Over at Teekay’s

I hope people have better things to do tonight than reading blogs (though I must say that I find New Year’s Eve to be a rather contrived holiday — it happens every year, it’s not particularly enjoyable since it reminds one of time’s passage and all the things left unfinished, kind of like birthdays, plus everyone seems to feel obliged to be in a great mood), but just in case I want to wish all of you a wonderful 2006.

All this Christmas stuff is evidently getting to people’s heads.

The Spanish defense minister was on a trip to visit Spanish troops in Bosnia when his plane skidded on landing at Mostar airport. Nobody was hurt, but he felt ccompelled to call not his wife or mistress but the King of Spain. According to the website of El Mundo, the minister told the King, “we left the runway, it was a shock but thanks to God, on Christmas Day the hope of life was born.”

From an AP story on Bush’s immigration plan:

“Those who enter the country illegally break the law,” Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.

I know several readers of this blog who will be absolutely delighted by this piece of news:

Jat to take off to New York and Toronto on May 15th 2006

In fact, I’d be disappointed if I knew fewer than half of the names on the passenger manifesto for the first flight! (And I’m not talking about Toronto here.)

The Frankfurter Allgemeine is running a front page editorial this morning (not online, AFAICT) saying a clearer picture of the implications of Gotovina’s arrest was yet to emerge, and then makes this astonishing claim:

Seit Jahren beteuern Präsident Mesic und Sanader, daß Gotovina sich nicht in Kroatien aufhalte, sich auch nicht in Reichweite der kroatischen Behörden befinde – das hatte Frau Del Ponte lange Zeit behauptet. Sie hatte unrecht, Mesic und Sanader hatten recht.

For years, President Mesic and [Prime Minister] Sanader have been giving reassurances that Gotovina was neither in Croatia nor within the reach of the Croatian authorities [i.e., in Bosnia], as Ms. Del Ponte had been claiming for a long time. She was wrong, Mesic and Sanader were right.

Now, there’s a reason it’s called editorializing. But it takes guts, or a particular kind of ideological blindness, to first admonish readers to be patient and wait for the facts to come in only to go on to make such sweeping statements.

Having said that, Del Ponte was widely criticized when she gave Croatia a clean bill of health in early October, making it possible for the EU to open membership talks not only with Croatia but with Turkey as well. The Austrians, steadfast allies of this former possession, had vetoed Turkey’s application and linked it to Croatia’s. In retrospect, some of that criticism — that the Hague prosecution was indeed an instrument of politics, as its foes in Croatia and Serbia had argued for years — now appears overblown. Indeed, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that Del Ponte received the critical bit of information from the Croatian governments already in September.

BBC World reports that fugitive Croatian General (ret.) Ante Gotovina has been arrested in Spain.

The French newsweekly Le Point has a piece by Bernard-Henri Lévy on the Centre Culturel André Malraux in Sarajevo, an oasis in a cultural scene otherwise characterized by provincialism and arrogance.

The Washington Post reported a few days ago that the DoD may be waking up to the colossal fuck-up also known as “Iraq.”

A broad Pentagon directive issued this week orders the U.S. military to be sure, the next time it goes to war, to prepare more thoroughly for picking up the pieces afterward.

Cool — let’s have yet another “lessons learned” exercise!

From an article in today’s Times about the U.S. military paying shitloads of money to some Washington scumbags to buy positive coverage in the Iraqi press:

“The State Department is working with journalists in Iraq to help them develop the skills that you all have in terms of reporting and journalistic ethics and practices,” the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, told reporters on Thursday.

“That’s important,” the department spokesman said. “This is a country where free media didn’t exist for decades, so they are learning. We think it’s important to assist them in that.”