She has been dubbed Iran’s Paris Hilton after appearing in a sex video on the internet. But while Paris’s exploits propelled her to worldwide stardom, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi faces ruin, a public lashing and even a jail term. Ebrahimi is one of the best-known actresses in the strict Islamic country and made the 20-minute sex tape privately with her boyfriend on a camcorder at the flat they shared two years

My friend and Arizona blogger, the fabulously delicious Miss Shelleigh Spicer, has a great post which she has graciously allowed me to share with PW readers.  Being the dork I am, I couldn’t get the pics in the post, so if you’d like to see them, go to Pixie Lair.

The New York Times opines: Under Republican control, Congress has exercised virtually no oversight of the administration’s misconduct of the war, and the new Democratic leadership is eager to hold extensive hearings. The public deserves a full accounting (backed by subpoenas, if necessary) of how prewar intelligence was cooked, why American troops were sent to war without adequate armor, and where billions of dollars in reconstruction aid disappeared to. A

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006): Incredibly entertaining movie.  See it.

I just learned an Afghan security offical I worked with while S-5 of TF Eagle was killed a while back.  Gul Zaman worked a really wild area – the Koh-e Safi.  I didn’t really go to the place much, as I contented myself with almost blowing up in a minefield on the border of the Koh-e Safi (in Ashrafkhel). The report says it was Taliban, but it easily could have

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006): I sure hope this is funny enough to justify all the hype.  That wacky Ali G!

Last week, I described a nightmare scenario in which the Republicans won the midterm prompting the president, high on mandate juice, to form the Department of Shut The F*** Up, headed by a sock puppet named Secretary Fiddlesticks. Now that the Democrats have taken back the Congress and 51+ percent of America finally has a voice in government again, I think it’s time to seriously let fly. So at the

Republican Sen. John McCain intends to take the first formal step toward a White House run next week by launching a presidential exploratory committee, GOP officials say. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting a public statement from the four-term Arizona senator, who is considered the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. McCain, the GOP maverick who unsuccessfully sought his party’s nomination in 2000, already

From the morons at crooksandliars: On page 344, Woodward describes the doings at the White House in the early morning hours of Wednesday, the day after the ‘04 election. Apparently, Kerry had decided not to concede. There were 250,000 outstanding ballots in Ohio. So Kerry decides to fight. In fact, he considers going to Ohio to camp out with his voters until there is a recount. This is the last

Here. Frankfurt, 80 km (50 miles) east of Berlin on the Oder river, is in Brandenburg, one of three ex-communist states where far-right parties won enough votes for state parliament seats. The federal government has called a rise in anti-Semitic violence worrying. Police said last month attacks by far-right groups rose 20 percent in the first eight months of 2006. In July, extremists in the neighbouring state of Saxony-Anhalt burned