"I would like to express my deep condolences for the loss of the Senate," Bush said shortly after hearing of Wellstone's death Friday. [CBS News link here via CounterSpin.]

UPDATE: The offensive quotation above is no longer served up by the link. But that's where I got it when I posted. {sigh}

{ 5:15 PM }

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Rest in peace, Senator Wellstone and family.

{ 2:10 PM }

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Broadway lyricist Adolph Green has also died. Here's an overview of his accomplishments, and below is one of his most famous lyrics, co-authored with Betty Comden, from the musical Bells Are Ringing:

THE PARTY'S OVER

The Party's Over, it's time to call it a day.
They've burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away.

It's time to wind up the masquerade.
Just make your mind up, the piper must be paid.

The Party's Over. The candles flicker and dim.
You danced and dreamed through the night,
it seemed to be right just being with him.

Now you must wake up, all dreams must end.
Take off your make up, The Party's Over.
It's all over, my friend.

{ 2:09 PM }

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Speaking of illegal art... here's a particularly juvenile Flash example of lying (and thieving — through blatant copyright infringement) from the hopelessly artless Republican National Committee. Via Counterspin.

{ 10:22 AM }

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The Enron/Halliburton administration, Part 98. The Washington Post reports on a lawsuit filed against Dick Cheney and the company he headed before becoming acting president of the United States:

In its lawsuit, self-described government watchdog group Judicial Watch accused Halliburton of using a change in accounting practices to overstate revenue by $445 million from 1999 through 2001. Cheney was chairman and chief executive of the oil field and construction company from 1995 to mid-2000.

Hmm... Let's compare this with other manipulative white collar crimes:

Overstated revenue by Halliburton Republicans:
$445,000,000

Stock options exercised by Enron senior management in the 2 years before collapse:
$1,200,000,000

Value of Martha Stewart's ImClone insider trade:
$227,000
Look at the scale: If we index Democrat Martha's wrongdoing at a value of $1, then Republican Cheney/Halliburton's would be almost $2,000, and Republican Enron senior management's would be about $5,300.

But who's getting all the press?

{ 9:55 AM }

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Lies, damned lies, and Enron. Public Information Research publishes an informative Enron page.

{ 5:08 PM }

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Q: What is illegal art? A: Lots of juvenile parodies of other people's work and bastardization of corporate logos, accompanied by a lot of pretentious rationalizations and self-congratulatory comparisons to jazz musicians of the 1930s.

Some of this material may be valid and some of it is certainly troublesome or downright stupid. But here's a link to a show of "illegal art" that opens in a couple of weeks in New York and moves to Chicago in January. A few of their ideas about the evils of copyright seem a bit too expansive, but in an era of corporate domination of intellectual content (buttressed by recent changes in copyright law) their voices should be encouraged. Guardedly.

{ 5:02 PM }

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Reporters without Borders publishes the first press freedom index.

Another opportunity for patriotic pride: the US is just a couple places behind Slovenia and Costa Rica.

{ 8:46 AM }

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Neal Pollack takes the rap for bloggers. Convicted and incarcerated in France for "inciting racial hatred through pretentious writing," Neal Pollack becomes the fall guy for an entire generation of pompous blowhards, i.e., yours truly and bloggers everywhere.

Thanks, Neal. We appreciate your sacrifice.

{ 11:10 AM }

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Crime-fighting superhero, retiree Ed Lake. When our professional intelligence and investigative agencies become too mired in their silo and turf wars* to actually protect the "homeland," as appears to have already happened with the advent of Junior's administration, only dedicated amateurs will be able to do the heavy sifting necessary to refine the truth.

Ed Lake is one guy who's doing exactly that with his one-man anthrax investigation, and here's the story on him in Time. Via the invaluable Cursor.

*Cf. Barbara K. Bodine/John O'Neill, the FBI Arizona memos, etc.

{ 10:41 AM }

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Remember Cipro? That was last October. Wouldn't it make sense that the sniper, like the unidentified anthrax mailer of 2001, and, for that matter, like bin Laden, is just another disgruntled nobody without respect for human life, airing a poorly reasoned public gripe with the US government?

But the timing of these and other distractions, real and artificial, is disturbingly convenient for Junior's administration. The Rockaway air crash last year occurred at nearly the same moment as the release of the 2000 vote recount study.

And now the country prepares to vote again. The stakes are higher, with the possible Republican eclipse of all three branches of government. But who's thinking about that?

Meanwhile, the sniper, poster boy of CNN and the NRA, is doing what snipers do best — hiding in the trees and behind Bushes.

{ 9:01 AM }

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Why I stopped reading the Chicago Tribune. I didn't grow up in Chicago, so I don’t have the sentimental attachment to the newspaper that many lifelong residents do. I moved here in the 80s, and gave up on the paper in the 90s, thanks to better national distribution of The New York Times and a newfangled thingamabob called the Internet (thanks, Al Gore!).

Sunday I picked up a Tribune to see what, if anything, I was missing. Here are excerpts from the lead article in the Business section by a staff reporter (Robert Manor) on the local economy:

Random, representative phrases: bad news… downright dismal… not much comfort to investors and workers… loss of confidence in stock markets… difficult for companies to raise capital… crippled the airlines and other industries…

Motorola Inc. warned that sales for the coming year would be weak, sending its stock price to a 10-year-low.

Boeing Co. lost a $6 billion order for 120 planes to European rival Airbus. It's now in danger of of losing its status as the world's largest aircraft manufacturer.

Shares of Sears, Roebuck and Co. tumbled 32 percent after the retailer disclosed… [etc.]

What's so remarkable about this article? The editor's input — the headline. Chicago economy not all bad. Huh?

Oh, right, mentioning the obvious (the deteriorating US pawn shop economy) is bad for Republicans on November 5.

Elsewhere on the Editorial page you'll find the requisite endorsement for the Republican senatorial candidate, the name-soundalike Durkin who is the challenger to Democratic incumbent Durbin. This endorsement falls neatly into line with every other überparty endorsement they've made (Dole in 1996, etc.).

The neat juxtaposition of news with contradictory headlines that are designed to support their Republican endorsements is a Tribune calling card.

You would think that a city the size and importance of Chicago would have a newspaper of proportional importance, but it doesn't. The scrappy Chicago Sun-Times is often quite good but its physical production is awful. The Tribune has the money but not the will to produce a paper that doesn't suck. This is a paper that screams, "I exist only as a pretext to deliver these ads and Best Buy inserts to you."

Some other day I'll go into everything else that bugs me about the Tribune (which will remain unlinked): the low quality of the prose, the design, and the appalling arts coverage. In a word, yecch.

{ 3:58 PM }

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More irrelevant idiocy from the world of genetic engineering. For what has the world clamored since the dawn of time? Tearless onions. The linked article hails the amazing breakthrough as the advent of "a new era of onion science and horticulture." Does this represent the great promise that genetic engineering — an extreme technology by anyone's standards — is supposed to offer? Evidently, the art of prioritization does not come naturally to food scientists.

What is so offensive about ordinary foods that corporations and university labs want to ruin them? The exasperated reader, seeking a more pungent experience, will want to go here instead.

{ 11:56 AM }

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Media Whores Online is back from a well-deserved vacation, and with a prolific vengeance.

But there's more to MWO than the front page. As one of its many public services, MWO also publishes extensive Annals of Enron, a sea of information exposing the dozens of connections between Junior's administration, the Republican elite, and the disgraced thieving liars that Enron used to call senior management.

{ 10:03 AM }

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