It will be impossible to fill Bhutto's shoes. Her adoring supporters saw her as a combination of saint, martyr and redeemer.

Reading the Pakistani authorities reaction to the planned protest,

He told the Associated Press there was a "strong threat" of another suicide bomb attack against Ms Bhutto, who survived an assassination attempt in Karachi on 18 October that killed more than 140 people.

almost makes you wonder where the threat is coming from.

It also got me thinking. The situation in Pakistan is clearly tense, passions are on the rise, and a quite popular figure is about to take to the streets with, if the crowds greeting her return are any indication, possibly hundreds of thousands of supporters. Any crackdown is likely to be quite nasty and bloody.

Musharraf is desperate, and its very hard to predict what a desperate man will do. But as ugly as a heavy-handed crackdown would be, what if the "strong threat" is real? And what if it succeeds?

With all the pent-up rage and frustration there right now, what happens if Bhutto becomes a martyr?

The assassination of Bhutto (a critical social systempunkt that rose in importance due to the evaporation of the Pakistani government's legitimacy) has plunge the country into chaos. Ethnic tensions are on the rise and critical infrastructure has been been sabotaged. The train system has been particularly hard hit -- trains burned, track destroyed, bridges burned -- such that major sections of it will be closed for a month (once repairs begin). 200 bank branches were looted and factories were torched. There are widespread shortages of gasoline, water, and food mostly due to a nationwide shutdown (a combo of strikes, fear, and a three days of mourning). Road transportation is very dangerous due to local rioters (mostly in Karachi). Paramilitary Sindh Rangers have been given "shoot to kill" orders against protesters in Karachi.

Turkish warplanes hit eight suspected Kurdish rebel hideouts in northern Iraq on Wednesday, the third cross-border air assault in 10 days, Turkey's military said.

Russia's delivery of nuclear fuel to the Bushehr power station makes it unnecessary for Iran to pursue its enrichment program, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

Lavrov, interviewed by the Moscow daily Vremya Novostei, also said any suggestion of "regime change" in Tehran had to be ruled out in discussions on verifying Iran's nuclear program.

"We believe that Iran has no economic need to proceed with its program of uranium enrichment," Lavrov told the daily.

"We are trying to persuade the Iranians that freezing the program is to their advantage as it would immediately lead to talks with all countries of the "six," including the United States."

Such talks, he said, would aim to end any suspicion that Iran had any secret aim to produce nuclear weapons. "Iran's agreement to this proposal is in everyone's interest."

Iran was aware, he said, that should there be any deviation from agreements to build Bushehr under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "we will freeze our cooperation."

Canada's defence minister has accused Iran of providing weapons to the Taliban and fuelling the conflict in Afghanistan, where thousands of Canadian troops are involved in military operations.

Atheist Santa
Who's that coming down the chimney? Nobody -- that's ridiculous. Atheist Santa shows up in a gray Toyota Corolla and knocks on your door. Once you let him in and he has cookies and milk -- come on, even atheists love cookies and milk -- he will explain to your child that Santa may love all the children of the world, but he has never submitted his claims of flying reindeer and magical present delivery to James Randi, who would gladly pay a million dollars if presented with irrefutable proof of his wild claims. However, as a gesture of goodwill, Atheist Santa will leave your child with a set of wooden periodic-table blocks and a scale model of archaeopteryx.

Congress first adopted a Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency standard in 1975 with the goal of raising the average fuel economy of the nation's cars to 27.5 mpg by 1985. Automakers scuttled efforts to increase the standard for more than 20 years. But the momentum against them reached critical mass this year amid mounting concerns in recent years over global warming, rising fuel prices and oil dependence. So the industry joined environmentalists and lawmakers to broker a compromise.

The Energy Bill raises the average fuel efficiency of automakers' fleets from 26.4 mpg to 35 mpg by 2020 and mandates a six-fold increase in biofuel use to 36 billion gallons within 15 years. The changes are expected to save 1.1 million barrels of oil per day.

A Honda Accord EX, for example, starts down here at $23,060 in American dollars. The same car in Toronto costs $27,490 Canadian.

