1) The organization Wikileaks, dedicated to posting online official documents the government doesn't want you to know about, unearthed an apparently authentic 2005 order granting U.S. forces permission to follow ex-henchmen of Saddam Hussein into Iran and Syria.
Think about that for a second: The U.S. government was okey-dokey with turning military personnel into bounty hunters, unconcerned with silly trivialities like international law, caring not one whit for the possible repercussions should this little plan be discovered.
And if, in the course of capturing one of these straw men (in Bondian terms, that's like going after Oddjob after you've already gotten Goldfinger and foiled his plot), civilian lives were lost, what then? How would that be explained away? After all...
2) ...American forces admitted Sunday they'd accidentally killed 9 Iraqi civilians. Which is better, at least, than admitting they'd intentionally killed civilians.
3) The Pentagon is due to propose its proposed 2009 budget: 515.4 billion bucks. Adjusted for inflation, that's the highest yearly military budget since World War II. Back then, the U.S. government asked citizens to make sacrifices to help pay for the costs of the war. Now, the government gives tax breaks to the rich and borrows the money from future generations.
4) Unrelated to any of the above, but worth mentioning: The Patriots lost! Anytime beefy, drunken Boston sports fans are denied victory, the world is a better place.
5) The Onion's AV Club posted a very funny list of twenty pop cultural obsession even geekier than Monty Python. No Star Wars, no James Bond. Thus, and in spite of that Goldfinger analogy I made earlier, I'm not a geek. Whew!
6) I shouldn't admit this, and it's not like I watch regularly, but, uh, I've watched Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew more than once. Yeah, it's absolute garbage, and most of the "celebrities" are non-entities, but dammit, I get a kick out of watching cranky, haggard, inexplicably wheelchair-bound Jeff Conaway vomiting all over himself.
Does that make me a bad person?
