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Grave

There’s no such thing as a fiscally conservative social liberal. No one should ever use this term again, ever

Our Man Palast strikes gold yet again. After reports covering everything from the August 2003 blackout in the Northeastern U.S. power grid, to the November 2000 “black”out of the Southeastern U.S. voter rolls, Greg Palast now documents the insidious effort by several power utility companies to work around a $9 billion recompensation plan due the State of California after all the 2000-era state energy crises, paying particular attention to gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s involvement in this malarkey.
You say you owe us one dollar? Let’s help you out, here — why not pay back one cent instead, after ensuring that your Republican candidate gets elected to manage the world’s fifth-largest economy? Wait a second, that makes this scale much larger: you owe nine billion dollars? Pay back nine billion cents! All’s fair in politics!
“But we’re running a deficit!”, you say. Well, we can cut state social programs, because there’s no way we’re taking money from the utility companies! Let’s deregulate!
Bah, humbug.

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Grave

Save us all, forgive us our Access Hollywood sins

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It’s more than likely that this is, by now, a familiar image to Los Angeles-area residents and commuters, which can only be a good thing, given the circumstances. If Andre the Giant has a posse, why can’t Arnold the Bodybuilder have a budget deficit to call his own? (By “Arnold the Bodybuilder,” I mean “Pete Wilson 2: The Sequel,” and most definitely not “Cruz the Bustamante”.)

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Grave

The most fun people at any party

The NY Times revealed that the U.S. military has been practicing the craft of shooting down airborne civilian flights, should that ever become necessary, in case, well, you know.
Included is this one line, which seemed a bit more casual than perhaps it ought to have been:
“[The general] said pilots and ground controllers were screened to make sure they would not refuse an order to shoot down a suspicious airliner packed with civilians…”
Yikes. Just imagine how callous and, well, military-esque these people who made it through the selection process must be.

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Grave

Not Reader Mail, but Representative Mail

As October approaches, we thought it fitting to do a “one year later” examination of the events leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in spring 2003. And what better lens through which to examine this than incriminating mail from elected representatives who signed off on the President’s ability to pre-emptively go into the Middle East?

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Shallow

Yet another reason why MLB needs revenue sharing

Yes, it’s painfully easy to rail against George Steinbrenner and his disdain for salary caps and smaller market baseball cities. But why should we exclusively scorn the Yankees’ bossman?
It seems as though his uber-capitalist TV-revenue-seeking mindset has spread to his employees as well. Listen to NY’s celebrated/overrated slugger Jason Giambi’s pullquote contribution to a Washington Post article about the celebrated matchups in this particular baseball postseason:
Jason Giambi can see why there’s so much enthusiasm.
“The teams that are in the postseason – the Cubbies always have great support. These playoffs should be great, a lot of TV viewers.”

Maybe George’s mouthpiece is anticipating a raise, what with all the exciting licensing revenue sure to come in this fall!

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Grave Unintentionally Hilarious

Unintentionally hilarious photo of the moment, Vol. 2

t_allbaugh_POST2.jpgFollowing up on the post immediately below, meet one Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Director of FEMA. A predictably awful suggested headline may have been, “FEMA DECLARES HAIRLINE A FEDERAL DISASTER AREA”, but that would have been tasteless. So instead, we’ll simply let the image speak for itself, and lest you think we’re picking on this poor chap in an unwarranted manner, take note of the following info snipped from the FEMA site:
“Mr. Allbaugh served as the National Campaign Manager for Bush-Cheney 2000 with responsibility and oversight for all activities related to the Bush election campaign. He had previously served as Campaign Manager for President Bush’s first run for Texas governor.”
See, the guy deserves it! Laugh away!

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Grave Unintentionally Hilarious

Super-spectacular unintentionally hilarious photo of the moment, vol. 1

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Grave

I don’t want to know anything more than what the five-word headlines tell me about my White House’s CIA leaks

What with the mini-hullabaloo about what may or may not be Karl Rove’s pseudo-anonymous leak to Robert Novak in July about the positive identification of a CIA official (thereby violating federal law), the press is yet again in a flurry! A tizzy! Law-breaking administration officials — scandal!
Well, rest assured this scandal will go the way of missing WMD’s and budget deficits and under-funded education legislation. The President’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, stated today that an investigation will ensue if the administration happens to come across any more information regarding the leaks. This information, of course, won’t come from up on high, as this excerpted info indicates:
“Q (The President) does not know whether or not the classified information was divulged here, and he’s only getting his information from the media?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, we don’t know — we don’t have any information that’s been brought to our attention beyond what we’ve seen in the media reports.”

Well, if what Bush knows is confined to what appears in media coverage, it might help to take the President’s news-gathering habits into account, as per last week’s interview with Brit Hume from Fox News:
“HUME: How do you get your news?
BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me…I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves.”

How do you like those odds of there being an independent counsel to investigate this matter?

Categories
Shallow

Step up to the plate, Jessica Simpson!

There has certainly been quite the spate of recent noteworthy deaths of late, and usually in pairs of sorts; 1940s anti-icons Edward Teller and Leni Riefenstahl; “entertainment johnnies” Cash and Ritter; and Ivy-League academic types George Plimpton and Edward Said (about whom you may want to read this surprisingly touching obit by the otherwise icy-demeanored Christopher Hitchens).
With the clock ticking as such, we’d like to wish 50 Cent and Nick Lachey’s wife all the best!

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Grave

Building a Better Mousetrap

In this post-Inside.com world of media criticism, scoops are few and far between. Unless you’re Slate‘s ineffably muckraking media crit Jack Shafer!
Shafer, who lost the magazine’s editorial stewardship to Jacob Weisberg when Michael Kinsley stepped down last year, has now posted two uber-niche media navelgazing pieces in consecutive weeks…starting with last week’s ill-conceived, contrarian-for-contrarian’s sake dismissal of “public” or “civil journalism” (which in and of itself isn’t the obscenely I.F. Stone-centric idea that Shafer makes it out to be) and culminating with today’s front-page featured article, The Rat of Baghdad – Who tattled on New York Times reporter John F. Burns to the Iraqi ministry of information?
Within, we get a sanctimonious dissection of one anonymous reporter’s “outing” of the Times’ John Burns and his criticism of Saddam Hussein to the tyrant himself. The issue? “(B)y performing his comparative literature review with the Iraqi ministry using Burns’ copy, did the unnamed American correspondent end up taunting the ministry for allowing Burns to write so damagingly? Did the unnamed American correspondent’s comparison draw an extra set of crosshairs on Burns’ forehead and put him in even greater peril? Did the unnamed correspondent encourage the Iraqis to further play one foreign correspondent off the other?”
Wow, first Daniel Pearl, and then Jayson Blair, and then…Burnsgate! Let’s hear it for (over-)reactionary New York-based self-absorption! Scoop on, Shafer!
We eagerly await the onslaught of frontpage media-crit controversies on the U.S. coalition’s shooting death of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana or the Army’s cannon-fodder treatment of journalists in Baghdad’s Palestine hotel or the American-led interim Iraqi government’s banning of Arabic satellite television networks such as Al-Jazeera.
Wait. Maybe those stories already got their token half-day of coverage?