April 2006 Archives

In case you missed Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday, you can view it here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

It's one thing to take on someone in a TV show. But to ridicule the press and the President of the United States in their face takes "muchos huevos grandes."

Billmon:

Colbert's routine was designed to draw blood -- as good political satire should. It seemed obvious, at least to me, that he didn't just despise his audience, he hated it. While that hardly merits comment here in Left Blogostan, White House elites clearly aren't used to having such contempt thrown in their faces at one of their most cherished self-congratulatory events. So it's no surprise the scribes have tried hard to expunge it from the semi-official record -- as Peter Daou notes over at the Huffington Post.

Colbert used satire the way it's used in more openly authoritarian societies: as a political weapon, a device for raising issues that can't be addressed directly. He dragged out all the unmentionables -- the Iraq lies, the secret prisons, the illegal spying, the neutered stupidity of the lapdog press -- and made it pretty clear that he wasn't really laughing at them, much less with them. It may have been comedy, but it also sounded like a bill of indictment, and everybody understood the charges.

And there was a lot of charges that short routine.

International terrorism

2001

Attacks: 346
Killed: 3,547

2005

Attacks: 11,000
Killed: 14,600

I don't get all the brouhaha about a Spanish rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Is this the first time the song has ever been sung in a foreign language?

If you ever wanted to know what a day was like at your local TV news station, R. Neal has your fix. In short, there's a lot that goes on, even on the most mundane of news days.

Unfortunately (for them) I generally don't find the content of local news all that interesting, so I rarely watch.

Mr. Neal notes how young many people at the station are. With that kind of hectic work day, I don't think this is too mysterious. I know someone who used to be a reporter at one of the station. He said he left the business because he was getting too "old" to do that kind of thing. Apparently, running all over the place and doing stories in the middle of the night doesn't go so well with middle age and family life.

Mr. Neal also points out the expense of such an operation. Recently, I was hanging around a remote live telecast at our church. Someone told me that just one camera/stand combination cost $100,000. If true, that illustrates how many bucks go into TV broadcasting.

Economy on the march:

The percentage of working-age Americans with moderate to middle incomes who lacked health insurance for at least part of the year rose to 41 percent in 2005, a dramatic increase from the 28 percent in 2001 without coverage, a study released on Wednesday found.

Moreover, more than half of the uninsured adults said they were having problems paying their medical bills or had incurred debt to cover their expenses, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based private, health care policy foundation. The study of 4,350 adults also found that people without insurance were more likely to forgo recommended health screenings such as mammograms than those with coverage, and were less likely to have a regular doctor than their insured counterparts.
. . .
About 45.8 million Americans did not have health insurance in 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
. . .
That study found that cost prevented 41.1 percent of uninsured adults from seeing a doctor, compared to 9.2 percent of individuals with coverage

It's a mystery to me why the news media makes such a big brouhaha about gas prices on the rise, and virtually ignores rising health care costs. Certainly for many Americans health insurance is a greater liability than gasoline prices. I guess it's easier throwing together footage of people complaining as they gas up their vehicles than it is to report on something complicated like insurance.

Or not.

It was amusing seeing part of the speech on MSNBC with the bold "BREAKING NEWS" caption underneath. Even Bush didn't seem very interested with what he was saying, as he kept stuttering and making gaffes.

Does anyone seriously think we are going to see any significant deviation in energy policy from the course Cheney Oil plotted in 2001?

But with falling poll numbers, expect plenty more noise and political theater from GOP, Inc. as they "get tough" on gasoline prices.

Congress is reportedly preparing to deliberate abroad new digital copyright bill which is stronger than the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And, as is mandatory with any policy debate these days, the Bush administration breaks out the terrorism card:

Such changes are necessary because new technology is "encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft," Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, "quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities."

Honestly, I wonder if there has been any bill in Congress the past four years which its supporters did not claim we needed it to fight the "War on Terror."

More discussion here.

Since all the news channels are running gas price temperature stories 24/7, I suppose I can get in on the action.

