Entries Tagged 'I'm speechless' ↓

It can’t be good for The Atlantic that the photographer they hired to shoot McCain for Jeffrey Goldberg’s the cover story went totally batshit insane.

Goldberg comments:

Like others at the Atlantic, I was appalled to read about the actions of Jill Greenberg, the freelance photographer who took the cover portrait that illustrates my article about John McCain. Greenberg doctored photographs of McCain she took during her Atlantic-arranged shoot, which took place last month in Las Vegas. She has posted these doctored photographs on her website, which you can go find yourself, if you must. Suffice it to say that her “art” is juvenile, and on occasion repulsive. This is not the issue, of course; the issue is that she betrayed this magazine, and disgraced her profession. …

Greenberg is quite obviously an indecent person who should not be working in magazine journalism. Every so often, journalists become deranged at the sight of certain candidates, and lose their bearings.

Wow.

Someone (allegedly) threw out top-secret designs for the World Trade Center in a garbage can on the corner of Sullivan and Houston Streets in New York City.

They were found by a homeless guy.

I am speechless.

Via the New York Post:

Two sets of confidential blueprints for the planned Freedom Tower, which is set to rise at Ground Zero, were carelessly dumped in a city garbage can on the corner of West Houston and Sullivan streets, The Post has learned.

Experts said the detailed, floor-by-floor schematics contain enough detail for terrorists to plot a devastating attack.

“Secure Document - Confidential,” warns the title page on each of the two copies of the 150-page schematic that a homeless, recovering drug addict discovered in the public trash can.

“Any time a sensitive document is unintentionally left behind, it’s a treasure trove for a potential adversary,” aid Robert Strang, CEO of Investigative Management Group, a global security firm. “It enables them to look for vulnerabilities in design that they can target - an age-old military tactic.”

Informed of what the homeless man, Mike Fleming, had found, shocked Port Authority officials called it an egregious security lapse.

“Violating these protocols is cause for serious disciplinary action - up to termination for employees and breach of contract and legal action for contractors,” said Candace McAdams, PA director of media relations.

One of the identical sets was missing the first 14 pages, which is particularly alarming.

Philip Weiss discovers anti-democratic extremism.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama’s campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don’t be an idiot. …

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about “the war on terror”. We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can’t forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

The sewer rats in his comments section are none too pleased about Weiss’s revelation:

We liked you better when you blamed everything on the Jews.

Posted by: Realist | December 28, 2007 at 07:57 AM

For his cheerleading of those other blamers of the Jews, Weiss made a Top Ten Moonbats of 2007 list:

Weiss has become an “Israel Lobby” fundamentalist. In his eyes, to question the scholarship of Walt and Mearsheimer is to question truth. Every page of their book is gospel. Any negative review of their work is automatically dismissed as a “smear,” and every day that passes without an expose of the “Israel Lobby” on “60 Minutes” or the cover of Time magazine is further evidence of Jewish control over the media.

This mild critique doesn’t do Weiss justice. He has to be read to be believed. I’ll give you all the pleasure of finding out for yourselves, but I won’t provide another link.

Also known as the “Man Code.” Incredibly, C. W. Nevius, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, appears never to have heard of it.

[A] funny thing happened after the headlines [about Mayor Gavin Newsom's affair] hit and the buzz began: Many women said they were ready to forgive and forget.

Not men, though. No way. Many said they would never trust Newsom again as long as they lived. Some were livid; many were incredulous.

The difference? Apparently it is the Man Code, a set of rigid but unwritten boundaries over which no man may step. Break the Man Code, and you’re toast.

“It’s a huge betrayal,” sputtered Jason Mundstuk, 67, a business owner from Oakland who got upset just talking about it. “It’s big. It’s mythical.”

C’mon, you say, what is this, a TV beer commercial? Evidently not. These guys were dead serious. Make no mistake — having an affair with the wife of a trusted male colleague is an irrevocable Man Code violation.

My inner sociologist has many, many qestions for C.W., beginning with:

Are you serious? (Okay, that wasn’t my inner sociologist.)

How old are you?

Have you ever heard the expression “crime of passion“?

Why do you have a job?

