Unqualified Offerings

Talk about your flypaper:
WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) – Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said he would like to have U.S. military bases in his country for an extended period to prevent foreign interference in Iraq, the Washington Post said on Monday.
Talabani was asked in an interview in New York last week if U.S. bases would be [...]

From this morning’s Baltimore Sun . . .
Silver Spring resident James Henley, 45, is a Libertarian who said he planned to vote for Cardin to balance power in Washington. It’s nothing personal against Steele, he said.”
At the national level, the Republican Party has become such a repugnant institution that I would like to take as [...]

Dean Karnazes has a cold. He’s up to eight marathons. I really wonder if he can do the fifty. No rest days; daily bus or plane travel. It’s both wearying and immune-system compromising. Intense endurance training appears to somewhat weaken resistance to upper respiratory-tract infections. Daily 26-mile runs with no recovery days certainly counts as [...]

Redskins rolled over the Texans today, in a game that counts as a great relief. Mark Brunell set an NFL record by completing 22 “passes” in a row – they say the ball has to travel forward, but they don’t say how far. The actually pretty good announcing team of Sam Rosen and Tim Ryan [...]

Last week I blogged about the NFL’s plans for tomorrow’s pregame entertainment in New Orleans. Perhaps concerned that the announced double-bill of U2 and Green Day wasn’t white enough, the NFL has added the Goo Goo Dolls, who make Green Day look and sound like Parliament-Funkadelic, but they’ve also announced that local legends Irma Thomas [...]

Hesiod appears to have found me one, Jon Tester of Montana, who is challenging Conrad Burns for his Senate seat. Gwen Florio covers their recent debate for the Great Falls Tribune. Excerpt:
When it came to the USA Patriot Act, Burns called it a useful tool, saying it lets law enforcement fight terrorism with the same [...]

I’m pleased to publish the following poem by Frederick Pollack for the first time anywhere.
Scene from an Epic
The King is outraged by a grating noise
that is not the yelps of the mob
besieging the castle, being dispatched
by arrows, boulders, boiling lead
from the battlements, or greeting
new comrades, the usual starvelings
and opportunists from the countryside;
he knows what they [...]

The Senate has made it official: torture is official government policy so long as it meets the strict test of being called something else, said test to be proctored, taken and graded by the President in consultation with . . . the President.
Two days ago Megan McArdle wrote
I do not think it is even remotely [...]

I stole the title of this entry from Gene Healy, in conversation this evening. It looks very likely that Radley Balko has saved Cory Maye’s life. I put it that way on purpose. In fact, it has taken dogged, pro bono legal work by Covington and Burling, the local efforts of the public defender and [...]

Recently we’re getting formal acknowledgement that the last round of “we expect to start drawing down troop levels in Iraq ’soon’ ” talk is not going to come true. CSM:

Currently, about 144,000 US troops are in Iraq, said Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, chief US military spokesman in Iraq, at an operational briefing in Baghdad [...]