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Archive for August, 2007

My first “You should be ashamed sir”

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 11:31 pm

I’m getting a little teary :

My first “You should be ashamed sir”


  • Mike McNulty // Aug 31st 2007 at 7:53 (edit)

    The only people who should be prosecuted are people like you who undermine the war and the effort of our troops. By all accounts these men did what they had to do…Maybe you should prosecute all B-17 bombardiers who by accident killed innocent germans. We would all be speaking German now if people like yourself ran the country back then…You should be ashamed sir………Michael J. McNulty Syracuse NY

I’m gonna Shake It Off

F1 PRIMETIME

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 9:54 pm

It was in 1987, the sole Williams exception to the string of seven straight McLaren drivers championships from 1984-91 (and the season that witnessed Piquet’s 3rd World Championship when Mansell broke his back in a qualifying crash at Suzuka), that the seeds for the fifth major technical revolution in Formula One were laid. Although their struggle to remain competitive would be doomed, in the ‘87 season Team Lotus unveiled the first F1 car with a computer-controlled “active suspension” system. Active suspension — later joined by the semi-automatic gearbox, traction control, “black box” controlled starting programs and anti-lock brakes — would produce fabulously complex and fast cars, but would also give lie to Niki Lauda’s prediction, after ground effects were banned in 1983, that the new rules “create a purer sense of racing for the driver.”

At the start of the post-turbo era, McLaren remained supremely dominant, but it’s two stars — Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost — would begin a personal battle that never came to an end. Given their cars’ technical superiority, both drivers agreed in 1988 that it made little sense (particularly since they usually qualified 1-2) to fight over the first corner of a race. Senna & Prost 89Yet that gentlemen’s agreement was broken at the 1989 San Marino GP, where Senna overtook Prost during the restart (after a flaming accident at Tamburello when Gerhard Berger hit the wall, a shunt that would have killed the driver a decade before) by taking the racing line from behind. Prost was furious, finding Senna’s adversarial approach to racing impossible to deal with, commenting that “I no longer wish to have any business with him. I appreciate honesty and he is not honest.” (Senna, for his part, complained that fighting for the racing line before the braking zone was legitimate.)

With the 1989 title on the line at Suzuka, the feud came to a head. Prost led by 1.7 seconds at the start, but Senna slowly reeled him in, moving alongside at the chicane, putting two wheels on the grass to go for the inside line. As Prost turned in, he held firm — he had given way previously, but not now. Both cars collided and went off. Prost got out of the cockpit in disgust, but Senna insisted on a push start from the track marshals, stopped for a new nose in the pits, and passed Alessandro Nannini to cross the line first. Yet FISA declared Nannini the winner, disqualified Senna (revoking his superlicense as well) and effectively awarded the championship to Prost. Senna remarked, “What we see today is the true manipulation of the World Championship.”

The two would do the same thing again in 1990 — different corner, same result — except that Prost by now had moved on to Ferrari, no longer content to take a back seat to Senna, and complaining that McLaren was giving preferential treatment in car set-up to the Brazilian. But in 1990, Senna was leading the World Championship when the shunt occurred, and many observers feel, to this day, that Senna deliberately drove Prost off the road as a measure of revenge for the prior year. (Senna admitted as much in 1991, without remorse.)

Green Line

QuoteSome will say, perhaps, that the 1991 World Championship was settled by the events at Montréal or Spa or Estoril, where apparently certain victories gave Nigel Mansell the slip. It was not. In reality, the World Championship was won — and lost — in the first four races, all won by Ayrton Sennna. Won, moreover, by a car which should not have been winning.Quote

Autosport Grand Prix Review ‘91 – Nigel Roebuck

Green Line

It was in 1991 that the active era in Formula One truly began, as Team Williams introduced the FW14, designed by Patrick Head. As the first F1 car combining a semi-automatic gearbox (originally debuted Australia 91by Ferrari in 1989) with traction control, the FW14 was revolutionary, but broke the old dictum that “To finish first, first you have to finish.” Thus Senna, driving a plainly inferior McLaren-Honda MP4/6, after four races had recorded four pole positions and four wins. No one had ever started a Formula One World Championship campaign with four straight victories, and for the rest it was more than demoralizing. With an increase in the points for a win from 9 to 10 (and all races counting for the championship for the first time in F1) Senna had 40 points, his nearest challenger 11, and Nigel Mansell of Williams just six.

The Williams began to improve at Monaco, where Mansell took second to Senna, and at the Canadian GP on 2 June it looked like Williams were finally ready to make their move. Mansell qualified second, took the lead in the first corner, and ended the penultimate lap with a commanding lead of more than a minute. Waving to the crowd, Mansell turned into the final hairpin, and the engine cut dead, the car coasting to a slow stop, a victim of electronic gremlins. Nelson Piquet pushed forward to take the checkered flag for Benetton — for what would be his last F1 win. The balance of the 1991 season would see a fruitless quest by Mansell and Williams to catch Senna, including a disqualification while leading at Estoril after a wheel fell off in the middle of pit road. Canada 91Mansell won three in a row in France, England and Germany, and came into Suzuka needing two more victories (and no more than a 4th from Senna) to take the title. But Mansell went off into the sand chasing the Brazilian on lap 10, and Aryton Senna had clinched his 3rd Formula One championship in four years.

But Williams got the bugs worked out of their gearbox and, adding traction control and a host of other computer-controlled wonders, ran off a tremendous streak over the 1992-93 seasons. In 1992, Nigel Mansell finally rode the Williams wave to the World Championship, winning the first five races and a total of nine overall — breaking Senna’s 1988 record — to cruise to the F1 crown. Mansell retired from Williams after

Green Line

QuoteMansell enjoyed enormously the best car and had reached the point in his career when he had could exploit it enormously. He seized the 1992 season and held it tight. In the end, the simplicity was all beguiling. After 13 years, after the nightmare of Adelaide in 1986, the pain of Suzuka in 1987 and 1991, Mansell would achieve the World Championship with five races to spare. That simple.Quote

Grand Prix Showdown – Christopher Hilton

Green Line

team owner Frank Williams announced that he had hired Alain Prost (who took the ‘92 season off) for 1993, but headed “over the pond” to IndyCar, where he won the 1993 PPG Cup championship, teaming with Mario Andretti (and Silverstone 93ironically with victories mainly on the ovals). The prodigal Prost returned to claim his seat — promoting test driver Damon Hill, son of Graham and driving number “0,” to the second spot at Williams — and in 1993 in turn won his 4th and last World Championship, putting him 2nd on the all-tome Formula One list only to Juan Manuel Fangio.

Yet in some respects, 1993 was the end of another era — in fact, of two eras — in Formula One. Again fretting over the perceived absence of driver skill as a delimiter of success, and concerned about the impact a long series of “runaway” seasons on worldwide viewership and sponsor money, FIA declared an end to “driver’s aids,” banning active suspension, traction control and other automatic car adjustment mechanisms. While the reaction was typical (recall 1981 and 1983), it was slightly overdone, as Aryton Senna had put on a spectacular show, once again in an outmatched McLaren MP 4/8, Prost 93to win five GPs. The most impressive of these, and perhaps the finest victory of his career, was at the European GP at Donnington Park, where Senna won after picking up five places in the rain on the first lap, cementing his place in history as the rainmeister. (1993 was also the season in which American Michael Andretti tried to master a difficult McLaren without testing and while commuting on the Concorde, crashed in his first four outings, and was sent limping home after a single podium finish.) And so, with a final victory at Adelaide in the last race of the 1993 season, Ayrton Senna prepared to move on to Team Williams, at long last striking a $20 million per-year deal with the team, and owner, who had given him his first test ride in an F1 car more than a decade before.
Green Line

ROBIN MILLER ON MICHIGAN INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 7:01 pm

 167791_sar.jpg

If you’ve harbored any passion for open wheel racing during the past 40 years, then you likely own some fond memories of Michigan International Speedway. A 2-mile, high-banked oval planted in the middle of the Irish Hills, it started life in 1968 as the first purpose-built superspeedway for Indy cars.

For all the great racing, which also included Can-Am, Trans Am and Formula 5000 on the road course plus USAC stocks and NASCAR on the oval, the crowds peaked in the mid-’90s for CART and have fallen off drastically in the past seven years.

Evidently unable to come to an agreement over a new date with the Indy Racing League for 2008 (it didn’t want to be a few weeks away from Detroit), MIS likely is hosting its final IndyCar race on Sunday.

Considering the ovals at Phoenix, Atlanta, Loudon, Fontana, Nazareth, Pike Peak, Orlando, Gateway and Las Vegas have all vanished from the IRL schedule during the past decade, there’s no reason to believe MIS will ever resurface.

But, for me, that drive up I-69 to Highway 12 across to MIS produced some indelible moments, great stories, miles of road rage and a few speeding tickets.

Here they are:

THE LEGAL EAGLE: Mistakenly disqualified from the ‘68 Indy 500 and then re-instated after USAC learned its scales were way off, road racer Ronnie Bucknum and his Weinberger Homes Eagle scored the inaugural win at MIS in 1968.

ADIOS ARMCO: In his Indy-car debut in 1972, Merle Bettenhausen crashed on the backstretch. His car caught fire, his shield had flipped up and, instinctively, the middle son of Melvin Tony Bettenhausen tried to raise up out of the cockpit. But the car veered back into the armco guardrail on the backstretch and it severed his right arm. Badly burned on his face, Merle made a victorious comeback in USAC midgets in 1973 driving with a prosthetic arm and a hook. That armco guardrail was replaced by concrete walls and, eventually, armco would disappear altogether from oval racing.

A GOOD IDEA: John Hubbard was a gritty sprint car driver making his Indy-car debut at Michigan in the early ’70s and I was his pitboard man. A.J. Foyt had blown up in qualifying so he was starting last – a couple rows behind us. Before the driver introductions, John asked me if he should go introduce himself to Super Tex and let him know he intended to move over at the start. But, before he could, Foyt walked up and said: “Boy, keep your eye on those mirrors because I’ll be going by on the rightside and I don’t need you slowin’ me down.” Nice to meet you too, Mr. Foyt.

VUKY’S VICTORY: Despite being a tough racer and having a good career, Bill Vukovich Jr. only captured one USAC Indy-car race and it wasn’t easy. In 1973, in the opening heat of the twin 125-milers, Vuky was victimized. He won the race but they gave the checkered flag to Gary Bettenhausen and Johnny Rutherford pulled into victory lane. The ensuing chaos saw Vuky run from his car, jump on the pace car’s hood and start screaming at pace car driver Shim Malone, who had waved Vuky around during a yellow. USAC scoring had totally screwed up and, two weeks after the race, Vuky was awarded the win – by phone in front of nobody and with no celebration.

DICKED AGAIN: While working as the vent man on Johnny Parsons’ car in 1973, chief mechanic Bill Finley warned me not to go behind the car and help push until I made sure Dick Simon (pitted behind us) had come to a complete stop. Sure enough, on the first stops Simon smoked into the pits (no speed limits then) and slid all the way under JP’s rear wing. Finley kicked Simon’s front wing and threatened to smack him with a wheel hammer if it happened again.

Mansell added some unnecessary drama to his ‘93 MIS win… (LAT Photo) MORE PHOTOS

ACADEMY AWARD: Following his dominating victory in 1993, Nigel Mansell all but collapsed while getting out of the car, holding his neck and writhing in agony until he looked a few feet away to see teammate Mario Andretti, who had finished second, barely sweating. Nige quickly regrouped and walked to the victory podium. The guy was a helluva racer and put CART on the international map, but what a lame actor…

RELAX RUBE: In 1974, working full-time as a stooge, vent man and beer chaser for Lloyd Ruby’s team, I was not allowed near the toolbox because of my mechanical ineptitude. But, the night before the race, our ace mechanic Danny Jones went on a bender and it was left to Jim Bob Luebbert and myself to assemble the rear suspension. Rube wandered in just before midnight and, to his horror, saw me with a wrench at the back of his car. “Hey, he’s not supposed to do that,” Rube shouted to Luebbert. We assured him I was only watching. Lloyd finished third the next day.

ONGAIS RULES: In 1977, Danny Ongais scored his initial Indy-car win at MIS driving the black Parnelli chassis of Roman Slobodyinski. Afterwards, in the press conference, I asked The Flyin’ Hawaiian to talk about being a tire buster at Indy-car races in the ’60s, not passing his first Indy-car test and now the accomplishment of being a race winner. He frowned and said: “I don’t talk about the past.” Thus began his great relationship with the media.

ARMAGEDDON: In 1981, the first 500-miler was staged at MIS and it was nearly the last. A major pit fire broke out during a pit stop by Herm Johnson and as tires exploded from the heat and pit equipment melted, it looked like Armageddon from the press box. Amazingly, there were no serious injuries in the inferno but A.J. Foyt nearly lost his arm in a grisly accident. On top of that, it rained and the race didn’t end until it was almost dark. Pancho Carter was declared the winner, although many felt it might have been Tony Bettenhausen Jr. because of a mixup during the red flag.

FEAR OF FOYT: In 1982, that “god damn Cooogan” (Kevin Cogan) and I were sitting in a garage when A.J. Foyt spotted us and started walking our way. Foyt had smacked me in 1981 at Indy because he didn’t like something I’d written and Cogan had swerved into A.J. at the start of Indy in ‘82 triggering a big crash. “What do you think he wants?,” said Cogan. “Blood,” I replied. But we all had a nice little chat and A.J. walked away chuckling because he knew we were both terrified.

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Gibbs Believes in His Team. Do You Believe Him?

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 6:31 pm

By Thomas Boswell
Friday, August 31, 2007; E01

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. Take your stand now. Don’t wait a month until the Redskins are on their bye week and say, “I knew they’d beat the Dolphins, Eagles and Giants and be 3-0.”

Or,
of course, that could be 0-3, since teams that finish 5-11 one season
seldom tear up the league the next year. Go ahead, take the measure of
the team you’ve glimpsed this August and extrapolate its results. But
make no mistake, there is one question and one question only underneath
your analysis: Do you still believe in Joe Gibbs?

The
team that lost to the Jaguars, 31-14, on Thursday night in sweltering
Jacksonville Municipal Stadium has Gibbs’s complete public stamp of
approval. This week at their annual Welcome Home Luncheon, Gibbs
reiterated once again that he and his staff — the most expensive
teachers in NFL
history — have been given everything they need to win. The coach who
won three Super Bowls claims that he has exactly the men he needs, the
precise players with the talents and temperaments he wants. He praised
their heart in the final seven games last year, after he took the team
back to its smash-mouth roots.

“It’s all on me,” Gibbs says.

Does
he say it because, in the fourth year of his return, he has no
realistic choice? Or does he see something — perhaps many things –
that others simply don’t? Who judges talent and people better than
Gibbs?

On nights like this, we’re reminded that wise fans might
want to give Gibbs the benefit of the doubt one more time. Not out of
gratitude for past Super Bowl victories, though that is merited, but
because coaches as special as Gibbs are so rare. Just a glimpse of the
rich promise that Gibbs thinks he sees is all that the Redskins showed
against the Jags. But it was an eyeful. With one sweet, eight-play,
70-yard touchdown drive on their first possession, the Redskins planted
the seed of hope. It doesn’t take much, does it?

Showing no hint of a limp from his bruised knee, Jason Campbell threw five passes and completed them all for 54 yards and a 23-yard touchdown to Antwaan Randle El. He was merely perfect. Rock Cartwright
blasted for 21 yards on three carries. Then, as quickly as they’d
appeared for one brief first-quarter drive and that 7-0 lead, every
first-string Redskin was finished for the night. Rookies, scrubs and
backup quarterbacks fought for jobs the rest of the evening. Yet, with
that one immaculately executed drive, the Redskins made you wonder:
Could Gibbs be right?

The Jaguars will tell you that Campbell’s
soft touch pass up the left sideline to Randle El was completed against
their third-string cornerback, Dee Webb, a fellow who’s more likely to
be driving a FedEx truck than playing at FedEx Field.
They’ll say that another of their humble third-stringers — defensive
tackle Walter Curry — knocked Campbell head-over-bruised-knee on a
sack that sent the hearts of Redskins followers into their throats.

The
Redskins don’t want to hear it. Their whole preseason has been one
continual offensive frustration. After a poor performance in Tennessee with no points in six possessions, Campbell was injured early in the Steelers game, then missed what would have been a useful test against the mighty Ravens
defense in the first half last week in a game cut in half by lightning.
So he and Gibbs were willing to take the risk of giving him just one
series last night to change the tone of his exhibition season.

“It was a confidence boost. It gave us momentum for the Miami
game,” said Campbell, referring to the season opener in Landover on
Sept. 9. “I was kind of nervous about taking the first hit to my knee.”

Yet he survived exactly the kind of big hit that the Redskins hoped to avoid as he checked down for a 12-yard gain to Mike Sellers. Actually, Campbell took “two licks but it was good to get ‘em out of the way.”

If
we step back and view this exhibition season as a whole, the Redskins’
preseason may actually have revealed more than many thought. By playing
on even terms against four teams that all finished at .500 or better
last season, the Redskins established that they are probably a solid,
competitive team that is already considerably better than last season’s
dismal mess.

The Titans,
Steelers, Ravens and Jags may not get to the Super Bowl this season.
But they are tough, physical teams with strong defenses. Playing them
to a standstill in August, especially with minimal time from Campbell,
is not insignificant. Even more important, the Redskins’ biggest
weakness — the 31st-ranked defense in the NFL — showed enormous
improvement. In the first halves of the first three games, the Redskins
allowed only 19 points. None of Jacksonville’s points came against starters.

“The first half of all those [first] three games we played up to our standards,” defensive end Renaldo Wynn
said. “That’s a big difference from last year. We’ve come a long way.”
This year, there was no confidence-shredding debacle like last August’s
41-0 loss to New England.

“We’ve
got to start off fast in the regular season, not like last year,” added
Wynn. “I don’t care who you are, going 0-4 in preseason, then losing
the first two games leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

Getting
off to that fast start may be more feasible this season — although the
opener against Miami bears a resemblance to last season’s opener
against the Vikings, when the Redskins were favored but lost by three
points. A large part of any NFL team’s success is the luck of its
scheduling draw. There, the Redskins could hardly ask for more.

Almost
every foe they play at home, where they were 3-5 last year, has a new
head coach, a new untested quarterback or a losing record. The Dolphins
(6-10) will arrive with rookie coach Cam Cameron, a former Redskins
quarterback coach. The digestible Lions (3-13) and Cardinals (5-11)
also arrive at FedEx in the first six weeks of the season. Those three
wins alone should avoid a panic like last year’s 2-5 start.

In the second half, the Redskins host the Bills (7-9) and visit the Vikings (6-10) and Bucs
(4-12). Also, if the Redskins can’t win two of three from their
division rivals at FedEx, they aren’t a serious postseason contender
anyway. Even last year, in what may have been the nadir for a franchise
with enormous resources, the Redskins were only outscored by five
points in three home games against the Eagles, Giants and Cowboys.

“This
game is a mystery,” said Gibbs late last night. “That’s why it’s such
an attraction. The fans don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t
either. But now it’s going to be played out. It’s a long haul. We’ll
see.”

When the Cowboys come to FedEx on Dec. 30 for the final
game of the season, the Redskins — if they bear any resemblance at all
to the team Gibbs thinks he has — will probably have a winning record,
perhaps 8-7. If that’s the case, a playoff spot may well be at stake as
the year ends.

If that’s how this season works out, with all the attendant Joe’s-back hoopla, don’t say Gibbs didn’t tell you.

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New York Offers Incentives to Homebuyers, Builders to Go Green

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 6:22 pm

New York Offers Incentives to Homebuyers, Builders to Go Green

Published: August 31, 2007

spitzer

By Kelly Sheehan, Online News Editor

New York—Two initiatives to promote the construction of green
homes in New York were recently announced by First Lady Silda Wall
Spitzer and David D. Brown, executive director of the Dormitory
Authority of the state.

In an effort to encourage homeowners to incorporate simple energy
reduction features into their homes, new legislation will offer
incentives to homeowners to integrate environmentally friendly
practices when building or renovating homes. The amount of the
incentive will be based on the size of the home, with a cap of $10,000
per home. This money will help offset the additional costs associated
with green building.

Earlier this year, Governor Eliot Spitzer unveiled his “15 x
15” plan to reduce energy use by 15 percent from forecasted
levels by the year 2015, through new energy efficiency programs.

“Buildings are part of the problem of climate change, but
they can also be part of the solution if they meet a higher standard
for environmental sustainability,” says Spitzer. “This
legislation offers an economic incentive to everyday New Yorkers who
would like to make their homes energy efficient, but are concerned
about higher construction costs. The incentive will help defray these
upfront costs, which will yield significant energy and cost savings for
the homeowner in the long-term. By working together and making smart
building decisions, New York State and New Yorkers can achieve reduced
energy consumption, decrease our carbon imprint, and save consumers
money.”

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Glenn Greenwald on the Democrats’ responsibility in the wake of Gonzales’ resignation

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 6:17 pm

(Updated belowUpdate IIUpdate III)

Glenn Greenwald drawing
One of the most blatantly dishonest political hacks ever to occupy the position of U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, has now resigned.
This is a real moment of truth for the Democratic Congress. Democrats,
who have offered up little other than one failure after the next since
taking power in January, can take a big step toward redeeming
themselves here. No matter what, they must ensure that Gonzales’
replacement is a genuinely trustworthy and independent figure.

That means that Democrats must not confirm anyone, such as Michael
Chertoff, who has been ensconced in the Bush circle. Instead, the DOJ
and the country desperately need a completely outside figure who will
ensure that the prosecutorial machinery operates independently, even if
– especially if — that means finally investigating the litany of
Executive branch abuses and lawbreaking which have gone almost entirely
uninvestigated, as well uncovering those which remain concealed.

The standard excuse invoked by Democrats to justify their capitulations
– namely, that they cannot attract a filibuster-proof or veto-proof
majority to defy the President — will be unavailing here. They
themselves can filibuster the confirmation of any proposed nominee to
replace Gonzales. They do not need Blue Dogs or Bush Dogs or any of the
other hideous cowards in their caucus who remain loyal to the most
unpopular President in modern American history. The allegedly “Good
Democrats” can accomplish this vital step all on their own. They only
need 40 Senate votes to achieve it.

It is difficult to overstate how vital this is. The unexpected
resignation of Gonzales provides a truly critical opportunity to
restore real oversight to our government, to provide advocates of the
rule of law with a quite potent weapon to compel adherence to the law
and, more importantly, to expose and bring accountability for prior
lawbreaking. All of the investigations and scandals, currently stalled
hopelessly, can be dramatically and rapidly advanced with an
independent Attorney General at the helm of the DOJ.

That is not going to happen if the Democrats allow the confirmation
of one of the ostensibly less corrupt and “establishment-respected”
members of the Bush circle — Michael Chertoff or Fred Fielding or Paul Clement
or some Bush appointee along those lines. The new Attorney General must
be someone who is not part of that rotted circle at all — even if they
are supposedly part of the less rotted branches — since it is that
circle which ought to be the subject of multiple DOJ investigations.

As Democrats supposedly just learned (yet again), even the Bush
appointees whom they claim (foolishly) to believe they can trust to act
independently, such as DNI Mike McConnell, have their ultimate
allegiance to George Bush and Dick Cheney. The President is certainly
entitled to choose someone who is generally compatible with him
ideologically, but the only acceptable replacement for Alberto Gonzales
is someone who is truly independent of the Bush machine and whom
Democrats are supremely confident will act independently, which means
pursuing criminal investigations where warranted of the highest levels
of this administration, including the departing Attorney General
himself.

Congressional Democrats, insulting the intelligence of their own
supporters, have repeatedly claimed to have trusted the Bush
administration and its appointees only to be “betrayed” time and again
– they were “betrayed” by allowing the confirmation of Alito and
Roberts to the Supreme Court based on false assurances that they would
respect precedent; they were “betrayed” again by the agreement on the
Military Commissions Act between the White House and
Graham/Warner/McCain only to then have the agreement modified severely
by last-minute changes; they were “betrayed” again by trusting Mike
McConnell on the FISA deal; and they even claim to have been “betrayed”
by supporting the confirmation of Gonzales himself based upon
assurances at his confirmation hearing that he understood and would
honor his independent role as Attorney General.

That excuse is not going to work again. Relying on assurances from
some current Bush appointee that they will act independently is
woefully and self-evidently insufficient. Only a truly outside figure,
one who is entirely independent of the Bush circle, should be
acceptable.

Pressuring Senate Democrats right away on this is vital. There is no
more important domestic political goal then ensuring that the DOJ
investigative and prosecutorial machinery operates independently.
Senate Democrats will have none of their usual excuses if they fail to
compel the nomination of someone truly independent and/or if they sit
by meekly and allow the appointment of someone whose independence is
even questionable.

Whatever it takes — repeated blocking of nominees, filibustering,
protracted hearings — it is critical that it be done in order to
restore integrity to the DOJ. A less-than-independent replacement as
Attorney General will be entirely the fault of Democrats if they allow
it to happen. Conversely, by ensuring the confirmation of someone
independent, Senate Democrats can take a major step in revitalizing the
rule of law, revitalizing their political base, showing the country
they stand for something, and making the case that the 2006 midterm
election change of control actually meant something.

UPDATE: Commenters have suggested that Bush could bypass the confirmation process with a recess appointment, but Bush and Harry Reid have an agreement in place that there will be no recess appointments during Congress’ adjournment:

There’ll
be no recess appointments this time around, Roll Call reports (sub.
req.), meaning the White House won’t be taking advantage of Congress’
vacation to install any contested nominees. That’s due to a deal
between Bush and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). . . .

Last recess, the White House made a number of controversial recess
appointments, including Swift Boat backer Sam Fox as ambassador to
Belgium. In order to prevent that sort of thing from happening again,
Reid had plotted to keep the Senate in “pro forma” session during the
recess — whereby the Senate floor personnel show up every three days
to make it an official session. But now Reid and Bush have made a deal,
according to Roll Call. Bush won’t make any recess appointments and
Reid has promised to move some of his nominees when Senate gets back in
session.

Obviously,
there is nothing truly binding about the agreement, and Bush could
violate it. But in the Beltway world, that is a Draconian step that
seems unlikely (though not impossible) for many reasons. Far more
likely, it seems, is Bush’s (reasonable) belief that Senate Democrats
will be as accommodating as usual and confirm a replacement who is
acceptable to the administration.

UPDATE II:
Oddly, the Drudge Report, for a period of no more than several minutes,
apparently “reported” that the Bush administration would replace
Gonzales via recess appointment, but has now taken that down.
Identically, the publication most closely associated with Drudge, The Politico,
briefly had a caption on its front page indicating the same thing,
though nothing in its Gonzales article mentioned that. When I just went
to the Politico site to screen capture the recess appointment reference, it, too, had been removed.

The Politico does have an article by the always-plugged-into-the-Bush-administration Mike Allen which signals the potential administration strategy here:

The acting attorney general with be Solicitor General Paul Clement. He
“can stay in that position for quite a while,” a senior administration
official said.

That would avoid a bruising confirmation fight. Some Democratic senators have vowed not to confirm a Gonzales successor. . . .

An administration official explained: An individual may serve in an
acting capacity for 210 days. However, if there is a pending nominee,
the 210 day “clock” starts again when a nominee is announced. The 210
day “clock” would restart again if the nominee is voted down. The clock
stops when there’s a nominee, and restarts with a new 210 days if the
nomination is withdrawn or fails.

Engaging
in that tactic would be tantamount to a recess appointment — allowing
Bush to have an Attorney General in place more or less indefinitely
without Senate confirmation. One would hope, though not necessarily
expect, that Harry Reid and company would treat that as the serious
violation of their agreement that it would be and respond with full
retaliation.

[Immediately after posting this update, the reference to a "recess appointment" has returned to the Politico front page:


And it is now gone again.]

UPDATE III: Gonzales’ resignation is not effective until September 17,
by which time Congress will be back in session, thus precluding an
overt recess appointment. The two most likely strategies for the
administration are: (a) try to find a candidate acceptable to it that
the Senate would be unlikely to block (such as some type of Bush
loyalist and Gonzales-defending Senator like Orrin Hatch — pompous
Senatorial courtesy trumps everything, including the rule of law) or,
alternatively, (b) leave Clement in place indefinitely in an interim
position, thus violating (in effect) the agreement barring recess
appointments. Either way, for countless reasons, this is a fight Senate
Democrats have to engage (which is not, of course, the same thing as
predicting they will, though all efforts should be devoted to
pressuring them to do so).

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Do We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 3:56 pm

                              THANK YOU COUNTERPUNCH

Now or Never

Do
We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran?

By RAY McGOVERN
Former
CIA Analyst

Why do I feel like the proverbial skunk
at a Labor Day picnic? Sorry; but I thought you might want to
know that this time next year there will probably be more skunks
than we can handle. I fear our country is likely to be at war
with Iran-and with the thousands of real terrorists Iran can
field around the globe.

It is going to happen, folks,
unless we put our lawn chairs away on Tuesday, take part in some
serious grass-roots organizing, and take action to prevent a
wider war-while we still can.

President George W. Bush’s
speech Tuesday lays out the Bush/Cheney plan to attack Iran and
how the intelligence is being “fixed around the policy,”
as was the case before the attack on Iraq.

It’s not about putative Iranian
“weapons of mass destruction”-not even ostensibly.
It is about the requirement for a scapegoat for U.S. reverses
in Iraq, and the White House’s felt need to create a casus
belli
by provoking Iran in such a way as to “justify”
armed retaliation-eventually including air strikes on its nuclear-related
facilities.

Bush’s Aug. 28 speech to the
American Legion comes five years after a very similar presentation
by Vice President Dick Cheney. Addressing the Veterans of Foreign
Wars on Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney set the meretricious terms of reference
for war on Iraq.

Sitting on the same stage that
evening was former CENTCOM commander Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni,
who was being honored at the VFW convention. Zinni later said
he was shocked to hear a depiction of intelligence (Iraq has
WMD and is amassing them to use against us) that did not square
with what he knew. Although Zinni had retired two years before,
his role as consultant had enabled him to stay up to date on
key intelligence findings.

“There was no solid proof
that Saddam had WMD…I heard a case being made to go to war,”
Zinni told Meet the Press three and a half years later.

(Zinni is a straight shooter
with considerable courage, and so the question lingers: why did
he not go public? It is all too familiar a conundrum at senior
levels; top officials can seldom find their voices. My hunch
is that Zinni regrets letting himself be guided by a misplaced
professional courtesy and/or slavish adherence to classification
restrictions, when he might have prevented our country from starting
the kind of war of aggression branded at Nuremberg the “supreme
international crime.”)


Cheney:
Dean of Preemption

Zinni was not the only one
taken aback by Cheney’s words. Then-CIA director George Tenet
says Cheney’s speech took him completely by surprise. In his
memoir Tenet wrote, “I had the impression that the president
wasn’t any more aware than we were of what his number-two was
going to say to the VFW until he said it.”

Yet, it could have been anticipated.
Just five weeks before, Tenet himself had told his British counterpart
that the president had decided to make war on Iraq for regime
change and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy.”

When Bush’s senior advisers
came back to town after Labor Day, 2002, the next five weeks
(and by now, the next five years) were devoted to selling a new
product-war on Iraq. The actual decision to attack Iraq, we
now know, was made several months earlier but, as then-White
House chief of staff Andy Card explained, no sensible salesperson
would launch a major new product during the month of August-Cheney’s
preemptive strike notwithstanding. Yes, that’s what Card called
the coming war; a “new product.”

After assuring themselves that
Tenet was a reliable salesman, Cheney and then-defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld dispatched him and the pliant Powell at State
to play supporting roles in the advertising campaign: bogus
yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment,
and mobile trailers for manufacturing biological warfare agent-the
whole nine yards. The objective was to scare or intimidate Congress
into voting for war, and, thanks largely to a robust cheering
section in the corporate-controlled media, Congress did so on
October 10 and 11, 2002.

This past week saw the president
himself, with that same kind of support, pushing a new product-war
with Iran. And in the process, he made clear how intelligence
is being fixed to “justify” war this time around.
The case is too clever by half, but it will be hard for Americans
to understand that. Indeed, the Bush/Cheney team expects that
the product will sell easily-the more so, since the administration
has been able once again to enlist the usual cheerleaders in
the media to “catapult the propaganda,” as Bush once
put it.

Iran’s Nuclear
Plans

It has been like waiting for
Godot…the endless wait for the latest National Intelligence
Estimate on Iran’s nuclear plans. That NIE turns out to be the
quintessential dog that didn’t bark. The most recent published
NIE on the subject was issued two and a half years ago and concluded
that Iran could not have a nuclear weapon until “early-
to mid-next decade.” That estimate followed a string of
NIEs dating back to 1995, which kept predicting, with embarrassing
consistency, that Iran was “within five years” of having
a nuclear weapon.

The most recent NIE, published
in early 2005, extended the timeline and provided still more
margin for error. Basically, the timeline was moved 10 years
out to 2015 but, in a fit of caution, the drafters settled on
the words “early-to-mid next decade.” On Feb. 27,
2007 at his confirmation hearings to be Director of National
Intelligence, Michael McConnell repeated that formula verbatim.

A “final” draft of
the follow-up NIE mentioned above had been completed in Feb.
2007, and McConnell no doubt was briefed on its findings prior
to his testimony. The fact that this draft has been sent back
for revision every other month since February speaks volumes.
Judging from McConnell’s testimony, the conclusions of the NIE
draft of February are probably not alarmist enough for Vice President
Dick Cheney. (Shades of Iraq.)

According to one recent report,
the target date for publication has now slipped to late fall.
How these endless delays can be tolerated is testimony to the
fecklessness of the “watchdog” intelligence committees
in House and Senate.

As for Iran’s motivation if
it plans to go down the path of producing nuclear weapons, newly
appointed defense secretary Robert Gates was asked about that
at his confirmation hearing in December. Just called from the
wings to replace Donald Rumsfeld, Gates apparently had not yet
read the relevant memo from Cheney’s office. It is a safe bet
that the avuncular Cheney took Gates to the woodshed, after the
nominee suggested that Iran’s motivation could be, “in the
first instance,” deterrence:”

“While they [the Iranians]
are certainly pressing, in my opinion, for a nuclear capability,
I think they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent.
They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons-Pakistan
to the east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west,
and us in the Persian Gulf.”

Unwelcome
News (to the White House)

There they go again-those bureaucrats
at the International Atomic Energy Agency. On August 28, the
very day Bush was playing up the dangers from Iran, the IAEA
released a note of understanding between the IAEA and Iran on
the key issue of inspection. The IAEA announced:

“The agency has been
able to verify the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials
at the enrichment facilities in Iran and has therefore concluded
that it remains in peaceful use.”

The IAEA deputy director said
the plan just agreed to by the IAEA and Iran will enable the
two to reach closure by December on the nuclear issues that the
IAEA began investigating in 2003. Other IAEA officials now express
confidence that they will be able to detect any military diversion
or any uranium enrichment above a low grade, as long as the Iran-IAEA
safeguard agreement remains intact.

Shades of the preliminary findings
of the U.N. inspections-unprecedented in their intrusiveness-that
were conducted in Iraq in early 2003 before the U.S. abruptly
warned the U.N. in mid-March to pull out its inspectors, lest
they find themselves among those to be shocked-and-awed.

Vice President Cheney can claim,
as he did three days before the attack on Iraq, that the IAEA
is simply “wrong.” But Cheney’s credibility has sunk
to prehistoric levels; witness the fact that the president was
told that this time he would have to take the lead in playing
up various threats from Iran. And they gave him new words.

The President’s
New Formulation

As I watched the president
speak on Aug. 28, I was struck by the care he took in reading
the exact words of a new, subjunctive-mood formulation regarding
Iran’s nuclear intentions. He never looked up; this is what
he said:

“Iran’s active pursuit
of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to
put a region already known for instability and violence under
the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”

The cautious wording suggests
to me that the White House finally has concluded that the “nuclear
threat” from Iran is “a dog that won’t hunt,”
as Lyndon Johnson would have put it. While, initial press reporting
focused on the “nuclear holocaust” rhetorical flourish,
the earlier part of the sentence is more significant, in my view.
It is quite different from earlier Bush rhetoric charging categorically
that Iran is “pursuing nuclear weapons,” including
the following (erroneous) comment at a joint press conference
with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in early August:

“This [Iran] is a government
that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon.”

The latest news from the IAEA
is, for the White House, an unwelcome extra hurdle. And the
president’s advisers presumably were aware of it well before
Bush’s speech was finalized; it will be hard to spin. Administration
officials would also worry about the possibility that some patriotic
truth teller might make the press aware of the key judgments
of the languishing draft of the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear
capability-or that a courageous officer or official of Gen. Anthony
Zinni’s stature might feel conscience bound to try to head off
another unnecessary war, by providing a more accurate, less alarmist
assessment of the nuclear threat from Iran.

It is just too much of a stretch
to suggest that Iran could be a nuclear threat to the United
States within the next 17 months, and that’s all the time Bush
and Cheney have got to honor their open pledge to our “ally”
Israel to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential. Besides, some
American Jewish groups have become increasingly concerned over
the likelihood of serious backlash if young Americans are seen
to be fighting and dying to eliminate perceived threats to Israel
(but not to the U.S.). Some of these groups have been quietly
urging the White House to back off the nuclear-threat rationale
for war on Iran.

The (Very)
Bad News

Bush and Cheney have clearly
decided to use alleged Iranian interference in Iraq as the preferred
casus belli
. And the charges, whether they have merit or
not, have become much more bellicose. Thus, Bush on Aug. 28:

“Iran’s leaders…cannot
escape responsibility for aiding attacks against coalition forces…The
Iranian regime must halt these actions. And until it does, I
will take actions necessary to protect our troops. I have authorized
our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous
activities.”

How convenient: two birds
with one stone. Someone to blame for U.S. reverses in Iraq,
and “justification” to confront the ostensible source
of the problem-”deadeners” having been changed to Iran.
Vice President Cheney has reportedly been pushing for military
retaliation against Iran if the U.S. finds hard evidence of Iranian
complicity in supporting the “insurgents” in Iraq.

President Bush obliged on Aug.
28:

“Recently, coalition forces
seized 240-millimeter rockets that had been manufactured in Iran
this year and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups
by Iranian agents. The attacks on our bases and our troops by
Iranian-supplied munitions have increased in the last few months…”

QED

Recent U.S. actions, like arresting
Iranian officials in Iraq-eight were abruptly kidnapped and held
briefly in Baghdad on Aug. 28, the day Bush addressed the American
Legion-suggest an intention to provoke Iran into some kind of
action that would justify U.S. “retaliation.” The
evolving rhetoric suggests that the most likely immediate targets
at this point would be training facilities inside Iran-some twenty
targets that are within range of U.S. cruise missiles already
in place.

Iranian retaliation would be
inevitable, and escalation very likely. It strikes me as shamelessly
ironic that the likes of our current ambassador at the U.N.,
Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the architects of U.S. policy toward
the area, are now warning publicly that the current upheaval
in the Middle East could bring another world war.

The Public
Buildup

Col. Pat Lang (USA, ret.),
as usual, puts it succinctly:

“Careful attention to
the content of the chatter on the 24/7 news channels reveals
a willingness to accept the idea that it is not possible to resolve
differences with Iran through diplomacy. Network anchors are
increasingly accepting or voicing such views. Are we supposed
to believe that this is serendipitous?”

And not only that. It is as
if Scooter Libby were back writing lead editorials for the
Washington Post
, the Pravda of this administration.
The Post’s lead editorial on Aug. 21 regurgitated the
allegations that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is “supplying
the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers
in Iraq;” that it is “waging war against the United
States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.”
Designating Iran a “specially designated global terrorist”
organization, said the Post, “seems to be the least
the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number
of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq.”

As for the news side of the
Post
, which is widely perceived as a bit freer from White
House influence, its writers are hardly immune. For example,
they know how many times the draft National Intelligence Estimate
on Iran’s nuclear program has been sent back for redrafting…and
they know why. Have they been told not to write the story?

For good measure, the indomitable
arch-neocon James Woolsey has again entered the fray. He was
trotted out on August 14 to tell Lou Dobbs that the US may have
no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons
program. Woolsey, who has described himself as the “anchor
of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs,” knows what will scare. To Dobbs: “I’m
afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years;
they [Iran] could have the bomb.”

As for what Bush is telling
his counterparts among our allies, reporting on his recent meeting
with French President Nicolas Sarkozy are disquieting, to say
the least. Reports circulating in European foreign ministries
indicate that Sarkozy came away convinced that Bush “is
serious about bombing Iran’s secret nuclear facilities,”
according to well-connected journalist Arnauld De Borchgrave.

It Is Up
To US

Air strikes on Iran seem inevitable,
unless
grassroots America can arrange a backbone transplant
for Congress. The House needs to begin impeachment proceedings
without delay. Why? Well, there’s the Constitution of the United
States, for one thing. For another, the initiation of impeachment
proceedings might well give our senior military leaders pause.
Do they really want to precipitate a wider war and risk destroying
much of what is left of our armed forces for the likes of Bush
and Cheney? Is another star on the shoulder worth THAT?

The deterioration of the U.S.
position in Iraq; the perceived need for a scapegoat; the knee-jerk
deference given to Israel’s myopic and ultimately self-defeating
security policy; and the fact that time is running out for the
Bush/Cheney administration to end Iran’s nuclear program-together
make for a very volatile mix.

So, on Tuesday let’s put away
the lawn chairs and roll up our sleeves. Let’s remember all
that has already happened since Labor Day five years ago.

There is very little time to
exercise our rights as citizens and stop this madness. At a
similarly critical juncture, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
typically direct. I find his words a challenge to us today:

“There is such a thing
as being too late…. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked,
and dejected with lost opportunity…. Over the bleached bones
of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too
late.’”

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990
and Robert Gates’ branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now
serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial
Crusades
, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com

A shorter version of this article
appeared originally on Consortiumnews.com

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Plumbing boss charged Pentagon $1m for two washers

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 3:31 pm


Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Friday August 17, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.
The Pentagon was billed over $20m in a 10-year period. Photograph: Angela Stafford/US air force/AP
 

Plumbers
are notorious for excessive bills. But none has come even remotely
close to matching an extravagant claim by a South Carolina firm: almost
$1m (£500,000) for two metal washers worth 19c each.

Charlene
Corley, 47, co-owner of the plumbing and electrical firm C&D
Distributors, who supplied parts to the military, is awaiting sentence
after pleading guilty yesterday to defrauding the Pentagon. She faces
20 years in jail.

The most expensive washers in history were part
of $20.5m the company stole from the Pentagon over the last 10 years.
The company shipped plumbing and electrical parts to US bases round the
world, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

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FOX hacks FARK?

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 3:09 pm

FOX hacks FARK?

First Wikipedia and now this….Slashdot has some info…Drew Curtis believes FOX hacked him…

The first rule of hacking, after all, is “Don’t get caught.” And Fox newsman Darrell Phillipsmay have broken that rule, says Drew Curtis. Curtis, left, is the founder of Fark.com, a thoroughly juvenile, and entertaining, social news site where users pick the headlines. Phillips, to his right, is the new media manager at WHBQ Fox13, a News Corp.-owned TV station in Memphis, Tenn. And Curtis claims to have assembled all-but-conclusive electronic evidence that Phillips has tried to hack into Fark’s servers, potentially breaking several laws…read on

 candl.jpg

Filed Under: Scandals, Fox News

Was the DOJ Kept in the Dark About Key Aspects of the NSA Program?

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 2:58 pm

katrina-anniversary-flag-for-nola.jpg

The Anonymous Liberal……GETTING IT DONE

Was the DOJ Kept in the Dark About Key Aspects of the NSA Program?

In response to a request from Congress, FBI Director Robert Mueller has turned over
his personal notes from the days leading up to and following the
showdown in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004. Think Progress has a
copy.

Despite
the many redactions, there are still a few noteworthy items. First,
Mueller repeatedly refers simply to “the program,” without any
additional adjectives or modifiers. For example, on the night of the
hospital showdown, he writes:

Called by DAG while at
restaurant with wife and daughter. He is at AG’s hospital with
Goldsmith and Philbin. Tells me Card and J. Gonzales are on the way to
hospital to see the AG, but that AG is in no condition to see them,
much less make decision to authorize continuation of the program.

Mueller’s
use of the phrase “the program” (particularly considered alongside his
testimony and statements by others in the know) strongly suggests that
there was only one NSA program and that the dissent within the DOJ was
about that program. In other words, Mueller’s notes are further
evidence that Alberto Gonzales lied to Congress in his testimony.

MORE AT The Anonymous Liberal

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Widening War, and the End of the World You’ve Known

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 2:48 pm

The formal declaration:

US President George W Bush has warned Iran to stop supporting the militants fighting against the US in Iraq.In a speech to US war veterans in Reno, Nevada, Mr Bush renewed charges that Tehran has provided training and weapons for extremists in Iraq.

“The Iranian regime must halt these actions,” he said.

In his speech to the American Legion, Mr Bush hit back, accusing Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of funding and arming insurgents in Iraq.

And he said Iran’s leaders could not avoid some responsibility for attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.

“I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities,” he said.

The BBC’s Justin Webb, in Washington, says this looks like a conscious effort by the White House to elevate the tension between Washington and Tehran to a new level.

Such an effort might be designed to avoid the need for armed conflict or might equally be an effort to bring that conflict about, our correspondent says.

Shortly after Mr Bush made his address, Iranian officials reported that seven Iranians working for the country’s electricity ministry had been arrested in Baghdad by US forces.

20070807_mother_weeping_over_dead_child_baqubah_bombing3.jpgNot that the Democrats will do a damned thing to stop it since they’re fully on board. And no one else will try to stop it, either.

Just thought you’d want to know.

Arthur Silber

DIEBOLD SCRUBS NAME, WIKIPEDIA ENTRY

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 2:11 pm

Diebold: New name, same bad voting machines!

Machinist“Diebold
Election Systems” are three words synonymous with the aggressive
pursuit of failure. Not only did the company badly implement a dubious
concept — unverifiable electronic touch-screen voting machines — but
it did so with determined flourish, letting its code and internal
communication leak out onto the Web;
employing as a chief executive a man who declared he was “committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year”; abusing copyright law in an attempt to quell its critics; and, among many other caught-red-handed indiscretions, deleting criticism of itself from Wikipedia.

No wonder, then, that Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal
a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!

Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling
incompetence, please say “Premier” rather than “Diebold,” because
Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems.

The name change, the company says in a press release,
“signals a new beginning” and a “fresh identity” — though in the same
release the firm concedes that it will still be making and pushing the
same sorry voting machines (machines that, as Princeton computer
scientist Edward Felten and his colleagues showed last year, are actually vulnerable to a virus-based attack).

Why the name change? Well, Diebold’s got a lot of other businesses
– it makes ATMs and security systems for health firms and for the
government, and the election subsidiary has always been something of a
sideline. Lately it became an embarrassing sideline, dragging down
Diebold’s good name. That’s why, a couple of years ago, Diebold moved
to sell the unit. Shockingly, it found no takers.

Now, along with the name change, the parent company (which will
remain Diebold) is creating an autonomous corporate structure for
Premier, further distancing itself from ineptitude. David Byrd, who
headed Diebold Election Systems, will run Premier.

The company also drastically lowered its earnings expectations for
the year. Previously Diebold expected to make more than $185 million on
elections in 2007; now, due to the “rapidly changing political
environment” surrounding voting technology (read: politicians across
the land realizing that running elections on such systems is
maddeningly stupid), Diebold says sales will drop by about $120 million.

[Flickr photo by joebeone.]

Wired News’ John Borland had quite a fun story yesterday about a new tool to track down folks who are anonymously editing articles in Wikipedia.

A CalTech grad student named Virgil Griffith developed the tool, called Wikipedia Scanner, after hearing about congressional aides who were fixing their bosses’ WP entries. The service is a database of all anonymous edits to Wikipedia organized according to the Internet addresses of well-known groups: Want to know what people with Democratic National Committee IP addresses were doing on Wikipedia? Go here. (Among other things, such folks were calling Rush Limbaugh a “racist” and a “jerkoff.”) Or check out the Republican Party’s record, including this alteration of the U.S. “occupying” Iraq to our “liberating” it. [Note: Direct links to Wikipedia Scanner don't seem to be working right now; that's likely because everyone online is checking it out.]

Among the many other organizations whose edits you can track are Diebold, the faulty voting-machine company; Wal-Mart; ExxonMobil; Fox News; The New York Times; and Al Jazeera.

Wired’s Threat Level blog is running a search for the most shameful self-promoting Wikipedia edits uncovered by the new tool. The leading contender, now, is Diebold’s deletions of criticisms of its voting technology — but if you unearth any yourself, be sure to let me (and Threat Level) know.

Correction: I originally called Griffith an MIT grad student; he is actually a student at Cal Tech.

