drat fink

counter topics

counterspin flip-flops on blogging issue, reenters fray

i love the leader

that is just one painfully absurd question.

remote control

maybe its my recent viewings of pink panther movies but i think john mccain had a minor stroke while praising the clouseau-esque leadership qualities of dick cheney last night. either that or he was fighting off the republican mind control device they had implanted. or maybe the republican mind control device was in a death struggle with the vietcong mind control device for predominance in his addled mind. regardless, it was an entertaining twitch. though, id tell mccain to steer clear of all celebrity poker matches with that kind of tell.

release the floodgates

"It appears to be the case that someone in the Pentagon got wind that Larry Franklin had been flipped, and was terrified that the investigation might go on up the ladder at the Pentagon, in AIPAC, and with the Israelis. So they leaked news of the investigation to make sure that everybody clammed up and shredded everything."

red in the face

lets go to the tote...

rinse, repeat

"Here is a summary of the latest posts from all bloggers who are covering the RNC Convention from The Tank in New York City."

peanut sputter

"NEW YORK (sPERTS.net) – The New York Mets have made their fans say “good grief” the last two months. Today, they made them say “Augh!”

In a continuing act of desperation to claim a playoff berth, the Mets acquired pitcher Charlie Brown from the Peanuts team for pitcher Jae Wong Seo."

lets just call it treason

all this treason business is just tiresome. cant we get back to figuring out how many times one needs to be shot at over the cambodian border before one is considered a hero? how about some swiftboat logic? if 224 people at the pentagon support feith but only 14 are against does that mean that feith is wholly within his right to launch a nuclear attack against iran?

as long as im ranting, saw chris matthews (and ashley banfield) on bill maher. both seemed considerably more liberal than their msnbc personas. matthews sounded like a campaign operative for kerry in the way he tried to frame the debate for undecided voters. most telling was the conversation maher and matthews had about trying to secure conservative commentators. as i noted earlier, ask probing questions, get blackballed by the gop. lying with impunity = good for america. question authority = treason. (did somebody say treason?) umm, well maybe if everyone asked tough questions eventually little scotty stonewall would be as big a laughingstock as saddams former flack. and whats so bad about liberal viewers. we might not support the military-industrial complex but we do buy lightbulbs.

if only there were a way i could protest this outlaw regime. if i could just find 250,000 other sign baring extremists and hate groupians, im sure we could walk together in an orderly fashion. i just hope noone has to pee.

earth to greg

(here on planet blog we use things like permanent links so its easier to propagate postings.)

despite his failures of netiquette, palast has the goods on former bush extortionist enabler ben barnes.

protest music

morning spy musings:

-- juan cole
-- marshall, rozen, glastris
-- laura rozen

umm, unconventional thinking?

"The art and design of political conventions are advancing before our eyes. The old forms are breaking up. The stage is literally coming apart. New ideas are emerging in how to "carry" the convention to the rest of the nation-- and how to get people to watch.

The latest news confirms it. Once they built a stage for the convention. And on that stage a raised platform, a dias, with a microphone. This was an idea about authority, and clear sight lines. But some ideas are changing."

chock to the gills

i guess i can try the rheingold swill. i hope their politics match their ads. plus they were the ny mets beer sponsors before schaefer before budweiser. id slag fresh direct but i just got an order this morning.

via rheingold beer

truth out (of the way)

i know nobody reads eschaton so ill post this here, too. bob dole only lies while the red light over the camera is blinking, then its back to reality. tv news, a dumb show for idiots.

blame eloise

in case you havent seen it, heres the plaza hotel banner aloft.

che's us

moore guevara tees

iran to get you

this (iran, israel, feith) must have been the big story josh marshall was barking about a few months ago.

aipac of thieves

juan cole delves deep into the israeli spy at the defense department story. jeez, i would hate to see anyone held accountable for this. maybe if there was a purple heart involved.

