Or also, from the last several days...

Political Punch: Liberal bloggers sayin Clinton ads darken Obama. Some others say it is a YouTube artifact effect.

Atmosphere released a free MP3 from the next album.

Hillary, Obama and the Establishment Machine | The Agonist

Hm. Definitely interesting: The Man Between War and Peace, Admiral Fallon.

Cuban Cyber Rebels and their flash drives and blogs! Viva Cuba flashdriva!

Smashing Magazine has nice design and free fonts.

io9 has random sci fi stuff. cool design too.

When in doubt, check out the Gary Webb video @ Archive.org, late in his life reflecting on the whole Los Angeles CIA crack cocaine thingy.

Global Guerillas is pretty buzzwordy, but it's pretty good. For your daily dose of super-modern open source insurgent warfare, extortion through DDoS - both Russian and Botnet variants, the imminent insect techno-eschaton, and how one super-empowered individual guerilla Henry Okah has brought Nigeria into total chaos and propelled oil over $100 a barrel. This Robb guy is definitely paying attention. National security bureaucracies are doomed?! Not if they can hoard up their own very biggest bestest haystack!

Meanwhile the economic crash continues apace. Much hand-wringing at one of my favorite spots, the Agonist . Wheat is over $12/bushel.

Buffett: it's a recession, stupid.

Banks face systemic margin call, $325 billion hit: JP Morgan!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are facing a "systemic margin call" that may deplete banks of $325 billion of capital due to deteriorating subprime U.S. mortgages, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N:Quote, Profile, Research), said in a report late on Friday.

JPMorgan, which sent a default notice to Thornburg Mortgage Inc. (TMA.N: Quote,Profile, Research) after the lender missed a $28 million margin call, said more default notices and margin calls were likely. The Carlyle Group's mortgage fund also failed to meet $37 million in margin calls this week.

"A systemic credit crunch is underway, driven primarily by bank writedowns for subprime mortgages," according to the report co-authored by analyst Christopher Flanagan. "We would characterize this situation as a systemic margin call."

The credit crisis that began about a year ago will likely intensify after Friday's weak February U.S. employment report "that most definitely signals recession," JPMorgan said.

Bush Family Piggy Bank Receives Default Notice! | The Agonist

The best news I have heard is the insane bastards in Florida who have taken advantage of the crashed system. They are sitting in their homes, paying nothing at all, waiting for the totally conked court system to struggle with the lost paperwork at every level of the mortgage. An awesome thing to behold!! The Big Picture | Foreclosure-proof Homeowners:

What is shocking, that in each and every case, I have been told by brokers and banks that the owners, have ceased paying their mortgages in some cases for nearly 2 years and have continued to occupy these homes. Now, these are homes in excess of $2,000,000 in the very best neighborhoods in South Florida. Brokers have added that these buyers further complicated things by putting huge home equity lines on top of their mortgages and now have no possibility of selling their homes for amounts needed to cover their accumulated debt.

America is amazing. Ok.

Bloomberg.com Citigroup needs Arab cash, fast!!!! Rlly fast!!!

Russians pissed off about American/Pakistani opium smuggling support in Afghanistan: (via cryptogon)

Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan by Vladimir Radyuhin

Global Research, February 24, 2008: Global Research Editor's Note

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.

Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on Afghanistan was launched following the Taliban government's 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a collapse in opium production in excess of 90 percent.

The following report, which accuses the United States of using military transport planes to ship narcotics out of Afghanistan confirms what is already known and documented regarding the Golden Crescent Drug Trade and its insiduous relationship to US intelligence.

February 23, 2008

Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan.....

....“Unfortunately, they [NATO] are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” Putin angrily remarked three years ago. He accused the coalition forces of “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.” As time went by, Russian suspicions regarding the U.S. role in the rise of a narco state in Afghanistan grew deeper, especially after reports from Iraq said that the cultivation of opium poppies was spreading rapidly there too.

“The Americans are working hard to keep narco business flourishing in both countries,” says Mikhail Khazin, president of the consultancy firm Niakon. “They consistently destroy the local infrastructure, pushing the local population to look for illegal means of subsistence. And the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] provides protection to drug trafficking.”