MEDIA BLOODHOUND BUSTS ABC NEWS AND THE TIME SWAMP ON KUCINICH TOMFOOLERY

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 31, 2007 at 1:18 pm

Special Report:
WashPo and Time Help ABC Bury Treatment of Kucinich

Photo

Following last Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate on ABC News’ This Week
with George Stephanopoulos, Dennis Kucinich’s campaign asked ABC News
to address issues it had with treatment Rep. Kucinich (D-Ohio) received
both
during the debate and afterward in ABC’s online coverage. In an email
sent out
to supporters on Wednesday, the campaign said it “submitted objections
and
inquiries to ABC News representatives on
Monday and Tuesday. ABC News representatives have failed to respond -
or even acknowledge – those objections and inquiries.” I confirmed with
the Kucinich campaign yesterday that it has subsequently been forwarded
the same response ABC News Executive Director Andrea Jones sent to The
Washington Post and Time magazine. 

ABC News representatives felt it necessary to answer the Kucinich campaign’s objections when Time magazine’s National Political Correspondent Karen Tumulty queried them. Writing on the Time
blog Swampland, Tumulty initially says of the Kucinich team’s issues
with ABC’s treatment (which included Kucinich not having a chance to
speak until 28 minutes into the debate), “These all seemed like fair
complaints to me, so I asked ABC News to respond.” Then Tumulty says,
“In an e-mail, Executive Director Andrea Jones answered him [Kucinich]
point by point.”

While I give Tumulty credit for contacting ABC News, her investigative journalism unfortunately ends there. Once
she receives the email from Jones, Tumulty slips into stenography
mode. Jones’ “point by point” response to the Kucinich campaign’s complaints does not in itself
exculpate or dispel any of ABC’s wrongdoing. Tumulty fails to assess the
accuracy and logic of Jones’ answers.

First, just so we’re all up to speed, here are the issues (an
aggregate of the thousands of complaints received during and after
ABC’s debate coverage) that the Kucinich campaign asked ABC News to
address:

* Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a “Politics Page” photo of the candidates.

* Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a
commanding lead in ABC’s own on-line “Who won the Democratic debate”
survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.

* ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.

* After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich
winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the
original survey with a second survey asking “Who is winning the
Democratic debate?”

* During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator
Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday
morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in
this second survey.

* Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.

* AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday
Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an
opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos
until 28 minutes into the program.

Now back to Tumulty commenting on Jones’ response [emphasis below is mine]:

This gist of her answer is this: She denies that Kucinich was cropped
out of any photo, noting that “there are 20 photos live on the ABC News
website, Mr. Kucinich is in a number of them and there is even one of
him and his wife. He is one of 6 candidates who got his own photo in
the slide show. As for the images, clearly nothing was cropped, the
image in question was shot by Charlie Neibergall of the AP not ABC.

FALSE. Had Tumulty – Time
magazine’s National Political Correspondent and former member of the White House
press corps – simply located the original AP photo
(which, at most, should’ve taken a few minutes online), she would’ve
found Kucinich in it and realized the following version ABC News
prominently displayed online after the debate had, indeed, been cropped:

Abc_website_2
So Jones
either lied when she said “clearly nothing was cropped” or was
misinformed by someone on her staff. Since Tumulty seems to think her
job ends with receiving answers from an ABC News spokesperson, she
doesn’t question the veracity of Jones’ assertion, which is clearly false.

Adding to its duplicity, ABC News has now completely replaced the original
photograph in question. If you click on the link in Tumulty’s post
(which is supposed to bring you to that photo), you are now taken to a wholly different shot that includes Dennis Kucinich and is currently the default debate photo sitting on the ABC News website.

So, in case your keeping score, first ABC
disappears Kucinich from a photo by cropping him out, then denies it,
then later disappears the original cropped photo, replacing it with a
separate photo that includes Kucinich, making it appear as if nothing improper ever occurred.

Eat your heart out Fox News.

Tumulty does later post an update after she manages (she doesn’t say
how) to find her way to a page on the site Pinkraygun that shows the
original AP photo and the doctored ABC
photo side-by-side. This compels Tumulty to gingerly concede “there
does in
fact appear to have been some cropping.” First, it was either cropped
or it wasn’t. “Some cropping” gives the impression a whole
cropping didn’t occur, which it did. Second, if there was “some
cropping,” then logic follows that Jones either did some lying or some misinforming. That, in turn, means Tumulty should be doing some follow up with Jones. She does not. Third, a question for Tumulty and her editors over at Time: How
did you fail to bring this simple fact to light yourselves? You had
three main points to investigate – whether a photo was cropped, whether
a poll was manipulated and whether Kucinich was allotted a fair amount
of time. Arguably, the cropped photo was the most simple and quick of the three to
verify. Did you attempt to find this on your own? If so, what’s your
excuse for initially failing to obtain such readily available evidence? If not,
what’s your excuse for failing to pursue this evidence in the first place?

On to the poll(s):

She notes that the poll was and is live on ABC’s website. (When I checked it, Kucinich was
still winning, with Barack Obama a distant second.) She also notes the
poll’s disclaimer that it is “not a scientific survey,” which seems
like a decent reason for ABC not to treat it as a news story.

MISLEADING.
Jones’ statement circumvents the facts and the original thrust of the
Kucinich campaign’s complaint about the poll. Tumulty’s unobtrusive
reporting gives the impression the poll has always been up on ABC’s
site in clear view and at no time were changes made to it.

FACT: The original poll, prominently displayed, asked, “Who won the
Democratic debate?” Once Kucinich jumped ahead, this poll was scuttled
from its prominence on the site. As it became clear Kucinich was
trouncing his competition, ABC just happened to decide to post a new
poll asking, “Who is winning the
Democratic debate?” As the Kucinich campaign (and Tumulty) correctly cited, Barack
Obama had an early lead in this second poll; but when Kucinich pulled
ahead by a wide margin, ABC then dropped this poll from prominence,
too. (Because the Kucinich camp had difficulty finding the poll after
ABC moved it, they questioned whether ABC may have buried the poll “or
killed it entirely.” It appears ABC didn’t kill it entirely; they just
made it difficult for users work to find – which, as anyone who
knows anything about online usability, is nearly tantamount to killing
it).

Though of lesser importantance (due to the current unverifiable
nature of online polls), Tumulty still manages to mishandle Jones’
explanation of why ABC News didn’t report the poll results. This issue
is about nuance and context. Not exactly Tumulty’s and the
mainstream media’s forte.

Yes, the online poll is “not a scientific
survey”* (incidentally, it’s verboten to mention in the mainstream media that
phone surveys, many of which include leading and misleading questions,
are often far from scientific accountings as well). But since news outlets
(possibly ABC among them) have certainly noted some online polls in the
past but in context of their scientific shortcomings, and considering
ABC’s shenanigans concerning Kucinich, it seems either intellectually
dishonest or misinformed for Tumulty to give Jones the free pass “which
seems
like a decent reason for ABC not to treat it as a news story.”

Does Tumulty honestly believe it’s “a decent reason”? Or does she merely believe it’s decent enough because
the target of the question is ABC News and the questioner is the
not-so-”viable” candidate Kucinich?

I should note here that
Tumulty frames her post with the opening line: “Should the networks and
interest groups that have been sponsoring the
seemingly endless series of debates and candidate forums start limiting
their invitations to those contenders who seem, by whatever definition,
‘viable’?” She then claims to like “the idea of including candidates
from the second tier–and beyond–in these settings,” saying, “You
never know when lightning may strike, and how is an underfinanced
long-shot going to get a breakout moment otherwise?” and that
“candidates such as Dennis Kucinich often are the only ones giving
voice
to ideas–like single-payer health care and a quick withdrawal from
Iraq–that have not been embraced by the leading candidates, despite
having significant support among the party rank and file.” Yet Tumulty
seems incapable of embracing such basic tenets of a democratic
political process; instead, she reverts to entrenched media establishment dogma
to round out her post’s frame: “Still, having decided to include them, should
they be given the same amount of time and attention as the leaders in
the race?”

This is the journalist we’re going to trust to get to the bottom of
whether ABC News treated Dennis Kucinich fairly?

Finally, there’s ABC’s defense of Kucinich
receiving so little airtime during the debate
and, once again, Tumulty’s stenographic framing and conclusions [emphasis below is mine]:

As for Kucinich’s complaint that he was not given a question in the
first 28 minutes of the debate, Jones notes: “He may not have been
addressed in the first 28 minutes, but he was the only candidate
questioned in his own segment on This Week with George Stephanopoulos,
two weeks in a row, that appearance is posted online
as well. Also. Mr. Kucinich was the only candidate to address
healthcare in Sunday’s debate, and that response was immediately
clipped and posted on the ABC News website.” Her bottom line: “After
back to back appearances on ABC News’ This Week with George
Stephanopoulos, clearly their claim is not substantiated by the facts
nor by the extensive coverage of his candidacy on the ABCNews.com
website
.”

First,
Jones’ “bottom line” skirts the issue at hand: she concedes ABC’s
debate moderators failed to address Kucinich in the first 28 minutes
of the forum (though she frames her concession with the words “he may
not have been addressed” rather than “he wasn’t addressed,”
incorporating shades of doubt, as if this were somehow open to
interpretation), but claims that ABC News has provided Kucinich much
airtime overall.

Yet here’s the real bottom line: In any equitable debate, no
candidate should have to remain
silent for the first 28 minutes. Period. This is not only unfair to
Congressman Kucinich, but to all American citizens
for whom news outlets such as ABC are supposed to be informing their
decision-making process instead of acting to unduly manipulate
it.

What’s more, Jones’ claim that Kucinich “was the only candidate
questioned in his own segment on This Week with George Stephanopoulos,
two weeks in a row” and that he had “back to back appearances” on this
program is blatantly misleading. (I must admit this one initially
slipped by me until, while fact-checking another element of this story,
I stumbled across the truth in a conversation I had yesterday with
Kucinich campaign spokesman Andy Juniewicz. More on that below).

FACT: Kucinich has made one appearance on This Week with
George Stephanopoulos. Jones has the audacity to count Kucinich’s
appearance at this ABC debate as his second appearance on the show in
which – breathing even new life into the word “truthiness” – he’s
received “his own segment.” Can Jones explain how a candidate receives
his own segment during a debate? What in the world is she talking
about?   

Moreover, in a statistical analysis
of the debate performed by USA
Election Polls, Kucinich was given less time to speak than any
candidate with the
exception of former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. Yet it gets worse: in
the critical first half of the debate (the time when viewers tend to be
most engaged), Kucinich received just 3.4% of airtime, the least of all
the candidates. To put
that in context, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama
combined to chew up 60.4% of airtime during the first half of the
debate.

USA Election Polls also points out:

In fact, even Chris Dodd got more air time than Kucinich which is
ridiculous because Kucinich is beating Dodd in the majority of state
polls. So if the emphasis was on giving the most time to the leaders in
the polls, then what was Dodd doing speaking more than Kucinich?

Nevertheless, Tumulty and Time
magazine show no interest in such further incontrovertible proof of the
unfair treatment to which ABC News subjected Congressman Kucinich.
Instead, Tumulty
follows up Jones’ “bottom line” by closing her post with these thoughts:

I honestly don’t know what the right balance is here when you are
dealing with such a large field of candidates, most of whom don’t have
a prayer of winning. What do you think? Was Kucinich treated unfairly?
Or should he be included at all?*

*Not a scientific survey.

Cute. But parting shot at the Kucinich campaign aside, shouldn’t Tumulty and Time
magazine provide the facts in a piece titled “Dennis Kucinich vs. ABC
News”? Instead, we’re presented with a slanted, inaccurate, misleading and
ill-researched breakdown of events that ends with Tumulty floating the question of
whether Kucinich should be allowed to attend these debates in the first
place.

And sadly, thanks to The Washington Post, that wasn’t the worst coverage of the Kucinich-ABC incident by a major news outlet.

In a post titled “Kucinich Mad at
ABC” over at The Washington Post blog
The Sleuth (oh the irony), journalist Mary Ann Akers (a former reporter for The Washington Times as well as NPR)
doesn’t try to hide her contempt for Kucinich while barreling ahead
without concern for facts or fact-checking.

She opens her post:

Don’t expect to see too many more appearances by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) on ABC News.

An apparently irate Kucinich sent out a letter to supporters
Wednesday accusing the network of ignoring him in the Democratic
presidential debate on Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

So
since Kucinich – along with, and spurred on by, thousands of other
American citizens – objected to ABC’s handling of the debate, should
we expect, and accept, that ABC has a right to actively work to further
marginalize him?

If
that’s Akers’ frame, you can guess where this is going.

Also, because she
fails to cite any source, we must assume her characterization of
Kucinich as “apparently irate” hinges not on fact but projection. And as it turns out, that is exactly the case.

Yesterday, when I contacted Kucinich campaign spokesman Andy Juniewicz, he addressed Akers unfounded assertion:

“Congressman Kucinich was not irate. Nothing in the email
communication expressed anger,” said the soft-spoken Juniewicz. “It was
just a delineation of what we were
hearing from thousands of people who contacted us, many of whom weren’t
even Kucinich supporters. We asked ABC to respond to the questions they
raised.” When I asked if Akers or someone else at The Washington Post
had spoken with anyone in his campaign about this purported
demonstration of anger, Mr. Juniewicz said, “No. No one.”

Note to Akers and The Washington Post: Before the Internets, there
was the telephone. Some news outlets, though fewer and fewer these
days, still find it handy for checking facts.

Moving right along, Akers then runs through roughly the same terrain on which Tumulty
trodded, but her condescension and bias is profligate and shameless.

Among Kucinich’s charges: he was “deliberately cropped out” of photos;
after he took a “commanding lead” in ABC’s online survey, the survey
was mysteriously “dropped from prominence on the web site”; and “as
every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday presidential forum is
aware” Kucinich was not asked a question until 28 minutes into the
program. (Everyone clocked that at 28 minutes, right?)

“Among
Kucinich’s charges” blunts the fact they’ve all been proven to be true
(something Akers apparently has no interest in uncovering or
presenting). Use of the word “mysteriously” not only mocks the
assertion that the poll was buried but conjures the mainstream media’s
favorite attack on uncomfortable truths: it must be the work of those
crazy conspiracy theorists (Akers also disregards the full story -
previously addressed above in this post – behind ABC’s bizarre and
devious manipulation of the debate’s polls). “Everyone
clocked that at 28
minutes, right?” is not only disparaging but gives the ludicrous
impression the Kucinich campaign
is contending everyone noticed the precise number of minutes
Kucinich had been shut out of the debate; rather, the campaign was
noting a simple fact: everyone watching certainly saw that Kucinich
didn’t get a chance to speak for an usually long duration of time.

We deserve more than such absurd manufactured nitpicking from
Akers and The Washington Post. Rather than chasing their tail to
portray Kucinich in a poor light, think of how much easier it would’ve
been to just present the facts. And to search them out.

But hey, according to Akers, “ABC News Executive Director Andrea Jones
addressed every charge Kucinich made.” Incredibly, Akers not only
embraces Jones’ answers without question, but also unwittingly contradicts
Jones’ claim that the photo in question was never cropped by providing
the ABC debate photo below her post. In other words, the AP photo that
ABC undeniably cropped is sitting below Akers’ post in which she
contends no cropping occurred. Again, all one needs to do is locate the original AP photo. And presto! Cropping mystery solved.

Again, too, Jones is either lying or misinformed, and Akers and The
Washington Post (along with Tumulty and Time magazine) are complicit in perpetuating this falsehood.

Escaping Akers’ notice or range of journalistic concern as well is
ABC’s wholesale swapping out of its cropped photo with an altogether
new one in which Kucinich appears alongside the rest of the Democratic
candidates. ABC News, in effect, has worked diligently to cover up this
despicable act, one worthy of Fox News and Orwell’s vision
of totalitarian media manipulation.

In their coverage of the Kucinich-ABC incident, Time
magazine’s Tumulty and The Washington Post’s Akers wind up
crystallizing the extent to which big media rigs the game against a
candidate like Congressman Kucinich. In defense of sound and equitable
journalism, it is incumbent upon both Time
magazine and The Washington Post to correct the record on ABC’s
actions, and the rest of the news media to hold ABC News accountable
for this disgraceful performance.

No news organization – especially one charged with facilitating part
of our electoral process – should be able to so grossly transgress such
basic journalistic standards and not be held to account. This isn’t a
partisan issue. Congressman Kucinich’s chances of capturing the
Democratic nomination are irrelevant to this matter.

This speaks to the viability of our national press.

At a time when the mainstream media is struggling to retain and
rebuild both its credibility and coveted market share among Americans,
it ignores ABC’s actions at its own peril.

UPDATE: I’ll be away until after Labor Day weekend
(wedding – not mine), but I first wanted to say thanks for your
additional insights, passionate (yet substantive) comments and very
kind words. To first-time readers, welcome! To everyone, by all means,
keep the conversation going while I’m away. And if you want to do something else to keep (or turn up) the heat on ABC, request that this story does not stop here. Don’t
just contact ABC or other mainstream news outlets – contact Raw Story,
Salon, Think Progress, Media Matters, FAIR.org and Truthout, and
respectfully request they cover this story. Along with Crooks and
Liars, these major alternative news outlets get the mainstream’s
attention and greatly increase the chances of forcing the mainstream’s
hand. More than anything, ABC wants this story to drop right down the
memory hole: it’s up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Colonel Is Acquitted in Abu Ghraib Abuse Case

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 3:38 pm


Colonel Is Acquitted in Abu Ghraib Abuse Case

August 29, 2007

A military jury acquitted an
Army officer on Tuesday of charges that he failed to properly train and
supervise enlisted soldiers involved in detainee interrogations in 2003
at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment.

In the court-martial at Fort Meade, Md., the jury of nine Army
colonels and a brigadier general found the officer, Lt. Col. Steven L.
Jordan, guilty of only one lesser offense, that of disobeying an order
to refrain from discussing the case.

Colonel Jordan, 51, was the only officer to stand trial on charges
related to the detainee-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, which led to
prolonged investigations and charges against several soldiers.

Colonel Jordan’s acquittal on most charges means that no
officers have been found criminally responsible for the abuses at the
prison. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the military intelligence officer who
ran Abu Ghraib, was punished administratively by senior Army commanders
for improperly allowing military dogs to be used during interrogations
to frighten detainees. Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general who was
the military police commander at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and
demoted.

During Colonel Jordan’s seven-day court-martial, Army lawyers
representing him argued that he was not responsible for training and
supervising the military police soldiers who abused detainees from
mid-September to late December 2004. Rather, his lawyers argued, he
served as a manager of sorts at the prison, focused on making living
and working conditions at Abu Ghraib, a notorious complex that Saddam Hussein’s government had used to torture its enemies, as accommodating as possible.

The jury members apparently were not convinced by the conclusions
of two generals who had investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal and found
that Colonel Jordan’s “tacit approval” of violent
techniques by the military police during an episode in November 2003
was “the causative factor that set the stage for the abuses that
followed for days afterward.”

For his conviction of disobeying an order to not discuss his case,
Colonel Jordan, currently on active duty with the Intelligence and
Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., faces a maximum of five years in
prison. The jury is expected to deliver a sentence on Wednesday
morning.

His lawyers, Capt. Samuel Spitzberg and Maj. Kris Poppe, declined to comment on Tuesday.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Colonel Jordan
expressed frustration at the charges against him and said he believed
that they were politically motivated, to allow the Army to assert that
it had tried at least one officer on criminal charges in connection
with the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch,
said the verdict was “a disappointment but not a surprise,”
given the meager case he said prosecutors presented to the jury of
senior officers. Mr. Sifton said prosecutors completely failed to
muster evidence, including military case law, to show that Colonel
Jordan, even if he did not participate in or know about abuses, was, as
a senior officer at Abu Ghraib, responsible for abuses that occurred
there.

“The prosecutors did not seem to understand the concept of
command responsibility as a legal issue,” Mr. Sifton said, adding
that other military officers, not just Colonel Jordan, should have been
brought to trial for their roles in commanding detention operations in
which detainees were abused.

New York Times

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“They wanted them poor n***ers out of there.”

In Uncategorized on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 2:52 pm

“They wanted them poor n***ers out of there.”
New Orleans two years after

by Greg Palast

Thurs August 30

“They wanted them poor ni***rs out of there and they ain’t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that’s just the bottom line.”

It wasn’t a pretty statement.  But I wasn’t looking for pretty.  I’d taken my investigative team to New Orleans to meet with Malik Rahim.  Pretty isn’t Malik’s concern.

We needed an answer to a weird, puzzling and horrific discovery.  Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes.  But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing “Blackwater” badges:  “Try to go into your home and we’ll arrest you.”

These aren’t just any homes.  They are the public housing projects of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others.  But unlike the cinder block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the tony French Quarter.

Raised up on high ground, with floors and walls of concrete, they were some of the only houses left salvageable after the Katrina flood.

Yet, two years later, there’s still bars on the windows, the doors are welded shut and the residents banned from returning.  On the first anniversary of the flood, we were filming this odd scene when I saw a woman on the sidewalk, sobbing.  Night was falling.  What was wrong?

“They just messing all over us.  Putting me out our own house.  We come to go back to our own home and when we get there they got the police there putting us out.  Oh, no, this is not right.  I’m coming here from Texas seeing if I can get my house back.  But they said they ain’t letting nobody in.  But where we gonna go at?”

Idiot me, I asked, “Where are you going to go tonight?”

“That’s what I want to know, Mister.  Where I’m going to go – me and my kids?”

With the help of Patricia Thomas, a Lafitte resident, we broke into an apartment.  The place was gorgeous.  The cereal boxes still dry.  This was Patricia’s home.  But we decided to get out before we got busted.

I wasn’t naïve.  I had a good idea what this scam was all about:  89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security’s trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries.  Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans.  Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate.  But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it.

Malik’s organization, Common Ground, wouldn’t wait for permission from the federal and local commissars to help folks return.  They organized takeovers of public housing by the residents.  And, in the face of threats and official displeasure, restored 350 apartments in a destroyed private development on the high ground across the Mississippi in the ward called, “Algiers.”  The tenants rebuilt their own homes with their own sweat and their own scraps of cash based on a promise of the landlords to sell Common Ground the property in return for restoring it.

Why, I asked Malik, was there this strange lock-out from public housing?

Malik shook his dreds.  “They didn’t want to open it up. They wanted them closed. They wanted them poor niggers out of there.”

For Malik, the emphasis is on “poor.”  The racial politics of the Deep South is as ugly as it is in Philadelphia, Pa.  But the New Orleans city establishment has no problem with Black folk per se.  After all, Mayor Ray Nagin’s parents are African-American.

It’s the Black survivors without the cash that are a problem.  So where New Orleans once stood, Mayor Nagin, in connivance with a Bush regime more than happy to keep a quarter million poor folk (i.e. Democrats) out of this swing state, is creating a new city:  a tourist town with a French Quarter, loose-spending drunks, hot-sheets hotels and a few Black people to perform the modern version of minstrel shows.

Malik explained, “It’s two cities. You know? There’s the city for the white and the rich. And there’s another city for the poor and Blacks. You know, the city that’s for the white and rich has recovered. They had a Jazz Fest. They had a Mardi Gras. They’re going to have the Saints playing for those who have recovered. But for those who haven’t recovered, there’s nothing.”

So where are they now?  The sobbing woman and her kids are gone:  back to Texas, or wherever.  But they will not be allowed back into Lafitte.  Ever.

And Patricia Thomas?  The middle-aged woman, worked sweeping up the vomit and beer each morning at a French Quarter karioke joint. Not much pay, no health insurance, of course.  She died since we filmed her – in a city bereft of health care.  New Orleans has closed all its public hospitals but for one “charity” make-shift emergency ward in an abandoned department store.

And the one bright star, Malik’s housing project?  The tenants’ work was done this past December.  By Christmastime, they received their eviction notices – and all were carried out of their rebuilt homes by marshals right after the New Year, including a paraplegic resident who’d lived in the Algiers building for decades.

Hurricane recovery is class war by other means.  And in this war of the powerful against the powerless, Mr. Bush can rightly land his fighter plane in Louisiana and declare that, unlike the war in Iraq, it is, indeed, “Mission Accomplished.”

***************

This report is based on Greg Palast’s film, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans.

IPHONE BILL-52 PAGES IN A BOX

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 5:05 am

Hilly Kristal, a Rock Midwife, Is Dead at 75

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 4:44 am

logoprinter.gif

Hilly Kristal, a Rock Midwife, Is Dead at 75

29cnd_cbgb190.jpg

Hilly Kristal, who founded
CBGB, the Bowery bar that became the cradle of punk and art-rock in New
York in the 1970s and served as the inspiration for musician-friendly
rock dives throughout the world, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was
75.

His son, Mark Dana Kristal, told The Associated Press that the cause was complications from lung cancer.

From its opening in late 1973, when Mr. Kristal, a lover of acoustic
music, gave the club its name, an abbreviation of the kinds of music he
originally intended to feature there — country, bluegrass and
blues — until a dispute with its landlord forced the club to
close last October, CBGB presented thousands of bands within its
eternally crumbling, flyer-encrusted walls.

Most famously, it served as the incubator for the diverse
underground scene of New York in the 1970s and early ’80s, with
acts like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads
and Sonic Youth playing some of their earliest and most important
concerts there, at a time when there were few outlets in the city for
innovative rock music.

“There was no real venue in 1973 for people like us,”
Ms. Smith said today. “We didn’t fit into the cabarets or
the folk clubs. Hilly wanted the people that nobody else wanted. He
wanted us.”

Besides his son, Mr. Kristal is survived by a daughter, Lisa Kristal Burgman, and two grandchildren.

New York Times

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TPMmuckraker: RNC VOTER SHENANIGANS

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 4:40 am

What 83 year-old William Sidwell of Queen
City, Missouri found in his mailbox last week scared him. It was a
letter from the Republican National Committee, but it seemed to bear
grave news: “Our records show that you registered as a member of our
Party in Schuyler County, MO,” the letter said. “But a recent audit of your Party affiliation turned up some irregularities.”

Audit? Irregularities? Was he in trouble? Were they threatening him?
Sidwell went immediately to his ask his son, Dennis, a licensed public
accountant, for advice. You can see the letter, and the accompanying
“Voter Registration Verification and Audit Form,” right here. Particularly puzzling to the both of them, Dennis told me, is that his father is a life-long Democrat.

The letter, it turns out, is just a misleading pitch for a
contribution to the RNC — one of the “irregularities” cited in the
letter is that “I cannot find a record of you taking a single action in support of the Republican Party — not locally, not nationally!” A contribution, the letter suggests, would help set the record straight.

The letter is signed by Bill Steiner, the director of the RNC’s
Office of Strategic Information, a title Steiner assumed at the end of
July. His responsibilities “include managing the RNC’s national
voter file and Voter Vault, the committee’s highly touted
micro-targeting operation,” Roll Call reported last month. And indeed, the voter “audit” requests detailed information about the voter’s voting history and current opinions on the 2008 presidential race.

It’s unclear how many similar letters (tens of thousands? millions?)
have been sent by the RNC. The RNC did not respond to our requests for
comment.

The letter “appears to be in a gray area,” David Becker, Director of
People for the American Way’s Democracy Campaign and a former voting
rights attorney at the Justice Department, told me. “It could
potentially run afoul of the law if it led an eligible voter to believe
they’re no longer eligible to vote.” The letter, Becker said, “appears
designed to give that mistaken impression.”


Rick Hasen, a professor
specializing in election law at Loyola Law School, agreed that the
letter was potentially misleading but didn’t think it raised serious
legal issues: “It is true that some elderly people or others with
limited experience might perceive the letter as some kind of official
audit, complete with its statements about ‘irregularities,’” he told
me. “But I believe most people would view this for what it is: a
ham-handed fundraising letter, of the type sent out by both political
parties to rev up the base and get contributions.”

Karen Finney, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee,
disagreed. “We have sent requests for people to renew their support for
the party,” Finney said, but they’re “straightforward,” and don’t
include “these kind of scare tactics.” She said that the letter showed
that the RNC is “stooping to a level of desperation to try and hold on
to support and raise money.”

TPMmuckraker August 10, 2007

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STEVE BENEN ON: “HOW MANY U.S. ATTORNEYS WERE FIRED”

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 4:22 am

It’s been a little while, but
the last time we checked in with the purge scandal, about a month ago,
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the AG how many U.S. Attorneys
he’d fired during his tenure. He said he didn’t know.

After acknowledging the nine we know about from the purge, Gonzales
said, “I’m not aware, sitting here today, of any other U.S.
Attorney who was asked to leave — except there were some
instances people were asked to leave, quite frankly, because there was
legitimate cause.” (Given that he’d just named nine other
U.S. Attorneys who’d been fired, it sounded like he was conceding
that they’d been fired for illegitimate causes.)

He added, “Senator, there may have been others [fired
prosecutors]. I would be happy to get back to you with that kind of
information about who has left. But I don’t know the answer to
your question. But I can certainly find out.”

The good news is, Feinstein has finally heard back from the Justice Department. The bad news is, DoJ officials have decided not to cooperate with the request.

Crooks and Liars

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Montoya looking forward to racing with Villeneuve

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 4:08 am

gpx324.jpg

USATODAY.com

CHARLOTTE,
N.C. — Juan Pablo Montoya and Jacques Villeneuve once had to be
separated during a confrontation in Canada. But that was six years ago
and their relationship has steadily improved since the contentious
early days.

Now Montoya is eagerly awaiting
Villeneuve’s arrival into NASCAR. The 1997 world champion is following
Montoya’s path into stock cars, and spent Monday and Tuesday testing a
truck in Chicago.

“I think it’s nice to see
Jacques, and hopefully he does well,” Montoya said. “If I can help in
any way I will. He’s a nice guy.”

That’s a
far different tune from the one Montoya sang back in 2001, his first
season in F1. He had just moved up from CART onto the world stage – a
path Villeneuve had also taken en route to becoming one of F1’s biggest
stars.

The contempt between the former
Indianapolis 500 winners erupted at the 2001 Canadian Grand Prix, when
Villeneuve accused Montoya of blocking him on the track during
practice. Montoya countered that Villeneuve brake-checked him at a
chicane during the same session.

The
tension boiled over in a confrontation at the pre-race driver briefing,
when the two exchanged words and Villeneuve reportedly tried to grab
Montoya by the throat. The two were separated by an official, and F1
boss Bernie Ecclestone threatened both with a two-race suspension if
they didn’t learn to get along.

Both drivers now say those days are long behind them.

“We
had a hard time, I would say early in our careers, then we mellowed
down,” Villeneuve said Tuesday. “But off the track, outside of the car,
we always got along. Just there were a few high-spirited moments in car
on the track.”

Villeneuve announced his
entrance into NASCAR last week, when he said he’d test a truck at
Chicagoland Speedway for Bill Davis Racing. Davis said he’ll enter the
Canadian in the final seven Truck Series races of this season, the ARCA
race at Talladega Superspeedway and then the full Nextel Cup schedule
next year. Villeneuve also will drive in the remaining Car of Tomorrow
test sessions.

Montoya believes it will be a
difficult transition for Villeneuve, who has not raced since he was
fired from BMW-Sauber last summer.

“I think
it will take him a little bit of time,” Montoya said. “It’s going to
take him some testing, and it will depend on how much the team is
behind him. That will all really make a difference in how good he is
going to be.”

Montoya said he’s willing to
help Villeneuve and will seek him out when the two cross paths at a
race track. Coming from the same open wheel background and the same
former series, the two will have a unique bond when compared to the
other NASCAR drivers.

“There will be
something there,” Montoya said. “I don’t know how big or how small, but
we have a lot of things in common. Jacques is very cool, he’s changed a
lot since I first knew him. He’s like a kid. He’s always buying music.
I look forward to him getting here.”

Q: You are the star of ABC’s new show “NASCAR in Primetime.” How do you like it?

JPM:
“I think it’s pretty cool. But it’s weird, seeing yourself on TV all
day, and your personal life. But I think they did a really good job of
it. I think people have been really happy with it, and I think people
who didn’t know me are getting a chance to see who I really am.”

Q: Is it an accurate portrayal of you?

JPM: “Yeah, I think it is. There is no acting. I don’t know how to act even if I wanted to.”

Q: Has any of it surprised you?

JPM:
“It’s interesting to see the Mark Martin side of the story, as well as
the two episodes of Johnny Sauter. It was interesting how Sauter uses
the “Rocky” movie to pump himself up before the race. I was thinking
that’s a little different, but if it works for him … “

Q: Well, what do you use to pump you up before a race?

JPM: “I just get in and drive the car.”

Q:
So, it’s been a few weeks since we’ve caught up and I missed all the
fireworks with you and Kevin Harvick. What’s going on there? You guys
had a bit of a run-in at Watkins Glen.

JPM:
“From my side, nothing. Really nothing. When they asked me about a few
days later, I didn’t even remember. I am being serious. I was doing
something for the team and they said I had two DNFs, and I said, ‘No,
my only DNF was in Michigan. And they said ‘We didn’t want to bring it
up, but Watkins Glen.’ I was like ‘Oh, yeah!’ But I don’t really care.”

Q: So you have not talked to Kevin since Watkins Glen?

JPM: “Nope.”

Q: Do you have any desire to speak to him?

JPM: “No. I think the day he sees that he screwed up, and has the (guts) to apologize, then we will talk.”

Q: He was talking about you on his team radio …

JPM: “Do I care?”

Q: Well, my question was, do you think you are in his head?

JPM:
“Next question. Not going there. Look, I’ll tell you, I think his
reaction in Watkins Glen is because he’s been having (bad) races in Cup
and this was the frustration of him having bad results, one after the
other.”

Q: Some people say that his reaction
was a buildup of frustration against you, and the things you have done
this season on the track?

JPM: “No, no, no. The only time he and I got together before that was Daytona.”

Q: No, not him and you, but others. Incidents you’ve had with others.

JPM:
“His teammates, you mean? I don’t care. And if he’s thinking about what
happens with anybody or everybody else out here, then everybody should
have problems with him. I shouldn’t be saying any of this. No more.”

Q: Are you NASCAR’s new Bad Boy?

JPM:
“No, I’ve been a ‘Bad Boy’ in too many series. People have always
looked at me like the Bad Boy and I don’t want to be that. I don’t even
look at myself as a Bad Boy. But if I think people need to respect me,
I am going to stand up for myself. That’s the best way I can put it.”

The Associated Press

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JACQUES VILLENEUVE JOINS NASCAR; IMMEDIATELY FINED

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 3:51 am

 The New Formula: Jacques Villeneuve Ready To Test The NASCAR Waters

The new world order of NASCAR was again on display this week.

Jacques_vill_2Former Formula One world champion Jacques Villenueve spent Monday and Tuesday at Chicagoland Speedway testing for Bill Davis Racing’s Craftsman Truck Series team in preparation for his series debut for the team at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sept. 22.

Bill Davis Racing officials announced Tuesday that Villeneuve will compete in the final seven events of the Craftsman Truck Series season and could possibly make his Nextel Cup Series debut this year. Seemingly all indications are the Villeneuve will likely be running full-time in the Nextel Cup Series next season for Bill Davis Racing.

And it sounds like that scenario would be just fine for the Canadian driver who won the Formula One title in 1997 and the Indianapolis 500 in 1995.

When Villeneuve decided he wanted to get back to oval racing in North America the Indy Racing League wasn’t even a thought in his mind.

“You know, after Formula One, when you want to carry on racing, you want it to be at a tough level,” Villeneuve said. “And in North America, the top level is NASCAR.”

Villeneuve would join Columbian Juan Pablo Montoya as the second former Formula One star joining the Nextel Cup ranks. There’s also rumors flying that American driver Scott Speed, who spent the 2006 season and half of the season in Formula One, is ready to take the NASCAR plunge.

“You know, I certainly think it shows that our sport is being respected on a worldwide scale,” reigning Nextel Cup champion Jimmie Johnson said. “I think that as Juan has come in and lived the experiences of Nextel Cup racing, it has shown how difficult our sport is. It’s unclear what Jacques will bring, and then if Scott Speed is able to come in and run as well, but it can’t hurt. It’s only good for our sport.

“We all know that NASCAR is built on – our sport is built on a different premise than F1 is. Our sport is focused on competition and entertainment, where their sport is focused on or F1 is focused on just technology. So it is going to take these drivers some time to get used to the cars and come in. But I think it helps grow our fan base, and also helps take NASCAR to the next level of respect in the racing world’s eyes.”

Villeneuve and Montoya competed together in Formula One and had their scrapes on the world circuits. Villeneuve isn’t surprised at all by the somewhat chilly welcome Montoya has endured in his first season in Nextel Cup driving for Chip Ganassi.

“Apparently no matter what you’re driving nobody likes the new boy,” Villeneuve said. “Any time anybody got into F1, we didn’t like it, and we made their life hard. So that’s a little bit natural. But [Montoya] was like that in Formula 1, extremely aggressive and got on people’s nerves. I guess he kept the same personality going into NASCAR, which once he settles in, it will be all right. He’s driving hard, he’s fast, and he’s making a name for himself. Now he’s earning respect, so that’s fine. But I’ve never been as aggressive as him, I would say. But at the same time, NASCAR is a different ball game. So if and when I get in there, I’ll figure it out.”

Shawn Courchesne

 

 

FISA Revised: A Blank Check for Domestic Spying

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 3:41 am

I’m Gonna Shake It Off

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 3:08 am

W I L C O

HADITHA MASSACRE BY MARINES YIELDING LITTLE JUSTICE

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 2:51 am

The New York Times


 

August 30, 2007

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., Aug.
29 — Last December, when the Marine Corps charged four
infantrymen with killing Iraqi civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005, the
allegation was as dark as it was devastating: after a roadside bomb had
killed their buddy, a group of marines rampaged through nearby homes,
massacring 24 innocent people.

In Iraq and in the United States, the killings were viewed as
cold-blooded vengeance. After a perfunctory military investigation,
Haditha was brushed aside, but once the details were disclosed, the
killings became an ugly symbol of a difficult, demoralizing war. After
a fuller investigation, the Marines promised to punish the guilty.

But now, the prosecutions have faltered. Since May, charges against
two infantrymen and a Marine officer have been dismissed, and dismissal
has been recommended for murder charges against a third infantryman.
Prosecutors were not able to prove even that the killings violated the
American military code of justice.

Now their final attempt to get a murder conviction is set to begin,
with a military court hearing on Thursday for Staff Sgt. Frank D.
Wuterich, the last marine still facing that charge. He is accused of
killing 18 Iraqis, including several women and children, after the
attack on his convoy.

If the legal problems that have thwarted the prosecutors in other
cases are repeated this time, there is a possibility that no marine
will be convicted for what happened in Haditha.

Nor is it yet clear whether officers higher up the chain of command
than Sergeant Wuterich will be held responsible for the inadequate
initial investigation.

At least one of the four Marine officers charged last December for
failing to investigate the civilian deaths appears to be headed to
court-martial. That officer, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of
Third Battalion, First Marines, “did not take personal action to
fully investigate the actions leading to civilian deaths,”
concluded Col. Christopher C. Conlin, the officer who examined the
evidence.

But the case against Capt. Randy W. Stone, the battalion lawyer
charged with failing to find out why so many civilians had been killed,
was thrown out by Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, whose decisions in the
Haditha prosecutions are final. Charges against First Lt. Andrew A.
Grayson, an intelligence officer, are in limbo because of his argument
that the Marine Corps has discharged him.

In a wide range of cases involving abuses by American troops in Iraq
and Afghanistan, prosecutions have tended to focus on enlisted men and
noncommissioned officers — those accused of having personally
committed the acts — not on officers who commanded the units. And
while there have been numerous convictions, there have also been many
cases in which plea arrangements allowed for lesser punishments, or in
which charges were dropped or found not to be warranted.

The sole officer to face criminal charges in the abuses of prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, was convicted Tuesday on only one minor charge and
will be reprimanded, Reuters reported, quoting an Army announcement.
The officer, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, faced five years in prison and
dismissal from the Army, but a court-martial decided on the milder
penalty, the Army said.

The court-martial acquitted him of the charge of being responsible for cruel treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

Experts on military law said the difficulty in prosecuting the
marines for murder is understandable, given that action taken in combat
is often given immunity under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“One could view this as a case crumbling around the
prosecutor’s feet, or one could see this as the unique U.C.M.J.
system of justice in operation,” said Gary D. Solis, a former
Marine judge who teaches the laws of war at Georgetown University Law Center and at West Point.

Prosecuting the Haditha case was especially difficult because the
killings were not thoroughly investigated when they first occurred.
Months later, when the details came to light, there were no bodies to
examine, no Iraqi witnesses to testify, no damning forensic evidence.

On the other hand, some scholars said the spate of dismissals has
left them wondering what to think of the young enlisted marines who,
illegally or not, clearly killed unarmed people in a combat zone.

“It certainly erodes that sense that what they did was
wrong,” Elizabeth L. Hillman, a legal historian who teaches
military law at Rutgers University
School of Law at Camden, said of the outcomes so far. “When the
story broke, it seemed like we understood what happened; there
didn’t seem to be much doubt. But we didn’t know.”

Walter B. Huffman, a former Army judge advocate general, said it was
not uncommon in military criminal proceedings to see charges against
troops involved in a single episode to fall away under closer
examination of evidence, winnowing culpability to just one or two
defendants.

When Sergeant Wuterich, the soft-spoken squad leader who faces the
most extensive murder charges in the Haditha matter, walks into court
here on Thursday, “all the prosecutorial attention is now going
to center on him,” Mr. Solis said.

Sergeant Wuterich’s lawyers have an uphill legal fight. First,
unlike the other marines who faced murder charges, Sergeant Wuterich is
charged with the close-range killing of five unarmed men who were
ordered out of a vehicle that rolled up near the scene.

Also, as a noncommissioned officer and the ranking member of the
squad, Sergeant Wuterich may be used by prosecutors to argue that he
had a greater responsibility to discern proper targets and avoid
civilian casualties. He also led the attack against or was present in
every house where civilians were killed.

But the earlier cases show that the defense has some opportunities, too.

The presiding officer, Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware, is the same Marine
lawyer who conducted hearings for Justin L. Sharratt and Stephen B.
Tatum, two other lance corporals accused of killing a total of five
Iraqis in three homes in Haditha.

Colonel Ware later recommended dismissing the charges against those
two men, and he has said the killings should be viewed in the context
of combat against an enemy that ruthlessly employs civilians as cover.
He warned that murder charges against marines could harm the morale of
troops still in Iraq.

General Mattis’s statements expressing sympathy for the plight
of other enlisted marines whom he cleared of wrongdoing in Haditha may
indicate his willingness to see Sergeant Wuterich’s case in a
similar light.

Regardless of what happened to charges against the other defendants,
there is still great public pressure on the Marine Corps to investigate
and punish any wrongdoing in a case in which so many civilians died.

“We can’t say those guys didn’t commit a
crime,” said Michael F. Noone Jr., a retired Air Force lawyer and
law professor at Catholic University of America. “We can only say
that after an investigation, there was not sufficient evidence to
prosecute.”

Marines’ Trials in Iraq Killings Are Withering – New York Times

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Gingrich sees immigrants as ‘more deadly’ than terrorists

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 12:31 am

The
recent story out of Newark about three college students who were
murdered, execution style, in a school playground was painful. Adding a
political angle to the horrible crime, one of the suspects is
reportedly an immigrant from Peru who entered the country illegally.
Another suspect is a legal immigrant from Nicaragua.

In light of the murders, Newt Gingrich has a message for the nation: immigrants are more dangerous than terrorists.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Tuesday he is
“sickened” that President Bush and Congress went on
vacation “while young Americans in our cities are
massacred” by illegal immigrants. […]

Gingrich said that the “war here at home” against
illegal immigrants is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and
Afghanistan.”

“The federal government’s incompetence, timidity and
uncoordinated efforts to identify and deport criminal illegal aliens
have had devastating consequences for innocent Americans,”
Gingrich said, in a newsletter.

Dave Neiwert details just how offensive this really is.

Crooks and Liars » 2007 » August » 15

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JOSE PADILLA’S DOCTOR: “What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind” said Dr. Hegarty

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 3:51 pm

US citizen Jose Padilla has been found guilty of plotting to kill people overseas and supporting terrorism. His two co-defendants, Lebanese-born Palestinian Adham Amin Hassoun and Jordanian-born Kifah Wael Jayyousi, were convicted on the same counts.Below is a detailed report from Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! news show describing what has been done to him:

In a Democracy Now! national broadcast exclusive, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty speaks for the first time about her experience interviewing Jose Padilla for 22 hours to determine the state of his mental health.

20070807_mother_weeping_over_dead_child_baqubah_bombing2.jpg

Padilla is the U.S. citizen who was classified by President Bush as an enemy combatant and held in extreme isolation at a naval brig in South Carolina for over three-and-a-half years. His case is now before a Florida jury. “What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind,” said Dr. Hegarty. “[Padilla's] personality was deconstructed and reformed.” She said the effects of the extreme isolation on Padilla are consistent with brain damage. “I don’t know if he’s guilty or not of the charges that they brought against him,” said Dr. Hegarty. “But, already – before he was ever found guilty – he’s paid a tremendous price for his trip to the Middle East.” [includes rush transcript] A jury began deliberations on Wednesday in Miami in the case of Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn-born man once accused by the Bush administration of plotting to set off a dirty bomb inside the United States.

The FBI initially arrested him in Chicago in 2002 after he got off a plane from Europe. For a month he was held as a material witness. Then Attorney General John Ashcroft made a dramatic announcement – the U.S. government had disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to set off nuclear dirty bombs inside the United States. At the center of the plot, Ashcroft alleged, was Padilla.

President Bush then classified Jose Padilla as an enemy combatant, stripping him of all his rights. He was transferred to a Navy brig in South Carolina where he was held in extreme isolation for forty three months.

The Christian Science Monitor reported: “Padilla’s cell measured nine feet by seven feet. The windows were covered over… He had no pillow. No sheet. No clock. No calendar. No radio. No television. No telephone calls. No visitors. Even Padilla’s lawyer was prevented from seeing him for nearly two years.”

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-jose-padilla-was-treated-while-in.html

LIFEHACKER AND SEARCH ENGINE LAND TIPS FOR EDITING WIKIPEDIA

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 3:17 am

Wikipedia

Fix inaccurate articles the right way

You already have a basic idea of how to contribute to Wikipedia, and you even know how to identify anonymous edits, but how can you correct an inaccurate Wikipedia article that hits close to home without looking suspicious?

Suppose your company… discovers that their Wikipedia
article is wrong, or has subtle inaccuracies that nonetheless paint
them in an unfavorable light? Most people unfamiliar with how Wikipedia
works consider only two solutions: edit the article or sit on their
hands. Unfortunately, neither approach typically results in the optimal
outcome: a factually accurate profile containing trustworthy
information.

Weblog Search Engine Land offers tips for correcting an inaccurate
article straight from a Wikipedia administrator, like contacting
Wikipedia projects specific to your article and getting the page
watchlisted.

The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles [Search Engine Land]

Lifehacker

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MICHAEL O’HANLON DECLARES SELF: “DOUCHEBAGARINO”

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at 12:36 am


On Tom Ashbrook’s radio program today, Brookings Institute “scholar”
and “fierce war opponent” Michael O’Hanlon responds
to a caller’s question about Glenn Greenwald’s column exposing his fraud of a trip to Iraq, organized and supervised entirely by the US Military.

audio_mp3 Download (638) | Play (590)

OHanlon: “Well, I don’t have high regard for the kind of journalism that Mr. Greenwald has carried out here.

“I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time
rebutting Mr. Greenwald because he’s had frankly more time and
more readership than he deserves.”

These people just don’t get it. If you ride the US Military “dog and pony show,” of course there is going to be a semblance of “progress”: You’re traveling only to places pre-approved by the Pentagon — with John McCain-esque military protection — and meeting with commanders; not
the Iraqi people. Try embedding yourself outside the Green Zone (ya
know, 99.9% of Iraq) and tell me how well things are going.

Not too well, I see.

Crooks and Liars

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DON IMUS IS COMING BACK TO RADIO

In Broadcatch on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 3:30 pm

Don Imus

Don Imus settles with CBS

From the Associated Press

9:49 AM PDT, August 14, 2007

NEW YORK —
Don Imus has reached a settlement with CBS over his multimillion-dollar
contract and is negotiating with WABC radio to resume his broadcasting
career there, according to CBS and a person familiar with the
negotiations.

Imus and CBS Radio reached a settlement that would pre-empt the
dismissed radio personality’s threatened $120 million
breach-of-contract lawsuit, CBS spokesman Dana McClintock said today.

No terms of the settlement were disclosed.

The person familiar with the talks told The Associated Press that Imus
is taking steps to make a comeback with WABC-AM. The person, who spoke
on condition of anonymity because the news had not been announced, also
said the deal with CBS calls for a “non-disparaging” agreement that
forbids him from speaking negatively about his former employer.

The settlement and possible comeback come more than four months after
Imus created an uproar over his racist and sexist comments about the
Rutgers women’s basketball team.

Just before his dismissal, Imus signed a five-year, $40 million
contract with CBS Radio (owned by CBS Corp.). Famed First Amendment
lawyer Martin Garbus said in May that Imus planned to sue CBS for $120
million in unpaid salary and damages.

