That depends on what the meaning of "48 hours" is

US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte, back when Resolution 1441 was passed: “There's no 'automaticity' and this is a two-stage process, and in that regard we have met the principal concerns that have been expressed for the resolution. Whatever violation there is, or is judged to exist, will be dealt with in the council, and the council will have an opportunity to consider the matter before any other action is taken.”

So they lied. They always lie. Or just change the rules so many times even they don’t know that they are. After giving a 48-hour ultimatum, they still had time in the next 24 hours to change the rules again. Twice. 1) We might invade in less than 48 hours if Hussein refuses to leave (here’s Ari Fleischer on that: “Saddam Hussein has to figure out what this means.” So Ari doesn’t know either). 2) We’ll invade even if he does leave. The latter flabbergasts me, it really does. I can’t figure out if they literally changed the policy after putting the figurehead-in-chief on tv in prime time to announce a different policy, or if they meant to say that troops were going in no matter what, and just phrased it in such a way that no one in the world knew that’s what they meant. And I don’t know which of those options would show greater incompetence.

My theory: I think what happened is that they’ve got a preconception that is so clear to them they didn’t think it needed to be said out loud, which is that the Iraqi military is only there to defend Hussein, not the country, and that Iraqis would be so happy to be “liberated” that if Hussein was around, there would be literally not a single hand raised against an American occupying army. Well good luck with that.

Still haven’t found out which insurance company pulled the rug out from the inspectors. I suppose we can’t blame them, a private company isn’t designed to act in the public interest. Which makes you wonder about all those companies lining up to provide services to the Iraqis. The US is going to be contracting out the Iraqi school and health systems to the lowest bidder.

Here’s a cute piece on various ways Iraq will be made more like the US (Hussein winning by 100% v. Florida; right hand cut off for theft v. 50 years in California for stealing videos, etc). My favorite: 6. Saddam has been universally seen firing his gun indiscriminately and menacingly. Under the second amendment, this right would be extended to everyone.

Moo: Colin Powell issues his list of 30 COW countries, and what an odd coalition it is. Even one of the biggest allies, Spain, is unwilling to send the much-feared Spanish army into fight, but basically any country willing to say that it might offer a paperclip at some point during the war gets on the list. Hey, the Philippines gave us overflight rights, isn’t that helpful? No, really, I’m asking, is it?

The US gave permission to Turkey to invade Iraq, by the way.

Legs of responsibility

Incredibly smug comment of the hour by Dubya: "The U.N. will definitely need to have a role [in running post-conquest Iraq]. That way, it can begin to get its legs of responsibility back." Although actually he plans to screw NGOs and just parcel the job out to American corporations.

Since writing that, I’ve seen The Smirking One’s address to the nation, and I wish to point out another piece of smugness he’s been doing, and which is spreading. The traditional obnoxious ending of such addresses, “God bless America,” or “May god bless the American people” has been expanded to “May God continue to bless America,” because of course we are god’s faves. Actually, my computer’s dictionary says “bless” comes from Old English, “perhaps originally in the sense of mark or consecrate with blood,” which is pretty fucking appropriate.

Of course blood isn’t Chimp Boy’s liquid of choice. In the part of the address aimed at the Iraqi people, he warns them not to use WMDs, but only after telling them not to harm one drop of our precious, precious oil. He can no longer even be bothered to pretend that oil isn’t his first priority. He also said “It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honor. Do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” That’s not honor, that’s self-interest. William Saletan at Slate notes that Bush is demanding courage and resolve from the American people, and the complete opposite from Iraqis.

Speaking of self-interest, since there was never a Security Council vote, do whichever countries we bribed to vote for us still get those bribes?

The CBC says that GeeDubya has given up on diplomacy, the Bushies are saying rather that diplomacy has failed. My computer’s dictionary defines diplomacy as “skill and tact in dealing with people,” so I’d ask when diplomacy was ever actually employed.

Robin Cook, who was my choice to lead the Labour Party in ‘92, despite the garden gnome look, resigned the British government today, taking a shot at Bush that was really a shot at his favorite lapdog (one British anti-war chant: “Blair is a poodle, Bush is a noodle”). He said that if the hanging chads had gone the other way, we wouldn’t be at the brink of war. What he is implying is that His Tonyness would have toadied up to the policy of whoever happened to be president. Cook is given a standing ovation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen clapping in the House of Commons before. Here’s his statement.

The supreme court of our other ally Spain has voted to ban the Basque separatist party.

George Monbiot says that international aid is being shifted from every other country in the world to Iraq, to ensure that the US isn’t embarrassed by the entire country starving to death between the time we invade it and the time the camera crews leave. For example, the UN has received 2.5% of the money it requested to deal with the severe drought in Eritrea, 1.2% to deal with the effects of the civil war in Liberia, etc etc. Afghan puppet Karzai was in the US begging for money this month, and was promised a whopping $50 million, but the US insisted that $35m. of that be spent on a 5-star hotel in Kabul.

For all your pimp hat needs.

La too-qaa-wim

Bill Frist, evidently the first doctor in Congress in many decades, just keeps showing us why we don’t elect more of them. Just keeps rubbing everyone’s nose in it. Now, being a heart surgeon doesn’t really qualify you to give informed opinions on abortion, which he considers to be bad medicine. What, you may ask, is good medicine? His WashPost opinion piece Sunday is headlined “When War is the Best Medicine.” So take two, and call him in the morning.

The Israeli army says it was an accident that one of its bulldozers ran over an American activist trying to stop it destroying a Palestinian house. And then reversed, and ran over her again. By accident.

Bush was holidaying in the Azores this weekend, in a conference labeled as designed to find a path to peace. The only people invited were those who supported the war, which certainly makes agreement a lot easier to reach. The Times notes, “Behind the leaders hung an impressive row of flags, but each national flag was represented three times, somehow reinforcing the smallness of the coalition against Saddam.” Azores is Portuguese for “hawk.”

The US military has been warning that the Iraqis may use “suicide prisoners,” that is send people to surrender with explosives strapped to their body. Oh yeah, this war is gonna be humane. Also, in case you need it, the phonetic Arabic for “do not resist” is "la too-qaa-wim."

In a referendum, 64.3% of Liechtensteiners vote their prince near-absolute powers.

The Raelians, that weird sect that claims to have cloned humans, has been getting lots of requests from Israelis and Palestinians to clone children killed in the Intifada.

The UN inspectors stop most of their work, and lose most of their helicopters, because their insurance company (which none of the stories name) pulls out. Just in case you were wondering who’s really in charge in this world. Now if we could just get State Farm of Baghdad to pull its policies on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and this whole thing would be over.

In repression news, the Spanish courts let the government ban a Basque newspaper, the Turkish government is banning 2 Kurdish parties, and Germany is trying to ban the largest neo-Nazi party, but it turns out that most of the members who testified against it were actually agents provocateurs working for the intelligence services, while the press have discovered that the gov has been deliberately under-reporting the number killed in neo-Nazi violence, 99 since reunification (not 39, the gov figure). Also, Santa Cruz Public Library, followed by others, has put out signs warning that the FBI can get patrons’ records.

Speaking of Nazis, CBS is making a mini-series based on Hitler’s early life. But they’ve decided that Hitler--Adolf Hitler, mind you--isn’t that interesting, so they’re going to spice it up a bit. Ian Kershaw, whose biography of Hitler they were supposed to be basing this on (which I’ve read), has walked off and demanded his name be removed.

Someone at the State Dept has leaked a report trashing Bush’s hilarious “domino theory” idea that “regime change” in Iraq will create a cascade of democracy throughout the region. The problem is that what State is essentially saying is that these towel-heads aren’t up to the task of democracy, that it isn’t suited to them, and best stick with the authoritarian regimes we know and love. It’s hard to know which is more dangerous, Bush’s optimism, or State’s pessimism.

One of the countries Bush needs to get a Security Council vote from is Cameroon. The big news in that country is that the government is threatening to arrest people who drink their own urine. For medicinal purposes. And note to Chris: it’s supposed to restore hair too.

Fresh off its victory on victims of medical malpractice, the bastards, the Bushies are now trying to make it easier to deny coverage to Medicare patients by, for example, replacing judges as the persons who hear complaints about denials to employees of the DHHS. Astonishingly, they don’t need to go to Congress to do this.

The Observer today runs the silliest op-ed piece ever, someone saying that while Martin Sheen may oppose the war, Jeb Bartlett wouldn’t.

From AP: Procter & Gamble has agreed to include a disclaimer in a Metamucil commercial featuring Old Faithful to mollify the National Park Service. The commercial shows what looks like a Yellowstone National Park ranger pouring a glass of Metamucil, a laxative, into the geyser to help it stay regular. It will now say, "Dramatization — Please Obey Park Service Rules."

Israel has answered Bush’s “road map” with the environment-friendly response that it won’t be taking any road trips soon. Specifically, it refuses to dismantle even the illegal settlement outposts or freeze settlements, and that any movement from the first stage will be “conditioned upon the complete cessation of violence and terrorism, full disarmament of terrorist organizations, their capabilities and infrastructure, the complete collection of illegal weapons and the emergence of a new and different [Palestinian] leadership.” The road map as leaked to the NY Times was hilariously vague, although I did like the false equivalencies, such as the Palestinian leaders are supposed to urge the end of violence against Israelis, while the Israeli government is supposed to urge the end of violence against Palestinians. The falseness of the equivalency, of course, lies in the fact that most of the Israeli violence is committed by agents of the government. By the way, the shooting of 2 Israeli guards by Israeli troops, one killed by a missile shot from a helicopter while he was fleeing, shows, if more proof was needed, that the IDF shoots first and asks questions later, if then.

