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About that ‘liberal bias’ in the media…

Oh, it exists, all right.  It is very, very real.  But it is the exact opposite of what the whining republicans and their enablers claim.  The bias actually works in favor of Republicans.

That is the finding of two Indiana University professors who analyzed network coverage of the 1992-2004 presidential campaigns.  

Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Bucy, both associate professors in the Department of Telecommunications of IU’s College of Arts and Sciences, report their findings in their book, Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (Oxford University Press).

“We don’t think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they’re just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage,” said Grabe, who also is a research associate in political science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “It’s self-censorship that journalists might be imposing on themselves.”

Wow.  Lenin and Goebbels were right.  Lies are mighty powerful things, and if you repeat them often enough they become true, or at least are accepted as so – with the added benefit of making those who don’t believe the CW suspect.  

Those are some damned fine role models you have decided to emulate, GOP.  Fine roll models indeed.

And by the way, where the hell is my pony?!?!?

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens is in a hand-waving tizzy over the fact that Barack Obama has been president for three whole weeks and world peace hasn’t broken out, lions have not laid down with lambs, and a chorus of angels has not filled the air with joyous strains.  

Barack Obama has now been president for 21 days, following an inauguration that was supposed to have pressed the reset button on America’s relations with the wider world and ushered in a new period of global cooperation against common threats. Here’s what pressing reset has accomplished so far:

This douchebag rails on for hundreds of words that President Obama needs to strike fear in the hearts of the wicked, otherwise we are all gonna diiiieeeee!!!!!!!!

I know!  What was the point of electing him if things weren’t going to get better yesterday?  That’ll teach us to try a different tack, won’t it?

Iran hasn’t closed down Nattanz, North Korea is still posturing, Pakistan hasn’t wiped out all Islamist militants in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, Russia hasn’t unilaterally disarmed and worst of all, he failed to bring a time machine and prevent the war in Gaza.  

Clearly, the Obama administration is an epic fail and we are stuck with this loser for another four years!  O noes!  

What hath democracy wrought???

The files don’t exist

After Barack Obama signed that long-awaited and much-anticipated executive order to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and conduct a thorough review of the case files for each and every detainee by a cabinet-level panel, a significant spanner was tossed in the works.

On many of the detainees, there are no case files.  Instead, information on many of the individual detainees is “scattered throughout the executive branch,”  so that ‘cabinet level panel’ will spend the first weeks of their task looking for information and relevant materials.  

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Put plainly – when you are reverse-engineering convictions you don’t put things in files that might end up running counter to your desired outcome.  

As a result of the incompetence of the previous administration, some truly dangerous people have been released, and truly innocent people have been held without charge or trial for years on end.  

A former Bush administration official, unwilling to allow his names to be used, insists that the Obama administration will come to the same conclusions.  

“All but about 60 who have been approved for release,” assuming countries can be found to accept them, “are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people,” said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

Obama officials said they want to make their own judgments.

“The consensus among almost everyone is that the current system is not in our national interest and not sustainable,” another senior official said. But “it’s clear that we can’t clear up this issue overnight” partly because the files “are not comprehensive.”

Charles D. “Cully” Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases. Threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee were often required, he said, to persuade the CIA to “cough up a sentence or two.”

The disarray in assembling the case files is so severe that one former prosecutor at Guantanamo asked to be relieved of his duties, in the formal request he cited as a reason that evidence was “strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks.”   He said he once accidentally found “crucial physical evidence” that “had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten.”

I read about this, and I feel personally betrayed.  My entire life has been spent in service to this country.  I was born into it, carried it on, and married into it, too.  We faced down an ideological adversary that violated human rights, ignored due process and locked people up for life after specious show-trials.  And less than twenty years later, we became something worse.  

Personally betrayed?  That is an understatement of what I feel right now. This is not my America.  I have spent the last eight years wanting my country back.  

Now I have it, and I don’t recognize it.  

Damn them all straight to hell for this.  Public hanging with a new rope is too good for these traitorous, limp-dick, torture-porn-loving perverted fucks.