Monday’s Mini-Report

July 14, 2008

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* Conditions in Afghanistan are getting worse: “Nine U.S. soldiers were killed in heavy fighting Sunday at a military base in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, according to a Western official. The attack was the deadliest against U.S. forces in the country since 2005.”

* The AP noted that the attacks on the American outpost in eastern Afghanistan have “deepened doubts about the U.S. military’s effort to contain Islamic militants and keep locals on its side.”

* The Fannie, Freddie fallout: “Buyers flocked to Freddie Mac’s $3 billion debt sale on Monday, just hours after the U.S. government pledged support for the nation’s top mortgage finance agencies, but the steps failed to stem growing alarm on Wall Street…. U.S. stocks quickly shed initial gains as investors feared the steps will do little stem the losses spreading through the financial sector in the wake of a deflating housing market and stalling economy.”

* Good: “The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court filed genocide charges Monday against Sudan’s president, accusing him of masterminding attempts to wipe out African tribes in Darfur with a campaign of murder, rape and deportation.”

* We haven’t seen a good ol’ fashioned bank run in a while: “IndyMac Bank, the second-largest financial institution to close in U.S. history, reopened Monday after being taken over by federal regulators. Hundreds of worried customers lined up to pull as much money as they could from the failed financial institution. However, federal regulators said it could be years before the affairs of the bank were fully resolved.”

* I had no idea it was this out of control: “The nation’s terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government’s own reported numbers for the size of the list. ‘Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape,’ said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.”

* The House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform had trouble investigating Pat Tillman’s death — everyone involved had Alberto Gonzales-like memories.

* Say hello Anheuser-Busch InBev: “After turning down an initial bid from Belgian-Brazilian suitor InBev, Anheuser-Busch accepted a higher bid of $70 per share. That’s a $52 billion price tag for the King of Beers, up from $46 billion. The companies today announced their formal agreement to combine into the world’s largest brewer with the very inventive name of Anheuser-Busch InBev. The new company also will rank the fifth largest consumer product company in the world.”

* Bob Novak reported over the weekend that Joe Lieberman “will be kicked out of the party’s caucus next year and lose his Senate chairmanship if he addresses the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., as planned.”

* Not surprisingly, Iranian officials heard about John McCain’s joke about their deaths, and formally denounced him.

* This probably won’t help Ted Stevens’ re-election chances in Alaska.

* Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-La.) legal troubles keep managing to get worse.

* Under no circumstances should we hear major media personalities talking about “oreos” in a racial context.

* It was only a matter of time before Mike Huckabee got his own show.

* A 13-part series on the unsolved murder of Chandra Levy? Really?

* The world’s oldest blogger has died at age 108.

* Awaken your inner elephant. (This might be my favorite Stranahan video yet, and I tend to love ’em all.)

* Didn’t Bush give up golf to honor the troops?

Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

Didn’t Bush give up golf to honor the troops?

Sure, except on days that end in ‘day.’

  • “…Joe Lieberman “will be kicked out of the party’s caucus next year and lose his Senate chairmanship if he addresses the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., as planned.”

    Lieberman should be kicked out of the party’s caucus next year and lose his Senate chairmanship even if he doesn’t address the Republican National Convention, as planned.

  • Not surprisingly, Iranian officials heard about John McCain’s joke about their deaths, and formally denounced him.

    Here’s hoping BushBot won’t say this is an act of regression and use it as an excuse to unleash Operation Oops We Don’t Got No Military.

  • A 13-part series on the unsolved murder of Chandra Levy? Really?
    Next up: the canny newshounds at WaPo bring us a hard-hitting fourteen-part series on the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor.

  • Cindy McCain will get a big payday from the Anheuser-Busch takeover.

    http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Beerheiress_McCain_to_profit_from_foreign_0714.html

    Bob Novak reported over the weekend that Joe Lieberman “will be kicked out of the party’s caucus next year and lose his Senate chairmanship if he addresses the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., as planned.”

    I predict that Lieberman will be kicked out of the Dem caucus if he doesn’t address the Republican caucus. I also predict that the sun will rise in the east early tomorrow morning.

    The nation’s terrorist watch list has hit one million names…

    Is the alert level orange or yellow this week? I can never keep up. Good thing Homeland Security is on the job!

  • Former Governor Frank Murkowski’s chief of staff also plead guilty in the Alaska bribery and corruption scandals. He is slated to be sentenced in September; presumably he has some singing to do this summer first in order to get a more lenient sentence. (Otherwise, why 6 or 7 months between plea and sentencing?) There may be other heads to roll, and there’s another Alaskan dynasty that may feel the heavy hand of the law yet.

  • We (puff puff) denounce the Great Satan (puff puff) and his plans to annihilate (puff puff) us. Allah is (puff puff) Great.

