Khrushchev’s son has passed his citizenship test, missing only the question on what sort of government the US has. I know you’re all waiting with bated breath, so the answer is evidently supposed to be: a democracy.

Another war ends and guess what, the Pentagon was wildly over-optimistic about its successes again. Who’da thunk it? NATO bombing destroyed all of Yugoslavia’s tanks except for, um, those 250 that rolled out of Kosovo. Evidently we took out a lot of cardboard tanks.

The Village Voice has a guide to the many many scandals of Hillary Clinton. Remember the White House travel office? Castle Grande? The $100,000 won in a single day playing the cattle futures? Channeling Eleanor Roosevelt?

Speaking of families with peculiar finances, what is it with the Bushes? Jeb Bush’s wife spent $20,000 on a little shopping spree in Paris and then lied to Customs. Whatever happened to Neil Bush, anyway? Or Roger Clinton? And how did Reagan ever get to be president without an embarrassing brother? Dubya’s finances could use a little wholesome sunshine themselves. Although he insists that since being born in the family compound on Third Base he never actually benefited from having well-connected relatives, it seems that his oil skills were minuscule, and he was paid a suspicious amount of money for his involvement in that, um, what, football team? basketball? Another one of those deals where the sales tax got put up so that investors like Dubya could walk away with a fortune.

The Supreme Court has released a raft of silly decisions this week. Under the guise of “federalism,” states evidently have complete sovereign immunity to break any law they feel like. Death penalty trials can be shoddier than ever, with juries given inaccurate or non-existent instructions on the alternatives if they deadlock. Also, in the same case the Supes ruled on whether the 2 necessary aggravating factors required for the death penalty can be basically the same one. Actually, the two were “the victim was a chick” and “her family liked her”, neither of which seem to me to count, unless you admit that some people have more legal protection than others and accept as mitigating factors “the victim was only a black person” and “he was a shit anyway”. The case was from Texas, where “he needed killing” is considered a defense, which is about all you can expect for the $500 or so most counties allocate for the defense in criminal cases. Dubya just vetoed a bill that would have provided a lawyer within 20 days of arrest (everywhere else it’s 72 hours).

Well, I'd like to think it was all about something

An e-mail making the rounds asks the disturbing question “What if the hokey pokey *is* what it’s all about?”

The one thing I don’t think the NY Times, which has been coming woefully inadequate over the last few years in providing maps in general, has bothered showing is a map of the zones in Kosovo. If they did, we might have to ask the question, why were the French given the zone with the highest concentration of Serbs? The French are the most pro-Serb and the least willing to do anything aggressive. As the ethnic Serbs are creating no-go areas in the north, the French are standing around and watching, saying that ethnic separation is a good thing. I have to assume that’s NATO policy as well. Indeed, they seem to be encouraging the Serbs to return immediately (as is Milosevic, who has difficulty declaring victory with all these refugees hanging around), but the Albanians to wait a couple of weeks while NATO futzes around with mines. If the Serbs succeed in grabbing and walling off the north, with all the mines (um, mine mines, not landmines) and other economic resources, the Kosovars have much less of an economic base and are therefore less likely to declare independence, at least I think that must be the reasoning.

A story in the Sunday NY Times on the Son of Sam says that he is now a mental health peer counsellor at his prison.

Stalin lives, and he’s photographing royal wedding! In the official pictures of the Prince Edward-Sophie Rhys whatever wedding, which had a smaller audience share than the average Eastender’s episode, but still screwed up my tv schedule all weekend, one picture had Prince William not smiling until they digitally stuck his head from another picture in it. Creepy. As her wedding present, Queen Elizabeth, rather than give one of those $20,000 tea pots on the register, gave them a couple of new titles. Otherwise, Sophie would evidently have been known as Princess Edward.

The Joint Military Intelligence College is offering a Masters degree in intelligence. I could tell you what my dissertation was about, but then I’d have to kill you.

Bumper sticker seen in Berkeley: I (heart) Big Brother

Fortune cookie: “You have an unusual magnetic personality. Be aware of your polarity.” If I remember my high school physics correctly, that means a fortune cookie just told me that I’m repulsive.

Stupidest idea of the week: The Godfather IV, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (as Sonny Corleone, formerly James Caan, who found out what happens when you don’t have exact change in the exact change lane).

Netanyahu declares that the Israeli people are just ungrateful bastards who won’t have him to kick around anymore. He also accuses the Labor government of being run by “rich industrialists and capitalist fat cats.” In other words, Jews.

Some doctors in Britain are offering aversion therapy to “cure” homosexuality on the National Health.

Speaking of which, Prince Edward got married today. He had trouble getting Sophie’s finger into the ring, which is probably a metaphor.

Serbia seems to have taken all its Kosovar political prisoners with it when it left. You’d like to think NATO would have noticed that. But then, while British troops were escorting Serbs out of Kosovo, the Serbs actually stopped to burn a few buildings.

Sensitive headline of the week: “Ageism Code Condemned as Toothless” London Times.

The longest-serving political party leader, Lord Screaming Sutch of the Monster Raving Loonie Party, is dead, evidently of suicide, at 58.

[Hello to Googlers in 2005: you are here because you misspelled Loony, as I did when I wrote this post. If you are looking for the 2005 Monster Raving Loony Party manifesto, click here.]

In what I can only assume is a tribute, Blair responds to the crushing defeat at the European elections by reinstating plans to ban fox-hunting.

Icky Kosovo story of the week: a family returned to their home to find that Serb soldiers had been using it to rape women. They had a large pile of underwear to burn.

“I’m dead, Jim”: DeForrest Kelley put on his red shirt yesterday.

The German chancellor’s brother is on the dole.

Prince Charles met the Artist Formerly Known as Prince this week. It is not known what they talked about.

Well, I tried to give the Russians the benefit of the doubt and assumed yesterday that the troops really did move into Kosovo on their own accord (not that a military that out of control would be much less scary), but I was wrong. Today their commander was promoted. And Kremlin finally admits that Yeltsin gave the order. It’s the sneakiness of the whole thing that’s the worst aspect, along with the childishness. All the lying and the denying and stalling, and pretending that Yeltsin was asleep and couldn’t be called to the Batphone.

Please someone tell me that we’re not starting one of those Cold War races for territory again. Evidently no one, including in Moscow, thought that the Russian troops were just going to storm into Kosovo like that. Did no one notice that in all the UN talk, the Russians never agreed to be ordered around by NATO or even coordinate, and that their proposal of last week to establish zones of occupation in Kosovo, which I commented at the time (whether in e-mail form or not I can’t remember) was wonderfully retro (no doubt Russia’s tribute to the new Austin Powers movie), was simply going to be put into effect on the ground unilaterally.

Jacques Chirac is claiming to have personally given approval or vetoed every one of the 22,000 NATO bombing runs, and saved the historic bridges of Belgrade and stopped NATO doing a lot more damage to Montenegro.

I can’t wait to see what a UN protectorate actually looks like. Presumably it gets to set its own tax rates and everything. Does the UN actually get to vote on whether the Kosovars get to vote for an elected assembly, and if so, whether refugees not in the country get to vote?

John Cleese has signed on to play George Washington in a movie directed by Ben Stiller.

Justice Antonin Scalia issues his silliest opinion since the last one he wrote. In saying why he thought Chicago police should have been able to order loitering people who might or might not be gang members and might or might not have a reason for loitering, to move or be arrested, he quotes large chunks of West Side Story. If this is not the first Supreme Court opinion to contain the words “Gee, Officer Krupke, krup you,” I don’t want to know about it.

Scalia, I just met a jerk named Scalia.

Hillary Clinton & such

The Daily Telegraph, which often gets American things wrong, seems to think that Hillary faces a constitutional problem in holding an executive branch office and becoming Senator (if she were elected, these would overlap for 17 days). Has anyone else heard anything along these lines? I doubt the Constitution had the office of First Lady in mind, but it is a fact that the First Lady has an office and staff paid for by the taxpayers, so she is exercising some sort of Executive branch function. Of course there is one obvious solution...divorce Bill.

The London Times says that the Dark Ages were brought on by ivory. In the 6th century ivory ships brought the Black Death from Zimbabwe.

The Wash Post says that 1% of US gun dealers sold 45% of the guns used in crime last year.

Virgin Atlantic Airlines is installing private cabins. I think they were tired of catching people initiating each other into the Mile High Club in the bathrooms.

If they’re Greek, how about some hemlock?

It has been pointed out to me that today’s McNeil-Lehrer featured a segment on boozing on campus that at one point mentioned an association of sororities which were “substance-free”--as if they were ever anything else.

Bringing crap to Newcastle: McDonald’s is to start selling pizza in its restaurants in Italy.

The death penalty in Russia is ended.

In the most important news of the week that you won’t read much about and couldn’t understand if you did, the euro is beginning to collapse.

And the United Nations was abolished today. You may not have noticed, but that was certainly the implication of the peace agreement with Serbia, which specifically says that the occupation force will have “NATO at its core”. Ignore the presence of Russian and other non-NATO troops; they are window dressing, and in the absence of proper UN action they too are illegal. The occupation will have force behind it, not law. That it may have morality behind it as well is to some extent beside the point. Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia in order to protect the poor Sudeten Germans. The US invaded Panama because some American woman got felt up, or something like that. In the absence of international law, there is always someone with a good excuse for military action. So all hail NATO, the new world’s policeman, when and where it feels like. Since this precise agreement could have been come to before the bombing started if the US was willing to accept a UN rather than NATO occupation, or a month ago if it had been willing to stop bombing, who is to say that the real purpose was not to give an excuse for the continued existence of NATO.

The inventor of the hovercraft died today. Last week it was the inventor of nylon, and the inventor of trucks going beep beep beep when they back up.

The Ku Klux Klan is starting up in Australia. Throw another cross on the fire, cobber.

Friday is the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The square is closed for renovations and curiously enough all western tv stations were taken off the air for maintenance. So who was that guy who stood in front of that column of tanks? We still don’t know.

