Three times a week we get a live feed from the meetings of the Iraqi National Assembly on al-Iraqyia television. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. At times this is more like comic relief from the daily car bomb report on others it is an interesting insight into what goes on there.
My jury is still out on whether I think the Iraqi National Assembly is a farce or a serious group of people. I watch the broadcast meetings whenever I can, and being a daytime TV watching jobless slob means I get to watch that show(?) quiet often.

Yesterday’s session was actually quiet interesting. If you remember a while ago I wrote a bout al-Jafari presenting his government’s policies for his term to the National Assembly. Yesterday the NA invited the PM and a couple of his ministers to discuss these policies and to vote on whether his government’s plans were to be endorsed or not.

The one sentence synopsis is the National Assembly tore tight though his 14 page plan and he stood on the podium brushed off all criticisms and said in half and hour what amounts to a shrug.

There is not a single sentence in that report which sounds like it will have an effect on our lives during the next coming 6 weeks not the remaining 6 months of his cabinet’s term.

One Kurdish MP stood up and told him in her broken (yet grammatically super correct) Arabic “these utopian dreams you talk about here won’t be even seen by your grandchildren, tell us what you’re going to do today”.