Pity the conservative thinker and reader haunted by the specter of a nuclear Iran. How would you feel if you got halfway through your day and someone punched a big hole in your already tenuous grasp on reality?

Vice President Cheney tried so hard to play his role of Big Daddy within the Big Daddy Party and protect the kids from facts that they were too young to deal with. But the intelligence community won, and finally we have professionals telling us what some of us knew: Iran's nuclear weapons program has long been more of a virtual threat, a diplomatic tool to keep its head above water in a complicated diplomatic ocean.

But don't worry, surrogates for the genius of our unitary vice president are already coming to the rescue. Check out some of the things they're saying.

The main line of response against the news from the US intelligence community that Iran's nuclear weapon program is not fearful boils down to one word: Iraq. We overestimated on Iraq, therefore, we're probably underestimating on Iran. Check out Gabriel Schoenfeld at Commentary:

...the latest NIE is not a rock-solid judgment, and as we have already seen in a number of other dramatic instances, even the intelligence community's rock-solid judgments might not be solid at all.

To further the idea that consistency is the hobgoblin of the little minds, another junior blogger echoes this principle:

From overestimating the threat, we're going in the polar opposite direction, and being wrong in underestimating the situation is just as dangerous - if not more so.

But it won't stop there. I guarantee you. Look at this conclusion taken from the NIE itself about why Iran stopped pursuing its nuclear weapon program:

Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.

In no time at all, watch for wags on the right to declare that Iran's decision to drop its nuclear program in late 2003 is proof that we should have invaded Iraq. By implementing the Bush Doctrine, and demonstrating that the US will take military action against proliferating boogeymen, they'll say we made Iran back down. Except that we didn't really know it until now.

Bottom line: It's time to let the adults take over on foreign policy again, and not the gawky teenagers who never stopped being pissed off about the hippies marching on their college campuses.

For half a decade now, Iran has been standing outside the room, waiting to make a deal with us. Iran is enriching uranium...yeah, so is Germany, and Japan is separating plutonium. We'd rather take aggressive diplomatic measures to put Iran in that category than to force them to feel like India, Pakistan, and Israel did in their decisions to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.

Four words, President Bush: Let's make a deal.

Perhaps you saw the video that Senator John Edwards put up the night before he formally announced on TV that he was running for President. In it, he labeled the plan to "surge" or "escalate" US troops in Iraq the 'McCain Doctrine.' It was clever speechwriting, and it looks like Senator John McCain is starting to feel its sting.

This weekend on Bloomberg TV, apparently McCain is going to show us how curvaceous that Straight Talk has become.

Take it away, Bloomberg News:

Senator John McCain, a longtime advocate of increased U.S. forces in Iraq, said he would support a troop ``surge'' into Baghdad only if it is ``sufficient and sustained.''

McCain said he would judge any surge proposal based on the assessments of people such as retired Army General Jack Keane, who has called for at least 30,000 additional troops. ``If it's not sufficient in the view of'' experts such as Keane, ``then I cannot support it,'' he said in an interview on ``Political Capital with Al Hunt'' airing this weekend on Bloomberg Television.

 

So, the word from Senator McCain has changed. His stated position at one time: "I'll support the policy that will win the Iraq war." His new position: "I'll support the policy that will distance me from President Bush and help me win the presidency in 2008."

Or, to paraphrase Senator Kerry, "I was for the troop surge before I was against it."

Meanwhile: McCain is going to listen to *retired* General Keane? What about all of our generals who are still in uniform? What do they have to say? Is McCain going to listen to them?

I'm cross-posting this over from Bolton Watch, where I wrote it last month.

*** 

I know everyone in the world already knows this, but as we, and (undoubtedly TPMCafe) prepare to decommission Bolton Watch (although, one should never stop watching John Bolton), let's report for a moment on Bolton's successor.

Bob Novak says it will be Zalmay Khalilzad, soon to be ex-Ambassador to Iraq.  Although what no one else is relaying is Novak's "footnote" that says that Andrew Card, former White House Chief of Staff, expressed interest in the job.

What would a Khalilzad ambassadorship mean for America, and the UN?

