The Anti-American Right II

Via Atrios, a predictably sad exercise in vicious fiction from the predictably sad Ann Coulter. No surprise that she joins the ranks of the anti-American right with the very first paragraph of this vile and mendacious screed:

The Howard Dean campaign was forced to cancel events this week in response to events in Iraq. Donations to the Uday and Qusay Hussein Memorial Fund can be submitted directly to the Dean campaign.

Implying that your political opponents are in league with murderous scum because they did not support the war that resulted in the deaths of said scum is anti-American. Is Bush a follower of bin Laden because he derided Clinton’s attempt to kill the elusive terrorist as “firing missiles at a camel’s butt”? Is Tom DeLay complicit in the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic because he didn’t support the NATO action in Kosovo? No—and you won’t see honest, decent people on either side of the political aisle making those kinds of accusations; honest, decent people understand that in a democracy, politics, like society, ought to be civil.

Once again, Ann Coulter has proven herself to be a dishonest polemicist who oozes hated for the American ideal.

Filed under: politics

Three more Hartz warnings

Here are three more warnings from commenters about Hartz flea treatment and its effect on cats. Again, please do not purchase or use this product, and please do tell your friends the same. (For the beginning of the story, see here and here.)

Jay writes:

I can’t believe what we have been through the past 2 weeks because of hartz flea medicine. 700.00 and our cat is still got neuological problems. ie fall to the right when standing and or walking. We have been through #$@@# and I am sick to know that I am the one that did this to my cat. Just got off the phone with Oklahoma state vet epidemiologist and she said that she sees at least 100 cases a year in her practice alone. How do they (Hartz) get away with this. I just wish I would have been warned or had known about this sooner.

(my emphasis)

Ann writes:

I am reading this just one day after taking my cat, Simon to the emergency vet last night. I thought I was being a good pet parent by putting Hartz flea medicine him two nights ago. Not long after, I noticed the very same twitches and paw shaking. It wasnt severe, just every once in a while, but I thought I better take him in. After talking with 2 vets.. they explained to me just how many problems they have with Hartz cat flea meds and said to NEVER use them. Simon seems to be ok.. they only think his reaction was mild. However, they see cats die from this way too often. They even told me that they called Hartz to let them now the extent of problems they were seeing and Hartz threatened them legally if they continued to give a bad name for their product.

We have to be our own advocate and listen to our VETS and stay AWAY from HARTZ.. they dont care about our pets!

(my emphasis again) So, not satisfied with selling a dangerous product or misleading advertising, Hartz is now threatening to sue medical practitioners for giving advice.

Finally, Leisa writes:

[] I put Hartz flea medicine on my cat, and he started getting sick very quickly. He stopped eating and go so weak he couldn’t stand up. I decided to check the Internet & see if there were any “side effects” to the flea medicine. I was shocked when I saw the warnings about this medicine & people saying their cats had died. I called my vet, and she told me to give the cat a bath immediately & wash the flea medicine off. My poor cat was so weak, he couldn’t hold his head up. I put him in the bathtub, and he had his head on my shoulder crying the entire time I was washing him. I held him in a towel for a long time afterward, and he finally did start to perk up and seemed normal the next morning. I don’t understand why nobody has sued this company. If my cat had died, I would not have given it a second thought—I wouldn’t have cared how much time or money—I would have made sure this company was sued & something was done to take that medicine off the market.

Obviously, I’m no instapundit—traffic-wise, or, I hope, in any other way. Most folks who find my little corner of blogtopia do so via Google. And by far the majority of them are searching for some variant of ‘hartz flea cat’. Very sadly, it’s often the ‘Hartz flea killed my cat’ variant. Please, again, whether you love the MPAA and silly copyright laws or hate them, whether you think Bush is despicable or damn-cute-in-the-flight-suit, and even if you think Dean is no more electable than a wet sack of anchovy heads, don’t use Hartz products.

