Dirty tricks starting against WikiLeaks' Assange?

From The Guardian. Note that this is two events, the original arrest warrant, and its cancellation 24 hours later:

Swedish authorities have withdrawn an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, stating that the accusation of rape against him was unfounded.

The move came just a day after a warrant was issued by Sweden's prosecutors' office in Stockholm in response to accusations of rape and molestation in two separate cases. . . .

Assange has denied both accusations, first reported by the Swedish tabloid Expressen, which were described as dirty tricks on the Wikileaks' Twitter account. [my emphasis]

There's more in the article (h/t this LiveJournal community).

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Study shows second hand smoke alters genes - and not in a good way

I had a low-level asthma attack the other day - and haven't had one in probably half a year - because of all the smoke just sitting at outdoor cafes in Paris. It's really disgusting how smokers have turned any communal outdoor activity in this town, a cafe, a restaurant, into one huge cesspool of smoke. My actions at the restaurant are not stopping smokers from eating, their actions at the restaurant are in fact stopping me. How is this not impinging on my freedom to enjoy whatever public accommodation I choose?

More from TIME, I guess:

As if the growing number of smoking bans in restaurants, airplanes and other public places isn't sending a strong enough message, researchers now have the first biological data confirming the health hazards of secondhand smoke.
Scientists led by Dr. Ronald Crystal at Weill Cornell Medical College documented changes in genetic activity among nonsmokers triggered by exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke. Public-health bans on smoking have been fueled by strong population-based data that links exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke and a higher incidence of lung diseases such as emphysema and even lung cancer, but do not establish a biological cause for the correlation. Now, for the first time, researchers can point to one possible cause: the passive recipient's genes are actually being affected.

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RNC has just $5m for final push

Politico:

The troubled Republican National Committee has just over $5 million in the bank for the final stretch of the 2010 mid-term election campaign, according to an unannounced filing with the FEC disclosed Friday night.

The report also indicates that the national party headed by embattled chairman Michael Steele is carrying just over $2 million in debt.

There was no press release from the RNC attempting to put a positive spin on the grim numbers. Rather, officials from the Democratic National Committee flagged the RNC's report, which was posted on the Federal Election Commission’s website Friday night.

It indicated that the committee brought in slightly more than $5.5 million in July — less than half of what the DNC raised — while spending $11 million.

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Shot fired into Sen. Franken's Minnesota home

No one was home at the time, and there are very few details. Politico:

Minneapolis and Capitol Hill police are investigating a shot that was fired at the condo of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.).

Nobody was home at the time of the incident, which was not reported until after the senator and his wife returned home to Minneapolis after a two-day trip out of town on Tuesday and discovered the damage to their window facing the street. . . .

“Right now it’s under investigation by the Minneapolis Police and the Capitol Hill Police,” Franken spokesman Marc Kimball told POLITICO.

(Thanks to Alltop_Politics for the lead.)

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Franklin Graham says Obama was born a Muslim

What a complete idiot. And check out how he hedges when he talks about whether Obama is now a Christian. Read the rest of this post...

Obama addresses corporate political spending

Over the past couple weeks, Target saw what happens when a corporation engages in political giving. That company is suffering from a backlash and boycotts. We also saw the part Saudi-owned parent of FOX News give $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. Today, in the weekly address, the President talked about the need to pass campaign finance reform.

As the political season heats up, Americans are already being inundated with the usual phone calls, mailings, and TV ads from campaigns all across the country. But this summer, they’re also seeing a flood of attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don’t know who’s behind these ads and we don’t know who’s paying for them.

The reason this is happening is because of a decision by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case – a decision that now allows big corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections. They can buy millions of dollars worth of TV ads – and worst of all, they don’t even have to reveal who is actually paying for them. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s BP. You don’t know if it’s a big insurance company or a Wall Street Bank. A group can hide behind a phony name like “Citizens for a Better Future,” even if a more accurate name would be “Corporations for Weaker Oversight.”

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BP's oily aftermath, Colbert style

One last segment from the Colbert Report. Enjoy Colbert joking at BP's expense, and a great follow-on interview with Michael Blum, an environmental scientist from Tulane. (Interesting mixed message about tainted shrimp, by the way.)

Notice at the one-minute mark, the weaselly news-reader's description of the BP spill — "when oil began seeping" into the Gulf. Seeping? BP could have written that manipulative phrasing.



I'm impressed that Colbert is able to fit so much factual information into segments that are also funny and ironic.

If you want to see masterful PR manipulation, by the way, notice the new BP ads (no link, but they're turning up as intros to MSNBC online vids).

Pristine waters, happy citizens, a cohort of rested and ready-to-restart BP beach cleaners; and one core message:

Now that the oil is gone from the beaches, we've done our job. And if oil ever returns to the beaches, we'll be back just that fast to clean it up again.

And all that clean water in the background. The words may say "beaches," but the pictures say "all outdoors." Can you smell the manipulation? Smells like that oil "taint" Colbert joked about.

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Krugman: Policy elites are like cult priests demanding human sacrifice

Some Friday Krugman for your early morning pleasure (my emphasis):

As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.

So how do austerians deal with the reality of interest rates that are plunging, not soaring? The latest fashion is to declare that there’s a bubble in the bond market: investors aren’t really concerned about economic weakness; they’re just getting carried away. It’s hard to convey the sheer audacity of this argument: first we were told that we must ignore economic fundamentals and instead obey the dictates of financial markets; now we’re being told to ignore what those markets are actually saying because they’re confused. . . . It seems almost superfluous, given all that, to mention the final insult: many of the most vocal austerians are, of course, hypocrites.

After his audacious opening analogy (perfectly appropriate, in my view), the Professor closes with his usual soft ending — a question, not an answer. The question:

What will it take to break the hold of this cruel cult on the minds of the policy elite?

The answer: Look at your opening analogy. Priests like these have only one goal, and it's not to please invisible gods. It's to keep the priestly caste in power. The obvious answer is thus to remove them from power.

Someone needs to rid us of these meddlesome priests. If you're not working toward that goal, sir, you're preaching to the deliberately deaf. They won't walk out on their own, based on some stunning argument.

(Psst — Read your own book.)

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