Exposing CNN's and Newsweek's Bias

A fellow blog has put up an excellent analysis of CNN's anti-Kerry bias during the Democratic National Convention. Newsweek is also reporting a "baby bounce" for John Kerry in a new poll. It has Kerry at 49 and Bush at 42, a gain of four points from the last Newsweek poll. The only problem is, it's a bad poll! The poll was averaged from polling on two days, one of which was Thursday. Kerry's speech was Thursday night, meaning an accurate poll meant to measure a bounce couldn't be done accurately until Friday. Coincidentally, the polling done on Friday showed a much greater lead, with Kerry at 50 to Bush's 40 - a lead of 10-points! Though Newsweek does mention the fact that the results might be skewed because of this in the article, that apparently wasn't enough to stop them from publishing a poll, which will cited in articles and the media without the context the article provided. The truth is, no accurate polling of Kerry's convention bounce will be available until next week, with polls covering days from Friday, and not before.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman takes on CNN's bias too in his latest Op/Ed.

The Kerry Landslide

I know, I know. The race is tight. The networks says Kerry and Bush are neck-and-neck. Most national polls show Kerry leading, but it's in the margin of error, therefore it's labeled a "statistical tie." However, when one uses state polls to determine the standing in the race (as the electoral collage is what really determines who wins), you see Kerry has a bigger lead. Of course, many of those state polls are within the margin of error too in the battleground states and some will change over the next three months, though the trend favors Kerry. Nontheless, the meme from most news organizations is that is a tight race. But is it really? We won't know the bounce from Kerry's convention speech until sometime next week, but John Zogby has very interesting early analysis. Basically, Kerry's leading all Democratic base constituencies, including the Catholic vote and even leads slightly in the South, while Bush's base is eroding. But what is even more interesting is if turnout is as high as many think it might be, this election might not be as close as people think:

"Mr. Kerry is showing a 2-to-1 lead (50% to 25%) amongst voters who didn’t vote in 2000, while winning three-quarters (75%) of Ralph Nader’s voters and stealing twice as many (8% to 4%) of Mr. Bush voters in 2000 than Bush is stealing of Gore voters in 2000."

Now here inlies the problem with the current polling. Most polls take into account what they refer to as "likely voters." Though any thinking person might assume "likely voters" means they asked who they were polling if they were likely to vote. Not so. "Likely voters" means those who voted in the last election. We all know many thought the 2000 election was a farce and stayed home. We all also know that's not gonna be the case this time. 9/11 happened since then. Bush happened! Turnout is gonna be high, and it will favor us. I will grant you the electorate is polarized, I see that everyday, but Kerry could be very possibly win over 50% of votes (which someone hasn't done in awhile). So let's start repeating our own meme (the right and the media do it all the time, so it's only fair): Kerry, in a landslide.

UPDATE: William Saletan analyzes the polls.

Is It November Yet?

Last night, John Kerry gave his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for President.  We here all believed it was a great speech, and that Kerry did what he needed to do to sell himself to undecideds. From the few I saw on the media channels last night, it looks to be so. We will see in the coming days what kind of bounce John Kerry gets from his speech and how long it lasts. For right now, I want to discuss the speech itself. I was certainly, like many others, impressed with the strength of the speech, that he didn't shy away from Democratic values like so many others, and that Kerry seemed like a new man. He seemed more comfortable, more personable, more presidential. He seemed ready. Last night made me truly proud this guy is the Democratic nominee and I will proud to call him President.
 
I have collected some highlights from the speech below:
 
"I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty!"
 
"There is nothing more pessimistic than saying America can't do better."
 
"Now I know there are those who criticize me for seeing complexities and I do because some issues just aren't all that simple. Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn't make it so. Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn't make it so. And proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn't make it so."
 
"As President, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to. "
 
"We are here to affirm that when Americans stand up and speak their minds and say America can do better, that is not a challenge to patriotism; it is the heart and soul of patriotism."
 
"That flag doesn't belong to any president. It doesn't belong to any ideology and it doesn't belong to any political party. It belongs to all the American people."
 
"I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi royal family. "
 
"Let's honor this nation's diversity; let's respect one another; and let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States."
 
"Maybe some just see us divided into red states and blue states, but I see us as one America red, white, and blue."
 
