If that headline didn't spin your head around I don't know what will.  Actually, I do: how about if being GROSSLY underpaid means that you aren't underpaid at all?  Read on.  It makes a kind of sick, 21st century PR spin sense.

What's an agency to do when it wants to perform cost comparison studies with an eye to privatizing functions, but congress won't fund the requests?  Well, if you're the VA: you do the comparisons anyway, using funds and people earmarked for providing medical care to vets.

A press release from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE)  today announced that the union's president has formally requested  that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, commence "an immediate criminal investigation of current management at the VA" for violations of two laws by diverting money that had been appropriated for health care to pay for outsourcing studies.

Mr. Bush and his cohorts would love for you to think that the NSA domestic spying controversy is about your personal privacy rights versus the safety and security of the country.  After all, privacy is a good thing, but you can convince a lot of people that the safety of all of us is far more important than keeping prying eyes from the phone call you had with Aunt Agnes.

But Mr. Bush and his friends know the truth.  They understand that it really comes down to balancing the need for security from external threats with the need for security from internal threats posed by a government with the power to monitor everything about its citizens.

At the least, somebody's worried about global warming....

"He is a bad version of us!"

That's Michael Scanlon complaining to Jack Abramoff about Ralph Reed's billing practices and expenditure claims, according to the Washington Post.

Just asking: exactly how sleazy would you have to be for Scanlon to think you're sleazy?

Is there someone, somewhere on the face of this earth (or any other planet) that Reed would find too sleazy?

Semantics, semantics, semantics.  Not a day goes by without another headline about what "the people" think of the NSA domestic spying issue.  And you'd go nuts if you put all the headlines on a table and tried to reconcile their very different conclusions.

Which prompted me to collect several recent polls and try to make sense out of them.

It's all semantics.  With a touch of opinions based on nothing.  But mostly semantics.  

Unbelievable. Mike Wallace sits down congressman John Murtha....

Check out this piece by Alan Tonelson, a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation, which takes the WSJ to task for "Dishonest Cheerleading (Again)."

To the WSJ editors' claim that rising holiday sales mean "somebody must have money," Mr. Tonelson reasonably replies: "Of course, it's possible to make this argument with a straight face only by forgetting a little economic and financial concept called debt."

You know, if propaganda was water, those of us who hadn't already drowned would be swimming for our lives.

Countless shills for the administration keep harping on the "who could have known" song whenever they are taken to task for screwing up Iraq this badly.

Who knew there'd be an insurgency?  Who knew the Sunnis would act like this?  Who knew that we didn't have enough troops to occupy/pacify the country that we just "liberated" from Saddam who was worse than Clinton?

Well, the U.S. military knew, that's who. Probably some of the less irrational people in the administration, too, but definitely the military, in the form of Generals Zinni and Shinseki.

You want to talk about the media not reporting "good news" from Iraq?  Well how come they haven't exactly plastered the airwaves and newspapers with this speech by General Zinni at the Center for Defense Information in May of 2004?

Excerpts below.

Are you one of the millions who are deeply disturbed by what the government is doing with electronic surveillance?  Well, I assume that eventually common sense and the Fourth Amendment will eventually catch up to President Bush and the NSA (though certainly not without a hell of a fight).

But the Fourth Amendment has no application to private spying.  And you'd be amazed at what these little spies can do.

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