Doug Feith, for all his sins, may not have invented a Dutch company
Doug Feith, of course, was one of the head loons who cooked up a bunch of now-discredited crap linking Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is the guy Gen. Tommy Franks so memorably called “the f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth”.
One of Feith’s alleged links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda involved a company called Vlemmo NV, said to be Dutch. (The “NV” seems to be analogous to our “Inc.” or “LLP.”)
But the Dutch government announced this week that they’d searched high and low and found no evidence whatsoever that any such company had ever existed in the Netherlands. And a bunch of lefty blogs have picked up on the report as further evidence that Feith was full of crap.
Tempting to join in. But I did some poking, and Vlemmo may well have existed after all.
It gets arcane from here, with links to Belgian justice ministry documents and my half-assed attempts to translate Dutch. Full bit over in puduland.
There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.
On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy…
The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).
This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf — which just became significantly larger — as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.
I’ll wait and see how Tester and Stabenow vote on the cave-in Iraq supplemental funding bill before criticizing them. But I’d like Reid to stop pretending he’s trying to stop the war right now. And I’d especially like him to stop pretending the bill he’s backing is some kind of victory for Democrats. Americans have already “spoken out” on the war. They oppose it. They elected Democrats to end it. Now the Associated Press reports Reid’s boast that the compromise legislation would be the first war-funding bill sent to Bush since the U.S. invasion of Iraq “where he won’t get a blank check.” The president is absolutely getting a blank check, Harry, and Democrats should be honest about it. As proposed, the benchmarks are toothless; they have no consequences, and Republicans are making sure Bush can waive them and continue spending when — note that I didn’t say “if” — Nouri al-Maliki’s government fails to meet them.
Sadly relevant cartoon from 2002 here. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …
The UK arm of McDonald’s is petitioning the Oxford English Dictionary to falsify the definition of the term “McJob”, the BBC reports:
Fast-food giant McDonald’s has launched a petition to get the dictionary definition of a McJob changed.
The Oxford English Dictionary currently describes a McJob as “an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects”. [BBC]
Note that McDonald’s isn’t disputing the accuracy of the OED’s definition of the term “Mcjob” as used by English speakers today. Instead McDonald’s is demanding that the dictionary fabricate a definition for the word because they don’t like the pejorative connotations it has in reality:
“The current definition is extremely insulting to the 67,000 people who work for us within the UK,” said McDonald’s senior vice president David Fairhurst.
“It is also insulting for everyone else who works in the wider restaurant and tourism sectors. [BBC]
Yes, there are other insulting words in the dictionary like “revisionist,” “Orwellian,” and “bully.” Maybe we should redefine those terms so that McDonald’s executives don’t feel insulted when they look them up.
Regular correspondent Haans P. has taken the plunge into the blog world, here. And my good friend Jim Bunte is launching new online magazine for toy collectors, here.
Also, John McCrea and CAKE are putting out a CD without the help of a record label. There’s been a lot of talk online lately about the changes the music industry is going through — I think a good way to support independent musicians is to buy their stuff.
The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.
Fantastic.
AND: Don’t read the comments on the ABC website if you tend to get depressed about the human condition.
Fun with inflation (or: hey, did I just lose a third of my stuff?)
I was just fooling with various inflation and exchange rate calculators. Since we all know basic math, absolutely nothing in this post should be surprising. And yet…
“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” premiered in 1999. Not exactly a long time ago, but adjusting for inflation, to receive an equivalent grand prize, a 2007 contestant would have to win about $1,240,600.
But let’s not forget the steep drop of the US dollar against most foreign currencies. In 1999, for example, the euro was worth an average of about 94 cents. In 2007, it’s worth $1.35. (This neglects the euro’s own inflation, which is a bit fuzzy, apparently, given the lumping together of many economies; if we ballpark it around the official target rate of around two percent, total euro inflation seems reasonably approximated at a little under 20 percent during the period.)
So, in constant 2007 dollars and euro, a “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” winner in 1999 could have bought over 1.1 million euro worth of stuff. A 2007 winner can only buy about 740,000 euro.
