Fiat Lux

Three months to election day. And a fresh round of terror warnings. What concerns me is not so much the warning but

1) The sense that there have been too many vague terror alerts without anything happening - and by that I mean the arrest and successful prosecution of some actual terrorists here in the US.

2) A sense that there is so much skepticism of anything that comes out of this administration's mouth that warnings are not going to get taken seriously, even if the threat is real.

Now I'm still willing to believe that our law enforcement agencies are sincerely trying to find and stop terrorists. But it would help me and I think a lot of other citizens be less cynical about the whole thing if we saw or heard more than just vague threat announcements ever so often. I'm not an expert on how terrorists get busted, but it seems to me that if our law enforcement services know enough about domestic plots to be able to provide warnings about specific times and places, they should know enough about who is doing the planning to make some arrests and make some cases in court (hint - Jose Padilla doesn't count). It also doesn't help credibility when the government can't even produce an accurate report on how many terror attacks have occurred recently.

At least on the left side of the fence I don't have a lot of company in my willingness to give the benefit of the doubt. It's not just the flame-throwers like Pandagon who think the government is either deliberately politicizing, flat-out lying and/or too incompetent to do a good job of protecting the country from real threats. Even more moderate lefties like Orcinus are highly skeptical of what's going on.

Sent to me by my sister. I have no idea who wrote it originally.

A Guide to U.S. Newspapers

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like the smog statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn't have to leave L.A. to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country, and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority, feminist atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are democrats.

10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

My addendum:

11. New York Newsday is read by the people who used to read the New York Daily News but have moved to Long Island. They still don't care who runs the country as long as they get a seat on the train, but now their commute is twice as long.

As in computers. The hard drive Scott gave me to put into my rebuilt computer rolled over and died tonight. So tomorrow I have to go buy a new hard drive and start the tedious process of reinstalling my whole system AGAIN. 2 more days down the drain.

I think I sucessfully saved my most recent data before the drive completely died, but I won't know for sure until I reinstall. At worst, I lost 2 weeks of work and emails, plus a few odds and ends like the 4 new iTunes I bought last week.

I am so very not happy right now.

I'm in a pretty foul mood from trying to get my system rebuilt (have just a handful of programs reinstalled so far) and then I find this in my Gmail in-box: Hate Crime in SF

Swastikas were scrawled over as many as 50 campaign signs in a hate crime against an Israeli-American Richmond District businessman seeking election to the Board of Supervisors.

The target of the anti-Semitic vandalism spree was David Heller, president of the Geary Boulevard Merchant Association and first-time candidate for supervisor in District 1.

Upon arriving to work Monday morning, Heller was inundated with messages from business owners whose windows had been defaced with swastikas over the weekend. In each reported incident, the campaign sign, which features Heller's picture, was taped to the inside of the store window and the vandal used a black marker to superimpose a swastika and a Star of David symbol in front of Heller's face on the outside of the glass.

I lived the the Richmond district for 2 and a half years. It's a great place to live and is arguably the most overtly Jewish section of the city; there's three synagogues and one of the city's two kosher butchers in the area where this hate crime happened. Anti-semitism is always upsetting but when it hits close to home like this it's also scary.

What also concerns me is that a number of the businesses who were displaying signs for Hiller have now pulled then out of their windows becasue they're concerned about the potential for further vandalism - which hurts his campaign. Now I don't know anything about Hiller as a condidate but when people can be scared into not supporting a candidate for fear of violence there is something very wrong going on.

Bleh.

Back to rebuilding my system.

The computer is more or less functional again, although I have been dragging my feet reinstalling software packages. I'm only about halfway through that particular quagmire so far. I am very tired of reinstalling and resetting all the little settings and options and filters to get things the way I like them, but of course until I do get them all set just so, it doesn't feel like I'm using "my" computer.

The only good thing about this whole mess is it has caused me to take a hard look at all the crap I have installed and question exactly how much of it I really need to have on my system. For example, do I really need WinZip AND WinRAR? Multiple FTP clients and HTML editors? Old games that I used to like but haven't played in ages? Bottom line, NO.

In this case, the 2000 year old classic, Sun Tzu's "The Art Of War". In Chapter 13 Sun Tzu discusses spies:

There are five kinds of spies used: Local spies, internal spies, double spies, dead spies, and living spies.

When all five are used, and no one knows their Way, it is called the divine organization, and is the ruler's treasure.

This Administration, however, seeems to have created a 6th kind of spy - the spy that you burn to try to gain internal political benefit.

