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classic pickle
professional liars needed. must be able to read government press releases with straight face. previous experience in government a plus. equal opportunity employer.
tar baby
calpundit on newt gingrichs guidebook to tarring your political opponents.
physical fitness
"If you think of physical genius as a pyramid, with, at the bottom, the raw components of coördination, and, above that, the practice that perfects those particular movements, then this faculty of imagination is the top layer. This is what separates the physical genius from those who are merely very good."
protest band-its
who would have guessed that the dixie chicks would become the most politicized band in recent memory.
boys choir
"The US military has admitted that children aged 16 years and younger are among the detainees being interrogated at its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a US military spokesman, yesterday said all the teenagers being held were "captured as active combatants against US forces", and described them as "enemy combatants".
sigh gone
"Last week the United States concluded the military phase of the war in Iraq and began discussing the creation of a new political regime and a new system. During the war—just as in every other U.S. military intervention of the past decade—Washington had to face the so-called Vietnam syndrome: the fear that conflict in a foreign country will lead to quagmire, especially in a country where the native population can use guerrilla tactics to stymie superior military technology. But there's another type of Vietnam syndrome, less well-known but just as pervasive. It derives from our relationship with South Vietnam and the political quagmire that resulted from our experience as democratic imperialists there. And if we don't address it, we may very well repeat it in Iraq.
What wrong turns did the United States take in South Vietnam?"
via hauser report
neo york
"Instead, said Mr. Gerson, it comes from New York moneymen like Bruce Kovner, chairman of the Caxton Corporation, and Roger Hertog, the vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management. Last year, both financiers helped fund a new newspaper, The New York Sun, now fighting its anti-liberal battle with its New York Times–counterprogrammed slogan, "A Different Point of View." Both Mr. Kovner and Mr. Hertog also chipped in to join neoliberal Martin Peretz as co-owners of The New Republic. Mr. Kovner and Mr. Hertog, as enlightened neoconservative businessmen-intellectuals, are also on the board of the Manhattan Institute, where Mr. Gerson and William Kristol are also trustees, as well as the Washington, D.C.–based American Enterprise Institute. The A.E.I., a favored neoconservative think tank, has recently served as a kind of human-resource office for the Bush administration. It’s the venue that President Bush chose to step up to explain his intentions toward Iraq on Feb. 26. As he stood before the A.E.I., he called the organization the home of "some of the finest minds in our nation" and said they’d done "such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds." Lynn Cheney, the Vice President’s wife, is a board member, and Richard Perle, the former Defense Department adviser known as the "father of the Iraq war," is a resident fellow."
iraqi prison blues
"And I was right. Out of the five of us picked up hours earlier from our Baghdad hotel by Saddam Hussein's security police, I was the second to be called into a cell that was the reception area of this wing of the vast prison. I was the second to have all my possessions registered and stored, and I was the second to be told to strip to my underwear and put on the same type of pajamas the broken man in the corner was wearing.
By that stage, within my first hour in Abu Ghraib, I already had lost the possibility of resistance and the power of self-determination.
"We're in the worst prison in the Middle East," I had whispered to Molly Bingham, a freelance photographer from New York who was rounded up in my group. We sat on the floor in the corridor outside the processing cell."
via talk left
brotherhoods
"Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as "the Family." The Family is, in its own words, an "invisible" association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as "members," as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities."
via cursor
party hearty
"Will Greens and progressive Democrats, sharing a mutual alarm about the state of the nation under George W. Bush, begin exploring a marriage of convenience in 2004 -- or as Dugger puts it, "a national emergency coalition"? Medea Benjamin does not expect to hear any such overtures from the Democrats, who continue to treat Greens "as if we didn't have the right to exercise our own minds" -- or in Robinson's words, simply as a "wayward constituency.""