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Thanks for your patience.

Andrew Stuart Morrison

Thank you for being patient everyone. Times New Roman Online is getting a long-overdue major overhaul. I am in the process of switching websites, moving to a dot com that I own, which allows me to upload images and films, keep track of stats more easily, and let's give you the opportunity to comment on every post. Generally, it is getting a shot in the arm in terms of aesthetics and functionality. This old site was fun and I had great feedback, but it was frustratingly basic. I will post the new url on this site and re-direct to the new before the New Hampshire caucus.

Once again, thanks for your attentions and patience. The return of TNRO is on the horizon.

It appears as if the Bush administration is going to turn back to the U.N after scolding the body as ineffective and irrelevant.

This from the BBC:

White House officials say the United Nations is to be asked to go back into Iraq to help oversee the transfer of power to the Iraqis. The US will try to persuade the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, to back the plan to set up an unelected government in Iraq by July.

Smart, predictable news and the folks down yonder will gobble it up. It gives the tarnished Bush image the lustre that comes with some semblance of success just as the 2004 elections approaches. Seeing that the attacks continue, with news breaking now that at least five more Americans have been killed, and seeing that it's pretty clear that there will be no let up, what will make the U.N step up to the plate and get just as targeted as they were back in August? Remember the Red Cross attack, too? These people are blowing themselves up in order to upset Bush's apple cart. In any case, those who are resisting the U.S in Iraq would prefer a strategically softer target like the U.N anyway, one not so vigilant, one without night vision goggles and satellites peering through their ruins. Indeed, will many countries be interested in sending their soldiers to fight in a fucked-up war run by the United States, if only by proxy? Will these poor blue beret's be interested in rebuilding Iraq in the name of the U.S? I have my doubts, friend.

This is a test for the U.N which they will fail. There is no answer to the request that Bush has put towards them. If Secretary-General Kofi Annan says "Sure, let's go to Iraq" they will be the kevlar vest of a politically shaky president and naturally despised by those they seek to protect and save, and if he says "Kiss my black ass, moron", the U.S will start turning screws, and we know how uncomfortable that can be. In the middle you have the Iraqi people getting as screwed as a bunch of serfs who speak no English.

In the end, it's a bad set of cards for the U.N and a smart move for Bush, or rather the people who keep him from talking without a script. Never in their history have the American people had the terrible misfortune to be stuck with such an abject failure for a president. Bring Nixon back and I'd have a party.

I've been on a Thompson kick for the third time in my life, reading Songs of the Doomed again and now Kingdom of Fear. There is nobody out there like him and I've realised after having his words in my head for a few days that we need more from him and more like him. Please, more crazed, Dunhill smoking, drug-addled, Mace-loving journalists! That would suit me just fine after having to be subjected to the drivel that has washed upon my shores these past two years. Since 9-11 the press has cowered in heaps of their own dung, the smell carrying across the water to me on gusts from these wind bags whether I read the news or not. Hell in a handbasket, I tell you. The lid is off the madness jar.

This excerpt I found here from Kingdom of Fear:

The difference between an outlaw and a war criminal is the difference between a pedophile and a Pedarast: The pedophile is a person who thinks about sexual behavior with children, and the Pederast does these things. He lays hands on innocent children--he penetrates them and changes their lives forever.

Being the object of a pedophile's warped affections is a routine feature of growing up in America--and being a victim of a Pederast's crazed "love" is part of dying. Innocence is no longer an option. Once penetrated, the child becomes a Queer in his own mind, and that is not much different than murder.

Richard Nixon crossed that line when he began murdering foreigners in the name of "family values"--and George [W] Bush crossed it when he sneaked into office and began killing brown-skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people.

When Muhammad Ali declined to be drafted and forced to kill "gooks" in Vietnam he said, "I ain't got nothin' against them Viet Cong. No Cong ever called me a Nigger."

I agreed with him, according to my own personal ethics and values. He was Right.

If we all had a dash of Muhammad Ali's eloquent courage, this country and the world would be a better place today because of it.

Okay. That's it for now. Read it and weep....See you tomorrow, folks. You haven't heard the last of me. I am the one who speaks for the spirit of freedom and decency in you. Shit. Somebody has to do it.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world--a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us....No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you.

Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers speak for America today--and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.

Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

They are same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American Character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us--they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.

And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.

-Hunter S. Thompson, 2002


If only he had the anchor spot at Fox News.

Not that big a deal. It will probably work against him more than anything else. Is it really a good plug to have Madonna and Michael Moore as your blowhorns in the culture sphere? Better than Britney, I suppose, or Sting. Too true, you might think...but have a look at his endorsement letter and the points he raises.

As Moore reminds us, this is Wesley Clark's take on the NRA:

You like to fire assault weapons? I have a place for you. It's not in the homes and streets of America. It's called the Army, and you can join any time!"

I love the kind of laughter that comes when things are deadly serious. To wit, it's a rare combination. Have a look at this video from Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. It will make you angry and cause you to pee in your pants at the same time which is, I've found, an oddly pleasurable sensation.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released their long awaited report on the threat Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed to the United States and the verdict does not look good for the Bush administration. The non-partisan and highly respected think tank has confirmed the long held notion that undue political influence on intelligence estimates resulted in a poor decision-making environment, with war hawks cherry-picking flawed and weak intelligence to fit their policy of invasion and regime change while ignoring or playing down information that accurately portrayed the threat Saddam posed to the U.S, the Middle East, and the world. In other worlds, Bush got his war by hook and by crook.

This from this morning's Globe and Mail:

The Carnegie report says there is "no solid evidence of a co-operative relationship" between Mr. Hussein's government and al-Qaeda and "there is no evidence that Iraq would have transferred [weapons of mass destruction] to terrorists -- and much evidence to counter it."

Mr. Cirincione said U.S. threat assessments were deeply flawed, mainly because of undue influence on intelligence officials by their political masters.

"We exaggerated the threat. We worst-cased it, and then acted as if that worst-case was the most-likely case. And some of the things we thought were not working, like UN inspections and sanctions, were actually working better than anyone anticipated," he said in an interview on CNN.

"And that's been made clear not only by what we found, but what the interviews have been with Iraq officials and scientists. Their programs were crippled by years of inspections and U.S. military strikes, and the sanctions that prevented them from getting anything going at all."

The six-month study compared public and declassified intelligence information with statements made by administration officials. The report concludes that the administration made the threat from Iraq sound more dire than the underlying information.

The Guardian has this to say:

The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views "sometime in 2002". Repeated visits to the CIA by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and demands by top officials to see unsubstantiated reports, created an atmosphere in which intelligence analysts were pressed to come to "more threatening" judgments of Iraq.

The report concludes that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes".

In the end we knew this was happening as it was happening. We knew the truth was being severely mangled as it was coming out of their mouths. It's expected for politicians to lie about just about everything to get what they want, from having sexual relations with interns or Tax cuts, but this is different. This is much a much bigger and infinitely more dangerous game. Hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis have died in a war that would never have taken place if the American people and the world had been told the truth about Iraq. Instead, the U.S intimidated, bribed, cajoled, lied and blackmailed their way into a mishandled and poorly planned conflict that not only effectively siphoned off all international sympathy after the attacks of September 11th, 2001 but also continues to kill people day after day without pause. The only discernible silver lining to all of this is one of the greatest aspects of American democracy: there are elections every 4 years.

I'm still wary of Bush and his traveling freakshow of babbling spindoctors conjuring up some anthrax in a bunker somewhere in Iraq, perhaps a week before election day, but I just don't know, and I'll tell you why: I thought Saddam had the damn weapons and so did you (don't lie fellas). Nothing too serious, no nukes or anything that nasty, but at least a milk carton of some evil botulism or a few vials of sarin tucked away in his private study, but alas, no dice. . .as of yet. So what gives me the right to speculate and trumpet the egg on my face, anyway? Because nothing's been dug up so far. It appears as if there was nothing to all the fear-mongering. These inspectors, who are on the U.S. payroll and not the U.N.'s, have found nothing despite the zeal with which they've gone about their increasingly politicised tasks. You can imagine Rumsfeld taking the Aussie headman of this crowd of weapon hunters aside and whispering: "Find these fucking things or we're both finished, got it?"

