2007 Movies

Time for my annual accounting of movies that I saw during the past year.

Spider Man 3
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Ratatouille
No Reservations
The Bee Movie
Meet the Robinsons.

And the movies that I still want to see from 2007:

The Bourne Ultimatum
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
I Am Legend
Live Free of Die Hard
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
American Gangster
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Enchanted
Beowulf
The Golden Compass
3:10 to Yuma
No Country For Old Men
Michael Clayton
Stardust
Charlie Wilson’s War
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Sicko
The Great Debaters
There Will Be Blood
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Bridge to Terabithia
The Simpsons Movie
No End in Sight

Another monstrous editorial

The Express-News ran another monstrosity of an editorial last week while I was gone. It is titled ”Another year, another monstrosity of a budget” and it is right in line with the editorial they ran in November that prompted me to write this rebuke. They even published my letter to the editor on that subject. But it was apparently all for not as in this latest editorial they once again unfairly chide Democrats for passing an omnibus spending package after “failing to pass 11 of the 12 appropriations that fund government operations.”
Sure, passing an omnibus bill at the last minute is not the best way to run the government, but once again the E-N editors are willfully and dishonestly ignoring the Republican shenanigans (record filibusters and obstructionist tactics) that forced us to this result. Thus the final graph of their editorial in which they piously suggest a “better way” to do things...

There's a better way. Congress is supposed to pass all 12 appropriations in a transparent budget process before the fiscal year begins. Presumably, that was part of the Democratic leadership's pledge to reform the way Congress does business.

....Is nothing more than the worst kind of partisan hackery dressed up as legitimate editorializing. It is utterly shameless and the editors who persist in allowing this to be published over and over again are either clueless twits or partisan shills for the current administration. Take your pick.
Also, you can bet that the crockodile tears that they are shedding over the earmarks in the bill will dry up and disappear in a future editorial when they laud those very same earmarks that will fund numerous significant projects in and around San Antonio, including the BRAC realignment that is bringing hundreds of new jobs to San Antonio.

Voice of Reason persists

I really should not be commenting on the frightfully appalling things going on over at All Things Conservative, but I was pleasantly surprised and heartened to see my old friend Mark Harden standing up for what is good and noble and challenging the forces of darkness and ignorance on the issue of torture.
As Bill Crawford stubbornly continues to insist that “waterboarding is not torture” and “even if it is it’s OK because we only do it to really, really bad people”, Mark has suddenly and uncharacteristically stepped forward to serve as the sole voice of reason at ATC and effectively obliterated Bill’s lame and dopey arguments.

For me, at least, "Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity."
You just cannot torture another one of God's children, just as you cannot kill them except in self-defense.

Bravo!

E-N disses Aggies, eviscerates Op-Ed section

I came back from my Christmas vacation to find that the Express-News was hyping a nonstory on its front page meant to embarrass and humiliate the Aggies. How else can you explain this kind of piss-poor news judgment by the editors other than that it was intended to be a shot at Texas A&M?
The fact that an Aggie Yell Leader said something inappropriate at a midnight pep rally should hardly merit an inside story in the sports section, but the E-N chose to put the story on the front page - the above-the-fold, lead story for the day. There is no excuse for this kind of nonsense.
My co-workers tell me there is no question that the E-N is biased in favor of the University of Texas and point to the numerous times when UT ballplayers have been arrested and caught with drugs only to have the story buried inside the sports section if it is published at all. I don’t pay attention to that sort of stuff well enough to know if the charge has any merit, but based on this latest example I now have to wonder.

But the Express-News folks apparently have bigger problems to deal with lately than the wrath of a few die-hard Aggies. Lately they have chosen to eviscerate the Sunday Opinion section. Beginning next week, the Views section of the paper on Sunday will be pared back to just three pages and tacked on to the end of the Metro Section. That means no more Random Notes which I had recently griped about, and no more canned editorial features which I had also griped about recently. And I should also mention belatedly that we no longer have Rebeca Chapa to kick around anymore. As much as I was disappointed with Chapa’s recent editorial contributions, she was one of the only outspoken liberals on the E-N editorial page, not counting the shrill, one-note ranting of Mansour El-Kikhia. While I don’t mind having El-Kikhia express his views once a week in the paper, I do have to object when he becomes the sole voice representing my side of the debate on every issue.
Canning Chapa is just the latest poor decision by the editorial overlords at the E-N, right up there with the decision earlier this year to fire the talented Leo Garza in favor of the insomnia-curing blandness that is John Branch.

