Mac Widget Of The Day

Know how many days before we, um, lose... no, before the end of Beloved Leader's reign. Link.

President McCain Demonstrates His Inability For Straight Talk, Unable To Answer Question Directly

"Ventilating"? Isn't that what the Mob does to competitors? Ah, the president's from Phoenix and his wife is in the "beverage" delivery business so....

There He Goes Again; All About President McCain's Flip-Flopping

Puppies!!!

Awww!!!

Crazy Dogs

The General Is Clear, The Big Media Journos, Defending Their BFF, Are Not

Again, to keep things in a proper perspective: President McCain has never evinced leadership. Ever. Simple fact.

Another Thing That Almost Made Me Laugh

The Top 15 Outsourced Newspaper Headlines From India

Green Houses in Sky Making Temperatures Too Warm

New York Mets Losing So Often, Manager Is Set on Fire

The headline queue is full; there is an approximate 30-minute wait time until a new headline will be available.

Midwest Sissies Petulantly Whine About Non-Annual Flooding

Telecoms to Receive Vaccinations

Cleveland Punjabis Defeat San Diego Fathers 3-2 as Water Vessels Fight to the Death

Studies Show Men Taking Viagra Have Longer, Firmer Lives

Driver Loses Arm and Leg in Oil Amputation

Famous Comedian Executed for Saying Forbidden Words on TV

Clothings Experts Say What You Should Wear This Summer Is Much, Much Different From What You Wore Last Summer

Boston Clerics Win 17th NAMBLA Championship in Sex Games

Bear Attacks Wall Street!

Court Allows Married California Couples to Be Happy

Strange Singer Amy Winehouse Is Sikh!

Britney Spears Shows Hairless Kitten to Photographers

This Almost Made Me Laugh

Link.

Our Leaders Give Us Just What We Need: Greater Dependence On Oil!

Leaders in the U.S. solar energy industry blasted the U.S. government on Monday for a freeze on applications for new solar projects on public land in six Western states.

The Bureau of Land Management announced the freeze a month ago, saying it would conduct an extensive study looking at the environmental, social and economic impacts of solar energy development.

During the 22-month study, the agency will not consider any new proposals for solar energy developments on public land in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico or Utah.

[more]

A Step Towards Greater Freedom -- 50 Years Ago

BoingBoing:

Guilherme sez, "June 30th is the 50th birthday of NAACP v. Alabama, a landmark case protecting the right of association. Alabama's efforts to expel the NAACP from its state included its demand of the NAACP's membership list. The Supreme Court struck down this demand, noting the importance of associational privacy for dissent: "Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs""

The full story.

Today, it's the freedom of energy czars to meet privately with the veep....

Flip-Flopping Pandering

But yes, how does being imprison exactly correlate with global leadership knowledge and abilities?

The McCain campaign wants to manufacture a controversy over Wesley Clark's comments about McCain's qualifications. Fine. McCain and his allies want to feign outrage. Fine. They want to spend the day whining about the Obama campaign being insufficiently sycophantic about McCain's military record. Fine.

But did these guys really have to give us Bud Day?

One of the members of John McCain's new Truth Squad -- which his campaign says was launched to respond to unfair attacks on his record of military service –- was a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and appeared in an attack ad for the group in 2004.

The group was created to attack 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry's military service record.

"How can you expect our sons and daughters to follow you when you condemned their fathers and grandfathers?" asked former Air Force Col. Bud Day, who was a prisoner of war with McCain in Vietnam, in a 2004 Swift Boat Vets spot.

The Politico's Ben Smith asked Day this morning if he sees a similarity between the lies spread by the Swift Boat group in 2004 and Clark's questions about McCain's qualifications Sunday. In an apparent attempt to bury the needle on the irony meter, Day rejected the comparison, saying, "The Swift Boat 'attacks' were simply revelation of the truth. The similarity does not exist here."

Sometimes, the irony is so overwhelming, I have to wonder if the political scene is some kind of satirical performance art and I'm just not in on the joke.

And let's not brush past the point too quickly that McCain, four years ago, expressed a fair amount of disgust for the vicious smear campaign that Day was involved in. In August 2004, McCain called the Swift Boat group "dishonest and dishonorable," and the kind of politics he "deplores."

With that in mind, why, pray tell, is McCain encouraging one of the people responsible for the "dishonest and dishonorable" smear to speak on behalf of his campaign, in order to distort the words of a four-star general?

Link.

I think I'm getting bored by the next prez's complete lack of any principle. Here's dishonesty on his on again/off again #1 issue.

Today's Competition: Spot The Idiot

What do you see as the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy?