NATO has been a busy little beaver this weekend, hitting a hospital, an old folks’ home, an apartment building, and a crowded bridge. Incidentally, under the War Powers Act, which is still the law of the land, this war actually ended last Tuesday. You’d think after all these accidents, NATO would change its tactics, and it has: it’s stopped apologizing. NATO (motto: it’s war, watcha gonna do?) bombed a bridge that even if it were a legitimate military target, could have been hit some other time than in broad daylight on market day, if it cared in the slightest about civilian damage. Now I can remember when the Israelis were roundly condemned, and justly so, for using cluster bombs on Lebanon, nasty and extremely indiscriminate little fuckers. NATO is using the same bombs with impunity. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, has practically surrendered, agreeing to a military occupation of the whole country with a NATO component, but it would prefer the troops have a non-NATO commander. Since there is no legal basis whatsoever for NATO to occupy a whole country, you’d think they’d jump at the chance to pass the buck. Of course it would be easier to feel sympathy for the Serbs if just once in all those interviews you’ve read and heard, had even one Serb said “It’s awful what our government is doing to the Kosovans, but bombing us isn’t nice either.”

Netanyahu, who amazingly is still in power, takes the opportunity to expand a West Bank settlement. Barak (and isn’t Barak a perfect name for a Klingon?) is still trying to put together a coalition that doesn’t involve #3 party Shas (motto: Who’s a black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks? SHAS!).

When the Turks kidnapped Ocalan, I said that he had obviously been drugged to the gills. On the other hand, given his plea in court to arrange a complete surrender of the Kurds if they wouldn’t hang him, maybe he’s just a coward.

Arkansas voters turn down a 1 cent sales tax increase to fund the Clinton presidential library, in the same week that Hillary announces plans never to set foot in Arkansas again if she can possibly help it.

A woman is to go on trial in Italy for not having sex with her husband.

A school has announced a weapons amnesty for the turning in of guns and knives. The school is Eton, in which an air gun was recently fired. The school officials are worried that Prince William and Harry’s secret service will see a weapon and blow away the heir to a dukedom.

An article in the Washington Post today (Thursday) details some of the sillier cases of school district over-reactions since Columbine. Worth reading. Similarly, Salon takes the WB to task for cancelling the season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Today NATO is to start bombing Serb telephone and computer centers. According to Tom Hayden (also in Salon), the US ranks 26th in countries taking Kosovo refugees. I know that Britain (22nd) has such stringent standards that the planes bringing refugees to Britain are actually arriving with empty seats.

Speaking of US bombing, we killed a kid yesterday. In Vietnam, where an unexploded bomb exploded. Didn’t see a single mention in the Washington Post or the NY Times.

Yesterday on McNeil-Lehrer saw Congresscritters Cox and Dicks (Dix?) talking about the penetration of nuclear labs. And when Cox and Dicks talk about penetration....

Of course you can hardly blame China for espionage, unless you think the US doesn’t spy on China at all. You can, however, blame them for spreading nuclear technology. It’s bad enough they have it, but they also sold it to Pakistan, which coincidentally may be about to enter its semi-annual war with India over Kashmir.

The Dolly the sheep cloning may not have been so successful after all; she may have been born middle-aged on the cellular level.

The Welsh Assembly opened today. The house is not going to have the pomp and tradition we’re used to from the House of Commons, I’m afraid. Today one member referred to another as the “honourable member” from wherever. The speaker reminded him that there are no honorable members here.

The Louisiana Senate votes to require elementary school students to say Yes ma’am and yes sir and no ma’am and no sir to their teachers. An armed society is a polite society. Of course it’s Louisiana, so a lot of the 6th graders are older than the teachers.

Bumper sticker seen in Berkeley: Who died and made you Darth Vader? I’d like to point out that this week saw the removal from power of the two world leaders with the names that were the most fun to say: Bibi Netanyahu and Sitiveni Rabuka of Fiji. Coincidentally, they were both shits. In breast reduction surgery news, two stories from the London Times. A Manchester woman police constable had hers done in order to fit comfortably into the body armor they have to wear all the time now. The force does seem to have made every effort to help with this first, by the way. (Actually, Dave Barry’s column last week mentioned that the Canadians were trying to develop a combat bra, whatever that means) The second story wins my award for best headline of the week: News Presenter to Have Breasts Removed on TV. The size of the Yugoslav military in Kosovo is precisely the same as it was 8 weeks ago. With reports of desertions on their side, and German opposition on ours, it remains to be seen who will fall apart first. It might go a long way to a solution if the US stopped insisting that any occupying force has to be NATO. The NATO invasion was always illegal under international law and no country should have to legitimize such an occupation. And it will be an occupation, and extend to all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. If you haven’t seen a map lately, Kosovo is surrounded by Yugoslavia. Thus the Rambouille accord gave NATO troops permission to move anywhere in Yugoslavia unhindered, and why Yeltsin’s statement that NATO wished to make all of Yugoslavia a protectorate (rather than just Kosovo), which sounded to me at first like another Yeltsinism, was in fact accurate.

So what happened in the world while I was gone? Well, I only had the L.A. Times, which is fewer steps up the evolutionary ladder from the SF Chronicle than it used to be, so I don’t really know. My favorite Times headline was “Man with One Leg, Not Accepted by LAPD, Sues”. You laugh, but he passed the physical tests. Turkey dealt with the new woman MP who insists on wearing Islamic headgear by revoking her citizenship. NATO bombed a bunch more refugees and the Chinese embassy, notably the only time it really took credit for its own accidents. This week it is saying that the Serbs are to blame for the refugees our bombs killed because they were, allegedly, used as human shields. “Stop hiding behind those refugees so we can bomb you from the safety of our airplanes.”

The D’s & R’s of California, after ordering the voters of the state to take back the open primaries and failing, have decided to simply ignore them, taking separate counts according to party affiliation. That is not what we voted for, twice.

Milosevic offered to pull half his troops out of Kosovo. The US called it a half measure. Duh.

The US, never learning from its past mistakes, is to train the Indonesian police in riot control. One of the biggest under-reported stories of the last few years is how the US has gone back to this sort of thing, especially in Latin America under cover of the “drug war”. In just this way, the US trained the security forces of the juntas in the 1970s and the
Central American death squads in the 1980s.

The Kuwaiti Parliament is dissolved because the government printed some Korans with typos.

While I was gone, Russia got a new prime minister, a man whose university thesis was on The Ideology of Firemen. And speaking of death squads, Israel’s new prime minister is famous for having led revenge attacks on Palestinians in the 1970s, wearing a dress and disguised as a woman. When all the news reports refer to him as Israel’s most decorated general, I think they mean best accessorized.

A deer almost stepped on my cat today.

Speaking of animals, the fields along I-5 are getting increasingly exotic. On this trip, in addition to the ostriches I’ve noticed before, I saw llamas. I think it’s becoming the world’s longest, narrowest petting zoo.

In Saugus, CA, a 13-year old was given a bag of marijuana by a friend. He took it to his parents who took it to the police, presumably exactly what he was supposed to do. But since he was given it on school property and there is a zero tolerance rule, he has been suspended and transferred to a different school.

I said some time ago that Gen. Wesley Clark would turn out to be a hawk, given that he had a wimpy name that must have resulted in his getting frequently beaten up as a kid, and I was right, wasn’t I? Well, I saw the Star Wars movie (superb special effects, shame about the script) and young Anniken Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, is called by the abbreviation “Annie”.

So back to Kosovo. Yesterday I was thinking that Milosevic may have done the future state of world politics a favor by responding to NATO’s demand that he jump not with “How high?” but with “No.” Today, though, everyone is praising the efficacy of air power without ground troops, and that doesn’t bode so well. Before bowing down before the almighty bomber, it might be remembered that NATO not only killed an estimated 1,200 civilians through accidents but bombed several different whole other countries accidentally, to say nothing of the Chinese embassy. Also, military analysis suggests that the much greater military efficacy of bombing in recent days was due to the fact that there was in fact a ground force in the field, a little thing called the KLA, which a) told NATO where the appropriate targets were, and b) drove Serb soldiers and tanks and such out from under cover so that they could be bombed. Which suggests that simply arming the KLA earlier would have been a better strategy than indiscriminately bombing every farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in Yugoslavia. If I see one more story saying that Clinton was really a military genius after all, I may puke. Here is the man who ruled out ground forces, making it necessary to bomb every farmhouse etc in order to reverse the impression that he really wasn’t serious, who never seriously tried to negotiate or any other non-military method, who touted the Apache helicopters as the magic bullet to win the war, then marched them to the top of the hill and marched them down again....

What must it feel like to be bombed by a country that doesn’t change its bombing tactics one iota when it’s hitting hospitals, old age homes etc etc on a daily basis, that is waging what feels like total war from the ground but is an unimportant sideshow on the other side, which never so much as figured out how one pronounces Kosovo, and which is willing to sacrifice thousands of Serb and Kosovar civilians to the cause but not a single US soldier? If Milosevic had had any understanding of the US psyche, he wouldn’t have had those 3 US soldiers taken prisoner, he’d have made sure they were found riddled with bullets on the wrong side of the border.

And speaking of things that piss me off, have you noticed the pull-quote in the ads for the movie The Thirteenth Floor in which the movie is supposed to be a cross between “Phillip K. Dick” and Orson Welles? What they mean is not the novelist Philip K. Dick, who they have probably never read, but the movie Total Recall, which similarly misspelled the author’s name in its credits (the movie didn’t really bear any resemblance to anything Dick wrote, but it’s common practice to buy the rights to something in order to immunize yourself from people claiming you plagiarized the script they’ve been circulating for years). (Speaking of which, I once wrote “boom” on a piece of paper in 1970, so I want 10% of the gross of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace based on their theft of my intellectual property.

As long as I’m rambling, there is nothing even vaguely resembling a phantom menace in the movie. I know that Lucas was really pissed off when Reagan’s missile defense program started being called Star Wars and I think this title is just to make sure that whenever a politician calls for Star Wars, an opponent can say something about it offering protection only from a phantom menace.

