Sounds oxymoronic, but, in Europe, that's what's happening. And, as the pictures show, the design is actually modern and funky. For anyone who's been, you know it's hard to stumble through Europe without seeing the Golden Arches. Business is good:

In the first half of this year, combined sales at Europe’s 6,400 restaurants rose 15 percent, to $4.1 billion, compared with a 6 percent increase in the United States, where McDonald’s has 13,800 restaurants and sales totaled $3.9 billion...The chain now serves over 10 million customers a day in Europe, which contributes 36 percent to the company’s operating income, making it the most profitable region, after the United States.

Still, it is McDonald's, and it's disappointing, at least for this American, to go to the Spanish Steps, or the Pantheon, and see the all-too-familiar Mickey-D's logo out of the corner of my eye.

I will never understand Americans abroad, eating at American chains. Familiarity, I guess. Isn't the point of travel, though, to become acquainted with the unfamiliar?

Then again, there are plenty of people who come to New York City and eat at Sbarro's. So what do I know...

(PS, you want pizza, you go to Joe's.) 

Recently, DNI McConnell revealed that putting together a FISA warrant required "about 200 man-hours to do one telephone number." Last year, there were 2181 FISA applications. Wired does the math:

That means government employees spent 436,200 hours writing out foreign intelligence wiretaps in 2006. That's 53,275 workdays. Let's assume dedicated government employees work 40 hours a week with two weeks off a year. That means there were 218 government employees with top secret clearances sitting in rooms, writing only FISA warrants.

This whole line of "200 hours" for a warrant was so obviously unlikely, yet, so far, I can't find anyone who reported it as anything other than straight fact.

Max points us over to the WaPo, where it's reported Democrats are "recalibrating" their message on Iraq. Maybe this question is a bit rhetorical, but why?

Why would they choose to parrot the Bush talking points about the surge "working," when, last weekend, seven active duty soldiers provided the Democrats all the talking points they need?

It couldn't be more clear:

To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched...The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins.

The surge is not "working," and all Democrats need to do is point to this well-written op/ed.

What may happen in Iraq is that, just like here, where Bush became a "uniter," and pulled most of the country together and against him, the "strategy" unfolding in Iraq will eventually pull the Iraqis together, against their occupiers. As the seven soldiers put it, the Iraqis will "will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal."

That seems as reasonable a prediction as anyone else's.

Going back to Max's post, I tend to agree, the Democrats are seemingly blowing the politics of the war. The WaPo report notes this is about a "broader Democratic effort to frame Petraeus's report before it is released next month by preemptively acknowledging some military success in the region." But taking refuge in White House Talking Points, especially knowing they're wrong, seems ridiculously stupid.

I smell the consultancy class at work here...

What's still not clear, though, is if people, noting the continual propensity for Democrats to turn themselves into political clods, will actually head back to the Republican party as the party they trust to keep us "safe."

That trust was clearly broken over the last few years, and it's unlikely the Republicans can get it back. At least not the same old Republicans, and at least not anytime soon.

Why does iTunes allow me to add the same songs to the same playlist more than once?

I realize I'm only a silly human, but my Mac is a really smart fancy computer.

Surely, it knows better?

From the NPR Blog, weighing in on the Skube affair:

My own bugaboo about bloggers is that I think sometimes physical isolation can lead to cultural and political nearsightedness. I would love to see "newsrooms" for bloggers in various cities...I'm talking about a physical place where they could regularly throw ideas at each other before they actually go out and publish them online.

That's a bizarre characterization of bloggers, no? Physical isolation? Sure, we might "blog alone," but don't we all have lives? And people in those lives with which we talk about politics?

I don't understand this need for "real" journalists to characterize bloggers as freakishly unsociable people.

I know it makes for a good, paper-selling story, "Obama's Camp Traced To Wiki Error," but not every wikipedia edit is nefarious.

Yes, there has been some incredibly shameful editing going on. But the real story here is that wikipedia works -- incorrect edits get corrected.

And, yes, sometimes, as it seems in the Obama "story," people just think they have the right answer, and they don't.

I'm not sure if there's anything new in a recent report on the news media's coverage of the Iraq war. If anything, what's surprising is Fox covers the war half as much as everyone else. I guess it makes supporting the war easier, if you don't know what's going on there...

But that's also related to the coverage within cable news -- they cover the Washington debate about the war much more than the actual war itself.

I still think if there was a cable news channel that actually gave us "news," it would do very well.