And his name is Tony Snow.

New White House Press Secretary Tony Snow continued to go after the media Thursday by accusing the Associated Press and Washington Post of unfair coverage of President Bush.

Since starting his job Monday, Snow has challenged five major news outlets in a clear signal that he will be more aggressive than his mild-mannered predecessor, Scott McClellan.

. . .

This week he has hit back at The New York Times and USA Today. On Thursday, he criticized the AP for a story headlined: “Army Guard, Reserve fall short of April recruiting goals.”

The White House countered: “The Army National Guard, Air Force Reserve, and Marine Corps Reserve all have exceeded or achieved their year-to-date recruitment goals.”

The White House also pointed out that the Washington Post ran an editorial calling Bush’s tax cuts “a windfall for the rich” on Thursday, the same day the paper also published a news article saying the measure would benefit the “middle class.”

The following retort by CBS, after being hit by one of Snow's emails, is ROTFL ironic:

[CBS reporter Jim] Axelrod suggested he was the victim of “selective editing on the part of the White House to make their own political points.”

“Very simply, the White House is cutting and pasting to make a point, something they accuse their critics of doing constantly,” he said.

“I am always open to criticism,” he added, “but if the White House has a point to make, perhaps they should furnish the full and proper context.”

I can't wait to see what will happen when Snow gives his first public briefing on Monday. It's as if he's said "I know you guys are going to give me about 15 minutes of grace time, and then you're going to go for the jugular. So why don't we just cut to the chase."

h/t to Rightwingsparkle.

Posted by: annika at 06:32 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Anyone got opinions on this sweet baby?

I like it. I like it a lot.

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Was something that scared me very much. And since I feel like I'm being a little paranoid, I thought I'd throw it out to you all.

You may have heard about the Danish Imam Abu Laban, who has decided to leave Denmark because of that country's supposed intolerance of Muslims. I first read about it from the Baron at Gates Of Vienna. (Now of course, the radical Imam appears to have called off the emigration.)

The Baron thought Laban's announcement was a good sign. My initial reaction was quite the opposite. I asked myself why now? This is a guy who has basically enjoyed enormous success waging jihad inside Denmark. (See Sugiero for a rundown on his nefarious activities.) He doesn't sound like the kind of guy who would skedaddle over a few rough words. Might there be some other reason Laban wants to leave Denmark now?

Remember, the major news story from last week was Ahmadinejad's letter to President Bush. Some have described this letter as a "call to Islam," which is step one in the process of declaring jihad against the west. (See Robert Spencer, Elder, IBA, LGF, etc.) I think this interpretation is correct. Especially since Ahmadinejad has acknowledged that his letter is, in fact, a call to Islam.

Remember, Iran is run by religious fundamentalists and end-of-the-world nut-jobs. They are not motivated by the same things that motivate modern rational states. Iran views itself as the vanguard of a pan-Islamic movement. They hate the U.S., they hate Israel, and they hate Denmark. (They're not too crazy about the rest of Europe either, but everything in due time.) Iran is also lying about their nuclear ambitions. They are unashamedly playing a delaying game against the west, in order to string us along until they can develop a deliverable nuclear arsenal.

I should add that Iran is executing their strategy beautifully, with a sophistication and a knowledge of its enemies' weakness that I only wish we could duplicate from our side of the conflict.

I should also add that Iran may already have one or more nuclear devices, from some other source. They could have a black market bomb (one of the missing Russian ones) or they could have bought one through a friendly nation.

Anyways, the question I'm getting at is this: Am I paranoid for thinking that the Danish Imam is making plans to leave Denmark because he knows something bad is going to happen there? And soon?

Keep your powder dry.

Update: AP reports that traces of weapons grade uranium have been found in Iran! Hat tip to California Conservative.

[c/p A Western Heart; technorati: Iran]

Posted by: annika at 08:15 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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I encourage everyone to see United 93. There is a post at The Cotillion (it doesn't seem right to call it a carnival or link fest, with such a subject) where you can sample many of our reactions to the film. Whether you're planning to go to the movie or not, these are definitely worth reading, as they are all deeply felt.

