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Posted by: Old Grouch in Beta at 05:26:49 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Magic (?) box

(Day late, but wotthehel!)

Today in 1946 [actually June 7th, see note], television in Britain resumed after the war. The announcer Leslie Mitchell said: "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted ..."

Which is sufficient excuse for posting some television history links:

John Logie Baird produced the first moving television image (in 1925) and the first public transmissions (at 30 lines!) in 1930.

Test Cards -- rarely seen nowadays.

Not from a card, but from a tube. The RCA "Indian Head" monoscope image. Chuck Pharis recovered the original artwork, and has prints for sale.

Teletext never got off the ground in the U.S., but elsewhere...

NBC, ABC, and CBS color presentation logos from the '50s and '60s. (That's not a logo, that's Uncle Miltie!)

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 05:17:08 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Turkish troops in Kurdish Iraq

Howard calls it, May 30th:

Turkey will absolutely invade the Kurdish area of Iraq and kill as many of the Kurds as possible.

Today:

Several thousand Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq early Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who attack Turkey from bases there, two Turkish security officials said.

UPDATE 070606 22:40:  Well, maybe not yes.

Fouad Hussein, the head of the office of Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani, said the government had no knowledge of any invasion. -- Reuters 15:40gmt

(The above story is headlined "Iraqi Kurds deny incursion by Turkish troops,"  but "having no knowledge of" isn't the same as "deny," is it?)
Later:  Turkish sources are telling varying stories, but all confirm some kind of incursion.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:51:24 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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"These idiots are blowing on a house of cards."

A former Israel Broadcasting Authority news editor admits: “We slanted the news towards a withdrawal from Lebanon - because we had sons there.”
[...]
Dr. Chanan Naveh, who edited the Israel Broadcasting Authority radio’s news desk in late 1990’s and early 2000’s, ... mentioned, with no regrets, two examples in which he and his colleagues made a concerted effort to change public opinion:

"In our newsroom, three of the editors had sons in Lebanon, and we took it upon ourselves as a mission - possibly not stated - to get the IDF out of Lebanon... I have no doubt that we promoted an agenda of withdrawal that was a matter of public dispute.”

-- Hillel Fendel, Israel National News

I had a reaction, but "Maine's Michael" says it better:

...They fail to realize that they are not living in the US, or Scandinavia, or Spain or any other country that is not surrounded by far more numerous mortal enemies that want them not only dead and gone, but mutilated into the bargain.

These idiots are blowing on a house of cards.

It would be an interesting study to see to what extent some sort of psycological defense mechanism is at work, wherein at some level their minds start thinking magically, that if they think and sound like LLL's of powerful, secure, western countries, that must mean they are living in a powerful, secure western country.

It's craziness.

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Via LGF.

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 01:46:13 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Other shoe drops in Minneapolis

Lileks has a bucket. (As to what exactly that means, he's being coy.)

I’m still not sure if I can announce the particulars, even if other media sites have made speculations – and how do they know these things?

I poked around at some of the usual places to no avail, so I guess I'll just have to wait for details.

UPDATE 070606: He'll be posting at buzz.mn. (No posts yet, "technical difficulties.") There's already some interesting (even to outsiders) stuff by other writers there. Look and feel: Site looks pretty clean (although it doesn't render as nicely as mee.nu at 800x600 .) Extra bonus points for no Flash. "Recent comments" box is relatively useless, just gives posting times. IMO, "buzz.mn" sitename is unfortunate. If it accomplishes what the Strib wants it to, it will outgrow that name quickly. Meanwhile, it's like your spinster aunt trying to be hip. ("Or is that 'hep?' I can never remember...")

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Previously:

• May 8: Jimmy Lileks, Cub Reporter
• May 7: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid - Part 2

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 16:13:32 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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And by the way

No, I'm not planing on making "Monday Politics" a regular feature.
Yes, I did date the title, because one never knows, does one?

Posted by: Old Grouch in Administrivia at 15:36:52 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Monday politics: June 4, 2007

"As if you didn't need another reason not to vote for him" department: President John McCain would have Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in his cabinet

"...the 70 year old presidential hopeful also said that he would ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to serve on his cabinet to deal with technology issues if elected." -- Arlen Parsa's Daily Background

(McCain is also clueless about net neutrality.) [Via Slashdot]

Document thief Sandy Berger gave up his law license, short-circuiting an investigation of his couduct by the D.C. Bar. Ronald Cass wonders what's so damaging that someone would give up his occupation to hide it.  And why no one but bloggers seems to be interested.

Is The Smartest Woman In The World sorry she didn't bother to read the intelligence report? From the CNN transcript:

WOLF: Senator Clinton, do you regret voting [to] authorize the president to use force against Saddam Hussein in Iraq without actually reading the national intelligence estimate, the classified document laying out the best U.S. intelligence at that time?

CLINTON: Wolf, I was thoroughly briefed. I knew all the arguments. I knew all of what the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department were all saying. And I sought dissenting opinions, as well as talking to people in previous administrations and outside experts...

