At the moment a total of two people seem to be following up on the provenance of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from that well-known tourist mecca, Niger. One is Seymour Hersch, who reports the theory that the papers were deliberately, poorly forged by former CIA agents [...]

Is it really possible that some people think Roger Ailes is capable of operating an unbiased news outfit? I thought it was just a running gag.
Why on earth is anyone surprised by this?

This piece in the New York Times magazine is good reading for anyone interested in the gory broad details of what went wrong in post-war Iraq and why it went wrong.
Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very [...]

Toys “R” Us spokesmammal Geoffrey the Giraffe is drawing criticism for a commercial in which he inadvertently inhales helium from a balloon.
A Toys “R” Us spokeshuman said the ad’s run was over and that the company “takes the safety of our guests very seriously. We would never encourage any behavior that would be dangerous [...]

Most of the country is mourning the soldiers killed and injured in the downing of a US transport helicopter near Baghdad.
But not the BushBlog, which understandably prefers to focus on the spectacular third-quarter bounce in the economy.
The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK) ediorial board looked at the inevitable tendency of the President’s critics in Washington [...]

Read his obituary of mainstream media.
“Shattered Glass,” a study in smarminess in which even the honest journalists come across as pretentious brats, is unlikely to draw crowds either. It’s handsomely made and decently acted, especially by Hayden Christensen, who plays the creepy title character as if he were the smarter kid brother of Anthony Perkins’s [...]

Denver Ballot Initiative 101 would require city leaders to come up with ways to reduce stress in Denver. It poses the question: “Shall the voters of Denver adopt an ordinance to require the city to help ensure public safety by increasing peacefulness.”

I enjoy the days when AP’s headline writers hit the cantina a bit early. This article is headlined, “Bush Agrees to Furnish Iraq Intelligence.” Read on, though, and you find this:
[White House spokesman Trent] Duffy, with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, repeated that phrase ["a spirit of cooperation"] in a conference call with reporters but [...]

What a relief.

I think many people, including me, who feared the ascendance of the Bush regime held unrealistically high hopes for Colin Powell, not just in terms of the leavening influence he might exercise but in terms of his personal iconoclasty. I guess it’s one thing to stand up at the Republican convention as a free agent [...]

Afghanistan is another subject not often remarked upon at the BushBlog. Here’s one reason why.
The UN Security Council sent a high-ranking delegation to Afghanistan yesterday to bolster the country’s leader, Hamid Karzai, amid signs that his authority is steadily slipping to powerful warlords and warnings that an opium boom could turn Afghanistan into a failed [...]

I miss Robert Palmer.
We’re about to flood Iraq with more dollars than many countries spend in a decade, but the bonanza is leaving some Iraqis feeling like a bald guy who wins a hair brush in a raffle. This is a long article, but well worth reading if you want some insight into how [...]

This is disturbing on all sorts of levels. For one, if Hanuman is taking over the government of India, peace in Kashmir seems ever farther away.

I sense a disturbance in the force. Have to read the book.
Privatisation, deregulation, openness, the free movement of labour and capital, technological advances – all hailed as key ingredients of economic success in the last 20 years – have been exploited by and adapted into the terror economy in a macabre form of geo-political ju-jitsu: [...]

Today’s theme is “disturbed.” Someone mentioned this photo to me but I hadn’t seen it.

One of the newspapers, or at least an online version of one, that sprang up in the wake of the war is Iraq Today. I’ve visited it perhaps a half-dozen times during the past few months—it offered a nice mix of opinion and news that seemed to correspond pretty closely with what appears to be [...]

We need to find everyone in the Pentagon named Murphy, and fire them all.
“One of the biggest mistakes of the coalition forces was to dissolve the army and the security forces,” Brig. Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani told IPS in Baghdad. Shahwani left Iraq in 1990 and became a part of Washington’s covert efforts to topple [...]

would be the official name of the country under the new constitution, the draft of which was released today. The BushBlog hails the achievement without mentioning the moniker, probably because it might make General Boykin jumpy.
The blog also quotes extensively from this Bill Safire column, which leads me to go on record with the [...]

I’m pitching a screenplay: think Mr. Smith Goes To Washington meets The Killing Fields. David Brooks, the New York Times’ latest nod to editorial insanity, has well and truly lost it.
It’s not that we can’t accept casualties. History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting [...]

Of course, neither did CNN or MSNBC.
“The Daily Show,” airing on Comedy Central, is the nightly fix for news junkies and casual observers alike, both source and spoof of current events. Among young viewers, it outdraws cable news outlets CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC for young viewers, according to Nielsen numbers. Turns out whippersnappers [...]

President cites 14% jump as “sign of desperation” from criminals
4 November 2003
Washington (BTC News) – President Bush today cited the 14% increase in the Washington, D.C., murder rate as proof that improvements in the city’s infrastructure, along with numerous new residential and commercial property developments, have made the city’s criminals increasingly desperate.
In a statement released [...]

From the Department of Defense War on Terra® news page:
The Selective Service System wants to hear from men and women in the community who might be willing to serve as members of a local draft board.
Prospective Board Members must be citizens of the United States , at least 18 years old, and registered with [...]

One of the things the International Atomic Energy Association noticed within a few hours of receiving the documents was that one of the ministers who had allegedly signed it had been out of office for ten years. The CIA, as we all now know, had doubts about the authenticity of the papers almost from the [...]

and the US offers him a job working with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan. This may or may not be a good idea; obviously Karzai and someone in the Bush administration think it is because the guy, former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, had been in US custody for 18 months prior to [...]

Isn’t it romantic? The Bush administration has a plan to to turn the entire country into a gauzy 1950’s nightclub. Picture a spotlit Poppy and Bar swirling across the dance floor as smoke drifts above the tables and a lazy jazz quartet plays softly from a small stage on the far right of the room.
[W]ASHINGTON, [...]

Habitual surfers are clinically ill, say EU psychologists
European Union psychologists have concluded that people who are habitual of surfing the Internet for more than four hours a day are clinically ill and need medical treatment. They said Net obsession was now a more serious problem than lottery addiction, warning doctors across Europe to be [...]

Continuing its tradition of ignoring, suppressing or applying prophylactic measures to uncomfortable science, the Bush administration surreptitiously yanked a group of scientists from a three-year project studying seasonal water flow in the Missouri River and, one month before the final report deadline, turned the study over to a new group.
Missouri River Scientists Off Project
Wed [...]

When Bush signed the appropriations bill authorizing unlimited pork for companies participating in the post-war construction boom in Iraq, it was missing a provision, included in the Senate version and removed in conference, that would have held companies accountable for excess profits on Iraq-related projects.
Meanwhile, following some agitated inquiries from Democratics in Congress, the Army [...]

The Christian Science Monitor has a handy reference guide to the history and ideology of the neoconservative movement.

The White House has adopted Bill O’Reilly’s signature approach to dealing with unwanted questions: shutting off the mic.
The director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled “congressional questions” to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Expressing “the need to add a bit of [...]