Bush kept off the Illinois ballot? Say it ain't so...

Major party presidential candidates have until Aug. 30 to be certified by the state elections board, three days before Bush is expected to be nominated at the Republican National Convention in New York City.

Sen. Dave Syverson (R-Rockford), treasurer of the state Republican Party

We could just go to federal court - it should be a no-brainer -- and put him on.

1. The Legislature splits in favour of the Democrats 66:52 in the House and 32:26 (1 Independent) in the Senate.

2. A phrase indelibly associated with BBC TV presenter and election show stalwart Peter Snow, often used in presenting absurd extrapolations from a handful of results in order to justify the expense of graphical gizmos.

Ben Bradlee back-story

We don't print the truth. We don't pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It's up to the public to decide what is true.

...Ben Bradlee, wrote a couple or three months ago something to the effect that as far as his newspaper was concerned, he said we don't print the truth, we print what we know. We print what people tell us. And sometimes we print lies.

BRADLEE: Well, if you think about it for one minute, is absolutely obvious. One of the lies that we printed...

KING: Is his quote.

BRADLEE: Is his quote. When he said that he couldn't talk about Watergate because it involved matters of national security. Well, you know, it just didn't. It just didn't. It was a lie.

Miller, her fellow reporters, and their editors had forgotten the Ben Bradlee rule.

1. Beneath a photo of Miller looking like Dracula's daughter - or is it Jaws? - one reads the caption

   BIRD WATCH: Miller uncritically parroted the White House. Now the Times has to scrape up the mess.

   Some copy-editor needs to take a lie-down...

2. He says he's

   quoting from memory

   - why? Why can't he check the script? (The only online version of the script is the pre-rehearsal version, which doesn't have the line quoted. An actual journalist shouldn't rely on Mr Google, though, should he?)

3. A still fuller version in this list of quotes - from another right-wing site:

   To hell with the news! I'm no longer interested in the news. I'm interested in causes. We don't print the truth. We don't pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It's up to the public to decide what's true. -

   The Houston Review places the remarks at a Smithsonian Institution symposium. If it's used in the 1976 movie, it must have been some kind of Bradlee catchphrase.

   The piece is reviewing a book of gotcha quotes You Don't Say: Sometimes Liberals Show Their True Colors which includes Lyndon Johnson's

   I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.

   - from 1964-5, I surmise.

The model for Chalabi?

Sahib, you want girl?

Sahib wants boy?

1. The thousand or so civil servants who ran India: by 1939, around half of these were Indians.

2. There were two armies present in British India in 1939 (later they got company!): the Indian Army, of (mostly) European officers and native other ranks and the British Army, white throughout. (British Other Ranks were pretty much the lowest form of white life on the subcontinent!) In the Indian Army, one had an unusual tertium quid: between King's Commissioned Officers and other ranks, one had Viceroy's Commissioned Officers - Subhadar-Major, and the like - ranks which were held solely by natives.

3. No relation to Mohandas Gandhi, of course. Daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, mother of Rajiv, mother-in-law of Sonia.

Wonkette a tad pissy about Alex Polier's tell-all?

who claims to have gone to school with Ms. Polier

1. My discussion of Okrent's 'ruling' on February 29 - search on landesman for several other Plawg pieces on the subject - it was a whole big thing...

Prosecutorial editing

Nothing should have gotten into the pages of the newspaper that the reporter couldn't defend against questioning by an editor as aggressive as a tough D.A. Every source needed to be, in effect, cross-examined for bias.

Gregg Easterbrook's been chugging the NYT Kool Aid

...let's hope the paper's remarkable editor, Bill Keller, is not punished for having the courage to be honest with readers.

Ideally The New York Times would have figured out, prewar, that Ahmed Chalabi was a Professor Harold Hill character and that, overall, claims about Iraqi weapons were suspect.

I only told you to blow the bloody doors off!

1. I didn't call the guy in so many words on his dud intel; but I did say of Chalabi on November 3 2002 - that was before the war, I seem to recall -

   the more this joker plays the Big Man, with the sophomoric devotion of Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, the more doubt is cast on whether this Administration has the judgement and intelligence (in both senses of the word) to run a whelk stall, let alone the conquest and rehabilitation of a country of 170,000 square miles and 20m people.

