INANE HACK Tim Russert, by his own words deconstructed by Paul Waldman....

The cruel media god smiles on us: TIM RUSSERT's baloney (photo above) EXPOSED in detail by Paul Waldman, back-to-back with Eric Alterman's expose of Chris Slobber-ball Mathews! (see our previous post)

The great PAUL WALDMAN wrote the best-seller "Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You" which was once our pick as one of the three most important books in America.

Michael Lind's "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics" remains our top pick for "most important book in America this decade," for explaining the neo-con (academic/intellectual, pro-Israel, war-hawk and economic exploitation) alliance with neo-Confederate unrepetent pro-segregation autocrats; which explains why the Joe Lieberman wing of the "Demcoratic" Party sells Black, minority, and even White Democrat voters [see, "What's the Matter with Kansas"] down the river every two years, and also explains America's insane, colonial "BOMBS, BULLETS, TORTURE, EXTORTION, and PLUNDER... as a FIRST RESORT!" global foreign policy.

As the title of Mr. Waldman's "[What] the MEDIA DIDN'T TELL YOU" book implies, the American media have become CAPTIVE WHORES to the neo-con/neo-Confederate alliance that Mr. Lind exposes, even though Paul Waldman doesn't quite capture that full, majestic insanity of that neo-con/neo-Confederate alliance of-recent-enemies that Lind details.

(Mr. Lind documents how ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM, not to mention anti-semitism, are core elements of neo-Confederate ideology; see, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and even babbling faux-intellectual demagogue Newt Gingrich.) But Paul Waldman's book does do a magnificent take-down of how cherubic-faced FORMER DEMOCRAT staff aides Chris Mathews and TIM RUSSERT have now become such slavish, corporate whores to the corrupt house of lies that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and the Republican corporate media machine built.

We grovel in submission to our cruel media god, who gave us back-to-back Russert and Mathews exposes this week..

==========================

Tim Russert: Stop the Inanity
by Paul Waldman
October 31, 2007
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=tim_russert_stop_the_inanity

Russert passes for a "tough" interviewer by adopting a confrontational pose rather than asking genuinely challenging questions. Which is why he's a terrible moderator for our presidential debates.

Last month, near the end of the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, moderator Tim Russert -- known as "Washington's toughest interviewer" and perhaps the most influential journalist in America -- had one last chance to pin the candidates down with his legendary common sense, persistence, and no-bull style. This is what he asked, first to Barack Obama:

"There's been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values. I want to ask you a simple question. Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?"

When Obama finished his answer, Russert said to the other candidates, "I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds." Predictable banality ensued. A foreign visitor unfamiliar with our presidential campaigns might have scratched her head and said, "This is how you decide who will lead your country?"

Indeed it is, because the process is controlled by Tim Russert and people like him. Russert's Bible question encapsulates everything wrong with him, and with our political coverage more generally. It seeks to make candidates look bad rather than finding out something important about them (if you want to explore a candidate's religious beliefs, you don't do it in pop-quiz form and give them just ten seconds to answer). It substitutes the personal anecdote for the policy position, the sound-bite for the substantive answer. It distills the debate into a series of allegedly symbolic, supposedly meaningful moments that can be replayed.

This type of debate question is not about what the candidate believes and would actually do in office, but about how clever the moderator is for cornering the candidate. And above all, it takes a genuinely relevant matter (a candidate's view of the universe) and crams it through a channel by which the thoughtful candidate will be pilloried and the shallow, pandering, overly rehearsed candidate will garner praise.

I have a fantasy that at one of these moments, a candidate will say, "You know what, Tim, I'm not going to answer that question. This is serious business. And you, sir, are a disgrace. You have in front of you a group of accomplished, talented leaders, one of whom will in all likelihood be the next president of the United States. You can ask them whatever you want. And you choose to engage in this ridiculous gotcha game, thinking up inane questions you hope will trick us into saying something controversial or stupid. Your fondest hope is that the answer to your question will destroy someone's campaign. You're not a journalist, you're the worst kind of hack, someone whose efforts not only don't contribute to a better informed electorate, they make everyone dumber. So no, I'm not going to stand here and try to come up with the most politically safe Bible verse to cite. Is that the best you can do?"

But we shouldn't hold our breath waiting for a candidate to say that, particularly not to Russert, who stands atop the insider media establishment. And like every skillful and experienced Washington hand, Russert knows that the way to the top is to pretend that for all the Georgetown cocktail parties you attend, for all the money you make, for all your heart flutters when the powerful treat you with deference, in truth you may be in Washington but you're not of it. No, deep down you're just a regular guy from the wrong side of the tracks, standing up to the effete swells of the ruling class.

As much as any politician, Russert has constructed a persona for the benefit of the public, an identity meant to give him the authority that his actual work might not. Like most well-designed personas, it has a basis in truth but has been polished and honed to a fine sheen.

The core -- if not the entirety -- of this persona can be summed up in the word Russert invokes at every opportunity, wielded like a talisman of authenticity: Buffalo. Buffalo, where the salt of the Earth trudge home from their exhausting blue-collar jobs, where the cheap beer is guzzled in corner bars, where the grime sits heavy on the walls of crumbling buildings, and the mills have all left town. Buffalo, where the young Russert got to know the real Americans on whose behalf he now speaks. Buffalo, which can bestow working-class credibility, even on a man who makes a reported $5 million a year and spends his summers among the decidedly elite at his second home on Nantucket. Although Buffalo is not technically in the "heartland," for Russert it functions the same way as the country's middle does for Republicans, as a shorthand of virtue, a geographical location out of which springs the values of modesty, piety, industriousness, and, most of all, the lack of privilege.

A look at Russert's press coverage shows how the image is reinforced. Peppered among articles chock full of admiring references to his allegedly tough interviewing style, one occasionally finds profiles like one from 2001 in Reader's Digest titled, "Our Man In Washington: Tim Russert's blue-collar smarts give politicians no place to hide." It had all the incisiveness the magazine is known for:

Unawed by power, unwavering in his interview technique, Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press, is tough and plain-spoken, with one foot placed squarely in the working-class neighborhood in upstate New York that he grew up in.
"Tim never forgets where he came from," says his sister Betty Buckenroth. "He carries Buffalo around in his bones."

And it shows. With cheeks where his jaw line should be, and the overall look of a man who never met a steak he didn't like, Russert is that rarest of creatures in national politics -- an average American inside the Beltway. Our man in Washington.

I feel more represented already. "Tim Russert is the anchor as everyman, the big talker with the street smarts, the man who hobnobs with presidents but aims his delivery at the working stiffs," wrote Howard Kurtz, with typical skepticism, in a 2004 piece in the Washington Post. Like many a celebrity profiler, Kurtz casts the most mundane act, when undertaken by a famous person, as an almost heroic manifestation of extraordinary character. Marveling at the fact that when Russert interviewed Yogi Berra, he got the Hall of Famer's autograph for his son and father, Kurtz writes that the event "makes clear that Tim Russert, media superstar, hasn't forgotten where he came from."

If an interviewer forgets to bring up Buffalo, Russert surely will. Asked by Kurtz how he avoids getting an inflated ego when he spends time interviewing presidents (a softball question designed just for Russert; try to imagine Kurtz asking the same thing of Tom Brokaw), Russert responded, "If you come from Buffalo, everything else is easy. Walking backwards to school, for a mile in the snow, grounds you for life." When Bill Moyers asked Russert whether he relied too much on the word of Bush administration officials during the run-up to the Iraq War, Russert replied, "Look, I'm a blue-collar guy from Buffalo. I know who my sources are. I work 'em very hard. It's the mid-level people that tell you the truth." Any questions about his being too close to the establishment are met with "Blue-collar! Buffalo!", brandished like a cross before the vampire of accountability. Russert may be the only journalist in America who considers all his conversations with government officials off the record unless they request otherwise -- an extraordinary gift to the powerful and an inversion of ordinary journalistic practice -- but that doesn't make him an insider. Because he's from Buffalo.

And one easy way to bring his hometown into any episode of Meet the Press is to invoke the Buffalo Bills, which Russert does again, and again, and yet again. It's his way of saying, "See, I'm just a regular guy -- I like football! And not only that, I have a favorite team, the one from my blue-collar home town!" That Russert no doubt actually prefers the Bills to other teams makes it no less of an affectation.

If nothing else, at least we're deep enough into the presidential campaign that we don't have to suffer through Russert's endless "Are you running for president? Are you? Are you?" quizzing of potential candidates. But that's what passes for being a "tough" interviewer these days: the pose of confrontation rather than genuinely challenging questions, the query designed to embarrass rather than enlighten, the worship of, rather than the challenge to, conventional wisdom.

