Iraq: The "tubes". They clearly were NOT for gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. The US Department of Energy knew this. But Secretary Rice kept saying that the tubes were evidence of efforts at uranium separation. In fact, as eventually did come out in the media, the tubes were to be bodies of crude rockets. Then W said "tubes" in his big speech. The media didn't clarify the situation and loudly call BS.

The uranium from Niger was maybe not real after all but even if real likely not very important: As I recall, that uranium chemical is a standard industrial item. E.g., one use of uranium is to color plastic lenses for cars or some such. Getting uranium is not so tough; enriching it enough for a bomb is. Running a uranium reactor is not so tough; getting the plutonium, 239 as I recall, and don't want 240 or some such, is tougher. Then to separate the plutonium, use just chemical means. Then to compress it enough to have a critical mass is tricky and likely needs some testing, and tests are now essentially impossible to hide.

The media should have helped make it clear that the evidence that Saddam was close to any very serious WMDs was very thin stuff.

W invaded Iraq on very thin stuff. The media should have made that fact very clear to the voters.

Okay, maybe we should have dumped Saddam. Maybe. I would have tried making him an offer he couldn't refuse, but maybe we're not supposed to do that. So, maybe we should have dumped him.

Getting to Baghdad took, what, 23 days? Then the big mistake started: Bremer decided to do 'nation building'. And his first step was to fire the Iraqi army -- dumb, dumb, dumb. Nearly every common thug criminal, gang leader, organized crime leader, terrorist leader, out of work soldier, Shiite leader, Sunni leader, Kurdish leader, Iranian politician, etc. saw how dumb it was and took advantage. Nearly the only one in Iraq who didn't 'get it' was Bremer.

Our media didn't keep us informed.

On China, it's simple: Our media didn't keep us informed. We still don't know the actual flows. First cut we need to know the flows.

Sometimes the media is silent; sometimes they pay attention to an important topic but make a mess, out of bias or just sloppy work; often they assume that the audience wouldn't want to know; usually it's just a lot cheaper to do sloppy reporting. Whatever, we're, net, getting the mushroom treatment from the media -- keep us in the dark and feed us BS.

Actually likely and apparently quite a lot of quite solid information is available. Likely a lot of it is on the Internet. I keep looking and hoping to find good sources although finding them is not my full time job.

I upchuck at FOX, NYT, LAT, WaPo, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and about everything else I can find. Law, medicine, engineering, etc. -- in none of these do we try to get by with the mushroom treatment we get from the media. If an airplane were designed with the information quality of the media, then it'd never get off the ground which, net, would be a good thing.

My concern is not partisanship but stupidity.

As voting citizens, we need solid information. With solid information, there's no way we'd be in the mess of The Great Recession or two wars each 10 years old.