MSM Strikes Back

Regardless of which presidential candidate is victorious next Tuesday (or in December, if the lawyers have their way), one thing this election will be remembered for is that the major established media news organizations finally and decisively chose to be partisan organs. Monday saw the latest in a notable series of one-sided hit pieces in this election season.

As you no doubt heard, on Monday the New York Times published a story about the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives from an Iraqi military facility (Al Qaqaa). This is taken to be prima facie evidence of mismanagement of the war. Never mind that the Duelfer report counts ten thousand different sites having weapons or munitions at war's end, and that the coalition has destroyed 240,000 tons of explosives to date, and has consolidated an additional 160,000 tons awaiting destruction. For the Democrats, whose wartime leadership is (apparently) historically flawless, nothing less than perfection is good enough. The coalition has deprived Mideast tyrants of twenty Hiroshimas worth of conventional explosives? But one-tenth of one percent of that got away. Inexcusable!

Of course, the Times trips over itself in its efforts to imply that the explosives disappeared out from under the nose of George W. Bush, quoting every defensive official they could trick into thinking that the coalition dropped the ball.

One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.

This to reinforce the standard story template that there were insufficient troops for the other story template of the poorly planned war. What the Times doesn't get around to admitting is that they really don't know when the explosives were moved out. The presence of the explosives hadn't been definitively checked since January of 2003, and no UN official was there after March, i.e., before the war. In fact, it was left to NBC to bring up the unfortunate fact (noted by its own embedded reporters) that the explosives were already gone before the first American soldier set foot on the site, merely a day after the fall of Baghdad. Someone should ask the Times how many invading soldiers would be necessary to secure explosives that are not there. Someone could also ask them how it feels to team up with CBS for yet another big story to be significantly debunked within 24 hours.

There are quite a few other good questions one can ask of critics on this occasion. If these explosives are as bad as everyone says, doesn't this just underscore how dangerous and treacherous Saddam always was? Does it not also illustrate once and for all the foolishness and impotence of the United Nations, which year after year consented to the continued existence of this mountain of explosives? Inasmuch as the runup to the invasion provided ample time for the explosives to disappear, are the critics ready to concede that the much-maligned "rush to war" maybe spent too much time on ineffectual diplomacy after all? And if we now agree that 380 tons of high explosives can disappear before the invasion, is it asking too much to be more open-minded about the possibility of a couple trailers of WMDs going missing as well? These are all natural questions that could have been raised with intelligence officials and politicians in conjunction with this news story. That such questions never occurred to the Times simply demonstrates that the writers are ideologues first and journalists during whatever time they have left over. A real journalist would see that a dictator who stockpiles four hundred kilotons of explosives while his citizens die of malnutrition is a monstrous threat to civilized nations.

But the Times got in its dig. The damage was done. Twenty four hours was all that John Kerry, Joe Lockhart, the DNC and a horde of sympathetic columnists needed to pound on the President. That there is little logical basis for their allegations of sloppiness or incompetence here is material insofar as their rhetorical attacks will ease slightly, awaiting the next news "gotcha". But the attacks themselves will be remembered more vividly than the refutation, and that is the point. As Churchill observed, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

Marketing II

And what is a presidential race, if not in large part a humongous marketing campaign? I'm not the first person to bring this up, but I find the Kerry-Edwards "Hope is on the way" slogan to be really weird. I mean, if your candidates are the ones who are going to win and deliver the goods, then they are your hope. Right here, right now, these are your candidates and they are your hope. On the other hand, saying "hope is on the way" implies that hope ain't here yet. These guys? Nope! Makes me think that a Hillary agent planted that slogan. "Hope is on the way... in 2008."

Not that this is the only slogan that Kerry has adopted. He's drumming on a few recurring themes to rally positive support. I believe I've distilled them all down into one bumper-sticker sized promo, offered here free of charge:

Kedwards: A strong hope for change is on the way

Marketing I

It was worth a try. 'Tis the time of year that asian lady beetles make it their mission to barge into our home for the winter. These insects amuse me, and I think they're cute. But they offend my wife's sensibilities, and she goes after the insects with grimly lethal effect.

