Bin Laden threats are real

Did that get your attention? Why didn't it do the same for Bush?

As part of his attempt to put all the blame for 9/11 on the Clinton admin for not unleashing the full wrath of the intelligence community on an unsuspecting world, Ashcroft yesterday said that when he came into office, “We should end the failed capture policy, I said. We should find and kill bin Laden.” Ignoring the fact that Clinton had already ordered bin Laden assassinated, this must be the first time that a US attorney general (more general than attorney here) has publicly called for an extra-judicial execution.

As Ha’aretz has been saying for a couple of weeks, Sharon had a few demands to make of Bush, and today Bush gave in to them all, including denying a right of return and letting Israel keep 60% of the West Bank, in exchange for removing a few sparsely populated, expensive to defend, settlements in Gaza. Bush phrased this as pragmatism, acknowledging the “realities on the ground,” by which he means settlements erected in violation of international law. “Establishing facts on the ground” is of course a key phrase in Likud cynicism, and it has paid off in spades. Not perhaps the best week for Bush to give another example of his contempt for Arabs/Muslims, while calling war criminal Ariel Sharon (wasn’t he supposed to be indicted for bribery right about now?) bold and courageous. The Guardian says that Israel had 4 possible plans for removal of some settlements from the West Bank, but the US took the first one offered, which, naturally, gave the least to the Palestinians (500 settlers evacuated). The Palestinian PM points out that Bush is the first “president” to legitimize the settlements. Bush also talked about being committed to Israel as a Jewish state; he did not suggest that Palestine should be a Muslim state, and you can imagine his reaction if someone else did. Despite yesterday having said that “brown-skinned” Muslims are capable of democracy, on the ancient question of whether Israel should be Jewish or a democracy, Bush came down firmly on the side of the former. Does that mean Muslims are capable of democracy, but not Jews?

Speaking of toadying, the leader of Australia’s Labor Party makes a bid for the yoof vote, saying that Labor’s policy is bling-bling.

The next visitor to Bush is Tony Blair, who will not bother to meet John Kerry, although they’ll both be in New York.

From the 9/11 hearings:

ROEMER: You don't see the president of the United States once in the month of August?

TENET: He's in Texas.

Yesterday, of course, Bush said that he talked with Tenet all the time.

And more news on intelligence reports sent to Bush in the spring of ‘01: headlines included "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."

Hilarious parody of political blogs (read the comments section too).

And a good parody of the Bush press conference.

And here’s another one:
Excerpt:

Q: Sir, you like to say that the August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing didn’t say al Qaeda was planning to fly planes into the World Trade Center at 8:48 a.m. on a sunny morning on September 11th as Mabel Johnson sat down to have a bagel at her house in Des Moines and a butterfly flapped its wings in Singapore, and therefore there was nothing “threatening” about the memo and no need for you to take action. But it did mention the likelihood of hijackings. Did the memo trigger you to take any action whatsoever to prevent even this kind of attack?
A: No.

Tom Shales on the press conf: “"When I say something, I mean it," George W. Bush said decisively near the end of last night's prime-time presidential news conference. Nobody called out, "When will you say something?" -- the White House press corps is too mannerly for that -- but some reporters, and some viewers, must have been thinking it.”

Nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens

A concerted attack by members of the 9/11 Commission on John “Lost to a Dead Guy” Ashcroft today could have done major damage to Bush, who scheduled a press conference timed to undercut it. In the end, the guy who downgraded terrorism as a priority for the Justice Dept because he was more interested in drugs and porn (aren’t we all?) and whose only response to intelligence was to stop flying commercial airlines, was let off remarkably lightly.

And so was Bush, following an interminable opener in which he stressed the same syllables (3rd and 7th, or whatever it was) in every single sentence. Every question was so unspecific as to allow him to squirm out. Interestingly, he gave the same answer to a question about whether he could name any mistake he’d made as Eisenhower gave about whether he could name any contributions Nixon had made to his administration (give me a few days, and I might come up with something). And he never did answer why he felt the need to testify to the 9/11 Commission only with Cheney holding his hand, or whatever he holds. And he needs a new adjective; he slathers “tough” all over every sentence like ketchup on his mother’s awful cooking. (Later: Juan Cole says it is in bad taste to equate the “tough” week for his administration with the “tough” week for families of the dead soldiers.) He also kept repeating that we were changing the world, and some crap about liberty. Josh Marshall: “I saw a man on autopilot, and a pretty crude autopilot at that.” Indeed, he repeated almost every exaggeration of the danger allegedly posed by Saddam; we should be grateful he didn’t bring up the yellowcake again.

When Bush characterized opponents of his insane Iraq policy as believing that Muslims or “brown-skinned” people can’t have democracies, did anyone else remember his father referring to Jeb’s kids as “the little brown ones”?

Mostly, he gave off the same air of passivity as Condi Rice did, not just about the past, when he’d have been willing to “move mountains” if only someone had told him what to do and where to do it (I’m not sure how strip-mining would have prevented terrorism, but Bush was willing to do it, right after he tried out tax cuts and drilling in Alaska to see if they would prevent terrorism), but also about the future. A paragraph from Salon demonstrates this passivity:

To whom will the United States hand over Iraqi sovereignty on June 30? "We'll find that out soon." Why haven't U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces been effective in quelling the uprisings? "We'll need to find out why." Was the information contained in the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief accurate? "I presume the 9/11 commission will find out." What about those weapons of mass destruction? "Of course I want to know why we haven't found a weapon yet," the president said. Later, he said of the WMD: "I look forward to hearing the truth as to exactly where they are."

A few fortune-cookie statements from the press conference: “A country that hides something is a country that is afraid of getting caught.” “I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either.” “Oceans don’t protect us. They don't protect us from killers.” “Look, nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens.” “We weren't on a war footing.” “I expect information that comes to my desk to be real and valid.” He actually used the name Osama bin Laden for what may well be the first time in a year or two.

Today was World Turban Day, aka, World Hey We’re Fucking Sikhs, Not Fucking Muslims! Day

I’ve mentioned wacky Turkmenistan president-for-life Niyazov before. There’s an article in the Indy. First paragraph: “He has banned beards and listening to car radios, and instituted a national holiday in honour of a melon. Now the world's craziest dictator has identified a new and pressing danger to his people: gold teeth.”

The Daily Kos: “Bush approaches the world as if the good things that happen to him are the result of virtue and the bad things the result of environment, but with other people it's the exact opposite.”

Change the channel

Our new old friend Gen Mark Kimmitt--military moron or comic genius? you be the judge!--was asked about Al Jazeera reports of civilians being killed by US forces in Fallujah. “Change the channel,” he responded.

Something I saw in an Arab source but not elsewhere, is that the US made Al Jazeera leaving Fallujah one of the conditions for a settlement of the siege. Kimmitt was pissed off at them for running live images of F-16 raids on the town during a phone interview in which he claimed that the US had declared a unilateral cease-fire.

Some thieves stole an alligator from a reptile park in Australia, only to return him 3 days later, in a reptile version of The Ransom of Red Chief. The alligator’s name was Mr. Cranky Pants, which might have been a clue (alligators who are forced to wear pants usually are cranky).

If you want to repress the Iraqi people, you have to turn to the experts. General Abizaid: “We've got to get more senior Iraqis involved, former military types involved in the security forces. In the next couple of days, you'll see a large number of senior officers being appointed to key positions in the ministry of defence and in Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands.”

Marines responsible for an Iraqi POW being beaten to death will face no charges. Surprise, surprise.

A Post story says that the Forest Service used misleading photos, which were supposed to demonstrate the horrible things that happen to forests if they aren’t logged, in a glossy pamphlet supporting more logging. Leaving the question, why were they using taxpayer money for that purpose anyway?

Department of I Told You So: In my e-mail of Feb. 24 I predicted a coup in Venezuela. Now the only question is whether this was a natural response to Hugo Chavez’s assholery, or whether the CIA was involved.

Department of Corrections: All these years I have been saying that the Star Wars program could not work. I hereby admit that I was wrong. I thought any system could simply be overwhelmed by decoys and MIRVed missiles, but it seems the Bush administration is working on a solution: detonating large nuclear warheads 60 miles above the United States. That would certainly solve all those problems, and I don’t see any possible down-side, do you?

Ari Fleischer today called Ariel Sharon a “man of peace.”

Remember I wrote about the Carlyle Group a while back, and wondered why this hadn’t been covered in any depth? Well, it’s nice to see it brought up by a US Congresscritter, Cynthia McKinney. Too bad she’s clinically insane, and brought it up while accusing the Bushies of having had advanced warning of 9/11. Carlyle responded by asking if she’d made the remarks while standing on a grassy knoll in Roswell, NM. Um, no, actually in Berkeley, what’s your point? So she brought it up but in a way to ensure that it was discredited. Now if one believed in conspiracies....

Cheney did allow environmental groups to have input into his energy plan. 11 groups were emailed and told that they’d have a little time to send responses: 5, 4, 3, 2... All right, they were actually given a full 48 hours.

Less casualty, except among the military age males

One of the world’s best writer/directors, Jirí Weiss, has just died. You’ve never heard of him or seen one of his movies. I’ve only been able to see 4 myself, none alike. During the Prague Spring, some incredible movies were made in Czechoslovakia, and then the tanks rolled in. The directors that stayed mostly did no work again (Jirí Menzel); those that left did better (Milos Foreman). Weiss left, but Hollywood never gave him a job. 3 of his movies that I’ve seen were in LA, and every time, he was there to introduce them. He had nothing better to do.

