Leftista

"Moral Values" Voters Outnumbered 4 to 1

2004-11-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

Frank Rich

On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide

New York Times, November 14, 2004

FAREWELL to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it's the culture, stupid.

"It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. To Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states' revenge on "Will & Grace." William Safire, speaking on "Meet the Press," called the Janet Jackson fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of the same mind: "I think it's people who are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies ...

There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.

Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").

None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings.

...

Coup d'etat 2004

2004-11-11T11:09:00.000-08:00

For more on the "irregularities" on 11/2:
Votergate

New York Times, Oct 17: Exit Polls Protect the Vote

2004-11-08T14:45:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
October 17, 2004 Sunday

Exit Polls To Protect The Vote
By MARTIN PLISSNER.

Martin Plissner, a former CBS News political director, is the author of ''The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections.''

SINCE the 1960's, the exit poll, that staple of election-night television, has been used along with other tools to declare winners when the polls close in each state, and its accuracy is noted later when the actual vote count proves it right. A landmark exception, of course, came in 2000, when the networks initially gave the decisive Florida vote to Al Gore.

But now exit polls are being used in some places to monitor the official vote count itself, either to validate the outcome or to mount a challenge to it.

That has happened in several countries in the last year, and in the United States one organization plans to use exit polls in five closely contested states in November to measure whether there have been impediments to voting.

Last fall, an American firm, whose polling clients have included Al Gore and John Edwards, was hired by some international foundations to conduct an exit poll in the former Soviet republic of Georgia during a parliamentary election. On Election Day, the firm, Global Strategy Group, projected a victory for the main opposition party. When the sitting government counted the votes, however, it announced that its own slate of candidates had won. Supporters of the opposition stormed the Parliament, and the president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, later resigned under pressure from the United States and Russia.

In August, exit polling figured in a bitter fight in Venezuela over what amounted to competing landslides for and against a recall of the sitting president, Hugo Chavez, a socialist with ties to Fidel Castro.

The recall's proponents sponsored an exit poll, supervised by Penn, Schoen & Berland, an American firm whose clients have included Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Sometime before the polls closed on Aug. 15, Penn, Schoen reported that 59 percent of Venezuelan voters had said yes to throwing the president out of office.

A few hours later, the official count, by an election commission under Mr. Chavez's control, declared him the winner, with 58 percent of the total. Both the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, the Atlanta-based human rights organization founded by Jimmy Carter, said that their observers had seen no irregularities at the polls. In response to the exit poll, they called for a random audit at selected polling stations and again found nothing suspicious.

Mr. Schoen acknowledged in an interview that the poll's field workers were recruited by a group that helped organize the recall, but he said the volunteers had been trained to conduct the poll professionally, and that his firm would have no reason to put its reputation at risk by participating in a fraudulent poll. The recall's supporters continue to believe the election was stolen.

In Afghanistan, ballot counting in last weekend's presidential election may not be over for a few weeks, and a United Nations panel is investigating claims of irregularities. But a survey of voters leaving the polls projected that Hamid Karzai, the current president, had received enough votes to avoid a runoff. The poll's sponsor, the International Republican Institute, is a Republican-run, federally financed vehicle for promoting democracy abroad. (The Democrats have one, too.)

Could exit polls also play a role in the American presidential election on Nov. 2? The potential is there.

Votewatch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, plans to conduct exit polls in selected states to monitor election procedures and record impediments to voting, including voting equipment flaws, confusion over ballots and perceived discrimination by polling officials.

Steven Hertzberg, a San Francisco systems engineer who founded Votewatch, said he planned to use volunteers supplied by civic groups like Common Cause, among other recruits, and that they would be trained and supervised by polling professionals.

...

The group has also decided to ask people whom they voted for, or meant to vote for, to assess whether one candidate's backers are more affected by irregularities. But Fritz Scheuren, president of the American Statistical Association and a principal adviser to Votewatch, said it was important to note that ''we are not competing with the networks, and we don't want to appear to be.''

