I really don't have time for this but I ran across it and had to share it with you. It's a sharing kind of thing....

A commenter to Just a Bump on the Beltway named David Byron responded to melanie's post on a WaPo article about Allawi's visit to his Emperor by de-constructing the process the reporter had used to downgrade Allawi's murder of six people to the status of 'gunplay' and applying it to a different sentence. It is the single most masterly description I have ever read on how the corporate press trains its 'reporters' to think about BushCo and how those 'reporters' use what they've been taught. I reproduce it here in its entirety for your amusement and edification.

If the internet had been invented 50 years ago we could Google for the same newspapers writing up glowing appraisals of the installation of Saddam Hussein no doubt.

the unfounded but popular Baghdad street rumor of his recent gunplay against some bad guys

Ok, so independent witnessess say he executed half a dozen people in cold blood. Same difference. Just a little change to a couple of details, right? The message here is that any "facts" that the WaPo reports are likely to be this "accurate".

Let that settle in.

Let's play a little game whereby we assume that the WaPo was no more dishonest, but no less dishonest with other sections of it's article, and on that basis guess what I like to call "what really happened". For example, WaPo says,

that night in London in 1978 when intruders presumed to be Saddam Hussein's henchmen tried to hack him apart with axe

Ok let's change the location and date first of all, since WaPo considers such things to be window dressing (per "Baghdad street" rumour). Let's say the event took place in Mosul in 1969 instead. Same difference, right?

And instead of it being an unprovocked attack on Allawi as suggested (not quite stated) let's make it a mutual thing -- let's say it happened during a gang fight basically initiated by others (Allawi being too young to be a leader then). Same difference, eh? I mean the word "gunplay" in the above pretty much says it's ok to switch from "one party totally responsible" to "both parties equally responsible".

Lets replace "hack him apart with an axe" with "received some bruises" because (per "gunplay") even death itself can be characterised as "play" then a horrible wound can be represented as a bruise I'm sure.

Finally "Saddam Hussein's henchmen" becomes "rival gangsters" and we can keep the word "presumed" or not. Presumption of innocence surely means nothing because civilians rounded up by the authorities without charge but designated terrorists become "bad guys".

So in summary what is the truth?

that night in London in 1978 when intruders presumed to be Saddam Hussein's henchmen tried to hack him apart with axe

or

Allawi had a little more than his ego brusied in a gang fight with other criminal types back in 1969 in Mosul

Same difference, right?

Pretty much explains it, don't it?

# Cynthia Tucker on Zell Miller and the history of Republican race-baiting in the South:

Zell Miller wants you to believe that he is dispensing a dose of discipline to his beloved Democratic Party — pointing out the foibles and foolishness that have led to its loss of the South. Miller claims he only wants the Democrats to regain their traditional values before it's too late.

Miller is a hypocrite. As a historian, he knows exactly why the Democratic Party is teetering in the South: It's precisely because the Democrats set aside a century and a half of ugly traditions that it has lost so many rural white Southerners. Miller knows better than most; he was once one of those rural white Southerners who embraced those ugly traditions.

Running for Congress in 1964, Miller dismissed the Civil Rights Act as neither "constitutionally acceptable [n]or fundamentally proper as an approach to the solution of racial problems in America." Even back then, he denounced the Democratic presidential nominee, declaring that Lyndon Johnson "is a Southerner who sold his birthright for a mess of dark pottage." From 1968-71, Miller served as executive secretary to Gov. Lester Maddox, who remained an unrepentant segregationist until the day he died.

eVoting News

# In Georgia, A Chimp Erases Votes

WASHINGTON — The computer systems that will count roughly half the ballots cast on Election Day are so vulnerable to hackers that almost anyone could rig the results, critics said Wednesday.

The group BlackBoxVoting.org illustrated its charge with a video showing "Baxter the Chimp" hamming it up as he punched a couple of computer keys that wiped out the totals on a vote-tabulating program.

Andy Stephenson of BlackBoxVoting.org shows former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney how to hack a voting program.

Bev Harris, executive director of the citizens action group and a computer voting critic who has written a book on the subject, said the program was the same used throughout Georgia, which two years ago became the first state to adopt paperless touch-screen voting statewide.

At the demonstration, Harris asked former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from DeKalb County, to follow instructions and demonstrate the ease of hacking into the program made by Diebold Elections Systems Inc., the nation's biggest provider of electronic voting equipment.

