New R.E.M. video

R.E.M. has created a faux news site at MORNING TEAM.com and you can get their latest video from there. Anderson Cooper interviewed Michael Stipe several weeks ago and premiered the video where, for the length of the video you could get not one, not two, but three (and I think even four at one point) news crawls of varying speeds and sizes running along the screen. I think the only thing I've seen more eye-boggling has been when one of the official news organs (cnn, fox, etc) runs an Al-Jazeera feed in a window of their own feed, so you end up with a left-to-right crawl from Al-Jazeera conflicting with the right-to-left crawls on the western networks.

It's been two years already, can we retire the constant crawls? Even CNNfn has swiched to what I'll call a market odometer, away from the stock quote crawl (which used to be normal and expected on financial newscasts).

salon: Report links Iraq deals to Bush donations

Gee, how surprising is this: Report links Iraq deals to Bush donations: Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.

The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president's 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.
The report was released by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based research organization that produces investigative articles on special interests and ethics in government. Its staff includes journalists and researchers. The Center concluded that most of the 10 largest contracts went to companies that employed former high-ranking government officials, or executives with close ties to members of Congress and even the agencies awarding their contracts.

More...