seriously irritated senior White House officials

* bbc via kathleen:

"The new Italian government has already stated its intention to withdraw troops from Iraq later this year and some of the comments they have made on the Iraq situation are said to have seriously irritated senior White House officials, our correspondent adds."

oh no! the WH is mad!

* emptywheel notes that nobody is buying America's north korea missile story

* ew: anatomy 3.5 ...

* ATR: "Would Someone Please Correct Al Qaeda's Misunderstanding Of Why They Hate Us?"

* the other day i mentioned how sirota has done a great job on colbert in a 'media training' sense. Compare and contrast with Kleiman who apparently went on O'Reilly. Kleiman says:

"Not owning a television set, I'd actually never seen O'Reilly in action, other than from watching Outfoxed and occasional clips on CrooksandLiars. So I wasn't fully prepared for his technique, which is basically to say so many false things in the first thirty seconds that his guest can't possibly refute them all in the next five minutes."

Note to everyone: this is not how you prepare for an interview with anyone, let alone someone whose reputation precedes them. (see here for another recent sirota episode - and note to anyone doing an interview: don't bring up the fact outta-the-blue that someone once said that you are a "smarmy-looking liar.")

* speaking of good media, i mentioned earlier that suskind did a great job on cnni. here's a vid of him with blitzer, again doing a good job. one interesting fact that i havent seen mentioned anywhere these last days about the book is that the CIA apparently made a formal analysis, before the 04 election, the osama's election video was specifically intended to get bush elected.

* billmon:

"I have to admit, even I didn't think the political pimps in control of our national whorehouse would have the gall to sneak through a pay raise for themselves, then turn around a week later and kill the first increase in the minimum wage in almost ten years. Even I wouldn't have imagined they would think they could get away with it. Not in an election year. I guess it's their way of showing Tom DeLay they don't need him around to act like a pen full of swine with a taste for eating their own feces. The Bug Man may be gone, but his pestilence remains."

* waxman via simbaud:

"Each of the Bush Administration's three signature initiatives -- Homeland Security, the Iraq war and reconstruction in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina recovery -- has been linked to wasteful contract spending.

Spending is categorized in the report as highly concentrated on a few large contractors, with the five largest contractors receiving over 20 percent of contract dollars awarded in 2005. Last year, the largest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, received contracts worth more than the total combined budgets of the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, the Small Business Administration and the U.S. Congress.

But the fastest growing contractor under the Bush Administration has been Halliburton. Federal spending on Halliburton contracts shot up an astonishing 600% between 2000 and 2005."

* meanwhile, ew (who is apparently trying to cash in on her fame by cranking out 3 posts per day) notes that parsons is actually losing contracts