Chris Boese's Weblog

Hugh Grant and Miss Jane Hathaway... twins separated at birth?

OK, so that just occured to me while watching the sequel to Bridget Jones Diary, um, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. I'm not necessarily recommending it, unless you have a thing for watching Hugh Grant movies.

It is pathetic that I have this guilty pleasure thing, watching Hugh Grant movies. I can never figure out the appeal of it, and I hate how good looking he is. Oh, I'd have far less resolve than poor old Bridget.

But then I saw the resemblance with Miss Jane Hathaway, from the Beverly Hillbillies. Normally that would put me right off old Hugh, but you know what?! That just makes it worse!

I shoulda read Wuthering Heights instead. Poor Mr Darcy.

I'll be looking for this "Wal-Mart" film, from the director of "Outfoxed"

"Outfoxed" used the visual mediuum and clips to SHOW how, without the visible evidence, issues of perception around Fox News always appear to be open for argument on both sides. Yet academic communication scholars could do persuasive work that is even more dramatic, quantitative content analysis. I wonder why we aren't hearing about those kinds of communications and media studies?

I'm interested to see how this "Wal-Mart" film plays out. If it is able to use the visual medium to dramatize and illustrate the logical inconsistencies between the company's marketing image and public perceptions, vs the reality, then it will be very interesting indeed.

It is disconcerting to me that ordinary argumentative proofs have less force in reaching ordinary people and their sense of reasoning, but again, it is the signal-to-noise issue, perhaps created by Fox News, and perhaps also by blogs, that cause so much argumentative "noise" that many people, my mother for instance, just throw up their hands and retreat into relativism, saying "nobody knows what the truth is."

I believe that verifiable truths about overt propaganda campaigns at Fox News can be parsed out and discerned, with criteria, critical thinking, verification, etc. But so many people get lost in the noise, and they don't have epistemological tools to do the work inside their own heads.

Journalism bears some responsiblity for this, because it (with good motives) tried to say, in the U.S. at least, "We know it is confusing, so we'll do your thinking for you and TELL YOU what the truth is." TRUST US." Which was the beginning of the end, I think, whenever ANYONE asks an independent thinker and agent to give up their native authority to some one or entity in blind faith.

I love the planned grassroots distribution of this film, and Wal-Mart's rather toothless attempts to fight it.

This is from the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle.

Link: Wal-Mart hit twice: critical film, activism / 6,800 sites to host DVD premiere by 'Outfoxed' director.

Wal-Mart hit twice: critical film, activism

6,800 sites to host DVD premiere by 'Outfoxed' director

- Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Most of the 4 million people who saw director Robert Greenwald's last movie, a critique of Fox News called "Outfoxed," caught it at a house party. The independent film ignited liberal audiences last year without the benefit of a Hollywood distributor, major studio or much of a theatrical release.

Labor and faith groups are shooting higher with this week's premiere of Greenwald's "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price": They hope to use the film to coalesce a social movement around criticism of the world's largest retailer.

Wal-Mart is countering with a campaign worthy of the final days before an election  --  circulating a review panning Greenwald's directorial efforts in a 1980 Olivia Newton-John vehicle.

And Wal-Mart officials haven't even seen the new film yet. That will change after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom presides over Wednesday's West Coast premiere at a Fort Mason benefit screening.

"Wal-Mart" DVDs will screen at more than 6,800 locales, including house parties, churches and labor halls. There will be plenty of opportunities to see the film in politically blue parts of the country such as New York and San Francisco, a city with no Wal-Marts but 11 scheduled screenings. However, there will also be a dozen showings in both deep-red Kansas and Georgia, and others in rural areas where Wal-Marts dominate the landscape.

Many of the screenings will happen during a "Wal-Mart Week of Action" starting Nov. 13. More than 400 groups, including the Sierra Club and Service Employees International Union, will use the film's premiere to publicize their anger at the nation's largest private employer. 

Their grievances are the ones labor and liberal groups have been pushing for several years  --  that nearly half Wal-Mart's employees have no private health insurance or are on Medicaid, that most of its stock is produced by cheap overseas labor, and that by building stores on the fringes of towns, it contributes to sprawl and destruction of the environment.

The SEIU is also one of the main financial backers of WalmartWatch.com, a 6-month-old organizing hub for the chain's critics that has posted leaked company documents and coordinates protests and legislation aimed at Wal-Mart.

