Snippets in the News - May 22nd 2008

• CNN is having difficulty recognizing Senator Obama as a viable candidate for the Presidential Election of 2008. Mark Casey writes …

I’ve noticed that CNN’s political coverage this year has been heavily, indefensibly, shamelessly biased toward Hillary Clinton. That’s to be expected — after all, two of her top political advisers, James Carville and Paul Begala, are former CNN employees, and continued their “political coverage” for the network even while they were Hillary employees, until the network got complaints and had to boot them.
But I’ve been keeping tabs on CNN more closely in the past two weeks, since Barack Obama has all but locked up his place as the Democratic nominee, even by Carville’s own admission. One would think that they’d probably give a little less publicity to Senator Clinton, since she’s nearly out of the presidential picture, right?
Wrong. Let’s look at a rundown of just the last forty “blogs” on their faux-news gossip column “The Political Ticker” — and I assure you that it has been no different for the past two weeks …
What’s more, most of the time CNN uses their “Political Ticker” to back up their front-page political posting. So the bias in the ticker is equal to the bias they feature on their front page. …
What I’m saying is, readers should take their “coverage” with a grain of salt. They’ve got some cards they’re not showing.

• Ten Behind-The-Scenes Facts You May Want to Know about Indiana Jones …

[Ian Gray, Editor for Telegraph, UK] …

1. Tom Selleck was George Lucas’s original choice for the role but had to turn it down due to his commitment to the US TV series Magnum PI.
   2. Indiana Jones was actually Indiana Smith until the first day of shooting.
   3. The famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy shoots the man dramatically wielding a scimitar was improvised by Harrison Ford. It is rumored he was suffering from piles and didn’t want to do the extended fight scene that was planned.
   4. Sean Connery, who played Indy’s father in the Last Crusade, is only 12 years older than Harrison Ford.
   5. Renowned British wrestler and Auf Wiedersehen Pet star Pat Roach was killed twice in Raiders of the Lost Ark (as a Sherpa in the bar fight and as the Nazi pugilist who meets the wrong end of a propeller) and is pushed into a rock crusher in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
   6. Harrison Ford got his distinctive chin scar in a car crash in his 20s.
   7. R2-D2 and C3PO, the robots from Star Wars, can be seen in the hieroglyphics in the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
   8. The “chilled monkey-brains” in Temple of Doom were actually made from custard and raspberry sauce.
   9. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas play missionaries in the airport at the start of Temple of Doom.
   10. Indiana Jones’ horse in The Last Crusade was also John Rambo’s horse in Rambo III.

More incorrect rhetoric from Senator Obama. Article by K.T. McFarland – Obama Needs a Quick Refresher Course in Cold War History …