I've tried softening the bugs' image by referring to them as "ladybugs," a somewhat erroneous moniker, but my wife doesn't go for it. So I announced last week I was renaming our houseguests "liberty bugs."

I have been informed that "liberty bugs" makes them "even more annoying," and have been instructed to stop.

A wedding day

As alluded to in the previous post, it appears that the Governor's wedding went off in fine fashion. It was a sunny spring day in Stanley with higher-than-expected temperatures (around 55F), albeit with considerable wind. I was only able to download one webcam frame every three to five minutes or so, but that sufficed to get a general idea of what was transpiring.

Recall also in the previous post, I was going on about how I imagined the Governor was having a crummy day on that Monday back in March. He was missing his sporting events and was obliged to get back to business in the capital. The Governor boarding the Islander nine-seater aircraft bound for Stanley doesn't absolutely end that anecdote, though.

The arrival and departure of FIGAS aircraft in the countryside ("Camp") is a cooperative effort, requiring at least one local person on the ground at the landing site to put up the wind sock, get out the firefighting equipment, and establish communication with the aircraft over the two-meter once it comes into view. Each airstrip I saw had a small shed (which I invariably dubbed the "terminal building") in which the necessary support equipment was located. Aside from the erectable sock-pole, there were no other structures. The firefighting apparatus consisted of tanks and hoses on a trailer which would attach to your Land Rover. Everyone in Camp has four-wheel-drive vehicles and trailer hitches, so anyone's vehicle can serve as fire truck.

The ground liaison is also responsible for assuring that the runway is clear. Chiefly, this means clear of sheep and clear of upland geese. Now, midwesterners can relate to geese. They're a nuisance all over the place, it seems. But what's with the sheep? With all the fences and gates separating airstrip and fields, can't they at least keep the sheep off the runway? As we were laconically informed at Goose Green, "Yes, but then the grass would get too long." The natives were polite enough not to add a big, "ah-DUUHHHHHHH!!" at the American suburbanite's expense.

What goes for landing applies to takeoff as well, and by the time the FIGAS plane bearing His Excellency was bouncing down to the far end of the airstrip for takeoff, a group of upland geese was browsing around toward the opposite end of the runway. Since someone else was serving as fire truck, the Land Rover we boarded (soon bound for Port Howard Lodge) was duly appointed to chase off the geese. So Wayne, who was driving, jostled us down the field and got the geese airborne. As our Land Rover pulled off to the side, the Islander aircraft started accelerating for takeoff.

Apparently though we had taken insufficient interest in where the geese actually wanted to go, because as we watched the geese all did a one-eighty, turning back en-masse to re-cross the runway in flight. The pilot had to pull back the throttle, abort the takeoff, turn around back to the start and do it all over again. Whether the Governor was ticked or just figured it was par for the course that day, I cannot say.

All that nonwithstanding, Mr. Pearce is certainly enjoying a far better day today. We'll find out soon whether Penguin News has a fast enough turnaround to get a picture on the front of their Friday paper.

Update: The Falkland Island News Network and the South Atlantic Remote Territories Media Association have the faster turnaround in getting news and a picture up. See article here.

Kwik2Jujj and The Governor

Thursday 21 October is the wedding of His Excellency, The Governor Howard Pearce to his fiancé, Miss Caroline Thomée. Governor Pearce, in case you haven't delved far into the links from this web page, is the top representative of Her Majesty's Government in the Falkland Islands, and exercises executive authority there.

I am almost certain that the wedding is to take place in Christ Church Cathedral in Stanley. It's hard to really know because I can only read the cover pages of the weekly Penguin News online, and those haven't even mentioned the Governor by name in the wedding stories, much less divulged the site of the ceremony. But a webcam portal has been set up, over which I was able to glimpse the wedding rehearsal earlier today. The interior of the Cathedral and the window configuration visible over the webcams match photographs on this site and my own pictures of the Cathedral's exterior from earlier this year. Anyway, the actual ceremony is scheduled to start at 1215 Falklands Summer Time on Thursday (1015 CDT, 1115 for folks in Ohio) in case anyone's interested in stealing a peek.

