"....We are great at dealing with the tactical problems--the killing and the breaking. We are lousy at solving the strategic problems; having a strategic plan, understanding about regional and global security and what it takes to weld that and to shape it and to move forward."

Of course, this country [the u.s.] has a long history of denying women and blacks the right to vote. To our credit, we did change that, and good for us. But we changed it ourselves, rather than having an invader oust our government. Would Cheney have launched a decapitation strike against Grover Cleveland? I noticed we didn't invade Nigeria to save the woman sentenced to stoning for adultery. We didn't even threaten to.

"If an Iraqi policeman stops someone on the street and asks them politely to do something," says al-Janabi of the I.N.A, "that person will be ready to be a ring on the policeman's finger. But if you shout at him like the Americans do and hurt his dignity—he will hate you." In Baghdad a U.S. special-forces officer sadly agrees. "We should have been culturally sensitive," he says. In places like Fallujah, he argues, "we should never have gone into people's houses. Saddam's soldiers never went into houses—they would negotiate and settle things with money. We don't understand how things work around here." That is an honest assessment, not an indictment. There is not the slightest reason in the world why 19-year-old boys from Kansas and Kentucky should know how to deal with Iraqi sensitivities—to get Iraq right—and it is unfair to condemn them for failing to do so. But it is not unfair to judge those who got Iraq wrong and thought five months ago that the mission of those young men, now hunkering down for a longer tour of duty than they ever expected, was over. It is not.

This month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that skepticism toward President Bush's scheme for Iraq is encouraging America's enemies...

...With that, Rumsfeld gave a new twist to Samuel Johnson's famous definition of patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel." In the case of the White House and its desk warriors, the last refuge of scoundrels is to denounce their critics as unpatriotic.

And this particular squad of scoundrels is desperate. They are no longer able to bludgeon dissenters with facts; the justifications Bush and his co-conspirators used for this pre-emptive war have been revealed as dissembling, distortion and outright lies.

There's an island in the Indian Ocean that the indigenous population say is shaped like a young maiden carrying flowers back from the market on a summer morning. As the above picture clearly shows, Sheppey is shaped like 37,000 useless pieces of shit floating in a swamp. Actually, to be fair, not everyone on Sheppey is a useless piece of shit. Many of them have jobs, and some of them are even learning to read. The ones who reach such dizzy heights usually leave the island and then disown their families. Their new found knowledge of the world drives them on to seek out new lifestyles that might include things like cinemas, book shops, hospitals, and intelligent conversation: all of which were outlawed on Sheppey shortly after the reformation.

...earlier in the week he jokingly announced what he claimed was his telephone number during an episode of his show, which he co-hosts with Democratic strategists Paul Begala and James Carville, along with conservative columnist Robert Novak. In fact, the number Carlson gave out connected callers to a switchboard at Fox News.

According to Carlson, an unknown person or persons at Fox retaliated by posting Carlson's actual home telephone number on the Fox Web site. Carlson said hundreds of angry phone calls were made to his home, including threatening calls. Carlson's wife and four young children were at home at the time the calls were made.

Carlson and Carville on Friday excoriated Fox for the reverse prank, which Carville said "scared young children to death," unnecessarily.

The president never tires of claiming, as he did last week, that "Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties." But "ties" is a mush word that suggests much and proves nothing. I have "ties" to Sammy Sosa because we work for employers that are owned by the same corporation. But that doesn't mean he leaves tickets for me at the Will Call window. The administration has yet to show that the flimsy connections it alleges presented a threat to Americans...

...From listening to people in the White House, you would think that embroiling ourselves in a guerrilla war in a once-stable part of the Middle East is a clever trap for our enemies. Those in Iraq today, insists National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, "were not off drinking tea someplace and minding their own business. If they weren't in Iraq, they would be fighting someplace else." Of course, Colonel Custer could have said the same thing about the Indians at Little Bighorn.

...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged — first and foremost — to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.