I doubt we'll see any bruising confirmation hearings over Ambassador Khalilzad - he's been confirmed to multiple embassies by the Senate, and with little dissension.  It would take something pretty shocking to make the US Senate, even under Joe Biden's chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, change their tone, and that ammunition would have been loaded before he was shipped off to Iraq.

Much will be made about how Khalilzad, as a Muslim, will be a good emissary to the Muslim world.  But if this was true, we would keep him in Afghanistan, or Iraq, where his presence would soothe the Muslims of the world we need to be most concerned with, rather than the ambassadors of Qatar and Indonesia.  With a PhD from the U. of Chicago and a membership in the Project for a New American Century, Khalilzad will be rapidly fingered as a primary neocon player, and that's quite enough to make the Group of 77 and China think you are a loyal Bush/Cheney man.  

Still, Khalilzad will be more likely to play by the UN's rule of diplomatic etiquette, and in this way, it will be a smoother time for the United States at the UN.  The G-77 and China won't just dig in their heels on issues because Khalilzad is Khalilzad - they'll dig in their heels because he represents America.  That's a better situation than where we've been, especially on the critical but underreported UN reform issues that need to be bigger American priorities.

I don't think I'm simply going out on a limb here - check out this report that Dr. Khalilzad signed off to in 2000 when he was still at the RAND Corporation.  The report was supposed to be a bipartisan blueprint to manage national security for the winner of 2000's presidential contest:

In our view, sustaining support for this approach will require rebuilding the effectiveness of the UN as an institution and reestablishing US domestic support for the UN.  This will require paying the dues that the US owes to the UN, while pressing for needed institutional reforms.

That's a heck of a lot better than "losing ten floors."

Well, I hadn't really considered this problem before. Take it away, Financial Times:

In the Senate, the vice-president – who formally presides over the chamber – holds a tie-breaking vote and Mr Cheney could be called to exercise this more often with the Democrats holding only a slim majority, and especially if Tim Johnson, the South Dakota Democrat who was taken ill before Christmas, remains in hospital.

So, we've all heard about Speaker Pelosi's first one hundred hours, and all the things she's going to want to get done. Will the VPOTUS hold it all hostage because the Senate Dems can't count to 51?

The thing is, it's very nice if the Dems pass a whole set of legislation on the House-side. But if it all gets locked up in the Senate, what good is it? Either a)the Dems won't bring it to a vote or b)they will, and Cheney will kill it. Or, the Senate's reputation for ponderousness waters down everything further that had been charged through on the House side.

It'd probably go issue by issue, but there are especially Dems in the Senate who will wander over to the other side on some matters, not to lose sight of Senator Lieberman. (Certainly there are Republicans who will also drift into tactical cooperation with Senator Reid.)

Of course, there's a dynamite article by Carolyn Lochhead in the San Francisco Chronicle that suggests the GOP might not put up such a big fight on many of the one hundred hours issues - cooperating with the Dems and moving them toward the center will help the GOP re-burnish its image for 2008. On the other hand, for the Senate side, see this insight:

These are among the reasons why Pelosi and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada are promising to concentrate on oversight hearings and ethics reform -- which cost no money and do not require Bush's approval -- rather than grand new bargains to reform health care, for example.

(With the variety of major Bay Area-politicians, I suggest political nerds keep an eye on this paper and others in the months to come - I'm guessing they'll be offering some more dynamite analysis and breaking some big stories)

 

So, as usual, don't let those expectations get too big.

By now, millions of people have viewed the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Not just Al Iraqiya's pornographic tease of America's old pit bull just prior to his necktie party. No, I mean millions have watched Saddam actually hang. Take a look at the video up at this website Live Leak, a YouTube clone (Hat tip to No Quarter; you probably don't *really* want to follow this link). How many views? When I clicked it was 134,205 times it had been watched. Meanwhile, the people at Boing Boing found 4 more of these clips at Google Video, guaranteeing that millions more casual internet users will watch Iraq's dead president swing. And I'm sure it will be no time at all before these videos are pressed to a million VCD's sitting on the floor of marketplaces across the Middle East to be viewed as short films prior to one's at home screening of a pirated copy of Dreamgirls.

Clearly, the location of Saddam Hussein's execution was one of the most secure settings for an execution ever constructed. So, why are we finding on the move about this planet a bunch of viral, unrestricted and uncensored videos of what is probably the most controversial execution ever carried out?