The Washington Post has articles about one-man vast right wing conspiracy Richard Mellon Scaife in the Sunday and Monday papers (still available at least until Tuesday’s paper comes on line).

Before Jesse Jackson went to Belgrade I was wondering why the Clinton admin was so vehemently opposing a trip that I figured had a good chance to get the hostages/kidnap victims/POWs (the Pentagon never really did get its story straight on that one or decide on what side of the border they were patrolling, did it?). And then I saw Jackson meeting with Milosevic and talking about giving peace a chance and the lion lying down with the lamb (London Times comment: some lion! some lamb!) and I could see what the problem might be. Am I right that Jesse only called for a cease-fire after his mission had succeeded? did he really negotiate his call for peace? I’m certainly not one to call a traitor someone who questions American foreign policy, for obvious reasons, but this is the sort of behaviour that turned Jane Fonda into Hanoi Jane and Lord Haw Haw into a corpse.

Queer as a $5 bill: according to Larry Kramer, Abraham Lincoln was gay. I don’t have anything to say about that, but that $5 bill joke did spring to mind.

The US unfreezes the assets of the guy who owned the chemical factory in Sudan that the US bombed, officially admitting to being unable to prove any terrorist connection for him or chemical warfare capability for the factory. I predict that this story will be completely ignored.

Which should serve as a warning for the Kosovars, who might be tempted to believe that after Clinton declares victory and goes home, that they might have some level of protection when Milosevic turns nasty again. Americans have the attention span of my cat, who I expect will not even recognize me when I return in two weeks. Note, for example, the engrossed attention not given to the elections in Panama this week, a country I believe the US has invaded more than a few times. The widow of a former president was elected president. He served three incomplete terms, being deposed by coups all three times. Her opponent was the son of a coup leader. Another example: tomorrow’s Washington Post notes that while the US claimed as one of its reasons for invading Haiti five years back that its generals were engaged in drug trafficking, the amount of cocaine funneled through Haiti has skyrocketed since then, now being about 1/5.

The Supreme Court by 9-0 says that the US can deport political refugees who have also committed non-political crimes, even if they will be persecuted, tortured or murdered in their home countries. It says that these matters are really none of the business of any courts, but that the executive “knows best” how to deal with issues that affect international relations. It is now official: human rights are a bargaining chip, not an absolute right.

Battle of the great thinkers: Dan Quayle vs. me

Quayle’s answer to Littleton: “The parents need to get in the children’s face when they raise them,” he said on “Crossfire.” “You’re not there to be just the child’s best friend, you’re there as a parent ... And if you see a sawed-off shotgun or whatever else laying around the house, take it away.”

My own answer: those black trenchcoats concealed the shotguns, but even regular clothes can conceal a handgun. Clinton’s been pushing school uniforms, but he just doesn’t go far enough. My idea: total nudity. No concealed weapons, no designer clothes. As with so many other innovative educational concepts, this one was pioneered in Berkeley. Come back, Naked Guy, all is forgiven!

I thought the US military was supposed to be preventing the war spreading throughout the Balkans, but a missile accidentally takes out a house in Bulgaria. Not the first time we’ve bombed the wrong country by mistake recently.

A school shooting in Canada: just what the NRA was praying for.

A school district in LA expels a student for no other reason than that he wears a trenchcoat. His mother bought it for him.

Bees are being trained to detect landmines. Really.

The Marines rejected one of the Littleton massacrers because he once took psychiatric medication. Evidently his criminal record was either unnoticed or a plus.

The deputy prime minister of either Serbia or Yugoslavia (tch tch to the London Times for that ambiguity) goes on to tv to tell the government to stop lying to the people. The tv station is shortly afterwards taken over by the army. I take it that would be a “no.”

So NATO’s blockade will not take the form of actually stopping any tankers that don’t want to be stopped from going to Yugoslavia. But they will stop and search them. A typical Clinton compromise: it’s still offensive to principle, illegal under international law, and an act of war, but totally ineffective. Incidentally, while the EU made it illegal to sell oil to Yugoslavia, but the US hasn’t and doesn’t plan to, and may still be doing so. At any rate, Texaco was still delivering oil two weeks into the air war.

For the NATO meeting, Clinton evidently took Tony Blair aside and told him to stop pushing for a ground war in public (according to the Washington Post and denied by Blair, who would, wouldn’t he?). The official line is that they’ve learned from the mistake of Clinton’s promising no ground troops and will no longer discuss tactics in public. So if a ground war is started, it will be with no advanced discussion. What would a democracy do?

Czech tv weather forecasters are now naked. Or rather, start out naked, and put on (slowly) the amount of clothes appropriate to the next day’s weather conditions.

For its 50th anniversary, NATO has decided to threaten acts of war against Russia. It intends to implement an illegal blockade of Serbia (unless there was a UN vote I missed) that Russia does not intend to honor. They’re talking Cuban Missile Crisis. How did NATO go from a defensive body to this sort of thing without any public discussion whatsoever? And if its purpose is being rewritten, don’t all the NATO treaties have to be re-ratified?

Turned on the car radio yesterday and heard Clinton talking about violence. It took a minute of listening to ascertain whether he was speaking about Littleton or Kosovo. In these times, I suppose the son of an Air Force pilot (as one of the Littleton trenchcoaters was) could be excused for thinking that violence was the approved method of dealing with people one does not like. Clinton continues to attack youth culture (as an Elvis wannabe and sax player himself, he knows that culture shouldn’t be about violence, it should be about sex), and, coincidentally, bombs the Serb state tv station off the air.

Since reunification Germany has been prosecuting East German border guards and others for performing their duties as ordered by their government. Today, oddly enough, they convict a German for killing a border guard while escaping East Germany in 1962. He gets a suspended sentence.

The great event in Serb history was their defeat by the Turks in 1389. The Serbs like to celebrate that defeat the way normal countries celebrate victories. After the battle, when Serb knights were declaring their allegiance to the sultan, one leaped up and stabbed him in the neck.

Colombine and masturbation

NATO finally blows up Serb tv stations, right in the middle of "The Erotic Adventures of Bill Clinton," too.

Secretary of Defense Cohen says that the Apache helicopters are not a silver bullet. And stop calling him kemosabe.

Next year what say we just give Hitler a cake or something. A few days ago I was reading an article about fears of masturbation in Victorian England (hey, it’s what I do. Read articles, I mean.) In those pre-Freudian times, all children were considered to be naturally innocent of sexuality, so the Vics developed elaborate theories about children being taught to masturbate by servants who used it to get babies to sleep, or schoolmates, or strange people they met in railway stations who showed them one dirty photograph, sending them into a downward spiral of masturbation ending in drooling imbecility (drooling imbecility is a quote).

So, about the Colorado thing: it ain’t the internet, Leonardo diCaprio movies (although I think Leo should be thrown in jail just on general principles), Marilyn Manson, etc. Youth culture doesn’t kill people, youths kill people. Victorian children were capable of discovering masturbation all by themselves, and late millennial children do not have to be taught the idea of blowing up their high schools and killing the other kids. You could take a 15-year old from the deepest part of the Amazonian rain forest, drop him in an American high school, and a week later he’d be having fantasies about blow guns.

Weird medicine: in Britain a 21-month year old is stretched via a balloon to make his abdomen large enough to accommodate a liver and bowel transplant from a 9-year old 3 times his size.

A pedal-operated tv has been invented, to solve the problem of fat kids.

There was a great recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon, which those of you with better browsers than mine can find on the Web, in which Iowa launches air strikes (crop dusters) on New York City, where the security forces are terrorizing the ethnic poor. Iowans however remain opposed to the idea of ground troops. “My uncle went there once--and got lost on the subway for three days.”

Another day, another NATO story on the bombing of the convoys of civilians 5 days ago. They now admit to 2 bombings, say there were 14 planes involved, that British Harriers had already seen the convoy and reported that it was civilian, but no one passed the information on (that’s the problem when one of the NATO countries forgets that there are other countries in NATO), but, and here is the impressive part, still doesn’t admit that the bombings necessarily killed anyone. They’re still going with that Serbs-machine-gunned-the-survivors story. The problem with the last five days of ass-covering is that when NATO announces, oh, say, that the Serbs have probably killed at least 100,000 Albanians, it’s hard to take them terribly seriously. Still, there’s rarely a downside to lying to the media. No one seems to be bringing up the stories George Bush used to tell about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, babies ripped from incubators and so forth. Meanwhile, Yugoslav media have been broadcasting a faked tape of the cockpit conversation of the pilots on that mission, saying he just saw tractors and being told to bomb anyway. I’m told it’s jolly good drama. In their version, the Serbs get to shoot down a plane. “Eject eject eject!” the pilot is heard to yell.

An article in the Village Voice suggests that Serbia thought it was given the green light last year when US special envoy Robert Gelbard went to the Balkans and called the KLA terrorists.

After 3 days of conflicting stories about bombing the refugees, NATO abruptly cancels a briefing at which they were supposed to show the footage taken by the plane itself, and then refuses to say anything more on the subject because NATO is “moving on.” Is that anything like achieving closure?

So yesterday after NATO planes attacked a convoy of refugees, the NATO commander claimed to have evidence that it was actually Serb soldiers who fired at the refugees. A day and a half later, we know that this was not true. Indeed, there were no soldiers and no tanks in that convoy. So what evidence was that, Wesley? Making a mistake is one thing, but if someone says he has evidence when he can’t have, some questions need to be asked, that no one seems to be asking.

In a gesture of goodwill, the Indian government has released a peregrine falcon arrested, if that’s the word, on suspicion of spying for Pakistan.

The latest unlikely-but-you-wouldn’t-put-it-past-them rumor out of Kosovo is that the Serbs are using Kosovars as living blood banks.

A complaint was submitted to the British Press Complaints Commission for harassment by a Mr. Slobodan Milosevic of Ilford (no relation).

