Check it out. Funky ain’t it?

Pentagon Creating Student Database

The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.

Woah.

Joho the Blog: Karl Rove: Apologize, resign, or both

As a liberal, I’m not insulted by Karl Rove’s remark that “liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” He’s just demagoging based on a seed of truth: I do want to understand our attackers (because it’s stupid in n dimensions not to understand the people you’re fighting) and I do want a nuanced, well-thought-out response that will actually make my children safer, rather than the kneejerk Bomb Someone strategery we got from Bush and Rove. So, fine, politicians exaggerate the positions they don’t like and even end up stating utter falsehoods like Rove’s.

No, what gets my goat is his unthought assumption that every issue and event is fodder for political advantage. So he goes into the very city where firefighters ran up the stairs instead of down, and he mouths off to score some points at a fund-raiser? Tell me now who doesn’t take 9/11 seriously, the liberals or callow, unfeeling, assroves like him? This split from reality – he was in New York City! – is where evil takes root.

Damn straight.

Think Progress wonders does Karl Rove speak for Bush?

You can sign a petition for his resignation here.

On a side note… how come my first name is spelled the same way by two people I care not to be associated with, one of whom is one of the most evil to walk this Earth? Pisses me off when I see Karl Rove referred to as “Karl”.

I just took part in a terrific Live 8 related conference call organized by David Sifry of Technorati, John Hinderaker of Powerlineblog.com, Joe Trippi and Daren Berringer of JoeTrippi.com.

Special guests were Mike McCurry, a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign and former White House spokesman and Mark McKinnon, Vice Chairman of Public Strategies and advisor to President Bush. Read more about their efforts with the One campaign at Data.org.

Report at Philly Future and discussion there.

Old news, but worth sharing again: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | China orders bloggers to register with government.

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.