it's one thing that a governor (in this case, Iowa's Tom Vilsack) admitting that he can't read email, it's quite another when another leader (in this case, the current resident of the whitehouse) bounces it. from today's slate:

Finally, the NYT fronts George W.'s new email address, in case you want to weigh in on any of the above. The new address dumps you smack into an e-bureaucracy, however—you've got to wade through nine Web pages, pick your topic from a list and then state your intentions, i.e., friend or foe? After your message is sent, you have to confirm that you really meant to send it. Jimmy Orr, first identified in the article as a White House spokesman and then, two paragraphs later, as Internet news director, calls the new system an "enhancement," but he adds that the old address is still perfectly fine—except that your message may not be read or responded to.

my letter to the editor of the globe gazette

there's just too much to track, so to enlist some help here's a couple of links:

ITN

and

BARTCOP

DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion: "Cozy ties between business and government get in the way of economic freedom, too. When governments intervene on behalf of various businesses, give welfare to corporations or adopt supposedly business-friendly policies, it skews the market. Business and government must maintain an arm's-length relationship for both business and democracy to function correctly, argues The Economist. When business lobbyists dominate government, public policy is inevitably twisted into the service of private greed."

DAMN i wish he'd run for president.
Janeane Garofalo Interview | Elizabeth DiNovella | May 2003 Issue: "Question: Why are you so active in social justice and peace issues?
Martin Sheen: I do it because I can't seem to live with myself if I do not. I don't know any other way to be. It isn't something you can explain; it is just something that you do; it is something that you are."

NBC’s instant expert. Appearing by phone from Baghdad on MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning on Thursday, NBC News reporter Tom Aspell complained about the lack of electricity and suggested U.S. officials aren’t being forthcoming about why there isn’t guaranteed electricity as he asserted that “we're being led to believe that the blame is entirely at the feet of saboteurs.” Noting how hot it is, Aspell suggested the solution is easy: “It's really quite unbearable and so easy to fix if they'd just rolled in and brought a lot of power lines and really did make a concentrated effort, I'm sure things would calm down a lot sooner."

So how much time has Aspell spent in Baghdad to gain such expertise on how the solution is so easy? Imus: "How long have you been there?" Aspell: "Two days.”

http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2003/cyb20030711.asp#2

give this girl a ceegar
DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion: "We continually hear that drug companies need the money to continue their research into new medications, yet their advertising budgets far exceed their research budgets."
Carol Dupic,
Emmetsburg.

DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion: "Supporting the troops means using every resource available to speed the completion of their mission so they can come home."

DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion: "If the benefit for seniors is really as good as politicians want America to believe, why isn't it good enough for lawmakers?
Congressman Fortney Stark of California observed, 'This bill says, 'We take care of our own, and to hell with the average American.' "

TOMPAINE.com - From The New York Times Best-seller: See No Evil: "On my BBC television show, Newsnight, an American journalist confessed that, since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. reporters are simply too afraid to ask the uncomfortable questions that could kill careers: 'It's an obscene comparison, but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck,' Dan Rather said. Without his makeup, Rather looked drawn, old and defeated in confessing that he too had given in. 'It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often.' "

BUSH LIED AND THOUSANDS DIED
Jihad Unspun - A Clear View On The US War On "Terrorism": "New information from remote locations of Iraq has pushed up the civilian death toll from the U.S.-led war by 500 in the last month to at least 6,000, an Anglo-American research group says. The Iraq Body Count's (IBC) latest figures, based on media reports and more than a dozen counting projects from independent investigators in and outside Iraq, put the minimum number of civilians dead at 6,055 and the maximum at 7,706"

the excuse du jour:
Yahoo! News - Rumsfeld: No New Iraq Weapons Evidence Before War: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday the United States did not go to war with Iraq (news - web sites) because of dramatic new evidence of banned weapons but because it saw existing information on Iraqi arms programs in a new light after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. "

well, DUH. what else should we have expected from liars, cheats and thieves.
2002 Federal Register Is Longest Ever (washingtonpost.com): "The Bush administration, philosophically wedded to the idea of smaller government, issued a record-high number of pages of new federal regulations last year, according to a study to be released today by the Cato Institute.
The libertarian think tank found that the Federal Register boasted 75,606 pages of federal regulations in 2002, up from a high of 74,528 pages in 2000, when President Bill Clinton was still in office. The surge is part of a decade-long rise in this crude index of federal regulatory activity, with the number of pages in the Federal Register increasing by 24 percent between 1993 and 2002."

