No president has ever done more for what now?

George W. Bush to the New Yorker: “No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.” I don’t know the context, but Chimp Boy is now officially the most self-deluded person on the planet.

The Supreme Court has decided to allow the government to keep the names and other details of Guantanamo detainees secret. Can you say “un-person”? Of course last week the government grounded a flight because it mistook a 75-year old Chinese woman for an Arab terrorist, so for all we know all the Guantanamo detainees are 75-year old Chinese women.

The TSA--which already has separate screening lines at some airports for 1st-class passengers, who may pay airlines more money for better service, but why should that affect a government service?--is planning to offer faster screening to passengers who allow the government access to their personal information. Which do you think Americans are most willing to give up, their convenience or their privacy? Me too.

Contra Costa county’s electoral politics continue to be dominated by Measure L, to zone out Wal-Mart. Today’s mailer says that old people benefit from lower drug prices at Wal-Mart, working parents benefit from doing all their shopping at one place at low prices, and these evil, heartless people want to take that away from them, and possible tie them to the railroad tracks. I must be one of the evil, heartless people, because I’ll be sending back their postage-paid envelope empty, forcing them to raise prices for their poor, elderly customers. Bwaa ha ha [evil laughter]. There is a questionnaire. Sample question: What do you think is the most important problem facing CC County? Education, crime, property taxes, jobs, growth, big box stores, other.

A judge ordered a woman convicted of vehicular homicide to place flowers on her victim’s grave and carry his picture in her wallet for 5 years. She is not happy: the victim’s mother is insisting that it be a picture of him taken after his death, in his coffin.

CON MAN OF THE WEEK: A decade ago, three British college students had to go on the run to escape an IRA hit squad. Actually, the MI5 agent who told them they’d been targeted was really a car salesman (a darned good one, I’m sure), who took hundreds of thousands of pounds off them while they hid out for years.

In our continuing World War I vet death watch: the last (British, at least) survivor of the Battle of Jutland is dead at 103.

The King of Swaziland, presiding over a poor country with the second-highest HIV rate in the world (39%!!!), decides that what the country really needs is for each of his 11 wives to get her own palace.

I feel like I should say something about Haiti, whose parliament just went out of existence, but I really haven’t been following it. When Aristide was deposed a decade ago, the choice between democracy and military dictatorship wasn’t a hard one, whatever my misgivings about the tiny turbulent priest, but now?

The US cover-up/apology for the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty continues. (Link no longer works)

More about justifying his own opinions than looking at the reality

Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-Texas)’s ex-wife plans to run against him for Congress. She’s working on a doctorate in marriage and family therapy, with a minor in irony.

For major irony, though, you need a Republican. White House spokesmodel Scott McClellan says that Paul O’Neill is “more about justifying his own opinions than looking at the reality.” About Iraq! Iraq!! Tom Tomorrow says that by the end of the week, O’Neill’s grandchildren will think his first name is “Disgruntled.”

There was supposed to be a peace conference of Israeli and Palestinian legislators in Ireland under the auspices of the Irish government, but Shin Bet decided to prevent a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council leaving the country, calling him a security threat.

In the interests of balance, I must also report that the Jordanian fencing association has banned Israeli fencers from the world fencing championship.

The Saudi government has set up a news channel to compete with Al-Jazeera, which is banned from the country. To attract viewers, it is using scantily-dressed anchorwomen, wearing only “a jacket, a white blouse and a black head cover.” Interestingly, according to the Guardian, “Female TV presenters in Saudi Arabia do not have to wear the black cloaks that women must wear in public in the kingdom.” The sluts.

And the US is transferring control over Iraqi state broadcasters from a defense contractor (!) to the Harris Corp., Lebanese broadcasting, and a publishing house from Kuwait, of all places. The sluts.

So Howard Dean never appointed a single black or Latino to his cabinet as governor during 12 years in that office.

The mullahs in Iran make another bid for power at the expense of the electoral system, banning hundreds of reformists from running for parliament, including dozens of incumbents (the exact number is not yet known, but one figure is 80, out of 210 reformists and 290 total seats). The right-wing is pissed that the government, trying to improve relations with Egypt, renamed a street named after the guy who assassinated Sadat. In theory the government could decide that the council had no power to exclude candidates without good cause, and keep them on the ballot. Or cancel the elections.

Belfast is turning into the racism capital of Europe. Loyalist paramilitaries have been trying to ethnically cleanse the city of blacks and Asians. Northern Ireland is only 99.15% white, so you could see why they’d be concerned.

As I said would happen, several of the candidates running against Putin were told to run by Putin in order to bring turnout over the 50% hurdle. There are no serious candidates running, although Vladimir Zhirinovsky did send his bodyguard to run.

This Modern World (for Jan. 11, scroll down to it if necessary) has a screen-shot from Fox News, featuring a “Fox News Alert: Howard Dean Loses His Temper on the Campaign Trail.”

The puppet Afghan government admits to 3,000 soldiers having deserted the new army after finishing their training (30% of the total). It says if they don’t return, they’ll have to pay for their training. Unclear how many just thought $70 a month was insufficient pay, how many worried about being hopelessly outnumbered by the warlords, and how many took their training to those warlords. Basically the same situation as in Iraq.

A Saudi teacher has been forced to retire. He is 100.

The smallest country in the world is about to give up. Niue, pop. 2,100, was just hit by a cyclone, and everyone’s leaving. It is the only nation in the world with nationwide wireless internet access. And coconuts, it’s got coconuts. And it sells webnames with a .nu domain.

NATO forces make the 934th failed attempt to arrest Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic. This could get embarrassing.

The tradition of fair play across the aisles

Wesley Clark defends his several decades as a Republican by saying, “We won the Cold War.” Sigh. That’s all, just...sigh.

Actually, the page on which that quote appeared, A9 of the Saturday NYT, is just full of depressing stuff about the D’s. Tom Harkin endorses Dean as “our best shot,” a truly ringing (ask not for whom the bell tolls...) endorsement. And an article on how Holy Joe is doing very well among voters, but Republican voters, with a bizarre photo of him shot from below, laughing maniacally, with light radiating out of his head from a lamp you can’t see behind his head, like a really Jewish, casually dressed, medieval saint (the picture is not on the website, sadly). By the time you get to the article on Nader below the fold, you can really see his point about the wimpiness of the Democratic party.

Viagra celebrates its 1 billionth customer. I guess we know how it celebrated.

Paul O’Neill, the moron who was Bush’s first treasury secretary, is saying that planning for the invasion of Iraq began at the very start of the Bush admin, well before 9/11. No kidding. But will it ever be mentioned again?

A federal court, voting along party lines, approves the Texas redistricting plan. At one point, one of the R judges mocked a D lawyer by saying that when D’s held power, “You rewarded your friends and punished your enemies. When did this tradition of fair play across the aisles come to Texas?” When indeed.

Doodles of mass destruction

On the absence of WMDs in Iraq, if you need to read more.

Here is how close they were--this is all the evidence there is, from the very pen of a top Iraqi engineer:


Tasmania, Australia, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997, has granted full legal rights for same-sex partners.

The US released some Iraqi prisoners today. They’d promised 100 but actually let out 60. Actually, they put them in trucks, then raced them right past their waiting relatives and dumped them under a bridge a mile away, in a childish attempt to keep them away from the world press.

(Later:) evidently those were entirely different prisoners. They will only release the others if they are vouched for by local leaders, who are no doubt still trying to figure out how much to charge for this service.

The last surviving American wounded (by mustard gas) veteran of World War I dies at 108. He said the secret to long life is to keep breathing. 108 years and that was the best he could come up with.

While continuing to keep Palestinians in refugee camps, Israel will take the last Falasha from Ethiopia, deciding that they are in fact Jews after all, although they haven’t actually been Jews since the 19th century. Since that was a convert-or-die situation, Israel figures it doesn’t count, and anyway they need people to scrub their toilets who don’t want to kill them. Israel, losing the demographic battle, has decided to purchase these people from the Ethiopian government. And I use the term advisedly, although both governments are keeping the precise payment secret.

The Palestinian PM says that if Sharon goes through with his threat to impose a unilateral solution, Palestine will give up on the two-state solution and go for a single state, demanding equal rights for Palestinians within Israel. Touché, Mr. Qureia, touché!

Next week Bush will announce plans for a manned station on the Moon, and then on to Mars, where he hopes to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, possibly ray guns. For some reason, Bush is referring to the Mars mission as “regime change”...

5 of the candidates removed their name from the ballot for the District of Columbia primary (which is Tuesday). Why?

Tony Blair will refuse to meet the Dalai Lama when he visits Britain. The timing of this announcement could have been better: the episode of The Simpsons Blair was in has just aired over there. So Blair was willing to meet Homer Simpson but not the Dalai Lama. Which would be my preference, too, but then I’m not the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Not yet, anyway.

The US program to shoot down planes involved in smuggling drugs, resumed after that little incident with the planeload carrying a condescension of missionaries (that’s the plural: school of fish, pride of lions, condescension of missionaries) shot down over Peru, scored another win. Which they succeeded in covering up for 4 months (no word in the NYT story on how it leaked out now). In September the Colombians forced down a plane and then strafed it. There were no drugs on the plane. They did not have or require American approval, and the Americans told them there was no proof the plane was smuggling drugs, but the Colombian military couldn’t have done it without information provided by the Americans.

According to the Guardian, this is the latest Bush plan for Iraq: Rather than direct elections, the US wants "caucuses" of handpicked "notables" in each of the 18 provinces to choose a transitional national assembly, which would then appoint a government.