"I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side. "

"July Surprise"

Today in his column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman mentions this:

"P.P.S.: Three weeks ago, The New Republic reported that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistan to announce a major terrorist capture during the Democratic convention. Hours before Mr. Kerry's acceptance speech, Pakistan announced, several days after the fact, that it had apprehended an important Al Qaeda operative. "
 
The Al Qaeda operative they're referring to is Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who has been wanted in connection with the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. He was captured last Sunday, but the Pakistani goverment waited until yesterday to publicly announce his capture.
 
I didn't see this article in The New Republic when it came out, so I read it for myself. In it the authors discuss the pressure being put on Pakistan to produce "HVTs" in time for the November elections. I've quoted the passage Krugman is referring to specifically below:

"A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston. "
 
Of course the Bush administration denies putting any such pressure to produce high-ranking members of Al Queda with the elections in mind, but the timing of Pakistan's latest announcement seems a little fishy to me too. The point of delaying the announcement of his capture until yesterday would be to draw some attention away from Kerry, and help to focus some the attention on the Bush administration and their success in the war on terror. However, given the fact that Ghailani seemed to be mostly unknown by the American public before his capture, the advantage in announcing his capture to coincide with the DNC convention is slight at best. But it does give credence to the belief that there is no issue, not even ones of national security, that the Bush administration won't play politics with.

 
 

Help Texas Democrats Raise "15K in 14 Days"

The Texas Democratic Party is trying to raise 15,000 over the next four days. If we win a net gain of just 2 seats in the next elections in the Texas House, we would be the majority again. This would be a great way to tell Tom Delay, Rick Perry, and Tom Craddick (who would likewise be out of a job) that's what we think of their efforts to redistrict out our US Reps, and that they can kiss our Texan asses.

http://www.txdemocrats.org/contribute/15k14days/index.php

"Iran Invasion Watch" pt. 1

As I mentioned in my earlier post on this topic, the run-up to any war in Iran begins first with the coordinated effort by various hawkish and conservative pundits to convince the American people of the "rightness" of any preemptive invasion. This first requires an airing out of the idea of the invasion, first in conservative media sources like The Weekly Standard or The Washington Times. The next step is to take the op-ed columns to the mainstream media, like The Washington Post, where they can try to reach a greater number of Americans and persuade them of the threat of a nuclear Iran. This is exactly what happened with Iraq, and the hawks are trying it again Iran. So I'm going to keep track of the "chatter" out there in the conservative media, with a weekly post I'll call "Iran Invasion Watch." Each week I'll post links to new articles, op-ed pieces and commentary that I see in the conservative media, advocating the invasion or Iran, or building up the potential threat of Iran to pave the way for talk of an invasion. And of course we'll all keep an eye on what the administration has to say about Iran, to get a sense of whether what the pundits say is gaining traction.

Today we have this, from American Daily. There's no specific recommendation for invasion, but rather an effort to set the mood by focusing on the threat of Iranian-sponsored terrorism.

PS. Occasionally I'll post the left's response to Iran invasion talk. Today we have this, from Znet.

Iraq War Hurt War on Terrorism

The US-led coalition's failure to restore security has turned Iraq into a battleground for the likes of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, a parliamentary committee said.  In a major report on the war on terrorism released Thursday, the House of Commons foreign affairs committee said the lack of law and order had created a "vacuum" for criminals and militias, with "appalling consequences" for the Iraqi people.  It added that Iraq's own police and armed forces are still "a long way from being able to maintain security," and warned that ongoing violence could mar elections planned for early next year.

Well, this report agrees with what we already know - not only did the Iraq war take the focus off Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism, it probably made it worse! Now we are fighting an unwinnable war with dire consequences.

Thankfully, America has the option of correcting this course. Tonight, John Kerry will accept the Democratic Party's nomination for president. The choice is simple, and the action easy. All you have to do is cast your vote this November.

Why not North Korea?

Fred Kaplan explores this issue of an arms race with North Korea in this excellent article at slate.com.

"The parallel between then and now is not precise. North Korea does not have the resources that the Soviet Union had at the height of the Cold War. But with the deployment of the new missile-defense system, the United States has entered into an arms race with the North Koreans—an arms race we are likely to lose—and nobody in the White House or the Congress seems even to be aware of it."
 
