Okay, this isn't recommending Wikipedia, but rather my book review for American Gods. Pretty good, a very interesting take on myth, mythologies and how they could operate.

American Gods - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

During that controversy, Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes criticized Edwards, though not by name.

"Any candidate for high office from either party who believes he can blacklist any news organization is making a terrible mistake about journalists," Ailes said at a Radio and Television News Directors Foundation dinner in Washington last month.

What Roger fails to understand is, the people working for Fox are no longer considered (and quite correctly I think) journalists. The head of the Democratic party, Howard Dean, stated, "My view is that Fox News is a propaganda outlet of the Republican Party and that I don't comment on Fox News."

In other words, he built this mess, the fact that the other side is now realizing it means he either needs to clean it up or get used to them telling him to go screw.

Obama to Nix Fox Debate

As the dean of a lower-ranked law school that benefited from the Bush administration's hiring practices, Jeffrey Brauch of Regent made no apologies in a recent interview for training students to understand what the law is today, and also to understand how legal rules should be changed to better reflect "eternal principles of justice," from divorce laws to abortion rights.

And here's part 2 of the stategery, plant your own grass. This is something that the religious right has tried doing to education. They get their people in at a local level to push creationism/untelligent design in state or local school boards, so when someone starts asking about church/state separation, their response is it reflects the local community and how could anything be wrong with that?

The mission of the new justice department is to create that permanent republican majority Karl Rove so wants, and doesn't care how he gets. These are the same sorts of tactics being employed by the opposition in Iraq, that were employed by the opposition in Vietnam, by the Maoists in China, by the Bolsheviks in Russia and by (let's invoke Godwin's Law right off the bat) the brownshirts in Germany. The idea is, you insert your people into key positions at the low levels and when there is opposition, use them to crush it. It gives the appearance that things are happening at a local level, a grassroots operation, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only that, but their methodology can be predicted. Let's take a likely event, Hillary gets the Democratic nomination. What can we expect if my analysis is correct? A reopening of Whitewater, the Rose Law questions, travelgate, and anything else Hillary may have done. Ignore that fact that millions were already spent on all of those with absolutely nothing of any legal issue coming from it, the point is to make political hay to win the election, then it can all go away again.

Update So to put this in better perspective, here's the USNews assessment of the law school enrollment. 461 full time students with an attrition rate of 9.1% first year and 4.3% year two gets us 401 out of those 461 who will graduate or about 130 per year. That matches up roughly with their website's statement of a class size of 161. ABA accreditation was not granted until 1996. According also to USNews, it is considered a Tier 4 law school, or bottom quartile.

Let's really go inside the numbers on this, here is a comment from Slate over the weekend.

Goodling is onl... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Scandal puts spotlight on Christian law school - The Boston Globe

Sources tell No Quarter that Rick Wiley, then the executive director of the state GOP, directed a staffer in 2005 to prepare a 30-page report on election abuses in Wisconsin so Wiley could pass it along to a top White House official.

That document, entitled "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary," turned up last week in the horde of White House and U.S. Justice Department records released by the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

"The report was prepared for Karl Rove," said a source with knowledge of the situation. "Rick wanted it so he could give it to Karl Rove."

More fun with "voter fraud." The only documented voter fraud I've seen was Ann Coulter. Voter suppression? That we've seen in New Hampshire and Kansas, to name two spots, but voter fraud? No.

JS Online: State GOP official pushed vote fraud issue

Some Republican activists say the e-mail request will not create great difficulty for the White House because nothing nefarious happened and because the RNC automatically purges some e-mails after 30 days.

We don't need no stinking shredders! Today's message is simple. Government in the United States is about transparency. Some things are secret and should be, maybe, but public policy is not one of those things. It's time for this batch of crooks to go.

GOP-issued laptops now a White House headache - Los Angeles Times

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford's hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week.

So, the plug goes here? BOOM!

Plug it in, fire it up, Mr. President

It took a while for me to finish reading this (three weeks, which for me is an eternity, most things take a day or two days tops, War and Peace took three) but the sheer density of this thing cannot be understated. Ricks breaks down what has gone wrong in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, spending most of the book dealing with 03-05 and why the things people were doing did not, would not and in many cases could not work.

It is a devastating, non-partisan look at how things went horribly wrong and in part tries to deal with why. I finished and think the medals of freedom given to Bremer, Franks and Tenet were actually given freeing us of them. This is a vital read for having an understanding of what is going on in Iraq.

Amazon.com: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq: Books: Thomas E. Ricks

Monica M. Goodling, the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, gave no reason for her resignation. Since she was at the center of the firings, Goodling's refusal to testify has intensified questions about whether the U.S. attorney dismissals were proper and heightened the furor that threatens Gonzales' own job.

uh oh...

This is something that is sure to develop more as this continues.

Gonzales aide Goodling resigns - Yahoo! News

What's intriguing about the contract Wade received from the White House is that its amount equals the price Wade paid in August 2002 to buy the Duke-Stir, the yacht Cunningham lived (and partied) on in Washington. According to the sentencing recommendation memo in Cunningham's case, Cunningham himself negotiated the $140,000 purchase price of the boat in the summer of 2002. This raises the intriguing possibility that Wade that summer needed money to buy Cunningham the yacht and--presto--a White House contract materialized.

Okay, this one is just damn curious. Follow the money...

The Cunningham Scandal: A White House Link?

But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.

The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black -- a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.

This is the war on terror. If the terrorists attacked because they "hate our freedom," I guess they'll need to find another reason to go after us now.

Police Log Confirms FBI Role In Arrests - washingtonpost.com