When they transferred the money to that lab to rehire the laid-off workers, where'd they transfer it from ? How many workers lost their jobs elsewhere so Bush wouldn't be confronted with reality?

Thomas Jefferson didn't have military experience.

Abraham Lincoln didn't have military experience.

Franklin Roosevelt didn't have military experience.

Bill Clinton didn't have military experience.

On the other hand:

Ulysses Grant certainly did have military experience, and he was one of the worst presidents in our history.

George W. Bush also had military experience (though it pains me to admit it, given the evidence of his having gone AWOL).

Military experience is not necessary to be a good president, even in wartime. Neither is it a guarantee of being a good president.

Take a statement from the Secret Service agents who were with Cheney? What's the point? They're not likely to give any information that varies by so much as a syllable from the official version of events. These would be the Secret Service agents that, far from doing their duty to uphold the law, obstructed local law-enforcement officers by barring them from Katharine Armstrong's ranch when they arrived to investigate the report of a shooting.

It's disturbing that nobody seems upset about this obvious subversion of a law-enforcement agency into the Bush regime's goon squad.

Salon, which is still featuring the "pink ghetto" Broadsheet, publishes an article deploring the dumbing-down of the news media. And the article is written by Farhad Manjoo, whose approach to serious issues like election theft is "can't be bothered to be bothered by it".

Irony is not dead. It is, however, willfully ignored by the staff of Salon.

In the fall 2005 issue of Ms. magazine, Phyllis Rosser wrote that rather than being "celebrated for [our] landmark achievements, [women] have engendered fear," and offers up this fact, conspicuously absent from most media coverage of the gender gap: "There has been no decline in bachelor's degrees awarded to men," she writes. "The numbers awarded to women have simply increased." Put simply, in the words of Jacqueline King, director of the Center of Policy Analysis at the American Council of Education, who is quoted in Rosser's piece, "The [real news] story is not one of male failure, or even lack of opportunity -- but rather one of increased academic success among females and minorities."

Uh huh.

Does anybody besides me suspect that the problem isn't that boys have disadvantages but that they no longer have all the advantages they used to? That the real aim is to make sure men retain their social and economic supremacy?

The things that everybody ignores when going on about how Sen. Reid and Sen. Dorgan, in particular, got donations from "Jack Abramoff's clients" is that these senators' political interests coincide with the tribes' interests. Sen. Dorgan has supported the tribes' interests for years and would do so even if nobody'd ever heard of Jack Abramoff. After all, he represents a state with a large Indian population. And Sen. Reid represents Nevada -- you know, Las Vegas, Reno, existing gambling establishments; of course he's going to vote the way the tribes would want him to, because they and he both have reason to limit new gambling establishments.

The question should be not whether politicians received contributions from "Jack Abramoff's clients", but why they did. In the case of the Democratic recipients, the answer definitely is not "because the contributors were Abramoff's clients".

One question I've yet to see answered about this story is how the White House found out that NYT reporters were working on the story. It seems to me, if reporters are working on a story based on leaks of secret information, they're not likely to call the White House and say, "Somebody gave us this information that we're not supposed to have because they're not supposed to give it to us; is the information true?"

So -- how did it happen that the White House knew about the story and was thus able to tell the Times not to run it?

I see a pattern developing. When Michelle Goldberg was writing about the antiwar movement, she was all about how the leftie-leftists were a bigger threat than the warmongers. Now she's telling us that the liberals are going to alienate more people by criticizing Joe Lieberman than Lieberman will by sucking up to Bush.

Little things like that could make me suspect that Michelle Goldberg thinks "leftist" is a synonym for "bogeyman".

Did the Supreme Court agree to review the Perrymandering because four justices thought there was sufficient problem with it, or because they want to overthrow the Voting Rights Act? (Remember, it isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you.)

Rabbi Eckstein's warning, "Rhetoric can create an anti-Jewish feeling among good Bible-believing Christians," sounds suspiciously like a threat: "Don't oppose the Evangelical Right's agenda or they'll mess you up bad." It's enlightening how quickly certain self-proclaimed followers of the Prince of Peace resort to threats when somebody disagrees with them. They're bullies, plain and simple, and I applaud Mr. Foxman and Rabbi Yoffie for standing up to them.

"Farhad Manjoo of Salon" is cited in the Acknowledgments as one of the people to whom Mark Crispin Miller "owe[s] an incalculable debt of thanks".

So maybe Joan Walsh didn't know this when she assigned the book review to Manjoo; Manjoo should have seen it and should have refused the assignment.

That he took the assignment anyway shows that his journalistic ethics are, shall we say, thinner than a butterfly ballot.

Hire illegal immigrants (who presumably will be afraid to complain about mistreatment for fear of being deported), refuse to pay them, submit the bill for the wages that aren't being paid, and pocket the money. Nice little racket there. The CEOs of all the companies involved should be arrested -- and held without bail in a New Orleans jail.