On C-SPAN today I saw some of Bush’s latest speech calling for renewal of every last creepy provision of the PATRIOT Act. He said this was “no time to roll back good laws”. He called the Act “good” twice, and while that may mean he simply has a diminutive vocabulary (as I just found out while trying to locate the quote, he used the word good a goodly number of times in the course of the speech), it’s not really a word you’d expect even the Act’s supporters to apply to it. It infringes on people’s freedoms and privacies, so you might argue that it’s a necessary evil, but a positive good?
So two Sunnis on the drafting committee for the Iraqi constitution were assassinated, four others have quit in protest/fear, but the head of the committee says everything is “on schedule.” Sure, if the schedule said, “Tuesday: shoot Sunnis.” Which it probably did. Given that the drafters have been quietly dismantling women’s freedoms, and threatening to do the same to Kurdish autonomy, I’m happy to see the process fail completely.
A German man lost a court case in which he demanded the state provide him a toupee, claiming discrimination since the state insurance system would provide a wig for a bald woman. The court ruled that the state need pay only “when a bald head disfigures a person so severely that they would be ostracised from public life. That is not the case with men.” Indeed.
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