Free from its imprisonment and its vile occupation

The FBI’s justifications for its questioning of people planning to protest the R convention suggest that the Fibbies are thinking of themselves less as a law-enforcement agency than a secret police. The assistant director Cassandra (!!) Chandler said that of course they wouldn’t bother innocent people, but those about whom they had received "intelligence" that they were planning violent criminal activity or knew of such plans. Law-enforcement agencies don’t receive "intelligence"--and you know she gets off on calling it "intel" when she’s not talking to the press--they receive information; spy agencies receive intelligence. The arguments for these harassing activities are pre-emptive; you’re not enforcing the law when the law hasn’t been broken yet. This is the Bush Doctrine gone domestic: we don’t want the smoking gun to be a rotten egg thrown at Mayor Bloomberg, to paraphrase Condi Rice.

Speaking of preemption, Iran is talking about launching pre-emptive strikes against Israel and the US (they seem to mean the American troops in Iraq, who the Iranian defense minister described as "hostages") to prevent them launching preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. They want to get their preemption in first.

The Iraqi national conference is now history, I believe. We never knew who they were. We never even knew how many of them there were--the tame media said 1,300, but 100 or 200 never showed up, and there were supposed to be 1,000 originally, but the first choices looked too unrepresentative, so more were conjured up somehow. And then they rendered what was already a sham even shammier by rubber-stamping a slate of candidates (that is, a list was chosen as a whole, rather than individuals being voted on) for the 81 seats out of 100 they were allowed to choose (it was meant to be 80, but Chalabi has been kicked out, although how and by whom we do not know). There wasn’t even a vote, the list was just declared to have been adopted. It’s like they think they’re in New Jersey or something.

Sadr, without ever meeting with the delegation, said he accepted their offer for him to give up the insurgency. Only... the US military would have to stop shooting up the place. So the Allayi clique upped the ante. Using the sort of playground-bully language so popular in Iraq lately, the defense minister threatened to "teach them a lesson they will never forget," and "set this compound free from its imprisonment and its vile occupation." And where previously the Mahdi Army was supposed to just drop its weapons and leave Najaf, now he’s telling them they have to turn in their weapons and themselves. Almost like he doesn’t want a peaceful solution. He added that only Iraqi troops would enter the shrine, American forces would just bomb it (sorry, I mean provide air support), and that Iraqi commanders would be in charge of the operation and why is everyone laughing at that? Guardian. Al Jazeera.

Ha’aretz says that Shin Bet is still torturing Palestinians. They got hold of a document. And continuing the foreign vocabulary lessons, here’s a Hebrew term for a torture technique: "hatayat gav" (forcing someone to maintain a position in which the back is bent backwards).

And as long as we’re doing Ha’aretz, there’s an article about a memorial plaque to the victims of a terror attack on a bus last year. All the Jewish victims are called "sainted" on the plaque, but a Filipina woman is just called "Mrs." because she’s not as, you know, good, as the Orthodox Jews.

No comment: "Mass. Judge Denies Relief to Gay Couples" (AP headline).

I also liked a headline about Greek sprinters walking out of the Olympics (as opposed to sprinting out, geddit?). I believe these are the two who missed their drug test because they "got the munchies and just spaced it." By the way, here’s what I wrote about drugs and the Olympics 4 years ago.

The Kerry response to Bush’s line about opponents of Star Wars living in the past is, for once, an effective response, noting that Bush’s pre-9/11 position was that the greatest threat to the US wasn’t, oh, say, terrorism but missile attacks, which are like, so 20th century. And Sam Rosenfeld at the American Prospect’s blog points out that most Americans when polled don’t understand why missile defense won’t work, and think we already have it (when the Russians launched the first Sputnik, many Americans wanted it shot down, not understanding that if the US knew how to shoot a satellite down, it would have been able to launch one of its own).

Funny, I thought we were supposed to have handed Abu Ghraib back to the Iraqis (and wasn’t it supposed to be torn down, too?). So why was it American forces who fired on prisoners today, killing 2 and wounding 5?

Of course the baby had to sign a loyalty oath before they let him near Dubya.

A hell of a lot more determined

Sadr refused to meet the delegation from the national conference. At first I thought this was a PR mistake. But the delegation (which was flown out by the US military) was not going to Najaf to negotiate, whatever some news sources have said, but to issue an ultimatum for him to leave the Imam Ali shrine so he could be arrested and/or assassinated without pissing off a lot of Shiites and Sunnis. And the American forces didn’t take a break from bombarding the city, almost as if they didn’t want the mission to succeed or something.

Those forces are Marines, who replaced the Army this month and, as in Fallujah, decided they needed to mark their territory, a decision the NYT claims they made all on their own. Here’s my favorite bit: "The ferocity of the rebel resistance surprised the marines, who had seen Saddam Hussein's army disintegrate last year as they marched north to Baghdad. ‘The ones we fought the other day are a hell of a lot more determined,’ Lt. Scott Cuomo said." And you’ve been, what, napping in a dark cave in the year and half since then? Hadn’t heard they shoot back now? Slow learners, very slow learners.

The Village Voice’s very gay gossip columnist Michael Musto is amusing about McGreevey & Cipel.

Voter registration in Afghanistan is now up to 9 million. of the 9.8m. eligible. It won’t be really impressive until it hits 10 or 12 or 15 million. A story in today’s London Times describes a team of registrars entering a village with their bodyguard of American soldiers. Maybe it’s me, but when the Motor-Voter drive involves armored personnel carriers and begins with a fire-fight, I begin to wonder if the Afghans are being protected while they eagerly register, or are registering at the point of a gun held by a foreign national. Addendum: the Toronto Star says voter reg is actually over 10m. It also points out that women in burqas are best able to get extra voting cards, which puts the boast that 43% of registered voters are women in a new perspective.

Kak, can you spare a dime?

The US gov evidently still sucks at Arabic. A key piece of evidence in the prosecution of an imam in Albany, Yassin Muhiddin Aref, is that he was mentioned in a notebook found in a "terrorist camp" (like regular camp, but with fewer marshmallows) in Iraq as a "commander." Only it turns out the word used actually means "brother." The WaPo has this wrong, so I’ve removed the link to them as punishment: CNN & the NYT make it clear that the word was actually in Kurdish but written in the Arabic alphabet; the US was off by an entire language. The word is "kak," which doesn’t sound like a word that should be an honorific, but there you are. The document was not shown to the defense lawyers or the judge, who denied bail on the basis of it.

Bush is pushing Star Wars again, saying that Kerry, who would cut back on the program but not god forbid scrap it, is "living in the past." Bush, whose 20s and 30s are lost in an alcoholic haze, cannot be accused of that.

Onion headline: "Homosexual Tearfully Admits To Being Governor Of New Jersey."

1000 > 0

The State Dept says that claims of fraud in the Venezuelan referendum should be "fully investigated." As opposed to claims of fraud in collecting signatures for the holding of this referendum, which the US didn’t want investigated (and fewer people actually voted for recall than were claimed to have signed the petitions).

The US is "studying" whether Ariel Sharon’s approval of 1,000 new housing units in the settlements amounts to a violation of his promise that there would be no new housing units. Forget studying, State Department: just this once, I’ll let you cheat off my paper: 1,000 > 0.

A pro-democracy candidate for the Hong Kong (land of cricket fights) legislative council (elections in September), Alex Ho Wai-to (Alex?)(Ho?) says that while on a business trip in the mainland, "he was asleep in his hotel when police burst in. While they beat him up in the bathroom they produced a prostitute, took photographs and video film and put condoms and women's underwear on the bed." The police imprisoned him (without trial; they can do that) for 6 months of "re-education." Link.

The International Herald Tribune story adds that relatives on the mainland of HK citizens have been ordered to ask them to vote for pro-Beijing candidates and to prove it, taking cellphone-camera pictures of their ballots.

Foreign language lesson of the day: Stehpinkeln, Sitzpinkler.

YOU SAY TOMATO: John Kerry’s campaign website mentioned, until Friday, his time as vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, because even his staff can’t remember the difference between John Kerry and Bob Kerrey.

The designated driver

Quote of the day, a US army major frustrated by the limitations on the use of heavy weaponry in Najaf: "It’s frustrating, like being the designated driver."

