The latest suck from Faux News

Robert Greenwald has documented the atrocities:



Whoring for Rudy G also:

Of all the allegations contained in former ReganBooks Publisher Judith Regan's lawsuit against her one-time employers at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the most explosive is the first. Regan charges that News Corp. executives wanted to destroy her reputation because she knew too much about her ex-boyfriend, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, and that what she knew could be harmful to the presidential hopes of Rudy Giuliani -- whom she depicts as the preferred candidate of News Corp. and its subsidiary, Fox News. According to Regan's suit, "This smear campaign was necessary to advance News Corp.'s political agenda, which has long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani's presidential ambitions."

I had a conversation yesterday with a hard-boiled conservative acolyte who noted his concern about a Clinton presidency as the discussion had turned to wiretapping Americans. This is what he wrote, when I asked him why he favored government surveillance for "terrorists" and didn't realize he had been caught in the sweeping net:

Actually yes, I have a few things to hide....

My offshore bank accounts when Hellory tries to take away all of my assets to redistrbute; My guns when Hellory tries to remove the 2nd Amendment. My medical information when Hellory decides I am not capable of choosing who my medical provider is; my internet and radio, when Hellory decides I should not read or listen to what I want; my voting record when Hellory decides I need to be "re-educated" becuase I prefer to think for myself.

Leaving aside the rhetorically failing ad hominem bastardization of her name (as well as most of the other paranoid drivel), I wanted to inquire as to the lack of concern for Dick Cheney's expansion of the unitary executive concept that lay at the heart of his paranoia, but chose instead to reassure him that nobody was going to be taking his guns away. (That right-wing myth gets trotted out every four years, have you noticed?)

He backtracked, responding that the Washington Post was no honest source of information.

Yes, a denizen of Fox News questioned the reliability of the nation's capital's most respected newspaper. But please note the Mukasey-tortured logic inherent in this conversation: how powerfully dishonest must a person be to believe that Hillary Clinton is going to take away their guns, yet faced with the evidence that the Bush administration has been wiretapping them, refuse to believe THAT?

I mean, "monumentally stupid" just seems too mild a description. Yet that is the precise finding of the research that reveals FOX news viewers are the most uninformed in America:

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland conducted a thorough study of public knowledge and attitudes about current events and the war on terrorism. Researchers found that the public’s mistaken impressions of three facets of U.S. foreign policy — discovery of alleged WMD in Iraq, alleged Iraqi involvement in 9/11, and international support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq — helped fuel support for the war.

While the PIPA study concluded that most Americans (over 60%) held at least one of these mistaken impressions, the researchers also concluded that Americans’ opinions were shaped in large part by which news outlet they relied upon to receive their information.

As the researchers explained in their report, “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.”

Almost shocking was the extent to which Fox News viewers were mistaken. Those who relied on the conservative network for news, PIPA reported, were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.”

You know, this is really embarrassing. For the United States of America, I'm talking.

What do you suppose we ought to do about the willful and arrogant ignorance of the conservatives among us? Or would anything we might do be the equivalent of teaching a pig to sing?

An Academic All-American

Dorrell, who maintains a 3.65 gpa in finance, has enjoyed success both on and off the volleyball court. A four-year starter for the Lady Razorbacks, she became the 12th player in program history to tally 1,000 career kills. She has since moved up into the 10th spot and will likely overtake the ninth position this weekend.

Niece-y was selected to ESPN The Magazine's Academic All-American Team for District 6, University Division, second team (.pdf).



Looks, brains, and a hell of an athlete.

All in the family. =)

Outrage fatigue? Get over it.

Mark Morford speaks for me:

I know how it is. You've had it up to here. There are only so many stories about blood and death and pain you can take, only so many times you can hear about random shootings and corporate malfeasance and how BushCo's squad of scabrous flying monkeys have, say, supported torture or endorsed wiretapping or gouged the nation for another $200 billion to pay for a failed war. Your nerves are raw and your heart is tired and the media will just not shut the hell up already about the sadness and the war and the mayhem and the Cheney and the doom doom doom.

It is outrage fatigue, and it is epidemic. It's that feeling that we are being hammered unlike any time in recent history with so many appalling and disgusting and violently un-American incidents and scandals and manipulations that our b.s.-detectors are smoking like an old V-8 engine on a hot summer's day and it's all we can do to get up every day without screaming.

What's more, it's not the mere quantity of moral insults, either. It's the bizarre absurdity of the subject matter, the things we are being forced to consider, or reconsider, that seem to make it all so horrific.

Torture? Are you kidding? Allegedly the most civilized, the most morally aware nation on the planet and we are still debating, in the highest courts and government offices in the land, about whether the United States should strap human beings to gnarled metal benches in rancid foreign bunkers and inflict such inexplicable terror and fear upon them that they confess to things they didn't even do just to get us to stop? Is this the Middle Ages? Are we regressing back to the goddamn cave?

It's mornings like these that make it plainly evident to me that our republican democracy is on borrowed time. And there's even less time remaining to lament its disappearance.

