Tuesday, May 28, 1996

For God, Harry, tallow, gellatin and semen!

The British war on Europe continues in earnest. While a Cabinet minister back home is admitting it could take 6 years for British cattle herds to be clean of BSE, Br reps in Europe are vetoing all measures that arise. So far, in the war to get Europe to take British tallow, gellatin and semen (and you thought the War of Jenkin's Ear was silly), they have vetoed measures on AIDS, 3rd World Refugees, cutting red tape for small businesses....

So Yeltsin promised to "go to Chechnya" like Ike, before the election, but his people told him it was way too dangerous. So yesterday he signs a peace accord that settles none of the main or even the minor issues, and today to everyone's surprise he turns up in Chechnya, not least surprise of the Chechen leaders and officials who are still in Moscow. Repeat: who are still in Moscow, and suddenly realizing that they have become in effect hostages for Yeltsin's safety. This isn't my paranoia, this is the London Times. What a sneaky little fucker Yeltsin is!

Wednesday, May 22, 1996

Summary of Romer v. Evans Decision (fwd)

My impression is that this decision is even narrower than we had guessed, that it was more the pre-emption of future political processes that was the problem for the Court.

Scalia's dissent was especially apalling, as per usual. I liked his approving reference to Kulturkampf. I'd have stayed away from the German terminology if I were him....

John Major formed a beef war cabinet today. The man thinks that trying to force his beef down the throats of hapless Europeans (British beef, you'll never get better) is going to be his Falklands.

Saturday, May 18, 1996

Clinton was on McNeil-Lehrer (or whatever) today talking about how uniforms cut down violence in schools. Yeah, right, like it worked in the post office (that's someone else's joke), and like the Chief of Naval Operations didn't just die over some jewelry, just like they do in South-Central LA (that's mine).

A true Clinton appointee, United States Attorney for Southern Florida Kendall Coffey, resigns after getting into a fight in a bar with a topless dancer, biting her on the arm.

Warren Christopher wants to have regular Cabinet-level meetings with the Chinese. Great, appeasement on the installment plan.

Finally, a physicist got a postmodern deconstructionist spoof published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was passed by 6 editors who didn't know what that meant either. The article, evidently modeled after a real trend towards lit crit deconstruction of
physics just like they do for literature, says that "physical `reality', no less than social `reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific `knowledge', far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations fo the culture that produced it." Basically, gravity, and pi, are just what the dominant culture chooses to believe.

Who needs sitcoms when you have the New York Times?

Wednesday, May 15, 1996

Yes it hurt. Yes it worked

James Miller III, Reagan's budget director, who evidently thinks that that is a qualification for higher office, running against John Warner for the Republican nomination for Senate from Virginia, visits so many gun shows that his staff have to make sure he doesn't violate the state's one gun per month law.

Speaking of idiots in the South, since the Olympics committee re-routed the Olympic torch route away from Newt's Cobb county because of its 1993 anti-homosexual ordinance, Spartanburgh (!) SC, on the new route, has decided that a bunch of foreigners won't push them around, and passed their own anti-gay ordinance for no other reason than to annoy the Olympics. Since the Olympics originated in a bunch of Greeks watching a bunch of naked Greek guys run around sweating, I don't know what they're complaining about. The whole torch thing only goes back to 1936 anyway, when Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl thought it would look neat (especially if they were naked).

New Tory party ad campaign: "Yes it hurt. Yes it worked."

De Klerk left the South African government, claiming that the ANC was racist.

The latest victim of the Yugoslav break-up: the language of
Serbo-Croatian. The Bosnian Muslims are bringing in Arabic words, while Croatians are reviving 15th century words and voting on a law on the Quebec model. President Tudjman personally came up with new tennis terms, but forgot when meeting Clinton that he was supposed to be sretan (happy) to meet him, not srecan (happy). Croatian tv edited it out.

Sigh.

Saturday, May 11, 1996

NY Times headline: "Dole attacks Clinton Asia policy although he supports part of it", and actual Dole quote: "As we have seen in Bosnia, Iran, Cuba and elsewhere, when President Clinton is faced with a fork in the foreign policy road, he takes it." (huh?)

Or in this case, chop sticks presumably.

Speaking of which, the US decision not to punish China as required by law for selling nuclear equipment to Pakistan is based on our belief that they were telling the truth. And what they said, that we believed, is that the transfer never happened, that the government didn't know that it had happened, and that it wouldn't happen again.

In return, they promise to believe that Clinton didn't inhale.

If Clinton really believes all that, then he has passed the qualifying test for jury duty in LA.

Thursday, May 02, 1996

Rep. Wes Cooley, arch anti-environmentalist Republican from eastern Oregon, class of 1994, who called Federal Fish and Wildlife Service agents a Gestapo & told a wildlife conservationist during Congressional hearings not to set foot in Oregon, who mistook an April Fools story for real and made a speech about it, then threatened to punch (his office claims whip, so that's all right then) the (6-month pregnant) Oregonian reporter who questioned him about it, is in almost as much
trouble as I am trying to figure out how to end this sentence before it goes on too long. He either lied in the 1994 voters' pamphlet, a federal crime known as voter fraud, about being married, or he and his wife have been fraudulently collecting collecting her 1st husband's death benefits from the Marine Corps. Not that fraud would be new to him. He collects
a tax break for his farm although he does not farm there, he manufactures vitamins (from snake oil, no doubt). Also on the voters' pamphlet, he claimed to have been in Phi Beta Kappa. Well, maybe it was Alpha Beta Epsilon.... And said he'd served in Korea. Then he said he was doing secret demolition work and wasn't allowed to talk about it. Then he admitted he was lying.

And he didn't even make the Progressive's 10 stupidest Congresscritters list a few months back.

Wednesday, May 01, 1996

That'll show him!

REUTERS
KEY WEST, Fla. A tiny flotilla of Cuban exiles sailed toward international waters near Cuba Wednesday to toss flowers and human rights pamphlets into the sea in protest against Fidel Castro's May Day celebration.
Ooooo, soggy pamphlets. Castro must be shaking in his boots....