Unqualified Offerings

Mark Danner’s new essay review in the New York Review of Books is close to the most comprehensive account of how the Bush Administration made a iatrogenic disaster in Iraq that I have read. It overlooks the extent to which the United States early became hostage to the wishes of Iraq’s local and sudden-blooming Shiite […]

James Joyner discovers the anti-immigrant movement pulling numbers out its butt.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bcc’s the world on a missive nominally to the American people. Since the plain fact is that Ahmadinejad is mistaken when he declares that, just like Iranians, Americans “are aggrieved by the ever-worsening pain and misery of the Palestinian people” and since the God talk in this letter is marginally less people-of-the-book generic […]

Chris Allbritton mentions that Lebanon could go completely to shit be Friday afternoon.
And there’s a no-prize for getting the title reference of this blog entry.

Fairfax County Virginia moves to protect the homeless from food.

Coincidentally I spent the afternoon seeing Borat and come home to find that Jesse Walker just posted my take on the movie:
Maybe Borat isn’t a particularly political film after all. Maybe it’s the world’s crudest comedy of manners . . . Borat is a movie in which a man at a formal dinner can hand […]

I’m test-driving last.fm. As an experiment, I listened for an hour to the station it served up when I entered “Julie Miller” as my favorite artist, and another hour to the station it produced when I entered “Buddy Miller” as my favorite artist. Interestingly, the first station was almost exclusively female alt-country performers. The latter […]

Good essay by Diane McWhorter on unmentionable comparisons. Conclusion:
So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy […]

Eric Martin takes the undeclared Unqualified Offerings-American Footprints blog-titling competition to outrageous levels. I am in awe. But we will retaliate at a time and place of our own choosing.

Arnaud de Borchgrave writes about Iranian willingness to help America exit Iraq with a modicum of grace. (Via Hit & Run.)
Meanwhile the Note has a breaking news banner declaring that Baby Sadr “TEMPORARILY SUSPENDS ALL DEALINGS WITH IRAQI CABINET AND GOVERNMENT.”
Devel-uh, you know.

Julian Sanchez tries to rescue a word that Panera Bread’s content filter won’t like at all.

He’s even bamboozled the National Security Advisor! From NSA Steven Hadley’s leaked memo about his recent meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki:
Despite Maliki’s reassuring words, repeated reports from our commanders on the ground contributed to our concerns about Maliki’s government. Reports of nondelivery of services to Sunni areas, intervention by the prime minister’s office to […]

Leon Hadar on Pennsylvania’s new representative from the Office of Special Plans.

Remaining browser tabs to deal with:
* Long chronicle of neoconservatism since the fall of the Soviet Union and especially in re Mideast policy by Jim Lobe and Michael Flynn which has the virtues of length and an understanding that the neoconservatives could never have gotten up to this much folly on their own; they required […]

1. Glenn Harlan Reynolds has an excellent article on the dangers of police militarization in, of all publications, Popular Mechanics. Best excerpt:
Abetting this trend was the federal government’s willingness to make surplus military equipment available to police and sheriffs’ departments. All sorts of hardware is available, from M-16s to body armor to armored personnel carriers […]

I read the President’s speech looking for the did-he-or-didn’t-he “just ratchet back up our ambitions for Iraq?” Zachary Roth seems to overstate when he writes that “Bush never said anything about democracy in Iraq. It’s just an incredibly sloppy mistake by the AP.” Bush clearly includes Iraq among the “fragile democracies” NATO is defending […]

I neither obsessively blog nor obsessively follow “latest atrocity” stories from Iraq, because I tend to think that structure and trends are where the action is. So before I quite noticed that AP reported that Shiite death squads burned a bunch of Sunni worshippers alive as they exited mosques last Thursday, I noticed that what’s […]

An April article in Governing magazine exhumed by Brian Doherty offers fodder for liberals and libertarians both. Unfortunately not from the same trough. Alan Ehrenhalt analyzes the painfully slow return of genuine supermarkets to poor urban neighborhoods. The good news is that the economics of running the stores are good! (”The conventional wisdom is that […]

Yesterday the Washington Post ran one of those stories that surely had someone somewhere complaining that it was objectively pro-terrorist. In it, Sudarsan Raghavan explains the sources of the Mahdi Army’s popularity among Iraqi Shiites, especially in Baghdad.
But the attacks Thursday illustrated the immense difficulties involved in tackling the Mahdi Army, the country’s largest and […]

Bookmarking the rules for A Tale Unwinding here lets me close another browser tab!
UPDATE: Sad. Link is dead now. It looked so healthy even yesterday.

George Packer gets down to the nitty gritty in the only article in The Non Republic’s “special Iraq issue” that deserves to be called a contribution. The only remaining relevant question for US policy is whether and how to save the lives of “Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its […]

From Borowitz:
But critics of Operation Noble Euphemism were skeptical of its outcome, particularly after the White House unsuccessfully launched a slogan contest last month to replace the phrase “stay the course.”
That contest, which was announced with much fanfare, was abandoned after a leak revealed that the top contender was “slog through the mire.”
White House spokesman […]

Canada passes a motion ‘to recognize that Québécois “form a nation within a united Canada.” ‘ It gets contentious.
When I was in Montreal in June, I kept thinking, “This city ought to bestride the global economy and culture like a colossus. It’s an educated city whose inhabitants at least theoretically speak two of the four […]

Newt Gingrich says maybe you’d better:
MANCHESTER – Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.
Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a “different set of rules” may be needed to reduce terrorists’ ability to use the Internet […]

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Northeast

Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island.  Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.