Hurricane Charley is a test of the idea of the Dept of Homeland Security, into which FEMA was merged. Priorities at FEMA are therefore now set by the terrorist-fighters (according to a story in the Wall Street Journal). This isn’t the first time FEMA’s priorities have been distorted: the Reagan admin redirected it to the task of preparing for a winnable nuclear war, leaving it totally unable to deal with hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.

Of course, according to Jeb Bush, it’s not like we need any preparedness, weather satellites, etc, because "God doesn't follow the linear projections of computer models." "This is God's way of telling us that he's almighty and we're mortal." And what were you telling us when you signed all those execution orders?

The NYT has two thematically linked stories today. One is that the FBI is questioning activists about possible protests at the R convention, the other (Bob Herbert’s column) that Florida state police have been questioning elderly black voters and get-out-the-vote volunteers. The theme these stories share, of course, is intimidation. The Justice Dept’s Office of Legal Policy, most recently heard or for arguing that torturing terrorism suspects was ok, has issued a ruling that the chilling effect on 1st Amendment activities is outweighed by law & order concerns. Florida claims to be investigating something to do with absentee ballots, they won’t say what. Remember, this is the state where the Republican party is telling R’s to vote absentee to ensure their votes are counted.

CNN & other media have started using the phrase "anti-Iraqi forces" for the very-much-Iraqi resistance, Juan Cole points out. He cites journalist Nir Rosen reports that the phrase was developed by a PR company, but "they were told that no Iraqis would fall for it. So apparently it has now been retailed to major American news programs, on the theory that the American public is congenitally stupid." Cole has no link to the Rosen piece, and I can’t find it. Has anyone seen it? Anyway, a News.Google search for the phrase scores 712 hits.
Update: Tex of the UnFairWitness blog has suggested to me that Rosen communicated this information to Cole privately rather than in a published article, which seems to me on re-reading to be a fair reading of Cole & Angry Arab. It would be nice to have more than anecdotal evidence, given the phrase's pervasiveness (now, 8/17/04, 5:30pm, 717 news.google, 4,240 Google hits).

1,600 Palestinian "security prisoners" in Israeli prisons have gone on hunger strike for better conditions. Prison guards have been barbequing meat and baking bread within smelling distance of the prisoners. It would be nice to know what percentage of them are being held without charge or trial. I don’t think they’re planning to fast to death, although they have been threatened with forcible feeding, something which the British prison system, to name one, stopped doing to sane hunger striking prisoners in 1974. The US has done it in Guantanamo, but generally won’t in mainland prisons.

Najaf police, no longer pretending to have ordered journalists out of the city for their own safety, have said they will shoot any reporters who leave their hotel.

Unimaginable under Baath Party rule

Shiites at the Iraqi national conference loudly protested the forthcoming Battle of Najaf. The WaPo, oddly, calls it a “scene of political activism that would have been unimaginable under Baath Party rule.” Really? I think Saddam would have allowed protests against an American invasion of Najaf.

The attempt to overthrow Hugo Chavez by referendum has failed, and I am of two or more minds. I don’t especially like Chavez, but he pisses off some of the people I like to see pissed off, is what it amounts to. The US and the National Endowment for Democracy has been going after him using all the techniques familiar from their campaign against Allende in Chile in the early ‘70s, white-skinned Venezuelan capitalists are horrified at having a government that doesn’t reflect their interests. But the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Maybe the best approach is regional rather than national: what’s best for South America as a whole? The transition over the last 20 years from military dictatorships to something resembling representative democracies has been impressive, but the veneer of democratic sensibility may not be very deep. From the perspective of democracy, events in Venezuela are close to a wash. Before winning office, Chavez headed a failed military coup; he should never have been allowed to run, but that was 6 years ago and he’s won several elections since then. His instincts are authoritarian and his followers use intimidatory violence, but he hasn’t moved against the newspapers, radio and tv stations which are almost uniformly hostile to him. He has trashed the institutions of government, courts and so on, but they were controlled by the country-club elite, but Chavez’s so-called populism is not embodied in any institutions--with any leader, you can gauge their relationship to real democracy by asking what would happen if they died suddenly in a plane crash, and Chavez (like Putin, say) does not score well there.

As for the referendum, well, Chavez allowed it to occur, but only after many delays, but I don’t believe that the opposition actually collected the required number of signatures (the US told the election commission it should ignore such “technicalities”). The opposition won’t accept the results, and Chavez probably wouldn’t have if it had gone the other way (assuming that the counting was reasonably fair, of course). Neither side is committed to democracy, both sides have shown a willingness to resort to coups and see the electoral process only as one weapon in their arsenal. Whatever works. Whether the electorate viewed the process so cynically and instrumentally, I’m less sure.

At any rate, the referendum in Venezuela would probably also have been unimaginable under Baath Party rule.

Some people with blogs are never going to get famous

"The Washingtonienne," the blogger who got fired from Sen. Mike DeWine’s office for writing about her complicated sex life, is quoted by the WaPo: "I was only blogging for, what, less than two weeks? Some people with blogs are never going to get famous, and they’ve been doing it for, like, over a year. I feel bad for them." Um, thanks, Jessica, ‘preciate it.

And in Monday’s WaPo, the results of Al Kamen’s In the Loop Carpetbagger Deflector contest for a sound bite for Alan Keyes to explain away charges of carpetbaggery after he denounced Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate run as "destructive of federalism." My favorite of the winners: "Did I say federalism? I meant FedEx -- when you absolutely, positively have to get a black Republican overnight."

If you do not leave by the deadline we will shoot you

The Indy & Daily Telegraph explain how the order for foreign journalists to leave Najaf was made: they were invited to the police chief’s office on false pretenses, told that while they couldn’t be arrested, their drivers and translators would be (and that the order came from the interior ministry). When they failed to comply, armed police were sent to tell them to leave or be shot. The excuse offered for the order was that a car full of dynamite had been found outside the hotel; even the usually gullible Telegraph doesn’t buy that one. And it was the police who made their point by firing shots at their hotel.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld announces a plan to make the deployment of troops more flexible. It will take several years to implement. All the flexibility of Rummy doing the limbo. I tried to look up his speech at the DOD website, www.defenselink.mil, but it’s stuck at August 3, more of that famous Pentagon flexibility.

An Iraqi solution--shudder

I’m a little unclear about the whole Najaf thing at this point, and I’m not getting a lot of help. The WaPo was told that decisions about timing of military operations were made not by the US but by Allawi, in a blatant bit of playacting--oo, he’s so powerful he can tell the Marines to stop and they will--AND THEY FELL FOR IT! The LA Times quotes a US major, "Allawi has decided there has to be an Iraqi solution to the problem." Ah, Vietnamization. Negotiations failed; the Allawi clique (dammit I can’t call it a government, it’s not one, and I feel silly using the word puppet over and over) is blaming Sadr for refusing their demands that his forces give up their weapons and leave Najaf (it was never clear to me what the Allawiistas were offering in exchange for this complete surrender), and for Sadr failing to meet with them personally, which they were curiously insistent on, if you get my drift.

And Najaf’s police chief has ordered all foreign media to leave the city immediately. Maybe he’s just planning a surprise party and doesn’t want it ruined.

Meanwhile, the "National Conference," yet another group of Iraqi "leaders" who were actually appointed by the Americans, will meet in Baghdad today after several postponements. The 1,300 conferees will choose a 100-member national assembly, whose first task, if I understand traditional Iraqi practices, will be to bury the bodies of the other 1,200. Oh stop it, like you weren’t thinking the same thing. Shiite groups including Sadr’s are not participating, and it's not that clear who is. Al Jazeera, exaggerating only slightly, says "The names of the ‘representatives’ have not been made available, nor is it known who they represent or who has chosen them." (Correction: actually they're choosing only 80 members, the other 20 will be from the American-appointed governing council.)

McGreevey had polls done on the "I am a gay American" line. Now why would a guy resigning his office and presumably leaving political life need to do that? And I wonder what other slogans they tested. Still, it would say something about the progress of tolerance in America if he could make this about his gayness rather than corruption, if Golan Cipel could be the distraction that a black and white cocker spaniel was for Richard Nixon, and let’s not make a big deal about the "cocker spaniel" thing, sometimes a breed of dog is just a breed of dog.

