Today, thousands will protest the war in Iraq. And at least one of those protesting will virtually be a neighbor.
The seasoned protesters who organized tomorrow’s antiwar demonstration are well-versed in many other causes. They have marched and rallied against police brutality, racism, colonialism and the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
But their [...]

It’s not often the right-wing newspaper turns on Bush, but it’s slowly turning against him.
Diana West laments:
Let’s take a look at this portrait of presidential leadership, as painted by the Associated Press: “Sitting in [the USS Iwo Jima] mess hall, the president watched large screens beaming to him via videoconference the images of three [...]

The bus were carrying elderly passengers.
Sad indeed…
A bus carrying about 45 elderly evacuees burst into flames on Interstate 45 south of Dallas, killing as many as 24 people. It pulled over and people were getting off when a series of explosions ripped through the bus, said Dallas County Sheriff’s Sgt. Don Peritz.
Peritz said the fire [...]

Will they ever learn?
Well I just found out why the media was in my parking garage. Looters struck last night and trashed 12 cars. We usually have very tight security but the gates were left open by management due to fears of power outages. I need to go check my car now.
Update:
My car is fine [...]

Thomas Friedman shows how a radical’s electoral triumph (in a parliamentary system) can be good news for moderates.

Next Monday, Israel and the whole Middle East will witness a hugely important election. Ostensibly it is a vote over when the Likud Party should hold its primary. But it actually is a vote over who will lead [...]

The Associated Press reports.
NEW ORLEANS – Hurricane Rita’s steady rains sent water pouring through breaches in a patched levee Friday, cascading into one of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods in a devastating repeat of New Orleans’ flooding nightmare.
“Our worst fears came true,” said Maj. Barry Guidry of the Georgia National Guard.
“We have three significant breaches in [...]

France is offering cash money to parents who have a third child.
A new measure will award $916 a month to parents who take one year’s unpaid leave from work after the birth of a third child…
And what is their reason?
France’s fertility rate, at an average of 1.9 children per woman, is the second highest in [...]

No, I didn’t spell that wrong. It’s simply how technology people choose to spell it… (NOTE: this might seem confusing, but the original title was War on Pr0n, but then I changed it back to Porn, but didn’t omit the striked sentence. Doh!)
From the Wash Post.
The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and [...]

I sincerely hoped I would never have to create a new category about a hurricane, but it seems like Hurricane Rita begs it.
Millions are leaving Houston in anticipation of the third most powerful hurricane on record.
Sixteen hours to San Antonio and Dallas. Eleven hours to Austin. With over a million people trying to flee vulnerable [...]

One man’s experience with the torturers of the Taliban should serve as a touchstone for the freedoms we have and must defend.

Jeff Jarvis makes an impassioned case against building the proposed International Freedom Center at the site of the World Trade Center. (He’s not the only one.)
Jarvis picks up on the Freedom Center backers’ own description of what will go on there: “an array of evening lectures, symposia, discussions, and special events that will be designed [...]

The Religious Policeman looks into the eyes of a suicide bomber and fills in his back-story. You might have heard of the bomber before. He’s the Saudi kid who somehow survived the detonation of the fuel tanker he drove into Baghdad’s Al-Mansour neighborhood on Christmas Day. (Bystanders were not so luck). Sufficed to say, there [...]

There seems to be some hope for the donkeys yet.
Political Wire digs into a piece by Larry Sabato and comes up with some good stuff.
How to do it? Assuming Democrats can hold all open seats (MD, MN, and possibly NJ) and win the close Democratic seats (WV, FL, WA, ND), they would need six seats [...]

Ben Kepple pinpoints the nadir of Western Civilization: July 12, 1979. Take a guess before you click the link.

GayOrbit puts the new Pope’s policies toward homosexuals in the context of Sept. 11. He does it eloquently, in about 1,150 words — 150 of his and 1,000 in a picture.
Andrew Sullivan has been on about this, too:

The fundamental point is fairness. It is fair to place restrictions on the conduct of priests and seminarians; [...]

Ridiculous.
Listen, I think our election system is as such that we’ll never truly know who had the most votes in Florida in 2000. Did Bush win? I don’t know. Did Gore win? I don’t know. But Carter says he has “no doubt” that Gore was elected.
No doubt? Really?
Listen to him say it himself at [...]

How many of the thousands of people who cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel realize they’re crossing the crater of one of the largest identified meteor strikes in North America? When you look out over the sheet of the bay, or drive through the placid tidewater towns, that kind of Old Testament catastrophe isn’t easy to [...]

The Onion reports that Senator Allen from Virginia thought he was making a joke when he introduced this bill.
S. 1718, also known as the Preservation Of Public Lands Of America Act, authorized a shift of $138 billion from the federal Medicare fund to a massive landscaping effort that, over the next five years, will transform [...]

A father dreams of her daughter’s future.

There is an old saying, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Which could mean bad news for abstinence-only advocates. Maine has become the third state to refuse federal abstinence education funds.
Good.
Under newly tightened federal rules, “This money has to be part of an abstinence-only program,” and that would prevent the [...]