More credible than Faux News

One of the things that is always amusing, when talking to wingnuts, is that they're always referring to things they saw on Faux News or read on World Nut Daily. It is to laugh. "Give me a URL to somewhere credible", I tell them. And they say, "So who's more credible than Fox News?"

Uhm. Dude. Talk about low-hanging fruit. Even pro wrestling and the Weekly World News have more credibility than Fox News. Not that it really matters, for reasons explained in this very credible and well documented news story.

I, for one, eagerly await being eaten by our gorgeous tall blond alien overlords.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Waitin' fer Republicans to refudiate her

At CPAC, Our Lady of the Skanky Little Black Cocktail Dress (sometimes referred to as "Man Coulter") says that the U.S. should start throwing journalists in jail. Just like in those havens of freedom North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia, I suppose.

Note that CPAC didn't boo OLOTSLBCD, they *cheered* her. If the Republicans want to stop being compared to Nazis, they need to quit proposing Nazi policies, yo. Just sayin'.

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Six years ago today...

... the Chimperer had just been elected to his second term of office, after John Kerry ran the worst Presidential campaign since Michael Dukakis. And I started up this blog with a bang, writing a well-footnoted post about a journalist destroyed by the CIA in 1996 for exposing government wrong-doing.

And today, six years later, here I am again, writing about a publisher -- Julian Assange of Wikileaks -- that once again made the mistake of telling the truth, and once again the government is trying to destroy him -- this time with rape charges that don't hold water -- and once again pointing out that we have free speech only when we speak in government-approved ways here in America. I can write this blog because my speech is approved speech -- it is speech that allows me to vent, but which does not allow me to change anything about how America is run or inconvenience those in power in any way. Julian Assagne's crime is that of inconveniencing those in power by showing the world diplomatic cables proving that they are moral-less, venal, and vicious.

Of course, there is one big difference between 1996 and 2010: the Internet has grown up. Today when newspapers of record attempt to destroy someone, the cyber-libertarian left, cool geek toys/geek culture bloggers, and people like Michael Moore can react in real-time rather than having to wait weeks or months for conventional publication. If this was still 1996, Assange would have been deported to Sweden by now, then would have been deported on an unmarked aircraft to a black prison run by the CIA somewhere in Eastern Europe, and that would be the end of it all. Instead, he's out on bail, and stands a good chance of at worst serving a few weeks in jail if he does end up deported to Sweden, rather than disappeared, because there's too many people watching.

Will that be enough? We'll see. I'll just point out that the oligarchy has a pretty good record when it comes to destroying journalists that they don't want publishing the truth. And lest you say "Watergate!" and "Pentagon papers!", those were factions within the oligarchy, i.e., a significant percentage of the oligarchy wanted those published. But Assange's reveal of the sheer droll venality of our ruling class is something that none of them want published -- thus why they're trying their best to play whack-a-mole with Wikileaks (which, BTW, is back up at its original wikileaks.org site after Michael Moore paid for new DNS hosting, though it immediately redirects to a Russian Wikileaks mirror at the moment).

And as it was six years ago, so it is today. The only thing to remember about history is that it repeats itself... but only as long as we let it. I just find it... interesting... that I posted about a journalist driven to suicide six years ago, and now the U.S. is trying to do the exact same thing to another journalist. Freedom! U S A! U S A! Fuck yeah!

-- Badtux the Free Speech Penguin

WikiYawn

Been watching the Wikileaks freakout by the tighty righties and the U.S. government with amusement. Especially amusing is the fact that this latest document dump has even led a few journalists to, well, commit acts of actual journalism (gasp!). For example, this evening on NPR News, NPR's correspondent in Baghdad asked around quietly about the Iranian influence upon the current Iraqi government and... err... found that this part of the document dump was, well, true (duh!). Which even Poppy Bush coulda told you, that's why he didn't depose Saddam in the first place back in '93, 'cause it'd turn the place into Iran West, but WTF, you gotta lead today's "journalists" to stories by the nose and stick it into the story nostril-deep before they can see what's been in front of their face all along...