Not very sensitive

John Kerry is such a limp noodle when it comes to responding to attacks. This is his answer to Dick "Mr. Sensitive" Cheney: "I don't think it's very sensitive to have a vice president who has secret meetings with the polluters who write the laws. And I don't think it's very sensitive to expect the wealthy to shift the tax burden to the average American." And Edwards’s response was that Cheney was "talking about a man who is carrying shrapnel in his body today. His is talking about a man who spilled his blood for the United States of America." What’s that, the you-can’t-hit-me-I’m-wearing-glasses defense? Honestly, wouldn’t "shove it" have been so much more effective?

The R’s in Joisey are quite correct that McGreevey is timing the date his resignation goes into effect in order to game the election laws to avoid a special election, much as Rep. Rodney Alexander timed his conversion to make sure the D’s didn’t have time before the filing deadline to replace him. And in general, I’m in favor of elected leaders actually being, ya know, elected, but the special election would have been between candidates chosen in smoke-filled rooms (which in NJ probably are actually, by-God smoke-filled) rather than by a primary process.

Both the NYT & WaPo have good, long articles on the Bush admin’s undermining of regulations on health & safety, the environment, etc etc. There isn’t much overlap between the articles (the Post’s is the 1st of a series), because there are so many examples to choose from. Compare and contrast how the powers of regulators at OSHA, the EPA, Labor, etc etc (one might add the reduction of audits of the rich at the IRS) have been reduced to nothing, while those of cops, the FBI, CIA, military interrogators and border patrol agents, who this week were given incredible autonomy to deport illegal aliens without any hearing at all, have been greatly augmented. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, if the detention and torture don’t get you, the monoxide will.

Imperialism and imperial hubris

Giving a press conference on Al Jazeera, Muqtada al-Sadr says, "Najaf has triumphed over imperialism and imperial hubris." That would be a set-back for George Bush, whose slogan is "4 More Years of Imperialism and Imperial Hubris." I wonder how much of the timing of the start & stop siege of Najaf is related to the Republican convention. That may also be behind the ban on Al Jazeera: preventing a split-screen presentation of pictures of the convention and of the bombing of whatever Iraqi city we’ll be bombing that week, like the 1968 D convention and the protestors. The whole world isn’t watching, if our tame censors can do anything about it.

Speaking of imperialism and imperial hubris, Colin Powell, in an interview with the Atlantic Monthly, says, "The United States believes it has worldwide obligations. Our European friends have never felt that that was their destiny or their obligation." How ignorant of history do you have to be to make a statement like that. Wait, it gets better: "The average European citizen, looking around, sees some of these out-of-the-way places like Afghanistan and the Balkans and Iraq." Who do you think used to go to war with each other on a regular basis to take those areas as colonies?

Speaking of hubris, Niyazov, the dictator of Turkmenistan who has exceeded even my taste for wacky news stories, has ordered a palace entirely constructed of ice to be built in his hot central Asian country. The Indy calls him neo-Stalinist, although neo-Dr. Evil seems more like it. It quotes one of his poems: "I am the Turkmen spirit reborn to bring you a golden age. I am your saviour ... My sight is sharp - I see everything. If you are honest in your deeds, I see this; if you commit wrongdoing; I see that too." So maybe it’s neo-Santa Clausism, which would explain the ice palace.

Another nuance

Imagine an election campaign, indeed imagine a country, in which smart was considered a desirable quality (and I know that’s like Albert Brooks in "Broadcast News" wishing for a world in which insecurity and desperation made us more attractive). What if Kerry had responded to "my opponent has found a new nuance" with "I see President Bush has lost another nuance."

CACI international, which supplied interrogators to Abu Ghraib, has conducted an internal investigation and decided that none of its people did anything wrong. And they just got their contract extended. What makes this more significant than your standard corporate CYAery, as the NYT fails to make clear, is that the US military has made clear that any punishment of torture by civilian contractors is up to their employers.

I don't fancy being kidnapped again

The Bush campaign commercials are getting odder and odder. This week alone, there was "Solemn Duty," with George and his faithful robot Laura talking about parents having to choose on 9/11/01 which child to pick up first (in their case, it would be the less slutty twin). Then "Ownership," in which Shrub says, "if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America." Paul Krugman says roughly what I thought when I saw the ad, that Bush is unconsciously echoing arguments made in the early American republic in favor of a property qualification for the franchise (not banned until the 15th Amendment) that only those with "a stake in the nation" should vote. (Some states preferred a tax-paying qualification, but, as Chimp Boy pointed out, rich people can always figure out how to dodge taxes.) And now there’s an ad, "Victory," that will be shown on tv screens in health clubs next to the treadmills and exercise bikes, boasting that because of the Bush wars, two former dictatorships, Iraq and Afghanistan, will be represented at the Olympics. So that makes it all worthwhile. Evidently, "Freedom is spreading throughout the world like a sunrise." As a metaphor, isn’t that a little too cyclical?

In the same week that Russia eliminates almost all benefits for the elderly, veterans and the disabled in favor of tiny amounts of worthless money, IN THE SAME FUCKING WEEK, MIND YOU, Putin announces a 40% increase in the military budget.

Quote of the day, from James Brandon, the Sunday Telegraph reporter kidnapped and then released, on why he is now leaving Basra: "I don't fancy being kidnapped again."

I really like this crowd

On Larry King, Bush finally explains the 7 minutes: "I was collecting my thoughts and I was sitting with a bunch of young kids, and I made the decision there that we would let this part of the program finish." Collecting his thoughts? How long could that take? there are so few of them. On the other hand, they’re very tiny.

The attack on Najaf, which I believe is called Operation Sensitive Resolve, has been postponed in favor of trying to starve the city into submission, but sensitively, or as Colin Powell puts it, "Our forces in Najaf are squeezing the city." He says the insurgents "don't understand the spirit of peace and reconciliation" and therefore have to be starved, bombed and shot, in a spirit of peace and reconciliation.

The Vatican comes out against Turkey being admitted to the European Union, saying it should go play with the other Muslim children instead.

A detail I missed about Cheney’s speech in Albuquerque: Dick "Mr. Sensitive" Cheney told the crowd, who had been required to sign a loyalty oath, stand in lines in the hot NM sun and go through a metal detector, "I really like this crowd!" Sure, they’ll put up with massive amounts of crap, what’s for a politician not to like?

Speaking of being willing to stand in lines: I’ve suggested before that Argentinian ants might be the end of civilization as we know it. Of course we never heard another word about the ants in Europe, but a column of ants 60 miles wide was just discovered under Melbourne. As in Europe, the ants have stopped fighting among themselves, as they do in South America, so their numbers are growing exponentially. Aussies call the laid-back ants metrosexuals.

I love my dead "gay American" governor of Joisey

Jim McGreevey, the governor of the state of big hair, resigns his, ahem, post, because, to quote Keith coming out to his workmates on Six Feet Under, "I'm gay. I have a boyfriend. I sleep with men. Okay? I have a lot of sex and it's really, really gay."

A quick googling of McG’s presumed lover Golan Cipel suggests that this was an open secret. There are references in newspapers to Cipel as McG’s "special friend," questions about why he was getting special treatment, etc.

Nuance, idn’t that a French word?

William Saletan goes into Kerry’s record of statements on Iraq to find out what he means, because god knows Kerry is incapable of making it clear himself. Saletan says at length what I said in 3 sentences on Tuesday.

The frightening thing about Kerry on this issue is that he’s letting Bush run rings around him, suckering him into a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game. Bush spent days goading him about not having said whether he’d have voted for war authorization knowing what he knows now, as if Kerry’s failure to answer a hypothetical question, something Bush always refuses to do, is a sign of wishy-washiness. When he does give an answer, Bush again attacks him, this time for finding "a new nuance." Nuance is a dirty word to the Bushies--two years ago I said that "Don’t nuance it to death," the response of an unnamed official when no one could understand a Bush comment about Israel, should be the new Bush motto.

The thing, though, about this particular nuance--that he voted to authorize war in order to give the "president" a stronger hand in negotiations--is that while the Bushies now pretend not to know the difference between voting for that authorization and voting for the actual war we got, that was their stance at the time; they kept saying that they hadn’t made any decision to go to war, remember?

