A winged condom in flight

Fox drops its upcoming reality show SERIOUSLY DUDE, I'M GAY, in which straight contestants competed to convince their friends they were gay in order to win $50,000. Astonishingly, something too tasteless for Fox, a sure sign of the apocalypse.

Remember the Panchen Lama? Soon after he was declared at the age of 7, he was taken into custody by the Chinese government, and never seen again. Today the Chinese say the 2nd highest leader of Tibetan Buddhism, now 16, is actually not in prison at all, but free, somewhere, he just doesn’t wish to speak to anyone who is not a member of the Chinese government, so that his family, also seized, can live a normal life. So that’s okay, then.

Evidently Brahimi, who we were all told was going to name the members of the Iraqi transition government, was never going to do anything of the sort, if we’re to believe what we were told today. Which we aren’t. Clearly, some sort of coup just happened, and it will take a while to sort out who foisted Iyad “Owie” Allawi on an unsuspecting world. And who had the naked pictures of Brahimi, who certainly had not been planning to appoint a former exile, politician rather than technocrat type, associated with the discredited IGC. Iyad “Zowie” Allawi is a 30-year exile, a man with connections to the CIA and before that with MI6 (to whom he gave the famous claim that Iraq could launch WMDs within 45 minutes, and endorsed the Niger yellowcake forgery), and before that the Iraqi secret service, for whom he presumably spied on his fellow Iraqi students in London. “Howie” Allawi was involved in that coup attempt against Saddam that the CIA believes was snitched out to Saddam by Chalabi (who’s some sort of relative of “Maui” Allawi)(later: evidently he’s Chalabi’s nephew twice over, and is smack in the middle of the cousinate that is the IGC, being related to several of the appointed ministers). His Iraqi National Accord, like Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, would not have existed without money from Western intelligence services. After enormous confusion among the Bushies, Scott McClellan says that “Wowie” Allawi “appears to have broad support among the Iraqi people.” He didn’t explain how he’d know such a thing. Presumably he actually meant broad support among his relatives who were appointed by the US. Although “Yowie” Allawi is invariably described as a neurologist, I have yet to see a hint he ever practiced.

Prank call opportunity of the week: “The Swedish Organisation for Sex Education has rolled out a "condom ambulance" service. Callers who unexpectedly find themselves requiring protection can dial 696969 to summon a delivery from the van, which features the logo of a winged condom in flight. Reuters, Stockholm”

I suggested Ashcroft’s nebulous THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU, RUN FOR THE HILLS message was purely political, and so it was. His claims about Al Qaida being 90% ready for the attack turn out actually to refer to another body, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which may not actually exist except as a website that takes responsibility for every terrorist attack anywhere, and some blackouts that had nothing to do with terrorist attacks. Chalabi offered better intel than Ashcroft. Good news: the FBI finally figured out how to use computers and get on the Web. Bad news: they believe everything they read there. And today, the FBI issued a warning to several cities of a terrorist attack within the next 24 hours...and then retracted it.

Arizona’s two-time prosecutor-of-the-year award winner is disbarred for eliciting perjury in a death penalty case. During his career, he prosecuted 250 felonies including 140 murders, of which 60 were capital. Can’t find out how many of those were executed. Or convicted, if it comes to that. The prosecutor is only being disbarred, not sent to prison forever.

Thanks to the Laci Peterson law which made the murder of a pregnant woman count as 2 crimes, a federal judge ruled that a pregnant illegal alien can’t be deported because her fetus is a citizen. Which should also mean pregnant women can’t be sent to jail unless there is a separate trial of the fetus, to say nothing of car poor lanes...