is that you have to roll down the windows of your car to air out your car once you’re out of the range of the skunk.

You know, if there’s a worse odor than skunk, I do not want to ever know about it.

No store in America would ever have the word “shop” spelled with an extra “pe” in its name.

Hamas is abandoning the hudna (a period of rearming and recruitment with the full intention of fighting again and not a truce or ceasefire with the emphasis on negotiations and peacemaking as the MSM often claims):

“The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again,” said a leaflet distributed by the militants at a Hamas rally Friday night. “The resistance groups … will choose the proper place and time for the tough, strong and unique response.”

Better have plenty of spinach-colored flags to wrap your corpses in, Hamas, because Yassin and Rantisi are about to get lots and lots of company courtesy of the IDF.

Apparently, Zarqawi wasn’t dead when the U.S. soldiers arrived.

According to the reports by the coalition forces that arrived on-site, he mumbled a little something, but it was indistinguishable and it was very short.

And perhaps he recognized the soldiers and tried to escape.

The first people on the scene were the Iraqi police. They had found him and put him into some kind of gurney/stretcher kind of thing, and then American coalition forces arrived immediately thereafter on-site. They immediately went to the person in the stretcher, were able to start identifying by some distinguishing marks on his body. They had some kind of visual facial recognition.

According to the person on the ground, Zarqawi attempted to, sort of, turn away off the stretcher. Everybody resecured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he’d received from this airstrike.

So here’s the contest, which will not be a photo contest, nor a caption contest, since I don’t want photos of Zarqawi polluting my weblog:

Name Zarqawi’s last words. What do you think he said just before he died?

Already used: “The infidels will never find me he–”

I was thinking about something I’d read regarding Justice Antonin Scalia and his penchant for constructionalism — the concept that we should interpret the Constitution only in the way the Founders meant it when they wrote it.

To which I must ask: If they thought the Constitution was perfect the way it was, then why did they put in an amendment process?

Say, remember when I wrote that Hamas has refused to accept $50 million in medical supplies from Israel? (Of course you did. It was only two days ago.) Remember how I said to remember this when the cries about the Israel-caused health crisis come out?

Well, that didn’t take long.

Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population said that Israel disallowed Egyptian medical aid to pass through its checkpoint to reach the Gaza Strip on Thursday, reported the official MENA news agency.

A statement issued by the ministry was quoted as saying that the Egyptian medical aid included 15.5 tons of medicines and medical supplies.

The relief assistance was supposed to reach the Gaza Strip via Israel’s Karem Abu-Salem checkpoint in line with an agreement with the Israeli authorities beforehand.

Upon arrival at the crossing, the Israeli authorities disallowed those medical staff to pass and announced the checkpoint closed until Sunday, said the statement, without giving more details.

The Egyptian government is known for its, how shall we say, bald-faced lying all of the time. I can find no corroboration of this from any other source, and you know this is the type of story that Reuters would tout from the rooftops if true.

But wait, what about Doctors Without Borders?

When you know that you won’t have enough supplies to make it to the end of the month, you tighten up. In Gaza, only emergency surgeries are performed. Medicines are also prescribed in smaller quantities and patients are sent to private pharmacies, which face shortages, too. Given the standard of living, patients cannot afford to pay for treatment. Some go to Egypt, where medicine is cheaper, but if they bring back more than a small amount, everything will be confiscated at customs. Last summer, in anticipation of possible blockages during the dismantling of the Gaza settlements, MSF stocked up on supplies and medicines, which have since allowed us to make some small donations. During my visit, we made contributions to the general public hospital and the pediatric hospital in Gaza, as well as to the Khan Younis hospital. We will continue to do that on occasion, but the needs are very great.

The Situation Could Quickly Turn Critical

If we get to the point where supplies of certain products are exhausted, treatment will stop. Managing a hospital is much more complex than simply buying medicine and paying salaries. You also have to dispose of wastes, clean and sterilize, and pay the electricity bills. The quality of care will be affected and contamination risks will increase. Similarly, if health care providers are not paid, their motivation can suffer. Doctors working for the public health system already hold down multiple jobs so that they can achieve a reasonable standard of living. Without salaries and supplies to carry out their job properly, you can imagine that they will only work in private offices and clinics. But people cannot — and will be increasingly unable to — pay for care. Finally, major illnesses like cancer, genetic problems and congenital deformities that, until now, have been treated in neighboring countries (Jordan, Israel and Egypt) will no longer be treated because of lack of resources. People are very worried about their future. They are feeling the weight of uncertainty and fear of tomorrow. A patient said to me, “It’s like walking with a stick in your shoe.”

