UncommonSense

Media Whores Online... is what everybody in Washington reads. - James Carville on Crossfire: 4/24/02

Congratulations MWO!

4/25/2002

Daily Read

Report from Jenin. Warning - this is quite brutal with graphic photos. Don't go here unless you are prepared to be shaken. For more info, click here.

Nichloas von Hoffman rips Yasir Arbusto a new one. "You do not stand with one thumb in your mouth and the other up your rear end as the cyclone approaches."

Bush is so incompetent, he can't even stick his own thumb up his ass. He needs Karl Rove to do it for him. You like that, baby?

Proof that religious insanity is not limited to any single religion. Read to the bottom for the reaction of the Greek Orthodox church to the strange virus sweeping Greece. Or read this article to see how Americans react to having their religion covered.

EPA - "La la la I'm not listening la la la." But by golly, this sounds like a spanky idea - clogging up streams with mine tailings.

National Distraction Alert - Anthrax discovered in Postal facility. Just in time for the weekend news cycle.

Vote here for whether or not there should be a full investigation of 9/11 to discover if the White House had prior knowledge.

Ok. So Ashcroft wants to split the Immigration and the Naturalization duties of the INS. In other words, he wants to take two governmental functions which are intimately linked, and split them into two departments which, by their very nature, are less likely to communicate effectively, thus introducing EVEN MORE opportunities for failure into the system. Hmmmm.

Yeah, pal. It scares the expletive out of me, too. But don't count on Bush letting Powell solve this. He's planning on Christmas in Bagdad.

An excellent three-part series by San Fran's Jon Carroll. Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

Daily Screed

So last night I'm watching the local news...

Don't you hate things that begin in the conversational present (a variation on the historical present)?

Anyway, the local news has many problems. The single greatest problem is that most people only watch the local news to see the weather. Meanwhile, the weather forecast is rarely correct, or even close. This morning being an excellent example.

Yet, like religious fools, we continue to believe, to trust and hope that the guy (who moonlights doing commercials for the obnoxious local furniture company) really has a grasp on that eternally complex and chaotic region called the atmosphere. Ah, the atmosphere!

But the weather isn't the problem of the day, even though they didn't get today's weather right - again. No, last night, they broadcast a segment called Cheap Gas Thursday.

Now, Cheap Gas Thursday is a good idea. It helps drive down gas prices by giving television coverage to those stores that sell the cheapest gas. So my problem isn't Cheap Gas Thursday, it is...

"Here's Tippy Longstockings with a live report." And there is Tippy, standing in a parking lot in front of a nondescript building, telling us where to find the cheapest gas.

So why did they send Tippy out for a remote broadcast from an unnamed parking lot? Your guess is as good as mine.

My problem is that, a while back, I had an email exchange with some of the reporters of this same station. I took them to task for reading the GOP propaganda about why the Senate Dems were opposing the nomination of Charles Pickering. They responded by saying that they usually get their reports from the wire. I assume this is because of budget reasons - they can't afford to have real journalists investigate real stories.

But they can afford to send Tippy out for a live remote to report on cheap gas?

Why not save that money, and the money you spend on all those other pointless live remotes that reveal nothing, and use it to pay the yearly salary of one journalist? Stand out from the crowd! Don't just report the news. Find the news!

4/25/2002

Daily Read

Now we get to see how much our unelected buffoon truly is married to the oil industry. Will he play chicken or chicken-little? Whose beady little eyes will blink first? He did promise in his most recent press conference that he would not blink, but I don't think he was talking about a face-off with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. So will his "'with us or agin' us" cowboy diplomacy bring about an Arab oil embargo, or will he finally embrace nuance and quit pussy-footing around with Israel? Stay tuned.

Ah, science! What will we learn next?

Ha, ha. I guess the Aggies didn't much appreciate Gramm's buddy Tom Delay telling people not to send their kids to Texas A&M. Or maybe they figure it would be poor judgment to hire someone likely to be indicted in the next year or two. Bad form, what?

Kissinger - "The issue is whether 30 years after the event courts are the appropriate means by which determination is made." But Henry, there's no statute of limitations on murder.

Since the ADG (Attention Deficit Gazette) wouldn't publish Gene Lyons' expose of Stenographer Sue Schmidt's outrageous actions, Buzzflash did. Thanks, Buzzflash!

Was Bush AWOL from the Texas National Guard? We may never know.

You just gotta love Alabama. They fine and jail poor people for not having a septic tank, but they let billion-dollar chemical industries pour toxins into their streams for decades. I guess it's easier to go after people you don't have to sit next to in Sunday School.

Daily Screed

Joshua Micah Marshall discovered this VERY Interesting little tidbit and posted it on his website. It's a posting for a job to assist in the democratic transition of the new government of Venezuela.

Except there is no new government of Venezuela.

The job was posted on the same day as the failed coup. If you look at this posting, it's pretty damn obvious that it was written beforehand. How is it obvious?

