As I recuperate from surgery, it's given me some time to collect some thoughts on many things, among them, well, to understand where I'm going with this, you have to take a short course in flying an airplane...

It's a rather odd story, part military news, part media blackout, part public relations event; publicly announced a month ago, yet reported in foreign press sources as new news, and basically ignored by the American media:

The U.S. is building a new, permanent detention camp at Guantanamo, at the very time that the international community calls for closing the Gitmo detention facilities altogether, and despite President Bush's recently announced desire to, maybe, sort of, do just that.

When Karl Rove tells $100-a-plate Ohio repubs that "it's time to ...do it again in 2006," I get real worried. Of course the Ohio polls look grim for Repubs, but we know that polls don't mean much in an era when electronic voting machine security resembles firm Swiss cheese.

How's that for a scary thought, huh?

That group of pandering wealth-o-philes known as the Republicans in the House of Representatives has outdone itself this time.

A Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch poll on the coming election is more grim news for our cast of Republican radicals.

In a very typical bureaucratic press release a couple of weeks ago, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, David S. C. Chu, said the military has been able to fill its ranks without sacrificing quality.

As has apparently happened every year since 1994, President Bush proclaimed July 23 as "Parent's Day."

Parent's Day?  Why? Don't we already have Mother's Day and Father's Day?  Is there some other kind of parent that needs acknowledging?

Continuing what I consider to be its abuse of the military contract between the government and its soldiers, "anonymous officials" in Washington are saying that the administration is, once again, considering the possibility of temporarily beefing up the forces in Iraq by extending the tours of some U.S. soldiers.

Imagine a United States federal court in this day and age ordering that the families of soldiers killed in Iraq have the right to a full judicial hearing on their claim that the United States should be forced to conduct a public inquiry into why the country invaded Iraq.  Done laughing?  That's what the British Court of Appeal just ordered.

Having already sued to prevent New Jersey officials from learning about details of the NSA electronic surveillance program, the DOJ has now filed a similar suit to prevent Missouri officials from enforcing subpoenas issued last month to find out whether AT&T Inc. supplied Missouri customer information and calling records to the NSA in violation of Missouri privacy rules.

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