Some worthy rest stops on your trek through the news information highway: (
Note: Some are dated before today, as I've missed them while nursing three sick people in the baldandy household this week):
The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland talks about a new CIA paper that attempts to define the insurgent enemy by a 15-page narrative of an Iraqi tailor pseudonymed "Kamal". What is revealing is the extent that the Bush regime still doesn't have a grasp on who they are fighting, and hence, why.
Two broad schools of analysis have competed within the administration since remote-control and suicide bombings erupted about four months after major combat operations ended in April 2003. Hearing the theories argued out again in one of his last White House meetings before he left office, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage groaned: "We can't even agree on who we are fighting."
More...
Also from WaPo,
Marc Fisher's column ripping Maryland Governor Ehrlich for failing to apologize about the O'Malley rumor mongering from a close aid:
Ah, yes, here 'tis: Gov. Robert Ehrlich, chief executive of the Free State, standing before the General Assembly two weeks ago, shoving his script aside, laying it on the line: "It's about respect," Ehrlich told the state legislature. Theirs for him.
Now, just a few hundred hours later, I believe I speak for most of Maryland in saying, um, Bob, "respect?"
And from the Big Apple, the NY Times' David Kirkpatrick points out the risks to campaign coffers in backing off from solid pro-abortion rights candidates:
Single-issue abortion rights groups gave over $1.4 million in the 2004 elections to candidates for national office, more than twice as much as the total from groups opposed to abortion rights, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In addition, Emily's List raised $34 million for female candidates who support abortion rights, according to the center. By comparison, the National Right to Life Committee, the largest donor opposed to abortion rights, raised about $1.7 million.
And Nicholas Kristof takes on Bush's "sex scandal":
Look, I'm all for abstinence education. I support the booming abstinence industry as it peddles panties and boxers decorated with stop signs (at www.abstinence.net), and "Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date" T-shirts.
Abstinence education is great because it helps counteract the peer pressure that often leaves teenagers with broken hearts - and broken health.
For that reason, almost all sex-ed classes in America already encourage abstinence. But abstinence-only education isn't primarily about promoting abstinence - it's about blindly refusing to teach contraception.
The Chicago Trib's Steve Chapman adds his amazement at Bush's predicament on Iran and North Korea:
[Bush's] displays of stubbornness are an embarrassment for a president who thought he could intimidate our enemies with threats and demands. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush declared, "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
That was the rationale for the Iraq war, which only adds to the mortification: We invaded a country that didn't have weapons of mass destruction, while putting up with one that claims it does and another that is far closer to getting nukes than Iraq ever was.
Clarence Page writes about Hillary's not-so-sudden moves to the center and connects her recent speeches to the wisdom of the Reverend Jim Wallis, author of "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It".
[Clinton] praised faith-based programs. She reminded everyone that she is "a praying person" and that when she was first lady she advocated teenage celibacy. She defended family-planning services and over-the-counter sales of "Plan B" emergency contraception, but allowed that "the jury is still out" on a conservative favorite, abstinence-only programs for teens...
[Rev. Wallis] is astounded, he told me by telephone on his book tour, to find hundreds of young people in his travels who "didn't know you could be a Christian and still care about poverty or the environment or promoting alternatives to war."
That perception is particularly dismaying to Wallis, a registered Democrat. Ever since his college days in the late 1960s, Wallis has been preaching about how the Bible has 3,000 verses that mention the poor and, so far, he has not found any that talk about capital-gains tax cuts for the rich.