A cheap and tawdry political trick

California voters: Although you will no doubt slavishly follow my recommendations, the SF Bay Guardian also always does a good job of describing the issues and candidates fairly, from a progressive standpoint--and then recommending that you vote for the lesser of 2 evils. But they’ll do it in such a way that you might start out reading their endorsement of, say, Barbara Boxer, planning to vote for her, and finish it convinced to vote for the Peace & Freedom candidate, as I just did.

Oh, and I hate do this to you, but they convinced me to vote against 1A, which I was always suspicious of.

Go Granny Go: In the Senate race in New Hampshire, former governor Judd Gregg was forced to debate the D candidate, 94-year-old Doris Haddock, famous for walking across the US at 90 in support of election reforms. He had initially refused, but she then challenged him to Scrabble, and he had to give in.

Which reminds me that I meant to criticize McNeil-Lehrer last week and yesterday because they keep running interviews with pollsters trying to predict the presidential election. Pointless, time-wasting segments, the reason, along with hurricanes and Fannie Mae stories, that I record the News Hour and watch it with one hand near the fast forward button. But there are 34 Senate races, 435 House races, and how many of them has the program bothered profiling?

Molly Ivins: “Character, says George Bush, is the issue. George Bush. Says character is the issue. ... What are George Bush’s principles, this man who accuses John Kerry of waffling.”

I’m afraid I altered that quote, which is from a column Molly wrote 12 years ago. It was George Bush the Elder accusing Clinton. Plus ca change, huh? More: “he has descended into rank McCarthyism with his unfounded charge that there was some impropriety about Clinton’s having visited Moscow...implying that it was unpatriotic to oppose the war in Vietnam.” Just what the Sinclair documentary says about Kerry. The column is in her new retrospective book, “Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I Have Known,” which I’m currently doling out to myself in little bits, as treats.

Speaking of “plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose,” the Indy has a counterpart to the NYT story I mentioned yesterday about Allawi bringing Baathists back into power: “Alleged war criminals [i.e., the warlords] are poised to take positions of power in Afghanistan’s new government”. As in Iraq, it’s just plain convenient to bring back the old shitheads, because they know how to make the trains/torture chambers/poppy trade run on time.

In the debate, Kerry referred in this wise to Mary Cheney: “I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was. She’s being who she was born as.” That’s the sum total of what he had to say, but Lynne Cheney threw a tantrum, calling it “a cheap and tawdry political trick,” saying he “is not a good man” and generally letting her daughter know how truly ashamed she is of her sexual identity. Really will be a hell of an awkward Thanksgiving this year. Oh, and fuck you Lynne Cheney.

Debate 3: A plan isn't a litany of complaints

Full text.

Bush says Kerry’s quoting him about not being worried about Osama is ex-ag-er-ra-ted, taking the 5 syllable word very slowly.

Bush says we took the right action in not permitting the contaminated flu vaccine into the US. Actually, it was the British that shut them down. He had nothing to do with it. Bush says he hasn’t had a flu shot. I’m waiting for him to turn to Kerry and ask him if he has, the big coward. He blames the reliance for flu vaccine on 2 companies on litigation. Everyone says it’s more to do with the unpredictable level of demand for the vaccine year to year.

Ohmygod, Kerry is going to do that “I have a plan” thing over and over again. Bush says a plan is not a litany of complaints, and calls it bait & switch. Like a lot of Bush’s memorized come-backs, it could be easily turned back by a method Kerry would never use: “President Bush, you just used the word ‘litany.’ Could you define litany? Could you spell it?”

Oh-so-hilarious Bush put down: Pay-go to a senator from Mass., a colleague of Ted Kennedy, means you pay and he goes ahead and spends.

I know Massachusetts isn’t that popular a state, so Kerry isn’t standing up for his home state, but isn’t there something unseemly about a “president” of the entire United States using the name of one of those states over and over as an insult?

Kerry alludes to The Sopranos. Oh, he’s so cool and “with it.”

Oops, there’s that blinking again.

Bush: litany of misstatements. Oh dear, he’s learned a new word. Add it to the drinking game. Also: “his rhetoric doesn’t match his record.”

Question: is homosexuality a choice. Bush doesn’t know. Or care.

Bush uses loaded phrase “culture of life” again. Adoption is “a great alternative” to abortion. Also abstinence. Praises Kerry’s wife for being involved in abstinence programs. I’ll bet she is.

Oh, there’s that chuckle again, that always makes me want to smack him. Bush’s chuckle, of course.

The No Child Left Behind Act is “really a jobs act, when you think about it,” at least if you’re trying to fill up time because you have nothing to say about jobs and the minimum wage.

