Utne/Media reform

Check out the new issue of Utne, where I ponder such ponderables as whether a real movement for media reform is in the works or whether the groundswell of activism surrounding the FCC's June 2 vote on media ownership is just a blip of consumer outrage. It's on newstands now, or buy it digitally here. You'll be inspired.

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A view from the inside. "George Bush isn't in control...the country's been hijacked," says Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Middle East specialist for the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy. She describes how "key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed," adding: "What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra look like amateur hour. . . it's worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam."

Linguist Noam Chomsky predicts that the Bush administration will "manufacture" a new threat to the American people in order to win the next election. "They have a card that they can play... terrify the population with some invented threat, and that is not very hard to do."

The FDA says meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat. Right now, the technology is too expensive for your butcher to sell much of the stuff, but when it becomes feasible, pray for a labeling law.

According to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity, "More than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years... Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush—a little over $500,000—than to any other politician over the last dozen years."

Will Bush's outright lie about the "Mission Accomplished" banner be his undoing? Dave Lindorff writes: "As voters, we're willing to forget many things. We'll forget about the stealing of an election, about scandals like the doctoring of a report on global warming, even about the deliberate outing of a CIA agent. But we won't forget being taken for yokels with a cheap lie."

A draft of Minnesota's statewide public school standards in social studies has come under attack for its conservative bias. While the standards aim to "reflect the greatness of the country," according to Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke, the standards fail to include presidents Kennedy and Johnson while giving multiple mentions of Reagan and Eisenhower. Said Yecke, "I don't believe in the hate America agenda, and it would be inappropriate to have that agenda in our standards."

A young design guy and a 71-year old with tendonitis have teamed up to make some pretty cool t-shirts. Check out their limited-edition wares at sharpastoast.com.

Due to a server error, BoingBoing has been temporarily been moved.

Pun intended. Here's a book I thought I'd never see: The Pop-Up Kama Sutra.

Banner boondoggle

The New York Times covers Bush's fib about who put up the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

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A Microsoft employee, noting on his personal blog that the PC maker had ordered a batch of new Apple G5's, got canned from his job for it!

The organic movement is gaining momentum in, of all places, Harlem, East New York, and Brooklyn. At least 6,000 New Yorkers, including many in the poorer parts of the city, have joined together in buying clubs and CSAs to get organic vegetables fresh from the farm.

Remember when the prez staged that expensive fly-in to the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of major combat in Iraq? So did a reporter at yesterday's news conference: "At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?" Bush's response:

I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we've still got hard work to do, there's still more to be done. And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops... The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff -- they weren't that ingenious, by the way.

Uh, right. In fact, the White House now admits it, and not the crew of the Lincoln, put up the sign.

Organic marketers are scrambling to cash in on the anti-junkfood movement by installing vending machines in high schools. In Rhode Island's Cranston High School West, Coke and candy bars have been replaced with soy chips, rice snack bars, pita chips and low-fat organic yogurt. And the movement is going national.

Trent Lott's suggestion for Iraq shows how deep his compassionate conservatism runs: "If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out."

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So much news, so little time to make sense of it:

Is the media filtering out good news in Iraq? Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) looks into the Bush administration's complaints about war coverage.

An informant told US authorities that Ba'ath party spies had infiltrated the al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad, with some members posing as hotel employees; the military ignored this news--until Sunday's rocket attack on the hotel killed a US colonel and injured 17.

Buzzflash interviews Bill Moyers on war, politics, and the state of today's news: "Wave the flag, stroke the sentiments, stir the prejudices -- and you can keep the masses distracted from the real game happening out of sight, behind closed doors in boardrooms and oval offices."

Due to the war, Bush's job rating is, ahem, tanking.

MoveOn invites you to try your hand at a TV ad that tells the truth about the Bush administration in a new ad contest.

Clark on Bush

Retired general and Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Bush's culpability for September 11:

"There is no way this administration can walk away from its responsibility for 9-11," Clark told a conference, titled "New American Strategies for Security and Peace," "You can't blame something like this on lower level intelligence officers, however badly they communicated memos with each other. ... The buck rests with the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush's desk."

...Clark argued that Bush has manipulated facts, stifled dissent, retaliated against detractors, shown disdain for allies and started a war without just cause. He said Bush put Americans at risk by pursuing war in Iraq instead of hunting for Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, pulling a "bait-and-switch" by going after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein instead of al Qaida terrorists.