Kabul is a glimpse of Dresden post-1945, with contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue. They have no light and heat; their apocalyptic fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the pock-marks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses are twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer Rouge to mark Year Zero.

Saddam Hussein has fallen, his sons are dead, most of his top officials are in custody, his alleged arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction” has gone poof, and Iraq is no threat to anyone, let alone the United States.

Now we’re told that many more troops, and a lot more money, will be needed to “pacify” and “stabilize” what’s left of Iraq. When will this elusive victory be consummated? Hasn’t the country already been “liberated”?

A “guerrilla war” wasn’t part of the deal. We were fighting a “preemptive” war to remove a “threat.” Mission accomplished. So bring the troops home. Leave the losers to their own devices.

Or was the antiwar Left correct? Was this a war of conquest and empire all along? Draw your own conclusions.

The 29% swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats is the largest for almost a decade, and is being described by commentators as one of the most stunning turnarounds in British electoral history.

Commentators are linking the Labour defeat with Tony Blair's decision to go to war with Iraq, and anger among the party's traditional voters over the involvement of the private sector in public services.

Saudi Arabia, in response to the current upheaval in the Middle East, has embarked on a strategic review that includes acquiring nuclear weapons, the Guardian has learned.

...the last thing President Bush needs is another nuclear crisis. But that is what he may soon face in Iran. On a visit last month to Tehran, International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei announced he had discovered that Iran was constructing a facility to enrich uranium — a key component of advanced nuclear weapons — near Natanz.

Some American intelligence analysts are becoming increasingly concerned that North Korea may have three, four or even six nuclear weapons instead of the one or two the CIA now estimates.

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

The question is why they're suddenly backing off the Saddam/9-11 connection, when they've managed to convince 70% of the public that there is one. Why now, particularly when it is an outright admission that they lied to Congress to justify the war ... ? Are they just trying to defuse the issue so the Dems can't beat them over the head with it? Is something going on behind the scenes that we don't know about? Are they just so insanely short sighted that they're reacting solely to criticism of Cheney's Meet The Press appearance, without any thought to the larger implications of what they're saying? That last would certainly be in keeping with their usual MO, but I have to admit, I'm stumped on this one. What's Karl Rove's angle here?

It may seem unlikely, but some are actually predicting that the Taliban could arrange a cease-fire between the United States and Al Qaeda.

This theory stems from the problems the United States is now encountering in Afghanistan, which is gradually slipping from its hands. Despite U.S. military power, the resistance movement is growing day by day. The Northern United Front, the de facto ruler of the country, does not enjoy the ideal relationship with the United States that it had earlier. Russia’s influence has surpassed that of the United States, and U.S. military installations and soldiers are attacked daily by Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami guerrillas.

There have been several informal contacts between the Taliban and the United States, but the United States made the first-ever formal contact in early March, proposing an initial dialogue aimed at overcoming the present turmoil.

The resurrection of space capsules, which last launched three decades ago, is gaining favor among astronauts, space agency officials and congressional staffers after the shuttle Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts on Feb. 1.

The 13 members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board were unanimous in urging NASA to replace the aging shuttles as soon as possible by using existing technology and materials.

What will these new vehicles be like? One thing is now certain: they won't be any kind of "spaceplane", even if "Orbital Space Plane" still lingers as the official name of the development program. Like Count Zeppelin's airships, the spaceplane blindly perpetuates the habits and traditions of a previous technology (seafaring/ aviation) in a new medium (air/space) which actually requires a completely fresh concept.

BBC correspondent Greg Barrow at the UN said several diplomats feared that through the vote Washington may have inadvertently sent a message to the Israeli Government that its threats towards the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will not be opposed.

Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat described the veto as "a black day" for the UN and said he hoped that Israel would not interpret it as a "licence to kill".

