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Czech out this web exclusive list of conventional wisdom on Amerikan values and their reality czechs Even Texans hook up in marriage, have children, put them through school, offer car rides to their teen friends and join clubs (especially gun clubs) and other organizations

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: The Downward Spiral of MEdia Abuse and Political Evasion
The dream may be, wrote Mary Riddell in the same paper, of a media respectful to politicians, mindful of their democratic duties and shorn of tatty stuff about Beckham's tattoos and Jemima's marriage. The result would be newspapers of such turgid blandness that nobody would ever buy them... the greatest causes can hang on the tackiest cases... Britain has rarely needed its flawed, contrary, trivia-obsessed free press more than it does now. And Andrew Neil, wrote in the same vein: The media is the lifeblood of democracy... though the specifics of their stories (the BBC Gilligan broadcast on government lying about WMD; the Daily Mirror fake pictures of British soldiers beating Iraqis) were wrong, both drew public attention to vital matters of public concern.
If the media doesn't have power over people's perceptions, then what is it doing? Above all, what is it doing to us? We in journalism haven't asked that question much. It is time we did, for if not us, who?
• The most pockmarked ground in journalism is that of political reporting [ 2004 A Democratic Year?]
• · Micklethwait and Wooldridge: The Right Wing's Deep, Dark Secret
• · · See Also Spain, the government is putting the 'social' back in socialism
• · · · How did it come to this? I cannot remember a time when the gulf between Europeans and Americans was so wide: A letter to Europe from Philip Gordon and ; A letter to America from Timothy Garton Ash
• · · · · Web Exclusive Robert Kuttner: John Kerry could win by 2 million votes and still lose the e(l)ection... Three ways to fix the electoral system
• · · · · · · Web Exclusive Steven Hill and Rob Richie Fixing E(l)ections: Instant runoff voting [ How the Uncle Sam of Electoral Collages (sic) is stacking up]

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Since we know President Bush does not like to read should we expect him to read the entire [9/11 Commission] report? I was thinking about this earlier this morning. Not only Bush, but countless members of Congress have the reputation of asking their aides to do their reading for them. This has driven me nuts for years -- Bush is hardly the first president I've covered who sometimes avoids nuts-and-bolts hard work to absorb complicated material. Some politicians even defend the practice as 'good leadership' -- delegate the details. This drives me nuts tooEmperor of Pen fame, Kaiser, hates it when politicos don't read reports

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Intelligence failures exposed
Australia invaded Iraq on the basis of thin, ambiguous and incomplete intelligence but without Federal Government pressure, an inquiry by former diplomat and spy boss, Philip Flood has found
• Spies underestimated JI threat: Flood [ via Vital reports on Iraq totalled only 51⁄2 pages ]
• · Congratulations: SMH actually provides a link to Flood Report from its Website; If this trend of providing links to primary material continues in the mainstream media then the MEdia Dragon can consider itslef totally redundant: Report of the Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies
• · · Snapshot: Key findings
• · · · Speed of lies equals the ease of acceptance Propaganda, maybe, but Fahrenheit 9/11 encourages vigilance about truth
• · · · · Blair's off the hook (again). Bush brushes off the United States Senate finding about "the greatest intelligence failing in the history of the nation". And now Howard looks to have avoided incrimination: Artful dodgers, these vain masters of war
• · · · · · · See Also Companies that helped arrange financing for Gov. Bill Richardson’s $1.6 billion transportation program are the top contributors to a newly formed political committee affiliated with the governor
• · · · · · See Also Judges who enjoy extensive travel entitlements as part of their salary package are taking a second dip at the public purse by claiming additional trips as work-related expenses

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Subsidising speculative investments
The top 5 per cent of income earners have received half the benefit of the Government's capital gains tax cuts,
which also helped push house prices beyond the reach of first-time buyers
How the right to destroy property has implications for a broad range of legal issues: Rational people discard old clothes, furniture, albums and unsent letters every day

