That’s me, but the bottle on the table is most certainly not a beer, given that this photo was taken in a coffee house in a dry county.

By the way, guess who I’m looking at. And guess who is smiling back. Hint: I’m on the far right and he is on the far left.

Click here for the full picture.

Sorry to make you scroll horizontally, but I don’t have Photoshop at this computer.

If you know where this was taken, you might see some other familiar people.

There’s Jason. There’s John. Is that Matt’s head? Is that Sara’s hand and shoe?

Update: the click-to picture is now fixed for your non-scrolling pleasure. if you’ve been there before, you may need to hit refresh.

News from a free Iraq, upon Bremer’s exit speech:

I turned to one friend who was a committed She’at and who distrusted America all the way. He looked as if he was bewitched, and I asked him, “So, what do you think of this man? Do you still consider him an invader?” My friend smiled, still touched and said, “Absolutely not! He brought tears to my eyes. God bless him.”

Another friend approached me. This one was not religious but he was one of the conspiracy theory believers. He put his hands on my shoulders and said smiling, “I must admit that I’m beginning to believe in what you’ve been telling us for months and I’m beginning to have faith in America. I never thought that they will hand us sovereignty in time. These people have shown that they keep their promises.”

You think this will ever make it into Bartlett’s, as these did?

“Many of you are well enough off that… the tax cuts may have helped you,” Sen. Clinton said. “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

I doubt it.

Here’s a good one:

Ladies and gentlemen, in their need for hope, in their desire for peace, in their right to freedom, the peoples of the Middle East are exactly like you and me. Their birthright of freedom has been denied for too long. And we will do all in our power to help them find the blessings of liberty.

Isn’t it sad that you can easily guess who said that?

And Jay Nordlinger passes along a gem - the Yankovic ode to Dylan. Very nice!

A while back, somebody in government had a stupid idea - let’s send ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson on a mission.

Later, we found out it might have been Valerie Plame’s idea to send him, because he was married to her. We know this, because of a column by Robert Novak, which was easily verified by Wilson’s online bio and a quick call to the CIA.

Wilson later admitted he was actually on a much different mission than the one he was asked to accept: “Neo-conservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both.”

Not surprisingly, Wilson was unable to verify the intelligence that prompted his trip to Niger. Wilson “spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea” and he said it “did not take long to conclude” that a transaction had not taken place involving uranium and Iraq. Sure, a Niger official confessed that Iraq’s former information minister, Mohamed Sayeed al-Sahaf, wanted to discuss trade, but it was certainly not for anything that could be used for Saddam’s illegal WMD programs.

Without the luxury of independent verification, President Bush in his State of the Union address cited a British government dossier concluding that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. The English government stood behind that intelligence, while Bush was accused of lying in America.

However,

European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq.

… three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001. Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq.

This intelligence provided clues about plans by Libya and Iran to develop their undeclared nuclear programmes. Niger officials were also discussing sales to North Korea and China of uranium ore or the “yellow cake” refined from it: the raw materials that can be progressively enriched to make nuclear bombs.

More here.

It turns out to be more tangled than previously thought.

Mike has the goods on a local University professor who is apparently peddling a “sloppily borrowed lie.”

This is my favorite part from the first episode:

I mentioned Rev. Donald Sensing’s site as a good place to learn why there will be military preparations (appropriations, contracts, supplies, materiel, new construction, etc.) long before a draft is put in place, but he warned me against taking information from the Web. Of course, he later encouraged me to some websites (moveon.org and others), and when I joked about his change of mind he let the conundrum pass unaddressed.

Now it seems the professor couldn’t help himself and was in violation of his own advice. Comparative drafts here, with (seemingly) plagiarized lines in yellow.

Al Gore strikes again:

The Administration works closely with a network of “rapid response” digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for “undermining support for our troops.” Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the President’s consistent distortions of the facts. Krugman writes, “Let’s not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President… you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation.

What hath your internet wrought, Al?

We’ve been exposed, friends. Now we’ve got to figure out what to do with this domain.

For more about this, see James Lileks, Ann Althouse, Jonah Goldberg, Jessia’s Well, digital brown shirts (a blogspot) and Sharp Marbles.

You can also read my reactions to Gore’s last rant here and here.

If I were a better writer, I would have written this. Since I’m not, the best I can say is, “ditto.”

Ugh. The partisan condiment madness continues.

Have Cheney’s recent gaffes embarrassed you? Have you forgotten why you voted for President Bush? If so, read this and watch this; you’ll either be enlightened or want to cause harm to yourself and others. Maybe a little of both.

The New York Times says it held this story back for several weeks. Why didn’t they publish it earlier? Wouldn’t it have been an appropriate companion to the sensational story they put out last week about the 9-11 commission’s staff report?

(To borrow the theme excerpted below…)

This is pure speculation, but my guess is that back three weeks ago The New York Times simply wasn’t ready to announce to the world that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were sweethearts.

I continue the shenanigans at Memphis Red Blogs.