Unqualified Offerings

I will likely try to upgrade the UO WordPress installation this weekend from 1.5 to 1.5.2. I’ll save my theme and plugin folders in hopes of being able to put everything back together, but things may go wonky for a bit.

Christmas comes early. What will we get? Maybe even - a pony? I admit that I was just on the edge of too cynical to think that anyone important would ever want to answer the question, “So, uh, who forged the bogus Niger documents anyway?” How sweet to be pulled, however provisionally, back from that […]

Logan finds one level in the Financial Times:
Diplomats and two US officials said the latest review was prompted by the conclusion reached by Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, and others that an effective sanctions option did not exist, and that they had been misled by the predictions of neoconservatives who saw the Iranian regime ripe […]

Gene Healy is your prospector.
The Miers nomination has managed to horrify almost every big-firm or ex-big-firm lawyer in the country. Because we all know/worked for someone just like her. Someone with such a vacuum of an internal life that they’d happily agree to write those insipid bar journal articles and sit on all those friggin’ […]

Matt Welch kicks the shit out of Judith Miller’s pretensions.
UPDATE: I guess it’s “kick the shit out of” night at Unqualified Offerings. Time to find a new phrase.

Is there anything in the world so infuriating as a liberal hawk? Every inch of the globe becomes a monument to his prating shows of “compassion,” which always seems to mean kicking the shit out of someone or other. You can’t get away from them!
God these people make me sick. Let’s cleanse the palate with […]

Our establishment media either don’t do their phony baloney jobs at the time or they lie about it afterward. Pick one of those appealing options:
Martha Raddatz of ABC News:
“I was in the Abu Ghraib neighborhood of the infamous prison, but it’s a Sunni-dominated area–you had people there never before voted, coming forward, holding up the […]

Quondam UO guest-blogger Kerry Howley explains that using the military to quarantine areas of bird flu outbreaks would be a really really bad idea. Excerpt:
More cracked than the idea of an enforced quarantine is the blithe suggestion that men and women trained to kill outside U.S. borders are the ideal candidates for dealing with vulnerable […]

I’d like to get Senator Ted Stevens drunk enough to think I’m cute.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said Wednesday he plans to propose a $3 billion subsidy program to ensure older television sets still work when the transition to better quality, digital broadcasts is completed.
Stevens, an Alaska Republican, said the estimated […]

Yes, but it gets too depressing to think about sometimes. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled bitching about foreign policy soon enough.

Because I have become the Firefly/Serenity obsessive people warned me against. What can I say in my defense? Mrs Offering is worse! Anyway, first with the links:
Nate reviews the movie with spoilers toward the end. Gary Farber starts with Neil Gaiman and ends with Joss Whedon and Roger Ebert. From him I find the Firefly […]

An author named Katherine Ellison has discovered splatter-animation site Happy Tree Friends and informs the readers of the Washington Post today. Perversely, her goal does not seem to be to bring the site tens of thousands of new visitors - the likely outcome of her article - but to warn that it’s a Very Bad […]