Wednesday, July 11, 2007

MOTS

As Lloyd Lindsey Young, a weather person on an Idaho Falls TV station in the 70s used to say, MOTS. More of the same. He'd probably say it about our weather here in Boise this week.

The MOTS I refer to now is the Bush administration politicizing the Surgeon General's office. TPM reports that the SG was even discouraged from attending the Special Olympics because the Kennedys are associated with it.

TPM also has a long list of information suppressed by the Bush administration.

On Friday, Justin discovered that the Department of Defense has suddenly classified the numbers of attacks in Iraq for September through November of this year -- after providing the figures for every month since the war began. Why classify the information now? If there's a good explanation, we don't know it, and the Pentagon isn't returning our calls.

As others have noted, it's far from the first time that the administration has tried to deep-six data that was unhelpful to its goals. Over the years, they've discontinued annual reports, classified normally public data, de-funded studies, quieted underlings, and generally done whatever was necessary to keep bad information under wraps.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lloyd Lindsey Young -- yow! Now that's a blast from the past. The guy was as goofy as a Disney character, but at the time he was hands-down the most popular weather personality in the region. I distinctly remember him pretending to be a groundhog coming out of a hole in the ground one year, and also speaking to my (gradeschool? Good Llord!) class.

Apparently, he's still going strong in San Fran at KPWB-TV and KGO radio.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/27w3ug

Back in what I recall was my high school days, his son was hired by the same TV station for a year or so and also was a weatherman. The TV station, by the way, was KIFI-TV channel 8, which was owned at the time by Jerry Brady's family.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the update. I wrote the guy a fan letter when I was in high school. He was goofy, big lipped, and fun to watch.