LET IT SNOW

MONEY AND POLITRICKS

MARS ON MY MIND

It was like a modern version of the ride of Paul Revere. All over the tube, weathermen with their doppler radars and fancy graphics, who claim to know which way the wind is blowing, were warning of a white apocalypse. Only storm news (or, god forbid!, a terror attack) could push politics and the New Hampshire primary aside as the lead story, but the snow expected in the Northeast is doing just that. If this scenario plays out true to form, there will be less snow than predicted, but it’s the threat that keeps TV news in business. The worse it looks, the better. More eyeballs stare at the screen, and people worry about getting to work.

A HIG?FIVE FOR WESLEY CLARK

New Hampshire is one place in the nation that is at home with snow — both natural and political. The voting has begun.

The Wesley Clark campaign is ecstatic. Here’s their first release of the day:

It’s very late here in Dicksville Notch, New Hampshire. It’s Tuesday morning, just past midnight, and I’m writing to share some great news. The residents of two small towns — Dicksville Notch and Hart’s Location — have just cast the first primary votes of the 2004 Presidential election and given us our first victories!

And indeed it is true. Clark garnered FIVE votes. (Bush, on the other hand, swept the Republican primary with ELEVEN.) The General’s campaign might profit by adapting the stance of the late African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral who said “claim no easy victories.” The voting has begun, but as the Great Yogi put it, “It ain’t over till it is.”

And so we are off into another day of political claims and spin machines. (The snow machines on the slopes can take a break for now.) Last night, CNN’s Jeff Greenfield divided the voters into “regulars” vs. “reformers,” “working class” vs. “white collar,” “beer drinkers” vs. “wine drinkers.”

Bear in mind, this is a state that has produced its share of political suprises. The pundits are rarely right. As politicians become performers and TV cameras show the voters, behind-the-scene strategists are doing the calculations. It’s about voting blocks and the electoral college, about money-raising and avoiding mistakes a la Dean. It’s about building grassroots machines and gearing up to march through South Carolina and Missouri and the other primaries that await.

YOU FOLLOW THE VOTES, THEY FOLLOW THE MONEY

While the media are counting the votes, the campaign strategists are counting the money. Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity reports,

Presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards campaign promises regarding campaign finance are misleading and disingenuous when compared with disclosure records, a Center for Public Integrity study has found.

As the primary race has heated up in New Hampshire, issues have recently focused on campaign finance with polling frontrunner Kerry saying he has never “taken a dime of PAC money.”

Kerry’s statement might be technically correct but his disclosure records show is that he actually went a step further. Instead of taking money from PAC’s, he took almost a half million dollars ($472,000) in contributions directly from corporations themselves through a lesser-known soft money committee.

Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity’s new book “The Buying of the President 2004″ details how Kerry created his own special soft money committee (Citizen Soldier Fund - nonfederal account) to raise this money and funneled more than a quarter of million of it to the early primary states Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

THE RIGHT TO KNOW

Is this illegal? Probably not, but it matters. Chuck Lewis explains on GregPalast.com,

The real powers that be in this country are not on any ballot. And they are accountable to no one…. The bottom line is that the American people have a right to know who is underwriting their presidential candidates, and their democracy.

( http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=309&row=0 )

Campaign finance reform has a long way to go The more rules, the more loopholes. Bear in mind that this “first in the nation” primary is no longer first and no longer definitive. The turnout is expected to be high. But when the smoke clears and the snow falls, it will turn into another footnote in the election 2004.

POLLS, SCHMOLLS

My pal at the Boston Phoenix Dan Kennedy, a long-time campaign-watcher in the region, shares his latest assessment, as of 7 AM:

Michael Goldman, who I don’t think has ever missed a sunrise, sends along the last New Hampshire tracking poll from the American Research Group. It’s now Kerry, 35 percent, Dean, 25 percent - an eight-point drop for Kerry since yesterday. Combined with yesterday’s Zogby poll, showing a three-point spread, and it’s pretty clear that predictions are futile.

Although Mickey Kaus says that the latest Zogby numbers - not up on the Web as I write this - show Kerry holding a larger lead than he did yesterday. Read down and you’ll see that Zogby changed his methodology to come up with Kerry’s narrow three-point lead. Is the Z-man now getting cold feet?

Caught a Dean town meeting from Phillips Exeter Academy on C-SPAN last night. He came across as relaxed and much more articulate in explaining his program than he had during the past month or so. If he loses, it may turn out that his decision to embrace the party establishment in the form of Al Gore, Bill Bradley, Tom Harkin, and the like was his undoing. The Dean on display last night could have won. Perhaps he still will, although it certainly seems like Kerry’s to lose.