Yesterday I mentioned that the US forces were allowing women and children to escape the siege of Fallujah, but not the males. Here’s the result: in a story the Guardian mistakenly headlines “Defiant US Says Falluja Dead Were Rebels,” a Marine colonel is quoted as saying, "What I think you will find is 95% of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting. The marines are trained to be precise in their firepower ... The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the marines are very good at what they do." The rather large distinction between actual rebels and “military age males” will not have escaped you, I’m sure. And that’s if you accept the 95% number, which is contradicted by hospital officials. The Guardian does give a figure I’ve been looking for: the population of Fallujah is 200,000. Lots more military age males to shoot. Propaganda-wise, the Bushies are having a little problem trying to claim at the same time that there are only a handful of rebels (“gangs,” Bush called them today--When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dyin' day.), and that the hundreds of Iraqis we’re killing are in fact rebels.

Iraqi soldiers are refusing to participate in the bloodbath.

Shrub, who has a way with worms, said today: “Obviously I pray every day there’s less casualty. But I know what we're doing in Iraq is right.”

That wasn’t a typo. He certainly doesn’t have a way with words, now does he? Less casualty, indeed. (Even the White House transcript has “less casualty.” The WaPo decided to clean it up.)

He also claimed today that the 8/6/01 PDB “said nothing about an attack on America.” Maybe no one told him the PDB was released and everyone can read it now, or else why is he so blatantly lying about its contents? AND he claimed to have asked for the briefing (“Did I see it? Of course I saw it; I asked for it.”), when in fact the CIA compiled it on its own authority, even giving it that title, which they incorrectly thought would get Bush’s attention. AND he claimed this: “And you might recall the hijacking that was referred to in the PDB. It was not a hijacking of an airplane to fly into a building, it was hijacking of airplanes in order to free somebody that was being held as a prisoner in the United States.” How does that make any difference? If you’d stopped the hijackings, you’d have stopped the planes being flown into buildings. And the line the Post uses as a headline to the transcript, “Had I Known, We Would Have Acted.”

COMMENT IN ATROCIOUS TASTE ALERT: Asked whether the violence would ebb soon, Bush replied: "It's hard to tell. I just know this: that we're plenty tough and we'll remain tough." Especially those 4 mercenaries. We asked for medium-rare!

An American hostage was released after 3 days in Iraq. Thomas Hamill was a truck driver for Kellogg, Brown and Root (aka Halliburton) after having had to sell his dairy farm because of debts. Who says Bush hasn’t created any jobs?

Our will is being tested

Here’s what happens when industry captures the agency that’s supposed to be regulating it: that agency sets not just minimum standards, but maximum ones. Case in point: a beef producer wants to test all its cattle for mad cow disease, which would allow it to resume exports to Japan. The Dept of Ag refused to permit it, saying it would have “implied a consumer safety aspect that is not scientifically warranted.”

A story about federal pork on an impressive scale: 2 bridges in Alaska snuck into the highway bill last week. “One, here in Ketchikan, would be among the biggest in the United States: a mile long, with a top clearance of 200 feet from the water — 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and just 20 feet short of the Golden Gate Bridge. It would connect this economically depressed, rain-soaked town of 7,845 people to an island that has about 50 residents and the area's airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million. The other bridge would span an inlet for nearly two miles to tie Anchorage to a port that has a single regular tenant and almost no homes or businesses. It would cost up to $2 billion.”

The US bombed that mosque in Fallujah again, this time hitting a minaret. Also, it broadcast threats of an imminent attack on the town and suggested that women and children leave. It will not let “military-age” men leave the town, which is incredibly scary and creepy, and historically (Bosnia, say) has been the sort of activity that led to mass graves. There was what was supposed to be a 5-day pause in the attack (which Fisk points out was called a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations," precisely the phrase used by Israel when it was besieging Beirut in 1982), which the US broke after 90 minutes. It was supposed to be so that the dead could be gathered up and buried. Currently, according to the Indy reporter, they are being eaten by wild dogs. Hard to win their hearts and minds when dogs are eating their livers.

And remember, all this was triggered by Bremer shutting down a small weekly newspaper for inciting violence by making false claims. Just like Shrub.

Cheney tells US soldiers that “our will is being tested in Iraq.” Which presumably means that they should really make out theirs being shipped out.

BASS-HOLE: Just as Bush’s spokesmodel was making snippy comments about Kerry going skiing, Bush himself was being filmed fishing by the Blood Sports Channel.

So it turns out that the name of the briefing--“Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States”--whose revelation was the ta-da moment of the commission this week, was actually printed in the Washington Post nearly 2 years ago, in the fist sentence of a story on page 1 of a Sunday issue, by-lined by Bob Woodward, but no one noticed.

And the Post today, on what Bush was doing the day after he got that briefing.

Not skiing

I’m not that good at the metric system: how many assholes in a Bush?

The Iraqi Minister for Human Rights has resigned in protest at American practices, which presumably don’t even come up to exacting Iraqi standards.

British cuisine for Easter: deep-fried chocolate cream eggs (500 calories, and well worth it, I’m sure).

The DNA testing clears Neil Bush of having a child with his current wife when she was someone else’s wife. By Bush family standards, this is vindication.

Condi admitted that Bush was alerted to the possibility of Al Qaida hijackings. Doesn’t that make his inactivity in the minutes after getting the news on 9/11 that much more irresponsible?

Asked about why Bush is on vacation now, as he was in August 2001 (all of August), and indeed for 40% of his presidency, White House communications director Dan Bartlett said that at least Bush is “not skiing.” Hearing this in Crawford, Bush sheepishly removed his skis.

I mentioned that American soldiers have sealed off the Saddam-statue-toppling square (that was a year ago today when, to be fair, the square was also sealed off by American tanks). Today they tore down posters of Muqtada al-Sadr in the square. And (quoting the Indy) “On Friday, an armored vehicle with a loudspeaker on top circled the square's colonnaded middle island, announcing in Arabic the curfew and a warning that anyone seen with a weapon would be shot. Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees with heavy machine guns took positions around the square.” And then for some reason started blaring rock & roll, according to the BBC.

Guardian headline: “Even I Think My Films Are Depressing, Admits Ingmar Bergman.”

“What fly did the President swat? Name me one swatted fly?”

Rumsfeld downplays the Iraqi intifada, saying it consists only of “thugs, gangs and terrorists.” Uh, Rummy, that’s two-thirds of the Iraqi population.

I’ve seen some of the Rice testimony and I think all Americans are asking the same question: what’s up with her hair?

But also, is she the laziest person alive or what? In the process of trying to shift blames to the intelligence bureaucracies, she portrayed herself as a passive recipient of reports that just weren’t good enough for her to actually do anything with. If she didn’t get “specific threat information,” there was nothing she could do, so she did nothing. And her hilarious dismissal of Richard Clarke’s report: “We were not presented with a plan. … What we were presented on Jan. 25 was a set of ideas.” God forbid she should have to do any work herself.

But before she’d do any work, she would have to deal with “structural problems,” like one of those people who says they’ve doing homework but really spend the first half-hour sharpening a dozen pencils, laying out index cards precisely so, getting out highlighters in seven colors.... On 9/11/01, 15% of the way through the Bush admin, she was still working out which colors to put on which file folders.

Favorite moments: Bob Kerrey asking what flies Bush ever swatted, since he was so tired from swatting flies; Kerrey referring to Rice’s refusal to use “the m-word” (mistakes); Richard Ben-Veniste asking why she was still talking when all he’d asked was the title of a report. Which was “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” and although Rice claimed it had “no new threat information, and it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States,” it actually reported (8/6/01) "patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking."

Some of the “frustratingly vague” “chatter” Rice oh-so-selectively quoted to bolster her case that she couldn’t possibly have stopped 9/11: "Unbelievable news in coming weeks" "Big event ... there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar" "There will be attacks in the near future". Non-specific, but the only response the Bush admin seems to have made was that Ashcroft stopped flying commercial planes.

No “silver bullets” indeed. They’re Muslims, not werewolves. Both hairy, but there is a difference. I think werewolves are allowed to eat pork.

SYMBOLISM ALERT: Remember--of course you do--the toppling of the statue of Saddam? Fardous Square, where the statue was, was the site of a pro-Sadr, anti-occupation demonstration this week. American soldiers are now sealing off the square.

AP story: Twenty young people at a national service camp near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were treated in hospital after an apparent outbreak of hysteria in which they claimed to have seen ghosts. Exorcists were called to remove the evil spirits. They later said they had caught them and thrown them into the sea.

It was necessary to destroy Fallujah in order to save it

Jon Carroll adds a corollary to my frequently made point that the Bushies cannot ever admit to having gotten something wrong: “As their time in office increases, they are spending more time fighting rear-guard actions trying to prove that they were right or cover up the fact that they were wrong.” This also means they can’t fix things they’ve broken, like the damage they’ve inflicted on relations with America’s allies, because they can’t admit anything is wrong. Carroll thinks the problem is that the Bushanistas learned the wrong lesson from Watergate, which is that Nixon didn’t stonewall *enough.*

(Later:) speaking of lessons learned from that era, lefti.blogspot.com/ comments that Kerry et al, who want to pour more troops into the quagmire, “think their job is to be better, smarter imperialists.”

I proudly use the word quagmire, making me in William Safire’s alliterative phrase a “quaking quagmirist.” Bill: eat me.

Turquoise has received an email from Dick Cheney inviting her to participate in National Party for the President Day on the 29th, which I just realized is a Thursday. The highlight of the day is a live conference call from Cheney himself, without which no really boring party is complete.

Colin Powell suggests that Ted Kennedy, who said that Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam, “should be a little more restrained and careful in his comments because we are at war”. Pathetic.

