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future sounds
"No one knows what will happen when Saddam Hussein's death grip on his country is finally broken. Prediction is a dangerous business in politics generally, but in the case of Iraq, where since 1968 the only political activity that won't get you killed is unambiguous loyalty to the Baath Party, the future is especially opaque. For the past several months the country has been crawling with foreign journalists, yet the security apparatus is so extensive and terror so deeply internalized that most of what we know about Iraqis' unofficial thoughts is confined to facial expressions and buried meanings. When Makiya and two other Iraqis were invited to the Oval Office in January, he told President Bush that invading American troops would be greeted with ''sweets and flowers.'' More fancifully, Prof. Fouad Ajami, a Middle East scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, predicts ''kites and boom boxes.'"
choke hold
unqualified offerings dismantles recent pollack oped.
appeal me off another one
"Bashman, an appellate lawyer with Philadelphia's Buchanan Ingersoll, presides over "How Appealing," the pre-eminent blog for the appellate court community, the primus inter pares of all legal blogs, the undeniable Marbury v. Madison of the genre."
espirito beneficiente
"The Centro Espirito Beneficiente Unaio do Vegetal (UDV) is a Brazilian church combining Christian beliefs with a practice copied from certain Amazonian Indians: ritual use of a psychoactive sacrament brewed from two Amazonian plants. The church and its sacraments are legal in Brazil. Its small American branch, which has both US and Brazilian nationals as members, sued the federal government, claiming the right to pursue its worship here in the face of the drug laws, after a shipment of the sacramental mixture was seized in 1999."
friedman flashback
"Nothing is local anymore. It's all global because the Internet makes everything local, which is the same as everything being global, because nothing has to be local when everything's global. Especially the local. For instance, I was talking to the guy who cleaned the toilets in my suite at the Bombay Hilton, and he told me, "If only I had a computer! You see, toilet-scrubbing in Bombay is really a local business, but with a laptop and a modem, I could maybe branch out into e-commerce services."
lesson up
"Blast from the past: Politicians on both sides of the argument over Iraq have been busy rummaging through the history books. The pro-war camp constantly warn against repeating the mistakes of appeasement. The antis claim we are heading for another Suez. But which is the more plausible parallel? Matt Seaton asked a dozen leading historians (what they think)."
youre such a cut-up
"A man's body - from which a lung and the heart and liver had been neatly extracted - was found in an abandoned North Philadelphia rowhouse yesterday afternoon by a man who had been foraging for scrap metal."
undermedicated
just got linked from hullabaloo. he also added tom moody to his blogroll. shouldnt be long now before we're the center of the left-leaning blogworld. with all the in depth commentary that i provide, the breadth width and height of my soaring intelligence, and the overall excellence of my faculties, not to mention my command of the language (which one im not entirely sure), i wouldnt be surprised if people stopped blogging as a result. i mean, who wouldnt be embarrassed if they start comparing themselves to what's going on here?
ok, maybe thats a bit of an overstatement. i did catch two mice today. can anybody top that?
here no evil
"The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.
Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer."
heart felt
the 24-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is deemed terrorist organization by ashcroft justice dept.