The two parties' nominees will be decided three months from now, and we can be sure that in that time, at least one or two candidates will have their campaigns upended by the answer they gave to an absurd question, delivered by Tim Russert or someone like him, about what their favorite Bible verse is, or whom they want to win the Super Bowl, or what kind of beer they like. "Aha!" the reporters will shout, as though they actually unearthed something revealing on which the race for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth should be decided. The one whose tiny little mind devised the question will be praised to the stars for his journalistic acumen.

And they'll continue to wonder why so many Americans are so cynical about our electoral process.

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.
[ed note: More importantly, Paul Waldman is the author of "Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You" available in excerpts on-line here at GoogleBooks
This book was once on our "Top 3 most important books in America today" early in the Bush administration; but Mr. Bush's DELUGE of LIES, FOLLIES, criminal conduct, war atrocities, and abject, in-your-face corruption has been so sweeping, that there are now DOZENS of books trying to capture the billions and trillions of dollars worth of Bush's lies, and Mr. Waldman's compilation is all but forgotten.)

Chris Mathews' MAN-CRUSHES, in inglorious, spittle-flecked detail..

Once again, we pay homage to the great MEDIAwhoresONLINE.com, who came before us and did a far better job than we of exposing the MAN CRUSH HYSTERICS of our bought-and-sold media whores.
If we recall correctly, CHRIS MATHEWS got his start on MSNBC's slobber-fest 'HARBDBALL' 'news' show (otherwise known as "SLOBBER-BALL" for the soft-pitch wet-kiss questions Mr. Mathews tosses to his man-crush manly Republican idols) helping Republicans make a CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS over the President Bill Clinton affair with Monica Lewinsky. Chris Mathews did his level best to make MONICA's EVERY BREATH, HER EVERY GESTURE, HER (his) EVERY STAIN on her blue dress INTO NATIONAL NEWS! and along the way helped pave the way for the FOx 'news' era of bubble-headed, hysterical, content-free 'news' in America. (If it bleeds it leads; Fox and its viewers love nothing better than celebrity scandal.)
We can't recall if Chris "won" his "MEDIA WHORE OF YEAR" award(s), against very stiff competition, before or after Bush Junior came to national attention (starting Mathews' many infatuations with the eldest Bush sibling), but we are sure that Mr. Mathews would have been nominated for "MEDIA WHORE OF THE YEAR" award (MWOTY) for his gushing over Bush's codpiece and manly manner on that "Mission Accomplished" carrier deck episode, alone.
Our great thanks to ERIC ALTERMAN, for braving the spray of Chris Mathews' deadly spittle to document Mathews' many and sundry, various, two-timing man crushes.......

======================================

The Many Man-Crushes of Chris Matthews
Eric Alterman, "The Liberal Media"
posted March 22, 2007 (April 9, 2007 issue)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/alterman


Chris Matthews is not known as a particularly right-wing television talk-show host nor, by the standards of the profession, a particularly foolish one. NBC considers him to be such an asset, it gave him his own Sunday program, in addition to the nightly cable shoutfest Hardball.

Within MSNBC, Matthews represents the "center" between the right-wing Tucker Carlson and the taken-for-a-liberal Keith Olbermann. It's worth taking a closer look, therefore, at just what passes for classy, centrist and sane in today's Fox-driven cable cosmos.

Like anyone who spends much time on live TV, Chris Matthews tends to say a lot of silly things. (I did too during the two years I was so employed.) But patterns and passions tell a tale, and those exhibited by Matthews are revealing. Like Elvis, Matthews can't help falling in love. And also like the King--who developed a thing for both Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover late in life--the object of Matthews's affection is invariably a tough-talking, self-styled Republican macho-man. And when he gets going on one of these guys, his style of punditry owes more to, say, Tiger Beat or Teen People than the Trilateral Commission.

Going back to 9/11, Matthews found himself blown away not by Bush's political or military response but by his ability to throw a baseball. He compared the man to--I kid you not--Ernest Hemingway. "There are some things you can't fake," he explained breathlessly. "Either you can throw a strike from sixty feet or you can't. Either you can rise to the occasion on the mound at Yankee Stadium with 56,000 people watching or you can't. On Tuesday night, George W. Bush hit the strike zone in the House that Ruth Built.... This is about knowing what to do at the moment you have to do it--and then doing it. It's about that 'grace under pressure' that Hemingway gave as his very definition of courage."

And remember that now-infamous Mission Accomplished moment? True, Matthews did not join his guest G. Gordon Liddy in admiring--still not kidding--the President's pretend penis, but he was no less focused on Bush's fashion statements. "He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West," he cooed. "We're proud of our President. Americans love having a guy as President, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton.... Women like a guy who's President. Check it out."

Matthews's man-crush on Bush continued longer than that of most of the mainstream media, leading him, for instance, to assert that "everybody sort of likes the President, except for the real whack-jobs," at a moment when the percentage of Americans telling New York Times/CBS pollsters that they "liked" Bush had fallen to 37 percent.

But nobody, save Fred Barnes, thinks Bush is cool anymore, and so Matthews has had to go cruising for a new crush. For a while it looked as if he and John McCain would hook up. "A lot of people," he explained coyly, naming no names, "like the cut of John McCain's jib, his independence, his maverick reputation." This led Matthews to declare the election all but over, announcing that as far as he was concerned, McCain "deserves the presidency."

This was just a warmup, however, for Chris's latest flame: the "perfect candidate"--the one who "looks like a President," who "acts and talks like a President," who "rises to the occasion" and is "the one tough cop who was standing on the beat when we got hit last time and stood up and took it," and who, to top it all off, got "that pee smell out of that subway." Say one thing about Chris Matthews, once he switches loyalties, he's really loyal. He got so mad at that meanie Hillary Clinton for wanting to be President against his new love, Rudy G, he gave a big fat warning to her homies about her husband. Again, I promise I'm not kidding. When Hillary staffer Ann Lewis showed up on Hardball, she was instructed three times by its host that Bill Clinton had "better watch it." And when former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe came on to promote his book, Matthews told him six times that Clinton had better "behave himself," lest his "social life" become a "distraction."

Just what so worried Matthews could only be inferred, as he was, like, too shy to say what he really meant. It's possible his concern was sartorial in nature, as the candidates' clothing has proven a Matthews obsession in presidential elections past. In 1999, for instance, he grew obsessed with Al Gore's suit buttons. "What could that possibly be saying to women voters, three buttons?" he asked a guest. "Is there some hidden Freudian deal here or what? I don't know, I mean, Navy guys used to have buttons on their pants." Indeed, Matthews thought the button development so significant, he returned to it five nights in a row.

Certainly Matthews couldn't have meant Bill Clinton's sex life. First off, it's Hillary who's running this time. And when it comes to screwing around while in office, well, the ex-President is the proverbial pisher compared with Mr. Pee Smell Out of the Subway. While serving as Mayor of New York, Rudy moved in with a couple of gay guys to facilitate cheating on his wife, and let the mother of his children know he wanted a divorce by holding a press conference. This led Mrs. Giuliani (Donna Hanover) to complain about yet another affair he'd apparently conducted with a member of his staff and to seek a restraining order to keep his new girlfriend (now wife) out of Gracie Mansion.

One would think, as my colleague at Media Matters Jamison Foser has so sagely noted, "On the distraction scale, that would have to rate pretty darn high."

Can this romance be saved? Too early to tell, but perhaps Rudy shouldn't be picking out silverware patterns just yet. The race is still wide open. Newt's got that handsome head of hair, and Fred Thompson, well, the guy is practically George Clooney--for a Republican. And hey, let's not forget Mitt Romney. He may not be a credible conservative or even (really) a Christian, but according to Chris, "He's got a great chin, I've noticed."

Fox 'news' tries to CENSOR GOP DEBATE video as THEIR PRIVATE PROPERTY!

How pathetic America has become, just as Russian cops beat and extort motorist to suppplement their meager pay. In this case, can anyone IMAGINE Fox or any other network trying to copyright the LINCOLN-DOUGLAS debates, as PRIVATE PROPERTY for the exclusive use of the network???

America- the nation founded on throwing East India Tea company ROYAL GOVT. MONOPOLY tea into Boston Harbor, is now a nation where OUR PRESIDENTIAL POLITICAL DEBATES are OWNED by an Australian media tycoon robber-baron!
(To be precise, Australian union-buster Rupert Murdoch owns Fox 'news,' the network that dominates America's right-wing media empire, while he simultaneously broadcasts Chinese Communist propaganda news on behalf of that Communist government.)

