A lot of Republicans are hoping that Fred Thompson makes a run for the presidential roses, but as British cartoonist Kal notes, American voters prefer hair on the presidential cranium. Writing at Democracy In America, the U.S. blog of The Economist, Kal writes that: “Not since 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower defeated an equally dome-headed Adlai Stevenson, has baldness prevailed in the presidential race. Since then America has been led by a succession of shampoo-users. One man to buck the trend...

That favorite whipping boy of left and right, New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman, turns 108 Friedman Units today.

Does the Bush administration’s astonishing assertion that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges rise to the level of a constitutional crisis? The answer, I believe, is that this is just the latest chapter in an ongoing constitutional crisis involving a rogue president who continues to insist that when he invokes executive privilege, inks a signing statement, unilaterally suspends a bedrock principle of the American legal system or violates an international...

Do you think those little green men miss us?

Denmark has secretly airlifted about 200 translators and other Iraqi employees of its troops and their relatives ahead of its withdrawal from Iraq, and most are expected to seek asylum. The Nordic country will withdraw all of its 480 combat troops in August and replace them with a small helicopter unit of 55 soldiers. Bo Eric Weber, Danish ambassador to Iraq, said the operation followed the killing in December of an Iraqi who had worked with the Danes as an interpreter. Around 80 of those flown...

More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time . . .

Although it helps, you don’t have to be black to be offended by the premise behind “Hot Ghetto Mess,” a new series on the Black Entertainment Television cable channel that is an orgy of stereotyping that mocks ghetto culture. Led by blogger Gina McCauley at What About Our Daughters?, a rather formidable coalition of religious and women’s groups is asking advertisers to pull their ads from the show, which debuts on July 25, and threatens a boycott of their products if they...

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by outed spy Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials. U.S. District Judge John Bates said the lawsuit raises “important questions relating to the propriety of actions undertaken by our highest government officials.” But in a 41-page decision, he found that Plame and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, failed to show the case belongs in federal court. More here.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel talks to a sailor in fire protection clothing during a visit to a marine technology school. You can surely do better than that. What caption would you write for this photo?

George Packer packs more punch into a single paragraph than most bloggers, myself included, do in a single week. Yes, the inestimable Packer, a longtime New Yorker writer, is blogging these days. He had this to say at his new Interesting Times blog: “Al Qaeda in Iraq has had an outsized strategic effect compared to its numbers. By slaughtering thousands of Shia civilians, it has plunged Iraq into civil war. Killing or capturing large numbers of Al Qaeda followers may be the main achievement...

First it was neocon darling and war drum beater William Kristol, who in a WaPo op-ed argued that the Bush presidency “will probably will be a successful one” because there hasn’t been a terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the economy is going great guns and that war thingie is going to turn out okey-dokey. Now comes president press secretary Tony Snow, who in a USA Today op-ed opines that “Politics sometimes manages to muddle the obvious” and goes on to muddle the...

Michael has the makings of a pretty good thread on that subject over at discourse.net. Click here for more.

In an unhappy confluence of events, one blogger friend has just lost a beloved pet and another is now having to prepare for that eventuality. Dave Schuler, who toils at The Glittering Eye, lost Mira, a four-year-young Samoyed, while our Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes has learned that Pepino, a 13-year-old Dalmatian, has untreatable cancer. This got me to thinking about the great joy that the many animals in my life have given me, as well as the sadness I felt at their passing. And how with so much pain...

Ask yourself this simple question: Nearly six years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, do you feel safer? No. Of course you don’t. There are two interrelated reasons for this state of affairs: Terrorists in the 21st century are fiendishly adept at recruiting and adapting, while the Bush administration’s War on Terror has been a failure. I am inclined to say that the latter doesn’t much matter because at the end of the day it is the former that counts the...

Cardinal Mahony prays for “a final resolution” In the interests of full disclosure, I inherited some fairly heavy baggage when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church. My father attended a parochial school for 12 years and dutifully returned the favor as an altar boy when he was younger and as a star football player when he was older. But when it came time to get hitched, he had the temerity to want to marry a woman whose father was a Jew in a church ceremony and the local diocese said...

President Bush, of course, is fond of comparing his folly in Iraq with World War II and it is oft commented by his supporters that had there been polls during that war they would have showed the support of a fickle public ebbing and flowing with every battle won and lost. But Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo that there was actually fairly extensive polling of public opinion during the Big One: “The key point is that many polls were taken during the war. And approval of the president’s...

Recent developments have pretty much cinched that George Bush will occupy a special place in American history as a coward of staggering proportions who gave even his most steadfast supporters the finger when they tried to help salvage his presidency and he then dumped the Iraq war on his successor. While the president technically has 18 months to prove me wrong, his continued obeisance to a strategy (if you’ll pardon the term) of shifting deadlines that cannot be met and changing promises...

Irène Némirovsky The Internet and blogosphere notwithstanding, we live in an age of great books. Well, perhaps every age since Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type around 1450 is a great age for books, but I revel in and continue to be amazed at at the incredible breadth and depth of the contemporary bookshelf. Following are five books that I’d recommend for summer reading. None are long, can be read between swims in the ocean, dips in the pool or TSA searches at the airport, and...

Quick! Somebody get a net! I’d like to revisit the matter of why the Republican Party continues to marginalize blacks and generally treats all people of color as second-class citizens. (The ones that are citizens, that is.) In responses to a post yesterday on the news that only Tom Tancredo of the nine Republican president wannabes appeared at an NAACP candidate forum, a number of commenters, all presumably Republicans, sought to deflect that criticism. Some noted that the NAACP is not exactly...

Coming hard on the heels of the reports that the Iraqi army remains unprepared to take over security of the war-torn country, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says his forces are capable and American troops can troops can leave “anytime they want.” Sounds good to me. Where’s the door? In another valentine to Washington, one of Al-Maliki’s top aides accused the U.S. of embarrassing the Iraqi government by violating human rights and treating his country like an “experiment...

Friday, 7/13/07: Cheney naps while Bush fiddles. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP-Getty Images

Given the shaky state of the mainstream media, it is easy for oldsters to get all weak in the knees when we think back to the era of I.F. Stone. So who the hay is I.F. Stone? If you don’t know and value incisive reporting and commentary, it’s time that you got to know this chap, whom the WaPo’s Dan Froomkin calls the world’s first blogger. More here.

Where’d everybody go? Another election cycle, another NAACP Presidential Candidate Forum. The civil rights group invited all nine Republican wannabes, but only Tom Tancredo showed up. Meanwhile, all of the Democratic presidential hopefuls appeared and, not surprisingly, Barack Obama brought down the house. The excuses given by the Republican candidates’ campaign staffs mostly had to do with scheduling conflicts. They were just too busy to make it. Ahem. More here and here.

If anyone needed convincing that President Bush is on another planet when it comes to the Iraq war – and there still are a few of you out there – Thursday was a keeper. Astoundingly . . . No wait, at this late date nothing the president says is astounding . . . he asserted at a press conference notable for its Through the Looking Glass quality that “the fight can still be won.” The president again batted aside some tough questions with answers so inane that the Queen of...

With due deference to President Bush and some of my co bloggers who continue to focus on how to keep the bus that is the American presence in Iraq from going off the cliff, the bus went off the cliff a while ago. What we are left with is what happens when it hits the ground. Austin Bay is among those bloggers who might not completely buy into the bus-off-the-cliff analogy, but knows that given realities in Baghdad and Washington (which is to say that the political clock is outrunning the military...