John Young, the owner of Cryptome, is notorious for many things, one of them being an encrypted neo-Joycean prose style. So it's something of a shock to have him prodcue a more Hemmingway-like account of ABC News's Visit to Cryptome.
And, here's ABC News's Report.
According to an impeachable news source, the UK's Guardian, in an otherwise unremarkable story about how scientists now think that T.Rex achieved its enormous size by an sudden four-ton teenage growth spurt, followed by the sort of short life we expect for binge eaters, one finds this remark:
The T rex in the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park famously snatched and devoured a lawyer cowering in a lavatory. Palaeontologists have since heartlessly adopted the lawyer as a standard unit of dinosaur diet.
Please say it ain't so.
Phil T. Rich, chief spokesman of Billionaires for Bush, has outlined an opulent set of plans for the coming weeks. Full details (from his email) below.
First Draft collates lies told by GW & Laura Bush on one single TV program. There was a time when our newspapers would have treated this as at least an interesting matter, and possibly a serious one. That was the past. I don't expect to read about this in the papers tommorow, do you?
Update: Actually, I should mention that there is one news source that caught at least one of these things earlier today — see this column by one Dan Froomkin, noting that the same Bush now touting the 9/11 commission had previously opposed it. But even if family counts, and even if he works for washingtonpost.com, that's still not print journalism.
I think the lastest MoveOn ad featuring former US Marine Lee Buttrill is superb in terms of content and effectiveness. But I'm somewhat concerned about the way the ad skirts the campaign finance laws. As I understand it — and I'm in no way an expert — the ads can't endorse a candidate, although they can talk about them.
If that's the rule, this ad comes very close to the line. Rather than say “Vote for Kerry” the ad no doubt accurately indentifies the speaker as “Voting for Kerry”.
If the statement is accurate, it's just descriptive. So perhaps technically it's not an endorsement and thus within the letter of the law, maybe brilliantly so. But it can't be consistent with the spirit of the campaign finance rules.
PS. There are a lot of good runner-ups on the MoveOn page, although I'm especially partial to Kenneth Berg
The Daily Howler is almost always at least good. Today, though, the Daily Howler is great: Brit admits that Bush is 'stretching.' But at the great Times, he's just “shrewd”.
Bob Somerby's discussion of Kerry's comments about his Vietnam service, and about Kerry's views on Iraq are so much more straightforward than most of what one sees elsewhere that one wonders what part of the Unthinking Depths inhibit many parts of the major media.
Yet, what Bob Somerby does isn't really rocket science. It's called “basic research”, and “reading”, and “spotting the obvious”. So here's the mystery: why is this sort of relatively simple exposition so rare? And why when it happens is the rest of the world so resistant to it?
Jotwell Blenderlaw