   The article linked - Wayback cache - is all about the CIA/Pentagon wars about defector intel in general and Chalabi in particular.

2. Not that either Hutton or Easterbrook needed to be told. A variation on the old ditty - penned by one Humbert Wolfe, I find:

   You cannot hope to bribe or twist
   (Thank God!) the British journalist.
   But, seeing what the man will do
   Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

What J-school teaches: be afraid, be very afraid

1. On the other hand, it does lower students' expectations to meet the level of professional realities in the real world. That's a valid educational goal, isn't it?

Piling on Judith Miller - what a shame!

aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.

Wonkette takes a nice photo at last!

1. Britons of a certain age would think Belisha beacon - and then correct themselves for being so unkind!

Partial birth abortion act struck down: a good day's work

1. She is ruthless in uncovering the lack of professional competence to testify of witnesses before her, and in Congress, giving evidence in favour of outlawing 'partial birth abortions';

2. She dissects the Congressional findings in the Act and finds them unworthy of deference, or, even if deferred to, not controlling of the issue.

1. The paperwork, including the Hamilton's final opinion, is here.

   Several earlier pieces here on partial birth abortion - April 26 piece has links to the ongoing litigation, and discusses the Stenberg case, amongst other things.

said he did not think that "one unelected judge, from the hinterlands to boot, ought to veto what Congress does just because he or she doesn't like it," Kopf said. "I've never seen a judge like that."

The ruling will now likely head to the U.S. Supreme Court...

although neither controlling nor fully measuring the Court's discretion, indicate the character of the reasons the Court considers

Cecile Dubois unmasked!

I aspire to be like Ann Coulter, in every way, regardless of her actions. She is a bloody genius and should be taken seriously. Her every word I take to heart and write down in my stakerish Coulter Book. I have my smooch prints all over her posters that plaster my walls. Although I am Jewish and brunette, I plan to dye my hair blonde and convert to Christianity. I shall move to the east coast and go to all the great lovely WASPy schools. If you don't like me, I shall blacklist you now under the 'Unpatriotic Americans' website. Be scared, be very scared.

based on the life of Countess Erzebet Bathory, a beautiful sixteenth century Hungarian noblewoman whose hobby was torturing and eviscerating the bodies of young virgins, supposedly in a desperate attempt to remain eternally beautiful...

Alex Polier - a nicely judged piece

I was seated between Peter [Kerry hack and Polier boyfriend] and the senator. I hoped it was my wit and enthusiasm, not my blonde hair and long legs, that got me a seat at the table.

Cutter sounded young and hard, and I imagined her like Lara Flynn Boyle on The Practice.

was very attractive and was at the center of much interest among young male researchers

One reporter had a little girl call up, assuming I wouldn't hang up on a child. They even made her say, "Can I talk to Alex?" And when I said, "Yes, it's me," a reporter jumped on the line.

When I finally got back into my account, assuming the hacker was a Republican, I changed my password to "Bushsucksdick."

I started out as an ambitious young woman inspired by politics and the media. I've ended up disenchanted with both.

Kerry and the War on Drugs

I think the federal government should play an active role fighting drugs in America, one that addresses both the supply and the demand issues. I support more funding for “treatment on demand” and believe we need to do a better job in this country of helping people overcoming addiction. And we need to find better ways to cut off the illegal supply of drugs coming into the country.

I think we need to focus on solving the problems within the Columbian economy and we need to find alternatives to coca crops that will provide enough money to be a reliable substitute for coca.

instead, favored shifting those funds to the War on Drugs and care for our nation’s Veterans...

We have never ever had a real war on drugs in the United States of America. And the reason that we've never had a real one is because we've always left out two of the most critical components of a legitimate war, treatment and education...

If we did a better job of intervening and at working at the issue of giving young people a stake in the world around them, You'd reduce a lot of the imperative for drug use. The despair and the other reasons that people turn to drugs in this country.

It's a you've got to have an holistic approach, we don't. And I promise that I will restore that kind of full measure approach to the problem of drugs.

1. A number of pieces here on Plan Colombia: start with the April 20 2003 piece, with links to CRS reports and other goodies. [On second thoughts, CRS links are liable to be dead - for reasons previously discussed, and too tedious to revisit: try the State Department CRS page. You might also try the gizmo.]