A Tennessee appeals court upholds a judge who banned a divorced father from "taking the child around or otherwise exposing the child to his gay lover(s) and/or his gay lifestyle," although it did find that that order wasn’t so specific that the judge could then throw the father in jail (as he did, in Sept 2002; why didn’t we hear about this?) for simply telling his son that he was gay. The court doesn’t actually say it would have been wrong to ban that too. It would be nice to know the kid’s age.

I can't do it with Schröder

Singapore is considering lifting its ban on oral sex, which dates back to British colonial days. Plan your vacations accordingly.

More on the Afghan constitution: its “rights,” including those for women and ethnic minorities, are not rights, because they can be overridden by laws, and anyway the Supreme Court in practice has been packed with religious rather than legal types. It also specified that the national anthem, which has yet to be written, will be sung in Pashto (presumably not by women), but will mention all the other ethnic groups, and it will be “funkadelic.” I may have made up the last part. Since the regions (read: warlords) refuse to be ruled by the central government, the constitution avoids the issue and omits to spell out the relationship between them, like who gets to raise taxes, which you’d kinda think is the sort of thing that belongs in a constitution.

The NY Times has an article on Condi Rice. It begins thus: “Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, stood in front of Mr. Bush's desk in the Oval Office last summer and tried to coax the president into something he did not want to face. She suggested, carefully, that the White House begin repairing the rupture with the allies over Iraq by reaching out to Germany... "I can't do it with Schröder," Mr. Bush told Ms. Rice, according to a senior administration official who witnessed the exchange. Ms. Rice, who had not directly suggested that Mr. Bush meet with Mr. Schröder, rushed to reassure. "No, no, no, we won't make you do it with Schröder," she said. But Mr. Bush seemed to know what Ms. Rice had in mind. "Wait a minute, you'll get me back with Schröder, I know what you're trying to do," the president said, the official recounted.”

I’m reminded of my mother trying to get me to eat lima beans when I was a kid. Ultimately Condi got him to do what she wanted (which is why she’s national security adviser instead of my mother, who was less successful).

New York City settles with Amadou Diallo’s survivors for a measly $3m (or $73,170.73 for each bullet the cops fired at him, or $157,894.73 for each one that hit him). It would have been more, but there was no pain & suffering, because he was shot to death. Reminds me of an insurance policy I once had which would pay $500 if I lost one eye and $1,000 if I lost both, which is obviously exactly twice as bad.

The principal of that SC high school where the police came in with dogs and pointed guns at students while they looked for drugs (and found none...in a high school...in America...does not compute), last November (I linked to the video at the time), has resigned.

There’s a London Times story I didn’t feel obligated to actually read about the TSA’s requirement that crew on planes in US airspace must announce every two hours that passengers may not “congregate outside the toilets.” The Times headline: “BA Defends Rights to Queue for the Loo at 20,000ft.”

Speaking of which, I mentioned that Brazil had retaliated. I didn’t mention that this was ordered not by the government but by a judge, who first called the fingerprinting and photographing “absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis”--and then ordered the exact same horrors inflicted on Americans. And speaking of double standards, the US State Dept has asked Brazil to reverse this, because of the “inconvenience” to American travelers.

Next week Paris, the city of cafes, will get what it has no doubt been panting for: its first Starbucks. Maybe they can get Wonder Bread to supply them with bread.

And Iraq is about to get what it has no doubt been panting for: Pepsi, absent from the country since sanctions began in 1990. Well, semi-absent. Its former bottler put “home-made cola” in old Pepsi bottles and sold it (I’m reminded of the “Commie Coke” I drank in East Berlin in 1983). For some reason, the Arab world is boycotting Coke, which has therefore not been sold in Iraq since 1968.

Here’s a photo, well you’ll probably see it everywhere, of Saddam Hussein being taken out of his “spider hole” by a soldier with no face. Saddam has clearly been punched in the mouth.

One or two emails ago, I linked to Osama’s latest message, which the Guardian ran as an op-ed piece. Here is a response by Catherine Bennett to “My Fellow Columnist, Osama,” in which she notes that at least he takes the long view, comparing Arab rulers who cooperate with the US to “our forefathers, the Ghassanids.”

From the Daily Telegraph:

“A vet in Thailand claims to have fitted the world's first elephant false teeth, for a 60-year-old female in danger of starving to death. Somsak Jitniyom said his team had successfully supplied a denture made of stainless steel, silicone and plastic to Morakot, which had lost all its upper teeth and could not chew its diet of leaves, bamboo, sugar cane and bananas. Elephants have four sets of teeth in a lifetime, but after they lose the last they often die from malnutrition or starvation. Alex Spillius, Bangkok

Some entrepreneurial US soldiers have set up tours of Iraq’s archaeological treasures--not because they’re archaeological treasures, of course, but because they were used in the opening sequence of The Exorcist. Hey, if people go all the way to New Zealand just to see where Lord of the Rings was filmed--and you know who you are--then surely Iraq could be the next big tourist destination.

Something I missed, last October: a member of the committee which “investigated” the USS Liberty incident in 1967 was ordered by LBJ and MacNamara to find that it was an accident.

Governor Ahnuuld’s State of the State address was today. I forgot about it. He said “Every governor proposes moving boxes around to reorganize government. I don’t want to move the boxes around. I want to blow them up.” The burly Neanderthal compared the executive branch to a “mastodon frozen in time.”

Some people have made fun of David Brooks’s column in today’s NYT for claiming that people who saw neocons as running the White House were conspiracy theorists and antisemites. Me, I’d like to make fun of him for his misuse of “awhile,” after the other conservative Times columnist, William Safire, wrote about the difference between “a while” and “awhile” in this week’s Sunday NY Times Magazine.

It'll take more than extreme anger

An Israeli official admits that the “fence” will effectively annex 6% of the West Bank.

“Jordan's parliament yesterday rejected a proposal to allow the state to ban parents from giving their children names such as Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.”

The US will start fingerprinting visitors to the US from all but 28 countries. This isn’t just security, of course, this is building up secret dossiers on everyone in the entire world.

Brazil has decided to fingerprint Americans. Not for security, just out of pique, in retaliation.

Did you know that Mussolini had a cyst the size of a potato on the back of his neck? Neither did I. Evidently he personally censored every photo taken of him, weeding out those that showed the cyst, or him smiling, or with a nun or priest (bad luck).

Is the D race nastier than previous ones, or have I just forgotten? I know it was Al Gore who first brought up Willie Horton, but this year we’ve got this gem from Wesley Clark: “I didn't have as much practice skiing as the governor did. He was out there skiing when I was recovering from my wounds in Vietnam.” He now says this was a joke. Ha fucking ha. And Kerry attacked Dean for suggesting that the rule of law applied even to Osama bin Laden (who he nevertheless says deserves the death penalty). Dean himself says that all the other candidates have been “coopted by the agenda of George Bush.” And yet he said, “If I was the president and the troops had Osama in their sights, we would shoot to kill,” suggesting he’d been coopted by the cowboy hat of George Bush.

Kucinich was asked this brilliant question (from the editor of the Des Moines Register): “Given your personal decision not to consume animal products, how can you assure livestock producers you will be an advocate for them as president?” I don’t know what the answer was, I couldn’t google me a transcript.

John Cleese is considering running (or silly-walking) for mayor of Santa Barbara.

The Afghan loya jirga has agreed a new constitution, and it has been hailed as probably good enough. Or at least the closest thing to a democracy you’re gonna get out of a body of warlords. Being a body of warlords, there were more death threats than occurred in Philadelphia in 1787 (although who knows, those proceedings were secret), but they may collectively own fewer slaves. George Bush, showing that enthusiasm for Jeffersonian democracy he is so well-known for, said the constitution would “help ensure that terror finds no further refuge” in Afghanistan. I believe that’s from the preamble. And the American ambassador, reaching for the most condescending thing he could say, called it “one of the most enlightened constitutions in the Islamic world.” In other words, it’s close to being an elective dictatorship, and will fall apart the second Karzai is assassinated--the NY Times notes that he took a helicopter to the assembly, not daring to drive the one mile from his office. The precise degree of American input into the document is unclear, although I assume reserving a quarter of the seats in the lower house for them was not an idea that the warlords came up with on their own (what does it even mean--can only women vote for those seats, in which case what about the other ones?). The lower house is the house of people, which hopefully is not a statement about building materials, and the upper house is the house of elders. I haven’t read how the latter is chosen, but I don’t suppose that many people get to be elders in Afghanistan, and I don’t suppose we want to know what they had to do to get that way.

Here’s a piece you must read about the condition of women in Afghanistan. How did I miss the law banning women singing in public?

Lieberman has a new ad saying, “How do we defeat George Bush's extreme agenda? It'll take more than extreme anger.”

The US is going to privatize its military aid to Georgia, including security for the all-important oil pipeline.

If anyone’s interested in Osama’s latest missive, the Guardian runs it in the op-ed section.

From the AP: “The Labor Department is giving employers tips on how to avoid paying overtime to some of the 1.3 million low-income workers who would become eligible under new rules expected to be finalized early this year.” Tips include cutting salaries to make up the difference. “"We're not saying anybody should do any of this," said Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank.”

The British Parliament today discussed church insurance, leading one MP to ask whether churches insure against acts of God. The Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer writes

“But the Speaker used the poser to make another attack on MPs who ask overlong questions. His new guidelines are, I gather, that no one may ask a question that lasts longer than Britney Spears' marriage.

“Finally, the year began with a splendid new extended metaphor. Michael Ancram was giving a guarded welcome to the recent deal with Colonel Gadafy: "This pudding served up today shows promise, but the proof does not lie in the recipe, nor in the cooking, but in the eating, and it should be eaten with a very long spoon, accompanied by your choice of cream, ice cream or custard."

