sotto.org

Kitchen sink equivalence.

Real time rss + flash = “newsy”:http://www.jeroenwijering.com/whatsup/ “distractions”:http://www.reverbiage.com/. Via a metatalk discussion.

The day “Coretta Scott King dies”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5180053 is the same day “Samuel Alito”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito is confirmed to the Supreme Court. The sad irony of this juxtaposition would be too much to bear if we did not already suffer from outrage fatigue. This is par for the course.
How would the Civil Rights movement have fared if Alito [...]

Anyone who believes we successfully _won_ the war in Afghanistan needs a “serious reality check”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-11-16-afghan-insurgents-inside_x.htm:
The adversary faced this year by the Desert Eagles and other American units fighting in Afghanistan has defied military predictions that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were fading.
“It’s absolutely true that the insurgency has become more effective and the insurgency has [...]

Incidents and deadlines at the daily grind have kept me from posting of late. One subject of import that I have sorely neglected has been the utmost dire situation in the regions affected by the recent earthquake. theyblinked’s brother Trevor gave him an “account”:http://www.theyblinked.com/blog/2005/10/this-just-in-from-trevor-in-pakistan.html a few weeks ago:
bq. Hope you get this. My computer died [...]

Delicious and sadly dead-on satirical on the primal scream inducing clusterfuck that is the U.S. government’s handling of the Katrina crisis:

Predictably enough, the president has come under attack in the wake of the New Orleans disaster, as embittered partisans seek to blame him for every little thing the agencies under his control failed to do [...]

My thoughts about the last week in a nutshell. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

File this under just desserts.

“So You’re Being Tortured To Death In An American Military Prison!”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/so-youre-being-tortured-to-death-in.html

Q: Help! I’m being tortured to death in an American military prison! What should I do?
A: First of all, you should get your facts straight. You’re not being tortured to death in an American military prison; you’re being interrogated to death in an American detainment [...]

!http://www.sotto.org/images/Pope_Palpatine_Small.jpg (Pope Palpatine…Benedict)!:http://www.sotto.org/images/Pope_Palpatine_Full.jpg
Speculation on the new pope was fast and furious during those first few hours when he was annouced to an anxious world through a cloud of smoke and some thrown antipasto and giardiniera. Luckily, Wikipedia scooped them all. I took a “screenshot”:http://www.sotto.org/images/Pope_Palpatine_Full.jpg of the Wikipedia page describing the ascendance of the new Emperor… [...]

More details come to light concering Pat Tillman’s death in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan last April. Two things came to mind while reading the article. Firstly, I couldn’t help but think how different the Armed Forces would be if there were more Pat Tillman’s serving: a soldier/poet spirit with the relative luxury of [...]

The Lonestart Iconoclast, Bush’s hometown paper, endorses John Kerry for president. I’m not sure how many papers Crawford, Texas actually has, but I was gobsmacked that their editorial board had the guts to print this in Bush country. Their arguments about why this president does not deserve a second term are lucid, cogent and rational, [...]

The first Kerry campaign speech that made me think he might actually win.

Democracy via Hellfire: A harrowing first person account of a purportedly unprovoked Apache Helicopter rocket attack on Iraqi civilians. The pictures are graphic.

Your right to dissent:The 2004 election is becoming a referendum on your right to hold the president accountable. If the President were a CEO of a fortune 500 company (remember he touted himself as the first CEO president), he would have been replaced a long time ago for poor performance on his mishandling of the [...]

Hell hath no fury like an erudite baritone from Lake Wobegone throwing down the gloves.

I wrote this draft post when the news about Abu Ghraib came out, but I never finished it. I resurrected it today because of the release of the Fay Report sans my thoughts about torture being being Western Democracy’s dirty little secret. Instead, I’ll let the original article I linked to speak eloquently for itself.

Is [...]

Time for a reality check: Someone finally puts this country’s inordinate fear of terrorism into perspective by placing himself into real harm’s way several times including a bus ride in Jerusalem after a major Israeli attack. What this article and these past three years have suggested to me is that there is something seriously wrong [...]

The Diebold Variations: Life’s a crapshoot. Elections don’t have to be.