Meanwhile, watching the tighty righties and Obama administration fulminate about how they want to have Wikileaks declared a terrorist group (yeah, their document dumps are a terror alright, but only a terror to liars who don't want the truth to come out), about how Julian Assange should be charged with the crime of espionage (he's not in the United States, he's not a U.S. citizen, he's not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, about the only way you could do that would be to invade Sweden and kidnap him like we did Noriega, and that's unlikely), etc., just goes to show that the term "freedom of the press" is a foreign term to both the tighty righties and to the Obama administration, which continues its authoritarian ways. The person who gave Wikileaks the documents could be charged with espionage, but committing an act of journalism by, well, actually publishing them, that's called "journalism" a.k.a. "the press" and in case you haven't figured it out, you can't legally go after folks for publishing government documents here in the United States because said documents are public domain.

Next up, Assange is going to publish some documents from one of the big banks (rumor says BofA) showing that they knew they were issuing fraudulent mortgages, and engaged in many other sketchy activities, but didn't care. Unfortunately, this *will* open up Wikileaks to legal challenges that the current document dumps didn't address. Those documents are copyrighted by BofA, and publishing them outright is a violation of numerous copyright laws. Assange is probably going to argue that there is a public interest exception for documents of this nature, but that exception allows you to publish only the minimum amount needed in order to illustrate your commentary, it doesn't allow you to just verbatim publish copyright documents without any surrounding commentary for each excerpt published. Maybe Assange *should* be accepting that refuge in Ecuador (whose leftist President, an acolyte of Hugo Chavez, has offered said refuge)... on the other hand, Ecuador's tiny military would be hopeless if the U.S. decided to do a Noriega on him. Decisions, decisions...

-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin

We must not censor discussions

Okay, so Joe Teabagger suggested that the problem with America was too many deadbeat black people, and the solution is to create work farms where all black people are interned. We must seriously discuss the pros and cons of this policy proposal, despite the fact that it's, well, unconstitutional, immoral, and disgusting, because to do otherwise is censorship, and we as responsible journalists should never engage in censorship, even if it's censorship of someone who is clearly insane and babbling nonsense. Because our responsibility as responsible journalists is to validate utterly insane positions by discussing them, not say "That's fucking insane" and ignore such whackjobs.

-- Badtux the Journalist Penguin

Fox News is not an aberration

Click on that image to the left and take a good long look at it. That's Paul Revere's woodcutting of the "Boston Massacre". Note the deliberation on the part of the British troops. Note the foppish way they hold their feet and the cruel smirk on their faces and how they are all lined up and deliberately firing upon an unarmed crowd.

This woodcut is, of course, long on propaganda and short on fact. The first person to die, Crispus Attucks, was *black*, not white as depicted here. The mob was engaged in attacking the Customs House at the time in protest of taxes and had assaulted the troops, the crowd wasn't standing peaceably around across the street and troops just decided to open fire on them. And there was no organized volley fired by British troops, but, rather, a ragged fire from those behind the troops being assaulted through the gaps to try to drive off the mob that threatened to overrun them. The mob itself was well armed with clubs and stones, if not firearms, and was decidedly a physical threat to the British troops -- yet in the woodcutting you see not a single stone nor club held by the crowd. The end result was that a jury of Bostonians found the soldiers "Not Guilty" of murder when they were brought to trial, defended by lawyer John Adams who later became famous as our second President.

This is what our founding fathers meant by "freedom of the press" -- the freedom to lie. Fox News is not an aberration. Fox News is exactly what our founding fathers intended -- a propaganda mouthpiece in the hands of the wealthy elite used to control and mold the public discourse. The only thing aberrant about Fox News is that they make it obvious, whereas most of our news media in recent times has tried at least to appear "fair and balanced" (Fox's self-mocking slogan for themselves).

One of the continual items of discussion on the left (the real left, i.e., the European left, not the moderate centrists labeled "the left" here in the USA) is the question of why socialism took hold in Europe, but there was never a viable socialist party with a chance of winning the Presidency here in America and instead, liberalism became the predominant philosophy of the political "left" in America. This peculiar definition of "freedom of the press" in America -- the freedom to lie for propaganda purposes -- is, I suggest, a large part of it. In Europe, the press can be sued successfully for libel or even shut down if they tell lies about events or public figures. Yes, there is a long tradition of "tabloid press" in Britain (for example), but there must be at least a certain amount of respect for the truth, and as Stephen Colbert is fond of satirically saying, "the truth has a liberal bias" (thus why righties use "truthiness" as their way of judging what to believe or not, "truthiness" being what their own personal prejudices *wish* was the truth). Here in the USA, our press has by and large been a propaganda arm of our wealthy elites since day one -- indeed, since *before* day one -- and our peculiar definition of "freedom of the press", which is defined as "freedom to lie blatantly", protects that. The result is that we've never had the free and open political discourse here in the USA that they have had in Europe because anything not in the best interests of our wealthy elites simply never gets published, or gets lied about in the press to such extent as to repulse people. So it goes, in the United States of Illusion, where we think we're free -- because that's what our wealthy elites tell us.