WOLF: So let me just be precise, because the question was: Do you regret not reading the national intelligence estimate?

CLINTON: I feel like I was totally briefed. I knew all of the arguments that were being made by everyone from all directions. National intelligence estimates have a consensus position and then they have argumentation as to those people who don’t agree with it...

Translation: "No, and the dog ate my homework."
[Via Don Surber, who calls it a "crash and burn" performance, but notes that you'd never know it from the press accounts.]

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:10:35 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Unnamed "suit" at WMUR-TV gets his 15 minutes of fame

...and if he's lucky, it will only be 15 minutes.

"Alterman was in the spin room as a guest of the Creative Coalition and went to an area reserved for a private reception for WMUR-TV. Police said he was asked by an executive at the party if he was invited to the private area and was asked to leave."-- CNN's Political Ticker

oh really...?

A guy came over and asked me who I was and I told him I was a colmunist for The Nation and he told me I had to leave. I thought he was kind of rude, so I asked him his name, thinking it might go into Altercation the next day. He refused to answer me I asked again. He refused again. But I was following him out when he went to get a cop. The cop told me to leave the room and I did. We left the room, past where the people were handing out badges to go into the reception and I figured the entire drama was over. But the cop kept yelling at me to leave. I didn't understand. I thought I had left. I asked him to stop yelling, I had left. He kept telling me to leave. In retrospect, I guess he was kicking me out of the building and I didn't understand, but it was really mystifying and annoying and I told him I wanted to speak to his commanding officer. -- Eric Alterman, via Instapundit

UPDATE:  WMUR is running what it calls "a first-of-its-kind Blogging Competition, aimed at identifying 15 representatives to participate in the New Hampshire Primary Debates," using the members-only gather.com blog service. So far (Monday afternoon EST) only one story about the arrest.
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Via LGF, where Eric's not getting a whole lot of sympathy from the peanut gallery.

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 04:45:30 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Curiouser and curiouser

My previous post on the Andrew Speaker matter centered around the AP's poorly-written initial story and how the questions it raised almost exceeded the information it conveyed. Two days later, more information is coming out, and it appears there are plenty of screwups to go around. It may take a Congressional investigation (horrors!) to sort things out. Here's a rough guide to the issues:

• What was Speaker told before he left? Speaker says health officials "discouraged" him from making the trip, but when asked point-blank if he was a risk and if they were forbidding his trip they said no. Wayne County (Georgia) health officials say they told Speaker not to make the trip. Speaker says he has a tape of the conversation. ("Steve Katkowsky of the Fulton County Health Department told CNN, 'If such a recording was made it was without the consent and without the knowledge of Fulton County Health Department officials.'"-- CNN Story, June 2, 9:25am) Um-hum, could be a gotcha. Let's see if there's any more mention of the tape.
  
• What was Speaker told by the CDC? In his Good Morning America interview, Speaker said he was told not to take a commercial flight home, and instead to check in to a clinic in Rome. This, he says, left him facing "a very real threat that [he] could have died" in Italy, since he had been told earlier that the only place he could be treated was in Denver.
  
• Did the government offer Speaker any assistance at getting home? Government says yes, Speaker says "that's a lie."

If Speaker's story holds up, it appears that U.S. authorities (that is, the CDC and the Fulton County Health Department) had second thoughts after they had allowed Speaker to leave the country. They contacted him, told him not to take a commercial flight back, but offered no practical assistance for his situation, their only suggestion being (to him) the equivalent of a death sentence. In fact, all they did was put Speaker on the "no fly" list (which had the consequence of exposing more people than if he's just flown directly back to the states), and flagged his passport. The results we all know.

My initial question ("What the hell were they supposed to do? Send him back to Canada?) seems to have been resolved: According to later reports, Speaker was supposed to be "detained and isolated, and public health officials [were to] be contacted" [CNN Report], not blocked from entering the country [gist of the AP report quoted in my post]. So I guess we're fortunate that American citizens still can't be barred from their country simply on the say-so of some bureaucrat.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 03:51:47 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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So what the hell were they SUPPOSED to do? Send him back to Canada?

More sloppy writing from the Associated Press:

A globe-trotting Atlanta lawyer with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed back into the United States by a border inspector who disregarded a computer warning to stop him and don protective gear, officials said Thursday.

If I remember my J101 correctly, you're supposed to put items in the lead sentence in descending order of importance.  It appears the guy is an American citizen.  So the problem is not that he was "allowed back into the United States," but that the "border inspector... disregarded a computer warning to stop [hold? arrest?] him" when he re-entered the country.  Sloppy writing is a symptom of sloppy thinking. Better (but not great):

"A border inspector disregarded a computer warning and failed to hold for authorities an Atlanta lawyer infected with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis when the lawyer reentered the country."

I'm not a professional.  Professionals should do better.
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Linked by a number of people over the last couple of days, most recently by Insty, at which point something snapped.

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 05:21:14 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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