Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

Even as I’ve researched Beck’s sources, it seems to me that he’s been sounding more and more like Jack Van Impe. Take this latest slice of his radio show, as recorded by Media Matters:

Greece is “collapsing,” Beck claims, because a “communist invisible committee” has a “foothold” in the country. But there’s been a communist party in Greece since 1918. Beck also refers to Greek riots that began in 2008, and fizzled in January 2009, as if they were ongoing today.

The point here is not so much that Beck is making shit up as he goes, but that he’s imitating a particular style of nonsense-peddling. Jack Van Impe has been peddling this same crap for two decades:

This sounds very much like Iraqi broadcast TV ante 2003:

The Saddam Channel debuted on Friday, the first day of this year’s Eid for Sunnis. The holiday started Saturday for Shiites. The station’s official name alternates between “Al-Lafeta” (“the banner”) and “Al-Arabi” (“the Arab”).

It is mostly a montage of flattering, still images of Saddam – some of him dressed in military uniform, others in a suit, even one astride a white horse. One image shows his sons Odai and Qusai smiling with their father, and another their bodies after they and Saddam’s grandson, Mustafa, were killed in a July 2003 gunfight with U.S. troops.

[...]

All the pictures are set against audio recordings of Saddam making speeches and reciting poetry. Patriotic songs urge listeners to “liberate our country.” None of the pictures appear to be recent, and no announcers or commentators appear or speak.

The story is a rare window on the bizarre world of Arab satellite television. I first became aware of it in the language school, when our teachers assigned several boring passages about the history of ARABSAT. It was only with the rise of Al Jazeera that Americans first became aware this “wild west” of Middle Eastern media even existed, but meanwhile it’s had profound effects on the culture.

Saddam’s propaganda outfit looked like a local cable-access operation compared to the network out of Qatar; in fact, the entire gamut of Arab government channels looked like amateur hour. We’re not just talking about snappy graphics, either: Al Jazeera went where no one else dared, calling out cronyism and bad governance across the region. It was unheard-of.

Today, Al Jazeera still isn’t quite what it was. In part, that is thanks to the Bush administration, which put heavy pressure on the Emir of Qatar to reign in his station. But given the current state of programming available to Iraqis, I’d imagine they’re laughing themselves silly at the Saddam Channel.

CERN issued a press release this morning to announce that the Large Hadron Collider is officially the world’s most powerful atom-smasher,

having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning. This exceeds the previous world record of 0.98 TeV, which had been held by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider since 2001. It marks another important milestone on the road to first physics at the LHC in 2010.

“First physics” seems to mean “actual experiments.” This was just a warm-up. By the time CERN gets serious about crashing teeny tiny particles together to find out what the universe is made of, it’s supposed to be operating at a power level about six times higher.

I caught this pic over at HuffPo, provenance unknown, and immediately wondered if Sarah was signaling a confederate about how many mooseburgers to serve for lunch.

Is she waving with fingertips? Are those “spirit fingers”? Does she have full command of American Sign Language, or is Sarah secretly implanting hypnotic suggestions with gangsign?

I don’t know, and actually don’t care. But the AP caught a photo that makes her look her age, for once, and suggests she’s past the peak of her sex appeal. With her poll numbers already hollow, we may have seen the peak of Palin fever.

It’s long since past time I had a week of Primus videos. Here’s Those Damn Blue Collar Tweekers live.

Your eyes do not deceive you. In making the case to delay health care reform, Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) is willing to discuss a tax increase:

“I believe there will be a separate accounting,” Lugar said. “I think we will have to pay for it. I would just make this suggestion: that in the three weeks of debate we still have ahead of us, we really ought to concentrate in Congress on the war, on the overall strategy of our country and the cost of it. And we ought to be on the budget, passing appropriation bills in a proper way. In the course of that, we may wish to break out that. We may wish to discuss higher taxes to pay for it.”

Get that? The GOP is opposed to the health care reform bill because it will raise your taxes (wrong), but they’re willing to raise your taxes for permanent war. Because it’s the patriotic thing to do.

See how that works?

News last week that the Obama administration won’t sign the landmine ban is disappointing, but also ironic: the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was the first success of information-age grassroots organizing on a global scale. Jody Williams won a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing together more than 1,300 nongovernmental organizations in 95 countries to pass the ban.

My guess is that the Obama WH came in unfamiliar with this issue or its history. The Pentagon insisted that it could not meet the ban so long as it’s involved in the Korean peninsula and the State Department wouldn’t second-guess Hillary’s husband’s decision to avoid a battle over it.

Obama may yet sign the landmine treaty, but it could take years for the champion of consensus politics to join this particular international consensus.

I like watching college students defeat Teh Stupid™.

A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama.

The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today’s typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs.

Average policy holders will save $200-500 a year, a figure that doesn’t include the savings accrued when insurers don’t cancel your policy the instant you get diagnosed.

Read the report here. For misinformation, look to Faux Noise:

That’s absolutely wrong. the public option will run off premiums, just like any other insurance plan. The difference is that it won’t waste 30% of those premiums on CEO bonuses and denial of care.