A few notes about the debate last night:
1) McCain needed a win, and he didn’t get it. Most  post-debate polls pointed to a clear Obama win, and on CNN — still using those absurd blue and red circular scorecards — even the Republican strategists handed it to Obama.
2) McCain still hates earmarks. Tagged at about [...]

Read Debate Analysis: Off The Deep End »

Meantime, the McCain campaign is not campaigning. The senator from Arizona wants to be clear that, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, he’s merely visiting the Middle East to take a lay of the land. It’s a good thing, too, because McCain has repeatedly confused Shia and Sunni Iraqis and Iranian militants [...]

Read McCain’s middle east of the mind »

Felicia (Felecia?) Pearson, the woman behind the wildest most-intriguing character on TV, hitgirl Snoop on The Wire, came out this week with a memoir called Grace after Midnight. We haven’t had the honor of peeping it yet (G-C publishing, send us a copy already!) but the stories in that book are sure to be the [...]

Read Snoop weekend »

The FBI has a new target — the Filipino Community. There are Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist cells in the Philippines, which isn’t news, but the feds are now targeting Filipino activists in northwestern US as supspected terrorists.
On October 4, Freedom Allah Siyam, a Seattle Filipino activist changed his name from Gotcho Cupp in 1998, had feds come [...]

Read no freedom for Freedom »

So, hey, why isn’t President Pervez “Mushy” Musharraf of Pakistan afraid of the Big Bad Wolf (ie, terrorism generally and al Qaeda in particular)? Is it maybe because he’s secretly on the side of Osama in the War on Terror? Or maybe because he’s a Muslim living among Muslims in a combative part of the [...]

Read american twinks »

We Americans are different: we think we’re special and the rest of the world thinks we’re especially isolated and willfully ignorant. Newsweek, it turns out, panders to both sides of the equation, printing two dramatically different versions of its weekly magazine– one for domestic readers and a completely different version for foreign readers. Check it [...]

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Truth Out today posted an Agence France Presse round-up of international newspaper editorials. There are no big surprises but the general disgust on the part of editors around the world toward the Bush response to the attacks in the last five years is sobering.
Papers in Europe and the Middle East were the most brutal– which [...]

Read whadda they know »

Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s Countdown, is all over the web today for lambasting the Bush Administration’s new election-season angle of attack on media dissent (the most effective way to limit any dissent). In a series of speeches this week, first Rumsfeld and then Bush linked American journalists with the Nazis and al Qaeda, [...]

Read uberman olbermann »

WireTap Magazine posted a piece today on Lt. Ehren Watada, 28, who is facing indictment and imprisonment for refusing to deploy to Iraq. He faces a pretrial hearing this week.
Watada is the first military officer to face charges for opposing the war and the government seems to be pursuing his prosecution to deter further objection [...]

Read Watada won’t go! »