U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources say.

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

And this isn't the first time - need I mention Valerie Plame?

Another lesson this administration should have learned about spies before invading Iraq but did not can also be found in Sun Tzu (emplhasis added) -

Only the wisest ruler can use spies; only the most benevolent and upright general can use spies, and only the most alert and observant person can get the truth using spies.

It is subtle, subtle!

This Modern World has a nice item about the upcoming "National Preparedness Month", scheduled to be kicked off by Tom Ridge on September 9th.

Per TMW:

Why September 9th? That's awfully late, if it's supposed to be the entire month. My guess, thinking like Karl Rove: this year's 9/11 anniversary falls on a Saturday, so an announcement on the date or even Friday would only get a burst of free media on a weekend. But by timing it for the 6 pm news on Thursday, it'll reach the Friday papers, and thus be fully-injected into all of the emotion-laden anniversary coverage, plus the Sunday morning talk shows.

The idea, obviously, is to throw a large amount of focus, possibly for weeks on end, on the only issue on which Bush outpolls Kerry. And of course this will come on the heels of the GOP convention. So where the Democrats' post-convention media got blitzed with terror warnings based on years-old intelligence, the Republicans' afterglow might well be favorably extended.

Indeed. But here's the real point of the whole thing (emphasis original):

It's three years after 9/11, and less than three months before an election, and now we get a National Preparedness Month.

And yes, let's ask Bush and Tom Ridge the simple question: what the hell do these people think the previous 35 months were?

There is so much bad news coming out of Iraq these days, so much confusion and chaos, and no idea how anything good is going to be able to come out of that mess, that I just shut down and stop processing information. I don't want to deal with it.

I suspect I'm not the only person who feels that way, and that might be part of why Iraq coverage is not in the press as much anymore. Also, of course, the so-called handover of power now means that news stations can, if they choose, slot Iraq back into their Middle East coverage, not treat it as US news (despite the fact that American troops are still dying and being wounded there daily).

All this is a very long preface to yet another reason why I LOVE Fafblog. The guy is a freaking genius. He somehow manages to report on a lot of news and still make me smile.

"You gotta use discipline on a young country," says Giblets. "Otherwise it won't grow up with the right values. Spare the gonad electrocution, spoil the child." "But won't torture corrupt the government an make the people angrier and more hostile?" says me. "An won't they hate us more for letting the new government torture them?" "Oh-hoho," says the Medium Lobster. "You poor, ignorant little Fafnir. You must understand: Iraq is going through a transitional period right now. It would be wrong for us to shock them with the presence of strange, new, unfamiliar cultural elements, such as 'not-torture' and 'not-oppression.' The key phrase here, Fafnir, is 'transition'."

Meanwhile Iraq's new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has banned the TV network Al Jazeera for the next 30 days after accusin it of "inciting hatred" an actin "against the interests of security, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people."

"But how is this different from politically-motivated censorship?" says me.
"Well you can't have a democracy without some politically-motivated censorship," says Giblets.

Go read the rest. Then bookmark Fafblog if you haven't already. And then bow! yes, bow before Giblets, bow before Giblets NOOOOOOOOW!

It's a frequent criticism of President Bush that he's stupid, and this latest quote below is certainly a stupid thing to say. But I don't think it's actual lack of intelligence that's the problem. Rather, I think the problem is that he lives in a world completely cut off from the reality 99% of the rest of us live in.

Bush on taxing the rich:

[Bush said that] high taxes on the rich are a failed strategy because "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway."

In BushWorld, any tax increase that Congress could come up with will have loopholes that their well-paid accountants will figure out how to exploit, so it's a waste of time even trying to increase taxes. They'll just offshore their corporation, or rewrite their compensation package, or shuffle the web of trusts, or something like that.

In short, in BushWorld, they can't conceive of a tax package that cannot be dodged or evaded. The rules are for suckers.

It would be nice if people in BushWorld took their obligations as seriously as they do their privileges, but that, I suppose, would be asking too much.

Comment spam, which to date has been pretty minimal, has sharply spiked upwards the past few days. I suppose it's the price of increased site traffic, but it's annoying. Not that I get a lot of comments, but I definitely prefer to keep commenting on when possible. I have reluctantly decided to turn off comments on some of the more popular older posts (e.g. the ones on The Davinci Code and Fahrenheit 9/11) on my site for now, since they're the posts getting hardest hit with comment spam.

