Israel will make it much harder for Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories who are married to Palestinians (or presumably to Jews?) in Israel to get residency permits. For now, they have frozen new family reunifications, and will sextuple the fee. Israelis (and I should say Israeli Jews, or perhaps Israeli fascists, since it’s a bad habit to refer to Israeli Jews as Israelis, as I told my 4th grade teacher during the 1973 war) are worried about demographics for obvious reasons. And for some reason the number of new immigrants under the Law of Return is way down--and the majority of those aren’t even real Jews.

William Webster, former head of both the CIA & the FBI (which means he’s not even supposed to talk to himself) wants Al Qaeda POWs injected with truth serum. This assumes that they aren’t doing that, or worse, now. I trust no one who reads the article in the Sunday NY Times that contained that tidbit really believes that questioning consists solely of good cop-bad cop and mind games. Given--I say again--that the progress and consequences of the hunger strike begun in Guantanamo 2 1/2 months ago have not been reported, nor is there any indication that any reporter or Congresscritter in the whole country gives a shit, much less the people at large, the only thing preventing torture is the goodness and purity of heart of the CIA/FBI interregators and Marine guards. Good luck, guys, hope none of you are innocent. This country manages to execute innocent people after trials, with lawyers and all the trimmings, and appeals and such, as opposed to being swept up by random military patrols--god knows we blew up a lot of convoys and wedding parties and friendly forces and arms dumps that weren’t what we thought they were--so, um, good luck, you’ll need it.

A story that I may have sent a couple of months back, probably in the Stop the Week section of the London Sunday Times that I used to send, before Rupert Murdoch got greedier and started charging for access, was that the Poetry Society had forgotten to renew their website URL and lost it to a Hong Kong company which sells online gambling and impotence cures--and URL’s back to their original owners. The New Statesman ran a competition asking for famous poets on the subject. Here’s one entry:

Cyber-Tiger, virtual blight,
With your online gambling site,
What e-portal, bland or sly,
Could claim domain o’er poetry?

Who, in odists’ dotcom guise,
Peddles cream for flaky thighs?
And, when our manhood’s in retreat,
Flogs us handy Groin-Deep-Heat? .....

Kaliningrad looks like being a problem. A non-contiguous part of Russia, Lithuania and Poland plan to make residents get visas if they want to go to the rest of Russia. It could just be a minor irritant in relations, or it could be the next Danzig Corridor.

The US is screwing with the prosecutors at the war crimes trial of Slobby Milosevic, who want Richard Holbrook to testify and are being held up by endless State Dept negotiations. If they wind up not calling him, Milosevic will, so this isn’t going away.

Speaking of trials, that of Moussaui, or however you spell it--I’d get the newspaper to look it up, but there’s a cat in my lap--will require information in the possession of the Germans. The problem is that they aren’t, like most Europeans, supposed to assist death-penalty cases. Unfortunately, they look like they’re going to fudge it, asking for a statement that their evidence wouldn’t actually contribute to the death penalty.

Speaking of evidence, in my email of last Sept. 19, I asked whether the standard of proof Bush used to link bin Laden and 9/11 was the same really high standard he would require to admit that global warming existed or arsenic in the drinking water was bad, or the low standard under which he was convinced that Star Wars would work. And you’ll note they still haven’t adduced any convincing evidence of bin Laden’s guilt. But my point today is that there has been a recent rash of alarming claims backed up by nothing. Not just dirty bombs and apartment bombing threats, but
the crap Rumsfeld is throwing around every day. Iran is harboring Al Qaeda (by the way, a second unmanned spy plane in as many months just crashed in Iran). Iran is developing missiles. Al Qaeda is operating in Kashmir (his handlers took this one back). All with no evidence. The Guardian calls him a clumsy loudmouth. Yup, but the American press still regard that, inexplicably, as charm.

One sad consequence of the Israeli invasions of Jericho and tighter border controls is the closing of the casino there (you’ll remember I announced its opening a year or two back saying that if the Palestinians were only allowed a reservation, they were entitled to act like it). But the Jews evidently have a real taste for gambling, and will soon do so over Israel in a plane. Oh, and they’re also betting on the location of the next
suicide bombing.

Bob Barr, he of the world’s creepiest mustache, is suing Bill Clinton, James Carville and Larry Flynt, for a conspiracy to expose his adultery during the Clinton impeachment, thus causing him, oh, $30 million worth of emotional distress. Elsewhere, he is sponsoring legislation to cut down on frivolous lawsuits.

Imperial presidency

Look at the list of stories in the nation & politics section of the Wed. Washington Post. Collectively, they show the expanding powers of the presidency: a man held without trial or lawyer for 8 months, treaties abandoned without Congress being consulted, and the decision to stop telling Congress, which I thought was given the power of the purse by the Constitution, anything about Star Wars expenditures, and an attempt to censor a book, in which the theory is argued in court that the executive’s decision to classify information is unreviewable by courts. Chimp Boy thinks he’s king.

Favorite moment of the farce that is the loya jirga: today, Karzai declared himself elected president by the body, and then had to admit that there hadn’t actually been a vote yet. The US has put god knows what sort of pressure on every rival candidate to drop out, so the election will actually be between Karzai and a woman. I don’t honestly know why we’re even pretending, since even less legitimacy could be granted by this body than by Zimbabwe’s last elections. Colin Powell denied that the US had exerted “undue influence,” but didn’t define what influence he considered to be due the US.

A detail I missed in yesterday’s email: the “treatment” program for sex offenders not only required its unwilling participants to confess to crimes for which they had not been taught, but then polygraphed them.

The European Parliament has voted to ban the import (phased in over ten years) of cosmetics which have been tested on animals. Such testing is illegal in most EU countries, but required in the US. We’ll see if the US dares start a trade war over this.

Favorite headline of the day: Senator Helms Moves to Rehabilitation. Presumably at the Betty Ford Center for Recovering Assholes. I believe he received a pig heart, which is too good and fitting a story to ruin by checking the facts, so I won’t.

Oh, driving on I5 I passed an old VW wagon filled with college signs, with a cardboard sign in the rear window saying “Show Us Your Tits.” I thought about it, but in the end failed to comply.

Second favorite headline of the day: Cabbage Machine Crushes Man to Death. And cuts off another guy’s arm. It’s not every day someone dies in the cause of cole slaw.

An even better death (hey, I had to drive 400 miles listening to the radio whitter on about dirty bombs, I deserve a little gruesome entertainment) was that of Peter Mokaba, one of South Africa’s “There is no such thing as AIDS” brigade. I don’t think I have to tell you what he died of.

So what *really* happened at the loya jirga today? The whole thing always seemed like a way to broker deals under the spurious guise of “tradition,” instead of the usual spurious guise of rigged elections. But the self-selected body really wanted the king back, and the Americans stepped in to, what, bribe? threaten? him into refusing any part, thus ensuring (helped along by the occasional assassination and assassination attempt by the CIA) that the US’s puppet government continues another term of puppetry.

The Washington Post Monday caught up with the Bush Doctrine, which I mentioned a few days ago. No longer will we be able to complain about Pearl Harbors and cowardly sneak attacks. Those will be ours. The Bushies are now trying to sell NATO, sort of. The sort of is that they’re claiming preemptive attacks aren’t explicitly ruled out by the NATO charter, so they must already be NATO policy. In the 17th century and beyond, various European countries had sumptuary laws, which said what clothes certain classes were and were not allowed to wear, the idea being that social class should be visible at all times. The Bush Doctrine proclaims the same sort of thing for certain weapons. Especially symbolic of this is that they are trying to develop small nuclear devices to destroy well-protected, dug-in weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld has told NATO that the standard of proof need not be very high, either, before an attack is launched.

The UN World Summit on Food is meeting in Rome to discuss world hunger. They are too embarrassed even to vote on whether there is a “right to food.” The delegates were, of course, well fed (the menu may be found in the London Times article on the story), although those from the richer countries didn’t dare show up at the banquet.

The Tuesday Post has a piece that wonders how the US will deal with armies containing conscripted 12-year olds, as so many do.

A guy shot up a Benedictine monastery today, killing two monks. The Church wanted to know if the guy was a priest, because they’re allowed one atrocity or child-rape free under the Two Tykes and You’re Out policy.

The Supreme Court rules 5-4 that prisons can punish convicted sex
offenders who refuse to admit guilt during therapy. I think mandating therapy is already a violation of their 1st Amendment rights, but that issue doesn’t even seem to have come up. Instead the Supes astonishingly saw no violation of the 5th Amendment in a requirement that a prisoner sign an “admission of guilt” form and, oh yes, list all his victims. The punishments involved seem to include going into maximum security and taking away his tv, but you know that some states must be keeping prisoners in jail for more of their terms. So it’s not just “terrorists” who have no rights in the US.

And note that Bush was able to remove all the rights of an American citizen unconvicted of any crime (the dirty nuke guy), including the right to see an attorney, or to any form of trial whatever, simply by signing a piece of paper. Just the way to treat someone who hates liberty, I say!

I haven’t decided whether to take the whole dirty bomb thing seriously or not.

So why wasn’t the ATF included in the Heimat Security Fiefdom, even though it was key in breaking the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and involved in Oklahoma City and other terrorist investigations? Think it’s part of Ashcroft’s campaign to make sure that no information on gun ownership is ever used for law enforcement purposes? Me too.

The Interior Department is buying out, for $235 million, offshore oil & gas leases off the Florida coast but refused to do same for California. Not for political reasons, but because, evidently, California is not opposed to offshore drilling like Florida is. At least that’s what the Interior Dept says.

A website offers pictures of women, excuse me, “homicide mothers”, at abortion clinics.

The Sunday Chronicle has a section on the FBI’s relationship with Reagan when he was governor, and their mutual attempt to wipe out the UC system. Not to be missed. www.sfgate.com/campus

The House has voted to kill the estate tax. Unfortunately, when the estate tax’s will was then read, it turned out that it had willed us all a major increase in the deficit.

