From the BBC : The US administration wants to re-allocate billions of reconstruction dollars for Iraq and spend them instead on security and other short-term needs. For those who have followed this, only about 5% of the reconstruction money earmarked by Congress has been spent. Now the Bush administration wants to detour more money. This is why the Iraqis aren't throwing flowers at our men and women in uniform.

From the Associated Press : Suggesting the government was acting as if it had something to hide, a federal judge Wednesday gave Washington one month to release records related to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq.

Fromt the Washington Post : Rhetorically, Bush has made the promotion of democracy, especially in the Middle East, a central theme of his administration. "This young century will be liberty's century," Bush said last month at the Republican National Convention. "By promoting liberty abroad, we will build a safer world." Last year, in a speech before the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush criticized past administrations for turning a blind eye to autocratic governments in the Middle Ea...

From the BBC : "They've done so much with outlawing and restricting access to abortion that they've set their sights on birth control because there's nothing else really they can do to further restrict abortion here in Wisconsin," Ms Boyce says. "Which is counter-intuitive because if you're against abortion in the least you'd think you would see the value in enhancing access birth control, the very means women look to preventing pregnancy and the need for abortion."

This is Republican blogger Andrew Sullivan : THREE TRILLION DOLLARS: It doesn't even sound better when Dr Evil says it. That's what George W. Bush's proposals for his second term would cost . Actually, that's just the cost of keeping tax relief in place and privatizing part of social security. It excludes the costs of the war or the other fast-expanding parts of Bush's Big Government. In terms of fiscal responsibility, it's way worse than John F. Kerry; and if the Congress remains in Republ...

This is the Weekly Standard 's Jonathan Last, summing up a Washington Post piece. I'll quote at length. (1) They get Marcel Matley to give an interview. Matley now says he examined not the documents, but only one signature and that "There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them." (2) They reveal that the Post has run its own, independent comparisons and found "dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing tech...

From the Washington Post : [Indiana Republican Congressman Mark Edward] Souder's bill ... would deny the District's elected officials "authority to enact laws or regulations that discourage or eliminate the private ownership or use of firearms." The legislation has 228 co-sponsors, more than enough to clear the 435-member House. Here, the Washington Republicans reveal their true (lack of) respect for self-government. Ronald Reagan used to say we should have faith in our local communities --...

From the Washington Post : Many people with advanced dementia appear to be voting in elections -- including through absentee ballot. Although there are no national statistics, two studies in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island found that patients at dementia clinics turned out in higher numbers than the general population. Well, at least someone's turning out.

From MetaFilter : Yesterday, Mazen al-Tomasi, a reporter for Al-Arabiya, was broadcasting live from the scene of a carbombed Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which had attracted a crowd of locals. While making his report, a sudden noise came from behind Mazen. Two Apache helicopters flew in overhead, and one of them started attacking the crowd, with their guns. The crowd, which included several small children, tried to run away. A helicopter launched a missile... Mazen al-Tomasi was struck by...

From whitehouse.org Matt Drudge is the founder, publisher, and tirelessly heterosexual editor of The Drudge Report, the Interweb's number one source of indisputably objective political news. Eschewing formal training and so-called investigating, this former CBS studio gift shop cashier has single-handedly reinvigorated modern journalism with his trademark blend of 100 point headlines, anthrax forecasts, and blow-by-blow updates on the all-important rumored exchange of Democrats' bodily flu...

From the Associated Press : "What would you expect from a senator from Massachusetts?" Bush said, as a partisan crowd cheered the reference to Kerry's home state and its liberal leanings. If Kerry said something so dismissive of a Red State -- and its citizens -- Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and the Bush supporting segment of the Blogosphere would be venting anger over the quote for days, and resurrecting it for months.

This is from Andrew Sullivan 's blog. Andrew Sullivan is a Republican: Here's a quote that unnerves me. It's from a Sunni insurgent who was once, he says, pro-American. What turned him into an enemy? The incompetence of the occupation, in part, beginning with the post-liberation looting: "When I saw the American soldiers watching and doing nothing as people took everything, I began to suspect the US was not here to help us but to destroy us ... I thought it might be just the chaos of war...

From the Guardian : First Bush, and now Putin, have picked up lessons for their wars on terror from Israel's campaign against the Palestinians. There has indeed been a dramatic rise in religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world. The problem is that under the Likud doctrine there is no space to ask why this is happening. We are not allowed to point out that fundamentalism breeds in failed states, where warfare has systematically targeted civilian infrastructure, allowing the mosques to s...

The subtitle -- "it's a fake" -- is a Star Trek (DS9) reference. Probably no one will get it, and I've just outed myself as a geek. Oh well. Lots of sort-of news this morning, most of it indicating that the Killian documents aren't authentic. There's a fairly good roundup at Slate . CBS finally produced an expert -- Marcel B. Matley -- who said he thought the records were authentic, but according to the Los Angeles Times, he was only vouching for the document in which Killian orde...

Top Scientists have discovered: Look at this enlargement from Section 2: Clause 4. If we magnify the image we see that the "h" in When and the are identical . This cannot be possible because at the time the framers of the constitution were using a Johnson-Matlock Quill pen, this was a very messy pen and did not allow for uniform letters. The earliest a uniform quill pen was invented was in 1793. Four years after this document was purported to be written. Clever. Very clever.