Tag: Media Watch

Gardiner Says U.S. Already Conducting Military Ops in Iran

Buck Banks

War’s on: A retired Air Force colonel is making the rounds in the media saying that the United States government is already conducting military operations inside Iran, and is preparing to start targeted bombing attacks. Sound familiar?

Just now on CNN, Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner (Ret.) said, “We are conducting military operations inside Iran right now. The evidence is overwhelming.”

Gardiner, who taught at the U.S. Army’s National War College, has previously suggested that U.S. forces were already on the ground in Iran. Today he added several additional new points:

  • The House Committee on Emerging Threats recently called on State and Defense Department officials to testify on whether U.S. forces were in Iran. The officials didn’t come to the hearing.
  • “We have learned from Time magazine today that some U.S. naval forces had been alerted for deployment. That is a major step.”
  • “The plan has gone to the White House. That’s not normal planning. When the plan goes to the White House, that means we’ve gone to a different state.”
‘The real U.S. policy objective is not merely to eliminate the nuclear program, but to overthrow the regime’

In a press release issued by the Century Foundation today, Gardiner asserts that Bushco is making plans to bomb Iran into submission:

In a new report for The Century Foundation, Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner warns that some in the Bush administration are making the case for air strikes aimed not only at setting back Iran’s nuclear program, but also at toppling the country’s government. He says that these officials are undeterred by the concerns of military leaders about whether such attacks would be effective.

“If this uncertainty does not appear to worry the proponents of air strikes in Iran it is in no small part because the real U.S. policy objective is not merely to eliminate the nuclear program, but to overthrow the regime,” he writes. “It is hard to believe, after the misguided talk prior to Iraq of how American troops would be greeted with flowers and welcomed as liberators, but those inside and close to the administration who are arguing for an air strike against Iran actually sound as if they believe the regime in Tehran can be eliminated by air attacks.”
[…]

Web Traffic Down Due to Terrifying ‘Asymmetry in Cyberspace’

Buck Banks

Missed hits: Pensito Review Editor-In-Chief Jon sweats the Web site traffic numbers every month. He crunches them, massages them and analyzes them to ascertain how many above-average people visit Pensito Review and how many stick around to read its insightful and occasionally irritating content.

Just the other day at the watercooler, he was lamenting to Trish and me about how our traffic numbers were down in July and are likely to be down again in August. We tried to make him see that it’s the summer and people are away at the beach or the mountains or whitewater rafting or watching “Snakes on a Plane” instead of seeking out trenchant political and cultural commentary on the Internet. But Jon was not to be consoled.

The collapse of Bush’s political standing and the growing public reaction against the war in Iraq appears to have produced an asymmetry in cyberspace

Yet, as it turns out, like George Bush’s polling numbers, traffic at conservative Web sites is plummeting at a much higher rate than the dozen or so folks who failed to visit Pensito Review in the past month (you know who you are). According to National Journal’s Technology Daily, conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly of Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” has experienced a 50 percent drop in traffic to BillOReilly.com since March, when it had more than 100,000 visits for every 1 million Internet surfers to below 50,000 in August.

And it ain’t just Billy-boy — other wingnuts are losing readers, too.

Traffic to blond blatherer Ann Coulter’s site is off 16 percent over the last three months. Rambling Rush Limbaugh has seen his site traffic drop 14 percent, and The Drudge Report has fallen 10 percent.

While all weblogs seem to be off their peak this summer, red ones are doing worse than blue ones: RedState traffic is down 28 percent; Right Wing News dropped 20 percent, Blogs for Bush was down 13 percent and Townhall dropped 14 percent.

Readership at the liberal Huffington Post is down 14 percent, and at Daily Kos, the most trafficked blog, traffic is down 12 percent. Some liberal bloggers saw gains, however — MyDD is up 9 percent, as is Alternet, and Virginia’s Raising Kaine grew 119 percent over the past three months.

