Mark Casey Online

The troop surge in Iraq, which was “working” in terms of making our presence even more necessary, was also working because it happened concurrently with several diplomatic initiatives. These initiatives included both striking a tenuous truce with influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and simultaneously bribing leaders of the violent Sunni insurgent groups.

Hey, I’m all for that sort of thing. If it works, it works. But, it’s starting not to work.

Fighting is breaking out again, and even with recent and surprising pleas from al-Sadr to keep any protests “peaceful,” it’s starting to seem like even he has lost control of his sector of the insurgency. There’s no telling whether it will have died back down or not a month from now, but today it’s looking like “fragile” has turned into “broken.”

Meanwhile, after news broke that our military accidentally shipped nuclear rocket materials to Taiwan last year, defense secretary Gates has ordered that all U.S. nukes be inventoried and located by serial number. Hey, that sounds like a good idea. If Barnes and Noble can do it, why not the nuclear weapons division of our armed forces?

If you like it when economists grandstand about the economy as if they were actually controlling it, then I have the perfect story for you.

Lakshman Achuthan just came down from the mountain with a simple message: this recession is worse than it should have been because The FED and Congress acted too slowly to lower interest rates and provide the stimulus package.

That wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the Bush Administration still denies to this day that a recession could happen, would it? No, they would never put America in harms way just to avoid admitting that something bad might have happened on their watch.

Remember, their top people graduated from Bob Jones University. They’re experts.

I’ve said since 2004 that the reason we’re invading Iraq is because the people in charge had no idea how things worked in the middle east. I’ve said that our poor understanding of the politics and culture of Middle Eastern nations is why we’re having such a hard time “winning the hearts and minds” in Iraq. And I’ve said that I’m all for sending in Green Berets and Navy Seals and whoever you want to send into any nation you want to carry out small, covert missions against terrorist cells. I’m all for that, yes I am.

But invasion is wrong. It’s destructive, it’s inefficient, and it kills almost nothing but civilians — we saw that in Iraq. These countries, of all the places in the world, need their infrastructure. They need their power grids. They need their water supply. For God’s sake, this isn’t Nazi Germany we’re dealing with — this is a nation of oppressed people whose lives we make nothing but worse by invading their countries. And so all it accomplished was to initiate a huge, visible, agit-prop marketing campaign against our own country.

That’s why I support the Democrats in this election. Very simple. We need someone who is willing to learn and understand the culture of the region. Someone whose policies will be informed by the actual situation on the ground — not the situation as we’d like to be.

But I was conflicted, because John McCain is a pretty smart cookie when it comes to foreign policy. Or so I thought. Until today, when he was discussing his imminent plans to invade Iran, and said that Iran was supplying and training Al-Qaeda. Yes, that’s Iranian Shiites that he claims are aiding Sunni’s in Al-Qaeda. It’s not true, it’s impossible, and most importantly — it’s the same faulty argument we heard for invading Iraq. So Joe Lieberman whispered in his ear, and he corrected himself “Oh, I mean extremists, not Al-Qaeda.” Right.

I’m willing to forgive a slip of the tongue. I hate the “gotcha!” game. But he’s basically talking about invading Iran, and it seems to me like the act of invasion is primary, and the reasons why and how are secondary. We can’t afford that again.

I don’t know who CNN thinks they are. Maybe they read my post yesterday about how wrong it was for them to parade around uncredited content and pictures from Ashley Alexandra Dupri’s MySpace page, but for whatever reason, their lead story this morning is nothing but more “quotes” and content lifted directly from Dupri’s MySpace and Facebook accounts. (For the record, Dupri is the high-priced escort at the center of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution scandal.)

With a sickeningly obvious tone of glee, CNN’s Mallory Simon wrote an “article” which is, literally, a detailed play-by-play of the events on Dupri’s MySpace and Facebook. She reports on Dupri’s Facebook ’status updates,’ and tries to infer what was going on in Durpi’s head when she wrote them, for example:

“Early Thursday morning, it appears Dupre realized she needed to make some changes to alter what the public would be able to know about her.”

It’s just a list of things like that. “Early Thursday morning,” “At 3:00pm,” and finally: “By 2:30pm, her MySpace and Facebook pages were gone.”

Yes, that’s right. Dupri was chased off the internet by CNN’s newfound tabloid journalism. And Mallory Simon just sat there and watched her updates roll by, taking notes and sketching out ways to somehow make Dupri’s friend requests a legitimate story.

CNN does go out of its way to quote one actual person, though. It’s a Law Professor (oh, god) from American University (Jesus Christ). And he’s happy to inform CNN and you, the reader, that Dupri has no right to privacy and deserves no respect from the media. After all, she opened up a MySpace account — why would she ever expect that information not to be exploited for free by mainstream media outlets?

That same law professor has some snarky comments about Dupri’s interest in singing, and her frustration that people were flooding her with hate mail:

“Unfortunately, you can’t say, ‘Oh well, I didn’t want that kind of publicity, I only wanted positive publicity,’”

I wonder what kind of publicity Mr. Professor wants.

Simon even goes so far as to detail how much she loves to investigate her subjects on the internet:

“Facebook and MySpace have become one of the go-to background tools for journalists in the past couple of years, allowing members of the press to put a face to the subject of their story and find out more about them.”