"With $166 billion spent or requested, Bush's war spending in 2003 and 2004 already exceeds the inflation-adjusted costs of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Persian Gulf War combined, according to a study by Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus. The Iraq war approaches the $191 billion inflation-adjusted cost of World War I."

Bradleys in Iraq need new tracks every 60 days, at $22,576 per vehicle. As many as a third of the Bradleys patrolling the dangerous "Sunni Triangle" are out of commission.

...you have a group of fat guys suing the fast food industry for making them fat, while they seem to be overlooking the cancer, scurvy, stomach ulcers, and ass rot it has also surely bestowed upon them. Oh, and vegetarians are getting whiney and upset about the fact that there are small amounts of animal fat in the vegetable oil. Meanwhile, Bob the disgruntled maintenance man, a Vietnam vet, who in between bouts of threatening coworkers with a knife and screaming curses at the Vietcong, decides it would be fun to take a piss in the vat where the fries are cooked. Personally, I'd be a little more worried about THAT than the animal fat.

At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld was asked about a poll that indicated nearly 70 percent of respondents believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved.
"I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that," Rumsfeld said.

Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks...

But Cheney left that possibility wide open in a nationally televised interview two days ago, claiming that the administration is learning "more and more" about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks. The statement surprised some analysts and officials who have reviewed intelligence reports from Iraq.

Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix now believes Iraq destroyed its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago and that intelligence agencies were wrong in their weapons assessment that led to war.

The small group of legal, financial and political advisers were invited to the Tuesday session in Little Rock, Ark., after being told Clark was ready to seek the presidency. One of the invitees, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he was told it was "a 99 percent certainty" that Clark would run, but he wanted to finalize plans at Tuesday's session.

Warwickshire folklore is littered with references to a place bearing the name ‘Lull Dell’, said to be hidden deep in the woods of the Avon valley and always mentioned within the context of strange lights, pagan activity, a spectral black dog named ‘The Grim’, vanishing infants, crop failures, farm boys driven mad or even werewolves.

S: 'This fucker has been after me for ages, the fucking gaylord, he's fucking dead. He's been throwing eggs and shite at my house.'

'I've been asleep, what are you on about'

S: 'It was fucking you. I'm going to get you, some evening when you're coming home, I'm going kick the shite out of you'. I'll knife you, watch out. Turns to J, points at me. This cunt came around at 9 'o'clock one night to complain about the noise, the bastard'. I'm going to kill him'.

He spits a big spray towards me. A light mist descends around me.

'That, I think, is assault'

'I'll tear your head off, fucking faggot'

I gestured, 'sure, c'mon, you might as well do it now'

The schools actually promote drugs. When my daughter was in the third grade, she had never thought about narcotics. Then a nice cop with DARE came. He showed them what the drugs looked like and explained what they did. The kids were intrigued: Acid? You see things? Neat...

Huya, the rain god in Venezuelan Wayuu Indian culture, has been granted a place beside his counterparts Jupiter, Mars and Venus...

Huya is most likely a Kuiper Belt Object, one of a swarm of icy boulders in the icy outskirts of the solar system. The object's surface temperatures is estimated at around 292 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (180 degrees below zero Celsius). It has a diameter of around 435 to 466 miles (700 to 750 km).

...many young, middle-class Iraqis -- future leaders of the country -- say they are losing admiration for the America they glimpse through action movies, raunchy music videos and the soldiers their age who patrol the streets. For many, thinking of themselves as Arab and Iraqi has taken on new importance since the American soldiers arrived.

While an objective survey of opinion in Iraq is impossible, it's clear that many students who perfected their English and dreamed of attending American universities now are joining Iraqi nationalist factions and, in some cases, resistance groups that attack U.S. soldiers. They are boning up on the pan-Arabist teachings of Egypt's socialist former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and are spraying Baghdad walls with graffiti that reads "Go wage jihad!" and "Down with Bush!"

