christopher hitchens: (R, Ex-Trotskyite)

* over at Time they have a list of Most E-Mailed Stories, for some reason #2 is this 2002 interview with scott ritter (from before the invasion...)

* hitchens thinks that cindy sheehan is a 'moral blackmailer'. good on ya, hitch.

* in other hitch news, he actually wrote in slate that the invasion of iraq was terrific because "We can now certify Iraq as disarmed, even if the materials once declared by the Saddam regime and never accounted for have still not been found. Why does this certified disarmament upset people so much?" (link)
my goodness.

* a few weeks back, i mentioned that the Guardian had printed an absurd story/interview with/about chomsky. it turns out that they've issued an apology and withdrawn it completely..

* juan cole: "Somebody named Dennis Prager wrote a frankly bigotted op-ed for the LA Times asking "Muslims" 5 questions. The questions are fairly easy to answer in themselves, but the stupidity of the whole framework is what is objectionable." (xymphora also takes prager to task)
this shit drives me mad. the worst example was when london got bombed and everyone wanted to demand that muslims say that they were "british first, muslim second." in related news, i was talking to my mum the other day, and she was telling me about some guy she knows had told her that his son has converted to islam - my mum said to me "that's not the sort of thing that you'd wanna tell people about." grrrrrrrrrrrrr.

* speaking of xymph, i dont think ive pointed to 2 of his posts on the jordanian bombings. here and here.

* juancole: "Bush's approval ratings are in free-fall! He is down to a 34 percent approval rating. Only Nixon in the last days of Watergate was doing worse. Seriously, I am worried about these numbers. At some point, the executive will stop being able to govern. Bush has been a disastrous president, but a country without any executive at all can be in real trouble (ask the Iraqis). It raises the question of whether the Dems can pull off a miracle and take the House of Representatives in 2006 (not at all likely, but not impossible), and whether if that happened there would be an impeachment." (link)