Can these people read the Constitution? Muslims shouldn’t be elected to office?
Here’s a question I’d like to ask George Bush: “Your close political ally Pat Robertson has recently stated that he believes Muslim-American citizens should not be eligible for political office in the United States. Do you disavow this statement?” If we could get him [...]

Duncan Black at Atrios suggests that if the press corpse can’t wean themsleves from the anonymous briefings, they should at least take advantage of the opportunity to leak the briefers’ names to bloggers or to Slate’s Jack Shafer, who has generously offered to serve as a conduit. But that’s not a solution, really: it’s more like a national press version of the MTV series, “Punk’d.”

The kernel of the issue remains the same: if reporters and their editors don’t want to get serially abused by anonymous administration briefers, just bite the bullet and quit attending the briefings. Hell, you’re all on the ultra-top-secret anonymous press gaggle press release distribution list anyway, so it isn’t as though you’ll actually miss anything.

Knight Ridder, the only national newspaper service with any right to be consistently proud of its coverage of the runup to and aftermath of the Iraq invasion, has, fittingly, become the first major US news outlet to cover the leaked British memo detailing the UK’s intention of going along with the Bush administration’s now-documented intention [...]

In response to an interesting post over at Crooked Timber, I would like to argue that America make Election Day a major national holiday. I lot of people don’t vote because they have to cram it in either before or after work. Some have proposed moving it to a weekend, but I propose that democracy [...]

Google, the world’s most widely used search engine, are applying for a patent on technology that would rank news sources for theirs Google News search engine by quality of the source. A Reuters story says the new search algorithm would weight sources by “the amount of important coverage produced by an identified news source; [...]

So here’s a caricature: If The Times aren’t publishing demonstrably false information gleaned from anonymous sources, à la Judith Miller’s incurious stenography during the runup to the invasion and in the immediate aftermath of it, they’re publishing unverifiable information from on the record sources, and they’re doing it the day after announcing a concerted effort to regain the trust of their readers.

Kevin Drum has been reading political scientist Larry Bartels’ research and telling us all about it. The evidence seems to indicate that different political parties generate different economic results. Under Democrats there is higher and more equitable growth, while under Republicans there is lower growth which is concentrated at the top. However, growth is higher [...]

Last year, the PBGC went to court to stop US Airways from defaulting on a $110 million payment to that company’s pension plans when it was in bankruptcy court. During the proceeding, US Airways told the bankruptcy court that making the payment would be “irrational.” In comments to Business Week at the time, PBGC Executive Director Brad Belt described the company’s argument as “a remarkable statement. The company is saying it’s irrational to keep your pension promises and to comply with federal pension law. Bankruptcy should not be the path of least resistance to deal with your pension obligations.”

In prepared testimony to the Senate commerce, science and transportation committee, Government Accountability Office (GAO) Associate General Counsel Susan Poling explained the agency’s legal opinions that unattributed government video news releases (VNRs) violate government prohibitions against covert publicity or propaganda.
Poling says that the two legal opinions GAO issued last year declaring two Health and [...]

I don’t expect every journalist to pick up a camera or a laptop and head off into a firefight. I do expect every journalist to respect the few who do it and to make sure their work gets the attention it deserves. The people at The Note deserve every bit of scorn they get for ducking that responsibility, and so do all the other journalists who consistently underplay the story.

I went to the White House press briefing twice this week, on Thursday and Friday, hoping to get a response to the recent revelation in the London Sunday Times that, eight months before the Iraq invasion, “intelligence and facts were being fixed” to support Bush’s war plan.
On Thursday, the reporters in the two-thirds-full briefing [...]

The Washington Monthly’s Drum and Ignatius both think that if the Ignatius scenario is accurate, the reporters are in something of a bind about whether they should breach their confidentiality agreements with the source. But unless they promised the source not to reveal his name in connection with any crimes he might commit during the investigation of the original one, it’s difficult to see the difficulty. Miller might suffer some pangs of conscience about giving up someone who is probably among the sources who lied to her about the Iraq threat, and some trepidation about losing access to other highly placed liars. But that’s not really a First Amendment issue.

From AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Staff Sgt. Samuel T. Castle of Naples died Wednesday from injuries suffered from an improvised explosive device in Al Asad, the Department of Defense said Friday. He was assigned to the Army’s 327th Signal Battalion, 35th Signal Brigade, Fort Bragg, N.C.
…
Both Samuel Castle and his wife, Nicole, [...]

