Hey Skinny,
With the mid-term elections coming up I thought you might interested in How to Steal an Election. It's a long article but it's really quite scary just how many opportunities there are in the voting process to do something sneaky. What's more is, most nerds aren't even politically motivated, some would try and do this just to show that it's possible.
I heard a paraphrase of Bush's speech from Radio Day. He said something about there being people in the Capital who are starting to measure up some drapes and crap like that. Then he went on to say something along the lines of ... even if it's against conventional wisdom, I'm going to win the next election...
Makes you wonder just how he's going to do that.
10.27.2006
10.26.2006
10.25.2006
10.22.2006
34 Scandals From Bush's First Year of Presidency
It's been impossible to keep track of all these, but this guy has kindly put all of Bush's scandals into one handy Scandal Sheet.
10.20.2006
10.19.2006
Letter From Guantanamo
Since it is now legal for anyone, American or foreign national, to be plucked up, declared and enemy combatant and sent to jail without trial, I thought this letter from the prison was quite striking. Below is cut and pasted from Kristof at the nytimes. See you in gitmo
In Sami’s Words…
Here is an excerpt from a letter by Sami al-Hajj, the Sudanese journalist in Guantanamo whom I wrote about today. The letter was written to his lawyer:
“It is now more than 1,200 days and I am suffering the darkness . . . the humiliation . . . the oppression, not for any crime that I committed. The only crime they have against me is that I carried an Al Jazeera camera and tried very hard to convey the suffering of the Afghan people to other nations.
“I left my only son Mohammed while he was taking his very first steps hoping that I would be back to him in a month or so to watch his early days of walking, and hear the first words he spoke. Unfortunately, the journey became far longer than I ever thought, and my waiting has been endless. It was at first two months, then three, then one year, then two years, and now it is three years.
“Suddenly, I received a letter from my family. It took about one year to arrive between the translators, the censorship, and then the investigators . . . in the end I got the message.
“In my mind I could hear my son’s question – ‘Where is my Dad? I want to see my father.’ My son, I want to let you know that your father wants nothing more in the world than to see you. I ask myself about you all the time. The most important thing that I want, that I miss, that I dream of, is holding you in my arms and kissing you.
“Now, about your question, ‘Where is my Dad?’ Your Dad is struggling and suffering in shackles and handcuffs in an island far away, thousands of miles away from you. He is on an island no more than a few square miles, pack with more than American 7,000 soldiers. It has a miniature zoo, but the animals are nothing more than donkeys or dogs, rats. Even so, these animals have more rights than your father has, or hundreds of other prisoners like him.
“I have been trying and trying, without success, for more than 40 months, to convince the investigators that the 28 days I spent inside Afghanistan were only for unbiased media coverage. But it is like talking to a brick wall.
“Now, I have lost the hair on half of my head because of what I went through during interrogations; the other half is for the most part grey, but maybe this half is turning white trying to prove that I am a man of peace, who went to Afghanistan only as a journalist. . . .
“Some of my colleagues here are very suspicious about lawyers. They say that the Freedom in the United States is just a stone statue, a Statue of Liberty and nothing more. Time will tell.”
In Sami’s Words…
Here is an excerpt from a letter by Sami al-Hajj, the Sudanese journalist in Guantanamo whom I wrote about today. The letter was written to his lawyer:
“It is now more than 1,200 days and I am suffering the darkness . . . the humiliation . . . the oppression, not for any crime that I committed. The only crime they have against me is that I carried an Al Jazeera camera and tried very hard to convey the suffering of the Afghan people to other nations.
“I left my only son Mohammed while he was taking his very first steps hoping that I would be back to him in a month or so to watch his early days of walking, and hear the first words he spoke. Unfortunately, the journey became far longer than I ever thought, and my waiting has been endless. It was at first two months, then three, then one year, then two years, and now it is three years.
“Suddenly, I received a letter from my family. It took about one year to arrive between the translators, the censorship, and then the investigators . . . in the end I got the message.
“In my mind I could hear my son’s question – ‘Where is my Dad? I want to see my father.’ My son, I want to let you know that your father wants nothing more in the world than to see you. I ask myself about you all the time. The most important thing that I want, that I miss, that I dream of, is holding you in my arms and kissing you.
