Be sure to click through each window of this ad -- it keeps going after you think it's over, and you have to see the whole thing. Granted, there are a couple of crudely funny moments, but that doesn't stop it from taking its place as the most loathesome example of GOP anti-gay bigotry to date.

There were a couple moments that made me think of the hilarious bush-Blair "Endless Love" video, which was truly funny and was not at all cruel. This ad, however, goes way too far, and its message is one of pure hatred and fear.

Update: Andrew Sullivan posts this email he just received in regard to the link above:

"I forwarded the anti-Kerry anti-gay ad posted on your site to my few gay Republican friends. No caption. No commentary. Today a friend who is a Bush supporter called me. Direct quote: "I'm voting for Kerry." When I asked why she said: 'Bush doesn't scare me but the people who support and defend him do."

If you still believe, deep inside, that we are actually "winning" our War on Terror and/or that the invasion of Iraq actually moved us closer to that goal, please read this much-blogged-about article that's surely going to become a classic for great reporting and myth smashing.

Bush has shaped his presidency, and his reelection campaign, around the threat that announced itself in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Five days after the attacks, he made it clear that he conceived a broader war. Impromptu remarks on the White House South Lawn were the first in which he named "this war on terrorism," and he cast it as a struggle with "a new kind of evil." Under that banner he toppled two governments, eased traditional restraints on intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and reshaped the landscape of the federal government.

As the war on terrorism enters its fourth year, its results are sufficiently diffuse -- and obscured in secrecy -- to resist easy measure. Interpretations of the public record are also polarized by the claims and counterclaims of the presidential campaign. Bush has staked his reelection on an argument that defense of the U.S. homeland requires unyielding resolve to take the fight to the terrorists. His opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), portrays the Bush strategy as based on false assumptions and poor choices, particularly when it came to Iraq.

The contention that the Iraq invasion was an unwise diversion in confronting terrorism has been central to Kerry's critique of Bush's performance. But this account -- drawn largely from interviews with those who have helped manage Bush's offensive -- shows how the debate over that question has echoed within the ranks of the administration as well, even among those who support much of the president's agenda.

Interviewing senior bush advisers, the reporter then goes on to pulverize the president's specious claims of victory and success and freedom on the march. It's devastating. You will simply not believe the mess we are now in as a result of our dirty little invasion of Iraq.

Most amazing in bush's utter refusal to understand that Al Qaeda is a hydra-like creature, sprouting dozens of new heads for every one we manage to sever. He sees it as an organization with a set number of officers, and if he can just kill those officers....

It's a depressing but important read. I truly expect a lot of Republican officials to step into the voting booth on November 2nd and pull the lever for Kerry. When you read this, you ralize that a lot of them have to know just how bad, just how dangerous our little princeling is, for us and for the world.

This is from a few days ago, but it's worth a post. It's good to know that somebody's better off thanks to our dirty little war with Iraq:

Bill Conway, Carlyle founder and chief investment officer, said conditions were ripe for Carlyle to realise some of its investments. "It's the best 18 months we ever had," Mr Conway said. "We made money and we made it fast."

He must be so proud, and board members GHW Bush and James Baker are no doubt slurping champagne from one another's slipper. Brilliant, that bush managed to actually pull off the world's stupidest war and enrich his friends and family along the way. Yes, these are unique times in which we live.

Can we really endure four more years of this shit?

This is a rather droll and must-read account of how Mao's body ended up being embalmed a la Lenin

China's politburo, once they were sure Mao was dead, ordered his body to lie in state for two weeks. Then, on a whim, they decided to have him preserved for all time, even though the Chairman had signed up years before to be cremated.

The Chinese doctors knew nothing of embalming and because of strained international relations they got no help from the Russians, who were the experts in the field. The Vietnamese, too, refused to divulge their trade secrets - perhaps no loss since by then Uncle Ho's nose had rotted away and his beard had fallen out.

Mao's personal physician sent an underling to scour the library of the medical academy for books on embalming. As a back-up he had the Institute of Arts and Crafts make a lifelike Mao effigy, just in case the embalming was botched.

