Frank Gaffney, a former Timothy Leary disciple now suffering flashbacks as the director of the Security Policy Institute, has an article in the Washington Times’ magazine in which he lays out the case that Saddam was a brutal despot fiercely intent on one day reconstituting his banned weapons programs and that what the Iraq [...]

The New York Review of Books has its usual quota of literary luminaries on the reviewing stand this week, with three of them writing on subjects of particular interest (to me, at least). Russell Baker reviews Paul Krugman’s new book, The Great Unraveling; Gary Wills introduces his own new book on Thomas Jefferson, Negro President; and Joan Didion offers a very timely glance at George Bush via the lens of Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages, the most recent of the Left Behind series. That last essay dovetails nicely with the current flap surrounding General William “Jerry” Boykin’s somewhat intemperate remarks regarding the true nature of the War on Terra^®.

George “I call him Gonzo” Bush has an unexpected opportunity to spend quality time with part-time psychic and full-time refugee Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, now spending time with his family somewhere in the US.

Fred Kaplan at Slate has one of the best commentaries I’ve seen on the Rumsfeld “Who am I and why am I here?” memo.

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift has a column today echoing Fred Kaplan’s comments yesterday over at Slate regarding the real import of the Rummy “long, hard slog” memo—the fact that it puts the lie to everything Rumsfeld and other Pollyanish administration voices have been singing about post-war Iraq for the past 18 months or so—but with a little more local color.

Thanks to a friend on the Slate bulletin boards, BTC News has learned that Ted Kennedy is to receive the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service. The news was in a recent column by Georgie Ann Geyer, who I thought was dead. No one seems to have picked up on the story apart from Geyer and the Associated Press:

Once a week or so I do a Google News search on Rashid Dostum, warlord, US ally, assistant minister of defense to the mayor of Kabul, likely opium trafficker and suspected war criminal. If anything bad is happening in Afghanistan, odds are that it’s either connected to Dostum or that whoever is reporting on whatever is happening will find occasion to mention him. This week, the search produced an article from the Beeb about UN concern over the increasing control the Taleban exercise over portions of the country.

Tom Kean, the Republican chair of the independent commission on September 11, has publicly threatened to subpoena documents it has requested but not received from the White House and other, unspecified executive departments.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology will be running a seminar in December to discuss “building trust and confidence in voting systems.” These would be the electronic voting systems recently ridiculed by computer scientists and electronic voting experts as enormously insecure and largely unauditable. BTC News will be running a special report on [...]

Human rights organizations are accusing the UN of censoring a report on western corporate participation in the looting of Congo’s natural resources during the just-ended civil war. The Independent has the story, including an allegation that a British company, Avient, was contracted to conduct military operations in the country during 1999 and 2000.
After initially focusing [...]

You can read the entire report here—it’s short, basically says that they read the UPI story about horrid conditions faced by injured and ill National Guard and Reserve troops there, sent some aides down to check it out and found that, yep, conditions are shitty—and below is the key paragraph in the summary.
The situation at [...]

In November of last year, Don Rumsfeld confidently laid out the future with regard to a potential, there-are-no-plans-on-the-president’s-desk war in Iraq.
“I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that,” [Rumsfeld] said in an hour-long radio [...]

Sam Dash, probably best known as the chief counsel for the Senate Watergate committee, and more recently cursed with the thankless task of acting as Ken Starr’s ethics advisor, has an op-ed piece in Newsday suggesting that the White House officials responsible for outing CIA agent Valerie Plame may have violated a domestic terrorism provision [...]

Fox News head Roger Ailes claims that his operation has single-handedly forced objectivity into the news world. Greg Mitchell, editor of media trade magazine Editor & Publisher, begs to differ, although he seems to have been so astonished by Ailes’ remarks that he got a little tongue tied.
Ailes is, of course, referring to the same [...]

On Monday, the governments of Bangladesh and Portugal joined India, Pakistan and a host of other nations in declining to send troops to Iraq. Pakistan is dithering—as in most of the rest of the world, public sentiment there is running strongly against such an action—as is South Korea, which originally said it would but now [...]

Curtis LeMay is best known for incinerating a half-million or more Japanese civilians in the Great Tokyo Air Raid, for his inspiration of the General Jack Ripper character in Dr. Strangelove and his 1964 recipe for success in the Vietnam War: “Tell the Vietnamese they’ve got to draw in their horns or we’re going to [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Bush told ambassadors from Muslim states that his administration does not tolerate anti-Muslim bigotry, but he stopped short of condemning a senior Pentagon official who said Muslims do not worship “a real God.”
Bush added that Muslims deserve the same respect afforded mackerel snappers and those bald freaks at the airport who [...]

The greatest danger facing American civilians at the moment may be the risk of being struck by a barrage of dropping shoes.
WASHINGTON — The newly retired head of the State Department’s intelligence arm said Tuesday that the U.S. intelligence community “badly underperformed” for years in assessing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and should accept responsibility [...]

A rumor to the effect that the Bush administration intends to pull out of Iraq, or at least substantially lessen the US presence there in time to claim victory going into campaign season, is making the rounds.
The approximate deadline for this is March, presumably because that’s the point at which the military ligaments will officially [...]

A little headline humor from our friends at the British news roundup site, UK Newsglance. The headline links to a short article in the Financial Times which offers its own taste of British wit, very dry, shaken, not stirred.
Mr Bush who sometimes appeared harried as he responded to critical questioning, said: “I can’t put it [...]

The Pentagon—under pressure from Yoric—wants to take a bunch of recent Iraqi high-school grads, give ‘em guns and a couple of weeks of training and send them out to make Iraq safe for democracy. At the same time, the administration are debating among themselves whether or not to divert some of the personnel now involved [...]

The Senate Intelligence Committee is frustrated with the slow pace of Bush administration responses (there’s a shock, eh?) to its queries relating to prewar intelligence on Iraq, so it sent letters to Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet establishing a Friday deadline for producing documents and scheduling interviews with key [...]

Forbes Magazine has a feature article on the economics of marijuana cultivation, including a handy little sidebar offering a list of essentials for establishing your own little boutique farm. Does this count as mainstreaming the weed?

So I was meandering about this evening and stopped in on Calpundit, where I read the news about the Department of Justice posting a two-year-old KPMG study on workplace diversity in the department. This is, mind you, a study commissioned by the department, paid for by you and made available only after repeated Freedom of [...]

Just to review: the current president of the U.S. believes that he was chosen by God and that he doesn’t owe anyone an explanation of anything, seems to have a bit of trouble understanding the impact of his behavior on others, has a history of failing upward and is perhaps a bit needy in the attention department (see Exhibit A at left).