========================================

Fox Bars Candidates From Using Its Images
By Marc Santora
October 26, 2007
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/fox-says-all-candidates-to-stop-using-images-from-news-channel/index.html?hp


The Fox News Channel sent notices to the campaigns of the leading Republican presidential candidates ordering them to stop using images from their Fox appearances in their campaign ads. The notices were sent out after the network was criticized for singling out only Senator John McCain’s campaign in barring use of the images.
Earlier in the week, Fox had demanded that the McCain campaign cancel an advertisement that prominently featured his performance in a debate Sunday night that Fox News had sponsored. The advertisement featured a video clip of Mr. McCain’s shot at Senator Hillary Clinton for pushing a $1 million earmark for a museum commemorating the Woodstock festival in 1969, ending with the biting observation that he was “tied up” during the concert. Mr. McCain was in a North Vietnamese prison at the time.
Earlier tonight, the Web site Talking Points Memo pointed out that the campaigns of Mr. McCain’s rivals, specifically Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney, made liberal use of footage from Fox images to promote their candidates, but had not been told to remove the images.

“Our legal team has been alerted and there will be cease and desist orders,” said a Fox spokesperson.
Rival campaigns have privately suggested that they believe Fox unfairly skews its coverage in Mr. Giuliani’s favor, citing his long history with Roger Ailes, who runs the cable outlet. Mr. Ailes, a former Republican operative, worked as a media consultant on Mr. Giuliani’s first, failed bid for mayor of New York City in 1989 and the two have remained close ever since.
Mr. McCain, appearing on Fox immediately after Sunday’s debate, even joked with one of the hosts, Sean Hannity, about what he saw as his obvious support for Mr. Giuliani, without mentioning his rival by name. Mr. Hannity, who is the host of one of the most popular shows on the channel, begged off the assertion, saying he does not support any particular candidate.

Major Media's coverage of IRAN reflects NEO-CON, White House INSANE DISCONNECT from reality....

The fact that this commentary was published in Newsweek (once considered "the most liberal" of the major weekly news magazines) doesn't for a minute minimize the effort by the WASHINGTON POST (WP group owns Newsweek), NEW YORK TIMES, and all the major networks to echo and reflect the Bus administration/Neo-Con call for a WIDER WAR IN THE MIDEAST.

---------------------------------------

Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?
Conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
Oct 29, 2007 Issue
http://www.newsweek.com/id/57346

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea's Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.

We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.

The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for." Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're mad.

Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

Burma's DEATH and PUNISHMENT slave-labor camps proceed apace, as US media IGNORES the atrocities...

The Poor craven ghouls of the US "major media" - there are no FLASHY VISUALS and graphics of BURMA's DEATH/PUNISHMENT camps.... so, "BACK TO COVERING BRITTENY and OJ!" say our shameless, craven, ghoulish, worship-money-over-all-else media whores...

================================================

Burma's 'new life' camps evoke memories of Pol Pot
By Kim Sengupta
Published: 20 October 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3078919.ece
Burma is a "land of prisons" with thousands of human rights activists being sent off to brutal "new life" camps after being arrested during night raids and convicted in secret trials, a senior British diplomatic source has said.

Monks who led the pro-democracy campaign are among the disappeared. Some are believed to have been beaten close to death in custody, while the fate of many others remain unknown. Roads to the monasteries have been cut and very few monks are now seen in public.

The account of retribution which has followed last month's violence came from the official who is closely acquainted with the unfolding situation in Burma. The "new life" camps, echoes of "re-education centres" set up by Pol Pot in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, are away from the capital, Rangoon, and surrounded by tales of savage punishment, he said.

Those considered by the regime to be leaders of the protest are believed to have received sentences of up to 20 years imprisonment.

And tales have begun to emerge of mistreatment in the jails and "new life" camps, with the monks in particular being targeted for severe abuse. They are being held in rooms where there are no toilets and where the walls are covered in excrement. They have been routinely beaten and soaked in ice cold water, with the interrogators often stripping robes from the clerics because this supposedly expiates them of any sins over what they had done.

The diplomat said yesterday that the regime is trying to portray a scene of normality, but "very serious abuses" are going on behind the scenes. "There are huge night-time sweeps. They have scooped up hundreds of people. There is heavy security in the parts of town where many of the dissidents come from. A hundred activists have been tried this week in closed courts in Mandalay, while another thousand have been brought before special courts in Rangoon."

Figures released by the regime regarding the number of dead and incarcerated cannot be believed, the official said. According to official numbers, of the 3,000 people arrested during the protests only 500 remain in custody, but the real total of those in detention was likely to be up to 2,500. The official death toll is 10; the real figure, was "many, many multiples" of that, the diplomat added.

Living conditions for the population continue to be dire in a part of Asia which is going through an economic boom. Fifty per cent of children do not have access to primary school education, while 30 per cent live below the poverty line. Communication with the outside world has been curtailed by closing down of internet services and sheer practical difficulties in a country where a mobile phone costs $2,000 (£975).

While British officials do not believe there is any immediate prospect of a repeat of last month's mass protests, the diplomat said signs of unrest have continued. There have been reports of rocks and bricks being thrown at police, while in Rangoon there has been booing at what was supposed to be a pro-government rally, even though the crowd had been surrounded by armed police.

There was deep outrage, said the diplomat, at the way the monks had been treated, which even extended to parts of the army and the government.

"The population is traumatised and for the moment, they are licking their wounds, but they are determined to carry on showing their resistance," the official said.

Jewish-owned New York Times cheerleading for IRAN war: CENSORS military officers who oppose expansion of war and other negative news.....

THE SULZBERGER owned NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST are up to their foul tricks again: CENSORING, from front page coverage (where it counts) NEGATIVE NEWS about the Iraq war - INCLUDING MILITARY COMBAT OFFICERS _OPPOSED_ to 'the surge' and other forms of EXPANDING THE WAR... in favor of BELLICOSE RHETORIC leading to expansion of the Iraq war, and BOMBING or other attacks on IRAN. Just as the whore Times and whoe Post once trumpeted "IRAQ WMD!" stories in 2002 and 2003 under the pen of JUDITH MILLER and other 'official' Times or Post WHITE HOUSE STENOGRAPHERS...

#1. Report Confirms 'E&P' Claims of Upsurge in 'Noncombat' Deaths Among U.S. Troops

By E&P Staff
Published: October 16, 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003659130

NEW YORK For several weeks, E&P has documented what appears to be a surge in non-combat deaths among U.S. troops in Iraq. These fatalities come from vehicle accidents, illness, suicides and friendly fire. The military always states that they are under investigation and it is local newspapers that usually first get word, often from families, about what might have really happened.
Now today comes confirmation of these concerns......

=======================================
MSM [NEW YORK TIMES and Washington Post] Buries Military Dissent on Iraq
By Robert Parry
October 17, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/101707.html

Last summer when two pro-Iraq War pundits returned from a Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq, the New York Times gave them prime op-ed space to re-invent themselves as harsh war critics who had been won over by George W. Bush’s “surge."

The deceptively packaged op-ed by Brookings analysts Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack – which then was amplified by their many appearances on TV news shows – proved very influential in shaping the congressional war debate. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The NYT’s New Pro-War Propaganda.” ]

By contrast, a few weeks later, the Times editors buried a report by seven U.S. non-commissioned officers who were on 15-month tours in Iraq and offered a more negative assessment. The Times’ editors stuck their account, entitled “The War as We Saw It", at the back of the Aug. 19 “Week in Review” section.

(Two of those soldiers – Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, 26, and Omar Mora, 28 – have since died in Iraq.)

Now, senior Washington Post editors, who have been major Iraq War enthusiasts from the beginning, have given even more dismissive treatment to an anti-war op-ed written by 12 former Army captains who served in Iraq.

On Oct. 16, the fifth anniversary of Bush’s authorization to use force in Iraq, the Post’s editors accepted the article from the captains but did not deign to publish it on the newspaper’s influential op-ed page. The article, entitled “The Real Iraq We Knew,” was consigned to the Post’s Web site.

The Post’s editors did find room on their Oct. 16 op-ed page for articles about a successful movie producer, the future of Estonia, political orthodoxy on the campaign trail, Turkey’s touchiness about the century-old slaughter of Armenians, and the need to provide more assistance to veterans.

Not to disparage any of those stories, but one might have thought that the on-ground observations of 12 commissioned officers of the U.S. military on a topic as important as the Iraq War would justify bumping one of the other pieces.

