Electric underpants

A, ahem, contretemps has erupted at the G8 summit, with Jacques Chirac saying of the British, “You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland” and “The only thing that they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease.”


George suddenly realizes he forgot to change out of his lounging-around-the-Oval-Office clothes before he went out in public. (Picture via Digby)

Favorite headline of the day, from the Guardian: “Man Used Electric Underpants ‘To Fake Heart Attack.’”

In rejecting any emissions standards at all, Bush has been explaining that global warming can be overcome entirely through technological advances, which the United States will be delighted to sell the world. Because nothing says capitalism like first getting rich creating a problem, and then getting rich again trying to fix the problem you created.

Bush has a similar approach to African poverty, as George Monbiot explains in the Guardian. Under the“African Growth and Opportunity Act,” African countries would only get American help if they fully open their markets to American multinational corporations, in return for which they get limited access to the American market, limited, that is, to the shit sectors the multinationals don’t want:

Clothing factories in Africa will be allowed to sell their products to the US as long as they use “fabrics wholly formed and cut in the United States” or if they avoid direct competition with US products. The act, treading carefully around the toes of US manufacturing interests, is comically specific. Garments containing elastic strips, for example, are eligible only if the elastic is “less than 1 inch in width and used in the production of brassieres”. Even so, African countries’ preferential treatment will be terminated if it results in “a surge in imports”.

Iraq has reached the apex of freedom and liberty: Coca Cola has returned.