Turns out, soccer players do better when playing for a monetary reward instead of playing to avoid being tortured:

Iraq delivered an inspirational victory Sunday by winning the Asian Cup with a 1-0 victory over Saudi Arabia, a beacon of hope for a nation divided by war.

It was an extraordinary triumph for a team drawn together from all parts of the Gulf and with its players straddling bitter and violent ethnic divides.

Iraq scored on a 71st-minute header by Younis Mahmoud and dominated the final against heavily favored Saudi Arabia, a three-time Asian Cup champion. This was Iraq’s first Asian Cup title. …

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office announced that each player on the Iraqi team would receive $10,000.

The win is being greeted with celebratory gunfire.

Thanks to everyone who has donated money to help us ship packages to our troops serving in the Middle East! Any money we get through the end of this month is going into our “send the troops cool stuff” budget. If you’re interested in sending stuff to the troops yourself, check out the Books For Soldiers website.

Our latest care package is heading to a soldier stationed north of Baghdad. Aside from yummy snacks, he’s also getting a couple of magazines, season four DVDs of CSI, a couple of battery powered hand-held fans (w/ batteries of course) because it’s in the 110s over there during the day, and toys like a nerf football and an inflatable beach ball.

There are lots of good military blogs out there that reflect the sacrifices that our armed forces make when they are called to duty. One of my favorites is Chaplain Kline’s blog. He has some amazing pictures.

Anyway, here’s the PayPal link again:

Becky’s latest hobby — which I think is really cool — is sending letters, care packages and various requested items to American soldiers stationed overseas through BooksForSoldiers.com. We can’t afford to break the bank on this effort, but a lot of the stuff they want is surprisingly cheap (in some cases, they just want letters, even from strangers, which kinda breaks your heart), and it makes you feel good to actually “support the troops” in some tangible, even if very small, way.

It’s sometimes amusing, and sometimes heart-rending, to read the lists of things that soldiers are requesting. (You have to be an “Official BFS Volunteer” to view the troop requests; it’s free to join, but to become an official volunteer, you have to get the application notarized.)

For example, it’s kinda funny that some of these guys, after spending their “on duty” time fighting real-life insurgents with real-life weapons, want to spend their “off duty” time playing violent video games and shooting each other with squirt guns. Then again, it serves as a reminder that these are young people, mostly young men — barely older than boys, really — who have volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way, away from their families, in defense of the freedoms that so many of us take for granted (a noble decision whatever one thinks of their current mission). That fact hits home repeatedly when you read one request after another for video games, DVDs, and glossy magazines like Maxim.

On the tear-jerking front, your heart hurts when you read soldiers’ requests for gifts to send home to their children for birthdays they’re missing, or the request from an expectant father who wanted baby books so he could audio-record himself reading them aloud, then send the tapes to his wife so that she can play the recordings to her belly, allowing their unborn child to hear its daddy’s voice.

Anyway, I’d encourage anyone with a bit of free time to get involved with this. It gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to think you might be brightening somebody’s day “over there.” And if you don’t have the time or energy to send stuff yourself, but you still want to help in some way, make a donation via my PayPal link — I’ll put all PayPal contributions received for the remainder of this month into Becky’s send-stuff-to-the-soldiers fund. Here’s the link (it’s also in the left sidebar):

If we get some contributions, one of us will post updates so you’ll know what cool items your money bought for our troops.

P.S. Becky says I should point out that the requested items aren’t all just for the soldiers themselves. For instance, there are occasional requests for toys for Iraqi orphans, soccer balls for Iraqi Army trainees, etc.

From the good senator’s interview with Hugh Hewitt:

HH: Would you accept a place on a Giuliani, a Romney or a Thompson ticket if offered to you?

JL: No, I think I got that bug out of my system. But…the national bug, I mean. It’s nice of you to ask, and I don’t think any one of them in their right mind would ask me, but my wife will appreciate that you asked.

HH: Is that an unequivocal no, Senator?

