All day CNN has justifiably, but uncharacteristically, been going completely apeshit over this story :

The Bush administration gave control of six crucial ports to a Sept. 11-linked Arab nation after a flimsy investigation and with weak guarantees the company in charge can stop Osama bin Laden from infiltrating, the House homeland security chairman said.
. . .
The firm, Dubai Ports World, owned by the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, cut a $6.8 billion deal last week to buy control of the ports - including Manhattan’s cruise ship terminal and Newark, N.J.’s, giant container port - from a British firm.

A source with knowledge of the purchase echoed the chairman, telling The News that while Department of Homeland Security administrators rubber-stamped it, senior analysts at the agency were never told, and they don’t like it now. News of the sale, approved by a secretive multi-agency panel headed by the Treasury Department, has sparked a growing outcry from both political parties.

Yes, this is a big, big deal, but with the way they’re on the warpath, you’d think this was the first questionable business deal by the Bush Administration. What’s wrong CNN? Have the endless examples of war profiteering not been as interesting as, say, a bad land deal in Arkansas?

From the beginning, this particular aspect of Cheney’s cover-story seemed implausible :

Now some guys with a video camera and a shotgun have busted that myth :



While the details of the shot’s spread are a little hard to see in the video, the pellet penetration pretty much debunks the Vice President’s affadvit to the Kenedy County Sheriff’s Department. Are the media, law enforcement, and Congress paying attention?

UPDATE : On further reflection, the video above is pretty retarded. The boasts about “scientific proof” are over-the-top, the details of the tests are dubious, and the guy performing the test is one of those loons who, among other things, loses sleep over Bush’s membership in the “Skull & Bones”. I still think Cheney’s story reeks, but I should be more careful about giving credibility to some random dude who’s shooting watermelons with a shotgun. I’ve been watching way too many episodes of Mythbusters, I guess.

It’s nice to see that Harry Whittington knows who the real victims are here (via DKos)

Whittington was hit in the face, neck and chest with birdshot Saturday during the hunting trip. After a shotgun pellet traveled to his heart, he had suffered a mild heart attack Tuesday while being treated at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial.
. . .
Whittington, his voice raspy but strong, said the past weekend encompassed ”a cloud of misfortune and sadness.”

”My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with,” he said.

Apologizing to the man who almost killed you? Sounds like somebody’s been taking advice from Harry Reid.

This is much, much worse than I could have imagined (via TPM) :

The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday.

With spending on public relations and other media included, federal agencies spent $1.6 billion on what some Democrats called “spin.”

The six largest recipients of ad and PR dollars were Leo Burnett USA, $536 million; Campbell-Ewald, $194 million; GSD&M, $179 million; JWT, $148 million; Frankel, $133 million; and Ketchum, $78 million. The agencies received more than $1.2 billion in media contracts, according to the report.

Let’s start a list of all of the things that cost less than the $1.2 billion that the Bush Administration paid for propaganda. I’ll start… body armor for our troops. What else?

Mr. Furious brings up a deplorable detail about Cheney’s hunting trip :

Monday’s hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney’s 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.

As Furious put it, “That’s not hunting–that’s skeet shooting with living targets.” Just the sort of thing you’d expect from people who have been playing chess with human lives for the last few years.

Of course, if you wanna look at the bright side, this makes the original story even funnier. Not only is our vice-pampered rich boy too effete to do some real hunting, but he can’t even play his carefully-orchestrated, killing-for-fun game right. Seriously, how lame do you have to be to go on a hunting trip where you’re guaranteed dozens of kills and you still shoot a guy?

Also, who wants to bet that the last words the guy heard before getting shot were “Your check bounced, asshole”?

Here’s the quote that I saw on the local news that alerted me to the fact that Dick Cheney shot a guy :

“The vice president didn’t see him,” Armstrong told the AP. “The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good … It broke the skin. It knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn’t get in his eyes or anything like that.”

Seems like NRA talking points about firearm safety got peppered pretty good.

Arrested Development, the best show on TV, is going out with a wimper tonight with a 2-hour finale opposite the Olympic opening ceremonies. Here’s a small photo gallery of things I’m going to miss :

All of these images are from the excellent fansite Balboa Observer-Picayune.

After the President’s conveniently-timed revelation about a foiled attack on Los Angeles, I contacted a few friends in the intelligence community and was able to get my hands on this IM conversation between Al Qaeda’s number two guy and Bin Laden’s second-in-command (on that org chart, everyone’s a VP).

