Daily Flog 7/31/08: Shoot for the cops before they shoot you

Posted by Harkavy at 8:23 AM, July 31, 2008

Running down the papers:

Post: 'DRAG 'NET: NYPD WELCOMES CRIME WEB VIDEO'

Terrific hed, and so's the story:

Only problem is that you send video to the NYPD, the cops open a file on you.

This is a clever P.R. move by the cops because the footage is going to be shot anyway, and maybe those who shoot it will hand it over to the cops first and won't immediately run with it to the press or post it themselves, thus reducing the risk to the NYPD of uncontrolled bad publicity and giving Kelly time to craft the right response to incriminating videos.

Times: 'McCain Tries to Define Obama as Out of Touch'

Call that "news"? It's effective propaganda by the McCain campaign, at very little cost. The McCain/Bush "veterans" now don't have to do this at all, because the Times has already embedded the phrase "negative narrative about Barack Obama" in voters' brains.

Post: 'BARACK THE BIMBO': MAC ATTACK AD PAINTS OBAMA WITH BLOND BRUSH

Carl Campanile and the paper's headline writers show the Times how it's done:

Sources tell me that the word "bimbo" is not in the New York Times style guide.

Times: 'A New Generation of Republicans in Alaska'

William Yardley's below-average piece, inexplicably promoted as a "top story":

So friggin' what? Ted Stevens's scandalous stuff with an oil industry exec is interesting. But does this "new generation of Republicans in Alaska" have any impact on whether Alaska's wilderness will be further plundered by the oil industry? Not a peep about that issue in this story.

Straining on the toilet of non-news news, the Post dumps this hed on us, after two straight days of brilliance about the "Rockefooler." Clever but forced, and it's based on this lede, which admittedly is pretty damn good on a relatively insubstantial piece of news:

Fresh angle, but flimsy. Yeah, this guy's an ersatz Rockefeller. Nelson Rockefeller showed what it takes: Word after his 1979 death at age 70 was that he died in the saddle with a 26-year-old chickie, though that's never been absolutely proven.

Now that was a real superman. This phony guy on the lam is just a Clark Went.

Daily News: 'Depressed during holidays, Clark Rockefeller spoke of kidnapping'

The Daily News shows the Post how not to do it:

Here's a grin, though. Above the hed, there's this line:

Post: '$25M SUIT: HO-LOVIN' HUBBY GAVE ME STDS'

Dareh Gregorian's lede:

Such an eloquent oral report.

Times: 'Democrats Call for Contempt Charges Against Rove'

Grossly understated headline. It implies some sort of press conference. No, it was an actual, formal vote by a powerful House committee:

It doesn't matter that it was strictly along party lines. That's a big step for the ordinarily lily-livered top Demo leadership to move beyond press conference whining to an actual vote.

On the other hand, what's kept them? I've been holding Rove in contempt for several years, and so have many others.

Jesse Helms Finally Dies

Posted by Harkavy at 12:08 PM, July 4, 2008

If we're lucky, he took some of his bitter bigotry with him.

Jesse Helms, an unrepentant supporter of unnatural causes throughout his life, died of natural causes this morning at the age of 86.

The only sign of moderation ever shown by the longtime North Carolina senator was his decision to stop saying the word "nigger" when he was likely to be quoted in public settings.

The death of Helms is just about the best birthday present the United States could wish for on July 4. Free at last — of Jesse Helms.

While the networks and most of the press will soft-pedal his virulent racism and reckless disregard for the First Amendment in his hounding of artists, foreigners and many others, Helms stayed his divisive course until the bitter end — at least until the end of his public career.

After building a reputation as a frankly speaking bigot, Helms ended his public life as a liar who whitewashed those previously bold stands.

In a 2005 review of a Helms autobiography and a Strom Thurmond biography, Michael Lind noted in the Washington Post:

Even though America has undergone many changes since the days when the word "nigger" was freely used, it's vital for us to not ban the word. We need it, in context, to accurately record our history. Black man Randall Kennedy, author of the book Nigger, has argued that point recently in "A Note on the Word 'Nigger' ":

Jesse Helms was such a radical that he was able to fan the embers of prejudice even when he spewed the milder N-word with malice aforethought.

In "Dr. Jim Crow," a 2003 article in the Journal of African American History about the post-World War II desegregation of Southern medical education in North Carolina, Karen Kruse Thomas noted:

The death of Helms, particularly on Independence Day, helps.

And it's fitting that he should die during a presidential race that features young black man Barack Obama.

Whether or not Obama wins, the death of Helms and the ascendancy of people like Obama represent at least some sign of progress in America.

