The Memory Hole Congratulations are due to The Memory Hole. Due to their Freedom of Information Act request, they have almost single-handedly splashed the banned images of coffins returning home from Iraq across the front pages of dozens, if not hundreds of newspapers in the US. (See for example the NYTimes, Washington Post, and the […]

Three Easy Steps Click. Read. Laugh. What a giant tool! AB P.S. Note to Chuck K.: Read this, from a source you should trust.

Postcards from Old Europe I was in Romania until yesterday evening and am about to head off to an offsite meeting. This means that there won’t be much of a postcard this week. Last week’s card looked a the upcoming expansion of the European Union; this week’s trip gave me a chance to talk about […]

What Happens if a Big Chunk of Congress is Killed? Well, apparently there’s currently no real plan, but Congress is working on one. The plan is to hold special elections within 45 days should 100 or more Congressmen and Congresswomen be killed. But, based on the following description, they may have failed to consider something: […]

Voting Machines From everything I’ve read, I’m pretty sure that any election board, council, or panel would reach the same conclusion: California should ban the use of 15,000 touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems from the Nov. 2 general election, an advisory panel to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley recommended Thursday. By an […]

State Government Spending The CBPP has a new report out about the decline in state government expenditures during the Bush administration. It’s pretty striking – state spending has taken quite a tumble over the past few years, as the following chart shows. Source: CBPP. The CBPP report details many particular examples of state government services […]

Is Meet the Press Unbiased? Eric Alterman of the Center for American Progress does a side-by-side comparison (done New Yorker style) of Russert’s recent MTP interviews of Bush and Kerry. You probably won’t be surprised to find that Russert seems to save his difficult (and often unanswerable) questions for Kerry. Kash

The Master of Doublespeak Take a look at these headlines from two different news sources, reporting on the exact same speech by Alan Greenspan that he made today: From CBSMarketwatch: “Inflation no worry yet, Greenspan says… Greenspan remains unconcerned about inflation, suggesting that he is not in a hurry to raise interest rates from the […]

Why Didn’t Everyone Applaud Bush… …when he decided to reverse 20 years of US foreign policy and endorse Israel’s settlements in the West Bank? Here’s Bush’s explanation, from a speech that he gave today in Washington: The long-term strategy of this government is to spread freedom around the world. And I believe — I told […]

That’s Nice Pentagon Deleted Rumsfeld Comment: The Pentagon (news – web sites) deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush (news – web sites) had decided to invade Iraq (news – web sites). […]