* Reno's lame-ass college football team might not provide NFL quality when it comes to the actual game of football, but they're sure working up to Pro Level when it comes to criminal athletes! Reno 911 police arrested UNR Wolf Pack player Rodney Landingham for armed robbery on Thursday. An ambitious young thug, Landingham has reportedly admitted to robbing two banks and two 7/11 stores. Cops caught him just after he finished robbing the Wells Fargo on California Avenue. He had a gun and a halloween mask in his car.
This brings us up to three felony arrests for our fine football team in just a single week. Last Friday, defensive lineman Brenton Kendrick and cornerback Steven Murphy were caught selling cocaine downtown. Good work, UNR! Go Wolf Pack!
* The West Nile virus is taking the Truckee Meadows by storm! With the fun-loving virus blamed for seven infected people and one dead horse in the county, local authorities are doing something or other to stop this tragic problem ... including draining the fake lake just down the road from our Newsroom. Seems mosquitoes just love the filthy, stagnant water in our nearby ditches and scum ponds. And how do you know if you've got the West Nile? Easy! You will either have no noticeable symptoms, or your brain will swell to triple-size and you'll die.
* The town continues to be filled with very old cars ... driven by very old people! If you thought getting around Reno and avoiding collisions with its elderly drivers was bad before, then you'll love Hot August Nights. The beloved klassic kar festival wraps up this weekend, hopefully with a giant fireball.
I get a half-dozen 24-hour news channels here at the ranch -- CNN, Headline News, Fox News, CNNfN (which thankfully becomes CNN International at night), CNBC and MSNBC -- plus another 10 channels with some local or national news: CBS, NBC, ABC, the Fox affiliate, PBS, CSPAN 1 & 2, BBC America, WGN and the only truly necessary one, Comedy Central. That's about normal for cable or satellite, right? And still, the amount of actual news is miniscule.
Take that crappy Headline News (take it, please, but leave Rudi Bakhtiar, the best anchor and most beautiful woman on the teevee). It's got 30 or 40 crazy things going on, all over the screen: tickers, little pictures, tiny cartoons, clocks, twisters, flashers, flippies, etc., and way up in the corner there's a video box the size of a cell-phone display. And it's playing a 30-minute loop that was probably recorded four or five hours ago. (I guess the CNN people finally figured out nobody believes the news is live, because when it is actually live these days, they've got a big LIVE on the screen. Live news, eh? What a crazy idea!)
Anyway, this morning I was trudging through the mud flats where the desert used to be right behind the house -- a "new development" is being built, which means it's almost time to move again -- wondering why the teevee news loves the "missing what's-her-name" stories so much, when I never see anything about these worthless Court-TV events on the blogs. I look at a lot of these blogs. Lefty, Righty, legal, libertarian, jokey, group blogs ... blogs about books, movies, technology, comics, business, music, travel, dogs, specific cities or countries, food, etc. Blog writers and readers have got to be the biggest "news consumers" in the world, and yet I never see much of anything about these court cases & dead pregnant women. Was I missing something? Was there a secret world of blogs where people were as interested in these police melodramas as the news networks seem to be?
Apparently not. I checked the DayPop for mentions of the two big U.S. murder stories that seem to take up about half the news time these days, and found just 15 blogs referencing Laci Peterson and 16 mentioning Lori Hacking.
(Dumb aside: My first DayPop query was for "Laci J. Hacking," my brain-damaged mix of the two popular dead women and Lacy J. Dalton, the country singer who lives in Reno and runs a foundation to help our local wild horses.)
Plenty of people complain about all the useless Court-TV "news" stinking up the alleged news channels, of course. Merle Haggard probably said it best on his latest record:
Someone's missing in Modesto And it's sad about the clues Suddenly, the war is over And that's the news
Yet ... it would be nice if the news producers and assignment editors paid attention to what the bloggy folk consider "Headline News." But they probably won't. The truth is, covering the murder du jour is so embedded in the TeeVee News Culture that it probably won't ever go away. Plus, it's really cheap and easy, compared to covering real news -- especially international stuff. You send a cameraman and a talking head to the courthouse. The teevee trucks park in a line, transmitters pointed at the sky. The reporter may or may not sit in the courtroom all day. The camera guys stand around in the shade, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and eating tacos off the catering truck. Three or four times a day, everybody mobs around the prosecutor or defense attorney on the steps, always on the steps. You get the sound bite from each side, try to get a shot of the defendant getting in the lawyer's car or sheriff's truck, and that's about it. Every day, sometimes for a year or even longer, these national teevee people live in a hotel next to the courthouse.
I've never worked for teevee news, other than a brief & useless high-school internship at an NBC affiliate, but I have covered a few marathon trials. You sit there for six hours a day, obsessively keeping track of every argument and bit of trivial evidence. Eventually, you don't know about anything else but this stupid trial, one of many thousands of trials going on across America. But you can't leave, because the other papers won't leave, and teevee people won't budge until it's over. It's like being a long-term temp at some company you couldn't possibly care about under normal circumstances. But soon you know these people, you have lunch and beers with them, you become work buddies with the guards and the cops and the lawyers and the frequent witnesses -- everybody but the jury. Once there's a verdict, of course, you go after those jury members like a dog on a steak.
