Harold Pinter has throat cancer. This is deeply ironic.

The Washington Post points out that Jeb Bush wants his daughter’s drug abuse case to be treated in exactly the opposite manner to his preference for every other drug abuse case. This is also ironic, in a different way.

The warning CNN was pissing itself over all day--that Al Qaeda planned to fly a plane into a nuclear power plant--turns out to have come from just one captured fighter, suggesting that the CIA’s processing of intelligence is as good as it was when it failed to discover a certain plot last September, when one plane may or may not have been intended to fly into a nuclear plant. Not that anyone is talking about that. The CIA is obviously now over-compensating for its previous short-comings by reporting as intelligence any half-baked rumor that anyone is willing to pass on to it, and probably paying good money for it too.

Sharon once more opens his big mouth, inserts his big feet, and does a tap dance on his tonsils.

There isn’t any country outside the US where the State of the Union address played well. Read the world press, and you will quickly learn how to write “arrogance” in every language there is. He damaged talks between North and South Korea, not for the first time, and set back the moderates in Iran.

There is, admittedly, a delicate balance between bull in the China shop and Thank you sir, may I have another. I can’t figure how Saudi Arabia has gotten away with so much shit with no criticism worthy of the name. Well yes I can, it’s the oil stupid, but if there were ever an exporter of terrorism, it has to be the Saudis. That they don’t actually order terrorist actions is perhaps worse, since it’s purest cynicism. Bin Laden at least believes in a cause, no matter how moronic. This week the Saudi foreign minister has been attacking the western (British) press for a conspiracy against his country. See, in November 2000 there were a series of explosions, which may have been Al Qaeda, but the Saudis liked to claim were western alcohol smugglers fighting it out--Al Capone instead of Al Qaeda. So one of the victims of an explosion, a British citizen, was seized out of his hospital bed and tortured for 2 months until he confessed, as were 4 others. The British government decided to cover this up. Read any of the British papers for this week.