Trent: don’t let the burning cross hit you in the ass on the way out

www.re-date.com will tell you how many seconds, minutes, etc you’ve been alive, how many people have born and died in that period, how far light would travel or your fingernails grow if you didn’t cut them.

At the UN, the US vetoes a condemnation of Israel for killing 3 UN workers. The US said the resolution was one-sided. No, it condemned everyone in the Middle East who has killed UN workers, which is a perfectly legitimate thing for the UN to do. The US is also against demanding that Israel comply with the Fourth Geneva Convention (i.e., stop targeting civilians).

Colin Powell has announced he won’t issue a Middle East peace plan because he doesn’t have one. No, actually he said he wouldn’t release it before Israeli elections, which suggests either 1) the US will tailor its plan, not to basic fairness, but to what flavor of fascists dominate the next government of one of the two sides, or 2) they want an election to occur without having basic facts before it.

American Samoa reverses its ban on Arabs. Samoa is semi-autonomous, but the ban was bound to be reversed when the US press finally noticed it, a mere 4 months after it was implemented (I didn’t know about it either).

A Guardian report on Ole Miss, where Trent cheer-led and certainly didn’t foster hatred, says it’s now 13% black, although his old frat sure isn’t. The Confederate battle flag has been removed from the University flag, but the marching band still plays Dixie--the black musicians routinely refuse to play along.

I’ve been meaning to mention something Lott said in one of those apologies. He said that he personally practiced affirmative action, that he had hired blacks on his staff. The thing is, his office has refused to release actual numbers, so what Lott evidently meant by affirmative action wasn’t that he hired blacks at or above their percentage of the population, but that he hired blacks AT ALL.

I still say the most frightening thing of the whole Lott affair was how the “liberal media” and politicians waited for permission from conservatives before reporting Lott’s remarks. A story in the Guardian notes that the story was brought to attention and kept alive by the bloggers.

Against the wishes of all 140 other nations in the WTO, the US blocked a deal for cheaper drugs to poor countries. Dick Cheney stepped in to overrule the US trade negotiator.