And so much for all that. Just wanted to say that I know some teevee-news people follow the blogs. We are your Top Customers. How about some news? Let goddamned Court TV deal with the dumb trials that don't matter at all. I know, it's expensive to get real news. But if you don't figure out how to afford it, soon, you're going to be up against the video equivalent of news bloggers, and you will be sad about that.
History reveals over 125 major incidents of subterfuge, terror, or violence on American soil by enemies within its' borders -- many with deadly consequences and grave impact. Each time, Americans responded with renewed patriotism, determination, and a quandary: how can the country be made more secure without compromising the civil liberties upon which it was founded?
THE ENEMY WITHIN reveals dramatic episodes in American history, from 1776 to the present, when the U.S. was attacked at home. How the country acted -- and sometimes over-reacted-- resulted in the evolution of U.S. counterintelligence and security measures that have positioned the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the vigilance of every American, to contend with the enemy within today.
Been wanting to see this museum since it opened two years ago. They've got piles of crazy stuff, including a Nazi Enigma machine, Navajo code-talker gizmos, J. Edgar Hoover's desk phone, secret bombs, listening devices, disguised guns ... even a James Bond Aston Martin DB 5, to show the "blends [of] pop culture and history" or something.
Officials in Indiana and Washington, D.C., said they are dumbfounded by a statement U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris made about a terrorist plot to blow up a power grid in Indiana ....
"As the sheriff of this county, I would certainly be aware of such a threat," Hamilton County Sheriff Doug Carter said. "I have no information to corroborate any of that."
In an interview Tuesday, Harris would not reveal the name of the mayor who told her about the threat or provide further details. She said in the speech that a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested in the plot and that explosives were found in his home in Carmel, a suburb north of Indianapolis.
Harris, a Republican from Longboat Key [Fla.] who is running for re-election, said the case was an example of the nation's success in fighting terrorism ....
Floyd Jay Winters, one of four Democrats running for the nomination to oppose Harris in this fall's election, called it irresponsible to bring up allegations at a rally but provide no details. In the case of the alleged plot in Indiana, "it will only incite fear if it's not true and if it is true, she shouldn't be talking about it because it is classified," Winters said.
But Don O'Nesky, head of the Republican Club of South Sarasota County, which sponsored Monday's event, said Harris' comments rang true.
Can't anybody have a little fun? Big Trouble in St. Louis, where two lawyers freaked out a bunch of people in their office building by having an old-fashioned air-gun battle:
Marietta Young peered out the glass door of her office at an unnerving sight. Pacing in the hallway of the upscale office building in west St. Louis County, just a couple of feet away, was a man wearing a blue shirt and holding a pistol.
"I didn't know what to think, but it was scary," said Young, a receptionist for the Tom James Co., a clothier. "At one point he stopped and peeped at me."
Young hid under her desk and asked her boss to call the police.
Officers arrived to find six to eight women hiding in cars, in closets and under desks at the three-story brick building .... As police searched, they were met by Melinda Hagaman, who works at a business in the building; she told them not to worry.
"I knew it had to be the lawyers from down the hall," she said in an interview Monday. "They had done this before."
Now one of the poor bastards is facing Felony Weapons charges; the other lawyer ran off to hide, apparently. I guess you can't do this kind of thing in offices anymore. Too bad. Humans weren't meant to spend their lives in offices, so the natural human reaction to such imprisonment -- at least for men, who are known for their maturity -- is to devise mock battles, horrible pranks, etc.
I have witnessed some rotten things go down: buckets of toilet water propped above semi-closed doors, foul lunch waste stashed inside wall heaters (smells better every week!), wheels removed from desk chairs (you just remove one, and arrange that chair leg to be out of view, then the guy falls over when he sits down, usually spilling coffee in his lap), dozens of bulging file folders carefully stapled together near the bottom edge (think about it), the "crawling index card" trick (slowly move the thumbtacked index cards on some middle-manager's bulletin board until they've crawled off the board entirely), fake mash notes left on windshields, mock arrests by real cops (an advantage of the Police Beat), etc.
Now why don't you be Helpful and share your favorite form of Office Cruelty in the comments?
First, you've got an administration that barely got into the White House at all -- the race wasn't only tight, but there were many valid claims of election fraud.
A horrific act of terrorism unites much of the country around the administration. Hoping to capitalize on this national nightmare, the Texan president and his minders carefully exploit the country's grief and fear.
Skip ahead to election season. The challenger -- a bad campaigner, war veteran, perceived extremist and very rich man -- has a chance of winning. That horrible day nobody would ever forget? Well, it was a couple years old now, and the country is no longer so unified. Those who never liked the administration in the first place are ready to clean house, still angry about the previous election's sketchy results. It doesn't matter that the challenger hardly represents a consensus in the party. It's enough that he's not the incumbent.
What did the incumbent president and his vicious campaign leaders do to ensure victory? They scared the bejesus out of people with images of a nation about to be blown up by the Enemy. If the challenger won, said the president's men, we would all be meeting the Angel of Death in the form of a mushroom cloud.
* * *
Of course, that incumbent president was Lyndon B. Johnson. His challenger was Barry Goldwater. The national horror was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who "won" the 1960 election with the help of Democratic heavies in a few battleground states.