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Sorry about poetry day yesterday. Finals have really fucked up my schedule. But here's your comic fix for the day.

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... or perhaps: The feminine answer to the shoe bomber?

Shoes that double as a stun gun.

But I like to think I can send a man 100,000 volts just by smiling!

: D

Via, Janette, Beth, Beth at SondraK's, LindaSoG, and Feisty, oh hell the whole Cotillion should get some!

Posted by: annika at 06:19 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Have I been out of it, or has this story slipped under the radar? It happened two weeks ago and I'm just hearing about it now.

Jose Manuel Pelayo-Ortega was a crazy passenger on a flight to Sacramento who claimed he had a bomb and was subdued by passengers.

I thought it was odd that, with United 93 premiering that week and all the illegal immigrant stuff in the news, that nobody seems to have reported the story! Pelayo-Ortega's hometown was not released, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was illegal. I only found 12 links on Technorati. It must have been back page stuff in the press. Is this being hushed up, or am I just out of it?

Update: Here's the Bee's story.

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Is Wednesday over yet?

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If I have any influence at all with this blog, let me use it now.

Vote for Elliott Yao Ming tonight. He totally annihilated the competition. And the competition was exceptional. But the dude with the bad teeth fukken' rocked!

Vote for Elliott!

Posted by: annika at 08:52 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Perimeters on this show are about as successful as they are in real life. Just ask OBL, Musab al-Zarqawi and John Allen Muhammad.

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[The following post was posted earlier today on annika's journal backup blog, which every good A's J fan should have bookmarked.]

As everyone knows by now, CIA chief Porter Goss has resigned today, quite unexpectedly. He did so in a joint appearance with President Bush, on a Friday afternoon. Bush said something equivalent to "heck of a job Gossie" or some crap like that.

All these signs point even an unseasoned observer like myself to the following conclusion. He was probably fired.

The fact that nobody expected this, and nobody in the administration has tried to explain away the unexpectedness is also a clue. The fact that Goss's statement used the words "step aside" not "resign" may or may not be significant.

Time Magazine has a piece on the resignation, which everybody and their brother is linking to, perhaps because it's one of the first MSM contributions that at least tries to piece together some background. Read it here.

Captains Quarters speculates, persuasively in my opinion, that Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend will replace Goss. An announcement is scheduled for Monday, so we will see.

I doubt that the speculation regarding hookers and "Duke" Cunningham, even if true, would be the reason for so sudden a resignation. I could be wrong, but isn't it a bad idea to fire an important intelligence chief over sex during a time of war? If it's a bribery scandal, that's a different story. But sex? I mean, who cares if he's still able to do his job, right?

I have no clue why he might have been fired, if indeed he was. But maybe he had serious philosophical problems with the bureaucratic restructuring that was mandated by the 9/11 Commission report. I think the whole CIA is in disarray over this, and that it has been floundering from internal division and external pressures for quite some time. Goss's resignation is a symptom of the agency's dysfunction.

I never quite understood why it was a good idea to consolidate the intelligence services under an all-powerful czar. If the problem is faulty intelligence, consolidation would tend to exacerbate that problem. What we really need is redundancy. A system of competing, parallel and independent intelligence agencies should be more likely to generate good information, even if such a system were less efficient.

Again, I'm no expert, but I think the changes should have been limited to enforcement of interagency information sharing, breaking down "the wall," renewing the Patriot Act, and expelling the dead wood and anti-American moles. But creating a whole new level of bureaucracy? When has that ever been a solution to any problem?

I'd much rather have multiple guys reporting to the president on intelligence matters than one DNI chief. I don't know anything about Negroponte, he may be a stand up guy, but what if he's not? He's the only gatekeeper now. If he screws up, if he downplays some key information that later turns out to be important for instance, who's there to challenge him?

Perhaps we'll find out more this weekend about why Goss left. But sudden changes in key positions, no matter how management tries to downplay them, are never good for morale. Anyone who's ever worked in a large company knows this. Goss came into the position with a lot of fanfare, he was a former agent and was supposed to be the perfect guy to get the CIA back on track. Now he's out. I don't like what I'm seeing here, and now my morale is starting to be affected.