Recently, Sen. Barack Obama reiterated his pledge to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, among other rogue leaders, without preconditions, suggesting his approach would be consistent with the best, and strongest, American foreign policy of the past century.
“Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries,” said Obama. “That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao.”
Not so fast. I was in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and I can attest that those Presidents understood the danger of prematurely forcing top-level meetings without sufficient preconditions. Neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan would sit down for face-to-face meetings with their counterparts in enemy nations until America had some realistic - and playable - bargaining chips. They recognized that negotiating without leverage isn’t negotiating, it’s begging.
Nixon and his brilliant national security adviser Henry Kissinger knew that to end the Vietnam War, they would have to cut off North Vietnam’s supply chain, which came from the Soviet Union through China. What leverage could Nixon get with the Soviets and the Chinese? China needed training and technology to enter the modern world - as well as breathing space from foreign threats in order to modernize its economy. Nixon calculated that, taken together, these were more important to China than fighting a proxy war in Vietnam.
Nixon also recognized the Sino-Soviet Communist alliance was cracking, and we could exploit it by being China’s great power counterweight to the Soviet Union. The threat of a loose Sino-American alliance gave us the leverage we needed to get the Soviets to the negotiating table on arms control. Nixon met with Mao Zedong only after he had the leverage needed to negotiate.
Similarly, Reagan waited until his second term to deal with the Soviets. He used the first term to line up the leverage necessary to negotiate from a position of strength. He rebuilt America’s defenses, which had atrophied after Vietnam. He reached out to allies in Europe and strengthened our alliances worldwide. He knew the Soviet economy was a sham; the Kremlin was heavily dependent on hard currency from selling oil abroad. So Reagan worked to drive down the international price of oil, which weakened the Soviet economy from within.
And when all those elements had been put in place, Reagan delivered the coup de grace and introduced his Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile defense plan that challenged the Soviets to a nuclear arms race Reagan knew they could neither afford nor win.
Obama said recently that Reagan’s negotiations with Gorbachev “led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall.”
He’s got it turned around. Reagan built up the leverage first, and then negotiated. He didn’t believe we could talk the Soviets into anything they didn’t want to do, nor trust them without verification. Reagan was a man of considerable persuasive powers, but he didn’t defeat communism and win the Cold War because he was able to charm and cajole Gorbachev during direct negotiations. He won it because by the time he sat down to negotiate, America held all the cards.
I don’t disagree that the next President needs to talk to the Iranians. Dealing with them will be an essential step in ending the war in Iraq, stabilizing the Middle East and pressing Iran to dismantle its nuclear program.
The question is who, when and how. We all have the right - indeed, the obligation - to ask exactly what leverage a President Obama would carry with him to the negotiating table, and how he plans to get it.

[K.T. McFarland was Henry Kissinger’s research assistant on the National Security Counsel staff during the Nixon and Ford administrations and deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs during the Reagan administration.]

• If you’re excited about the Prius that gets 60 miles per gallon or the Chevy Volt that gets 40 miles per gallon - hold on to your seat. By 2010, it is expected that there will be cars that will go 230 miles per gallon. It is being planned by Volkswagen. The tiny engine will only top 75 mph, but it makes up for it in fuel mileage. VW will soon release the details, but production won’t start until 2010 - and that is a firm year of production. The only real competitor would be the 300 MPG Aptera.

 

• Javier Espinoza, London, reports in Forbes magazine online …

If you thought the World Wide Web was a limitless receptacle to the world’s news, blogs and occasionally pointless musings, thing again. The Internet could run out of web addresses by 2011, undermining the potential of businesses to use new services and applications, Karine Perset, the author of World Wide Web, warned Friday. … The rapid expansion of the Internet, which has allowed businesses to expand on their services and monitor activities from afar, took on more than a billion new users in 2007.
Internet protocol addresses are essential to Internet use, as every computer and web address carries its own unique IP address. … One option is to upgrade to “v6″, a new version which offers an almost infinite number of possible IP addresses. …
“Companies are not upgrading their IP addresses as quickly as they should. And changing an entire protocol requires time. By the time they start thinking about it, they probably won’t be able to find the right expertise or the won’t be able to grow their network,” she added.
Governments and businesses need to start preparing now for the move.

• I.A. Muocon states that supernatural or more importantly superstition is dangerous. He writes in The Dangers of Supernaturalism article …

