Kitty Fix!

US Kills 9 Children

Still winning hearts and minds, as always:

A U.S. attack killed 19 insurgents and 15 civilians, including nine children, northwest of the capital Thursday — one of the heaviest civilian death tolls in an American operation in recent months.

Lessing Wins

Well done:

The British author Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel prize for literature. Lessing, who is only the 11th woman to win literature's most prestigious prize in its 106-year history, is best known for her 1962 postmodern feminist masterpiece, The Golden Notebook.

Announcing the award, the Swedish Academy described Lessing as an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". It singled out The Golden Notebook for praise, calling it "a pioneering work" that "belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship." Lessing, who was shopping at the time of the Nobel announcement, was typically irreverent in her response to the news. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot," she said to the reporters gathered outside her home in north London. "It's a royal flush."

Come Out!

C'mon, Larry Craig.

Today is the perfect opportunity for you to lose that "wide stance" and instead stand tall.

Why Does the Marine Corps Hate America?

Don't they know that Iraq is THE central front in the War on Terror?

The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.

Bush Is Profoundly Committed

He is stalwart in his opposition to telling the truth about anything, ever:

Congress rejected a plea by the Bush administration yesterday over a resolution officially recognising as genocide the deportation and massacre of Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman empire.

George Bush warned of the negative repercussions should Congress use the word genocide to describe the killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians and their exile.

The Hallowed Halls of Academe

Even universities are not safe from vile racial intolerance in such backward Southern states as... New York:

A noose found on the office door of a black professor at New York's Columbia University is being investigated as a hate crime, police said on Wednesday.

Police said 44-year-old Professor Madonna Constantine arrived at work on Tuesday to discover the noose outside her office at Columbia's Teachers College.

It was the second involving a noose to occur this week in New York. Police arrested an 18-year-old woman earlier this week for hanging a noose on a tree in her yard and threatening to hang the children of her black neighbors.

Wide Stance

Move over, santorum, there's a neo logism in town:

The online Urban Dictionary defines "wide stance" as a euphemism for a closeted homosexual.

Still on the Brink

The situation has been thus for a while now, and I know some of my readers are skeptical, but I still expect Turkey to begin making more and more substantial incursions into Iraq:

Turkish warplanes bombed positions of suspected Kurdish rebels Wednesday, and the prime minister said preparations for parliamentary approval of a military mission against separatist fighters in Iraq were under way.

Priorities

Millions of children with health insurance vs. forty more days in Iraq:

The Measure vetoed last week by President Bush to provide millions of children with affordable health coverage would cost what the Pentagon spends every 40 days in Iraq, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today.

Thanks, Dems

Once again, the "opposition party" caves to the executive branch:

Two months after insisting that they would roll back broad eavesdropping powers won by the Bush administration, Democrats in Congress appear ready to make concessions that could extend some crucial powers given to the National Security Agency.

Administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess. Some Democratic officials concede that they may not come up with enough votes to stop approval.

As the debate over the eavesdropping powers of the National Security Agency begins anew this week, the emerging measures reflect the reality confronting the Democrats.

Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence.

Blogging

I'm not exactly burned out, but I am very busy with the many classes I'm teaching.

Further, my laptop has rather thoroughly crapped out on me, which complicates blogging from home.

Hence the light blogging of late. I proffer profound and profuse apologies.