(Prester John, Priesty Juan, Presbyter John) was a (king, pope, saint, caliph) in (India, Ethiopia, Asia, Africa) who had a (theocracy, monarchy, caliphate, church) of great wealth and power, possibly populated with all manner of mythical beasts, during the (10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th) Century...

Unlike most legends, which generally require several centuries to propagate into massive variation and inconsistency, the tale of Prester John seemingly sprang into existence fully formed and in a half dozen variations.

The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.

The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.

In the 1990s the then Conservative government closed down many of Sweden's mental homes, privatising the sector and turning many disturbed people out onto the street, he said, adding that the country had seen a wave of appalling crimes committed by the mentally ill.

'The same day as Lindh was murdered a mentally ill man stabbed a five-year-old girl to death. In May a mentally ill guy went berserk with an iron bar and killed an old woman. He thought he was fighting trolls. Another crazy guy chopped someone's ear off with a samurai sword recently and a couple of years ago we had "laser man" who shot at anyone who looked foreign.

'We never used to have this but there are more homeless people and mentally disturbed people on the streets than ever before. At the beginning of the nineteenth century we had space for 2,000 [mentally ill patients]. Now we have room for just 600 and many have been released onto the streets.'

A Nation Remembers by Mark Fiore. You must see this NOW. I mean it. Be warned though, that if you do, the Bush administration will hunt you down and kill you (and every member of your family).

We've been told that he's homeless and hunted and incapable of appearing out in the open, but here he is, out in the open, taking a stroll. If he had the means to run a scroll of text across the bottom of the image, CNN-style, it would ask, over and over, a simple question: "Where are your spy satellites now?"

I had never seen so many newspapers, so many eager readers. I was bombarded daily with outrageous headlines that provoked hostility towards Arabs and Muslims and gradually found myself feeling out of place. Physically, I began to occupy less space by crossing my arms or legs. I did not want to share a space with the burgeoning readership of The New York Post. I grew more and more frustrated as each day passed and as each headline became more blatantly racist.

Ted Rall's best yet. If he keeps this up he's sure to die in a tragic accidental plane crash.

Steve Bell's portrayal of Bush and Blair looks ever more reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch's medieval nightmares.

The one story with content that sticks in my head was about an Iraqi baby christened “George Bush” by his grateful parents. The Indian Brit woman got to cover that story. The newborn was shown screaming in a dirty hospital and the anchoress ended by saying that if there’d been twins, the parents would have named the later, lesser kid “Tony Blair.”...

...It made you think what would happen to this kid. I thought of the old Johnny Cash tune, “A Boy Named Sue,” with its premise that giving a kid a shameful name would teach it to “tussle and fight.”

If one accepts the logic of Johnny Cash’s lyric: that naming your son “Sue” ensures his swift education in the martial arts; then naming an Iraqi baby “Georgeboosh” should produce the next Genghiz Khan. We’ll be hearing from this kid, probably as he pilots a hijacked ion-drive starship right into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, all the juicier targets across the USA having already been vaporized by fellow Baghdadi schoolmates at the helm of various nuclear-powered spacecraft. Would“George Al-Bush”…would he get tough or just break? Break, probably. Be beaten to a pulp, day after day, until he won’t leave the hut. It was a really sad story—which makes me think it must have been one of CNN’s rare mistakes: much too memorable.

In Vietnam, the last sustained war the nation fought, the United States spent $111 billion during the eight years of the war, from 1964 to 1972. Adjusted for inflation, that's more than $494 billion, an average of $61.8 billion per year, or $5.15 billion per month.

One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.

The RIAA has nailed one of the most prolific file-traders in the U.S., filing a lawsuit against 12-year-old Brianna LaHara...

Brianna could face charges of up to $150,000 per infringed song. but we have a feeling this might be a tad unrealistic. We suggest the RIAA take all of her toys instead.