But Bruce Davidson assures us in an editorial note that “the commentary department will continue to provide varied opinions from local and national columnists...”
Is that so? One of the only “liberal” syndicated columnists in the E-N is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, and while it is true that she tends to be politically liberal, she also has it out for Hillary Clinton and spends most of her column inches these days in a concerted effort to bash Hillary at every turn. Meanwhile, the wingnut side of the E-N which was already loaded up with George Will, Cal Thomas, Rich Lowry and Kathleen Parker, has now been beefed up with a new addition - Jonah Goldberg whose latest book is called “Liberal Facism.” It’s as if they decided that having one right-wing neo-con with the initials JG wasn’t enough. Of course, I’m talking about Jonathan Gurwitz, who along with Ken Allard and T.R. Fehrenbach, sets the right-wing tone of the whole editorial section.
Anyway, it looks like I will have plenty more things to grouse about in regards to my local paper during the new year.

The Hobbit movie

Great news about a new JRR Tolkien movie with Peter Jackson at the helm.
Apparently, New Line Cinemas and Peter Jackson have decided to kiss and make up. I don’t think there was ever any question that this would happen because it would have been terribly stupid on New Line’s part to do anything else.
Now it looks as if Jackson will executive produce, but not direct, the next two, yes two, Tolkien films. The first will be based on The Hobbit, the precursor to Lord of the Rings, and the second will deal with the 60 year period between the time when the Hobbit story ends and the Lord of the Rings story begins.

Here is a web site with all the details.

Creationists strike back Part II

The Express-News had a story the other day about a committee on accreditation at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board giving the "green light" for the Institute for Creation Science to get state certification for an online master's degree program in science education.
That means these nut jobs who believe the world was created in seven days just 5,000 years ago will be able to teach science classes in our public schools.

When I saw this my first though was "How the hell did this happen?"
It seems I wasn't alone.
What happened is that a delegation of so-called experts made a formal site visit to the ICS in Dallas and gave them a glowing report which led to a unanimous vote of affermation from the accreditation committee. Now the issue will go to the full committee in January.
But who were these "experts" that evaluated the ICS? The E-N reports thusly:

The trio consisted of two scholars at Texas A&M University-Commerce, reference librarian David Rankin and educational leadership professor Lee "Rusty" Waller, and Gloria White, managing director of the Dana Research Center for Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Texas at Austin.

A reference librarian and an education leadership professor? Where are the scientists?? Oh, and here is the kicker. The educational leadership prof is also a Baptist minister.
And the third person, Gloria White, is a graduate of Abilene Christian University, a private religious school in West Texas.
It certainly sounds like the deck was stacked in favor of the fundamentalist crowd.

So now what? If they actually allow this group to get accredited here it will make Texas a laughing stock and the accreditations for all the legitimate schools won't be worth crap anymore. It is high time that some heads started to roll up in Austin.

Morally Repugnant, Part II

It seems that my old friend Bill decided to respond to my previous post on this subject.

Ann already posted her reply.

I take this as a positive sign. At first, Bill had indicated to jimmyk that he would not respond at all. But it seems like he just could not resist. I think this might be the first time Bill has given me a link on his site since the little blow-up a while back when he began deleting all of my comments (and Ann’s) and stopped responding to my e-mail.

He is continuing to tout the one CIA officer’s claims as rock solid proof that torture works and ignores the contrary claims and the fact that the CIA officer can’t backup what he says with any specific examples.
Instead, he demands that Democrats “defend their policy of outlawing an interrogation technique that is: 1) reserved for the worst of the worst, and 2) saves lives...”

First off, when we take a “suspect” into captivity, we generally don’t even know for sure that they are guilty of anything, much less that they are the “worst of the worst.”
Secondly, the link that Bill provides for his next assertion that torture saves lives is little more than a rightwing blogger’s rant claiming that Khalid Sheik Muhammed deserved to be waterboarded because he was such a bad guy.

The man earned his waterboarding. He masterminded 9/11 on behalf of Osama bin Laden. He admits he beheaded Daniel Pearl.

As to that confession about Pearl, it came as welcome news to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh who had already been arrested by Pakistani authorties and charged with Pearl’s murder. Now he is planning to use the Khalid confession in his appeal.

But Bill seems genuinely confused when he also reposts this bit:

ABC News reported: “A senior CIA official said KSM later admitted it was only because of the waterboarding that he talked.”

