In an article dated October 29, 2004, here’s one of NASA’s top scientistswho specializes in the detailed analysis of images, on Bush’s bulge and wrinkled shirts:

“Everyone wants to think my colleague and I are just a bunch of dope-crazed ravaged Democrats who are looking to insult the president at the last minute,” he says. “And that’s not what this is about. This is scientific analysis. If the bulge were on Bill Clinton’s back and he was lying about it, I’d have to say the same thing.”

There’s clearly something there.”

Via CNN.com:

Study: 100,000 Excess Civilian Iraqi Deaths Since War

By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the U.S.-led invasion last year, American public health experts have calculated in a report that estimates there were 100,000 “excess deaths” in 18 months.

Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports but the researchers described what they found as shocking.

Bush campaign Web site blocks overseas visits

A Bush-Cheney campaign spokeswoman referred questions to Michael Turk, the organization’s Internet campaign director. Turk did not return several calls seeking comment.

Much has been made - pro and con - of all the chattering that goes on in the blogosphere, and predictably established forms of transmitting information have looked askance at this new form of interactive communication. But advances in the capabilities keep happening … a couple of years ago it was RSS and Atom feeds, foloowed by various forms of aggregation capability. All of this helps us to create, and follow, emergent meaning (if I remember correctly, Doc Searls called it the scaffolding of knowledge, and thence meaning).

During these past couple of years, it has also dawned on many people that in an interconnected and interlinked world, some form of carnal representation and exchange (no, not THAT!) will also be necessary to make interacting in this interconnected world more meaningful, more purposeful, and perhaps more useful, in the sense of actionable exchange.

The people I read and interact with in the blogosphere are typically people I respect and admire, and from whom I can learn a lot. I’ve decided, some time ago, to become aggregarious, reaching out in my own way to make more real the richness I get, personally, from the magic in the people I have met in the blogosphere.

If Bush cannot even protect our troops from explosives at a sensitive facility in a country he had conquered, how is he going to protect the American public from terrorists who have not even yet been identified?

Even though the story is from www.cnn.com, it’s still unfuckingbelievable.

Halliburton may keep disputed money

According to Pentagon documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the Army has acknowledged that the Houston-based company might never be able to account properly for some of its work, which has been probed amid accusations that Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown & Root unit overbilled the government for some operations in Iraq.

Hunter S. Thompson weighs in, in this month’s Rolling Stone, on the absurdities of this year’s event called the election (reminiscent of Rageboy’s style, but cleaned up to go out in public).

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a “liberal” candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today — and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected “American people”) don’t rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.

Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid and the Hughtrain is on a roll these days, speaking out clearly about why the advertising and PR games are changing in this interlinked environmen.

Ross Rader of Blogware has picked up on this, and adds his perspective about the changes underway.

From Ross’s blog (Thanks, Ross):

The New Buzz: On replacing analysts and pitchmen

This excerpt only shows up in the RSS feed of the article - presumably it has been edited out of the webpage version of the post…too bad - Hugh hacked out the most compelling part - read it again: gapingvoid is a better marketing vehicle than USA Today because of the trust relationship that Hugh has with his readers.

I’d like to believe otherwise, but I sense that GWB will win the American presidential election on November 2, 2004. In that case, my fear for all Americans (and also us Canadians) is that daily life will become much more uncomfortable, in the sense of various aspects of authoritarian control being imposed.

What would make me think that? Well, in addition to Ron Suskind’s recent NY Times Magazine piece titled Fear, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, more and more assertive (polite Candian term) mutterings are being floated each day. For example … whilst in Ottawa this morning I read that both Israel’s Ambassador to Canada (Alan Baker) and the US Ambassador to Canada (Paul Cellucci) stated yesterday that “Canadians must realize additional restrictions on rights and freedoms are necessary to counter the relative ease with which terror groups can now infiltrate Candian society and launch attacks here, against the United States or on Israel and other foreign interests in Canada”.

The Internet, the Web and the interconnected information systems which pervade and surround our lives used to be called the Information Highway a few years back.

I think it may be time to plant the seeds for a new version of the support provided by the Underground Railway to beleagured people … I am calling this the Underground Blogway.

I will undertake to help, in whatever way I can, anyone who wishes to explore the possibilities of moving to Canada. This help may consist of information, links, connections to people (I know people who may be helpful in Toronto, Montreal, the Maritimes, Vancouver), shelter for periods of time (if I can get enough people interested who would be willing to share a bedroom, a spare garage, a vacant house or apartment, and if it comes to this, food and money.

There are seriously troubling times a’coming, I think. I hope not, but I am worried … for you, my American friends. And probably … dammit … for us up here in Canada.

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

– John Cleese