This on their retreat from al Jazeera tonight:

The United States has pulled out its 400-strong team looking for illegal weapons in Iraq even though another group searching for weapons of mass destruction remains in the country.

"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," a US official told The New York Times on Thursday, referring to the Joint Captured Material Exploitation Group.

Headed by an Australian brigadier, the team's task included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons.

Some military officials are viewing the pullout as a sign that the US has given up hope of finding chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, the daily said.

However, a team tasked with disposing of chemical or biological weapons remains part of the 1400-member Iraq Survey Group that has been searching for weapons of mass destruction since Saddam Hussein was overthrown, a member of the survey group said.

However, he told the paper the team, known as Task Force D/E, for disablement and elimination, was "still waiting for something to dispose of".

Good to see that he has a sense of humour about things. I think I remember Rumsfeld referring to the weapons hunt as looking for needles in haystacks, but maybe he meant a "program" for needles, I really don't know and I hesitate to speculate (as you well know).

I seldom find myself trawling for interesting news at MSNBC because my efforts are not usually rewarded, but tonight I came across an interesting article on how American soldiers are dealing with the psychological effects of combat. Here is an excerpt:

In a "normal" war, only 10 percent of the Army's forces would be in frontline combat roles—the others would have support duties and be far from harm's way. Yet in Iraq, all U.S. forces are effectively in combat roles. Typically, 25 percent of frontline soldiers will suffer from combat stress, experts say. Not all of those will go on to get full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder. But even in Gulf War I, studies put the number of PTSD victims at 5 percent to 10 percent. In Iraq, with a much longer engagement and nearly all troops potentially in harm's way, the rate could be much higher.

Also, the high number of suicides by U.S. soldiers in the Iraqi theatre has not suprisingly alarmed the Army. War is hell, as the saying goes . . . and that's probably enough explanation for that, but why do I have to go to AP, Reuters, and Al Jazeera to find this out? Because it's a bum rap. The war for hearts and minds isn't being fought solely in the streets of Tikrit, Baghdad and Samarra, but also in New York, Washington, and London. The folks on the Bayou and in the Beltway certainly don't want to know about how their little war affects their boys and girls unless it's good news or at least bleeds with dignity, which in the media world is something suicide is completely bereft of, that is unless it's a star who overdoses on a speedball and champagne.

Nevertheless I should steer you towards a story that is getting play, and that is how some soldiers are passing up on the need for counselling and are going the other way instead, taking their frustrations out in ways that are more gung-ho than Freudian. Have a look here at tonights BBC lead story, for example, but also this CNN video (no longer in their archives) that a reader sent me. Viewer discretion is strongly advised. . .

For a tight encapsulation of the fallacy that has been and remains the U.S War on Terror, read William Cook's essay at Counterpunch entitled Failure to Respond to 9-11.

Slap a beard on Perle and he could be Santa. I read this Telegraph article and was struck by the Christmas spirit of peace and goodwill permeating it. When there's no one left to bomb will they go away? Read on:

President George W Bush was sent a public manifesto yesterday by Washington's hawks, demanding regime change in Syria and Iran and a Cuba-style military blockade of North Korea backed by planning for a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear sites.

The manifesto, presented as a "manual for victory" in the war on terror, also calls for Saudi Arabia and France to be treated not as allies but as rivals and possibly enemies.

The manifesto is contained in a new book by Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and "intellectual guru" of the hardline neo-conservative movement, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter. They give warning of a faltering of the "will to win" in Washington.

In the battle for the president's ear, the manifesto represents an attempt by hawks to break out of the post-Iraq doldrums and strike back at what they see as a campaign of hostile leaking by their foes in such centres of caution as the State Department or in the military top brass.

Their publication, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, coincided with the latest broadside from the hawks' enemy number one, Colin Powell, the secretary of state.

Though on leave recovering from a prostate cancer operation, Mr Powell summoned reporters to his bedside to hail "encouraging" signs of a "new attitude" in Iran and call for the United States to keep open the prospect of dialogue with the Teheran authorities.

