“I don’t understand a lot of shit, so clearly the NY Times is up to no good.
PS. Mitt is teh DREAMY!“
by John Cole| 32 Comments
This post is in: I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
by John Cole| 53 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, General Stupidity, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
Uncle Jimbo, still stupid as hell. You can almost see the shit-eating grin on his face as he wrote the post.
The new “Conservative”/Republican/War Party Credo:
“I hate big government, unless it is prosecuting speech I do not like.”
This post is in: Politics
As a newly minted left-wing America hating dhimmi, I think one of the things that amazes me is the visceral anger of the right wing blogosphere. Last night, incredulous, I watched as Dana Milbank, Chris Matthews, and some ad exec basically decided that ‘Bush’ had won the debate over Iraq this week:
MATTHEWS: I agree with that, he didn’t know. But if he believed that this war was making America safer, wouldn’t he have said so?
DELLA FEMINA: I think that he just won people over by saying, I haven’t got an answer. Sometimes coming up with a fast answer will—there are people who are looking at him and saying, I know we should get out, the surge isn’t working. They now believe that they’re right and the surge isn’t working. There are other people saying, I’m telling you, the surge seems to be working. They believe—so he didn’t change anyone.
What they wanted was status quo. They wanted everyone to say, Well, gee, this guy is—he’s very impressive. He’s a war hero.
I think the biggest mistake that was made was the anti—the “Petraeus Betray us” that ran just before that. I mean, what a setup that was. Snow could get up and say, Gee, this is a hero. How could we treat this man this way?
***MILBANK: Well, as a tactical matter, Bush has won this round. But this actually, purely politically, makes it much more difficult for him and his party next year. This means there won’t be a massive reduction of troops before the election. This is going to be going on next summer now. So they’ve kicked the can down the road. They’ll be able to do that until March. But this is exactly what the Republicans didn’t want.
General Petraeus came to DC, offered what is essentially fact-free testimony, and admitted in a fleeting moment of candor that he, like the rest of us, doesn’t think this war is making us any safer, the Democrats are pre-emptively rolling over and playing dead, the “surge” will continue on until it is physically impossible, and if you survey the blogosphere, it is the right that is angry- about an ad in a newspaper none of them fucking read anyway.
And I just don’t get it. What the hell do they have to be angry about? Other than immigration and social security, hasn’t Bush given them everything they wanted and demanded? What, exactly, have the defeatocrats stopped? Name one thing that has been denied Bush in his prosecution of this war. One dollar that wasn’t budgeted. Even today, at the height of the Democratic opposition, and the Bush administration is adhering consistently to the doctrine of “Doing Whatever the Fuck We Want.” The troops aren’t going anywhere until we don’t have enough troops. That isn’t a Democrat forced drawdown/withdrawal, it is a shortage of troops.
And so it is for everything, tax cuts, domestic policy, torture, surveillance, judicial picks- you name it. Bush has done whatever he wants, the right has supported him the whole way, and the opposition from ‘teh left’ can charitably be called inconsequential. Christ on a crutch, it took a beating at the polls (the only ones that count) to force Bush to accept Rumsfeld’s resignation, and Gonzales stayed on until he was literally the laughingstock of the legal world, both domestic and abroad. And does anyone want to place a bet that there will be little more than token opposition to Ted Olson as the next AG? Anyone?
So again- what are they so damned angry about? I don’t get it. I used to throw around the term the “angry left” myself, but watching this administration do whatever it wants to the cheerleading of imbeciles and first rate hacks, I am surprised the left is not angrier. Bush, the worst President of my lifetime and possible the last century, turned a 51% tightly fought election into a mandate, while the Democrats can’t figure out how to remove one god damned troop from Iraq with 60+% of the public furious about the war.
Again, I don’t get it. What are they so damned mad about? If they had to put up with the crap the left is putting up with, they would be burning cars in the street. If the roles were reversed, the right wouldn’t be pooling their money for an ad in the NY Times- they would burn the god damned building down after stoning the editorial board to death. And that is putting it mildly.
And why are the Democrats so damned hopeless?
by John Cole| 81 Comments
This post is in: Media, Politics, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, General Stupidity
The NY Post “reports”:
According to Abbe Serphos, director of public relations for the Times, “the open rate for an ad of that size and type is $181,692.”
A spokesman for MoveOn.org confirmed to The Post that the liberal activist group had paid only $65,000 for the ad – a reduction of more than $116,000 from the stated rate.
A Post reporter who called the Times advertising department yesterday without identifying himself was quoted a price of $167,000 for a full-page black-and-white ad on a Monday.
Serphos declined to confirm the price and refused to offer any inkling for why the paper would give MoveOn.org such a discounted price.
Citing the shared liberal bent of the group and the Times, one Republican aide on Capitol Hill speculated that it was the “family discount.”
Allegedly a reporter, Jules Crittenden writes:
NYT Lies, People Will Die
… If they have their way, that is.
Wouldn’t you know it. Times gave a break to MoveOn.org to gratuitously and falsely insult Petraeus. It isn’t editorializing. It’s subsidizing propaganda. Maybe Petraeus should consider cutting the NYT’s Baghdad bureau off from any access to the U.S. military in Iraq. It’s not like they are doing much in the way of meaningful reporting there, anyway. Could lead to some unpleasant truths being aired, a little housecleaning. Theoretically what the ad department does and what the editorial page does are separate from what the news department does. Or doesn’t do.