Filed under: cats

Guest cat

Please welcome our first friday guest cat, Coco. Coco is a Linux enthusiast who makes his home in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s trying to open an old ISDN modem box, because he’s heard about all of the other cats he can meet out here on the interweb. Sadly, I don’t think even ISDN for dummies will help him get online.

Filed under: cats

Polyanna

The 9/11 report, where not redacted to protect the reputations of bad politicians or very bad nations, tells a story of pathetic failure piled on pathetic failure, and this ought to be a cause for great optimism about the likelihood of our preventing future major terror attacks in this country.

The 9/11 plot succeeded not because the hijack crew had a brilliant plan executed with ruthless efficiency, nor because we are systemically too stupid to stop terrorists. It succeeded because the FBI and CIA made stupid mistake after stupid mistake after stupid mistake. If a chain of error this long and this moronic is what it takes for Al-Qaeda plots to succeed, they should not be too confident of future success. The hijackers got lucky, very lucky, again and again. If they whiff only one time, or the FBI or CIA doesn’t make only one out of their many mistakes, the plot fails.

Yes, indeed. When it comes to stopping terror plots, we are good enough, and smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like us.

Filed under: politics/war

The Howler gets one wrong

I read Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler religiously. Somerby—relentless and counterproductive snark aside—is probably the best media critic in the business. But on the Yellowcake issue, he’s just plain wrong.

In Somerby’s view, the press is failing in its responsibilities by conflating Africa (in general) with Niger (in specific); they don’t see that evidence against the Niger claim is not evidence that the President or his staff intended the “16 words” to mislead, or even that the claim is substantively wrong. A typical example is found in today’s Howler, where Somerby quotes, then dismisses, a paragraph from Dana Milbank’s CIA memos story from today’s Washington Post. Here’s the dismissal:

At any rate, the memo, as described by Milbank, has little to do with what Bush said in his January State of the Union address. First objection: “The amount was in dispute.” This suggests that this memo referred to the specific allegation that (we quote the October 2 National Intelligence Estimate) “Niger planned to send several tons of pure uranium (probably yellowcake) to Iraq.” It has long been known that the CIA warned against crediting that shaky report, the one that turned out to be based on forged documents—but Bush did not allege that this transaction occurred when he gave his SOTU. In fact, he didn’t allege any transaction. Second objection: It wasn’t clear that uranium could be purchased “from the source.” Presumably, this refers to Joe Wilson’s judgment that it wouldn’t be possible to buy uranium in Niger. But again, Bush didn’t claim in his SOTU that any such purchase had occurred. Third objection: Iraq already had lots of yellowcake. Presumably, this is meant to suggest that Saddam would have no need to acquire more. On its face, this is the only objection that is even relevant to Bush’s SOTU statement, but this objection seems to be highly speculative.

When Somerby argues that the words in the State of the Union aren’t put into question by the newfound memos, or any of the other revelations or contradictions of the past few weeks, he is missing the point. The “16 words” themselves aren’t the story. The story, and the deception, are in how and why those 16 specific words were chosen.

As is clear from Hadley’s statement, and past reporting such as Josh Marshall’s June 25th column from the Hill, the sequence of events was something like this:

1. The White House wanted to include the Niger uranium claim—specifically—in the State of the Union.
2. The CIA objected, saying that the evidence was that the claim was bogus.
3. The White House came back with a more general claim—“sought uranium from Africa”.
4. CIA objected again, saying, again, that there was no reliable evidence to support even the more general claim.
5. Finally, the White House based their claim on the publicly-available British dossier.
6. CIA objected to this as well, saying that they didn’t think the British intelligence was trustworthy.
7. The White House put the line in the speech anyway, defending it as ‘technically true’, because they were only saying that the British had said it.

So: the “16 words” were intended to deceive. The White House knew that the best evidence was that the Niger-uranium story was substantively false. They wanted to convince us all that it was true nonetheless. So they twisted and tweaked and sourced it, to give it the sheen of truth. But a well-polished wormy apple still has worms.

