Roundup 12/4/08

Sara Robinson's "Talking Turkey: Ten Myths Conservatives Believe About Progressives" over at the Campaign for America's Future is a good overview of the subject, especially for surviving the holidays. (I believe Right-Wing Cartoon Watch has a dozen cartoons at least for each of those ten myths.)

Media Bloodhound catches the latest example of a major media outlet trivializing the Iraqi death toll, a serious and persistent problem.

On a related note, Mock, Paper, Scissors has a CNN video about another back door draft. Great family values, indeed.

Over at Newshoggers, Cernig looks at some dangerous assumptions in "Mumbai: Tortured Confessions and The Justification For War" and examines dangerous framing in "Manly Men And Hard Power" (bringing to mind an earlier post here, "Brave Cowboys of the Junior High Lunch Room"). Also, Fester takes on Bernard Finel's defense of Bush on WMD. It's a subject I hope many people revisit, especially since Bush is embarking on the revisionist no-fault legacy tour.

Over at skippy's, there's important but discouraging information about a possible Screen Actors Guild strike, and a reader survey if you've the time. Remember, blogging is better in a skippy t-shirt.

FranIAm commemorates a sad anniversary.

Blue Gal has a good meditation on the not-poor contemplating the poor and outsiders examining insiders who contemplate outsiders.

I'm overdue for linking Jesse Wendel's post on the Obama job application going over the line.

Meanwhile, Lance Mannion is a vampire snob and an elitist who values reading habits. Oh well, that's the fashion these days. And while an Interview with Obama about Vampires is probably out of the question, when it comes to musing about Obama and creature of the night Batman, well, the outlook is good.

Update: Bernard Finel's e-mailed a correction:

Actually, I didn’t defend Bush. I did, however, defend people who in 2002 might have supported the Iraq war resolution. There is a notion going around that everyone who supported the war was either a dupe or a Bushie fanatic. That just isn’t true, and it oversimplifies what was actually a complicated issue of intelligence assessment and strategy.

I've had a polite exchange with him, and may post more on these and related issues later on. But you can read the Bernard Finel post Fester was critiquing here and an article with a more comprehensive explanation of his views here.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)