Speaking of lack of restraint, Rumsfeld today said, “U.S. forces are on the offense. The United States and our partners and free Iraqi forces are taking the battle to the terrorists.” So the US bombed a mosque. During afternoon prayers. Killing 40 or 48 or 25 or (the Pentagon says) one. Gen. Kimmitt, military moron, puts it in perspective, saying the “actual mosque structure itself” was not damaged. So that’s ok then. We’ll see if the dead-children pictures on Al Jazeera get the same distribution here as the crispy-mercenary pics did (I looked at 2 of the 16 pictures before I had to stop). Winning hearts and minds, one rocket attack on a mosque at a time. After a year of occupation, do we still not know when afternoon prayers are? In the afternoon, I’m guessing.

OK, maybe socialized medicine is evil. A deal with a private company put tv’s in hospital rooms. Only trouble is, they have no off button and run 15 hours a day. And the patients have to pay £3.20 a day. If they don’t, they get one hour free, and 14 hours of advertisements for the service and hospital announcements.

Prom season is coming up, and this year the fad is Botox injections under the arms to prevent sweating.

At a Mississippi high school, Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia says that people don’t revere the Constitution like they used to. As he was saying this, a federal marshal was forcing reporters to erase recordings of the speech.

Thou shalt not be negative

The NYT says that Dick Cheney proposed a gas tax on his own in 1986 that if in effect now would be costing more than the plan they’re falsely claiming Kerry had. Cheney: “Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States.”

2/3 of companies operating in the US paid no corporate income taxes 1996-2000.

The California Supreme Court upholds treating a fetus as a separate entity under the state’s version of the thing just passed federally. The court says “There is no requirement the defendant specifically know of the existence of each victim,” which is ridiculous as a legal principle, and throws around the phrase “disregard for life” a lot, which rather misses the point. I mean in this case the guy beat and then shot his girlfriend. That’s not disregard, which is defined as “paying no attention to”; the guy was paying a great deal of rather specific attention to taking his girlfriend’s life.

Preview of the 9/11 Commission report (which we now know the Bushies intend to look over very very carefully before releasing it oh say a month after the elections.

AN ARMED SOCIETY IS A POLITE SOCIETY: The Israeli police commissioner has called on Jews to carry guns for Passover. Also matzoh.

The British Methodist church held a contest to find an 11th Commandment. “Thou shalt not be negative,” the idiots chose as the winner. Runners-up: Thou shalt not consume thine own bodyweight in fudge; Thou shalt not dump your lover by text; Thou shalt not dance like your dad; Thou shalt not hold loud conversations on thy mobile phone in a public place.

With all the bitching about illegal aliens getting driver’s licenses in California, guess who supports a bill to do the same in Florida? Jeb Bush.

Robert Fisk says the US has moved Saddam Hussein (remember him?) to Qatar. Actually, he may not have been in Iraq since December. This is why the US gave him POW status; otherwise it would have been illegal to remove him from Iraq. They didn’t bother telling the royal family of Qatar.

China declares that it has the right of veto over changes in Hong Kong’s governance, such as directly electing the chief executive, as democracy activists are demanding. Under the handover agreement, China has no such veto.

The US ambassador to Pakistan threatened that if they didn’t hunt down Taliban & Al Qaida types, the US would send in troops.

Outlaw

Paul Bremer has announced the creation of an Iraqi Ministry of Defense. Smart-asses are pointing out the irony of the occupying authority announcing a ministry to defend, presumably, against occupation by a foreign power.

Bremer also described Monsieur al-Sadr as an “outlaw,” although he failed to explain which law he is out of. I assume the demonization of Sadr is part of the ongoing attempt to find that one guy who, if they arrested or killed him, all their troubles would come to an end. And good luck with that.

Safire today says that the debate over whether Bush failed to heed warnings about 9/11 is “ancient history.” True (if you have the same idea of what “ancient history” is that a 12-year old has, Bill), the debate should have happened 2½ years ago. When it would have been attacked as unpatriotic. Thus following the Bush admin policy of heads I win, tails you lose.

Speaking of ancient history, congrats to the Toledo Blade for the Pulitzer for the series mentioned here on Vietnam war crimes. Still waiting for the results of the Pentagon investigation of that one. Last week Jim Lehrer mentioned it for the first time, and then asked why “you may be hearing about it for the first time.” He did not pick up a mirror and start cross-examining himself.

Revenge attacks by US forces in Fallujah are called Operation Valiant Resolve. There’s some guy whose whole job is to come up with those names (although the first attempt was Vigilant Resolve, which was dropped for obvious reasons), and he’s paid more than any of us. Also, note that we’re back to bombing people from the air. Robert Fisk: “The helicopter attacks in Shoula looked like a copycat of every Israeli raid on the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, Iraqis are well aware that the US military asked for, and received, Israel's "rules of engagement" from the Sharon government.”

Spending time with their respective families

Bumper sticker: “Defeat Bush again.”

The NYT casually mentions that Sharon threatened to cut off water and electricity to Gaza if there are attacks after Israel withdraws. I once asked if his plan was to turn Gaza into a bantustan or a free-fire zone; I evidently neglected the alternative: Warsaw ghetto.

By the way, Sharon’s threat to assassinate Arafat was phrased in Jewish-stereotype-speak: he said that Arafat was a “poor insurance risk.”

The Observer says that GlaxoSmithKline and others have been testing AIDS drugs on orphans, including 3-month old babies, black and Hispanic kids in a Catholic aid center in NYC. These are tests of drug toxicity and tolerance, things like, Hey, let’s see what happens if we double the dose. Normally such tests would require parental consent, but the city of NY gave its consent for children under its control to be used as guinea pigs.

The Duma will water down its ban on demonstrations. 2 steps back, 1 forward.

And a similar dance move in China, where they have released 2 mothers and a widow of Tiananmen Square victims.

NYT: “Two Bush administration officials in charge of a widely criticized program that is supposed to help sick nuclear weapons workers are leaving their jobs, the Energy Department said on Friday. ...The two officials took the brunt of criticism from lawmakers this week after it was disclosed that a $74 million program to aid nuclear weapons workers sickened by on-the-job exposure to toxic chemicals had paid out a single claim, $15,000, to one worker. Joe Davis, an Energy Department spokesman, said of the resignations, "The fact of the matter is that they want to spend time with their respective families."”

Bush is trumpeting his first-ever monthly increase in jobs. Looked at a little closer, they’re all part-time jobs, presumably with no benefits.

The former British ambassador to the US says that Bush asked Blair to support an invasion of Iraq 9 days after 9/11.

For whatever it’s worth, when those Russian secret agents go on trial in Qatar, their defense team will include former US attorney general Dick Thornburgh.

The Bush campaign has emailed Republican congressmen telling them what to say about the environment: global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better' and has nothing to do with asthma in children, the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', the EPA is lying about water pollution, and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people'.

So that’s all right then.

12 years ago, Slovenia erased the names of all non-ethnic-Slovenes from government records, turning them into Orwell’s famed unpeople. No pensions, no drivers licenses, health care, etc. There was a referendum today to restore their human rights. It failed. Miserably.

Not to be confused with Slovakia, whose elections today were also pretty egregious in their results.

Protests related to the US shutting down that newspaper in Iraq have now resulted in dozens of demonstrators being shot dead. You’ll remember that the reason given for shutting the newspaper was that it had incited violence (for which no evidence was adduced), so, well, whoops. Allegedly people in the crowds attacked British troops with guns and RPGs, which is possible, but no Brit suffered so much as a scratch, so I think we’d all be excused a little agnosticism on the question.

And here’s an AP story suggesting that the propaganda wing of the CPA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bush “re”-election campaign.

What I said

WaPo headline: “Bush to Announce Plan To Double Job Training.” Well, sure, the only jobs the Bush economy is creating are part-time, so people’ll need two jobs, so....

And the Post reporter on the Duh beat informs us, “Attention Deficit Linked to TV Viewing.”

Email from an aeolist

The Grandiloquent Dictionary. You can download the whole thing as a pdf, and I’d suggest you do so, because you may see an increase in these emails of my lexiphanicism as a result of finding this thing.

In 2000 Bush said Clinton should “get on the phone” and demand that OPEC not cut oil production. OPEC just decided to cut oil production and Bush is...?

A quote I somehow missed: Health & Human Services Sec Tommy Thompson went to Iraq, inspected a hospital and said Iraqi hospitals would be ok “if they just washed their hands and cleaned the crap off the walls.”

Good Krugman column on Bush admin lying.

The US military is showing the troops in Iraq “The Passion of Christ.”

A school district in Indiana bans pink clothing because they somehow think pink is a gang color. (Reminds me of a gay comedian saying that he used to get beaten up a lot in school; the other students had all learned how to fight from watching martial arts movies, while he learned how to fight from watching West Side Story).

R’s in the House have quashed subpoenas, and thus any meaningful investigation, into the White House lying to it about the cost of Medicare changes. The White House is concerned with separation of powers, it says, it’s one of those “principles,” it says. R Congresscritters are evidently not similarly concerned with being lied to with impunity, which is also a separation of powers concern, among other things. Bill Thomas refused to subpoena the liars in question “to satisfy someone’s whim or curiosity” about whether they were lied to.

Indonesia’s about to be a problem again. Elections Monday.

A new record, it is believed, in Britain: a 99-year old is charged with murdering his wife, 87, after 68 years of marriage, which to be fair does seem like more than enough. The retired butcher cut her throat.


Governor Ahnuuld is being sued by one of the gropees, a British tv presenter, for suggesting that she was askin’ for it.