What the press gets—whether through laziness or, one hopes, the application of logic—is that the ‘he-said-Africa-not-Niger’ defense is no defense at all. The evidence on which Bush’s substantive claim was based was the Niger evidence, evidence his NSC knew was dubious; the memos reveal that the CIA told them it was dubious, even in its ‘Africa-not-Niger’ formulation. But when they were told that the claim they wanted to make was unsupportable, instead of choosing not to make it, Bush and company chose to disguise its origin and its dubiousness. When they say that the 16 words were ‘technically true’, they are admitting this; they are admitting that the only truth in their sentence of 16 words resides in the construction of the sentence itself, that they know this, but that they wanted to deceive people into believing its substance anyway. That’s not as direct a lie as Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, but it is still a lie, and a far, far more serious one. Somerby is giving too much credence to the Bush spin; the press corps, to their credit, are not.

Filed under: politics/war

Harvey Pekar

I am a moron and a philistine. This is the only explanation I can offer for my failure up until this week to read Harvey Pekar’s extraordinary comic exegesis of his so-called ordinary life, American Splendor. Not to mention Our Cancer Year, an account of Pekar’s harrowing bout with lymphoma that he co-wrote with his wife, Joyce Brabner. If you haven’t read these, get thee to your local library or comic shop right now, lest you sink to my level of philistinism and moronitude.

Pekar also has a new blog, which is very flashy and probably sponsored by the people who are making American Splendor into a movie, but which you should read anyway.

I’m still fairly skeptical of the movie. Movies that cut between live action and cutesy, computer-animated plays on the comic form are usually pretty lousy. But for once, I’ll wait to make up my mind until I’ve actually seen it.

Filed under: culture/comics

The anti-American right

As the first in what will likely become a depressingly long series, here are a few words from today’s New York Times op-ed (reg. required) by anti-American rightist William Safire.

Patience is not an American virtue. Saddam anticipates that the antiwar minority — furious at the unexpected ease of the U.S. victory and shrugging off findings of mass graves of Saddam’s victims — would turn a steady accretion of casualties among occupiers into dread visions of “quagmire.”

Tarring your political opponents as supporters of mass murder and desirous of failure and death for the American military because they do not agree with your rationale for war is anti-American. And all too common on the right. And I’m sick of it, and I’m going to make a note of it every time I see it—or any other typical rightist anti-democracy, anti-free-speech, anti-civil-society vomit—from now on.

Filed under: politics

Late nite cat blog

Why is this cat blog entry so late?

It took him longer than we thought to chew his way out.

Filed under: cats

Return to the Den of Evil

Once again, I’m perplexed and shamed by the technophobia of the Democrats in Congress. And once again, a name is added to the roll of miserable luddites: John Conyers of Michigan, who has sponsored, along with a few of the usual suspects, the worst copyright and technology law of this session.

Professor Felten comments on the section of this scathingly idiotic law that apparently makes Windows, ftp servers, webDAV, and all browsers illegal in one fell, vaguely-worded swoop, by making it a crime to offering (without appropriate warnings) ‘enabling software’, which the bill “defines” as:

[S]oftware that, when installed on the user’s computer, enables 3rd parties to store data on that computer, or use that computer to search other computers’ contents over the Internet.

Yeah, that pretty much covers everything, IDE drivers to Unreal Tournament.

There’s also some good stuff in there about how our government should be spying on us more effectively, in order to better serve foreign governments that want to investigate us for copyright crimes. And the bit that makes—even accidental—sharing of a single copyrighted work punishable by 5 years in jail, that’s good too.

It’s infuriating that these kinds of bills are proposed at all, but so very much more so that they are proposed by people who claim to represent the “people, not the powerful”. At least the Republican party honestly represents the best interests of millionaires and megacorporations. Conyers, Berman, Hollings, Smith, and all of the other Democrats who are pimping these despicable and dangerous laws—they represent nothing but their own corrupt self-interest.