Yes, and I believe the stick’s logo is “Hamas.” Get rid of it, and your problems are over. Because Israel offered, and Hamas refused, the medicines.

But the lying has begun. Watch it grow.

Israel analysts have very different opinions on how Zarqawi’s death is going to affect Al Qaeda than the experts that the mainstream media have been finding:

Amatzia Baram, an expert on Iraq at Haifa University, said, “The death of Zarqawi signals the beginning of the end of the al-Qaida organization and of Sunni rebellion in Iraq.” According to Baram, who has advised the White House on Iraq, the end of the rebellion and victory in the war on terror is still a number of years down the road, and there will still be heavy casualties. But, he said, the end was in sight.

“The blow that al-Qaida took today is a heavy one, but not mortal,” Baram said. “We are talking about a very important symbol who had great influence on the insurgents’ morale. They received their inspiration from him.”

But there’s even more of an upside.

Regarding the ripple effect of his death on the terrorism Israel faces, one diplomatic source in Jerusalem said this will set back al-Qaida’s efforts to make inroads here. The organization’s energy will now have to be spent to a large degree on bouncing back from this blow, on finding a successor, on protecting the organization, rather than on setting up branches here.

They say he was behind the launching of rockets from Lebanon as well. Sucks to be him right now, hey?

Hamas has sent a letter to Israel demanding the tax money that Israel has been withholding since Hamas took office. You have to love the tone of this article in the JPost:

In a direct communique to the finance minister of a country it refuses to recognize, the Palestinian Authority’s Finance Ministry, headed by Hamas’s Omar Abdel Razek, has written to Avraham Hirchson, demanding that Israel transfer to the PA’s coffers the hundreds of millions of dollars in customs revenues it has been withholding since Hamas’s victory in January’s elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The one-page letter was written on PA-headed paper in English and formally addressed to Hirchson at his ministry in Jerusalem, Israel. The PA has said it needs the money to meet the payroll for its approximately 160,000 civil servants, whom it has generally been unable to pay since the international community froze funding after Hamas came to power.

The letter accused Israel of unlawful behavior and specified the agreements under which, it asserted, Israel was obligated to transfer the funds, including the Paris protocol on economic relations of April 1994, which formed part of the Oslo accords.

Those would be the same Oslo accords that Hamas says they are not bound by. Funny how when it’s to their advantage, though, Israel should be bound by them, hm?

Despite heavy international pressure since its PLC victory and formation of the PA government, Hamas has steadfastly refused to recognize Israel or to honor previous agreements between Israel and the PA - two of the three international preconditions for substantive relations with the PA government. (The third, also unfulfilled, condition is the renunciation of terrorism.)

The Finance Ministry is not treating the letter as representing any formal change in that Hamas position, and has no intention of responding to the letter, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Nor does the ministry anticipate a change of policy that would see a resumption of the customs transfers.

I think the answer to when Hamas will be getting the tax revenues would be on the day Hell freezes over.

In the Seattle Times, a paper not known for saying anything positive about Israel, an article that could best be labeled “A Young Shiksa in Israel.”

His wife welcomes us at the door with a polite gasp of disbelief before disappearing into the kitchen with a look not unlike panic on her face. Evidently, however, food multiplication is not limited to Cana, and moments later the crowded table is piled with enough food to feed a soccer team — challah, stuffed eggplants, sweet potatoes, stuffed grape leaves, cucumber salad, garlic chicken, homemade hummus, brisket, and more than enough wine. I eat for what feels like three hours before falling into a delicious-food-induced coma and resigning myself to the rabbi’s children, who gleefully decorate me — the only non-Jewish member of our party — with napkin holders and place settings.

Our incredible dinner at the rabbi’s house is actually, shockingly, not rare. It is, in fact, not only a widely held Jewish tradition, but also a perfect example of the overwhelming and endearing sense of familial community that characterizes this nation. Here’s what I mean: everyone here hitchhikes and, by and large, everyone picks up hitchhikers; kibbutzim, small socialist communities, pepper the countryside and welcome the itinerant traveler to stay for a night or a year in exchange for work; and, although no one seems to agree on politics, everyone is willing to listen to your opinions, so long as you listen to theirs.

I’ll leave it to my Israeli readers to discuss her interpretation of life in your country. But it’s an interesting read.