Adjusting the Vote

I was too ill to perform my duty as the Democratic observer at the Harris County central counting office last week, so at the last minute I asked John Behrman to stand in for me. And look what he saw:

The county Web site already showed that all precinct totals had been counted; three sheriff's deputies who guarded the counting process on the fourth floor of the County Administration Building in downtown Houston had been sent home.

Also in the locked, glass-walled room were Republican (Harris County Clerk Beverley) Kaufman and John R. Behrman, a computer expert and longtime election observer representing the Democratic Party. He said he considers Kaufman's staff the most knowledgeable election computer administrators on the continent and does not question their motives.

But Behrman said he was shocked when he saw (county elections administrator Johnnie) German use a series of passwords and an "encryption key" — a series of numbers on a nail file-size computer memory storage device — to reach a computer program that said "Adjustment."

"A hundred percent of precincts reporting, and everything had been distributed to the press," he said. "Then and only then did I see how they were going to do this, and frankly I never thought it was possible.

"Basically it turns out, without regard to any ballots that have been cast, you can enter arbitrary numbers in there and report them out in such a way that, unless you go back to these giant (computer) logs and interpret the logs, you wouldn't know it has been done."

Hart InterCivic has converted nearly the entire state of Texas to e-Slates. What do you think the security of your ballot might be in a rural county -- where there ain't too many folks who know much 'bout computers?

But the real value is in the largest counties in the state, where manipulating the tally -- say, in an $800 million bond election -- has a chance for a real payoff. For a few insiders.

Who needs to hack the vote when you can just bribe a county elections official?

Why do you think several states have decertified Hart InterCivic's e-Slates for use?

And it's easy to understand the nonchalance of Republican officials and Republican-appointed judges, but why do you suppose it is that Houston's Democrat mayor (and rumored candidate for governor in 2010) , Bill White, doesn't really care about this problem?

Update (11/15): Charles Kuffner digs deeper, including this comment from Rice professor Dan Wallach, one of the country's foremost authorities on voting machine technology:

So, indeed, Hart has multiple lines of defense. Unfortunately, every one of them is incorrectly engineered, rendering the system entirely vulnerable to compromise. Of course, I am not stating that any such compromise has ever happened in Harris County. What I am saying is that the design of the Hart system is entirely insufficient to prevent such attacks, should a competent attacker wish to make them.

Express Checkout

The Crowne Plaza in the Texas Medical Center ate it Sunday morning.



There was a big crowd watching, they served Dynamite Bites; I'm just sorry I missed being on the scene. My wife slept through the boom-boom-boom of the detonation, and all I could see from my living room window was the big cloud of dust that arose and then drifted away to the north.

I spent a weekend in the ballroom of that place doing my est Training in 1984. It had a horrible parking garage, so narrow you could barely make the turns, even in my Plymouth Laser. Later that same year we met my wife's cousin Salomon for dinner there; he was down from Brooklyn for an anesthesiologist's convention.

A few years from now that space will be home to a huge maternity ward.

This Swamplot fellow has all the dope (thanks to Kuffner for the tip, who also notes the demise of another landmark building in New Jersey).

Quoteworthy and Excerptilicious

"The death penalty ... says that to kill in certain circumstances is acceptable, and encourages the doctrine of revenge.

"If we are to break these cycles, we must remove government-sanctioned violence."

-- Desmond Tutu, writing in The Guardian ahead of a vote on a draft resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for a moratorium on executions

The Age of Dinosaurs ended roughly 65 million years ago with the K-T or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, which killed off all dinosaurs save those that became birds, as well as roughly half of all species on the planet, including pterosaurs. The prime suspect in this ancient murder mystery is an asteroid or comet impact, which left a vast crater at Chicxulub on the coast of Mexico.

Another leading culprit is a series of colossal volcanic eruptions that occurred between 63 million to 67 million years ago. These created the gigantic Deccan Traps lava beds in India, whose original extent may have covered as much as 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers), or more than twice the area of Texas.

Arguments over which disaster killed the dinosaurs often revolve around when each happened and whether extinctions followed. Previous work had only narrowed the timing of the Deccan eruptions to within 300,000 to 500,000 years of the extinction event.

Now research suggests the mass extinction happened at or just after the biggest phase of the Deccan eruptions, which spewed 80 percent of the lava found at the Deccan Traps.

-- "Double Trouble: What Really Killed the Dinosaurs"

Baseball's free-agent supermarket opens for business today, and Astros general manager Ed Wade apparently will be making offers to closer Francisco Cordero, second baseman Luis Castillo, pitcher Randy Wolf and several others.

Wade won't say how much money he has to spend. He'll just say that he has enough to do the things he needs to do.

Hearing this, I wanted to ask if Drayton McLane still owned the Astros. But Wade is new in town, and with us still being on speaking terms and all, I asked if he'd had the special at Irma's.

Besides, they say people can change, and maybe McLane has decided he likes spending money. Or maybe he has decided he doesn't like the way Minute Maid Park looks when it's empty in October.

--Richard Justice, in the Chronic