Wednesday Stuff

Dr. Frank Newport of The Gallup Poll has some numbers about how we see ourselves versus the rest of the world (hint: the numbers are trending the wrong way)...



...and I think it's because we all know this is what's going on in our name in Iraq (some of these pics are intense; maybe we should be more mindful of all this as we approach the five-year anniversary of the beginning of the war, not digesting so easily the claptrap spoon fed to us by our media and the generals who don't want us to see this while they chant, "the surge is working, the surge is working"...and this is a good post from Will Bunch in a related vein).