Bill seems to think this means that Khalid is crediting waterboarding with getting him to confess to a murder he actually did commit.
What that bit is really saying, however, is that Khalid now denies killing Pearl and says he only confessed to it because they were torturing him and he told them what they wanted to hear.

The fact that Bill can’t seem to make this distinction might explain his inability to understand why “liberals oppose waterboarding” (along with most every other decent American liberal or otherwise). He goes on to speculate that “even a liberal” would approve of waterboarding if there was a chance that it would save their family’s lives. But this is a ridiculous fantasy unlikely to ever occur outside a script for an episode of Fox’s “24.” And if we are suddenly going to say waterboarding is OK in that instance, is there ever a point where we would draw the line? Would you approve torturing the suspect’s wife and children if you thought it could “save the lives of your family”? What if someone held a gun to your family and threatened to kill them if you did not go out in the street and kill some random innocent person. Would you do it?
We cannot set policy based on such ridiculous and outrageous rightwing fantasy scenarios.

Bill then goes on to claim that I would be in favor of torturing people if a Democratic president were doing it and the only reason I’m not for it now is because it’s being done by Republicans.

...the real reason the Left opposes waterboarding is because the president is a Republican.  They'll pipe down if a Democrat wins the White House.

You mean like the far right piped down about immigration when a pro-immigration Republican president (Bush) was elected? Nonsense!
And no, it doesn’t change anything whether or not Nancy Pelosi failed to protest about waterboarding prior to 9/11. If the allegation is true, then I am disappointed in her. But regardless, at least she is on the right side now, which is more than can be said about most Republicans.

FBI vs. CIA

The FBI is calling “bullshit” to the CIA’s claims that torture works.

Al-Qaeda captive Abu Zubaida, whose interrogation videotapes were destroyed by the CIA, remains the subject of a dispute between FBI and CIA officials over his significance as a terrorism suspect and whether his most important revelations came from traditional interrogations or from torture.

While CIA officials have described him as an important insider whose disclosures under intense pressure saved lives, some FBI agents and analysts say he is largely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures.

There is little dispute, according to officials from both agencies, that Abu Zubaida provided some valuable intelligence before CIA interrogators began to rough him up, including information that helped identify Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and al-Qaeda operative Jose Padilla. Footnotes in the 9/11 Commission report attribute information about a variety of al-Qaeda personnel and activities to interrogations of Abu Zubaida beginning in April 2002 and lasting through February 2004.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou -- who participated in Abu Zubaida's capture, was present for the next three days and later saw classified reports of the agency's harsh interrogations -- attracted attention last week when he said that information obtained from Abu Zubaida under measures that Kiriakou now regards as torture "probably saved lives."

Former CIA director George J. Tenet, in his book recounting his tenure at the agency, also said claims that Abu Zubaida's importance was overstated were "baloney." Tenet wrote: "Abu Zubaydah had been at the crossroads of many al-Qaida operations and was in position to -- and did -- share critical information with his interrogators."

But FBI officials, including agents who questioned him after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home, have concluded that even though he knew some al-Qaeda players, he provided interrogators with increasingly dubious information as the CIA's harsh treatment intensified in late 2002.

In legal papers prepared for a military hearing, Abu Zubaida himself has asserted that he told his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear to make the treatment stop.

So they got all the good information out of him by using legitimate interrogation techniques. But once they started the torture sessions, all they got was whatever he thought they wanted to hear just to make them stop. In other words, crap.

Baseball singled out

How is it that the only professional athletes who have apparently dabbled in steroids or growth hormones over the years are either baseball players or Olympic athletes?
Did the steroid era totally miss all the other sports? No football players or basketball players ever got “juiced”?
Does anyone else find that hard to believe?
And yet, here we are singling out baseball for condemnation and turning a blind eye to every other professional sport.
OK, enough of that whining.
I have a mixed reaction to the Mitchell Report that came out last week. First, I think it was unfair to throw all those names out there when many of them are based on second-hand, hearsay evidence that would never hold up in court. Also, players who were using a controlled substance before it was formally banned by baseball should not have be penalized. That would include players like Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch who were apparently using a human growth hormone to deal with injuries prior to their being banned by the league.
In Knoblauch’s case, it appears that his use of the hormone was part of a desperate attempt to deal with his throwing problem which brought his career to a premature end. Likewise, Pettitte says he was trying to heal faster from an arm injury when he took the drugs, and not trying to pump up and gain an edge on the field.
But what about the players who clearly were juicing up to get that extra little “edge”? I’m torn. I see how the drug would give them an unfair advantage, not just against contemporary players not on the juice, but also compared to stars of the past whose baseball records were broken during that period.
But at the same time, the fact that so many people were apparently juiced also makes players like Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire seem better in retrospect. That’s because it shows that simply taking steroids isn’t enough to turn anyone into a homerun champ. You still have to have the talent.
And finally, this whole steroid mess should make Pete Rose come out smelling like a, well, a rose. After all, no one can claim that his all-time record for most hits was due to anything other than his own natural efforts. Even his gambling addiction which got him banned after he was no longer an active player had any impact on his record.
Clearly if any of these steroid-era ballplayers make it into the Hall of Fame, then Pete Rose should be allowed in too.

