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March 06, 2004

Kerry tried to delay his Vietnam tour
: A report in the Telegraph, via the Harvard Crimson, says John Kerry tried to delay his tour of duty in Vietnam.
And who the hell could blame him?

Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate who is trading on his Vietnam war record to campaign against President George W Bush, tried to defer his military service for a year, according to a newly rediscovered article in a Harvard University newspaper.
He wrote to his local recruitment board seeking permission to spend a further 12 months studying in Paris, after completing his degree course at Yale University in the mid-1960s.

Hmmm. Paris/Vietnam, Paris/Vietnam...
Seems like he passed that sanity test.
I hope we put an end to Vietnam history with both Bush and Kerry and get on with the war that matters, the one against terrorism.

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Sequels
: I was wondering when Mel Gibson's Passion would open in Europe, where the real fun will begin. It opens on March 26 in the UK and likely in June in Germany and France and, if I'm translating correctly, in Poland.
And, by the way, the official Passion site has been translated into Latin and Aramaic.

: UPDATE: A commenter said he'd read that the movie was not being distributed in France. From Frank Rich's Sunday NY Time's column:

Whether "The Passion" will prove quite as benign in Europe and the Arab world is a story yet to be told. It can't be coincidence that France, where Jacques Chirac has of late called for "zero tolerance" of anti-Semitism, was the only country where the film lacked a distributor until this week, when a Tunisian producer declared it was his "duty as a Muslim who believes in Jesus" to remedy that terrible lapse.

: Rich also takes media to task for giving Gibson an easy ride:

But speaking as someone who has never experienced serious bigotry, I must confess that, whatever happens abroad, the fracas over "The Passion" has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before.
My quarrel is not with most of the millions of Christian believers who are moved to tears by "The Passion." They bring their own deep feelings to the theater with them, and when Mr. Gibson pushes their buttons, however crudely, they generously do his work for him, supplying from their hearts the authentic spirituality that is missing in his jamboree of bloody beefcake....
What concerns me much more are those with leadership positions in the secular world — including those in the media — who have given Mr. Gibson, "The Passion" and its most incendiary hucksters a free pass for behavior that is unambiguously contrived to vilify Jews....
Of late, however, the star has racheted up the volume of his complaints, floating insinuations out of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Speaking of his critics to Diane Sawyer of ABC, Mr. Gibson said: "It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." So who is in this dark, fearful conspiracy? The only conspirator mentioned by name in that interview was me. But Ms. Sawyer never identified me as Jewish, thereby sanitizing Mr. Gibson's rant of its truculent meaning. (She did show a picture of me, though, perhaps assuming that my nose might give me away.)
Bill O'Reilly was not so circumspect when he returned to this same theme last week, asking an editor from Variety why Mr. Gibson has taken so much heat for his film. After beating around the burning bush for a while, Mr. O'Reilly said: "I'm asking this question respectfully. Is it because that the major media in Hollywood and a lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people?" With respect like this, Jews hardly need any disrespect. Besides, the idea that Jews control the media is disproved by Mr. Gibson's own media campaign. Just as he kept most Jewish journalists out of early screenings of "The Passion," so he cherrypicks his interviewers now. No Jewish journalist on network television (and there are some) has been permitted to question him thus far — a press manipulation by Mr. Gibson's flacks that is worthy of further investigation.
The vilification of Jews by Mr. Gibson, his film and some of his allies, unchallenged by his media enablers, is not happening in a vacuum. We are in the midst of an escalating election-year culture war in which those of "faith" are demonizing so-called "secularists" (for which read any Jews critical of Mr. Gibson and their fellow travelers, liberals).

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The daily Stern: It's the First Amendment, stupid
: Thought you'd go a day without a report on Howard Stern and freedom of speech, just because it's on the weekend? No way!
Nation editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel blogs on Stern (linking to this very Stern-heavy blog) and makes it, indeed, a First Amendment issue:

