Telling it like it is

This whole debacle about US troops abusing prisoners of war in Iraq is getting rapidly out of hand. The Americans don't seem to think there's anything wrong with it, while the Arab world have declared renewed hatred of the US because of it. Whilst a lot of papers in the rest of the world ran the abuse and torture pictures as their front page and lead stories, in USA Today, it wasn't even mentioned. In other newspapers, it was buried inside. In a classicly blinkered move that we've come to expect of well-educated people, David D. Perlmutter, a historian of war and media at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said the decision showed that U.S. editors understood what kind of war coverage interested U.S. readers. This is what he actually said (and the horrible thing is, I expect he truly believes what he's saying) : “The torture pictures are absolutely irrelevant. Americans care about American soldiers, and only journalistic and political and academic eli

Bollocks! Google has finally nailed its coffin shut and filed for a $2.7bn IPO. ie. they're going public. ie. they're about to be run for the shareholders. We can look forward to advertising, banners, popups, useless links, and all the other crap that comes when a dot-com goes public. Crap. Now we've got no search engine to use.

El Busho's numbers are down (:-)) His approval rating is at an all-time low and fewer than half of Americans now believe invading Iraq was the right thing to do, according to a CBS/New York Times poll. If the November election was held today, 46% would vote for Democrat John Kerry and 44% percent would vote for Bush. 32% (the lowest number ever) say Iraq was a threat that required immediate military action a year ago. 47% now say the United States did the right thing taking military action in Iraq, the lowest support recorded. 56% percent thought Bush was "mostly telling the truth but still hiding something" when he spoke to them about Iraq. 61% now believed the administration did not try hard enough to reach a diplomatic solution before going to war in Iraq -- a complete reversal of the public's belief last year during the war. 39% approve his handling of the economy. His overall approval rating (46%), his rating on handling Iraq (41%) and his r

Wow. We know El Busho is a retarded warmonger, and we know that the Feds and the CIA are suspicious of everything now (at Bush's behest) but for the secret service to be hassling a 15 year old kid about two drawings he did in school is truly beyond what even I thought this regime was capable of. Apparently, the kid drew two drawings. One was El Busho's head on a stick, the other depicted him as the devil launching a missile, with the motto "end the war on terrorism". The school phoned the police, the police phoned the secret service and they "detained" the kid for questioning. They are now frantically denying that it's a freedom-of-speech issue. It seems clear to the casual observer that El Busho is turning the Secret Service into his private Orwellian army. You can see the "CNN version" of the story (ie. not really the truth) here.