“I made the bit up after "spoon" but you get the idea.)”

Finally, some excerpts from George Monbiot’s latest column:

But foreign policy is also driven by commerce, and in particular by the needs of domestic exporters. Aid goes to countries that can buy our manufacturers' products. Sometimes it doesn't go to countries at all, but straight to the manufacturers. A US government website boasts that "the principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the US Agency for International Development's contracts and grants go directly to American firms."

A doctor working in Gondar hospital in Ethiopia wrote to me recently to spell out what this means. The hospital has none of the basic textbooks on tropical diseases it needs. But it does have 21 copies of an 800-page volume called Aesthetic Facial Surgery and 24 volumes of a book called Opthalmic Pathology. There is no opthalmic pathologist in training in Ethiopia. The poorest nation on Earth, unsurprisingly, has no aesthetic plastic surgeons. The US had spent $2m on medical textbooks that American publishers hadn't been able to sell at home, called them aid and dumped them in Ethiopia.

Bisexuality is the new black

The Telegraph says Dean and other D’s are now sprinkling Christ all over their speeches to appeal to the Southern vote. Also, something about think tanks offering seminars in religious imagery and rhetoric--the mind boggles.

(Later:) Oh good, a real paper has the story. Dean says he’s not used to wearing his religion on his sleeve. How would he know what his sleeves look like, he always rolls them up to show his dedication or something. I’ve really seen quite enough of Howard Dean’s lower arms.

Finally, a member of the British royal family will get psychoanalysis. Princess Anne’s dog, of course, the one that killed the queen’s corgi and bit a maid. Observer columnist Mary Riddell notes that the investigation to find out which of Anne’s vicious dogs was the Real Biter was rather more thorough than the investigation into one of Charles’s servants claims that he’d been raped in the palace. She adds, “The Buckingham Palace corgi makes Caligula's horse look under-promoted. .... Where else can they find companions who never fawn or curtsy and whose filthy tempers mesh so neatly with their own?”

According to the Observer, bisexuality is very in among American teenage girls. Actually, it’s creepier than that, since it sounds like they’re just making out at parties in order to get male attention. One step forward, two steps back, really.

The Plame Game investigators are asking White House officials to sign releases from their confidentiality agreements with reporters on the case. My first thought was that Bush should be pressed to fire anyone who doesn’t comply. Then sanity, sadly, reasserted itself. Even if they do sign, the reporters (if Bob Novak deserves the title) are honor-bound (if Bob Novak has such a thing) not to comply.

NYT: “President Bush, who regularly talks about nuclear dangers, has never mentioned Pakistan's laboratories or their proliferation in public”. The article explains why he should.

Actually, it’s not true. He was asked a question about the subject a couple of days ago, and said that Musharaf says Pakistan’s nukes are safe, so that’s that for that.


After one day, Florida stopped an insane new idea of having pharmacists decide whether Medicaid patients should pay for prescriptions or not.

Blowout

When Ashcroft very belatedly recused himself from the Plame-gate inquiry, he was evidently scrambling to escape the blame for a decision that no actual crime was committed in releasing Valerie Plame’s name because Karl Rove or whomever didn’t know that she was an undercover operative, because that was classified. In other words Rove-or-whomever could escape because they were 1) stupid, 2) too lazy and/or careless and/or reckless of the consequences to check her out before they plastered her name all over Robert Novak’s column. Also, 3) the actual severity of the leak (the classified aspect) makes it less prosecutable by this theory.

The Israeli justice minister is investigating who in the government authorized a $1 million road to an illegal (even by Israeli standards) outpost in the West Bank, which features a seminary for followers of racist (even by Israeli standards [and American--the group is on the State Dept’s terrorist list]) Meir Kahane (remember him?).

Last month Sharon made a speech endorsing Bush’s “road map,” adding “based on President Bush's speech of June 2002.” Newspapers pretended it was a breakthrough. Thing is, the road map was in 2003. The June 2002 speech required nothing of Israel, but said that the Palestinians must forego terrorism “before the peace process can begin.”

The US keeps grounding other country’s planes. The Air France plane that started this, well, it was all a case of mistaken identity, of course. One of the suspected terrorists was 5 years old, another an elderly Chinese woman. How the latter’s name was mistaken for that of an Arab terrorist, they’re not saying.

Helen Thomas has the year in really stupid Bush administration quotes.

In 1953, Winston Churchill sent a frigate and marines in response to an invasion by Argentina of Deception Island, near the Falklands. When they got there, they found and swiftly routed the occupation force: one sergeant, and one corporal.

Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, who neither you nor I have ever heard of, switches to the R’s. The reason he gave is that the R’s didn’t put pork for his district in a spending bill because he was (nominally) a D. It’s nice when politicians out and out admit that they have no principles and can be bought.

From the Indy: “In South Korea's society of lofty aspirations, mastery of the English language is so highly prized that ambitious parents are forcing their children to have painful tongue surgery in order to give them perfect pronunciation. The operation, which involves snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler...” That’s called the frenulum by the way, and it’s your vocabulary word of the day. Worse, the surgery really doesn’t help (with that Asian thing with l’s and r’s, which is of course linguistic not biological)(which no doubt has something to do with why Chinese names sound like Arabic ones to the CIA). Evidently Koreans spend hours a day practicing English, and makes children’s lives hell, according to the weekly magazine Dong-A, which I quote only so that I can work that title in. Which was probably why the Indy quoted it, too.

Pat Robertson says God told him George Bush would win the 2004 elections in a “blowout.” Would God really use the word blowout? And does that prove He’s not Korean?

Australia enacted tough gun control laws in 1991. In the next 10 years, firearms deaths halved. Now Australians are forced to try to interest crocodiles in eating family members they want to get rid of.

The NYT did have a good op-ed piece about the take-over of Ag by beef and agribiz lobbyists, which almost takes away the foul taste from that WaPo thing, but why not an article in the actual news sections of the paper?

So what DID happen to all those Saddam doubles?

An ordinary witch with an original business idea

George Bush talked about compassion today, after spending the morning shooting birds. Here’s what he said: “What we're doing in Iran is we're showing the Iranian people the American people care, that we've got great compassion for human suffering. And I eased restrictions in order to be able to get humanitarian aid into the country. The Iranian government must listen to the voices of those who long for freedom, must turn over al Qaeda that are in their custody and must abandon their nuclear weapons program.” Now re-read the first sentence and see if you can figure out what’s wrong with it. Go ahead, I’ll be waiting in the next paragraph.

See it’s not actual compassion, in Bush’s formulation, it’s a visible, fundamentally political, DISPLAY of compassion, a performance of compassion. And then he started issuing orders about what the Iranians had to do, a temptation which someone with real understanding of the human emotion of compassion would have resisted.

And then he told the reporters that he’d eaten beef today. And everybody else should too.

Incidentally, the US is asking other countries to resume accepting beef from us, unlike what we did to, say, Canada, in the past. Do what we say, not as we do--I’m telling you, we should just print that on the money.

A British radio show asked its listeners to suggest a piece of legislation to improve life, and Stephen Pound, MP (Lab.), would then try to enact it. 26,000 listeners voted, and they chose a bill to let homeowners kill burglars, no questions asked. Pound, quoting Mo Udall, said, “The people have spoken...the bastards.”

Is it just me, or when you see the WaPo headline “Gay Community Gave Dean Early Boost,” do you wonder whether you’d want all those gay people with their hands on your ass?

Speaking of laughable WaPo headlines, how’s about this one about Ag Sec Ann Veneman: “Secretary Puts Experience to Work in Mad Cow Case.” Nowhere in the puff piece does the word lobbyist appear.

Under new national rules, Swiss doctors will be able to charge $10 to $15 every 5 minutes, like a taxi, “including the time taken for a greeting and a parting handshake.”

A frenzied round of gardening and debauchery

Saw a Wesley Clark stump speech on McNeil-Lehrer. Someone needs to ask him to explain how military experience--and only military experience--makes him so qualified to handle foreign policy, as he keeps saying. He also says that if he’d been president, we would have caught Osama bin Laden by now, because he knows how to do it. So maybe he should share that with somebody, rather than withhold it until he can become president, which is over a year away. This is Nixon’s secret plan to win in Vietnam all over again.

A week ago I mentioned that a quote in a Fisk article of a US officer talking about the need to “instill fear” in Iraqi villagers, and that the quote appeared in no other media that I could find. A news.google search today still only shows it in Fisk’s piece (since picked up by Aljazeerah & a Bangladeshi newspaper), ditto Lexis-Nexis. However, one of y’all informs me that it actually was FILMED and broadcast by CNN International, so there really is no excuse for the media silence.

Tony Blair says his job is only half-done. If there is a rash of suicides in the UK, it might have something to do with the prospect of Our Tone still being PM in 2010.

Today’s the day Britain releases 30-year old secret documents, so I’ve been reading up on 1973. Ted Heath thought (sounds like with good reason) that the US was planning to invade Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait in response to the oil embargo. There was also a juicy sex scandal in which a junior defence minister was filmed smoking a joint in bed with two prostitutes. He told MI5 that in response to depression over losing a fight to use the title “viscount,” he threw himself into a “frenzied” round of “gardening and debauchery.” Some files were not released, leaving us wondering what remains top secret about an Imelda Marcos visit to London.

CBS paid Michael Jackson $1 million for an interview on 60 Minutes. Journalistic ethics at its finest.

A Liverpool woman had a heart attack on a flight to America. Which also turned out to be carrying 15 cardiologists on their way to a convention, so she was ok.

