CNN:
The invasion of Iraq, re-spun once again.
Later: The International Republican Institute ran a survey in Iraq, and finds the US-backed government is losing support.
MSNBC:
“Without fanfare, President Bush Friday signed into law a bill containing nearly $140 billion in corporate tax cuts denounced by critics on both sides of the aisle as a giveaway to special interests.” Hush up now; can’t have the sheep knowing we’re selling the barn.
MSNBC:
How about they stuff her in a dog cage for a while?
BBC:
The “Melancholy Whores” are less melancholy today.
The Walrus:
Book reviews, looking at how Viagra has changed male sexuality. “Boys learned the nuances of sexuality from older brothers or the schoolyard medical expert. Girls were warned by their mothers. These armies clashed in the Chevrolets of the nation.” My italics. Wonderfully phrased, that.
NY Times Travel:
Biking Dark Tunnels and Wide Lanes on a Lost Highway. Biking abandoned sections of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The Alleghenies have some very long tunnels.
NY Times:
Pentagon Reportedly Skewed C.I.A.‘s View of Qaeda Tie. “Among the findings in the report were that the C.I.A. had become skeptical by June 2002, earlier than previously known, about a supposed meeting in April 2001 in Prague between Mohamed Atta, a leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, and an Iraqi intelligence official. Nevertheless, Mr. Feith and other senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, continued at least through the end of 2002 to describe the reported meeting as evidence of a possible link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.” The pursuit of truth has never been bipartisan, except on rare occasions. The pursuit of advantage ... well, that’s entirely different.
NY Times Letters to the Editor:
Shocking even Orwell. Distortion and misinformation that the media could easily debunk, but won’t, as I expressed yesterday.
NY Times:
Estimates by U.S. See More Rebels With More Funds. “Their financing is supplemented in great part by wealthy Saudi donors and Islamic charities that funnel large sums of cash through Syria ...” We definitely need to get real about Saudi Arabia, and our unfortunate reliance on their oil, sooner than later. The numbers of insurgents seems to be growing slowly over time, as it did in Afghanistan?
SF New Mexican:
75% of registered voters in New Mexico favor raising the minimum wage to $7 bucks an hour.
CNN Money:
Pentagon may let Halliburton keep disputed money. “According to the report, Kellogg Brown & Root has so far billed about $12 billion in Iraq, and about $3 billion of that remains disputed by government officials.” That’s 1/4 of the total. Someone’s being awfully generous with *our* money, don’t you think? Where’s Republican fiscal conservatism at a time like this?
Washington Post:
Mr Krauthammer hits the Administration ‘false hope’ line, harder than Mr Safire did the other day. “... the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate ... ?” From what I’ve read and seen, untrue. Judge for yourself. More on the adult/embryonic stem cell controversy. Catch a PBS special that discusses these therapies, if you ever see it on. Miraculous, full of hope. Here’s a transcript.
Later: Dana Reeve supports John Kerry. Not exactly a surprise.
CSM:
An off-the-cuff historical background on ‘nasty politics.’ “The age of statesmen is gone…. God save the Republic ... from the buffoon and gawk ... we have for President.”
Discover:
Clever. Is it real, or Photoshopped? No more excuses over altered images.
Washington Post:
“One-fifth of women of childbearing age have mercury levels in their hair that exceed federal health standards, according to interim results of a nationwide survey being conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.”
Village Voice Literary Supplement:
The Da Vinci Code, analyzed once again.
Yahoo News:
Wal-Mart Nixes Stewart’s “America”. I was a lot more ‘uncomfortable’ with the book “God and Ronald Reagan”, with “God” standing forth in across-the-sales-floor readable shiny gold letters above Reagan’s smiling face. Subliminalism bothers me more than frontal nudity.
Guardian.UK:
El Greco, enveloped.
If you haven’t seen it,
and been as flabbergasted as the rest of us ... read the “Constitution Restoration Act”. Talk about one branch tying the hands of another. How, exactly, is the House an arbiter of Constitutional law, over and above the Supreme Court? Read the Constitution itself, you’ll realize this is more a ‘Constitution Hijacking Act.’
NY Times Editorial:
Why taxes have to go up. “The United States carries the biggest deficit and debt loads among the world’s advanced economies, borrowing a daily $1.7 billion from abroad, mainly from China and Japan. As a result, the economy, which is increasingly viewed by outsiders as cooling off and hobbled by deficits, runs the ever greater risk that foreigners may decide they are not willing to lend or, worse, may decide to sell off large chunks of their $10 trillion in United States assets. Either could provoke a crisis by causing interest rates and prices to rise sharply and the economy to falter.”
We’re hanging by our nails, and none seem to appreciate the position. Voodoo economics seems to have some sort of magical numbing effect. With American citizens’ debt load, those interest rates go up, and we’ll have Hoovervilles across our great nation.
Oh, they also lambast the Administration for crying wolf too often. A richly-deserved whack. Noone I know here in the West pays any attention to color code levels ... much less has three days of food and water stored.
This
pro-Bush ad campaign is being fielded in New Mexico. There’s also another that ends with RNC branding ... a toothpaste-smiling Cleaverish white family in front of their home. We’re half Hispanic, silly fools. You’d be more of a threat, if you were smart.
NY Times Letters to the Editor:
Beliefs, Decisions and the President. All excellent.
CNN:
Semantics. Two climbers dead in Yosemite. Hikers don’t scale vertical cliff faces.
From Sinclair and other reality distortion fields,
one would think John Kerry was the only veteran ever publicly protesting the Vietnam War. There were others, long before him. At least one America should remember.
In 2001, Salon asked if it was time for a Vietnam Truth Commission? Too bad it didn’t happen then. “Frank McCullough of Time magazine, for instance, covered the war for four years without ever reporting on atrocities. But after My Lai broke, he recalled seeing Viet Cong prisoners pushed from airplanes by American troops, shot with their hands tied behind their backs and devoured by Dobermans unleashed by interrogators. Many other reporters told similar stories: It was as if the floodgates had opened, as if the press suddenly had official sanction to report a previously suppressed government secret.”
There seem to be many journalists who should be stepping forward to clear Mr Kerry, many other veterans, who are not doing so.
Where are these voices now?
Finally, read the transcripts of the Winter Soldier investigation, months before Kerry’s testimony. Who, seriously now, is ‘traitorous’?
A criminal disservice is being perpetrated against a good man, and the media is letting what they know is right slip by in ‘balanced’ reporting. Since when is plain truth ‘unbalanced’?
Later: As for Kerry’s testimony being used by torturers: the public statements of Congressmen against the war were used as levers with POW’s far, far more than Mr Kerry. But just as America does not negotiate with terrorists, neither do the functions of the US Government - or First Amendment rights - cease for war. Even innocent letters from home were used by the Vietcong to torture prisoners with. Would you condemn mothers? Senator Fulbright was a favorite for the Vietcong, from my readings. If you read that article, you will be surprised at the Iraq parallels you can draw.
BBC:
Dutch uncover diary of Nazi camp. “We are homeless, countryless and have to adjust ourselves to that way of life. What we have seen in these last months is indescribable, and for someone who hasn’t been there, unimaginable.”
