A Baghdad burger joint

A poignant story of a small business behind the blast walls. The last lines of the article make me wonder: What responsibility do we have?

Whack-a-mole

An armistice of sorts slows the carnage in Sadr City, while the Iraqi army begins a new campaign in Mosul. War without end.

The party's over...

Iran is shifting its oil-exchange currency to euros and yens. Saddam Hussein was in process of doing so when the US invaded his nation.

Grab your coat, pay the lady in the cloakroom and hale a taxi. Get outa here. To some nation south of here, preferably, but not one that hates the dollar. Mexico, maybe, or Argentina (maybe). But not Europe or Africa or Australia. Perhaps--dare I say it?--Vietnam.

Occupation blues

The Iraqi military: Fired up and ready to go!

Is it just me

or does Hillary Clinton not only act like the Energizer Bunny in this campaign, she's beginning to look like him/her?

It makes sense to me

that conservatives are happier than liberals. Why is this so?, you ask. Because, according to the survey, they're callous, rationalizing assholes.

Good news, bad news

Good news: Obama's gonna do it!

Bad news: Sales of a just-released video game exceeded one-half billion dollars in just a few days. It's called Grand Theft Auto IV, and here's what it's about:

"Grand Theft Auto IV" follows the criminal exploits of protagonist Niko Bellic, an immigrant-turned-gangster who travels from Eastern Europe to Liberty City, the game's fictional locale based on New York City. As Bellic, players can hijack cars, earn cash for criminal activities, shoot innocent bystanders and visit strip clubs.

The madhouse that is Iraq

Nothing new, I suppose, but when "Iraqi soldiers" are arresting "Iraqi policemen" you've got to wonder which lunatics are running the asylum.

I don't know why...

but the prospect of all of us someday using Evernote bothers me, offends me, even. How about you?

You can't make this stuff up

I've long marveled at how truth is not just stranger than fiction, but that it makes fiction pale in comparison. It's true that movies and novels that show our astronauts sailing off to Mars within a single reel of film are still unrealistic, but scenes from Blade Runner and Mad Max aren't far from the present mark we're creating in the world.

And then there's this: Disneyland in Baghdad, surrounded by barbed wire adjacent to the Green Zone. You tell me: Could you sell a screenplay with such an outlandish premise?

I gotta tell ya

I'm beginning to hate Hillary Clinton. I find her marginally more tolerable than McCain to watch on TV (but of course immensely more watchable than Bush--but then, so is Mussolini).

Her latest gimmick--the "summer vacation" from federal gasoline tax, which is but a parody of McCain's, with a politically-expedient announcement of a years-later, after-the-fact "windfall-profits" tax--is merely a capper in a long string of her "say-anything-to-get-elected" ploys that have made a mess of this nation for more than a generation. She's but a chip off Bill's block (the substituting of "bl" for "c" is purposeful): President "Don't-ask-don't-tell"; President "Welfare-reform"; President "Deregulate-media-ownership"; President "Nafta-Cafta-America-afta" (I made that up, BTW.) Clinton's presidency was a disaster, saved only by a dot-com bubble. Without that--and a few saving Executive Orders in his last days, all of which were, by law, reversible (and reversed) by Bush--he wrecked the Democratic Party, turning it into an amorphous mass of yea-sayers to corporate influence.

I won't vote for McCain if Hillary's the nominee of the Democratic Party. But I sure don't know what I'll do. (Do they accept mail-in ballots from Tahiti?)