The Decline and Fall of Western Civ for 9 Feb.

It's the end of the world as we know it...

• A top Iranian cleric said on Friday the United States was within Iran's "firing range," a day after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to hit back at US interests worldwide if attacked, reports News24.com.
  
  

  "Americans have surrounded us but it works to our advantage. They are within our firing range in the east, west and elsewhere," Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said in his Friday prayer sermon carried live on state radio.
  
  "In the worst situations we are able to turn the region into burning hell and take the possibility of using the Persian Gulf away from them forever," Rear Admiral Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani said, quoted by semi-official Mehr news agency.

• Serial numbers and other markings on bombs suggest that Iranians are linked to deadly explosives used by Iraqi militants, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday in some of the administration's first public assertions on evidence the military has collected, according to AP.

• Reuters reports a senior U.S. official said on Friday that Iran is "digging a hole deeper and deeper for itself" in the international dispute over its atomic energy program.
  
  

  "Iran seems to be determined to further its isolation internationally on this issue of nuclear weapons," Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, told reporters in Buenos Aires.

• Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, the Defense Department's inspector general said Friday, reports AP.
  
  Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman denied that the office was producing its own intelligence products, saying they were challenging what was coming in from intelligence-gathering professionals, "looking at it with a critical eye."
  
  

  "The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow 'unlawful' or 'unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading," said Feith, who left his Pentagon post in August 2005.

• An al-Qaeda-backed group on Friday released an Internet video of what it said was the shooting down of a U.S. helicopter in Iraq this week, which killed seven military personnel, reports Reuters.

• With Iran now threatening America with new missiles and the United States hunting down agents of the mullahs in Iraq, the conflict in the Middle East is again threatening to escalate. Nobel laureate and Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, warns in a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview: "The Middle East is in the worst condition I have ever seen."

• Examiner reports in a bizarre attack, a well-known author and Holocaust scholar was dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator by an apparent Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks.

• Speaking of Holocaust deniers, writing in the Boston Globe, Ellen Goodman makes this somewhat foolish, if not totally insipid statement:
  
  

  "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

  For the sake of debate, Goodman is one of those unfortunate global warming alarmists who fall victim to Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies and invalidate their own illogical arguments with an appeal to the emotions right from the start.

• While some folks are downright paranoid about the impending heat wave of climate change, other are just trying to stay warm. NBC News reports with some areas of upstate New York already topping 100 inches of snow since last Sunday, forecasters on Friday told the region to expect more -- up to four feet more -- as well as a longer blast lasting into next week.
  
  Forecasters are predicting up to four more feet snow for the area.
  
  More than a week of bitter cold and slippery roads have contributed to at least 20 deaths across the northern quarter of the nation -- five in Ohio, four in Illinois, four in Indiana, two in Kentucky, two in Michigan, and one each in Wisconsin, New York and Maryland, authorities said.
  
  AP reports before weekend squalls add to the 8 feet of snow already on the ground, the communities along eastern Lake Ontario needed the dry respite they got Friday.
  
  Talk about a climate change emergency . . . brrrrrr.

• A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said, reports latimes.com.
  
  

  "I can't think of anything colder than that," said LAPD Det. Russ Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he has seen in his career. "There was no mission around, no services. It's the worst area of skid row."

• CNet reports in Florida, teenagers caught taking risque photos of themselves are prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

• Also from CNet, Turner Broadcasting has confirmed that Cartoon Network head Jim Samples resigned on Friday. The Cartoon Network is the television network owned by Turner Broadcasting responsible for the blunder in which devices for a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Adult Swim cartoon show Aqua Teen Hunger Force were mistaken by Boston authorities for bombs.

• Last and truly least, ROO TV presentes News for Blondes video.

Tags: Decline and Fall of Western Civ, Open Thread, Wire, Headlines, United States
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