The perils of living with lackeys

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?

... But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate" and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does on a great one (the Bush interview).

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr. Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was. You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long charade played out like a lost reel of "Duck Soup."

...If anything, the first Bush-Kerry confrontation has given split-screen television a new vogue. Having defied the efforts of both campaigns to squelch its use on Sept. 30, emboldened TV news organizations can run with it at will. So we saw on the Sunday after that debate, when Condoleezza Rice appeared on ABC's "This Week."

There she was quizzed about the report in that morning's Times saying that in 2002 she had hyped aluminum tubes as evidence of Saddam's nuclear threat a year after her staff was told that government experts had serious doubts. Ms. Rice kept trying to talk over the soft-voiced George Stephanopoulos's questions, but he zapped her with a picture: a September 2002 CNN interview in which she had not, shall we say, told the whole truth and nothing but. As the old video played, ABC used a split screen so we could watch Ms. Rice, "This Is Your Life" style, as she watched the replay of her incriminating appearance of two years earlier. Maybe, like Mr. Bush at the first debate, she knew her reaction was being caught on camera. But even if she did, the unchecked rage in her face, like that of her boss three days earlier, revealed that her image and her story, like the war itself, had spun completely out of her control.

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Tom Friedman similarly ambushed Rumsfeld on camera. He was telling his usual incredible bold lies when Friedman quoted directly from a past Rumsfeld speech. I'm told Rumsfeld was filmed gasping for air.

By controlling the US media, by controlling the audiences they interact with, by controlling what they read, by speaking only to themselves, by consistently shooting the messengers, by their ruthless destruction of dissenters, Bush et al have created a hermetic fantasy world. It may yet work for them, but it will not work for our world.

It may be that the US media is waking up. One senior journalist tells me he feels the media was essentially asleep for the past two years, paralyzed by fears of the "liberal media" accusation, misled by false patriotism, trapped by conventions of "neutrality". He thinks those days are passing.

NPR : Secret Service Cleanses the Disloyal Voter

NPR : Morning Edition for Friday, October 8, 2004

An amazing story. We've known for some time that the Bush campaign has been allowing only the most loyal supporters to attend Bush rallies. Now we learn that the Secret Service has been the muscle for some of these screenings -- threatening anyone carrying Kerry paraphenelia with arrest and imprisonment as suspected terrorists.

Repeat. Some Secret Service agents consider anyone with less than full loyalty to George Bush to be a terrorist threat to America.

We are way past too far.

Bush and his remote control pod

Salon.com News | Bush's mystery bulge

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology [remote teleprompt with intra-otic mike] earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies -- notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's appearance. 'They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera,' Schechter said. 'The Democrats weren't doing that at their convention.'

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Bush had some device strapped to his back during the debates. What was it?

Note that rumor has it that Bush has also deferred his October medical into November. (I've no substantiating evidence on this.) Given the bizarre behaviors and intrigues of this administration, the story almost writes itself. Cheney has been poisoning Bush for years, inducing an organic brain syndrome. After the election Bush-bot receives a "thorough" exam and his dementia is detected. He shuffles off to a nursing home. Cheney takes power. A mysterious dirty bomb causes great panic; Cheney declares martial law. Opponents disappear. Quietly, Bush passes on. A new world begins ...

You gotta admit, doesn't Cheney look like he could do something like that?

Anyway, if some journalist can figure a way to tap the frequencies used for teleprompt devices they might break a good story at the next debate.

Innovators work for free - historically

Marginal Revolution: The returns from innovation

The implication is that “society” pays a paltry $2.20 for every $100 worth of welfare it enjoys from innovating activities.

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This may change with recent abuses of patent and copyright -- innovators may capture more of the value. On the other hand, it is pretty clear we'll get less innovation from an era of protected intellectual property.

Bottom line, innovators innovate because they have to. It's a compulsion. Some people need to run, some people need to innovate.

Edwards and Cheney -- revealed

Boing Boing: Best VP debate parody image EVAR

The truth will come out.

Identification of the 1918 pandemic's lethality factor

The New York Times > Science > Critical Gene a Suspect in Lethal Epidemic

By recreating the influenza virus that killed up to 50 million people in 1918-19, researchers may have identified the gene that turned it into one of the most lethal in human history.

