How much further can they go in 4 years?  Before this election, I heard people suggesting that a second Bush term might never end.  Was this hyperbole, or is it just too horrible to think about now?

   We've already seen the damage that can be done to a system of checks and balances in a four year period, and Bush was apparently elected this time on the strength of his personality, not his policies.  How much of a stretch is it to think he might try something radical to stay in power after his 8 years are up, and that his actions would be ignored by the people and supported by the other two branches?

Over at the Bush Cheney '04 Official Blog, one of the 3 "Featured Posts" is titled "the elusive John Kerry.  I know it's generally impolite to repost articles in their entirity, in this case the article is short and I feel it's the only way to do it justice:

Presumably as a patriotic alternative to French vanilla, Dreyers is offering a limited edition "America's Vanilla".  This innovative, solidly built flavor is like other vanillas, except that the upstanding folk at Dreyers have taken the liberty (har) of dying it in the colors of our nation's flag.  So far, an heart-stirring display of unity against those traitorous frogs.  But wait...

     

From the Bangladesh Daily Star:
At the Camp War Horse detention centre in Baguba, north of Baghdad, it is a surreal scene: US soldiers handing out cash to freed prisoners along with a note saying "You have not been mistreated."

Desperate to limit the damage from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the US military has launched something of a charm offensive surrounding their detention centres.

They face an uphill struggle.

The domain is still registered to Russ Kick, but the site has been replaced by a placeholder page for a webserver called Plesk (which also seems to be a domain registrar or something; I won't pretend to understand).  Russ is guest blogging over at Boing Boing, but he hasn't mentioned anything.  Did his server crash, or was someone ordered to take it down?  Anybody know what might have happened, or if this Plesk product is actually a server someone might use for a high-traffic website, and not just a steaming pile of internet marketing?

Bullshit. How can our officials keep spouting this crap?  Are they deliberately lying, or are they really that poorly informed, even now?  And which is worse?

via Daily Rotten

    I very rarely pay attention to the right-wing hemiblogosphere, but today I slinked on over to InstaPundit and Tacitus to have a look around, and found a completely different discussion happening than what I'm used to in my usual, lefty world.  This is not a conversion story; I disagreed with much of what I read, but was a bit surprised to find nuanced, rational disussions and even some minor dissent from the standard-issue talking points.

 

Just recently rediscovered this strip and noticed this uncharacteristically political one.  Thought you folk might enjoy it.  That's all.

Currently the first item in the "More Top Stories" list on the upper right corner of the front page.
Um.  I'm not a journalist or anything, but I could swear there've been some larger antiwar protests than that in the last few months.  Like, thousands of times larger than the "more than 60 people" mentioned in CNN's lead-in.  I know it's common knowledge that mainstream media is biased and tends to underreport these things, but picking such a sparsely attended event and holding it up as representative of the national movement seems particularly slimy.

article here