Interesting:

One of France's leading TV news executives has admitted censoring his coverage of the riots in the country for fear of encouraging support for far-right politicians.

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service TCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been "excessive" and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.

Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

"Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television," Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

"Having satellites trained on towns across France 24 hours a day showing the violence would have been wrong and totally disproportionate ... Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you're broadcasting," he said.

Mr Dassier denied he was guilty of "complicity" with the French authorities, which this week invoked an extraordinary state-of-emergency law passed during the country's war with Algeria 50 years ago.

But he admitted his decision was partly motivated by a desire to avoid encouraging the resurgence of extreme rightwing views in France.

French broadcasters have faced criticism for their lack of coverage of the country's worst civil unrest in decades. Public television station France 3 has stopped broadcasting the numbers of torched cars while other TV stations are considering following suit.

"Do we send teams of journalists because cars are burning, or are the cars burning because we sent teams of journalists?" asked Patrick Lecocq, editor-in-chief of France 2.

Gee, that never seemed to give you pause when you were covering bombings in Iraq. And of course that coverage gets watched in French-speaking North Africa, and picked up by Al Jazeera.

I don't know if it's right or wrong to lay off of stuff like this when it may be encouraging more of it. On one hand, it's censorship. On the other hand, major media shouldn't allow itself to be hijacked by terrorists or rioters into becoming a propaganda tool.

I do know, however, that when it comes to terrorism in Iraq, I've never heard a French media type expressing worry that excessive coverage was encouraging more terrorism. Perhaps that wasn't a worry so much as an intention.

Posted by: Ace at 10:11 AM | Comments (10)
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If all of your news anchors look like Melissa Theuriau, no one will notice what she is saying, or mind that she is French.

I suddenly have a strong desire to get my own satellite dish.

(h/t to The Derb @ National Review Online)

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 07:00 PM | Comments (155)
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It's Degenerate! No Wait, It's Fair Game!

"It seems to me that using explicitly religious criteria--rather than jurisprudential philosophy--for judicial nominations is yet another sign of how degenerate Bush's brand of conservatism is."--Andrew Sullivan on Harriet Miers, Oct. 28

"The upshot of [Pope] Benedict's church will be indeed to dictate to Catholic public officials, including judges, what they can and cannot do and still be allowed to receive communion. Under those circumstances, a judge's religion would indeed be fair game for Senate hearings, it seems to me."--Andrew Sullivan on Sam Alito, Nov. 7

"Under these circumstances" is the fudge. Religiosity can, in Sullivan's world, be held against someone, but it's "degenerate" to hold it in favor of someone.

From Taranto.

Posted by: Ace at 12:32 PM | Comments (28)
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Everyone seems to be in favor of ending the terrible practice of political gerrymandering, except for actual voters, who soundly defeated initiatives to end the technique in Ohio and California. So, let me defy the pundit class and argue in favor of the voters:

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (24)
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When Carl Levin asked the DIA to declassify a report stating that an Al Qaeda source was likely a "fabricator," the DIA took eight days to grant his request.

Steven Hayes wants to know why it's taken years of constant requests for declassifcation to get important documents into the public view which support the administration's case for war... and as of yet, more stonewalling.

There is a permanent government in Washington of bureaucrats, liberal in their politics but conservative in the sense that they want desperately to protect the status quo -- their way of doing things, their preferred policies -- from "meddling" by outsiders like the duly elected President of the United States.

This would seem, at first blush, to be another example of that. The low-level staffers in charge of classifying and declassifying documents seem to move with lightning-quick alacrity when very liberal, very anti-war, very Democratic-partisan Carl Levin makes a request, but stonewall and double-talk when it comes to documents that may tend to support an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection.

Rumsfeld, Porter Goss, and Robert Mueller should look into this and make it clear to their underlings that "helping the Democrats" is not a criterion in favor of declassification, nor is "this helps Bush" a criterion in favor of keeping documents secret from the public.

