If you haven’t already read Democracy Now’s interview with Nir Rosen, perhaps the best American journalist covering Iraq, you should read it now.

It’s all interesting, and all hideous. Did you know Sweden’s taken in 40-50,000 Iraqi refugees? And America’s only allowed in 700? To be fair, of course, America is just 1% of the size of Sweden.

From this morning’s Times:

Lawyers representing Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s father, Bernard Spitzer, say a prominent political consultant who has been working for State Senate Republicans threatened the elder Mr. Spitzer this month in an anonymous, invective-laced phone message …

Mr. Stone, a seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics who worked for Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan and for George W. Bush in the 2000 recount battle, adamantly denied the allegation in an interview, calling it “the ultimate dirty trick.” He asserted that allies of Governor Spitzer may have gained access to a phone in his Manhattan apartment to make the threatening call…

Bernard Spitzer’s lawyers hired Kroll Associates, the private investigative firm, to trace the message, and their report was included with the letter to Mr. Winner. The firm traced the number that appeared on Mr. Spitzer’s caller identification system, linking it to listings under the name of Mr. Stone’s wife, Nydia.

“The review of publicly available records,” the report says, “strongly suggests that the number is controlled by Roger Stone.”

Digital recordings were also sent to Mr. Winner, including the audio of the voice mail message and “a sample of Roger Stone’s voice from a broadcast interview” to allow for comparison. The Times was given a copy of both recordings, but was unable to draw any conclusions about whether Mr. Stone’s voice was on Mr. Spitzer’s phone message.

In the message, the caller says, referring to a potential subpoena: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.”

Mr. Stone, 55, said the number from which the call was alleged to have been made was indeed his, and that it was also shared by a Florida law firm for which he does public relations work, Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler. But he denied that he made the call or that it was his voice on the message.

He said his apartment building on Central Park South is owned by H. Dale Hemmerdinger, a fund-raiser for Mr. Spitzer who is the governor’s nominee to be chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and suggested that allies of the governor might have given access to his apartment to someone who made the threatening call. An official at Mr. Hemmerdinger’s company said she was not prepared to comment.

Interestingly, this is basically the same explanation Roger Stone gave in 1996 when it became public that he and his wife had been placing ads in sex magazines seeking male and female partners:

The Post quoted Mr. Stone as conceding that the bills for the postings on the Internet site were paid for with his credit card. He told the newspaper the post office box number listed on the Internet site belonged to him, but had been improperly obtained.

Is this an old story? Somehow I missed it before it showed up in the LA Times a few days ago:

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush’s opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina…

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove’s team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, [Rove lieutenant Matthew] Dowd explained [after the election]: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party’s nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most…

“Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds…So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards,” Dowd said. “And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce” around Kerry.

“It wasn’t like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped,” he said.

I assume many people read that and immediately thought of this:

[T]he president says he was helped by bin Laden, who put out a videotaped diatribe against Bush the Friday before the 2004 election.

Bush said there were “enormous amounts of discussion” inside his campaign about the 15-minute tape, which he called “an interesting entry by our enemy” into the presidential race….

“I thought it was going to help,” he decided. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”

Here’s an NPR story from February, 2003:

The Bush administration has been decidedly vague about how much a war with Iraq might cost. When pressed, officials have said less than $50 billion. Last year, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey caused a stir when he put the price tag at between 100 and 200 billion at best. The administration dismissed the figure, and Lindsey was soon fired.

Here’s the 2004 WMD report by the CIA:

Advisory groups [Saddam] established generally assumed Saddam already had a preferred position [on issues] and commonly spent time trying to guess what it was and tailor their advice to it. More conscientious members of the Regime sought to work around sycophantic or timid superiors…

The growth of a culture of lying to superiors hurt policymaking…Lack of structural checks and balances allowed false information to affect Iraqi decision making with disastrous effects…

Saddam ignored his economic advisors in the Ministries of Finance and Planning with respect to strategic planning. For example, Saddam entered the Iran-Iraq war heedless of Ministry warnings about the economic consequences. He had no plan or strategy for how the war was to be financed.

From CNN:

The women are too afraid and ashamed to show their faces or have their real names used. They have been driven to sell their bodies to put food on the table for their children — for as little as $8 a day…

A mother of three, she wears light makeup, a gold pendant of Iraq around her neck, and an unexpected air of elegance about her.

“I don’t have money to take my kid to the doctor. I have to do anything that I can to preserve my child, because I am a mother,” she says, explaining why she prostitutes herself.

This isn’t the human degradation part, though. In fact, anyone who’d see these women as somehow shamed really should be punched in the face. Here’s the human degradation part, from Cunning Realist:

Wondering about those on the other side of this situation? Here’s something called the “International Sex Guide.” It features reports from men who have visited prostitutes in various countries. Yes, there’s an “Iraq” section. The most recent post, from today, links to the above report and asks “Can someone give us a trip report? thanks!”