The movement-wrapped-around-a-movie that WalmartWatch.com is organizing with Greenwald is a new strategy. 

[...]

Wal-Mart is swatting back criticism with what it calls an "aggressive" public relations campaign.

"We've got a lot of things planned," said Bob McAdam, vice president of corporate affairs. "Anything is possible."

Five days before the movie's scheduled premiere in New York on Tuesday, Wal-Mart released a 10-page press release criticizing it as "propaganda video." The missive dusted off three pages of negative reviews of Greenwald's nonpolitical films, including a 25-year-old Newsweek thumbs-down for the Newton-John dud "Xanadu," which said, "Robert Greenwald, the director, should look into another line of work."

[...]

It's been a public week of soul-searching for the retailer, not all of it intentional. A leaked internal memo from Wal-Mart's executive vice president of benefits, Susan Chambers, conceded that nearly half its workforce is uninsured or on Medicaid and noted that overall, its workers spend double the national average on health care. The memo was a rare admission that criticism is affecting the company, whose stock price has fallen 21 percent in the past year.

The leak followed several we're-going-to-do-better announcements from Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, who promised to improve health benefits and cut energy use at stores. On Friday in Washington, D.C., Wal-Mart plans to hold an academic conference on its economic impact, both locally and nationally.

The "Wal-Mart" DVD isn't the only dart being aimed at the chain, however. The next month will bring a wave of Wal-Mart analysis from liberal publications, which, in an unusual example of cooperation, are timing their stories for the release of the "Wal-Mart" movie.

The Nation, the American Prospect, In These Times and the San Francisco-based online site Alternet are all scheduled to run stories examining everything from Wal-Mart's opposition to union organizing to the philanthropy of its founders, the Walton family.

In his previous house-party film, Greenwald took a swing at Fox News for aping Republican talking points and contributing to a conservative echo chamber. Alternet Executive Editor Don Hazen, who coordinated the timed pieces, insisted this is different.

"This is not everybody saying the same thing," said Hazen, whose site is selling the "Wal-Mart" DVD. "Everybody has their own take.

[...]

Borrowing a page from the conservative playbook's reliance on the religious right, the film's accompanying campaign is being anchored by faith leaders.

"It is about creating a moral economy," said the Rev. Ron Stief, a Washington-based leader for United Church of Christ, whose churches are hosting dozens of screenings. "Fifty percent of our congregations are rural, and these communities are seeing the impact of Wal-Mart every day," in the demise of mom-and-pop businesses, he said.

The film's backers face a challenge, however  --  many communities have welcomed Wal-Mart. More than 11,000 people filed applications to work at the chain's new store in East Oakland, a job-starved area that other retailers have shunned. The store has been bustling since it opened in August, and the neighborhood has 400 new jobs.

[...]

Not much of a future for Sesame Street in Turkey, nor constitutional lawyers at the White House

What a day for odd news!

Link: CNN.com - 20 fined for using letters W and Q - Oct 25, 2005.

20 fined for using letters W and Q

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) -- A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said.

The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira ($75.53) for holding up the placards, written in Kurdish, at the event last year. The letters Q and W do not exist in the Turkish alphabet.

Under pressure from the European Union, Turkey has improved language and human rights for its Kurdish minority, but the EU says implementation has been patchy and loopholes remain.

The 1928 Law on the Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters changed the Turkish alphabet from the Arabic script to a modified Latin script and required all signs, advertising, newspapers and official documents to only use Turkish letters.

[...]

Meanwhile the White House says "We are not amused" at the parody site "The Onion's" use of the presidential seal.

Link: CNN.com - White House to Onion: Stop using seal - Oct 26, 2005.

Do they have real lawyers at the White House, you know, the kind that actually studied law?! No wonder they have to dig so deep to find nominees for the Supreme Court. Looks like they've already hit the bottom of the barrel.

They can call up Fox News if they want a clarification from it's idiotic lawsuit it LOST against Al Franken over the phrase "fair and balanced."

As in, PARODY IS COVERED UNDER THE FIRST AMENDMENT. It's called "FAIR COMMENT AND CRITICISM."

If The Onion caves on this one, I will be very disappointed. Not that I think they will.

White House to Onion: Stop using seal

Symbol 'being used inappropriately,' says spokesman

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The White House is not amused by The Onion, a newspaper that often spoofs the Bush administration, and has asked it to stop using the presidential seal on its Web site.

