Vice President Cheney’s assertions notwithstanding, a 9/11 Commission report concludes:

We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.

Meanwhile, in Spain a judge says charges against 15 in that country are likely for helping to plan 9/11.
Hmmm.

I see it didn’t take Bush/Cheney 2004 long to tap into the Reagan lovefest. I’ve noticed that in the past week they’ve shifted their TV advertising away from negative Kerry spots to an ad touting the administration’s “accomplishments.” This comes in the wake of a week of reminiscing about Reagan’s optimism. Now we see Bush on TV touting his optimism in America and decrying Kerry’s pessimism, which has “never created one job.” [Anyone who points out shortcomings in the administration’s record is obviously part of the problem.]
Bush/Cheney 2004 has spend $10s of millions thus far on attack ads and it’s barely registered in the polls. I’m not sure how much more effective this approach may be. I’m not the target audience, here, as I’ve already made up my mind on this election. But even among the under-informed public, I think self-professed optimism can only go so far in papering over incompetence. And come this fall there might be a lot to cover over.

I don’t know much about the substance of this rift other than what’s been reported in the papers, but part of this strikes me as strange:

The Southern Baptist Convention voted today to quit the Baptist World Alliance following complaints that some members of the loose, global association had adopted liberal theology and “anti-American” thinking.

I can understand disputes regarding “liberal” versus “conservative” theology. But what’s this about the religious organization being “anti-American”? Exactly where in the Bible are the tenets of “American” Christianity founded? Is Jesus an American? Have I missed something?

James Bamford spills the beans on the President Vice President Cheney’s “undisclosed” location:

[T]he undisclosed location known as Site R, an underground bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border where the Vice President spent much of his time in 2001. Deep under Raven Rock Mountain, Site R “is a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir.” It is just 7 miles from Camp David.

The revelation comes in Bamford’s book, A Pretext for War, which looks at the CIA’s recent shortcomings and how it caved in to the administration pressure to go along with the trumped up case for war against Iraq.
An interesting, though not surprising, nugget from Time’s book review:

The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle East and Israel � only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel’s hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel’s interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year.

One is lead to believe that U.S./Israeli interests are virtually one and the same when you look at the recent American stance during the so-called Mideast peace process.
At any rate, this looks like an interesting book.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture discovers a new “fresh vegetable” to go along with your ketchup: instant salad!
And people wonder why we’re a nation of fatties.