Month: November 2005

Tainted Rightwing Gabfest Moves from PBS to Fox

Jon Ponder

And good riddance: This show was ill-conceived – literally – on PBS. Now it’s moving to Fox News. Perfect:

“Tomlinson made extensive efforts to develop and promote the conservative ‘Journal Editorial Report,’ featuring Wall Street Journal commentators — despite federal law barring board members from being involved in program development.”

The “Journal Editorial Report” on PBS has been enveloped in controversy recently. A May 2 report in the New York Times said Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson “encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast ‘The Journal Editorial Report.'” Tomlinson helped get the program on the air “as a way of balancing ‘Now,'” the story added. Tomlinson was “instrumental in lining up $5 million in corporate financing and pressing PBS to distribute it.”

“Participants in the show generally conform to conservative orthodoxy in their discussion of public affairs,” a May story on the UPI wire added.

The issue has been in the media as recently as Sunday. A Washington Post editorial said “Tomlinson made extensive efforts to develop and promote the conservative ‘Journal Editorial Report,’ featuring Wall Street Journal commentators — despite federal law barring board members from being involved in program development.”

AFA Tells Retailers It Ain’t Christmas Without the ‘Christ’ Bit

Buck Banks

Wildman Wildmon strikes again: The same bunch of cross-waving Bible-thumpers who boycotted Disney because it allowed gays to ride rides, eat food and buy junk at its theme parks are now going after retailers who eschew the term “Christmas” for the Annual December Retail Frenzy Season. According to Cybercast News Service, the mouthpiece for wingnuts, the American Family Association, led by founder and chairman Don Wildmon, analyzed the advertising inserts of two Southern newspapers and found them to be lacking in the “C” word.

AFA gathered inserts from 11 different companies placed in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and Memphis Commercial Appeal on Nov. 27 — a total of 280 pages. Only one company — McRae’s/Belks — had a reference to “Christmas.” The other 10 used the term “holiday” a total of 59 times.

Who are these Grinches that failed to mention Christmas in 260 pages of insert promotions? Target, Kroger, Office Max, Walgreens, Sears, Staples, Lowe’s, J.C. Penney, Dell and Best Buy.

“Ask these companies why they banned ‘Christmas’ in their in-store promotions and retail advertising and they will tell you they didn’t want to offend anyone. They mean, of course, anyone except Christians,” AFA’s Wildmon said in a message to supporters.

“These retailers are willing to use Christmas to secure about 20 percent of their yearly sales, but they absolutely refuse to mention the Reason for the season,” he said.

Of course the AFA is mounting a petition drive to raise a million signatures to get the stores to start using “Christmas” in their advertising again by next year.

Is it just me or isn’t it absurd that Christians would want to link Christmas so closely with the secular suckiness of advertising and retail sales. So what if Target doesn’t want to alienate Jews who observe Hanukkah or African-Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa by including all “holidays.” Let’s hope the retailers don’t cave and the AFA’s effort is as pathetically unsuccessful as the Disney boycott was.

Did Someone Leak Bush’s Speech to Hil?

Trish

Or is she just that good?

In case you missed the memo, Sen. Hillary Clinton did a brilliant job of emailing people yesterday with the facts — as opposed to the spin — on Bush’s call for Congressional support of disarming Saddem Hussein way back when.

Of course, now we refer to this as “Quagmire in Iraq.” But Hillary still remembers why she voted to give the president the authority to make decisions in 2002.

“It is time for the President to stop serving up platitudes and it is past time for the President, Vice President, or anyone else associated with them to stop impugning the patriotism of their critics.” – Sen. Hillary Clinton

I voted…on the basis of the evidence presented by the Administration, assurances they gave that they would first seek to resolve the issue of weapons of mass destruction peacefully through United Nations sponsored inspections, and the argument that the resolution was needed because Saddam Hussein never did anything to comply with his obligations that he was not forced to do.

Their assurances turned out to be empty ones, as the Administration refused repeated requests from the U.N. inspectors to finish their work. And the “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda turned out to be false.

Before I voted in 2002, the Administration publicly and privately assured me that they intended to use their authority to build international support in order to get the U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq, as articulated by the President in his Cincinnati speech on October 7th, 2002. As I said in my October 2002 floor statement, I took “the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible.”

Instead, the Bush Administration short-circuited the U.N. inspectors – the last line of defense against the possibility that our intelligence was false. The Administration also abandoned securing a larger international coalition, alienating many of those who had joined us in Afghanistan…

I take responsibility for my vote, and I, along with a majority of Americans, expect the President and his Administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war.

