“CANADA IS GOING THROUGH ANOTHER SPATE OF SEPARATION ANXIETY,” says Austin Bay (at GlennReynolds.com).

BAD NEWS FROM IRAQ: A municipal coup d’etat.

Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

“This is the new Iraq,” said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.”

The militia that overthrew the mayor is an Iranian proxy.

I’d say this needs to be reversed, that he should be put back in office so this sort of thing isn’t rewarded and therefore encouraged. But he already tried to resign in June and it looks like he doesn’t even want to stay in Iraq.

If Tamini can’t be restored, the new mayor Hussein al-Tahaan must in turn be replaced. As quickly as possible.

JEANINEE PIRRO, currently the DA for Westchester, is running for the Senate against Hillary. This is a long shot, but yesterday I heard Dick Morris on the radio making a credible case that Pirro can make things uncomfortable for Hillary by demanding that she committ to serving out her term. He also argued that if Pirro gets enough money early on, and does moderately well in the polls, she will force Hillary out of the race, because Hillary will want to conserve money (and credibility) for her 2008 run at the presidency.

Pirro’s biggest weakness, that her husband was convicted of tax evasion (Pirro herself was cleared as an “innocent spouse) is harder for Hillary to capitalise on, since Pirro can always say “Why don’t we take the focus off my husband’s arrest and your husband’s lost law license, and talk about the issues”. I still think Hillary is probably the clear winner, but it will be an interesting race to watch. Pirro is a pro-choice, socially liberal and fiscally conservative Republican. She may well be able to take some of the shine off Hillary’s presidential campaign.

THE WASHINGTON POST DISCOVERS THAT high paying jobs are boring too. Having spent a summer as an investment banking intern during a mad moment in business school when I imagined that I could somehow shoehorn my personality to fit the pathologically detail-oriented, hyper-competitive, number-hugging world of Wall Street, this was not news to me.

While I would not go so far as to say that proofreading pitch books and tweaking capital asset models is as boring as the year I spent working a cash register at the Love Pharmacy Chain (no, it was a perfectly respectable chain of drugstores, and no, I have no idea what was going through the head of the fellow in marketing who decided that “Love Pharmacies” would look good on the letterhead), investment banking was nonetheless considerably more boring than most of my other jobs, including (prior to business school) building the computer systems that the investment bankers used to tweak their models.

Part of this is, of course, that while I obtain moderate enjoyment from reading balance sheets, I don’t enjoy it enough to spend days on end speculating about whether retail growth in Disney’s Latin American markets will average 2.4% or 2.6% over the next three years.

But even my friends who live and breathe finance find a large portion of their work intensely boring. They are doing it because they hope that if they spend long enough proofreading powerpoint presentations and scrutinising IPO prospectuses, they will one day be paid really gargantuan sums of money to fly all over the world and tell CEO’s how to finance their companies. This job is so fun and exciting that most of the people who do it retire by 50. But until they reach that halcyon horizon (and, with banking’s military-inspired “up or out” model, only a small fraction of freshly-minted MBA banker larvae will ever get to that level) most of them are bored for much of the time.

There is a tendency among liberal arts types to think that it is grossly unfair that investment bankers make so much money, when said artsy type’s clearly more socially valuable work is so pitifully renumerated. Having spent a summer doing it, I personally think that anyone who is willing to spend his Saturday night going over the fine print in an SEC prospectus until 2 am is welcome to all the filthy lucre they will pay him. I chose to become a journalist because I’ve only got forty or fifty years left on this planet, and if I’m going to spend the majority of my waking hours doing something, I’d rather do something I feel is worthwhile than something that will buy me a cushy place to sleep. It seems downright piggy for those of us with what my mother calls “English Major Jobs” to demand both fulfilling work and lavish renumeration.

GRAND ROUNDS is up, and full of interesting medical posts.

WHITHER OIL? If you’re driving one of this big, gas-guzzling American cars, these days you probably cringe every time you pull up at the gas station. Will price relief ever come?

Probably not soon. OPEC, scarred by the memory of $10 a barrel oil, is not bringing new capacity online as fast as it could, and consumers seem strangely reluctant to let higher gas prices affect their behavior (perhaps they too are under the spell of the halcyon days when gas was practically free and Saudi princes lined up at the gas station to beg you to accept a free toaster with your purchase of 1 gallon of regular unleaded). But eventually things will even out, and probably go the other way–the current shortage will eventually produce a glut.