The California Supreme Court (finally a California story worth passing on, after a week and a half of reading the LA Times--unless you want to know about Valley secession, which has pit brother against brother, surfer dude against Valley girl, all very Ken Burnsian) grants both paternity and custody to a guy who is not the kid’s biological father or even married to the mother, but acted as the kid’s father. Advocates of gay adoption see this as a great victory, although biology has always been secondary in establishing parenthood under the law. The British are talking about a law to prevent “fathers” DNA-testing their putative children.

Speaking of British parenting, the joke I’ve been meaning to send for a week: at the Royal Jubilee, it had been announced that the Queen would go on stage to sing All You Need is Love with Paul McCartney. This did not happen, presumably because he was unwilling to rewrite the lyrics, like Elton John did with that Diana song, to All You Need is Repressed, Unexpressed, Horribly Awkward Love.

Bush’s solution to the problem of bureaucratic infighting among the intelligence agencies is to create another bureaucracy. Who say’s he’s a Washington outsider?

It wouldn’t even resolve the problem of the infighting, just create a new body for the FBI and CIA to stonewall.

Of course if you over-centralize intelligence, it leaves it open to moles, as we know from John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy.

In 2000 there were only 16 children put up for adoption in Sweden. How?

Ah, rich Republicans. Mitt Romney, candidate for governor in Mass., actually claims that his primary residence is in Utah, in order to save on his taxes. The funny part, for a Republican running in Taxacheussets, is that the taxes are Utah property taxes.

Bush on the EPA’s report acknowledging the existence of global warming: “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.” My, the contempt just drips from his tongue, doesn’t it? Oh, and he didn’t so much read it as color it in.

There’s a piece in today’s NY Times op-ed section on why the whistle-blowers at the FBI and Enron were women. Basically, it was because women have no insider status and found that they could only change their workplace by going outside it. The author: Anita Hill.

Long to reign over us

Hard to get any sense out of the British papers today, given the Jubilee celebrations. The Queen was wearing a stunning ensemble from the Dowdy Matron collection, circa 1955. My fellow cultural historians will have a field day in future generations explaining Dame Edna Everidge and Ozzy Osbourne’s prominence. God forbid they should celebrate with excerpts from Shakespeare or, I don’t know, Upstairs Downstairs.

Speaking of the fear of high culture, TNT just ran a version of King Lear transposed to the Old West (haven’t seen it yet) with Patrick Stewart. Notably, in their commercials for it, they didn’t mention Lear or Shakespeare.

A court in India makes illegal any assembly of 4 or more pigs. Cows, meanwhile, do whatever they like. Can’t we all just get along?

A girl in England has been excused from school because she bursts into tears every time she sees a school uniform. She has been diagnosed with “school phobia.” Of course when a middle-aged Tory bursts into tears when he sees a school uniform, it’s something else entirely.

A couple of Salvadoran military chiefs look to go on trial in Florida for atrocities committed in the early 1980s. Two more war criminals I didn’t know had been given asylum. I’m not sure what they’ve been doing while here. You’ll remember that the guy who shot the Vietcong captive in the head in the most famous photo from the Vietnam war owned a pizza shop in Virginia.

Arafat overrules a court to keep in jail someone Israel has ordered him to keep in jail, and fuck the rule of law. Actually, the NY Times quotes a Clinton staffer as saying that their policy in such cases was “I don’t think we really cared about due process.” Hey, no kidding. As I’ve been saying, the US policy re Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, etc has been that “terrorists” should be kept in jail, no “revolving door,” but not actually ever put on trial.

In a drug store yesterday, saw the most disgusting sign ever: “Assorted incontinence on clearance.”

Some of the Pacific Coast Highway is now the American Veterans of the Vietnam War Memorial Highway. ‘Cause you never know when PCH is just gonna SNAP.

Saw my opthamologist yesterday. She told me I have a hernia.

See William Safire’s column in the Monday NY Times castigating the FBI’s assumption of new powers. Or better yet, don’t, so that I can use his phrase “Congressional undersight,” and you’ll think I invented it.

I said within a couple of days of 9/11 that the hijackers didn’t require anywhere near the level of organization that everyone was saying. But I didn’t realize they were actually complete idiots. Various terrorist types were all using the same cell phone; some of the hijackers had previously done a milk run flight all together, breaking the basic security of keeping cells separate from each other, which any 8-year old knows. The point being that not only should the FBI and CIA have been talking to each other and to others (I like that the State Dept routinely renewed visas of people known to the CIA, which hadn’t told anyone to watch out for them), but that the whole network could rather easily have been rolled up.

There is finally a Bush Doctrine, not that anyone was paying much
attention: first strike, preemptive action against countries that haven’t actually done anything, but are lookin’ at us funny. Which is a legitimate defense in a Texas court.

The Cal. legislature buries the bill to ban Indian mascots at public schools. It was a tough choice, really: perpetuate Indian stereotypes or California PC stereotypes.

The FBI has finally decided that what it really needs in the war on terrorism is more power. There’s a surprise. On Tuesday they announced new powers for the central hq of the FBI. On Wednesday, more powers for agents in the field. Next up: janitors will be able to strip search any celebrity they want, at random (the janitors have an even better union than the field agents). Does anyone really believe that the FBI wasn’t able to surf the internet?

PETA has been fighting off the infiltration and counter-intelligence operations of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. When the circuses have their own secret agents, you know you’re in trouble.

Some days, life hands you the perfect straight line. In this case, it was a business news report that McDonald’s was going to start selling “non-food items.”

Denmark pulls in the welcome mat, enacting an extraordinarily tight immigration law. This is in part thanks to the presence of a racist party in the new coalition government, but I wouldn’t absolve the rest of the government. For example, did anyone in the cabinet rebuke the leader of the Danish People’s Party for saying that Muslims have a taste for mass rape?

Britain is similarly moving to an instant-deportation system for those rejected for political asylum. On the other hand, they do now have the first ever black cabinet minister.

The Bush administration decided that the way to deal with failing Indian reservation schools run by the BIA was to privatize them, but stepped back after the obvious protests.

Colin Powell was on McNeil-Lehrer yesterday threatening India or Pakistan with worldwide condemnation if they start a nuclear war. Right, they’re not afraid of having Delhi or Islamabad hiroshimaed, but they’re terrified of “worldwide condemnation.”

Ever wonder where your old computers go when you throw them out? The answer was China, where these and other highly dangerous electronic components (“e-waste”) are stripped by little children without protective gear, and the drinking water polluted. Actually, China just banned the import of such products. The US is the only industrial country which didn’t sign up to a 1989 convention against exporting hazardous waste.

Speaking of which, Zimbabwe, though on the brink of starvation thanks to being run by an idiot, has refused an offer from the US of $9 million worth of maize, because the US would not certify that it wasn’t genetically modified.

Drano

Before going in to meet Pootie-Poot, Bush spit out his gum into his hand. The image led every Russian news report.

At a Russian university, somebody asked him about the brain drain. Bush’s response: “It’s gonna take a lotta brains in Russia to create a drain.”

Colombia, which is Spanish for “Vietnam, but with better drugs,” just elected the right-wing-death-squad candidate president. He’s promising to kill lots of guerillas, and to do it with lots of American money.

Amusing reading of the week: the British embassy in Japan has issued a pamphlet on how to deal with English football fans--serve beer in plastic cups, messages in English on how to sort their garbage, learn a few English phrases like Hello and England are a very good team. “You might be afraid of their big bodies and large numbers....” (found at guardian.co.uk/worldlatest)

A couple of days ago, Bush said that Cuba was like a prison, with no civil rights. As opposed to the part of the island the US occupies.

An Israeli astronaut, the first, is going into space in, um, July I think. He has requested the Kosher meal. Tang and gefilte fish.

A lot of Russia’s criminals are orphans, and there are many orphans because life expectancy is so low now. But one boy was lucky. A couple took him from the orphanage. Unfortunately, they also made him clean his room. He’s 12, by the way. He didn’t like having to clean his room. Fortunately, he knew some criminals. From the orphanage. So he arranged a hit.

When the pope was in Bulgaria, he brought a present. A piece of Pope John XXIII (who was once a priest in Sofia). They won’t say what part. The Guardian story said that if anyone else got on a plane with a body part in his luggage, he might be in some trouble. If you’re a pope, evidently that’s considered normal behaviour.

You probably missed it, but there was a threat of invasion against Pakistan this week because it’s harboring terrorists. The threat came from General John Keane, #2 in the US Army. Fortunately, the Ghauri missile they tested today can’t reach the US (it’s named after a 12th Century warlord type who beat the shit out of some Indians). By the way, Pakistan evidently has many more nukes than we realized, thanks to a crash program to produce weapons-grade uranium. I don’t think westerners realize how ready both sides are to use their nukes. For a start, these are not world-ending weapons. They’re mostly only about 15 kilotons, which is enough to destroy Hiroshima but not enough to set off nuclear winter. They are, in a word, usable. And they’re five minutes away from their targets, which creates a lot of incentives to shoot first when that sparrow sets off your radar.

One last joke about Bush’s speech at the Reichstag: He called terrorism the new totalitarian threat, at which point half the deputies thought: I knew Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler was a friend of mine....

Women wishing to join the Indonesian military must pass a virginity test.

In Moscow, Dubya and Pootie-Poot sign the new treaty, which finally has a name (although I believe both sides have their own name for it, which is what happens when you don’t negotiate long enough): the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty. Yes, it’s SORT of a treaty. That should be easy to remember, and to make it easier, before long it’ll be the only acronym you need to know. In 3 weeks the US will renounce the ABM Treaty, and Russia will declare Start II dead in response.

Which reminds me: if you were the leader of a country in danger of nuclear warfare, what would you do to reduce tensions? If you answered, announce a missile test, then your name must be Musharaf, because no one else is that stupid.

