News sentence of the day

Via Glenn Greenwald, an Agence France-Presse wire story on Dick Cheney's exploding heart.

Whoops. Someone better get on the blower and tell France how real American journalism professionals sidestep that whole "torture" thingy dingy. Hint: they pretend it didn't happen and that torture isn't actually torture. Shh, pass it on.

I know, France. This whole "Debate" over who did what to whom with electrodes and barking dogs seems so cut and dried that even a Fox News analyst can see it for what it is and prescribe the correct line of action, but it isn't. Because. Try to bone up on your journalism standards. The objective isn't truth, it's covering for those in power. Remember that next time you go besmirching a man like Dick Cheney's record with an objective reporting of the facts.

By the by, it's nice to see Cheney finally have a heart type device implanted into his chest to replace the gaping black void of nothingness, avarice, and sadness that resided there before. A few years too late by my count, but still a nice gesture.

I'm puttin' that on my predication list

The brilliance of this is that it's not even a full step away from most of the opinion news programming we get today. It's like a scant half-step. All I know is that I would watch it every day. Show 'em the 2nd Amendment!

Broken News: Justice Stevens to Renounce Amateur Judicial Status, Turn Pro

WASHINGTON—When Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, 90, announced his retirement last week, most assumed that the rigors of the court combined with his advancing age had finally become too much for the revered jurist and that he was simply going to move on to retirement and a life of leisure.

But with spoilers leaking out for newly taped segments of next week’s Dancing With the Stars, it turns out that Justice Stevens has terminated his long standing amateur status in order to turn pro and pursue his other lifelong dream: judging celebrity dance contests for network TV.

Perhaps the early indication was in his resignation letter to the President. While one paragraph has been released to the public, Stevens also submitted an epilogue. In it Stevens referenced a need to pay off student loans for his legal education and also “make some serious bank.” He claimed that he could no longer be hindered by the Supreme Court’s onerous rules on amateur status and eligibility and was leaving to “do some real showboat judging for ridiculous coin.”

“I think he just became fed up with the politics of the thing,” said David Thompson, a former clerk for Justice Stevens. “He didn’t care for the hypocrisy of the American Amateur Judicial Association. Sure, they can make millions promoting the work of amateur judges and the yearly Jurisprudence Madness tournament, but if one guy tries to make a little cash on the side with a gavel endorsement? Disbarred.”

“I guess he just got tired, after 63 years, of dealing with the bullshit,” Thompson sighed. “Good for him, he’ll be raking it in now.”

This is thought to be a major coup for ABC’s Dancing With the Stars program, which has long fought for more legal credibility on its judging panel. It was initially thought that Stevens was looking for work in recently politicized beauty pageant field, but surprised everyone by going for the high stakes, high glamour world of celebrity contest judging.

“I guess he just wanted to roll with the big boys,” said Dan Harnett, a junior programming executive at ABC. “No disrespect to Thurgood Marshall, John Jay, and Earl Warren – I think we all recognize the purity of the legal game they played – but Stevens is finally stepping up to join the big dogs in the judging world; we're talking the likes of Simon Cowell, Judge Judy, and David Hasslehoff.”

Already some of Stevens' dynamite legal opinions are rocking the TV world. In one of his first written opinions, in the case of Kate Gosselin and Tony Dovolani v. Jitterbug, he is reported to have remarked that “One thing is certain. Although we may the identity of the winner of this year's competition for some time, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in your ability to put one foot in front of the other.”

Later he was said to remark towards Pamela Anderson that while he “always allowed dancers wide latitude in determining how best to achieve legitimate artistic goals,” that “the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society is outweighed by your completely awful fucking dancing”, before decreeing the dance be edited out of the show. He then comically banged an oversized gavel on the judges table and proceeded to show Ms. Anderson how to execute a proper Charleston.

