Add to your collection of disgraced journalists one Hans Nichols working for Bloomberg.  His story "Las Vegas Strippers May Influence Nuclear Waste Policy" is the reason why.

There is, I suggest, an honest winning strategy for the Democratic Party that can effectively fragment the current neocon-led Republican Party while simultaneously building a strong Democratic majority coalition.  You’re going to need something like this for 2008.

QUEENS COLLEGE WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAM PRESENTS

THE VIRGINIA FRESE PALMER CONFERENCE
WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH 2006

WOMEN AND THE IRAQ WAR

Mon. March 20, 2006
9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
4th Floor, Student Union, Queens College

9:00 a.m. - 12 noon:    Panel on Women and the Iraq War

Aseel Sawalha:  Professor of Anthropology, Pace University

Houzan Mahmoud:  London Representative of OWFI (Organization
for Women's Freedom in Iraq)

Yifat Susskind:  Associate Director of MADRE, International
Women's Human Rights Organization

Janis Karpinski:  First Woman General to Lead U.S. Troops in a Combat Zone and Commanding General at Abu Ghraib Prison

Amy Goodman:  Host and executive producer of Democracy Now!
TV and Radio News Program

12:15 - 1:30 p.m.:  Performance of "Girl Blog from Iraq:  Baghdad Burning," a play based on the blog of Riverbend, a woman writing from Iraq.  Adapted by Kimberly Gefgen and Loren Noveck.

1:30-3:00:  Lunch

The following caught my attention.  USA Today's storyline:

Police apologize, drop charge against Sheehan

This I had to read.  We've all noted the differential treatment accorded to Cindy compared with Beverly Young.  Cindy was handcuffed, arrested, and detained for wearing a tee-shirt that said "2245 Dead. How many more?", whereas Beverly Young was removed, but neither cuffed, nor arrested for wearing a shirt that said "Support the Troops -- Defending Our Freedom". But after spending the better part of a half hour deconstructing the story, I ended up thinking it was a good object lesson in political maneuvering -- with the help of the obliging media of course.  Let's have a look.  

Wikipedia grows daily as the largest encyclopedia in the history of mankind.  Its contributors are restricted to anyone with a pulse.  It is remarkable how much useful information there is, and entries can and often do evolve to become informative and generally accurate articles.  But some topics are the subject of political contention, and sometimes entries become the battleground for competing political interests.  Deliberate falsification or irresponsible practices can result in the persecution of innocent individuals.  Such is examined in today's New York Times.  The right wing has seen Wikipedia as a golden opportunity to smear their targets in a widely disseminated information source.  You may already have been Freeped!

Among the targets, I discovered, is my town, Ithaca, New York.  I might have known.  Has your town been Freeped?  Maybe it's time to find out

Received this today via a friend, and thought people might be interested to see it.

John Hinderaker of PowerLine concedes in an article published this hour in The Weekly Standard that the Schiavo Memo was not a fake.  To his credit, he reverses his claims against the democrats.  

However, he takes some of the force out of his retraction by asserting that he was right that this memo was not a product of the Republican Congressional leadership.  Here the memo becomes again a diversion.  Although it remains to be seen how far the memo was disseminated, surely the memo itself was not the problem.  In the end, the memo was an indicator of what was already commonly believed among the Republican Congressional leadership.  Could there have been anyone among the Republican Congressional leadership who did not understand what elements of Republican strategy were being exercised during the Terri Schiavo intervention?  

QP

In the course of my flight from academia into the arts, I took a detour of several years into the dark world of Wall Street out of economic necessity.  There I worked as a consultant to senior VPs on the technical side of an extremely large company known for its male bovine imagery.  Here I found myself as one of the only liberals in the midst of the very breeding ground of right-wing Republicanism.  I barely escaped.  What I saw there and what that says to us now is the subject of this diary entry.