For some surprisingly conciliatory (I’ll try to refrain from saying “good”) news coming out of the usual troublespots. First, it appears that Pervez (Our-Man-in-Islamabad), who is now going to Saudi Arabia, has released thousands of detained political prisoners, and has signaled some level of “softening” in that department– perhaps more will be released. No word that he would meet with former Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif (whom Pervez deposed in the first place) while visiting Sharif’s exile situs of Saudi Arabia. Still… anything even a little calming in nucular-armed Pakistan is a good thing. And on the other side of the...

Almost certainly thanks to the the Army reports that desertions since 2003 are up around 80%. This comes at the same time that the Army’s usual 18% or so rate of early discharge, primarily for physical inability (and including other things, such as reporting oneself as gay) dropped to around 7%, as major military action (in the form of occupations) in Iraq and Afghanistan roll on. One would think that this would mean that the Army should be more exacting in its physical standards, rather than less. So… something has to give, and many soldiers have decided to vote with...

Mrs. TD.

Lindsay, writing at In These Times, asks the musical question:

President Pervez, a/k/a our man in Islamabad, while jailing lawyers and students and dissidents (oh my)… has begun releasing captured Taliban, including the highest ranking Taliban in Pakistani custody. Not much we can do: the DeciderTM says Pervez is our man, and nothing– NOTHING– he does will change that (until, say, 21 January 2009, anyway).

His unreconstructed racism, his cocksure arrogance, his personal nastiness, his incompetent governance (which, quite frankly, must be recognized to include failing, despite clear warning, to provide adequate emergency communications equipment to firefighters and to locate the emergency response center in the likeliest target), and his clear likelihood of following in Dubya’s footsteps as a xenophobic institutional torturer (Abner Louima anyone?)… all seem to be features, rather than bugs, as St. Rudy Giuliani marches toward the Republican nomination (NOT: his front-runner-ness is actually by and large a media creation, insofar as the actually moderate and not bat-shit-insane-like-Rudy Mitt Romney is way...

As the “emergency” rolls on, former PM Benazir “Pinky” Bhutto has planned a massive (though banned) political rally for Rawalpindi, near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. Pres./Gen. Musharraf has already said he would have “an election” by mid-February, though he will doubtless win that “election”, as everyone has figured out by this point. Revelations have come out recently that billions went to Pakistan in the form of a blank U.S. check to “fight terrorism”… “terrorism”, evidently defined as “India”. And of course, there is Pakistani nuclear proliferation… like nuclear powers America and Russia, Musharraf has a fellow follow him around...

A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan. Dershowitz says Democrats will lose the White House unless they embrace torture (like he has). The Clintons killed Kathleen Willey’s husband Ed (just ask her). Just more grist for the mill of the nation where 25% of us believe the rapture will occur this year. This has been… “It’s on the web so it must be true.”

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor earthquakes, nor support of nuclear proliferation or Islamist extremists nor imposition of martial law will interfere with American aid from making its rounds into Pakistan. The bet was “all in” on Pervez Musharraf, and so, boys and girls, that’s that. [Perhaps, like another double-dealing politician from the Islamic world always willing to tell us what we wanted to hear, we might call him… Mush-arraf-at– say it three times fast… naaaaaa…] There’s nothing Pres. Gen. Musharraf can do that will piss off the United States enough to, well, do anything about it, whether that...

After last month’s horrors involving the death of a marathoner and hospitalization of hundreds of runners at the unseasonably warm Chicago Marathon, and the death of yet another runner at D.C.’s Army Ten-Miler, I was hoping that we had come to the end of tragedies in the sport, at least for a while (my sport… I’ll be taking my chances– and apparently I do mean chances– in my seventh consecutive ING New York City Marathon tomorrow)… the running world (and the world) is shocked by the collapse and death during the U.S. Men’s Olympic Trials in New York’s Central Park...