Consolation Champs

So President Bush remains adamant that Iran is a threat? Even after his own intelligence services have told him otherwise? Why am I not surprised? I’m reading Frank Rich’s book The Greatest Story Ever Sold right now, and it’s all sounding very familiar. I just hope that the presidential election campaign can steamroll any “ambitions” […]

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From the November 2007 Harper’s magazine:
From a summary of recommendations in Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, a 211-page report released in July by the RAND Corporation’s National Defense Research Institute, under a $400,000 contract with the United States Joint Forces Command.
HARNESS THE POWER OF INFLUENCERS: Businesses […]

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Lake of Fire (USA, director Tony Kaye): A monumental (152 minutes!) documentary on the abortion issue filmed over a 15-year period, Tony Kaye’s film is likely to become a classic. The film covers all kinds of ground and features interviews with many people on both sides of the issue. Perhaps surprisingly, quite a few of […]

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Offside (Iran, director Jafar Panahi): Filmed during an actual qualifying match for the 2006 World Cup, Offside works brilliantly as both a comedy and a tragedy. The film follows the fortunes of a group of young women who are caught trying to sneak into a football match at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium. The country’s Islamic religious […]

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Brooke and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth tonight, which was fantastic. The horrible thing was sitting through three car commercials before the screening. I’ve been starting to count the number of commercials that are for cars and I’d say, according to my unscientific guess, that one out of every three commercials I see […]

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Absolutely the most cringeworthy thing that’s ever been on television. C-Span, even! For the record, I thought he was incredibly brave to stand there even when the audience was clearly not enjoying it. Salon has a great article about the whole debacle.

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CNN has published the results of a new poll showing President George W. Bush’s approval rating at 38% and the number of people who actively disapprove of his leadership is at 60%.
The most interesting part of the poll is the downloadable PDF which tracks his ratings all the way back to February 2001. Did you […]

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Harper’s is going from strength to strength recently, taking on the Iraq war with ferocity and honesty. Here are the last two paragraphs of an article about torture entitled “What We’ve Lost” by William Pfaff that appears in the November 2005 issue:

International illegality, the deliberate repudiation of international law, and torture, gratuitously employed in defiance […]

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Sigh…I wish I could stop linking to this stuff.
Patrick Henry College is a Christian college where 85% of the students come from homeschooled environments. It was founded explicitly to produce conservative politicians and other public office holders.
Discussion on Metafilter

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Though I haven’t commented yet, I was very happy with our Prime Minister’s recent decision that Canada not participate in the American Ballistic Missile Defense (Defence) plan. And don’t think we haven’t been getting a lot of flak about that up here. W won’t return Paul Martin’s calls, our beef can’t cross the border, Condi […]

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