Invisible Hands & Markets: Harry Potter, Market Wiz: Is Pulling Rank A Social Injustice?
When a power-hungry boss, an overzealous coach, or a powerful politician uses his perceived authority to slap down an underling, most people would label the guy a jerk, a bully, or worse.
But Robert Fuller is taking it one step further, accusing such types of rankism, a serious social injustice which points up the need for society to begin tearing down traditional structures of rank, or at least to demand better treatment from those in authority. Fuller, a prominent physicist and past president of Oberlin College, is proposing some controversial societal changes to combat rankism, including the abolition of university tenure.
• The Order of Rankism: you shouldn't trust any rankism [With Hermonione, Ron and the usual suspects, the young wizard fights passionately against the politicians' ambition to control his school: Too bad that young students, in the real world, aren't fighting the same battle ]
• · Why the Invisible Business Cycle Happens Groping for an explanation for the cycle [Only a country that could produce the Invisible BlackSmith Hand and Yes Minister Could Produce a Report on the Worst Intelligence stuff up in history and say Nobody is to blame...]
• · · Terror in the Skies, Again? What does it have to do with finances? Nothing, and everything ((TERROR IN THE SKIES (CONTINUED)
At least the basic story is true
• · · · 40 Richest Australians, Ach, Rupert Murdoch: Australia's 40 most influential people of 2004
• · · · · Prince of tax avoidance is making trouble again. Michael Badnarik, a dark horse on the third ballot
• · · · · · Thomas Frank: on the FMA and how success comes by losing ((All magic aside, a striking aspect of the Harry Potter books is just how completely normal and bourgeois are all the settings and experiences of the characters ))
Drawn into a magical universe of flying cars, spells that make its victims spew slugs, trees that give blows, books that bite, elf servants, portraits that argue and dragons with pointed tails...

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MM blog now has more hits than my decade old car has meters Here are Michael Moore's extensive factczeching notes on Fahrenheit 911

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Nudist colony gives you a newfound appreciation for intelligence
The intelligence failure over Iraq will take a prominent place in the history of notable intelligence breakdowns.
These range, if you want to go back far enough, from the wooden horse in Troy to, in modern times, Stalin's refusal to believe that Germany would invade the Soviet Union in 1941, and the British belief that they would have warning of an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.
Intelligence also failed to warn against - let alone stop - the two sudden and daring strikes against the US, at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and on 11 September 2001.
Intelligence failures can be put into a number of categories:
Overestimation
Underestimation
Over-confidence
Complacency
Ignorance
Failure to join the dots
This is the failure to make connections between bits of intelligence to make a coherent whole.
The key intelligence failure was that the Trojans ignored a warning.
The trouble is that lessons are not always learned, which is why the list of intelligence failures grows longer.
• A short look at the long history of intelligence failures: Turning the tables on intelligent conpersons [Trotskyism and Centrism: Don't let a series on the politics of opportunism on the left rattle you ...(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7)]
• · Dirty party talk: Tis the season of the free buffet, and the diplomats, self-important journalists (ahem) and cuddly cultural icons are out in full force
• · · See Also Who's Got the Wrong Values Now? Order of the British Empire
• · · · Operation Buy Candidate a Drink: Politicians have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want: How come this fact does not surprise me to even the slightest degree?
• · · · · See Also Federal Park Police Chief fired after talking to reporter
• · · · · · · See Also Transparent grab for power or genuine threat?

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It is easy to make fun of the French and their pompous pretense to the grandeur they shed a half-century ago when their loss of honor under Vichy, and then their loss of empire, relegated them to the rank of second-class power. But the fun is over.

Tracking Trends Great & Small: You, yes you, you are worthy of Box Office Record
This is just a small rant, but it always annoys me. I've read in several places comments about Man From Cold River 2 breaking box office records. (This isn't a comment on the movie which I haven't seen yet although I intend to). This is a comment on economic ignorance or in some cases just laziness. We constantly hear of movies breaking box office records or record breaking gas prices or some other such, but the figures quoted are almost always unadjusted for inflation.
• Economic Ignorance [Dymock's 'Top Ten' bestsellers list: I did not have relations with John!]
• · Election seasons flood the airwaves with cold minded ads: Why are campaign commercials so bad? [Do pundits care that all candidates are millionaires? Americans have a choice in November — they can vote for millionaires John Kerry and John Edwards, or cast their ballot for millionaires George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ] ((Swing Party of Punters The swing vote isn't just a story, it's a fun house, a riddle, with no penalty for guessing wrong))
• · · See Also Ivory Project: Advertising Soap in America 1838-1998 ((The Limits of Media Dream Machines...))
• · · · See Also Deering Literary Agency: A genteel racket for Great Rejected Masses
• · · · · See Also Decline of Australian relative power ((Homes boom widens the wealth divide))
• · · · · · See Also Fascists hate homosexuality, but many fascists are gay. Scratch the homophobic surface and there’s a spandex swastika underneath

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During a recent graduate seminar on 20th Century American Autobiography and Memoir, I found myself obliged, in the interest of civility, to swallow a fit of temper.
Deeply ironic, Saar's work speaks from a sort of existential nakedness, and gets beyond...Exclusion is the rule in binary practice (either/or), whereas poetics aims for the space of difference -- not exclusion but, rather, where difference is realized in going beyond. Read it before it is banned!

