before administration claims of threats to national security is scarcely new. I remember in the early 1980s when CIA assets bombed Nicargua's Pacific port at Corinto, the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour had some admin flak on to explain the whole thing. He dutifully produced satelite video images which he claimed proved that arms were being smuggled into Nicaragua at Corinto. The images showed a black background, an indistinct line which could have been the coastline and a white speck which could have been a boat or a grain of rice moving toward the indistinct line. That was it. Like Powell at the UN, he claimed this proved arms were being brought into the Corinto port. Jim Lehrer never made a peep, never raised the obvious questions that occurred to me and doubtless many others. This was around the time that Reagan claimed that Managua was a "three-day march from Harlingen, Texas."

The bottom line is, when politicians claim the security of the country is threatened, no lie is too big for the media to swallow and no question too obvious to ignore. At the time, I was incredulous that Reagan could actually sell Nicaragua as a threat to the security of the US.

Blix and El Baradei would never have said (and did not say) that they knew for certain that Hussein did not have WMDs. That's just in the nature of being careful with the facts. They knew they'd done a lot of looking and hadn't found anything; they knew Kamel had told us that Hussein had abandoned the programs in 1995. But that's not the same as knowing for certain he had none, thus their accurate and honest phrasing of what they knew to be the truth. Doubt, even overwhelmingly well-founded doubt about whether Hussein had WMDs is just not the same as knowing he had none.

You have appropriately criticized the MSM on this and other occasions, but never, to my knowledge (which is incomplete at best) referred to Chomsky and Hermann's critiques or to their analysis. Theirs has always seemed to me to be the most trenchant analysis of the MSM, so I wonder why they're missing from yours.

my point was a small one. Yes, Blix said he believed Iraq had no WMDs. He did not say he knew it had none because he didn't know that. He used words which accurately reflected the sum of his knowledge and differentiated that from the conclusion he drew from that knowledge. That was appropriate to do and contrasted sharply from what the Bush Admin did and does.

wins baseball games, particularly playoff games. Cashman doesn't seem to know that.

why the neocons are so unpopular with actual conservatives. Balanced budgets, limited involvement in foreign affairs (particularly foreign wars), limited intrusion by government into the lives of private citizens and the rule of law have always been indispensible parts of the American conservative canon. Given that Bush, Cheney and the neocons violate every one of those core tenets of conservatism, it's no wonder conservatives are beginning to abandon them. The only thing strange is that they didn't do it earlier.

will take the 5th regardless of who is investigating.

is anything but straightforward. On its face it simply asks whether employers should be able to fire gay employees, the obvious answer to which is "yes, employers can fire anyone based on job performance." But the question suggests that it asks if employers should be able to fire gay employees because they're gay. That's a different question requiring a different answer.

and am a long-time fan of the Rockets, but let me be clear, the Rockets, if they manage to beat the Jazz tonight, will not beat the Warriors. They're just too slow. The Warriors will score too many times before Yao crosses mid-court for the Rockets to have a chance.

You mean to tell me that Congress doesn't represent the will of the American people? I don't believe it.

what a surprise. When will all the misguided children out there realize that they know what's best for us?

good idea, except you're assuming that Democrats oppose the war. They don't. If they did, they'd recognize they have voters on their side and rescind the act that authorized the war in the first place. They won't do that because they're afraid of being called soft on national defense which of course they're being called anyway. It's the same old song, umpteenth verse. Our two-party system makes no pretense of representing the people of this country. They represent elite interests and try to sell that to us. The public side of politics is nothing but that - an attempt to sell elite values to the rest of us. In the Viet Nam war, the public was so far ahead of the political class and the media in opposing the war it truly was astonishing. If this one drags on long enough, it may come to that, but we're not there yet.

that you can talk to a few people in the hinterlands and know what "the American people" think is preposterous on its face. As any social scientist will tell you, when you do that all you learn is what the people you talk to think. They may represent some narrow demographic segment of people, but it is elitist in the extreme to believe that it teaches you anything beyond that. Well-done surveys tell you a lot more about people generally than all the talking in the world, but you have to take time to read the questions and compare the responses over time, something most journalists will never do.