Here's a USA Gas Temperature Map. It graphically illustrates gas prices by county. Not pictured, Alaska or Hawaii. But I'm guessing those are mostly red.

Yeah. From time to time I also engaged in this kind of reading when I was in school.

Going way down memory lane . . . back in high school I had a real joke of a class. Ironically, it was physics--one of the more "advanced" courses in the school's curriculum.

To some degree we actually covered much of the material in the text. What made it a joke, however, was that the teacher let us know what was on the test before we took it. So if you simply learned what was in the review guide, you could screw around in class--which the teacher allowed. I recall how one guy literally brought a pillow to class, stretched out on the floor, and went to sleep. Those were the days.

At least Cheney was a bit more subtle with his siesta.

Frank Herbert:

When politics and religion travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. The movement becomes headlong -- faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.

Quoted by Billmon.

Or whatever they are:

The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.
. . .
KBR may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster.

Uh, "immigration emergency"? What's that? And we've recently witnessed how well the government would do in getting people to such facilities in the event of a natural disaster. Not too well.

This sounds a bit creepy to me. But hey, what's good for HAL must be good for America.

Heh:

[O]ur current situation--with so many foreign troop deployments that even military buffs can't keep track of them all and with wars initiated essentially on presidential whim--would have horrified the Framers.

Ye Professor, during Clinton the Conqueror's military campaigns.

It gets better. When confronted with his past comment, which apparently became inoperative once Bush took office, Reynolds says:

Er, except that war on Al Qaeda, and the invasion of Iraq, were explicitly authorized by Congress, in declarations of war and everything. After, you know, an actual attack on the United States.

Funny, I must have missed that Congressional "declaration of war" against Al Qaeda and Iraq. At any rate, how does that refute his earlier admonition against "so many foreign troop deployments"? Would the framers be any less "horrified" about the global deployment of troops in 2006 than they would have been in 1999? Have we been repatriating lots of troops over the past seven years?

Heh.

Well, it's not all fun and laughs when you consider this is the same type of bamboozlement that lead us into the Iraqi mess. What's to stop it from happening again?

Greater Nashville area blogger JD documents tornado damage at his high school.

According to The Tennessean, the damage from Friday's storms includes:

• 12 people killed
• At least 167 people injured
• At least 2,300 to 3,000 homes, businesses and farms damaged or destroyed
• At least 20 counties affected
• At least 12,200 homes and businesses lost power
• Buildings damaged included Centennial Medical Center in Ashland City, buildings on the campus of Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin and Metro Baptist Church in Goodlettsville

Fortunately, this week's weather looks much better.

Oh, that Fourth Amendment, how quaint:

Attorney General Al Gonzales on Thursday left open the possibility that President Bush could order no-warrant wiretaps on telephone calls occurring solely within the U.S., thus expanding the potential reach of the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance program. In response to a question from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Gonzales said the government would have to determine if a conversation was related to al-Qaeda and crucial to fighting terrorism before listening in without court supervision. "I'm not going to rule it out," Mr. Gonzales said of the possibility of monitoring purely domestic communications.

I guess it's another sign of the progress of human evolution: humans are getting bigger and stronger, and their government leaders are simply getting wiser. We no longer need the restrictions from an archaic, two-century-old document to impede their good deeds. Those obsolete civil liberties are so 18th century.

President Bush, Sept. 30, 2003:

Yes. Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There's leaks at the executive branch; there's leaks in the legislative branch. There's just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.

Yes, we really should get tough on those in the executive branch who leak classified information, shouldn't we?

It's a big mystery why Americans are always on top of what's going on in the world. Here's what's broadcasting on the "news" channels as I type (prime time):

MSNBC: EXCLUSIVE: Did Natalee buy drugs?

CNN: Inside the real world of polygamy

FOX: Investigating McKinney

Ouch:

"The most classic case of the Peter Principle I've ever seen in American politics," Mr. [Charlie] Cook said, in an uncharacteristically brutal assessment. "In a business where eloquence and rhetoric is important, he is a man of no talent whatsoever."

Are people starting to pile on as lame duckhood draws neigh?