A CNN story about the Bush team’s doctored photo (and the impending correction thereof), included the following paragraph. (The person quoted is Mark McKinnon, head of Bush’s advertising team.)

“I didn’t even know it was done,” he said. The doctoring was first revealed on an Internet site. “There was no intention on anybody’s part to try to represent anything that wasn’t true,” McKinnon said.

An Internet site? What’s CNN’s problem with naming it? Can you imagine if it said something like…

“I think blue is a very nice color,” Smith said on a television show. “My living room is blue.”

or

“I bought myself a new car today,” said Jones in an interview in a magazine. “It’s very nice.”

Of course you can’t imagine it; CNN would obviously identify the TV show or the magazine. But perish the thought it would ID a Web site.

“Winslet Scoffs at Rumors About Her Wait” reads the ABC News headline.

(Click the image for a larger version.)

Update: It’s been fixed.

First the insurgents penetrated the Green Zone in a big way. Now an entire platoon of Army Reservists was arrested for refusing what they called a “suicide mission” in Iraq.

As reported in The Clarion-Ledger:

A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a “suicide mission” to deliver fuel, the troops’ relatives said Thursday.

The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq � north of Baghdad � because their vehicles were considered “deadlined” or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.

As my wife put it, “Incredible. It’s like the Soviets.”

Yep, all those letters were real. My USA Today editor took out the details of the writers. Here is the relevant section with the names of the writers intact:

(Dr. Jeffrey Reese Zavaleta (drzavaleta@mac.com), an M.D. in Irving, Tex., asked, “What do you mean by ‘little people’? I’m 6′0.” He then suggested that I “Go back to your winblows software and be happy.”)

[snip]

Mac Daily something

What kind of people read Mac Daily News? Although I got some polite letters “correcting” me (my information was already correct), most were along the lines of what Mac user “gabeharville” wrote. His note had a subject of “you suck, you f—-n little b—-f–” and read simply, “F–K YOU, F–K YOUF–K YOUF–K YOUF–K…” And so on, for several more lines. I’ve added the dashes here; he didn’t.

AnotherMac user, one “rp” (finalcutpro78@yahoo.com) had this to say: “Wake up an [sic] smell the roses a–hole. PC’s [sic] are far behind Macs. Get you [sic] f–king s–t straight you f–king geek.”

In a later note “rp” pointed me to a pro-Mac article with a note, “This guy is up for the next Pulitzer you f–king fat pig faced gay b–tch c–t bag pole smoking mofo. Take notes you a–hole.”

And points for brevity go to Mac user “Nick” from Albany, N.Y. (macattack15@spymac.com), who wrote, simply, “douche.” Yep, that was the entirely of his note.

You can almost picture these folks, sitting in their bedrooms in their Moms’ basements, candles burning in front of the Steve Jobs poster, scouring the Net for anyone who doesn’t speak highly enough about the Mac.

Could be real, could be the Bush administration trying to scare people again.

A CNN article explains why Sen. Mark Dayton (D - Minn.) is closing his Washington office until after Election Day. It reads in part:

Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota issued a statement Tuesday, citing a “top-secret intelligence report on our national security” provided to congressional members by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee.

“Based upon that information,” Dayton wrote, “I have decided to close my office in the Russell Senate Office Building until after the upcoming election.

Is this all leading up to an October surprise? Or is the fear-mongering itself the surprise?

Guess we’ll have to see.

Get this: As reported by KLAS TV in Nevada, a company hired by the Republican National Committee got people to register to vote, then threw out all the registrations belonging to Democrats.

In-freakin’-credible.

The company — Voters Outreach of America (aka “America Votes”) — is no longer operating in Nevada. Now it’s in Oregon.

Let’s be clear, though: This is not some small, fringe group doing something nasty. This company was paid for by the Republican National Committee.

I say again: In-freakin’-credible.

(Thanks to Josh Marshall!)

According to a post over at A Tiny Revolution, investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh (he exposed the My Lai massacre and its cover-up), spoke at Berkeley on October 8th and “told a story about recently receiving a call from an American lieutenant in Iraq who’d just witnessed other American soldiers massacring Iraqis.”

An excerpt:

So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he’s hysterical. He’s totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, “No, you don’t understand. That’s a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents.”

How long after this war, how long after this election, will these kinds of stories come out? And the question is, are these kinds of events rare things that get attention, or the standard operating procedure over there?

Alls I know is that next time I hear about “insurgents” being killed in Iraq, I’ll think twice.

* * *

More: Mark Adams links to video of a US pilot killing — no, destroying a group of 30 or so people walking across the street in Fallujah.

He writes, “It is unclear whether they were armed insurgents or civilians,” although they certainly don’t appear to be walking like any soldiers I’ve ever seen, especially with an American attack aircraft overhead.

