Even though the Ukrainian Intelligence Service offers us some of their delicious borsch whenever we say it, this is NPR.

—Tom & Dave
Car Talk

Today I go to nice restauraunt to drink with my friend. Going to drink with friend is fun. If friend pay for me, it's more fun. But this friend is not such a kind of friend. I anticipate normal fun. But he give me extreme fun!

I see no need to force people to be informed. If they don't want to be then it is Darwinism in action...societal Darwinism being the only place that his theory has been proven.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this.

——Garrison Keillior

Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating list of which companies in America own what. The second half of the twentieth century was a time when we witnessed something very sinister, in which a chart reflecting the various news sources in this country ceased to be a crowded jumble of various, contradictory voices, and started to look like an octopus—el calimari, as Gore Vidal put it— with every tentacle leading, ultimately, to the same few dark and hungry beaks. On the New York Post website, there is a banner that can direct you to papers from dozens of countries—all of them owned by Murdoch. Just before I left Utah, the paper I read as a child, The Salt Lake Tribune, was taken over by Media News Group, Inc., the same company that owns the Charleston Daily Mail, the "local" paper where I now live, half a continent away.

Of course, the big media tycoons and the independent voices have co-existed for a very long time. The Rupert Murdoch's of this country have been driving us into unnecessary, pointless wars since William Randolph Hearst blamed the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine on shadowy Enemies of Freedom and started the Spanish-American War. And those of use with the ability to think for ourselves have always been able to find independent voices, from the Abolitionist newspapers of the 1840's to the indie weekly paper where I was a summer intern the year before I started high school.

And we don't lack voices from either side of the aisle, as Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh prove. We also have smart people in media, despite Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh. The problem is that both Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are tentacles of the same calimari. The same company that put up the money to make Fahrenheit 9-11 owns Limbaugh's home station. (That company, ironically, is Disney.)

That's a strength of capitalism, right? Certainly Ayn Rand would say so: no matter what your beliefs, if you can get people to watch you, you can get on TV.

Well, here's the sinister part: these eleven companies that own ninety percent of the news sources in America all report the same news. Here's a pop quiz, kids: which enormously influential, wealthy and long-lived leader of an Arab country died in the run-up to 2004 presidential election?

If you said Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, congratulations—you're from Europe! The number of people I known in this country who knew about Sheikh Zayed's death when it happened number precisely four. The number who knew about his death and have never been American ambassador to Abu Dhabi is just three!

Sheik Zayed was president of the UAE from 1971 until 2004. That's over thirty years. In that time he was one of the most influential and powerful men in the Middle East. He spent decades building hospitals, schools and universities across his country, he was tolerant of Christians, his majlis (a traditional Arab council) was open to the public, he even gave up hunting with firearms to encourage conservation—in short, he was one of the most liberal, democratic leaders in the entire region. He advocated the presence of women in the workplace and allowed a private media; not with as much freedom as we have here, unfortunately, but a thousand times better than Iran or even Russia. In other words, precisely the sort of person we want to be encouraging, supporting and helping.

Yet not one person in the American media have I heard lament his passing. Does Tucker Carlson know who Sheik Zayed was? No. Bob Novak? Hell, no. Does Michael Moore? Michael Moore knows that the Saudi embassy is right next door to the Watergate apartments, an irony I have known and appreciated since I was fifteen.

So we can sit back and listen to the folks on Crossfire or Hardball or Can 'o Whoop-Ass argue about today's scandal, that Yasser Arafat may have owned part of the bowling alley Rudy Giuliani went to—you think I could make that up?—and congratulate ourselves that we have people both red-faced-with-fury and blue-in-the-face-from-yelling on TV. We can sit back and listen to conflicts as scripted and substance-free as the WWF while el calimari gobbles us all up. It would be easy.

The fact that we might do that is the greatest threat to America today.

My institutional memory stretches back to early 1998, when I covered social services for this newspaper and the state was mired in an infamous class-action lawsuit, David C. v. Leavitt. The National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, Calif., filed the suit in 1993 on behalf of 17 children who had been horribly abused and neglected in Utah's foster care system. Lawmakers had been warned by child protection experts for years of the mess, and looked the other way.