Bill Clinton has been in China giving a speech on “The World Trade Organization and the Chinese Real Estate Economy.” Except it wasn’t, because he didn’t do any homework for it, so he just rambled on for 30 minutes about the time he visited China in 1998 and whatnot, and then collected his check for $250,000. Jeez, I hope Carter at least came back from Cuba with a few smuggled Havanas for his trouble.

The Israeli plan to turn the West Bank into not one but eight giant prison camps proceeds apace. Trucks will not be allowed to travel between them, so goods will have to be unloaded and change trucks, for no very good reason except to destroy the Palestinian economy. And Palestinians with Palestinian papers or, amazingly enough, from East Jerusalem, will not be allowed into Israel, nor Israeli Palestinians into Palestine.

The FBI may not have been able to detect terrorism, but it did root out yet more traitors within the Bureau itself, punishing those agents who passed information to the Enemy--the Central Intelligence Agency. The one good piece of news out of all this is that the FBI failed in its attempt to get a warrant to tap Moussaoui. I’d heard that those requests were never ever rejected.

Drooling in the Vatican, drivel in Berlin

The NY Times today informs us that the pope cannot always control his saliva and that aides have to wipe it for him. Ok, but here’s the thing: there must have been great competition for that job.

In case you’re not paying attention, India and Pakistan have 1 million soldiers facing each other (and Britain is still selling them weapons, don’t know about the US). And both sides are too stupid to back down.

Bush gives a speech at the Reichstag. And unlike JFK, he really is a jelly donut. He said “We are defending civilization itself.” Just don’t ask him to spell it (although to be fair, the London Times spelled it with an “s”). He said this is in the capital of civilization for the last century, Berlin. He said that 9/11 was a dividing line as sharp and clear as Pearl Harbor. Which is probably his way of reminding the Europeans just how late the US entered the Second World War. Of maybe he thinks the war actually started on September 7th, 1941 (the day his father thought Pearl Harbor was). He sought to allay fears of an Iraq invasion: “I have no war plans on my desk.” So what do you think he does have on his desk? An electric train set? A collection of Spider-Man comics? A case of tequila?

Kudos to Jesse Ventura, for vetoing making the pledge of allegiance mandatory in schools.

Last night was another edition of Celebrity Boxing, which again I did not watch, although I understand that Horshack risked his new nose. Call me when it’s Jesse Ventura against Gary Condit.

The Washington Post headline of a study reported in the Journal of the Bleeding Obvious: “Uninsured Don’t Get Needed Health Care.”

In today’s NY Times, an unnamed spokesman, questioned about the failure to raise the Tom Ridge Color of the Day from yellow to orange, says “There is a certain art to this.” Let me help you out, chuckles: you add red to the yellow to make orange.

The FBI agent who wrote the Phoenix memo is the guy who was instrumental in breaking the Oklahoma city bombing.

Let me correct the NY Times, which says that Ariel Sharon threw the Shas Party out of government because he plans to reduce subsidies to families with more than two children (the paper helpfully adds that devout Jews have many many children) (I added the second “many”). Actually, he planned to reduce subsidies to families with many many children who duck military service, like many devout Jews do. Also, interestingly enough, Sharon plans to cut subsidies to settlers.

I said the US should apologize to East Timor. It seems what it’s actually been doing since Bush got into office is trying to screw Timor. Should have known: it’s got oil. Now the UN administration that’s been overseeing the place for the last 3 years has been re-negotiating the sweetheart energy contracts the Indonesians had. Which means the UN was negotiating with one of its members, Australia, which is a bit odd; also, they really should have left this, which more than anything determines the future of the country, to the post-independence government. One of the oil companies is Phillips Petroleum. Anyway, some Aussies met Dick Cheney, who started putting pressure on the Timorese. Also, Colin Powell put further pressure on them to sign a document refusing to accuse any Americans in the new international tribunal, presumably UN peacekeepers--except there are none from the US--so possibly protecting Henry Kissinger and, remind me again, who was the Director of Central Intelligence at the time?

Blame

In environmental news, the Japanese failed to overturn the ban on whaling, so they’ll just have to keep breaking it.

In other environmental news, Britain opens the first cow-shit-fired power station.

Bush should have greeted the independence of East Timor with a hearty apology for the US giving a green light to Indonesia to invade in 1975, but .... say, 1975, wasn’t his dad in charge of the CIA in 1975?

Britain legalizes adoption by gay couples, as couples, and other unmarried couples together for 2 years or longer.

Followup: the guy sent to jail for stealing golf balls has had his sentence over-turned.

Bush’s nickname for Vladimir Putin is Pootie-Poot. We are governed by a five-year old, folks. I have a theory about W. Remember Tom Hanks in “Big”?

Condi Rice said that the warning Bush got on 8/6/01 was vague and only 1 1/2 pages. Whose fault is that? Bush made it clear early on that he didn’t want to be given any report longer than 2 pages.

The first head we need on a platter over this is John Ashcroft’s. His sole interest was the drug war, including, you’ll remember, raids on medical marijuana farms in California. For example, he sent up a proposal to Bush, on Sept. 10, calling for increases in the funding of 68 programs, none of them counter-terrorism. Being briefed by outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh, he didn’t want to hear a thing about that subject. And he sent a memo to department heads, I think also Sept 10, listing his top priorities, none of which were terrorism. However in July, he did take action on threat assessments: he stopped flying commercial airliners and started taking chartered private jets.

Everyone in the admin had higher priorities. You’ll remmeber that Ashcroft’s pro-gun fanaticism was such that he had records destroyed after 9/11 that might have helped in tracking terrorists. And Treasury Sec Paul O’Neill hampered efforts to track terrorist money by his concern to help his friends by stopping efforts to stop money laundering and tax havens. Donald Rumsfeld refused to shift budget monies from his beloved Star Wars to anti-terrorism, and evidently stopped flights by the CIA Predator spy-plane started under Clinton to try to track Bin Laden---because of a turf war between the Pentagon and the CIA.

You’ll notice that with all the Bushie efforts to scare us this week, the Tom Ridge Color of the Day hasn’t moved off yellow.

Speaking of colors, did you know that carrots weren’t orange until the 16th century? It was an ideological thing in the Netherlands. Someone is now selling purple carrots, the way God intended.

I could make a joke about Stephen Jay Gould here, but I won’t.

One point about the pre-9/11 intelligence failures is that the Bushies have been insisting that to fight terrorism properly they needed to rip up the Constitution, but in fact they had about as much evidence as they really required well before they started pissing on the Bill of Rights.

Dick Cheney warns that there could be another terrorist attack any second. Well that would certainly distract the media from past intelligent failures, wouldn’t it? And if someone else makes that comment, he can just say that the opposition complains when they withhold vague warnings, and when they make them. Win win, isn’t it?

It occurred to me that the attempt by the Catholic church to blame everything on those darned homosexuals is sort of a step forward, in that it has to contain an acknowledgement of homosexuality as a sexual orientation rather than a mental disorder. What would be interesting is a definitive statement of church policy as to what exactly paedophilia is. I’m increasingly inclined to think of it as a sexual orientation, which is highly problematic in terms of how you deal with it. It’s too bad that the church, while espousing celibacy for priests, evidently knows nothing about how to keep people celibate, since that would be useful for paedophiles.

Sinn Fein wins 5 seats in the Irish parliament, including 2
former IRA leaders/gunrunners.

Israel is busily cantonizing the West Bank, turning it into 8 little bantustans, requiring Israeli permits to move between them.

Good article in the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting (www.guardian.co.uk/columnists) on the failure of military operations in Afghanistan.

Some British ramblers have failed in court to establish a right of way in Sussex that would have allowed ramblers to see some beautiful natural sights. It would have gone through a nudist camp. Nice try.

If you have #10,000 to spare, you can buy H G Wells’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He drew dirty pictures in the margins.

US troops arrive in yet another country, Soviet Georgia, in order to protect terrorists. Seriously. Georgia harbors Chechens it’s unwilling to do anything about, and this mission seems to be our way of telling Russia not to invade because Georgia is our colony now.

At the detention facilities of the war crimes tribunal, Milosevic is best man at another prisoner’s wedding. Somehow, even in a group of Serb war criminals, I doubt that Milosevic is the best man.

So what do I think should go in the World Trade Center site? How about a pillory? We lock the directors of the CIA and FBI and, oh, Condaleeza Rice, in stocks and everyone gets to throw fruit at them. Good for the NY street vendors, good for tourism, infinitely less destructive than bombing Kabul.

A NY Times columnist makes the case that whatever Al Qaeda were up to, it was never going to be simple hijacking, which was not their style at all. And that’s even without the advanced warning it now seems we had from multiple sources dating back to 1996 (to say nothing of the original attack on the World Trade Center: if there’s one thing that Dubya understands--just ask Iraq--it’s that simmering resentment about the big one that got away). I’ve heard asked several times, But what could we have done differently if the warnings had been made public? There’s an answer to that which is not only obvious (so why has no one but me come up with it?)(or maybe someone is sending a letter to the Times right now--my flight Simulator joke turned up in today’s paper), it actually happened: the Pennsylvania plane. The passengers crashed the plane once they had figured out what was going on--might not the pilots, crew and passengers of the other planes have done so, too, had they had advanced warning? A second obvious answer is, if a warning had been made, maybe they’d have cancelled or postponed the attack, giving the FBI time to catch them. That answer also hasn’t appeared anywhere.

Ari Fleischer, speaking for the American people, says “They will welcome an inquiry if it’s free from politics, led by the responsible experts, and the determinations of what should be looked into are made on the basis of intelligence analysis and not political considerations.” In other words, let the same bozos at the FBI and CIA who originally fucked up determine the lines of inquiry.

And Laura Bush is wheeled out to say: “I think it is very said that people would play upon the victims’ families’ emotions, or all Americans’ emotions.” You mean the way you just did, Laura? Another candidate for the pillory.