Filed under: politics

Axe falls at AOL

Everyone knew it was coming when they signed the deal with Microsoft, but today AOL finally killed Netscape, and fired nearly everyone they paid to work on Mozilla. Find more info on MozillaZine.

There’s no way that this isn’t bad news, especially for the many talented and hard-working folks who are now jobless because they built a browser too good for Bill to keep ignoring. We owe them all a great debt.

But there’s a silver lining. Mozilla will go on. Mozilla will go on specifically and only because it is open source. AOL and MS can conspire all they want, but the Lizard belongs to everyone, and they can’t do a damn thing about it.

This is why Gates and Ballmer call Linux a cancer and finance piss-ant lawsuit factories to try to destroy Linux and wish a Sarlacc-like end for all free software: because they don’t control it, they can’t control it, and they know it.

Today is a bad day, but a good object lesson in why free software is essentially and manifestly superior to closed, proprietary software. One day, I think, Microsoft is going to regret teaching us this lesson so often and so well.

Filed under: technology

It's ok, he wasn't under oath!

The Washington Post catches Bush in a blatant lie.

Bush said the CIA‘s doubts about the charge—that Iraq sought to buy “yellowcake” uranium ore in Africa—were “subsequent” to the Jan. 28 State of the Union speech in which Bush made the allegation. []

Bush’s position was at odds with those of his own aides, who acknowledged over the weekend that the CIA raised doubts that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger more than four months before Bush’s speech.

The public record on this is crystal clear. Bush is wrong, and there is no way, no way, that he does not know that he’s wrong. Two of his closest aides were all over the airwaves yesterday explaining how the CIA objected to these claims in October of 2002. To argue that this is just an innocent mistake, one would have to believe that the President was not consulted on and had no say in or knowledge of how his own administration planned to respond to what has become its largest political scandal.

Once again, I’m waiting for all of those Republicans who excoriated Clinton for lying about where he stuck his doodle to come forth and at least be a bit annoyed that their guy has now clearly and undeniable lied on the record about this issue. Maybe the Niger uranium wasn’t the heart of the case for war—I don’t know. But lying about matters of national security and war, tangential or not, can’t be any less serious than lying about a blowjob. So? . Didn’t think so.

Filed under: politics/war

Electable

Or, this again?

So, once more, the conventional wisdom about Howard Dean is that he may be a heck of a candidate, but he’s not electable. Used to be electable in the can’t-win-the-nomination sense, but that’s fallen by the way side. Now it’s the general election that he can’t possibly win. John Judis, Ruy Teixeira, the DLC, Karl Rove nobody thinks Dean would have a Peace Pop’s chance against the hot, hot, hot G. W. Bush.

I think this is nonsense, for many reasons. But what I really want to know is, if the one guy who is attracting crowds of thousands, raising the most money, outmaneuvering his opponents, and dominating the debate isn’t electable, who is?

Kerry? He’s just as liberal as Dean: he’s waffled over to Dean’s side on the war, he supports gay rights too, and the press already hates him enough to make up stories about how much he pays for haircuts.

Gephardt? Bob Dole.

Edwards? Losing to Bush in his home state, by double digits. Hasn’t even finished a single Senate term. Won’t commit to running for President instead of a second Senate term. Can’t even buy good press anymore, and also doesn’t have the money to buy it with.

Lieberman? I say this more in sadness than in anger, but it is difficult to win when your own party hates you.

Graham? Notebooks.

Kucinich? Ohhh-say can you see

Sharpton? Tawana Brawley.

Moseley Braun? Is she still running?

Clark? Biden? Wake me up when they get into the race.

Seriously, guys, if Dean can’t win, can anyone?

Filed under: politics/2004

Why now?

Yellowcake break is over.

Watching Rumsfeld and Rice perform the talking points on the chat shows this morning was remarkable for many reasons. They performed poorly and, yes, dishonorably for one. But more telling to me was the fact that one major theme of every interview was: we take it back. The uranium story is not false—we never said it was false, we just said that it didn’t rise to the level of being included in a Presidential address.

