And the violence continues:

A Katyusha rocket hit Friday the BBC office east of Baghdad with no human casualties occurring.
The office employees told KUNA the rocket hit the editors department but did not cause any serious damages.

More from McClatchy and it's not pretty: Round-up of Daily Violence in Iraq, Thursday 8 May 2008

Playing with fire

In 1971, Edith Efron purported to expose the liberal bias of the news media in The News Twisters. The dubiousness of Efron's conclusion was matched by that of her methods, and critical reaction was harsh. But, under orders from Richard Nixon, Chuck Colson spent $8,000 buying copies of the book in order to vault it onto the New York Times best-seller list.

Even before Efron's book was published, undermining the news media was among Nixon's top priorities. In 1969, Nixon aide Pat Buchanan had proposed blunting media reports about Vietnam by accusing the networks of being biased in favor of the antiwar movement. In 1971, Nixon told top aide H.R. Haldeman, "[M]uch more than any single issue that we are going to emphasize, the discrediting of the press must be our major objective over the next few months."^[i]

In fact, the discrediting of the media remained a major objective of the conservative movement for the next few decades. The News Twisters was followed by countless other books making similar allegations. Right-wing groups like Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center thrived. And Republicans at all levels, from president to precinct worker, routinely attacked the news media.

Not that they necessarily believed their own attacks, as the occasional moment of honesty from conservatives over the years demonstrates. In 1972, Pat Buchanan praised news coverage of that year's presidential election as "extraordinarily fair and balanced." Brent Bozell conceded in the 1990s that major newspapers could not be faulted "with a media bias in favor of Bill Clinton" and praised The Washington Post's (deeply

On May 8, Fox News anchors and reporters repeatedly promoted the notion that Sen. John McCain is reluctant to discuss his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, making such assertions at least 15 times between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. ET. During Special Report, while introducing chief political correspondent Carl Cameron's interview with retired Col. George E. "Bud" Day, guest anchor Bret Baier asserted that "McCain rarely talks about his experience as a prisoner of war during Vietnam." During the interview, Cameron reiterated the claim: "[R]epeating what he went through is something McCain almost never does as a presidential candidate." One hour later, during The Fox Report, anchor Shepard Smith falsely asserted, "One thing McCain has not brought up during the campaign: his days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam." In fact, as Media Matters for America has documented, McCain has repeatedly highlighted his experience as a POW, even as he and the media have promoted the notion that he is reluctant to do so.

During the Republican primary, numerous McCain campaign advertisements on television and the Internet noted McCain's time as a POW. One ad, a 60-second spot titled "One Man," begins with 27 seconds of footage of McCain being interrogated during his captivity. Additional footage of McCain in captivity appears while a narrator says, "One man sacrificed for his country." Five other McCain

Four days after Arianna Huffington first reported it, John McCain's 2000 VoteGate has become the election issue du jour. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have all run stories confirming Huffington's account that in 2000 a still steaming McCain did not vote for George W. Bush, the man who savaged him and his family during the Republican primaries. But as the fevered denials from his campaign show, the story of McCain's hate-love relationship with Bush is the tale of Mr. Straght Talk's tightrope walk from personal pride to political opportunism.

Huffington's she said, he said about McCain's 2000 vote began on Monday. Huffington claimed that a gathering in Los Angeles after the November election John McCain told her, "I didn't vote for George Bush." (Cindy McCain, apparently more forthcoming about her 2000 vote than her 2007 tax returns, chimed in, "I didn't either.") After McCain spokesman Mark Salter protested, "it's not true and I ask you to consider the source," the Times and the Post verified Huffington's account with West Wing stars Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff, both of whom were in attendance at Candace Bergen's Beverly Hills bash that night.

What is beyond dispute, however, is McCain's past hatred for

When considering John McCain's history of unethical behavior, the list usually starts (and ends) with the Keating Five scandal in the 1980s, for which McCain was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for having shown, at a minimum, poor judgment. While McCain took on the role of a "reformer" in the scandal's aftermath, his ethical lapses have hardly disappeared.