In Nature, the scientific journal for people with too much time on their hands, an article analyzes the best way to skip stones (a 20 degree angle to the water’s surface).

The right to take nude photos of Barbie dolls being menaced with kitchen appliances

WaPo headline: “Almanacs May Be Tool For Terrorists, FBI Says.” Amish terrorists?

Israeli reality tv (shudder) has a show called Test of the Nation in which people from various walks of life take an IQ test. Surprisingly, lawyers and teachers come near the top, models and bodybuilders at the bottom. And the 6 members of the Knesset? Somewhere in the model. But, it turns out, they cheated.

The chicken hawk faction, led by Richard Perle (he has a book due out), has issued a manifesto with the modest title, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Regime change in Syria and Iran, a military blockade of North Korea, treating Saudi Arabia and France as rivals or enemies.

Bits of the Patriot II bill were quietly snuck onto other legislation this month. The FBI can now get information without a warrant (but with a gag order) not only from banks, but stockbrokers, car dealerships, credit card companies, airlines, the post office, casinos, etc etc. In the Senate it passed with a voice vote, so no one will be blamed. The previous requirement for the FBI to report to Congress how often it uses warrantless “National Security Letters” is now gone.

From the Daily Telegraph: “A US court yesterday upheld an artist's right to take nude photos of Barbie dolls being menaced with kitchen appliances, despite objections from toymaker Mattel. ...The photo series included a picture of Barbie dolls wrapped in tortillas and covered in salsa in a casserole dish.” Damn, I’m proud to be an American.

When Mad Cow Disease first hit Britain, the Ag minister--still in a Mad Cow, what mad cow? mode--famously fed a hamburger to his kid on tv. Now the US Ag Sec, Ann Venemen, has promised to feed beef to her family over the holidays. Venemen was a lobbyist for the beef industry before taking her current job. So at least she gets to clean up the mess she helped cause. White House spokesmodel Scott McClellan says that Bush has “continued to eat beef,” but he may have been making a comment about Bush’s sexual practices rather than his eating practices.

"Hi." Is that it?

The National Park Service recently approved selling at national park gift stores books giving Creationist explanations for things like the Grand Canyon, explaining how it’s not really millions of years old but 10, 20 years tops.

The great Alan Bates has died. Judging by the obits, he was best known for wrestling Oliver Reed naked. I saw him on the stage in London once in a John Osborne play without quite so much naked wrestling (although there were a fair number of female impersonators).

From Reuters: Sicilian police say they have charged a man who persuaded a friend to shoot him in the groin in a vain attempt to make his ex-girlfriend feel sorry for him. The man, 27, apparently admitted to hospital staff in Piazza Armerina that he had not been involved in a hunting accident as he first claimed.

http://69.56.179.3/audio/peeance.wav This is an audio clip, just a few seconds long.

Al Sharpton: “[Bush] had the audacity to say, 'It doesn't matter whether it was weapons or not, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and it was the right thing to do. That's like me coming to the Commonwealth Club and saying that we all must get out of the building, we are in imminent danger; and we all get outside on Market Street and you say, 'Reverend Al, where's the danger?' 'Ahh, it doesn't matter, you all needed some fresh air anyhow.'”

The Monday WashPo reports on the military instituting a sort of draft, of people already working for it whose contracts were due to run out or who were going to retire. While understandable, it’s not especially smart, since it makes clear to people who would otherwise join up in the future that the terms of the contract can be changed by the government into anything it wants.

The Sunday Times (London) says “The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.” This began in the late 1990s. It gets worse: Scott Ritter says that he was recruited in 1997, with the approval of Richard Butler, who was executive chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq Disarmament. MI6 planted information in newspapers in Poland, India and South Africa, from where it would feed back to the US & Britain.

Confirming everything you ever heard about British families, this is Mark Henderson, released by Colombian rebels this week, speaking to his father for the first time: “Three months in the jungle and you say 'Hi'. Is that it?”

The Informal Anarchic Federation strikes again

Must...not...make...jokes...about...Bam....

Cuba denounces the Guantanamo concentration camp. What took it so long?

Article on Southern Baptists and others using aid to Iraq as a cover for proselytizing (hey, I spelled that right on the first attempt). I also googled to some of the Baptist newsletters mentioned in it, and yech. Fortunately, no Southern Baptists actually seem to know Arabic, so they can’t be doing that much damage.

Heh, the next story in the Telegraph is about Japanese troops finally arriving in Iraq. I think Shinto could go over real well there. May the biggest god win (and yes, William Boykin really was never fired, transferred or disciplined in any way).

Not surprisingly, the head of the IAEA says that Libya was nowhere near building a nuclear bomb. The US has succeeded in removing yet another mythical threat from the planet.

Tony Blair this week declared victory over another one, saying that there was “massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories” and an attempt to “conceal weapons” in Iraq. When that claim was put to Paul Bremer--without telling him it came from Blair--he flatly denied it, calling it “a bit of a red herring.” Hurrah for the British interviewer, Jonathan Dimbleby, who pulled off that one. Ted Koppel wouldn’t have dared.

Kallyfohrnia’s new lefty governor, ahem, has suggested cutting the prison population by say one-third, and release rather than parole non-violent offenders.

There was an attempt to kill Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, with a letter bomb. Responsibility was claimed by the Informal Anarchic Federation (!).

What we have here is a failure to communicate in tongues

Florida opens the first “faith-based” prison (actually an existing prison, but it’s found the Lord, hallelujah). It will be a great success, because it will cherry-pick the prisoners least likely to make the program look bad, thereby affecting the ongoing Republican project of letting the God-botherers take over the provision of all social services in this country at taxpayer expense. Presumably, all of Florida’s other prisons, with the best-behaved prisoners skimmed off, will be just that little bit more hell-holeish. Jeb Bush: “I can't think of a better place to reflect on the awesome love of our lord Jesus than to be here at Lawtey Correctional.” Which didn’t stop him leaving a short time later, of course, unlike the rest of the, um, parishioners, who were a little more worried about the awesome love of their cellmate Big Vinnie, if you know what I mean.

The Rise of the Machine continues. Governor Ahnuuld ordered the release of funds to cities and counties in partial compensation for the loss of the car tax revenues. Of course he has no such power and has been called on it. Now, he has decided to refuse to give people on welfare their legally required cost-of-living increase.

A year ago, the US military started trying to recruit Canadian Inuits, claiming that under the Jay Treaty (1794), they were joint US-Canadian citizens. (About the same time, I mentioned that they were also going into Mexico to recruit). Canada, like Mexico, told them to knock it off. The Voice article also notes that the privatization of military logistical support including security means the importation into Iraq of “franchised versions of the French Foreign Legion” which are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.

So they sent a probe to Mars on Christmas and wouldn’t you know it, some Martian kid has already broken the thing. His father is looking at the instructions and saying “They might as well be in Terran...”

Anyone else wondering if the US just canceled a perfectly ordinary Air France flight just in order to be able to claim they foiled a terrorist attack (and cheese off the French at the same time)?

It’s time for best-of-the-year.
Best mug shots of the year.

Another article in the LA Weekly describes Bush in the flight suit as looking like the Lost Member of the Village People.

Yup, all the good subject lines were used up yesterday

According to the National Weather Service website, "Unusually hot weather has entered the region for December ... as the Earth has left its orbit and is hurtling towards the sun. Unusually hot weather will occur for at least the next several days as the Earth draws ever nearer to the sun. Therefore, an excessive heat watch has been posted." That announcement was soon taken down, but it might explain the orange alert.

Speaking of alarming, here’s a truly repulsive headline from today’s NYT science section: “Attacking Prostate on 2 Fronts.”

Speaking of repulsive stories, does anyone want to hear how I took care of a little dermatological growth this week? Probably not, huh? Although if it had gone horribly wrong, some ER doc would be telling it to her whole extended family right about now: “He took a pair of pliers, and then guess what he did...”

Would have broken up a dull week, anyway. And there’s a kid in the building too, my divorced next-door neighbor’s son, who’s in such noisy high spirits that I’m strongly tempted to ring the doorbell and tell him that there is no Santa Claus. Must be 35 years since the last time I did that...

Speaking of believing in Santa Claus, are we really going to let Pakistan get away with claiming that its top nuclear scientists were working on their own in spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, etc etc?

Speaking of weapons of mass destruction, Princess Anne’s bull terrier has killed one of the Queen’s corgis. Christmas may be a little awkward this year, but with the royal family, when isn’t it?

NY Governor Pataki issues a pardon for Lenny Bruce.

The Beagle 2 has reached Mars, and Ladbrokes has cut the odds on finding life there from 33-1 to 25-1.

With Palestinians excluded from Israel proper, Israeli companies have been scrambling to import cheap slave labor from all over the world. One company required its Chinese workers to sign a contract not to have sex with any Israelis, or marry them. Or practice any religion. Or politics.

Harassing a wild burro on federal lands

It’s like waiting for a bus. I haven’t had a good subject line in days, and then 3 come at the same time.

To elaborate on Joshua Marshall’s take on Libya, there was no “break-through” last week: Libya’s been trying to get back on our good side for years. Bush pushed on an open door in order to declare yet another victory for the Bush Doctrine. Of course (and this is my elaboration), only a rabid right-wing Republican could have done it, Nixon going to China and all that. Imagine the reaction if Clinton had done what Bush did.

Tom Ridge says if we don’t see our grandmothers for Christmas, the terrorists win. Yeah, but what if your grandmother is a terrorist, huh, huh, huh?

Speaking of terrorists, the NYT has a headline, “Israeli Forces Arrest a Senior Hamas Official in the West Bank.” The fact that they also shot a 5-year old boy dead is not mentioned in the headline, nor in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth paragraphs. Callous, much?

