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So how did Russia get the names of US agents, one former FSB and one current FSB, and one hotel cleaner, six days after Trump got the unredacted piss memo with the names of those agents in?

I'm not sure what your point is. The article here is about one intelligence failure, which was in 2011. You're asking about a different intelligence failure, six years later. The existence of one intelligence failure doesn't say much about the other one.

...There is ONE article by "Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin" and this is it. Just because you read it, don't assume its true.

Yes, it is one article. Once you read it, however, you see that there were earlier articles on the same leak which just didn't have the actual details.
https://www.pulitzer.org/files/2015/national-reporting/mcclatchy/10mcclatchy2015.pdf. (alternate source: https://www.kentucky.com/news/...) :

John Reidy, a former CIA contractor, recently cited his frustration with the inspector general’s handling of his case in his appeal to the new intelligence community panel. Reidy claimed he was demoted and eventually fired in retaliation after he tried to raise the alarm in 2007 on an “intelligence failure” by the spy agency. His lawyer McClanahan said he understood that “the intelligence failure involved U.S. government activity that was supposed to be covert but was done in such a bungled way that it was virtually guaranteed to be discovered.” CIA inspector general investigators didn’t interview Reidy until two years after he first went to them and then only after being directed to do so by the House Intelligence Committee, McClanahan said.

Or here: https://www.emptywheel.net/201...

he [Reid]described what by 2010 had become a “catastrophic intelligence failure[]” in which “upwards of 70% of our operations had been compromised.” The problem appears to have arisen because “the US communications infrastructure was under siege,” which sounds like CIA may have gotten hacked. At least by 2007, he had warned that several of the CIA’s operations had been compromised, with some sources stopping all communications suddenly and others providing reports that were clearly false, or “atmospherics” submitted as solid reporting to fluff reporting numbers. By 2011 the government had appointed a Task Force to deal with the problem he had identified years earlier, though some on that Task Force didn’t even know how long the problem had existed or that Reidy had tried to alert the CIA and Congress to the problem. All that seems to point to the possibility that tech contractors had set up a reporting system that had been compromised by adversaries

Or here: https://www.thestate.com/news/...

Journalism is subject to fads.

Man! You're not kidding!

I ask myself, "Does this news source give all viewpoints, including the ones I disagree with, including the unpopular ones?" I judge them first by the subjects that I'm most familiar with myself (primarily medicine and biology). Classroom example: Does a story about abortion give both (or all) sides? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02...

In my freshman year of college, even the engineering majors had to take a humanities course. The most valuable book they gave me was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.... Mill summarized it himself:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.

And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

So I look for a news source that gives me as many ideas as possible, so I can evaluate them myself. A special case is the journalistic rule: Whenever you attack someone, you have an obligation to give him a chance to respond. I worked as a journalist myself, and any journalist can tell you that when you get the other side, it often turns the whole story around.

The one newspaper that did the best job (more than the New York Times) was the Wall Street Journal. For example, they did a story on a welfare work program in California, and interviewed everyone from the governor down to the welfare recipients. (It seemed clear to me that the program wasn't working, but you could come to your own conclusions.) Some of their best reporters were socialists. Their page 1 editor was gay, contracted AIDS, wrote about his treatement with AZT, and got a Pulitzer Prize for it. http://www.pulitzer.org/winner... They wrote about the successes and failures of the capitalist system. The WSJ made their reputation when GM told them to kill a story, threatened to cancel all their advertising if they didn't, and the WSJ told them to fuck off.

But best of all, they gave me ideas every morning that I disagreed with, and I had to figure out whether I was really right.

Then Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ and destroyed the best newspaper in the world, by placing right-wing political commissars over the editing process and censoring liberal ideas. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12... .

So it's back to the New York Times, even though they have an annoying habit of pandering to their advertisers and to the neo-liberal establishment. (I noticed this when I was following auto safety engineering, and the NYT basically followed the auto industry line that seat belts and air bags were too expensive. The auto industry is in the top 2 or 3 newspaper advertisers.)

