Unqualified Offerings

Mark Danner’s new essay review in the New York Review of Books is close to the most comprehensive account of how the Bush Administration made a iatrogenic disaster in Iraq that I have read. It overlooks the extent to which the United States early became hostage to the wishes of Iraq’s local and sudden-blooming Shiite [...]

James Joyner discovers the anti-immigrant movement pulling numbers out its butt.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bcc’s the world on a missive nominally to the American people. Since the plain fact is that Ahmadinejad is mistaken when he declares that, just like Iranians, Americans “are aggrieved by the ever-worsening pain and misery of the Palestinian people” and since the God talk in this letter is marginally less people-of-the-book generic [...]

Chris Allbritton mentions that Lebanon could go completely to shit be Friday afternoon.
And there’s a no-prize for getting the title reference of this blog entry.

Fairfax County Virginia moves to protect the homeless from food.

Coincidentally I spent the afternoon seeing Borat and come home to find that Jesse Walker just posted my take on the movie:
Maybe Borat isn’t a particularly political film after all. Maybe it’s the world’s crudest comedy of manners . . . Borat is a movie in which a man at a formal dinner can hand [...]

I’m test-driving last.fm. As an experiment, I listened for an hour to the station it served up when I entered “Julie Miller” as my favorite artist, and another hour to the station it produced when I entered “Buddy Miller” as my favorite artist. Interestingly, the first station was almost exclusively female alt-country performers. The latter [...]

Good essay by Diane McWhorter on unmentionable comparisons. Conclusion:
So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy [...]

Eric Martin takes the undeclared Unqualified Offerings-American Footprints blog-titling competition to outrageous levels. I am in awe. But we will retaliate at a time and place of our own choosing.

Arnaud de Borchgrave writes about Iranian willingness to help America exit Iraq with a modicum of grace. (Via Hit & Run.)
Meanwhile the Note has a breaking news banner declaring that Baby Sadr “TEMPORARILY SUSPENDS ALL DEALINGS WITH IRAQI CABINET AND GOVERNMENT.”
Devel-uh, you know.