Cunning Realist then cites some past posts about Iraq from this site, which are, horrifyingly enough, exactly what you’d expect.

But even that isn’t the deepest human degradation involved here. The deepest human degradation is that the State Department briefings from just before the war, using Iraqi women for our propaganda in the most vile way imaginable, are still online. And so’s this:

LAURA BUSH: I want the women of Iraq to know how much American women stand with them.

Via Atrios, the blogging superman who keeps it going even while apparently on vacation, we learn of a good old fashioned bank run:

Anxious customers jammed the phone lines and website of Countrywide Bank and crowded its branch offices to pull out their savings because of concerns about the financial problems of the mortgage lender that owns the bank.

Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest home-loan company in the nation, sought Thursday to assure depositors and the financial industry that both it and its bank were fiscally stable. And federal regulators said they weren’t alarmed by the volume of withdrawals from the bank.

The mortgage lender said it would further tighten its loan standards and make fewer large mortgages. Those moves could make it harder to get a home loan and further depress the housing market in California and other states.

The rush to withdraw money — by depositors that included a former Los Angeles Kings star hockey player and an executive of a rival home-loan company — came a day after fears arose that Countrywide Financial could file for bankruptcy protection because of a worsening credit crunch stemming from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

This relates to the very last panel in this cartoon from last March, the tiny “afterthought” panel. In the penultimate panel, when Sparky learns that his mortgage payment is about to skyrocket, he says, “You’d think I would have anticipated this moment.” This was my little way of acknowledging the fact that — while it served the purposes of the cartoon — it really wasn’t in character for Sparky to be caught off guard like that. Then, in the very last panel, the predatory lender echoes the same sentiment, and to some extent that’s the real punchline of the cartoon — what did these people think was going to happen, when they based their entire business model on these predatory loans that would clearly drive a lot of their customers into default? You’d think they would have anticipated this moment …

Rick Perlstein reports that he just got this email from David Horowitz:

One strong measurement of the effect we’re having (and the need for what we do) came in the form of request from the head the FBI-California Highway Patrol Joint Counter-terrorism Task Force who called this week to ask if their group could use our flash video “What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad” as a training film.

I hope you’ll take the time to watch this important video, here. It’s a great piece of work, although I’m concerned it may be a bit too intellectually and aesthetically sophisticated for the target audience.

Oh, this is sweet:

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company’s machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Other Wikipedia edits have been made from IPs owned by the CIA, Microsoft, Wal Mart, and Fox News. Someone from the latter changed this:

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the [[National Public Radio]] program ‘’[[Fresh Air]]'’ on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox’s case against him was “literally laughed out of court” and that “wholly (holy) without merit” is a good characterization of Fox News itself.

into:

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal [[National Public Radio]] program ‘’[[Fresh Air]]'’ on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox’s case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.

Actual quote from a Neil Cavuto interview, via the Daily Show:

“Nobody likes to be called names. On the other hand, there’s, uh, we got a bigger enemy than name callers. That’s Al Qaeda. Or people losin’ jobs.”

I cannot believe this man has been in the White House for more than six years.

… and:

“If rebuilding bridges is that big a priority, we oughta prior’tize that in the highway moneys that we’ve already budgeted. In other words prior’tization means real prior’tization.”

Greenwald:

Glenn Reynolds today sends his readers to this absolutely exquisite essay from Roger Simon of Pajamas Media, who explains why his support for gay marriage and women’s rights leads him to be such a committed warrior in the War against Islamofascism:

…So, yes, I am a supporter of gay marriage and undoubtedly will remain so, since it is consistent with my values of long duration. And, yes, I will continue to agitate for it in my writing and elsewhere. But in return I call on my friends on the Left –- straight or gay -– to help defend that real source of liberalism the Enlightenment, because if we lose and fall under religious law, there not only will be no gay marriage, there will be no women’s rights, no freedom of the press, no basic human rights, not even – as in the case of Iran – any music.

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/ right-wing-blogosphere / Fox News / Michelle Malkin / Rush Limbaugh listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.

Also currently up on Salon:

Is the critique of Darwinism basically the same as what you’d find from American creationists?
Much of the rhetoric is similar. There are only so many ways you can argue against evolution, only so many ways you can say the fossil record doesn’t tell you what the biologists say. But there are also differences. For example, in American creationist circles, one of the stronger options is “Young Earth creationism.” People who read the Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000 years ago, literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim creationists are almost invariably “Old Earth creationists.”

What about the idea that human beings have a common ancestor with chimpanzees?
That’s definitely a no-no …you will find that Muslims will typically be very reluctant to allow for human evolution.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.