The NYT noted a few weeks ago, for example, that McCain went to considerable lengths in 1999 to help one of his top campaign fundraisers buy the land at an Army base that was being closed. McCain helped his benefactor get the land -" and special water rights -" for just $250,000, which the donor then sold two years later for $30 million. (The donor, Donald Diamond, was rather candid about buying influence with politicians: "I want my money back, for Christ's sake. Do you know how many cocktail parties I have to go to?") It's the kind of obvious influence peddling McCain swears he never gets involved with.

Today, the WaPo has a front-page item highlighting yet another real-estate controversy in which McCain helped out one of his most generous supporters.

Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers.

Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona

Now that that's all over with, can we please focus on beating John McCain?

Virtually everyone (with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton -- I guess nobody told her) now knows that the Democratic candidate for president is going to be Barack Obama. But while the end of this long and winding road is now in sight, Democrats should not just be heaving an enormous sigh of relief -- they should be turning all their energy towards beating John McCain in November.

Because we've already seen what happens when the candidate lets their guard down between becoming presumptive nominee and the convention (can you say "Swift Boat"?). And we definitely don't want that to happen again.

We also want to help Barack Obama with his down-ticket coattails. A stunning thing happened in Louisiana last week, but very few people noticed. There was a special election for a House seat in a district held by Republicans for 33 years, which voted overwhelmingly for Bush last time around. And guess what? The Democratic candidate won. Importantly, he won even after he was smeared by an anti-Obama and anti-Wright ad campaign by his Republican opponent.

What this means is that Republican strategists who were overjoyed at Barack's "reverend problem," and who saw it as a way to attack Democrats for House and Senate races are now rethinking this strategy. This is good news indeed. Even Newt Gingrich is worried -- warning Republicans (in the starkest of language) of a "catastrophic election" which could bring about a "permanent minority" for the GOP in the House -- a "real disaster."

Getting Obama into the Oval Office is important, but it's just as important

Any presidential candidate asking for our vote might rightly be asked in return, "Will you live long enough to serve out your term?"

This question has never been more relevant than in the case of Senator John McCain, who, if successful, will be oldest candidate we've ever elected president -- 2 years and 165 days older than Ronald Reagan was at the time of his inauguration. And then of course there's the well-publicized matter of McCain's malignant melanoma, the status of which he's keeping, well, decidedly unpublicized. He promised us he'd release his health records in April. It's now May.

Putting that aside for a moment, we decided to calculate McCain's life expectancy to see if, given his habits and age, we can expect him to last until 2016. While we were at it, we thought it only fair to apply the same scrutiny to Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.

For our calculations we used the Vitality Compass, an online tool developed jointly by Bluezones.com and the University of Minnesota school of Public Health. It uses CDC Life Tables and the meta analysis of more that 335 epidemiology studies to calculate how different lifestyle factors estimate life expectancy and Biological Age. Then, we dug into the available reporting on each of the candidates and ran them through the Compass. For variables we couldn't answer (e.g. do you take sleep medications?) we plugged in the same variable for each candidate so as to put them all on a level playing field.

We found that all candidates are above average in life expectancy. They all benefit by being rich (making over $150K/yr), well educated, married, super-engaged in their work, somewhat active physically and engaged socially and religiously. Here's how they break out:

Hillary Clinton

Life Expectancy: 95.1
Biological Age: 58.2

Big corporations give him money. Presidential candidates seek his endorsement. He has influential friends in Congress and the governor's mansion. The Rev. Al Sharpton has emerged over the past decade as perhaps the nation's most prominent civil rights leader, a status that was demonstrated again this week when he led protests against police brutality that briefly shut down six of Manhattan's major bridges and tunnels.

But he still carries baggage from his early days as a fire-breathing agitator: Government records obtained by The Associated Press indicate that Sharpton and his business entities owe nearly $1.5 million in overdue taxes and associated penalties.