Johnson's ad man, Tony Schwartz, was a sort of Marshall McLuhan / new-media genius with manipulation skills that would make Lee Atwater grin in admiration. For LBJ's re-election campaign, Schwartz created one of the most famous commercials in the history of teevee. I remember seeing it on dozens of news programs & documentary-type things as a child, and I wasn't even born when it first aired. The ad, in fact, only aired once as a paid spot. But it was so crazy & scary that every news program ran it again and again throughout those final months of the campaign.
It worked. Goldwater was pummeled. LBJ won 61 percent of the popular vote. Goldwater crawled off with only six states.
The commercial shows a little girl who can't count very well. She's in a field, plucking petals off a daisy. And then the petals are gone and a big Darth Vader voice is doing a countdown, and then it gets to zero and the little girl's face is a pancake of dumb fear and BOOOOM there's the mushroom cloud. Johnson's voice is heard next, saying how important it is to vote. Hell, that Goldwater will get you all blown to bits.
Go ahead and watch it. It's weird. Until recently, I thought it was so cheesy that it had a kind of Monty Python comedy feel. Nobody would fall for that kind of ham-fisted scare, not in our enlightened era ....
* * *
This has been a Public Service to remind you that the idea of Terrorizing the Electorate is hardly new, and hardly exclusive to Karl Rove. First in a series, etc.
The volunteers were aged from 18 into their 50s and described themselves as ranging from liberal to deeply conservative. No matter what a person's political conviction, thinking about death made them tend to favor Bush, Solomon said. Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.
Four days into Operation Terror Scam, and now the White House says they forgot to mention that there's some really, really specific -- and Super Secret -- ultra-scary evidence that's totally new, really, please believe us, we are very serious!
If President Bush is truly serious about preventing terrorist attacks, he has to ensure that these alerts, even when they're wrong, are at least perceived as sincere and untainted by political motive. By this standard, Tom Ridge last Sunday proved himself a dreadful homeland security secretary, and the Bush administration (by association, if not collaboration) diminished the trust that a president must inspire on such matters.
During the news conference where he announced the heightened alert, Ridge made the following remark: "We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror."
As far as I can tell, only Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, quoted this line. On one level, the "real" news media might be lauded for ignoring the sentence and thus separating the news from the propaganda. But on another level, by censoring Ridge's spin, aren't they distorting the news? Isn't his spin part of the news? Could it be that the spin spurred the news, supplied (at least in part) the rationale for the announcement -- especially given the broader context of its timing just a few days after the Democratic Convention?
Assuming the documents are authentic, a case can be made that Bush should have issued the alert, regardless of whether his motives were honorable or cynical. But given the bumpy ride ahead, it would be nice if we could assume they are honorable.
N. Korea Can Now Hit California! (Thanks, Rev. Moon)
Swapping e-mails with Jim Treacher the other day, I wrote something about why it seemed necessary to start up this blogging nonsense again: It's because I feel like the next six months are going to be Extraordinary. And since returning to this little Web site last month, following "The News" has been more entertaining and strange than any political thriller.
Jane's Defense Weekly is reporting this week that Kim Jong-Il, unstable North Korean dictator (I wrote about him in the British Guardian) may be able to target California with sea-launched missiles. His know-how, the Reuters story relates, comes from 12 ex-Soviet submarines that fell into his hands. They came with their original launch tubes and stabilizing gear intact. Where does Kim get those wonderful toys?
Fantastic. Moon is equipping North Korea with the tools to launch a nuclear strike on the West Coast. This would be the same Rev. Moon who was anointed twice this year as The New Messiah & King of Peace, in a Senate building, during ceremonies attended by dozens of U.S. Representatives and at least a couple of Senators.
Make sure to read this whole article if you haven't already. It makes Osama Bin Laden sound like a benign, rational philosopher:
Say you're a congressman who's just been caught attending an event where a notorious cult leader declares himself the Messiah. You say you were fooled into attending the "awards dinner," but you learn that the Messiah has been going from church to church having Christian crosses torn down and offering poor deacons gold watches to switch saviors from Jesus to himself.
Then, you hear that he's been making speeches like this: "If the U.S. continues its corruption, and we find among the senators and congressmen no one really usable for our purposes, we can make senators and congressmen out of our members. ... I have met many famous -- so-called "famous' -- senators and congressmen, but to my eyes they are just nothing. They are weak and helpless before God."
Is it time to stop attending the multibillionaire's flashy "world peace" symposiums in South Korea? After all, the hosts were probably less interested in your "Beyond Missiles to Global Culture" talk -- the one that culled a $3,000 honorarium in 2002 -- than in using you to make their family-shattering organization look respectable. Is it time to demand to know why a man who wants to bulldoze traditional Christian values is warmly received on Capitol Hill?
Armed gunmen took two Carter County Sheriff Department deputies and the Carter County Commission hostage Monday shortly after 7 p.m. Audience members watched in disbelief as three armed men and one armed woman threatened everyone in the Carter County Courthouse with guns and a bomb that was allegedly placed in the building to deter anyone from escaping.