dueling quotes comin up:
Yahoo! News - Dems Urge Probe of Iraqi Uranium Claim: "On June 8, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), too, had said on NBC's 'Meet the Press' that Bush was wrong when he said the British government had learned that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa to build weapons.
'No one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery,' she said. 'Of course, it was information that was mistaken.' "

the voice of the grunt, david hackworth writes:

that's tellin 'em clark. :)
DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion: "Bruce Fleming's June 27 letter, 'More Gun Owners Equals Less Gun Violence,' makes the statement that 'Guns are used 2.5 million times per year to defend life and home from criminals.'
The figure appears statistically impossible. If accurate, it would mean approximately one in 100 Americans - man, woman and child - would have used a firearm in the last year to defend their lives or property.
Yet a majority of Americans don't own a gun, much less use it annually to blast away at attackers. Translated to my town of 5,000, it would imply there were 50 such incidents of defensive shooting in the last year. I would have heard about such a wave of violence.
The only way the numbers work is if recreational hunting is included in the mix. Perhaps the source of the data has counted ducks, deer and other game in his definition of 'criminals.'
This sounds improbable, but it makes the statistic believable and is on a similar intellectual level to other arguments by the National Rifle Association and its supporters.
Clark Sheets,
Sheldon. "

t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The Insiders Are Coming Out: "'As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.'"

carolyn kay over at makethemaccountable points out all the good news lately. well, DUH. evil greed has that way of overbiting and choking on it.

republicons will say: yes sir, yes sir.
democrats will say: say WHAT?

To cut to the chase, we have just revealed a hole in the U.S. Electoral system through which you could drive a mack truck. The details follow below and are at the following two links… with pictures….

Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

Story with, for the first time, a link to the full 40,000 files from the
Diebold ftp site

BRAAAH VO

New Page 1: "Fox gives misinformation.
Conservatives watch Fox.
Therefore, conservatives who follow the news closely are misinformed."

Go-Along First Lady Shows She Can Go It Alone: "But in a White House where senior staff members are commended for keeping their heads down and letting the president be the star"

Go-Along First Lady Shows She Can Go It Alone: "Laura Bush collected nearly $2 million last month at three fund-raisers for President Bush's re-election campaign, Bush-Cheney '04, and campaign officials expect her to appear at some 20 more."

i cant believe disney did it. they actually did it.
New York Post Online Edition: entertainment: "July 3, 2003 -- MICHAEL Savage has been permanently dropped from up following the collapse of West Coast contract talks that used the Bronx-raised blabber's beloved New York affiliation as leverage.
WABC (770 AM) abruptly yanked Savage off the air earlier this month in solidarity with its San Francisco sister station, KSFO, during noisy negotiations with Savage, who's based at KSFO but is syndicated by another company. "

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!... and in the words of one of the great men in the 20th century:

Liberalism is not socialism, and never will be... Liberalism has its own history and its own tradition. Socialism has its own formulas and aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly."

-- Winston Churchill

disturbing is an understatement.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Isabel Hilton: Blunkett has stripped us of protection: "So what if he's not guilty. He just has to look the part"

i know, i know. its amazing that there are people that can possibly be so ignorant, but sure enough, there's one right in my own backyard.
globegazette.com - North Iowa Opinion Stories: "I assume Chris would rather go back to the Clinton era of honor and credibility. The '90s truly made the U.S.A. the laughing stock of the free world internationally, and President Bush is bringing back honor and credibility "

they had to put THAT one up?? bastards. rediculously transparent.
Yahoo! News Photos - Vermont Gov. Howard Dean: "Howard Dean, D-Vermont, candidate for the United States President(AFP/File"

Katherine Hepburn, the last grande Dame of Hollywood, died over the weekend. in her honor, one quote that typifies her simpleness: "I don't believe in marriage. It's bloody impractical to love, honor and obey. If it weren't, you wouldn't have to sign a contract."

DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion: "It's hard to argue for preservation of AmeriCorps in the face of $400 billion budget deficits, but its selection for the ax might say something about the nation's values. "

: "But what neither plan deals with is the escalating costs of prescription drugs and the questionable practices by drug manufacturers aimed at keeping those costs - and their resulting profits - high. Legal reforms talked about so much during the last congressional campaigns, which would have reduced costs by forcing drug companies to spend less on advertising and by making the criteria for releasing generic, less costly versions of the same drugs to the public less stringent, have been forgotten in all this new rhetoric. "

well, DUH
Opinion: Joel McNally: Family values for all (captimes.com): "There's an incredibly simple solution for people who are opposed to same-sex marriage. All they have to do is refrain from marrying anyone of the same sex. "

Yahoo! News - FCC Official: Fast Web Content Rules Not Needed Now: "'A competitive market will ensure that all content providers ... will be able to reach any Internet-connected customer without interference from software, hardware or access providers, regardless of affiliation,' Tom Tauke, Verizon's vice president for public policy, told the conference. "

yaya sisterhood
Court overturns Texas sodomy law

a uniter not a divider i think he said during the campaign. didn't he? couldn't tell from kurtz this morning.
The Great Divide (washingtonpost.com) Two wars later, we're back to the old red state/blue state divide in America.
It's hardly unusual, as the presidential cycle heats up, for the Dems who want Bush's job to be painting him as a failure. But rarely is there such a perception gap, with the Dems portraying the prez as devious and semi-incompetent, while GOPers see a strong, moral leader who has stood up to terrorists. The war in Iraq, in this regard, is either a brilliant triumph over a brutal dictator or an unnecessary conflict sold on a Big Lie.
Take a CBS/New York Times poll from last month? Does Bush have strong qualities of leadership? 92 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of independents and 50 percent of Democrats say yes.
Cares a lot about the problems of people like yourself? 63 percent of Republicans say yes, compared to 25 percent of independents and 9 percent of Democrats.
Do his policies favor the rich? Only 25 percent of GOPers agree, compared to 56 percent of independents and 82 percent of Democrats.
That, friends, is a pretty polarized country.