Leavitt inherited the case in 1993, just weeks after beginning his first term. He certainly can't be blamed for it, but he can be questioned for the length of time it took to fix it.

And it still isn't fixed.

In 1994, the state settled the case, agreeing to overhaul foster care and to increase training and case oversight. The agreement was renegotiated in 1999. A federal judge has been monitoring the state's Division of Child and Family Services ever since and has until 2006 to determine if oversight can end. Under much improved DCFS leadership, the system is nearly in complete compliance with the settlement. But 10 years is one long time to wait, and progress has moved glacially. Nine of those plodding years were under Leavitt's watch, and U.S. senators who question him should press him for the why.

Mr. Leavitt as governor probably had a stronger impact on health-related issues than environmental ones, working closely with Washington to give states more flexibility in managing federal health care programs.

In 1994, the Utah Legislature passed his health care initiative that led to an increase of 400,000 people with health insurance in the next 10 years. In 1995-96, Mr. Leavitt was one of six governors who led efforts to reform welfare and Medicaid.

In 1997, he fought to make the new federal Children's Health Insurance Program a separate entity, rather than an expansion of Medicaid, to protect it from economic downturns that would reduce benefits. In 2002, state officials said, Utah became the first state to win a federal waiver allowing it to cut some Medicaid benefits to provide coverage for a larger number of low-income residents.

Statesmen are simply politicans who have been dead long enough for us to forget all the horrible things they did.

Me
Five Minutes Ago
Cool, Huh?

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this.

Garrison Keillor

Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

Garrison Keillor

After a baker's-dozen raucous roller-coaster years, JoAnn is taking early retirement "to devote more time to my husband and other humanitarian causes."

Like the time we registered our own church to show how easy it is to form a nonprofit religious organization to receive tax breaks. For a fee of $20, the Church of the Holy Rolly was approved for incorporation by the Department of Commerce. Our articles of incorporation carried the state seal and, as minister of our church, The "Left Reverend'' Rolly had the authority to marry. But after two men requested I perform their wedding, the church decided to specialize only in political confessions and absolutions.

During the reign of Queen Dee (Corradini), we also informed folk how to establish their own offshore companies and avoid paying taxes. (Our own company never quite got off the ground.)

We competed in a media shoot-out during the NBA all-star weekend. Wells made a 3-pointer. Rolly went 0 for 10. We once judged a polo match, a fund-raiser for the Utah Opera Company. Later I rode a horse in a media vs. politicians fund-raising match. My horse got an award for putting up with me.

When a state senator suggested reporters should register as lobbyists, we did, listing the public as our client. We rode in a few parades and almost got arrested once for throwing candy from our convertible. We competed in Fantasy Football against other media and a dog that made its picks by choosing labeled dog food bowls.

We angered the Deseret News when we registered with the Department of Commerce the new names its editors were considering, after they insisted we were wrong when we mentioned they were contemplating changing the name.

We have never been sued.

Every new idea begins as heresy and ends as superstition.

singer David Johansen
on Fresh Air

Now, keep in mind the figure of 250,000 is for troops deployed in support of operations. That doesn't translate into combat troops deployed. It looks like you're trying to sort through that in your post, but in this day and age, it is getting harder and harder to differentiate between "combat troop" and "combat support"...the example someone mentioned on the bar of the armed jeep driver comes to mind.

As an Air Force example, a single modern fighter bomber, crewed by two and supported by 6 maintenance guys, and operationally controlled by 10 other guys (i.e. intelligence officers using satellite data to tell them where to attack, etc...) is way more effective than 9 fighter-bombers with no maintenance guys and no overhead operational oversight. So overall combat effectiveness can't really be measured by raw numbers of trigger pulling troops.

The Army does need to concentrate on given non 11-Bravo's a little more infantry training, maybe going as far as what the USMC does, send everyone to Infantry School first.