U.S. freelance writer Dave Gibson recalled in an article published in American Chronicle in December what a U.S. foreign intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told NewsMax.com in March 2002 of the CIA’s record of involvement with the international drug trade. The official said: “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences – the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favourite business.”

AFP

(A USAF cargo plane takes off from the U.S. airbase in Incirlik in Turkey in March 2003. A Russian news channel reported that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.)

Now Russia has joined the fray accusing the U.S. military of involvement in the heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to Europe. The Vesti channel’s report from Afghanistan said that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey.

The Ganci Air Force base at the Manas international airport in Kyrgyzstan was set up in late 2001 as a staging post for military operations inside Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz government threatened to close the base after neighbouring Uzbekistan shut down a similar U.S. airbase on its territory in 2005, but relented after Washington agreed to make a one-off payment of $150 million in the form of an assistance package and to pay $15 million a year for the use of the base.

One of the best-informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, Arkady Dubnov, recently quoted anonymous Afghan sources as saying that “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation.”

A well-informed source in Afghanistan’s security services told the Russian journalist that the American military acquired drugs through local Afghan officials who dealt with field commanders in charge of drug production.

Writing in the Vremya Novostei daily, Dubnov claimed that the pro-Western administration of President Hamid Karzai, including his two brothers, Kajum Karzai and Akhmed Vali Karzai, are head-to-heels involved in the narcotics trade.

The article quoted a leading U.S. expert on Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin, as telling an anti-narcotics conference in Kabul last October that “drug dealers had infiltrated Afghani state structures to the extent where they could easily paralyse the work of the government if decision to arrest one of them was ever made.”

Sure, they can say the Russians are grumbling like usual. But from Moscow's perspective, the U.S. is just trying to keep on top of all the Players in the Game. And they run the Wire all over the whole territory, so they know exactly who is doing what where, and can watch the opium caravans go cruising by. The fact that this doesn't track in American conventional wisdom is a monument to the intentional ignorance of Baby Boomers, regardless of how accurate the Russians are here.

The planes, the drugs, the detainees, it all seems to be part of a nexus of secret military/DHS contractor airlines. These guys are soooo 1980s. The ponzi scheme depends on information asymmetry, which can always be disrupted......

Yeh I have been up around with the sniffles all week. Finally today the ol' sinus passages cleared out and I feel good once more. This was an interesting week, as on Monday I met the one and only Dries Buytaert, the guy who invented Drupal back in college. (The Drupal team is at the U of M to do badass User Interface research). That was the same day as the Veto Override of the Transportation bill, which included a ban on privatizing the road systems of Minnesota.

I suspect that the ban may have been related to the work I did exposing the NAFTA Superhighway plan for MN back in December, which apparently got picked up by the DFL Capitol staff. have to follow up on that.

So yeah, today is the first in quite a few days where I don't feel totally gunked or garbled. Not bad for a Friday!!!

In an epic battle, Minnesota Democrats and a small tribe of brave, rebellious, Republicans defeated Governor Pawlenty's perpetually stupid transportation policies, and put forth a really good plan to save this whole metro area from a perpetually crappy future. Toll roads and privatization are banned (with some loopholes), the license tab caps enacted under Ventura have been removed, and a ton of money will get put into transit. MnDOT is also directed to make nice with the feds and develop a complete metro-wide transportation plan.

The metro area gets a huge block of new money, much of which will go right into transit, the first time in ages that anything has come that way.

Meanwhile local areas can vote to enact small sales taxes to cover various projects, which will be handed out by new joint boards. Or something along those lines. While it seems like a big slam of money, there is also a small gasoline tax refund for lower brackets.

Also they have to report the state of all the bridges every year. In all, it is a model bill for a troubled metro area such as ours, and should really catch notice within months. It also couldn't come soon enough: the municipal bond market is all screwed up now, so it is going to be hard to borrow money.

TPaw sheds some crocodile tears for the defeat of his hardline friends. Once again, he gets off the hook!