McKinney moved the mouse and punched a few buttons, and the computer file vanished.

"This is incredible," said McKinney, who is running in the Nov. 2 election to regain her old seat.

The response:

Diebold representative David Bear: "What was presented was analogous to a magic show. In a real election environment, people don't have unfettered access to the system."

Spokeswoman for Republican Sec of State Cathy Cox, Kara Sinkule: "If you allowed a monkey access to the cockpit of an airplane — without any physical security whatsoever — he could possibly cause it to crash," Sinkule said. She said Georgia has "multiple, overlapping security" elements to safeguard its system.

Uh-huh.

Election Officials Wish They Hadn't

Meanwhile, computer scientists from coast to coast have warned that the machines sometimes err in counting votes and could be easily compromised by amateur hackers intent on disrupting elections. In either case, they say, a manual recount would be meaningless if it was based on corrupted electronic data.

All of this has left officials like Palm Beach County Commissioner Addie Greene wishing they hadn't rushed to spend millions of dollars on the new touch-screen machines so soon.

In the last few months, as Greene campaigned for reelection, she told dozens of senior citizens to forget the newfangled voting terminals and put pencil to paper on their absentee ballots instead.

"I want our votes to be counted," said Greene, a 61-year-old Democrat. "I'd rather do absentee ballots than take a chance on the machines."

Greene is an unlikely critic of the electronic voting machines. After all, she helped get 5,000 of them deployed throughout this seaside county of 1.2 million residents.

As eRobin over at Fact-esque points out succinctly:

I haven't been posting much about the eVoting issues lately because, frankly, I've seen my worst fears realized and it's depressing. The stories now being written are mostly about how it's too late to do anything about the election in November. Of course, it is not, but that's the story we're being fed. Go back to sleep.

We get fed lies daily by the corporate media - damaging, dangerous, deadly lies.

# Jonathan Chait on Bush's lack of principles--of any kind:

One of the things we Bush haters like to say to each other, over lattes with NPR in the background, is that the current president makes us nostalgic for George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Non-Bush haters have trouble understanding this point. Is this GOP president really that much more conservative than other GOP presidents? Well, yes, he is. But the main problem is less his conservative principles than the frequent absence of any ideological principles whatsoever.

One telling episode began last year, when, because of a World Trade Organization ruling, Congress had to eliminate a $5-billion-a-year export subsidy. The obvious thing to do was pocket the $5 billion and make a dent in our quite large budget deficit. Of course, the GOP-controlled Congress decided instead that every dollar saved would be devoted to tax cuts. And because the newfound money would come from corporate America, it would be returned to corporate America.

That line, from the uncomfortably prophetic film The Siege, in some ways may say everything that needs to be said about the situation in Iraq as it is evolving, just as it would have summed up Viet Nam forty years earlier. Car bombs, suicide attacks, poorly armed militias holding off the might of the biggest, best, and most powerful military force in the world--it's time to say it out loud: Holbrooke is right. Iraq is Viet Nam all over again, only worse.

Ever since Bush announced his intention to follow the PNAC 'plan' from 1989 and invade Iraq on the strength of innuendo, misinformation, and bald-faced lies, critics like me have been saying it would be Nam all over again, and from the start of the invasion the parallels have been downright spooky. Yes, the physical terrain is different--desert instead of jungle; yes, the people are different, Arabs instead of Asians; yes, there is more at stake in the Gulf than there ever was in Nam--real oil instead of imaginary dominoes; and yes, Nam was not a response to a direct attack on US soil. But the mistakes are the same: arrogance fueled by fear, lies fueled by ideology, disastrous military decisions being made by civilians for political reasons against the advice of military leaders, a steady stream of HappyTalk from the Administration and its loyalists about how much better everything is than it looks, and, most importantly, a native insurgency arising from a desire to expel a foreign occupier being defined by a blind Admin as the rumpus made by a few 'outside agitators'.

The neocon naifs in the Bush Admin are patently still in thrall to Laurie Mylroie's paranoid fantasies and Ahmad Chalabi's self-serving lies: Wolfowitz and Perle are still insisting no more troops are needed and that everything is just ducky even as we have reached and passed the 1000-death mark in a war that was supposed to be over--shades of McNamara grousing about 'negativity'; Bush is running around the country campaigning on his 'Don't listen to them' platform, pleading with people to pay no attention to the reports of chaos and confusion, incompetence and outright theft, a massively botched reconstruction, and instead trust his glowing, optimistic assessment based on--what? He doesn't say. His optimism, one imagines.