The seal was still on the Web site www.theonion.com on Tuesday at the spot where President George W. Bush's weekly radio address is parodied.

With headlines like "Bush To Appoint Someone To Be In Charge Of Country" and "Bush Subconsciously Sizes Up Spain For Invasion," The Onion is popular with readers looking for a little laughter with their politics.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said people who work in the executive mansion do have a sense of humor, but not when it comes to breaking regulations.

"When any official sign or seal is being used inappropriately the party is notified," Duffy said.

"You cannot pick and choose where to enforce that rule. It's important that the seal or any White House insignia not be used inappropriately," he said.

[...]

Scott Dikkers, editor-in-chief of the satirical newspaper, said its lawyer disagrees with the White House assessment.

"I've been seeing the presidential seal used in comedy programs most of my life and to my knowledge none of them have been asked not to use it by the White House," Dikkers said.

[...]

 

Is there an echo in here?

Looks like this latest NYTimes review of Stephen Colbert's new show on Comedy Central was inspired by one of my previous posts. Well, from my mouth to god's ears, eh? Glad to know someone agrees with me, at least.

Link: Bringing Out the Absurdity of the News - New York Times.

The TV Watch

Bringing Out the Absurdity of the News

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: October 25, 2005
There was never much chance that Stephen Colbert would bungle his own show. Mainly, there were concerns that the "The Colbert Report" (pronounced with a French accent, as in ra-PORE) would turn out to be the Double-Stuf Oreo of Comedy Central - too much of a good thing..

It's not.

If anything, after one week, Mr. Colbert's half-hour sendup of cable news commentators already suggests that "Saturday Night Live" has outlived its usefulness - or at least is in need of a shake-up. When a comedian from "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" has a big enough following to warrant his own spinoff, it may be time to renovate NBC's 30-year-old comedy show. Even last Saturday, when Tina Fey, the head writer, was back at the "Weekend Update" anchor desk after her maternity leave, most of the political jokes were as labored and predictable as the comedy skits.

[...]

And some of the best material on Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert's shows lies in their sadistic use of snippets from real newscasts and political speeches. On Thursday, Mr. Colbert showed a montage of alarmed reports about the avian flu epidemic on CNN, C-Span and MSNBC, then showed a more upbeat Fox News headline: "Bird is the word on the street. Why the avian flu could send stocks soaring."

Mr. Colbert praised Fox News for always finding something positive in bad news, be it about the Bush administration or the nation. "Every global pandemic has a silver lining," he said approvingly. "Remember, the Medici made their money investing in the bubonic plague. A lot of people did. Until the boil burst."

That bit on the show just had me rolling, but "Truthiness" is still my all-time fav. I noticed the link was broken on the page the other day. Hope they fix it soon.

Even though Mr. Colbert stays in character - a smug, bombastic and ultrapatriotic cable news commentator - he packs more wit and acid commentary in 22 minutes of his one-man show than multiple skits by the entire cast of "SNL." On his regular feature "The Word," Mr. Colbert routinely mocks the kind of anti-intellectual populism perfected by Fox News. "Trustiness" was his word of the day, he told viewers with a poker face, sneering at the "wordanistas over at Webster's" who might refute its existence. "I don't trust books," he explained. "They're all fact and no heart."

[...]

The premiere of "The Colbert Report," which featured a gravitas face-off between Mr. Colbert and Stone Phillips of "Dateline NBC," provided a quickened pace and a refreshing change of tone. The faux anchor and his guest took turns delivering absurd selections from news scripts with straight faces. ("We invited Mother Teresa to respond to these charges.")

[...]

His sendup of the Bill O'Reilly/Joe Scarborough/Aaron Brown persona is very funny, as are the show's Fox News-ish graphics of swirling American flags and screeching eagles. But what puts Mr. Colbert over the top is that he is not just impersonating well known television personalities, he also uses parody to score larger points about politics and the press.

On Tuesday night, he asked "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl about the Valerie Plame scandal and listened blankly as she likened the White House leak of a C.I.A. agent's identity to Watergate.

"What is the big deal about this particular case?" he asked Ms. Stahl with mock indignation. "I mean, all that they are saying is that somebody in the White House had to do what they had to do to get the war they wanted."

[...]

Here's cause for celebration...