Yikes. Is that right? If my math isn’t screwy (which is entirely possible, although I think this is close), your dollars have lost a full third of their buying power compared to the euro, all just since the first time you heard some pour soul call a phone-a-friend who could barely even operate the phone.
While we’re at it, George Washington was offered a salary of $25,000. (He declined, since he was already wealthy.) That would be about $285,800 in 2007 dollars. George W. Bush, on the other hand, gets paid $400,000 per year. So in constant dollars, we pay the current George W. about 40 percent more than the original George W. was offered.
Exhaling. Staring into middle distance. Moving on.
CORRECTION: Turns out I was looking at the wrong numbers on the George Washington example. His $25000 actually would be more like a half-million in today’s dollars. My bad. So Bush is not being paid more than Washington was offered. And balance has been returned to the universe. Whew.
…the larger change is that the very process Gore describes — of propaganda taken as fact, of slogans taken as arguments, of repetition substituting for logic and, yes, of lies and half-truths taken as truth — is now well-recognized. What worked against Gore during the recount and what worked for the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war doesn’t work anymore. That is an advance for democracy and for reason.
That is an extraordinarily sunny assessment, to put it mildly. I myself am more of a cynic, and will bet E.J. Dionne a moderately priced dinner in a relatively pleasant restaraunt that there will be an effective instance of lies and half-truths taken as truth before the summer is finished. I’ll even handicap him the current examples of propaganda taken as fact and slogans taken as arguments.
You’ve probably already seen the Salt Lake City Tribune article about the alleged MySpace page of Laura Schlessinger’s son Deryk, a paratrooper in Afghanistan:
The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.
I only find that mildly interesting. But what I find extremely compelling is the Army’s suggestion that this actually is the creation of Osama bin Laden:
Army spokesman Robert Tallman [said] “it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this.
“Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace,” Tallman continued. “Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda.”
I think I speak for everyone when I say that, if Al Qaeda’s propaganda arm has the time and sophistication to create a fake-but-believable MySpace page for Laura Schlessinger’s son, we’re going to lose this thing. I suggest that we surrender immediately, and I for one welcome our new salafist overlords.
NYPD surveillance prior to the 2004 GOP convention: a list
About 600 pages of previously secret documents were released this week, records of the NYPD’s surveillance activities in advance of the 2004 GOP convention.
The NY Times has published the Intelligence Digests here, with links to .pdf files of the original declassified documents. I thought it would be handy, though, if somebody went through and made a list of every name that comes up. The list is huge, so the whole thing is currently hogging the front of puduland if you’re curious.
Please do not leap to conclusions. Just because a name appears does not mean that the person or group was under extensive, active surveillance. In many cases, the NYPD clearly got their information from press releases and public press conferences. This is obvious from reading just a handful of the pdfs.
Then again, there was also a lot of spying involved, too. The Times has already reported that the NYPD sent officers nationwide and across half of Canada, and the vast majority of their targets were peaceful groups operating fully within the law — primarily church groups, environmentalists, peace activists and other organizations whose privacy and peaceful opposition to the GOP is supposed to be fully protected by the United States Constitution.
Predictably, most of the groups fall politically somewhere between Barack and Che, but you’ll also find the Klan, Randall Terry, and Fred Phelps’s nutball gay-hating church in here. And many of the names couldn’t possibly even need surveillance, unless MSNBC, the Quakers, and the American Gas Association are planning to gang up and knock the windows out of Starbucks.
I have no idea what many of these groups even are, of course, but you can guess that the Canadian Federation of Students, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and the Center for Anti-Violence Education aren’t particularly well armed.
A few of the names are also pretty wonderful, just by themselves. I mean, who wouldn’t want to party with the Zombie Flash Mob, Dogs Against Republicans, the Johnny Cash Bloc, the Surveillance Camera Players, or — my favorite name — the Shadowy Revolutionary Cell? I mean, come on. Those all sound like fun people.
