Some interesting things I read but didn't comment on due to my complete and utter disregard for this blog for the past three days...

... but they are worth noting.

This post on Pandagon just served to remind me of something that someone said before the election in that groundbreaking Ron Suskind article:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Articles on Armstrong, Dean, The DNC, and the future of the party: Why Democrats Lose (MyDD), DNC Thoughts (Pandagon - Also included are links to some cases for or against Dean and Rosenberg as it seems to be becoming largely a two horse race), Armstrong Williams is a Crack in the Matrix (MyDD), Why Dean? (Oliver Willis), The DNC Chair Race (Matthew Yglesias), Talking Points Memo, (Who reminds you that it doesn't matter who you support for DNC chair, you don't get to vote anyway).

Chuck listed his Intro to Film movies, and a very interesting conversation emerged in the comments.

Here is an ABSOLUTELY scathing attack on the President by Juan Cole.  A must read:

Bush's response contains three elements.

1) The US was not alone in being wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. All the other nations did, too.

2) Saddam was dangerous.

3) Absolutely.

When is someone going to call him on this inanity? The Belgians didn't have intelligence assets inside Iraq that could have given them an independent view of the question. Whatever the world believed, it mostly believed because the United States disseminated the information.

Moreover, it is not true that there were no dissenters. The State Department's own Intelligence and Research Division dissented. French military intelligence dissented. What Bush is saying is either untrue or meaningless.

As I have pointed out before, Saddam without weapons of mass destruction could not have been "dangerous" to the United States. Just parroting "dangerous" doesn't create real danger. Danger has to come from an intent and ability to strike the US. Saddam had neither. He wasn't dangerous to the US. It is absurd that this poor, weak, ramshackle 3rd world state should have been seen as "dangerous" to a superpower. That is just propaganda.

Calling Saddam "dangerous" as an existential element without regard to the evidence falls under the propaganda techniques of name-calling and stirring irrational fear.

As for "Absolutely," it is a weasel word. It is not an argument. It is a species of hand waving. It is cheap.

Atrios brings up an interesting point that bloggers should be more careful in how they link.

And finally, if anyone can get me this girl's telephone number, I may just be ready to settle down right now:

Kate Stelnick may weigh only 100 pounds, but her appetite is remarkable. The college student from Princeton, N.J., is the first to meet a restaurant's challenge by downing its six-pound hamburger - and five pounds of fixins' - within three hours.

Stelnick didn't eat for two days to prepare for the challenge. "I felt very full, but I was too excited that I actually ate it to notice," Stelnick said.

Stelnick, 19, made the five-hour drive to Denny's Beer Barrel Pub with two friends from The College of New Jersey on Wednesday, after they saw pictures of the monster burger, dubbed the Ye Old 96er.

Denny Leigey Jr., the owner of the bar 35 miles northwest of State College, had offered a two-pound burger for years and conceived of the six-pounder after his daughter went to college and phoned him about a bar that sold a four-pounder.

But nobody had finished the big burger in the three-hour time limit since it was introduced on Super Bowl Sunday 1998. In addition to the meat, contestants much eat one large onion, two whole tomatoes, one half head of lettuce, 1 1/4 pounds of cheese, two buns, and a cup each of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, relish, banana peppers and some pickles.

Stelnick did it all in two hours, 54 minutes.

Comments

[Pauly D]

I saw the picture of that burger and let me just tell you -- it was HUGE.

And I coulda done it in 2 hours!

[Dylan]

Now THAT's a WFYE post: The story of how Pauly D tried to eat the monster giant 6 lb burger in 2 hours.

[Pauly D]

True...true.