Friday Bits and Bobs

• Say, how about that jobs number? 96,000. Remember, we need about 150,000 to stay even with population growth. Wall Street had been expecting about 145,000. And, lest we forget, the White House projection in February 2003 for what we could expect if their tax cut was passed was 306,000. As Jon Stewart remarked, the facts are looking awfully partisan these days. (Oh, and before W. pulls out a "It's the hurricanes' fault" excuse, the report says they didn't make a difference.)
  
  
• Paul Bremer has an op-ed in the New York Times this morning, backpedalling as fast as he can. Sadly, in the course of desperately trying to shore up the Bush campaign, he manages to (unwittingly?) write something else to undermine it.

  "But during the 14 months I was in Iraq, the administration, the military and I all agreed that the coalition's top priority was a broad, sustained effort to train Iraqis to take more responsibility for their own security." (emphasis mine)

  This begs the question: if this was your top priority, why is it that so few Iraqis have actually been trained? Not the 100,000 the President keeps talking about, not twice that number, which was projected at one point. Most accounts think about 22,000 have gotten minimal training. I shudder to think of what happened to their lowest priority. (One might reasonably wonder if, had you asked him for his top priority during that period, whether "training Iraqis" would have been his answer, or if this has become his top priority in light of the Bush campaign's need to emphasize this now. Not that there's any historical revisionism in the Bush camp this week.)
  
  
• Intent? Are they saying we toppled Saddam because he had evil thoughts? As someone wrote elsewhere, Spike Lee has the intent to become an NBA star, it doesn't mean he's about to. What does the report actually say?

  Charles A. Duelfer, the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, found no plans and no existing capability to restart these programs, and he said in his report released Wednesday that divining Hussein's intention "is like having the picture box cover of a jigsaw puzzle to guide the assembly of the component puzzle pieces."

  Well, I guess that's completely reliable, then. Never mind. There is, of course, no way of telling what would happen in that hypothetical universe where the international community (including a US with a bipartisan belief that Saddam was dangerous) moved away from increasing the levels of inspection and pressure on the regime to move instead in the completely opposite direction to lift sanctions and start ignoring Saddam. But it doesn't really matter, does it, since the odds of that happening were slim, and we probably could have figured out solutions other than an invasion and occupation if it started to. Meanwhile, back in the non-hypothetical real world, THERE WERE NO WMDs, and there WAS NO GATHERING THREAT!
  
  
• Daniel Froomkin at the Washington Post thinks he's picked up on one of Bush's "tells", a verbal tic that shows he's putting out a whopper. It's the phrase "of course." Read his column, and then look for it tonight.
  
  
• Check out a series of online commercials designed after those Macintosh "Switch" ads. I particularly liked "Respect."
  
  
• Since some of you have been wondering, Amenhotep was the name of several rulers in Egypt's 18th Dynasty. In other words, "King of de Nile".