podpolia

Vanity Fair seems to be running a story in which W. Mark Felt admits to being Deep Throat. Somehow I don’t imagine that someone would take credit for it if they were likely to be shown as a fraud, but you never know. We’ll see how it plays out.

It looks like the FEC has made some minor adjustments to its proposed rulings on blogs: now only bloggers who sell their endorsement would be effected. This is a lot less blatantly unconstitutional than their previous go at it, but I’ll have to see more on the topic before I decide whether I agree with how the new rules would work.

There’s an interesting piece here about how to interpret what Bush is saying, and what some of his stock phrases really mean.

I’m going to sound rather like Charles and some of the stories he covers in his Cynical Manner (TM), but I’ve finally scratched up confirmation of something that I had seen in one of the original articles on the story. (No, it’s not “how would the Islamic equivalent of the Bible fit down a toilet?”)
Despite the outrage about the false stories of US investigators, there are true stories of desecration of the Qur’an — but by the same people who purportedly hold it to be sacred, and important enough to kill people for. This story mentions “about a dozen cases” where prisoners damaged, destroyed, or even shoved pieces of the inviolable holy book into toilets themselves (mind you, these copies had been provided to the prisoners by the government — a signal of ‘cultural respect’ that you’d find in no story about what goes on at Guantanamo, unless it was attached to something negative like this). The article goes on and on detailing possible mistreatments of the Qur’an by guards, including a case where the Qur’an was accidentally knocked down by a guard, and another in which a detainee intentionally threw a copy next to a toilet so as to blame the guards and stir up trouble.
Where’s the outrage in the Muslim world over desecration of their holy book by members of their own faith? Why has there been no outcry from the vast majority of Muslims about the irreligiosity of the terrorists, while at the same time western political leaders stress that the vast majority of Muslims don’t support the terrorists? Why no outcry that the terrorists are committing outrages to important tenets of Islam?
I guess it’s just easier to blame the Americans — even the American media will help you out. If you tried to say anything positive about America and what it is doing or has done, you’d never be heard.