Saturday, January 31, 2004

ABC12.com: The Dean Scream: The version of reality that we didn't see on TV: "It was the scream Howard Dean says became famous after the media played it nearly 700 times in a few days. Not only that, his camp adds, what we heard on the air was not a reflection of the way it sounded in the room. " After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again -- in fact played it to them -- I noticed that on that tape he's holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise. It isolates your voice, just like it does to Charlie Gibson and me when we have big crowds in the morning. The crowds are deafening to us standing there But the viewer at home hears only our voice. So, we collected some other tapes from Dean's speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage. We also asked the reporters who were there to help us replicate what they experienced in the room. Reena Singh, ABC News Dean campaign reporter: "What the cameras didn't capture was the crowd." Garance Franke-Ruta, Senior Editor, American Prospect: "As he spoke, the audience got louder and louder and I found it somewhat difficult to hear him." Dean's boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd. And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd. Neal Gabler, Senior Fellow, Lear Center USA: "When you're talking about visuals, context is everything. So, you've got a situation in which you have what I'd call the televised version of reality, which is not the same as the actual reality in room. You know in a situation like this, no one takes responsibility." How do the networks see it? Here are comments from network executives to ABC News: CBS News: "Individually we may feel okay about our network, but the cumulative effect for viewers with 24-hour cable coverage is -- it may have been overplayed and, in fact, a disservice to Dean and the viewers." -- Andrew Heyward, President - CBS News ABC News: "It's always a danger that we'll use good video too much." -- David Westin, President - ABC News http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/news/012904_NW_r2_group_deanscream.html

Missteps Pulled a Surging Dean Back to Earth: "… just as Dr. Dean headed onstage, his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, offered a snippet of rocker philosophy: 'Freedom's just another for word for nothing left to lose.' Actually, Dr. Dean still had plenty to lose that night, when his speech turned his highflying candidacy into late-night joke fodder. " Above is what passes for objective analysis, and until recently I'd have bought into it too. Then I saw a four minute story on ABC where they played a recording of the "I have a scream speech" made by people who were actually in the room. You couldn't even hear Dean, above the cheers of the crowd. He was yelling trying to be heard and failing miserably. Unfortunately, someone, gave him a noise cancelling microphone. Unfortunately it wasn't hokked up to the PA system so his crowd could hear him. Unfortunately, it was connected to the media, who, being there, had to know that the people in the room never heard a scream, but reported it as if they had. At the time of ABC's "correction" the phony (manipulated) scream had been aired well over 800 times. If you missed the truth on ABC, well, you missed it. The Dean Scream: The version of reality that we didn't see on TV http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/news/012904_NW_r2_group_deanscream.html The scream that may not have been http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/politics/campaign/01DEAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Today's Editorials: How to Hack an Election: "When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails." When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election. They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location. Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately 10 seconds." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/opinion/31SAT1.html

Thursday, January 29, 2004

We Are the Majority | Bernie Sanders | February 2004 Issue: "So how do the rightwingers get elected if they have nothing to say about the most important issues facing the American people? That is the central question of modern American politics. And the answer is that they work day and night to divide the American people against each other so that they end up voting against their own best interests. That is what the Republican Party is all about. They tell white workers their jobs are being lost not because corporate America is downsizing and moving to China, but because black workers are taking their jobs--because of affirmative action. White against black." If you turn on talk radio, what you will hear, in an almost compulsive way, is a hatred of women. And they're telling working class guys, you used to have some power. You used to be the breadwinner. But now there are women running companies, women in politics, women making more money than you. Men against women. And they're turning straight people against gay people. The homosexuals are taking over the schools! Gay marriage is destroying the country! Straights against gays. And if you're not for a war in Iraq waged on the dubious and illegal doctrine of "preemptive war," you're somehow unpatriotic. And those of us who were born in America are supposed to hate immigrants. And those of us who practice religion in one way, or believe in the separation of church and state, are supposed to be anti-religious, and trying to destroy Christianity in America--and we get divided up on that. And on and on it goes. The Republican leadership does all of this in an incredibly cynical, poll-driven way, because they know when you lay out their program about the most important economic issues facing America, it ends up that they are representing the interests of 2 percent of the population. You can't win an election with the support of 2 percent. So they divide us, and the result is that tens of millions of working people vote against their own interests. We know, that come election time, they will have huge sums of money that we will never come near to having. But we also know something else: that we are the vast majority of the people. We are the middle class and working families, and there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. http://www.progressive.org/feb04/sand0204.html

