Two things...

I'm still without a laptop and probably will be for a while, so I'll be blogging during work downtime (which, unfortunately, has been rare of late). Two things have caught my notice today. First, I think Russ Feingold had a nice retort to the administrations "pre 9-11 mindset" talking point. He said:

This administration reacts to anyone who questions this illegal program by saying that those of us who demand the truth and stand up for our rights and freedoms somehow has a pre-9/11 world view. In fact, the President has a pre-1776 world view. Our government has three branches, not one. And no one, not even the President, is above the law.

Secondly, these Muslims that are rising up around the globe and burning embassies are really in need of a sense of humor. I'm afraid there will be a giant puss-out in Europe as they pull up the kid gloves with which the West treats the Muslim world. I admit I'm not the one to be commiserating with Muslims on the sacrosanctity of their holies, but at some point these folks need to stop being such titty-babies about every little thing. I would like nothing more than the world collectively telling them to get the chips off their shoulders and grow up. I thought Andrew Sullivan had a great point when he said:

One massive supporting pillar of Jihadism has been the West's refusal to treat the Islamic world as it would any other part of the world. If Chinese radicals were ransacking Western embassies because of a cartoon, and were backed by the Chinese government, we would be outraged, demanding apologies, severing relations, and so on. But when Muslims do it, backed by Islamist governments, we are supposed to take it on the chin, to "respect" their religious traditions, issue mealy-mouthed statements, etc. In many ways, this is the real offense: treating Muslims as if their violation of global norms, and thralldom to medieval conceptions of politics and religion, were somehow acceptable. They are not acceptable.

The Iranians, as usual, did not help matters. While President Ahmadinejad was planning his trip to the annual pariah conference - held in Havana this year - his state-run newspaper solicited the best holocaust cartoons from the readership. In my opinion the proper response would have been, "Whatever dude." The actual response...pompous rhetoric from the European analog of the Anti-Defamation League furthering the "fuck you, no fuck you" that's been going on between Iranians and Jews for quite a while now.