Saturday, May 27, 2006

Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Liars? Karl Zinsmeister, of the American Enterprise Institute, is the new Assistant to President Bush for Domestic Policy. He will fit right in: Questions Arising Over Quotations Of Zinsmeister: BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun: A magazine editor named to a top White House policy post, Karl Zinsmeister, altered his own quotes and other text in a published newspaper profile of him posted on the Web site of the magazine he has edited for more than a decade, the American Enterprise.... The New York Sun... editor, Molly English.... "It's reprehensible, frankly," Ms. English said. "Once this is published, it's not his property. From that point in time, he can't just pick and choose." The version of the story posted by the American Enterprise runs under Mr. Park's byline and states that it was published in the Syracuse New Times. Mr. Zinsmeister did not respond to a phone message and an e-mail seeking comment for this article.... The Sun yesterday republished a quote from the original New Times story, in which Mr. Zinsmeister, who lives and works in upstate Cazenovia, expressed his antipathy for the nation's capital and its denizens. "People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings," the Syracuse weekly quoted him as saying. However, in the version posted on the American Enterprise site, his quote reads differently and sweeps less broadly. "I learned in Washington that there is an 'overclass' in this country stocked with cheating, shifty human beings that's just as morally repugnant as our 'underclass,'" the revised article said. In addition, what Mr. Park described as Mr. Zinsmeister's "strong distaste for the Washington elite," became, in the later version, simply, "a distaste for the Washington elite."... The original article quoted Mr. Zinsmeister as saying, "[Bush] said, 'I'm gonna do something for history.' To say nothing of whether it was executed well or not, but it's brave and admirable. It got depressing to have to be [in the Middle East] every couple years like cicadas." The version posted by the American Enterprise omits the suggestion that the war was poorly run, drops the insect metaphor, and substitutes nobler language. "[Bush] said, 'I'm gonna do something for history.' It's a brave and admirable attempt to improve the world," the second version said. Mr. Park also quoted the magazine editor as saying, "I can't think of one Iraqi I met that I'm confident never lied to me." Mr. Zinsmeister's version said he passed on the comment from "one officer who'd been in Iraq for a full year." One of the changes Mr. Zinsmeister made corrected a factual error about D-Day casualties... Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now. (Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal.) 5:42:21 PM    comment []

Has HP Quality Become an Oxymoron? Are the words "HP" and "quality" becoming contradictory terms? Recent gripes from readers make it... (Via Ed Foster's Gripelog.) All I know is that I've had two experiences lately installing HP printer drives on several different machines, and both left me dissatisfied and angry. Both installs are continuing sources of pain. It'll be a long time before HP can talk me into buying another of their products. 5:41:07 PM    comment []

99 by Anthony Burgess Anthony Burgess’s list of the best 99 novels published in English from 1939 to 1984 (Via Grow-a-Brain.) 5:25:07 PM    comment []

RIP Gilbert Sorrentino If the work is to have the wholeness and serenity of art it must be complete, that is, coherent. On the other hand, the works of literature to which we return, which offer themselves anew to us each time we encounter them, are never complete, never truly coherent. There is always a mystery to them, an opacity, a level of discourse that is just out of reach of the intellect, an arrogance. Such work goes well beyond the idea of the possibility of its being something other: it has, in fact, its otherness built in. This otherness is the quality of infinity that permits the reader to understand that although the author has finished his work, there is in it a quality that refuses to be finished; such a work can never end, but goes on "writing" itself forever. Curiously enough, such work may be more "finished" than work that is seemingly finite. If this is a contradiction of my statement that "writers never complete their writing," it is so only insofar as those who do the completing are readers. --Gilbert Sorrentino, "Fictional Infinities "in Something Said As Slim Pickens once voiced memorably, "ditto!" via The Mumpsimus 4:59:47 PM    comment []

Cell Phone As P.C Scanner Five second year Masters students at the School of Information (formerly SIMS), UC Berkeley have developed a project/product called iBuyRight which turns any cell phone into a social responsibility scanner of sorts. iBuyRight is a mobile phone application that displays social and environmental information about a product, enabling consumers to make purchases consciously aligned with their personal values. After a product bar code is scanned with a cell phone, iBuyRight retrieves relevant information from a social and environmental issues database, then displays it on the cell phone screen in an easy-to-read format. By turning the phone into an access point for product information at the point of purchase, the application aims to fulfill a consumer#039s need to know where a product comes from, how it is made, and the impact these practices have on the environment and communities. By facilitating informed purchases, iBuyRight gives consumers the power to put their money where their values are. The idea, the students say, is to empower consumers at the point of sale to make more socially conscious decisions before they buy. (Via Personal Democracy Forum blogs.) 4:52:38 PM    comment []

About Dobbs and his racist fantasies The CCC map Alex Koppelman 05.26.2006 CNN Stands By Lou Dobbs' Racist Fantasies Huffington Post blogger Bill Scher caught CNN's Lou Dobbs in a bit of an innocent mistake Tuesday night. Seems Dobbs' show was citing someone they shouldn't have been -- the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that descended from the White Citizens' Councils of the civil rights era. Oh, (Via The News Blog.) 4:24:47 PM    comment []

Murtha Was Right, Sadly I’m waiting on all those idiots to issue their apologies to him. Not holding my breath. Official: Marines could be charged with murder Investigators believe that their criminal investigation into the deaths of about two dozen Iraqi civilians points toward a conclusion that Marines committed unprovoked murders, a senior defense official said Friday. The Marine Corps initially reported 15 deaths and said they were caused by a roadside bomb and an ensuing firefight with insurgents. A separate investigation is seeking to determine if Marines lied to cover up the killings. The official, who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the yet-to-be-completed investigation, said the evidence developed by investigators strongly indicates the killings last November in the insurgent-plagued city of Haditha in the western province of Anbar were unjustified. >> August: “How in the hell did they get it right where Michelle Malkin, TownHall, PowerLine, and FreeRepublic got it wrong?” (Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.) 10:32:19 AM    comment []

The Horror Of Haditha We must not cover up this incident, those responsible must be punished and we must make it clear to the world that this behavior is the exception to the admirable work our Marines and the rest of the Armed Services do. This is not the time to reprise the brush-off of Abu Ghraib as “harmless fraternity pranks”. The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif’s house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates. Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation, based on accounts of survivors and on a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student at Haditha’s hospital and inside victims’ houses. When our armed services are out in the world, their reactions - and our reactions to that - represent our face to the world. It is far past time we began acting like it again. (Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.) 10:30:14 AM    comment []

Tech or no tech, THIS MUST BE HEARD "They didn't know that Lester's wife had turned on a tape recorder in the kitchen. When Lester exercised his constitutional right not to sign a consent to search his house, these officers spent the next two hours torturing him." MP3 audio is attached. Spread this like wildfire people. (Via digg / dig.) 9:39:36 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel. Last update: 6/1/2006; 8:55:10 AM.