ELECTIONS HERE, ELECTIONS THERE

The other country where elections are the issue is Iraq. The US is still opposing for the occupied Iraqis what occupied Americans still enjoy — as was expected. The UN is sending a team to negotiate a compromise with the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who is demanding elections, not some fakakta version of the Iowa caucuses. If you thought Dean could scream, watch what happens if the latter is imposed instead of the former. Writing in today’s New York Times, Dilip Hiro blows apart the arguments challenging Iraqi elections.

Mr. Bremer and the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council give many reasons for ruling out quick elections: the electoral rolls are not up to date; the political parties are not functioning properly; and the security situation is not conducive to election campaigns. All of these arguments fall apart on closer scrutiny.

For one, the voter rolls may be outdated, but since 1991 all Iraqis have been issued food ration cards that could be used as identification at polling stations. Mr. Bremer and some governing council members object that using ration cards would disenfranchise exiles who have returned since Saddam Hussein’s fall. Yet there are only about 250,000 Iraqi returnees and all should have documents from the countries of their exile that would suffice as identification.

Some Iraqi families had their cards taken away by the Baathist regime because a family member deserted the army. But another identification document exists, a “census card” provided to all Iraqis when they reached school age, giving the student’s name, address and age. It is worth noting that within two months of the overthrow of the shah of Iran in February 1979, the revolutionary government used the fallen regime’s identification cards to hold a referendum on whether Iran should be an Islamic republic.

As for the argument that political parties are needed, Iran offers another precedent. In August 1979, the Islamic authorities held elections to the constitutional Assembly of Experts. Almost all of the candidates ran as individuals rather than as party affiliates, yet they were able to campaign and get their messages out to voters.

( http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/opinion/27HIRO.html?pagewanted=1&th&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1075221672-hMVCaiJzIGBGkXt1DwXocA )

KAY: BLAME THE CIA

David Kay, the discredited, CIA-run weapons inspector, has now turned on the agency and blamed it for intelligence failures. The Guerilla News Network’s Anthony LaPapp頣orrectly explains the new spin on the old spin — let the CIA take the fall and let Bush get off.

? Apparently, here’s the new improved WMD spin: Kay argued that the President wasn’t guilty of misleading the American public, but that, in fact, if anything, he was the “victim” of the CIA’s bad intelligence. The blame, he seemed to be saying, lay squarely on the Agency.

It’s looking like this is where the WMD hot potato is going to land, right on Langley’s lap. It’s perfect. The CIA is a faceless, nameless bureaucracy. The excuses have already been floated: They were too lazy to have men on the ground. They didn’t have any native speakers. They listened to the wrong exiles. They were under-funded by the Clinton administration. It’s Iran-Contra all over again: The President was out-of-the-loop. Why do you think they pick guys like Reagan and Georgie Jr.? They have a built-in plausible deniability factor.

I am not naﶥ. I believe that this is all a ruse to protect Bush from his “Achilles Heel” in the coming election which is 9-11.

If the Bush Administration can establish that our intelligence services were inept in providing accurate information about WMD’s in Iraq , then it will be easier for them to likewise pass the blame for the attacks on 9-11 to our intelligence services because they can then say that warnings could not be trusted because our entire intelligence system was dysfunctional.

( http://www.opednews.com/duncan0104_bush_will_skate.htm )

George Soros seems to have taken his campaign against President Bush to Europe. He writes in the Guardian,

The invasion of Iraq was the first practical application of the pernicious Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military action, and it elicited an allergic reaction worldwide - not because anyone had a good word to say about Saddam Hussein, but because we insisted on invading Iraq unilaterally without any clear evidence that he had anything to do with September 11 or that he possessed weapons of mass destruction.The gap in perceptions between America and the rest of the world has never been wider. Abroad, America is seen as abusing the dominant position it occupies; opinion at home has been led to believe that Saddam posed a clear and present danger to national security. Only in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion are people becoming aware they have been misled.

( http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1131132,00.html )

MARTIANS: WE HAVE LANDED

Let us remember, as the New York Times reminds us, that on this day, “Jan. 27, 1967, astronauts Virgil I. ?Gus’ Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo spacecraft at Cape Kennedy, Fla..”

Corrupt computer files have been blamed for the failure of the first lander. (I wonder if that computer is getting all those penis enlargement ads that mine is?) To keep our attention focused elsewhere, we now have those groovy new pictures of rocks on Mars to mesmerize us.

