The Week in Ogre-oids

Afghanistan - June was the deadliest month yet for coalition troops in our endless, stupid war in Afghanistan.  I can find no mention of how many civilians were killed but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it was a fucking lot of people.

The deaths of 102 servicemembers included a record 59 Americans. Nine of the 46 nations in the U.S.-led coalition suffered fatalities, the most countries to lose troops since the conflict began nearly nine years ago.  via

GOP Blocks Extension of Unemployment Benefits - After more than a decade of spending like drunken sailors with a pocket full of stolen credit cards, GOP Congress members have blocked an extension of unemployment benefits because it would add to the deficit.  War is fine with them, tax cuts for the ultra-megas are fine with them, but helping people out whose jobs have been lost thanks to the Republicans' reckless behavior?  Not a chance.  I think I'm going to print myself a bumper sticker that says, "Fuck the Poor! vote GOP."  more


Proof Our Newspapers Are Too Chickenshit to Call Torture Torture - Worst offender?  The NY Times which virtually stopped referring to waterboarding by Americans as torture after Bush/Cheney decided it was hunky dory while still calling it torture if other countries do it according to a new study by Harvard’s Kennedy School (pdf).

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator. via

NPR's Continued Practice of Allowing It's Correspondents to Also Work For Fox News - Fox News is not a news organization.  They follow no rules of journalistic ethics.  They are a propaganda service for the far right of American politics and anyone in their employ is damaged goods.  NPR and Fox's Mara Liasson manages to insert some Fox bullshit into every article aired on NPR and she once again managed it by noting, for absolutely no reason other than to sound the fascist dog whistle, that President Obama was "reading from a teleprompter" during a speech in Louisiana.  It's utterly disgusting that any organization that claims to report facts would allow these hacks to sully its broadcasts.

Here's an exchange I had with the ombudsman's office.

NY Times Propoganda Depicts Oil-Spill Containment Efforts as a Success

In its latest endorsement of corporate mania and reckless greed, the front page of yesterday's NY Times (2010, May 17) featured an "article" that blatantly depicts BP's efforts to contain the oil spill that resulted from its exploded rig in the Gulf of Mexico as a success. This interpretation of events follows the same rhetorical trope that shapes popular media discourse about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that are also successes no matter the loss of life, widespread destruction, and all of the many other things that obviously go wrong (like the failure to protect American lives on September 11, 2001, for example). The word "success" is featured in the title of the article and again on page A15 in the title of the article's continued section. The word "success" or close variations of it, e.g. "successful" appear seven times in the 23 paragraph article. But the word "failure" only appears twice and does not appear until the 19th paragraph--even though there wouldn't be anything to report in the first place were it not for the fact that everything about the operation has been a total, abject failure. And the first time an event related to containing the spill is described as a failure it is immediately re-interpreted as a "success" because of what the damage-control people figured out as a result. BP spokesman Tom Mueller is quoted in the article as saying that the oil spill itself and the time it's taken to mitigate its rate of flow into the ecosystem are "not a problem" and spins the environmental tragedy and BP's tortoise-esque urgency at stopping the fucking oil from filling the entire Gulf of Mexico as an educational opportunity: ". . . it's what I'd call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again." Funny how when these virtues are mentioned in support of investment in education and teachers salaries, they are ridiculed as a welfare-state appeal on behalf of people who don't want to be held accountable. Of course, if you're BP, Halliburton, or the U.S. military, you don't have to worry about being held accountable, because major media outlets like the NY Times will fuel the feedback loop whereby Americans tell themselves over and over that those organizations never fail, even when they fuck up colossally.