The gene, one of eight in the virus, seems to have an unexpected capacity for sending the body's immune system into overdrive, causing inflammation, hemorrhage and death, the scientists report today in the journal Nature.

... Dr. Kawaoka, Dr. Taubenberger and others have been reinserting the 1918-type genes into ordinary flu viruses to see if they can pinpoint which of the genes made the virus so lethal and how it did so. In the latest of these experiments, which Dr. Kawaoka reports today, a gene called the hemagglutinin or HA gene seems to be largely responsible for the dire effects of Spanish flu, as the 1918 epidemic is also known.

... The HA gene studied by Dr. Kawaoka's team is well known to flu experts because it changes from year to year. Since the protein made by the gene is the one singled out for attack by the immune system, the body's defenses are caught off guard each year as flu virus arrives with a novel version of the protein to which the body has no prior immunity.

... What he has now found is that the Spanish flu version of the HA gene, in addition to its break-in and enter role, seems able to trigger the release of cytokines, the signaling agents with which the immune system gears itself up for massive attack against an infectious agent.

Uncontrolled overdrive can make the immune system kill the body in order to save it, through excessive inflammation. The virus carrying the Spanish flu version of the HA gene produced high levels of cytokines in mice, Dr. Kawaoka says, and this is probably what led to the inflammation and lung damage that killed them.

... Survivors of the 1918 epidemic have high levels of antibody to the engineered virus, Dr. Kawaoka reports, but people infected recently with a similar class of flu virus do not. "Thus, a large section of the population would be susceptible to an outbreak of a 1918-like influenza virus," he and his colleagues concluded.

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If this is borne out by further work, Drs Kawaoka and Taubenberger may share the Nobel prize. Of course by the time they get their prize, high school students will have the facilities to create viruses that make this one seem relatively benign.

Today in central China a baby boy was born. Sixteen years from now he'll swear revenge on an unfaithful lover -- and in heartbroken spite he'll create the pathogen that saves the earth from humanity.

And some people think we should worry about al Qaeda.

Steroids increase head injury death rate by about 15%

Study: Steroids useless for head injury

The study, coordinated at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, involved 10,008 adults with severe head injuries who were randomly given either a steroid drip or a placebo for 48 hours after being admitted to the emergency room.

Within two weeks, 21 percent of the patients given steroids had died, compared with 18 percent of those given the placebo. The results were the same regardless of how quickly the treatment was given and regardless of the type or severity of the head injury.

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The steroids may or may not have helped with brain swelling, but they are toxic and dangerous drugs. The net effect appears to have been quite harmful.

Once again we see the limitations of retrospective studies. Only a large randomized trial was able to expose this problem. This is very reminescent of the estrogen replacement therapy crisis, though here the harm seems greater (ERT therapy was only slightly more harmful than no therapy).

I'm left with a bad feeling about the basis of a lot of interventions that have been shown in smaller or retrospective studies to improve mortality by 10-25%. A LOT of our medical and surgical interventions have benefits in that range. I think we need to consider them all to be highly suspect.

Author and intelligence specialist on Bush and the misuse and abuse of the CIA

Salon.com News | "A temporary coup"

...Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they corrupted, coerced or ignored have made extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our national security for years. By manipulating intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's intelligence capabilities.

"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis."

The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush administration -- a fact which Powers says reveals the urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief -- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the White House trashed the career of veteran CIA operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity. The move was a crude retaliation against Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had exposed the Bush administration's specious claim that Saddam had sought "yellowcake" from Africa to build a nuclear bomb.

The struggle between the CIA and the Defense Department reached a bizarre climax a few weeks ago when Ahmed Chalabi's office was very publicly ransacked by officers working under the command of the CIA; the Iraqi exile leader was later accused of leaking vital information to Iran, among other allegations. The abrupt fall from grace of the man hand-picked by neoconservative policymakers to lead post-Saddam Iraq, says Powers, lays bare the brutal turf war between the two sides.

