Unqualified Offerings

French electoral map. Hunh.
Via Steven Taylor.

A useful reminder that there are worse people than Ben Adler. (And here’s a link to the chat with Knight-Ridder/McClatchy’s Strobel and Landay.) The most quotable stuff for me was . . .
. . . the KR bureau chief saying, Our readers aren’t the people who decide whether to send other people’s children off to [...]

Glenn Greenwald:
Most of our nation’s journalists do not report on government conduct. They participate in it actively and consciously as government spokesmen.

Shorter Ed Morressey:
A handful of autocracies warbloggers spent four years after the Septemer 11, 2001 atrocities demonizing will be inconvenienced if the US withdraws from Iraq. Therefore we must stay forever.

Ben Adler will tell you when he can afford to let you do anything and you’ll like it:
This clearly expresses a fundamental tenet of conservative/libertarian thinking: that engaging in risky behavior with serious social costs is an entitlement. People who are injured by metal bats, or fall ill from smoking or fatty food, cost the [...]

A recent pseudo-article from the American Forces Press Service about the increase in overseas deployment lengths is a prime example of bureaucratic doublespeak. Excerpt:
“I’m absolutely confident that that’s going to work and that’ll manage the pressure and the stress on the force,” Army Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 4th Brigade [...]

The new PIPA poll shows that of four Muslim populations surveyed, Egyptians are most likely to say that when they hear about a suicide attack by a Muslim that the action is likely justified. (See page 11 of the PDF.) Egypt -and we’ve been over this – is the country in the Arab world where, [...]

By Mona
Pat Tillman was an atheist. Neither he nor his family are neoconservative, and they — including Pat — opposed the war in Iraq. Further, Pat’s family knows their government lied to them as to how he died in Afghanistan, and the only reason they can’t let it go and instead demand [...]