Alas, probably not soon enough to ease your pain as you steer the family SUV onto the road for the annual trek to Yellowstone. This might be the year to think about renting a Mini.

WE’RE DOING IT FOR YOU, DARLING Laura at 11D, a premier politics-and-parenting blogger and one of my absolute favorite reads, has a great post on a new book arguing that divorce isn’t really better for the children after all.

Update: Not so new–the book was published in 2001.

THE ONLINE ARMS RACE CONTINUES The Wall Street Journal, to which I subscribe online, has apparently decided to prevent concurrent logons. Since I generally leave my login on at home when I go to work, I had to call them to clear that session so I could login here.

The object, obviously, is to prevent people from sharing their subscriptions, which quite a few people I know have been doing (and I bet they’re kicking desks and throwing things this morning). However, I’m not quite sure the folks at the Wall Street Journal have thought through what this means, at least if they have many subscribers like me. Absent-minded subscribers. Subscribers who never turn their computers off. Subscribers who use several computers each working day. Subscribers who will now be calling their technical support people two or three times a day to clear their other login so they can read the paper.

On the other hand, I suppose the typical WSJ subscriber is your type-A perfectionist who will have no trouble remembering to make sure that he logs off his WSJ account before moving to another computer. In which case, I demand to know why the folks at the WSJ haven’t quite thought through what this means for me.

SHOULDN’T JOURNALISTS APPLAUD the passing of “Jovian authority”?

AN ANTI-SPAM VICTORY FOR MICROSOFT. “We have now proven that we can take one of the most profitable spammers in the world and separate him from his money.”

UPDATE: The BBC seems to have a bit of an innumeracy problem.

TIRED OF ALL THAT MICKEY MOUSE ANALYSIS of the Disney opinion? (Oh, no, the judge let Disney pay Michael Ovitz $140 million for 14 months’ work!) The Conglomerate has a whole symposium going — 9 lawprofs strong.

WHEN BAD POLITICS HAPPEN to good bands.

IT’S A GOOD DAY to visit Day by Day.

COTTAGE INDUSTRY AND SCIENCE FICTION: Glenn Reynolds interviews science fiction author S.M. Stirling in his new Tech Central Station column.

“NOW I CAN MAKE THE BLOGS!!!” Oh, beautiful! Eggagog is back! Nothing is more certain to put a smile on my face than a new post from Eggagog!!!

YOU JUST CAN’T PLEASE SOME PEOPLE: Liberal hawks who are lumped in with conservatives by anti-war liberals may be amused to see that even anti-war lefties like Marc Cooper get the same treatment for being insufficiently anti-war.

IS IT FOR REAL, this suggestion — published in the Boston Globe — that Catholic judges be barred from participating in abortion rights cases?

AUSTIN BAY IS SUBBING for Glenn over on GlennReynolds.com. His first post is about executive greed and “golden parachutes,” a good subject to think about as the Disney case comes out, approving of the deal that rewarded Michael Ovitz with $140 million for 14 months’ work.

BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T WANT TO DETRACT from the rest of the art exhibit, the curators removed the fetus head grafted onto the body of a bird.

“OH, LIVERMORE, THE TOWN THAT MISSPELLS STUFF.” For $6,000, an artist, already paid $40,000, returns to correct the 11 misspellings — like “Eistein” for “Einstein” — in the “educational” mural she made for the Livermore public library.

UPDATE: A reader emails that Livermore is also the town that lost its own time capsule. There’s a film documentary about it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In Livermore’s defense, though it may not have the brightest bulbs, it does have the world’s longest burning light bulb.

SHE WORE A SHORT SKIRT, or BLAMING THE VICTIM: Martin Kramer slaps Juan Cole after Cole slaps journalist Steve Vincent for supposedly getting himself killed in Iraq. (Hat tip: Tony at Across the Bay.)

AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING: You’re a news and politics junky. So you already know the usual arguments against racial (and perhaps gender) profiling. Here’s one I’ll bet you haven’t read yet at The New Criterion’s blog Armavirumque.

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR ZERO TOLERANCE: Radley Balko has a smart op-ed in the Washington Post about draconian zero tolerance measures against parents who wisely choose to supervise underage drinking.

RECREATING THE BAMIYAN BUDDHAS. By laser projection.

“WEARY AND INCREASINGLY PLAGUED BY SELF-DOUBTS”: How Der Spiegel sees us, as translated and analyzed by Davids Medienkritik.