After that, the best news sources that I read are in the professional journals. Science magazine actually does get all sides. I also read the New England

The SQL tutorial looks at the numbers but doesn't emphasize two kind of glaring omissions in the WSJ article:

a) Dr Weaver is charging for a procedure _labeled_ 'cardiac', but there is no mention of what the procedure is,

page 8 'the proce-dure, which is called "enhanced external counterpulsation" or EECP

it's relevance to cardiology (if the label is accurate),

page 8 'Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the
Cleveland Clinic, characterizes EECP as “a treatment that
is, and should be, rarely used”'

or it's relevance to internal medicine (Dr Weaver's _labeled_ current specialty). For all we know, Dr Weaver is an ex-cardiologist, now practicing internal medicine for which he has found this procedure to be extremely useful in the patients he treats.

page 8 'Dr Weaver, ... acknowledged having no specialized training in
cardiology ... By his
own account, he doesn’t see patients himself but employs
two to three cardiologists for that purpose.'

For all we know, the procedure was mislabeled (esp. since it is pointed out that the data is noisy incl. spelling errors, multiple labels for same thing, etc.)

b) At one point, Dr. Weaver's _statistical_ use of the procedure (99.5%) is compared to a raw numerical value (6) by Cleveland Clinic cardiologists. For all we know, the clinic cardiologists only saw 6 patients for whom the procedure was relevant, or they never use the procedure because they have other more relevant/current techniques, or patients who are seen by the clinic are at a point where the procedure isn't required.

Page 8 'Medicare covers EECP only for patients
who have “disabling” angina, a kind of persistent and
extreme chest pain, and who can’t have surgery to treat it.'

While the SQL tutorial is an interesting look at how to verify the accuracy of the statistics in an article, it tacitly provided validation for what is still poor reporting ie. the statistics need explanation and validation beyond simple numbers.

This statement is in fact quite entertaining.

If you assume that most people are pretty honest (statistically they are), then the SQL queries are a neat way to highlight that the billing system (not the practioners) is in need of a second or third look.

Source
Please note that the linked pdf hosted on pulitzer.org includes an additional 2 pages at the beginning, which are omitted from the screenshot provided in the padjo.org reference.

I think people don't understand what the Pulitzer Prize is for these days. Once upon a time, it was given to inspire journalist excellence, but these days it is just a back-patting that says, "we endorse and agree with your leftist views." Just look at the prizes for Investigative Reporting - seven years into Obama's term and not a single Pulitzer has been awarded for investigating corruption and criminal behavior in his administration. Not one. And this from a scandal-ridden Presidency that is ripe for old-fashioned, shoe-leather, crusading journalists to expose to the light of day.

I don't see anything condemning any leftists at all. You have to go back 20 years ago to find a Prize awarded for an investigation of the Nation of Islam's questionable business dealings. Can you imagine this sort of thing going on today? A journalist would never receive a Pulitzer for doing this sort of story, in fact they'd probably be publicly shamed, fired, and rendered unemployable. So, let's all remember what the Pulitzer Prize actually is and what it stands for.

Its nice to see that the wall street journal is working on raising the quality level of articles they publish

I think people don't understand what the Pulitzer Prize is for these days. Once upon a time, it was given to inspire journalist excellence, but these days it is just a back-patting that says, "we endorse and agree with your leftist views." Just look at the prizes for Investigative Reporting - seven years into Obama's term and not a single Pulitzer has been awarded for investigating corruption and criminal behavior in his administration. Not one. And this from a scandal-ridden Presidency that is ripe for old-fashioned, shoe-leather, crusading journalists to expose to the light of day.

I don't see anything condemning any leftists at all. You have to go back 20 years ago to find a Prize awarded for an investigation of the Nation of Islam's questionable business dealings. Can you imagine this sort of thing going on today? A journalist would never receive a Pulitzer for doing this sort of story, in fact they'd probably be publicly shamed, fired, and rendered unemployable. So, let's all remember what the Pulitzer Prize actually is and what it stands for.

