Fox, from inside the belly of the beast. Fox Sues Self: Apparently Did Not Get Joke, from The Guardian.

“Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons over a spoof news ticker, the show’s creator Matt Groening has claimed. ... The episode of the Simpsons in question showed a rolling news ticker at the bottom of the screen, which read: “Pointless news crawls up 37 percent... Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com... Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer... Dow down 5,000 points... Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple...”

Once known as Washington’s young man in a hurry—he was just 43 when he had his first tour as Defense secretary under Gerald Ford—Rumsfeld, at 71, is now sometimes called “an old man in a hurry” by Pentagon hacks.

The only people who were in a position to make such meta-plans would be those who both knew exactly when the attack was to occur, and were in a position to see to it that Shafiq bin Laden and General Ahmad were in the compromised positions at the requisite times.

Wolfowitz went to visit a badly injured American, which led to this paragraph in the Associated Press story:
"A badly wounded American colonel, who had grown up in Beirut but lives in Arlington, Va., gave Wolfowitz the thumbs-up when he was asked: 'How do you feel about building a new Middle East?'"
'How do you feel about building a new Middle East?' What a stupid, insensitive, dweebish, neocon question! My guess is that the colonel's gone native, and is using the Iraqi meaning of 'thumbs up'.

The report said 60 percent of the firms with contracts had employees or board members who served in previous administrations, for members of Congress and at the highest level of the military.


Well, go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt and go see for yourself. It's *only* 61K, and I'll excerpt a little for you here Mr. Mortimer.
# robots.txt for http://www.whitehouse.gov/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /1/2/3/4/iraq
Disallow: /1/2/3/4/text
Disallow: /360pics/iraq
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/iraq
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/iraq
Disallow: /911/heroes/text
Disallow: /911/iraq
Disallow: /911/patriotism/iraq
Disallow: /911/patriotism/text
Disallow: /911/patriotism2/iraq
Disallow: /911/patriotism2/text
Disallow: /911/progress/iraq
Disallow: /911/progress/text

It was done. It was *obviously* done. As a constituent, I am *not* amused!


mr ed -im actully getting 'page not available' at two of the relevant pages
http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021002-7.html
its a crazy world


How about ten people famous in history for making peace? (Other than religious figures who preached peace, I mean.)
Well, um ... er ...
I guess a peace treaty was a novelty at the time. But here's the interesting thing: Two copies of this treaty exist, and they are identical except for the first few lines. The Hittite version says Ramses started the peacemaking. The Egyptian version says it was Hattusili. Neither man wanted the credit.
But the bottom line is this: When peacemaking is successful, it leads to a nonevent. A war that might have happened, does not happen. History does not record events that don't happen.

The GOP has the media cowed with their constant 'liberal media' babble. There number of journalists who are prepared to hold Bush to account is tiny - Krugman, Conanston, Irvins, Alterman. After that its Al Franken, Jon Stewart and David Letterman.

The State Department did it the smart way. [state.gov] Put it all in one directory and block that directory.
# tell scanning search robots not to index the older arhive pages
#
User-agent: *
Disallow: /www

mr ed - oops - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/iraq/20030501-15.html and
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/text/20030501-15.html
are also offline

In Feb. 2002, the Sydney Morning Herald predicted that the U.S. would ride roughshod over the U.N. and wage war regardless what Saddam and/or the international community said or did [LINK] and eight months later, reiterated its stance -- saying that the U.S. planned a military attack on Iraq five months before Sept. 11 in order to "secure control of its oil." [LINK] Sure enough, by the time some of Cheney's Energy Task Force's information was released in the summer of 2003 (those sections that weren't "stifled" by the Vice President, that is) two things were clear: 1) That task force documents contained maps of Iraq's oil wells and a list of "foreign suitors for Iraqi oilfield contracts" and 2) That the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy had recommended that Cheney's task force consider "a 'military' option in dealing with Iraq," months before the Sept. 11 attacks. [LINK]

The Christian Science Monitor
Prediction: This administration, like the last Bush administration, will distort intelligence and lie its way to war.
Source: "In war, some facts less factual," Sept. 2002.Highlights:

Robert Fisk
Prediction: President Bush will go to war (and snub the UN) no matter what.
Source: "President Bush wants war, not justice - and he'll soon find another excuse for it." - Sept., 2002
Highlights:

Denis Halliday
Prediction: "An American invasion would be an international crime -- and would make the U.S. even less safe." - March, 2002
Source: The Salon Interview: Denis Halliday

Hunter S. Thompson
Prediction: The U.S. will engage in forever war, feed its citizens a steady diet of disinformation and thrust us into darkness.
Source: Fear & Loathing in America, Sept.12, 2001 (written in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks)
"Big Darkness, soon come."

"If I did anything like this as a policeman, and killed 3,000 people, with this much evidence against me, I'd spend 100,000 years in jail." -- former New York City police officer Bruce DeCell, the Nation, June 19, 2003

General Wesley Clark was also encouraged to engage, sans evidence, in Sept. 11 spin. "I got a call on 9/11," Clark told Tim Russert "I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. . . This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.'"