It's government, people. Nothing gets done in a day. It would take a week or more just to get the approval to post this job. They have to check with finance to make sure there is money in the budget, they have to get approval from higher ups and higher-higher-ups. Trust me. I know what I'm talking about, here.

This document wasn't written in a day. Deciding the duties and responsibilities for this position took weeks of meetings. Deciding how best to describe the situation in Venezuela probably had to receive approval from the State Department. A document like this would go through dozens of hands before it received approval for posting.

Also, posting an update to a government web page takes time. You don't send a document to the tech guys downstairs and see it posted within the hour, especially not on a Friday. You're lucky if it goes up within a week. What's the hurry?

You really think this job posting was ordered after Chavez's capture and supposed resignation, and that it was written, submitted, approved, and posted to the web site all in one day?

Not exactly.

4/24/2002

Daily Read

More news about US involvement in the Venezeulan coup. It's one of those subjects that has its thunder stolen by the sheer banality of it. Of course we were involved in the coup! After all, some of the plotters are currently relaxing in Miami (which is in Florida, whose governor is who?).

Speaking of Miami, "The Republican Party, airing costly new TV ads touting Gov. Jeb Bush's concern for public schools, filmed its commercials in a private Christian academy." Here's another excellent argument for transparency in government. Even when doing something as ordinary as filming a commercial, Republicans can't stop themselves from rewarding friends and contributors. They can't be trusted to make a commercial without resorting to graft. When the stakes are as low as this, and they still manage to do something so incredibly PIG IGNORANT, how can we possibly trust them with the more important issues?

Another reason not to fly.

Finally, somebody is addressing the assumption that Bush can start a war in Iraq all by his lonesome Texas self. This is insanity, and I hope Congress, especially the Senate, has the cojones to stand up to this unelected knave and force him to JUSTIFY war before declaring it.

I've been saying that weaponized anthrax could have been smuggled out of a lab by a janitor, that the anthrax mailer didn't have to be some high level scientist capable of manufacturing the stuff himself. Now we discover that safety protocols at anthrax labs are not being followed today, after the anthrax attacks and after they'd already had one leak. So does anyone reasonably believe that security wasn't a sieve before the anthrax attacks?

The government's 9/11 case continues to fall apart as yet another of the 19 hijackers surfaces, disturbingly not dead.

Daily Screed

It all makes sense, now. After reading this, it all makes sense.

My primary problem with the 9/11 conspiracies that say Bush was involved, is that the payoff is too small. You don't risk that much for a pipeline through Afganistan, no matter how much oil is under the Caspian Sea. The wrath of the American people would be terrible to behold, if it ever came out that Bush ordered attacks against America itself. No, the risks do not outweigh the gain.

Have you looked at a map of the Caspian Sea region? There are other routes. Afganistan is not the only road to oil riches. The most convenient, yes; the most vulnerable, yes, but even now, we aren't putting all our eggs in that basket. The Republic of Georgia, for instance, provides a much shorter route, and guess what - we now have troops in Georgia.

No, the subsequent actions point toward a much broader agenda. We've got troops in Georgia. And the Phillipines. And Yemen. And Columbia. Look at these places strategically. What do you have to sail past to get oil to Japan and China? The Phillipines. To get oil to Europe (via the Suez Canal), you sail past Yemen (and Somalia). To get it there by pipeline, the shortest route is through Georgia. Want to enter the Panama Canal? Whichever way you go, you sail within airstrike distance of Columbia.

This is about global economic domination. The stakes are much higher, as are the risks. But the US has one big advantage - its military. How do you use the military to threaten a beligerent nation without being seen as a bully? By framing that nation with a terrible crime against the United States of America.

If Bush was involved in 9/11 (and this is a big if), the biggest payoff isn't a Caspian Sea oil pipeline. It's the message to every other nation in the world - We framed Afganistan to get what we want. We can frame you.

That's why the official story is so full of holes. It only has to be plausibly deniable, not an airtight case. For it to work as a threat, other nations have to believe that you did this to yourself in order to frame your enemy in order to invade their country and destroy them. But more importantly, they have to know that they could just as easily be framed with a similar crime.

BTW, where's the investigation?

4/23/2002

Daily Read

Did Bill Clinton ever send his only daughter on a wild trip to Las Vegas to entertain a bunch of rich white campaign contributors in a penthouse suite above a casino? Nope. But this man of God Republican Texas Congressman sure as hell did.

Dubyaspeak quote of the day: The incredible shrinking president. Last July, he was proud to be the country. Now, he's reduced to just being a state, and having to share this awesome geographical responsibility with his wife. "I like to tell people, Laura and I are proud to be Texas -- own a Texas ranch, and for us, every day is Earth Day." I suppose it's ok, though, because he surrounds himself with people fully capable of being the other 49 states.

