Good News From Sunny Iraq!

On NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS, there was a story at the end of the broadcast filed under "News You May Have Missed". As part of the Bush administration's shake-up of its Iraq policy,we now have a new high-level committee tasked to make sure that the American people know more of the good things happening in the war on terror (We're not sure what this committee is called, but we understand that it is NOT called the Propaganda Ministry).

One of the first stories was that of Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen, Republican from New Jersey. According to the Moyers transcript, "Wearing a flakjacket and riding in a blackhawk helicopter, Mr. Frelinghuysen said: 'From the air, Baghdad looked remarkably prosperous and totally undamaged.' He also reports that American soldiers were 'very positive' about their work, but unhappy with the American press coverage. Here's what the Congressman said: 'After the war was over, the Dan Rathers of the world and others who were embedded in the front, returned home. Now they have third rate reporters there.' "

We're not sure about how it looks from the air, but from the ground, Baghad looks really torn up. I guess that's just bad reporting from all those "third rate reporters" there.

Moyers also mentions a Washington Post story that the Bush administration has ended media coverage of scenes of dead American soldiers being brought back from war.

This media control offensive began with a Bush speech in which he said that there were good things happening in Iraq, but the stories were not making it past the media "filter". It's funny that he noticed a media filter, since he never reads newspapers or watches the news (see Michael Kinsley's article in Slate - Bush prefers his news heavily filtered).

Here is an opinion on media filtering from FAIR, along with a link to FAIR's continuing monitoring and analysis of news from Iraq. Finally, Matt Bliven's take on the whole affair from his weblog on The Nation

D'OH! Murdoch's Fox Threatens to Sue Self!

In a story that looks like it was taken straight from The Onion, the Fox News Channel threatened to sue Fox Entertainment over a Fox News parody that appeared in the Simpsons, one of its more popular shows. According to Matt Groening the show's creator, Fox News was upset with a scrolling news ticker that was at the bottom of a Fox News broadcast the Simpson family was watching in one episode. The ticker poked fun at Fox's conservative, pro-administration, anti-Democratic Party agenda (which Fox News denies it has) with headlines like:

"Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com..."
"Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay..."
"JFK posthumously joins Republican Party..."

Fox News Channel (part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire) at first threatened to sue, but later backed down. According to Mr. Groening, speaking on the NPR program Fresh Air (transcript available here), "We called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it."

See one article at iCV2 (surprising little from the mainstream press).

Electronic Voting Machine Irregularities Revealed

The website, BlackBoxVoting.org, has been monitoring the activities of electronic voting machine manufacturers and software developers calling into question the accuracy and safety of the new system.

BlackBoxVoting.org has acquired internal memos of employees at Diebold, a manufacturer of electronic machines (and large George Bush contributor) that point out security weaknesses and certification irregularities. These memos can also be found at smashthetrifecta.com, but I'm not sure for how long. You see, the Diebold suits have apparently been contacting sites with links to or actual text of the memos (smash the trifecta has a link to an international site where the memos can be found).

Not only do the memos suggest lax security protocols. They suggest the company knew that certain jurisdictions are changing the software as they see fit - thus making the software's certification meaningless. Diebold has sent "Cease and Desist" orders to websites that have published or linked to the original memos.

BlackBoxVoting has also been going around with the suits at Sequoia Voting System. The files from their software, WinEDS, are available publicly on a reseller's FTP site.