This makes sense - if the point of journalism is to deliver high-quality photography of the kind that other photographers will appreciate. So much of old-fashioned journalism is a gigantic circle-jerk. It has been repeatedly proven that nobody needs this sort of hugely expensive photography in order to tell a story.
Have a look at some the Pulitzer prizes for photography.

2013
2012
2011

Those photographs are pretty powerful. They help tell a narrative, and the appeal extends way beyond photographers.

"But how will anyone win the Pulitzer Prize?!?!" Yeah, the local newspaper won't win that anyway. It's more of a political award than an acknowledgement of talent

Although the Sun-Times hasn't won a photography pulitzer in a good many years, it is still a major metropolitan daily.

This makes sense - if the point of journalism is to deliver high-quality photography of the kind that other photographers will appreciate. So much of old-fashioned journalism is a gigantic circle-jerk. It has been repeatedly proven that nobody needs this sort of hugely expensive photography in order to tell a story.
Have a look at some the Pulitzer prizes for photography.

2013
2012
2011

Those photographs are pretty powerful. They help tell a narrative, and the appeal extends way beyond photographers.

"But how will anyone win the Pulitzer Prize?!?!" Yeah, the local newspaper won't win that anyway. It's more of a political award than an acknowledgement of talent

Although the Sun-Times hasn't won a photography pulitzer in a good many years, it is still a major metropolitan daily.

This makes sense - if the point of journalism is to deliver high-quality photography of the kind that other photographers will appreciate. So much of old-fashioned journalism is a gigantic circle-jerk. It has been repeatedly proven that nobody needs this sort of hugely expensive photography in order to tell a story.
Have a look at some the Pulitzer prizes for photography.

2013
2012
2011

Those photographs are pretty powerful. They help tell a narrative, and the appeal extends way beyond photographers.

"But how will anyone win the Pulitzer Prize?!?!" Yeah, the local newspaper won't win that anyway. It's more of a political award than an acknowledgement of talent

Although the Sun-Times hasn't won a photography pulitzer in a good many years, it is still a major metropolitan daily.

Bullshit. Is that what we tell ourselves, or are the actions of the Left simply put down the garbage disposal of the Memory Hole? Cambodia was a revolutionary Marxist paradise. Private property, religion and money were abolished. Here's a contemporary account of the Leftist view of Cambodia. You'll recognize the tropes, eh?

"For years western imperialism raped an Asiatic land, killing nearly a million people, transforming a beautiful cultured Cambodian city into a ghetto, a brothel. But the people rose, freed themselves, threw out the intruders, found that their fine towns needed restoration. So they emptied the houses and began to clear up the mess. They began to scrub floors and walls, because people were never meant to live in degradation here, but in peace and with dignity. Then crocodile tears poured forth in the West. The brothel has been emptied and the clean-up is in progress. Only pimps can regret what is happening."

Link

"When Gunnar Bergstrom was a guest in Khmer Rouge Cambodia of Pol Pot in August 1978, the Swede enjoyed a rare meeting and dinner of oysters hosted by Pol Pot.

The meal followed a rare interview he and three politcal comrades from Sweden were given by the innaccesible and secretive Pol Pot who was then presiding over the death of more than a million and a half people that was actually escalating and under full rage at the time of that August 1978 feast. he returned to Europe and labeled talk about genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge rule as a Western lie.

The young Swedish leftists shared Pol Pot's view, seeing the Khmer Rouge takeover as a revolution to transform Cambodia into a fairer society benefiting the poor."

Link

Edgar Snow lied like a dog about Mao Zedong, and Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for covering up Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine. The Pulitzer Prize committee flat-out refused to revoke his award.

Go visit our universities and do some research - people were not cast out for these views. Most of them (or their proteges) are still teaching students.

http://www.pulitzer.org/files/entryforms/2013planofaward.pdf

There you go.. full instructions..

