All Zanzibaris are beautiful

Bush has already used that crowd of literally tens of people watching the pulling-down of the statue (we need a shorthand name for the statue thing--anyone have an idea?) to justify the war. As opposed to a couple of million peace protesters, when it was “you know, size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.”

Zanzibar bans beauty pageants because “all Zanzibaris are beautiful.” Isn’t that special--in a Special Olympics kind of way.

Rumsfeld may have to take back his light-hearted comments about the looting of vases. Robert Fisk visits the National Archaeological Museum and sees some destroyed 4,000 year old Assyrian vases. 50,000 artifacts have been looted. Fisk also says that this is not mere looting, but a civil war between Shiites and the Sunnis who were the ruling class until last week.

The US are recruiting from Saddam’s police force, although they are evidently not especially well-liked by the populace, despite being called “bobbies” and wearing funny tall hats and saying “Hallo guv’nor” to everyone they passed, when they weren’t attaching electrodes to people’s unmentionables (I may have some of the details wrong). Also, the US is giving a major policing contract to DynCop (a major Republican contributor), despite its record in doing the same job in Bosnia, when they weren’t heavily engaged in white slavery. The Observer had a reporter pretend to be a potential recruit. He was told that he didn’t have to speak Arabic.

Haiti legalizes voodoo marriages, and each one of you can come up with as good a joke as I can on this one.