Critics Blast Al Gore's Documentary As 'Realistic'

NEW YORK— The Al Gore-produced global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth is being panned by critics nationwide who claim the 90-plus minute environmental film is "too disturbingly realistic and well-researched to enjoy." "I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief in man-made climate change for the first half-hour—and utterly impossible after that—which makes for a movie-going experience that's far more educational than it is enjoyable," said New York Post film critic Skip Hack. "Gore's film overwhelms viewers with staggering amounts of scientific information until nothing about global warming is left to the imagination, and that's just not good entertainment. Two stars." Some critics have called the film's claims that sea levels could rise 20 feet somewhat sensationalistic, although most agree that this is not enough to save the film from being unwatchably factual.

A Massive, Coordinated Campaign to Subvert the Will of the People

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now up at Rolling Stone.

The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

[snip]

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell."(54)

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friday random ten

Photo by Ryan McManus

"Secretest Crush" - Casiotone for the Painfully Alone
"Smile Around the Face" - Four Tet
"Elephant Woman" - Blonde Redhead
"No More Bad Future" - Hangedup
"Black Tongue" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
"Blundertown" - The Birthday Party
"Love Songs On the Radio" - Mojave 3
"All I Know" - Screaming Trees
"Pluto" - Björk
"Modern Art" - Art Brut

Bonus video: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds- "Abbatoir Blues"

quote of the day

Well, first of all, I have no feelings, as everyone watching the Factor knows. I mean, just totally numb. I am a sociopath. Look --

Bill O'Reilly

thursday morning briefs

Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball

AP(inhead)'s Solomon Sucker Punches Reid

Mmmmm.....ice cream

wednesday morning reads

Molly Ivins - Reform the System or Lose the Democracy

Gary Hart - Rushing Towards a Constitutional Crisis

Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers (via pharyngula)

Kill Your TV

Bush 'planted fake news stories on American TV'

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies' products.

Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.

The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.

"We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them," said Diana Farsetta, one of the group's researchers. "I would say it's pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air."

while my guitar gently weeps

Stark evidence is emerging of deliberate reprisal killings of about two dozen civilians, including women and children, by a handful of U.S. Marines last November in what may prove to be the worst atrocity yet by U.S. forces in Iraq.

Juan Cole on the anti-American and anti-Karzai riots in Afghanistan and the updates the situation in Iraq.

DIRELAND reports on the first Moscow Gay Pride March.

More than a half-century after hostilities ended in Korea, a document from the war's chaotic early days has come to light - a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, informing the State Department that American soldiers would shoot refugees approaching their lines.

War Is A Racket - Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

Links to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps videos.