Barbara Boxer plays the "you have no stake in this argument" card against Condoleezza Rice:
Ever since Sen. Barbar Boxer (D-Calif.) noted that Rice was childless during hearings Thursday on Bush's new Iraq plan, a controversy has erupted across the blogosphere about whether Boxer's comment was appropriate.
Some conservative analysts interpreted Boxer as meaning that Rice wasn't capable of making decisions on war because she did not have children.
This effect of the Iraq war deserves a lot of discussion:
Until now, the Pentagon's policy on the Guard or Reserve was that members' cumulative time on active duty for the Iraq or Afghan wars could not exceed 24 months. That cumulative limit is now lifted; the remaining limit is on the length of any single mobilization, which may not exceed 24 consecutive months, Pace said.
USA Today spends a lot of money and devotes a lot of space to a survey of those darn kids today, and reports this shocking discovery:
How do you feel about this? Proud? Horrified?
An Indianapolis-area soldier, believed to be the first female Indiana National Guard member wounded in Iraq, was presented a Purple Heart this morning.
I saw an annoying report on "Good Morning America" yesterday in which Diane Sawyer stared with worshipful adoration at Oprah Winfrey while they discussed the $40 million school Winfrey has been building in South Africa. But that's pretty much the way everyone in the press treats the woman, and it's her money. She can spend it however she likes, and there are worse things than education.
It's such an old story. The bad guys break the rules, forcing the adoption of tougher rules that do nothing but hurt everybody else. Today's version results in a step back in Milwaukee, to the probable dismay of thousands of teenagers:
If you wanted to buy condoms 30 years ago, you had to bear the embarrassment of asking a pharmacist to fetch them from beneath the counter.
I've always liked John Lennon's "Imagine," in fact would rank it somewhere in the top 10 pop/rock songs of all time. Imagine there are no religions, countries, possessions to divide us into opposing camps, that we had to deal with each other strictly human being to human being, with only the consequences of those dealings motivating us. That is the essence of idealism, which is the heart of so much good music.
If the category is "best newspaper corrections of the year," that also means they were for the silliest errors of the year. The St. Petersburg Times presents a collection from regrettheerror.com and graciously incudes one of its own doozies:
I have a friend whose mother was a runway model with Betty Ford in Grand Rapids, Mich. I should have her get in touch with the newspaper. It would certainly be a much better "I knew the famous person when" story than this one:
On the other hand, if this is the best the professional journalists have to offer -- a lazy exercise in divining what Americans think will happen in 2007 -- perhaps we are better off to let YouTube visitors do the sorting for us. Did the people who put this together stop and think that their standard disclaimer put on this story comes very close to self-parody? "The telephone poll of 1,000 adults was conducted Dec. 12-14 by Ipsos, an international polling firm.
