Colorado has significantly expanded gun rights with new concealed-carry legislation.

Colorado has significantly expanded gun rights with new concealed-carry legislation.

That’s the code name that Iowahawk says we should use for the Iraqi operation. Maybe then the Germans and French will get the message.

I ask you, would protestors in favor of liberating Iraq be this stupid?

I’d like to flood the zone with this. It’s a significant development, considering all of the disparate groups that they got to this consensus, but unfortunately it’s really bad timing to get much attention. Once things start getting mopped up in Iraq, it would be nice to make a serious policy push for it, though.

Given the massive defections and surrenders already occuring, it was just suggested to me that we shouldn’t think of this as invading Iraq, so much as a huge hostage standoff, in which we’re trying to arrest or kill him before he can kill the hostages.

[Update, a few minutes before the sand runs out of Saddam’s forty-eight hourglass]

David Warren agrees.

Would that it were possible to temporarily remove the entire Iraqi civilian population, but Mr. Saddam won’t let them go.

For the war to come is likely to resemble the resolution of the largest hostage crisis in history. The task of the allies is to remove Mr. Saddam, and his fellow monsters, while sparing every possible innocent human life that he is holding for his protection. Mr. Saddam’s strategy, for the battle ahead, as revealed in everything from satellite imagery, to reports from special forces ensconced on the ground, to what is now a flood of information from defectors and even Iraqi general staff, hoping to preserve their own lives through the conflict, is to maximize the carnage and suffering, in the earnest expectation that the world’s U.S.-haters will blame it all on Washington, not Baghdad.

Read the whole thing–it has some interesting and, to me, credible speculation on Saddam’s brutal strategy and the course of the war.

BBC is reporting that B-52s, presumably loaded with JDAMs, just took off from an RAF base in England. Iraq is about seven hours away…

[Update at 12:44 PM PST]

I was wrong about the ordnance–it’s cruise missiles.

Walter Cronkite has weighed in. It isn’t pretty.

At a Drew University forum, Cronkite said he feared the war would not go smoothly, ripped the “arrogance” of Bush and his administration and wondered whether the new U.S. doctrine of “pre-emptive war” might lead to unintended, dire consequences.

…In response to a question about media bias, Cronkite said the press is not politically partisan but does tilt toward liberalism. He said that the smartest president he ever met was Jimmy Carter.

Pathetic. Somehow, I suspect that he’s no longer “the most trusted man in America.” At least, I hope not.

An anti-war idiot chained himself to the wrong building in Olympia, Washington.

Mason padlocked one end of the chain around his neck and the other to a door, which opens to a bottom-floor office. He told onlookers he was protesting Bush’s foreign and domestic policies. He had affixed a sign to the building reading, “Reduce Deficit.”

Grange employees explained that he was at the wrong building. The Grange is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that advocates for residents in rural areas.

“I don’t think that’s ever happened before,” said Larry Clark, Grange communications director.

No, it’s probably a unique event. They cut him off with bolt cutters. There was no arrest, but then, I guess it’s not clear what law he broke. It would have been entertaining to leave him there a couple days and allow the crowd to pelt him with decaying vegetable matter, though.

Here is the leading candidate for the stupidest (English-speaking) woman on the planet.