Obama: If we don’t get a handle on our energy policy, it is possible that the kinds of trends we’ve seen over the last year will just continue. Demand is clearly outstripping supply. It’s not a problem we can drill our way out of. It can be a drag on our economy for a very long time unless we take steps to innovate and invest in the research and development that’s required to find alternative fuels. I think it’s very important for the federal government to have a role in that process.

McCain: Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences. You’ve been a supporter of climate-change legislation that would essentially impose a penalty on the use of fossil fuel.

Link.

How Are Leaders Are Bringing Success To Iraq And The Middle East

Isn't lovely.... This is presumably what we want four more years of.

Listen: No matter how inept O would be -- and I'm not sure he could be better than Slick Willie -- there is virtually no way he can e as bad as what we had for the last eight years -- and there's no reason to believe that Saint John will offer any significant deviation. The campaign season is the time for him to break away from Our Leaders, and he isn't.


TPMMuckraker:

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government has spent nearly $500 million on an Arabic language television and radio station.

Now an investigation finds that the project has not only been poorly run and hemorrhaged taxpayer money but is also airing bizarrely anti-American and anti-semitic coverage despite repeated complaints from the State Department and Congress.

ProPublica, in a joint investigation with 60 Minutes, finds that the al-Hurra network -- "the Free One" in Arabic -- has completely failed in its initial mission to counter the influence of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera news network in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

For starters, there are problems with the staff, which often does not have any Arabic language skills or a background in broadcast journalism:

Alhurra's president, Brian Conniff, does not speak Arabic and is unable to understand anything broadcast on the radio and television networks he is paid to manage. Conniff has no journalism experience and worked previously as a government auditor. His news director, Daniel Nassif, grew up in Lebanon and has no background in television. Before coming to the network, he helped promote the political aspirations in Washington of a Lebanese Christian former general.

Then there is the accounting, which has failed to track millions in taxpayer dollars:

Financial accountability also appears to be lacking. In its four years, the network has been unable to provide full documentation to auditors to account for its spending, according to two people familiar with the records and a 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office.

(The GAO report is here.)

Meanwhile, the station may have been doing more harm that good for America's image in the Middle East. Along with the story, ProPublica also publishes a series of documents showing the complaints about al-Hurra filtering into the State Department and Congress in recent years.

One incident that seems to summarize the station's problems came when a reporter last year provided credulous coverage of a Holocaust deniers' conference in Tehran. "The reporter who covered the conference told viewers that Jews had provided no scientific evidence of the Holocaust," ProPublica reports.

As word of this report got back to Washington, Congress demanded that the station fire the reporter, Ahmad Amin. Top executives assured lawmakers that he was gone. But the ProPublica investigation found that Amin remained on staff until just a few weeks ago.

There's also evidence that the station was exacerbating the sectarian tensions in Iraq last year as death squads roamed the streets of Baghdad and American troop casualties reached their peak:

Alberto Fernandez, an Arabic speaker who served as the top public diplomacy officer for the Middle East until recently, wrote [Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen] Hughes in May 2007 that Alhurra's Baghdad operation was stocked "with radical Shi'a Islamists who favored their political brethren and discriminated against and intimidated members of other parties ... especially during the Iraqi electoral season."

Beyond Iraq, anti-American sentiments were given prominent voice:

When Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah railed against the U.S. government and threatened Israel, Alhurra carried it live and unedited. When U.S. combat deaths in Iraq surpassed 4,000 in March, Radio Sawa interviewed an anonymous militant who told listeners: "Occupation is occupation. We need to resist them and kill more than 4,000." In March, Alhurra aired a documentary on the "The Crusades" -- a series of military campaigns that Christian Europe waged against the Muslim world during the Middle Ages. Muslim staffers saw the program as an unfortunate reprise of Bush's 2001 comment that the coming "war on terrorism," would be a "crusade."

The Washington Post also has a story about al-Hurra in today's paper that comes to a similar conclusion about the station's success.

James Martone, a former CNN Middle East correspondent, was hired by al-Hurra as a producer in early 2007. Fluent in Arabic, he acted as an unofficial watchdog, cataloguing errors and reporting them to senior management. He said he had to teach many al-Hurra staffers the basics of what they could or could not say on the air.
"There were a lot of people working for the organization who weren't really journalists," said Martone, who resigned after several months. "When I started pointing out what was actually on the air, it became my full-time job. . . . The people upstairs, the Americans, I don't think they knew what was going on."

Late Update: Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) fired off a letter this morning asking that House foreign relations committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) "hold immediate oversight hearings and initiate an investigation" of al-Hurra.

The Genius Of President McCain

In May of 2006, as Iraq spiraled down into an orgy of sectarian bloodletting, John McCain had a solution. "One of the things I would do if I were president," McCain told a group of wealthy contributors, "would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.'"

If only someone had thought of that before. This is the man Brian Williams of NBC News recently referred to as having "vast foreign-policy expertise and credibility on national security."