2. Loadsa links on Berger and fellow Kerry adviser Richard Holbrooke.

The mandatory-minimum-sentencing structure of our country is funneling people into jail who have no business being there.

mandatory minimum sentences for dealers who sell drugs to children

New York-Judith Miller: further thoughts

a pilotless plane spraying 200 pounds of anthrax near a large city might kill up to a million people

According to a friend of Raines's, as well as one of Miller's colleagues at the paper, the editor pulled her aside after the attacks. "Go win a Pulitzer," he told her.

One incident that still rankles happened last April, when Miller co-bylined a story with Douglas Jehl on the WMD search that included a quote from Amy Smithson, an analyst formerly at the Henry L. Stimson Center. A day after it appeared, the Times learned that the quote was deeply problematic. To begin with, it had been supplied to Miller in an e-mail that began, "Briefly and on background" - a condition that Miller had flatly broken by naming her source. Miller committed a further offense by paraphrasing the quote and distorting Smithson's analysis. One person who viewed the e-mail says that it attributed views to Smithson that she clearly didn't hold. An embarrassing correction ensued. And while the offense had been entirely Miller's, there was nothing in the correction indicating Jehl's innocence.

Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.

This was a bit too sweeping. While there were no heroes within the Times, there were editors who raised serious and consistent doubts about Miller's reportage. During the run-up to the war, investigations editor Doug Frantz and foreign editor Roger Cohen went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller's overreliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions, especially Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. For instance, Frantz rejected a proposal for a story in which Pentagon officials claimed to have identified between 400 and 1,000 WMD sites, without providing much backup evidence to justify their claims. "At the time, people knew her reporting was suspect and they said so," one Timesman told me. But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed management's faith in her by putting her stories on page 1.

Raines had crafted Judy's assignment so that it became extremely easy for her to circumvent the desks. According to one of her editors, she worked stories for investigative one day, foreign the next, and the Washington bureau the day after. It was never clear who controlled or edited her. When one desk stymied her, she'd simply hustle over to another and pitch her story there. It was an editorial vacuum worsened by the absence of a top editor on the investigative unit, her nominal home. Between Doug Frantz's departure for the Los Angeles Times in March 2003 and Matthew Purdy's arrival in January 2004, Miller had almost no high-level supervision from editors with investigative experience.

When Miller joined the Times in the late seventies, she arrived in the Washington bureau at about the same time as Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - a recent college graduate getting hands-on experience in the shop floor of the family business. The D.C. office had only about half a dozen reporters under the age of 35, including Sulzberger, Miller, Steve Rattner, and Phil Taubman. They clung to one another...Fairly or unfairly, there's a sense that Miller has protection at the absolute top - and that fear reportedly deters some editors from challenging her.

But making the process more transparent is easier than reforming the profession itself, which inevitably relies on people. People like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what's what.

1. The piece is on five pages, with no printer option. Damn!

2. How old is Miller? The piece puts her in grad school in 1971: she must be mid-50s now, surely.

3. The Beyond the Fringe sketch (Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller) is here.

And The Alex Polier Story too!

The New York Judith Miller take-down: first thoughts

Paradoxes of government

• At a time when the CEO of a company in the top 10 of the Fortune 500 is looking for tens of millions of dollars a year in salary and benefits, the President of the most powerful corporation on the planet gets a measly $400,000.

• In fields like medical care, corporations can influence the elected branches to provide them with billions in public money in fatuous or downright anti-social projects, at the expense to those corporations of a few million in campaign contributions.

• The financial health of a single industry - broadcasting - is dependent on the expenditure of contributions thus received, for campaign advertising - despite the evidence that such advertising is largely ineffective.

1. loonies;
2. zealots; or
3. crooked.

1. pols were paid the commercial rate for job; and

2. the broadcasters were paid Danegeld - for running government infomercials, say - Karen Ryan is available, I believe.

Brownstein and his time-zone edge

1. Source not remembered - possibly from looking into the LA Times-Staples Center fiasco (May 15).

Prohibition lite - the incomprehensible age-limit for drinking

Subject to the provisions of this section, the Secretary shall make grants to those States which adopt and implement effective programs to reduce traffic safety problems resulting from persons driving while under the influence of alcohol or a controlled substance...