If Kerry can be portrayed as agreeing with Bush, Bush wins. If Kerry can be portrayed as disagreeing with Bush, or even presenting his own position, which is what you do in an election, Bush wins, attacking Kerry for "sending mixed signals" and fucking up Bush’s glorious little war: "The mission is not going to be completed as quickly as possible if the enemy thinks we’re going to be removing a substantial number of troops in six months." Here in California, in this week’s senatorial debate, R challenger Bill Jones absolutely refused to express any opinion on the war, presumably the most important issue this election year, on these grounds.

The same heads-I-win etc logic works in the appointment of Porter Goss, forcing the D’s to give him a pass, which he does not deserve on his merits, rather than be accused of obstructionism. So the D’s acquiesced in Bush’s portrayal of any oversight, much less disagreement with his policies, as illegitimate.

Friendly militias

Wolfowitz wants to build a "global anti-terrorist network of friendly militias," bypassing insufficiently pliable national militaries in favor of building up warlords and death squads and you’ve got to be fucking kidding. He said this to the House Armed Services Committee, but of the 15 stories on this subject turned up in a news.google search ("friendly militias" or "wolfowitz +militias"), none are from an American source.

Voter registration in Afghanistan, like this year’s opium crop, has surpassed expectations. And by surpassed expectations, I mean they faked so many of them, after such a poor initial showing, that no one can keep a straight face. Except for Secretary of War Rummy Rumsfeld, visiting Afghanistan yesterday, who said "Given the campaign of intimidation and attempts to dissuade people from registering, the surge in registration has to be a very vivid demonstration that the Afghan people are determined to make democracy work." Oh yeah, it just "has to be." Couldn’t be anything else.

The WaPo’s Washington Briefing section finds that since the start of 2003, Bush has only mentioned bin Laden 10 times in public appearances, 6 of those in response to questions. The last time he spoke about him at any length was in March 2003, when he downplayed his importance--"Terror is bigger than one person." Unlike, presumably, the war on terrorism, which his campaign tells us every day is personified by one, oddly chimp-like, person.

Rich, white and wishy-washy

The White House has a pamphlet, "President George W. Bush: Friend of the American Jewish Community," which I can’t find online, although they emailed it as a pdf to Jewish leaders, some of whom were quoted, without permission, as if they supported Bush, but do not. And there’s this: "For Yasser Arafat, the message has been clear. While he was a frequent White House guest during the last administration, he has never been granted a meeting with President Bush." And evidently this was put out at gov expense, not by the campaign. Anyone know where a copy exists online?

Speaking of pandering, this is Bush’s "W Stands for Women" site. With 140 million women in this country, the 4 listed under "Women supporting W" include a former Miss America (!), and the vice president of West Group Commercial Real Estate. And it leads off with this condescending quote from Shrub: "Our country, my administration and my own life are improved and enriched by strong, capable women, from my wife, daughters and mother to senior members of my White House team. I’m proud that our administration has more women in senior positions than any administration in the history of our country. America’s wives, mothers and daughters bring strength, dignity, compassion and integrity to our communities and our country." He really does have difficulty seeing women other than as appendages of men. Would he refer to Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Powell as "America’s husbands, fathers and sons"? Or not mention a single specifically women’s issue, as opposed to security, the economy, although it does mention education, as if women are allowed to be concerned for their children, but not for themselves.

And still speaking of pandering, here’s a WaPo article on ads that a white businessman, J. Patrick Rooney, who profits greatly from Bush policies, is running on black radio stations attacking Kerry for being "rich, white and wishy-washy", and Teresa Heinz-Kerry for having commented that with her Mozambican roots she could be called African-American, although Rooney, who I repeat is white, says in the article that he goes to an "all-black church." OK, stupid and silly, but... rich, WHITE, and wishy-washy? Is attacking a candidate’s race ok if he’s white?

We know from the recent Tigger-bad-touching case that the actors in character costume at Disney World have limited range of vision and motion. So OSHA has decided that maybe they shouldn’t be next to moving vehicles, and fined Disney a whopping $6,300 for an incident February where "Pluto" got his foot caught in a float at the "Share a Dream Come True" parade and was run over and killed, which for all we know was his dream, I mean if your job is to dress as Pluto, you must have pretty weird dreams. But my point was...$6,300. You may lose respect for me, but I have to say that fine is pretty Mickey Mouse.

Happy no matter what

I’ve gotten to the point where I can mostly ignore the banner ads Blogspot puts at the top of my site (a small price for the free hosting). Still, what’s with the one "Achieve personal freedom, learn how to be happy no matter what"? Self-help and New Agey goodness via "The Toltec Way." I guess that gets points for originality. But how did the Google program pick that particular ad? Did it analyze my site’s content, decide it was depressing as hell and that people reading it would need to "learn how to be happy no matter what"?

The British Court of Appeal will allow evidence obtained by torture, at Guantanamo, to be used to allow the home secretary to detain people indefinitely as terrorism suspects without charge or trial. The torture evidence was the sole evidence. Lord Justice John Laws (the other judge is named Lord Justice Pill; it’s like a very weak Monty Python sketch) says that if the home sec "has neither procured the torture nor connived at it, he has not offended the constitutional principle which I have sought to outline." So that’s ok then. And that he has no "duty of solemn inquiry as to the interrogation methods used by agencies of other sovereign states." Jesus wept.

Elsewhere in the British criminal justice system, a man on temporary release from prison (not clear why; he is supposed to be serving a life term for rape and sexual assaults) bought a lottery ticket. He won £7 million, so he was immediately moved from an open prison to a high-security one because with all that money, he now poses a flight risk. And his victims get to sue him for the money.

Turns out that Rep. Rodney Alexander of Louisiana, who switched parties from D to R last week at the last minute, to keep the D’s finding someone to run against him, was violating LA. election law.

A guest at a wedding in the Philippines is killed, cooked and served to the other wedding guests. The family of the bride were annoyed because he had touched her bottom.

Ok, maybe Russert is only a semi-douchebag of liberty

Paul Wolfowitz thinks Pakistan has suffered enough on the whole spreading-nuclear-technology-to-anyone-with-a-MasterCard thing (by the way, a little-reported fact that puts Pakistan’s seriousness about this into perspective: not only was A Q Khan not prosecuted, he was allowed to keep all the money he made selling nuclear secrets). Wolfy wants to resume training Pakistani military officers in US military academies because, he says, this is the best way to increase our wonderful influence and decrease that of the Islamic fundies. See, the military is really powerful in Pakistan, so we should try to influence the military and not, say, work to reduce its power and restore (semi-)democracy. About the supposed beneficial influence of military to military contacts, I have just four words: School of the Americas.

Martin Sieff in Salon has a list of 21 mistaken assumptions Neocons made about Iraq. Put all together like that, it’s kind of awesome.

OK, maybe I owe a partial apology to Tim Russert, if it’s true that all he told the special prosecutor was that he hadn’t been leaked to. That’s not the same as naming names, but even helping in a process-of-elimination investigation is wrong.

And even my credibility

The WaPo has misquoted an attack made by Bush on Kerry today. It’s the usual flip flop thing about Iraq. The Post has Shrub beginning a sentence, "After months of questioning my motives and my credibility..." Now, I saw those remarks on McNeil-Lehrer and he actually said "questioning my motives and EVEN my credibility," which is a much more revealing comment because it is so arrogant of him to think that his credibility is beyond doubt.

First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

Remember the scenes in Fahrenheit 911 with the military recruiters? The Post’s Sunday magazine has a good article on the subject. It’s all very Glengarry Glen Ross.

Billmon covers why Porter Goss is such a crappy choice to head the CIA for 5 months.

Saletan at Slate has an interesting article about the politicization of stem cell research, which reminds me that I meant to mention Laura Bush’s atrocious little intervention into that debate, which was to accuse proponents of stem cell research of offering false hope that cures are right around the corner. What the hell is she saying, that medical research shouldn’t be conducted unless it will produce immediate results? Where would we be if Alexander Fleming had had that short an attention span?
(Update: Good Michael Kinsley piece on this, ending "While she battles rhetorically against false hopes, he (George) works to ensure that there is no hope at all.")