Honda's Odyssey EX minivan costs $28,960 US here, as opposed to $36,990 in Canada. At this writing, the currencies are virtually at par.

At the more exotic end of the new car scale, the differences are staggering. GM's Corvette coupe, for example, starts down here at $46,225 US In Canada, it's $70,920.

A Cadillac sedan in the States starts at $50,350 US In Canada, $67,220 Canadian.

. . .

The fact is, though, business loves being regulated, at least when it's in their interest. So when the Canadian government promulgated a new regulation in September, stipulating a standard for anti-theft immobilizers in new cars sold in Canada, the car manufacturers, anxious to keep the two markets separate, stampeded to comply.

But it's the same device!

In short order, companies like Honda and GM stated that none of their new, 2008 American models complied with Canadian standards and therefore, regrettably, had to be declared inadmissible to Canada.

In fact, in Honda's case at least, the immobilizers buried in the guts of its American-sold vehicles are identical to the immobilizers in the cars it sells in Canada. Precisely the same, right down to the last wire.

But Canadian government was asking the manufacturers to make the casing housing the immobilizer a little more resistant to cracking. That provided the excuse to declare it inadmissible.

As a result, Transport Canada banned import of the much cheaper American cars. The ones that cost thousands less. What's more, it did it, the department says, for Canadians' own good.

In other news, the Bush administration is proposing having all barns in the United States inspected for horses. If the barns, once containing horses, are empty, then all barn doors are to be shut to prevent any further loss of horses.

McCain has somehow become the second choice of both Rudy and Huckabee supporters. He appears to be everyone's candidate of last resort.

The December 17th issue of Time had some interesting statistics on voters. When asked the “most important quality” for a candidate, Democrats picked “good judgment” 33% of the time, and Republicans picked it 21%. The other choices were caring about people, leadership, character, and experience.

Does it bother you that good judgment wasn’t the top choice for three-quarters of all voters?

Obviously experience doesn’t help if you have bad judgment. But a person with good judgment would consult with people who have experience. Clearly, judgment is more important than experience.

. . .

Clearly, good judgment should be the most important quality in a president. But how often do you hear someone say that a candidate “has good judgment”?[emp. mine]

He also said he appreciated Obama's stand against the war when other candidates supported it.

"I think this is a human being who knew in advance how unnecessary and foolish this war was," Burns said, adding that Obama knows how to distinguish between "fraudulent wars," and "those that really need to be fought."

As a state senator, Obama spoke out against the invasion of Iraq, while Clinton voted for the use of force resolution.

"His record is utterly clear and unassailable on this point," said Burns.

Let’s be clear about the continual smears from the Clinton surrogates: “Hey, this guy is a Muslim, black, drug-dealing, madrassah-going, unelectable, scary brown Hussein — but we didn’t mean it the way you took it.”

The Clinton campaign, like any county sheriff from the Deep South in the Jim Crow era, is making this campaign about one thing: “N***er, N***er, N***er.” It’s repulsive and inexcusable. 1 To put this in context, Atrios uses a phrase “scary brown people,” when he justifiably points out some Republican appealing to racism and xenophobia. Appeals to fear conflate all of these: Muslims, black people, madrassah-attenders, brown people, various Husseins, inner city drug dealers, etc. The Clintonistas are doing the same thing right now. Every day this month.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term, “National Socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

A Who's Who of America's top scientists are launching a quixotic last-minute effort this week to force presidential candidates to detail the role science would play in their administrations -- a question they say is key to the future of the country, if not the world.

"Right now we have a confluence of issues facing candidates: embryonic stem cell research, global warming, science and technology education, biotechnology and energy policy -- it's just becoming an avalanche," says Lawrence Krauss, a physics professor at Case Western University, and author of the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek. "I think at some level, you have to get some insight into what the candidates know, or what they're willing to learn."

Behind the call is a growing fear that the United States is falling behind in science and technology education, and that a leader who is scientifically illiterate won't be able to keep the United States ahead in the global economy.

"We're talking about the health of millions of youth across the United States," said Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association. "We know abstinence education offers the best for them. Now is the time to put more emphasis on that message, not less."

Congress is considering boosting the $176 million in annual funding for abstinence programs by $28 million.