I'm planning on upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 when it comes out, in large part becasue it will integrate the MT-Blacklist plugin. If comment spam starts getting really bad I may implement the plugin sooner than that, but I'm going to try to hold out for just the one upgrade so I don't have to implement the same change twice.

I've often thought over the past few years that my grandparents, who weathered the Great Depression, would have a lot of insight to offer on today's economy. Kevin Drum makes a similar point on his site today:

Almost everyone who's not already well off these days knows someone who's been ruined by a personal catastrophe, and this personal knowledge rubs off. You're worried that you could get laid off at any time — and not be able to find a job for months or years. You're worried that a sudden healthcare crisis could devastate you. You're worried that your pension fund or your 401(k) might not be there when you retire because you made bad investment choices.

FDR dedicated the New Deal to "freedom from fear." He believed that government's role was not to provide handouts to the poor, but to provide a certain minimum level of security against the everyday catastrophes that ruin people's lives.

It is this minimum level of economic security that George Bush and modern movement conservatives want to abolish. In fact, it's the point of Bush's "ownership society": if everyone owns their own Social Security account, owns their own healthcare account, and owns their own college accounts, then the government no longer provides security against disaster. If you make a mistake, or if the market makes a mistake, you're screwed.

This is likely to be the eventual downfall of modern conservatism. Human beings have a deep desire for a certain minimum level of stability and security in their lives, and eventually they'll rebel against a party that refuses to acknowledge this. Life today is so much better than it was in the 30s that people have forgotten the basic New Deal ethos that made it that way. But if conservatives have their way, it won't be much longer before they start remembering.

That said, I am not sure what the government's actual role in this process should be. My initial feeling is that attention should be paid to restructuring the tax code in order to encourage 'good' corporate behavior. Instead of the government spending billions of dollars on health insurance, why not alter the tax code so companies have a big financial incentive to give all their employees good health insurance? Self-interest and greed are powerful motivators. If you make it worth a company's while to make life better for their employees, they'll do it gladly.

If this tactic worked (and whether it could I have no idea, I'm not an economist), it would have the added benefit of totally spiking the "democrats hate business" card.

On a more personal note, certainly this household has had a large share of income instability over the past few years. It's left both financial and emotional scars on us, and an intimate knowledge of how easy it is to fall out of the 'middle class'. You need to work hard to not become a victim of your unhappiness. Finding a good job may seem impossible but you still have to believe you can find meaningful work. You may feel resentful or envious of friends who are doing better than you, but you can't let that poison your friendships, or you'll have few friends left at a time when a broad base of emotional support is more important than ever.

And taking that perspective out to the realm of the political, you can't fall victim to class warfare rhetoric. Blaming X, Y or Z for your problems might feel good for a little while but it won't solve the problems. And more than anything, that's what we need to do.

That said, I agree with Drum that today's so-called conservatives are not solving the problems we're facing. We need to give something else a try.

I was on the phone with my grandmother a little while ago. She's almost 80 but active as ever and is a dedicated Democrat, and we spent a lot of time talking about current events. I started reading through my blogroll after I got off the phone with her. Lots being said about the resigning New Jersey Governor, which I don't have much to say about right now, and then this little gem (hat tip - Sisyphus Shrugged) got me angry:

"The days when the chief Israeli puppeteer comes to the United States and meets with the puppet in the White House and then proceeds to Capitol Hill, where he meets with hundreds of other puppets, should be replaced," Nader said earlier this summer.

Source here.

The belief that Jews are secretly the puppet masters of international events and finance goes directly back to the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

Certainly American-Israeli relations and the whole godawful mess in Israel is something that everyone is entitled to have an opinion on. But to express your opinion using inflamatory language that suggests Jews secretly run the world is not fine.

Yet one more reason why Ralph Nader ought to go back to writing consumer protection guides.

Sad news this morning.

We all should be so lucky to have had a life and a death like Julia Child's. Dying peacefully in your sleep at age 91 is a pretty good way to go.

Julia Child's passing is a great loss. Her honesty and humor were refreshing, and her passion for good food, good wine, and having fun in the kitchen were obvious.

I saw a couple of the FoodTV programs featuring her last year. One that stuck in my mind was a visit by Emeril to her home, where they cooked together. She totally schooled Emeril on how to cook a chicken. It was a hoot. There was another epiode where Wolfgang Puck came over bearing champagne and made her veal, asparagus, and dessert.

Red wine with your steak, anyone?

Hat Tip: All Spin Zone for finding this beautiful quote:

Sen. Tom Harkin called Vice President Dick Cheney a "coward" for avoiding service in Vietnam and called on President Bush to end the "backdoor draft."

