stuff I'd write about intelligently if I was to write about anything intelligently lately...

Bob Herbert this morning, about gratuitous violence in Iraq. Not that we couldn't have guessed.

Bush and Blair plotted regime change all along. They lied. They lied and lied and lied, and they called it 'managing public opinion.' This is news in the UK, but not, apparently, here in the States, where everyone's already accepted that Bush lied and no one really cares.

Pat Robertson says judges are worse than terrorists. On national TV. No one cares.

Krugman on the plan to kill social security.

Say goodbye to PBS.

This is several days old, but the headline is "Doctors are warned on fetus care." Not that we didn't know it, girls, but our bodies are no longer our own, and the feds want to make sure everyone understands that.

Also several days old: a small AP notice about someone resigning from a federal election reform commission:

The first chairman of a federal voting agency created after the 2000 election dispute is resigning, saying the government has not shown enough commitment to reform.

The former chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, DeForest B. Soaries Jr., said his decision was prompted in part by what he called a lack of support."All four of us had to work without staff, without offices, without resources," Mr. Soaries said. "I don't think our sense of personal obligation has been matched by a corresponding sense of commitment to real reform from the federal government."

Mr. Soaries, a Republican former secretary of state of New Jersey, was the White House's choice to join the commission, created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help states enact voting changes. After his term as chairman ended in January, he remained a panel member.

So those of you turning blue waiting for election reform, stop holding your breath.

Digby quotes Fritz Stern:

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.

Give money to Kerry; get blacklisted from telecom conferences.

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week's meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry's 2004 campaign.

The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.

The White House admits as much: "We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and--call us nutty--it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that," says White House spokesman Trent Duffy. Those barred from the trip include employees of Qualcomm and Nokia, two of the largest telecom firms operating in the U.S., as well as Ibiquity, a digital-radio-technology company in Columbia, Md. One nixed participant, who has been to many of these telecom meetings and who wants to remain anonymous, gave just $250 to the Democratic Party. Says Nokia vice president Bill Plummer: "We do not view sending experts to international meetings on telecom issues to be a partisan matter. We would welcome clarification from the White House."

Also, the U.S. finally admits that it did kidnap that German guy who wasn't a terrorist after all. Oops, our bad.

Some people were excited in the past couple of weeks to find that some conservatives thought that Delay and Frist were "going too far" with their attacks on the judiciary. "Look what Charles Krauthammer said", they exclaim. "Even he thinks they're being crazy."Anyone who reads this column as a win for the side of sanity is dead wrong:

Provocation is no excuse for derangement. And there has been plenty of provocation: decades of an imperial judiciary unilaterally legislating radical social change on the flimsiest of constitutional pretexts. But while that may explain, it does not justify the flailing, sometimes delirious attacks on the judiciary mounted by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and others in the wake of the Terri Schiavo case.

Haven't we seen enough of this strategy? I think I prefer to hear DeLay threatening judges than to read Krauthammer saying that judges are awful but we shouldn't threaten them. It's an incendiary column purporting to denounce incitement. Are we really that easy to fool???!