"I have good news and bad news for you . . ."

The good news is that the Dow is up and OCP* is down -
The headline from Tom Paine reads: "Why am I not doing backflips over the Dow?" My sentiments exactly. I have a small tax deferred annuity, but stock market gains do not impact that bottom line as much as a rise in interest rates does.
The Financial Times headline signals *Our Current President's status in rather stark words: "Bush sidelined as defeat looms." 'Nuff said. As a matter of fact, I am cautiously optimistic that a number of Republicans will be watching from the sidelines come November 8. We can only hope.

The current bad news is "badder," as reported from foreign news sources than from our usually sanitized MSM - Because this media can prove to be more reliable, I tend locate news sources from abroad at the top of my "feeds" list.
From the BBC - The headline reads: "Search for the least worst option in Iraq" Analysis By Paul Reynolds, World affairs correspondent, on the BBC News website. An exerpt follows:

A "helluva mess" is how the former US Secretary of State James Baker is said to have described the state of Iraq - and the search is on for the least-worst option for US policy makers.
One idea is to break up the state of Iraq itself.
Mr Baker's own informal bi-partisan Iraq Study Group - requested by Congress and endorsed by President Bush - is unlikely to go down that path, however.

From the FT - The headline reads: "US army concedes failure in Baghdad" By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Steve Negus, Iraq Correspondent. Published: October 19 2006 by the Financial Times. Quoting from the story:

American and Iraqi efforts to improve security in Baghdad have failed to reduce bloodshed in the increasingly violent Iraqi capital, the senior US military spokesman in Iraq acknowledged on Thursday.
In an uncharacteristically gloomy admission, Major General William Caldwell said the recent surge in violence was “disheartening”. He said US and Iraqi forces would have to “refocus” security measures. The review was demanded by General George Casey, who commands the 140,000 US troops in Iraq.
Gen Caldwell did not specify how security methods might be refocused, but the unusually grim assessment seems in part intended to put pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take political steps that US officers have long said need to accompany military operations.

From Aljazeera - The headline reads: "Grim month for US in Iraq" Thursday 19 October 2006. To quote from the story,

The US military has reported the deaths of 10 soldiers in Iraq, raising to 68 the number of US troops killed in Iraq this month, while the Iraqi prime minister has held meetings with two influential Shia figures in an effort to build political consensus.
. . . Against this backdrop of rising US and Iraqi fatalities, Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, on Wednesday consulted Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shia cleric, and the Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr in a bid to enlist support for his government's efforts to build political consensus and tackle widening sectarian violence.
"I came [to see al-Sistani] so that the security and political situation can be stabilised, allowing the government to turn its attention to reconstruction," al-Maliki said after his meeting with al-Sistani in the city of Najaf.
Al-Maliki, whose more than four months in office have seen a marked deterioration in security, also sought to project the independence of his government from perceived US influence.

The three sources cited today are very different from each other. The BBC and FT from the United Kingdom, and Aljazeera from Doha, Qatar, often present contrasting perspectives with even the best of US papers. (The NYT and WaPo are also on my feeds list). I sometimes worry that Americans are somehow being "protected" from bad news, as if we are all children.

Tags: Bush iraq republicans current affairs media news and politics news journalism
My "creative post" today at Southwest Blogger is about zoo news.