Molly Ivors on Distance Ed

"I've Got My Notebooks And I'm Going Back". Her husband, Thers, teaches English, like me. He and his wife share that Whisky Fire blog. He's hilarious, and you should check him out.

Anyhow, I teach DE for half my classes.

Jameson's Birthday

Russia, Georgia, and the USA

Billmon

Zuzu and Grandpa are bringing Jameson home today

We are happy. While he was gone, we took down his crib and put a big boy bed in his room. The next few nights should be interesting.

Starting to Get the Idea

Byron York: The Left and Plans for "Nuremberg-Style" Tribunals for Bush Administration Officials

He shouldn't just be worried about what kind of accountability an Obama administration might pursue. International law was broken.

It just keeps coming

EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them

I guess the surprise is that they decided not to do it. Instead, they've gone with supporting what are essentially Al Qaeda groups inside Iran. Which plan do you find more absurd?

Anthrax, Iraq Propoganda, and ABC

Glenn Greenwald.

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports [anonymously "leaked" to ABC] linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.