-- Badtux the Propaganda Penguin

So why can't we have a better press corps?

That's a question often asked by folks like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong, who decry the ridiculous state of economic reporting in our newspapers. So why is the output of our newspaper industry, when talking about economic policy, so often one-sided propaganda? Well, that's simple: That's what they get paid to produce by the people who pay their bills. It's called the Golden Rule: I.e., he who has the gold, rules.

We cannot have a better press corps because they are bought and paid for by corporate America. The fundamental problem is that advertising dollars, not subscription dollars, pay the freight at newspapers. Expecting newspapers to report accurately upon news affecting major advertisers is like expecting tobacco companies to accurately report the risks of smoking. It simply is not in their best interests to do so, and thus they do not, regardless of any theoretical "firewalls" between the editorial and advertising departments.

Given the realities of news distribution it seems unlikely that this will change anytime soon. Newspapers are a natural monopoly. There are only a certain number of places that you can place newspaper bins in a city, and whoever gets there first gets first-mover advantage and can crowd out possible competitors. For subscriptions, the newspaper with higher circulation will have lower per-subscriber costs because it costs a certain amount per mile to run newspaper routes across a city regardless of how many subscribers you have per mile, so the newspaper with more subscribers per mile will have a lower per-subscriber cost and thus a competitive advantage. And finally, advertisers will advertise in the paper that reaches the most people, meaning that the #2 paper in a given market will be starved of advertising funds. The end result is what you would expect -- single-newspaper cities are now the rule, not the exception, and anybody desiring to start up a new newspaper to compete with the established monopoly faces some daunting realities -- *IF* we're talking about a subscriber-supported newspaper delivered in print.

Is the future of real journalism (as vs. corporate boot-licking) on the web? If so, what will it look like? Current attempts at online journalism have been rather laughable, nowhere near as professional as even the most unprofessional hick newspaper. But as the print industry continues to spin down into irrelevancy, that may change...

-- Badtux the Press Penguin

Grumpy about the newspaper industry

Various people say, "the newspaper industry is dying because it's giving away its content for free online!" But the problem with that notion is that they have no (zero) clue about the business model for every newspaper in existence for the past 200+ years. Newspapers have pretty much *always* given their content away for free. That subscription you pay for? It barely pays for the cost of the newsprint and the paper dude to plop it at your doorstep. At best. All the infrastructure (printing presses and such)? Paid for by advertising. All the reporters? Paid for by advertising. All the bought content from AP, Reuters, etc.? Paid for by advertising.

The basic problem isn't that newspapers are giving content away for free, because that's been their business model since, like, forever -- the news-stand price has never covered content. Rather, the basic problem is that newspapers screwed the pooch on Internet advertising. If newspapers had set up their classifieds sections online early on, Craigslist would have never existed and sucked the guts right out of their dead trees classifieds. If newspapers had set up online jobs advertising systems early on with the ability to submit resumes through the newspaper's computer systems, Monster.com and its ilk would have never existed. And so on and so forth. There's a *ton* of ways that newspapers could make money online to replace the off-line advertising income, and they just freakin' screwed the poch on *all* of them, instead using their outrageous profit margins to buy up other media outlets all over the country, run up oodles of debt, and now... now that debt is killing them.

So the whole "giving content away" thing isn't their problem. It is the fact that, given a choice between investing in new technology (Internet advertising) and buying the Boston Globe, the New York Times decided to, err... buy the Boston Globe. Morons! They're like buggy manufacturers that invested in a new buggy assembly line to compete with Henry Ford's Model T, instead of themselves going into the automobile industry. It's not a case of them "giving away content". It's a case of them failing to see that the news industry is undergoing the same sort of paradigm shift that the transportation underwent in the first decades of the 20th century. They're buggy-makers in a time of automobiles, and unless and until they retool to meet the current conditions, they're going to continue losing market share and readership every year until they finally collapse and go away.

- Badtux the Business Penguin

Why journalism is dead

It takes a 4th grader to ask Condi a probing question about torture. None of the other "reporters" who have interviewed her since her original "it's not torture if the President says it's okay" statement asked her whether she agreed with torture or not, because that would have been "adversarial" -- why, they might have even been disinvited from her dinner parties in the future! It took a fourth grader.