In any event, its backers say, Votewatch won't be projecting who will win or lose in November -- only the incidence of voting problems that might affect the outcome.

Chart of Florida Voters by Party vs. Actual Results

2004-11-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

Chart of Registered Voters by Party vs. Vote Results in Florida

Dick Morris: "Exit polls are almost never wrong."

2004-11-08T08:17:00.000-08:00

I usually don't quote or refer to Dick Morris, but this time his main points are correct, but his conclusions are off. He thinks the exit polls indicate a conspiracy by Democrats that election day to cause lower Republican turnout. This is from The Hill, the newspaper for Congress:

Those faulty exit polls were sabotage
Dick Morris, The Hill

By now it is well-known and a part of the 2004 election lore how the exit polls by the major television networks were wrong.

Likely this faux pas will assume its place among wartime stories alongside the mistaken calls on Florida’s vote for one side and then for the other in the 2000 election. But the inaccuracies of the media’s polling deserve more scrutiny and investigation.

Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.

So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. When I worked on Vicente Fox’s campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the actual counting impossible.

But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong. So, according to ABC-TV’s exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.

To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.

The mistaken exit polls infiltrated all three networks and the cable news outlets and had a chilling effect on the coverage of election night.

While all anchors refrained from announcing the exit-poll results, it was clear from the context of their comments that they expected Kerry to win and wondered if Bush could hold any key state.

Indeed, one network hesitated to call Mississippi for Bush because of the uncertainty injected by the bogus exit polls. Dark minds will suspect that these polls were deliberately manipulated to dampen Bush turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones by conveying the impression that the president’s candidacy was a lost cause.

The exit pollsters plead that they oversampled women and that this led to their mistakes. But the very first thing a pollster does is weight or quota for gender. Once the female vote reaches 52 percent of the sample, one either refuses additional female respondents or weights down the ones one subsequently counted.

This is, dear Watson, elementary.

Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.

At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.

This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

2004-11-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
Karen Hughes had told Bush he lost in a landslide, November 2, based on the exit poll data
by Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

. . .

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

. . .

Salon: Kerry 3-0, yet Punditry again call it a draw or play it down

2004-10-14T01:27:00.000-07:00

The media reaction: Ho-hum, just a Kerry sweep
If Bush had won all three debates, would the pundits have been so reserved?
By Eric Boehlert at Salona

Oct. 13, 2004 | It's hard to imagine that if an array of instant poll results spread over three debates and two weeks showed that John Kerry had failed to win a single survey, let alone a single debate, that Wednesday night's media spin would have been as humdrum as it was, when polls once again revealed Kerry had bested President Bush for the third time in as many tries. And Kerry did so with relative ease. According to the CNN/Gallup survey, 52 percent of voters thought Kerry won the third and final debate, compared to 39 percent who gave it to President Bush. CBS's turnaround poll also gave it to Kerry, 39-25. ABC's instant poll was much closer -- 42-41 for Kerry -- but its pool of respondents was weighted more heavily toward Republicans.

For Kerry, it's a rather startling and completely unforeseen achievement, considering Bush entered the final stretch season with an unblemished career debate record and had been given high marks by the press for his debate message discipline and ability to connect with voters. Yet he went O for 3.

Despite the consistent polling results, most of the assembled television pundits Wednesday night considered the debate to be a draw and suggested it would, in the end, have little impact on Election Day. Again, it's hard to imagine that the media response would have been so reserved if it were Bush completing a debate sweep. Either the pundits are right to discount the importance of the debates and that the last two presidential face-offs really were draws, or voters have been sending a clear message over the last two weeks, one that's been falling on deaf ears inside the media's Beltway. We'll know the answer to that question in 20 days.

the rest ...a

The Humor of George W. Bush

2004-10-13T01:26:00.000-07:00

On democracy:
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
-- December 18, 2000, CNN

