....LMB: "Gallons of News"....

February 10, 2003

Saudis Plan to End U.S. Presence- possibly the most interesting news of the day. Allegedly, the Saudi royal family is going to ask the U.S. to withdraw its military forces from Saudi Arabia as soon as Iraq is disarmed/conquered. And if we remember our history (and few do), the U.S. military presence is (allegedly) why Osama bin Laden founded Al Qaeda in the first place: he claimed that the "infidels" should not be allowed in the land of Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina. And honestly, the U.S. might accept this offer, because they can just move their bases into Iraq.

The Police State Enhancement Act of 2003- the ever-insightful Geov Parrish on the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003," AKA "Patriot Act II".

Powell's Flimsy Evidence- Dayum! Maria Tomchick (who edits Eat the State with Geov above) strips bare Colin Powell's UN report, stripping it down to a skeleton of error, misdirection and ambiguity.

White House Floats Idea of Dropping Income Tax Overhaul- "President Bush, having already set off a firestorm over his proposals to cut taxes and revamp retirement accounts, suggested today that the time might be near to drop the income tax as a whole and replace it with some form of consumption tax." The more I think about it, the more pro-rich this idea is. If you make a small wage, and spend nearly all your money on day to day living, nearly 100% of your income is taxed. If you have a very large income, you probably have a substantial part of your income that you put in savings or the bank or something, meaning that a much smaller percentage of your income is taxed.

Suspicious Package Sent To Ashcroft Ends Up Being Porn- heh. Someone sends pornography to America's Puritan-in-Chief, Attorney General John Ashcroft.

77,000 body bags- in 1991, the Pentagon purchased 16,000 body bags for American casualties in Gulf War I. In 2003, the Pentagon purchased 77,000 body bags. Maybe they were just on sale....?

Comparing the News- I'm just going to steal this entry from Calpundit:

It's interesting to see how different newspapers treat the same news. Here's how the Washington Post reported yesterday's negotiations between Iraq and the UN team:

The top U.N. arms experts said tonight that they were unable to reach agreement with Saddam Hussein's government on several key issues they had traveled here to resolve in a bid to build support for continuing weapons inspections.

And here's the Los Angeles Times:

The top two U.N. weapons inspectors came to this capital over the weekend wanting something spectacular from Iraqi authorities to prevent a war. After two days of intense and arduous meetings, they announced Sunday night that what they got was not bad.

And the differences are even more pronounced if you read the full text of each article. It's kind of hard to believe that both papers are actually reporting the same meeting.

Bad Boy Done Good- Puff "Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs" Daddy just signed a huge deal with Vivendi Universal: V-U will distribute and promote the albums released by Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment record label, and Combs will make tons of money.

I only bring this up because of my record industry tirade some weeks back. If you as a musician sign a deal with a record label, you make like 12% of the profits from the sales of your own album. According to Wendi Day of the Rap Coalition, if you start your own record label and sign a distribution deal with a big label, you make like 80% of the profits. If any of you reading this are aspiring musicians, try for option #2.

Hopefully this will be the only time I ever tell anyone to emulate Puff Daddy.

Reinventing the Marketing Communications Business- more industry talk about last week's "Madison + Vine" conference about merging the advertising and entertainment industries.

Venezuelan Agencies End Anti-Government Ad War- apparently, for the length of the "let's drive President Hugo Chavez from power" oil industry strike in Venezuela, there were no commercials aired on television-- except for propaganda ads against the President. Try to imagine a similar situation here. Imagine that America was led by a popular, populist, liberal-to-radical president who had incurred the wrath of the business class. The business class incited a labor strike that lasted for two whole months, hoping to make us so miserable that we call for our president to resign just to stop the country from falling into a depression. And all the while, all of our television commercials have been replaced with anti-president propaganda. All of them.

The strike has final broken, but the country lost two months of oil revenue and the economy is in turmoil. And the advertisers are starting up work again.

For the curious, we have some the anti-Chavez print ads here (in pdf), and a video of one of the commercials. The TV ad shows that pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez folks don't have to fight, they can play soccer instead.