For nearly two years now critics of the Bush administration's policy towards North Korea have tried in vain to point out that of the three members of the "Axis of Evil", Iraq, Iran and North Korea, North Korea by far presents the most immediate threat to the United States in the form of a revamped nuclear weapons program. It's no secret that North Korea would like the ability to gain some leverage over it's Asian neighbors with it's nuclear weapons(and perhaps eventually the ability to threaten the United States.) It's also speculated that North Korea may seek to sell some of it's nuclear weapons technology to other nations that we might not like to see armed with these weapons. Unfortunately our administration seems to think that installing an ABM system in Alaska while avoiding direct negotiations with N. Korea is the best policy for dealing with this threat.

The hawks of course are silent on the issue of nuclear weapons in North Korea. For one it doesn't fit into their grand schemes of remaking the Middle East, and second North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and any military effort to remove them would not nearly be as easy as the invasion of Iraq.

I for one believe only a stiff combination of diplomacy and the threat of action can push North Korea away from the further development of a nuclear weapons program. Our only choice is to make it worth more to them(in food and technical aid)to go without nuclear weapons.

 

So it begins...

In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, many of of us who opposed the war began to wonder how long it would take the Bush administration to find another target for their doctrine of "pre-emptive" war.  Sure enough some of the hawks, swelled with confidence from the largely successful invasion, began saber rattling in the direction of Syria, making accusations that Syria was hiding Saddam's WMDs, assisting leftover Fedeyeen in resisting us, funding terrorists groups throughout the Middle East, and before he was found, of even hiding Saddam himself. Then, amidst the nearly absolute failure of the Administration to prepare for the aftermath of war, the resistence to the occupation began in earnest and all talk of any more invasions withered on the vine as our soldiers found themselves bogged down battling a tenacious insurgency which continues to this day. I for one figured that the hawks had finally realized they'd bitten off more than they could chew, and would realize that they're focus needed to remain on restoring security to Iraq. More war was almost certainly out of the question.

Until now that is.

It seems that I've overestimated the hawks and their commitment to Iraq. I'd always assumed that despite their incredible naivete in how to go about it, they were actually serious about turning Iraq into a shining example of democracy in the Middle East. Articles like Krauthammer's make it clear that, at least for some of the hawks, that's not the case. Krauthammer sincerely believes that the threat of nuclear weapons on Iraq is great enough such that we should currently take all of our soldiers battling to secure Iraq and send them flying across the border and into Tehran, to replace the Islamic regime currently in power. Who exactly will be left behind to guard Iraq is not addressed in his column. But it didn't take me long to realize that's not the point. What's left out is that the the reason Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons so feverishly is because of the failure of this administration to deal with the threat sooner, and the lesson they've learned from North Korea that nuclear weapons will actually deter attack from us, not invite it. What we have here is another cynical attempt to distract the American people from a real problem, Iraq, to focus on another problem of seemingly greater urgency, Iran and nuclear weapons. It's an awful lot like what they did the first time around; distracting us from the real threat of Al Queda by pushing the case for war in Iraq. Some hawks seem to think you can play this prank on the American people twice. I for one don't agree, but be on the lookout for more articles like this to appear, as the hawks try desperately to divert the attention from Iraq as they make their case for war in Iran.

As for me, I'll talk more later about what we actually should be doing about Iran.

UPDATE: Krauthammer may be on the earliest advocates of war with Iran, but he's not alone. The first step in making this US policy is for the pundits and commentators to throw the idea out there on their blogs, op-eds and websites.  Some examples:

New York Daily News(via FrontpageMagazine.com)

The Washington Times(predictably trumpeting the threat of Iran)

News Round-Up

Turns out 10 Republicans who might be investigating Tom Delay accepted some of his PAC cash  and a computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines. Meanwhile, a Republican senator speaks out against the Iraq war, while George Bush's best defender against the accustations of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns out to be one of Osama Bin Laden's brothers. Speaking of Iraq, three sons of an Iraqi provincial governor were kidnapped and an army captain has been charged with murdering an Iraqi. But in better news, Democrats today will formally nominate John Kerry as their challenger to President Bush in November and hear from vice presidential running mate John Edwards in a nationally televised speech.
 
 

Republicans Have Zell Miller, We Have Steve Brozak

Tomorrow night a man named Steve Brozak, who is running for congress in New Jersey, will be speaking at the Democratic National Convention about terrorism and defense. He plans to tell them that John Kerry "offers a real vision ... for making sure we win the war on terror and making sure we have solutions for the Iraqi conflict." He is an ex-marine, ex-Republican investment banker who left his party because of their negative attacks on the patriotism of war veterans such as Max Cleland during the 2002 mid-terms (those ads and Paul Wellstone's death are the only reasons we lost the Senate). Brozak went on the say he saw too many Republicans with the "arrogant attitude that if you ask questions, you're considered disloyal." He is a moderate Democrat who will be hard to attack because of his background and will be a formittable candidate.
 
