Unqualified Offerings

You’re on your own!

This was a pretty good episode, much better than the Days of Our Lives promo led me to fear. The one weakness is the decision of screenwriter Michael Taylor and director Edward James Olmos to heavily crosscut between the climactic scenes of the parallel plot threads – they just weren’t parallel enough. Or orthogonal enough. [...]

By Mona
Recently Jim and I have examined two former presidents of the United States — Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower — and how they differed from Bush and his supporters on issues of both the validity of dissent during time of war, as well as peace. It is time to [...]

The story evolves. Now it’s “American helicopters and tanks” that “backed” the Iraqi security forces involved. Still there are supposed to be 250 bodies, “most” of them insurgents or militants or whatever. Interestingly, the force size is now reported to range from 100-600. If it’s the low number, that’s some good shooting to kill 250 [...]

The early reporting on this battle near Najaf today looks pretty implausible. See the Washington Post, the Daily Star and the Boston Herald for starters. I can buy the idea that there were Sunni insurgents gathering to attack Ashura pilgrims in or near Najaf. I can buy the idea that the Iraqi police caught on [...]

This is by Thoreau, not Jim
So, this morning in Sunday school I was telling the first graders about the Prayer of Saint Francis.
One of my students, in response to the parts about “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned” and “Make me an instrument of Your peace” said that the President should stop fighting [...]

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad interviews a Mahdi Army platoon commander about his lucrative kidnapping and killing racket. It’s all good:
“We ask the families of the terrorists for ransom money,” said Fadhel. “And after they pay the ransom we kill them anyway.”
There’s a lot more to the piece, including the Origin of Fadhel. (His family lived in a [...]

Walter in Denver takes on the vicious John Hawkins drug war apologia that Mona linked to earlier.

Jeff Stein writes about the burgeoning yet inconsequential army of “national security undead,” the whistleblowers and critics cut loose from their careers for dissenting on aspects of post-9/11 war and intelligence policy. It’s a good story, whose chief takeaway is that in important respects there is no story:
During the Vietnam war, a single national security [...]

So I kept to my plan of catching the new Heroes on SciFi Channel Friday at 7, since I missed it Monday night while watching 24. This is a workable method anyone without video recording capability can follow to keep up with both series. But . . .
I like Heroes a lot better than 24.
God [...]