After the President’s conveniently-timed revelation about a foiled attack on Los Angeles, I contacted a few friends in the intelligence community and was able to get my hands on this IM conversation between Al Qaeda’s number two guy and Bin Laden’s second-in-command (on that org chart, everyone’s a VP).

OsamaMama : u there?
72Virgins : yeah, sup?
OsamaMama : martyr 4 life, bitch!
72Virgins : lol
72Virgins :
OsamaMama : turn on fox
72Virgins : k
OsamaMama : shes hot
72Virgins : who? the angry blonde?
OsamaMama : yup
72Virgins : dude, she looks like barney fife with a wig
OsamaMama : whatever. anns my gril
OsamaMama : girl
OsamaMama : i cant tpe today
OsamaMama : type today
OsamaMama : ARRGGGGGHHHH!!!!
72Virgins : nice.
OsamaMama : where you wanna hit the infidels?
72Virgins : i dunno. sears tower
OsamaMama : las vegas
72Virgins : space needle
OsamaMama : disenyland
72Virgins : disneyworld
OsamaMama : i just said that
72Virgins : no, you said land, I said world
OsamaMama : aren’t they the same?
72Virgins : no, dumbass
72Virgins : the white house
OsamaMama : the washington monument
72Virgins : brb
72Virgins : im back
72Virgins : the tallest building in texas
OsamaMama : the tallest building in los angeles
72Virgins : i got skills
OsamaMama : what?
72Virgins : nunchuck skills
72Virgins : bowhunting skills
OsamaMama : it’s a liger
72Virgins : flippin sweet

Seriously though, it’s hard to know what to think about all of these vague threats when the President is so blatant about politicizing them and mum on the details. Where these guys stopped at the airport or was this “plan” just something jotted down on a bar napkin? If revealing the existence of a spying program undermines our ability to fight terrorism, what are we to make of the President’s self-congratulations being on the cover of every newspaper? If it was so important to keep this incident a secret then, what were the changes that made it perfectly acceptable to blab about it now?

–White House Knew of Levee’s Failure on Night of Storm, here.

–Victories in the war on terror:

One is a second grader in Manhattan. Over the protests of his American mother, immigration officials have been trying to deport him ever since he returned from a brief visit to his native Canada without the right visa. Another is an Irish professor of literature invited to teach at the University of Pennsylvania last month. He was handcuffed at the Philadelphia airport, strip-searched, jailed overnight and sent back to Europe to correct an omission in his travel papers.

Then there are the seven Tibetan monks who were visiting Omaha two weeks ago. After their church sponsor abruptly withdrew its support, their religious visas were revoked and a dozen immigration officers in riot gear showed up to arrest them.

–Libby Testifies Leak Was Ordered, here.

–In case you missed it, the guest post from Iraq vet Tomas Young is well worth reading.

–A review of the new Neil Young concert movie by Jonathan Demme, here. This was filmed over two nights at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville last August. The concerts were closed to the public, but I had the great good fortune of attending both nights, thanks to my friend Louis Black (who is not the comedian), and the greater good fortune of meeting both Demme and Neil Young. Sitting in the third row, I felt like I was attending a private concert in Neil’s living room. Imagine the best concert you’ve ever been to, and imagine that it was immortalized on film. That’s how I feel about this one, and I haven’t even had a chance to see it yet.

From John Suggs, senior editor for the Creative Loafing alt-weeklies:

So, let’s look at the guy who started this whole cartoon escapade. He’s Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. Only a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”

How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world, his racism is about as blatant as that of the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism – designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures – earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized.

He’s got more and you really should, if you will forgive the expression, read the whole thing.