Excuses, excuses

Most Insultingly Implausible Excuse of the Day: Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was supposed to go to a regional summit in Swaziland for negotiations to save the doomed power-sharing deal that Robert Mugabe signed but never intended to honor, but he has not been issued a passport because... Zimbabwe is running out of paper. That’s what the government said. Because of sanctions, it said (and possibly because these days you now need a dump truck full of Zimbabwean currency to buy one peanut).

Second Most Insultingly Implausible Excuse of the Day: Ted Stevens, testifying at his trial, on why an expensive lounge chair given to him seven years ago should not be considered a (unreported) gift: “We have lots of things in our house that don’t belong to us”. Indeed, “I don’t know how it got in the house.”