With an opportunity to go after Bush for refusing to give his position on abortion rights, Kerry hits him with the softest of Nerf blows. Bush responds with an attack on Kerry having a “litmus test.” Again, Kerry should ask him to define it. Why do R’s think that that phrase has any resonance with the American people? Oh no, he has a litmus test! Duck!

Ah, there’s the “global test” again. Kerry suggests instead a “sort of truth standard.”

Bush: Part of being a hopeful society is that somebody owns something. Unless it’s a crack pipe.

Bush: “my faith is very personal.” Then fucking keep it to yourself. Faith gives him calmness. I thought that not knowing what was going on is what gives him calmness. God wants everybody to be free. The freedom in Afghanistan is a gift from the almighty. Can you say crusade?

Kerry: we have a lot more loving of our neighbor to do. Thanks, we had enough of that with Clinton.

What did you learn from the women in your life? Bush’s wife was a librarian so...not much. Although there’s this:

Barrel of fish

The Bush campaign is accusing Kerry of standing “in pulpits across the country using Scripture to make political attacks.”

After John Edwards makes a comment about stem-cell research helping people like Christopher Reeve, Sen. Bill “Here, Kitty Kitty” Frist accuses him of cruelly offering false hope to patients. Frist prefers to offer false despair.
(Later: Edwards said “When John Kerry is President, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get out of that wheelchair and walk again.” The repugnant Mr. Frist may have a point.)

From a letter to the NYT: “The Bush record is a barrel of fish, and John Kerry can’t seem to hit any of them.”

Mass graves are being dug up in Iraq, with children in them, and I’ll bet Bush mentions that fact in tonight’s debate even though it’s supposed to be confined to domestic and economic issues. I don’t think it’s too cynical of me to wonder about the timing of this. (Bob Goodsell was on this first.)

The NYT has a piece on Allawi trying to hobble the de-Baathization process, trying to disband the independent commission, and then not allowing its members sufficient passes to enter the Green Zone, ordering ministries not to deal with it, etc.

Hyman, Hyman, nope, can't think of anything humorous to say about that name

Ha’aretz locates one of the secret CIA detention/torture centers, in Jordan. Human Rights Watch claims that this location is so secret that Bush asked the CIA not to tell him where it was. Not that he could find Jordan on a map. But if the existence of such centers is to remain a (dirty little) secret, how can you release any of the prisoners, or try them in real courts? Ever?

I’ve stayed away from the Sinclair Broadcasting issue, because I don’t want to be on the side of speech suppression, even when the speech involved is nasty and one-sided. Did I say “even”--I meant especially. Sinclair has called its anti-Kerry film (I was going to use a pejorative adjective, but I haven’t seen it, so I shouldn’t be characterizing it--that’s a hint to other bloggers) a news report, and while that may be laughable, we really don’t want lawsuits every time Frontline or NBC News profiles a candidate, and the news programs we’d get if that sort of scrutiny became common would be even duller and stupider than they are now.

And then Sinclair VP Mark Hyman, a jerk of the highest order, goes on tv and makes me want to join the baying crowd. First he tells CNN that if this is an in-kind campaign contribution, then every car bomb in Iraq is a contribution to Kerry’s campaign. Then he goes on McNeil-Lehrer and says that his idea of equal time is for Kerry to come on after and respond to the charges that he’s a traitor. No, Sinclair should be required to air anything Kerry wants it to air. In a perfect world, that would be “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The antidote to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.

Purely coincidentally, I’m pleased to announce that this blog has been mentioned negatively (idiot, schmuck were the words used) on a website I will not name here. And let me extend a big welcome to anyone who may have clicked through from there: a mind willing to listen to multiple viewpoints is a free mind.

Irony in Iraq

The US occupation authorities are not letting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspect in Iraq. And the interim government isn’t fulfilling its responsibilities to the IAEA either.

Interesting LA Times article, explaining the Duelfer report, “Through Hussein’s Looking Glass.” In the world that only existed inside Saddam’s head, he won the 1st Gulf War, was the greatest Arab leader in history, and, get this, the CIA was smart enough to know that he had no WMDs. He was bluffing Iran, but he assumed--god, this cracks me up--that the CIA was competent.

And then Zarqawi will jump out of the wedding cake...

In preparation for the last presidential debate, I have devised the World’s Shortest Presidential Debate Drinking Game: whenever Bush brings up Kerry’s “reducing terrorism to a nuisance” quote, take a drink. Five minutes into the debate, you will be lying unconscious in a pool of vomit. Drinking game over.

I asked 3 days ago how long the US could deny that it bombed a wedding in Fallujah. Well the NYT (which doesn’t bother updating us on the condition of the bride/widow) quotes a senior Pentagon official, who was having a senior-Pentagon-official moment, saying “We know what the strike was supposed to hit, and we hit it. If a wedding was going on, well, it was in concert with a meeting with a top Zarqawi lieutenant.” Some weddings just have the worst entertainment.

