Bremerton, Wa. appears to be the Scarborough of Puget Sound.

Longtime Turkmenistan dictator Saparmurat Niyazov -- the eccentric, self-styled Turkmenbashi, or father of all the Turkmens -- checked out about a year ago.

Now, energy-rich Turkmenistan is still largely a dictatorship, but a normal one -- one where people look down on Uzbekistan.

From the NYT:

William Kristol, one of the nation’s leading conservative writers and a vigorous supporter of the Iraq war, will become an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, the newspaper announced Saturday.

Mr. Kristol will write a weekly column for The Times beginning Jan. 7, the newspaper said. He is editor and co-founder of The Weekly Standard, an influential conservative political magazine, and appears regularly on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel. He was a columnist for Time magazine until that relationship was severed this month.

The paper matter-of-factly noted that Kristol had been a "fierce critic" of the Times.