Thursday, October 02, 2003

Karl Rove: Boy Genius or Turd Blossom?

3:33 PM |

To the axiom that journalists love lies, however, there's one important corollary � and it helps explain Bush's Teflon coating. Reporters like only certain lies. Perversely, those tend to be the relatively trivial ones, involving personal matters, such as Clinton's deceptions about his sex life. Similarly, Al Gore's talk of having inspired Love Story was seized on by reporters as a "lie," even though it was true. Here, the press can strut its skepticism without positioning itself ideologically.

The lies reporters dislike, in contrast, center on what are usually more important matters: claims about public policy � taxes, abortion, the environment � where raising questions of truthfulness can seem awfully close to taking sides in a partisan debate. Most of Bush's lies have fallen in this demilitarized zone, where journalists fear to tread.

3:21 PM |

3:07 PM |

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

From Teresa Nielsen Hayden,
posted on January 29, 2003 05:04 PM:

I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

11:30 PM |

11:13 PM |

Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate allegations that Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday.

The poll, taken after the Justice Department announced that it had opened a criminal probe into the matter, pointed to several troubling signs for the White House as Bush aides decide how to contain the damage. The survey found that 81 percent of Americans considered the matter serious, while 72 percent thought it likely that someone in the White House leaked the agent's name.

11:07 PM |

The CIA is set to spend several million dollars to develop a video game aimed at helping its analysts think like terrorists, The Washington Times has learned.
The agency's Counter Terrorist Center, or CTC, is working with the Los Angeles-based Institute for Creative Technologies on a project designed to help its analysts, "think outside the box," a CIA spokesman said. The project is close to approval, but officials wouldn't comment on the exact cost of the program.
The institute, part of the University of Southern California, works with Hollywood movie and video game specialists.

4:29 PM |

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

3:28 PM |

Another journalist yesterday confirmed receiving a call from an administration official providing the same information about Wilson's wife before the Novak column appeared on July 14 in The Post and other newspapers.

The journalist, who asked not to be identified because of possible legal ramifications, said that the information was provided as part of an effort to discredit Wilson, but that the CIA information was not treated as especially sensitive. "The official I spoke with thought this was a part of Wilson's story that wasn't known and cast doubt on his whole mission," the person said, declining to identify the official he spoke with. "They thought Wilson was having a good ride and this was part of Wilson's story."

In addition to Novak's column, an administration official told The Washington Post on Saturday that two White House officials leaked the information to several journalists in an effort to discredit Wilson.

3:08 PM |

Every time a software program locks up and you want to start over, every time you need to change your password or log on or off your computer, you can thank David J. Bradley.

That's the same David Bradley who was the "answer" to Final Jeopardy on an episode of that show's special college edition last fall.

It's the same David Bradley who saved Bill Gates' derriere before the Windows operating system became the monster it is today.

Bradley is the man who gave the world "control-alt-delete."

2:15 PM |

It starts with the story of Charlotte Beers, former chairwoman and CEO of two of the world's top ad agencies, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather. She was hired after 9/11, as Colin Powell explained, "to change from just selling the U.S. ... to really branding foreign policy."

Efforts like these eventually cost $1 billion a year. Where did the money go?

A $5 million failed "Shared Values" advertising campaign was a typical Beers project. The TV commercial showed average Muslim Americans going about their daily lives, enjoying the lack of religious and racial discrimination in the U.S. Meant to be broadcast in Islamic countries, the "Shared Values" ad prominently featured a woman running in shorts. Deemed offensive to Muslims, the ad was not permitted to be broadcast on many important television stations in Egypt and other largely Islamic countries.

1:05 PM |

Harris has discovered that Diebold's voting software is so flawed that anyone with access to the system's computer can change the votes without leaving any record. On top of that, she's uncovered internal Diebold memos in which employees seem to suggest that the vulnerabilities are no big deal. The memos appear to be authentic -- Diebold even sent Harris a notice warning her that by posting the documents on the Web, she was infringing upon the company's intellectual property. Diebold did not return several calls for comment.

1:00 PM |

For those of you who happened to read the NYTimes

Because of Dr. Said's prominence, an Israeli scholar, Justus Reid Weiner, spent several years researching his early life to show that Dr. Said had falsified his biography. In an article in Commentary magazine in 1999 Mr. Weiner argued that Dr. Said had cultivated a moving personal story of a Palestinian childhood brought to an abrupt and tragic end by the creation of Israel in 1947, when, in fact, according to Mr. Weiner, Dr. Said's childhood home was in Cairo.

All this from someone who claims that I have falsified the past to pretend that I am a victim. In a 1992 interview (in Edward Said, A Critical Reader ), for instance, I spoke of Cairo as where I spent much of my childhood; this had been anticipated by my "Cairo Recalled," House and Garden, 1987. Weiner deliberately ignores all this, as he does my absolute right to say that my time in Palestine was "formative." What he cannot understand, and has not been able to understand from any of my writings, is the fact that I have been moved to defend the refugees' plight precisely because I did not suffer and therefore feel obligated to relieve the sufferings of my people, less fortunate than myself.

Some of that criticism was base and outrageous and sordidly politicized�I have just finished reading the obituary in the New York Times, which in a cowardly way leaves open the question as to whether Edward, or indeed any other Palestinian, lost a home in the tragedy of 1947-48

12:36 PM |

State No. 1 in lack of health coverage
More uninsured -- 6.4 million -- than any other state

11:43 AM |

Monday, September 29, 2003

One out of every four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest percentage of uninsured residents in any state in the nation, according to new Census Bureau figures.

10:13 PM |

10:45 AM |

Sunday, September 28, 2003

It is a violation of law for officials to intentionally disclose the identity of a covert operative. The column by Novak [where the story of Ms. Plame's job first surfaced] came eight days after Wilson wrote a July 6 New York Times op-ed piece challenging President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. Also on July 6, Wilson, who had gone to Niger to investigate at the CIA's request, was quoted by The Washington Post as saying the administration was "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." Bush has since backed off the uranium claim.

A senior administration official told The Post on Saturday that two top government officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. Wilson said yesterday that journalists for the three major broadcast networks told him they had been contacted by someone in the White House. He named only one, Andrea Mitchell, NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent, who interviewed Wilson and reported on July 22 that he said the administration was "leaking his wife's covert job at the CIA to reporters." Mitchell could not be reached for comment yesterday.

10:20 PM |

How did so many Americans arrive at these beliefs? For some, it was no doubt just the feeling that one evil Middle Easterner is the same as the next, and since Saddam and Osama bin Laden are both bad guys, they must be in cahoots. No one in the administration ever said, "Saddam helped plan Sept. 11," but the rhetoric before and after the war contained innumerable suggestions to that effect. It is hard to believe that the White House was unaware that if the words "Saddam Hussein" and "Sept. 11" were mentioned in the same sentence or the same paragraph, people would not make the link on their own.

This is an example of what scholars of rhetoric call enthymematic argumentation. In an enthymeme, the speaker builds an argument with one element removed, leading listeners to fill in the missing piece. On May 1, speaking from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush said, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001, and still goes on. . . . With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got." This is classic enthymematic argumentation: We were attacked on Sept. 11, so we went to war against Iraq. The missing piece of the argument -- "Saddam was involved in 9/11" -- didn't have to be said aloud for those listening to assimilate its message.

5:51 PM |