I've earlier stated that the reason mainstream newspapers are dying is because of a self-inflicted wound -- they're simply not selling a product that the majority of people want. There are fewer newspapers sold today than when JFK was elected President of the United States in 1960, and that's not a coincidence, that is a steady drip-drip-drip of people deciding newspapers simply do not provide them with what they're looking for (which, for the most part, is truth -- not "he said she said" transcription of "he said the sky is blue, she said the sky is purple", which fails once issues become too complex to be immediately obvious). This is yet another example of Journalistic Fail. I think in the future we should just eliminate the whole White House press corpse and replace them with 4th graders. I suspect the end result will have more value. Which says a lot about the value of today's press corpse (sorry, Helen, but you're not typical today).

-- Badtux the News Penguin

Shutting the barn door after the horse got out

AP to Internet: Go away, we don't want you to link to our content.

Internet to AP: Uhm, you're 15 years too late, dude!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The Incredible Collapsing Newspaper Industry

The City of San Francisco is about to be without a daily paper for the first time since 1856 due to the impending demise of the San Francisco Chronicle. In Los Angeles, the Daily News has fired all but a skeleton staff and the L.A. Times is up for sale and may be shut down if no buyer is found. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News published its last edition last week and the Denver Post's last payroll checks bounced, and if MediaNews, the owner of the Denver Post, goes down, then not only will Denver not have a daily paper, but San Jose and Oakland will join San Francisco on the no-daily-paper list.

So what's going on? Well, two things: First, the newspapers missed the Internet boat. They should have leveraged their Internet sites and news stories to sell advertising -- i.e., if you buy an advertisement in the print edition not only does it appear in the print edition, but it appears online too. This would have preserved their advertising income once their print circulation started falling, because as people move to getting their news online rather than on dead trees, the advertising income would have remained steady because the same number of eyes would have seen the ads. Craigslist and eBay would have never appeared if newspapers had leveraged their own classifieds sections and put them online complete with their own shopping cart and online payment processing mechanisms.

So missing the Internet boat is a big deal. I remember when the local rag's classifieds section was 20 pages on Sunday. Now it's 6 pages, and a lot of that is filler articles to fill in the blank spots. The rest of the ads are on Craigslist or eBay. But that's not the biggest reason. The biggest reason is pure free market economics: They simply are not providing a product that people want to buy.

I always laugh at the "one sided reporting" slur always being thrown at newspapers, because other than on the editorial page, they don't do a lot of what non-journalists think of as "reporting" (i.e., seeking of truth), they mostly transcribe what they're told by people in power or by powerful interest groups and do so accurately and without taking any sides in the matter. For example, in the runup to the Iraq War, New York Times reporter Judith Miller accurately transcribed what she was told by Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (which turned out to be an utter fabrication by Chalabi, as we have now found out, Chalabi had lived in London for thirty years and hadn't the slightest clue of anything happening in Iraq other than what he was told to pass on by his Iranian handlers). Lefties deride her reporting as "one-sided reporting", but she accurately transcribed what she was told. According to every newspaper editor I've ever talked to, it's not a newspaper's job to determine whether what their reporters are being told is true or not, that would be "analysis" not "reporting" and thus not a newspaper's job.

I once got into an argument with a newspaper editor about that. The problem is he said she said journalism. If Joe Schmoe from the Flat Earth Society gets up and announces that the Earth is flat, and Neil Armstrong from Apollo 11 gets up and says err no, he's orbited the Earth and taken photos of it and it's round as a billiard ball, the newspaper will blithely announce that person A said that the Earth was flat and person B said that the Earth was round. So is the Earth flat, or is it round? Well, newspaper editors nationwide will tell you that the answer to that question is "analysis", not "news", thus is not the job of a newspaper. The newspaper's job, the editors will tell you, is to accurately report what person A and person B said, not to figure out which of the two is telling the truth.

