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Friday, Feb 15, 2002

back log

miserable melodies
crooked e
roadfood

kappa tau

"Yet more than Dingell, Tauzin is a perverse kind of consumer advocate�one for whom the theater is much more important than the substance. Tauzin, a former amateur actor, calls his Enron hearings "the show," and that is clearly how he thinks of them. He aims at little more than creating drama and embarrassing the parties he summons before him. As BusinessWeek pointed out recently, Tauzin's consumer investigations have produced almost nothing in the way of legislation or substantive change�a few extra dollars for highway safety, no alteration in TV election coverage, no intervention in the California energy crisis. The embarrassed Red Cross did agree to give more cash to 9/11 victims. You can already predict what Enron- or Andersen-related legislation will emerge from Tauzin's committee: not much."

unilateral pass

"Those who have argued that America's war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had "better get their house in order" or face what he called the "justice of this nation", it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all."

barnyards

"tv barns new tv documentary page"

pass the hat

"Campaign Inflation Industry pumped in a record 696 million dollars to elect George W. Bush and a GOP Congress. The Mother Jones 400 reveals the nation's top contributors -- and what they expect in return."

essay sheik

"In this first of three reports from Saudi Arabia, Elizabeth Farnsworth explores a country and culture that has remained inaccessible to most foreigners until just recently."

bugging out

"Chinese President Jiang Zemin believes fellow Politburo member Li Peng is behind the planting of electronic listening devices aboard the president's new U.S. jetliner, according to a (not so) classified State Department intelligence report."

hard times

"Prominent Campaign Finance Reform Proposals Would Not Have Reduced Enron's or Andersen's Political Spending "

mission scrub

"On 9-9-01 - just two days before Osama Bin Laden's attack on the US - the NY Times published a lengthy and chilling article about Osama Bin Laden by reporter John Burns. Some time after 9-11, the Times SCRUBBED this article, replacing it with a completely different article that Burns wrote on 9-12."

Thursday, Feb 14, 2002

b-list

""I didn't agonize over it," the vice president breezily tells the Post. Neither, apparently, did Woodward. But Dana Milbank might have. By general consensus, Milbank -- one of the Post's two White House correspondents -- is the administration's least-favorite journalist. And it's not hard to see why. Over the past year or so, Milbank, who previously covered the White House for The New Republic, has broken a number of stories that made life difficult for Bush. Last summer, he exhumed an administration plan to exempt the Salvation Army from state and local antidiscrimination laws -- a major embarrassment to Bush aide Karl Rove, who played a central role in the discussions. Milbank also broke early stories about the vice president's secret energy-task-force meetings (which prompted angry phone calls from Congress) and Bush's decision to abandon school vouchers (which prompted angry calls from conservatives)."

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