Not everyone has a burning bush, period.

Creepy, creepy, creepy: WaPo report a Dept of Labor pamphlet telling religious groups how to apply for gov money for job training because “Not everyone has a burning bush to tell them their life's calling.”

Chalabi might have told Iran that the US had broken its codes, it certainly sounds like him. But the story about how we know this is hinky, and if you wanted to throw an enemy into confusion, one way would be to claim that you’d broken its codes and been reading its secret messages for some time. This could be a CIA dirty trick to get two birds with one stone. Just a possibility.

Juan Cole (juancole.com) disputes the notion that Iran used Chalabi to get the US to invade Iraq, repeating what I’ve heard elsewhere, that Iran wouldn’t have wanted to be surrounded, with the US also occupying Afghanistan. Except that if Iran was using Chalabi, it started years before then. Also, the US, as we now know even if Rumsfeld couldn’t figure it out a year ago, the US couldn’t possibly occupy Iraq and Iran at the same time. The real threat to Iran was always fairly slight, but enough to unify the country behind the hardliners. Not that I’m necessarily buying it (though the idea is amusing), but I don’t find the arguments against the theory convincing.

More convincingly, Cole floats the theory that Chalabi peddled his stories about Iraqi WMDs to Iran as well as to the US, thus impelling Iran to escalate its nuclear program.

CNN is suing Florida to get a copy of the list of supposed felons who will be purged from the electoral rolls. Although the list is public, in the sense that parties can make copies of it and journalists can see, but not copy it, Florida is claiming that letting CNN make copies would violate the privacy rights of the many people who are on the list but aren’t really felons. Really, they said that.

In case you missed it, today Bush gave the 2nd of his speeches on Iraq policy. It was emptier than the first one. He says that America is always more secure when freedom is on the march. Should freedom really be marching? And he talked about the dangers of terrorists taking up residence inside failed states. He gave this speech at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, well-known for the rapists who took up residence...oh, you do the rest, I’m tired.