Larry David vs. Steven Spielberg: Who’s funnier? The man who makes a phony reality show out of his own life, or the guy who “touts the latest documentary project of the Shoah Foundation, established by Spielberg with proceeds from Schindler’s List, as ‘the ultimate reality TV.'” You decide.

“In a remarkable example of historical irony,” writes The American Conservative‘s Eric S. Margolis, “a scowling, black-turbaned Shia ayatollah has emerged from obscurity for the second time in a quarter century to vex and confound America’s plans for the Mideast.” But Margolis goes further back than Khomeini: “Washington has now inherited the identical problem faced by imperial Britain when, in order to control the region’s recently discovered oil, it stitched together three disparate Ottoman vilyats to create the Frankenstein state of Iraq.” And, he predicts, just as the British failed to understand “Iraq’s well-organized Shia,” so to will Washington. Read more.

Angry ex-Baptist James Heflin worries about the proposed Constitution Restoration Act, which he says is a step toward American theocracy. “If its backers get their way, Americans will no longer receive the same protections that Washington has carefully insisted that Iraqis have.”Read more.