I find this 85% statistic absolutely mind-boggling. Is the military preventing troops from seeing liberal web sites? I'm sure they are or troop morale would drop like a brick but haven't many of the troops over there been rotated out and then back in again at least once, and some as many as two and three times? Surely they and the new soldiers on their first tour of duty should know perfectly well by now that Saddam had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks. So what conclusion can we possibly draw from this? Does 85% of our all-volunteer army have the intellectual curiosity of a door knob? Are they functionally illiterate? Are they so naive that it wouldn't even occur to them that their government would lie to them? Are their families and friends (and 15% of their fellow soldiers) so worried about keeping their spirits up that they're reinforcing this myth?

Now that the results of this poll have been made public, is there now going to be some high-principled grass roots movement to find some way to let these soldiers know that they've been sold a bill of goods? I'm guessing Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh would rot before they'd mention it and I'm not so sure that I'd blame them. And to what lengths, I wonder, will the military go to keep these poor sods from finding out that their being there has nothing to do with 9/11 and everything to do with George Bush wanting to build military bases in Iraq, the better to keep the flow of oil coming?

Instead of a privacy issue, isn't this really a question of who has control over our bodies? If so, there's always the old reliable ... does the state have the right to take one of your kidneys to save the life of that same 2-year-old who barely escaped from the burning fertility clinic? C'mon, you're an exact match and he's going to die without a new kidney. Even so, wouldn't most people say NO, it's their decision, not the state's? So the state does not have control of your body when it comes to saving the life of a living, breathing human being but it DOES have control of your body to save the life of a fetus?

I suppose Wilkow would sputter over that too!

Okay, his advice to start stockpiling makes a lot more sense than me waiting for the Federal government to drop sandwiches on my house but I can't ever recall being told to hide food under my bed before. Clearly the man doesn't have any pets, or pests either, for that matter. (To my Irish Setters anything on the floor, including under the bed, belongs to them -- if it's not edible, it's a toy. If it's a can of tuna, it's a doggie hockey puck.)

Well I guess all of us pet owners will just have to remember not to eat everything in our cupboards. And if you have a problem with ants you should probably find a better hiding place for that extra bag of sugar.

It always seems like the Republicans manage to come up with some hot-button issue to get their people out in record numbers to vote. (In 2004 it was get out and vote to ban gay marriages in your state.) If the Republicans are saying that the Democrats are going to impeach George Bush, it's because they think that would be their perfect hot-button issue for the mid-term elections ... get out and vote for your Republican senator and/or representative so they can make sure our beloved George Bush doesn't get impeached.

I'm as "pro-impeachment" as anybody can be but, upon further review, maybe I can wait until next January for impeachment proceedings to start. On the other hand, why these Washington weasels can't even manage enough gumption to support Feingold's motion to censure is completely beyond me. I can only assume they've all had their spines amputated and we're all being represented by a bunch of jellyfish.

And if Chavez attended the George W. Bush School of Democracy, then it goes without saying that if anyone has the temerity to criticize President Chavez he can just accuse them of aiding Venezuela's enemies and go right on doing what he's doing. (Mr. Chavez should also feel free to refer to his country's constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper", wiretap his enemies, real or imagined, start renting space in some nice 3rd world jails, and start enrolling all of your soldiers and police in W's newest class at his School of Democracy, "Introduction to Torture".)

With one exception, virtually every Republican in Congress has rolled over while George Bush did everything he could think of to make them irrelevant. (Refusal to allow oversight, signing statements, and an unrivaled cloak of secrecy are the very hallmarks of the Bush administration.) That one exception, of course, isn't a person ... the one exception to Congress' irrelevance is that the Republicans have come up with more pork-laden legislation and and more legislation to benefit special interest groups than any Congress in recent memory and George Bush has yet to veto even one of those bills or budget amendments. How incumbent Republicans think that they can now distance themselves from this administration is beyond me. They are indeed "Brand W Republicans" and if there's any justice in this country then come November they're going to pay the price for doing a helluva lot more for the lobbyists than the people they were elected to represent.

That transcript reads more like an Abbott & Costello routine than a White House briefing. More and more it seems as though McClellan is flying around in ever smaller concentric circles. Eventually he's going to fly up his own ass, never to be seen or heard from again.