.
In his piece "Unfairenheit 9/11" at Slate.com, he states the following:
More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box.
So, according to Hitchens, those who wished that Bush had done something different that morning were of two different minds: those who felt he should have been a hero, and those who know that he knew all along about the attacks.
Thus Christopher Hitchens wins yet another argument, by falsely characterizing the opposing viewpoint as insipidly political; no valid counterargument could ever be made and even if it was, Hitchens has ignored it and devised his own ephemeral opponent to attack, an opponent who is at times "shameful" and "paranoid". How convenient. How puerile.
In a similar way he has decided that because the 9/11 commission has stated that they found nothing strange about planeloads of Bin Ladens being allowed to leave the country on the days after the attack, that of course, nothing strange had gone on, and any comment about it is absurd (and probably shameful and paranoid, to boot).
I won't go on - read his piece if you can stomach it. If Hitchens is going to go to the trouble of trying to best Michael Moore, the least he could do is be honest. "Pathetic" and "addled" won't cut it.
Paul Krugman on John Ashcroft. As the Comicbook Guy would say, "Worst Attorney General EVER!"
Lies! Dripping out your mouth like dirt!
Spencer Ackerman explains why this talk of a Saddam/Bin Laden link in the form of one "Ahmed Hikmat Shakir" is probably bullshit. If the guy was really working for Saddam when he supposedly attended the infamous meeting in Kuala Lumpur, wouldn't the detainees that we have in custody who were at that event, including the guy who organized the thing (Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) know about it? Apparently the 9/11 commissioners have had "full access to debriefings of his [Mohamed's] interrogations". And if Mohammed told us anything, don't you think we would have heard about it by now? And if they didn't know that he worked for Saddam, then what kind of "tie" is that??
More bullshit from the people who will go down in history as the most deceitful, corrupt administration in the history of America.
Monday June 21, 2004
Does anyone think Bradbury really has a case against Moore? Or is this just the Rightist media playing up the story in order to trash Moore on the eve of the film's release? It is a different medium, and the name is generic enough -- can Bradbury sue because his book's name inspired a movie's different name?
Washington Post, under fire from Rumsfeld, comes out with guns blazing
The Washington Post lays it on the line in today's editorial:
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald H. Rumsfeld expressed dismay on Thursday about editorials in which "the implication is that the United States government has, in one way or another, ordered, authorized, permitted, tolerated torture." Such reports, he said, raised questions among U.S. troops in Iraq, reduced the willingness of people in Iraq and Afghanistan to cooperate with the United States, and could be used by others as an excuse to torture U.S. soldiers or civilians.
We agree that the country is at war and that we all must weigh our words accordingly. We also agree that the consequences of the revelations of prisoner abuse are grave. As supporters of the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been particularly concerned about the ways that the scandal -- and the administration's continuing failure to come to terms with it -- could undermine the chances for success. We also have warned about the uses that might be made of it by captors of Americans. What strikes us as extraordinary is that Mr. Rumsfeld would suggest that this damage would be caused by newspaper editorials rather than by his own actions and decisions and those of other senior administration officials.
They go on to clarify exactly how Rumsfeld and others in the administration ordered, authorized, and permitted torture throughout the military's prison system in Iraq and Guantanamo.
Friday June 18, 2004
I was wondering how long it would take before this blog was taken off of the planet.mozilla.org subscription list.
Glazman, I liked the Station Agent, too. I've seen it twice so far.
Is Fahrenheit 9/11 coming to your area?
See if Fahrenheit 9/11 is coming to your town. That Rightist Kaloogian and his PR friends at Move America Forward would probably rather burn the film in a big bonfire than let anyone see anything that they remotely disagree with. And guess who else has jumped on the bandwagon to help them out? Newsmax, that pillar of journalistic integrity, that bastion of bipartisanship. Their sponsored page on Move America Forward's website calls Fahrenheit 9/11 "anti-American", and asks that the reader "stop Michael Moore from profitting in his attacks on America & our military".
"Halliburton? That war profiteering charge is just crap! They're just pursuing the American dream in Iraq!"
"Enron? Well, California deserved it!"
"Carlisle Group? They're just businessmen! Give 'em a break!"
"Michael Moore? He called our President a 'deserter!' Anti-American rat bastard!"
"No, it's not true, god dammit! He and Cheney had other priorities during the 60s and 70s. O-ther pri-or-i-ties."
...like avoiding shrapnel by avoiding Vietnam entirely, and turning deception into an artform.