Newsweek provided an interesting interview with Ali Al Massedy, the "official videographer" tasked with producing the official record of the execution. He usually does this job for Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Presumably, they brought him in to shoot the film so that there would only be one version of the execution, and the government would then be able to tightly control its distribution. Ali says as much:

Ali said the videotape lasts about 15 minutes. When NEWSWEEK asked to see a copy, Ali said he had already handed the tape over to Maliki's chief of staff. "It is top secret," he said. He would not give the names of officials in attendance, though he estimates there were around 20 observers....He also said that government officials had not decided whether or not to release the videotape.

Well, I guess they decided. It was so top secret that they let multiple men out of that limited group of 20 bring in cellphones with video functions, and then allowed them to record the execution. I bet you couldn't smuggle a gun into that execution chamber. But apparently you could smuggle a cell phone with a video camera into those gallows, and stand out in plain sight 15 feet from the platform and shoot that video of this "top secret event" to your heart's desire.

And just as our fair president raced to wake up Saturday morning and issue a statement about what had been done in Iraq, several of those 20 attendees raced home or to their offices to upload videos of a hanged Saddam Hussein so everyone in the world could see this secretive execution carried out.

What a sham it has been. Pretending at the time of Saddam's capture that now was the time for a trial, and pretending at the time of his sentence that now was the time to order his execution, and pretending at the time of his execution that now was the moment he had to hang, and then pretending that it was a secret act carried out with discretion to avoid antagonizing any of Iraq's population.

Here we are seeing 21st century psychological operations. It's hard to know who is directing this internet traffic, but it can be concluded there were elements within America's government and/or military, working in concert with Iraq's current scarecrow power-holders, who wanted as many people as possible in the world to see Saddam hang. And from that rope hanged not just that bearded old man, but whatever was left of our culture that hasn't been degraded by the 7 years of 'leadership" we've been dragging around with us.

Over at The Morningside Post, a blog from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs that I helped found, we're having a debate about whether or not veterans come to campuses, especially, well-heeled Ivy League and other private academies, and lose the respect they rightfully deserve for having served our nation in combat. Ultimately, this debate seems to focus too much on the wrong things.

This debate was triggered by one Matt Sanchez, who braved the Mesopotamian sands as a Marine, only to find himself "publicly humiliated" by a Columbia University classmate and told he was stupid for joining up. He told this tale of woe in an op-ed for the New York Post. Beyond his concern with other students, he added that "The school also has no faculty member who specifically deals with veteran affairs."

My friend, classmate, and co-conspirator Jimmy Finan wrote a letter in response, which the Post was kind enough to print. Jimmy is also a veteran (of our overseas adventure in Afghanistan), and he chided Sanchez for giving more ammunition to the Fox News nutters, adding that his "experiences at Columbia have been nothing but the polar opposite of" Sanchez's own. With Michelle Malkin picking up Sanchez's story, and offering fodder for other raging right wing bloggers, it seems like Finan was on target with his prediction. The two proceeded to have an interesting back and forth that I think is worth examination - two veterans debating how welcome they feel inside the academy.

As an Ivy League faker (I only paid for an expensive grad school education, after all), my experience with this debate is a little new. At the University of Iowa, we had *a lot* of students in the reserves, and there was really only a tiny population of students who would call them stupid, if they had the chance. Ultimately, at a state-run school like Iowa, most aren't rich, and most understand that enlisting in the nation's armed services is just another means to pay for an education that grew in cost every year. You might not be considered lucky for having to do it, but certainly no one questions your smarts, especially in the 90s of my education when America's wide-scale military commitments seemed a thing of the past.

But in the Ivy League, perhaps it was a little bit different. With a larger class of students who come straight out of the intelligentsia, the fashionable nature of protest is more pronounced. Intellectual entrepreneurs are more likely to seek out targets, and Corporal Sanchez is therefore far more likely to have a bad day.

But is Corporal Sanchez an intellectual entrepreneur himself? His political leanings are not tipped off in his article, and I don't want to hoist any assumptions upon him. But at a school like the University of Iowa, being a veteran or a reservist is far less likely to make one stand out. At Columbia University, being an advocate of the Iraq War who has been there and come back is far more likely to get your name in the New York Post.