An interesting article on Danforth Quayle in the Wednesday Washington Post. It says he doesn’t see himself the way everyone else in the universe does. You have to read it to catch a glimpse into a universe where Quayle is a winner and a hero. And Mr. Spock has a goatee.

Elsewhere in the Post, Al Kamen makes fun of Henry Kissinger for going on all the talk shows complaining about the lack of an exit strategy for Kosovo, and brings up Vietnamization. I hereby propose my own version of Vietnamization: any politician of a certain age who is a hawk now but avoided the draft back then is given bayonet and is dropped from an airplane into Beograde.

I haven’t decided on whether to give them parachutes first.

The briefing on how it was possible to blow up a passenger train was rather interesting. OK, by the time the pilot saw the train, he had already fired the first rocket, got that. Um, and then he turned around and took a second shot at the bridge, and hit the train again.

So Jack Kevorkian is sentenced to 10 to 25. A judge with a sense of humor would have sentenced him to life.

Why the sun has set on the Empire

Today’s London Times has an article on the state of the education system. Well fuck that. I have distilled the article down to the important information: funny mistakes on the GSCE tests.


A MYTH is a female moth and Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak,

“Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure - he invented cigarettes and started smoking.”

“Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100ft clipper.”

“Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they wrote in hydraulics,”

“Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul,”

“Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf - he was so deaf he wrote loud music,”

“The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.”

“In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits and threw the java,”

“Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock - after his death his career suffered a dramatic decline,”

“Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments,”

“Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.”

Serbia says peace has been restored in Kosovo, so that’s all right then.

Germany says it has a secret Yugoslav plan for ethnically cleansing Kosovo, drawn up 6 months ago. There is also one written in 1937 by Vasu Cubrilovic, a man whose life suggests how short the 20th century has really been. Cubrilovic, whose pamphlet by the way was titled “The Expulsion of the Albanians by the Serbs” (he was for it), was one of the seven assassins of the Archduke Ferbinand in 1914. Released from prison in 1918, he became a professor of philosophy (applied philosohpy, I guess) at the University of Belgrade, and was a minister in Tito’s government. He died in 1990 at 94.

Speaking of young murders, Arkansas has decided to sentence children under 14 to life imprisonment. Just some of them.

Finally, a solution to the Kosovo Krisis

Macedonia seems to have beaten the Serb’s land-speed-ethnic-cleansing record. Huzzah and cudos. I now support Greek’s position that Macedonia has no right to the name Macedonia. I propose as its new name Serbia Lite.

Propaganda has gotten so much better with the computer. Serb tv is showing films of NATO jets flying in the swastika formation.

Serbia is also issuing stamps. First up, the bulls-eye stamp; next, the downed Stealth fighter stamp. Too bad there’s no international mail out of Serbia, these could be worth a fortune some day. But don’t try to buy them in Pristina’s central post office: we blow it up today.

An Egyptian woman is granted a divorce from a man because he wore an unIslamic earing. Let me rephrase that: all earrings are Islamic on men, since they make them like women.

The Germans are having a problem with their military forces in Yugoslavia. They don’t have any medals to give them. The Iron Cross was pretty much abolished--too many bad memories. The stuff they’ve been giving out has been designed to look as little like military medals as possible, and is for non-combat stuff, essentially Miss Congeniality awards.

Kevin has had the good grace or bad memory not to point out that several years I advocated pretty much precisely the actions over Bosnia that I have been criticizing over Kosovo. I said at the time that bombing could reduce Serb military capabilities and, if it would not end the war, would at least reduce the slaughter from wholesale to retail. Of course, that was the seige of Sarajevo, which is a somewhat different military situation.

So Milosevic has that tame/intimidated Kosovan leader they’ve been parading on tv. First NATO said that they were doctoring old footage, now that he’s acting under coercion, and they keep pointing out that there are pictures but no sound track. My question is, how long does it take to find a lip-reader who knows Serbo-Croatian?

I may have made another mistake over Kosovo. Some time back I commented that if nothing else, it was at least good that this war wasn’t started by something in Clinton’s sex life. On reflection, I’ve decided that the whole thing is a sneaky plot to get people to say precisely that. Clinton, looking to his place in history, wanted to bomb some place at a time when he didn’t have a sex scandal, so that history would say that that indicates that he didn’t bomb all those other places just to cover up sex scandals. Sneaky, huh?

I may have made another mistake, when I said that American Atheists Inc moved to New Jersey because NJ is proof perfect of the non-existence of God. Well, I told that to my mother, and she related the story of a friend who went to Catholic school in New York in the ‘50s, and they used to put the kids on buses and drive them past some place like Hoboken to show them what Hell had in store for them if they weren’t good Catholics.

Tipper Gore’s motto for the 2000 campaign: “I still believe in a place called Stepford.”

Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia says that passengers in a car have a reduced expectation of privacy even for things hidden away in say a purse, so cops can search passengers they don’t think did anything because they think the driver did something.

NATO has officially stopped using the word refugee for Kosovars. They are now deportees. Macedonia, that fount of humanitarian benevolence, has been shoving refugees onto planes to airlift them to anywhere else. Turkey, which is taking some of them while countries like the US and Britain dither, is planning to use them to populate parts of Cyprus from which they expelled Greek Cypriots. At least in Cyprus, they’ll feel right at home.

Evidently NATO can affect events in Kosovo solely by bombing, according to Madeline Albright, because we are degrading his military and hence his ability to control the area. Of course by next week there should be so few Kosovars left that they could be controlled by a couple of guys with pointed sticks.

One of those workplace psych guys in Britain says that members of the House of Lords who are about to be, um, downsized, should really be given the sort of counselling you give after layoffs. You can just picture the session, can’t you?

Serbs you right

Don’t blame me for that one, it came from a British tab.

Notice all those Pentagon briefings given by Ken Bacon, who will never be mistaken for Kevin Bacon? He was the guy who leaked Linda Tripp’s file to the press.

OK Slobadon, quit hiding behind that Rembrandt!

American Atheists Inc is moving to New Jersey, a state which many people believe proves that there is no God.

So has the government yet figured out where those soldiers were when the Serbs captured them, and if not, why not? I smell covert op.

General Wesley Clark wants to bomb Beograde. Well, if you want a tough soldier, go for the guy whose name ensured he got beat up a lot as a kid.

In time for Passover, Louis Farrakhan goes into the hospital. His followers think the government gave him cancer, you know.

New Hampshire no longer has a school system.

...but it just might work!

NATO destroys a Yugoslav vacuum cleaner factory, hoping that Milosevic will be brought to his knees by dust bunnies.
-Yugoslavia, fighting back at last, brings the NATO public relations website to its knees.
-Russia plans to send a spyship to help Serbs kill NATO military personnel.
-All those zillions of dollars in defense spending, and now we’re actually running out of cruise missiles.
-Not that we’ve done anything useful with the ones we’ve already used. Beyond the vacuum cleaners, we’ve mostly destroyed planes and anti-aircraft sites. In other words, covering our own asses and not doing a thing for the Kosovars, who are not being bombed by those planes and have no aircraft for those anti-aircraft sites to be targeting.
-The Serbs have been destroying Albanians’ passports, birth certificate, marriage certificates, etc in preparation for refusing to let the refugees back into the country. That can’t be allowed to happen, so NATO just inherited another task. Of course, it would be made much easier if we simply tacked Kosovo onto Albania. No border, no problem.
-So the bombing didn’t work, but when does it ever? Well, once... What was Clinton thinking when he ruled out ground forces? His only idea was to get in quick, bomb, get out quick. I swear the man puts no more thought into the consequences of bombing someone than of getting a blowjob.

The president of Iran postpones a visit to France because the French refuse to have a state dinner without wine.

First Russia cancelled the Monica trip, now the Kiss (the rock group) tour. This war thing is turning out pretty well for them.

Stupid Internet idea of the day. Some guy has a site at which you can see daily pictures of his left nipple. It has an archive. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I don’t think a similar site featuring a woman’s nipple would be all that interesting either.

Kosovulva

Oddest start of a news story: “Russia’s rage over NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia boiled over tonight when it canceled the upcoming visit by Monica Lewnisky.”

Serb tv has been running Wag the Dog over and over, like Iraq tv did a few months ago. Oooo, copyright infringement, now we’re really mad.

Quayle says that if Al Gore created the Internet, he invented the spell-check.

For Tom Lehrer fans, the diaries of Alma Mahler-Werful-etcetera have come out.

Best name for a book, the former Labour leader Michael Foot’s newish “Dr. Strangelove, I Presume?”

“Los Angeles is just New York lying down.” Quentin Crisp

That guy freed from death row & prison by a journalism class is back in jail for hitting his daughter & her mother.

The return of some old friends

The Axis is back. The Luftwaffe is back in combat for the first time since 1945, and so is Japan, which fired on North Korean spy ships, both in the same day. And today saw the largest air strike in Europe since, what, Dresden? So we have the best of both sides of World War II. And we call it NATO. Now sometime in the last few years, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has gotten the ability to decide to invade whole countries. If NATO weren’t a tool of the US, that would actually be frightening, since I don’t recall voting for any elections to NATO or in any way giving up that sort of sovereignty to it. Clinton gave another truly crappy speech in support of his little war (by the way, have we stopped bombing Iraq this week so that we can bomb Serbia, or Kosovo, or whoever it is we’re bombing?) He evoked the possibility of a wider Balkans war, which if it hasn’t happened by now, won’t. He said something about leaving a stable Europe to our children. Evidently in his will, he’s leaving Luxembourg to Chelsea. And the Netherlands if she promises not to inhale. He said that we’ll bomb but we won’t send troops. Hey, even if Milosevic suddenly signs the peace accord we stuck under his nose, does Clinton think no peacekeepers will be required? And that’s best-case. If Milosevic doesn’t surrender, we literally have no plan. Clinton is talking about restoring Kosovo’s autonomy, but that was autonomy within Yugoslavia which doesn’t really, ya know, exist. Autonomy within Serbia is meaningless. If we can send troops into a country whose only mischief even we define as domestic, then we can by the same principles decide to dismember that country and declare Kosovo independent, which is the only thing that makes any sense (unless you own a map, when you notice that Kosovo would be surrounded by Serbia). Find a principle, almost any principle at this point, and stick to it.

