Me: “What really irks me— and what should piss off anybody who believes in like, egalitarianism and human rights—is that they have a Nobel Prize for literature, but they don’t have one for achievement in the culinary arts.” Terry the bar band roadie:  “They don’t?” Me: “Nada, man.  And that’s a freakin’ travesty, too.  Because let’s face it:  these chili cheese fries are, like, so totally superior to anything Nadine

Via Tigerhawk, who wants us to spread the word: Egypt has apparently arrested, Alaa, one of its most prominent Arabic bloggers, in connection with the ongoing struggle in that country over the independence of the judiciary. Haitham Sabbah has the story and the context, and the Sandmonkey has more, with a picture of Alaa. The contact information for the Egyptian embassy is below: The Embassy of the Arab Republic of

The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jim Lindgren quotes John Kerry, who, in the course of a speech yesterday at Grinnell College in Iowa, managed to cram a number of dubious assertions into an admirably compact soundbite—presumably as a way to reinforce the ignorance of the student activist class that the Democratic left so relies upon for vocal outrage: Dismissing dissent is not only wrong, but dangerous when America’s leadership is unwilling to

Jimmy Carter must certainly feel conflicted about this.  From the Times UK: A HAMAS plot to assassinate Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has been thwarted after he was tipped off by Israeli intelligence. Hamas’s military wing, the Izza Din Al-Qassem, had planned to kill Abbas at his office in Gaza, intelligence sources said. Abbas, who became president of the Palestinian Authority last year after the death of Yasser Arafat, was

In “The Killing of Atwar Bahjat”, Greyhawk points us to a graphic [warning: not for the week of stomach] Times UK account of the murder of Iraqi journalist Atwar Bahjat. What one is left with, after reading the piece, is twofold, I think:  first, the unquestionable brutality and arrogant ideological certainty of our enemies, whose mindset is borne in some cases of odious fundamentalist religious “convictions”, but in other cases