McCain on Bush: 'A President Who Dares to Work for the Best'

Posted by Harkavy at 1:18 PM, April 24, 2008

Recalling a past outbreak of fete-in-mouth disease.

Pols will say anything, especially at chicken-dinner affairs where they pat one another on the back in front of selected guests of their own ilk.

That must be the reason that John McCain gave George W. Bush something called the Freedom Award in 2005.

We're nearing the third anniversary of that barely noted annual event hosted by the International Republican Institute. (Laura Bush "won" it in 2006; other recipients include Dick and Lynne Cheney.)

You'll say that this is typical behavior by pols to give one another awards and make glowing speeches, so don't give much weight to such speeches. OK, fine, but it's still funny and somehow a little tragic to hear these pols log-rolling. My old guru, John Bremner, tried to pound into my head that "words convey ideas." So, these words by McCain mean at least a little something about our democratic process and its phony-baloney "civility."

The only time to pay attention is when the candidates (not their handlers or aides) are ripping into each other. "Dirty politics"? Bullshit. That's when you get down to what democracy is all about: lots of arguing, with, hopefully, some deals and compromises struck.

This chicken-dinner speech, though pretty humorous, may not reveal anything that's specific to John McCain, because every pol indulges in this kind of ass-kissing in selected venues. But McCain hasn't always been very good at checking the credentials of the asses he has kissed.

Back in Arizona, he pinned his tail to donkeys like financiopath Charles Keating and phony-war-hero Duke Tully (publisher of the state's largest paper). He stroked those two schmucks vigorously.

In the end, that's what McCain is really good at. When he's not losing his temper, he's a hail fellow well met, as I know from personal experience — he's a good guy to talk with, smart, lively, and great with the press, which will always cut him a break.

Anyway, back in May 2005, when this marvelous dinner took place in D.C., McCain was the president of the IRI, an org that sprung from the Cold War tool called the National Endowment for Democracy.

McCain gushed over Bush like a White House intern. And why not — they were at a GOP soiree, not in front of the general populace.

Read McCain's whole spiel (and Bush's reply in kind), if you want, but here are some excerpts of current presidential candidate McCain talking about current president Bush:

It chokes you up, right?

America's Suicide Bomber

Posted by Harkavy at 8:34 AM, February 25, 2008

Ralph Nader, the newest entrant in the presidential race, is sure to implode, but not before he wreaks some panic among Democrats. He's our own homegrown suicide bomber of politics.

Suicide bombers elsewhere are exploding, not imploding. Yesterday, on the road from Baghdad to Karbala, one of the schmucks killed a couple of dozen of pilgrims at a rest stop:

And in Pakistan, one of Nader's kissing-of-death cousins targeted a cop:

Nader, however, is the only suicide bomber who publicly announces his intentions:

Sounds as if Nader's the one who's feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized, and disrespected.

The latest episode of HBO's The Wire, the best piece of investigative entertainment ever seen on TV, is once again instructive. Detective Jimmy McNulty's "serial killer" — a fake murderer springing only from McNulty's imaginative scam to get more money for police work — warranted an FBI profile. And McNulty himself fits the profile — especially the part about the "killer" feeling superior to everyone else. Back to reality: For once, the New York Times put perspective in a political story — probably because Adam Nagourney didn't write it:

Worth it for whom? Nader's quixotic quests for the presidency are reminiscent of Harold Stassen's. Only no one's laughing, except for the Republicans. If McCain's people are smart, they'll start siphoning campaign funds to Nader. So far, the only campaign contributor to Nader in the past six months appears to be one Patricia Gilmartin of Homewood, Illinois, according to federal campaign records. And, schizophrenically, she also has given money to Barry Obama.

Nader came to fame with his auto exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed. But he just can't seem to take his pedal off the metal. Take it out of first gear, Ralph. Your whining is annoying.

Top-Down Geekonomics, Bottom-Up Democracy

Posted by Harkavy at 2:24 PM, January 8, 2008

The mainstream press can marginalize Ron Paul all it wants, but that there Texas maverick Libertarian is virtually the best presidential candidate online, especially of the Republicans.

No matter what happens to Paul's candidacy — and it's scary to see how many otherwise progressive kids are supporting his partially wack ideas — Paul has set the standard among the current candidates for Web savvy and pointed the way for the even more intense use of the Web for future races. Check out the figures at techpresident.com.

What's more of a sure sign of our flawed democracy: the anachronistic 18th century Electoral College or the 21st century Facebook/My Space "friends" personality contest?

