Roger Ailes’ latest war

Robert Greenwald, maker of the documentary “Outfoxed,” has put together a three-and-a-half-minute clip of agitprop from the Fox News Channel in which Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and company push for war against Iran.

As Greenwald shows, the rhetoric is almost identical to what Fox was saying in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Have a look:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsPs-5Wqfoo]
You can learn more about “Fox Attacks Iran,” and sign a petition, here. Media Matters is on the case as well. This is scary stuff. As Christiane Amanpour observers in the clip, Fox’s warmongering on Iraq had a huge effect on how other media outlets behaved. Could it happen again?

A tip from the Cardinals

This is not going to be a good day for Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell. The Herald picks up an item from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on why Joel Piñeiro is doing so much better with the Cardinals than he did with the Red Sox. Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan says he’s got the answer.

Here’s an excerpt from the Post-Dispatch story, published Monday:

“You don’t have the kind of stuff like he has and get hit like he did,” Duncan said. “You start looking for why. Why is he getting hit? … It was so obvious.”

It took less than Pineiro’s first start as a Cardinal for Duncan to pinpoint what he believes was a big part of Pineiro’s problems: He was tipping his pitches. The righthander and his coach say an adjustment to his delivery erased the flaw that Duncan believes allowed “people to make it difficult on him.”

Pineiro has pitched 14 innings since, allowing two earned runs and no walks, and takes a winning streak into today’s scheduled start against the Cubs.

OK, so Piñeiro didn’t pitch that great on Monday. But this is intriguing, no?

Farrell tells the Herald that Duncan is wrong, but Jason Varitek doesn’t exactly give him a vote of confidence, saying, “We usually have guys who are watching the game on the side who usually pick up on that stuff pretty well.” Yeah, usually.

Piñeiro cost the Sox $4 million, and they got next to nothing when they dealt him to the Cards.

Not to whine. The Sox are up six games today, they’ve got the best record in baseball, Farrell must have something to do with the great pitching, etc., etc., etc. But it sounds like Farrell may not have done a good job of protecting this particular investment. Unless Duncan is blowing smoke.

My guess is that Theo is going to be talking to Farrell. Maybe he already has.

The joys of anonymous comments

The Globe’s Christine Wallgren reports that Casinofacts.org, which opposes the idea of a casino coming to Middleborough, has apologized closed its comment section after an anonymous poster made a lewd remark about casino supporter Selectman Adam Bond’s 2-year-old daughter.

Obviously way out of bounds. Of course, it would also be nice if Casino-friend.com would apologize for comparing casino opponents to the Ku Klux Klan, but I suppose that’s expecting too much.

L’affaire Skube

I took a pass on the imbroglio over Michael Skube’s stunningly uninformed Los Angeles Times column on the shortcomings of bloggers, other than posting a brief comment on Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog. So if you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, I recommend Dan Gillmor’s wrapup, a nice summary with all the links. Skube’s interaction with Josh Marshall is mind-blowing.

Let me repeat what I said on PressThink. There’s only one way to complete the sentence “All blogs are …” And that is this: “All blogs are published on the Internet.” Anything else is an intellectually dishonest generalization.

A teaching moment (II)

Today’s Globe editorial on lagging test scores among minority teaching candidates takes a sensible approach:

Inadequate preparation, not cultural bias, is the most likely explanation for the high failure rate among black and Hispanic candidates. Similar to the achievement gap problem between white and minority students, a solution requires educators to target the academic deficiencies of prospective teachers and provide them with remedial support.

No talk of doing away with the test, which was one of the subthemes of the Globe’s Sunday story. Good.

How’s that trade working out? (XV)

Wily Mo Peña, who’s off to a fast start with the Nationals, pays tribute to the Red Sox and their fans, according to a statement that appears in today’s Herald:

To my sisters, brothers and fans of the Red Sox Nation. I want to take a moment to thank you and the entire Red Sox organization for your support during my time in Boston. Your constant passion for baseball and your beloved Red Sox is unmatched and has touched me deeply. I will always consider you with a special place in my heart.

The Red Sox organization deserves only the best and the Red Sox Nation is just that. Peace in life, Wily Modesto Peña.

No regrets over this trade, no matter how well he does in Washington. The only way Peña can develop into a serviceable major-league player is to play every day, out of the spotlight, and that wasn’t going to happen here. Give him this: If you sent up Wily Mo to pinch-hit with the game on the line, you can be sure he’d at least swing at something — unlike, say, J.D. Drew.

Meanwhile, Bronson Arroyo is now 6-13, with a 4.58 ERA. This one ends with a whimper.