So, I believe I was about to embark on a rambling story with no real point to it. And I shall. My stay on the Falkland Islands was only one week long, and yet I encountered the Governor on two separate occasions. Permanent Falklands residents might not immediately relate to how charming an occurrence this is. As a Wisconsin resident, I literally go 'round for years and years without seeing our governor. I think I saw Governor Thompson once in all the years of his tenure, and I have yet to encounter Governor Doyle. Of course this has something to do with having millions of fellow citizens instead of just a few thousand, but the twice-in-a-week happenstance was striking nonetheless.

The first and more-noteworthy crossing of paths was near Port Howard, on Monday 01 March 2004. My wife and I were arriving on West Falkland via the Falkland Islands Government Air Service (FIGAS) following our two-night stay at Darwin House. We actually landed at an alternate grass airstrip that day because the regular airstrip nearer the settlement was in use for Camp Sports, the annual all-island late-summer games. As we were disembarking from the Islander nine-seater aircraft and trundling over to a waiting Land Rover from Port Howard Lodge, the Governor was waiting to board the plane for a return to Stanley.

Though the Governor was with another gentleman at the time, it was really quite tempting to briefly intrude - maybe get a photograph. Ken Greenland (of Darwin House) had said of Pearce that "he's really quite personable." But it also seemed at the time that Pearce wasn't having the best day. I had heard that the Governor was on West Falkland to present the Governor's Cup for the horse racing, but it seems he hadn't been able to do so on account of overnight rains muddying the course and delaying the morning's events. So His Excellency was missing the barbeque, not able to present the trophy, and was probably not looking forward to spending the rest of that beautiful Monday in his office at Government House. I declined to barge in on his disappointing day.

I saw the Governor again on Saturday, this time at Mount Pleasant. He was seeing somebody off on the Lan Chile flight that my wife and I were also departing on. If I remember correctly, we were already on board the plane when he appeared on the tarmac. It was another short appearance.

Such were our encounters with Mister Pearce. Nevertheless Mr. Governor, "2 Minute Sidebar" transmits most pleasant wishes from some crazy American who you almost, but didn't quite meet! All the best to you, your new bride, and our Falkland friends.

Think news skews your views?

You may have heard last week that AT&T intends to cut another 7,400 jobs. A big headline today was that GM is cutting up to 12,000 jobs (albeit from its European operations). I bring this up because I'd like to propose a little experiment for someone (anyone) to try.

The experiment: Carefully comb through your daily newspaper for one month. Document each and every news story mentioning individual companies adding or slashing jobs. At the end of the month, tally up the stories to find the newspaper's net reported job loss figure. Using that figure, project how many months until the United States has zero jobs.

You then have two choices: (1) Buy guns, trade goods, and precious metals, OR (2) Think about what's wrong with your newspaper.

I'll bet India has less fraud

Here's some big-time voter registration fraud. See this story from Denver:

9News has discovered a record number of fraudulent voter-registrations across the state. [...] Most of the fraud has come from registration drives, where people at grocery stores or on the streets ask you to sign up. 9News has learned many workers have re-registered voters multiple times by changing or making up information about them.

I wonder what it's going to take before legislatures and law enforcement become motivated to crush this growing trend. Because it won't abate until a few thousand people get something on the order of $5,000 fines and/or 30 days in jail. When you've got folks willing to tell a reporter (or even a video camera) that they've registered "about 35 times" and they just chuckle about it... that only happens because they've never ever heard of anybody being punished for such a thing.

And why should it be that these activist organizations bear no responsibility for turning in piles upon piles of fraudulent government forms? One lightning-quick reform idea would be to make the form submitter co-responsible for the document, a responsibility which could be mitigated by attaching copies of three government-issued identifying documents (for example). Because allowing these organizations to crisscross the country and just dump all the responsibility for distinguishing real voters from fakes onto the county offices is absurd.

Plus, consider this: a few vote fraud prosecutions and you have a county fund for hiring the necessary temporary labor for cleaning up the voter registry. A few election cycles and you could be back to a low-fraud equilibrium.