I commented about the administration watching its language with Security Council nations it has tried to overthrow. Bush’s comment about bringing the resolution to a vote no matter what the whip count is reminds me: he might also avoid talking about whips around nations like Guinea that we used to import our slaves from.

Headline of the day: Man Gets Prison for Pogo Stick Murder. The story, naturally, isn’t quite as funny.

Runner-up, from the Guardian: Tories Say Touch Typing Will Help Fight Crime. Turns out to mean that the police would get more actual work done if they typed their reports faster, which is sensible. Once again, it would have been better to stop after reading the headline.

The Oscar people are scared shitless that someone will use the platform to denounce the war. So they’ve resorted to that time-honored remedy, the blacklist. That may work for presenters, but what about winners, especially if Michael Moore wins one?

The Italian Supreme Court rules that interference by an “overbearing and intrusive mother-in-law” is grounds for divorce. The wife got the house and kid, and the husband moved back in with, you guessed it, his mama.

Somebody has decided to create an opera based on the BBC Newsnight program. Next up: Stephen Sondheim’s “McNeil-Lehrer,” with Mandy Patinkin as Jim Lehrer.

The new Lithuanian president, Rolandas Paksas, is being advised by an astrologer and mystic healer (she wraps people in toilet paper), who has been screening candidates for office. The Catholic Church is not pleased. The phrase “pact with the devil” has been used.

The news from Condoleeza

Congresscritter Ginny Brown-Waite (R-Fla), has introduced a bill to allow families of World War II dead to go to France and dig them up. She complains that the Frogs have forgotten that if we hadn’t helped them, they’d be speaking German now. Evidently compound nouns are a fate worse than death. The French could, of course, respond that if they hadn’t helped us during the Revolutionary War, we’d have a president who speaks English.

Incidentally, for those of you who have suggested that I lobby to change the excessively French name of my town, I’ve finally come up with an alternative: Condoleeza.

Longish piece on Bush admin secrecy, media complicity, and the likely restrictions on coverage of Dubya Dubya III.

And here’s another piece on the supine press. It has a phrase I like, calling Bush’s use of 9/11 to somehow justify war on Iraq as bait-and-switch.

Most of the American press has been lauding Serbia’s assassinated PM as the savior of his country, which should automatically make you suspicious. Here’s another view, perhaps going too far in the other direction, which says that Djindjic was a Quisling who worked for the US, sold off his country’s assets, and would have been cheerfully assassinated by pretty much any Serb. The story has a greater significance, since it suggests what happens when the US imposes “regime change.”

I’m told the French have taken to calling Rumsfeld Dr. Follamour (Dr. Strangelove). You won’t be surprised if I start doing the same.

Thankfully, the anti-abortion ideologues wrote their bill against “partial-birth” abortions in such a way that it will be struck down by the courts, unless of course Bush gets to appoint someone to the Supreme Court.

ttp://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n05/print/ande01_.html

This is scripted

I had a joke in mind I forgot to insert in my last, about the House cafeteria changing french fries to freedom fries, which is that if it’s anything like the cafeteria food at Santa Cruz, they’d have served their purpose better by keeping the name. Remember Saga’s Swiss Steak? Swedish meatballs? At the time I said Switzerland wouldn’t keep its neutrality long if it inflicted that food on the rest of the world.

The idiots on the DC Circuit Court say that Guantanamo detainees have no legal rights whatsoever, including access to the courts. Evidently they’re supposed to appeal to the Cuban courts. What I want to know is how if the judicial branch has no authority over these people, the executive branch can.

On the growing belief that Pakistan staged a fake arrest of retroactive-mastermind Khalid Mohammed, see this.

Read a piece complaining that in the staged Bush press conference the reporters playacted their parts, waving their hands even though Bush was clearly calling people from a written list, not even looking up, so the reporters were just giving credence to the masquerade of this being an unscripted event. Indeed, it has been noted elsewhere that many news sources’ transcript of the event have Bush saying “This is unscripted...” at a point where he actually said “This is scripted”.

Speaking of scripted events, the US is getting ready to set up France for the “failure” of the UN (to do what the US wants). The word you will hear most frequently applied to Jacques Chirac is “bully,” and not in the Teddy Roosevelt sense. Well, if the US can castigate Iraq for not obeying the UN and invading other countries and having weapons and so forth, I guess it can call France a bully. Although it might want to refrain from doing so in the Security Council, where so many of the swing voters (Angola, Mexico, Chile, etc) are countries whose governments the US has overthrown or tried to overthrow (in Angola’s case, the 25-year old civil war was started by the CIA when it was headed by Bush the Elder, which the US may have forgotten about but I can assure you Angola has not)(another country on the Security Council whose elected government Bush overthrew: the United States)(Mexican prez Vicente Fox fakes a back operation so he doesn’t have to make a decision publicly).

Yesterday on the Daily Show, they said that there was a debate in the Bush admin over how many hoops to make Saddam jump through, Powell opting for 2, Rummy for 3, but they all agreed the hoops would be flaming. Today, Britain introduces 6 new “conditions” to impose on Iraq, including that Saddam go on tv and read, in Arabic, a statement Britain will write for him to the effect that he has been a very bad boy, has hidden weapons, and will never ever do so again. As if any leader would just go on tv and robotically read something written by...well, yes, ok, but George did go off-script when he said “This is scripted.” The conditions also include surrendering weapons that Iraq may not actually have, like mobile chemical/biological weapons facilities, and drones (did you see the fearsome drone on tv today? it was actually made of balsa wood).

Speaking of things made of balsa wood, Tony Blair isn’t looking too good lately, not helped by the accidental groin-kicking given him by Secretary of War Rumsfeld yesterday. Blair, who will never be called boyish again, is probably sacrificing his political career to Bush’s war, only to have Rumsfeld casually say that it wasn’t really necessary. Still, at the end of his career, Tony finally finds something he has a conviction about, and it turns out to be killing people. Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart asks,

Wouldn't you be spooked if he turned up at your door, just as you were sitting down to tea, all smart in his suit and tie, briefcase full of leaflets? "Hello, I'm here to tell you the good news about going to war with Saddam Hussein."

"Sorry, we're all Jehovah's Witnesses in this house."

Ah, Hollywood. Sigourney Weaver has evidently staged an elaborate wedding for her dog, an Italian greyhound. With a pre-nuptial agreement.

An AP story says that Italian schoolchildren will have to be multilingual. Evidently, talking with their hands doesn’t count. They will be learning English from the 1st grade.

The Serb PM is assassinated. Fortunately, assassinations in the Balkans never have significant consequences. The government immediately blames organized crime, which is possible, but there is no evidence for it, so they’re clearly going the cover-up route. It may have been related to his efforts to capture Bosnian Serb Ratko Mladic, a bit of left-over business from about 20 wars ago.

Wisconsin is moving towards not releasing election results until the polls close in the West. They should be encouraged, and everyone else follow.

Molly Ivins, in the current column, says exactly what I said yesterday about the NY Times perhaps needing to focus in its coverage on those areas where the American people show huge ignorance in the polls.

The Rolling Stones are going to China. Which has asked them not to play any songs with s-e-x in them.

Republicans are trying to turn Rep. Moran into the new Trent Lott for his semi-anti-Semitic remarks about Jews and American foreign policy. At the same time, the FBI is “investigating” the fake evidence the US cited linking Iraq to attempted uranium purchases in Niger. They say it may be the work of some foreign nation that wants to instigate a war between the US and Iraq. Of course, they mean to imply Israel.

Whatever it is...

I lose: the day I predicted for the start of the war, March 10, has come and gone (Chris said Feb. 28).

Faced with complaints from the states about being short-changed by the federal budget, the Bush admin has decided to stop publishing the report on how much each state gets from each federal program.

At the bottom of the WashPost story on that are a pair of quotes: Ari Fleischer: "He denied he had these weapons, and then he destroys things he says he never had." And Hans Blix 3 months before saying that Iraq declared those very missiles. Colin Powell pulled the same crap about the drone planes, saying that Iraq hadn’t declared them when it had.

In a NY Times poll, 45% say that Saddam was personally involved Fin 9/11. If you’re noticing a theme developing, it would be Don’t Confuse Me With the Facts. The paper observes that the 45% figure is virtually unchanged from one month ago. Hey, here’s an idea: when a poll reveals an area of vast and significant ignorance, why don’t you run a story or two on the subject?

FAIR points out that 9 days later, the Times has still failed to report on the story of the US spying on the UN, although unproven assertions that Iraqi diplomats are acting as spies in 60 countries got some play. Maybe one of the reasons for the mutual incomprehension between the US and the rest of the world is that stories that are front-page news elsewhere aren’t even picked up by the paper of record.

There’s a Salon piece on the crappy logic underlying this war. Something occurred to me while reading it this part of it:

“By framing the entire crisis in terms of Palestinian terrorism, rather than Israeli occupation and Palestinian terrorism, Bush has subtly equated the Palestinians with al-Qaida. In Bush's view, as in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's, the Palestinians have no history, no grievances, no claims of any kind on the world's conscience: Their acts of violence are completely evil, exactly like those of al-Qaida. All Arabs, it seems, must pay the price of 9/11.”

What occurred to me is just how willfully ignorant Bush is. He literally acts as if the very few facts he knows about any given situation are the only ones there are.

Incidentally, largely unreported here, the Bush “road map” for Israeli-Palestinian peace, put off for the Israeli elections, and then for the many weeks it took Sharon to cobble together a coalition, has now been postponed until after the Iraq War.

The French also have their minds mind up. Jacques Chirac says, "Whatever happens, France will vote 'no'." I knew the French were big on Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen, but Groucho?

