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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Get this. USNews&WorldReport.com, the website, the link here says: Bulletin. “The US News political bulletin has learned Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly concerned that President Bush will order air strikes against targets in Iran in the next few months or even weeks. They cite as evidence the tough warnings from senior administration officials, including the commander-in-chief that Iranian help for insurgents in Iraq is leading to the death of US troops and Iraqi civilians. Democrat insiders tell the political bulletin here at US News that they suspect Bush will order the bombing of Iranian supply routes,...

SAMAWA: A grave containing the bodies of 200-250 Kurdish prisoners has been found in the deserted province of Muthanna near the border with Saudi Arabia, a provincial official said on Thursday. Amin Mohammed Amin said the grave was found west of the town of Salman after tip-offs from inhabitants of the sparsely populated region. A five-member commission has been set up to verify the find and exhume the bodies from mass grave, located less than a kilometre from a former detention camp. The corpses of between 200 and 250 prisoners held by the former regime of Saddam Hussein had been...

Given America’s bitter experience in Iraq, one would think that President Bush could finally figure out that threats and brute force aren’t a substitute for a reasoned strategy. But Mr. Bush is at it again, this time trying to bully Iran into stopping its meddling inside Iraq. We have no doubt about Iran’s malign intent, just as we have no doubt that Mr. Bush’s serial failures in Iraq have made it far easier for Tehran to sow chaos there and spread its influence in the wider region. But more threats and posturing are unlikely to get Iran to back down....

Let us contemplate some wisdom from a media ethics expert quoted by The New York Times this week: "To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. 'If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,' said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts." No, he wasn't talking about the Associated Press' (and the Washington Post's and the Los Angeles Times' and the New York Times') anonymous stringers relying on unnamed and unreliable sources reporting...

Skip the boring bulk of Public Editor Byron Calame's latest innocuous, inside-baseball column and skip straight to the brief shirt-tail, "Drawing a Line." Apparently some liberal Times readers complained that Times military reporter Michael Gordon had the bad taste to go on the PBS talk show"Charlie Rose" January 8 and say he wanted the United States to win the war in Iraq. Calame: "Times editors have carefully made clear their disapproval of the expression of a personal opinion about Iraq on national television by the paper’s chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon. "The rumored military buildup in Iraq was a hot...

Michael Moynihan, a friend of mine who works at the Swedish think tank Timbro, sends along this item: A story you might be interested in: The New York Times published an editorial a week or so ago by Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek ostensibly on the Saddam execution. It was a typically muddled affair, pieced together from earlier Zizek screeds. But it seems that the Times (and the IHT, whose op-ed editor Serge Schmemann told me that he hadn’t seen the original) edited out Zizek’s final sentence, which was published unexpurgated in both Sweden (Aftonbladet) and Spain (El Pais). And what...

Anonymous blabbers and their stenographers at the NYTimes are at it again: The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday. The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s...