They've already taken a couple of aircraft out

Shrub rushes to make clear his horror at the most recent beheading of an American, knowing that he needs to exploit this one quickly before the next one comes. Within 6 months they won’t make the front page anymore, within a year they’ll get the same level of attention as soldiers in Iraq get now. Bush says, “America will not be intimidated by these kind of extremist thugs” but does not say what sort of extremist thugs it WILL take for him to get the fucking point. Slate notes that none of the stories on the beheading were datelined Saudi Arabia. Incidentally, Johnson was wearing another of those orange jumpsuits.

American Catholic bishops meet and almost but not quite endorse withholding sacraments from politicians who are “cooperating in evil” by supporting paedophilia. Did I say paedophilia? I meant abortion.

The Justice Department decided to ignore the condition under which a Dominican judge extradited a man to the US, that he not be subject to the death penalty. Although the US had presumably agreed to the condition, once they got their hands on the guy they decided it was “not binding.” When the Federal District judge in Brooklyn wasn’t going along with this, they reversed themselves.

What was it, a week ago that we learned there had been 50 attempts early in the Iraq war to assassinate Iraqi leaders, all failed? So today they drop bombs on Fallujah to assassinate Zarqawi, and guess what? c.22 innocent bystanders dead, no Zarqawi (and what’s Zarqawi supposed to have done that was actually worse than what we just did trying to kill him?). One reason so many died was that there was a second missile strike several minutes after the first, presumably intended to kill anyone trying to help the victims. This is a standard Israeli tactic. In terms of an inability to learn from mistakes, this reminds me of that baby bird that flew in here 20 minutes ago and kept flying against the window, which kept being solid, accomplishing nothing except to provide a metaphor. Now if I can just come up with a way to make a metaphor out of that innocent, just-looking around inspection my cat made when I let her out of the bathroom after I’d finally gotten rid of the bird, the whole experience might be worth it.

The Clinton interview to watch is not the 60 Minutes one, but one with the BBC’s David Dimbleby, not that we’ll ever get to see it, in which Dimbleby keeps asking him whether his contrition about Monica is real, until he gets really pissed off.

Since Israel announced massive bribes for Gaza settlers who leave, a bunch of the settlers who had left are trying to move back in order to be bribed to leave again.

So the civilian CIA contractor who beat a prisoner to death with a flashlight had a record of spousal abuse, shooting at his neighbor’s car, and was kicked off the Hartford PD for beating up a guy. The CIA knew this, and still hired him.
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Even ignoring the ineptitude on 9/11/01 that led Cheney to think two planes had been shot down as per his orders, is this the sort of phrasing that’s appropriate when discussing planes full of innocent civilians you’ve just ordered killed: “it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out.”?

Out of nowhere, Putin says that he gave information to the US about Saddam planning terrorist attacks in the US, and it’s such a transparent lie that it gets almost no coverage on the first day, and no follow-up.