Hillary’s email went out a full day before Bush’s speech but in it she correctly anticipates both the speech’s contents and its themes.

After all, if ever there was someone who could stand in front of a meticulously staged backdrop before a crowd of hand-selected supporters and spout absolute inanities with an air of bluster and arrogance, that man is George W. Bush.

It is time for the President to stop serving up platitudes and present us with a plan for finishing this war with success and honor — not a rigid timetable that terrorists can exploit, but a public plan for winning and concluding the war. And it is past time for the President, Vice President, or anyone else associated with them to stop impugning the patriotism of their critics.

You go girl.

Potential Feinstein Opponent Drops Out, Leaving Senator Virtually Unopposed in ’06

Jon Ponder

Scared away: Sen. Dianne Feinstein is going to be tough to beat in her re-election bid next year – and the GOP knows it. But frankly, I’d never heard of Bill Mundell until today:

Bill Mundell, the only Republican making serious preparations to challenge U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s bid for reelection, said Tuesday he has decided not to run, leaving the GOP with no clear contender for one of California’s top races for 2006.

The move by Mundell, an education software executive, reflects the difficulty Republicans face in finding a strong candidate to challenge the popular Democratic incumbent.

In an interview, Mundell said he was willing to spend several million dollars of his own money on the race, but would have needed to collect much more from donors to mount a viable campaign. He said his conversations with the party’s major contributors in California made clear that donors do not plan to put substantial money behind any push to oust Feinstein, and he had no interest in running a “vanity campaign.”

Mundell, chief executive of Vidyah Inc., had raised his public profile this year as a major supporter of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Nov. 8 ballot measure to strip state lawmakers of their power to draw district maps for themselves and members of Congress.

Schwarzenegger May Appoint Dem to High Post

Jon Ponder

Too late: Apparently Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has returned from China and is now planning to reshuffle his government. I say “apparently” because there has been a virtual news black out from the governor’s office – the strategy being: Maybe they won’t hate me so much if I stay very quiet.

It also seems apparent that the governor is letting his wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat of the highest order, make some decisions:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, launching an overhaul of his administration, is poised to hire a former Democratic Party activist and high-ranking aide to Gray Davis as his new chief of staff, sources familiar with the negotiations said Tuesday.

The hiring of Susan P. Kennedy — a former executive director of the California Democratic Party, longtime abortion rights activist and Cabinet secretary to Davis, the Democrat whom Schwarzenegger replaced — would signal a shift in direction for the Republican governor.

His political circle already includes at least two prominent Democrats: First Lady of California Maria Shriver and longtime friend and aide Bonnie Reiss. Shriver recently hired another former Cabinet secretary to Davis, Daniel Zingale, as her chief of staff…

[…]

Information Offensive: Bush Admin Pays for Propaganda in Iraqi Press

Jon Ponder

Operation Hoodwink: This question comes up time and time again as we consider the rightwing’s tactics: If you are right about your positions and policies why then must you continually lie about them? If things are going so well in Iraq, why do we need to pay for happy-talk propaganda over there? Is it an information offensive, or just offensive information?

The articles present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments.

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism,” since the effort began this year.

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group’s Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets…

U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological operations or planting propaganda through American media outlets. Yet several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon’s efforts were carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press inevitably “bleeds” into the Western media and influences coverage in U.S. news outlets.

Cheney Says He Is Above the Law, Will Keep Travel Costs Secret

Jon Ponder

What is he hiding? Why should we believe Vice President Cheney supports democracy when he routinely pokes our democratic principles in the eye? If some outside source – the Chinese government or Halliburton, say – is paying to fly him around the country, the public should know it. This is (another) outrage:

In a report this month, the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity said Cheney and his staff have sidestepped regulations that require annual reporting of travel expenses of more than $250 received from outside groups. The center, which focuses on ethics and public service issues, said previous vice presidents routinely disclosed such payments for lodging, travel and food when the veep and his staff made appearances at colleges, think tanks and trade associations.

“The private sector reimburses elected officials and bureaucrats for such trips, but laws require officials to disclose where they went, how much it costs and who paid for it,” the report said, citing provisions found in Section 1353 of Title 13 of the U.S. Code.

