...more recent posts
universal health care in california?
Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn't thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's identity. "I'm afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing," he later told Carl Ford Jr., State's intelligence chief. Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had "slipped up" and told Novak more than he should have. "He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that f---ed up. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat," Ford recalls in "Hubris," to be published next week by Crown and co-written by the author of this article and David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine.
kirsten powers handles ann coulter as she should be handled -- with distain. and its on hannitys show, no less. guess chivalry along with civility is dead.
kirsten brings da blog along with da funk.
wanker du jour: former oklahoma tailback jc watts. stunting powers of illogica and propaganda.
Village Voice writer Wayne Barrett wrote a scathing biography of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani a few months before the 9/11 attacks. Giuliani became a hero after the attacks and has maintained that image ever since. But Barrett has just co-written a new book that questions his handling of the situation. In Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani, Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins argue that Giuliani's leadership may have exacerbated the crisis. Plus, the Fringe Festival turns 10.
There was a very odd moment in today's press conference. It was so odd that I checked two different video captures to make sure it wasn't an edit. About 1:55 into this clip, he stops mid-sentence, softly mumbles something with his eyes closed, and then resumes. Maybe he's whispering to someone off frame, but it looks like glossilalia or a fugue to me. Just strange.
Lance: Angelina' s a goddess.
Intelligent and discerning reader: Are you out of your mind! She looks like a Barbie doll with a face designed by a cross-eyed Cubist who's terrified of real women!
huffmoney
I'm sure everyone has heard the crap about tomorrow (8/22) being a possible "doomsday" date for the shiites. Here's an ABC news piece on this. Obviously this is a bullshit story, but what caught my eye was this passage:
August 22 was rumored by intelligence experts to be a possible date that the London plotters would blow-up passenger planes headed towards the United States, though it is not known if the suspects were Shiite extremists.Could it really be the case that ABC doesn't know if they are Shiite or not? I know I saw interviews with friends of the alleged plotters. Didn't anybody ask about their religion? I find it hard to believe that this fact is not known. How can it be clear they are Islamic, but not be clear what kind? Doesn't seem right.
whats this about?
duh, every one is. why now?
WOOOOOLLLLLLLFFFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OMFG, we have a Fucktard-in-Chief
Well, he's a history major, not a geography major.
rabbi gellman: professional jewish wanker with extra cheese and a side of hetrosexual man schvitz
joe klein: professional wanker
a fun dave 3m0ry tin foil hat thread
You know, some might argue that Chuck Roberts blows retired crack whores in exchange for their used Burger King collectable cups. Not ME, mind you -- I'm just sayin' some people might argue that.
I watched without sound, so I must have missed something, but apprarently this film sent to me by the JPost proves that the rumors of a protracted Israeli attack on Lebanon over the past month are completely false.
As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7˝-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.
The JPost says there's a good chance that the wobbly Olmert government will accept this resolution. Over at NRO's corner, John Podhoretz contends that this would mean the end of the Olmert government. I'm tempted to suggest that our government, having seemingly lost its will to oppose (or even to let others oppose) our deadliest enemies, deserves the same fate. But let's wait until the facts are in.
via ezra klein via Think Progress:
39% of Americans believe that Muslims should be force to keep special ID. 49% say that Muslim citizens aren't "loyal" to the United States.
via billmon:
The bad news:
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
The good news:
While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks. (emphasis added)
“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.
josh gives joe back class ring. tells girlfriends joes a two-timer.
And yesterday, after I saw Greg Sargent's update that Lieberman was going down the 'A win for Lamont will be a victory for the terrorists' track, I openned up our chat and wrote something to the effect of, "I've always liked Joe, but with this 'victory for the terrorists', it's enough. F--k him.
In case you missed Wednesday's Daily Show -- Opportunity Knocks
qana
boxer offers to campaign for lamont
-- I was all prepared to call up Boxer's office and give some random staffer/intern a talking to. Now I guess I should call to say "Thanks for seeing the light."
rice (like powell) not of the inner circle.
decent times editorial. gail collins has a pulse.
Good God, I can't believe that the Lieberman "hackers crashed our website" bogus story is the lead article on the NY Times website. Fucking major media, all they know how to do is lie and recycle spin for the bad guys.
joshs mind and soul need a two state solution.
