Mid day round up

Here goes:

• Sen. Pat Roberts is still stone-walling an investigation of pre-war intelligence claims, with the section on the administration's public proclamations on intelligence versus the intelligence they were presented with in private not looking like it will be done before the November elections. Imagine that.
• The New York Times has done a profile on the Dobrich family that was run out of town after they challenged the local school district's habit of religious coercion. Notes and Comments has parsed the town's inverted sense of "religious freedom."
• Quote of the day: "My politics are pretty simple. Killing people is bad. Killing civilians is worse. Killing children is an obscenity—whether it's the Katyusha rockets that killed two kids playing in their yard in Nazareth or the 6-year-old girl killed in her house in Shajiya." - Scout Tufankjian
• "Israeli justice minister Haim Ramon announced on Israeli army radio Thursday that 'all those in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah,'" reports IPS
• Following from the above, an Israeli air strike on a southern village in Lebanon Sunday night killed 56 people, including 34 children, aka "terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah"
  
• "Environmentalists are warning of widespread and lasting damage" as a result of the air strikes in Lebanon which caused approximately 25,000 tons of oil to spill into the Medditeranean and other environmental degredations.
• Media Channel has its own round up of recent news stories that haven't managed to garner much attention. All stories that deserve some consideration.
  
• MoJo blogger Clara Jeffery on Iraq reconstruction overcosts being withheld from Congress.
• Human Rights Watch has done an informative (and balanced) Q & A on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Pay particular attention to this answer regarding Hezbollah's use of civilians as human shields and attacks on urban areas.