Thursday, September 30, 2004

Nice try...

Glenn Reynolds linked to this so maybe you've already seen it. Tough - I want to emphasize this passage:
''The Najaf shrine — HUNDREDS of dead women and children were brought out after Sadr left,'' Rose wrote. ''They (Sadr's supporters) rounded them up during the battle and brought them in to be executed. Why? Because they anticipated the Americans would eventually enter the shrine and walk into a media ambush. We never went in. The people of Najaf love us right now because of that. They hate Sadr and want him dead.
Leave aside the utter fiendishness of it all for a moment - where was Sadr's media ambush?

Here's another passage:
...journalism in America is broken. It has no foundation of values by which many Americans can relate and depend. The moral of this column is not about one side prevailing in news coverage on the war on terror. It's simply about fairness — about Americans getting both sides with the same prominence.

They're not. And media emphasis on Iraq being in chaos has coincided with John Kerry making the same pitch to voters. It makes you wonder, just as we did on the authenticity of Dan Rather's reporting. And now America knows about Rather's ruse.
Interesting to see this possibility raised. Before the assumption would have been that Kerry was reacting to events and not that the press was reacting to Kerry's needs. But the bias has been too flagrant for too long for us to continue to be so charitable about the MSM's motives.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Colorful politicians

Americans like a politician with a colorful past, and they usually don't have to look far. Bill Clinton certainly qualified, and if you just wanted to sit around and have a bull session you'd probably want him around, as long as you're not in the White House.

Jail needn't stop you. Here in DC Marion Barry is back in the local govt again. There are many other examples, my favorite being Boston's former mayor James Michael Curley.

I can't trace this Curley story as I write this, and I don't have time to authenticate it to Big Media standards (you know, typing it up in Word, copying the copies for a few generations, getting rid of the original, and claiming that I got it from some mystery woman...). But hey, this is a blog - I have no credibility anyway!

Anyway, Curley is in the hospital in bad shape, being fed rectally through a tube. But one day he perked up and noticed that he was being serviced by a pretty nurse. So he proposed that the next day she should bring two tubes so they could have lunch together. Now that's the spirit...Strom Thurmond probably went the same way, and I'm expecting similar from Bill Clinton.

Color is great, but it can be overdone. Consider the politician from Montana who took too much silver for its supposed medical benefits. Now his skin has turned blue, and I'm told the condition is permanent.

Now John Kerry has changed color, to orange. His aides claim it happened over the weekend playing football. Good grief. Having been around competitive dancers, I know that color - it's a fake tan from a bottle.

It won't help. They can paint John Kerry orange, but they can't give him appeal.

Get it? A peel? Like an orange? Oh, never mind...

Trojans via image files

I've seen some skanky looking people in my time, and it's nice to know that I can't catch anything just by looking at them. But now it appears that thanks to a flaw in some versions of Windows, viewing the wrong pictures could catch you a Trojan:This may or may not apply to you, and other safeguards might prevent problems in any case. Follow the link for more details.

Sunday, September 26, 2004