(Begin quote) The plaintiffs are Al-Haramain — a defunct Islamic charity based in Oregon — and two lawyers who represented Al-Haramain in 2004 during proceedings by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to declare Al-Haramain a terrorist organization, the primary consequence of which was to freeze its assets.

Note: I say credible because these guys aren’t part of the neocon orthodoxy that informs the top people in the Bush administration, slack-jaw lowbrows like Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack. Lynch and Martin are usually very interested in real discussion and engagement with the players throughout the Middle East beyond the ever-shifting borders of Israel.

Abu Aardvark (Marc Lynch)

American Footprints (Eric Martin)

From the Washington Post:

Sen. John McCain hasn’t had good luck joking about Iran. But he tried it again Tuesday.

Responding to a question about a survey that shows increased exports to
Iran, mainly from cigarettes, McCain said, “Maybe thats a way of killing them.”

He quickly caught himself, saying “I meant that as a joke” as his wife, Cindy, poked him in the back.

(Begin quote) ...you head to the dressing room with a swimsuit flirtatiously monogrammed with cherries and begin to slip the suit on. Right there in the crotch of these cutesy bikini bottoms is a sanitary liner that jolts you out of your pampered and privileged life — and not because you’re horrified by the realization that the suit has come into contact with other people’s private bits.

There are no weekend box office charts for online videos. But if there were, near or at the very top of the list right now might well be a four-and-a-half-minute video called “Dancing,” which more than four million people have viewed on YouTube, and perhaps another million on other sites, in the just over two weeks since it appeared. It’s the online equivalent of a platinum hit, seeping from one computer to the next like a virus.

Video here

Story here

The most damning evidence against Pakistan is the fact that the Taliban aren’t trying to take responsibility. As the spokesman says, they would have been proud to take responsibility if they had done it.

(Begin quote) The Taliban has carried out a wave of suicide attacks across the country in the past seven years, but said it did not carry out the embassy attack.

Zabihullah Mujahed, a group spokesman, told the AFP news agency that the Taliban would have been proud to claim responsibility for the attack but they had not been involved.

My question in the headline comes from this sentence of an article about the American Christian movement: The religious right is “not simply a religious movement or a political movement; it has also, and above all, been a sexual movement.”
....

I’ve written recently about the possibility of the development of errors in Islamic practice; now here is something about the development of a serious error (culture of profligate moral hazard devoid of any care for consequences) in US civil society and economic behavior.

h/t Fatemeh at Talk Islam.

via Tim Ferriss

"The sexualization of torture from the top basically turned Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay into an organized sex-crime ring in which the trafficked sex slaves were US-held prisoners," writes Naomi Wolfe today over at Huffpo.

She continues: