Quick Hits

Just to unclog my news item inventory:

• The same key opens 118,000 FEMA trailers in use in the Gulf Coast. What's the real tragedy here, that the same key opens all those doors, or that a year after Hurricane Katrina, 118,000 families are still living in FEMA trailers?

• Gunter Grass, author of "The Tin Drum" and other works, served in the elite Waffen SS in Hitler's Germany as a teenager and waited 60 years to disclose it. He said he came out about it now because "it weighed on me." 60 years later? That's a heavy weight.

• Ahmadinejad has an Ahmadine-blog. This after his "60 Minutes" appearance. What a publicity whore. His site didn't really work on my browser. Still, if you read the account at the BBC, it's got to be one of the oddest public displays by an international figure since Kim Jong Il's round of golf.

• Democrats continue to fight hard on national security, and they're being rewarded by a media that sees any aggression as evidence of strength and resolve. Not the best way to judge public policy, but you go to war using the media you have, not the media you'd want, so at least the Democrats are learning the rules of the game. And this is not a bad ad at all.

• More after-the-fact corrections from the Bush Administration. After out-and-out accusing Iran of meddling in Iraq, a top general came out today and said there's no evidence of that. But when has evidence ever stopped these guys?

• And ANOTHER after-the-fact refutation. This Republican-created hysteria over MySpace and "online sexual predators" is contradicted by the fact that online sexual solicitations have decreased measurably over the past five years.

• Old news, but the Republicans still want to dismantle Social Security, and this should absolutely be an election issue. The Democrats are on the right side on this one and they are a united front.

• Mark Schmitt wrote a great piece last week on the media's unrelenting fear of hippies and their need to turn every progressive victory into 1972 redux. My favorite part:

Earlier in the piece, Weisberg makes clear that the Cold Warrior "repudiated" in 1972 was Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. I’m going to make it my special mission to knock this one down as often as I have to: Scoop Jackson wasn’t "repudiated" or robbed of something legitimately his. He just, like dozens of Senatorial would-be-presidents before and since simply Didn’t Get Any Votes. He’s not a martyr, just a guy who No One Voted For. A lot like Joe Lieberman in fact, although Saint Scoop’s performance in 1972 fell short even of Joe’s famous "three-way tie for third place." -- more conventionally known as "fifth place."

Fantastic stuff.