The Iowa Democrat was responding Friday to the call-up of a Des Moines police officer who has already completed his eight-year military commitment.

[snip]

"The part of the U.S. code that provides for this anticipates major wars, major national emergencies," Harkin said. "That is not what we're confronting right now. You think about using this law only in (extreme cases), only when we're really in dire, dire need."

Harkin also shot back at Cheney, who said in a visit to Iowa on Tuesday that presidential candidate John Kerry lacks a basic understanding of the war on terrorism and cannot make America safer.

He noted that Cheney had several student deferments that allowed him to skip serving in Vietnam.

"When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil," Harkin said. "Those of us who served and those of us who went in the military don't like it when someone like a Dick Cheney comes out and he wants to be tough. Yeah, he'll be tough. He'll be tough with somebody else's blood, somebody else's kids. But not when it was his turn to go."

Nice to see a Democrat finally being blunt about Cheney's service record (or lack thereof). Let's hope it continues.

The Presidential / VP debate schedule for the fall has been announced: details here. It's interesting to note that 2 of the 3 of the debates are going to have candidates seated at a table (the 3rd debate doesn't specify). I have no idea why but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Kerry is so much taller than Bush, and the more traditional podium debates show the height difference more clearly.

My problem with the whole debate format is it has become yet another way for candidates to get out their spin more than anything else. Nothing that's said there can be taken as either fact or serious policy proposal.

Here's an example:

I have a very clear recollection of one of the 2000 Presidential debate - I happened to be driving up Nob Hill at the time and for some reason Candiate Bush's comment about how he was completely uninterested in "nation building" (the buzzword of the time; considered a criticism of the USA's involvment in Bosina) stuck in my brain. Look what 4 years have brought.

Yet I'm sure I'll watch them all anyway.

Just when you think that this administration has been so screwed up for so long and has done so many heinous things that it's hard to tell them all apart or even care about them all anymore, along comes something that reminds you that the horror is not over and you can still be outraged.

Digby excerpts a long GQ article about Joseph and Bernadette Darby and what has happened to their lives since Joe was identifed as a whistleblower in the Abu Ghirab scandal.

Digby talks about the article as a window into red-state wingnut America and why nobody is supporting the Darbys in their home town. Which is true, and the fact that they have had to be moved into protective custody is sad, but as far as I am concerned, what's really appaling is why.

Abu Ghirab is in fact worse that we've heard. And it's getting lost in the outrage backwash. Nobody is talking about it. And we don't know why.

One thing Bernadette didn't know—because almost nobody knows it, because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret—is the rest of the story, what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Oh, you hear allusions to the fact that certain things haven't been told, like Rumsfeld saying in May that the whole story is "a good deal more terrible" than what you've seen. But you don't hear Rumsfeld saying any more than that, or explaining what "more terrible" means.

[snip]

Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered the Abu Ghraib scandal in The New Yorker, claims that video exists of young Iraqi boys being sodomized. But Hersh hasn't come forward with the video, and neither has anybody else. Even if he's not right, there's no question that other prisoners were sodomized by U.S. soldiers. There are pictures of at least one Iraqi man being raped with a light stick. You didn't see those pictures on the news though, didn't hear Rumsfeld talk about that. Just like nobody except Janis Karpinski is talking about the three military-intelligence officers who were sent home in January after the sexual assault of two female prisoners. That case is confidential, just like the roughly 5,950 pages of Major General Antonio Taguba's 6,000-page investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal are "confidential."

Its obvious that there is indeed much more to tell, but it also seems obvious that we're not going to know the worst there is to know. And the longer we don't know the truth, stand up to it, punish the guilty, and apologize, we're going to have the spectre of what we did hovering over Iraq and elsewhere for a long time.

Maybe moving back to NYC isn't such a bad idea after all .... SF beats NY on the "most overpriced places to live" list. At least we don't live in the most overpriced city - Seattle!

This article in the NY Times is an interesting slice of Israeli life.

"When I had my list of stickers, I realized it's like a capsule of Israeliness, all the brutality and aggression and the need to get out of this situation,'' said [song author David] Grossman, who is best known for magical-realistic novels like ''See Under: Love'' and volumes of left-of-center political essays, including last year's ''Death as a Way of Life.''

''The more the dead end of the situation grows, the more frustrated people become with their inability to influence it,'' he continued, in a telephone interview. "Few people on the left or the right are satisfied. And the more they are frustrated, the more they are extremists, the more bumper stickers they have on the car. Sometimes you stop behind a car that looks like a shouting demonstration.''

