PRIORITIES: Apparently Saddam Hussein is giving millions of dollars to residents of Jenin who lost their homes in Operation Defensive Shield.
Two thoughts:
1) By Saddam's standards, this is an improvement over conditioning his cash grants on murdering innocent civilians (see the same article).
2) Just wondering...Iraq has money for this project, but not for food and medicine for its own civilians?

GREAT MOMENTS IN BRITISH OBITUARIES: This one is to die for.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: I may not be able to post much over the next couple of days. Here's a thought recently expressed by Joe Klein, who recently demolished the political essays of Joan Didion in the New Republic:

Didion's political essays seem very dated now. They are artifacts of the most placid and prosperous moment in American history, a time when allegedly serious news organizations and journals of opinion turned to cynics and stylists--people who knew little about politics and nothing at all about policy--to make pronouncements about public life. These people practiced a form of theater criticism, assuming and sometimes even asserting that politics was a lesser branch of show business, that politicians were merely actors reading lines, that political performance consisted only of public speaking and image-making; while the quiet work of governance, the true work of elected officials, was largely ignored. This was, almost by definition, a flagrantly superficial conceit. It is probably finished now. When reality visits, there is no need for political fictions.

I think this is absolutely true. Writers like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have seemed 98% anachronistic since the pop-culture-ignoramus George W. Bush took office. Since September 11, it's been 100%.