OsamaMama : u there?
72Virgins : yeah, sup?
OsamaMama : martyr 4 life, bitch!
72Virgins : lol
72Virgins :
OsamaMama : turn on fox
72Virgins : k
OsamaMama : shes hot
72Virgins : who? the angry blonde?
OsamaMama : yup
72Virgins : dude, she looks like barney fife with a wig
OsamaMama : whatever. anns my gril
OsamaMama : girl
OsamaMama : i cant tpe today
OsamaMama : type today
OsamaMama : ARRGGGGGHHHH!!!!
72Virgins : nice.
OsamaMama : where you wanna hit the infidels?
72Virgins : i dunno. sears tower
OsamaMama : las vegas
72Virgins : space needle
OsamaMama : disenyland
72Virgins : disneyworld
OsamaMama : i just said that
72Virgins : no, you said land, I said world
OsamaMama : aren’t they the same?
72Virgins : no, dumbass
72Virgins : the white house
OsamaMama : the washington monument
72Virgins : brb
72Virgins : im back
72Virgins : the tallest building in texas
OsamaMama : the tallest building in los angeles
72Virgins : i got skills
OsamaMama : what?
72Virgins : nunchuck skills
72Virgins : bowhunting skills
OsamaMama : it’s a liger
72Virgins : flippin sweet

Seriously though, it’s hard to know what to think about all of these vague threats when the President is so blatant about politicizing them and mum on the details. Where these guys stopped at the airport or was this “plan” just something jotted down on a bar napkin? If revealing the existence of a spying program undermines our ability to fight terrorism, what are we to make of the President’s self-congratulations being on the cover of every newspaper? If it was so important to keep this incident a secret then, what were the changes that made it perfectly acceptable to blab about it now?

Ahem. Take a look at the commercial for the Anime Network below and tell me if you see something that looks familiar [UPDATE : Yes, I know the video isn’t showing up. YouTube seems to have disappeared for the moment.]:

Here’s a couple of screenshots from our non-profit political cartoon “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?” :



I should probably point out that the Anime Network’s commercial is at odds with the Creative Commons license under which we released the short :



The point here isn’t to lock down the rights to the short completely, but to ensure that our hard work is shown in the context in which we created it. Specifically, we didn’t want Brother’s message to get lost in the shuffle. That’s why we’ve granted every request to repackage, exhibit, and present the short in full. It’s been shown on television, film and animation festivals, video podcasts, DVD’s, and worldwide screenings. And because our goal has always been to juxtapose a depression-era setting with the Bush Administration’s elitist economic policies, we’ve never asked for a penny in return. So it’s doubly insulting to not only have our work chopped up and reappropriated without permission or attribution, but that it’s being done by some mega corporation that could easily afford to make a charitable contribution in exchange for the rights to re-use the footage.

I know I’m being petty here, but let me also say how much I’m annoyed that our work is being sqeezed into their strained “cartoons vs. anime” comparison as an example of animation that sucks. If you want to sell your infantile “robots, babes, and ninjas” crap to the masses, that’s fine, but there’s no reason to insult your fellow animators in the process. Since you drew a line in the sand, however, I gotta wonder where the works of animation geniuses like Isao Takahata, Osamu Tezuka, and Hayao Miyazaki would fit. They seem more like “cartoons” to me.

Y’know that post I did yesterday that included Andrew Sullivan’s infamous “fifth column” quote? Well, reader James forwarded the link to Andy, who had this to say :

u deny that there are some on the far left who would prefer osama to bush?
i’ve seen a couple of articles lately confessing exactly that.
andrew

Sullivan’s ridiculous strawman and lack of capitalization would be funny if he weren’t actually serious. Who are these traitors on the “far left”? Are they a well-organized group actively working to undermine the U.S. government or are they a couple of obscure, pissed-off bloggers who are venting a little steam? I’ve seen some pretty despicable things written by angry liberals and conservatives, but there’s a big difference between ranting against your government and collaborating with the enemy. Let’s go back to Sullivan’s original quote :

“The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.”

The irresponsible thing about his statement isn’t that he’s warning about fifth column movements, but that he’s implying that pretty much everyone who disagrees with the President is a traitor. You’re painting with pretty broad brush-strokes there, Andy. By citing “the great red zone that voted for Bush” in your first sentence, you’re essentially setting up a false dichotomy that implicates everyone else in this undefined “decadent Left”. If you weren’t trying to draw a parallel, then the quote you’re defending is poorly written and should be explained beyond hiding behind your intentionally vague wording.

But if you really do think the majority of us blue-state, coastal lefties “may” constitute a “fifth column”, then would it be equally valid to make a statement like this?

“In the densely-populated urban areas which are likely targets for future attacks - and heavily favored Democrats in the last election - are serious about capturing Osama Bin Laden. The religious extremists in the south and Midwest have other plans - for they might be more interested in firebombing abortion clinics.”

Would it be okay to contrast John Kerry voters and white supremacists? Or divide the country into secular humanists and hate-filled bastards like Rev. Fred Phelps? Singling out extremists to score points against your political opposition isn’t just unfair, it’s lazy reporting.

Besides that, the whole point of my post wasn’t to bash Andy for a stupid-ass comment he made four and a half years ago, but to spur a discussion (in a roundabout way) about what constitutes a “fifth column” movement, who gets to make those decisions, and what actions should be taken against them. Andy’s gone on record as saying that the “far left” (a relative term if ever these was one) should be under suspicion, Sen. Graham believes it’s acceptable to spy on those of us suspected of being in the “fifth column” without a warrant, and the President rode to victory by repeatedly suggesting that John Kerry and his allies “embolden our enemies” , so where do you draw the line between legitimate dissent and “fifth column” activity?