I'm really surprised that this isn't getting more coverage. I read the A-List, B-List and C-list of blogs and have seen very little of this:
TVSquad.com is reporting that Frontline is going to do a series on the press manipulation leading up to war. Okay. I admit that TV Squad is a must read for me but this is pretty good stuff.
Is anyone else covering this? The word needs to get out.
I know I've been absent this week. The tornados have had a terrible impact on our community and I've been doing my part to help, donate and pitch in where I can. But today, I am just pissed and it had to happen in MY state.
Today we are witnessing an offshoot of the Missing White Female syndrome in which the news media whips itself into a frenzy - ignoring real news and things that have a dramatic impact on day-to-day life. This was the case with the Natalie Holloway disappearance - 24/7 coverage for weeks on end.
Over the last 24 hours, we've been witnessing this offshoot with Anna Nicole Smith. Can we just get real? MSNBC dedicated a one hour special in which they did not cover any other news. The cameras lined up outside the Broward County Medical Examiner's office are just sick. It's on every cable news channel and every cable news outlet's website is leading with this story.
Even CNBC is covering this story?!?!
I'm not saying the media shouldn't cover the story but PLEASE! There are more important things happening in our community today.
And that's just to name a few. Please, people, get some perspective.
That is all.
Remember the uproar about the provision of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act that allowed the Attorney General to appoint US Attorneys without Senate confirmation. The early reports indicated that Senator Arlen Specter snuck the change in during negotiations. Well it turns out that Specter was a bit miffed when he heard he had submitted that change. Why, he would have remembered doing something that dastardly. It turns out that while Senator Specter didn't slip the language into the Patriot Act, one of his staff did insert it at the request of the Department of Justice. Apparently the Republican staffer forgot he worked for Senator Specter, or maybe he thought they both worked for the Karl Rove, who apparently was able to talk Alberto Gonzolas into appointing one of his political operatives US Attorney in Arkansas.
In any event it is being reported that the provison is on its way to being repealed. Apparently Justice and Senate Republicans aren't complaining now about the senate confirmation requirement. Instead they seem upset about a provision of the old law (now being restored in a bill sponsored by Senator Feinstein) that allows district court judges to appoint replacement US Attorneys if they are not confirmed within 120 days of nomination.
I wonder what other laws were enacted having never been reviewed by a single member of Congress. I guess we will find out as the 110th congress unfolds.
UPDATE Joe Conason has posted a very good discussion of this mess at Salon.com including information about the Specter staffer,Michael O'Neill, now a law professor at George Mason University, who evidently thought being a Clarence Thomas law clerk gave him the right to insert language in legislation without running it past his boss.
Well, not the whole body,... The headline reads, “Chinese army harvesting parts from Falungong inmates.” The article begins, “China's military is reportedly harvesting organs from prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for large scale transplants including for foreign recipients, a study said.”
Falungong is a new religion that originated about fifteen years ago in China. It appears to be a fairly harmless (as religions go these days) pastiche of various elements of popular Buddhism, emphasizing Qigong-style breathing exercises, healthy living, and meditation. Fà lún 法輪 is the Chinese translation of Sanskrit dharmacakra, “Wheel of the (Buddha’s) Law” and gōng 功 means, in this context, “exercise,” or “practice.” [For reasons known only to the Mainland geniuses who cooked up the currently-fashionable Pinyin Romanization scheme, “lun” and “gong” have the same vowel sound - both rhyme with “book”.]
The founder, or “revealer” as he prefers to be known, of Falungong – perhaps “the decider” was already taken by then – is a 55-year-old Chinese man named Li Hongzhi 李洪志. Depending on whom you believe, Li’s life from early childhood until his 1992 revelation of Falungong was spent either in almost forty years of intensive study and practice of esoteric Buddhism, or consisted of a ne’er-do-well childhood, followed by a tour as a trumpet player in an Army band and a later career as part-time security guard at a cereal factory.
Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution [English 中文 ] guarantees freedom of religion, unless its believers “disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state.” Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, it appears that Falungong practitioners quietly doing breathing exercises in public parks have somehow fallen afoul of one of those exclusions.