I'm not planning to whoop it up too much, until I hear that they are actually LOOKING at what the depleted uranium is doing in U.S. bombs and missiles and all those other nasty things. In case they want to know where to start, I hear all you gotta do is start digging just about anywhere around Iraq, going back to the Gulf War.

Link: CNN.com - U.S. drops nuclear 'bunker-buster' plans - Oct 25, 2005.

U.S. drops nuclear 'bunker-buster' plans

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration has abandoned research into a nuclear "bunker-buster" warhead, deciding instead to pursue a similar device using conventional weaponry, a key Republican senator said Tuesday.

Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico said funding for the nuclear bunker-buster as part of the Energy Department's fiscal 2006 budget has been dropped at the department's request.

The nuclear bunker-buster had been the focus of intense debate in Congress, with opponents arguing that its development as a tactical nuclear weapon could add to nuclear proliferation.

An administration official, speaking on condition on anonymity because negotiations on the department's spending bill have not yet been completed, confirmed that a decision had been made to concentrate on a non-nuclear bunker-buster.

Administration officials have contended the country must try to develop a nuclear warhead that could destroy deeply buried targets, including bunkers tunneled into solid rock. Potential adversaries increasingly are building hardened retreats deep underground, immune to conventional weapons, the officials said.

But Congress has been cool to the idea of a new nuclear warhead. The House blocked funding for the program, even though the Energy Department had requested only $4 million, scaling back earlier requests.

[...]

Domenici, chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Energy Department's budget, said the conferees had agreed to drop funding for the program at the request of the department's National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that oversees nuclear weapons programs.

[...]

"This is a true victory for a more rational nuclear policy," said Stephen Young, a senior analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear nonproliferation advocacy group. "The proposed weapon, more than 70 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, would have caused unparalleled collateral damage."

Last April a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that an earth-penetrating nuclear device would likely cause the same casualties as a surface burst if the weapons are of the same size. Such a bomb could cause from several thousand to 1 million casualties, depending on its yield and location, the panel said in a report requested by Congress.

[...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, one of Congress' most vocal opponents of the bunker-buster, has said the nuclear bunker-buster "sends the wrong signals to the rest of the world by reopening the nuclear door and beginning the testing and development of a new generation of nuclear weapons."

Incredible Charlie Rose interview with Joan Didion

I don't know why I've been so captivated with Joan Didion's recent book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," (I've posted here on it before, and here). I read the New York Times Magazine piece on it, and the excerpt from it, but I've yet to buy it, thinking, "Oh I'm young, and why do I want to think about death right now?"

And yet I keep circling back to it, like something is drawing me. I just couldn't make sense of it, but it felt like Didion's experience was a kind of deja vu, but for a life I've never lived, a past life maybe.

It just rang too familiar, and the familiarity doesn't begin with the book for me. It started when I found myself writing the obit ticker item on CNN Headline News when her husband, John Gregory Dunne passed away.

It was one of those days of relatively slow news, and story selection was pretty much up to me. Another ticker writer might have never put that particular obit on the air, but that was the peculiar aura of my tickers. I always tried to include stories outside that broadly conceived but often narrowly-executed perception of the lowest common denominator television audience. And, by that time, of course there was no way I would leave the obit of Joan Didion's husband out of the rotation. Unlike, say, Ted Williams's passing, it wasn't breaking news, but it was worthy of note, even if well over half the folks in the newsroom had never heard of either Didion or Dunne.

As I've written here before, at the time I felt a twinge of sadness for her, but I had no idea how symbiotic their relationship was. It spurred an odd interest I couldn't explain, until I suddenly discovered Dunne's books, which just happened to be on a topic I was researching at that time. So I read them, which again is neither here nor there. It was just research. I didn't glean anything pithy or amazing from them, as I have from the experience of reading some of Didion's essays.

And I currently have no life partner, so my interest is not born of a commonality, not that I would long for a relationship quite that symbiotic anyway. It would probably make me a bit bonkers, but for what I learned from the Charlie Rose interview with Didion tonight.

I joined the Charlie Rose show after it started, so I only gleaned this from the conversation, but I believe he was a friend of the family, or at least of Dunne. As came out in the interview, Didion had come to depend on Dunne to be a buffer between herself and the outside world, while Dunne was far more socially interactive on a daily basis.

Whether Rose knew the family well or not, he at least knew them as folks around New York City in the circles people who are well-known or literary move. Perhaps that accounts for the sensitivity of the remarkable interview. Rose handled every question and leading suggestion in exactly the right way, and drew Didion out with a slow progression of increasingly probing questions. The pace was exactly right on.