I'm surprised at how infrequently France makes the cut in lists of major arms-supplying nuisances. The US has the largest share of the arms export market in absolute terms, but as a percentage of GDP the French surpass the Americans by far, and they have a great list of past clients, like the Hutus of Rwanda (1) and Gaddafi (2).

(1) French arms, war and genocide in Rwanda: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j5571355l6m6rr48/ ; see also http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/5706 and, for more recent take, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/11/rwanda.insideafrica.

(2) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22189006/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/gadhafi-visits-france-arms-nuclear-deals/, from that trip where he set up his tent on the Champs-Élysées. Great quote:

Human Rights Minister Rama Yade expressed disgust with the symbolism of the chosen date of International Human Rights Day. 'It would be indecent, in any case, that this visit be summed up with the signing of contracts,' she said in an interview published Monday in the daily Le Parisien.

According to the official guidelines, there are 14 categories of journalism Pulitzer. Leaving aside the ones that cant be made to apply to the Onion's ouvre (a distinguished example of investigative reporting, for instance), there are only four potential categories in which it could compete:

Category 1 - a distinguished example of public service by a newspaper or news site,

Category 9 - commentary, or

Category 11 - editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction.

The guidelines state that anyone - that includes you, gentle reader - may submit an entry for consideration. You don't have to be The Onion or even have The Onion's permission to submit it for a Pulitzer. All you have to do put together a submission package that conforms to the Pulitzer guidelines (pdf), and pay the $50 entry fee.

I suspect that a flood of thousands of third-party entries on behalf of The Onion would be certain to garner sufficient attention on the part of the Pulitzer Board to guarantee it would, at a minimum, take into consideration awarding a special Pulitzer to The Onion, if not next year (It's too late to enter the Onion for consideration for this year), then in s subsequent year sometime in the not-too-distant future. And I'm certain that would be the case, if the flood of third-party applications recurs in 2013 and 2014.

FWIW, Next year's deadline is February 11, 2012, and the window for submission opens January 1, 2012, for work originally published during 2011.

So, to summarize, if you think The Onion deserves a Pulitzer, it's within your power, both as an individual, and especially as a community, to lobby very effectively for that to happen. All that's required is that you, as an individual, spend a little time, effort, and money crafting an entry submission on behalf of The Onion, and then send that sucker in on January 4, 2012 (because New Year's Day falls on a Friday next year, so you're likely to be too busy taking advantage of the long weekend to want to hit the Post Office or UPS store on the 2nd). And, if enough of you, as a community, spend that time, effort, and money, you just might make it so.

According to the official guidelines, there are 14 categories of journalism Pulitzer. Leaving aside the ones that cant be made to apply to the Onion's ouvre (a distinguished example of investigative reporting, for instance), there are only four potential categories in which it could compete:

Category 1 - a distinguished example of public service by a newspaper or news site,

Category 9 - commentary, or

Category 11 - editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction.

The guidelines state that anyone - that includes you, gentle reader - may submit an entry for consideration. You don't have to be The Onion or even have The Onion's permission to submit it for a Pulitzer. All you have to do put together a submission package that conforms to the Pulitzer guidelines (pdf), and pay the $50 entry fee.

I suspect that a flood of thousands of third-party entries on behalf of The Onion would be certain to garner sufficient attention on the part of the Pulitzer Board to guarantee it would, at a minimum, take into consideration awarding a special Pulitzer to The Onion, if not next year (It's too late to enter the Onion for consideration for this year), then in s subsequent year sometime in the not-too-distant future. And I'm certain that would be the case, if the flood of third-party applications recurs in 2013 and 2014.

FWIW, Next year's deadline is February 11, 2012, and the window for submission opens January 1, 2012, for work originally published during 2011.

So, to summarize, if you think The Onion deserves a Pulitzer, it's within your power, both as an individual, and especially as a community, to lobby very effectively for that to happen. All that's required is that you, as an individual, spend a little time, effort, and money crafting an entry submission on behalf of The Onion, and then send that sucker in on January 4, 2012 (because New Year's Day falls on a Friday next year, so you're likely to be too busy taking advantage of the long weekend to want to hit the Post Office or UPS store on the 2nd). And, if enough of you, as a community, spend that time, effort, and money, you just might make it so.