WFAN, the New York radio station that was Imus’ flagship, also
announced today that former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason will take
over the morning time slot along with Craig Carton, a New Jersey radio
personality.

WABC is a talk-radio station that features political and topical shows with such stars Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Imus, 66, was dismissed April 12 after describing the Rutgers women’s
basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” on his nationally syndicated
radio program, which was also simulcast on MSNBC. (General Electric
Co.’s cable TV channel now has the “Morning Joe” program with Joe
Scarborough.)

Garbus had said Imus would sue for the contract’s unpaid part. He cited
a contract clause in which CBS acknowledged that Imus’ services were
“unique, extraordinary, irreverent, intellectual, topical,
controversial.”

The clause said Imus’ programming was “desired by company and …
consistent with company rules and policy,” according to Garbus.

Los Angeles Times

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GOOGLE TAKES ON iTUNES AND ALREADY WINS

In Broadcatch on Monday, August 13, 2007 at 12:54 am

Forbes.com
NEW YORK –

Add gBox Inc. to the growing list of online music services hoping to chip away at iTunes’s dominance.

The Cupertino, Calif., startup was forced out of a stealth mode when
Universal Music Group announced late Thursday it would test sales of
some digital music without the customary copy-protection technology.

Under the program, gBox will get referrals through ads Universal will buy through search leader Google Inc., gBox Chief Executive Tammy Artim said Friday.

Google will get standard advertising fees rather than a cut of sales under the
arrangement. The ads, which would appear when a Google user searches
for specific terms such as the name of an artist, will direct the user
to gBox.

The arrangement with Universal and gBox is separate from
Google’s music search service, which directs users to online music
stores when they search for specific albums or artists. The company
says it does not get paid for such referrals, and it does not restrict
links to a single retailer.

Google, which has said it has no
plans to create a music store of its own, described the new arrangement
as strictly an advertising relationship.

Songs at gBox cost 99
cents each. For the Universal songs that are part of the test, gBox
will offer an MP3 version free of copy-protection technology known as
digital-rights management, or DRM. A DRM-enabled version will be
available at the same price.

DRM technology is designed to block or set limits on copying and CD burning.

Although DRM can help stem illegal copying, it can also frustrate consumers by
limiting the type of device or number of computers on which they can
listen.

Copy-protected songs sold through Apple’s
market-leading iTunes store generally won’t play on devices other than
its popular iPod digital player, and iPods won’t play DRM-enabled songs
bought at rival music stores, including gBox.

Although many independent music labels have for years sold their tunes without copy
restrictions, the major recording companies have resisted.

Earlier this year, Britain’s EMI Group PLC became the first of the major labels
to embrace DRM-free tunes, letting Apple sell versions of songs with
higher audio quality and without any built-in copying hurdles.

The test by Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, while only encompassing a
portion of its catalog, is significant because Universal is the world’s
largest recording company. That raises the prospect that other major
labels could follow.

Universal Music will make DRM-free songs available Aug. 21 to Jan. 31.  to Amazon.com Inc.

 Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best Buy Co., and RealNetworks Inc.’s Rhapsody are among the other retailers selling such tracks, but only gBox will get Universal’s Google referrals.

Although gBox won’t formally launch until Aug. 21, it already has a site with music from Sony Corp. and independent labels. Artim said the company has negotiated deals
with other labels, but could not disclose them until the launch.

She also said gBox was working with other major labels to sell DRM-free tracks like Universal’s, but such talks are ongoing.

GBox now works only with Microsoft Corp.’s
Internet Explorer browser on Windows-based computers, but Firefox support will come by the launch date, Artim said.

It won’t be compatible with Apple’s Macintosh computers, however. Even
though DRM-free tracks can play on any computer, the DRM versions
won’t, and gBox didn’t want to confuse customers, Artim said.

GBox is also is developing a “wish list” feature – software code that users can
place on their blogs or social-networking profiles at News Corp.’s MySpace, Facebook and other sites. Friends visiting the blog or profile can buy a song for that user through gBox.

In relying on referrals through Google and social-networking sites, gBox
is taking a different approach to marketing. Other retailers tend to
drive music buyers to the store’s home page to discover new songs and
make purchases there.

“Instead of doing marketing and
(advertising on) billboards on Highway 101 to go to gBox,” Artim said,
“we want to take advantage of the viral element that has been so
successful for companies in the past
Forbes.com

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JOEL OSTEEN’S BROTHER CANCELS MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR GAY VETERAN AT TEXAS MEGACHURCH

In Broadcatch on Sunday, August 12, 2007 at 6:13 pm

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — A megachurch canceled a memorial service
for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased
was gay.

Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil
Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his
sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner
as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.

“It’s a slap in the face. It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re sorry he died, but he’s gay so we can’t help you,’” she said Friday.

photos
Wright said High Point offered to hold the service for Sinclair
because their brother is a janitor there. Sinclair, who served in the
first Gulf War, died Monday at age 46 from an infection after surgery
to prepare him for a heart transplant.

The church’s pastor, the Rev. Gary Simons, said no one knew
Sinclair, who was not a church member, was gay until the day before the
Thursday service, when staff members putting together his video tribute
saw pictures of men “engaging in clear affection, kissing and
embracing.”

Simons said the church believes homosexuality is a sin, and it would
have appeared to endorse that lifestyle if the service had been held
there.

“We did decline to host the service — not based on hatred, not
based on discrimination, but based on principle,” Simons told The
Associated Press. “Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it
— yes, we would have declined then. It’s not that we didn’t love
the family.”

Simons said the decision had nothing to do with the obituary. He
said the church offered to pay for another site for the service, made
the video and provided food for more than 100 relatives and friends.

“Even though we could not condone that lifestyle, we went above and
beyond for the family through many acts of love and kindness,” Simons
said.

Wright called the church’s claim about the pictures “a bold-faced
lie.” She said she provided numerous family pictures of Sinclair,
including some with his partner, but said none showed men kissing or
hugging.

The 5,000-member High Point Church was founded in 2000 by Simons and
his wife, April, whose brother is Joel Osteen, well-known pastor of the
38,000-member Lakewood Church in Houston. Now High Point meets in a
432,000-square-foot facility in Arlington, near Dallas.

Wright said relatives declined the church’s offer to hold the
service at a community center because they felt it was an inappropriate
venue. It ultimately was held at a funeral home, but the cancellation
still lingered in some minds, she said.

Houston Chronicle

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GLENN GREENWALD BUSTS THE POLLACK-O’HANLON TRIP TO IRAQ

In Broadcatch on Sunday, August 12, 2007 at 12:34 pm

The truth behind the Pollack-O’Hanlon trip to Iraq

Last Wednesday, I interviewed Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution regarding the trip he recently took to Iraq and the highly publicized Op-Ed in the New York Times
about his trip, co-written with his Brookings colleague, Ken Pollack.
The full transcript of the interview, which lasted roughly 50 minutes,
can be read here.

O’Hanlon’s answers, along with several other facts now known,
demonstrate rather conclusively what a fraud this Op-Ed was, and even
more so, the deceitfulness of the intense news coverage it generated.
Most of the critical attention in the immediate aftermath of the media
blitz focused on the misleading depiction of the pro-war Pollack and
O’Hanlon as “critics of the administration.”

To his credit, O’Hanlon
acknowledged (in my interview with him, though never in any of the
media appearances he did) that many of the descriptions applied to him
– including Dick Cheney’s claim that the Op-Ed was written by “critics
of the war” — were inaccurate:

First, I think that to an extent, at least, it’s certainly fair to go
over a person’s record when that person themself is being held up as
playing a certain role in the debate. So while I’m not entirely happy
with some of the coverage I’ve received here [on this blog] and
elsewhere, I agree with the basic premise: that if I’m being held up as
a “critic of the war”, for example by Vice President Cheney, it’s
certainly only fair to ask if that is a proper characterization of me.
And in fact I would not even use that characterization of myself, as I
will elaborate in a moment.

Indeed, as I documented previously
and as he affirmed in the interview, O’Hanlon was, from the beginning,
a boisterous supporter of the invasion of Iraq. While he debated what
the optimal war strategy was, once it became clear exactly what
strategy Bush would use, O’Hanlon believed — and forcefully argued –
that George Bush was doing the right thing by invading Iraq:

As you rightly reported — I was not a critic of this war. In the final analysis, I was a supporter.

He believed with virtual certainty that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD
and that that fact constituted the principal justification for the
invasion. In February, 2003, O’Hanlon wrote — in a column entitled “Time for War”
– that the “president was still convincing on his central point that
the time for war is near” and decreed that “it is now time for
multilateralists to support the president.” Not a single one of the
television interviews Pollack and O’Hanlon gave about their Op-Ed
included any reference to the fact that they were both supporters of
the war and of the Surge
.

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, O’Hanlon supported not only the war,
but also Bush and Rumsfeld’s occupation strategy. And while he began to
argue — just as did Bill Kristol and his neoconservative comrades
– that improvements were needed in Iraq due to the need for more
troops, there was never a point, and there still is none, where
O’Hanlon argued for withdrawal of troops or a timetable for withdrawal
(though in 2004, he argued for a decrease in troop numbers). Then, in
2005, he argued for troop increases. At the beginning of this year,
O’Hanlon (and Pollack) supported George Bush’s and Fred Kagan’s Surge
plan.

Manifestly, then, to describe them as “aggressive critics of the
Bush administration’s handling of the war” or as “critics of the war”
– as virtually every media figure and pro-war pundit did with no
correction — is misleading in the extreme. In no meaningful sense is
Michael O’Hanlon any more of a “strong critic of the administration” or
“vigorous opponent of Bush’s war policies” than Bill Kristol or Fred
Kagan, who also frequently bickered over the administration’s strategic
choices, accused them of poor war management, and/or called for a
greater troop presence.

While this entire group of “war scholars” continuously objected to
various strategies executed along the way — they always believed they
harbored the undiscovered Perfect Plan for this war — they were in the
past and are now full-throated supporters of the invasion itself and
Bush’s subsequent occupation. They are full-fledged members of the
small minority of Americans who have been pro-war since before the
invasion and who continue to be. The contrary media depictions of
O’Hanlon and Pollack (which they actively encouraged) were just pure
fiction.

* * * * *

“The itinerary the D.O.D. developed”

But the far greater deceit involves the trip itself and the way it
was represented — both by Pollack/O’Hanlon as well as the excited
media figures who touted its significance and meaning. From beginning
to end, this trip was planned, shaped and controlled by the U.S.
military — a fact inexcusably concealed in both the Op-Ed itself and
virtually every interview the two of them gave. With very few
exceptions, what they saw was choreographed by the U.S. military and
carefully selected for them. This is O’Hanlon’s description of how the
trip was conceived:

GG: I just want to ask you some questions about the trip that you just
took. Whose idea was that trip? How did that trip arise and who planned
it?

MO: Well, I have wanted to go back to Iraq for a long time. I
feel it’s- I’ve been there once in September 2003 – it behoves
anybody who’s working on this issue a lot of the time as I’ve been for
a few years trying to get some on-the-ground experience and
observations. And so I’ve been trying to get back for a couple of years
and I started putting in these requests a little bit more assertively -

GG: Who did you put them in with?

MO: To the military, starting in about the spring.

GG: And then, at some point they accepted and said that they would organize a trip for you?

MO: Yeah. I think the trip was ultimately originally scheduled for
other people as well. I think it’s public knowledge that Tony Cordesman
was also on our trip, and I think he had plans to go before Ken and I
managed to get ourselves invited as well, but –

GG: Why did you need the permission of the U.S. military in order to go? Why couldn’t you just go yourself?

MO: I suppose I could have, but I was hopeful that someone could help
take care of my security, for one thing. I’m not going to try to sound
more heroic than I am. And also I wanted to talk to a lot of military
personnel and get their impressions.

The
entire trip — including where they went, what they saw, and with whom
they spoke — consisted almost entirely of them faithfully following
what O’Hanlon described as “the itinerary the D.O.D. developed.”

But to establish their credibility as first-hand witnesses,
O’Hanlon and Pollack began their Op-Ed by claiming, in the very first
sentence: “VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel. . . . ” Yet the overwhelming majority of these “Iraqi military and civilian personnel” were ones hand-picked for them by the U.S. military:

GG: The first line of your Op-Ed said:”viewed from Iraq where we just
spent the last eight days interviewing American and Iraqi military and
civilian personnel…”

How did you arrange the meetings with the Iraqi military and civilian personnel?

MO: Well, a number of those — and most of those were arranged by the U.S. military.
So I’ll be transparent about that as well. These were to some extent
contacts of Ken and Tony, but that was a lesser number of people. The predominant majority were people who we came into contact with through the itinerary the D.O.D. developed.

I specifically asked O’Hanlon whether, as a result, he was concerned
that he was getting an unrepresentative view of the situation in Iraq,
and in response he said:

If someone wanted to argue that
we were not getting a representative view of Iraqis because the ones we
spoke with were provided by the military, I would agree that this would
be a genuine concern. Certainly that might have influenced the
impressions that we were presented, though by no means did all of the
Iraqis agree with the view of progress in Iraq.

The following exchange then occurred:

GG: Given that some of the claims in your Op-Ed are based upon your
conversations with Iraqis, and that the Iraqis with whom you spoke were
largely if not exclusively ones provided to you by the U.S. military,
shouldn’t that fact have been included in your Op-Ed? MO: If the suggestion is that in a 1,400 word Op-Ed, we
ought to have mentioned that, I can understand that criticism, and if
we should have included that, I apologize for not having done so.

But I want to stress that the focus here was on the perspective of the
U.S. military, and I did a lot of probing of what I was told, and
remain confident in the conclusions that we reached about the military
successes which we highlighted. But if you’re suggesting that some
of our impressions might have been shaped by the military’s selection
of Iraqis, and that we might have disclosed that, that is, I think,
fair enough
.

Subsequently, I pressed him again on
how they could possibly rely on what they were hearing given that
virtually all of the vaunted “Iraqi military and civilian personnel”
with whom they were speaking were hand-picked for them. O’Hanlon
acknowledged:

I will take your point and I would agree
with your point that we were certainly not getting a representative
view of Iraqi opinion.

Indeed, the great bulk of the
information on which this Op-Ed was based came from the U.S. military,
either directly or through the Iraqi “sources” provided to Pollack and
O’Hanlon, a fact which — though concealed in their Op-Ed and in their
interviews — O’Hanlon defended this way:

Now you could say in one sense all this data ultimately, all this information ultimately is coming from the U.S. military. Yes, but there’s an opportunity for a lot of probing, a lot of debate, a lot of conversations back and forth. . . .

Not only was this obviously critical fact –that “all this information
ultimately is coming from the U.S. military” — excluded from their
Op-Ed, but, with one exception, neither they nor their numerous media
interviewers saw fit to mention it. The only reference to it was a
fleeting one as a result of this commendable question from Wolf Blitzer
to Pollack during one of CNN’s several segments devoted to their “findings”:

BLITZER:
Was this part, though, of a U.S. military tour, if you will, that they
took you around, you were escorted from location to location to
location and they were the ones that took you to specific places? Or
did you have the freedom to say I want to go here, I want to go there?
Who organized, in other words, the stopovers, the visits that you were
having? POLLACK: It was — largely this was — it was largely organized
by the military. We felt that was important because right now the big
story is the military story.

And
that was it. In their Op-Ed and countless media appearances, where they
constantly paraded around — and were held up — as first-hand
witnesses who had seen the Truth in Iraq with their very own eyes, that
was the only mention of this fact, a fact which rather obviously and
profoundly impacts the credibility of what they claimed to have
“discovered.”

* * * * *

Sweeping conclusions from 2-hour visits

But this only begins to convey how ludicrous and misleading a spectacle
this whole event was. O’Hanlon and Pollack were in Iraq for a total of
7 1/2 days. They spent every night ensconced in the Green Zone in
Baghdad. They did not spend a single night in any other city. As
O’Hanlon admitted, they spent no more than “between 2-4 hours” in every
place they visited outside Baghdad, and much of that was taken up
meeting U.S. military commanders, not inspecting the proverbial
“conditions on the ground.”

Yet in their Op-Ed, they purported to describe the encouraging
conditions in four places other than Baghdad — Ramadi, Tal Afar,
Mosul, and the Anbar Province — as though they could possibly have
made any meaningful observations during their visits which were all
roughly the duration of the average airport layover. Worse, both
O’Hanlon and Pollack — and especially Pollack — in their interviews
repeatedly described their optimistic observations about Iraqi cities
in such a way as to create the misleading impression that these were
based upon their first-hand observations.

Here, for instance, is Pollack on NPR
purporting to describe the Great Progress in Mosul as though he is some
grizzled war reporter who has witnessed the conditions “on the ground”
there — a place in which, O’Hanlon acknowledged to me by e-mail, they
spent a grand total of 2 hours:

The most
obvious change we saw was in the security sector, where in Northern,
Central and Western Iraq, there was improvement. It varied very widely.
It was uneven. But in some places, it was really striking.

My last trip to Iraq was at the end of 2005, and I was up by Mosul. And
I gotta tell you, Mosul was a disaster. It was completely out of
control, and we had tens of thousand of American troops up in Mosul
trying desperately to keep that place together.

Well, this trip, we went up to Mosul, and found that there are only
several hundred American troops up there. And the reason for that is we
now finally have some Iraqi army divisions that are rising to the
occasion. We got two divisions up there — an Army Division and a
Police Division — which are both capable and reliable. And that’s
allowed the military to greatly scale back their commitment to Iraq’s
third largest city, to the point where they are simply providing
advisory teams and fire support teams, and the Iraqis are doing the
work . . . . That is such a dramatic change.

And here is what Pollack told Tucker Carlson on MSNBC:

In addition, what was most striking to me — because the last time I
was in Iraq was about 18 months ago in late 2005, and I was over there
looking at Iraqi army formations — and frankly, they were all awful [GG: that was the same exact time when Gen. Petraues was proclaiming "very substantial momentum" and "huge progress" in Iraqi troop readiness]. This time around, the Iraqi army formations are really starting to step up to the plate. And we have a number — I won’t say the whole army, not even the
majority of it — but there are a number of divisions and brigades and
battalions that are really proving to be able partners of the U.S., to
the extent that in some parts of Iraq, particularly Mosul, Tal Afar,
some other parts, areas south of Baghdad, the Iraqis really are taking
the lead and the U.S. forces are really just supporting them.

Any
reasonable person would conclude that Pollack is describing progress
based upon first-hand observations made during his “visit to Mosul” –
a completely deceitful impression in light of the reality of this trip.
Indeed, the overarching narrative for every interview was that they had
“just returned from Iraq” and were excited by what they saw.

Yet they inspected virtually nothing in these cities, and everything
with regard to “Iraqi troop readiness” — which Pollack excitedly
touted in hailing the “dramatic progress” in Mosul and elsewhere — was
all based on what they were told by the U.S. military or its
hand-picked sources. As O’Hanlon said:

GG: What I’m trying to get at is if they told you, for instance, that
there were certain army divisions in Mosul where the bad commanders
were being weeded out and they were now capable of holding
neighborhoods better, you wouldn’t actually go to the neighborhoods and
inspect whether or not what you were told was true. Your claims in
that regard in the Op-Ed were based upon your belief that what the U.S.
military commanders were telling you was accurate. Is that true?

MO: Yes, that’s true. Based on that example, on that type of example, you’re right.

The day before I interviewed O’Hanlon, The New Yorker’s George Packer spoke with Pollack and reported that Pollack “spoke with very few Iraqis and could independently confirm very little of what he heard from American officials.”
To Packer, Pollack also confirmed that the flamboyant claims about
Iraqi troops readiness “came from American military sources.”

* * * * *

Severe sloppiness or bad faith?

With the possible exception of their observations about U.S. troop
morale and the McCain-like claims about the isolated, peaceful strolls
they were led on by the military, Pollack and O’Hanlon could have just
as easily stayed at home, spoken on the telephone with U.S. military
commanders, written down what they said, and then “reported” everything
exactly as they did in their Op-Ed. The trip to Iraq part was just a
prop in the argument, something to bestow unwarranted and artificial
credibility on their war cheerleading claims.

I have nothing against O’Hanlon personally; he was perfectly cordial
and professional in my dealings with him and I think he deserves credit
for agreeing to be interviewed in light of what I had written about his
Op-Ed. But it is very difficult to credit him and Pollack with good
faith, as though they are guilty of nothing more than sloppy
“scholarship.”

A failure to disclose obviously critical facts that bear on the
credibility of their “findings” and a willingness to ground their
conclusions in patently one-sided and highly controlled data are far
more serious sins than mere sloppiness. It is difficult to avoid
reaching any conclusion other than that they willfully served as
propaganda tools in order to bolster the perception of success for a
war and a “Surge” strategy which they prominently supported and on which their professional reputations rest.

After all, the whole premise of the Op-Ed is that they have credibility
to speak about the Progress in Iraq because they just returned from a
trip there and because they are “two analysts who have harshly
criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.”
Indeed, they used the very first sentence to create the misleading
impression that they were offering first-hand accounts of the purported
progress, rather than simply relying upon claims of the U.S. military.

Moreover, they not only acquiesced to the fraud that they are “critics
of the administration,” they actively propagated it in order to lend
their claims credibility they did not deserve. Here, as but one
example, is Michael O’Hanlon’s description of himself on Hardball: “I have been a critic of the administration all along.” That is nothing short of an outright falsehood.

But far more importantly, they had to have known beforehand that they
were going to get a highly unrepresentative picture of Iraq by having
the U.S. military shape their itinerary from start to finish and
hand-pick virtually everyone with whom they would speak. That is just
so obvious. And yet when I asked O’Hanlon about this, he acted as
though this had never occurred to him before.

It’s one thing for political hacks like Joe Lieberman or John McCain to go on these contrived missions — trips aptly derided on Meet the Press by Jim Webb in explaining why he has never gone:

Sen. Graham: “Have you been to Iraq and talked to the soldiers?”

Sen. Webb: “You know, you haven’t been to Iraq, Lindsey. (cross-talk). You go see the dog and pony show. That’s what Congressman do.”

But
Pollack/O’Hanlon are “scholars” — people whose claims are supposed to
be immune from political pressures and who reside above the political
fray. Ask them and they will be happy to tell you that. Here is Ken
Pollack with Tucker Carlson, snidely dismissing the notion that he has
anything other than the purest of aims:

And you know, I am
going to go out there and I am going to say what I have to say. I’ve
been doing this my entire life. I say exactly what I think is the right
answer. I don’t care about politics.

Pollack’s deeply apolitical superiority did not, however, prevent him from issuing this decree at the Council on Foreign Relations last week:

Q.
The Democratic candidates have been fighting among themselves over what
to do. Your advice to the Democrats is what, to cool it until the
election? Pollack: Certainly to cool it until early 2008.

Whatever
it means to be a “scholar,” it ought to include at the very minimum a
refusal to ground one’s “scholarly” conclusions in data that is plainly
biased, politically motivated, and worthy of extreme skepticism. Yet –
while O’Hanlon sheepishly admits being fooled about Iraq’s WMD and
repeatedly insisted that he has learned lessons — they go on an Iraq
“fact-finding trip” and then come back and flamboyantly trumpet
extraordinary claims based on very little other than the unverified
assertions of the U.S. military. And they never bother to disclose any
of that. Whatever that is, it is not the behavior of apolitical
“scholars.”

[The above-the-political-fray Pollack is employed by the "Saban Center for Middle East Studies"
at Brookings -- so named because it is funded with many millions of
dollars by billionaire Haim Saban, an Israeli-American neoconservative
who was a 2004 supporter of George Bush,
was a close associate of Ariel Sharon, and spent the 1990s persuading
Bill Clinton (with millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic
Party) to be more supportive of Israel.

In a 2004 glowing profile, the NYT
described Saban as "throwing his weight and money around Washington
and, increasingly, the world, trying to influence all things Israeli,"
and in that article, Saban told the NYT: "I'm a one-issue guy
and my issue is Israel." The profile also reported: "While Mr. Saban is
a vocal opponent of President Bush -- 'I think Bush is just messing it
up every day more' -- he supports some of Mr. Bush's policies. 'On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk.'"
In essence, Saban is Marty Peretz but with money that he earned
himself. That is who backs Ken Pollack's presumably large paychecks and
funds his Brookings war "scholarship"].

O’Hanlon and Pollack appeared on at least 10 major television news
programs. Other than Blitzer, no interviewer even raised the issue of
whether they were overly-dependent on the U.S. military for their
information, none probed the basis for their claims, and Pollack and
O’Hanlon never once even alluded to the questionable nature of what
they had been shown (even though O’Hanlon “apologized” for not
disclosing it in the Op-Ed when I pressed him on it). And from what I
reviewed, not a single one ever identified either of them as having
been pro-war and pro-Surge, and they themselves never bothered to
mention that as they were hailed as hard-nosed “critics” of the
administration — thus helpfully preserving the dramatic television
storyline that “harsh critic of the Bush administration” went to Iraq
and found Great Progress.

These interviewers just all stood by, excited and oozing
enthusiasm, as Pollack and O’Hanlon lavished tales on the country of
the grand and glorious progress we are finally making in Iraq. The host
on the very-very-liberal NPR began the Pollack interview by gushing:
“If you’ve been searching the papers for good news from Iraq, we found
a little on the Op-Ed pages!” Vapid, mindless and absurd.

After all this time, and everything that has happened under the Bush presidency, nothing has changed. Michael Gordon and the NYT
continue to publish one war-fueling story after the next on its front
page based on nothing other than the unverified claims of government
and military officials. Our “journalists” do not have even an iota of
instinct to question or probe anything they hear from our war-mongering
Serious Experts and Serious Political Leaders.

And the Foreign Policy Community is led by highly revered
propagandists whose “scholarship” violates the most basic and obvious
principles of research and disclosure — all in the service of
prolonging still further a war for which they bear profound
responsibility. This, in turn, is driven by the overarching and
self-absorbed fear that they will be forced to acknowledge their own
wrongdoing and culpability. And thus we will remain occupying and
waging war in Iraq, through the end of the Bush presidency and beyond.

Glenn Greenwald

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The Alert In New York City Was Prompted By DEBKAfile

In Broadcatch on Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 10:42 am

New York City went on a terror alert, reportedly prompted by a warning posted on an Israeli Web site.
Citing an “unverified” terrorist threat, the NYPD on Friday set up
checkpoints in lower Manhattan and stepped up the deployment of
radiological sensors on cars, boats and helicopters.
Reuters quoted a law-enforcement source as saying that the alert was
prompted by DEBKAfile, a Web site that deals with security issues and
is run out of Jerusalem. DEBKAfile had reported Internet chatter
suggesting that Al-Qaida would use trucks loaded with radioactive
material to attack New York.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg described the alert as precautionary


I call Bullshit

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Chris Matthews Gushes Over Bush’s ‘Great Neo-Conservative Mind

In Broadcatch on Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 1:04 am

In A Three Minute Monologue, Matthews Gushes Over Bush’s ‘Great Neo-Conservative Mind’

Immediately following President Bush’s press conference
today, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spent three unbroken minutes
fawning over the president’s “powerful rendition” of
his “philosophy” without uttering a single critical word.
“I thought in listening to the president, I was listening to one
of the great neoconservative minds,” gushed Matthews.

Calling Bush “powerful” on three separate occasions,
Matthews marveled at the president’s defense of his foreign
policy:

We were given a rare opportunity to hear the real philosophy of this administration with regard to the war in Iraq.
A powerful rendition by the president of why we’re there. When he
talked about the fact that we can support emerging democracies in the
Middle East, and that’s the only way we can prevent future
9/11’s, you’re getting to the heart of why this
administration is fighting that war in Iraq.

“This president is ready to fight like a rock through the rest
of his term,” Matthews proclaimed. “He made it clear that
he’s going to fight as long as it takes to develop a democracy in
Iraq. There’s not going to be any change come September.”
Watch it:

Bush’s comments today, which contained at least one untrue assertion, were nothing more than a rehashing of his tired old rhetoric. Yet somehow, Matthews, who is labeled a liberal by partisan conservatives, only saw it through rose-colored glasses.

Matthews’ monologue is unsurprising, however, given his long
record of hero worship for Bush and his supposedly
“powerful” presidency:

– “We’re proud of our president.
Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little
swagger, who’s physical.” [5/1/03]

– “Sometimes it glimmers with this man, our president, that kind of sunny nobility.” [10/25/05]

– “I like him. Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left.” [11/28/05]

– “A little bit of Lincoln there, I think,”
referring to Bush finally admitting that telling Iraqi insurgents to
“bring it on” in 2003 “sent the wrong signal to
people.” [5/25/06]

Given the president’s track record with the truth on Iraq, Matthews should check his uncritical awe at the door.

UPDATE: Media Matters catches Matthews lamenting over the lack of “big, beefy” and “every-way big” guys in the Democratic presidential race.

Think Progress

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FUN ON WALL STREET

In Broadcatch on Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 12:59 am

August 11, 2007


Central Banks Intervene to Calm Volatile Markets

Central banks around the
world acted in unison yesterday to calm nervous financial markets by
providing an infusion of cash to the system. But stocks still fell
sharply in Asia and Europe, and in early trading in New York, before
they recovered and closed essentially flat for the day on Wall Street.

As in recent weeks, the markets moved in wild swings — sharp
drops were followed by steep gains and vice versa — underscoring
the uncertainty. Investors weighed concerns that losses in the American
mortgage market would deepen and spread against their faith in the
ability of a strong global economy to withstand additional shocks.

Hoping to provide some comfort that there is ample cash available,
the Federal Reserve made its largest intervention since the markets
reopened Sept. 19, 2001, in the wake of the terrorist attacks. The
central bank injected $38 billion into the financial system on top of
the $24 billion it put in on Thursday.

The intervention steadied the markets — at least for the day.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index closed at 1,453.64, a
gain of 0.55 point, and the Dow Jones industrial average closed down
31.14 points, to 13,239.54. For the week, the Dow was up 0.4 percent,
the S.& P. 500 rose 1.4 percent and the Nasdaq was up 1.3 percent.

The question that remains is just how exposed the financial system
and the economy are to losses in the credit markets and the increase in
borrowing costs. The answer will set the agenda at the Federal Reserve,
which finds itself confronting its first major financial crisis under
the leadership of Ben S. Bernanke, who took over last year.

The Fed will be guided by its assessment of how much do banks, hedge
funds, pension funds and others stand to lose and whether consumers and
businesses will be able to stomach higher interest rates and stricter
loan underwriting.

“There are a lot of risks in front of us,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “Financial crises, in the past, when not accompanied with a recession have been good for the markets.”

But, she added, “if the economic landscape deteriorates much
from here, then we are going to have to suffer through a more difficult
market period.”

That debate, Ms. Sonders and others agree, will not be resolved
anytime soon, which suggests that markets will remain choppy as
information about failing hedge funds and mortgage companies dribbles
out.

Investor anxiety has been so heightened in recent weeks that days of
stability have been shattered by the first sign of trouble tied to the
debt markets.

Volatility, as measured by one popular index of options trading, has
surged to its highest levels in more than four years, though it remains
far lower than it was early this decade and in the late 1990s.

The financial sector has been among the most volatile — stocks
there fell by as much as 1.7 percent during the day, only to climb as
much as 1.1 percent before closing little changed.

Shares of Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and Washington Mutual,
the sixth-biggest lender, opened sharply lower after both companies
said they were facing a harder time selling loans and could potentially
have problems raising money.

While those stocks recovered much of their losses for the day, they are both down significantly for the year.

A common pattern has been a surge in trading late in the afternoon,
around 3 p.m., that has often sent stocks higher, as it did yesterday
— though on some days, like Thursday, the move has been just as
sharp on the downside.

Richard X. Bove, an analyst at Punk Ziegel & Company, noted the
trend in a recent note to investors and suggested that the reason was
strong buying from portfolios that use computer models to buy and sell
quickly, a practice known as program trading, or a foreign source like
the investment arm of the Chinese government.

“We are talking about such a sizable amount of buying and
volume goes up and stocks react strongly one way or the other,”
Mr. Bove said. “What I have trouble with is trying to figure out
where it’s coming from.”

But he acknowledges that the pattern will probably not last long,
because as sophisticated traders figure it out they will jump in on the
other side to profit from the trades.

Using data from the New York Stock Exchange,
Ms. Sonders of Charles Schwab estimates that program trading accounted
for about 40 percent of all trades on the Big Board in recent days, up
from the 30 percent range earlier this year.

“That’s why we are getting these swings, this is
professional- to-professional trading,” she said. “This is
money that has a time horizon measured in minutes.”

Indeed, there is evidence that the average individual investor has not been a big player in recent days.

Flows into mutual funds that specialize in American stocks were
essentially flat for the week that ended on Wednesday, according to AMG
Data Services. But investors put $36.2 billion into money market
accounts, the largest weekly inflow this year. Investors often put cash
into money market funds, which earn more than savings accounts, that
they eventually plan to invest in the market.

It is not surprising that individuals are sitting on the sidelines,
given the sharp moves in the market. Yesterday, for instance, all three
major American indexes fell immediately after the opening bell, and at
one point the Dow Jones industrial average was down 212 points. By
noon, stocks were on the rebound and the indexes were briefly in
positive territory, then declined. The Nasdaq finished at 2,544.89,
down 11.60, or 0.4 percent.

“You can’t invest into a market that does that,”
Mr. Bove said. “You have a better chance at making money on the
craps table than in this market.”

Treasury prices were little changed yesterday. The 10-year note fell
9/32, to 99 18/32 and the yield, which moves in the opposite direction
from the price, rose to 4.81 percent, from 4.77 percent on Thursday.

Earlier, stocks in Japan, Hong Kong and Australia dropped by more
than 2.5 percent. The benchmark Kospi in South Korea fell 4.3 percent,
the biggest decline since June 2004. Most major European indexes
plunged by 3 percent or more.

In both Asia and Europe, fears about the American housing market
prompted investors to sell assets and forced commercial banks to reel
in credit lines.

Central banks around the work stepped up efforts to slow the losses.
The Bank of Japan added liquidity for the first time since the market
problems began.

The European Central Bank
injected money into the system for a second day, adding another 61
billion euros ($84 billion), after providing 95 billion euros the day
before. The Federal Reserve yesterday added $19 billion to the system
through the purchase of mortgage-backed securities, then another $19
billion in three-day repurchase agreements.

In Washington, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.
spent the day in what his aides said was hourly contact with the Fed,
other officials in the administration, finance ministries and
regulators overseas and people on Wall Street — where until last
year he had worked as an executive at Goldman Sachs.

“We’ve been in touch with our colleagues in other
agencies and among the financial regulators and are monitoring the
situation carefully,” said Michele Davis, the Treasury Department
spokeswoman. “Beyond that, we are not commenting.”

As investors in Asia sold off assets considered relatively risky,
like Philippine stocks, they bought those considered safer, like
Japanese government bonds. Asian currencies like the Thai baht also
retreated against the dollar and more liquid and stable currencies like
the yen.

“Everyone’s been talking about a credit crunch, and not
surprisingly it turned into one,” said Jan Lambregts, head of
Asia research at Rabobank.

While Asian banks did not seem to be directly affected, he said,
“the main problem is we don’t know who is bearing the
losses, and that kind of uncertainty is creating the situation that
we’re in right now.”

Wayne Arnold, Steve Weisman and Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

Central Banks Intervene to Calm Volatile Markets – New York Times

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I Think We Can Win With Hillary

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 10, 2007 at 12:46 pm

I think we can win with
Hillary.

 
Win.
 
Than put Kucinich in charge of
something.
Send Bill out to see his old friends in
M.E.
Obama-Cabinet-
Richardson-Cabinet
BIDEN-STATE
Edwards-Education
Sec
Dodd-Martini (ass, when it comes down to
it-his scolding Obama over Military strategy made me feel
icky)
These jackasses all voted for the War…
Military Commissions Act…. FISA (unbelievable)
Bankruptcy bill
 
Obama gets to gloat but he WASN’T in the
Senate so he didn’t have to make that decision, did
he?
 
The repugs are
cretins.
These (Dems)people are just
pathetic.
FISA?
MCA?
Are you fucking kidding
me?
 

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EZRA EZRA EZRA…GET IT TOGETHER

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 10, 2007 at 2:41 am

Ezra, Ezra Ezra!


Ezra, Ezra Ezra! When asked what Gonzo did wrong, have your shit
together and some bullets in the gun. I could have gone on for the next
five minutes without pause. How far back would you like me to go Chris?

Hardball-Hanretty-Libby
-Covered Bushes DUI
-Strongarm sick AG in hospital
-Authorize torture
-Moussaoui trial bait and switch
-Illegal wiretaps
-Illegal spying on protest groups
-Raid and bust whistleblowers, but the the crimes they disclosed
-Zero terrorist convictions for terrorist charges
-24 unfilled US attorney vacancies
-Lying to congress
-Abuse of FBI National Security Letters
-Padilla “dirty bomber” trial. Evidence????
-Failure to enforce congressional subpoenas
-Most of his staff have resigned since purge investigation began
-White house Email cover up
-Coached Monica Goodling testimony
-Guantanamo Fucking Bay
-Dogshit Oxycontin settlement
-Voter rights a mess
-Voter ID laws, that promptly get overturned
-Convict and jail border patrol officers who bust a drug mule
-No election fraud investigations, but mountains of worthless voter fraud BS
-Voter caging
-Political qualifications for career DOJ positions
-Unqualified USA’s
-Department moral in the shitter
-Minorities removed from Equal rights division
-Trust by Congress = ZERO
-Trust by American people = ZERO

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Zappa Plays Zappa

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 9, 2007 at 7:42 pm

ON SALE TOMORROW:
Zappa Plays Zappa
on
Halloween
at The
Beacon Theatre
October 31!

Under the direction of his eldest son,
Dweezil, has exceeded expectations, prompting new tour dates. A
special Halloween concert at New York’s Beacon Theatre kicks
off the just-announced new leg of the “Tour de Frank.” The date
represents the renewal of a Zappa family tradition that began over 35 years ago
as Frank Zappa could be counted upon to perform at a New York
area venue every Halloween.
Far from a “tribute band,” Zappa Plays Zappa underscores the
compositional genius of Frank Zappa much as a symphony
orchestra would perform pieces by a master composer. A highlight of the concerts
has been a sequence in which video footage of Frank Zappa is
juxtaposed to the eight-piece Zappa Plays Zappa band playing
live, creating a unique musical experience for audiences that have not heard
Frank Zappa’s music performed since his untimely death in 1993.

Don’t miss Zappa Plays Zappa for a special Halloween performance on
October 31!

Tickets go on sale TOMORROW, August 10, 2007 @ 10AM.

Click
here
to purchase your tickets.

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The Blogs Are Alive With the Sound of Angry Democrats

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 9, 2007 at 9:47 am


New York Times

The Blogs Are Alive With the Sound of Angry Democrats

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 —
Progressive and liberal groups and left-leaning blogs are furious,
tossing around fighting words like “spineless,”
“craven” and “weak.”

So much for the hopes of Democratic leaders that they could avoid a
withering political attack by clearing the way for Congress to approve
an expansion of the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance
program before the August recess.

“Democratic leaders in Congress didn’t put up much of a
fight and they didn’t stand up and say ‘no’ to
Bush,” said an e-mail message that political operatives for the
group MoveOn
sent Tuesday to the organization’s members, urging them to sign
an online petition calling on Congress to reverse the new law.

Activist groups were somewhat forgiving earlier this year when
Democrats backed down in a fight with President Bush over war spending,
but the concession on changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act seems to have touched a nerve.

From the perspective of liberal critics, Democrats again let
themselves be hoodwinked into handing Mr. Bush substantial new power on
the basis of White House warnings of an imminent threat. And they did
so when Mr. Bush’s poll numbers are low.

“Ultimately, it was the Democratic leadership on the Hill that
rolled over to this demand,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a top
lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Instead of standing strong and standing on principle, they
panicked and gave the administration not only what it has been asking
for, but more.”

Democratic officials in the House and the Senate say they understand
the dismay that greeted the measure’s passage and point out that
most Democrats opposed the bill, including the four senators seeking
the party’s presidential nomination. But they say that given
classified security briefings and the approach of the recess, Democrats
had little choice.

“Everyone who heard the briefings from the administration
agreed that the intelligence community did not have what it
needed,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “Both Democrats and Republicans alike agreed that going home without addressing this issue was not an option.”

And once the Senate left town after approving the Republican
proposal making it possible to institute wiretaps without warrants,
House members found themselves in the position of either acting or
being the last roadblock to the changes sought by the White House.

“We agreed with the administration that there was a problem
with FISA that needed to be fixed,” said Brendan Daly, a
spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi
of California. “We thought we had a bill that protected civil
liberties and addressed their problems, but it did not have the votes
on its own.”

Still, many House Democrats argued Saturday both in private party
meetings and again on the floor that Democrats should either prevent a
vote on the Republican proposal or join together to defeat it no matter
the political cost. They believed the measure went too far in handing
surveillance power to the administration, particularly Attorney General
Alberto R. Gonzales, without sufficient judicial review.

“We should have stood our ground,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler,
Democrat of New York. “We had a bill that did everything they
said was necessary for national security. I think we could defend
that.”

Progressive bloggers agreed. “Cowards,” said the
headline on a post Tuesday on the Daily Kos Web site, which listed the
41 House Democrats and 16 Senate Democrats who sided with the White
House and Republicans.

As they dealt with the political fallout, Democrats noted that
Congressional aides were already drafting a revision of the bill, which
expires in six months. But they also acknowledged that reaching
agreement on changes would not be easy.

The A.C.L.U. wants to make sure that Congress and the country have
all the information they need for the renewed debate. On Wednesday, the
group filed an unusual request with the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which operates in near-total secrecy, asking it to
make public its recent opinions on the scope of the government’s
ability to wiretap Americans.

The executive director of the A.C.L.U., Anthony D. Romero, said,
“Unless the FISA court discloses the documents leading up to the
recent law and shedding light on the government’s claimed
surveillance authority, an informed and meaningful debate — the
cornerstone of our democracy — cannot occur.”

Democrats and political analysts said they expected the long-term
political consequences of last week’s votes to be minimal because
most of those who are irate would not be inclined to back Republicans.

“At the end of the day, how many choices do they have?”
asked Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst, about liberal
voters. “How many Democratic primaries are going to be determined
by this? Base voters have a way of complaining, being angry, of holding
their breath until they turn blue. But I don’t see it as having
any real consequence.”

Others say frustration with the party over issues like the
surveillance vote is at the heart of the dismal poll ratings for
Congress.

Some are already talking about primary challenges for Democrats whom
they consider enablers of Mr. Bush, like moderate Blue Dogs who formed
the core of Democratic support for the eavesdropping proposal in the
House. On the Web site Open Left, the blogger Matt Stoller accused the
Blue Dogs of one of their “standard betrayals.”

“The upside,” Mr. Stoller wrote, “is that
organizing is beginning already around fixing the FISA legislation, and
a campaign to destroy the brand of the Blue Dogs is not far
away.”

Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting.

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Pakistani TVs say Musharraf to declare emergency

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 9, 2007 at 9:43 am

Pakistani TVs say Musharraf to declare emergency

Wed Aug 8, 2007 4:08PM EDT

By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Private Pakistani television channels reported
on Wednesday that President Pervez Musharraf was preparing to declare a
state of emergency imminently, but government spokesmen denied there
were any such plans.

State-run Pakistan Television quoted official sources as saying the
reports were baseless and Information Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani
denied to Reuters that a meeting had been held to discuss the
imposition of an emergency, as rumors swept the country.

A member of the inner circle of the Pakistani leadership told
Reuters, however, that U.S. ally Musharraf was considering the option,
which could allow him to extend the tenure of the national and
provincial assemblies by 12 months and delay elections due by the turn
of the year.

The government could explain such a step by citing growing
insecurity because of the threat posed by Islamist militants allied to
the Taliban and al Qaeda after a series of attacks, many of them by
suicide bombers, in the past month.

Political analysts and opposition leaders, however, have feared that
Musharraf, who is going through his weakest period since coming to
power in a 1999 coup, might resort to an emergency because of
difficulties he faces in getting re-elected by the sitting assemblies,
while still army chief.

“Both internal and external threats are such that you cannot rule
out anything. At the moment there is no emergency. We have said that
options are available with the government,” Deputy Information Minister
Tariq Azim Khan told Geo TV, one of the channels reporting that the
measure would be announced soon.

The United States has put Musharraf under pressure to act against al
Qaeda nests in hostile tribal regions on the Afghan border, such as
North Waziristan.

Western countries with troops in Afghanistan are sensitive to any
instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan, whose help is crucial to
fighting the Taliban insurgency and in counter-terrorism operations
against al Qaeda.

SHORT OF SUPPORT

A not-so-secret meeting in Abu Dhabi in late July with former Prime
Minister Benazir Bhutto, leader of the largest opposition party, to try
to agree terms for power sharing was indicative of how desperate
Musharraf’s position had become.

Musharraf wants to be re-elected in uniform between mid-September
and mid-October before national and provincial assemblies are dissolved
for parliamentary elections due in December or January.

Although Musharraf can command the simple majority needed to win
re-election in the assemblies, he is likely to face multiple
constitutional challenges.

The Supreme Court’s decision on July 20 to reinstate a chief justice
Musharraf had spent four months trying to sack heightened expectations
that those challenges could well be upheld.

Musharraf would need a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly
to change the constitution, and avoid challenges in the Supreme Court,
but for that he would need Bhutto’s help.

She wants Musharraf to quit the army and guarantee free and fair elections before she will countenance any deal.

© Reuters 2006.

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Tow-truck Driver From New York City Steam Blast in Medically Induced Coma

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 11:24 pm

A tow-truck driver and his
passenger burned when a massive steam-pipe explosion blew a crater in a
Manhattan street last month have sued the city’s utility provider,
accusing it of misconduct.

Passenger Judith Bailey and a guardian for driver Gregory
McCullough seek unspecified damages from Consolidated Edison in the
lawsuits filed Tuesday in State Supreme Court.

The victims accused Con Edison of failing to “properly operate and
maintain its steam system,” thereby creating a “ticking time bomb.”
More than 12 such pipes have exploded since 1987, including one that
killed three people in 1989 and released 200 pounds of asbestos into
the air, the plaintiffs claim.

The lawsuits came the same day the utility said a shoddy repair job
on one of the pipes didn’t cause the explosion. Inspections suggested
the explosion was spontaneous, utility officials said.

About 40 people were injured and one woman died of a heart attack as a result of the blast.

McCullough, 21, and Bailey, 30, were in the truck when the pipe
burst near Grand Central Terminal on July 18, causing the ground below
them to give way and create a massive sinkhole. McCullough was taking
Bailey home after towing her car to a repair shop.

The truck was sucked into the crater and engulfed in a blanket of
scorching steam, mud and asbestos that soared stories into the air,
sending people fleeing and rattling the city.

McCullough has been placed in a medically induced coma to control
his pain and has undergone surgery to remove dead skin. He suffered
third-degree burns to more than 80 percent of his body.

Bailey, a single mother with two daughters, suffered burns to more
than 30 percent of her body. She was to be released from the hospital
Wednesday afternoon, her lawyer said.

Con Edison spokesman Chris Olert said the utility does not comment on pending litigation.

Con Edison has hired an engineering firm specializing in analyzing
structure failures to investigate the blast. The work is expected to
take at least three months. State utility regulators are conducting a
separate investigation.

(AP)

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NASA SPARING NO EXPENSE:: AIRSTREAM CIRCA 1966

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 11:02 pm

CBS News

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Rain Cripples New York City Transit

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 9:27 pm

By VERENA DOBNIK and DAVID CARUSO

NEW YORK –

A torrential downpour sent water surging through New York’s subway system
and highway tunnels and across airport runways Wednesday, leaving
thousands of commuters stranded and one big question: How could 3
inches of rain bring the nation’s largest mass transit system to a halt.

 

The
storm, which also spawned a rare tornado, hit just before dawn. By rush
hour, the subway system was virtually paralyzed when pumping stations
became overwhelmed. Bedlam resulted from too much rain, too fast; some
suburban commuters spent a half day just getting to work.

 

“One
big rain and it all falls apart,” said Ruby Russell, 64, as she sat
waiting on a train in Brooklyn. She had been trying to get to Manhattan
for three hours.

 

The failure renewed a debate about whether the
network of pumps, sewers and drains that protects the city’s subways
from flooding needs an overhaul. Every line experienced some sort of
delay as track beds turned into streams gurgling with millions of
gallons of rainwater. The washout was the third time in seven months
that the subways were disrupted by rain.

 

Metropolitan Transit
Authority engineers were asked to report back to Gov. Eliot Spitzer
within 30 days with suggestions about how to deal with the chronic
flooding.

 

“We have a design issue that we need to think about,” Spitzer said.

 

The
National Weather Service said a tropical air mass dumped an
extraordinary amount of rain in a short period of time. The worst was
recorded between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m., with 2.5 inches falling on Central
Park and almost 3.5 on Kennedy International Airport.

 

Naturally,
the stormwater sought the low ground, and that meant the subways. Water
poured in through vents, drowned the signal system and flooded the
third rail, forcing a shutoff of power on some lines.

