Keller Lies?

I don't think the importance of this post from Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters can be should be missed. New York Times editor Bill Keller admits he lied about the timing of the release of the story on the program to monitor some phone calls.

In fact, the Keller/Calame interview seems very strange indeed. Keller refused to answer this question in January, and in fact refused to answer any of Calame's questions regarding the timing of the publication. Calame followed up this week, and despite Keller's insistence that the story was now "old news", agreed to sit down with his public editor — and then confessed he had lied all along.

Left-wing pundits and bloggers have insisted that Keller spiked the story to keep George Bush in office. Keller, however, has a different take on his decision. He insists that the news would have likely helped Bush rather than hurt him, and the public support for this program after its delayed revelation last December supports that analysis. John Kerry and the Democrats had castigated Bush for the lack of visible effort to find and track terrorists, and the program's exposure would have forced Kerry to recant and suddenly argue that Bush had been too enthusiastic about fighting terrorism, a tough pirouette to execute in a grueling presidential campaign.

In the end, the final version of the story got prepared just days before the election, and Keller argues that a release at that point would have been "unfair" to all parties. It took several weeks for all of the political dust to settle once the article did come out. He may have a point, but then two related events took place: he delayed the release for over a year, and then Keller lied about the timing when he published it.

Keller flat out lied. At this point, the NYT isn't a good choice for even lining a bird cage. It's become too toxic for that. I would say it's time for the Times to reconsider staffing levels.

I’ve Decided….

….That Pat over at Brainster, is evil incarnate. I did not need this picture in my head. No, I really did not. Arrgh.

Paybacks, Pat. Paybacks! I'll find your weakness! But I need to flush my mind's eye with Drano right now.

They Let Him Leave?

They WHAT?

ROMULUS, Mich. - The Customs area at a Detroit airport was briefly shut down Saturday after a passenger claimed he had contaminated everyone on a flight with a biological agent, officials said.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, officials evacuated part of a terminal airport because a suitcase was smoking and leaking liquid.

At Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a U.S. citizen got of a Northwest Airlines flight and implied to the crew he had a biological agent of some sort and had contaminated the flight, U.S. Customs agent Ron Smith said.

Airport emergency medical technicians examined the man and decided that he did not pose a health risk. He was eventually allowed to leave, Smith said.

Look, even if this person was as crazy as can be, this is not something you want to mess around with. This person should have been held - in a psycho ward if necessary - until they were positive there was no threat.

At What Point?

At what point do we say, "Enough!"? There have been several instances of falsified photographs coming out of Lebanon. There have been serious questions about the integrity of some shots. The media has chosen to largely ignore the problems. But now, professional photographers are beginning to question what is going on.

Especially when people pull bodies out of graves to display them.

This is barbarism. This is manipulation of the Western press and an attempt to pump propaganda down the throat of the West. The Western media seems intent to assist, too. I mentioned before that I have some credentials as a photographer myself. I mentioned that the truly iconic photographs were few and far between. Ansel Adams took decades to assemble a body of work. But some photographers are doing so, in Lebanon, in days. Apparently by pulling the dead out of graves for a photo-op.

i have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms. these photographers have come away with powerful shots, that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem.

At what point do we say, "Enough!"?

I think we're past that point. This is barbarism.

The “H” Word

I happened to come across this item in the Yahoo News aggregater. It is by Richard Reeves and bears the title, "TODAY'S TERRORIST, TOMORROW'S STATESMAN?". Here's what Reeves has to say about American support for free elections:

Admittedly, we sometimes reacted rather badly if the locals did not vote the way we thought they should. There was Iran in the 1950s, when Iranians elected Mohammad Mossadegh as their new leader, and he had the nerve to try to throw out British Petroleum and other foreign companies taking their oil. But the Central Intelligence Agency took care of that one, deposing Mossadegh and putting our friend the Shah back on the Persian throne. It was a famous victory!

And, yes, we had to work to get rid of President Salvador Allende, that Marxist, maybe even communist, doctor elected in Chile. But we did our best to give the Chileans a real patriot, Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

But, still, in our good hearts our policy was almost Franklinite: There was no such thing as a bad election.

I would say that was a good idea back then and it is now, even if election results sometimes lead to bad choices in the short run, maybe even the medium run. It is undeniable that an awful lot of elected presidents around the world opt for a presidency-for-life once they get control of the army and the treasury. Take Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe … please! We were blessed by God in that the few Americans who could then vote chose George Washington, who preferred farming to monarchy.

I say all this because, like many Americans (I hope), I am greatly disturbed by the fact that we now are in the process of establishing a policy that there is such a thing as a bad election. If we don't like the winners, or some of them, then we do not recognize the legitimacy of democracy. The Palestinians freely choose the bad Hamas; we cut off aid to them and send more missiles and such to their enemies. Hezbollah freely wins a few seats in the little parliament of Lebanon, and we back the Israeli contention that they should all be killed, or at least thrown in jail forever — as if Lebanon does not deserve the fragile democracy it has.