These people understand how the press works. So well, in fact, that this whole affair Niger came as a huge surprise to me, because I never would have imagined that they would make the most elementary and dangerous mistake possible: admitting they were wrong on the record.

The political press (most of the them, anyway) likes to imagine that it is objective, but their version of objectivity is terribly flawed. Consider the following scenario:
# Politician A claims proposition P is true
# P is demonstrably and clearly false
To keep partisan emotion out of it, let’s say that the politician is Pitt the Elder, and the proposition, “Goldfish are made of wood”. How would this be reported by today’s political press? Most of the stories would go something like:
bq. Prime Minister Pitt stands by his claim that goldfish are made of wood, in spite of critcism from Tory MPs.
Every once in a while, in the hands of a Dana Milbank or Sy Hersh, we might get:
bq. Prime Minister Pitt stands by his claim that goldfish are made of wood.
bq. In fact, unlike wood, goldfish appear to swim around and eat fish food, and are very squishy when stepped on.
But those sorts of pedantic, factually-oriented stories are far from the norm in American political reporting, and are almost never picked up by TV news, which makes them only slightly more relevant than this blog post. The more common case is the first, in which every dispute of fact—no matter how checkable—is reduced to a he said/she said. Because the press thinks that they do not seem objective when they themselves confront a lying public figure with the truth. Even when the facts are no longer in any kind of reasonable dispute, to hold a fact up against a lie, they have to put the words in someone else’s mouth.
This is why admitting that you are wrong is the worst thing you can do, if you happen to be a politician with truthfulness issues. In this case, and this case alone, is the press freed from its self-imposed shackles of pseudo-objectivity. Only when you admit that the fact is a fact can it be reported as a fact, and not as the theory of a “critic”.
This is why the Niger uranium issue only became an issue in the past week, even though the facts about the forged documents and the Wilson trip have been widely known for months. When David Sanger got Ari Fleischer to tie himself in knots, he forced a clearly-worded admission from the White House, and that admission opened the door for the political press to report what was long known: there was no reliable evidence to back up the President’s assertion, and there are clear indications that that was known in the White House at the time of the speech.
Now the White House is trying to stuff the horse back in the barn, if they have to grind it up and squirt it through the slats in the door, because they know the only way this scandal can end without major resignations and permanent damage is if they can convert it back from a factual story to a he said/she said. They have to stop the press from investigating and reporting on what happened, and go back to reporting on what each side says about what might have happened. Whether the press will stand for this, and whether it will make much difference to Bush’s political future anyway given the broad and vigorous criticism (finally!) from Democrats, is anybody’s guess.

Filed under: politics/war

Another reason to support Dean

Governor Dean will be guest-blogging for http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ this week. Which is if nothing else a sign of excellent taste on the part of the Gov.

But what I mean when I say “another reason to support” is not that fact, but something Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi posted to the Slashdot discussion of the fact:

Thanks for the welcome—and I will try to post on other issues—my problem is not having the time—its tough enough just keeping up with everything as it is! Personally I have spent the better part of the last three to four years working on a lot of issues discussed here and with a lot of the technology. I advised Progeny Linux Systems—the Debian flavor, it gave me alot of insight as to what open source politics would be like and how the same principles could be applied. Really a lot of the same forces are at work if you think about it. Entrenched and flawed system, closed to everyone except the few that aim to keep control etc vs open dialogue, open collaboration, and a better solution emerging from the common actions of many. The country was not founded on the principle of self interest—it was founded on the principle of the common good. And its fascinating to me how on every front its the commons we need to build again. Joe Trippi campaign manager Dean for America

Highlights are mine. Wouldn’t it be something to have a guy who knows what Debian is sitting in Karl Rove’s seat in the White House?

