The, Concerned Citizen Community, making America safe for alliteration

You know you’ve been blogging too long when you read about the Abu Ghraib dog handler being sentenced to 6 months and you immediately start calculating what that is in dog years.

The Afghans are working on a compromise: instead of sentencing the Christian convert, Abdul Rahman, to death, declare him insane.

Bush today had a meeting on immigration reform, which he described as “a very constructive and important dialogue with members of the agricultural community, the faith community, the concerned citizen community”. The what? He says the debate on immigration “must be done in a way that doesn’t pit one group of people against another.” Funny, I thought the whole point of a border was to pit one group of people against another.

A few days ago I said we should resist the temptation to quote “Comical” Allawi’s announcement of a civil war. Juan Cole writes about Allawi’s agenda (“He therefore wishes to signal that the status quo cannot hold, that sectarianism is the biggest danger, and that only his brand of secular Iraqi nationalism can hope to hold the country together. It is a plea for a minority government under his leadership, with the clear message that Iraq needs a strongman like himself to avoid chaos.”) and quotes a workable definition of crapfest civil war: “Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter’s ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain.” A touch mechanical, but good enough.