Speaking of Earth Day, here's a hilarious account of the great presidential non-event.

"You better look out BartCop. I've got my own hammer, now."

What's that out there in left field? Why, it's Karen Hughes, and she's leaving the White House! "I'm leaving to spend more time with my family." Isn't this what they always say when they quit before they can be fired? (Or maybe she's sick of covering for Monkey Boy with a Hammer. Or maybe she's just sick of the stinking hypocricy. Maybe, from her position on the inside, she sees the rot, she sees the crumbling facade, and she knows it's about to come tumbling down. And being smart, she's decided that Texas is the safest place to be.)

Speaking of stinking rotten hypocricy... in it's inexorable drive to sacrifice Canadian lives in Iraq, the Bush administration has ousted the one person who might have convinced Iraq to sign the international ban against chemical weapons. You see, we can't allow Iraq to abide by international law - that would ruin our sinister plans to rule the world.

Or how about the fact that Bush opposes a ban on US imports of Iraqi oil, even as he is laying the groundwork to go to war against Iraq. I guess collaborating with the enemy runs in his faimly.

Or how about a Republican effort to turn churches into tax-free, unregulated, and Constitutionally-protected vehicles of illegal campaign fundraising and fascist propaganda coordination?

You have to hand it to South Carolina. At least they are consistent. Remember, it was South Carolina that fired on Fort Sumpter.

Daily Screed

Today's daily screed goes to a fellow Memphian, as appearing in yesterday's letters to the editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal:

An April 11 headline read: "Bush sees human cloning as threat to dignity." Considering his behavior throughout his life, Bush may have a problem understanding the word "dignity."

The article said Bush's statement was "the second time in eight months that Bush has made a major address on the issue of morality in science."

After his avoidance of the Vietnam War, his insider business deals arranged by his father's political cronies and his close relationship with Kenneth Lay and other Enron people, I wonder whether he has the faculties seriously to consider morality in politics.

Mack Hamblen

Germantown

4/22/2002

Daily Read

It's gotten so bad that even a red-blooded Bush suck-up like Ron Fournier of the Associated Press can't keep criticism of Bush out of his stories.

If we are a country based on principles of justice, then we should be prepared to release a suspect when we have no evidence, even if we believe that suspect might be guilty. We DO NOT rewrite the law to fit the suspect; we DO NOT change the rules to keep from losing. This isn't about winning and losing, it's about justice. The right-wing cabal of the Republican party wants to make the pledge of allegiance the template for American government - one nation, under God. They should also remember the last three words of the pledge - with liberty and JUSTICE FOR ALL.

Is public knowledge about your illegal, immoral, and unethical business practices hurting your ability to make a buck? Fear not - with a Bush in your pocket, all your troubles will soon disappear. There's nothing Georgie won't do to protect wealthy contributors.

Top Ten Conservative Idiots

Daily Screed

The author of this excellent article ponders how easy it would have been for the FBI to do a simple investigation based on a tip. A month before the 9/11 attacks, actor James Woods noticed four men behaving strangely on a Boston-LA flight, and he notified the FBI. Had they followed up with a simple identity check, it might have raised a red flag, which could have made a difference on 9/11.

Unfortunately, the FBI didn't (as far as we know) follow up. As far as we know, they rarely follow up on anything provided to them by the general populus. It took the flight instructor in (was it?) Minneapolis numerous contacts to get them to finally investigate Zacarais Moussaoui. A friend of mine had a strange airport encounter a few weeks after 9/11. She reported it, and as far as I know, the FBI has never contacted her.

What is more, a few weeks ago I noticed something very strange, strange enough to compel me to contact the FBI with my concerns.

I was in my car driving home when I noticed some thick, brownish smoke coming from the chimney of a house. It was a warm, windy day, certainly not a day to build a fire. The wind was blowing toward the street, and as I drove downwind of the house, I smelled the odor of cooking meat. It was a strong enough odor to smell inside my car with the windows rolled up, driving at 40 miles per hour.

And it was disturbing enough that I turned around. I was familiar with the neighborhood, so I turned at the next street and circled back to get a look at the front of the house. There was a van parked out front, and the yard was quite overgrown and looked like it hadn't been kept up very well. I continued around the block to get a look at the back of the house, and found the back fence partially collapsed and the yard littered with scraps of lumber and other refuse - not garbage, just a bunch of junk. Once again, I was downwind, and again I smelled the unmistakable odor of cooking meat, while thick smoke continued to pour from the chimney.

My fertile imagination worked on this for two days before I sent an email to the FBI tip line. I have not heard back from them yet. Maybe it was nothing. There are plenty of explanations for why someone was cooking meat in their living room fireplace on a warm Saturday afternoon. All I wanted them to do was to check their database to see if they had ever investigated the person living at that address. Have they followed up on my tip? I don't know.

But I can't help wondering how many people that guy has cooked in his fireplace and buried under his floor in the interim.