JL: Yeah, that’s unequivocal. Actually, my wife probably would not appreciate that.

Of course, Hewitt only asked about “a Giuliani, a Romney or a Thompson ticket” — in other words, a Republican ticket. He didn’t ask about an independent McCain-Lieberman ticket, which would be the most obvious possibility, IMHO. (Though, as I mentioned previously, such a ticket presumably couldn’t win in the current political climate vis a vis Iraq, and would just serve to throw the election to the Democrats.)

P.S. Speaking of Lieberman… Sean Paul Kelley at The Agnoist thinks Lieberman’s “Sense of the Senate” resolution (PDF here) wagging the Senate’s collective finger at Iran — approved by a vote of 97-0 — opens the door for an Authorization of the Use of Military Force down the road. The amendment, as characterized by Kelley, basically says (not in so many words), “It is the sense of the senate that Iran is participating in acts of war against the United States.” Which seems to lend itself rather nicely to a rather powerful pro-war argument down the road: “How could you not support military action against a country committing acts of war against the United States?” (Hat tip: My Left Nutmeg.)

Personally, I doubt this vote will have any real effect on later debates. If going “on record” in such a way had the kind of rhetorical power envisioned by Kelley, nobody would be able to gripe about “Bush’s” rejection of the Kyoto Accords (which were rejected in principle on a 95-0 “Sense of the Senate” vote in 1997), nor about “Bush’s” decision to pursue regime change in Iraq (a policy explicitly endorsed in 1998 by a vote of 360-38 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate). Yet nobody seems to feel shamed by those votes, so I doubt they’ll feel shamed by this one. If war in Iran comes up for a vote, Democratic senators aren’t going to feel obligated to authorize it just because they voted for this unanimously approved legislative nullity.

Still, it’s an interesting development nonetheless. The storm clouds continue to gather, I fear.

The New York Times reports:

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations. … “Sept. 15 now looks like an end point for the debate, not a starting point,” the official said. “Lots of people are concluding that the president has got to get out ahead of this train.” …

[However,] [t]he calendar may be working in Mr. Bush’s favor. If he can get through the next three weeks without more defections, Congress will recess until September, returning just as the report from Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker arrives in Washington.

Also, the Republican defectors have not agreed on what different strategy they would prescribe, giving the president some negotiating room. But Senator Lugar said yesterday on CNN that he would support a significant withdrawal that left “residual forces” in Iraq to ensure that “the whole area does not blow up.”

That approach would mean abandoning the current mission of using those forces to patrol Baghdad and try to reimpose order, which was Mr. Bush’s stated goal in January.

On a tangentially related note, antiwar demagogue Cindy Sheehan — whose retreat into private life lasted barely a month before she came “out of retirement” to “gather a people’s movement for humanity” in protest of “yet another Bush flagrant abuse of power” (the Libby commutation) — is now threatening to challenge Nancy Pelosi for her congressional seat “if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush.” Sheehan would run as an independent. She told the AP: “Democrats and Americans feel betrayed by the Democratic leadership. We hired them to bring an end to the war. I’m not too far from San Francisco, so [moving to Pelosi’s district] wouldn’t be too big of a move for me. I would give her a run for her money.”

(Regular readers will recall that Cindy Sheehan bothers me.)

P.S. Seeing as how Sheehan has apparently joined the “post-partisanship” crowd with her conversion to being an independent: how does Bloomberg-Sheehan ‘08 sound? ;) Or better yet: Lieberman-Sheehan ‘08! Heh!

UPDATE: Here’s a helpful summary of the various Democratic proposals to push for an end to the war.

What’s better than killing a high-ranking terrorist in Iraq? Killing him twice!

Confederate Yankee looks at the AP’s odd double standards when it comes to reporting on violence in Iraq. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Remember when I demonstrated the laziness and gullibility of some journalists by showing that a Procter & Gamble front group, posing as an independent research “foundation,” had repeatedly hoodwinked major news outlets into running bogus stories about a “new” “scientific” “study” showing that redheads are going extinct — and the reporters didn’t catch it, even though the “new” study had been described in virtually identical terms (presumably copied from press releases) by media reports in January 2007, November 2006, March 2006, May 2005, August 2004, March 2004 and November 2003?

