Month: June 2005

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Brilliant Human Achievement

Why aren't we listening?

<![CDATA[Audio Activism » This Modern Deep Throat:

Today my friend Luke sent the Feindz an article posted by Bob Harris on This Modern World called, The New Deep Throats: Collect ‘Em All!. Gawd! Harris is so freakn’ right! The world isn’t lacking in people, or evidence, to blow the whistle on tha Shrub (aka Bush tha second) and his ‘Sunshine Boys’. IT’S JUST THAT THE MEDIA ISN’T ALLOWED TO ACT ON REAL MUCK!

It’s not just that we aren’t acting on real muck, but that real muck is discouraged as unpatriotic and not simply the kind of sour grapes Mark Felt (who was passed over for FBI Director by Nixon) is being accused of. The link points to a long list of modern Deep Throats, like Richard Clarke, who have called bullshit on the Bush Administration. We should be listening to them and, more importantly, someone with a press or network at their disposal (even bloggers) need to spend the time to report these stories until they are fully documented and their ongoing consequences (Americans and Iraqis killed unnecessarily, for example) are understood.]]>

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Brilliant Human Achievement Impolitic

Extraordinarily bad judgment, Example 1,000,000,000,001

<![CDATA[SI.com – NFL – In-house video meant to train 49ers players causes stir – Wednesday June 1, 2005 9:00PM:

An in-house video meant to prepare 49ers players for dealing with the media backfired on the NFL team Wednesday after it was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle. The 15-minute film, featuring racist jokes, lesbian soft-porn and topless blondes, features the team’s public relations director, Kirk Reynolds, impersonating San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in the mayor’s office and other city scenes.

Reynolds goes on to claim that this is not who he is, it was just a kind of parody. It is hard to imagine how using soft-core porn and topless babes in a video does anything to prepare a bunch of football players for dealing with the press and public like adults that haven’t been coddled since junior high school.
Note to anyone thinking they can make a video of questionable taste and not have it get out (In fact, see it here): Don’t be so fucking stupid.]]>

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Brilliant Human Achievement Life

Firmly in the "He is a hero" camp

<![CDATA[tompeters! management consulting leadership training development project management:

Is Felt a traitor or hero? To me he’s a hero. (And I was working for President Dickster-Trickster in the WH at the time.) But the far bigger issue is that thing they taught all of us junior military types: Despite the overwhelming Rule of Order in the Military, one must not obey an illegal order.

Love the comments in response to Tom Peters’ posting, where a troglodyte does this Clinton-was-worse thing and accuses Woodward and Bernstein of “making it up as they went along,” totally ignorant of how research works—you discover facts that begin to add up. The facts in the Nixon case were that he was a crook who tramped all over the Constitution. Ben Stein disagrees, but he was a Nixon speechwriter, a fact he conveniently neglects to mention in his attack on W. Mark Felt, in which he calls JFK a “lying, conniving drug addict.”
Class act, that Ben Stein, a handy shill to have around when one of the heros of the Watergate scandal finally feels it is safe to reveal his identity without paying a very high price. Good thing he wasn’t tied up doing a game show or something important so that he could spend some pundit time on Felt, eh?
Remember, this is where the suffix “-gate” that has been applied to every scandal for the past 30 years came from; it’s the definitive scandal, but the neocons are using the “Deep Throat” revelation as another opportunity to rewrite history.]]>

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Brilliant Human Achievement Business

When Soros buys into the national pasttime

<![CDATA[Soros Joins Ledecky’s Bid For Nationals:

Billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros has joined Washington entrepreneur Jonathan Ledecky’s bid to purchase the Washington Nationals, Ledecky said in an interview yesterday.

I pray he changes the name to the Washington Liberals, just to spite the neocons. I’ll buy a jersey if they take that name.]]>

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Business Everything Else Impolitic

All the more reason to be honest

<![CDATA[Scoble says: So, watch what you write, a CEO might be reading.
Man, that’s exactly the wrong time to watch what you write. If you can’t be honest when addressing a CEO, why bother writing at all? Tell truth to power.]]>

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Business Media Comment & Crimes Social & Political

Who let the trogs out?

<![CDATA[I don't usually pay attention to lists, but this one is too idiotic to leave unexamined.
HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries:

These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books….

You can read the list of people who chose the “ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries” and judge for yourself whether there were any contrasting views of the world represented in the august decision to condemn certain ideas.
Seriously, folks, the idea that The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes is responsible for the U.S. federal debt, which was built up almost entirely by anti-Keynesian Republicans, or that Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, which drove the standard use of seatbelts deserves honorable mention, is simply ludicrous.
For a bunch that loves to argue that “guns don’t kill people, people do” the far right sure doesn’t appreciate the distinction between ideas and action. Yes, The Communist Manifesto was wrong, because it called for revolution based on its analysis of history, but does that mean it caused the Russian Revolution, as the panel suggests? By the same logic guns do kill people.
If we’re going to label ideas as harmful, these 15 trogolodyte “scholars” are the most harmful ideologues scuttling through American thinking.]]>

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Brilliant Human Achievement

An American hero, for sure

<![CDATA[Mark Felt today Hooray for W. Mark Felt, former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who was “Deep Throat,” the source who provided the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information that led to their breaking the Watergate story.
Felt is a hero of the first order. It’s hard to recall in these times of demands for blind loyalty that a single individual inside government is all it takes to topple a corrupt presidency.
It’s also instructional in these times when the press is skewered for making mistakes that the Post wasn’t completely accurate. It incorrectly reported one element of grand jury testimony. In the wake of the charge that Newsweek incorrectly reported U.S. military interrogators’ desecration of the Koran, a story that was later confirmed by FBI reports that show the abuse was ongoing, those eager to crucify press mistakes—rather than press hubris, which deserves all the skewers it attracts—should be hoisted on their own petards for criticizing imperfect reporting that nevertheless reveals truths. Anyone claiming to be holier than others needs deflating; that’s not a defense of the press, it’s a call for the spirit of good journalism and good blogging to strive to reveal the truth.
The hard truths about the tendency of government officials of all stripes to abuse power need to be reported and acknowledged. It should not be necessary for someone like Felt to keep the secret for 30+ years in order to avoid repercussions from colleagues who were on the wrong side of the law or morality.]]>