“Now, about your question, ‘Where is my Dad?’ Your Dad is struggling and suffering in shackles and handcuffs in an island far away, thousands of miles away from you. He is on an island no more than a few square miles, pack with more than American 7,000 soldiers. It has a miniature zoo, but the animals are nothing more than donkeys or dogs, rats. Even so, these animals have more rights than your father has, or hundreds of other prisoners like him.
“I have been trying and trying, without success, for more than 40 months, to convince the investigators that the 28 days I spent inside Afghanistan were only for unbiased media coverage. But it is like talking to a brick wall.
“Now, I have lost the hair on half of my head because of what I went through during interrogations; the other half is for the most part grey, but maybe this half is turning white trying to prove that I am a man of peace, who went to Afghanistan only as a journalist. . . .
“Some of my colleagues here are very suspicious about lawyers. They say that the Freedom in the United States is just a stone statue, a Statue of Liberty and nothing more. Time will tell.”
10.06.2006
The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Here is an article about unexploded cluster bombs littered all around Lebanon as it appeared in the nytimes this morning. I wonder if these were the bombs made in the USA Oh, all those hearts and minds we must be winnning...
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Sept. 29 — Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah ended in August, nearly three people have been wounded or killed each day by cluster bombs Israel dropped in the waning days of the war, and officials now say it will take more than a year to clear the region of them.
United Nations officials estimate that southern Lebanon is littered with one million unexploded bomblets, far outnumbering the 650,000 people living in the region. They are stuck in the branches of olive trees and the broad leaves of banana trees. They are on rooftops, mixed in with rubble and littered across fields, farms, driveways, roads and outside schools.
As of Sept. 28, officials here said cluster bombs had severely wounded 109 people — and killed 18 others.
Muhammad Hassan Sultan, a slender brown-haired 12-year-old, became a postwar casualty when the shrapnel from a cluster bomb cut into his head and neck. He was from Sawane, a hillside village with a panoramic view of terraced olive farms and rolling hills. Muhammad was sitting on a hip-high wall, watching a bulldozer clear rubble, when the machine bumped into a tree.
A flash of a second later he was fatally injured when a cluster bomblet dropped from the branches. “I took Muhammad to the hospital in my car, but he was already dead,” said Yousef Ftouni, a resident of the village.
The entire village was littered with the bomblets, and as Mr. Ftouni recounted Muhammad’s death, the Lebanese Army worked its way through an olive grove, blowing up unexploded munitions in a painfully slow process of clearance.
Cluster bombs are legal if aimed at military targets and are very effective, military experts say. Nonetheless, Israel has been heavily criticized by United Nations officials, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs, because they are difficult to focus exclusively on military targets. Israel was also criticized because it fired most of its cluster bombs in the last days of the war, when the United Nations Security Council was negotiating a resolution to end the conflict.
Officials calculate that if they are lucky, and money from international donors does not run out, it will take 15 months to clear the area. There are now about 300 Lebanese Army soldiers and 30 other clearance teams, each of up to 30 experts, working on the problem of unexploded bomblets.
The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center in southern Lebanon recorded 745 locations across the south where unexploded bombs had been found. Of the million estimated to be scattered around, so far 4,500 have been disposed of, according to the center.
“Our priority at the moment is to clean houses, main roads and gardens so that the displaced people can return to their villages,” said Col. Mohammad Fahmy, head of the national mine clearing office. “The next stage will be cleaning agricultural lands.”
In Lebanon there are two explanations of why Israel unleashed cluster bombs at the end of the war: to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah before withdrawing, or to litter the south with unexploded cluster bombs as a strategy to keep people from returning right away.
The United States has sold cluster bombs to Israel in the past and says it is investigating whether Israel’s use of cluster bombs in its war with Hezbollah violated a secret agreement that restricted when they could be used.
The final days of the war — a conflict that began when Hezbollah launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel and sent militiamen across the border to capture Israeli soldiers — were marked by a huge Israeli offensive. Israel hoped its final push would, in part, help force the Security Council to adopt a tougher resolution on Hezbollah than appeared to be taking shape.
