Tomorrow is the day that my bet with ellem is decided, based on whether the Downing Street Memos are real, and not forgeries or fakes, according to the two-out-of-three judgement of the following three news sites, listed with their most recent articles mentioning the memos excerpted below. If I win, ellem has to volunteer for 8 hours at

Karl Rove
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Condoleezza Rice
Stephen Hadley
Andrew Card
Alberto Gonzales

[This post, after having been slept on, has been redacted in its entirety, but has been saved and may appear later in a retrospective edition. Summary: I've got so much stuff going on, really good and really bad, that I'm not going to be posting much if at all for months at least.]

Such a great melody with vapid lyrics. I wish I hadn't looked.

Finally! Could be quicker....

US plans Iraq troop cuts as revolt rages
By Martin Sieff, UPI Senior News Analyst
July 27, 2005

Have kids in school? Don't want them to be recruited to go around killing people and breathing uranyl oxide gas vapor fumes? Click here. You need to opt out twice for each kid: once for direct recruiting, and again for in-school recruiting.

• For the first time, a majority of Americans, 51%, say the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
• By 58%-37%, a majority say the United States won't be able to establish a stable democratic government in Iraq, similar to the results when the question was asked in April 2004.
• About one-third, 32%, say the United States can't win the war in Iraq. Another 21% say the United States could win the war, but they d

Shots to the Heart of Iraq
By Richard C. Paddock
L.A. Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD -- Three men in an unmarked sedan pulled up near the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit. The two passengers, wearing traditional Arab dishdasha gowns, stepped from the car.

elmegil scooped on this article:

The Iraq War is Over, and the Winner Is... Iran
By Juan Cole
Thursday 21 July 2005

Hamstrung by the Iraq debacle, all Bush can do is gnash his teeth as the hated mullahs in Iran cozy up to their co-religionists in Iraq.

I have been scarce. Slashdot jumped the shark, as far as I'm concerned. Do people with subscriptions have to wait for indeterminate numbers of minutes, greater than two, between posts these days? DailyKos has no such restriction. Therefore, some links from Kos:

And now, for your moment of WTF:

Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org

For Release -- 1:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, July 6, 2005

U.S. Government Fining Activists for Taking Medicine to Iraq

Alternate Power: A Change Is In The Wind
By John Carey in Washington and Adam Aston in New York, with Justin Hibbard in San Mateo, Calif., and Ronald Grover in Los Angeles
Business Week
July 4, 2005

I read a bunch of comments here on Slashdot and elsewhere on Google about support from the peer-reviewed literature of the obscure yet repeatedly-proven fact that the FBI's nonviolent interrogation techniques yield better information on average than coercion.

Bohemian space opera.

Tax Credit Survives
by Bill Fonda
The Cape Codder
Friday, June 24, 2005