Unqualified Offerings

By Mona

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America.

Ward Churchill said that, right? Wrong; it was a wingnut named Stu Bykofsky in the Philadelphia Daily News longing for another 9/11. And not only that, others on the right think it is a peachy keen aspiration. As Tim [...]

By Thoreau
UO Con was fun. We had about a dozen people in attendance last night. I’m bad with names, so no doubt I’ll leave out a few, but attendees included me, my wife, Jim, Jim’s neighbor, commenter Matthew Hogan, commenter KC in DC, commenter William Burns, Reason editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie, and Reason writer [...]

Huckabeemania! Ron Paul places a distant fifth. Honestly, I don’t know what the point of building up a $2m cash hoard is if you’re not going to blow a hundred grand or two on one of the few events you really can buy.
Do Duncan Hunter and Tommy Thompson bail now?

Charles Simic blows. I say that as someone who likes his buddy Mark Strand pretty well. But there’s something cloying and fake about Simic’s faux folktales that doesn’t mar Strand’s best work. When I tried to read Simic a decade ago I got too annoyed and stopped. Now, he can’t be a more embarrassing choice [...]

By Thoreau
America is, of course, the standard to which all the rest of the world aspires.  Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, seeing the high standard of security that the US government assures to all of its citizens, has signed his own East Germany Restoration Act:
Human rights lawyer Otto Saki  told VOA that the law interferes and [...]

For the record, I doubt The SurgeTM is “working.” I’m not just talking about “lack of political progress” shading into outright political disintegration. Cernig has the best roundup and gloss of several important recent pieces on that issue. Read it and follow the links. I’m talking about claims that the “military” component of the Surge [...]

Peter Guralnik writes about Elvis Presley’s racial attitudes.

The Big Here, from Kevin Kelly. (”What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you?”) Via Unfogged. I’m livequizzing it without using Google to find answers. Feel the excitement!
1) POINT NORTH.
Done. You’ll have to trust me on this.
2) WHAT TIME IS SUNSET TODAY?
Ooh, just after 8pm, I think. 8:09pm says the [...]

The Iraq War Czar breaks his silence to call for the country to “certainly consider” a military draft.
“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” said Lute, who is [...]

In a pretty good essay on people confessing that they supported the Iraq War for gob-smackingly stupid reasons, Hilzoy oversimplifies the story of the American intervention in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Excerpt 1:
For that matter, sending US Marines into Lebanon in the hopes that their mere presence would deter violence, and without any serious [...]