As you look up, also look down. Why are we suddenly playing space games? Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, speaks to this on the “Between the Lines” radio show. It may be one of the least covered stories of the year.

I think it’s part of a long, long-time plan to begin to build the infrastructure to use space to control the earth and then ultimately to create a 50-year, 100-year plan to control the shipping lanes between the earth and planetary bodies. There’s a plan to actually mine the skies. They’ve discovered gold on the asteroids. On Mars, there’s magnesium and cobalt and uranium. That little rover driving around Mars today, it’s not looking for the origins of life like we’re told; they’re doing soil identification and they’re trying to identify what is where on that planet.

There’s helium-3 on the moon. In fact, there’s a New York Times story where they say that it will replace fossil fuels when they are gone on the earth, and helium-3 will be used for fusion reactors. Coincidentally, the U.S. never signed the 1979 Moon Treaty that outlaws permanent bases on the moon, military bases, and most importantly, says that no country or corporation or individual can claim ownership of the moon. The U.S. didn’t sign that treaty because we’ve always intended to have military bases on the moon.

Listen in RealAudio: www.btlonline.org/gagnon013004.ram
AOL users: www.btlonline.org/gagnon013004.ram

THE POPE ON THE MEDIA

Dick Cheney met with the Pope in Rome today but refuses to talk about the Dick Kay issue. The Pope, meanwhile, has been talking — about the media.

Pope John Paul II criticised the media on Saturday, saying they often give a positive depiction of extramarital sex, contraception, abortion and homosexuality that is harmful to society. The pontiff, in a statement issued ahead of the Church’s World Communications Day in May, urged the media to promote traditional family life.

( http://story.news.yahoo.com/newstmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=518&e=5&u=/ap/20040124/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_media_2 )

YOUR LETTERS

Ed Dewitt writes and spinkles in some !!!!!s.

I am not surprised by the lack of media attention regarding Andrew Fastow reneging on his plea arrangement. This is right out the Bush administration playbook: tell them [what] they want to hear and then DON’T DO IT!!! The media AND the legal communities should be up in arms over this display of contempt!!!

Apologies to Chuck O’Brian of Savannah, GA, whose work was excerpted yesterday but whose name was mangled. Will do better next time. Keep ?em coming.

Daigu Ferell writes,

Your experience at “customs” is not unusual and it is quite sudden. I’ve a friend who travels often, and these cameras and security magazines are pure ***.

I recall Edward R. Murrow’s work often these days, especially his descriptions of how he learned the trade. Significant is the fact that it all happened to him ?without–77 channels on the box, computer games, expanding violence in our “entertainments” and now our daily lives (1 in 4 kids now “expect” violence at school), etc. Indeed, with media expansion, “journalism schools” expanded, and the kids trained therein were enculturated in a manner that is the polar opposite to the way “reporters” once learned the ropes. How can we be surprised that the quality of reportage has become so banal and subservient to the powers that be. Any formula, diluted, will yield a more tepid product. This enculturation experience must be relevant when we discuss the quality of media.

Murrow, and his like, became learned on the streets, with primary sources, and lots of legwork. Today, reporters depend on phone calls, computers, other tv news, secondary, tertiary, and beyond sources, and produced press conferences?.

ON THE DAY BEFORE THE HUTTON REPORT IS RELEASED ?

Our final quote today comes from Bill Bowles over in the UK. He has a wordplay lesson for us. His website again: www.williambowles.info.

“Throwing the book at our leaders'’ by William Bowles 26/01/04

Lie (noun): falsehood, fabrication, prevarication, fib, untruth, falsification, invention, mendacity, canard.

Ah woe is me, what’s got into the world when those who claim to be fearless in pursuit of the truth - the great and glorious media, schooled, we are told in the art of assembling the dissembled - are afraid to utter the word lie. LIE! There, I’ve said it twice but I don’t feel any better. Perhaps if I contextualise it, I’ll feel less unclean, less soiled by our mendacious government headed by a gang of canards, who with the complicity of a cowardly media, falsify reality and prevaricate when challenged, fabricate inventions and tell us untruths about their reasons for going to war.

That said, there’s less for me to add.

IN CLOSING . . .

Watch for the launch this week of MediaChannel’s new Media for Democracy project. You will be impressed. I was. Check out Tim Karr’s piece on the latest media analysis by Media Tenor (http://tinyurl.com/36v6m). And keep your letters and notes coming. Write dissector@mediachannel.org.