He called Bush's labeling of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an axis of evil in his January 2002 State of the Union address -- "the single worst formulation in the last half century of American foreign policy."

More here.

"Domestic terrorists" in the White House

Bush and Ashcroft are seeking to extend the powers of the Patriot Act. On their wish list is the right to hold suspects without bail and to expand the death penalty to include cases of "domestic terrorism." The definition of the latter is wide open, though, since Section 802 of the existing act defines domestic terrorism as "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state" that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." So protesters at abortion clinics or Earth Firsters could be tried--and potentially killed--under these proposed additions. Curiously, it could also be used to define the White House insiders who leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity as "domestic terrorists." My, how those in White House flag-lapel-pin brigade would bristle at that. (Links via Cursor).

Krugman on Bush's "willful ignorance"

Paul Krugman writes on Bush's "willful ignorance," asking why the president is so flabbergasted that Islamic leaders are suspicious of America's intentions. He writes:

Surely it's important to understand how others see us, but a new, post 9/11 version of political correctness has made it difficult even to discuss their points of view. Any American who tries to go beyond "America good, terrorists evil," who tries to understand — not condone — the growing world backlash against the United States, faces furious attacks delivered in a tone of high moral indignation. The attackers claim to be standing up for moral clarity, and some of them may even believe it. But they are really being used in a domestic political struggle.

Last week I found myself caught up in that struggle. I wrote about why Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister — a clever if loathsome man who adjusts the volume of his anti-Semitism depending on circumstances — chose to include an anti-Jewish diatribe in his speech to an Islamic conference. Sure enough, I was accused in various places not just of "tolerance for anti-Semitism" (yes, I'm Jewish) but of being in Mr. Mahathir's pay. Smear tactics aside, the thrust of the attacks was that because anti-Semitism is evil, anyone who tries to understand why politicians foment anti-Semitism — and looks for ways other than military force to combat the disease — is an apologist for anti-Semitism and is complicit in evil.

Yet that moral punctiliousness is curiously selective. Last year the Bush administration, in return for a military base in Uzbekistan, gave $500 million to a government that, according to the State Department, uses torture "as a routine investigation technique," and whose president has killed opponents with boiling water. The moral clarity police were notably quiet.

Why is aiding a brutal dictator O.K., while trying to understand why others don't trust us — and doing something to create that trust — isn't? Why won't the administration mollify Muslims by firing Lt. Gen. William Boykin, whose anti-Islamic remarks have created vast ill will, from his counterterrorism position? Why won't it give moderate Muslims a better argument against the radicals by opposing Ariel Sharon's settlement policy, when a majority of Israelis think that some settlements should be abandoned, and even Israeli military officers have become bitterly critical of Mr. Sharon?

Full column here.

Puff Daddy aka P.Diddy aka Sean Combs aka... Sweatshop kingpin?

Hip hop artist Sean Combs' line of clothing is allegedly manufactured in a Honduran sweatshop, according to new charges.

POWs beaten, burned, Bushed

As POWs in the first Gulf War, 17 veterans were whipped, beaten, burned, electrically shocked and starved while in captivity. In 2002, the POWs launched and won a lawsuit against Iraq, to the tune of nearly a billion dollars. A success story! Except for the fact that Bush administration won't let them have it.

Joseph Hough on religion's role in turning America around

Bill Moyers interviewed Union Theological Seminary faculty president Joseph Hough on this week's episode. An amazing interview covering themes from the "obscene" disparity between the rich and the poor, and the duty of the three Abrahamic religions--Islam, Christianity, Judaism--to rebel against an immoral status quo. He begins the interview discussing this bold act of refusal: "I think that it would be a wonderful thing if we could stand together, these three great Abrahamic traditions, and say, 'Look, we do not countenance this sort of thing. It is not only unfair, it is immoral on the basis of our religious traditions, and we believe it's an insult to God.'

MOYERS: And "it" is what?

HOUGH: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do... [I]t's not just a political pundit issue. It's not just a think tank issue. It is a deep and profound theological issue. And it has to do with whether we are faithful to the deepest convictions called for by our faith.

