Posted 8:36 PM by Angie Schultz

CBS: Reality Is Beside the Point

Macho stud hombre blogger Bill at INDC Journal has exclusive interviews with three people from CBS regarding their story on restarting the draft. First, the story's reporter, Richard Schlesinger:

INDC: "Probably the main concern with the story is that the e-mails that are shown in the piece are false; they've been debunked on various internet sites long ago ..."

Schlesinger: "The fact is, they were going around. I know several people that got them, and it's gotten people all riled up. Whether or not there's any reality to there being a draft, is almost besides the point. Do I think there's going to be a draft? No. But it's an issue that people are talking about."

Emphasis mine.
And next, the overseeing producer, Linda Karas:

INDC: "Ok, the e-mails in the story have been criticized because they've been debunked online for some time, why did you use them?"

Karas: "The truth of the e-mails were absolutely irrelevant to the piece, because all the story said was that people were worried. It's a story about human beings that are afraid of the draft. We did not say that this (e-mail) was true, it's just circulating. We are not verifying the e-mail."

Again, emphasis mine.

You got that? Even if your primary source is known to be false, it's still worth covering if there's a controversy. Well, I hope we'll soon see CBS covering some much more important stories, such as the fact that markings on the backs of highway signs (do a search on Serge Monast) are actually directions to UN Chinese troops (Google cache) in their black helicopters which will round us up and load us into white boxcars for transportation to concentration camps (handy state-by-state list).

NOTE: Not responsible for any computer or brain damage resulting from following any of those links.

If not, perhaps CBS will address the allegations made on some websites[*] that their senior staff, at least, are all Cthulhu worshippers, and in fact that CBS stands for Cthulhu Broadcasting System. There are also rumors circling[**] that CBS is a hotbed of autocoprophagia. The veracity of these allegations[+] will surely be considered irrelevant. The only criterion is whether they get people stirred up[++].

[*] This one.
[**] With any luck.
[+] I made 'em up, right here.
[++] Are you stirred yet?

Posted 9:09 PM by Angie Schultz

Pssst! CBS! Need some news tips?

Well, it looks as if CBS is still in the market for some hot Hot HOT story tips. Well, I got 'em right here -- absolutely genuine (in that I, personally, did not make them up).

FBI scanning random computers for illegal downloads!

Bush refused to sell his house to blacks!

AND the voting rights of blacks will terminate in 2007! It's all Bush's fault!

You could have your FDIC insurance denied if you violate the Patriot Act!

The Post Office is going to tax email! (I have the actual documents for this one. And don't you worry none, CBS; you won't get fooled again! These were typed on a genuine Smith-Corona typewriter in pica. In 1963. Or at least, they look like they were.)

Oh, hey, here's a great one:

Bill Clinton got special treatment to avoid the draft! And he did not fulfill the requirements he had agreed to in order to do so!

What do you mean, you're not interested in that one?

Posted 8:12 PM by Angie Schultz

Floridation and Carter's Truth Decay

Jimmy Carter whacks vigorously away at my last remaining respect for him with this column in yesterday's WaPo. Let's begin:

After the debacle in Florida four years ago...

Whoops, hate to stop in the middle of the first sentence, but this would be a good time to remind everyone that there are two issues here:

1) There were accusations of voting irregularities in Florida, and

2) The vote in Florida was really, really close.

These two are not related, and Carter seems determined to obscure that fact.

Since I'm sitting here in my pajamas, I don't have to go looking for any facts or anything, so I'll just assert without proof that, in every state, in every election, there are always voting irregularities and complaints of vote tampering. Some of them may be actual tampering; some are just due to poor organization.

But in Florida these (alleged) irregularities were magnified by the close election there. The vote in Florida could have been absolutely positively 100% fair and aboveboard, and there still would have been a "debacle", because of the closeness of the vote. There still would have had to have been a recount, and statistically speaking, there still would've been errors.

To continue with Jimmy:

The Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections, all of them held under contentious, troubled or dangerous conditions. When I describe these activities...the almost inevitable questions are: "Why don't you observe the election in Florida?" and "How do you explain the serious problems with elections there?"

