That police-shooting-dog story inspired a few messages making this point:
I am a dog lover. Even if I wasn’t I would be shocked and appalled by this incident.
But what I want to point out is the really scary part of this story:
Mrs. Grundy sees this station wagon drive past, and sees the money flying out of the wallet. She is not a trained observer. She is just a nosy busybody. Yet on her say so, these people are on their knees, handcuffed, with many guns pointed at them, and no idea of why it is happenning. They then are forced to watch their pet get murdered. ALL BECAUSE MRS. GRUNDY SAID SO!!! The police even checked to see if there had been a robbery that they could have been a part of, and there wasn’t. And they were still held at gunpoint!
This is the America of John Ashcroft’s vision. How many more lives will be lost or ruined because of it?
…about North Korea’s plutonium, on Kevin Batcho’s blog:
I came across an interesting fact while researching the history of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The North Koreans manufactured all of their Plutonium between 1987 and 1991, this being, of course, during the Reagan/Bush and Bush I administrations. According to the Federation of American Scientists:
close examination by the IAEA of the radioactive isotope content in the nuclear waste revealed that North Korea had extracted about 24 kilograms of Plutonium. North Korea was supposed to have produced 0.9 gram of Plutonium per megawatt every day over a 4-year period from 1987 to 1991. The 0.9 gram per day multiplied by 365 days by 4 years and by 30 megawatts equals to 39 kilograms. When the yearly operation ratio is presumed to be 60 percent, the actual amount was estimated at 60% of 39 kilograms, or some 23.4 kilograms. Since 20-kiloton standard nuclear warhead has 8 kilograms of critical mass, this amounts to mass of material of nuclear fission out of which about 3 nuclear warheads could be extracted.
This is completely contrary to Republican propaganda, eagerly regurgitated by our lap-dog press, which claims former President Clinton is an appeaser and responsible for allowing the North Koreans to become a nuclear power.
I don’t hate Michael Moore, I pity him - he’s going to die in 15 years of a massive coronary on a cold tiled bathroom floor, awash in the blasts of his emptied bowels, his autopsy photos posted to The Smoking Gun’s new 3D holographic photo section.
Wow, is that ever a coldblooded piece of prose.
I understand that a lot of right-leaning bloggers have a particular fixation on Michael Moore — but this is really disturbing, even within that context.
(Post edited slightly to stem a tide of unnecessary email. These things happen.)
While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors’ sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi billion-dollar corporation.
Instead of refuting Kasky’s charge by proving in court that they didn’t lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same “free speech” right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, “The check is in the mail,” or, “That looks great on you,” then, Nike’s reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns.
In Porter Township, PA, meanwhile, they’re having none of it.
Some propaganda is so blatant, so clumsy, so self-evidently stupid, it hardly seems worth refuting. But of course it always is, and Bob Kuttner does a bang-up job, as usual.
And this little buzzphrase does provide us with a useful lesson in meme-spreading. See the White House introduce their latest Big Lie. See the lapdogs at Fox News and the Wall Street Journal start using it as if it is a serious concept worth addressing. See it become conventional wisdom on the Sunday talk shows.
During last month’s firestorm over Mr. Lott, Republicans tried to have it both ways on race. They appeased the majority of Americans, who were outraged at Mr. Lott’s sympathetic words about segregation, by pressing him to resign as the Senate Republican leader. At the same time they winked at Mr. Lott’s supporters by having prominent party members stand by him. More recently, they announced plans to award Mr. Lott a new position of honor by making him chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.
Throughout the zigging and zagging it still seemed possible that the party would heed the advice of Bill Frist, the Senate’s new G.O.P. leader, who said one of his priorities would be “ensuring that our agenda is inclusive of all Americans.” That hope evaporated with the renomination of Judge Pickering and several other jurists with dubious records on racial issues. Senator Charles Schumer of New York, among others, has declared that he will use every weapon at his disposal to defeat Judge Pickering. Other Democrats should join in, as should moderate Republican senators, who insisted last month that Mr. Lott’s views had no place in their party.
To which he apparently inexhaustible Atrios (from whom I’ve lifted a couple of links this morning) adds: “Sanctimonious backslapping bloggers, too.”
COOKEVILLE, Tennessee (CNN) — Police video released Wednesday showed a North Carolina family kneeling and handcuffed, who shrieked as officers killed their dog — which appeared to be playfully wagging its tail — with a shotgun during a traffic stop.
