Mood:
a-okTopic: He's a good guy!
Jef has been sending me a veritable blitzkrieg of good news and notes related to the horseshit I have been blathering about lately so I thought I would post a bunch of what he has sent form various other sources and call it a guest blogger post.
First off Jeff sent me this interesting tidbit from Al Franken:
"Meanwhile, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which we ran, has lost 8.8 billion dollars. By lost, I mean it’s totally unaccounted for. Not only has Congress not "looked into" this $8.8 billion and who might have it now, but it seems that some members are completely unaware that this staggering sum, which was supposed to go toward rebuilding Iraq, is missing. The Sunday morning after the White House Correspondents dinner, I ran into Senator George Allen at a brunch thrown by John McLaughlin and his wife. Allen had never heard of the missing $8.8 billion, or at least that's what he told me. And he's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Stunned, I went up to Susan Page of USA Today and her husband Carl Lubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News, two veteran Washington political reporters, and told them about Allen’s ignorance of this huge scandal, which has no doubt contributed to hatred for America and the deaths of our troops. There’s less electricity in Iraq now than there was before we invaded Iraq.
Turns out that Page and Lubsdorf had also never heard of the unaccounted-for $8.8 billion. For a moment I thought that maybe I had been imagining things.
Then I spotted my friend Norm Ornstein, scholar from the American Enterprise Institute. "Would you believe it if Norm Ornstein told you about the $8.8 billion?" I asked Susan and Carl.
"Sure."
I brought Norm over, and indeed I had not been imagining things. "It was a huge story," Norm told them.
"Was it in the New York Times?" Carl asked Norm.
"Yes," Norm assured him.
What in God’s name is going on?"
I had heard some whispers in the wind about something like this from sometime ago but haven't heard dick about it until now. This is very interesting how it has been so cleanly suppressed. Missing money can lead to real problems like theft, larceny, fund misappropriations but in the end perhaps it is all monies being reallocated towards the mission to save the earth from that comet that is coming to wipe us out in 2028. At any rtae, I would like to be the one to find that 8.8 billion...that could set some of my financial woes straight.
Let us turn back to the world of Newsweek...Jeff provided a couple of interesting posts, this one from Capital Banter:
In the mid-nineties, NEWSWEEK formed the Project for a New American Century that formulated a policy of U.S. global dominance based on an American invasion of Iraq.
Once in power, NEWSWEEK failed to pick up on the intelligence that warned of the 9-11 attacks. Subsequent to 9-11, NEWSWEEK cooked the intelligence on Iraq that linked it to 9-11 and falsely verified its active weapons of mass destruction.
NEWSWEEK ignored the advice of senior military advisers who warned that more troops would be needed to curb a post-hostilities insurgency, and denied that an major insurgency was in progress when it was clear that one already was.
NEWSWEEK was singularly responsible for the lack of sufficient body and vehicle armor in the Iraq war, and for the pathetically slow response in supplying it once the shortfall was identified.
NEWSWEEK wrote the Justice Department memorandums that led to the prisoner abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and led to the practice of "extraordinary rendition."
Exhibiting shameless hubris throughout its tenure, NEWSWEEK claimed that it never made a mistake because God was telling it what to do.
See, as we now know EVERYTHING is Newsweeks fucking fault. Thanks a lot you fucking magazine whoreing bastards!
Here's some more related fun regarding everyone's favorite Press secretary courtesy of Left Coaster and Jeff:
"McClellan Lied At Press Gaggle Yesterday
(5/17/05)
It looks like Scott McClellan was caught in a lie yesterday, during his impromptu press briefing
Q: Can you 100 percent say for sure that it is wrong, that there were no incidents of American interrogators putting Korans in the toilets?
MR. McCLELLAN: I know of no such incidents. And the Department of Defense said last week that they could find no credible evidence of it either. They have looked into it.
Really? That's not what the Pentagon actually said
Q: Different issue. There have been protests in Pakistan over reports that investigation over abuses in Guantanamo has found that guards have apparently put Korans in the toilet. And I'm wondering if either of you can comment on whether that's accurate, or whether the investigation has found that, and what's being done about it?
MR. DIRITA: I can't speak to any particular -- I've not seen the reports on that specific point. As we've said many times, we have conducted multiple investigations into the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere in the world, and we are facing an adversary -- in the case of many of these detainees, particularly at Guantanamo -- who are exceedingly well-trained in counter-interrogation tactics. And the procedures that are provided for by field manuals, as well as other authorization, have taken that into account. But I can't speak to a particular assertion about what may have happened.
Q:( Inaudible) -- at least the status of that investigation at Guantanamo?
MR. DIRITA: Which investigation?
