403 Days Until My TV Dies, or Is anyone else looking forward to February 17, 2009?

This is what my television will be broadcasting from February 17, 2009 on, and I couldn't be happier.
Anyone else out there looking forward to DTV (Death of TV) day?

The Most Important Issue for Voters of Both Parties

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

What is the easiest thing you can do to help the environment?

... not only is it easy, but it will save you money.

The victory of expensive tap water in disposable bottles delivered by trucks and labelled by Coke ("dasani") and Pepsi ("aquafina") over inexpensive tap water delivered through (emission-free) pipes is a victory of expensive advertising and scare tactics over common sense and the common good. But it may, with just a little help like this editorial in today's New York Times, be just a temporary victory.

Impeach Cheney First

There's no way to impeach Bush unless we get rid of Lewis Libby's boss (and the next man in line for the presidency) first:

Sign the petition at ImpeachCheney.org

Loyalty is a Vice

Back in the Brownie and Harriet Miers days, I questioned whether loyalty to friends and cronies was the worst of George W. Bush's "virtues".

Now, with his statement yesterday, Mr. Bush -- never known to coddle criminals or consider even the most excessive sentence "excessive" -- shows that loyalty is now a vice, maybe Dubya's key vice.

I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.
[...]The Constitution gives the President the power of clemency to be used when he deems it to be warranted. It is my judgment that a commutation of the prison term in Mr. Libby's case is an appropriate exercise of this power.

--G.W. Bush (from whitehouse.gov, 2 July 2007)

The simplistic code of loyalty that drives him can be seen on every level. He knows his family is nice, and good. He knows his friends are nice, and good. He knows his America is nice, and good, and blessed by God. If he doesn't know you? Watch out. You may very well be mean, and evil. And it may be his duty to ignore your pleas for gubernatorial clemency from death row. It may be his Presidential duty to lock you up on a island prison camp with no recourse to the American legal system, or to bomb you and your family and your godforsaken desert home.

I have nothing against Lewis Libby. He's a stooge. He was only following Dick Cheney's orders, and of course George knows that. But don't commute Lewis Libby's sentence unless you're willing to throw the real criminals behind bars, or until you're willing to give the same compassionate consideration to the MILLIONS of Americans who are behind bars -- many with longer sentences for lesser crimes than Scooter's.

Election Fraud? Or an unexpected groundswell for Joe Biden?

I wish I had made a screenshot a few days ago, because the last time I looked at the summer sidebar poll, the only votes were for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich, with the Democratic hopefuls running in that order. Now, as a commenter to the previous blog entry pointed out, Joe Biden has jumped from last to first, showing either a great groundswell of support for the Senator from Delaware, or the work of one dedicated fan who knows how to vote more than once on Pollhost.
Here's a screenshot from June 2.
Is it time to reset the results and start from scratch, or should we just live with the fact that, in this electronic age, election fraud is going to be as common on meaningless internet Presidential preference polls as it is in Florida and Ohio elections, and American Idol phone-in contests?

Vote early in the new True Blue Liberal sidebar poll

In France this week, published opinion polls are illegal [see update below]. If we lived in Avignon or Tours, we would have to spend this week reading about something other than the constant tracking polls during the final days of the presidential horse race. We would have to wait until Sunday to cast our vote for Ségolène Royal, and to see whether our countrymen had agreed with us or chosen Nicolas Sarkozy to occupy the Élysée Palace for the next five years.

Unfortunately, we can't include Ségolène in our sidebar poll. Being born in Senegal somehow disqualifies her from occupying our Oval Office. You'll have to choose between one of the seven alphabetically-arranged also-rans to your right.

Fortunately for us, there is never a shortage of meaningless horse-race polls in the U. S. of A.!
-------------------------
UPDATE 4 May 2007: The law changed, or I was mistaken, because the French press is full of polls like these today showing Sarko in the lead in advance of Sunday's voting.

No More Wars on Abstract Nouns, or John Edwards takes the lead in the True Blue Liberal primary

Here's the quote of the day from an online Time article, "Edwards Rejects the 'War on Terror'" :

"This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do," Edwards said in a phone interview from Everett, Wash. "It's been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true."

Even when the British Government officially rejected the use of "War on Terror" last month, I held out no hope that any leading American politician would have the courage to do the same.

Since Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton raised their hands when Brian Williams asked all the Dem hopefuls, "Show of hands question: Do you believe there is such a thing as a global war on terror?", John Edwards has taken a momentary lead in the early True Blue Liberal presidential primary. He is making the world safe from US attacks on abstract nouns in particular, and the English language in general.

Bill Moyers, Iraq, a complacent & bullied press, and the WHIG

Look, I know it's TV Turnoff Week, but how could I resist watching a show on Channel 13 last night that started off with these opening paragraphs from Bill Moyers?