The US military declares central Najaf a free-fire zone, ordering all civilians out.

Because of the reintroduction of the death penalty in Iraq, Danish troops there have stopped handing over prisoners, who might be executed for, say, "endangering national security." The British, while ostensibly opposing the death penalty decision, are not following suit. The US...actually, has anyone of significance in the US gov even been asked about capital punishment?

Dammit, I didn't get a free ice-cream sundae on my birthday

Kerry’s position on the Iraq War this week, as I understand it, is that he was right to vote to give Bush a blank check, even if he’d known that all of the intel was cooked, but Bush was wrong to use it the way he did. Kerry is obviously looking towards the future, when he might want to lie to Congress and be given absolute power. You have to keep those options open.

Tim Russert = Elia Kazan.

One-point plan.

The ACLU reports that the federal government increasingly bypasses privacy laws by using private companies to collect data on Americans. Of course we know about airlines passing along info on passengers to the gov since 9/11, sometimes without being asked. But the ACLU (in a pdf that keeps stalling when I try to download it) says the practice has grown tremendously, with the gov buying data, using court orders or simply asking for it. I remember something from early in the Reagan administration. There used to be an ice-cream parlor chain called Farrell’s, one of those olde-timey things where the staff wear straw hats and striped shirts, there are too many banjos, and you bring children on their birthdays, when they get a free sundae. Farrell’s was found to be handing its birthday list over to the Selective Service, which was harassing people who hadn’t signed up for the draft on their 18th birthday. This was discovered because people had, naturally, made up false identities to scam a free ice cream sundae.

The NYT has an editorial today against the banning of Al Jazeera in Iraq. It is against it, as am I. But the article makes some rather odd assumptions while trotting out its clichés. It says twice that "Owie" Allawi is "supposed" to be moving Iraq towards democracy (actually, the second reference is that he is supposed to be merely "pointing the way toward a more democratic Iraq," possibly in the manner of pointer breeds of dog which have been bred to indicate the location of a bird that has been shot out of the sky. And really, "more democratic Iraq"? Could you possibly set that bar lower?). He’s "supposed to" be doing that? Whose supposition is that? The NYT says that he "has begun yielding to the same kind of authoritarian mentality that has stifled democracy in too many neighboring states." Too many? What’s the right number? So are we meant to believe that Allawi was a liberal democrat who is being corrupted by power? Where’s the evidence that Allawi’s mentality was ever anything other than authoritarian? And when was democracy stifled in a Middle Eastern state; when was there ever a democracy to be stifled? The problem is that the Times is assuming that democracy is the normal state of affairs if there is no untidy interference from tyrants, ethnic strife, etc. That, I think, is what they really meant by "supposed to": that the natural flow of events is towards democracy, like one of the laws of the universe: a nation-state in motion tends to moves towards a state of representative democracy and civil rights. This is not the case. Democracy is hard, democracy is not natural or inevitable. This is not to say that Arabs are incapable of democracy--that straw man Bush keeps trotting out--but the laws of history do not ineluctably lead towards American-style democracy, and it will be much harder work to create representative democracy and, especially, liberal democratic values, than it would be to create another dictatorship. Only if you own up to that do you have any chance of accomplishing it.

The slaveholder's position

Fay Wray has died. ‘Twas old age killed the beauty.

Zambia decides that democracy is literally too expensive, postponing local government elections for 2 years.

Bush says that there’s no point in raising taxes on the rich because "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway."

Alan Keyes says Barack Obama’s support for abortion rights is "the slaveholder’s position." No, you’re thinking of Jack Ryan, your predecessor as R candidate for Senate for Ill.; he’s the one who was into whips and chains. He also said something about a victory for him being a victory for God. Hard to believe they actually had to go out of state to find a candidate like this.

Last week I advocated smiling on passport photos to screw up the biometrics. But this is better: a German has won the right to stick out his tongue (like the Albert Einstein picture, you know the one) in his passport photo.

This business we call show trial

In my previous post, I didn’t link the two Iraq stories together as strongly as I should have. The issuing of warrants against the Chalabis while they were out of the country--and both warrants at the same time though for very different crimes, as a Daily Kos writer points out--tells you everything you need to know about the Interim Puppet Government’s willingness to use the criminal justice system against its political foes, like Karl Rove subordinating the federal government here to the dictates and timing of the Bush "re"-election campaign. Now apply that lesson to the death penalty: people willing to distort the justice system arming themselves with the ultimate sanction to use against their political, clan, ethnic and religious enemies. Roll on the show trials. (Update: shorter version of this argument, from Wonkette: "Hey, it's an unelected, unaccountable government without a functioning justice system and the ability to kill whomever it deems guilty! That seems familiar somehow.")

Also, according to the NYT, it’s broader than I realized: the death penalty applies to attacks on infrastructure, "endangering national security," and activities related to biological and chemical warfare, which I take to mean this will be applied retroactively. And the American-appointed Allawi will begin this wave of executions under the protection of the American military, which makes them our executions.

Alan Keyes figures out a way to justify running for Senate from a state not his own: Barack Obama is a bigger traitor, not to his state, but to "the declaration of principles our country was founded on," by supporting abortion rights. In fact, Keyes is a little like Abraham Lincoln: "You have to ask yourself: Are we in a position where if I do nothing the principles of national union will be sacrificed?" Pompous much? The WaPo explains why the Republicans’ cynical choice of Keyes is a travesty, and they do it without even once using the word whacko, which is the difference between a newspaper and a blog.

Apparently I threatened somebody who subsequently was killed

Iraq restores the death penalty, supposedly only until stability is restored. Because capital cases are most likely to be fairly and dispassionately tried in trials held during a civil war. The ultimate penalty (unless you count having Lynndie England laugh and point at your genitals) will be applied for murder, kidnapping and drug-running. It is unclear if it applies to Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi government also issues arrest warrants for Ahmed Chalabi and his nephew Salem Chalabi, who is Saddam’s prosecutor, for money laundering (or counterfeiting, depending on what story you read) and murder, respectively. The murder is that of an official in the finance ministry, who had prepared a report on the Chalabis’ seizure of properties. The government’s level of seriousness about this can be seen by the fact that they announced this while both Chalabis were out of the country. Salem "Witchtrials" Chalabi told CNN that "apparently I threatened somebody who subsequently was killed." Apparently?

Newly released Nixon tapes suggest that he delayed the inevitable military withdrawal from Vietnam in order not to hurt him in the 1972 elections. Henry Kissinger talked on the tape (8/3/72) about finding "some formula that holds the whole thing together a year or two"; by January 1974, he said, "no one will give a damn." Comparisons with Iraq are obvious.

US officials are trying to shift the blame for leaking the name of the Pakistani undercover agent onto a Pakistani intelligence official.

Mexico has found 2 men on its Most Wanted list. They were in jail. One of them, according to a story which provides no further information, is known as "the bullet swallower."

Just listened to a political humor program (excuse me, humour programme), "The Now Show," on the BBC website, thanks to a mention of it in the comments at lefti.blogspot.com. Rather good. Some of the references may be too British for Americans, but even if you decide not to listen to the whole 30 minutes (the current program will be online until the next one comes out Friday), don’t miss a song by Mitch Benn about 25 minutes in about the politics of fear. "Crap your pants for America, foul yourself for freedom..."
Update: the program has now been replaced. The lyrics are available online, but it's not the same thing. It wouldn't hurt to email the BBC about putting the song online permanently; there's certainly a demand for it, as I can testify from the number of people reaching this site through Google searches for it (I've become the go-to guy for Crap Your Pants for America; I'm so proud).

Update to the update: the lyrics are no longer online anywhere, so I'll append them here:

Crap your pants for America


We live in troubled times
Our enemies surround us
We must be vigilant
To the dangers all around us
There's evil little furr'ners
And perverts here as well
It's your patriotic duty
To be as scared as hell

So crap your pants for America
Foul yourself for freedom
Soil your shorts for the USA
Crap your pants for America
Only Dubya can save us
And we'll hide beneath our beds, and quake and pray

It could happen any minute
It could happen any place
So gaze with deep suspicion
In every stranger's face
Your government is struggling
They've run out of ideas
They've run out of excuses
All they've got left is fear

So crap your pants for America
Foul yourself for freedom
Soil your shorts for the USA
Crap your pants for America
The land of the paranoid
The panic-stricken, jittery, and free

I am a Disaster Action Kid, bow down before me!