Israel has said it leafleted areas before bombing and provided Lebanon with maps of potential cluster bomb locations to help with the clearing process. United Nations officials in Lebanon say the maps are useless.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article on Sept. 12 anonymously quoting the head of a rocket unit in Lebanon who was critical of the decision to use cluster bombs. “What we did was insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” Haaretz quoted the commander as saying.
Repeated efforts to get Israeli officials to explain the rationale behind the use of the bombs have proved fruitless, with spokesmen referring all queries to short official statements arguing that everything done conformed with international law.
In Lebanon the problem of the unexploded munitions is magnified by the desire to return to villages and lives in a region that is effectively booby-trapped. People want to begin rebuilding and harvest their crops. In some cases they have tried to clear the bomblets themselves, and some people have begun charging a small fee to clear away bombs — a practice that officials have discouraged as dangerous.
But the people are desperate.
“If I lost the season for olives and the wheat, I have no money for the winter,”‘ said Rida Noureddine, 54, who farms a small patch of land on the main road in the village of Kherbet Salem. There was a small black object at the entrance to his farm, and he thought it was a cluster bomb.
“I feel as if someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by my neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul,” he said.
The bomblets, about the size of a D battery, can be packed into bombs, missiles or artillery shells. When the delivery system detonates, the bomblets spread like buckshot across a large area, making them difficult to aim with precision. A fact sheet issued by the Mine Action Coordination Center says cluster bombs have an official failure rate of 15 percent.
That means that 15 percent of the bomblets remain as hazards. According to the fact sheet, the failure rate in this war is estimated to be around 40 percent. “We estimate there are one million,” said Dalya Farran, the community liaison officer of the mine action center.
Ms. Farran has worked at the center for nearly three years. It was set up in 2000 to help deal with the mines and unexploded ordnance left behind after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and from other wars.
After this war, Ms. Farran said, there are two types of cluster bomb fragments across the south. The most commonly found type is known as M42, a deceptively small device resembling a light socket.
She said a large percentage of the unexploded bomblets were made in America, while some were produced in Israel. Each one has a white tail dangling off the back, like the tail of a kite. As they fall to the ground, the tail spins and unscrews the firing pin.
When the device hits, the front end fires a huge slug while the casing blasts apart into a spray of deadly metal fragments. When they fail to detonate they cling to the ground, and with their white tails look deceptively like toys, so children are often those who are injured.
“This is what they are living with every day,” said Simon Lovell, a supervisor with one of the clearance teams as he looked at five unexploded bomblets poking out of the soft, rocky soil of the Hussein family farm.
Across the street, Hussein Muhammad, 48, at home with his wife and four children, waited for the clearance team. His olive trees were heavy with fruit, but he could not tend to the harvest.
“I feel that the land has become my enemy,” he said. “It represents a danger to my life and my kids’ lives.”
Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Lebanon.
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Sept. 29 — Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah ended in August, nearly three people have been wounded or killed each day by cluster bombs Israel dropped in the waning days of the war, and officials now say it will take more than a year to clear the region of them.
United Nations officials estimate that southern Lebanon is littered with one million unexploded bomblets, far outnumbering the 650,000 people living in the region. They are stuck in the branches of olive trees and the broad leaves of banana trees. They are on rooftops, mixed in with rubble and littered across fields, farms, driveways, roads and outside schools.
As of Sept. 28, officials here said cluster bombs had severely wounded 109 people — and killed 18 others.
Muhammad Hassan Sultan, a slender brown-haired 12-year-old, became a postwar casualty when the shrapnel from a cluster bomb cut into his head and neck. He was from Sawane, a hillside village with a panoramic view of terraced olive farms and rolling hills. Muhammad was sitting on a hip-high wall, watching a bulldozer clear rubble, when the machine bumped into a tree.
A flash of a second later he was fatally injured when a cluster bomblet dropped from the branches. “I took Muhammad to the hospital in my car, but he was already dead,” said Yousef Ftouni, a resident of the village.
The entire village was littered with the bomblets, and as Mr. Ftouni recounted Muhammad’s death, the Lebanese Army worked its way through an olive grove, blowing up unexploded munitions in a painfully slow process of clearance.
