Oh. Um, never mind …
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Barbara Ehrenrich, a leftie author and activist, is subbing for the hapless ultra-moderate New York Times columnist Tom Friedman during the first month of his rehabilitation. Ehrenreich is a Social Democrat and, most recently, the author of Nickel and Dimed – On Not Getting by In America. She inherents Friedman’s coveted Sunday Times slot and [...]

In an effort to solidify his standing among African-American voters, Bush*, as elsewhere noted, is set to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to avoid attending the NAACP’s national convention. It’s quite possible he’ll get half the percentage of the African-American vote as he got in 2000, which would put him somewhere below 5%, [...]

The specter of gay marriage is casting light upon recesses of the Republican mind perhaps better left dark.
First off the mark was Senator Rick Santorum, who apparently fears that he might somehow get lured into screwing the family pooch if gay marriage becomes a widespread fact, and now Senator John Cornyn of Texas apparently has [...]

James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, is quoted in the laughable WorldNet Daily excoriating senators for fleeing before the wrath of the homosexual lobby.
As the Senate debates the Federal Marriage Amendment, supporters of the measure charge a number of lawmakers are afraid to vote according to their inclinations because they fear the homosexual [...]

Falluja, the first city in Iraq to successfully resist the occupation — the US ceded control of the city to a group of former Ba’athist military officers after a bloody and ultimately futile seige — has turned into the insurgents’ version of the Green Zone, the more or less impenetrable area in central Baghdad that [...]

I was browsing around some sites tonight I hadn’t visited in quite some while. One of them Digital Journalist, hosted a photoessay a few months ago examining the effect Israel’s security wall was having on the Palestinians in its path. That got me thinking and thinking got me writing. Rather than duplicate it here, I’ll [...]

Does anyone remember the last time the United States actually exported democracy? The most recent efforts that come to mind are the Marshall Plan and the occupation of Japan. Most of our foreign affairs since then, both the public kind and the sneaking around in cheap motels kind, have been noticeably thin on the reform [...]

I suppose the explanation is that Barbara Ehrenreich, as with most Nader 2000 supporters, has to find a way to retrofit the outcome of that effort so as to coexist with a routine that includes getting up in the morning and facing the mirror. And so the Dowdian flavor to her current column in the [...]

I ran across a pre-invasion Washington Post article providing the broad strokes of US support for Iraq prior to the Gulf War, and it got me thinking about blowback, and the time frame for it.
It’s probably just coincidence, but the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq took place about twenty years after we started giving [...]

The company that hosts my site experienced a denial of service attack over the past couple of days and apparently chose to ward off the attacking machines one at a time. My own access to the site and my email server is still spotty. Back tomorrow, I hope.

I have no idea what the story with Sandy Berger actually is, but I must say it’s a bit spooky, if he really is that absent-minded or disorganized, to think he was in charge of our national security. That aside, Josh Marshall has what I think is the definitive (and pretty obvious) take on the [...]

The Government Accountability Office, known until about a week ago as the Government Accounting Office, has issued a new report showing that the military faces a shortfall of about $13 billion on top of the $65 billion supplemental appropriation already approved earlier this year.
The administration would prefer not to return to Congress with another [...]

Bush and the National Guard: Let’s Move On
by BTC NEWS
23 July 2004
Washington (BTC NEWS) – Now that the Pentagon has found the inadvertently lost or destroyed payroll records for President Bush*’s 1973 Alabama National Guard duty, many will be wondering just how to make use of the new information.
Your typical liberal will, of course, say [...]

First there’s Sandy Berger doing whatever he did or didn’t do with papers from the National Archive, then we got Senator Richard Shelby (Moron-AL) under investigation for leaking news of the National Security Agency’s al Qaeda telephone intercepts, a leak that, according to intelligence officials, alerted the terrorists to surveillance of one of their key [...]

What happens when the press falls down and can’t, or won’t, get up?.
Four years into Mexico’s newly minted electoral democracy, all is not as it should be with the body politic. One indication is that the host of the most influential news show in the capital is a clown.
We’re not in an exactly analagous situation. [...]

I probably mentioned this already, but standout journalist Nir Rosen has a series of articles about his recent month or so inside Fallujah, the first independent city in Iraq. No one esle I’ve read has provided anything like the context he does, not to mention the scorecard for keeping track of the major players in [...]

the Democratic candidate for Senator from Illinois, gave a spectacular speech at the Democratic convention. He’ll be 59 years old in 16 years, closing out his third Senate term or his second term as vice president.
The coverage of the convention has been pretty abysmal. That’s not the least bit shocking as regards the mainstream [...]

by the press, the delegates to the Democratic convention escaped all but the most casual mention in most of the writeups I read. I didn’t watch anything on TV except the speeches, but I’m assuming the coverage by the networks was at least as bad and probably much worse than anything the print guys perpetrated.
The [...]

For health reasons, I’ve been getting my convention converage entirely from the print world. Mostly it’s been disappointing, in large part because the press are still pounding many of the themes they were during the primaries (the “unstable, Bush*-bashing angry Democrat” chief among them).
Slate Magazine sent at least six writers to the convention. (Their [...]

later in the day. I was out falling off a surfboard and watching my kid catch some waves that were just a hair smaller than she is. I hear the speech was great. I’m not sure if that’s “great” relative to John Kerry or just plain “great,” but either way it probably surpassed most people’s [...]

Excluding any convention gems, this can’t be topped. Juan Cole, on his excellent Informed Comment blog, responded as follows to Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that terrorists are as determined to destroy the US as were the WWII Axis powers.
Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis [...]

It’s as if there was a god and she’s decided to try her hand at screenwriting. There’s nothing I can say to cushion the blow.
While Gov. Jeb Bush reassures Floridians that touch screen voting machines are reliable, the Republican Party is sending the opposite message to some voters.
The GOP urged some Miami voters [emphasis mine] [...]

I know very little about Sudan in general and the situation in Darfur particularly, so running across this essay in the London Review of Books was a treat, if a troublesome one. The gist of it is there’s no quick fix to be had once, or if, the slaughter is stopped. I had to read [...]