1.1A bill for an act


1.2 relating to transportation finance; appropriating money for transportation

1.3activities; providing funding for highway maintenance, debt service, and local

1.4roads; appropriating funds for emergency relief related to the I-35W bridge

1.5collapse; establishing a trunk highway bridge improvement program; requiring

1.6a study of value capture to reduce the public costs of large transportation

1.7infrastructure investment; authorizing sale and issuance of bonds; modifying

1.8motor vehicle registration and motor fuel taxes; establishing annual surcharge on

1.9motor fuel taxes; creating a motor fuels tax credit; allocating motor vehicle lease

1.10tax revenues; providing for local transportation sales taxes; modifying county

1.11state-aid highway fund revenue allocation; prohibiting tolling or privatization

1.12of existing transportation facilities; establishing bridge improvement program;

1.13modifying driver's license reinstatement fee provisions; regulating certain transit

1.14funding activities; modifying provisions related to various transportation-related

1.15funds and accounts; establishing a task force; requiring reports;amending

1.16Minnesota Statutes 2006, sections 160.84, subdivision 1; 161.081, subdivision 3;

1.17162.06; 162.07, subdivision 1, by adding subdivisions; 168.013, subdivision 1a;

1.18171.29, subdivision 2; 290.06, by adding a subdivision; 296A.07, subdivision

1.193; 296A.08, subdivision 2; 297A.64, subdivision 2; 297A.815, by adding a

1.20subdivision; 297A.99, subdivision 1; proposing coding for new law in Minnesota

1.21Statutes, chapters 160; 165; 296A; 297A; 398A.

1.22BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:

.... huzzah (and there was much rejoicing) ..... TPaw blamed someone else, and all was well in the land.... BE IT ENACTED!

It has been quite a while since I rattled at the shimmering electrons which might or might not care about what I have to say. Things are definitely going to shit:

• Turkey is invading Iraq, which will generate internal war #4 apparently. Pakistan is also disintegrating with generous jabs at the hornet's nest from freaggin Obama.
• Evidently our infrastructure is crumbling. I spent quality time at work reading all the wretched MnDOT reports on the I-35W bridge; they were nightmares - more on that later
• The national credit market LSD-fueled HedgeFundMortgageCrackPalooza seems to be crumbling as well. There is a systemic shock or crash emerging which is going to damage the housing/sprawl market for a long time. Literally our urban structures might stop sprawling & generating all that fabulous paper wealth. At least the last couple weeks a sign that the economy might suddenly abandon 'good faith & credit' soon, just in time for...
• The exploding oil market which will finally kill the American Dream of fetid suburban development once and for all. Even Mexican oil production is crashing. Demand is going to rise in these producer countries and they'll quit exporting. Supplies will fall and we're gonna hit that fucked-up time where all these complicated Cheap Oil systems will fail (Wal-Mart's 11,000 mile supply chain is a prime example).

That is enough to keep anyone away from writing. Yet here I am back again, against my better judgment.

No harm; the summer is a terrible time for blogging. I still have to update some Drupal modules, but at least the core is safely up to 5.2. After watching The Bourne Ultimatum and TNT's nifty docudrama miniseries The Company, I had a good whomping of the paranoia and knew it was time to tighten up all the digital angles best I can, so I took the site offline for a couple days to patch it up.

The first week back in town (last week) really rattled me. I haven't quite found my feet yet, I guess.

To top it off some little bastard stole my bottle of French wine from the kitchen over the weekend. It is a lucky stroke of good fortune I saved a backup. It's airport duty-free wine anyway, but fuckall shit I hauled it around the world spewing 90 pounds of carbon to get it here. FUCK. And then they left a filthy, half-full glass in the fridge.

Now back in town, I am at my parents' house in Hudson, Great Wisco, while I ponder getting a new apartment and the absurd amount of gas you gotta burn to live out here.

Tonight I finally gave in and plugged my desktop Mac G5 back together. It likes to scare the shit out of me once in a while and refuses to come back on. The monitor just sits there, glum & dark. I dimly recalled beating this problem before. [Nice thing about Macs: these kinds of shitstorms have a pretty limited complexity. It's about something easier than device drivers and Windows insanity...]

