“Let’s begin with what could have been an ending. In October, an editor asked me to prepare Courtney Love’s obituary. Nobody actually believed that Courtney Love had died, but many thought she was heading in that direction. If she had a fatal overdose or sudden heart failure, we needed to be ready. It was the first time, in 10 years of newspaper writing, that I had been asked to write an advance obituary for someone under 40.” —New York Times

The problem isn’t the breast, it’s violence against women: “The real shock was that a man would rip off a woman’s clothes — planned or not — and we would talk only about what was exposed in the process. It doesn’t matter whether her wardrobe malfunctioned. What matters is that he was messing with her wardrobe in the first place.” —Cindy Miller, Chicago Sun-Times

“Was Joy Adamson an angel of mercy… or a tyrant? The man who killed her 24 years ago now speaks out. Her moving account of how she raised a captive lioness before returning her to the wild made Joy Adamson a legend way beyond the African bush. But the author of the bestseller Born Free, which was turned into a hugely successful film, was a tyrannical employer who fired live bullets at her black African staff, according to the man who was convicted of her murder.” —Guardian.UK

In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War —New York Times

“…The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say.

Concerns that militants might assemble a bomb or another weapon on board were a key factor in the series of recent cancellations of transatlantic flights.” ` —Guardian.UK

“Wesley Clark has gravitas and charm but seems like a closet Republican. John Edwards is bright and articulate and really, really youthful. Who’d be the best V.P.?” —Salon

Vice-presidential machinations on the Republican side too? Arianna Huffington: “ GOP inner circles are buzzing with the rumor that President Bush is planning to drop Dick Cheney from his re-election ticket and replace him with 9/11 action hero Rudy Giuliani.

As one firmly committed to making sure Bush doesn’t get another four years in office, all I can say to this is: Please, Mr. President, say it ain’t so!

Cheney is the Democrats’ best—though sorely underutilized—weapon. A loose-lipped loose cannon who threatens to torpedo the Bushie ship of state every time he half-opens his mouth. If only we start paying attention.

Perhaps sensing that Broadway Rudy is warming up in the bullpen, Cheney has begun upping his public profile. After rarely venturing out of his secure, undisclosed location—aka Republican fund-raisers—he has given a rash of high-profile interviews over the past month.

And thank God for that: the Most Powerful Number Two In History just can’t help telling it like he sees it, and the way he sees it is very, very telling. And frightening.” —tompaine.com

“Two years after my husband, Danny Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered, his employers at the Wall Street Journal seem all too willing to forget.” —Mariane Pearl, Salon

Great Taste, Less Privacy “Wonder what information is contained in that barcode on the back of your driver’s license? “Visitors to an art exhibit at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts got more than their martinis when they ordered drinks at a bar inside the gallery’s entrance. Instead of pretzels and peanuts, they were handed a receipt containing the personal data found on their license, plus all the information that could be gleaned from commercial data-mining services and voter registration databases like Aristotle. Some patrons also got receipts listing their phone number, income range, marital status, housing value and profession. For added effect, the receipt included a little map showing the location of their residence.” —Wired

“Over the past three years, President Bush has been plugging away at his faith-based initiative — and it’s doing better than you think.” — Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange [via AlterNet]

Expanding the boundaries of corporate malfeasance to new lows of dirty dealing, these ten companies are the worst offenders in a year that saw a lot of offenses. —AlterNet

“Mel Gibson’s controversial film on the Crucifixion is being hailed by US Catholics as the best recruiting tool for 2,000 years.” —Guardian.UK

Bruce Schneier: How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism: “In recent years there has been an increased use of identification checks as a security measure. Airlines always demand photo IDs, and hotels increasingly do so. They’re often required for admittance into government buildings, and sometimes even hospitals. Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that’s just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.

Let’s debunk the myths…”

Maureen Dowd: “Now, with the White House looking untrustworthy and desperate; with the national security team flapping around and pointing fingers at each other and, of course, Bill Clinton; with even the placid Laura getting testy; and with Newsweek reporting that the Justice Department is reviewing whether Halliburton was involved in paying $180 million in kickbacks to get contracts in Nigeria at a time when Dick Cheney was chairman, anybody else would be sweating.

Not deadeye Dick. His heavy lids didn’t blink when it turned out he’d blown up a half-century of American foreign policy alliances on a high-level hallucination.” —New York Times op-ed

In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War —New York Times