For a second year, U.S. government screeners have failed to detect a shipment of depleted uranium in a container sent by ABCNEWS from overseas as part of a test of security at American ports.

Weeks go by without serious newspapers investigating or commenting on human rights abuses by the American government.

apparently 60,000 iraqi men have been trained to defend iraq (3 days earlier, on wednesday, rumsfeld in baghdad put it at 50,000. what kind of training do these people get that 10,000 of them can be trained in 3 days?)

"The expectation is that we would not get a large additional number of forces as a result of an additional U.N. resolution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld / Powell told lawmakers the world community is suffering from "donor's fatigue"

"We are helping the long suffering people of Vietnam enjoy the freedoms of democracy," Johnson said. "To do so, we must do what is necessary, at a cost that is necessary, to promote freedom throughout the world."

Nearly 160 local governments and the legislatures of Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii have condemned the Patriot Act and, in some cases, instructed their officers not to cooperate with its enforcement. / "This is a country where a totalitarian state is least likely to emerge, because of our long tradition of checks and balances."

Krugman: The first is that a good part of the media are essentially part of the machine. If you work for any Murdoch publication or network, or if you work for the Rev. Moon's empire, you're really not a journalist in the way that we used to think. You're basically just part of a propaganda machine. And that's a pretty large segment of the media.
he is amazed that the nation, as whole, hasn't caught on to the fact that we have the bank robbers running the bank.
When you talk about [Bush] administration policy, it's not a case of, well, "OK, maybe I disagree with your model, but according to your model, this policy will do what you say it will." These guys are insisting all the time that two minus one equals four. There isn't any reasonable argument in their favor, but there's a lot of power in their favor.
So you have a situation in which mainstream publications continue to report and hammer on Davis' $38 billion deficit, which isn't even remotely true, while Bush, for the most part, gets a free pass on the $500 billion deficit which is absolutely real.
There's an enormous scandal right now involving Boeing and a federal contract, which appears to have been overpaid by $4 billion. The Pentagon official who was responsible for the contract has now left and has become a top executive at Boeing. And it's been barely covered in the press –- a couple of stories on inside pages.
I'm trying to understand what a petroleum industry expert is telling me, when he says that some of the market futures suggest that the market is pricing in about a one-in-three chance that unrest in Iraq spreads to Saudi Arabia.



"No indication of post-1991 weaponization activities was uncovered in Iraq."

But I only despised Richard Nixon. I never hated him. I have never known what it is like to hate anyone. Until now.Until George W. Bush became president.

Novak told other commentators they were getting carried away over "a few missed meetings." He is Rove’s conservative hand puppet. By leaking Ambassador Wilson’s wife’s name to Novak, and by Novak writing a column about her, Karl Rove has committed treason, violated the National Security Act, and should be brought to justice, as surely and swiftly as Osama bin Laden ought to be.

March said he found absentee ballot totals from 57 of 164 San Luis Obispo County precincts in an easily accessible File Transfer Protocol site operated by North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold. The votes were time-stamped at 3:31 p.m. on March 5, 2002 -- more than four hours before polls closed.

"I heard somebody say 'We'll we need a tax increase to pay for this'," Bush said. "That's an absurd notion.

Australia and its allies who are battling to free up world farm trade are under intense pressure to compromise their ambitious demands or risk the failure of world trade talks in Cancun, Mexico.

"They are talking about expelling or killing the President of the Palestinian Authority, recognised by almost all the countries of the world, including the United States."

Last year, according to Treasury statistics, foreigners bought 58 percent of the securities that Treasury sold to investors. Some 60 percent of that 58 percent was bought by central banks. Although Treasury doesn’t say so, a large percentage of that went to the central banks of Japan and China. So you can imagine what would happen if, for reasons financial or political, either bank stopped buying Treasuries. Or, heaven help us, began selling them heavily.

Schwarzenegger: "I'm back to recalling his words, which were: 'Barbara, you will never meet anyone who is as good as I am,"' she said, imitating his accent. "That was fairly prophetic."

I've actually gotten to the point where I hope Dick Cheney is embroiled in a Clancyesque conspiracy to benefit Halliburton. Because if it's not a conspiracy, it's naïveté and ideology.

No amount of American propaganda is going to change the fact that the United States is responsible for the existence of the most unsavory bunch of dictators in the world, which it manipulates to steal the resources of the Middle East in order to serve as the basis for its own prosperity.

The Washington Post pointed out yesterday, in the past six weeks President Bush has invoked 9/11 not just to defend Iraq policy and argue for oil drilling in the Arctic, but in response to questions about tax cuts, unemployment, budget deficits and even campaign finance. / So these people must win, at any cost. / In other words, if you thought the last two years were bad, just wait: it's about to get worse. A lot worse.

mred - i know ive been mostly worried about the present from the perspective that it augurs badly for the future, hearing pk say 'if you thought the last two years were bad, just wait: it's about to get worse. A lot worse.' doesnt help my optimism levels much


He compared the situation to the carnival game of shooting ducks. "I was the duck," he said.
"We can't lose," he said. "We can't lose this. It'll all have been a waste. If we pull out now, I got blown up for nothing."

mred - this is why war is dumb - the gi sez that, the other side say that - all of a sudden u r fiting for the wrong reasons