War supporters: in November, it is extremely likely Barack Obama is going to win the presidency. If you continue to respond to the war's critics with "lalalalalalalala I can't HEAR you!", you are going to be completely shut out of the discussion come November. Demanding, incredulously, of me or anyone else, whether we seriously think it would have been better to leave a murderous dictator in place is not going to help. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 125,000 to 150,000 Iraqis have died since we invaded, ... We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars, we have reduced our strategic effectiveness both within and outside of the middle east, and the most likely outcome of an eventual withdrawal seems at present time to be a prolonged and bloody civil war. It is only a good idea to remove a murderous dictator if this results in, on net, fewer people being murdered.

Whether or not you agree with me on this, do me and the war's opponents the credit of assuming that yes, we have thought this through, and no, we are not secretly rooting for Osama bin Laden. ...

War opponents: the core of your movement is not a majority; your ranks have been swelled by people who regret the current chaos in Iraq, but will abandon you at the slightest shift, as indeed the polls show. You will not accomplish anything without a coalition, and that coalition will need to include many of the people you are currently insulting. You have spent too much time talking to each other, telling each other that you are right, everyone who disagreed with you is evil and stupid, and you therefore deserve to run things. Whether or not this is true, you do not have the numbers or the power to do so. If all you have to offer to the foreign policy establishment is an enraged demand that they shut up and go away while you take over, you cannot seriously be surprised when they close the door in your face and continue the meeting without you.

Really.

The FBI is analyzing a torn, tangled parachute found buried by children in southwest Washington to determine whether it might have been used by famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, the agency said Tuesday. ...

A man identifying himself as Dan Cooper _ later mistakenly but enduringly identified as D.B. Cooper _ hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle in November 1971, claiming he had a bomb.

When the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and asked to be flown to Mexico. He apparently parachuted from the plane's back stairs somewhere near the Oregon border.

Agents doubt he survived because conditions were poor and the terrain was rough, but few signs of his fate have been found. ...

If it is Cooper's parachute, that will solve one mystery _ where he apparently landed _ but it will raise another, Carr said.

In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper's money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there's no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal. "If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means," Carr said. "That whole theory is out the window."