News bits...

[tangaroa]

• One nut carried a sign implicitly threatening the life of President Obama and was condemned instead for carrying a gun. This has lead to a backlash of more gun owners openly carrying at political events. The mixture of more guns with the increasingly extremist and aggressive mood at these events (looking a lot like fascism) gives strong cause for concern for the potential for an outbreak of violence.
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran at the Washington Post has a detailed article on the sacking of General David McKiernan over the situation in Afghanistan. McKiernan was the highest ranking American officer to be removed since MacArthur in Korea. He comes across as someone who had some good ideas but could not execute them quickly enough or effectively enough, and on top of that faced undeserved derision for a lack of charisma.
• The U.S. internet service provider America Online has been hiring hundreds of journalists to provide content for dozens of niche weblogs under the name MediaGlow.
• Yale University Press is publishing Jytte Klausen's book "The Cartoons that Shook the World", on the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons, without printing the cartoons themselves. Roger Kimball says the direction came from the office of Yale University President Richard Levin.
• The Philippines lost 20 soldiers in heavy fighting against al Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf on Basilan Island.
• An Unite Against Fascism march against the BNP in Birmingham ironically turned to violence as Muslim rioters assaulted random Englishmen after the BNP left the area.
• The United States government already spends as much per person on health care as most fully socialized health care systems.
• An insult to Hillary Clinton leads to an amusing parody of the Washington Post's Mouthpiece Theater.
• Wired has a description of HAARP which is better known for the conspiracy theories surrounding it than the realistic goals of the project.
• A cartoon alleges that our modern information lifestyle is the dystopia of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.