Speaking of leaving cover-ups, I mean inquiries, to the responsible experts, only the NY Times seems to have had the story of an article by a Vatican lawyer, obviously vetted by his bosses, trying to prevent inquiries into paedophile priests spread from the US. He says that bishops shouldn’t give any information to secular authorities, shouldn’t force psychological testing on the priests, and should continue to transfer them without staining their good names [yes, in those words] by informing the new parish.

US military aid to Indonesia is about to resume, at midnight Sunday, when East Timor becomes independent.

Kaiser Permanente, which is so evil that its executives all dress as Darth Vader except that the helmet has a spike at the top (get it, Kaiser, German helmet, get it?), had a policy of paying its telephone clerks bonuses based on how quickly they got off the phone with sick people, and how few appointments with doctors they scheduled. TELEPHONE CLERKS!

The Russians are crowing over having assassinated a Chechen warlord, which they did by sending him a letter. Laced with poison. It’s nice to see the KGB up and running again, isn’t it?

If you go into the woods today: Economic conferences are no longer held in cities, at the request of the local McDonald’s and Starbuck’s franchises, I believe. So the G8 is due to meet in the Canadian Rockies. Only they just realized that it was the start of the grizzly bear hunting season--that is, hunting *by* the grizzlies. Secret services are a little nervous.

Gerhard Schroeder successfully defends his crown, as a German court rules that his hair really is that color.

Jimmy Carter and the White House agree that Castro won’t let dissidents speak out.

On a completely unrelated matter, Dick Cheney warns Democrats not to question the government’s handling of 9/11. It is irresponsible in a time of war, he says, and calls it “incendiary,” perhaps not the best choice of words. In a second day of spin rather than truth-telling, Bush, who came in second in the last election, says that Washington is a place where second guessing has become second nature. He is actually annoyed that people are upset by his cover-up. Bush: “Had I known that the enemy was going to use aeroplanes [I copied this from the London Times] to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people.” Ah, so he needed to know the exact day, the exact time of day, and the exact method of attack before he could do anything. It seems that FBI agents were predicting that planes could be crashed into buidlings, so it wasn’t quite as unimaginable as the White House was claiming yesterday. Hell, has Ari Fleischer never played Flight Simulator? I’ve personally crashed an aeroplane into the Sears Tower on more than one occasion.

Lithuania scraps its requirement that women get gynaecological exams before being issued drivers’ licenses.

The results of the Dutch elections sucked, as predicted, and the anti-immigrant Insert Pun-Based-on-Fortuyn-Here Party will join the next government. One immediate result: the next German chancellor came out in favor of curbing immigration and preventing Turkey joining the EU. He says immigrants must start integrating. You know, eating sausage, invading Poland, that sort of thing.

The outgoing German chancellor, Gerhard “No chance in hell” Schroder, is now pissed at Stern magazine for running a faked picture of him naked but for a figleaf. Given that his other big concern is newspapers saying he dyes his hair, I presume this is because the figleaf prevented the German public seeing if the carpet matched the drapes.

I’ve just disgusted myself.

As I mentioned before, the British hailed Operation Snipe as a success despite failing to find a single enemy. It also turned out that those caves full of munitions they blew up belonged to one of the “good” warlords.

Finally, Bush’s horrible horrible screw-up (snort, giggle giggle). OK, we knew 9/11 was a horrendous intelligence failure. Right now I’m actually more pissed off at Congress, which after 9/11 completely failed to investigate that failure, and hence 9 months later didn’t know that there was advanced warning. The analogies to Pearl Harbor just keep getting more apt, don’t they? What will really hurt Bush was the cover-up. The line that they only thought there would be regular hijackings, which was all they had today, seems particularly inept, since they don’t seem to have done anything to prevent those either, and if they had, it would obviously have stopped what actually happened. The airlines deny ever having received the warning the Bushies are claiming they put out. And what makes it look worse, Bush got the warning while he was on vacation, and perhaps paying less attention than usual. I’m going to enjoy this.

The Japanese are literally preparing for an invasion. English football fans, for next month’s round of the World Cup at which England will be eliminated. They’re very scared. The government has helpfully prepared t-shirts which English football fans who are not football hooligans can wear to identify themselves. They say “Not a football hooligan.” Problem solved. A friend of mine is planning to buy a bunch, figuring they’ll become collector’s items.

In Jordan, for the first time a woman divorces a man.

The NY Times points out that when Bush was condemning Castro’s human rights record yesterday, he was standing next to the prime minister of Malaysia at the time.

One of the sillier conflicts is between Britain and Spain over control of Gibraltar. Talks are breaking down even as we speak, in part because Britain has promised not to change the Rock’s status without a referendum of the locals, who regard absorption into Spain much as Ian Paisley does the Irish Republic. Spain doesn’t want to admit to the principle of consulting people, because someone might suggest that the Basques be asked their opinion (Spain is about to ban the Basque independence party Batasuna).

Speaking of referenda, do you notice that no one but no one is demanding the referendum that was supposed to be held for the last 50 years in Kashmir? One reason I have trouble choosing up sides there is that I really have no idea what the majority of the Kashmiri people actually want.

The Democrats are shocked, shocked, to find that there is fund-raising going on (that’s a Casablanca allusion, in case you missed it). Bush is using in his fund-raising a photo of himself on Air Force One on the phone to Dick Cheney on September 11, asking “Can I come home yet?” This is said to be capitalizing on a national tragedy, although Bill Maher says that another picture, of Bush after the last election, is doing the same. I never watch his show, but I’m kind of sorry he’s been cancelled.

Every cloud of uncertainty has a coal-black lining

The Bush admin has asked a federal judge to reverse his decision suspending permits to mine for coal by ripping the tops off of mountains and tossing them in rivers. It says the decision “casts a tremendous cloud of uncertainty”. Better that than muddying the waters...

Since 1967 Israel has stolen 42% of the West Bank (actually, the report doesn’t say, but I’m assuming this doesn’t include the 25% or more of the West Bank that’s been annexed to “Jerusalem”). The settlements themselves don’t take up that much territory, but their municipal boundaries are to say the least generous. Add to that land allotted to the settlers’ regional councils, seized for military purposes, declared abandoned, declared “state land” under old Ottoman laws.....

On further reading of the details of Bush’s nuclear missile treaty, if “details” is not too grandiose a word for a 3-page document (compared to Start I’s 700 pages), I find it to be totally pointless. It requires literally nothing for the next ten years, and then when it’s about to require something, it expires. That Putin agreed to this amounts to a complete surrender. Will encourage Russia to store nukes, which leaves them open to theft, and does nothing about tactical nukes. It has no monitoring provisions.

Crown Prince whatsisface has been explaining that he spent a full five hours with Bush because Bush was such a complete ignoramus that he needed everything explained to him very slowly. The Guardian used a headline evoking comedian Harry Enfield’s upper-class twit character, Tim Nice But Dim.

5.2, big deal

Yes there was an earthquake, yes I felt it, end of story.

Article in Tuesday Washington Post on the Carlyle Group and the Crusader, detailing how they made out like bandits off a failed military project, and just who they paid off, how much.

Daily Variety’s site lists under theater reviews: Sweeney Todd, A Class Act. Turns out that’s two different plays.

A tv show actually under consideration involves a makeover of a “crude and uncultured” straight guy into a “hip and happening Renaissance man a the hands of five fabulously trendy gay men.” It sounds, um, fabulous.

A nuclear arms agreement is reached between the US and Russia, and the cold war is finally over. Except that we’re not actually destroying any weapons, unless we feel like it of course, just putting them in storage. No one’s said who long it would take to get them ready to launch again, but I’m guessing not very long. So this agreement actually restricts us in no way whatsoever, but is entirely voluntary in its effects, just like Bush’s idea of how to regulate polluters.

The real nuclear war is more likely to show up over Kashmir. As I understand it, the US is pissed at Pakistan for not doing anything about all those Al Qa’eda militants hanging out there, which Pakistan says is because it has to defend its border against India, which is only pissed because Pakistan isn’t doing anything about all those Kashmiri militants sneaking into India. India is threatening to close the mountain passes and launch rocket attacks on training camps that Musharraf had promised to close and didn’t.

The British have finished up their sweep in Afghanistan, hilariously named Operation Snipe, and pronounced it a complete success, despite not having caught a single enemy.

As if France having the sole choice between Chirac and Le Pen wasn’t bad enough, now Israel has Sharon v. Netanyahu. Next up, Darth Vader or Ming the Merciless? Ebola or bubonic plague? Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey?

Speaking of crappy elections, people with no arms are being trained how to vote in the forthcoming Sierra Leonean elections, where they can mark their ballots with their big toe. Why do they have no arms? They were hacked off in reprisal for voting in the last elections.

A forthcoming book called The Science of Superheroes informs us that Spider-Man is not scientifically accurate. And Krypton’s gravity would have to be 8X that of earth for Superman to be able to leap a 30-story building. On this subject, I would recommend Larry Niven’s essay on the mechanics of sex between Superman and an all-too human Lois Lane, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”

Trying to ruin Carter’s trip to Cuba, the Bushies last week claimed Cuba was developing bio weapons. Their proof is that it has “dual-use” facilities--this is all Condi Rice could drag out on McNeil-Lehrer, and all Carter himself was shown in his briefings--which means nothing more than that it produces its own medicine.

Congress is working on a measure to deny arms sales to any country that signs up to the War Crimes Tribunal, and to permit operations to rescue any Americans caught in its evil clutches. One Democrat, I’m sorry I forget whom, had a little fun questioning his colleagues to find out that they didn’t know where the court would be, i.e., that they were forget whom, had a little fun questioning his colleagues to find out that they didn’t know where the court would be, i.e., that they were authorizing war against the Netherlands.

Saddam Hussein offers Arafat a safe haven if he gets expelled from Israel. Right, cause in Baghdad he could get away from having rockets dropping all around him.

Ben-Gurion: “whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a Zionist.”