Well, it seems the same thing can happen with more significant news stories, like bogus reports of decapitated bodies in Iraq. On three separate occasions now, major media outlets (specifically, the AP, Reuters and the New York Times) have credulously parroted thinly sourced reports of gruesome mass beheadings near Baghdad, only to learn that nothing of the sort occurred. It’s a blatant propaganda effort by extremists hoping to incite more sectarian violence, and the MSM is falling for it — hook, line and sinker. Repeatedly.

Reporting from a war zone is hard, as NBC’s Karl Bostic noted in his blog post about the second of the three “bogus bodies” incidents last year. No question about that. And there’s lots of gruesome violence in Iraq these days, so reports of mass beheadings aren’t inherently unbelievable. But neither of those realities make it excusable to pass off unconfirmed urban legends and/or insurgent propaganda as news, especially when the very same reporters would doubtless cringe at the thought of treating their own government’s official statements with anything other than a healthy dose of skepticism. As well they should — but healthy skepticism (not to be confused with cynicism, of course) should apply to all sources of information, not just the ones associated with the Bush Administration.

Independent confirmation: learn it, live it, love it.

Unrest in Tehran.

Andrew Sullivan on the looming possibility of war with Iran: “I worry about this not because I think we should never wield the threat of military force against Iran. It’s because events seem to be favoring the West in Iran anyway and a Cheney-driven bombing campaign could reverse it.”

P.S. Speaking of which…

On the Drudge Report at last check, just below the masthead:

Heh.

After 4 days of infighting between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has dismissed the Hamas led government and declared a state of emergency. Hamas had declared today that the territories are now under its Islamic rule which led to the declaration.

The European Union has suspended all aid to the territories and Israel has expressed grave concerns over the development.

More details here

Margie Kieper looks at the aftermath of Cyclone Gonu in Oman, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Despite weakening as it approached shore, the storm still did a lot of damage. At least $1 billion in damage, in fact, according to this report. But “Oman is relying on its own resources in cleaning up from the worst natural disaster to hit the country since record-keeping started in 1945. The government has not asked for international help and did not accept the US Navy’s offer of aid.” The death toll is at least 70 — 30 in Oman, 40 in Iran.

Joe Lieberman says that we need to “be prepared” to hit back at Iran for killing our troops in Iraq, “and to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.”

I think such a strike would probably be unwise, all things considered, but it would certainly be justified if such a base does indeed exist — and I definitely think we should “be prepared” to do it, and should actively consider it as an option (even if it’s ultimately rejected). A strike on Iran isn’t exactly a good option, but neither is standing around idly while they attack our troops with impunity. If we can achieve what we want through negotiation, great — but what if we can’t? Advocates of diplomacy need to remember that it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.

At Daily Kos, of course, this story is fodder for a fresh round of Lieberman-bashing. Writes the poster: “If Lieberman really wanted to stop what he believes are Iranian-sponsored attacks on our troops, well, then, he should be demanding that we bring our troops home.” Ah yes, because abject surrender isn’t just one possible option, it’s the only option.

(Note: I’m not saying that “bringing our troops home” can’t be justified on grounds that would prevent it from being an “abject surrender.” I’m saying that if the stated justification is “we’re bringing our troops home to stop Iranian attacks against them,” then that would be abject surrender. To Iran. Which I tend to think is a bad thing. In other words, that’s the worst argument for troop withdrawal I’ve ever heard.)

(Second note: Nor am I presuming that “abject surrender” might not be the right course of action. Maybe it is! But one should be honest if that’s what one is advocating, and one must grapple with the adverse consequences if so. Surrender, like “peace,” is not costless.)

Tropical Cyclone Gonu has weakened to a tropical storm as it heads toward southeastern Iran, but not before killing at least 15 people in Oman.

Margie Kieper has much more.