Alexandra Polier writes her side of the story including an attempt to interview the scuzzball that broke the lie.
… One reporter had a little girl call up, assuming I wouldn’t hang up on a child. They even made her say, “Can I talk to Alex?” And when I said, “Yes, it’s me,” a reporter jumped on the line. …
… she’d had the courage to meet me—more than I can say for The Sun’s Brian Flynn, who had first named me. Afraid I would lose my temper, I asked my editor to call him first.
“I was calling to ask you who your source was for your story which named Alex Polier as the intern in the Kerry story,” she said.
“Ah, many people have asked me; it was a fantastic source,” he said. “I broke that story to the world, you know,” he added proudly. “But your source was wrong,” she pointed out. He paused, startled. “You’ve just ambushed me,” he cried. “You’ve ambushed me!”
… When I finally tracked him down the following week, he was brusque and told me to go through The Sun’s PR office. I asked him about my mother again, but he kept saying, “Sorry, Alex, proper channels.” Reached in London, Lorna Carmichael, The Sun’s PR manager, refused to comment. I went to Flynn’s apartment, and spoke to his wife through the intercom. “Go away and leave us alone!” she cried. “He’s not going to come down or speak to you.” …
So the Padilla case is laid out: American Jose Padilla proposed detonating an improvised nuclear bomb in the United States, but al Qaeda’s leaders were skeptical he could do it and sent him on a mission to blow up apartment buildings instead, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday. … al Qaeda figure Mohammed Atef directed Padilla in July or August 2001 to take part with “an operation to blow up apartment buildings in the United States with natural gas,” and Padilla accepted the task. Expect this story to die within the next day or so, under questions of “Why is an American still being detained?”
BTW – my favorite Reuters-ism in this bit is He rejected suggestions the Padilla information was released because of criticism of Attorney General John Ashcroft for last week’s vague warning that al Qaeda plans an attack against the United States in the next few months. Isn’t the lesson we’re to take from the 9/11 commission that GWB should have released similarly vague warnings in the summer of 2001?
Scott Kurtz really is one of the funniest cartoonists doing the do these days.
This whole new side-storyline around the doctor-evil-ish cat is cracking me up. You can grab this wallpaper, now, and soon it’ll be available as a shirt at one of my favorite t-shirt joints, ThinkGeek.com/tshirts/.
to the NYT’s handwringing on Iraq:
The Dallas Morning News did a search for US wire service images from Iraq in the wire services over the last month and found exactly one image of US troops in Iraq not shooting at Iraqis.
Among the positives noted:
-school attendance is up more than 95 percent from prewar times
-all Iraqi hospitals and primary health care clinics were operating by December
-vast marshlands area of southern Iraq … are being restored through efforts of the U.S. government, along with Iraqi and international agencies.
There’s stories other than a dozen or so Army Reservists humiliating prisioners. And the US wants to hear them: A CBS News poll released on May 24 revealed that 61 percent of those polled believe the news media are spending too much time on the Abu Ghraib story. Dreher gives the media a pass; I don’t. Want to shut down Limbaugh, and get CNN’s ratings to rise like Fox’s? Give the people what they want.
Ties into two things: First, could you imagine Salon (or even NBC/ABC/CBS) running a story actually critically evaluating Kerry’s voting records (beyond replaying “I actually voted for it before I voted against it”)? NRO may wear its conservative heart on its sleeve (Standing Athwart History Yelling “Stop”), but there is a concerted effort to divulge truth and beauty, even when it imparts badly on “their guy”. (Side note: How is it that $46 billion dollars potentially in bribes isn’t front page news every day, especially when the targets of the investigation aren’t cooperating at all? Oh, that’s right – both presidential candidates still believe the UN is a salvageable body. But the media’s not biased …)
Most recent evidence (See JRO’s NOTD a while back) of friendly fire is Deroy Murdock’s inquiry into the fraud that was perpetuated by Tom Scully (then Medicare administrator) and Secretary Tommy Thompson to minimize the estimates of the drug benefit to increase Republican support.
Scully and Thompson should be hung out to dry, and charged if necessary. There should an immediate bipartisan move to repealing this money sink. Then the program should be debated, with closer to true costs discussed.
Murdock concludes: Democrats complain most loudly about this outrage. Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians, however, should be at least as furious that federal bureaucrats in a GOP administration used coercion and lies to engineer a $534 billion expansion of the welfare state.
Amen. But I’m still not voting for a self-proclaimed war criminal. Forbes 2008.
So I’m listening to Morning Edition today and Ev Erhlich’, ’01-Jun-2004’, 9, ‘WM,RM’); (Audio Link) comes on insisting that we still need higher gas prices to keep things over $2/gallon for the forseeable future. If I were proposing the idea, I’d call it a “reverse hedge tax” after the device that most companies use to minimize the impact on the bottom line of, for example, variations in exchange rates. (If I weren’t calling it an outright price control) In this case, Erhlich’s “benefit”, in addition to fostering interest in alternatives to oil, was better planning on the part of businesses and individuals.
It got me to thinking about tax policy again, and it struck me: If we really want to make the income tax system “stick it to the rich” (meaning those with high incomes, not necessarily those with lots of money in the bank), there’s one simple change we could make immediately: remove the mortgage interest deduction.
Radical? Yes. But the tax system is broken, and the way to fix it isn’t by complicating it further; it’s by chipping away at special interest protections bit by bit.
Read more!
Today’s reason: increased spending/increased government.
Spending on the drug war is still a priority in the Bush adminstration, yet studies are showing that anti-drug ads increase teen’s comfort-level with drugs — $145M this year on those ads.
Anti-drug ads, which the government plans to spend $145 million to produce this fiscal year, do little to dissuade young people from taking drugs, according to research conducted by Texas State University at San Marcos psychology professors.
Even worse, the ads may actually prompt some teens to experiment with drugs — a reaction diametrically opposite that sought by the White House Office of National Drug Policy.
Tax money well-spent, eh? Still, this is a piddly amount when you consider the prison population increase which leads to $57B spent annualy on this nation’s incarceration “needs”. (If drug laws — and specifically mandatory minimums — were only applied to trafficers, even if applied using the faulty logic of “he’s got a lot of drugs, he must be selling them”, this number could be reduced by at least 5%.)
The number of people held in U.S. federal and state prisons and jails on June 30, 2003, was 2,078,570 — almost 41,000 more than the previous year and the biggest increase in four years.
The Justice Department reported earlier this month that the annual cost of the U.S. prison system was around $57 billion.
Be careful if you go to this website or you may find your mouse pointer attracts a bunny.
How Stuff Works is an excellent website covering the science behind many semi-useful things like car engines and DVDs, but undoubtedly the most useful article they have is How Ninja Work.