BILL MOYERS: Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn't have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.

Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

This 90-minute special edition of Bill Moyers' Journal from April 25, 2007 "Buying the War", which has a full transcript online here, was a good introduction or review for anyone interested in how and why the leading lights of the mainstream press were either dupes or collaborators in the march to invade Iraq. He did not (like the New York Times) ignore the group that gave WHIGgate Update its raison d'être.

BILL MOYERS: As the WASHINGTON POST'S veteran reporter Walter Pincus would later report, the propaganda machine was run by the president's inner circle — officials who called themselves the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG..... You wrote that WHIG included Karl Rove, the chief of staff, Andrew Card, Mary Matalin, Condi Rice, Steven Hadley, Lewis Libby and they were in charge of
selling the war.

WALTER PINCUS: Selling the war. Yeah.

PRESIDENT BUSH (9/11/02): Good evening. A long year has passed since enemies attacked our country.

BILL MOYERS: Their chief salesman had the best props at his disposal [spoken over a clip of Bush with the Statue of Liberty behind him on the 1st anniversary of 9/11/01]

PRESIDENT BUSH (9/11/02): …and we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder.

WALTER PINCUS: They created that link.

BILL MOYERS: The marketing group?

WALTER PINCUS: The marketing group. And the link was a twofold link. One, he had weapons of mass destruction. And two, he supported terrorists. And they repeated it everyday. anybody who watches-- television these days knows you sell a product, not just by saying it once, by saying it over and over again with new spokesmen two, three times a day and it sinks into the public.

BILL MOYERS: But is there anything unusual about an administration marketing its policy?

WALTER PINCUS: It's, I think each administration has learned from the other, and with this group is just the cleverest I've ever seen-- and took it to new heights.

NORM SOLOMON: The TV, radio, print, other media outlets are as crucial to going to war as the bombs and the bullets and the planes. They're part of the arsenal, the propaganda weaponry, if you will. And that's totally understood across the board, at the Pentagon, the White House, the State Department.

COLIN POWELL (9/26/02): A proven menace like Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction

PRESIDENT BUSH (Discussion with Congressional Leaders, 9/26/02): The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons

DONALD RUMSFELD (DOD Press Briefing 9/26/02): We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.

PRESIDENT BUSH: The regime has long standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations.

BOB SIMON: Just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Repeat Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Just keep it going. Keep that drum beat going. And it was effective because long after it was well established that there was no link between Al Qaeda and the government of Iraq and the Saddam regime, the polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that Al Qaeda-- that Iraq was responsible for September 11th.

The Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast networks all come under fire in this show (as do the easy targets of the flag-waving cable news networks and saber-rattling pundits). The only heroes are two reporters for Knight Ridder (Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay) who saw the holes in the government's stories with basic fact checking rather than high-level cocktail party access to the lies of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.
The New York Times STILL has not mentioned "WHIG" or the "White House Iraq Group" in its news pages even though one of their reporters, Judith Miller, has been exposed as their chief tool (or maybe even an honorary member of the Group). When the White House Iran Group starts feeding their reporters information from "Important High Level Administration Sources" (i.e., Liars), maybe the Times editors should think about the following quotation from a Knight Ridder editor before uncritically printing government "information" about Iranian WMDs on their influential front page.

BILL MOYERS: Knight Ridder's early skepticism was a rarity inside the beltway bubble…..

JOHN WALCOTT: A decision to go to war, even against an eighth-rate power such as Iraq, is the most serious decision that a government can ever make. And it deserves the most serious kind of scrutiny that we in the media can give it. Is this really necessary? Is it necessary to send our young men and women to go kill somebody else's young men and women?

crossposted from WHIGgate Update (http://whiggate.org)

My First BlackBerry Sighting

The little BlackBerry breakdown yesterday, which substantially slowed the moving and shaking of movers and shakers all across this great continent of ours, reminded me of my first sighting of one of these devices in use. I wish I had noted the date of this incident, but I didn't think at the time that this little gizmo would take quite the prominent place in our culture that it has in the past few years. So the date is inexact, but here's the scene:

Time: Around 2001, during the evening rush hour.
The Place: A New Jersey Transit train leaving New York's Penn Station
The Characters: Middle-Aged White Man in a Dark Suit #1 & Middle-Aged White Man in a Dark Suit #2

Man#1 is watching Man#2 type on a tiny keyboard with his thumbs.
Man #1: What's that thing?
Man #2: A "Black Berry".
Man #1: What are you doing?
Man #2: I'm talking to my boss right now!
Man #1: Why the fuck would you want to do that?

Why indeed? thought the man sitting across the aisle from them who was trying to read a book.