Punchposts 14th Oct.

Punchpost - a short blog post usually involing simply a link and a couple of lines of snark. In extremes it can be just the link and a single snarky word such as "Heh" or "Indeed".

If you saw Primetime's "Radioactive Road Tour" last night then I'm sure your reaction was something along the lines of "WTF are we giving Homeland Security $47 billion a year for, exactly?" But wait, it gets worse. The same investigative team found the equivalent of two and a half tons of enriched plutonium sitting in a tent in New Mexico!

What would you do if you were the head of a major progressive organisation and discovered that you employed a telemarketing company that had been busting its own workers' attempts to organize a union? Well, you would tell them to shape up or be fired, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?

I should have written about this at the time. When after two years of occupation, an army starts blowing up essential infrastructure to deny its use to the enemy - that army has lost the war, its only a matter of time. For this reason, I am seriously rethinking my opinions as expressed in my "Twin Wars" posts. Watch for more soon.

All those liberal fans of John Edwards must be disappointed that he decided to step through the revolving door and be another corporate crony after all.

I'm an equal-opportunity snarker and so bring you the tale of a former Dem Representative who has been sentenced to four years in CampFed for "for conspiring to divert taxpayer money to his law firm and family through a charitable organization he helped start." Sheesh, corruption and revolving-door cronyism. What will they think of next?

Well, there's always that old staple the choreographed Q&A session to make it look like your agenda has popular support, as Bush just did in a teleconference with troops in Iraq. Its a favoured form of lying.

As is making up a letter from your enemies and then "capturing" it. It has a precedent stretching all the way back to the "Protocols of Zion" and further. Who says the Republican party is the party of new ideas?

If you only read one piece this week about Plamegate, it should be this fascinating post that begins to join the dots between Plamegate, the White House Action Group, The Downing Street Memos, the death of British scientist David Kelly and even the mysterious attacks that turned out to be using US Army-issue anthrax. If Prosecutor Fitxgerald is connecting the same dots then its going to get really interesting for Blair and Bush very soon - as in the old Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times." Rove has been called to testify a fourth time to explain "inconsistencies" in his testimony - thats poli-speak for "lies" by the way.

I have to agree with E.J. Dionne - the unseemly speed with which Democrats allowed the Republicans to lead and thus buried the idea of a "bold, urgent, far-reaching, post-Katrina war on poverty" in about a month is nothing short of shameful. This is the natural battleground of the Left and we should not allow this issue to be buried.