"nobody could have known" vs "nothing new here"

* "War on Terror" sounds even funnier in pakistani english than it does when Blinky says it

* dave mcgowan, conspiracy writer extraordinaire, is back in the keyboard saddle. i havent read his stuff for ages cos he took a long hiatus and got bored checking for new material. i'll pore over his post-hiatus stuff in the next few days, but here is his post on cheney shooting a man. it's worth reading even though burr-gate was many media cycles ago.

* laura points to her earlier work on the foggo/wilkes connection, and lays out a roapmap for others looking into the story: "The larger point I raised in this piece should also not be missed: the security implications, and counterintelligence implications, raised by the Cunningham case... One place someone might want to look: Cunningham's trips to Saudi Arabia, and what they were all about. I know for a fact that the half of this has not yet been reported."
indeed, i've been shadowing laura's work in this area - re the SAudi trip, see here and here for example.

* and then there's this rumour: "Wilkes will implicate four more Republicans for possible criminal activity: Richard Pombo, John Doolittle, Duncan Hunter, and Jerry Lewis."
and that's not all, of course.

* "A State Department-commissioned poll taken days before January's Palestinian elections warned U.S. policymakers that the militant Islamic group Hamas was in a position to win.
Nevertheless, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after the election that they had no advance indication of a major Hamas triumph... "I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by its very strong showing," Rice said on Jan. 29 as she flew to London for talks on the election results with her counterparts from the European Union, Russia and the United Nations." (link)
nobody could have known - the repug mantra

* jane: "That Bush let someone (Heckuvajob) with the goods on him get so far out of the fold is an incredibly stupid mistake; Brownie above all others should've been kitted up with some cushy job and bankrolled to into abject silence. It was an outrageous stumble on the part of a beleaguered and embattled administration, one I'm more than willing to take advantage of."

* btw - i've noticed a newly revarnished repug 'deflect' mechanism that has been trotted out this past week in a few different situations: " nothing new here" - keep an eye out for it. i can't quite remember the situations it was used - there was the AP/Katrina video, and then someone used it re Paul Pillar (on Lehrer), and i think i saw it somewhere else as well...

"nobody could have known" vs "nothing new here" - the new mashup.