Abu Muqawama Was the Alternate

One of our readers sent along this "guest list" from the glossy Washingtonian Magazine. On the list of people the Washingtonian would invite to a dinner party are both Ghida Fakhry and John Nagl. Now, Ghida Fakhry is the second-most beautiful woman with whom Abu Muqawama has ever shared a cup of coffee. She earns bonus points for being from South Lebanon and starting her career at LBC (!) of all networks. So we understand her inclusion. (She's married, to answer your next question.)

But Nagl? You mean there's someone living in Washington, DC who hasn't had dinner with John Nagl yet? Abu Muqawama frankly has a tough time believing that.

In completely unrelated news, from Sen. Barack Obama:

As we rebuild our armed forces, we must meet the full spectrum needs of the new century, not simply recreate the military of the Cold War era. In particular, we must focus on strengthening the ground force units and skills that military officers have dubbed “High Demand/Low Density.” The U.S. military must build up our special operations forces, civil affairs, information operations, engineers, foreign area officers, and other units and capabilities that remain in chronic short supply. We should invest in foreign language training, cultural awareness, and human intelligence and other needed counterinsurgency and stabilization skill sets. And we should create a specialized military advisors corps, which will enable us to better build up local allies’ capacities to take on mutual threats.

(Thanks, Matt and SNLII)