I don't know what they have to say,
it makes no difference anyway
whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is
or who commenced it,
I'm against it!

Your proposition may be good,
but let's have one thing understood
whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it
or condensed it, I'm against it!

Conversely, though, the Bushies, faced with a possible loss in the Security Council, Monday were saying that they were flexible about the content of the resolution, which means, presumably, that those countries they coerced or bribed into promising their vote were signing a blank check. Whatever it was, they’d be for it.

The House of Representatives cafeteria now serves “freedom fries” and “freedom toast.” The French Embassy had no comment, except to point out that french fries come from Belgium.

My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now

The world’s richest nations have given the UN refugee agency 1/4 of what it asked for to deal with the crisis that Gulf War II will cause. I have the sneaking suspicion at least some of this is deliberate, as one of the areas which will be flooded is the northern Iraq Kurdish-run region; this would be one way of over-stressing their resources and forcing the Kurdish government into collapse in advance of its reabsorption by the central Iraqi government. If you follow.

The pope says that Scotland is no longer a Christian country.

Seymour Hersh on Richard Perle’s venture-capital company. Evidently after 9/11 he set this thing up to invest in defense industries, seeing no conflict of interest with his day job in the Pentagon, pushing for wars that would benefit the company. Indeed, defense contractor Boeing found it prudent to invest heavily. Evidently he’s done this before, advising the army in 1983 to give a contract to an Israeli firm that had paid him $50,000 two years before. Another featured player in the article: Adnan Khashoggi of Iran-Contra fame, who helped Perle try to blackmail the Saudis into investing in the company. Asked about the article on CNN, Perle said "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist."

Speaking of Reagan’s evil-doers, Fox News hired Ollie North to follow his old Marine division into Baghdad. He’s already given up, saying "I'm too old for all this. I'm going back to Kuwait City for a shower and a decent night's sleep."

Li Peng, the Butcher of Tiananmen Square, retires.

Here’s a headline--“Net Closing Around Bin Laden”--that must rival “Time Running Out for Saddam” as the most frequently rerun headline of our time. Pakistani intelligence officials say they are “just hours” behind bin Laden, but don’t say whether that’s by car or by airplane.

N Korea says that the $500 million secret payment it took in exchange for coming to a summit with the South was not a bribe but an expression of brotherly love. I’m suddenly sorry I’m an only child.

George Monbiot’s latest column. He says that the argument that it took 9/11 for the US to start caring what sort of regimes there were in the Middle East is false, since Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, etc were demanding the US overthrow Saddam in 1998. Monbiot says that while the overthrow of the Taliban may or may not have improved the lives of Afghans, and the overthrow of Saddam ditto in Iraq, the real worry is the change in the US, which is now feeling empowered to reshape the world.

An interesting interview with the Israeli military refusenik who is Netanyahu’s nephew. While international human rights conventions forced Israel to set up tribunals to assess conscientious objectors, it stocked them with military officers who have never recognized the existence of pacifism.

The Pentagon has hired an art director (just off a Michael Douglas film) to create the set for Pentagon daily briefings during the war. The set’s budget is $200,000. Don’t know if that includes the salary of this guy, who also designed the set for Good Morning America and works with magician David Blaine.

In Norway, a heavy metal band named Mayhem was carving up a dead sheep on stage when the head went flying off and hit a concert-goer, Per Kristian Hagen. He said later: "My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now. I like them, but not when they come flying through the air. I have a headache now." Police detective Carl-Petter Leganger said an investigation has started, but "nothing suggests this was a conscious act".

No kidding.

Journalism delayed

Just received my first feminist Nigerian scam. I’ll pass the whole thing on to anyone who’s interested, but the idea is that this woman’s husband died just as he was setting up a $30 million business deal, and now his wicked family members are trying to cheat her and her daughter out of it because they’re women, who can’t inherit in Nigeria (simply not true).

Utterly repellant website of the week.

You may have heard about Benjamin Netanyahu’s nephew, who will go on trial this week for refusing Israeli military service as a conscientious objector. Naturally, they will come down hard on him. Actually, it’s pretty easy to get out of military service (45% of Israeli men do), and it’s not just for religious loons anymore. The military encouraged this kid to get a psychiatric exemption (as 10% do), or serve in a military hospital, but he refuses to go the hypocritical route. He was examined by the army’s...wait for it...Conscience Committee, which looked at his previous record of refusal to engage in military areas of his school curriculum and came to two conclusions. First, his record of opposition to the army showed he had the character of a warrior and was clearly not a pacifist. Second, the best place for someone like him who refused to submit to authority and discipline was the army.

Next week, Liechtenstein will vote on the prince’s demands for a return to absolute monarchy. Isn’t that quaint?

The Observer, which last Sunday broke the story about the US spying on UN Security Council members, asks why it was big news throughout the world, but ignored by the American media. Well, they asked the NY Times, which 4 days later still hadn’t published anything at all, because the government wouldn’t confirm or comment on it. The Observer commentator commentates, “Journalism delayed is journalism denied.” The Post gave it 514 words, the LA Times rather more, both emphasizing that this sort of thing happens all the time, so that’s all right then.

Britain, along with every other racist European country, which is all of them, wants to deter Johnny Foreigner coming there and claiming political asylum. The latest plan is to send them to Siberia, well ok, Albania, which is arguably worse. The poorest country in Europe has agreed to be the site of detention centers on behalf of other European countries, how many is as yet unknown. The Telegraph notes the travel advisory issued by the Foreign Office on Albania, which says everybody there owns guns, driving there is dangerous, and for god’s sake don’t go to an Albanian dentist.

The US says that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is finally talking. How did they get such an ardent hater of the US to talk, if he really is? Here’s a hint: Pakistanis authorities have been holding on to his 7-year old and 9-year old sons since September, and just transferred them to American custody, where they are being interrogated. That came from the Daily Telegraph, and nowhere else, although it contains quotes from US officials confirming it. The Sunday WashPost has a story on Mohammed which only mentions that his sons were nabbed in paragraph 143, without mentioning their ages or current whereabouts. A long piece in the NY Times about techniques of questioning prisoners fails to mention threatening their children.

Incidentally, did you know he went to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Jesse Jackson’s old school?

A British Department of Education ad for a literacy campaign says "One in five British employees have poor literacy and numeracy skills."

The death toll in the Thai drug crackdown is now...oops, the government has stopped releasing that number.

The UN monitors of the Iraq-Kuwait border, the ones who just reported American incursions, have all been removed.

Maureen Dowd summarizes Bush’s press conference: “Message: I scare.”

Apart from the lack of underpants, it was a conventional operation

2 Hughes Aircraft divisions, neither still owned by Hughes, plead guilty to giving China data rocket & satellite data, and pay a fine. No actual human is held responsible in any way, certainly are not facing trials for treason and possible execution, although the Rosenbergs were certainly electrocuted for less. If only they’d known enough to work for a multinational corporation.

Good piece on the Bush press conference. I’d have to ask what the hell are the “Al Qaeda-type organizations” Iraq is supposed to be funding. (I’d have to ask because none of the reporters did, although the format and Bush’s filibustering/rambling responses prevented there being all that many questions asked to begin with. Joe Conason in Salon points out that no such accusation was made in, say, the last State Dept report on international terrorism.) Bush refused a couple of times to say whether the war would be a failure if it didn’t end in the capture or “accidental” death of Saddam Hussein--like with your father, the reporters were too polite to add. One minor innovation in rhetoric is the new Bush line that if Iraq were disarming, it would be obvious. How that would be obvious, I don’t know, although he did say that inspectors “could have showed up [sic] at a parking lot and he could have brought his weapons and destroyed them.” Yes, that’s how you destroy biological warfare agents. In a parking lot. Hitting them with hammers, maybe. Moron.

Bush’s answers to questions on N Korea don’t seem to have gotten much attention--indeed, those parts of the press conf don’t even appear in the transcript in the print edition of the NY Times. Oddly, he said that North Korean nukes are a “regional issue.” I’m not even sure what that means, but even if it were true, and even if N Korea didn’t have missiles that could reach, well, me here on the West Coast, don’t we have defense pacts with some of those countries in the region? Also, he described the region as including China, Japan and Russia, which is less a region than it is half the world.

He also has what may be a new line on opposition to his policies: asked why “so many people around the world take a different view of the threat that Saddam Hussein poses than you and your allies” he said “I recognize there are people who don’t like war.” And then says that he doesn’t like war either, which was surprisingly not followed by the reporters bursting into laughter. What he’s doing with this line is pretending that real intellectual disagreement is just based on knee-jerk pacifism, and can therefore be dismissed.

Yesterday’s press conference was followed by today’s conference by the arms inspectors. Most interesting was the complete refutation of there being any Iraqi nuclear program, of there being any connection between aluminum tubes, magnets, etc to such a program, and of the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. The latter is the most interesting: the evidence cited by British intelligence is forged. Badly.

Not much attention is being given to the sudden appearance of holes in the fence between Kuwait and Iraq, and the foray by US Marines into the neutral zone, which will not only piss off the Romulans, I mean Iraqis, but makes Kuwait a legitimate target and, by the by, is a violation of the cease-fire accords.

A Texas judge gives a gay divorce. This has proven a bit of a problem, since Vermont will let anyone get a gay marriage, but only residents (1 year+) can get divorces there.

The Pentagon refuses to comment on the cases of two prisoners beaten to death, possibly during interrogations, possibly not, at a US military base in Afghanistan.

The DOD’s budget proposals (so why do I have to read this in a British paper and there’s nothing in the Post or NY Times?) include a single line asking to be allowed to develop mini-nuclear weapons. Which, bad enough in themselves, would need to be tested, breaking yet another international treaty.