convention

"That brings us back to 1940, and the convention that had it all--the five days in Philadelphia during which the Republicans took six ballots to select a candidate. Not only was the convention exciting, but the stakes were also high: Would this country keep its head in the sands of isolationism, or would it face the menace of Adolf Hitler? "

its rainesing again

"I was not the first, nor will I be the last writer to break his pick on that stone. But in reviewing what I wrote in 1982 after two years of close observation of Reagan on the campaign trail and in the White House, I saw a couple of points that seemed worth revisiting as Reagan's self-appointed heir seeks a second term. I characterised Reagan as a "political primitive" who valued "beliefs over knowledge" based on verifiable facts. The White House spin was that this was a positive in that it represented "rawbone American thinking". I also noted that Reagan had a "high tolerance for ambiguity" as to the outcome of policies that proceeded from such rough-hewn thought.

That strikes me as a different - less troubling - trait than what Brookhiser sees as Bush's refusal to recognise the mere existence of ambiguity. In general, I've come to feel that what we have in George Bush is a shadowy version of Reagan's strengths and an exaggerated version of his intellectual weaknesses."

vote iv

"A plan to make the presidential battleground of Missouri the first state to allow military voters serving in combat zones such as Iraq to cast their absentee ballots via e-mail is renewing concerns about the security of online voting."

frame game

"BERKELEY – With the Democratic National Convention over and the Republican one beginning next week, it seemed a good time to check in with George Lakoff, the UC Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics whose scrutiny of the language of politics has begun to bring him national recognition. The author of the seminal book "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," Lakoff's specialty is dissecting "framing," or the ways in which conservatives and liberals position issues to fit their respective moral worldviews. (For more on framing, read this excerpt from the NewsCenter's October 2003 interview with Lakoff.) He grasps how Republicans use language more effectively than Democrats, and what Democrats can do about it."

walk, dont run

naomi klein and todd gitlin spar over protesting at rnc convention on democracy now.

marriage penalty

a few weeks back in the glow of the democratic convention, george will claimed that for 95% of the delegates the most important issue was gay marriage. this claim went unchallenged on This Weak when uttered. it was an obvious overstatement which im sure will if pressed would have said he was exaggerating for effect and that delegates are part of the "activist' wing of the party. as we all know most of these fabrications go unchecked. here from the pew center we have their annual report on americans and religion and public life. when asked what are their voting priorities, gay marriage ranked last (among those listed) for both democrats and swing voters (pg 10). plenty of other baubles to ponder within.

your song

"Ludlow Music dropped its demands that JibJab, a small web animation site, stop using Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" in a satirical Flash cartoon. It turned out Ludlow did not own the rights to the song as it claimed, a lawyer representing JibJab said on Tuesday."

exit music

sweet goodbye from tbogg to his father.

heat of the moment

another back2iraq episode from our intrepid reporter in najaf.

red flag

"Aug. 24, 2004 -- Military officials are cracking down on blogs written by soldiers and Marines in Iraq, saying some of them reveal sensitive information. Critics say it's an attempt to suppress unflattering truths about the U.S. occupation. NPR's Eric Niiler reports."

registered male

"Within seconds, Daniels, a computer consultant whose company is based in Annapolis, joined 125 other local travelers who signed up yesterday to become "registered travelers" at Reagan National Airport. The test project, which aims to give frequent fliers a quicker pass through security checkpoints, is already underway at four other airports. It relies on the latest biometric technologies to verify a passenger's identity with increased precision. Digital fingerprint scans and photographs are already used to identify foreigners traveling on a visa, and U.S. officials plan to encode a facial recognition technology into passports."

even flow

"The conservative media had been pushing the fabrication story energetically. How did it deal with this new evidence undermining it? As it turns out, at almost every turn it soft-pedaled the new evidence or outright ignored it, showing its bias throughout."

