Evidently the incident occurred on June 11, and Craig pleaded guilty on August 8th. So why are we hearing about this today, three weeks later, on the day of Alberto Gonzales's resignation? To change the subject?

And the story's in Roll Call, whose executive editor is right-wing bloviator Morton Kondracke. Maybe they want to dump all their bad news at once; the Craig conviction's sure to come out eventually.

Check out today's interview of former Justice Department attorney Jesselyn Radack on Democracy Now.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/1527204

(if I did this right, my signature should also link to it).

She charges that charges that department officials under Chertoff (when he headed the criminal division of the Justice Department) improperly questioned John Waker Lindh and that her memos raising ethical concerns about his interrogation were purged; also that he lied about this to Congress at least twice.

From a purely linguistic point of view, prepending "post" to a word means that the original word is now past tense, of historical interest, perhaps, but of limited relevance to current conditions. It's over, or at least that's what you're saying.

It's one thing to advocate alternative approaches, but to implicitly claim that an entire movement is over seems rather rude.

People who read only editor's choices will only see the falsehood about the "rule of thumb", and not the corrections, and the star implies an endorsement from Salon's editors.

Nothing against DurianJoe, who acknowledged the error.

Buchanan was against the Iraq war from the beginning; he's an isolationist. Seems like an odd choice for a debate opponent.

He wasn't looking for excessive force, or tasering. Nearly 200 people have died in the last five years after being shot with a Taser stun gun.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/44455/

(or click on my name)

If Congress has the guts to attach restrictions to funding, Bush must accept the restrictions to get the funding. A veto override is not needed. If Bush vetoes the bill, Congress can send it to him again, and possibly provide limited emergency funding if he plays chicken.

Unfortunately, this strategy would require not flinching in the face of a Bush veto, and I'm afraid that too many Congressional Democrats are flinchers.

It's become a verb: "freep this poll!"

The pioneers at stuffing online "ballot boxes" where the folks at Free Republic, the right-wing blog. Now the right and left bloggers all do it.

If a site wants a decent shot at having an online poll mean anything, they need to have some way of limiting freeping, like only allowing registered users on the site to vote (once each) and not counting votes from users who register after the question was posted.

Even then, sites with large memberships will still see distorted polls.

Alternatively, you can think of the polls as tests of organization online.

Limbaugh is a monster, but the fact remains that someone who's paid to be a journalist is expected to do at least a bit of checking before firing off speculation of this kind. Since Edelstein didn't do his homework, it isn't "informed speculation", it is uninformed speculation.

The Fed doesn't control the money supply by speeding up or slowing down the printing presses. Actual paper money is a small portion of the supply.

Banks create money whenever they make loans. You get a credit, which you can then go out and spend. Central banks regulate the money supply by regulating the banks; their main lever is their control over short-term interest rates.

As for those who would abolish the Federal Reserve: that's a good way to finish off the dollar for good, as no one will want an unmanaged, out-of-control currency, not when they can use the Euro, a currency that's strictly regulated by the inflation-phobic European Central Bank.

Go to gold, you say. Well, you've got a problem. The total above-ground gold supply is a bit over 100,000 metric tons. Gold is about $24 a gram, or $24 million per metric ton. That makes all the gold in the world worth about $2.5 trillion. But the US GNP is over $13 trillion. Those of you who think that gold is the source of all value have a problem, in that the US produces much more wealth than there is gold in the world, every year. We can't claim that each dollar is backed by gold, because there is way too little gold to do the job.

I can understand journalists agreeing for material to be off the record when the reporter is pursuing a story and it's the only way to get the info. But why, when a campaign is sending out information unsolicited, would a reporter accept that such information is off the record? Do they have special off-the-record lists that reporters can subscribe to?

Few people are aware of just how poor the turnout is in Iowa. It is so low that I don't think Iowa deserves its position; they should forfeit it on the basis of overwhelming apathy.

See http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2004_Primaries.htm .

The number of eligible Iowa voters is estimated at a hair under 2.2 million, but only 133,353 people actually bothered to vote, even after being inundated with months of campaigning, with major issues (e.g. Iraq war: thumbs up or thumbs down?) at stake. That's 6.1 percent!

So Mr. Keillor is, I'm afraid, wrong. If they know which candidate is real, they don't give a damn, and 94% of them do not vote.