October 16th, 2006
I watched The Insider last night. It was one of those movies that’s been traveling up my Netflix queue for awhile. O.K. It’d been on there so long that I’d actually forgotten pretty much what it was about. My vague recollection was that it was about a whistleblower who went to 60 Minutes. That’s a really boiled down summary of what it is.
One man told the truth. Another reported the story. Both paid the price. The Insider — a true tale about a Big Tobacco scientist (Russell Crowe) who exposed industry secrets, and the newsman (Al Pacino) who fought corporate forces that would have squelched the story — offers a glimpse into power, media and money in America. A thought-provoking and thrilling film. [Netflix]
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Tags: The Insider, Netflix, Russell Crowe, Al Pacino, Christopher Plumber, movie, 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace, Jeffery Wigand, Lowell Bergman, tobacco industry
April 24th, 2006
I watched 60 Minutes last night and I’ve been reading all of the related articles on Yahoo!News, The Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters. O.K. It’s all the same article. They all say the same thing. And really for those of us liberals who’ve been paying attention since 2002, it’s nothing new. In fact, there wasn’t anything in that report I hadn’t heard before, so it’s hard to get excited.
And I know none of the conservative right-wingers were paying attention anyway so it was just preaching to the choir. In fact, I stopped by Fox News and there’s no mention of the story on their website, not even something to refute Tyler Drumheller’s claims that the White House flat out ignored CIA intelligence that conflicted with what they needed to make the case for war in Iraq.
“The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested,” he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.
“We said: ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said: ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change’,” added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official. [“Ex-CIA agent says WMD intelligence ignored” (Reuters)]
Tags: WMD, Tyler Drumheller, Fox News, Yahoo!News, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, White House, CIA, Intelligence, Iraq, 60 Minutes
October 17th, 2005
Well, it’s true that we could be a year or two off from that sort of price tag for filling up our gas; however, today, most of us, I think would balk at such highway robbery.
And yet, as Andy Rooney on last night’s 60 Minutes pointed out, American’s are spending quite a ton on bottled water.
pint costs $1.35 in the CBS cafeteria. Now just think about that. There are eight pints in a gallon, so if your car ran on water instead of gas and you had to fill a 15-gallon tank with this, it would cost $162 to fill your tank with water.
As Andy pointed out, in this day and age, if you walk through a cube farm, you’re likely to see a bottle of water on almost every desk, particularly desks belonging to women — though this is because it’s been drilled into us that we need to drink 8 glasses of water a day or something really bad will happen, like we’ll gain weight or worse.
Interestingly, Andy spoke to a water “expert” in a testing laboratory who called bottled water “dead water”. He told Andy (and the viewers) that well water and tap water have chemicals in them that the body actually needs and those bottling companies apparently like to filter all of that out.
Fascinating stuff.
I’m not ready to give up my “dead water” yet though. I’ve read too many articles over the last 5 or 6 years like this one I found linked to from AmericaBlog, which suggests that there are chemicals in our drinking water that shouldn’t be there — chemicals from drugs other people are taking. The fact is that plants that filter the polutants from our sewage and water supply aren’t equiped to filter out unmetabolized medications that our population is popping — everything from prozac to birth control to steroids could be in that coffee pot you just filled from the sink. I have to take plenty of my own medications, I don’t want to be mixing and matching with other folks’ chemicals.
Tags: Andy Rooney, 60 Minutes