The four armed people, along with a few other unarmed citizens, frightened everyone who was not made aware that the mock situation was a drill, conducted by the Elizabethton/Carter County Emergency Management Agency.
A man and a woman held guns to the backs of deputies stationed at the rear and side entrances of the courtroom. Another gunman waived a pistol while preventing people from exiting the back door. Fearful commissioners watched in disbelief while waiting for an official to take control of the situation .... Commissioner Robert Davis challenged the man, saying this was an "authorized governmental meeting" and "Where is the sheriff?" Davis stormed past one of the gunmen saying, "Don't touch me. Do not touch me."
A shot was fired from the gunman at the rear door warning people to sit still and to stop moving as commissioners scurried into locked jury rooms only accessible to the people sitting behind the wooden gate.
Audience members were unaware of the secretly planned drill, and some fought back tears while Emergency Management Director Earnest Jackson walked calmly to the podium and informed County Mayor Dale Fair, commissioners and other officials that the hostage situation was only a drill.
"We conducted a scenario. We are required to have two drills per year and this exercise is what we tried to do this evening. This is something that could occur. Whether we like it or not this scenario is very real," Jackson said. He also rationalized the drill by saying "We are faced with terrorism every day. I was trying to do my job."
Of course, no American in power -- not even the Homeland Security director in Carter County, Tenn. -- would ever trick people into believing The Terror had arrived. And if such a trick did happen to occur, it would be because we are faced with terrorism every day. That's what happens when you're trying to do your job. Think about it. How do you, faced with terrorism every day, "do your job" if you live in a little Appalachian town of 13,000 that isn't exactly a High Value Target for terrorists? Well, maybe you just terrorize the people yourself. Just make sure you don't tip your hand by letting the rest of the government know what's going on:
Jackson intended for the drill to last 30-40 minutes and include emergency response from all county agencies. However, the drill went awry when a few commissioners jumped up and demanded to know why Carter County Sheriff John Henson was sitting behind commissioners without reacting to the hostage situation.
Almost all of the commissioners, County Mayor, and other officials were intentionally uninformed of the drill. Jackson tried to tell all audience members and commissioners who are law enforcement employees before the meeting.
The only good to come from this cheap backwater stunt is that Mr. Jackson is suspended and state investigators are on the case. He should've been shot dead at the scene.
That's a quote from Michael Totten up there. And I'm sorry, but I just can't remember the Headline Cap rules. The should be down if it doesn't start the sentence, and a should be down in such circumstances, and the rest has suddenly become a mystery. Does it matter? Whatever rules I learned are ignored by USA Today, CNN and a million other Web Sites and TeeVee Networks and Nation's Newspapers. The dull tyranny of random editorial style has won the war!
Anyway. MJT has one of those logical minds -- I've been trying to get one for myself -- and is rarely swayed by "moonbat" theories. Yet, he isn't happy about the Terror Campaigning. The comments are interesting, too.
Why do I post this? Because if Rove & Co. lose the Tough-On-Terrorism centrist voters, Bush loses.
At the same time, Kerry's campaign stays clear of this mess, only sending out attack-dog Howard Dean to make the "It's B.S." claims on the teevee. Maybe that's smart, maybe not. I don't know. It sure looks like the strategy of a wuss. Then again, I've never voted for a winner when it comes to the Presidential Elections. My skill set is broken. (Even though I like the Clinton these days, I couldn't stand him in '92 and would not vote for him. So I registered 20 U.S. voters in Prague -- all Dems -- and didn't vote myself. I got a T-Shirt for my trouble: VOICE -- Voter Outreach In Central Europe.)
Actually, with all the time Bush & Cheney & Rove spend in Reno these days, I don't know that we're as off the map as I'd like to be .... (Kerry & Edwards will make the first of about 1,000 Nevada campaign stops in two weeks. I can't wait to see those guys live! I hear the new one is dreamy!)
Meanwhile, Judith Miller is doing her usual hysterical act on Chris Matthews. Shouldn't she be in jail by now, instead of jabbering more crazed B.S. on the news?
After getting through the insane security at CitiBank Headquarters -- caused by four-year-old Evidence of Terror Plans released Sunday to scare the bejesus out of you -- you get to say "Hi" to Laura Bush in the lobby! That's neat.
It's neat when schedules work out that way.
Oh, and the Immediate Alert Scary-Ville terror info? Now they're saying it actuallyrefers to an attack planned for Sept. 2. You know, the last day of the Republican Convention in New York, when Bush gives his big speech?
This stinks. Go ahead and say, as Tom Ridge did this morning, "This is not about politics. It's about confidence in government." If you have to deny it's about politics -- while your party is actively campaigning in the locked-down buildings of New York City filled with teevee cameras and photographers and frazzled employees who wonder if today's Terror Day -- then you have done a Poor Job of showing us otherwise.
If you launch a Big Scare on Sunday -- when the big political news for the coming week is the just-finished Democratic convention -- and don't tell us the info you're holding is four years old and that it doesn't refer to any immediate attacks, and then the newspapers come out with that information, and then you change your story and say that the Attack Plans actually refer to Sept. 2 in New York, when the incumbent president will give his big campaign speech, you do not sound like a person would ever treat the Dept. of Homeland Security as anything but a campaign office.
