A tail dragging romp through the swamps of the world
Chris Hedges was interviewed on the November 2nd show and it blew me away. Hedges gives - in a 26-minute interview - the cause, effect and chilling prediction of the "Death of the Liberal Class" - the title of his new book.
Reuters: (Lead paragraph.) The Pentagon said on Friday it does not expect big surprises from an imminent release of up to 500,000 Iraq war files by WikiLeaks, but warned that U.S. troops and Iraqis could be endangered by the file dump.
CBC: (Hillary Clinton) "We should condemn in the most clear terms the disclosure of any classified information by individuals and organizations which puts the lives of United States and partner service members and civilians at risk," she said in Washington, D.C.
CNN: "This is all classified secret information never designed to be exposed to the public," Morrell told CNN. "Our greatest fear is that it puts our troops in even greater danger than they inherently are on these battlefields. "
CNN: Friday, Lapan said they know of no case where anyone in Afghanistan had been harmed because their name was in the leaked documents, but he made clear that doesn't mean such people couldn't be killed in the future.
FoxNoise: Lapan said that so far no Afghans have been killed as a direct result of WikiLeaks releasing the same type of information over the summer, but he characterized the leak as deplorable.
The Pentagon and State Department crowd might start stocking up on wolf spray and protective gear. Perhaps one day their dire warnings will go unheeded and ignored.In fact, after you read Woodward's book, you'll split a gut every time you hear a politician or a government teacher talk about "civilian control over the military." The only people really making the decisions about America's wars are across the river from Washington in the Pentagon. They wear uniforms. They have lots of weapons they bought from the corporations they will work for when they retire.
_______________It matters not whom we elect. The Pentagon and the military contractors call the shots. The title "Commander in Chief" is ceremonial, like "Employee of the Month" at your local Burger King.
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So here's your assignment for tonight: Watch Eisenhower's famous farewell speech. And then start thinking about how we can tame this beast. The Soviet Union had its own military-industrial complex, which is one reason they got into Afghanistan...which is one reason there's no more Soviet Union. It happened to them.
Don't think it can happen to us?
So why does the MSM continue to report the story like there is actually a snowball's chance in hell of "reform"? Probably the same reason they:
Palin press may boycott UN conference
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
September 23, 2008 01:30 PM EST
NEW YORK – Journalists, displeased with Sarah Palin’s efforts to restrict their access to her, are threatening not to cover her events surrounding the United Nations conference here unless they're allowed more access.
The unfolding boycott is the latest development in a rocky relationship between Palin’s handlers and the press, in which the campaign has sought to tightly control her interactions with the media.
The campaign had originally indicated that the print reporters following her campaign would be among the small group of journalists allowed to attend the so-called “pool sprays” before Palin’s meetings with dignitaries on the sidelines of the U.N. meetings.
The sprays are basically glorified photo opportunities during which journalists can snap photos and film footage and – if they’re lucky – shout a question or two at Palin and her company before she adjourns for private meetings. On Tuesday, those meetings were to include Afghan President Karzai and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
But the imbroglio began developing Tuesday morning when Palin’s handlers informed the small print press contingent covering her campaign that the print reporter designated to cover the events, Elizabeth Holmes of the Wall Street Journal, would not be allowed to cover the sprays.
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The campaign also at first moved to bar CNN, the television network designated for pool duty, from sending its editorial producer – basically a hybrid print/video journalist – though the campaign budged when the network threatened to withhold its cameras as well.
Tories keep candidate Cadman away from media
Andrew Mayeda - Canwest News Service
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The Conservatives refused a request by the media to interview the woman at the centre of the so-called Cadman affair at a campaign stop in Surrey Tuesday.
Media travelling with Prime Minister Stephen Harper requested an interview with Dona Cadman, the Conservative candidate for Surrey North and widow of late MP Chuck Cadman, after Harper addressed a rally here.
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However, the Conservatives ushered her and the other candidates out the back door of the conference hall before the media could speak with her.
Dona Cadman has alleged that Tory operatives offered to buy her husband a $1-million life-insurance policy so he would vote with the Conservatives to topple the government in the summer of 2005. Cadman died of cancer weeks after the confidence vote, which the Liberal government survived.
"Local candidates' priority is campaigning in their local ridings, and not talking to the national media," said Harper's chief spokesman, Kory Teneycke.
Teneycke suggested Cadman did not want to speak with the media, but would not confirm if the party actually relayed the interview request to her.
Excuse me for a moment, I've got to go close the windows. It seems there is one of Stanley Park's famed furry black and white creatures in the 'hood spreading his or her perfume around.
Bloggers fill in gaps with most interesting facts
War in Georgia illuminates mainstream media's failure to inform
Vancouver Courier - Friday, September 12, 2008
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Consider the recent reporting on Russia's conflict with Georgia. From what I could see, North American mainstream media spoke with one voice: the Russian bear had mauled the independent republic of Georgia, threatening stability in the region. There was some mention of the breakaway republic of Southern Ossetia, which Georgia attacked first, but it wasn't really germane to understanding Vladimir Putin's alpha male display.
From the outset, the story from bloggers was considerably different.They pointed to the documentation of strong U.S. and Israeli influence in Georgia prior to the conflict. Just last week, the Washington Post reported what the bloggers had concluded many weeks earlier: both nations weren't just shocked witnesses from afar. So bloggers were on to something big, weeks before one of the respectable bastions of the press smelled something fishy. How could that be? Many bloggers hardly have barely enough cash to fill up their car with gas, let alone fly to Tblisi for a round of interviews.
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In this case, a global network of bloggers zeroed in on the consistent stories about the Russia/Georgia debacle that didn't fit the authorized version from North American mainstream media, and brought them to the forefront of the web through a democracy of page clicks. In between the hyperlinks they rambled on about the new chess moves in Central Asia's "Great Game."
The bloggers beat the Washington Post to the punch by many weeks, just as they did prior to the war in Iraq, when they concluded that Saddam's WMD's were as fanciful as unicorns. When the mainstream media finally got around to acknowledging that pre-war whopper, many months after the bombs rained down on Baghdad, they pleaded manipulation by their sources, rather than concede their failure to investigate a story requiring no more resources than a high-speed connection. (Although Knight Ridder reporters Warren Stroebel and Jonathan Landay had done their homework and came to the same conclusion about Saddam's WMDs.)
There are many other examples. Consider last year's spectacular career flameout of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, after being outed for his hooker connections. That was a fascinating, salacious story, but there was an even more interesting angle to Spitzer's outing that received virtually no followup in the press. A month prior to his resignation, he publicly revealed that the Bush administration had dismantled state protections against "predatory lending," which had allowed banks and brokers to go off on their disastrous, subprime mortgage spree. (In his previous job as New York attorney general, Spitzer had led the legal charge to reign in both the lenders and their benefactors in Washington.)
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Bloggers fill in the gap more with synthesis than analysis. The digital horses are already out, and it's too late to shut the barn door. The question is, can the newspaper industry effectively subsidize online vehicles from the revenues of their financially troubled print versions? And has the reading audience already been burned too many times by mainstream media's "agreed-upon facts" to care?