Cluster bombs are legal if aimed at military targets and are very effective, military experts say. Nonetheless, Israel has been heavily criticized by United Nations officials, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs, because they are difficult to focus exclusively on military targets. Israel was also criticized because it fired most of its cluster bombs in the last days of the war, when the United Nations Security Council was negotiating a resolution to end the conflict.
Officials calculate that if they are lucky, and money from international donors does not run out, it will take 15 months to clear the area. There are now about 300 Lebanese Army soldiers and 30 other clearance teams, each of up to 30 experts, working on the problem of unexploded bomblets.
The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center in southern Lebanon recorded 745 locations across the south where unexploded bombs had been found. Of the million estimated to be scattered around, so far 4,500 have been disposed of, according to the center.
“Our priority at the moment is to clean houses, main roads and gardens so that the displaced people can return to their villages,” said Col. Mohammad Fahmy, head of the national mine clearing office. “The next stage will be cleaning agricultural lands.”
In Lebanon there are two explanations of why Israel unleashed cluster bombs at the end of the war: to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah before withdrawing, or to litter the south with unexploded cluster bombs as a strategy to keep people from returning right away.
The United States has sold cluster bombs to Israel in the past and says it is investigating whether Israel’s use of cluster bombs in its war with Hezbollah violated a secret agreement that restricted when they could be used.
The final days of the war — a conflict that began when Hezbollah launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel and sent militiamen across the border to capture Israeli soldiers — were marked by a huge Israeli offensive. Israel hoped its final push would, in part, help force the Security Council to adopt a tougher resolution on Hezbollah than appeared to be taking shape.
Israel has said it leafleted areas before bombing and provided Lebanon with maps of potential cluster bomb locations to help with the clearing process. United Nations officials in Lebanon say the maps are useless.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article on Sept. 12 anonymously quoting the head of a rocket unit in Lebanon who was critical of the decision to use cluster bombs. “What we did was insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” Haaretz quoted the commander as saying.
Repeated efforts to get Israeli officials to explain the rationale behind the use of the bombs have proved fruitless, with spokesmen referring all queries to short official statements arguing that everything done conformed with international law.
In Lebanon the problem of the unexploded munitions is magnified by the desire to return to villages and lives in a region that is effectively booby-trapped. People want to begin rebuilding and harvest their crops. In some cases they have tried to clear the bomblets themselves, and some people have begun charging a small fee to clear away bombs — a practice that officials have discouraged as dangerous.
But the people are desperate.
“If I lost the season for olives and the wheat, I have no money for the winter,”‘ said Rida Noureddine, 54, who farms a small patch of land on the main road in the village of Kherbet Salem. There was a small black object at the entrance to his farm, and he thought it was a cluster bomb.
“I feel as if someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by my neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul,” he said.
The bomblets, about the size of a D battery, can be packed into bombs, missiles or artillery shells. When the delivery system detonates, the bomblets spread like buckshot across a large area, making them difficult to aim with precision. A fact sheet issued by the Mine Action Coordination Center says cluster bombs have an official failure rate of 15 percent.
That means that 15 percent of the bomblets remain as hazards. According to the fact sheet, the failure rate in this war is estimated to be around 40 percent. “We estimate there are one million,” said Dalya Farran, the community liaison officer of the mine action center.
Ms. Farran has worked at the center for nearly three years. It was set up in 2000 to help deal with the mines and unexploded ordnance left behind after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and from other wars.
After this war, Ms. Farran said, there are two types of cluster bomb fragments across the south. The most commonly found type is known as M42, a deceptively small device resembling a light socket.
She said a large percentage of the unexploded bomblets were made in America, while some were produced in Israel. Each one has a white tail dangling off the back, like the tail of a kite. As they fall to the ground, the tail spins and unscrews the firing pin.
When the device hits, the front end fires a huge slug while the casing blasts apart into a spray of deadly metal fragments. When they fail to detonate they cling to the ground, and with their white tails look deceptively like toys, so children are often those who are injured.
“This is what they are living with every day,” said Simon Lovell, a supervisor with one of the clearance teams as he looked at five unexploded bomblets poking out of the soft, rocky soil of the Hussein family farm.