It very nearly was. The library book recommended draining the body and injecting 16 litres of formaldehyde, but in their anxiety the doctors pumped in 22 litres. Mao's face swelled like a ball and his ears stuck out at right angles. His skin turned slimy and formaldehyde oozed out of his pores like sweat.

The piece's wry humor becomes more side-splitting with each paragraph. It concludes:

Within a minute or two, we are past the Chairman and into an anteroom where China's new capitalist future confronts us. The crowds rush the counters which display assorted merchandise of dubious taste. There are Mao badges, Mao busts, Mao watches and Mao cigarette lighters that play The East Is Red when you flick them open. At the rear of the building, rows of stalls offer the same range plus soft drinks, stuffed toys and Fuji film.

In deference to history, we invest in a set of Chairman Mao tea caddies and a Mao wall hanging that can double as a tea towel. A set of 32 Mao badges mounted on cardboard is a bargain at only $2. Wording on the box describes the contents as "Great-Man Badge Album of Screen Style".

Old-style socialists may feel a twinge at the whole experience but, let's face it, the capitalist road these days leads to the very steps of Chairman Mao's resting place. If only the Russians could embrace the market economy as efficiently, Lenin, too, would be raking in the roubles.

They don't even tell us the author's name, but he's fiendishly good.

The scariest aspect of all the voter fraud being carried out by diligent Republican minions is its brazen shamelessness.

Last week we brought you the news that Larry Russell, head of the South Dakota GOP's get-out-the-vote operation (Republican Victory Program) had resigned along with several of his staffers amidst a burgeoning vote fraud scandal.

The Bush campaign promptly brought Russell and several of his newly-resigned staffers to Ohio to run the get-out-the-vote effort there.

Now South Dakota officials have handed down indictments against six of Russell's South Dakota staffers, including at least three he brought with him to take care of business in Ohio.

Perhaps they can push extradition back past election day.

Leave no fraudster behind (LNFB)!

It was only a few years ago that "voter fraud" was a term we rarely if ever heard in America. Bill Clinton may have brought "oral sex" into the public parlance; shrub's contribution will be "voter fraud" (and "casual lies with lethal consequences"). It's become part of our reality as we take for granted that Republicans will resort to blatant lawlessness to take away their citizens rights to vote. It's quite beyond belief.

That's the title of Frank Rich's latest masterpiece on the hysteria over John Kerry referencing Mary Cheney's well-known lesbianism during the third debate. This was a topic I wasn't going to write about since it's already been overplayed, but this article is too good to pass up.

Though the president pays "compassionate conservative" lip service to "tolerance" of homosexuality to appease suburban swing voters, his campaign has pushed a gratuitous constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, one opposed by Mary Cheney's own father, to stir up as much fear and ugly rage as it can.

When Mrs. Cheney hyperbolically implies that even using the word lesbian in 2004 is a slur out of the McCarthy era - "a cheap and tawdry political trick," she said - she is playing a similar game. She is positioning lesbian as a term comparable to child molester. But as Dave Cullen writes in Salon: "It is not an insult to call a proudly public lesbian a lesbian. It's an insult to gasp when someone calls her a lesbian." Mrs. Cheney and her surrogates are in effect doing exactly what Elizabeth Edwards had the guts to say they were doing: they are sending the message to Mr. Rove's four million that they are ashamed of Mary Cheney. They are disowning her under the guise of "defending" her. They are exploiting her for the sake of political expediency even as they level that charge at Democrats.

The deployment of homosexuality as a nasty campaign weapon has long been second nature to Mr. Rove. In the must-read article "Karl Rove in a Corner" in the November issue of The Atlantic, the journalist Joshua Green exhaustively researches the tightest campaigns of Mr. Rove's career and exhumes the pattern. As Mr. Green reminds us, George W. Bush's 1994 gubernatorial race against Ann Richards "featured a rumor" that Governor Richards was a lesbian. Gay whispers have also swirled around Rove adversaries like a rival Republican campaign consultant in the 1980's and a 1994 Alabama judicial candidate who was branded a "homosexual pedophile."

