A Harry Dilemma

The Los Angeles Times, this morning, insists Harriet Miers is, uh, straight.
No really.
Straight, straight, straight.
The girl simply loves the boys or, rather, a boy.
Just take a gander at this Dallas Morning News photo of Harry and her, uh, boyfriend.


The cosmetically and fashion-challenged Harry, in this undated and hopefully 70’s era photograph, is just, according to the Times, “very European”:

The lives of Nathan Hecht and Harriet E. Miers began to intertwine in the early 1970s…Friends thought they would get married…a kinship that has entranced and confounded their closest friends…The Rev. Ron Key, their pastor, said…theirs was the only relationship that had ever tempted him to intervene…"Their relationship has been such a special one. Sometimes I think they wanted to protect how special it was by not getting married."

Yeah, that’s the ticket.
I’m surprised the articles didn’t mention Harry and Nate’s vast collections of Melissa Etheridge and Judy Garland recordings…

Photo: Dallas Morning News & LA Times
- posted by Sean @ 7:55 AM 0 comments  

 
Oopsie!


Exiting the Aspen grove

That rootless Judy Miller!
The New York Observer is reporting that Princess Judy, likely doing some post jail loft cleaning, has discovered a previously undisclosed batch of notes taken during a previously undisclosed telephone call with OVP chief-of-staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby:

The notes, a source said, could significantly change the time frame of Miller's involvement with Libby…[and] covered a pair of conversations she had with Libby...in July of 2003--shortly after former ambassador Joseph Wilson published a Times op-ed challenging the Bush administration’s account of the evidence for Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

Ahmed Chalabi’s favorite girl reporter has obviously read between the florid lines of Scooter’s September 15th paean to root systems and her most recent grand jury grilling to opt out of any pre-planned cluster turning with two particular well-rooted Executive Branch varieties, the Populus tremuloides, or aptly, Quaking Pines.

Modified Image: Reuters, TheFreeDictionary.com
- posted by Sean @ 8:46 PM 0 comments  

 
Those who blaspheme God will suffer the consequences of their guilt and be punished.
--Leviticus 24:10-16



Modified Image: Reuters
- posted by Sean @ 8:12 AM 0 comments  

 
Evidence Of Absence

The (sic) internets, or specifically posted comments at various web sites, have been buzzing about a suicide bombing that happened outside a packed Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on October 2nd.


Suicide bomber Joel Hinrichs III

On that particular Saturday afternoon I was reading the blogs when I noticed a freshly posted comment describing the sound of a large explosion outside Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, a stadium packed with Oklahoma State University and Kansas State fans watching their Sooners and Wildcats battling over a football.
Turning on the television expecting breathless live reporting, I found nothing on the alleged news channels.
The story, since, has received minimal to zero coverage by what passes for America’s mainstream media.
Long past my bedtime last evening, AmericaBlog posted links to an Oklahoma TV news report and a terrific blog containing information about the bombing.
FanBlogs.com presents a superb roundup of a most curious, and getting curiouser as coverage dwindles, story of potentially America’s first suicide bombing.
The bomber, 21 year-old Joel Hinrichs III, was a mechanical engineering junior, a National Merit Scholar, and a member of Triangle fraternity, an organization of engineers, architects, and scientists.


Sign outside Hinrichs mosque

Oklahoma TV station News9 reports Hinrichs shared an apartment with a “Pakistani student” employed “with the [OSU] Athletic Department”, recently tried to purchase a “large quantity of Ammonium nitrate” from a Norman, OK feed store and attended the Norman Mosque, once the mosque frequented by the 20th 911 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui.


Bomb disposal unit leaving Hinrichs apartment with an explosive device

The Northeast Intelligence Network at HomelandSecurityUS.com, in reports based on information from “reliable law enforcement sources”, states that Hinrichs' backpack bomb was made of triacetone triperoxide or TATP, the highly explosive compound used recently in the London bombings and by the infamous shoe bomber Richard Reid.
Additionally, the Northeast Intelligence Network is reporting that police confiscated “a significant amount” of Islamist Jihad literature in Hinrichs apartment and that “other un-detonated explosive devices were found in the area cordoned off by police and federal officials”.

Shouldn't even the most jaded cynic have to admit that this bombing story is strange enough to deserve mainstream media coverage?
"No strings or connected dots here, folks. Move along" the media, by this absence of evidence, seems to be suggesting.
Oklahoma is likely rural enough to afford federal agents fairly easy information containment, when necessary, and has enough terror/bombing antecedents to make the corporate media and Washington very nervous about even minimal news coverage of information stemming from this October 2nd suicide bombing.


Former Vice President Gore framing a key electoral issue yesterday in New York

Former Vice President Al Gore said yesterday, in a widely unreported keynote speech delivered to the Media Center’s We The Media conference at the Associated Press headquarters in New York City, that we must "notice what is not on" our televisions:

News divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part…The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations…Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising.

