A weird echo of the old Iraq: Baghdad's elected City Council chief Mazen A. Makkiaremoves the U.S.-appointed Mayor Alaa al-Tamimi.

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq's capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

Apparently there's work yet to be done with the Iraqis on the concept of "due process." Perhaps we need a timetable.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter scrubbed for a second straight time.

The problem with sensors and software that measure the amount of fuel being loaded into the rocket appeared with just minutes left until liftoff. The launch was rescheduled for Friday morning.

The Register notes:

A study by Glamorgan University Business School's Department of the Fairly Bleedin' Obvious has concluded that it's not just a website's subject matter that determines whether it appeals more to guys or gals but - wait for it - "the appearance of the site also might play a subtle role", as AP explains.

. . .

Actually, it's a bit more subtle than that - but not much. The Welsh investigators found that women were drawn to pages with more colour and preferred "informal" rather than "posed" pictures. Men, naturally, showed a penchant for dark hues and "straight, horizontal lines across a page" as well as animated objects.

A stunning finding which will revolutionize the Web. I guess Medary needs some work to appeal to the female half of the target demographic, eh?

Radio Equalizer has the latest:

FRANKEN: Ok, it turns out he was on the board, or worked for, this Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx or something.

And he uh, borrowed (laughter) $875,000 from, I don't know why they did it, and I don't know where the money went, I don't know if it was used for operations (softer, especially fast), which I imagine it was. I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Who's running Air America, anyway? You'd think that someone would have asked this Evan Cohen guy where he got nearly a million dollars. Wouldn't you?

U.S. Army forced to redirect funds from reconstruction to security efforts.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for carrying out some $18.4 billion worth of planned projects across the country, says up to 25 percent of that aid has gone on security to face down relentless violence and sabotage. Poor electricity and water supply, two of the issues sapping public confidence in the U.S.-backed government, have been directly affected by the unplanned-for redirection of cash, Brigadier-General Bill McCoy said this week.

Some observations:

1) The post-war violence continues to cost in blood and in treasure.

2) Our military and political leadership appears to have underestimated the post-war violence.

3) Anything which the bad guys can interpret as either our weakness of will or of support of them makes the situation worse. This includes everything from demanding a timetable for withdrawl to attending anti-war protests, to simply dignifying the barbarian thugs in news articles by calling them "insurgents."

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi insurgents savaged a U.S. patrol overnight, killing four soldiers and wounding six after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged Iraq's leaders to end arguments over a constitution to help undermine the revolt.

OK, let me get this straight: Rumsfeld urged Iraq to get their constitution done. Hearing this, Iraqi "insurgents" went out and attacked U.S. forces. That's what the Reuters sentence says. The article directly implies a direct causal link between the two. We wonder how the Reuters reporter knows this.

We're certain that that is the conclusion the reporter and his editor wanted the reader to make. It seems to me that this story is crying out for an "Elsewhere in Iraq" somewhere. I sincerely doubt that the attack and Rumsfeld's statement are directly connected in the way the article plainly implies.

But since all of us in the newsroom know that Rumsfeld is an evil power-hungry Republican puppet of the ridiculous, illegitimate and stupid George W. Bush, it's OK to casually smear him like this.

Christopher Hitchens asks if anybody is considering the consequences of losing in Iraq?

It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

Before you go out to your next anti-war rally, answer this question: What happens if we do what you want us to do? Where do the foreign terrorists in Iraq go next? What does Iran do? What does Syria do? What happens to the Wahabbist campaign to create a global Islamic Caliphate, and what happens to CodePink when Islamic Law becomes the law of the land?

Via Ann Althouse at Instapundit.

Chrenkoff analyzes the links between white supremicist skinheads and Islamic barbarians:

Consider:
1) fascism and Islamo-fascism have a long history of mutual admiration, reaching back at least to the days of the World War Two flirtation between the Nazis and the anti-British Arabs in Palestine and Iraq - continued, when after the war many wanted Nazi war criminals found sanctuary throughout the Arab world.

2) today, both share a long list of common enemies: the Jews and Israel, "decadent" liberal democracy, capitalism and globalisation. Skinhead thugs would also be attracted to Islam as a "manly" warrior-creed, unlike the "soft" and "Judaic" Christianity.
3) one of the most intriguing unanswered question of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing is the possible Middle East connection of its perpetrators.

4) recall that already in the aftermath of September 11, many American neo-Nazis actually came out in support of the terrorist attacks.

Both the far left and the far right have always hated the Western civilization. Now they've found somebody else who shares their loathing.

North Korea wants a peace treaty:

The Korea Times notes that, despite North Korea's insistence on a peace treaty, it has tried to exclude South Korea from peace talks in the past on the grounds that South Korea did not sign the 1953 armistice treaty. That treaty was signed by North Korea, China, and the US-led United Nations Command.

This is not good:

Relative to the sizes of their populations, Asian nations such as Taiwan and South Korea are graduating five times as many undergraduate students in engineering as the United States. Engineering Trends did an exhaustive study and determined that the United States ranked 16th per capita in the number of doctoral graduates and 25th in engineering undergraduates per million citizens.

This isn't merely an academic problem. It affects virtually every engineering specialty in society beyond the civil and structural designers who build roads and bridges, including chemical, petroleum, industrial and especially electrical and computer engineering.

Via Fark.