Adventures In Car Stereos.

Conditions: Overcasty.


Choices Illuminate The Chooser.

So, with surprise-veep candidate Sarah Palin still 'wowing' people with her folksy, iron-tipped charm, can we look at this choice as illuminating John McCain's character? What does it say about this guy that from out of nowhere he picks a feisty inexperienced unknown as the potential Vice President of the U.S?

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country.
[...]

As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a 'full vetting process.' She had been subjected to 'an F.B.I. background check,' we were told, and 'the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.'

The Times had it right. The McCain campaign's claims of a 'full vetting process' for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they've invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically 'a Google,' he wasn't joking.

This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton's imagination. 'Often my haste is a mistake,' McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, 'but I live with the consequences without complaint.' Well, maybe it's fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.

We've already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 - even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam's W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn't until months after 'Mission Accomplished' that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

In other words, McCain's hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia ('Today, we are all Georgians') or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved 'the benefit of the doubt' even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain's blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.

- truthout.org/

So, firstly it seems McCain's image as a maverick who will do what he thinks is best, regardless of whether his party agrees, hasn't even survived the V.P-picking stage of his candidacy. And secondly, going with Palin shows that while mavericks may be exciting to watch on movie screens, or read about in books, when it's a real person who's mavericky decisions have to be lived with by everyone else, pretty soon all that impulsiveness that seemed charming becomes wildly unsettling at best, disastrous at worst.



Examining The Peace.

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth (too much), but peace seems to be settling onto Iraq like a big fluffy blanket. Therefore in political circles it's now time to stop distancing one's self from the war, and start taking credit for it. W Bush, and W McCain in particular have nominated the surge as the reason Iraq is now 'pacified.. But is it? Bob Woodward's latest book (focusing on the Iraqi spying the CIA has been up to) goes into some detail about the end of the Iraq war.

The American troop 'surge' of 2007 when 30,000 additional U.S. troops were sent to Iraq to pursue more aggressive tactics was not the main reason for the fall in violence in Iraq over the last sixteen months says Mr. Woodward in The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008.

Instead he claims that "ground breaking" new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to find, target and kill insurgent leaders in rebel groups, particularly in al-Qa'ida in Iraq. In its summary of Mr. Woodward's book, to be published on Monday, the Washington Post, of which he is associate editor, says he does not reveal the code names of this assassination campaign because of national security concerns.

The origin and degree of success of the 'surge' is politically important in the U.S. presidential election because the Republican candidate John McCain says that he was an early advocate of the strategy and it has brought the U.S. close to military victory.

Denying this, Mr Woodward concludes that there were four factors leading to the reduction in violence in Iraq: covert operations, troop reinforcements, the decision by the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to restrain his Mehdi Army militia, and the rise of the Awakening Movement in the Sunni community opposing al-Qa'ida in Iraq.

There certainly was an increase in assassinations of Sunni rebel leaders in early 2007 timed to coincide with the beginning of the "surge." But the weakening of al-Qa'ida came primarily because al-Qa'ida alienated the Sunni by trying to take full control of the anti-American resistance and also provoked a sectarian war with the Shia in which the Sunni were largely defeated.

- alternet.org/

So bear this in mind when politicians talk about the surge: it was only a small part of the reason why eventually Al Queda in Iraq were beat down, and other parts of the reason included the current religious segregation of the entire country, covert ops and Al-Queda getting greedy. Try drawing campaign slogans for that. McCain 08: Because the bad guys are probably as fallible as we are!

Despite strong evidence to the contrary, it has become established conventional wisdom among mainstream Washington journalists that the "surge" was the singular reason for the recent decline in Iraq's violence. It's also agreed that McCain deserves great credit for pushing the "surge" idea early.

Barack Obama has been repeatedly chastised -- even badgered -- for opposing the "surge." His attempts to refocus the debate more broadly on the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place are rudely rejected by Big Media interviewers.

The latest example came during an ABC News "This Week" interview on Sept. 7 when George Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: "How do you escape the logic that ... John McCain was right about the surge?"

When Obama responded that he didn't understand "why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five," Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying "Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?"

