Unqualified Offerings

Somehow, wow.
I’d love to know the first time someone used a smiley insincerely, actually. Anyone want to cop to it?

Talk Like a Pirate Day comes round again, tomorrow. You might think I’d lard this blog post with piraticisms, but that would be premature: let’s wait until General Petraeus talks like a pirate on September 19.
Do I have my holidays straight?

By Mona
.
Greg Djerejian has it down how Lugar States The Obvious.

More people watched the Democratic responses to the President’s speech last week than watched the speech itself. I figure most everybody has long since tuned the President out, despite the fantasies of the political class. And there was little suspense about what the President would say. On the other hand, the off-again, on-again Democratic leadership [...]

ogged gets to the nub of it:
But the firing on civilians is presented as part of Blackwater’s incompetence or callousness, and not linked back to Iraqi resentment. It seems like a minor point, but I think that this is precisely how impressions are formed: Iraqis are resentful of speeding motorcades yadda Iraq is very dangerous [...]

Daniel Davies calls bullshit on the story I linked to last week about movements in the Iraqi bond market as a referendum on the Dribble.

Senate votes on the habeas corpus restoration act tomorrow. Call them.

Rhapsody has the deluxe-edition reissue of Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True and I thought I’d start by listening to the included early live concert disc. Clicked the button and the opening bars of “Welcome to the Working Week” pour, for the thousanth time in thirty years, from the speakers. No problem – I will [...]

Because I’m switching computers for the evening. Absolutely everything below comes unvetted and largely unread:
* Dave Schuler on a history of the expansion federal power
* The other thing, besides grunge, going on in the early 1990s
*  Schumpeter-Galbraith Fight!
*  The Wikipedia talk page on a yesterday’s widely distributed quote attributed to Ayn Rand on takin’ land [...]

The seawater, it burns!
Via Crash Landing.