Friday etc.

The FDA now is checking for contaminated tooth- paste from China, our second biggest toothpaste supplier. Why do we get toothpaste from China -- and Canada? We supposedly can't trust Canada for low-cost prescriptions, but their toothpaste is OK? I'm glad I use Tom's of Maine toothpaste. It's made in Maine.

Red Bank Jazz and Blues Festival begins today! Top bill: Big Bill Morganfield, Muddy Waters' son tomorrow.

African-American voices on the Internet gather in a clearinghouse worth browsing or bookmarking at rsspect.org.

Please excuse my language, but Bob Shrum is a dick. He wastes Time magazine space with his arrogant -- and, no doubt, calculated -- recollections of sad, naive Johnny Edwards getting to know Washington and getting in John Kerry's good graces, only to fail to return Kerry's and Shrum's phone calls after the election. No kidding, Bob? Y'all threw the election in what no educated person can rule out as vote fraud conspiracy, and Elizabeth Edwards was suddenly in intense chemotherapy, and the Edwardses didn't have your sensibilities foremost on their minds? I hope John Edwards kicks DLC (Hillary) ass next year.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog chief warns "new crazies" advocate military action in Iran.

"I wake every morning and see 100 Iraqis, innocent civilians, are dying," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview for BBC Radio. "I have no brief other than to make sure we don't go into another war or that we go crazy into killing each other. You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say 'let's go and bomb Iran.'"

Yipes! and more yipes: Another U.N. report says our unsustainable debt may trigger a "disorderly adjustment and the steep fall of the dollar."

And, journalism professor Mark Danner's speech at the first graduation from the (for real) Department of Rhetoric at USC-Berkeley, “Words in a Time of War,” is a good read.

Those in the “reality-based community” — those such as we — are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.

Let's reverse that course.