Bad s*** coming out of Iraq. (Dogrun member) Professor Juan Cole is writing that the situation over in our Mess O’Potamia is lookin’ pretty ominous… in particular, the recent guerrilla bombing of the gold domed Shiite Askariyah Shrine in Samarra, which in turn led to retaliation against Sunnis all over Iraq, with 75 Sunni mosques attacked, including 3 burned to the ground, 3 clerics and 6 people overall killed, on the same day that saw bombings all over Iraq that killed dozens more. Bruce the Veep suggests that Iran (or, as I prefer to think of it, Iraqi elements closely...

For those of you in the New York area, you might want to consider joining me and a few hundred of our friends at a Bill of Rights reading/protest of NSA internal spying etc. sponsored by Move-On.Org; tonight’s protest is 6 pm, at Federal Hall on Wall Street, sight of President George Washington’s first inauguration, on this, President Washington’s natural birthday. Be there. Aloha. Update: Maybe around 200 people showed up for the 20-25 minute protest, mostly upscale looking, mostly older than me (and I ain’t so young); Move-On was kind enough to provide many with signs (“Bush broke the...

Apparently, the Vice-President’s straight-shooting has thrown the White House off its game; it finds itself back on its heals for the second week in a row, this time trying to defend a recently announced deal permitting the acquisition of the British company that manages six American ports (New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and New Orleans) to a company owned by the government of Dubai, U.A.E. On its face, the sale may actually be pretty inocuous: the concession to operate the ports was already in foreign hands, albeit English hands. And, for a change, it is always possible that the...

Let me join in the chorus of outrage over the conviction of Holocaust-Denier and All-Around-Prick David Irving, convicted by an Austrian court of the crime of Holocaust denial, and sentenced to three years in prison. For one thing, the timing is wonderfully outrageous: while Europeans insist that their honorary first-class citizens, the Jews, are worthy of sufficient respect so as to criminalize the kind of speech that understates suffering at the hands of the Third Reich, Europeans insist that their new second-class citizens, their Moslem immigrant population, just grin and bear speech (or cartoons, anyway) that they find mortally offensive....

Let’s continue our beating a dead quail to death in… Fudd-fest… We’ll move on to comparing accounts of how everyone’s favorite right-wing-operative-married-to-a-left-wing-operative, i.e. Mary Matalin, has presented herself about the whole Fudd-gate fiasco (thanks to Bruce the Veep for the term.) We’ll start with Mary’s allies at Right Voices, who believe Mary kicked ass in her dealings with Tim Russert and Maureen Dowd on the Sunday talk show that digby calls “Press the Meat.” Notably, Mary quickly scored points by attacking human “left wing clay pigeon” Maureen Dowd, invoking among other things, Hillary Clinton and the Vince Foster fiasco. I’ll...

It should surprise no one that I of all people refuse to give up on the Dick Cheney story. We’ll start with this “round-up Guide to Quail-gate“. We’ll move right on to “Cheney’s Chappaquiddick“. Some strange details emerge. For one thing, the shooting seems very endemic to Dick Cheney: he shot an endangered species (i.e., the last progressive Republican in the great state of Texas). For another, he seems to have surrounded himself with the typical trappings of royalty. We’ll start with our esteemed hostess, Katharine of Aragon Armstrong… daughter of a major rancher and her Mom was Ambassadress to...

The vice-president believes he dodged a bullet (even if his good friend Harry still got peppered) as Harry Whittington left the hospital, and, showing what a good loyal GOP team player he is, apologized to Dick Cheney for all the trouble he caused by getting in the way of Dick’s gun. Is that a friend? Ladies– see if this man is single… He’s not only loaded… he’s ready to go when his friends are locked and loaded. We all (when I say “we”, I’m referring to the 70-80% of the American people who actually believe that Republicans are capable of...

The President, as usual, expressed full confidence in his vice-president and the President stated he was satisfied with Dick Cheney’s explanation and his conduct of how he trickled out information regarding it to the press in derogation of the usual White House press channels and how he successfully avoided investigation of his probable inebriation at the time of the shooting. Except, of course, that this won’t do. This won’t do at all. There are lots and lots and lots of non-stories out there, that there’s no point in us talking about, like the scathing UN report demanding that Gitmo be...

The Vice-President broke his half-week long silence today by giving a statement in the friendly confines of Fox News to Brit Hume… Cheney admitted that it was his own damned fault that he shot his good friend Harry Whittington, and Cheney noted that he had “a beer with lunch”. This is the clearest confirmation possible that there indeed was at least some level of alcohol involved, and hence, there was significance in the fact that local law enforcement officials were kept at bay until the following morning. “One beer” of course could be a 12 ounce can, a pint glass,...

While the post-title reminds one of the old Dana Carvey SNL character Massive Headwound Harry, we are speaking of course, of hapless Harry, specifically Harry Whittington, the Austin, Texas based attorney who Dick Cheney accidentally shot full of pellets intended for farm-raised quail. More specifically, Mr. Whittington had a “mild” heart attack as a result of one or more of the pellets lodged in or near his heart bringing about a “fibrilation”. While the recriminations will fly over the apparent breaches of protocol and procedure associated with the nearly day-long delay in announcing news of this unfortunate accident to the...