By PAUL KRUGMAN

Just in case, the right is already explaining away President Bush's defeat: it's all the fault of the "liberal media," particularly The New York Times, which, so the conspiracy theory goes, deliberately timed its report on the looted Al Qaqaa explosives - a report all the more dastardly because it was true - for the week before the election.

It's remarkable that the right-wingers who dominate cable news and talk radio are still complaining about a liberal stranglehold over the media. But, that absurdity aside, they're missing a crucial point: Al Qaqaa is hardly the only tale ...   more »

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After a technical analysis, the CIA cannot determine whether a videotape obtained by ABC News in Pakistan featuring a man claiming to be affiliated with al Qaeda is authentic, a U.S. intelligence official said Thursday.

"We have been unable to verify the tape's authenticity," the official said…

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In falsely accusing Senator John Kerry of denigrating American troops, it is in fact conservatives themselves -- including one of Bush-Cheney '04's most vocal campaigners -- who are suggesting that soldiers on the ground are responsible for explosives going missing in Iraq. On FOX News Channel, both Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and conservative radio host Laura Ingraham claimed that it was the soldiers -- not President George W. Bush -- who decided not to search for the explosives. And on NBC's Today, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, an active Bush campaigner, placed the "actual responsibility" ...   more »

(First it was fake tukeys. Now, it's fake soldiers!)

INDIANOLA, Iowa - President Bush's campaign acknowledged Thursday that it had doctored a photograph used in a television commercial to remove the president and the podium where he was standing. The campaign said the ad will be re-edited and reshipped to TV stations.

Fri Oct 29, 3:03 AM ET

By EMMA ROSS, AP Medical Writer

LONDON - Researchers have estimated that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis — many of them women and children — died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq than would have been expected otherwise, based on the death rate before the war.

Writing in the British-based medical journal The Lancet, the American and Iraqi researchers concluded that violence accounted for most of the extra deaths and that airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition were a major factor…

The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data ...   more »