 

MTA
Executive Director Elliot G. Sander said the intensity of the rain was
simply overwhelming. The subway’s drainage system can generally handle
a maximum of 1.5 inches of rainfall per hour.

 

“The timing and intensity of the storm took us by surprise,” Sander said.

 

The
subway problems come as weather experts predict New York is due for a
major hurricane. A storm with 130 mph winds and a 30-foot storm surge
could cause the Hudson and East rivers to overflow – and bring with it
more significant flooding than a severe rainstorm.

 

Keeping the subway system dry is a challenge, even in regular weather.

 

On
an average day, hundreds of MTA pumps remove 13 million gallons of
water from the system, which includes several tunnels and stations
below sea level. Much of that water is groundwater that enters from
sources such as streams.

 

Public officials called for improvements
in the drainage system after a similar rain-related shutdown in 1999,
and the MTA made some changes after another round of paralyzing tunnel
floods in 2004, when the remnants of Hurricane Frances washed out the
subways for hours.

 

The city’s sewer and stormwater drains can
handle steady rain, “but when it comes to these very intense, high
inch-count rain events, over a short period of time, it is very
difficult,” said Michael Saucier, a spokesman for the city’s Department
of Environmental Protection.

 

DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd said
the city is spending $300 million per year upgrading its piping systems
and has been gradually building a more robust stormwater drainage
system to replace the old combined sewers that handled wastewater and
rain.

 

In Manhattan, Times Square was one huge mess Wednesday,
packed with many of the 4 million riders who rely on the subway system
daily. Thousands waited for hours for any means of transportation,
jostling one another to get on the few buses that arrived. The suburbs
were no better: In Westchester County, hundreds of commuters were
stopped on a Metro-North train due to track flooding.

 

Streams of
people in business attire – with briefcases, cell phones and
BlackBerries in hand – trudged through drenched streets toward the
subway. But it, too, was flooded. The hordes then made a beeline for
buses they’d spotted up the street.

 

The storms also created
problems for the region’s airports, where delays of up to an hour were
reported. The National Weather Service said a tornado touched down in
Brooklyn, where winds downed trees, tore off rooftops and wrapped signs
around posts. At least 40 homes were damaged.

 

Tornadoes have hit
New York City before, but not often. The National Weather Service had
records of at least five, plus sketchy detail on the last reported
tornado sighting in Brooklyn, in 1889. None was as strong as
Wednesday’s twister, which had winds as high as 135 mph.

 

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event,” said Jeffrey Tongue, a Weather Service meteorologist.

 

A
woman on Staten Island died when a car got stuck in an underpass and
another car came along and hit hers, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. A
handful of people were injured, Bloomberg said.

 

Lanie Mastellone,
who lives in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood, awoke as her roof was
coming off. Before escaping, she ran to get her late husband’s wedding
ring.

 

“It happened so quick. Maybe he was watching over me,” Mastellone said.

 

At
the end of the day, some trains were finally back up and running. But
commuters trying to get home were met with another unpleasant surprise:
The storm left behind high humidity that felt like they were walking
into a sauna – and when they got onto train cars, a sardine can.

 

Associated
Press writers Kiley Armstrong, Samantha Gross, Sara Kugler, Colleen
Long, Karen Matthews and Cristian Salazar contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS the last name of a commuter to Russell, instead of Russel.)

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

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When in doubt, blame Washington

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 1:58 pm

Obama turns to his favorite weapons

When in doubt, blame Washington

August 8, 2007

The debate over who has the best foreign policy judgment continued
Tuesday, with Barack Obama taking punches from Hillary Rodham Clinton,
John Edwards and Chris Dodd.

But Obama, playing an unfamiliar defense game with home field advantage
on a Soldier Field stage, kept returning to two central campaign themes
to inoculate himself against criticism: blaming Washington insiders and
stressing his early objection to the Iraq war. Edwards also raged
against the establishment and gave Obama a run for the anti-Washington
crown.

Nothing very subtle in this 96-minute exchange moderated by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

Clinton hit Obama in the belly over Obama getting trapped
recently in answering a hypothetical question about a nuclear attack on
Pakistan and announcing that he would, if there were actionable
intelligence, send a U.S. strike force into Pakistan to root out
terrorists.

“I do not believe people running for president should engage in
hypotheticals,” she said. Without naming Obama, she said it was a “very
big mistake” to “telegraph” his Pakistan move and “destabilize the
Musharraf regime which is fighting for its life.”

Clinton earned boos for saying what was on her mind about Obama. “You
can think big, but remember you shouldn’t always say everything you
think if you’re running for president, because it has consequences
across the world.”

But she was warmly received as Girlfriend Clinton standing up against
six men. After taking incoming from Obama and Edwards, Clinton slipped
into a serene state. Asked to respond to the attacks, she said calmly,
“I’m just taking it all in” while urging Democrats not to fight each
other. Referring to her years wrangling the “vast right-wing
conspiracy,” Clinton said, “So if you want a winner who knows how to
take them on, I’m your girl.”

And, at a time Obama is trying to establish himself as a foreign policy
heavy, he misspoke when he called the leader of Canada a “president.”
Canada’s leader is a prime minister.

Obama turns to his favorite weapons :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Lynn Sweet

When in doubt, blame Washington

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Obama Struggles to Keep Up

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 10:25 am

CHICAGO SUN TIMES

Democratic
rivals accused Hillary Clinton of being too cozy with lobbyists and
Wall Street Tuesday, but the party’s presidential front-runner
portrayed herself as a champion of working people and commonsense
policies, drawing cheers from a crowd of union activists.

Barack
Obama, running second to Clinton in most polls, leveled some of the
criticism but was forced to defend his own recent statements on
Pakistan during the 90-minute debate sponsored by the AFL-CIO at
Chicago’s Soldier Field.

The debate turned into the most
animated encounter of the Democratic campaign, suggesting that the
battle for the party’s nomination may be entering a new phase, one that
is likely to grow increasingly contentious after Labor Day.

The
candidates appeared far more willing to challenge one another directly,
and in more pointed language, than in previous debates.

Elbows
flew throughout the night, and the challengers appeared more eager to
mix it up, stoked perhaps by the enthusiasm of a large and boisterous
audience.

The debate over who has the best foreign policy
judgment continued as the circus came to town, with Barack Obama taking
punches from Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards and Chris Dodd.

But
Obama, playing an unfamiliar defense game with home field advantage on
a Soldier Field stage, kept returning to two central campaign themes to
inoculate himself against criticism:

Blaming Washington insiders and stressing his early objection to the Iraq war.

Edwards also raged against the establishment and gave Obama a run for the anti-Washington crown.

Nothing very subtle in this 96-minute exchange moderated by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

Clinton
hit Obama in the belly over Obama getting trapped recently in answering
a hypothetical question about a nuclear attack on Pakistan and
announcing that he would, if there were actionable intelligence, send a
U.S. strike force into Pakistan to root out terrorists.

“I do not believe people running for president should engage in hypotheticals,” she said.

Without
naming Obama, she said it was a “very big mistake” to “telegraph” his
Pakistan move and “destabilize the Musharraf regime which is fighting
for its life.”

Clinton earned boos for saying what was on her
mind about Obama. “You can think big, but remember you shouldn’t always
say everything you think if you’re running for president, because it
has consequences across the world.”

But she was warmly received
as Girlfriend Clinton standing up against six men. After taking
incoming from Obama and Edwards, Clinton slipped into a serene state.

Asked to respond to the attacks, she said calmly, “I’m just taking it all in” while urging Democrats not to fight each other.

Referring
to her years wrangling the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” Clinton said,
“So if you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I’m your girl.”

And,
at a time Obama is trying to establish himself as a foreign policy
heavy, he misspoke when he called the leader of Canada a “president.”
Canada’s leader is a prime minister.

Jo Swift

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Hal Fishman | 1931-2007

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 10:21 am

Hal Fishman

In 1999, KTLA’s 10
p.m. news team included, from left, sportscaster Tony Hernandez,
Fishman, co-anchor Terry Anzur and weatherman Roland Galvan.
(KTLA)

Hal Fishman
Hal Fishman | 1931-2007

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War Is a Moneymaker

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 2:41 am

War Is a Moneymaker

It
should be clear to America, by this point in the “war
president’s” reign, that American foreign policy has always
been to create its own enemies.

Like all of Bush’s
predecessors, his “mistakes” in foreign policy have usually
strengthened those we are fighting, or those whom we are about to
fight.

The enormous arms packages that Bush has proposed for
Israel and every Sunni state in the Middle East region (except for
Shiite Iran) are meant to be used in a planned regional expansion of
the war in Iraq.

Congress has basically authorized a massive
expansion of the war that the People want to be terminated, with the
recent votes against Iran that read like the Iraq war resolution.

The
creation of covert forces to be used inside of Iran and the torrent of
weaponry that is now flowing to the Sinoura government in Lebanon are
leading elements of the strategy to make war against Iran and all of
its allies, even those in Iraq.

Jo Swift

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Nixon Resigns

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 2:18 am

Nixon Resigns

He Urges a Time of ‘Healing’; Ford Will Take Office Today The 37th President Is First to Quit Post

By JOHN HERBERS
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
Washington, Aug. 8 — Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, announced tonight that he had given up his long and arduous fight to remain in office and would resign, effective at noon tomorrow.

At that hour, Gerald Rudolph Ford, whom Mr. Nixon nominated for Vice President last Oct. 12, will be sworn in as the 38th President, to serve out the 895 days remaining in Mr. Nixon’s second term.

Less than two years after his landslide re-election victory, Mr. Nixon, in a conciliatory address on national television, said that he was leaving not with a sense of bitterness but with a hope that his departure would start a “process of healing that is so desperately needed in America.”

He spoke of regret for any “injuries” done “in the course of the events that led to this decision.” He acknowledged that some of his judgments had been wrong.

The 61-year old Mr. Nixon, appearing calm and resigned to his fate as a victim of the Watergate scandal, became the first President in the history of the Republic to resign from office. Only 10 months earlier Spiro Agnew resigned the Vice-Presidency.

Speaks of Pain at Yielding Post

Mr. Nixon, speaking from the Oval Office, where his successor will be sworn in tomorrow, may well have delivered his most effective speech since the Watergate scandals began to swamp his Administration in early 1973.

In tone and content, the 15-minute address was in sharp contrast to his frequently combative language of the past, especially his first “farewell” appearance- that of 1962, when he announced he was retiring from politics after losing the California governorship race and declared that the news media would not have “Nixon to kick around” anymore.

Yet he spoke tonight of how painful it was for him to give up the office.

“I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so,” he said.

Puts ‘Interests of America First’

“I have never been a quitter,” he said. “To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body.” But he said that he had decided to put “the interests of America first.”

Conceding that he did not have the votes in Congress to escape impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, Mr. Nixon said, “To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home.”

“Therefore,” he continued, “I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.”

Then he turned again to his sorrow at leaving. Although he did not mention it in his speech, Mr. Nixon had looked forward to being President when the United States celebrates its 200th anniversary in 1976.

“I feel a great sadness,” he said.

Mr. Nixon expressed confidence in Mr. Ford to assume the office, “to put the bitterness and divisions of the recent past behind us.”

“By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America,” he said. “I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that events that if some of my judgments were wrong — and some were wrong — they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interests of the nation.”

Further, he said he was leaving “with no bitterness” toward those who had opposed him.

“So let us all now join together in affirming that common commitment and in helping our new President succeed for the benefit of all Americans,” he said.

As he has many times in the past, Mr. Nixon listed what he considered his most notable accomplishments of his five and half years in office — his initiatives in foreign policy, which he said had gone a long way toward establishing a basis for world peace.

Theodore Roosevelt Is Quoted

And, at the end, he expressed his own philosophy — that to succeed is to be involved in struggle. In this he quoted Theodore Roosevelt about the value of being “the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” and who “spends himself in a worthy cause.”

After spending himself in a long political career, Mr. Nixon is scheduled to fly to his home in San Clemente, Calif., and retirement tomorrow while Mr. Ford is being sworn in the Oval Office.

A White House spokesman said tonight that Mr. and Mrs. Nixon and their family would bid farewell to Cabinet members and staff personnel at 9:30 A. M. tomorrow in the East Room. Then they will board a helicopter at 10 A. M. for the short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, where they will emplane on the Spirit of ‘76, a jet aircraft, for their flight to San Clemente.

Ronald L. Ziegler, the Presidential adviser and press secretary, also said that Mr. Nixon’s letter of resignation would be delivered to the office of Secretary of State, Kissinger in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House by noon tomorrow.

Mr. Nixon’s announcement came only two days after he told his Cabinet that he would not resign but would let the constitutional impeachment process run its course, even though it was evident he would be removed from office after a trial by the Senate.

In the next 48 hours the pressures for him to resign and turn the reins of the Government over to Mr. Ford became overwhelming.

His chances of being acquitted were almost hopeless. Senator Barry, Goldwater, the Arizona conservative who was the Republican Presidential candidate in 1964, told him that he had no more than 15 votes in the Senate, far short of the 34 he needed to be sure of escaping conviction. Members of his own staff, including Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., the White House chief of staff, strongly recommended that he step down in the national interest.

In the end only a small minority of his former supporters were urging him to stay and pledging to give him their support. It was his friends, not his legions of enemies, that brought the crucial pressures for resignation.

Seventeen months of almost constant disclosures of Watergate and related scandals brought a steady attrition of support, in the country and in Congress, for what many authorities believed was the most powerful Presidency in the history of our nation.

However, a Presidential statement of last Monday and three transcripts of Presidential conversations that Mr. Nixon chose to make public ultimately precipitated the crush of events of the last week.

In that statement, Mr. Nixon admitted, as the transcript showed, that, on June 23, 1972, he ordered a halt to the investigation of the break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex here six days earlier by persons in the employ of agents of Mr. Nixon’s re-election campaign. He also admitted that he had kept the evidence from both his attorneys and the House Judiciary Committee, which had recommended that the House impeach him on three general charges.

Then came the avalanche. Republicans, Southern Democrats and others who had defended Mr. Nixon said that these actions constituted the evidence needed to support the article of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee charging obstruction of justice. And it gave new support to other charges that Mr. Nixon had widely abused his office by bringing undue Presidential pressures to bear on sensitive Government agencies.

As the pressures mounted and Mr. Nixon held publicly to his resolve not to resign, the capital was thrown into a turmoil. A number of Senators anxious for a resignation began publicly predicting one.

At the White House yesterday, Mr. Nixon met in his White House offices with Mrs. Nixon and his two daughters, Mrs. David Eisenhower and Mrs. Edward F. Cox, and with his close aides. Members of his staff, acting independently of the Congressmen, sent him memorandums he had requested as to their recommendations. Most called for resignation rather than taking the country through a painful impeachment debate and vote in the House and a trial in the Senate.

Last night, Raymond K. Price and other speech writers were ordered to prepare a resignation statement for use tonight. Secretary of State Kissinger met with the President late in the evening and Mr. Nixon told him that he would resign in the national interest.

At 11 A.M. today, as crowds for the third day gathered along Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House, President Nixon summoned Mr. Ford to his Oval Office and officially informed him that he would submit his resignation tomorrow to the Secretary of State, as provided by Federal law, and that Mr. Ford would become President.

Shortly after noon, Mr. Ziegler, the President’s confidant and press secretary, his face saddened and weary, appeared in the crowded White House press room and announced that the President would go on national radio and television tonight to address the American people. As with most previous such announcements, he did not say what the President would talk about.

But by that time, other Presidential aides were confirming that Mr. Nixon planned to resign, and the tensions that had been building for days subsided.

At 7:30 P.M. Mr. Nixon met in his office in the Executive Office Building with a bipartisan Congressional leadership group — James O. Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi, President pro tem of the Senate; Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, the Senate majority leader, Hugh Scott, Republican of Pennsylvania, the Senate minority floor leader, Carl Albert, Democrat of Oklahoma, the Speaker of the House, and John J. Rhodes, Republican of Arizona, the minority leader. The meeting was to give them formal notice of his resignation.

Among the White House staff today there was a sadness but there were no tears, according to those there. Mr. Nixon, who was described as wretched and gray yesterday while wrestling with his decision, was described today as relaxed. To some, he appeared relieved.

He ordered Mr. Price to begin drafting the resignation speech yesterday, even before he made his decision to resign, aides said. Five drafts of it were written before it was turned over to Mr. Nixon to make his own changes.

It was exactly six years ago last night that Mr. Nixon was nominated on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention to be the party’s nominee for President, a note of irony that did not escape members of the President’s staff.

That evening marked the beginning of an ascension to power that was to put the Nixon mark on an important segment of history. After a first term marked by innovations in foreign policy and a return of resources to the state and local governments in domestic policy, Mr. Nixon in 1972, won re-election with 60.7 per cent of the vote.

In early 1973, as he ended American military involvement in the Vietnam war and as he moved to strengthen the powers of his office in a multitude of ways, his popularity rating in the Gallup Poll registered 68 per cent. But as the Watergate disclosures broke his rating dropped quickly and was below 30 per cent before the end of the year.

Mr. Nixon made a number of counterattacks to win back his lost popularity. He campaigned from time to time across the country as if he was running for office. He disclosed information about his taxes and property. He hired a succession of lawyers to defend him in the courts and in Congress.

He made television and radio appearances. He ordered his subordinates to step up their activities to show that the Government’s business was moving ahead. He made foreign trips to show he was still a world leader.

Cheered in Tour of Middle East

In the Middle East in June he was cheered by vast throngs, and he held a summit meeting with Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in Moscow.

Yet, when he returned to the United States, the Gallup Poll showed his rating at 24 per cent and the Watergate charges broke anew as the House Judiciary Committee stepped up its impeachment inquiry. His Administration was tottering when he made his remarkable statement last Monday, apparently in an effort to put his own interpretation on information that was expected to have been made public at the Watergate trials as a result of a Supreme Court decision upholding a court order for the information.

When the decision to resign came, Mr. Nixon moved to achieve an orderly transition of power to Mr. Ford. General Haig, who has had broad delegated authority in recent months, met frequently with the Vice President to brief him on policy, as did other Administration officials.

Mr. Kissinger gave a number of assurances that the nation’s “bipartisan foreign policy” would remain firmly in place. The Defense Department announced that American military forces around the world would continue under normal status. And across this city thousands of Federal employees performed their chores as if nothing was happening.

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Hal Fishman, 75; revered award-winning KTLA news anchor

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 2:11 am

Hal Fishman, 75; revered award-winning KTLA news anchor

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 8, 2007

Hal Fishman, the award-winning KTLA-TV Channel 5 news anchor who was a Los Angeles broadcasting fixture for nearly 50 years, died Tuesday, the station announced. He was 75.

Fishman died at 3 a.m. at his Brentwood home with his family at his side. He had been hospitalized with a serious infection after collapsing at his home Aug. 1, less than a week after being diagnosed with colon cancer. On Friday, the station announced that the disease had spread to his liver.

A broadcaster who began his television career in Los Angeles in 1960, Fishman had anchored his station’s10 p.m. newscast — now called “KTLA Prime News” — since 1975. He covered major news stories in Southern California, including the Watts riots, the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the Sylmar and Northridge earthquakes and the Rodney G. King beating case.

A onetime assistant professor of political science, he also served as the newscast’s managing editor and commentator.

Fishman anchored his last broadcast July 30.

“He’s really the last of the old-fashioned broadcast journalists who cared about giving information to the public,” Joe Saltzman, a journalism professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, told The Times on Tuesday. “He had fought for years against the dumbing down of television news — celebrity journalism and car chases and all the silliness — and tried to maintain the criteria he believed in. He wanted to give people news that affected their lives, stories of substance. I don’t think a Hal Fishman would be hired today in a local news market,” Saltzman said.

Former longtime KTLA news director Jeff Wald called Fishman “the dean of Los Angeles television news.”

“My joke about him was that he was a walking encyclopedia,” Wald told The Times. “I’ve never met anybody who was as close to genius as the word can be. He had almost a photographic mind in that everything he had read — and he was a voracious reader — he remembered.”

Fishman, Wald said some years ago, “knows the material better than what is written in his copy or what comes in on the wires. That’s no slap to the writers, but he is so into his job, he can usually ad-lib better than what the writers can write for him.”

Rich Goldner, interim KTLA news director, told The Times on Tuesday, “Hal was one of the last newsmen in this country who was extremely well-read and was so interested in informing the public about the truth.”

His lengthy career as an anchor was a tribute to his believability and integrity, Goldner said.

Word of Fishman’s death spurred an outpouring of remembrances from viewers on the website of KTLA, which like The Times is owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co. E-mail missives praised the veteran anchor for his “honesty,” “sagacity” and “responsible journalism.”

“Hal Fishman was one of the last serious newsmen,” said a message submitted by John P. “Guys like him are irreplaceable.”

“I loved Hal. I loved his voice, his delivery, and his general friendly attitude and manner,” a message submitted by Kathy Stevens said. “His presence was just a comfort in some way, which I can’t really explain.”

By midafternoon Tuesday, viewers had posted more than 2,000 messages about Fishman.

The announcement and discussion of Fishman’s passing filled more than 10 minutes on the “KTLA Morning Show” as the news team reminisced Tuesday about the veteran anchor.

Frank Buckley, who was filling in for regular anchor Carlos Amezcua, almost apologized to viewers as the discussion went on, finally saying that Fishman, as a dedicated journalist, would have wanted them to get to the news of the day.

The station’s website posted a six-minute video tribute Tuesday morning to Fishman that detailed the anchor’s rise from college professor to leading local news anchor. The tribute was accompanied by staff remembrances from Fishman’s colleagues, including news reporter Stan Chambers, who joined KTLA in 1947, and former co-anchors Jann Carl and Lynette Romero.

Carl, who co-anchored the station’s broadcast with Fishman for eight years, recalled his intense need to get the story right. “I never worked with a man so dedicated, so intelligent, so concerned with the accuracy of every single word we would utter,” Carl said.

KTLA news officials aired a lengthy retrospective on Fishman’s life and career during Tuesday night’s 10 p.m. broadcast.

Fishman, who spent his entire 47-year news career at independent TV stations in Los Angeles, has often been referred to as one of the longest-running news anchors in the nation — if not the longest-running.

At a gala celebrating KTLA’s 60th anniversary at the Autry National Center on July 31, Fishman was honored for his years in television news and presented with a certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records proclaiming his durability in anchoring television news without interruption from June 20, 1960, until the present.

“When I think of the hundreds of anchors who have come and gone over the last 30 years — many of them better-looking and better-coiffed than I ever was, there was one area that they were not better, and that is in being dedicated to being informed. And I think the audience perceives that,” Fishman told The Times in 1990.

“I am not a charismatic broadcaster or a dramatic guy,” he said, “but I think I am a person that people can trust to give them a straightforward and accurate account of what’s going on in the world. I think that’s why I have lasted so long.”

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Aug. 25, 1931, Fishman earned his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, where he got into broadcasting after accidentally entering the campus radio station.

“Someone asked me, ‘Are you here for the tryout?’ I had no idea what it was about, but I had nothing else to do, so I said ‘yes,’ ” he told the Riverside Press-Enterprise in 2000.

After earning a master’s degree in political science from UCLA, Fishman had planned for a career in academia.

He was an assistant professor of political science at Cal State L.A. in 1960 when KCOP-TV Channel 13 invited him to teach an on-air class in politics — “American Political Parties and Politics” — during the summer the Democratic National Convention was being held in L.A.

In a 2006 interview with Broadcasting & Cable magazine, Fishman recalled the first words he said on television: “Good afternoon, I’m professor Hal Fishman, and this course is certainly quite unique for me, because it’s the first course that I have ever taught where the student can turn the professor off.”

Fishman did so well that he was asked to stay at the station and provide political commentary.

“What I didn’t know was that the course was getting a rating,” Fishman told The Times in 1995. “I didn’t know from ratings in those days. I ad-libbed everything. I interviewed the Kennedys — JFK, Bobby, Teddy. When the course was over, I went to say goodbye to the general manager, and he said: ‘How’d you like to come on our news? Do your thing for two, three minutes. Do anything you’d like.’ So that’s how it started.”

As Fishman told The Times in 1985, “I decided I could reach more people in one broadcast than I could teach in a lifetime.”

In 1965, Fishman moved to KTLA-TV, where he contributed to the station’s Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning coverage of the Watts riots.

He moved to KTTV-TV Channel 11 in 1970, returned to KTLA in 1971 and moved to KHJ-TV (now KCAL-TV) Channel 9 in 1973 before returning to KTLA in 1975.

“He was always a ratings winner,” Wald said Tuesday. “He was an advantage . . . because of his longevity. People knew who he was.”

Fishman told The Times in 1990 that he “always looked at broadcasting as a continuation of my teaching.”

After Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait that year, he set a Michelin road map of the Middle East desert on an easel and used a pointer to illustrate for viewers the route that buses packed with U.S. and British women and children would have to travel to escape Kuwait City.

Fishman thought his study of political science and history was far more valuable to him as a newscaster than formal journalism training would have been.

“When I was a professor,” he said in the 1985 Times interview, “I used to tell my students, ‘You can’t have a properly functioning democracy without an enlightened electorate.’ It’s our job as newscasters to enlighten the electorate. We are the conduits of information.”

A longtime aviation buff and pilot who held numerous world aviation records for speed and altitude, Fishman sometimes covered news stories from his own airplane and often folded stories about aviation into the newscast.

Among his many honors was the prestigious Governors Award from the Los Angeles chapter of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1987, given to him “for his special and unique contribution to Los Angeles area television.”

In 2002, the Associated Press Television-Radio Assn. gave him its first Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as naming him “Best News Anchor” for the third consecutive year. And in 2004 and 2005, the Radio and Television News Assn. of Southern California honored Fishman for best news commentary.

Like many Los Angeles TV newspeople, Fishman appeared as a newsman in a number of movies, including “Joe Dirt” and “Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.” He also co-wrote two novels with Barry Schiff: “The Vatican Target” (1978) and “Flight 902 Is Down!” (1982).

He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1992, and in 2000 — his 40th anniversary in television news broadcasting — KTLA named its newsroom “The Hal Fishman Newsroom” in recognition of his service to the station and the community.

Fishman is survived by his wife, Nolie; and a son, David.

Services are pending.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com

Times staff writers Valerie J. Nelson, Martin Miller and Greg Braxton contributed to this report.

Hal Fishman, 75

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LEAVE IRAQ NOW

In Broadcatch on Tuesday, August 7, 2007 at 5:14 pm

 

20070807_mother_weeping_over_dead_child_baqubah_bombing1.jpg

The dead child she is weeping over is her son. He was killed by a
roadside bomb this morning east of Baqubah. The photograph was taken at
Baqubah city morgue.

Leave.

 

What you are looking at is what the American invasion has brought to Irak’s children.

  • Starvation
  • Disease
  • Sudden Violent Death.

Gorilla’s Guides

 

NEW YORK CITY SPIED ON REPUBLICAN CONVENTION PROTESTERS

In Broadcatch on Tuesday, August 7, 2007 at 11:46 am

City Is Rebuffed on the Release of ’04 Records

A federal judge yesterday
rejected New York City’s efforts to prevent the release of nearly
2,000 pages of raw intelligence reports and other documents detailing
the Police Department’s covert surveillance of protest groups and
individual activists before the Republican National Convention in 2004.

In a 20-page ruling, Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV ordered
the disclosure of hundreds of field intelligence reports by undercover
investigators who infiltrated and compiled dossiers on protest groups
in a huge operation that the police said was needed to head off
violence and disruptions at the convention.

But at the behest of the city and with the concurrence of civil
liberties lawyers representing plaintiffs swept up in mass arrests
during the convention, the judge agreed to the deletion of sensitive
information in the documents to protect the identities of undercover
officers and confidential informants and to safeguard police
investigative methods and the privacy of individuals caught up in
investigations.

The city had largely based its bid for nondisclosure on the need to
protect those identities and methods, and argued that the public might
misinterpret the documents or the news media sensationalize them. But
the civil liberties lawyers insisted that the documents — even
without the sensitive materials — were needed to show in court
that the police had overstepped legal boundaries in arresting,
detaining and fingerprinting hundreds of people instead of handing out
summonses for minor offenses.

The order was the latest development in the long-running case, which
posed thorny questions about the free speech rights of protesters and
the means used by law enforcement officials to maintain public order.

It appeared that the plaintiffs, who had denounced the police for
trampling on the civil liberties of protesters who were fingerprinted
and detained at length for minor offenses, had largely won the day,
while the city had achieved a more limited objective.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union,
which represents the lead defendants in a barrage of more than 80
lawsuits, said of the judge’s ruling: “He’s given us
everything we asked for. He has redacted the names of undercover agents
and the particulars of surveillance techniques. We agreed to that. But
he has said the city cannot withhold the information it gathered in
these operations.”

Peter Farrell, the city’s senior lawyer in the case, offered a
narrower interpretation of the disclosure order. “Judge Francis
held that the city properly invoked the law enforcement privilege in a
document-by-document review,” he said in a statement released by
the Law Department. “While he has ordered some limited
information disclosed, he has also provided for restricted
access.”

As for a possible appeal, Mr. Farrell said: “We are in the
process of reviewing the information the judge has ordered produced to
determine whether the disclosure will compromise the programs or
personnel of the N.Y.P.D. Intelligence Division. Once we have completed that review, we’ll make a determination on appealing.”

The city and the Police Department have come under intense scrutiny
over the surveillance tactics, in which for more than a year before the
convention undercover officers traveled to cities across the country,
and to Canada and Europe, to conduct covert observations of people who
planned to attend. But beyond potential troublemakers, those placed
under surveillance included street theater companies, church groups,
antiwar activists, environmentalists, and people opposed to the death
penalty, globalization and other government policies.

And as the convention unfolded, more than 1,800 people were
arrested, mostly for minor violations, and many were herded into pens
at a Hudson River pier and fingerprinted instead of being released on
summonses or desk appearance tickets, which are more customary for
charges that amount to little more than a traffic ticket.

As scores of federal lawsuits challenging the mass arrests on Aug.
31, 2004, were filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, with
plaintiffs claiming wrongful detentions of up to two days and other
violations by the police to keep protesters off the streets, the
outlines of the extensive covert surveillance operation began to emerge
from court records.

In March, The New York Times disclosed details of the sweeping
operation, including a sample of raw intelligence documents and
summaries of observations from field agents and the police
cyberintelligence unit. Some plaintiffs and their lawyers, seeking to
bolster their cases, asked the court to disclose the documents. In May,
Judge Francis allowed the disclosure of 600 pages of documents relating
to security preparations before the convention.

But a second batch of documents, including pictures and reports by
undercover agents detailing which protest groups were infiltrated and
the results of the surveillance operations, remained in contention. The
city argued that disclosure would reveal sources, methods and other
information that might compromise current and future investigations,
while the plaintiffs contended that the reports would disprove city
claims that the protesters planned to engage in violence, and would
show that mass arrests had been unnecessary.

In his ruling yesterday, Judge Francis acknowledged that some
information in the documents needed to be protected. He himself edited
out what he regarded as privileged law enforcement information in many
“field intelligence reports” from agents covering
confidential sources and techniques. And he did not order the release
of documents in which the Republican convention was not mentioned.

But he rebuffed city arguments that general information gathered
about an organization would necessarily jeopardize confidential police
matters. “It is difficult to imagine how someone could determine
the identity of an undercover officer simply from the fact that he or
she was present at a meeting or protest attended by dozens, if not
hundreds, of people,” the judge declared.

In addition to the field intelligence reports, two other categories
of documents whose contents and even subject matter have never been
publicly discussed — 84 documents that the city contended were
privileged in their entirety and 177 that the city agreed to release
with its own editing — were ordered disclosed in part by the
judge.

The city, he said, did not explain “why the documents in the
first category are privileged, nor does it explain why it is necessary
to redact information from documents in the second category,”
adding: “The court can only guess at why the city believed that
they are subject to privilege.”

Parts of the documents, which could be released in 10 days unless
the city appeals, are expected to be used in court by the plaintiffs,
either as evidence in challenging the motives and conduct of the police
in the arrests, fingerprinting and detention of protesters, or in
formulating questions for cross-examining witnesses for the city,
including David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence.

Mr. Dunn, of the civil liberties union, said that Commissioner Cohen
had been giving a deposition when the dispute over the documents arose,
and the judge granted a city motion to postpone the deposition.

“We believe that these documents will disprove the
N.Y.P.D.’s claim that demonstrators planned to engage in
violence,” Mr. Dunn said. “We believe these documents will
reveal not only the vast scope of the N.Y.P.D.’s political
surveillance operation, but also that there was no need for the Police
Department’s harsh treatment of protesters.”

New York Times

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Zeitgeist, the Movie

In Broadcatch on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 8:51 pm

BOING BOING::Jay Kinney reviews Zeitgeist, the Movie

For the last couple of months, Boing Boing readers
have been emailing me about a two-hour documentary available on Google
Video called Zeitgeist, the Movie. I finally got around to viewing it.

In three parts, Zeitgeist (which
has no credits) attempts to show that 1) Christianity is rehashed pagan
sun-worship and is used by the rich and powerful to control people, 2)
the 9/11 tragedies were part of an elite conspiracy, and 3) ever since
World War I, the ultra-rich have been secretly manufacturing wars and
financial collapses to control the populace and to get richer and more
powerful.

I don’t know enough about politics, history, or religion to have a valid opinion of Zeitgeist but I was interested in getting a well-informed person’s assessment of
the documentary. I could think of no one better suited than Jay Kinney. He’s the publisher of Gnosis magazine, the author of several books on Western esoteric and occult traditions, and the author of The Masonic Enigma, “a journey of discovery into the real facts (and mysteries) of Masonry’s history and symbols.” He’s also an amazingly talented cartoonist, and contributed to The Whole Earth Review which is how I first learned about him. (His 1987 article, “If Software Companies Ran the Country,”
where he compares Al Capp’s Shmoos to infinitely-copyable software,
remains as fresh and powerful today as it did 20 years ago).

At my request, Jay watched the movie, and kindly wrote the following review for Boing Boing:

Zeiting the Geist

The latest bit of guerilla media to take the online universe by
storm is “Zeitgeist, the Movie.” Clocking in at close to
two hours’ length, and with over a million views on Google Video
since its June 26th “official” release, Zeitgeist
is a grabby, cranky, can’t-stop-watching-it documentary that
purports to tell the real truth about Christianity, 9/11, and the
International Bankers.

Exactly who is behind the video is unclear, although someone
with the moniker of “Peter J.” has posted an online letter
claiming credit and explaining Zeitgeist’s message to those who may have somehow failed to grasp the worldview that the video hammers home.

And what is that worldview, pray tell? Religions in general, and
Christianity in particular, are primarily systems of social control.
9/11 was an inside job and the destruction of the WTC twin towers and
building 7 were aided by controlled demolition. And finally,
International Bankers, through the Federal Reserve and the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR), control our money and our future, leading to,
ta da, the coming One World Government and the microchipping of
everyone.

Exactly how all this fits together is left to the
viewer’s imagination or, presumably, the film-maker’s hash
pipe. Are those who manipulate Christianity for control purposes in
cahoots with the Bankers, and were the Bankers in on the 9/11 caper? Zeitgeist
sidesteps such logical questions through the use of the all-purpose
term, “the elite,” a shadowy group of rich and powerful men
who want nothing more than to enslave humanity and reap block-buster
profits through the promotion of wars and financial crises.

For conspiracy buffs, this is all pretty standard fare, and,
indeed, aficionados of the genre will find little new in
“Zeitgeist.” The notions that most religions were
originally a kind of solar worship, and that the Jesus Christ story
recapitulated the mythos of numerous other “dying gods,”
were floating around in the late 1700s. Fittingly, the video features a
quote from Thomas Paine reducing Christianity to warmed-over sun
worship, which was a daring bit of religion-baiting 200 years ago,
albeit not so earth-shattering today.

The nefarious International Bankers meme has been propagating
itself since at least the mid-1800s and has long been a mainstay of
radical right-wing circles where it has often overlapped with
mutterings about Jewish cabals.

The 9/11 truth segment of the video is, of course, of much
more recent vintage, but, here too, it mostly repeats accusations that
have gotten widespread play in the uber-skeptic milieu.

Breaking new factual ground is not what Zeitgeist is
about, however. Rather, the video is a powerful and fast-acting dose of
agitprop, hawking its conclusions as givens. Unfortunately, like most
propaganda, it doesn’t play fair with its intended audience. At
times, while watching it, I felt like I was getting Malcolm
McDowell’s treatment in Clockwork Orange: eyes pried wide open while getting bombarded with quick-cut atrocity photos.

At other times, Zeitgeist engages in willful confusion
by showing TV screen shots of network or cable news with voice-overs
from unidentified people not associated with the news programs. If one
weren’t paying close attention, the effect would be to confer the
status and authority of TV news upon the words being spoken. Even when
quotes or sound bites are attributed to a source, there’s no way
to tell if they are quoted correctly or in context.

Late in the video, there’s a supposed quote from David
Rockefeller, which, if genuine, would be an astounding confession of
complicity in mass manipulation. But, of course, the quote is not
sourced or dated, which renders it useless. (The video’s website
does feature a Sources page, but a hodge-podge list of books, with no page numbers cited, is of little value for source verification.)

The over-all temper of the video is rather like the John Birch
Society on acid, with interludes by Harry Smith. Incongruously, after
spending nearly two hours trying to scare the bejeezis out of its
viewers, Zeitgeist ends on an oddly upbeat note, telling us
that Love — not Fear — is the answer, We are all One, and
featuring sound-bites from Ram Dass and Carl Sagan.

It’s a shame, really, that Zeitgeist is,
ultimately, such a mess. There are plenty of legitimate questions about
what transpired on 9/11, just as there are plenty of shady doings in
international finance or puzzling aspects of religious history, for
that matter. And what is coming down in the name of National Security
is truly unnerving. Yet, bundling them all together in disjointed
fashion does justice to none of them. Time and again, Zeitgeist maximizes emotional impact at the expense of a more reasoned weighing of evidence. But, perhaps that’s the intention.

I’ve often pondered about what it might take to snap
everyone out of the walking dream we collectively entered on 9/11/01.
Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall provided the emotional pivot for
the end of the Cold War, only a collective experience of an intensity
equal to that of 9/11 might jolt us awake as to what is really
happening in the corridors of power and certain undisclosed locations.

Picture 1-88It’s my hunch that Zeitgeist is one attempt to
provide such a jolt, and it does indeed pack a certain punch. Too bad
it also runs off in three directions at once, and is so indiscriminate
in its sources and overly certain of its conclusions. Zeitgeist
may be powerful, but its power is tainted with some simplistic and
pernicious memes that have already received more propagation than they
deserve. The video’s producer does inform us that “It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth . . .”

Indeed.

Link to Google Video page | Link to torrent files

 

General Clark’s Keynote Speech at Yearly Kos 2007

In Broadcatch on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 5:19 pm

Body:

August 3, 2007
transcript by Reg NYC

“We are not questioning the generals. Mr. President, we are questioning you! Stop hiding behind Dave Petraeus.” – Wesley Clark

Jon Soltz: …an Iraq war veteran.

(applause)

(laughs)
I find that so funny, because whenever you go to a Republican event,
they don’t seem to cheer for the troops. So, I (laughs) I, I thank you
guys for that applause. I’m also the Chairman of VoteVets.org a group
that (cheering) y’all have been so supportive of that without, without
the support of the Kos community we would never’ve been where we are
today. We obviously penetrated the political system from the outside
much like everybody in this room, and for your support I, I thank you.

It’s
obviously an honor to be here. I’m here this morning to introduce
General Wesley Clark who, who sits on the board of, of VoteVets.

(applause and cheering)

Click here for Jon Soltz’s complete introduction

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a round of applause for General Wesley Clark.

(enthusiastic cheering and applause)


GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

(more cheering and applause)
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
(more cheering and applause)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
(persistent cheering and applause)
Thank you very much.

Thank you. It makes me feel good and I haven’t even announced yet.
(laughter and cheering)

That was a joke.
(laughter)

I’m,
I’m really happy to be here, and I’m really happy to see all of you
here. This community’s made a huge difference in American politics.
This is the centerpiece of a new politics, and you can feel it. You can
feel it in the energy. You can feel it in the ideas. You can feel it in
the enthusiasm and the commitment and the, the, the selflessness that
you all have brought into the business of politics. You didn’t work
your way up to get positions. You weren’t after a claim. All you wanted
was an opportunity to have your ideas heard and to be able to resonate
with others who have the same concerns and the same love for America
that you have. And you built a community that’s incredibly powerful,
and I want to thank you for that, and I want to thank you for what you
did for helping Democrats take over the House and the Senate in 2006.
You’re wonderful.

(applause)

And I want to, I want to
also recognize we’ve got a lot of people here who are working in this
community now, you’ve got a lot of people here, you may not have met
them, but who are candidates for elective office in the 2008 cycle. And
could I ask all the candidates in 2008, if you’re here, would you stand
up and let this community get a look at you, because they want to meet
you?

(applause)

I’m real proud of those people who are
running, because it takes a lot of courage to go out there and run for
office. It’s not the kind of courage that you might get a Silver Star
for in the military. It’s the kind of courage where you really think
about it, where you worry about your family. You worry about what the
impact is. You worry about what it’s going to do to your life and
whether you actually are pursuing a, a dream that’s got some chance of
becoming real. It takes true, deep courage to make those kinds of
commitments. So, I salute the candidates, and I’m really proud of you.
I hope every one of you win.

(applause)

Read More

 

MySpace.com

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STONERS RULE CONGRESSIONAL SOFTBALL LEAGUE

In Broadcatch on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 1:39 pm

The top spot in a Congressional softball league belongs to drug
reform advocates who are “busting the stoners-as-slackers stereotype,”
Roll Call reports.

The “One Hitters,” took over the No. 1 spot in the Congressional
Softball League last week, and the team fielded by Students for a
Sensible Drug Policy and NORML holds a 13-3 record in the league
comprised of lobbyists, Capitol Hill aides and interest group employees.

“Kris Krane, executive director of Students for a Sensible Drug
Policy and the softball team’s captain, chalks up its success to
the five years the team has been playing together — and a little
extra motivation that comes from trying to dispel the myth that folks
who want marijuana legalized are all munchie-craving, lava-lamp-gazing
losers,” reports Roll Call’s Heard on the Hill gossip column.

This is the One Hitters’ fifth year in the intramural softball
league, and the team previously made headlines when the Office of
National Drug Control Policy refused to face them on the field two
years ago.

“Everyone knows that ONDCP backed out because they were scared
of losing to us on the field, much the same way they are afraid to
debate us because their policies fail in the court of public
opinion,” said
center fielder David Guard, who is associate director of the Drug
Reform Coordination Network. “We have an open challenge to the
Drug Czar to play or debate anytime, anywhere.”

The team’s next game is Tuesday against the “No Talent AZ Clowns,”
whose players come from the offices of Arizona Sens. John McCain and
Jon Kyl.

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Iraq’s power grid is on the brink of collapse

In Broadcatch on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 12:40 pm

0428_b69.jpgAP Via Yahoo:

Iraq’s power grid is on the brink of collapse
because of insurgent sabotage of infrastructure, rising demand, fuel
shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from
the national grid, officials said Saturday.

Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power
generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had
been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, he said.

Power supplies in Baghdad
have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a
day, if that. The water supply in the capital has also been severely
curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and
filtration stations.

Karbala province south of Baghdad has been without power for
three days, causing water mains to go dry in the provincial capital,
the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

“We no longer need television documentaries about the
Stone Age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger
because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having,” said
Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market. Read more…

This how we win hearts and minds. Dirty water, rotting food, no
electricity, no refrigeration or air conditioning in 130 degree heat
and worst of all, no end in sight.

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FACT CHECK: Congress Has Repeatedly Placed Limits On Military Deployments And Funding

In Broadcatch on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 11:28 am
Vietnam

January 9, 2007
Tomorrow night at 9 p.m. EST, President Bush will address the nation and announce an escalation of the war in Iraq by sending about 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq. Can Congress do anything about it?

Some members have claimed that anything other than symbolic action is unconstitutional. Legal scholars on both the left and the right say that’s false. History supports their case.

A new report from the Center for American Progress details how, over
the last 35 years, Congress has passed bills, enacted into law, that
capped the size of military deployments, prohibited funding for
existing or prospective deployment, and placed limits and conditions on
the timing and nature of deployments. Some examples:

December 1970. P.L. 91-652 —
Supplemental Foreign Assistance Law. The Church-Cooper amendment
prohibited the use of any funds for the introduction of U.S. troops to
Cambodia or provide military advisors to Cambodian forces.

December 1974. P.L. 93-559 — Foreign
Assistance Act of 1974. The Congress established a personnel ceiling of
4000 Americans in Vietnam within six months of enactment and 3000
Americans within one year.

June 1983. P.L. 98-43 — The Lebanon Emergency
Assistance Act of 1983. The Congress required the president to return
to seek statutory authorization if he sought to expand the size of the
U.S. contingent of the Multinational Force in Lebanon.

June 1984. P.L. 98-525 — The Defense
Authorization Act. The Congress capped the end strength level of United
States forces assigned to permanent duty in European NATO countries at
324,400.

November 1993.
P.L. 103-139. The Congress
limited the use of funding in Somalia for operations of U.S. military
personnel only until March 31, 1994, permitting expenditure of funds
for the mission thereafter only if the president sought and Congress
provided specific authorization.

Read the full report for more examples.

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The Abu Ghraib Whistleblower’s Ordeal

In Broadcatch on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 11:50 pm
The Abu Ghraib whistleblower’s ordeal

By Dawn Bryan

BBC News

Joe Darby


The US soldier who exposed the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib
prison found himself a marked man after his anonymity was blown in the
most astonishing way by Donald Rumsfeld.

When Joe Darby saw the horrific photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison he was stunned.

So stunned that he walked out into the hot Baghdad night and smoked half a dozen cigarettes and agonised over what he should do.

Joe Darby was a reserve soldier with US forces at Abu Ghraib prison
when he stumbled across those images which would eventually shock the
world in 2004.

They were photographs of his colleagues, some of them
men and women he had known since high school – torturing and abusing
Iraqi prisoners.

His decision to hand them over rather than keep quiet changed his life forever.

The military policeman has only been allowed to talk about that
struggle very recently, and in his first UK interview, for BBC Radio
4’s The Choice, he told Michael Buerk how he made that decision and how
he fears for the safety of his family.

Photos of abuse

He had been in Iraq for seven months when he was first handed the
photographs on a CD. It was lent to him by a colleague, Charles Graner.

I knew that some people wouldn’t agree with what I did… They view it as – I put American soldiers in prison over Iraqis

Joe Darby

Most of the disc contained general shots around Hilla and Baghdad, but also those infamous photos of abuse.

At first he did not quite believe what he was looking at.

“The first picture I saw, I laughed – because one, it’s just a pyramid
of naked people – I didn’t know it was Iraqi prisoners,” he says.

“Because I have seen soldiers do some really stupid things. As I got into the photos more I realised what they were.

“There were photos of Graner beating three prisoners in a group. There
was a picture of a naked male Iraqi standing with a bag over his head,
holding the head, the sandbagged head of a male Iraqi kneeling between
his legs.

“The most pronounced woman in the photographs was
Lyndie England, and she was leading prisoners around on a leash. She
was giving a thumbs-up and standing behind the pyramid, you know with
the thumbs-up, standing next to Graner. Posing with one of the Iraqi
prisoners who had died.”

Promised anonymity

Joe Darby knew what he saw was wrong, but it took him three weeks to
decide to hand those photographs in. When he finally did, he was
promised anonymity and hoped he would hear no more about it.

But he was scared of the repercussions from the accused soldiers in the photos.

“I was afraid for retribution not only from them, but from other soldiers,” he says.

“At night when I would sleep, they were less than 100 yards from me, and I didn’t even have a door on the room I slept in.

“I had a raincoat hanging up for a door. Like I said to my room mate,
they could reach their hand in the door – because I slept right by the
door – and cut my throat without making a noise, or anybody knowing
what was going on, and I was scared of that.”

When the accused soldiers were finally removed from the base, he thought his troubles were over.

And then he was sitting in a crowded Iraqi canteen with hundreds of
soldiers and Donald Rumsfeld came on the television to thank Joe Darby
by name for handing in the photographs.

“I don’t think it was an accident because those things are pretty much scripted,” Mr Darby says.

“But I did receive a letter from him which said he had no malicious
intent, he was only doing it to praise me and he had no idea about my
anonymity.

“I really find it hard to believe that the secretary of
defence of the United States has no idea about the star witness for a
criminal case being anonymous.”

Rather than turn on him for betraying colleagues, most
of the soldiers in his unit shook his hand. It was at home where the
real trouble started.

Labelled a traitor

His wife had no idea that Mr Darby had handed in those photos, but when
he was named, she had to flee to her sister’s house which was then
vandalised with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor.

“I knew that some people wouldn’t agree with what I did,” he says.

“You have some people who don’t view it as right and wrong. They view it as: I put American soldiers in prison over Iraqis.”

That animosity in his home town has meant that he still cannot return there.

