No relationship with Saddam

My mother sent an ad from the LA Times for the 99¢ Store chain which says that due to customer pressure, they refuse to sell the following French items: Dom Perignon Champagne, Louis Vuitton Purses, and Peugeuots.

Also a cartoon explaining the extinction of the unicorns, with security at Noah’s arc refusing to let them on because they were carrying sharp objects.

A Brit living in France named Eric Bush, age 72, decided to change his name to protest the war (to Buisson, French for Bush).

I can’t keep up with the changing roster of Republican assholes like I used to. For ex, there’s one Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-Wy) who in a debate over exempting gun manufacturers from lawsuits, said “One amendment said we couldn't sell [guns] to anybody that was on drugs or had had drug treatment or something like that. Well, so does that mean if you go into a black community, you can't sell any gun to any black person?” She was also in the middle of some point that centered around her children having blond hair and blue eyes; I’ve looked in a couple of papers and can’t find out what; possibly she was interrupted by angry black people before making her doubtless scintillating point. I have found out that she supports bear-baiting, which doesn’t mean what it did in the 19th century. The R’s backed her right to make such comments.

This follows Ed. Sec Paige’s comments which I alluded to but didn’t quote, and now will: In Christian schools, "the value system is set. That's not the case in a public school where there are so many different kids with different kinds of values." Paige used to be superintendent in Houston. Before his time, Houston was faced with a court order to desegregate, and so decided that for the purposes of desegregation, Hispanics counted as white, so they bussed a lot of Hispanic and black kids and left the white kids entirely alone (until the courts told them to stop it).

The Iraqi ambassador to the UN insists that “I have no relationship with Saddam.” Or with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

Matthew Parris, Times columnist, on watching tv coverage of Iraq: “Looters, I suppose, cannot be choosers, and if you break into (say) the regional offices of the Ministry of Public Works, you must take what you find. Pictures of a vase of plastic gladioli waving wildly as their captor scuttled down the road with them will stay with me for life. One man who had looted a swivel-type office chair tore across a lawn with a grin on his face and the chair on his head, upside-down and swivelling.” He also comments that that statue should never have been pulled down by the US marines with a tank, but that the Iraqis should each have been given a rope and left to do it themselves, which would have been a much better symbol. “Instead the confusion about what to do became another kind of metaphor: the Stars and Stripes draped over Saddam Hussein’s head in temporary triumphalism, swiftly thought better of, but too late; a moment spoilt as liberators briefly forgot they were not invaders, or not supposed to be. That, too, will never be forgotten.”

Joe Lieberman, the prig from Connecticut, says of Iraq “History teaches us that if you leave a brutal, immoral dictator with weapons of mass destruction, eventually he will use them.” I just want to point out that Hitler had poison gas and Stalin had atomic weapons.

I’d missed that Viceroy-designate Gen. Jay Garner had signed a statement praising the “admirable restraint” of the Israeli army.