9/11 Press for Truth


Yesterday, we here on the trusty Wurlitzer, posted about the routine manner in which the corporate press kinda mentions and kinda doesn't mention important elements in a given "news" story.
Some important people, in this film made available by Google Video, once popularized the practice as "connecting the dots".
I urge you to connect a few dots yourself and all for the cost of an hour and a half.
Watch this film, link to it and make at least one other person watch it.
A brilliant and compelling telling of the most important post September 11 story never told.
The use of a time line and material published around the world also illuminates the alQaeda escape from Tora Bora and the complicity of a mysterious global super power.

Video: 911PressForTruth.com, John Seagriff
- posted by Sean @ 2:15 PM 0 comments

 
"12 Soldiers"


As a boy I was taught about sins of commission and omission.
According to vast swaths of the traditional media, the Blackhawk “crash” in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad last Saturday killed “12 soldiers”.
But the people taken out by this “crash”, according to the list published by Stars and Stripes were hardly ordinary soldiers.
Excluding the chopper pilot and two men from the Virgin Island national Guard of whom little is known at present, the casualties included a young Signal Corps Corporal, two Command Sergeants Major working out of Joint Forces Headquarters, a Major with a computer background and two noncoms assigned to the 185th Air Assault Regiment, one First Sergeant and two Colonels, one who served as chief of the aviation and safety division at the National Guard Bureau and a second who was the command surgeon for Multi-National Force-Iraq.
If this wasn’t a “crash” someone has compromised our intelligence at a very high level.
This is another significant reason against concentrating and increasing US troop strength within Baghdad.

Modified Image: AP
- posted by Sean @ 1:14 PM 0 comments

 
We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us - sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.
--Senator Jim Webb, D-VA, Democratic Response to the 6th Bush SOTU


Did Jim Webb, intentionally or not, declare his existential candidacy for president last evening?
I say this because the conclusion to Mr. Webb’s scene stealing speech made reference to President Theodore Roosevelt’s standoff with the robber barons in the years following 1900.
Webb said:

The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.
Roosevelt spoke strongly against these divisions. He told his fellow Republicans that they must set themselves "as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other." And he did something about it.

Roosevelt came to the Presidency via an indirect path when William McKinley’s weak-hearted Veep, Garrett A. Hobart, died unexpectedly on November 21, 1899.
The former Assistant Secretary for the Navy, war hero and anti-corruption Governor of New York was then forced upon the seemingly imperial McKinley by Republican Party bosses and against the wishes of McKinley’s political and fund-raising Svengali Mark Hanna.
Hanna, the strategist, influence peddler and product of the political and business corruption growing out of the wealth produced by the industrial revolution, had guided McKinley’s first election in 1896 and wanted to insure a Republican majority for decades into the new 20th century.
Sound familiar?
Hanna’s plans were dashed when McKinley was assassinated on September 6, 1901 and died on September 14, 1901.
While the McKinley/Hanna and Bush/Rove parallels are, obviously, not a perfect fit those that come close still tantalize a flabby brain's brain and myself.
Now after all the dizzying time contortions and recasting I’m wondering if Senator Jim Webb of Virginia will ascend to the moderate but firm center and the role of President Roosevelt?
Stranger things have happened.

Images: Reuters, Wikipedia
- posted by Sean @ 1:55 PM 0 comments

 

According to the New York Times' review of Scooter's operatic debut this morning at 333 Constitution Avenue, NW in Washington, DC:

“Scooter Libby was to be sacrificed,” Mr. Wells told the jury...to keep Mr. Rove out of trouble because, Mr. Wells said, he was the “lifeblood” of the president’s political operation and “was most responsible for seeing the Republican Party stayed in office. He had to be protected.”

No wonder he's called "Scooter".

Modified Image: AFP, SenecaFoods.com
- posted by Sean @ 2:55 PM 0 comments

 
The Colbert Effect


In last year’s experiment, the direct voltage of Colbertian public humiliation was applied to the leg muscles of the seeming dead frog of critical Washington journalism.
Those previously motionless muscles, as everyone knows, then twitched causing a yearlong bitchy whine from the frog involving hypersensitive hurt media feelings and the cliché cable roundtable IED of character assassination...Oh, and the hiring of a safe, passé comic for this year’s Colbert-free Oscars for Ugly People, the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner.
According to a controversy roundup in this morning’s Washington Post, pasta-faced WHCA President and C-SPAN host Steve Scully said, among other things:

Do you want to invite someone to a party and make them into a political piñata? That's not the purpose of the dinner. It's for [journalists] and their sources and contacts to have an enjoyable evening.

Got that people?
We’re here to have an absolutely neutral evening.
Heaven forefend that a performer should suffer headlines, Mr. Scully!
The vicious remarks gassy punditry directed at the Comedy Channel’s ultra witty Stephen Colbert throughout 2006 could be one of the reasons the WHCA, according to the Post report, had a spot of trouble booking a comic this year.
The real news, I thought, in the Paul Farhi article, was word that Scully had “sought David Letterman, Jay Leno, Billy Crystal and Martin Short as performers for this year's dinner, but none was interested.”
Rich Little, aside from doing impressions of dead people...his Alben Barkley is spot on...is in the awkward performing position of being at least 5th choice.
Steve Scully, also, gets a checkmark in the “naughty” column for intentionally confusing the alleged WHCA tradition with the 125 year-old motto of The Gridiron Club.
While the Gridiron performance owes its heritage to the seemingly innocuous 1885 popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s sometimes pungent musical criticisms of the British Empire, Gridiron performances have an American pungency all their own no matter the rule that they be sung to the music of a known tune.
For example...
Unlike the WHCA, Gridiron performers, often including high ranked officials and their spouses as well as media, usually direct their sharpest barbs at themselves.
Nancy Reagan’s 1982 performance of Second Hand Rose springs readily to mind...
The rule in the boozy, late night Washington of old was to be, in no particular order, funny, witty and self-deprecating...Everything that isn’t a certain person and their normally tone deaf administration.

Modified Image: ExtremeMortman.com, PopZhao.com
- posted by Sean @ 2:56 PM 0 comments