Washington Monthly magazine has a nicely formatted, detailed list of the major Cheney lies from the VP debate.

At yesterday’s debate, VP Dick Cheney said to Sen. John Edwards, “Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you ‘Senator Gone’.”

Um, turns out that’s — shockingly — not true.

The newspaper to which Mr. Cheney was referring was The Pilot, which had this to say in its editorial today:

The Pilot hasn’t “taken to calling him” anything. In fact, the vice president’s obscure reference sent us scrambling to our library. And sure enough, we did publish an editorial 15 months ago, on June 25, 2003, headlined, “Edwards Should Do His Day Job.” In it, we noted that Sen. Jesse Helms used to be called “Senator No.” And we added: “Four and a half years into his first term, John Edwards is becoming known as Senator Gone.”

[snip]

But we also wrote: “Members of the senator’s staff point out that Edwards’ attendance record this year has been better than the three other Democratic senators who are campaigning for president � Joe Lieberman, Richard Gephardt and Bob Graham. And the aides also say none of the votes Edwards missed was close, so his presence on the floor would not have changed the outcome.”

I think Cheney needs to learn that just saying something with conviction doesn’t make it true, and that these days there are a lot of people out there willing to fact-check you.

Speaking of “fact check,” by now most people have discovered that the site Cheney suggested people visit — factcheck.com — is not what he meant (it in fact links to an George Soros’s anti-Bush message). He meant factcheck.org.

BUT…

I’m sure there are some folks who will take what Cheney said as the truth — that is, that there must be something damning on the factcheck.org site. Or at least something that refutes what Edwards said.

Turns out that’s not so.

It all started when Edwards said that Halliburton “paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false information on their company, just like Enron and Ken Lay” and “Not only that, they�ve gotten a $7.5 billion no-bid contract in Iraq, and instead of part of their money being withheld, which is the way it�s normally done, because they�re under investigation, they�ve continued to get their money.”

Cheney replied that people should go to the factcheck site.

But the folks at FactCheck.org said that Cheney was, well, wrong. Again. They wrote:

Cheney got our domain name wrong — calling us “FactCheck.com” — and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton.

In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn’t profited personally while in office from Halliburton’s Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney’s responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.

Some sites are starting to imply that Cheney is, in fact, a pathological liar.

What do people look at when they view a Web page? The Poynter Institute found out. Sort of.

It did an admittedly unscientific study of how people navigate a Web page with their eyes. (It worked with the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media and Eyetools as well.)

The study is called Eyetrack III (FAQ here) and is “research that tracks where a person’s eyes look while reading, then analyzes the data to reveal patterns.”

The site warns:

It is a preliminary study of several dozen people conducted in San Francisco. It is not an exhaustive exploration that we can extrapolate to the larger population. It is a mix of “findings” based on controlled variables, and “observations” where testing was not as tightly controlled. The researchers went “wide,” not “deep” — covering a lot of ground in terms of website design and multimedia factors. We hope that Eyetrack III is not seen as an end in itself, but rather as the beginning of a wave of eyetracking research that will benefit the news industry.

Regardless, it’s a very, very interesting bit of info for Web designers.

See it at http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm.

Just got a taste of something that some credit card companies are doing. It’s a nasty thing, and MBNA (or MBNA America — I forget what the full name is) is one of those doing it.

(It’s actually an Ohio Savings Bank card, so I have to say that Ohio Savings Bank is just as bad.)

Here’s what’s what: I have a Visa card with Ohio Savings Bank/MBNA. Interest rate was 12.9%. I never missed a payment.

Then, without warning, I saw that my interest rate had — I kid you not — doubled. MBNA just raised my “fixed” rate without telling me.

Why?

Because MBNA is one of those nasty companies that will raise your rate if you miss a payment with someone else. (In my case, I assume it was the power company — we missed a payment when we moved from Columbus to Roanoke.)

In other words, even though I’ve always been a good MBNA/Ohio Savings Bank customer, I’m being punished because I missed a payment with another company.

If you’re an MBNA customer — or an Ohio Savings Bank customer — I strongly urge you to A) check your statement carefully, and B) find another credit card company. One with better ethics.

Taking the whole bottled water thing to a new level — and worth a laugh — is FineWater.com. Among other things, it offers the “FineWaters Balance” scale from Bold (”sparkling waters with large, loud bubbles”) to Still (”the still, or flat waters”).

Of course, temperature is important, and you want to know how best to serve your water. Dasani? Be sure it’s at 54 degrees. Perrier? Use 62 degrees.

And of course, you want to use the right stemware for your water.

Sheesh.

“I see on the TV screens how hard it is.”

–George W. Bush, on fighting the Iraq War, Sept. 30, 2004