After Donald Rumsfeld blew his cover, he was bundled out of Iraq very
quickly and lived under armed protection for the first six months.

He has since left the army but did testify at the
trials of some of those accused of abuse and torture. It is Charles
Graner he is most afraid of.

“Seeing Graner across the courtroom was the only one that was difficult during the trial,” he says.

“He had a stone-cold stare of hatred the entire time – he wouldn’t take
his eyes off me the whole time he sat there. I think this is a grudge
he will hold till the day he gets out of prison.”

Mr Darby and his family have moved to a new town. They have new jobs. They have done everything but change their identities.

But he does not see himself as a hero, or a traitor. Just “a soldier who did his job – no more, no less”.

“I’ve never regretted for one second what I did when I was in Iraq, to turn those pictures in,” he says.

You can hear Joe Darby being interviewed by Michael Buerk on BBC Radio 4’s The Choice on 7 August at 0900 BST.

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Anger boils up in Najaf over power cut

In Broadcatch on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 10:30 pm

Saturday , 04 /08 /2007 Time 5:59:12
Najaf – Voices of Iraq

Najaf, Aug 4, (VOI) – The holy Shiite city of Najaf suffered
from a power cut during the past two days after the National
Electricity Network turned off the power station that provides the city
with electricity, adding to the agony of local residents who struggled
to withstand the scorching heat of August.

A source from the Najaf Electricity Department told the independent
news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI) that the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity
turned off the northern and al-Hizam power stations after the Najaf
municipal council detached the local natural gas station from the
national network.

With a temperature of 48°C, the price of ice cubes increased
dramatically. Muhammad al-Ghazali, a local resident told VOI, “I
have been searching for ice cubes since the early morning, but to no
avail. (Large) ice cubes are sold at 16,000-20,000 Iraqi dinars
(12.9-16 U.S. dollars) and people are fighting over them.”

Wondering why Najaf’s residents should be punished for a
dispute between the Ministry of Electricity and the local municipal
council, al-Ghazali called on the government to provide basic services
for the Iraqi people.

Complaining about a similar increase in fuel prices, another local
resident said that gas has been sold for 35,000 Iraqi dinars/20 liters
($28), compared with 18,000-20,000 dinars ($14.5-16) before the
electricity crisis in the city. “We are completely crippled by
heat and lack of electricity. We lost concentration. For how long will
the government allow this to continue?” he wondered.

Najaf’s Deputy Mayor Abdul Hussein Abtan announced earlier on
local al-Ghadeer TV that the municipal council had isolated the natural
gas station from the national network, while municipal council member
Birak al-Shamarty denied the news. According to al-Shamarty, the
council switched off the capacity regulator which controls the flow of
electricity to the city, but vowed to adhere to the city’s quota
for electricity.

Al-Shamarty attributed the power cut to a failure in the electricity
national network, which he said was the result of an overload on the
network. Meanwhile, a source from Najaf’s natural gas station
linked the electricity crisis in the city to a significant decrease in
gas pressure which he said deactivated two natural gas-powered units in
the local power station.
SS

Aswat Aliraq

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A beginner’s guide to BitTorrent

In Broadcatch on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 6:11 pm

UltraNewb

utorrent.png
Despite the fact that BitTorrent has been around for a good 6 years now, the lightning fast file sharing protocol hasn’t completely taken off in the mainstream. Since we post a decent amount about BitTorrent around here, we figured it was just time we put out a beginner’s guide to BitTorrent. This is the guide you can send to your friend next time he gets that glassy look in his eyes when you mention BitTorrent and how quick and easy it makes downloading albums educational, public domain videos and other large files.

Without going into too much detail, here’s a crash course in the file sharing protocol that is BitTorrent (feel free to skip to the How to find and download a file with BitTorrent section if you’re not all that interested in the details).

What is it

BitTorrent is not a program. [1] It’s a method of downloading files using a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing system. The programs that you use to download files via the BitTorrent protocol are called BitTorrent clients.

BitTorrent is not like Limewire/Kazaa/Napster/other P2P programs you’ve used in the past. This is often the biggest source of confusion for people new to BitTorrent. It’s not difficult to use, it’s just different. As soon as you forget about your old file-sharing program (and you will once you start using BT), the easier it will be to start using BitTorrent.

How does it work

how-bittorrent-works.pngWhat makes the BitTorrent protocol unique is that it distributes the sharing of files across all users who have downloaded or are in the process of downloading a file. Because BitTorrent breaks up and distributes files in hundreds of small chunks, you don’t even need to have downloaded the whole file before you start sharing. As soon as you have even a piece of the file, you can start sharing that piece with other users. That’s what makes BitTorrent so fast; your BitTorrent client starts sharing as soon as it downloads one chunk of the file (instead of waiting until the entire download has been completed).

In order to download a file like the educational public domain video we mentioned above, you have to find and download a torrent file (which uses the .torrent file extension) and then open it with your BitTorrent client. The torrent file does not contain your files. Instead, it contains information which tells your BitTorrent client where it can find peers who are also sharing and downloading the file.

How to find and download a file with BitTorrent

Now that you’ve got a better idea of the terminology and process behind BitTorrent, let’s jump right into using BitTorrent.

First you need to download a BitTorrent client (the program that manages your BitTorrent downloads). I’d recommend:

  • uTorrent for Windows
  • Transmission for Mac
  • Azureus or KTorrent for Linux (Actually, Azureus is cross platform, meaning it will work on Windows and Mac, but on those platforms it’s not nearly as lightweight as the alternatives listed above.)

Search for a good torrent. There are a handful of really good web sites for downloading torrents (that’s right, you search for torrents on the internet). The sites I’d recommend (in no particular order) are:mininova.png

seeders-health-files.pngTry out whichever one you like. One might fit your tastes better than another, but I’ve had good experiences with all of these. From this point, search the site using their search box like you’re using Google—just type in the name of what you’re looking for. You’ll likely get several results, but you want to choose the torrent with the highest number of seeders (indicated in most BitTorrent search results under a field labeled ‘S’). Seeders are people who have already downloaded and are sharing the entire file. The more seeders, the faster your download will be. Some sites also provide you with a health meter, which is generally a measure of seeders vs. active downloaders.

open-with-client.pngDownload the torrent. Once you’ve found a good and healthy torrent, find the download link and download the torrent. Your browser will ask you what you want to do with the file, so be sure to tell it to open the torrent in the BitTorrent client you downloaded above.

save-as.pngYour BitTorrent client will open and (possibly) ask you where you want to save the file(s). Pick your save location, hit OK, and that’s it; your file will begin downloading. If you’re not impressed with the speed at first, be patient. It can sometimes take a minute or two before the download ramps up to full speed. If you’re still not happy, try searching for another torrent with more seeders.

That’s it?

Yep, that’s it. That, in a nutshell, is how to download files using BitTorrent. There can be more to it, of course, if you want to dive in a bit deeper. For example, you can run through the Speed Guide in uTorrent to improve your download speeds (the guide is fairly self explanatory—just go to Options -> Speed Guide to get started), download select files from the torrent rather than every file, throttle your bandwidth, and so on, but this basic guide should get you started.

ratio.pngAlso, to ensure you stay in good standing in the BitTorrent community (and aren’t labeled a leecher), you should always try to upload as much as you download. Most BitTorrent clients keep track of your upload/download ratio, and you should generally continue sharing a file until your ratio reaches 1, after which you can feel free to remove it from your client (the file will remain on your computer—you just stop sharing it).

If you’re ready to move on to even more advanced BitTorrent business or you want to try out alternate methods of downloading files via BitTorrent, check out the following posts:

Since I’m sure many of our readers are experienced with BitTorrent from way back, I’d love to hear your suggestions for BitTorrent newbs in the comments. Also, if you’re new to BitTorrent and you have any questions, let’s hear ‘em.

[1] Well, there is a BitTorrent client specifically called BitTorrent, but we’re talking about the BitTorrent protocol. Most of the time you hear someone talking about BitTorrent, they’re talking about the protocol and not the program. [back up]

Feature

12:00 PM ON FRI AUG 3 2007
BY ADAM PASH
39,240 views

Read More:

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Gebrselassie Wins NYC Half Marathon

In Broadcatch on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 12:29 pm

NEW YORK -

Haile
Gebrselassie already showed he can make it anywhere; he can add New
York to his list. Running in the Big Apple for the first time, the
34-year-old Ethiopian won the New York City Half Marathon in 59
minutes, 24 seconds Sunday – the second-fastest time in the United
States and his eighth win in eight half marathons.

“I was
dreaming just to run in New York City. The dream has come true this
morning,” said Gebrselassie, probably the world’s greatest distance
runner. “Wow, I’m so happy!”

Abdi Abdirahman of the United States
was second, more than a minute behind. Two-time Boston Marathon
champion Robert Cheruiyot of Kenya was third in the second running of
the race.

Hilda Kibet of Kenya won the women’s race in 1:10:32,
outsprinting defending champion Catherine Ndereba by 1.15 seconds. Nina
Rillstone of New Zealand, a surprise leader until the final
quarter-mile when the two Kenyans passed her, was 2.60 back in third.

Gebrselassie,
a two-time Olympic gold medalist, emerged from Central Park after the
7-mile mark, along with Cheruiyot Abdirahman. Gebrselassie and
Abdirahman dropped Cheruiyot when the Kenyan went for water, and before
the American knew it, he was in Gebrselassie’s wake, too.

“I
thought I was going to recover my surge and then just maintain the pace
but it wasn’t that way,” Abdirahman said. “I didn’t give up, no way. We
know Haile’s the greatest, but at the same time, this is sports.”

Gebrselassie didn’t see it quite the same way.

“Right after the park, I just said ‘OK, this is my race,’” he said.

All
that was left was a Sunday morning jog. He took a moment to gawk at
Times Square, like any tourist would, as he breezed through, then he
trotted down the West Side of Manhattan to Battery Park, occasionally
looking back to see if anyone was gaining on him.

Of course, no
one was, even though Abdirahman’s time of 1:00:29 was a personal best.
Cheruiyot was taken to a hospital as a precaution after he finished in
1:00:58. In October, the Kenyan slipped while crossing the finish line
of the Chicago Marathon and spent two days in the hospital with a
concussion.

The women’s race wasn’t decided until Kibet turned it
on at the finish. The Kenyan, who said she will probably compete for
the Netherlands in the 2008 Olympics, discovered her finishing kick
this year in a race when she had to beat her sister over the final 100
meters or so.

“You know when it comes to sprinting, when you’re
just a few meters from someone, then you feel very strong,” Kibet said.
“You’re just fighting to win.”

Ndereba was confused by marshals
pointing to different routes at the finish for men and women, and
didn’t see a sign indicating how close the runners were until 200
meters remained. It wasn’t enough to catch Kibet, who also beat Ndereba
by more than 30 seconds in a 10-kilometer race in July.

“I didn’t
know who to go with,” Ndereba said. “I’m not disappointed. I never get
disappointed for this kind of thing. … I count it as something to
work on.”

The temperature was a comfortable 70 degrees after a
week of oppressive heat and humidity, helping Gebrselassie set the
course record.

Gebrselassie, who holds world records in the 10K
and 20K, won gold in the 10,000 meters in Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney in
2000. His time Sunday (a half-marathon is slightly more than 21
kilometers) was second-best in the U.S. only to his own 58:55 in Tempe,
Ariz., last year. It was the 16th-fastest half marathon.

In the
days before the race, Gebrselassie soaked up the bustle of the city. On
Sunday morning, he ran through mostly deserted streets.

“Yesterday, I was in Times Square. I was there,” he said. “It was very busy. Today, nobody. Amazing.”

Does this mean he’ll run the New York City Marathon?

“Not
this year,” Gebrselassie said. “I’m thinking 2008 or 2009. I’m thinking
I’ll run the New York Marathon before I stop running, surely.”

 

Ridin’ in Style:: The global war on terrorism license plate

In Broadcatch on Saturday, August 4, 2007 at 11:24 am

Study: Some office printers emit dangerous particles

In Broadcatch on Saturday, August 4, 2007 at 11:17 am

A new study suggests that some printers emit dangerous particles that could make office workers sick.

Researchers at Queensland University of Technology
in Australia found that 17 of the 62 printers they tested were “high
particle emitters” that posed a threat to humans. They say 37 of the
printers didn’t emit any particles, but one gave off particles at the
same rate as a burning cigarette.

“These [printer] particles are tiny like cigarette smoke particles
and, when deep inside the lung, they do the same amount of damage. The
health effects from inhaling ultra-fine particles depend on particle
composition, but the results can range from respiratory irritation to
more severe illness such as cardiovascular problems or cancer,”
Professor Lidia Morawska, the study’s author, tells The Age.

Her research showed that particle levels were five times higher
during working hours because of the emissions from printers. She says
the printers were more likely to emit dangerous particles when the
toner cartridge was new or the machines was being used to print
detailed images.

“Printers should operate in environments where there is as much
ventilation as possible and as far as possible from where people’s
desks are located.” she tells tells Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

ABC Science has an extensive report on the findings.

USATODAY.com

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The New Republic VS. The Weekly Standard

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 11:44 pm

The New Republic VS. The Weekly Standard

The war in Iraq has sparked a parallel war between two of Washington’s most prominent partisan political publications, The New Republic and the Weekly Standard. The war has been akin to the ongoing seige of Baghdad’s Green Zone, with the Standard playing the role of Iraqi insurgents, lobbing mortars over the Green Zone gates while TNR rushes to shore up its defenses.

The war began on July 13, when The New Republic published a “Baghdad Diary”
by “Scott Thomas,” an Army private writing under a pseudonym about U.S.
atrocities in Iraq. Thomas described his participation in the mockery
of a female soldier disfigured by an IED, claimed he witnessed
troops
intentionally running over dogs in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and
alleged that another soldier played with the skulls of dead Iraqi
children.

In attempt to challenge the wild notion that atrocities could occur amidst a violent occupation, the neoconservative Weekly Standard’s Matthew Goldfarb published an article declaring that TNR’s
Baghdad Diary was “looking more like fiction.” Goldfarb’s piece relied
on a series of letters supposedly sent to him by active-duty soldiers
that raised questions about the veracity of TNR’s story.

As a result of intensifying attacks from the Standard and right-wing blogs — attacks amplified by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz — Thomas was forced to reveal his identity:
Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp. According to Foer, the Army punished
Beauchamp by revoking his cellphone and email privileges. Right-wing
bloggers subsequently seized on TRN editor-in-chief Franklin Foer’s disclosure that Beauchamp is engaged to TNR reporter and researcher Elspeth Reeve.

Beauchamp has placed his career in extreme jeopardy and subjected
his private life to the scrutiny of right-wing trolls, all to confirm
his published account of U.S. atrocities in Iraq. TNR for its part has just completed a review
of Beauchamp’s diary and found only one minor error. Now it is up to
Goldfarb and his allies to back up their incendiary charges. Who are
the Standard’s sources? Are they reliable? And if they are, why did the Standard omit key details about their backgrounds?

Among all the active duty soldiers used by Goldfarb to undermine Beauchamp, only one is cited by name: Matt Sanchez, a corporal in the Marine reserves. “Frankly, I don’t believe ANY of this story,” Sanchez proclaimed in the Standard about Beauchamp’s diary. Who is Sanchez? According to Goldfarb, he is simply a soldier “who stands behind his work.”

But Sanchez is more than a mere man in uniform. As I reported for Media Matters today, Sanchez is also a conservative pro-war activist whose bio includes a stint as the gay porn actor Rod Majors, (star of such filmic classics as “Beat Off Frenzy”) and an illustrious part-time job as a male prostitute — facts he has acknowledged “leaving … off my curriculum vitae.”

More importantly, Sanchez has been under investigation by the Marine Corps for fraud. According to an April 1 Marine Corps Times article,
Sanchez was informed in a March 22 email from Reserve Col. Charles
Jones, a staff judge advocate, that he was under investigation for
lying “‘to various people, including but not limited to,
representatives of the New York City United War Veterans Council [UWVC]
and U-Haul Corporation’ about deploying to Iraq at the commandant’s
request.” The email added: “‘Specifically, you wrongfully solicited
funds to support your purported deployment to Iraq’ by coordinating a
$300 payment from the UWVC and $12,000 from U-Haul.”

There is no excuse for Goldfarb’s omission of these facts about Sanchez. They were easily accessible through a simple Google search of Sanchez’s name, and have been the talk of the blogosphere for some time. I wrote extensively about Sanchez for the Huffington Post in March and appeared on a segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss his strange double life. Sanchez has also been profiled by Radar and by numerous bloggers. He even penned a long auto-apologia
for Salon.com about his path from porn to the conservative movement.
Couldn’t Goldfarb find a better on-the-record source? Apparently not.

The efforts of Sanchez and right-wing bloggers to take Beauchamp down were allegedly supported by a TNR staffer with a bizarre background. I just received a letter from a source close to TNR. The source wrote:

One reason Beauchamp had to go public was that
conservative bloggers were tracking him down. And the reason they were
was that a temp who was working as assistant for our publisher was
leaking like crazy to right-wing websites. Not that he knew much, but
he was hanging around, he went to a going away party for Ryan [Lizza]
at frank’s [Frank Foer] house, eavesdropping and then posting on
right-wing websites.

That’s how they found out about Scott being married to Ellie [Elspeth Reeve].

Anyway, the guy’s name is Robert McGee. His online pseudonym:
Throbert McGee. Not real hard to track down (especially when he’s
posting that he works at TNR.)

After a little Googling, I found that “Throbert McGee” (seen here embracing his “longtime sidekick Juan”) once kept a “blinkin’ blog”
where he posted about “Faggot fixer-upper wallpaper” and linked to the
overtly racist right-wing blog, “Little Green Footballs.” On the forum
of another conservative blog, Throbert commented favorably about Matt Sanchez’s “11″ Monster Cock.” Throbert also used this forum as his platform to attack Beauchamp and leak information to conservative bloggers about Beauchamp’s private life.

I hear there are darker postings by Throbert lurking in the
blogosphere, but I will leave it to his right-wing mouthpieces to
explain those. And I will wait (hopefully not in vain) for the Weekly Standard’s
Goldfarb to come clean about Sanchez and the rest of the unnamed
“active duty soldiers and various experts” he used as sources.

Max Blumenthal: The Weekly Standard’s Reliable Sources:
Male Prostitute Matt Sanchez and Web Weirdo “Throbert McGee”

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Clinton-Obama Tensions

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 11:28 pm

On the Trail

In his Web column today, Jeff Zeleny writes that for Hillary Rodham
Clinton and Barack Obama, the genteel decorum of the Senate has given
way to the go-for-the-jugular instinct of the campaign trail:

It wasn’t always this way.

When Mr. Obama was running for the Senate, Mrs. Clinton waited out a
lightning storm on a tarmac to fly to Chicago for a fundraiser on his
behalf. After he arrived in Washington in 2005, he studied her first
year in office and worked to keep a similarly studious – yet low
– profile. After Hurricane Katrina, he joined Mrs. Clinton and
former President Bill Clinton as they visited storm evacuees in
Houston, with Mr. Obama walking a few paces behind out of deference to
the leading names of the Democratic Party.

The relationship began to change, according to several Democrats who
are friendly to both senators, when Mr. Obama began musing aloud about
a presidential bid. The day he opened his exploratory committee,
several Senate observers said, he extended his hand and said hello on
the Senate floor. She breezed by him, offering a cool stare. Go to Column

Clinton-Obama Tensions Spill Into the Senate – The Caucus – Politics – New York Times Blog

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KTLA anchor Hal Fishman has colon cancer

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 11:19 pm

By Greg Braxton and Carla Rivera, Times Staff Writers
3:41 PM PDT, August 3, 2007

Veteran KTLA Channel 5 anchor Hal Fishman, who was hospitalized this
week after collapsing at his home, has been diagnosed with colon
cancer, station officials said today.

31626223.jpg

Doctors were treating Fishman, 75, for an infection he suffered after
the collapse when they discovered the cancer, which has spread to his
liver, said interim news director Rich Goldner.

Added Goldner: “Hal is awake and thanks everyone for their well wishes
and says he is going to fight this illness. He is looking forward to
coming back when he gets better.”

Fishman, a news veteran of more than 45 years, has anchored the
station’s 10 p.m. newscast since 1975. He is a former political science
professor and renowned aviation enthusiast, holding several records for
speed and altitude.

He joined KTLA in 1965 and reported on the assassination of Robert F.
Kennedy, the Northridge earthquake and the Rodney King beating.

His honors include a Governor’s Award from the Los Angeles Chapter of
the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and an Outstanding
Broadcast Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

In 2000, KTLA named its newsroom the “Hal Fishman Newsroom” in
recognition of his services to the community and to the station, which,
like the Los Angeles Times, is owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co.

His omnipresence on the Los Angeles news scene prompted dozens of well-wishers to send messages to the station’s website.

Many lauded Fishman’s straight-talking perspective, often delivered in the style of a stern father.

“Hal, get well soon and get back to work,” said one missive from Gerry
in El Cajon. “L.A. needs your honesty and perspective. Many of us have
watched KTLA for decades. We have grown up [I won't say old] with you.
You are a civic treasure.”

carla.rivera@latimes.com

greg.Braxton@latimes.com

Los Angeles Times

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Cop shielding Villaraigosa gets rough with reporter

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 11:14 pm

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today sought to put the scandal surrounding
his personal life behind him, one day after the Telemundo network
suspended his girlfriend, newscaster Mirthala Salinas, for covering the
mayor while they were romantically involved.

But a Villaraigosa news conference at the Port of Los Angeles ended
chaotically, with a port police sergeant shoving a television reporter
against a cargo container as she attempted to pursue the mayor.


FOR THE RECORD:

An earlier version of this article referred to KVEA-TV Channel 52 as Channel 54.


Only minutes earlier, Villaraigosa had voiced hope that the
conclusion of Telemundo’s review of Salinas’ conduct would allow him to
move forward.

Yet even as the mayor expressed those sentiments, he took questions on
whether his poll numbers had dropped (he said he didn’t know), whether
he spoke to Telemundo for its review (he said he hadn’t) and whether he
felt responsible for the disciplinary actions that befell Salinas and
three management-level employees at Telemundo and its local affiliate,
KVEA-TV Channel 52.

“I regret (that) the decisions that I’ve made in my personal life have
been a distraction to the City of Los Angeles,” said Villaraigosa,
whose wife of 20 years has filed for divorce. “I’m deeply sorry that
I’ve let so many people down, especially my family. But it’s time to
move on, and move on we will.”

Villaraigosa said he took full responsibility for his actions “from the
very beginning.” And he repeatedly attempted to refocus reporters on
the port’s announcement that the retail chain Target had obtained 100
trucks powered by cleaner-burning liquid natural gas.

“That’s the real news here, by the way,” he said.

Villaraigosa customarily lingers after news conferences to answer
additional questions from reporters and allow cameras to follow him to
his vehicle.

But today, as the mayor strode from the podium, a half-dozen port
police officers formed a skirmish line to block reporters and cameramen
from approaching him.

“How come we’re not allowed to talk to him?” one reporter barked.

“Why the suddenly limited access?” another demanded.

When the officers broke their formation, more than a dozen journalists
starting running across a parking lot in pursuit of the mayor as he
departed.

Spanish-language television reporter Alicia Unger was at the front of
the pack, and as she approached one 20-foot container, Port Police Sgt.
Kevin McCloskey shoved her into the side of it, further infuriating
reporters, who began shouting.

“That’s wrong,” one television reporter screamed.

Another said: “You can’t hit a woman like that.”

A visibly shaken Unger, who reports for Azteca America Channel 54, then shouted at the officer: “Why are you pushing me?”

Reporters and camera operators surrounded McCloskey demanding to know
why he pushed Unger. McCloskey told them to contact port police as
another officer led him away.

Afterward, reporters turned their attention to Unger, who said that McCloskey “slammed me. He slammed me hard.”

Spokesman Matt Szabo later said that the mayor’s office did not order port police to keep reporters away from Villaraigosa.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

duke.helfand@latimes.com

Cop shielding Villaraigosa gets rough with reporter – Los Angeles Times

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GREAT QUOTES STOLEN FROM A RIGHT-WING DOUCHEBAG

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 11:09 pm

“I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear
weapons in any circumstance… involving civilians. Let me scratch
that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the
table.”

BARACK OBAMA

“What Giuliani is, is George Bush on steroids. Giuliani, Romney and
the rest of the Republicans running for the nomination are going to
give the country four more years of crony capitalism, which is exactly
what we have now. We have insurance companies and drug companies and
oil companies running this government. They need to be stopped. And
Giuliani just wants to empower them.”

JOHN EDWARDS

“I’m a democrat and I can’t stand this president…. I’m here to
represent people. The people I represent don’t want to impeach
this clown.”

EARL POMEROY

“We should reverse the presumption of confirmation. The Supreme
Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice
Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another
Alito.”

CHUCK SCHUMER

“While President Bush and Vice President Cheney continue to operate
as if they are leaders of a monarchy, Congress should censure them and
make it clear to this and future generations that their actions are
entirely unacceptable.

“If Congress does not act to formally admonish this White House then
the future of our democracy will be placed on a slippery slope in which
other presidents may point to the actions of this administration as
justification for further abuses of the Constitution. Congress cannot
allow such abuses of power and law, which is why Senator Feingold and I
will soon introduce these censure resolutions.”

MAURICE HINCHEY

“I will be shortly introducing a censure resolution of the president
and the administration. One, on their getting us into the war of
Iraq—in Iraq and their failure to adequately prepare our military
and the misleading statements that have continued throughout the war in
Iraq. And the second, on this administration’s outrageous attack
on the rule of law, all the way from the illegal terrorist surveillance
program to their attitude about torture…. [T]his administration has
done the greatest assault on our Constitution perhaps in American
history.”

RUSS FEINGOLD

“I think we’re in great danger of [a terror attack staged by the U.S. government].”

RON PAUL

“I live in North Carolina. I’ll probably never eat a tangerine again.”

ELIZABETH EDWARDS Read the rest of this entry »

And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks…

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 10:55 pm
David Brooks and Mark Shields
 
audioRealAudioDownload  

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

David, do you see something new and awful about this heat that erupted in the House of Representatives?

DAVID
BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: It’s not new, but awful. It’s like a
Eugene O’Neill play. They’ve got all these submerged hatreds, and it
only takes a little fissure to open them all up. And that’s what
happened yesterday.

What was striking about what happened with
the ag bill was that, first of all, the parties couldn’t agree what was
in the bill, and then they couldn’t agree on how the vote went about
the bill. And then when they had this whatever happened, the bit of
chaos, and the versions you get depend entirely on what party you’re
talking to, immediately the hatred erupted.

And it’s the same
hatred that erupted when Tom DeLay and others held the vote open a
couple of years ago, and that hatred is still there. And I don’t think
the procedures of the House have changed that much. The majority party
has changed, but a lot of the strong-arm tactics are sort of the same.

JIM LEHRER: Hatred is a strong word to use. Do you agree with David, who uses that word?

MARK
SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: No, I disagree with David. I think there
was a crankiness, there is a crankiness in the House right now, this
tension.

JIM LEHRER: Crankiness, not hatred?

MARK SHIELDS:
Crankiness. No, it was cranky. They’re tired. They’ve worked long
hours, and I think they’re ready to get out of there. And I think the
profound difference between what happened last night and what happened
with Tom DeLay, keeping the Medicare bill open for three hours, the
vote on the floor for three hours in total violation of the House
rules, and twisting arms and making threats on the House floor, was
that both Steny Hoyer, the majority leader — I thought who handled it
very well — and Mike McNulty, who was in the chair, said, “I was
wrong. I made a mistake.” I mean, I didn’t hear that in the DeLay era.
That was entirely different. Now…

JIM LEHRER: But David’s point
is that, whether or not it was an honest mistake or not, that
underlying the surface here is tension, and much more than tension.

MARK
SHIELDS: Well, I don’t know — I mean, I thought John Boehner was quite
measured and quite restrained. Roy Blunt, the Republican whip, was
different. And I think there’s no question that, within the Republican
caucus, there are people who are unreconstructed, just as there are
people on the Democratic side who are unreconstructed in any dealing
with the other side.

And I think Roy Blunt was speaking to and
for them, whereas John Boehner, who’s a fierce partisan and a very
loyal Republican, you know, was trying to think how he could make the
house work.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, they both have Machiavellian
reasons to want to make the House appear less angry because the
approval ratings of the Congress as a whole, and the House in
particular, are sub-Cheney, and they’re pretty terrible. So they both
have an incentive to make it seem like they’re both doing their job.

And
the big thing that has changed — this has been a long, gradual change
– is that members of each party are much less likely to care what
people in the other party think of them personally than used to be. And
so they’re perfectly happy to shout, “Shame,” or to behave in shameful
ways toward people in the other party.


Mark Shields



Mark Shields

Syndicated Columnist
Let’s
be very blunt: The House reflects the country, and the country is riven
over the issue of Iraq. There’s a consensus that we want to get out,
and there’s no consensus on how.


Civility in Congress

JIM LEHRER: Does it matter?

MARK SHIELDS: Why, sure, it does matter.

JIM LEHRER: I mean, other than just…

MARK
SHIELDS: It matters because, you know, for one thing, I mean, we saw
the retirement announced this week of Ray LaHood. Ray LaHood is a
Republican from Peoria, Illinois, who served as Bob Michel’s chief of
staff, who was Republican leader, was an enormously civilized, genteel
man, who has friends on the other side of the aisle, and for whatever
reason is leaving.

And the quotient and quota of civility in that
institution has depleted seriously by people like David Skaggs, from
Colorado, who left, and Ray LaHood, both of whom organized a weekend
for families to overcome what David has described, that would get
along. They went away for one weekend, maybe even two, but then he
tried to rejuvenate it, and couldn’t get people to want to do it.

DAVID
BROOKS: I actually went to one of those weekends as a facilitator of
conversation. And there was — I tell the story — there was a woman in
the hallway weeping because, in one of the breakout sessions, she’d
been insulted so badly that she left the room weeping.

JIM LEHRER: A member of the House of Representatives?

DAVID
BROOKS: A spouse. And this was at the civility conference. And so
that’s a little of the atmosphere that was even carrying over.

JIM
LEHRER: Going to substance here now, Speaker Pelosi said in an
interview on the program last night that she was proud of the record of
the House of Representatives during this session. Does she have a right
to be proud? Should she be proud?

DAVID BROOKS: I don’t think in
particular. I think she’s done things to exercise her control over her
party, which looked unlikely when this started. I think she’s been an
effective speaker at organizing the Democrats, and this was a party
that seemed riven with Steny Hoyer on one side and her on the other. I
think she’s been effective in that.

In terms of passing
legislation, changing the way the House does business, reducing the
number of earmarks, that’s certainly not been a success. The number of
earmarks has shot upwards. And so I think substantively, it’s not been
a successful Congress, but politically she’s done well, and that’s what
she’s oriented to, 2008.

MARK SHIELDS: I agree with David. I
think she’s been a far more leader of the — effective leader of the
party than many people thought she was capable of being. I mean, she’s
cracked heads, and she’s kept the Democrats quite united.

Let’s
be very blunt: The House reflects the country, and the country is riven
over the issue of Iraq. There’s a consensus that we want to get out,
and there’s no consensus on how. And that’s exactly where the House is.
And they’ve had six separate votes on it. That drives the House; that
drives the entire ethos of the House, the entire atmosphere of the
House.

I think that — if you’re giving a grade, I’d say it’s an
incomplete, because, I mean, there are things like children’s health,
and the student loan reform, as well as the ethics reform I think that
are significant, and the energy bill — it will be tomorrow — that it
will be September, it will be October, but they will — I think they
will be done.


David Brooks



David Brooks

The New York Times
I
was out on the campaign trail with Republicans in New Hampshire, every
other question was about health insurance. This really is an issue in
even Republican circles.


Debate over children’s health bill

JIM
LEHRER: What do you think on — what is your view on the children’s
health bill, the SCHIP thing, David, which got a lot of heat? We’ve had
debates here on the NewsHour about it.

DAVID BROOKS: I confess
I don’t have an intelligent view on the substance. From first glance,
it looks like something is building on a successful program that would
extend health benefits to children. If you look at the members of the
Senate, the Republicans say who would be unlikely to vote for a
Democratic piece of legislation, I think 18 Republicans voted for it.
So you have to think the thing has some merit.

What strikes me,
interestingly, is the politics of it. Because on the one hand, I was
out on the campaign trail with Republicans in New Hampshire, every
other question was about health insurance. This really is an issue in
even Republican circles.

JIM LEHRER: You mean about no having it and worrying about not having…

DAVID
BROOKS: Exactly, one thing or another, whether it’s veterans or
something, it’s a big issue, let alone on the Democratic side. And so
that’s a big issue. On the other hand, spending restraint is also a
huge issue out there. And Democrats have been notably slow to pick
fights on spending versus not spending, for that reason.

JIM LEHRER: And the SCHIP issue has got both. It’s got health insurance. Also it’s got spending issue politically, right?

MARK SHIELDS: Hey, Jim…

JIM LEHRER: Oh, Mark.

MARK
SHIELDS: … there is no political defense from the White House’s
position on this. This is a Republican program passed in 1997. I mean,
Trent Lott, God bless him, the Republican whip in the Senate, talks
about this is socialized government-run medicine. This is what they’re
trying to push.

The last time I checked, every member of Congress
and their children is covered by a government-sponsored-and-paid-for
health program. I trust in a better conscience they’ll all renounce
this during the recess and go to private plans.

I mean, what are
we talking about? We’re talking about the children of the working poor.
I mean, somehow there’s a charge that the six deadbeats who are 5 years
old, these 6-year-olds want to get on and rip off the taxpayer? I mean,
I just can’t believe it.

They’re going to tax? Yes, they’re going
to tax cigarettes. I mean, unfortunately, cigarettes and the poor
people who smoke them have become a punching bag and a fiscal reservoir
for the country and for programs. But I don’t think the Republicans and
the White House — I mean, the Republicans talk openly about how they
can’t understand the White House’s political point on this.

DAVID
BROOKS: I think most Republicans would not accuse 6-year-olds of being
deadbeats. I don’t think quite that’s their argument. This is the
open-air argument of what’s going to be the biggest domestic argument
of the ‘08 campaign, and the Republican position would be, not that
these people shouldn’t be covered, it’s going to be that we shouldn’t
do it in a nationalized way, a Britain-Canada style, and we shouldn’t
ramp up spending that we can’t pay for. And they’d say the cigarette
tax only pays for a tiny portion. There are other things that aren’t
paid for, so you’ve got to pay for it.

And so that’s going to be the argument. I’m not sure the argument is going to be over deadbeat 6-year-olds.


Mark Shields



Mark Shields

Syndicated Columnist
[W]hat
this does is it…ends the whole entertainment industry in Washington,
no tickets, no gifts, no entertainment, no dinners for lobbyists.


New ethics rules

JIM
LEHRER: OK, Mark, you mentioned the ethics legislation. Are things
really going to change that much because of what happened?

MARK SHIELDS: Sure, they are.

MARK
SHIELDS: First of all, Jim, according to the Heritage foundation, the
Republican think-tank, very respected, since 1996, Republicans members
of Congress have left the House, one out of two has become a registered
lobbyist. I mean, the explosion in K Street is just…

JIM LEHRER: K Street is a street in Washington where the lobbyists work and live.

MARK
SHIELDS: Lobbyists work, it’s just remarkable, OK? And the nexus
between lobbyists and money to campaigns — if David’s running, I’m a
lobbyist. What I do is I then collect money from my clients, from my
associates, and I then bundle that money and bring it to David, and
say, “Look, you know, I can only give you $2,300, but here’s $45,000.”

JIM LEHRER: And, by the way, I represent the…

MARK
SHIELDS: Exactly, and I want to have a continuing relationship with you
and your wonderful staff. And what this does is it exposes that, it
ends the whole entertainment industry in Washington, no tickets, no
gifts, no entertainment, no dinners for lobbyists. But the money thing
– for members and staff — extends to two years the time before a
member who leaves can now go out and lobby. And I just think — I
really think it makes an enormous difference. It’s going to be
disinfectant of sunlight. We’re going to know who’s bundling…

JIM LEHRER: They can still bundle, but they have explain it.

MARK SHIELDS: That’s right. That’s right.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think?

DAVID
BROOKS: I think it makes a difference for the reasons Mark talked to.
It’s going to be lonely for us at Nationals games, no lobbyists and
members of Congress floating around, a lot of beer and hot dogs for us.

MARK SHIELDS: You’ll get better seats.

DAVID
BROOKS: But the thing a lot of people wish had gone further — and this
is controversial — is, again, going back to the earmarks and the
transparency of the earmarks. A lot of people, like John McCain, think
that they should have gone further so that the earmarks, that you
couldn’t slip it in.

The Democrats claim they did go to some
extent. But I really think the earmarks are corrosive. And that’s what
the lobbyists really care about is, is getting those special provisions
slipped in. And until you cut away that, which is the root of all
evil…


David Brooks



David Brooks

The New York Times
[I]n
‘94, there were 4,000 earmarks in the budget. Ten years later, there
were 14,000. And I think the Washington Post reported there were now
34,000. People love earmarks.


Impact on earmarks

JIM
LEHRER: And the new bill does not in any way ban earmarks. All it does
is say, “You’ve got to say who got the earmarks and why,” right?

MARK SHIELDS: And you have to certify that nobody connected with you is benefiting from it financially.

DAVID
BROOKS: Right, but there are loopholes about where it gets certified
and things like that that a lot of people are complaining about.

JIM LEHRER: So do you think it’s going to end earmarks, it’s going to…

DAVID
BROOKS: Oh, well, it certainly won’t end earmarks. Everybody loves
earmarks. I mean, I think, if I remember this correctly, when Gingrich
came to power in ‘94, there were 4,000 earmarks in the budget. Ten
years later, there were 14,000. And I think the Washington Post
reported there were now 34,000. People love earmarks.

JIM LEHRER: Does the raid on Senator Stevens’ Alaska home, does that affect the ethics climate and passable legislation…

MARK
SHIELDS: It guaranteed Senate passage. I mean, if you’re a Republican,
you can’t say, “Oh, boy, this is political.” Here they are, the FBI,
going in and invading and examining the home of the senior Republican
senator. It absolutely guaranteed it.

And I think what we’re
seeing is that Alaska is, from top to bottom — the political
environment there is being examined and will be scrutinized.

JIM LEHRER: A climate change as a result of this?

DAVID
BROOKS: Yes. But, again, the Ted Stevens, what he did, whether he did
it or not, that’s not what the cause of all this lobby reform
legislation. It wasn’t the stuff that people were trying to hide that
caused this legislation. It was the stuff that was happening in the
open day on restaurants on K Street.

And so, you know, what he
did, may have done, may be illegal, but the stuff that was going on
every day is what we needed to address. And that’s what the legislation
was about.

JIM LEHRER: But I’m just thinking about whether or not
it’s tied directly to this. Does it have an indirect influence on the
way people…

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think when you’ve got money
in freezers, houses being rebuilt, it all feeds in. Duke Cunningham,
we’ve had many cases of this.

JIM LEHRER: OK, David, Mark, thank you both very much.

Online NewsHour: Analysis | Republicans Walk Out on House | August 3, 2007 | PBS

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Harry Reid is craaaaaaaaazy!

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 10:19 pm

Daily Kos

Tue Jul 24, 2007 at 02:31:18 PM PDT

So
your president is at 25% approval rating. Your attorney general is a
laughing stock who doesn’t even bother concealing his perjury and
contempt for Congress (including members of your party). Iraq continues
to spiral out of control. On just about every issue, your political
foes have the upper hand. And on that one advantage you could always
count on — cash — you’re getting blown out.

So what do you do?

Seeing that Republicans can’t function without an enemy, and seeing
that efforts to demonize scaaary Nancy Pelosi have failed disastrously,
they’re moving on to Plan B — Harry Reid.

Senate Republicans are preparing to take aim at Majority Leader
Harry Reid over the August recess for being “all talk but no
action” and helping drag the Democrat-led Congress’
approval rating to a historic low, according to a document distributed
to caucus members.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Republican
Conference, is meeting with members yesterday and today to disseminate
a message critical of Democrats for endlessly debating the Iraq war,
stalling judicial nominations and squandering time on at least 300
investigations of the Bush administration.

“We really ought to be asking why this Democrat leadership
won’t allow Congress to move forward on serious policy
debates,” Mr. Kyl said, when asked about the talking-points
memorandum he is circulating.

The Carpetbagger Report notes:

I suppose it’s possible that I’ve heard more
breathtaking hypocrisy, but nothing comes to mind. Reid isn’t
allowing Congress to move forward? Republicans are on pace to be the
most obstructionist minority in the history of Congress, and the GOP
wants to blame Reid for blocking progress?

I suppose we should have seen this coming. Fred Hiatt went after
Reid over the weekend, at the same time as David Brooks, Bob Novak, and
a handful of other conservative media voices, suggesting some kind of
coordinated effort to blast the Majority Leader.

And now the RNC is making it official.

The lemmings are in action, their hypocrisy be damned! But isn’t it
always this way? What’s hilarious is the “ammo” Republicans are
wielding in this laughable effort, as Joe at AmericaBlog notes:

The Chair of Republican National Committee, Robert M. “Mike” Duncan,
just launched a full-scale attack on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The funny thing is that the first line of the e-mail could be a
fundraiser for Democrats:

On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called President Bush “a liar” and a “part of the culture of corruption.”

Both true.

Duncan’s e-mail devolves into a rant from there. But you have to
love the fact that the RNC is attacking Reid for doing something most
Republican will never, ever do: Tell the truth.

Despite gains in recent years, the GOP still has a vastly superior
media machine to get their message out. So I’m ecstatic that they’ve
decided to give us a helping hand by reminding people that 1) Democrats
oppose Bush, his lies, and his corruption, and 2) Democrats want to get
out of Iraq.

The dumbasses think this is going to help them, so who are we to dissuade them from that notion?

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Democratic Accomplishments in the 110th Congress: Leading America in a New Direction

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 10:16 pm


Democratic Accomplishments in the 110th Congress: Leading America
in a New Direction

Less than six
months into the 110th Congress, Senate Democrats have made significant
strides in passing important, common-sense legislation that reflect the
priorities of the American people.  After nearly a decade of
Republican control, Democrats have worked to restore fiscal
responsibility in Washington and pass key legislation on Iraq policy,
homeland security, troop readiness, veterans’ health care,
economic competitiveness, ethics reform, the minimum wage, health care,
education, energy independence, stem cell research, and Gulf Coast
revitalization.  Democrats are committed to proving that elections
do matter, and we will continue to pursue the international and
domestic priorities that matter most to the American people. 
Together, we will take the country in a new direction. 

Under Democratic leadership, the Senate has passed the following measures:

  • A fiscally responsible budget: a budget that restores fiscal discipline and
    will lead to a surplus, while cutting middle-class taxes and funding
    foreign anddomestic priorities, including education, childrens health care, veterans, and our troops;
  • 9/11 Commission recommendations: a
    bill to make America more secure by giving our first responders the
    tools they need to keep us safe; making it more difficult for potential
    terrorists to travel into our country; advancing efforts to secure our
    rail, air, and mass transit systems; and improving intelligence and
    information sharing between state, local, and federal law enforcement
    agencies;
  • Homeland security funding: legislation
    that provides $1.05 billion in funding necessary to address dangerous
    border and transit vulnerabilities left open by the Bush Administration
    since 9/11;
  • Support for our troops: legislation
    funding the President’s requests for Operation Iraqi Freedom and
    Operation Enduring Freedom, including $1.2 billion in additional
    funding for a total of $3 billion to provide our troops in Iraq with
    mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles;
  • Health care for wounded soldiers and veterans: legislation
    that provides $3 billion in supplemental funds for military health care
    and $1.8 billion in supplemental funds to the Department of
    Veterans’ Affairs to accommodate the increasing number of new
    veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan;
  • Benchmarks for Iraq: legislation
    that conditions U.S. economic support for the Iraqi government on its
    progress toward achieving key political benchmarks;
  • National Guard readiness: legislation
    to provide an additional $1 billion to President Bush’s request
    for National Guard equipment needs to remedy equipment shortfalls that
    are compromising the quality of force training and limiting the
    Guard’s ability to quickly respond to natural and potential
    man-made disasters at home;
  • Continuing Resolution: legislation
    providing funding for the nine remaining appropriations bills that were
    not completed by Republicans in the 109th Congress.  In passing
    this legislation, Democrats stayed within budget limits, eliminated
    earmarks, and increased funding for national priorities, including
    veterans’ medical care, Pell grants, elementary and secondary
    education, the National Institutes of Health, state and local law
    enforcement, and global AIDS prevention and treatment;
  • Energy Bill:
    landmark legislation to increase our energy independence, strengthen
    the economy, reduce global warming emissions, and protect American
    consumers.
  • American competitiveness: bipartisan
    legislation to increase the nation’s investment in basic and
    innovative research; strengthen educational opportunities in science,
    technology, engineering, and mathematics from elementary through
    graduate school; and develop the infrastructure needed to enhance
    innovation and competitiveness in the United States;
  • Ethics and lobbying reform: a
    bill to slow the “revolving door” for former Senators and
    staff, strengthen limits on gifts and travel, expand lobbying
    disclosure requirements, establish a study commission on ethics and
    lobbying, prohibit pensions for Members of Congress convicted of
    certain crimes, and implement reform procedures relating to earmarks
    and conference reports;
  • Minimum wage: legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $7.25/hour;
  • Middle-class tax cuts: the 2008 Budget Resolution
    provides for permanent extensions of the Marriage Penalty tax relief,
    the $1,000 refundable Child Tax Credit; the 10 percent income tax
    bracket; the adoption tax credit; the dependent care tax credit; U.S.
    soldiers combat pay for the earned income tax credit;
    and reform of the estate tax to protect small businesses and family
    farms;
  • AMT patch: the 2008 Budget Resolution
    ensures that the number of taxpayers subject to the alternative minimum
    tax will not increase in 2007, giving Congress and the Administration
    time to come up with a permanent solution; 
  • Head Start: a bill to expand eligibility for the Head Start program;
  • Stem cell research: legislation to expand the number of human embryonic stem cells eligible for federally-funded research; 
  • Children’s health coverage: the 2008 Budget Resolution and the 2007 Emergency Supplemental provide needed funds for the Children’s Health Insurance Program;
  • FDA reauthorization: a bill to greatly improve the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of drug safety;
  • Rebuilding the Gulf Coast: legislation
    providing a total of $6.4 billion for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and
    Rita, including $1.3 billion to complete levee and drainage repairs,
    $50 million to reduce violent crime in Gulf Coast states, and $110
    million to repair the seafood and fisheries industries, which is vital
    to the region’s economic recovery; 
  • Army Corps reform: legislation to ensure that the Army Corps of Engineers does its job more effectively and soundly;
  • Disaster assistance for small businesses: legislation
    providing recovery assistance for small businesses impacted by the 2005
    hurricanes in an effort to revitalize the Gulf Coast economy;
  • U.S. Attorney appointments: legislation
    ending the indefinite appointment of interim U.S. Attorneys and
    restoring the role of the Senate in the selection of U.S. Attorneys;
  • Tax relief for small businesses: legislation providing a range of deficit-neutral tax incentives designed to help small businesses grow;
  • Education and training: the 2008 Budget Resolution provides for the largest increase since 2002 in funding for elementary and secondary programs; and
  • Energy and environment programs: legislation
    increasing funding for basic science research at the Department of
    Energy and for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.

 

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‘Company’: Not what it seems

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 9:50 pm

thecompanyx.jpg

Sometimes it’s not just the company you keep; it’s how long you keep it.

 

Credit
TNT with ambition, if not a good grasp of its reach, for trying to
shoehorn the history of the CIA and the Cold War into a six-hour
miniseries. Unfortunately, the project is too short to do its subject
matter justice and too long and clumsy to keep us involved — a
problem compounded by Chris O’Donnell’s boyishly bland performance as TheCompany’s central agent.

CLIP: See what lurks inside ‘The Company’

MORE: Get clued in to TV’s spy legends

Based on Robert Littell’s novel, The Company uses
O’Donnell’s Jack McAuliffe as a witness to CIA history, starting him
off in the agency in the mid-’50s and carrying him through to the fall
of the Soviet Union. He chases spies in Berlin, fights tanks in the
Hungarian Revolution, battles planes at the Bay of Pigs and hunts for
moles in Washington, D.C., yet he never seems to change, mature or even
age.

The performance is so callow, it makes you wonder if it’s meant as some kind of comment on American foreign policy.

O’Donnell
has high-profile support from Alfred Molina as Jack’s mentor and
Michael Keaton as James Angleton, the CIA’s real-life head of
counter-intelligence. Chances are you’ll cling to Molina, who gives the
miniseries its few sparks of life as an amusingly bitter but
clearheaded cynic. As for Keaton, you’ll either find his oddly
mannered, tightly contained performance intriguing or, well, odd.

To fit all its history in, The Company splits
itself into three semi-separate movies: the first a spy-vs.-spy
thriller, the second an action/adventure story, the third a paranoid
conspiracy tale. But the attempts to connect the whole ultimately
destroy the parts as the continuing plot threads tying the main
characters together take away from the more interesting historic events
going on around them.

