Blogging for a Cleaner Environment

While we are waiting for Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, to open at The Flicks in Boise on June 30th, there is a clever way to help the environment from the comfort of our own blogs. DeepMarket.com, a stock-market analysis site, will offset one ton of carbon emissions for every blog that links to [...]

The Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraq

In his commencement address to the graduating cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, President Bush claimed victory over terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Just as an earlier generation of Americans helped change Germany and Japan from conquered adversaries to democratic allies, today a new generation of Americans is helping Iraq and Afghanistan [...]

Conservatives Get Their Kicks

One of the funnier (more pathetic?) stories to flow through the blogisphere this week is the list of the “top 50″ conservative rock songs as compiled by those really hip dudes at National Review.
The Rude Pundit and Pandagon do hilarious analyses of the list. There is one Idaho connection. “Kicks” by Paul Revere & the [...]

The Taliban in Iraq

It is nice to know that we have reached another “turning point” in Iraq. Unfortunately, it appears that Islamic repression ala the Taliban is what is growing rather than democracy. Consider the report from Iraq that three members of the Iraq tennis team, including the coach, were killed for wearing tennis shorts. According to the [...]

The Trucker’s War

NPR had an interesting report on the “shadow army” of private contractors in Iraq. They point out that privately contracted truck drivers drive the most dangerous roads in the country and do so without adequate armour and unarmed. The company that hires them, KBR, is a subsidiary of Halliburton. KBR has 700 trucks on the [...]

Data Mining

It should surprise no one that Bush’s warrantless phone data collection will result in more than “spying on al Qaeda.” The project’s designers say the National Security Agency’s electronic warehousing of trillions of phone records from calls made by some 200 million Americans is intended to seek out “patterns” from conversations involving alleged terrorists and [...]

Big Brother and the MSM

According to ABC News, the government is tracking phone numbers of ABC reporters in order to identify confidential sources.
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources. “It’s time for you to get [...]

A Mother for Peace

Happy Mother’s Day! I wonder how many Americans know that Julia Ward Howe, the mother behind Mother’s Day, was a pacifist? In fact, she envisioned Mother’s Day as a time when women would unite against war. In 1870, she published her “Mother’s Day Proclamation” which said, in part:
Arise, then, women of this day! [...]

Tweedle Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

Republican candidates for Congress appeared at a forum in Caldwell sponsored by the Idaho-Press Tribune Wednesday. Although each of the five candidates (Skip Brandt, Keith Johnson, Bill Sali, Norm Semanko, Shela Sorensen and Robert Vasquez) tried to separate him/herself from the pack, there was little to distinguish one from the other when it comes to [...]

Big Brother and Ma Bell

There is a long and detailed article in USA Today contradicting the Bush administration’s claim that NSA telecommunication spying was confined to external sources.
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the [...]