A big opposing force to these remedies is the weird notion that registering to vote is supposed to involve an absolute minimum of inconvenience - so convenient in fact that apparently we don't even insist upon proving residence or identity. Why should registering to vote be any easier than renewing your driver's licence? Why must it be easier than applying for student loans? Yes, I understand that this is one of those sacred rights we have as citizens. But the First Amendment is right up there too - and to me, allowing this sort of sight-unseen, utterly unaccountable registration and voting chaos to persist is like letting folks yell "Fire!" in crowded theatres.

Kerry vs. TraitorCo!

Kerry campaign press release, 3 February 2004:

George Bush continues to fight for incentives to encourage Benedict Arnold companies to ship jobs overseas at the same time he cuts job training for our workers and cuts help for small businesses that create jobs here at home.

(Note that the link to the original source, a press release on John Kerry's own campaign website, has long since vanished.)

John Kerry, February 2004:

We will repeal the tax loopholes and benefits that reward Benedict Arnold CEOs and companies for shipping American jobs overseas. Instead we will provide new incentives for good companies that create and keep good jobs here in America.

Wall Street Journal interview, May 2004:

But the Benedict Arnold line applied, you know, I called a couple of times to overzealous speechwriters and said "look that's not what I'm saying."

Benedict Arnold does not refer to somebody who in the normal course of business is going to go overseas and take jobs overseas. That happens. I support that. I understand that. I was referring to the people who take advantage of non-economic transactions purely for tax purposes -- sham transactions -- and give up American citizenship. That's a Benedict Arnold. You give up your American citizenship but you want to continue to do business and deduct and do everything else. That's what I'm referring to. [...]

Washington Post, 5 August 2004:

But Kerry campaign officials said Kerry's use of the "Benedict Arnold" designation had to do only with firms that incorporated overseas to avoid U.S. tax liabilities, not firms that have engaged in "outsourcing."

Mickey Kaus, 9 August 2004:

Discriminations catches the Kerry campaign erasing from its Web site the primary-campaign denunciations of "Benedict Arnold CEOs" that don't fit Kerry's new, narrower, business-friendly definition of "Benedict Arnold."

The Boston Globe, 19 June 2003:

Documents obtained by the Globe detail John Kerry's 1983 investment of between $25,000 and $30,000 in offshore companies registered in the Cayman Islands. The document below, signed by Kerry, shows his pledge to purchase 2,470 shares of Peabody Commodities Trading Corp. through Sytel Traders, registered in the Caymans.

Caution: All-political

You are probably already familiar with the standard Kerry-Iraq flip-flop. Back in 2002, Kerry was unwilling to be stranded on the unpopular side of yet another successful war effort (like he was in 1991 for the Gulf War). Back then, he wrote in the New York Times:

If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act.

But by 2004, while trying to run leftwards of his Democratic primary opponents, Kerry agreed with Chris Matthews' question on Hardball that he was unhappy with the conduct of the war, and was an anti-war candidate:

I am -- Yes, in the sense that I don't believe the president took us to war as he should have, yes, absolutely.

His vote against funding the Iraq and Afghanistan occupation and reconstruction in October 2003 matches the sudden leftward cut.

Let's see if I can paraphrase a Kerry defense: "Oh, but you see, Kerry was and is still behind the decision to go to war, only Kerry would have done things altogether differently. You know, so that France, Germany and Russia would have tens of thousands of soldiers there, no looting would have occurred, no insurgency, and so forth. So he wasn't against the war, only against how it turned out."

Well, nevermind that the guy in the Oval Office doesn't have a magical Futurescope to help with decisionmaking, and nevermind that these staunch allies of Kerry's America have pre-emptively nixed any hint of lending soldiers, now or ever. Can we at least say that Kerry wasn't flipping or flopping, and instead was just slathering an added layer of nuance to an increasingly complicated position? Well, Kerry's debate answers Friday night in St. Louis sure make it hard to put the flip-flop tag out of mind:

Well, let me tell you straight up: I've never changed my mind about Iraq. I do believe Saddam Hussein was a threat. I always believed he was a threat.

Mere minutes later, regarding Iran:

I don't think you can just rely on U.N. sanctions, Randee. But you're absolutely correct, it is a threat, it's a huge threat. And what's interesting is, it's a threat that has grown while the president has been preoccupied with Iraq, where there wasn't a threat.

