Category: The Dish

Frank Rich on Don Imus (TimesDelete). My column on the affair -translating it for Brits – can be read here in the Sunday Times of London.

You probably know very little about the man who will soon in all likelihood succeed Tony Blair. Here’s an interview with him from the Guardian. He’s even written a book called "Courage." Like JFK’s early, ghost-written tome, it features mini-profiles of courageous individuals. The selection is interesting:

Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was shot by the Germans for helping the enemy in Belgium in 1915 … Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor who opposed the Nazis, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish count who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Cicely Saunders, who founded the hospice movement, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident.

Enough to give Dick Cheney the willies.

(Photo: Peter MacDiarmid/Getty.)

Great idea. Pity it doesn’t work.

Jon Rauch makes the case for a revival. I’m with him.

Michael Blowhard wonders what parts of contemporary culture will survive and be relevant in 2300. Here’s one candidate on his list. I see his point:

The laudable concentration on trying to reduce violence in Baghdad has unfortunately meant less security elsewhere. When you have destroyed the instruments of government, and sent a third of the troops necessary to keep order, the chaos is simply unstoppable – and will be unstoppable under these circumstances, indefinitely. The carnage in Karbala today is simply difficult for anyone who hasn’t lived in a war-zone to understand, but among its many victims were women and children:

Two months into the U.S.-led Baghdad Security Plan, at least 289 people were killed and injured across Iraq on Saturday, including 36 dead in a car bomb attack in the holy Shiite city of Karbala. The carnage of a crowd teeming with women and children set off an angry mob of hundreds against the governor and police.

The morning bombing outside a bus station and marketplace ripped through vendor stands near a Shiite shrine where the grandson of the prophet Mohammed is buried. Bodies littered the street and body parts were found as far as 160 yards from the site of the explosion. Three buses of passengers were charred and storefronts lay in shambles.

At least 167 people were injured in the bombing, but the death toll was expected to increase because of still-unidentified bodies and serious injuries, said Saleem Kadhim, spokesman for the Karbala health directorate.

(Photo: An Iraqi rushes a wounded child into a hospital in the holy city of Karbala, 14 April 2007. A car bomb slaughtered 47 people in Iraq’s pilgrimage city of Karbala today, the latest brazen attack to undermine a security crackdown exactly two months after it began in Baghdad. By Mohammed Sawaf/AFP/Getty Images)

The Foosball version.

They have a story to tell as well.

Just add water.

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz pauses while speaking to the Doing Business Reformers’ Club April 13, 2007 in Washington, DC. Wolfowitz has come under fire for promotions that a woman he was romantically involved with received while working with the group. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)