But last night, I dreamed that Al Gore announced his 2008 presidential candidacy on the Daily Show.

Apparently the administration's after-the-fact pronouncements about how effective the January 13 (Friday the 13th, I might add) airstrike against suspected al Qaeda members in the mountainous region along the Pakistani-Afghan are apparently news to Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

The US has claimed that al Qaeda chemical weapons expert Midhat Mursi (a.k.a. Abu Khabab), Khalid Habib, aQ's chief of operations for Afghanistan/Pakistan, and Ubayda al Masri, its operations chief for the Afghan Konar province were in the vicinity when the airstrike took place and were the intended targets.  US officials also claimed that as many as eight alQ-related foreigners were killed in the raid, but that their bodies were quickly spirited away by accomplices.

On CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer", Aziz called the report US report "bizarre" and said that "There is no evidence, as of half an hour ago, that there were any other people there" other than the 13 civilians confirmed killed.

For instance, he is pro-abortion; pro-privacy; he's against institutional discrimination (although he's a little racist himself); he's not religious and thinks that the religious right's influence over the Repubs is pernicious; he's for gay civil unions (but not for gay marriage); he thinks Bush is a bumbling dunce not fit to serve as president (ditto for Bush's neocon posse); and he's very uncomfortable with the direction of the US government in the past few years.

One caveat: he's extremely pro-gun.

From SR (name redacted due to the vengeful nature of DeLay and his myrmidons), a Houston trial lawyer who often has to appear before the Big-Business biased, tort-reformer Repub judges and nutcase Christian evangelists who currently comprise the vast majority of the Harris County state court judiciary.

I just wrote this email to Kroger's head offices via the contact page on their website:

I was absolutely shocked driving home today as I passed two Kroger stores featuring regular unleaded gasoline prices of $3.31 per gallon. Across the street from one is a Shell station (generally one of the higher-priced gas retailers) with gas at $2.89, almost fifty cents per gallon difference.

If I were buy gas from you instead of the Shell station across the road, it would cost me an additional $8 to fill up my tank.

I don't know what you call such a brazen and shameless disparity, but I know what I call it: freaking price gouging. And I believe the Texas Attorney General's office just might have a similar opinion after I lodge a complaint against you with them.

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Remember all that political capital President Bush said he'd earned after the election?  And how he said he'd be spending it to advance his agenda?

Well, he's spending that virtual money as wildly as he's spending our real money ... and getting about the same results.  After a month-long stump-speech-laden campaign trip (affectionately termed on Daily Kos as "Bamboozlepallooza") to drum up support for his nebulous "plan" to "reform" [destroy] Social Security, the public's opinion of him and his "plan" is worse than when he started.  [it's a good time for another terror alert, don't you think?]

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This story is far too important to allow it to be rated under U.S. to Crack Down on Lasers Pointed at Aircraft or New U.S. Food Guidelines Stress Vegetables, Grains (cmon, are you freaking kidding me?)

This should stay in the news for several days and not just be blithely passed over like the latest celebrity breakup or "stupid criminal" piece.

Help de-freep this story by clicking here: Rate it up

[Warning: verbosity alert]

An ambitious morality tale on the inherent dangers of media consolidation.  It's decently executed, but could have stood to be longer and more in-depth.  I'd be interested in seeing version 2.5 (positing that this one was 1.0).

But it does give rise to broader, more profoundly frightening thoughts about the malleability of reality through manipulation of perception ... a phenomenon we see merely the pale beginnings of today in FoxNews' viewership's view of the world.  A schism between actual facts and the stage-managed perception of the real ... which becomes a reality unto itself.  

In the past, I've created snarky and sarcastic Bush/Cheney reelection tshirts and sold about 80 of them on zazzle.com (short url to my collection: http://bush.mirrorz.com).  So I've decided to continue sniping from the sidelines.

After reflecting on the (seemingly outlandish) theory that Poe's death resulted from being abducted and repeatedly doped up and forced to vote by election-rigging thugs in Baltimore (an apparently common practice in those days), I was inspired to write a bit of political satire based on Poe's immortal "The Raven".