Tuesday, May 18, 2004
The Oregon Trail Ends...Today
Kerry brought Dean with him to Oregon yesterday. Pretty standard coverage resulted, with the veiled hints that these two fellers don't think too much of each other. But buried in the coverage was news that Nader didn't even gather the 1000 signatures he needed to make the Presidential ballot. For someone who got 5% there in 2000, that's a telling stat. Which leads me to offer my opinion that all the polls that show Nader drawing around 5% nationally are so far off-base as to be detrimental to the actual horserace by giving Ralph even more false confidence for digging in his heels in the states where he does make the ballot. I'd prefer that the pollsters look to places like Oregon and New Mexico that actually have a history of voting for the 3rd Party spoilers as a way of better gauging his support this year. Just a thought.
At long last, Chalabi's gettin' kicked off the gravy train! I'd hate to see what sort of a mess he and his henchmen make of their squatters palace given this overdue development. He doesn't officially lose his $350K/month until June 30th, but it finally looks like it indeed will happen. In retrospect, it's amazing just how much false justification for war a measly $27M can buy.
DailyKos, one of the best politico-blogs, hit one out of the park yesterday by analyzing the cynicism of Bush's fake grandiloquence during the 50th Anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka. To paraphrase, for the Bushies to praise the actions of Judges that rule against the misguided majority of 'Mericans barely passes the laugh test. But the fact that Massachusetts began offering gay marriages yesterday I believe this moment will stand as an important contrast between the future of our collective march toward equal rights for all Americans and the hard-to-stomach present Administration's claims of higher aims.
To follow up on yesterday's ironic disparity in coverage of the news from Iraq - the Wall Street Journal seems to have dusted off an editorial from a year ago and added a new lead to trump up the importance of the single sarin shell found over the weekend. Apparently, the WSJ thinks that comments such as the following still hold water:
Though it gets little attention, the Iraq Survey Group that is searching for WMD has also found warehouses full of commercial and agricultural chemicals. Mixed and packaged properly, those could quickly become chemical weapons, and Saddam had no legitimate need for so much pesticide.
Yea right, any pharmacist/pharmer can whip up a big batch of anthrax given a casual motivation. Unbelievable. Look, I read the WSJ every weekday given a still active subscription from when I did news briefings with the Dean Campaign. I respect them as a national paper and some of their reporting is beyond comparison for quality. But their editorial page simply cannot be taken seriously by anyone other than a diehard NeoCon. Listen for Wolfie to quote from it in today's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It's just about the only defense of his time at Defense in play at the moment for the Bushie/WSJ/FoxNews side of the argument. And to play this during the same news cycle when the rest of the world is shocked by the suicide bombing that killed Ezzedine Salim is just downright jingoistic crapola masquerading as progress.
The LATimes keeps the legs churning on the Iraqi prisoner abuse story with some gruesome details from statements by the guards currently being run up the flagpole. More is sure to come (yet another great "get" for the LATimes in this particular case). After all, the first court martial starts tomorrow in Iraq.
Kerry brought Dean with him to Oregon yesterday. Pretty standard coverage resulted, with the veiled hints that these two fellers don't think too much of each other. But buried in the coverage was news that Nader didn't even gather the 1000 signatures he needed to make the Presidential ballot. For someone who got 5% there in 2000, that's a telling stat. Which leads me to offer my opinion that all the polls that show Nader drawing around 5% nationally are so far off-base as to be detrimental to the actual horserace by giving Ralph even more false confidence for digging in his heels in the states where he does make the ballot. I'd prefer that the pollsters look to places like Oregon and New Mexico that actually have a history of voting for the 3rd Party spoilers as a way of better gauging his support this year. Just a thought.
At long last, Chalabi's gettin' kicked off the gravy train! I'd hate to see what sort of a mess he and his henchmen make of their squatters palace given this overdue development. He doesn't officially lose his $350K/month until June 30th, but it finally looks like it indeed will happen. In retrospect, it's amazing just how much false justification for war a measly $27M can buy.
DailyKos, one of the best politico-blogs, hit one out of the park yesterday by analyzing the cynicism of Bush's fake grandiloquence during the 50th Anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka. To paraphrase, for the Bushies to praise the actions of Judges that rule against the misguided majority of 'Mericans barely passes the laugh test. But the fact that Massachusetts began offering gay marriages yesterday I believe this moment will stand as an important contrast between the future of our collective march toward equal rights for all Americans and the hard-to-stomach present Administration's claims of higher aims.
To follow up on yesterday's ironic disparity in coverage of the news from Iraq - the Wall Street Journal seems to have dusted off an editorial from a year ago and added a new lead to trump up the importance of the single sarin shell found over the weekend. Apparently, the WSJ thinks that comments such as the following still hold water:
Though it gets little attention, the Iraq Survey Group that is searching for WMD has also found warehouses full of commercial and agricultural chemicals. Mixed and packaged properly, those could quickly become chemical weapons, and Saddam had no legitimate need for so much pesticide.
Yea right, any pharmacist/pharmer can whip up a big batch of anthrax given a casual motivation. Unbelievable. Look, I read the WSJ every weekday given a still active subscription from when I did news briefings with the Dean Campaign. I respect them as a national paper and some of their reporting is beyond comparison for quality. But their editorial page simply cannot be taken seriously by anyone other than a diehard NeoCon. Listen for Wolfie to quote from it in today's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It's just about the only defense of his time at Defense in play at the moment for the Bushie/WSJ/FoxNews side of the argument. And to play this during the same news cycle when the rest of the world is shocked by the suicide bombing that killed Ezzedine Salim is just downright jingoistic crapola masquerading as progress.
The LATimes keeps the legs churning on the Iraqi prisoner abuse story with some gruesome details from statements by the guards currently being run up the flagpole. More is sure to come (yet another great "get" for the LATimes in this particular case). After all, the first court martial starts tomorrow in Iraq.
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