Dick Cheney sends a letter (on official Office of the VP stationary, yet) threatening a satire site, whitehouse.org, which has a moderately humorous (don’t bother, really) parody of his wife.

The US is claiming that Iraq is buying up uniforms like those worn by American soldiers (while refusing to offer any proof). So remember, any soldiers in American uniforms committing atrocities are bound to be Iraqis. Really.

Britain’s Education Secretary’s 16-year old son was suspended from his school for swearing at a member of staff who confiscated his football.

Jörg Haider, the gay neo-fascist in Austria, has started a campaign for independence for Carinthia.

We never hear anymore about the passengers of Flight 93, the one on 9/11 that went down in Pennsylvania, and isn’t that interesting? The only instance of civilians (admittedly doomed civilians) fighting back against terrorists, but it’s been allowed to fade into the background. What should be powerful symbolism is never invoked--when was the last time Shrub mentioned them? I assume it’s for the same reason he refuses to ask for any sacrifices: he doesn’t really want the citizenry participating actively, but rather wants them to view security and safety as one more commodity to be purchased and consumed passively.

Follow-up: I mentioned (2/4/03) that the feds asked a district court judge to dismiss a case by a whistle-blower who was wrongly fired by TRW for pointing out that they were faking Star Wars tests, arguing that this would endanger national security. The case has been dismissed.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Worldwide: Police accused of using witchcraft to catch fugitive
By Margaret Wilson in Lusaka

Claims that the Zambian police removed their underpants in order to search more effectively for a fugitive are the latest bizarre revelation in a row about the role of witchcraft in the capture of Zambia's most wanted man.

Katele Kalumba, former foreign minister, vanished three months ago after his arrest was ordered on charges of plundering the nation's resources. Despite the best efforts of a large team of police and reported sightings from as far as Belgium, he was living undetected in a tent on his farm in north-western Zambia.

Police say witchcraft lay at the heart of his elusiveness and they displayed an assortment of "magical objects" found in his tent when they finally caught up with him.

Black arts, and the fear of them, bubble just below the surface of life in Zambia. Police have been accused of resorting to the services of a witchdoctor to find their man.

Mr Kalumba, 50, disappeared when Zambia's national task force investigating corruption demanded he answer questions relating to the disappearance of £12.5 million for military equipment, as well as other sums.

Police say he used two witchdoctors to achieve his invisibility and eavesdropped on them with the aid of a wooden fetish doll. They also said he used the screen of his solar-powered laptop computer. "He confirmed he was able to see what was going on through this traditional computer," said a police spokesman.

As it happened, Mr Kalumba voluntarily showed himself to the team that came searching again after a tip-off from a local man. He emerged from behind a shrub too small to hide a man, said the police, adding that he wore charms around his neck and waist.

Now behind bars in Lusaka awaiting trial, Kalumba has denied the use of witchcraft, saying the objects were planted on him.

Police said the case was plagued with strange troubles. Police vehicles would unpredictably run out of fuel or develop mechanical failure; heavy rain would fall from clear skies at key moments.

Even after his capture, they said, Mr Kalumba was able to make himself invisible when the convoy passed through roadblocks on its return to Lusaka. Mr Kalumba and his wife, Lumba, claimed that police resorted to a witchfinder to track him down.

Accusations that police removed their underpants to make the search more effective would be interpreted in Zambia as a sure sign of witchery; black magic is best practised naked.

But police said that, apart from the lack of underpants and their urination on traditional herbs found at Kalumba's hideaway, it was a conventional operation.

Curse be upon your mustache

A Washington Post headline refers to “provocations” by North Korea. Right, they were bothering a spy-plane which was sent to spy on them. The effrontery!

The Arab summit didn’t go especially well, with the Iraqi delegate calling the Kuwaiti a monkey and shouting “God curse your mustache!” Possibly it loses something in the translation (another translation I’ve seen is “Curse be upon your mustache!”, which is arguably more elegant). Here’s a quote from the London Times: “A Kuwaiti Foreign Minister tried to interrupt, prompting Mr Ibrahim to shout: "Sit down, you minion, you agent. Shut up you monkey." There were gasps as some delegates thought that Mr Ibrahim had not said qird (monkey) but kelb (dog - a far graver insult).”

Speaking of something lost, well, gained actually, in the translation: Not having seen the Dan Rather interview with Saddam Hussein, I missed hearing the CBS translator, who had a thick Arab accent--and turns out to have been an American actor faking the accent.

A BBC reporter talking about US arm-twisting at the UN says the message is You’re either with us...or with the French. Ouch.

Don’t remember where I got that story about the members of the Washington state legislature who walked out during a Muslim opening prayer, but the AP version carried in the NY Times misses the key quote I highlighted, “My god is not Mohammed.” Either they didn’t want to make that legislator look like the fool she is, or their grasp of Islam isn’t any better than hers. [Later] I just looked up the story on news.google, and even the Wash. papers don’t carry the quote. Incidentally, she is now claiming that she really left just to get a drink of water. Her husband is a pastor, by the by.

Here’s a Chicago Sun Times columnist on the sudden rise by Khalid Mohammed from Wanted Terrorist No. 22 to top man in Al Qaida, who really made all the decisions, never mind that Osama guy.
Here’s a paragraph:

News reports quoted U.S. officials as saying that Mohammed was like the "Forrest Gump of al-Qaida." His name and fingerprints seemed to be everywhere. He'd been involved in all of al-Qaida's major attacks. But no one had noticed. The class nerd has a way of fading into the background.

Evidently he’s being upgraded because of evidence from one of those oh-so-reliable AQ prisoners. Actually, this guy’s story is really very tangled indeed, with so many lies attached to it that...well, read this story.

Here’s a good terrorist idea: one of those suicide terrorist types infects himself with something like smallpox and just walks around.

An 85-year old retired nurse in Britain says that doctors and paramedics often experience pressure from relatives to revive people who don’t want to be revived. So she’s had “Do not resuscitate” and a heart with a line through it tattooed on her chest.

The Supreme Court rules that a 50-year sentence under the Cal. 3 Strikes law for shoplifting some videos (Cinderella and, ironically, Free Willy) as gifts for the perp’s children is not cruel and unusual. Gray Davis says “This is good for California,” but doesn’t explain how. I take back anything I may have thought about the SFPD’s Fajita Crisis being silly. The perp’s lawyer notes that if he had committed rape, he’d have gotten 8 years because it would have been his first rape.

Bash a Peugot for peace

Prosecutors in New Hampshire say the Catholic Church was wilfully blind to paedophile priests. Probably have hairy palms, too.

Yesterday Israeli troops accidentally kills a pregnant woman when it destroys the house next to hers. Her husband explains that they hadn’t left their house because soldiers warned everyone to stay inside--or else--over loudspeakers.

The Easter Bunny, packin’ heat.

Evidently the US’s spying on UN delegations is not actually news. The guy who broke the story was scheduled to go on NBC, CNN & Fox News, but all three cancelled. Indeed Bulgaria’s ambassador to the UN says it’s a mark of prestige: "It's almost an offense if they don't listen." In the good old days in Bulgaria, of course, the highest social status was marked by the secret police attaching electrodes to your genitals. People put it on their resumes.

And for more about icky things done to genitals.

Speaking of inflated resumes, think Whatsit Mohammed is really the Al Qaida “mastermind” he’s cracked up to be? I had my doubts even before this.

Two Washington state legislators stage a walk-out when the opening prayer is led by a Muslim. One of them, no doubt a religious studies major, says "My god is not Mohammed."

Speaking of intolerance for our enemies, a Nashville radio station hosts a “Bash a Peugot for Peace” event. Note to organizers: how could you tell the difference.

The leaflets being dropped on Iraq.

A BBC interview with Rummy Rumsfeld today. Questions about his role in dealing with Iraq in the 1980s led to him stalking out of the studio at the end. A bit I liked: “DD: How damaging to the war plans is Turkey's refusal to let their bases be used?

“DR: There are workarounds. We'll be fine. Turkey is a democracy, it's a moderate Muslim country, it's a friend, it's an ally in Nato, and they're going through a democratic process, and we accept that.”

Notice how he makes “going through a democratic process” sound like an adolescent rebellion? Like Turkey just had something pierced just to piss off the US?

It’s also the first time I’m aware of where Rummy has been cross-questioned on his use of the phrase “so-called occupied territories.”

A man who escaped a Texas prison by helicopter in 1962 is re-arrested. The police say “You can run, but you can’t hide.” I would say Robert Coney has proven that wrong.

Something I didn’t know: Israeli subsidies to (Jewish) children are sharply progressive. That is, the amount given for the first and second child is half that for the third, ¼ that for the fourth, 1/5 that for the fifth and up.

The part of Kuwait now occupied by the US military and off-limits to Kuwaitis is now up to 50%.

War, what is it good for?

Hell is (for) other people: A Harris poll says that 82% of Americans believe in heaven, while 2/3 believe in hell--and 1% expect to go there.

And half believe in ghosts.

Drunk upon the floor

British journalist Henry Nevinson, re the Black and Tans in 1921, but with perhaps some slight applicability elsewhere: “It is a terrible thing to feel ashamed of the country one loves. It is like coming home and finding one’s mother drunk upon the floor.”

Everybody says that the recently captured Al Qaida guy is a master of disguise, but no one explains why he was disguised as John Belushi when captured.

The last Caribbean who fought in Europe in World War I dies at 105.

A Martin Amis essay on Iraq and Bush, longish but with several quite good bits.

Ah, democracy. The US has evidently told the Turkish government to tell its Parliament to vote again, and this time get it right (arrogantly, the process of unloading military supplies in Turkey went on like nothing had happened). Why can’t they be more like the Bulgarians, whose Parliament offered bases and support without a single no vote? As a communist state, Bulgaria was the most sycophantic puppet of Moscow.