Gadi Taub, one of Israel's leading cultural critics and public intellectuals, put Mr. Grossman's experience into a larger context. ''Israel is such a small place that taking a political position is like declaring the very core of your identity,'' he said. ''For many years it was unthinkable for Israelis that if you're a Likud voter you could marry someone from Labor. It would be a battle over every dinner and every breakfast. So your car, too, will declare your identity. You don't think you can even make friends across bumper stickers."

iTunes doesn't have the song, unfortunately, but I found it in less than 5 minutes on an MP3 file trading network. Hat Tip: Amygdalagf for the link.

Haven't been in much of a mood for blogging this week but this is really something. Apparently - and of course nobody is quite sure why - Senator Ted Kennedy's name found itself onto the FAA's "Watch List" and Kennedy was barred from flying as a result.

Now, you may not like Ted Kennedy, but putting him on a list of people who are so much of a danger to the USA that they should not be allowed to fly smacks of deep wingnuttery. Except that this time the wingnut in question worked for the US Government.

Kennedy said it took three calls to Tom Ridge and several weeks before his name was removed from the list. Being a Senator, he has the kind of clout to make that happen. We average citizens, who would be lucky to talk to any human being ewith real clout at DHS, let alone Ridge, should be very very concerned.

The New Republic thinks Kerry should sue the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" for libel.

That is why if Bush should lose this November, there won't be any honeymoon for Kerry His first few months in office will look like the last years of the Clinton presidency: congressional inquiries, constant talk radio trash-talking, and book deals for anyone with a charge to make. Simply, Kerry can't afford to let the SBVT charges go unanswered if he wants to govern effectively.

I agree completely but I also think it's not going to happen.

Feeling a little paranoid this morning? Well if you like intrigue here's one for you.

The Pentagon has urged Congress to authorize $500 million for building a network of friendly militias around the world

Ostensibly this would allow the US to pay militia type forces to bring about law and order in "ungoverned" areas of the world (funny, I thought it was pretty much settled who got to govern just about all of the planet by now).

Of course, that leaves open the issue of whether said militias would have to even pretend to follow the Geneva Conventions or any other laws. Not that the US has been all too good at it, but this would be taking another page from the Nixon playbook - plausible deniability. "We were funding them, but no, we had no idea what they were going to do with those finds!" Political assassinations not legal? Leave it to the Militias!

Think I'm kidding?

In his testimony, Wolfowitz also suggested expanding the scope of the war on terror by including into the list of its possible targets radical Islamic clerics, who, in his words, provide "ideological sanctuary" to terrorism.

Hat tip to Larry for the link.

We're please to announce that a new kitten has come to join the household - meet our new baby GIMLI:

As a volunteer, you see literally hundreds of kittens at the SPCA during kitten season. Some stick in your heart more than others, and for whatever reason Gimli caught at mine. After seeing him go without a home for 2+ months, Scott and I decided ours was the right home for him. We brought him home today.

Gimli is an active, high-energy kitty, currently about 5 months old. He was very much in need of space to run around and play in, and being locked up with so little play room was taking a toll on him. He also had a really nasty cold for several weeks which didn't help his adoption chances. Despite it all, though, he purrs like a jackhammer the minute anyone picks him up. I had thought that when the time came for a new kitten we'd probably get a tortie, but nope! Our boy is almost entirely black except for a patch of white on his belly and the tips of his paws.

Gimli (yes, named after the Dwarf in Lord of the Rings) was the name he was assigned at the shelter. After calling him that for 2 months, I can't think of him as anything other than Gimli, so we're going to keep it. It might not have been the name we would have chosen but it's good enough.

The resident kitties are still trying to decide what to make of the newcomer. More pix are posted in the Gallery.

More to follow as he settles in, I'm sure.

Even a new kitten high can only last so long. It's back to reality today. Not only is the Marine Corps cutting its training time for soldiers,

The exercise, called a CAX in Marine lingo, has been shortened from 23 to 11 days, Col. Blake Crowe, operations officer for the Marine Corps Training Command at Quantico, Va., said in an interview.

This was done, Crowe said, to "get more battalions through" in a shorter period of time. Until now, the Marine Corps trained 10 battalions in CAX every six months. Under the accelerated schedule, it will train eight battalions in two months.

but the trainees don't even get to actually fire some of the weapons they've been trained on due to lack of funding.