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: ACTION AND REACTION: It's Imitation Time
In Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson argues that ambiguity serves an indispensable function in poetry. When the disparate meanings of an ambiguous grammatical construction or word reinforce and enrich each other, the poet can achieve radically novel conceptual and emotional effects; but unhappy ambiguities, including those condemned as mixed metaphor, may be simply incoherent when the meanings are mutually impertinent or at odds. In his recent contribution to the history of ideas, which tracks the medieval word reaction and its more ancient correlate action from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, Jean Starobinski makes a similar argument about the metaphorical appropriation of terms.
• Jean Starobinski's History of Reaction: The Uses and Dangers of Metaphorical Language [The most dangerous threats are right under our noses: If books could kill]
• Gene Deitch: A whole new area of work opened up for me just as the Soviet forces were breathing smoke around the borders of Czechoslovakia, and I made a film called The Giants that the communists banned for 20 years. For me, it was a point of pride: The Giants Win and Lose (Part 1): (Don’t Let a Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!)
• · See Also Our MPs can scarcely be accused of being bookish. Why then a plush library?
• · · Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies A Cheeky Work of Postmodernist Genius
• · · · The Boston Globe: offers an amusing round-up of reviews of presidential memoirs
• · · · · See Also The attraction of strangers: partnerships in humanities research [Happy ever after - on separate floors Couples are increasingly finding that living apart is the best way to stay together ]
• · · · · · See Also Literacy in the new millennium

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The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
Justice Learned Hand, a prophet of democracy

To live is an expression which has had much harm done it by rich celebrity writers who seem to think that life is limited to pretending you like absinthe, cocaine, and keeping a mistress in Potts Point.

