Unqualified Offerings

Because that Chrenkoff guy stopped blogging. This is big:
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s new prime minister announced an agreement Monday by nine political parties to dissolve their militias . . .
Previous attempts to abolish the militias failed, but the current drive may have a better chance of succeeding because of the reintegration plan for the [...]

Big train explosion in Northwest Iran, the Kurdish region. Wasn’t someone keeping track of these sorts of things a few months ago, and weren’t here rather a lot of them?

Kevin Drum wonders. I dunno. But I suspect the anti-Jafaari campaign reflects as much as anything the American obsession with personality over structure. See Hussein, Saddam; Uday-n-Qusay; Baby Sadr; Zarqawi, Abu-Musab al-. Nobody’s called Jafaari “worse than Hitler” yet, so he’s strictly a junior-grade supervillain, but the same contest of ethnic and sectarian elites supported [...]

The Best and the Brightest Mark II edge closer to bombing Iran. Arnaud de Borchgrave lays out the possible consequences:
Most of Iran’s secret nuclear installations are not only underground, but also close to population centers. The first pictures of a B-2 raid would be dead women and children on al-Jazeera television newscasts, now as globally [...]

Tom Delay is, as the new euphemism may have it, “moving to Alexandria.” If you had to personify the betrayal of libertarian hopes for the so-called “Republican revolution,” Tom Delay would be the guy.
You can’t really personify it, though. It probably comes down to demographics, specifically, Pew’s “Enterprisers.”
For all their similarities on income and education, [...]

“Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the reverse.”
– Old Russian Joke
When the President spoke at Whitehall in London, he talked about 60 years of trying to buy stability at the expense of freedom, and getting neither. Now we are attempting the reverse . . .
– Condoleezza Rice (mostly)