Okay, one more thing. Before I leave town, I have to call your attention to this: "Drug causing GIs permanent brain damage." The drug in question is the antimalarial Lariam, and I can personally vouch for its psychosis-inducing effect having taken it in 2000 and becoming startlingly despondent for months, even long after I had voluntarily halted the regimen before it was complete. My doctors were flippant and dismissive about my reaction, and I would bet that depressive and psychotic contraindications are routinely underreported by a huge margin.
Lariam has been implicated in a wide range of psychiatric side effects among military personnel and Peace Corps workers, including suicide and homicide. Remember those four soldiers who killed their wives at Fort Bragg in 2002? They were all on Lariam.
A good information source on the Lariam controversy is Lariam Action USA.
The occupation of Iraq has helped al-Qaeda recruit more members, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The influential group's annual report says the network has reconstituted itself after losing its Afghan base.
It adds that Osama Bin Laden's followers have set their sights on attacking the US and its close allies.
They would ideally like future operations to make use of weapons of mass destruction, it reports.
The institute quotes conservative intelligence estimates as saying that the group has 18,000 potential operatives and is present in more than 60 countries.
Meanwhile, we spent $200 billion to flush a WMD-free Saddam Hussein from a hole in the ground.
Here's a prayer for anyone in an American skyscraper: "Jesus, please protect us from your followers."
Now that the first Daughters have graduated from college (Barbara from Yale and Jenna from the University of Texas), what's next? First up: a taste of the spotlight. The two have already sat for an interview and photo shoot for Vogue—the first of many interviews they'll do this summer. Then, after a European vacation with friends, the twins will return to Washington to work for Dad. They have their choice of jobs: pitching in at the suburban Virginia HQ, helping at a field office or perhaps hitting the campaign trail. The president is elated about their deciding to join the family business, but are the Bushes nervous about the increased scrutiny of their daughters? "You bet," says one White House official.
Why weren't 788 American soldiers asked to do a photo shoot for Vogue? Oh, right, it's because they're dead.
...one must painfully recall the now famous May 1, 2003, e-mail to the paper's Baghdad Bureau Chief John Burns from star Times reporter in Iraq, Judith Miller, who wrote: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper. ... He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."
Oh, how quickly the Times forgets its friends, Chalabi must be thinking today.
Describing Chalabi, Sanger wrote today: "He became a master of the art of the leak, giving new currency to the suspicions about Mr. Hussein's weapons." Leaks? Who was his favored drop? Miller of the Times, although there were many others.
And in today's Times editorial: "Before the war, Ahmad Chalabi told Washington hawks exactly what they wanted to hear about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction ... Much of the information Mr. Chalabi had produced was dead wrong. He was one of the chief cheerleaders for the theory that Iraq had vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction. ... But he can't be made a scapegoat.
"The Bush administration should have known what it was doing when it gave enormous credence to a questionable character whose own self-interest was totally invested in getting the Americans to invade Iraq. ..."
Left unsaid is that the Times should have known better, as well. Yet, incredibly, the paper of record has never run a corrective editor's note to clean up the mess that Miller made for the Times' integrity.
Potus motorcade departed Private Residence No. 1 at about 4:57 edt and arrived at Private Residence No. 2 at about 4:58 e.d.t., traveling a total distance of about 200 yards.
Here's a photo of bicycle-related abrasions on the face and hand of Potus the peripatetic pussy, also courtesy of Wonkette.