Filed under: politics/2004

Yellowcake break

I’ve recently been re-reading an old favorite of mine, Dave Sim’s Cerebus. “Old” is the operative word, because I finally gave up on Sim around 100 issues ago, when he started devoting half of each comic to a series of bizarre, pseudo-autobiographical misogynist rants. I suppose I’ll pick up the last issue, just to see what becomes of the old aardvark, and out of respect for how great a book it was before Sim got dumped by one girlfriend too many.

And great it was. From High Society through Church and State, I spent my whiny teenage years in constant fear of not being able to locate a comic shop that sold Cerebus. I trolled the dealer room at cons for back issues. I made my friends read it. Re-reading it now, almost 20 years after I picked up my first issue, I’m reminded of why. Cerebus must be one of the most densely and intelligently constructed comics ever—up there with Alan Moore’s best work. But it is also one of the funniest comics ever; hell, a collection of Lord Julius pages alone would be one of the funniest comics ever. From the dead-on Marvel “hero” parodies to the merciless lampooning of political figures from Washington to Thatcher, Sim’s nose for caricature never failed to sniff out the hilarity.
And then there was Melmoth—a lyrical and sensitive rendition of the last days of Oscar Wilde. In which Cerebus himself barely appears; and when he does, he does nothing but sit and clutch a rag doll, and occasionally eat a potato. But it’s great.
And then there was the art. Especially after the addition of master-renderer Gerhard on backgrounds, Cerebus was second-to-none artistically. (Well, ok. Second to Love and Rockets.) Sim’s quirky characters, Gerhard’s ethereal architecture, the most evocative lettering in comics—it was masterful.
Which all makes Sim’s precipitous decline into hubristic lunacy after Melmoth all the more regrettable. Always an arrogant jerk, Sim surrendered all pretense of rationality and editorial judgment with his Ayn-Randian Reads storyline. Now half of each book was given over to an ongoing prose story in which an arrogant jerk comic author named Viktor Davis took on the forces of nefarious editors, cretinous readers, and creativity-sucking females, achieving ‘viktory’ over them by virtue of extended application of arrogance and jerkhood.
Or at least, I assume he achieved victory I stopped reading halfway through, because there was finally nothing left of the Cerebus I loved. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t smart. It wasn’t even interesting. Just sad.

Filed under: culture/comics

Tenet and the Yellow cake

If you aren’t reading Josh Marshall’s excellent coverage of the unfolding Yellowcake debacle, you should be.

His latest post goes about halfway towards the conclusions that I think are inescapable after today’s swirl of revelations.

But all of this begs the obvious and singularly important question: the charge is that CIA didn’t push hard enough to keep bogus information out of the president’s speech. Who was pushing on the other side? Who was pushing to keep the bogus information in? And why?

Marshall is being cute, because obviously, it was the White House—as personified by Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and so on. (I leave out Powell because he clearly, like Tenet, knew the Niger claim was false; he refused to use it himself only 8 days later.) Ultimately, the pressure must have come from Bush’s inner circle—there’s simply no-one else who could have applied it.

So, that leaves us with the Bush board of directors pushing to include the Niger claim in the State of the Union address, even after being told that it was not supported by any actual evidence. They knew it was at best dubious. They wanted to include it anyway—so they played ventriloquist, putting the words into the mouths of British. To make the claim “technically true”. And what could that possibly mean, aside from “substantially false”?

This is the key point; the fact that they changed the wording of the claim demonstrates that they did not believe it. If they believed that the Yellowcake story was true, why use weasel words? Why not say straight up that Iraq sought Yellowcake in Niger? Because they couldn’t—because the CIA told them that it wasn’t so.

Which all means: Bush, or someone very close to him, willfully and consciously misled the country and the world. They wanted us all to believe that Saddam was pursuing nukes, whether or not the evidence was there—whether or not it was true.

Now tell me, please, how is that not a lie?

UPDATE: Looks like the grey lady agrees. And may I say, interim executive editor Lelyveld, may you please devote the same energy to this story as you did to Whitewater and to who was or was not the model for some character or other in “Love Story”.

