whether you consent to it or not. Again, two articles today:

U.S. soldiers released eight members of an Iranian delegation on Wednesday, a day after the group was arrested at a hotel in eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military and an Iraqi government spokesman said.

"Associated Press Television caught blindfolded men being escorted from a Baghdad hotel. Yassin Majid, an aide to Iraq's prime minister, said the Iranians who were detained were employed by Tehran's power ministry and were invited by Iraqi government officials to the capital to sign an electricity supply contract. They were released Wednesday morning, he said." So we arrest diplomats, again.

This is the same day that dubya gave a speech demanding Tuesday that Iran end any support for extremists in Iraq "at once" and raised the specter of a "nuclear holocaust" in the Middle East. curiously, the same article stated the obvious:

"The United States has expressed its discomfort over the increasingly strong relationship between Iran and Baghdad, disapproving of comments made by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on a recent visit to Tehran. Some Western analysts have argued that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, helping Tehran to boost its influence in the region."

The ramp up to war with Iran was begun a while back. bush43 is just starting to use the very same methods and reasons they used to get us to invade Iraq. Can we stop them? God I can only hope so.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

PAKISTAN'S weakened President Pervez Musharraf has agreed to resign as army chief in a power-sharing deal with exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

General Musharraf had previously insisted he would remain army chief while standing for re-election, but a deepening political crisis appears to have forced the key ally in the US-led war on terror to compromise.

After months of secretive political horse-trading, Mrs Bhutto - who has consistently said she would not strike a deal with General Musharraf unless he stepped down as army chief - said this week that the issue of the President being in military uniform had been resolved.

story

I hate to see pakistan in the headlines, frankly, because one day that place is going to start WWIII. At the same time making a clear break between the office of president and the military seems potentially good.

Anyone know more about the situation?

Bush wanting yet another 50 billion dollars for Iraq?!?!? This is absolutely insane. Let's hope congress grows a backbone, puts its foot down and says a resounding no to Bush's demands!! They've caved into G. W. Bush's demands far. too. often, imo.

I like John Cole's assessment .

from Kevin drum:

FOLLOW THE MONEY....The census report yesterday that documented a rise in the number of people without health insurance also reported an increase in median earnings. So at least there was some good news, right? Not quite:

Experts said the rise in income was mainly a reflection of an increase in the number of family members entering the workplace or working longer hours. Average wages for men and women actually declined for the third consecutive year.

Italics mine. Among full-time workers, income declined 1.1% for men and 1.2% for women. And — this will come as a shock, so be sure you're sitting down — incomes decreased a bit at the low end and increased a bit at the high end, causing the Gini index of income inequality to go up yet again.

Typical for republican presidencies.

This thread on redstate is interesting only because of the poster Vladimir. He makes good valid points and discusses the differences between Tar Sand and Oil Shale in easy to understand terms.

Unforutunately most of the posters are too busy baldly claiming that we can use oil shale to actually pay attention to the realities of the situation (oh and attacking liberals and wanting ANWR opened, but that's par for the course).

Apparently a bunch of wingnut hacks from the National Review got stranded in greenland.

sweet

Air Greenland went out on a sudden strike yesterday just two days before the last flight to the United States. It's stranded about 60 Americans (and a number of others) around a region where there are no intra-town roads. The Air Greenland office in town is refusing to help with rescheduling those here and the Greenland travel folks in Copenhagen are no where to be found. We seem to be pawns, all the more so since there doesn't seem to be enough hotel rooms in town for everyone. Even if the strike ends, it will take a bit to get all the various travelers to the single airport that can handle jets to the U.S. or Europe. There is only one internet accessible computer at the hotel and a long line, so, long story short, no Iran News Round Ups for a little while until I can find my way back from Ilulissat.

I'd like to particularly thank the nation of Greenland for preventing them from having internet access. Thank you.

OTB highlights this article about how AQI and the Sunnis in Iraq started killing each other. Not surprising it has exactly nothing to do with US or our surge.

Some tribal leaders told me that the split started over women. This is not as odd as it sounds. One of AQ’s standard techniques, which I have seen them apply in places as diverse as Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, is to marry leaders and key operatives to women from prominent tribal families. The strategy works by creating a bond with the community, exploiting kinship-based alliances, and so “embedding” the AQ network into the society. Over time, this makes AQ part of the social landscape, allows them to manipulate local people and makes it harder for outsiders to pry the network apart from the population. (Last year, while working in the tribal agencies along Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, a Khyber Rifles officer told me “we Punjabis are the foreigners here: al Qa’ida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun hill-tribes to the point where it’s hard to tell the terrorists from everyone else.”) Well, indeed.

...

Islam, of course, is a key identity marker when dealing with non-Muslim outsiders, but when all involved are Muslim, kinship trumps religion. And in fact, most tribal Iraqis I have spoken with consider AQ’s brand of “Islam” utterly foreign to their traditional and syncretic version of the faith. One key difference is marriage custom, the tribes only giving their women within the tribe or (on rare occasions to cement a bond or resolve a grievance, as part of a process known as sulha) to other tribes or clans in their confederation (qabila). Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done. AQ, with their hyper-reductionist version of “Islam” stripped of cultural content, discounted the tribes’ view as ignorant, stupid and sinful.

This led to violence, as these things do: AQI killed a sheikh over his refusal to give daughters of his tribe to them in marriage, which created a revenge obligation (tha’r) on his people, who attacked AQI. The terrorists retaliated with immense brutality, killing the children of a prominent sheikh in a particularly gruesome manner, witnesses told us. This was the last straw, they said, and the tribes rose up. Neighboring clans joined the fight, which escalated as AQI (who had generally worn out their welcome through high-handedness) tried to crush the revolt through more atrocities. Soon the uprising took off, spreading along kinship lines through Anbar and into neighboring provinces.

Other tribesmen told me women weren’t the only issue. The tribes run smuggling, import/export and construction businesses which AQI shut down, took over, or disrupted through violent disturbances that were “bad for business”. Another factor was the belief, widespread among the tribes (and with at least some basis in fact) that AQI has links to, and has received funding and support from, Iran. In their view, women were simply the spark – AQI already “had it coming”. (Out in the wild western desert, things often tend to play out like The Sopranos… except that AQI changed the rules of the game by adding roadside bombs, beheadings, murder of children and death by torture. Eventually, enough was enough for the locals.)

There's a lot more to the post that is interesting but given the shameful attempts recently by the right to lay the credit for sunni's working against AQI at the feet of the surge I wanted to highlight this portion.

on RS by Mbecker908 of all people. Article here.

It explains the current housing mess and how it's set to get a lot worse before it gets any better. His conclusions are naturally rubish, he of course trusts that the same market forces that created the problem will magically fix them if we just leave them alone. No matter how many times these people are confronted with the failures of free market economies their faith is unshaken. It's pathological.

Still the description of the disease is solid, even if the proposed cure is just more of the disease.

This topic is personally distressing since I had hoped to get into a house in the next few years and now it seems due to the stupidity and greed of others that won't be possible. Come to think of it seems like most of the problems I've seen lately directly stem from the stupidity and greed of others.

In case you forgot, wonkette has a depressing reminder of how Bush responded to the destruction of an american city and the deaths of 2000 people.

Worst. President. Ever.

So looking forward to it.