Amitai Etzioni asks the 9-11 Commission to expend more effort looking forward than backward, and makes some excellent points. They’re points we should insist our government to address soon, before it all goes boom.

For a change, there’s good news for the Florida elections. Drew of So Far, So Left reports on a ballot initiative that should improve turnout for our side.

The notion of the media being liberally biased dates back to the Nixon administration. It reached the point where Eric Alterman, MSNBC media columnist and author of the book “What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and News,” found that even most journalists assume the media is perceived as being too liberal. “They tend to bend over backwards to give conservatives more than a fair shake on most issues,” Alterman said in an interview with the Associated Press. “They feel pinned in, to a considerable degree, by the perception of bias.”

Alterman’s book quotes conservative leaders such as Rich Bond, former Republican Party chairman, comparing conservatives’ calls against the media to a basketball or football coach “working the refs” on the sidelines. And from Pat Buchanan: “For heaven sakes, we kid about the ‘liberal media,’ but every Republican on Earth does that.”

And William Kristol, whom Alterman calls “the most influential neoconservative publicist in America,” said, “I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”

First Ahmad Chalabi admits to falsehoods, now Kristol. I hope it’s catching. But it’s too much to hope that the media will respond to anything but the corporate bottom line.

Before permitting an Arizona reporter to interview VP Cheney, they asked the editor what her race was.

Next week: is she a lesbian? A feminist? An ACLU member? What’s her sign?

The Bush administration is putting its own spin on how the hamster wheel will turn following Vanessa Kerry’s revelation of her father’s heroic hamster rescue. “Mr. Bush once dropped the key to the family liquor cabinet down the garbage disposal on the morning after the twins’ senior prom,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “Rather than disappoint Jenna and Barbara’s friends, he retrieved the key while the disposal was running…”

Bush is mindful that that the Kerry campaign appears to have won a large part of the once-silent rodent vote after the candidate’s speech Thursday evening. A tracking poll that follows the furry mammals shows some hamsters are literally dancing in the streets — not to mention cyberspace .

The Bush-Cheney ticket, however, belittles the power of rodents in swing states like Ohio, where hamsters and gerbils are looked upon as a “coastal” phenomena. The GOP admits, however, it is looking at the snake-in-the-grass vote to push itself over the top in reptile habitats such as California and Arizona.

Within hours of the younger Kerry’s disclosure of its near-death experience, Licorice, the hamster in question, gave a personal account of the incident in the New York Times, despite admitting that “privacy is all that we hamsters have.”

There are, of course, some in the hamster community who expressed shock that a rodent was the recipient of mouth-to-mouth respiration — even if it was from a potential President of the United States. “I don’t think it’s right to mix the species like that,” POTUS, an independent hamster candidate for President of the United States reportedly told reporters.
Bush supporters in the rodent community are calling for a constitutional amendment to ban future close encounters of the human kind. “We have to protect the institution,” one rodent leader spoke up. “Once they start giving us artificial respiration, you never know how far humans are capable of going,” one Texas rodent noted.
In his New York Times version of the story, Licorice also reveals that the rescue did not leave him undamaged. “I have continuing health problems, including a partial paralysis on my right side that makes it difficult for me to drink out of a regular water bottle.” he says, “ And let’s just say there aren’t going to be any Licorice Jr.’s. One of the small pleasures of hamster life denied.”
Had Kerry known John Edwards at the time, chances are he might not have even gotten the small sett