I have written comments and posted articles which have touched the reason in tangential ways, but I think the reason is much more compelling when a human face is put upon it. I argue against supernaturalism in all its forms because belief in the supernatural is dangerous. That’s right. Firm conviction in supernatural agents inevitably leads to someone somewhere killing someone.
This is not, as some may claim, merely the flip side of Ben Stein’s claim that “science leads to killing people.” It’s not an opinion tenuously linked together by barely camouflaged fallacies and footage of Nazi concentration camps. It’s an inescapable conclusion derived from looking at the facts. And it is time that it was acknowledged openly.
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=167
Nor are supernatural beliefs confined solely to backward third world nations. Whether we’re talking about an Eagle scout killing ‘Satan’ with a shotgun or someone who thinks newspaper astrology columns hold a special message for his immediate future, supernaturalism is alive and well in the United States. Nearly three-quarters of Americans believe in Satan, and more than one-third believe in ghosts.
This prompts the question– what the hell is going on with these people? To some extent, I believe that we cannot, as human beings, help but believe in the supernatural. We are pattern seeking animals, and where patterns do not in reality exist, we will invent them. The development of supernatural beliefs begins at childhood, and continues throughout much of our lives.
But there is a dangerous side to thinking that reason is a game and mysticism is the only serious approach to understanding life. Superstition has a cost, and that cost is oftentimes paid in blood. The burning of one’s neighbor’s home and/or the neighbor herself is not an irrational act once one allows for supernatural reasoning to hold some sort of primacy in how one models the universe. If your neighbor can fly, turn invisible, and make people sicken and die merely by “bewitching” them, it is not “irrational” to think that perhaps your neighborhood would be a safer place without them. And frankly, there is no way to legitimately divorce “benign” supernatural beliefs (such as in ghosts) from potentially harmful ones (such as post hoc, ergo propter hoc ideas that your neighbor’s “evil eye” is responsible for your flu symptoms). …
This does not mean that there is no value to be had from spirituality… religions and superstitions seem to have arisen to address a variety of needs which will not simply disperse once we tell ourselves to “be rational”– the reduction of anxiety in the face of an unpredictable world, for instance, or a sense of intimate connection with the past and with each other, irrespective of any such “real” connections. …

• Soon Memorial Day will be here and folks will be firing up their BBQ grills for the beginning of a Summer season event that lasts well into October. But as folks begin their preliminary shopping for grill supplies, repair parts and whatever, they are finding that prices are higher than they were last year. And when they get down to the grocery store to get the meats that go on the grill – they are in for another shock.

CNN/Associated Press reports …

Food inflation is the highest in almost two decades, driven by record prices for oil, gas and mounting global demand for staples such as wheat and corn, and for proteins such as chicken. And that’s reaching into Americans’ backyards.
The price of an average barbecue – with burgers, hot dogs, soda, condiments, salad, paper plates and lighter fluid – could run families about 6 percent more than last year. That’s making shoppers pause as they fill their carts for the Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of the barbecue season. …
The consumer price index for food rose 4 percent last year, compared with an average 2.5 percent annual rise for the last 15 years. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture raised its forecast for next year by half a percentage point, to a range of 4.5 to 5.5 percent.
Basic economics account for most of the increase: Bad weather has hurt crops, economic prosperity has driven up demand in developing countries, and surging fuel prices have raised transportation costs.
Economists and food scientists have argued that biofuel production is also a major factor in rising food costs, particularly corn, and that it should be scaled back. Meat and poultry executives have come out against federal ethanol mandates, which they say is driving the cost of corn higher. …
While beef prices have been high, chicken and pork prices are expected to rise as producers are feeling the brunt of higher costs for feed and fuel. …

• In a day and age when discussion and argument reigns over marriage with same gender – what about marriage outside of species? MSNBC-AP-Jerusalem reports:

Sharon Tendler met Cindy 15 years ago. … In a modest ceremony at Dolphin Reef in the southern Israeli port of Eilat, Tendler, a 41-year-old British citizen, apparently became the world’s first person to “marry” a dolphin.
Dressed in a white dress, a veil and pink flower in her hair, Tendler got down on one knew on the dock and gave Cindy a kiss. And a piece of herring.

“Cindy” by the way is a male bottlenose dolphin, so gender is not the issue here. When Tendler is not importing clothes and promoting rock bands in England, she is visiting Israel several times a year since first meeting the dolphin.

“It’s not a perverted thing. I do love this dolphin. He’s the love of my life,” she said Saturday, upon her return to London. …
While she acknowledged the “wedding” had no legal bearing she did say it reflected her deep feelings toward the bottlenosed, 35-year-old object of her affection. …
While she still kept open the option of “marrying human” at some stage, she said for now she was strictly a “one-dolphin woman.” …
“He will play with all the other girls there,” she said, of their prenuptial agreement. “I hope he has a lot of baby dolphins with the other dolphins. The more dolphins the better.”