Here I'm making a note to myself: When initially setting up, I need to unplug all external drives and the external speakers (harman/kardon makes a nice speaker, but these old dogs are getting rough - and they tend to cause USB fuckups). Then I had to hit the Mac's special internal reset button, known as the PMU switch, which gives a mega-zap to the PRAM. (these were called CUDA switches back in the day) IMPORTANT: Only press the PMU for One Second While It's NOT plugged in. Otherwise you'll fry it. Too bad I definitely pressed it for way too long.

Then is step 2: plug the computer back in; hit the power button and immediately hold down Command-Option-P-R . This is also a PRAM zap which works at a lesser level than PMU. The G5 first issues its normal startup chime, then you gotta wait, still holding the keys. It chimes again. Wait. And again.

Then finally you let go, and for whatever mysterious reason it comes right back to life, no problem. I really think it's because the USB speakers and maybe the external hard drive hork it somehow.

In any case OS X 10.4.10 has been kinda dodgy in the USB department: my brother's Intel MacBook can't connect to his external music hard drive for shit since the upgrade. Someone discovered that running 'USB Prober' from the OS X Developer Tools gets it to rediscover the drives. I am way too tired to look up links right now.

That is all for now. I promise we'll be back on the gravy train of at least 3 posts a week for a while.

All right everyone. I am about to leave for England & France with my brother and dad tomorrow and I don't plan to blog or stay in the loop at all. But before I go, here is a story I did about the secret NAFTA superhighway scheme uncovered here in Minnesota. We published this in Politics in Minnesota: The Weekly Report yesterday...

SuperRondo Superhighway? MnDOT, NASCO, and plans for the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway

St. Paul's Rondo Days festival is right around the corner on July 21st. Rondo, of course, was the primarily black neighborhood obliterated when I-94 was built and blasted through, a route selected because of the neighborhood's lack of political clout. Deploying the "Stops-4-Us" message, the University Avenue Community Coalition plans to raise awareness about the potential damage to their neighborhoods because of the proposed Central Corridor light rail project, which they fear will remove parking, disrupt commerce and fail to offer enough stops for their community. The federal government wants fewer stops on the Corridor to reduce trip time, or else federal funds will be jeopardized. As one UACC organizer said to PIM, this federal policy has effectively removed transit stops from other urban communities around the nation.

On a much larger scale, proposals are now being drawn up for large transportation networks across America piggybacking on the interstate highway system. PIM has obtained documents from the Minnesota Department of Transportation about proposals to create major international transportation corridors along I-35 and I-94. The documents were obtained from MnDOT via the Minnesota Data Practices Act by local lawyer Nathan Hansen and posted on his blog and law firm's website. We have packaged the PDFs into a 66 MB ZIP archive available here through PIM's website.

The major group coordinating this effort is North America's Supercorridor Coalition, or NASCO. The MnDOT files include many strategic public relations emails among NASCO, lobbyists, government employees across the country, in Canada and Mexico, as well as grant applications specifying the exact nature of NASCO projects. Many emails among MnDOT personnel are also included. These documents formed the basis for a report by Jerome Corsi at WorldNetDaily, which also discussed MnDOT's views of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's (R) position on the matter. (Officially, he doesn't have one). The documents confirm that MnDOT agreed to join NASCO for a specially discounted price of $15,000, money that perhaps could have been better spent patching I-35W's potholes.

NASCO's website declares that I-35 is already the NAFTA superhighway; the group is not trying to build some vast network. Oklahoma City's mayor recently agreed [GoogleVideo] that I-35 was "really a part of that NAFTA corridor," and the U.S., Canada and Mexico should really be one economy. Both publicly and privately, NASCO brushes off the supposedly sinister nature of their project, which they say is intended to benefit the economy and alleviate congestion. Also MnDOT provided NASCO an index of projects along I-35 and I-94 in an effort to get NASCO's Washington lobbyists to coordinate better funding.