So am I to understand that NYC will be under lockdown for the next month, and the whole world watches as the Terrorized City awaits that Sept. 2 deadline with terrible fear, and we get there without an attack (I hope), and a grateful nation watches the Bush speech, and then the barricades & body armor go away with the GOP convention? Is that the schedule?
I don't have a clue what might really be going on. Is the information honest, the threat real and the administration just incredibly bumbling? Well, we know the information wasn't honest. Otherwise, Ridge would've told the truth about the "intelligence" on Sunday during his Scary Show. The threat may indeed be real -- it's sure not News that terrorist have wanted to blow up famous buildings in big cities, is it? -- but it doesn't seem to be "real" in the sense that it required two huge & important American cities to be locked down this week. And the administration, despite its desperate attempts at Total Secrecy, can't seem to keep its secrets for very long ... it only took a day for the the truth about the evidence to hit the front pages of the Times & the Post.
Bottom line: the new director heads no agency, doesn't have cabinet rank, doesn't work in the White House, has no budget authority, and apparently has no reporting authority. In other words, he's just a figurehead.
This is a sham. If Bush doesn't like the 9/11 Commission's recommendations he should have the guts to say so. Instead, he and Rumsfeld have cooked up a transparent con: to the public at large it looks like he's acting decisively to take up the commission's recommendations, but anyone who knows how Washington works understands that he's really just giving them the finger.
This is a complete victory for the Pentagon. They'll be able to brush off this new director like a fly.
Just saw Bob Kerrey speaking at the 9/11 hearings. (And if Congress is in recess, who's holding these hearings? Temps?) Kerrey, one of the commission members, said Rumsfeld is going to fight to the death to keep DoD free of this new "intelligence czar," and if he succeeds the whole process will be worth absolutely nothing.
I'm not sure if the whole process is already worthless. All that seems certain is that somebody -- Bush or Kerry -- will approve the creation of another thick layer of bureaucracy that will further muddle an already crazy system of 16 different intelligence agencies. And the new thing will almost certainly allow morePatriot Act-style abuses. As we have already seen, cops & prosecutors will happily use "anti-terrorism laws" against anybody, for any reason at all.
Anyway, what does it matter if we've got the best, most streamlined intelligence system in the history of the planet ... if intelligence is simply ordered up to nakedly serve the political goals of an administration?
Nothing will happen before the election, I figure. And if Kerry's team moves to the White House in January, they'll probably rush to enact the commission's Exact Recommendations, even if previously ignored bits are found to be completely insane -- like a new protocol for secret spy handshakes, or a Total Ban on mustaches, etc.
I do love the FARK.com. The blogs are wearying, in large numbers, because you pretty much know what a specific blog is going to say about anything, just as you know what Begala will say on "Crossfire" or what Cavuto will say on Fox. To steal a phrase from Saddam, it's just political theater. (Doesn't mean there's nothing worth reading on the poli-blogs -- and I do read more of 'em than is wise -- but knowing how they'll respond to almost any news takes the learning away from the Experience.)
The FARK members seem to be a lot more like people down at the corner bar. To a few, everything's Right or Left and everything fits neatly into a two-party system where the other side is always Evil. The majority, though, can still see Bad People on any side & are able to use their own minds and not exclusively rely on the Talking Points. Here's a nice, simple example from a Farker:
A) This is a credible threat.
B) Bush is an asshat.
A and B can both be true at the same time.
And just like at the corner bar, now and then somebody gets crazy and has to be 86'd. But that's all right. It's a friendly bar, and most Problems are resolved without trouble.
You know what's sad? Well, lots of things. But the saddest thing to me is when you can't even believe the "Yes this is a definite terror alert, for sure this time!" everybody-stay-calm everybody-go-crazy reports on the teevee, from our beloved Dept. of Homeland Security.
To fark around with the people who lived through the Sept. 11 attacks and are now nervously getting their new disaster plans together ... that's not only sad, it is sick & subhuman.
Because tonight we know -- as so many of us expected, because you can almost set your watch by the Scary Time Terror Alerts -- that the brand-new super secret specific terror plans announced on Sunday, the weekend Bush & Cheney went into High Gear on the campaign trail, are neither new nor specific. It's all three or four year old. (The Washington Post story says there may be one "updated" item from six months ago, and even that might've come "from information about the buildings that is publicly available.") Whatever terror surveillance was done, the usual bunch of anonymous law enforcement & intelligence people say, it was done before the NYSE, IMF, etc., adopted strict & permanent security after Sept. 11. Doesn't mean the bastards won't still try to blow up stuff, doesn't mean there was nothing of value in these three or four year old reports (who knows?), but it sure as hell means the one and only reason you would try to freak out the NYC and D.C. metropolitan areas is to fill 'em with fear and make them stop thinking about such luxuries as giving the policies and actions of the 2004 presidential candidates a hard look.
Jesus, it's beyond reprehensible.
Know what happens when you're a scared New Yorker or Jerseyite or D.C. resident and you visit the Dept. of Homeland Security's Web site because, well, you don't want to die, and you don't want your family and friends to die, and maybe you would like to figure out how to avoid becoming another grim statistic in the War on Terror?