The US says that it would prefer Israel not assassinate Arafat, as Sharon threatened to do (did it even make the US newspapers?) a couple of days ago. This is in marked contrast to the veto of a UN resolution against the assassination of the near-blind quadriplegic (which I just spelled correctly on the first try, hurrah for me), which was evidently the reason for the little bbq in Fallujah, which ullamah are condemning as un-Islamic--mutilating the bodies, not the killings. Sharon is also threatening to ethnically cleanse 10s of thousands of Palestinians living “illegally” in Israel once the Wall is complete.

It will be at the time and place of our choosing

Washington Post headline: “Kerry Criticizes President, Then Undergoes Surgery.” I guess Clarke should count himself lucky.

The Post also has excerpts of a speech Condi Rice was scheduled to give on 9/11/01, which the White House has been trying to suppress. She does talk about counter-terrorism: “that is why in May the president appointed Vice President Cheney to oversee a coordinated national effort to better protect the U.S. homeland against a terror attack using WMD.” That’s the committee that never actually met. But mostly she accused the Clinton admin of ignoring the real threat, presumably Soviet ICMBs, by neglecting Star Wars.

The LA Times website has some pictures of the Fallujah incident, although, LA being LA, they pay as much attention to the damage inflicted on a car as to the humans. That poor, poor SUV, it never hurt anyone.

Actually, the NYT’s photos are better, if that’s the adjective I’m looking for.

References to the bloody history of the American occupation of Fallujah leading up to yesterday have been at best parenthetical in the press reports, and at worst quite lazy. The NY manages two mentions of the April 2003 incidents when American soldiers twice fired on demonstrators, killing a number of people, and I say “a number”--and “lazy”--because the two Times stories give two different numbers, and one repeats the pretty-much-disproven claim that the soldiers had been fired on first. Eventually the army realized that killing 19 (or whatever) civilians (and later on 8 Iraqi cops) is not something you recover from, PR-wise, and mostly pulled out of Fallujah. The army has been replaced by the Marines, which last week decided to reassert the American presence by patrolling the streets, lifting their legs to mark their territory, firing rockets at houses, and other macho but pointless Marine-type activity.

Fallujah highlights a new military idiot, or maybe an old one I haven’t noticed before, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the guy who said two days ago how great everything was going in Fallujah. Today: “We will be back in Fallujah. It will be at the time and place of our choosing.” Hey stupid, the place will be Fallujah, that’s the point. Every quote I’ve read from this guy is over-the-top tough-guy bullshit; he’s a walking--well, swaggering--caricature.


Spitting in the face of Bush’s last remaining ally, some assistant secretary of state has gone to Congress to accuse Britain of “going wobbly” in failing to eradicate the poppy in Afghanistan.

The US ends foreign aid to Serbia for its failure to cooperate with the war crimes tribunal. And today NATO forces (Americans) failed for the 583rd time to capture Radovan Karadzic, using explosives to break into an Orthodox church, injuring the priest and his son.

In further religion news, the state of Baden-Wurttemberg bans Muslim teachers wearing headscarves in school. Crosses are of course fine. The state’s education minister says the scarf is part of the history of women’s suppression.

And a Saudi cleric blames a drought on women not wearing veils.

And Bahrain bans The Passion of the Christ.

The Russian Duma bans demonstrations near Russian pipelines, kindergartens, embassies, major roads, hospitals, stadiums, concert halls, religious centers, and official buildings, and rallies that “run counter to the Constitution” or threaten “public morality.”

This fall, Harvard will have more female than male undergrads.

I’ve said that the US relied for some of its claims about Iraqi WMDs on a single defector it never interviewed. German intelligence agents are now saying they told the CIA that the defector, a brother of a Chalabi aide, was not credible.

In the process of being detained, 20 terrorists blew themselves up

On the Daily Show, Richard Clarke said that the Bushies had made many cuts in his book, a fact that has appeared nowhere else that I know of.

So the 9/11 Commission will get to question Rice under oath, but had to agree not to call anyone else from the White House to, say, check on her statements. And they can talk to Bush, but only if Cheney goes with him to hold his hand. And somehow the time limit showed up again. In short, the Commission gave the White House way too much in return for way too little. If the Bushies hadn’t spent a week and half looking so incompetent, one might suspect that this was the plan all along.

George Bush the Elder gives what Reuters calls an “emotional” speech defending his idiot son. “There is something ignorant in the way they dismiss the overthrow of a brutal dictator and the sowing of the seeds of basic human freedom in that troubled part of the world,” he said in an idealistic speech to the annual convention of Amnesty International. No, sorry, it was the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, I get those two confused.

Wonder how much he was paid to make that speech?

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT: Statement of the Uzbek government: “In the process of being detained, 20 terrorists blew themselves up.”

Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist, who was so upset about Richard Clarke profiting from 9/11 by writing his book, himself wrote a book on the anthrax scare.

Massachusetts will stop marrying non-resident gay couples, having discovered a 1913 law banning the state from issuing marriage licenses to people banned from being married in their own states. And I don’t have to tell you who those people were.

Yesterday Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, America's deputy director of military operations in Iraq, said that there was only a “slight uptick” in violence. Today, some things were done to American contractors (read: security guards/mercenaries) that McNeil-Lehrer refused to let us see (Arab stations ran the footage without fuzzying it up). Although we did see a lot of very happy Fallujans. See, Cheney and Rumsfeld and so on were right that Iraqis would dance in the streets to welcome Americans...if those Americans are on fire at the time.

I know it’s April 1st, but the story of the chicken-powered plutonium landmine appears in several British sources.

The Bushies illegally used Treasury employees to “analyze” Kerry’s tax plan, claiming it would raise taxes by up to $477b over 10 years on “hardworking individuals and married couples.” I like how the individuals are hardworking (how do they know?), but the couples are just married.

Schwarzenegger reveals that he took the state’s sexual harassment training course and is now much more efficient in his sexual harassment, pinching an average of 15% more butts per day.

In these times, we can't ignore anything

Richard Clarke on the Daily Show tonight (reruns at various intervals through tomorrow evening if you don’t read this today). And Karen Hughes tomorrow. I think we should put pressure on the White House until Condi Rice is a guest there. By the way, Jon Stewart signed a new long-term contract to continue the show, which is becoming weirdly popular for politicians, although Stewart isn’t a great interviewer of the powerful. In one of the more bizarre moves of broadcast journalism, MSNBC a couple of weeks ago threatened not to let Desmund Tutu on their channel if he also did the Daily Show.

An American Airlines flight from Florida to Texas was searched because of a call from a psychic. Said the local Transportation Security Administration director, “in these times, we can't ignore anything.”

The George Bush Conspiracy Generator.

The Onion has a headline today, “Wheelchair-Bound Student Would Have Preferred To Sit Out Pep Rally.” Possibly stolen from a Peter Ustinov obit: in WW2, he asked to join the tank corps, because he preferred to go into battle sitting down.

I saw Ustinov on stage once, in London, starring in one of his own plays.

Just what Berlin needed: talking garbage cans.

The nationalist lunatics are back in charge of the asylum that is Serbia. The government has decided to pay a salary to Milosevic and the other war crimes defendants; also legal expenses and so on.

Speaking of genocide, documents just released under the FOIA show that in 1994 Clinton was aware that one was being planned and under way in Rwanda, that he had accurate intelligence about exactly what was going in as 800,000 died while he did nothing, although he has always claimed ignorance. Wonder what the American papers will say about this?

Supporters of God’s wrath

From the Sunday Times: “Police stopped a driver in Huerth, Germany, and discovered that he was wearing only a dog collar. Asked his name, the motorist replied: "Woof!" He was later banned from driving.” How do they know that wasn’t his name? Sounds like a nice German name. And if they wanted to know his name, why didn’t they just check his tags?

Watched 60 Minutes again, to see Condi Rice squirm (you know what else looks like rice squirming? maggots). Never before has one person gone on so many news outlets to talk about why she can’t talk. Evidently it says somewhere in the Constitution that a sitting national security adviser can’t testify, or possibly can’t take an oath, or possibly can’t tell the truth, because, as I believe it says in Article 15, paragraph 6, “You can’t handle the truth!” The obvious way out of that little constitutional dilemma is for her ass to be fired.

I continued watching for the following piece, an, ahem, whitewash of Judge Charles Pickering, the theme of which is, Why are liberals attacking this nice man who isn’t even really a racist, but came to the defense of cross-burners for other reasons entirely. Reminded me of why I never watch 60 Minutes.

Ireland has banned smoking from all public places, including bars. Irishers who need to combine their vices are slipping over the border into traditionally tolerant, um, Northern Ireland.

Paul Bremer has closed down an Iraqi newspaper for publishing false news (which it did), and encouraging violence against the occupying army & puppet government (which it did not). Let’s stop for a moment to contemplate the awesome level of irony in Bremer, who would not now be in Baghdad if not for false reports issued by Bush, complaining about false news. Specifically, the false news is that a police barracks was blown up by a US helicopter. Of course if that were true, we know that the US would be lying about it, and that the US never talks about the Iraqis that it kills. Really, if you’re unwilling to give your own version of events, you can hardly complain if the press gets it wrong, now can you? Bremer also cites an article that criticized him as following the example of Saddam. By keeping the Iraqi people hungry, not by silencing the opposition--even Bremer doesn’t rise to that level of irony. I think. Although he does respond, “This report is false and the CPA is doing its best to provide food and medical help for the Iraqi people and to repair the infrastructure of the country and put the fundamentals of political, economic and individual freedoms in place.” OK, I won’t use the word irony again, but this is surely a matter of opinion, not true versus false. Robert Fisk notes that the paper was a weekly with a circulation of only 10,000, but that its closing has provoked great wrath, and you know how good the Iraqis are at great wrath.