A good answer to this question would be: "Because Florida is not new to democracy. Because "disenfranchisement" in Florida means someone was told that the lines were too long, so he should come back later -- but, like, that was too much trouble. It does not mean your ballot says, 'Should George Bush be President? Choose one: __Yes __Kill Me Now'" But Carter seems determined to obscure that fact, too.

(Oh, and I wouldn't brag too much about your oversight of the Venezuelan elections if I were you, Jimmy.)

Carter says that Florida is missing some "basic international requirements" for a fair election, among which is:

Uniformity in voting procedures, so that all citizens, regardless of their social or financial status, have equal assurance that their votes are cast in the same way and will be tabulated with equal accuracy. Modern technology is already in use that makes electronic voting possible, with accurate and almost immediate tabulation and with paper ballot printouts so all voters can have confidence in the integrity of the process.

During the 2000 election, I was living in Australia, and the media there were full of wonder that we were using that antiquated Hollerith card technology. Not only that, but some more privileged areas got to use modern, efficient touch-screen voting machines, while the poor and downtrodden had to make do with these ancient punchcard devices.

During the 1998 election, I was living in among the technological have-nots and economic hopelessness in poverty-stricken Silicon Valley. We used punchards. We used them, I figured, because the voting stalls were easy to move. Most of my five years there, voting was done in the hall of a church about a block from my apartment (if I'd had a blog then, I could've thrown something on over my pajamas and toddled on over to vote). The last election I was there, though, the polling place had been moved to someone's garage a couple blocks away. If we'd had big, bulky voting machines, we might have had to have permanent polling places, which would have meant fewer polling places, and therefore voting would've been less convenient.

(Oh, yeah, I meant to say, impoverished, technologically deprived, and heavily Republican Silicon Valley.)

(And we had butterfly ballots, too, though in those halcyon days we didn't know they had special names, or that we were supposed to whine when we were too stupid to figure them out. Ah, things were simpler then.)

You see, that's the sort of thing that happens when you have small government entities and let them decide voting procedures for themselves: different areas make different choices. The Australians never could understand that. They are much less federal than we are.

Carter tells us about the horrible civil rights violations in Florida:

Several thousand ballots of African Americans were thrown out on technicalities in 2000, and a fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61 Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons.

That is an odd discrepancy in numbers, but I'm sure the Republicans will be surprised to find that Hispanics are their voting bloc. (Yeah, yeah, I know about the Cubans; but not every Hispanic is Cuban, not even in Florida.)

I think this is my favorite part:

The top election official [outed in the previous (elided) paragraph as a "highly partisan" elector for Bush -- A.S.] has also played a leading role in qualifying Ralph Nader as a candidate, knowing that two-thirds of his votes in the previous election came at the expense of Al Gore. She ordered Nader's name be included on absentee ballots even before the state Supreme Court ruled on the controversial issue.

Oh my God! You mean she let Nader on the ballot, knowing that he would take votes away from Democrats? Everyone knows you're only supposed to take votes away from Republicans! (Really, Jimmy, even if you had a point there, you might've expressed in such a way that didn't suggest you were more horrified that Bush might win than that the rules were broken. You know, just for the sake of appearances.)

You know what this is about. In 1980 I had a choice of voting for warmongering right-wing lunatic Ronald Reagan, or craven wimpy peacenik Jimmy Carter. So I voted for John Anderson, a third party candidate whose chief virtue was that he was not Reagan or Carter. Had there been no Anderson, I probably would've held my nose and voted for Carter. Betcha he's still smarting over that.

Meanwhile, in other states, Democrats have been trying to keep Nader off the ballot for that reason.

It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or biased electoral practices in any nation. It is especially objectionable among us Americans, who have prided ourselves on setting a global example for pure democracy. With reforms unlikely at this late stage of the election, perhaps the only recourse will be to focus maximum public scrutiny on the suspicious process in Florida.

Let's say it again: every state in the Union, in every election, has some voting "irregularity" (scare quotes meaning it's not necessarily an illegality) which has someone screaming bloody murder, justly or not.

The mess that was the 2000 election did not come about because of voting irregularities in Florida. The close election only threw those particular irregularities into sharp relief. If God himself had been in charge of voting in Florida, it still would've been a nailbiter.