RSS woes

RSS can be a great time-saver, but the glitches make it less than a complete solution. Here are a few examples:

  • My Mac-based newsreader, NewsFire, does not recognize the feed coming from Boston Magazine’s newish Boston Daily Blog. My first assumption was that the BoMag geeks were doing something wrong. But no. Because Google Reader tapped into the feed just fine.
  • So I started playing with Google Reader. Great interface, good organizational scheme, and I’ve been signing over more and more of my life to Google anyway (mail, calendar). But I quickly discovered that Google Reader is fantastically slow in updating — even items from days ago don’t appear, regardless of whether I bang away at the “refresh” button. It reminded me of another Web-based newsreader, Bloglines, which I abandoned for that very reason.
  • Too many blogs I like to check in on still aren’t using RSS, such as the Weekly Dig‘s, although I’m told that should change in the near future.

I’d be interested in hearing your RSS tales of woe — as well as any possible solutions.

More: I’ve been playing around instead of making the calls I should make, and I’ve found that fiddling makes a difference. For instance, the RSS feed for Media Nation seems to work better than the Atom feed. But the opposite is true at a couple of Phoenix blogs, Talking Politics and Don’t Quote Me, where switching from RSS to Atom brought me right up to speed. Obviously some standardization is needed.

The sagacious Dick Cheney (II)

Jon Garfunkel has some thoughts on the 1994 Dick Cheney tape. There’s a lot in here, including some ramblings from the conspiracy-minded left as to whether the media are deliberately ignoring evidence that George W. Bush is prematurely senile. But Garfunkel does get to the heart of the matter with this about the Cheney tape:

[W]hat’s remarkable is that no one found this earlier — five years ago would have been a good time. Vice President Cheney appeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert on September 8, 2002 and then on March 16, 2003, three days before the Iraq war. Russert asked him reasonably tough questions. In the March interview he showed a video clip from Cheney’s appearance on the the show during the 2000 campaign. Cheney had said in 2000 that they didn’t go to Baghdad on the advice of the neighboring governments in the coalition. What had changed, to Cheney and the war’s supporters, was the world on 9/11. But while the specter of global terrorism may have changed the urgency for war, it could not have changed the expectations about the quagmire. Either the 1991 NPR clip or the 1994 C-SPAN clip would have brought that more directly.

Garfunkel makes an important point here. After I posted my earlier item, several Cheney defenders wrote comments saying, essentially, So what? Lots of politicians change their minds. Look at John Kerry! Karl Rove said the same thing yesterday in his appearance on “Meet the Press,” telling substitute host David Gregory:

He [Cheney], he was describing the conditions in 1994. By 2003 the world had changed. It changed on 9/11, and it became clear — it should be clear to every American that we live in a dangerous world where we cannot let emerging threats fully materialize in attacks on our homeland…. [P]eople are entitled over time to look at the conditions and change their mind, and that’s exactly what Dick Cheney did.

Well, yes. But, as Garfunkel observes, changing your mind about the threat posed by Iraq is one thing (John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”), but changing your mind about the consequences of war is quite another. We now know that Cheney got it exactly right in 1994. We have no idea why he later decided the invasion and its aftermath would be a cakewalk. Did Ahmed Chalabi really hold that much sway?

Not that it could have stopped the war, but it’s a shame that Cheney’s 1994 words couldn’t have been thrown in his face in 2002 and ’03, before the invasion. Forcing him to explain why he no longer believed the war would lead to a quagmire would have been a useful exercise. It’s nice that it’s come out now, but at this late date it only confirms what most Americans believe about a vice president they detest and a war they no longer support.

Update: The Telegraph quotes Media Nation.

A teaching moment

This, from the top story in today’s Boston Globe, is a very strange lede:

More than half the black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts fail a state licensing exam, a trend that has created a major obstacle to greater diversity among public school faculty and stirred controversy over the fairness of the test.

Are diversity and fairness really the first things we ought to think about when we encounter such information? No, I didn’t think so.

Monday morning quarterbacking: An anonymous commenter thinks I’m being unfair to the Globe because the news hook was, in fact, a state investigation into why minority teaching candidates are faring so poorly on the test. A fair point, but in the main I disagree. In this case, the Globe shouldn’t have bought into the state’s notion of what’s newsworthy.

What’s news is that many teaching applicants are failing a basic state licensing test — and that, in the case of black and Latino applicants, at least some advocates are saying we should do away with the test. If all the questions are as easy as the two examples offered by the Globe, then blaming the test is ludicrous.