The absence of newsy proof, in many of these cases, is often the proof of some niggling danger to the present order as precieved by the MSM's corrupt guardians and self-proclaimed arbiters of public safety.
Widespread awareness of the October 2nd Oklahoma bombing, certainly would have cast an unflattering light upon the speech President Bush delivered this morning at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington:

We're determined to prevent the attacks of terrorist networks before they occur…We're reforming our intelligence agencies for the incredibly difficult task of tracking enemy activity…here and abroad.

Noticing what isn't reflecting in the mirror is a difficult skill to master for us human animals...but master it we must if the current established order manages, by hook, crook and the absence of news, to continue the maintenance of its present iron information grip.

Images: AP, Lamphere Productions
- posted by Sean @ 2:09 PM 0 comments  

 
They Eat Their Own


Will in happier times

This morning in the Washington Post, George Will, prig and self-avowed crypto-racist, joins the right wing pack hounding the unscuffed presidential cowboy boots of the Crony-in-Chief:

It is not important that she [Harriet Miers] be confirmed…because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence…He [President Bush] has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution…the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution…The president announced, surely without fathoming the implications, his belief in identity politics…The crowning absurdity of the president's wallowing in such nonsense is the obvious assumption that the Supreme Court is, like a legislature, an institution of representation.

Ouch!
The right wing, since old Harry’s nomination, has filed for divorce from their Prince Not-Quite-So-Charming.
Reagan’s favorite pet pundit kicks poor Dubya’s judicial baggage to the curb with the same vehemence the first Mrs. Will used to defenestrate the randy columnist’s own effects in 1987.
Can you hear the splash of my big crocodile tears?
I urge the rightwing to take small bites and to chew with painstaking care.

Modified Image: Maxwell.syr.edu
- posted by Sean @ 8:45 AM 0 comments  

 

Harriet Miers rushes past the "Jets NY Boom!" part of the President's August 6, 2001 EZ PDB.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial "presidential daily briefing" hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Something tells me Ms. Miers judgement isn't perfect.
Like our cornered President says, "We all make mistakes."

Modified Image: AmericaBlog.com
- posted by Sean @ 2:09 PM 0 comments  

 


Image: Reuters
- posted by Sean @ 12:03 PM 0 comments  

 
Some things, like bad hair and the smooth taste of malt liquer, never go out of style!



Thanks to Brian for the challenge!
Click image for a larger version...

Modified Image: Dallas Morning News, BFCgroup.com, WhiteHouse.gov
- posted by Sean @ 10:40 PM 5 comments  

 

I've delayed long enough!
Postings will be irregular, as I must begin the final preparations for our annual trek to Florida.
Once we are ensconced within the leafy paradise of Sanibel and Captiva Islands, I may post occasionally as the islands, I’m told, are now wired for web connectivity.
Be aware that I'm using a pretty hefty “may” in the last sentence, but I have to imagine a major news event could provoke your humble blogger into using an unfamiliar laptop, hiking to a Hot Spot and posting.
The southwestern Florida intercoastal waterways, however, are best enjoyed unplugged.
We should return and normal posting should resume sometime in November.

Image: sean
- posted by Sean @ 9:13 AM 2 comments  

 

I urge you to read two interesting companion articles, this morning, from Washington and London.
London’s Guardian-Observer puts it best with their headline, Something Stinks in America but the Washington Post is reporting that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could bring his investigation of the Bush administration to the public as early as this week:

Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials…[Judith] Miller's account…could establish a piece of a web of actions taken by officials that had an underlying criminal purpose.

The Guardian article, without saying directly, presents the Plame investigation as a piece of a larger plot:

DeLay is…the driving force behind a vicious, organized demonisation and attempted marginalization of Democrats that for sheer, unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an advanced democracy…The K Street Project is little known outside the Washington beltway… DeLay, together with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and some conservative activists, notably the ubiquitous Grover Norquist… conceived the notion 10 years ago that they should use the Republican majority in the House as a lever to ensure that the lobbyists, law firms and trade associations that inhabit Washington's K Street, heart of the industry, should only employ Republicans or sympathizers…DeLay's ambition was to construct such a disciplined Republican party that lobbyists would not need Democrats, and so create an inside track in which the only greased palms from legislators to lobbyists would be Republican.

I would argue that the K Street Project also influenced Washington area corporations, particularly the media, interested in federal deregulation.
These companies, also throughout the 1990’s, winnowed employees with avowed liberal attitudes from the ranks through a brutal application of streamlining and synergy, popular concepts in pre-millennial America and ultimately a clever subterfuge for companies hungry for non-traditional monetary streams.

NOTE: Latin words in the all-seeing pyramid symbol within this article's lede artwork translate as "words deceive" and "words deceive perception".
Here's a larger image of the pyramid symbol.

Image: AP, Tom Butler, Plover.net, Reuters
- posted by Sean @ 9:41 AM 0 comments