This is the Escape that will Never Be Duplicated: The Seventh of July of Our Tragic Escape: Declaring Independence From Fear...
It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about. The cold hard truth is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so we should not be surprised if or when Madmen Run the Asylum...
Once Upon A Bad Time, the lives of Eastern Europeans were dominated by leaders with aristocratic manners appropriate for the stone age. Thank your lucky stars you were not one of us. We have to remind ourselves that those born and bred in the Eastern parts of Europe were the Western European equal in their desire for life, their longing for liberty, their passion for happiness.
7/7 of 1980 enlarged the meaning of escape across the Iron Curtain as the crossing has no exact precedents or parallels. Even after 24 years, the scent of horror is still impossible to wash away.
In death, Cold Rivers’s characters find an extension of life: they live in death and we, the readers, actively participate in keeping them alive, even if only during our reading. Nothing was as it seemed and the more mundane the surface, the more layers there appeared to be; we are peeling a true literary onion, multi-layered myths and realities that are quite able to bring literal tears to your eyes.
There is no history, only biography of divine discontent. It was Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson who first coined the prase divine discontent. Characterized by a yearning for greater meaning in life, this restlessness and dissatisfaction with the status quo is often an impetus to escape to the world that is more soul-satisfying... What could possibly impel three twenty-two-year-old Czechoslovaks, who just completed two year compulsory service in the communist army, to swim across the Morava River to Austria? How are we to understand their decision to forsake the land of their birth and build a new life in the far way world?
The ghost of the Central Europe tends to breathe confused life into every boy born into the communist system. In childhood we harboured fantasies that when we go to sleep at night our toys would magically come alive and carry us across the borders to the New World. Alas, it never happened, but that did not mean that one day we would not discover a mystical passage to the land of our dreams. One of the great things about life under communism was that it could always get worse, just when you thought it couldn't... Those who know what it was like to be twenty-two-years young in communist Czechoslovakia might understand that some of us had absurd and impossible aspirations and we believed that we could achieve them. We used to dream of dancing at the Beatles' concert and marrying Olivia Newton-John ... Then we transferred our dreams to crossing the Iron Curtain.
There is a theory going around on the net that everything you need to know about divine discontent, and even life, you can learn from the drops of lessons in the Cold River. There is a lesson for teens, there is a lesson for adults, there is a lesson on having fun, there is a lesson on being serious, there is a lesson on soulful friendship, there is a lesson on dancing, there is even a lesson on how not to escape across the Iron Curtain. Moreover, there is a lessson how to make you feel like a Central European.
Unlike myth, history is not tidy, and the wall that became known as the Iron Curtain is complex as any genuine tragedy. Cold River is a chilling image of a totalitarian world without breathing space, where ideology has no outside and even an unborn child is already a subject.
When something is wrong, you know it. Deep inside, even if everyone around you tells you it is not, you still know the truth. Few would dare dream about crossing such a border, unless, of course, you have inside knowledge and contacts. Milan has both. They will have only one chance to disarm the army guards at the gate and drive through an army barracks without alarming others. Their set day is sunny. Not one of them, even for a moment, thinks it might rain. But it does and the swollen river makes it impossible for them to cross, yet it is impossible to go back...
You didn't care if you were brave or weak. You just became nothing!
The character in the Quiet American said, Sooner or later, one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
In some ways, it was a selfish act. We had in a small way done our duty to our people and our country. We crossed the uncrossable Iron Curtain so we could sleep at night. True happiness calls for courage and a spirit of sacrifice, the rejection of any compromise with evil empire, and readiness to pay in person, including with death... As Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying features a central character Toloki who observes:
Death lives with us everyday. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying ?
· No power on Earth can stop an oppressed people determined to win their Freedom: Let's Say It with Blood [Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened This was the Escape of Our Times: Survivor-on-Amazon breaking historical taboos]
· · See Also This is Another Fight of Our Lives [New Political Tidal Wave: Something to get mad about: Just memorise poetry if you are a teenager at heart- because the escape defies prose
· · · We weren't given a hope in Morava River... The Passion of Exile: Sentenced to the Strange Psychological Hell... From Old World Tragedy to New World Disaster
· · · · See Also In any society, it’s a risk to take freedoms for granted
· · · · · Random reality bites: We can't all be born rich, handsome and lucky... Better That 100 Witches Should Live
· · · · · · Better Off Dead: I'll admit I survived, but I wasn't proud of myself for surviving
· · · · · · Read more: In every book a wealth of experiences and universal wisdom awaits you, and they will enrich your cultural world ... Marilyn Monroe swimming in the Cold River

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Glenn Milne: At last count, three but which one is the real Mark Latham?

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Hacks cop flak
Forget the dangers of policing the meaner streets of our state. Far more dangerous is a stint at the Police Media Unit.
As well as having three managers leave in less than a year, remaining staffers in what was a 25-strong unit have lodged numerous complaints against each other. One female employee complained about a threat to throw her from a 14-storey window.
And the dust is still settling after the axing last week of Norm Lipson, who was head of the unit, and his public affairs director boss, Ross Neilson. Stepping into the breach in the interim is Superintendent Mark Wright, whom the Herald revealed recently is being investigated after openly referring to Aborigines as "coons" during a senior management team meeting.
Police reporters got drawn into the squabble. Indeed, Channel Nine's Adam Walters complained to the Deputy Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, that Neilson had left a text message on his mobile phone which read weak c---. Neilson, on the other hand, complained to friends that he was sick of Walters, Lipson and others bad-mouthing him when all he was trying to do was to break down the historic mistrust between the media and the police.
· Spin Doctors ((Bipartisanship Ian Hanke: a Kevin Andrews' staffer )) [ Elsewhere Political and Media Animals]
· · Mark Latham: Will you take me as I am, Australia? I've been subjected to more rumours and smears than you can poke a stick at... (( Boilermaker Bill's Macquarie St musings ))
· · · See Also My hero, George Soros,Musing on Putin's Heavy Hand Halting Russia's Rise
· · · · See Also E(l)ction-vote-eligibility
· · · · · See Also This the most horrible thing I have read all week Almost as bad as the patterns set by the NSW Parliametary Clerks (nicknamed Marco Polos)
· · · · · · See Also This the most tattooed thing I have read all week: tracks the 372,644 tattoos on current and former state politicians