duh

I riffed on this before, and not it creeps up again. What the fuck is wrong with this country lately?

Look, I know as well as anyone that it’s really up the party who they choose as their nominee and I’m fine with the whole delgate, convention thing. But can someone please tell me how it is at all fair in any way that Florida and Michigan are getting to seat any of their delegates? I mean, as I understand things, a while before the election, the DNC told these states (and thier voters) that they were not going to get to seat their delegates. That did 2 things: 1) some, maybe most of the voters did not even vote since they knew their votes would not be counted and 2) the candidates did not campaign in those states.

To now allow delgations from those states is quite unfair to the voters of those states that did not vote and the candidates who did not campaign as hard. What the fuck man?

At what point are we going to care that the govt. is ILLEGALLY wire-tapping us with no court orders? It seems congress is standing up for us a little bit with the wired networks, but this is the first I’m hearing about the wireless networks. I say we should all boycott Verizon!

This woman in Saudi Arabia was raped by six armed men. They all got between 1 and 5 years in prison for the offence. Interestingly enough the woman was punished as well for breaking a law where she wasn’t allowed in the car of a non-family member, so she got 90 lashes (as if her suffering wasn’t bad enough). But here’s the interesting part. Her lawyer had appealed the sentences of the men and asked the court to give the men the death penalty. After the appeal the judge raised the sentances for the men but also decided that the woman should get 200 lashes and jail time herself. (story here)

We hear about these cases all the time in the middle east. Where women are stoned, whipped, even killed for “bringing dishonor” to her family. We hear of women mutilated at puberty. We hear of all kinds of horrible offences towards women in these countries and yet our woman’s groups don’t protest and our country keeps up relations with these countries instead of bringing them to task for their human rights violations. What’s up with that? Why is this?

Yesterday the UN got all up in arms about the death penalty. They decided that it was cruel and inhumane punishment and should be abolished worldwide no matter what the host countries thought (of course the US was against the measure) . Why isn’t the UN trying to pass similar proclamations/laws/letters of intent (what do they pass exactly?) about the treatment of women in Islamic countries?

I know it and you know it but yet nobody seems to do anything about it. At least I complain to my friends, post here, and pretty much get 0% of my news from (non-bbc) television but still I’m just a small percentage of the potential voters in america. Perhaps if we had a media machine focused on the candidates and what they are all about people would be more interested in voting. Perhaps someone like Dennis Kucinich or Bill Richardson would actually be doing better in the polls if the media stopped focusing on “the front runners”.

Here is a piece in Ars Techica that highlights a very interesting report from The Project for Excellence in Journalism which discusses this very issue. It’s a great read and it should inspire us to demand more from our media.. Will it?

Doesn’t this man have more important things to do with his time?

http://www.philly.com/philly/business/Mayor_on_line_to_buy_iPhone.html 

What a fucking asshole!

NYT Supports Hoaxer, NOT Real Victims by Michael Gaynor

I just don’t get it. Yesterday in Iraq there were two car bombings in the same place that killed 24 people and wounded 120. Today there was another 24 dead and 50 wounded in 4 more bombings.. That makes the 2 day total 48 dead and 170 wounded. Here is a link to my source.
Do I even have to point out to you how insane it is that we obsess for weeks about the VT killings and pay little heed to even greater death tolls in Iraq? Do the Iraqi civilians matter less because they aren’t dying within our borders?

I don’t want to get into a debate about what we should or should not do in Iraq or weather our “surge” is helping or hurting the situation there or if we should get our troops out or not. What I want to get into a debate about is weather we should as a country care more about a story where 30 die as opposed to a news story where 50 die. Do you seriously think that we’ll get 10 24 hour cycles of coverage on 5 news channels about the car bombings? We won’t and there is something fundamentally wrong about this. We have to complain to the media outlets. We have to write letters and emails to them. We have to blog about this. We have to stand up and fight this. Why don’t we? Why does it feel that I’m the only one who is trying to do something about this?

Does anyone care that on any given day 33 people die in the Sudan or that 33 people (a good portion american) die in Iraq? Does anyone care that the executive branch of the US govt. is under congressional investigation? Or that the Secretary of State may be be facing a subpoena soon? You wouldn’t think so if you watched or read the news lately. When I come in to work, the lobby of my building has CNN on a big flat screen TV. For the past 3 days the only thing I’ve seen on it (and I’ve walked past it quite a bit) has been this shooting incident at GT. Look, it’s pretty sad that this happened and innocent people died, but guess what? It’s over and its time to report on real news.. stuff that is happening right now..

Yea yea, we need time to grieve.. Blah Blah Blah. Grieve about the other deaths around the world that either we caused directly or by our inaction allowed and allow to happen all the time. Lets grieve about that. Lets grieve about how badly we ruined the environment and how we still have no plan on how to fix it. Lets grieve about New Orleans and how it isn’t much better than it was 2 years ago. And the list goes on.

