So is Sherlock Holmes 2: Game of Shadows a slovenly, slapped-together mess of a big-budget Hollywood sequel, like you might’ve heard? Oh, yeah! You bet it is! One of the slovenliest! Now ask me if I care!

Hitchens’ video is totally fake — there’s even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist’s office, and his “interrogators” treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only 11 seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face.

The first hiccup of his usurpation was the second bottle. It slithered past the incisors, a Mamba of zooanthropic vengeance, exuding a peaty pathos, a 12-year-old blurt of inhumation, to crash against the pharynx which had held, Cincinattus-esque, against so many lucre-hefted Caledonian tides, but which on this first day of a coming future teetered and fell, a single twin tower, a meat WTC, revealing in its nude Lucretism the weakness of the West.

But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole.

There are a lot of reasons why Russians–young Russians, young Muscovites in particular–poured out into the streets last Saturday to protest rampant election fraud in the Duma vote. For the past couple of decades, young Muscovites couldn’t be bothered with…

LASD insiders say that, for years, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka—not Lee Baca—has ruled the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department though a system built of favoritism, pay-to-play campaign donations, and loyalty rewarded over competence—and the jails scandal is one of the results…

Late last week, as I was reading a story by the Family Guy writer who had been brutally arrested and mistreated at the Occupy LA crackdown, I suddenly realized, “Holy shit, I remember that guy!” I didn’t catch his name…