Speaking of countries that are only allowed democracies if they don’t produce governments and policies the US doesn’t like. Yesterday I noted that the US press had mostly missed Bush’s step back on the issue of Israeli settlements, saying nothing had to be done while there was violence and Arafat was in power, the wholesale adoption of Sharon’s ever-increasing list of demands, in other words. What I missed is that the next day Sharon told the Knesset that expansion of the settlements would be a priority--abandoning the pretext that his building boomlet was to accommodate “natural growth.” According to the Israeli defence minister, the current plan for a Palestinian state is 7 cantons based on the cities, with the rest of the West Bank annexed by Israel, with Israel controlling entry into the 7 bantustans.

Another regime change demanded by American conservatives: NBC is being pressured to fire anti-war activist Martin Sheen from The West Wing. Network execs have already demanded that Sheen explain his views.

A leaked Republican party memo on the environment says that they should pretend that there is no scientific consensus on the danger of greenhouse gases. Consultant Frank Lunz writes, “The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.” He also says they should never use the frightening phrase “global warming,” but rather “climate change” (and yes, Bush stopped using the phrase last year).

The British advertising regulator bans a McDonald’s commercial because the image of a steak sandwich in the ad looked nothing like the ones they actually sell. A Holocaust on your plate--and the portions are so small!

Yesterday I mentioned text messaging. The BBC has had a competition, classic texts into text messaging.
For ex:

rm rm w4Ru rm? [Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?]

1nc mr un2 T brech dr frnds 1nc mr

0.5a leag 0.5a leag
0.5a leag onwrd
All in T valy o Dth
Rd T 600
"^ T LB!
"Chrg 4T gns" he sd
In2 T valy o Dth
Rd T 600

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Voila moment

Here’s a site from someone with way too much time on his hands, but he uses it to correspond with spammers. Fun.

I’d have mentioned it days ago, but I assumed it would get proper coverage in the press. Silly me. Bush now says that Israel doesn’t have to stop building settlements until he gets everything he wants from the Palestinians.

So Turkey has decided not to be one of the COW (Coalition of the Willing) states. Evidently all the talk about bazaars, and editorial cartoons showing Turkey as a bellydancer, pissed them off. Fortunately, the US has immediately learned its lesson in dealing with the national pride of countries it wants favors from, and sets about wooing Angola’s Security Council vote by having Dick Cheney call its president. Dick Cheney, the supporter of UNITA. Dick Cheney, who voted against protesting South Africa’s treatment of Nelson Mandela. Dick Cheney, the proponent of South Africa’s apartheid government. What, Chester Crocker or Henry Kissinger or Trent Lott too busy? The annoying thing is that they’re so poor we probably can bribe them (we’ve been blocking international development money to rebuild after the 30-year civil war we played such a big role in keeping going).

As I’ve said, the US has drastically stepped up its bombings in the “no fly” zones. Now, the Pentagon claims that the rules of engagement haven’t changed, which would mean that pilots only fire in self defense. If this were actually true, then the increased bombing would have been in response to some escalation of attacks by the Iraqis. And if that were true, the Bushies would have been making a big deal of it, as more proof of Iraqi aggression. Which they haven’t. Therefore, class, using simple logic, we prove that the Pentagon’s justifications are a crock of shit. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The Pentagon’s theory of the Iraq war depends on something called the “Voila Moment.” This is the moment when Iraqi civilians, soldiers, etc, with missiles raining down all around them, suddenly realize “Why those nice Americans don’t really intend to kill me and all my family, they just mean to free us from that evil tyrant Saddam.” Then they rise up in their thousands, stop fighting the Americans and overthrow Saddam. This is the point of all those leaflets and radio broadcasts we are currently annoying the Iraqis with. The problem, one Guardian commentator commentates, is that this actually happened in some parts of Iraq during the last war, and was swiftly followed by a Screw You Moment, when the Americans let the rebels be slaughtered.

The Daily Telegraph launches its hysterical over-reaction of the week, about the decline of literacy due to mobile phone text messaging, after a 13-year old girl in Scotland turns in a “What I did over summer vacation” essay in it: “My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." Translation: "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York, it's a great place."

Nostalgia time: there’s a fire at the new library in Alexandria.

I’ve thought of another bad joke about the PETA campaign: A Holocaust on Your Plate, A Thousand-Year Reich on Your Hips.

There seems to be some controversy about what happened to that Al Qaida guy, something Mohammed, captured over the weekend. Most reports say he was removed to an unnamed country, while Pakistan claims they still have him. What nobody disputes is that if they’re going to get any actionable intelligence out of him, they have to do it fast, so torture will be involved. We are now a nation that routinely tortures people, and no one cares.

Also, a federal appeals court ruled admissible a confession by a Colombian drug-lord type in Colombia made as part of a failed plea bargain. Such statements are inadmissable if made in the US, but trials of foreigners now rather often seem to involve evidence extracted by less than savory methods by foreign governments.

Bastards

I think I’d better explain better an item in my last post, that a man was sentenced to 155 years for giving $3,500 from the proceeds of cigarette-smuggling (from N Carolina to Michigan, I might add) to Hezbollah. This conviction was the first under the new law (I think Clinton’s anti-terrorism rather than the “Patriot” Act) that treats giving money to a “terrorist” group (a designation which is of course made for political reasons, like the several Chechen groups just added to the list because the US is trying to buy off Russia’s Security Council vote), the way some of us did in college to Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, or South African groups, as exactly the same as committing actual terrorist acts. The NY Times gives a couple of paragraphs to this that leaves out all the key facts and fails to notice the significance of it.

I just mentioned a US bribe for Russia’s vote. Chile and Bulgaria are to get trade deals. Then there’s this on the NSA tapping the phones of other Security Council nations to discover their negotiating positions. My favorite part is when the paper calls the NSA guy who wrote the leaked memo, and his secretary insists that they have the wrong extension and hang up. Article on the bribes and threats being deployed.

The US now says that even Iraq disarming isn’t enough, Hussein has to go. In other words, Iraq looks like actually disarming, at least enough to remove the excuse for war, so they’re trying to push him not to disarm. If we’re going to go to war no matter what, it might have put US troops at less risk if we had at least waited for Iraq to destroy those missiles first. Also, a minor point I know, but going to war to change the rulers of another country is contrary to international law.

Thai drug war deaths: 1,140 and rising.

As you may have heard, a Canadian MP who didn’t know the microphone was on said, “Damn Americans. I hate those bastards,” and has since been having difficulties trying to explain it away. The Toronto Globe and Mail said that she was not speaking for the Canadian people and to prove the point, held an internet poll, which says
that Americans are, in fact, bastards, by a vote of 11,960 to 11,287.

No thanks, I couldn't eat one ethnic cleansing more

I paid $1.93 a gallon for gasoline today and so am now wholly behind a war for oil.

A Times article says that kindergarteners in Britain have been playing war games a lot more lately. Also, building towers and ramming planes into them.

170 nations have agreed an international treaty on tobacco, including bans on advertising, attempts to stop smuggling, and putting warning labels in big print, covering 30% of a cigarette pack. Now who could object to that? You guessed it.

By coincidence, a guy convicted in the US of smuggling cigarettes and giving a full $3,500 of the proceeds to Hezbollah is sentenced to 155 years (and yes, that’s really all he did).

Speaking of over-reaction, PETA’s latest campaign compares the eating of animals to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. “A Holocaust on Your Plate,” the campaign is called. Mmmm, says Homer Simpson, Holocaust on Your Plate. Can I have a side of Freedom Fries with that?

The US response to Iraq’s decision to destroy those missiles is that it is “too late.” The logic of that position is that Iraq is not obligated to do it. If it is too late, then the US is already committed to war and no one could expect Iraq to continue disarming.

You can't even die in this country

So according to the one Iraqi defector the admin loves to cite as proof that only defectors rather than inspections get at the truth, and that Iraq covered up its early weapons program, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law & weapons chief, all WMDs were destroyed in 1991. Only the UN never told anyone that he said this (in 1995). (This is from Newsweek, which downplayed it, but see the FAIR.org report).

A businessman is planning a theme park on the outskirts of Berlin: Ossiworld, for those feeling nostalgic for the GDR. Actually, the East Berlin they’re talking about--snarling dogs, random searches, etc.--is nothing like the one I remember, with polite helpful officials and a Wall less heavily guarded than the Tuilleries Gardens in Paris. Also, and no one ever talks about reproducing this, there was that propaganda lecture you had to go through before entering the East--the one given by an American.

President Niyazov, Great Hero of the Nation and True Father of all Turkmen, had his 63rd birthday today, and seems to have passed up the opportunity to rename something else, like the planets maybe. [Oh Christ, I wrote that before reading the rest of the article; actually, he has a meteor named after himself.] Here’s one I missed: the People’s Assembly (whose members come from the one legal party), recently demanded that Niyazov’s enemies be drawn and quartered and their organs left for the vultures in the Karakum Desert (which I believe is also one of the provisions in John Ashcroft’s draft Patriot II Act).

I didn’t know that inter-faith marriages are banned in Israel.

The House of Representatives voted today to ban human cloning. They obviously haven’t been watching the McNeil-Lehrer interviews with Democratic candidates for president.

According to the Georges Bush and Will, if the Senate doesn’t vote on Miguel Estrada’s nomination, it will be tantamount to a coup against the Constitution. Will then undermines his case a tad by saying it would be as if the Democrats wielded power without having won a presidential election.

