gay adultery

* "President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists."

* blinky sounds like he is proud that he knows what MRE stands for.
* driftglass: "Reach into the feculent hurricane that is this Administration’s Iraq policy and pull out anything George Bush has done at random – anything at all – and it’ll be either a lie or a failure...or a hand-spun cover-up cozy of White House doublespeak that has been used to hide a lie or failure coming apart at the seams. And the leading edge of that shitstorm is Karl Rove. The poster-boy for everything that it fatally, feloniously, treasonously wrong with the Bush Administration is the very same man who stands at the President’s elbow, working his pulleys and guy-wires, spitting words into Dubya's mouth that he then faithfully regurgitates back into the microphone." (emphasis in orig)

* "gunmen have shot and killed senior police officers in Baghdad and the oil-rich city of Kirkuk."
(link)

* "A man's affair with another man constitutes adultery and is grounds for divorce, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge has ruled.
In granting the divorce, Justice Nicole Garson said she was persuaded that she had the authority to make a change in the legal definition of adultery, which under previous Canadian court rulings has been considered voluntary extramarital sex between a spouse and someone of the opposite gender." (link)
yay

* juancole: "My sources in Baghdad indicate that entire articles (of the constitution) are disappearing. The document is still in flux, both to bring Sunnis on board and placate the desires of Shiites and Kurds. But the process is now off the rails. There is no semblance of any legality. They are working outside the framework that was envisaged in the interim constitution.
The text may not be final until the constitutional referendum of October 15, though you would hope that there is some date by which the text is fixed and printed so that the public can have some idea of what they are voting on. People didn’t know what they were voting for back in January. .. But I think it is probably going to pass. Whether that’s a good thing, I can’t say."

* stirling newberry discusses Fukuyama's recent nyt oped that i mentioned the other day: "If even "The End of History" guy makes sense, then hell has, officially, frozen over"

* "When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be. Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?
The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it’s obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults." (link)

* "The latest studies, published in Nature today, show that... the (genetic) difference between humans and chimps is about 10 times that between any two humans." (link)
wow - the fundies will go mad. they hate being related to "monkeys and rocks". but this is the coolest thing ive read in forever. as a comparison, i wonder how large the genetic difference is between family members vs strangers. and similarly different isolated populations - say icelanders vs new guineans. (vis-a-vis the factor 10 human/chimp difference)