I have my rare afternoon to myself and I spent the first part of it running around doing errands. As an extra bonus I got the all-too-rare treat of listening to the news, and you know: maybe I just shouldn’t any more.

The show was “The World” on NPR, which they tell us approximately every 2 and a half seconds is a co-production of the BBC and PRI. And within ten minutes I heard one story talking about Fallujah in which the reporter attributed the uprising to (I paraphrase, but this is pretty much the list): Saddam supporters, Islamic terrorists, malcontents, and common criminals.

The anchor then asked what the normal citizens of Fallujah, who support the Americans, are doing. I mean, you know: it’s a total given, right?

Jon Stewart put it the best way last night: “Pockets of resistance? Right now we’d settle for pockets of acceptance.”

The next story was about the kidnapping of three Japanese in Iraq, during which the British reporter, discussing Japan’s national reaction to this crisis, described Japan as a nation unfamiliar with the turmoil of warfare. (Again, not an exact quote. But close.)

And my first reaction was: are you fucking out of your mind?

Now, I do not doubt for a second that modern Japan is sincerely pacifist and is not the militaristic, belligerent nation of the past. But give me a fucking break. If he’d said “all too familiar with” I would have said, Yup, yup. If he’d made some allusion to how much Japan has changed in the past 60 years, I’d be right there with him.

But this nonsense?

This is news for people who have zero historical knowledge. This is news for idiots.

Do yourself a favor. Get your news from a variety of blogs. Here are my top five must-checks every day:

1. Billmon
2. Talking Points Memo
3. Political Animal
4. Atrios
5. Orcinus

The best thing, of course, that blogs add is analysis. The trick is to find blogs by informed people who have a memory longer than the last commercial break. And who don’t say stupid things like how resisters to an occupation in their own country must of course be Islamic terrorists and common criminals.

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Billmon has a typically lucid and brilliant analysis of why I think lefty blogs are more on point than righty ones.

Drove to the market today (Cosentino’s Vegetable Haven on Bascom) when I came across this charming poster:

A Clear Channel poster on a Clear Channel billboard. In case you’re wondering: this is propaganda. It is simultaneously political and commercial propaganda.

What does the sign say? Let’s see: “Working to give local heroes a voice, a stage and a victory.” What does that mean? Nothing, of course. How are they working? And what are they working to do? What are “local heroes”? I know what I’m supposed to think they are, but what specifically does Clear Channel mean?

I definitely like the rhythm of “a voice, a stage and a victory.” Again, totally meaningless, unless you start asking: a victory over what? (Actually, the “victory” thing is definitely the most disturbing tidbit on the poster.) And the first people who go to their local Clear Channel station insisting that they get to use their voice and their stage will be met by the radio engineer, whose sole job is to play whatever signal Clear Channel beams to their “local” broadcast.

The United States as the only landmass on a heart-shaped globe. How many ideas does this single image get across? The heart, indicating warm fuzzies and other soft emotions: check. The United States as sole inhabitant of planet: check.

“Clear Channel cares.” Now, anybody who believes Clear Channel cares about anything besides the bottom line is clearly delusional. But that puts the critic in the position of having to say, “No, Clear Channel is a big meanie corporation!”

I discovered Propaganda Critic, which had some relevant things to say on the subject of modern propaganda:

The information revolution has led to information overload, and people are confronted with hundreds of messages each day. Although few studies have looked at this topic, it seems fair to suggest that many people respond to this pressure by processing messages more quickly and, when possible, by taking mental short-cuts.

Propagandists love short-cuts — particularly those which short-circuit rational thought. They encourage this by agitating emotions, by exploiting insecurities, by capitalizing on the ambiguity of language, and by bending the rules of logic. As history shows, they can be quite successful.

If you peruse the articles on the site, you quickly see that this billboard fits Propaganda Critic’s definition of propaganda. Glittering generalities! Euphemisms! Plain folks!

Christ.

If you’re not reading Riverbend, do yourself a favor and start. Anyhow, today she talks about life in Baghdad on the first anniversary of the start of Gulf W. War (as we’ve taken to calling it around our house):

And where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of ‘liberators’ and ‘Free Iraqi Fighters’; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we’ve seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspectionsÂ… journalists are being killed ‘accidentally’ and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.

But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that terrorism isn’t actually the act of creating terror. It isn’t the act of killing innocent people and frightening othersÂ… no, you see, that’s called a ‘liberation’. It doesn’t matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you’re not a terrorist- you’re a liberator.

The war on terror is a jokeÂ… Madrid was proof of that last weekÂ… Iraq is proof of that everyday.

I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don’t.