The Nutshell restaurant, that is.

I’m about to head up to Vancouver shortly for a brief visit, and thinking of the Pacific Northwest reminded me that I want to plug one of the coolest and most unique restaurants I’ve been lucky enough to eat in, visited a few months ago on a swing through Portland.

Check out the lunch and dinner menus, seriously.  Tunisian brik, Nigerian akras… I had no idea what any of it was, really, but it was marvelous.

If you live in Portland, visit Portland, or can spell Portland, eat Nutshell.  That is all.

Woke up this morning to find myself (in round-shouldered cartoon form, anyway) suddenly on the front page of Salon.com, thanks to the mad genius of Scott Bateman:

If you like the cartoon, I hope you’ll enjoy the book.

(Say, my griping about ad-driven media has just been revealed as mid-range hypocrisy.  Still, it won’t be full-on until you see this site running ads from, I dunno, TexacoBurgerKing or whatever, and then running pieces about how the new PetroGriller With Cheese is both yummy and non-toxic.  Then the hypocrisy will be complete.)

Why, immediately destroy the connection by leaking its existence it to Fox News, of course.

Just hours after “two senior officials” in the White House received the info, somebody chose the forgettable 24-hour partisan advantage of saying, whee, lookee what we got! over the obvious national security interest in keeping this backchannel surveillance of Al-Qaeda, which required years to set up, secret and functioning. There are children with better long-term judgment.

My appall-o-gland was exhausted long ago, but this made it twitch like it was 1999 again.  Oh, to be young again and not living under the thrall of these idiots.

Once again, as if it bears repeating for the 237th time: to this bunch, their own political advancement trumps national security, your safety, or any other concern.

If you’ve read Prisoner of Trebekistan, you may remember my final nemesis, Michael Daunt, winner of the Jeopardy! 1997 International Tournament of Champions, at one time arguably the best player in the world.

Michael was the last (of several) players to beat me over the years, but he’s a great, funny, brilliant guy, and we’ve stayed in fairly frequent touch ever since. Turns out he and some friends are just in the formative stages of launching a new online magazine called Quiblit, itself host to a series of ten other blogs (roll over "Hosted Blogs" for a list), none of which are nearly so hard to spell.

Worth a look. In a quick glance, "Man Bites Blog" looks particularly promising.

One warning: when Quiblit’s writers all refer to Thanksgiving as something that just happened, they’re not time-warped, they’re Canadian. The only time-warping involved entails living in a country where wars aren’t rushed into, health care and education are truly considered public issues of real import, and the environment is more than just a place to get and put junk.

I’m hoping that’s ten years in America’s future. Not part of some distant imaginary 1970s past.

First, if you haven’t read the full text of Barack Obama’s October 2, 2002 speech in opposition to the Iraq war — given nearly six months before the invasion began, while most of the country’s leaders in both parties were still in full smoke-’em-out mode — go take three minutes and read it.  Seriously.  Go.  You’ll see it wasn’t based on a knee-jerk opposition to war on principle, but because of the specific facts of the situation, plainly visible in advance.

You may be blown away by how clearly, accurately, and wisely an American politician can actually speak, at least when he’s not yet particularly well-known.  (Lately, not quite so much.  Obama not even showing up to vote against the Kyl-Lieberman Iran amendment was disappointing.)

In retrospect, Obama (in 2002, at least) displayed both foresight and political courage.  How do you discredit that?

Simple — by bizarrely equating factual correctness with weakness, as Fred Barnes did on Fox News over the weekend.  (Hat tip Media Matters, Atrios, and TPM.)

If knowing the facts = weakness, then the contrapositive case — not being weak = not knowing the facts — is the logical equivalent.  Compare and contrast:

Of course, this may have just been a slip of the tongue.  I mean, the ruling party in 1984 constantly preached against sex, saw perpetual war as an inherently stabilizing force, engaged in torture in a series of secret prisons, and were completely obsessed with domestic surveillance.  Um.  Hmm.

Maybe I should get this out of the way while I can:  Do it to Julia!  Do it to Julia!

OK, there.  We’re cool.