Deep Throat, Antihero
His unmasking makes everybody look a little less noble.
By Timothy Noah For years the better class of Deep Throat sleuth
Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1
An Online Dowser and Filter Of Important Information
His unmasking makes everybody look a little less noble.
By Timothy Noah For years the better class of Deep Throat sleuth
By Susan J. Douglas
No matter how much columnists and media critics bemoan the sorry state of American journalism, no matter how low the press sinks in the estimation of the American people, the news media, particularly on television, remains defiantly abysmal. Now, on top of the usual toxic doses of runaway brides, irrelevant celebrity trials and President Bush holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah, we have the rise of Jesus News.
Blinded by their own erroneous news frame that the last election was all about “moral values,” and pressured to give religion more coverage by an evangelical right running on methamphetamines, the news media are devoting more airtime to everything Jesus.
The ghoulish death watch of Pope Paul John II (“Is he dead yet?” “No, Bob, not dead yet, back to you.”) hogged nearly an hour of total news time on the three networks from March 28-April 1, and his death and funeral preparations garnered 129 minutes of network news attention the following week, making it the year’s third biggest story so far. By contrast, that same week, Tom Delay’s ethics problems received four minutes of coverage on ABC and CBS combined, and none on NBC. By the week of April 18-22, when the networks devoted 37 minutes to the Conclave of Cardinals (“Is the smoke white or black, Bob?”) and another 32 minutes to the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new pope, one might have thought Catholicism had become our state religion.
By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times
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No one knows who sent the letter, but the relentless violence here is often baffling. Four of the hospital’s top surgeons stopped going to work. So did six senior cardiologists. Some left the country.
It was far from an isolated incident.
The director of another hospital, Dr. Abdula Sahab Eunice, was gunned down May 17 on his way to work, officials at the hospital said.
In the past year, about 10 percent of Baghdad’s total force of 32,000 registered doctors – Sunnis, Shiites and Christians – have left or been driven from work, according to the Iraqi Medical Association, which licenses practitioners. The exodus has accelerated in recent months, said Akif Khalil al-Alousi, a pathologist at Kindi Teaching Hospital and a senior member of the association. A vast majority of those fleeing, he said, are the most senior doctors.
“It represents a very good chunk of the doctors,” Dr. Alousi said. “These are the cr
Mark Danner
For the Class of September 11th, which, I’m afraid, is all of us, there probably can’t be too much graduation advice. A week ago, I offered Against Discouragement, the commencement address Howard Zinn gave at Spelman College, as my way of graduating the rest of us. But — a sign of the tough times we find ourselves in — I can’t resist bringing up more graduation artillery and offering a second barrage of observation and advice, this time from Mark Danner, who in mid-May addressed graduating English students at Berkeley.
As Danner reminds us, we inhabit a strange land, one in which worldly revelation — revelation after revelation of the scandals, follies, and crimes of Bush administration officials — has lead nowhere in particular. You know that we’re in a startling moment when Amnesty International issues its annual report and its Secretary General, Irene Khan, refers to Guant
By Dahr Jamail
Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
The mayhem continues in Iraq, with today at least 40 people dead, including
five US soldiers in Diyala province as the meltdown of the failed US-led occupation
continues.
Two suicide bombers detonated themselves after walking into a crowd of police
officers in Hilla, south of Baghdad. The policemen were demonstrating outside
the mayor’s office to protest a government decision to disband their Special
Forces unit.
In yet another horrible PR move (or attempt to raise sectarian tensions?) by
the US military the head of Iraq’s largest Sunni political party, Mohsen
Abdul Hamid was detained from his home early this morning in western Baghdad.
Of course his head was promptly bagged and his hands tied before he was taken
away to be interrogated. His three sons were also detained with him. Stun bombs
and bullets were said to be used during the raid, according to his wife.
It just so happens that his party, the Islamic Party, opposes the new US-backed
security operation now engulfing Baghdad because they believe the security forces
will disregard the rights of innocent Iraqis.
Later today he was released and the military admitted it made a mistake.
After more than five months of negotiations, the European Commission tonight will end its talks with Microsoft and begin assessing the company’s proposal to comply with the March 2004 antitrust order against it. “We’re in regular contact with Microsoft and we have no reason to believe they will not make their final offer before midnight tonight,” EU spokesman Jonathan Todd told the Associated Press. “It will take time to analyze this proposal. I can’t say whether they’re going to fall into line or not.” If it turns out Microsoft hasn’t fallen into line (and given the way the company’s been dragging its feet, there seems to be little indication that it will), the EC can slap it with a fine of up to 5 percent of its daily revenue, or about $6.25 million a day. That would drain about 12 percent of earnings for the current quarter and the fiscal year that starts July 1, an expense that would cause even Microsoft, sitting atop some $40 billion in cash, no uncertain pain.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s abuse of power has gotten worse and without urgent action he might get away with it. Last week a judge in Texas ruled that a political action committee formed by DeLay was guilty of violating state law by failing to report some $600,000 in corporate contributions that were used to sway Texas elections in 2002. Those 2002 elections were part of a power grab to redraw the congressional district lines in Texas in order to put more Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Tomorrow hundreds of MoveOn members will go to the offices of congressional Republicans and deliver petitions urging them to “Fire Tom DeLay” from his post as majority leader. Please take one minute right now to sign our petition before tomorrow’s deadline so we have lots of signatures to deliver, increasing our impact.