They do have a good article on workplace deaths, which you’ll be surprised to hear OSHA never bothers to prosecute, including where employers had previously been cited for safety violations that later resulted in death. Such cases used to be called “willful” violations, but OSHA now usually calls them “unclassified,” precisely to prevent the possibility of anyone going to prison for it. As it is, killing a worker is a misdemeanor under federal law, with a maximum sentence of 6 months, half that for harassing a wild burro on federal lands (well, that’s what is says in the article. I’m assuming that’s not sexual harassment). For the 2,197 deaths the Time tracked over 20 years, employers paid $106m in fines (compared to the $750m paid by WorldCom for misleading investors, obviously a much more serious crime), and were sentenced to under 30 years, most of which were for a single case in which 25 workers died.

Another headline from the German cannibal trial: “Cannibal Rejected Victims Who Were 'Too Fat'”.

A researcher claims that Joan of Arc was actually a put-up job, actually the illegitimate daughter of a previous king, induced to pretend to be a peasant as a symbol of God’s support for the French cause. He also thinks another woman, a condemned witch, was burned in her place and that she lived to her late 50s in prison.

A Guardian writer asks why the US is trying so hard to get Iraq’s debt forgiven and trying so hard not to get the debt rung up by Argentina’s dictators forgiven.

If you’d prefer to read total nonsense on the subject, there was Safire’s piece in today’s NYT, in which he said that France and Germany were forgiving billions of dollars owed to them in exchange for access to a few million in contracts.

Department of Homeland Security Pun Alert Level: Orange. Orange you glad it isn't red?

A Hanukkah story: a Polish brother and sister, each thinking the other died in the Holocaust, were reunited for the first time this week since 1938. Turns out they’ve been living 60 miles from each other, in Israel, since 1948.

The LA Times investigated the claims by the Justice Dept to have successfully dealt with 280 terrorism cases since 9/11. Some of them turn out to have been people even Justice admits weren’t terrorists, although they were accidentally discovered during terrorism investigations (like 2 owners of corner stores in Jersey who received boxes of stolen cereal in 2000, or the guy who paid a bribe to get a driver’s license)(and as shown by the fact that these terrorists received a median sentence of 2 weeks). In fact, Justice’s rationale for stone-walling the Times’s questions about the alleged 280 is that it would be “prejudicial” to the people who aren’t terrorists but are nonetheless included in the figure if their names were released.

So what is it Libya is supposed to have? “Weapons programs,” evidently, which as we know from Iraq means anything or nothing.

The neo-cons are celebrating this triumph of pre-emptive scaring the crap out of every country on the planet.

A Sunday Times writer summarizes Tony Blair’s speech on the subject: “Oops, we got the wrong country. Still, let's not quibble about a bit of smelly Arab desert. Great news. I've saved the world. Again. Good night.”

Speaking of WMDs in the Middle East, Israel threatened to shoot down Egyptian spy drones which have been flying over its nuclear weapons and missile sites.

What Brazilian nuns pray for

Rumsfeld’s famous 1984 trip to see Saddam Hussein, according to declassified documents, was made to assure him that US criticism of his use of chemical weapons was just rhetoric that didn’t affect US support of him. This is the exact opposite of what Rumsfeld has said the trip was about.

How do we know Libya is keeping its promise to give up WMDs? Because of weapons inspectors. Bush has always believed strongly in the efficacy of weapons inspectors and we have always been at war with Oceania.

A figure I missed from the Russian Duma elections: 4.7% voted for of the above, a record. And turnout was 55%. Putin may have a little problem when it comes to his re-election: for the election to be valid, turnout must be 50%, and he’s got no serious rival, thanks to his having destroyed the nascent democratic culture of post-Soviet Russia, and voters will make the entirely reasonable decision not to bother. So it’s expected that Putin might funnel enough backing to some other candidate to make it look like a real election (which seems to be what happened in the Duma elections, where a “left-nationalist” party appeared out of nowhere).

Pope John Paul II has created an almost ridiculous number of saints, many of them political figures. This week they’ve started beatifying the last Austro-Hungarian emperor. You have to wonder if they actually believe in the rather large number of “miracles” they’ve had to certify, in this case a Brazilian nun who was cured of some disease after praying for Charles I’s beatification. Why a Brazilian nun was praying for Charles I’s beatification, I really couldn’t tell you.

In other royalty news, a certain lump passed around for 200 years has been identified by DNA as indeed being the heart of the French sort-of-king Louis XVII, who died miserably in a revolutionary prison at the age of 10.

And in yet more royalty news, Princess Di was evidently pregnant when she died.

Remember the Kabul-to-Kandahar road? It was the only thing Karzai’s government has been able to accomplish outside of the capital, and hence a great symbol. Evidently it was done on the cheap and its surface is very thin and won’t survive the winter.

If Philip means horse-lover, what does Strom mean?

Sorry, did I say “what a prince” about Strom Thurmond? I meant grand dragon.

It has been pointed out that Strom (at 22) having sex with a 15- or 16-year old black servant was not illegal under the stat rape or miscegenation laws in effect at the time, but that Strom as a judge in 1942 sentenced a black man to the electric chair for raping a white woman.

A feminist group in Britain has pointed out that for seats it might actually win, the Tory party has selected more candidates named Philip than women with any name. Philip, The Times helpfully points out, means horse-lover.

A Central American semi-free trade pact is being cobbled together without anything resembling public discussion or news coverage in the US. I say semi because most of the free trade concessions will be on their side--they have to sell us their phone systems, and not try to make generic versions of our drugs--while we don’t have to actually take their exports. I haven’t paid enough attention to the details myself to know why they’d want this thing. Costa Rica just pulled out, leaving only those countries that received heavy CIA attention in the 1980s.

Taiwan bans the sale of dog meat.

The governor of Connecticut John Rowland, caught with his hands in the cookie jar for the umpteenth time in his career, says that God doesn’t want him to resign. His wife compared the newspaper which uncovered his lies to “grinches who have stolen our tree.”

Diebold, the voting machine company, employs a bunch of convicted felons including purveyors of fraudulent stocks, and falsifiers of computer records. Swell.

Those stupid berets, on the other hand...

France will ban Muslim girls wearing headscarves in schools. Also, Muslim women in hospitals will not be able to refuse being treated by male doctors.

And Saudi Arabia has banned the importation of teddy bears and female dolls. Also crucifixes and models of Buddha.

The Supreme Court has lifted its stay of execution in a Texas case, not bothering to discuss whether it’s ok to use a drug banned for veterinary use in Texas and elsewhere because it is too inhumane for dogs.

Speaking of too inhumane for dogs, Bush’s campaign has hired the advertising guy who created the talking Chihuahua for Taco Bell.

Robert Fisk says that checkpoints in Iraq are now manned by militia working for (and right next to) the Americans--and wearing hoods and masks. (Later:) yup, seen ‘em on the BBC.

Nation article on Bush’s use of religious language.

From the Daily Telegraph: “A traditional doctor in Nigeria has been shot dead by a patient who was testing the potency of an anti-bullet charm which the herbalist had tied around his neck in order to check its efficacy, police said.”

This week Richard Perle described people who oppose American unilateralism as wanting to make US security dependent on “signatures on pieces of paper.” This would be huge, if people were historically literate. They’re not, so it won’t be. When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914 in violation of a treaty guaranteeing that country’s neutrality, the act that brought Britain into the war, the kaiser described the treaty as a “scrap of paper,” a line repeated endlessly for the next 4 years to prove his infamy (infamy, infamy! They’ve all got it in fa’ me!)(sorry).

How did I move from a historical lecture to quoting a Carry On movie?

The black servant Strom Thurmond impregnated must have been 15 or barely 16. What a prince.

Here’s a heart-warming story about a blind guy who went hunting (he got Michigan law changed to allow him to do so), and shot a deer. Well, they told him it was a deer.

From the Diane Sawyer interview with Shrub:

SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still --

BUSH: So what’s the difference?

Between reality and ... wait, I’ve just figured something out. Bush really can’t tell the difference between WANTING something, like WMDs, and HAVING them, because whenever he’s wanted something, his father’s friends gave it to him.

I’ve read part of the transcript, and Sawyer was surprisingly tough on him, and he was very evasive. My favorite question was, what would it take to convince you he had no WMDs. Bush ignored that one entirely. It’s a reminder of how badly he stands up to real questioning, which in turn is a reminder of how rarely he lets himself in for real questioning, which is a reminder of the fact that somehow he can live in that bubble without being seen as the feeb he is.

Britain’s foreign minister spent part of today figuring out how to acquiesce to Bush’s desire to have the Iraqi puppet government execute Hussein. You’ll note I’ve downgraded them to puppet status again, because for all the talk about how whether to impose the death penalty is up to the “Iraqi people,” this thing is very much a show trial. Let me prove it to you: if the Iraqi war crimes court somehow decided that Saddam was innocent, and free to go, do you think that Bush would let that happen? Of course not. A court that only has the option of guilty is not a court.

And while we’re at it, a note to the media: US troops do not “arrest” people in Iraq. They are not the police, they are not enforcing Iraqi law, they are soldiers. They seize, they capture, they cannot arrest. To suggest otherwise is to pretend that the occupation is something other than an occupation.

Spider hole of denial

Bush on Saddam: “I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole and you crawled into it.” As opposed to joining the Texas Air National Guard, perhaps?

And more: “The arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq. And justice will be delivered to him in a way that is transparent and for the world to see.”