Stand by your man

At yesterday’s press briefing, Ari Fleischer denied that the US is buying support for the war from other nations. From the official transcript: “But think about the implications of what you're saying. You're saying that the leaders of other nations are buyable. And that is not an acceptable proposition. (Laughter.)” That’s not Ari laughing, that’s the entire press corps literally laughing him out of the room.

A German police force decides to torture a kidnapping suspect (although the threat alone proves enough to get him to confess, they were really going to do it).

A judge in, where else, Texas, sentences a man who abused his 11-year old stepson by, among other things, hitting him in the genitals with a car antenna and throwing him out of the house, to sleep in a doghouse for 30 days (and pay a fine). So instead of putting him in jail where he belongs, he gets to go camping for a month.

Speaking of brilliant judges, Bush is still fighting for Miguel Estrada’s honor, which is more than Miguel Estrada ever did. Bush said, “I will stand by that man's side until he is sworn in as a judge.” That could get a little awkward in the shower, I suppose.

The Supreme Court rules that RICO can’t be used against demonstrators, which is exactly right, although I’d still like to see the courts force those Operation Rescue types to pay up the damages awarded against them.

As Bush is promising a miraculous spread of democracy in the Middle East if we have just one more war there, here’s a timely reminder of the results in Kuwait from the last War to Make the World Safe for Feudalism.

Very unfriendly

My raccoon came back tonight. And left again, a little bit wetter.

Speaking of water fights, see this interview (ok, not really) with a sea lion being trained by the Navy for combat against Iraq (interestingly, the link in the article to the page on this program in the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command website does not work).

The Fox affiliate in Tampa, under pressure from Monsanto, tried to get 2 reporters to broadcast false reports related to the presence of Monsanto’s synthetic bovine growth hormone in milk. They refused and threatened to report the station to the FCC; they were fired, filed suit, and the court ruled that the station had deliberately falsified news. The decision has been reversed because it’s not illegal to lie in a news report. Which is as it should be, but that shouldn’t mean you can fire whistleblowers.

An American professional snowboarder (!) dies after trying to slide down the handrail of the fifth floor staircase in his hotel, then falling 15 meters. Alcohol is believed to have been involved.

And in Philadelphia a man responds to his daughter being hit with a snowball by shooting into a group of children, hitting one in the head. Which is the same principle US foreign policy is based on.

Speaking of shooting people in the head, see this on US assassination policy.

Forget the virtual march on Washington (that’s today). Instead, join the fast for GeeDubya’s holiness: “Our goal is to have 1,000 people fasting for the President each day. That will greatly encourage him and keep him accountable when the Evil One [Donald Rumsfeld?] seeks to sidetrack him from his commitment to the Lord.”

Do you know what the CIA hq is named? Neither did I, but it would explain a lot.

Here’s a nice gross story. A man beats his baby, then 3 months old (this was December 2001) to brain-death, but it’s been on a ventilator since then, with the mother going to court to get him removed, the father trying to prevent that happening and, coincidentally, his subsequent trial for murder. A court just sided with the mother.

North Korea conducted a missile test just before the inauguration of a new prime minister in S Korea. Ari Fleischer says N Korea will not be rewarded for bad behaviour. Also today, Colin Powell says the US will resume food shipments to N Korea. Obviously they’re not coordinating. I’m not sure I understand the absolute US refusal to talk bilaterally with the N Koreans and its insistence that any talks be regional. Japan isn’t the one with 40,000 troops stationed in S Korea, we are.

From the Telegraph: A woman spent a night in jail for trying "to help" a 6ft long alligator she had run over in her car. Leslie Strickland, 49, took the animal to her home in Florida but when neighbours said it was illegal to possess an alligator she panicked, and drove off to find a pond in which to release it. But the animal thrashed its tail causing her to crash. She faces motoring offences. The animal died.

I thought this crap had stopped: Slovakia is still coercing gypsies into being sterilized.

Sharon adds another party to his coalition, one opposed to any Palestinian state. And some tiny parties which support ethnic cleansing get some positions too.

That Palestinian film, “Jenin Jenin,” that the Israelis banned? Some reservists who took part in the Massacre of Jenin have sued the director for libel. Incidentally, one cinema defied the ban and showed it.

Tom Toles’s political cartoons have been pretty good lately. On the Yahoo site is probably the easiest way to view them (well, second easiest: I have them sent to me as email).

The Bushies have been emphasizing more that the war in Iraq will lead to a wave of democratization all over the Middle East, what Bush calls a “battle for the future of the Muslim world.” (Oh good, a rabid Christian gets to decide that future.) That is, democratization unless you count the places like Jordan and Egypt that are putting anti-war protesters in prison (see the Amnesty International reports), or Turkey, which is about to defy 96% of its population (or as low as 94%, if you read other polls) and give support to the war, or... The Post talks about a credibility gap on this issue among those with long memories. What, like when we abandoned the Afghans to warlordism and a puppet government a few months ago?

The army chief of staff told a Senate committee that occupying Iraq would take hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Rumsfeld later said that he had “misspoken.”

The American ambassador to France says that the US would view a French veto of its war resolution as “very unfriendly.” I don’t know, I think friends don’t let friends do genocidal wars. Speaking of friends, a member of the Kurdish Parliament in northern Iraq says that if the US lets Turkish troops into Kurdistan, “the United States will lose its best friend.” I don’t know about best, but certainly most consistently gullible.

Incidentally, the Post article, under the haven’t-we-seen-this-before headline “Bush Firm Warning on Iraq,” says that the US draft resolution “recalls the council's November warning that Baghdad would face ‘serious consequences’ if it did not [disarm], language that the United States and its allies in the chamber view as an explicit authorization to use force.” Explicit? In what dictionary?

A Post article on possible ethics charges being filed against a Republican Congresscritter says that this would break a “six-year ethics truce,” but doesn’t elaborate. Sounds like there was an agreement to ignore all the ethics rules by not filing charges against each other. How cosy.

I mentioned the admiral who was removed from a battle group on the way to the Gulf for having sex with a subordinate. Evidently, that was the USS Kitty Hawk battle group. That’s “kitty hawk,” admiral, kitty, not...

No, no, I guess that joke isn’t really my style.

Prime Minister of garbage cans

The US keeps encouraging Iraq to resist the UN inspectors. For example, here’s Ari Fleischer today: “If Saddam Hussein destroys the missiles that he said he never had ... you've got to wonder what other weapons does he have?” No, Ari, you really don’t. They must be chortling over Iraq’s current Catch-22: give up missiles it needs to fight an inevitable war, or give the US the excuse it needs to start the war immediately. Although, as I said last week, the US keeps bombing sites in Iraq, with less and less justification (a story in the Independent since then makes the same point), so really the war is now in its, what, 13th year.

Hussein wants to debate GeeDubya. Wouldn’t that be hilarious?

The Farc rebels in Colombia say they will treat the 3 CIA employees as prisoners of war. Hey, that’s more than we’d do for them. In fact, if they are CIA employees, or indeed civilian contractors like the gov says, the Geneva Conventions do not apply to them. A story on NPR today I only heard the headline for comments on this aspect of the increasing employment by the Pentagon of (armed) outside contractors, which is a way to avoid Congress or the press noticing just how many of them there are spread out over Colombia, the Philippines and god knows where else.

A Kentucky grand jury refuses to indict a white cop who shot a black prisoner, who was in handcuffs, 11 times. Since June 2000 Louisville cops have shot 6 men to death. Five were black, no charges have been brought.

Sharon will exclude Shas from government. Its “spiritual leader,” a rabbi, calls Sharon “Prime Minister of garbage cans,” whatever that might mean.

Which reminds me. The next Austrian coalition gov, which is taking even longer to put together than Israel’s, will include the party of the gay neo-fascist Jorg Haider.

Jonathan Steele in the Guardian says that the risk that Blair et al are taking in going to war in defiance of public opinion requires that there be tv images of Iraqis dancing in the streets, just as the invasion of Afghanistan was retroactively justified by women throwing off their burquas. Never mind what happened after that, it’s those first images that matter. This is why the US’s seesawing plans for post-invasion governance matter so much. The British, who have some experience of this, seem to think that Viceroy Tommy Franks is not going to be good PR. And what after that? If the UN gives permission for this war, it gives up the right to send peacekeepers in later, as it could in Kosovo (4 years after the Yugoslavs were kicked out, the UN special representative rules by decree as absolute dictator, the Albanians having no more self-determination than they did under Milosevic). Anyway, why should the UN discredit itself by picking up the wreckage left by the US, because the US “only does war”? The Afghan model won’t work, because there are no warlords to bribe. Fortunately for the US, it won’t matter, because we will have forgotten about Iraq by the end of this year, just like Afghanistan.

Saw Gephardt on McNeil-Lehrer. He drones on worse than Gore.

The parents of the 9-year old pregnant rape victim in Nicaragua say fuck it and get her an abortion illegally. The medical board that is required to approve an abortion had said that she faced the same risks from either abortion or pregnancy (a 9-year old? bullshit!).

Not so much running, as speed-walking

Good (but long) Joan Didion article on various aspects of life after 9/11.

Obit of the day: Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to Britain who barely survived an assassination attempt in 1982, giving Israel the excuse to invade Lebanon. As a reminder of the human cost of these things, Argov was in the hospital for the last 21 years, blind and mostly paralyzed. Oh, and he strongly opposed the invasion of Lebanon and the fact that it was made in his name.

The White House denies that the 3 CIA employees kidnapped in Colombia last week were in fact CIA employees. Whatever happened to the thing about never confirming if people are in the CIA? That’s supposed to be policy. Whether these people really are or not (and of course they are), the policy is obviously now to lie, since what would they have said if the 3 were CIA? They’d never admit it, so they’d either lie, or do the neither-confirm-nor-deny thing, which if they’re only doing it for actual CIA employees and denying it for the rest, would be the same as admitting it. So, if you follow my logic, the official policy is now to lie.

