Heath Ledger is dead, apparently of a drug overdose:

Heath Ledger, an Oscar nominated actor for the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain, has died in his apartment, police officials said today.

Police said a housekeeper found Ledger’s body lying on his bed in an apartment at 421 Broome St. in SoHo at 3:35 p.m. surrounded by pills.

According to police, Ledger had scheduled a massage for that time, and the housekeeper had gone to wake him up for his appointment.

Ledger was 28 years old.

Hillary met privately with John Edwards after the debate, according to CNNPolitics.com [e.a.].

Hmm. I was particularly struck by this exchange at the debate last night, when Edwards went out of his way to pile on to Obama just after Hillary had accused Obama of voting “present” too many times in the Illinois State Senate:

EDWARDS: …I mentioned this about Senator Clinton earlier, to be fair, about Social Security. I do think it’s important whether you are willing to take hard positions.

I mean, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who are sitting in front of me right know they have to go to the floor of the House every day and vote on hard issues. And they have to vote up or down or not show up to vote — one of those three choices. What I didn’t hear was an explanation for why over 100 times you voted present instead of yes or no when you had a choice to vote up or down.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: I’ll be happy to answer it. Because in Illinois — in Illinois, oftentimes you vote present in order to indicate that you had problems with a bill that otherwise you might be willing to vote for. And oftentimes you would have a strategy that would help move the thing forward.

Keep in mind, John, I voted for 4,000 bills. And if you want to know whether or not I worked on tough stuff, I passed the first racial…

EDWARDS: I don’t question whether you worked on tough stuff.

OBAMA: No, no, no. Hold on a second.

EDWARDS: I don’t question whether you worked on tough stuff.

OBAMA: No, no. But you…

EDWARDS: The question is, why would you over 100 times vote present? I mean, every one of us — every one — you’ve criticized Hillary. You’ve criticized me for our votes.

OBAMA: Right.

EDWARDS: We’ve cast hundreds and hundreds of votes. What you’re criticizing her for, by the way, you’ve done to us, which is you pick this vote and that vote out of the hundreds that we’ve cast.
(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: No.

EDWARDS: And what — all I’m saying is, what’s fair is fair. You have every right to defend any vote. You do.

OBAMA: Right.

EDWARDS: And I respect your right to do that on any — on any substantive issue. It does not make sense to me — and what if I had just not shown up…

OBAMA: John — John, Illinois…

EDWARDS: Wait, wait, wait. Wait, let me finish.

OBAMA: Hold on a second.

EDWARDS: What if I had just not shown up to vote on things that really mattered to this country? It would have been safe for me politically. It would have been the careful and cautious thing to do, but I have a responsibility to take a position…

OBAMA: John, you…

EDWARDS: … even when it has political consequences for me.

(APPLAUSE) consequences. This — most of these were technical problems with a piece of legislation that ended up getting modified.

But let’s talk about taking on tough votes. I mean, I am somebody who led on reforming a death penalty system that was broken in Illinois, that nobody thought was good politics, but was the right thing to do.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: I opposed legislation that now is being used against me politically to make sure that juveniles were not put in the criminal justice system as adults, even though it was not the smart thing to do politically. It was not smart for me to oppose the war at the start of this war, but I did so because it was the right thing to do.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: So I understand that Illinois has a different system than Congress, and that it is fine to try to use that politically. But don’t question, John, the fact that on issue after issue that is important to the American people, I haven’t simply followed, I have led.

Shrewd move from Counselor Edwards, who, I believe, just raised his had for the vice presidency. Now, that’s a Democratic ticket to contend with. (Unless something unforeseen should crop up.)

John Bolton accuses her of having ceded to Hezbollah under the pressure of its fauxtography campaign.

[T]he main reason for America’s retreat from its initial position was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who “changed her mind fundamentally” after an Israeli aerial assault killed 28 civilians in Kana on July 30. “Rice exerted enormous
pressure on me to reach an agreement already,” he said. “Until Kana, the U.S. wasn’t interested in another typical Middle Eastern cease-fire. We thought we would exploit the fighting to fundamentally change the situation, especially in Lebanon and Syria. But under the influence of her shock over Kana, the secretary of state changed her mind and only wanted an immediate end to the fire. That was the policy Rice dictated.”

She wanted to get the pictures off the TV screens, regardless of the cost. What an incompetent dolt.

 I decried the lack of attention to fauxtography here.

I suppose we’re going to have to have a lot more experience with this new weapon in asymmetrical warfare before we get secretaries of state who stick to their guns rather than cave in to demented neanderthals like Nasrallah.

Carlos Edde, head of the National Bloc party which is part of the March 14 Forces in Lebanon, has criticized Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah for announcing that his organization was holding body parts of Israeli soldiers.

Edde said: “I never imagined that a Lebanese political leader… would shout before hundreds of children and before television cameras that he has body parts and is proud of it. The worst thing is his joy in trading in these body parts.”

Secretary Rice’s legacy:

“Your army left behind the remains of soldiers in our villages and fields,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, addressing the Israeli people during a speech to tens of thousands of Shiites taking part in commemorations marking Ashura.

“They [Israeli army] were so weak on the field that they left behind remains not of one, two or three but a large number of your soldiers,” Nasrallah added.

“One body is almost complete,” Nasrallah said. “What did the [Israeli] army say to the family of these soldiers and what remains did they give them?”

The Hizbullah leader’s comments sparked outrage in Israel, which prides itself on doing everything to recover the remains of its soldiers from fields of battle and has in the past freed prisoners in exchange for remains of soldiers and civilians.

And now some Israelis are calling for his assassination. I’m sure that Secretary Rice—who finds it so inconvenient to hold Israel’s enemies accountable for their destructive behavior—will find some way to condemn the “cycle of violence.”

Idiots in the blogosphere continue to cast doubt on the gravity of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz between American warships and Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats.

The latest installment comes from the HuffPo, in which the New York Times is accused of doing a “Judy Miller” on the incident—namely, publishing hysterical propaganda:

 Two days after the blogosphere had largely unravelled the military’s original story and the Navy itself was starting to backtrack, the paper-of-record felt compelled to trumpet the threat on its front page with a piece titled: Iran Encounter Grimly Echoes ‘02 War Game. (Link.) And then yesterday, more than a week-and-a-half later, The Times not only returned to the subject with more saber-rattling, but with a visual display of impressive disproportion.

In an op-ed piece in the Week In Review by one David B. Crist — ID’d as a Marine Corps reservist who served in Iraq in 2003 — the headline touts: Iran’s Small Boats Are a Big Problem. (Link.)

I have yet to see evidence from any of those crying “Gulf of Tonkin” that Iran’s speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz do not present a problem for the United States Navy.

Instead, every attack on this story (and on the Pentagon) carries the insinuation that our military is just too uptight.