Amd some Americans (maybe Kat among them) are a bit less sanctimonious than stereotyping sometimes suggests. Are we not entitled to smile at two typos so close upon a denial of illiteracy?

In the UK a few nights ago, One of the two biggest mass-audience tv channels in the UK set aside a huge chunk of airtime to show John Pilger's cinema documentary The War on Democracy. Moreover ITV1 considered significant enough to be run with only one commercial break.

I hadn't seen it. The film is VERY hostile to the US and is very much a polemic, but there are plenty of unarguable facts behind the opinions. What came across most strongly was the breathtaking hypocrisy of the admin's utterances and pronouncements about "democracy" and "liberty." How Miami's economy must have suffered when the 2002 coup in Venezuela, by grotesque capitalist gangsters backed by Washington dollars, came to naught.