New on the reading list ... The End of Iraq by Peter Galbraith, who previously served as ambassador to Croatia. I heard him on NPR yesterday morning. And Fiaso byt Thomas Ricks, Pentagon correspondent for the WaPo and previously for the WSJ. I caught him on Fresh Air recently.
What drives so many Democrats crazy about Lieberman is not simply his support for the Iraq war. It's that he's unashamedly pro-American.
LANGUAGE CONTROL PATROLmore nunberg radio... / this one from 7/31/06 discussing the book w/ brian lehrer is very good
March 3, 2006
BOB GARFIELD: Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. He says language is used by governments and their opponents to highlight certain features of reality and suppress others.
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Take the word "regime." People spoke of the Saddam regime, for instance, or the Baghdad regime rather than the government. And "regime" is a word that implies always a certain illegitimacy or instability. We talk, for instance, about the Latin American countries that have adopted democratic government we describe as "democratic regimes," but we don't talk about nations like France and Sweden and the U.K. as "democratic regimes." They're just democracies. Language like that always carries a point of view, and the media use the words in ways that pretty much accord with the assumptions that the government brings to them.
BOB GARFIELD: So do you believe that the media can and should be arbiters of what the right word choice is, or should we be leaving this to politicians? How do we alight on just the right word?
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: In recent years, certainly the media has been willing, perhaps too willing, to adopt the administration's usage. After the administration announced that they'd no longer be talking about "private" Social Security accounts but "personal" accounts, if you looked in the media in the two or three months after the administration made those announcements, the number of stories describing them as "personal" rather than "private" accounts doubled, which is a pretty clear indication of the government's influence. A lot of people in the media have taken to using death tax without quotation marks, without a little hedge like "so-called" rather than estate tax. The American media were extremely reluctant to use what Rumsfeld called "the torture word" after the first Abu Ghraib stories came out. And this is while the European papers, even the right-wing, even Murdoch's papers in the U.K. were using "torture" while the New York Times and the Washington Post for quite a while were dancing around that word out of a fear of either criticism from the administration or from, in particular, right-wing press watchdog groups.
BOB GARFIELD: Is it fair to say that he who controls the vocabulary really controls the debate?
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: I think that's fair to say, though I think people sometimes tend to look in the wrong place for that. I think the vocabulary that really matters here is a vocabulary about which the press is actually less aware and less sensitive than these phrases like "private accounts" or "death tax" and so on, where everybody's kind of keyed into the partisan significance of those phrases. So look, when I look in the so-called liberal media -- The Washington Post, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, L.A. Times -- in domestic political context at the word "values," I see that conservative values are anywhere to three to five times as common as liberal values. And that's not a matter of some dictat coming down from the editor of those papers, nor is it really a matter of a conscious decision. It's just that "values" nowadays in American speech evokes conservatism rather than liberalism. And you can go on with that sort of thing. But those are the usages that I think really move public opinion or crystallize public opinion, and they're ones that the media adopts, I really think, without much thought.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, Geoff. Well, thank you very much.
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Okay. Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist and author of the forthcoming Talking Right: How Conservatives Turn Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving Left-Wing Freak Show. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
[....]
Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”
[....]
The Bush Administration's Legal Strategy
In “The Hidden Power; The Legal Mind Behind the White House's War on Terror,” New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer examines David S. Addington--the man many believe is behind the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 legal strategy. (w/ leonard lopate wnyc)
more fatherflot links :
John Conyers released a 350 page report called "The Constitution in Crisis.
New Name Alert: According to Rummy's testimony before the Senate on Thursday it's now the "struggle against violent extremists who are determinded to keep free people from exercising their rights as free people" or SAVEWADTKFPFETRAFP, pronouced sa-ve-wad-tkfpfet-rapf.
But I still prefer the Global Clusterfuck on Terror.
I must be missing something, but given that we have zero military units ready to deploy, why wouldn't China invade Taiwan right now?
Am I misunderstand their desire to get Taiwan back? Or am I missing some leverage that we hold over them? Or are they just being rather reasonable and peaceful?
Just found this yesterday (am I late to the party?): War In Context - "Iraq + war on terrorism + Middle East conflict + critical perspectives". Seems like a fairly comprehensive listing of current pieces (mostly major media) on the war, with lots of pull quotes. Not much analysis, but a good way to keep up with all the reporting.