Also released were NASCO public relations documents describing how to spin media coverage, and MnDOT emails about media incidents. Oddly, NASCO distributed PR material disambiguating themselves, the cross-border Security and Prosperity Partnership, and even the Council on Foreign Relations, among their materials sent to Minnesota.

Interestingly, NASCO discusses an advanced systems integration platform called NAFTRACS (North American Facilitation of Transportation, Trade, Reduced Congestion and Security Project), which would be developed by SAVI, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, which already handles shipping container logistics for the Pentagon's Global Transportation Network. The NAFTRACS "integration pilot program will automatically gather, correlate, and interpret fragments of multi-source (Radar, AIS, & GPS tracks, Open Source, Intelligence, Watch list & Law Enforcement Report, CCTV, Bioterrorism sensors) data together into one collaborative portal-based environment, an [sic] ultimately a Total Transportation Domain Awareness Center of Excellence." The NASCO Center of Excellence and Total Domain Awareness Center would be the "centerpiece of the corridor coalition; will engage in studies, development and deployment activities; will seek funding & investment for a broad array of projects relevant to both the corridor and of current & national significance," including "the US-Mexico-Canada Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP); Hurricane Katrina/Rita impact; Cross-border trade facilitation and information sharing; inland ports network; counter-terrorism and security." In the last couple PDF files, the development of NAFTRACS through Lockheed Martin's advanced military-oriented research facility in Virginia is discussed at length.

PIM hasn't heard anything about this project through the grapevine; only nativist and conservative media outlets (what some would dub "right wing whacko") have focused on plans for continental integration. It seems unlikely that massive superhighways will be built along I-35, but still, it's quite interesting to examine the flurry of communications, message management and cross-border integration exposed by this set of documents. Check out the raw material; it's really quite unusual and informative. While activists in Texas and Oklahoma are raising a ruckus about the potential Rondoization of their counties, Minnesotans would be wise to look south and keep an eye out.

**********

Well that's it everyone. Have a good time, I will see you in two weeks. Thanks for visiting! And check out PoliticsInMinnesota to see how they pull it off when I'm gone!

Some misc bits for you. First check the Google Zeitgeist, the global popular search phrase listing.

First the Econ: Agonist.org has a bunch of economic stories up today (and most Mondays) to get you thinking seriously. The total value of derivatives rose nearly 40% to a whopping $415,000,000,000,000, which of course dwarfs the national debt and national economy. More on that here. The 1929 Stock Market's got nothing on Modern America!! Who needs to worry about margin calls when you can just make up some more devious debt instruments until next quarter? Real America's economy sucks, but in pretend derivatives-world it's all gravy.

Amazingly, a funny article about adjustable mortgages. Lying cheerleaders on CNBC blame the recent Sarbanes-Oxley for everything - bullshit! This guy thinks that bubbles are good because after they Pop, they leave infrastructure behind. Seems dumb to me.

Hearts and minds:

Supporting the security and justice systems in Iraq is one of the main challenges that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confronts to help the Iraqi government develop the infrastructure countrywide.

According to Rick Mers, a project engineer with the Gulf Region South District the New An Nasiriyah Maximum Security Correctional Facility, which is built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the Dhi Qar Province, is considered to be the biggest prison in the south of Iraq. "The project is a new maximum security correctional facility located near the city of Nasiriyah. The prison will hold up to 800 inmates and includes holding areas, laundry, dining facilities, and administrative offices," he said.

Michael Osborne, a resident engineer with Gulf Region South, said that the prison will help to provide employment for security personnel, medical personnel and support staff. It will also improve the quality of security correctional facilities south of Iraq.

Meanwhile the Turks and Kurds are gearing up to kill each other across northern Iraq:

While President Bush's new strategy in Iraq focuses on stopping the violence in Baghdad, trouble threatens to boil over in Iraq's Kurdish region to the north, which the administration frequently holds up as an island of stability and a model for the future.