I am not arguing that Hamas and Hezbollah are good people, but then I come from a country where the colonial occupying power, the English in their red coats, declared my ancestors were "terrorists." They used that word because our men didn't wear uniforms, and they fired from behind trees at British soldiers returning to Boston from Concord and Lexington. Damn that asymmetric warfare.

The point of the whole opinion being this:

I was reminded of that last week — many statesmen begin as "terrorists" — by a column here in The Guardian by the very smart Timothy Ash Garton, writing about democracy, right or wrong. Among the terrorists he cited were Gerry Adams and Nelson Mandela. The point he was making is that you have to deal with the world as you find it; that if you believe peace is better than war, and that democracy does not always produce the leaders he or I would choose, you still have to make a choice: Either you believe in democracy or you don't. That's the best we can do, and then move on from there.

Ah, so we either believe in democracy or we don't. We either support the free election or we don't. We hold our tongues collectively and bite the bullet and just let it be. If it is a leftist "nationalizing" other people's investments without compensation, or a marxist or a communist or a thug or a theocrat, we sit on our hands.

But not, it seems a conservative (or Republican) who one disagrees with. Then it is one's duty to publish opinion pieces excoriating the 'offender' and agitating for change.

Reeves informs us so here, here, here, here and here - and that is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. So we have here a case where Mr. Reeves is telling us on the one hand we have to accept the results of democracy, for good or ill, because the person elected might be a statesman in disguise. On the other hand he informs us at length of the shortcomings of the currently elected president of the US. And he most definitely does not accept that president.

We are left, then, with one of two things. A raging double standard or the rather more direct and unsubtle shorthand for the double standard.

That would be the "H" word.

Ant. It’s What’s For Dinner

Driving along on this highway
All these cars and upon the sidewalk
People in every direction
No words exchanged, no time to exchange and when
All the little ants are marching
Red and black antennae waving
They all do it the same
They all do it the same way

(Dave Matthews, Ants Marching)

Forget everything you've heard about Colombia's big export crops. Cocaine? Not even important. Coffee? A blip in the great scheme. The real money is in ants. No cultivation needed. All you have to do is catch them and sell them to really stupid gringos people from other countries! But not just any ants. They have to be the kind that are charmingly referred to as "big butt ants".

BARICHARA, Colombia - The first loud crackle tastes and feels like popcorn, but by the time the juices spray wildly in your mouth and the filament-like legs slide down your throat, there's no mistaking this toasted ant queen.

The people of sun-soaked northern Colombia have been eating ants for centuries. They believe the accurately named "hormiga culona" — big-butt queen ant — is everything from a natural form of Viagra to a protein-rich defense against cancer.

Now the invertebrates are going global: A businessman in Santander province exported more than 880 pounds of the inch-long queen ants last year, many of them to be hand-dipped in Belgian chocolate and sold in fancy packaging at $8 for a half dozen at upscale London department stores like Harrods and Fortnum & Mason.

But even as the delicacy begins to expand beyond Colombia, the ants appear to be dwindling in Santander, and that worries the region's ant-eating bipeds.

This year's harvest, which usually begins around Easter and lasts as late as June, was one of the worst on record, with peasants in the artist colony of Barichara reporting half their normal year's haul.

Entomologists say the winter was unusually harsh and spring rains were late, which may have disturbed the virgin queen ants' nuptial flights — the one time a year when they emerge from their dune-like ant hills to seek a mate and form a new colony. Almost as often, the queens are grabbed by lizards, birds or humans.

Expanding fields of beans, tomatoes and tobacco also have replaced the region's last remaining wilderness and farmers consider the leaf-cutting ants — the species atta laevigata — to be serious pests.

"It's an age-old dilemma for the farmer — should I kill it or eat it?" said Andres Santamaria, who was given a $40,000 grant from Santander's government to develop an environmentally sustainable, export-oriented program for breeding the ants.

Hey! Why not both? Kill it and eat it, too! But the people who really, really enjoy these? More than anyone apparently?

"In France, they're so highly regarded people started calling them the caviar of Santander," said Stephane Le Tirant, curator at the Montreal Insectarium.

During harvest time in Santander, ants by the bagful are sold at almost every roadside stop. But although relatively abundant, they're not cheap — costing as much as $11 a pound.

The culona is a source of regional pride, its image gracing everything from the logo of a long-distance bus company to the provincial La Culona lottery. It also connects locals to the province's indigenous past, when ants were a part of a complex mating ritual of the Guane Indians.

Rising demand from the outside has helped push up prices that peasant harvesters are getting.

"A few years ago they cost half as much," said Hernando Medina, the province's main exporter.

