Tuesday...

Jerusalem, Israel: A Palestinian girl walks in an alley in the Silwan neighbourhood. Eighty-eight homes in Silwan are set for demolition by the Israeli government, which claims they were built illegally [Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP]

So.  I read Monday that Germany joined our boycott of the Durban II conference in Geneva… and the UK walked out at Ahmadinejad’s speech.

The atmosphere at the Geneva meeting was tense even before the Iranian president began speaking, with pro-Israel protesters chanting “shame” from the other side of the chamber’s doors and a Jewish student group from France infiltrating the hall. Some countries, led by the US and Israel, had already declared a boycott, Others, including Britain, took their seats, but were braced, with their “shoes on”, to walk out if Ahmadinejad’s oratory was to prove offensive.

When he did speak, he was even more vitriolic than they had feared.

We’ll always have friends.  To the death.

WE can be as disjointed, delusion ridden, insulting, propagandistic  and demagogic as we wish.  And our friends, too.  But let anyone else steal our looney deadly thunder… well, just watch.

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In other cartoons… have we finally found one simple (tho deadly) enough for us?  From the new Tom Dispatch:

In the comic books, bad guys often team up to fight the forces of good. The Masters of Evil battle the Avengers superhero team. The Joker and Scarecrow ally against Batman. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take on Superman.

And the Somali pirates, who have dominated recent headlines with their hijacking and hostage-taking, join hands with al-Qaeda to form a dynamic evil duo against the United States and our allies. We’re the friendly monsters — a big, hulking superpower with a heart of gold — and they’re the aliens from Planet Amok.

In the comic-book imagination of some of our leading pundits, the two headline threats against U.S. power are indeed on the verge of teaming up. The intelligence world is abuzz with news that radical Islamists in Somalia are financing the pirates and taking a cut of their booty. Given this “bigger picture,” Fred Iklé urges us simply to “kill the pirates.” Robert Kaplan waxes more hypothetical. “The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists,” he writes. “Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard.”

Someone, stop us.  And our melded into looney toons Texas Chicago Hawai’ian rancher with metrosexual cow boy boots.  Someone stop the cartoon leadership.  The swagger and the pecs.  All of it.

Just the killing of the three pirates morphed thru several stages.  The first animation, showed a small flat window – easy for a rapt public to forget or not know it was at the forefront of a pop up in the life boat cover – thru which 3 shadow heads were shown.  A little triple burst of star like shapes was to indicate the sniper kills.  Little shadow heads go away!  Magic!  Ok………………..

Later animations showed one head shot thru the [again] little flat panel window… with two heads popping up out of a hole in the top of the bump up.

Over the weekend Evan Thomas tried to say that the two heads popping up and out, were vomiting pirates.  Sick on the sea.

Oh that so sounds like fishermen to me.

The reality?  The front of the bump up is peaked, with two small windows, each angled.

Yeah, get a new cartoonist.

As we madly story board the cartoon weapons.  Such fun for the “reformers”:

And of course, no new mission should lack its preferably expensive, high-tech weaponry: in this case, the Littoral Combat Ship, a mighty pile of money in a relatively small package. A third the size of a destroyer, this $500 million craft is meant to patrol the planetary shallows, even if it has so far proved a production-plagued nightmare. Nonetheless, Secretary of Defense Gates has just modestly upped the craft’s production — and there’s more to come from Navy “reformers.” Count on a new array of smaller, shallow-water vessels that could be formed into little armadas already termed by one naval officer “Influence Squadrons.”

Carry on…

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