Posted by: annika at 06:19 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment
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Hook up with a guy . . . get shot and die.

Update: Nice try Scof. But your theory, "DUI = bad career move," while it has some supporters, fails to explain Shannon's death earlier this season, right after she hooked up with Sayid. Thus, my theory is superior.

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Thirty-six years ago, what has become known as the Kent State Massacre took place.

On May 4, 1970 members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine Kent State students. The impact of the shootings was dramatic. The event triggered a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities to close. H. R. Haldeman, a top aide to President Richard Nixon, suggests the shootings had a direct impact on national politics. In The Ends of Power, Haldeman (197 states that the shootings at Kent State began the slide into Watergate, eventually destroying the Nixon administration. Beyond the direct effects of the May 4th, the shootings have certainly come to symbolize the deep political and social divisions that so sharply divided the country during the Vietnam War era.

It's still hard to believe I had to write this song. It's ironic that I capitalized on the death of these American students. Probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning. My best CSNY cut. . . . David Crosby cried after this take.

On the web, I found a couple of poems dedicated to the Kent State shootings. They range from the ironic to the angry. Allen Ginsberg references the incident in his poem "Hadda Be Playin' On A Jukebox," which was later set to music by Rage Against The Machine.

The most interesting poem to me was the one published immediately after the shooting in the Soviet propaganda newspaper Pravda. Over on our side of the Iron Curtain, the event instilled greater momentum to the peace movement. But for most adherents, it always remained a peace movement, except for those on the radical fringe.

On the Soviet side, the incident seems to have been a call to arms, judging by the crazy warlike imagery in this propaganda poem. Also take note of the clumsy materialist stereotypes of American youth by the communist poet.

Flowers And Bullets

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
(English translation by Anthony Kahn)

Of course:
Bullets don't like people
   who love flowers,
They're jealous ladies, bullets,
   short on kindness.
Allison Krause, nineteen years old,
   you're dead
for loving flowers.

When, thin and open as the pulse
   of conscience,
you put a flower in a rifle's mouth
   and said,
"Flowers are better than bullets,"
   that
was pure hope speaking.

Give no flowers to a state
   that outlaws truth;
such states reciprocate
   with cynical, cruel gifts,
and your gift, Allison Krause,
was the bullet
   that blasted the flower.

Let every apple orchard blossom black,
   black in mourning.
Ah, how the lilac smells!
   You're without feeling.
Nothing, Nixon said it:
   "You're a bum."
All the dead are bums.
   It's not their crime.
You lie in the grass,
   a melting candy in your mouth,
done with dressing in new clothes,
   done with books.

You used to be a student.
      You studied fine arts.
But other arts exist,
      of blood and terror,
and headsmen with a genuius for the axe.

Who was Hitler?
      A cubist of gas chambers.
In the name of all flowers
      I curse your works,
you architect of lies,
      maestros of murder!
Mothers of the world whisper
      "O God, God!"
and seers are afraid
      to look ahead.
Death dances rock-and-roll upon the bones
      of Vietnam, Cambodia -
On what stage is it booked to dance tomorrow?

Rise up, Tokyo girls,
      Roman boys,
take up your flowers
      against the common foe.
Blow the world's dandelions up
      into a blizzard!
Flowers, to war!
      Punish the punishers!
Tulip after tulip,
      carnation after carnation
rip out of your tidy beds in anger,
choke every lying throat
      with earth and root!
You, jasmine, clog
      the spinning blades of mine-layers.

Boldy,
   block the cross-hair sights,
   drive your sting into the lenses,
      nettles!
Rise up, lily of the Ganges,
      lotus of the Nile,
stop the roaring props
   of planes pregnant
      with the death of chidren!
Roses, don't be proud
   to find yourselves sold
      at higher prices.
Nice as it is to touch a tender cheek,
thrust a sharper thorn a little deeper
   into the fuel tanks of bombers.

