We wanted animal rights

Scummy Republican dirty trick, so despicable even I didn’t expect it from them: blaming John Kerry for 9/11. Evidently he was told that security at Logan Airport was crap. The author of the following has evidently been on, where else, Faux News.

Going after public officials who break the law and license gay marriages is one thing (Wonkette: but the guy who married my parents is still at large), but ministers? When measures were described as being to “ban” gay marriage, I always thought that was over-statement. Actually though, arresting ministers (2 Unitarians in upstate NY) may be the logical next step, if you’re going to mix up state and religion so thoroughly. Of course, by the same logic you should be able to require that Catholic priests perform interfaith marriages and marriages by divorced people and so on. The crime the 2 ministers (both women, I now notice) committed is performing marriages under authority vested in them by NY state, and doing so without a license. This just shows what happens when you turn ministers of religion into agents of the government and license their activities, and why marriage needs to be made a totally civil function.

Quote from a former Guantanamo detainee: “After a while, we stopped asking for human rights. We wanted animal rights.”

Several more Baptist missionaries (the branch whose former leader described Muhammed as a paedophile) have been killed in Iraq.

Article detailing how Chalabi’s group gaslighted the American media.

And Henry Waxman has a report detailing Bush admin lies about Iraq. He even graphs them month by month. Download the pdf here.

Employees of the Dept of Heimat Security, who have nothing more important to do, have been told to look out for photo ops for Bush. Tom Tomorrow: “Homeland Security, working to keep you safe from terror--one photo op at a time.”

Speaking of Potemkin photo ops, there was an event which the Post headlined “U.S. Displays Nuclear Parts Given by Libya.” No story I’ve seen suggests that they showed anything more than a bunch of pipes, and some crates which they claimed contained important stuff.

The Columbia Journalism Review is tracking down tv stations that ran the fake news segments provided by the federal government hyping Medicare, complete with fake reporters. 6 so far.

Something I missed in Bush’s sanctimonious International Women’s Week speech: he mentioned a woman who had just been released from prison by Libya. Turns out, though, the chick’s actually a dude.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2993426915&category=1469

Spain is giving citizenship or residency to spouses, children and parents of those killed or injured in the Madrid bombings, showing a generosity the US never did. 1/4 of the dead were non-Spanish.

The NYT editorial page is almost exclusively devoted to whether the elections in Spain were a victory for Al Qaida (David Brooks and Edward Luttack) or not (Paul Krugman, in a column worth reading, mostly arguing that Bush has failed to go after terrorism in any serious way). Actually we have just witnessed that most awesome of political events, a peaceful transition of power effected by democratic elections. American (and British) conservatives are acting as if it was treason for people who didn’t like the Partido Popular to vote against it, because Al Qaida didn’t like it either. Doing something because it’s the opposite of what AQ wants isn’t any less an abdication of one’s democratic rights and responsibilities than is the opposite. Last year’s rallies in Spain against Spanish participation in the war were almost as large as last week’s rallies against terrorism, and polls suggest that the war wasn’t much more popular in Spain than the train bombings. The scary thing (attention John Kerry) is that the government was on track to be reelected anyway, and only lost when it cynically lied about a terrorist attack and tried to assign blame to people it wanted to attack anyway (attention George Bush). Also, the Spanish electorate proved capable of telling the difference between the war in Iraq and the “war” on terrorism, unlike Bush and a declining number of Americans.

Now I don’t think for a minute that the Spanish people voted the way they did as a bargain with terrorists to do what the terrorists wanted in exchange for not being bombed again. But even if they did, so what? Here’s a job for someone with Lexis-Nexis and a lot of free time: go through the writings of the clowns now chastising the Spanish and find where they said that restoring democracy or preventing genocide in Rwanda/Bosnia/Haiti/Sierra Leone/etc/etc/etc wasn’t worth a single American soldier’s life. And the Bush admin, which cynically bribes voters with tax cuts at the expense of the poor, ill and disadvantaged can hardly bitch about people voting to save themselves from being blown up. Especially when Spain was participating as a COW nation (why am I still the only one using that abbreviation)(Coalition of the Willing, if you’ve forgotten) in a war that was supposed to end Islamist terrorism, not bring it to Spain for the first time.

Or, to put it more succinctly, as I did yesterday, the critics of the Spanish electorate can fuck themselves.