These horrible agents

I meant to direct your attention to a N Korean propaganda poster featured on the front page of the NY Times Saturday, but forgot. Fortunately, here it is, and several others.

I saw an SUV outside Trader Joe’s last week, with a Ralph Nader bumper sticker. I took it for post-modern irony. Or possibly delusion: it was parked in a compact space, so maybe the owner thought they were driving a Sentra. Anyway, I’ve got a modest proposal: since SUVs are only purchased to drive your kids to a soccer game on a butte and such, I say let’s ban them from paved roads altogether. They’ll get good use out of their 4-wheel drives, and the rest of us will get faster, safer commutes.

Interview with Kurt Vonnegut on the war and such.

On why we should send the Statue of Liberty back to the frog-eaters.

Symbolism of the week: when Colin Powell went to the UN today, the staff covered up Picasso’s Guernica.

Said Powell: “Clearly, Saddam will stop at nothing until something stops him.” Clearly.

He also said (clearly) that when Resolution 1441 passed, “No Council member present...had any illusion...what serious consequences meant.” In other words, he is again saying that the French (etc) actually voted to let the US go to war with Iraq, and just either forgot or are lying about it.

Well, Powell successfully made the case that Iraq isn’t being very cooperative with the inspectors, and that neither is the United States. Imagine how much more effective the inspectors would be if the US hadn’t saved up its alleged intelligence for this day. Yes, the Iraqis are trying to hide weapons. But, as Powell himself said a few days ago, just because there’s a UN doesn’t mean that nations give up their sovereign right to defend themselves. How much more so for Iraq, which is being asked to give up all its weapons more dangerous than a pointy stick, when it is faced with certain war. Powell’s actual evidence was semi-convincing, though most of it depended on relying on him to be right and telling the truth about what those buildings were (although those satellite pictures were great, weren’t they? And that’s after being deliberate fuzzed up to hide our capabilities. Certainly good enough that you’d have to ask why we need U-2 flights), who those people were, and for god’s sake, how seriously are we expected to take this line: “Stop talking about it. They are listening to us. Don't give any evidence that we have these horrible agents.” These horrible agents? You mean your agent Maury who got you this gig, telling you it was an episode of Law & Order? Horrible agents indeed. Who writes this dialog?

Even William Safire, who has pretty much turned off his analytic skills for the duration, wonders why if we knew about an Al Qaida base in northern Iraq (an area not under Saddam’s control, but effectively an American protectorate anyway), we didn’t just bomb it into oblivion. The aluminum tubes were brought out again, and still prove nothing. Some defector testimony, which is always valueless, and stuff obtained by torture. The Iraqi-Al Qaida connections are laughable, of course (some of Powell’s claims have already been denied by British intelligence).

Speaking of intelligence, Guardian arcticle on previous American intelligence failures and/or lies: the Kuwaiti babies in the incubators, the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” the “chemical weapons” factory in Khartoum, etc.

Oh, and North Korea just threatened the US with a first strike. You’d think that would be news, but the good people at the NY Times evidently don’t.

2 Republican Congresscritters from NC have little problems with racism. Howard Coble, chair of the subcommittee on domestic security, says that FDR was right to intern Japanese, because weren’t a multicultural society then. And Sue Myrick also warns of the enemy within: “Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.”

Speaking of the enemy within, the World Court just ordered the US to stop executing Mexican nationals.

To the president's recollection, he thinks he has been there

GeeDubya calls the US space program “a desire written in the human heart.” But he can’t remember whether or not he’s ever visited the Johnson Space Center. Which is in Houston. Says his spokesmodel, “To the president's recollection, he thinks he has been there.” In George Bush’s head, no one can hear you scream. Ari Fleischer also says Bush has never seen a NASA takeoff or landing because there are so many other beautiful things to see.

Speaking of beautiful things to see in Texas, the state executed that innocent guy today. The prosecution did release to the defense the documents it had previously withheld, a full 7 hours before the execution, so that’s fair enough. The DNA test was never performed.

All hail the Union of Serbia and Montenegro Until the Next Civil War, as the nation of Yugoslavia is voted out of existence. Farewell, Union of Southern Slavs, and don’t let the war crimes tribunal hit you in the ass on the way out.

From the Daily Telegraph (a story about Britain): “The Catholic Church is to appoint an education "tsar" to fight suggestions that Catholic schools are breeding grounds for sectarianism and religious bigotry.” Yes, to show how open and tolerant you are, you’re appointing a TSAR.

Speaking of tolerance, New Mexico’s state senate saves the proud sport of cock-fighting from being outlawed. Evidently it’s an important part of Hispanic culture, according to some assholes.

Evidently I failed to mention the Bush plan to let states reduce Medicaid payments, impose co-pays, throw people off, etc etc, without having to get federal permission. This would not only set off a race to the bottom, which we’ve already begun, but end Medicaid as an entitlement program, which is the idea.

Drinking pesticides for fun and profit

Here’s a subtle clue that your housekeeping might not be the best: after hearing a loud crash in my bedroom during one of Sunday’s earthquakes, I couldn’t figure out what had fallen down.

The fed gov is asking a court to dismiss a suit by a whistle blower who said that Star Wars doesn’t work, and was fired. The gov says that letting her have her day in court would let military secrets out (like the fact that Star Wars doesn’t work, I’m guessing).

Speaking of secrets, Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator of Nebraska, owned the company that ran the voting machines that counted the votes that put him into that office in 1996 in a surprise win (the company threatened to sue someone who found went public). Article on how computerized vote-counting is a black box that leaves no verifiable paper trail. The whole country is now Florida. The Hill reports (there’s a link to the story from the above link) that Hagel failed to disclose his interest in the company, as required by law. His company makes half the voting machines used in the US, and this is very paranoid-making.

So why is Tony Blair, whose pursuit of whatever the latest opinion poll tells him to pursue is legendary, following Bush’s line so assiduously when he can’t even bring the Labour party behind him, much less the British people? I’m thinking Shrub’s got pictures of him tied up and being whipped, possibly by Hillary Clinton. Today, Mr. Blur actually channeled Lyndon Johnson: "History points to this lesson: show weakness now and no one will ever believe us when we try to show strength in the future”.

Guardian on the US’s war in Colombia, and the legalization of new death squads in that country. For the spelling-challenged, this is the nation of Colombia, not the space shuttle Columbia. When Colombia falls apart in a mass of flaming debris, it will not be available at reasonable prices on Ebay.

Bayer paid college students, mostly in Edinburgh, to test out some pesticides. By drinking them. This actually violates the Nuremberg Code. Bayer is a subsidiary of IG Farben, which brought you Zyklon B.

Creationists are suing a Texas Tech professor who won’t write letters of recommendation for students who don’t believe in evolution.

The Catholic Church bans transsexuals from being priests.

I mentioned that Bush’s little initiative on AIDS in Africa mostly bypasses the UN AIDS fund. That fund ran out of money today.

The US is planning to use sea lions in the Iraq war.

You can now pass Florida’s high school PE requirements online. Now why didn’t they have that when I was in high school?

The Bush admin wants to keep using methyl bromide, a pesticide due to be banned under an international agreement to protect the ozone layer, because it is necessary to one of the American industries most beloved of Republicans: golf courses.

CanNOT make this shit up.

Speaking of poison gases, it seems that the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja was actually the work of Iran, not Iraq.

Britain is working on setting up new tests for aliens seeking citizenship. It includes how to use a telephone, what the cops can and can’t do, “etiquette of everyday life,” equality of the sexes, the funny name of that guy Mrs. Wallace Simpson was fucking, why Wales only gets a “National Assembly” while Scotland has a “Parliament,” etc etc. What it does not include, to much tut tutting, is British history. I believe the American system is that if you can correctly answer any historical questions (what decade did World War II occur in, that sort of thing), you are promptly expelled.

Well, there’s nothing like a little shuttle explosion to break the monotony of war coverage. Shrub, in a speech I thankfully missed, said, "The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.” He added, “On the other hand, the joker who named Uranus...”

Observer on an innocent man Texas is due to execute this week. The police kept back evidence of his innocence, just brought to light. And the judge who is to decide whether to issue a stay, has evidently already made up his mind--if you count a letter to the pardons & parole board telling them they should fry the guy--but is willing to take new evidence, two days after the execution.

His willingness to terrorize himself

Maybe Shrub could make his case for the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection by saying that he has no evidence for it because he’s relying on the US intelligence agencies that so completely failed to notice the 9/11 guys.

At least it would make more sense than this: "The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself."—Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003

I missed something obvious about the timing of the war. It’s not just the weather, it’s the reservists. A shitload of reservists have been called up, and you don’t keep reservists sitting around for months, or send them home to call them back later. This is actually how World War I started.

Not that we’re waiting. A report yesterday that doesn’t seem to worry anybody in particular says that US troops are already operating in northern Iraq.

I’m told Bush’s one effort at pretend compassion, the AIDS initiative, actually amounts to less than what our proportional (by population and wealth) contribution to the UN Global AIDS Fund should be but isn’t. And most of it goes to US pharmaceutical companies and church groups. (His other new initiative, $600m for drug addicts, will be in the form of vouchers that can be used at religious groups--see a trend here?). Actually, $2b a year to treat 30 million with AIDS in Africa--to say nothing of prevention--that’s, let’s see, carry the 2, $67 per year each. How much does it cost to keep an American with AIDS alive for a year?

The Herero are suing Germany for genocide (look it up, I can’t explain everything to you).

I Am Your Father’s Skeleton, Luke: Two teenagers stole a Broadway actor's skeleton from a New York crypt and took it to a party dressed as Darth Vader the Star Wars character, police said. Michael Herz, 18, and Michael Sossi, 17, deny taking the body of Elmer Grandin, who died in 1938, and two other skulls.

