the blindest of George Bush's bats

* fisked: "Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning "democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as "the greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that "contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States"."
the rest is worth a read too. mr fisk is seething.

* wow - i knew that alqaeda has scores of "number threes" - but i didnt know that there were three "20th hijackers": "Mohammad al-Qahtani was touted by the U.S. as being a top-notch informant. Imprisoned at Guantanamo, the U.S. said he was the planned 20th hijacker (of course, the U.S. also believed at one time that Zacarias Moussaoui was the planned 20th...and at another time that Ramzi Binalshibh was the 20th hijacker.)" (link)
the most recent #3 has now unconfessed, given that he isnt being tortured (in the back of my head, I can hear Rumfeld saying: "yeah, they're trained to unconfess once we stop torturing them. it's in their training manual that we found at their training camp. oh - yeah - and they behead people, in raperooms, before putting them in mass graves!")

* something to warm miguel's cockels: "Ralph Reed has said he didn't know it until last year, but emails suggest he was informed that eLot — a firm then in the online lottery business — was behind his effort to fend off a ban against internet gambling in 2000." (link)

* everyone is apologizing to heckuvajobbrownie (eg here's fdl) - i'll simply note that he is now being compared to Bush.