Protester=Criminal? | Matthew Rothschild | February 2004 Issue: "In many places across George Bush's America, you may be losing your ability to exercise your lawful First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Increasingly, some police departments, the FBI, and the Secret Service are engaging in the criminalization--or, at the very least, the marginalization--of dissent.…" This crackdown took a violent turn in late November at the Miami protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and at an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland last April. In both cases, the police used astonishing force to break up protests. But even when the police do not engage in violence, they sometimes blatantly interfere with the right to dissent by preemptively arresting people on specious grounds.… It's not every day that a sitting judge will allege he saw the police commit felonies. But that's what Judge Richard Margolius said on December 11 in regard to police misconduct in Miami during the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in late November. Judge Margolius was presiding over a case that the protesters brought against the city. In court, he said he saw the police commit at least twenty felonies, Amy Driscoll of the Miami Herald reported. "Pretty disgraceful what I saw with my own eyes," he said, according to the paper. "This was a real eye-opener. A disgrace for the community." Police used tasers, shock batons, rubber bullets, beanbags filled with chemicals, large sticks, and concussion grenades against lawful protesters. (Just prior to the FTAA protests, the city of Miami passed an ordinance requiring a permit for any gathering of more than six people for longer than twenty-nine minutes.) They took the offensive, wading into crowds and driving after the demonstrators. Police arrested more than 250 protesters. Almost all of them were simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Police also seized protest material and destroyed it, and they confiscated personal property, demonstrators say. "How many police officers have been charged by the state attorney so far for what happened out there during the FTAA?" the judge asked in court, according to the Herald. The prosecutor said none. "Pretty sad commentary, at least from what I saw," the judge retorted. Even for veterans of protests, the police actions in Miami were unlike any they had encountered before. "I've been to a number of the anti-globalization protests--Seattle, CancĂșn, D.C.--and this was different," says Norm Stockwell, operations coordinator for WORT, the community radio station in Madison, Wisconsin. "At previous events, the police force was defensive, with heavy armor hoping to hold back protests. In Miami, police were in light armor and were poised to go after the protesters, and that's what they did. They actually went into the crowds to divide the protesters, then chased them into different neighborhoods." Stockwell says some reporters were mistreated, especially if they were not "embedded" with the Miami police. "I got shot twice [with rubber projectiles], once in the back, another time in the leg," reported Jeremy Scahill of Democracy Now! "John Hamilton from the Workers Independent News Service was shot in the neck by a pepper-spray pellet." Ana Nogueira, Scahill's colleague from Democracy Now!, was videotaping some of the police mayhem when she was arrested, Scahill said. "In police custody, the authorities made Ana remove her clothes because they were pepper sprayed. The police forced her to strip naked in front of male officers." John Heckenlively, former head of the Racine County Democratic Party in Wisconsin, says he was cornered by the police late in the afternoon of November 20. Heckenlively and a few companions were trying to move away from the protest area when "a large cordon of police, filling the entire block edge to edge, was moving up the street," he says. "As they approached, an officer told us that we should leave the area. We informed him that was precisely what we were attempting to do, and seconds later, he placed us under arrest." Police kept Heckenlively in tight handcuffs behind his back for more than six hours, he says, adding that he was held for a total of sixty hours. Trade unionists were particularly outraged at the treatment they received in Miami. John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft on December 3 to urge the Justice Department to investigate "the massive and unwarranted repression of constitutional rights and civil liberties that took place in Miami." Sweeney wrote that on November 20, police interfered with the federation's demonstration "by denying access to buses, blocking access to the amphitheater where the rally was occurring, and deploying armored personnel carriers, water cannons, and scores of police in riot gear with clubs in front of the amphitheater entrance. Some union retirees had their buses turned away from Miami altogether by the police, and were sent back home." Blocking access to the rally was the least of it. After the march, "police advanced on groups of peaceful protesters without provocation," Sweeney wrote. "The police failed to provide those in the crowd with a safe route to disperse, and then deployed pepper spray and rubber bullets against protesters as they tried to leave the scene. Along with the other peaceful protesters, AFL-CIO staff, union peacekeepers, and retirees were trapped in the police advance. One retiree sitting on a chair was sprayed directly in the face with pepper spray. An AFL-CIO staff member was hit by a rubber bullet while trying to leave the scene. When the wife of a retired Steelworker verbally protested police tactics, she was thrown to the ground on her face and a gun was pointed to her head." http://www.progressive.org/feb04/roths0204.html

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Op-Chart: The Medicare Index: "Last month, President Bush signed into law Republican-sponsored legislation that adds a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and invests billions of dollars in an effort to lure the elderly away from the government program and into private health insurance plans. Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Bush said the new measure 'kept a basic commitment to our seniors.' By approving the legislation, the president may have fulfilled a commitment or two, but not to the nation's elderly. Here are some key details omitted from President Bush's speech …" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/28/opinion/28BROW.html

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Citing Free Speech, Judge Voids Part of Antiterror Act: "For the first time, a federal judge has struck down part of the sweeping antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, joining other courts that have challenged integral parts of the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism. In Los Angeles, the judge, Audrey B. Collins of Federal District Court, said in a decision made public on Monday that a provision in the law banning certain types of support for terrorist groups was so vague that it risked running afoul of the First Amendment.…" At issue was a provision in the act, passed by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that expanded previous antiterrorism law to prohibit anyone from providing "expert advice or assistance" to known terrorist groups. The measure was part of a broader set of prohibitions that the administration has relied heavily on in prosecuting people in Lackawanna, N.Y., Portland, Ore., Detroit and elsewhere accused of providing money, training, Internet services and other "material support" to terrorist groups. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/politics/27PATR.html

Monday, January 26, 2004

ZDNet AnchorDesk: Security breach on Capitol Hill: It's criminal: "Let's say you happen to gain access to confidential information, either on a Web site or another individual's system. Do you report it? Do you read the confidential information yet not act on any of it? Or do you read the information and immediately use it to your own personal advantage? It's question of ethics, really, one that speaks to the integrity of the individual involved and the security policy in place in a given environment. IF YOU ARE a certain Republican staff member for the politically divisive U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently you choose that last option. According to the Boston Globe and other news sources, GOP committee members gained access to computers used by their Democratic colleagues and, from the spring of 2002 well into 2003, both monitored communications and leaked info to the press. The material obtained through this breach has already been used by columnists and talk show hosts, who offered their audiences unprecedented insight into the inner workings of the Democratic party. " This is as wrong as a criminal hacker breaking into a corporation's Web site. If these allegations hold up under investigation, those responsible should be punished just as a criminal would. It could happen in the private sector as easily as in the public. Many corporate employees work on shared networks and systems that contain plenty of confidential materials, everything from corporate strategy to trade secrets. Can you imagine the financial losses and legal repercussions had this same thing happened between competing businesses? http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/AnchorDesk/4520-7297_16-5118530.html?tag=ns