Minnesota 31, Green Bay 17




From the Heraldblog news desk:

A seven year old Missouri boy was at the center of a courtroom drama this morning when he challenged a court ruling over who should have custody of the boy.

The boy has a history of being beaten by his parents and the judge awarded custody to his aunt.

The boy confirmed that his aunt beat him more than his parents and refused to live there.

When the judge suggested that he live with his grandparents the boy cried out that they beat him more than anyone.

In an unusual turn of events, the judge dramatically allowed the boy himself to choose who should have custody of him.

Custody was granted to the Green Bay Packers this morning as the boy firmly believes that they are not capable of beating anyone.
10.1.05 15:25


The Salvadoran option


I hope they're just kidding.

Or maybe it's just a trial balloon. That's when government officials "leak" a seemingly loopy notion to the press, to see who supports it, and who doesn't.

Or maybe the Bushies are in meltdown mode over Iraq. The hearts and minds option has flatlined. Conservative Republican are splitting over the wisdom of invading a Muslim country on faulty premises. And half of Americans disapprove of a President who is one week away from being sworn in. Again. So using Muslim death squads to kill, torture, and terrorize the Iraqi Sunni population is looking pretty sweet these days.

Somebody is calling this the Salvadoran option. Republicans get all misty eyed remembering how Ronald Reagan crushed a communist insurgency in El Salvador in the halcyon 1980s:
One [Salvadoran] death squad member, when asked about the types of tortures used, replied: "Uh, well, the same things you did in Vietnam. We learned from you. We learned from you the means, like blowtorches in the armpits, shots in the balls. But for the "toughest ones" — that is, those who resist these other tortures — "we have to pop their eyes out with a spoon. You have to film it to believe it, but boy, they sure sing."
Let freedom ring.


Pyramid boy on Fox?

James Wolcott is trying to start a rumor that Fox is eyeing Spc Charles Graner for a commentator slot, if the former naked-pyramid coach and Iraqi-smacker is acquitted of beating and torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
This would indeed be a controversial talent pick, one that would no doubt earn head-shaking disapproval from the graybeards in the Old Media. But Fox News feels that Spc Graner has proven that he is one tough dude who knows how to get the dirty job done, which plugs in nicely with the cable news channel's angry white male demographic. The way he cocked his thumbs-up at the camera after forming naked Iraqi prisoners in a pyramid demonstrates the sort of can-do attitude America needs to fight the war against terror without losing its sense of humor.
We can lose the war. We can lose our credibility. But please, God, don't let us lose our sense of humor. We're gonna need that.


Do you want fries with that?

And why is CNN calling this news?
Chayse Westin McDonald was due Wednesday. But on Sunday, Ann McDonald knew her time was getting near -- and fast.

Problem was, there is no hospital in this eastern Missouri town, and the closest one was 15 minutes away.

McDonald, whose husband is fighting in Iraq, and the child's grandmother, Linda Cuneio, got in the car, but it soon became evident they wouldn't make it to a hospital. So they pulled over at a McDonald's in Union.

The baby was born beneath the golden arches.

"Of course everyone is like, 'Are you going to name him Ronald?"' Ann McDonald said.
The baby reportedly weighed 5 pounds, 6 ounces at birth, but was supersized to 10 pounds, 12 ounces.


Quote of the day

"However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we're there, why we went there, and why we're still there." Red state heart throb Mel Gibson, quoted in the New York Times
12.1.05 04:06


A blog for Dan?

Jay Rosen at PressThink says Dan Rather needs a blog:
Participating in debate around the blog and online journalism worlds could be as simple as lose the spokesperson and meet with your personal blogger for 20-30 minutes a day. He does the rest. Morning talks are turned into posts quoting you; your blogger gets the links to go with them and "runs" the blog, including comment sections. Whenever you want to write, you do.
The blogger is a feedback loop and fail safe device. Part of what she does is monitor the online world for what is being said about Dan Rather and his reporting. Such a person, well connected to the discussion, would have been extremely valuable to you during the 12-day period, Sep. 8-20, 2004. After six months of your blog, statements like this from Linda Mason, your new vice president for standards:

"Dan does think he's constantly attacked. If we backed off every story that was criticized, we wouldn't be doing any stories."

would be rendered inoperative by reason of being inane.
Yes, but equally inane are the yowlings of the Freepers who became overnight experts on the aracana of 1970-era typography, and declared the CBS memos forgeries. Does Professor Rosen think that subjecting mainstream media reporting to internet detectives is the perfect balance for imperfect reporting?

I'm no fan of the network nightly news roundups. The reporting is shallow, and the follow up inconsistent. But the problem is not bias, as the Freepers suggest. It's laziness.To paraphrase Al Franken, saying the problem with the news is bias is like saying that the problem with al Qaeda is they put too much olive oil in their hummus.