Did those reportorial juices get flowing for Jules at any time during his tirade? Of course not! This is right-wing reporting. It would not occur to him to ask around and see what other organizations have paid for ads. It would not occur to him to think maybe retail prices are never actually paid. It would not occur to him to pick up the phone and, you know, call his buddies at Freedom’s Watch, or anywhere else, to determine whether or not the price seems out of line. Or to ask them what they paid. It would not occur to him to do any of the things that ACTUAL reporter Jake Tapper did:
New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis tells me that it’s Times policy to not “disclose the rate that any one advertiser pays for an ad. The rate that is charged for an ad will depend on a variety of factors including how frequently the advertiser advertises with us, the day of the week, is it color, is it black and white, what section it appears, all of those kinds of things.”
Mathis says the newspaper tries “to keep our advertising columns as open as possible” and “there are many instances when we’ve published opinion advertisements that run counter to the stance that we take on our own editorial pages.” As an example of how the Times is open to all points of view in advertisers, Mathis points out that on September 11, 2007, “we published a full-page advertisement from Freedom’sWatch.org, an organization whose view is opposite of MoveOn.org.”
Freedom’s Watch spokesman Matt David, however tells me the group was charged “significantly more” than MoveOn.org for its ad. The organization says it plans to run a response to the MoveOn.org NYT ad in the Times, “and we plan to demand the same ad rate they paid,” David says.
Note the folks at Freedom’s Watch refuse to disclose how much they paid. Will any of our brave truth detectors on the right try to figure out why?
There still is ZERO reporting and ZERO evidence that the NY Times did anything out of the ordinary, but the treason of the NY Times is now established “fact” on the right. And no one, and I repeat, NO ONE, will challenge them. And this is how it goes, day in, day out, as they fling things against the wall and hope they stick to their pre-existing opinions, and reify them for their own political purposes. Now the professional (and by professional, I mean the ones on fulltime wingnut welfare) wingnuts are involved. Brent Bozell was bitching about it on Fox last night. All that is left to happen now are columns by Jonah Goldberg, Malkin, and Hugh.
Two Questions:
1.) Has it always been like this? Does anyone ever stand up to these folks? And don’t people realize that in a week or so, should someone actually compares rates charged to different groups and find out nothing out of the ordinary actually happened (they may have received a big, out of the ordinary, and unusual rate cut, right now there is nothing to prove that these allegations are true, though), IT WILL NOT MATTER? By then, it is too late, and this will already be established truth. Like WMD in Iraq, bitches.
2.) How is it treason for a free press to allow groups of citizens to pay for something they want to advertise? And why is that wrong? And even if they DID give them a good deal, why the hell does that matter?
*** Update ***
*** Update #2 ***
Goldstein is also upping the ante, citing McCain/Feingold (something we actually still both agree on, and something that by itself disqualifies McCain from ever being President):
So the question once again is, was the discount offered by the NYT to MoveOn.org within the parameters of discounts given in the “ordinary course of business?
And will we ever know anyway, given that the Times will (as is their prerogative) comment only generally on their advertising pricing policies?
An interesting question, especially considering not one person in the fluffersphere has asked that or even attempted to investigate it. It was just decreed that the NY Times gave them some unheard of deal, and thus, is in bed with evil liberals. In fact, all the speculation to date has amounted to little more than ‘GEE- that sure seems like a big discount to me! There must be something wrong!’
by John Cole| 8 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
They site may seem particularly laggy or nonexsistant tonight after normal business hours (which are what, exactly, for a blog?), and that is because we are having a long overdue update to WordPress installed, as well as moving to a different server.
The tech folks sent me some detailed information explaining what they are going to do, but they lost me at ‘Fantastico console,’ and as such, I quit reading it and skimmed to the point where I had a vague idea that something important was going to happen tonight.
You have been warned.
by John Cole| 47 Comments
This post is in: Politics, War, General Stupidity
Via the Instapundit, Bill Quick:
I have said all along, and I still believe there is one way Bush can save his presidency as well as guarantee a GOP sweep in 2008, and that is to strike hard at the Iranian regime, and keep striking it until it falls.
If he does so, the world will suddenly become a far safer place, and even I will revise my opinion of his watch drastically upward.
And then we can nuke North Korea. And the bad parts of Pakistan. And what are those fuckers in Syria up to? Bombs for everyone!
Permanent war has its political advantages.
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Politics, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, General Stupidity
According to these folk:
On the Friday before the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Osama bin Laden appeared in a new video, his first since prior to the U.S. presidential elections in 2004. In analyzing the video, Neal Krawetz of Hactor Factor, an expert on digital image forensics, said in his latest blogs that the video contained many visual and audio splices, and that all of the modifications were of very low quality.
Most striking is bin Laden’s beard, which has been gray in recent images. For this video it is black. “As far as my tools can detect, there has been no image manipulation of the bin Laden portion of the image beyond contrast adjustment. His beard really does appear to be that color.” The Washington Post has the full video here.
Krawetz says the inner frame of bin Laden was resaved at least twice, and not at the same time. The images show fine horizontal stripes on bin Laden and a background indicating these came from interlaced video sources. In contrast, the text elements, such as the As-Sahab logo, appear to be from non-interlaced sources.
The September 7 video shows bin Laden dressed in a white hat, white shirt and yellow sweater. Krawetz notes “this is the same clothing he wore in the 2004-10-29 video. In 2004 he had it unzipped, but in 2007 he zipped up the bottom half. Besides the clothing, it appears to be the same background, same lighting, and same desk. Even the camera angle is almost identical.” Krawetz also notes that “if you overlay the 2007 video with the 2004 video, his face has not changed in three years–only his beard is darker and the contrast on the picture has been adjusted.”
Two interesting things with this development. Will the fact free right wing blogosphere take back all the stupid remarks about Democrats writing the Bin Laden speech? And will we stop listening to these yahoos, who are so unscrupulous they will cite bin fucking Laden if they think it helps them politically?