The article also quotes a “Pentagon official” thus:

“If there are civilians dying in connection with these attacks, and with the destruction, the locals at some point have to make a decision. Do they want to harbor the insurgents and suffer the consequences that come with that, or do they want to get rid of the insurgents and have the benefits of not having them there?”

Please note that this official is admitting to deliberately bombing a civilian population in order to get them to “make a decision.” This is the textbook definition of both a) terrorism, and b) a war crime.

The government is dismantling the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. It just gave up the idea of blowing up the old plutonium processing building because that might be unsafe. They are planning to turn the site into a wildlife refuge. Really, really wild life. But at least you’ll be able to see the animals at night. When a superintelligent antelope with two heads takes over the world, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Freedom is not given. It is taken by force

Bush meets his Waterloo
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
(but didn’t try very hard).

Kerry really needs to clarify that reducing-terrorism-to-a-nuisance quote to counter the silly charge that he doesn’t take terrorism seriously. If I may make a suggestion: “I meant to say ‘a fucking nuisance.’”

The WaPo spots a banner in the Iraqi city of Hit: “Freedom is not given. It is taken by force.”

Bush chair Marc Racicot has written to the AFL-CIO accusing it of, well really, an unspecified but indirect connection to vandalism at several Bush campaign offices (the union demonstrated at those offices to protest the new overtime rules). Note the care taken to avoid slanderous accusations in the letter (full text here): “Protests by your organization come on the heels of several other incidents... I hope you will put an end to protest activities that have led to injuries, property damage, vandalism and voter intimidation. We will hold you and your organization accountable for the actions of your members and urge you to immediately discontinue any coordinated protest efforts.” Led to? Come on the heels of? Not exactly proof of a causal connection, and indeed the campaign later clarified itself, according to Reuters: “Bush campaign spokesman Brian Jones said Racicot did not mean to link shootings and break-ins to the union protests. ‘I think what he’s trying to show is that there is this pattern of violence and vandalism and just pointing to the fact that it’s a part of an overall pattern,’ Jones said.”

The over-all message is familiar: your legal, peaceful dissent from governmental positions emboldens the enemy, so shut up.


Freedom is not given. It is taken by force.

Even though we’ve destroyed their houses, the people are happy with us

The military budget just passed eliminates the limit on the number of US troops and “contractors” that can be sent to Colombia in support of the government of death-squad promoter and violent thug Alvaro Uribe (I’m not a big fan of Uribe). I’ve written a lot in the past about Colombia and Uribe, and here’s the results of a Google search for those posts (not in chronological order, I’m afraid, but the dates are clear enough).

The Iraqi “government” has been buying up weapons in Sadr City. They may come from members of the Mahdi Army, or not, since the prices are higher than those on the black market. Just in case you’ve got a few RPGs or machine guns you’ve been wanting to get rid of, I am providing the buy-back price list as a public service:

• Heavy machinegun, $1,000
• Heavy machinegun ammunition, 440 rounds, $200
• 60mm mortar, $225
• 120mm mortar, $275
• Rocket-propelled grenade, $160
• Kalashnikov, $150
• Romanian sniper rifle, $630
• Roadside bombs, $50
• Katyusha rocket-launcher $50
• Empty Kalashnikov magazine, $4
• Grenade, $5
• 350 Kalashnikov rounds, $320

Nothing about bows & arrows. One of the many industries for which tax breaks were just secretly voted by Congress is bow and arrow manufacturers.

Elsewhere in Iraq, Marine Capt. Carrie Batson, herewith declared Military Moron of the Day, said of the massive destruction caused by American bombing of Najaf, “Even though we’ve destroyed their houses, the people are happy with us” because Sadr had “hijacked” their town.

The divine right of incumbent Congresscritters

Happy Indigenous People’s Day (Berkeley only).

The LA Times says that of California’s 53 Congressional seats, exactly one is even close to being a competitive race (and that one isn’t very close). Also, 2 out of NY’s 29, 1 out of Florida’s 25. “We’re getting back to the divine right of kings,” says alliterative Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Which explains why members of Congress so often seem like the result of generations of cousins marrying cousins.

Kerry tells the NYT, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they’re a nuisance.” Even when he’s right, you just want to slap him, don’t you? Although from the look of his face, that would probably hurt your hand more than his face.

Saudi Arabia will have municipal elections in February, its first elections of any kind since the 1960s. And no, women won’t be allowed to vote. The voting age is 21.

Tom Coburn, the asshole running for Senate in Oklahoma, says (said, actually, on 8/31/04, and we’re only hearing this now?) “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?” Us? Spend a lot of time in girls’ bathrooms in schools in southeast Oklahoma, do ya, Tom?

