Now This

This blog is now read by more machines than humans: RSS robots, spam-laying insectopoids, echoes of blog-gathering .edu projects. This essentially is the state of affairs that all human activities wil

Cleaning Up the Nation

Austin Bay:

If Air America were a conservative radio network its corrupt funding trail and cynical abuse of a poverty program would be front page news at the NY Times and full-time mega-scandal at

Rank Materialism

Freedom. I am now the proud new owner of a Gateway 6020GZ laptop, perfect for students and others with limited means. I can now go into a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble and look like I'm doing some

Fallujah Fonda

Uh-oh. From the Telegraph comes this exciting news:

Jane Fonda is returning to anti-war activism and embarking on a cross-country tour to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq.

Acros

John Pilger: Partner in Terrorism

In an outrageous piece of terrorist propaganda appearing on the cover of today's New Statesman, John Pilger puts the blame for the 7/7 London attacks not on the terrorists, but rather on Tony Blair:

A Small Incident at Wendy's

Kerry talking to a US Marine in a Wendy's in Scranton, PA (via Insta and LGF). From the NY Post:

The Marines — two in uniform and two off-duty — were polite but curt while chatting with Kerry, answering most of his questions with a "yes, sir" or "no, sir."

But they turned downright nasty after the Massachusetts senator thanked them "for their service" and left.

"He imposed on us and I disagree with him coming over here shaking our hands," one Marine said, adding, "I'm 100 percent against [him]."

A sergeant with 10 years of service under his belt said, "I speak for all of us. We think that we are doing the right thing in Iraq," before saying he is to be deployed there in a few weeks and is "eager" to go and serve.

Like most media events of this sort, there's a whole lot of context missing that, were we aware of it, might change our take on the event. But that photo is a small disaster for the Kerry campaign. The expressions on the Marines' faces, Kerry's finger wagging; it looks like Kerry's lecturing a Marine. What makes the picture more salient is that it plays right into the story that Kerry is weak on defense. If any picture is Kerry's version of "Dukakis-in-a-tank", it's this one; forget the NASA cleansuit pics.

What does it appear that Kerry's saying in that picture? For all I know, he's saying that he supports US troops in Iraq 100% and as president, would do everything in his power to achieve victory there and bring the troops home, and that he'd continue to fight the War on Terror even more vigorously than Bush has done. But it appears as if, and again probably unfairly, that he's lecturing them on the wrongness of preemptive military action, and oh yeah, you guys screwed up in Abu Ghraib. Such interpretation is in the nature of photographs. Of course other people will bring different mindsets to the picture and come up with a different narrative context. But not as many, I think.

I wonder how many media outlets will publish this photo. I know a lot of blogs will. We'll see.

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Comments

That's a decent US Marine defending his position under attack.

Is not Kerry saying, "Pull on this son - and then we'll all witness a weapon of mass destruction going off......."?

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