Turkmenistan, home to the looniest dictator of all the loony dictators in all the former-Soviet Central Asian dictatorships, now has the plague, possibly because most of the health-care professionals were fired, and all those with foreign credentials. The government has responded by making the word plague illegal.

In South Africa, the National Party of Verwoerd, P.W. Botha, F.W. DeKlerk and Vorster, the party that built apartheid and imprisoned Nelson Mandela, will dissolve itself and be absorbed by the ANC. It got 1.65% at the last elections. President Thabo Mbeki calls the Nats a “party of oppression” and, um, welcomes its members into his own party. I have mixed feelings about this. The Nats are, obviously, no great loss and should not let the door hit them in the ass on the way out (they used to employ black servants to hold the door open for them), but SA is moving slowly but not irreversibly in the direction of a one-party state, one result of which is an AIDS policy only slightly saner than that of Turkmenistan (which also made the word AIDS illegal, although to be fair, it made the disease illegal as well), and no proper opposition party able to hold the government’s feet to the fire on the issue.

Bob Harris at the This Modern World blog reports that September will be National Preparedness Month, nicely coordinated with the Republican convention. Harris covers that well, so I don’t need to, but while following links through government websites, I came across the FEMA for Kids website, hosted by Herman the spokescrab. I encourage everyone to get a Disaster Action Kids Certificate, by filling out the online form provided. You must fill out Two Things You Learned (mine: FEMA has nothing to do with the femoral artery; Natural disasters are a sign that God hates America.) and list One Disaster You Learned About (the Bush administration)(naturally). Oh, gyp, they don’t mail it to you, you have to print it out yourself.

Exudation of Optimism

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a BBC World Service interviewer who was asking too many questions about the excuses for going to war with Iraq to "fuck off." Sadly, the Beeb didn’t broadcast the words. Can’t find a transcript on their website, either. I guess they took his advice.

The American-appointed administration in Iraq bans Al Jazeera for 30 days, renewable, claiming it instigated violence (by reporting on it) and that it failed to show the "reality of political life," and should "readjust its policy agenda" during this time-out. While that certainly reflects the appointees, and of Arab governments which have also banned Al Jazeera (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc), I have to wonder whether they did it on their own, or at the instigation of the Americans. Bremer, Rumsfeld and Kimmit certainly would have loved to be able to get away with that (they could only "accidentally" bomb its offices, although they did try to get Qatar to clamp down), but now have plausible deniability. Here are some old posts of mine which mention the US’s verbal and sometimes literal war on Al Jazeera: 4/8/03, 6/15/03, 7/27/03, 4/13/04, 4/29/04.

Al Jazeera’s website, which has several details that, say, the NYT does not, notes that the closure did not have the legally required court order, and that thing about them adjusting their policy agenda is actually a piece of paper they have to sign before they will be allowed to reopen. And that the order followed remarks by Rumsfeld Friday in which he said that AJ and Al-Arabiyah "have persuaded an enormous fraction of the people that we’re there as an occupying force, which is a lie, that we are randomly killing innocent civilians, which is a lie. ... And they’ve persuaded a pile of people that what's happening is a terrible thing." Rummy also says that its reporters were paid by Saddam Hussein (who actually also banned the station). By the way, after those Abu Ghraib pictures, maybe Rummy shouldn’t be using the phrase "pile of people."

Is there actually a need for an "Anna Kournikova of chess"? After reading that story, I put that phrase into Google, quite frankly looking for pictures (which the Telegraph didn’t have) so I could judge for myself as part of my quite legitimate blogging duties, and it turns out there are actually a bunch of women (and girls) trying to be the Anna Kournikova of chess.

Headline (WaPo) that makes you too scared to actually read the story: "Ga. Town Torn Over Feelings for Wild Chickens."

Another WaPo headline: "Kerry Leads Bush in Exudation of Optimism." They probably make a salve for that.

7 minutes

Kerry said that if it had been him in that classroom on 9/11, he would have gotten up and left. Guiliani accused him of taking his cues from Michael Moore, who is rapidly becoming a figure of hate among the R’s. But the fact that Guiliani could link Pet-Goat-gate to Moore just shows that almost no one else talked about it for almost 3 years; Moore owns the issue. Now, I suggested not two weeks after 9/11 that if someone ran film of those 7 minutes in a split screen with images from NY from those same minutes, or with sound from the Pennsylvania plane’s black box, Bush would be finished.

And it’s not a cheap shot. Once the second plane hit, it was clear that terrorists were using passenger planes as weapons, and the only person then legally allowed to order civilian planes shot down was the president (although we now know that Cheney illegally ordered planes to be "taken out"), who should have been collecting information in case there were other hijacked planes, as indeed there were. It was criminally negligent of Bush to remain in that room.

Affirmatively taking action, but not affirmative action. Head... hurt.

Asked by minority journalists about affirmative action at colleges & universities, Bush, evidently thinking he was fooling somebody, said "I support colleges affirmatively taking action to get more minorities in their school." Showing what happens the one time a year he lets himself be questioned by a group that hasn’t been properly screened, he is asked about legacy admissions--such as his own undeserved admission into Yale--and forced to come out against them.

Russia is stonewalling Poland’s war crimes/genocide investigation of the Katyn massacre.

And an Indonesian appeal court quashed 4 more of the few convictions for the 1999 massacres in East Timor, leaving only 2 people whose convictions stand. 18 were convicted; the 16 whose sentences were overturned were all in the military or police, the other 2 were civilians.

A shorter version of that story appears in the "news in brief" section of the Daily Telegraph. Now, the Tel is a right-wing newspaper with low journalistic standards, but I’ve been reading it online for 8 years. Today’s news in brief section demonstrates why. Along with the genocide story, there’s a story about Dutch politicians considering making unsolicited toe-licking a crime after a man who engages in that hobby can’t be convicted of anything (better headline in the Guardian: "Toe-Sucker Not Brought to Heel"), a man who shot himself in his own buttocks, the world’s hairiest man gets his ear hair trimmed, a German in a Spanish jail who glued his hand to his girlfriend’s during a visit to prevent his being extradited, and a sect of Muslim wife-swappers in Nigeria fighting off the police with bows and arrows.

The greatest of Satans

Muqtada al-Sadr issues a sermon calling the US "the greatest of Satans." Aw shucks, now we’ll just get a swelled head.

To answer my question of yesterday, the NM Republicans did indeed demand driver’s licenses from the people they required to sign the loyalty oath.

The wingnuts are entering the electoral process in all their glory. First up, James Hart has won the Republican primary for Tennessee’s 8th district congressional seat. Wasn’t James Hart the main character in "The Paper Chase"? "Mister Hart, here is a dime, call your mother, tell her you will never be a wacky United States congressman." Hart is running on a platform of "Stop Welfare and Immigration Replace it with a War on Poverty Genes." His website has to be seen to be believed. I especially liked the "Socrates Vs. Jesus" link (a dialogue, not a cage wrestling match), which, fortunately, I read before going back and seeing all the eugenics stuff about black people having low IQs, after which it became harder to laugh. I know it’s a very safe D seat, and I once lived in a safe D seat where the R candidacy for Congress went to a guy running against the Trilateral Commission conspiracy to take over the world, but that’s not the same thing as an open racist running for Congress in the South.

And the R’s in Illinois offered the US Senate candidacy to dotty right-wing talk show host Alan Keyes, who does not live in Illinois. There might be justification for the very occasional carpetbagger--Hillary Clinton and Bobby Kennedy as senators for NY--but if we (especially those of us who live in under-represented California) have to put up with the Electoral College and the Senate as violations of the principle of one-person-one-vote, then we have a right to demand that it is actually the states themselves that are being represented, and not political parties. In most other representative democracies (France, the UK, etc etc), the national parties drop candidates into districts chosen by the parties (parachutists, they’re called in France), so that senior members of the parties get the safe seats and the interests of local voters don’t get heard at all. So Keyes was not wrong in 2000 when he decried Hillary’s candidacy as a violation of the principle of federalism. A system in which local interests are overridden by those of the national parties is entirely different than the system we have known up till now, and we shouldn’t just back into it without considering the consequences. The constant interventions of Tom DeLay in Texas give some sign of where that leads.