Filed under: politics/war

He loves his work

Our very own Professor B. engages in his favorite activity: perusing the dictionary for unfamiliar words that sound like something good to eat.

Filed under: cats

In a hole? Dig faster

Desperate Bush administration Urain’tium spin somehow manages to get even more desperate:

White House officials argued that since a paper issued by the British government contained the assertion, if it was attributed to Britain it would be factually accurate, CBS said. CIA officials dropped their objections, CBS said.

I’m sorry, “White House officials”, but outside of grade school debate club, we call this sort of sophistry lying.

If you know something is false, claiming that it’s hearsay doesn’t make it true. Bush’s cadre of the oh-so-clever may think that they’ve outwitted us all by putting a little bonnet on the elephant, but it’s still here in the room. Yes, the British said what they said; that’s true. However, you, “White House officials”, knew that what they were saying was false. When you then use their false statement as a debating point, you are lying. Twice.

Filed under: politics/war

Lies, damned lies, and yellow cakes

A while back, I foolishly predicted that the centrifuge discovery would spell the end of aggressive reporting and investigation into Bush administration WMD claims.

As it turns out, I was wrong, wrong, wrong-ity wrong. Maybe really amazingly disastrously wrong (for the administration), if this Capitol Hill Blue story cited by Kevin Drum turns out to have legs. Because, if this is true:

”[Bush] said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn’t prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could,” Wilkinson said. “He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country.”

then it’s possible that people other than LA Times op-ed writers (reg. required, use cpunks/cpunks) may start using the I-word, because then it will no longer be deniable by any honest observer that Bush lied in his State of the Union address. No, he didn’t tell as clear a lie as Clinton’s; but claiming to have proof when you have none—even if you are really really sure you’ll find some—is, in fact, lying.

Not that Bush would ever be impeached: rank partisanship, powered by the vicious politicking of DeLay, Rove, and Frist, will see to it that no Republican-controlled chamber even brings such a blasphemous proposal up for a vote. But Bush ran on two things, more or less: his character, and the brains of his advisers. Both must now be called into question. If the Capitol Hill Blue story is accurate, then Bush was led by his own overweening pride and arrogance to lie to the nation about his, and its, most serious responsibility. If it’s not accurate, then he is surrounded by idiots and yes-men, or corrupt viziers who were led by their overweening pride and arrogance to keep from their President the information he needed to fulfill his most serious responsibility. Looks bad for Bush either way. Looks pretty good, on the other hand, if you happen to be a principled fiscal conservative, who is fairly liberal on social issues, and who steadfastly opposed the war because he believed Iraq was not a threat to the US.

Which all just goes to show you that the Bush strategy of deny, deny, deny then change the subject was brilliant, and they should have stuck with it. Admitting in public that the uranium “information” was false—something everyone knew already—allowed the press leeway to hammer and hammer on the subject, and now it has every appearance of not going away by the end of the news cycle. This is the flip side of the press’ self-imposed objectivity trap: since they can only “objectively” go after on-the-record hypocrisy, they tend to go after it with claws bared and teeth gnashing.

Now we get to see whether Bush, Rove, and company are smart or ruthless or lucky enough to survive a vacation at the yellowcakegate hotel. Should be interesting.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum now reports that the CHB story was false, which swings the pendulum strongly over to the idiots/yes men/corrupt viziers side. Fascinating stuff, this yellow cake saga.

Filed under: politics/war

That "sinking" feeling

It’s roughly 9,000 degrees kelvin in the shade here in the Chicagoland area this 4th of July. Fur-bearing Americans are especially troubled, and we should remember them today. While we celebrate our freedom to go out to air-conditioned bookstores and douse ourselves with cool, clean, patriotic sprinklers and squirtgun fights, let us not forget those among us whose only comfort comes from sleeping in the sink.

Let also not be tempted to turn on the faucet, because that would be mean.