Morally repugnant

After reading the following post and subsequent comments at All Things Conservative the other day, I can only say that it is a good thing and even a testament to my good character that I am no longer welcome in that little community...

Since waterboarding works, any debate over whether to use it is just ridiculous in my mind....

Ahhh, such a very small and closed mind indeed. The evidence they use to demonstrate that “waterboarding works” is an AP article in which a former CIA official confirms that the U.S. has used waterboarding against suspected al-Qaeda operatives:

According to the former agent, waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah got him to talk in less than 35 seconds. The technique, which critics say is torture, probably disrupted "dozens" of planned al-Qaida attacks, said John Kiriakou, a leader of the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, a major al-Qaida figure.

But as Dan Froomkin points out, the former agent could not back up any of his claims:

Kiriakou, whose first interview was with Brian Ross of ABC News, also made the unsubstantiated claim that torture worked. Kiriakou told Ross yesterday that, as a result of waterboarding, suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah coughed up information that "disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
Ross asked Kiriakou to say a bit more about those thwarted attacks: "Were they on US soil? Were they in Pakistan?"
Kiriakou replied: "You know, I was out of it by then. I had moved onto a new job. And I-- I don't recall. To the best of my recollection, no, they weren't on US soil. They were overseas."

Furthermore, his claims about Zubaydah providing useful information is contrary to what investigative reporter Ron Suskind said in his latest book “The One Percent Doctrine,” an excellent book, by the way.

...investigative reporter Ron Suskind has written that Zubaydah was a mentally ill minor functionary, and that most if not all of the information he provided to the CIA was either old news -- or entirely made up.

Nevertheless, as far as the denizens of ATC are now concerned, torture works and they are absolutely giddy about the prospects of doing more of it. In fact, they think it should be an election year issue for Republicans:

Democrats should be forced to defend their opposition to waterboarding in light of the evidence proving that it works, but the liberal media won't be doing that anytime soon. 
On this plus side, this is a great election issue for Republicans and I can't understand why we haven't seen ads on it yet.

As if the thought of GOP adds touting themselves as the Torture Party wasn’t bizarre enough, we then get the following exchange in the comments:

I don't think the issue is whether it works or not, it's pretty clear that it does. The issue is whether it is legal or not or whether it is torture. It's obvious there is a difference of opinion on that and it hasn't been resolved. If we want to be intellectually honest about it I think our position has to be that it is torture but we get valuable information that might save lives so we should do it anyway.

Posted by: David | December 11, 2007 at 11:33 AM


If you want to be intellectually honest about it, we wouldn't use the word "torture" to describe things that 20 years ago might have been used as fraternity initiation ceremonies. Just because our society has become weak and cowardly over time doesn't mean we need to start changing the meaning of words. Otherwise you'll soon have people screaming "torture" every time an inmate is denied his ice-cream sundae desert.

Posted by: Alex | December 11, 2007 at 11:38 AM


If you want to be intellectually honest about it, we wouldn't use the word "torture" to describe things that 20 years ago might have been used as fraternity initiation ceremonies.

I agree, waterboarding is not torture, it's an interrogation technique.

Posted by: Bill Crawford | December 11, 2007 at 11:55 AM

No, it was not a “fraternity initiation ceremony” 20 years ago. But we did prosecute Japanese soldiers after WWII for waterboarding American POWs at that time. I’ll bet if any of those soldiers were still alive they probably would not say that they had gone through a fraternity initiation.

But the final word at ATC is that, torture or not, it is “an interrogation technique” and one that works. Therefore we should use it without question and without hesitation.
Does torture really work?
Digby has a fine example of a torture session from 1628 that “worked.”
Come to think of it, the denizens of ATC would have fit in quite well with the folks in 1628.