Soldiers in the army of compassion

Slate has a report on a Bush campaign rally in Columbus. What’s interesting is Bush’s tendency to use the same words in different contexts (granted, he has a small vocabulary) in ways that are suggestive. One word is heart. He advocates government funding of religious anti-addiction programs because "sometimes it requires a change of heart in order to change habit." But talking about terrorism, he says "we’re facing an enemy which has no heart, no compassion." Compassion is something Our Side has, and evidently it’s a weapon of some kind, because "All of you are soldiers in the army of compassion." He again calls on citizens to love their neighbors, and tellingly says that "We can change America one soul at a time by encouraging people to spread something government cannot spread, which is love." Why on earth not? He didn’t mention gay marriage in this speech, I don’t think, but his approach to that subject makes it quite clear that he thinks government can tell you what to feel about certain people. And while he castigates government, which "can never...put love in a person’s heart," some of us don’t want government or anyone else telling us what emotions to feel towards whom. P.S.: David Brooks, in his 8/7/04 NYT column, says Bush campaign events are "like a travelling road show of proper emotions."

Getting back to the army of compassion, he says that "change agents" can put an arm around someone who needs love and help make their life better. But in the part of his speech about terror, he says "we’ve got to say to people who are willing to harbor a terrorist or feed a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorists." (This could be a reference to the various Islamic charities whose funds the government has seized, to individuals who did nothing illegal themselves but whom the government wishes to criminalize because they knew other people who the government does not like, or nations like Afghanistan under the Taliban.) So change agents are supposed to make judgments about who they feed and shelter, and be darned careful about who they offer love and compassion to, which isn’t particularly Christian, I’d have thought. To sum up, there can be no compassion without judgment of the worthiness of people to receive that compassion, government can’t spread love, and the enemy has no heart. His use of the same sort of words to describe both domestic and foreign policy gives some insight into his thinking, but that’s as far into the dark recesses of Bush’s brain as I care to go today; I’m getting claustrophobic in these cramped environs.

The full text of the Columbus event isn’t online now, but he used very similar language in Dallas Tuesday.

Update: the NYT also has an article on the Columbus rally, but doesn't say whether and how members of the audience were screened. After the "loyalty oath" thing in New Mexico, this needs to be an element of news reports of all Bush/Cheney campaign events.

Preserving Tigger's Magic

In an effort to make passports harder to forge, the British government will reject any passport photos in which the subject is smiling. Screws up biometric readings. I think in future we should all beam like demented monkeys on any photo id’s. Got through that without making any comments about British dentistry.
(Update): Funny, I wrote that before seeing this WaPo story about American US's plans to use biometric data in passports, even though it won't work. The Post doesn't mention the thing about smiling.

A Disney World employee was acquitted of fondling a 13-year old girl while dressed as Tigger. His lawyer (who himself moonlights as Tigger and Goofy at Disney World, which is normally not the best recommendation for an attorney) put on the suit in court and demonstrated to the jury how the costume limited vision and motion. The jury members were also invited to try on the suit, although Disney had tried to prevent the costume being entered into evidence, in order to preserve Tigger’s "magic."

Alabama executes a 74-year old. He was the oldest person executed in the US since 1941.

The US is thinking about writing a jolly stiff letter of protest to Israel, which just started building new settlement housing in violation of promises made to the US. The settlements will completely encircle East Jerusalem, and probably be annexed to Jerusalem (since 1967, the area defined by Israel as the West Bank has been steadily whittled away as land is annexed to what Israel defines as Jerusalem).

Republicans Anonymous

The Florida Republican Party is refusing to make public the names of the delegates to the national convention, citing privacy concerns (I suspect anti-Cuban nutjobs). Someone needs to make clear to them the difference between private and public, and a convention that votes on the top candidates and platform of a political party is not private. One hint: the US taxpayers will be paying millions of dollars. This is the same lack of understanding of the distinction between public and private shown by the requirement that members of the general public sign a semi-literate loyalty oath to George Bush in order to enter an event with Dick Cheney. On that, I’ve been waiting in vain for a follow-up story to tell whether signatures were checked against id’s, or if an unusual number of attendees shared the name Michael Mouse. Link (which may get past the annoying registration barrier).

A day after Memphis’s city council chairman refused to let an Iraqi delegation enter city hall to learn about democracy and civil rights, two of the delegates were the victims of armed robbery in the city. So really, they just need that visit to Graceland, and to talk to the supporter of eugenics about to become the Republican candidate for Congress in Tennessee’s 8th district, and they’ll have learned everything we have to teach them.

Best forgotten

Happy 90th anniversary of the start of World War I. Here’s more on the survivors, 4 of whom showed up at the Cenotaph in London (there are 23 British veterans of the Great War still living), and are profiled and interviewed here. One of them even has one of those and-if-I-didn’t-have-a-pocket-watch-to-take-that-German-bullet.. stories. As I noted a couple of days ago, there is tension in their stories between the need to remember and the awfulness of those memories. One said, "I will never forget my comrades. You cannot think about the morbid things that took place. If you did, you could not go on." He’s 108 (and doesn’t look a day over 107), so no one can accuse him of not going on. Another: "You've gone over the top, you're buried in muck and when they dig you out you've got another face looking at you. And that face hasn't got a body, and the rest has been blown away. ... No one would know what it was actually like unless they were there. Your imagination won't go that far. It's best forgotten." Story. Other story.

Speaking of historical memory, one of those surveys I’m never entirely sure whether to believe says that half of 16- to 24-year olds in Britain know that when Protestants march on July 12 in Northern Ireland, they are commemorating the Battle of the Boyne (1690), while 15% think it was the victory at Helm’s Deep (in the second book of The Lord of the Rings).

While both Bush and Kerry were campaigning in Davenport, Iowa, three banks were robbed. Does anyone know where Dick Cheney was at the time?

Knowing what I know today

I have another take on OrangeAlertGate. The July Surprise failed: the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani didn’t distract from the Democratic Convention and got so little attention that it was hardly worth whatever Pakistan was bribed. So this week they tried for a second bite at the apple, claiming that the arrest was accompanied by this incredible intelligence coup. Well, this time it earned the Bushies the publicity they didn’t get last week, but the wrong kind.

Missouri, the "For God’s Sake Don’t Show Me" state, votes in a referendum to add a ban on gay marriage to the state constitution.
Update: I just figured it out, when I saw a headline "Gay Marriage Ban in Mo." This is actually part of Fox's strategy to get everyone talking about which character on The Simpsons is coming out of the closet in January and getting married. Now we know it isn't Mo the bartender. Isn't it clever of them to get an entire state to participate in their PR campaign?

The Chalabis and other former exiles are trying to ensure that the 3 million Iraqis living abroad can vote in the next elections.

Bush said this week that "knowing what I know today, we still would have gone on into Iraq." But just what does Bush know today?:

• That Dick Cheney sure has a big head.
• That pet goat sure is funny.
• I like pie.
• Nuclear is pronounced nookyuler.
• Ride bike, fall down boom, ow.

We don't do politics

The White House is claiming that there was other, better intelligence behind this week’s orange alert, it was just happenstance that the only intel they told us about was years old. Sound familiar? Yes, the same White House insists that there was other intel about Iraq trying to buy Nigerien yellowcake, much better than the only evidence they ever released, which happened to be amateurish forgeries.Tom Ridge said yesterday, "We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security." Right: if politics is the art of the possible, what they do at HeimatSec is the art of the imaginary.

The Post has a must-read on how Bremer stole billions dollars of Iraqi money (I say "stole" advisedly: there are strict rules in international law on what occupiers can do) and awarded them in contracts to Halliburton and other American companies. So the Iraqis are made to pay for their own occupation, and the money can be doled in secret and out without oversight. Saves all that paperwork. And the American corporations, also acting without oversight, hire non-Iraqis at inflated salaries, lose equipment (see 2 posts ago), and spend most of the money for "administration" and security, so they accomplish very little at the most expensive price possible. Which is one reason why almost nothing has been done, as the LA Times points out today, to supply Iraqis with clean water, resulting in epidemics of typhoid and hepatitis E.

