Category: Politics

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We Brought Democracy to Iraq, But Apparently Not Freedom of the Press

Buck Banks

Senseless censorship: In the wake of Saddam Hussein’s execution, the Western media have been collectively wringing their hands over how to handle coverage of the ex-tyrant and U.S. political toy’s execution, funeral and burial. “Do broadcast the grainy cell phone video of Hussein’s last living moments?” “Do we show his dead body?” “Do we cover the sparsely attended funeral?”

But the execs at privately owned TV station al-Charkiya in Baghdad don’t have to worry about such questions because the Iraqi puppet government shut them down for inciting sectarian violence by broadcasting scenes of Hussein’s funeral:

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the closure of the Baghdad studios of privately owned satellite TV al-Charkiya, which was accused of “inciting sectarian violence” for showing footage of Iraqis mourning the death of former president Saddam Hussein.

The announcement of his execution and the broadcast of footage of his hanging produced sharply different reactions in the Iraqi media. Some, particularly state-owned publications, celebrated the death of the “tyrant”, while others lamented his death.

“We are very concerned by the attitude of the Nuri al-Maliki government which is imposing more and more restrictions on the press,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said. “The authorities should show more restraint so that pluralism of news and information remains a reality in Iraq.”

The interior ministry decided on 1st January 2007 to shut down the offices of the al-Charkiya, in the capital’s Yarmuq neighbourhood for “incitement to sectarian violence” and “to hatred”. The same day the channel had showed film of several demonstrations opposed to the execution of Saddam Hussein, in Bagdad, Tikrit (province in which the president was born) and in the Jordanian capital, Amman, where his daughter, Raghad Hussein, lives. Elsewhere, presenters on public al-Iraqiya condemned “Iraqi and Arab TV channels showing sympathy for the tyrant Saddam Hussein”. Al-Charkiya is still broadcasting from its studios in Dubai and Amman.

The Iraqi authorities already ordered the closure, on 5 November 2006, of TV stations al-Zaura and Salah-Eddin for showing footage of demonstrators brandishing pictures of the former president and protesting at his death sentence. Both stations were accused of inciting sectarian violence and have still not been allowed to resume broadcasting.

Seems you can impose democracy on a reluctant Muslim populace, but you can’t teach them a thing about freedom.

Bush Theocrats Censor Grand Canyon Geology, Insist It Was Formed by Noah’s Flood

Jon Ponder

From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by [PEER].

PEER says the new director of the National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, has been stalling requests to remove a book that presents the Creationist version of the formation of the Grand Canyon titled, “Grand Canyon: A Different View,” by Tom Vail. The group also says that the park’s interpretive rangers are forbidden from providing the age of the canyon based on its geology.

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of [Vail’s book]. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

Bush appointees in the NPS defend selling the book by saying that bookstores are like libraries and should present a variety of different views. PEER says that “both law and park policies make it clear that the park bookstores are more like schoolrooms rather than libraries. As such, materials are only to reflect the highest quality science and are supposed to closely support approved interpretive themes.” PEER has obtained records showing that during 2003, park officials rejected 22 books and other products for the park’s bookstore and approved only one new sale item — the book presenting the creationist version of the canyon’s origins.

Olbermann: Bush’s Escalation in Iraq Will Needlessly Sacrifice American Troops

Jon Ponder

NBC’s Pentagon reporter confirmed that the president’s new strategy, called “surge and accelerate,” entails sending additional troops to Iraq for “political purposes.”

Last night on MSNBC’s “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann reported that Pres. Bush will announce next week that he is sending 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. According to NBC and the BBC, the president will try to sell the escalation as a “sacrifice” by the American people in order to achieve stability in the Middle East.

The real reason for the escalation, of course, is to try to create sufficient stability in the region so that Bush can declare “victory” in Iraq before he leaves office.

In an editorial later in the show, Olbermann expressed outrage at the president’s intent to require the sacrifice of additional American troops in order to salvage what is left of his own legacy:

[…]

Pardoning Nixon Saved the GOP, Not the USA

Jon Ponder
As leader of his party, Ford knew that having former Pres. Nixon on trial when the 1976 campaigns got underway could have permanently hobbled the GOP

As the pundits have eulogized former Pres. Gerald Ford over the past few days, a new version of the conventional wisdom about his pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, has emerged. In the newly revised history, Ford pardoned Nixon in order to spare the nation the agony of witnessing a former president on trial. However, I agree with Margie Burns that his motives were a bit more basic:

[The pardon] did not spare the nation; it spared Richard M. Nixon. The nation had not undergone a long nightmare with Nixon’s resignation; Nixon had. The nation had not endured a virtual state of siege with Nixon’s attempt to spy on and to steal from the opposition and then to stonewall investigation into his actions (assisted by then-head of the Republican National Committee George H. W. Bush); Nixon had. And with all due respect, most of the graybeards on television probably know that. If they don’t, they’re not qualified to be either reporters or commentators. Anyone who recollects the Seventies as being a period when public adoration of Dick Nixon was at its peak -– such that seeing him answer questions about Watergate would have been simply unbearable -– is remembering wrong.

Margie Burns is being generous. Ford may have been motivated to help Nixon, with whom he had a social relationship. But Ford’s primary objective in pardoning Nixon was to prevent the GOP from entering the 1976 election cycle with the trials of a Republican ex-president and his aides dominating the headlines.

Ford knew that the putting Nixon on trial in 1975 could have easily spread Watergate’s cancer on the presidency into the GOP body politic at the same time that the 1976 presidential campaign was ramping up. Nixon’s secret Oval Office tapes would be played in open court, and the crimes of his staffers would be exposed in the worst possible light. The Republican Party could not afford this exposure, so, as its leader, Pres. Ford did what had to be done.