On the death penalty (Karla Faye Tucker):
"`Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, `don't kill me.'"
-- September 1999, Talk Magazine

On campaigning:
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on."
-- March 2001

On his Vice President:
"My goal is to clone another Dick Cheney, that way I won't have to do anything"
-- March 2001

On his claim to be a "uniter not a divider":
"It means when it comes time to sew up your chest cavity, we use stitches as opposed to opening it up" (to Letterman soon after his heart surgery).
--February 2000

On corporate control of farm foods, in ending a lunch with EU leaders:
"Let's go eat some genetically modified food for lunch."
--ABC News Online: June 26, 2003

On hearing that refusing to award Germany or France contracts in Iraq may violate international law:
"International law? I better call my lawyer."
-- December 11, 2003

On the wealthy:
"It's nice to be here with the have's and have more's. Some call you the elite. I call you my base."

On why the wealthy shouldn't be heavily taxed:
“The really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.”
-- August 9, 2004

On raising daughters:
“I’ve been to war. I’ve raised twins. If I had a choice, I’d rather go to war.”
-- January 2002

On global warming:
"The only way to unlock the sun's mysteries is to have our astronauts do a lunar landing on its surface," said Bush. "Then, they can collect all of the astrological information we need. With this information we might one day find a way to cool off the sun and put an end to global warming. . . I envision a day, where we will no longer risk blindness by staring into the sun. Where, during a particularly hot summer, we might be able to turn a knob like on the thermostat which would draw a gigantic shade and give us all temporary relief. I realize this sounds like science fiction, but that’s what we said when we first started watching Star Trek."

To Washington Post reporter Terry Neal, an African-American, listening to his Walkman:
"Whatcha listenin' to? Some rap?"

On his tax cuts:
"My fellow Americans of the press corps, especially the cameramen, tax relief is on the way. Don't spend it all in one place. Thank you very much."
-- September 2003

On his three conditions under which a deficit would be acceptable (war, recession or emergency):
"Lucky me, I hit the trifecta."
-- Late 2001

On not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq:
“Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere...," showing a slide of himself looking underneath furniture in the White House. "No, no weapons over there . . . Maybe under here?"
-- March 24, 2004, White House correspondents dinner

Responding to the question "War, what is it good for?" asked by a first grader:
"It's the economy, stupid."

On hearing that a plane had hit the First World Trade Center tower:
"That's one bad pilot."

On the eve of September 11, 2001:
George W. Bush: "And this guy's out of breath, and we're heading straight down to the basement because there's an incoming unidentified airplane, which is coming toward the White House. Then the guy says it's a friendly airplane. And we hustle all the way back up stairs and go to bed."

Mrs. Bush: [laughs] "And we just lay there thinking about the way we must have looked."

Peggy Noonan (interviewer): "So the day starts in tragedy and ends in Marx Brothers."

George W. Bush: "That's right –– we got a laugh out of it."

Schieffer, Moderator of Third Debate, Bush's Golfing Buddy

2004-10-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

Schieffer's statements raise questions about objectivity

Bob Schieffer, CBS chief Washington correspondent and host of Face the Nation, is scheduled to moderate the third and final presidential debate on October 13. As moderator, Schieffer will be responsible for formulating the debate questions and following up after the candidates respond. However, Schieffer has described in the past his "golfing friendship" with President George W. Bush "during the 1990s" and has said, "It's always difficult to cover someone you know personally." These and other past statements by Schieffer raise the very question that Schieffer himself suggested: Can he perform the role of objective moderator given the "difficult[y]" of "cover[ing] someone you know personally"?

Schieffer may find it "difficult" due to Bush friendship. According to an August 20 Mother Jones article, Schieffer "struck up a golfing friendship with George W. Bush during the 1990s." In 2003, Schieffer told Washington Post staff writer and CNN host Howard Kurtz: "It's always difficult to cover someone you know personally."