"Exoatmospheric kill vehicle" would make a terrible name for a rock band

I mentioned a man suing the police for sending him a Valentine’s Day Card. Here is what it said: "Will you be my Valentine? I'm hoping we can meet. We have a cosy cell, prepared here in St John Street."

Bush said that if Saddam ain’t evil, evil has no meaning. John Pilger, in a somewhat over-the-top article, suggests that dropping 800 cruise missiles on Baghdad, the majority of whose population is under 14, might constitute that. Well, as Bush didn’t say to the Iraqi people, Your real enemy isn’t surrounding you, it’s over-head and coming straight for you. This is the administration that has claimed that Iraqi will be dancing in the streets when we “liberate” them. I don’t think there’ll be that much dancing in the rubble.

OK, that was me being over-the-top, not Pilger. Pilger does call Bush a fascist, but if you read past the hyperbole, you can see that it comes from someone who know what he’s talking about regarding American bombing (he is an Australian journalist who helped break the story of the secret bombing of Cambodia, and wrote about East Timor for 25 years).

The real problem is that nothing is unthinkable for the Bushies. I don’t think they’ll actually use nuclear weapons against Iraq, but they’ll sure plan for it and threaten it. I was about to say that they might even use smallpox or something, but it’s not like the US hasn’t used biological warfare against Iraq before: targeting water purification and sewer treatment plants, then denying Iraq access to replacement parts and medicines (did they get away with the attempt last month to stop Iraq importing antibiotics?), etc.

Incidentally, if I were Iran, I’d be worried about the several minutes Bush spent talking about them. And Iraq. And N Korea. He didn’t repeat the phrase Axis of Evil, but it’s obviously still in his oddly chimp-like head.

Also in the speech, the return of the Laffer Curve, which I don’t think anybody has pointed out yet. Drug benefits on Medicare only for those who subject themselves to HMO controls.

And very vague assertions of connections between Iraq and Al Qaida. On Prime Minister’s Questions today, Tony Blair had a rather hard time dealing with the fact that British intelligence has cleared Iraq of that allegation. The new emphasis on terrorism suggests that the whole WMD thing isn’t going over well. His father also changed the rationale for attacking Iraq several times in the run-up to the fighting, and Reagan with Grenada. There is also a focus, in relation to inspections, on down-grading the inspections themselves and saying that Iraq fails if it doesn’t do all the work itself. This is of course partly because the inspectors have hit several hundred sites and found zippo, but also because it shifts focus from the lack of cooperation with the inspectors by the United States, which has failed to provide them with real intelligence, if any. The growing talk about an “Adlai Stevenson moment” is clearly worrying them.

By the way, if terrorists had blown everyone up, the president would now be John Ashcroft. The horror. The horror.

Michael Kinsley on the speech:

“It would be a fine reason to topple other governments around the world that torture their own citizens and do other despicable things. Is the Bush administration prepared to enforce the no-torturing-children rule by force everywhere? And what happens if Saddam decides to meet all our demands regarding weapons and inspections? Is he then free to torture children and pour acid on innocent citizens without fear of the United States?

“If Saddam's human-rights practices morally require the United States to act, why are we waiting for Hans Blix? Or if the danger that Saddam will develop and use weapons of mass destruction against the United States justifies removing him in our own long-term self-defense, what does torturing children have to do with it? Bush was careful not to say explicitly that Iraq's internal human-rights situation alone justifies going to war-though he was just as careful to imply that it does. But Bush has said clearly and often that Saddam's external threat does justify a war all by itself. So, human-rights abuses are neither necessary nor sufficient as a reason for war, in Bush's view, to the extent it can be parsed. Logically, they don't matter. That makes the talk about the torture of children merely decorative, not serious.”

Sorry I only found this afterwards, but here’s the State of the Union drinking game, along with scores—this is actually well worth looking at, it’s quite revealing.

For my fellow censorship buffs, a landmark: the BBC has allowed the first broadcast of “cunt,” in a docudrama about witch-hunts. They say it wasn’t an offensive term in the 16th century.

The Post says the “new evidence” about the Iraqi WMD programs is confined to dual-use materials--like those aluminum tubes. They really do have nothing.

Evidently, the key Star Wars contract was won by default by Raytheon in 1998 after Boeing got caught spying on it and dropped out. So no actual analysis was done as to whether Raytheon’s “exoatmospheric kill vehicle” would actually work. Which it doesn’t. No one ever prosecuted Boeing (for example, for fucking up an $800m. bidding process), because then people might have wondered why it was still left in charge of the Star Wars project (that’s not me, it actually says that).

The White House cancels a poetry symposium because some of the poets might oppose the war.

Many government documents on the resignation of King Edward in 1937 have been released, if anyone is interested. Evidently they threatened to take his money away if he came back to Britain without permission. The Guardian has the best coverage.

And the State of the Union is...the envelope, please...strong!

In Davos, Colin Powell strayed from his script and used the words “great crusade.” You just may hear more about this. He also says again that Saddam is running out of time. If the Bush admin had a theme song, it would be the one from Jeopardy.

Another amazing scoop from the Guardian: “Arab World: US Flag Burnt in Protests.”

CBS says the Iraq war will start with a bombardment of 300-400 cruise missiles, in the first day, more than in the whole 1991 war. And the same again the second day.

The Comcast cable company refused to accept anti-war commercials to run on CNN in the DC region during the State of the Union address (obviously not actually during, but that’s what AP says).

If the US didn’t like Libya getting the chair of the UN human rights commission, I really don’t think it will be pleased in May when the chair of the Conference on Disarmament goes to Iraq (it goes alphabetically).

In preparation for war, many American soldiers are making deposits at the sperm bank (some of which have military discounts). Many of them are less afraid of being killed than of being Gulf War Syndromed into infertility.

From the Daily Telegraph: A convicted burglar has been given legal aid to sue the police for sending him a Valentine's card last year. Gary Williams, who has a 12-year criminal record, was one of 10 known burglars and car criminals who received cards from Brighton police. But when he opened the card, his girlfriend thought it must be from another woman. She was so cross that, before he could explain, she hurled an ashtray at him, and it went whistling past his head. Williams, 26, will go to the High Court next month to seek a judicial review of the actions of Ken Jones, the chief constable of Sussex. He is seeking damages, arguing that the card was malicious and caused him distress.


State of the Union address, some random quotes and sarcastic comments:

“No one was ever healed by a frivolous lawsuit.” Did he not see Patch Adams, in which Robin Williams taught us the healing power of frivolity?

Creepiest line to a secularist: “we will transform America one heart and one soul at a time.”

He said we should set a high standard for humanity by banning cloning. Makes it sound like an entrance test.

On Saddam Hussein: “If this isn’t evil, evil has no meaning.” That would be very worrying to Boy George, whose vocabulary is already pretty small.

Another word in his vocabulary that he trotted out several times is security. For example, he talked about a peace between a secure Israel and a democratic Palestine (on the same day that the first part of the BBC news at 3 was given over to a live broadcast of Sharon’s victory speech, which actually made me more nauseous than Shrub’s). And he would defend the “freedom and security of the American people.” Who precisely is threatening the freedom of the American people? No one, but you’re not supposed to look at the construction that closely. The problem is that security is a purely negative virtue, so he needed to pair it with a positive one. Or more positive, since freedom itself is only the absence of restrictions. Which is why the speech only offered freedom to Iraq, not democracy.

He actually brought up those damned aluminum tubes again, saying they were “suitable for atomic weapons production.”

Nothing about Osama. Guess Bush isn’t mad at him anymore.

It is now illegal in France to insult the flag or boo the Marseillaise (6 months + €7,500). I haven’t said enough about France’s rapid movement in an authoritarian direction, of which this law is the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, much of what Secretary of War Rumsfeld calls Old Europe does seem to be moving backwards. Italy is on the verge of restoring immunity for members of parliament--immunity is a standard protection for democracy in other countries, but Italy is, well, Italy. Berlusconi, who keeps changing laws to legalize his many illegal activities, often retroactively, this week has changed a law to let him continue breaking the rules after he dies: he wants to be buried in a place too close to a population center, in violation of some perfectly sensible health codes from the 19th century.

He’s got big ones

No Elephant Sex, Please, We’re British: the Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire has fired a herd of African elephants who have become a little too, shall we say, frisky. Where will they go where their sexual antics will be tolerated? France, of course. The Guardian does not say precisely what the elephants have been doing--I assumed the obvious until the last sentence: “workers involved with the elephants will be offered alternative positions at Longleat Safari Park.”

A British radio station held a contest offering tickets to a concert by a former Spice Girl to whoever could sit on dry ice the longest. Three of the contestants missed the festival because they spent 8 to 10 weeks in hospital with severe ass injuries (their nerves froze first so they didn’t realize there was a problem; also, their brains were very very small).

The Senate has quietly struck out of the budget funding for John Poindexter’s Big Brother program and the registration of enemy aliens. Also dead, Bush’s idea of letting states limit trips to the ER on Medicaid. On the other side, Bush plans to let federal housing money be used to build places of worship, ‘cuz Jesus needs a place to live too, I guess.

I saw on the BBC news, but not I think anywhere else, that this week the Israeli Supreme Court approved the use of human shields by the military.

An interesting piece on the op-ed pages of Saturday’s NY Times on the Kennedy administration’s efforts to impose inspections of the nuclear facilities of Israel, which fooled inspectors every time. Although the article doesn’t say it, Israel’s tactics were more like North Korea’s, demanding throughout the 1960s ever-escalating bribes in terms of aid & military hardware in exchange for not building nukes, which it did anyway.

With the shortage of oil imports due to Venezuela’s little local difficulties, the US has been greatly increasing its oil imports from, would you believe, Iraq.