He paid a heavy price for the pardon. Within a month, Ford’s popularity plummeted over 25 points. Less than two years later, he lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter.

Ford was a genuinely decent guy — a World War II veteran who served in the House for 25 years before being named Nixon’s vice president. For the pardon of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party owes him everything, and the nation owes him nothing.

Giuliani Misplaces Secret Prez Playbook

Jon Ponder

Knucklehead: Unless you are Rudolph Giuliani fan (and I know some very smart people who are), here’s a story that will make you chuckle:

“All will come out – in worst light.”
— Giuliani ’08 internal campaign memo

It’s clearly laid out in 140 pages of printed text, handwriting and spreadsheets: The top-secret plan for Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the White House.

The remarkably detailed dossier sets out the budgets, schedules and fund-raising plans that will underpin the former New York mayor’s presidential campaign – as well as his aides’ worries that personal and political baggage could scuttle his run…

One page cites the explicit concern that he might “drop out of [the] race” as a consequence of his potentially “insurmountable” personal and political vulnerabilities.

On the same page is a list of the candidate’s central problems in bullet-point form: his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; “social issues,” on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover… “All will come out – in worst light,” the memo continues.

These documents could haunt the campaign later by making it impossible to make Rudi’s personal issues go away via the Bush/Rove method of denying they exist.

Giuliani is the most over-rated would-be president out there. Aside from his spotty mangerial record, his personal history is a mess. Voters in Peoria may forgive him for having gay friends, but may be less forgiving about his marital transgressions, particularly the very public affair he engaged in while he served as mayor of New York, and was very much married to someone else.

Pensito Review Salutes the Year’s Most Worthless Everything with The Pennys: Inaugural Edition

Pensito Editors

Are you fed up with life’s rich pageant of people, events and trends completely lacking in value or values? Well, we here at Pensito Review are too, which is why we created the Penny Awards, taking the “pen” from “Pensito” and the theme from the lowest valued coin of the realm, the one-cent piece, which fully 80 percent of people polled said they would not bend over to pick up off the street.

The Penny Awards, or “Pennys,” allow us to put in our two cent’s worth of commentary on the penny ante antics of people in the news, organizations that promote worthless agendas and anything else we decry as having no redeeming — or indeed any — value at all.

O.K., except for entertainment value, which we hope you will find in lavish quantities, as we hand out the 2006 Penny Awards to the deservingly worthless.

And, if you have your own ideas about who deserves a Penny, send it in, via a comment. Your opinion is not worthless to us. No, we’d give you two pennies, at least, for your thoughts.

Of course, then we’d have your address ….

[…]

Before Execution, Saddam Was Handed One of His Own Red Cards of Death

Jon Ponder

Like all good fascist states, Saddam’s regime had its paperwork. The most dreaded document produced by Ba’athist bureaucracy was the “red card” — a death decree signed by a judge and printed on red paper. Guess what Saddam got a few hours before he was hanged yesterday:

Iraqi officials say as Hussein stood on the gallows he was handed a red card; the official order for his death, signed by the chief judge. The card was symbolic, as it was a staple of the many state-sponsored executions under the Hussein regime in Iraq.

Aside from giving him a taste of his own medicine, the red card was also meant as a symbol that it was the the Iraqi government, not the Americans, who tried and executed Saddam Hussein, thus making it less likely Saddam’s dead-enders will elevate him to martyrdom.

Even though the Saddam loyalists are probably smart enough to see through the “red car” ploy, they are not a particularly potent force in the insurgent wars today. Saddam probably lost a lot of his followers, and any chance of restoring his tyranny, when the Americans and British released photos showing him in very bad straits after his capture. First there was video of a doctor checking Saddam’s mangy beard for lice, followed by glamour stills of a beardless Saddam in his tighty-whiteys.

It’s hard to regain the adulation and fear of your subjects after they’ve seen you in your BVDs.

Poll: Bush Is ‘Biggest Villain’ of 2006

Jon Ponder

This is really bad:

A new poll from The Associated Press and AOL News has discovered that Americans are torn in terms of their perception of President George W. Bush and his performance in 2006. When asked to name the past year’s biggest villain, Bush was far and away the #1 choice, commanding 25 percent of the vote, distantly trailed by Osama Bin Laden (8 percent), Saddam Hussein (6 percent), President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran (5 percent), North Korean leader Kim Jong II (2 percent) and Donald Rumsfeld (2 percent). Satan only took in 1 percent of the vote, as did Hugo Chavez, Tom Cruise, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Rosie O’Donnell, among others.

On the flipside, Bush also claimed the top spot when Americans were asked to name the year’s biggest hero, but with only a trifling 13 percent of the vote. The troops in Iraq came in second (6 percent), followed by Jesus Christ (3 percent), Barack Obama (3 percent), Oprah Winfrey (3 percent), and rock star/philanthropist Bono (2 percent). Other “do-gooders” of 2006, receiving 1 percent each, included luminaries, business leaders and politicos such as Warren Buffett, George Clooney, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Billy Graham, Angelina Jolie, Colin Powell, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Condoleeza Rice.

Ironically, the number of Americans who are delusional is also 13 percent.

Um, That Global Warming Stuff? It’s Happening

Trish

What were you doing on Aug. 13, 2005? If you were a Canadian ice shelf, you were melting and breaking free. Yikes.

“What surprised us was how quickly it happened,” Copland said. “It’s pretty alarming.”

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 497 miles south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada’s remote north. Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.

“This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are loosing [sic] remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead,” Vincent said Thursday…

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.

Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

“What surprised us was how quickly it happened,” Copland said. “It’s pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that for one they are going, but secondly that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it’s all at once, in a span of an hour.”