Free Mojtaba and Arash Day. From the BBC.

The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers' is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on Tuesday to the "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day". Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.

Ok, I missed it by a day. Sorry.

Democrat Maurice Hinchey has turned an army of right-wing bloggers into a quivering mass of indignation.

More like quivering from laughing.

Hinchey suggested that presidential political mastermind Karl Rove is behind the fake documents that brought down several top executives at CBS. The controversy led to the early retirement of longtime anchor Dan Rather, many believe.

There is more than a little paranoia here. Anything that goes wrong for the Democrats has to have been a plot by Rove.

Rove would have been a fool to have tried something like this. First, who would have thought that it would work? CBS's own authenticators recognized that the documents looked like they had been written in MS Word. If CBS had done a decent job of authentication they would have uncovered major problems and pulled the story. Granted a good con man counts on the victim not looking too close but Mapes and company violated all standards. Would Rove count on that?

And if Rove had planted the documents, there are several ways that it could have blown up in his face. The forgeries were uncovered so quickly because CBS posted them on their web site. What if they hadn't? This is just too convoluted.

And does anyone think that Kerry could have won on this issue? The voters were judging Bush on his four years in office, not on his military record. Kerry was the one running on his time in the military. Bush did not drop in the polls during the brief interval between the CBS story and its unmasking (unless you read conservative blogs, this took 3-11 days depending on your news source) and even if he had, he still had two months to recover.

Reportedly one reason that CBS ran the story is because the White House didn't deny it. I recently realized why they didn't. Bush and company realized that issuing a denial just kept negative stories in the news cycle longer.

Look at Kerry and the Swift Boat Vets. The original ads were barely funded and there was a complete media silence on them (except for blogs) until Kerry started fighting back weeks later. Then the story was suddenly everywhere. Had Kerry ignored then the MSM would have followed his lead and conservative bloggers would still be complaining.

In the meantime, the originator of the story, Bill Burkett, is complaining about how treated him.

But what do they (the Democratic Underground) really think of us?

Welcome to the National Security State, the global arbiter of perpetual war, police state tactics and the militarization of society on all levels. It's a place where the state religion hawks Jesus wearing an Uncle Sam hat, driving a gas guzzling Humvee with little plastic flags attached to the door and a gay couple, recently married in the People's Republic Taxechusettes, dragged behind in chains that are attached to the rear bumper.

The National Meal is a fat laden, high calorie, low nutrition blob of dead, imported cow flesh, made possible courtesy of the patent protected products of Big Pharma and the destruction of the Amazon River Basin. Just the thing to feed the teaming masses of bloated and lethargic teenagers who have not yet found their proper place in the ranks of cannon fodder slated to fight future "preemptive" wars for their Neocon masters.

This goes on and on. I'm not sure that there is a facet of American life that they approve of.