I haven’t had the time to pay as much attention as I’d like to the Israeli elections, which sound like fun. The Likud defense minister went on walk-about yesterday while his handlers went ahead of him calling out “He’s got big ones, he’s got big ones,” meaning exactly what you think it means. Today, the secular party held a rally--today being the sabbath. A prominent Orthodox rabbi, a rabbi mind you, said that he hoped the party’s leader would burn to a cinder--said that about a man who survived Nazi concentration camps.

The larrikin moon

Bush today opened his mouth, which is never a wise move for him. He said that Iraqis who obeyed orders to use WMDs would be “persecuted as war criminals,” and referred to “the so-called inspectors”. Also, France and Germany will be “held to account” if they don’t back Bush’s war.

And then Secretary of War Rumsfeld opens his mouth and pisses off all of “Old” Europe.

WaPo on the sort of advice Bush gets on AIDS and homosexuality.

(Later): Jerry Thacker has had to withdraw, although he says that his calling AIDS a “gay plague” was taken out of context.

Orrin Hatch will make it harder for D’s to block Bush’s nominees for judgeships the way he allowed R’s to block Clinton’s nominees.

Also in the hypocrisy stakes, Harvey Pitt is *still* in charge of the SEC, which just quietly gutted most of the new accountancy rules imposed after last year’s scandals, which were, after all, *last year’s* scandals.

Been meaning to mention Maureen Dowd’s column of the 23rd, which says precisely some of the things I said recently: “The Bushes seem to believe that the divisive thing in American society is dwelling on social and economic inequities, rather than the inequities themselves.”

The Sundance Film Festival is going on right now and one of the big hits is a documentary about some of my relatives. It sounds like the film thinks they didn’t actually abuse all those children, so that’s nice, I guess.

Speaking of sex with children, we need to know exactly how the story about Scott Ritter leaked to the press just as he was about to go to Baghdad on a peace mission.

For your surfing pleasure, it is now possible to access all of Salon’s articles. They make you watch a commercial first (although if you have more than one screen up at once and your speakers off like I do when I web-browse, this isn’t much of an inconvenience). Actually, Salon is not what it once was, but some of its political and cultural writing is still worth reading.

Happy National Sanctity of Human Life Day

Headline in NY Times world brief section: “Northern Ireland: Protestant Group Upset.” Woodward and Bernstein would be proud.

Site at which you can click on any year since 1776 and see who US troops were killing or threatening. The producers of the site seem to think that the US is not a peace-loving nation.

Today (Sunday) was National Sanctity of Human Life Day, as proclaimed by GeeDubya.

Isn’t it interesting that when we read that, we all know he actually meant--and only meant--fetuses, and American fetuses at that.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld helped put out the point of the day Sunday that if Saddam Hussein left Iraq, he could be offered immunity from prosecution. Leaving the question, prosecution by whom? The US can’t immunize someone from the International Court, it can’t speak for the next Iraqi government (well, it probably can, but you’re supposed to pretend that your puppet governments are capable of speaking when you’re drinking a glass of water), so Rummy really only means that the US won’t prosecute him, like Manuel Noriega, which was never very likely. Either that or the Rumster forgot that he doesn’t actually speak for the entire world. God I hate that man.

Empty war heads

Bush wants pain and suffering in malpractice lawsuits limited to $250,000. That last sentence was of course fallacious. Bush couldn’t give a shit about limiting pain and suffering, he wants to limit compensation for doctors whose incompetence inflicts pain and suffering, or perhaps more importantly, for their insurance companies. Those insurance companies have, like everyone else who invests heavily in the market, not been doing that well, but they expect their other investments, in campaign donations to Republicans, to perform rather better. Naturally the insurance companies want to shift their losses from having bought stock in Enron to those who most deserve to bear them: those scheming bastards who have been crippled and tormented by the mistakes of their doctors. Bush of course said nothing about doing anything to reduce malpractice, which you might have expected at the same time as he was proposing to reduce the costs to doctors of malpracticing. Maybe this is because gross incompetence is a way of life for GeeDubya, taken for granted like the air he breathes.

Any comments he might have made about doing this to ensure continued access to doctors (didn’t read the whole speech) were made nonsense of by his plans to cut payments to Medicare doctors yet again, announced last month, or by the plan announced on the very same day as his malpractice speech to let states restrict the access of Medicare patients to emergency medical services.

But that isn’t the real addition of insult to injury. No, the real jaw dropping, you gotta be shitting me insult is the provision that got almost no attention: he wants any money plaintiffs receive from their own insurance companies to be deducted from awards. In other words, he wants to shift penalties awarded against doctors guilty of medical malpractice from the guilty doctors to the insurance companies of their innocent victims.

So the inspectors found some empty warheads in Iraq. I guess that means the warhawks will stop attacking the inspectors as incompetent, huh? I’ve heard conflicting opinions from Iraq and from the empty war-heads in charge of US foreign policy as to whether Iraq accounted for them, but nothing from the UN inspectors yet. Of course anything that the US says about the content of the Iraqi submission is automatically suspicious given the 8,000 pages the US decided to censor before handing it to anyone else. In further sloppy reporting, I haven’t heard what happened to the warheads: did the inspectors remove them for destruction, or what? Also, I take it warhead means the part of a rocket that doesn’t contain the engine and propellant, which makes it pretty much just an empty metal container. OK, they may be more sophisticated than that, but it would have been nice if one of the many fine news sources I patronize had looked into this. One quick and dirty guide to their sophistication or lack of it might be the price.

Divisive

I bought shoes today. I hate buying shoes. Fortunately, the shoe store was near a Krispy Kreme, and I don’t so much mind buying donuts.

North Korea’s website. Probably its only website.

It is now legal to have unmarried sex in Georgia. Plan your vacations accordingly. In the case involved, a 16-year old boy was ordered by the court to write an essay on why he shouldn’t have sex (in Georgia the age of consent is 16, although I guess only if you’re married; however, asking a 16-year old student of the Georgia education system to write an essay is just plain cruel). He wrote that it was none of their business. Unmarried sex is still illegal in 9 states and the District of Columbia.

News from the exciting world of cock fighting: in the Philippines, a fighting cock with razors attached accidentally kills, heh heh, his owner, after hitting him in the groin.

In his speech attacking affirmative action at the U of Michigan, Bush attacked “racial prejudice” at length. It’s just discrimination he doesn’t mind too much. Or at any rate, he’s willing for it to end, but only if it happens accidentally, as some commentators have said. Actually, though, what he really wants is for the issue of race to just go away. This is why he talks about prejudice, which doesn’t directly hurt anyone, and why he attacks affirmative action as “divisive,” as if rocking the boat is the worst thing he can accuse it of. Compare this to his preemptive claims that critics of his tax cuts for the rich were engaged in “class warfare.” Remember, it’s not racial and class inequality that are the problem, as far as he is concerned, but people bringing those inequalities to our attention.

In place of “quotas,” he approves the humbug plan adopted in California, and elsewhere, after affirmative action was banned in the university system, of taking the top, what is it, 5%?, of students at each high school, in effect replacing racial quotas with the divergent standards of schools in different neighborhoods. Elsewhere, he has criticized these differing standards as the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but here he actually makes them the basis of his policy (or “basics of his policy,” as GeeDubya would say).

I was gonna say that “divisive” is what Trent Lott would mean when he used the words “stirring up the niggras,” but I decided that was too crude.

Secretary of War Rummy Rumsfeld again (see mine of 11/18/02) says that it doesn’t matter what the UN inspectors say about Iraq having WMDs (there, I’ve finally given in to the acronym). In fact, if they find no weapons, it just shows how sneaky the Iraqis are. On 11/18/02 I called this the heads I win tails you lose approach (in case you haven’t committed all my emails to memory)(and if not, why not?). Actually Rumsfeld has never been a big fan of having proof for the assumptions behind his policies (like GeeDubya with tax cuts). Bob Woodward reports that Rummy was calling for war with Iraq on 9/12/01, with, obviously, no proof of Iraqi involvement. To be fair, recent polls suggest that Americans think that some or most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, which is further evidence that in a democracy you get the government you deserve (or, to roughly quote H L Mencken, democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it--good and hard).

The Supreme Court decided 5-4 that it wasn’t double jeopardy to give a death sentence to someone in his second trial after the jury in his first trial found him guilty but deadlocked over the sentence, which in Pennsylvania law meant he automatically got a sentence of life rather than death. I guess it comes down to how you define “jeopardy.” Since he was found guilty the first time, and the second trial was on his own appeal, then yes a second *verdict* of guilty doesn’t count as double jeopardy. But the second trial certainly put him in jeopardy of a *sentence* of death for a second time, and the 5th Amendment reads that no one shall be “subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb”--the wording doesn’t confine jeopardy to the verdict. Either way, to create the possibility that challenging your conviction, as in this case, would put you in danger of the death penalty, is to pervert the course of justice. Even if it weren’t unconstitutional, it would be wrong and dangerous. In fact, I may be wrong, but I see nothing in the ruling that stops prosecutors who didn’t go for the death penalty in the first trial doing so for the second, purely as a way of punishing prisoners who dared challenge their conviction.

The NY Times didn’t like the $41 hamburger at all.

Bored as dead rats

In another display of arrogance, the Bush admin decided that Tom Ridge didn’t have to show up for a confirmation hearing chaired by Joe Lieberman. In another display of Democratic cravenness, Lieberman has caved in, and even given up his chairmanship a few days early, showing the leadership style that makes him totally unsuited for the office he announced he was running for the same day.

http://www.theonion.com/onion3901/bush_on_north_korea.html

You know that new car smell, the real one, not the one in the spray cans? It’s poisonous, can give you sick building syndrome. It takes 3 years for the level to drop into the safe range.