The Secretary shall, by rule, establish criteria for effective programs to reduce traffic safety problems resulting from persons driving while under the influence of alcohol...Such criteria may include, but need not be limited to, requirements -
.
.
.
(6) for the setting of the minimum drinking age in such State at twenty-one years of age;...

1. The WaPo piece that set me off refers to DC law, which, needless to say, is different.

2. That elected in 1972 - the pons asinorum of American political history is surely to know which year each Congress started without needing to think about it. As a rank civilian, I reckon from the 80th - elected in 1946 - and work forward and back from that. Lincoln was elected to the 30th, of course, for those who delve that far back. This crib may also come in handy.

There has never been a large political or social question before the American people which did not quickly resolve itself into a moral question.

Why misspellings persist in Big Media

Mort Kondracke's column in last week's Washington Times had some rather unorthodox names: Defense Secretary Donald Ruffed. Democratic candidate John Gerry. The Bookings Institutionalize. The Viet Congo. Deposed Iraqi dictator Adam Hussies and the country's national security adviser, Moonwalk al-Rubies.

Uncle Sam's Mideast Viceroy in trouble?

1. Avoid commenting on the affairs of any country whose language you can't read.

A referendum grows in Venezuela, after all

1. If I were going to get into the detail, I'd start with this page - with what looks like a couple of dozen good links to reports and the like, many of which seem referendum-related, and some in English.

The Great Colorado Constitution Subversion Caper - again

The Colorado initiative has been bankrolled, to the tune of $150,000, by something called The People's Choice for President, formed in San Francisco. This is another of these stealth groups that seek to fly under the public radar.

The People's Choice for President's campaign adviser, Rick Rudder, ...a Democratic activist who's worked for Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Gary Hart, Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Howard Dean.

1. The regular nightly news on commercial TV (ITV), News at Ten - from around the mid 1960s, from memory, would always end with a quirky, off-beat item: dogs being rescued by owners, owners being rescued by dogs, that sort of thing. The same show, after its sig tune, would have the anchor - newscaster (BBC news presenters didn't use the word) - read the headlines of the day between Big Ben sounding the hour. These were therefore known as the Bongs.

2. On the Initiatives page of the Colorado Secretary of State's site. The text doesn't seem to be available on the site.

3. Apparently,

   Terrachord is dedicated to accelerating the implementation of new generations of environmental solutions by industry, government, and citizens through productive alliances enabled by appropriate and effective application of information technology.

   I'm none the wiser. Burnap used to be with the State government, I think.

Kerry: pre-emption with coalition?

This strategy focuses not only on what we must do, but on what we must prevent. We must ensure that lawless states and terrorists will not be armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Any potential adversary should know that we will defend ourselves against the possibility of attack by unconventional arms. If such a strike does occur, as commander-in-chief, I will respond with overwhelming and devastating force. If such an attack appears imminent, as commander-in-chief, I will do whatever is necessary to stop it. And, as commander-in-chief, I will never cede our security to anyone. I will always do what is necessary to safeguard our country.

The worst option is one in which cash-starved North Korea becomes a supplier of nuclear weapons to al Qaeda or Hamas or to radical Chechens, who then deliver them to Washington, London, or Moscow.

1. The most cursory search produces this, this, this and this. No analysis: but it looks like plenty of WMD - CW, in fact - and loads of guns and missiles to deliver it. And more conventional weapons, too, of course.

While critical of Bush for making military pre-emption a central doctrine, Kerry insisted he would be willing to use it as a "last resort."

At long last Okrent?

FROM the moment this office opened for business last December, I felt I could not write about what had been published in the paper before my arrival. Once I stepped into the past, I reasoned, I might never find my way back to the present.

Early this month, though, convinced that my territory includes what doesn't appear in the paper as well as what does, I began to look into a question arising from the past that weighs heavily on the present: Why had The Times failed to revisit its own coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?

I did not see a prima facie case for recanting or repudiating the stories.

spoken to nearly two dozen current and former Times staff members whose work touched on W.M.D. coverage

I think they got it right. Mostly.

Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles by David Johnston, James Risen and others that provided perspective or challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby.

reporters do not put stories into the newspaper. Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through various editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine where they will appear. Editors are also obliged to assign follow-up pieces when the facts remain mired in partisan quicksand.

pinning this on Miller alone is both inaccurate and unfair: in one story on May 4, editors placed the headline "U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq" over a Miller piece even though she wrote, right at the top, that the discovery was very unlikely to be related to weaponry.

the journalistic imperatives and practices that led The Times down this unfortunate path.

• The hunger for scoops -

  Times reporters broke many stories before and after the war - but when the stories themselves later broke apart, in many instances Times readers never found out. Some remain scoops to this day. This is not a compliment.

• Front-page syndrome - As they do not tell you on the back of the box,

  You can "write it onto 1," as the newsroom maxim has it, by imbuing your story with the sound of trumpets.

  Can you say Extreme moral hazard?

• Hit-and-run journalism - Defying the relentless pressure of continuous news,

  The more surprising the story, the more often it must be revisited.

  But checking is for bean-counters, isn't it?

• Coddling sources - Okrent has been too generous on the subject of anonymice: but, here, there's a shift in tone, and some useful statements of principle:

  a newspaper has an obligation to convince readers why it believes the sources it does not identify are telling the truth. That automatic editor defense, "We're not confirming what he says, we're just reporting it," may apply to the statements of people speaking on the record. For anonymous sources, it's worse than no defense. It's a license granted to liars.

  And

  I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed.

• End-run editing - despite Howell Raines' protestations to the contrary, Okrent says he found that

  a dysfunctional system enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management.

  Some stories are just too good to risk handing over to the timorous and small-minded: like reporters with actual knowledge of the subject, for instance [2].

The editors' note to readers will have served its apparent function only if it launches a new round of examination and investigation. I don't mean further acts of contrition or garment-rending, but a series of aggressively reported stories detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led virtually the entire world to believe Hussein had W.M.D. at his disposal.

We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.

1. Since May 26, there have been half a dozen or more pieces here on the subject: get down the May archive and scroll.

2. The famous email exchange between Judith Miller and John Burns, discussed in the Michael Massing NYROB piece - my piece of February 10.

Readers were never told that Chalabi's niece was hired in January 2003 to work in The Times's Kuwait bureau. She remained there until May of that year.

The Pinochet caravan sets off again

1. The sad Tale from [Lord] Hoffman for another time: that a brilliant legal mind could not spot a potential conflict of interest apparent to a ten year old is not the least mystery in the Pinochet saga.

2. A University of Alicante site seems to be the place to start for documentation on the earlier litigation. It hasn't been updated since 2000.

1. Partido Socialista Obrero Espańol - the name for historic reasons, no doubt. The French socialists were known, between the split with the Communists in or about 1920 and the early 1970s as the SFIO - the Section française de l'Internationale ouvričre.

2. John Mills rips the dead Miss Havisham's curtains in David Lean's film, at least. I decline to pretend I've actually read the Dickens Doorstep.

Electoral college antics in Colorado

In Nebraska and Maine, a candidate gets one electoral vote for each congressional district carried and two more for winning the statewide vote. Under that formula, Al Gore would have gotten two of Colorado's electoral votes in 2000, instead of none.

This initiative is more ambitious. It would award Colorado's electoral votes proportionally as a percentage of the statewide popular vote.

1. Version associated with raconteur and homosexualist Arthur Marshall - this one. Tony Hancock's (probably Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's) was all part of life's rich tapestry.

Kerry straw in the wind on foreign policy

He said securing all nuclear materials in Russia, integrating China in the world economy, achieving greater controls over Pakistan's nuclear weapons or winning greater cooperation on terrorist financing in Saudi Arabia trumped human rights concerns in those nations.

In many ways, Kerry laid out a foreign-policy agenda that appeared less idealistic about U.S. aims than President Bush or even former president Bill Clinton...

1. The piece talks about

   a one-hour interview Friday night

   Was the Post's Glenn Kessler the sole hack there - or was this a communal event?

Remembering the man with a hole in his shoe

Photographer William M. Gallagher won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for this photograph of Stevenson on the campaign trail in 1952. The image of the "Man with a Hole in his Shoe" remained with Stevenson and served as a symbol of his efforts during the 1956 presidential campaign.

Reflections on longevity- #94 Kenny Everett and Michael Foot

Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away!