The first sentence of a wire story: “A Japanese faith healer was sentenced to death for beating 6 people to death with a drumstick during a 1995 exorcism ritual.” So is that a stick used to beat a drum or a chicken part? Enquiring minds want to know.

This week may have seen the last use of Old Sparky.

In 1999 the Pakistani army “mobilized” its nuclear weapons (whatever exactly that means) against India, and the prime minister wasn’t told, although he was informed by Clinton. Before Sharif, Benazir Bhutto had to ask for US intelligence briefings about her country’s nuclear capability, because the army wouldn’t tell her. And we’re continuing to support military rule for what reason now? Well, one reason is that it’s so much better on women’s issues than some other Muslim countries, although when informed about a woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery because she reported being raped, he seemed a little surprised and said that he’d never given much deep thought to changing the country’s ridiculous adultery laws.

Saddam Hussein offers Arafat a safe haven if he gets expelled from Israel. Right, cause in Baghdad he could get away from having rockets dropping all around him.

Ben-Gurion: “whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a Zionist.”

The first sentence of a wire story: “A Japanese faith healer was sentenced to death for beating 6 people to death with a drumstick during a 1995 exorcism ritual.” So is that a stick used to beat a drum or a chicken part? Enquiring minds want to know.

This week may have seen the last use of Old Sparky.

In 1999 the Pakistani army “mobilized” its nuclear weapons (whatever exactly that means) against India, and the prime minister wasn’t told, although he was informed by Clinton. Before Sharif, Benazir Bhutto had to ask for US intelligence briefings about her country’s nuclear capability, because the army wouldn’t tell her. And we’re continuing to support military rule for what reason now? Well, one reason is that it’s so much better on women’s issues than some other Muslim countries, although when informed about a woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery because she reported being raped, he seemed a little surprised and said that he’d never given much deep thought to changing the country’s ridiculous adultery laws.

Enough with the Amish already. Put the fucking orange triangle on the fucking carts already. Call it the new black. If you want to stay away from modernity so much, keep the carts off the asphalt, which you won’t find in the bible either. Do you believe they’re actually talking about leaving Pennsylvania for Ohio to escape the oppressors?

A couple of days ago, the CIA tried to assassinate an Afghan warlord (that’s what the news stories called him--you might never have known he used to be prime minister). He had no connections with the Taliban or with Al Qa’eda. To show how little critical attention is paid to American foreign policy, you’ll note that there has been no mention of this in today’s newspapers, or any hint as to the justification, or who ordered this.

The Bush administration is planning to interpret the laws against discrimination to allow public schools to set up separate, but no doubt equal, schools for each sex. Add to this the growth in compulsory school uniforms, and abstinence-only sex ed., well, all you have to do is add nuns with rulers...

Speaking of the dark ages, Bahrain just had its first election in which women could vote. Bahrain never made it on to the list of countries in which women couldn’t vote--like Kuwait--because no one else has voted since 1973. Women ran for office, too, but none were elected or made it run-offs.

Maryland suspends the death penalty while it investigates why most people on its death row are black and why all their victims, but one, were white.

The House Appropriations Committee adds another unasked for $200 million on for aid to Israel. No wonder Sharon looks like the cat who’s swallowed a 350-pound canary.

Actually, the happiest-looking person I’ve seen on tv lately has been that kid who put all the bombs in the mailboxes. A smiley face? A SMILEY FACE?

The Bush administration does not, contrary to what I said in my last, support the right to own machine-guns. Sorry: badly written wire service report.

Bush calls the latest suicide bombing (or perhaps the one before that) a “wanton taking of innocent life”. Presumably, the wanton taking of guilty life, say in 152 executions, is just tickety boo. No one ever applies the term wanton to sex any more, I kind of miss it.

Sharon has been saying that he got permission from the US to bypass Arafat. The White House denies it, but you gotta wonder. Sharon has been talking about reforming the Palestinian administration, as have some unnamed Bushies, and the minute they all move to Palestine and take out citizenship I’m sure their opinions will be taken with all the seriousness they deserve. Clearly the plan is to “reform” Arafat into a figure-head role like the president of Israel. Or the Queen of England, but without the dress sense.

The comedian Reno is quoted as describing Dubya’s ad lib speaking as like a drunk trying to look sober. Today you could see him desperately trying to remember what you call the place where the Palestinians live, finally settling on “the Palestinian world.”

I assumed that Israel had forged the documents it claims link Arafat to terrorism. Instead, it seems that they just lied about the content of those document. Speaking as an academic, there’s nothing as annoying as shoddy scholarship.

Sharon pissed off the Bush admin by hinting to the ADL while in the US that the Bushies had helped him in preventing the Jenin inquiry.

We got trouble: and while Sharon is in the US a suicide bomber blows up a snooker hall. Which I wouldn’t have mentioned, but I wanted to make the We got trouble joke.

Hilariously, the Israelis and Palestinians were proposing to exile people from the Church of the Nativity to Italy without asking Italy first. Italy says no, meaning it wants a present. Like being the location of the proposed Middle East conference.

Sharon is now making demands about restructuring the Palestinian authority. I thought the Israeli army already did that. And where Powell proposes a conference in which neither Sharon nor Arafat go so they don’t have to meet, Sharon proposes that he go and Arafat not.

I’d been wondering why the US was planning to un-sign the treaty setting up the war crimes court, which seemed like an unnecessary symbolic gesture. But actually, under the Vienna Convention of 1969, if a country has signed a treaty, even if it hasn’t ratified it, it’s not supposed to actively undermine that treaty. So now we can.

The London Times claimed yesterday that Pim Fortuyn’s assassination robbed European politics of its innocence (that was an op-ed headline). Yes, innocence, that was exactly the word I was looking for to describe European politics. A Dutch paper applied the same phrase to the Netherlands, which at least makes more sense. Although if your assassinated politician is a racist, you might wish to rethink the whole innocence angle there too. He was killed by an animal rights activist, which makes it that little bit sillier.

If the NY Times seemed completely unsure what position Fortuyn actually held in the Rotterdam government, it also failed to explain how Chirac was able to just pick a new prime minister in what is supposed to be a parliamentary system (I don’t know the answer to this one myself). He will serve only 6 weeks, but plans to pretend to crack down on crime in a big way to secure the Le Pen voters, acting by decree rather than legislation. Explain to me again how this was a victory for democracy?

The Bushies have now *officially* taken the position that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of individuals, not in a militia, to own guns, evidently including machine guns.

If you’ve been paying attention to the Bush admin’s Middle East rhetoric the last few days, you’ll have noticed that they have found something new with which to beat up Yasir Arafat: corruption, a word that now makes its way into every speech. I’m not sure what the point of this is.

I read a story told by one of those Israeli reservists who refused to serve in the Re-Occupied Territories (of whom there have been almost none in the last month and a half, if you were wondering). When he was previously serving on roadblock duty, the army asked if the platoon needed anything. Washing water, they said, so a digger fractured a pipe, giving 10 Israelis the ability to wash on duty, while a village of 5,000 had no water for 5 days.

The World Cup is being held in Seoul this year and there is a major push on to promote the eating of dog, with lots of free samples for the tourists, including some sort of liquid dog that is expected to make them forget about Pepsi forever.

Hurrah, hurrah, Jacques Chirac is reelected. Bush has not used the word corruption about him, but surely a “victory for democracy” would have meant that this corrupt embezzler would have been hounded out of public life and into a jail cell.

For a good time, call...

212-479-7990. (This is a number intended to be given to people in bars in NY). Oh, just call it.

The Israelis let Yasir Arafat out. He immediately saw his shadow, meaning six more millennia of intractable turbulence. [Daily Show joke]

God created war to teach Americans geography. [European joke]

The golf ball martyr is out of prison pending an appeal.

However South Carolina just executed someone who probably didn’t do it. He’s supposed to have killed a state trooper, and was convicted on the evidence of his hitch-hiker, who is a loon and has since confessed. The state Sup Court had a judge check it out and he said that she told so many stories, her confession can’t be believed. As opposed to her original testimony.

Dick Armey says that it’s ok if Israel grabs the entire West Bank and expels all the Palestinians. And the Senate and House both pass resolutions taking Israel’s side, the House saying that Arafat is not “a viable partner for peace.” Unless you use Bush’s dictionary, in which Sharon is a man of peace.

Just a few days after Linda Lovelace dies, we find out that Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat was one Mark Felt. So now we know. Maybe.

A new site www.medialens.org, is worth checking out, for articles on subjects and perspectives ill-treated by the media. Check out, for example, the Noam Chomsky piece on the Middle East.

Follow-ups: the US was force-feeding prisoners in Guantanamo last week, but isn’t now, although it will go back to it since they still aren’t eating. Prisoners are being tortured in our name, but no one cares. It’s nice to know that American justice is better than that of Saudi Arabia, where they just extracted two teeth from a man who knocked out two teeth from another man in a fight (they also fined, flogged and imprisoned him).

And the guy with the missing leg in Texas was finally executed yesterday, and they still wouldn’t give him an artificial leg. So he was wheeled in. A proud day.

It’s always fun when Republicans’ worst instincts conflict with their other worst instincts. In this case, a bankruptcy bill written by the credit card companies to screw consumers is being held up because it may harm the ability of anti-abortion protestors to declare bankruptcy in order to avoid paying fines and damages.

5 years of Tony Blair, as of today, and 50 years of QE2. To show that British politics are no less dysfunctional than Lizzie’s family, there were endless difficulties in working up a seating chart that accommodated the 4 living former prime ministers (primes minister?), who all hate each other.