...
More at Media Matters

Furious George

2004-10-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

HIs angry eruption at Gibson was much worse than Dean's scream, so I am surprised that this isn't a bigger story.:

The madness of George

The Bush campaign was once happy to use 'angry' as a term of abuse - but that was before the US public met Furious George, writes US political blogger Markos Moulitsas
Tuesday October 12, 2004
The Guardian

The evolution of George Bush's persona over the past few weeks is startling for even the most casual observers. Only a short while ago, Bush was a strong, decisive leader and Kerry was a weak, flip-flopping Massachusetts liberal. The Bush campaign expected those images to carry them through the November elections: it had cost them more than $200m (�112m) to build those caricatures and they had every reason to expect a solid return on their investment.

But those images were built on a carefully crafted stage. Despite all the flaws in the US electoral process we still force the candidates to exit that bubble a handful of times during the election, and it is some credit to the system that those three 90-minute debates can still determine the fate of an election. This year, they have helped introduce the nation to Furious George.

Bush's political operators have worked overtime to make "angry" a pejorative term this political cycle. They wielded the "too angry" attack against Howard Dean in the primaries, when it seemed Dean would be the Democratic nominee, and it helped destroy Dean's candidacy. Republicans again shouted "too angry" to discredit Al Gore's series of impassioned anti-Bush speeches earlier this year.

The "too angry" claims successfully marginalised the content of those speeches - blistering indictments of an incompetent administration. But what happens when your best attack line is a double-edged sword?

Bush's operation has taken stage management to extremes. His handlers have figured - correctly - that the press conference format suits their man poorly and is to be avoided at all costs. His last primetime press conference was in April 2004, and he has had only two with the White House press corps since late August - both of them with the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, at his side. (The Bush campaign actually wrote Allawi's speech in order to squeeze out precious political points.)

...

Given the force of Republican efforts to deify Bush, his debate performances came as a big shock to many Americans. They showed a Bush quick to anger, indecisiveness, pettiness and petulance. The sheltered Bush was clearly unprepared for the debate and unprepared to face criticism. In fact, it seemed to take him by surprise. No one seemed to have told him he had critics.

After his first debate performance, Bush was in a quandary. He had to stem his erosion in the polls, but to do so would require attacking Kerry and furthering the perception that he was too angry to be president.

So how did he respond? By getting even more angry. He not only viciously attacked Kerry but also took out the moderator and several questioners in the process. Someone, somewhere, labelled Bush Furious George - a clever turn on HA Rey's Curious George children's books and an appellation that took firm hold in the online and, increasingly, offline worlds.

Bush acted like the proverbial ugly American trying to be understood in a foreign land, cranking up the volume and shrillness to make his points while Kerry sat by serenely. The contrast was impossible to miss as Bush became increasingly unhinged. Even on the road, Bush's desperation is palpable as the rhetoric soars to angrier heights.

...

Bush's political operation has conditioned the electorate to distrust "anger". It has made the charge a cornerstone of its smear effort against Democrats such as Dean and Gore. For a campaign that lives by the smear, it is poetic justice to see the tables turned. Furious George is here to stay.

Former presidential interpreter says Bush does use an earpiece commonly

2004-10-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

from Democrats.com
Also a bit on Bush's temper tantrums...

Bush's Interpreter Says Bush Uses Earpiece
Sunday October 10, 2004 1:46 AM

From: Fred Burks

As a deep insider myself, I have independent confirmation of President Bush using an earpiece to assist him in communicating intelligently with others. I've worked as a contract Indonesian language interpreter with the US State Department for over 18 years. I first started interpreting at the presidential level in 1995 at a White House meeting for President Clinton and President Suharto of Indonesia with their top advisors....

On September 19, 2001, just eight days after 9/11, I was in the White House interpreting for an important 90-minute meeting between President Bush and President Megawati Soekarnoputri of Indonesia. This meeting made national news on all the TV networks, as at the time, the administration wanted to show they were supportive of our Muslim friends. Indonesia has the largest population of Muslims in the world. Over 80% of Indonesia's 220 million people are Muslim.

