Again, pretend he was speaking ironically:

“If you�re going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you ought to back it up with facts,” Bush told reporters in the Oval Office after meeting with Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands.

Interesting (and troubling) statistics on the quality and consumption of American journalism, from Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism:

Circulation of English-language daily newspapers has dropped 11% since 1990; network news ratings are down 34% since 1994; late-night local television news viewership has fallen by 16% since 1997; and the number of viewers watching cable news has been flat since late 2001.
. . .
The report catalogued a striking decline in the number of journalists employed in American newsrooms.
There are one-third fewer network correspondents than in 1985; 2,200 fewer people at newspapers than in 1990; and the number of full-time radio newsroom employees fell by 44% from 1994 to 2001.
Only 5% of stories on cable news contain new information, the report found. Most were simply rehashes of the same facts. There was also less fact checking than in the past and less policing of journalistic standards.
Quality news and information were more available than ever before, but so was the trivial, the one-sided and the false.

Yep. That pretty well describes what I see every day, especially on TV. If you sift out the entertainment, celebrity justice, lifestyle/health, and daily he said/she said political pieces (with no fact checking), there’s not much “news” left in the broadcasts.

Here’s an article on a soldier who refuses to return to duty in Iraq for moral reasons. Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia is believed to be the first soldier to turn himself in after failing to report for duty in Iraq. Those involved in Mejia’s defense say he could face several years in prison.
Mejia is not alone:

600 others are AWOL
Font speculated that whatever happens to his client would serve as a precedent for the estimated 600 soldiers who have gone AWOL to avoid service in Iraq. Some, like Mejia, have failed to return to Iraq after being granted temporarily leaves home and others have deserted before deploying overseas.

It’s a shame that rather than face criminal prosecution, these soldiers couldn’t simply sign up for graduate school or something and “work it out with the military.”
It’s great to have a “steady” leader whose example our troops can follow.

Couple interesting articles in today’s New York Times. President Bush and his apologists have explained our budget deficit with their trifecta of excuses: (1) inherited a recession; (2) 9/11; (3) the media scared economy with war talk. According to a Congressional Budget Office report, the finger pointing isn’t going to fly any more:

[A] report released on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that economic weakness would account for only 6 percent of a budget shortfall that could reach a record $500 billion this year.
Next year, the agency predicted, faster economic growth will actually increase tax revenues even as the deficit remains at a relatively high level of $374 billion.
The new numbers confirm what many analysts have predicted for some time: that budget deficits in the decade ahead will stem less from the lingering effects of the downturn and much more from rising government spending and progressively deeper tax cuts.
. . .
The Congressional report, though, concludes that the “cyclical” problems of slower growth are a tiny part of the overall budget problem. The Congressional agency estimated that slower growth reduced tax revenues by $53 billion in 2002, accounting for a third of the budget deficit that year. In 2003, the agency estimated that subpar growth cut tax revenues by $68 billion. The overall budget deficit in 2002 swelled to $375 billion as a result of spending on the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s tax cuts.
But this year, with the economy expanding, the Congressional agency predicted that lingering weakness would drain only $30 billion in tax revenues while the deficit hits $477 billion, less than the White House had forecast, but still a record.

Edmund Andrew’s has pulled double duty with another article examining Alan Greenspan’s changing stance on economic conditions. Despite the aforementioned federal deficit, a huge trade deficit, the falling dollar, growing personal debt, and record bankruptcies, Greenspan seems strangely “sanguine” on America’s imbalances.
Greenspan has been acting a little funny recently. From his testimony on Social Security to his commentary on variable rate mortgages; makes one wonder if something is up.

How bad is our voting system? Bad enough that the Russians now ridicule it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, confronted by Bush administration criticism on the openness of the Russian elections, looked deep into the soul of the 2000 election and responded thusly:

“We will listen to the critical statements, analyse them and, if we think there is something to think about, will draw the corresponding conclusions,” he said.
But, Putin added, some “see the splinter in another’s eye and ignore the log in his own”.
“Four years ago, we watched in bewilderment how the US election system was failing,” he said.

Ouch.
Via Counterspin Central.