Wednesday June 16, 2004
Careful, Safire...
*Unhinged Clinton Hatred
And another plea for basic human rights -- in the Washington Post
Wow - the worm finally has turned, it seems. I guess that having to look at the thousands of photos from Abu Ghraib over and over and over finally got to the editors at the Washington Post. Here's commentary from a guest editorial by Dan Cole in the paper today:
First, the government's anti-immigrant measures have made us less, not more, secure. Of the more than 5,000 foreign nationals subject to preventive detention, for example, none has been charged with being associated with al Qaeda or with complicity in the attacks of Sept. 11. Only three have been charged with any terrorist crime at all, and two of those three were acquitted of the terrorism charges at trial. The lone conviction is now under a cloud because the prosecution failed to disclose to the defense evidence that its principal witness lied on the stand.
The most extensive campaign of ethnic profiling in this country since World War II has thus far failed to disclose a single terrorist. More than 80,000 foreign men were compelled to register, be fingerprinted and photographed merely because they came from predominantly Arab or Muslim countries. Another 8,000 men were called in for FBI interviews, again merely because they were from Arab and Muslim countries. And 6,000 more were prioritized for deportation, for the same reasons. Yet not one of these people has been charged with a terrorist crime.
...
Second, history suggests that what the government does to foreigners in the name of national security it will ultimately do to citizens as well. The Palmer Raids were directed at foreigners, but their architect, a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, was not content to stop there. He devoted his career to seeking out ways to extend those tactics to citizens, and in the McCarthy era, he succeeded. In fact, every significant form of political repression that the government has used against citizens began as an anti-alien measure.
So we should support the Civil Liberties Restoration Act because it is in our interest to do so. But there's still another reason: It's the right thing to do. The rights not to be locked up arbitrarily, tried in secret, held without charges, or discriminated against based on national origin or religion are not privileges of U.S. citizenship, but basic human rights. They belong to all of us, regardless of status.
Washington Post finally seems to be getting it
From today's editorial:
"Sadly, the Bush administration's policy decisions have cast doubt on whether this country accepts this fundamental principle of human rights."
Took them long enough.
Tuesday June 15, 2004
Fallout from Ron Reagan's slap-in-the-face comment regarding Bush's use of religion for political gain. I initially mentioned the comment here.
But every cloud has a silver lining, and Newt Gingrich apparently has the direct line to heaven: "Ronald Reagan has to be looking down from heaven and smiling at the way the current president, generally speaking, stands and the things he's doing, even though they might well disagree on some specifics."
Fox News Reviewer Praises Fahrenheit 9/11
That's right, this is from the Fox News website: "It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail."
There he goes again
Cheney points out Saddam's "long-established ties" with Al-Quaeda. He has to know that he's doing nothing but cementing uncertainty as truth in the mind of his base, but he's not convincing anyone else, and looks more and more like a huckleberry every time he carts this idea out. If there's any connection to Al-Quaeda through Saddam, it's by way of Bush's war, which seems to have precipitated the movement of Al-Quaeda into that country by the busload.
Monday June 14, 2004
More on Kaloogian and his compadres at Russo Marsh & Rogers, who are starting a campaign to get Fahrenheit 9/11 out of theaters before anyone can actually see it (before they've actually seen it).
Kaloogian apparently led the successful effort to get CBS to pull "The Reagans".
And Sal Russo, whose PR firm was first listed as the owner of the domain name for Move America Forward, was Bill Simon's campaign strategist, and helped engineer the California recall with Kaloogian.
Rightist California nutsack behind effort to stop showings of Fahrenheit 9/11
Who are the people behind the website Move America Forward, the website that incites readers to cajole theater companies into halting showings of Fahrenheit 9/11? Well, the group that registered the domain, according to Eschaton, was the PR firm Russo Marsh & Rogers, which helped push the Recall Davis campaign. Today, they changed the domain's owner to Howard Kaloogian, Rightist nutsack running for a Senate seat in California, a key player in the Recall Davis effort.
NOTE: Not that this should have been a surprise to anyone. His name is on the front page of the MAF website.
His campaign website is full of such wisdom as "I believe that tax cuts stimulate the economy, while tax increases slow the economy," "I believe that it is essential that our nation’s Constitution must be changed to specifically state that marriage is between a man and a woman," and "Furthermore, it is time that our environmental regulations recognize the power of market forces in achieving our environmental goals."
Sunday June 13, 2004
Prison Dog Abuse Photos
Saturday June 12, 2004
Apparently Reagan's son Ron dissed Bush during his eulogy.
Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.
Friday June 11, 2004
This is the site of the Democratic National Convention. Just to help counteract the googlebombing.
Must Read of the Day...
... is this blog post from Baghdad by reporter Christopher Allbritton, excerpted below.
Baghdad is also an incredibly stressful place to live and work, especially as a westerner, as I’ve mentioned. We’re targets, and when you look very western, like I do, you’re constantly aware of eyes on you and the hostility. At restaurants, the waiters sullenly clear your table, sometimes being none too careful about keeping chai or food from spilling on you. The kindness I encountered last year is absent; a western face brings a sullen welcome, calibrated to the bare minimum.
Thursday June 10, 2004
Daily Show Clip: Ashcroft's reticence
Gotta watch (via blog "Everything isn't Under Control" (Requires DivX codec. Broadband also.)
Saudi flight confirmed
Via many blogs, this article at the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times says that the Tampa International Airport is now confirming flights used to pick up and fly certain Saudis out of the country two days after 9/11, when air traffic was still restricted. This is after many denials, and many fudgings saying that flights "out of the country" did not take place during this time.
From the article:
wo days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.
The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky.
The Saudis then took another flight out of the country. The two ex-officers returned to TIA a few hours later on the same plane.
Wednesday June 09, 2004
Baghdad Freestyle
Via This Modern World, a link to Gunner Palace, a documentary set in Baghdad with the 2/3 Field Artillery batallion. Be sure to check out the Quicktime trailers.
Tuesday June 08, 2004
No, George W. Bush wouldn't use Ronald Reagan's death for partisan political gain.
Monday June 07, 2004
I had not heard of this...
Via Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, The Truth about Reagan and AIDS: "The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, 'I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.' As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died."
Rock Hudson was a friend of Reagan. According to this site, Reagan apparently called Hudson on his deathbed. Had a change of heart at some point, I guess.
Now that he's been deified, none of this matters...
UPDATE: Rock Hudson died in 1985. So much for sincerity.
Saturday June 05, 2004
Via Daily Kos: This is the ad of a Republican, Vernon Robinson running for North Carolina's 5th district.
Reagan's dead, according to ABCNews. Scooped Drudge.
Friday June 04, 2004
Bush in Rome
Among the slogans chanted during a protest by COBAS in Rome during Bush's visit: "10, 100, 1000, Nassiriya!", and "Return to Nassiriya and stay there!", directed at the carabinieri (who had sent troops to Iraq). This last one started "Tornate", not "Torniamo" -- "you" return to Iraq, not "we" return. Not a sign of solidarity.
Thursday June 03, 2004
Tuesday June 01, 2004
Free Speech In America II
I guess free speech is only free if you're a drug-addled neo-fascist. Then you even get your show on Armed Forces Radio. But stand in front of a recruiting station dressed like an Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib? Your punishment might be heavier than that of the torturers.
Joe Previtera, a twenty one year old student at Boston College, was arrested Wednesday and charged with felonies after dressing as a hooded Iraqi prisoner in front of a military recruitment center on Tremont St. in downtown Boston. In his arraignment today a Suffolk County District Attorney suggested that Mr. Previtera's bail be set at $10,000. However, a National Lawyers Guild attorney and Mr. Previtera's mother, also an attorney, persuaded the judge to free Previtera on personal recognizance.
Previtera faces misdemeanor charges of disturbing the peace and felony charges of making a false bomb threat and using a hoax device. The charges apparently reflect the District Attorney's concern that Mr. Previtera might have been mistaken for a terrorist. Witnesses say that passersby seemed unconcerned by Mr. Previtera's actions.
After his release today, Previtera said his arrest took him completely by surprise. "I did this hoping that the image of an abused Iraqi prisoner might make people think twice about joining the military ... both for their own safety and because of the abuses they might be asked to committ. Is it reasonable that I face greater punishment for my free speech than do the soldiers who actually committ abuses? Well, this is post-911 America, isn't it?"
Here's an account (with photos) of the arrest scene.
Free Speech in America
What do the American Rightists have to say about the Constitution?
"I hope your shop goes down the toilet right along with your freedom of expression."
That was said before punching an art gallery owner in the face, knocking her unconscious. This was the second time she was assaulted over an art exhibit where a painting depicted American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners.
The artist had this to say:
"Apparently, people are quite shocked by my painting. I don't know why they are not equally or more shocked by the pictures they are seeing on television of the actual torture taking place."
