Yet another list

* Mike Whitney, Jim Lobe, and David Corn weigh in with -- what do you expect? -- negative takes on Bush's State of the Union address. Plus: Mark Weisbrot on lowering the bar to 2018 and Matthew Yglesias breaks down the Bush plan for social security into "three distinct phases."

* The LA Times notes that Bush's second-term domestic agenda is driven as much by ideology as the hope that dismantling the welfare state will allow the GOP to "achieve an ambitious political goal: Stripping money and voters from the Democratic Party and cementing Republican dominance for years after he leaves office."

* Dave Lindorff revisits Bush's bulge, noting how the NY Times killed the story because of -- get this -- its potential impact on the Presidential election.

* Jack Shafer dons the shrill hat in Slate, asserting that "slogan-chanting is only one small part of an effective propaganda operation. Successful propagandists must also discourage dissenters who might disrupt the party line. And the two best ways to keep people stupid and nodding is by shutting down the information flow and by stiffing the press. At these chores," Shafer contends, George Bush "excels."

* Similarly, the Center for Public Integrity's Charles Lewis asks, "What has happened to the principle that American democracy should be accessible and transparent?"

* Looks like Iyad Allawi, America's favorite thug in Iraq, is going to be out of power pretty soon, making way for Sistani.

* "Influential Sunni Arab leaders of a boycott of last Sunday's elections expressed a new willingness Friday to engage the coming Iraqi government and play a role in writing the constitution, in what may represent a strategic shift in thinking among mainstream anti-occupation groups," reports Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post.

* Despite Condi Rice's soft-pedaling, Kaveh L. Afrasiabi says the demonization campaign against Iran is well under way.

* In the Daily Star, Jonathan Cook observes that the recent controversy over Israel's "land theft" policies raises a fundamental question about Israel's "original mass dispossession of the Palestinians" in 1948, which was subsequently justified by similar legal provisions.

* Is Israel trying to "make the desert bloom" via massive crop dusting projects in the Negev?

* Whither media coverage of Afghanistan? Kim Hart searches in vain for AJR.

* A study in Health Affairs has found that "medical problems contribute to about half of all bankruptcies" in the US, and concludes that the "low rate of medical bankruptcy in Canada suggests that better medical and social insurance could greatly ameliorate this problem in the United States."

* "The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that requires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals," according to the NY Times. See more on the CIA and Nazi War Criminals over at the National Security Archive.

* George H.W. Bush -- "Deep Throat"?

* Anthony Lappé throws his two cents into the ring over the Ward Churchill controversy, to which Joshua Frank responds.