And Jimmy "Dances with Dictators" Carter would still be hinting that the Devil was behind it.

UPDATE: Jane Galt suggests that Carter is only accidentally looking like a complete partisan hack. Oh, well, then.

Posted 8:26 AM by Angie Schultz

What's Your Mama's Name, Child?

[The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.]

My mama, for the sixty some-odd years of her life, has been named Mary Jane Diana. This was a source of wonder to us when we were children, since having two middle names was unheard of. It simply wasn't done. Why, lots of people didn't even have one! Apparently, Grandma and Grandpa couldn't decide whether Jane or Diana should be her middle name, so they compromised and used both. This is also a source of wonderment, since that sort of stubbornness usually stems from wanting to name a child after a relative, and to my knowledge we have no other Janes or Dianas in the family.

Well, two middle names being impossible, the "Diana" became silent on official documents. Mom's checks and other papers were usually in the name Mary J., with occasionally some illiterate organization dubbing her Maryjane.

Well, last year Mom and Dad went on a Caribbean cruise, which was a real thrill for them. Since they actually left the country!, they needed some sort of proof of nationality. Mom's previous forays into a foreign land (Canada) needed no such thing, so she figured she'd be OK with her "birth certificate".

But it turns out that the "birth certificate" is really no such thing. Not having seen it, I don't know what it is, but it was deemed inadequate. There they were, about to leave on this trip of a lifetime, and Mom's primary form of birth ID was no good.

The cruise line (or customs, or whatever) finally relented, but I guess my parents figured they needed real ID. So recently they applied for official birth certificates from the county (or possibly the state), and Mom finally learned her True Name: Maryjane Piana.

Piana? Yes, somebody wrote "Diana" with a little too much vertical, and some idiot transcribed it as "Piana". ("Why, shore we named her Piana, after that music box they got down to the church. We thought it was an awful purty name.")

Now she's Maryjane Piana, and she thinks changing it would take a lawyer and hundreds of dollars. (That might not be true. I tried looking on the web, but the state where she was born doesn't seem to have any instructions for correcting a birth certificate.)

Now, this has not come up before because Mom has not held a steady job since something like 1963. That used to be common for women. It was also common for people not to need a jillion pieces of paper to get a job or a bank account. That's before the IRS took an interest in your every crook and nanny. Those inclined to wail, fume, rage, or declaim against the creeping power of the government, feel free to go ahead without me. I'm just going to giggle that my mother's legal name is "Maryjane Piana".

Two things come to mind:

1) Was she ever legally married?

2) She's lucky her parents didn't name her Denise.

In other name follies, my stepdad had an aunt whose mother named her Ruby Crystal, but the doctor who delivered her didn't think this was a good enough name, so he wrote "Mary Catherine" on the birth certificate. (Perhaps the doctor, ahead of his time, feared she might lase at some point.) She worked at a hospital, and I was surprised, visiting her once, to hear someone call her "Mary". That's how I found out about the name change. Ruby had a sister named Opal. Wonder what was on her birth certificate.

Posted 9:46 PM by Angie Schultz

Avast Ye Lubbers, and Prepare to Be Bored!

Arr, maties. And once again it be the 19th of September: Talk Like a Pirate Day. I was thinking that all me bloggy maties had forgotten it, but I see that Long Island lubber Michele has posted about the pirate Dan Rather. ("S. S. Memo" har har har, that'd be a good 'un.)

Arr, now there's a poor excuse for a pirate, lorlumme. Forgery is a chancy game, and it don't pay beans. Stick to plunder and kidnap fer ransom, ye great walrus. That's where the loot be.

Ye might have got to wonderin' where it was I was keepin' meself. Well, I wasn't. Some others were keepin' me. I was bein' held captive by some scurvy dogs somewhere near the Great Orion Nebula. Nice scenic spot it is, but the radiation is a might thick.

Arr, what's that ye say? Well these be space pirates, o'course. Be ye dense? I sent up a distress signal, but it'll take about 1500 years for it to get back here, as I shoulda recalled. Arrr, bloody light.

Anyways, what with takin' my revenge and gettin' caught up on the backlog o' floggins, I might not be postin' reg'lar. I'll give it the ol' pillage try, though.

Arr.