Filed under: cats

Noted (almost) without comment

Our President, ladies and gentlemen:

“There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there,” Bush told reporters at the White House. “My answer is ‘bring them on’. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation.”

(via Reuters)

Our President, who should be reminded that inciting attacks against our soldiers is not entirely untreasonous, even when a Republican does it. Who should be reminded that another soldier died today, from wounds suffered in such an attack. A soldier whose daddy didn’t buy his way out of the war. A soldier who didn’t go AWOL from his agreed and assigned duties during wartime. Do you think he wanted ‘them’ to ‘bring it on’?

Filed under: politics/war

Fast-forward... directly to jail

If you must break only one law today, may I humbly suggest letting today’s Aimster decision be your guide:

[C]ommercial-skipping, amounted to creat-
ing an unauthorized derivative work, see WGN Continental
Broadcasting Co. v. United Video, Inc., 693 F.2d 622, 625
(7th Cir. 1982); Gilliam v. American Broadcasting Cos., 538
F.2d 14, 17–19, 23 (2d Cir. 1976); cf. Ty, Inc. v. GMA Accesso-
ries, Inc., 132 F.3d 1167, 1173 (7th Cir. 1997), namely a
commercial-free copy that would reduce the copyright
owner’s income from his original program, since “free”
television programs are financed by the purchase of com-
mercials by advertisers.

(The full text of the decision is here. See also Professor Felten’s comments here. It should be noted that this absurdity is not the responsibility of the Aimster judge, Richard Posner, but is in fact part of the original Sony case that established the legality of the VCR. Posner is just noting it.)

The illogic of this is almost beyond description. Is it similarly a violation to walk out of a movie theater in the middle of the film? How about to walk out and demand a refund? How about to show up late and miss the previews? How about to go to the movies, but not buy any popcorn—since the theater is financed by the purchase of popcorn by movie goers?

Back at home, is it also illegal to press the ‘mute’ button during commercials? Or to get up and go to the bathroom? What if your house is on fire—is it illegal to flee before the end ‘Golden Girls’? How about to deride the commercials as they air, and persuade your family and friends not to buy the products advertised? If the advertisers are boycotted, they might stop advertising, which would reduce the copyright owner’s income rather dramatically. What about channel surfing—am I creating an illegal derviative work when I flip from a bad Simpson’s rerun to the BBC world news? How about watching the first few episodes of a program with a ‘story arc’, but not the rest; isn’t that just as much a ‘derivative work’? Once I’ve seen five seconds of ‘24’, am I legally obligated to watch the rest?

How about blinking? Clearly, one blink per hour is not copyright infringement. But if you close your eyes through the entire duration of a commercial, you are deriving and reducing, just as much as if you fail to watch the commericial by fast-forwarding—maybe more! So, there must be a maximum ratio of eyes-closed to eyes-open that is legal while watching TV. Maybe the networks should add an “allowed blinks per minute” graphic to the ubiquitous branding bug in the lower righthand corner of the screen.

But, these violations only count for taped or otherwise recorded shows, you say. Ok, then: once I’ve taped 5 seconds of ‘24’, am I legally obligated to tape, and watch, the rest? Is it illegal to record 15 minutes of a late-night informercial over the beginning of a good Simpson’s rerun? Is it only illegal if you do it on purpose—but legal if you accidentally misprogram your VCR? (And what if the guy in the informerical looks just like Troy McClure, and the Simpson’s rerun features a Troy McClure infomercial?) Is the electric company liable for millions of dollars in copyright violations if the power goes out all over the city, preventing thousands of VCRs from recording the last commercial break in an episode of ‘Friends’?

Where is the line? Appeals to common sense are obviously moot, so, Hollywood, Judges, Congress people—where is the line? Assuming I want to tape shows at home and somehow stay on the good side of copyright law, how can I possibly do it? Where is the guidebook that tells me which apparently-innocuous behavior is ok, and which is illegal?

Filed under: copyright