Ouch.

Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino?

A: I'm not sure, but if the answer is "A cure for Parkinson's disease," then Bush will try to stop scientists from breeding them. Because he likes it when people get Parkinson's.

(Via Demagogue.)

Very few things render me speechless. This is one of them. Via PageOneQ:

Two boys, one aged 18 and one underage minor, were lashed 228 times before being hung by Iranian authorities in the northeastern city of Mashad, PageOneQ has learned.

Within hours of the execution, Members of Iran’s parliament expressed outrage, not for the deaths of the two young men, identified only by the the initials A.M. and M.A., but at journalists who reported the ages of those who were put to death.

More here.

Ignorant, despicable barbarians. A pox on all their houses.

(Via TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime.)

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, July 9, 2003, in a transcript not available from the White House itself:

But there's a bigger picture here, and this is what's fundamental -- the case for war against Iraq was based on the threat that Saddam Hussein posed because of his possession of weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological, and his efforts to reconstitute a nuclear program. In 1991, everybody in the world underestimated how close he was to getting a nuclear weapon. The case for going to war against Saddam is as just today as it was the day the President gave that speech.

It remains true that many, many neocons believed and advanced reasons for invading Iraq beyond WMD. It also remains true that "the case for war against Iraq was based on the threat that Saddam Hussein posed because of his possession of weapons of mass destruction." Believing in other reasons does not change this.