Mr McDowell, our Minister for Justice, believes that the State should be able to access all our telephone records and emails for up to four years. He believes that the State should be intimately concerned with when we socialise with each other in a public place. He believes that the news media should be regulated by the State through a government-appointed press council. He believes that the State should, through that press council, draw up a code of ethics for journalists. He believes that there is a poisonously unhealthy relationship between the press and the gardai that requires legislation and jail time to correct. And he supports his Government's decision to curb the freedom of information.

Our unseen tormentors are the ones who seem canny and organized, not us. As they move from killing individual U.S. soldiers and Iraqis to sabotaging power plants, burning oil pipelines, blowing up mosques, demolishing the U.N. headquarters and now hitting the Baghdad police headquarters, our enemies seem better prepared and more committed to creating chaos in Iraq -- and Afghanistan -- than we are to creating order.

They've also proved more adept at putting together an effective coalition than the Bush team: a terrifying blend of terrorists from other countries, al-Qaida and Ansar al-Islam fighters, radical Shiites and Saddam remnants, all pouring into Iraq and united by their hatred of America.

We can be sure that this administration will never utter the three simple words that no administration has yet learned to pronounce: “We were wrong.” But from now on its chief challenge will be to disengage from Iraq, to withdraw decorously, and to minimize the political cost in 2004.

It won’t be easy. All the urgent reasons trumpeted for the war for so many months now ring hollow. Even Colin Powell’s reputation for sober judgment is in ruins. America’s international image is one of a bully, and an incompetent one at that. Once again it has started something it had no idea how to finish. Instead of being loved and respected, it finds itself hated and despised.

Bush is a stubborn man, and he isn’t inclined to climb down from a position he has insistently taken. He pledged to destroy the Iraqi threat while leaving the Iraqi people better off. But there was no Iraqi threat, and most Iraqis are probably worse off than before. And Bush no longer looks politically invincible.

FINALLY!

Six months after spitting in the face of the world, the Bush administration is crawling on its belly before the U.N. If the world doesn't rush to help it, the White House has only itself to blame.

"Screw you U.N. bastards - we don't need you! We's goin' in alone, coz we's the greatest nation on earth and we can do anything we want and the Iraqis will shower us with flowers and kisses and be so very thankful and that'll show you stupid cowardly French frog-eaters and you ugly fat-ass Germans and you smelly Russkies! Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya!"

"Ehm, we're in a spot of trouble - we could really use a little help from our friends. Please could you lovely Frenchmen and big strong Germans send us some of your soldiers to get killed instead of ours - otherwise we might get in some real big trouble. We're starting to run out of money, and if we can't get our boys out of Iraq then we'll never be able to invade Iran!"

Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll. That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents.

The United States sneered at plans by four European countries to create an autonomous European military command headquarters near Brussels separate from NATO, referring to the idea's proponents as "chocolate makers."

In unusually blunt language that drew surprised gasps from reporters, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher scoffed at Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg for continuing to support the proposal that they first introduced at a mini-summit in April.

He described the April meeting as one between "four countries that got together and had a little bitty summit" and then referred to them collectively as "the chocolate makers."

The United States will not be able to destroy half its stockpile of chemical weapons by the deadline laid down in the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Meeting the 29 April 2004 international deadline for destroying 45% of its chemical WMD arsenal will take an additional three years, according to the Defence Department.

The United States stockpile of lethal chemical warfare munitions consists of various rockets, projectiles, and mines.

These contain BLISTER AGENTS, various forms of MUSTARD GAS and both VX and GB NERVE AGENTS, according to Virginia-based GlobalSecurity.org.

Every single argument used against the war is now a generally accepted fact. There never was any connection between Saddam and Al- Qaeda, Iraqi weapons were never any real threat, and we've gotten ourselves into a multi-billion dollar quagmire with no end in sight. This is exactly what the war protesters were saying all along.

So how come no one seems to have noticed? It should be obvious even to people who only get their news from the mainstream media that we had good reasons for being against the war, and that we weren't just evil incarnate. But I'm still waiting for someone, anyone, to apologize for the name-calling and admit that we were right to speak out like we did.

