Why does Bush have to find weapons of mass destruction? Because that’s how he justified the war. Exhibit A: the State of the Union (original). There is a sequence of 19 paragraphs directly discussing Iraq, beginning with the line “Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq,” and ending with “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.” ...

The first round of talks on the new Iraqi government ended today. The largest Shi’ite group decided to stay away; not an entirely good sign, but not a disaster quite yet. In Nasiriya, there were protests over American presence in Iraq: “No to America, No to Saddam.” Under the logic that I should recant my opposition to the war because the Iraqi people were happy to be rid of Saddam, I’m assuming that anyone who believes we should maintain a presence in Iraq should change their minds because there’s a significant number of Iraqis who’d be happy for us to leave. ...

Best line about the French evah: “It’s not true that the French are ungrateful for what the Americans did in WW2. In fact they’re so inspired by the American example that they plan to wait two years until they personally are attacked, then join the coalition and pretend the war against Saddam was all their idea.”

So I’ve given the new Safari beta a quick test-drive. It still doesn’t support title attribute tooltips. On the other hand, the nicetitle trick looks gorgeous now, so that’s something. My MT bookmarklet still needs the tweak found way down in the comments of this post. Basically, you chop out everything before “void(window.open” and you’re good to go. Dunno about Blogger bookmarklets but I bet the same kind of approach would work. Some sites look like shit. I don’t remember Tacitus looking this bad on earlier versions of Safari. ...

Huh. This is really interesting; someone took a listen to the ABC live broadcast of Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and the CNN report on Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and you know what? CNN really has the boos miked way higher. There’s one guy yelling “Booo” really loudly in the CNN version who doesn’t show up at all in the ABC version. Listen for yourself. I didn’t think I’d hear a difference, but I did. I’m not gonna claim it’s foul play — it could just be a different set of mikes used by CNN — but it is really distinct. ...

There’s a new Safari beta out. I won’t be able to try it out until late tonight, but it includes tabbed browsing and autofill for forms. I’ve been using Camino lately because Safari was crashing on me a lot, but Camino’s pop-up blocking happens to block pop-ups on one’s bookmark bar. This includes the Movable Type bookmarklet. Total pain. Hopefully this Safari build will be a little less crashy. Hopefully the various bugfixes mentioned by Dave Hyatt are included, too. I am particularly hot for the cookie fix and I’m crossing my fingers for the title attribute fix.

I got my first piece of spam offering copies of the Iraqi Most Wanted (original) playing cards today. Some yobbo’s selling the PDF on Ebay. You can download it for free from the DoD, of course. Here’s someone who printed out the PDF onto card stock, and is selling the results for 16 bucks a pop; he’s also claiming that you can’t print from the PDFs others are selling. Just amazing.

Masanori Murakawa, better known as the Great Sasuke (original), won a seat in the Iwate Prefectural Assembly today (original). By special arrangement, he was permitted to run and will be permitted to take his seat masked; also, he was allowed to use his wrestling nom de plume on the ballots. Well, he’s not the first wrestler ever to be elected to a government, but he’s probably the first one to do so masked. Also probably the best of them all (sorry, Jesse). In fact, you could make a decent argument for him as the best athlete ever to reach elected office.

Popular right-wing comment of the week: “look what the left has been defending.” Well… OK. If we’re responsible for the horrors of Saddam’s rule, I’d like the reasonable sensible right wing bloggers to stand up and take responsibility for this: Osama is a pathetic little bitch. I swear, if I run into his sorry little ass in an alley somewhere, I’m gonna turn that turd into my own personal sex toy. And I’m not even gay. I’ll still get an orgasm just thinking about the humiliation I’m laying down on his murderous stinking ass. ...

Frontline ran an excellent piece on North Korea tonight. As usual, they stuck all the good stuff up on their Web site. Gotta love it. And, since (as we all know) PBS is hopelessly liberal and biased, they made sure to include an interview with the highest ranking North Korean ever to defect in which he praises Bush to the skies. Cunning, those liberals. My cynicism aside, I particularly liked the Ashton Carter interview. He has lots of good insights, and he takes a pretty rational appearing line on the implications of a war on the Korean peninsula. Also, he has the quote of the entire piece: ...