Perhaps because the
miniseries strains to cover so many time periods, none feels lived in
or organic as they do in AMC’s gorgeous paean to Madison Avenue in the
’60s, Mad Men. Here it’s more like kids playing dress-up, with scenes in Russia coming across as a bad spoof of Chekhov.

For those who follow CIA history or who have already seen The Good Shepherd,
the writers take on faith the idea that there was a mole in the CIA to
be discovered and that Angleton’s search, however obsessive, was
justified. The other theory, that there was no mole and he tore the
agency apart out of sheer paranoia, will have to wait for another
miniseries.

There is some amusement to be had from The Company’s
initial embrace of old-tech spying: the primitive listening devices,
the secret codes hidden in walnuts. But by the time they finally reveal
the KGB’s diabolical plan to destroy the Western world, you may just
think the film has gone from walnuts to plain nuts.

Assuming you’re still around, of course. My advice? Spy out some better company.

USATODAY.com

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Federated Media is an independent family owned company

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 9:06 pm
 

 VEDDY INTERSESTING…

Federated
Media is an independent family owned company that offers top quality
products to our customers. Whether they listen to one of our 15
radio stations in the Midwest or read The Truth our newspaper located
in Elkhart, Indiana, we keep Northern Indiana, Southern Michigan, and
Northwest Ohio informed and entertained!

Through our
radio stations Federated Media can provide the combined power to reach
over 986,000 people each week! Our newspaper “The
Truth” reaches 571,000 people each week making Federated Media an
excellent advertising choice! That’s a total reach of over one
and a half million people each week!

We believe
it’s our employees that help discover and define our
successes. Federated Media is made up of over 368 professionals
that continue to strive to make our company “the best independent
multi-media company in the world!”

We invest literally
hundreds of thousands of dollars in training our employees to help
provide our advertisers with excellent customer service, our listeners
with the best local programming available, our readers with accurate
and dependable information, and our employees with the tools they need
to help them further their careers in media.

Thank you for
visiting our web site. If you’d like more information about
our company that has not been provided on our web site, feel free to
contact Dave Ogle regarding newspaper at
dogle@etruth.com or Tony Richards regarding radio broadcasting at trichards@federatedmedia.com .

Thanks again, and welcome to Federated Media!

Welcome to Federated Media

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JOSH CATONE LOOKS INTO BLOGGER ETHICS

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 9:00 pm

Written by Josh Catone / August 3, 2007 / 7 comments

Is there a new blogger scandal brewing? Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks seems to think so. Allen takes issue with the new video blog Webb Alert (which mentioned Read/WriteWeb today), saying that the blog doesn’t disclose its connection with advertising network Federated Media
(which hosts it and sells advertising for it) and suspects that the
whole thing may be an elaborate scheme to push traffic to FM clients
(and notes that FM clients have been gushing over the show in return
for the disproportionate links they get).

I honestly don’t think there’s any conspiracy here, but Allen’s post
sheds light on a larger subject: the journalistic practice of
disclosure. Blogging is still in its relative infancy and bloggers are
still struggling to figure out when and how they should disclose
potential conflicts of interest in an ongoing effort to gain legitimacy
and garner respect from readers and other media producers.

The Ins and Outs of Disclosure

Disclosure is a tricky business and as a practice is still
ill-defined even in the realm of traditional journalism. The general
idea is that anything that might be seen as a potential conflict of
interest between a writer and the subject of his story should be
disclosed to the reader. If I invested in a startup I am writing about,
for example, or if the CEO is my best friend, I should disclose that
fact. But it’s not always so cut and dry.

Journalistic disclosure is something that the ombudsman at National Public Radio writes about a lot. In November of 2005, he published an interesting piece
on the subject asking, “Do journalists have an obligation to disclose a
personal, as well as a professional, connection to a source?” This is
an instance when knowing when to disclose is not so clear. The NPR
ombudsman talks about an episode when a disc jockey on the radio
network mentions in passing a columnist from Slate magazine as a source, but fails to disclose that the columnist is also her husband.

Should she have disclosed that fact? The ombudsman concludes that
the she should have, writing, “In this case, more disclosure would have
been better than less. By finding another person to quote, the program
would have avoided giving an impression of familial favoritism.” But
what if the columnist in question had not been a family member, but a
former co-worker? Or someone whom the radio DJ had interviewed in the
past? Is disclosure still necessary? Or, what if the columnist and DJ
had been romantically involved in the past but aren’t any longer? Does
she need to discuss her sex life on air in the interest of journalistic
integrity? You can see that it becomes quickly confusing, and at times
overtly personal.

Sometimes I think bloggers take disclosures too far. Specifically,
bloggers nearly universally seem to think that they must disclose
advertising relationships when writing about companies that they run
ads for (but then many paradoxically make specific posts thanking and
praising those advertisers). We disclose advertiser relationships here
at Read/WriteWeb, though you’ll notice that I didn’t disclose — until
now — that Federated Media handles some of our advertising. This is
something that I personally think borders on the absurd. Sure some
people might be conflicted about biting the hand that feeds them, so to
speak, and writing negatively about an advertiser. But journalism
(which, let’s face it, is what many bloggers strive for) has long been
an advertising supported medium, and the relationship between writers
and advertisers is obvious to readers.

You’ll never see, for example, Brian Williams on the NBC Nightly
News conclude a story about Ford Motor company by saying that Ford
advertises on the NBC family of networks (which includes USA, Bravo,
CNBC, MSNBC, etc.). The New York Times doesn’t stop to disclose
that the movie they’re reviewing has a display ad in their Arts
section. In fact, the screenshot below depicts the Times’ Arts web page
today. Notice the review of the “Bourne Ultimatum” right next to an
advert for the very same movie. The review was favorable, and didn’t
include any disclosures, but I don’t think anyone thinks that the paper
was shilling for ad dollars.

Further, as my NBC example may have illustrated, full disclosure can
get even trickier for journalists in today’s landscape of media
conglomerates. In a piece from three weeks ago in Slate about Rupert Murdoch’s then-impending purchase of Dow Jones, Jack Shafer wrote about what the full Wall Street Journal
disclosure will look like when News Corp. assumes control of the
newspaper. As Shafer said, it’s “almost as long as the Manhattan
telephone book.”

“Presently, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t run a
disclosure every time it cites a CNBC show or makes a passing mention
of a publication or business that competes with Dow Jones. So there’s
no obvious reason why a News Corp.-owned Journal would have to disclose
its parent company’s holdings if it mentioned Facebook, a movie from
Paramount Pictures, a book from Random House, a show on NBC, the New
York Daily News, LexisNexis, ESPN, Comcast, the Dish Network, or any of
the thousands of companies that directly compete with News Corp.

But common sense would dictate the inclusion of some sort of
rider in full-fledged news stories about News Corp. competitors. My
rough estimate indicates that upwards of a dozen News Corp. competitors
make Journal-worthy news each day.”

When to Disclose

Disclosure is necessary, however, and at times I think that maybe it
is the overzealous trend toward complete and utter transparency offered
by bloggers that makes blogs so attractive to readers. So when should you disclose?

  • Financial association — I don’t mean advertising, which is
    obvious, but less clear affiliations such as investments, ownership, or
    partial-ownership. For example, WIRED should mention they own Reddit
    when they write about the company. (Of course, you might not always even know when you’re investing in a company.)
  • Employment — If you are paid by a company you are writing about as an employee, contractor, or consultant, you should disclose that.
  • Competition — If you are writing specifically about
    a direct competitor to a company you are involved with in an
    aforementioned manner, especially if you’re writing in a negative
    way, it is probably best to disclose it. For example, WIRED should
    disclose that they own Reddit whenever they write about Digg.
  • Personal involvement – This is by far the trickiest. As I
    illustrated before, personal or emotional involvement with stories can
    get complicated and, well, personal. I don’t think it always needs to
    be disclosed. For example, I don’t feel the need to disclose my
    political views whenever I write about politics. However, if I’m
    reviewing a company run by a close friend, I would disclose that fact
    or pass the story to a writer with less emotional involvement.

You’ll notice that I don’t include a rule about disclosing when you
were paid to write about a specific topic or company. The reason is
that any blogger who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist cannot
and will not accept money or gifts from a source (or vice versa). That
said, it should also be noted that there is a big difference between
accepting gifts in exchange for writing a story and accepting review
copies of goods for free. Last year a total non-scandal erupted when Microsoft handed out laptops loaded with Vista
to select tech bloggers. These were not bribes or gifts or payments, as
some people later called them — they were review copies of Vista that
Microsoft (smartly) tried to make sure were loaded in an optimal
machine before being reviewed. I used to work as an editor for an
online computer game magazine and we never paid for the things we
reviewed, and very often were sent pricey pieces of software or
hardware that companies didn’t ask us to return. But we never disclosed
that fact, or let the fact that we didn’t pay for our review copies
influence our reviews.

In 2004 Nick Denton, owner of blog network Gawker Media, called for a code of ethics for bloggers to cover, among other ethical quagmires, the tricky and complicated maze that is disclosure.

“The guidelines would cover questions such as photo
copyright, freebies, pay-to-post deals, editorial tie-ins, paid text
links. They would be voluntary. But sites that adhered to them would be
able to indicate that they met certain blog ethics standards.”

To my knowledge, nothing has ever been accomplished in this area. Earlier this year Tim O’Reilly began to draft a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, but curiously absent are ethical concerns like disclosure policy. Perhaps it is time to revive Denton’s idea?

Conclusion

As I said, blogging is still a very new medium and its evolution is
just beginning. Bloggers are still figuring out by trial and error how
to deal with things like disclosure. I’ll close by borrowing from Vaughn Ververs, writing last year for the CBS blog “Public Eye” about the topic of disclosure:

“The world can be pretty complicated, do simple
disclosures on the part of journalists really do anything to clarify
it? Who is to judge what type of disclosure is germane to a story? If
it’s an example of, you-know-it-when-you-see-it, isn’t it
just one more judgment call that is open to everyone’s individual
interpretation?”

What sort of disclosures do you think are necessary for bloggers? Do
bloggers go overboard? Or do they not disclose enough? Leave your
thoughts in the comments below.

(Full disclosure: I was talking to Allen Stern on instant messenger when I first starting writing this piece. ;) )

Blogging Ethics: When And What Should Bloggers Disclose?

Blogging Ethics: When And What Should Bloggers Disclose?
Written by Josh Catone / August 3, 2007 / 7 commentsIs there a new blogger scandal brewing? Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks seems to think so. Allen takes issue with the new video blog Webb Alert (which mentioned Read/WriteWeb today), saying that the blog doesn’t disclose its connection with advertising network Federated Media (which hosts it and sells advertising for it) and suspects that the whole thing may be an elaborate scheme to push traffic to FM clients (and notes that FM clients have been gushing over the show in return for the disproportionate links they get).

I honestly don’t think there’s any conspiracy here, but Allen’s post sheds light on a larger subject: the journalistic practice of disclosure. Blogging is still in its relative infancy and bloggers are still struggling to figure out when and how they should disclose potential conflicts of interest in an ongoing effort to gain legitimacy and garner respect from readers and other media producers.
The Ins and Outs of Disclosure

Disclosure is a tricky business and as a practice is still ill-defined even in the realm of traditional journalism. The general idea is that anything that might be seen as a potential conflict of interest between a writer and the subject of his story should be disclosed to the reader. If I invested in a startup I am writing about, for example, or if the CEO is my best friend, I should disclose that fact. But it’s not always so cut and dry.

Journalistic disclosure is something that the ombudsman at National Public Radio writes about a lot. In November of 2005, he published an interesting piece on the subject asking, “Do journalists have an obligation to disclose a personal, as well as a professional, connection to a source?” This is an instance when knowing when to disclose is not so clear. The NPR ombudsman talks about an episode when a disc jockey on the radio network mentions in passing a columnist from Slate magazine as a source, but fails to disclose that the columnist is also her husband.

Should she have disclosed that fact? The ombudsman concludes that the she should have, writing, “In this case, more disclosure would have been better than less. By finding another person to quote, the program would have avoided giving an impression of familial favoritism.” But what if the columnist in question had not been a family member, but a former co-worker? Or someone whom the radio DJ had interviewed in the past? Is disclosure still necessary? Or, what if the columnist and DJ had been romantically involved in the past but aren’t any longer? Does she need to discuss her sex life on air in the interest of journalistic integrity? You can see that it becomes quickly confusing, and at times overtly personal.

Sometimes I think bloggers take disclosures too far. Specifically, bloggers nearly universally seem to think that they must disclose advertising relationships when writing about companies that they run ads for (but then many paradoxically make specific posts thanking and praising those advertisers). We disclose advertiser relationships here at Read/WriteWeb, though you’ll notice that I didn’t disclose — until now — that Federated Media handles some of our advertising. This is something that I personally think borders on the absurd. Sure some people might be conflicted about biting the hand that feeds them, so to speak, and writing negatively about an advertiser. But journalism (which, let’s face it, is what many bloggers strive for) has long been an advertising supported medium, and the relationship between writers and advertisers is obvious to readers.

You’ll never see, for example, Brian Williams on the NBC Nightly News conclude a story about Ford Motor company by saying that Ford advertises on the NBC family of networks (which includes USA, Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.). The New York Times doesn’t stop to disclose that the movie they’re reviewing has a display ad in their Arts section. In fact, the screenshot below depicts the Times’ Arts web page today. Notice the review of the “Bourne Ultimatum” right next to an advert for the very same movie. The review was favorable, and didn’t include any disclosures, but I don’t think anyone thinks that the paper was shilling for ad dollars.

Further, as my NBC example may have illustrated, full disclosure can get even trickier for journalists in today’s landscape of media conglomerates. In a piece from three weeks ago in Slate about Rupert Murdoch’s then-impending purchase of Dow Jones, Jack Shafer wrote about what the full Wall Street Journal disclosure will look like when News Corp. assumes control of the newspaper. As Shafer said, it’s “almost as long as the Manhattan telephone book.”

“Presently, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t run a disclosure every time it cites a CNBC show or makes a passing mention of a publication or business that competes with Dow Jones. So there’s no obvious reason why a News Corp.-owned Journal would have to disclose its parent company’s holdings if it mentioned Facebook, a movie from Paramount Pictures, a book from Random House, a show on NBC, the New York Daily News, LexisNexis, ESPN, Comcast, the Dish Network, or any of the thousands of companies that directly compete with News Corp.

But common sense would dictate the inclusion of some sort of rider in full-fledged news stories about News Corp. competitors. My rough estimate indicates that upwards of a dozen News Corp. competitors make Journal-worthy news each day.”

When to Disclose

Disclosure is necessary, however, and at times I think that maybe it is the overzealous trend toward complete and utter transparency offered by bloggers that makes blogs so attractive to readers. So when should you disclose?

* Financial association — I don’t mean advertising, which is obvious, but less clear affiliations such as investments, ownership, or partial-ownership. For example, WIRED should mention they own Reddit when they write about the company. (Of course, you might not always even know when you’re investing in a company.)
* Employment — If you are paid by a company you are writing about as an employee, contractor, or consultant, you should disclose that.
* Competition — If you are writing specifically about a direct competitor to a company you are involved with in an aforementioned manner, especially if you’re writing in a negative way, it is probably best to disclose it. For example, WIRED should disclose that they own Reddit whenever they write about Digg.
* Personal involvement – This is by far the trickiest. As I illustrated before, personal or emotional involvement with stories can get complicated and, well, personal. I don’t think it always needs to be disclosed. For example, I don’t feel the need to disclose my political views whenever I write about politics. However, if I’m reviewing a company run by a close friend, I would disclose that fact or pass the story to a writer with less emotional involvement.

You’ll notice that I don’t include a rule about disclosing when you were paid to write about a specific topic or company. The reason is that any blogger who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist cannot and will not accept money or gifts from a source (or vice versa). That said, it should also be noted that there is a big difference between accepting gifts in exchange for writing a story and accepting review copies of goods for free. Last year a total non-scandal erupted when Microsoft handed out laptops loaded with Vista to select tech bloggers. These were not bribes or gifts or payments, as some people later called them — they were review copies of Vista that Microsoft (smartly) tried to make sure were loaded in an optimal machine before being reviewed. I used to work as an editor for an online computer game magazine and we never paid for the things we reviewed, and very often were sent pricey pieces of software or hardware that companies didn’t ask us to return. But we never disclosed that fact, or let the fact that we didn’t pay for our review copies influence our reviews.

In 2004 Nick Denton, owner of blog network Gawker Media, called for a code of ethics for bloggers to cover, among other ethical quagmires, the tricky and complicated maze that is disclosure.

“The guidelines would cover questions such as photo copyright, freebies, pay-to-post deals, editorial tie-ins, paid text links. They would be voluntary. But sites that adhered to them would be able to indicate that they met certain blog ethics standards.”

To my knowledge, nothing has ever been accomplished in this area. Earlier this year Tim O’Reilly began to draft a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, but curiously absent are ethical concerns like disclosure policy. Perhaps it is time to revive Denton’s idea?
Conclusion

As I said, blogging is still a very new medium and its evolution is just beginning. Bloggers are still figuring out by trial and error how to deal with things like disclosure. I’ll close by borrowing from Vaughn Ververs, writing last year for the CBS blog “Public Eye” about the topic of disclosure:

“The world can be pretty complicated, do simple disclosures on the part of journalists really do anything to clarify it? Who is to judge what type of disclosure is germane to a story? If it’s an example of, you-know-it-when-you-see-it, isn’t it just one more judgment call that is open to everyone’s individual interpretation?”

What sort of disclosures do you think are necessary for bloggers? Do bloggers go overboard? Or do they not disclose enough? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

(Full disclosure: I was talking to Allen Stern on instant messenger when I first starting writing this piece. ;) )

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Central Park West Loses Decades-Old Market

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 6:36 pm

Central Park West Loses Decades-Old Market

Gristede'sThe
empty facade of the Gristedes supermarket on Central Park West that
closed last weekend. (Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times)

It is not easy to find a grocery store on Central Park West. In
fact, it is not easy to find a store of any kind. But for 42 years
— until last weekend — Gristedes operated a 3,200-square-foot supermarket at the West 62nd Street corner of the Century apartment building.

Once a year, on marathon day, the store appeared to be as jammed as Fairway
(if Fairway shoppers wore aluminum foil capes). At other times, it was
simply a modest neighborhood convenience. In late evenings this week,
doormen at the Century were still intercepting eastbound pedestrians
hurrying along 62nd Street, trying to get to Gristedes before 9 p.m. In
more senses than one, the shoppers were too late. It had closed for
good.

flyerA Fresh Direct advertisement bidding farewell to the Central Park West Gristedes.

John A. Catsimatidis, the chairman, president and chief executive of
the Red Apple Group, which owns Gristedes, was quoted this week on The Real Deal
as blaming a steep rent increase. (He was also quoted as saying the
store had “been there for 50 years at least,” but Gristede
Brothers actually signed the lease in 1965.) His office did not return
phone calls this afternoon.

FreshDirect lost no time in reminding neighbors of the changed foodscape.

“Goodbye, Gristedes,” said postcards that arrived on Thursday. “Hello, FreshDirect!” Meanwhile, the Lansco Corporation
is marketing the retail space by noting its location “amid New
York’s most renowned new condominium residences.”

That doesn’t seem to describe the kind of place where you can pick up a quart of milk or a roll of toilet paper.

 City Room .

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VING RHAMES’ DOGS KILL 40 YR. OLD MAN

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 6:09 pm

The Daily Breeze

12:30 p.m.:
Caretaker found dead at Ving Rhames’ Brentwood home appeared to have
“injuries as a result of the mauling,” police said. Two of four dogs
taken into custody weigh about 200 pounds.

A man working as a caretaker at a Brentwood
residence owned by actor Ving Rhames was found dead on the property
today after being mauled by two dogs, authorities said.

The man died
at the scene of the attack, which was reported about 7:15 a.m. in the
12900 block of San Vicente Boulevard, said Los Angeles police Officer
Sandra Gonzalez. His name was withheld pending notification of
relatives.

Los Angeles police Lt. Ray Lombardo told ABC7 that the man, in his 40s, had been a caretaker at the residence about two years.

He “appears to have suffered a number of injuries as a result of the dog mauling,” Lombardo said.

“There
were dogs loose on the property. Those dogs have been captured by
animal regulation (officers),” he said. “We have four dogs
that have been taken into custody for quarantine pending further
investigation …” Police believe two of the four dogs — both
weighing about 200 pounds — were involved in the attack.

“Both
those dogs are mastiffs; they’re rather large,” Lombardo
said. “Normally we understand they are pretty friendly dogs. But,
you know, there are occasions where dogs will turn on their owners or
their caretakers, and this looks like a tragic accident.”

The man had numerous dog bites all over his body, but the exact cause of death was pending a coroner’s ruling.

Authorities
said they could not be sure whether it was the dog mauling that proved
fatal, or if the man suffered some other type of health problem, such
as a heart attack, brought on by the dog attack.

Rhames, who appeared in the “Mission Impossible” films, was not at home when the attack occurred, police said.

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More California E-Voting Reports Released; More Bad News

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 3:51 pm

Yesterday the California Secretary of State released
the reports of three source code study teams that analyzed the source
code of e-voting systems from Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia.

All three reports found many serious vulnerabilities. It seems
likely that computer viruses could be constructed that could infect any
of the three systems, spread between voting machines, and steal votes
on the infected machines. All three systems use central tabulators
(machines at election headquarters that accumulate ballots and report
election results) that can be penetrated without great effort.

It’s hard to convey the magnitude of the problems in a short
blog post. You really have read through the reports — the
shortest one is 78 pages — to appreciate the sheer volume and
diversity of severe vulnerabilities.

It is interesting (at least to me as a computer security guy) to see
how often the three companies made similar mistakes. They misuse
cryptography in the same ways: using fixed unchangeable keys, using
ciphers in ECB mode, using a cyclic redundancy code for data integrity,
and so on. Their central tabulators use poorly protected database
software. Their code suffers from buffer overflows, integer overflow
errors, and format string vulnerabilities. They store votes in a way
that compromises the secret ballot.

Some of these are problems that the vendors claimed to have fixed years ago. For example, Diebold claimed (p. 11)
in 2003 that its use of hard-coded passwords was “resolved in
subsequent versions of the software”. Yet the current version
still uses at least two hard-coded passwords — one is
“diebold” (report, p. 46) and another is the eight-byte sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 (report, p. 45).

Similarly, Diebold in 2003 ridiculed (p. 6)
the idea that their software could suffer from buffer overflows:
“Unlike a Web server or other Internet enabled applications, the
code is not vulnerable to most ‘buffer overflow attacks’ to
which the authors [Kohno et al.]
refer. This form of attack is almost entirely inapplicable to our
application. In the limited number of cases in which it would apply, we
have taken the steps necessary to ensure correctness.” Yet the
California source code study found several buffer overflow
vulnerabilities in Diebold’s systems (e.g., issues 5.1.6, 5.2.3
(”multiple buffer overflows”), and 5.2.18 in the report).

As far as I can tell, major news outlets haven’t taken much
notice of these reports. That in itself may be the most eloquent
commentary on the state of e-voting: reports of huge security holes in
e-voting systems are barely even newsworthy any more.

Freedom to Tinker

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Stocks Tumble amid Subprime Turmoil

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 3:46 pm

Financial issues plunged Friday on a spate of negative mortgage
headlines. The Fed will be in a tricky position at next week’s meeting

Who said Summer is dead on Wall Street? Major U.S. stock indexes
started August with another wild week, capped by an honest-to-goodness
rout Friday. Once again, the main culprit behind the sell-off was
investor fears over the subprime-loan mess, and the degree to which
hobbled credit markets may hinder U.S. economic growth.

On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 281.42 points, or
2.09%, to 13,181.91. The broader S&P 500 index was off 39.14
points, or 2.66%, to 1,433.06. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index
dropped 64.73 points, or 2.51%, to 2,528.89.

There was plenty of bad news to go around. A move by ratings agency
Standard & Poor’s to lower its credit outlook on Bear Stearns Cos. (BSC)
to negative also weighed on sentiment, as did a comment by the firm’s
CFO on a conference call with analysts that fixed-income market turmoil
is the worst in 22 years. Meanwhile, mortgage lender American Home
Mortgage (AHM) basically closed up shop amid financing difficulties.

Investors also weighed a disappointing report on job growth in July and
a decline in a service-sector sentiment gauge for the month, both of
which suggested the economy isn’t growing at the pace some people had
hoped.

Investment banking and homebuilding stocks were among the groups plunging on the credit-market fears.

Stocks Tumble amid Subprime Turmoil

GEORGE STEINBRENNER IS NOT WELL

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 3:35 pm

GEORGE IS FADING


Friday, August 3rd 2007, 2:54 PM


George Steinbrenner

George Steinbrenner making an appearance at Yankees spring training camp
earlier this year. There has been much speculation about Steinbrenner’s
health in recent months.


George
Steinbrenner “looks dreadful,” his “body is bloated” and “his skin
looks as if a dry-cleaner bag has been stretched over it,” according to
a lengthy article about The Boss coming out in the September issue of
the magazine Conde Nast Portfolio.

“He doesn’t look all right. In fact, he looks dreadful,” Franz Lidz,
the author of the piece, writes in the story, which hits newsstands
Aug.15. “Steinbrenner’s face, pale and swollen, has a curiously
undefined look.”

There has been much speculation about Steinbrenner’s health in
recent months, and The Boss rarely makes public appearances – he’s been
at only one Yankee game this season, the April2 opener. But, according
to team officials and Steinbrenner’s personal spokesman, Howard
Rubenstein, the Boss is still active in the Yankee decision-making
process and recently he was involved in organizational meetings near
the trade deadline.

Steinbrenner was seen often by reporters during spring training, but
at times walked unsteadily in the hallways at Legends Field. In a
recent interview with The Associated Press, in which he said GM Brian
Cashman was “on a big hook” this year, Steinbrenner’s responses seemed
lucid.

But the Conde Nast story seemingly paints a different picture. Lidz
recounts a visit to Steinbrenner’s home in Tampa with Tom McEwen, a
longtime Steinbrenner pal, in which, according to Lidz, Steinbrenner
answers a series of different questions, including inquiries about his
wife, Joan, by saying, “Great to see ya, Tommy.”

Lidz writes:

“McEwen asks about his sons, Hank and Hal. ‘Great to see ya, Tommy,’ he says.

McEwen asks about his daughters, Jennifer and Jessica.

‘Great to see ya, Tommy,’ he says.

McEwen asks about his health.

Steinbrenner sighs heavily and mutters, ‘Oh, I’m all right.’”

Rubenstein said that Lidz and McEwen “came in under false pretenses”
and that Steinbrenner didn’t know Lidz was there to report a story.
Lidz writes that McEwen “introduces me as a writer working on a story.”

“George was better off saying, as a gentleman would, ‘Nice to see
you, nice to see you,’ rather than something harsh,” Rubenstein said.
“George remained a gentleman and they really shouldn’t have come in
under false pretenses.”

Asked about Steinbrenner’s health yesterday, Rubenstein said, “I’m
not going to go beyond saying that I talk to George almost every
day….He’s OK and he’s still an active participant in every decision.”

NY DAILY NEWS

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George Steinbrenner

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 3:07 pm

George Steinbrenner

from the Baseball Library dot com

George Steinbrenner made himself synonymous with owner meddling, involving himself
with the day-to-day fortunes of his ballclub to an extent unmatched by any owner
since Connie Mack, who was his own manager. Only Charlie Finley can approach Steinbrenner
in this, but not even Finley equaled Steinbrenner’s record of 17 managerial changes
in his first 17 seasons. Finley rehired Alvin Dark as manager just once; Steinbrenner
gave Billy Martin five separate terms. Graig Nettles commented, “Every year is like
being traded – a new manager and a whole new team.”

The son of a Great Lakes shipping
family, Steinbrenner made his money as chairman of the American Shipbuilding Company,
a Cleveland-based firm. In his youth he was an assistant football coach at Northwestern
and Purdue universities (Jim Spencer said of his employer, “George Steinbrenner knows
nothing about baseball. He doesn’t understand that this is a major league team, not
Purdue”) and assembled national champions in the National Industrial and American
Basketball leagues. In 1973 he put together the group that bought the Yankees from
CBS, promising at the time, “I won’t be active in the day-to-day operations of the
club at all.” But one-time associate John McMullen, who later owned the Astros, said,
“Nothing is more limited than being a limited
partner of George’s.”

The advent
of free agency proved a boon to Steinbrenner although he said of it early on, “I
am dead set against free agency. It can ruin baseball.” After Catfish Hunter was
released from his A’s contract in 1974, the Yankees paid him the unheard-of salary
of $2.85 million for four years. He signed Reggie Jackson after the team won the
AL pennant in 1976, and the move was largely responsible for back-to-back World Championships
in 1977-78. However, in that period Steinbrenner had solid baseball minds such as
Al Rosen and Gabe Paul in the front office making trades like the one that brought
Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss from Cleveland, and also refusing to trade Ron
Guidry. Steinbrenner’s initial success purchasing free agents led to a tendency to
overstock the team with superstars to the point where there wasn’t room in the lineup
for them all. His preference for name players came from the conviction that “you
measure the value of a ballplayer by how many fannies he puts in the seats.” The
departure of general managers nearly matched the turnover of managers and apparently
was accompanied by a corresponding lack of GM control over major decisions. A series
of disastrous acquisitions in the early 1980s (Ed Whitson, John Mayberry, Doyle Alexander,
Mike Armstrong) was made worse by a steady stream of departing stars escaping from
what had been dubbed The Bronx Zoo. From 1979 through the end of the next decade,
the Yankees won only one more pennant, in the strike-split 1981 season; the 1980s
were the first decade since the 1910s in which the Yankees did not win a World Championship.
(SH)

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Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 2:27 pm


“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the
voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the
path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of
terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives
in fear.”
-Harry Truman-



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Frequent Errors In FBI’s Secret Records Requests

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 2:17 pm

Frequent Errors In FBI’s Secret Records Requests
Audit Finds Possible Rule Violations

By John Solomon and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 9, 2007; A01

A
Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the
FBI’s use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and
financial records in national security cases, officials with access to
the report said yesterday.


Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said possible violations were not deliberate. (Dennis Cook – AP)

Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said possible violations were not deliberate.

The inspector general’s audit found 22
possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations –
some of which were potential violations of law — in a sampling of 293
“national security letters.” The letters were used by the FBI to obtain
the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and
2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases.

Officials
said they could not be sure of the scope of the violations but
suggested they could be more widespread, though not deliberate. In
nearly a quarter of the case files Inspector General Glenn A. Fine
reviewed, he found previously unreported potential violations.

The
use of national security letters has grown exponentially since the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2005 alone, the audit found, the FBI issued
more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests
for information.

The letters enable an FBI field office to compel
the release of private information without the authority of a grand
jury or judge. The USA Patriot Act, enacted after the 2001 attacks,
eliminated the requirement that the FBI show “specific and articulable”
reasons to believe that the records it demands belong to a foreign
intelligence agent or terrorist.

That law, and Bush
administration guidelines for its use, transformed national security
letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and
visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

Now the
bureau needs only to certify that the records are “sought for” or
“relevant to” an investigation “to protect against international
terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

According to
three officials with access to the report, Fine said the possible
violations he discovered did not “manifest deliberate attempts to
circumvent statutory limitations or departmental policies.”

But
Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without
citing an authorized investigation, claimed “exigent” circumstances
that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate
documentation to justify the issuance of letters.

In at least two
cases, the officials said, Fine found that the FBI obtained full credit
reports using a national security letter that could lawfully be
employed to obtain only summary information. In an unknown number of
other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and
Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed
personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to
be released. The FBI “sequestered” that information, a law enforcement
official said last night, but did not destroy it.

Alan Raul,
vice chairman of the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight
Board and a former Reagan White House lawyer , said in an interview
that the Bush administration has asked the board to review and
recommend changes in the FBI’s use of national security letters.

“The
processes seem to be seriously in need of tune-up,” Raul said. “We hope
to play a role in helping the FBI get to where it knows it needs to be.”

Lanny Davis,
another board member and a former attorney in the Clinton White House ,
said his recent briefing by the FBI left him “very concerned about what
I regard to be serious potential infringements of privacy and civil
liberties by the FBI and their use of national security letters. It is
my impression that they too regard this as very serious.”

Fine’s
audit, which was limited to 77 case files in four FBI field offices,
found that those offices did not even generate accurate counts of the
national security letters they issued, omitting about one in five
letters from the reports they sent to headquarters in Washington. Those
inaccurate numbers, in turn, were used as the basis for required
reports to Congress.

Officials said they believe that the 48
known problems may be the tip of the iceberg in an internal oversight
system that one of them described as “shoddy.”

The report
identified several instances in which the FBI used a tool known as
“exigent letters” to obtain information urgently, promising that the
requests would be covered later by grand jury subpoenas or national
security letters. In several of those cases, the subpoenas were never
sent, the review found.

The review also found several instances
in which agents claimed there were exigent circumstances when none
existed. The FBI recently ended the practice of using exigent letters
in national security cases, officials said last night.

The
report, mandated by Congress over the Bush administration’s objections,
is to be presented to several House and Senate committees today. But
senior officials, speaking with permission on the condition that they
not be identified, said the Bush administration has already responded
vigorously to the audit’s findings.

Attorney General Alberto R.
Gonzales learned of the findings three weeks ago and “was incensed when
he was told the contents of the report,” according to a Justice
Department official.

“The attorney general commends the work of
the inspector general in uncovering serious problems in the FBI’s use
of NSLs,” said Tasia Scolinos, a spokeswoman for Gonzales. “He has told
[FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III] that these past mistakes will not
be tolerated, and has ordered the FBI and the department to restore
accountability and to put in place safeguards to ensure greater
oversight and controls over the use of national security letters.”

FBI
and Justice Department officials have long described national security
letters as an indispensable tool in combating terrorism, and Fine’s
report, according to one official who cited excerpts, said
investigators told the inspector general that the letters “contributed
significantly to many counterterrorism and counterintelligence
investigations.” Fine did not make an independent assessment of the
efficacy of the letters as investigative tools.

FBI procedures
require that any possible violation of law or regulation on national
security letters be reported to the President’s Intelligence Oversight
Board within 14 days of discovery. Of the 26 breaches it discovered
before Fine’s review, the FBI referred 19 to the oversight board.

Among
the responses officials highlighted last night is a tracking database
under development by the FBI to ensure that its accounting of national
security letters is accurate. One official said the FBI would begin
deployment of the system in four of its 56 field offices by the end of
the year. Meanwhile, the official said, each office will be required to
“hand count” the numbers every month.

Gonzales, officials said,
has ordered the department’s national security division and inspections
division to begin audits next month of a sampling of national security
letters in every field office. About 15 offices should be audited by
the end of the year, the official said.

Gonzales has also ordered
that he chief counsel of every field office personally sign off on
every national security letter, a practice that has been encouraged but
not required until now.

The office of Director of National
Intelligence Mike McConnell has established a working group to consider
how much of the information gathered by national security letters
should be retained and whether any of it should be purged. After the
Patriot Act was passed, the Bush administration eliminated the FBI’s
requirement that irrelevant personal information from case files be
discarded after cases are closed.

Mueller has ordered improved
training of agents involved in national security cases and better
record-keeping. Last May, changes began with the fixing of databases.

A
senior group of FBI inspectors has been asked to review the conduct of
agents and their supervisors to determine if any should be disciplined
for mistakes.

Frequent Errors In FBI’s Secret Records Requests – washingtonpost.com

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Judge Quits, Reportedly Over U.S. Spy Program

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 2:14 pm
December 21, 2005

Judge Quits, Reportedly
Over U.S. Spy Program

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 – A federal judge has resigned from the court
that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases, reportedly
over concerns about the secret program authorized by President Bush
that bypasses the court and allows spying on people believed to be
communicating with terror suspects abroad.

United States District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, notified the chief justice
of the United States, John Roberts, of his resignation on Monday,
according to The Washington Post. It said Judge Robertson gave no
reason.

U.S. Senate judiciary panel members start considering ways to push Gonzales out of office

Anger about the secret surveillance program helped fuel a
Democratic-led effort currently blocking renewal of the USA Patriot
Act. Democrats say some provisions infringe on civil liberties – by
allowing access to library and business records, for example – and
should be dropped. They seek a three-month extension of the act while
those provisions are reworked.

But Mr. Bush, speaking from the White House South Lawn today, lashed
out at the blocking effort, saying, “This obstruction is inexcusable.”
Later, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that if the act lapses at
year’s end, “We will not be as safe.”

Judge Robertson has not commented on his resignation. But The Post
quoted unnamed colleagues as saying he was concerned that information
gained under the secret program could then be used to press the
so-called FISA court to obtain warrants for further monitoring,
subverting the congressionally defined process. It quoted one
colleague, speaking anonymously, as saying some judges feared that the
FISA body had become a “Potemkin court.”

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, declined to
comment on the matter. “Judge Robertson did not comment on the matter
and I don’t see any reason why we need to,” he said.

When Mr. Gonzales was asked about the resignation, he replied: “I
don’t know the reason. I’m not going to speculate why a judge would
step down from the FISA court.”

FISA judges are limited to a single term, and Judge Robertson’s
would have expired in May. He was first named to the federal bench here
by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Chief Justice William Rehnquist
later appointed him as one of the 11 judges on the FISA court, which
conducts its work in secrecy. Judge Robertson has not resigned from his
district judgeship, an aide said.

The emerging details of the secret surveillance program – first
reported Friday by The New York Times – have angered many in Congress,
who question the president’s authority to order such warrantless spying
on people in the United States and who deny that they were adequately
informed or consulted.

The administration said it has held a dozen classified briefings
with congressional leaders on the matter, but at least two Democrats
who took part – Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, and
former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota – have said they received little information and raised serious concerns at the time.

A bipartisan group of senators – Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia
Snowe of Maine, both Republicans, and Dianne Feinstein of California,
Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon, all Democrats – called
this week for the Senate judiciary and intelligence panels to open a
joint investigation of the matter.

Several critics of the classified program have asked why, if the
FISA court had proved too cumbersome in an age of sharply heightened
terror threat, the administration had not asked Congress to streamline
the process.

Mr. Gonzales said today that the administration had studied and rejected that option.

“We were advised it would be virtually impossible to obtain
legislation of this kind without compromising the program,” he said.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
have vigorously defended the surveillance program as vitally important
in preventing potentially calamitous terrorist attacks like those of
Sept. 11, 2001.

“I would argue that the actions that we’ve taken there are totally
appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the
president,” Mr. Cheney told reporters Tuesday aboard Air Force Two en
route from Pakistan to Oman. “You know, it’s not an accident that we
haven’t been hit in four years.”

The administration has said that even small delays under the FISA process could be critical.

The FISA court, created in 1978, can legally authorize secret
surveillance but only after the government shows probable cause that it
is aimed at foreign governments or their agents, not what the law
defines as “U.S. persons,” a term that includes aliens legally in the
country.

The new program allows for surveillance, without FISA warrant, of
people in the United States when they are believed to be communicating
with terror suspects abroad. But the program has at times captured
purely domestic communications, The New York Times reported today.

Quoting unnamed officials, it said that a small number of internal
communications were captured, apparently accidentally. The widespread
use of cellphones reportedly makes it harder at times to determine
whether a call crosses borders.

Mr. Bush had said in a news conference Monday that internal
communications were not part of the secret program. “I want to stress,
and that is, is that these calls are not intercepted within the
country,” he said. “If you’re calling from Houston to L.A., that – that
call is not monitored.”

Judge Quits, Reportedly Over U.S. Spy Program – New York Times

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MnDOT feared cracking in bridge but opted against making repairs

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 12:53 pm

MnDOT feared cracking in bridge but opted against making repairs

Last update: August 03, 2007 – 1:32 PM

Structural
deficiencies in the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed Wednesday were
so serious that the Minnesota Department of Transportation last winter
considered bolting steel plates to its supports to prevent cracking in
fatigued metal, according to documents and interviews with agency
officials.The department went so far as to ask contractors for
advice on the best way to approach such a task, which could have been
opened for bids later this year.

MnDOT considered the steel
plating at the recommendation of consulting engineers who told the
agency that there were two ways to keep the bridge safe: Make repairs
throughout the 40-year-old steel arched bridge or inspect it closely
enough to find flaws that might become cracks and then bolt the steel
plating only on those sections.

Fears about bridge safety fueled
emotional debate within the agency, according to a construction
industry source. But on the I-35W bridge, transportation officials
opted against making the repairs.

Officials were concerned that
drilling thousands of tiny bolt holes would weaken the bridge. Instead,
MnDOT launched an inspection that was interrupted this summer by
unrelated work on the bridge’s concrete driving surface.

“We
chose the inspection route. In May we began inspections,” Dan Dorgan,
the state’s top bridge engineer, said. “We thought we had done all we
could, but obviously something went terribly wrong.”

Dorgan said
there was enough money in the agency’s budget to pay for construction
work on the underside of the bridge. But he and Gov. Tim Pawlenty
acknowledged that transportation officials will face tough questions
about the state’s upkeep of the bridge, which has had known
deficiencies since 1990.

“We will absolutely get to the bottom of
this,” Pawlenty said. “There were a lot of decisions made, a lot of
judgment calls made, and they’re all going to have to be critically
reviewed.”

Pawlenty said an independent consultant will be hired
to scrutinize MnDOT inspection practices meant to safeguard the state’s
13,026 bridges. In the case of the I-35W bridge, MnDOT inspections
convinced officials that the bridge wouldn’t need to be replaced or
overhauled until 2020, the governor said.

Was there an internal debate?

State
and federal officials said it was too early to speculate on what caused
the eight-lane bridge to collapse during Wednesday’s evening rush hour,
but Dorgan said the focus of the investigation is on the bridge’s
superstructure, or steel underside.

He said inspectors have
long been on the lookout for metal fatigue and cracking in the bridge
because it was designed before engineers learned about dangers to
bridges from fatigue cracking.

“Up until the late 1960s, it was
thought that fatigue was not a phenomenon you would see in bridges.
Unfortunately that was a wrong assumption,” Dorgan said.

According
to a source with knowledge of the state and federal investigations,
MnDOT is focused on the east side of the northbound section of the
bridge past the Washington Avenue entrance as the likely spot where the
bridge first gave way.

Bob McFarlin, assistant to the
commissioner at MnDOT, dismissed speculation that the collapse was
somehow linked to corrosion from de-icing chemicals automatically
dispensed on the bridge.

The National Transportation Safety
Board is conducting the official investigation and Minnesota has hired
its own forensic engineering firm to conduct a parallel study.

A
construction industry official who met with MnDOT about shortcomings on
the I-35W bridge told the Star Tribune that there have been ongoing
concerns among some MnDOT employees about the safety of this and other
similar bridges.

“There were people over there that were deathly
afraid that this kind of tragedy was going to be visited on us,” the
industry official said. “There were people in the department that were
screaming to have these replaced.”MnDOT has been trying to move these
‘fracture critical’ bridges up in their [budget] sequencing so
something like this wouldn’t happen,” the source said.

“The
Lexington Bridge [I-35E over the Mississippi River], that was a
fracture-critical bridge. MnDOT moved that up pretty aggressively. What
was happening on the Lexington Bridge was crack migration in the steel
in the I-beam.”

Dorgan said no open dissension existed.

“It
was talked about whether replacement was needed, whether we could keep
it in service,” Dorgan said. “That was the whole point of those
studies. There was engineering discussion of that, but I’m not aware of
anyone who was rankled, or a heated discussion.”If there was a strong
opposition, it was not voiced,” he said.

MnDOT said Thursday that
about 8 percent of all bridges in Minnesota, including the I-35W
bridge, have been listed by the federal government as “structurally
deficient,” compared with 13 percent nationally. The label doesn’t
necessarily mean a bridge is unsafe, but in the case of the 1,907-foot
bridge, inspections were increased from once every two years to once
every year, officials said.

According to findings from the most
recent inspection in June 2006, inspectors noted various cases of
corrosion and cracking, but found no evidence of growth in pre-existing
cracks, Dorgan said. Another inspection began early this year but was
put on hold when work began on a $9 million contract to patch and
improve the bridge’s driving surface. Dorgan said he has seen no link
between the surface work and the collapse.

“We considered the bridge fit for service,” he said.

Still,
as recently as December, MnDOT indicated a desire to reinforce the
bridge by 2008 with steel plates. According to a newsletter distributed
in January 2007 by the Minnesota chapter of the Associated General
Contractors, MnDOT was intending to take bids in late 2007 on a project
that would “retrofit some of the chord members on the steel deck truss
of [the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River].”The Department is
looking for feedback and advice from contractors regarding the project
staging and constructability,” the newsletter said.

But Dorgan
told the Star Tribune Thursday that plans changed. “We decided to
handle it with inspections instead,” he said. Gary Peterson, MnDOT’s
assistant bridge engineer, said plating would have required drilling
thousands of holes in the bridge.

“If you take a look at drilling
all of those holes in a bridge that is already fracture critical you
could initiate flaws that might initiate a fracture,” Peterson said.

The
option to monitor through inspection was one of two suggestions given
to the department in 2006 by URS Corp., a San Francisco-based
construction management consultant.

Some close observers of MnDOT
continued to speculate Thursday that the decision to monitor instead of
fix deficiencies in the bridge was driven by financial concerns. Dave
Semerad, CEO of the Minnesota chapter of the Associated General
Contractors, said everything MnDOT does is based on cost-benefit
analysis.

“Let’s face it. They don’t have any money,” Semerad
said. “At the end of the day, that’s the issue. This is indicative of a
long-term pattern.”

Asked whether a lack of money was behind
MnDOT’s decision not to reinforce the bridge, MnDOT Metro District
Engineer Khani Sahebjam said: “No, we would never do that because of
money.”

Laurie Blake • 612-673-1711 lblake@startribune.com Paul McEnroe • 612-673-1745 pmac@startribune.com Pat Doyle • 651-222-1210 pdoyle@startribune.com Tony Kennedy • 612-590-5973 tonyk@startribune.com

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Only In New York

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 12:08 pm

Only In New York
Buying a ridiculous number of lotto tickets actually does give you a chance at winning

August 3rd, 2007


You know that crazy lady that stands outside of bodegas, chain smoking
and playing scratch offs? Well, she just won a million dollars. [NYDN]

only-in-new-york-final.jpg• Does anyone who orders large fries from Wendy’s really care that it has some trans-fat? [AP]

• And here we thought local politicians weren’t scummy assholes. [NY1]

• Wyoming says historic diner, we say mediocre food and room for a new high-rise. [NY Sun]

• Apparently it pays to wear a cute mini-skirt and heels to work, it totally gets you more money. [NYT]

Jossip

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10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot

In Broadcatch on Friday, August 3, 2007 at 11:38 am


IT web site TechRepublic suggests 10 things you can do to coax Windows
XP into booting when it won’t start up properly. The post covers
everything from using your Windows startup disk and system restore to
fixing a corrupt boot.ini or master boot record. This all might sound a
bit difficult, since most people have never heard of master boot
records or partition boot sectors, but TechReplublic provides a simple
walkthrough for each tip. If you’ve had trouble getting your computer
to start up with you, these 10 tips are a good place to start.

10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot [TechReplublic via MakeUseOf]

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ZABRISKIE POINT::VIDEO

In Uncategorized on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:50 pm

Antonioni

L’esplosione finale

New York’s Bridges

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:45 pm

New York’s Bridges

August 2nd, 2007

Given that the New York City Department of Transportation maintains 787 bridges, the collapse of the bridge across the Mississippi in Minneapolis raised immediate concerns here.

A 2006 report
on the state of the city’s bridges by the transportation
department listed only three in poor condition—the lowest number
since at least 1997: the Brooklyn Bridge; a pedestrian bridge over the
FDR Drive in Manhattan, and a bridge at in Flushing Meadows-Corona
Park. According to the City Room,
city officials called reporters today to reassure them. “The poor
rating for the Brooklyn Bridge means that there’s only components
of the bridge that are in poor condition,” Lori Ardito, first
deputy commissioner at the transportation department reportedly said.
“They’re actually the ramps leading to the bridge —
not the span of the bridge.” She said the city planned no special
action in response to the Minnesota disaster but noted the Brooklyn
Bridge is slated for reconstruction work starting in 2010.

To add to our unease, Gothamist
points out the East River Bridges carry far more traffic than the
Minneapolis bridge – not counting the subways that rumble over
some of our bridges – and are a lot older.

And on the state level, State Senate Transportation Committee
Chairman Thomas Libous is calling for more money to be spent on bridge
and road repairs, telling Gannett News Service,
“Maybe this tragedy (in Minneapolis) is going to open the eyes of
some of my colleagues reluctant to spend the money.” A 2003, a report
by civil engineers found 37 percent of bridges in the state were
considered “structurally deficient” or “functionally
obsolete.” Today, state inspectors were reportedly
out in force checking out the spans. Similarly New Jersey Governor Jon
Corzine, apparently not quite so sanguine as New York City officials, ordered inspectors to examine all of the more than 6,000 bridges in his state.

