166 pounds, 33″ waist, an uptick of a pound from last week, girth stable, 50 pounds lighter than when I began my official diet last Thanksgiving.
In other weblogs: Michael Fumento continued to make fun of Rich Hailey and taunt “the blogosphere” on his weblog, Advise and Dissent, while claiming, somewhat amusingly, that his weblog isn’t […]

From Riverbend’s blog, which you need to be reading even though she never musters quite the detachment that Salam Pax can:

The looting and killing of today has changed from the looting and killing in April. In April, it was quite random. Criminals were working alone. Now they’re more organized than the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) […]

What, asked Brecht, is the evil of a man who robs a bank compared to the evil of a man who founds a bank? Well, screw the old dead commie anyway. But let’s extend his principle a minute.
Yesterday’s car-bomb assassination in Najaf has provoked some interesting reactions. Jeanne d’Arc avers that the US is at […]

as it is Mrs. Offering’s birthday. I’ll be spending my day singing “Stacy’s Mom” with special feeling.
Read Eve’s homage to middlemen and her subsequent qualification.
Read Gene Healy on Josh Marshall’s interview with Peter “Holy War, Inc.” Bergen.

but now that John Smith is back at LincolnPlawg and following British “security” “policy” like a gumshoe on a wandering spouse, I am once again amused. Read everything.

Forbes reports that the Washington Redskins, who play in a stadium their owner built with his own money, are the NFL’s most valuable franchise. Number 4 on the list are the New England Patriots, whose owner declined a sweetheart stadium deal in Connecticut a couple of years ago because he felt like a crumb taking […]

Colby Cosh says libertarians and conservatives are natural allies. Agitator Man Group member Nicholas Weininger demurs.

The Whither Libertarians and the Republican Party? moves to Matthew Yglesias’ blog. I’m particularly interested in the reactions of the liberals in Matthew’s comments section.
1) Look. Guys. It’s not my place to tell you your business. But what a lot of us are saying is that libertarians are “in play” for the first time in […]

Diana Moon and Jonathan “Head Heeb” Edelstein are debating the extent to which Howard Dean’s wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, will hurt his chances, with reference to this profile of Mrs. Dr. Dean (Mr. Dr. Dean is also an MD) that appeared in a recent Newsweek. See particularly the comments to Jonathan’s aside about Latin […]

Via Crooked Timber comes NationMaster.com, “Where Stats Come Alive.” Looks very very cool.

In the course of taking up the 1602 Challenge, Nate “Polytropos” Bruinooge let’s drop a major “Whoah!” aside:

The odd thing is that I ought to be annoyed at this rash of self-referentiality, but none of the above examples suck . . . Navel-gazing by the craft’s top practitioners isn’t limited to comics – it’s commonplace […]

A not especially informative article in the New York Times yesterday about the legacy of cartoonist Jack “King” Kirby, on whom Marvel and DC creators dined for decades. It can probably said to simultaneously claim too much (fewer than half of the mutants in the X-Men movies were Kirby’s creations, and not the ones the […]

The ceasefire in Liberia seems to be collapsing. Reuters reports fighting; AP quotes Liberia’s defense minister du jour saying that “reports of rebel attacks on one central town were rumors spread by his own troops to facilitate looting.” Everyone agrees that the multinational West African peacekeeping force needs to hasten its deployment beyond the capital […]

An important Christopher Dickey essay from Newsweek about a recurring theme on this site - the American government’s increasingly open embrace of torture. (Link via Perverse Access Memory.) Thank heavens for on-the-record euphemisms, though!

No need to get out the battery cables or fingernail pliers, it seems. The only thing Jacoby tortures is prose. “Interrogation is […]