Blogger is Bloggered Today

flickr: Smithsonian
Most of the time I can't get on my own blog! Here are some good links/arguments/reads, hope they publish:

Bushco has been using ships to hide prisoners and break human rights laws. Maybe Bush can title his autobiography "Outsourcing Torture for Democracy". And he won't even get the contradiction in terms.

Who killed the salmon? Republicans killed the salmon.

John McCain's endorsed/renounced pastor from H E Double Hockey Sticks inspired this headline: Pastor Hagee: The Antichrist Is Gay, "Partially Jewish, As Was Adolph Hitler" (Paging Joe Lieberman!) There's a lot of hating rolled into that one headline.

Vanity Fair publishes a concern troll piece by Dee Dee Myers' husband Todd Purdum, questioning what Bill Clinton has been doing when out of office. (I'm not going to link it, it's on Vanity Fair's site.) If the corporate media EVER does a story about George H.W. Bush, The Carlyle Group and the dictators and thugs he has cozied up to, I'll eat my hat.

Coming Attractions: Booman Tribune tells us that one of the rabid-to-point-of-lunacy Clinton blogs is promoting a video that will bring down the Obama campaign; apparently it's all based on the difference between questions asking "Why'd he"" and claiming that those questions ask, "Whitey?" This will be on Fox/Faux News, Drudge, Politico and rest of the corporate media presently.

From the WaPo, President Head Cheerleader, according to General Ricardo Sanchez, gave this confused pep talk after the death of four contractors in Fallujah in 2004:

"Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal."

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

He may as well have added, "I am stupid", but I'm sure the listeners got that point as well.

Steve Gilliard died a year ago today. Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast offers a tribute, and collects links from other bloggers remembering Steve. The News Blog was the first blog I read every day, and I miss Steve's powerful voice.

I Have One Great Senator

And he opposed the war in 2002. The corporate media conspicuously ignored him.

Media Matters for America: Why did the press ignore Ted Kennedy in 2002?

[B]ack in September 2002, with the Bush administration and much of the Beltway media rushing to embrace war with Iraq, Kennedy delivered a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about a possible invasion. Unlike today, the political press wasn't very interested in Kennedy or what he had to say about the most pressing issue facing the nation. Back in that media environment, being the voice of American liberals didn't mean much.

[]

And looking back, a key turning point during that public rush to war was Kennedy's fervent and thoughtful speech. It was a turning point because it highlighted, months before the invasion even took place, how the press was going to deal with high-profile, articulate critics of Bush's war policy. The press was going to downplay them, marginalize them, and ignore them. Even if those critics included high-wattage political stars like Ted Kennedy.

In retrospect, I can't help thinking that if the media treated Kennedy in 2002 the way they treat him today (and the way the press treated him before 2002), as somebody whose actions command respect and attention, that the doomed public debate about the war would have, or at least could have, been much different. It could have been more critical, more thoughtful, and more illuminating.

Instead, much of the political press in 2002 treated Kennedy as a bystander in the passing Bush parade, and specifically, they treated Kennedy's September 27 speech as little more than a political maneuver that deserved only passing mention -- literally.

That night on NBC's Nightly News, just 32 words from the Kennedy address were excerpted. On ABC's World News Tonight, it was 31 words. And on the CBS Evening News, 40 words. In all three instances, the brief mention of the Kennedy speech was part of a larger report on the looming possibility of war. Meaning, on none of the networks did Kennedy's speech qualify as a stand-alone news event.

The address was given on a Friday. Two days later on the Sunday talk shows, where Iraq was discussed in detail, Kennedy's name never came up on NBC's Meet the Press, on CBS' Face the Nation, or on ABC's This Week.

For the network pundits, Kennedy's anti-war speech did not exist. It was irrelevant to the around-the-clock media chatter about a looming war.

And yet the corporate media thinks they did a great job on their media coverage. There are none so blind...

Glenn Greenwald, salon.com: Network news anchors praise the job they did in the run-up to the war

Another Reason to Prefer Larry Bird's Red Auerbach's Celtics

No fucking cheerleaders.

Boston Globe: Go-go dancing all over Red's grave

Red Auerbach, the iconic coach and general manager who built 16 Celtics championship teams, was disdainful of cheerleaders, who he feared would distract from the game. The Celtics would have cheerleaders over his dead body, Red said. And so the suits waited. In February 2004, Auerbach told the Globe, "They're just waiting for me to die so they can get cheerleaders." He was right. Two and a half years later, Red was dead, and at the first available opportunity the girls took the court.

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As a fairly recent transplant from New York, I'm a little puzzled by all this. I thought that I was moving to the land of stiff collars and self-restraint. No one thinks of Boston as "sexy." Boston is classic. It's distinguished. It's Brooks Brothers and Bloody Marys.

Maybe that's why the Celtics Dancers' erotic interruptions feel so incongruous. And when I glance around at the game, I see plenty of baffled faces. There are suburban dads in attendance with preteen daughters, shrugging helplessly. They seem to be saying, "These aren't your role models!" There are respectable older gentlemen, like my father-in-law, who sinks deeper into his popcorn. Our eyes don't meet. There are also legions of teenage boys, their eyes like saucers, holding up their cellphones to get the perfect soft-porn picture to show off around school. I guess those are the customers the Celtics are hoping to please.

Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cheerleaders

Robert Caplin for The New York Times

The University of Maryland competing at the National Cheerleaders Association United States Championships held earlier this month at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

[Notice the team in the right front, falling.]
Besides the horrible traditional female role indoctrination, the worst thing about cheerleading is that those girls have an unacceptable risk of being maimed or killed. Are parents brain dead? At high school sporting events I watch teenagers being thrown in the air by other teenagers, or balancing on the shoulders or the hands of other stupid teenagers. Disaster waiting to happen. Finally, someone got around to studying the most dangerous 'sport'.

Encourage your girls to play real sports. It will help them in myriad ways: confidence, health, strength, self-esteem, teamwork, and competitiveness. (Guess what? Life is competitive. Get used to it early.)

NYTmes: As Cheerleaders Soar Higher, So Does the Danger
Cheerleaders suffer more catastrophic injuries than female athletes in all other sports combined.

There were 22,900 cheerleading-related injuries treated in emergency rooms in 2002, up from 10,900 in 1990, according to the Columbus study. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, reported there were nearly six times as many emergency room visits for cheerleaders in 2004 than in 1980.

Noting that many other injuries probably occur but are treated by private physicians without an emergency room visit, Dr. Frederick Mueller, director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, said, “The real number of cheerleading injuries could be twice as high.”

NYTimes video: Jessica Smith fell headfirst and broke her neck trying to perform a difficult cheerleading stunt.