ENDS & ODDS

Why are pundits debating whether Nick Berg's decapitation was revenge or not? The conservatives argue that it's not revenge for the Abu Ghraib torture because the Iraqis would've killed him anyway--whether the American torture had come to light or not. Yeah, maybe, but the Abu Ghraib torture sure came along at a convenient time for these guys.

Even if Berg's demise wasn't really revenge for Abu Ghraib, it's revenge for illegally invading Iraq, or I don't know, perhaps our unwavering support of Israel.

Colmes was pretty good tonight on H&C. I don't really watch it very often, but he was giving some former CIA guy hell about torture. The guy was all tough, saying, "When I'm trying to stop airliners from crashing into builidings and killing 3,000 people, I'm gonna take the gloves off and get that intel." So Colmes points out that we're signatories of the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. prohibitions against torture and asks him, "Do you think it's all right if we say one thing [sign the treaties] and then do another [torture prisoners]? Isn't that what we accuse other countries of?" Or words to that effect.

Anyway, when's the impeachment? Eric Alterman has several interesting links on his blog today about how the tide is turning in American public opinion about Iraq. Thank God for that. I'm beginning to think that even if Osama bin Laden is trotted out on Halloween, no one will really care because of Abu Ghraib and Fahrenheit 9/11 and whatever else is bound to go wrong between now and then. At this point, I don't think there's any way Bush can win legitimately. But that's no different than last time.

And I ask when the impeachment is because there were no WMD and no connection to al Qaeda. It just helps to remind people of that once in a while.

Also, now that I think about it, where are all these Islamic fundamentalist websites that all the networks seem to have access to? Do I just go in to Google and type "Hot terrorist action" or something? OK, I just did that and no bizarre, gritty "death to America" websites came up. Not that I want to like sign up on al Qaeda's email list or anything, I just want to know that I can get to these sites on my own and verify their actual existence. Because, you know, sometimes the news is made up...

CUNEIFORM RECORDS
Good stuff from Cuneiform Records I heard today...

University of Errors: A new band put together by Daevid Allen, who founded Soft Machine and Gong. Apparently, the new album "Jet Propelled Photograph" is a re-invention of some early Soft Machine stuff. Even if you didn't know that, you could just think of it as hot, noisy, brainy indie rock.

Yo Miles: Henry Kaiser and friends re-do some Miles Davis fusion tunes and some originals in the same vein. It's quite badass and sounds awesome (it was recorded with some new super-duper digital recording system that is supposedly as close as digital gets to analog...)

This record is not on Cuneiform of course, but I've really been into AC/DC's song "If You Want Blood (You Got It)"...I've never owned "Highway To Hell" and bought it recently..."Blood" is just simple and rockin', but it fires me up...

Also, I'm returning the DSL to BellSouth...it was slower than Christmas...