Perhaps blogging is still in its infant stage, and as the media matures, a true system of checks and balances will emerge. The problem with relying on blogs for balance is that there are no clear "blogs of record." It's still too early to say "If Atrios says it's so, it probably is." As imperfect as the New York Times is, observers on the left, right and in between still feel relatively secure quoting its reporting. It's interpretation of events that divides people. But the blogosphere does little verifiable reporting. Oh sure, you get great tsunami videos, and if Josh Marshall recounts his conversation with a Pentagon insider, most will agree things went down that way. But the real reporting is stil being done by corporate owned media, and even the blogs rely on their accounts.

I agree with Rosen's point that Dan Rather and other news anchors need to pay more attention to the blogosphere. It's an emerging story, and nobody knows where it will lead or what impact it will have on society. I just don't want to see the networks driven by anonymous communities of bloggers. Blog bias is much more potent than anything the networks could cook up.
14.1.05 02:31


Brazen lies


Politicians lie. Everyone knows that. But most political lies fall in the gray zone of exagerration, half truth, false analogy and such.

But lately President Bush has been pushing the prevarication envelope, casting aside all pretense of fact, and just out and out lying. Jaw dropping whoppers. He's now telling anyone who will listen that social security will be bankrupt in 45 years, stressing the word "will" to let us know that he knows something that the rest of us need to know. It will be bankrupt. It reminds me of my doctor's telephone voice message, "Please allow five days for a prescription to be filled or your prescription will be delayed.

If Bush is right, and SS will go bankrupt in 45 years, it's because of his administration's outrageous deficit spending.

So maybe Bush does know something the rest of us don't.


Why we fight

My Cost of the War in Iraq counter passed $150 billion today, and the US death toll is over 1,300 mostly young soldiers and Marines. Now I know some of you might be wondering why the US invaded a Mideast country two years ago, and why we are still there. For an answer, Heraldblog takes you directly to the inner sanctum of the White House itself, where Presidential mouthpiece Ari Fleischer cleared up the mystery for an obviously inattentive press on April 10, 2003:
Inattentive reporter: Ari, part of the reason for the war was WMD. Now, well into the war, WMD has not been found. The American public is going to the television every morning, listening to the radio every morning, trying to find out if, indeed, WMD was found. Does the administration feel there's some awkwardness right now with these statements of they're professionals at hiding, and we know it's there? I mean, is there some sort of awkwardness about the fact that this has not been found as of yet?

MR. FLEISCHER: No. We know Saddam Hussein is there, but we haven't found him yet, either. The fact of the matter is we are still in a war, and not everything about the war is yet known. But make no mistake -- as I said earlier -- we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found.
Now I hope we're through talking about this.
16.1.05 01:14


Thirty-four things to do before the inauguration

Via Julie Saltman

1. Get that abortion you've always wanted.

2. Drink a nice clean glass of water.

3. Cash your social security check.

4. See a doctor of your own choosing.

5. Spend quality time with your draft age child/grandchild.

6. Visit Syria, or any foreign country for that matter.

7. Get that gas mask you've been putting off buying.

8. Hoard gasoline.

10. Borrow books from library before they're banned - Constitutional law books, Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, Tropic of Cancer, etc.

11. If you have an idea for an art piece involving a crucifix - do it now.

12. Come out - then go back in - HURRY!

13. Jam in all the Alzheimer's stem cell research you can.

14. Stay out late before the curfews start.

16. Go see Bruce Springsteen before he has his "accident."

17. Go see Mount Rushmore before the Reagan addition.

18. Use the phrase - "you can't do that - this is America."

19. If you're white - marry a black person, if you're black - marry a white person.

21. Take a walk in Yosemite, without being hit by a snowmobile or a base-jumper.

22. Enroll your kid in an accelerated art or music class.

23. Start your school day without a prayer.

24. Pass on the secrets of evolution to future generations.

26. Learn French.

28. Attend a commitment ceremony with your gay friends.

29. Take a factory tour anywhere in the U.S.

30. Try to take photographs of animals on the endangered species list.

31. Visit Florida before the polar ice caps melt.

32. Visit Nevada before it becomes radioactive.

33. Visit Alaska before "The Big Spill."

34. Visit Massachusetts while it is still a state.


Starve the poor, I mean, beast

After four years of record deficit spending, the Bushies finally have an excuse to slash domestic entitlement programs that don't benefit major Republican Party contributors. According to the Washington Post:
The Bush administration is preparing a budget request that would freeze most spending on agriculture, veterans and science, slash or eliminate dozens of federal programs, and force more costs, from Medicaid to housing, onto state and local governments, according to congressional aides and lawmakers.

The White House also plans to reintroduce measures to stem the growth of federal health care and other entitlement programs that rise automatically each year based on set formulas, they said.

The tough budget for the fiscal year that begins in October is intended to signal President Bush's commitment to reining in the record federal deficit, and to satisfying conservative critics who note spending has soared since Bush took office.

