Our guest columnist this afternoon posted this from the American embassy in Cairo on May 14, 2007.

Presidential succession is the elephant in the room of Egyptian politics. Despite incessant whispered discussions, no one in Egypt has any certainty about who will succeed Mubarak, or how the succession will happen. Mubarak himself seems to be trusting to God and the inertia of the military and civilian security services to ensure an orderly transition. In the current political framework, the most likely contenders are presidential son Gamal Mubarak (whose profile is ever-increasing at the ruling National Democratic Party), [Egyptian General Intelligence Service] chief Omar Suleiman, dark horse Arab League secretary general Amre Moussa, or an as-yet unknown military officer. Whoever ends up as Egypt’s next president likely will be politically weaker than Mubarak. Once Mubarak’s successor has assumed the post, his first priority will be to build popular support. We thus expect that the new president will likely adopt an anti-American tone in his initial public rhetoric, in an effort to prove his nationalist bona fides to the Egyptian street, and may possibly extend an olive branch to the Muslim Brotherhood, as did previous Egyptian presidents at the beginning of their terms…

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This morning I sent a link to one of my contacts at Car Talk for their Links We Like section (I currently have a link in the top 3).  I was surprised when gmail thought the word “Oldsmobile” was a misspelling. I checked “Plymouth”, but it knows that word, presumably because it’s a place.

On the day I was born you could have walked into an Olds dealership and driven away in this car. How long ago it was:

Title: “Mr. Sunday’s Soups”

Authors: Lorraine Wallace and Chris Wallace

Rank: 64

Blurb: “After a long day on air, Chris would often arrive home hungry and delight at the sight of a big pot of his wife Lorraine’s soup on the burner.”

Review: “I like to make big vats and store in freezer bags.”

Customers Also Bought: “Known and Unknown: A Memoir”, by Donald Rumsfeld

Footnote: “Mr. Sunday is a serial killer.”

Mr. Sunday’s Soups [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]

We now return to our wall-to-wall Egypt coverage, brought to you by Halalipops! Official snack of pagan revolutions!

[WorldNetDaily]

Egyptian President Mubarak has ordered a curfew across Egypt tonight, after protesters battled police across the country.  Protesters show no sign of letting up, despite police attacking them with tear gas and rubber bullets. Opposition leader and former UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei is under house arrest.

The country took the unprecedented step of shutting down Internet Service Providers and cell phone service, but news is still getting out.  Egypt’s Al-Masry Al-Youm is getting live coverage out.  Al-Jazeera also has coverage, and is reporting that there are protests in Jordan against the ruling government. The Beeb is saying that one of its reporters was arrested, had his camera taken from him, and was beaten by police forces, that thousands of protesters have been arrested and at least eight people are dead.

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 Rememeber the last two of years when Dick Army’s Tea Party engineered massive astroturf rallies against the Obama Administration by scaring seniors into believing that the President was going to implement large funding cuts to Medicare? The nation saw scenes of seniors on electric scooters attending anti-government TEA party rallies terrified by the prospect that the Obama administration was threatening their access to a Socialist, government run health insurance program.

The juxtaposition was incongruous, to be sure. But nonetheless, there they were with their government supplied scooters and their signs, proving that in politics it is far more effective to scare people with lies than try to convince them of the superiority of your actual policy positions by explaining the intricacies and nuances of your plan. Read more »

One of the advantages of allowing Our Dear Scatterbrained Readers to stray off topic is that you never know what kind of perverse shit they’ll come up with. For example, a polite discussion Thursday about Sarah Palin’s surprising onset of verbal acuity suddenly morphed into nominations for America’s Most Phallic Civic Landmark.

As we were unfamiliar with most of the nominees — clearly we’ve led a sheltered life — we thought it expedient to line them all up for a Stinque Priapic Edifice Challenge. While everyone can agree that Size Matters, we think the most telling observation is this: Which would embarrass you the most around your mother?

And yes, everybody knows about the Washington Monument, which spends its days taunting the totally not gay Lincoln Memorial. We’re excluding that on account of obviousness.

With that out of the way, here are your nominees:

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