sfarber

It would seem that a deal is in the offing, to wit, the unpopular-among-the-Sunnis-Kurds-and-Bushmen Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has agreed to step aside and make way for his fellow Dawa party member Jawad al-Maliki to assume the post. This, as we all know, will be the instant panacea we have all been hoping for, and within days, in addition to all remaining Iraqi schools being painted and hospitals rebuilt, the oil infrastructure will be quickly restored, security will be in place, Shiite death squads and militias will promptly disband, Sunni insurgents will turn in their weapons, water and electricity...

The Pentagon released another list of names of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. While the Pentagon insists that of the 558 names, only around 490 or so are still detained there, this list is, evidently, the most comprehensive to date. The Government’s rationale for not releasing the names of those detained by a supposedly free and law-abiding society before (before it was compelled to do so in legal action brought by the Associated Press) was that “we would be giving al Qaeda a heads up” somehow by even revealing the names. That somehow the organization that we are all supposed...

That might be good old Beijing and the People’s Republic of China’s leader, Hu Jintao. The President urged the Chinese leader to take up a greater role in negotiating and resolving issues surrounding North Korea and Iran, the world’s two current most irritating problems (aside from the President himself, of course). Evidently, a Falun Gong protestor (sporting a media pass originally issued to someone named Gannon) made her way in and started screaming at the two autocrats during a White House omerta ceremony. (Bush later apologized to Hu for our having a far less efficient state security apparatus than that...

As part of their presentation, defense lawyers for madman Zacarias Moussaoui played tapes of his sisters, both of whom are institutionalized in France for schizophrenia. The defense also called an expert psychiatrist, who concluded that paranoid schnizophrenic Zacarias Moussaoui is, in fact, a paranoid schizophrenic, and the defense called some 9-11 victims’ relatives who evidently do not believe that executing the first Arab we can find is somehow an advancement of divine, or even earthly justice. For its part, the prosecution noted that at least one of Moussaoui’s brother is not a paranoid schizophrenic, and like, who will they believe…...

Given the announcement of White House spokesman Scott McLellan’s resignation, and Karl Rove’s reduction in duties as part of the package, I can only think of one man worthy of replacing Scotty. Meet the new White House Press Secretary:

As the Iraqi death-toll mounts on all sides, as more and generals call for the ouster of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and as talk turns to a possible welcome diversion in the form of a war of aggression against Iran, the Iranians are showing a public face almost designed to justify such an act, from the recent announcement that uranimum had been enriched by Iran to recent shriill calls by (in actuality powerless) front-man “President” Mahmoud Ahmanidedjad for “the end of the Zionist state” to today’s announcement that an Iranian group had signed up 200 potential “martyrs” for suicide...

This week’s Saturday talking dog blogging brings us to a special case, that of South Carolina’s United States Senator (the only talking dog, to my knowledge, ever elected to any kind of office, let alone to the United States Senate). While there are those who think of Senator Huckleberry as a principled conservative, I can no longer do that in good conscience. While I might have been willing to abide Huckleberry’s role as a “house manager” for the Clinton impeachment on the basis of “principle”, albeit misguided principle (back when he was just “Congressman Huckleberry”) the abomination he and Senator...

Not exactly fair to all MBA holders, or even Harvard MBA holders, that the President of the United States is among their ranks. Unfortunately, he would seem to represent an all too prevalent trend among American managers, of rewarding friends and cronies from the same social circles regardless of (and indeed, frequently despite of, or at best, oblivious of) their actual job performance. Hence, executive compensation continues to head to the stratosphere, even as stock prices, earnings and other measures of corporate performance do not, and layoffs and plant closings increase, even as top executive compensation increases more. Thus, it...

As I expected, the-now-convicted 9-11 plotter Zaccarias Moussaoui took the stand in his own “defense” (as I fully expected, ignoring my advice) and proceeded to say he was sorry the 9-11 attacks didn’t kill even more Americans, that the testimony of relatives of those killed on 9-11 was “disgusting” and otherwise ingratiated himself with the jury sufficiently to get the jury to return that death sentence he seems to want, which, quite frankly, was a foregone conclusion from the moment Moussaoui took the stand in the first part of the penalty phase to tell us about a (most improbable) plot...

One of the many stated goals of American intervention in Iraq held up by knee-jerk supporters of the Imperium when the whole WMD thing kind of went to s**t was, of course, the arrogant holding up of ink-stained thumbs (and a bunch of fat-cat m****r f****rs who never did two minutes of public service of any kind, let alone military service, holding up “purple heart band-aids”) because “we were bringing democracy to the Middle East.” After our… reluctance to embrace the Islamist regime elected in Iraq or the Hamas led government in the Palestinian territories, and with Egypt reversing earlier...