Good evening. New blog here. Watching a Frontline special about North Korea on PBS. I have an affection for Korea, having spent a semester in Seoul.

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We weren't all wrong I've been wanting to blog about this for a while. The whole talking point "We were all wrong about WMD in Iraq" is patently untrue. I wasn't wrong. I didn't believe Colin Powell, as I wrote about last May. I just couldn't figure out how best to express this. The Slacktivist has managed it. It's good, and explains why reasonable people were deceived by the media and deceived by the White House. Maybe it was my distrust of this administration, but I knew back then they were lying about the economy and tax cuts, so I wasn't all that surprised that they were lying about WMDs in Iraq. slacktivist: "Not Everyone Was Wrong" "We were all wrong," David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector told Congress on Jan. 29. Kay's statement sent the Bush administration scurrying for a response. That response, as it turns out, has been to try to minimize that last word -- "wrong" -- by ...
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Sometimes headlines just write themselves Like this one from the Washington Post today: Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm Michael Brown certainly has shown he can plan a disaster. Look at how awful Hurricane Katrina was. For preventing or fixing things afterwards, he's not so good.
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What's the deal with Bandar? You know, Bandar bin Sultan, Ambassador from Saudi Arabia to the US? The guy the Bushes call "Bandar Bush"? Has he resigned ? BBC said he has. But then Saudi sources have said that he will return to work at the end of August. The International Herald Tribune sums it up pretty well. Bandar is not in Washington. King Fahd has been in poor health since he had a stroke in 1995 (I think) and the kingdom is under the de facto caretaker rule by Crown Prince Abdullah. Fahd had a case of pneumonia that put him in hospital recently, and has been declining. If King Fahd dies, Abdullah becomes king. Prince Sultan, Prince Bandar's father, becomes Crown Prince. Abdullah, like Fahd, is in his eighties. I'm not sure about the age of Prince Sultan. Bandar may be angling to become intelligence chief or defense chief (the position currently held by his father) to increase his chances of becoming Crown Prince, and King eventually. Or, Banda...
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