None of these rumors were, in fact, true, but Mary Cheney is unambiguously and unapologetically gay. For a campaign that wants to pander to the fringe, that makes her presence in the Bush-Cheney family a problem - just how big a problem can be seen by its disingenuously hysterical reaction to Mr. Kerry's use of the L word. But Mary Cheney isn't the only problem for Mr. Rove as he plays this game. The Republican establishment is rife with gay people - just ask anyone in proximity to its convention in New York - and the campaign doesn't want the four million to know about them, either.

(It's true, about the gay Republicans. I've known several, though I never understood how they could join the camp of the enemy.)

This has been a campaign rife with irony. Here is John Kerry, always a friend to the gay community, being savaged for gay baiting by the far-right -- which has redefined the very concept of gay baiting to the point of trying to write it into the Constitution. Then we have a much decorated and proven war hero derided as a coward who can't face the enemy -- by accusers who dodged the draft and never once faced real danger.

It will be an election year to remember. Will life even go on after the election? Somehow I can't imagine it.

If so, you may want to check out this new blog created by some creative Chinese-speaking expats and repats, including Brendan O'Kane.

Sorry to neglect this blog the past few days. I'm under serious pressure at work and my cable modem at home has become increasingly neurotic, throwing periodic fits. I have at least five half-written posts saved as drafts that I hope to get to later today. Stay tuned.

John Cleese tells a good joke:

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.

This is from one of the smartest and best-written blogs I've ever come across. Be sure to check it out, and thanks to Mark Kleiman for letting us know about it.

His name is Marlow W. Cook and I am reproducing his entire article below, because it's so wonderful. Thanks to the commenter who alerted me.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'Frightened to death' of Bush

By Marlow W. Cook

I shall cast my vote for John Kerry come Nov 2.

I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts."

I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

First, let's talk about George Bush's moral standards.

In 2000, to defeat Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — a man who was shot down in Vietnam and imprisoned for over five years — they used Carl Rove's "East Texas special." They started the rumor that he was gay, saying he had spent too much time in the Hanoi Hilton. They said he was crazy. They said his wife was on drugs. Then, to top it off, they spread pictures of his adopted daughter, who was born in Bangladesh and thus dark skinned, to the sons and daughters of the Confederacy in rural South Carolina.

To show he was not just picking on Republicans, he went after Sen. Max Cleland from Georgia, a Democrat seeking re-election. Bush henchmen said he wasn't patriotic because Cleland did not agree 100 percent on how to handle homeland security. They published his picture along with Cuba's Castro, questioning Cleland's patriotism and commitment to America's security. Never mind that his Republican challenger was a Vietnam deferment case and Cleland, who had served in Vietnam, came home in a wheel chair having lost three limbs fighting for his country. Anyone who wants to win an election and control of the legislative body that badly has no moral character at all.

We know his father got him in the Texas Air National Guard so he would not have to go to Vietnam. The religious right can have him with those moral standards. We also have Vice President Dick Cheney, who deferred his way out of Vietnam because, as he says, he "had more important things to do."

I have just turned 78. During my lifetime, we have sent 31,377,741 Americans to war, not including whatever will be the final figures for the Iraq fiasco. Of those, 502,722 died and 928,980 came home without legs, arms or what have you.

Those wars were to defend freedom throughout the free world from communism, dictators and tyrants. Now Americans are the aggressors — we start the wars, we blow up all the infrastructure in those countries, and then turn around and spend tax dollars denying our nation an excellent education system, medical and drug programs, and the list goes on. ...

I hope you all have noticed the Bush administration's style in the campaign so far. All negative, trashing Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards and Democrats in general. Not once have they said what they have done right, what they have done wrong or what they have not done at all.

Lyndon Johnson said America could have guns and butter at the same time. This administration says you can have guns, butter and no taxes at the same time. God help us if we are not smart enough to know that is wrong, and we live by it to our peril. We in this nation have a serious problem. Its almost worse than terrorism: We are broke. Our government is borrowing a billion dollars a day. They are now borrowing from the government pension program, for apparently they have gotten as much out of the Social Security Trust as it can take. Our House and Senate announce weekly grants for every kind of favorite local programs to save legislative seats, and it's all borrowed money.