Coburn also has an ad out which “shows images of Hispanics and dark hands receiving welfare payments,” echoing an old Jesse Helms ad, which I’ve been unable to see. It’s not, for example, on Coburn’s website, although many other of his ads are. If anyone’s seen it online somewhere, drop me an email.

And given that he’s running racist ads, it occurs to me to ask how many of those under-age girls he sterilized were non-white.

They do exist

Rumsfeld is upset that the media are ignoring the Iraqi security forces: “They do exist. Over 700 of them have been killed.” There’s something wrong with that logic, I just can’t put my finger on it...

The party line is that the complete failure of safeguards against fraudulent voting in Afghanistan is irrelevant. So what if the condom broke, baby, we had a good time, didn’t we? Karzai says the ink thing “did not diminish the value people gave to the vote.” Robert Barry, the OSCE guy I quoted a while back, says talking about the fraud would “put into question the expressed will of millions of citizens.” As Antonin Scalia wrote in Bush v. Gore, counting the votes accurately might “cast a cloud on what [Karzai] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.” Vote-counting is the boring, messy bit, like cleaning up after a party, and I say we don’t bother doing it. If the only thing that’s important is that people showed up to vote, who needs to count ballots? Let’s declare victory and go home.

Many of the candidates have been bribed/pressured/whatever to back away from demands to re-run the election. They will accept the findings of an independent commission. An “independent” commission, in Afghanistan. Really now.

Ground zero

The Indy: “Bombs in Baghdad killed 18 people as the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, declared during a visit to Iraq that America was winning the war against insurgency.” Also, “Mr Rumsfeld’s trip had not been announced beforehand for security reasons.” He held a Q&A with Marines, who were ordered beforehand not to ask him when they would be going home. He told the Marines that Iraq was “ground zero” in the war on terrorism, which must have reassured them no end (American Heritage Dictionary: “Ground zero. n. 1. The target of a projectile, such as a missile or bomb. 2. The site directly below, directly above, or at the point of detonation of a nuclear weapon.”).

For a change of pace, a religious story, from the London Times:

Spanish count jet skis to heaven
From David Sharrock in San Sebastián

A SOCIALITE count hopes to avoid Purgatory by embarking on a maritime pilgrimage, using a jet ski to undertake one of Europe’s most well-trodden paths, the Camino de Santiago.

Alvaro de Marichalar, Spain’s most eligible bachelor, was expected to be somewhere off Spain’s “Coast of Death” this morning, bearing down upon Santiago de Compostela at 35 knots.
For centuries weary pilgrims have walked the Camino de Santiago, from the French Pyrenees and through northern Spain, to atone for their sins, taking an average of three weeks.

But Count Alvaro, who earned a place in The Guinness Book of Records in 2002 by crossing the Atlantic by jet ski, is pioneering what could turn out to be the salvation of time-starved believers.

This is a Xacobeo year — when the day of St James falls on a Sunday in Spain — which means the souls of pilgrims who complete the Camino are excused from Purgatory.

Count Alvaro hopes that by Wednesday evening, having made landfall on the Galician coast and marched the last 18 miles inland, the Camino will have been completed in record time.

The count, 43, was anxious to dispel thoughts that this 650-mile journey is no more than a jaunt for someone who took 63 days to complete the 10,000 nautical miles from Rome to Miami about two years ago.

“Success is never guaranteed, and I will be standing up all the time to avoid injuring my back,” he said.

Credibility test

Although Bush didn’t like the idea of global tests, he says that Kerry “doesn’t pass the credibility tests.” Must not be graded on a curve.

Everyone is rushing, prematurely, to proclaim the Afghan elections good enough. For example, the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), which had just a handful of its own election monitors, has pooh-poohed calls for the Afghan election to be re-run, its ambassador saying that that “would not do service to the people of Afghanistan who came out yesterday, at great personal risk, to vote.” This is a variant of Bush’s “You can’t call the war a mistake, that would demoralize the troops” argument.

Oh, and this should be obvious, but the news reports featuring pictures and interviews with happy voters came from the few parts of Afghanistan it was safe enough for reporters to travel to.

Another piece of animation by the guys who did “This Land.” This one’s even better.

Posturing

Afghan women (one presumes) on line to vote.

It’s bad enough to see the word election applied to the event that just took place in Afghanistan, but to use the word democracy is to strip the word of 90% of its meaning, to turn it into a signifier without a signified (that’s my little homage to the late Jacques Derrida; don’t worry, I won’t do it again.)

First, democracy is a SYSTEM of government. But there won’t be elections for a legislative body for another 6 months. Even if you accept this election as legitimate, it was only for a single branch of government. There are no checks and balances, unless of course you count the fact that the only power he really has grows out of the barrel of an American gun. If he weren’t a puppet, he’d be an absolute dictator.

