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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Roman Berry
Published Letters: 198 Editor's Choice: 10
Well, this isn't promising.
http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2009/06/11/D98OPKB80_us_congress_war_funding/index.html (Linked at sig.)
Jun 11th, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- After a flare-up over controversial detainee abuse photos, House-Senate negotiators sealed agreement on a crucial war-funding bill Thursday night when President Barack Obama personally guaranteed the photos would never be released.To reassure Democratic moderates who had balked at House demands that Congress not interfere in a lawsuit to force the release of photos of U.S. troops abusing detainees, Obama promised to use every available means to block their release. His powers include issuing an order to classify the photos, thus blocking their release under the Freedom of Information Act.
So first Obama said he'd comply with the court order and release the photos, and then he decided to appeal, and then he decided that he was absolutely against releasing the photos (which he has claimed aren't particularly inflammatory), and then he seems to have relied on senate mentor Joe Lieberman to get a new law in to block the release of the photos, and now having failed there is appealing to the US Supreme Court but apparently doesn't care what the USSC says because he has personally guaranteed that these photos won't be released apparently even if he has to have them made classified.
Transparency rules!
(Good thing there's not that much to these photos. Otherwise they might actually go to some trouble, yes?)
Click through the link I posted and you'll see that the headline on the story is War-funding bill back on track for passage. What I posted in the letters section was my post title based on the first two paragraphs of the linked story:
http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2009/06/11/D98OPKB80_us_congress_war_funding/index.html
"Less was at stake in these elections than many outsiders assumed, however, since the Iranian presidency is weak and most important policy is set by Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei..."
Wait just a cotton pickin' minute! I've heard from the right for the last two or three years (at least) that Iranian President Ahmadinejad is some sort of power hungry madman intent on getting the bomb, attacking Israel (if not perhaps even the United States) and just generally a modern day dictator wielding nigh on ultimate control of Iran's vast military ambitions* and foreign policy. And now someone is gonna try and tell me that the real control in this fundamentalist religious state is in the hands of their fundamentalist religious leader? How can that be? How can so many of our talking heads have been so wrong? I guess the adage "It must be true 'cause I saw it on Tee Vee" is in need of serious examination.
Seriously though, I have no real idea if the Iranian presidential election was stolen or otherwise subject to widespread fraud/maniupulation. I do know that I don't hold much trust for anything I see reported in the US media these days.
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of protesters turned out in advance of the start of the war but they went largely ignored by our media. Recently, Faux Newz threw its media support behind the very-small-by-comparison public tea bagging demonstrations and made them seem much bigger than they were. In the 2001 inauguaration, many thousands of protesters lined Pennsylvania Avenue to give voice to their displeasure of seeing G.W. Bush installed into office following the shutdown of the Florida vote count by the USSC and those protesters were effectively disappeared by our news media. So now, when there are protests in Iran following this election, I have no way of judging whether their numbers are up there with the public tea-baggers and are being played up because that's the way the desired narrative goes, or if there are in fact massive protests being objectively reported.
I hope there was no fraud in the Iranian election, or that if there was that it wasn't enough to swing the election. The mere clumsiness of committing fraud to the point that Ahmadinejad would receive around two thirds of the vote in an election our media had reported as being nip and tuck in the final days leads me to be at least somewhat skeptical. But that said, since it appears that regardless of what I've heard from various talking heads on the Tee Vee these last years the fact is that the Supreme Leader in Iran is an Ayatollah and not the president of Iran, does it all really matter that much?
*For those that might misunderstand, that was sarcasm. I don't know that Iran has much in the way of vast military ambitions, especially as compared to the world's one remaining superpower.
Dust, be careful of accepting "evidence" because it comports with that which you wish to be true. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com more or less tears this "statistical proof" you've linked to apart. Please see http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/statistical-evidence-does-not-prove.html (or click on my sig for a direct link.)
Just to be clear, Silver is not saying that there wasn't fraud in the Iranian election. He's just saying that the analysis picked up and posted by Andrew Sullivan is irretrievably flawed. Check Silver's chart of the McCain-Obama contest from right here in the good ol' US of A in his post and you'll see what he's getting at.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
