Rosie O’Donnell writes on her blog that Britain engineered the capture of its service personnel as a pretext for a US-led war on Iran:

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities.

the british did it on purpose
into iranian waters
as
US MILITARY BUILD UP ON THE IRANIAN BORDER

we will be in iran
before summer
as planned

Perhaps Rosie can explain the latest warmongering statement from the British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett:

I think everyone regrets that this position has arisen. What we want is a way out of it – we want it peacefully and we want it as soon as possible.

[...]We continue to express our willingness to engage in dialogue and discussion, to come to a resolution of this issue.

Before you write off the seriousness of Rosie’s opinion, remember she is co-host of one of America’s most popular daytime talk shows, the View—a program upon which she repeated the conspiracy theory last week.

Conservative attack dog Bill O’Reilly and satanic shock rock singer Marilyn Manson have a sensible discussion on The O’Reilly Factor. (Via Metafilter.)

A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice-president had shot someone. Ah, those were the good ol’ days.

Full story.

Sorry. Caught up in other projects all day. More soon.

John, if you’re reading this please excuse the errors but I broke the cardinal rule: I never took notes.

John is from Michigan. He’s been in New York for about two years. Some time in the past year the apartment building where he and his girlfriend lived and worked burned down. They’ve been sleeping rough ever since. John says he has no parents to turn to and his sister has her own problems.

Once, when John and his girlfriend were sleeping a block from the Empire State Building some men tried to rape John’s girlfriend. John intervened and has the knife marks to prove it.

John and his girlfriend are trying to get out of the city. They have a dog so they can’t take public transportation easily.

John spends most days on 14th Street between 5th Avenue and Union Square. His girlfriend is a block over. Her grandmother, who lives on the West Coast, died recently and she hopes she may have a small inheritance waiting for her if she can make it there. Someone has offered to give them a lift but it’s not definite.

John says he doesn’t care whether passersby give him money. He just hope his sign makes them laugh.

Some fascinating stories in this week’s New York Times. First up is an interview with Kanan Makiya, one of the most influential Iraqi dissidents living in the US. Makiya has written a number of books on Saddam’s brutality. He was a fervent believer in the otherthrow of Saddam. And following the invasion he started the Iraq Memory Foundation to catalogue cases of Baathist crimes. Makiya still believes the 2003 invasion was a good idea. But he says what followed has been a series of mistakes and missed opportunities:

The [Iraq Memory] foundation has shared some documents with the Iraqi court set up by the Americans to try Mr. Hussein and his aides. Yet, Mr. Makiya refers to Dec. 30, 2006, the day Mr. Hussein was hanged, as “one of the worst days of my life.”

“It was a disaster, an unmitigated disaster,” Mr. Makiya said, his voice rising. “I was just so upset, even on the verge of tears. It was the antithesis of everything I had been working for and hoping for.”

The tribunal did little to expose the all-encompassing cruelty of the Baath Party, Mr. Makiya said. And in failing to control an execution chamber filled with seething Shiite officials and policemen, the Iraqi government “actually succeeded in making Saddam look good in the eyes of the Arab world.”

He added, “Just like everything about the war, it was an opportunity wasted.”

Meanwhile, Edward Rothstein takes issue with the Museum of the City of New York’s latest exhibition Facing Fascism New York and the Spanish Civil War:

Actually, this show…deviates little from what would have once been called the party line. Its story is told in black strips that are meant to suggest the unfolding of newsreels, the design echoing at times the placards of protest marchers; free-standing biographical pillars of memorabilia stand like memorials to martyrs. Perry Rosenstein, the president of the Puffin Foundation, the main sponsor of the exhibition, writes of these fighters: “They represented the best of our country and the best of our conscience.”

Did they? The real situation is far more complicated than anything suggested here. Some essays in an accompanying catalog published by the museum and N.Y.U. Press hint at other directions the show might have taken, including taking note of the distinctive New York intellectual life that developed on the left, partly in opposition to these ideas. Instead, the curators, Sarah M. Henry and Thomas Mellins, are so focused on the virtues of the fighters that the exhibition seems like an attempt to rehabilitate the Communist left after decades in which historical research and opened Soviet archives have revealed how much darker the Spanish conflict was than the party interpretation ever let on.

Finally, the Week in Review looks at the apparent ease with which Russians accept their fellow countrymen dying in disasters following a week in which 180 people died in a plane crash, a mine explosion and a nursing home fire:

Disasters, natural and man-made, occur everywhere, but unnatural death occurs in Russia with unnatural frequency and in unnatural quantity.

In a report in 2005 called “Dying Too Young,” the World Bank warned that accidents, which affect men of working age most, were contributing to Russia’s decline in population. The country is now a world leader in industrial accidents, like the explosion at a Siberian mine on Monday that killed 110, in traffic accidents, in fires, in murders and in suicides.

Russians grieve, but they do so privately. They rarely demand public action — through the media, elected representatives or, in the extreme, street protests. A result is a lack of accountability, even impunity, that lets corruption fester, otherwise solvable problems mount and disasters repeat.

Thanks to everyone who called, commented, emailed, instant messaged, sent text messages and donated to the Amelie Dobek Memorial Research Fund yesterday. I had a wonderful birthday. Very busy today and over the weekend. More soon.

It’s my 31st birthday today. Happy Birthday me! Do you feel like giving me a gift? If so, do me a favor, make a donation to The Amelie Dobek Memorial Research Fund.

You may remember I blogged about little Amelie a few weeks ago. She is the daughter of friends of ours who died when she was just two weeks old. Your money will help raise awareness of congenital heart defects. If it means one more person in the world who will celebrate their 31st birthday and one less bereaved couple like Paul and Clarissa, it will be the best present ever.

Thank you to everyone who donates.

P.S. To those friends now saying “shit” and reaching for the phone, you have the perfect excuse for not calling me on my birthday. Our phone line went down on March 21 and the phone company says it will not be fixed until 6pm on March 22. So you tried, but you just couldn’t get through…