It’s a wonderful coincidence that the Law Lords released their, for lack of a better word, decision on Pinochet today, given that dictators the world over must have been paying attention. They said he could only be extradited to Spain on 3 of the 35 charges. Although I don’t see anything in the world stopping Spain reinstating the other 32 when they get their hands on him, in a minimum of a year.

The first baby produced by sperm taken from a dead man is born. Yick.

Paraguay impeaches its president. Keep an eye on that one.

A study shows that people looking at crappy video, like security video such as is used in court all the time, or those cameras they’re sticking in city centres, produce images that people can’t match up accurately to mug shots more than 70% of the time. If they see people they know on video, it’s 100%, strangers, not so good. If the head is turned or the guy’s smiling, no chnce at all. It suggests that people are going to jail on the basis of what’s supposed to be objective evidence, but isn’t.

As I said, the Axis is back. Come to think of it, an Italian just became president of Europe today as well.

I was wondering when J.C. Watts would have to say something about his colleagues’ connections with a racist group, and this week he’s been busily heading off an attempt in Congress to condemn the CCC (that’s pronounced as a hard C, if you know what I mean) and replace it with a measure condemning all forms of bigotry everywhere in general but nowhere in specific. My problem here is that I think the attempt by Congress to condemn the views of anyone is dangerous to the Constitution.

Russia’s prime minister refused to come to the US because we’re about to bomb Serbia, we really mean it this time. He stands on the high moral ground of someone just caught trying to smuggle MIGs to Serbia.

Amusingly, Russia was stopped in this endeavour by Azerbaijan.

Paraguay seems to be in the early stages of a military coup, if I read my tea leaves correctly.

Another sign of age: two grey nose hairs.

On the other hand, when I passed the local school walking home from the library, the crossing guard helped me across the street.

Miscarriage of justice of the week

And wouldn’t you know it’s in Texas.

But speaking of injustice, George Bush has actually beaten Reagan’s record for suspiciously overpaid speaking tours of Japan, having been paid in stock for a single speech last year, stock now worth $14.4 million, or $4,000 a word, which is more than even Stephen King makes. At least he didnt’ throw up on anyone.

Sweden, in a burst of rationality unknown to the rest of the world, has decided that since no one’s likely to invade it, it can cut its military budget in half.


After 30 Free Years, Man Faces Life for 2 Grams of Drug
By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 20, 1999

In the Susan McDougal trial, the Starr people take the rather unusual step of calling one of their own grand jurors as a witness, to say that Starr wasn’t out to get anyone, he just wanted the facts, ma’m. The trial then broke for lunch, during which the juror could be seen indicting his ham sandwich for obstruction of justice.

The New York Times has recently added a world summary column in which the boring countries of the world get about two sentences each (sigh), but they still don’t have the space for an odd little story out of Egypt in which a charity is accused of selling orphans for spare parts. In a world less inured to horror stories, this might have made the front page instead of “NFL Backs Limited Replay After Complaints of Bad Calls”, but there you are. The charity took charge of 32 orphans. Shortly after, 25 were dead. Now there is a possibility that the organ transplant thing was made up by Islamists trying to derail a bill to legalize organ transplants, and the government certainly denies that anything of the sort happened. But they would, wouldn’t they? And the death certificates have consecutive numbers, which is more than a little suspicious.

Paul Wellstone, Patrick Leahy and Richard Durbin, the last 3 sane voices in the US Senate, voted against Star Wars. Buoyed by the fact that last week a Star Wars test actually succeeded (presumably on the same principle that a stopped clock is right twice a day, and 80% of American VCRs as well) after 3,000 consecutive failures. How long does a really stupid idea have to be around before 97 Senators vote for it without blinking an eye? I take it this is aimed at North Korea, whose last citizen should die of starvation well before that eventuality comes about, and China, which means that we are now literally in an arms race with ourself. Two arms races actually, if you count the race between our defense contractors and our spies to see who can sell American technology to the Chinese first.

Has anyone seen a story that says precisely what was unique about this week’s municipal elections in Qatar? This is not a rhetorical question.

And shows just how slow a news week this is, although Lafontaine’s resignation should make things more interesting. Here is another sure sign of press excitement, from the London Times:

LUCY, David Blunkett’s guide-dog, made parliamentary history yesterday when it was sick on the floor of the House. The rare example of canine weakness came shortly after the Education and Employment Secretary finished a speech on the education provisions in the Budget.

The House voted 398-12 to prevent nursing homes that drop Medicaid participation from shoving the existing Medicaid patients into the snow to make way for private patients paying more money. They are, however, free to make their lives a living hell until they “voluntarily” leave. Who on earth are the 12?

Clarence Thomas testifies to a House committee that the Supreme Court would really like to have minority and women clerks but that the Court is just too darned important to be tinkering around with stuff like equity. He says that when he wants clerks, he asks for the cream. Jokewise, there are two possible ways to go here. One is that it’s probably the sole woman clerk who has to go out for the cream. The other has something to do with pornography.

Some mathematician killjoy with too much computer time figured out how to win at Monopoly. I’d tell you how, but I read the story in one of the British papers, so the streets all have different names. But don’t get the expensive properties, and get the ones near the Jail.

Best obit of the week: Sidney Gottlieb, the former mad scientist of the CIA 1953-73. If it was an exploding cigar or a poisoned handkerchief you wanted, he was your man. He was also in charge of the MK-ULTRA (that’s LSD to you) program, experimenting on countless mental patients and inmates (did anyone see that great Canadian tv-movie on the program that ran on Lifetime a few months ago?) and, by the way, himself. What the London Times obit in tomorrow’s paper says that the NY Times’s Wednesday did not is that the man admitted that everything he did at CIA was a complete failure. None of the attempts to poison Castro or Lumumba or make Castro’s beard fell out ever worked, the LSD stuff was completely pointless. When Gottlieb retired from the CIA, at age 55 or so, he went to India with his wife and ran a leper hospital. Then he tried to start a commune in Virginia, and later ran a hospice, and, quote: “practiced two of his lifelong hobbies, folk dancing and herding goats.” Did I mention he dropped a whole lot of LSD?

You know it’s a slow news week when the BBC uses the phrase “emergency banana summit”.

Real news to keep up with: the Northern Ireland was supposed to be established by this week. It hasn’t been.
-The former prime minister of France was acquitted by a rigged jury for manslaughter.
-Um, you did know that the former prime minister of France was being tried for manslaughter, didn’t you?
-Austrian fascists do very very well in a state election.
-Another Austrian fascist gets into Japan without a passport. What, are you going to be the one to tell Arnie no?

Speaking of idiot Germans, two teenagers in southern Germany went into a gas station with stockings over their heads. Naturally, the police were called. But it turned out that they’d just gone in to buy condoms, and were embarrassed.

The British Labour party, increasingly desperate about the fact that the Scots are not going to vote for them in sheer gratitude at being granted Home Rule, is now campaigning on the claim that the Scottish National Party would slaughter baby seals if it wins power.

When will the Full Monica media blitz be over? I’ll be hiding under my bed until then, and if you knew how long it’s been since I vacuumed down there, you’d know how serious a statement that is. You know, in Norway, the prime minister actually took 2 months off in 1992 because her son committed suicide, and the media never said a word.

The 4th Circuit overturns a 1994 law allowing rape victims to sue on civil rights grounds in federal court. The court said that this really wasn’t what the Constitution meant by “regulating interstate commerce”.

Monica’s abortion: the daddy was the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Readiness. Which I assume means he used a $20,000 condom that didn’t work.

Road kill and oral sex

According to Molly Ivins, the big issue in the Tennessee legislature is a bill to allow people who run over animals to take them home & eat them without having had a permit.

Saw some of the Monica Lewinsky interview. Barbara Walters asked her if she had no self-esteem at all. I forget if that was before or after she asked Monica to explain what phone sex was. The only difference between Walters and Tripp is that the former told Monica that she was going to ask a lot of ridiculously personal questions and then broadcast the tape to the whole world. If we want to know what phone sex is, we should ask the Israelis to cough up their tape of the Clinton-Lewinsky phone sex. And who would pay $800,000 for a 30 second ad during this broadcast? The new Hugh Grant movie. How appropriate.

Quote of the day

“We will continue the battle against Hezbollah because they continue the battle against us.” Netanyahu.

I wonder why Hezbollah continues the battle against them...?

There’s an article in the Washington Post today, Tuesday, on the US using UNSCOM as cover for intelligence-gathering that’s rather more detailed than

There’s an article in the Washington Post today, Tuesday, on the US using UNSCOM as cover for intelligence-gathering that’s rather more detailed than anything we’ve seen before and suggests what anyone with a brain cell to all their own already knew, that the US line since being caught us was a complete lie.

I spent part of today in the Graduate Theological Union library (don’t ask). Now in such a library, if a woman at the next microfiche machine keeps talking to herself, wouldn’t you like to her to speak loud enough that you can make it out?

Quote of the day, from John Le Carre:

“We failed to embrace the former Soviet empire. We failed to give them their dignity.

“Instead, there was a shameful expectation on our side, particularly the American side, that if we gave them enough pairs jeans and enough rock music and had McDonald’s there, somehow they would find private enterprise for themselves.

“They didn’t do that. They found crime.”

Lockheed Martin is developing the latest technology in troop transport: a really big blimp, capable of moving 4,000 soldiers.

The Times has an obit of a trader in port wine, who “elevated the act of spitting to almost an art form.”

In another example of an increasing problem, a Russian nuclear sub went out of commission because one of the sailors had snipped some wires and sold them to another submarine. This happens to elevators in Russia all the time. Also, units of the army have been selling some of their soldiers to the Chechens as hostages.