When Clear Channel yanked Howard Stern for violating its new 'zero tolerance' obscenity policy, the network cited as its reason a racial epithet made by one of Stern's listeners. But, Clear Channel's explanation is hogwash.
I agree with the many people who think that Stern is offensive to minorities and women. He's degraded the quality of radio by trafficking in crude sexual references and unseemly racial remarks for as long as he's been in broadcasting. But the issue here isn't indecency; to paraphrase James Carville, it's the First Amendment, stupid....
Clear Channel's decision to fire Stern signals the latest target in its sights--the Bill of Rights. Its decision is based not on any pious, self-serving qualms about indecency on its stations but on its desire to curry favor with Bush and his Republican Congressional allies.
The implications are alarming. If Clear Channel can yank the commercially-successful Howard Stern, then it has the power to silence any DJ or radio kingpin who refuses to play the network's chosen music, adhere to its appointed standards, or mouth Clear Channel's political line.
Its decision to pull the plug on Stern coincides not with a sudden increase in Stern's offensive behavior but with a rise in Stern's anti-Bush rhetoric. According to Jeff Jarvis of the blog Buzzmachine, Stern "has become an anybody-but-Bush voter," based, in part, on his concerns about the threat of censorship from the FCC. Stern also recently endorsed Al Franken's book on the air.
Is it a coincidence that Stern came out against Bush shortly before his suspension? Or that Clear Channel president John Hogan was due to appear before a House subcommittee investigating indecency over the airwaves, on the heels of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction"?
What is not under dispute, according to the Center for Public Integrity, is that Clear Channel vice-chairman Thomas Hicks and Hick's law firm have given Bush more than $225,000--and Clear Channel's PAC, executives, and their relatives have given three-quarters of their political donations to the Republican Party.
So, they couldn't have been too happy to hear Stern's recent on-air rant about the president: "Get him out of office. I'm tellin' you, man, he's in dangerous territory [with] a religious agenda and you gotta vote him out--anyone but Bush," Stern railed....
"When these insider dealings were exposed by the Houston Chronicle in 1999," Micah Sifry wrote in his blog about Stern and Clear Channel, "Hicks resigned from the company's board. By then, he had made Bush a rich man when he bought the Texas Rangers from him and his partners in 1998 for $250 million, three times their investment in the team." ...

It's the First Amendment, stupid.
I'll say it again just because it sounds so nice: It's the First Amendment, stupid.

: AP story on Stern here.

: The FCC didn't announce fines on Friday but they are working on them. From Bloomberg:

The Federal Communications Commission is close to levying about two dozen fines for indecency against radio companies, including Viacom Inc.'s Infinity Broadcasting and Clear Channel Communications Inc., FCC documents show.
"At the end of 2003, we had pending more than two dozen cases in the final stage of investigation, and anticipate enforcement action in all or most of these cases within the next few months," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said in a letter to U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat. The March 2 letter was released Friday.

: The Economist on the cast:

Mr Powell's new passion? Smut.
Unlike those fiddly telecoms and media rules, the FCC's assault on indecency has yielded gratifyingly quick results. Janet Jackson's breast, which escaped during the Super Bowl half-time show, is safely under wraps again. Radio shock jocks, such as Howard Stern and (the somewhat less famous) “Bubba the Love Sponge” have been muzzled, at least on Clear Channel, a radio giant that was roughed up in the scrap over the media rules. Mr Powell has promised Congress bigger fines and tougher enforcement, including revoking public-broadcasting licences of repeat offenders.
This may upset the likes of Mr Stern (“These are the last days of Pompeii, baby,” he predicted, darkly), but Mr Powell seems finally to have grasped that his real job is not to craft good rules but to make people happy. President Bush, who withheld his support during the battles over the telecoms and media rules, is now warming to the son of his secretary of state, Colin Powell. In an election year, fighting smut on the airwaves appeals to America's religious right, whom Mr Bush has also been courting with his proposal to ban gay marriage. Michael Copps, a Republican FCC commissioner who made trouble for Mr Powell over his media reforms, has fallen quiet. Mr Copps opposes media deregulation mainly because he thinks it encourages the spread of sex and violence over the airwaves.

: Previous Stern posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

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Better if he'd sung it
: Johnny Cash reads the Bible. [via Relapsed Catholic]

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Democracy delayed
: Zeyad writes about the rumors and frustration surrounding Sisanti's delaying of the signing of the Iraqi interim constitution.

I hope Iraqis can now see clearly through some of the pretentious GC members, members that have made it clear that they show allegiance and loyalty to their respective sects and ethnicities (or in a couple of cases to neighbouring countries) over Iraq. And that when the time comes for voting in ballot boxes those members will be ruled out. I have faith in the insight and wisdom of Iraqis. They will never allow another despot to take over their lives and futures. Never again.

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Passion follies
: An elementary school teacher shows sixth-grade students scenes from a pirated copy of Mel Gibson's Passion. He is suspended, as well he should be.