• Viral E-Mails Attack Obama’s Life Story, Ben Smith & Jonathan Martin, Politico, May 21^st 2008 …

The main obstacle standing between Barack Obama and the White House was distilled into five words by a local television correspondent in South Charleston, W. Va., earlier this month. … “They think you are un-American,” he said.
Such questions, asked by reporters and plainly on the minds of voters in Appalachia and elsewhere, are the fruits of an unprecedented, subterranean e-mail campaign.
What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream white America.
The spread of these e-mails has forced Obama to embark on a campaign to Americanize his image and his biography. Pivoting away from his pitch to a primary election audience uninterested in flag-waving and nationalism, he’s returning to the message that first brought him to the national spotlight in 2004: the idea that his is the quintessential American story. …
Ironically, the smear campaign represents the dark side of the Internet’s emerging dominance in American politics – a phenomenon that has driven Obama’s unparalleled grass-roots and financial campaigns. After harnessing the Web to great advantage, Obama is now struggling to beat back the viral threat from the same uncontrollable medium. …
The anti-Obama e-mails now bouncing around the Internet have multiplied and are difficult to track, though the website Snopes.com has catalogued and debunked many of them. But the themes are similar: Elements of his biography make him too exotic, or unknown, to be president.
One features a made-up quote in which Obama “explains” why he purportedly doesn’t place his hand over his heart during the national anthem. “There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression,” the e-mail quotes Obama as saying. “And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message.”
Obama has never said such a thing.
Another makes the false claim that Obama was sworn into the Senate on the Quran. He took the oath on the Bible. …
The e-mailers aren’t troubled by the dissonance between two lines of attack – the assertion that he’s a Muslim and the claim that he belongs to a radical black Christian church – though one goes as far as to try to reconcile the apparent conflict by arguing that Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ is covertly Muslim, something that would come as a surprise to its parishioners.
Smear campaigns have a rich history in politics. Many Americans believe that President Bill Clinton had an aide murdered or that President Bush had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers. …
A Pew survey found that one in 10 Americans think Obama is Muslim, a misperception that crosses party lines.
An eye-opening video shot by the online Real News Network earlier this month in West Virginia drove that point home. One voter concludes that, “The United States of America should be run by somebody from the United States of America.” When reminded by the reporter capturing the footage that Obama is, in fact, American, the voter responded: “He’s Muslim.” …
When confronted with Muslim e-mails, Obama last year began talking more openly about his Christianity and using most campaign Sundays to attend church services. … Now Obama is taking steps to incorporate a patriotism rebuttal to go with his faith pushback. After scoffing last year at the need to wear a flag pin on his lapel – grounds for one of the e-mail attacks – Obama has begun to affix the stars and stripes to his suit coat. And he’s begun to talk about the side of his family that more Americans can relate to. In the Democratic primary, his unique and unlikely life story was part of what many cosmopolitan voters found compelling about him. …
Targeting Hispanic voters in Nevada, he even stressed the foreign element of his story, with a narrator of his radio advertisement describing him as “the son of a foreign father who came to this country in search of a better life.”
…it’s his late mother and her white family who have come to take center stage as Obama confronts not just challenges among blue-collar workers but also fundamental questions about who he is.
He made pilgrimages to middle America – to his mother’s hometown in Kansas and to an ancestral property on his maternal side in Indiana – and featured images of both his mother and her parents in TV ads.
And he’s increasingly laced his stump speech with references to his grandfather’s World War II service, noting recently that Stanley Dunham was buried with an American flag around his casket. Later this year, he’ll go to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, where Dunham is buried, and pay homage. He’s also hoping that allies – elected officials and labor unions – can tell his story to people who trust them. …

And yet, it is the discrepancies of Senator Obama’s rhetoric to all of this, not actually what he has been accused of that is making the headlines and into Op/Ed commentaries these days. After all, the author left out the most important aspect about a candidate – his/her voting record. He has been quoted as saying that the voting record is not accurate because he (at least six times) pressed the wrong button to choose a “Yea” or “Nay” vote. As if this improves his appearance and actions before the public – who wants a president who cannot press the right “button” when voting? Is this the sort of person we want to represent America in a complicated world of foreign diplomacy and decisions?

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