As a reader of the Post newspaper every morning, I was unaware that the article by the 12 former captains even existed until I happened to catch a reference to it on a radio talk show.

For those, like me, who read the print newspaper and thus missed the op-ed, you can find the original by clicking here. Since the mainstream media (or MSM) doesn't seem to find skeptical Iraq War views from Iraq War veterans very interesting, I ’ve also re-posted the article below:

The Real Iraq We Knew
By 12 former Army captains
Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2007

Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.

As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out.

What does Iraq look like on the ground? It's certainly far from being a modern, self-sustaining country. Many roads, bridges, schools and hospitals are in deplorable condition. Fewer people have access to drinking water or sewage systems than before the war. And Baghdad is averaging less than eight hours of electricity a day.

Iraq's institutional infrastructure, too, is sorely wanting. Even if the Iraqis wanted to work together and accept the national identity foisted upon them in 1920s, the ministries do not have enough trained administrators or technicians to coordinate themselves. At the local level, most communities are still controlled by the same autocratic sheiks that ruled under Saddam. There is no reliable postal system. No effective banking system. No registration system to monitor the population and its needs.

The inability to govern is exacerbated at all levels by widespread corruption. Transparency International ranks Iraq as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers.

Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq's oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq's reconstruction. Yet holding people accountable has proved difficult. The first commissioner of a panel charged with preventing and investigating corruption resigned last month, citing pressure from the government and threats on his life.

Against this backdrop, the U.S. military has been trying in vain to hold the country together. Even with "the surge," we simply do not have enough soldiers and marines to meet the professed goals of clearing areas from insurgent control, holding them securely and building sustainable institutions.

Though temporary reinforcing operations in places like Fallujah, An Najaf, Tal Afar, and now Baghdad may brief well on PowerPoint presentations, in practice they just push insurgents to another spot on the map and often strengthen the insurgents' cause by harassing locals to a point of swayed allegiances. Millions of Iraqis correctly recognize these actions for what they are and vote with their feet -- moving within Iraq or leaving the country entirely. Still, our colonels and generals keep holding on to flawed concepts.

U.S. forces, responsible for too many objectives and too much "battle space," are vulnerable targets. The sad inevitability of a protracted draw-down is further escalation of attacks -- on U.S. troops, civilian leaders and advisory teams. They would also no doubt get caught in the crossfire of the imminent Iraqi civil war.

Iraqi security forces would not be able to salvage the situation. Even if all the Iraqi military and police were properly trained, equipped and truly committed, their 346,000 personnel would be too few. As it is, Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we're gone.

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command. This is either what did not get passed on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore. While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.

America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.

This column was written by 12 former Army captains: Jason Blindauer served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Elizabeth Bostwick served in Salah Ad Din and An Najaf in 2004. Jeffrey Bouldin served in Al Anbar, Baghdad and Ninevah in 2006. Jason Bugajski served in Diyala in 2004. Anton Kemps served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Kristy (Luken) McCormick served in Ninevah in 2003. Luis Carlos Montalván served in Anbar, Baghdad and Nineveh in 2003 and 2005. William Murphy served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Josh Rizzo served in Baghdad in 2006. William "Jamie" Ruehl served in Nineveh in 2004. Gregg Tharp served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Gary Williams served in Baghdad in 2003.

Daily Howler deconstructs the NY Times' millionaire-punditocracy DUMBING DOWN of American journalism and politics....

In our previous post, we highlighted the great "Good Germans Among US" op-ed by FRANK RICH at the New York Times; how Mr. Rich is the first well known writer or commentator we have seen to state the obvious: that the Bush-Cheney White House's TORTURE and INTERROGATION and SUMMARY ARREST powers the claim in the "war on terra" are IDENTICAL to the KBY/GESTAPO arrest, incarcertaion, and execution powers of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, (duh)! (According to the Bush-Cheney White House, the arrest and detention of Terror Suspects are "state secrets," as is the fate of those suspects killed by brutalization or execution at "secret locations" whose very disclosure would harm the "war on terra.")
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html

Unfortunately, the great DailyHowler.com reminds us that NEW YORK TIMES columnist Mr. FRANK RICH had NO SMALL ROLE in bringing about THIS KBG/GESTPO-esque nightmare in America: read here to see how Mr. Rich equated Vice President Gore's long record as a public servant with Texas Governor George W. Bush's record of entitlement for the wealthy sons of oil-barons and former presidents.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh060706.shtml
For an example of Frank Rich's scornful, derisive reporting, note (halfway down the page) that Vice President Gore supported a PATIENT'S BILL OF RIGHTS that would take health-care decisions OUT of the hands of Insurance executives, and put those decisions in the hands of doctors and patients. Texas Governor Bush is able to execute a BAIT & SWITCH: he CONFLATES a typical Republican high-sounding bill, with the Dingell-Norwood bill that would ACTUALLY PROVIDE PATIENT's RIGHTS.

FRANK RICH _ALLOWS_ this misperception to stand uncontested in his (Rich's) put-down of Gore's position......

NY Times: "White House PUMPING OUT FOG of FEAR & DISINFORMATION" re surveillance & war-on-terra powers. YA THINK??!

In a MASTERPIECE of UNDERSTATEMENT HYPCOCRISY, the New York Times notices... the Bush administration "PUMPING OUT A FOG of FEAR and DISINFORMATION" to push its agenda through Congress (and against the American people) this year.

YA THINK??! Just to set the record straight, ARTHUR SULZBERGER, owner/publisher of the New York Times, gave FREE REIGN to Right-Wing Likudnik chickenhawk WILLIAM SAFIRE - FORMER, UNREPETENT NIXON SPEECHWRITER - to TRASH the Clinton-Gore administration, Safire's callow columns including his infamous "INDICTMENTS WILL BE HANDED DOWN THIS WEEK" (against, Mr. Safire assured us, Bill or Hillary Clinton, for any of 1,000 pre-Monica offenses), or Safire's even more assinine column, headlined thusly in Mr. Sulzberger's Times, "HILLARY IS A CONGENITAL LIAR." (Note: "congenital" implies a genetic defect apparent at birth. This editorial smear of Mr. Safire's echoes the Nazi propaganda smear that "all Jews are born 'congenital liars'.")

Speaking of, ILLEGAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE (SPYING, with NO OVERSIGHT, by the dictators of government over the entire American populace) is only the half of it. Today's great op-ed by one of the Times' handful of honest commentators, Frank Rich, finally gets to the crux of the matter: that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the US government are demanding KGB / GESTAPO powers to round up, detain, torture, and/or kill any "detainees" they so desire, merely by labelling said detainees "terrorist suspects!" and making the documents regarding their arrest/torture/execution into "STATE SECRETS". America has been truly "DUMBED DOWN" - made incredibly stupid - if we don't realize that Bush-Cheney are requesting exactly those GESTAPO/SS DEATH CAMP/KGB death camp powers.

Well, at least the TIMES, and their AIPAC (Likud/neo-con warmongers) cohorts, FINALLY NOTICE that ANN COULTER likes Jews no more more than she like Muslim terrarists, female voters, 9-11 widows, or anti-war Iraq combat veterans.

Maybe there is hope for the New York Slimes after all - better late than never in the race to the Right-Wing Apocalypse!

-------------------------------------------

FRANK RICH, nyt op-ed: "THE GOOD GERMANS AMONG US"
14 October 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “THIS GOVERNMENT DOES NOT TORTURE PEOPLE" [Bush lied.] Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.
By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago

=========================================

Spies, Lies and FISA
New York Times unsigned (editorial board) Editorial
Published: October 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14sun1.html


As Democratic lawmakers try to repair a deeply flawed bill on electronic eavesdropping, the White House is pumping out the same fog of fear and disinformation it used to push the bill through Congress this summer. President Bush has been telling Americans that any change would deny the government critical information, make it easier for terrorists to infiltrate, expose state secrets, and make it harder “to save American lives.”

There is no truth to any of those claims. No matter how often Mr. Bush says otherwise, there is also no disagreement from the Democrats about the need to provide adequate tools to fight terrorists. The debate is over whether this should be done constitutionally, or at the whim of the president.

......Ever since 9/11, we have watched Republican lawmakers help Mr. Bush shred the Constitution in the name of fighting terrorism. We have seen Democrats acquiesce or retreat in fear. It is time for that to stop.

Washington Post LEADS the media WHORES in Snarky TRASHING of Al Gore...

THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN! The LIARS, TRAITORS, THIEVES, and COWARDLY CHARACTER ASSASSINS of the WASHINGTON WHORE POST are out there LYING for fun and profit... continuing the Right-Wing march to turn America into an electorally disenfranchised, economically segregated third-world Banana Republic dictatorship.....

MSNBC's ALEX WITT joins the Gore trashing: first she snidely tries to tease up the SNL spoof of Vice President Gore's "trophy awards" as being THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS about Gore's Nobel Prize, and then she makes conversation with CNN's reporter at the Bush residence in Texas, making CHAT seem more important than General Sanchez's recent media accusations that Bush's Secretary of War, Donald Rumsfeld, ORDERED SYSTEMATIC TORTURE and abuse of Iraqi prisoners WHEREVER they were captured and held by US forces in Iraq, and that the Bush-Cheney White House was guilty of INCOMPETENCE in planning, executing, and overseeing that war.
Ms. Witt - you are a CHEAP TALKING BIMBO BLONDE NEWS ANCHOR of the exact sort that musician Don Henley wrote about in his song about media whores, Dirty Laundry

I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something, something I can use
People love it when you lose, they love dirty laundry

Well, I could've been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear, give us dirty laundry
The Bubble headed bleach-blonde, comes on at five....
She will tell you about the 'plane crash, with a gleam in her eyes."

In a related story, Jeffry Feldman at HuffingtonPost catches this NY Times Bob Herbert commentary, Herbert noticing the grim truth: that the American media TRASHED Al Gore in 2000 based on Gore's personality, not policies or leadership, even though Texas Governor George W. Bush had far more "character" and personality shortcomings than the Vice President who actually went to Vietnam as a war correspondent (Mr. Bush infamously ducked out of his Vietnam war era Texas Air National Guard duty, never even reporting for a make-work assignment outside of Texas at an Alabama ANG station, after then Lt. Bush _refused_ to take an Air Force flight physical exam as ordered as part of his million-dollar F-102 flight training.)

In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds. Mr. Gore was taken to task for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes. It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent. We've paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn't seem to know up from down. He's hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He's blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt. I could go on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html

=====================================

Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again

By Robert Parry
October 13, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/101307.html

When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore during Campaign 2000.

That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.

But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.
Lies and distortions about Al Gore remain an easy political commodity to sell, as we have seen in the renewed assault on Gore in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
As the news spread about the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore’s work publicizing the threat from global warming, both the right-wing media and major news outlets geared up to hype criticism of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in a ruling by an obscure English judge.
Hours before the Nobel Prize announcement, the Washington Post ran a news story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/11/AR2007101102134.html [by Post minion Mary Jordan]
quoting High Court Judge Michael Burton as detecting “nine errors” in the documentary and asserting that the alleged mistakes “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.”

Burton ruled that English schools could show the film but only with a cautionary advisory for students.

Burton’s ruling became a cause celebre for the American Right’s powerful media, which used it to discredit both Gore and the movement seeking to stop global warming. Mainstream news outlets, such as CNN, quickly fell into line, citing Burton’s ruling almost every time Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was mentioned on Oct. 12.

Right-wing Internet postings soon added the word “significant” between the words “nine” and “errors,” albeit without quotes around those three words together.

Lo and behold, on Oct. 13, the Washington Post ran a snarky editorial about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize claiming that Burton’s ruling had found “nine significant errors” – now put together in quotes. The editorial faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”

For his part, Gore has sought to play down the significance of Burton’s ruling, much as he tried to finesse press misstatements about him during Campaign 2000. Rather than confronting false quotes then about him claiming to have “invented the Internet” and to be the one who “started” the Love Canal clean-up, Gore tried to make light of the misunderstandings so he wouldn’t be further bashed as “defensive.”

Similarly now, Gore’s spokesman Kalee Kreider cited the positive side of Burton’s ruling, saying Gore was “gratified that the courts verified that the central argument of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by the scientific community.” [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2007]

However, like the “invented the Internet” canard and the press misquotes about Love Canal, Burton’s ruling quickly became the supposedly definitive judgment in dismissing the Gore documentary as the “Inconvenient Untruth.”

Who Is Judge Burton?

Yet, regardless of where the Post editorial writers lifted the phrase “nine significant errors” – clearly not from their own news story – the more significant question should be: Why is Judge Burton suddenly the arbiter of truth on the complicated subject of global warming and on Gore’s lectures about the topic.

Burton, in his early 60s, is best known as an “employment appeal tribunal judge.” Though his career has attracted little public notice, he earned praise from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National Party for issuing a ruling in 2005 that applied the nation’s Race Relations Act “to cover the racial rights of White people.”

Hailing what it called Burton’s history-making ruling, the BNP said, “This now means that any organisations or companies that discriminate against a member of the British National Party are guilty of anti-white racism.” [BNP statement on Aug. 10, 2005]

Burton’s criticisms of Gore’s power-point presentation also read more like quibbles than anything “significant.”

At one point, for instance, Gore shows a photo of flooding on a Pacific island and in reference to rising sea levels states, “That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”

Gore’s brief remark doesn’t spell out exactly which islands he was referring to or whether the evacuations were permanent or temporary.

But Burton took Gore to task over the sentence. As recounted by the Telegraph (U.K.), Burton’s ruling states that “An Inconvenient Truth” claims that low-lying Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but that there is no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

While Gore’s single sentence could be criticized as imprecise or confusing, Burton is not entirely correct either.

The leaders of Tuvalu, a string of islands between Hawaii and Australia, announced in 2001 that they had no choice but to abandon their island-country because of rising sea levels and asked permission to relocate all 11,000 inhabitants to New Zealand. [See article by the Earth Policy Institute, Nov. 15, 2001.]

Since then, New Zealand has agreed to a plan for the gradual evacuation of Tuvalu and other Pacific islands facing environmental catastrophe. [See report from Friends of the Earth International.]

Evacuation Begun

Contrary to Burton’s ruling, the evacuation of Tuvalu already has begun, according to travel reporter Janine Israel in a 2004 story about the expected loss of these picturesque islands to potential tourists.

“Over recent decades, the remote Pacific nation [of Tuvalu] has been beset by frequent floods, cyclones, and rising sea levels.” Israel wrote. “Tuvalu’s 10,500 inhabitants have already begun the dreaded process of evacuating to New Zealand, which has agreed to accept 75 Tuvaluans per year as environmental refugees. …

“Tuvalu has been given 50 years before it sinks beneath the waves. Although the melting of glaciers and icecaps is partly responsible for the rise in sea level, it is also due to the warming of the seawater, which expands when heated.

“And it isn’t alone. Other low-lying island nations are at the frontline of climate change. Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Palau, Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Republic of the Marshall Island, Tokelau, and the Republic of Maldives are all gearing up for a Noah’s Flood. For intrepid travelers, these are the countries to visit before they slip off the map for good.”

Given this unfolding tragedy, Burton’s querulous point would seem to be finicky at best.

Judge Burton also blasts Gore for supposedly suggesting that “in the near future” a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland.

“This is distinctly alarmist,” the judge wrote, arguing that sea levels may indeed rise that much “but only after, and over, millennia” and the idea that the melting would occur “in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus,” the Telegraph reported.

But in “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore never said the 20-foot rise in sea level would occur quickly or even at all.

Referring to Antarctica’s giant ice cap, Gore said, “If this were to go, sea levels world wide would go up 20 feet.” A similar rise could result from the complete thawing of Greenland’s ice cover, Gore said.

“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of west Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” Gore said as slides showed what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would do to coastlines around the world.

While Burton’s ruling fits with the characterization of Gore’s comments as popularized in the right-wing news media, it doesn’t match up with what Gore actually said.

Gulf Stream

Judge Burton also puts words in Gore’s mouth in other alleged “errors.” For instance, he notes that Gore’s documentary refers to the danger of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” which powers the Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures in Western Europe.

Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. agency which shared the Nobel Prize with Gore, Burton said it’s “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, though it might slow down.

Again, however, Burton is adopting a contentious interpretation of Gore’s comments. Gore refers to the shutting down of the Ocean Conveyor in a historical context, when a vast reservoir of North American ice melted and flooded into the North Atlantic, causing a disruption of the Gulf Stream and an ice age in Europe.

Gore’s description of this historic event suggests that something similar could occur if the Greenland ice cap melted, but again Burton is exaggerating Gore’s comments before attacking them.

Similarly, Burton asserts that Gore claimed that two graphs – one representing CO2 levels and the other global temperatures – showed “an exact fit.” The judge ruled that while there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”

But what did Gore actually assert and where did the judge get the words “an exact fit”?