... Tenet was pushed out by the accumulating circumstances, not because he failed to do what Bush wanted him to do, which was essentially two things: The first was to not speak too clearly about the warnings that he'd given the White House before 9/11. You can be certain that it was not easy for Tenet to do that. Tenet has never spoken out clearly and said, "I told the president everything he needed to know to at least start responding to the threat."

... Secondly, Tenet hasn't spoken clearly on the reason why they got Iraqi WMD wrong. And it's not because people in the bowels of the agency had it all balled up, it's because in the process of writing finished intelligence -- which was required to extract a vote for war from congress -- it got turned on its head at the upper levels of the CIA. They found certainty where there wasn't any; the evidence for WMD stockpiles and programs was extremely thin. Who else could have created this situation besides the policymakers themselves?

... The agency is politicized to an extreme. It is under the control of the Bush White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis. It's somewhat like Iran-Contra, though on a totally different scale. The president wanted to go to war. He's supposed to have the support of the Congress. How did he get it? Well, his administration made up a scary story about imminent dangers.

... I think the truth about what happened at the policy level will eventually come out. We know, because it was on paper, that on Aug. 6, 2001 the CIA gave the president a very explicit warning. When 9/11 actually occurred, you would expect to look back and see, once the distress light was on, various U.S. intelligence and police organizations scurrying around frantically responding to the warning. But what do you find? Nothing.

It's a race

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

From the Wall Street Journal, today:
WSJ.com: The latest Zogby Interactive poll puts Mr. Kerry ahead of President Bush in 13 of the 16 closely contested states.... If the results on Election Day matched Zobgy's numbers, Mr. Kerry would win.... Mr. Kerry would have 322 electoral votes and the president would have 216.

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Ok, I'm guilty of figuring I was going to strive mightily and fall nobly in a hopeless cause. I didn't bank on actually having a chance of winning. Gee, kind of takes the fun out of hopelessness.

What went on in Iraq prior to the war - the WMD mystery

BBC NEWS | Middle East | A huge failure of intelligence

[The report of the Iraq Survey Group] ... came up with the theory that Saddam Hussein's dark mind was convinced that his power lay in his special weapons and that, even though he had to give them up after the first Gulf War in 1991, he was determined to preserve an ability to manufacture them.

At the same time, he wanted to maintain the myth of invincibility which the weapons had brought him. He always believed that it was the threat of the weapons which stopped the Americans from going to Baghdad in 1991. So he obscured what he had and did not have.

His priority was not to rebuild his weapons. That would have ensured the continuation of sanctions. It was to get rid of sanctions and to subvert them in the meantime.

He was prepared to wait his time until the outside world lost interest and left him alone.

This, and the system of fear and rewards he ran which was unfamiliar to the West, made his regime hard to read. He did not, as South Africa and Ukraine did, throw open his doors willingly and allow easy inspection. Indeed, the inspectors left at the end of 1998, so hard was their task.

Suspicion therefore remained and suspicion led to errors of judgement in which Saddam Hussein was not given the benefit of any doubt, even when the inspectors returned and found nothing.

It proved a disastrous strategy for Saddam Hussein because the uncertainty about his weapons could be exploited by an administration in Washington quite prepared to go to war.

It turns out that the only area in which a reasonably accurate assessment was made was in rocketry. Here, ironically, the threat was probably underplayed. Iraq had plans, according to the Survey Group, for a rocket with a range of 1,000km (620 miles), far in excess of the 150km (90 miles) he was permitted by the United Nations sanctions rules.

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This has been the emerging consensus for some time. The major question is whether Saddam thought he really had more current capabilities than was true. I think that's still an open question, though a relatively minor one.

The plausible charges against the Bush administration are three:

1. Did the Bush administration bias the pre-war intelligence, and avoid killing Zarqawi when they could have, to bolster their personal desires to destroy Saddam?

2. Was the Bush administrations desire to destroy Saddam rational?

3. Was the Bush administration delusional about what would happen after the invasion, or did Rumsfeld take horrible risks in order to preserve capacity for a second strike against Syria or Iran?

The current state of evidence on these charges suggests:

1. Likely guilty on both counts.
2. An open question. It may have been irrational, but a rational case could also have been made. The big argument is about method rather than goal. They are probably guilty of incompetence.
3. Guilty of incompetence.