Staff Sgt. Don Allen, a combat instructor, said his trainees watch demonstrations of the M203 grenade launcher, the Squad Automatic Weapon and the .50-caliber machine gun, but not everyone gets to actually fire the weapons.

"It's financial," said Allen, a combat engineer who fought in Iraq last year with the 8th Marines. "I wish I had the money for them to shoot actual rounds. When I went through this training in 1995, we all shot every weapon."

Where the hell is all the money going?

Blogging has been more irregular this past week.

Comment spam has been getting worse and worse, and fighting it has been siphoning off blogging time (I may not be able to wait for MT 3.1 to come out after all). New kitten to love and play with. Plus, I'm having a little of a crisis in confidence - it feels like anything I want to talk about, other bloggers have already addressed, and said it better than I could myself.

I guess you could say I'm in a bit of a rut. Hopefully I'll pull out soon.

Finally implemented MT-Blacklist this morning and it was so easy I wonder why I waited so long. Jay Allen rocks! In fact, I think I'll bow before him even more than I bow before Giblets.

Now I need to find a replacement for Outlook 2003, which is annoying the hell out of me. Any suugestions for a good Windows-based PIM/email client?

Yet another report on Abu Ghraib is out but this one at least starts to point the finger in the right direction.

What began several months ago with the emergence of shocking photographs showing a handful of U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq has led this week to a broad indictment of U.S. military leadership and acknowledgement in two official reports that mistreatment of prisoners was more widespread than previously disclosed.

The reports have served to undercut earlier portrayals of the abuse as largely the result of criminal misconduct by a small group of individuals. As recently as last month, an assessment by the Army's inspector general concluded the incidents could not be ascribed to systemic problems, describing them as "aberrations."

But the findings yesterday of another Army investigation offered a more critical appraisal of what led to the mistreatment at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. It implicated 27 military intelligence soldiers in abuse, providing some support for assertions by some of the seven military guards previously charged that they were not acting alone. Counting other intelligence, medical and civilian contract personnel cited for failing to report the abuse, and three more military police officers alleged to have engaged in abuse, the report appeared to raise to nearly 50 the number of people who may face charges or disciplinary action for misconduct at Abu Ghraib.

The people at the top of the foodchain, of course, are probably never going to have to pay for what happened. We'll be lucky if anyone over the rank of Colonel feels the heat.

Yet more proof that you don't need to make stuff up when - from their own mouths - you can have why God wants you to Vote Republican (not!)

Click here (must have Flash)

And even better, they have a source list for the quotes in the cartoon.

2 Russian airplanes go boom and it's barely a blip in the US press. Why? Because it's internal terrorism.

A top Russian official acknowledged Thursday what many citizens already suspected -- that terrorism was the most likely cause of two jetliners crashing minutes apart, a feeling reflected in a newspaper headline warning that "Russia now has a Sept. 11."

A day later, a Web site known for militant Muslim comment published a claim of responsibility for Wednesday's twin plane crashes, connecting the action to Russia's fight against separatists in Chechnya.

OTOH, I suppose the lack of press is good in that at least it won't inflame the paranoid among us even more.

I thought it was hilarious, per Atrios:

I swear that I witnessed George W. Bush having carnal relations with a swine. I am willing to sign an affadavit stating so.

I can now appear in commercials stating. "I am a pig farmer. While at a campaign stop in Iowa. George Bush attacked one of my sows. George Bush is a pigfucker. I know, because I was there."

Soon I will appear on the cable news shows. The Washington Post will dutifully report on my claims, because, it will not judge my credibility. I will be appointed to be a federal judge by the Kerry administration. My career path is set. Bring it on.

So after months of hinting that something big was in the wind, Josh Marshall & friends have broken their story. The thesis?

The DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a "regime change" agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself.

I need to go dig into my library to confirm this (and it's late Saturday night so I'm not going to do it now) but I have a recollection that Ghorbanifar did in fact have some sort of Israeli connection as well as being a player in Iran-Contra way back when. If I'm remembering correctly, then it's quite possible that Mossad is involved in this whole DOD/intelligence passing mess and boy is that not good for the Jews.

All that said, this is not the "bombshell that's going to rock Washington" that Marshall was promising, unless there's more yet to come. Bummer.

I was never much of a Jack Kemp fan but TNR's blog has an interesting piece about Jack Kemp and Jewish voters among other things.

Not that even Giuliani has a good chance of getting a large piece of the Jewish vote for Bush, but it's an interesting story from the otherwise uninteresting RNC convention.