In that segment of the film, Gore doesn’t use the phrase “exact fit,” although he does joke that a sixth-grade classmate who once asked a teacher if the continents of Africa and South America ever “fit together” might have a similar comment about the two graphs.

Gore then states, “The relation is actually very complicated but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this, when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun.”

While there are legitimate questions about the precise correlation between past changes in CO2 and earth temperatures, Burton ignores Gore’s admission that “the relation is actually very complicated” and instead puts the words “exact fit” into Gore’s mouth.

Judge Burton plays a similar trick regarding Gore’s references to the destruction from Hurricane Katrina and other powerful storms. Burton claims that there is “insufficient evidence” to support Gore’s supposed claim that global warming caused Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans.

But Gore never makes that direct connection. He does show footage of extreme weather from around the globe, which many scientists believe has been made worse by rising temperatures, but Gore never specifically attributes Katrina or the other examples of flooding to global warming.

Again, Burton has set up a straw man and knocked it down.

Disappearing Snow

Burton faults Gore, too, for attributing the disappearance of snow caps on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The judge ruled that scientists haven’t established that the receding of ice and the worsening of droughts are primarily attributable to human-caused climate change.

Regarding Lake Chad, Burton said “it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability,” the Telegraph reported.

While Burton is entitled to his scientific opinions, Gore’s concern that warming temperatures have reduced snow cover and contributed to faster evaporation of water is not a particularly controversial point of view.

Burton’s other cited “errors” are even more trivial. Gore is taken to task for saying that polar bears have been drowning because they face swims of up to 60 miles through open ice. Burton asserts that the confirmed cases show four bears drowning during storms, though he acknowledges that it makes sense to expect future drowning-related deaths of bears if ice caps continue to melt.

Gore’s last “error” supposedly was to warn that coral reefs were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. While agreeing with Gore that rising temperatures could increase coral bleaching and fatality, Burton ruled that it was difficult to separate the impact of climate change from other problems, such as pollution.

[For the full list of Burton’s alleged “errors,” see Telegraph (U,K.), Oct. 11, 2007.]

In other words, Burton appears to be a quirky judge who is prone to quibbling over minor nuances. But the larger significance of Burton’s ruling – as it is now championed by right-wing and mainstream U.S. news outlets – is that the vilification of Al Gore is not likely to cease, even with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize.

That also should be a cautionary lesson to Democrats seeking the White House. The political/media dynamic of Washington has changed little since Campaign 2000. The powerful right-wing news outlets still can make little controversies big and big controversies little.

Plus, major news outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, continue to fall into line.

The Washington insider community also shows no serious readiness to reexamine its failures in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency and the devastating Iraq War, which now even retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces, calls a “nightmare with no end in sight.”

It’s all so much easier to continue making fun of Al Gore.

"WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?" The #1 question that should be asked of Democratic leaders...

Over at HuffingtonPost.com, Arianna Huffington asks "What one question would you have me ask Speaker of the House [i.e. the leader of Congress] Nancy Pelosi when I talk to her Monday night?"

The Number one question that the press, media and voters should be asking of Democratic leaders, bar none, is "WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?"

Republicans can create vast amounts of outrage in an instant - on wholly trivial 'issues' such as "Lincoln bedroom 'scandal'" and "White House Trashing 'scandal,'" (Both of these so-called "SCANDALS" were created out of thin air by Republicans and their media-whores PR factory. The "White House Trashing 'Scandal'" never even produced ONE PHOTO of evidence to support WEEKS worth of criminal accusations!) or turn molehills into mountains, such as the Whitewater, Foster suicide, Cisneros mistress, and other long-winded prosecutions.
And, conversely, Republicans can take entire mountains of genuine scandals, and turn them into puffs of dust, as with Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate/BCCI, swiped elections 2000, 2002, 2004, and even 2006 (Florida's 13th Congressional District recorded 18,000 "undervotes," thereby seating a Republican in Katherine Harris' old seat - an 'undervote' tally 9 times bigger than those in similar sized districts), Dereliction-of-Duty leading up to 9-11, and of course vast corruption in Iraq war contracts or the systematic lies-to-war that Bush and Cheney force-fed Congress and the media, leading to the Iraq war while Osama bin Laden roamed free.
Ms. Pelosi seems to think that merely going through the motions - routine, ineffectual (legislative) protests against the Bush-GOP agenda - is fulfilling her leadership compact with voters and the constitutional responsibilities vested through her in the Congress. Robert Parry has posted on-line the first chapter of his Secrecy & Privilege" book, illustrating how in 2001 President Clinton helped quash on-going criminal investigations into the Reagan-Bush administration abuses of power.
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/100307.html
Clearly, President Clinton hoped Republicans would reciprocate with bipartisan comity. A more cynical view is that Clinton was willing to forgive Republican crimes, if it would boost his power and privilege in the White House.
Is Nancy Pelosi following in Clinton's misbegotten steps? When will Democrats finally CONFRONT the Right-Wing smear, attack, slime, and Swift-boat machine, and put the liberal-progressive agenda of the past 200 years - hard-fought progress always towards greater enfranchisement, civil liberties, and economic empowerment - BACK on the MORAL HIGH GROUND? Will Democrats continue to beg us for money every election season, then hand over a great proportion of that money (to buy prime-time campaign ads) to the very media barons whose policies and editorial agenda we so vehemently oppose? Or will Ms. Pelosi continue to allow the Media thugs to portray all Katrina victims as criminals ("untermensch", even), justifying billions of dollars of crony contracts to Blackwater, Halliburton, and other connected corporations, even as New Orleans residents must pay mortgages on homes they are not even allowed to rebuild?

(Note: We realize how tough it is for the Democrats and the "liberal" press to confront the business and theological wings of the Radical Right Republican Party: in "whack-a-mole" fashion, any Democrat or writer who tries to stand up to the abuses of the Right-Wing theocrats - whether the Vatican influencing American elections on abortion, the Protestant Kennedy/Falwells/Robertsons/Bob Jones U advocating Christian evangelism in public schools and the US military, or the AIPAC lobby taking billions of dollars of US donations to Israel and directing it right back into influencing American politics - will be "WHACKED" (defeated or smeared) by the faithful of those religions should that Congressman/woman publicly oppose those sacred cow issues. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN that we Americans no longer have a right to oppose that radical-right, theological agenda that is the cornerstone of the Big Business wing of the Republican Party connecting with enough voters to win elections.)

Ho Hum. The AIPAC wing of the Radical-Right junta (coup) in America FINALLY notices Ann Coulter's HATE-speech. Only took 7 years...

Ann Coulter, the oh-so-favorite guest for the "Mainstream" media whores, is the very face of Republican Right-Wing hate, intolerance, contempt, scorn, and devisive derision (and "moral values" hypocrisy, Ms. Coulter proud of her "play the field" single promiscuity and sexual allure). The AIPAC wings of the Republican and Democratic parties have IGNORED Ms. Coulter till now, in a despicable attempt to drown out war opponents and administration critics by heaping scorn and derision on them - Ms. Coulter's specialty.

For the past several years, of course, ANN COULTER could INSULT 9-11 WIDOWS, INSULT Black Voters, INSULT Vietnam-wounded combat veterans (like Max Cleland and John Kerry, among others),INSULT US military generals, and even INSULT Iraq war-wounded combat veterans... all completely "A-OK" by the AIPAC wing of the Democratic Party ("leaders" like Lieberman, Feinstein, Boxer, Feingold, Levin, and others). The Democratic Party NEVER had an articulate (much less forceful) RESPONSE to the abject HATRED and no-bones RACISM of ANN COULTER, RUSH LIMBAUGH,Bill O'Reily, Michael 'Savage' (ne Wiener), Fox "news," or other propaganda components of the Radical Right-Wing Republican Party... Because ALL of that Right-Wing propaganda, no matter how vile or racist, WAS NECESSARY to create a climate to bolster and support the Bush-Cheney illegal invasion, war, occupation, torture, and looting of Iraq. NOW Ms. Coulter - in one of her "come hither" seductive "moral values" prime-time mini-skirts - finally gets around to, SURPRISE, SURPRISE, SURPRISE! putting Jews in the same category as Muslims who need to be converted to Christianity (or, dare we say it, as "terror suspects" who should be rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps beyond the purview of law or human rights).

