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I spent the weekend in Dallas, Texas, hooting and hollering over a college football game and mostly missing any news of Friday's debate. I have to admit it was nice to spend a couple of days focused on something so silly and not concentrating so much on the troubled times we're living in.
My team won, by the way.
I Tivo'd the debate, but have seen and heard it rehashed so thoroughly since my return to New York that I'll probably skip watching it.
Meanwhile, here are a few bits of news that cropped up while I was away:
The Sinclair Broadcast Group is at it again, (mis)using the public airwaves:
Sinclair to air anti-Kerry show
by Jon Friedman, CBS.MarketWatch.comNEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns the largest chain of TV stations in the United States, plans to shelve regular programming next week to broadcast a documentary accusing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War, according to a news report Monday.
Separately, the Democratic National Committee on Monday said it would file a complaint against Sinclair with the Federal Election Commission. The DNC complaint will accuse Sinclair of making an "illegal in-kind contribution" to President Bush's re-election campaign, according to a DNC news release.
According to the Washington Post's Web site, Hunt Valley, Md.-based Sinclair has ordered its 62 stations -- some of which are in swing states such as Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin -- to show "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" during prime-time hours two weeks before the Nov. 2 election. The Sinclair station group extends to 24 percent of U.S. television households.
"Stolen Honor" focuses on Kerry's antiwar testimony to Congress in 1971 and its effect on American POWs in Vietnam. Kerry testified that U.S. forces frequently committed atrocities in Vietnam. The program, produced independently of Sinclair, contains interviews with former prisoners of war.
The report quoted Kerry's campaign spokesman, David Wade, as calling the documentary "lies" and "a smear."
Sinclair generated headlines last April when it ordered seven of its ABC-affiliated stations not to show a "Nightline" segment that included the reading of the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. At the time of the controversy, a Sinclair executive called that broadcast "contrary to the public interest."...
And the Right accused Hillary Clinton of abusing her position?
Lynne Cheney office in booklet controversy
by Ricardo Alonso- Zaldivar and Jean Merl
Los Angeles TimesWASHINGTON -- The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed.
In June, during a routine update, the Education Department began distributing a new edition of a 10-year-old how-to guide called "Helping Your Child Learn History." Aimed at parents of children from preschool through fifth grade, the 73-page booklet presented an assortment of advice, including taking children to museums and visiting historical sites.
The booklet included several brief references to the National Standards for History, which were developed at the University of California, Los Angeles in the mid-1990s with federal support. Created by scholars and educators to help school officials design better history courses, they are voluntary benchmarks, not requirements.
At the time, Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Cheney, led a vocal campaign complaining that the standards were not positive enough about America's achievements and paid too little attention to figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere and Thomas Edison.
At one point, Lynne Cheney denounced the standards as "politicized history."
In response to the criticism, the UCLA standards were heavily revised, most critics were mollified and the controversy faded -- but not for Cheney and her staff.
As the wife of the vice president, Cheney has no executive position in the federal government. But when her office spotted the references to the National Standards for History in the new edition of the history booklet, her staff communicated her office's displeasure to the Education Department.
Subsequently, the department decided it was necessary to kill the new edition and reprint it with references to the standards removed. Though about 61,000 copies of Helping Your Child Learn History had been distributed, the remaining 300,000-plus copies were destroyed....
From the Progress Report:
Taliban Threat: Two weeks ago, President Bush announced, "[The] Taliban no longer is in existence." He was egregiously mistaken. The Taliban may not be in power in Kabul, but they have been making a steady comeback throughout the countryside. The Afghan death toll attributed to the Taliban rose by 45 percent this year, and more than 40 election workers have been killed or wounded by the Taliban in the past four months. Moreover, as a new paper commissioned by the Center for American Progress, "Security in Afghanistan: The Continuing Challenge," warns, the Taliban "continue to enjoy substantial support in the provinces and tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, regardless of enhanced efforts in 2004 by the Pakistani government to cooperate with the United States in the counter-terror fight."...
Bush and Blair get called on the carpet by those in the know:
Former UN arms inspectors slam Bush, Blair after weapons reportLONDON (AFP) -- Two former senior UN weapons inspectors in Iraq (news -- web sites) criticized US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for clinging to ever-weaker arguments to justify their war on Iraq.
In separate comments in The Independent on Sunday, Hans Blix, the former UN chief arms inspector until the US-British invasion in March 2003, and Scott Ritter, a senior inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, backed a US official report concluding Iraq had no banned weapons before the war.
The authors of that report, although Bush appointees, "have had to acknowledge that the reality on the ground was totally different from the virtual reality that had been spun," Blix wrote.
Charles Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group, said in the 1,000-page report released Wednesday that Saddam had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after his 1991 Gulf War defeat and that his nuclear program had "progressively decayed."
Duelfer said the Iraqi leader had however hoped to renew his weapons quest if sanctions were lifted -- and both Blair and Bush have rushed to use that to argue their pre-emptive strike was necessary.
"This is the new straw to which the governments concerned have begun to cling," Blix wrote....
The Roanoke Times nails the draft issue:
The military draft and a credibility gap
Talk of a draft won't be silenced by promises from an administration that can't shoot straight.House Republicans forced a vote on the military draft Tuesday so they could slam the idea down. President George W. Bush says he's not considering reinstating the draft, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says it won't be necessary.
Yet, fear of the draft continues to be the talk of college campuses and Internet blogs. It's as if America's draft-age youth don't believe the nation's leaders. Why would that be?
Let's see, the Bush administration made war on Iraq to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, but the weapons did not exist. Evidence of them, Americans learn, was never as strong as they were led to believe.
President Bush said major combat was over in Iraq in May 2003, but many more troops have died in fighting since he declared "Mission Accomplished" than before.
The president insists the U.S. occupation of Iraq is leading inevitably to freedom and democracy even as widespread insurgency thwarts reconstruction and threatens to make a mockery of any election.
And now Bush assures skeptical young adults that, even after our November election, Uncle Sam won't need them badly enough to draft them.
That's what Americans hear from this president. What they see are National Guard members and reservists going to Iraq -- more than once -- to fill gaps. And they hear from others, including military officers, that the force on the ground is not big enough to pacify Iraq....
Posted by brett at 05:24 PM | TrackBack