Of course:
   Bullets are stronger than flowers.
Flowers aren't enough to overwhelm them.
   Stems are too fragile,
   petals are poor armor.
But a Vietnam girl of Allison's age,
   taking a gun in her hands
is the armed flower
   of the people's wrath!
If even flowers rise,
   then we've had enough
   of playing games with history.

Young America,
   tie up the killer's hands.
Let there be an escalation of truth
to overwhelm the escalating lie
   crushing people's lives!
Flowers, make war!
   Defend what's beautiful!
Drown the city streets and country roads
   like the flood of an army advancing
and in the ranks of people and flowers
   arise, murdered Allison Krause,
Immortal of the age,
   Thorn-Flower of protest!

Correction: I must apologize and amend what I said up there regarding the poet. When I wrote this last night, I cut and pasted the name Yevgeny Yevtushenko without really thinking, although the name sounded familiar. This morning John's comment inspired me to look up his stuff, which I was able to do, since I have a very fine book of contemporary world poetry, which Shelly sent me last year.

The truth is, the poet was not some unknown communist hack for Pravda, which I thought at first. Yevtushenko is one of the best known and controversial Russian poets of the twentieth century. Here's his Wikipedia entry.

Reading "Flowers And Bullets" alongside Yevtushenko's more famous protest poems like "Babii Yar" (which laments the Nazi execution of 96,000 Jews near Kiev) or "The Heirs Of Stalin," I was able to place the above poem in better context. The poet had a history of using his art to condemn atrocity.

That's what happens when you critique the poet instead of the poem. A common mistake. But I still stand by my criticism of the poem, which really fails to understand the American "peace movement" of the '60s and '70s. And it really was a socialist propaganda piece, which urged violent retaliation against a capitalist enemy. Whether Yevtushenko really held the same sentiment, or whether he just knew how to market a poem, is an open question I suppose.

Posted by: annika at 10:24 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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So ZM got life.

I'm no criminal lawyer, but I think there's got to be some way to simplify a jury verdict form that's 42 pages long. That's just insane.

One interesting tidbit I gathered from the jury verdict (until I got bored and gave up reading it) was that the jury unanimously rejected two of the most often cited arguments against the death penalty in this case, namely

That a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of release . . . will be a more severe punishment . . . than a sentence of death

That the execution . . . will create a martyr for radical Muslim fundamentalists, and to al Qaeda in particular. [see pages 6 and 7]

But nine jurors seemed to agree that the touchy-feely rationales of "unstable childhood," "dysfunctional family," "physical and emotional abuse" blah blah blah, were mitigating factors in this case. [id.]

That's disturbing.

So let's say we catch OBL? If he claims a bad childhood would another jury let him off? Even if he killed 3000+ people, was unrepentant, and the jury agrees that life in prison is not the most severe punishment available? Dr. Laura should have sent the jury a copy of her book.

I don't know. I can't say I undersand how the jury came to its decision, and I don't really have time to study all 42 pages of this thing, but something stinks.

Anyways, I don't have a major problem with sticking the guy in jail for the rest of his life. Except for the fact that Amnesty will probably be agitating for his release within about six months. And how much you wanna bet the lefties will be carrying signs with his picture on it during the next anti-war rally. Right along with the free Mumia signs.

And how long do you think it will take for al Zarqawahiri to kidnap another hostage and then demand this guy's release from prison?

Oh well. They say he won't be in the general population, so there's little chance he'll get the shiv. But you know, these things have a way of happening, even when you think they won't. I wouldn't be surprised if ten years from now we hear about ZM's unexpected "suicide." If you know what I mean.

Findlaw link via Dr. Rusty.

[CP: A Western Heart]

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Robert remembers Chancellorsville at the Llama Butchers.

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Okay, issue spotting this bizarre story I see fraud, conversion, IIED, NIED, breach of contract and a good faith purchaser issue. I don't see defamation, but those facts might have been left out of the story. And you have to throw in negligence, whether or not the facts are there, just to get the insurance coverage involved.

Okay, back to the real studying.

Via Old Skool.

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