“Strong explosions were heard late Monday in central Baghdad, and it appeared the blasts were coming from the western side of the Tigris River.

Five blasts shook the area in quick succession about 9:10 p.m. The U.S. military command had no information on the incident.” —Washington Post. Perhaps they ‘had no information’; if the situation is dire enough, the military may simply repress the news. How would we know? After all, journalists were fiercely excluded by a military cordon from the site of the downed helicopter over the weekend, according to reporters I heard interviewed on NPR.

Freed Iranians accuse US of torture: “Two Iranian journalists with state-run television who were freed by US forces in Iraq after four months of detention have charged they were subjected to ‘severe torture’ while in American custody.

But in Baghdad a coalition military spokesman denied that anyone was mistreated in its custody.” —Agence France Presse

” ‘ She would not have believed London still had so many inhabitants…’ Michael Moorcock has begun a new short story for us. Now it’s up to you to continue it… Moorcock has called the story ‘Crowning the Kitten’. You can read his opening here.

The story will unfold in weekly instalments over the next six weeks, but how it continues depends on you.” —Guardian.UK

Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour: “Jayne Margetts on Anthony Bourdain’s quest to eat the most gastronomically dangerous dishes on the planet”. —spike

“This week, washingtonpost.com and The Concord Monitor will host a series of live discussions with each participating Democratic candidate in the presidential race. Bookmark this page for the upcoming full list of scheduled discussions.”

I find much of interest posted to Abyssal Mind.

From game designer and author Greg Costikyan:

“Sometime in the 80s, I was living in Columbia University housing with my then-wife, who was studying for her MBA. A political worker came to the door, and asked us to make a donation to some political organization, I don’t recall which, to help fund the ‘fight against the radical right.’ Louise told him ‘but we are the radical right.’

Today, we have a president whose idea of cutting taxes is cutting them in such a way that the richest few percentage of the population gains almost all of the benefit; who has no compunction about leading the nation into a wholly unnecessary war, with no workable plan for how to manage the victory; whose administration consistently works to increase police powers and erode individual freedom; and whose party has been captured by fundamentalist Christian lunatics whose political agenda consists solely of oppressing women and those who make love in ways they don’t like.

It is patently clear that, today, the Republicans pose a far greater threat to American liberties than the Democrats.

I’m not of the ‘anything but Bush’ school. I could never bring myself to vote for someone who thinks censoring games is a good idea (Lieberman), seems to want to bring back the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (Gephardt), or came to political prominence through irresponsible race baiting (Sharpton–I’m a New Yorker, and I assure you that I remember Tawana Brawley, not to mention Crown Heights).

Still, today, the United States is in the hand of a dim-witted Yalie frat boy who listens only to neocon nutcase advisers and has no clue how close we are to a hundred-year war between the Islamic world and the West–and if he did, might think it was a good idea, since that would resemble some of the predictions for the End Times.

If the Democrats wind up nominating Dean, Clark, Edwards, or Kerry, I will almost certainly wind up voting for someone other than the nominee of the Libertarian Party in the next presidential election–the first time I will have done so since I was old enough to vote.”

He says Iraqi forces will fill the gap —Washington Post.



Really. The rush to remobilize the Iraqi army we disbanded when we invaded is a rush to use the ‘hajjis’ (recall: our expletive for all Muslims) as cannonfodder as soon as possible and to extricate ourselves as fast as we can, before mounting American casualties lose Bush the election. Oops, too late, Dubya. A majority of Americans polled now disapprove of the dysadministration’s handling of the Iraqi quagmire, a majority feel the death toll is unacceptable, and a majority would vote for an unnamed Democratic adversary to Bush (any) in the next election if it were held now. By the way, memo to American public: it’s about time. (Don’t get me started on the idiocy of Congressional calls to send more U.S. troops to Baghdad; if there is anything more out of touch with sane alternatives than the Bush cabal, it appears to be Congress. How about calling for extrication?)