And why do we want to know the answers to these probing questions, why do we want to elucidate aspects that Didion develops in the book? The answer to that question is as quiet and crucial as the interview itself, which proved by its process how important the answers to the questions were, how important (I have come to believe) the book is. I think Rose said it is nominated for a National Book Award, and that with only being out a short time.

A memoir by a famous person of the life, death, and grieving process for a much-beloved partner is not in itself remarkable. Didion's perspective is perhaps more remarkable as she puts that all in the frame of "magical thinking," the delusions a normally rational person is quite happy to live with as a secret reality after such a loss. Like being unable to get rid of Dunne's shoes, because he'd need them when he came back, and so on.

But there is a larger subject to this book, something bigger to discover about ourselves than just pop psych reminiscences. It's about something abstract and maybe unnamed that flows around and through interactions when there is no subterfuge, no walls, few white lies or false fronts. Maybe it is intimacy taken to the -nth degree, and that might freak me out a bit if I had to live with it, but it was a relationship they both cherished even if they were joined at the hip. At least it approaches these things postmodernists belittle as non-existent: integrity and authenticity, and for that at least, I am envious.

It tries to pin down something that only becomes possible to name and identify by its absence. That is the thing that's the elusive real subject of Didion's book. Death and grief only give the occasion to note and identify it.

I know, I should just shut up and go read the book, and I will. I just couldn't help but be moved by this interview as well, an interview that could only have happened with the kind of trust Didion must have had for Rose. But I couldn't for the life of me tell you why I'm drawn to an experience that really touches no direct common note in my own life, except maybe that I've also experienced loss, or as Emily Dickinson says, "I've waded grief, whole pools of it."  Maybe that's enough.

Wired News does DragonCon

How to cover the biggest, wackiest sci-fi convention out there? I took my own shot at it a few years ago on CNN.com. I still like my take on things better (via Dante's "Inferno"), but a new take on this perennial story is definitely needed.

I went religiously for many years, living close enough for the welcome diversion, but once the novelty wore off, too much sameness from year to year started to give me that feeling of "been there, done that." I went back to September to find the story, because there's still something about that massive space for the joyously fringe that I miss.

Link: Wired News: Sci-Fi Fans Chase the DragonCon.

Sci-Fi Fans Chase the DragonCon 

By Annalee Newitz

02:00 AM Sep. 07, 2005 PT

ATLANTA -- At 10 a.m. Saturday, thousands of bleary-eyed science-fiction fans lined up on the streets outside the downtown Hyatt Regency. They were looking for fairies, and even more unlikely creatures.

Eventually the road filled with mysterious beings coated in sparkles and green paint, their gossamer wings floating in humid Southern air. They were followed by a troupe of mournful vampires, a couple of Spider-Mans, Aeon Flux, Superman, a fleet of Klingons on motorcycles, a mass of Harry Potters, assorted characters from Babylon 5 and of course an entire phalanx of stormtroopers marching more or less in formation behind a gaggle of Princess Leias.

[...]

Somewhere upward of 20,000 fans descend on Atlanta for this event every year, filling three massive hotels to share everything from their comic-book collections and home-brewed Lord of the Rings fan fiction to gigantic Transformer costumes they've spent months creating for the Masquerade Ball contest.

[...]

The dealers' room was a massive catacombs of booths packed with everything from T-shirts that say "Legolas is My House Elf" to Buck Rogers rocket pistol model kits.

[...]

A panel devoted to women in gaming brought an activist message to the convention, albeit with a fannish twist. Mur Lafferty, a longtime gamer and the brains behind top-ranked podcast Geek Fu Action Grip, urged women in the audience to fight the stereotype of the passive "gamer girlfriend" by taking leadership roles in games. "You can change men's perceptions of you by becoming a game master and telling them they'll be playing a game on your terms," she said.

On other panels, such as "Hacking 101," science fiction was set aside in favor of science fact. Learning Perl author Randal Schwartz talked about being arrested at Intel in the mid-1990s for using the software tool Crack to check the security of his company's password files. "I worry that we're going to see other frivolous convictions like mine in the world of peer-to-peer," he said.

[...]

Best of all were the late-night parties. At about 3 a.m. Sunday, Eric "Qenatlh" Koske shared "the most common Klingon joke."