The Democratic National Committee was down 24 percent, but the Republican National Committee doubled that at 48 percent fewer clicks.

Pundits trying to fathom the traffic drain have resorted to arcane explanations:

“The collapse of Bush’s political standing and the growing public reaction against the war in Iraq appears to have produced an asymmetry in cyberspace that, together with other consistent evidence, bodes well for a strong national Democratic tide,” Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said of the traffic numbers.

So don’t feel so bad, Jon, it’s just a passing asymmetry in cyberspace that should clear up about Nov. 8.

Trouble at the New York Times

Jon Ponder

The opposite of love, sayeth the wise man, is not hate but apathy. In the five long years during which I was a Manhattanite, I developed a yawning apathy about the local newspaper of record, the New York Times.

The main problem for me as a local resident was that its reportage on the local scene was spotty at best. What good is a newspaper if it fails to cover its putative beat? To find out what was going on in New York, you had to read the tabloids, the Daily News, the Post and (for a while) Newsday.

The reason was obvious: The New York Times considered itself to be the nation’s newspaper of record — a sort of USA Today for grownups — and therefore did not deign to report on which New York man was bitten by what New York dog — or, better, which New York man was found headless in what New York topless bar.

In an exposé on the troubles facing the New York Times, Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff offers some statistics on the disastrous results of the paper’s decades of trying to be everything to everyone, which apparently, and predictably, have resulted in it’s becoming nothing to no one:

Unlike The Washington Post, which has put much of its editorial and business energies into dominating its local market, the Times’s strategy — a doomsday scenario, foreseeing a one-newspaper nation, a last-man-standing paper — has been to make the paper national. Hence, the New York Times is no longer principally a metropolitan paper. With a daily circulation of 260,000 in the five boroughs, it’s no longer even creditably a New York paper. (Its two tabloid competitors, the Daily News and the New York Post, have far more readers in New York City.)

Wolff’s article tracks what appears to be the New York Times’ downward spiral. Business is not good and the paper has been rocked by two journalism scandals — Jayson Blair’s plaigarism and Judith Miller’s stenography for the Bush/neocon war machine — all of which is symbolized by the paper’s current project: a huge new office tower under construction on West 40th Street.

Rapture Index Gauges Nearness of End of the World

Buck Banks

Signs of the end times: It’s a high-tech version of the cliche cartoon character — the zealot in long beard and robe holding the sign that predicts the end of the world. It’s the Rapture Index, a kind of gauge of how close we are to Jesus’ return to the earth, the Rapture and the Apocalypse as predicted in the Book of Revelations and various Old Testament visions.

The world has always been going to hell in a handbasket, and the prophets of doom have always been among us

This week’s rating is 160, based on measures of 45 different components that ostensibly portend the end of the world. A rating under 60 represents a period of slow prophetic activity, whereas anything over 145 is considered a pretty good indicator that there is going to be a lot of driverless vehicles on the interstate very soon. The 45 components are ranked on a scale of one to five, with five being high prophetic activity. This week low unemployment, lack of supernatural activity and the peace process (as represented by the cease-fire in Lebanon) all get a one ranking. Good signs of the rapture include high oil/gas prices, poor political leadership, developments in Israel, Gog (Russia) and Persia; and droughts, floods, wild weather and volcanoes all rate a five.

Reading the Rapture Index’s analysis is kind of like getting those annoying cryptic readings from a palmist:

  • Supernatural: Satanism is reported to be flourishing in Russia
  • Leadership: During the past few weeks, several end-time categories have become locked in a holding pattern.
  • Ecumenism: World religions have been at odds with each other.
  • Gog: Events in the Middle East are moving closer to the Ezk 38 & 39 prophecy.
  • Mark of the Beast: The U.S. Patriot Act has failed to get enough votes for extension.
  • Date Settings: Several organizations have been talking about Iran launching an attack against Israel on 22 Aug. The claim is based on the doomsday beliefs of Iran’s President.