  • Keep in mind that one million names corresponds to 0.333% of the population, which, you have to admit, is pretty damn good! I mean, when they’ve got 50% of the population (including the entire list of the “activist judges” as well as the Democratic members of Congress and perhaps the entire Obama Campaign) on the list, we should start getting somewhat worried. But as things stand, I’d say they’re doing a heckuva job keeping a tight reign on their spying.

    I should say they aren’t spying enough! AT&T should release MORE records to the government. Who’s with me on this? Anyone?

  • TAiO@3,

    We have a perfectly good military, thank you very much. We just don’t have very many people in it, that’s all.

    Or rifles.

    Or body armor, or up-armored vehicles, or Armour-brand canned meat.

    Iraq war specialists on Sunday morning cable TV “kinda-sorta-news” shows. We do have plenty of those, though….

  • I asked US Bank if all my checking and savings transactions done over the net would soon be a matter of government record they said “It shouldn’t” but they really couldn’t say because they don’t know to what use the government might put this information. They don’t even question that they are data mined.

    The terrorists are laughing saying look at what we made the Americans do to themselves.

    I got news for them. The right wing has been trying to turn us into a police state years before 9/11 as a means to protect their greed. Ha ha ha…fist bump. You hit the building that had all the Enron records…oh wait…that’s right . They didn’t hit that one…Gramm bots did.

  • The AP noted that the attacks on the American outpost in eastern Afghanistan have “deepened doubts about the U.S. military’s effort to contain Islamic militants and keep locals on its side.

    Did the AP explain how this was Obama’s fault?

    Sorry, of course they did. It’s the AP.

  • Not surprisingly, Iranian officials heard about John McCain’s joke about their deaths, and formally denounced him.

    I don’t understand how they heard about this. They weren’t even in the same room when I said it. Wait. Does this have something to do with those computer thingies everyone won’t shut up about?

  • Here’s an angle. Some sites automate the AP feed and take whatever headline the AP offers. A responsible news site would rewrite the AP headlines at least when they’re egregiously misleading.:

    Joan Walsh – Salon.com

    What Obama really said to the NAACP

    Here’s the headline on the AP story we ran today, about Barack Obama’s fantastic speech to the NAACP: “Obama tells NAACP blacks must take responsibility.”

    Wow. Obama did say that, and he’s said it before. But he gave a long, moving, smart speech that said many other things first, and I thought that was an odd and lazy headline for the story. We automated AP wires, by the way, so we could bring you the news faster, and that’s the headline they gave us

  • 9.
    On July 14th, 2008 at 6:38 pm, ROTFLMLiberalAO said:

    Where in the world is Karmen Rove?
    Czechoslovakia?

    🙂 I don’t know I’ll czech. I haven’t found out Where’s Waldo yet.

  • WOULD YOU PLEASE MAKE A LIST OF OBAMA’S FLIP-FLOP AS DETAILED AS THE MC CANE, FOR THE SAKE OF IMPARCIALITY? PLEASE, INCLUDING HIS WIFE SAYING THAT SHE NEVER IN HER ADULT LIFE WAS PROUD OF AMERICA UNTIL NOW , THAT HER HUSBAND WAS WINNING THE PRIMARIES,OF COURSE HE REFRAISED HER FRASE.

  • For me, the biggest story today – and possibly for quite a while – is the one uncovered in an email exchange between Karl Rove and Ron Fournier, now head of the Associated Press’ Washington Bureau:

    AP’s Ron Fournier To Karl Rove: “Keep Up The Fight”

    Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line “H-E-R-O.”

    In response to Mr. Fournier’s e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this?”

    To which Mr. Fournier replied, “The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/14/aps-ron-fournier-to-karl_n_112696.html

    Don’t you think that this gives something of an insight into the mind of the man who’s going to ‘clear the clutter’ of AP reporting? For a right-wing ideologue with an agenda, putting that agenda into practice will tend to translate into sensationalist reporting, sound bite stories all aimed at the most interesting and newsworthy candidate. That would be…ummmm…..Obama.

    And AP is important. Because it operates under the cloak of supposed impartiality, there is an assumption that the ‘news’ it presents is in fact news. Conversely, if it’s not covered by the AP (e.g. countless McCain flip flops and gaffes), then these things can’t be news.

    A small remark for sure, that was never meant for public consumption. But it allows you to conjecture that this is one of the links in the narrative-creating machine uncovered.

    McCain/Schmidt/Whoever decides on the topic of the day. They communicate it to Fournier. He directs a team of AP hacks to produce x number of words on the topic and voila – you have something that’s in a thousand newspapers and magazines in the morning.

    The Fournier connection is revealing. What can be done about it is debatable.

  • Does anybody else wonder how we can stretch the U.S. military to the breaking point in this “war on terror,” where the terrorists number a few thousand motley starving malcontents living in caves along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, with virtually no equipment, no tanks, submarines, B-2 bombers, battleships, marines, and have nothing to show for it after six long years? They’ve fought the greatest military the world has ever seen to a stalemate, for chris sakes, and nobody questions what the hell is going on?

