More depressed ramblings

The Bushies are doing something rather ungracious, which is insisting that Bush is responsible for all the R’s being elected. Possibly this was just to convince them that they now owed him. I happen to think that a president thinking of members of another branch of government as his personal cannon-fodder is not good for the republic, but that’s me. It also emphasizes the growing trend towards partisanship, which everyone thinks they’re talking about when the talk about the “atmosphere” in Washington, but I mean true partisanship, which is the increasing trend over the last years for the party of a congresscritter being predictive of their vote on any given issue. This is also not good for the republic, and if you want to see why, well I mentioned yesterday that the British Tory party insisted on telling its MPs how they were to vote on adoption by unmarried people, and IDS getting all hysterical about the party not uniting behind him when members didn’t march in lock-step. Trust me, we don’t want the political parties to have that much power; people may like individual D’s or R’s, but they all know that the parties themselves are evil.

I knew there was something wrong when the Democratic Party said, We need a savior, I know, let’s get Walter Mondale.

Has any other user of the Opera browser found that those annoying banner ads are suddenly all in German?

Paul Burrell, Princess Di’s butler who blackmailed the palace into keeping him out of prison, is to host a quiz show featuring questions on the royal family and scandals. Title: What the Butler Saw.

Angelika, Dowager Countess of Cawdor, is trying to have her stepson, the 7th Earl of Cawdor, removed from the family castle. These are the descendants of The Scottish Play, I mean Macbeth, so this may not end well.

Morocco’s king rejects the UN referendum in occupied Western Sahara, stalled by Morocco for lo these many years.

Egypt has broadcast the tv show based on a Protocol of Zion type conspiracy theory. OK, the show is obviously bad and stupid, but the US tried to get the Egyptian government to censor it, which is also bad.

US also complains that the Swedish foreign minister quite rightly describes the assassination in Yemen (which we now learn wasn’t even authorized directly by Bush, but delegated to people lower down) as a “summary execution that violates human rights.” The US trade rep castigated Sweden, asking when it had last been in a major war (answers on a postcard please), as if that was a bad thing.

Oklahoma banned cockfights.

Oddly, Oregon rejected a measure to label genetically modified food. Of course the opposition was very very heavily funded.

One unilateralist Bush foreign policy idea I’d favor: delivering food to opposition-controlled areas in Zimbabwe that Mugabe is trying to starve. Although whether or not this would include GM food is another question. And there are implications for the future that aren’t especially good (undermining governments, sending people in to be taken hostage in order to spark military interventions, all that good CIA shit).

Musharaf prevents the newly elected National Assembly from convening. If this is the beginning of another coup, it will certainly have the US’s backing.