If you listened to the President confirming the value of our war with Iraq, you heard him say, "If no weapons of mass destruction were found, at least we know we have stopped his future distribution of same to terrorists." If that is his justification, then, if he is re-elected our next war will be against Iran and at the same time North Korea, for indeed they have weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, which they have readily admitted. Those wars will require a draft of men and women. ...

I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Those of you who are fiscal conservatives and abhor our staggering debt, tell your conservative friends, "Vote for Kerry," because without Bush to control the Congress, the first thing lawmakers will demand Kerry do is balance the budget.

The wonderful thing about this country is its gift of citizenship, then it's freedom to register as one sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.

If we are indeed the party of Lincoln (I paraphrase his words), a president who deems to have the right to declare war at will without the consent of the Congress is a president who far exceeds his power under our Constitution.

I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right path.

The writer, a Republican formerly of Louisville, was Jefferson County judge from 1962-1968 and U.S. senator from Kentucky from 1968-1975.

Via Hoffmania.

Michael Berube says of progressives who won't vote for John Kerry:

Maybe you’re fond of speaking of the “corporate duopoly” of American politics– and I admit that the phrase does roll nicely off the tongue. Or maybe you like to imagine that there’s a groundswell of hundreds of millions of people around the globe who believe that Kerry and Bush are just two different brands of detergent, even though actual polls show wide margins of support for Kerry in other nations. Or maybe you just think it’s smart, cool, and alternative to dismiss both guys as “millionaires” or “Skull and Bones men,” because you know better than to buy into “the system.”

But your political stance really means one of two things. Either:

(a) you are unaware of the extent to which the Bush crowd consists of kleptomaniac Contra-funding retreads, neo-segregationists associated with Confederate outlets like Southern Partisan magazine and the Council of Conservative Citizens, and Christian fundamentalist jihadists who believe themselves to be the instruments of God; or

(b) you are sublimely indifferent to the fact that the Bush crowd consists of kleptomaniac Contra-funding retreads, neo-segregationists associated with Confederate outlets like Southern Partisan magazine and the Council of Conservative Citizens, and Christian fundamentalist jihadists who believe themselves to be the instruments of God.

To the progressive young lady who sits next to me at work and refuses to vote for Kerry -- are you listening?? Damn it, wake up. They are not the same.

The link is from the Poor Man, who goes on to make his own interesting observations.

That's the title of a breathtaking article by Rick Perlstein that is overflowing with examples of how tday's media and the Democratic Party let bush off the hook for transgressions that would have been fought tooth and nail at any other period in American history.

Democratic insiders use politics to explain their inaction away. They've seen the focus groups: Accusations of a president draining the lifeblood from democracy just won't play in Peoria. "It's what the folks in this business, we call an 'elite argument,' " says Jeff Shesol, who was a speechwriter for President Clinton and whose firm, West Wing Writers, develops messages for some of the most prominent Democratic campaigns. "It pitches too high to reach the mass electorate."

Julian Epstein, another Democratic consultant and frequent talking head, puts it more simply. "People will think you're whining," he says.

Peter Fenn, a Washington advertising guru who frequently represents the Democratic side on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, says reaching voters on this point is hopeless: "Their eyes glaze over when you deal with process kind of issues."

Yet the "process," by many accounts, is not just broken but shattered, intentionally ground into dust by Karl Rove and his Republican campaign machine. "What these guys do every day, as a matter of course, without thinking twice about it, would be dramatic transgressions even under Nixon," Jeff Shesol admits from his Dupont Circle office, crowded with paraphernalia from Democratic triumphs past. He's just amazingly quick to dismiss the notion that there's anything a Democratic presidential campaign can do about it. "It is very hard for most people to look at Bush and see him as an extremist," he says. "It is very hard to make that charge stick to a guy who seems so down-home, so commonsense, such a decent man."

Perlstein gives example after example of blatant character assassination and unbelievable lies, and notes the apathetic, wearied, self-defeated attitude among those who would normally be up in arms. It's a terribly depressing read and I felt pretty sick when I finished it. I wanted to blockquote the whole thing, every word. Instead, I ask you that you take a minute to read it all. It's hair-raising.

Update: Case in point. Do these women look obscene?

Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and thrown out of the President Bush rally at the Jackson County Fairgrounds Thursday night, after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Protect our civil liberties.