Makes one wonder how long it will take the AIAPC lobby TO NOTICE that Mr. Bush's pet BLACKWATER "security contractors" HAVE ALL THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE German pre-WWII SS: a PRIVATE "Christ-ian" army loyal only to the Furher! The AIPAC heads (talking heads) in the media thought it was SO AMUSING when BLACKWATER GOONS PATROLLED NEW ORLEANS STREETS in black uniforms with machine-guns and license to kill... and that two years later, BLACKWATER rakes in MILLIONS of dollars of government contracts, while New Orleans residents must still pay mortgages on homes they are not allowed to rebuild. Even today, the more radically-right AIAPC news-heads (Krauthammer, Kristol, Kurtz, Sulzberger, Safire, Kagan, Brooks, etc.) PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE the GOP's ALLIANCE with Ms. Coulter... or the Bush-Cheney administration's DEPENDENCE on BLACKWATER mercenaries.
(below, one of a hundred articles this week on Ann Coulter's "Jews should be 'perfected' by conversion to Christianty" comment, this particular article choosen at random.)

=============================================

Coulter's anti-Semitic comment too dangerous to ignore
Tim Rutten: Regarding Media
October 13, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-rutten13oct13,0,1859447.column?coll=la-home-center

Ann Coulter is buzzing from one talk show to another these days, peddling her new book. Our era values mindless contention as a kind of entertainment, and we don't just reward relentless self-promotion -- we admire it. Thus, Coulter's phenomenal success at marketing distasteful, mean-spirited books -- poorly written and spottily researched -- that otherwise would go all but unremarked upon by everyone except the rhetorical ghouls who haunt the political fringes.

Now, no Coulter promotional campaign would be complete without a calculated outrage -- a call for the forcible conversion of all Muslims, for example, or a demand for revocation of women's suffrage, an insult hurled at gays or the grieving widows of Sept. 11 victims. As more than one political consultant has remarked, the American far right is a carnivorous constituency, and it needs to be regularly thrown red meat. Coulter's singular genius has been to ignite tightly focused and timely controversies, thereby getting her ideological opponents to toss the scraps to her fans.

So if you know what's coming, why play ball and deliver the denunciation that validates the Coulter strategy?

In part, it's because this time Coulter didn't intend to ignite the firestorm that's currently raging around her; in part, it's because the implications of these latest remarks simply are too threatening to be allowed to stand.

Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity.

Deutsch, to his everlasting credit, wasn't having any of it, and the full transcript of their extended and -- on Coulter's side -- vilely offensive exchange on the matter is widely available online. Reaction over the last couple of days has been swift.

The National Jewish Democratic Council weighed in with a petition asking other broadcast news organizations not to give Coulter a forum. "While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment," said council Executive Director Ira N. Forman. "Just as media outlets don't invite those who believe that Martians walk the Earth to frequently comment on science stories, it's time they stop inviting Ann Coulter to comment on politics." (Sadly, too many Americans now believe the only way to confront offensive or dangerous speech is to silence it.)

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that Coulter's "remarks that Jews needed to be perfected and America would be better off if everyone was Christian are deeply offensive and have been the classic language of anti-Semites throughout the millennia. She may have been a guest on CNBC's 'Big Idea,' but what she invoked is the oldest 'Bigoted Idea,' and she should apologize." (Good luck on that one, rabbi.)

Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."

That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.

It's a scandal that in this pluralist nation it falls to the voices of organized Jewry to make this case, because it is a case whose outcome is of the greatest consequence to us all. For too long we've pretended that the brutal political rhetoric that now characterizes our partisan politics can be quarantined, that it won't inevitably leach over into every other aspect of our lives. In fact, it's doing just that, and soon the coarse and vituperative language of the war between red and blue -- with it's instantaneous imputations of bad-faith and utter disrespect for minimal civility -- will begin to color aspects of our civil society where mutual respect is too crucial and hard won to tolerate this sort of risk.

Here, for example, is what transpired on the airwaves Friday. Deutsch went onto NBC's "Today" show and called it "scary" that, in this instance, Coulter was not being deliberately provocative. "We're playing with dangerous words in our society -- there's no accountability, there's a glibness that we in the media kind of elevate."

Meanwhile, Coulter was on the Kevin McCullough radio talk show, making the utterly absurd case that Deutsch somehow had ambushed her. On his blog later in the day, McCullough agreed. Deutsch, he said, "is an angry anti-Christian bigot, looking to make a name for himself by biting into Christian icons."

How many Americans really want to follow Ann Coulter into this sort of confrontation? Not many, one suspects. But are enough of them willing to give up, once and for all, the sort of dangerous fun she and her rhetorical fellow travelers provide?

timothy.rutten@latimes.com


AIPAC wing of the Right

America's whore Corporate media IGNORES Burma mass-murder nightly purges...

Betraying the GREED and LUST (for money and power) that drives America's whore media, most outlets IGNORE the SYSTEMATIC MASS-MURDER PURGES by the Burma military junta, conducted nightly as we speak - "NO MORE SHINY BAUBLES to sell the American public" (vidoe footage of peaceful protests led by Burmese monks), so TIME TO MOVE ON TO THE NEXT celbrity-retard story.
Today, the US WHORE MEDIA doesn't give A DAMN how many monks, protesters, and democracy advocates ARE MURDERED by the election-stealing Burma regime.

===================================

Only now, the full horror of Burmese junta's repression of monks emerges
By Rosalind Russell
Published: 11 October 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3047606.ece

Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon's residents hear their neighbours being taken away.
Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month's pro-democracy uprising.
The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime's soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.
The hidden crackdown is as methodical as it is brutal. First the monks were targeted, then the thousands of ordinary Burmese who joined the demonstrations, those who even applauded or watched, or those merely suspected of anti-government sympathies.
"There were about 400 of us in one room. No toilets, no buckets, no water for washing. No beds, no blankets, no soap. Nothing," said a 24-year-old monk who was held for 10 days at the Government Technical Institute, a leafy college in northern Rangoon which is now a prison camp for suspected dissidents. The young man, too frightened to be named, was one of 185 monks taken in a raid on a monastery in the Yankin district of Rangoon on 28 September, two days after government soldiers began attacking street protesters.
"The room was too small for everyone to lie down at once. We took it in turns to sleep. Every night at 8 o'clock we were given a small bowl of rice and a cup of water. But after a few days many of us just couldn't eat. The smell was so bad.
"Some of the novice monks were under 10 years old, the youngest was just seven. They were stripped of their robes and given prison sarongs. Some were beaten, leaving open, untreated wounds, but no doctors came."
On his release, the monk spoke to a Western aid worker in Rangoon, who smuggled his testimony and those of other prisoners and witnesses out of Burma on a small memory stick.
Most of the detained monks, the low-level clergy, were eventually freed without charge as were the children among them. But suspected ringleaders of the protests can expect much harsher treatment, secret trials and long prison sentences. One detained opposition leader has been tortured to death, activist groups said yesterday. Win Shwe, 42, a member of the National League for Democracy, the party of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has died under interrogation, the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said, adding that the information came from authorities in Kyaukpandawn township. "However, his body was not sent to his family and the interrogators indicated that they had cremated it instead." Win Shwe was arrested on the first day of the crackdown.
It was the russet-robed Buddhist clergy, not political groups, who had formed the backbone of demonstrations during days of euphoric defiance and previously undreamed-of hope that Burma's military regime could be brought down by peaceful revolution. That hope has been crushed under the boots of government soldiers and intelligence agents and replaced by fear and dread.
A young woman, a domestic worker in Rangoon, described how one woman bystander who applauded the monks was rounded up. "My friend was taken away for clapping during the demonstrations. She had not marched. She came out of her house as the marchers went by and, for perhaps 30 seconds, smiled and clapped as the monks chanted. Her face was recorded on a military intelligence camera. She was taken and beaten. Now she is so scared she won't even leave her room to come and talk to me, to anyone."
Another Rangoon resident told the aid worker: "We all hear screams at night as they [the police] arrive to drag off a neighbour. We are torn between going to help them and hiding behind our doors. We hide behind our doors. We are ashamed. We are frightened."
Burmese intelligence agents are scrutinising photographs and video footage to identify demonstrators and bystanders. They have also arrested the owners of computers which they suspect were used to transmit images and testimonies out of the country. For each story smuggled out to The Independent, someone has risked arrest and imprisonment.
Hein Zay Kyaw (not his real name) received a telephone call last week telling him to be at a government compound where the military were releasing 42 people, among them Mr Kyaw's friend, missing since he was plucked from the edge of a demonstration on 26 September. Mr Kyaw told the aid worker: "The prisoners were let out of the trucks. Even though now they were safe, they were still so scared. They walked with their hands shielding their faces as if they were expecting blows. They were lined up in rows and sat down against the wall, still cowering. Their clothes were dirty, some stained with blood. Our friend had a clean T-shirt on. We were relieved because we thought this meant that he had not been beaten. We were wrong. He had been beaten on the head and the blood had soaked his shirt which he carried in a plastic bag."
The United States yesterday threatened unspecified new sanctions against Burma and called for an investigation into the death of Win Shwe.
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a statement: "The junta must stop the brutal treatment of its people and peacefully transition to democracy or face new sanctions from the United States."
The scale of the crackdown remains undocumented. The regime has banned journalists from entering Burma and has blocked internet access and phone lines.
Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK says the number of dead is possibly in the hundreds. "The regime covers up its atrocities. We will never know the true numbers," he said.
At the weekend the government said it has released more than half of the 2,171 people arrested, but exile groups estimate the number of detentions between 6,000 and 10,000.
In Rangoon, people say they are more frightened now than when soldiers were shooting on the streets.
"When there were demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, the world was watching," said a professional woman who watched the marchers from her office.
"But now the soldiers only come at night. They take anyone they can identify from their videos. People who clapped, who offered water to the monks, who knelt and prayed as they passed. People who happened to turn and watch as they passed by and their faces were caught on film. It is now we are most fearful. It is now we need the world to help us."

