Political Linky Dinks: Iraq and a rack

A leaked document from the departing CIA station chief in Baghdad paints a gloomy picture of Iraq. It "warned that Iraq would descend even deeper into violent chaos unless the government was able to assert its authority and deliver concrete economic improvements." This is not, exactly, what the administration would like us to believe.

Also, disgruntled troops grilled Rumsfeld in Iraq:

Spc. Thomas Wilson had asked the defense secretary, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Shouts of approval and applause arose from the estimated 2,300 soldiers who had assembled to see Rumsfeld.

The defense secretary hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.

"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson concluded after asking again.

Rumsfeld's snarky response: "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can [still] be blown up."

On our side of the Atlantic, it turns out that the flap over Janet Jackson's Superbowl boob was generated by the complaints of 23 people. The FCC chairman testified before congress that the number of indecency complaints "soared dramatically to more than 240,000" this year—but neglected to mention that 99.8% of those complaints had come from a single activist group, the Parents Television Council. This gives the lie to the idea of "community standards" setting indecency policy. (Thanks, supergee!)

[Edit: I misread the article; the 23 people were complaining about Married By America. There were 540,000 complaints about the boob-oo. The important thing here is that complaints in general have surpassed 1,000,000 so far this year, up from about 350 three years ago, and if we exclude the Jackson flap nearly all of the remainder came from one group.]