You get this helpful political message from Tom Ridge:
But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President's leadership in the war against terror.
Yes! We must understand the grand role of George W. Bush in unmasking this nefarious three or four year old scheme. Always remember!
IN THE COMMENTS, my buddy Scott Chaffin says that the 9/11 plot itself was three or four years old and it still happened, and that he would rather know this stuff than not know. And I agree, of course. What should enrage one & all about the Sunday Freakout is that they made no mention of the info being three or four years old. They made it sound like it was going to happen today. And they didn't have anything (that we know of) to make them believe it was going to happen today. And they went ahead with the Eminent Threat Horror Scare. That is wrong, that is politically motivated, and the law-enforcement & intelligence sources in the newspaper stories seem bewildered by the Sunday Scare.
The Holland Tunnel & Williamsburg Bridge were closed to NYC-bound trucks today -- that costs a lot of people and businesses Big Money. How long do we keep that up? People were out of their minds with fear today. Yet, Mayor Mike Bloomberg admitted, "There was no time frame, and let me emphasize that -- there was no time frame associated with the intelligence."
I can't tell you if the Prudential financial center in northern New Jersey has been under High Security for years, because I've never been there. I have been around all the other Targets on this list, especially the IMF and World Bank in D.C. I walked past those well-known global Western institutions every day -- sometimes I even entered the buildings -- when I worked on H Street in D.C. And I can tell you that even back in 1999-2000, those buildings were under high alert pretty much all the time. There were paramilitary guards, those giant concrete cones around the entrance, total lockdowns when the protestors came to town, helicopters, etc. It is not news that the American headquarters of global and federal institutions are constantly under threat of terrorist attack, whether foreign or domestic. Based on its iconic height & profile more than anything that happened there, the WTC towers were struck by Islamic terrorist bombers in 1993 before passenger planes were used to take the buildings down in 2001. But from all I can gather -- and it is only what we are told by DHS and the press -- this current threat is the same truck-bombing threat we've known about for a decade. Yes, it's serious. Yes, we must watch out. Yes, it could and probably will happen again, someday, maybe on Thursday and maybe in 2007.
Yet none of that explains why NYC and D.C. and Northern New Jersey went batty today, except that a politically motivated cabinet-level department wanted everybody to be scared right now.
It is news guaranteed to raise a cheer among those who enjoy a glass or two: drinking half a bottle of wine a day can make your brain work better, especially if you are a woman.
Research to be published tomorrow by academics at University College London has found that those who even drink only one glass of wine a week have significantly sharper thought processes than teetotallers.
Sir Michael Marmot of UCL led the study
The benefits of alcohol, which are thought to be linked to its effect on the flow of blood to the brain, can be detected when a person drinks up to 30 units of alcohol - about four to five bottles of wine - per week.
Women obviously have the advantage here, which is why I am conducting a long-term experiment involving substantially higher dosages.
Well, goody. Now the Bush Administration wants a new intelligence bureaucracy and a new "Intelligence Czar." (If this keeps up, Bush will soon be in favor of tax increases for rich people, homosexual-marriage incentives and a Federal Late-Term Fetus Harvesting Center.)
Makers of cubicle dividers, copy machines, office-network systems and industrial coffee makers were delighted to hear another federal bureaucracy would be created by the Bush Administration. "Honestly, I thought it couldn't get any better than the Department of Homeland Security," said Office Depot CEO Mac Smiley. "Like I just told our Board of Directors, this is Christmas in August."
Reached at his ranch in Pakistan, a bored Osama bin Laden said, "Whatever. Oh, and death to America ...."
It was bad enough to have Kerry go on and on about how he would immediately adopt all the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, as if that was some kind of incredible bravery, to just rubber-stamp the pointless creation of a whole new spy organization -- one that will have enough spooky domestic power to at least deserve a serious debate.
Also, is anyone keeping a scorecard on Bush's increasingly schizophrenic pronouncements?
UPDATE 12:37 P.M. -- Yes, there is a difference between Kerry & Bush's "agreement" with the 9/11 commission. Having the new Super Secret Top Level Intelligence Chief work outside the White House actually makes the new Agency even more useless. And it gives another layer of political protection to the White House.
It hardly matters in the long run, because Kerry's spin on this will be, "And unlike the current president, I'll move the Intelligence Czar into the White House, into my own bedroom if necessary, because nobody can adopt the exact recommendations of a commission like John Kerry can!"
Dick Cheney came to Reno this weekend. He flew in on Friday evening -- from my house, you could see Air Force 2 touch down -- and gave a little speech in the morning to the Disabled Veterans meeting at the Hilton.
As usual, nobody else was invited. Getting into the Hilton on Saturday morning was like getting into the Green Zone in Baghdad. No questions were taken from the press or anybody else. Because he arrived on Friday night and spoke Saturday morning and was gone by lunchtime, few who weren't in the Hilton conference room ever knew he was here. Most of disabled vets were from out of town. There was a story in the Saturday paper, which nobody reads, and a segment or two on the Saturday teevee news, which nobody watches because it's the weekend and people have better things to do.
So how is this campaigning?