    Doesn’t anyone wonder if we’re doing something wrong?

  • I am for abandoning objectivety and saying what we really think, so long as saying what we believe doesn’t feed into the perception of liberal media bias.

  • ‘Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ’suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape,’ said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.” — CB

    If nuns insist on trying to vote, without proper ID, what do they expect? And I’m glad to see that the “members of Congress” are on that list. I can guess who they are (plus, maybe, Hagel). They’d better hang on to their private and/or chartered planes — can’t take the risk of travelling otherwise — and don’t talk about their travel plans over the phone or via e-mail. Thanks, O, for helping to “fix” FISA! We can now look forward to a great expansion of this list…

    * Say hello Anheuser-Busch InBev: — CB

    The smaller the pool of producers (ie the more concentration), the more diluted the product. Not that their beer had ever been all that good (I only drink beer while I’m in Europe, unless it’s some obscure microbrewery) but it’s likely to be really piss-poor from now on.

    @16

    Mamma mia! All those misspellings *and* in all caps… Wow, just wow! At least the name’s appropriate, even if only when Latin is applied 🙂

  • YOU SAID IT NIL #16!!!!!!! YOU ONLY NEED MORE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    YOU CAN’T BE SINCERE UNLESS THE CAP LOCK’S ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • …OBAMA’S FLIP-FLOP….

    Certainly, nillie. Obama will “flip” on the lightswitch, thus illuminating—for all the world to see, no less—the “flop” that is the Bush/McCain stupid-human-tricks cartel. If you want more than that, you must return to the fifth grade, and learn how to spell.

    Then finish grades 5 through 12, graduate successfully, and serve three successive combat tours in the war zone of my choice.

    Without whining.

    You may go now….

  • Speaking of petulant, vindictive and childish dicks, Kagro X at Kos has a piece on Bush’s expected veto of the Medicare bill tomorrow, despite a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress. Seems that because of the veto, CMS will either have to scramble about to extend the deadline for initiating reduced payments, or providers will actually face cuts in payments.

  • Dennis-SGMM wrote: “Next up: the canny newshounds at WaPo bring us a hard-hitting fourteen-part series on the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor.”

    The shocking revelation at the conclusion of the series is that the Maine was sunk by an Iranian suicide speedboat.

  • Speaking of petulant, vindictive and childish dicks…

    This act should firm up a few more votes for Obama. It’s rare to find someone in this country not hurting right now. Screwing with Medicare (again) will throw some folks literally off their rockers. And on to the voting booth.

    People are pissed. Lots of ’em on both sides, on every Main Street..

    They’ll remember this in November.

  • […] Bush’s expected veto of the Medicare bill tomorrow, despite a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress. — beep52, @25

    We’ll see whether it is, indeed, veto-proof… I’m not entirely sure it will be, at least in the Senate. It became veto-proof there due to an intensive campaign in the states of potentially vulnerable (due for re-election) Repub Senators as well as the dramatic, unexpected, appearance of Ted Kennedy casting the final necessary vote for cloture.

    But, even then, it was only 9 Repubs who broke ranks (10, if you count LIEberman) and I don’ know how far we can count on them to keep up their resistance. NYT had the list of the “traitors” and although I no longer remember who-all was on it, I do remember that two things struck me as interesting. One was that the intense campaign in the vulnerable (and potentially vulnerable) Repubs’ states didn’t seem to pay off as well as expected; people like Sununu, who *is* hanging by a thread, blew it off and voted “with Bush”. OTOH, John Warner, who’s retiring and can blow a raspberry to Bush and to his right wing constituents, voted his conscience and whatever the remainder of honour he still has left.

    I expect Warner to stick with his vote but some of the others… Who knows? Not every egg that’s been laid is gonna hatch; some of them may go back on their vote, once Bush cracks his whip. McCain may show up for a vote (yeah, I know. But) and change the dynamics.

    I’ll suspend judgment for the time being but, essentially, I figure that if Bush *does* veto the bill, it means he’s managed to chip off a few of those 9 “mavericks”; at this point, I don’t think he’s going to have an appetite for issuing a veto which sure to be overridden.

  • Incidentally, the commentariat are of the opinion that liberal bloggers are outraged that the New Yorker cover will be misconstrued by ‘stupid people’. Apparently, this is proof of liberal elitism. Whereas the liberal journalists, bloggers and posters are smart enough to ‘get it’, they believe that there are a lot of dumb people that won’t. The columnists and commentators on the other hand have more faith in the intelligence of their fellow Americans than that.

    But here’s an odd thing. I had a trawl across various sites that allow posted responses – CNN, Newsweek, Time, NYT etc etc. And guess what? A virulent and persistent strain of people who say that the cartoon was ‘spot on’ and ‘accurate’.

    Saying that there are a lot of stupid people out there isn’t elitism. It’s a statement of fact. Unfortunately for those who would argue otherwise, stupid people also have access to the internet and a keyboard.

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