I missed this back in February: Bill O'Reilly apologizes to America for supporting pre-war claims that Iraq had WMD.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."
If you recall from before, Bill O'Reilly promised to apologize to the American people should he be shown to be wrong about WMD.
This is beyond mind-shattering... Weasley Is Our King is a page with an incredible theory about Harry Potter: Ron Weasley = Albus Dumbledore. It's long but very well worth the read. This absolutely blew my mind... they make a very convincing argument, and it sends chills up my spine just thinking about it. If the rest of the Harry Potter story does pan out this way, then J. K. Rowling will have vindicated herself to all the HP naysayers out there who dismiss it as a childrens' series.
John McCutcheon has put music to the words of our eloquent President Bush and produced a massively amusing piece entitled "Hail to the Chief". Download Hail to the Chief and read the lyrics. As the credits on the song state, the music is by John McCutcheon but the words are 100% Bush. An excerpt of the lyrics:
When I delivered the State of the Budget Address
I offered a question or two
How can a man still put food on his family
Will the tollbooth to the middleclass become more few?
It’s time to make the pie higher
This idea’s sure to resignate
This is no time to be subliminable
It’s a time to unificate
He also has a lot of other songs for download. Also amusing: Ashcroft's Army , Let's Pretend (about the "Mission Accomplished" fiasco), Pat and Jerry Blues (about Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on feminists, gays, and liberals), and The List (about ClearChannel's alleged list of banned songs after 9/11).
An MSNBC article talks about neuroeconomics and how fMRI machines are revealing the low-level brain mechanics behind game theoretic decisions:
Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual. This is consistent with field observations, Platt says, which have found that social primates spend a lot of time just keeping track of the highest-ranking troop member. It isn't known exactly why monkeys do this, but the finding might help explain the behavior of human beings who pay $1,000 just to sit in a hotel ballroom with the president. You can draw whatever conclusion you choose from Platt's finding that there is no quantity of juice sufficient to get a male monkey to look away from the hindquarters of a female in estrus.
In their latest efforts to reduce the size of government and increase freedom, the Bush Administration has required that government scientists appearing before the World Health Organization must be cleared by an administration appointee. Some might worry that this is just the most recent in a number of steps the Bush administration has taken to politicize science. They argue that this requirement is merely a way for the administration to censor the expert, scientific opinion of, for instance, public health scientists who think that abstinance-only programs are far from effective for reducing rates of STD and unwanted pregnancy.
The optimists among us will realize that there is nothing insidious going on here. The administration just wants to make absolutely sure that the World Health Organization gets the best possible scientific advice it can!
“It’s in no way politicized,” Pierce said. “This is a policy to make sure the WHO has the very best the federal government has to offer when it comes to our experts.”
Because, kids, science isn't some sort of ad-hoc, democratic system where peer review leads to excellence -- can you imagine what sort of anarchistic rubbish that would lead to? No, science always works best when the State appoints someone to oversee what is "good" science and what is "bad" science. Yep...
The Vandenbrink Carver is an awesome, street-legal (in the EU) tilting body one-seater vehicle. Check out the pictures and the videos!
Here is the transcript of Al Gore's speech at NYU. It's long but it's great. There are too many gems in there for me to quote them all, but here is one particularly concise one:
[Bush's] former Domestic Adviser on faith-based organizations, John Dilulio, who said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
Moore is a genuine populist, but what he can’t deal with is the unpleasant possibility that Bush, as people used to say of Nixon, has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism. Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone’s politics.
A scathing smackdown in Slate:
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
If you missed a good Daily Show episode and want to find a transcript of it, try Anita's Daily Show Page. Some veritable gems of true excellence in broadcasting right there.
Cnn.com has an article about a bipartisan coalition of former diplomats and military leaders calling for the end of the Bush administration.
A statement from the group notes its more than two dozen members include Democrats and Republicans who have "served every president since Harry S. Truman."
They contend Bush's foreign policy has failed at "preserving national security and providing world leadership."
Members expressing their opposition in the statement are former senior diplomatic, national security and military officials.
Thom Hartmann has some really excellent essays about democracy and especially about our current moment in time. He draws on historical examples and Jeffersonian principles and has essays on:
- Universal military service, the danger of a standing army, and the origins of the 2nd amendment
- Jefferson's prescient comments on how democracy must be fostered, and not merely thrust upon people: "Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes, with an unprepared people, a tyranny still, of the many, the few, or the one."
This last one is particularly troubling to me because I've always figured the people who equate Bush and Hitler as wacko extremists. I know that our president is hardly the power-hungry fascist that Hitler was, but actions speak louder than words, and his track record thus far speaks very poorly of him.
TheWax.com is a pretty nifty site. Check out The Bug Jar, where Agents of TheWax trap hapless chat room users in one-on-one chats that are absolutely hilarious.
The Wage Slave has an awesome Scorecard of Evil, a light-hearted but factual look at all the crummy things that Bush has done.
A great list of Donald Rumsfeld's rules for service. Written by the man himself, for the Wall Street Journal in January of 2001. It's very good; this is my favorite:
Don't divide the world into "them" and "us." Avoid infatuation with or resentment of the press, the Congress, rivals, or opponents. Accept them as facts. They have their jobs and you have yours.
Here's an unforeseen danger of outsourcing IT to low-wage areas: the Mafia might bribe them to hand over customer info, including credit card numbers.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has a tidy editorial regarding the Justice Department's latest revelations about its considerations of what types of torture are appropriate. My favorite bit from the column:
The Bush administration constantly reminds us that there's a war on. That's wrong. There are two. One is being fought by soldiers in combat, and the other is being fought for the hearts and minds of people who are not yet our enemies. However badly the administration has botched the first war -- where, oh where, is Osama bin Laden? -- it has done even worse with the second.
The Bush re-election campaign has sent out emails to thousands of churches in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, seeking to locate 1600 congregations friendly to the campaign and asking for volunteer coordinators in these congregations to use their churches to "distribute information to supporters".
The Interfaith Alliance, an organization that promotes the positive, healing role of religion and counterbalances the fundamentalism of the radical religious right, is having a major cow: "The Bush-Cheney campaign has dropped any pretense of honoring the separation of church and state mandated by the Constitution, and puts in jeopardy the non-profit status of 1600 houses of worship by asking them to engage in partisan politics."
Here is a deeply inspiring and unsettling quote from the Brian Aldiss novel "Helliconia Summer":
When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations... At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility; in all the forests of opinion, there is a vital something that can be known -- known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. So that then one's true life -- the point of everything -- will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension. But it isn't like that at all. But if it isn't, where did the idea come from, to torture and unsettle us?
Another entry for the Quotable Bush journal that everyone's keeping: "We will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom."
Generally, marching proceeds in a forward fashion. Generally, people marching forwards (or backwards) are not really free - they are bound either by duty or by servitude to be in lockstep with their peers. Neither is freedom.
Nor is Iraq the same as World War II. It should be a whipping offense to compare this current ill-planned, ill-executed exercise in government deception with that noble struggle against hatred and totalitarianism. I'm surprised more people aren't taking Bush to task for it. (See the WashPost article "Bush Speech Ties Iraq War to WWII")