It didn't have to be this way. As Jay Bookman points out in a brilliant essay, Tikrit is as quiet as Fallujah is an uproar.

The Army's 1st Infantry Division is headquartered in Tikrit, and its footprint has been heavy and it has been felt. U.S. troops patrol the streets in relative safety, because here, if nowhere else in Iraq, they have been given the numbers to squelch opposition. "I can sit on that corner, on 'RPG Alley,' and eat an ice cream cone now," Lt. Col. Jeffrey Sinclair recently told the Associated Press, pointing on a map to the infamous city's most infamous street.

Before the invasion, the haughty amateurs who planned this brave adventure were warned that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify Iraq. Rather than listen and learn, they scoffed at the four-star generals who spouted such nonsense. These men knew better, for in the Washington think tanks that had nurtured them like fragile hothouse orchids, eager Iraqi exiles had assured them that if we invaded, we would be greeted as liberators, that our path would be strewn with roses, that our leaders would be honored with statues on Baghdad squares.

Tikrit, by its silence, condemns those men for their arrogance. Here, at the very core of Saddam's strength, the difficult has been achieved. The calm may be a sullen calm, an enforced calm, but it is a calm nonetheless. This is what might have been elsewhere in Iraq if competence had been valued over blind allegiance, if we had been led into this war by serious people who understood that when you bet high stakes, you play to win and you assume nothing.

But we weren't. We were led into this war by corporate-style leaders watching the bottom line, ex-corporate executives who believe that the truth is what they say it is and that how it looks is more important than what it is, and corporate consultants who specialize in marketing attractive ideas in order to sell shoddy, defective, and useless products to people who don't need or want them. Corporate executives are valued largely on their ability to convince themselves and others that the impossible is doable, that illusions are what matter, and that products can be forced on unwilling consumers if you tell them the right lies in the right way.

Well, we elected a pile of corporate-trained, corporate-educated, corporate-indulged executives who, like all their class, were so completely cut off from reality, so thoroughly enmeshed in their own private fantasy world of success, so convinced that the lofty heights of business to which they had climbed--largely through political contacts and the Old Boy network--were the direct result of their own genius, that they virtually live in an alternate universe, a universe where their stubbornness is heroism, their incompetence is superior vision, and their blindness is loyalty. So what did we expect them to do? Suddenly become realists after spending their lives investing their energy and resources committing to an illusion? It don't work that way, people.

If we ever get out of this I hope the one lesson we take away with us, indelibly printed in the core of our brainpans, is to never never NEVER again allow corporate managers to grab the reins of government. Because while it matter who is the most committed, it matters just as much what they're committed to.

Junior is finally keeping his 2000 campaign promise to bring us together. Republicans and Democrats in the Congress are at long last united--against him, or at least his policies in Iraq.

WASHINGTON (AP)--Senators from both parties urged the Bush administration on Sunday to make a realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and adjust its policies aimed at pacifying the country. But Bush readied a firm defense of his Iraq policy--and a sharp new attack on rival John Kerry's stance--for a speech Monday.

``The fact is a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where we finally lost,'' said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran who is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election committee in Nebraska.

``We can't lose this. It is too important,'' Hagel, R-Neb., said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.''

A major problem, said leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was incompetence by the administration in reconstructing the country's shattered infrastructure.

The chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar, noted that Congress appropriated $18.4 billion a year ago this week for reconstruction. No more than $1 billion has been spent. ``This is the incompetence in the administration,'' Lugar, R-Ind., said on ABC's ``This Week.''

``Exactly right,'' interjected Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee's top Democrat. He said later: ``This has been incompetence so far. Five percent of the $18.4 billion that George Bush keeps ... beating the other candidate up and about the head for how he voted and didn't vote, and he's released 5 percent.''

Sen. John McCain, who has campaigned often with the president, said mistakes in Iraq generally can be attributed to inadequate manpower. McCain, R-Ariz., said problems began arising shortly after the dash through the desert to take Baghdad, the capital, in April 2003.

``We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders,'' McCain said.