London Times headlines, world in brief section: Struggle to Name Dead in Club Fire. Gee, isn’t that a bit late to be naming them, shouldn’t that have happened when they were, like, born? And a cop chasing thieves in his SUV (what else?) ran over 2 French sisters sunbathing. One is dead, one critical.

Sharon, still putting together a coalition, is giving housing over to a party representing the settlers. That can’t be good.

Some BBC headlines: “Blair: time running out for Iraq” (February 1, 2003); “Bush: time running out for Iraq” (January 14, 2003); “Straw: time running out for Iraq” (15 September, 2002); “Time is running out, UK warns Iraq” (November 9, 1998?)

Maybe it’s like one of those stores that always has a going out of business sale?

The Thai crackdown on drugs is up to 600 dead.

moveon.org is sponsoring a “Virtual March on Washington” Wednesday. Something about spamming Senators. Still, I’m picturing millions of people all over the country, sitting in front of their computers wearing those Virtual Reality gloves and glasses. Martin Luther King may have had a dream, but did it have kick-ass state-of-the-art digitized special effects, just like in Matrix? I thought not.

Satan for breakfast?

Crap I can’t make up: the “What Would Jesus Eat Cookbook.”

Bush: “if we are incapable of guaranteeing this peace, international peace would become senseless rhetoric.”

Choosing the next leader of Iraq, the American way.

Coffins are exploding

Crematorium workers in Sweden are complaining about a rise in exploding coffins caused by pacemakers and breast implants, and relatives placing liquor, bullets and fireworks in caskets.

Evidently Tom Ridge is recommending "Have a good communications plan for your family." Or, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, if you don’t have a good communications plan for your family, the very least you can do is to shut up.

His Fraudulency GeeDubya’s radio address today was on the subject of stealth judicial candidate Miguel Estrada, who neither Chris nor I can hear about without thinking of the actor in the 1970s gay cop show Chips (which is especially odd because I’ve only seen the show once). Anyway, Bush says the D’s “are stalling Miguel Estrada's nomination, while they search in vain for a reason to reject him.” I just want to point out that UN weapons inspectors have also been looking, mostly in vain, for reasons to reject Saddam Hussein. However, in that case, Bush cites that as reason to assume the worst, whereas after stonewalling the Judiciary Committee for 21 months, he expects the Senate to assume the best about Estrada. The point in common is that he wants his way, and he wants it NOW, dammit! Also, he referred to the Bar Association’s rating of Estrada; although he has refused to cooperate with the ABA in assessing his nominees, he is willing to cite them when they agree with him. As with his attitude towards going to the UN for resolutions on Iraq, it’s heads he wins, tails he loses.

WashPost headline: “Columbia Panel Focuses on Foam.” That’s what every committee needs: a latte machine.

The Post has an editorial on something I’ve been meaning to talk about. On the 15th I sent a link from the NY Times about Bush’s AIDS in Africa policy. I said, and I quote myself, “So Bush’s AIDS-in-Africa policy is also an attempt to stop abortion. What a surprise.” Imagine my surprise when the same story was run (even elsewhere in the Times) under headlines which suggested that Bush was in fact liberalizing his policy by working on AIDS with groups that also do abortions, when in fact it was clear that he was trying to hamstring them and extend the gag rule. The Post has it right, although they give Bush too much credit for his Potemkin policy. They do note that while he promised $10 billion, he’s only increased the budget this year by 1/20 of that. And guess what, it’s stolen from child poverty programs (and run through religious groups and US pharmaceutical businesses, as I’ve already said, while the UN AIDS program goes bankrupt).

supplemental

Click here. The bit about not running if you catch fire. But really, what do you make of #11, "account for your family members," which seems like it would take more counselling sessions than I'm really prepared to engage in, or #12, "Do not go back into a burning building and carefully supervise small children." Yes, a burning building is
probably not the best place to supervise small children.

Pardon my freedom

The Daily Show points out that the Dept of Homeland Security’s website has this useful piece of advice: if you are on fire, don’t run.

If you’re looking for parodies of the site, see this, this, and especially this. But to fully appreciate them, you must first experience the hilarious graphics and duct-and-cover advice on offer at the government site. For example, here we see how a simple door can block the blast, firestorm and radiation of a nuclear blast.

Speaking of stuff that’s already most of the way to being a satire of itself, there is a restaurant in NC that has renamed French Fries “freedom fries.” Insubordinate.net suggests some other changes: “Freedom kissing”, “Pardon my freedom.”

The Serbian prime minister threatens to sponsor a breakaway Serb province in Kosovo if the west doesn’t let Serbia’s troops return to “protect Serbs’ rights.” Well, it’s worked so well in the past.

The sharia courts in Nigeria are getting creative. A thief has been sentenced to “cross-amputation”: right hand and left leg.

Sexism rears its ugly head in the Russian space program, which during the current crisis will not be sending any more woman cosmonauts up.

8 foot ceiling. Fireworks. What could go wrong?

After arresting the Palestinian professor in Florida, the Justice Dept is now going after academics elsewhere, including accusing a lecturer at Birbeck College in London, producing this gulp-inspiring headline in the Telegraph: “Don Denies Terror Claims.”

In more random censorship news, Russian authorities shut down a newspaper for running a parody of Putin’s growing personality cult, and Spain orders a Basque paper closed for supporting independence (it appeared anyway today under a different name).

Creepy religious item of the day (only $20).

A little snip is a small price to pay for such a splendid machine

Rumsfeld wants to change the law preventing the deployment of weapons systems (i.e., Star Wars) that don’t actually work.

350 or so American Special Forces troops (and support staff--actually a suspiciously high number of support staff) will join the Philippines government in active combat against rebels. I must have missed the Congressional debate on that one. You’ll remember this started off as a “training mission.”

Saw John Ashcroft on McNeil-Lehrer saying that the Patriot Act was what allowed him to arrest that South Florida professor today. And charge him with things that took place before that Act was passed.

Pakistan’s air force commander dies in an air crash. That reminds me, I’m thinking of forming a charity to bring much-needed irony to irony-deprived nations. Ironie Sans Frontièrs, maybe.

Hey if those prisoners being kept forever in Guantanamo are such dangerous, highly-trained terrorists, how come none of the 19 who have tried to commit suicide actually succeeded?

Evidently, private mobile phones are banned in Iraq. OK, it’s to prevent them contacting the outside world, but still, isn’t that a great idea?

Speaking of fascist dictatorships, at the Georgia high school where Bush spoke today, students were warned that any protest against the war to make the world safe for democracy would not be tolerated. See, this is what I’m saying, we in the US have more irony than we could ever possibly use, and there are countries where children go to bed each night hungry for it. We are only 5% of the world’s population, and we use 23% of the world’s supply of irony.

According to Al Kamen at the Post, the founder of the largest duct tape company in the US is a major contributor to the Republican Party. Kamen also mentions the wart thing, if you didn’t believe me.

Israel has looked over the US “roadmap” towards Palestinian independence, and has over 100 changes it wants to make, including that there be no timetable, and that Palestinians have to jump through many hoops before Israel does anything at all, and that Palestine would have no military, control over its borders or airspace, or diplomatic relations with anyone Israel doesn’t approve.

From the Daily Telegraph: “Samoa's government has decreed that a new national uniform, complete with coconut shell buttons, must be worn by everyone attending a state function. The uniform - suits for men and the neck-to-ankle puletasi for women - can be made out of any material as long as it features traditional designs. These should include the teuila, the national flower, on the left side of the shirt with the word "Samoa" printed in small letters underneath it.”

Evidently at some point Samoa was taken over by gay men.

What would Jesus litigate?

Nicholas Kristof in the Times says roughly what I said last week about Bush’s frightening optimism.

It got no particular coverage, but police in Colorado Springs shot anti-war protesters with rubber bullets.

It’s kind of fun to watch the US and Turkey haggling about the size of the bribe Turkey’s going to get. We all know they’re going to come to a deal, but there’s all that bazaar bargaining to be gotten through first--“Sooner would I cut off my own left testicle than accept such a measly offer as $15 billion.” Hope they’re gonna pass some of the extortion money around; the last opinion poll showed 96% of Turks opposing this war, which may be higher than in Iraq itself. Actually, even with the bribe, Turkey is expecting to be really badly hit economically (unless of course it can find that map it says shows that the northern Iraqi oil fields are actually theirs), which should mean plenty of discontent, which I’m sure the Muslim extremists are much too ethical to exploit. No, no way this could go horribly horribly wrong.

Another possible political casualty is the EU. Chirac may be on the right side of the war issue (or he may be playing the Turkish game a little more subtly: God knows it’s not like he hasn’t taken a bribe or ten in his time), but he’s still a major prick, and way overplayed his hand when he told the Eastern (“new”) European states that now was a good time to shut up. Usually it takes an Israeli leader to come down from a moral height so quickly. Still, he may have a point: the US is using the former Warsaw Pact countries’ allegiance to NATO as a way of subverting their allegiance to a European community, or perhaps more accurately as part of an attempt at a hostile takeover of the EU by the US.

Have you noticed that the US bombing of Iraqi military sites, which is now a daily occurrence, no longer comes with any justification whatsoever (they fired a missile at us, they turned their radar on, they looked at us funny)?

Salon has an interview with Molly Ivins. They make you watch a commercial first, except they’re also failing economically and no one much wants to advertise, so sometimes you can’t read anything, like yesterday when it first ran.

Evidently part of the reason the GAO abandoned its efforts to get the names of Cheney’s energy advisors is that the R’s threatened to cut its budget.