The biggest split over what to replace the World Trade Center with is between the sexes. Naturally, men want really tall, thrusting, throbbing towers at least the height of the original. Women are more concerned about safety. Actually, whose stupid idea was it to exempt the towers from fire department regulations anyway? Just don’t do that again, and we’ll keep the replacements below 50 stories.

The French minister of education (I’ll give the URL for the educationalists on the list), says what no other minister of education has ever said--school is boring, and by god it’s supposed to be boring. Why when he was in school, “80 per cent of us were as bored as dead rats”.

Turkmenistan’s loony leader, Sapamurad Niyazov, who renamed the months, has announced that later this week (in the month of Turkmenbashi) 32 people allegedly involved in a plot to assassinate him will go on trial. He also announced what their sentences will be.

In different parts of today’s NY Times, it is reported that Cal. Governor Gray Davis plans to cut 500,000 people from Medicaid, and that he will spend $220,000,000 on a spanking new death row for San Quentin, capacity of 1,000.

The world’s stupidest kidnappers released their victim, a former Goldman Sachs exec, after he promised to pay them $5 million. They actually got caught, just after that, because they ordered a pizza using his credit card.

Do you want fries with that?

I talked a while back the growing partisanship in Congress, in the sense of increasing intolerance of independence by rank & file Congresscritters. For more evidence of this, see this story

on changes in Congressional rules to tighten control by the leadership over the committees. This is important.

New Senate majority leader Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist says that critics of his civil rights record ignores “the fact I go to Africa once a year or twice a year to work with the African American community.” Um, I think those people are the African AFRICAN community.

CIA black propaganda alert: the sudden reports in several sources that Saddam Hussein might fake a coup, even fake an assassination using one of his doubles, before or during a US invasion. The hawks must be very worried about their war being taken away from them. Fake coup indeed.

In NY, a restaurant is offering a $41 hamburger. The meat is Japanese kobe beef, whatever that means. Evidently the cows are fed beer and get massages. Oh, and the restaurant is one of those that charge a service charge (20%), rather than have tipping. The Times reporter enjoyed it.

Damn, now I'm hungry again.

Drawing ridicule, scorn and anger

The government of Greenland has collapsed, after 37 days, in a controversy over a healer being brought in to drive evil spirits out of the government’s offices. The government resigned. So it worked.

Weapons of Mass Irritation: the US has been spamming Iraqi military and other leaders with emails suggesting that they not use their weapons against the US invasion, or face “personal consequences.” Also that if they help the US defeat Saddam, their credit will improve, penises grow larger, and watch women have sex with donkeys (I’m guessing. Actually, I’d like to see the exact text of these emails, if anyone runs across them).

In Britain, someone posted in the website Friends United that he’d become a great success since high school, selling cocaine. He’s now in prison.

I guess relating to Iraq, John Bolton, #3 man in the State Dept: “There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.”

When the ex-boyfriend of a Portland, Ore. cop was arrested for drugs, the cops went through her garbage cans and had her used tampons tested for drugs. (The story I read doesn’t say what the results were, but I think negative). She sued. A newspaper decided to go through the police chief’s garbage and list its contents in the paper. That would be one response. The other, I humbly submit, is for everyone in Portland to send their used tampons to the police or DA.

Ill. Governor George Ryan has pardoned or commuted all 150, 156, or 167 (how hard a fact was this for the newspapers to check, really?) people on death row. Here’s the response of the brother of one homicide victim: "How can one person have all of this authority and power?" As opposed to the power to decide that someone else’s life should be snuffed out. I can’t even imagine thinking that way, where a commutation is some awesome tyrannical use of absolute power, while signing a warrant of execution is nothing. Another relative of a victim (or maybe the same one) says "It's like we were murdered again." We? Ryan rightly says that his decision "will draw ridicule, scorn and anger."

The protean meaning of the phenomenon of the fart

The NY Times is not paying enough attention to prepositions. On its front page Wednesday, this headline: “US, in a Shift, Is Willing to Talk With North Korea About A-Arms.” Actually, though, that’s not the case. The US statement is that it has decided to speak to North Korea. Not with North Korea, but to North Korea. The distinction will not have eluded the North Koreans.

I haven’t noticed the FBI showing any embarrassment over last week’s fallacious warning about 5 Middle Easterners infiltrating the country from Canada. It’s not just that they went into full panic mode over a tip from one guy, but that they failed to notice that the pictures and names they had were of Pakistanis, not Arabs.

There are 54 Mexican nationals in US death rows. According to Mexico, which has gone to the World Court, all of them have been denied consular access.

Speaking of lack of evidence, there’s a cute piece in Salon by William Saletan comparing the press’s reporting of unsubstantiated claims that a clone has been born to reporting of unsubstantiated claims by the US that Iraq has weapons.

The Israeli Supreme Court allows the 2 Arab MPs to run for re-election. Which is fine as far as it goes, but the willingness of Jewish politicians to jettison the democratic rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel to have someone to vote for remains disturbing. The Court also allowed the candidacy of Meir Kahane’s racist successor. Meanwhile, the corruption scandal in Likud reaches Sharon. He went on tv today to denounce any suggestion that he would ever break election rules, only to have the broadcast ended in the middle by order of the election commission because it, well, broke election rules. The rules he had broken were that he illegally borrowed money after Likud was ordered to repay election contributions that had also broken the rules. Oh, and then he lied about the source of the borrowed money. Another infinite regression loop, just like the never-ending exchange of “reprisals.” Even his broadcast today wasn’t an explanation, but a series of accusations against his accusers and the Labor party--libel, perjury, etc.

WARNING: JOKE IN EXTREME POOR TASTE COMING UP. The UN reports that rebels in the Congo are eating pygmies. This is what happens when cannibals go on a diet.

Publisher’s blurb for On Farting: Bodily Wind in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen and John Thompson: "The study of the fart in medieval culture participates in the widespread and productive contemporary study of the body, its practices and its hermeneutics. As a consequence of the cultural materialist interest in the quotidian, recent criticism has moved away from an abstracted conception of selfhood toward an appreciation of how the concrete daily regimens of bodily habits, generally taken for granted, shape the horizon of our cultural and individual consciousness. The fart, in its parodying of language and its logic of affinity, leads us ultimately to the problem of interpretation itself. ... A multifarious typology of the fart will permit a better understanding of the phenomenon's protean wealth of meaning.”

It takes years of grad school before you can write a boring book about farting.

Which leads us to another book, “Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis.” According to the review, ancient Hebrews used to swear oaths with their hands on their testicles, which is the origin of the word testify. My Oxford Concise says it’s the other way around, that the word testicles comes from the Latin testis (witness), suggesting that testicles are a witness to virility. There will be a short quiz on all this later.

Suicide kindergarten camps, he averred

In the middle of one of his rants, Netanyahu said the Palestinian gov should close “suicide kindergarten camps”. Say what?

Photo of Ariel Sharon peering through binoculars--whose lens cap is on.

The BBC reports that Britain has finally been proven still to be the force in the world it likes to think itself. All right, they didn’t put it in those terms, but for months you could see how dispirited Tony Blair was by the fact that there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack, even an abortive one, on Britain, despite his many warnings that Britain was a prime target. The BBC said that a raid on a home has uncovered a “deadly toxin.” Let the flood of jokes about British cuisine begin.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided that potential terrorist threats cannot be considered when licensing nuclear reactors, not because there is no threat, but because they can’t put a number to it. “We have no way to calculate the probability portion of the equation [risk = probability times consequences], except in such general terms as to be nearly meaningless.” Well, no, we don’t know the number, but I’m sure if you ask Tom Ridge, he’ll come up with a nice color for you. Jesus Christ, our entire foreign and military policy, the suspension of major civil rights and so forth are all predicated on risks expressed in such general terms as to be nearly meaningless.

Republicans have suddenly discovered that “double taxation” is immoral, at least when it’s in the form of dividends (of course it’s not double taxation for the many corporations that escape paying corporate income tax). The fact that they’d even say this in public suggests a total contempt for the intelligence of the American people (the thing nobody ever went broke underestimating, as the Bard of Baltimore averred). The sales tax is a double tax. Paying state as well as federal income taxes is a double tax. I could go on.

But if you’re going to be double taxed, at least you shouldn’t have to work hard to earn your money. Just received a box of things my mother taped off HBO for me, and I’ve been somewhat befuddled by the credits. Someone is employed on The Sopranos as a dialogue coach for James Gandolfini. First, imagine your job being to teach someone to talk like a New Jerseyan. Second, Gandolfini is a native of New Jersey. I was very disappointed by the fact that not once in the 4th season is someone described as a “motherless motherfuck.” Also, in a Robin Williams special, someone had responsibility for Mr. Williams’s hair and makeup. OK, any makeup was washed away in a flood of sweat within the first twelve seconds, so that part’s kind of pointless, but my god, his hair--that should be a team effort. I’d expect to see one person credited with responsibility just for the hair on his left arm above the elbow. The man is quite hairy, is the point I’m trying to make here.

Do you think “averred” is the most pompous word I’ve ever used? Do you think I made up for it with “motherless motherfuck”?

Is Oxford ready for Chancellor Billy Bob?

Another Republican, the current vice-chairman of the California party, running for the top job, has befouled his career by expressing the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, that of white Republicans for the Confederacy. Bush’s people refuse to comment, saying it’s a local matter. These are the people who keep telling Venezuela and the EU and everyone else how to handle their local matters.

I mentioned that Roy Jenkins died without mentioning that he was chancellor of Oxford. There is a move afoot to have Bill Clinton replace him.

I also mentioned that Israel banned Palestinian delegates to a conference in London. What’s interesting is how Israel took the opportunity to spit at the British gov, which it didn’t actually forewarn of the move. And when Jack Straw called about it, they published a transcript, which is a serious breach of diplomatic protocol.

The US continues to refuse to talk to North Korea, saying that that would be to reward blackmail. So the US has cut off food aid. Denying food to a starving nation can of course in no way be construed as blackmail.