All three women said they were carrying valid tickets for the event that they had received from Republican Party headquarters in Medford, which had been distributing event tickets to Bush supporters.

Teacher Janet Voorhies said she simply wanted to bring a message to President Bush, but did not intend to protest.

"I wanted to see if I would be able to make a statement that I feel is important, but not offensive, in a rally for my president," said Voorhies, 48.

The women said they were angered by reports of peaceful protesters being thrown out of previous Bush-Cheney events. They said they chose the phrase, "Protect Our Civil Liberties," because it was unconfrontational.

"We chose this phrase specifically because we didn't think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene," said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.

The women got past the first and second checkpoints and were allowed into the Jackson County fairgrounds, but were asked to leave and then escorted out of the event by campaign officials who allegedly told them their T-shirts were "obscene."

We are not the great democracy we were just four short years ago. From the great Digby.

That's the new Republican meme. I just this minute heard Sean Hannity say those words, that Kerry will "say and do anything" to win. So I went to Google News and typed in the four words and sure enough it's being repeated by everybody. It's an offical talking point, both of the party and the media that support it.

This from the party that arrests people at bush speeches wearing a Kerry t-shirt, that tries to block voter registration based on the density of the paper their form is wrtitten on, that summons the media to "a major speech on terror" that's all about John Kerry. Fascinating.

That's how Jay Leno described the Bill O'Reilly sex scandal on last night's Tonight show. I like that.

Update: Oh, and this article chronicles O'Reilly's ongoing obsession with pornography, demonstrated by excerpts from "the Factor."

The name of the article: "The No Skin Zone."

Yeah, and bush was also going to pay for our efforts in Iraq with all that oil money remember? No, it's pretty obvious what's going on: Shrub's aides are literally freaking out over the new Democratic talking point that bush may well re-introduce the draft. But the point is totally valid, especially in light of a recent flood of articles detailing how poorly prepared we were (and are) for the Iraqi occupation and how our military manpower is stretched to the breaking point.

Paul Krugman offers a cogent and all-too-plausible scenario for seeing bush break his word come 2005.

Those who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn't drive the budget into deficit - but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won't revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will.

There were two reasons some of us never believed Mr. Bush's budget promises. First, his claims that his tax cuts were affordable rested on patently unrealistic budget projections. Second, his broader policy goals, including the partial privatization of Social Security - which is clearly on his agenda for a second term - would involve large costs that were not included even in those unrealistic projections. This led to the justified suspicion that his election-year promises notwithstanding, Mr. Bush would preside over a return to budget deficits.

It's exactly the same when it comes to the draft. Mr. Bush's claim that we don't need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine - the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war - would require much larger military forces than we now have.

This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft.

Mr. Bush's assurances that this won't happen are based on a denial of reality.

The funny thing is, the RNC is saying groups like Rock the Vote (and John Kerry) have no right to raise the possibility of a draft because bush says it won't happen. As if his word makes it so. Sorry, but trust has to be earned, and at this point bush has precious little trust to bank upon.

Meanwhile, as Krugman notes, our "volunteer army" isn't so voluntary anymore, with many servicepeople being kept in the military past their agreed terms of enlistment by "stop loss" orders.

Krugman closes on an ominous note.

The reality is that the Iraq war, which was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the Bush doctrine, has pushed the U.S. military beyond its limits. Yet there is no sign that Mr. Bush has been chastened. By all accounts, in a second term the architects of that doctrine, like Paul Wolfowitz, would be promoted, not replaced. The only way this makes sense is if Mr. Bush is prepared to seek a much larger Army - and that means reviving the draft.

Did you hear that, my young friends? A draft under a second bush term is all but inevitable, and don't believe the soothing voices of the right promising it just isn't so. Just as they promised we'd be greeted in Iraq with flowers and chocolates, they're now promising we have enough troops no matter what those annoying intelligence reports say.

If I were a college freshman, I'd be very disturbed to contemplate the possibility of being shipped off to die in bush's dirty, ugly little war. Thank God there's something they can do about it.

LA Times reporter Robert Scheer's got a bombshell, and it's going to make shrub look very bad (yes, even worse than now).