Oh dear: immediately after writing that, I read an article that troops in Basra fired rubber bullets to disperse a crowd associated with a group called “God’s Wrath.” The Telegraph has a photo caption, “Supporters of "God's Wrath" clash with British troops in Basra.” I’m sorry, that phrase is just funny--supporters of God’s wrath.

A Guardian columnist says that gay marriage (Blair is considering civil unions) is off the table because it would lead inevitably to gay divorce, “and the upholders of "family values" would become irretrievably confused over whether these were destroying the very fabric of society. (Divorce: bad! Homosexual partnerships: unnatural! Divorcing homosexuals... emergency! Will not compute! Help, hair on fire!)”

An enemy of God and Islam

The University of Mass. Amherst says it is surprised at the protests among international students over a new $65 per semester fee to pay for the costs of the federal government spying on them.

John Kerry is having surgery on his shoulder, which he injured picking up a baby.

The LA Times has a story today saying that the US claim of Iraq having portable weapons labs was based on a single source, a defector the US never spoke to directly, or knew who he was. It’s on the front page. Does this sound familiar? If so, it’s because your single source--namely, me--told you about this on February 8 (I read it in the Independent, which also credited the source for the “45 minutes” claim). The LA Times adds details, though, including that the source was the brother of an aide to Chalabi. And they quote Scott Ritter, who destroys his own credibility as an arms inspector by reporting that he committed the cardinal sin of intelligence work by telling his source what he wanted to be told--“So we outlined the gaps in our understanding of the Iraqi program, including the mobile bioweapons labs. Basically, we gave them a shopping list.”

But is it art?: “Artist Dyes Iceberg Red in Greenland.”

YOU’RE SO VAIN, I’LL BET YOU THINK THIS SONG IS ABOUT YOU, part 2: AP story: “John Kerry cited a Bible verse Sunday to criticize leaders who have ‘faith but has no deeds,’ prompting President Bush's spokesman to accuse Kerry of exploiting Scripture for a political attack. Kerry never mentioned Bush by name during his speech.”

Similarly, the new Hamas leader calls Bush an “enemy of God and Islam.” No kidding.

What would Jesus confess to?

My last email had the subject line “mean and nasty people,” which was evidently enough to get it bounced by Chris’s work computer, which thinks everything is about sex.

Bill “Here, kitty kitty kitty” Frist, on the floor of the United States Senate, today accused Richard Clarke of lying under oath, because he (supposedly) “told two entirely different stories under oath” (Condi Rice, of course, continues to refuse to take an oath). Later, Frist had to admit he didn’t actually know what Clarke had actually said the first time, but he wants the testimony declassified so he can conduct a fishing expedition. At least Frist wasn’t under oath, or that little discrepancy between his statements today might be a problem, huh?

Someone has searched all the public statements by both Bush and Cheney from their inauguration until 9/11/01, and found not a mention of Al Qaida or bin Laden.

Evidently MSNBC reported that 58% of all exercise done in America occurred on tv infomercials, without realizing that it was an Onion parody (this once happened with the Chinese news service, which never quite got the concept of parody even when it was explained to them slowly).

Some clown in, where else, Texas, confessed to having murdered his girlfriend after seeing The Passion of the Christ. And someone else in, where else, Florida, confessed to a bank robbery after seeing the movie. Also, a couple of people have had heart attacks watching it.

Mean and nasty people

Times headline on Blair’s meeting with Qadafi: “Democrat and Dictator Unite Against Terror.” Blair is which one again?

As I understand it, at the annual radio & tv correspondents’ dinner, George Bush put on a show. “Is my integrity under this cushion? Where did I put my believability?” Ha ha, I’m kidding of course--even George knows he never had integrity or believability. No, he made jokes about not being able to find Iraqi WMDs. This reminds me of another time he tried to make a joke. I don’t remember where or the exact details, but he made a joke about there being arsenic in the drinking water, which was stolen from the movie Erin Brockavitch. Except he missed what made that scene (moderately) amusing: the PG&E officials were claiming that their plant hadn’t polluted the ground water, and at that moment Julia Roberts tells them that the water in their glasses came from the site. When the joke is made by Bush, the man who wants to put arsenic in drinking water, it’s not funny but creepy. In the same way: I am allowed to make jokes about Bush lying, he is not. I want that clear.

So we’re nearly at the end of a whole week where the Bushies did nothing except try to destroy the credibility of one man. (And by the way, Richard Clarke is a right-winger who would happily start wars and bomb and assassinate all over the world, so I’d appreciate it if the left would stop making him out to be a great humanitarian and public servant.) The smear probably wouldn’t have taken, even before the wildly popular “we failed you” apology, which wouldn’t be a big deal, except he is apparently the only person in Washington willing to make any apology (on McNeil-Lehrer today Rumsfeld was asked if that made him do any soul-searching; I didn’t hear his answer since I was laughing so hard at the idea that Rummy has a soul). Imagine Fox News going to the White House to ask it to waive the confidentiality of a briefing Clarke gave them. And they waived it, even knowing that the Valerie Plame thing is still being investigated. Unbelievable. The short-term gain for this briefing, like that memo they dredged up, has to be so slight anyway, claiming that there’s some horrible contradiction in his not telling his bosses exactly what he thought of them, which would only seem like a contradiction to someone who has never actually had a boss.

Thing is, as Clarke pointed out, they had his book for 3 months before they allowed him to publish it, so they had an awfully long time to prepare a rebuttal, and this is the best they came up with. Clarke: “These are mean and nasty people, when it comes down to it.”

He's not the Road Warrior, he's a very naughty boy

Just watched the coverage of the 9/11 hearings by Nightline and the Daily Show. Once again, the latter had better political analysis, and even better editing, interspersing Condi Rice and Scott McClellan, who attacked Richard Clarke in literally the same words. If the Bush admin had coordinated half as well in attacking bin Laden as it has against Clarke...hell, if it did anything as efficiently as it does character assassination...

What’s wrong with regular tv news is its he-said-she-said-edness, so that regular news anchors wouldn’t express incredulity, like fake anchor Jon Stewart can, at Cheney’s claims that the anti-terrorism tsar was “out of the loop” on terrorism, or the absurd claim that Bush couldn’t have pressured Clarke to frame Saddam because he wasn’t even in the situation room on Sep. 12, 2001--what on earth are they saving the situation room for? Stewart also pointed out the extent to which they are attacking Clarke personally rather than addressing his accusations.

I like the thing about how Clarke’s just trying to sell books. The problem is that there is an issue there, just not that one. His publisher is in the same media conglomerate as CBS, which explains the long interview on 60 Minutes. To what extent is coverage by the competing conglomerates affected by that?

Bush, still convinced, perhaps with good reason, that he can utter any lie he likes, says that Kerry voted to raise taxes 350 times. That includes votes not to reduce taxes, and votes for tax cuts that were smaller than R’s wanted, and it includes counting a single vote on a bill with multiple provisions as if it were a bunch of votes, and multiple votes on a single provision.

Richard Clarke, in yet another interview, for Salon, comments on the attacks on him, “the Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset.”

Scotland, the culinary center of the universe, has come up with the fried chocolate sandwich: two slices of white bread smothered in chocolate sauce, dipped in batter and deep-fried, then covered in sugar and more chocolate sauce, with vanilla ice cream.

Suddenly, I’m both hungry and a little nauseous.

Although, really, white bread, how unhealthy can you get?

To cash in on the success of Mel Gibson’s little Jesus movie, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is being re-released. Extra points to any theater that runs them in a double bill.

Once again the NYT (Wed.) has the oddity of the editorial page commenting on a story the news section never bothered covering, the new prime minister of Haiti’s consorting with death squad and coup leader types.

At the end of the end and with all due respect, I absolutely hear what you're saying

Danny Rubinstein, who evidently has the “duh” beat for Ha’aretz, reporting on the bleeding obvious, writes that the assassination of Sheikh Yassin will “apparently” strengthen the extremist wing of Hamas.

Bush today: “And had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September the 11th, we would have acted.” So they really were waiting for an engraved invitation. With the time and place specified.

And Wacko Warlord Rumsfeld today testified something to the effect that killing bin Laden before 9/11 wouldn’t have stopped 9/11--which the Bushies are now portraying as unstoppable by any means known to man, because the hijackers were protected by their magic box-cutters, or something (Rummy: “the sleeper cells that flew the aircraft into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon were already in the United States months before the attack.”)--and only make it look like 9/11 was a response to Osama’s death.

I hadn’t noticed that the chief sponsors of the Unequal Rights Amendment were from Colorado, whose university demonstrates its commitment to heterosexuality by providing its football players only female prostitutes. Anyway, they’ve rewritten it so as not to ban civil unions. It’s still crap, and it’s still a federal provision telling state judges that they may not interpret state constitutions in a certain way.

Jon Stewart points out that Dawn of the Dead has displaced Passion of the Christ as #1 at the box office, suggesting that if one guy rising from the dead is good, then many people rising from the dead is better.

The Wall Street Journal has a good analysis of the many lies told about what happened and what Bush did on 9/11/01. None of it will come as a surprise to my long-time readers, but it’s nice to have a reminder, and from the Journal, of all sources.

The members of the Plain English Society vote for the most annoying phrase in the English language: “At the end of the day...” Also “I hear what you’re saying” and “absolutely” and “with all due respect”.

How many times now have I reported on the US bombing entirely the wrong country? A helicopter gunship strayed from Afghanistan into Pakistan and fired on a van. (The Reuters report is from Saturday morning. Why am I only hearing this now?)

