Category: The Dish

A new life  – and an open thread.

From the NYT – and, yes, this strikes me as a more important story than some cranky old bigot on the radio:

The Convention Center is one of the most heavily guarded buildings inside the Green Zone, a four-square-mile area surrounded by blast walls and concertina wire that houses the offices of the Iraqi government and the American embassy.

The blast followed the destruction of the al-Sarafiya brudge in Baghdad by hours. Message: Nowhere is safe. Surge or no surge: this country is in collapse.

(Photo: Iraqi rescue workers search for victims in the River Tigris at the destroyed al-Sarafiya bridge after a suicide bomb attack, on April 12, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq. A suicide truck bomb exploded on the busy bridge, killing at least 10 people, cutting the bridge in two. The bridge connects the Sunni Waziriyah and the Shiite Utafiyah neighbourhoods. By Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.)

They got a real-live snuke at South Park studios. Someone at "24" removed it from a certain presidential candidate’s snizz.

"It’s a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him," – Snoop Dogg, on the Imus affair.

Uh-oh.

A classic from NRO.

""When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," – Kurt Vonnegut, whose comma was removed yesterday. There’s another appreciation here.

That’s the lesson from the bombing of the Parliament area today. If we cannot secure that, how can we secure anything? I know this is exactly the message al Qaeda wants to send. But it also happens to be true. How is it possible to have a functioning government and state when lawmakers can be murdered within the safest zone of the city? McCain’s timing could not have been more poignant, could it?

Josh Marshall has been banging on about this for ages, to the point, I must confess, that my eyes have glazed over from time to time. But today’s NYT story does a lot to buttress his claims that a great deal of voter-fraud investigation – aggressively pursued by the Ashcroft and Gonzales Justice Department – is better understood as a form of voter purging and intimidation of Democratic voters by partisan Republican U.S. Attorneys, selected principally not to uphold justice in any neutral form, but to deepen and strengthen one party’s grip on power. One wonders what kind of country we’d be living in if the war had not gone so badly. Rove’s project represented an attempt at complete control of American democracy by one party under "God." Cheney’s project was to create an executive branch immune from any constitutional challenge, empowered to detain "enemy combatants" at will, and to imprison them indefinitely without charges, and full habeas corpus protections. This is what Republicanism has become in power. It’s one good reason to expel it for a while.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 11.15 am.