http://www.moveonpac.org/delay/?id=5609-3740569-xPQTFve_hrlYolgQwRV9Kg&t=3
DeLay has already been found guilty three times by the House ethics committee
The Little Secret That Can Change Your Life
If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat
Joann Davis
With a light heart and in the nicest, most insightful way, Joann Davis invites us to stop running around in circles. If we stop working for the cheese at the end of the maze, for the biggest toys at the end of the day, who knows what we could accomplish or how we might feel? This little book is nothing less than a game plan for creating a life that counts.
In the tradition of Robert Fulghum, The Little Secret That Can Change Your Life* is a collection of short inspirational essays designed to help readers discover the path to a more meaningful life, one that is less about running the modern rat race of workaholism, consumerism, debt, and frustration. The book suggests that a more rewarding way of living comes when we realize that beneath the surface of life is a spiritual economy made up of virtues and values. Money and material things matter, but they aren
Atrios posts a 1998 story about the Washington, D.C. Establishment’s outrage at Bill Clinton for his lying about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. What is truly nauseating is not the corrupt and cliquey insiderism – it is the outrage over lying about sex, and the subsequent silence we’ve all experienced from the media/political Establishment when it has come to the current administration’s lying about war.
Here are some choice comments from the 1998 article:
“There has to be a functional trust by reporters of the person they’re covering. Clinton lies knowing that you know he’s lying. It’s brutal and it subjugates the person who’s being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly lied to.”
On this memorial day we honor those who sacrificed their lives for our country. And just as we were last year on this day, we are still engaged in an endless occupation of attrition in Iraq with not even an exit plan. For those who gave their lives with honor, we owe it to them to get to the bottom of why they were sent there in the first place.
According to the revelations in a recently disclosed top level Top Secret British Memo, president Bush had decided no later than July, 2002, to attack Iraq and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”. There was no imminent threat, only an imminent deceit. Won’t you tell your members of Congress to demand an honorable investigation?
http://www.usalone.com/warlies.htm
A resolution of Inquiry has been proposed as follows:
Whereas considerable evidence has emerged that George W. Bush, President of the United States, has engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people as to the basis for taking the nation into war against Iraq, that George W. Bush, President of the United States, has manipulated intelligence so as to allege falsely a national security threat posed to the United States by Iraq, and that George W. Bush, President of the United States, has committed a felony by submitting a false report to the United States Congress on the reasons for launching a first-strike invasion of Iraq: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary is directed to investigate and report to the House of Representatives whether sufficient grounds exist to impeach George W. Bush, President of the United States. Upon completion of such investigation, that Committee shall report thereto, including, if the Committee so determines, articles of impeachment.
Just a few simple words from you mean more than any form letter can. Who in Congress has the integrity to demand the truth? Who among us cares about our country enough to DEMAND AN INVESTIGATION wherever it may lead? This one click form will send your personal message to all our members of Congress at once.
http://www.usalone.com/warlies.htm
Please forward this message to everyone you know and post it everywhere you can.
by Michael Smith
THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.
The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.
The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how to make “regime change” in Iraq legal.
Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, told the meeting that “the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime”.
The new information, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, shows that the allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001, and that the RAF increased their attacks even more quickly than the Americans did.
During 2000, RAF aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone over Iraq dropped 20.5 tons of bombs from a total of 155 tons dropped by the coalition, a mere 13%. During 2001 that figure rose slightly to 25 tons out of 107, or 23%.
However, between May 2002 and the second week in November, when the UN Security Council passed resolution 1441, which Goldsmith said made the war legal, British aircraft dropped 46 tons of bombs a month out of a total of 126.1 tons, or 36%.
Or the Metrics of Losing
By Tom Engelhardt
On March 19th, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed the “metrics” of measuring success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Here is part of that interview:
“NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said recently. You were at a meeting with troops, taking questions from troops. You talked about measuring progress in Iraq. Metrics as you called them, that were important to you. And you said what you measure improves. How are some ways that you are measuring progress in defeating insurgents in Iraq?
“RUMSFELD: Well, we’ve got literally dozens of ways we do it. We have a room here, the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
“We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area. And what we’re seeing, for example, and one metric is presented graphically and it shows that we had spiked up during the sovereignty pass to the Iraqi people and spiked up again during the election, and are now back down to the pre-sovereignty levels which are considerably lower
Many worry that strains between Sunnis and Shiites could ignite a conflict that would overwhelm U.S. troops and the government.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
BAGHDAD — Explosions rip through marketplaces, scattering blood and vegetables and leaving women wailing in the alleys. Bodies bob in rivers and are dug up from garbage dumps and parks. Kidnappers troll the streets, sirens howl through morning prayers and mortar rounds whistle against skylines of minarets.