Such talk is anathema to hawks like Mr Perle and Mr Frum who urge Washington to shun the mullahs and work for their overthrow in concert with Iranian dissidents.

It may be assumed that their instincts at least are shared by hawks inside the government, whose twin power bases are the Pentagon's civilian leadership and the office of the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Such officials prevailed over invading Afghanistan and Iraq, but have been seen as on the back foot since the autumn as their post-war visions of building a secular, free-market Iraq were scaled back in favour of compromise and a swift handover of power next June.

The book demands that any talks with North Korea require the complete and immediate abandonment of its nuclear programme.

As North Korea will probably refuse such terms, the book urges a Cuba-style military blockade and overt preparations for war, including the rapid pullback of US forces from the inter-Korean border so that they move out of range of North Korean artillery.

Such steps, with luck, will prompt China to oust its nominal ally, Kim Jong-il, and install a saner regime in North Korea, the authors write.

The authoritarian rule of Syria's leader, Bashar Assad, should also be ended, encouraged by shutting oil supplies from Iraq, seizing arms he buys from Iran, and raids into Syria to hunt terrorists.

The authors urge Mr Bush to "tell the truth about Saudi Arabia". Wealthy Saudis, some of them royal princes, fund al-Qa'eda, they write.

The Saudi government backs "terror-tainted Islamic organisations" as part of a larger campaign to "spread its extremist version of Islam throughout the Muslim world and into Europe and North America".

The book calls for tough action against France and its dreams of offsetting US power. "We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington," it states. Britain's independence from Europe should be preserved, perhaps with open access for British arms to American defence markets.

Hyper-right-wing intellectuals who have no military experience clamouring for war from their armchairs are only scary when they're listened to. Can't we put put these two back in the box again? War on the Korean peninsula. . .hmm, sounds great fellows, especially when the United States is nearly universally despised at the moment, and stretched thin militarily on the ground. Maybe the coalition for that fight will include Tonga this time, and if they're really lucky, maybe even the military juggernaut of Uruguay. Probably over 100,000 dead in the first month sounds about right, when you consider how Seoul is within artillery range of the North Koreans. Nice plan, too: pull back your forces while the capital gets a good pounding and then fight for the ruins. What's next? An op-ed article on how the Koreans were responsible for 9-11?

This article from Arab News:

Lest anyone forget the power of incumbency, President George W. Bush delivered a few reminders in the past few weeks. The capture of Saddam Hussein and the announcement that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had agreed to open his country to weapons inspections demonstrated that ability of the occupant of the White House to generate positive and transformative news.

This is a critical fact to note in an election year. Not only can the incumbent administration make news more easily than its challengers, but it can also better manage news as well.

Challengers must fight to get press coverage. And at this point in the Democratic primary process, with the nine candidates sharply attacking each other and the Bush White House, the news coverage that they generate usually has a negative tone.

The president, on the other hand, has been on an upswing. Congress supported his proposal to reform the way that senior citizens pay for expensive prescription drugs. The nation’s economy is continuing to show signs of recovery, and now Bush can bask in the glow of two significant foreign policy successes.

The Democrats’ dilemma is clear. While the president’s victories have produced simple straightforward headlines, their criticisms are more complicated and, to some ears, may sound like mere complaining.

Also of concern has been the ability of the administration to manage bad news and change the subject of coverage when they needed to.

Who remembered the Enron or Halliburton scandals of the summer of 2002? And whatever became of the challenges to the vice president’s dealings with oil company executives in planning the administration’s energy policy?

The war with Iraq, which was itself a “subject change,” provides yet another case in point. The raison d’etre of the war was the danger posed by the Baghdad regime’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the not so subtly implied links between Iraq and international terrorism.

The former is no longer mentioned, while continuing violence in Iraq is now noted as proof of the connection between terror and the former regime.

In the American public’s mind Sept. 11, Afghanistan and Iraq have all been morphed into a vague but clearly threatening reality — a “reality” that has been cultivated by carefully managed news.