Or view material from pulitizer prize winning journalists.

Ummm.. hey dude, safari works just fine on the ipod/iphone/ipad and you can use it to read any prize winning journalist that you have legal (and even illegal) access to. E.g., just navigate to here, find the author you want and look it up on google. It's really not that hard.

In any case, you don't need flash and you only need one app. Adobe can suck it, flash sucks on anything but windows and I for one, am sick and tired of not having flash apps load properly and/or slow my system to a crawl. Ever since it was invented, people on slashdot have been complaining about sites that rely on flash to show their content, but now that Apple has banned it all according to you, being forced into using Adobe products to view the web is "being allowed to use your device anyway you want"? Are you nuts? You are being played by Adobe and they're waging their PR campaign not for your freedom like they say, but to preserve their profit and control of the world wide web.

If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 [pulitzer.org] that shows you how the free market system is failing...

There is little-to-no "free market system" in the US these decades. Finance and auto certainly do not qualify. Healthcare? Probably the least free of them all (professional licensing, device regulation, endless hurdles to deploy or import, perverse incentives to divorce decision makers from payers, etc). If you have missed this, it may not matter how many words you read.

I spend a big part of my life taking complicated scientific information and making it simple enough for people to read on the Internet in bite-sized chunks.

But sometimes it isn't possible.

Sometimes if you want to understand something important, you just have to sit down and go through something long, with difficult language, and boring parts, where you have to read it several times and look things up before you get it right. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html

The Republicans and Democrats are competing with each other to see who can destroy the common good faster and make more money out of it for their campaign contributors.

If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 that shows you how the free market system is failing and how the Bush administration was pimping the regulatory system, you won't understand what they're doing to you (us).

If everybody is like you, this democracy is in trouble.

Yeah, I read the blogs, I read Glen Greenwald, Common Dreams and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But even Greenwald (he's a lawyer) will tell you that sometimes the only way to find out the truth is to read the (long, complicated) original source.

This idea that you can take a lot of snippets from ideological bloggers on all sides, throw them into a box and somehow the truth will shake out, is like the idea that you can take a lot of bad mortgages, aggregate them together and have them turn into good investments. That's what we call "A mile wide and an inch deep." You wind up with a lot of manipulation and cynicism.

Sometimes you have to do hard work. And one thing I don't tolerate is being lazy when you have an important job to do.

You could make an argument that nobody deserves George Bush. That may be true. But we get him because Americans are too lazy to read a 5,000-word news story.

In the meantime, the current administration let the nutty banking policies developed under Clinton's watch to http://www.usa-foreclosure.com/">fester and metasticise, and now the country's technically insolvent.

As a consequence, I think putting people in space is going to be seriously backburnered, and I would humbly submit that the majority of people who will ever be in space have already gone.

I'm not happy about that - I would love to go put bases on the moon to harvest He3 and do all that kind of groovy stuff, but I think we shot our wad, and pissed away the resources on crap like highways for Cadillac Escalades and useless cities like Las Vegas. We had our chance, and we blew it.

RS

And I quite like Mexico's philosophy on the policy

That's spelled "Pulitzer", you insensitive clod.

1 billion poorly lit, poorly framed, grainy images from cameras

Maybe if we assemble these correctly we can see the image of a news scene from a fly's composite eye view... hmmmmm... nope, never mind, they still look like shit.

When I think of photojournalism, I think of the person who can not only take a picture of some news scene, but who can frame it in a way to put a human context on what has/is happening to convey more information than what is just in the picture.

Don't believe me? Go look at the Pulitzer web site and see. You can look at prize winners from 1995 to present on line. The pictures speak for themselves.

