| The Punchin’ Judy Show: Team Libby comes out swinging
Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was on the stand at the Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial today. Miller spent 85 days in the slammer for refusing to testify to a grand jury about conversations with Libby on the subjects of former ambassador Joe Wilson, his CIA wife and the administration's insistence that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger, but she ultimately cut a deal with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald allowing her to testify to the grand jury about Libby and Libby alone. Miller is best known to press aficianados as the reporter most likely to regurgitate unfiltered administration spin on Iraq prior to the war, and for writing the single most bizarre story on Iraq's banned weapons programs after the invasion. The latter involved an anonymous guy in a ball cap pointing to a patch of sand where he said — not to Miller, because she wasn't allowed close enough to talk to the guy or even describe him beyond the ball cap — that a bunch of chemicals had been buried.
Now you see it...
ALTHOUGH BEAUTIFUL BY few standards, the F-117 Nighthawk -- the Air Force's black, angular, "Stealth" fighter -- looked like the future when it was unveiled in 1988. Sculpted to evade radar, the plane -- despite its name it's really a precision bomber, or "strike" plane, not an air-to-air fighter -- became a star of the first Gulf War, flying some 1,300 sorties, and it got the call for some of the most sensitive missions of the second Iraq war, too. In 1999, it helped drive the Serbs out of Kosovo, though not before a Serbian anti-aircraft missile managed to knock one out of the sky. The pilot ejected, and was safely plucked out of enemy territory, but that one of these superplanes was laid low made news around the world. To hear its fans tell it, the F-117's place in aviation history is secure.
Nat-ural Wisdom: A new approach to literary criticism
“deconstructivism," best talked about in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is; and the various “-isms" relating to creating heroes of all the women, minorities, and especially women-minorities in a work of literature, just to name a few. But I propose a new -ism: Anti-textualism. In this “-ism," you assume that the author didn't really mean what the author actually meant, and support this argument with reasons that not only lack textual evidence but heavily reflect personal preferences, biases and even prejudices. Essentially, you don't let the idea of “textual evidence" get in the way of understanding a work. For instance, take John Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Hailed by many as “The Great American Epic," it has received a great deal of praise in high literary circles for its stark depiction of the suffering of the Great Depression.
Hurricane To-Do List Still Long, Crist Says: As He OKs Insurance ...
Jan. 26--Gov. Charlie Crist signed a sweeping insurance-reform bill into law Thursday -- but even he agreed there's a lot of work left to be done. "It is just the beginning -- let's understand that," Crist said. "We need to remain vigilant about this issue." The 167-page bill, the product of a seven-day special session, promises property-insurance reductions averaging 22 percent statewide, in return for Florida taxpayers shouldering a greater share of the risk that a catastrophic hurricane will sweep through the state. But lawmakers and the populist-sounding Crist, eager to provide short-term relief to unhappy homeowners, overlooked -- for now -- longer-term proposals to reduce hurricane damage. Absent from the package was any attempt to restrict new coastal development or detailed plans to reward residents who take steps to protect their homes from hurricane damage.
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