Internal Monologue

How inaccurate is ABC's Path to 9/11 ? So inaccurate they can't even get Madeleine Albright's name correct: Bwahahahahaha! (HT: AmericaBlog via Atrios ). I actually searched through the clip (available on YouTube here ) to find this frame, and it's there at about 4:24. Maybe Disney/ABC delibrately changed her name so as to be able to claim she's a different Secretary of State, so they could attribute to her all sorts of silly things. Maybe I should make a "truthful" documentary in which a character named Condoleeza Rice gets a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US" and then drops the ball...oh I guess I don't have to because the real Condoleezza Rice already did that. Disney sucks and Mickey Mouse is a shill for Bush.

Here's another article on how our wasteful and ineffective "War on Drugs" is screwing up our foreign policy. How? By driving poor, rural Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. The US occupying forces destroy the opium poppies which are their source of livelihood, and only the Taliban will stand up for them. Sullivan links to this article which shows the impact of the Taliban resurgence on women in Afghanistan: When the death-threats began, she approached the nearby British military base for protection. Since the Western rhetoric at the time of the invasion was all about how we were committed to women like Jamilla, she assumed her school would be offered immediate protection. The individual British soldiers were very sympathetic – but explained, “We’re not in that business.” Their orders do not include directly protecting female civilians and girls’ schools from Talibanist slaughter. Sorry. This is so pathetic. It fills me with rage at our government. (I know that in this

I'm not sure how this dovetails with what Sullivan's been saying , but Singer at MyDD is saying that according to this Washington Post article , the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) plans to go highly negative: Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads. Of course, the big question is: will it work? I doubt it. And I think Democrats could and should hit twice as hard. Republicans: the party of Katrina, Iraq, and Bush. Want more of that?

I don't know how good Sullivan's White House sources are, but I'm sure they're better than mine. Here's what they're telling him : Next week, I'm informed via troubled White House sources, will see the full unveiling of Karl Rove's fall election strategy. He's intending to line up 9/11 families to accuse McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the perpetrators of that atrocity, because they want to uphold the ancient judicial traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution. He will use the families as an argument for legalizing torture, setting up kangaroo courts for military prisoners, and giving war crime impunity for his own aides and cronies. This is his "Hail Mary" move for November; it's brutally exploitative of 9/11; it's pure partisanship; and it's designed to enable an untrammeled executive. If it was anyone but the Bush administration, I'd say there's no way they would be so stupid, braz

Here's a wonderful musical depiction of a certain aspect of the Old Testament divinity (HT: Pandagon ).

Via an email from Grishnash, here's a funny little episode : CHICAGO (AP) - Cook County prosecutors say a 29-year-old man traveling with his mother desperately didn't want her to know he'd packed a sexual aid for their trip to Turkey. So he told security it was a bomb, officials said. I hope he doesn't have to go to jail. That would be sad. But of all the things to tell the security guard it was...

Well, this is a first. I deleted a post. It was brought to my attention by Mark A.R. Kleiman that the characterization of his views presented in a quote I posted by Retardo Montalban was inaccurate. I should have checked on my own before posting the quote, but since I agreed with Retardo's overall thesis (that some writers have an annoying tendency to desire "politeness" at all costs), I didn't check to see if the example Retardo was using actually supported it. This was sloppy on my part. Having now thoroughly examined the Kleiman post in question, I don't think Kleiman's post is a good example of this phenomenon. So I removed the post and apologized to Mr. Kleiman for posting a quote that misrepresented him. And I apologize to him once again here. There was a huge blowup between Atrios and Kleiman involving Jane Galt back in 2003. And apparently Atrios' link to the Retardo post on Sadly, No! (which is how I found it) was a re-ignition of that old co