Feeling safer yet? How about now?

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Dean talks about his faith. Reporter has snark fit.

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The testing of the meat we eat is far from complete. Welcome to the era of personal responsibility - you should be testing it yourself.

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Krugman suggests some New Year’s resolutions for journalists. Don’t hold your breath.
Political operatives have become experts at manufacturing the appearance of outrage. In the last few weeks the usual suspects have been trying to paint Howard Dean’s obviously heartfelt comments about his brother’s death in Laos as some sort of insult to the military. We [...]

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Shorter Richard Reeves:
Are there still people dumb enough to believe invading Iraq was a principled thing?

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On the way to a family gathering today, my son and I were talking about Howard Dean and the media attacks. “Mom, these people really don’t get it,” he said about the Beltway pundits. “They’re already obsolete and they don’t even realize it.”
I agreed. I told him the journalism establishment’s attitude toward the Internet and [...]

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It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.- Wendell Berry
I love this poem. It’s so difficult sometimes to believe the hard times will ever end, yet somehow they do.
Merry Christmas, everyone.

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God is not a wingnut. Read about the good work this clergyman is doing.

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From Dave over at Seeing the Forest:
“In the week ending Dec. 20, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 353,000, a decrease of 1,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 354,000.”
Here’s the UNADJUSTED number: ETA Press Release: Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, “The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, [...]

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WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: “Truth No. 2″, the Dixie Chicks. Each time when he swung the bat/ And I found myself a-laying flat/ I’d wonder/ What a way to spend a dime/ What a way to use the time/ Ain’t it baby/ I looked at my reflection/ In the window walking past/ And I saw [...]

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Laura Rozen at War and Piece asks: So what’s the real story with Libya?
So what is the Libya back story? None of the pieces so far seem to totally nail it. Who were the actors, the back channels, on both sides? One report suggested such discussions began five years ago. Was the US invasion of [...]

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Wacky Laurie Mylroie was on C-SPAN this morning plugging her book (I guess everyone else was busy) and man, the woman is scary. As one caller put it, “You appear to be drunk, or on drugs.”
The former AEI adjunct presented her Unified Field Theory of Terrorism: all evil springs from Iraq. Yes, just as Wee [...]

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I wouldn’t be chowing down on burgers anytime soon.
“We’re talking about billions of people” around the world who potentially have been exposed to U.S. beef, Lester Friedlander, a former USDA veterinarian who has been insisting mad cow is present in American herds for years, told UPI.
The USDA insisted the case is probably isolated and the [...]

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Oh, then it was okay for them to lie - er, make a false claim.
In the speech Jan. 28, President Bush cited British intelligence in asserting that Hussein had tried to buy uranium from an unnamed country in Africa. The White House later said the claim should not have been made, after reports that the [...]

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I’m still feeling safer. You?

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WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: “Let Him Fly,” Patty Griffin, “Living With Ghosts“: And there ain’t no talking to this man/ He’s been trying to tell me so/ Took a while to understand/ The beauty of just letting go/ ‘Cause it would take an acrobat/ And I already tried all that/ I’m gonna let him fly.

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Michael Moore shares letters he’s gotten from soldiers in Iraq - and tells us what we can do to help them:
“You’d be surprised at how many of the guys I talked to in my company and others believed that the president’s scare about Saddam’s WMD was a bunch of bullshit and that the real motivation [...]

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Don’t forget the reality of what’s happening in Iraq. And this isn’t even addressing civilian deaths.

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“Structural change” is what may put Wee George out of work, too. We can only hope.
An August Federal Reserve study estimates that as many as 79 percent of jobs are in industries where jobs have been lost forever, a phenomenon Fed economists call “structural change.”
Another estimate by Forester Research goes into more specifics. Forrester [...]

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This seems a bit of an overreaction, doesn’t it?

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Via Atrios, this Robert Scheer piece on what sadly passes for journalistic integrity these days:
To sue for violation of his rights under the federal Privacy Act, Lee must identify the government agencies that leaked the defamatory information. Last week, New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and James Risen, who did the most to hype claims [...]

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Halliburton: They made us buy more expensive gas from Kuwait with their mind control.

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Krugman on birds of a feather flocking together.
The real surprise, though, is that two prominent journalists, William Buckley and George Will, were also regular paid advisors to Hollinger. Now, I thought there were rules here. First, if you’re a full-time journalist, you shouldn’t be in that kind of relationship. Second, whoever you are, if you [...]

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The Gallup poll - one that traditionally estimates Bush’s support on the high end - says there’s been only a slight bump in his approval ratings since Saddam Hussein’s capture.

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Holy shit.
It was supposed to be simple, breaking into a small boatyard near here and stealing a marine radio to monitor police frequencies.
But when the two intruders, Patrick V., 14, and his accomplice, Christopher Conley, 19, spotted what they thought were video surveillance cameras, they panicked and set fire to the building, burning it [...]

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Okay, Josh Marshall weighs in on the story about Saddam Hussein really being captured by the Kurds - and why he doesn’t believe it.
So, I think this all adds up to no reason to believe there’s anything to do this story, at least not based on what I’ve seen in published accounts. What I think [...]

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Confined Space points us to the New York Times, whose latest series verifies that OSHA is a toothless old broad. Read here, here and here:
Over a span of two decades, from 1982 to 2002, OSHA investigated 1,242 of these horror stories — instances in which the agency itself concluded that workers had died because of [...]

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Looks like Wee George has managed to piss off his last ally:
According to diplomats, relations between the allies have gone into “deep freeze” since the capture of Saddam Hussein last weekend.
President Bush was incensed that Mr Blair stole Washington’s thunder by being the first Western leader to confirm that the former dictator had been arrested [...]

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FEELING SAFER YET?
This was sent to me today by a reader who works for the feds:
To All Employees:
1. The Department of Homeland Security has issued an upgraded advisory on terrorist activity. Unfortunately, increased security comes at the expense of being inconvenienced at times due to those measures. For this reason, we [...]

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Looks like Dean was right.

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