Colin Powell, showing why generals make crappy diplomats, accuses the French--excuse me, “some nations”--of being “afraid of stepping up to the responsibility of imposing the will of the international community”. Oooo, now he’s calling them ‘fraidy cats. That should work--if they’re six.

Also, what’s “will of the international community” when it’s at home? The Holy Ghost?

A study shows that the majority of AIDS cases in Africa before 1988 were caused by unsterilized needles. This may or not be true, but there’s certainly been something of a cover-up of unsafe medical practices, for fear that Africans will give up on Western medicine altogether.

Another creepy medical story: a pregnant woman goes into the hospital in Sardinia to give birth, but instead for some reason decides to jump out the window, killing herself. A caesarian is performed successfully on her dead body.

Here’s a story of truly French thieves: they broke into a cheese cellar in eastern and stole one ton of something called comte (like gruyere, the article says), worth about $10,000.

Down with this sort of thing

You know what else duct tape is good for? Removing warts, evidently.

More signs from the London anti-war rally: “Stop Mad Cowboy Disease", "Down With This Sort Of Thing", "Peace Not Slogans". It occurs to me that y’all probably thought my reference to grass in Hyde Park was a joke. If it was, it was that of the government, which initially tried to ban the rally from the park on that basis (mow down Iraqis, not grass). They had to back down, unlike the NY City government, which got away with trying to stop anti-war protests in NYC, with, as it turns out, a friend-of-the-court brief by the Bushies (which I’m hoping someone will put online).

What the fuck just happened in the Cyprus elections?

Sharon, anxious to increase Israel’s Jewish population, has decided to import some 20,000 Ethiopians who may or may not have once been Jewish.

Chirac today said that war is always the worst resolution. It’s too bad he was unaware that that is the motto of the Bush administration: “Always the Worst Resolution, since 2001.”

The Nicaraguan government is mulling over whether to allow a 9-year old rape victim to have an abortion. Cardinal Obando y Bravo (remember him?) naturally thinks she should be forced to carry it to term.

Remember when Shrub went to Spain and got Prime Minister Aznar’s name and title wrong? Well, his brother is there now, promoting trade, and referred to the “Republic of Spain.” The king is not happy. Fortunately, the Aznar problem may not plague Shrub long, since Aznar’s support for Bush’s war has caused his support, like Tony Blair’s, to plummet.

Thailand’s crackdown on drug use has somehow wound up with 397 dead, and counting.

As the FCC considers relaxing rules against media monopolies yet further, read this on the Venezuelan media’s onslaught against Hugo Chavez. This is a must read.

N Korea threatens to tear up the armistice agreement ending the Korean War, or more accurately says that US actions have already abrogated it.

The last New Zealand veteran of World War I has died.

One Two Three Four...

Looking back on old emails, I find I forgot, when discussing Powell’s UN speech, to use a fact which I was holding for an apposite moment. Actually, I’m wondering how many of you were aware of this: in 1969 Powell wrote the first report on the My Lai massacre, which he said based on no investigation did not happen, and added that in fact the American soldiers had great relations with the Vietnamese people.

The US expels an Iraqi journalist covering the UN. Hopefully the UN will protest. But I’m guessing the point was to make sure that Iraq would respond and kick US journos out, so there will be fewer pictures of the coming carnage broadcast in the US. And sure enough, some Fox News reporters are kicked out. Or possibly Iraq is just taking seriously the Fox slogan “We report, you decide,” and made the decision the rest of us would like to make--to deport all employees of Fox.

Given that Turkey is trying to extort a bribe of something like $25 billion to aid the war effort, it’s hard to get too worked up over France and Germany holding up deploying weaponry there.

Well over a million people marched to Hyde Park against the war, doing the grass simply no good at all. One person protested in support of war outside the Iraqi embassy. Protesters included the Eton George Orwell Society, Archaeologists Against War, the Swaffham Women's Choir and Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice). “Make Tea Not War,” and the slightly cleaner and infinitely more British version of an old American standard: “One Two Three Four, We Don’t Want Your Bloody War.” One man walking a poodle had a sign “Stop insulting poodles.” The astonishing thing is that no one is chanting the equivalent of Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. No one actually supports Saddam; the protest is purely anti-war. Tony Blair does not have the British people behind him, nor his own party, but he does have proxy control over the royal prerogative and a willingness to substitute his personal judgment for that of the nation.

Here’s a paragraph from a Mary Riddell column in the Observer:

Political leaders hate crowds. Mass meetings have been supplanted by leaks and soundbites. In the fractious build-up to war, lonely societies are encouraged to become more solipsistic. A fearful population, hiding behind its anthrax-proofed windows, is also tractable. There is nothing threatening to government about citizens bickering over the last roll of duct tape in Wal-Mart.

So Bush’s AIDS-in-Africa policy is also an attempt to stop abortion. What a surprise.

The American ambassador to Venezuela, where the US has supported a coup and really should shut up now, says that elections aren’t the answer. “Elections divide people. Elections don't bring people together ... Either you're on this side or you're on that side”. Or to put it another way, the elected president, Chavez, should give in to the rich people holding his country hostage.

Incidentally, Iraq rejected the Franco-German peace plan (which involved UN soldiers, for no obvious reason since there has been no resistance to inspections). Doesn’t seem to have gotten much play yet, only saw it in one paper.

A mad Martian come to live on Earth

WashPost headline: “Shuttle Probably Was Pierced.” Last time it was the O rings, now it’s evidently the belly button rings.

NY Times headline: “Survey Shows Majority Backs Delaying a War.” How ‘bout this one: “Survey Shows Majority Backs Whatever the Last Person They Heard Call Into Talk Radio Said.” The poll also says 42% think Saddam was involved in 9/11.

Doonesbury joins the chorus pointing out that Bush has never asked for sacrifice in the war on terror. That’s ok, we’re sacrificing quite enough for tax cuts for the rich.

Bush: “The decision is this for the United Nations: When you say something does it mean anything?” We’ve been wondering the same thing about you for years now, George.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/frontpages/ for the 2/14 front page.

Saddam issues a decree banning weapons of mass destruction. So that’s ok then.

AP headline: “Boston Priest Reinstated After Probe.” No comment.

The US Navy, showing that sense of priorities for which it is famous, removed the Admiral in charge of a battle group that is literally heading for the Gulf right now, because he had sex with a (female) subordinate.

A little late, some Valentine’s Day cards. My favorites: “You’ll do.” “I love you blah blah blah hearts & flowers yadda yadda yadda cupid etc.”

Here’s a British Valentine’s Day story: a juror in a fraud case sent a card to the prosecutor, asking him out. She was bounced off the jury and the other 11 quizzed about whether they also wanted to have sex with the prosecutor. None did. He won the case.

Russia’s tax police are going to start questioning the *children* of suspected tax cheats--using lie detectors.

Not really sure what this is about (from the Daily Telegraph): Einars Repse, Latvia's prime minister, told critics of his first 100 days in office that he was a "mad Martian come to live on Earth".


Yet another “old” European country makes Rummy’s hit-list. Austria is refusing to let the US transport troops through the country. Austria is not, of course, a member of NATO, but no one knows if the Secretary of War knew that. Or cared.

Duct tape, plastic sheeting, and other Valentine's Day accessories

The fake bin Laden suggests in that tape that Iraqis fight the Americans by digging ditches and camouflaging them. Presumably this involves plastic sheeting and duct tape, as recommended by Tom Ridge and Jeffrey Daumer (possibly for different reasons).

The Congressional hearings on the Columbia accident have already begun, and a commission set up. Meanwhile any investigation of the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, 17 months ago, remain stalled.

Here’s another ironic contrast: North Korea has a new ballistic missile capable of reaching California, which the Bushies will no doubt soft-pedal, while Iraq has been found to have a missile capable of traveling 183 kilometers, breaking the limits placed on its missile capacity by a full twenty miles, which means it can reach a bit more of Kuwait than it could before, and I’m just guessing that Powell and Rumsfeld will explain how that is a reason why we need to go to war with Iraq.

Speaking of double standards, the perceived need to prepare for war is so strong that we’re threatening trade sanctions on Germany and France for preventing NATO moving weaponry into Turkey, why isn’t Iraq allowed to prepare for the same war. We’re calling up reserves, moving troops into place, bombing defensive sites in Iraq every day, even operating militarily inside Iraq according to today’s WashPost, etc., but if Iraq made any of these preparations, it would be, you guessed it, another reason why we need to go to war with Iraq.

In Parliament today, Jack Straw accused the Iraqis of giving inspectors nothing but a “reprint of earlier documents.” He should talk. He also accused Saddam of tyranny, while refusing to let Parl vote on going to war.

In the British census, 390,000 people designated themselves Jedis. They will not officially be counted, although they outnumber newer religions (depending on how long ago “a long time ago (in a galaxy etc)” actually is) like Sikhs, Jews and Buddhists. The registrar general, asked if he was being presumptuous in deciding what constituted a religion, said that he had acted “with immense consultation and remarkable concentration"”--like Yoda.

Ooh, are the Israelis pissed off at Belgium, whose supreme court ruled that Ariel Sharon can be tried for war crimes in the 1982 Sabra/Shatila massacres after he leaves office. Netanyahu calls it a “blood libel,” although the charge is neither a collective charge against the Jews, nor is the massacre false. The Israeli justice minister astonishingly says, "Legally, this is practically a world precedent, a law which allows for the prosecution of a person for alleged actions in the past. It has a clear retroactive nature to it and is, therefore, unprecedented." I can’t see any reason why the Israeli justice minister would ever have heard of the Nuremberg trials, can you? Or indeed, Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Unprecedented, indeed.