My actions don't reflect my voting record

I had the best sort of jury duty today, the type where you don’t have to show up (and, indeed, drive 18 miles through the rain to do so). And I’d washed my Cat in the Hat t-shirt and everything.

The Russian claim that a Chechen leader in his 30s died in prison of “natural causes” might be more credible in a week other than one in which a Russian colonel charged with murdering (and probably raping) an 18-year old (or 17, depending on which paper you read) Chechen woman will be released because he was “temporarily insane.”

In Canada an Indian chief says that Hitler was justified in “frying” the Jews. What’s a PC person to do?

The SF Weekly published the address & phone number of John Poindexter, head of the Total Information Awareness program. (301) 424-6613. 10 Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md, satellite photos of which are available online at http://cryptome.org/tia-eyeball.htm. Woops, that site is 404.

Women discovered in the Afghan city of Herat are often arrested and subjected to gynecological tests, and they are banned from driving. In Kabul, the Taliban’s old Vice and Virtue thugs are now called Islamic Teaching, and still harass women wearing makeup. But they can still fly kites, right?

Yesterday saw Trent Lott’s fifth gig of Apologypallooza 2002, on Black Entertainment Television, which may be the first time I’ve ever watched that channel. Let’s just say he’s not getting better at this over time. Now Clinton, that man could apologize. Trent may well have been on drugs. “My actions don’t reflect my voting record,” he said, which I think means that because he’s hired a couple of black staffers (incidentally, his people refuse to release the actual number), we should ignore his attacks on affirmative action and voting rights. Although he does now claim to support affirmative action and the Martin Luther King holiday. But the most moving part came at the end:

A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a slave, and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little negro, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the negro, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

(By the way, if you’ve never read the Checkers speech, do so now).

That information in the Iraqi report that was censored? Germany had the most companies which helped Iraq, followed by the US. A German newspaper got hold of the original--the speculation is that this was an American leak designed to embarrass the German government.

I never got around to mentioning the Likud primary a week ago. Sorry ‘bout that. The hard-line Netanyahu supporters all won, of course. The primary is a non-electoral thing, but it is determinative: voters in Israel vote for a party, not a candidate, so who becomes a Knesset member is determined by their position on the party list. Evidently, the people who got to vote on the 8th did so by paying for the privilege. This time, many turn out to be criminals trying to exert pressure on the party to secure pardons.

www.raptureletters.com. See, after the Rapture, when all the good little boys and girls have been taken up to Heaven, there’ll be all these people wondering what happened. This site will send them an e-mail the Friday after the Rapture, explaining it to them.

From the Daily Telegraph: Iran's moral police arrested a barber in Isfahan who gave young women short haircuts so that they could pass as boys and go out without covering themselves, the Kayhan newspaper said.