Note that there is one problem with the LBJ comparison, the Army in the 60's was VERY different, primarily being composed of short-service draftees on a two-year hitch, as opposed to the current long-service professional army. Any private today is worth 2-3 privates in the old army, simply due to having the training and experience they never had the chance to get. It takes 18 months to train a competent private, Selective Service Hitches were 24 months. So a Draftee would ETS right at the point where they'd had enough training and experience to actually be effective, not to mention the idiotic replacement policy used back then, which severely hampered unit cohesion.

The current 150,000 troops are likely more effective than the half-million that were in Vietnam in '68, in every measure apart from sheer numbers.

And there was an even less-noticed development this past month: the relative silence across Iraq after the devastating coalition assault on Falluja. The military campaign led to the deaths of thousands, including civilians caught in the crossfire, and left much of the city in rubble. It included the awful imagery of a scared U.S. Marine blowing a wounded Iraqi's head off, a scene replayed endlessly on Arab television. Did the rest of Iraq rise up in protest, as happened in the spring during a similar aborted attack on Falluja? Not even close. The Kurds and the Shia understand that their interest today lies in a successful election. They're not unhappy to see Sunni and Baathist rebels get pummeled by American arms. In that, you see the beginning of the new Iraqi reality: a place where 80 percent of the country wants the democratic transition to succeed.

The coalition has learned a critical tactic in neo-imperial governance: divide and rule. From the Romans to the Brits, it has long been a useful strategy. By working with the grain of Iraqi ethnic tension, specifically the pent-up hostility of Kurds and Shia toward the Sunnis, who for decades ran the country, the United States has been able to gain leverage against the largely Sunni insurgency. So as Sunni Falluja was pummeled, the Shia were quiet and Kurdish troops actually took part in the operation. Yes, it's a potentially dangerous ploy. Pushing the division too far could lead to civil war. But there's some good news here as well: In a recent poll of 2,210 Iraqis, a full two-thirds of those surveyed said the prospect of a civil war was "not realistic."

There's no end to the depravity.

Phillip Cosby
Kansas activist

ABILENE, Kan. — Outside, the prairie lies dark and still. In the windowless gray building by the Interstate 70 offramp, a clerk with a tired face rings up sex toys. "Need batteries for that?" she asks politely, again and again.

Adult "superstores" like this are popping up all over rural America — brightly lighted, clean, as well-organized and well-stocked as a Wal-Mart.

Remote freeway offramps are X-rated in Quaker City, Ohio (pop. 563), and Nelson, Mo. (pop. 212), in Montrose, Ill., and Perry, Mich. The Lion's Den chain operates 29 stores in the Midwest, including this one in Abilene, off Exit 272, near the cows and hay bales of Dickinson County.

From: "Greg "BLT" Donahue"

We have about 250,000 troops actively deployed in operations out of about 1.6 million total available ~active duty~ military, with 145,000 Guard and Reserve helping fill the actively deployed ranks.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/global-deployments.htm

Nice try. Next red herring, please.

ASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - Congress has cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, an engine for research in science and technology, just two years after endorsing a plan to double the amount given to the agency.

Supporters of scientific research, in government and at universities, noted that the cut came as lawmakers earmarked more money for local projects like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the Punxsutawney Weather Museum in Pennsylvania.

"Public acceptance of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is well below the 50% mark, a fact of considerable concern to many scientists," Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll, observed today. He noted that given three alternatives, only 35% say that evolution is well-supported by evidence. The same number say evolution is one of many theories and not well supported by evidence. Another 29% say they don't know enough about it to say.

Almost half of Americans (45%) believe that human beings "were created by God essentially as they are today (that is, without evolving) about 10,000 years ago," according to Gallup's poll.

Newport, in his weekly report, cited two possible reasons for these findings: Most Americans have not been regularly exposed to scientific study on these matters; or many Americans know about Darwin's theory, but feel it contradicts a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. "Indeed, about a third of Americans are biblical literalists," he writes.

We need a critique of moral values.

One has taken the value of these "values" as given, as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated in the slightest degree in supposing "the good man" to be of greater value than "the evil man," of great value in the sense of furthering the advancement and prosperity of man in general.

The value of these values themselves must first be called into question.

Friedrich Nietzsche
July 1887

The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say "this is this and this," they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it.

Nietzsche again
November 1886