WashingtonPost – White House Web Scrubbing (via Think Progress – The White House’s White-Out Problem):

“The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead.”

NYTimes:The White House Stages Its ‘Daily Show’ (via MyDD – The War On Reality):

The pre-fab “Ask President Bush” town hall-style meetings held during last year’s campaign (typical question: “Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?”) were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York’s Daily News, “unsuspecting viewers” tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were “watching a completely open forum.” A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?

TomPaine.com – Why George Went To War (
via Dan Gillmor – The Downing Street Memos, in Context):

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, “a great president.” Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush’s decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

PressThink: Jay Rosen: The Downing Street Memo and the Court of Appeal in News Judgment:

News judgment used to be king. If the press ruled against you, you just weren’t news. But if you weren’t news how would anyone know enough about you to contest the ruling? Today, the World Wide Web is the sovereign force, and journalists live and work according to its rules.”

Congratulations to Jay Rosen for earning the 2005 Reporters Witout Borders best blogs defending freedom of expression award.

Read up. Great site and resource: Our Documents.

US ‘losing in Iraq’ – Republican Senator Hagel – Yahoo! News: says administration policy is “disconnected from reality”. And now we will see Senator Hagel disconnected from party support. After all, Senator Hagel must hate America. From me, that’s a sarcastic response. But check out Yahoo!’s comments thread attached to the article.