I am Musa Ibrahim:

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

A9.com is a new search engine project from Amazon. Essentially A9 is a new interface for Google with some features added to search inside books (as you can do on Amazon’s website). Check it out.

This article argues that Janet Reno’s attire at the 9/11 Hearings expressed her refusal to be judged. Do you think that Janet Reno actually thought about it, or is she just a fashion incompetent?

Here’s an op-ed by a reasonable leftist about how conseratives might not be telling the whole truth about tax rates and how much the “rich” pay. I don’t agree with his argument, but he is reasonable and makes an interesting point.

Check out what Tony Kornheiser has to say about Barry Bonds moving into 3rd place on the all-time home run list.

Check out Fundrace’s website. It shows how much money is donated to Presidential campaigns. My favorite part is the Neighbor Search which allows you to search for donations by zip code and name.

Read this article from the Moscow Times. Here’s a good excerpt:

It was Kennedy’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, who dragged the United States into the Vietnam quagmire, and the senator should know better than to compare Vietnam and Iraq.
…
Under Saddam Hussein, the Sunni Muslims of Fallujah, a city of some 400,000 inhabitants, were regularly recruited to serve as officers in the armed forces and the security services. When Baghdad fell, these loyalists found themselves out of a job and returned home. In Fallujah, they formed underground armed groups and waited for the Marines to attack. It is possible that the killing of the four contractors was a deliberate provocation intended to lure U.S. forces into the streets of Fallujah, where local armed bands lay in wait. In Vietnam, and more recently in Somalia in 1993, U.S. losses during street fighting led to outcry back home and the unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah outnumbered the Marines and were armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles, RPG-7 antitank grenade launchers and mortars. Chechen fighters used the same weapons in Grozny in 1995, 1996 and 2000, killing thousands of Russian soldiers and destroying hundreds of armored vehicles.

Just like the Russians in Grozny, the Marines last week were supported by tanks and attack helicopters, but the end result was entirely different. U.S. forces did not bomb the city indiscriminately. The Iraqis fought well but were massacred. According to the latest body count, some 600 Iraqis died and another 1,000 were wounded. The Marines lost some 20 men.
…
The more accurate historical analogy to the current war in Iraq is not Vietnam but, say, the battle at Omdurman, Sudan, in 1898, when Horatio Herbert Kitchener, a British field marshal, crushed the Sudanese forces of al-Mahdi by bringing machine guns to bear against the enemy’s muskets and spears.

Check out the entire article–it is an interesting read.

If there’s one thing I hate about government is when politicians want to “protect” me from myself. According to the Washington Post:

A California state senator Monday said she was drafting legislation to block Google Inc.’s free e-mail service “Gmail” because it would place advertising in personal messages after searching them for key words.

“We think it’s an absolute invasion of privacy. It’s like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home,” Sen. Liz Figueroa, a Democrat from Fremont, California, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“We are asking them to rethink the whole product,” she said.

Oh jeez, thanks. Google is set to come out with a new product that provides, at no cost, email with 1 GB of storage (500 times more storage than Hotmail and 200 times more storage than Yahoo). And this California Senator thinks it

So what if I’m a week late posting this? Here’s Homestarrunner.com’s April Fools Joke.

A month ago, I took a little weekend trip to North and South Carolina. One of the reasons I went was to eat Carolina BBQ. While in Charleston, South Carolina (if you have never been to Charleston, you need to because it is absolutely gorgeous) I ate at a chain restaurant called Sticky Fingers. Sticky Fingers was good, but it was wasn’t great. Luckily, my waitress told me about her favorite BBQ joint–Sweatman’s.

After lunch at Sticky Fingers, I drove to Sweatman’s in near Holly Hill, South Carolina. This review properly describes the Sweatman’s experience. The pulled pork is fabulous and the hash was great. Even though I had only eaten a few hours before, I ate until I was absolutely stuffed.

Next time you are in South Carolina, stop at Sweatman’s. Carolina BBQ doesn’t get any better than Sweatman’s.