Because the central teaching of Jesus is-announced when he says, from Isaiah 61, "God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, freedom to the oppressed, and the year of Jubilee." And as you know, the year of Jubilee was the year when land reform was supposed to take place, debts were to be canceled, slaves freed.

--snip--

MOYERS: Again, I come back to the paradox, which is that-these policies to which you are protesting, which you say are immoral—were enacted by a Congress and an Administration elected to a significant degree with the support of the religious right — Conservative Christians who got active in politics and saw that their candidates were elected, and they're seeing now the policies that they believe they elected those officials to carry out.

HOUGH: Well. That's true, Bill, but my Dad, as I told you, is a Baptist preacher. He was until he was 84. And there was a notorious drunk in town who when he got drunk, he really went after preachers. But he said he was born-again Christian. And one day, someone asked my father if he thought Brother Suggs was a born-again Christian. And my father said, "Only God knows that."

But, you know, the Lord Jesus said, "By their fruits, you shall know them." And speaking as a humble fruit inspector of the Lord, I'd say that if this person is a Born Again Christian, there's a mixed signal somewhere." I feel the same way.

If Tom Delay is acting out of his Born Again Christian convictions in pushing legislation that disadvantages the poor every time he opens his mouth, I'm not saying he's not a Born Again Christian, but as a the Lord's humble fruit inspector, it sure looks suspicious to me. And anybody who claims in the name of God they're gonna run over people of other nations, and just willy-nilly, by your own free will, reshape the world in your own image, and claim that you're acting on behalf of God, that sounds a lot like Caesar to me.

MOYERS: Can a secular democracy, in a pluralistic society, where there are many faiths, including people of no faith, can that democratic government be expected to represent the religious, prophetic imperatives of people like you?

HOUGH: Well, maybe so, maybe not, Bill. But I'm getting tired of people claiming they're carrying the banner of my religious tradition when they're doing everything possible to undercut it. And that's what's happening in this country right now. The policies of this country are disadvantaging poor people every day of our lives and every single thing that passes the Congress these days is disadvantaging poor people more.

Read the entire interview.

No White House webcrawling for "Iraq"

UPDATE 10/28: Jim Liedeka writes in to explain:

A robots.txt file is a set of rules that web crawlers are expected to
follow when indexing a site. When google or altavista or others crawl a
web site, they are supposed to read the robots.txt file and do what it
says. The file describes resources which should not be indexed by the
crawler.

There is nothing compelling anyone to do that but it's bad manners to
ignore it. Mostly everyone plays by the rules (except spammers). If I
wanted to point a web crawler at the whitehouse.gov site and ignore the
robots.txt file, there's nothing preventing me from doing so. It's just
a convention that everyone follows.

Usually these files are used to exclude dynamic content which it
wouldn't make sense to index.

(Thanks, Jim.)

Apparently the White House has monkeyed with its official web site to prevent directories containing the word "iraq" from being indexed by search engines. This somewhat tech-heavy (for a tech lightweight like me) page outlines how they did it. Can anyone tell me more about this? (Via Boing Boing.)

Carbombs in Baghdad

Five car bombs on the same day--one directed at the Red Cross, the others at Iraqi police stations--have killed 34 people and injured 224 in Baghdad. Given this tragedy, Bush's response--painted in simplistic, ham-fisted and shockingly un-nuanced terms--seems nothing short of insane: "The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become... [They] can't stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos."

Also: military officials estimate that Iraqi guerillas have from 650,000 to a million tons of arms caches at their disposal--a staggering amount of firepower, equal to more than a third of the US' total stockpile.

Odds and ends

One in six "original" Warhols is a fake.

Celebrity sells? Not according to a new survey.

Progressive radio station, OutrageRadio, to debut on the internet.

Grade school can be hard.

Student at "Christian" school admits he's gay, gets expelled.

The 9/11 Commission may have to subpoena the White House to force them to hand over critical documents.

All Halliburton, all the time. (A new blog.)

Compassionate conservatism?

Rememories

Harvard psychology chair Daniel Schacter, in his new book The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers writes about "consistency biases" that lead us to recast past beliefs and feelings so they resemble what we now believe and feel, "blocking" (having a name on the tip of your tongue, for instance, and not being able to recall it), and suggestibility. Of the latter, Schacter writes:

This refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions, comments or suggestions made when a person is trying to call up a past experience. This is especially relevant to the legal system, and can sometimes wreak havoc. Ten months after an air disaster in Amsterdam university staff were asked: “Did you see the TV film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?”, and two-thirds said yes, recalling the speed, the angle of impact, what happened to the fuselage. There was no TV film of the incident.