Australia’s deputy chief censor is now in the porno business. Just another example of the Hey I can do better than that! phenomenon. His films all seem to have the words “Down Under” in the title.

In 1954 the Catholic orphanages in Quebec were converted into psychiatric institutions in order to qualify for federal funding. They had 3,000 illegitimate children in them at the time. So what did they do with the kids? Re-classified them as mentally ill, put them in straitjackets, drugged them...

Britain is still working on their own little Rodney King story, after six years. A teenager named Stephen Lawrence was stabbed by a bunch of white teenagers. Reports at the time suggested that police arrived while he was still alive and stood around letting him bleed to death. That doesn’t seem actually to have been what happened, but that ensured that media attention stayed on the case. Everyone knows who did it, and everyone always knew. One newspaper even printed the names, which is unheard of, given the libel laws. The police screwed up the case beyond description so that no charges were ever brought, were nasty to the family, who got more and more upset as the years went on. Anyway, a report came out last week which blamed the London police for being racist (who knew?) and incompetent. Unfortunately, they also accidentally released the names and addresses of all their secret witnesses. And then the memorial to Lawrence was vandalized and it turned out that the police video cameras monitoring it were fakes, with no film. The Home Secretary Jack Straw, a man with all the passion for liberty of Antonin Scalia, has proposed doing away with double jeopardy protection and making it illegal to say racist things in your own home.

You’ll all hear this sooner or later, so why wait for the media hand-wringing? Clinton has been accused by unreliable sources of 2 more rapes, one in Britain in 1969, a British woman, and one while he was at Yale Law School, which brings to mind a fairly obvious joke.

Kosovolvo

The war goes on. And those damned Serbs refuse to play ball and send up their planes and missiles. Since the missiles are still in reserve, the real bombing can’t begin, which means the whole campaign drags on while NATO falls apart, or so Milosevic hopes. The Italian government came very close to collapsing over Kosovo today. And the Greeks were never on board. More ominously for the future of this thing, Macedonia is not especially thrilled either, and Milosevic could easily start the usual civil war there just by sending a stream of refugees their way. See Macedonia has a large Albanian minority with whom Macedons don’t get along, and the last they want is more of them.

Still, isn’t it nice to see us killing Christians for a change?

And isn’t it nice to have a war that isn’t a distraction from a Clinton sex scandal?

Party dude

Another creepy-twins story: twins in Sicily give birth at the same time.

The Japanese consul to Canada, a wife-beater, says it’s no big deal, it’s a cultural thing. The Japanese prime minister is asked if he beats his wife, but says he is a pacifist.

Speaking of pacifists, that guy in Jasper is sentenced to death. They figure that in terms of re-education, nothing will be more effective than putting him in a place in which he is part of a small racial minority, the Texas death row. He is the first of hundreds of Texans sentenced to death to be a white person convicted of murdering a black one.

Speaking of people you don’t mind too much being executed even though you don’t support the death penalty, Texas executes the first of those Germans who thought choosing the gas chamber over lethal injection would keep the sentence from being carried out. As a Jew, the thought of a German in a gas chamber is kind of a giggle.

The Supreme Court rules that illegal aliens have no first amendment rights.

The Watergate burglars evidently carried out another break-in no one knew about until now, at the Chilean Embassy, for no good reason except for someone to link it with the planned Watergate break-in so that both would be blamed on a CIA operation. Something like that. Even Nixon thought it was a stupid idea.

Nigeria has its parliamentary elections. Corruption is such a way of life that it is carried out even when there is no reason. One election official reported 100% turnout in his area, where 250 people voted for one party, and 250 for the other party.

Another American victim

Bye to the skinny one.

And hello to Woo Yong Gak after 41 years in a South Korean prison.

The Washington Post says that one up and coming idea is the restoration of civil rights to ex-felons, given that 13% of black men are ineligible to vote, 31% in Florida.

I have some comments about the elections for leader of the Welsh Labour Party, but I doubt anyone wants to hear them.

Monica’s interview has been taped. She says she was raped by the constitution. Incidentally, although Starr finally allowed her to speak, she isn’t allowed to say anything bad about him or his crew. And what does that have to do with an immunity agreement, exactly?

In Arizona, which is weird, two prisoners, German brothers, one scheduled to die I believe Wednesday, the other one next week, having been given their choice of poison, as it were, chose the gas chamber so that they can appeal their own decision as cruel and unusual.

So Jane Doe #5 has finally gone public with claims Clinton raped her. The most curious aspect is her supporting evidence. At the time she is supposed to have told a) her husband, b) her best friend, whose father was murdered by someone whose death penalty was commuted by Governor Clinton.

Those Israeli Embassy guards in Berlin who shot 19 Kurds, 3 fatally, which strikes me as a fair number of bullets to be letting off, are themselves let off because they have diplomatic immunity. Does this sound like a good idea?

Threats of violence from the Japanese right prevent a publisher going ahead with a Japanese edition of an American book about the Rape of Nanking.

Yeltsin, who claimed yesterday to have spoken on the phone with Clinton, which he didn’t (American sources say he probably meant Madeline Albright, which is a mistake I think we’ve all made at some time), today meets Gerhard Shroeder for the first time, or at least what he seems to think is the first time.

The Pope intervened with Britain, asking them to let Pinochet go free. What’s interesting, aside from the inappropriateness, is that the Vatican has been lying about it ever since November. Aren’t they not supposed to do that? Isn’t there a commandment, or something?

Speaking of which, Monica’s blue & semen dress may go into the National Archives, which will at least spare us the knowledge of how much someone would be willing to pay for it at auction, but will mean that the dress is never going to be cleaned. They can put it next to Jackie Kennedy’s pink & blood & brains dress, which has also never been cleaned.

3 top members of the Greek government have to resign over the Greek role in the Turkish capture of Ocalan. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Madeline Albright to resign for the same reason. The Turks have already denied his lawyers entry into the country and refuses to let the trial be monitored. Oh, and some of those strange comments he made after his arrest suggest to me that they drugged him.

Kurd who most needs to be bitch-slapped: the guy who is so proud of his 15-year old daughter’s setting herself on fire in protest.

The Secret Service secretly funded a private company’s efforts to gain access to state driver’s license photos and create a Big Brother database without the states being aware of the fed involvement. Not that such a db in private hands is any better, of course.

The Czechoslovak divorce isn’t going that well after all. It seems the Slovak intelligence service has been busy stirring up anti-NATO and anti-Gypsy sentiment in the Czech Republic (the latter to make it seem less acceptable for NATO and EU membership).

Yesterday the US and Serb negotiators at that conference took a little break and flew to Beograde to talk with Milosevic. What the press didn’t bother mentioning is that this was a violation of the ground-rules which said that everyone stays there, and incommunicado, until a deal is reached. The Kosovar and I believe Russian delegations literally engaged in a car chase trying to head off the others as they drove to the airport.

Death of an honest man

John Ehrlichman’s obit says that he’s been a VP in a firm that does hazardous waste handling. You can take the boy out of the Nixon White House, but I guess you can’t take the Nixon White House out of the boy.

Washington’s birthday

Ah, the simpler days, when “interns” came not from the West Coast of North America but from the West Coast of Africa, and when... well, it’s a holiday, why don’t you all just write your own joke, utilizing the following elements: wooden teeth, oral sex.

oops (Valentine Day’s story)

The South African government has handed out tens of thousands of condoms--stapled to a helpful pamphlet.

According to the Sunday Times, after the US offered the use of its U2 spy planes to Unscom to monitor Iraq, the first thing it did was to refuse to tell when and where photos were taken and deliberately fuzzy them up to disguise the U2’s capabilities.

Trent Lott says that Clinton is untrustworthy. This from a man with the least trustworthy hair in the US Senate, bar none, including Strom Thurmond.

Real estate notice from Halifax Property Services: First floor bedsit in generally good order. Drug dealers next door.

Tough justice

An article in tomorrow’s Washington Post says that the Chinese are solving their girl-shortage problem by buying brides from North Korea.

The Italian supreme court rules that a woman wearing tight denim jeans can’t be raped. The all-male judges, never having heard of a zipper, insist that a woman must cooperate to get them off, especially Italian women with large asses. Alright, they didn’t say the last part. They reject the idea of threats possibly being a component of rape, because there is nothing worse than rape with which to threaten women. In protest, women MPs and a lot of other women will be wearing jeans until the court of cassation, tired of seeing fat Italian asses, reverses itself.

Today Pluto passed beyond Neptune’s orbit, resuming its position as the 9th planet, having escaped an impeachment resolution and removal from office as a planet. If anyone is asking my position, I haven’t considered Pluto to be a planet since Charon was discovered.

And yes, I do have a position on Pluto being a planet. I have a position on everything, haven’t you noticed?

George Dubbya knows foreign affairs like Dan Quayle knows spelling

A “Draft George W. Bush” campaign opens. They think he has the principles, the something, and the something else to win the next election. He’s also an ignoramus. William Hague, leader of the British Tory party, is visiting the US including Texas. And while the Washington Post was too polite to mention it, it was clear that Dubbya had no idea who he was, first confusing him with Alexander Haig, and then evidently thinking that Hague was something in the current British government.

Although Monica is still on Starr’s leash, not allowed to speak to the press, Linda Tripp, who also has an immunity agreement with the Office of Independent Council (motto: We’re not holier than thou. We’re holier than you) (from Matt Groening), is somehow allowed to go on tv. Must have been the same oversight where they forgot to tell her not to talk with Paula Jones’s lawyers.

Although it just came out this week that Janet Reno is planning to investigate some of Starr’s abuses of power, including lying to her, the decision was evidently made in mid-January. Now here’s something: it didn’t leak. That was before the trial started in the Senate and details might certainly have affected it, but Reno didn’t leak it. The Justice Dept didn’t leak it. And Starr’s office didn’t leak it. So it is possible for something not to leak: it just has to be helpful to William Jethro Clinton.

