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.

The Breck girl and the "skinny kid with a funny name"

Every hostess knows the pain of throwing a party and having no one show up. So, boo hoo today for Fox cable television (I refuse to call it "News"), which had to call off its trumpeted Democratic presidential debate in Nevada.

The handsome John Edwards respectfully declined and Barack Obama, who wowwed America at the '04 Democratic convention with his "politics of hope" speech, did not respond to the invitation, but earlier had blown off Fox reporters after that started the Hussein-is-his-middle-name hysteria.

As every teen knows, if you can't get the kul kids to your party, only desperate nerds will come.

So Edwards and Obama outfoxed Fox with a whisper merely by doing what real leaders do -- follow their principles.

I've been studying the phenomenon called Fox since Aussie Rupert Murdoch brought his style of "journalism" here some 20 years ago. And then watch as every dweeb network followed suit to get a piece of the money pie Fox was getting. I'm convinced it's as much the manipulative mouthpiece of the neoconservative branch of the Republican Party as Pravda and Tass were for the USSR's Communist Party. It may be worse, because Pravda didn't compete with real, objective media it could camouflage within.

Which is more offensive, the bigotry or the stupidity?

I didn't want to ring the echo chamber on this latest Ann Coulter dust-up calling Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot," but I'm interested in what Shore readers have to say about it.



Let's be clear on one thing. Degrading terms like faggot are only about hate, bigotry and divisiveness, so save any "thin skin" defense of that word. But I'm sitting here shaking my head and wondering if the sheer stupidity of it isn't worse than the offensive word. I mean, whether you favor Edwards' political views, what's the point of gay-baiting a happily married man who has sired four children with his one-and-only wife, unlike notorious bed-hopping men among those she calls "her people," which includes former Rep. Mark Foley, the boy-page lover his fellow then-majority covered for?

It's not the first time she used gay references to those she calls her "opponents" (a little self-aggrandizing for an alleged pundit, no?). She apparently thinks her base has chips in their brains that dismiss as a nonperson anyone who is homosexual. In August, she said she was willing to bet Sen. Hilary Clinton comes "out of the closet" before the '08 election.

Do card-carrying Republicans really still listen to her? If so, why? What does nonfact-based hate contribute to the public discourse?

Meanwhile, Verizon is among several businesses that now have pulled their advertising from her Web site as a result. Daily Kos reports today. Thank you, Verizon.