Instead of the Dow Jones of the Apocalypse, the Rapture Index prefers to see itself as a kind of prophetic speedometer — the higher the number, the faster we are hurtling toward the end.

It’s an interesting attempt to quantify biblical prophesies as they are supposedly manifested in the news. But it’s a load of hooey. The world has always been going to hell in a handbasket, and the prophets of doom have always been among us, waving their signs and exhorting us to repent, the end is nigh. This is just a more entertaining poster for the end of the world.

Disparity Between Anti-Semitism Stories a Sad Commentary

Buck Banks

Who hates Jews more: The drunk guy who slurrily cursed them and then apologized, or the guy who shot five Jews, one fatally? You don’t have to decide — the media has done it for you, according to a column by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe.

Jacoby said the Mel Gibson anti-Semitic tirade turned up 888 hits on a Nexis search, while the story of Naveeq Haq’s attack with an automatic weapon on the Jewish League of Seattle received coverage in only 236 stories. Jacoby asks, Why the disparity?

No doubt part of the answer is that Gibson is a celebrity, and that “The Passion,” his 2004 movie about the crucifixion, was criticized by many as a revival of the infamous anti-Semitic motif of Jews as Christ-killers. Gibson, who belongs to a traditionalist Catholic sect, was already suspected of harboring ill will toward Jews. His crude remarks on July 28 confirmed it, and pushed the subject back into the spotlight. But if previous behavior and religious belief explain the burst of interest in the Gibson story, they only deepen the question of why the Seattle bloodshed was played down. After all, Haq is not the first example of what scholar Daniel Pipes has called “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” in which a seemingly nonviolent Muslim erupts in a murderous rampage.

….

If the Catholic Gibson’s nonviolent bigotry is a legitimate subject of media scrutiny, all the more so is the animus that spurs Muslims like Haq and the others to jihadist murder. As The New York Sun asked the other day, how many more Haqs must erupt in a homicidal rage before we open our eyes “to the possibility that they are part of a war in which understanding the enemy is a prerequisite for victory?”

Poll: One In Two Americans Believes Iraq Had WMDs

Buck Banks

Fifty percent can be all wrong: A new Harris poll suggests that half of Americans believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at the time Bushco decided to invade Iraq. And it appears that the delusion has been maintained and even enhanced by strong partisan rhetoric by bloggers and conservative media, as well as by individuals’ personal psychological need to find a justification for the ongoing war. The Associated Press reports:

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

“ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN’S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH’S HANDS?”
— Fox News

Pollsters say that the timing of the poll may help explain the results:

Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan’s Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

“I think the Harris Poll was measuring people’s surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country,” said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such “orphan” munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

The no-surprise aspect of the non-story didn’t stop the — surprise! — wingnuts from jumping all over it:

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra’s announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press “didn’t give the story the play it deserved.” But in some quarters it was headlined.

“Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today …” was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. “Americans are waking up from a distorted reality,” read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general’s book — at best uncorroborated hearsay — claimed “56 flights” by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

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Why Did Rush Limbaugh Take Viagra on Vacation with Four Guys?

Jon Ponder

When asked if his cigar was a phallic symbol, Sigmund Freud supposedly replied, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Implied in this answer, of course, is the idea that sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar: It is a symbol for something else.

Keeping that in mind, the Smoking Gun has revealed that when renowned cigar smoker Rush Limbaugh was busted with someone else’s prescription of Viagra, he was returning to the United States from a vacation in the Dominican Republic with four other guys:

Rush Limbaugh was traveling with four other men–including the producers of the hit show “24”–when he was detained over a mislabeled bottle of Viagra found in his luggage during a Customs search.

Hugh Hefner once called Viagra “the best legal recreational drug out there.” Keeping that in mind, the four men in Limbaugh’s Dominican sex party included:

Joel Surnow, “24”‘s co-creator and executive producer and Howard Gordon, another of the Fox hit’s executive producers (Hollywood agent Jeffrey Benson was also part of the Limbaugh quintet).