"When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs," Gore Vidal wrote, "he observed, characteristically: 'It would seem that the worse you fu*k up in this job the more popular you get.'" Perhaps that explains Bush's approval ratings? They certainly don't make sense otherwise. But then again, few things do.


"The West sees the UN as a benign organization, but the sad reality in much of the world is that the UN is not seen as benign," said Halliday, who was nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. "The UN Security Council has been taken over and corrupted by the US and UK, particularly with regard to Iraq, Palestine and Israel.

Zelikow will be guiding an investigation that presumably will scrutinize the actions of Rice, his friend and co-author.

Speed is important. The law establishing the 911 commission granted it only eighteen months of life, and the clock began ticking on December 2. It now has less than a year to conduct its investigation and write its final report.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, a presidential candidate who, with Senator John McCain, sponsored the legislation that created the commission, testified that "too many of the failures we have already identified are unchanged to this day, a full twenty months after the attacks." McCain blasted "excessive Administration secrecy on issues related to the September 11th attacks."

Hunter S. Thompson: Well let’s see, ‘shamefully’ is a word that comes to mind, but that’s not true in the case of The New York Times, The Washington Post, but overall the American journalism I think has been cowed and intimidated by the massive flat-sucking, this patriotic orgy that the White House keeps whipping up.

Hunter S. Thompson: Yeah, that’s a problem. I’m not sure if it’s my problem or other people’s, or their’s, but I stand by this column and the one after it. I’ve been right so often, and my percentages are so high, I’ll stand by this column that I wrote that day, and the next one. So what appears to be maybe Gonzo journalism, I’m not going to claim any prophetic powers, but…



Fear & Loathing in America
By Hunter S. Thompson 911 + one day.
The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday).

byrd: Candidate George W. Bush spoke about the need for humility from a great and powerful nation. He said, "Let us reject the blinders of isolationism, just as we refuse the crown of empire. Let us not dominate others with our power -- or betray them with our indifference. And let us have an American foreign policy that reflects American character. The modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness." It is time for the Bush administration to swallow its false pride and return to that philosophy of humility before it is too late.

mr ed - one wonders if his opinion has changed or if he was lying even then

"From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit -- we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of the occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on."-- Norman Schwarzkopf, from his 1993 autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero.

Believing in the projected brevity and stated purpose of W.W.I, diehard imperialist Rudyard Kipling used his influence to secure a commission in the Irish Guards for his only son, Jack, who was both medically unfit and underage. Wounded in combat, Jack was listed missing in action and confirmed dead two years later. By that time, Kipling's grandiose notions about patriotism and valor were replaced by bitter self-recrimination. "If any ask us why we died; Tell them 'Because our fathers lied,' a haunted Kipling wrote.

But even so, Norman Schwarzkopf, George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell told us what to expect a decade or so ago. "The Gulf War was a limited-objective war. If it had not been, we would be ruling Baghdad today -- an unpardonable expense in terms of money, lives lost and ruined regional relationships," Powell wrote in 1992. "Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not. They still do."

Surprisingly, various veterans organizations also became vehemently antiwar. Some found this war so unreasonable, in fact, that they urged soldiers to disobey orders. "Do you know what it is like to look into the eyes of a people that hate you to your core?"

It doesn't help, of course, that Bush's soulless "bring them on!" invitation, [LINK] inspired Iraq's 'nonexistent' guerillas to reply or that Donald Rumsfeld asserts "criminals" are attacking US troops. Doesn't the Secretary of Defense understand the difference between criminal activity and guerilla warfare? "A little background, especially for our Confused Rummy," Vietnam veteran Stewart Nusbaumer wrote, "criminals kill for money, guerrillas kill for politics . . . Iraqis are killing Americans to take back their country!"

Though mass graves are certainly testimony to Saddam's barbarity, rarely do Bush apologists mention that some of these graves contain the remains of Shiites George H. W. Bush urged to rise up against Saddam, nor do they address why America installed a strong-arm dictator in the first place. In October, 2001 Scowcroft explained it to PBS' Frontline:

LOWELL BERGMAN, FRONTLINE: Wasn't there an uprising?
BRENT SCOWCROFT, Former National Security Adviser: Of course.
LOWELL BERGMAN: Didn't we see their military killing people?
BRENT SCOWCROFT: Yes.
LOWELL BERGMAN: And we didn't intervene.
BRENT SCOWCROFT: Of course not.. . . . because-- first of all, one of our objectives was not to have Iraq split up into constituent parts because it's our-- it's a fundamental interest of the United States to keep a balance in that area. . . between Iraq and Iran.. . . suppose we went in and intervened and the Kurds declare independence and the Shi'ites declare independence. Then do we go to war against them to keep a unified Iraq? [LINK]