Ah, the French. Me, I'll have a nice steak. Beef steak, please.

Update On 1,000 Cell Phones Story

Authorities have arraigned the three men caught with 1,000 cell phones in their van on terrorism related charges. Their bail has been set at $750,000. Each.

A magistrate set bond at $750,000 for each of the men, who are charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes.

Officials have declined to say how the case relates to terrorism.

No pleas were entered at the arraignment at a District Court in Caro, about 80 miles north of Detroit.

Maruan Awad Muhareb and Louai Abdelhamied Othman, both of Mesquite, Texas, and Adham Abdelhamid Othman, of Dallas, were stopped before dawn Friday after they purchased 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart in Caro. Police said they found about 1,000 cell phones, mostly prepaid TracFones, in their minivan.

I still can't think of a good reason they have that many phones. Well, any legal reasons.

Chavez To Visit Castro

Well, Hugo Chavez is supposedly going to visit Fidel Castro.

"I announce that tomorrow I will be with Fidel celebrating," Chavez said during a press conference at the nation's electoral authority to kick off his re-election bid.

"I will be with him as of tonight in Havana. I'm taking him a good present, a good cake, and there we will celebrate the eighty years of that great figure of our America."

Chavez, the most visible face of a resurgent Latin American left, has developed a close alliance with Cuba.

Well, it would be nice if he visited him in the appropriate place. And stayed himself, of course.

One Side Views Death As A Tragedy

Hezbollah sees it as on opportunity. Tim Rutten takes a look at the staged and falsified pictures spewing in a torrent from Lebanon. Enough legitimate questions have been raised, enough phony pictures identified to warrant a very hard look by the wire services and newspapers that have been using them. But it seems they are not really interested in doing so. 

There are, however, two problems here, and they're the reason this controversy shouldn't be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media's grudging response to the revelation of Hajj's misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.

Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson's website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj's photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there's anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies — including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj — are sending out of tormented Lebanon.

Read the whole thing, it is completely devastating to the media. The sickness of moral relativism makes wire services like the AP assign a reporter to defend a man caught, most literally, red-handed manipulating dead children for maximum photo impact. But not to worry, it is only a cultural thing the AP assures us. Why it is not one bit different than taking in dinner and a movie. All part of the normal way of things. Displaying the dead as a form of entertainment, we should just accept it and move on. Nothing to see here.

If the Western left and the media genuinely wants to stop the killing of civilians, they must begin denouncing Hezbollah's tactics of using human shields at every opportunity. They must stop buying pictures of dead civilians staged for maximum drama. They must stop calling all casualties on the Lebanese side "civilians" while calling all civilian casualties on Israel's side "Israelis". (Nasty trick that one).

They must stop the double standard. Or this will get ever so much worse.

UPDATE: Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project.

Israeli Forces Reach The Litani

In a massive push, Israeli units have reached the Litani River in Southern Lebanon. This is a very rapid advance, and is somewhat unexpected.

The units were part of a massive force that flooded into Lebanon, trying to seize as much territory as possible before a U.N. cease-fire comes into effect. The objective was to control southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, about 18 miles from the Israeli border, before handing over the area to the Lebanese army and U.N. troops.

Meanwhile, both sides in the war indicated they would accept a U.N. cease-fire plan to stop heavy fighting still raging in southern Lebanon.

Airstrikes killed at least 19 people in Lebanon, including 15 in one village, and Hezbollah rockets wounded at least five people in Israel. Long columns of Israeli tanks, soldiers and armored personnel carriers streamed over the border.

More than 50 helicopters ferried Israeli commandos into southern Lebanon in what was called the biggest such operation in Israel's history. It was part of an all-put push to drive Hezbollah fighters behind the Litani River, about 18 miles from the border, before the truce.

One has to wonder why they waited this long. AP, still carry water for Hezbollah, says resistance was "fierce", but it looks like a walkover when the advance is made this quickly.

Hezbollah Doublespeak

Hassan Nasrallah has set a new benchmark for doublespeak. He says that Hezbollah would abide by the UN ceasefire but would continue to fight Israeli troops for as long as Israeli troops remain in Lebanon.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said on Saturday the militant organization would abide by the U.N. cease-fire resolution but would keep fighting as long as Israeli troops remained in southern Lebanon.

He called continued resistance to the Israel offensive "our natural right."

Absolutely awe-inspiring gall. He starts the war and complains that Israel is fighting it. He agrees to a ceasefire without actually stopping the fighting. The mind boggles.

Sheehan Hospitalized

Cindy Sheehan has been hospitalized in Waco, Texas, for dehydration and exhaution. Which is not at all funny, by the way. There is, however, one unintentionally funny thing in the article:

Sheehan, who has been on a liquid diet as part of the nationwide "Troops Home Fast" hunger strike, had been treated and released from a Seattle emergency room Thursday night. On doctors orders, she ate for the first time in about 37 days, Burns said.

