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Friday, August 29, 2003

Oh man, this is great--Schwarzeneggar's sex talk, direct from the smoking gun--Arnie on orgies, drugs and homosexuality!

posted by Jenny at 6:48 AM |

I'm happy to see Bob Harris posting at This Modern World again...and I especially enjoyed this post, which zooms in on Bush and Cheney's speech cyberpimping and AWOL's personal defacing of the flag!

posted by Jenny at 6:24 AM |

Remember this cop?

A Cookeville, Tennessee, police officer who fatally shot a family's dog after they were mistakenly stopped as felony suspects is suing the city.

Officer Eric Hall claims in his federal court suit in Nashville that the city violated his right to privacy.

Via South Knox Bubba.

posted by Jenny at 6:21 AM |

Iraq is turning into that "great" house you and your wife bought that was billed as only needing "a few minor improvements," but wound up requiring massive remodeling, fumigation, a new foundation, a new roof, all the lead paint stripped out, and the asbestos removed. --Hesiod

Less than a week after the press figured out that the "post-war" death toll in Iraq exceeds the number of casualties sutained during "major combat operations", Paul Bremer announces that billions and billions will be needed for the rebuilding of the state. Rhymes nicely with the new congressionally-projected federal budget deficit--more than more than $500 billion, future expenses in Iraq not included--doesn't it?

Links via Counterspin, Ash, and the Cursor.

posted by Jenny at 6:15 AM |

Just in the nick of time, Washington Monthly presents us with its Presidential Mendacity Index!

posted by Jenny at 6:03 AM |

*Bill Cosby's "Noah" voice* Riiiiiiight.

Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war.

…

As evidence, officials say former Iraqi operatives have confirmed since the war that Hussein's regime sent 'double agents' disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites.

Of course! Confused dark people! It's their fault we're in this mess, yesiree. And they surely helped Saddam Hussein torpedo the World Trade Center, too...

posted by Jenny at 6:00 AM |

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

FOX News, accused of "trying to undermine the First Amendment", has dropped its lawsuit against Al Franken! Nice to know that the courts haven't lost their perspective on fair and balanced constitutional law...

posted by Jenny at 10:28 AM |

Monday, August 25, 2003

Ashleigh may just convince me to become a regular reader of Maureen Dowd.

Even though his "Mission Accomplished" backdrop turned out to be woefully premature, W.'s "Top Gun" moment is immortalized with an action figure in a flight suit and the leg-hugging harness that made Republican women's hearts go boom-boom.

In presidential races, voters look for the fatherly protector. In the 90's, contenders showed softer sides, crying, wearing earth tones, confessing to family therapy.

But 9/11 and the wars that followed have made pols reluctant to reveal feminine sides. Howard Dean struts and attacks like a bantam, and wonky Bob Graham paid half a mil to plaster his name on a Nascar truck.

Out-he-manning the cowboy-in-chief, Arnold Schwarzenegger strides into the arena in a cloud of cordite, cigar smoke, Hummer fumes and heavier bicep reps.

Spike TV, the first men's channel, offers "Baywatch," a Pamela Anderson cartoon called "Stripperella," "The A-Team," "American Gladiators," "Car and Driver" and "Trucks!"

Conservatives want to co-opt all this free-floating testosterone and copyright the bravery shown on 9/11. They disparage liberals as people who scorn "traditional" male traits and sanction gay romance.

The cover of the American Enterprise Institute's magazine bellows: "Real Men: They're Back."

A round-table discussion by conservative women produced the usual slavering over W. in his flight suit and Rummy in his gray suit.

"In George W. Bush, people see a contained, channeled virility," said Erica Walter, identified as "an at-home mom and Catholic writer." "They see a man who does what he says, whose every speech and act is not calculated."

Yeah. Nothing calculated about a president's delaying the troops from getting home and renting stadium lights so he can play dress up and make a movie-star landing on an aircraft carrier gussied up by his image wizards, at a cost of a mil.

Kate O'Beirne of The National Review gushes: "When I heard that he grew up jumping rope with the girls in his neighborhood, I knew everything I needed to know about Bill Clinton. . . . Bill Clinton couldn't credibly wear jogging shorts, and look at George Bush in that flight suit."

On the men's round-table, David Gutmann, a professor emeritus of psychology at Northwestern, notes that Mr. Bush "bears important masculine stigmata: he is a Texan, he is not afraid of war, and he sticks to his guns in the face of a worldwide storm of criticism."

Stigmata, schtigmata. Shouldn't real men be able to control their puppets? The Bush team could not even get Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraq Governing Council to condemn the U.N. bombing or feign putting an Iraqi face on the occupation. The puppets refused because they didn't want to be seen as puppets.

Shouldn't real men be able to admit they made a mistake and need help? Rummy & Co. bullied the U.N. and treated the allies like doormats before the war, thinking they could do everything themselves, thanks to the phony optimistic intelligence fed to them by the puppet Chalabi. No wonder they're meeting with a cold response as they slink back.