Chirac:

PARIS, Jan. 31 — President Jacques Chirac said this week that if Iran had one or two nuclear weapons, it would not pose a big danger, and that if Iran were to launch a nuclear weapon against a country like Israel, it would lead to the immediate destruction of Tehran.

The remarks, made in an interview on Monday with The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune and Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine, were vastly different from stated French policy and what Mr. Chirac has often said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chirac summoned the same journalists back to Élysée Palace to retract many of his remarks.

I wrote the other day that the world has turned upside down. This is what I meant.

No amount of spin is going to convince the population of the West that their leaders have any idea of what to do to preserve our way of life.

Not that there’s anything right about this.

He’s now telling David Letterman that he was heckled onstage and he “lost his temper.” He “went into a rage.” He’s “busted up over this.” He’s “very sorry” and admits to “hate” and “rage” and is concerned about more “hate and rage and anger.”

Stage rage. That’s a new one.

I’m sick to my stomach.

Name the source of this quote:

Iran, whose president has vowed to wipe Israel off the map, complained to the United Nations on Wednesday that the Jewish state was repeatedly threatening to bomb it.

If you said Reuters…you’re a genius. So then you won’t be surprised that Iran claims Israel’s “threats” are a matter of “extreme gravity.”

David Geffen wants a new toy, the Los Angeles Times. Nikki Finke has the scoop on what he’d like to do with it once he buys it:

Here’s what he’s saying to friends: He’ll pour money into more hires. He plans to staff — more like stuff — the paper with name writers and journalism stars. (Of course, he’ll raid The New York Times, where Frank Rich and his wife, Alex Witchel, are his good friends and occasional overnight guests. So are Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi. So are a lot of literati.) He’ll demand quality. He’ll ratchet up the Web site (even though he hates how prohibitively expensive it is to do that). He’ll figure out a way to bring in Latinos as readers. Geffen loathes how boring, badly written, inconsequential and pedestrian the L.A. Times’ editorial and opinion section is. He thinks nobody reads it. He knows nobody talks about it. Most of all, he wants his newspaper to be talked about. He’ll put the newsroom ahead of the ludicrous profit margins demanded by Wall Street and the Tribune Co. That’s not to say he wants to lose money, just that he thinks it’s a good investment already (though not if its stock price keeps dropping).

If this is anywhere near true, the idea that Geffen is looking for Glamour and Buzz and Fun in the Future in a newspaper is…well, it’s beyond sad. At a time when every newspaper in America is finally facing the grimmest realities about the future of media, Geffen wants to resurrect the lost dream of the cohort. I know he means well. But he’s nuts.Just ask the Sulzberger family.

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. This will be a recurring feature after I set up a page.

Meanwhile, here is the Los Angeles Times “reporting” on an 18-year-old Palestinian female who detonated herself at an Israeli checkpoint yesterday (emphasis mine):

An 18-year-old Palestinian woman strode defiantly toward an Israeli army checkpoint and blew herself up Monday, slightly wounding a soldier in the latest act of resistance among women to the occupation of the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun.

Suicide terrorism is not “resistance.”

Suicide terrorists are not “freedom fighters.”

Why does the American media glorify murderers?

Why do editors of American newspapers permit inflammatory language to distort their reporting?

Could it be that the stewards of the press, like John Kerry, live in such a bubble that they don’t even realize how they betray their mind-set in their “reporting”?

I am sick to my stomach.

Yvonne Ridley, a pal of George Galloway’s, writes in today’s Washington Post: “How I Came to Love the Veil“:

I used to look at veiled women as quiet, oppressed creatures — until I was captured by the Taliban.

It’s all downhill from there, since she converts to Islam—after she discovers that only through Islam can she be liberated as a woman:

I was a Western feminist for many years, but I’ve discovered that Muslim feminists are more radical than their secular counterparts. We hate those ghastly beauty pageants, and tried to stop laughing in 2003 when judges of the Miss Earth competition hailed the emergence of a bikini-clad Miss Afghanistan, Vida Samadzai, as a giant leap for women’s liberation. They even gave Samadzai a special award for “representing the victory of women’s rights.”

Some young Muslim feminists consider the hijab and the nikab political symbols, too, a way of rejecting Western excesses such as binge drinking, casual sex and drug use. What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence? In Islam, superiority is achieved through piety — not beauty, wealth, power, position or sex.