The long dispute between Turkey and Iraq over renegade Kurdish fighters camped on the Iraqi side of their shared border reached new heights last month. When the head of Iraq's Kurdish regional government threatened to provoke an uprising among Turkish Kurds, Turkey responded with warnings of direct military action and an angry complaint to Washington.

Ankara has massed thousands of soldiers on its side of the border and has warned it will dismantle the camps in Iraq if the U.S. military will not use some of its nearly 150,000 troops in Iraq to do it.

.....On the Iraq side of the seam, there is wide concern that the administration has already given Turkey a green light to act in northern Iraq, one State Department official said, although others insist that Washington has urged restraint.

Looming over the conflict is the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. The postwar Iraqi constitution calls for a referendum in December to determine if the population wants to become part of the Kurdish region. Turkey has made clear it would view that as a direct threat to the rights of Kirkuk's large minority of ethnic Turkmen.

Turkey believes that "if the Kurds get Kirkuk, it will mean an independent Kurdish state," said Qubad Talibani, the son of Iraqi President Jalal Talibani and the Kurdish regional government's spokesman in Washington. "We've seen Turkish groups lobbying quite actively" against the referendum.

Alleged Turkish interference over Kirkuk sparked a flare-up last month when Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, threatened retaliation if Turkey continued "interfering" in Iraqi affairs. It would be easy, he warned, for Iraqi Kurds to stir up their 30 million ethnic brethren in southeastern Turkey.

Turkey's military chief, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, responded with a warning of a cross-border attack, and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul demanded that the United States restrain Barzani. Ankara sent sharply worded notes to Baghdad and Washington, and Erdogan said publicly that Barzani would be "crushed under his words."

An old story, but interesting: a guy found MS Word documents from the old Coalition Provisional Authority, then used the Track Changes feature to reveal secret material from 2004. The secret material proves the CPA were a seriously dumb bunch of gringos. In particular they said that a healthy dose of violence would intimidate foolish Arabs - a classic racist stereotype that has carried America far.

One of the American outlying patrol outposts got overrun by Iraqi guerillas at 0400, and the media termed it an "ambush" even though the American forces were stationary. Is this intentional spin or just journalistic ignorance, Pat Lang asks.

Chalmers Johnson is the scholar of the current global American empire, especially the military base structure that underpins everything. He's concerned the military-industrial complex is going to bankrupt America. Check out "Ending the Empire" for the problems today, and how to shutdown the military-industrial complex.

John Bolton shrewdly advises bombing the fuck out of Iran immediately. This guy's one long-term thinker. He sucks as someone on the Internets managed to point out.

Chinese wheat gluten is contaminated with melamine, just one situation among many. Huge setback for Chinese agriculture.

Old school spy angle: Phil Giraldi, an old CIA hand, enumerates the way Tenet has been lying about his record.

The so-called Class Action Fairness Act is gonna screw regular people. Sweet.

Freight rail works. I agree. You can get a ton of cargo 400 miles on a gallon of fuel - that's what we need right now. Auto manufacturers conspired to kill rail back in the day, blah blah blah...

The War Czar may be illegal. Where's Congress?

Lobbying reform might not work as Dems sink into the Beltway swamp.

Major strategy writer Andrew Bacevich's son, also named Andrew, was killed serving in Iraq. Our condolences to the family. The father's book "The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War" is excellent! Even handles the eschatology of the military-industrial complex and evangelicals.

Bridges to Money from Nowhere: Alaska Senator Ted "Shut Up! It's a series of tubes" Stevens has more corrupt friends still trying to get bridges to their property holdings.

Once there was a joke called the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, who can't release their own reports without political hacks scratching out the bad stuff.

Feel sorry for the Schloz: another doomed gremlin in the Department of Justice, Bradley Schlozman, is pretty much screwed. Schloz is the kind of lawyer you send when you need to get more black people kicked off the voter rolls in Missouri. Good times in Purple America. Fox "News" features only black people in stock footage suggesting illegal voting. Nothing new, just visual shorthand for what they always say.

Murdoch trying to take over Wall Street Journal: A WSJ China specialist talks about how Murdoch would sugarcoat China news to help his own bottom line. More on this.