We need to start questioning why nobody is standing up and pushing back against the fact that our media is failing us, that it is feeding us useless shit every day and we just eat it up. We need to complain. We need to stand up and demand that the media start focusing on things that are important. Don’t you all see where this is headed?

From the NY Times (Adam Cohen, Apr. 16, 2007) :

Madison, Wis.

Opponents of Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin spent $4 million on ads last year trying to link the Democratic incumbent to a state employee who was sent to jail on corruption charges. The effort failed, and Mr. Doyle was re-elected — and now the state employee has been found to have been wrongly convicted. The entire affair is raising serious questions about why a United States attorney put an innocent woman in jail.

The conviction of Georgia Thompson has become part of the furor over the firing of eight United States attorneys in what seems like a political purge. While the main focus of that scandal is on why the attorneys were fired, the Thompson case raises questions about why other prosecutors kept their jobs.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which heard Ms. Thompson’s case this month, did not discuss whether her prosecution was political — but it did make clear that it was wrong. And in an extraordinary move, it ordered her released immediately, without waiting to write a decision. “Your evidence is beyond thin,” Judge Diane Wood told the prosecutor. “I’m not sure what your actual theory in this case is.”

Members of Congress should ask whether it was by coincidence or design that Steven Biskupic, the United States attorney in Milwaukee, turned a flimsy case into a campaign issue that nearly helped Republicans win a pivotal governor’s race.

There was good reason for the appeals court to be shocked. Ms. Thompson, a 56-year-old single woman, seems to have lost her home and spent four months in prison simply for doing her job. Ms. Thompson, who spent years in the travel industry before becoming a state employee, was responsible for putting the state’s travel account up for competitive bid. Mr. Biskupic claimed that she awarded the contract to an agency called Adelman Travel because its C.E.O. contributed to Mr. Doyle’s campaign.

To charge her, Mr. Biskupic had to look past a mountain of evidence of innocence. Ms. Thompson was not a Doyle partisan. She was a civil servant, hired by a Republican governor, with no identifiable interest in politics. She was only one member of a seven-person committee that evaluated the bidders. She was not even aware of the Adelman campaign contributions. She also had a good explanation for her choice: of the 10 travel agencies that competed, Adelman submitted the lowest-cost bid.

While Ms. Thompson did her job conscientiously, that is less clear of Mr. Biskupic. The decision to award the contract — the supposed crime — occurred in Madison, in the jurisdiction of Wisconsin’s other United States attorney. But for reasons that are hard to understand, the Milwaukee-based Mr. Biskupic swept in and took the case.

While he was investigating, in the fall of 2005, Mr. Biskupic informed the media. Justice Department guidelines say federal prosecutors can publicly discuss investigations before an indictment only under extraordinary circumstances. This case hardly met that test.

The prosecution proceeded on a schedule that worked out perfectly for the Republican candidate for governor. Mr. Biskupic announced Ms. Thompson’s indictment in January 2006. She went to trial that summer, and was sentenced in late September, weeks before the election. Mr. Biskupic insisted in July, as he vowed to continue the investigation, that “the review is not going to be tied to the political calendar.”

But the Thompson case was “the No. 1 issue” in the governor’s race, says the Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman, Joe Wineke. In a barrage of commercials, Mr. Doyle’s opponents created an organizational chart that linked Ms. Thompson — misleadingly called a “Doyle aide” — to the governor. Ms. Thompson appeared in an unflattering picture, stamped “guilty,” and in another ad, her name was put on a graphic of jail-cell doors slamming shut.

Most of the eight dismissed prosecutors came from swing states, and Democrats suspect they may have been purged to make room for prosecutors who would help Republicans win close elections. If so, it might also mean that United States attorneys in all swing states were under unusual pressure.

Wisconsin may be the closest swing state of all. President Bush lost it in 2004 by about 12,000 votes, and in 2000, by about half that. According to some Wisconsin politicians, Karl Rove said that their state was his highest priority among governor’s races in 2006, because he believed a Republican governor could help the party win Wisconsin in the 2008 presidential election.

Mr. Biskupic insists that he prosecuted Ms. Thompson only because he believed a crime was committed, and that he did not discuss the political implications of the case or the timing with anyone in the Justice Department or the White House. Congress has asked the Justice Department for all e-mail messages about the case to help resolve the matter.

But even if there were no discussions, Mr. Biskupic may have known that his bosses in Washington expected him to use his position to help Republicans win elections, and then did what they wanted.

That would be ironic indeed. One of the biggest weaknesses in the case against Ms. Thompson was that to commit the crime she was charged with she had to have tried to gain personally from the contract, and there’s no credible evidence that she did. So Mr. Biskupic made the creative argument that she gained by obtaining “political advantage for her superiors” and that in pleasing them she “enhanced job security for herself.” Those motivations, of course, may well describe why Mr. Biskupic prosecuted Ms. Thompson.