Several commentators see a link between the bridge collapse in Minnesota and last month’s steam pipe explosion in Midtown Manhattan: aging infrastructure.
“What all politicians must do is put aside the bickering and
blame on the infrastructure issue since every one of them has a
responsibility to help reduce the damage,” writes the Tygrrrr Express.

Gotham Gazette – The Wonkster » Blog Archive » New York’s Bridges

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KARL ROVE FORCES OWN CHILD TO TESTIFY BEFORE CONGRESS

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:36 pm

White House Aide Won’t Answer Questions of a Senate Panel

 

Published: August 3, 2007

WASHINGTON,
Aug. 2 — J. Scott Jennings, a 29-year-old White House aide,
refused repeatedly on Thursday to answer questions before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, saying he was under orders from President Bush not
to respond.


Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

J. Scott Jennings, a White House aide, at Thursday’s hearing.

“I must respectfully
decline to respond at this time,” Mr. Jennings said about a dozen
times to questions about the White House’s role in the dismissals
of federal prosecutors. Each time Mr. Jennings was asked about the
removals, he looked at a sheet of paper and said in a rote manner that
he could not reply, “pursuant to President Bush’s directive
invoking executive privilege.”

His appearance before the
committee was the latest act in the ripening showdown between the White
House and Congressional Democrats over the issue of executive privilege.

Mr.
Jennings’s explanation was treated scornfully by the
committee’s Democrats, who said they did not accept Mr.
Bush’s assertion that he has the authority to prevent former and
present officials from testifying to Congress.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman, called the assertion “a bogus claim.”

Mr.
Leahy was especially withering in his criticism of an earlier claim by
Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, that Mr. Jennings’s
boss, Karl Rove,
had an even greater claim to the privilege. Mr. Fielding wrote that as
a senior official who has regular access to the president, Mr. Rove had
complete immunity from questioning by Congress.

Mr. Rove had been
subpoenaed to answer questions at Thursday’s session, but did not
appear. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, suggested that
Mr. Rove had left it to Mr. Jennings to take the committee’s
heat.

“Why is he hiding?” Mr. Durbin asked.
“Why does he throw a young staffer like you into the line of fire
while he hides behind the White House curtains?”

Committees
in both the House and the Senate are investigating whether there was
any improper political influence in the dismissals last year of several
federal prosecutors and have sought to determine Mr. Rove’s role
in the deliberations.

Although the issue has split Congress largely along party lines, Senator Arlen Specter
of Pennsylvania, the committee’s ranking Republican, has
criticized the White House approach. Mr. Specter said at the Thursday
hearing that it was important to move ahead with the investigation
because he believed it would end with the resignation of Attorney
General Alberto R. Gonzales, in whom he expressed a lack of confidence.

White House Aide Won’t Answer Questions of a Senate Panel – New York Times

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Judge Backs C.I.A. in Suit on Valerie Plame/Wilson Memoir

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:29 pm

Published: August 3, 2007

Valerie Wilson may be the best known former intelligence operative in recent history, but a federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that she was not allowed to say how long she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the memoir she plans to publish this fall.

Although the fact that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. from 1985 to 2006 has been published in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the judge, Barbara S. Jones of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Ms. Wilson was not free to say so.

“The information at issue was properly classified, was never declassified and has not been officially acknowledged by the C.I.A.,” Judge Jones wrote.

Asked whether the ruling would affect the book’s scheduled publication date in October, Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Ms. Wilson’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, said only that the book would appear “this fall,” suggesting that revisions required by the decision may cause a slight delay. David B. Smallman, a lawyer who represented Ms. Wilson and Simon & Schuster in the suit they had filed to include the information, said his clients had not decided whether to appeal.

C.I.A. employees sign agreements requiring them to submit manuscripts to the agency for permission before they are published. The C.I.A. has publicly acknowledged only that Ms. Wilson worked there from 2002 to January 2006, when she resigned.

But a February 2006 letter from the C.I.A. to Ms. Wilson about her retirement benefits said that she had worked for the agency since Nov. 9, 1985, for a total of “20 years, 7 days,” including “six years, one month and 29 days of overseas service.” The letter was published in the Congressional Record in connection with proposed legislation concerning Ms. Wilson’s benefits, and it remains available on the Library of Congress’s Web site.

Judge Jones acknowledged that the C.I.A. “does not contest that the information is, in fact, in the public domain,” adding that “the public may draw whatever conclusions it might from the fact that the information at issue was sent on C.I.A. letterhead by the chief of retirement and insurance services.”

But she said a classified court filing from Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy director of the C.I.A., which lawyers for Ms. Wilson and her publisher were not allowed to see, contained a reasonable explanation for the agency’s position. Judge Jones did not reveal it, saying only that Mr. Kappes has persuaded her of “the harm to national security which reasonably could be expected if the C.I.A. were to acknowledge the veracity of the information at issue.”

“His explanation is reasonable,” Judge Jones wrote of Mr. Kappes’s secret statement, “and the court sees no reason to disturb his judgment.”

Mr. Rothberg said that aspect of Judge Jones’s ruling was particularly frustrating.

“Trying to argue a case in which the government was able to submit a supersecret affidavit which we were not able to review was like playing an opponent who has 53 cards in his deck,” he said.

The entire decision, he added, “runs counter to the First Amendment, sets a dangerous precedent and creates an unreasonable standard by which the government can disappear public information and rewrite history.”

The C.I.A. apparently had no significant objections to the manuscript beyond the dispute over how long Ms. Wilson worked for it. In a December 2006 letter quoted in Judge Jones’s decision, the agency’s publication review board said the manuscript was “replete with statements” that “become classified when they are linked with a specific time frame.”

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said only that the agency was satisfied with Judge Jones’s decision.

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YEARLY KOS VIDEO :: HOWARD DEAN GIVES KEYNOTE ADDRESS

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:20 pm

Google Pushes Tailored Phones

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 9:59 pm

Google Pushes Tailored Phones
To Win Lucrative Ad Market

By AMOL SHARMA and KEVIN J. DELANEY
August 2, 2007; Page A1

Google Inc. is searching for growth in cellphones.

The company, which has made billions of dollars in Web
advertising on computers, is courting wireless operators to carry
handsets customized to Google products, including its search engine,
email and a new mobile Web browser, say people familiar with the plans.
It wants to capture a big chunk of the fast-growing market for ads on
cellphones.

Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in
the cellphone project, say people who have been briefed on it. It has
developed prototype handsets, made overtures to operators such as
T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, and talked over technical
specifications with phone manufacturers. It hopes multiple
manufacturers will make devices based on its specs and multiple
carriers will offer them.

For wireless operators, the plans are a double-edged
sword. Google’s powerful brand and its popular Web services could help
operators sign up more subscribers to data packages, on which they
increasingly rely as voice revenue declines. However, operators have
been wary about losing control over the mobile-ad market.

The long-rumored Google phones are still in the
planning stages, and wouldn’t be available to consumers until next year
at the earliest, say people familiar with the idea. Some details are
likely to shift as the plans develop.

The Mountain View, Calif., company has made clear it
is serious about developing advanced software and services for
cellphones. “What’s interesting about the ads in the mobile phone is
that they are twice as profitable or more than the nonmobile phone ads
because they’re more personal,” said Google Chief Executive Eric
Schmidt at the D: All Things Digital conference in May.

A Google spokesman yesterday declined to comment on a
Google phone project, but noted: “We are partnering with almost all of
the carriers and manufacturers to get Google search and other Google
applications onto their devices and networks.”

The Google phone project goes far beyond Google’s
existing deals to include its search engine or applications such as
Maps on select handsets, say the people familiar with the matter.

The company’s past efforts to get its software on
cellphones have raised some concerns in the industry. Verizon Wireless
Chief Executive Lowell McAdam said the carrier has chosen not to
integrate Google’s Web search engine tightly into its phones because of
Google’s demands to get a large share of search-based ad revenue.

“What this really boils down to is a battle for the
mobile ad dollar,” Mr. McAdam said in a recent interview. “They want a
disproportionate share of the revenue.” Mr. McAdam declined to comment
specifically on any Google phones.

Google has announced that it may bid for
wireless-spectrum licenses at a coming government auction. The Federal
Communications Commission on Tuesday approved rules addressing some of
Google’s concerns about the sale.

If it owned spectrum, Google might turn into a phone
operator itself. However, such a project would take years to come to
fruition and cost billions of dollars. For now, Google has to work with
existing cellphone operators to get its mobile products to consumers.

In recent months Google has rolled out mobile versions
of products such as the YouTube video-sharing site. It has made deals
to include its search engine or applications such as Google Maps and
Gmail on select handsets. But the company has sometimes been frustrated
at the limited distribution it has achieved. In some cases, Google has
managed to get around operators. Its 411 location search service can be
accessed by dialing an 800 number from any handset.

Now it is drafting specifications for phones that can
display all of Google’s mobile applications at their best, and it is
developing new software to run on them. The company is conducting much
of the development work at a facility in Boston, and is working on a
sophisticated new Web browser for cellphones, people familiar with the
plans say.

The prize for Google: the potential to broker ads on
the mobile phones, complementing the huge ad business it has built
online. Google even envisions a phone service one day that is free of
monthly subscription charges and supported entirely through ad revenue,
people familiar with the matter say.

Last year, global spending on mobile-phone
advertising, including placement of ads in text messages, Web pages,
video and all other content, was only $1.5 billion, according to
eMarketer. But that figure is projected to grow to nearly $14 billion
by 2011, the market research firm says.

The proposed Google phone, Apple
Inc.’s iPhone and efforts by other technology companies are aimed at
making Web and computer functions easier for consumers to use on
cellphones. Today, surfing the Web, listening to music and watching
video on cellphones are often clunky experiences.

Unlike Apple, whose cellphone is available exclusively through AT&T,
Google is hoping that multiple operators will offer its phone. And
Google is ready to relinquish some control over design, allowing
manufacturers to create devices based on a common set of specifications.

Google has approached several wireless operators in
the U.S. and Europe in recent months, including AT&T, T-Mobile USA
and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, people familiar with the situation say. T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom
AG, appears to be the furthest along in considering it, these people
say. Andy Rubin, who helped design T-Mobile’s popular Sidekick phone,
now works at Google and is involved in its handset project.

Google recently struck a deal with Sprint Nextel
Corp. to have a wide array of its services bundled into devices for
that carrier’s high-speed wireless network based on the nascent WiMax
technology. Both companies declined to comment on whether that
relationship would extend to offering Google-customized phones on
Sprint’s existing cellular network.

The specifications Google has laid out for devices
suggest that manufacturers include cameras for photo and video, and
built-in Wi-Fi technology to access the Web at hot spots such as
airports, coffee shops and hotels. It also is recommending that the
phones be designed to work on carriers’ fastest networks, known as 3G,
to ensure that Web pages can be downloaded quickly. Google suggests the
phones could include Global Positioning System technology that
identifies where people are.

People who have seen Google’s prototype devices say they aren’t as revolutionary as the iPhone. One was likened to a slim Nokia
Corp. phone with a keyboard that slides out. Another phone format
presented by Google looked more like a Treo or a BlackBerry. It’s not
clear which manufacturers might build Google wireless devices, though
people familiar with the project say LG Electronics Co. of South Korea
is one company that has held talks with Google. Google has already
lined up a series of hardware component and software partners and
signaled to carriers that it’s open to various degrees of cooperation
on their part, the people say.

Google doesn’t plan to charge a licensing fee to
hardware makers or operators, people familiar with the matter say. The
company has suggested the phones could carry the Google brand alongside
the brand of the operator, or they could be distributed without the
Google name. The Google brand has yet to appear on a significant piece
of consumer hardware.

Some executives at cellphone operators were skeptical about Google’s efforts. They noted the case of Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, which introduced a sports-centric handset but was forced to shut down the venture last year amid soft demand.

Apple’s iPhone could be a formidable competitor among
consumers — and also present strategic complications. Four of Apple’s
eight directors also serve as directors or advisers to Google. Mr.
Schmidt, the Google CEO, is on Apple’s board. Those with ties to both
companies might find it difficult to avoid conflicts of interest.

Google has generally had better luck in Europe than in
the U.S. in getting its software on cellphones. It has forged a
relationship with the United Kingdom’s Vodafone Group PLC to provide
the search bar on the carrier’s branded Internet homepage, with results
customized for cellphone users. T-Mobile in Europe integrates Google’s
search bar into its welcome screen for users who have a data plan
designed for heavy Web browsing. It’s unclear which carriers in Europe
Google is working with on its handset plans.

–Cassell Bryan-Low, Jane Spencer and Evan Ramstad contributed to this article.

Google Pushes Tailored Phones

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The Best Dangerous Science Jobs: Hurricane Hunter, Volcanologist

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 9:53 pm

WIRED
Erin Biba
Email
07.24.07

1 Astronaut
Since manned spaceflight began in 1961, 24 US astronauts have died in
astro-action — 10 during launch, six during training flights, and
seven on reentry. In 1971, three Soviet cosmonauts suffocated when a
malfunction caused the oxygen to leak out of their ship. Then there’s
that whole riding-an- explosion-into-space thing. And we haven’t even
found aliens yet.

2 Biosafety Level 4 lab researcher
BSL-4 labs handle the deadliest diseases on Earth. In 2004, a Russian
scientist died after accidentally sticking herself with an Ebola-laced
needle. The death occurred only months after a US scientist at the
Army’s BSL-4 lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland made the same mistake…
and survived.

3 Hurricane hunter
The Air Force’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron crew members are
the daredevils of meteorology. They fly WC-130s into a hurricane’s
eyewall, 10,000 feet up, to locate the storm’s pressure center and
measure its wind speed. Not surprisingly, some get a little turned
around. Even on the ground, they’re not safe — Hurricane Katrina
destroyed the squad’s home base.

4 Doctors Without Borders mobile lab tech
Testing blood for sleeping sickness — an infectious disease
transmitted by flies that causes brain swelling, heart failure,
insomnia, and an uncontrollable urge to sleep — is dangerous
enough. Now just imagine doing it at an outdoor mobile lab in the
middle of the ongoing genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

5 Propulsion engineer
Turns out, the people who ground-test rocket engines don’t actually
worry about explosions. When you work with cryogenic oxygen and gases
pressurized up to 300 psi, you’re far too busy worrying about “cold
burns” and other trauma to really give proper consideration to what
might happen should one of the buggers completely ignite.

6 Grad student
Even the most mundane job in science is hazardous if you don’t know
what you’re doing. Grad students in labs around the world are in
constant danger of, well, screwing up. In 2004, a Texas A&M
student, for example, was cleaning up a laboratory when a jar of
chemicals he was handling suddenly exploded, leaving him with severe
lacerations and burns.

7 Volcanologist
Active volcanoes blow enough ash to bury a city the size of, oh,
Pompeii. No wonder many volcanologists don’t come back from their
helicopter visits to hell. In 1991, three were killed by Japan’s Mount
Unzen. In 2001, one died after falling off a 985-foot-high caldera rim,
and in 2005, four Filipino researchers died in a chopper crash while
inspecting landslide areas.

8 Biologist
Animal research can lead to more than an allergic reaction. Being
bitten, scratched, or exposed to “secretions” can be deadly. For
example, at least 70 percent of captive adult macaque monkeys are
infected with herpes B. In 1997, a 22-year-old researcher died after
contracting the virus from some “biologic” monkey material that got in
her eye.

Illustrations by Thomas Fuchs

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The Journamalism of NPR Drives Lance Knobel Shrill!

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 9:50 pm

He writes:

Davos Newbies » Blog Archive » Way short of “a detailed case”:
NPR usually does a better job than most of reporting accurately and
maintaining the appropriate skepticism about our country’s
leaders but it let me down this morning. While I was shaving, they had
a report on president Bush’s speech yesterday about Iraq as the
front line of the so-called war on terrorism. Mary Louise Kelly said:
“In his speech, the president laid out a detailed case linking
Osama Bin Laden’s terror network to its offshoot in Iraq.”

His case consisted of saying, “Al Qaeda in Iraq is Al Qaeda. In Iraq.”

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A Hipper Crowd of Shushers

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 4:40 pm
July 8, 2007

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers

Correction Appended

ON
a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a
professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling
store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and
abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web
designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists.

When talk turned to a dance party the group had recently given at a nearby restaurant, their profession became clearer.

“Did you try the special drinks?” Sarah Gentile, 29,
asked Jennifer Yao, 31, referring to the colorfully named cocktails.

“I got the Joy of Sex,” Ms. Yao replied. “I thought for sure it was French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

Ms. Yao could be forgiven for being confused: the drink was numbered
and the guests had to guess the name. “613.96 C,” said Ms.
Yao, cryptically, then apologized: “Sorry if I talk in
Dewey.”

That would be the Dewey Decimal System. The groups’ members were librarians. Or, in some cases, guybrarians.

“He hates being called that,” said Sarah Murphy, one of
the evening’s organizers and a founder of the Desk Set, a social
group for librarians and library students.

Ms. Murphy was speaking of Jeff Buckley, a reference librarian at a
law firm, who had a tattoo of the logo from the Federal Depository
Library Program peeking out of his black T-shirt sleeve.

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with
a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative
patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more.
 

With so much of the job involving technology and with
a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is
available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the
kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is
“looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

When the cult film “Party Girl” appeared in 1995, with
Parker Posey as a night life impresario who finds happiness in the
stacks, the idea that a librarian could be cool was a joke.

Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young
literati. “Unshelved,” a comic about librarians —
yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster
librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number
of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but
also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.

“We’re not the typical librarians anymore,” said Rick Block, an adjunct professor at the Long Island University
Palmer School and at the Pratt Institute School of Information and
Library Science, both graduate schools for librarians, in New York
City.

“When I was in library school in the early ’80s, the students weren’t as interesting,” Mr. Block said.

Since then, however, library organizations have been trying to
recruit a more diverse group of students and to mentor younger members
of the profession.

“I think we’re getting more progressive and
hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in
Washington.

In the last few years, articles have decried the graying of the
profession, noting a large percentage of librarians that would soon be
retiring and a seemingly insurmountable demand for replacements. But
worries about a mass exodus appear to have been unfounded.

Michele Besant, the librarian at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
said the Association of Library and Information Science statistics show
a steady increase in library information science enrollments over the
last 10 years. Further, at hers and other schools there is a trend for
students to be entering masters programs at a younger age.

The myth prevails that librarians are becoming obsolete.
“There’s Google, no one needs us,” Ms. Gentile said,
mockingly, over a drink at Daddy’s.

Still, these are high-tech times. Why are people getting into this
profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many
of the members of the Desk Set wear?

“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.

Ms. Murphy, 29, thinks so, too. An actress who had long considered
library school, Ms. Murphy finally decided to sign up after meeting
several librarians — in bars.

“People I, going in, would never have expected were from the
library field,” she said. “Smart, well-read, interesting,
funny people, who seemed to be happy with their jobs.”

Maria Falgoust, 31, is also a founder of Desk Set, which took its name from the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer
Tracy romantic comedy. A student who works part time at the library at
Saint Ann’s School, she was inspired to become a librarian by a
friend, a public librarian who works with teenagers and goes to rock
shows regularly.

Since matriculating to Palmer, Ms. Falgoust has met plenty of other
like-minded librarians at places such as Brooklyn Label, a restaurant,
and at Punk Rope, an exercise class. “They’re everywhere
you go,” she said.

Especially in Greenpoint, where Ms. Murphy and Ms. Falgoust live
about 10 blocks from each other and where there are, Ms. Falgoust said,
about 13 other librarians in the neighborhood.

How did such a nerdy profession become cool — aside from the
fact that a certain amount of nerdiness is now cool? Many young
librarians and library professors said that the work is no longer just
about books but also about organizing and connecting people with
information, including music and movies.

And though many librarians say that they, like nurses or priests,
are called to the profession, they also say the job is stable,
intellectually stimulating and can have reasonable hours —
perfect for creative types who want to pursue their passions outside of
work and don’t want to finance their pursuits by waiting tables.
(The median salary for librarians was about $51,000 in 2006, according
to the American Library Association-Allied Professional Organization.)

“I wanted to do something different, something maybe more
meaningful,” said Carrie Klein, 36, who used to be a publicist
for a record label and for bands such as Radiohead and the Foo
Fighters, but is now starting a new job in the library at Entertainment
Weekly.

Michelle Campbell, 26, a librarian in Washington, said that
librarianship is a haven for left-wing social engagement, which is
particularly appealing to the young librarians she knows.
“Especially those of us who graduated around the same time as the
Patriot Act,” Ms. Campbell said. “We see what happens when
information is restricted.”

Ms. Campbell added that she became a librarian because it
“combined a geeky intellectualism” with information
technology skills and social activism.

Jessamyn West, 38, an editor of “Revolting Librarians Redux:
Radical Librarians Speak Out” a book that promotes social
responsibility in librarianship, and the librarian behind the Web site librarian.net
(its tagline is “putting the rarin’ back in librarian since
1999”) agreed that many new librarians are attracted to what they
call the “Library 2.0” phenomenon. “It’s become
a techie profession,” she said.

In a typical day, Ms. West might send instant and e-mail messages to
patrons, many of who do their research online rather than in the
library. She might also check Twitter, MySpace
and other social networking sites, post to her various blogs and keep
current through MetaFilter and RSS feeds. Some librarians also create
Wikis or podcasts.

At the American Library Association’s annual conference last
month in Washington, there were display tables of graphic novels, manga
and comic books. In addition to a panel called “No Shushing
Required,” there were sessions on social networking and zines and
one called “Future Friends: Marketing Reference and User Services
to Generation X.”

On a Saturday, after a day of panels, a group of librarians relaxed
and danced at Selam Restaurant. Sarah Mercure nursed a blueberry vodka
and cranberry juice and talked about deciding on her career after
hearing a librarian who curated a zine collection speak. Pete Welsch, a
D.J., spun records and talked about how his interest in social
activism, film and music led him to library school.

But some librarians have found the job can be at odds with their outside cultural interests.

“I went to see a band a few weeks ago with old co-workers and
turned to one and said ‘Is it just me or is this really, really
loud?’ ” said Ms. Klein, the former publicist. Her friend,
she said, “laughed and said, ‘You have librarian ears
now.’ ”

Correction: July 15, 2007

An article last Sunday about a younger generation of librarians misstated the name of a library organization that held a conference in Washington last month. It is the American Library Association, not the American Librarian Association.

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Democrats are “PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda”

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 2:06 pm

Media Matters – Limbaugh:

Limbaugh: Democrats are “PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda”

On the July 31 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio
show, Rush Limbaugh
claimed that Democrats have “aligned themselves with the enemy” in Iraq and went on to assert: “The enemy
kills more soldiers, their spokesmen here in the U.S. are the Democrats. When we
kill more of the enemy, the Democrats are silent and they say nothing.”
He continued: “But when we have reports of, you know, another IED, or
pictures of a car on fire — then the Democrats assume the role of media PR
spokespeople for Al Qaeda.”

From the July 31
broadcast of Premiere
Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: I mean,
there’s almost a mathematical formula to this that I have detected. To
the extent that we make progress, the Democrats’ political hopes are
diminished. Now, what kind of political leaders position themselves that way so
that they only win when their country loses? And what kind of brains do they
have to position themselves in such a way so that when we make progress, their
political aspirations are diminished?

They’re the ones that created
this situation. They have aligned themselves
with the enemy. They continue to align themselves with the enemy. They
won’t admit it, obviously. The enemy kills more soldiers, their spokesmen
here in the U.S.
are the Democrats. When we kill more of the enemy, the Democrats are silent and
they say nothing. But when we have
reports of, you know, another IED, or pictures of a car on fire — then the
Democrats assume the role of media PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda.

—A.J.W.

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In Praise of Tap Water

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 1:26 pm

In Praise of Tap Water

On the streets of New York or Denver or
San Mateo this summer, it seems the telltale cap of a water bottle is
sticking out of every other satchel. Americans are increasingly thirsty
for what is billed as the healthiest, and often most expensive, water
on the grocery shelf. But this country has some of the best public
water supplies in the world. Instead of consuming four billion gallons
of water a year in individual-sized bottles, we need to start thinking
about what all those bottles are doing to the planet’s health.

Here are the hard, dry facts: Yes, drinking water is a good thing, far
better than buying soft drinks, or liquid candy, as nutritionists like
to call it. And almost all municipal water in America is so good that
nobody needs to import a single bottle from Italy or France or the Fiji
Islands. Meanwhile, if you choose to get your recommended eight glasses
a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The
same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents.

Next,
there’s the environment. Water bottles, like other containers,
are made from natural gas and petroleum. The Earth Policy Institute in
Washington has estimated that it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil
to make the water bottles Americans use each year. That could fuel
100,000 cars a year instead. And, only about 23 percent of those
bottles are recycled, in part because water bottles are often not
included in local redemption plans that accept beer and soda cans. Add
in the substantial amount of fuel used in transporting water, which is
extremely heavy, and the impact on the environment is anything but
refreshing.

Tap water may now be the equal of bottled water,
but that could change. The more the wealthy opt out of drinking tap
water, the less political support there will be for investing in
maintaining America’s public water supply. That would be a
serious loss. Access to cheap, clean water is basic to the
nation’s health.

Some local governments have begun to
fight back. Earlier this summer, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom
prohibited his city’s departments and agencies from buying
bottled water, noting that San Francisco water is “some of the
most pristine on the planet.” Salt Lake City has issued a similar
decree, and New York City recently began an advertising campaign that
touted its water as “clean,” “zero sugar” and
even “stain free.”

The real change, though, will come
when millions of ordinary consumers realize that they can save money,
and save the planet, by turning in their water bottles and turning on
the tap.

In Praise of Tap Water – New York Times

Senate to Hold Hearing on Security of Voting Machines

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Senate to Hold Hearing on Security of Voting Machines

By Kim Zetter

Electronicvoting2
In the wake of the California report
released last week showing that Red Team security researchers were able
to hack voting machines from three of the top voting machine companies,
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) announced today that the Senate
Rules and Administration Committee will hold a hearing in September to
examine the report’s findings. From the press release:

“I was very surprised to read how easily these machines could be
hacked into and election results distorted,” Senator Feinstein
said. “This report demonstrates the precarious risk of relying on
electronic voting machines, especially when a verified paper record is
not provided. These findings are yet another reason that states and
counties should consider a move to optical scan machines that provide
an auditable, individual voter-verified paper record without having to
rely on a separate printer.”

One wonders where the senator has been the last four years
that she’s surprised by the findings revealed in the report. Feinstein
introduced a bill earlier this year that would require voting machines
nationwide to produce a paper trail, but the bill has received little
support in the Senate thus far.

Another bill that Congressman Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) introduced in
the House years ago (and reintroduced this year) is making better
progress, though its path has hardly been smooth. As I reported two weeks ago,
the bill almost died due to arguments among interest groups over
sections of the bill dealing with the paper trail mandate and voter
accessibility. A compromise was apparently reached this week (see the draft version
that’s been circulating on the internet), but voting activists are
steaming mad with it since it would allow touch-screen machines with
add-on printers to continue to be used. The machines use thermal paper,
such as the kind used in cash registers.

Voting activist groups fought hard to get those printers in place in 2003 and 2004 and were the impetus
for the original Holt bill back in 2003 which would have mandated that
printers be installed on all touch-screen machines. But the activists
have since changed their minds and now want touch-screen machines
outlawed entirely and replaced with optical-scan machines that use a
durable full-size paper ballot. The revised bill introduced this year
initially seemed to suggest that touch-screen machines would be
outlawed, but that wording in the bill has since changed to permit
counties to use the touch-screen machines with printers.

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Coffee drinkers rejoice: your liver and skin thank you

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 12:26 pm

ARS TECHNICA

Coffee drinkers rejoice: your liver and skin thank you

By John Timmer
| Published: August 01, 2007 – 05:20PM CT

We tend to view habits that are referred to as addictions as
necessarily bad things. In recent years, however, there has been good
news for those who consider themselves hooked on things like red wine,
green tea and chocolate: these complex substances appear to contain
some chemicals that actually enhance human health. Two recent
publications suggest that we may be able to add coffee to that list.

The first comes from the June issue of Hepatology,
a journal devoted to the study of the liver. Some researchers
(primarily from espresso-mad Italy) performed a meta-analysis of
studies that tracked liver cancer, the third most common cause of
cancer deaths globally, and pulled out data related to coffee
consumption. Overall, this happy addiction appeared to correlate with a
41 percent reduction in the risk for cancer.

The benefit held up well across a variety of studies, including both
case-controlled and cohort designs. It also persisted across geographic
regions, with the frequent drinkers of Southern Europe and the rare
sippers in Japan seeing a protective effect. There was also a dose
effect, with heavy drinkers seeing even more protection, and
consumption even benefitted those with signs of liver damage, which is
often a precursor to cancers of the organ. It was one of the more
convincing data sets I’ve seen in this sort of analysis.

At PNAS, a study
skipped the coffee, and headed straight for putting caffeine in the
drinking water of some mice. Nevertheless, they suggested that the mice
dosed themselves in a manner typical of us humans: “The plasma
concentration of caffeine in mice ingesting caffeine (0.1–0.4
mg/ml drinking water) is similar to that in the plasma of most coffee
drinkers (one to four cups per day).” This caffeine was coupled with
the mouse equivalent of a voluntary exercise program, which involved
placing a running wheel in the cage.

The researchers looked at how the combination of exercise and
caffeine affected a potential path to cancer, the response of cells to
ultraviolet light exposure (something that often accompanies exercise).
Cells exposed to UV have two choices: suffer the damage, or commit an
organized form of cell suicide called apoptosis. It’s thought that the
apoptotic response prevents cancer by killing off anything that may
have picked up DNA damage, and hence a propensity to cancerous growth.

Either the exercise or caffeine alone caused a slight uptick in the
number of cells undergoing apoptosis following UV exposure. Combining
the two, however, caused a far more dramatic increase, over 400 percent
compared to the sedentary, uncaffeinated controls. This was more than
simply adding the two separate effects, suggesting that caffeine and
exercise acted synergistically. As an added benefit, the subdermal fat
layer in the mice shrank dramatically in these animals. These results
suggest that making caffeine part of your exercise program may give it
an extra boost, and help limit the damage caused by any of the exercise
you pursue outdoors.

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NewYorkology: YANKEE STADIUM PRIMER

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:46 am

Yankee Stadium primer

On the eve of the Yankees’ first home game of the season, NewYorkology
contributor Scott Ross offers up a Bronx Bomber guide to everything you
need to know about buying tickets, how to get there, where to sit and
what to eat. Ross is the East Coast editor of Sploid.

The Stadium
In the decade preceding the arrival of Babe Ruth, the Yankees were a
so-so team. Their performance at the gate reflected their play on the
field, as average attendance at the Polo Grounds was only about 5,000.
With the addition of Ruth the Yankees in 1920 started winning and
immediately their attendance tripled. The influx of cash from gate
receipts allowed team owner Jacob Rupert to put up the money for “The
House That Ruth Built,” as the stadium came to be known.

Yankee Stadium opened on April 18, 1923. That season the Bronx Bombers
captured their first World Series title. Since then, the stadium has
been home to an additional 25 championships, more than any other team
in pro sports.

With the announcement in June 2005 of a new Yankee Stadium slated to
open in April 2009, there are now less than 250 more opportunities (not
including the playoffs) to see a game there. If you haven’t seen this
historic coliseum, get on it.

How to Buy Tickets
Tickets are available online at the Yankees official website or through Ticketmaster. You can print your own tickets off the Internet, so you needn’t fall victim to the capricious ways of the U.S. Postal Service.

You can also visit one of the Yankee Clubhouse Stores
around the city. Don’t bother getting your tickets through the
Clubhouses in an effort to avoid the Ticketmaster surcharge, they still
get you. … Yeah, I don’t get it either.

You can buy tickets at the ballpark, but it’s in your best interest to
get them before you head up there. You’d be wise to call and check
availability before making the trek up there ticketless.

Of course you can always buy tickets from scalpers, but you do so at your own risk.

Where to Sit
Ticket prices range from $12 for the bleachers to $115 for “Field
Championship” seats, what dad used to call “box seats.” All the really
pricey tickets for 2006 are sold out; the most expensive section still
on sale is “Main Box” for $52.

I typically sit in the upper-deck behind home plate (Tier Reserved,
between Sections 7 and 8). The tickets are cheap, $18-$20, usually
available and you can see the whole field. The more expensive the
ticket, the harder it is to come by, so you need to decide what’s important to you.

If your priority is not having your child surrounded by blood-hungry
drunks, let me suggest the bleachers or Tier Reserved sections 13 &
14, where the sale of alcohol is forbidden.

There’s no escaping the thunderously loud P.A., though I find it particularly bad in the upper decks.

How to Get to Yankee Stadium
Subway – Yankee Stadium is easily reached by taking the 4 train if you’re coming from the East Side or the D
train up the West Side. Both trains let you off at the 161st Street
station. (Be advised the 4 train will not be crossing between Brooklyn
and Manhattan on weekends until the fall of 2006.)

Car – If you just have to drive, the Stadium is at exit 4 off of Route 87 (aka, The Major Degan). There are parking lots, but isn’t going to a game expensive enough? And getting out of there after a game can be a nightmare. In “A Pitcher’s Story,”
Roger Angel tells of how the police allow Yankee P.A. announcer Bob
Shepherd to make an illegal left turn that cuts 30 to 45 minutes off
his drive. You are not Bob Shepherd.

Ferry – NY Waterway’s Yankee Clipper
costs $18 roundtrip and makes several Manhattan stops. The trip takes
about an hour and a half and leaves you about a 7-10 minute walk from
the Stadium. Really, what’s more magical than a cruise along the East
River?

Riding the Yankee Clipper from Pier 11 (near South and Wall streets)
takes considerably longer and is more expensive than the train, but
it’s not without its merits. The chief advantages of the ferry are the
full bar and the comfort, with the later truly becoming an issue on the
ride home. Rather than jostling with 50,000 other hot, tired fans on
the dank, sweaty subway platform and trains, you’ve got plenty of fresh
air and seating as you float down the East River. It’s a far more
civilized way to travel.

Where to Meet
Mercifully, we all have cell phones now, so finding one another is far
easier, but you still need a location. Everybody who doesn’t know the
area meets at The Bat. As you get off the subway and walk west along
161st, you’ll see a giant bat, maybe 30 feet high, surrounded by a
couple hundred people looking as lost and confused as you.

Before the Game
Unless you’re sitting in the bleachers, your ticket also allows you to
take a walk through Monument Park in centerfield, where the team pays
tribute to its former greats. The park is located by Section 36 and is
open from two hours before game time to 45 minutes before game time.
It’s pretty cool; check it out if you have time.

If you’d rather grab a beer or a nosh beforehand, there is no shortage
of bars and restaurants in the neighborhood, all of them teeming with
fans.

Getting Into the Stadium
The gates open two hours before first pitch and you’re permitted to
seek autographs until the end of batting practice. Give yourself a
minimum of thirty minutes to get through security, buy a hot dog and
find your seat.

Before you get into the park, you will be subject to a search,
typically a cursory patting down. Be prepared to turn your cell phone
on, take off your hat or open your purse.

Outside food is permitted, though cans and bottles are not. If
you’re carrying anything in an opaque bag, you may be asked to
transfer your belongings into a clear one provided to you by security.

Any bag larger than a purse (this is a purely subjective determination
made by the security guard taking into account your gender, demeanor
and bra size) will not be permitted (diaper bags are OK).

You can check your bag for $5 at many of the bars across River Avenue.
The lines move pretty quickly and I’ve never heard of anybody
losing anything, but there are no guarantees, so if you can avoid it,
don’t bring a bag.

What to Eat
The Stadium has your standard ballpark fare; vendors troll the aisles
with beer, dogs, peanuts, soda, popcorn, Cracker Jack, ice cream. …
If you want pizza, fries, nachos or a sandwich, you have to walk quite
a ways and wait in a long line; you’re looking at a minimum of 30
minutes, more likely 45.

Miscellanea
If you feel compelled to wear your Red Sox hat, be ready for catcalls
and mockery, but don’t take the bait. You can’t win.

There are only four ATMs in the whole ballpark, so you’d be advised to get money in advance.

Listen for the mellifluous sounds of Bob Shepherd on the P.A. I’m
holding onto the hope that someone will have the good sense to record
Shepherd pronouncing every syllable in the world so we can create a
Shepherd see-and-say, and hear him for all eternity. The sound of that
man saying “Shigetoshi Hasegawa” makes my knees weak.

Watch out for Freddie, the crazy old guy with a sign that reads “Freddy Sez …
The man has been trolling the aisles of the stadium forever, carrying
his sign and offering people the chance to clang his bell with a spoon.
If you get close enough, ring the bell, have your picture taken with
him and be sure to ask for a copy of his newsletter. Bad jokes,
recipes, ads. … It’s incredible. A stapled mess of photocopies,
it may be the original zine.

Listen for the chant at the start of every game that rains down from
the bleachers. In the top of the first inning the fans in the bleachers
chant the name of each player on the field and clap (Der-RICK! Je-TER!
… clap … clap … clap-clap-clap) until the player acknowledges
them with a tip of the cap.

Whether you’re visiting from Smithtown or Boston or Manhattan,
Kansas, the idea of spending the day in the South Bronx can sound
daunting. Do not be afraid. The neighborhood is completely safe.
Don’t think twice about heading up early for a beer or to take
the tour of Monument Park.

Corrected: This entry was modified after a commenter pointed out that
the phrase “(i)n hours leading up to the game and for about an hour
after, the neighborhood is perfectly safe” made it seem the Bronx may
be perpetually burning when not under the soothing spell of a Yankees’
game. Writer Scott Ross concurs with the commenter and the phrase has
been deleted.

Update: Writer Scott Ross took a mid-season trip on the Yankee Clipper
and provided more details on the sail for the entry above. Also, this
new info on security changes: After 9/11, security at Yankee Stadium
was cranked up quite a bit. In the wake of the terror plot uncovered in
London last week (Aug. 10, 2006,) the Yankees have again raised the
bar. As always, the Yankees remain one of the few — if not only –
ballparks that graciously allows outside food and drink, however you
now must take a sip of any liquid before it’ll be permitted. As a
friend noted, this new protocol may keep liquid explosives out of the
stadium, but it won’t keep you from smuggling in booze. Hooray for
freedom!

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Sean Penn Praised by Venezuela’s Chavez

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:38 am
By IAN JAMES, Associated Press Writer




CARACAS, Venezuela -Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has praised
Sean Penn for his critical stance against the war in Iraq, saying the
two chatted by phone and soon plan to meet in person.

Chavez said
Penn traveled to Venezuela this week wanting to learn more about the
situation in the country and walked around some of Caracas’ poor
barrios on his own.

“Welcome to Venezuela, Mr. Penn. What drives
him is consciousness, the search for new paths,” Chavez said Wednesday
in a televised speech. “He’s one of the greatest opponents of the Iraq
invasion.”

Chavez read aloud from a recent open letter by Penn to
President Bush in which the actor condemned the Iraq war and called for
Bush to be impeached, saying the president along with Vice President
Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are “villainously
and criminally obscene people.”

The socialist president, who
shares those views, said he and Penn talked by phone _ “with my bad
English but we understood each other more or less.”

Chavez said
the two plan to meet Thursday. He called the actor “well-informed about
what is happening in the United States and the world, in spite of being
in Hollywood.”

What’s more, Chavez said, “he’s made great films.”
The Venezuelan leader said he recently watched Penn’s Oscar-winning
performance in the film “Mystic River.”

For his part, Penn on
Wednesday toured Venezuela’s new film studios on the outskirts of
Caracas. Penn, whose visit was unannounced, did not speak publicly.

Sean Penn Praised by Venezuela’s Chavez

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Rove refuses to testify on role in prosecutor firings

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 11:28 am

Nick Juliano
RAW STORY

The image “http://rawstory.com//images/new/rovebush.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

White House senior adviser Karl Rove has rebuked a Senate Judiciary
Committee subpoena and will not appear Thursday to testify about his
role in the firing of nine US Attorneys, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said
late Wednesday.

The Senate Judiciary chairman chided the White House for allowing
Rove to give public speeches about the attorney firing scandal but not
permit his testimony under oath.

“Mr. Rove has given reasons for the firings that have now been shown
to be inaccurate after-the-fact fabrications,” Leahy said in a
statement. “Yet, he now refuses to tell this Committee the truth about
his role in targeting well-respected U.S. Attorneys for firing and in
seeking to cover up his role and that of his staff in the scandal.”

The House Judiciary Committee initiated criminal contempt of
Congress charges against former White House counsel Harriet Miers and
Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton last month after they refused to comply
with subpoenas demanding their testimony.

It remains unclear whether Rove will face similar charges. A Judiciary Committee spokeswoman told RAW STORY
Wednesday night that if Rove followed through in refusing to testify,
the committee could decide to issue criminal charges later. The aide
said no decisions had been made yet.

“It is a shame that this White House continues to act as if it
is above the law. That is wrong,” Leahy said. “The subpoenas authorized
by this Committee in connection with its investigation into the mass
firings of U.S. Attorneys and the corrosion of federal law enforcement
by White House political influence deserve respect and compliance.”

Scott Jennings, the White House deputy director of political
affairs, is expected to appear before the committee Thursday, but his
testimony will be limited by Bush’s claim of executive privilege.

A letter to the Judiciary Committee from White House counsel Fred F.
Fielding claimed Rove “is immune from compelled congressional testimony
about matters that arose during his tenure (as an immediate
presidential adviser) and that relate to his official duties in that
capacity.”

The Raw Story |

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Panel Queries Rumsfeld on Tillman Battle Death

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 2:02 am

Panel Queries Rumsfeld on Tillman Battle Death

WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — With Donald H. Rumsfeld seated at the witness table, the chairman of a House committee investigating the bungled aftermath of the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman told a packed Capitol Hill hearing room Wednesday that the time had come for some answers. What did Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Defense Department officials know about Corporal Tillman’s accidental killing by American forces, he asked, and when did they know it?

Rumsfeld Defends Himself in Tillman CaseThree and a half hours, a few four-color charts and a couple of lost tempers later, the chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, solemnly admitted that he had gotten almost nowhere.

“You’ve all admitted that the system failed; none of you feel personally responsible,” Mr. Waxman said, addressing Mr. Rumsfeld, who resigned as defense secretary last fall, as well as one currently serving general and two retired ones who also testified under oath Wednesday. “Somebody should be responsible.”

The hearing, held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s first return to Capitol Hill since President Bush asked him to resign after the Democratic victories in midterm elections. And although the bitter exchanges between Mr. Rumsfeld and the Democrats who now control Congress focused on the case involving Corporal Tillman, they exposed veins of anger over what the Democrats regard as a lack of accountability for broad missteps in Iraq.

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KARL ROVE SUBPOENED

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 1:57 am

Senate Committee Issues Subpoenas to Rove and Deputy

Josh Marshall’s TPM Mucraker


Finally, the big one.

The Senate Judiciary Committee issued two more subpoenas as part of
the U.S. attorney firings investigation today: one for Karl Rove and
the other for his deputy, Scott Jennings. Senate Judiciary Chairman
Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced the subpoenas on the Senate floor.

The question for Rove and Jennings, of course, is whether to take
the same course taken by Rove’s former aide, Sara Taylor, who appeared
before the committee to answer questions that were not covered by
executive privilege — or to take the approach taken by Harriet Miers,
who refused to show up at all.

The subpoenas call for Rove and Jennings to show up on August 2nd and also produce documents by that date.

Update: Leahy’s statement is below.


Leahy’s statement:

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is issuing subpoenas
to political operatives at the White House for documents and testimony
related to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the mass
firings of U.S. Attorneys and politicization of hiring and firing
within the Department of Justice. This is not a step I take lightly.
For over four months, I have exhausted every avenue seeking the
voluntary cooperation of Karl Rove and J. Scott Jennings, but to no
avail. They and the White House have stonewalled every request. Indeed,
the White House is choosing to withhold documents and is instructing
witnesses who are former officials to refuse to answer questions and
provide relevant information and documents.

We have now reached a point where the accumulated evidence shows
that political considerations factored into the unprecedented firing of
at least nine United States Attorneys last year. Testimony and
documents show that the list was compiled based on input from the
highest political ranks in the White House, including Mr. Rove and Mr.
Jennings. The evidence shows that senior officials were apparently
focused on the political impact of federal prosecutions and whether
federal prosecutors were doing enough to bring partisan voter fraud and
corruption cases. It is obvious that the reasons given for these
firings were contrived as part of a cover up and that the stonewalling
by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort. Just
yesterday during his sworn testimony, Mr. Gonzales contrasted these
firings with the replacement of other United States Attorneys for
“legitimate cause.”

The White House has asserted blanket claims of executive privilege,
despite testimony under oath and on the record that the President was
not involved. The White House refuses to provide a factual basis for
its blanket claims. The White House has instructed former White House
officials not to testify about what they know and instructed Harriet
Miers to refuse even to appear as required by a House Judiciary
Committee subpoena. The White House has withheld relevant documents and
instructed other witnesses not to produce relevant documents to the
Congress but only to the White House.

Last week, the White House did much to substantiate the evidence
that it is intent on reducing United States Attorneys and federal law
enforcement to merely another partisan political aspect of its efforts
when it dispatched an anonymous senior official to take the position
that the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia would not be
permitted to follow the statutory mechanism to test White House
assertions of Executive privilege by prosecuting contempt of Congress.
In essence this White House asserts that its claim of privilege is the
final word, that Congress may not review it, and that no court can
review it.

Yesterday, during an oversight hearing with Mr. Gonzales, the senior
Senator from Pennsylvania, the Ranking Republican on the Senate
Judiciary Committee rightly asked:

“Mr. Attorney General, do you think constitutional government in
the United States can survive if the president has the unilateral
authority to reject congressional inquiries on grounds of executive
privilege and the president then acts to bar the Congress from getting
a judicial determination as to whether that executive privilege is
properly invoked?”

There can be no more conclusive demonstration of this
Administration’s partisan intervention of federal law enforcement
than if this Administration were to instruct the Justice Department not
to pursue congressional contempt citations and intervene to prevent a
United States Attorney from fulfilling his sworn constitutional duty to
faithfully execute the laws and proceed pursuant to section 194 of
title 2 of the United States Code. The President recently abused the
pardon power to forestall Scooter Libby from ever serving a single day
of his 30-month sentence for conviction before a jury on multiple
counts of perjury, lying to a grand jury and obstruction of justice.
Stonewalling this congressional investigation is further demonstration
that this Administration refuses to abide by the rule of law.

This stonewalling is a dramatic break from the practices of every
administration since World War II in responding to congressional
oversight. In that time, presidential advisers have testified before
congressional committees 74 times voluntarily or compelled by
subpoenas. During the Clinton Administration, White House and
Administration advisors were routinely subpoenaed for documents or to
appear before Congress. For example, in 1996 alone, the House
Government Reform Committee issued at least 27 subpoenas to White House
advisors. The veil of secrecy this Administration has pulled over the
White House is unprecedented and damaging to the tradition of open
government by and for the people that has been a hallmark of the
Republic.

The investigation into the firing for partisan purposes of United
States Attorneys, who had been appointed by this President, along with
an ever-growing series of controversies and scandals have revealed an
Administration driven by a vision of an all-power Executive over our
constitutional system of checks and balances, one that values loyalty
over judgment, secrecy over openness, and ideology over competence.

What the White House stonewalling is preventing is conclusive
evidence of who made the decisions to fire these federal prosecutors.
We know from the testimony that it was not the President. Everyone who
has testified said has said that he was not involved. None of the
senior officials at the Department of Justice could testify how people
were added to the list or the real reasons that people were included
among the federal prosecutors to be replaced. Indeed, the evidence we
have been able to collect points to Karl Rove and the political
operatives at the White House.

A former political director at the White House made a revealing
admission in her recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee
when she refused to answer questions citing the oath she took to the
President. In this constitutional democracy, the oath taken by public
officials is to the Constitution, not any particular President of any
particular party. The Constitution itself provides the oath of office
of the President. Every President since George Washington has shown to
“preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United
States.” The oath for other federal official is prescribed by
Congress through statute and provides that every federal
officer’s duty is not to support and defend any particular
President or Administration but “to support and defend the
Constitution of the United States” and “to bear true faith
and allegiance” to our founding principles and law.

I pointed out to Ms. Taylor that the oath I have been privileged to
take as a United States Senator is likewise to the Constitution. I
proudly represent the people of Vermont. I know it is a privilege to
serve as a temporary steward of the Constitution and the values and
protections for the rights and liberties of the American people that it
embodies. My oath is not to a political party and not even to the great
institution of the United States Senate, but to the Constitution and
the rule of law. As a former prosecutor, I feel strongly that
independent law enforcement is an essential component of our democratic
government, and that no one is above the law.

Despite the constitutional duty of all members of the Executive
branch to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,”
the message from this White House is that the President, Vice
President, and their loyal aides are above the law. No check. No
balance. No accountability.

