i'll admit it: things are slow at work today. as a consequence, i just spent some time poking around the paul krugman archive. i love that man.

one of the things that reading krugman -- or reading about krugman -- places in sharp relief is the mainstream media's head-in-sand approach to bush adminsitration lies. i have opposed the bush adminstration from the start (from before the start actually, notwithstanding that joke photo from prom night in 1999*), and i still have a hard time understanding the depth of duplicity it produces.

which is why this article threw me for a bit of a loop. now, it purports to be about tom daschle's criticism of bush adminstration mudslinging. look slightly more carefully there, and you'll note a big bush whopper that the reporter up and prints like it's a fact: he's still trying to maintain connections between iraq and 9.11. of course, that's not what his folks would say. they would probably say that one sentence claiming saddam was a threat, in conjunction with another sentence claiming that "9.11 taught us" something-or-other about threats to our country, blah blah blah, does not constitute a claim that saddam had a hand in 9.11.

at least, that's what they've been trying to say ever since it turned out they made up all the facts that might have supported that scenario. i CAN'T WAIT for this adminstration to be over.

*me; black evening gown; smoldering eye makeup; slightly unhealthy tan; big smile. i am holding a copy of fortune magazine on which bush is wearing a grin rather eerily similar to my own. the headline reads, "the next president of the united states?" OH, HAD I BUT KNOWN!