In the midst of all the buzz about LOTR (just one more week!), Atlas Shrugged, the movie, now has a web site.

Like Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg tackles the subject of how wrong all the quagmirers and handwringers were a month ago. He chooses William Pfaff’s piece of just a couple weeks ago as emblematic of the short sightedness of the professional punditocracy.

What this suggests to me is a new noun, pfaff, for warrantless doom-saying about American military and foreign policy.

Here’s a weird one from my ancestral homeland of Michigan. A Grand Rapids postal worker pled guilty to flinging porcupine feces at his co-workers.

You couldn’t make stuff like this up. At least, I couldn’t.

I just hope it doesn’t give bin Laden any ideas…

Here’s a weird one from my ancestral homeland of Michigan. A Grand Rapids postal worker pled guilty to flinging porcupine feces at his co-workers.

You couldn’t make stuff like this up. At least, I couldn’t.

I just hope it doesn’t give bin Laden any ideas…

Here’s a weird one from my ancestral homeland of Michigan. A Grand Rapids postal worker pled guilty to flinging porcupine feces at his co-workers.

You couldn’t make stuff like this up. At least, I couldn’t.

I just hope it doesn’t give bin Laden any ideas…

This babe’s got to be a finalist.

As reported by the Telegraph, a Japanese woman, dressed in lightweight clothes, froze to death in North Dakota looking for the buried briefcase full of cash from the movie “Fargo.”

Apparently, Robert Fisk doesn’t have a monopoly on anti-West paranoia among British journalists. Reuters (no one here but us freedom fighters…) has reported that Yvonne Ridley, the woman who snuck into Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban and later released, is accusing the CIA, or Mossad, or MI5, or somebody, she’s not quite sure who, of plotting to have her shot for propaganda purposes. She says the Taliban released her because they caught on to the evil plot, but even though she’s seen incriminating documents, she can’t produce them. Maybe her donkey ate the evidence…

According to this story by Dennis Hans, Bush and Cheney cut a deal with the mens’ grooming industry for the concession to the Afghan shaving market.

The disconcerting thing about this piece is that I can’t figure out for the life of me whether it is lunacy or satire. If it were in the Onion, no problem. But it’s printed at Common Dreams, a site that professes to be a center for “breaking news and views for the Progressive community.”

So, is it real, or parody, and if it’s the latter, do the Common Dreams folks understand that, or did they post it in seriousness?

What do y’all think?

[Thursday Update]

A kind (and unduly appreciative) reader, with reading ability apparently vastly superior to my own, has pointed out that the word “Parody” appears just above the headline.

[VOICE=”Emily Litella”]

Never mind.

[/VOICE]

In addition to his (probably-deserved) physical beating in Afghanistan, Robert Fisk has also undergone an even more deserved rhetorical pummeling by Welch, Layne, et al. Now David Perlmutter piles on in Front Page Magazine.

So the beating of Robert Fisk teaches us much but apparently he has learned nothing. Didn’t they used to say that a conservative was a liberal who has been mugged? Not any more. For some people a crack to the head cannot dislodge calcified prejudices.

In addition to his (probably-deserved) physical beating in Afghanistan, Robert Fisk has also undergone an even more deserved rhetorical pummeling by Welch, Layne, et al. Now David Perlmutter piles on in Front Page Magazine.

So the beating of Robert Fisk teaches us much but apparently he has learned nothing. Didn’t they used to say that a conservative was a liberal who has been mugged? Not any more. For some people a crack to the head cannot dislodge calcified prejudices.