I don’t know whether to laugh or weep. I urge my readers to pick up a copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Lipstick Jihad, or Persepolis for views about what it’s like behind the veil for those who have no choice but to wear it.

I used to watch Nightline every night back in the good old America Held Hostage days and beyond, when Ted Koppel appeared to be a sophisticated analyst of politics and policy and opened a window into the world inside the Beltway. Now I wonder what has happened to him.

In today’s New York Times ($$), he chides Ahmadinejad for “tweaking” the West (Mr. Koppel’s parents were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany) and then goes on to make the following suggestion for how we should deal with Iran:

If Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it. The elimination of American opposition on this issue would open the way to genuine normalization between our two nations. It might even convince the Iranians that their country can flourish without nuclear weapons.

But this should also be made clear to Tehran: If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear “accident,” Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.

What a clever notion! We should cede first strike capability to Iran, and if they hit us, well then we’ll just hit them back. Pure genius.

‘Cause it’s only a movie—not, you know, the gospel truth. But some people are taking the upcoming ABC TV extravaganza The Path to 9/11 waaaay too seriously:

the Clinton administration’s lethargic and chronically dilatory efforts to deal with bin Laden are an irrefutable part of the historical record.

The preceding leaves us with two possible explanations regarding the [scene that is causing all the controversy]. One is that the filmmakers have unearthed a previously unknown jewel that they can fully document; that Berger really did slam down the phone on a field agent looking for guidance. If that’s the case, then this entire conversation is irrelevant and you should cease reading this essay.

The other explanation is that, being a docudrama, the filmmakers included a fabricated scene (which was a composite of many real factors) to dramatize the ineptitude and fecklessness that so characterized the Clinton administration. One can (if one so chooses) give the filmmakers artistic license to do such a thing. But if that is what they have done, conservative analysts who back this movie as a historical document will mortgage their credibility doing so.

YOU MIGHT NOTE THAT the defense of the scene offers a rationale that Dan Rather would probably be comfortable with – fake but accurate. I’m uncomfortable embracing such a rationale, and I suspect most other bloggers who have rushed to tout the film will feel the same way once they think it through.

It’s all fake, fer chrissake. Who’s claiming it’s accurate, and what meds are they on? Are conservative bloggers (or liberal bloggers, for that matter) really investing their “credibility” when they voice an opinion about a movie about 9/11?

Television offers dramas designed to grab and hold our attention for as long as possible. The dramatizations on television take liberties with the “truth” (which in real life takes a long time to unfold, if it ever does, and is often confusing and nonlinear) in order to tell a story. A docudrama is an entertainment based (loosely) on true events and factual tidbits. It is infotainment. Infotainment about 9/11 is no more truthful or sacred or important than any other television programming. Nor is it more likely to stick in the mind of the average viewer (or voter) than any other piece of entertainment.

My previous thoughts on this apparently important cultural moment are here, here, and here. I do seem to have underestimated the amount of attention this “controversy” would receive prior to the airing of the miniseries (this coming Sunday and Monday evenings).

Today, for example, the New York Times weighed in.

Days before its scheduled debut, the first major television miniseries about the Sept. 11 attacks was being criticized on Tuesday as biased and inaccurate by bloggers, terrorism experts and a member of the Sept. 11 commission, whose report makes up much of the film’s source material. …

In particular, some critics—including Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar—questioned a scene that depicts several American military officers on the ground in Afghanistan.

It is quite amusing to see serious people taking this so seriously—as if the court of public opinion and the politics of the day are all that matters, and as if their legacy were being determined by dramatists. And it’s always the serious people who talk about the “dumbing down” of America.

On the other hand, after I followed the Power Within link that Jeff Jarvis pointed to today, I decided that I have to revise my personal definition of “serious person.” Sadly, Bill Clinton has jumped the shark.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L) shakes hands with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan during their meeting in Tehran. Annan has won a pledge from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to support a UN resolution bringing peace to Lebanon but was warned Iran would not suspend sensitive nuclear work before negotiations.(AFP/Atta Kenare)

Step one: evacuate your bowels.