Honest greed

Last week, which was the week there was all that talk about whether foreigners backed John Kerry, the State Dept’s whatsis for the Western Hemisphere, Otto “Thousand-Year” Reich, told El Salvador who it had to choose as president in yesterday’s elections (“We could not have the same confidence in an El Salvador led by a person who is obviously an admirer of Fidel Castro and of Hugo Chavez.”). And so, El Salvador did as it was told.

If the blind paraplegic sheikh was so dangerous, why did Netanyahu let him out of prison? Well, it was because 2 Mossad agents were caught in Jordan trying to murder a Hamas official with poison. King Hussain threatened to put them on trial, so Israel released Yassin.

The US claims it didn’t know in advance, didn’t give a green light. Which would be worse, that it did or didn’t know?

By the way, the helicopter the missiles were fired from is one the US gave to Israel.

Incidentally, the decision to assassinate Yassin was also a decision to assassinate other people near him, for the crime of being near him. Whatever you want to say about the guy in the wheelchair, someone was killed for the crime of pushing a guy in a wheelchair.

TPM notes that the Bushie attacks on Richard Clarke are mutually contradictory: either everything Clarke wanted was done, or he was completely out of the loop. The latter from Dick Cheney, who needs to explain why the counter-terrorism tsar was out of the loop on counter-terrorism matters. (Is anyone else always reminded, when they hear the phrase “out of the loop” of how Bush the Elder claimed he was out of the loop on Iran-Contra?)

What’s interesting is the retrospective pessimism about 9/11. To wit, Scott McClellan today: “His assertion that there was something we could have done to prevent the Sept. 11th attacks from happening is deeply irresponsible. It's offensive and it's flat-out false.” The bombers will always get through, as Stanley Baldwin said. No wonder the Dept of Heimat Security has time to look out for presidential photo-ops: nothing else they do, evidently, will make a blind bit of difference.

And me with a birthday coming up:
http://www.foxbronzeart.com/Bush.htm
(At first glance, I assumed it was a joke)

Lots of good targets in Iraq

I watched 60 Minutes for the first time in years to see that counter-terrorism guy. First, what’s with all the reaction shots of Leslie Stahl? Second, loved the bit about Bush wanting pictures of Al Qaida leaders so he could cross them out as they were killed. Anyway, we now have a pretty clear picture of the Bushies having been completely blind to the terrorist threat to the point of the “president” not having bothered to get a briefing on the subject and downgrading counter-terrorism from a cabinet-level position, and Wolfowitz saying not to bother with bin Laden, and Rumsfeld having been willing after 9/11 to ignore bin Laden in favor of attacking Iraq for no reason except he always wanted to (“There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.”). This is exactly the scenario that got the Spanish government booted, except that the Bushies were persuaded for PR reasons to invade Afghanistan before going after their real target. If Kerry can’t use this to his advantage, he doesn’t deserve the presidency, and I may have to refer to “President” Bush without the quotation marks.

Here’s a hint on how to do that: “There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently. That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And I think that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were based on uncertain intelligence ... a decision was made to go to war [then people said] 'Let's find a reason to do so'.” Jimmy Carter.

Under the provisions of the Palestinians With Disabilities Act, Israel had no choice but to kill Sheikh Yassin, the quadriplegic founder of Hamas. Took 3 missiles. They must be so proud.

But were they home-made missiles, like the bullets in the bizarre assassination attempt in Taiwan, if that’s what it was. Slate mentions a WashPost article that says President Chen did this before, 14 years ago appearing at election rallies with an IV claiming his enemies had tried to poison him. I can’t find any such article, not in the Post or via news.google or Lexis-Nexis. Has anyone else heard such a thing? The whole story gets weirder and weirder. Today they had to release footage of the president being operated on, to prove it actually happened.

A Nigerian woman goes into labor aboard a flight from Lagos to London. That must have been a fun flight (actually, it turned around and went back). The airline: Virgin. The jokes: painfully obvious. The kid’s name: Virginia, who will be able to fly free on Virgin until she turns 21.

The only sign language I know is a word I can't repeat here

This will surprise no one here, but the Bushies are trying to prevent the use of generic drugs for AIDS in the Third World, and will waste taxpayer dollars by buying the expensive stuff. What hadn’t occurred to me as an advantage of generics is that sometimes you don’t have to take as many pills. The AIDS cocktail consists of pills the patents for which are held by 3 different companies, so you have to take 6 pills. If it’s generic, they can combine it, and you only have to take 2.

In Melbourne, a bicycle thief turns out to have been a fetishist. Or something. His house was packed with 1,000 bicycles.

British Sign Language is being revised to remove its incredible racism, with someone monitoring what goes out on tv programs for the deaf. The Sunday Telegraph: “The abandoned signs include "Jewish", in which a hand mimes a hooked nose; the sign for "gay", a flick of a limp wrist; and "Chinese", in which the index fingertips pull the eyes into a slant. Another dropped sign is that for "Indian", which is a finger pointing to an imaginary spot in the middle of a forehead.” Astonishingly, the deaf lobby is complaining that this is discrimination, interfering with deaf culture. The new sign for Jews mimics a menorah (although deaf Jews prefer something imitating stroking a beard), and the gay one is an upright thumb on one hand in the palm of the other, wobbling from side to side, whatever that means. The sign for Germans is a fist held to the forehead a finger pointing up--the shape of one of those World War I Prussian spiked helmets. Now in China, the sign for a Westerner is the shape of round eyes.

Repulsive, so I’m linking to it:
http://www.einsteinshrugged.co.uk

Yasser Arafat says The Passion of the Christ is not anti-semitic. So that’s ok then.

Iraq sure do got a purty mouth

It’s a scandal: Saddam Hussein siphoned money off the UN Oil for Food program. Who does he think he is, Haliburton?

The guy in charge of protecting federal workers from discrimination, Special Counsel Scott Bloch says it’s ok to fire them for being gay, but not for conduct like going to a gay pride rally, although mostly because that’s not definitive proof that someone is gay. So at least there are standards for proving that someone is gay before canning their ass, although I’m not clear what those standards are. Since Bloch was previously on the Justice Department’s Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives, I’m guessing that if the federal employee floats...

SQUEAL LIKE A PIG: Today was the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. Bush says, “For Iraq it was a day of Deliverance.” Always knew Dubya reminded me of someone: just put a banjo in his hands...

I briefly mentioned that Coke was trying to market bottled water in Britain (95p per half liter bottle) that turned out to be tap water (0.03p), albeit purified. Actually, they fucked up even the task of putting Thames water in bottles at a 3000% mark-up: the purification process introduced a carcinogen in illegal quantities. The product has been pulled from the market after 2 weeks.

Donald Trump has applied for a trademark for the phrase “You’re fired.”

The Dept of Homeland Security has posted a new job opening: “liaison to the entertainment industry.” Salary up to $136,000 plus benefits.

The cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization

Francoist Spain--fascist Spain, if you will--was treated by the US as an ally, invited into NATO etc etc, without a word of criticism about the, you know, fascism. So maybe we should just shut up about appeasement already.

Also: do we have to call it “Freedom fly” now?

Kerry’s new slogan: “I have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization.”

What’s actually going on is that Spain is a stand-in for John Kerry. The message is that anyone who disagrees with Bush out loud is encouraging or “appeasing” the terrorists. Here’s a quote from Bush from today: “By speaking clearly, consistently and meaning what we say, the more likely the world will be more peaceful.” Was that line directed at Spain or Kerry? Kerry, but could be either, couldn’t it?

Evidently there really is a Karen Ryan, that was not an actress. But neither is she a reporter; she’s a PR flack. In fact, she often voices PR pieces disguised as news segments, just as she did this time for Medicare, for corporate clients. Which I think is actually worse.

Scalia, refusing to recuse himself from a case against Dick Cheney, writes in a 21-page explanation: “I never hunted in the same blind with the vice president.” I believe that’s what Bill once said about Monica.

Atrios reminds me that while Kerry won’t say which furriners would prefer him to Shrub as president, a year ago the Bushies were talking about some countries being secret COW countries.

The US upgrades Pakistan’s status to “major non-NATO ally” so we can sell it more weapons, like depleted-uranium shells, ignoring Pakistan’s nuclear testing, threats of war with India, it being run by a coup leader, protecting Al Qaida, selling nuclear technology to everyone with a MasterCard...

By the way, the one fact I never see in US media: not only was A. Q. Khan pardoned, but he was allowed to keep all the money he made selling nuclear technology illegally.

In the Russian presidential elections, 94.99% voted for Putin in Chechnya.

Man, you stop paying attention to Kosovo for a second, and...

We wanted animal rights

Scummy Republican dirty trick, so despicable even I didn’t expect it from them: blaming John Kerry for 9/11. Evidently he was told that security at Logan Airport was crap. The author of the following has evidently been on, where else, Faux News.

Going after public officials who break the law and license gay marriages is one thing (Wonkette: but the guy who married my parents is still at large), but ministers? When measures were described as being to “ban” gay marriage, I always thought that was over-statement. Actually though, arresting ministers (2 Unitarians in upstate NY) may be the logical next step, if you’re going to mix up state and religion so thoroughly. Of course, by the same logic you should be able to require that Catholic priests perform interfaith marriages and marriages by divorced people and so on. The crime the 2 ministers (both women, I now notice) committed is performing marriages under authority vested in them by NY state, and doing so without a license. This just shows what happens when you turn ministers of religion into agents of the government and license their activities, and why marriage needs to be made a totally civil function.

