A fistfight at the WaPo? In the STYLE section! The cliche possibilities are endless;>

It warms the cockles of my evil little heart to wonder what George Bush must be thinking about Clinton getting a hero's welcome in Kosovo instead of being pelted with shoes.

RE: the WaPo fight, I agree with martin above, but will hold off snarking on the line from "To Wong Foo..." about STYLE over substance. :) There's very little of the latter left there.

The case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was arrested at JFK and shipped to Syria to be tortured and interrogated for almost a year, was dismissed by a federal appeals court today. The court claimed the case could not be heard without disclosing sensitive military details. This is bunk: we can hear his case and consider justice without jeopardizing national security. What is not allowed, apparently, is holding our own officials -- former officials, in this case -- accountable to the law.

Well, the Washington Post fight is amusing. But I'd really like to see Eugene Robinson deck Bill Kristol.

On the "Big Dog" in Kosovo: See David N. Gibbs,"First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia" Vanderbilt U. Press, 2009.

Re Arpaio's investigation:
Maybe that's why he's now trying to play the helpless, persecuted victim, who's being gunned at from every corner?
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/01/us/AP-US-Arizona-Sheriff-Security.html

I would vote for Maher Arar to be Prime Minister just to zap American legal hypocrisy about officials, FBI, CIA, etc.

Better fix that down there.

* DVR users are watching commercials. That's surprising.

i rarely watch live tv any more, preferring to record or sometimes delay what i'm watching just so i can skip through the commercials. it's amazing how much more pleasant the experience can be.

This Goldman Sachs stuff etc. should be prosecuted as fraud. Obama is too in bed with those Wall Street types and we can't be afraid to criticize.

"Big Dog celebrated in Kosovo: Thousands of ethnic Albanians braved low temperatures and a cold wind in Kosovo's capital Pristina to welcome former President Bill Clinton on Sunday as he attended the unveiling of an 11-foot (3.5-meter) statue of himself on a key boulevard that also bears his name. Clinton is celebrated as a hero by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority for launching NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that stopped the brutal Serb forces' crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians."

Add that to the William Jefferson Clinton Peace Center established in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland for his brokering of the Good Friday Peace Accords and ending decades of bloodshed in Northern Ireland.

RE: Goldman's sales

Anyone who bought these mortgages obviously thought they were worth more than goldman, otherwise goldman wouldn't have sold them (i.e. they would rather have the cash) and the buyer would rather have the securities.

The problem isn't that goldman thought that real estate was goind down... lots of smart people thought that - see krugman, paul.

The problem is that the government paid off AIGs debts completely, instead of the 60 or 70 cents on the dollar they should have paid off.

i rarely watch live tv any more, preferring to record or sometimes delay what i'm watching just so i can skip through the commercials. it's amazing how much more pleasant the experience can be.

Anyone who bought these mortgages obviously thought they were worth more than goldman, otherwise goldman wouldn't have sold them (i.e. they would rather have the cash) and the buyer would rather have the securities.

Suddenly it's 1968 again and here we go, propping up a shit government because if we don't wreck the country then the Bad Guys will wreck the country and we can't have that.

It was not a surprise when the epidemic of corruption in Afghanistan produced a rigged election. It was surprising that the administration accepted today's outcome without a quibble. Hamid Karzai's appointment to a second term as Mayor of Kabul, er, President of Afghanistan, will result in no more good for the people of Afghanistan than did his first term. We're spending blood and treasure to prop up a man who has combined corruption and ineptitude to a degree rarely seen in the name of what? Oh, right; because if we don't do whatever it is that we're trying to do in Afghanistan then the whole region will fall to the Islamic fundamentalists just as all of Southeast Asia went Communist after we left Vietnam.

"I don't recall" is the new "I plead the Fifth."

In addition to the administration's dog and pony show in Afghanistan, I find their behavior with respect to the jewish settlements in Palestine equally incomprehensible. Is this administration deliberately trying to scuttle the peace process there, or are they just tone deaf ?

From the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/sports/03runner.html?hp)

"As soon as Meb Keflezighi became the first American to win the New York City Marathon in 27 years, an online dispute erupted over his heritage."

We are no longer, (were we ever), a nation of immigrants.

An actual fist fight among staffers at the Washington Post? Wow.

The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Just because people let commercials run on DVR doesn't mean they're watching them. Since you still have to pay attention to the screen I just let it run and use the time to read.
Joe