But if the only criteria is whether or not an “interrogation technique” works or not, then why not capture members of an al-Qaeda suspect’s family and torture them as well. I’m sure if a suspect isn’t telling us what we want to hear after being tortured themselves, they might think twice when we start torturing their infant children.
Then the ATC folks would have even more things to cheer about and I’m sure it would make a great GOP campaign ad.

Morally repugnant imbeciles.

The Gurwitzification of the Express-News

The editorial the other day in the San Antonio Express-News about the new NIE report on Iran is a perfect example of what I call the Gurwitzification of the San Antonio Express-News editorial page.
That is what has happened lately as columnist Jonathan Gurwitz has become the driving force behind most of the paper’s editorial opinions. Gurwitz’ hawkish neo-con views are clearly evident in this editorial that trys to play down the NIE reports conclusions and glosses over the fact that the Bush administration has been trying to cover the report up for the past year while beating the war drums for a military confrontation with Iran.
Gurwitz is by far the sharpest tool in the E-N’s tool pouch and so it isn’t too surprising that he has managed to steer the listless editorial board his way on most issues, foreign policy in particular. I have long said that Gurwitz is the best columnist the E-N has and he would be a good columnist even if the other columnists at the paper weren’t so worthless. But unfortunately Gurwitz stands especially tall above the pack because the others are so pitiful. Most of the so called “columnists” on the page write the kind of non-controversial pablum that would be more at home in the Lifestyles section than on the Opinion page — Maria Anglin, Gloria Padilla and Kathy Clay-Little fit that bill while Rebeca Chapa, who started out more promisingly, is rapidly heading in that same direction.
For a time, I thought that Chapa might actually be the liberal voice that the paper is so severly lacking, but lately it seems as if she has fallen under Gurwitz’ spell just like the rest of the staff. Her last two columns, bashing leftist leader Hugo Chavez and the fundamentalist mullahs in Saudi Arabia, with only the mildest rebuke directed at President Bush, could have easily been penned by Gurwitz himself.
While Gurwitz is a hardline partisan on most issues, he does have a humanitarian streak which I find admirable that comes through on occasions like when he focues on the crisis in Darfur. I’m guessing Darfur will be one of the next topics that Chapa will tackle under Gurwitz’ tutelage.
But back to the Iran editorial, it trys to cast doubt on the latest NIE report by noting that it differs sharply with the one done in 2005. What they fail to acknowledge is that the intelligence agencies haven’t forgotten about their 2005 report, it is just that they have new information now that clarifies things in the 2005 report that they did not fully understand at the time.
I am not privvy to all the classified information obviously, but this is what I have gleaned from the news articles I have read. Back in 2003-04 sometime they obtained a laptop belonging to some Iraqi scientist that had information about a nuclear weapons programs and made some references to it that they did not fully understand. The person was apparently upset about something but they did n’t know why. What they have learned since then is that the person who owned the laptop was upset because the funding for his program had been cut off when the government shut down the weapons program in 2003. So the 2005 report now makes better sense, although the ultimate conclusion they had drawn has been reversed. And they are more certain about that now than they were in 2005.
Knowing this, it is irresponsible for the E-N to ignorantly cast aspersions on the new report. Moreso, it makes little to no sense to continue hounding Iran about a weapons program that they have not been pursuing for the past four years. If we truly have a stick and carrot approach, it would seem that it is long past due to present the carrot, not bash them over the head with another stick.

McCain after all?

Maybe John McCain will be the Republican nominee after all. First, Fred Thompson’s late-start campaign fell flat. Then Rudy Giuliani’s campaign began to freefall with the recent revelations that he used state resources to supplement his extramarital affairs while serving as mayor of New York City. Then it seemed there was an opening for Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist preacher who has become the darling of the religious right crowd.
But now it looks like Huckabee will get hammered over his role in releasing a convicted rapist who turned around a week later and sexually assaulted and murdered another woman. It is like Willie Horton all over again, except worse because Huckabee was more involved in Wayne Drummond’s release than Mike Dukakis was in the furlough of Horton. Willie Horton was furloughed as a result of a program supported by most law enforcement and prison officials for its effectiveness in reducing recidivism rates. Dukakis had no direct role in Horton’s release other than that he supported the program itself.
Huckabee, however, was directly petitioned by a group of Clinton-hating wingnuts in the 1990s who wanted Wayne Drumond released solely because his victim had been a distant cousin of President Clinton’s. The fact that Huckabee went along with that crowd should disqualify him from ever holding public office again.
So that leaves Mitt Romney, who is having trouble selling his mormonism to the wingnuts, and John McCain. And I still haven’t figured out why McCain got cast aside early on other than that he perhaps wasn’t the fresh new face they were looking for.