New York Times whores - ALL of its oil and energy reporting. PROPAGANDA from the pages of Herr Goebbels...

The Gray Lady's Obdurate Bias on Oil Reporting
by Raymond J. Leasy
Posted October 9, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/the-gray-ladys-obdurate-_b_67708.html

On it goes at the "Gray Lady." And, sadly it is becoming progressively more debilitating and peculiar. Unable to present an objective view of the oil industry and oil markets THE NEW YORK TIMES has VACATED VIRTUALLY ALL CLAIM TO RESPONSIBLE REPORTING on one of the economy's more important industries and critical commodities. In effect placing into question the bona fides of its business and financial pages. And writing of the New York Times' shortcomings on this issue is becoming boring.

On Friday, the lead Business Day article, "Can a Plucky US Economy Surmount $80 Oil" could have been written by a semi-skilled oil industry flack. It reports yes, the price of oil is high, reaching record levels. Then goes to assuage us that the fallout has been negligible, factories stayed busy, consumers continued spending.

The NY Times article then poses the question: with the economy starting to sputter, will the high price of oil cause pain? Blithely it answers the question, "Many economists do not think so...if the United States entered a recession the price of oil would quickly drop." Then, to give the appearance of balance and to lay the groundwork for continued steep prices, goes on to quote none other than Larry Goldstein of the Petroleum Research Foundation, a foundation largely supported by the oil industry and always ready to trot out whatever rationalizations are needed by a gullible press to explain the manipulated levels of today's oil prices. Says Goldstein, "Our relative importance in the global markets is diminishing" and an economic slowdown "won't have a visible impact on high oil prices." Get it? Prices will remain high and the NY Times has helped indoctrinate us into accepting the reasons why.

The Times' article goes on to state there is little precedent for understanding today's oil market. Which is probably true if you ceaselessly report oil industry PR information handouts as received gospel. The article goes on to repeat the tried and true oil industry saws, placating us with such bamboozle as "the economy has become less sensitive to energy prices," and "the amount of energy needed to produce $1 of economic output has been cut nearly in half since 1988," and on.
continued at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/the-gray-ladys-obdurate-_b_67708.html

MORE on US STATE DEPARTMENT as sponsors, employers, and Defenders of BLACKWATER MURDERS in Iraq....

Again we note: the USE OF MERCENARY HIRED GUNS was one of the SPECIFIC COMPLAINTS enumerated (listed) by the Signers of the Declaration of Independence against King George III of Britain in July of 1776:

<< For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
He is at this time transporting large armies of FOREIGN MERCENARIES to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. >>

==========================================

State Dept. ignored Blackwater warnings
Yuri Cortez / AFP/Getty Images
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blackwater7oct07,1,4463745.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true


ACCOUNTABILITY: Complaints about Blackwater guards’ behavior were acknowledged by some in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but received little high-level attention.
Diplomats had raised concerns about guards' endangering of Iraqi civilians, but the complaints got little attention.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The State Department, which is facing growing criticism of its policy on private security contractors, overlooked repeated warnings from U.S. diplomats in the field that guards were endangering Iraqi civilians and undermining U.S. efforts to win support from the population, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Ever since the contractors were granted immunity from Iraqi courts in June 2004 by the U.S.-led occupation authority, diplomats have cautioned that the decision to do so was "a bomb that could go off at any time," said one former U.S. official.


On guard
click to enlarge
Related
- TOP OF THE TICKET Blog on Blackwater's chairman
- TOP OF THE TICKET: Blackwater's Prince tied to GOP

Related Stories
- U.S. supervision is ordered for convoys
- House OKs bill to prosecute contractors
- Congress moves to rein in contractors

But State Department leadership, unable to field U.S. troops or in-house personnel to guard its team, has clung to an approach that shielded the contractors from criminal liability, in the hope of ensuring continued protection to operate in the violent countryside.

The procedures have come under critical scrutiny since a Sept. 16 shooting involving contractors for Blackwater USA, the State Department's main security contractor, killed at least 11 Iraqis and set off a series of American and Iraqi investigations.

On Friday, in a tacit acknowledgment of the policy's shortcomings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered drastic increases in supervision of the security contractors. Meanwhile, the House, flatly rejecting the current approach, on Thursday approved in a 389-30 vote legislation that would subject contractors to U.S. criminal law.

The developments -- and the dramatically heightened attention to violence involving security contractors -- have not surprised current and former officials who have served in Iraq and seen incidents that injured Iraqis and destroyed their property.

"It's about time," said Janessa Gans, who was a U.S. official in Iraq for nearly two years, describing her reaction to news that the Iraqi government was threatening to expel Blackwater in the aftermath of the Sept. 16 shooting.

Gans said that during her travels around the country she saw heavily armed contract guards frighten Iraqi civilians and destroy their property, and she was shocked that they appeared to have so little accountability and that the Iraqis often found it difficult to obtain justice or compensation.

Gans, who related her experiences in an interview and in an opinion article published in Saturday's Times, described one incident. In 2005, a heavily armored Chevy Suburban at the head of her U.S. convoy smashed into a tiny car carrying an elderly man, a younger woman and three frightened children.

When she objected, the contractors pointed out that they were trained to treat all Iraqis as potential terrorists. Gans said she replied: "If they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now."

Several other officials formerly assigned to duty in Iraq agreed to discuss concerns about security procedures but insisted on anonymity because they still are employed by the government and are not authorized to express their views. Some officials who have had similar experiences while at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad declined to describe them out of concern that they could be identified through the details of their accounts.

Their views of Blackwater and other security contractors are at odds with the descriptions in recent weeks from Rice and other top State Department officials, who have praised the guards as providing effective service under dangerous conditions.

Blackwater's chief executive noted last week that no U.S. official has been killed under Blackwater's protection.

Nonetheless, concerns have been voiced at times even by the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq. Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John D. Negroponte, now the deputy secretary of State, had been overheard urging contractors to slow down and take more care as they careened through the streets.

"He was frequently exasperated," Gans said. "He would say, 'Is that necessary?' "

Gans said she complained to high-level embassy officials. Other current and former officials said that the concerns frequently were discussed among embassy staff and were acknowledged by some members of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which oversees contractors for the State Department.

But the complaints and concerns received little high-level attention, for several reasons, said diplomats who served in Iraq. In the crisis atmosphere of Iraq, the security problems seemed less urgent than other issues. In addition, even staff members who were uneasy with the arrangement were ambivalent because they wanted aggressive protection when they felt personally endangered.

When leaving the gates of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, "you want the biggest, meanest guys in the world protecting you," said a U.S. official who served in Baghdad and has been moved to another post in the region.

The private security contractors working for the State Department have operated under murky legal guidelines. While U.S. laws apply to contractors working for the Pentagon, workers for the State Department do not fall clearly under American or Iraqi law, allowing some to escape punishment for wrongdoing.

In May 2005, an Iraqi cabdriver with two passengers in the back seat was traveling down a broad thoroughfare when a five-car U.S. convoy carrying U.S. officials heading back to the Green Zone approached from a side street. The driver, Mohammed Nouri Hattab, 34, stopped about 50 feet from the convoy, but bullets ripped into his Opel, killing one passenger and striking Hattab's shoulder.