At the end of the end and with all due respect, I absolutely hear what you're saying

Danny Rubinstein, who evidently has the “duh” beat for Ha’aretz, reporting on the bleeding obvious, writes that the assassination of Sheikh Yassin will “apparently” strengthen the extremist wing of Hamas.

Bush today: “And had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September the 11th, we would have acted.” So they really were waiting for an engraved invitation. With the time and place specified.

And Wacko Warlord Rumsfeld today testified something to the effect that killing bin Laden before 9/11 wouldn’t have stopped 9/11--which the Bushies are now portraying as unstoppable by any means known to man, because the hijackers were protected by their magic box-cutters, or something (Rummy: “the sleeper cells that flew the aircraft into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon were already in the United States months before the attack.”)--and only make it look like 9/11 was a response to Osama’s death.

I hadn’t noticed that the chief sponsors of the Unequal Rights Amendment were from Colorado, whose university demonstrates its commitment to heterosexuality by providing its football players only female prostitutes. Anyway, they’ve rewritten it so as not to ban civil unions. It’s still crap, and it’s still a federal provision telling state judges that they may not interpret state constitutions in a certain way.

Jon Stewart points out that Dawn of the Dead has displaced Passion of the Christ as #1 at the box office, suggesting that if one guy rising from the dead is good, then many people rising from the dead is better.

The Wall Street Journal has a good analysis of the many lies told about what happened and what Bush did on 9/11/01. None of it will come as a surprise to my long-time readers, but it’s nice to have a reminder, and from the Journal, of all sources.

The members of the Plain English Society vote for the most annoying phrase in the English language: “At the end of the day...” Also “I hear what you’re saying” and “absolutely” and “with all due respect”.

How many times now have I reported on the US bombing entirely the wrong country? A helicopter gunship strayed from Afghanistan into Pakistan and fired on a van. (The Reuters report is from Saturday morning. Why am I only hearing this now?)