testing your endurance

"Malkin may think of this all as an exercise in polemics, all in the pursuit of "debunking" critics of modern-day racial profiling in the "war on terror." But the truth is that, by defending the indefensible -- which, in the end, is what the was -- she has replicated almost exactly the mistakes of her forebears in 1942, impugning the loyalty of nearly 80,000 citizens and another 40,000 longtime resident immigrants without a whit of solid evidence to support her."

incendiary advice

"The real wild card for TV executives isn’t so much the mass Sunday demonstration—which has yet to secure Central Park as its location—but the dozens of other demonstrations around the city during the convention itself, including an unknown number taking to the streets on the night of Sept. 2, when George W. Bush accepts his party’s nomination. Considering the unpredictability of thousands of anti-Bush mobs acting out in public—and the possible presence of black-clad Starbucks-haters—the main worry for TV news organizations is inciting disruptive behavior by showing up with cameras."

latch ki

"Inside every neologism lies a compact history of cultural change -- think McJobs, metrosexuals, the blogosphere. In Japan, the coining of kokoro no kaze marked a sea change in people's thinking about depression. That transformation was triggered by the pharmaceutical industry's other contribution to Japan in 1999: along with providing a catchy slogan for mild depression, the industry provided a cure: modern antidepressants. More than a decade ago, Peter Kramer chronicled the capacity of those drugs to reshape the cultural landscape in ''Listening to Prozac.'' But back then the culture they reshaped was the culture that had shaped them. Now, a huge campaign by the pharmaceutical industry is publicizing mild depression, which most Japanese didn't realize existed until recently. Japan has become a proving ground for what we stand to gain and lose by the global expansion of Western psychopharmacology."

the main eventually

hold the line

i was wondering how the rethugs keep their messengers in lockstep with their talking points. turns out they have a 1-800-BULLSHiT telephone number for the dittoheads to learn their lines. why not give out the number, it would save me the aggravation of watching people lie so aggregiously. (scroll down, or read the rest as dibgy commands.)

a pax on both

salam pax latest blogging incarnation

back off

why cant i cut and paste from back to iraq? so tedious if its purposeful.

you give us 22 minutes...

just in case you havent heard, kerrys on daily show tonight.

burying the leders

metaphors abound

"Now for an update on the White House's ongoing effort to kill the press corps. The White House travel office signed a contract last week with an airline called Primaris to fly the press corps to Bush events. The two-month-old company has only one airplane. True, media representatives gave their blessing to the deal. But that was before they learned that the company's president twice had his pilot's license revoked related to his flying of an "unairworthy" aircraft, that the chief executive flopped in his last attempt to start an airline and that the 15-year-old plane itself was damaged in a hailstorm a decade ago and spent most of the past two years mothballed in France."

vital statistics

back to the important story that has met fans gnashing and rending. the mets traded away there number one pitching prospect scott kazmir for another more established pitcher who is considered talented but inconsistent. the rationale given was that the mets needed to "win now" not in 3 or 4 years when the prospect might become a top line pitcher. so, in his third start the newly acquired pitcher injures his arm and is out for (at least) the rest of the season, and a week later the prospect kazmir, who started the season in A ball, wins his first major league start for his new team. this ill-advised trade has all the makings of a colossal failure on par with earlier met debacles involving tom seaver and nolan ryan. only the bushies could run an organization (or a country) into the ground which such aplomb.

punch drunk

"I think we can salvage some meaning by looking more closely not at the electoral implications of this political dogfight, but at the cultural ones. Before the Democratic Leadership Council enjoined the political assassination of Howard Dean--whose insurgency within the Party was trifling, but important on one account and that was his stated opposition to Bush's Napoleonic delusion in Iraq--there was a new energy, semi-conscious as it was, emerging inside the Party, and that energy was rooted in the mass movement that had materialized against the post-911 neocon lunacy, especially the plan to invade Iraq. Fearing a conscientized popular base every bit as much as the reptilian Karl Rove (remember Clinton's Dick Morris?), the Democrat Party bosses opted not to risk a position on the war."