Q: This is -- I believe this is an investigation that was sparked by allegations by FBI officials --
MR. DIRITA: Oh, right. That was an investigation that because of these FBI e-mails that we learned of, the commander down there asked for it to be pursued. I know that the investigators down there have coordinated with the FBI, which apparently is doing its own separate investigation. The Department of Justice inspector general is involved because there are FBI interrogators as well as other -- as well as military.
So I think where we are is that the commander is coordinating closely with the Department of Justice so that we have -- we can be as linked together as we need to be. He, I think, received some -- the commander received some initial assessments early, asked for some additional inquiries, and those have not been completed.
And I think we're probably -- because of the desire to make sure that we're working closely with other agencies, it's a little bit more complicated. And I think we're probably several weeks away from being able to say that the commander has made his final assessments there.
So, as of last Tuesday, May 10th, (the day after the story broke) we were "several weeks away" from the Guantanamo commander being able to make his final assessments as to whether or not the "Korans down the toilet" stories were credible.
Yet sometime between last Tuesday and yesterday afternoon, the White House was able to say with certainty that in six days a multi-agency effort involving the Department of Justice's Inspector General and the FBI's own investigation had fast-forwarded "several weeks" of work into a conclusion that the Pentagon "could find no credible evidence of it either."
So I guess the FBI's own report, and that of the Department of Justice IG are done and available for the media to see, right? Or did Rove and McClellan just pull that one out of their ass yesterday afternoon and hope the media didn't look at the May 10th transcript?"
This SO illustrates in specifics the game the White House is playing for us. The media is clearly unable to play this game to their advantage thanks to shit like this Newsweek debacle. it's all so horrible. For more proof of how these motherfuckers in the White House operate let us look at this submission from The Poor Man (again courtesy of Jeff):
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
That post makes me want to puke, give up and take up alcoholism. Meanwhile, as we all collectively get our panties in a bunch over this whole Newsweek/Afghanistan riot situation...Did you know there was an even worse riot, apparently not caused by Newsweek (Maybe it was Time!?), that happened in Uzbekistan:(Reuters)
By Dmitry Solovyov
ANDIZHAN, Uzbekistan (Reuters) - Uzbekistan's government on Wednesday took foreign diplomats to the town where witnesses said troops shot dead hundreds of people but did not show them the actual site of the massacre.
Authorities have blamed the killings in the eastern town of Andizhan on Muslim rebels, but witnesses said some 500 people, including women and children, were gunned down by security forces who opened fire on protesters last Friday.
"Write that down in your story that they never took us to the school," one diplomat shouted to reporters from a bus taking the envoys and foreign journalists back to the airport.
It was outside School No. 15 on Cholpon Avenue that witnesses said the killings took place.
"It's really weird. Why should they want to go to this school?" this reporter heard one Uzbek official say to another.
The group included diplomats from a number of European countries, including Britain, Romania and the Czech Republic, and China and South Korea.
The more than two-hour tour of the Central Asian town, in the densely populated Ferghana Valley, was led by Interior Minister Zakirdzhon Almatov who repeated government insistence that it was rebels, not Uzbek troops, who were behind last week's slaughter.
"Some media are saying the Uzbek government opened fire on peaceful demonstrators. But where do you see peaceful demonstrators? How dare you say those were peaceful civilians," Almatov barked at reporters.
The government says 169 were killed, most of them "bandits" who themselves had killed civilians and security officials. An Uzbek opposition party said it had compiled a list of 745 dead."
You know, these are the costs of freedom, killing those bandits is the price. According to Scott, we wish that the people of Uzbekistan would support change through, you know, the democratic 'process.' Although in Uzbekistan, there is no opposition, and the torture is widespread and effective. They don't even fake the process of elections like they do in other dictatorships, like Zimbabwe or Russia. Or in the US, I guess.
Jeff
Topsy-Turvy folks. Last but not least an unsourced piece of "humor" also sent in by the Jeff...
"Bush To Retract War
Cites Protests, Poor Sourcing, Newsweek Debacle as Impetus.
George W. Bush retracted the Iraq war today, saying that it had been based on information from an unreliable source and that the original premises for the war were wrong.
"We had one source for the war -- two, if you count Judith Miller -- and it now appears that that source didn't know what he was talking about," George W. Bush told reporters. (Ahmed Chalabi had no comment, but told reporters that he would consider "telling them everything they wanted to hear" for 10 million dollars.)
While the Administration initially reported that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that it was linked to the 9/11 attacks on America, it appeared as recently as last Thursday that that was not true. "We couldn't be sorrier that our misreporting of the facts surrounding Iraq has caused the loss of human life," said Scott McClellan today.
McCelllan explained that the President thought that the recent Newsweek debacle required the Administration to reexamine its own poorly sourced actions. "We couldn't really ask Newsweek for an apology and not admit our own mistake," said McClellan. "We're not hypocrites."
Yeah...If only things could ever be just around here. I really wish we were as great as we think we are. I really do.
Posted by Ahlberg
at 4:11 PM CDT
