With Fred Thompson in the running for GOP nominee, this 1996 article from the Washington Monthly may be old enough to be current again. Thanks you Google and FindArticles.com for bringing it to me.

This lack of a central passion could pose a problem if the GOP plans to cast Thompson in the role of president. "Reagan was passionate about defense," notes Kopp. "Even if you disagreed with his military spending, you knew it stemmed from his core passion of wanting to protect our country. Thompson doesn't seem passionate about anything except being Ol' Erred. If he wants to hold national office and be another Ronald Reagan Republican, he's got to find a core"

Such criticism is ironic, considering that Thompson makes this exact observation about Richard Nixon in At That Point In Time: "[In Nixon,] I could find no underlying philosophy by which all things could be measured. In the end, I think that this, more than any other factor, caused his undoing. There was no anchor there; there were no roots"

Assuming Thompson can define his philosophy, he still lacks one other vital asset for a presidential candidate: a wife. In this age of family values, the GOP would have a hard time painting a single divorce as the epitome of Norman Rockwell Americana. And word has it Thompson's charm works as well on the ladies as it does with the voters. A friend of his notes that "there's been a long line of women" in the decade since Thompson's divorce, including a semi-serious relationship with country music singer Lorrie Morgan. Says Sen. Orrin Hatch, who chairs the Judiciary Committee on which Thompson sits, "Really lovely women just seem to like Fred"

I didn't see the film, but this review is so odd I had to comment on it. More than half the review talks about the history of global warming science and insinuates this disproves the existence of man made global warming, before even a shred of alleged evidence is discussed.

Here.

On Tradesport the prediction that Fred Thompson will be the GOP nominee for President is trading between 7 and 7.2 out of 100. Considering the fact that he hasn't even said for certain he's running yet ...

My wife is getting over a bad cold right now. I hope I'm not coming down with it. I seem to have shaken it off so far.

Instapundit seems to think this is good news.

Commander of the Islamic Revolution's Guards Corps (IRGC), Brigadier General Rahim Safavi, on Wednesday warned the Iraqi Kurd authorities to expel the armed bandits and counterrevolutionaries, linked to the foreigners, from their territories, Fars news agency reported.

"Otherwise, the IRGC forces are ready to sacrifice their lives and defend their country in pursuit of the counterrevolutionary bandits across the border and wipe them out," the IRGC Commander has been quoted as saying.

He made the remarks in a commemoration service held in Orumiyeh, West Azarbaijan Province, for a number of IRGC forces who were martyred in a helicopter crash last week in the area.

He said that members of counterrevolutionary terrorist groups in northwestern Iran are now being surrounded by the Iranian armed forces.

Three commanders of PEJAK terrorist group were killed in Sero region in Orumiyeh, West Azerbaijan Province, by the Islamic Republic armed forces Tuesday, he said.

according to the report, the IRGC Commander said that the US is funding the terrorists groups to act against Iran and the Zionists are training the Iranian counterrevolutionary bandits in northern Iraq.

Before this I was hoping our new General and Defense Secretary might be up to the job. Iraq couldn't let people attacking across their border alone even if they wanted to - and after our words about regime change, they won't trust us enough to work with us either.

Many Democrats are wildly overoptimistic about what will happen when we leave Iraq - to America's reputaion among other things, blue states and red alike. But if the middle east is going up in flames, the people who say there is nothing we can do may be right.

Bill Maher's little dance has gotten me thinking. I always used to shrug off talk about the 'angry left'. I always figured that there was a lot more violence from the right then the left, especially when you counted abortion bombers and doctor shootings, and gay bashing. It seemed it only stood to reason. What else defines the history of the Iraq war if not a willingness to believe overwhelming force would lead to an easy and quick victory, as soon as the 'sleeping giant' was woken?

Maher may be slicker than Coulter, but I'm not sure it's a virtue. I've always believed that Coulter's most outrageous remarks said something not merely about Coulter, but the people who fawned on her. How can I fail to wonder the same about Maher? If Ann Coulter's 'lame joke' was calculated to people who dare not fully admit certain fears even to themselves, what about Maher?

Bill Maher tells us how he didn't wish Cheney dead. If you follow his links to his own transcript, you can see how closely he flirted with it. If that transcript is too long for you, this doesn't quote out of context.

Plenty of Cheney fans will be criticizing this post, but I do it from the perspective that the administration has done badly and are in danger of continuing to do so, although there is hope that Gates and Petraeus will be an improvement.

Maher: I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.

Apart from how close he came to saying the world would be better if our vice president were assasinated, what kind of fact is that? How would the Bush administration have responded to the assasination of a sitting vice president? Has Maher figured out who would replace Cheney, not as VP but as war advisor to the President?

Remember that Iranian Oil Bourse everyone was talking about a few months ago? I happened to read a comment thread wondering about what had happened to it, any nobody knew. It took me a few google searches to finally find an answer.

"Oh, crikey, it's at a much earlier stage than people would think," said British consultant Chris Cook, who claims credit for coming up with the idea for the exchange in the first place and is a member of the consortium headed by the Tehran Stock Exchange that is charged with bringing the project to life.

"You can rest assured, there will not be a crude oil contract, Gulf-based, in my opinion, within a year -- and that would be really pushing it," Mr. Cook, a former director of ICE's predecessor, the International Petroleum Exchange, said when reached in Scotland.

The reason for his death was the subject he was about to discuss - his declaration that democracy, not the gun, is the best way forward for Iraq's Sunnis. Qassim al Janaabi, his assistant, said: "In the last two weeks he had been saying in prayers that all Iraqis should vote. He said if we get a government, president and constitution, the Americans will have no reason to stay.

"Some groups sent messages to him saying, 'Don't be a traitor, if you carry on doing this you will die.' But he didn't care - he insisted that he would carry on with this subject. Then two cars full of men came and took him away."

Stories like this are important because there are many Sunni's in Iraq who say the terrorist groups who attack Americans are morally justified. If they read in American media about American troops who violate the laws of war, they should read as well about things like this - to know who regularly kills Sunni clerics without trial, investigation, or apology. Oddly, we don't seem to see many stories like this in Fox news or the Washington Times, which seem to get much of their coverage from wire services. Good for the British Telegraph.

Has Al-Zarqawi messed up big time?

This could be worse that any blunder Bush ever made - if we can somehow aeize the moment. Zarqawi has explicitly told the Sunni minority that he does not fight to make them safe in their own country, but to embroil them in civil war.

And how about little Sadr, who has tried to pretend they are all good friends, and there would be peace if only the Americans leave?

This time they have it right at GOP.com:

More important, the terrorist acknowledges that the agreement of Iraq's leading Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties on the country's first permanent postwar government last week was, as he bluntly put it, ‘a dagger in the heart.’ The Zarqawi movement has spent the past several years trying to ignite a sectarian war between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites; the new ‘unity’ government, if it takes hold, could be the turning point toward defeating that strategy.”

I actually was more worried about the compromises involved in creating this new government, but if it scares the piss out of Zarqawi it's got to be good.