O the Pain

I just returned from a sports bar where I, along with 30 to 40 other Stanford alums, watched in horror and disbelief as our team lost to Alabama. O God, why have you forsaken us?? Why couldn't we get another miracle buzzer beater? Now I have no reason to watch the tournament anymore, since both my bracket and my team went down in flames. Now I know what it feels like to be a Cubs fan. Every year I have so much hope only to have my heart stabbed and ripped out mercilessly in March. "You are such a dork," Maribel laughed when I clutched my chest and groaned and then hugged her. Tonight I have given up all hope on a national championship from Stanford men's basketball.

Another Credibility Issue

Here's an article from Time on the questionable impartiality of the 9/11 intelligence commission, whose members were handpicked by Bush:

But retired U.S. appellate court Judge Laurence Silberman, the panel co-chair, is a Nixon-era friend of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's and Vice President Dick Cheney's. Panel member Henry Rowen, a Hoover Institution scholar and former Rand Corp. president, worked under Cheney at the Pentagon during the first Gulf War. In September 1990, with Cheney's backing, Rowen cooked up Operation Scorpion, a secret plan to invade Iraq from the west, go all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam. (The plan went nowhere.) Another panel member, former CIA deputy director William Studeman, now with Northrop Grumman, contributed $250 to candidate Bush's campaign in 2000. His wife gave the Bush re-election committee $500 just a week before her husband was named to the panel last month.

"Infoganda"

That's a new word I learned from tonight's episode of The Daily Show, which reminded me of this article I read a couple of days back:

Federal investigators are scrutinizing television segments in which the Bush administration paid people to pose as journalists praising the benefits of the new Medicare law, which would be offered to help elderly Americans with the costs of their prescription medicines.

The videos are intended for use in local television news programs. Several include pictures of President Bush receiving a standing ovation from a crowd cheering as he signed the Medicare law on Dec. 8.

The materials were produced by the Department of Health and Human Services, which called them video news releases, but the source is not identified. Two videos end with the voice of a woman who says, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

This, combined with that 9/11 ad featuring fake fire fighters ("There's many reasons not to use real firemen," retorted one Bush media adviser. "Mainly, its cheaper and quicker."), really serves as an ominous omen for the lies and distortions to come in this campaign. It's time to put on our cynicism hats.