News isn't news because it happens. A lot of things happen. For example, the fact a tree falls over in the forest (I don't give a shit if you can hear it or not) is not news *unless* maybe (a purely hypothetical 'maybe' not a Reuters maybe) it was the last tree in existence that contained some microspore that will cure cancer... but the spore can only grow in living trees and now it will be lost forever... or something else that ties it to people somehow. More specifically a good photojournalist will either show how the photo ties the story to you or me, or how it makes you or me feel tied to the story. (Notice the word 'feel'.) Some dweeb taking a picture of the tree on its side with his/her cell phone is not likely to do be able to do that unless they really have some underlying talent already.

TaxChurches. com say...

Yes they do, but basing public policy on anecdotes is not a good idea. I do agree on putting them under the same rules governing other social services, however.

As far as mixing politics and religion, even making a serious threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of a church could have a big impact. Like how prosecuting a farmer for saftey violations made others start taking it seriously, going after organizations like the Southern Baptists or the Christian Coalition could change the political landscape very quickly, even if they don't actually lose their tax-exempt status.

Your argument was that the articles you listed were comprehensive, I've shown they are not. That's the point of those examples.

What you haven't shown is any evidence of a "first-tier newspaper" charging for its content around same time as the WSJ started. The stories I listed would have probably mentioned at least one of them if they had existed. So far, you've only pointed out they missed The Roll Call, which isn't even a daily.

Your argument that they are better is because the Columbia school of Journalism liked them a lot and gave them an award.

Only 3 of the 19 members of the Pulitzer committee are members of the CSJ and two of those are former professional journalists. Furthermore, it is not just those 19 distinguished individuals. From the history of the Prizes: "The awards are the culmination of a year-long process that begins early in the year with the appointment of 102 distinguished judges who serve on 20 separate juries and are asked to make three nominations in each of the 21 categories" from over 2,000 submissions.

The Pulitzer Prize represents a consensus of the very people (including the Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal) who write and edit the news.

The WSJ has tons of controversial business content. They've uncovered very important instances of corporate fraud, misrepresentation....

The New York Times 2005 Pulitzer was on that very topic: "corporate cover-up of responsibility for fatal accidents at railway crossings."

You don't win prizes for the sort of journalism that actually challenges the society.

One need only point to the Times' Pulitzer Prize for the Pentagon Papers (1972) and Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize for Watergate coverage (1973) to show how baseless that statement is.

Your argument was that the articles you listed were comprehensive, I've shown they are not. That's the point of those examples.

What you haven't shown is any evidence of a "first-tier newspaper" charging for its content around same time as the WSJ started. The stories I listed would have probably mentioned at least one of them if they had existed. So far, you've only pointed out they missed The Roll Call, which isn't even a daily.

Your argument that they are better is because the Columbia school of Journalism liked them a lot and gave them an award.

Only 3 of the 19 members of the Pulitzer committee are members of the CSJ and two of those are former professional journalists. Furthermore, it is not just those 19 distinguished individuals. From the history of the Prizes: "The awards are the culmination of a year-long process that begins early in the year with the appointment of 102 distinguished judges who serve on 20 separate juries and are asked to make three nominations in each of the 21 categories" from over 2,000 submissions.

The Pulitzer Prize represents a consensus of the very people (including the Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal) who write and edit the news.

The WSJ has tons of controversial business content. They've uncovered very important instances of corporate fraud, misrepresentation....

The New York Times 2005 Pulitzer was on that very topic: "corporate cover-up of responsibility for fatal accidents at railway crossings."

You don't win prizes for the sort of journalism that actually challenges the society.

One need only point to the Times' Pulitzer Prize for the Pentagon Papers (1972) and Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize for Watergate coverage (1973) to show how baseless that statement is.

-Democratic forms get tossed in the trash, but not Republican forms...

If that is what happened. All that is certain is that some forms were brought to the FBI that had been ripped in half. We don't know who did the ripping, or why. Maybe these were duplicates - people filling out two forms. Maybe the people turning in the forms to the FBI did it. Who knows?

-It's Texas Republicans who are Gerrymandering in their redistricting efforts...

