Historical tidbit: Under the Eisenhower Doctrine, JF Dulles had promised Iraq, among other Middle Easter "nations" that the U.S. would shield them from subversion with a "mobile power of great force." On July 14, 1958, Arab nationalists rose up, siezed the Baghdad radio station, post office, cable office and all the Tigris bridges, proceeded to execute the king, the crown prince and the prime minister, and stirred up a hornet's nest of new trouble in Lebanon and other spots around the area. The CIA, upon whose information Dulles had relied, never saw it coming and left the U.S. with considerable egg on its face. When the Eisenhower Doctrine was reinvented as CENTO, Iraq was conspicuously absent from the alliance.

IOW, this is hardly our first pig's breakfast in Iraq due to faulty intelligence.

Ike had it right. This isn't about ideology, or any real fear that Iran is going to invade and we'll all be speaking Farsi. When the people who make money from war are too closely aligned and allied with those empowered to wage war, there's gonna be trouble in River City.

We have two feral hives on our property, lots of flowering trees and shrubs and the bees are doing their thing this year just like always. They're everywhere, about their business. People who visit freak out and are not at all comforted by the news that in the ten years we've lived here no one has been stung. Not even once. They are our friends; I hope nothing happens to them.

BTW, for those who don't know Encino, it's anything but rural.

So, if you speak English like a hick with a tin ear, you're gonna succeed? Guess he ought to know. He's the poster boy.

BushCo may be building this monstrosity, but it's we and our children who are paying for it. Congress, pull the funding for this shit!!!

I read somewhere this morning that Americans spend 40 billion a year on their pets. Now, pets are a great thing, don't get me wrong. But with that kind of number floating around, surely we can come up with 65 billion to give health care to ourselves and our fellow man.

The most difficult part of Mr. Obama's health plan to understand is the continued tying of insurance to employment. At some point in the past, health care was offered as a way to entice workers into employment, but this doesn't mean there's some natural connection between jobs and insurance. Why not have first cousins insure each other? People with the same middle name? We already have problems competing in a globalized economy. Adding insurance costs to other employment costs (don't get me started on the payroll tax -- that has to be retired, as well) just means that American products

will have a harder time competing and that employers will be all the more motivated to offshore their employees.

Bottom line, the details and design for universal health care and other social programs mean nothing if our economy doesn't do well and our people are not at work. We need a tax system that doesn't choke off innovation and entrepreneurship but that can find the money to pay for universal health care. This can be accomplished. Maybe by not spending more than the rest of the world combined on Military Viagra? In any case, asking employers to add to their burden when competition from overseas does not bear similar costs is a formula for eventual disaster.

So, you're saying your real name is Axordil? Come on, friend, you're just as anonymous as someone who admits it.

Is an ass.

I suppose Tony Snow means that if VP wasn't on a covert mission the day she was outed, then she "wasn't covert anymore" and Novak has a King's X.

I wonder if Mr. Snow would agree that, come Feb. 1, 2009, George W. Bush won't be president anymore, and should be denied any further protection from the Secret Service at that time.

I'm waiting for them to start looking outside the DOJ. Are there not laws regarding political hires at the EPA? The FDA? All the rest of the alphabet soup that supposedly protects us from Big Bidness, Big Govmint and such?

Now what do we do? These guys seem to be covered in Teflon.

When a con man starts believing his own con, he's doomed. Karl Rove knows that when you call lowering pollution standards the "Clear Skies Act" it's a con. He knows when you Swiftboat a decorated warrior it's a con. He knows you can talk about supporting the troops while sending them into harm's way with insufficient arms and training and get away with it as long as you talk loud enough. And on and on and con and con. I don't think Rove has ever lost sight of what he's doing. But the Republican rank and file actually drank the KoolAid. They believed that if Fearless Leader said he was cleaning up the skies, no matter what the fine print said, then that's what he was doing and that's what Jesus would do, too, innit? Bush, Jesus, Bush, Jesus, Bush=Jesus.

Now, they're coming down off the KoolAid trip they were on, the hallucinations are evaporating and that old sense of disappointment upon returning to the real world is setting in. If only Karl had taken them aside early on and told them the facts of life...

"It would not be the first time that the name of God has been used to consolidate power."

No, it wouldn't. The name of God has been thus used since time immemorial. In fact is was invented precisely for the purpose of consolidating power into the hands of the few who posit themselves as God's representative, descendant or interlocutor. That's why, as Mr. Hitchens so accurately states, religion poisons everything.

That was like hitting a grapefruit over the back fence with a tennis (NPI) racket. Surely you get letters with more nuanced issues than this.