In this picture the details have been ignored or deliberately pushed aside. What has been promoted as important to consider is that “we were attacked and we are fighting back — and our power has been decisive.” That Afghanistan is in a state of upheaval, that Pakistan may very well have been destabilized and that Al-Qaeda remains a very real threat - are not subjects for discussion. What matters is that “we are fighting terror” and, in this vague fight, we are told “we are winning”.

The coverage is managed and “spun” and, when needed, shifted to new topics — positive stories of victories. For a while, for example, as daily attacks against US forces were taking their toll, public support for the war was declining. This required management. To a degree, the effort has been successful. Americans and Iraqis continue to die, on a daily basis, but the stories of these deaths no longer generate front-page news coverage. For example, a series of attacks on US forces on Christmas Day resulted in four American deaths. A review of a number of major US daily newspapers found the story on page 39 in one, page 18 in another and not even appearing in another two.

In most instances, US deaths are reported buried in much larger press round-ups of Iraq-related news. In the past, they were featured as separate stories.

In a similar vein, Iraqi civilian deaths, resulting from actions by coalition forces, have all but disappeared from the US press. After pre-war polling showed that the US public was highly sensitive to such “collateral damage” deaths, the Pentagon refused to release such data forcing US reporters to hunt for these numbers on their own. Often times they had to go to Iraqi hospitals to learn casualty figures. Now, however, the coalition-administered Iraqi Ministry of Health has joined the Pentagon’s efforts by forbidding hospital staff from issuing any information to the international news media. Still some negative news will, on occasion, leak out, but it is episodic and incomplete.

As a result, the management of “bad news” has been quite effective, leaving the field wide open for coverage of what is termed the “larger” political news coverage of “progress”.

All of this is to say that the United States public is in the dark about much of what is happening or not happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and the magnitude of the challenges facing both countries. What they know is that the United States is facing an upgraded “Orange Alert”, “Saddam has been caught” and the “United States is still fighting and winning the long war against terror”.

Even with this, the public remains deeply divided. But with accurate news so difficult to come by in this “cloud of war” that has descended on the country, it is increasingly hard to discuss the merits, or even the reality, of this war or the foreign policy that led us into it.

This will continue to be the situation in the next year. Reality may, on occasion, break through and the press may respond with tough stories, asking hard questions. But as the past few weeks have shown the administration has more arrows in its quiver, and, as the situation warrants, they may decide when and how to use them.

It's snowing here so naturally my thoughts return to the plane crash in Egypt. It's too weird out here (on the deck). I can hear the ocean and the ships bleating in the white darkness but the streets are quiet with the big flakes falling. Ok, so my first thought was terror. My second is more disturbing: the Egyptian President was going to meet Tony Blair at Sharm el-Sheikh today, security is tight, surely there is missle defense operational at the resort meeting place, air threats abound, it is dawn, and a chartered flight flies out to sea and gets too close. . .

Perhaps it was an accident, but with terror on the brain you get to thinking and. . .well, it's shameful, really.

Check out the BBC Breaking News story here.

Initially I'm freaked out because it was a clear day and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair is in Sharm el Sheikh as we speak, right where the plane went down on the Red Sea coast. It's odd that terror is what we think of first rather than the French tourists on board who just disintegrated.

I wonder if many people look at the great buildings or monuments in their cities and no longer stare at them with awe but rather question how much of a target it might represent to terrorists. To anyone living near the Houses of Parliament or work in the West Wing I've never come this close to empathy. I can almost understand what it might feel like. I've been held up, scared out my wits, charged by animals and been subjected to storms and gnarly turbulence, but none of that can come close when I start entertaining a worst-case scenario, like thinking the distant rumblings of a cement truck signals the beginning of an 6.5 earthquake. We are living in times fraught with fault lines. Terror bites, friend.

I thought about it on the ferry coming back from the island, on the bridge, and while having a smoke on my deck looking out to sea at all the massive tankers coming and going along the water. I could have gotten out a pen and started to colour-code the grades I was giving for security at the targets I was imagining. Not to be defeatist (for I shall overcome), but terrorism is effective.