And TSG asks, “With all those guys in tow, it is unclear what Limbaugh needed with those 29 100mg Viagra pills.”

Speaking for all the gays in Gaydom, I don’t think Rush is a homo. We don’t want him. He is one of yours. Ick.

If Limbaugh and his boys went to the Carribbean to trawl resort bars for dates, you might think having Rush in their party would be a dumb girl magnet. Evidence suggests otherwise: only one of the 30 pills in the prescription was missing.

Here’s the takeaway: A cigar may not always be a cigar, but Rush Limbaugh is always a dick.

Hillary Clinton Gets ‘Busted’

Buck Banks

Statuesque senator: From the “things best left unseen” file comes the story about New York’s Museum of Sex and its preparations to unveil the “presidential bust” of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton next month. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – New York, NY – July, 26 2006 A presidential bust of Hillary Clinton is set to be unveiled at the Museum of Sex on August 9, 2006 at 10 am. Accentuating her sexual power and bolstered by the presidential seal, The Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton: The First Woman President of the United States of America will be officially open for public viewing on August 9 for a limited six week run.

Artist Daniel Edwards describes this new sculpture as capturing Clinton “with her head held high, a youthful spirit and a face matured by wisdom. Presented in a low cut gown, her cleavage is on display prominently portraying sexual power which some people still consider too threatening.”

Edwards’ inspiration for the piece was derived from actress Sharon Stone’s controversial quote earlier in the year about challenges that would most likely be encountered should the Junior Senator from New York run on the ’08 ticket. “I think Hillary Clinton is fantastic,” Stone said. “But I think it is too soon for her to run. This may sound odd but a woman should be past her sexuality when she runs. Hillary still has sexual power and I don’t think people will accept that. It’s too threatening.”

One has to wonder about “art” that is inspired by a quote from Sharon Stone ….

Media Guy Sums Up the Oprah-Gayle Gay Thing

Buck Banks

The horror, the horror: AdAge’s Simon Dumenco, aka Media Guy, plumbs the depths of his psyche to create images we never wanted to entertain. WARNING: If you read this, it will happen to you, too.

Oprah and Gayle are happy-gay, not gay-gay
Look, when I worked with Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King (on the launch of O magazine), I didn’t think they were gay. I still don’t think they’re gay. I don’t care that they think that the American public might think they’re gay, or that their in-print denials of their gayness (in the current O) are making many people who’d never a-thunk about their possible gayness now think they actually are gay. What I am concerned about is how to strike from my mind the images of Oprah and Gayle sharing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Neapolitan Dynamite (with one spoon), loofahing each other in the shower (in slo-mo) and then shopping at Home Depot together (taking turns pushing the cart).

Ew!

Hey Tony, They Love You In Billings

Buck Banks

Snow job: White House Press Secretary Tony Snow is apparently impressing some folks with his witty repartee and ability to parrot the party line for the prez. A letter to the editor in Sunday’s Billings Gazette proves the Snowman has won the heart of one politically savvy Montanan:

The situation in Iraq is improving and everything is hunky dory, according to Snow.

Letter: Press secretary makes everything seem great

Scott McClellan, press secretary, was recently replaced by Tony Snow. Wow! This new guy is good. All’s right with the world.

After listening to Snow for 15 minutes, I ran to the window to see if it was snowing, even though it’s the middle of July. What an appropriate name for President Bush’s press secretary.

The situation in Iraq is improving and everything is hunky dory, according to Snow. I would really like to believe this if it wasn’t for the rest of the story reported daily by the news media.

Regardless, I like Snow and will continue listening and seeing him on TV because he gives me a sense of euphoria, even though I know it’s a hodgepodge of political rhetoric.

Robert G. Orlando
Billings