war babies

Off To War. tv documentary looks at the lives of soldiers from arkansas as they prepared to go "off to war" in iraq.

oceans away

zogbys battleground states infographic

meet the mets

metro v retro

sad alight

"That we are still fighting about the Vietnam War is sad. Watching an old political fight (among veterans, but involving the nation) try to finish itself thirty years later in either the wreckage of the Kerry campaign or its triumph over the attempt to wreck-- that's sad. I'm with Meep , a voice at Jarvis's weblog, Buzzmachine: "Are boomers going to be eating their livers in retirement because of Vietnam? Sounds like it to me." That's a sad thing to say about boomers, and I was born near the crest of that boom.

Now if you like sad as the best mood for consuming Swift Boat stories, if you think it fitting, then pay especially close attention to what the Chicago Tribune published over the weekend: This is what I saw that day by William B. Rood, a brilliantly disciplined and moving work of first-person journalism, which is also a moral statement, for while it defends John Kerry and his military record--and thus makes news--that is not the heart of what Rood meant to say."

so much not to like

its so painfully boring to point this shit out but heres another misleading ny times headline.

"Bush Denounces Outside Groups' Influence on Campaign"

of course the key to that headline is the placement of the apostrophe. someone who is closely monitoring will immediately understand that nothing new will follow as bush will have intoned the talking points repeated ad naseum yesterday on the chat fests. when asked to condemn the ad any apparachnik will quickly move the goalposts to condemn all 527s and call for their rapid termination, but never will they denounce the swiftboat lies and fabrications. and then for good measure to put the dems on the defensive, they will call them out to condemn the nasty 527s. if you can include a dark allusion to moveon.org and george soros than you receive bonus points toward your quest for entre into republican valhalla.

update:

i cant get one bit of spittle out before they go and change the headline. it now reads

"Bush Urges End to Attack Ads by Outside Groups on All Sides.'

id still like to see

"Bush Wont Denounce Dubious Swiftboat Claims"

but thats just me.

numbers game

"1+1=2. Mathematics doesn't get any more basic than this, but even 1+1 would stump the brightest minds among the Piraha tribe of the Amazon. A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting."

comprehension

"Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" v. The Truth"

diamond mind

"A Better Way to Build a Baseball Team"

blame everyone

"In case you hadn't already noticed, portraying themselves as victims is an important component of the Right's strategy."

no fly zone

"WASHINGTON - Sen. Edward M. Kennedy [related, bio] thought he'd been called every name in the book during his career - until airline ticket agents mistakenly flagged him as a terrorist suspect at Boston and Washington airports."

army of god 2

"In short, the West Bank from which Olmert wants Israel to withdraw and from which Sharon says, with rather less credibility, he wants to withdraw, is not the same West Bank that existed 20 years ago, and the Israeli military is not the same force it was 20 years ago. If, indeed, the political echelon ever gets its act together and moves from talk of withdrawal to actual withdrawal, it is likely that it will likely face militant organized opposition."

army of god

"US FORCES fighting in Iraq have been accused of secretly training in Israel, where they have been taught tactics used over the past four years against Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

A senior Israeli military expert confirmed that elite American troops were regularly trained in Israel."

balls in his court

didnt see it but i like how it sounds. someone must have reminded chris matthews that hes a democrat (has a conscience) and that you are allowed to take liars to task, and that that too can be good for ratings.

crop circles

"This November's Presidential election will be no exception, as a bumper of initiatives addressing marijuana policy and enforcement will appear on various state and municipal ballots. Below is a summary of this November's more prominent marijuana law reform proposals."

really, im not talking about you

you know what i find is really the most annoying thing about stupid people? its that they are so fucking stupid. oh yeah, and that i have to deal with them, as opposed to say remove their corporeal form from its current junction in time and space. if only my killbot hadnt run off and joined the intergalactic peace corp, or whatever euphemism theyre using for the military these days.