``Airstrikes don't do it; artillery doesn't do it. Boots on the ground do it,'' McCain told ``Fox News Sunday.''

Now that's leadership.

I was going to kick my new home off with a long piece on the direness of the situation in the Middle East caused by Junior's war-fever and imperialist chest-thumping that I've been knocking around on the word processor for a few days now. But then something happened that sent my mind off on a whole different tangent and I decided to spend my first post talking about that instead as a sort of signal--you know?--that Arran's Alley is going to be, well, different, if you know what I mean. No holds barred, everything on the table, prejudices and all. So Ok, here goes.

Why do women feel this compulsion to 'share' absolutely everything that happens to them with somebody even when that somebody was right there with them when it happened? It's not an exclusively female trait but it is primarily female and extreme in almost every case.

So I'm standing at the bus stop outside the supermarket the other day with nothing much to do except admire the shine on the shopping cart that was, no matter which way I moved, unerringly bouncing the glare of the midday sun right straight toward my left eyeball, when this woman with two kids got out of an SUV and walked across the parking lot toward the store. She was talking when she got out of the truck and she talked without letup all the way across the lot. Even before I could actually hear what she was saying, I could see the 14-yr-old daughter rolling her eyes while the 12-yr-old boy had apparently found something that fascinated him sticking to the toe of his sneaker.

Now, I had a daughter--well, I mean, I still have her but she's not 14 any more, she's 35--who started rolling her eyes at her mother when she was 9 and didn't stop until she was 24, so I am not unaware that adolescent female eye-rolling is endemic to the breed and can be set off by nothing more consequential than being told to tuck her shirt in or an offhand comment to the effect that the Beatles were a way better group than, say, Duran-Duran, and that once started it can go on for days, during which time everything you've ever thought, said or done comes in for close examination and is judged to be either seriously flawed or convincing proof that you've been daffy since Nero was a tot rolling around on the palace floor playing with matches.

However, as they got closer and I could hear what the mother was--still--saying, I had to admit that in this case the girl had a clear and objective case that could be defended in any court from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St Jo. Mom had been out during the morning with her camera and had taken, it seemed, a few thousand pictures.

Mother: --and I saw this cute outfit in the window of Lane's that reminded me of that time I went to Portland with my girlfriend Jane and her friend Kathy, the one with blonde hair out of a bottle that was cut so short she looked like she was bald, so I wanted to take a picture of it but I didn't know how the light would play out through the reflection in the glass so I backed up all the way across the sidewalk so of course this guy walking his dog, a Schnauzer, the cutest little thing, it had a red collar, had to come by and stand right in front of the window and I had to ask him to move so I could take the picture--

Daughter:(patiently) I know, Mom, I was there.

Mother:(without missing a beat, as if Daughter hadn't spoken) --and he got all grumpy about it and pulled the dog away while you were still petting it--

Daughter: I remember, Mom, it was only 20 minutes ago.

Mother: --and then I realized I forgot to take the lens cap off, so of course I had to do that, and then I took the picture and we got back in the car to go to the drug store but when I was supposed to make that left turn some guy cut me off and I had to take a right and go all the way around the rotary again and then I got stuck behind this black Ford--

Daughter: I know, Ma, I was sitting right there next to you.

Mother: --and she didn't know which way she was going so I--

And that's when the supermarket's automatic door shut behind them and I couldn't hear any more.

Now, what struck me about this (maybe it struck you, too) wasn't that she wanted to tell the story of her morning's picture-taking but that in doing it she felt the need to include every single extraneous detail that she could remember, right down to the color of the dog's collar, no matter how mind-numbingly irrelevant and miniscule and insignificant it was, and that she had to tell this story as soon as she could even if that meant telling it to people who had been there with her and seen it all for themselves. And a moment later I was struck again, this time by the realization that I hadn't thought anything whatever of this when it was going on. It was so familiar, I was so used to sitting through exactly the same kind of long-winded, pointlessly-detailed and strung-out-to-the-max story-telling emanating from virtually every female I have known well enough to call by their first names, that it never for a moment occured to me that there was anything odd about it.