In other words, the big-name journalists don't want a discussion about the decision to illegally invade Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 (presumably because they almost all were cheering the invasion on), but instead they want the debate to center entirely on their latest false assumption, that the "surge" has virtually won the war.

- alternet.org/

I guess in the world of television, there simply isn't time to go into a detailed analysis of why something has happened. People may change the channel, and that is more dangerous than mis-information. I'll put $20 bucks on the table right now that says 20 years from now the Iraq war will be seen as a huge American success.

Does it show I'm not much of a gambler?




Still Waiting On That Whole Anthrax-Killer Thing.

Despite waiting a month, the F.B.I still hasn't really proven that Bruce Irvins, a U.S army scientist, was the anthrax-killer. Is anyone curious about that?

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that "important and lingering questions remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case."

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr. Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.
[...]

Meanwhile, new details of the investigation, revealed in recent interviews, raised questions about when the bureau focused on Dr. Ivins as the likely perpetrator and how solid its evidence was.

In April 2007, after the mailed anthrax was genetically linked to Dr. Ivins's laboratory and after he was questioned about late-night work in the laboratory before the letters were mailed, prosecutors sent Dr. Ivins a formal letter saying he was "not a target" of the investigation. And only a week before Dr. Ivins died did agents first take a mouth swab to collect a DNA sample, officials said.

Justice Department officials, who said in early August that the investigation was likely to be closed formally within days or weeks, now say it is likely to remain open for three to six more months. In the meantime, agents are continuing to conduct interviews with acquaintances of Dr. Ivins and are examining computers he used, seeking information that could strengthen the case.

So, despite the guy being dead, and there not going to be a trial, the F.B.I is still going to spend months building a case?

Officials also acknowledged that they did not have a single, definitive piece of evidence indisputably proving that Dr. Ivins mailed the letters - no confession, no trace of his DNA on the letters, no security camera recording the mailings in Princeton, N.J.

But they said the case consisted of a powerfully persuasive accumulation of incriminating details. Dr. Vahid Majidi, head of the F.B.I.'s weapons of mass destruction directorate, said the accumulation of evidence against Dr. Ivins was overwhelming: his oversight of the anthrax supply, his night hours, his mental problems and his habit of driving to far-off locations at night to mail anonymous packages.

- truthout.org/

Ahhh, circumstantial evidence, how I wish you could fill the hole in my heart. - I mean, the case. The hole in the case.




Film Review: Taken.

Liam Neeson stars in this film about a retired government agent who's daughter is kidnapped while on a trip to Paris and sold into prostitution. Of course he goes after her and proceeds to torture and kill his way through various brothels, slave markets and prostitute halfway houses in his quest to get her back. I'm assuming they asked Harrison Ford first, since this is his kind of role, but who it's really suited for is Kiefer Sutherland. This really feels like a simplified adventure for Jack Bauer.

There's no context for this film. The motives and pressures for the various bad guys are completely ignored. They are just fodder to be tracked down, quickly interrogated (if they're lucky) and then dispatched. This film has absolutely no qualms about torture, innocent casualties, or mass execution. How many does Liam kill in his rush to save his daughter? 20? 30? With all the shaky camera, it's hard to tell.

And that's the problem. With absolutely no context or information about the bad guys, and every action sequence being a riot of shaky-cam as Liam's stunt double smacks yet another "foreign guy" into a wall, or the floor, or his fist, or the wall and then his fist, or the wall, then the floor, then his fist... you start to drift off. I mean, if you can't tell what's going on, and you don't even know who it is who's receiving the latest smackdown, then it's tough to keep paying attention. This is the price of the shakycam. Sure, it makes shooting action sequences quicker, faster and cheaper, but it disconnects all the drama from the scene. And you find yourself thinking, as the various grunts and yelps emanate from what looks like scenes from inside a blender, that while that silvery thing might be a knife that the bad guy is wielding, of course Liam isn't going to come all this way just to get killed by bad guy #18 or bad guy #25, so I'm sure he'll be fine. And he is. This film is an old cliche wrapped up in a new fad. And the daughter was annoying. One karaoke machine out of Five.



- Peace out.