The only rational judgement given the facts of the case:

Fire Bush.

Vote for Change resurrects Neil Young

MoveOn PAC

My wife and I attended our first mutual rock concert last night -- Bruce Springsteen, REM, John Fogarty ... and ... Neil Young. Young showed up at the Vote for Change concert unannounced. He looked near death during his first performance, but, incredibly, by the final ear crushing brain splintering finale he looked about 20 years younger. I thought the damned speakers would explode (which would have been at least quieter).

A very impressive group and a fun audience. Admittedly a very pale and aging audience. Springsteen is a great speaker (Governor Springsteen?). I still don't know who that REM guy is, but he has one heck of a magnetic personality.

My ears may never be the same again. Ouch.

Cheney says --- trust Factcheck.com on Halliburton

GeorgeSoros.com

This is truly hilarious. Good for George! Cheney misspoke during the debate, and named a .com domain rather than a .org. In the twinkling of an eye someone in Soros organization acquired the educational domain --- and pointed it here.

Update 10/10/04: Turns out the redirect was done by the owner of the factcheck.com domain without input from the Soros organization. Bravo for him! A hero of the resistance ...

The worst intelligence report in US history

The New York Times > International > Middle East > How the White House Used Disputed Arms Intelligence

This long article focuses on one part of what's been called "the worst report in the history of US intelligence" -- the pre-war Iraq intelligence estimate. The CIA and Dick Cheney both come out very badly. Colin Powell also does poorly. Now we know why Tenet quit.

George the Divine - coming soon to a DVD near you

IHT: Frank Rich: Bush's crusade for the White House

Rich comments on a DVD to be released October 5th. It tells the story of George Bush -- agent of God. Emphases mine.

... A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to comfort us all after 9/11. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: They were separated at birth.

... Anyone who stands in the way of Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter.

The president - who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the White House to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" from God. "I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction," Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."

Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he recently told the con-servative talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed to Bush by the Reverend Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making mistakes.
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The president didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the autumn of 2001. His view of faith is as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."

... "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how someone like Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period.

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh

GBrowser, Google, Microsoft and Netscape Constellation

Could a 'GBrowser' Spawn an 'MBrowser'? - Mary Jo Foley (Microsoft Watch)

When Sun first fielded Java, it was 'just' a programming language. Then Sun expanded it into a 'platform' by adding other layers of software to the Java core.

It seems that Google is embarking on a similar path. In addition to providing a search engine, Google is now offering Web mail. It acquired photo-storing/sharing vendor Picassa. And in the not-too-distant future, Google could add a browser to its repertoire, as well....

Microsoft's focus on Google could become even sharper if rumors pan out regarding Google's intent to become a browser purveyor. The company has registered the 'Gbrowser.com,' 'Gbrowser.net' and 'Gbrowser.org' domain names. And if you piece the clues together, as some company watchers are doing, the Google browser won't be any old browser. It will be more of a development and operating environment, allowing users to work offline as well as online. Some might even go so far as to call it a 'platform.'

...My bet? While Opera, Safari and Firefox seemingly weren't enough to convince Microsoft that the company should find a way to swallow its antitrust arguments and release a new version of IE, Google's entrée into the market might be. I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft release some kind of stripped-down browser (IE Lite, though they won't call it that) some time in the next year-plus.

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This is very familiar to anyone who remembers Netscape Constellation (1996, almost 10 years ago!). Constellation incited Microsoft to crush Netscape forever. Now the hand of Netscape is thrusting out of the grave. Microsoft will need to redouble their efforts to acquire or destroy Google.

Mary Jo Foley also notes that Microsoft has decided that it will fight hard to keep closed their networking communication protocols. In other words they have declared that the "lock-in" between their desktop and server solutions is critical to their business models.

Between Google and Linux Microsoft's paranoia must be working overtime. Of course a few billion dollars and an armada of lawsuits should suffice to defeat both of these enemies. (The only real concern is China. If China decided that it needed Linux as a matter of national security, that might be hard for Microsoft to overcome.)