This was my first time interpreting for Bush. The previous day, I had been given the 22 points Bush would be covering in this meeting in order to familiarize myself with the topics to be discussed. About half of these "talking points" had to do with terrorism, which was to be fully expected given what had just happened. The other points, however, involved many details of Indonesian politics which even I would have had a tough time addressing, let alone Bush, who I assumed had limited knowledge of Indonesia.

During those 90 minutes, President Bush not only covered all the points, he covered them quite well and without any notes! Not once during the entire meeting did he look at any notes or receive cues from anyone present in discussing the Indonesian political situation with depth and intelligence. I was astonished! "How could this be?" I asked myself. It was a huge surprise. I concluded either that Bush was much more intelligent than we had been led to believe, or that somehow someone was feeding answers to him through a hidden earpiece. At the time, I really didn't know which of these was true.

Having worked directly with President Bush twice since then, and having additionally talked with many of my fellow interpreters who have worked directly with him, I am now certain that he could not have had that much knowledge of Indonesia. He doesn't even read the daily newspaper to keep up with what's being reported in the press. I am convinced that he must have been using some sort of earpiece through which someone was telling him what to say.

Having interpreted for media guests touring large TV studios, I've seen how the news anchors all have hidden earphones, and how the news producers are feeding them all sorts of information even as they talk live on TV. "20 seconds to a commercial," "15 seconds of filler here," "wrap it up quick " etc... This is standard practice for live TV shows. The "let me finish" comment made by Bush in the debate was only confirmation of something I already knew.

I will also mention that a number of months ago a colleague of mine was in the room with President Bush and his advisors when Bush threw a full blown temper tantrum filled with foul language and all. He ranted and raved at his advisors for a number of minutes to the shock and dismay of my colleague who was standing unseen in the refreshment corner. When he finally finished blowing off steam, Bush turned towards the refreshment table only to see my colleague standing there. He instantly switched into his "good ol' boy" friendly demeanor and said, "Hey, how ya doin' buddy?"

. . .

The Guardian: Was Bush wired for the debate?

2004-10-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

from The Guardian, not some conspiracy website. Originally, in Salon.

Bush's mystery bulge
The rumour is flying around the globe. Was the president wired during the first debate?

Dave Lindorff
Friday October 8, 2004

Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in his first debate with John Kerry? That's the latest rumour flooding the Internet, unleashed last week in the wake of an image caught by a television camera during the Miami debate. The image shows a large solid object between Bush's shoulder blades as he leans over the lectern and faces moderator Jim Lehrer.

The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it's safe to say he wasn't packing. So was the bulge under his well-tailored jacket a hidden receiver, picking up transmissions from someone offstage feeding the president answers through a hidden earpiece? Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate?

Bloggers are burning up their keyboards with speculation. Check out the president's peculiar behaviour during the debate, they say. On several occasions, the president simply stopped speaking for an uncomfortably long time and stared ahead with an odd expression on his face. Was he listening to someone helping him with his response to a question? Even weirder was the president's strange outburst. In a peeved rejoinder to Kerry, he said, "As the politics change, his positions change. And that's not how a commander in chief acts. I, I, uh - Let me finish - The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at."

...

LA Times Editorial: Bush is a Dope

2004-10-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

Does this man think through his beliefs before they harden into unwavering principles? Is he open to countervailing evidence? Does he test his beliefs against new evidence and outside argument? Does his understanding of a subject go any deeper than the minimum amount needed for public display? Is he intellectually curious? Does he try to reconcile his beliefs on one subject with his beliefs on another?

It's bad if a president is incapable of the abstract thought necessary for these mental exercises. If he is capable and isn't even trying, that's worse. It becomes a question of character. When a president sends thousands of young Americans to kill and die halfway around the world, thinking about it as hard and as honestly as possible is the least he can do.