To the untrained eye, one not connected to the brain of a counterinsurgency scholar, it looks like the insurgents are doing this: killing off members of the government; killing off officers of the security services; killing off recruits to the security services; killing US soldiers; blowing up Iraq’s infrastructure; and, demonstrating convincingly that neither the US nor the Iraqi government, such as it is, can protect Iraq’s civilians or their property.

DARFUR DRAWN :: War through the eyes of a child

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Why does no one care about Darfur? A rally yesterday in London only managed to draw 150 people (chronicled here by blogger Lakshmi). The answer, I suspect, is multi-facteted, and ranges from indifference and impotence to [...]

Michael Getler, the Post’s ombudsman, apologized yesterday for his paper’s failure to cover the “UK memo” story, which we here at BTC News were on top of from the beginning. Apparently, Getler’s been inundated with angry emails on the subject. An excerpt from his column:
“I’ve said in earlier columns that I don’t like massive e-mail [...]

One likely warning sign of an impending Cheney candicacy might be a Republican attempt, beginning in the 2006 Congressional campaigns, to gerrymander the boundaries of “the politics of personal destruction” to include references to a candidate’s health history.

In Ireland on Monday, Condi Rice warned Syria to tighten control of the 600 mile border between Syria and Iraq, saying that the Syrian regime was allowing militants to cross the border and join the Iraq insurgency.
Syria, which has a considerably smaller and overwhelmingly less sophisticated military than does the US, may be turning a [...]

Although, then, the story about Syria and New Bridge appears to be untrue, it does help point up the extraordinary web of relationships between Washington insiders who sometimes hold dual, superficially conflicting roles.

And at the end of it all, we’re still left with questions about what investigations have been completed and reviewed by whom, and whether or not the allegations made by numerous Guantanamo detainees and a US government official, are true. Somewhere, behind the smoke and the heat, lie the answers.

At his best, Daniel Okrent was a good ombudsman. Most of the time he was mediocre, often enough unable to recognize bad journalism when he saw it. At his worst, he was a dishonest bully who should never have been allowed to complete his term at the paper.

The editorial board of the Des Moines Register became the first US newspaper to call for an independent investigation into the Downing Street memo, top secret minutes from a July, 2002, meeting between British prime minister Tony Blair and senior members of his Cabinet who said they believed the US had determined to attack Iraq [...]

Today in the White House briefing room, I asked Scott McClellan this question:
Scott, last week you said that claims in the leaked Downing Street memo that intelligence was being fixed to support the Iraq War as early as July 2002 are “flat-out wrong.” According to the memo, which was dated July 23, 2002, and whose [...]

So the “nuclear option” debate is over (for now). The conservatives are crying foul and the Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief. Which is very strange, since this is as much a compromise as a mugger deciding at last the minute not to take your life along with your wallet is a compromise. [...]

Bolton’s nomination has been troubled by allegations that he sought to have intelligence analyses tailored to his needs, and that he bullied analysts who refused to cooperate with him, in some cases attempting to get the analysts fired. His opponents contend that appointing a UN Ambassador with a reputation for twisting intelligence will only diminish the country’s already damaged credibility.

Neither government, in the U.K. or the U.S., have disputed the accuracy of the meeting minutes summarized in the memo. But even though by far the more serious charges in the memo are leveled at the U.S. administration — that the “last resort” war, costing the country nearly $300 billion and counting, nearly 2,000 military dead and counting, nearly 20,000 wounded, maimed and injured and counting, many tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, maimed and wounded, and our credibility shattered not only in the Muslim world, but the rest of it as well, was the product of incessant lying, to Congress and the American public, by George Bush and his administration — our press have given it an almost invisible fraction of the attention the British press have done.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average pay for top US executives was 185 times that of the average employee in 2003. And that was down from a ratio of 300-1 in 2000.

On May 10, Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi, the newly appointed governor of Iraq’s Anbar province, was kidnapped by insurgents.
Five days later, according to news reports, he was freed.
But today, more than two weeks after he was freed, he was “found dead along with his militant captors after a clash with U.S. forces.”
Notice anything unusual in [...]

We’ll leave it to the Constitutional scholars to determine whether stupidity is an impeachable offense — judging purely from the experience of the previous Oval Office occupant, it is — and just focus on the fact of it.