(Via the Associated Press.)

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Pssst. Pass it along.

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"Check, please...!"

(Via the Associated Press.)

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The New York Times reported over the weekend from Baghdad:
I'm inclined to reprise my analysis from the end of March, when a similar truce occurred in Basra:
Although some canny analysts frequently cite the Sadr movement's grassroots support, this shouldn't be overestimated -- I don't believe ordinary Iraqis' support for Muqtada extends to violent resistance to keep senior Sadrists from being imprisoned, especially when that means volunteering their homes and families' lives for possible destruction.

That's the box Mookie is in... to maintain his popular political support, he needs to restrict himself to being a political actor. But if he does, the government (and the Americans) will use their official military leverage to whittle away at his ability to act politically.

As for the box the rest of Iraq is in, this plaintive Washington Post story today puts it well:
The Post's reporter, who met Yousif in 2002, quotes him from a profile written at the time: "The only thing Iraqis can do, [Yousif] says, is wait. They have no influence over the US. They can't change their government themselves. 'We are like cockroaches feeding on sewage,' he says. 'We survive.'" The substitution of one inept-but-brutal regime for another, and the presence of an overextended occupying army, doesn't seem to have changed that underlying, sad reality.

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An even more-random-than-usual hodgepodge of links found while updating the Needlenose blogroll for the forthcoming WordPress version of the site:

-- Fafblog on the pieing of Thomas Friedman: "Fafblog would like to Officially Condemn this wanton and aggressive misuse of pie, almost as much as we'd like to Officially Condemn how much we enjoyed it."

-- Brian Beutler passes along a photo of a bar in Italy with (I hope) an unclear grasp on what the Ku Klux Klan is.

-- Via Chris Andersen, did you ever notice the "Garfield" comic strip's dark, Beckett-like undercurrents? Well, it helps if you remove Garfield:


-- The King of Zembla reports on the quiet evisceration of the GI Bill, underscoring an important GOP philosophical tenet: "Government programs that work must be watered down, undermined, or dismantled altogether, lest citizens draw the naive and dangerous conclusion that government programs can work."

-- Former Pennsylvania resident Dick Destiny on "codgers and uneducated for Clinton" ("Barack Obama had it right when he pegged small-town Pennsyltuckians. They just didn't like hearing it. They're poorer than the average, less educated, and they don't like those who tell them so in any form. Like many Americans, they can't take criticism."), as well as Obama Girl's racist hometown and "Republicrat barflies" ("white men who turn into Republicans the instant they find a candidate on the other side of the fence who seems like a strong and manly daddy-figure").

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An inadvertently revealing moment -- though revealing of what, I'm not sure -- from the Associated Press today:
I think it's safe to say that neither Dubya nor John McCain would have had the Thomas Jefferson quote be the first clue that popped into their heads.

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(Image via The Phoenix.)

On the same day that $100 million-plus heiress/candidate spouse Cindy McCain says, "How about never? Is never a good time for you?" with regard to when she'll release her tax returns, the Associated Press profiles the most fearsome financial powerhouse of the 2008 election:
I think I like this contrast on the subject of public accountability -- or, to put it in less jargonesque language, knowing who you work for -- going into the fall campaign. Barack is likely to be the target of whining from the Double-Talk Express if he chooses to opt out of the general-election public financing restrictions, but all he has to do is point out that the purpose of that funding approach was to keep candidates from being compromised by their reliance on who's giving them money.

Then he can add, "If John McCain wants to accuse me of being beholden to the nearly 2 million Americans of all backgrounds who have donated money to my campaign, mostly in amounts ranging from 10 to 100 dollars, my answer is... yes! I'm indebted to them, and those are the people whose interests I'll serve as President."

Go for it, John... I dare you.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

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Via El Mundo:

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(Barack Obama in Raleigh, NC yesterday, via Reuters.)

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Looks like she's waving goodbye...

In the wake of the primary election results in Indiana and North Carolina -- a barely discernible win in the former, and a substantial defeat in the latter -- Hillary Clinton has reportedly cancelled all public appearances tomorrow, and David Niewert writes at Firedoglake about her "victory" speech:
And, as Markos notes (and Greg Sargent documents), her post-results email to supporters doesn't include the usual explicit request for money.

