Passing on. Ruben Gonzalez, the spirited jazz pianist of Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club, has died at age 84. Ry Cooder called him a "cross between Thelonious Monk and Felix the Cat" and The Beat's Robert Tarte dubbed him "the Lee 'Scratch' Perry of Cuban acoustic music, part nutcase and total certified genius too overwhelmed by his own talent to plow safe performance ruts." Check out his amazing discography here, and hear for yourself.

Is that why W can't find the WMD's? The New York Post oddly juxtaposes the headline "Nukes Missing" (from a story about missing "dirty bombs" in Moldova) with a photo of Bush with two kids from the Nutcracker. Very strange.

Compassionate conservatism? Dick Cheney on a Monday hunting trip personally shot more than 70 pheasants in a 10-person hunting party that killed a total of 417 birds, a count that doesn't include the countless mallards killed. According to The Humane Society, 500 farm-raised pheasants were released into a confined space prior to the visit by Cheney. "This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," a Humane Society representative said. (Via BoingBoing.)

Calling all whistleblowers. California congressman Henry Waxman is making an open call for whistleblowers at the Pentagon, the CIA, and other agencies to spill the beans on the Bush administration for creating false links between al-Qaeda and Iraq's alleged WMDs. In a TomPaine.com report on Waxman's efforts, which includes opportunities for anonymous and on-the-record tips, Robert Dreyfuss also questions whether Israel doctored data to exaggerate Iraq's WMD threat. He writes, "According to informed U.S. sources, a secret intelligence team was set up in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office before the war in Iraq to generate data adding yet more justifications for war—intelligence that Sharon’s office then shared, in English, with [US neocon advisor William] Luti’s OSP [Office of Special Plans]—even though the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, was said to be much more cautious and restrained about the threat to Israel from Iraq."