Bush is a Dope"

Bush dupes CNN & MSNBC into broadcasting full campaign speech

2004-10-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

You Call That a Major Policy Address?
In a week of devastating revelations about his Iraq policies, Bush has nothing new to say.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2004, at 1:57 PM PT

Did CNN and MSNBC get hoodwinked this morning? Yesterday, the White House announced that President Bush would be delivering a "major policy address" on terrorism today. The cable news networks broadcast it live and in full. Yet the "address" turned out to be a standard campaign stump speech before a Pennsylvania crowd that seemed pumped on peyote, cheering, screaming, or whooping at every sentence.

The president announced no new policy, uttered not one new word about terrorism, foreign policy, or anything else. He did all the things he wanted to do in last Thursday's debate—accuse his opponent of weakness, bad judgment, vacillation, and other forms of flip-floppery—though this time without a moderator to hush the audience, much less an opponent to bite back. And Bush loved it, smiling, smirking, raising his eyebrows, as if to say, "How 'bout that zinger?"

In short, the cable networks were lured into airing an hourlong free campaign ad for George W. Bush.

The full article at Slate

I thought this was the case: MSNBC provided extremely slanted analysis of the VP debate

2004-10-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

Post-debate debate: Networks and cables v. MSNBC

Immediately after the vice presidential debate, Media Matters for America documented the media's reactions on cable and network television. While the clear majority of commentators described the debate as a draw, MSNBC pundits expressed a dramatically different view, declaring Vice President Dick Cheney the undisputed victor. NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell claimed Cheney "steamroll[ed] over Edwards on foreign policy points"; Hardball host Chris Matthews said Cheney "was out on a hunting trip. ... And he found squirrel"; and Scarborough Country host Joe Scarborough proclaimed: "Edwards got obliterated by Dick Cheney." By contrast, conservative Washington Post columnist George Will said, on ABC, "I think both these men did a superior job."

According to a CBS poll, 41 percent of uncommitted debate watchers said Edwards won the debate, 28 percent said Cheney won, and 31 percent thought it was a tie. ABC's "scientific" poll, weighted towards Republicans (38 percent Republicans, 31 percent Democrats, 27 percent Independents), found that 43 percent of viewers thought Cheney won the debate. Thirty-five percent thought Edwards won, and 19 percent thought it was a tie.
...
For a long list of quotes from the post-debate coverage, see the whole article at Media Matters

100,000 Kurds Demonstrate in Iraq

2004-10-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

By Associated Press, 10/2/2004 08:34

SULEIMANIYAH, Iraq (AP) About 100,000 Kurds demonstrated outside provincial government offices Saturday, demanding that the turbulent, oil hub of Kirkuk be made part of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

A tense confrontation has been building in Kirkuk, with hardline Kurdish politicians demanding the departure of some 200,000 Arabs who settled here during a campaign by Saddam Hussein's regime to increase the Arab population in oil-rich parts of northern Iraq.

''Kurdistan means nothing without Kirkuk,'' read banners carried by the demonstrators marching in Suleimaniyah. They called for a referendum to decide the future of all Kurds in Iraq. They also demanded that the two main Kurdish parties that now control the north unite under one banner.

A second, similar protest, drawing about 1,000 demonstrators, occurred in Kirkuk itself. Demonstrations were reported in other northern cities.

Demonstrations such as Saturday's appear aimed to increase pressure ahead of Iraq's general election in January, with the Kurdish parties looking to bring Kirkuk province into the orbit of the autonomous Kurdish lands.

Sunni Arabs in particular oppose incorporating the city into the Kurdish zone.

Allawi Speech Apparently Written by White House

2004-10-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

from TruthOut

Lawmaker Expresses "Dismay" that
White House Allegedly Wrote Allawi Speech
Agence France Presse

Thursday 30 September 2004

    Washington - In a letter to the White House, a leading US Senate Democrat expressed "profound dismay" that the White House allegedly wrote a large portion of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's speech to Congress last week.

