Fantasy

Juan Cole has a few choice words for the republican congressional report on Iran.
The words are: "riddled with errors", "neoconservative propaganda", "wild fantasies", and "vastly exaggerates".
Ouch.
Cole also notes that the report was written by John Bolton's former assistant:

So this report is the long arm of Bolton popping up in Congress . . . John Bolton is just an ill-tempered lawyer who has no special expertise in nuclear issues or in Iran, and aside from an ability to scare the bejesus out of young gophers who bring him coffee and to thunderously denounce on cue any world leader on whom he is sicced, he has no particular qualifications for his job. Nor do the Republican congressmen know anything special about Iran's nuclear energy program. They certainly know much less than the CIA agents who work on it full time, some of whom know Persian and have actually done, like, you know . . . intelligence work. We are beset by instant experts on contemporary Iran, like the medievalist Bernard Lewis, who wrongly predicted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would attack Israel on August 22, based on Lewis's weird interpretation of his alleged millenarian beliefs . . . Pete Hoekstra, who is the chair of this committee, has a long history of saying things that are, well, disconnected to reality. Like when he made a big deal about some old shells with mustard gas found in Iraq left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, and claimed that these were the fabled and long-sought Iraqi WMD over which 2600 of our service people are six feet under and another 8000 in wheelchairs. Nope. Bolton at one point was exercised about an imaginary Cuban biological weapons program, which even his own staffers wouldn't support him on, and at one point he was alleging that Iranian mullahs were sneaking into Havana to help with it. This congressional report is full of the same sort of wild fantasies.

Ouch.
But I particularly liked his description of Bolton as an ill-tempered lawyer...

Who is listening to these people?

Glenn Reynolds, April 2003:

. . . maybe we shouldn't rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a "quagmire" were wrong . . . And I suppose we shouldn't stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It's probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again. Nah.

Mark Steyn, May 2003:

. . . It takes two to quagmire. In Vietnam, America had an enemy that enjoyed significant popular support and effective supply lines. Neither is true in Iraq. Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body . . .

Glenn Greenwald, today:

. . . The same people who were wrong about everything -- literally -- and who viciously mocked those who were right, now want to use the same mindset and assumptions to guide us into our next war . . . Democrats should make this election about this question because it is, in large part, what the election is about -- whether the country wants the same people who dragged us into Iraq to do the same in Iran, Syria and beyond.

Priceless!

This is hilarious.
A Fox News interviewer cuts off Ann Coulter's ridiculous and ignorant blathering. And then, while she bleats and flaps and pleads for Sean Hannity to interrupt, both the interviewer and the other guest, a Democratic party strategist, calmly proceed to discuss Afghanistan and Bin Laden and terrorism and security. And they both completely ignore Coulter for the rest of the segment.
Priceless.

Green party convention

The Green Party convention is on this weekend in Ottawa, being broadcast on CPAC. Look close and you'll see a tall young man with longish blond hair, likely wearing a hoodie -- that's our boy!
I was watching the speeches tonight and I did catch a glimpse of him in the audience.

Base Ball

Noted in passing that a group of former ball players are trying to start up a vintage base ball league. Here are some of the "vintage" rules:

six balls for a walk, and a foul ball won't count as a strike — unless it's caught, in which case the batter will be out. A foul ball caught on a bounce counts for an out, and a hit batter is only a ball, with no base awarded.
Gloves will be tiny, bat handles will be thick and the ball — that's right, one ball will be used per game unless it falls apart or is lost — will be dead. There aren't any pitcher's mounds, and there's no such thing as a balk on pickoff attempts . . . umpires must be addressed as "sir." Fans — called "cranks" — will be encouraged to wear period costumes . . . .
The ball will have seams in the lemon-peel style, which was replaced by the current seam pattern designed by Albert Spalding, adopted by the major leagues in 1877. Pitching will be overhand, and games will average about 2 hours, 15 minutes.
Before each plate appearance, a batter will declare his "desired strike zone preference" — belt to knee or belt to armpits. If the umpire misses a call because his view is blocked, a team captain can ask for a "gentleman's ruling," in which players involved in the play are to truthfully say what occurred. If a dispute remains, the umpire may ask the cranks for their opinion.

Sounds like fun, but I just hope you can still yell from the stands.

Great line of the day

Well, August 22 came and went and nothing happened (or, at least, nothing blew up.)
The Poor Man alerts us to the next day of infamy:

I believe the calandar is free of apocolypses for the next six weeks, right until the Chinese Confucio-Nazis begin their long-planned Columbus Day weekend invasion of Missouri.

Requiem?

We have spent the last two nights watching Spike Lee's `Requiem for New Orleans'. It is more than just the tale of slow recovery from a natural disaster. There is deep anger and resignation and betrayal, but also the people Lee interviewed were spirited and independent and committed to their city, and they were shaking their fists at engineers and insurance companies and FEMA and government at all levels.

Winning hearts and minds

Juan Cole reports on the results of a recent opinion poll in Egypt:

a poll of the Egyptian public. . . found that Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, is the most popular politician in Egypt. In second place comes Khalid Mashal, the radical Hamas leader who operates from Damascus and has been implicated in terror attacks inside Israel. In third place? Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Funniest. Comments. Ever

The Poorman post is funny enough:

Title:God Damn I Hate Working For Living
Text: If anyone has figured out a way around this particular problem, please email me. I promise I won’t tell.

