Taranto's in fine shape . . .
. . . in yesterday's Best Of The Web.

Blogger Arthur Chrenkoff has an excellent, and long, roundup of good news from Iraq, along with links. Here's a very brief summary:
* Several parts of the country are already holding local elections.
* Iraqis are wealthier, and their health and education systems are better.
* Iraq's culture is undergoing a revival. The national soccer team beat Saudi Arabia for a place in the Olympics, Kurdish music albums are selling big, and the Marsh Arabs are coming back and restoring the environment that Saddam Hussein wrecked.
* Reconstruction is going well.
* Outside Fallujah and some parts of the south, the security situation is good.
* Nine Iraqis whose hands Saddam's regime amputated are getting prosthetic ones thanks to American volunteers, as our Dan Henninger noted last week.
* Other Middle Eastern countries are beginning to make reformist noises.

But the top story is this,

Bizarre as it may sound, that's the tack the Times is taking toward the discovery earlier this week of an artillery shell containing sarin in Iraq. Although, as we noted yesterday, the volume of the sarin is between three quarts and a gallon, the Times insists that field tests found only "very small traces of sarin."
The Times continues protesting Saddam Hussein's innocence, suggesting that he did away with his weapons in "a large-scale destruction program" from which only "some residual weapons" may have "escaped"--never mind that U.N. resolutions obliged Saddam to destroy all his weapons and to document their destruction.

Which reminds me of what this blogger said, also yesterday (warning: bad language) How far the rabbit hole goes. When it comes to Iraq, the ironies are many