News Roundup for 2/23

• Orcinus discusses that the skinhead movement is on the rise again, but don't fret. Following Bush's lead, it is compassionate racism, a kinder, gentler movement.

• Juan Cole explains why the latest developements in Iraq are VERY bad news.

• Jill Quadagno gives a nice simple explanation about why "Health Savings Accounts" will not solve the health care crisis.

• BushCo is hard at work making de-classified documents classified again. We can't tell you what is being re-classified, because that's classified. Actually, one document we find out about is a 1950 CIA assessment that it was unlikely the Chinese government would intervene in Korea. This report was about two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops crossed the border. Has the CIA ever been right?

• A sad story about a 19 year-old soldier charged with stabbing his wife 71 times while home from Iraq recuperating from wounds he suffered in Mosul. This is a story I fear will be repeated many times in the coming years.

• Libby's trotting out version 1.0 of his expected defense, "I had other things on my mind". Like what? Did you have other CIA agents whose cover you were planning to blow on orders from DICK Cheney?

• 47 workers were murdered in Baghdad bringing the total dead to well over 100 in the last 24 hours since the bombing of a mosque sacred to Shiites early yesterday. But our government assures us that "considerable progress has been made over the last two years toward a multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Iraqi society, and that the Samarra bombing should not tip the country toward civil war."

Tip the country toward a civil war? No. Shove the country off a cliff into civil war? Absolutely.

• BushCo is issuing its own report on Hurricane Katrina. I'm sure it will be a "heckuva report".

• Four more American soldiers have paid the ultimate price for Bush's Folly.

• In Minnesota, John Kerry shows us he STILL doesn't get it. Yes, there were better choices about the war in Iraq and sadly, you didn't make them then, or in 2004. As long as you insist your vote abdicating your Constitutional power to Bush was correct, you never will make the right choice.

• Torture advocate John Yoo claims Bush can pretty much do any damn thing he wants because he if president, and "We are confronting a new kind of enemy." Really? Since when is terrorism new?

• And people ask me why I told the local Chamber of Commerce guy he had thirty seconds to get out of my office before I set the dogs on him. This is reason enough.

• This problem will be addressed when somebody who can't get their anti-psychotic meds goes on a shooting ramapage.

• Here we have another example that GOP has become so complacent in their corruption that they no longer even try to hide their illegal activities. In this case, public money is used for GOP campaigning.

• Stungun maker Taser is working on a nifty new way to kill people. "Taser's eXtended Range Electro-Muscular Projectile, or XREP, is meant to combine the blunt-force trauma of a fast-moving baseball with the electrical current of a stun gun". Because shooting your friends in the face with buckshot isn't nearly as much fun as shooting them in the face with ELECTRIC buckshot.