Today’s edition of quick hits.<\/p>\n
* AP<\/a>: “President Vladimir Putin placed strategic bombers back on long-range patrol for the first time since the Soviet breakup, sending a tough message to the United States on Friday hours after a major Russian military exercise with China. Putin reviewed the first Russian-Chinese joint exercise on Russian soil before announcing that 20 strategic bombers had been sent far over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans — showing off Moscow’s muscular new posture and its growing military ties with Beijing.”<\/p>\n * On a related note, Josh Marshall responded to the news from Russia with a terrific post<\/a>: “[O]ur whole national dialog, hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot more are going to Iraq. And more generally the fantasy 450 year long-war epic battle with the Islamofascists. We’re close to breaking the US Army and Marine Corps with over-extended deployments. And in hotspots around the world, there’s a vacuum, as the world sort of rushes past us. In many ways this is the greatest danger in Iraq, not that our future as a nation is at stake in staying (as the right would have it) or even that it’s necessarily at stake in leaving but that our engagement with the country has fixed us with a dangerous national myopia which is letting many other problems fester unattended for going on a decade.”<\/p>\n * An edge-of-the-seat week on Wall Street ended on a positive note<\/a> today, after the Fed lowered interest rates cut a key interest rate by a half a percentage point. “The Fed also said in a statement that recent turbulence in financial markets has significantly increased the risk that the economy will worsen. Investors interpreted the two moves, taken together, as a signal that the central bank is prepared to take serious action to try to prevent disruptions that began in the market for mortgages from spreading widely through the economy.” The Dow closed up 233 points.<\/p>\n * On a related note, confused about the current market freakout? Salon’s Andrew Leonard did an excellent job explaining what’s going on and why<\/a>.<\/p>\n * Yesterday, the Bush gang insisted publicly that they were not pushing for closed-door-only briefings between Gen. Petraeus and members of Congress. By all indications, the administration was lying<\/a>.<\/p>\n * Next week, The Daily Show will get reports from Baghdad — real<\/i> ones<\/a>, not in front of a green screen. * Lee County, Florida, doesn’t want<\/a> Rep. Don Young’s (R-AK) ethically-dubious $10 million earmark.<\/p>\n * Remember Nicole and Jeffery Rank? They were arrested on the 4th of July, 2004, for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts to a public event where the president was speaking. The couple filed a lawsuit with the help of the ACLU, and settled out of court<\/a> yesterday for $80,000. White House spokesman Blair Jones said the settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing. No, of course not.<\/p>\n * Fox News got caught this week fiddling with Wikipedia pages, editing content<\/a> that didn’t fit with the partisan network’s political agenda. Not surprisingly, Fox News then ran a segment last night blasting Wikipedia’s reliability<\/a> because some people manipulate the online encyclopedia due to “self-serving agendas.” The irony was rich.<\/p>\n * Before the report the White House is writing for Gen. Petraeus is turned over to Congress next month, the public is already skeptical<\/a>. CNN reports, “A majority of Americans don’t trust the upcoming report by the Army’s top commander in Iraq on the progress of the war and even if they did, it wouldn’t change their mind, according to a new poll…. 53 percent of people polled said they suspect that the military assessment of the situation will try to make it sound better than it actually is.”<\/p>\n * A South Carolina small supplies shipping company exploited an automated shipping system to charge the Pentagon $1 million to ship two 19-cent washers<\/a>. The system was designed to make it easier to quickly get supplied to U.S. troops, but Charlene Corley, the owner of C&D Distributors LLC, decided to try to exploit the system. She pleaded guilty yesterday to wire fraud and money laundering.<\/p>\n * If there’s a bigger hack in public life than Sean Hannity<\/a>, he or she is hiding well.<\/p>\n * Thanks to several alert readers, I now have a clear understanding of the president’s position on brain-eating zombies<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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\n* Donald Rumsfeld wants to write a book. Publishers don’t seem to care<\/a>.<\/p>\n