Iraq: George Bush & The July 6th Fund

George Bush celebrated his 60th birthday on Thursday with rounds of well wishing and an obligatory nod to the Mess in Messopotamia. He also said something about traveling around the country "to learn what's on
Americans' minds."

This got Doomsy to thinking over at Highway Scribery.

Why not mark the occasion with an act of atonement by building something positive upon all the negative stuff, specifically a July 6th Fund to raise money for scholarships for the sons and daughters of people killed on Iraq on the president's birthday since the war began in 2003?

Doomsy has more here.

AS IF THINGS WEREN'T BAD ENOUGH . . .

TPM Muckracker has a disturbing report that Aryan Nation graffiti is turning up in Baghdad.

It cites a Defense Department investigator as saying that neo-Nazi groups have long sought to place members in the U.S. armed forces as a way to train them on the use of weapons and explosives for the "race war" they believe is imminent.

. . . THEY'RE GETTING EVEN WORSE

Mohammed, blogging from Baghdad at Iraq the Model, says that there there is increasing evidence that a Hamas-like organization is emerging in the battered city.

His money quote:

[T]he issue of militias remains the tedious riddle facing the government who realizes how difficult it's going to be to deal with these octopus-like multi-headed bodies and there are rumors here that the SCIRI and Sadrists are determined to bring down al-Maliki. The Sadrists in particular are deliberately embarrassing the government in this regard by behaving like government and rebels at the same time and I think I find them pretty close to Hamas who's also lost their way between being government and remaining as "resistance."