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Bush on the Bush ads
: Bush will not pull his ads with 9/11 scenes. This is pretty much already in the nonissue column. I linked to a few liberal bloggers who weren't upset and I'm seeing more who feel the same. Says Bush:

“I will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency,” Bush told reporters at a joint news conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox at Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch. “How this administration handled that day as well as the war on terror is worthy of discussion and I look forward to discussing that with the American people.”

[via CommandPost]

: See also that the protesting 9/11 families don't speak for all families.

More than a dozen families who lost relatives in the Sept. 11 attacks released an "Open Letter to America" Saturday declaring their support for President Bush and his use of images of the destroyed World Trade Center in campaign ads.
"There is no better testament to the leadership of President Bush than Sept. 11," the letter states. "In choosing our next leader we must not forget that day if we are to have a meaningful conversation."

: UPDATE: MoveOn says it was hypocritical for the Bush administration to forbid taking pictures of flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq and then to use the image of a flag-draped coffin at the World Trade Center. Well, they have a point.

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Comment civility
: People: I will not tolerate personal attacks on each other (or me), nor the seven dirty words (because I don't want this site blocked) and I most certainly will not tolerate bigoted hate speech. When I see any of those things, I am taking to killing all comments I see by that person and not wasting time seeing which comments are OK and which are not. So behave or get out. Period. These comments are open so that we can have a civil, mature, productive, and pleasant exchange of ideas and views. We can disagree. We can disagree strongly. But no one should act like an ass. This is my house. Be nice or be gone. Note that I will also kill comments that I think are just too dumb or off-topic to live. See the Rules of Engagement at right.

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'Read it. Discuss it.'
: The Guardian gives high praise to Tony Blair's speech on terrorism, telling readers to read the speech and discuss it.

But it is a very serious speech, intellectually demanding and carefully expressed throughout most of its length, about an indisputably big, difficult and complex subject. It is a speech worthy of its subject, and it deserves the respectful attention of all who take politics seriously. At a time when politics is widely felt to be so disreputable, that is no small achievement. It deserves an appropriately respectful and thoughtful response that goes beyond attitudinising.

The Telegraph calls it "an eloquent case for going to war." Even The Independent praises the speech as "one of the most substantial and genuine of his premiership."
This is what it feels like to have an eloquent statesman as a leader.

: UPDATE: The Observer chimes in, too:

But his central argument, which we fully support, was that, given the nature of the terrorist threat, it should not have been so hard to find political legitimacy for action. The threat of terrorism, he argued, requires the international community to be able to use pre-emptive force. Again, we support this view.
The US has shown itself woefully unprepared for Iraq's reconstruction, but that does not undermine the Prime Minister's crucial point. Terrorism does represent a new threat and it does require new responses. The international laws that served us in the aftermath of the Second World War are overdue for reform. Mr Blair will not silence his critics by describing them as 'cynics' - they are not - but his call for a new world compact based on shared international beliefs and interests is a vision that supporters and critics alike should support.

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More ballot stuffing
: And here's another online poll you can go and manipulate. [via LGF]

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Pagan Blue
: Robert Cox and others see a secular conspiracy on Blue's Clues: They didn't call it "Valentine's Day" but instead "Love Day" they wonder whether that's because Valentine was a saint and all. I actually find "Love Day" pretty darned sexual. Better call in the FCC!

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The fundamentalist threat
: The Misanthropyst says:

I think that the radical Fundamentalist threat to our American way of life is clearly the compelling issue in 2004.
...morality fines, intrusive and over-bearing governmental searches, religious police, banning free speech, attacking the separation of church and state...

It's why Howard switched.

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The value of Drudge
: It just occurred to me that some good chunk of the $343 million Ask Jeeves paid for Excite, IWon, MyWay, etc. can be attributed to Matt Drudge. Everytime he links to a wire story these days, he links to MyWay and considering that he is the No. 1 referrer to the Washington Post and NY Times, among many others, I'll just bet that he send an s-load of traffic to little MyWay. He should have gotten options.

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Maher speaks
: Bill Maher told Barbara Boxer last night that he won't vote for George Bush but he won't bet against him either.
: Biggest laugh of the show: He reported that Ashcroft was in the hospital and doctors were figuring he got sick from "wiping his ass with the Bill of Rights."
Oh, spare me your indignant and hostile comments, it's just a joke and it was funny.
: Maher's show has really found its voice (Dennis Miller should have been so lucky); it's a good way to end the week (HBO should move it up to prime time).

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