memeo to self

"A newfangled news tangle"

truth or dire

"Harvey Rishikof and Michael Schrage have a really interesting essay in Slate about some new medical techniques which could be used by the intelligence community to extract information from detainees unwilling to talk -- in lieu of barbaric practices like those used at Abu Ghraib and possibly used in U.S. secret detention facilities abroad. The essay raises a litany of difficult moral, practical and legal issues, and none of these are easily resolved."

technolibertarians

technology liberation front

scandal us

"WASHINGTON -- A long-awaited report on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal will implicate about two dozen military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors in the intimidation and sexual humiliation of Iraq war prisoners, but will not suggest wrongdoing by military brass outside the prison, senior defense officials said yesterday."

washing up

"The problem with these newsprint confessions is not that they are craven, insufficient and self-serving, which of course they are. The problem is that, on the whole, they do not correct the pre-war mistakes, but actually further them. The Post would have you believe that its "failure" before the war was its inability/reluctance to punch holes in Bush's WMD claims.

Right. I marched in Washington against the war in February 2003 with about 400,000 people, and I can pretty much guarantee that not more than a handful of those people gave a shit about whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That's because we knew what the Post and all of these other papers still refuse to admit—this whole thing was never about weapons of mass destruction. Even a five- year-old, much less the literate executive editor of the Washington Post, could have seen, from watching Bush and his cronies make his war case, that they were going in anyway."

out damn spotter

dont know what to believe about the "outing" of al-qaida spy mohammed khan. as neither the pakistan nor american govt have much credibility whos to say theyre both not liable.

chris craft

i had a similar reaction to chris matthews as campaign desk. it wasnt that matthews was getting exercised over the spin, it was that they had misused a quote from his show. hey chris, spin happens all the time, not just when its a convenient ploy to boost your own self importance or ratings (not that theres any difference).

ill give him minor props for hardblogger.

troop transport

"Foreign policy scholar Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire and, Blowback, discusses the frauds and realities surrounding Bush's troop shift proposal. Interviewed for Democracy Now! by Amy Goodman."

a mighty wind

for the texans

free verse

gangs of america: the rise of corporate power and the disabling of democracy

exam notes

"Another way of looking at it: compare the Red Eleven with California, which has 54 electoral votes, just two more than their total, but 33,871,648 people, almost twice as many. Cali has 627,235 people per presidential elector; the eleven aforementioned states have 359,069 people per elector. Wyoming, the most overrepresented state in the union, has 164,594 people per elector -- barely a fourth of California's total. That's right, Wyomingans are almost four times better represented in the Electoral College than are Californians."

22% margin of error

"Washington, DC: A just-released survey demonstrates that despite a four-year effort, GOP attempts to woo the Jewish vote for President Bush have failed, with likely Jewish voters preferring Senator Kerry over President Bush by a whopping 75-22 percent margin -- essentially identical to the 76-21 percent margin by which the same respondents voted for then-Vice President Al Gore over then-Governor Bush in 2000."

hut one

havent been mp3ing around lately or blogwhoring but since i receive a steady trickle of misguided souls from tofuhut i suspect they deserve another link. and because itsa good'n a'swell.

stranger than diction

"For the first time since Joan Rivers was touted as Johnny Carson's replacement in the late 1980s, a young female comic is the front-runner for a job behind the desk of a late night TV show.

Comic cut-up Amy Sedaris — star of the cult cable hit "Strangers with Candy" and a regular guest on the wee-hours circuit — finds herself at the head of a short list of names to take over "The Late Late Show" when Craig Kilborn steps down in two weeks."

price pointed

"SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 16 - RealNetworks plans to announce on Tuesday that it is putting its digital music offerings on sale at half price as part of an aggressive strategy to force its way onto Apple Computer's popular iPod digital music player.

