Analyses of the State of the Union address by Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet, Jeff Koopersmith (who reams the biblical diction that Kusnet finds effective), Arianna Huffington (on the "marriage initiative"), Rahul Mahajan, Tom Engelhardt, David Corn, Greg Palast (on Bush's "educational eugenics"), Richard Cohen, David von Drehle and Calvin Woodward, George Lakoff, Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, and Matthew Yglesias. Plus some fact checking by The Center for American Progress.

Weaponized Information
Tom Engelhardt has two recent columns on the Newspeak a la Shrub that's entering the language. Includes "hunter-killer teams," "embedded," "free-speech zones," "transfer tubes," many more.

"This War Was Not Necessary"
AThe quote above is from a 61-page study, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications," released by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on January 7. Other highlights:
-- "There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al Queda."
-- "The dramatic shift between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2003 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), together with the creation of an independent intelligence agency at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest the the intelligence community began to be unduly influence by policymakers' views sometime in 2002."
-- "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs ...."

Hi Randy and everyone---I did not know that you made this with Blogger. I already have a Blogger blog, and so it's easy to use another one. It's easy any way you do it. Cheers for Blogger.

The Ira Chernus article you sent around about the New York Post's character attacks on Dean makes one believe that our mandate here at rfp is all the more crucial. And again, it points me to Al Franken's book, _Lying Liars..._, which I can't recommend enough.

I'm looking forward to seeing some of you again in Texas in March...

Streaming Video Outrage Deluxe
Don Waller of the generally excellent Take Back the Media comments on the well-rehearsed outrage of right-wing pundits over a submission to MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign comparing Bush to Hitler. Waller points out, among other things, that the Republican National Committee's Ed Gillespie was, um, compelled to put the offensive submission on the RNC's own website to be able to complain about it, since it was one of the approximately 1500 entires that didn't make MoveOn's final cut.

UPDATE: Media Channel's Timothy Karr compares the media reaction to the MoveOn story to the reaction to the New York Post's comparison of Dean supporters to Brownshirts and the Gestapo, finding there is no comparison.