The Dish

… with gay butt-sex jokes. It’s striking that when I simply make a point about someone obviously not having a clue about Immanuel Kant, a conservative cartoonist’s first response is to play the anti-gay card. C’mon, Chris. You can surely do better than puns on "a posteriori."

"No one can say with confidence how this crisis will play out. There are limits on what Israel can do in Lebanon. The Israelis will not be pulled deeper into Lebanon and its villages and urban alleyways, and Israel can’t be expected to disarm Hezbollah or to find its missiles in Lebanon’s crannies. Finding the political way out, and working out a decent security arrangement on the border, will require a serious international effort and active American diplomacy. International peacekeeping forces have had a bad name, and they often deserve it. But they may be inevitable on Lebanon’s border with Israel; they may be needed to buy time for the Lebanese government to come into full sovereignty over its soil," – Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal today.

Surely a serious international force is preferable to another Israeli occupation – for Israel and the rest of the region. Lebanon’s nascent democracy requires defense as well – from Iran and Syria and Hezbollah, and the blowback from Israeli self-defense.

The proliferation of sectarian warfare and de facto civil war is no longer a debatable question in Iraq. More pertinent, it seems to me, is: who is behind this shift? And what evidence is there that Shiite militias now control parts of the Maliki government itself? A key figure, many agree, is the former interior minister and now finance minister, Bayan Jabr. If you want to read an excerpt from a truly disturbing piece about Jabr’s past, his corruption, and his ties to murderous Islamist thugs, this report from Harper’s Magazine by Ken Silverstein is well worth a few minutes. Jabr is quite clearly an agent of anti-Sunni death squads, and is integral to the government the United States supports. Money quote:

Iraqi Sunnis accuse Jabr of sponsoring abuses committed by Shiite militias linked to his Interior Ministry. General Muntazar al-Samarrai, a former commander of special forces at the Interior Ministry, publicly stated that Jabr had condoned the torture of detainees. In late 2005, Falah al-Naqib, who preceded Jabr as head of Interior, told the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, that sixteen Sunni men whom Jabr ordered to be arrested were later executed, according to an account in The New Yorker.

American officials began pushing for Jabr’s ouster from the Interior Ministry in 2006, suggesting that he was too close to Shiite militias and had turned a blind eye to death-squad activities ‚Äî or, in the most generous interpretation, had taken insufficient steps to control them. Either way, Jabr is thought to have greatly contributed to the political violence in Iraq. "He allowed his ministry to become a preserve of the Shia militias," said Ken Katzman, a senior analyst on Iraq at the Congressional Research Service. "It all flows from there."

I’d like to know more about Jabr and hope the MSM will follow through with more reporting. My fear is that we may be creating our own new version of Saddam in Iraq. Except, he’s a Shiite and a key ally of Iran. Substituting one murderous tyrant for a second is bad enough. But this one would be allied with an Iran that truly does have WMDs – and is trying to get nukes.

It’s become a sensation. Where the hell is Matt? Find out below.

From Tehran, candles lit for future freedom. I propose we make July 19 an annual day to remember and reach out to all those gay men and lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered men and women around the world who live in fear, terror and oppression. They need to know we care and will never forget their struggle. (Pic via Michael Petrelis who, once again, shows what one man can do, while huge organizations twiddle their thumbs).

"Well, you have to be angry about the mess that’s been created [in Iraq]. It appears that they hadn’t planned what to do with the country afterwards. That to me seems criminal. I mean, I still agree with getting rid of psychopathic dictators. The unfortunate thing is that psychopathic dictators probably sleep more soundly now. It drives me mad to think of the people of North Korea living in this mad acid-trip of a state," – Neil Tennant, pop genius. He’s wrong about blogs, though.

Another reader writes:

What you don’t understand is that when a researcher conducts research, he is often involved with many projects. Therefore it is likely that one who would engage in embryonic stem cell research, funded by a state or private organization, will also be participating in research funded by federal agencies such as the NIH. The problem with this ban means that none of the researchers implements funded with federal money can ever be involved/associated with research funded by other means. This includes the lab space, every beaker, piece of paper, pencil, etc.! This is not practical in the slightest. That means that a researcher, say here at UCSF, who wants to tap into the money allocated by the state of California for stem cell research, would have to have a completely different facility whereby NOTHING funded with federal dollars can enter, and that likely includes the researcher himself. In academic medicine this is impossible.

Remember that idea? Congress disposed of it back in 2002. But that didn’t stop the Bush administration from doing it anyway. I tend to think these programs are useful and, with oversight, defensible. Some may be legal, under exceptions to the law. But the Bush administration – again – seems to think oversight is a dirty word; and no sane person can trust them any more. Money quote:

USA TODAY discovered the continuing TIA programs through entries in a public database of government contracts and a search of academic papers mentioning those contracts.

And so King George just does what he wants. In the end, his contempt for the constitution may undermine the perfectly defensible anti-terror programs he has instituted.

President Clinton will campaign for the left’s pariah, Joe Lieberman, next Monday. Mike Crowley explains why it’s not so surprising.

Kantian nihilism? Cartoonist Chris Muir should stick to what he knows.