Speaking of nuclear blackmail, during the Gulf War, Colin Powell was asked, and then ordered, to draw up contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against Iraq. Ordered by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

A hot tip on the Iraq war

Roy Jenkins, Britain’s home secretary and chancellor and nearly prime minister in the 1960s, has died, rather disconcertingly while I was in the middle of reading his biography of Churchill.

Britain was supposed to have a conference on Middle East peace next week, but Israel has banned the Palestinian delegates from traveling.

Cute story in the NY Times Sunday about a New Orleans prosecutor in a capital case who wears ties with nooses & the Grim Reaper on them.

Brits and gambling. Foreign sec Jack Straw says that the odds of war in Iraq are 60-40 against (the last figure on Slate’s Saddameter was 68% for). And Ladbrokes lowers the payoff for bets that Iain Duncan Smith won’t last out the year (as head of the Tory party, if you didn’t know, and if you didn’t, that’s just one reason he’s probably going) from 3:1 to evens. But if you’re planning a flutter, my handicapping is in favor of war and against IDS leaving that soon, simply because of lack of alternatives.

Britain is planning to ban replicas of guns: when fake guns are banned, only fake criminals will have fake guns. If there’s ever a ban on replicas of crime policies, Blair would be in trouble.

Still no word on exactly what the “hot pursuit” policy re American troops really is on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Baby Jesus butt plugs

John Edwards announces he is running for president. This may be the last you ever hear from him. He says he wants to be a “champion for regular people.” So I guess none of us will be voting for him. Guardian headline: “Millionaire Lawyer Aims to be President for ‘Regular Folks’.”

See the 1/3/03 Doonesbury for a useful concept: “comfort arrests.”

The body of a murdered prostitute in Britain is identified through her breast and butt implants. You don’t want to know why fingerprints and dental records were no help.

Butt implants was a new concept to me. But see www.betterbuttocks.com.

www.furnitureporn.com

The US military claims it can pursue people from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Pakistan says like hell.

Didn’t the Bay Guardian’s “Offies” used to be funnier? Well, here’s a link anyway.

And 3 stories from it, below, so you don’t have to bother.

Oh, there’s also an article on dildos with religious themes, such as the one I couldn’t resist using in my subject line.

Excerpts from Offies:

And while we're at it, I'm not a crook, so let's stop all this impeachment crap

Recently released tapes from the Nixon archives provided even further insight into the former president's beliefs: After Nixon's ambassador to France got badly drunk on an airplane and began groping flight attendants, Nixon declared at a staff meeting, "Look, people get drunk. People chase girls. And the point is, it's a hell of a lot better to get drunk than take drugs. It's better to chase girls than boys. That's my position, and let's stop this crap."

Coming soon to Abercrombie and Fitch

The leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, set off a new fashion trend in that country with his trademark hat made out of the fur of aborted lamb fetuses.

And next, the happy cows will be promoting McDonald's

An ad campaign for Denny's featured Miss Piggy, the Muppet, hawking a sausage- and-bacon combo breakfast. "I think people understand that it's the Muppets," a Denny's spokesperson said. "If we had a real pig in here eating bacon, then there would be issues."

A diplomatic showdown

Israel bans another Arab MP and his party from the elections (a story yet to appear in either the NY Times or the WashPost, although everyone carried the court ruling that military reservists can’t resist illegal orders but must be good little Germans). Won’t stop them calling themselves a democracy, I imagine, although 20% of the population is now effectively disenfranchised. But I guess the Palestinians can always vote for the Zionist of their choice.

The US has finally snuck genetically modified crops into Europe in a rather odd place: its money. The euro is printed on cotton, which is imported from Turkey or the US. In the US, cotton is often GM, and no records are kept.

Speaking of funny money, the parents of a Vermont girl arrested for marijuana possession showed up with her $50,000 bail money, which the police promptly confiscated because it smelled like marijuana. The money came from their daughter’s friends.

Today was the annual release of British records under the 30 Years’ Rule. In 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday, the Heath gov considered repartitioning the province and expelling the Catholics. The 2001 census shows the Catholics are gaining fast. The census people refuse to take no religion for an answer. Even if you’re an atheist, they ask what your parents were and where you went to school so they can decide what religion you should be.

The Texas Supreme Court rules 8-0 that the state doesn’t have to pay for abortions in cases where the mother’s health is at risk. That’s eight to zero. The state is required to pay for all medically necessary procedures for men, of course.

This is a British story, or it might result in some very silly warning labels: A 12-year-old girl died after hitting her head during a pillow fight with her best friend. Jessica Smith made a playful lunge with the pillow but missed and banged her head on a bedstead. ....

Speaking of dead girls (because I always enjoy starting out the year on a light note), that Russian colonel, the only person in the military ever charged with one of the many, many atrocities committed in Chechnya, was acquitted for raping and strangling a teenage girl because he was crazy at the time. Well, drunk, anyway. The rape part wasn’t mentioned in court.

Shrub is twisting himself into humorous knots trying to describe why North Korea is not like Iraq. He again tries to claim that Iraq might have nukes, which it does not. He says, “I believe this is not a military showdown, this is a diplomatic showdown.” The word showdown is a sure sign that he was in Texas at the time; the military/diplomatic distinction, if it means anything, means that the American response in one case is military, in the other diplomatic, or in other words, his explanation for why he’s responding to the two situations differently is that it’s because he’s responding to them differently. So that clears that up. Come to think of it, I know what a military showdown is, but what the heck is a diplomatic showdown? Start back to back, walk ten paces, then turn around and exercise diplomacy? Dooooo not forsaaake me, o my daaarlin’....

Ask not what her country can do for Gwyneth Paltrow...

www.stopabductions.com for instructions on building a helmet to screen your thoughts from aliens. And it’s fashionable too.

As predicted, the Israeli Election Commission has barred one Palestinian MP (so far) from running for reelection, while allowing Jewish nationalist Baruch Marzel (successor to Meir Kahane) from a banned party to run.

Philippines prez Gloria Arroyo has received a message from God not to run for reelection.

WaPo on Reagan administration efforts to get close to Iraq by selling it weapons and components of its chemical warfare program. Same old stuff, maybe a bit more detail. I’m sure any day now the UN inspectors will kick in the door at Dow Chemicals and forcibly remove its scientists for questioning. Mark Russell said we know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction--we’ve got the receipts.

I can’t figure out if there is an actual policy towards North Korea. Rumsfeld threatened them with war, Powell threatened them with long boring negotiations. One article said that the Clinton admin assumed that the NK government was irrational while the Shrub admin assumes it’s a rational actor, or maybe it was the other way around, because I don’t see how either view is reflected in actual policy. Others think the Bushies aren’t worried about NK because its government is bound to collapse--just any day now--and the US will put pressure on its neighbors to put pressure on it to ensure that. Worked so well with Cuba. The argument that you don’t negotiate with people who continually go back on their word is a sound one, of course, except 1) the US is in no position to make it, both in general and because the North Koreans have some reason to argue that the US isn’t keeping its end of the 1994 deal, 2) principles are great and all, but if the Dear Leader would give up nuclear weapons in exchange for a blow job from Gwyneth Paltrow or whatever the hell he wants, maybe we should just put a big red bow on Ms. Paltrow and parachute her into Pyongyang in the interests of large numbers of people not being turned into charcoal. All the American talk about not giving them anything in exchange for bad behaviour is especially worrying because it seems designed to back the Northies into a corner: they must not only give in, but be shown to the world as giving in, to the might and majesty of the United States of America.

Under a law passed in Israel in May, and unreported in the American or British press until today (you read about it here on May 1st, but it really was a coincidence that I happened across it while looking for something else in Ha’aretz), the Knesset can bar members and parties that deny that Israel is a Jewish state. Currently, it is trying to expel all 3 Arab deputies and bar their party from next month’s elections. The party’s leader is being prosecuted (the Knesset stripped his parliamentary immunity, natch) for arranging to reunite elderly Palestinians with their families in Syria.

Speaking of horrible crimes, there’s been an incredible amount of condemnation of a weird-ass cult’s claim to have cloned a human. The pope, to name one, said that this act, which at worst created a new human life, was a sign of a “brutal mentality.” In other news, Israel shot dead an 11-year old yesterday, and a 9-year old the day before that, and not a fucking word was said about that.

Negative effect

Not that you’d know it, but there was a large-scale round-up of Muslims in this country last week. They were told to go in to INS offices to register, and many did not come out again, like those scams where the police call up wanted felons and tell them they’ve won a prize. This is presumably not something you’ll find in those propaganda films the State Dept is trying to show in Muslim countries. A high number of these round-ups were in southern California and the local Iranians were pissed off. (This is from a story in the LA Weekly). The Justice Dept flew in a rep to talk to the Iranian community, and to threaten them with the “negative effect” of protesting the mass arrests. “It makes other people think you don't want to be here. I think we need to look at what is the impact of open, glaring challenges to our system."

Also, Middle Easterners on student visas, including 2 at Kevin’s university, have been put in jail for carrying too few units.

Israel conducts a number of operations looking for “wanted Palestinians.” Can’t have wanted them that much, since they managed to kill a bunch of them (plus the usual innocent bystanders). Must be a Christmas thing: they bugged their parents for months for some Hamas Action Figures, get them, immediately break them, and now they’re playing with the boxes.

Sorry ‘bout that.

Israel is also announcing free-fire zones around Jewish settlements. Or to put it another way, they’ve just seized a lot more land.

The Israeli soldier who shot the 95-year old has actually been punished: 65 days in jail. Well, in a military prison, which I gather tend to be very cushy.

Iran has suspended stoning as a punishment.

