Catching Up Again

It was a rough week between work and kid events so I've fallen behind on news and blog reading.

• Flip flopping: Bin Laden was dying from kidney failure before he was dying of typhoid fever. And he may really be dead -- who knows? All I'm saying is I find the timing of the leak, closely following Bush's two week 9/11 blitz (where he mentioned getting bin Laden 17 times in one speech), to be a little more than coincidental. I smell another case of voter manipulation.
  

• "The Axis of Lesser Evilism"... what a clever phrase! Saw it while surfing the news.

• Has the war in Iraq made us safer? According to the NIE, "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," it sure doesn't look like it. This shouldn't be a shocker but the same folks who believe that Iraq is really a great success story that the liberal media has just been covering up to discredit Bush aren't going to be convinced.

• Clinton Vs Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday (I prefer the full transcript to the partial clip). I agree with Digby on this point: Apparently Democrats are expected to tip-toe around and not upset anyone or be too loud or too passionate or too emphatic. Fuck that. I grow weary of the Angry Democrat meme. Why isn't everyone angry? For Pete's sake, anyone with functioning brain should be angry at this administration and its media operatives at Fox news. At any rate, I was happy to see Clinton speak passionately and factually, especially about the Cole issue (which I have also written about here). Clinton laid it out when he said that he may have tried and failed to stop bin Laden but Bush hadn't tried at all. Having read the book Clinton refers to, Against All Enemies, and excerpts from the 9/11 Commision Report, I think it's pretty clear he's telling the truth.
  

• Vladimir Buklovsky writes a compelling piece on torture. Please read it. As for the John McCain "compromise"... I probably should be more disillusioned that the rhetoric didn't match the outcome but I quit believing McCain was a political purist earlier this year when he reversed his independent position and started openly fellating Jerry Falwell and the religious right.
  

• Glenn Greenwald spots hypocrisy and catches Michelle Malkin being... well, Michelle Malkin.
  

• Bush still at 37%? I have to wonder if this actually bodes well for Democrats at the polls. Although it seems logical that folks should be looking for a change in leadership based on gross incompetency, something tells me that we've probably got a good percentage of the country who are unhappy because he isn't conservative enough.