Democracy Now! (Marcia: "Always worth watching"):
Headlines for April 22, 2005
- Resistance Group Shoots Down Chopper in Iraq
- Ret. General Calls Iraqi Resistance 'Viable and Resilient'
- War Costs Taxpayers $300 Billion
- Soldier Convicted in Fragging in Kuwait
- Ecuador President Swears in Cabinet
- House Passes Energy Bill
- Negroponte Confirmed By Senate
- Howard Dean Supports Bush on Iraq
- Rice backs Belarusian opposition
Report: ExxonMobil Spends Millions Funding Global Warming Skeptics
A new investigation by Mother Jones magazine has revealed that ExxonMobil has spent at least $8 million dollars funding a network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming. We speak with the author of the report, a member of one the organizations that receives money from Exxon and a journalist covering environmental and climate change issues. [includes rush transcript - partial]
The Armenian Genocide: 90 Years Later Turkey Continues to Deny the Extermination of a People
This week marks the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide when more than a million Armenians were exterminated by the Young Turk government through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. Another million fled into permanent exile. Almost a century later, Turkey continues to deny the genocide. We speak with Colgate University professor Peter Balakian, author of "The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response" and Zanku Armenian of the Armenian National Committee of America. [includes rush transcript - partial]
Matthew Rothschild's latest "This Just In" focuses on the Negroponte vote/embarrassment:
John Negroponte was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence.
The vote in the U.S. Senate was 98-to-2.
Only two Senators were disgusted enough by Negroponte's dirty hands to dissent.
Only two Senators recognized that Negroponte's support for torturers in Honduras when he was ambassador there ought to have disqualified him from such a high office.
Shirley e-mailed Margaret Kimberley's latest "Freedom Rider" from The Black
Commentator:
Our government is treating us the way exterminators treat vermin. We are ruled by people who mask evil ideology with the artful use of language, so an advertising slogan is in order.
"Roaches check in, but they don't check out."
The United States government is now proposing that the roach treatment be meted out to American humans who want to visit Canada, Mexico, Panama and Bermuda. These countries currently do not require visiting Americans to have passports.
The United States can't force these nations to change their laws, so they are changing ours. The Department of State is proposing that Americans returning from these countries be required to have passports in order to re-enter the United States. We'll be able to check in, but not check out without letting Uncle Sam know where we have been.
From Bob Somerby's The Daily Howler today, let's note the opening:
OUR SUGGESTION: If you want to understand your world, we’ll suggest you read every word of today’s lengthy but incomparable HOWLER.
Truer words have not been typed today. Somerby dealing with the realities of Ann Coulter's notations. (A subject he's addressed in depth in real time.) So read it.
If you need further prompting, here's an excerpt:
That was the end of the piece. None of the ugly terms inside Coulter's quotes appear in this editorial. In fact, there's no name-calling done here at all; there are no "ad hominem attacks." Yes, Coulter was lying--as she constantly does--when she said that the editorial didn't concern Thomas' judicial philosophy, but she committed a vicious offense when she slandered the New York Times so grotesquely. Taylor was too kind--he was much too kind--when he said that Coulter had "fudged" her claims. In this paragraph, Coulter puts nasty language in the mouth of the Times--language the Times never used. She directly, blatantly misled her readers, even as she engaged in the very type of "ad hominem attack" she was pretending to criticize.
This, of course, is vintage Coulter--and yes, it's pure pathology. To the good, Taylor had caught one part of her lying, even if he was a bit too mild in his condemnation. But uh-oh! With Coulter, the pure pathology runs so deep that there's often a second layer of lying, and that was true in this event, although Taylor, understandably enough, completely failed to take notice.
Yes, Coulter's basic claims were bogus--but so were those footnotes, the ones Taylor cited! When Taylor looked in the back of the book, he noticed that the footnotes didn't cite the New York Times; they cited a Joycelyn Elders Playboy interview, and they cited statements by Lowery. As we've seen, Taylor reported this in Salon: "[N]otes in the back of the book identify the sources as former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elder's interview in Playboy, and Joseph Lowery at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quoted in the New Yorker." But uh-oh! That string of invective isn't from Elders; Coulter was up to her old tricks again. And in this case, she also was plagiarizing.
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