Americans don't know....

Yesterday I mentioned that Bush avoids actual individual soldiers, especially dead or wounded ones, but I didn’t think to connect it with The Photo last week of Bush signing the “partial-birth abortion” ban with nary a woman in sight (unless you count Rick Santorum).

An interesting Guardian column on the state visit of Bush to Britain. No one there will even admit to having invited him, and he does seem actually to have invited himself. Like the aircraft carrier, he decided pictures of himself and the queen would make him look like a world leader in his campaign ads. Problem is: “Americans don't know shit. They're not going to recognise the prime minister of the Philippines. The only foreign leaders they could pick out are the Queen of England and the Pope.” (That was an American speaking.)

Protesters are planning--and I can’t for the life of me think why no one has done this before--to topple a giant effigy of Bush, in Trafalgar Square.

On the Bush strategy to erode abortion rights.

An Ellen Goodman piece with fewer facts but more outrage.

The Israeli High Court reverses a ban on the film “Jenin, Jenin,” about the Jenin massacre, which is also a reversal of its statement in April that “The right of expression exists in full force even when a differing viewpoint is forbidden due to a legislative arrangement.”

Dunno if the right of expression exists in full force in Greece, but a tv station was fined $100,000 for showing two men kissing.

The Resistance manages to kill a dozen Italian Carbinieri, who were in Iraq to bring the benefits of Italian policing to the benighted natives.

And the US evidently plans to start running away, after all, and turn over power to any Iraqi who wants it. Which I believe is the plan we made fun of France for suggesting two months ago. This is serious chicken-with-its-head-cut-off time, as you can tell by the number of ridiculous plans being bandied about. Hand power to one leader, as in Afghanistan. Who? Ok, speed up election to a constitutional assembly. Which would entail running an election during the middle of a war, and who would man the polling booths, and there isn’t an electoral registrar; there is, in other words, none of the infrastructure that would make an election anything other than a joke.