As for the elections, there seems to be an unspoken agreement in the media to pretend that the mere fact that a lot of people voted, without too many casualties, legitimizes the election, no matter how little the final vote count will correspond to the votes actually cast by the people who voted who were actually qualified to vote. We all know that more people registered than were eligible to register (one of my readers has pointed out that population figures for Afghanistan are just estimates, which is true but the over-registration was highly uneven geographically, with some regions reaching more than 140%). Given that, you’d think the failure today of the procedures that were supposed to prevent multiple voting would be considered serious, but when 15 candidates have the presumption to complain, the WaPo dismissively describes them as “posturing,” which is as childishly insulting as those “Sore Loserman” placards in 2000.

And then there’s the absence of newspapers or national media of any kind, or any other form of political infrastructure, the fact that the country is occupied by a foreign power and too unsafe for the candidates to campaign (I doubt whether the majority of voters could have named more than 2 of the candidates), the attempts by the US ambassador to force candidates to quit, little stuff like that. This is not to denigrate the brave Afghans who went to the polls, some of them children, some of them repeatedly, some enthusiastic at the thought of rejecting warlordism and embracing democracy. But the majority of countries have elections, and the majority of those countries are not democracies.

Moving on alphabetically, I’d also like to reject the results of Australia’s elections. Just because I don’t like John Howard, a liar and racist douchebag.

In 1941 Americans were deeply affected by the diary of a little Dutch boy (Dirk van der Heide, My Sister and I), whose mother had been killed by German bombing during the invasion of Rotterdam and who had fled with his sister to safety in America. Turns out, the whole thing was manufactured by the British Secret Service to help convince the US to join the war.

I haven’t yet mentioned the warning issued, and then retracted, that Al Qaida intended to attack schools in Florida, Oregon, NJ and Michigan. All of which are swing states.

The story about Bush possibly having worn an earpiece in the 1st debate, which was originally just one of those “rumors on the Internets,” has now received play in the WaPo, NYT & Independent. This may not contribute anything, but in Marlon Brando’s last film, the not-very-good “The Score,” Brando refused to memorize lines, which were fed to him through an earpiece.

Who is more important

Made-up quotes are in red.

15 of 16 presidential candidates in Afghanistan’s elections today denounced the election process when indelible ink put on voters’ thumbs to prevent fraud turned out to be rather easily, uh, delible. Karzai dismissed their complaints, asking “Who is more important, these 15 candidates or the millions of people who turned out today to vote,” waiting for hours “in the dust and snow and rain” in order “to participate in a complete bloody farce.”

The UN Security Council passed the Russian resolution for creating a list of terrorist organizations, speeding up extradition and imposing travel bans. Expect many loud battles over what groups are or are not terrorist. US ambassador to the UN John Danforth says that “the deliberate massacre of innocents is never justifiable in any cause,” adding, “unless you, like, totally accidentally, bomb a wedding or something. That’s cool.”

In unrelated news, US planes bombed a wedding in Fallujah. The US has never admitted that the last wedding we bombed (in December, I believe) was actually a wedding, so we’ll see how long they can claim that this was a Zarqawi hideout. Forever, would be my guess. He was probably hiding in the cake. 11 members of the wedding party were killed, including the groom.

The Bush campaign’s email to my cat says: “President Bush won a decisive victory last night. The President dominated the debate with impassioned, thoughtful and concise arguments that left Kerry looking petty and defensive as he sputtered out tired, false political rhetoric and distortions that shattered his credibility and contradicted the Senator’s 20-year record of being on the wrong side of history on national security and domestic policy.” It goes on to quote from emails sent to the campaign from...hey, they’re all from swing states, what a coincidence!... such as “You were awesome,” “You are my winner tonight.” The only quote from Bush himself is the “You can run, but you can’t hide” line, which Atrios and others have pointed out Bush also liked to use about Osama bin Laden.

I was about to say that despite walking with sticks and being 6’4”, Osama seems to be running and hiding perfectly adequately, when it hit me that John Kerry is also 6’4”. So that’s where Osama’s been hiding all this time! Right in plain sight. Oh, he’s good.

Debate 2: It’s never quite as simple as the president would have you believe

A FEW CHANGES TO THIS POST. Altered or added text is in blue.

Transcript.

James Wolcott describes this debate as pitting “President Pet Goat against knight of woeful countenance, John Kerry.” I am gonna so totally steal both of those names.

You don’t get to call it a town hall meeting if its members were chosen by Gallup.

Kerry says he likes the Patriot Act, just not how Ashcroft uses it. That’s not point. The powers available to the government should not be so far-reaching that it matters who the attorney general is. Ashcroft hasn’t abused the powers he was given by the Patriot Act (although he has abused others of his powers), he used them.

Bush says again we had to look at the world differently after 9/11. The other day I saw a book titled “Moral Philosophy After 9/11.” My reaction was that if it’s changed by 9/11 it’s either not philosophy or not moral (I didn’t look inside the book).

