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Breaking News: 50 Dead in Irbil Bombing, 100 Wounded A man with high explosives on his person detonated his payload in the midst of a crowd of civilians lined up to apply for jobs as policemen in the northern, Kurdish city of Irbil. (Or it might have been a car bomb– reports are confused) Casualty […]

Sunni VP Boycotts Swearing-In Ceremony 8 US Troops Wounded at Qaim and Ramadi, Dozens of Iraqis Killed Iraq’s government was sworn in on Tuesday. But the key ministries of Defense (which will go to a Sunni Arab) and Petroleum (which will go to a Shiite) are still unfilled, as are several others promised to the […]

Is Bigotry All Right in Politics? John Aravosis argues that Pat Robertson should be a political pariah after his remarks on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Muslim Americans are not fit to serve in the US cabinet. It is actually much worse than that. Robertson also implied that Jews are unfit to serve on […]

Madison and Algeria Many, many thanks to Armando and other diarists at Daily Kos for a thorough, impassioned and learned debate on my rant about the dangers of the Republican Senators ending the American republic in favor of a simple demagogic “democracy” like Algeria, 1991.

Boycott of Israeli Universities Wrong: AAUP The American Association of University Professors has quite rightly come out against a recent resolution of the British Association of University Teachers (one of two main such organizations in the UK) that an academic boycott should be imposed on the University of Haifa and Bar Ilan University. Long-time readers […]

The Disaster of Destroying the Voice of America Arabic Service Corey Pein in the Columbia Journalism Review writes about the current state of play with regard to “Radio Sawa.” The real tragedy here in my view is that the Voice of America Arabic service was destroyed by Norman Pattiz of Westwood One. The VOA was […]

US Military Tied down by Afghanistan, Iraq The US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq pretty much exhaust the conventional army capacity of the US military (and then some– the reserves are being over-used). This according to Gen. Richard Myers. Washington spinmeisters scrambled to attempt to cover up the contradiction with President Bush’s recent assertion that […]

Jaafari Rethinks Debaathification 23 Killed in Violence Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari caused a major stir with a speech on Monday that seemed to back off the policy of debaathification or the exclusion from high office of former Baath civilian and military officials. Some Shiite parliamantarians were furious. At the same time, Jaafari has been under […]

41 Killed, 76 Wounded in Bombings Among Wounded: 5 US Soldiers The guerrilla campaign of mass violence continued unrelentingly on Sunday. Guerrillas in the far northern, largely Turkmen city of Telafar, sent a car bomb into the midst of a funeral for a just-assassinated local Kurdish leader. The bomb killed 30 mourners and wounded more […]