Both parties have done this forever. It's wrong, but you should see the Congressional districts in Democrat-controlled Illinois. Also, the minority party always cries gerrymandering to get leverage. Whether it's happening in Texas, and what effect it finally has, who knows.

-Sinclair wishes to put an obviously anti Kerry Docuganda on TV...

You can't ignore the overwhelming mainstream media bias. Besides, Mr. Kerry is proud of his service to the country in Viet Nam. Those who served with him recall it differently. There are other groups who do honor his service, though.

-Flordia 2000 -- Black voters are disenfranchised by the thousands. Guess which way they lean?

Ah yes, the 'disenfranchised Florida voter' myth. Here is the reality:

Prior to the 2000 election (in the race for Miami Mayor), there was a scandal about convicted felons voting. The Miami Herald ran a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about the Florida voter rolls having thousands of felons and deceased voters. In response to the public outcry, Florida Legislature mandated that the Secretary of State clean up the voter registration rolls.

Anybody who's ever maintained a list of names and addresses knows that they are error-prone. Complicating this, some states don't bar felons from voting, while Florida does. A felon moving from a voting-felon state should continue to vote, while a felon shouldn't be able to move from a non-voting-felon state in order to vote. (Can you say "reform"?)

So five months before the election, the Secretary of State sent the state purge list to the counties. They keyed on full name, since that's the only common field in both databases. They also gave the aliases that the felons were known to have used. Apparently at least one county election official was on the list! As a result of the flaws in the state list, many counties continued to get their lists from the courts, illegally ignoring the official state list.

People were given an chance to re-register if they could show that they were not a convicted felon or dead, but merely had the same name. From glennbeck.com, (conservative site, but the figures are in the ballpark, anyway):

Research revealed that 239 [of] the 4,678 African Americans on the Miami-Dade felons' were eventually cleared to vote which represented 5.1 percent of the total number of blacks on the felons list. Of the 1,264 whites on the list, 125 proved to be there by mistake-which is 9.9 percent of the total. The error rate for whites was almost double that for blacks.

Most of the people who were made to re-register did so without difficulty. There were a handful of people who didn't get themselves re-registered for various reasons.

While that is a hassle for those handfull of people, and it's clear that the system is flawed, it certainly doesn't represent a systematic effort to disenfranchise Democratic voters, African-American or otherwise.

As

-Democratic forms get tossed in the trash, but not Republican forms...

If that is what happened. All that is certain is that some forms were brought to the FBI that had been ripped in half. We don't know who did the ripping, or why. Maybe these were duplicates - people filling out two forms. Maybe the people turning in the forms to the FBI did it. Who knows?

-It's Texas Republicans who are Gerrymandering in their redistricting efforts...

Both parties have done this forever. It's wrong, but Texas is not the only place where redistricting efforts have been charged with foul play. You should see the Congressional districts in Democrat-controlled Illinois. Also, that's what the out-of-power party always says, in an effort to get leverage. Whether it's happening in Texas, and what effect it finally has, who knows.

-Sinclair wishes to put an obviously anti Kerry Docuganda on TV...

What about CBS-ABC-NBC-CNN? You can't ignore that media bias. Besides, Mr. Kerry is proud of his service to the country in Viet Nam. There are others who served with him who recall it differently. There are other groups who honor his service, though.

-Flordia 2000 -- Black voters are disenfranchised by the thousands. Guess which way they lean?

Ah yes, the 'disenfranchised Florida voter' myth. Here is the reality:

Prior to the 2000 election (in the race for Miami Mayor), there was a scandal about convicted felons voting. The Miami Herald ran a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about the Florida voter rolls having thousands of felons and deceased voters. In response to the public outcry, Florida Legislature mandated that the Secretary of State clean up the voter registration rolls.

Anybody who's ever maintained a list of names and addresses knows that they are always filled with errors. This was complicated by the fact that some states don't bar felons from voting, while Florida does. A felon moving from a voting-felon state should continue to vote, while a felon shouldn't be able to move from a non-voting-felon state in order to vote. (Can you say "reform"?)