Now the U.S. attorney is investigating his nonprofit group, a probe that an undeterred Sharpton brushes off as the kind of annoyance that civil rights figures have come to expect from the government.

"Whatever retaliation they do on me, we never stop," he told the AP. "I think that that is why they try to intimidate us."

Over the past year, Sharpton's lawyers and the staff of his nonprofit group, the National Action Network, have been negotiating with the federal government over the size of his debt, which they dispute. The group has also been trying to pay off tens of thousands of dollars it owes for failing to properly maintain workers compensation and unemployment insurance.

Charlie King, the organization's interim executive director, said both Sharpton and the group he leads were unprepared for their rise in stature in recent years and had trouble dealing with big jumps in donations and income.

"The infrastructure was trying to keep up with that pace, and it was not a perfect fit," he told the AP on Friday. "The National Action Network may not have been perfect, but nothing was going on that was untoward."

He said the organization has new accountants and a new administrative team, and the group recently finally filed long-overdue tax returns.

Sharpton's

As a lawyer might say (OK, I am one), I have no personal; knowledge of whether John or Cindy McCain voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. However, now that that has been called into question by Arianna Huffington (who says no) and Huffington's truthfulness has in turn been questioned by the McCain campaign (although not yet by the McCains), I can offer the following anecdote as admissible hearsay shedding a little light on the subject:

Over the Fourth of July weekend of 1999, I had the good fortune to accompany my then fiancée (and now happily my wife) to the McCain vacation home in Sedona where she was interviewing them for a Home and Garden Television show. The interview itself was entirely apolitical, focusing on fabrics and furnishing in their lovely Oak Creek abode, topics about which I do recall the senator was less than comfortable discussing.

Always the goods hosts, the McCain's also invited us to spend the day with them, including for barbeque, a favorite of John's. And as McCain flipped burgers, I could not help but ask his views about then candidate George W. Bush.

"He's as dumb as a stump" McCain offered. We then went on to discuss other matters (including Vietnam) but that quote remains seared in my memory.

So how the McCain's actually voted that November is between them and their voting booth. But if John McCain did end up voting for Bush, then by his own admission he voted for a stump.

Once again the U.S. military is conducting major combat operations in Baghdad's Sadr City slum. Urban street fighting, daytime air strikes, refugees fleeing, the whole 9 yards. The targets are Shiite extremists who have been killing our troops and obstructing the so-called progress of a freely elected Iraqi government. Oh yeah, we are winning but we have to do this sort of thing from time to time -- no biggie.

So for the foreseeable future the violence rages on, US troops will continue to die, Iraqis will die, and according to President Bush it is all for the cause of our freedom here at home.

The Iraqi insurgents hate us for our freedom -- didn't ya know?

Will Americans ever wake up to the harsh reality that is Iraq? At this point it is too frustrating to care or look for an answer to that ridiculous question. Sort of like the definition of insanity when stated as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

I'm very close to embracing the truism that I can do nothing to stop this tragic war that has been enabled, encouraged, and carried forward by our cowardly Congress along with millions of careless and complacent citizens of this country who, for the most part, have no stake in the game.

On that note ....

Let me tell you who the people are who do care and do have a stake in the game. They are the servicemen and women that make up the Individual Ready Reserve. Most have completed multiple tours in Iraq, have been honorably discharged from the military, and have started new lives with the hopes of putting this horrendous war behind them. Now, many of them are receiving letters in the mail commanding them back to active duty to fight in Iraq -- again.

Can you imagine? If you're not in their shoes probably not.

I recently interviewed my long time friend and mentor, Bill Moyers, who, after serving as a member of the Lyndon Johnson administration, became one of the most respected journalists on American television. He has spent his life engaging with central issues of American democracy. We talked about whether Barack Obama is "elitist" and discussed his recent interview with Reverend Jeremiah Wright.