Poet Laureate to Remain at Post--and Other Things

CNN has the details, Slate has the poetry. I'll just note in passing that if beaucracy tends to award poor to mediocre performance, then perhaps it lauds downright incompetence.

In other news--it's starting to really look like Fallujah or bust went bust--insurgents have moved back into areas cleared by the US Military...that is according to...the US Military. I've heard that a common busy-work task assigned to young recruits involves something along the lines of digging a hole, then another, then taking the dirt from the first hole and...you get the picture. Fallujah has all the signs of being a far deadlier version of the same.

Off topic, but: Howard Zinn has a good article over at the Progressive, something along the lines of my own rant from earlier today, but better written (hey, he's an academic, after all). I also chanced upon similar prose at Bad Attitudes.

From Needlenose, here's a good piece from the Asian Times that compares Fallujah to Guernica, which places the US in the uncomfortable position of the Luftwaffe, (and Allawi, fittingly, as sort of a peckerwood Francisco Franco). The Times reports that napalm and white phosphorus bombs were used during the "liberation," which was banned by the UN in 1980 (although these days apparently the UN is the source of all evil in the world, thanks to the corruption in the oil-for-food campaign in Iraq, which I guess is NOW the reason for invading in the first place or whatever)--but you know, even if the UN HADN'T banned napalm and white phosphorus bombs, they're still a pretty despicable thing to drop on a population you're supposedly "liberating." Liberating them from what? Their skin?

Oh--and TODAY'S bombing in Baghdad took place outside of a mosque--about twenty killed there--then there was an attack on a police station, killing roughly ten more. The other headline that will likely soon become an everyday news item concerns a plot on Allawi's life. If I was the editor, I'd keep that or an equivalent phrase handy on the autotext. And Juan Cole notes more violence in the quickly-fading-to-yellow-if-not-red Green Zone.

Here's to the holidays...