You know, I may just have figured it out. The Iraqi war crimes tribunal, with its death penalty provisions, was set up as the “bad cop,” to force Saddam to cooperate (i.e., not name every US official who kowtowed to him over the years, starting with Rummy, cough up something vaguely resembling a WMD, and generally play his assigned role in the show trial) with the US, the “good cop.”

The Iraqis really can’t try him. Who would the judges be? Do you have them nameless and wearing hoods as in Peru, or do you name them and watch their families members die one by one?

Good piece on what’s wrong with the proposed Afghan constitution.

Tomorrow is the centenary of heavier-than-air flight. Whee. George Monbiot pours a fetid pile of airline food over the achievement:

When Wilbur Wright was asked, in 1905, what the purpose of his machine might be, he answered simply: "War." As soon as they were confident that the technology worked, the brothers approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and started test bombing in 1910. The aeroplane was conceived, designed, tested, developed and sold, in other words, not as a vehicle for tourism, but as an instrument of destruction.

In November 1911, eight years after the first flight, the Italian army carried out the first bombing raid, on a settlement outside Tripoli. Then as now, aerial bombardment was seen as a means of civilising uncooperative peoples. As Sven Lindqvist records in A History of Bombing, the imperial powers experimented freely with civilisation from the skies. Just as the Holocaust was prefigured by colonial genocide, so the bombing raids which reduced Guernica, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and parts of London to ash had been rehearsed in north Africa and the Middle East.

Canada's Air Transport Security Authority banned fruitcakes in carry-on luggage.

Wolverines!

The Pentagon slapped that lt. col. who fired the gun next to the POW’s head and had his subordinates beat the guy up, with a jolly big fine ($5,000). He is planning to retire. On full pension, of course.

The capture of Saddam was “Operation Red Dawn”, inspired by one of the crappiest movies I ever laughed my ass off while watching (only slightly unsettled by the fact that nobody else in the theater was laughing)(Halliwell’s Film Guide: “Violent teenage nonsense”). Quotes here.

Seriously, this was a rabid, jingoistic, incredibly stupid movie, so you could see why folks in the Pentagon like it, but using its name in this context is a public relations no-no on the scale of “crusade.”

I can’t seem to work up any enthusiasm. That Hussein wasn’t killed, and indeed let himself be taken alive, will help demythologize him, which is all to the good. The Resistance will have to find something better to fight for, assuming that just fighting against the American occupation isn’t enough.

Now who on earth gets to try him, where will he be held, and will somebody start taking hostages in order to demand his release? The slimy answer to the first was no doubt provided by the suspiciously timed establishment by the establishment by the fake Iraqi government of a war crimes show-trial court just a couple of days ago.

I got to see the Commander in Chimp do his victory smirk this morning, which is one reason I’m a little light on the enthusiasm. The photo op of my enemy is my enemy, or something like that. At least it occurred way before the elections, although if Saddam is tried and convicted in, say, October, I won’t be especially...surprised.

And, say, weren’t we the ones complaining when the Iraqis showed pictures of our POWs? So what’s with the “Open up and say ah, Mr. Dictator” footage? Much less parading him like a zoo animal before Ahmad Chalabi.

The Economist on new freedoms for Kurds in Turkey: “A new porn video, Xashiki Kaliki (Grandad's Fantasies) is selling well: until recently, it would have been banned, not for its content but for being in the Kurdish language.”

Grandad's Fantasies?

When did you last pray for your stockbroker?

So I don’t have to write about it, here’s a link to Molly Ivins on the decision to deregulate mercury. A good article, but I have one caveat. She says mercury is one suspect in recent increases in autism, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Actually, that’s recent increases in diagnoses of those diseases, none of which can be proven without an autopsy. Increases in diagnoses may not be related to actual incidences of the diseases, but to 1) increased awareness of the diseases, 2) increased medical trendiness of the diagnosis. Autism is this decade’s ADD, the label to put on any child not behaving “normally.” Autism is no doubt a real disease, but the diagnosis procedure is ridiculous. There are 9 possible symptoms; if you have 4 [my numbers may be off, but the 2nd number is definitely ½ of the 1st number minus 1] you can be diagnosed as autistic, meaning two people without a single symptom in common can be diagnosed with the same disease. In other words, neurology is voodoo.

Reality tv reaches the Arab world: who wants an arranged marriage?

And in Pakistan, a man who blinded his fiancé with acid is sentenced to...if you guessed, be blinded with acid, you are correct!

You’d think opponents of gay marriage wouldn’t object to gay divorce, wouldn’t you?

Neither sheep nor fools

An internal memo from Diebold, the creepy voting machine company, suggests making it “prohibitively expensive” for states to require printed receipts. The memo was obtained by a hacker, which tells you everything you need to know about the security of any ballot operated by these clowns.

The US authorizes the creation of a new secret police in Iraq, at least partly staffed by members of the old secret police, to be run by a former exile who no doubt has his own get-even list.

Just received the first campaign mailer of the 2004 elections. Evidently there will be a county initiative to ban Wal-Mart. Guess who the mailer was from. Did you know that “Not everyone can afford to shop at fancy department stores”? I weep for those people, forever shut out from the Sears’s and Targets of this world.

A must-read about gerrymandering. If that doesn’t sound like a must-read, just trust me and read it anyway. It explains why Congressional elections barely matter any more.

I wasn’t going to mention the last D debate, especially since I didn’t see it, but I’ve seen excerpts and transcripts now, and Ted Koppel should be horse-whipped. He kept talking about process stuff that no voter cares about (and no voter SHOULD care about), tried to humiliate the lesser candidates into bursting into tears and resigning their candidacies on the spot, accusing Carol Moseley Braun of being a vanity candidate (which she is, but 1) she was a United States Senator, 2) I don’t think he’d have used the term to a male candidate, 3) it’s not his job to say so, 4) and certainly not in that forum). Koppel has been quoted by the Post as wanting a smaller field to make the debates better, or better drama anyway. And the day after the debate, ABC withdrew coverage from the 3 candidates Koppel attacked. Forget Al Gore’s alleged arrogance for daring to express his opinion, what about ABC’s arrogance? Also, aren’t Kucinich, Braun and Sharpton the 3 candidates who are furthest to the left? What gets left out when they’re gone?

Of course the day after Kucinich berated Koppel for not treating him as a serious candidate, he went on a date selected for him by a political website, with the tv cameras rolling.

In Britain, a Labour MP has also been using the internet to trawl for dates. Chris Bryant MP appeared in underwear on the site and declared that he enjoys “a good long fuck.” The site is...wait for it...gaydar.co.uk.

Italy bans fertility treatment and egg and sperm donation for gays, single people and older women, and makes several other decisions about fertility treatments that are none of the state’s business. Italy lacked virtually any regulation of such matters precisely because it is a Catholic country, and the Church fought any law that didn’t follow its orders precisely.

40% of the Iraqis the US was training for the new Iraqi army have quit, because they weren’t paid enough. I wonder who they’ll be selling that training to?

In his dissent to the decision upholding McCain-Feingold campaign finance rules, Scalia wrote, “The premise of the First Amendment is that the American people are neither sheep nor fools, and hence fully capable of considering both the substance of the speech presented to them and its proximate and ultimate source.” Is that what the premise of the 1st Amendment is? Boy, that is SO off-base.

The majority of the Supes took the position that issue ads and soft money constituted corruption, rather than speech.

Speaking of corruption, Bush responded to questions about the illegality in international law of his attempts to use contracts in Iraq to reward his supporters with what he evidently thought was a joke: “International law? I'd better call my lawyer.” He explained carefully, like someone explaining to idiots something so obvious it didn’t need explanation, that only companies whose home countries had sacrificed some 18-year olds (“friendly coalition folks risk their lives”) deserved to charge $2.64 to import a gallon of gas, even though none of the executives of those companies were related to those 18-year olds.

On the table

LA Times: “Retreating from two central campaign promises that helped make him governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday dropped his personal "guarantee" that cities and counties would be compensated for billions in lost car-tax revenue and reversed his pledge to safeguard spending for public schools.” It’s official, he has now broken every promise he ever made in political life, and all within one month of taking office. During the elections he said that education cuts would be over his dead body. So when his spokesmodel said that everything was on the table....

Name in the News: president of Friends of Animals in Darien, CT: Priscilla Feral.

More Fun Facts to Learn and Then Instantly Forget: Nicholas Kristof writes in the NYT that no US company makes bras.

Did you know the US has a Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues? Name of, ahem, Edward O’Donnell. Because you wouldn’t want a Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues who couldn’t get into the same country club as Dubya. No, wait, that doesn’t work--they probably don’t let in Irish either. Anyway, he says that the anti-Americans in Europe are all anti-semites.

In the London production of The Producers, Richard Dreyfuss is doing the Zero Mostel role. Could work.

Switzerland’s governing coalition gives in to the far right’s blackmail and lets its chairman into the cabinet.

Creepy Christian children’s site. Scroll down to “Habu’s Corner.” And below that, it asks the question, “What should you do if you find an Atheist?”

Senator Paul Simon dies. Every obit feels obligated to mention his funny little bow ties, none mention his really weird ears.

Very, very forceful. Very.

I
ndy headline: “Cannibal Denies Sexual Motive.” Oh good, so it’s not like he’s some sort of pervert, then.

Seymour Hersh on the US’s use of Operation Phoenix tactics in Iraq, secretly advised by Israel. “Preemptive manhunting,” indeed.

