Thank you. Thank You. You just made my day, week, month and possibly year. The twitter feed is way too epic to describe. I mean, "Live in peace notin pieces"?? That is some Oscar Wilde league shit right there. I am feeling giddy just thinking about it. I now know how 14-year-old girls feel at a Jonas Brothers concert.

Needless to say, I would be too disappointed if the genius behind those tweets turns out to be one of those smart-ass impersonators.

Back when I was in school, if I had a choice, I would have chosen this over being hit on the knuckles with a cane. Kids these days have it really easy.

See also: http://pakistaniat.com/2007/05/11/pakistan-czech-republic-flag-diplomacy-check-checkered/

Thanks for reading the Corner so we don’t have to ;).

Here here. Especially Ramesh -- or is that "RAM-ish"?

But the world delivered us a valuable ass-kicking that day. Listen up, it said. Alpha geek means nothing. Read your audience. Talk directly to the granny.

Riddle me this, Brownman: which category of judges is it that goes for debaters jumping on the tables? The flowsters or the laysters?

There's something about seeing Deepak Chopra hawking a computer OS that calls to mind Tip O'Neill coming out of a suitcase.

This week's sign of the apocalypse.

"It’s part of a broader shift in self-confidence that is happening, where people are no longer looking at Westernized symbols of having arrived"

.... Nilekani says about Ambani, with no trace of irony, in an article whose lead photo and opening anecdote depicts Ambani sitting in his private box while attending an Indian Premier League match. I guess the cheerleaders didn't show up that afternoon?

AfPak? Awesome -- do they have one of those ducks?

If you’re highly-placed in the government, flatter the ruler.

Let a thousand Shaukat Azizes bloom.

Right in time for Halloween: a one-dimensional article which purports to be comprehensive saying, "Boooo! Pakistan is scary!"

Base-balle-balle!

A related view of the same "staged bellicosity" (perfect description) than the video you've posted -- less aesthetic evaluation, but perhaps more depth (albeit anecdotal and from only one side of the border)....

More Nawaz pictures here. Reviews seem to be mixed though:

Moving from the dining table to the dressing table, Nawaz Sharif has had hair-transplantation, and after several years of baldness he has once again started using the comb. In fact, he uses it much more frequently than other people do. Maybe the bristled hair have to do something with it, or perhaps it is just a psychological thing with such cases.

While he may have overcome his baldness, the transplantation has meant that Nawaz Sharif has lost his identity. Interestingly, brother Shahbaz Sharif has also undergone the same process.

In Pakistan, the two brothers were once affectionately called CT, BT (Choti tind, Barhi tind). They were so addressed when Pakistan was under pressure to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which also carried the acronym CTBT. Since one brother was then the Prime Minister and the other was the Punjab Chief Minister, people called them CT, BT. But as the two Sharifs have now had their hair transplanted, a friend of theirs commented in a lighter vein that the issue of the ‘CTBT’ had finally been settled for good.

I wonder if Abbaji would have approved....

Nice photos, Pooja!

spend your time legislating

ummm, actually manish -- with this guy? i'd much prefer that he waste his time blustering about whatever the heck he'd like to bluster about. ;)

He also said statements coming from the United States, including from Sen. Barak Obama, D-Ill., a presidential hopeful, over the possibility of U.S. military action against al-Qaida in Pakistan “has started alarm bells ringing and has upset (the) Pakistani public…�

Nice. I think it's fair to say that alarm bells have been ringing for quite some time.

like rats fleeing a sinking ship (or however that saying goes)....

Most of the foreign policy analyses I’ve seen in the recent months (including Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek today) note that Islamists have never received more than 10% of a nationwide vote in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto says the same, though she’s got another motive in pushing a return to democracy.

Yep. And arguably (though some folks might disagree about this) Musharraf's own double game with Islamist groups has boosted their standing even higher than it otherwise might have been on its own. Not that other Democrats have been any more with it in their statements about Pakistan, but Edwards is completely out to lunch in that comment. He might want to take a break and go check on his hair. Or work on his staff's sense of humor.

Well, that is coming from the Sun -- do you expect them to do anything other than engage in "divide and rule" when it comes to covering Democrats? ;)

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not trying to defend the memo itself, and the point about internal organization isn't necessarily a completely unfair one either. But there is still a difference between something racially stupid coming out of the candidate's mouth vs. in a campaign statement. And it's not as if all the other campaigns are such well-oiled machines that they couldn't possibly ever do something stupid or racially insensitive (or both). Take that ridiculous Edwards story (which is priceless -- thank you for that) as the most recent example of the former. You and I could both probably come up with examples of the latter as well, including by some of the very same Democratic and Republican political insiders who would now completely rake the Obama campaign over the coals.

Bear in mind that these words, unlike Clinton's, Biden's, and Allen's, didn't come from the candidate's mouth himself. So while Obama is ultimately responsible for what his campaign does, obviously, there is nevertheless a difference here -- and that makes it worth reserving judgment until we see what the candidate himself has to say about all of this.

And they never come off, do they?