At least that’s my takeaway from this specimen of the newest new journalism, in which no detail of the reporter’s experience goes unmentioned:

‘Keith is coming,’ someone said. I realised I simply had to go to the toilet. Before every performance, I ritually evacuate. It makes me feel cleansed, light, literally unblocked; the thought, the very idea, of meeting him with full bowels seemed absurd and someone took me, like a toddler, to the lavvy.

It’s not just the defecation; I like to have a moment alone to gather my thoughts, to focus. It’s a hangover from my time as a junkie, when every challenging encounter was preceded by a trip to a cubicle to heighten, or numb, my unreliable senses. Once solitary I began the rigmarole of unbuckling my numerous belts and peeling off my preposterously tight jeans, then at the least convenient junction, came the cry, ‘Russell, Keith’s waiting for you!’ Oh God.

I hastily completed, cleansed, and buckled my belts. I think there were four and one has to be twice wrapped around your waist. It was like applying lights to a Christmas tree under the glare of an atheist with a grudge.

Isn’t the Age of the Transgressive over yet?

Gunter Grass—Germany’s foremost novelist, widely credited for restoring grace to the German language after the ravages visited upon it by the Nazi propaganda machine—admits to having served in the Waffen SS, in which he enlisted:

GERMANY has been rocked by the revelation that Gunter Grass, its greatest living author and a doyen of the left, was a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS.

The Nobel laureate, who has been the country’s moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published yesterday that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.

The 78-year-old said he was motivated by feelings of guilt to reveal the details of his “shameful” past in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, due to be published next month.

“It was weighing on my mind. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. I forced myself to do it,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: “It had to come out finally. It will stain me forever.”

That is the phrase used in the totalitarian fantasy written by one “Hanyost,” a poster at Daily Kos, to describe the sovereign nation of Israel.

Why the US can impose a one-state solution on Israel-Palestine

by Hanyost

Wed Aug 09, 2006 at 05:45:19 AM PDT

In my diary of yesterday, I proposed that our party support the creation of a single secular democracy in the area now controlled by Israel, and I was impressed by the quality of responses. Based on this tiny sample of 100 or so Democrats, I’m thinking that maybe the average Democratic voter might be open to taking a more impartial role in the Middle East - and thus making our country less of an object of hatred by Muslims everywhere.

The most common objections to such a proposal is that the two sides hate each other too much to stop the killing and that outside forces, like the USA, cannot impose a solution.

However, I think that the US, as the prime, and virtually the only, supplier for the Israeli Defense Force for the past many decades has the capacity to force a settlement simply by cutting off that support.
…What I am proposing for discussion is that our party break with this decades-old policy and formally announce that we will no longer provide any military aid to Israel so long as that government refuses to work toward the one-state solution which I proposed in a previous blog. Even a return to the pre-1967 borders would not be sufficient, since that still allows Israel to keep the indigenous peoples of the area in subjection.

I should be used to it by now, but it’s still mind-boggling that this poster, with an extremist agenda—one that might find favor with Hezbollah or Hamas—finds a home (and feels at home) among super-partisan Democrats, who today celebrated the defeat of Joe Lieberman, while the Big Pharaoh, an Egyptian blogger I read every day, went out of his way to mention that Joe Lieberman is one of his favorite senators.

My favorite comedian—his holiness the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, a frequent guest on CNN, who I made fun of here

because of his strong resemblance to Rowan Atkinson

—has a blog.

The ambassador is quite the sensitive soul. And he knows his art. He compares Qana to…Guernica.

So far, this is topped only by a remark made by my uncle, who referred to the media’s selling of Qana as “the Holocaust without a holocaust.” 

I was hoping this was a joke, but I don’t think it is. The geriatric wing of CBS, in the person of Mike Wallace, has scored an “interview” with the Provocateur-in-Chief of Iran:

Wallace Interviews Ahmadinejad

Technically retired 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace scored an exclusive interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran yesterday. In the Q&A, “the Iranian leader comments on President Bush’s foreign policy, lack of relations between Iran and the U.S., Hezbollah, Lebanon and Iraq.” Excerpts will air on Thursday’s CBS Evening News. 60 Minutes is coming out of summer repeats to run Wallace’s entire report this Sunday…