A Sunday Times poll suggested that if Britain had a party like the French Front Nationale, anti-immigrant and anti-Europe, 22% would vote for it. The suggestion is that if fascist parties weren’t unrespectable, there would be a major constituency for them. I picture it like a junior high dance, with all the guys hanging out at one end of the gym, waiting for one or two of them to cross over and make it ok. And this is everywhere. The support for the old parties and support for representative democracy, is growing thinner and thinner. Where it was never that strong, Zimbabwe and Pakistan, say, we’ve seen unsubtle parodies of the democratic process (the US says of Pakistan’s referendum today, in which anyone could vote anywhere as many times as they wished and counting was done centrally with no oversight, that it was Pakistan’s internal affair.) Hugo Chavez led a failed coup and then was actually elected, which means no one could expect that he’d necessarily leave when his term was up. But in the last decade, we’ve seen support for old ruling parties literally evaporate in Italy, Canada. Italy’s ruling party is named after a football team. 1/3 of electors in France’s presidential election voted for fascist or trotskyite candidates. A wrestler is governor of Minnesota, and the cuteness of that has rather worn off. I’m telling you, if a fascist party could get itself that first 20% of the vote in most countries of the world including this one, the next 20% would just roll in. The continuing debate on how to handle Le Pen in today’s Guardian (guardian.co.uk/worldlatest) is instructive: do you debate him, do you go out in the streets yelling No passaran, do you ignore him? There is no consensus on how to make it clear that fascism is unacceptable to an electorate that doesn’t understand that already.

That poor, poor bicycle repair man

The Washington Post headline has the Israelis “retaliating” again.

A joke: Donald Rumsfeld and his top aides go to the Oval Office. Rummy tells Bush that the invasion of Iraq will kill ten million Iraqi civilians and a bicycle repairman. Bush asks, “What’s this about a bicycle repairman?” Rumsfeld turns to his aides and says, “See, I said no one cares about the Iraqi civilians.”

Madagascar may be in the process of splitting apart. I’m not sure even they care. I like Madagascar because they have great names and I know how to pronounce them, having taken African history courses.

www.fwfr.com. Movies reviewed in four words.

A cricket pitcher has broken the 100 mph barrier. I started losing you people around Madagascar and it’s just going downhill, isn’t it?

The hunger strike and forcible feeding of Guantanamo detainees, front page news 4 weeks ago, still hasn’t been worth a single follow-up. Did it end 4 weeks ago, is it still going on? And not a word in weeks or months on the anthrax investigation.

Also not making the NY Times is Mugabe’s new target of attacks in
Zimbabwe, the Asian populace. If anyone’s memories extended as far back as Uganda in the 1970s, this might be a source of some worry, but it doesn’t. A couple of weeks ago George W. was asked if his father had made a mistake in not deposing Saddam Hussein; his response: “I can’t remember that far back.” The man truly speaks for the American people. Oh well, as they say at the White House, “Don’t nuance it to death.”

I’m writing on Sunday night, and the UN commission to investigate Jenin still hasn’t begun work. Israel, which has nothing whatsoever to hide, keeps adding conditions, which now include only allowing it to speak to Israelis the government chooses, monitoring other interviews, telling the UN where it can and can’t go, and it wants none of the evidence collected ever to be used in, oh, say, a war crimes trial.

Under the new “anti-terrorism” laws, Michigan police can keep secret the reason for a search.

The farm bill is complete, and California is getting screwed, no surprise there. After last year’s posting on the web of the billionaires getting farm aid, they’ve decided not to have any limit on the amount of aid any single person can get (ok there is one, but with a zillion exemptions), and they’re going to keep the names of recipients secret this time. Agribusiness as usual.

OK, I can’t hold it in any longer: a German commits mass murder, how could it be?

I’m better now.

A Guardian columnist informed his readers that his birthday was coming up and the one thing he didn’t want was the CD-ROM, just out, of the complete public statements of Margaret Thatcher, 1945-1990. 14 million words. #293.75, which the columnist thought was a suspiciously specific price.

Speaking of suspiciously specific, how about Cardinal George’s comments about there being a difference between a paedophile and someone who, say, has sex with a consenting 16-year old girl when he’s drunk? I liked the line in the policy statement about throwing out only “notorious” child-molesters. My computer dictionary says notorious means widely known, which is what they were trying to avoid by moving them around. I also liked whichever cardinal that was who said that even celibate homosexuals couldn’t be priests because they wouldn’t be giving up anything good, like marriage and heterosexual sex, but something bad, like gay sex. Yup, trust the Catholic hierarchy to turn this into an opportunity for gay-bashing.

It didn’t make it into any of the three papers I just read, but the Pakistani supreme court rejected a bid to stop Musharaf’s referendum as being unconstitutional. I don’t know how you even go about applying constitutionality to a referendum to maintain in power someone who seized it unconstitutionally in the first place.

A piece in one of the British newspaper on Bush’s pushing of abstinence-only sex ed. gives the figure that the programs postpone sexual activity by 18 months, but fails to note (and I mention it now in case any article you’ve read has done the same) that when they do have sex, they’re much more likely to have unprotected sex, presumably because they’ve never been taught any better. Bush wants to spend $135 million per year on this.

A Daily Telegraph headline, which was a lot more interesting before I realized what it actually meant: Internet Kills off Porn “Dinosaurs”.

A new trend: storing cells of umbilical blood, containing stem cells useful if baby needs a transfusion or bone marrow transplant. Cost (in pounds, though it’s mostly an American practice): #1,000 plus 70 per year.

Ariel Sharon’s approval ratings have shot up since last month from 35% to 65%. Israel is only going to get nastier, you know. There’s a fair amount of talk about the Palestinians out-breeding the Israelis, but among the Israelis, it’s the religious fanatics who out-breed rabbits, and the last decade’s immigrants have mostly been from the outer Soviet republics and transfer their existing racist antipathies from Asians to Palestinians. Right now the country is as open-minded and liberal as it’s ever going to be again.

smoking goat gonads

You might want to check out the latest Molly Ivins column (creators.com/opinions.html), which contains the phrase found in my subject line.

So Arafat had a nice little kangaroo court for the alleged assassins of the racist Israeli tourist minister, a court at which no real lawyers or judges were present, and sentenced them, and the Israelis still aren’t happy. Well, tough shit, because it still complied with the 1993 peace accords. Like it or not, Israel can no longer demand that they be handed over.

The other Trial of the Week occurred in Britain, where a man was sentenced to 6 months for stealing golf balls. He was caught emerging in a wet-suit from the water hazard of a golf club with 1,158 balls. He quite rightly argued that the balls were lost and therefore recoverable by anyone, and that no one could prove that those golf balls belonged to the golf club in which they were found. Says the Daily Telegraph, Free the Whetstone Golf Club One!

The US’s funding of the Venezuelan opposition comes out. Why does the National Endowment for Democracy still exist? You only hear about it when it’s trying to influence foreign elections or destabilize a country the US government doesn’t like.

Something fairly remarkable happened last week. The US was applauding a coup in Venezuela, and it was supported in this by not a single Latin American country.

Some of the coup leaders have turned up in Florida (where else?). Do you suppose they will be excluded from the country? We do have laws about that, and in fact used them in the past against another Venezuelan coup leader, Hugo Chavez.

A German artist was arrested in Salzburg, Austria (as was I, once). On the municipal building is a plaque with a single sentence from Theodore Herzl: “I spent some of the happiest hours of my life in Salzburg.” The artist added the rest of the quote, which is that he couldn’t stay there because they’d never let a Jew be a judge.

This should be fun. Kofi Annan is now threatening to send the UN inspection team to Jenin despite Israel’s insistence that it not show up until, oh, October-ish, around tea time. This after letting Israel veto members of the team, including former Irish president Mary Robinson. I’m sure the US will treat this with the same indignation poured on Iraq when it tries this sort of thing.

You can tell a lot about a democracy by who it blames when the results of the democratic process are profoundly unsatisfactory.

That’s a great start for an essay on the results of the first round of the French presidential election. Too bad I’m not going to write that essay. Still. The Times yesterday blamed an electoral system that allowed in too many candidates. I think we’ll get a lot of the “too much democracy” line. Lets all blame Ralph Nader again. Voter apathy is a good one, provided we not blame the voters for the failures of the politicians. Britain is facing local elections in which the neo-nazis might do well if the turnout is low, so France has focused minds on getting the voters out. I think most “democracies” have gotten way too willing to play to the committed voters and ignore how many people won’t bother to vote for the choices handed to them. But there is so much in modern politics to be cynical about. Jospin looks way too much like Dr Strangelove and has the personality of an Al Gore. The crime isn’t that he lost to Le Pen, it’s that he wasn’t ever going to beat Chirac, a man with 7 corruption investigations that he’s ducking. Or Italy, run by a man who built an empire on Mafia money and rewrites the conflict of interest laws to eliminate the crimes he likes to commit. These two should be in jail. Gerhard Schroeder is pissing away the electoral lead the SPD used to have in Germany and is more concerned with going to court against anyone who says his hair is dyed. Which it is. I mean, come on. Democracy won the ideological battle against communism, and is now daily losing it to influence-buyers and hair-dyers.

Tom DeLay, House Majority Whip (this is from the Saturday Washington Post) tells some Baptists that God is using him to promote a “biblical worldview” in American politics and that he wanted Clinton impeached so badly because he held “the wrong worldview.” He also told parents to send their children to good Christian colleges, and not to Texas A & M and Baylor, the latter of which expelled him for drinking and carousing (did you know that? I didn’t.)

The US is going to go for the death penalty against a former Air Force guy who thought about selling secrets to Iraq and Libya. That is, he wrote letters suggesting such a deal, although he may not actually have sent them, if I understand this correctly. So there may be no actual crime, and they’re trying to use the death penalty for something that isn’t murder. This is bad. It gets worse. They plan to claim that he actually did sell secrets, but since they have no evidence of it, they’re planning to make that claim only in the penalty phase.

Yet more stories from Jenin. The considered opinions of the reporters from the Observer and the Sunday Times are that there was no massacre per se, but that it was pretty bad. My favorite story is this family of 13 people the soldiers kept confined to one room while they operated from the rest of the house (i.e., they were kept around as human shields). The soldiers fed the dog but not the children.

