Dickie's Quickies

Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate on the administration hiring a group to produce "positive" news stories in Iraq (keep in mind, Hitchens supports the war):

It is, anyway, not so much a matter of fooling people as of insulting them. The prostitute journalist is a familiar and well-understood figure in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein's regime made lavish use of the buyability of the regional press. Now we, too, have hired that clapped-out old floozy, Miss Rosie Scenario, and sent her whoring through the streets. If there was one single thing that gave a certain grandeur to the change of regime in Baghdad, it was the reopening of the free press (with the Communist Party's paper the first one back on the streets just after the statue fell) and the profusion of satellite dishes, radio stations, and TV programs. There were some crass exceptions—Paul Bremer's decision to close Muqtada Sadr's paper being one of the stupidest and most calamitous decisions—but in general it was something to be proud of. Now any fool is entitled to say that a free Iraqi paper is a mouthpiece, and any killer is licensed to allege that a free Iraqi reporter is a mercenary. A fine day's work. Someone should be fired for it.

Donald Rumsfeld sounding like he's taking on the work of reporting on the war in Iraq himself. Of course, his stories sound pretty much like Miss Rosie's:

Rumsfeld, speaking at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, delivered a blistering attack on the U.S. media, saying that in the present 24-hour news cycle, events in Iraq can be reported too quickly and without context.

He said there was a "jarring contrast between what the American people are reading and hearing about Iraq and the views of the Iraqi people." The Iraqi people and the U.S. military deployed in the country, he said, were optimistic about the progress of the war there.

And for something completely different, a couple of workers monitoring the CCTV system in England decided to turn their cameras away from boring city streets and buildings in the night and turn them towards something far more to their interests: a woman undressing, bathing, and going to the toilet. The bad news is that these blokes did this and who doesn't believe there are more out there? The good news is that the managers of the system do believe that such idiots exist and they installed a monitoring system on them and that's how these guys were caught.