One of the pleasures of the NY Times is its reviews trashing horrible movies. Read the review of Pinocchio.

http://www.playingsafely.co.uk/12stisofchristmas/12-STIs.html

Guardian columnist John O’Farrell asks if British troops, instead of being sent to war in Iraq in order to help GeeDubya get re-elected, couldn’t just be sent directly into marginal states to canvass for Republicans. “Instead of blowing up Baghdad, the RAF could just blow up thousands of red, white and blue balloons.”

The 5 Japanese kidnapped by North Korea have finally denounced the NK government.

No government can go about sucking blood of its own people

43% of new Congresscritters are millionaires. In 2000, it was 1/3.

Here’s something I didn’t know: in Alabama, January 20 is both the federal Martin Luther King holiday and the state Robert E. Lee holiday.

WaPo for US national security defends defending the torture of Al Qaida and Taliban suspects, including handing them over to Egyptian or Moroccan torturers--nothing I didn’t mention months ago, but it’s nice to see it in the Post. And the quotations are horrifying, so this is a must-read. The paper notes that sleep deprivation, one of our methods, is denounced in the annual State Dept reports as a method of torture when other countries do it.

There’s also a story in the Post about how in 1969 Nixon tried to give the Soviets an incentive to hurry North Vietnam along at the negotiating table by putting US nuclear forces on alert, essentially threatening them with a nuclear war, as part of his “mad bomber” strategy. I’m unclear why this is news, since I knew about it 20 years ago, I think from an essay by Daniel Ellsberg.

Speaking of mad bombers, no one seems to be making anything of it, but Rumsfeld threatened North Korea with war a couple of days ago. He said that the US can indeed conduct two wars at the same time, so Iraq won’t stop us taking them on too. Does anybody else think that threatening war--especially threatening possible nuclear powers with war--is becoming entirely too routine, so much so that this one didn’t even cause the tiniest of stirs?

Analyzing their poo

Chester Trent Lott in an AP interview: “A lot of people in Washington have been trying to nail me for a long time. When you're from Mississippi, when you're conservative and when you're a Christian, there are a lot of people that don't like that. But I fell into their trap and so I have only myself to blame.” Ah, so the whole 100th-birthday-party-for-Strom-Thurmond thing was actually a cunning Liberal trap, going back to 1902, to nail Trent Lott.

Lott spread the blame a bit: he also attributed his fall from grace to a plot against the great state of Mississippi and of course to God. “God has put this burden on me and I believe that he'll show me a way to turn this into a good.”

The Lott thing has finally made one news source, the New Republic, write about the racism of Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, as I have in the past on several occasions, but somehow the man rejected by the Senate for a district court judgeship under Reagan for his racist actions and words slipped past the media into the Senate in 1996 by the clever expedient of shortening his name to Jeff Sessions. And now he’s on the judiciary committee.

Lott has of course been replaced by Bill Frist. Am I the only person who imagines the R Senators singing “If I only had a heart doctor”? I’m telling you, the irony of this thing is ridiculous. Here’s an extremely disturbing comment on Frist’s qualifications by Lamar Alexander on today’s McNeil-Lehrer: Well, let me tell you a very short story to answer your question. Imagine ten years ago, a 40-year-old young physician having dinner with his family here in Nashville, gets an emergency telephone call, goes out to the airport, gets in his own plane, flies to Duke, to the medical center, cuts the heart and lungs out of a dying person, puts it in a plastic bag full of ice, puts it back in his plane, flies back to the Vanderbilt University heart transplant center, which he founded, and goes into an eight-hour surgery procedure to place that heart and lungs back into another dying person who then lives. Now, if you understand that, and a man who then gets back to his young family the next morning about 12 hours after he left, you understand about 75 or 80 percent of who Bill Frist is.”

And Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-Way Down South in the Land of Cotton), the guy who made the comments about Cynthia McKinney giving him segregationist feelings, has repainted his lawn jockey white.

Iraq invites the CIA to send agents--openly--into the country to check on arms. Where’s the fun in that?

The US has dismissed the offer as a “stunt.” No, juggling chainsaws is a stunt. GeeDubya trying to speak a coherent sentence is a stunt.

Iraq has also welcomed the first international group of voluntary human shields. Sadly, they do not include Sean Penn.

Speaking of omissions in the Iraqi arms dossier, the US cut 8,000 pages out before handing it on to the non-permanent members of the Security Council. The US did that, not anyone working for the UN.

The AP yesterday became the first media source I’ve seen actually to question the laughable claim by the US that Saddam intends a “scorched earth” policy, noting that no evidence for this assertion has been given. The article also says that US radio broadcasts into Iraq, currently trying to get soldiers to desert, says that when Iraqi POWs were returned after previous wars, Saddam ordered their ears be cut off. This is a lie.

Remember when the US accidentally bombed some Canadians in Afghanistan in April? It turns out that the pilots were on amphetamines. Why? Because the Air Force told them to. Evidently this is standard.

There is no room at the Bethlehem Inn. It has been commandeered by the Israeli Army. Another paper reports that every Palestinian living under constant curfew in Bethlehem has but one dream: a visa to the US. Talk about no room at the inn!

The Catholic Church in Boston demands that all sex abuse cases be dropped on First Amendment grounds. I really must go over the New Testament again.

Best headline of the week, about Kenya’s elections, in the Guardian: Après Moi, the Delusion.

More than Winona Ryder ever did

There’s a piece in the NY Times on how subtly Bush managed the removal of Trent Lott, without leaving any fingerprints. Unless you count that front-page story. Oh, or last week when Bush publicly called Lott’s remarks un-American, which was the moment any political commentator with half a brain knew that it was all up. Is there a way for me to suggest that Bush being able to reshape the leadership of another branch of government is a bad thing without actually getting Lott back? If so, sign me up.

To quote a disgraced British celebrity you’ve never heard of, At least I’ve paid for my slips, which is more than Winona Ryder ever did.

What I enjoy is that so many of the Republican Senators who wanted Lott gone disliked his sudden death-bed conversion to affirmative action and the King holiday. Lott was now too liberal on race for his colleagues.

The Daily Telegraph says that incidents in which US troops have been attacked in Kuwait have been covered up. Also, the Kuwaiti government has been cracking down on people who denounce the American presence there.

Bad news: the show Friends has been renewed. This is bad because it lessens the pressure on NBC to renew the West Wing.

The Post has a story on a Dallas suburb that has banned toy guns (if toy bans are banned, only toy criminals will have toy guns). And in Israel, the Orthodox owner of a toy-importing company removed all the pigs from a farmyard model.

A while ago I asked who was supposed to give asylum to those Iraqi scientists & their families the Bushies want abducted, since the UN can’t given anyone asylum. The Post says that the inspectors have been talking about this with the last country that should be seen to be involved in this, the US. And amazingly, the US is refusing to promise that it will offer asylum. Or rather, it won’t give it to anyone who says things the US doesn’t want to hear, like that Iraq has no weapons of MD, only those who follow the US line. Subtle, huh? The article also says that the US will give Blix a list of scientists they want interviewed: in other words, a shopping list of people Bush wants gift-wrapped and put under his tree.

Trent: don’t let the burning cross hit you in the ass on the way out

www.re-date.com will tell you how many seconds, minutes, etc you’ve been alive, how many people have born and died in that period, how far light would travel or your fingernails grow if you didn’t cut them.

At the UN, the US vetoes a condemnation of Israel for killing 3 UN workers. The US said the resolution was one-sided. No, it condemned everyone in the Middle East who has killed UN workers, which is a perfectly legitimate thing for the UN to do. The US is also against demanding that Israel comply with the Fourth Geneva Convention (i.e., stop targeting civilians).

Colin Powell has announced he won’t issue a Middle East peace plan because he doesn’t have one. No, actually he said he wouldn’t release it before Israeli elections, which suggests either 1) the US will tailor its plan, not to basic fairness, but to what flavor of fascists dominate the next government of one of the two sides, or 2) they want an election to occur without having basic facts before it.

American Samoa reverses its ban on Arabs. Samoa is semi-autonomous, but the ban was bound to be reversed when the US press finally noticed it, a mere 4 months after it was implemented (I didn’t know about it either).

A Guardian report on Ole Miss, where Trent cheer-led and certainly didn’t foster hatred, says it’s now 13% black, although his old frat sure isn’t. The Confederate battle flag has been removed from the University flag, but the marching band still plays Dixie--the black musicians routinely refuse to play along.

I’ve been meaning to mention something Lott said in one of those apologies. He said that he personally practiced affirmative action, that he had hired blacks on his staff. The thing is, his office has refused to release actual numbers, so what Lott evidently meant by affirmative action wasn’t that he hired blacks at or above their percentage of the population, but that he hired blacks AT ALL.

I still say the most frightening thing of the whole Lott affair was how the “liberal media” and politicians waited for permission from conservatives before reporting Lott’s remarks. A story in the Guardian notes that the story was brought to attention and kept alive by the bloggers.

Against the wishes of all 140 other nations in the WTO, the US blocked a deal for cheaper drugs to poor countries. Dick Cheney stepped in to overrule the US trade negotiator.

Every paper today has “leaks” from the US government that Saddam intends a “scorched earth” policy in event of war. None of the papers suggest that these attempts to put the blame in advance for power plants, water purification plants, food depots, etc., blowing up on Saddam rather than on the US would insult the intelligence even of a member of the Bush family. This really has to be the lamest disinformation exercise yet, but by god it works.

An op-ed piece in the Times points out that Bush has yet to issue a single pardon or commutation and says that this is bad for the notion of rehabilitation. The article does not mention the fine work Bush has done in placing so many felons--some of them issued with pardons by his father--in charge of American foreign policy. Indeed, asked about John Poindexter, Bush said that he “has served our nation very well.” Unfortunately, he didn’t serve any of his six-month prison sentence.

