FranIam: That was then, this is now.

Maria.Maria: Ann Richards' daughter Cecile, President of Planned Parenthood, speaks at the DNC...

Reed writes: "Why didn't the emergency NATO meeting in Brussels do a three-for-one sale and tell USA to get the hell out of Iraq and Afganistan, and take their sad Canadian flunkies with them?"

Princess Sparkle Pony: Reviews of the DNC set and the Big Tent.

Scholars and Rogues: Art on the street in Denver

Guest posted by Blue Gal.

Brad Reed has compiled the extensive list, but I'll give you the Reader's Digest version here. Go read the full article at Alternet:

10: Bush Gets Re-elected
9: Alberto Gonzales' Congressional Testimony
8: North Korea Conducts a Nuclear Test
7: Colin Powell's Bogus WMD Presentation at the U.N.
6: The Terri Schiavo Affair
5: Bush and Condi's Excellent Gaza Adventure
4: "Brownie, You're Doing a Heckuva Job"
3: Abu Ghraib
2: 9/11
1: "Mission Accomplished"

Seems like the hardest part is simply narrowing it down to just 10.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Bill W)

NY Times: (reg. req'd.)

The Air Force's senior civilian official and its highest-ranking general were ousted by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday following an official inquiry into the mishandling of nuclear weapons and components, senior Pentagon officials said.

The Air Force secretary, Michael W. Wynne, and the service's chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, were forced to resign after the inquiry found that both leaders were responsible for "systematic and cultural failings in how the Air Force carried out its important mission to assure the security of the nation's nuclear arsenal," according to a senior Pentagon officials.

Never before has a defense secretary ousted both a service secretary and a service chief, according to senior Pentagon officials. Since taking office 18 months ago, Mr. Gates has made accountability of theme of his tenure. He has also fired senior Army officials, after disclosures of shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the service's premier medical facility for wounded soldiers.

The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nosecone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March - a year and a half after the erroneous shipment.

Most troubling, the senior Pentagon official said, was that little had been done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure after it was disclosed last year that the Air Force unknowingly let a B-52 bomber fly across the United States carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

Blah3: Horror stories from Afghanistan

CQ Politics: God's James Bond

JURIST: Serbia prosecutors searching for rioters behind the US Embassy attack

washington independent: Walter Reed gets some Disney Magic

Shakesville: A strong, brave woman fighting leukemia - can you help?

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: al Qaeda in Albuquerque, MAL Contends, Only Sayin', Change Any1thing,

Brad Reed imagines the day that Doughy Pantload was inspired to write Liberal Fascism.

Update from Blue Gal: naturally, when we say Doughy Pantload's book, we really mean, Liberal Fascism.

The Center for American Progress has released this "prebuttal" to Bush's planned speech to the nation on Iraq tonight, where he is expected to say that he will "listen" to the recommendations of Gen. Petraeus and have 5,700 troops home by the end of this year and 24K by next spring.

Nancy Pelosi has issued a statement that Bush's policy is just more of the same and asks "Which slogan will we hear tonight?" Sen. Jack Reed (RI) will give the official Democratic response. John Edwards will have a response airing on MSNBC. And Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews will have post-speech analysis on MSNBC.

Mike Reed has caricatured some personalities occasionally present in comment and discussion forum threads. Shown here: Godzilla.   (h/t True Randomness)

As Rick Perlstein noted, "The 'racism isn't a problem any more' trope is a perennial in America. Next time you hear it, send them the news from Jena, Louisiana."

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a "whites only" shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree....

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena's black population didn't take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could "end their life with a stroke of the pen."

Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles....

The mind reels.

The Heretik : A surge of BS...and squalid, cowardly, despicable demagoguery

Radar Online: An Iraq war translator's inside take on America's failure to communicate

A Tiny Revolution: If we find ourselves at war with Iran, it won’t just be Bush’s responsibility. It will also belong to a Democratic-controlled Congress.

Nieman Watchdog: Before Walter Reed there was Fort Stewart and Fort Knox, and...

Nuestra Voice: Look out for an attempt on the part of Gonzales supporters to call on the Latino community to somehow frame the pressure on Gonzales as racially motivated.

This is what I've been saying for months...

David Sirota:

A simple question: Why is politics the only arena where those who turned out to be right still get flayed as outcasts, while those who are known to be utterly wrong get rewarded as visionaries? In business, if you make the wrong calls, you lose money and, most often, lose your job. If you make the right call, you make a lot of money, and you usually get promoted. There are exceptions to this axiom, of course - but it generally works this way. In politics, it generally works the opposite way. The people who make the right call on the big issues are punished with elite vitiriol, and those who repeatedly make the wrong calls on such issues are vaulted into the highest echelons of the Establishment.

Nowhere was this more obvious than on the Iraq War. As Jebediah Reed at Radar Magazine has shown in detail, most of the major pundits who led the cheering section for the war have been rewarded with promotions, while those writers who actually accurately predicted the war as a disaster have been cast aside like pieces of garbage.
This has also happened when it comes to "free" trade. Despite the fact that NAFTA and China PNTR have helped destroy American wages and jobs; have increased our trade deficit to crisis proportions; and have been a key weapon in preventing global environmental and human rights standards, the people who predicted such outcomes are still regarded with contempt and berated with false attacks, while the people who championed such awful policies are considered the legitimate voices of reason. Jeff Faux spells this out particularly well today over at TPM Cafe