~ here is a million dollar idea for google or some capable programmers out there: let us have a site that scans every piece of reporting and journalism and editorial in order to track the increased appearance of certain words, namely words that appear in over 10,000 articles each month after not appearing in a total ten articles over the past five years. here are some to get you started: vetted, parsed, wonk.

~ from cnn:

“Shortly after his disappearance, Hassoun’s family was notified he was missing, but there was no public announcement, the Pentagon official said, because the military did not want to signal insurgents that a Marine might be out in the countryside unprotected.”

…or the military was hoping that he already had been killed quietly and anonymously somewhere, so that he wouldn’t show up on television with a bunch of insurgents behind him who are threatening to cut off his head, thereby presenting the american public with more unpleasantries on the eve of the ‘reign’ of freedom in iraq.

~ few things could interest us less than the prospect of a televised trial for saddam hussein. watching a rerun of the 1978 superbowl would probably have a bigger surprise of an ending.

~ we are mystified by that ‘let freedom reign!’ tag that gwb left on condi rice’s note. is he deliberately being cynical, or is he truly that naive? does he believe that americans have been duped into thinking that there is participatory democracy in iraq, or are his handlers still letting gwb believe it himself? strange!

~ granted, we agree that it is wrong for the u.s. to be swaggering around iraq, even though we own the place, body-searching anyone in the street and storming into little kids’ bedrooms in the middle of the night to check for weapons, but who doesn’t at least smirk when seeing Ahmad Chalabi fuming because he is being treated like everyone else? with so much going badly to all the wrong people in iraq, let us at least cheer ourselves with thoughts of chalabi watching helplessly a silver urn of duck sauce is toppled onto a silk rug while a rolex is shattered under the butt of an m4. “that’s a five hundred dollar camel’s hair coat!!”

~ we have not made the rounds of though the boortz/hannity sites yet, but we are sure that they are as grievously outraged over this as they were over the death of nick berg, because they used the opportunity of his decapitation to display so vociferously their aversion to the needless death of innocents; they would not let something like this pass without demands for the people responsible to be held accountable for this error.

“Associated Press Television News footage showed a truck containing bloodied bodies, many wrapped in blankets, piled one atop the other. Several were children, one of whom was decapitated. The body of a girl who appeared to be less than 5 years of age lay in a white sheet, her legs riddled with wounds and her dress soaked in blood.” -ap

how long does it take to kill 40 people? unless you are using one of those daisy cutters, or unless the wedding you are attacking is being held in a space so confined that every shot hits a mark, one would think that at some point during the assault, the u.s. would have realized that no one was shooting back, or that they were shooting at a bunch of little kids and people in dresses. i guess, though, just like the prison guards, they are ‘following orders’, and we can’t expect them to protest when told to do something fucked up.

~ we don’t think we can stand another hourly report with some senator making excuses for why the hundreds of other ‘disgusting’ images of prison abuse should be kept secret. just for fun, we scripted these lines, pondering whether a more straight forward answer might be forthcoming:

‘we have evidence of the united states engaged in criminal activity. after much deliberation, we thought it best to keep the evidence from the rest of the world, lest we suffer repercussions for our criminal actions.’

such a precedent would be useful in other hypothetical circumstances:

‘i have evidence in my apartment of the illegal downloading of movies. after much deliberation, i thought it best to keep the evidence from the m.p.a.a., lest i get in trouble.’