The Memory Hole website has been tracking the amazing disappearing website of the Total Information Awareness office. Its creepy logo has now vanished from the site, following its motto and the biographies of its officials.

Speaking of websites, TomPaine.com has offered $10,000 for the name of the Senator who put in that provision shielding Eli Lilly from lawsuits.

The US’s propaganda aimed at Muslims (see how well we treat them in the US? We allow them to drive taxis, so how can you think we’re anti-Islamic) have been banned from Lebanese tv on the grounds of being total shite. And, from the booklet being put out under this program in Indonesia, these fun facts to know and tell: number of mosques in California: 227; number in New Hampshire, Maine and South Dakota: one each. There is no mention of the four most famous American Muslims, Muhammed Ali, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan or Mike Tyson.

From the Telegraph: A teacher who killed a pensioner after trawling the internet for information on death and torture was jailed for life yesterday. Two days before stabbing Dennis Cottrill, 71, who was out for a walk, Thomas Clark, 30, logged on to the Ask Jeeves website to ask: "What sentence would I get for stabbing somebody in an unprovoked attack?"

Brad Pitt creates a sense of inferiority among Asians

Joe Conason at Salon notes a deal between CSX, the railway company formerly headed by John Snow, the new Secretary of the Treasury, and the Carlyle Group, the evil Republican conglomerate I’ve talked about before, a deal that was threatened by the dock conflict until Bush ordered the dockers back to the jobs they’d been locked out of. Also, Snow got CSX to give him a new contract last year whereby he’d make a bundle if he left for...a government job.

Malaysia bans a series of Toyota ads from tv, saying that ads featuring non-Asians create a sense of inferiority among Asians. The ads star Brad Pitt.

A town in Switzerland, Meilen (pop. 11,500), tried to establish apartheid, banning asylum-seekers from certain parts of town, and not allowed to gather in groups in other parts. They had to back down. Did I mention the area is the German-speaking part of Switzerland?

And American Samoa banned Middle Easterners.

Medical break-through: a man’s liver is removed from his body, given radio-therapy, and then reimplanted, without the radiation endangering his other organs. Pretty cool.

Last time, I mentioned a scandal in the Likud party primaries, which like the Lott scandal raises the question, where the hell were the American newspapers? The Israel story is two weeks old, and nothing before tomorrow’s NY Times. This story fails to mention that one of the new Likud candidates is Sharon’s son. This is doing major damage to Likud’s reputation in advance of next month’s elections, but not enough damage. The next Knesset will therefore be full of criminals and their relatives, who bought their way in with cash and hookers. And in a separate scandal, the guy who assassinated Rabin says that he had been heard talking about the need for Rabin to be assassinated by the head of the religious-settler party Molodet.

My actions don't reflect my voting record

I had the best sort of jury duty today, the type where you don’t have to show up (and, indeed, drive 18 miles through the rain to do so). And I’d washed my Cat in the Hat t-shirt and everything.

The Russian claim that a Chechen leader in his 30s died in prison of “natural causes” might be more credible in a week other than one in which a Russian colonel charged with murdering (and probably raping) an 18-year old (or 17, depending on which paper you read) Chechen woman will be released because he was “temporarily insane.”

In Canada an Indian chief says that Hitler was justified in “frying” the Jews. What’s a PC person to do?

The SF Weekly published the address & phone number of John Poindexter, head of the Total Information Awareness program. (301) 424-6613. 10 Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md, satellite photos of which are available online at http://cryptome.org/tia-eyeball.htm. Woops, that site is 404.

Women discovered in the Afghan city of Herat are often arrested and subjected to gynecological tests, and they are banned from driving. In Kabul, the Taliban’s old Vice and Virtue thugs are now called Islamic Teaching, and still harass women wearing makeup. But they can still fly kites, right?

Yesterday saw Trent Lott’s fifth gig of Apologypallooza 2002, on Black Entertainment Television, which may be the first time I’ve ever watched that channel. Let’s just say he’s not getting better at this over time. Now Clinton, that man could apologize. Trent may well have been on drugs. “My actions don’t reflect my voting record,” he said, which I think means that because he’s hired a couple of black staffers (incidentally, his people refuse to release the actual number), we should ignore his attacks on affirmative action and voting rights. Although he does now claim to support affirmative action and the Martin Luther King holiday. But the most moving part came at the end:

A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a slave, and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little negro, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the negro, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

(By the way, if you’ve never read the Checkers speech, do so now).

That information in the Iraqi report that was censored? Germany had the most companies which helped Iraq, followed by the US. A German newspaper got hold of the original--the speculation is that this was an American leak designed to embarrass the German government.

I never got around to mentioning the Likud primary a week ago. Sorry ‘bout that. The hard-line Netanyahu supporters all won, of course. The primary is a non-electoral thing, but it is determinative: voters in Israel vote for a party, not a candidate, so who becomes a Knesset member is determined by their position on the party list. Evidently, the people who got to vote on the 8th did so by paying for the privilege. This time, many turn out to be criminals trying to exert pressure on the party to secure pardons.

www.raptureletters.com. See, after the Rapture, when all the good little boys and girls have been taken up to Heaven, there’ll be all these people wondering what happened. This site will send them an e-mail the Friday after the Rapture, explaining it to them.

From the Daily Telegraph: Iran's moral police arrested a barber in Isfahan who gave young women short haircuts so that they could pass as boys and go out without covering themselves, the Kayhan newspaper said.

The one with the bigger brain

Other people have given thought to the question of What Would Jesus Drive, and it seems there is evidence. In St. John’s gospel, Jesus tells a crowd, “For I did not speak of my own Accord.” Bumper stickers on the Honda include “My other car is a flaming chariot,” “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased because he was an honor student at Galilee Elementary. The Bible also says that God drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Evil in a (Plymouth) Fury. At least they bought American.

The Post mentions that the lack of news from the war on terrorism last week kept the focus on Trent Lott. Of course if it had been Cheney or Bush in trouble, the weapons of mass distraction would have been turned loose.

Gore says he won’t run for president again, although he doesn’t address the deeper issue of whether he will ever appear on a comedy show again.

Once more, without feeling

I watched Trent Lott make his 4th “apology” on C-SPAN today. And why not a 4th? If Arnie can make another Terminator movie, Mel another Mad Max movie and Sylvester another Rocky movie, why can’t Trent return to the scene of his former triumphs?

Naturally, it looked about as sincere and believable as his “hair.” He mouthed the words he had to mouth, but, like Rock Hudson in a Doris Day movie, didn’t exhibit any of the sentiments that should have been behind them. Nor did he seem to understand the importance of the issue, rather like Cardinal Bernard Law talking about paedophelia--and hey, Bernie, don’t let the choir boy hit you in the ass on the way out--he doesn’t understand why people are getting worked up about it. Paul Krugman’s column in the Friday NY Times suggests that The Republicans present two faces: their national leader pretends tolerance, like Shrub yesterday, but display their real attitude by keeping around people like Lott and by appointing those judges. Krugman notes that Bush didn’t follow up his rebuke of Lott by calling for him to step down. Like Bernie Law, he’d like to forgive Lott his sins and go right on with business as usual.

R’s use a lot of coded words that the media never bother decoding for the rest of us. I don’t know if I commented during the 2002 elections how often Bush mentioned to R audiences the need to get a R Senate in order to confirm his judges. They knew he meant abortion, I assume the reporters knew it too, but no one ever translated it.

Still, the Cardinal and Kissinger stepping down in the same day ain’t bad. Trent would be gone too if Mississippi didn’t have a D governor.

Russia bans the use of any alphabet but Cyrillic for languages within its borders. Evidently Chechens, Tatars and other separatists have been moving towards Latin script.

The CIA (motto: assassinating Fidel Castro since 1958) has been given a list of terrorists to kill.

Speaking of not learning from past mistakes, the US has called for early elections in Venezuela. Hey, once you support a coup, you really don’t have a right to say anything about elections.

Party like it's 1948

The official, official mind you, Mississippi Democratic Party sample ballot for 1948. It says that a vote for Truman is a vote to ban lynching and the poll tax, so true Democrats should vote for Strom Thurmond.

In one of his interviews, Trent claimed not to remember who the Republican was that year, and couldn’t be drawn on whether Truman or Thurmond would have been the better president.

I’ve been trying to track a hint I heard today that when Trent Lott was president of his fraternity at Ole Miss, at the time James Meredith was trying to integrate it, he led an effort to keep his fraternity segregated nationally. My websearch turned up something more interesting: during the riots, his frat was raided by the FBI and military, because it was stockpiling weapons (that ain’t in the Time magazine story).

Today Bush finally called Lott’s comments offensive, while using an executive order to allow federal contracts to go to organizations that discriminate on the basis of religion.

Seattle has now made it illegal to film up women’s skirts, so plan your vacations accordingly.

Interesting case of cannibalism in Germany. What makes it interesting is that the perp, a software specialist, found his victim, a chip engineer, online. And I don’t mean he lured him, I mean the victim volunteered to be eaten, responding to an ad saying, “Wanted: young, well-built 18-30-year-old for slaughter.” He has since placed the ad again, getting 5 new volunteers, but the police intervened first. Those crazy Germans, huh?

Man bites crocodile: a businessman went swimming in Malawi, was attacked by a croc and escaped by biting it.

Click here.

If we'd elected Dewey, we wouldn't have had all these problems

Coincidentally, the US has released its new military strategy, which involves nuking Iraq if it uses chemical or biological weapons.

Joining Kissinger on the 9/11 Coverup Commission, retired Sen. Slade Gorton. Wasn’t he the guy that really hated Native Americans? And Mitchell is out, and Trent Lott is trying to keep Warren Rudman off, because he might be a wee bit independent and we can’t have that.

