In My Not So Humble Opinion - The Blog

Have you listened to Forum today? Michael Krasney did an entire show on writer's block. Have a look at what was said

Blissful Times

Opinion/event log


Thursday, April 15, 2004

Where were you and what were your thoughts at the time of the Pearl harbor investigations after World War II? Remember Admiral Kimmel and General Short; the communications "mix up"; wondrous FDR and his bumbling State department?
Empathy for ALL of us. The intense scrutiny and media blitz of the past week reporting the 9/11 Commision and the President Bush press conference have been overwhelming and sobering. The answer to the question "What did he know and when did he know it," has been revealed, but not acknowledged by our President. Similar questions were posed in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor----remember?
The appalling inadequacies of our intelligence services are now apparent. Near the zenith of the dot.com boom, fueled by intelligence technology, our FBI and CIA were not able to uncover the 9/11 plot in timely fashion; when they finally had relevant information, they were not able effectively to connect the dots or communicate with each other; or more importantly, promptly and effectively to the President. This is a tragic, sobering, infuriating, and ironic disclosure. If the major role of the federal government is first and foremost to protect its citizenry and borders from harm, 9/11 represent the classic blunder. WRONG STUFF---failed execution!!
And when finally there was information in the first nine months of the Bush presidency, especially in April and May, 2001, according the George Tenet, CIA Director, "the system was blinking red." He reported that in addition the the now infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Bulletin, Bush, Cheney and the top Security Team were made aware of the stream of alarming reports on Al Qaeda intentions.
In his press conference on April l3, President Bush again indicated that he was blameless---but the evidence indicates that he and his staff had been informed of the clear terrorist danger---and unforgivably were inattentive and inactive during the critical period when the 9/11 catastrophe might have been thwarted.
Perhaps , in retrospect, we can see our mistakes from Pearl Harbor to 9/11----but when will we learn from them?
Mort
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/SH.html
(Pearl Harbor)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086197/
(The Right Stuff)
// posted by Morton @ 7:25 PM


Tuesday, April 13, 2004
This is my new blog site---created on April 13, '04
Blissful
// posted by Morton @ 9:39 AM



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04/01/2004 - 04/30/2004

We're praying.

Wow! Do you suppose that Powell was really lying in what he said yesterday?

John Ashcroft may be a finger pointer, but Colin Powell seems to take the prize for moral cowardice. If Bob Woodward's new book is accurate (and Powell was presumably a major source for it) then the Secretary of State's willingness to play along with a war decision he opposed is stunning. If he was as frozen out of decisionmaking as he now claims to be, what possible justification did he have for staying on in the Administration? Had he resigned, or at very least refused to make that Weapons of Mass Destruction speech to the UN, he might have kept his country out of war. For Evan Thomas's summary of the Woodward book click here Watch this space for polling links.

Congratulations to those of you who are posting. I'll do a couple over the weekend to bring you up to date on the latest polling and to show you a couple of tricks for style. The learning curve is a little steep at the very beginning, but I think it's more a psychological block than anything to do with skill. Send electronic hugs to Scott for tending the technology and remember it's still the beauty of the written word that counts.

Try to catch John Kerry on Meet The Press (NBC) Sunday morning and start thinking about which three topics we want to blog about next week. I'm swimming in November ballot initiatives at the moment because I have to talk about them on television tonight. There are a couple of doosies we may want to investigate.

President Bush's daily briefing of August 6, 2001 was actually hidden from him by John Ashcroft. We are kidding.

Until we figure out whether to do e-mail, here are links that will help with the assignment I will give you in class today.
Assignment April 13

If you've been exploring the Blogosphere since last Wednesday then you've probably figured out that plenty of what's out there is junk - or worse - that it's impossible to tell what is junk because many blogs are just too difficult to read. Try these for smart content and as the intro to our Tuesday class. copy sites.doc

We'll have to go over a few technical things, including what to do when you find typos in our blog and how to format a link within the body of your posting. My aim, however, is to keep the logistics to a bare minimum (even if that means we have to make some adjustments later) so we can spend most of our first session on content.

And fear not, these preliminary writings and instructions will disappear once we all get the hang of this and take the blog public.