    "I want to express my profound dismay about reports that officials from your administration and your reelection campaign were 'heavily involved' in writing parts of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's speech," California Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote in a letter to President George W. Bush.

    "You may be surprised by this, Mr. President, but I viewed Prime Minister Allawi's speech as an independent view on conditions in Iraq," she wrote.

    "His speech gave me hope that reconstruction efforts were proceeding in most of the country and that elections could be held on schedule."

    "To learn that this was not an independent view, but one that was massaged by your campaign operatives, jaundices the speech and reduces the credibility of his remarks," Feinstein wrote.

    Her letter was a response to an article appearing in Thursday's Washington Post, which also alleged that Allawi was coached by US officials - including Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq - in perfecting his delivery of the speech delivered before a joint session of Congress one week ago.

Bush Administration using CIA to Manipulate Iraq Elections

2004-09-28T01:14:00.000-07:00

from American Muckracker
or TIME Magazine

CIA Operation to Influence Iraq Elections Shot Down

The Bush administration officially abandoned a CIA plan to influence upcoming Iraqi elections in the face of blistering criticism
from representatives on Capitol Hill.

The covert CIA operation would have provided aid to candidates favored by Washington, and, if the operation stayed true to form to previous such clandestine ops run by the CIA to influence foreign elections, would have attempted to sabotage the campaigns of those candidates not favored by Washington.

As usual the US media has soft pedaled the story by spinning it as a "positive" pledge by the White House not to involve the US on one side or the other in the Iraqi elections, rather than focusing on the fact that such a covert CIA plan was in the works in the first place.

Lawmakers, from both parties, raised questions about the plan, which had been in the works for several months, when it was sent to Capitol Hill. According to TIME magazine, house minority leader Nancy Pelosi "came unglued" when she learned about what a source described as a plan for "the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections."

Pelosi, TIME said, had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue. Rice's spokesperson Sean McCormack refused to comment on the subject, which he referred to as "classified."

The strongest reporting on the CIA plot has come from overseas media such as the press in India, and from the blogosphere.

Under Bush, Many Corporations pay no Taxes

2004-09-27T10:29:00.000-07:00

from the Progress Report, by the Center for American Progress:

TAXES – CORPORATE WINDFALL: According to a new study by the trade journal Tax Notes, "America's biggest corporations are increasingly funneling profits earned in the United States to tax havens around the globe, depriving the United States Treasury of anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion in lost tax revenue each year." Last year, U.S. corporations "shifted $75 billion in domestic profits last year to no-tax and low-tax foreign havens like Bermuda and Ireland." This comes on the heels of a separate study released last week by the Citizens for Tax Justice which showed 82 of America's largest – and most profitable – corporations paid zero federal income tax in "at least one year during the first three years of the George W. Bush administration."

Demott's Critique of the 9/11 Report

2004-09-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

Track it down: Benjamin Demott's essay in this month's issue of Harper's.
Here are excerpts:

. . .The plain, sad reality--I report this following four full days studying the work--is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantalize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation. Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership response, the Commission can't discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperment essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises. It can't tell the truth about was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial points. . .In the course of blaming everybody a little, the Commission blames nobody--blurs the reasons for the actions and hesitations of successive administrations, masks choices that, fearlessly defined, might actually have vitalized our public political discourse.

At the core of all these failures lies a deep wariness of earnest, well-informed public debate. And the wariness is rooted, clearly, in a conception of the nature of citizen virtue that (1) strips the critical instinct of its standing as essential equipment for the competent democratic mind, and (2) finds merit in the consumer credulity that relishes pop culture and shrugs off buyer-beware warnings. The ideal readers of The 9/11 Commission Report are those who resemble the Commission itself in believing that a strong inclination to trust the word of highly placed others is evidence of personal moral distinction. As the Report's project becomes ever more visibly that of sanctifying equivocation and deference, the Commissioners retreat ever further from evaluating the behavior of which their interviews and research nonetheless allow brief glimpses--behavior on which fair judgments of character and intelligence could and should have been based. . .