Look, I’m all for open source media — I think we should all visit social networks and interact with one another. And I’m well aware that CNN is within its rights to exploit this sort of information. It’s hypocrisy I’m against. It’s the fact that CNN would probably send me a cease and desist letter if they saw their logo on my blog. And exploitation, no matter what the purpose, is unethical. CNN can be my guest to write any number of stories that cite MySpace and Facebook pages — as long as they’re part of actual stories.

These last two were not actual stories. They were barely Tabloid stories. I hope CNN gives some of their ad revenue from this week to that poor girl, who had to close up her social media accounts because of all the hate mail CNN’s white, middle-aged demographic started to send her.

The mainstream media is giving us a schooling today on how to completely exploit a young woman — and the free content she’s created on her MySpace page — for fun and profit.

The 22-year old high-priced escort at the center of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal wants to be called Ashley Alexandra Dupre. That’s her pop star name. Her escort name was Kristen, who was described in court papers as a “Petite, very pretty brunette.”

Immediately after her “real” name was released by the courts, mainstream media mainstays like the New York Times, CNN, and of course FoxNews — who so often laugh off sites like MySpace as ‘illegitimate media,’ — were using her MySpace page to earn themselves millions. The Times was first on the case, publishing three photos of her culled free of charge from her MySpace page. CNN did them one better, quoting from her blog posts as if they had actually interviewed her.

CNN’s headline read:

“Spitzer’s Escort: ‘I love who I am’”

Then their whole front page article ripped quotes out of her blogs, and used her “About Me” section to psychoanalyze the young girl. They doctored a quote from her that originally read “It all started when I moved in with a musician during my Odyssey to New York.”

CNN thought it would be better if they said she was on “an ‘Odyssey’ of degrading abuse and high aspirations.” They are, of course, talking about her admitted “drug abuse” and the fact that she left home when she was 17. But things seem to be going very well for her — she makes a very good living doing something that she seems to enjoy, and she has time to work on her ultimate goal of being a singer.

And for what it’s worth, her songs aren’t that bad. They’re the standard kind of pop/hip-hop songs you hear all over the radio, but her voice is decent.

All the articles contain at least a trace of tut-tutting about this poor girl’s “degradation” and exploitative lifestyle. But none of them seem to conceptualize their own exploitation of the MySpace service and the personal nature that users see their content as being. It’s certainly public information — and, according to contract, “owned” by MySpace.com — but that doesn’t change how creepy it is that the media would raid her page for some tabloid-style gossip.

I’m sure her page is flooded now that CNN has “interviewed” it and left it for dead. She’s getting all kinds of comments, mostly positive, such as “All this pressure is going to turn you into a diamond.” Who says she isn’t already?

Support her via MySpace here: http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta

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At a wedding reception two years ago, I met a woman who worked in environmental science.  In particular, she was doing research into steroid use and it’s effects on amphibian populations.  You see, she said, what was happening is people who used drugs regularly would pass a large portion of the drugs through their system, and after sewer treatment it would end up in lakes and streams where it would turn the frogs and fishies all hermaphroditic and worse.

I certainly thought that was interesting, and previously didn’t know that such a thing was possible.  Now, this fact is national headlines with the release of a new AP report this week.  And it’s not just steroids.  In Indianapolis, our water is apparently caffeinated.  In Southern California, they have numerous behavioral drugs in their water (big surprise, there).  In Philadelphia, which is by my count the most contaminated city in the country, there are over 56 different drugs and chemicals in their tap water that originated with people taking pharmaceuticals.

And now today, the AP is reporting about that nice lady at the wedding’s research — along with other people’s.  The fish are swapping sexes.  The frogs are growing extra legs.  And to think, we were all just worried about some silly Mercury.

It’s a sad fact, and whatever you blame it on — the slumping national economy, manufacturing layoffs due to globalization, etc — one thing is certain: it needs to change.

Indiana’s situation is not unlike the overall national picture, but one thing which is unique to us is our state government’s severe aversion to SCHIP, the government-sponsored initiative to relieve impoverished children who have no health insurance.

The program could be, and should be, improved and expanded. It’s being debated at the state and national levels, but one thing which is unique to Indiana is the fact that we have a neo-conservative Governor in Mitch Daniels, and a classically conservative state government. That means it’s unlikely that anything will be done to help Indiana’s impoverished children until at least 2009.

After Obama’s impressive Super Tuesday showing, he raised a record amount for February — $55 million. That’s almost double what Hillary raised, and roughly half the donations came from people that identified themselves as first-time donors.

That’s the good news for the Obama camp. The bad news? They spent a whole lot of that to whittle down Hillary’s leads in Ohio and Texas, but still came up a little short.

So the important questions are now: 1.) Will Obama get as much financial support this month as he did in February, now that Hillary showed she’s still a viable candidate? And, 2.) Will the upcoming Pennsylvania battle, which leans toward Hillary like Ohio and Texas, force the Obama camp into panic mode, much the same way Hillary’s campaign acted early this month?

He was a Danish journalist, just hanging out near President Bush’s Texas ranch for a story. He decided to take a stroll, and didn’t know that he had inadvertently wandered into Bush’s neighbor’s front yard. But he realized it pretty quickly, because a woman came barging out of her house with a pistol in her hand, screaming at him to get off her property.

I guess it’s nice to know that when Bush retires, he’ll be well taken care of and with “his own people.” That is if he even keeps “the ranch,” which he bought to market himself to people for the 2000 election — a fact which has been widely lampooned.

Anyway, it’s pretty funny. Especially when you consider that lovely law in Texas which allows homeowners to legally shoot people who are trespassing on their property.

Gulp.