Bush: sanctions were not working, the UN not effective in removing Saddam Hussein. Kerry correctly says what I was starting to type, that the objective of the UN was removing WMDs, not removing Saddam. The UN doesn’t get to decide which national leaders are legitimate.

Bush’s tactic seems to be to say the same crap he’s said before, but more vehemently. And then to nod his head vigorously once or twice afterwards--what’s that about?

Bush says the decision to “take Saddam out” was unpopular. I think he means with Europeans. No, on reading the transcript, I can't tell who it was unpopular with, unless "taking Saddam out" mean taking him out on a date...

Also, dissing Arafat was unpopular. I think he means with Palestinians.

Kerry finally challenges the Bush line that his job in the war is to do what the generals tell him (“Of course, I listen to our generals. That's what a president does.”).

Bush called the Internet the “Internets.” Remember his father and checkout scanners?

And then he says that wars can be fought with fewer soldiers, using technology. Technology which is just sorcery to Bush.

Bush: it’s a long, long war. Now he tells us.

Bush: we’ll talk about the tax cut in a minute. Funny, I thought they didn’t know the questions in advance. Of course, what he’s saying is that he’ll talk about tax cuts no matter what the question is.

When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it won’t kill you. Oh, he means to make sure it doesn’t come from the Third World, where drugs by definition are made out of snails, rhino horns, aardvark feces and arsenic.

You can tell he’s in the South, because he just referred to the Yew-nited States Congress.

Bush says Kerry is “running for the president.” The word is presidency, moron. How could you hold the office and not know that? Also, I could swear I heard him call Kerry “Kennedy” earlier. I did.

Bush: “I don’t think the Patriot Act abridges your rights at all.” Also, “I really don't think your rights are being watered down.” Yeah, they're not being watered down, they're being pissed on. And Kerry says we shouldn’t let terrorists change the Constitution. Um, ok.

On stem cells, Shrub says he made the decision to balance science and ethics. Like he thinks science is inherently unethical.

Bush says he wouldn’t appoint a Supreme Court justice who would uphold Dred Scott. Fair to say that Dred Scott won’t be coming up for reconsideration any time soon, but best to be prepared. Or ban “under God” from the pledge of allegiance. Oddly, he insists that those decisions must have derived from personal opinion rather than constitutional interpretation.

Kerry: “It’s never quite as simple as the president would have you believe.”

Asked to give three instances where he made mistakes--and calling for 3 was a wonderful touch--Bush evades. I think that’s a mistake, so to speak, because he’s demonstrated yet again his inability to acknowledge error. He does say some of his appointments were wrong, but he won’t say which ones because he doesn’t want to hurt their feelings. Oh brother.

Are there any brave Afghan men to forcefully take the dirty hands of the crusaders from this innocent Afghan virgin?

Ken Bigley is “executed” (the word the killers used, evidently in the belief that someone would believe this was some sort of judicial process), his head sawn off, while someone filmed. These people are not normal.

I haven’t been talking as much as I should about the details of the intelligence reform bill, which is turning rapidly into a sub rosa version of the Patriot Act II we all feared. In part this was because I have no idea which provisions are likely to pass. I’m not really sure what Congress is capable of, which is frightening by itself, and which bits will quietly die in committee. The provision for deporting people to countries where they were likely to be tortured has been replaced by one allowing the head of Homeland Security to order foreigners detained forever, with no judicial review. There’s something about letting employers have access to arrest--not conviction--records, without punishing them for passing on the info to everyone they know.

Does anyone know of a website with Afghan election posters? I’ve mentioned several of them, but I’ve only been able to read about them. The Guardian reports on a Taliban anti-election poster: “A glossy colour poster juxtaposes photos of charred American corpses swinging from a bridge in Falluja with that of a US soldier apparently frisking a burka-wearing Afghan woman.” It then asks a question that none of those undecided voters in Missouri thought to ask, “Are there any brave Afghan men to forcefully take the dirty hands of the crusaders from this innocent Afghan virgin?”

Muslims in Bangladesh demonstrate against the recent formation of what they call the satanic women’s football league.

Kerry would win in a landslide if he just promised that the long national nightmare of watching Bush smirk would be over

So GeeDubya’s handlers told the cable news networks that he’d be making a major policy speech, conning them into running what was actually a regular campaign speech for an hour (and not one of them pulled the plug?), with lots of little digs at Kerry. Two things occur to me:

1) Isn’t it just adorably deluded that after all this time, Team Chimpy think that what undecided voters need in order to make up their minds is more exposure to...Shrub... speaking?

2) The thing that’s so irritating about those little pauses he takes after he gets off one of those zingers, where he stands there smugly smirking until you want to smack him (if I may alliterate), is that he’s so goddamned self-satisfied about a line he didn’t actually come up with himself, just read off the teleprompter.