While Corporal Sanchez complains about the intellectual trends at Columbia, it's funny to reflect on the intellectual pincers that the school's administration faces. While SIPA's Dean Lisa Anderson was being assailed as one of the most dangerous professors in America by David Horowitz for bringing Libyans to campus and later inviting the President of Iran to speak, she was also facing an insurgency within her own student body accusing her of quashing leftist literature from the school's curriculum.

So, the administrators of Columbia U. and other elite institutions sure are getting some mixed messages. Their students rise up and call them right-wing saps, while the Fox News crowd identifies them as traitors polluting the minds of our nation's young people.

But ultimately, I think the Dean Lisa Anderson's and President Lee Bollinger's of the world see the kind of aggravation that Sanchez faced as a safety valve that allows students to blow off steam. In the meanwhile, Columbia's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies is still mostly bringing people to campus to lecture about how to fight wars because peace is an impossible state in our world, and the university is signing up its life sciences faculty to help the Department of Defense develop protections for our troops against biological weapons attacks. Joseph Masad could sell 10,000 books about how Israel kills Palestinians. But at the end of the day, Ivy League students are receiving Boren National Security and Presidential Management Fellowships in huge numbers. When student Marxists show up to protest a CIA clandestine services information session, they can't find chairs and get shouted down by 50-plus students eager to learn more about getting jobs as "targeting officers." There might be a million protests against wars in Iraq, Sudan, and Lebanon, but the homeland security contracts that university-linked entities pursue are counted in multi-millions of dollars, and it's on this side that the academy comes down.

So, I think Matt Sanchez should have a sense of humor about this. The academic administrators know that most of his adversaries will grow up, get jobs, and put down their arm bands and placards. Meanwhile, our Department of Defense is always looking for well-educated people eager to contribute to the furtherance of our nation's security in so many different ways. While an Ivy League school's wanna-be proletariat may make a lot of noise as they matriculate, at the end of four (or more, or less) years, they are happy to take shake hands with that same university administrator who is eager to bring government and military contracts to his or her school.

Remember when Stephen Colbert said that reality had a well known liberal bias? Well, it appears that someone at Fox wasn't listening. It appears that the writing team at Fox News Channel is giving "Facts" a try.

A posting put up at the popular media jobs website Media Bistro spells it out for us - Fox News is hiring a "Fact Writer." Read on:

Job Location

New York, NY USA

Job Requirements

Freelance Fact Writer New York Requirements/Responsibility: FOX News Channel, a fast-paced 24-hour television news operation in New York City, is seeking a Freelance Fact Writer for its information center. Responsibilities include writing on-air facts and press conference quotes for daytime programming. Individuals must have strong writing skills, be able to handle multiple assignments and deadlines, and work well in a team atmosphere. Excellent communication and writing skills are also required. A successful candidate will: * Possess a strong interest in news and be well-informed about current events * Be detail oriented and pay close attention to spelling, grammar, syntax * Have ability to write in a concise, conversational and colorful style at an extremely fast pace Must be willing to work on a flexible schedule including weekend shifts. This is a high-pressure position where your work product gets national exposure on a daily basis. A bachelor's degree is required. Fox News Channel is an EOE. Interested applicants please send resumes to: Fox News Channel Human Resources 2nd floor 1211 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10036 Fax: 212-301-8588 Email: Resumes@foxnews.com WWW.FOXNEWS.COM

Neither a "Fact Finder" nor a "Fact Checker." A "Fact Writer." You write the facts, eh? And I'm not sure what is entailed in "writing on-air facts." Does that mean the facts are only facts when presented on the television? Also, apparently one only needs a bachelor's degree to write the facts - I guess Roger Ailes meant it when he said he didn't have much use for people with master's degrees in journalism.

Fear not, faith-based news lovers. This isn't a full-time thing, only freelance, so that means that Fox's regular, salaried employees will continue on in the funny universe they've created for themselves.

With all hell breaking loose in Iraq, a typhoon named Durian drowning hundreds in the Philippines, and the FSB irradiating or shooting any Russian who has opened their mouth in the past six years, how about some good news in the world of international affairs to cap off the week?

I know I could use it.

Here's the good word from the UN News Centre:

The United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia today sentenced a former Bosnian Serb general to life in prison after dismissing an appeal against his convictions for his role in the long siege of the city of Sarajevo during the early 1990s.

The appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), sitting in The Hague, upheld prosecutors’ separate appeal against the original sentence of 20 years for Stanislav Galic, a commander in the Bosnian Serb army, over the campaign of daily shelling and sniping against Sarajevo’s residents.

It is the first time that the ICTY’s appeal chamber has imposed the maximum penalty.

A majority of judges dismissed all 19 grounds of appeal by Mr. Galic against his convictions, stating that there was ample evidence to demonstrate that the main purpose of the attacks during the siege was to spread terror among Sarajevo’s civilian population.

While foreign policy conservatives in the United States rail against the United Nations for being ineffective and corrupt, it is a useful reminder to see that some of the institutions like the ICTY, over which the individual Member States have the least control, are highly capable of carrying out the mandates assigned to them. With this life sentence, hopefully our world can build momentum to bring justice to those who have committed crimes against the world's civilians who find themselves caught in warfare, be it in Iraq, Sudan, the United States, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Rwanda, Chile, or other parts of our planet.

I've heard of the War On Christmas, but I never imagined that being on Santa's naughty list would be an excuse for war by other means. From AP:

The Bush administration wants North Korea's attention, so like a scolding parent it's trying to make it tougher for that country's eccentric leader to buy iPods, plasma televisions and Segway electric scooters.

The U.S. government's first-ever effort to use trade sanctions to personally aggravate a foreign president expressly targets items believed to be favored by Kim Jong Il or presented by him as gifts to the roughly 600 loyalist families who run the communist government.

Kim, who engineered a secret nuclear weapons program, has other options for obtaining the high-end consumer electronics and other items he wants.

But the list of proposed luxury sanctions, obtained by The Associated Press, aims to make Kim's swanky life harder: No more cognac, Rolex watches, cigarettes, artwork, expensive cars, Harley Davidson motorcycles or even personal watercraft, such as Jet Skis.

The new ban would extend even to music and sports equipment. The 5-foot-3 Kim is an enthusiastic basketball fan; then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented him with a ball signed by Michael Jordan during a rare diplomatic trip in 2000.

The article goes on to call it a "creative solution." Yeah, I guess after you've dithered for six years, crippled one of the best nonproliferation agreements ever forged, and escalated a crisis to a nuclear weapons test, you have to get "creative." What's next? No more Whitney Houston for Osama?

Best when changed frequently.

This seems to be the message suggested by a summary tacked to the end of an Associated Press article about when exactly Rumsfeld will sign out and Gates will punch in:

There has been speculation that the Pentagon transition would be put off until the end of December in order to give Rumsfeld the distinction of being the longest-serving secretary of defense since the post was created in 1947.

Rumsfeld is the only person to have held the job twice. The first time, he served for 14 months, from Nov. 20, 1975 to Jan. 20, 1977. His current tenure began Jan. 20, 2001. If he were to stay until Dec. 28, his combined tenures would surpass the longevity record held by Robert S. McNamara, who served from Jan. 21, 1961 to Feb. 29, 1968.

Ruff said, however, that the timing of Gates' takeover has nothing to do with the longevity record.

"I can assure you that is not a factor on the secretary's mind," Ruff said.

 

McNamara, of course, has grown old enough to regret much of what he did during his tenure in that post. Will Rummy be around long enough to realize how much he screwed up and how much death and destruction his incompetence rained down upon the American and the Iraqi peoples? Does he have it in him to find his own shortcomings and share what those who attain the heights of power as he has should learn from them?

I sure do doubt that one, especially if Bush goes ahead and pins another Medal of Freedom on another dubious chest.

It's interesting how Rumsfeld and McNamara are almost like mirror images. Charlie Savage's Boston Globe article on Sunday about Cheney's lust for untrammeled executive power was a good reminder of how Rumsfeld started his career in presidential politics - running the Office of Economic Opportunity, whose antipoverty mission he apparently held in rather low regard. After gutting OEO, he moved on up to Secretary of Defense in the Ford administration. And, of course, our brilliant Decider gave him a second chance in 2001 where he showed that you really can't teach very old dogs how to carry out basic motor functions, let alone new tricks.