Nevada is, as you've heard, a Battleground State. The race is tight as hell out here. Bush won this state by just 20,000 votes last time around. The Republican lead in voter registration has dropped down to 8,000 since then, while the state has gained an electoral vote -- thanks to booming populations in Vegas / Clark County and up here in Reno / Tahoe / Carson -- and independents still make up 20 percent of the electorate.
Bush came through a month ago and spoke at the Reno Convention Center. My wife, a registered independent, got a personal invite on the telephone. She said no thanks. Apparently, a lot of people said no. A few days later, the teevee news was promoting a See The President scheme, whereby you went to the local Toyota dealership and the Secret Service would give you a free ticket if you looked right. Eventually, they filled the convention center's main room with a Bush-friendly crowd. That might not be anybody's idea of an effective plan to convince independent or swing voters to go your way, but at least there was a chance for a few undecideds to see Dubya in the flesh.
Cheney's little visit didn't seem to have any point at all, unless he is deeply worried about a couple hundred disabled vets voting against Bush / Cheney and maybe voting for someone who actually served in Vietnam. Then again, this seems to be the New Normal when it comes to Cheney on the campaign trail. Those who don't swear allegiance aren't allowed to be in the same building with the Veep.
Kerry & Edwards have yet to come through Northern Nevada. Maybe it's on their Chug Chug Choo Choo Hello America schedule; I don't know. When they do start assaulting us with their own special kind of "We can do better" love, I sure hope it is in a semi-public place. If Kerry or Edwards just walked down Virginia Street shaking hands -- in the manner they seem to do all the time in other states -- it would be far more than Bush / Cheney will ever do. It would be almost human.
Apologies, I guess, if things look a little screwy around here for the next few hours / days / years. I'm trying to work out some elegant dual-Front Page solution so that our Musical Site might also show up, or maybe some split-screen thing, or one of those Pop Ups everybody loves so much ....
It appears the Great Blogging Revolution of the DNC has been judged a bummer, a wash, and a terrible waste of the great potential exhibited a whole week ago when hundreds of Journalists proclaimed Political Convention Blogging to be the biggest, bestest, neatest trend in Media.
As a spectator this time around, I guess I could jump on the sad-clown bandwagon and agree that it was all a miserable waste of time, a bunch of silly hype, etc. But that's not actually true, except for the "silly hype" part -- and you should understand by now that any novelty whatsoever will be aggressively & endlessly covered by the convention media hordes: Lady in a funny hat, guys with boxes on their heads, trouble with the balloons, the usual heavy security, lines for the toilet, etc. Nothing will ever live up to convention-media hype.
It has all been forgotten now, but four years ago the media hordes went just as loopy for "new media" at the convention. Not even the reporters who covered it could possibly remember what a big deal they made out of "e-journalists" attending the GOP & DNC conventions of 2000. Then again, who would want to remember writing this:
The test of whether the Internet has come of age as a political medium is: Can you follow the GOP convention as closely as ever without ever turning on a television? The answer is yes -- if you can put up with some annoying technical problems.
San Francisco Chronicle Aug. 1, 2000
Let's take a walk back down "Internet Avenue," "Democracy Row" and "Internet Alley," the cleverly named, far-from-the-action areas set aside for "new media" at the 2000 conventions. There were many, many Web / Technology companies at these things, along with the online divisions of traditional media companies (ABCNews.com, Wired.com, etc.) and reporters from online magazines (Slate, Salon, ZDNet). Fine. Even though HotWired and Salon and several other online publications had been around during the previous conventions -- here's Salon columnist James Carville getting tossed out of the 1996 GOP convention in San Diego and HotWired's Brock Meeks reporting from the same party -- it was just unbelievably big news that they were once again covering the presidential campaign.
In the interactive age, only Dead Media would sit high up in glass booths gazing down and piously intoning on events where nothing happens. Only Dead Media would race around convention floors wearing headsets and interviewing delegates who have no decisions to make, no issues to debate, and little to do other than scream and applaud when told to do so.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Reminding us that New Media Hubris & Hypocrisy is certainly not new to 2004 (or 2000), Katz then informs us that lots of online reporters in 1996 were already doing exactly what he just attacked as the exclusive realm of "Dead Media."
But the online media seem to be drawn in as well.
The Netizen, which views itself as a beacon of the new digital culture, is in Chicago in considerable numbers and at great expense. Other online sites such as AllPolitics and PoliticsNow are covering the conventions in even more minutiae than the networks. Others may be more or less liberal or conservative, skeptical or accepting, but their very presence implies ratification and acquiescence.
You tell 'em, Katz!
Good times, good times. While the world may have forgotten this vintage 1996 blend of Web triumphalism and "conventions are worthless commercials" grumbling, the present offers much of the same in ever so slightly new skins. (Nice wine metaphor, jackass!) From this week, for example, here's Dave Winer's "online writers are at the conventions" triumphalism and Jeff Jarvis' "conventions are worthless commercials" grumblings.
The point, I think, is that the convention-blogger buddies should not be Sad & Blue about the dim reviews they've received. Web-page writers didn't live up to the hype in 2000, and they didn't even get hype in 1996, because most newspaper & teevee journalists hadn't quite figured out the Internet existed. Imagine how sad you would feel to cover the whole thing, from the floor, making history, etc., and nobody even comprehends what you're talking about, let alone acknowledges your efforts in the New York Times.
