Nobody likes war, and nobody doesn't like Sara Lee

In the California election, 4.6% skipped the recall question. Except for the 3 counties which used those Diebold voting machines all the controversy has been about. There, evidently, no one skipped it. Oh yeah, that’s not suspicious at all. Paper and pencil, people, paper and pencil.

LA Times on what the claim of 130,000 Iraqis now under arms actually means.

I just ran across a quote from Lord Clanricarde, an absentee Irish landlord during the land wars of the 1880s: “If you think you can intimidate me by shooting my agent, you are mistaken.” Or as Dubya would put it, “Bring them on.”

Creepy creepy creepy.

The Washington Post points out that Bush gave an interview to a low-rent British tabloid--owned by Rupert Murdoch, natch--which features naked women on page 3. Don’t know if they also pointed out--The Sun sure did--that he hasn’t given a one-on-one interview to ANY American newspaper this year. Here’s a quote: “Nobody likes war. See, I understand the consequences of war. I understand particularly when I go and hug the moms and dads and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of those who died.” Yuck. And again I say, yuck.

A tv station asked Secretary of War Rummy Rumsfeld if the mortar attack in Baghdad on the hotel Paul Wolfowitz was staying in might be a wee hint that Iraq wasn’t so peaceful after all. His answer: “It seems to me that doesn't really follow. The fact of the matter is in any major city in the world, there are attacks of various types that take place.”

Serbian presidential elections, for the third time, fail to attract enough voters to be valid. The thing is, this has somehow been going on for something like a year now.

Here’s a cute AP story [link no longer works] about the US renewing diplomatic ties with Equatorial Guinea, despite the facts that “Equatorial Guinea's president had his opponents imprisoned and tortured, had his presidential predecessor executed by firing squad, helped himself to the state treasury at will. State radio recently declared him ‘like God.’” But they have oil.