province seems to be poppin, and poopin, all over the place when referring to iraq.
Inexperienced Hands Guide Iraq Rebuilding (washingtonpost.com) "Before the war, nobody stopped and said, 'Aren't we going to need a bunch of people in the provinces?' "

iowa sure takes the civil war era seriously. besides all the reenactments going on around the state throughout the summer, there seems to be quite the fracas over the confederate flag.
DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion Why is burning the American flag protected as free speech, but displaying the Confederate flag is condemned as racism?
Ruth Naberhaus
Scranton

reka is a wonderful woman. i'd really like to shake her hand for the fine job she has done all these years at the des moines register.
DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion The students who sued chose to focus on Michigan giving a 20-point edge, out of a possible total of 150 points, to undergraduate minority applicants. They could instead have griped that it also awards 20 points to an outstanding athlete or impoverished student. Is that unfair to rich students or non-athletes? What makes athletic considerations fair and race ones unfair?

and they still can't figure out why health care costs are so out of control?
globegazette.com - North Iowa Local News Headlines In Mason City, a 30-day supply of the anxiety drug Alprazolam, for example, cost $97.09 at Mercy Westside Pharmacy, $14.29 at Walgreens and $15.39 at a Hy-Vee Food Store.

the birth tax. how ironic.
Goodbye, Death Tax. Hello, Birth Tax! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the truly republican tax: The Birth Tax.
The Birth Tax is the interest paid on an enormous debt that republicans will create when they decide not to collect the estate tax anymore.

georgie's new best friend?
Russia Shutters Last Independent TV Station (washingtonpost.com) Boris Nadezhdin, a member of the Union of Right Forces party in the Russian legislature, called it "the last TV channel that ventured to criticize Russian leaders."
Echo Moskvy's editor in chief, Alexei Venediktov, said the closing of TVS gave the government a virtual monopoly on broadcasting. "It's like when all candidates are excluded from the election campaign, except for only one," he told the Interfax news agency

and then we get this in the next story about the poopyheads in sioux city
DesMoinesRegister.com | News A Sioux County chief deputy who will run against his boss in next year's election was demoted to a deputy job this week, just days after he announced his bid for sheriff
unbelievable.

HYPOC ALERT: this one's so blatant, it's nauseating. first we have the head republiCON telling us this about kerry's visit in mason city:
DesMoinesRegister.com | News Ed Gillespie, a GOP strategist who will assume the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, told Iowa reporters Friday that the Democrats seem more interested in attacking Bush than putting forward a "positive vision."

HYPOC ALERT
Senate Votes to Allow Importing of Prescription Drugs From Canada After today's vote, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, went to the Senate floor and denounced the underlying Medicare legislation. Mrs. Clinton said the bill would create a confusing, bureaucratic "Medicare maze." She made her point with a chart reminiscent of the one Republicans used in 1994 to ridicule the plan Mrs. Clinton had developed as first lady to guarantee health insurance for all Americans.

is anybody surprised?
Report Says U.N. Embargo Does Little to Halt Al Qaeda (washingtonpost.com) A key weakness in the U.N. sanctions regime, the panel says, is the submission by U.N. members of lists of terrorist suspects who are inadequately identified or whose names are misspelled. For instance, 34 individuals on the list are identified by only a single name. Further confusion has been caused by the varied translations of names from Arabic to English and other languages.
The United States and other governments have also been reluctant to put the names of some suspected terrorists on the U.N. terrorism list in bids to maintain secrecy as they conduct their own investigations. "There have been some reports of known al Qaeda members, not on the list, having been turned back, detained or arrested while in transit," the report says.

DesMoinesRegister.com | Opinion I can't figure how Republicans win elections when at least 80 percent of the people would be better served by Democrats

A Stranger in Faris By Eric Umansky The Wall Street Journal says that with growing concern about the cost of rebuilding, the White House is tossing around the idea of helping to pay for it by issuing Iraqi securities (aka debt) backed by future Iraqi oil revenues.

i'm not a financial planner or anything, but doesn't this sound a bit like kenny-boy talk?

A Stranger in Faris By Eric Umansky "These guys are growing in resistance, and they're still being troublesome, and you have to ask what's motivating them," said one defense official

i dont have to ask. do you? it's plain as day. their motivation is for the occupation to get the hell out. can we say palestinian?

DesMoinesRegister.com | News Coverage would not start again until the cost rises to a total of $5,800 annually. At that point, Medicare would cover 90 percent of the costs over that amount.

i'd sure like to know why there's a gap
DesMoinesRegister.com | News After seniors pay the first $275 out-of-pocket under the Senate plan, Medicare would pick up half the cost of each prescription up to $4,500 a year. At that point, Medicare recipients would encounter a major gap in coverage