Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?

Say, if we build a nice statue of Osama bin Laden, and then pull it down with a tank, can we claim that the war on terrorism is over too?

The NYPD professes to see nothing wrong with interrogating arrested protesters about their political affiliations (pardon me, not interrogating, because that would require the presence of a lawyer; rather, these were “debriefings,” which evidently don’t), but will knock it off anyway.

Another day, another extreme right-wing judicial nominee. For the Federal District Court, one Dr. James Holmes, who is another rabid anti-abortion activist who believes that rape exemptions are a “red herring” because rapes rarely result in pregnancy, believes that wives should subordinate themselves to husbands, that feminism is evil and leads to contraception and homosexuality, etc etc.

Rumsfeld today once again blamed the media. He thinks that all that looting is actually one guy stealing a vase, but that tv keeps running the footage of that one guy over and over. ("The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over. It is the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase and you see it 20 times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?") Rumsfeld (aka the bull in the China shop) has morphed into the Iraqi information minister before our very eyes. The US and Britain keep saying that it is not their role to stop looting. Actually, under those pesky Geneva Conventions again, it is indeed the responsibility of the occupying power (as the Internat Red Cross pointed out today). Whose else would it be? Actually, the Kurds did a nice job of it in Kirkuk, but the US has ordered them out because Turkey doesn’t like it.

Bush may have been watching tv this week, but Blair did something much more useful: he recorded his guest appearance on The Simpsons (there is talk of a movie, by the way).

Remember before the 1st Gulf War when that story was faked about Iraqis stealing incubators in Kuwait? You guessed it, Iraqis have today looted the hospitals and stolen the incubators (and ambulances and everything else). Anyone else wondering if these people deserve “liberty”? Some of the looters were assisted by Marines. Well, the looters told them that the shopkeeper (this is in Baghdad), who was defending his store with a rifle, was Fedayeen, so the Marines shot him...

The “sheikh” the British picked to run Basra, whose name they wouldn’t even release for days (possibly the only reason he’s still alive, unlike that Shiite cleric who was hacked to death; British troops had to stop a mob going after His Sheikhiness today), turns out to be a former Iraqi general in Saddam’s army.