"Is a Klingon warrior red?" he boomed. "No! He is green!" Suddenly this reporter was surrounded by laughing Klingons. "It's hard to explain to humans why that's funny," one said, raising his flagon of blood wine and drinking.

 

 

Stephen Colbert shoots, he scores!

I don't think to catch Comedy Central enough, the ascendancy of the Daily Show be damned. It is probably the best thing on TV right now, but I can never work out my schedule, so I just catch clips online.

I'll have to do that with Stephen Colbert now too.

Colbert, like Stewart, does fake news, and does so brilliantly. We are in an era of rich parody news, despite the early days of Saturday Night Live. The Onion is also indispensible.

But somebody gave me a link to this page of recent bits from Colbert's show, and I just about lost it. There are some bits here that are furking hysterical, and spot on! I couldn't help myself, I had to include links to them, before they fall off the "Recent Videos" page.

My all-time favorite so far is "Truthiness," which should be required listening for all journalists, but ranking right up there is the Stone Philips face off on the wonders of broadcast news "tease-writing," called "Let the Gravitas Begin."

Bookmark this page below and check it often if you are TV-schedule-challenged, like me!

Link: Comedy Central - Shows - The Colbert Report - Videos - Most Recent.

Good approach to citizen journalism

Here's a case where a citizen and a parent is taking issue with the local media coverage of a tax and bond issue, and may have discovered something fishy with the management (and election promotion issues) of an eight million dollar city pool issue in Missoula. Great job, Beth!

This shows what a little critical thinking and basic digging can turn up, and anyone can do it with many of the tools and records available online. Once upon a more idyllic time, all this information would have been clearly available in the public domain BEFORE the city bond issue was passed. But often when big developers have too much sway in underfunded municipal governments, it is the public interest that gets hidden under a bushel basket.

Link: It's a Missoula Life: The 50-Meter Pool Controversy.

The 50-Meter Pool Controversy

The Missoulian has covered this controversy, but in a way that leaves readers more confused than ever. How does that happen? How could it be covered differently?

The issue is pretty simple: Is the $8.1 million aquatics bond supposed to pay for a 50-meter pool? Or was that pool supposed to be paid for with private funds?

[...]

I looked for the paper trail. Cities don't pass million-dollar bonds without talking about it -- and cities don't talk about million-dollar bonds without someone keeping minutes of the meetings.

I quickly found the promotional materials Missoula Parks & Recreation prepared to convince voters they should tax themselves for this project. First was a flyer, and next was a slide show. Lo and behold, at the top of the page (in bold type), the flyer says this:

The Aquatics Bond would build a new indoor pool and family aquatic center at McCormick Park, a new 50-meter competitive pool and aquatic center at Playfair Park and four "splash decks" at Bonner, Marilyn, Westside and Franklin parks. (my emphasis)

Although this seems pretty darn clear, there is language suggesting just the opposite on the very same page. A sidebar outlining costs says that $1.4 million will be "pledged  to City Council by user groups and competitive aquatics advocates for the 50-meter pool." Although I would certainly argue that this flyer was misleading and confusing to voters, it still doesn't answer the underlying question: Was the pool supposed to be included or not? Who is in charge of that question, and when did they decide it?

[...]

read more here...

Archeological evidence of a spine found in a former incarnation of the State Department?

Now isn't this an interesting development?!

I'm always interested when GOP-linked sources find ways to say things that, if said by anyone on the left OR in the press, would bring reactionary outcries of bias from goosestepping armies of freeper dittoheads. It limits sourcing, limits the number of topics and issues and even questions that are allowed into the media "discussion."

What I mean to say is, I hesitated to post this almost without thinking, wondering to myself, hmmm, is this story is "too partisan" to cite? That is how automatic the fear-driven reaction is, the self-censorship I've developed in the past 4 years.

And then I looked again and saw that it was someone on the right making these charges, so I guess it isn't "partisan" to report on or want to discuss these issues after all. What a relief, eh?

What-It-Feels-Like-to-Be-In-The-Cowed-Media 101.

Link: Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal' - New York Times.

October 21, 2005

Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal'

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

The comments came in a speech Wednesday by Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Mr. Powell at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005. Speaking to the New America Foundation, an independent public-policy institute in Washington, Mr. Wilkerson suggested that secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.

[...]

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either." He was far more admiring of the president's father, whom he called "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

[...]