Over the weekend

Blogging will be sporadic for the near future as I don't have regular access to a computer.

* Following news that the White House was recently warned that the insurgency in Iraq poses a major threat to the elections scheduled for late January, two massive car bombs went off in Karbala and Najaf yesterday, while three election workers were executed in broad daylight in Baghdad.

* Michael Isikoff of Newsweek has discovered a late September 2001 memo from Justice Department lawyer John Yoo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' office that "seems to lay a legal groundwork for the president to invade Iraq -- without approval of Congress -- long before the White House had publicly expressed any intent to do so."

* Assessing the prospects for a revived challenge to the Bushist project in Iraq and beyond, Michael Albert argues that the "left should develop and pursue a radical organizational, moral, and intellectual alternative, not parrot liberal positions."

* "In the Vietnam War," Jules Witcover observes in the Baltimore Sun, "it took Americans at home years before the return of body bags reached a breaking point against a wrong war, with protest spilling noisily and sometimes violently into the streets. One wonders how much longer, and how many more body bags, it will take this time around."

* A sign of the apocalypse?: "The White House is pressing Pentagon officials to cut tens of billions of dollars from their proposed budgets over the next several years, signaling that the Bush administration's massive defense buildup in the years following the Sept. 11 attacks is coming to an end," reports the LA Times.

* Those seeking a resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict should look back to the period prior to 1948 for inspiration, asserts George Bisharat in the SF Chronicle.

* In The Nation, Tony Judt examines the revived concerns about anti-Semitism in Europe, America, and the Middle East.

* Via War In Context comes a Spiked review of the new book by French sociologist Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, which charts changes in Islamic culture in accord with rapid modernization and globalization. See also this CFR discussion with Roy moderated by Fouad Ajami.

* Geov Parrish has the over/under on the media stories of 2004.

* Liza Featherstone explores how Wal-Mart feeds on and off the poor in The Nation.