Let’s see, the deadliest day ever in the U.S. occupation (although I would venture to say it will not be the deadliest to come, as all the evidence says the resistance is well-armed, increasingly organized, sophisticated, accurate, more and more assertive, more and more deadly… and more and more cheered by the Iraqi population) is the six-month anniversary of our action figure hero’s photo-op under the “Mission Accomplished” banner (which he now denies was his people’s responsibility… and he is right, it wasn’t their responsibility, it was their fault). Didn’t the smirking chimp say, at one point, “Bring ’em on”, enraging our troops’ families back home by seeming to invite the slaughter we are now seeing? Now we’re several weeks into a dysadministration public relations offensive accusing the media of underplaying the progress in Iraq in favor of reporting on the insurgency (which someone commented is like saying a thunderstorm obscures the sunny day behind it). Oh, and there’s that line about how the attacks on American troops are evidence of our success. What would indicate our failure? Total pacification and jubilant acceptance of occupation by the entire Iraqi populace? The Washington Post article notes that “during a southern swing on Saturday, Bush largely ignored the death toll in Iraq, referring specifically to Iraq only once in four speeches totaling 72 minutes.” Let’s face it, Dubya — there is nothing you can say; you’re a liar and you’re inept. You keep on lying, they keep on dying.

Related: The Brown Paste on Bush’s Shoes

“…first whiff…of the collapse of the Bush maladministration’s credibility and with it its operatives’ dreams of a Thousand Year Right…”:

“Surely, as my numerous detractors on the right-hand end of the speculum will point out, it is wrong to make mock of a president struggling so manfully against such dire evils as are abroad in the world? Surely we, the American people, should get behind him and support our troops? There’s a silly frigging idea. Bush is surrounded by concrete barriers and electric razor wire in Washington, DC. Our troops are sucking dirt in some hellhole on the other side of the world, overworked, underpaid, and going swiftly insane slaughtering the locals. You want to support our troops, get Bush in front of them. They’ll be home on the first transport out of Kuwait. Bush has had all the support he could ever ask for, and six trillion times more support than he ever deserved (I’m rounding the number to the nearest trillion for ease of reading). I for one am well pleased that the noisome brown paste is finally clinging to his shoes and ankles, and Rumsfeld’s, and Condi’s pumps, and on down the line of them, the whole vile, varicose, villainous gang of them embrindled with poo at last. O schadenfreude, O schadenfreude, Du kannst mir sehr gefallen!

The ruination of Bush’s utterly spurious credibility has been a long, slow process, entirely unaided by such old fallbacks as the free press and Congress, two entities that (in the good old days when a bottle of pop cost a nickel and you could purchase cocaine over the counter to alleviate toothache) Americans used to rely upon to moderate the behavior of even the most madcap Executive troupe. For two years no action by the Bush junta, be it ever so perfidious, got the slightest rise out of any of the traditional watchdogs. They were sunk in some kind of narcoleptic trance. Trample the Bill of Rights! Destroy our common weal! Wage unprovoked wars on the wrong moustache! Throw firecrackers at our fission-capable enemies! Capering like maniacs across the national and world stages, not an eyelid could the Bush operatives cause to bat, watchdog-wise. But Bush, or properly the Buffalo Bob types operating the monofilaments attached to his limbs, have finally started to get results. Through constant diligence, Bush and his gaggle of suck-buttock familiars have managed to force the slumbering Chihuahuas to react, however slightly. And it looks like there’s more to come.” — Ben Tripp, —CounterPunch [via wood s lot]

Joshua Micah Marshall on Language in Politics:

“We hear again and again how all the bombings and mayhem are obscuring all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But this is like how the thunderstorm ‘obscures’ the underlying sunny day.

Watching Paul Bremer today on CNN I was struck by his use of language like ‘enemies of freedom’ and terrorists to describe the people we’re fighting in the country (these are from my recollection, the precise phrases may be different.) People who kill soldiers are not, at least not by definition, ‘terrorists’. They’re guerillas or insurgents. This isn’t a matter of cutting them slack, but one of precision. And precision is required to know what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and how we can get from clarifying what our goals are to finding effective means to pursue their implementation.

This is part of what Orwell was getting at in “Politics and the English Language” when he lamented that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.””