Across the street, Hussein Muhammad, 48, at home with his wife and four children, waited for the clearance team. His olive trees were heavy with fruit, but he could not tend to the harvest.
“I feel that the land has become my enemy,” he said. “It represents a danger to my life and my kids’ lives.”
Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Lebanon.
10.05.2006
Talk of the Nation
a very excellent, informative hour of radio touching on the tragic reality of our current "rules of engagement" and the problems with our "war on terror."
10.04.2006
The Daily Show News
Hey Mo,
This is gonna be big news for you mate so prepare yourself. I found this article over on Ars Technica:
The Daily Show is as substantive as the "real" news
10/4/2006 4:36:32 PM, by Eric Bangeman
The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.
The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.
"It should be noted that the broadcast network news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories," said Professor Fox. "The argument could be made that while the amount of substance per story was not significantly different, the proportion of each story devoted to substance was greater in the network news stories ... On the other hand, the proportion of stories per half hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in The Daily Show."
Using the entire half-hour programs as the basis of analysis yielded the same results: there was just as much substance to The Daily Show's coverage as there was on the network news. And The Daily Show was much funnier, with less of the hype—references to photo ops, political endorsements, and polls—that typically overshadows substantive coverage on network news, according to the study.
What constitutes "substantive" coverage? Ars Technica spoke to Professor Fox who told us that the she and the other researchers defined substantive coverage as that which addressed issues included in the party platform or questions of candidate qualification. "It was the same definition I used in a previous study of network news coverage from 1988 to 2000," Professor Fox told Ars. "It is similar to criteria used by other scholars who examine political coverage—'image vs. issue'—but there's consensus with in the scholarly and journalistic communities that anytime there is discussion of issues in a campaign, that's what would be considered substantive."
Is it time to tune out World News Tonight and tune into The Daily Show? Professor Fox doesn't think so, saying that "we should probably be concerned about both of those sources, because neither one is particularly substantive. It's a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an 'infotainment' society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available."
It's ironic that Jon Stewart, who seldom hesitates to criticize the media, is turning out tongue-in-cheek content that is just as substantative. It also demonstrates that the mainstream media may not be so mainstream anymore, and that people looking for in-depth treatments of newsworthy topics are often best served by looking in places other than the evening news or The Daily Show, no matter how funny the latter is.
Professor Fox's study, titled "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer in the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media.
This is gonna be big news for you mate so prepare yourself. I found this article over on Ars Technica:
The Daily Show is as substantive as the "real" news
10/4/2006 4:36:32 PM, by Eric Bangeman
The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.
The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.
"It should be noted that the broadcast network news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories," said Professor Fox. "The argument could be made that while the amount of substance per story was not significantly different, the proportion of each story devoted to substance was greater in the network news stories ... On the other hand, the proportion of stories per half hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in The Daily Show."
Using the entire half-hour programs as the basis of analysis yielded the same results: there was just as much substance to The Daily Show's coverage as there was on the network news. And The Daily Show was much funnier, with less of the hype—references to photo ops, political endorsements, and polls—that typically overshadows substantive coverage on network news, according to the study.
What constitutes "substantive" coverage? Ars Technica spoke to Professor Fox who told us that the she and the other researchers defined substantive coverage as that which addressed issues included in the party platform or questions of candidate qualification. "It was the same definition I used in a previous study of network news coverage from 1988 to 2000," Professor Fox told Ars. "It is similar to criteria used by other scholars who examine political coverage—'image vs. issue'—but there's consensus with in the scholarly and journalistic communities that anytime there is discussion of issues in a campaign, that's what would be considered substantive."
Is it time to tune out World News Tonight and tune into The Daily Show? Professor Fox doesn't think so, saying that "we should probably be concerned about both of those sources, because neither one is particularly substantive. It's a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an 'infotainment' society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available."
It's ironic that Jon Stewart, who seldom hesitates to criticize the media, is turning out tongue-in-cheek content that is just as substantative. It also demonstrates that the mainstream media may not be so mainstream anymore, and that people looking for in-depth treatments of newsworthy topics are often best served by looking in places other than the evening news or The Daily Show, no matter how funny the latter is.
Professor Fox's study, titled "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer in the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media.
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