“That’s the kind of judging we all knew he was capable of,” observed Constitutional Law Scholar and George Washington University legal professor Jonathan Turley. “Sound legal opinion combined with the flash, showmanship, and showboating that pro judging requires. Another season or two of these kinds of performances and he might be ready to go down with the legal greats: getting his own judge show where he gets to mete out decisions in small claims court.”

In any event, if the leaked reports are true, former Justice Stevens seems to be well on his way towards fulfilling the promise he showed during his 35-year amateur career.

And our hired killers used to be so honest...

Do your best to feign surprise at today's Washington Post article about two ex-Blackwater employees who have come clean about the private security firm's systematic defrauding of the US government during its time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two former employees of Blackwater Worldwide have accused the private security contractor of defrauding the government for years with phony billing, including charging for a prostitute, alcohol and spa trips.

That's right, kids. Why stop at the occasional unprovoked massacre when you've got a shot at some full-bore war profiteering? And as much fun as peppering unarmed mud people with automatic weapons fire and embezzling hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money might be, think of the chicks...

The Davises assert that Blackwater officials kept a Filipino prostitute on the company payroll for a State Department contract in Afghanistan, and billed the government for her time working for Blackwater male employees in Kabul. The alleged prostitute's salary was categorized as part of the company's "Morale Welfare Recreation" expenses, they said.

This, for me, is the truly revelatory portion of the article. As far as I'm concerned, prostitutes are now 100% tax-deductible. And just in time for this year's filing period!

Lie of the year

As we reach the end of the year, there are many year end lists to get to along with a whole crop of all-decade lists. Debates ensue over which annoying pop song was the song of the year, whether Transformers 2, GI JOE, or 2012 was the movie of the year, and which person in America had the best emotional meltdown over the state of the economy. I think "everyone from Detroit" is the answer to the last one.

But some lists are closer to America's heart than others and such is the case for Politifact's "Lie of the Year". With the health care fight taking center stage, fallout from the bailouts, and the President trying to hide the fact that he was a Kenyan born Muslim socialist, the lie harvest was bountiful. What ended up taking the prize in an overcrowded field was the Sarah Palin classic "Death panels", also known as "The government's gonna murder your grandma."

The claim set political debate afire when it was made in August, raising issues from the role of government in health care to the bounds of acceptable political discussion. In a nod to the way technology has transformed politics, the statement wasn't made in an interview or a television ad. Sarah Palin posted it on her Facebook page.

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, "Death panels? Really?"

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural "Lie of the Year."

Some of the runners up were "anything Glenn Beck said",the Orly Taitz "Obama was born in Kenya" birth certificate nonsense, "global warming, evolution, and all non-Bible based sciences", the President Obama "pretending that he wasn't born in Kenya" nonsense, Joe Wilson's "You lie!", "anything Michelle Bachmann said", and Joe Biden opining on aircraft air circulation and Porcine AIDS. It was a crowded field, but I think the right one won. "Everything Glenn Beck said" is just too broad a category. In fact, maybe Glenn needs his own category or immediate entry into the liars Hall of Fame, which I was told was in St. Louis, but I went and not only couldn't I find it, but people there were claiming it didn't even exist. Maybe Glenn can just be dipped in bronze.

All in all, it was a nicely played lie Mrs. Palin. It took the issue of the day and completely distorted it with irrational fear, government backed murder conspiracies, and thoughts of grandmas being shotgunned by civil servants. What's more you got other politicians to spring to action based on this lie and fight over it. All over a tiny portion of the bill that was relatively unimportant. That's how the pros do it, Sarah. I can see why you're the 2012 front-runner.

Picture of the Day

The Picture of the Day feature takes a little different track today. Instead of featuring the horrifying Chinese onslaught, men dressed as the devil jumping over babies, or the majesty of space, we link to a Wired Science piece on just how, through exposure times, color filters, and layering, a "mind blowing space photo" is created.