This is part of a pattern in which the Bushies see any government program with a large budget as a way to reward their friends. Think of the attempts to shift social-service spending to "faith-based" groups. Or compare Iraqi "reconstruction" with Bush’s AIDS initiative of 2003. If the goal is to deliver services, both do so in the least efficient way possible, with American contractors/drug companies charging First World prices the host countries can’t afford, while making them more dependent on American multinationals in the future because locals with the appropriate skills are starved out of the field (Iraqi builders, engineers, etc) or not trained in the first place (African doctors, nurses). Another comparison is the way Bush has used African famine as a lever to force countries to take genetically modified foods.

Chilling

The White House continues to insist that they didn’t over-react to the antique intel discovered in Pakistan, which they still describe as "chilling." Anybody else reminded of SCTV’s Count Floyd, always having to pretend that the terrible movies he was showing were "scary stuff"?

The right thing to do

More of Bush’s brilliant argumentative skills, from the same press conference: asked why he now supported the creation of an intelligence tsar, he responded: "Because I thought it was the right thing to do." So that settles it.

The laughably unrealistic idea of Muslim countries sending troops to help occupy Iraq--and then putting them under US command--is going as well as such an idea can be expected to go. Pakistan has just announced that it will not send troops, which is too bad because the Pakistani military has always done such a good job supporting democracy in Pakistan.

Halliburton has lost 6,975 out of 20,531 items of US government property it was supposed to be managing in Iraq. Items that fell off the backs of trucks include computers, office furniture, and trucks themselves.

Russia is about to destroy the country’s pension system, converting rights old people now have to free medicine, transportation, etc. into a tiny cash payment. There have been protests by pensioners, mostly led by the Communist Party. Here’s a slogan from one placard that puts Russian history into perspective: "Hitler took our youth, Yeltsin and Putin took our old age."

Turned the corner, turned the corner, turned the corner, turned the....

So in fact Tom Ridge just scared the orange juice out of NY, NJ & DC based on information that is 3 years old. Somewhere in a cave, Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off. Shrub, however, demonstrating the irrefutable logic that only his razor-sharp mind could bring to this matter, said today, "It’s serious business. I mean, we wouldn’t be, you know, contacting authorities at the local level unless something was real." See, that proves it.

Well, according to the Daily Show, in recent days Bush has said that "we have turned the corner" 23 times in 5 speeches. So maybe he’s just dizzy from going around in circles.

Speaking of the Daily Show, the guest today was Rep Henry Bonilla, and Jon went after him like I haven’t seen since the Spice Girls were on. Bonilla started by saying that he hadn’t watched the show, which may be why he didn’t realize he was repeating every "talking point" dissected in the famous talking points episode (transcript here). Jon kept repeating innocent questions (Who is it who compiled the figures proving Kerry to be the most liberal senator?), drawing him further and further out, then springing the trap on him. Glorious; catch the repeat if you missed it.

Driving the Turkmen way

Saw Bush on tv today, being asked questions about his plans to restructure the intelligence bureaucracy, and he remembered that his handlers had told him he opposed making the intelligence czar a cabinet post, but clearly couldn’t quite remember why. Kerry is saying that if Bush was really serious about this, he’d call Congress back into session. Of course Kerry wasn’t serious about that. A special session would make no particular demands on Bush’s time, but force Kerry and Edwards to abandon campaigning and do their senatorial jobs for a change.

The NYT cites a US intelligence report from 1991 saying that Colombia’s current president slash warlord, Alvaro Uribe, was closely associated with Pablo Escobar. The Sunday Times (London) said the same thing nearly 2 years ago, and I mentioned it here. The US State Dept rushed to defend him, saying that Uribe’s gov extradites lots of drug suspects to the US, although he spent his career as a legislator slash cartel flunky fighting any extradition. Ah, but is he doing that with all the cartels equally?

In Turkmenistan, applicants for driver’s licenses will have to demonstrate knowledge of the sacred writings of wacky megalomaniacal president-for-life Niyazov (the guy who renamed the months) to "ensure future drivers are educated in the spirit of high moral values." And you can bone up, too (a cache file because the book's website went out of business).

Speaking of wacky megalomaniacs, Governor Schwarzenegger has settled his lawsuit with the company making bobble-head dolls of him. They will continue to make them, but they will no longer carry weapons. Remember: when toy guns are outlawed, only toy bobble-headed outlaws will have toy guns.

The Second Annual Homeless World Cup was just held. 26 teams of homeless people from all over the world compete in soccer. Italy won.

Signs you’ve been spending too much time online: I just read the headline of an AP story, "Assault on Afghan Site," and for a second I actually thought they were talking about a website.

Orange alert: no rhyming for the duration

So Tom Ridge raised the alert color, displaying a naive belief that it still works to the administration’s advantage to scare the American people because they have such faith in the Bushies’ competence on security matters. (By the way, I’ve noticed that John Kerry now uses the abominable phrase "homeland" security). According to the WaPo, the orange alert is because documents found in that suspiciously timed raid in Pakistan revealed this stunner: "The information that emerged confirmed that al Qaeda continues to plan operations and conduct surveillance against targets inside the United States." Gosh, and I thought they’d all retired to Florida.

If you’re looking for a conspiracy theory about this that doesn’t involve the election, you can read one between the lines of another WaPo story, by Walter Pincus, who I believe is the guy who usually writes whatever the CIA wants him to. Pincus’s story spells out the lesson you’re supposed to draw from this little morality shadow play right in the headline: "Agencies Shared Intelligence That Led to New Alert." So there is no need for a reorganization which would shift power away from the entrenched intel bureaucracy.

Happily, this threat, if real, just targets the financial sector. Remember: if they don’t go on cheating little old ladies out of their pensions and making sure Fortune 500 companies pay no corporate income taxes, the terrorists win.

Our Lady of Survival

Kuwait bans Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, because it insults the Saudi royal family.

Must-read Robert Fisk article on the current state of Iraq.

In what was either a Freudian slip or a bad translation, the BBC said today that one of the Christian churches bombed in Iraq was "Our Lady of Survival." That would be: Our Lady of Salvation.
Update: the NYT calls it Our Lady of Deliverance. Squeal like a piggie.

Speaking of churches and survival, Kerry went to church today. Now if he needs to prove to the god-botherers that he’s one of them, fine, whatever, but does he need to denigrate rational thought at the same time? "More physicists and more and more scientists, the more they learn in some ways the less they know about some things and the more they believe in that power," he said.

It will be the 90th anniversary of the start of World War I on Wednesday, and the British papers are talking to veterans. Unlike Kerry, who won’t shut up about Vietnam, these men didn’t talk about their experiences. One is described by the Telegraph as never discussing it with his wife of 68 years, his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren or great-great grandchildren. Another, who was at both Jutland and Passchendaele, says, "I used not to think about it at all, but now that I keep getting bothered by people like you, because I am one of the few left, I suppose I think about it more."

This is what democracy is all about

When delegates and speakers at a party convention are stage-managed, that’s not good. When George Bush speaks over and over to crowds of military personnel, ordered to be there and under threat of military discipline if they express any disapproval, that’s bad. But when Team Chimpy starts requiring signed endorsements of his candidacy from members of the general public before they are allowed into a public appearance by Dick Cheney (key word = public), that’s...and here’s a word you won’t often if ever hear me use...unAmerican. In March, John Kerry earned my respect--something else I haven’t said too often--when he responded to a heckler by questioning him in return, and then defending him against his own supporters, who he told, "This is what democracy is all about."

In 1950, the London Times ran an editorial entitled "A Good Word for Hecklers," which argued that too much polite applause only shielded politicians from the facts of political life and did nothing for their performances, that (this is a rough quote) a few well-timed interventions and a sprinkling of laughter in the wrong places, would hasten politicians’ political development and promote their spiritual welfare. George Bush stands in desperate need of greater contact--hell, any contact--with the real world, which he is as unfamiliar with in his bubble as is Michael Jackson in his. Maybe the first sign was when he started giving everyone nicknames. Then he started rubbing the head of every bald man he passed, and wiping his glasses off on the sweater of whoever was standing by. If he gets elected in November, within two years he’ll be just like Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.