Bush tells Taiwan not to “provoke” China by holding a referendum asking it to stop pointing quite so many missiles at the “province.” Trust Bush to see things from the bully’s perspective. Taiwan did not immediately respond that it would not take advice from a renegade British colony. Amusingly, Bush criticized Taiwan’s actions as “unilateral.” Do as we say, not as we do. He didn’t actually mention the proposed referenda on missiles and sovereignty, because that would make explicit his rejection of the right of self-determination by the Taiwanese--in the same way that PM Wen talked about separatism under the “signboard of democracy”--but instead personalized his criticism against the “leader” of Taiwan.

Bush is buying into China’s representation of itself as so hyper-sensitive that it will go ape-shit if it doesn’t get its way all the time, in every excruciatingly explicit detail--no doubt the reason Bush couldn’t bring himself to use the Taiwanese president’s actual name in front of the Chinese prime minister. That princess and the pea thing has worked pretty well for China in getting other countries, especially the US, not to “provoke” it. According to White House officials, Bush was “very, very forceful” in warning off China from attacking Taiwan--in private; those who saw the public performance noted that Wen said that Bush opposed Taiwanese independence, which is not supposed to be US policy.

Repulsively, Wen cited Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War in support of his position.

Bush said, and I’m pretty sure these are the exact words he’s used before, “The United States policy is one China.” What’s that, a Zen koan? There are words missing from that sentence, without which it’s close to meaningless: US policy is (that there is) one China; US policy is (that there should be just) one China...

Governor Ahhnuld has decided not to investigate himself for groping women after all. Seems it isn’t necessary after all because “the people have spoken.” They’ve said “Ouch, stop pinching my ass.”

William Saletan points out that when Al Gore was “trailing in the Florida recount, [he] urged the nation to wait until all the votes were tallied,” but his endorsement of Dean is intended to short-circuit a democratic process that hasn’t even started yet.

Some are portraying Gore’s choice of Dean over Lieberman as a sign that Gore has moved left. Possibly, but let’s take him at his own words, from today: “All of us need to get behind the strongest candidate.” Pure cynicism. Indeed, he told the other candidates to shut up and stop criticizing Dean. “We can’t afford to be divided.” In other words, the great Al Gore has had his say, lesser mortals should now desist from expressing their views. If the other candidates took that advice, tonight’s debate must have been as dull as it is possible for any such event to be, unless of course Al Gore participated--that would make it duller. Arguably, Saletan’s condemnation of Gore for opening his mouth is the mirror image of Gore’s advice to the other candidates to shut up and slink away. And everyone imputes to Gore way more influence in the real world than he actually has.

I’m using more dashes and fewer parentheses today. Have you noticed?

From AP: “The Pentagon has formally barred companies from countries opposed to the Iraq war from bidding on $18.6 billion worth of reconstruction contracts.” The policy is in a memo from Paul Wolfowitz, which says it “is necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States.” How does excluding Canadian companies protect US security, precisely?

A moot point

Something to think about re prescription drugs: they don’t work. A VP at GlaxoSmithKline admits that "The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people."

John Kerry’s campaign is pronounced dead because he used the “F word” in an interview in Rolling Stone: “Did I expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don’t think anybody did.”

Andrew Card on CNN today (where he said that he was very, very disappointed with Mr. Kerry’s language) said that the question of whether the US went to war with Iraq based on faulty intelligence was “a moot point” (because evidently Saddam was a bad, bad person)(who knew?).

I hate it when the funny news stories have some importance when you look past the first paragraph. Here is that first paragraph, from a Post story: “H. James Towey, director of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has stirred up a pot of trouble by suggesting that pagans don't care about the poor.” Asked whether such groups should get federal funding, Towey says “Once you make it clear to any applicant that public money must go to public purposes and can't be used to promote ideology, the fringe groups lose interest. Helping the poor is tough work, and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it.” In other words, the government will decide which religions have loving hearts, and which are fringe groups. Also, the article points out that many pagan groups are deeply involved yadda yadda yadda.

Aggressive headscarves

The officials overseeing Sunday’s Russian parliamentary elections are under the authority of the KGB. There are already signs of massive fraud, but it doesn’t matter. What I said here during the last Russian election still holds: this is another non-issues election campaign. Putin’s party literally lacks a platform. A vote for it is a vote for fill in the blank, and that is not representative democracy but electoral dictatorship (and I only use the word electoral because I think Putin would win even without stealing the election). Also, access to the media for opposition parties is nill.

And there is a terrorist attack blamed on the Chechens, just as there is before every Russian election in which Putin is involved. Coincidence, I’m sure.

FORGIVE, FORGET: Bush appoints James Baker to lead the effort to restructure Iraq’s debt, which means get other nations to ignore that country’s past debts, just like Baker was chosen in 2000 to get the courts to ignore the results of the presidential elections. (Did that symmetry work? I think it sounded better in my head than it does on screen.) Iraq owes between $200 and 400 billion. The US also likes to forget how much money it owes, (given the boom in national debt begun by Reagan’s Treasury secretary, one James Baker) as Paul Krugman points out in a good NYT column (but for the hell of it, I’m linking to Pravda).

Joshua Marshall points out that Baker has way too many business links to Saudi Arabia for this to be a good appointment.

Chirac says Islamic headscarves are a kind of aggression. “We cannot accept ostentatious displays, of whatever sort, of religious proselytising.” If you’ve already seen this story, you might have noticed that he made these statements in Tunisia, and wondered about the choice of location. In fact, they are illegal in Tunisia.

“A woman who drove over a McDonald's manager, causing her serious internal injuries in a row over a cheeseburger, has been jailed for 10 years. Waynetta Nolan, 37, flew into a rage after she was refused mayonnaise in Houston, Texas.”

From AP: “Democrat John F. Kerry on Friday challenged the notion that questioning President Bush is unpatriotic and defended his right to criticize, saying he left "some blood on a battlefield that President Bush never left anywhere."” Well he did choke on a pretzel once. I’m getting sick of Kerry using military service in a stupid war, that even he admits was a stupid war, as if it was a qualification for anything.

Some newly declassified State Dept papers from the 1970s implicate Kissinger even more deeply in the atrocities in Chile, that he in fact gave an explicit green light. Why nothing in the NY Times or, I think, the Post? Instead, I give you the Guardian, and the Miami Herald.



The soldiers who had Thanksgiving with the Turkey in Chief were actually screened by their commanding officers.

Maybe "terror socks of death" would be more frightening. Or not.

I’m sorry, Daily Telegraph, it is impossible to take this headline seriously: “Terror Socks Seized.”

An article elsewhere in the Telegraph on Nigerian fraudsters says that their business is, sadly, declining. It confirms something I’d always suspected, that the spelling and grammar mistakes were mostly deliberate, to convince people they were dealing with uneducated Africans.

How big is the illegal trafficking in human organs? An Israeli was just fined c.$750 in South Africa, with no jail time, for having an illegal kidney transplant there. Basically just sales tax. Israelis are big in this market, in part because their insurance companies, unlike those in any other country, are allowed to pay for black market organs.

NY Times article on the Israeli methods now being used by US forces in Iraq: villages sealed off, punishment house demolitions, kidnappings of relatives of suspected guerillas, etc. I like this detail: the i.d. cards those in the sealed villages have to carry are in English only. And this priceless quote: “"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel Sassaman said.”

The NY Times catches up to an overlooked detail in the Medicare bill: private Medicap policies covering drugs will be banned. Because they believe that old sick people must be forced to pay something when they are stupid enough to be both old and sick, so that they won’t overuse medical services. Nor will they be allowed to have a policy that will pay for drugs not on the government list of favored drugs.

Oh the smelly humanity

AP headline: “Goodyear Blimp Crashes into Fertilizer Pile, Injures One.”

Good article on border control. In the last decade, at least 2,500 Mexicans died trying to cross through deserts or mountains, the obvious but presumably unintended consequence of making it harder to cross at safer places. In the Berlin Wall’s entire history, only 287 people died trying to cross it. Enforcement that would actually impact businesses has declined, even from 2000 when a total of 178 American employers were fined for employing illegal aliens. Well, to be fair, how do we know that more than 178 American employers even hired illegal aliens, right? The article mentions a border patrol unit comprised entirely of Native Americans, called the Irony Brigade, sorry, the Shadow Wolves.

Bush has indeed lifted steel tariffs, as of 10 minutes from now, as I write. Um, since when is the power to set tariffs held by the executive branch, anyway? The White House statement on this decision is hilarious. I said on Monday that they’d be declaring victory, that the tariffs had done their job, but they’ve actually gone so far beyond that, actually pretending that the decision had absolutely nothing to do with the WTO decision or the imminent imposition of retaliatory tariffs by the EU, that the timing is just a big coincidence. They’re not even attempting to make their lies plausible anymore. And they’re so committed to doing everything unilaterally that they wouldn’t even spin it as respecting the concerns of our allies in the war on terror. Read it if you don’t believe me.

Another reason the US doesn’t care that much about increased poppy production in Afghanistan: that heroine goes to Europe, not to the US.

B-1 Bob is back: Bob Dornan is talking about running for Congress against Dana Rohrabacher. Boy, that could be fun.

Endomorphically endowed

The US has decided that 5 Iraqi political parties (including Chalabi’s, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) can have their own armed militias/death squads, subject to some minor conditions that won’t mean a thing on the ground. ‘Cuz the warlord thing is working out so well for us in Afghanistan.

Although to be fair, the biggest Afghan warlord, Gen. Dostum, has supposedly just agreed to hand in his heavy weapons, in exchange for absolute power in the north, a seat in the Cabinet and millions of dollars of international aid.

Of course most of what the world community sends to Afghanistan is in exchange for the now plentiful poppy. A Guardian columnist notes that the US has suddenly gotten interested again in that harvest. “The reason for the belated concern is the fear that it is funding the wrong warriors - the resurgent jihadis and the Taliban.”

