But the roots of FNC's day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it.

The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently comes across on FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo. But along with the obvious - information on who is where and what they'll be covering - there have been subtle hints as to the tone of the anchors' copy. For instance, from the March 20th memo: "There is something utterly incomprehensible about Kofi Annan's remarks in which he allows that his thoughts are 'with the Iraqi people.' One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought." Can there be any doubt that the memo was offering not only "food for thought," but a direction for the FNC writers and anchors to go? Especially after describing the U.N. Secretary General's remarks as "utterly incomprehensible"?

Software used to count the votes in as many as 16 states has been found available on a publicly accessible Internet server. The files, which appear to reveal technical details about how votes are stored in machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, have been accessible on the site for at least two years.

A computer programmer, who asked not to be named for fear of legal retaliation from Sequoia, says that he came upon the FTP server holding the files on Friday, when he visited the Web site of Jaguar Computer Systems, a computer consulting firm in Southern California that provides technical services to, among other customers, Riverside County. In the 2000 presidential election, Riverside became the first county in the nation to employ touch-screen machines in its precincts. Its machines are made by Sequoia.

As our casualties continue to mount, America's leaders could do themselves and us a favor by calling things by their right names. What's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan today is not nation-building. It's not postwar reconstruction. It's not pacification. It's war.

It's not war just because both nations are crawling with troops. So are others. Nor is it war just because people continue to die violently. That happens every day in every city in the world. Nor is it war just because some of the victims wear uniforms. That too is not uncommon even in peacetime.

It's war because our undefeated enemies say it is and behave accordingly.

The entitled and the enlisted
When George W. Bush is prevaricating, he often utters a little wisecrack. At today's press briefing, when he was asked about that now-embarrassing "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Lincoln, he pinned that premature boast on the crew and then delivered his quip.

"I know [the banner] was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff," said Bush. "They weren't that ingenious, by the way." Heh heh. Over at John Kerry's headquarters, the rapid response team quickly fired off a rebuke to Bush, scolding him for trying to "blame" the sailors for the sign. The Kerry press release includes this paragraph from Elizabeth Bumiller's report on White House image-making in the New York Times May 16:

"The most elaborate -- and criticized -- White House event so far was Mr. Bush's speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that [White House communications deputy Scott] Sforza embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Mr. Bush's landing in a flight suit and his early evening speech. Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot."

There's nothing surprising about this cheap little lie. The entitled always blame the enlisted. It's the American aristocratic way.

[Researchers Peter Lyman and Hal Varian] found twice as much new information had been created in 2002 as in 1999, the last year they studied.

This time, they even had to employ a new term of measurement: the exabyte, or a million terabytes. (A terabyte is a million megabytes.)

Last year, people generated five exabytes of information, the equivalent of a half-million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress, they reported.

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.