I was going to look for a picture of Junior smirking to attach to this post, but I think we’ve all suffered enough.

Tie his hands and smear his good name

Creeping jargon alert: I’ve mentioned before the military’s use of the phrase “anti-Iraqi forces” to describe Iraqi insurgents. The NYT parenthetically mentioned today that the phrase has acquired initial caps (Anti-Iraqi Forces) and an acronym (AIF). Now, are the forces anti-Iraqi, or are the forces made up of Anti-Iraqis, possibly traveling here through a dimensional portal from a parallel universe exactly opposite to our own, where Saddam really had WMDs and Spock has a goatee? Because if that’s the case, I think we should be told.

Bush, spinning the Duelfer Report, which says that everything he ever said about Iraq was a lie, claims that it shows that Saddam Hussein was “systematically gaming the system... with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world looked away.” Except that the system couldn’t be “gamed” and the world couldn’t “look away”: the sanctions were imposed by the UN Security Council and could only be removed by the Council, where the US has a veto. The sanctions worked. Bush’s arguments are getting stupider. The strongest retrospective case for invading Iraq, or rather the case they’re pushing now, is that he could have passed WMDs to terrorists, which is not the sort of thing he ever did.

The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin admonere, meaning didn’t do doodly squat)(to quote Cicero) Tom DeLay two more times yesterday, for 1) the appearance that an energy company was buying access to him when he went to a fund-raiser they held on behalf of his PAC while energy legislation was pending. Appearance? That word just covers one of the senses, and it also sounds like that and it smells like...well, let’s just say it smells. And 2) getting the FAA to track down Texas legislators during the redistricting thing. DeLay’s lawyer says--and just to diagram this sentence--“Mr. DeLay has not done a lot that others may not have done,” adding, “It is just that he is under the microscope.” Lord, who would want to look at this under the microscope:

DeLay himself responded to calls by D’s that he step down as House R leader, calling them “relentless personal attacks”--which is just what they are not; they are attacks on his public behaviour--made in an attempt to “tie my hands and smear my good name,” and he already pays a hooker perfectly good money to tie his hands and smear his good name (if you know what I mean) every Tuesday night.

California proposition recommendations

Post-election, I'm adding the results, in this color. Numbers at the secretary of state's site.

I know everyone in California is just waiting for my opinions on the propositions before filling in their absentee ballots. (Everyone else can skip this post: by California standards it’s a remarkably un-wacky election, so find another state to point at and laugh, go away, nothing to see here).

I'd also recommend checking out the SF Bay Guardian's endorsements. And there's also the LA Weekly.

1A & 65 are both about the fiscal relationship between state and local governments, and are therefore important and very dull. Fortunately, 65 has been abandoned, and rightly so--it looks like a mess. 1A looks ok to me, mostly protecting local gov finances from more raids by the state and from unfunded mandates, but it’s supported by Governor Ahnuuld, so I’m suspicious and reserve the right to change my mind. (Later: and I have changed my mind, for the reasons the Bay Guardian sets out).
No on 1A & 65.
1A easily passed--Arnold supported it, 65 failed.

Proposition 59 — Guarantees the right of access to state and local government information.
Yes.
Easily passed.

Proposition 60A — Requires that the proceeds from the sale of surplus state property be used to pay off bonded indebtedness.
It's bad budgeting practice to dedicate a revenue source to a completely unrelated purpose. No.
Yes.

Proposition 61 — A $750-million bond issue for constructing, expanding and equipping children’s hospitals.
I’m opposed to bonds on philosophical as well as fiscal grounds. They’re an expensive way of funding something, they’re regressive in that they provide their purchasers an undeserved tax deduction, and place tax obligations on future citizens to pay them off--taxation without representation. No.
Yes.