McNamara, of course, went from the international war on peace to the global war on poverty (which, let's face it, he probably won't be remembered for very positively). He left powerful marks on both institutions, and at the end of his life, seems regretful of much of what he was responsible for. While Rumsfeld's legacy is beamed over by people who want to name the entire country after Ronald Reagan, it's useful to keep McNamara's sense of his own legacy in mind.

Running our nation's armed forces is hard work. It seems like letting the same people do it for eight years at a time twice now hasn't been all that good for our country. Rowan Scarborough's article in the Washington Times today shows how Robert Gates has a long-standing reputation for being on the wrong side of many fights in our nation's national security administrivia, and so it would seem that the Decider has selected another turkey again. There isn't much we're going to be able to do to make our Department of Defense better functioning in the last two years of the Bush Administration/Cheney War Cabinet.

But there's a message that whoever comes after him should certainly take away, whether it's Hillary, Obama, Rudy, or McCain: effective leaders know when it's time to say goodbye.

It looks like President Bush is getting back to the United States just in time...no, not to shepherd those spending bills through Congress so that the government isn't facing fiscal crisis in January. Instead, President Bush is getting back from his round of Asian diplomacy just in time to stand before the cameras and pardon a turkey.

It's that time of year - tomorrow morning, President Bush will carry out the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation, a time-honored tradition where the President of the United States of America anoints two turkeys as inedible. They are then retired to a Disneyland where they get to live out their natural lives. This year, some one at the White House web section decided to put up a banner on the front page of the White House website that reads "Gobble the Vote." I hear they're inviting the Florida Secretary of State's office to demonstrate the proper vote gobbling technique.

OK, the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon is a sweet tradition carried out by presidents forever, or, in this case 59 years. Just as Ford pardoned Nixon, presidents pardon turkeys as a matter of course. Under the Bush presidency, it's time that it stop; more than that, it's time that the media stop giving this sham act such fawning attention.

For much of the day, the limited doses of news that Americans will get about our Unitary Executive will be limited by the moments devoted to the damn turkeys (two get spared the knife; one is ruled the alternate in case it gets stage fright). Instead of reporting on critical decisions being made - like our exiting Congress refusing to finish their jobs and pass the spending bills - we'll hear President Bush yucking it up while certifying that Ben and Franklin, or Washington and Lincoln, or Corn and Copia (these names are for real - they are this year's options) are very nice turkeys.

But I think there's a certain moral authority that goes with the pardoning of the turkey. Every year, it's a reminder that our president is ultimately a decent man who wants us to think about what brings us together during Thanksgiving. Right now, we have a President that has encouraged Americans to be further divided, and it's hard to believe that he's just a decent family man.

What's more, turkeys are about the only thing that George W. Bush has ever pardoned. I can't do any better than to point to Alan Berlow's take on his performance as Governor of Texas, alongside his trusty Secretary of State Alberto Gonzales in which he considered 153 cases for execution. Berlow wrote that Bush and Gonzales were faced with "as many as two executions a week, as many as eight in a single month...we have access to Bush's daily appointment logs -- which show that he rarely spent more than 30 minutes on an execution briefing -- and we have Gonzales' own files, which show that he did not send Bush a clemency petition laying out a defendant's best arguments for a pardon on even one occasion. Most important, we have Gonzales' actual execution case summaries on which Bush relied in making his decisions to proceed with more than 99 percent of the death warrants that landed on his desk."

Our president has proven himself incapable of taking clemency seriously as an option when deciding whether or not a human life should be taken. By humorously sparing two pre-selected turkeys from the butcher's blade, President Bush makes a mockery of the men whose executions he approved in Texas. Torturers carry out mock executions; President Bush conducts a mock pardon every year. And by covering the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation in such a fawning manner, the media helps the president mock justice and innocence.

If you're watching CNN or Fox today, and they're making a big deal about "gobble the vote," turn off your TV. President Bush's efforts to paint himself as a family man preparing to enjoy the holiday with his loved ones belies the violence that he has personally committed. Don't pardon his awful decisions to execute so many human beings by watching him pardon turkeys.

Here is a story that is touching, heartbreaking, and a little bit funny just in time for Thanksgiving.

I was an inter-collegiate debater throughout my years as an undergraduate; in spite of that, I wish I had been 1/3 as articulate as the "college kids" from Swarthmore who crank out War News Radio on a weekly basis. If you only listen to one podcast a week, this should be the one.