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago. "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."
....
The stonewalling by the Bush administration and the failure of Congress to gain release of the report have, said the intelligence source, "led the management of the CIA to believe it can engage in a cover-up with impunity. Unless the public demands an accounting, the administration and CIA's leadership will have won and the nation will have lost."

Yikes. The most untransparent, scrutiny-averse administration in America's history. Well, as shrub likes to say, they can run but they can't hide: Even if Kerry loses (which seems less and less likely), this will all come out in the wash, and the bushies will be recognized as the scoundrels who put Warren Harding to shame.

Link via Kos.

Flightsuit boy really cracks me up:

Did a quick term count in yesterday's "major" speech on terrorism. The results, amazingly, are even more ridiculous than I expected:

• Frequency of John Kerry (with the terms "Senator", "Senator Kerry", or "my opponent"): 41
• Frequency of "Saddam Hussein": 4
• Frequency of "Al Qaeda": 1
• Frequency of "Osama bin-Laden" or "bin-Laden": 0

Assuming this was, as stated, a speech on terrorism, it seems quite clear that George W. Bush believes the main terrorist threat facing our country is John Kerry.

It's further clear that Osama bin-Laden has been totally neutralized, as he didn't merit a single mention in a 4,500+ word address on terrorism. As for Al Qaeda, they barely figure, with a pathetic single appearance, and even then only in context of how many of their leaders George Bush has (presumably, personally) killed.

And bush's big talking point is that Kerry doesn't understand the threat of terror.

Who knows why, but I won't complain. Averaging about 70 hits an hour, which for a dinky site like this is respectable!

Update: Well, it was nice while it lasted. Traffic back down to the usual trickle.

...go here right now. You will be laughing for the rest of the night!

(Thanks for this, Duncan.)

Interesting. I'm impressed at how prescient the analysts were in assessing Mao's influence, and how with this death the country would return to sanity.

"As long as Mao is capable of political command, China's situation will probably be tense and inherently unstable," it said; a "disorderly and contentious" struggle would follow, and eventually a move away from "discredited" policies to "secure modest economic growth."

In an introduction to the collection of 71 documents, which are on the agency's Web site at www.cia.gov and will be released by the Government Printing Office on compact disc, Robert L. Suettinger, a career intelligence analyst and China scholar, says that "unfortunately, the collection provides only a few examples of this kind of cogent analysis on China's leadership situation." But Mr. Suettinger described the record as "nonetheless an impressive one" in which "the fundamentals are consistently right."

Among the most important judgments, Mr. Suettinger wrote, was a consistently accurate assessment that the Communist Party in China was never challenged from 1948 on in its predominance of power on the Chinese mainland.

For true Sinophiles this will be a must-read. For those interested only in US politics, pardon the digression, but China is always on my mind.

Jasper Becker, whom I trust, and Daniel Howden say it will.

In the shadow of the Jade Dragon Snow Peak, deep inside the Tiger Leaping Gorge, Chinese developers are operating in secret to push through a massive dam project that will wash away the section of the Yangtze river valley thought to have been the real location for the fictional Shangri-La.

Local tribesmen have revealed that work is already under way on a massive project that would flood a Unesco world heritage site, displace more than 100,000 people and destroy the way of life of the unique Naxi people, one of the world's only surviving matriarchal societies. It would also bring an abrupt end to the nascent tourism industry in the remote southwestern Yunnan province.

The battle to save the gorge, one of the deepest in the world, has pitted a David-like alliance of green groups and local tribespeople against the Goliath of the Huaneng Group, China"s biggest independent power producer, working with the Yunnan provincial government. The company is run by Li Xiaopeng, son of the hardline former prime minister Li Peng, who oversaw the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Mr Li was at the forefront of the controversial Three Gorges Dam project that was pushed through in the teeth of strident opposition from environmentalists and residents.

"The stakes are extremely high. Chinese environmentalists have decided to make this their next major campaign," says Ma Jun, a consultant who was the first to produce a study on the dam's implications. "I'm optimistic they will succeed because this case is a touch-stone of all the big talks on balancing environmental preservation with development".

