Unqualified Offerings

Our sixth annual orders of merit and scorn. New categories are asterisked. Previous installments: 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001.
Least Dispensible Weblog - American Footprints
Hawk of the Year - Newton’s First Law of Motion
Dove of the Year - Tie: Justin Logan; Ned Lamont
*Dove of the Year, Posthumous Division - Gerald Ford
Penpal of the Year - Iranian […]

MSK at ‘Aqoul answers the musical question, “Just how do those killers at the [Iraqi] roadblocks know who is who?” The downside for my purpose - being able to conclude the sect of named Iraqis quoted in news stories - is “for the outsider, unless it is bleeding obvious (like Shirzad Sinjari or Yohanna Mikha’il […]

Josh Marshall tells it like it is.
Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam’s treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. Bush […]

I confess to a bout of auto-googling just now! In the course of it, I found that James at Aces Full of Links took the implications of the “Ticking Bombast” article in a direction I hadn’t thought of:
Let me go back to Nazis as I wrap this up.
A hypothetical question has been asked many times, […]

Okay, I’m in love. The ability to download just about any album or song I want just to give it a try almost feels like teens/twenties days, when you could buy albums with impunity because hey, what the hell else was there to spend your money on?
The database search problems went away. The remaining annoyance […]

This one’s a bit out there, but, prompted by Eric Martin’s latest overview of the Afghan situation, I was just struck by another possible answer to the “Why hasn’t Al Qaeda hit the United States again?” question:
Because that would violate AQ’s deal with Pakistan.
I don’t entertain this very strongly, but almost everyone believes that Bin […]

You’re all thinking that the preceding post was boring as hell, aren’t you? Hey. It’s free!

Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) wants the state of Wisconsin to appropriate the value of unused gift cards from Wisconsin merchants rather than letting the merchants book the breakage themselves after the expiration date. On what theory of law and justice? On the theory that Fred Kessler would really like to have that money. Radley Balko […]

The Daily Star runs a report compiled from wire services about the fatal raid in Najaf the other day with an interesting tidbit:
The US military said Iraqi Army troops with US advisers raided the home of Amery, who was accused of a role in a bomb attack on a police chief in October.
Interesting, especially in […]

US troops shot dead “a senior ally of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr during a raid on his house,” according to an AP story by Hassan Abdel Zahra. Najaf is on high simmer, but the US military stoutly defends the action:
“The suspect allegedly provided recently several IEDs (bombs) to his cell for an attack that […]

We’ve talked before about the seasonally adjusted ratcheting pattern of insurgent violence. I think there’s a facet of the data that gets overlooked, though. The recent Pentagon report has the crucial graph on page 25, the one that plots the frequency of “Enemy-Initiated Attacks” is a stacked-bar graph with three components: attacks on coalition forces; […]

Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan show some foresight in the Washington Post this morning - they want their excuses for any failure of the so-called “surge” strategy on the record early. Specifically:
Reports on the Bush administration’s efforts to craft a new strategy in Iraq often use the term “surge” but rarely define it. Estimates of […]

Gerald Ford is dead. My hobbyhorse is Carter-Presidency revisionism, not Ford-Presidency revisionism, but I have a soft spot for any president where you can’t quite remember what happened while he was in the White House. Ford was dealt an economy that Johnson and Nixon had spent ten years wrecking. His only answer to the problem […]

The apparently liberal Economist’s View blog reminds us that Hayek found fairly comprehensive kinds of social insurance entirely defensible. I remember reading somewhere off the internet that this was exactly the source of Ayn Rand’s antipathy to Hayek. On Rand’s view, Hayek’s arguments supported no principled case against any kind of government intervention.
Via a commenter […]