Anyone? Any of you flag-wavers ready to say sorry? Hello? .... Is this thing on??

The number of deaths from the peace has now exceeded the number from the war. The dollar outlay is no less stunning. One billion dollars a week is what this so-called "peace" is costing us, and that is, by most accounts, a conservative estimate. The end is not in sight. The country is in shambles. If we leave it that way, they'll hate us even more. Having begun the mission, we have to finish it. Five years to rebuild the country, again a conservative estimate. Do the math yourself.

Would you have voted to spend $260 billion to bring a better life to a country where American soldiers are being killed standing guard at hospitals and traveling in convoys, killed simply because they are American soldiers?

Before the war, President Bush told us Iraq was a throbbing hub of terror. It wasn't, of course. But it is now.

With astonishing speed, the United States and Britain are making their nightmares come true. Iraq is fast becoming the land that they warned about: a throbbing hub of terror. Islamists bent on murder, all but non-existent in Saddam's Iraq, are now flocking to the country, from Syria, Iran and across the Arab world. In the way that hippies used to head for San Francisco, jihadists are surging towards Baghdad. For those eager to strike at the US infidel, Iraq is the place to be: a shooting gallery, with Americans in easy firing range.

Bush wants You!

the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the Americans rolled in—and fraternization between former enemies was a bigger problem for the military than confrontation.

Some journalists also dispute the Pentagon's official count. Julian Borger of The Guardian claims "unofficial figures are in the thousands." Central Command in Qatar talked of 926 wounded, but "that too is understated," Borger maintains. And in fact, a mid-August report in The Salt Lake City Tribune claims that Central Command has acknowledged 1,007 U.S. wounded. (The Pentagon did not respond to inquiries.)...

..."The wounded are much too real; telling their stories would be too much of a bummer for television's news programmers," says Norman Solomon, media critic and co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. "Dead people don't linger like wounded people do. Dead people's names can be posted on a television honor role, but the networks and cable news channels won't clog up their air time with the names and pictures of hundreds and hundreds of wounded soldiers."

Fifty-five Americans were wounded in action last week alone, pushing the number of troops wounded in action since May 1 beyond the number wounded during peak fighting. From March 19 to April 30, 550 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq. Since May 1, the number totals 574.

But by far the most interesting and quite possibly most realistic report comes by way of Jude Wanniski, the supply-side economist and ex-Wall Street Journal reporter who has struck up a correspondence with Mohammad al-Obaidi, an Iraqi doctor living in Britain. ...

Al-Obaidi told Wanniski that "hundreds of our party's cadre" spent five weeks interviewing undertakers, hospital officials, and ordinary citizens in all of Iraq (except for what's controlled by the Kurds) and came up with a total figure of 37,137 civilians killed since the beginning of the invasion, 6,103 of them in Baghdad. Those figures, according to al-Obaidi, do not include members of unofficial militias, paramilitary groups, or Saddam's Fedayeen units.

On his daily show, The O'Reilly Factor, he uses it as a place-holder for an idea still formulating in his brain. As a way to begin a sentence, end it, or punctuate it. Sometimes he says "shut up" with fury, eyes bulging. When he's being dismissive, he delivers it offhandedly and without real malice. Other times he says it gently, with a minxlike twinkle in his eye, signaling to all the world that he's just being frisky.

She had a penknife three foot long
Weela weela wallia
She had a penknife three foot long
Down by the river Sallia

She stuck the penknife in the baby's head
weela weela walia
She stuck the penknife in the baby's head
Down by the river Sallia

The problem is that as long as there’s a space shuttle and an I.S.S. the NASA culture will never change. The shuttle program was designed to ferry people back and forth into orbit, not to actually take them out into space. The space station was designed to be a destination for the shuttle (as well as Russian spacecraft) and will spend years traveling in a big loop around the planet. It’s created a lot of jobs for Russian scientists and American contractors. But other than that, it’s not accomplishing much.