I know that men do this, too, but only when they're talking about sports (in which every conceivable detail of Manny Ramirez's breakfast is dissected for its potential effect on his batting average) or cars (where the intricacies of cleaning a fuel-injection system can take longer to catalog than it took to do the actual cleaning) but women do it about practically everything. Any woman alive, it seems, can make a 30-minute story out of a 5-minute trip to the corner store for a half-gallon of milk that will have any normal male's head spinning trying to figure out the point while other women just nod and sympathize with the ungodly unfairness of, apparently, having to suffer the indignity of getting milk rather than it being delivered to her doorstep so she doesn't have to go through the double-bladed traumas of driving, parking, mingling with other people in the store, and then carrying this heavy burden back to the car all by herself.

It is as if every woman considers every second of her life worthy of epic saga, a tale of such monumental cosmic importance that every last tiny, remorselessly banal detail of it should be encased in amber and preserved for future generations to study with awe and reverence. If you think I'm exaggerating, I suggest 2 tests:

1) Stop closing your ears when the women in your life talk, and try actually listening to them. I realize this will be painful, but suck it up for the sake of widening your horizons.

2) Do what I did: cruise female blogs. I did that for several months looking for blogs to include in Women Blog, Too!, and I learned a few things.

* Whenever a blog has entries that start with 'I got up this morning and took a shower. I used the pink soap and rinsed my hair thoroughly twice, just like it said on the bottle', 99 times out of 100, that blog belongs to a female. After awhile I realized that 'I got up this morning and--' was all that was needed for purposes of gender identification. Men rarely--if ever--start that way (I think I saw it once).

* Whenever a female blog has entries that start with 'The most important thing happened to me today--' the odds are overwhelming that it will be followed by 20 long, unutterably verbose grafs in which nothing happens of any importance whatever to anyone, living or dead, except--maybe--the blogger herself, and even then you'd have to stretch the traditional definition of 'important' to include activities like buying a different brand of ketchup (how daring!) and leaving work 15 minutes early to pick up the dry cleaning.

There are exceptions, thank god. When Cyclopatra talks about her personal life, not only is she witty and straightforward about it but she connects it to life in general for a lot of people, not just herself, and every detail she includes is there for a reason. (Whether she shows such admirable restraint and concision when telling her partner these very same things is veiled in mystery, however.) But they pale into insignificance next to the inordinate numbers of merciless tale-spinners who are entirely without pity for male brains that lack either the interest in or the capacity for processing long, complicated files whose only excuse for being is that they're there, like lumps of coal in a Christmas stocking, and can't be ignored.

So you might say that this post is in the nature of a plea. There's nothing actually illegal about telling long, pointless stories that fry the brains of any male inside the 12-mile marker in any direction, but it isn't very nice.

Have a heart. Lay off once in a while. You may not believe this, but the world will not explode into a billion pieces tomorrow if one--or even two--of your stories remain untold. Honest. The sun will still come up, birds will still sing, and Red Lobster restaurants will still be a blot on the suburban escutcheon from which there is no forseeable escape.

Give us a break one time, OK? It would be an act of kindness that will ease your way into a Heaven where every woman gets to be the only guest on Oprah for eternity. That's worth a little self-control, isn't it?

That's what former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had to say about the situation in Iraq last week. He pointed to the potentially disastrous consequences of waging a never-ending war in the region which supplies most of the world's oil and suggested bluntly that it could lead to destabilization of the world's economy. I read five papers a day, and I missed that little item. Holbrooke is one of the few looking past the immediate quagmire to see the larger picture: what's the occupation of Iraq doing to the global balance of power? We are treating the deteriorating situation there as at best a temporary chaos created by outside agitators and remnants of the old Ba'athist regime and at worst a local insurrection, but Holbrooke is seeing it as a developing regional conflict that could easily force other Arab nations to choose up sides, enlarging the 'insurrection' into a region-wide nationalist struggle. Kaveh L Afrasiabi of the Asia Times agrees. In an essay entitled 'Refocus on the the big picture', Afrasiabi lays out the way the war has already changed.

The stage is now set for another chapter in a showdown between the forces of occupation and their local props on the one hand, and the diverse forces of (religious) nationalism seeking to regain Iraq's independence on the other. This means that contrary to some recent analyses focusing on a Shi'ite-Sunni divide, the most important determining factor in the war-torn country is, and for the foreseeable future will be, nationalism versus imperialism.

Whether we think of ourselves as an imperial power or not, the point is that they do.

As things go, nothing much has changed. There will be a bit less posting and the posts may be a bit longer, but the man behind the curtain is still wearing a rubber nose.