The Pentagon continues its efforts to backtrack from releasing an obviously edited video with audio that sounds like it was taped by Borat in a studio. The debate just gets more and more laughable.

The dispute over whether the tape released by the Pentagon showing the confrontation between five Iranian motorboats and three US ships gets even more absurd.

That’s what the Iranians say. They say the US took video and superimposed audio to it with the menacing threat, “I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes,” but that the threat (and the claimed throwing of small boxes in front of the US Navy ships) didn’t happen.

Noah Shachtman has a post linking to Steven Boylan alerting us that we’re no longer at war with Eastasia.

Digby and Steve Benen are right. Bush’s impending veto of the military spending bill is just weird. It’s weird in that Bush has had months to push a very compliant Congress to write the bill precisely as he wants. And it’s weird because the stated reason for the impending veto doesn’t make any sense.

Now that Bush has alienated Old Europe with his botched release of the NIE, Iran has taken the opportunity to ditch the dollar. Gotta say something for those old Persians–they still know how to play chess better than we do.

Guess what?!?!? John Bolton is an intellectually sloppy and inconsistent man.

The intelligence analysts had to present the intelligence underlying the NIE at a meeting in the Situation Room two weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, Dick Cheney was there, twisting arms again.

A timeline of the drafting of the NIE and related items.

It sure looks like the withdraw of support for a UN statement supporting the Annapolis peace plan relates to the release of the NIE.