Though he is still a fiscal conservative and social moderate, I am glad to have this guy on our side. Being a military man himself, his split with the Republican Party over that issue is certainly understandable.  It is great that he was invited to speak at the convention, and even better that he will speak so strongly about Kerry's ability to protect America in the face of more of the Republicans' lies and distortions. Republicans might have that loon Zell Miller on their side this year, but I'm much more pleased to have Steve Brozak.

The Elusive Saudi Connection

An op-ed piece in today's NY Times discusses the Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks, and the failure of the 9/11  Commission to scrutinize that connection in great detail. I don't entertain many conspiracy theories, but in this case it certainly seems that there is more than meets the eye when talking about Saudi assistance of the 9/11 hijackers. I don't believe there was any official connection by the Saudi government to the terrorists, but I do not rule out the possibility that certain Saudi royals helped to fund Al Queda in general as the group was preparing for these attacks. I do believe that this connection is something that will never get the serious attention it deserves from anyone in our government. The truth is we have far too much at stake in our relationship with the government of Saudi Arabia, in that we have vast economic interests in the oil that is lying under their desert sand. We simply cannot afford to call the Saudi royals to the carpet for any participation they may have had individually or as groups with Islamic terrorists while we remain beholden to the oil that they sell us. Changing this relationship requires a fundamental change in energy policy on our part, away from our reliance upon vast quantities of oil for our cars and our industries. Unfortunately there is no incentive to do this either in the Republican or the Democratic party, as many politicians believe that we Americans are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to change our policy. For now we simply must accept the bland assurances of the 9/11 Commission, and wait for a day when our energy policy is not the prime determinant of our national security policy.

 

Economic Realities (or, Why Republicans Should Be Voting For Kerry Too)

Today, as I was filling out a job application at a local restaraunt out here in East Texas, I noticed an older man walk in to apply. The rugged man look to be in his 40's; your average conservative blue-collar man wearing a baseball cap with lyrics from a country song on it, blue jeans, and a T-shirt. He quickly started up a conversation with a another, younger man like myself about how his company layed him off two years ago and hasn't been able to find work since. His story was not atypical: He had put a lot of years into the job, but it was all for-not, and he was told to he had 2 days to "get his shit out of there." As I was listening to this, two thoughts occured. The first was that while liberals and conservatives often talk a lot about the economy it terms of statistics, it is nice (or in this case, not) to see the reality of it all.  The second, was that this guy is probably a Republican, or at least, votes for them and unfortunately, probably still will in these upcoming elections. I have no doubts about why, it's for the same reasons people have been voting against their own economic interests for awhile - Republican talk of values, less government, and as Toby Keith (who's actually a Democrat) would put it, putting a boot in our enemy's ass. Of course, what it really means is that this man doesn't have a job anymore, in large part due to Republican's disastrous economic policies (it didn't used to be this way, but the Pat Buchanan wing of the party is all but dead). This particular thought continues to sadden me, because this is the kind of guy who should be on our side. But I have no idea if Kerry's economic message is getting through to people like this man, at least down here. Though I don't know if his particular job was lost due to outsourcing, the same basic principle remains:
 
Big companies have too much damn power in America and it is time we did something about it.
 
Republicans surely won't, but Democrats, with progressives at the grass-roots level like us edging them on, will. So I again think of what I said earlier, we should support the Texas Democratic Party's and Glenn Smith's DriveDemocracy Organization, and get pro-worker Democrats in and pro-corporate Republicans out. It will hard to turn back the tide after a decade of Republican control in Texas and on the national level, but we have to start somewhere. And we will start with guys like the one I met today.

Republicans Up To More Dirty Tricks in Florida

Naturalized citizens in Florida are saying that the Republican Party there has been registering them to vote as Republicans - without giving them a choice.
 
Is there nowhere too low for these GOP scumbags to sink to? Wait, don't answer that.
 
Alas, this is really no surprise. It's not like they won it last time.

