The Blog | Arianna Huffington:
Each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren’t, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless… The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House.
Crooks and Liars » 2006 » December » 18:
John MCain is a Saint—don’t ya know!. As Chris Matthews tells us:
“Every time I look at a poll. And I expect McCain to win everyone of these polls. The press loves McCain. We’re his base I think sometimes.”
The “press loves McCain” narrative is made crystal clear by Newsweek when they failed to mention the polling data from their big cover story about Hillary and Obama:” Is America Ready?” Hillary beat McCain and Giuliani in their own internal poll. Wouldn’t that have been a huge story? Matthews constantly tells his audience that Giuliani and McCain destroy Hillary in every poll he sees. Early polls don’t really very mean much at all, but you can see how the media narrative is being played out already.
This might be the first poll I’ve seen with Hillary beating the Saint. Why isn’t Newsweek shouting it from the rafters? Steve runs the data down.
* Asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Clinton enjoyed a seven-point lead in the Newsweek poll, 50% to 43%. (Among self-identified independents, with whom McCain is supposed to excel, the two were tied at 45% each.)
* Asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, Clinton led 48% to 47%.
* Asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, Clinton is ahead 58% to 32%.
* Asked to choose between Barack Obama and John McCain, McCain’s lead was only two points, 45% to 43%, despite the fact that a far larger percentage of respondents said they weren’t very familiar with Obama.
* Obama trailed Giuliani by a similar margin (47% to 44%), and led Romney, 55% to 25%….read on”
Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Six:
For your possible edification: The low-fi, necessarily incomplete, increasingly outdated thumbnail gallery that I use for browsing through the UK/Canada Modern Classics covers. Much easier than combing endlessly through Amazons .co.uk and .ca. (Created earlier this year via a few minutes of grepping the text of a Penguin catalog PDF of Modern Classics ISBNs and plugging them into Amazon image URLs.)
Out of those 377 covers, here are 147 more-or-less favorites.
While we’re at it, because they were included at the end of the PDF, the typographically excellent covers for Penguin’s Great Ideas series.
Right Wing Watch: Soy Makes You Gay:
Soy Makes You GaySometimes you just have to marvel at the things published by WorldNetDaily – things such as this column by James Rutz of Megashift Ministries:
tinky-soy-med.jpg
There’s a slow poison out there that’s severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture ….
The dangerous food I’m speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they’re all over the place. You can hardly escape them anymore.
…
Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.
It is difficult to imagine just what WorldNetDaily’s standard is for rejecting a column or article – but whatever it is, it is apparently set so low that “soy makes you gay” manages to exceed the criteria.
Posted by Kyle at 11:08 AM
Excerpts from: Burning BushNew York Daily News [11/7/04]
So that’s why the Bushes don’t like New York City: Laura can’t smoke here.
The presidential campaign was stressful enough to send the First Lady, an avowed nonsmoker, back to her chain-smoking ways.
“Absolutely no one was allowed to see her smoking,” says one insider. “At events where she appeared, there had to be a room off to the side where she could close the door and chain-smoke before and after she spoke.”
The official version is that Mrs. B gave up cigarettes at the same time she made her husband kick the bottle. And a spokesperson for the First Lady’s office insisted that Mrs. Bush did not use a smoking room at appearances.
YY. Why did you switch from choo-choos?
I will not be railroaded into a response.
Foreign Policy: The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006:
United States Funds the Taliban
The Taliban’s resurgence brought the ongoing war in Afghanistan back onto the front pages in 2006. From record opium production to suicide bombings, the outlook has only grown dimmer in the past 12 months. What you probably didn’t hear is that some of the money the United States is spending to combat theresurgence of the Taliban is winding up in the hands of . . . the Taliban.
As recently as November, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting revealed that villagers in Afghanistan’s war-torn south were handing over U.S. cash meant for reconstruction projects to Taliban fighters, who then use the money to purchase weapons, cell phones, and explosives. As part of an effort to stimulate economic development in the country, the United States had committed $43.5 million for reconstruction as of September. One Canadian officer charged with helping to distribute cash said that “millions” has already gone missing in the five years since coalition troops arrived. Why? According to the report, local mullahs have urged residents to fight the foreign occupation and hand over the money in the hopes of gaining back the security they’ve lost. Others say it’s simple extortion from Taliban thugs. Either way, the United States may inadvertently be aiding the enemy in a fight that will almost certainly become more costly in the year ahead.
MARY, the mother of Jesus, is considered especially holy in Islam and is, in fact, the only woman mentioned by name in the Koran, “Mary” (Arabic, Maryam) being the name of one of the Koran’s most often-read chapters.
LAT started describing Iraq situation as “civil war” last month
Los Angeles Times
NBC is the first television network to officially adopt the term “civil war,” while the Los Angeles Times was the first major news outlet to formally adopt the description when it began to refer to the hostilities as a civil war in October — “without public fanfare,” the paper notes. Times foreign editor Marjorie Miller says: “For some time now we believe it has been a fairly simple call: Inside one country you have different armed groups fighting with each other. That is the definition of a civil war.”
/> NYT will use “civil war,” but “sparingly and carefully,” says Keller (BG)
/> J-prof: NBC move “a defining and negative moment” in Iraq war (USAT)
/> Washington Post doesn’t have a policy on “civil war,” says Downie (E&P)
Posted at 8:25:00 AM