So if people can't find out the truth from newspapers, they turn to other sources to try to find out what's true or not. They listen to Art Bell or read Internet conspiracy sites or watch screaming commentators on one of those horrible television shows where people yell at each other and never manage to complete a sentence without someone screaming louder and drowning them out, they listen to talk radio or visit blogs like this, and where are newspapers in all of this? Nowhere. Because newspapers decided that truth -- the product that people are looking for -- is not a product that they're interested in selling, even though newspapers are uniquely qualified to sell that product because they are so effective at gathering accurate information. But they're not interested. What they're interested in selling is transcription -- the accurate transcription of the words of persons A and B regarding whether the world is flat or round -- with no indication as to which of A or B is telling the truth. And so it goes. People want to know whether the world is flat or round, newspapers don't tell them that, so they go elsewhere to find that out and never come back. The industry was dying before the current economic problems, all it's doing is making a dying industry die faster. Which is sad, but (shrug). What can you do, when a whole industry commits collective suicide by deciding that its job is to *not* provide the product that people want?

-- Badtux the News Penguin

Banana republic lynchings

One of the things that continually irritates me is the fact that we do so many lynchings here in the United States -- i.e., where we crucify someone without a trial via prosecutors using the press as their hangmen. Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell, and Dr. Steven Jay Hatfill are three prominent examples of people who had their lives ruined via these sorts of lynchings.

But even more poisonous is when these lynchings are used against people who have current active criminal charges against them. The usual way it works is that the prosecution attempts to poison the jury pool by releasing prejudicial information to their cronies in the press that person XYZ did evil deed ABC. The person they're lynching never has the opportunity to respond in the press because of the needs of the upcoming criminal trial -- the defense needs to keep their defense strategy under close wraps so that they can spring surprises on the prosecution in the actual criminal trial, so the accused has to either try his case in the press and lose his case in court, or lose his case in the press and maybe -- but with reduced certainty -- win his case at court.

The inevitable result is that there is no fair trial. The jury pool has been poisoned by the prosecution's leaks to the press, no matter how much they insist they haven't been (all that jury questioning accomplishes here is to find out who's more convincing liars), and is predisposed to find the accused guilty unless proven innocent, making a mockery of the "innocent until proven guilty" notion. Even in the case where it appears there is no question of guilt, the notion that the accused can get a fair trial after his name has been drug through mud by the press is ridiculous. It's nothing but a show trial, Soviet-style, and a travesty of justice.

It doesn't have to be this way. In Canada, for example, their constitution guarantees a fair trial to all accused, thus prohibits the press from talking about cases that have not yet been tried in the courts. But then, Canada is a democracy and has a system of justice, rather than an oligarchy with a system of show trials to meet the pro-forma requirements of the Constitution. Here, the right of the oligarchs to lynch a man in the press overrides the right of the accused to a fair trial. And that's how we like it.

-- Badtux the Justice Penguin

Silly Chinese think they're equal to Americans

When Chinese passengers land at LAX (Los Angeles International), their luggage is searched and they endure a three-hour wait to get through Customs.

When American journalists land in Beijing, their luggage is searched and they endure a three-hour wait to get through Customs. Oh the horror!.

Silly untermenschen. Why, next thing you know they'll produce some document whose second paragraph starts with "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal ...", which clearly would be a Communist document and anti-American. Sheesh!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Shorter Dana Milbank

Obama is an uppity nigger.

Sigh.

-- Badtux the Bigotry-spottin' Penguin

The stupidest prune farmer on the planet

I'm talking about V.D. Hanson, the mad prune farmer of Modesto, and his latest editorial saying we can drill and mine our way out of the current oil crisis.

Uhm, no. We already drilled everywhere on the continental U.S. that's drillable. There's still offshore off the West Coast and East Coast but that's less than 5% of the area of the United States and at most we'll get 5% of the oil out of'em that we got out of the rest of the United States. Sorry, that's just the facts. There's more oil out there, but it's in places that are currently pretty inhospitable politically speaking, or just damned remote (e.g. the Amazon basin, the Congo River basin).

But V.D. Hanson whines that "salt of the earth" types in the "heartland" are hurtin' because of the fuel prices. Oh waaah! I have no sympathy. *NONE*. Jimmy Carter had the solution for that problem back in 1976 -- fund alternative energy so that when the oil ran out, we'd already have a solution ready to go, rather than leaving it to some future generation, plus fund real mass transit that could eliminate the need for most folks living in cities and large towns to have a car. Guess what. These "salt of the earth" fucking dumbasses voted for Ronald fucking REAGAN because he promised to end "alternative energy" and cut their taxes. So now they're gathering what they fucking reaped, and they're going to whine about it? Oh waaahhh! Stupid motherfuckers, nobody wants to take responsibility for their own actions anymore. The stupid motherfuckers voted against alternative energy for the past forty years, and now they wanna go wah, wah, wah because their own stupidity resulted in high oil prices? Fuck'em.