The Commission's book comes on, bewilderingly, as a pop entertainment, observing the conventions of old-time nonfiction narrative, tucking into out-of-the-way corners passages that approach complex or abstract matters. Chapters open with standard ominous-menace hooks. . .Chapters end with nightmare curtain lines. . . Children's book talkdown is leaned on to allay anxiety that some dry-as-dust, demanding lecture, bereft of entertainment value, on a quick-doze topic such as government organization, is in the offing. . . .

Daily Show viewers more politically astute

2004-09-24T17:06:00.000-07:00

it's nice to see this. i am tired of Daily Show viewers being referred to (as O'Reilly has) as mostly "stoned slackers."

Sep 21, 2004 12:20 p.m.

PHILADELPHIA -- Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central, are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy, the University of Pennsylvania�s National Annenberg Election Survey shows.

Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming.

The campaign knowledge test covered such topics as which candidate favors allowing workers to invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market, the income range at which John Kerry would eliminate the Bush tax cut, and which candidate is a former prosecutor.

�In recent years, traditional journalists have been voicing increasing concern that if young people are receiving political information from late-night comedy shows like The Daily Show, they may not be adequately informed on the issues of the day,� said Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a senior analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center who conducted the research. �This data suggests that these fears may be unsubstantiated. We find no differences in campaign knowledge between young people who watch Leno and Letterman � programs with a lot of political humor in their opening monologues -- and those who do not watch late night. But when looking at young people who watch The Daily Show, we find they score higher on campaign knowledge than young people who do not watch the show, even when education, following politics, party identification, gender, viewing network news, reading the newspaper, watching cable ...

In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers -- even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration.�

full article

Republican mailing: Liberals will ban the Bible

2004-09-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

in the New York Times:
The Republican Party acknowledged yesterday sending mass mailings to residents of two states warning that "liberals" seek to ban the Bible. It said the mailings were part of its effort to mobilize religious voters for President Bush.

The mailings include images of the Bible labeled "banned" and of a gay marriage proposal labeled "allowed." A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: "This will be Arkansas if you don't vote." A similar mailing was sent to West Virginians.

A liberal religious group, the Interfaith Alliance, circulated a copy of the Arkansas mailing to reporters yesterday to publicize it.

...

full piece

If Iraq were the US

2004-09-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq's current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?

There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers, hiding out in dangerous urban areas of cities all over the country? What if they completely controlled Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Denver and Omaha, such that local police and Federal troops could not go into those cities?

What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target "safe houses" of "criminal gangs", but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

...
more from Juan Cole

A study: Media affects popular views of debates

2004-09-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

from today's New York Times

Recent studies of the debates four years ago by Prof. Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and others indicate that it matters whether a voter actually watches the debates or forms an opinion from reading media commentary devoted to them. Those who watched the first debate, Professor Jamieson said, tended to think Al Gore won, while those who merely read about it reflected the view of many journalists that Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Mr. Gore look hypocritical.

Majority of Americans support Canadian-style Health Care

2004-09-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

RANDI F. MARSHALL, NEWSDAY - - Rising health care costs and shrinking coverage have prompted a significant majority of Americans to support government regulation - or even universal health care, according to a survey released yesterday. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they supported a health care "guarantee," similar to the Canadian or British systems,
according to the survey, which was issued by Results for America, a division of the Civil Society Institute, a Newton, Mass.-based think tank. Additionally, 78 percent of Americans advocate government regulation of
health care, similar to utilities such as gas and water, the survey found.

"What this survey shows is a nation in the grips of a health care crisis," said Civil Society Institute president Pam Solo. "Americans are now prepared to embrace some tough ideas."

from Newsday
via the Progressive Review