Year: 2007

More Real Journalism

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It should be noted that McClatchy was pretty good before the invasion too. They were pretty much alone on covering the claims of Bush and His Evil Minions™ and comparing them to reality.

This article follows this course. It not so subtly calls the Whitehouse and Pentagon Liars.

And while top U.S. officials insist that 50 percent of the capital is now under effective U.S. or government control, compared with 8 percent in February, statistics indicate that the improvement in violence is at best mixed.

U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don’t support the claim.

More at the story.

The Press is Still Clueless About the Credit Crunch

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Dean Baker has a good take on the general cluelessness of NPR’s financial correspondent Adam Davidson about the credit crunch. They seem to think that it’s all the “subprime meltdown”, when it’s a more systemic problem.

I would generalize further regarding the press.

At this point in time, almost all of the Financial reporters are well behind the curve. We don’t have a problem with a small segment of the home mortgage market. We have a situation where credit is drying up because people cannot determine risk in any meaningful way.

Malice in NSAland

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Kevin Poulsen was live blogging the two NSA wiretap suits in San Francisco.

One is the generic warrentless surveillance case, the other involving wiretapping privileged communications between a lawyer and a client, where the wiretap was inadvertently revealed to the lawyers in a document dump (the FBI subsequently confiscated the document).

At one point, in response to the government’s assertion that they could not proceed on the basis of the lawyer’s recollections of the inadvertently disclosed document, and that the government could not release the document one of the Judges, Judge McKeown, said, “I feel like I’m in Alice and Wonderland.”

No, my dear man, this is Kafka.

Susan Collins Feeling the Heat of Her War Support

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It appears that the good Senator Collins is objecting to the Tom Allen campaign sending a staffer to follow her public appearances and video what she says.

Standard operating procedure for campaigns these days, and a great way of showing how a candidate talks out of both sides of their mouth.

Collins’ problem is that she’s been Bush’s bitch. When push comes to shove, she’s never voted against him. Her “bipartisanship” consists of joint pressers with Lieberman.

That’s how she guarantees no real opposition to her in the primaries (all of Bush’s support is from the party faithful), but she can’t go and talk to small wingnut audiences and tell them what a loyal Bushie she is if those speeches end up on Youtube.

There is No Patreaus Report

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You know how all of Bush and His Evil Minions™ have been talking about David Petraeus’s report on progress in Iraq? It now appears that there is no such thing as the Petraeus Report. Instead, “Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.”

But it gets EVEN BETTER. It appears that the Bush administration won’t even let Petraeus testify before congress at a public hearing. “Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration’s progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.”

I guess that they are afraid that the good General might tell the truth.

allofmp3.com Owner Acquitted

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Well, the owner of allofmp3.com just got acquitted in Russia. This is not surprising. While the IP laws in Russia are not what the record distributors would want, it has always been fairly clear that Denis Kvasov was operating within those laws.

The question now is whether Putin finds more advantage in joining the WTO, or giving Washington the finger.

One thing that needs to be said though, this dispute does not affect the amount of money that performers get for their recordings by one cent. That number is still zero. I’ve yet to hear of a performer who has actually received royalties, due to corrupt record company accounting.

USAF Attempts UAV Power Grab

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The USAF is attempting to take control over all UAV systems that operate above 5000 feet. This is about the USAF wanting new toys, not any special skills or abilities to handle the programs in a better manner.

….

“I think this is a case of the Air Force having too much time on its hands,” said John Pike, who runs the Arlington, Va.-based military think tank GlobalSecurity.org. “They seem to be striving for purpose as a military service and this is a way to go about that.”

….

Army leaders have said losing the UAV mission could endanger soldiers because of delays in Air Force close-air support to troops in combat.

“The service chiefs and our (U.S. House) committee met in a closed session,” Cramer said, “and I asked them directly if the Air Force could perform as well and support troops on the ground, specifically Army troops on the ground, as well as the Army could.

“The Army and Marine chiefs said no, they did not believe it based on past performance.
….

Intel and Symantec team up Stop You From Using Your PC As You Wish

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It appears that the Bobsey Twins of the security worldhave decided to put features into chipset that will prevent users from running the software they choose.

They are not admitting this, but the statement that, “Intel plans to incorporate Trusted Platform Module capabilities, which already ships as separate modules in some of its laptops, into its chipsets next year.” Means that you will not be able to run the programs that you buy on your PC.

Hello AMD.

Bush Without the Thinking

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Guiliani has been taking shots at Edwards ever since John criticized Rudy’s foreign policy ideas (which are truly insane).

Now Edwards’ spokesman Eric Schultz puts in his $0.02:

Poor Rudy, first he loses all touch with reality by bragging he spent more time at Ground Zero than our brave firefighters and first responders, and now he wants to brag about his foreign policy vision which can be best described as “George Bush without the thinking.

OMFG!!!!! Journalism Practiced Here!!!

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Even more amazing, it has been practiced by the normally quite hacktacular Nedra Pickler in debunking a right wing troll storm.

A few days back, Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”

Not only is this an accurate assessment, the US tactics are bad enough that the Brits want US troops and aircraft out of their sector because they are generating too much support for the Taliban through their indiscriminate bombing.

Now we see a real fact check:

As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can’t be attributed to one party.

CBS’s Bill Plante Practices Journalism

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At the ceremony announcing Rove’s departure, there was no question and answer session. Like any good reporter, Plante got a question in anyway:

As Karl Rove embraced President Bush today following an emotional farewell announcement on the South Lawn, the solemnity of the moment was shattered by Bill Plante of CBS, who bellowed to Bush: “If he’s so smart, how come you lost Congress?”

FWIW, it’s not the Carpetbagger (source of link) who called the moment “solemn”.

It was a political moment, not a solemn one, and questions should have been asked.

Bush Toadies Need to be cleaned out of the US Military Needs to Cleaned

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Think Progress has the video and this remarkable quote from Gen. Casey:

A questioner asked, “What are the prospects in Iraq and how will this war end?”
Casey responded: Right now, there’s so much residual mistrust left over from the time under Saddam Hussein that they’re not quite ready to go forward. But they have an educated population, they have oil wells, they have water, they have some of the most fertile land I’ve ever seen. In a decade or so, this will be a remarkable country, if we stick with it.“

Bush and His Evil Minions™ (Karl Rove) has succeeded in poisoning almost every branch of government by purging competent reality based people, and replacing them with those who are insane.

Wall Street Investment Banks to Create System to Hide Insider Trades

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Seriously. Notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, this is what a private bourse like this is for.

Banks to start trading platform
Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and others are setting up a private system to trade stocks of companies looking to avoid public scrutiny.
August 14 2007: 1:34 PM EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Five of Wall Street’s biggest banks, including Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, said on Tuesday they were setting up a private system to trade stocks of companies eager to avoid the scrutiny of public markets.

The group, which also includes underwriter Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York Mellon, said the new platform is designed to ease trading for privately sold securities. It will target companies looking to raise capital while avoiding the rules imposed on publicly listed shares.

…

If the SEC were really concerned about healthy markets, it would take steps to prevent secret transactions by actors who are likely to have inside information.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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OK…That’s odd, it appears that
a motorcyclist failed to notice that he had lost his leg below the knee: “Company worker Kazuo Osada, 54, was on a jaunt with 10 other bikers yesterday when he failed to negotiate a bend. However, he was ‘unaware his right leg had been severed below the knee apparently because his attention was focused on the strong pain he felt from the crash’, according to police.”

‘Tis but a scratch