So five months before the election, the Secretary of State sent a list to the counties to use to purge their individual voter registration lists of felons and the deceased. They keyed on full name, since that's the only common field in both databases. They also gave the aliases that the felons were known to have used. Apparently at least one county election official was on the list! As a result of the flaws in the state list, many counties continued to get their lists from the courts, illegally ignoring the official state list.

People were given an chance to re-register if they could show that they were not a convicted felon, but merely had the same name. From glennbeck.com, (conservative site, but the figures are in the ballpark, anyway):

Research revealed that 239 [of] the 4,678 African Americans on the Miami-Dade felons' were eventually cleared to vote which represented 5.1 percent of the total number of blacks on the felons list. Of the 1,264 whites on the list, 125 proved to be there by mistake-which is 9.9 percent of the total. The error rate for whites was almost double that for blacks.

Most of the people who were made to re-register did so without difficulty. There were a handful of people who didn't get themselves re-registered because they couldn't wade throught

Except that this article isn't a review of ROTK, it's a discussion about battle sequences in recent movies. The actual review by the author of this article (who happens to have won this year's Pulitzer for criticism) discusses the specific issues you raised.

• Jenni LaPlante, 18, said one of the suspected shooters was calm Tuesday morning at a beforeschool bowling class.
• Six hours before they opened fire [...] Senior Dustin Harrison said they showed up bright and cheerful for the 6:30 a.m. session, and he laughed and joked with both of them.
• Tuesday, Harris, Klebold and another friend missed their 6:30 a.m. bowling class at Englewood's AMF Belleview Lanes. "You always kind of noticed them," said 17-year-old John Hause

Dustin Harrison says both were there. Jenni LaPlante says one was calm, so we know she believed one to be there. (Nothing is said about the other.) John Hause says they missed the class, but he bases this on the fact that he didn't notice them, but he may have missed them if they "were calm" instead of behaving normally; i.e. if they weren't disrupting class with nazi salutes like they often did, he may not have noticed them. We can't say what the police think with any certainty, because we don't have accurate quotes. However, it looks like some of their class thought they were there, and there's a logical reason why the one person quoted as saying they were not may have been wrong. The only way to know for certain is to check the class attendance sheet, but more people are saying they were there than not. I'd say BFC is on solid ground.





Claim 2: Lockheed Martin's plant in Littleton doesn't make weapons. It makes space launch vehicles for TV satellites.

Truth: Moore was not standing in front of a weapon, but that plant does have a history of producing them

Details:
The martin plant in littleton was founded as a defense plant, and is where the titan family of missiles were built . The Titan II is "the largest Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) ever developed by the United States.". In 1998, the Littleton plant recieved $550,889,415 of airforce money for continued booster procurement and assembly; three ship sets of solid rocket motor upgrades, spares, and liquid rocket engine quartz skirts for the Ti

This guy is beyond pathetic.

There's a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece done by the L.A. Times on Michael Greene and his questionable dealings. The series of articles is available on the Pulitzer site.

Also, any of you living in Chicago may want to tune into to an excellent radio talk show called Sound Opinions. It's aired weekly on WXRT (93.1 FM), Tuesday nights from 10pm-midnight, hosted by rock critics from the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Anyway, they interviewed Michael Greene a few months back, and he hung up on them when they brought up the L.A. Times piece. Since last Tuesday was the first show after the Grammys, they spent the first 30 or so ripping on the Grammys. In particular, they talked about Michael Greene and replayed a clip of when Michael Greene hung up on him.

It doesn't look like the archives have been updated to include this week's show, but check back later.

Yes, that must be why The Oregonian won two Pulitzer Prizes this year, because they're so skewed.

(Links are here and here)

Yes, that must be why The Oregonian won two Pulitzer Prizes this year, because they're so skewed.

(Links are here and here)

After I read the story, I went looking for items on the Hancock Tower problems (I live in New England and have been around the tower many times). There is a piece on Useless News that tells the similar story of the Citibank Building near-disaster, and it has a link to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe story on the averted collapse of the Hancock.