Opponents say the reservoir will devastate local cultures, robbing people of their farms and livelihood, and leave tens of thousands of mostly Tibetans, Miao, Yi, Bai, Lisu and Naxi minorities homeless. It would also consign ancient villages with distinctive architectural styles. Concerns are mounting over the fate of the Naxi with their unusual matriarchal tradition, which has drawn an increasing number of visitors to the area.

This would be a tragedy beyond description. It's all thanks to the tireless and enterprising Li Peng, architect of the June 4, 1989 massacre at and around Tiananmen Square and a mastermind of the Three Gorges Dam project, which thus far has wreaked unimaginable havoc on China's environment. Ah, progress.

Shrub completely ignored the warnings in 2003 that we were heading into disaster. This is certainly a bombshell.

"The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious," warned an Army War College report that was completed in February 2003, a month before the invasion.

Without an "overwhelming" effort to prepare for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the report warned: "The United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."

A half-dozen intelligence reports also warned that American troops could face significant postwar resistance. This foot-high stack of material was distributed at White House meetings of Bush's top foreign policy advisers, but there's no evidence that anyone ever acted on it.

"It was disseminated. And ignored," said a former senior intelligence official.

Did you get that? Foot-high stacks of intelligence reports saying we had a serious chance of losing the war were given out at the White House - while we were being told it would be a piece of cake. And the reports were simply dismissed. That amounts to gross negligence.

This administration wins the gold star when it comes to ignoring dire warnings. Remember, for example, Richard Clarke's security brief, "Osama Bin Laden Intends to Attack America"? The one Condi called a mere "historical document"? And yet bush can't think of a single mistake -- not even one -- aside from appointing a few officials who weren't loyal enough to him. Oh, the hubris, the vanity, the stupidity; but then, why should he listen to intelligence reports when God speaks through him?

Via Andrew Sullivan, who sees this as proof of "the appalling amateurism" with which our leaders conducted their dirty little war.

Ouch.

Down 7.81 percent today alone.

UPDATE: You can make yourself heard at this hilarious Sinclair message board! Via Atrios, who says "I haven't had this much fun reading a stock message board since Enron was in free fall..."

Here's why.

Anyone following this lurid sex scandal (and who isn't?) will enjoy this funny analysis of how Bill has only made his messy situation worse by firing the producer making the charges against him.

I am not a lawyer, but I can read. Even my non-legal mind knows you don't fire someone who sues you. Because now she has unfair termination as an additional cause.

Let me explain this slowly, so even the simple among us can understand it:

Bill, the word is deposition. It is what Benedict Morelli will conduct this winter. It will involve every senior person at Fox, every staff member and every bed partner you had there. Your wife will read the details of your extramarital affairs and may well decide to file for divorce.

He will not only ask, but will find every woman you hit on, not only on Fox, but at every other job you had. Boston, ABC, whatever the fuck that other show was, all of them. We're talking a long witness list. In fact, he may well try to establish that a culture of concubinage existed at Fox. What does that mean? It means that senior Fox execuitives pick sexual partners from the people they supervise. (See the Texas Prison Rape story for grim details). This is like letting the FBI into your cocaine filled warehouse.

Being the dumb Irish bully that you are, you're going to provide me with days of copy and amusement.

But because seeing evident stupidity makes me ill, here's a suggestion: SETTLE THIS FUCKING THING MONDAY. Because, you just made Fox compound your stupidity with their stupidity and this will go before a Fox-hating, Post-hating Manhattan jury. Ms. Mackris will enjoy her summers on the Cote D'Azure, her winter vacation in Gstaad, and a Palm Beach condo because of your uncontrolled anger and rage. She will be RICH, as in seven figure plus rich.

If it were anyone but Bill O'Reilly I would probably feel a touch of sympathy, as it's part of my bleeding-heart nature to feel bad for people in trouble. But since it's Bill, I can scarcely conceal the schadenfreude -- in fact, there's a lot more freude than schaden. After all, this is the self-anointed pope of morality, the paternalistic critic of all things improper. He is wiser than we mortals, and he knows what's good and bad, right and wrong.

Of course, anyone with minimal grey matter has known all along it's a sham. It's nice that the rest of the world now knows, too.

More great pics and articles from Iraq, from the best of the China bloggers.