Don’t nuance it to death

Two incredibly British stories: a woman is reported to the RSPCA for neglect of her dog. Reported by a burglar. And the man who ran a marathon for charity wearing a 120 pound deep sea diver’s outfit, in only 128 hours, 29 minutes and 46 seconds. I saw the last few feet on the BBC, and it was painful just to watch. He also runs super-marathons in the Sahara (whatever those may be, I don’t want to know), has climbed Everest and is thinking of bicycling across Australia. He recovered from leukemia himself.

Bob Barr’s report on the vandalism by outgoing Clinton staffers revealed $14,000 in damage (if you include a lot of normal wear and tear). 170 members of the Bush and Clinton staffs were interviewed, at a cost of something like $200,000.

In the Times there is the diary of a 15-year old Palestinian girl in Jenin, whose house was taken over by Israeli soldiers. She got to see her father used as a human shield.

A NY Times columnist, the new guy whose name I can never remember, notes that the director of Medicare and Medicaid has defied a subpoena to testify before Congress. See, the Bush admin figures on future health-care spending are ridiculously low, too low to stand up to any questioning at all. This is in order to bolster the Bush claim that tax cuts can be afforded.

Everyone’s still trying to figure out what Bush meant yesterday when talking about the failed Powell mission. He seems to have given permission for the Israelis to keep doing what they’re doing, but an official, unnamed, told the press “Don’t nuance it to death.” I think George W. has just been given a new motto.

Declaring victory and going home

Bush is actually saying that Powell made progress, although most newspapers seem to be using the words “humiliating” and “defeat” in close proximity. But then Bush is the guy whose proclamation of Jewish Heritage Week used the phrase “in the Year of Our Lord 2002,” so his engagement with these things may not entirely be trusted.

Some unnamed government leaker said that Powell was getting along well with Sharon, that they had a “general thing going” (meaning that they were both former generals, not that the “thing” was non-specific). I assume this means that they can reminisce over the times they both ordered people buried alive by bulldozers, Powell in the Gulf War and Sharon at any number of times between 1953 and this week. Ah, memories.

Israel is opening a concentration camp in the Negev desert. Oh, and it’s taking as hostages the mothers and wives of the Palestinians who took sanctuary in the Church of the Nativity.

Bush the Elder famously considered the Bill of Rights to be very much a work in progress, supporting I once counted something like 7 or 8 constitutional amendments: school prayer, abortion, flag burning, balanced budget, I can’t remember what all else. Junior not so much, but he did just come out in favor of a “Victims Rights” amendment, which wasn’t important enough for the NY Times or Wash Post to mention, but I was reading the LA Times yesterday while waiting for the idiots in the microfilm room to figure out how I could read one reel without having to resort to a mirror.

Virtual child porn is upheld by a Supreme Court in which Clarence “Long Dong” Thomas was surprisingly quiet. Various aspects passed by 6-3 or 7-2. What’s wrong with the right wing of the court was demonstrated by the dissent in the 6-3 part allowing people to use computers to stick a child head on an adult body; they said that it would allow the pornographers to pretend that real child porn was photo-shopped. That’s surely an enforcement problem which has no place in a decision on constitutionality.

See the piece in Slate on Scalia’s advocacy of the torture of prisoners.

The Bushies can’t make up their mind about what they said to the
Venezuelan coup plotters and when they said it, taking back the early statement that they spoke with the leader on the very day he took power. Now they’re claiming that in their many secret talks with these people, they advised against a coup. Yeah, that’s believable. And Otto Reich is evidently giving secret briefings to Congress claiming that Cubans were involved in shooting demonstrators, which is possible I suppose but no one
else has even suggested it.

The ant war continues, with the Argentinian ants beginning to take hold in England.

OK, when I first mentioned this yesterday it was as a curiosity of the natural world. Today I’d like to propose that it is actually the end of the world as we know it. These ants displace local ants, their sudden success after 80 years since their arrival in Europe is related to global warming, and, oh yes, they don’t spread seeds. Which is where the end of the world comes in, since there goes your ecosystem. Did I mention that the same ants are taking over in California?

Speaking of the end of the world, in a sure sign of the apocalypse, some politicians take responsbility for their own actions, the Dutch government resigning over their troops’ inability to stop the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995.

Speaking of massacres, in Jenin... ah, fuck it, next topic.

The Bush administration’s fingerprints turn up on the Venezuelan coup a lot sooner than I’d guessed. Did you notice that everyone who had contact with the coup plotters was a veteran of Reagan’s Contra wars? Latin American policy is full of these Ollie North wannabes like Otto Reich and Roger Pardo-Maurer, and whatever anonymous jerk admitted to the NY Times that Chavez was elected, but added “Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however.” Another ironic reference to Florida, I assume. The US may have done more than wink at the plotters, since there was some sort of American plane waiting to ferry Chavez out of the country. Ari Fleischer today did not deny this but gave this somewhat confusing, where not actually false, statement: “the transportation was arranged after his resignation through the Venezuelan military.” Note that Fleischer is still peddling the lie that Chavez resigned, a couple of days after some Congresscritters complained that they had been briefed by the government to that effect, with no evidence.

The US keeps going to Arafat with proposals that match Sharon’s agenda. Today’s is Powell’s idea of a conference to which Arafat would not be invited, but instead maybe foreign ministers. Powell himself this last week has been a perfect refutation of that idea, embodying the impotence of a foreign minister with no authority to do anything.

He did, however, get Arafat to condemn the most recent suicide bombing in Arabic. Israel immediately said that they couldn’t care less, that only action mattered. Which is fair enough, but why then has the Bush admin spent so much effort trying to get a concession that Israel wasn’t interested in in the first place?

Reporters for the London Times and Guardian have been wandering around Jenin, taking in the sights and talking to the locals. Someone in the Bush administration today talked about the need to end hatred of Israel. Read the reports and tell me what the appropriate attitude is.

Speaking of impotence, the pope has summoned all the US cardinals to Rome. Yup, a bunch of octogenarians sittin’ around talking about sex with children, wouldn’t you hate to be a fly on the wall at that one?

Speaking of insects, those in Europe have gotten strangely cooperative. Evidently they’ve inter-bred some, so they no longer smell each other as enemies, and the food situation has gotten pretty good, so a billions-strong super-hive now covers Italy, France, and Iberia, and is currently at war to subjugate the last remaining hold-outs in eastern Spain.

OK, fine, but I found it interesting. War correspondents’ reports on this battle may also be found in the Times and Guardian.

Well, Hugo Chavez seems to be back, and after the White House openly gloated about the coup. Oops. The US ambassador should be about as popular as the Saudi ambassador to Britain who wrote poems in praise of the suicide bombers.

The Sunday Times (sunday-times.co.uk) is full of atrocity stories from the Israeli... what’s the Hebrew for blitzkrieg? I especially like the guy they used as a human shield, shoving him through doorways until he gets shot, not by Palestians but by an Israeli sniper, in the leg, so they just leave him in the street, where he stays 24 hours until someone pulls him in. Today Sharon deliberately ruined Powell’s breakfast by showing him pictures of mangled bodies while he was trying to eat.

Here’s a story of the Queen Mum you didn’t hear much about: in 1941 she had a bunch of her more embarrassing mentally retarded relations (not by blood, at least not the niece who just died) in a home, where they stayed the rest of their lives, the last of the 5 dying this week and going to a pauper’s grave (the home was NHS). The royal family at one point claimed that 2 of them were dead, which they were not.

In our country, on the other hand, mentally retarded relations of former presidents become presidents themselves.

The UN, it seems, is supporting the families of Serb war criminals. Not intentionally, but it’s paying their lawyers such high fees that the defendants are extorting kickbacks of 1/3 to 1/2.

The story about the Bush idea of using nukes in Star Wars has yet, two days later, to appear in either the NY Times or the Washington Post. You really do have to read 5 newspapers to know what’s going on. One might also ask: what are the US troops in the Philippines up to now? Yemen? Georgia? etc? Are we still forcibly feeding prisoners in Guantanamo?

In the French presidential elections (safe bet: the incredibly corrupt Chirac will be re-elected), the candidate for a center-right party slapped a 10-year old Arab boy, and his ratings doubled, and he is now being courted for greater things, like possible prime ministership. To be fair, the kid was picking his pocket. Deja vu for me, that story.

The War Crimes Tribunal is now in existence, and what a week for it. The Unilateral States of America is not only not participating, but has banned anyone in government helping prosecutions before it in any way, and is considering sanctions on anyone who does.

Speaking of criminality, more and more black people have been claiming the slavery tax credit on their income taxes, some for political reasons, some the victims of scams. And the IRS is actually paying some of them, maybe $30 million or more so far, by mistake of course. Evidently if you’re black you can deduct $43,000, the current value of 40 acres and a mule.

Speaking of black, researchers have decided that the Black Death was not caused by bubonic plague after all.

The US has recognized the coup government of Venezuela, which has abolished the country’s congress, supreme court, atty general, constitution, and name. Bush says that now the status will be one of tranquility and democracy. Or in other words, the country is now back in the hands of the rich white people. Yeah, I know, this is me never being satisfied, since I was deeply opposed to the election of Chavez, who had previously attempted a coup (so has really nothing to complain about today) and was obviously a lunatic driven mad by power, if you consider being president of Venezuela to be power. But he was an indio, which drives the white elite crazy, and a sort of socialist who liked Cuba, which drove the US crazy. If the CIA didn’t arrange for him to be driven out, it would have, even if the country wasn’t a major oil producer.

By the time Powell finally arrived in Israel, it was already way too late. He had his knees cut off. Not by the latest bomber (the White House is now calling them homicide bombers, and Fox News immediately followed suit), not by Sharon, but by the folks back at home. Bush, you may not have noticed, but you can be sure everyone in the Middle East has, has stopped calling for the immediate pull-out of Israeli troops, and yes, called Sharon a man of peace. They said that the decision to meet Arafat was made entirely by Powell. By the time Powell arrived, it had been made abundantly clear that he did not speak for his own government. It’s time to resign, while he still has some faux dignity left.