As War News Radio's Peter Holm reports (that's a link to an mp3 file, by the way), the Maine National Guard has devised a curious means of lessening some of the separation anxiety felt by the families of members of the service deployed in our global adventure. They take a photograph of the soldier, and blow it up to make a life-size cutout which is given to the family. Holm shares the voices of service members' families who talk about how they've integrated the Flat Soldiers into their daily lives. It's a touching reminder of what so many families will be missing this year from their Thanksgiving Dinner tables.

Check out the Maine National Guard's Family Assistance Center and their gallery of photos of "Flat Soldier Sightings."

Happy Turkey Day to everyone out there, but especially to everyone who can't make it home, and to everyone in the home they can't make it back to.

Quick, get Curveball on the phone!

That must be what someone somewhere is thinking whenever they get a chance to accuse Iran of seeking to further their nuclear program these days.

How else can we explain the bizarre accusations found in a recent United Nations report that Iran was trying to acquire uranium from Somalia of all places? Somalia has uranium? I mean, c'mon - the last I heard, they didn't even have any copper wire in the country because in the decade-plus of chaos they've been experiencing, every bit of anything that anyone could make a red cent from has been pulled out of the country. So, it seems a little strange that we'd start thinking that Somalia is a source of uranium for a country that's trying to build a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

But, that doesn't stop people from bloviating. Take the moronic blog Atlas Shrugs which couldn't even stay coherent enough to say uranium - they said the Iranians were trying to get plutonium from Somalia! Indeed, I guess when you've got a fourth-grade understanding of international politics, you may in fact believe that Somalia has naturally occurring plutonium laying around, the periodic table being at least a 7th-grade level skill in our country's educational system.

So, where is this coming from? It's in a leaked document posted by the Council on Foreign Relations for the world to play with (thanks, Laura Rozen). The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia was established by the Security Council to determine who was violating the arms embargo on the war-torn, government-less country. Buried amid all of the report's detailed paragraphs and information is this two-lined, thoroughly undetailed paragraph about Iran:

At the time of the writing of this report, there were two (2) Iranians in Dhusamareeb engaged on matters linked to the exploration of Uranium in exchange for arms to the ICU.

Like Iraq, this isn't the first time that Iran has been accused of sourcing uranium it would need for a clandestine nuclear weapons program from an African country. This summer, following publication of another UN report, Iran was accused in the Times of London of moving a significant quantity of uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Tanzania. It was sensationalist, baseless hokum, and well debunked by Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk.

More than that, the prospects of getting enough uranium to be of any use to a bomb program out of Somalia are even slimmer than they would be from the DRC. For one thing, there's no active uranium mining industry in Somalia - any uranium mining operation would create quite a footprint, and Iran would get caught long before it got a big enough drill bit in the country. But mostly, there just isn't enough uranium in the country. Check out eRiposte over at Left Coaster who long ago spelled out why Somalia could not have been a source of uranium for Iraq (see numeral four in the post in particular), reasons that would go for Iran, too.

But even more than that, some analysis of Somalia's uranium reserves, like this one from the World Energy Council, show that they've got only about 6,600 tonnes of uranium in the country, and that commercially, it would only be accessible if there was a prevailing price of $80 to $130 in the uranium market - i.e. it is very difficult and expensive to exploit these reserves.

When you consider that Iran has considerable uranium reserves of its own, or at least plenty for a weapons program as the Nuclear Control Institute claims, you start to see that there's really no reason that they'd be trying to set up a mining operation in what is probably the most chaotic country in the world.

So while it might be unquestionable that Iran and Hezbollah are helping to arm and train the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, why are we back in Africa with Iran?

The UN Monitoring Group shows that ten states are breaking the arms embargo on Somalia. Some of them are good friends of America's - Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Djibouti, who our President regularly lauds for being contributors to America's Global War on Terrorism. All are cited for helping out the Islamic Courts Union, which the United States believes is providing safe haven to al Qaida-linked terrorists.

But more than that, Ethiopia comes out for a lot of criticism in this report. More than just arming the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia, they appear to be sending troops into Baidoa to prop it up. And the Ethiopian government would seem to have ample reason for burying the fact that they are engaged in a major military adventure inside Ethiopia.