Both are absurd, but they're not as scary as the dreams of Bill Gates. If Ron Paul is the bottom-up small-D democratic standard bearer of technology, Gates continues to be the top-down daddy of totalitarian IT.

As Computerworld's Elizabeth Montalbano wrote yesterday of Gates's Sunday night star turn at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas:

Even less funny — in fact, downright scary — was what happened later in Gates's shtick:

Yeah, we can't wait for Microsoft to develop this. That's all we need: a tool that the government and corporations and cops and marketers can use to track us in line of sight and peddle shit about us and to us.

Gates is obsessed with this top-down approach to the future. Creepshow stuff, and no doubt the code will be kept proprietary instead of open source, so the general public of geeks will have a tougher time combatting such intrusions on our privacy.

Let's see: In future presidential campaigns, the candidates' staffs will aim their devices at us to see who we support or what we've read lately. And such a device would really come in handy for cops to use during protests.

If we're lucky, though, this new tool will also come with the usual Microsoft Blue Screen of Death.

Durham Bull

Posted by Harkavy at 10:34 AM, January 3, 2008

Spare us the comparisons between John Durham — the newly named special prosecutor of Interrogate, the CIA tapes scandal — and Plamegate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The Washington Post succumbs to this typical piece of journalist b.s., noting this morning:

That's the easiest trick in political journalism: Get a quote from someone who shares the small, local stage with Durham — and who doesn't know whether Durham can handle the big stage — and run with it, instead of doing some serious checking to see whether Durham has any frame of reference in dealing with national and international crimes, criminals, and cases. The Post does at least add that caveat:

Durham made his bones by prosecuting GOP Connecticut governor John Rowland for sleazy business dealings. Rowland wound up exiting Hartford and entering prison for a short bid.

Fitzgerald, on the other hand, had vast experience in national and international cases before he tried to hound Scooter Libby. He prosecuted the plotters of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The new attorney general, Mike Mukasey, knows the difference. He presided over that WTC case. But as Bill Kunstler pointed out at the time (read my earlier item here), Mukasey should have recused himself (because he's a fundamentalist Jew) from presiding over the case, which, after all, was against fundamentalist Muslims.

Unfortunately, Durham comes with the recommendation of Kevin O'Connor. Who he? Again from the Post:

Durham is supposedly a guy who's tough on violent criminals. That really sets him apart from other prosecutors. Dealing with White House schmucks is another matter altogether. And this is a monumental chore that requires some nuanced pressuring of true heavyweight schnooks. As this morning's New York Times story says:

Don't expect much, and don't expect it soon.

A Bundler Blunders

Posted by Harkavy at 6:57 AM, October 29, 2007

Merrill's Stan O'Neal wasn't ready for subprime time, but he was a record-setting fundraiser for Bush

Merrill Lynch's ouster of CEO E. Stanley O'Neal is good timing for the financial behemoth, but it comes a few years too late for America and for thousands of Merrill employees.

He's being driven out for his reckless bundling of subprime mortgages into shaky securities that Merrill aggressively peddled and that are now shaking Wall Street's foundations. Yes, these big financial institutions play funny money with your monthly payments, making millions while you don't see a dime from their monopoly tactics.

Not that this is anything new. The explosion in subprime mortgages is caused in large part by predatory lending practices, which are particularly aimed at black people (O'Neal used to be one of those) and other minorities.

More on O'Neal in a minute, but as I wrote in April 2001 about this financiopathic scheme — "From the Subprime to the Ridiculous" — when the War of Terror was still being waged almost entirely on the domestic front by banks and companies like Merrill:

In those days, Stan O'Neal, while firing thousands of Merrill employees, was recklessly expanding Merrill's subprime bidness.

In 2003, as I previously noted, O'Neal, the highest-ranking black man on Wall Street, was a reckless bundler in another way: He set a fundraising record for George W. Bush's campaign by sending out a letter that generated $279,750 from other rich people in less than three weeks' time, the most in such a such a short period.

O'Neal, one of the nine Bush "Rangers" on Wall Street, was a prime bundler before the term hit its current vogue.

As this moneychanger is being driven from the temple, he'll be dragging along a big bag of cash. Details of that aren't immediately known, but, like most CEOs, he had one helluva deal. For instance, as the New York Times's Eric Dash noted this past April, O'Neal had a particularly sweet clause in his Merrill deal just in case the big company wobbled so much that it fell under the control of another big company:

Hell, that was incentive for him to be reckless enough take Merrill into the toilet. If he had stayed around long enough to really ruin the company to the extent that some other behemoth would take control, he would have gotten a quarter of a billion.