Besides, there were at least a handful of blogs that did a good job some of the time. (You can't do a good job all the time at these logistical hellshows. Most of the 24 hours are spent talking to people, walking around, standing in lines, drinking with pals old & new, sleeping, sightseeing, drinking alone, getting lost, finding decent food and maybe listening to part of a speech or two. This leaves maybe two hours a day for the computer, anchored to some spot with wireless or wired Internet access. Oh, and then you need something to report or at least make jokes about. Spending 10 hours a day with a laptop on your, uh, lap? Then you should've stayed home, like the smart people did.)
If you're going to do this blogging stuff at the next convention, you should really start the work now. Set up some interviews, start calling people like your hometown delegates, post all kinds of crazy speculation, plan elaborate parties and get other people to pay the bills, trick people into drunkenly dissing the platform (you could win their trust online, gradually), etc.
And if you haven't read Hunter Thompson's book about the 1972 campaign, go buy a copy right now and study it very carefully. (If you've read it, but not during this campaign cycle, go get it off the shelf and pay attention. I read it every four years and always learn something new. It's also a terrific Early Days introduction to many party stalwarts and Washington insiders we all know and despise today.)
Thompson created a completely new & totally unique style of coverage that is remarkably similar to the style & tone of the best news / commentary weblogs. The unadorned interview transcriptions, big chunks of text from newspaper & magazine articles, funny graphics & photos, wild conjecture, personal insults, out-front bias, inside-baseball trivia, brilliant insight mixed with hungover analysis, strange conspiracies, breathless news flashes, goofy footnotes and running personal essay ... that was Thompson at the top of his form in 1971-72, and it had the bizarre dual impact of both changing journalism forever and ensuring that nobody like him would ever again work for any Serious Media Property.
You, however, are now working in the only media format on Earth where such nakedly-subjective all-you-can-eat narrative journalism is welcome. And that's mostly because there is no boss, or reliable income, or anything beyond your heart and brain and a fanciful electronic typewriter. Still, it is published work, available to as small or large an audience as you deserve. It is as real as Judith Miller's lies, as solid as Mike Barnicle's plagiarism, and hopefully more interesting than Jayson Blair's cheap-ass little fictions. ("Oh, I'm in Maryland, but I'm really in Brooklyn ...." That's the best the little crapbag could invent? Forget the "journalistic sins." He should've been fired, and then executed, for a tragic lack of imagination.)
Will you ever have the impact of ... oh, let's pick a name out of the air ... the New York Times' Judith Miller? Well, it's doubtful whatever you write will directly lead to the violent death of a thousand Americans in Iraq. But who knows? Go out there and give it a whirl, as they say.
Also, it is important to realize the conventions, while not meaningless, are in fact the end to a long process, not a thing unto themselves. In the GOP's case, that process began some six years ago when a faction in the party command structure decided to run the almost totally unknown George W. Bush against Al Gore. They gambled correctly that American voters would find the name familiar, without remembering they had voted Bush I out of office just eight years earlier. Only problem was that the hard conservative wing of the party didn't want anything to do with a Bush, at first. They saw Pappy Bush as a soft internationalist ... and a loser. But a savage machine was put together, and the Big Donors decided Young Dubya was just the kind of friendly face with a familiar name they needed to get a bunch of Nixon, Ford and Reagan-era thugs back in power, and it all worked out great!
(I hope some of the more politically connected bloggers, like Josh Marshall, will soon have a whole lot of stuff about the backroom deals & promises secured in Boston. I know the big promises have already been made, but with Edwards' coming in relatively late in the game, there should've been a lot of "smoke-filled room" talk about the lesser prizes & who's up to get them ... and who's up to be severely punished.)
There's all this talk about Kerry being the nominee of a fractured party, and once again nobody seems capable of remembering a whole four years ago when the GOP field included Pat Buchanan, John McCain, Steve Forbes, Elizabeth Dole, Lamar Alexander, Dan Quayle, Alan Keyes and John Kasich. (I think that's all of them.) And John McCain whipped Dubya's ass all the way to South Carolina, when Karl Rove authorized a last-minute "telephone poll" asking Republican voters what they might think about McCain having a nigger child out of wedlock. I'm not kidding! Nobody remembers anything.
But it's all there, thanks to Google, if anybody cares to look into it.
Our top stories tonight:
* The West Nile virus is taking the Truckee Meadows by storm! With the fun-loving virus blamed for 
Johnson's ad man, 
Also, it is important to realize the conventions, while not meaningless, are in fact the end to a long process, not a thing unto themselves. In the GOP's case, that process began some six years ago when a faction in the party command structure decided to run the almost totally unknown George W. Bush against Al Gore. They gambled correctly that American voters would find the name familiar, without remembering they had voted Bush I out of office just eight years earlier. Only problem was that the hard conservative wing of the party didn't want anything to do with a Bush, at first. They saw Pappy Bush as a soft internationalist ... and a loser. But a savage machine was put together, and the Big Donors decided Young Dubya was just the kind of friendly face with a familiar name they needed to get a bunch of Nixon, Ford and Reagan-era thugs back in power, and it all worked out great!