The law says otherwise. The criminal contempt statute, 2 U.S.C.
§ 194, provides that if a House of Congress certifies a contempt
citation, the United States Attorney to whom it is sent has a
“duty” and “shall” “bring it before the
grand jury for its action.” For this White House to threaten to
intervene in an effort to preempt further investigation, cover up the
truth and avoid accountability is an insult to the rule of law. This
law was duly passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by a duly
elected President of the United States. It is derived from law that has
been on the books since 1857, for 150 years.

The Bush-Cheney White House continues to place great strains on our
constitutional system of checks and balances. Not since the darkest
days of the Nixon Administration have we seen efforts to corrupt
federal law enforcement for partisan political gain and such efforts to
avoid accountability.

Given the stonewalling by this White House, the American people are
left to wonder: What is it that the White House is so desperate to
hide? As more and more stories leak out about the involvement of Karl
Rove and his political team in political briefings of what should be
nonpartisan government offices, I think we have a better sense of what
they are trying to hide. We have learned of political briefings at over
20 government agencies, including briefings attended by Justice
Department officials. This week, the news was that Mr. Rove briefed
diplomats on vulnerable Democratic districts before mid-term elections.
Why, Senator Whitehouse properly asked at our hearing yesterday, were
members of our foreign service being briefed on domestic political
contests? Mr. Gonzales had no answer. Similarly, why were political
operatives giving such briefings to the Government Services
Administration, which rents government property and buys supplies? In
her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the former
political director at the White House ultimately had to concede that
her briefings included specific political races and particular
candidates being targeted.

In this context, is anyone surprised that the evidence in our
investigation of the firings of U.S. Attorneys for political purposes
points to Mr. Rove and his political operations in the White House?
Despite the initial White House denials, Mr. Rove’s involvement
in these firings is indicated by the Department of Justice documents we
have obtained and from the testimony of high-ranking Department
officials. This evidence shows that he was involved from the beginning
in plans to remove U.S. Attorneys. E-mails show that Mr. Rove initiated
inquires at least by the beginning of 2005 as to how to proceed
regarding the dismissal and replacement of U.S. Attorneys. The evidence
also shows that he raised political concerns, including those of New
Mexico Republican leaders, about New Mexico U.S. Attorney David
Iglesias that may have led to his dismissal. He was fired a few weeks
after Mr. Rove complained to the Attorney General about the lack of
purported “voter fraud” enforcement cases in his
jurisdiction.

We have learned that Mr. Rove raised similar concerns with the
Attorney General about prosecutors not aggressively pursuing voter
fraud cases in several districts and that prior to the 2006 mid-term
election he sent the Attorney General’s chief of staff a packet
of information containing a 30-page report concerning voting in
Wisconsin in 2004. This evidence points to his role and the role of
those in his office in removing or trying to remove prosecutors not
considered sufficiently loyal to Republican electoral prospects. Such
manipulation shows corruption of federal law enforcement for partisan
political purposes.

Documents and testimony also show that Mr. Rove had a role in the
shaping the Administration’s response to congressional inquiries
into these dismissals, which led to inaccurate and misleading testimony
to Congress and statements to the public. This response included an
attempt to cover up the role that he and other White House officials
played in the firings.

Despite the stonewalling and obstruction, we have learned that Todd
Graves, U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Missouri was fired
after he expressed reservations about a lawsuit that would have
stripped many African-American voters from the rolls in Missouri. When
the Attorney General replaced Mr. Graves with Bradley Schlozman, the
person pushing the lawsuit, that case was filed and ultimately thrown
out of court. Once in place in Missouri though, Mr. Schlozman also
brought indictments on the eve of a closely contested election, despite
the Justice Department policy not to do so. This is what happens when a
responsible prosecutor is replaced by a “loyal Bushie” for
partisan, political purposes.

Mr. Schlozman also bragged about hiring ideological soulmates.
Monica Goodling likewise admitted “crossing the line” when
she used a political litmus test for career prosecutors and immigration
judges. Rather than keep federal law enforcement above politics, this
Administration is more intent on placing its actions above the law.

With our service of these subpoenas, I hope that the White House
takes this opportunity to reconsider its blanket claim of executive
privilege, especially in light of the testimony that President was not
involved in the dismissals of these U.S. Attorneys. I hope that the
White House steps back from this constitutional crisis of its own
making so that we can begin to repair the damage done by its untoward
interference with federal law enforcement. That interference has
threatened our elections and seriously undercut the American
people’s confidence in the independence and evenhandedness of law
enforcement. Mr. Rove and the White House must not be allowed to
continue manipulating our justice system to pursue a partisan political
agenda. Apparently, this White House would rather precipitate an
unnecessary constitutional confrontation than do what every other
Administration has done and find and accommodation with the Congress.
If there are any cooler or wiser heads at the White House, I urge them
to reconsider the course they have chosen.

There is a cloud over this White House and a gathering storm. I hope
they will reconsider their course and end their cover up so that we can
move forward together to repair the damage done to the Department of
Justice and the American people’s trust and confidence in federal
law enforcement.

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KOS MAKES FREEPERS, O’REILLY LOOK LIKE LITTLE GIRLS

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 1:51 am

WIRED’S WRAP:

Annual lefty bloggers conference to be featured on Fox News Show Tonight, Again

By Sarah Lai Stirland EmailAugust 01, 2007 | 6:48:04 PMCategories: Election ‘08  

So there’s been a raging rhetorical fight over political hate speech on the Internet recently between the left-leaning DailyKos and Fox’s conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly. Following in the footsteps of the Clinton campaign, Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd
is jumping into the fray. He’s going to be on the O’Reilly Factor
defending the conference in about half an hour. Cleverly, he’s
apparently using this as an e-mail list building exercise, and to publicize his appearance in front of bloggers this week-end at the conference.

[O'Reilly fired off the first shot mid-July when he criticized JetBlue for sponsoring the YearlyKos
blogging conference in Chicago later this week. He pointed to some of
the DailyKos' readers' less tasteful posts, and then accused the site
of fostering hate. JetBlue then asked for its corporate logo to be removed from the YearlyKos site, but continued with its sponsorship. The war has carried on ever since.]

*In other Dodd-related news, Web developer Aaron Welch has joined the campaign as Internet Technology Director. Welch is a co-founder of  tech firm Advomatic, and a former member of the Howard Dean campaign.

Bill O’Reilly gets a taste of his medicine…

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 12:58 am

stark-oreilly.jpg

Bill O’Reilly gets a taste of his medicine…

Hey, Bill, how does that taste? Calling All Wingnuts’ Mike Stark
pays a visit to The Falafel King’s home to ask him some probing
questions. Ya know, like he does to people he disagrees with. More at dKos, including pictures…

After O’Reilly provided an
“accountability moment” to the JetBlue CEO at his home, I
decided to provide O’Reilly with his own accountability moment at
his home.

I’ve just returned to home base.

I’ve got video of O’Reilly in his sleepwear (red
shorts and a white t-shirt). I delivered the Andrea Mackris Court
filings to all of his neighors – every home in his development got a
copy. And I put a bunch of signs up along his street – “Bill
O’Reilly: Andrea Mackris has your cash” directly across
from his house; “Bill O’Reilly: PERVERT” in front of
his home; “Bill O’Reilly: CHEATER” on the road he
must take to exit his development and “Bill O’Reilly:
Can’t be trusted with your daughters” at the landmark
boulder marking the entrance to his development.

We had an interesting conversation – not too explosive, but I think a lot of people will be entertained.

It’s about time someone pulled this crap on O’Reilly.

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Two Vets Go At It On Hardball

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 12:13 am

Hardball-Soltz-Rumsfeld

On Wednesday’s “Hardball,” VoteVet’s Jon Soltz squared off with another veteran, Eric Egland, of Vets For Freedom
on today’s heated testimony on Capitol Hill surrounding the cover
up of Pat Tillman’s death. Egland–who is involved with Melanie Morgan’s Move America Forward–naturally defends Bush, Rumsfeld and the generals involved in the coverup.

video_wmv Download (1277) | Play (1596) video_mov Download (717) | Play (1093)

Laughably, Eglund–who authored this plan for “victory” in Iraq and is mentioned as a possible replacement for corruption-embattled politician John Doolittle
in California–calls Soltz’s demands that Bush stop his
invoking of Executive Privilege and treat the Tillman family with
respect they deserve “partisan spin.”  Um, yeah. 
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Please sign VoteVets’ petition to demand the truth

Filed Under:
Military, Supporting our Troops, Hardba

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Ebert’s Web Site to Post Movie Reviews

In Broadcatch on Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 12:03 am

For someone who can’t talk, film critic Roger Ebert is saying a lot – at times in a British accent.

Open a newspaper and his reviews are in there. He’s published three books since last fall and has two more on the way. All the while, he’s recuperating from cancer surgery and a subsequent operation that left him unable to speak.

“I’m writing as much as ever,” Ebert said in a Wednesday interview with The Associated Press, during which an electronic voice with a British accent spoke the words he typed onto a laptop computer.

And now he’s adding a page to the “Ebert & Roeper” Web site that is all thumbs: His, the late Gene Siskel’s, Richard Roeper’s and those of others who have been filling in on the movie review show.

Starting Thursday, the site will offer visitors a chance to watch spirited – sometimes really spirited – discussions about movies that always ended with reviewers assigning them a “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” designation.

“You can tell when we were mad at each other and when we were together against the world,” Ebert, 65, said of his longtime partner, Siskel.

Sitting in the living room of his home in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, Ebert talked about his show that looks pretty much as it did when he and Siskel – competing film critics at rival Chicago newspapers – first sat down in the late ’70s on PBS and talked about movies. He answered questions about his health, his work and his plans for the future.

Ebert’s neck is wrapped in gauze and his mouth hangs open, but he appears robust. As he fiddled with his computer before the interview, he even gave a sly smile and his trademarked – literally – thumbs-up when it started speaking his words.

Ebert has been battling cancer. After undergoing a series of operations, he was operated on again in June of last year, with doctors removing a cancerous growth from his salivary gland and part of his right jaw. Two weeks later, a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation, forcing emergency surgery.

He can’t talk because doctors did a tracheostomy, opening an airway through an incision in his windpipe.

Ebert, who has been the film critic for the Sun-Times since 1967 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, said he isn’t quite sure when he might return to the TV show. He still needs surgery that he hopes will restore his voice, but he said he is cancer-free. After being hospitalized so long that he had to learn how to walk all over again, he said he is getting stronger and he and his wife, Chaz, take daily long walks.

“He’s taking about 12,000 steps a day,” his wife said.

In the meantime, he said, he screens as many as three films a day, with his nights spent watching DVDs to catch up on the films he’s missed.

He clearly wants to return to the balcony seat next to Roeper, who has been his co-host since 2000, the year after Siskel died. But, he said, even if he doesn’t, he’d like to see the show “go on and on and on.”

Ebert is obviously proud of the program – as much for what it isn’t as for what it is.

“Too much entertainment TV is just hype and gossip,” he said. “We have no interviews, no premieres, no arrests … And (it is) a rare show that says when we think a movie is bad.”

All of that can be found on the Web site.

Observers can see just how often Siskel, then the Chicago Tribune’s film critic, and Ebert disagreed and how passionately they did so on “Siskel & Ebert at the Movies.” They can see “Ebert & Roeper.”

And they can see more recent shows featuring Roeper and guest reviewers including Jay Leno, The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott and Christy Lemire of The Associated Press.

They can see the time Ebert said he got “worked up” when Siskel didn’t send his thumb north for “Apocalypse Now” – or the time the two heaped praise on the documentary “Hoop Dreams,” smiling at the memory of how the “Oscar judges turned it off after 15 minutes.”

Then there is the memory of the enthusiastic thumbs-up both he and Roeper gave “Monster.” If that doesn’t sound like such a big deal, given that the movie earned Charlize Theron an Academy Award for best actress, Ebert said that at the time they gave their review “‘Monster’ wasn’t necessarily going to theaters at all.”

Laura Ingraham said she is considering whether to accept CNN offer to guest host

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 11:52 pm

Media Matters For America

On the July 31
broadcast of her nationally syndicated radio show, Laura
Ingraham
— who has attacked reporters stationed in Iraq for
“report[ing] only on the IEDs [improvised explosive devices], only on the
killings … only on the reprisals,” and for “reporting
from hotel balconies” instead of in the field
– said CNN “emailed me”
and “said, ‘Will you fill in the 8
o’clock [p.m. ET] hour for a week?’
Paula Zahn Now currently occupies
the 8 p.m. weeknight time slot on
CNN, but host Paula Zahn is leaving the network, to be replaced
ultimately by Campbell
Brown. Ingraham is the
second conservative radio personality that CNN has recruited to guest host a
prime-time show during the 8 p.m. time slot.

As Media Matters for America noted, Glenn Beck, whom CNN hired in 2006 to host a CNN Headline News
program, filled in for Zahn from July
2-6.

Ingraham’s attack on
reporters stationed in Iraq came during an appearance on the
March 21, 2006, edition of NBC’s Today. Later that day, on Fox News’
The O’Reilly Factor, Ingraham
stated that “before the [Today]
segment began … I actually was watching a report by their NBC reporter,
Richard Engel, who was doing one of those from-the-balcony reports, reporting on
the bombs going off, reporting on the difficulties in Iraq.” She followed
up
these comments on the May 31, 2006, broadcast of her
nationally syndicated radio show, stating:

And by
the way, when I went on the Today
show back in March to talk about the fact that it would be nice for the Today show to go to Iraq and do a show on
a military base, and I brought up the hotel balconies, that was coming right off
a Richard Engel report from a hotel balcony about the latest IEDs going off. The
point of that is all the guys I talked to in Iraq were tired
of it, and I was speaking for them.

In the wake of a car
bomb explosion that killed two CBS News crew members — cameraman Paul Douglas
and freelance sound man James Brolan — and severely wounded correspondent
Kimberly Dozier, Ingraham asserted on the June 6, 2006, edition of
Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor
that she was “surprised” that NBC president Steve Capus criticized her
for her comments about what she called the “dinosaur media.” She
claimed she had said that reporters in Iraq should “go to a military
base” and “just talk to the troops” when in fact, in her original
comments, Ingraham added that reporters should “go out with the Iraqi
military.”

Additionally, while
discussing CNN’s offer on July 31,
Ingraham said she was “not sure whether I should do it or not” because “lots of
factors are in play, but just in
principle.” She further commented that she would “be up against [Fox News host
Bill] O’Reilly. That’d be tough. Might be
fun to just mess with the computers at CNN and see if I could put chewing gum
under the seat and stuff.” During an appearance on the June 1 edition of CNN’s
American Morning, Ingraham referred to “the liberal elites … at
CNN.”

Some of Ingraham’s
other notable comments follow:

  • As the blog
    Firedoglake first reported, on the November 7, 2006,
    edition of her radio show, Ingraham encouraged listeners to jam the phone
    lines of the Democratic Party’s voter assistance hotline 1-888-DEM-VOTE. Ingraham said: “I want
    you to call it and I want you tell us what you get when you call 1-888-DEM-VOTE.
    They’re on top of all of the shenanigans at the polling stations. One problem:
    you can’t get through.” She later added: “Let’s keep ‘dem’ lines ringing.”
    Firedoglake later reported that that
    the voter assistance
    hotline was “being flooded with calls from crank
    callers.”
  • On the June 27, 2004, edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Ingraham challenged
    former President Bill Clinton’s assertion on CNN’s Larry King Live that nationally syndicated
    radio host Rush
    Limbaugh
    has said that former
    deputy White House counsel Vince
    Foster
    “was murdered in an apartment that belonged to the
    Clintons.” Ingraham said: “I never heard Rush Limbaugh say anything of the like.
    And I’m certain he didn’t say that. … There are people on the right who were
    saying those things. Those things were reprehensible. I don’t know anyone
    responsible who was saying that.” However, according to the national media
    watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
    (FAIR), during a 1994 broadcast of The Rush
    Limbaugh Show
    , Limbaugh said he had received a fax with “a bit of
    news … that claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by
    Hillary Clinton.” FAIR went on to report that “[a]fter he returned from a
    commercial break, Limbaugh began referring to the story as a ‘rumor,’ but
    continued to claim that the story was that ‘the Vince Foster suicide was not a
    suicide.’ “

From the July 31
broadcast of Talk Radio Network’s The Laura
Ingraham Show:

INGRAHAM:
CNN called me up and asked me if
I would fill in — if I would think of — they didn’t call me up, they emailed me
– excuse me — and said, “Will you fill in at the 8 o’clock hour for a
week?”
Would you consider doing a week some time because they have a
number of months before Campbell Brown takes over the 8 p.m. slot. She’s having
a baby, and she’s going to have the baby, I guess, and then do the show.
And I’m not sure whether I should do it or
not — well, obviously lots of factors are in play, but just in
principle.
If all those other factors, all those other conditions –

MALE
PRODUCER: Well, there is one factor that will be in play up against you there at
8 o’clock.

INGRAHAM:
Oh, that’s right. I’ll be up against O’Reilly.
That would be tough. Might be fun to just mess with the computers at CNN and see
if I could put chewing gum under the seat and stuff.
See if that
would work out. But — it’s so — I don’t know, we’ll see, we’ll see. They’ve
done some interesting segments and shows. I don’t even know who the hosts are
anymore. It’s just a rotating cast of characters at 8 o’clock, and I don’t know
how — I don’t know how you can take four months off from competing with
O’Reilly. How do you take four months off? You got to get a show on the air. You
can’t take four months off. But that’s what they’re doing. I mean this is –
What do I know? I’m just a radio host. I’m not a big television executive.
I don’t know anything.

From the June 1
edition of CNN’s American
Morning
:

JOHN
ROBERTS (host): Take a quick listen and we’ll get you to react to it.

BUSH
[video clip]: If you want to kill the bill, you don’t want to do what’s right
for America. You can pick one little
aspect out of it. You can use it to frighten people or you can show leadership
and solve this problem once and for all.

ROBERTS:
What do you think about that, Laura, the fact that he says that opponents of this
bill are opposed to what’s right for America?

[...]

INGRAHAM:
Well, you know, it’s absurd. I think it was a bad tactical decision for him to
say that. The way to get people on your side is not to insult them, especially
people in the conservative movement, who worked tirelessly to get him
re-elected, and the president has been consistent on supporting this. You know,
you have to give him credit on that. And, I’ve, I’ve never questioned his
motives in pushing for this type of comprehensive reform. But to insult his base, I mean, I hope he thinks he’s going to be saved by the liberal
elites at, at CNN, John,
because if, if he is, then, then I’ll be
wrong about this. But I think it’s kind of silly.

ROBERTS:
Excuse me, what was that last comment?

INGRAHAM:
What? How did — you know, by the way, John, how did you introduce me for this
segment before the break? “The outspoken Laura Ingraham.” Do you guys — do you
guys introduce liberal commentators that way? I’m going to check.

—C.M.H.

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Depp toasts Hunter S. Thompson with “Rum Diary”

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 11:39 pm

Johnny Depp toasts Hunter S. Thompson with “Rum Diary”

gd.gif

Mon Jul 30, 2007 11:12AM EDT

By Gregg Goldstein

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) – Johnny Depp is moving closer to
bringing Hunter S. Thompson’s autobiographical novel “The Rum Diary” to
the big screen, seven years after the project was first announced.

Oscar-winning producer Graham King, the Oscar-winning producer of
“The Departed,” has acquired all rights to the property, which King
would produce with Depp for Warner Independent Pictures.

A spokesperson for King’s GK Films banner said it was hoped that
production would begin shortly after principal photography is completed
on Depp’s next film, Mira Nair’s crime drama “Shantaram.” No shooting
dates have been set for either film.

Loosely based on the late author’s experience working as a freelance
journalist in Puerto Rico in the late ’50s, the book was written in
1959 but not published until 1998. Depp would play a reporter who works
alongside a motley crew of self-destructive staffers at a struggling
San Juan newspaper, where an erotic love triangle emerges.

Bruce Robinson, whose 1987 comedy “Withnail & I” gained a cult following, is writing the screenplay and directing.

Depp previously played Thompson’s alter ego in Terry Gilliam’s 1996
adaptation of the author’s book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” for
Universal Pictures.

Many plans to make “Rum Diary” have been announced over the years.
The now-defunct indie production outfit Shooting Gallery and SPi Films
optioned the book and announced plans to make the film in 2000, with
Depp set to star and executive produce and Nick Nolte co-starring. A
new producer came on board in 2002, and Benicio Del Toro and Josh
Hartnett were soon attached as cast members.

Del Toro reportedly was set to make his directorial debut with “Rum
Diary” in late 2003, but the project remained dormant through
Thompson’s February 2005 suicide. According to their reps, Del Toro,
Nolte and Hartnett are no longer attached to the project.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

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Groening: ‘No end in sight’ For Simpsons

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 10:50 pm

LONDON, England (CNN) — The most eagerly anticipated
animated film this year hits big screens this weekend, as “The Simpsons
Movie” opens worldwide. The Screening Room spoke to creator Matt
Groening and writer Al Jean in London about everyone’s favorite
two-dimensional yellow family.

Matt Groening told the Screening
Room that fans had driven the demand for the movie. “We’ve had fans
clamoring for a movie for the past 18 years,” he said.

The film
has taken four years to come to fruition, as writer Al Jean explained.
“What really held us up for a long time was to have enough people to do
the show and the movie,” he said. “We talked for a while about doing
the movie after the show is done, but the show is never done! So it
really started in earnest in 2003, when we started working on this
story that became the movie.”

Technology has also played its
part. Jean continued, “The technology to do this film really wasn’t
even around five years ago. For example, there was this joke I once
pitched and David Silverman, the director, started drawing and as I was
pitching it, it went into the film and it was cut a day later. To go
from pitch to cut in two days is pretty impressive.”

Its creators
hope that “The Simpsons Movie” will both satisfy long-term fans and
bring Homer and Marge’s family to a new audience. Groening told the
Screening Room, “This movie is designed to both honor the people who
have loved the show all this time, so there’s lots of little details
for them in the movie, little characters and stuff who they know and
love, but we also want people who don’t know the family to not be
completely confused. It is a complete movie experience, but again, we
have a lot of little details that only the really, true die-hard fans
are going to get.”

And fans can expect to be entertained by
plenty of cartoon mishaps. Groening said, “When you see somebody fall
off the roof in a live-action film, it’s funny — we all love it. But
it’s not as funny as when Homer falls off the roof. I don’t know what
that says about humanity, but we do like to see cartoon characters hurt
themselves and there’s quite a bit of that.”

But how have
Springfield’s finest led the field for so long? Groening believes that
a large part of the Simpsons’ success is down to the traditional
animated techniques used to create it — and that its hand-drawn charm
puts the movie ahead of its CGI rivals. He told CNN, “The difference
between our film and these other films is that we have no penguins,
okay? So that’s the big difference. (Although we do have one penguin.)

“But
the other thing is, our film is done the old fashioned way. It’s got a
lot of errors and flaws in it. These computer-animated films — and I
love them — are perfect. They’re spooky, they’re so good. Ours is a
way for us to honor the art of traditional animation.”

Al Jean
thinks that the series’ success is also down to its wide appeal. He
says, “I have a two year old and she loves the Simpsons already, just
because of the way it looks and the family. And then on the other hand,
we do satirical references that only an adult would get.”

A large
part of the appeal of “The Simpsons” comes from its ability to portray
the more touching moments in family life, like Jean’s favorite moment
in the movie. “It’s a scene where Bart is really mad at his father,” he
told CNN. “He’s sitting in a tree outside the Simpson house at night.
He looks over and sees the Flanders house and thinks how wonderful it
would be if he lived there. It’s just really sweet: there’s something
really warm about that scene.”

Groening, who has been meeting
fans worldwide while promoting the movie, said that the Simpsons
phenomenon has excelled his wildest dreams. “It’s not just the
numbers,” he told CNN. “The numbers are good, but it’s the intensity
and the tattoos. The tattoos are freaky. You know? And it’s not all
just Bart and Homer. You’d think it would be just Homer. I talked to
this one guy and he had Millhouse, and I said, ‘Oh my god, Millhouse!’
and he said, ‘Yeah, everybody gets Bart.’”

While Groening never
expected the series to run for so long, he told the Screening Room he
has no plans to quit while it’s ahead. “The answer is, ‘No end in
sight! No end in sight!’” he said. “We’re having fun, we hope the
audience has fun, and as long as that’s true, we’ll continue doing the
show.”

Jean believes the show has proved it has longevity. “I’m
sure [it], like Mickey Mouse, will live on and on,” he said. And he
also hopes the Simpsons’ success will continue. “In terms of new
episodes, we’re doing another season after the movie comes out for
sure, and then the casts’ contracts expire, but I’d love to get another
three seasons and maybe another movie,” he said.

But what is the
legacy of this much-loved yellow family? Matt Groening sees the film as
the culmination of two decades of hard graft. He says, “I want to make
sure that everyone who’s ever worked on this show is proud of their
work on this movie, so this rewards the writers, the animators, the
actors. It’s basically a celebration of twenty years of The Simpsons.”

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New York Airports Rate Among The Nation’s Worst For Late Flights

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Sunday, July 29, 2007


A
congested national airspace reached its choking point this summer,
fostering record delays at New Jersey and New York airports that
already rate among the nation’s worst for late flights.

By nearly every measure, the flying experience has grown worse this
year. Delays have increased. Passengers have missed more connections,
and airlines have canceled more flights. Even complaints of mishandled
baggage are up.

For the first six months of 2007, Newark Liberty
International Airport’s on-time performance was 66 percent, according
to Flightstats.com, an online database of airline performance. In June,
the number was worse: Only 54 percent of the airport’s arrivals were on
time.

The number of late arrivals at John F. Kennedy International
Airport, where flights have been increasing by thousands every month,
is also surging. In June, the airport’s on-time performance was 53
percent.

This summer’s problems follow the misfortunes of March, when the
lethargic response of some airlines to icy weather in New York and
other cities left thousands of passengers stranded on runways for as
long as 12 hours.

“Pretty much every time I’ve flown in the past five months, there
has been a problem,” said Eleanor Norton, a Manhattan musician who
missed a vacation to the Bahamas in March because icy weather canceled
most of JetBlue’s operations at JFK.

On Wednesday, as she waited for a flight to Columbus, Ohio, Norton
recounted her recent frustrations: canceled flights, missed connections
and long security lines. She flies almost weekly to performances as far
away as Poland, but has decided there is sometimes a better way to get
there.

“My philosophy about the whole thing is if you can drive somewhere, drive,” she said. “The airport situation is just awful.”

Hub system blamed

It isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. Even as the airlines’
performance worsens, passengers keep boarding planes — and airlines
keep adding flights. The region’s three airports, operated by the Port
Authority, handled 104 million passengers in 2006. The bi-state agency
projects more than 107 million in 2007.

“It’s the most heavily transited airspace in the country, so all it
takes is a hiccup, like a storm, in the system to create a very
negative impact on the industry,” said David Castelveter, a spokesman
for the Air Transport Association, the lobbying arm of the airlines.

Nationally, the Federal Aviation Administration expects a system
that currently processes 750 million passengers each year to reach 1
billion by 2015.

And though delays are most frequent in New York, the problem is
national. The hub-and-spoke system, used by most carriers, means that
even local travelers are affected by weather in far-off locations. The
hub-and-spoke system relies on flights connecting through larger
airports to reach their destination.

“It’s a nationwide issue, so I would not estimate that the delay
problem is going to go away anytime soon,” said Port Authority Aviation
Director William R. DeCota.

Many officials believe the airlines could improve performance if
they reduced their reliance on hubs and offered more direct flights.
Southwest Airlines, which has one of the best records for on-time
performance, avoids the hub-and-spoke system. But Southwest also avoids
the nation’s busiest airports, including La Guardia, JFK and Newark,
where sheer volume make it difficult to depart on time.

Airline officials say the hub-and-spoke system is here to stay.
Without it, they said, the airlines could not offer much service to
smaller markets.

Rather, they blame delays on external factors, including bad weather
and outdated air-control technology that doesn’t make use of the entire
sky.

Outdated technology

The airlines and the FAA are pushing for legislation by this fall
that would provide funding for a new, satellite-based air-traffic
system, known as NextGen. The new technology would allow planes to fly
closer together, opening up room for more flights.

“The transformation to NextGen has to begin now or these delays are
going to get even worse as more volume is thrown into the system,”
Castelveter said.

But many insist the airlines have inflicted much of the damage on
themselves. Officials at the Port Authority have urged the airlines to
use larger aircraft instead of the 37- and 50-seat planes that are used
for many flights.

In 2006, about 38 percent of Newark’s 363,555 domestic flights used
regional jets, Port Authority officials said. About 40 percent of
Continental’s operations at Newark use regional jets, Continental
spokeswoman Julie King said.

The airlines prefer smaller jets for some routes because they enable
frequent service and usually mean the planes are full. Passenger
revenue is increasing for many airlines after they lost money for
years. Last week, Continental reported its highest second-quarter
profit since 2000.

“From the business-model perspective, they have the right-size
airplanes flying the right routes, at the right time of the day,”
Castelveter said. “That is evidenced by their success.”

Too many flights?

Frequent flights appeal to business travelers, who pay higher fares
than vacationers who book tickets months in advance. The competition
among airlines to compete for that business helps keep fares low.

But DeCota said airlines have taken the strategy too far. He cited
the 23 daily departures from the Port Authority’s airports to Richmond,
Va.

“Why do you need this volume of flights to a destination like
Richmond, all served by regional jets?” DeCota said. “It makes no
sense.”

Sensing the decline in customer satisfaction, the Port Authority
recently formed a task force that includes airline executives and FAA
officials. The task force hopes to issue its final recommendations by
December.

“The dream would be that some of those recommendations would be very
applicable to winter operations, which are also one of the biggest
causes of delay,” DeCota said.

Some experts say the problem is more urgent than some airlines
think. They say airlines risk alienating their best customers –
business travelers — if the delays continue.

Robert W. Mann, an airline consultant based in New York, said
passengers would eventually “throw up their hands and say: This system
doesn’t work anymore. I can’t schedule meetings or be productive.”

Some business travelers said they would even pay more to avoid the hassles.

“It’s critical that business travelers be able to get there, then
get home to see their families,” said Don Giordano, an insurance
executive from Montclair who flies twice a month from Newark Liberty.

Airports risk a backlash, too. Jay Alcorta, a health-care executive
from Richmond, said he concluded after several late flights at Newark
– including one this month that cost him five hours on the way home –
that the airport “is absolutely the worst airport I fly though.”

“It’s a myriad of problems, but certainly there is too much traffic
on the runways,” he said. “Sitting there for an hour-and-a-half is
awful.”

E-mail: michaels@northjersey.com

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Joe Klein and Beltway Seriousness

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 10:33 pm

 

Joe Klein today responds to my post
from earlier this morning — regarding Joe Lieberman, John Hagee and
Seriousness — without expressly acknowledging that he is doing so. He
all but quotes my post at length and says he is responding to the use
of the word “serious” as an epithet in “certain precincts in the
blogosphere.”

In this morning’s post, I referenced what has become the most common
and vapid Beltway rhetorical device — namely, the use of the term
“Serious” to bestow with respectability the people who furrow their
brows and show great reverence for government and military leaders and
reflexively support American wars and believe that muddled compromise
and principle-free “moderation” is the Ultimate Good, while demonizing
as “unserious” those who have actual convictions — such as the belief
that war is a horrific option that should never be pursued unless
absolutely necessary for self-defense and the belief that government
leaders should have their claims subjected to real scrutiny and they
themselves should be subjected to investigation and punishment when
they break the law.

In defending himself as one of the “Serious” Beltway analysts, and
in defense of what he understands as “Seriousness,” this is what Klein
wrote:

And now, among certain precincts in the blogosphere — those
prohibitively clever sorts who opine daily and endlessly about
journalism without doing any reporting (or much thinking) about it — a
new epithet: serious. This is meant to convey disdain for those of us
who grant undue credibility to people in positions of authority or
people of moderate political views. The critics have a point: There is
no credible moderate position on issues like torture. And those people
in positions of authority who gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on the
war in Iraq — including my singular and momentary lapse on Meet the Press — failed the test of being truly serious.
But, all things considered, I’m not ready to surrender that very
valuable word to the cynics and will continue to use “serious” as I
always have, unironically. Usually.

To my mind, being a “serious person” means the following: you
study the facts on the ground, you study the history, you take into
account opinions on all sides — not just your side — and then you
come to a conclusion. Essentially, that’s what I try to do, and also
the people I admire across the political spectrum (including many who
reside in the blogosphere). I don’t always succeed, of course.
Sometimes, instant
opinions offered on TV shows (see above), can seem deeply unserious and
ill-considered the moment they escape one’s lips.
And various
serious people I know have momentary or long-term lapses, sometimes
very serious ones, on this issue or that. I can disagree with someone
profoundly — as with John McCain on Iraq — and still value their
opinions on other issues (immigration, fiscal responsibility and so
forth).

First, the good news: Klein seems to admit,
for the first time, that he supported the invasion of Iraq. Up until
now, he had been falsely denying it.
I would say that a pre-requisite to being Serious is being honest about
whether you supported or opposed a war before it began.

But note how odd — and unserious — Klein’s confession is. He actually
seems to be saying that he accidentally supported the invasion of Iraq
as the result of a “singular and momentary lapse” on television whereby
a pro-war position “escaped his lips” — almost like it was an
involuntary outburst or seizure of some sort — and he argued that we
ought to militarily invade another country. To the viewer, Klein’s
advocacy of attacking Iraq might “seem deeply unserious and
ill-considered the moment [it] escaped [his] lips,” but he is still
Serious.

Presumably, Klein also suffered the same sort of “singular and momentary lapse” when he went on national television and suggested
that we might want to launch a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran –
that we might drop an atomic weapon on that country even if we are not
attacked. Apparently, Serious People sometimes are prone to go on
television and start urging wars and even nuclear attacks on other
nations when they don’t really mean it.

In any event, the problem with the self-anointed “Serious” Beltway
elite is not, contrary to Klein’s self-flattery, that they study too
much information or take too many views into account. Nor is the
problem with their vaunted Seriousness concept that it places too much
of a premium on compromise and agreement, nor that it grants too much
respect for those who hold different views.

The actual problem is that the term “Serious” when wielded by
Beltway denizens is nothing more than a cheap and manipulative tactic
to demonize those with non-Beltway-approved views without actually
doing the work to demonstrate that those views are wrong. Beltway
“Seriousness” has nothing whatever to do with the studious and careful
methods one uses to reach conclusions. It has everything to do with the
ideologically correct nature of the beliefs and, much more importantly
still, the Authority and Place in the Beltway Court of those who are
expressing them.

That is how, prior to the invasion of Iraq, Howard Dean and other
war opponents became so terribly “unserious” while Bill Kristol, Peter
Beinert, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, the Brookings
Institution, Joe Lieberman, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney were Very
Very Serious — despite the fact that Dean expressed more wisdom about
Iraq every time he sneezed than all of the Serious National Security
People managed to compile in all of their millions of words about
Saddam’s mushroom clouds and the Evil Labs of Dr. Germ and Mrs.
Anthrax.

Klein thinks that he is mocked as “Serious” because he does too much
work studying ideas and information. Actually, the opposite is true.

The “Serious” mockery stems from the fact that his views are
unaccompanied by any such work and are devoid of any critical thought.
Klein, for instance, famously defended the President’s NSA lawbreaking
by admitting
his Bush defense rested in blissful ignorance: “People like me who
favor this program don’t yet know enough about it yet. Those opposed to
it know even less — and certainly less than I do.”

That is what a Serious Person does — blindly trusts the President even
when he breaks the law, and demonizes as Unserious those who object to
presidential lawbreaking, exactly what Klein did when he scorned Unserious Nancy Pelosi in the pages of Time
because she said that George Bush should not commit felonies when
spying on Americans. Klein called objections to Bush’s lawbreaking
“civil-liberties fetishism” and said “these concerns [i.e., that Bush
broke the law] pale before the importance of the program.”

Klein also warned that if Democrats continued to object to illegal
eavesdropping, “they will probably not regain the majority in Congress
or the country,” because “liberal Democrats are . . . far from the
American mainstream” on this issue. The hallmark of Beltway Seriousness
is the inability to do anything other than spout authority-worshipping
conventional wisdom (“you better revere the President even when he
breaks the law, and stop investigating him so much, or else you will
lose elections”) which is wrong time and again, while branding as
“Unserious” anyone who challenges Beltway orthodoxy and, especially,
who opposes too strenuously the High Beltway media and government
priests. That is the essence of Beltway Seriousness.

Several days ago, I referenced a Joe Klein post
from January in which he called Paul Krugman an “ill-informed
dilettante” and said Krugman made “a fool of himself” when Krugman
argued against the Surge. Illustrating the Virtues of Beltway
Seriousness, Klein complained that Krugman failed to study the Complex,
Important Issues surrounding the Surge, unlike Serious Analysts like
himself, Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan:

As for [Kristol and Kagan], Krugman’s right: they’ve been wrong about Iraq. But at
least they’ve taken the trouble to read the doctrine and talk to key
players like Keane and General David Petraeus. Liberals won’t ever be
trusted on national security until they start doing their homework
.

After
I posted that, I received an email from Krugman pointing out that –
directly contrary to what Klein accused him of — Krugman had written a
column
months earlier, entitled “Arithmetic of Failure,” discussing the
military doctrine of counterinsurgency, and explaining why it was
impossible for the U.S. military to succeed with this strategy. Vincent
Rossmeier, a journalism student at NYU who works with me on various
projects, reviewed Klein’s accusations and Krugman’s column and then
wrote:

Krugman is completely right concerning Klein’s
unfounded accusation. In the “The Arithmetic of Failure”, Krugman cites
what he calls “The classic analysis of the arithmetic of insurgencies”,
a 1995 piece written by James T. Quinlivan, an analyst at the Rand
Corporation entitled “Force Requirements in Stability Operations”. He
found that “Mr. Quinlivan’s comparisons suggested that even small
countries might need large occupying forces”.

He then goes on to argue that in a country as large as Iraq, with
as much chaos and sectarian animosity as it currently has within its
borders, the US would probably need at least 500,000 soldiers on the
ground to ever subdue the competing factions. Krugman concludes that
there’s no way this is possible given our current military capacity. In
the end, Iraq is just too big of a job for the US to handle.

Krugman wrote this in October 2006, before President Bush had
adopted his surge policy (perhaps before it had even been publicly
disseminated) and therefore he’s definitely right to feel irate that
Klein, who continually has been wrong in his predictions and analyses
about the Iraq War, would accuse him of not doing his homework. As
is so often the case with Klein, he asserted his own personal opinion
as fact, whereas Krugman relied on a well-respected study to come to
the conclusion that he did.

Krugman finishes his article by arguing how we have a much better
chance of succeeding in Afghanistan than Iraq. He points out that if we
transferred in troops from Iraq, they’d be much better utilized and
achieve greater progress towards our military objectives than they ever
could in Iraq. The situation in Afghanistan, despite the recent
deterioration in conditions, is still less chaotic than the civil war
raging in Iraq. Krugman postulates that we were at a tipping point in
Afghanistan (proven correct by the recent security and terrorist threat
analysis documenting the reemergence of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban there
and on the Pakistan border). In
short, everything Krugman predicted has come to pass and Klein is, as
per usual, the one whose claims have no basis in reality.

Joe
Klein and his fellow “Serious” People in the Beltway have given this
country George Bush, Dick Cheney, the invasion of Iraq, ongoing support
for the four-year occupation with no end in sight, a public that
overwhelmingly believed that Saddam planned the 9/11 attacks, a
complete assault on our Constitution with barely a peep of protest, a
chronically lawbreaking government with no consequences, virtually
absolute government secrecy, the collapse of America’s moral standing
around the world, and a new war with Iran that is just a small
provocation away. Beltway Seriousness, know thee by the fruits you bear.

UPDATE: Atrios notes a classic examples of the use of Seriousness, from NBC News’ David Gregory on Chris Matthews’ show this weekend:

Mr.
GREGORY: I think Hillary Clinton — her sister soldier [sic] moment is
going to be telling the left that they have to sort of move beyond
their hatred over Iraq, for Bush, and think about how they’re going to engage the war on terror in a very serious and tough way.

As
Atrios says: “I’m not quite sure how David Gregory imagines The Left is
supposed to be engaging with the war on terror. . . . But, clearly,
those people who oppose Bush’s little war and think that getting out of
Iraq is a good idea are very unserious indeed.”

Gregory’s comment is just devoid of meaning — “the left” needs “to
engage the war on terror in a very serious and tough way.” What does
that even mean? Nothing. The Beltway stars who endlessly dole out the
Seriousness sermons really never do anything other than spout the most
meaningless platitudes grounded in mindless, crusty, decade-old
Washington media conventional wisdom. Hence: the Democratic candidate
needs to “Sister Souljah” the Left and the Left needs to get “tough and
serious” with the Terrorists, says the Serious Washington Journalist
who can think only in slogans and cliches.

UPDATE II: Klein responds to this post here.
I don’t have the time right now to reply further to it, and I’m not
sure there is much to address even if I had the time, but — completely
independent of whether his responses have any merit or are even
actually responsive in any meaningful way — I will give Klein credit
for at least attempting to address criticisms of this sort.

– Glenn Greenwald

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New York Press Bought By Manhattan Media

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 8:07 pm

Lost amidst all the hubbub about Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Dow
Jones is this little nugget: The little alternative weekly that could,
the New York Press, got bought yesterday! Its new owners are “Manhattan Media.” You may be familiar with their other publications, New York Family and AVENUE, not to mention a newish outfit called Our Town, Downtown. Doesn’t that just sound so quaint! What’s even quainter is that the new owners are going to merge Our Town, Downtown with the Press. Just when it seemed like it would be the perfect time for a real competitor to the New Times-ified Voice to emerge, the Press
basically gets turned into a community paper. Then there are these
reassuring words: “We also anticipate that most current New York Press
employees will be joining the Manhattan Media family.” (Does that include Martin Basroon, we wonder?) The full memo follows.

From: Tom Kelly
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 12:04 AM
Subject: Manhattan Media Acquires The New York Press

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Rupert Murdoch may have snagged Dow Jones, but today Manhattan Media is buying the New York Press.

On the exact date that our company was formed six years ago with the
acquisition of the Manhattan Newspaper Group, we are very pleased to
welcome the Press into a portfolio which can now claim truly to be New
York’s leading community media company.

We have always been admirers of the rich history of the Press. As
New Yorkers we watched the Press being born from the imagination and
drive of Russ Smith in the late 80’s with a dedicated, smart bunch of
writers, editors and graphic artists. It really shook up the Village
Voice’s dominance of the alternative market. We’ve also watched it in
more challenging times yet believe it’s a strong and recognizable
brand. It needs reviving and reinvention in a great city that’s changed
a lot, too, in the last twenty years.

It’s our fourth attempt to buy the Press, the first being when we
approached Russ shortly after 9/11. We knew that we needed to have a
distinctive voice and presence downtown but couldn’t wait for the Press
to become available on the right terms for us. So we launched our own
weekly last May and we’re incredibly proud of the work founding editor
Bill Gunlocke and his team have performed in establishing Our Town
Downtown in a short period of time. We’re just as excited at the
prospect of taking that team and merging it with the Press’ writers and
contributors to produce a better paper than either of us could have
done individually. Now the resources are just going to be deeper and
wider. We will publish next week as the New York Press.

The importance of independent reporting and opinion is even more
important now in New York. We expect to invest considerably in
editorial for the entire Community Newspaper Group. We also anticipate
that most current New York Press employees will be joining the
Manhattan Media family.

We have to thank Avalon Equity Fund, L.P., who owned the Press, for
helping us to arrange for this transaction and doing all they could to
assure a smooth transition.

The purchase of the New York Press is very much in line with our
previous acquisition policy: finding media which have a long history
serving their communities. In addition to the other titles in our weekly
community newspaper group, the Press joins AVENUE (coincidentally also
acquired August 1, 2002) and New York Family. We also remain very
committed to start-ups where they fill important gaps in the market -
our launches of the Blackboard Awards and City Hall are excellent
examples.

For all of you at Manhattan Media, this acquisition marks another
step in the growth of our company. We remain absolutely committed to
growing this company with a long-term view for the benefit of its
shareholders, employees, clients and readers.

Richard Burns
Chairman

Tom Allon
President/CEO

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WHOOPI JOINS “THE VIEW”

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 7:18 pm

NEW YORK –

Whoopi Goldberg will bring no celebrity feuds with her when she joins “The View,” at least none that she’s aware of.

“Who knows?” she told The Associated Press. “Anybody could say `I don’t like her.’ That’s OK. I just won’t come to your home.”

That
already sets Goldberg apart from her predecessor. “The View,” putting
Rosie O’Donnell in its rearview mirror, officially introduced Goldberg
to the show’s audience as its moderator on Wednesday. She’ll start full
time the day after Labor Day.

The show is on the lookout for
another cast member to join Goldberg, Joy Behar, Elisabeth Hasselbeck
and creator Barbara Walters. That person won’t be named until the fall,
Walters said.

O’Donnell announced this spring she was leaving
ABC’s daytime talk show after less than a year filled with controversy
and feuds with Donald Trump and co-star Hasselbeck, among others.

Despite O’Donnell’s polarizing presence – or maybe because of it – ratings shot up last year.

Goldberg,
51, gives “The View” a genuinely big name and distinct personality in
her own right. She’s among the select few performers to win an Oscar,
Emmy, Tony and Grammy award.

She’s no stranger to political
controversy, although that part of her resume isn’t quite as filled as
O’Donnell’s. Goldberg was dumped from a Slim-Fast advertising campaign
in 2004 after making a speech mocking the Bush administration at a
political rally, at one point using the president’s surname as a sexual
reference.

“She’ll be potentially less controversial than Rosie
but still have a bit of an edge,” said Bill Carroll, an expert in
syndication for Katz Television.

Advertisers are likely to be happy with the choice, he said.

Goldberg
said she’s looking forward to talking about what’s going on during what
promises to be an interesting year ahead. She’ll be the moderator,
meaning it will generally be her job to steer the discussion and keep
the show running on time.

“I just figure I’m going to be me,” she
said. “They know who I am and know what I do, so nobody will be
surprised if I disagree strongly but not meanly. I’ll never be mean.
It’s just not in me.”

Walters, in an interview, said Goldberg isn’t being brought in to calm a troubled sea.

“What Whoopi will bring us is fun,” she said. “This is an entertainment program. We are not a newsmagazine.”

She
said Goldberg brought a formidable combination of smarts and skills as
an entertainer, and also adds diversity to the program. “The View” has
been without a regular black cast member since Star Jones Reynolds left
under stormy circumstances last summer.

There were reports last
week that “The View” was also close to bringing actress Sherri
Shepherd, who’s also black, on as another cast member. But Walters said
several candidates are still being considered.

Walters teased her
“big announcement” throughout Wednesday’s show before Goldberg
appeared, slapping hands with audience members as she walked down the
stairs to the stage.

“I’m not sure what the show needs,” she
said. “I won’t know what my position is until I’m there and I’m doing
it and I haven’t given a lot of pre-thought to how I would be doing it.
But I will tell you that each time I’ve been on, I have a good time.”

ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co.
(nyse:
DIS -

news
-

people
)

ABC:


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43 Are Arrested in Gang Inquiry in Los Angeles

In Broadcatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 7:11 pm

Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press

A man not suspected in the investigation watched on Tuesday as officers entered a Los Angeles County house.

By SOLOMON MOORE

Published: August 1, 2007

LOS ANGELES, July 31 —

More than
400 police officers and federal agents took part in predawn raids on
Tuesday, arresting 43 people suspected of being members of the Eastside
Pain Bloods gang in a narcotics and gun trafficking investigation,
federal and city officials said.

Local and federal
prosecutors said a joint task force would follow the sweep with
property seizures and eviction orders at eight houses and two motels
where gang members are accused of selling or stashing drugs and weapons.

Los Angeles prosecutors said they were also planning to file child
endangerment charges against several of the suspects. The prosecutors
said child welfare officials were holding 15 minors found during the
sweep.

Officials said the operation was the conclusion of a
six-month undercover investigation in a 12-block area known as Ghost
Town during which undercover agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
and confidential informants bought several thousand dollars’
worth of crack cocaine, marijuana, assault weapons, rifles and handguns.

Police
officers said Ghost Town, on the border of the San Pedro and Wilmington
neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, had long been a haven for the
Eastside Pain Bloods gang. The police said the raids focused on nine
families they believe led the gang.

“Today A.T.F. is
reinforcing the message that we will not put up with armed gang
violence and the drug trade that fuels it,” said John A. Torres,
special agent in charge of the bureau in Los Angeles. “We are
warning all gang members that if they don’t stop terrorizing our
neighborhoods and cities, the combined weight of federal, state and
local law enforcement will come after them.”

The use of
property seizures and forced evictions is the latest prosecutorial
strategy in the city’s antigang efforts. In 1987, Los Angeles was
the first city to use injunctions barring two or more gang members from
congregating in a public area.

Gang members in Los Angeles also
face harsher prosecution; misdemeanors can be charged as felonies, and
sentences can be lengthened by as much as 10 years for some crimes.

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