Yeah, not bloody well diplomatic. But I just get fucking sick of all these goddamned crybabies out here whining that they don't like the consequences of their own actions. These are the stupid motherfuckers who voted for Ronald Reagan and ended alternative energy research in the United States for a generation. And they don't like what they voted for? Well fuck them. Fuck them good and hard. Well, OPEC is doing that for us, but so it goes.

-- Badtux the Unsympathetic Penguin

Dastardly Hezballah wants... democracy?!

The Muslim majority in Lebanon has a problem. They are *way* under-represented in Lebanon's government, under an ethnic division scheme that was put in place to end the Lebanese Civil War.

Hezballah has been politely asking that the plate of government be reshuffled slightly -- not to benefit Hezballah, but to benefit the other parties in Lebanon that represent Islamic populations. Well, not so politely. They've been protesting in the streets for over a year. Quite annoyingly so, actually, but then that's the whole point of protests. But until May 7, that's *all* they did -- protest in the streets. This is despite the fact that Hezballah is the most powerful military force within Lebanon -- I mean, c'mon. They fought Israel to a draw. You think the antiquated 1950's era armored cars and tanks and 1940's artillery of the Lebanese Army would bother them any? But the fact of the matter is that Hezballah is not interested in taking over Lebanon by force. They could do it in a heartbeat. But that would defeat their long-term goal -- which is to show that a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic nation can work in the Middle East. Their long-term goal is to destroy the rationale for existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, said rationale being that a stable multi-ethnic multi-faith state is not possible in the Middle East and thus imposing Jewish law onto non-Jews is the only way to protect the Jewish population of Israel.

Then on May 7, the coalition of Fouad Siniora that currently controls the government made its fatal mistake. They tried to attack Hezballah using force in order to destroy Hezballah's phone system so that they could replace it with a phone system that they could tap, and to remove the Sunni official who was allowing Hezballah to fly weapons into the Beirut airport. Hezballah resisted this force, and basically swept the Siniora coalition's military forces off the table. The Lebanese Army basically said "We are not going to take sides in a new civil war" and stayed off to the side, not that it would have changed things if they had taken sides -- everybody in the area knows that the Lebanese Army is hard-pressed to deal with smugglers, much less wage actual warfare against a military that could fight Israel to a standstill. Everybody gulped, and realized that if it went on this way, there would be civil war, and came to their senses.

So now the country, which has had no President since November because the various parties could not muster a majority for a new President, now has one -- the head of the Lebanese Army, the man wise enough to not start a new civil war, Michel Suleiman, a man who everybody now seems to trust to be impartial and honest. And while Hezballah did not get everything they wanted -- in particular, they did not get any more representation in the legislature for the other folks they were helping -- they did get an agreement that their coalition can veto any major actions such as attempts to seize Hezballah's phone system or radio station or dismiss civil service appointees who peeve the government by allowing Hezballah's arms shipments. Furthermore, because Hezballah used only enough force to resist government attacks upon its facilities but did not engage in all-out war against the government (i.e. they used enough force to defend themselves but no more), Hezballah came off looking no worse in the eyes of the average Lebanese citizen. So while it's not a grand victory for Hezballah, it is one more step toward their goal.

Of course, you wouldn't know any of this by reading the U.S. propaganda press. You'd need to read the foreign press to know that there's more going on than "Hezballah bad! Siniora good!". Lebanese power politics is a chess game with dozens of players each jockeying for position and advantage, far too complicated to express as black and white. Coalitions change with the wind, allegiances shift, I've been following Lebanese politics since the early 1980's and still don't pretend to have that good an idea of who's on whose side today and why and what that means. This is the area of the world that originated Western civilization. They've been playing these games for 5,000 years. Us barbarians with our barely-240-year-old nation can barely imagine how complicated things can get with 5,000 years of trying.

As for the U.S. propaganda press, even if they wished to report honestly, the Western press doesn't have a clue at all, since they fired all their Lebanon specialists as soon as the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990. You can read good summaries from the Lebanese press, but even there you must read between the lines -- Lebanese reporters are not going to put themselves on anybody's hit-list by reporting things that major players don't want reported, and the editors of these papers are themselves participants in the game of politics that is Lebanon.