If you like freak shows (and who doesn’t?), you should be following the trial in Germany of the man who posted on the Internet asking for volunteers to be killed and eaten. Indy headline: “Cannibal Says He Was Lonely and Dreamt of 'Brother' to Disembowel.” The Times has “Eaten by a Thoroughly Modern Cannibal.”

Russia has decided to kill the Kyoto Accord, rather than simply ratify it and then break the rules and fail to meet the targets, like everyone else.

Something I just heard that may not be wrong just because I read it on the Internet: the Israeli “wall” will not only put 10% of West Bank land on the Israeli side, but 50% of the water.

The Cincinnati coroner rules the beating death of the 400-pound guy by the police a homicide.

Gerhard Schröder is in China, calling for the EU to resume arms sales to that country, which has been under embargo since Tiananmen Square. Of course it was only last week that China threatened to go to war with Taiwan if it holds a referendum on independence. France also backs arms sales, but when doesn’t it?

Polls show that Bush’s Thanksgiving stunt earned him 5 points in the polls.

Melvyn Bragg, author of The Adventure of English 500AD-2000, has pointed out that every word of Churchill’s "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills: we shall never surrender." is from the Old English except for “surrender,” which is French.

(Attention, people who googled in looking for a sound clip of the Churchill speech: there's one here, a zip file.)

13-day old kid most likely to need major analysis: “ a Palestinian baby who was born with a birthmark on his face that bears a striking likeness to the name of his uncle, Ala, right, a Hamas militant killed by Israeli soldiers after he allegedly masterminded a suicide bombing. Palestinians in the West Bank are travelling in droves to Bethlehem to pay homage to the 13-day-old infant, also named Ala. His family is convinced that the mark is a divine message of support for the Palestinian struggle against Israel.”

Remember Thailand’s war on drugs? Like the US, they stopped counting dead bodies on that one when it got embarrassingly high, 10 months ago, which I’m embarrassed to say is also the last time I mentioned it here. Anyway, they’ve declared victory, with a death toll of 2,300, and 52,364 of the usual suspects rounded up.

Every year the Literary Review, in London, sponsors a Bad Sex Prize for the worst sex scenes in literature (astonishingly, I quote from the winner every single year). This year’s was one by an Indian author, Aniruddha Bahal, and here’s the thing: his publishers flew him from Delhi to London to accept the prize.

From the Guardian: “Columnist and former Today programme editor Rod Liddle was almost struck out on the grounds that his sex scenes were actually rather well done, but his novel Too Beautiful for You, ("after a modicum of congenial thrusting, she came with the exhilarating whoops and pant-hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys") was reinstated after he said the judges were unqualified, since nobody on the Literary Review had had sex since 1936, in Abyssinia.”

The Times describes the winning passage as “too excruciating for a family newspaper.” So I got it from the Guardian: “She's taking off her blouse. It's on the floor. Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed. In spite of yourself a soft whistle of air escapes you. She's taking off her trousers now. They are a heap on the floor. Her panties are white and translucent. You can see the dark hair sticking to them inside. There's a design as well. You gasp.

'What's that?' you ask. You see a designer pussy. Hair razored and ordered in the shape of a swastika. The Aryan denominator..."

Oh yeah, that’s some bad sex all right.

Full of giblets

Governor Ahhnuld says he now understands what people who warned him that the budget would require hard choices meant. Oh sure, NOW he figures out how unqualified and unprepared he is.

Speaking of things it would be better to have planned in advance, The Daily Show suggested that Bush’s visit to Iraq might have some lessons for the war in Iraq. “For instance, when it comes to planning...do some. And lesson two of the Thanksgiving trip - when it comes to an exit strategy...have one.” Bush knew when he was leaving, and how he was leaving: by 2:00, and full of giblets.

Anyway, California. Though I’m pretty sure Arnie promised to fix the deficit entirely by opening the books and finding tens of billions of dollars of waste, or maybe two pages inadvertently stuck together, oddly enough there’s damned little talk of that now. He does however, want a mandatory spending cap, with extra powers for the governor to make budget cuts entirely on his own (which could be overturned by 2/3 of the Lege, but c’mon) if during the middle of a year the state starts running a deficit.

A Ha’aretz article looks at a government pamphlet on democracy, which fails to mention Palestinians, but does say that as a Jewish democratic state, which it defines by saying that Israel “accepts every Jew wherever he is and respects the values of
Jewish culture and heritage”. Something to remember the next time someone says that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

One reason the military tribunals haven’t begun is that the first group of defense lawyers recruited by the Pentagon balked at the ground-rules, and were promptly fired.

From his jail cell in the Hague, Milosevic will run for the Serb parliament. He can do that because he hasn’t been convicted yet, because it’s only, what, the 3rd year of his trial, 8th year? 73rd year?

And Prince Alexander II wants to see monarchy restored. The prince was born in 1945, the year the monarchy was abolished. He was born in Claridge’s hotel in London. Problem was that a Yugoslav monarch had to be born on Yugoslav soil, so Churchill declared suite 212 of Claridge’s to be Yugoslav territory. No word on whether it still is.

The Thai prime minister plans to ban MPs from his party having mistresses or going to brothels. There is a mass revolt. The party’s name is Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais).

The new head of Australia’s Labor Party is a man who called Bush “the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory” and John Howard an “arse licker,” and once broke a taxi driver’s arm in a dispute over what was the fastest route.

NY Times: “The federal official who runs Medicare and was intimately involved in drafting legislation to overhaul the program is the object of a bidding war among five firms hoping to hire him to advise clients affected by the measure.” Thomas Scully got an ethics waiver from the DHS (or is that an ethics bypass?).

A French scientist withdrew his life savings from the bank, about $1/4 million, set it on fire, then tried to commit suicide by taking pills. Unfortunately, his neighbors saw the smoke, called the fire department, and now he is alive and broke.

Calm as a Belgian

The 46 killed yesterday are now 54, except there are no actual bodies, they just made it up based on what US soldiers said they’d done. Locals say 8. The commander opines that the remaining guerillas must have carried off the 54 dead bodies. Oh yeah, that’s believable: under heavy fire, they carried 54 corpses (plus presumably all of their wounded), in, what, wheelbarrows? stretchers? and got them right out of the area, so that none could be found.

And of course most of the dead “guerillas” turned out to include an awful lot of civilians, whoever was around when US soldiers started shooting in all directions. Who says Iraq isn’t like Vietnam?

And in this way too: “Sgt Jones said when the two convoys had driven into Samarra on Sunday, the city centre was a virtual ghost town, suggesting that the civilian population knew the ambushes were about to happen.”

There was a tribute to the victims of Franco (still dead) in Spain’s parliament building. The right-wing ruling party boycotted the event because it reopened old wounds and “smelt of mothballs.”

Haven’t seen it, but there is a film of Cincinnati police beating a black man to death. They say it was self-defense. He was 400 pounds. Says the head of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP!!), "In that video, what did these officers do wrong?" Uh, beat a guy to death? Beat a guy after he was lying on the ground? And why were they equipped with steel clubs, anyway?

The Lithuanian parliament is about to impeach the president, who evidently has Russian mafia ties. He says he won’t leave even if impeached, adding “I am as calm as a Belgian.”

Which is pretty fucking calm.

George Monbiot gives an outline of how badly we’re screwed, given the taboo fact that oil is running out.

Alessandra Mussolini, Benito’s granddaughter and former stripper, quit the neo-post-fascist party after its leader said bad things about the Upside Down One, and has formed her own party, called
Freedom of Action. It will be“futuristic and feminist”.

And the White House evidently made up a story about a BA pilot recognizing Air Force One.

A great two weeks (for those who survived them)

Gen. Sanchez’s words, the only ones quoted anyway, were that there had been “a great two weeks for the coalition.” In addition to the deaths I mentioned in my last, the Resistance killed some South Koreans and a Colombian.

Today, the US responds by killing 46 Iraqis, and what’s interesting about that is that the Pentagon has released a body count, possibly the first one.

Speaking of body counts, let’s see if you can catch the mistake in this sentence in a Times (London) story: “November was by far the bloodiest month since the invasion”. That’s right: it was only the bloodiest month FOR AMERICANS (79 dead, 105 for the COW as a whole). So the Pentagon was right: if dead Iraqis aren’t counted, dead Iraqis don’t count.

The Times notes that the American media, unlike the British, are not covering Neil Bush’s admissions about having sex with prostitutes. Neil, by the way, also has a consulting “job” with New Bridge, which uses R contacts to secure contracts in Iraq for its clients.

The US is evidently finally willing to admit that some of those locked up without trial in Guantanamo for the last two years were simply nobodies kidnapped by Afghan war lords and such for the reward money. Time magazine says the government is just waiting for a “politically propitious time.” Christmas Day? And the San Jose Mercury (link below) says that they’re still holding 3 children. Excuse me, “juvenile enemy combatants.” They are sometimes given a “time-out,” the story says. Yeah, two years and counting. They are of course interrogated, but no more than 16 hours a day, like the other prisoners, so that’s ok then.

Evidently the Bushies are going to give up their illegal steel tariffs, right before the EU was set to retaliate against products from marginal states. They’re going to pretend that the tariff had succeeded in protecting the steel industry while it restructured itself, so we didn’t need it anymore anyway. In the 20 months the tariffs have been in place, I have yet to see a news story that gives me the most basic information necessary to understand how this works. How much did steel imports decline? How much did the federal government collect by levying this illegal tariff, and do they get to keep it, and if they could just do that for 20 months, well after the WTO ruled it illegal, and give in right before sanctions were due to start, doesn’t that mean there is no down-side to this lawlessness?