There's something about The Poorman that inspires the funniest comments and this post has some great ones -- like these:

~I realize you were young and inexperienced at the time, but in hindsight you should have chosen your parents more wisely.
~Be chronically ill . . . and beg for donations, which grow fewer and fewer as time goes on. I don’t really recommend this one.
~If you send me 5 dollars, I’ll send YOU the secret to making money… the EASY WAY!!!!!
~Work - the curse of the drinking class.
~Work is a fucking scam. What kind of world is this that some people spend 60 hours a week pulling fries out of hot grease? What does a $300,000 car say to the cosmos? “Please, fucking wipe us out with a giant asteroid already”, is what.
~Don’t you get regular payoffs from kos in exchange for not mentining the scandal with his kittens? The rest of us do.
~Ooh, I know! Nobody ever went broke soliciting contracts from Republicans for pie-in-the-sky, never-gonna-reach-even-the-r&d-phase defense technology.
~I heard that if your roomate commits suicide, the government will give you money every year for the rest of your life.
~There is this guy in Nigeria who is looking for a business partner. I’ll forward you his e-mail.
~Get a dog or cat that can sing opera. It’s always worked for me.
~Hostages can be real money makers.

And finally, this one:

~Apparently, if you drink a lot, do a lot of coke, and crash your dad’s businesses into the ground, you can become President.

What you can do with a jar of Nivea

Harry Hutton:

I’m flying to the US this afternoon. I’m going to try to smuggle a jar of Nivea cream on board. Then, half-way through the flight I’m going to stand up and scream, “Look out! There’s a balm on board. Salve yourselves! Aarrrggh!”

Great lines of the day

From James Wolcott - who else?
First, a riff on Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's fall to 40 per cent in the Israel opinion polls:

. . . the bitter irony to those of us accustomed to the toasty crunch of bitter irony first thing in the morning is that even with Olmert's facedown splat he's still got better poll numbers than Bush! If Bush clawed his way back into the forties, the Note would form a conga line and bugger each other until they squeaked, Peggy Noonan would paint herself pink and roll downhill like an Easter egg, and Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss would make the rounds of the political chat shows to muse knowingly about Bush's Reaganesque Indian summer, and his durable bond with the American people (most of whom despise him. . .

Then onward to a discussion of the Bush 'legacy':

If Seymour Hersh's sources are creditable (and I think we can all agree Hersh's track record ), Bush has made up his one-track mind for the rest of us that he will not leave office without neutralizing the threat of Iran. Not having learned the lesson of Iraq about the danger of apocalyptic hyperbole, the media are already beating the bass drums like a corps of Michael Ledeens . . . I still have my doubts as to whether the US will attack Iran. As Emmanuel Todd writes in After the Empire, the recent US pattern-- evidence of its atrophied superpower prowess--has been to bomb countries much weaker than itself, while shying away from more formidable foes (such as North Korea). Iran is no pushover, and Hezbollah out-smarted and out-toughed Israel in Lebanon, making even an airstrike on Iran a more difficult sell. But one thing we've learned in the Bush years is never to anticipate that reason will prevail.
Lind: "For America, the question is whether Washington will continue to demand that we go down with the Israeli ship."
Or is it that Israel will go down with the American ship?
I suppose it's a distinction without a difference to the watery grave.

Emphasis mine.

AIDS? Harper says Euuhhh!

Foghorn says "There's something EUUHHH! about a kid who doesn't like baseball."
I was reminded of Foghorn's sneering distaste when I saw today's story about how Harper isn't going to make any announcements about HIV/AIDS funding during the Toronto conference.
So HIV-AIDS is too "political" now? Since when did politics ever scare Harper?
Nope, I think our Steve is actually saying, "there's something EUHHH! about HIV-AIDS". He doesn't want to be associated with it. Thus, he embarasses Canada before the world and displays his own incurably parochial "small town" attitude -- where the most important consideration is " oooh, what will the neighbours think?"
Well, so what do you suppose two of the world's most influential men, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, think about our prime minister now?
And here's what some others thought:

Interim Liberal Leader Bill Graham: "this was an opportunity to show leadership and to genuinely help, and if the money comes, great. But it would be a shame that it couldn't be done in a way with the global community that's here, and so many young Canadians could've said, 'We're proud of you.' "
BC MP Keith Martin: "[Postponing the announcement] shows a complete lack of respect for this disease and for the people who suffer from it and for the people who work in it. The government has been missing here. They've showed no presence, no plan, no money."
Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa: "It just shows the chaos of their activity, there's just no focus at all. . . . The Conservatives have known for many months that this conference was coming. They've left a sour taste in everyone's mouth. The entire activist, research, scientific world is now skeptical about Canada's intention and motives. So even when the announcement does come - no matter how good it is - it will be viewed skeptically. They've just done themselves damage."

Safety, front and centre!

From Crooks and Liars

Is this actually news to anyone?

Hmmm -- without a warrant, listening to the phone calls and reading the emails of US citizens is unconstitutional.
Is there anyone, anywhere in the world, who didn't already know this?

Great line of the day

Digby describes how the American government is war-gaming against the "terro-hippies" -- peace activists, anti-globalization radicals, eco-freaks, animal rights activitists and all the other long-haired weirdos who first exposed themselves at Woodstock and have been threatening the very foundations of civilization ever since:

. . . it's only a matter of time until one of these terro-hippies gets around to killing you in your beds and writing Helter Skelter in organic beet juice on the bedroom walls.