Hasn’t even cleared her throat yet

Henry Hyde said over the weekend that it isn’t over until the fat lady sings, and she hasn’t even cleared her throat yet. Now the first part of that quote I myself used as a subject line a couple of weeks ago when Monica was called, and felt a bit cheap in so doing, but even my mind wasn’t filthy enough to think of the second part. Guess it takes a Congressman.

When they were debating whether to make their speeches in open session or not, Daschle suggested that grandstanding could be cut down by limiting the speeches to 10 minutes instead of 15. My suggestion: for all the value any of this has, we could save still more time by leaving the speeches at 15 minutes, but having all 100 Senators recite them at the same time.

Phil Gramm, in opposition to censure, notes that Andrew Jackson’s censure was expunged from the record an election or two later, and that Jackson is now on the twenty dollar bill.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department has announced plans for a sixty-nine dollar bill....

The 4th Circuit eliminates Miranda rights.

In the “why do we bother to vote” department, California’s new more caring Democratic governor fries his first felon.

Yeltsin almost makes it to King Hussein’s funeral, but has to go home early, tired, as the Daily Show put it, after handing out invitations to his own upcoming funeral. Back in Moscow airport, Yeltsin’s plane clips the plane with the Italian prime minister, and spokesmen rush forward to say that Yeltsin wasn’t trying to fly it, like that bizarre conducting incident.

Clichés in the Trial of the Century

The New York city police shoot an unarmed Sierra Leonean 24 times. Almost as worrisome to the city’s innocent bystanders, they also missed 17 times.

The surgeon who amputated the wrong leg a while back in Florida, and was assessed a jolly big fine ($2,500, probably less than he tried to charge Medicare for the operation), who then missed the target by an even larger margin by putting a chest catheter in the patient in the wrong bed, is back at work.

The anti-abortion web site ordered to pay $107 million in a questionably constitutional decision for almost advocating the deaths of doctors, announces plans to install web-cams at abortion clinics. Its provider then pulls it.

In her deposition, Monica Lewinsky objects to her affair being described as “salacious”. The Daily Telegraph says she’s lucky she wasn’t asked to spell it.

o

The municipal employee who used the word “niggardly” is hired back in D.C., but you’ll notice it took a week for it to be realized how stupid that was. I also didn’t notice any black leaders standing up to say that of course blacks aren’t so stupid that even if they didn’t already know the word they couldn’t have it explained to them, and that it was an insult to suggest otherwise.

Oklahoma executed the guy who committed the murder when he was 16, a new low in the death penalty biz. His was the 12th or 13th execution of the year. The Philippines resumes the death penalty tomorrow.

After the Senate today voted not to let the White House know in advance what clips from the depositions the prosecutors are planning to use on Saturday, Tom DeLay had to have explained to him twice the suggestion that there be a break before the defense responds to this surprise evidence, as if the whole idea of fundamental fairness was alien to him. But then often enough in this farce the White House was supposed to respond to charges not even made yet. I kept waiting for David Kendall to put on his Karnak hat but he never did. DeLay may have been distracted by Newsweek reports that he himself lied under oath in a civil suit deposition.

Testimony

The lower house of the Dutch Parliament has voted to legalize brothels, which is a surprise to everyone in the universe, who thought they already were.

Today Sidney Blumenthal, the chief proponent of the vast right-wing conspiracy, will have his deposition overseen by Arlen Specter, who invented the single-bullet theory.

Bossy

Margaret Thatcher says that Tony Blair is too bossy.

The 1st Circuit appeals court upholds the idiotic federal law outlawing computer kiddy porn created by computer manipulation rather than by using actual naked children.

Prince Charles finally goes public with Camilla. Mr. Lucky’s photo op was ruined by too much flash photography, making it impossible to air on tv for more than 5 seconds at a time without sending epileptics into spasm.

A piece in today’s Wash Post talks about Barbara Durham, who was forced on Clinton as a nominee to the 9th Circuit in exchange for his getting a judge he actually wanted. Durham broke the Washington state canons of individual conduct during her election in 1996 to the state supreme court by running a partisan campaign (Republican, if you hadn’t guessed), and by having the state attorney general as her campaign’s co-chair--no, no conflict of interest there. And she endorsed Dole on the grounds that he would get the executions moving.

Netanyahu’s election slogan is causing some controversy: “A strong leader for a strong people.” It probably sounded better in the original German.

Dennis Miller says that the Senate is trying to figure out a form of punishment for Clinton that won’t make him hard.

The majority of federal wiretaps are now issued by a secret intelligence court.

Did you know that since 1996 civil rights settlements are taxable? What incredible nerve Congress has. On the up side, Paula Jones gets screwed again.

Sex addiction

The pope in St. Louis speaks against abortion and assisted suicide, arguing for the dignity of human life. He then put on one of his many funny hats, and drooled.

44 Senators, if you read both votes together, said that they’ve heard enough to dismiss the charges, while 0 say they have heard enough to convict and need to see more.

Oklahoma plans next week to execute someone for a crime committed when they were 16, the first such since 1977.

Evidently Sidney Blumenthal is the right’s bete noir, the dark prince in its conspiracy theories, its Richard Mellon Scaife if you like. This is why he wound up on the witness list and not Betty Currie. Of course the last time he was questioned, it was by Starr’s people last June. They asked him whether Bill Clinton believes that oral sex is sex, does Bill Clinton’s religion include sexual intercourse, whether he ever discussed with Hillary whether Bill had a sex addiction....

Woody Woodpecker in a KKK cap

One of the defendants in the Jasper, Texas murder-by-dragging trial has a tattoo of Woody Woodpecker in a KKK cap.

Speaking of Woody Woodpecker in a KKK cap, the House impeachment “managers” today announced their list of witnesses, described by Bob Barr as two Jews and a niggra.

1 year on

The Wash Post’s impeachment coverage has recently included a “one year ago today” section, and today is the anniversary of the finger-wagging episode.

Normally there is no more fervent supporter of freedom of the press than myself, but sometimes there is an exception. Whatever reporters were briefed by Senators about what was said in closed section today should be hauled in and have electrodes attached to their genitals until they name the offending Senator, who should be expelled from the Senate under the standing rules. I didn’t support the decision to go behind closed doors, but I want a scalp. The hypocritical assholes can’t have it both ways.

Lindsey Graham’s speech arguing against dismissal was an exercise in televised nervous breakdown, and very entertaining as such. Henry Hyde, looking more than ever like Willie Loman, did his sorrowful-at-the-ways-of-the-wicked-world routine. Of course Saturday he supported the civil rights of Paula Jones in the same speech as he mentioned his opposition to abortion, just in case anyone had forgotten that he’s a prick.

As I write, the Senate is hearing arguments about hearing witnesses. No it isn’t, it just went to break. This is all rather problematic because there are good political reasons why Clinton’s people can’t put on a proper defense. If Monica testifies that she understand that Clinton wanted her to lie, without his actually having said so, someone needs to ask her whether she also believed that he would leave his wife for her and that Linda Tripp was her bestest friend. McCollum said that it is not he said, she said because she told other people at the time. She needs to be asked whether she also told them that she slept overnight at the White House and her other tall tales. None of this is possible.

I haven’t made any comments on the impeachment trial of William Jethro Clinton in the last couple of days, so here are my thoughts on developments in that period:

That Cheryl Mills sure has a sexy voice, doesn’t she?

On to other things.

I saw a bit of a clip on the Daily Show yesterday of Dan Quayle in a classroom. The teacher introduces him and explains to the tykes that he is President Clinton’s vice president. She is told that he isn’t and asks who is. Does anyone know where this took place?

Also on the Daily Show yesterday was a piece about a church in whose stained glass people have spotted the image of... Bozo the Clown. And there it was, too, clear as day. The pastor said sorrowfully that, yeah, once it’s pointed out to you, it’s impossible afterwards not to see it.

I think it was on the Daily Show that it was said that the only mention of the impeachment trial during the State of the Union Address was the bit about protecting our children from tobacco.

State of Union/impeachment & whatnot

So Bob Barr didn’t go to the State of the Union speech (see below). I’m guessing it’s for a reason similar to that of Andrew Cuomo, the single Cabinet member who traditionally doesn’t go, so that if the Capitol blows up, after the partying dies down, the Department of Health and Urban Development can go on. Similarly, Barr didn’t go so that even if Clinton, Gore, all but one member of the Cabinet, and most of the House and Senate and Supreme Court get blown up, the impeachment hearings can continue.

In 1940 a German firing squad executed a French horse that kicked a German soldier to death.

The Supreme Court lets stand a 25-year sentence under the Calif. 3 Strikes law for someone who shoplifted some vitamins.

During the Address, there seemed to be applause for everything. Who but a politician would applaud “putting a human face on the global economy”?

A quick read through Salon, the free parts of Slate and the Washington Post show no one else making the obvious observation, so I will: Clinton said that Boomers like himself have a fear of becoming a burden on their children, which is why Social Security should be shored up by investing a lot of money in the stock market. An interesting sentence for someone who last week sent a large chunk of Chelsea’s inheritance to Paula Jones.

In the speech and in today’s impeachment hearings, the day was surprisingly abject-apology free. Maybe we’re done with all the groveling. Today, Ruff pointed out two obvious holes in last week’s case: the call from Betty Currie to Lewinsky that proved there was a Clinton conspiracy to hide gifts, actually occurred after the gifts were given to Currie, not before. And Vernon Jordan’s meeting with Lewinsky that proved the job assistance was a bribe in exchange for false testimony because it occurred immediately after the judge in the Jones trial ruled that testimony from other girlfriends was admissable, actually occurred before--Jordan was on a plane to Europe by the time the ruling came down.

Quick excerpt from a Washington Post story:

There were tricky moments. At one point, Ruff found himself explaining that Clinton could not possibly have been obstructing justice when he lied about his affair to various top aides. Why not? Because he was lying to everyone else too. If you had a television, the president lied to you. The aides were nothing special.