In other words, how this:

Becomes this:

Sounds ethical

What are you to do if you're a struggling news paper. Revenues are down debt is up, you decided a long time ago to put your news on the web for free and now no one will ever accept paying for it, and Craigslist is sleeping in your house, driving in your car, eating your food, and screwing your wife. So if you're the Washington Post and you're seeing all these problems there's only one obvious solution: sell access to your journalists for anyone with a sack full of cash.

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

Not to say this isn't completely and totally unethical, I mean who wouldn't want to pay the WaPo $25,000 so you could be in the same room with their neoconservative editorial/columnist crew and a blunt object to beat them with? If there's one thing I've always said about the news it's that the regular citizen has too much attention paid to his or her best interests and opinions in the health care debate. Isn't it time the news elite in this country were forced to consider the concerns of lobbyists and insurance CEO's? What better forum than one that is ethically indistinguishable from prostitution? Strike that: forced prostitution. I'm sure the journalists are thrilled to be doing this.

So if you want access to some of the Post's top minds get your $25,000 out, $250,000 if you want to be a part of the whole series of "Salons." See if an extra couple grand can get those journalists to perform some "French-style" reporting on you, maybe even get two of them to perform a "journalism show" like you saw in the seedy, pasty fleshed ink pits of Bangkok. I'm sure the WaPo is up for it. They really need the money.

Constitutional violation ain't cheap

The CIA's $1,000 a Day Specialists on Waterboarding, Interrogations

As the secrets about the CIA's interrogation techniques continue to come out, there's new information about the frequency and severity of their use, contradicting an 2007 ABC News report, and a new focus on two private contractors who were apparently directing the brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture.
Top interrogation officials' "waterboarding expertise" was "misrepresented."

According to current and former government officials, the CIA's secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington: Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates.

Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure agreements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA's interrogation program.
...
Associates say the two made good money doing it, boasting of being paid a $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques on top al Qaeda suspects at CIA secret sites.

Really. It costs $1K a day per man to have specialists supervise simulated drowning? I thought at the very least we were getting a cost effective means of violating our law and ideals. I figured they only needed water, a bucket, a rag, maybe a table, and an amoral cretin or two that was already on the payroll. Turns out you need two guys watching and going "No, with less humanity. Move the hose closer, I can't hear Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave yet."

Both Jessen and Mitchell got the lucrative job because they were the guys who helped tech pilots how to resist....waterboarding torture...if they got caught behind the enemy lines of some nasty, un-American, godless country that didn't believe in freedom or International law, like we do. Turns out though that they misrepresented their medical expertise, had in fact zero experience as interrogators, and conducted waterboarding that was much more dangerous, unsafe, and medically dangerous than what they were allegedly "experts" at.

You know what really hurts? Besides being waterboarded. Our specialized $1K a day torture experts weren't even experts. We got our Constitution pissed on by amateurs. I'm a little disappointed, Bush Administration, I at least thought you would have sprung for some pros to really get some vicious dogs barking at the shame filled & terrified ghost of George Washington.

Quote of the day

How seasoned pros move in and out from talking about the untimely death of pitching prospect Nick Adenhart into calling the baseball game that is going on.

Vin Scully:

Nick, from Maryland, had pitched six scoreless innings and was in a car with three friends, and a driver apparently went through a red light and T-boned the car, killing three of the four, including Nick, and one other member is in critical condition. And if there is one thing I’ve learned in all my years — and I haven’t learned much — but the one thing I’ve learned: Don’t even waste your time trying to figure out life.

Ground ball through for Andre Ethier, and life continues for those who still have it. And with a leadoff single, Russell Martin will be coming up.

But I would say, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a moment and say a prayer in memory for Nick, especially for his parents. What a shock to lose a twenty-two-year-old.

Andre Ethier at first base, Russell Martin the batter, James Loney on deck, and the Dodgers try to strike in the second inning against Kevin Correia.

Like silk. Not weird or awkward at all.