Quote from a former Guantanamo detainee: “After a while, we stopped asking for human rights. We wanted animal rights.”

Several more Baptist missionaries (the branch whose former leader described Muhammed as a paedophile) have been killed in Iraq.

Article detailing how Chalabi’s group gaslighted the American media.

And Henry Waxman has a report detailing Bush admin lies about Iraq. He even graphs them month by month. Download the pdf here.

Employees of the Dept of Heimat Security, who have nothing more important to do, have been told to look out for photo ops for Bush. Tom Tomorrow: “Homeland Security, working to keep you safe from terror--one photo op at a time.”

Speaking of Potemkin photo ops, there was an event which the Post headlined “U.S. Displays Nuclear Parts Given by Libya.” No story I’ve seen suggests that they showed anything more than a bunch of pipes, and some crates which they claimed contained important stuff.

The Columbia Journalism Review is tracking down tv stations that ran the fake news segments provided by the federal government hyping Medicare, complete with fake reporters. 6 so far.

Something I missed in Bush’s sanctimonious International Women’s Week speech: he mentioned a woman who had just been released from prison by Libya. Turns out, though, the chick’s actually a dude.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2993426915&category=1469

Spain is giving citizenship or residency to spouses, children and parents of those killed or injured in the Madrid bombings, showing a generosity the US never did. 1/4 of the dead were non-Spanish.

The NYT editorial page is almost exclusively devoted to whether the elections in Spain were a victory for Al Qaida (David Brooks and Edward Luttack) or not (Paul Krugman, in a column worth reading, mostly arguing that Bush has failed to go after terrorism in any serious way). Actually we have just witnessed that most awesome of political events, a peaceful transition of power effected by democratic elections. American (and British) conservatives are acting as if it was treason for people who didn’t like the Partido Popular to vote against it, because Al Qaida didn’t like it either. Doing something because it’s the opposite of what AQ wants isn’t any less an abdication of one’s democratic rights and responsibilities than is the opposite. Last year’s rallies in Spain against Spanish participation in the war were almost as large as last week’s rallies against terrorism, and polls suggest that the war wasn’t much more popular in Spain than the train bombings. The scary thing (attention John Kerry) is that the government was on track to be reelected anyway, and only lost when it cynically lied about a terrorist attack and tried to assign blame to people it wanted to attack anyway (attention George Bush). Also, the Spanish electorate proved capable of telling the difference between the war in Iraq and the “war” on terrorism, unlike Bush and a declining number of Americans.

Now I don’t think for a minute that the Spanish people voted the way they did as a bargain with terrorists to do what the terrorists wanted in exchange for not being bombed again. But even if they did, so what? Here’s a job for someone with Lexis-Nexis and a lot of free time: go through the writings of the clowns now chastising the Spanish and find where they said that restoring democracy or preventing genocide in Rwanda/Bosnia/Haiti/Sierra Leone/etc/etc/etc wasn’t worth a single American soldier’s life. And the Bush admin, which cynically bribes voters with tax cuts at the expense of the poor, ill and disadvantaged can hardly bitch about people voting to save themselves from being blown up. Especially when Spain was participating as a COW nation (why am I still the only one using that abbreviation)(Coalition of the Willing, if you’ve forgotten) in a war that was supposed to end Islamist terrorism, not bring it to Spain for the first time.

Or, to put it more succinctly, as I did yesterday, the critics of the Spanish electorate can fuck themselves.

You can't organize a war with lies

Sedna is not a planet. Pluto is not a planet either. I hope that settles that.

Bill Maher on why Bush should stop campaigning against Washington: “"Washington insider" is by definition a function of one's proximity to the president. That's you, Mr. Bush. You're ground zero. Ever wonder, sir, why everyone stands and they play music when you enter a room? When you're given check-writing privileges by the Federal Reserve, you just might be a Washington insider.”

Bush: “God loves you, and I love you. And you can count on both of us as a powerful message that people who wonder about their future can hear.”

DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO: Colin Powell, on Kerry’s claim that foreign leaders want him elected: “It's an easy charge, an easy assertion to make. But if he feels it is that important an assertion to make, he ought to list some names. If he can't list names, then perhaps he should find something else to talk about.” WMDs, Colin?

YOU’RE SO VAIN, I’LL BET YOU THINK THIS SONG IS ABOUT YOU: When Kerry made his open-mike comment that “These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen,” you’ll notice the R’s immediately assumed he was referring to them. Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.

You’ll remember that someone turned the sayings of Rummy Rumsfeld into poetry. Someone else has taken the next step of turning that poetry into songs, having it sung by a soprano and putting out a CD. Listen to the songs here.

A kid in Philadelphia has been summoned to face truancy charges, for not showing up at a school he doesn’t actually attend. The fun part is that he got grades for classes at the school he does not attend. Not especially good grades, which is something, although he got a B in gym.

Spain’s next prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, says of Bush and Blair, “You can’t organize a war with lies.” Um, sure you can. Evidently it’s considered a really big blow for Bush that Spain has moved from New Europe to Old Europe. And to those on the right (Andrew Sullivan, Tim Hames in the London Times, etc), who are calling this a win for bin Laden, go fuck yourselves. That’s all the refutation they deserve.

PS, it wasn’t Bush who called PM Aznar “president” this time, it was Condi Rice.

An article in new website gadflyer.com--because we need yet another political website, sigh--argues that since the media let Bush get away with an ad with a flat-out lie, that Kerry plans to raise taxes $900b, we can expect more lies.

Kind of folklore

Oh sure, I could say that Vladimir Putin was the president of Freedonia and you people wouldn’t blink twice, but show an unfamiliarity with a Muppet character...

The right-wing Spanish government loses the election badly. I’m still unclear (everyone is, really) how that happened. Was Aznar punished for his role in a deeply unpopular war in Iraq, and if so, was that because of the war itself or the Al Qaida response this week? Or was it because Aznar lied, and withheld evidence, to misattribute the bombings to ETA instead? All good reasons, of course, and that’s without going into the People’s Party’s domestic record, but I think we’d like to know here in the US whether it was the war or the lying. Turnout was 74%, up from 65% in 2000. The new PM’s grandfather was a Republican army officer killed during the Civil War.

On the other hand Russia today buried whatever remnants of democracy it had. It will be interesting to see how high the “none of the above” vote was. Turnout easily reached the 50% mark, thanks to giveaways of free haircuts, grocery discounts, movie tickets, vacation raffles, concerts, etc etc. Boy, I voted this month and all I got was a slightly sickly feeling.

I read a NY Times profile of John Kerry, from 1971. I’m not clear exactly what his story today is on how he joined up, but then he said in as many words that he was trying to stay away from being shot at. Which is why he joined the Navy, Vietnam not being a particularly naval sort of war up to that point. Unfortunately for him, 2 weeks before he got there, they decided to start sending the swift-boats he’d trained for up rivers (instead of patrolling safely off-shore), just to prove that there was nowhere Americans couldn’t go. And thus the 3 war wounds, which gave him the prerogative of asking to be sent home, which he did. There’s not much hint of the buddy-buddy, band of brothers, war nostalgia he’s exhibiting these days.

Jimmy Breslin reports on the massive engineering project of making sure that George Bush’s shoes never touch dirt.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld today says that it’s “kind of folklore” that anyone in the Bush admin said that Saddam was an immediate threat. Bloggers, start your google engines!

He also said that Bush ordered Powell and he not to get involved in the election campaign. That was on CBS. On Fox, Powell got involved in the election campaign.

Evidently the Republican candidate for Senate for Illinois used to be married to Star Trek Voyager’s 7 of 9. And there’s something in the child-custody court papers he doesn’t want made public.

This will be your only present soon

Many of the older internet users will have fond memories of a website in Switzerland where you could plug in text and have it translated into “jive.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Dialectizer, which does that and more. Here is the 1st paragraph of George Bush’s weekly radio address, rendered into Redneck:

Good mo'nin'. This hyar week, ah met wif intrepreneurs an' wawkers in Ohio an' Noo Yawk, an' talked t'them about how we are stren'thenin' South Car'lina's economah. On over th' past three years, South Car'lina's economah has faced a series of challenges: stock market decline, recesshun, terro'ist attacks, co'po'ate scan'als, an' th' unsartinties of war. Mah administrashun cornfronted them challenges squarely, an' acked boldly. We redooced taxes on families an' small businesses, we encouraged noo investment an' we is seein' th' results.

Jive:

Good mo'nin'. Dis week, ah' met wid entrepreneurs and wo'kers in Ohio and New Yo'k, and raped t'dem about how we are strengdenin' America's economy. Slap mah fro! Ova' de past dree years, America's economy gots faced some series uh challenges, dig dis: stock market decline, recession, terro'ist attacks, co'po'ate scandals, and da damn uncertainties of war. Ah be baaad... Mah' administrashun confronted dose challenges squarely, and acted boldly. Slap mah fro! We reduced taxes on families and small businesses, we encouraged new investment and we's seein' de results.

Cockney:

Good mornin'. Cor blimey guv! This week, I met wiv entrepreneurs and workers in Ohio and New York, right, and went on ter ffem about 'ow we are strengffenin' America's economy. Over the past free years, America's economy 'as faced a series of challenges: stock market decline, recession, terrorist attacks, right, corporate scandals, right, and the bloody uncertainties of war. Yer can't 'ave a knees-up wivout a joanna. Me administration confronted them challenges squarely, and acted boldly. We reduced taxes on families and wee businesses, we encouraged new investment and we're seein' the results.

