It took me a while to figure out what had set you off this time, and I even wondered if this was one of those cases of an article and headline that were swapped when you read it, and corrected later, by the time I read it.

BTW, speaking of mismatched titles and articles, you do know that most of the time the headline comes from some junior editor in the newsroom and not the author, don't you? It's too easy (to the point that I'm a bit embarrased for you) to take shots at headlines that don't match the article because the editor couldn't figure out what the author was trying to say. Have you noticed some of the doozies in our own Murky-News?

I eventually figured out that you're obsessively zeroing in on the quantity and excluding the qualitative points of the story. True enough, the body of the article never cites a hard number and quotes speculation that the number in individual countries such as Egypt is in the hundreds. But does that mean that no Iraqis are fleeing the country? Hardly. The article's badly written, to be blunt, and I can discern garbled hints at the number in the headline, such as

But overall, officials in Jordan say there are 250,000 Iraqis legally residing in the kingdom. Unofficial estimates put the number at 600,000, at least.

350,000 Iraqis illegally residing in Jordan is a pretty big clue, Tom. How many moved there after the war? And if the number of registered refugees in individual countries is measured in the hundreds, doesn't that add up to thousands? Egypt's a long way from Iraq, too--wanna bet the quantity of displaced Iraqis in each country is smoothly proportional to distance from Iraq?

Tom, you're outraged over a dimensionless number. Thousands of Iraqis per what? It makes a vast difference whether you're talking thousands per day or just thousands since "Mission Accomplished".

I fault the author for not clearly making his point nearly as much as I fault you for applying classic Nitpicking Squad tactics to attack an otherwise innocuous and pretty insignificant filler piece. Talk about a low threshold for outrage! Aren't you a little bit embarrassed to be expending so much effort to attack something so small?

Aren't I the least bit embarrassed to have taken the time to rebut you? Now that you mention it...