News Roundup

Sometimes there are just too many stories popping up at once to write a post about each one.

Bush gets weird again at G8 summit, this time giving German Chancellor Angela Merkel a friendly massage. Crooks and Liars has the video. This whole trip has been an embarrassment for Fearless Leader-- did his handlers mix up his meds, or does he think he's at summer camp?

In another example of White House nominations that are all about rewarding the blindly loyal rather than, say, competence or political acumen. This time, General Bantz Craddock has been nominated for the top NATO post. "Craddock currently oversees the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and was formerly chief military assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." That should make for some great international cooperation.

Calls for large-scale US involvement in escalating violence between Israel and Syria are coming faster and louder from the right, who have quickly begun to tout neoconservative Middle East policy as a panacea-- even though Iraq and Afghanistan are both becoming more violent and unstable. Pundits like Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh are all for it (and openly saying it's a great opportunity to attack Iran), and former CIA director James Woolsey is now getting in on the fun. Prominent neocons had become whipping boys even in conservative circles over the past year, but these ideologues have turned on a dime and made them brilliant visionaries again. Scary. Matthew Yglesias tries to make sense of the hawks' position in an article on The American Prospect today.

The New York Times has gone two days without correcting a blatantly false story about a speech Hillary Clinton recently gave. As Time Grieve notes at Salon, they have in the menatime corrected several mistakes in their sports reporting.