For reasons that have not been adequately explained, membership in Falungong is now deemed a serious political crime. The religion is officially banned in China (except in Macau and Hong Kong) and its members subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment without due process of (Chinese) law.
According to the study cited in the article linked above, once the Falungong believers are locked up in military prisons, they are all “systematically subjected to blood tests to match their organs with recipients.” That information is stored in a database so that when rich foreigners come to China for transplant surgery, perhaps to bypass long waiting lists at home or because the surgery in Chinese military hospitals is much cheaper, they sometimes receive organs from what are demurely called “executed prisoners” in official press releases.
What the globe-trotting transplant shoppers may not know is that the execution may have occurred only a few minutes earlier in an adjacent operating room and the prisoner’s only crime may have been joining the wrong church.
When we give a country “Most Favored Nation” (MFN) status, it means we won’t assess a tariff on any of their goods that is higher than we assess against the hypothetical “most favored nation.” China’s MFN status was revoked by President Truman in 1951, after China invaded its sovereign neighbor Tibet, and incorporated it into the People’s Republic by force.
China decided to wait us out, doing nothing significant to improve conditions in occupied Tibet, while flagrantly abusing the international tariff system. By the early 1970s, with our legendary geopolitical short attention span, we provisionally reestablished China’s MFN status -- now renamed the more harmless-sounding “Normal Trade Relations” (NTR). In 1999, under a Republican Congress and a Democratic President, it was permanently restored so China could apply for membership in the World Trade Organization.
Bills to repeal China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status surface every few years in Congress. Repealing it would be a good way to curb the disgusting trade in organs from executed prisoners of conscience. On the other hand, it might also drive up the cost of organ transplants, Happy Meals and athletic shoes.
Ask your Senator or Representative how they would vote on a tough choice like that.
Crossposted at The Mandarin.
I wanted to stay away from this, I really did, but I just read another instupid essay. So...
Wow. So this is what the great American Civil Rights Movement has devolved down to: angry/hurtful responses to in inarticulate old man’s inartful attempt to say nice things about one of his colleagues.
No, its not about child poverty, teenage mothers, absent fathers, seemingly ever present violence and drugs, a 25% incarceration rate, gangs, substantial lack of buy in to the positive outcomes of educational effort or insufficient investments in minority communities.
No my friends, it all about different interpretations of the use of a word. What a joke this is, fueled by people who have unclear agendas. Or is there a clear agenda…victimization?
The problem with the term 'articulate' is that we rarely see it used in reference to white guys.
What?
My god! Google the word “articulate” in conjunction with Clinton, Cuomo, Churchill etc. and prepare to spend hours following the links that are retrieved.
“Lorna Bingham of Des Moines said she was impressed by how articulate Clinton* was. "I didn't realize she was such a good speaker.” -Washington Post
Note: HRC is not a "guy". So, should she be pissed?
“Like Churchill, he is extremely intelligent and articulate. Like Churchill, he is a Christian. He is, of course, Newt Gingrich.” –The American Thinker
Amazing.
This coming Tuesday Senator Schumer will preside over an interesting Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled "Is the DOJ Politicizing the Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys? "
You might recall that when the Attorney General appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month one of the topics concerned a recent spate of firings among US attorneys. Apparently seven were fired in the period after the November election and replaced before the convening of the 110th Congress. Some of the firings and replacements have all of the hallmarks of political patronage. The first involved the firing of H.E. "Bud" Cummins III who had served as the US Attorney in Little Rock for the last 5 years. He had was told by officials in DC there was nothing wrong with his performance, but that officials in Washington wanted to give the job to another GOP loyalist. The loyalist the administration wanted to reward was J. Timothy Griffin, a well known political operative and former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove. Maybe Karl needs subpoena power to plow Arkansas for dirt to use against Hillary Clinton or maybe Governor Mike Huckabee?
Dan Eggen of Washington Post concludes his February 4, 2007 article by quoting Cummins:
"the political aspect of it shouldn't really be a shock to anybody. . . . Every U.S. attorney knows they serve at the pleasure of the president."
Instead of nominating local, qualified attorneys whose philosophy jibes with the administration (as was the traditional practice), the nomination of U.S. Attorneys has been subsumed into the Republican Party's political machine.
