Dead Parrot Ryan has an apt analogy. And, you know, Joe Lieberman’s accent does sound vaguely Canadian...

Over at the Commercial Appeal, we learn that the Rendezvous has added vegetarian selections to its menu:

“Change is hard,” said owner John Vergos. “But we wanted to reach some of those groups who might not consider coming here because one or more of them didn’t eat meat.”

Well, sort of. Apparently vegetarians have two choices: red beans and rice, or a Greek salad.

It’ll take a better selection than that to get me to go to the Rendezvous. But I guess it’s a start.

I’ve been deliberately avoiding posting anything about Iraq. I didn’t support the war, and in retrospect I still wouldn’t have, but I don’t really have anything terribly insightful to say, and frankly I find the topic rather tiresome. But one of the cover stories from today’s Wall Street Journal deserves more attention than it’s getting in the blogosphere. The headline:

How a 24-Year-Old Got a Job Rebuilding Iraq’s Stock Market

Choice quotes:

At Yale University, Jay Hallen majored in political science, rarely watched financial news, and didn’t follow the stock market. All of which made the 24-year-old an unlikely pick for the difficult task of rebuilding Iraq’s shuttered stock exchange. But Mr. Hallen was given the job immediately after arriving in Baghdad in September.

In early November, Mr. Hallen traveled to Baghdad’s Hamra Hotel for a lunch meeting with Luay Nafa Elias, who runs an investment company here. Mr. Elias says he was expecting to meet a middle-age man and therefore was astonished to see the baby-face Mr. Hallen sit down at the table and order a plate of Kabobs. “I had thought the Americans would send someone who was at least 50 years old, someone with gray hair,” says Mr. Elias.

As the lunch continued, Mr. Elias found himself impressed by Mr. Hallen’s confident tone and his repeated promises to quickly open a stock market that is the envy of the Arab world.

Mr. Elias’s faith in Mr. Hallen, however, began to evaporate when the market’s opening was delayed without explanation, first to the middle of this month, and then into February. “Maybe someone older and more experienced could have gotten this done on time,” Mr. Elias says.

That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority's ability to turn Iraq into a stable democracy.

The long-awaited Hutton Report emerged today in Britain, and it looks to be far more embarrassing for the BBC than it is for Tony Blair’s government. On a similar note, David Kay’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee today painted a picture of widespread intelligence failures, rather than a deliberate effort by the Bush administration to distort intelligence on Iraq.

Later today—after I get some work done on a consulting project I’m doing—I’ll have further thoughts on the nature of intelligence gathering and how it relates to, of all people, Howard Dean (among others).