I didn't watch much news today, but I was really interested to hear how vociferously our beloved Democratic leaders were opposing the Alito confirmation, so I tuned in the late hour of CNN's Situation Room (transcript).  If you were paying attention to any news around that time, I'm sure you know the top story was the air strike in Pakistan that was alleged to have killed Ayman Al-Zawahiri, maybe... but that's unconfirmed.  Wolf Blitzer spent the first segment of the show talking about nothing else.  He conferred with a couple CNN correspondents that had nothing substantial to add other than that if Zawahiri were dead it would be a good thing... but that's unconfirmed.  Oh yeah, they played the same clip of rubble and a dead cow about sixteen times, maybe more.

(Read about Laura Bush after the fold)

I was watching CNN on Tuesday.  At one point they cut away to the President talking about the supposed nuclear threat from Iran.  I don't remember who the reporter was, but she said something like, "the President is at his ranch in Crawford, Texas -- now they want us to call it the Western White House."  I've heard the term used before -- and not just with this President.  Wikipedia gives examples as early as Franklin D. Roosevelt.  What struck me was that apparently the press had been asked to refer to it as the Western White House.  Then sure enough, when the video feed came up, the President was standing in front of an official-looking seal of the Western White House.  You can just see it in this picture at Yahoo.  Personally, I think the phrase "leisure retreat" is more appropriate.

<more after the fold...>

I know a lot (if not most) of this has been covered here before, but I posted this to my own blog and felt like it summed things up pretty well.  I decided to post here also and learn how to use the diary.

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If there is any one thing held sacred in a democracy, it is the process of democracy itself.  Each voter has the right to vote, and each vote must be counted.

In the blogosphere there has been much talk of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement as well as mechanical errors and outright election fraud.  I'm not going to get into individual cases for any of these.  If you're interested, just poke around the political blogs and you'll find hundreds if not thousands of examples.  These range in credibility from confirmed problems that have already been fixed through certain hoaxes designed to draw attention away from legitimate concerns.