Rapid link dump

Ok then kids, my dad will be here in like 20 minutes. I have all these browser windows to clean out before I go to Utah, so this will be a little funky. But interesting stuff.

josh Marshall points out a new washington blog. this guy wrote a sweet article about think tanks.

low numbers for bush. checkpoints.

Robert Fisk says Iraq imploding. Durrr.

mccain and the swift boat veterans thing.

who what is this?

israel says to hell with road map, more suburbs in west bank!! interesting letters.

Alan Keyes is the Quintessential American

The internal press squabbles about WMD lameness

particles information holes etc.

After the convention, Democrats are reclaiming the center says Dionne. Right wing son of a bitch liked Obama. Explosions of applause etc. krugman on the Script. go to hell Brooks.

So then are the Dems shifting to the right on foreign policy?!

Dissection of Iraq lies from before. So then why did they go to the desert? the uprising is a test!

American prisons are horrible too.

i saw this sweet video called Spin that was made from unedited network TV satellite transitions, and people come across as racist or just batshit crazy, in Larry King's case. About Spin [1 2 3 4 5 6]

I liked Manchurian Candidate. Read Ebert's review of the classic original and the new one.

Keep reading TPM. Duhhh.

Reap the whirlwind sucka!!!!

Iraq reconstruction funding has spawned 27 criminal inquiries. what the hell?!

Most important: does M. Night Shammaaaala (no time to type) suck as director?

OK I am the hell out of here!!!! Peace to y'all!!!!! Be back Sunday!

'Between the Lines'

Mordred has posted something about Donald Trump this morning so I suggest ya check it. Again I'll note that he's going to have a top link on the side here, but I haven't had the time to change my templates yet, and I guess I won't until I get back.

The wild documentary "Outfoxed" that even Kerry is mentioning finally arrived at my house yesterday and I haven't had time to watch it yet. It sounds awesome though.

Well well, it took one hell of a long time, but my summer video project is finally finished. I decided to call it 'Between the Lines' because that's where I'm always looking, true?

In the University lab right now, I am burning a total of four DVD copies. Turns out the first two that I made last night have a couple glitches in the menus that i didn't catch. I would also like to note that Apple's DVD Studio Pro, while a fairly powerful and intuitive program, is really annoying because it seems to always want to render (in this case called 'compiling' menus and 'muxing' tracks) every time I want to burn a copy. In other words, it is rendering out the whole thing, and then throwing it away every time. What the hell? It wastes like 20 minutes a disc.

On the other hand I may have been using the wrong command, 'Build' instead of 'Build/Format.' Right now it's doing the latter, so my hopes are higher.

So I am getting picked up at 3:30 today to fly out to Utah for my cousins' wedding. As I wait for the discs to burn, let me share some quick headlines that have been sitting around. I have a stack of about 30 links to post up. In the meantime here's a smaller collection of older tidbits:

Times feature on a woman who educates naive county officials on the madness of electronic ballot systems. What can I say? These things scare the hell out of me and I try not to think about it. Some terrorist plotting to disrupt the election? Who cares, we've got electronic machines that can eat votes by what, the millions?

In Iraq

The Times has switched its little "Iraq news theme" motif to "THE REACH OF WAR: THREATS AND RESPONSES" with scary looking narrow type. Hey, they gotta be selling papers....

This cemetary fighting in Najaf is some seriously creepy stuff. Can you imagine the chills on their spines as the Marines go into this ancient collection of Shi'ite graves? This type of situation is so incredibly combustible I don't even know what to say. And Robert Fisk (or was it Juan Cole?) said that the governor of the province is some unemployed old Iraqi they dragged out of Michigan. However, I think that the anger Iraqis feel about violating the sanctity of the cemetary is perhaps directed as much to Muqtada al -Sadr's guys that hunkered down there. I mean, it's not exactly a standard insurrection tactic. Then again, if you were a fanatical pre-millennialist you might want to bring about a more mythic Mahdi Army by fighting among the dead spirits. Or something like that. Like I said, chills on the neck.
A National Guardsman was ordered to look the other way at torturous conditions in an Iraqi detention center. Down the slippery slope...
Newsweek on Fallujah: "We Pray the Insurgents Will Achieve Victory."
Al Jazeera shut down in Iraq again?grouchy ministers. So is Jazeera just a Jihadi PR device? (I don't buy that; Control Room really put the idea away)

Elsewhere

Alternet on the vast right-wing Scaife conspiracy and more specifically his grudge against Teresa Heinz-Kerry.

"Afghanistan's Transition: Decentralization or Civil War?" on EurasiaNet. Indeed.

BAGnewsNotes has the best regular collection of parody images. Laughs every day.

Kerry has an interview in the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes, and it's really a pretty gutsy one. Nice work on both sides. But does this stuff, particularly about the global military base arrangement, mean Kerry is just going to play the military-industrial game yet again? (in fairness, Kerry is not a huge military pork enthusiast) He knows the jargon pretty well.

I found this random weird online science fiction story via a BlogAd. Just for something different.