"Your blog is 5 days old!"

My mother emailed me this morning to point out that my blog "is 5 days old." I know! And now I'm getting ready to visit friends and family in the east - but I'll be posting from there. And hoping for a hassle free flight tonight. (Read that link. It's appalling.)

Great Frank Rich this weekend:

...That the Bush administration would risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as revealing a C.I.A. officer's identity smacks of desperation. It makes you wonder just what else might have been done to suppress embarrassing election-season questions about the war that has mired us in Iraq even as the true perpetrators of 9/11 resurface in Madrid, London and who knows where else...

Taking a page from the Robertson and Falwell playbooks...

Days before the London bombings showed us how the world is safer without Saddam in power, the National Counterterrorism Center more than quadrupled its original count of the number of attacks occurring in 2004. Check out this graph (scroll to the bottom of the page) and let yourself marvel over Bush's high "war on terror" ratings. Robin Cook reminds us how we got here:

...Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.

Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.

The danger now is that the west's current response to the terrorist threat compounds that original error. So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail. The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want to speak up for cooperation.

Success will only come from isolating the terrorists and denying them support, funds and recruits, which means focusing more on our common ground with the Muslim world than on what divides us...

Head over to Think Progress and read up on RoboScotty and Karl Rove. There are too many good items to link to individually.

And if we needed further proof that we are making a screeching u-turn for the Dark Ages, read what Cardinal Schonborn has to say about evolution. (Thanks for the heads-up, E!)