Month: November 2008

Buzzfeed describes this better than I can:

This is the story of Toby the dog and Sheila the duck. Their interspecies friendship tested the limits of adorableness – until one day tragedy struck. And then things just got weird.

Hilzoy has been impressed with Obama’s picks so far. Me too. She outlines why continuity at Defense would make political sense:

I think that there are two main reasons for keeping Gates. The first is that it’s very important to get bipartisan cover for the withdrawal from Iraq if we want to avoid some future conservative "if only the Democrats had let us win" story. (Likewise, bipartisan cover would be very useful if Obama decides to cut some weapons systems.) The second is that by all accounts the military have a lot of respect for Gates; keeping him on, therefore, would allow Obama to bypass the need to establish his own credibility and that of his Secretary of Defense with them. (Yes, I know: this shouldn’t be necessary. But it is.)

But hotter and dumber and younger next time:

Sure, a lot of our newly elected officials may not be completely up to speed on the issues, but once elected, they’ll have close to three months to cram. That’s almost a full semester – enough time to get the gist of the Constitution. Leave the details for the staffers.

In this new Republican wave, young Hispanic, black and gay conservatives and libertarians will finally take on the Democratic Party’s identity politics mafia and show them where to shove their soul-depleting race, gender and sexual-orientation dogma.

His first sentence in his new column:

It was apt in a small way that the first endorser of Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state should have been Henry Kissinger.

Does it get any better?

Brompton, North Yorkshire, England, 8 am.

Pretty cool security camera footage of a meteor landing in Canada last week.

Suadad Al-Salhy blogs from inside Iraq’s parliament

It seems like 70% of the Iraqi MP’s have no idea what is in the agreement. This is clear from the complaints and criticisms that I hear when I am listening to their questions in the press room of the parliament building, and on the television coverage when I get home.

Read it all. Freedom is on the march.

J.L. Wall reviews Clifford May’s review of The Dark Side. It’s one of the very, very few reviews of this seminal book in the "conservative" media and, perhaps deliberately, not posted online. But this is the point:

It’s important to pause now and clarify something that May (and others elsewhere) does not appear to grasp in his review. The argument against torture, at its most basic level, has never been that terror suspects necessarily should be granted the full Constitutional rights of American citizens (the answer and extent are different, and later, questions), but that we grant them basic status as human beings.

Basic status as human beings: this is distinct from the concept of universal human rights. It is not a statement that there is a basic natural right held by all humanity to have counsel, or see evidence against them, or receive halal meals if they want them. It is a statement that there is a basic standard expect of us—you and me—in how we treat our fellow human beings; that so long as we acknowledge their mere humanity, we are morally—so much more morally than legally—obligated to treat them as more than animals. At its core, this is what the torture debate is about, has always been about, and will always be about.

I’m sorry but this scares the crap out of me:

The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago…The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.

(Hat tip: FP)

Juan Cole responds to protests in Iraq over the weekend and the impending SOFA vote:

If I were a betting man, I’d say that the security agreement is likely to pass through parliament, even if narrowly– though if the Sunni Arabs do unanimously vote against or absent themselves, the agreement will lack the legitimacy that would have come from a national consensus across ethno-religious groups.

It seems to me that if the Iraqis cannot manage to get a national agreement to get rid of the occupiers, the odds of their coming to any sort of national agreement when the occupiers are gone is close to non-existent. No one has yet been able to convince me – from Petraeus on down – that there is any serious chance of a stable unified country existing in 2011 without the continued presence of over 100,000 US troops. The much bigger likelihood seems to me to be a newer and nastier civil war. What we need to do now is thnk through how we’d be able to minimize the spill-over, and avoid the trap of staying there – for just a little while longer – to prevent the reckoning that never ends in Iraq.