Your Random Saturday

Hey, where'd summer go??

You probably missed this in the news...as they intended:

A front-page story by James Risen in The New York Times on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, reported on a "troubling trend" of sexual assaults committed by American employees of military contractors in Iraq. The centerpiece of his story was Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been brutally gang-raped in 2005 while working in the Green Zone...

Jones famously claimed that days after arriving in Iraq with KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, she had been drugged and gang-raped by fellow employees and then held at machine-gunpoint in a tiny shipping container by KBR managers, with no food or water for 24 hours, as retaliation for reporting the rape...

And then a few weeks ago, the Times ran a microscopic, one-paragraph Associated Press story on page 13 of a Saturday paper, reporting that a jury looked at the facts and found that ... Jones made the whole story up...

When the time came to put up or shut up, Jones' "gang-rape" claim simply disappeared. DNA evidence showed she'd had sex with one only man, and he claimed it was consensual.

In fact, the whole crime disappeared: After an investigation, no criminal charges were brought...

Jones' claim that she had been drugged with Rohypnol was demolished by tests taken by a female military doctor the day after the alleged attack. Rohypnol is detectable for 72 hours, but there was no trace of it, or any "date rape" drug, in her system.

Jones said the attack was so brutal that her breast implants were ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn, requiring massive reconstructive surgery. This was contradicted not only by the female doctor who examined her the next day, but also by her own plastic surgeon back in Houston...

Having showcased Jones' original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing.

Well-worn ground, but always worth retreading:

President Obama has repeatedly derided the sort of Republican partisanship that led the current minority party in the Senate to filibuster some of his appointments -- most prominently his nomination of Goodwin Liu to the federal bench. But Senator Obama not long ago strongly advocated such partisan obstructionism when out of power he praised the filibuster as much as he now deplores it while in power. Indeed, he joined a filibuster to deny votes on the nominations of both Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and John Bolton to the U.N. ambassadorship...

During the last three years, in almost every debate -- deficit reduction, taxes, illegal immigration -- Obama has smeared the motives of his political opponents. He suggested that critics of illegal immigration wished to add moats and alligators to help close the border, and that they planned to arrest parents and children on their way to get ice cream. He advised that Latinos "should punish our enemies." He accused opponents who wanted balanced budgets of abandoning children suffering from autism and Down syndrome.

Obama's partisan rhetoric has always been rough. He called his political adversaries on taxes and the debt "hostage takers" who engaged in "hand to hand combat," and needed to be relegated to the proverbial back seat. Obama even suggested that AIG executives were metaphorical terrorists: "They've got a bomb strapped to them and they've got their hand on the trigger."

Heh:

The Tea Partiers Lost America's AAA Credit Rating. Sure, the Tea Partiers may have supported the Ryan Plan and Cut, Cap, and Balance, both of which would have preserved America’s AAA credit rating, but what we’ve just experienced is a “Tea Party downgrade.” How does that work? Well, just as Paul Revere caused the British to attack America and Mothers Against Drunk Driving causes people to drive drunk, the Tea Partiers caused America's credit downgrade with their incessant demands that we cut spending to avert a credit downgrade…or something. It’s a little foggy.

Take that. And that. And that:

First -- 32 months after his inauguration, 28 months after the unemployment rate first surged past 9 percent -- Obama will propose a "very specific" jobs package. In September. Following a well-deserved vacation...

Obama may be preparing unexpected policy wonders at Martha's Vineyard, but he cannot change the fact that he made a bad bet. In 2009, he assumed that a staggering economy would recover in a normal cyclical fashion, just in time for his re-election. So he spent his political capital on the largely irrelevant issue of health care. Now he wants to become the jobs candidate, mainly through the repetition of the word "jobs."