So, America has its Curveballs, and the rest of the world may, too. For a change, it may not be our country who is accusing Iran of African uranium adventures in which it has no need to be engaged, but other states in the region who are hoping to bury the true lead here - that they have embarked on a reckless adventure of their own in one of the world's saddest places.

It's a useful corrective to keep this fact in mind when someone comes back sometime soon and says that Iran is getting uranium from Somalia.

We are just over a week into the Democratic majority, and what do we find bubbling up? Some good old fashion spin against the Democrats in our reliable mainstream media. Who needs Fox News when NPR or the Associated Press can pin down the new majority party and make them wriggle?

See today's AP coverage of the House Majority Leader race, headlined "Pelosi Faces No-Win Outcome Over Murtha":

Pelosi passed over Steny Hoyer of Maryland, now the assistant minority leader, and endorsed longtime ally John Murtha of Pennsylvania to become majority leader, the powerful No. 2 party post in the House. Yet Murtha could prove to be a problematic candidate because of his penchant for trading votes for pork projects and his ties to the Abscam bribery sting in 1980, the only lawmaker involved who wasn't charged.

I mean, reading this garbage, you'd think Murtha was the second coming of Bob Ney, and that his brother Kit who worked for a lobbying firm was just like Curt Weldon's daughter. The fact is, Abscam didn't stick to Murtha, and the Feds had more than 25 years to get him on somethign else. More than that, the knives were unsheathed against Murtha last autumn when his voice became so strident against the war. And did we see a turnabout where the GOP, which was definitely hurt by his anti-war leadership, was able to make him shrink from public view by calling him "Porky Pig in Fatigues" (as Investor's Business Daily tried last November)?

The answer is no. Because no one has any solid indication that Murtha has done anything illegal, or anything solidly unethical.

More than that, the spin about how this is going to be bad for Pelosi no matter what is dripping from the news today. My NPR podcast this morning also painted this as a no-win situation for Pelosi. And here's your New York Times fluffing of the new minority party:

Downtrodden Republicans were enjoying the spectacle of the split between Representative Nancy Pelosi, the incoming speaker, who is publicly pushing Representative John P. Murtha, her longtime ally, and Democrats rallying behind Mr. Hoyer, who has served in the leadership slot beneath Ms. Pelosi for four years.

“I can’t believe they are self-destructing before they even get started,” said Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois. “Everyone on our side is giddy.”

Is Roy LaHood our new arbiter of how the Democrats are faring? A week and two days in, and "self-destructing?" C'mon. Why is this idea even true? If Hoyer wins, Pelosi loses, and doesn't get her man. If Murtha wins, Pelosi is victorious, and gets the House leadership team she's seeking. You can't presume Murtha's guilt. It's just not there. More than that, if Murtha is on the team, Pelosi will be deftly setting the tone for the 110th Congress, and conveying a clear message of the direction she wants to take this country.

Mr. Soon-to-be-ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives,

We're glad to see that over the course of your eight years as Speaker of the House of Representatives, you mastered the arts of prevarication and passing the buck. You did a great job huffing and puffing and saying you knew nothing about Mark Foley, a member of Our Party who couldn't control himself when it came to underaged boys.

But, listen. We can't keep you around here anymore, and we know how loyal you were to the Party. So we're going to make you an Ambassador to Japan. Out there, you can't hurt us here with your presence, which as it is stands like a sagging blot on a minority party that needs a new face so it can get back to being the Majority Party it Deserves to Be, the American people be damned.

But just because you can't hurt us here with your presence, you can still hurt us there. There are a lot of things you're going to need to learn. And we've got good people in Tokyo that can bring you up to speed.

But most notably, when you hear that there's an American in Japan doing things to people under the age of 18 they shouldn't be doing, this "I didn't know about it" garbage isn't going to fly. In September 1995, when 3 American servicemen raped a 12 year old girl, the Japanese people were angry. We almost lost one of our most important bases in Asia, and one of our most important security relationships in the world. If there comes a moment when an American is in Japan doing wrong, whether in our services or not, don't give those Japanese reporters that vacant stare you mastered in Washington. If you do, we might end up with a tenth nuclear power in the blink of an eye.

Sincerely,

Your White House Handlers