A Bit Late To The Party But…

Still, this is worth posting:

Scott and I were talking about Iraq in the context of Lebanon instead of Vietnam the other day. What bothers me is that it took less than 300 US casualties of Marines to get the US out of Lebanon, yet with this set of jokers in Washington, the kind of attack that killed 241 Marines in one day in Lebanon will be seen in the context of Iraq as a reason to throw even more members of the US armed forces into harm’s way.

Civil war in Iraq, should it come, is not a good thing for anybody. Not for us, and definitely not for them. Whether it can even be stopped is the question at hand. And I really have no idea. I’d like to hope that a full-out civil war in Iraq is not inevitable, but the cynic in me says that cooler heads generally don’t prevail until after a lot of blood has been shed.

Quick Update

We’ve dumped Comcast for Internet connectivity and gone back to DSL. It’s not as fast, but 4 multi-day outages in less than 2 months is just way too much downtime.

Between work and school I’m finding myself more and more squeezed for blog time these days, and the semester is only going to heat up more over the next several weeks. I want to try to keep to a minimum of a post a day but it’s getting really hard to do even that some days. I’ve also cut the blogroll down a bit to help reduce my read time.

Fear The Blobby American!

I’m not generally a Mark Morford fan, but he did a good column in the Chronicle today about obese America vis a vis his recent vacation to Cabo. Here’s a snippet:

Perhaps this, then, is the new great divide. Forget red state versus blue state. Forget liberal versus conservative, straight versus gay, rich versus poor, mullet versus sideburn, red wine versus white. The new division in America is greater than anything we have seen before: Healthy versus ill. Slim versus fat. Light versus heavy. Clean-running organs and unstrained hearts and the ability to engage with the world around you with something resembling lightness and ease and swift reflexes, versus a sort of indolent awkwardness and dis-ease and pain, an unconscious layering-on of fatty protection against a world gone angry and confusing.

They Didn’t Wait Long, Did They?

Three states have ruled that a Federal law banning late-term abortions is unconstitutional, but SCOTUS has decided they need to look at the case as well. Uh oh. That doesn’t bode well.

And Shakes delivers a nice smackdown in response:

The big question, of course, is what is the point of ramming through this legislation [that restricts abortion] without a provision that allows it in cases where the mother