I recall looking up at a jet-liner on Palmerston in Toronto in late September, 2001 and thinking "Oh Jesus, that's too low" or being a little secretly frightened of panel vans as they drove along the Strand in London last year during the run up to war in Iraq. Remember that Volkswagen ad with the man who has a miniature Beetle (the new kind) on top of his head 'cause he can't get it off his mind? Well, today I have terror, and it sucks. I hope that this crash was nothing, but I feel bad that people died nevertheless. I never imagined I would ever think something like that.

I'm always a little surprised that all of Vancouver Island hasn't been developed, paved, and sold for top dollar every time I go over there. It is God's country, brutha, and I'm an athiest. I had a great time. Nothing but food, beers, surf, rainforest, and good company. I've revisited a book idea which might have merit, and will probably go forward with that and Times New Roman concurrently. I wish I could do more to jazz the site up, add photo's, stats, etc...but in the end that sort of thing is garbage, for a good news site should be about thinking and providing many points of view not purchased or overtly influenced, each with a heavy dose of thick-grained salt. That's what I'll be trying to achieve in 2004. Note: I don't mention balance in that mission statement because the arguments of the right are mostly retarded. ;-)

So, back to the news shall we?

It seems no sooner had I switched my computer off that all hell started to break loose. First, mad cow disease. This is a nasty business, and since I am a carnivore of note used to lathering himself in offal while gnawing on the odd carcass, I feel I should be heard. Very few countries have an FDA-like organisation checking for things such as mad cow. I've eaten cows in parts of Africa where I'm rather certain the animals in question were never tested for anything other than genitals and four legs. In fact, wherever I go, I devour the indigenous animals with a fury that would get me locked up here at home. And by most accounts I'm fine. With all this hype internationally and in the United States over a single confirmed case of BSE, one could imagine a Gary Larson style cartoon with a couple of cows in Bangladesh referring to the plight of their poor American cousins by saying "And they thought we had it bad!" In any event, it now looks as if Canada is getting blamed for this particular mad cow. CNN has a story up tonight that says:

Soon after the December 23 announcement that mad cow disease had been found in a Washington dairy cow, officials quarantined two herds. One was the herd the infected cow was in before slaughter; the other was the herd where her bull calf was taken.

The department has also been trying to track the whereabouts of 81 cows originally thought to have been imported with the infected cow from Canada September 4, 2001, via a port in Oroville, Washington.

One of those cows has been tracked to a dairy farm in Mattawa, Washington, USDA Chief Veterinarian Ron DeHaven told reporters. As a result, he said, authorities this week placed that cow's herd under quarantine.

As with all things American, it could get entertaining: "You can overcharge me for gas and smokes and make it impossible to fly from A to B but if you take my Big Mac I'll fucking kill you bastards."

Unless this gets worse it's a non-story, like a single case of cholera in downtown Scottsdale. It might freak you out long enough to make you forget about the war, but not long enough to sway your attention from the fate of Michael Jackson.

Which brings me to other news: the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson story. Remember this? The ex-diplomat went public to show the Bush administration had lied about Iraq purchasing uranium from Niger in an op-ed piece in The New York Times (read it here). By claiming the White House wasn't being up front with the American people he invited attacks which we're swift, but none more personal, dangerous, illegal, and stupid than the public outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a Central Intelligence Agency NOC. A NOC is a spy, an agent with non-official cover, working overseas usually under a false identity. It is illegal to reveal the identity of an agent, but two "senior administration officials" called up 6 journalists to say Wilson was a crank and by the way his wife is CIA. Wilson thinks it was Karl Rove who ordered the leak or did the leaking. Attorney General John Ashcroft was leading the investigation but has now recused himself, bringing in independent Patrick Fitzgerald who I hope will waste no time and scare the crap out of the White House. Josh Marshall has some great insights into the Plame case here. This story nearly died in the last few weeks so I'm glad to see it creeping back to the front page. It has had the potential to be worse than Watergate but the attention-span of the media has been swayed by mad cow rumours, the freakshow that is Michael Jackson and Merry Christmas, don't get on a plane. Dig in your heels, boys...break's over. Get back to work.

Other than that, the war in Iraq continues to kill people even though it ended in last May and Afghanistan remains about as "free" as it was before 9-11. The War on Terror is a fuck-up. Anyway, it's snowing outside and I'm glad to be home and writing.