That last item may be the clearest indicator that we won't have Clinton to kick around much longer. You may recall her well-publicized dip into her and Bill's private finances back in January, and it always made me wonder if part of her motivation for staying in the race was to recoup her "investment."

Seen in that light, the most damaging thing about the IN/NC returns isn't that she can't spin the media or superdelegates on a plausible path to the nomination; it's that she can't drum up the kind of fundraising spike her victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania brought. And so, having gotten back as close to even as she's going to get, now might be a good time to withdraw rather than go back to running on her own dime.

Update: Okay, so maybe she's been running on her own dime again for a while. And maybe she's not shutting down her campaign totally, and not withdrawing just yet. But at some point you've got to figure Chelsea will step in and tell her mom to stop spending her inheritance.

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Just to jab a stick in the beehive of the Hillary lovers unleashing their venom in comments against our mild Obama bias here on Needlenose - remember that Limbaugh Loves Hillary!

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(Images via Witty Comics.)

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One advantage of not posting much lately about the long-running Democratic nomination race is that I don't share the apparent hysteria its continuation has induced in other writers. Consider this freak-out headline from the most popular story on the Huffington Post today:
Not surprisingly, the story itself is far less apocalyptic:
This doesn't sound much like (as Markos put it today) trying to "to stage a coup against the will of the voters," or as the nuclear-option hyperbole implies, to "blow up" a process already moving inexorably away from her (as it has been the past few months). Rather, it's an attempt to be prepared if the party powers become convinced a coup is necessary -- if Obama is already visibly hemorrhaging support, Team Clinton has a tactical plan to help move the delegate totals in her favor.

As I wrote in a comment two months ago, "The purpose of her staying in... isn't to try to steal the nomination through a brokered convention. It's to hang around just in case those photos of Obama having sex with a goat become public -- i.e., some sort of scandal/meltdown that causes a genuine buyer's-remorse situation." I don't foresee a meltdown like that happening, but I also accept that this is the closest primary contest of my lifetime, so I don't begrudge Clinton her right to hang around just in case.

That said, I'm not a fan of some of the tactics Hillary & Co. have used in trying to stay afloat, but let's keep things in perspective. First, as anyone who's been watching the NBA playoffs (or the NCAA tournament earlier) knows, a team that's losing in the final minutes is going to take some seemingly unwise gambles -- committing fouls to prolong the game, etc. And as far as I can tell, nothing Team Clinton has launched at Obama has been as hard-hitting as this ad from last fall, which was by John Edwards against Hillary... and which, in fact, she never fully recovered from. (Howard Dean rightly commented that even Clinton's famous "3 A.M." ad pales in comparison with the treatment he got in 2003-04.)

So it's hard for me to buy the caricature of Clinton as a singularly vicious and ruthless candidate who will stop at nothing to win the nomination. If Obama's victory is as inevitable as his supporters claim -- and, in fact, I think it is -- then they should stop freaking out over the imagined schemes of an opponent they insist is irrelevant. Because as long as Barack stays focused on the ultimate goal and doesn't get rattled, Clinton will be irrelevant soon enough... and her last-ditch aggressiveness will have provided useful practice for the real fight to come.

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In a well-timed bit of piggybacking, the Brookings Institution has posted an article by Peter Singer on "the Pentagon’s Five Step Plan For Making Iron Man Real":
All that is just the beginning, as Singer updates us on research into self-supporting armored exoskeletons, ways of manipulating body chemistry and metabolism ("steroids on steroids"), and their implications for future warfare.

Fortunately, the author leavens the gee-whiz tone of what all these innovations might accomplish with reminders of the likelihood of unanticipated consequences and complications -- and a rigorous pattern of linking each concept to the comic book or science-fiction novel where it originated (to the extent that copyright infringement is a significant concern of the military researchers -- in at least one case, they're being sued by angry authors.)

(Thanks to Abu Aardvark for the Brookings link.)

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The misAdministration finally released an Al-Jazeera news cameraman from Gitmo who was held there for 6 years without charge as an 'enemy combatant.' Fucking criminals.

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