Posted by: Ace at 08:40 AM | Comments (23)
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Here's the comically predictable part: the Democrats want this investigation, into a a specific leak in 2005, to also include the "twisting of intelligence" in 2002 and the "outing" of husband-outed soccer mom Valerie Plame in 2003.

Democrats, meanwhile, said that if Republicans wanted to pursue an inquiry, it should go beyond any leak related to secret detention facilities and cover a range of other issues that Democrats say are ripe for investigation.

"That includes the possible manipulation of prewar intelligence on Iraq, and the disclosure for political purposes of classified information involving the identity of the C.I.A. officer," said the House minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California.

Oh, and remember that New York Times piece, which revealed the CIA's secret air fleet? Apparently that information might have been used in conjunction with the WaPo leak to ID the countries helping us imprison terrorists:

The Post, citing a "request of senior U.S. officials," did not identify the Eastern European countries. But the mention of Eastern Europe stirred anxiety at the intelligence agency, particularly after Human Rights Watch, a group that has opposed American detention policies, issued a statement on Monday saying its research had tracked C.I.A. aircraft in 2003 and 2004 making flights from Afghanistan to remote airfields in Poland and Romania. The group said aircraft used in the flights had been previously flown by the C.I.A. for prisoner transport.

Investigate that leak too. Put the journalists under oath and force them to reveal their criminal sources.

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (23)
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So says this article, and for once, they speak the truth.

Now why would that be? Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post may have reasons for this thinly-veiled gloating:

"Katrina's devastation points the finger at Bush's system . . . Issues forgotten for years are back to the fore: poverty, the state's absence, latent racism."

-- Le Monde, Sept. 8, 2005

The quotation above appeared in a front-page article in France's newspaper of record. Just below was a cartoon showing the American president watching TV footage of black corpses floating in the water. "But, what country is this?" the caption had him saying to his generals: "Is it far away? We absolutely have to do something!"

...

But the insoluble violence in urban France should inspire more than just schadenfreude in this country. Although there isn't yet evidence that this bout of rioting is Islamist in origin, it's pretty clear that large, unintegrated, ungovernable and unemployed Islamic communities in Western Europe will continue to incubate radical Islam. Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker of Sept. 11, is a Frenchman of Moroccan dissent. The Madrid bombings and the London bombings were also proof that the war on terrorism was never as much about rogue nations in the Middle East as it was about the domestic polices of our closest allies.

It is in our own interest, then, to be magnanimous and to come up with ways to assist the French. We could, for example, help them to shatter the myth that they live in an enlightened society, insulated from racial tension, by mass-mailing them copies of Le Monde with the word "America" crossed out in all editorials and the word "France" substituted instead.

It's immoral to take nasty pleasure in frightening riots in France, but somehow, the fundamental arrogant assholishness of the French extirpates the sin.

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 AM | Comments (33)
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Bad news for Bush? Well, not really:

Now, it's true that George W. Bush won Virginia by 8 percentage points in 2004, while Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore appears to have lost by 5 points. But if you think Kilgore's loss reflects Bush's weakness and a nightmare for the GOP in 2006, consider this:

Bush won Virginia by eight points in 2000, too — and the following year Democrat Mark Warner became governor with a 5-point margin of victory. The next year, in 2002, Republicans won a stunning midterm victory, taking four Senate seats and expanding their majority in the House of Representatives.

Summing up: In New York City, New Jersey, California, Ohio, and Virginia, voters cast their ballots for as-is governance. No big offices changed party ownership, no initiatives passed. (Except for several banning gay marriage.)

And a Republican picked up Democratic House seat in a special election.

Posted by: Ace at 08:18 AM | Comments (17)
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Apparently it is $102.50.

Anyone else want to confess to felonious Fashion Mistakes?

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 07:23 PM | Comments (25)
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Can someone please explain this to me?

Seriously. What the fuck.

Ace: Added an NSFW. Kinda borderline, as it's a Yahoo pic, but still.

Posted by: LauraW. at 07:19 PM | Comments (41)
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