Top 10 Signs Your Neighbor is Brainwashed. — Maureen Farrell, buzzflash

Uh oh, Judith Miller is at it again, describing administration allegations that Syria has an ambitious program to develop ‘unconventional weapons’, supports terrorism, and is behind at least some of the attacks on US troops occupying Iraq. NY Times Miller, of course, came under fire for her amazingly credulous reporting on Iraqi WMD, using dubious sources in the Iraqi exile community and the State Dept., as Josh Marshall reminds us here.

Specify an emotional and stylistic tone and you’ll be offered a list of novels which match your stipulations.

“CNN’s top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN ‘was intimidated’ by the Bush administration and Fox News, which ‘put a climate of fear and self-censorship.’

As criticism of the war and its aftermath intensifies, Amanpour joins a chorus of journalists and pundits who charge that the media largely toed the Bush administrationline in covering the war and, by doing so, failed to aggressively question the motives behind the invasion.

On last week’s Topic A With Tina Brown on CNBC, Brown, the former Talk magazine editor, asked comedian Al Franken, former Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke and Amanpour if ‘we in the media, as much as in the administration, drank the Kool-Aid when it came to the war.’

Said Amanpour: ‘I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I’m sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.'” USA Today [via truthout]

Phrases, sayings, quotes and cliches, with their meanings and origins.:

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On this day in 1672 Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of

the American colonies, died. Many of her poems are conventional,

but others have personality and a New World edge: “I am obnoxious

to each carping tongue, / Who sayes, my hand a needle better

fits….” Such lines inspired John Berryman to “Homage to

Mistress Bradstreet,” the collection that brought his first fame. Today in Literature

Dream Song 1
John Berryman

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,–a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry’s side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don’t see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

and empty grows every bed.