GOOD NEWS FOR MODERN PEOPLE

Cheney booed at baseball game...Bush's poll numbers continue to drop...Majority of people think Bush's leaks were unethical...Gingrich provides cover for Democrats, says U.S. should "pull back" from Iraq...

Iran joins the nuclear club, insuring that we can't invade them.

Oh, and the oilman/CEO president continues to make sure that we get gouged at the gas pump...not that being gouged is good news, but it's good that it makes people wake up to how this adminstration is harming everyone.

Been reading "Cruel and Unusual" by Mark Crispin Miller...great book--I checked it out from the library once before but couldn't get into it. But this time, I can hardly put it down. Here's a good sample passage:

"This Age of Information has turned to be an Age of Ignorance, in some ways comparable to the so-called Dark Ages, when the priests alone knew how to read and there was nothing to plug in. We live with an unprecedented wealth of information: countless facts and solid arguments and scrupulous researches, all of it (for many of us) just a click away. And yet..there is, out there, an entire propaganda universe available to anyone who wants to obsess about one thing and from one point of view...Thus the right has made for its constituents a new designer consciousness. Having co-opted the media, the right can fill your head all day, all night, wherever you may go, as long as you're plugged in. You can watch only Fox News Channel and MSNBC, listen only to Sean Hannity et al., read only those newspapers that re-echo what you've seen and heard, hit only those Web sites that others like you also hit...all such products having been approved directly or inspired by the White House and the Republican National Committee, if not sources even farther to the right. (p. 123)"

And wait, here's another really, really good one that kind of echoes the previous one and also reiterates Chomsky's point about how if you want to know the actual truth about a political subject, you practically have to do a research project:

"And so America's minority of rightists walk around completely misinformed and yet cocksure, belligerently echoing the sophistries and fabrications that have made it through the bubble so that they themselves are also nonstop propagandists. Meanwhile, other than those plucky few who try to learn what's really happening out there, everybody else, too busy for such extra daily work, feels timid, uninformed, and therefore half-inclined to heed the ones with strong opinions, booming voices, and a lot of 'facts.' Through such a network has the right deluded millions of Americans just as effectively as any modern oligarchy or medieval faith--just as effectively, in fact, as Bush/Cheney have deceived themselves. (p. 124)"