Making the gravy train (gondola?) run on time

Israel has successfully followed the United States in throwing away all the sympathy gained for it by terrorist acts against it. We sure don’t need to see another news interview with an Israeli teenager saying how it isn’t even safe to drink lattes at a cafe anymore, when people in the West Bank are without water.

When Ariel Sharon offered Arafat a one-way ticket to Beirut, I thought what I’m sure we all thought: “Man, what a crappy travel agent he’d make.” So you have to wonder who’s Colin Powell’s travel agent, as he makes his way slowly to Israel by way of Morocco, Spain and possibly Tahiti. In Morocco they asked him if he was lost, shouldn’t he be in Israel? His response is unrecorded, but I like to think it was “I came to Casablanca for the waters.”

Did you know that Israel is the only recipient of US foreign aid that gets it all at once in January, rather than paid in instalments? Not that Bush would threaten the funding (which I understand is now mostly military aid), but he couldn’t if he wanted to.

Sharon has been quietly gathering right-wing nuts for the winter, adding 2 religious right parties to his cabinet in case Labor develops a backbone and quits. It might have been nice if some of the media had told us what their positions are, but I assume pretty ghastly, given that they’re supposed to push to the right a cabinet that already includes advocates of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Arab states and Palestinians need to recognize Israel, but no one ever says what that means. I’ve said this before, but not in a few years, so it bears repeating: what is there to recognize? Israel has no borders; I mean, even Israel couldn’t tell you what it’s borders are supposed to be. It has no constitution, but has essentially been a self-selecting body, setting the rules as it goes along for the choosing of its successors. You could say the same thing about Britain, but it’s not quite the same thing. How about the Israeli population? Well, Sharon would exclude from that Palestinians who actually lived there but were expelled by military force and terror, but include, potentially, me and any other Jew in the world. Recognize Israel, I’m not even sure there is such a thing.

When the Bush administration talks about education, it always uses the word accountability. The rest of the time, it prefers to avoid the subject. Case in point: the Pentagon is asking for a large slush fund for foreign military assistance, entirely at the discretion of the Pentagon, with none of those pesky restrictions based on human rights, drug production, support for terror, etc that are supposed to apply to regular foreign aid (until Bush signs the waiver). Also unaccountable are businesses who injure their employees through repetitive stress; Bush has a plan to deal with it and, surprise, it’s entirely voluntary.

Also unaccountable, as in accountable to a court of law, is the treatment of POWs in Guantanamo. The latest plan is to bring in Pakistani intelligence officers to “interrogate” the prisoners.

The Taiwanese, worried that they are falling behind in teaching their populace English, have assigned the task to their garbage trucks, which will now broadcast simple phrases in English such as “How much does a pound of cabbage cost?”

In a case which has medical ethicists as excited (in a creepy way) as only medical ethicists can be, a lesbian couple (that’s not the issue), nay a deaf lesbian couple, has been having children through artificial insemination deliberately designed to be deaf. They’re those weird type of deaf people who think of it as some sort of lifestyle choice. One commentator asked if it was not the job of parents to ensure the most advantages for their children. One of the parents gave an interesting response, though, that black people in America are worse off than deafs, but no one complains about people deliberately choosing to have black children. Of course, the whole issue could have been avoided if they’d been able to *adopt* a deaf kid rather than making another one.

Two stories this week of Bush politicizing ecological science. A report, the product of 12 years which said that caribou would be harmed by a pipeline in Alaska, was replaced by a two-page jobbie cobbled together in 7 days which said they wouldn’t. And the US is not supporting the American who heads the UN body looking at global warming, because he believes it exists, and is instead supporting a pliable Indian.

To the increasingly long list of things about His Fraudulency, add sentences with the word “needs” in them. “Saddam Hussein needs to go.” “Arafat needs to say, in Arabic...” No, Georgie, this is what you want, not what they need.

Sharon has decided to treat Colin Powell’s arrival next week as a deadline before which he needs to commit as many atrocities as he can, like one of those game shows where people run around supermarkets trying to throw expensive items into their cart within 60 seconds (which I seem to recall is how Kevin used to earn his living). I’d like to think this isn’t what Bush had in mind, but I can’t seem to make myself think that.

I was going to remark at some point on the fact that while no Palestinian leader seems to believe that terror tactics are bad (or Palestinians period, including parents of the suicide bombers) (although it should be said that at least the bombers volunteered; Bush talks about Palestinians who dragoon children into these missions, but it’s not like Israel doesn’t have a draft), neither has anyone resigned from the Sharon government in protest. But then, I haven’t noticed anyone protesting the torture through forcible feeding of the POWs, or the fact that Rumsfeld says he intends that that alleged Al Qaeda leader will tell everything he knows, which can obviously only come about through some form of torture or threat of death (but most likely sleep deprivation, which is considered by experts to be the most invidious form of torture, but doesn’t leave scars).

Bush would be more believable if he named specific practices he didn’t approve of: shooting Palestinian civilians through doors in front of children, for example, leaving old women to bleed to death in the streets while ambulances are blocked, that sort of thing. I read an account by the head of a clinic who was made to enter every room in front of the soldiers, who quickly realized that he was being used as a human shield.

Hello from Doe Library. Just read a London Times editorial twitting a politician thusly:

“He asks whether the Afghans, in resisting us when we occupied
military positions in their country, did not do what we should have done ourselves; but he omits to express any reprobation of the treachery which provoked us.”

That’s from the November 7, 1879 issue, the politician was William Gladstone.

Yesterday I heard some of the tributes in Parliament to the Queen Mum. “She smells of wee but we love her” was not amongst them. Someone said she has gone to “perpetual peace and rest.” What else does he think she’s been doing for the last 101 years?

Bush finally gets pissed off about the Middle East. Ooooo. “Enough is enough,” he said, indicating that one word is exactly equal to the same word, just as sure as eggs is eggs. What he actually means is, now Christians are being threatened, and that’s something else entirely, that something else being “enough.”

The Vatican is looking for a new “chief papal embalmer,” as the current one has died.

So cousins can now marry and have children, say scientists. Great, all my cousins are male.

If you think the Queen Mum’s death was the end of an era in Britain, prepare to gasp: Bobbies’ helmets are going to get a new design. The current 12-inch tall things, favorite targets for drunken students, have been in use since 1863.

See the NY Times piece about the guy in jail in Illinois since murder since 1946 who didn’t do it? Uncovered, once again, by journalism students. Evidently they gave him sodium pentathol and a spinal tap (which needs explanation), and they gave his confession to the papers--before he’d actually made any confession.

A Fairness and Accuracy Reporting study of news broadcasts on the 3 networks over a year and a half on events in Israel find many many uses of variants of the word “retaliation,” as in “Israelis today retaliated for yesterday’s suicide bombing by blowing up Chairman Arafat’s favorite camel, Booboo.” 79% of the time, it was used just that way--the Israelis retaliating for something Palestinians did--and 9% the other way around. In other words, in the most common formulation, the Palestinians were portrayed as the aggressors and the Israelis were only responding.

With effort and fun

The Tom Ridge color of the day is blank, ‘cause I’m out of ideas.

Remember those stories about all the farm subsidies going to really rich people like Ted Turner? Well Congress decided to do something to stop it: the new farm bill requires that information to be kept secret. Problem solved.

The US claims to have captured a top Al Qaida leader, or possibly a waiter. And by captured, I mean sent along forces, presumably armed, in a foreign country, and simply removed people from that country. People say that Sharon is trying to prove that his forces can go anywhere they want and do anything they want, but the US really can.

Of that man, Donald Rumsfeld, in a euphemism excessively folksy even for him, said that we were “visiting” with him. Since this visiting is going on in a location the government refuses to disclose, I assume this visiting involves electrodes attached to genitals rather than lemon meringue pie, unless the CIA has uses for a lemon meringue pie which I’d rather not know about.

Speaking of torture, a) Amnesty International refuses to condemn the forcible feeding of POWs in Guantanamo, which is stupid of them, b) if you haven’t seen the picture of Johnny Taliban naked, blindfolded and trussed up like a Christmas goose, make sure you do. Prosecutors told the court yesterday how they intend to indict him for conspiracy to do things he didn’t actually do, including kill that CIA officer Johnny Spann who had just threatened to kill him. I would just note that Spann was not wearing a uniform, which according to Rumsfeld would make him an “unlawful combatant.” The judge kept interjecting gratuitously, asking what Lindh was doing there in the first place, and asking his lawyers if they’d ever been in a war. American justice at its most impartial.

The fuss about whether BBC reporters should wear black ties when reporting on the Queen Mother’s death goes on, and on. See The Times for how much ink can get spilled on this subject.

The fucking Michigan law against fucking saying fucking obscenities in fucking public has been fucking struck down in fucking open court, live on Court TV in what I understand was a fucking hilariously obscenity-laden trial. So you can shout “f...” in a crowded theater.

zdnet.co.uk for corporate anthems, which I’ve mentioned before but have since then really taken off as an internet past-time. KPMG’s song, with the refrain “We will be number one, with effort and fun,” is this week at number, um, two. “Together each of us will run for gold that shines like the sun in our eyes.”

The Tom Ridge color of the day is Soylent Green, which is people.

You wouldn’t know it from reading the NY Times or watching McNeil-Lehrer, but the US just started torturing hunger-striking POWs at Camp X-Files. Britain gave up this practice in 1974 (after force-feeding women IRA prisoners) and as far as I’m concerned any doctor who participates in it should be defrocked. There should be discussions of this in the AMA; there should be debates on Nightline; there will not be.

The top-selling book in France explains that 9/11 never actually happened, or maybe just that the Pentagon was never attacked.

In some ways I miss the old Catholic church. A statement from a priest was read at various pulpits, in which he apologized for having “inappropriate sexual contact” with an 8-year old. Now is that one of the Seven Deadly Inappropriatenesses or one of the Ten Suggestions on Avoiding Inappropriate Behaviour?