Now O'Neal joins the ranks of former Merrill employees. He probably won't be asked to join them for commiseration drinks. He fired more than 25,000 of them during his tenure.

Bad Guys at Ground Zero

Posted by Harkavy at 9:32 AM, September 21, 2007

This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.

New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.

Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?

Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."

Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?

On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.

So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.

After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:

Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:

That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.

The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.

At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:

Danger of a Pull-Out -- of the Dollar

Posted by Harkavy at 7:52 AM, September 20, 2007

The world has started foreclosure proceedings on the U.S. It's finally happening, much to the detriment of your children and their children.

Bad news out of Saudi Arabia: The archaic but wealthy kingdom is so scared of our imminent recession that it's abandoning our shaky dollar. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph (U.K.) explains this morning:

This stuff is really complicated, and I'm oversimplifying, and many rich schnooks are the ones making the decisions. (Read this good overview of Wall Street's subprime greed by David Ignatius in Beirut's Daily Star.)

The fact is that, no matter how much money the hedge funds and private-equity people are raking in, a recession looms in the U.S. The rest of the planet is a coalition of the unwilling to be dragged down with us.

This attack by the Saudis on our economy may prove to be more damaging to the U.S. in the long run than the mostly Saudi hijackers' attack on the World Trade Center, which, though horrible and deadly, was an attack on only the symbol of our economy. There was no justification for the 9/11 attack. But this economic attack is justified, because of the greedy schmucks and costly war that have helped send our economy spinning out of control.

Here's the rub: Our rich are getting richer, but foreign investors and governments own most of our debt. As the dollar collapses, they are pulling their money out — can't a brother get a dime?! World investors are looking elsewhere; many have a yen for Japan's strong economy.

We're Number Something-Other-Than-1!

Just one example of how relatively poor we are and how this crisis has been building for a long time: In April, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal demanded that Citigroup make "Draconian" cuts in its budget, and 17,000 people lost their jobs. Who cares what some Saudi prince says? Well, he's the huge bank's biggest individual shareholder.

Here's more from the Telegraph on the recent move by Saudi royals:

Our money woes are killing us:

Are the Democrats really sure they want to take over the White House? They will inherit an economy heading south and an unwinnable, tragic war.

We can't afford to keep fighting in Iraq, but we can't afford not to as long as we can't get some sort of international alliance to help calm things down over there.

Mercenaries like Blackwater may have to do all the fighting for us, but we won't be able to pay for them. As for our own soldiers: When we finally bring them home, there may be a full-blown recession and no jobs for them.

This is all tied to our mortgage-market crisis, which is caused by our money men playing dangerous games with the dough you homeowners send to the bank every month.

Here's even more from the Telegraph that warns of an even deeper crisis with the mortgage mess:

That's easy for him to say. He's got a new book to peddle.

Senator's Career Stalled

Posted by Harkavy at 5:18 PM, August 29, 2007

Idaho senator Larry Craig hasn't come out of the closet yet but this just in: He's now gone from three key committees — Veterans Affairs, the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, and Energy's Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests.

All this because he temporarily served on a two-man public bathroom committee.

Craig's hometown TV station KTVB.com just reported Craig's ouster from the committees. Ouch. He won't be cruising around Boise anytime soon. And he didn't volunteer to leave those posts. In fact, Craig didn't even make the announcement, as the Boise TV channel reports:

An ethics inquiry? That's what I can't understand. If the police report from Minneapolis is true, Craig followed perfectly the ethics of cruising, according to yesterday's ABC News story "Secret Signals: How Gay Men Cruise for Sex". Take a look at the police report, and then read the "Secret Signals" story and tell me that Craig, with all that toe-tapping and hand-signalling, wasn't following the ethics of cruising.

We don't know what tune the formerly gay-bashing Craig will be singing as this saga unfolds, but he and the aforementioned Lott sure made some sweet music together at one point, especially when John Ashcroft was hanging around D.C. Those three and Jim Jeffords were once known as the barbershop quartet The Singing Senators (that's Craig, sandwiched between Lott and Ashcroft, forming a perfect "O" with his mouth).

Ashcroft's penchant for singing started to piss people off when he moved from the convivial old boys' club of the Senate to the halls of the Justice Department in his job as AG. As Glenn Weiser noted in Metroland in August 2002:

Ashcroft's now gone from D.C., and Craig's days as a "singing senator" are clearly over. The self-proclaimed God-fearing Craig had better devote himself to silent prayer, or whatever else he does on his knees.

Rove's Defining Legacy

Posted by Harkavy at 8:54 AM, August 14, 2007