Americans Without Health Insurance: Now 42,999,999

Hear That Sound? It's The Other Shoe Dropping
When CIA Director George Tenet resigned on June 3rd he cited "personal reasons." Well with the release of the Senate Intelligence committee's report on the run up to the Iraq war we now know that those reasons were more like, "I'm being held personally responsible for the administration's intelligence failures." The report blasts CIA analysts for, among other things, getting swept up in the Orwellian sounding "group think", basically adopting the popular assumption that Iraq had weapons programs and therefore viewing all intel thru that filter. "Corporate culture and poor management" were also offered as explanations for the monumental intelligence gaffes used to justify the invasion. Of course Republican and Democratic members of the committee disagree over whether administration pressure (remember Destro's little visits to Langley?) played a role in exaggerating claims. There will be a second phase of the investigation, which will focus on the White House, but it "probably won't be finished until after the November elections." That's convenient!

Those UN Election Observers Better Get Their Asses Over Here
If Diebold doesn't cockblock the most hallowed democratic process perhaps a fabricated terror threat will. Funny that as we approach the fall election the normally ambiguous terror warnings (which I completely ignore, don't know about you) have suddenly taken on a new urgency. While still "nothing specific" has been divined from the chatter, national security agencies are pretty sure that Al Qaeda would like nothing more than to disrupt the elections to affect an outcome like in Madrid. You remember that one? It involved an unpopular ruling party, who strongly supported the Iraq war, being ousted by a leftist minority. Now wouldn't it just be a shame if the election timetable was altered, or even cancelled, by a 'terror threat'? Crazy? We'll see...

--MC No Shame, no more webmd.com and Advil for me