It shouldn’t matter anyway it goes, however, because 2008 will be a Democratic year thanks to George Worst.President.Ever Bush.

Sticks and carrots

Despite the conclusion of our intelligence agencies that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, President Bush is still trying to garner international support for sanctions.
But what sense does that make now? Bush even mentioned at one point in his news conference the other day that the “stick and carrot” approach had worked back in ‘03 - the Iranians apparently dropped their weapons program as a result of international pressure. But where is the carrot in Bush’s current policy? Instead, we have the stick and bigger stick approach. Iran does what we wanted - four years ago - and we continue to bash them over the head the entire time. Great diplomacy there, guys!

Dead Parrots

Sometimes I feel like we are living in a Monty Python sketch. For the past year, the Bush administration has been pushing for a military confrontation with Iran by claiming that the country is developing nuclear weapons.
Now we find out that Iran halted its nuclear arms bid in 2003 according to a National Intelligence Estimate that came out over a year ago. So the Bush administration has been pushing this line about Iran and nukes all the time knowing that the consensus view of the intelligence community was the complete opposite.
And now when you try and confront the administration or its apologists/defenders they start acting like the pet shop owner in the Monty Python skit, refusing to acknowledge that the parrot is dead.
“Iran’s nuke program is dead.”
“No, it’s not. It’s only resting.”
And so on.
But that is the state of political discourse today. We essentially have a rouge regime in control of our country pushing forward with a foreign policy agenda that is opposed by the vast majority of the citizenry. And the only way they can continue to do this is by repeatedly denying the obvious. They lie. They obfuscate. They play word games (”The President never said it was an ‘imminent threat’.”) And they push ahead as if the will of the American people does not matter.
And if they succeed in doing so and still win the next election with a Bush clone like Giuliani, then perhaps they will have been right.

Evel Knievel

People of a certain age know where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I know where I was when Evel Knievel attempted his rocket-powered jump over Snake River Canyon. I grew up watching Knievel on the Wide World of Sports and his antics inspired a generation of youngsters to race their bicycles over makeshift ramps. I still remember the thrill from the feel of your bike lifting off the ground and being temporarily airborne before coming down with a hard jolt.
Knievel took a lot of hard jolts. I read way back then how he had more than 100 broken bones (the real figure I think is closer to 80).
I had just thought about Knievel the other day before I learned that he had died. I was flipping through a catalog with “vintage” toys and saw an Evel Knievel motorcycle set that was one of the coolest toys of my youth.
Knievel was more than just a stunt man, he was a pop culture icon of the ‘70s.

NIE: Iran ended weapons research in 2003

When I first saw the news about Iran dropping its nuclear weapons research in 2003, I wondered how the Bush administration could still justifying beating the war drums for a military confrontation.
Then I saw this tidbit from Kevin Drum noting that the NIE report has been out for more than a year, meaning the Bush administration knew about it this whole time.
This is appalling on every level, but, unfortunately, not without precedent for this administration.
Now I’m curious how the wingnuts will react, but I figure they will simply ignore it like it didn’t happen and go on with their warmongering as usual.

A pro/con sham

On Sunday, the San Antonio Express-News ran a canned editorial feature on its Views section front about clean air legislation under a pro/con format. They didn’t post it online, but it is essentially the same as what ran in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch a week earlier.

Here is the thing that always galls me about this - They get a reknowned scientist who is an expert in this field to write an op-ed piece, in this case it is Michael E. Kraft, the Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Then they turn around and for the con view do they get another academic whose studies have pointed to an opposite conclusion? No. They get some right-wing hack from a “conservative think tank” to review the article and then pen a rebuttal.
That always seems to be the pattern. For the “liberal” side you have a dispassionate academic and/or scientist applying their research to real world situations, and for the “conservative” side they go to an ideological warrior, funded by the oil industry, with no real expertise in anything but churning out propaganda and disinformation.
While I am glad to have the intelligent person who actually has a clue on my side, this is still not a fair fight in that they are pitting apples against oranges. The academic is not being paid to push a specific agenda like the "think tanker" and thus doesn't always come across as having the slam-dunk answer to everything. So people who don't know any better at best walk away thinking the two sides are equally correct when there is really no comparison.