Shouldn't real men be reducing the number of Middle East terrorists rather than increasing them faster than dragon's teeth?

Could the real men please find some real men?

posted by Jenny at 11:40 AM |

35 years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr...

A black woman who has to have a foot amputated was told she could only have a white artificial limb unless she was prepared to pay extra.

It was only when Ingrid Nicholls, 46, from Reading in Berkshire, complained that health chiefs at the Royal Berkshire hospital offered her a prosthetic limb matching her skin colour.

The Royal Berkshire and Battle NHS trust, which administers the hospital, at first told her only white limbs were available.

The mother-of-three told the Daily Mirror: "It doesn't make sense. We have black cabinet ministers, judges and doctors, but apparently only false limbs for white people. It's so unjust."

A trust spokeswoman said: "She was originally told she would have to pay more for any other colour, but that has now been resolved."

Also from the Guardian.
posted by Jenny at 11:28 AM |

God Help America

Nice title to this Guardian article, and interesting stuff to boot.
posted by Jenny at 11:24 AM |

At least 42 dead in Bombay bombings

News like this just makes you want to bury your head in your hands...especially since it seems to be coming in from all directions.
posted by Jenny at 11:10 AM |

Despite the persistence of civil unrest in their occupied territory, Israeli officials have one reason to keep smiling. Anybody still remember the Haifa pipeline? Well, according to Ha'aretz, a senior Pentagon official has just contacted a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem to check the possibility of pumping oil form Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The pipeline would take oil from Kirkuk to Israel via Jordan. Apparently the telegram from the Pentagon also included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the original Mosul-Haifa pipeline, used prior to the War or Independence in 1948.

No, there's certainly no payoff there, right? And oil was never a factor in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq...

Via the Agonist.
posted by Jenny at 10:59 AM |

Arnold's Enron Connection

Maybe this one's been floating around the blogosphere for awhile, but I just dug it up at Utne.

Schwarzenegger still won't respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk-bond king Michael Milken met secretly with former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, who was touting a plan for solving the state's energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn't attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin "Magic" Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

While Schwarzenegger, Riordan, and Milken listened to Lay's pitch, Gov. Davis pleaded with President George Bush to enact much-needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour. Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California's power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29, 2001, five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger, to discuss the California power crisis.

At the meeting, Davis asked Bush for federal assistance, such as imposing federally mandated price caps, to rein in soaring energy prices. But Bush refused, saying California legislators designed an electricity market that left too many regulatory restrictions in place and that's what caused electricity prices in the state to skyrocket. It was up to the governor to fix the problem, Bush said. However, Bush's response appears to be part of a coordinated effort launched by Lay to have Davis shoulder the blame for the crisis. It worked. According to recent polls, a majority of voters grew increasingly frustrated with the way Davis handled the power crisis. Schwarzenegger has used the energy crisis and missteps by Davis to bolster his standing with potential voters. While Davis took a beating in the press (some energy companies ran attack ads against the governor), Lay used his political clout to gather support for deregulation.

A couple of weeks before Lay met with Schwarzenegger in May 2001, the PBS news program Frontline interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier. Cheney was asked whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California.

"No," Cheney replied. "The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things -- an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they're trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process."

This article, if true, indeed works to vindicate Davis...whether or not such information will be picked up and believed by the majority of voting Californians, however, remains to be seen.
posted by Jenny at 10:49 AM |

Sunday, August 24, 2003

Media Whoring 101: Direct from the mouths of babes!

Rummy gets a question on "unreported eventful progress" in Iraq from a nine-year-old who apparently wants to be a reporter...only problem is, cute little Katie Hanks was "helped" with her question by her aunt, an Air Force major who also "happens" to be a speechwriter for Paul Wolfowitz. Inclined to chalk it up as coincidence? Here's an excerpt from the DoD press release:

Hanks, from Ogdensburg, N.Y, had been sitting in the back of the room, quietly observing Rumsfeld's briefing with Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command. After telling reporters he was through answering questions for the day, Rumsfeld made a beeline to the back of the room.

"Who is this young lady with a smile?" Rumsfeld asked the shocked girl.

"Katie Hanks," she replied, and without missing a beat, added, "I've got a question for you."

The secretary asked her to make it an easy one, saying he'd had a tough day. Referring to her notebook like any seasoned reporter, Katie shocked everyone within earshot.

"Can you please describe the most unreported eventful progress in Iraq?" the girl asked. Abizaid responded, "That's the hardest question you've gotten all day, Mr. Secretary."

...

Katie later admitted her aunt had helped her with the question but that it was a thrill to meet the secretary.

"I never get this much attention," she told reporters after Rumsfeld had departed.

Not only are they sneaky, but they have no shame.
posted by Jenny at 4:43 AM |