So anyhow: my point is that things in Lebanon are in their usual state (FUBAR), but are now in a slightly less level of FUBAR thanks to everybody backing away from the brink. Hezballah "won", but of course in Lebanese politics what they won was what they had to begin with (a veto power over government actions), they merely made it official rather than having to bring out guns to prove it. The situation in Lebanon isn't much different today than it was yesterday, all that's different is that everybody has stepped back and acknowledged reality. There is still a lot of hard work before the goal of the majority of the Lebanese people is reached -- a peaceful, prosperous democratic multi-cultural state capable of serving as an example to the world. Hezballah isn't going to get a free pass from the Lebanese people, and neither is the Siniora coalition. Everybody's going to have to work hard at the compromises needed to keep Lebanon from flying apart again into another civil war. But that's a reality that everybody has acknowledged now. If only our own leaders could similarly acknowledge reality...

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin

Yee-haw!

Seems that our boy Johnny Mac still hasn't dumped Richard M. Quinn. Who is Richard M. Quinn? Well, he's the part-owner and former editor of a magazine called "Southern Partisan", which said things like:

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela are terrorists -- about MLK, "King Day should have been rejected because its purpose is vitriolic and profane. The black leaders who lobbied so furiously for King Day confirmed another unpleasant reality. By celebrating King as the incarnation of all they admire, they have chosen to glorify the histrionic rather than the heroic." He has stated that slavery wasn't evil, slavery was not as bad as it has been portrayed and that slaves were better off in slavery than out of it. Slave owners were great people who were good for the black family because "they (slave owners) encouraged strong slave families to further the slaves' peace and happiness in order to promote efficient work." He encouraged the election of former KKK leader David Duke, saying "What better way to reject politics as usual than to elect a maverick like David Duke? What better way to tweak the nose of the establishment?"

This is the man who John McCain has put in charge of his South Carolina organization -- not once, but twice. This is who John McCain is: a man who cozies up to racists.

And from the mainstream press we hear... [crickets].

-- Badtux the Pointy Hood Sniffin' Penguin

The disconnect

Fewer people read newspapers today than when John F. Kennedy was President. Why does newspaper circulation continue to decline? Well, free market economics has an answer to that: Newspapers no longer provide a product that citizens want.

What citizens want is the truth. They want to know what's true and what's not true. They want to know who is lying and who is telling the truth. Newspapers are failing utterly at this job. Indeed, they view it as not their job at all. I once got into an argument with a newspaper editor about that -- "you know that Joe Politician is lying out his ass, why do you print his lies?" The newspaper editor responded, "it's not my job to tell whether he's lying or not, it's my job to accurately report what he said."

Yep, you got it. Newspaper editors view their job as transcriptionists to power -- not truth. You see, if they didn't report Joe Politician's lies, someone else would, and we can't have that, can we? And if they reported that in fact Joe Politician was lying, that e.g. Darth Cheney talking up al Qaeda/Saddam connections was utterly nonsense according to all reputable experts, that would be "analysis" and not "news" and thus not their business. But the problem is, truth is what the citizenry seek. And if they don't get it from their newspapers, they will get it from elsewhere -- maybe an elsewhere that doesn't have the resources of newspapers, or that has an agenda other than the truth.

Meanwhile, all the newspapers are talking about how Admiral Fallon "resigned". Yeah sure, he resigned. He resigned in much the same way that someone standing on the edge of a cliff with a gun held to his back "voluntarily jumped". This is a hatchet job to clear the way for an attack on Iran, an attack that Admiral Fallon opposed mightily. So why don't the newspapers mention this? Well, that'd be "analysis". Not "news". They view their job as accurately transcribing the words of people of power, all of whom are saying that Admiral Fallon voluntarily resigned, rather than viewing their job as being "truth". But truth is what people seek. Is it any wonder that, with newspapers failing to provide what people want, people do what people always do in a free market economy -- go look elsewhere for what they want?

-- Badtux the Free Market Penguin

CIA says Taliban, al Qaeda killed Bhutto

Really. Nevermind that the area where Bhutto was killed has no al Qaeda or Taliban presence and that it's unlikely that al Qaeda or Taliban could operate freely there...

ICanHasCheezeburger.com

Okay. Pull the other one, okay?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

And Orwell smiled

The man to the left is showing no emotion, CNN reports.

Ignore the evidence of your eyes, which show him looking unhappy and concerned. The truth is what our brave Party commissars in the mainstream media tell us, not what we see with our own two eyes.

-- Badtux the Orwellian Penguin