I haven’t seen Mel Gibson’s apotheosis and don’t intend to. I can, however, say with authority that Gibson doesn’t care much for Vatican II, the Catholic Church council which, among other things, absolved Jews of blame for the death of Jesus.
Time magazine wanted to talk theology with Mel Gibson recently on the set of The [...]

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who went on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney and an energy company guy whose name is probably somewhere in the documents the Sierra Club sued to have Cheney make public, and who will shortly be considering a government appeal of a ruling related to that case, and who ridiculed [...]

Dick Cheney came out strongly for the tax policies of Kerry and Edwards today, noting that “if the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and Edwards have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we’ve [...]

Concerned by the increasing public discontent with outsourcing US jobs to cheaper, offshore locations, a number of powerful business and industry leaders have joined forces to address the issue.
The coalition is now rallying around “worldwide sourcing” as a less provocative term for the movement of jobs around the globe. The change is part of a [...]

Maybe it’s just me, but the BushIfThat’sHisRealNameBlog seems to be getting stranger by the day.
Last Saturday, Bush Volunteers in Pima County, Arizona competed against Democrats and twenty other entries in the “Unsanctioned Anything Goes Chili Cook-off” to benefit the Colossal Cave Mountain Park’s Research Library and education programs. Over 200 people attended the event and [...]

The president, if that’s his real job, appears to have Beantown in the bag.
Students for Bush showed their support for the President in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse in Boston, lining the street, encouraging drivers to honk in support of the President and passersby to sign up and volunteer for the campaign. Certainly, the rally [...]

with her version of this classic.
In her speech at Southern Maine Community College, Koch said her brother has “a great record on women’s issues.”

A report just issued by a consortium of security and foreign policy think tanks, and available at the Center for Defense Information website, is a bit critical of the Bush (if that’s his real name) administration’s priorities in the security arena. The report, “A Unified Security Budget for the United States,” is couched in determinedly [...]

I thought this had been pretty well established quite some while ago, but apparently no one had done a really comprehensive statements v. actual evidence examination of the matter. Knight-Ridder’s investigative team took on the task and as has been the case on a number of occasions since the war began, the humble K-R guys [...]

This is so frickin’ stupid.
President Bush said privately yesterday that he believes Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) will be a tough and hard-charging opponent, but said he feels he is starting the general election from a stronger position than he did in 2000.
Bush’s views emerged from an unusual 80-minute session in the Oval Office [...]

The Hill has an article ostensibly about John McCain’s role on the “independent” “commission” appointed by Bush, if that’s his real name, to investigate pre-war intelligence on Iraq. I think McCain experienced a mid-life crisis during the 2000 campaign and started wondering what he was doing with his life, and that’s why he began doing [...]

Iraq’s hospitals are in pitiful condition. They weren’t in good shape before the war, and most of them were looted or otherwise damaged during the war and the complete breakdown of civil order that followed, as were warehouses holding medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and other hospital supplies. A year later, things aren’t much better

From Minnesota this time.
For any of your Democratic friends who think that the President’s base isn’t energized, ask them to check out the turnout and energy at the Minnesota Republican caucus. In an election year where our candidate is running unopposed, turnout was strong and enthusiasm was stronger, and the attendees unanimously supported President George [...]

is poised to strike.
The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer’s name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.
Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand [...]

is the title of a piece in the new Columbia Journalism Review examining how the editorial boards of six large dailies — the five nationals plus the Chicago Tribune — treated the runup to and the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.
As the Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, a dissenter from his paper’s editorial stance on [...]

Hard to top this.
WHAT: Press conference at the Florida State Capitol, Tallahassee, Fla. Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace and justice movement, will announce its plan to bring election monitors from the international community to observe and monitor the November elections in Florida. Pax Christi USA will also issue a call inviting other state [...]

Knight-Ridder has a good article about the significance of the upcoming presidential election. I don’t agree with every characterization in it, but it’s the first article I’ve seen addressing the historical context of the election rather than simply the political or personal differences between the candidates.

Mike Allen makes amends, to an extent, for his bizarre article about the super-secret but widely discussed Bush, if that’s his real name, meeting with some network faces while posing as an anonymous, not-for-attribution source. The current effort chimes in with more detail about the subpoenas issued to the White House in furtherance of the [...]

They’ve put together a package of all the articles examing administration claims about Iraq, or at least all the articles they like, that they published during the past 18 months or so.

George Bush, if that’s his real name, is at it again. Not satisfied with reality, he’s simply ignored it, or he didn’t read the newspaper and no one told him; it’s hard to tell.
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) President Bush on Saturday hailed a new interim constitution as ”excellent progress” toward democracy in Iraq, painting an upbeat [...]

The Department of Homeland Security is a huge undertaking. I supported the idea, but not the final form — I fail to understand why an entity charged with domestic security doesn’t include the law enforcement agency, the FBI, most concerned with the undertaking.
I changed my mind, though, when I read two articles in Government [...]

Every now and then I browse a feature in the online Asia Times called “Ask Spengler.” It’s an advice column unlike any I’ve seen in the US, although you might come close if you combined Chuck Shepherd, Cecil Adams, Randy Cohen and perhaps Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
The Spengler column I linked above may not [...]

On the one hand, they’ve most of ‘em been dealing with the Bush, if that’s his real name, family for quite some while. On the other hand, they might regard Kerry as less likely to drop the 3rd Infantry Division in their laps on a dare. So I’m thinking it’s up for grabs.

From the Slate bulletin boards, this one on the Bush, if that’s his real name, 911-invoking ads:
Body parts are real, the firefighters fake
‘Cause there’s just so much reality the president can take.
Why’d we have to script what the “firefighters” say?
We can’t afford to let you hear what the real ones say today
Everything from the last [...]

This story isn’t as portentous as the writers made it sound, but it’s interesting to note that the Brits were still wrangling almost right up to zero hour about whether or not the invasion of Iraq would be legal. The resaon it actually mattered to them is that, unlike us, they’re signatories to the International [...]

Which is good, because these aren’t subtle days. Jimmy Breslin’s column in tomorrow’s Newsday begins with this: In his first campaign commercial, George Bush reached down and molested the dead.

And I couldn’t be happier. According to Editor & Publisher, the New York Times got three nods from the Pulitzer juries this year, as opposed to nine (!) for the LA Times and four for the Washington Post, the latter of which deserved to be beaten about the head and shoulders as much as or [...]

Actually that’s Thomas Powers putting words in Perle’s mouth via a review of the new Perle/David Frum opus, “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror.” Perle’s position on resolving most international situations seems to be the evil twin of Reagan’s “Trust but verify” approach to glasnost; in Perle’s world, it’s “Don’t [...]

in Government Executive magazine.
Still, progress aside, a lingering challenge for the department is to figure out how to define success. Right now, in the absence of a more sophisticated equation, there is a sort of binary calculation: Attacked equals failure; not attacked equals success. But does the absence of another 9/11 necessarily mean that the [...]

The Pentagon, dissatisfied with the nature of coverage traditional media are providing it in Iraq, is getting into the biz.
KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait (AP) The U.S. military will launch its own news service in Iraq and Afghanistan to send military video, text and photos directly to the Internet or news outlets.
…
“This is the kind of news [...]