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Wednesday, Aug 25, 2004
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
Tuesday, Aug 24, 2004
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.