Ashcroft (surprise) mislead the 9/11 commission on Gorelick memo

During his public testimony before the 9/11 commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft attempted to deflect criticism from his own lackluster counterterrorism efforts by pinning the blame on a 1995 memo written by former deputy Attorney General (and current 9/11 commissioner) Jamie Gorelick. Ashcroft said, "The 1995 guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers, barriers between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall effectively excluded prosecutors from intelligence investigations. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents." Ashcroft called the memo "the single greatest structural cause for the September 11 problem."

In their final report, the bi-partisan 9/11 commission concluded that Ashcroft's public testimony was false and misleading. The commission bluntly stated that Ashcroft's public testimony did not "fairly or accurately reflect the significance of the 1995 documents and their relevance to the 2001 discussions." Specifically, "The Gorelick memorandum applied to two particular criminal cases, neither of which was involved in the summer 2001 information-sharing discussions." Any barriers between the law enforcement and intelligence communities were not created from written guidelines by internal Justice Department conflicts which "neither Attorney General acted to resolve" prior to 9/11. Even Ashcroft himself has recently backed away from his April testimony before the commission. In a recent document released by the Justice Department, Ashcroft conceded that Gorelick's memo permitted "interaction and information sharing between prosecutors and intelligence officers" and allowed the FBI to use the fruits of an intelligence investigation "in a criminal prosecution." Ashcroft, however, failed to mention that guidelines issued by his own deputy Attorney General, Larry Thompson, were more restrictive because they affirmed the Gorelick memo and added additional requirements.

The Plot Thickens...

The U.S. military today admitted ties to Johnathan Idema, the Afghan vigilante, in that it held an Afghan prisoner for two months after receiving him from Idema's group which has been charged with torturing detainees at a private jail. The admission followed claims by Idema, who was in the Army reserve from 1975 through 1984 and received special forces training, that he was working for the Defense Department and had contact with Rumsfeld's office almost daily.

Fundamentalists abroad and at home

Iran's conservative-dominated parliament approved a draft bill that would allow abortion in the first four months of pregnancy if the woman's life is in danger or the fetus is malformed. I think it is sad that most Iranian clerics could support such a bill, whereas earlier this year the South Dakota congress tried to pass a bill that would effectively ban abortion even in these cases. Fortunately, the state senate killed the bill after it was sent back by the governor, but it is very disheartening that conservatives would try to so blatantly undermine the U.S.S.C. on a woman's right to choose. While the Iranian law would not support abortion in the case of unwanted pregnancies, I find it interesting that a place that we criticize as so religiously fundamentalist supports an obvious and pragmantic policy, when some of our own religious leaders and lawmakers at home do not.

Texas Politics

As the House Ethics Committee decided to extend their review of House Majority Leader Tom Delay's illegal use of Enron contributions for Texas races, a recent study by the watchdog group, Campaigns for People, has found most of the 31 members of the Texas Senate draw on the kindness of big campaign donors to help support rich lifestyles they otherwise couldn't afford. The group's biggest discovery was that only 40% of the senators' campaign funds go toward actual campaign activities. The remaining 60%, the report found, paid for lifestyle, office, or miscellaneous expenses. The study, aptly named "Money in All the Wrong Places," is based on an examination of senators' campaign-finance reports filed electronically with the Texas Ethics Commission. The data covered a three-year time period between Jan. 1, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2003. 
 
This is the kind of thing that would make even the most cynical political observers, including us, cringe.
 
More disheartening is that this is happening in our home state, illustrating how much our system is hobbled by ineffective campaign-finance and ethics laws and the amount of influence corporate powers have, even moreso than at the national level. But until we stop electing corporate-backed Republicans and Democrats-in-name-only and change the laws, there's never going to be a difference. We must help the Texas Democratic Party and groups like DriveDemocracy to elect better people, from the grassroots to the national level. Let's start by showing Mr. Tom 'Teaching evolution caused the Columbine shootings" Delay that even redistricting won't stop us from keeping a Democratic majority in our congressional delegation and winning as many state races as possible. From U.S. Senator to your local school board, every vote makes a difference.

Air Marshals say Passenger Overreacted

Which passenger you ask? Oh yeah. Annie Jacobson. She doesn't come off quite so well in this version of events. Again, I think we have a situation here of a hysterical woman over-reacting to a situation, and so making a big stink out of something that wasn't that big of a deal after all. Oh yeah, and then going on to write a 3000 word column online about it.

 

Where have all the conservatives gone?

