Lunar Eclipse from a window in San Francisco!

Lunar Eclipse from a window in San Francisco!

Did you catch last night's lunar eclipse? The next one comes in 2007. The pic above (or below, or wherever it shows up) is mine - taken through the bedroom window with a digital camera that isn't much for night work (I didn't bother trying to use it with my baby telescope - a Bushnell Voyager - because the three of us always end up arguing. But if anyone has rigged a Fuji Finepix 3800 to a telescope successfully, please share your secrets). For a much better selection of photos, take a look here.

• I heard this with my own ears as I ironed my clothes this morning: While Bush was on the campaign trail trying to twist Kerry's explicit criticism of Bush into charge of "denigrating the action of our troops," his thug Guiliani was on TV... denigrating the action of our troops.
  
  
• Another glorious news day for the Bush administration:

  WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co., seeking an interview with a top Army contracting officer and collecting documents from several government offices.
  
  The line of inquiry expands an earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice President Dick Cheney's former company.
  
  FBI agents this week sought permission to interview Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer who went public last weekend with allegations that her agency unfairly awarded a Halliburton subsidiary no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars in Iraq, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press....

  And -- Videotape by an embedded news crew appears to show that the now-missing explosives WERE presnt immediately after the invasion (via Daily Kos), thus blowing the administration's "they could have been gone before we got there" trial balloon.
  
  
• Harold Myerson:

  If John Kerry is elected next Tuesday, the tsunami of volunteer activity within the independent groups will be in large part responsible. Whether this tsunami can be bottled — whether this coalition will take on a permanent life of its own, become an enduring progressive presence in American politics — is a question of resources, opportunity, Zeitgeist and even law (the legal status of the 527s may be under attack if Bush wins). But the leaders of progressive organizations, Democratic elected officials, and the hundreds of thousands of phone bankers and precinct walkers, each for their own reasons, want the outpouring of 2004 to become a fixture of American politics. “Progressives have been waiting for decades for a citizen-based movement to happen,” says Ed Cyr. “One that’s independent of the party, that’s integrated, that’s effective.”
  
  “This is it,” says Cyr. “It’s happened.”

• Alternet has a good feature on the possible reasons for the rise of pentacostalism and the relative decline of prostestantism. I'm still mulling it over, so I don't have much commentary on it. See what you think.
  
  
• Jay Rosen thinks Sinclair's attempt to air "Stolen Honor" was just the beginning... (thanks, A)