~ like any liberal who wants to preempt the accusations of a lack of patriotism, we have tried to follow the advice of ‘hate the war, honor the warriors’, or similar homily, that is usually displayed somewhere along the line of the peace marches. we understood that the economic conditions which some men and women face make a job in the military unfortunately seem to be a reasonable option. we understood that the job, while unpleasant, was a necessary feature of the nation. we understood that the injustice of the war that they fight is not always clear to those who place their faith in an administration rather than a nation.

waking to a photograph of west virginian woman in a u.s. uniform holding a naked prisoner on a leash has completely cleansed us of this seemingly dichotomous policy. taking a look at the policy that we follow for the police [+, that is to say, all things being equal, we harbor distrust and animosity towards all officers, until evidence to the contrary arises. henceforth, we shall have unswerving skepticism and contempt for anyone at every level and job of the military; rather than giving any one the benefit of the doubt, it is best to assume the worst, until it is proven to be otherwise by individual cases.

whereas we previously might have nodded approvingly to the banner, ‘support our troops; bring them home’, we now demand that the first phrase be excised from the slogan.

~ to the iraqis who are whining about the top-down approach for determining your nation’s flag and wondering if your ‘council’ has nothing better to do: there is a democracy in the state of georgia, and – when they are through trying to prevent two men from getting married – the gov’t there finds time to churn out a new flag almost every two years. so, if wasteful activities of a deafened assembly are hallmarks of democracy, then you are closer than we all might think.

to the iraqis who are whining about the design: the two stripes for your rivers are much more clever than the stripes on the recently served georgian flag, which don’t mean anything but that the designer had seen them on another flag. on the other hand, we don’t think it was too clever to base the rest of the iraqi flag on religion, separatists, and the israeli model.

~ major media peddlers seem to be telling us that the death of an american solider who turned down millions of football dollars to join the army is somehow more poignant or heartbreaking than the death of hundreds of men and women who were forced to join because of dearth of other economic options. we say that it is not.

~ regarding the pentagon vs. the memory hole [w]: if you are going to be ‘brave’ enough to send americans to their deaths, you should be brave enough to face their images when their remains are returned home.

~ a coffee bean and tea leaf can be seen in the latest ‘spider-man 2’ trailer. there are no coffee bean and tea leaf establishments in new york city.

~ everyone in the angry red office has been sick over the past two weeks; some of us want to eat but can’t, and others can eat but won’t. in the meantime, we have scrawled a few notes:

— we predict it is more likely that ‘outlaw cleric’ al-sadr will be killed, along with many americans and iraqis, than arrested.

— the local protest over the iraq war would draw more participants if there had been some u.s. flags instead of, or at least in addition to, palestinian flags behind which american participants were expected to march. or if the black panthers spent more time talking about bush (2004) and less time ranting about allende (1973).

— whilst investigating the percentage of local ‘artists’ at the dogwood festival, we noticed two (2) cups with markings that indicated that they contained 64oz. of cola. more surprising than the discovery that the 12″ tall cups were not an attempt at art was the discovery that each 64oz. of cola was intended to be consumed by one (1) human.

— it looks like we will rearrange our favourite spider-man cover list when ‘spectacular #14’ comes out. [+]

— ‘vetted’ is replacing ‘on the ground’ as the media’s latest annoying platitude. [+]

— too few people in this country are aware of the importance of keeping line of secularism from becoming thin.

~ unless he plans on shooting a bunch of 12 year old kids, are we to assume that when paul bremer promises ‘punishment’ for the culprits who mutilate corpses in fallujah, he is exhibiting a gruesome understanding of april fool’s day?

~ the angry red planet has received the following message to our inbox. we asked the sender to provide a source for the text, but they have neglected to do so. we have tracked down a remarkably similar passage at the end of an article at alternet.org [w]; we wonder what the white house number for reporting plagiarism might be? anyway, please note that you can call in your position either “for” or “against” the war in – and around – iraq that will regardless take place; who is to say that democracy is at risk?

Below is the number to the White House where you can actually call & say yes or no to the potential “war on Iraq”. G.W. claims to want to hear it directly from the American People. All calls need to be between the hours of 9-5 eastern time monday through friday I just called the White House at 202-456-1111. A machine detains you for only a moment and then a pleasant live operator will thank you for saying “I oppose” (or “I approve of”) of the proposed war against Iraq. It will only take minutes! The president is asking to know what the American people are thinking. Tell him. Please forward this if you want.