Marketers are clamoring to get in on the action. "Memory morphing," championed by Jerry Zaltman, a psychologist affiliated with Harvard Business School, is a practice of constructing advertisements to create false memories. In his book How Consumers Think, he writes, "When asked, many consumers insist that they rely primarily on their own first-hand experience with products - not advertising - in making purchasing decisions. Yet, clearly, advertising can strongly alter what consumers remember about their past, and thus influence their behaviours... What consumers recall about prior product or shopping experiences will differ from their actual experiences if marketers refer to those past experiences in positive ways." Disney's "Remember the Magic" ad campaign, researchers say, was created to invoke real or imagined memories of a happy childhood, for example. Elizabeth Loftus, a former University of Washington professor, did a study where she showed subjects a TV spot that suggested children visiting Disneyland had the opportunity to shake Bugs Bunny's hand. Later, many from the study believed they'd remembered meeting the cartoon rabbit during childhood visits to the park--an impossibility since Bugs is a Warner Brothers character. Loftus said: "This brings forth ethical considerations. Is it OK for marketers to knowingly manipulate consumers' pasts?"

Number-one demographic

"In 1940, less than 8 percent of Americans lived alone. Today that proportion has more than tripled, reaching nearly 26 percent. Singles number 86 million, according to the Census Bureau, and virtually half of all households are now headed by unmarried adults."

War news

One year ago today, I joined more than 10,000 people in St. Paul who were protesting the ramp-up to war with Iraq and celebrating the life of Paul Wellstone. It's heartening--and sad--that we're in essentially the same place today: 100,000 antiwar protesters gathered in DC and another 20,000 in San Francisco to demand an end to the war on Iraq. A 30-year old Air Force sergeant, speaking at the DC rally:

I think there is a lot of sentiment inside the military that what we are doing isn't right. Technically and legally we did sign up for this, and it's our responsibility to fill what our responsibilities are, but the people making the decisions also need to use us as a last resort.

While one counter-protester in Washington (part of a group calling peace activists "anti-war racists") said she's "pretty happy" with how the war in Iraq is going, other news suggests there's little cause for glee: anti-American attacks are becoming bolder, more sophisticated and frequent (26 attacks per day). Eight to 10 rockets were fired at the Al Rasheed hotel where US military officials live, killing a colonel and injuring 15. The strike, fired from "near blank-point range," comes a day after a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by rocket-propelled grenade fire near Tikrit.

Also: 10,000 marines come home!

One year ago today...

The politics of conviction is a winning politics.
--Sen. Paul Wellstone

It's been a year since the late Senator Paul Wellstone died with his wife, daughter and staffers in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. It's been a rough year--war, federal fiscal irresponsibility, CIA leaks--and his voice is sorely missed. He was a good man, and I wish he was still around.

Henan AIDs crisis

China's Henan province is "the ground zero of arguably the world's worst HIV/Aids epidemic," according to The Guardian, with up to a million people infected. In the village of Xiongqiao it's likely that every adult has the disease. The shocking culprit, in general terms, is "China's peculiar blend of profit-at-all-costs capitalism and hide-and-control communism." Specifically, the problem is the province's largely unregulated trade of human blood:

The system had been adapted so that villagers could give such huge amounts of blood without suffering anaemia. After extracting plasma from each 800cc donation, the collectors would pump 400cc back into the arms of the donors. It is believed that people's blood often got mixed up in this way, spreading HIV to almost everyone involved.

As in China's response to SARS, the goverment refused to accept the magnitude of the AIDs problem until 2002, when its AIDs statistics were amended from 30,000 to a million in the course of a single day. Western media sources estimate that China will have 10 million AIDs-infected citizens by 2010.

Mayor for a day

When San Francisco mayor Willie Brown leaves the country, he appoints a temporary acting mayor, a title some see as an honorary role. But during Brown's recent trade trip to Asia, acting mayor Chris Daly went ahead and appointed two environmentalists to the Public Utilities Commission--former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach and architect Robin Chiang. Within 20 minutes of the swearing-in ceremony, Daly's credentials as mayor were yanked.