Polls are annoying...

As are, apparently, most who respond to them. Check out Bush's "support numbers" now:

President Bush has maintained strong support among Republican voters even as bad news from Iraq has drowned out good economic news and driven down the president's overall standing in recent polls....The Gallup Poll reported last week that 89 percent of Republicans give Mr. Bush high job-performance marks — four points higher than President Reagan had five months before his re-election in 1984.

Why? Seriously, what reason is there for this beyond bleating out "war on terror!" or the typical partisan boilerplate?

Times like this I wish I could pull aside these ultra-loyal types and grill 'em until they either explain what they still see in Bush or their heads explode. I'm really not seeing it.

Superstition sucks...

Apparently the despiration for predictability in the stock market is still so large that tripe like this is considered even remotely relevant:

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Stock market investors should be pulling for the Detroit Pistons in the National Basketball Association finals due to the Shaq curse, according to a published report Thursday. The New York Daily News pointed out that the Dow Jones industrial average posted its only three losses in the past 15 years in the years that the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship, 2000, 2001 and 2002. Meanwhile the Dow had its best year during that period -- a 33.5 percent gain -- in 1995, when the Orlando Magic, led by current Lakers star center Shaquille O'Neal, lost the finals to the Houston Rockets.

Maybe it can serve as a humorous point or something. Oh well...

Well...Iraq has a president now. What this is to mean, I dunno. Sounds like he's got a bit of a historical link, but I have no idea what impact he'll have, or even the extent they'll get back their sovereignty.

Speaking of which: Let's have a show of hands here, how many of you saw this cartoon in your newspaper and cringed? I did, but because the first two panels were funny enough to run alone, not out of rejection of the point behind the 3rd. Theoretically we're really holding a wait-and-see approach -- if they stabilize just fine then more sovereignty, if they don't then less. I personally don't agree with the rationale behind it (we can't force the issue, only kill the ones who attempt it on the other side), yet I'm ambivalent about the idea itself. After all we've been through and all we've put them through, I really don't care what is done as long as the result is decent, by now we should all be sick of making predictions.

I'm gonna make a shift here. From this point on, less foreign policy/Iraq posts unless something REALLY screwy happens. We need to fix our own home...

Took a long Memorial Day weekend, ate a ton of meat -- probably literally.

More in a bit.