Elmer Fudd:

Good mowning. Dis week, I met wif entwepweneuws and wowkews in Ohio and New Yowk, and tawked to them about how we awe stwengthening Amewica's economy. Ovew the past thwee yeaws, Amewica's economy has faced a sewies of chawwenges: stock mawket decwine, wecession, tewwowist attacks, cowpowate scandaws, and the uncewtainties of waw. My administwation confwonted those chawwenges sqwawewy, and acted bowdwy. We weduced taxes on famiwies and smaww businesses, we encouwaged new investment and we'we seeing the wesuwts. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!

Pig Latin (suddenly it makes sense):

Oodgay orningmay. Isthay eekway, Iyay etmay ithway entrepreneursyay andyay orkersway inyay Ohioyay andyay Ewnay Yorkay, andyay alkedtay otay emthay aboutyay owhay eway areyay engtheningstray America'syay economyyay. Overyay ethay astpay eethray yearsay, America'syay economyyay ashay acedfay ayay eriessay ofyay allengeschay: ockstay arketmay eclineday, ecessionray, erroristtay attacksyay, orporatecay andalsscay, andyay ethay uncertaintiesyay ofyay arway. Ymay administrationyay onfrontedcay osethay allengeschay uarelysqay, andyay actedyay oldlybay. Eway educedray axestay onyay amiliesfay andyay allsmay usinessesbay, eway encouragedyay ewnay investmentyay andyay e'reway eeingsay ethay esultsray.

Swedish chef (huh?):

Guud murneeng. Thees veek, I met veet intrepreneoors und vurkers in Ooheeu und Noo Yurk, und telked tu zeem ebuoot hoo ve-a ere-a strengzeeneeng Emereece's icunumy. Bork bork bork! Oofer zee pest three-a yeers, Emereece's icunumy hes feced a sereees ooff chellenges: stuck merket decleene-a, recesseeun, terrureest ettecks, curpurete-a scundels, und zee uncerteeenties ooff ver. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp! My edmeenistreshun cunffrunted thuse-a chellenges sqooerely, und ected buldly. Bork bork bork! Ve-a redooced texes oon femeelies und smell booseenesses, ve-a incuooreged noo infestment und ve're-a seeeeng zee resoolts. Um gesh dee bork, bork!

Another option was “moron,” but why gild the lily? Here’s the link, knock yourselves out:
http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/
And if you’re still getting any work done, here’s the Random Masturbation Synonym Generator.

The Post jumps in on the story of the actuary who was ordered not to give Congress the true estimates (did I just say true estimates?) for the costs of Medicare. He was told to "cease responding directly to Congress". The guy who threatened to fire him now says it was said in jest. Of course it was. This isn’t just lying, this is a violation of separation of powers, it is the sort of thing that makes our system of government unworkable. In short, if Bush personally knew about this, it would be an impeachable offense.

While elsewhere in DC, the Washington Times actually conducted a survey which purports to show that 60% of respondents think that Kerry would be the preferred presidential choice of terrorists (Bush 25%).

Cal. State Senator “Pete” Knight, who wrote the anti-gay-marriage initiative that passed in 2000, turns out to have a gay son (all anti-gay activists have gay children, following the Iron Law of Irony). I think you know where this one is going...

Be vewwy vewwwy quiet: NATO forces in Bosnia put up posters for Ratko Mladic’s birthday, with pictures of handcuffs, saying “This will be your only present soon.” No word on what NATO sent him on the other 8 birthdays he’s celebrated while they’ve been hunting him down.

Lebensraum: the raccoon population of Germany has hit 1 million, and growing rapidly. They were introduced into the country by Goering in 1934. Meanwhile, native rabbits are dying out.

The Bushies are trying to get Jamaica to expel Aristide, and should really shut up.

So if ETA planted the bombs in Madrid, the right wing benefits in tomorrow (Sunday)’s elections, and if it’s Al Qaida, the left wing benefits. But if the government lies and says it’s ETA when it isn’t, and the left is unwilling to start accusing them of it while the bodies are still being buried, which means waiting until after they lose the election...? The government, of course, has no such compunctions, and has been bombarding newspapers with calls insisting it’s ETA. I’m not sure how close the election was before, but Al Qaida may just have ensured the reelection of another right-wing government.

A quote from Desmond Tutu: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said: "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

Because we are Americans, we don't abuse people in our care

Amusing story in which a reporter tries to get the views of the audience at a Bush campaign stop, only to be told “No speak English.” Well, neither does Bush.

The 2 Russians being held by Qatar for a bombing that killed a Chechen leader have admitted being members of the Russian special forces. And that the bomb was smuggled in from Saudi Arabia, where Russia had sent it by diplomatic bag. Russia, by the way, is still holding the 2 judo people (or Graeco-Roman wrestlers, in today’s Times’ version).

The US says that the impeachment of the South Korean president is a domestic, internal matter and none of our concern. Unlike, say, Venezuela. I mentioned the US is funding opposition parties there--well, it’s also funding the group collecting signatures for Chavez’s impeachment.

Colin Powell, denying the charges of brutality by the British Guantanamo detainees: “Because we are Americans, we don't abuse people in our care.” I assume that’s an attempt at irony.

Utah, which does abuse people in its care, especially if they’re women, is charging with murder a woman who refused to have a C-section. As we all know, the opinions of doctors have the full force of law. The story makes little sense: prosecutors are saying it was a matter of vanity, that she didn’t want a scar. Except she’s had 2 previous C-sections, so she already has the scar. Note that the hospital she went to was Mormon, a fact mentioned in none of the stories, which are all pretending that Utah is a normal state. I’d love to know how this case was drawn to the attention of the prosecutors.


More Bush slogans, via Wonkette:

"I Wasn't Using Those Rights Anyway"

“600 Dead American Soldiers Can't Be Wrong!”

“No, Monkeys Could NOT Do Better!”

and my new favorite: "Don't Settle for the Lesser of Two Evils"

Letting bad leaders govern badly

Compare and contrast:

Scummy asst secretary of state Roger Noriega on Haiti, 2004 (or possibly the US, 2004): “We're not under any obligation to let bad leaders govern badly.”

Scummy national security adviser Henry Kissinger on Chile, c.1973: “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”


Robert Fisk’s columns, while still blocked to most of the non-paying public at the Independent site, can be found pretty quickly these days at www.robert-fisk.com, which I suspect exists purely to break copyright laws, but what the hell. For a while someone was posting them to the discussion pages of the Pravda website, which I thought was amusing.

Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said that he’d have corrected Cheney’s lies, but he only found out about them 2 months later. Way to keep on top of the news, George!

Evidently the US military has been buying cadavers which were devoted to science, and then blowing them up to test landmines. Which could be fun, I suppose, if you’re, like, high, but probably not what the donors had in mind.

I’d like an explanation for why the 5 Brits released from Club Med Guantanamo are in such terrible physical condition. Possibly we’ll get to read it in a British tabloid--the bidding war has already begun (£200,000 so far for one of them, I hear)(the problem will be whether they tell the truth. One is saying the US troops brought prostitutes in and paraded them naked in front of the prisoners. While I’m less inclined to dismiss that out of hand as being just too silly, it’s still pretty silly). And Fisk asks why the Achille Lauro guy suddenly dropped dead. And I’ve lost track of how many prisoners have been beaten to death already. And these are the ones we hear about. US forces have been seizing Iraqi leaders for more than a year now, and you never ever hear or see them again--including Saddam.

But the good news is that the US military has been cleared, by the US military, in a report they refuse to release, of blame for killing 9 children in an air strike in Afghanistan in December. I feel so reassured. They do assure us that the incident resulted in a change in the rules of engagement. They won’t tell us what those rules of engagement are, what they were, or how they changed. I feel so very reassured.

Chile has legalized divorce, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so. Next stop, in 130 years: gay marriage!

Bush’s nominee to be assistant secretary of commerce for manufacturing and services turns out to have himself laid off his workers and opened a factory in China. The nomination may be withdrawn. In favor of a 22-year old Indian in Bangalore who’ll do the job for 1/6th the salary and no benefits, which for some reason will make Thomas Friedman very happy.

Just click here. Do it, I command you!

The Bushies threatened the chief Medicare actuary if he gave Congress the real cost of Bush’s Medicare proposals.

Bush was at the ground-breaking ceremony for a 9/11 memorial. Atrios headline: Bush Picks up Shovel and Actually Makes it Work. Reminds me of a favorite line about his father: he’s a man who calls a spade a shovel-thing.

And speaking of like-father etc, if you haven’t heard the term Muhammad Horton yet...you will. (Or google it now)

Astonishingly, the UN Security Council rushes to condemn ETA for the Madrid bombing, with no evidence that ETA was responsible (the right-wing Spanish government, heading into elections, really wanted it to be ETA)(which it probably wasn’t).

Bush made a statement on it. I was holding my breath waiting to see if he’d screw up PM Aznar’s name and/or job title yet again. Fortunately, he didn’t mention him.

Evidently recalls of cars, as ordered by the government, are sometimes issued only in certain states, because the defect relates to, say, cold or high temperatures. And it’s not like automobiles are, you know, mobile or something.

Hugo Chavez releases leaked documents from the US’s National Endowment for Democracy, which is spending $1m a year to overthrow him. Excuse me, I meant to say to build democracy. By overthrowing him. Most of it is seems to be fairly anodyne. They talk about bolstering the party system when they mean funding the opposition. But I’d like to draw your attention to one word in this sentence: “strengthening political parties remains a critical part of any long-term solution.” Did you spot the problematic word? If not, try again, I’ll be waiting in the next paragraph. No peeking.










How many of you got “solution”? Democracy is a process, one which is continuous. There is no solution. If you talk about democracy as a solution, you aren’t really interested in democracy.