Good morning friends. I suppose the lineup bugged Scarecrow, here’s what he had to say …

The Overture to “William Tell”. This Universal Pictures Walter Lantz Production cartoon was part of the Musical Miniatures series and was released on June 16, 1947.

In a post wherein Ann Althouse squawks she is not at all interested in our “Eli” — apart from, one supposes, this particular post, wherein she squawks about our “Eli” — Althouse intriguingly declares: People who are immersed in politics ought to take a good look at their own minds.

The roadmap for controlling and cleaning up the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station is evidently out.

Lost in the dust of the national debt this week was a Texas execution. While every execution is an egregious violation of human rights, this was distinguished in it blatant disregard for not only human life but for the rule of law.

It may not take long, then, for a country like Iran or an entity like a Mexican drug cartel to develop and disseminate a way to hack drones. And given the way other arms proliferate, it won’t be long before drones are available on the private market. (Incidentally, remember how some of the crap intelligence used to trump up a war against Saddam involved a balsam-wood drone? Great times those were!)

Thursday in Colorado a broad coalition of organizations officially launched the petition drive to put the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act of 2012 on the ballot next November. To get on the ballot, the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol will need to gather 86,000 valid signatures over the next 180 days.

In The Interrogator: An Education, retired CIA clandestine officer Glenn Carle tells how, in fall 2002, he was sent to the Middle East to interrogate a purportedly high level al Qaeda figure he calls CAPTUS. While Carle does not identify either the detainee or the countries in which he interrogated him, Scott Horton reports the detainee is an Afghan named Pacha Wazir who, before he was captured, ran a hawala al Qaeda used; the two locations are Morocco and Afghanistan’s Salt Pit. After some weeks of rapport-based interrogation, Carle became convinced CAPTUS wasn’t as involved in al Qaeda as CIA believed him to be.

So, Mike Mullen’s contention here is that Iran is arming Shiite militias to attack Americans in Iraq.

These things never seem to have direct evidence attached to it, but OK. I’ll give that to you. Let me offer a suggestion for stopping these well-armed militias from killing US troops.

US troops could leave Iraq.

The only way cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits can become law as part of a debt ceiling deal is if a significant number of Congressional Democrats vote for those cuts. A bloc of Congressional Democrats can stop these cuts if they simply vote against them, using the leverage they have.