Cursor's Media Patrol - 09/22/05

As Cindy Sheehan reaches Washington, and activists prepare to encircle the White House, Danny Schechter asks, "Where is the march on the media?"

Given current Pentagon accounting practices, "neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing," according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, and "a leader in online philanthropy" teams with USAID in 'PayPal-ing the War.'

A Pentagon Web site has removed a document which discusses scenarios for preemptive use of nuclear weapons.

"Our dirty little secret" Basra is said to have "become like Tehran, where morals are enforced not by family but by religious militias," and an Iraqi diplomat says that "This is our greatest fear, that the religious people will take over Iraq."

The focus of "outer-circle cronyism" is described as being not so much on "handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates--that is, to one's own cronies. It's on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, which increases the scale of the cronyism exponentially."