A breath of fresh air...

Amid a week nauseating Reagan-worship:

...Calling Reagan an "all-American" insults the millions of Americans whom he deprived of his sunlight. Reagan far too often invited the nation to live down to its lowest common denominators. Reagan tried to make America younger, all right. He tried to return us to the days where we sat before black-and-white televisions, in separate black and white neighborhoods, where white people saw only white people and black people were represented by Buckwheat and the only time you saw lots of people of color were dead Indians in Westerns.

Complete op-ed here.

And more realism here if you have access to Salon.

Reagan spectacle....

...They were the first of thousands of Americans who descended on Washington to say their own goodbyes.

Is that "thousands" as in "I took home $20,000 after taxes last year," or "thousands" as in the estimated half-million protestors who greeted President Bush in Rome last week?

On Tuesday evening in Manhattan, John Hockenberry of NBC (speaking to an audience of some 700-800 people) said the media was expecting a "hundred thousand" mourners to file through the rotunda in honor of Ronald Reagan.

If that was a peace demonstration, such a poor turnout would make it a failure. And it certainly wouldn't attract the media attention the Reagan funeral rites are garnering!

This circus over Reagan's death is like a huge circle-jerk, with each media outlet striving to outdo the other and in the process exciting themselves to an even greater pitch.

Sadly, they don’t seem to realize that everyone outside their circle doesn’t share their enthusiasm.

Excerpt from here.

Who killed Nick Berg...?

This column in the Sydney Morning Herald sums up pretty well the inconsistencies in the Nick Berg video that suggest he may have been killed in a "black ops" action by the C.I.A.

...Possum believes "the available evidence surrounding the case suggests that it was a 'black operation' by US psychological warfare specialists ... to provide the media with a moral relativity argument to counter the adverse publicity over torture at Abu Ghraib". The use of FBI footage in the opening sequence, if confirmed, suggests the involvement of high-level US Government operatives....

Read it here.