Sheehan's much vaunted "fast" must have finally taken enough ridicule that they are finally calling it a liquid diet. Which she apparently wasn't particularly good at, since it led to dehydration. A word of advice to anyone spending time outdoors in the heat. Water is your friend.

Warpath!

You know, you have to admire the professionalism and restraint police officers use quite frequently. For example, if there was ever a time where absolutely nobody would blame an officer for unloading a full magazine into a guy, this is it. A police officer in Deposit, New York pulled a guy over for a routine traffic stop. The driver got out of the car and started approaching the cop, telling him he was having a bad day, and that someone else was about to. Which is pretty threatening behavior, but not really cause for use of deadly force.

But the tomahawk the guy was swinging sure was.

DEPOSIT, N.Y. - Police subdued a man with a Taser gun after he tried to attack an officer with a Tomahawk. Jeffrey Moore, 37, of Deposit, was immediately dropped to the ground before he could harm the officer when two jolts of electricity passed through his body.

"Somebody's life was saved because of the Taser and it was probably the defendant's," said Deposit Police Chief Timothy Roberts.

The incident began at 11:35 p.m. Thursday when Moore was pulled over for a routine traffic violation in Deposit — 93 miles southwest of Albany, police said.

Moore got out of the car holding what looked like a hatchet, refused to drop it, and began swinging it as he approached the officer, officials said.

"The officer asked Moore what he was doing with the hatchet, and he replied that he was having a really bad day and someone else was about to," Roberts said.

Officials declined to release the name of the officer who used the Taser.

Apparently scalping is making a comeback in upstate New York. Who knew? I suspect that the attacker's life was definitely saved because the cop chose the Taser. He would have been justified in using his gun, though. (For our non-North American readers, a tomahawk is a type of hatchet, generally associated with war use, see picture below. It is usually classified as a deadly weapon).

Bleeding Hearts

A remarkable smackdown of the media - aimed particularly at the British media in this case - appears in Ha'aretz. Written by Julie Burchill, it shows just how badly Israel has been losing the war of ideas, mostly because of the complicity of the media.

Later that night Chas and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been "two militants wounded" with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree. But it's been that way ever since - and more than one night has seen me screaming at the TV/my husband "You don't understand! None of you English bastards understands!" before running into the bedroom, slamming the door and collapsing in a tearful heap with only Bibi to comfort me.

One of the most grotesque examples of the almost brainwashed level of bias can be seen on the official BBC Religions Web site, where that "peace be upon him" eyewash is going on like crazy, while other religions are coolly commented on in a strictly "objective" way.

This is a piece that really needs to be read in it's entirety to get the full impact. Excerpting it does not do it justice. To say that it exposes the blatant, almost suicidal complicity of the media in disseminating Islamist propaganda is an understatement. Read it all.

Poor Media

Oh, gee. Let me get out my violin. The media is choosing not to send a chartered jet full of reporters chasing after the president everywhere he goes. It costs too much, you see. But Critics of Anything Bush™ are whining that it's "secrecy".

The idea that Bush could travel across the country without a full contingent of reporters, especially in the middle of a war, highlights a major cultural shift in the presidency and the news media. In the four decades since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, presidents traditionally have taken journalists with them wherever they traveled on the theory that when it comes to the most powerful leader on the planet, anything can happen at any time.

But increasingly in recent months, Bush has left town without a chartered press plane, often to receptions where he talks to donors chipping in hundreds of thousands of dollars with no cameras or tapes to record his words for the public. Barred from such events, most news organizations will not pay to travel with him. And so a White House policy inclined to secrecy has combined with escalating costs for the strapped news media to let Bush fly under the radar in a way his predecessors could not.

Good lord. Don't you feel sorry for the media? No more free travel. Dang. Let's throw a bake sale for the poor reporters. Even funnier id the outside pressure groups power whining:

Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition formed three years ago that includes groups such as the American Library Association, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Society of Professional Journalists, called the changing pattern of coverage "quite disturbing" and part of a "rising tide of secrecy" in Washington.

"It's another way of closing off responsibility and accountability and shutting themselves off from public view," she said. "I think the public would prefer that somebody be in the room who is not there for their own interests to be served."

So, fund it yourself, Patrice. Write the check. Because Tony Snow has it exactly right here:

White House spokesman Tony Snow said there is nothing insidious about closing fundraisers in private homes and noted that news organizations choose whether to pay for a plane follow the president. "It's really all about money," he said. "It used to be that media organizations had more dough."

News flash: Media is a business, not a charity to give junkets to reporters. The president has a pool that is always with him. Having a flock of redundant reporters wandering around everywhere he goes is not a smart way to do business. Welcome to the real world.