After the Senate failed to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, the Republican-controlled House passed today the so-called "Marriage Protection Act" which would prevent the Supreme Court and other courts from ordering states to recognize same-sex unions sanctioned elsewhere.  In other words, the law is designed to prohibit these courts from ruling on the constitutionality of gay marriage bans.  Did I miss something here? It is not up to legislators to decide what courts can and cannot rule on. This is the most blatant attack on the Constitution and the Seperation of Powers I have ever seen.  What makes them think the courts won't just decide this law is unconstitutional (as it so obviously is) anyway? Fortunately, I don't think this will pass the Senate, either by vote or because the Democrats will fillibuster. What happened to conservatives wanting to protect the Constitution? Why would they even want this? What if, say, a Democratic House decided to pass a gun control law that no court could rule on? This is just idiotic.

Music in the Skies

So it turns out that all those menacing Arab guys on Mrs. Jacobson's plane were just Syrian musicians. In fact as it turns out the security concerns that might have actually been worth heeding in Jacobson's mostly melo-dramatic piece, were not that serious after all (via Political Animal.) Look, I'm not a liberal with my head stuck in the sand. I can understand how a group of dark-skinned Arabic gentleman milling around in my plane might cause some fleeting thoughts of terrorists to leap into the average passenger's brain. However, my response would not be to write a 3,000 word mostly hysterical and moderately racist article that contributes virtually nothing to the debate over airplane security. She leaves me with the impression that the only possible thing we could do to make her feel safer would be to ban large groups of Arabic men, or maybe all Arabic men, from flying in American planes.

9/11 Commission

Today the 9/11 Commission releases their final report on the attacks. With all the politicking surrounded the efforts of this commission, I'd like to give the members of the commissions-Democrat and Republican-kudos for rising above their partisan affiliations to release a thorough and detailed report. I think they did as good a job as they could, considering the circumstances.

Afghan vigilante working for U.S.?

An American arrested in Afghanistan with two countrymen for illegally detaining people he suspected of being Islamic militants said Wednesday he was working for the U.S. government, and he had evidence to prove it.

"We were in contact directly by fax and email and phone with Donald Rumsfeld's office," he said, referring to the Secretary of Defense.

Rumsfel's office is denying a link, but columnist Ted Rall says he met Idema and has a different story to tell.

Hmm...

 

Republicans sure do love the military

Just as it was reported that the American military death toll in Iraq has reached 900 and the US Army is calling up recruits earlier, House Republicans decided to back a block expansion of a program to improve military housing. This is hardly surprising considering the VA hospital budget and combat pay cuts they've tried to pass through. Though they could care less about our military, Republicans are making sure no lobbyist is left behind. Oh, and it looks like the war cost was a little underestimated and war funds are dwindling according to the GAO.
 
Oops.

Do the terrorists want Bush to win in November?

Despite all of those bumper stickers that claim Bin Laden's man is Kerry, the terrorists themselves seem to say otherwise.

 

Seymour Hersh Details Horrific Abu Ghraib Prison Torture

The 2004 ACLU Membership Conference in San Francisco featured a keynote address from New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. The Pulitzer Prize winning Hersh has been at the top of his game recently, writing more exclusive stories on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal than any of his competitors.
 
Seymour Hersh  told the conference the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison. "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
 
You can see the video of the speech or read a transcript here.

Did the new prime minister of Iraq execute six suspects in cold blood?

So says the Sydney Morning Herald... Whether this can be substantiated or not is still undetermined.  They have promised an investigation, but who knows what will come of it. I seriously doubt this occured, because I don't see what Allawi would gain from it. I think, with his past, he is certainly capable of doing something like this, but we will have to wait for further evidence.

The Arabian Candidate

A brilliant op/ed from Paul Krugman on Al Qaeda's choice for president...
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/opinion/20krug.html

Terror in the skies...

...in the form of Arabic men daring to fly commercial that is. Would it be too much to refer to this woman's article as racist hysteria? I don't think so.  Still, I envy anyone who finds so much drama in their everyday airplane flight. Last time I was on a plane I spent more time wondering if the laws of physics would continue to work until I got back on the ground.

Incest, schmincest!

How liberal is Howard Dean? He supports incest!

It is the National Review, so how can I NOT trust it?

 

Here it is!

This is my new blog, which I've created purely on a whim. I figure I'll post some commentary on politics, or things I find amusing, or somesuch. We'll see.