At the same time, the company acknowledged that the sale - which lowers the price of songs on the online RealPlayer Music Store to 49 cents and the cost of most albums to $4.99, tentatively through Labor Day - would have an impact on the company's finances."

college exam

"A plan to scrap the winner-take-all system of allocating electoral votes in Colorado will be on the ballot in November, the AP reports. If passed, the amendment "would make Colorado the first state to allocate electoral votes proportionately according to the popular vote, rather than giving a winner all of the state's electoral votes."

save me from this ease

"From the Bible on, moralists and nags have promoted the benefits of hard work and early rising. They are mistaken, argues Tom Hodgkinson. For breathing space to create and time to reflect, indolence is essential. "

blue beard

electoral vote predictor

boring header

nice mp3 blog - *sixeyes

free tirade

prescient

opinionadir

Then, one by one, the producers pitch ideas, tossing them out like clay pigeons that O'Reilly shoots out of the air.

"C'mon, people," he says.

A female producer suggests a segment on the Palestinians, who it seems are -

"I'm asleep, Stephanie," O'Reilly interrupts. He looks around the circle. "Give me something I can put on the air, please."

A producer tosses out an idea about a doctor who recommends giving pot to kids with attention-deficit disorder. O'Reilly's eyebrows lift into two sharp points.

"Can we get the doc?" he snaps.

defenseless position

"How is it that civilians in a hijacked plane were able to communicate with their loved ones, grasp a totally new kind of enemy and weaponry and act to defend the nation's Capitol, yet the president had "communication problems" on Air Force One and the nation's defense chief didn't know what was going on until the horror was all over?"

ship to shore

just saw chris matthews give anti-kerry swiftboater john o'neill "the business." as usual for his show, nothing was learned, but im glad to see matthews shortsighted bluster reserved for someone i dont like. even the dimwitted matthews understood that enlisting to fight trumps awol from the national guard. good thing matthews feels a double dose of shame as he himself avoided the war. he made this clear at the end of the show when he repeatedly made reference to the fact that kerry had done more for his country than either he or bush had. hopefully that bit of conventional wisdom will remain part of the larger narrative.

triumph of the shrill

"Comedy writer Robert Smigel has built a formidable career out of childhood fixtures such as silly voices, animals, cartoons, and puppets. He received his big break in the mid-'80s, when Lorne Michaels hired him as a writer for Saturday Night Live; Smigel went on to write such classic skits as the one in which William Shatner admonishes a crowd of Star Trek fans to get a life. In 1991, Smigel hooked up with fellow SNL writer Conan O'Brien to write Lookwell, a revered pilot starring Adam West as a clueless, washed-up TV star turned detective. The show wasn't picked up for production, but Smigel later become one of the primary creative voices behind Late Night With Conan O'Brien."

money honies

"Before Moneyball, the mainstream more or less ignored sabermetrics. Those who brought up statistics were dismissed as roto-geeks; the game couldn't be boiled down to numbers, and if these losers would get their heads out of their spreadsheets and actually watch a game, they'd know that.

But now, as Moneyball showed everyone, they're on the inside, taking over some of the game's most prominent franchises, and what's more, they've been successful. Sabermetrics no longer belongs to fringe outsiders, it's part of the game. Sabermetric teams are still a minority, but it is firmly entrenched, and likely to spread."

pass it on

"TiVo, the company that makes the digital-video-recorder boxes that inspire such strange idolatry among their users, is in a weird spot. It's asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to add a new feature -- the option for a TiVo user to send recorded digital TV programs via the Internet to nine other people."

tvelopment

"That's because "Arrested Development" is trying to reinvent the rules of the half-hour comedy. The show trades the laugh track, multiple cameras and over-lighted stage sets that have characterized sitcoms from "I Love Lucy" to "King of Queens" for the hand-held single camera, natural light, heavily scored soundtrack and voice-over narration of a pseudo-documentary like "The Real World." It's very much a post-reality-show sitcom, capitalizing on the influence of the fledgling genre and translating its conventions into a new kind of comedy — broadly drawn but presented utterly deadpan."

wrysible

"Write it yourself!"