He said it so calmly, so smoothly, that it passed by entirely unremarkably.

State of the Union?

The House impeachment wranglers made the point over and over yesterday that Clinton was being accused of stuff that the Senate has previously impeached judges over. I think that presidents in the future should wear uniforms so that they may be easily distinguished from other people in uniform. If Billy Clinton were a judge, he’d be wearing a black robe and no pants and he would serve for life upon good behaviour. If he were in the military he’d wear another kind of uniform and he could have been thrown out for the adultery alone (or for being gay or for sending a bunch of Italian skiers to their deaths). If he were in the Boy Scouts, he could have been thrown out for any of this, or for being an atheist. But he isn’t any of these things. Get over it.

A British judge rules that a house is not haunted. The owners were trying not to pay it off.

Motto: “And sleep like a Senator during an impeachment trial”

A piece in the Monday Washington Post points out that Clinton is in one sense not above the law at all, that the abuses perpetrated by Starr are the ones that US attorneys inflict on average Americans every day. Indeed, Reno has been lobbying against a bill to make US attorneys comply with state ethics rules and not interrogate people who have lawyered up (as they say on NYPD Blue).

On the talk show circuit today, 19% of the “jury” has spoken its mind, if any. D’s are fighting back on the witness issue, threatening to interrogate Starr and Tripp. It could be a long winter.

This year South Africa will legalize polygamy, as long as it is performed according to traditional rituals and so on. There will be no legal limit on bride-price, so this should hold the incidence down. Interestingly, whites will be able to take advantage of the law. No discrimination in the new South Africa.

Now it can be revealed

Jerry Falwell says the Antichrist is alive now and is a male Jew.

The University of Abertay (Dundee, Scotland) is developing a degree in computer games technology. The university’s first fellows in this dept. are the people who created Lemmings.

Egypt convicts a couple to one year for kissing in public.

The Sunday Times confirms that Hitler had one ball.

The US Department of Defense wants the right of prior censorship over Scott Ritter’s book.

All right, I admit it, Jerry Falwell, *I* am the Antichrist. There. You’ve dragged it out of me.

At the impeachment yesterday, Tom Harkin objected to the Senators being called “jurors” on the grounds that, quote, “Only losers get stuck with jury duty.” Rehnquist sustained the objection.

Republicans are calling for Monica Lewinsky to be called so that her body language can be read. I’ll leave it to you to create your own jokes, using the following elements: Ted Kennedy and Braille, overeating as an aid to Senators sitting in the back.

Ya know, Mark Fuhrman pleaded nolo contendre to perjury in an actual murder trial and got a $200 fine.

In one of the sillier moments, George Gekas talked about his mother’s naturalization classes, in which she learned that the three branches of government were, she said in her “wonderful, lovable accent”, were “The Exec, the Legisla and the Judish.” George Gekas’s mother was, in fact, Chico Marx.

And on and on. Bill McCullom actually summarized yesterday’s summary of the Starr Report. Jeff Greenfield on CNN is speculating that none of the House managers are speaking to each other, since they all deem it necessary to repeat the same damn things, including reading what Betty Currie said Clinton said to her (perhaps if it gets repeated enough times, we’ll all be convinced that Currie was able months later to remember it word for word?). Jon Stewart on Nightline described the Republicans from the House as looking like “every guy who ever fired my father.” McCullom looks like Clark Kent sucking on a kryptonite lemon. Now let’s see if I’ve got this argument straight: perjury must be impeachable because the Federal sentencing guidelines (the ones written in the 1980s?) said that perjury is as bad as bribery, which is mentioned in the Constitution. Head...hurt. The guidelines also say that crack is much worse than powder cocaine. And Clinton was lying when he said he wasn’t paying attention to his lawyer. If he has to deal with people like these Congressmen every day, I’ll bet he’s mastered the art of looking like he’s paying attention when he isn’t. As opposed to the Senator, I forget which one, who’s been showing up wearing sunglasses so no one can be sure when he’s sleeping.

I’ve read the affidavit of Bob Barr’s ex-wife, on the web, of course. What is it with Republican first wives and cancer? Bob reacted to her breast cancer and chemotherapy by saying she should take her mind off it by working for his election campaign.

Christopher Hitchens quotes Clinton after ordering the missile strike on Sudan: “I was here on this island [Martha’s Vineyard, poor baby] till 2:30 in the morning, trying to make absolutely sure that at the chemical plant there was no night shift. .. I didn’t want some person who was a nobody to me--but who may have a family to feed and a life to live and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there [a CIA official?]--to die needlessly.”

And Michael Douglas in the movie “The American President,” which we know Clinton has seen because it’s about a president who dates: “Somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor is working the night shift at Libyan intelligence headquarters. And he’s going about doing his job because he has no idea that in about an hour he’s going to die in a massive explosion.”

From bias free of every kind, this trial must be tried

Someone at Slate counts today as the 9th presentation of the same old evidence against Clinton including the Starr report, Starr’s testimony to House, the judiciary committee’s presentation to the whole House, etc etc. And boy did it seem it, from the half or so I’ve seen or heard so far today. Henry Hyde said that oaths were real important (key theme today: every time someone lies under oath, an angel dies), that Thomas More went to the stake rather than swear a false oath (all together now: I knew Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas More was a friend of mine...). Poor Paula Jones had her civil rights violated. It’s always laughable watching Republicans try to hitch their causes to civil rights: Sensenbrenner likened Jones’s suit to sit-ins at lunch counters. Especially laughable if you’ve read today’s NY Times article about the Council of Conservative Citizens and why Trent Lott had to have known what it was all about, including the frightening information that 34 Mississippi legislators and Governor Kirk Fordice (who I’ve described as David Duke without the sheet) are members. And don’t get me started on Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, one of the three jurors currently consorting with the prosecutors about witnesses.

Things House “managers” did today they shouldn’t have: turned the count about grand jury perjury into an argument that Clinton lied during the Paula Jones deposition. Which he did, but that was a count the House voted against. It should not be resurrected now. And making the argument for calling witnesses during what was supposed to be about something else.

In other news today, the Pope says that God is not an old man with a beard, but refuses to say what she does look like.

The European Commission barely survives a censure vote, unfortunately.

A Labour county councillor in Sussex of all places defects to the Scottish National Party.

Israeli Watergate?

Something else worth paying attention to in the days or weeks ahead: the German debate over the proposed citizenship law.

A new California law says that it is now legal to throw out your old batteries. Um, you have all been recycling those batteries as was legally required, haven’t you?

So Bob Barr (R-Antebellum South) committed adultery, lied about it in court papers, failed to pay child support, and paid for his wife’s abortion. And has a really creepy mustache. Larry Flynt also says he has video on a congressional player yet to be named. And pretty much said that the next one he outs will be Tom DeLay.

The sheer spectacle of the Clinton impeachment is just overwhelming, isn’t it? Rehnquist in his personally designed comic opera robes, Strom Thurmond in his personally designed comic opera hair and comic strip (Li’l Abner) accent. The senators were required to keep silent under pain of imprisonment. I personally saw three senatorial heads explode. Each senator signed something or other and got a souvenir pen. A cigar would have been more appropriate. An exploding cigar would have been still more appropriate. Clinton still hasn’t been allowed to see all the evidence against him. But remember, folks, this is not a trial, no matter what they call it, even if it is the trial of the century of the week. It is essentially an administrative procedure. If they don’t want to show him evidence, they can. There has never been a standard of proof established for impeachments (beyond a shadow of doubt, a preponderance of evidence, whatever). I personally think they could order Clinton to testify without any right of non-self-incrimination, because it is not a trial.

The most popular boy’s name in California and Texas last year was Jose. Elsewhere, Austin is big (groovy, baby). I don’t know what the most popular baby’s name in China is, but it’s certainly a boy’s name, since they’re producing fewer girl babies than ever before.

Linda Tripp has established a legal defense fund. So send your letter bombs to...

Who are these unnamed US officials who are confirming to every newspaper that will listen to them that the CIA used the UNSCOM inspectors as cover to spy on Iraq? On the one hand, the US’s blatant abuse of the UN will definitely make sure that weapons inspection will not be re-established in Iraq or anywhere else (North Korea might have been a candidate). The UN’s credibility is especially damaged by the fact that the information flow came entirely through the US, which passed on only what it felt like, only to the UN folks it liked (Scott Ritter, to name one, was out of the loop), and for all we know tampered with it before doing so. On the other hand, whose idea was it to give the UN essentially espionage duties, for which it had no capabilities whatsoever? What did anyone expect it to do, other than to subcontract the job out?

John Ashcroft drops out of the presidential race before anyone knew he was in it. Of course, in today’s environment you have to ask whether that means he had an affair he doesn’t want to come out. Get used to it: even if it isn’t about sex, it’s still about sex.

Or at least about gender. The following is the summary of two stories from the index to the British news section of tomorrow’s Times:

[19]Women kick men when they are down
Survey indicates that women are more likely to attack men when they are most vulnerable

[20]The Thatcher theory of women’s success
Study shows female managers go to great lengths to appear more macho than men, writes Alexandra Frean

If you read only legitimate news sources like the NY Times or the Washington Post, you will be woefully uninformed about this week’s two Bill Clinton scandals. 1) his father is evidently not the guy his mother always claimed he was. 2) the son of a black prostitute is being DNA-tested to determine if Bill is the dad (this is made possible by Starr’s running tests on a certain dress).

The British Lottery, which funds lesbian theatre and other worthy causes, including a number of heritage projects, is to be used to renovate one of the last of the Victorian public loos, made famous because the playwright Joe Orton used to have sex there.

New laws: kids in Wisconsin can bring inhalers to school. They couldn’t before? NH parents of murdered children can sue for loss of companionship (although presumably the defendant can respond by proving that the kid was a little shit). And Massachusetts gets an official state polka. Massachusetts.

The Post suggests that 1998 can best be summed up in the words of Monica Lewinsky to the grand jury: we’re all really sorry for everything that’s happened. And we hate Linda Tripp.