Interesting stuff about Basra, via Mudville Gazette via Instapundit.

After the Iraqi Army set up checkpoints and the militia disappeared from the streets, I decided to start selling alcohol,” Luay Hanna, a 46-year-old liquor store owner, said. His shop was burnt down by fundamentalist militiamen three years ago, and many of his colleagues were butchered.
“Many of the alcohol sellers reopened their shops. We always sell near the Iraqi army checkpoints to be safe - not like before when the militia killed and kidnapped people right in front of the police’s eyes.”
Qaldoon Nuri, who runs a CD shop, was forced to stop selling pop songs for fear of the zealous gunmen four years ago. One of his friends was murdered for refusing to heed the ban. He was forced to sell religious songs, many of them praising al-Sadr, as well as lectures on tenets of the Shiite faith.
“The militia forced us to follow a fanatic Islamic code. They forced us to put up pictures of the imams,” he said. “Now after the militias have been defeated by government forces, we started to put some songs on CD and are looking for what’s new in the arts - what people actually like.”
One of his neighbors, Saleh Muhammad, has been badgered in his phone shop by customers demanding new pop ringtones and pictures of female singers to download. “I think it’s freedom from the fear,” he said.

In an email to The Independent on Sunday, the commentator wrote:

“Don’t know what came over me: the dear boy did suddenly seem extremely sapphic, yet I think my intuitions must have been scrambled all the same, since what I was actually thinking was: ‘Andrew really wants to have Barack Obama’s fucking child’. Clearly some confusion of categories on my part.”

That’s right…”lesbian furore” - fuck-ing-hell. The whole debate linked to here already.

Those of you have who have read Terry Jones’ insightful columns at The Guardian may have wondered where he obtains his up-to-the minute information and informed opinions from. Thanks to the BBC iPM programme, we now know. The intertubes. My favourite part of this interview is where he states he has rather given up listening to mainstream media, like the BBC, because it is so biased in its vocabulary. His example is the way it talks about insurgents in Iraq: “Now if this was the second world war you wouldn’t be talking about the insurgents, you’d be talking about the resistance fighters, but it’s insurgents now and that’s become the way you talk about the people who are objecting and fighting against the occupying forces, which is what the Americans and British are.”

Nice.

Listen to Terry Jones impart his wisdom.