Briefly...

"Allah": Yes to nukes: Osama bin Laden has obtained a fatwa--religious permission--from a Saudi religious leader to use nuclear weapons on Americans, according to the no-longer-anonymous author of Imperial Hubris (and former CIA agent ) Michael Scheuer. Good thing we spent $146 billion and counting tracking down nonexistant WMDs in Iraq while leaving bin Laden uncaptured. See Scheuer on 60 Minutes tonight.

The Sanctity of Entertainment: A CBS News producer who broke into programming of the crime drama CSI: New York to report the death of Yasser Arafat was canned for the offense.

Educational-Industrial complex: A west Philadelphia high school, a joint development with the public school district and Microsoft, is selling naming rights to the facility. Bidding starts at $5 million, but the frugal-minded can slap their brand name on a single classroom for around $25 thousand.

Spread the meme: Thanks to Star Tribune letter-to-the-editor writer Marc Conklin for devising a meme I hope catches on to describe so-called Christians who oppose gay marriage but support war on innocent Iraqis: "the piously correct."

The lessons the "piously correct" ignore: The kick-assest nun around, Joan Chittister, OSB, reminded Bill Moyers on Friday night of the truly radical nature of Christianity by pointing out the rarely quoted (by rightwing Republicans, anyway) Beatitudes. Y'know the ones, "Blessed are the peacemakers," etc.

Dear George letter: Bob Jones III scares the hell out of me. Read why.

The Gospel According to Zogby: Peace, poverty, and greed are the three most urgent "moral values" cited by voters according to a recent Zogby poll. The survey also found that "Catholic voters overwhelmingly think that issues of economic justice are the greatest moral crisis in the United States today." "Greed and materialism" and "poverty and economic justice" (31%) were mentioned twice as often as abortion (16%) and gay marriage (12%).

Wireless warmongering: The Pentagon is spending $200 billion to create a global wireless web network to give the US a--retch!--"Gods'-eye-view" of the battlefield, according to the CEO of Lockheed-Martin.

US accused of flying "torture flights": The Times on Sunday says the US is using an executive jet to deliver terror suspects to countries with poor human rights records to perform "torture by proxy."

Would you fight a foreign invader on your soil? Watching the 1984 film Red Dawn last night--about a band of high school insurgents resisting a Soviet/Cuban occupation of the US--I couldn't help but think it a fitting film for the final days of the Battle for Fallujah. Only this time, the US is the bully. (I'm not alone in this observation; a San Francisco Chronicle writer made that argument in July, dubbing the Patrick Swayze vehicle as shamelessly conservative as Fahrenheit 911 is liberal and opining that "Like many Hollywood war movies, the patriotic premise breaks down when real war breaks out.")