The Sufferable Ass

Path to 9/11 is an ABC miniseries airing tonight and tomorrow and billed as a docudrama based on the 9/11 Commission Report. The series has been reported to contain scenes that are inaccurate and misleading, and has prompted an outcry from liberal (and even some conservative) bloggers and commenters. Many prominent public figures have spoken out against the film, including Bill Clinton, Richard Clarke, and the film’s star Harvey Keitel. One former FBI agent refused to work on the film as an advisor once he had read the script, and another quit when the producers failed to correct a list of inaccuracies.

The program was written and directed by a pair with strong ties to the right wing. ABC has actively reached out to the right wing in order to drum up support for the program. The movie will be shown around the world, and ABC had made a deal with Scholastic, Inc., to distribute the series to schools along with a companion guide pointing up the supposed documentary aspects of the movie (Scholastic has since altered the guide to focus on media literacy).

Although ABC has made review copies of the series available only to right-wing bloggers and commentators, AmericaBlog has obtained a preview and has found that:

• The movie falsely identifies American Airlines as the carrier that let Mohamed Atta on board despite a security warning. The movie also puts the event at the wrong airport. The airport was in Portland, Maine, and Atta boarded a US Airways flight (facts contained on Page 1 of the 9/11 Commission Report!).


• The movie contains a scene of a Talibani firing bullets at the projected image of President Clinton’s head.


• The movie contains a scene where Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger refuses to give the CIA permission to kill Usama bin Laden, even though an agent has bin Laden in his crosshairs. This event never happened.


• The movie even misspells Madeleine Albright’s name.

This is a real shocker. Steve Irwin, TV’s Crocodile Hunter, has died in a freak accident, while filming an underwater documentary off the coast of Cairns, Queensland, Australia. He was struck through the chest by the barb of a sting-ray and killed instantly. Our deepest sympathies to his wife Terry, and the couple’s children Bindi and Bob.

This is a very wise and important point that Atrios makes, and it’s a very hard truth to embrace. I absolutely believe that all of us have our blind spots, but it’s always hardest to understand your own. Yet it’s vital that we make an effort to understand it in order to win others to our point of view. Too many of us on the left side of the blogosphere suffer from this particular malady.

I wish that the rest of the media had Keith Olbermann’s understanding of history. Tonight he delivered a powerful rebuke of the Secretary of Defense’s recent remarks to the American Legion, hitting all the right notes. Click here and take just a few minutes to watch the video.

I’ve discovered a weird glitch in NetNewsWire, where some linked text simply doesn’t display in the newsreader layout, though links do display on the original site and in other RSS readers. I’m posting example pictures here in case anyone has any insight into why this might be.

I use the Ollicle Flex theme, though NNW exhibits the same behavior regardless of the theme selected.

Here’s a screenshot from NNW, from a post on The Year of Coffee blog:

Notice the pairs of double quotes? There should be linked text between those quotes, as you can see in the following screenshot from the live version of the page:

Here’s another example from Media Matters:

The NNW view panel drops all the links in these two paragraphs, as you can clearly see from the following screenshot of the live site:

Now, it’s fun to kind of play MadLibs and make up my own words to fill in the blanks, but I’d really like to know why my favorite Mac newsreader is dropping links.

Any thoughts?