Unqualified Offerings

Because it fits! At popular deadender blog “The Jawa Report,” Rusty Shackleford reacts to a new video appearing on Islamic extremist websites:
I’m listening to the audio now. Starts out with sirens, gunshots, and panicked people screaming. There is a voice over in Arabic. Very menacing. Not at all like the usual. There’s shouting and screaming, [...]

Comes from Tim F. of Balloon Juice, in a Thoreau-like entry on America’s First Family of Goalpost-Shifting:
Scientifically speaking, happy-talk surge boosters like Kagan rank somewhere between the disappointing undergraduate assistant whom you mostly try to prevent from injuring himself, and a beaker.
That’s all I got tonight. Work, month-end close, you know the usual first-week excuses.

Kerry Howley, who has lived and worked in Myanmar, takes Laura Bush to task for the usual: hubris and narcissism in the guise of humanitarian concern.
Bush:
The Burmese I’ve met, they want our affection.
Howley:
Are they puppies? The Burmese I’ve met want to not live under a thuggish dictatorship, and seem pretty unconcerned with the amount of [...]

By Thoreau
A commenter at Kung Fu Monkey wrote:
I’m stealing this comment from another blog, but in the last hour of his presidency Bush pardons Cheney and promptly resigns. President Cheney returns the favor.
Yep.  I can see it happening.

By Thoreau
We have all engaged in much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the awfulness of our government and its deeds. Yet I remain unashamedly pro-American. We may refer to “postmortem America”, but in doing so we refer only to our government. The American people, as people, remain great innovators and achievers [...]

The Human Rights Watch Syria page. It’s not the Yezhovschina, but it ain’t Denmark neither. And it’s certainly the kind of state that the Beltway Consensus told us needed an example of reform “in the heart of the Arab world” to inspire its freedomization. Instead, it’s a refuge for the victims of our stewardship.

Thoreau e-mails to confirm his safe arrival at his new Southern California home.

Strangely, today feels very much like yesterday. Even though Fred Thompson is now officially in the Republican presidential race.

By Thoreau
I see that Jim posted some approving remarks about a post I made about shame. The problem is that I don’t recall any posts on the specific topic of shame. But I did have some thoughts in mind today about the parties and shame, coincidentally, and I offer them here:
It is often [...]