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Pat Tillman demolished sterotypes while he was alive. His family continues that tradition in his memory:

Just when we thought we had a pure and simple hero, a millionaire athlete who gave up wealth and fame to become the ideal patriot, to make the ultimate sacrifice, his friends and family complicated everything. They turned Pat Tillman [...]

Kevin Shelley, the Secretary of State for California has banned all electronic voting machines from being used for subsequent elections in the state, after revelations by the state voting commission uncovered a serious March 2nd fuckup in San Diego County. In addition, he is presenting evidence to the State Attorney General to consider bringing fraud [...]

“You never hear about most of it because the press never hears about most of it. And if the press wasn’t there, it never happened.” An intimate look at the daily cycle of violence that one must endure while living in occupied Iraq, from a journalist living among Iraqis. Noted: civil war seems all but [...]

This is their argument in a nutshell:

Terrific reporting by Gail Sheehy on the information discovered by the bipartisan 9/11 commission so far: heroic stewardesses on doomed flights, stonewalling and a lack of transparency by the government, and the failure of those at the highest levels to tell the public the whole truth. A must read.

“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.” The sorry record of the Transportation Security Administration. Read it and realize just how much we’ve lost these last three years. Read it and mourn the demise of privacy, common sense, decency and human dignity in our public lives. Read it and be saddened and outraged at what rough beast the government [...]

Judging 2003’s Ideas: The Most Overrated and Underrated:

At the end of each year, [NYTimes] Arts & Ideas asks a handful of writers, scholars and other opinionated people to identify the year’s most underrated and overrated ideas.

I’d accept this one about an overrated America having lived abroad, but would have written it with less vitriol and [...]

High seas piracy of modern day maritime vessels seems an anachronism of the absurdly highest level. Yet there is a new piracy occurring in the busy South East Asian corridor where merchant ships offload cargo to ports such as Singapore and Hong Kong where this old maritime crime happens all too often. A long [...]

9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable. A bombshell that shakes America out of its nationalist delusion or simply another diversion from Paris Hilton?

How did I not hear that former Illinois Senator Paul Simon passed away on the 10th? I remember a friend of mine showing me the Senator’s house when I was visiting southern Illinois many years back. I can’t remember the name of the town, but the house was a proud but unassuming old Victorian among [...]

Colin Powell appoints James Brown “Secretary of Soul and Foreign Minister of Funk”. Cain’t hep meself, I feel good.

In three short years, our common sense has given way to hyper-paranoia, while the checks and balances that protect our freedom and privacy (the very thing that makes the United States different from the rest of the world) are slowly being chipped away in innocuous fineprint.

The Tribune is running a series of reports about the results a of controversial security initiative meant to stem terrorist plots in the aftermath of 9/11: mass deportation of Muslims who are in this country illegally. The results so far: despite the multitude of deportations that have occurred since the initiative took place, there has [...]

Brookfield wolf killed after visitor is attacked.

Cinnamon Bear, an 11-year-old wolf born and raised at the zoo, was shot once in the chest Wednesday by a zoo police officer after the 100-pound animal clamped down on the woman’s arm–and refused to let go–when she apparently tried to pet him.

Sad and Outrageous. I think they should [...]

September12.org: The anniversary of September 11, 2001 brings back many sad memories, and the days that followed were moving in untold ways. Amid the loss, shock, and fear, people reached out to one another. New Yorkers, so often stereotyped as living too independently, treated each other tenderly and patiently. The grief shared [...]

Time’s recent article about the confessions Abu Zubaydah made during a sodium pentathol interrogation is the stuff of tinfoil hats and conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams. Insane stuff and it makes you wonder even more about the recently blocked material from the final September 11th Congressional Investigation:

Posner elaborates in startling detail how U.S. interrogators used drugs—an [...]

Farah tried to plead with the US troops but she was killed anyway. The death of two innocent Iraqis was thought so unremarkable the US military did not even report it, but Peter Beaumont says it reflects an increasingly callous disregard of civilian lives in coalition operations. This is a very sad story, not only [...]

More quote timelines from the unsinkable Molly Ivins. I know that I’ve already posted a few of these, and the absence of outrage (or anything resembling bemusement) among the average Am-reekan is par for the course these days.

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