Cute. Seems the New York Times is pulling the plug on the public email addys for their writers...

Convinced that we knew where Ayman al-Zawahri was, according to news reports, CIA-operated Predator drone aircraft carried out a missile strike inside Pakistan.  Yesterday: much anticipation of consequences.  Today: consequences seem pretty bad.

We've already posted stories on the intense pressure that recruiters now face and the advertising blitz that the military is using to help out, but this one was new to me.

If you thought it was bad that the No Child Left Behind Act (section 9528) requires most secondary schools to submit lists of students with pertinent info to military recruiters, you're going to love the news that the Department of Defense maintains its own database of info on American kids of prime military recruitment age.

The first stage of rolling back wages in this country was simply to cut American jobs and add overseas jobs at a fraction of the old cost.  That left fewer jobs, but didn't lower the wages of the jobs that remained in America.

As I've said repeatedly, though, it was inevitable that this would be followed by a second stage in which the large employers used the threat of job loss to start rolling back wages on existing American jobs.

The president appeared on stage in Louisville on Wednesday, Jan. 11, to deal with, as the moderator said, "some tough and challenging questions."  Tough and challenging, indeed.  Who knew that so many Jeff Gannons could be in one place, at one time, in the form of women, men, children....

Makes you wonder who was asking the questions, don't it?  Wasn't me, wasn't anyone like me, wasn't anyone I would ever recognize; I doubt it was you and yours.

A dear friend of mine who is slowly sliding further away from the grasp of the poisons of GOP pre-processed stuff asked me recently, as we were talking....and it came time to dispell some myths, to which this person was shocked...

National Review Online's subscription come-on says, "That's right . . . for 50 years NR has provided news, commentary, and insight (not to mention sanity) to hundreds of thousands of readers. If you aren't already one of the enlightened . . . take advantage of this very special 50th anniversary offer today!

For a magazine that likes to think it has an educated, intelligent readership to enlighten, National Review sure has some questionable thinkers on staff.

Editor Rich Lowry comes to mind.  Just about every one of the admittedly few Lowry pieces that I've read have gaping holes in the logic and/or facts.  Lowry took another shot last week at defending the NSA warrantless surveillance program in a piece titled "FISA Fallacies, Bush's unconstitutional critics".

President Bush has used the phrase "coalition of the willing" so often to describe the small band of nations that agreed to go into Iraq with us that the phrase is now part of the lexicon of anyone at all political.

Frankly, it never seemed like much of a coalition to me, certainly nothing like the united forces that our president's father mustered for the first Gulf War, and from what I'm reading, it's very little like a coalition now.  It's smaller all the time, and there are some signs of serious breaks between the U.S. and the U.K., which have always been its main partners.

A report from the AScribe Newswire today carries the claim of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) that "The consulting firm in charge of investigating how toxic chromium from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) contaminated a regional aquifer" is the very same company that previously planted a fraudulent article in a scientific journal which claimed to refute the findings of an earlier study that linked chromium to cancer."

I don't know about you, but I'm reassured that  the U.S. Department of Energy and the Centers for Disease Control seem to be carrying on the fine tradition of FEMA.  Not to mention the crack federal legislators who just gave us the Medicare Prescription Drug program that has so far has kept many seniors from getting those prescription drugs, and has cost many others considerably more than they would have had to spend before that great program took effect.

Does anyone know the date that the United states ceased to be able to do anything competently and above board?

Excerpt:

Continuing America's descent into political nightmare, word comes today from the AP that the first problem in getting an investigation into the legality of the president's warrantless surveillance program is not the need for speed, not the need to get the public the information it needs to understand what's been going on, but.......deciding exactly whch branch of which agency is the one to do the job.

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