Weekend Update (23 September)

It's been a wild and wooly week of work, and I haven't had the time I'd like to devote to Cracks. And unfortunately, I see the next few weeks as being a bit light as well (which elicits a frown from Mrs. F) as I've got a special project with Amazon taking up my time. Also, Old Fogey will be jetting off to Paris with Mr. OF, so we'll be missing her wise commentary (see this one) and quote roundup for a week or so.

Picture of the Day



Hundreds of thousands of people stood Friday and chanted “God, God, protect Nasrallah.” It was the moment they had waited for: Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in person, declaring that his militia was stronger than ever and that no army in the world could force it to disarm. [NYTimes]

The Big Dog Bites Back
I'll be setting our TiVo to record Fox News Sunday (see TV Guide for times in your area) for Chris Wallace's interview with Bill Clinton. From the advance word that's going 'round the blogosphere, it looks like Wallace's query of "why you didn't do more about terrorism and Osama Bin Laden?" got the Big Dog baring his teeth. Here's a taste from ThinkProgress:

CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

And what guess what meme the Right Wing Noise Machine is going with? Yepp, here we go again with unhinged, angry Democrat (the first from everyone's favorite Republican propaganda site, the second -- hat tip to ThinkProgress -- from FoxNews' own web site publicizing the interview):





Also, check out this segment with Keith Olbermann's interview with Clinton (at Crooks and Liars), in which he asked an "'unrealistic political hypothetical': If George Bush called you up to ask for your advice, what would you tell him?" Nicely diplomatic, but very true to the Clinton Way (inclusive, respectful, etc.).

BushCo's Wars

• A bomb blew up a kerosene tanker truck in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood on Saturday, killing at least 37 people, police said. Meanwhile, authorities said a leader of Ansar al-Sunnah, a group linked to al-Qaida in Iraq that responsible for kidnappings and beheadings, has been captured by Iraqi and U.S. forces. Elsewhere, an American soldier was killed in a roadside bomb attack in northern Baghdad. In another attack, a Danish serviceman was killed and eight others were injured by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq the Danish army said. He was the fourth Danish serviceman to die in the conflict.
  [...]
  In a grisly scene in Beiji, about 155 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen threw the decapitated heads of ten men into a popular open-air market at about 4:30 p.m., police said. They then fled the scene. [AP via Yahoo!]
  
  
• Manfred Nowak, the UN's chief anti-torture expert, captured the headlines round the world when he suggested that torture could be worse in Iraq now than it was under Saddam Hussein. Torture is indeed at appalling levels in Iraq. Everyone, it seems, from the Iraqi forces to the militias to the anti-US insurgents, now routinely use torture on the people they kill. Each day, bodies are found with appalling injuries, particularly in Baghdad.
  [...]
  147,000 American soldiers are deployed in Iraq, the majority of them in the area around Baghdad. In recent months, reinforcements have been brought in to try to curb the violence.
  
  The figures seem to indicate clearly that the US forces simply do not have the answer to the basic problem. The same applies to the British forces in Basra and the south, where the situation is also deteriorating. (It) may seem a large number, and it is more than the US Department of Defense had been hoping to deploy in Iraq by now. But the overwhelming majority of them are not out on the streets, stopping the bombings and kidnappings and murders. [BBC]
  
  
• Letting nature take its course?
  

  French secret service officials have informed the French government that Saudi Arabia is trying to confirm intelligence reports that Osama bin Laden, the masterminded of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, recently died of typhoid in a remote area of Pakistan, according to a report Saturday in a regional French newspaper. [WaPo]

Climate Crisis

• Margaret Beckett, UK Foreign Secretary, last night warned growing industrialisation and prosperity in the developing world is accelerating climate change and risks global disaster. "If we don't act on climate change, we risk undermining the basis of the prosperity and security we are seeking to achieve."
  
  Ms Beckett highlighted China's transition into an economic powerhouse as an example of the dilemma of matching progress with conservation. [The Scotsman]
  
  
• Canadian and British climate scientists have clearly detected human-induced climate change at a regional scale in Canada, southern Europe and China. This new research is the first to combine the results from several climate model simulations, increasing scientific confidence in these findings. In the study, the scientists used four climate models -- two developed by Environment Canada, and two developed by the UK Met Office.
  
  The three regions in the study have experienced rising temperatures during the 20th century. The scientists analyzed temperature measurements from 1900 to 1999, to determine the geographic patterns and timing of this warming, as it changed from decade to decade. The researchers then used computer-based climate models developed at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis and the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research to simulate the climates over the same time periods.
  
  They found that simulations which include human influences on climate were able to reproduce the patterns and evolution of the observed temperature changes. This indicates that the models can simulate climate change, even at a scale as small as that of a large country, and that natural variability of the climate system alone can not explain the observed warming. [Science Daily]

Domestic Potpourri

• From the Foreign Policy's Passport blog's weekly Winners and Losers posting comes a winner:
  

  Barack Obama: Rocked in Iowa last weekend and is heading back for an encore next Saturday. Now, why would he want to do that?

Big Blue Marble

• Storms that battered Bangladesh and eastern India have killed more than 170 people and left many missing, navy and coastguard officials said on Saturday. A new cyclone alert was also issued for early Sunday in the Kutch region in the Indian state Gujarat located on the western coast, and two ports -- one in Mundra and one in Kandla -- have been shut down. [WaPo]

And one more thing... Oprah's Book Club has nothing on the new kid in town--Hugo's Book Club:

The U.N. address by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has had an unexpected impact ... on the best seller lists of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

At the start of his talk Wednesday, during which Chavez referred to President Bush as "the devil," Chavez held up a book by Noam Chomsky, "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance," and recommended it to everyone in the General Assembly, as well as to the American people.

The paperback edition of “Hegemony,” a detailed critique of American foreign policy that Mr. Chomsky published two years ago, hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list yesterday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6. At both Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, sales of the title jumped tenfold in the last two days. [NYTimes and WaPo]