Unqualified Offerings

We’ll have attained the ultmate in jingo decadence when hawks adduce “the brutal imprisonment and torture of innocent Canadian software engineer Maher Arar” as proof of the need to overthrow “the odious Syrian regime of Bashar Assad.”
Via Inactivist.

Wow. The Pentagon has started classifying the “insurgent attacks” numbers that have been tracked by Brookings and GAO since the end of Really Freaking Major Combat Operations in 2003, the ones that show the seasonal ratcheting increase in insurgent violence over the last three years. This is going to totally hose the Big Sekrit Projekt [...]

Failing to title his post about Ralph Nader’s intervention in the great NBA ball dispute “You Have Nothing to Lose But Your GOLD Chains” shows why Kevin Drum will never be a serious contender in the blog-entry titling wars. You can’t let the easy ones get away.

AP reports that the Pentagon is moving a 3500-troop combat brigade to Kuwait en route to Iraq, according to Baghdad police captain Jamil Hussein. Hey, kidding about that last part! The government is still mulling ways to scrounge up to 20-30,000 troops to add to the existing forces.
As a reminder, the winter months are when [...]

The Economist is having nothing of Pinochet revisionism:
Most dictators are economic bunglers. A few get the economy right, as Spain’s Franco did after 1958. But in the long run (as China is likely to discover) economic liberty seldom thrives in the absence of political liberty. And General Pinochet’s claim to have stood selflessly for the [...]