not "stay the course" bullshit

* via americablog:

"Marines based in western Ramadi now regularly knock on people's front doors instead of storming through."

* demfromCT:

"Democrats are going to have to come to grips with the war sooner or later. The idea that they can finesse their way around it, or avoid saying what they think, is rapidly becoming inoperable inoperative (Ron Ziegler's words, though my not-enough-coffee error fits, too) - and the reason is that that's not what Americans want. They want to know what alternatives are available - that's alternatives, not "stay the course" bullshit - to get us out of the quagmire. Present one, and you win. Pretend we can win if we only do it better than Bush ("the next six months are crucial") and you lose, big time. You can't compete with Republicans on the basis of making stuff up. They have a lock on that."

* athenae:

"You want to make the Democratic party a place where Christians feel more at home than thousands and thousands of them already do? Then you shut the Bible and you pick up a shovel and you pick up a hammer and you pick up a pen. You help those people in that story above, and all the hundreds and thousands like them.
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I'm flat-out sick of defining a religious conversation as one that forces me to take sides in a court case that does not and never will affect me one whit. I'm tired of defining a religious conversation as one that centers on a review of Mel Gibson's latest movie. I'm positively exhausted by discussions of moral values that are all about my sex organs and never, never, about my head or my hands or my heart."

* Hirsh in Newsweek:

"Another figure named by Powell in that U.N. speech, Abu Atiya, was said to be the Zarqawi and Al Qaeda link to terror networks in Europe. But according to a French investigation documented in Le Figaro newspaper, he turned out to be a minor figure. "If he was so important, then why was he returned to his home country, Jordan, and released at one point?" says John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, who has closely tracked the fate of high-level "ghost" detainees. "He does not fit the profile of high-level Al Qaeda terrorists. Neither do any of these supposed Al Qaeda operatives that were trumped up by administration officials in 2002 and 2003. Every single one of these stories, when subjected to the harsh light of public scrutiny, has collapsed." Those of us who have been on the war-on-terror beat since 9/11 have been reluctant to write about Al Qaeda this way, although some of us have suspected for a long time the group was never all that it was cracked up to be. "

* hecate has a 60th birthday present for the Inappropriate Sniggerer