Month: May 2006

“Granholm watches DeVos define race — and define her”

Granholm watches DeVos define race — and define her

As DeVos has bombarded the airwaves with effective messages emphasizing his business acumen, presenting him as a regular guy who drives his own car and subtly impugning the governor’s leadership, the Granholm campaign has observed an electronic blackout.

You know, the irony here, to me, is that the one time I met Dick DeVos, when he was visiting my workplace, he flew in in his private helicopter. Kid you not. [Update: Joel in comments points out that I have no idea what I’m talking about here.  Not too uncommon a situation.]
Don’t get me started on his business, Amway (aka Alticor). There’s enough dirt on them a google search away; I’m not going to repeat any of it here. I am grateful for the philanthropy DeVos has engaged in here in West Michigan, which is considerable. Children’s hospital and everything. That’s awesome. I just have a hard time feeling comfortable about the source of those millions.

And The Propaganda Begins.

You know that story that went round about Iran making Jews and Christians wear special badges? It turns out:

  • it was completely false
  • its ultimate source was a small Canadian newspaper, not normally where you’d go for the scoop on the Middle East

Cui bono?

Oh, remember that story about Iran’s leaders wanting to “wipe Israel off the map”?  Bogus too:

This affair is similar to the attribution to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the statement that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” No such idiom exists in Persian, and Ahmadinejad actually just quoted an old speech of Khomeini in which he said “The occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Of course Ahamdinejad does wish Israel would disappear, but he is not commander of the armed forces and could not attack it even if he wanted to, which he denies.

New Pentagon Crash Videos

These (video, video) are supposed to debunk the conspiracy theories that “that wasn’t flight 77 that hit the Pentagon!” I’m not a particular believer in those theories, but I don’t see how these could prove a whole lot either way. If you look carefully you can see something horizontal and white coming in from the right on one single frame, and then badoom — big explosion. Maybe it’s possible to gauge the size and prove it’s a big passenger jet, I dunno. None of this is anything I could possibly judge as a layman. But if you want to see the videos, there they are.

I think it’s pretty darn well established that those were passenger jets hitting the Twin Towers, so I’m not sure what’s up with the obsession that this wasn’t one. Any conspiracy theory you forge is going to have to take the Twin Tower jets into account, so I’m not sure why proving there wasn’t a third jet involved could be such a big deal.
The CNN coverage of these videos is pretty good too; the little video there features the CNN dude that was there the day it happened, and he points out that something he said that day was taken badly out of context on the “not Flight 77” websites. On the flipside, he does discuss things like other videos supposedly showing the plane still being denied/under wraps.

Terrorists, Reporters, Six of One….

The Blotter:

ABC news has been told that their phone records, having been handed over by the phone company, are being examined to try to identify people who have leaked secret information to the news agency.

Yeah.  It’s about stopping terrorism.  Fucking right.  That’s GWB and Cheney and the intelligence agencies — they’re all about stopping the terrorists.  It’s not about political vendettas or naked power grabs here in America.  No way.