The Inland North

Philadelphia

The […]

I agree with the thrust of Virginia Postrel’s defense of chain stores in the new Atlantic. I’m old enough to remember when there were more “mom & pop” stores, and a lot of them weren’t that great. I tentatively concluded a couple years ago that the biggest problem with comic-book retailing is that comics lack […]

Kind of a fun episode. The Hiro-Charlie story was pretty well done, actually, and we get a lot of backstory.

Mohammed at Iraq the model has a very good piece about how his neighborhood coped with the long weekend of battle in Baghdad.

I agree with the substance of Chuck Hagel’s anonymous staffer’s oped yesterday, but somehow the piece isn’t making a logical and rhetorical whole. CHAS commendably shies from outright blaming the Iraqis for the FUBAR situation - “getting tough on Maliki” et al has been the political path of least resistance for weary professional Repubs and […]

That Iraq and Syria lacked formal diplomatic relations from 1982 until - last week? Syria ruptured relations over alleged Iraqi attempts to provoke rioting in Damascus. Syria then cozied up to Iran during the The Gulf War That Lacked American Troops; then Syria nominally participated in the anti-Iraq coalition that threw Saddam Hussein out of […]

This entry title is not metaphorical. I’ve been trying to get down to something less than a dozen open Firefox tabs since the weekend with no luck. So you and I can both get to the pelvis-levelling article from the blog now.

I’m on an at-home, errand-oriented vacation this week and hope to get a lot of blogging in. Sometime shortly after it ends, Wii’s should be available for purchase, after which I don’t expect to touch the blog.

James Joyner is skeptical of the Iraq Study Group’s expected call to formally negotiate with Iran and Syria on stabilizing Iraq because it might not work:
Considering that these are the same two countries that are backing Hezbollah and that Iran, especially, has to like the way things are headed in Iraq, it is far from […]

Fresh from slaying the Dragon Sausage scourge, Great Britain’s Proctorship Militant turns its disciplinary eye toward - “offensive demo chants and slogans.”
Police are to demand new powers to arrest protesters for causing offence through the words they chant and the slogans on their placards and even headbands.
The country’s biggest force, the Metropolitan police, is to […]

John Quiggin uses a particularly amusing example to call for An End to Endnotes. Personally, I like them, and not least for the potential irony value, like that in John’s example. I get a little disappointed by endnotes that are only references. But what I most dislike are endnotes that are almost all mere references […]

Three quotes from the NYT account of the Iraq Study Group’s draft report, in reverse order because that’s the best way to tell the real story:
Administration officials appear to be taking steps that will enable them to declare that they are already implementing parts of the Baker-Hamilton report, even before its release.
This will be unsurprisingly […]

Daniel Henninger bawls all over the Wall Street Journal editorial page:
One might have expected most of the disagreement to center on the doctrine’s assertion of a right to pre-emptive attack. Instead, Iraq’s troubles have been conflated with a general repudiation of the U.S.’s ability to abet democratic aspiration elsewhere in the world.
“Abet” by killing people. […]

Last week the uneven Suzanne Nossel of the uneven Democracy Arsenal blog posted a nine-point analysis and recommendation for what to do about Iraq now. Much of it I don’t disagree with, so of course, I won’t talk about those parts.
3. At least in the near-term, if US troops pull out, conditions on the […]

Mona writes
What does it mean for libertarians in ‘08 and beyond? I don’t want one-party-rule by Dems any more than I’ve been pleased by it from the GOP.
But the convenient thing about the Democratic Party is that even one-party rule isn’t one-party rule. This goes beyond interest group fractiousness - e.g. having to satisfy environmentalists […]

Wading through Michael Barone’s book report on Robert Gates’ memoirs, I was most alarmed by the following passage:
He writes that his preference, at least on Nicaragua, was a bolder and more open policy.
“By the end of 1984, I concluded that we were kidding ourselves if we thought the contras might win. I wrote [CIA Director […]

A small part of me thinks that it would be a dandy black op to provoke a Shiite crowd in Sadr City into stoning Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s motorcade mere days ahead of his scheduled summit with President Bush, just the sort of incident to motivate him to agree to the President’s possible demands that […]

Matt Welch explains the balefulness of Senator John McCain, who is what we might have gotten if little Anthony Fremont grew up and became a Senator:
“Our greatness,” he wrote in “Worth the Fighting For,” “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions.” So, […]

Only saw the Redskins game, not the Steeler game, which was just as well.
Julius Peppers says he’s lost 20 pounds this season without changing his diet and his coach’s reaction is “Get your weight back up somehow.” Wouldn’t a better reaction be, “See a doctor RIGHT NOW!?!?!?”
Jason Campbell plays alright so far! That interception on […]