Unqualified Offerings

So, were the ad agencies not even trying this year?
Also, I got the impression that Prince’s halftime show was pretty good, but only an impression: I watched the first half of the game at a house party with a healthy population of young, loud children. I figure YouTube will have the answer soon.

That was the most effed up Super Bowl ever. Maybe the iron law is, any Super Bowl with the Colts in will suck. (Super Bowl III was a landmark game, but boring. Super Bowl V was an ineptly played cliffhanger. This game – fah.) I won’t claim that this game was as badly played as [...]

By Mona
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The milblogs are having fits about William Arkin’s piece in WaPo arguing that the American military is made up of “mercenaries.” A blogger at Daily Kos, former Captain Kevin O’Meara, has affirmed that characterization, which really honks off BlackFive, who apparently served with O’Meara and alleges:

I guess no one is allowed [...]

I’m tempted to say it’s obvious that none of Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards will be the Democratic Presidential nominee, but I suppose it could happen. And I admit I don’t like any of them. Last time around, Yglesias said I was nuts to buy the sitting senators can’t win the Presidency “myth,” [...]

Kevin Drum calls The Weekly Standard “the magazine that provides the intellectual superstructure for hawkish neoconservatism,” but that’s not really true. The Standard provides an emotional superstructure, but it could care less about intellect. Any such thing happens by accident in passing. At various times, Commentary, The New Criterion and The American Scholar have provided [...]

by Thoreau
This morning’s Washington Post has an interesting article on people who were right in their predictions about Iraq before it happened.  The article subjects include a member of Congress, think tank folks, retired public officials, and some retired generals.  Interesting stuff, too bad they relegated it to the “Style” section instead of, oh, I [...]

by Thoreau
The latest Economist has an interesting article on the general topic of Shia vs. Sunni tensions. It covers lots of things, I’ll just bring out three interesting tidbits:
Shias say that last month’s attacks by vandals in the American city of Detroit on two Shia community centres and some Shia-owned businesses were sectarian.
I had [...]

by Thoreau
Paraphrasing what John Edwards just said on “Meet the Press”:
The Iranian government has done some bad things in Iraq, but they have been very supportive of the Iraqi government.
Now, I’m all in favor of holding talks with Iran for all sorts of reasons, but, please. Don’t pretend that Iranian support for the Iraqi [...]

I got hold of a press release from Dar al-Iftaa saying that the Mufti was not in fact against women being president. The fatwa in fact referred only to barring women from being caliphs — which is hardly relevant to modern politics. Or at least, if the Caliphate is ever restored, whether women can hold [...]