If you are not worried about Syrian musicians on your flight, then maybe you should worry about swarthy flight attendents. That’s right — the friendly skies have just got . . . uh . . . stupider. MOSCOW – Drunken passengers often give air crews trouble, but Russia’s leading airline on Tuesday reported an "unprecedented" reversal: A passenger was assaulted … Read More
Are You Rrrrready to Rrrrrrrumble?
Apparently, Moveon.org has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that Fox News Channel’s slogan "fair and balanced" violates the FTC’s prohibition against deceptive advertising. (Source, although there are probably others). I’m not sure what Moveon.org hopes to achieve — they are unlikely to win, in my view. However, they will clearly cause a lot of damage and … Read More
How To Show You Are Tough On Terrorism: Lie
Federal prosecutors in Iowa claim they built 35 terrorism-related cases in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Wow! Thirty-five terrorism cases? In Iowa? That’s surprising news to me. It also came as surprising news to the judge who tried some of the cases: "If there have been terrorism-related arrests in Iowa, I haven’t heard about them," said … Read More
Bush Presidency is “the Least Democratic in the Modern History of the Presidency”
That sounds like typical partisan screed, but Jonathan Chait does an amazing — almost bulletproof — job backing it up with concrete examples and logical argument. He takes various definitions of "democracy" — including one supplied by GWB himself — and shows that the Bush Administration is more undemocratic than any other administration in recent memory. The reason the article … Read More
On Pre-War Intelligence and Post-War Lies
A hat tip to Eric Alterman who realizes that he is going to be branded as an anti-Semite for merely pointing to this article from the nation’s leading Jewish newspaper. The article describes the recent Senate Intelligence Committee Report dealing with pre-war intelligence. It also refers to the Knesset report — the Israeli equivalent of the Senate report. The money … Read More
Energetic Response
We all remember the hubbub several months ago regarding the Bush White House’s "ho-hum" response to the August 6, 2001 PDB ("Presidential Daily Briefing") — the one with the headline saying: "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S.". As you may recall, Condaleeza Rice dismissed the August 6 PDB as an "historical document" that said "nothing new". She and the … Read More
Hawking Flip-Flops About Universe
After almost 30 years of arguing that a black hole swallows up everything that falls into it, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking backpedaled Thursday. Source. Does this mean we can all get rid of "A Brief History of Time" which none of us ever read anyway? P.S. On second reading, it occurs to me that "backpedaled" might not have been the best … Read More
How To Correct Mistakes
You bury them. And the bigger the mistake, the deeper you bury the correction. From Tuesday’s Washington Post on page A02: A story in the July 12 Sports section should have indicated that the top four finishers in the men’s 100-meter dash at the U.S. Olympic trials were separated by eight-hundredths of a second. A story in the July 11 … Read More
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
The scene is a courtyard adjacent to a police station in Baghdad. Saddam is there with several prisoners. An eyewitness tells the story: "The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when [he] said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. [He] said that they deserved worse than death – but … Read More
Flip . . .
. . . flop. Actually, it works just as well if I only give the New York Times headlines: JULY 11, 2004: "Urged By Right, Bush Takes On Gay Marriages" JULY 14, 2004: "Senators Block Initiative To Ban Same-Sex Union" JULY 15, 2004: "Bush Refines His Position On A Measure Banning Gay Marriage" Heh. And on a mostly-unrelated note, this … Read More
What Is Rove Doing?
That’s the question that has been plaguing me for a while. I see Bush going out to states where he is already doing well, and talking about issues that merely mobilize his base, rather than trying to attract the crucial swing voters. How can he hope to win an election THAT way, I constantly ask? Well, according to this analysis, … Read More
No Respect For One’s Elders
"Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible…We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq…there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern of handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going … Read More
I Love Stats Like These
They’re rich and chock full of meaning. This I lifted from Eric Alterman’s site. This is, in fact, part of the new afterward to the paperback edition of his book "What Liberal Media?", and it is sssoo-wwweeet: An in-depth study undertaken for the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and published around the time of the second anniversary … Read More
More America Haters
”Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives,” it reads. Oh, geez. Not Moore’s website again. Doesn’t that guy EVER get tired of making light of dead American soldiers??? Actually, it’s not Moore. It’s Fox. It’s a memo from Fox Senior Vice-President for News instructing Fox News not to report TOO much on dead … Read More
Decision 2016
For those of you who want a sneak-peak of the man who will be elected President in 2016, you can read about him here, or just watch the Democratic convention keynote speech on July 27. I’m not kidding. I already got $100 bucks riding on this guy in a bet with my Mom. (In 1974, she bet me $20 that … Read More