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Light blogging today. First of all, my babies are coming home today. They have been living in Germany courtesy of the US Army. My oldest baby is Jenny, who is 22. She just got a medical discharge (asthma) and is returning with her baby, Robyn. My other baby is Robby (18) who has been with Jenny taking care of Robyn. They were to be in last night but they missed a connecting flight in Atlanta and should be arriving this morning. Woo hoo!! Secondly, I am putting on a concert tonight down at the Bayview Cash Store for Gideon Freudmann. He is the electric cellist that will be on TestingTesting Monday night. We wanted to set up a paying gig for him. So, if you are on the Island, come on down for an evening of CelloBop. The TestingTesting House Band opens. It's at 7:30. $7 all tickets. Too much happening today. Huge earth-shaking explosions, horizons filled with flame and smoke, doomsday clamour and an indiscriminate devastation: these are the familiar, unnerving symptoms of a bankrupt policy, of plans lacking or gone awry, of exponential escalation and dread futility. Familiar because the world has seen the Americans go this way before, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and in Iraq, with no good result.
Unnerving because the impression strengthens that President George Bush has no clear idea how proportionately to attain his ends or even what those ends may ultimately be. Futile because carpet-bombing, whatever its immediate consequences, looks to all but an implacable American public like an act of desperation prompted by a failure of imagination. Every towering column of dust and ash obscures ever more completely the twin towers whose appalling downfall was the root of it all. thanks to SmirkingChimp.com The controversy over the decision to withhold the data from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) Florida ballot survey has fueled a great deal of speculation regarding the conclusions that will be drawn from that data. While media drones like Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post continue to spin the fiction that nobody knows what the NORC data will show, the truth (and Kurtz must know it) is that the NORC data will merely confirm conclusions that can be drawn from the abundant information available from precinct-based returns, various other media recounts, and other sources. The reporters and analysts from the media consortium have studied the other data sources in order to know what to look for when they get the NORC data. Some of these reporters and analysts have acknowledged privately that their newspapers have not done stories based on other ballot reviews because their editors and publishers want to wait until they have the NORC data.
In sum, the media consortium withheld election-based stories for the past nine months because they wanted to get the biggest bang from their NORC bucks. And as other reviews and investigative reports uncover the truth about what happened in the Florida election, they have realized another reason for withholding such stories. According to two independent journalists and other sources, the NORC data have been available since early July. Release of the data has been delayed by members of the media consortium that did not want to publish facts that would lead to the inevitable conclusion that the wrong person is in the White House — and that he got there through corrupt practices by Florida Republicans. thanks to SmirkingChimp.com
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