Month: July 2004

McKinney Rears Her Ugly Head Again

Henry Hanks points out that Cynthia McKinney is trying to make a political comeback after the woman who ouster her in the Democratc Primary last time around decided to run for the Senate this year.

On her web site, McKinney uses the slogan, “Cynthia McKinney: The Voices for the Voiceless” and includes claims like this,

Cynthia was tapped by the Congressional Black Caucus to lead its effort on the Durban World Conference Against Racism. With her leadership, the Congressional Black Caucus spoke on this United Nations effort and at this important event, never once compromising on the rights of all peoples to come together and express their pain and suffering and ways to end it. Cynthia was unwilling to be silenced in the face of injustice.

McKinney, of course, leaves out her support for Zimbabwean strong man Robert Mugabe (the same Mugabe who recently called Desmond Tutu “angry, evil and embittered little bishop.”)

In 2001, the United States approved sanctions against Zimbabwe after Mugabe began a number of illegal tactics inlcuding seizing the lands of white farm owners, arresting politicians and newspaper editors who disagreed with him, and even denying that Zimbabwe had any sort of AIDS crisis because homosexuality was only a problem in decadent countries like the United States and Great Britain.

McKinney was the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to speak out against the sanctions bill, and as far as I can tell the only pro-Mugabe politician in the Congress period.

The fascinating thing is that almost no one is aware of this. I e-mailed several prominent Left defenders of McKinney back in 2002 about what they thought of her pro-Zimbabwe stance and the reply back is inevitably “I had no idea she’d ever said anything like that” but of course there was never any follow-up afterward. McKinney’s support of Mugabe was apparently just not that interesting.

The Audible Internet

The National Education Association released a study this month suggesting that the number of Americans who read fiction, poetry or drama has declined to in recent years, especially among younger Americans. A lot of news stories on the study, however, insist on spinning this to mean a general decline in all reading, leading to hilarious nonsense like this from the Christian Science Monitor,

As with any good detective novels, the usual suspects are here — but surprises are, too. As websites and talk radio proliferate, reading is no longer the only way, or even the primary one, of getting information.

Yeah, if only the Internet was dominated by text rather than being exclusively a video/audio media, then maybe more people would be reading.

LOL.

I have a hypothesis, by the way, on the literature finding. Personally, I read far fewer novels than I did a decade ago. Why? Because story telling can be replicated in large part by video/audio media whereas text is (and will likely remain) still superior to video/audio for nonfiction. Plus I can tell when a movie or TV show is crap pretty quickly, whereas you might have to read several hundred pages before learning the novel you’re reading is crap.

(Not to mention the fact that the last 3 or 4 novels I’ve read were all on my PDA, and the only one that wasn’t was a tie-in novel to Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Somehow I don’t think either of those count in the NEA’s book).

Source:

New on the endangered species list: the bookworm. Christina McCarroll, The Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 2004.

Sen. Rockefeller: Iraq Better Off Under Saddam

I’m not surprised when I see far left folks make this claim, but I am still surprised when someone like Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) tells Jim Lehrer that Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein,

Are we better… are the Iraqis better off that we went in there, and are we better off? And in both cases I cannot answer yes.

Sen. Pat Robertson (R-Kansas) responds a bit later in the interview saying,

But, you know, I don’t know about Iraq being better off or worse off. Now we’re trying to achieve stability, and there is a central nervous system, Jihadist movement over there that’s very, very difficult, but we do have a new government. And I could tell you one thing for sure, the 500,000 people that Saddam Hussein murdered, we can’t ask them, but I think I know what the answer would be.

Maybe Rockefeller’s been watching too much “Farenheit 9/11” and thinks Iraq under Saddam was all about kids flying kites.

Source:

INTELLIGENCE FAILURES. News Hour, Transcript, July 9, 2004.

Stupid Dirty Politicians

California Secretary of Education Richard Riordan told a little girl that her name, Isis, meant “stupid dirty girl.” Idiot. He should be fired or quit.

The fascinating thing is that at least one Democrat in Calfornia was preparing a protest against Riordan — until he found out that the little girl in question was white rather than black,

Democratic state Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, who had scheduled a protest by civil rights organizations, canceled the demonstration after an apparent mix-up over the girl’s racial background.

Dymally was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News Thursday saying the child was “a little African-American girl. Would he (Riordan) have done that to a white girl?”

The girl is white, with blonde hair.

Dymally did not return telephone calls. His office issued a statement Wednesday calling Riordan’s remarks to the girl “outrageous and irresponsible,” then issued another statement Thursday saying, “To err is human; to forgive is divine.”

“Race is not a factor in this issue,” Dymally said in Thursday’s statement, adding that Riordan had apologized a second time. “It is time for us to move on.”

No wonder California’s so screwed up with people like these representing them.

Source:

California education chief calls preschooler ‘stupid dirty girl’. Associated Press, July 9, 2004.

Winer’s Wrong about Senate Intelligence Investigation

Dave Winer claims,

Key point about the Senate report on the CIA. They should disclose that they did a deal with the White House that the investigation would not look at them. In other words, everything they’re saying about the CIA probably fully applies to the President. If so, then the solution is clear, vote him out of office in November

This is simply not true. As the New York Times notes, the deal between Senate Democrats and Republicans simply puts the investigation of the White House into a later stage of the investigation,

Under a deal reached this year between Republicans and Democrats, the Bush administration’s role will not be addressed until the Senate Intelligence Committee completes a further stage of its inquiry, but probably not until after the November election. As a result, said the officials, both Democratic and Republican, the committee’s initial, unanimous report will focus solely on misjudgments by intelligence agencies, not the White House, in the assessments about Iraq, illicit weapons and Al Qaeda that the administration used as a rationale for the war.

Source:

Senate Iraq Report Said to Skirt White House Use of Intelligence. Douglas Jehl, New York Times, July 8, 2004.