Contrary to what I said last time, the Iraq disclosure will be censored, so that we won’t be told what Western corporations sold military-use equipment to Iraq. I was really looking forward to seeing the name Haliburton, and maybe the Carlyle Group, etc.

Trent Lott clearly made a big mistake by speaking the way he did. I mean by apologizing, because the media and god knows the Democratic “leadership” ignored his racist comments completely until then--which is actually pretty frightening; this could quite easily have continued to be ignored. I mean, he was interviewed by CNN right after that speech, and wasn’t even asked about the “slip of the tongue” (like a 61-year old white Southern politician could accidentally make such a remark without understanding its implications). Anyway, this may even prevent him retaining his leadership position, although it would have been better if it hadn’t occurred right before Christmas and the, ya know, war and everything. FAIR gives a bit of his history with the race issue (as does Joe Conason at Salon, although highlighting different things): Of course we now know he made exactly the same comments about Thurmond in 1980 (the Daily Show says in Lott’s defense that he only does this sort of thing every 22 years--he’s like the Halley’s Comet of racism), but he also sponsored restoring Jefferson Davis’s citizenship, pushed Reagan to give tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University (and filed a friend-of-the-racist brief with the Supreme Court in which he argued “racial discrimination does not always violate public policy”), voted twice against extending the Voting Rights Act, once against continuation of the Civil Rights Act, fought the ML King holiday, lauded the Council of Conservative Citizens (who have a website now, check it out), etc etc.

Speaking of Trent Lott, the Supreme Court heard a case on cross-burning today [I am the king of segues, bow down before me!]. Several of the Supes seem literally incapable of telling the difference between a symbol of violence, and actual violence. Souter said, “The cross has acquired a potency that is at least equal to that of a gun.” Tell that to someone who’s been shot. Scalia said blacks would prefer to see a rifle-toting man in their front yard rather than a burning cross. I’m guessing not so much. Clarence Thomas, who actually spoke out loud in the Court, said that the burning cross was a symbol of oppression during “100 years of lynching”. That would presumably be the low-tech kind. And obviously not very efficient, if it...takes...one hundred...years...to... OK, maybe that joke is trying too hard. Or not hard enough. Personally I’d only accept a very, very carefully written ban, and Virginia’s isn’t good enough. Wonder what Trent would think? He’s the guy who argued to the Court in 1981, “To hold that this religious institution is subject to tax because of its interracial dating policies would clearly raise grave First Amendment questions.”

Bush is implementing logging rules that were rejected by Congress. I must have missed hearing about the suspension of the US Constitution. According to the Post, “The new rules will decrease, from 200 pages to perhaps only one page, the amount of environmental impact information needed to approve clear-cutting projects in some areas.” Ironically, this means that there is now only 1/200th of the need for clear-cutting.

Discarded toupees of the past

A couple of quotes about a moron Republican president: he devotes his public life to translating a complicated world of public affairs he barely comprehends into those values he never questions. Like much of America, he contained contradictions, but never experienced them.

About Reagan, but there is a certain familiarity, no?

Lott’s embrace of Strom the racist as well as Strom the man has finally made the NY Times, as he issues a non-apology apology, which says he doesn’t embrace the discarded policies of the past. Not the “wrong” policies or the “racist” policies of the past, just the discarded ones. Jesse Jackson has demanded he resign. I’d go further and demand that Tom Daschle resign as well, for this comment on Lott: "There are a lot of times when he and I go to the microphone and would like to say things we meant to say differently, and I'm sure this was one of those cases for him, as well." Salon has tried to get comments from Joe Lieberman, Nancy Pelosi etc, without success.

Bush is evidently working on a plan for prescription drug benefits for Medicare recipients--but only if they move from fee-for-service to HMOs and pay higher fees for doctor visits. Shame.

Today’s NY Times has headlines at opposite ends of the front page, one about the US being the first to get the Iraqi report, the other that a judge lets Cheney keep his energy policy contacts secret. Transparency is for other people. The judge, a Bush appointee, fancy that, used to be deputy for Kenneth Starr, when he had a very different set of ideas about the level of privacy due to the White House.

Incidentally, the Iraqi report will contain the names of the Western companies that helped it build up its weapons inventory. Expect some familiar names.

So the new secretary of the Treasury is to be a railroad executive. Yes, railroads, the model for the American business of the future. Well, CFX is the largest railroad company in the East, and I guess its fierce competitiveness did manage to drive into bankruptcy United, the largest company selling travel on those new-fangled flying machines (it’ll never catch on). Snow is one of those executives who benefitted by his company lending him money to buy stock in the company, and then forgiving the loan when the stock plummeted (a practice since made illegal). It must be nice when your actions or incompetence have no personal consequences whatsoever. It must also be nice not to have to pay taxes, like CFX (see the report from the Citizens for Tax Justice).

Speaking of United, is it really the function of the federal government to be engaged in screwing employees, refusing to give the company a loan as long as its mechanics and pilots are making above minimum wage?

Salon reminds me of the most famous Iran-Contra-hearings quote from John Poindexter, now head of the Total Information Awareness program: “to the best of my knowledge, I can’t recall.” I guess knowledge isn’t power, after all.

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?: The Bush admin is thinking of defining membership in Al Qaida as a war crime for the purposes of its military tribunals. Guess that takes care of that whole “finding evidence of a crime” problem.

The US will spend $92 million for 6 Iraqi opposition groups which share our values, including the Movement for Constitutional Monarchy and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (which is based in Iran). Because the world needs more monarchs and more Islamic revolutions. Can’t have enough of them.

We are also going to sell arms to the vicious government of Algeria.

Georgia Republicans are planning a law to make women intending abortions (called “executions” in the bill) to go to court to get a death warrant. Then a guardian would be appointed for the fetus, who could demand a jury trial....


From the Telegraph: A vicar has apologised for giving a sermon at a children's carol concert in which he told them that Father Christmas could not "scientifically exist". Parents said they were horrified after the Rev Lee Rayfield told the children, some aged three, that Father Christmas and his reindeer would "literally blow up" if they had to deliver all those presents.

What Would Mohamad Do?

The river of insane “reality” shows continues. Starting next week, a show in which ex-minor celebrities go on blind dates. First up: the guy who played Eddie Munster. Next, on Fox, will be one of those shows in which 20 gold-diggers compete to marry a millionaire. The twist this time: he’s not really a millionaire, he’s a ditch digger, but the women are told he just inherited $50 million. Hilarity ensues.

Speaking of signs of the impending apocalypse, Elliott Abrams is now in charge of Middle East policy. I had really hoped that Iran-Contra would have finished his career in public service forever. But in those days I underestimated the willful amnesia of the American people, and now the government is full of Bush the Elder’s co-conspirators. That willful amnesia means not only that nobody remembers who that smug little prick was and what he did (and you can look it up if you don’t either), but that it didn’t even bother the Bushies that putting people like him, Negroponte, Reich, Poindexter etc into these positions would bring up all those never-answered questions about Bush Senior’s role in Iran-Contra and the sleazy pardons after he had been defeated for reelection. It’s also an insult to Congress that all those people convicted of lying to it in the past should be given any sort of job. Still, Congressional undersight is such these days that none of these people have actually been called on to testify about anything, even Poindexter over his plan to spy on every American.

The Americans who don’t have amnesia are Southerners, who remember a rosy past which never actually existed. Like Trent Lott, who astonishingly has not been hounded out of public life for his rhapsodizing last week over the joys of segregation and how we’d all have been better off if we’d let Strom Thurmond sort out the nigras, or words to that effect. Slate’s Today’s Papers says the major papers have devoted only one story to it, in the Post. Joe Conason at Salon says the NY Times hasn’t even reported the words, which I did last Friday.

What if they held a presidential election and no one came? Well, in Serbia they just held their third attempt at one, and once again failed to make the 50% turnout required for an election to be valid. It was raining. Some democracies fail due to economic collapse, some during wars, and then there are those which can’t handle a bit of water, like suede. Well, to be fair I understand it was raining really quite hard. Maybe next time they should trick the Serbs into voting, you know, tell them there’ll be a good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing at the town hall, then when they come, tell them it’s been cancelled but as long as they’re here...

Do you think if I submitted that idea to the Carter Center they’d offer me a job?

Saw a book of I guess you could call it British social history in the new books section at Doe Library yesterday — “Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sport and Alcohol.”

Iraq’s report was not supposed to go to UN Security Council states without being vetted first by the inspectors (what that means is that Syria is currently on the Sec Council, and they didn’t want it knowing how to make weapons of mass destruction), but somehow the US is already receiving a copy--it promised to do all the xeroxing--under some sort of deal under which only the 5 permanent members get it.

Well, I don’t know if Mohamad really would have married one of the Miss World contestants, as that journalist suggested, but the King of Swaziland, already in some trouble for having kidnapped a 17-year old girl to be one of his wives, has plans to do the same for his country’s entrant when she returns home.

Seriously

Kevin has sent in the following complaint:

I'm afraid you're losing it. Consider the way you began a sentence:


>GeeDubya is seriously thinking ...


Webster’s defines serious as “requiring much thought or work”. In Shrub’s case, anything at or above the complexity of tying his shoelaces requires much thought or work. The Oxford Shorter Dictionary adds this definition: significant or worrying in terms of danger or risk. Well, whenever Dubya tries to think...it’s serious.


Remember three months ago, the Bushies put out “evidence” of new building at an Iraqi nuclear site? You’d never know it from the news reports, but that was one of the sites visited by the inspectors this week. There was nothing there. And Bush was not taken to task for its earlier hysteria. Remember this on Monday or whenever they claim that they have evidence that the Iraqi declaration was a lie. Oh, right, it may not be that early because Blix doesn’t intend to hand it all over to the US right away, and boy are they pissed off.

The NY Times, commenting about Clinton’s remarks this week that the right wing control talk radio, says that the D’s have a “yammer gap.”