And I guess a little insight why Big Journalism is suffering so: who wants or needs crap instead of news? Fewer and fewer care to wate their time....

A Warning From The Past

Saw a quote online the other day about we (obviously) don't live in the future nor, really, in the present. What we're doing is constantly reliving the past.

Apropos that, from Salon:

'50s America seem somehow justified. If American Communists held a misguided faith in the Stalinist Soviet state, the thinking goes, and if some tiny percentage of them were Soviet agents or spies (and let's stipulate that those things are true) then all 80,000 or so were, prima facie, seditious revolutionaries and threats to democracy -- and the Hollywood 10 really were trying to pervert healthy Americans with Red propaganda concealed as entertainment. Not all versions of the neocon rehabilitation of McCarthyism are quite so baldly ludicrous, but all must make the imaginative leap that a tiny, ineffective and consistently persecuted political movement, which throughout its brief heyday attempted to reassure the public that "Communism is 20th century Americanism," was in fact an immensely powerful and sinister force.

All disputes about history are really arguments about the present, and that goes double in this case. Contemporary right-wingers don't care about the real story of Dalton Trumbo, his nine original co-defendants or the dozens of other blacklistees that followed. (A random assortment: John Garfield, Dashiell Hammett, Judy Holliday, Langston Hughes, Gypsy Rose Lee, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker, Edward G. Robinson, Artie Shaw, Orson Welles, Josh White.) In fact, as Askin's film makes clear, Trumbo was a witty, irascible, mule-stubborn individualist who grew up on Colorado rangeland and was a poor candidate for Marxist-Leninist groupthink. He was a Communist Party member for, at most, four or five years, and like most other American Reds of the period -- like, say, my mother -- he was more attracted to the excitement, the sense of action and heady adventure, than to the core ideology. (No, I'm not a neutral observer of this issue, if that's even possible.)

What the more intelligent neocons see in the 1950s crackdown on Communism is both an underlying pattern and an instructive example, having to do with power and how to wield it. The real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society, which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic conformity. Whether this was accidental or intentional, pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian elements in this country with a test case: How far could constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and would-be dictators from J. Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight.

In one devastating letter read in the film, Trumbo observes that the liberal producer who doesn't believe in the blacklist but apologetically tells him he can't hire a known Communist because "that's the country these days" is more oppressive than any congressional blowhard. His eloquent anger toward the country that he believes betrayed freedom, principle and basic human decency in its moment of postwar crisis is matched by his confidence that if he could poll the entire American population on one question -- "Would you like a man who informs on his friend?" -- the universal answer would be no.

But the lesson of "Trumbo" that clearly resonates in 2008 is that even in an increasingly pluralistic society, public tolerance can readily be turned against those who hold troubling ideologies or alien beliefs, and in that situation terrible things become acceptable. Some of those things are small, like the cruelty and ostracism Trumbo's daughter endured in elementary school, and some are larger. One of the anti-Communist movement's darkest triumphs was the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, which envisioned the suspension of constitutional rights in a national emergency, and funded the creation of six concentration camps for American civilians who "probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage." It was passed by Congress over Harry Truman's veto, but without much public debate.

Not much about this act is easily available online, a startling fact in this age of information overload. Congress repealed it in 1971, and the six camps -- some of them formerly used as Japanese-American internment camps during World War II -- fell into disrepair. But it obviously struck some people as a good idea, and so today our secret prisons are in other countries and governed by no law, and so far they have not housed any cantankerous Hollywood screenwriters. No one, as Trumbo said, who lived through the blacklist years emerged from them unscathed by evil, and now that evil has been visited on later generations. His wife and kids loved him, and he finally got his Oscars. Surely that counts for something.

In San Francisco, You Soon May Be Able To Literally Give A Crap For Beloved Leader

Reagan has his highways. Lincoln has his memorial. Washington has the capital (and a state, too). But President Bush may soon be the sole president to have a memorial named after him that you can contribute to from the bathroom.

From the Department of Damned-With-Faint-Praise, a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

From The Wayback Machine, The Genius Of The Modern Punditocracy

Friedman in 2003.



Really, one must ask: Are these guys stupid? Ignorant? Know better but believe there's some good reason to lie? And who watches these guys and take any guidance from them?

A Little Music

The Genius Of Beloved Leader

A Message

Onward To Victory -- In Iran! A THird Front For President McCain

Si Hersh says so (more or less).

If it was anyone less than Our Leaders, you'd think they might be smart enough to keep at a covert level and destabilize the crap out the nation (assuming the people are sufficiently dissatisfied with Islamofascism). But Our Leaders? We know they're not so swift.

And if a covert war, as it were, the plan, it's worrisome that it's leaked.