Got that? There was no threat in Iraq. But Saddam Hussein was a threat.

Kerry needs to be careful, because flip-flopping that violently in the space of a few minutes could re-injure that rotator cuff. And did you notice that Kerry is saying directly that Iran is a huge and growing threat? Is Kerry on the verge of warning us that Iran has WMD stockpiles, even though the gathered intelligence might not be perfect? Could Kerry be laying the groundwork for another year-and-a-half "rush to war?" You'd think MoveOn.org would be alarmed.

Two shares!

In my paleoquotology post a couple weeks ago, I blegged for info on how I might discover what MCI shares from 1986 may have grown (and re-shrunk) to today. Meanwhile, I sent my wife's ancient stock certificates off to be converted into their modern equivalents.

If only were as easy as the bank had implied. The form and the certificates have returned, with further instructions, most of which relate to the forms my wife needs to produce in order to have herself take sole ownership of the property (as her mother was "custodian" in 1986). We'll have to send back the original form and certificates, plus a signature guarantee from a particular type of bank, plus a W-9 form, plus a certified birth certificate (for cryin' out loud), and (finally) a cover letter. Now, the bank knew from the get-go that this was a custodial account. So I don't see why they didn't mention in the original correspondence that all this may be necessary.

But here's a better question. It says right on the stock certificates that they were issued 14 April 1986. The date's stamped on there, along with my wife's name. So given that my wife's ownership of the stock is indisputably over eighteen years old, how is it that the bank thinks it possible that my wife herself is not eighteen - and thus requires the certified birth certificate, et. al.? What sort of bizarre, twin-paradox circumstance are they envisioning and legally safeguarding themselves against?

Bunch of overly-officious, bureaucratic nincompoops...

Fantasy psycho

I invite you (yes, you!) to share with me here the name of your "fantasy psycho," i.e. the celebrity who is both (1) very attractive in your eyes and yet (2) either demonstrably criminal or obviously crazy. I am asking for the celebrity individual who maximizes the above sum for you.

For me, I'd have to say Winona Ryder. Cute! Nuts! But if you think Winona isn't crazy enough, then how 'bout Anne Heche? Still attractive, and way more bonkers.

Tough sell

NBC 15 News in Madison had a short piece recently about a fundraiser intended to help a family pay medical bills for their son. For the purpose of this post, I'll refer to the young man as John Doe, mainly because I don't want the fellow or his family to Google later and see me (a total stranger) writing unflattering things concerning him. But if you want the name, you can check this news story from August.

I digress. The TV news story mentioned that the young John Doe had been terribly injured and is still hospitalized following his fall from a balcony August 28th. We are told the family is in financial straits and that the medical bills are huge (though nobody mentions even a rough figure or the matter of insurance). We are given information on how to write and send cheques to the John Doe Medical Fund.

So why am I drifting toward writing something negative here? Or anything, for that matter? If you consult the story above, or related ones such as here, you see that young Doe (an incoming freshman to UW-Madison) critically injured himself by pitching over a balcony rail, most likely in the act of vomiting while extremely intoxicated. The TV news story pushing the charity case graciously omitted these unflattering details. But I think these details are pertinent. Nobody wronged this fellow by doing anything bad to him. He wasn't struck down by some unforseeable malady or dreadful disease. He wasn't maimed while soldiering, or volunteering, or doing anything at all productive. As such, I put this individual and his family way, way, way down on my list of targets for monetary donations. Above panhandlers, surely, and yet well below IDF pizza.

Let me be clear: It would be great for this guy and for society in general if he were to make a rapid, full and complete recovery. That would be a very positive thing. But I think it's also good for society when people who hurt themselves in dumb ways feel embarrassed about it, suck it up and face the consequences themselves. That would actually make for an instructive, perhaps even inspiring story of growth and responsibility.

WI DMV 4U

What's not to like about a clever personalized plate, unless (of course) it's so clever you don't get it? Seen today: "12 SQRD," which can only elicit one reasonable interpretation:

Gross!

(As a noun, first entry).