Iraqis awake each day to the sounds of violence. With little respite, many wonder whether strange, terrible forces are arrayed against them. They fear that weeks of sectarian and clan violence, claiming the lives of all types from imams to barefoot fishermen, are a prelude to civil war.
“I’m worried 24 hours a day,” said Zainab Hassan, a university student majoring in computer science. “Whenever I hear bomb or shooting, I call my mother and husband to check if they’re OK. I can see a civil war coming, it’s obvious. Everybody is talking about it. We have to be more careful.”
Iraqis such as Abu Mohammed, who sells books along the Tigris River, struggle to comprehend how the euphoria of January’s election has withered so quickly. They find contradictions rather than answers. Life has become a vicious thrum, with boys clinging to courtyard walls and gun battles beneath the date palms appearing live on TV.
Interviews with Iraqis from Basra to Baghdad to Mosul suggest that much of the nation fears that intensifying strains between Sunni and Shiite Muslims could ignite a conflict that would overwhelm the increasingly unpopular Iraqi government and 140,000 U.S. troops. Abu Mohammed blames, among others, Saddam Hussein, who, even from his jail cell, seems to taunt the country.
The Public Campaign Action Fund has put out a fun ranking list that helps you look up how close your representative is to Tom DeLay. (A representative’s ranking is based on money received and/or donated, as well as lockstep voting patterns, among other things.) My own representative managed to clock in at a measly #406
By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive
When Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, he was asked whether he “ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise, and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison.” Sanchez, who was head of the Pentagon
A top N.Y. court acts after protests
ALBANY, N.Y. — The village mayor who challenged New York law by marrying gay couples last year will face trial, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday.
Jason West, mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., faces 24 misdemeanor counts of violating the state’s domestic relations law by marrying couples without licenses in late February 2004. He faces fines and up to a year in jail if convicted.
West ’s actions came amid efforts in various states to wed gay couples after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed gay couples to marry in February 2004. Those efforts have largely been put on hold by the courts.
West has said he was upholding the gay couples’ constitutional rights to equal protection — and thus his oath of office — by allowing them to wed in the Hudson Valley town in late February 2004.
But top state officials, including Governor George S. Pataki and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, have said same-sex ceremonies violate state law.
”Mayor West stood up for the constitutional rights of people being treated unfairly and unconstitutionally,” said West’s attorney, E. Joshua Rosenkranz. ”If he is wrong about that judgment, of course he will stand trial and we’ll pay whatever penalty and he’s prepared to do so.”
Before making its decision, the state Court of Appeals refused West’s request first to hear arguments on the constitutionality of the state’s gay marriage ban. West had argued that the high court should take up the issue now because the case was unique and critical to the state.
But Assistant District Attorney Joan Lamb argued that other cases brought by gay couples are wending through the system, and that those couples have better status to contest the law because it affects their own rights, while West was acting as a public official. 
PLEASE PARTICIPATE AND RE-DISTRIBUTE
June 1, 2005 — World’s biggest protest against Bush!
Be part of a coordinated effort to remove Bush. Hit the media and politicians hard. Try it ! This will be the world’s biggest protest against Bush. All of us will speak with “ONE VERY LOUD VOICE” via millions of emails to all American media news desks and politicians on Wednesday, June 1, 2005. They’ve already contacted hundreds of activist organizations across the world but need your help NOW!!!
1. Email everyone you know asking them to email everyone they know (blind copy them if you like and aim for local and overseas people).
2. Your email tells everyone to contact media and politicians on Wed 1 June 2005 requesting that Bush (a) Face charges of war crimes, (b) Be thoroughly investigated for conflict of interest and abuse of position with personal financial interests in Middle East pipelines and military equipment manufacturers.
3. For Wed 1 June 2005, email addresses of hundreds of American media news desks and politicians are listed at http://MediaNewsDesks.blogspot.com or http://www.rumormillnews.com/MEDIA_EMAIL_ADDRESSES.htm
4. Write the date on your calendar!
5. You can also sign an on-line petition to impeach George Bush at
http://www.votetoimpeach.org
You have support: In a poll of 22,000 people across 21 countries, 58% expected Bush to have a negative impact on peace and security, only 26% considered him a positive force, and dislike of Bush is translating into dislike of Americans in general.
Rep. who filed successful ethics complaint against DeLay says ‘web is getting bigger’
By John Byrne | RAW STORY
The former Democratic congressman who filed a successful ethics
complaint against House Majority Tom DeLay (R-TX) last
year said, the ruling against a DeLay political action committee
is a sign that DeLay
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Fold, Spindle, Mutilate, has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Fold, Spindle, Mutilate, endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
