Unqualified Offerings

By Mona

Having learned nothing from the left’s Bush Derangement Syndrome, the conservative movement’s big talkers spent the days before Super Tuesday indulging in a fiery display of McCain Derangement Syndrome.

That and the rest of Bill Kristol’s latest effluvium in The Weekly Standard are not worth noting, much less dissecting, except to [...]

Paul Rogers of Free Bad Company Open Democracy on plans for America’s permanent colony in Iraq. The piece has been widely linked; I’ll offer a different excerpt than most people are using:
Perhaps the clearest indicator of where power in Iraq is intended to lie is the attempt to impose or extend wide-ranging exemptions for non-Iraqis [...]

One has to hope that Bin Laden and Mullah Omar are enjoying “refuge in Pakistan’s western tribal areas.” If they are, then at least American intelligence has a vague idea of their location. Otherwise they’re somewhere on Earth and the country’s intelligence professionals have no clue. Which is very far from impossible.

A little bit of pronunciation pedantry in the entry title, a link to Steamy Kitchen’s instructions for making your own hearty Vietnamese noodle soup in the body text. But – the recipe looks involved enough to half convince me that the standard six bucks or so a bowl price at the DC Metro area’s many [...]

By Thoreau
As is being discussed downblog, many Americans feel that security concerns trump the human rights of non-citizens.  I’ve even heard some argue that Americans who cast their lot with a foreign organization cannot enjoy the same rights as Americans, because their activities are connected to groups in foreign lands outside the range of US [...]

Diana sent me the artist or ape test. I got five of six. One of the ape pictures I guessed was by an artist. I still like that one quite a bit. The other ape pictures are, to my eye, noticeably inferior to the artist pictures. I bet the apes can’t play Chess960 either.

Document the flavors of insanity in this advisory by a creepy “public-private partnership” you didn’t know existed. Go on, people: I have faith in you.
Ultimately via Libby.

Current front page “actual” (all variants) count: 9
Jim – 6
Mona – 1
Thoreau – 1
Quoted Justin Logan – 1
Count specifically for “actually”: 3
Jim – 1
Thoreau – 1
Quoted Justin Logan – 1
I’m pretty sure this represents an improvement . . .

Dowblog in Mona’s most recent FISA thread, Robert comments
Almost no one cares about the privacy of people who live outside the USA (as I do).
So, yeah. Everyone* agrees that FISA needs reform because of a loophole that keeps the NSA et al from eavesdropping on a certain class of calls between two foreigners – calls [...]

Two genuinely good items from the Cato blog. Benjamin H. Friedman on “Our Big, Fat Defense Budget.” Every word is worth reading, so I’ll just excerpt a piece of it:
The worst thing about the budget is that it is bipartisan. No one influential complains. Congressional Republicans on the defense committees are either for it or [...]