Cheney’s office says nothing is amiss. In three letters since 2002 to the Office of Government Ethics, which collects the travel reports, David S. Addington, then Cheney’s general counsel, noted that the reporting requirement applies to the “head of each agency of the executive branch.”

“The Office of the Vice President is not an ‘agency of the executive branch,’ and hence the reporting requirement does not apply,” wrote Addington, who this month replaced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby as Cheney’s chief of staff

Rumsfeld’s Epiphany — ‘Insurgents’ Are Really ELIGs

Buck Banks

Too much turkey: Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Defense Secretary of Torture Donald Rumsfeld had what he called an “epiphany” that led him to conclude that the homicide bombers and setters of roadside bombs in Iraq do not merit the lofty sobriquet “insurgent.” Rummy delivered this idiotic insight at a press conference at the Pentagon of Torture yesterday.

“This is a group of people who don’t merit the word `insurgency,’ I think,” Rumsfeld said. He said the thought had come to him suddenly over the Thanksgiving weekend.

“It was an epiphany.”

Rumsfeld’s comments drew chuckles but had a serious side.

“I think that you can have a legitimate insurgency in a country that has popular support and has a cohesiveness and has a legitimate gripe,” he said. “These people don’t have a legitimate gripe.” Still, he acknowledged that his point may not be supported by the standard definition of `insurgent.’ He promised to look it up.

An astute Associated Press reporter did look it up, and noted that Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines the term “insurgent” as “rising up against established authority.”

The excursion into lamebrained linguistics went even further when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, who also spoke at the news conference, found it impossible to describe the fighting in Iraq without twice using the term “insurgent.”

After the word slipped out the first time, Pace looked sheepishly at Rumsfeld and quipped apologetically, “I have to use the word `insurgent’ because I can’t think of a better word right now.”

Without missing a beat, Rumsfeld replied with a wide grin: “Enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government. How’s that?”

ELIGs, huh? In a military-industrial establishment that loves acronyms, it might just catch on. Meanwhile, the men responsible for the continued loss of American and Iraqi lives quibble over semantics. Almost makes one want to “rise up against established authority” don’t it?

GOP Congress Quietly Killed Air Marshal Program

Jon Ponder

Associated Press:

Efforts to train thousands of federal agents to protect commercial flights during heightened terror alerts were quietly abandoned more than a year ago because Congress objected to the cost, government investigators said Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, reported that the federal air marshal service suspended its efforts to develop such a “surge capacity” by training customs and immigration agents to protect passenger airliners.

The Homeland Security Department “indicated that it would continue to support the surge effort but had not determined whether and when it would resume cross-training to resume this initiative,” the report said…

By October 2004, Homeland Security had cross-trained some immigration and customs agents, but stopped because of congressional concerns that it was “an ineffective use of resources,” the report said.

The number of immigration and customs agents who were trained wasn’t disclosed for security reasons. The assistant secretary for the agency, though, testified in March that 800 agents would be trained by October, the report said. Some of those agents were assigned to augment air marshals on flights during heightened threat alerts.

The air marshals moved back to the Transportation Security Administration in October.

Another Sign that Miami Is a Third World City — Thousands of Chickens Range Freely Through Our Streets

Buck Banks

Nothing to crow about: It is illegal to keep barnyard animals in the City of Miami, but that doesn’t stop our fellow residents from keeping thousands of chickens and roosters that wander our palm-shaded streets.

Many of these yardbirds are used in santeria rites, and the city even has a special detail to clean the chicken carcasses and other ritual matter off the courthouse steps early each morning. Such rituals are intended to influence the outcome of court cases, for instance, Tio Sanchez’s speeding ticket or Abuela Gonzalez’s citation for keeping a pit bull in Miami-Dade County.

In certain areas of Miami, the concentration of chickens that wander neighborhood streets is alarming. Since April 2003, a joint team of firefighters, code enforcement officers, and NET personnel has dedicated time (once a month) to ridding neighborhoods of these chickens. They are known collectively as the Chicken Busters.

Because of the ongoing operation, we Miamians have come to realize that loose chickens are a greater problem than we previously thought, with captured chickens numbering in the thousands. Captured birds are sold to farms in Homestead and the proceeds go to local charities.

The most frequent response (in English, Spanish and Creole) when people are confronted by a Chicken Buster regarding a chicken wandering on their property is — and I am not making this up — “What chicken?”

Since April 2003, the Chicken Busters have caught 6,427 fowl, generating $10,650 in revenue from chicken sales.

Thanks to KRB for the stats.