"From a thematic standpoint, the goal is to reduce the deficit in half over four years, and you can't reduce the deficit if you don't reduce the growth of entitlements," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.). "If the president sends up an aggressive budget, I'll be certainly receptive to it, and I think the Congress will be, too."
Anti-government conservatives call this tactic "starving the beast." The plan is maddingly simple: run up huge deficits, then claim that you need to cut entitlement spending to pay for the deficits. The crippling budget deficits that Bush's tax cuts helped to create are an excuse for Republicans to squeeze domestic discretionary spending.


What if you torture your nanny?

Apparently, hiring an undocumented nanny can disqualify you from a leadership job in the Bush administration, but going medieval on Ay-Rabs is OK. That's the takeaway, unfortunately, once the Senate confirms Roberto Gonzalez as attorney general. As The Washington Post argues today, most of the damage to America's reputation as a defender off the rule of law was avoidable:
Mr. Gonzales's defenders argue that his position on the Geneva Conventions amounted to a judgment that captured members of al Qaeda did not deserve official status as prisoners of war. If that had been his recommendation, then the United States never would have suffered the enormous damage to its global prestige caused by the detention of foreigners at the Guantanamo Bay prison. In fact, the White House counsel endorsed the view that the hundreds of combatants rounded up by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, who included members of the Taliban army, foreign volunteers and a few innocent bystanders, as well as al Qaeda militants, could be collectively and indiscriminately denied Geneva protections without the individual hearings that the treaty provides for. That judgment, which has been ruled illegal by a federal court, resulted in hundreds of detainees being held for two years without any legal process. In addition to blackening the reputation of the United States, the policy opened the way to last year's decision by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the prisoners were entitled to appeal their detentions in federal courts. The court also ruled that an American citizen could not be detained and held as an "enemy combatant" without court review or the right to counsel, invalidating Mr. Gonzales's position in the cases of Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla.
The Geneva convention is clear on what constitutes a legal combatant, and it seems clear to me, at least, that captured al Qaeda terrorists are not soldiers, and not covered by the Geneva convention. But that doesn't mean we get to pull out their fingernails. Either try them as criminals, or call them POWs. There is no third way.
18.1.05 01:33


Kill your television day

I'm boycotting television, radio, and internet today. It's the only way I know how to avoid hearing about Bush's inauguration. I'll be sitting in front of computer for the day, doing my design and publications work, and listening to jazz and blues on iTunes stations. But no NPR, no New York Times online, no CBS news updates on the telly.

I'll be in full rant mode Friday.
20.1.05 01:10


America split on that whole
uniter or divider thing


A recent USA Today poll asked 1,000 or so Americans if President Bush was a uniter or a divider. Forty-nine percent said uniter, and 49 percent said divider. Two percent have no clue.

Now this can be interepreted a number of ways. The 49 percent who say Bush is a uniter are obviously united by their affection for the man who relied on faulty intelligence to kill 100,000 Iraqi civilians. But the 49 percent of Americans who think the former governor of Texas is a divider are also united in their loathing of a President who lies to voters and panders to religious bigots to win the slimmest electoral majority in 90 years. So in a way, President Bush is a uniter.

A different interpretation of the "uniter/divider" paradigm would take all Americans into consideration, as in "I promise to unite all Americans." Or "I promised not to pander to an interest group that sees the 18th century European enlightenment as an unfortunate detour on the road to Jesusville." Using this "uniter/divider" model, President Bush is a divider.

So maybe just asking people if Bush is a uniter or divider is not the right question. Perhaps we should be looking at what Bush says is important, and comparing notes with what Americans think is important. After all, a President is at least partially defined by his policy agenda.

So what is important to George Bush? Lately, he's been talking about privatizing social security in order to save it, in much the same way US soldiers used to destroy Vietnamese villages in order to save them. So social security is important. Bush also wants to cut taxes for the wealthy, and keep gay people from entering into managomous relationships. And he still thinks that invading Iraq was a swell idea, and going just as planned.

So are Americans united with their leader on this agenda items. Not according to the USA Today poll:
On domestic issues, Americans are more concerned about education and health care costs than they are about Social Security. They worry more about jobs, the deficit and poverty than they do about taxes, another focus for Bush. Protecting the environment ranks above curtailing lawsuits against doctors, the first major legislative proposal the president plans to pursue this year.

Among 18 issues, same-sex marriage — the subject of heated debate in the election — comes in last when Americans are asked to rate their concerns.
There is a glimmer of hope in all this for Bush. If you really stretch the definition of "united" to include more that 60 percent of Americans, then Dubya's uniter side does shine through on two or three critical areas:

• 70 percent say he will not be able to reduce the federal budget deficit in the next four years

• 69 percent think 2005 will be "a troubled year"

• 70 percent say the country is more divided on major issues than in the past

• 59 percent say things are going badly for the United States in Iraq (since the poll has a +/1 3% margin of error, I'll count this as uniter material)

So to sum it all up, I'd have to say President Bush is more of a uniter than a divider. He just doesn't unite in ways that really help.
21.1.05 20:54


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