60 & 62 are evil-twin initiatives and have to be considered together. If both pass, the one that passes with fewest votes won’t be enacted. These are yet more attempts to “reform” primaries. Primaries are in an odd position, constitutionally speaking: they’re slightly less official than other elections because you’re voting to fill a position not in government, but in a political party, which is essentially a voluntary association. The party hacks reminded us of this when they refused to accept two previous initiatives in favor of open primaries, but they still wanted the taxpayers to pay for primaries. After the last round of reapportionment, districts in California (and most of the country) are so solidly partisan that the primary is the only election that matters, which favors ideologues rather than centrists, and leaves you with a choice of whack-jobs in November. And choice is not the word, since there isn't a single competitive race for the US House of Reps in all of California this election. Prop. 62 is an answer to that problem, but not the right answer. It would have a non-partisan (yeah, right) primary, with the 2 top vote-getters facing each other in November. In practice you’d still wind up with a D and an R, with rare exceptions--but no Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom. Even if you don’t vote for candidates in those parties, don’t you feel better about the democratic process just knowing they’re there? In my case, I have a little litmus test that I apply to voting for offices (governor, lite governor, attorney general, judges) that might have something to do with death penalty decisions: I am against the death penalty and feel morally obligated not to vote for supporters of it in those positions. I don't consider that unreasonable. In 20 years of voting in this state, I have never been able to vote for a Democrat for any of those offices applying that standard. Without third-party options, I won't vote. A choice of 2 is no choice. There are better ways to deal with the problems 62 addresses: 1) reform the redistricting process to create more competitive races; 2) if the worry is that a third-party candidate will act as a spoiler, change the November elections, adding, for example, an instant-check-off system. 62 pretends to remove political parties from the election process, but as long as candidates require money and lots of it in order to be viable, the parties will always sneak back in. Prop. 60 enshrines the status quo in which all parties make it onto the final ballot; it is a fairly cynical ploy to preserve party power, but (sigh) vote for it, and against 62.
To my surprise and great relief, that's just what happened, even with the governor's meaty finger on the scales.

Proposition 63 — Levies an additional 1% tax on the income of millionaires to finance expanded mental health services.
Ignore what I said re Prop 60A about bad budgeting. Increasing mental health funding is good, increasing progressivity in taxation is good, so what the hell. Yes.
Yes.

Proposition 64 — Limits an individual’s right to sue under unfair business competition laws to situations in which the individual has suffered actual injury or financial loss because of an unfair practice.
There are definitely cases of lawyers using threats of these lawsuits to blackmail small businesses. Reform is needed. This isn’t it. It would leave enforcement of laws against unfair business practices to the government, which can’t be trusted with it (but has nothing to do with environmental laws, public health, etc as the fear-mongers who wrote the no argument claim. I wish someone would enforce a minimum standard of honesty in these arguments; it’s especially annoying when the legitimate arguments are lost behind the alarmist rhetoric). No on 64.
Yes. Everyone hates a lawsuit.

Proposition 66 — Amends the three-strikes law to require that a crime be a violent or serious felony in order to qualify as a strike and imposes more severe penalties for sexual crimes against children.
The Jean Valjean protection initiative. You have to love how they threw in the sexual crimes against children thing as red meat to balance out the part making 3 Strikes more rational (but not actually rational; that would be too...rational). Some of this would be enacted retroactively, but nowhere near as many people would be released as the No people in the pamphlet, or indeed the governor, have been shamelessly claiming. And while the opposition talk about rapists and murderers being released, by definition anybody affected will have served their time for those crimes and only be in prison now for a non-violent crime. Yes on 66.
No, the public fell for the lies. At least we'll be safe from pizza thieves.

Proposition 67 — Adds a 3% surcharge on telephone usage to provide additional money for hospital emergency services and training.
Ignore what I said about ignoring what I said about bad budgeting. Telephone calls have nothing to do with ERs. No.
No.

Proposition 68 — Requires Indian tribes that own casinos to contribute 25% of their slot machine revenue to state and local governments. If they refuse, 11 card rooms and five horse-racing tracks would gain the right to install 30,000 slots and would pay 33%, or roughly $1 billion a year, primarily to local government.
This is a first, I believe: blackmail enshrined in a proposition. Call this the “You sure got a nice casino, it would sure be a shame if something was to happen to it” initiative. No.
No on both gambling initiatives. I can't tell if we hate gambling, or just Indians.

Proposition 69 — Requires felons to provide a sample of their DNA for storage in a law enforcement database, and authorizes local authorities to take such specimens from individuals arrested on suspicion of rape or murder.
Creepy. It’s even retroactive, applies to some non-felons, to juveniles... DNA tells many things about you that you may not want the government to know, and as the human genome is deciphered, the amount of info will increase. No on 69.
Yes.

Proposition 70 — Grants Indian tribes unlimited casino expansion rights on their land. In return, the tribes would pay the state 8.84% of their net profit.
Unlimited? I think not.
No.

Proposition 71 — Establishes a constitutional right to perform stem-cell research. Authorizes a bond issue of up to $3 billion to finance such research.
Gesture politics at its most gesturey. It will be federal legislation that decides this thing. I like a good gesture as much as the next lefty, but there’s that bond thing, not only because I oppose them philosophically, but because medical research should not be funded by this sort of popularity contest. Including for-profit medical research, I might add--the LA Times says venture capitalists have put up $10 million in support of 71. My advice: don’t vote against it, but don’t vote for it either.
Yes, by nearly 60%.

Proposition 72 — Requires employers to provide healthcare insurance for uninsured workers.
Yes, of course.
No, the fear-mongering about jobs leaving the state worked, paid for mostly by Wal-Mart and the restaurant lobby, which are obviously businesses that can't leave the state. The consolation is that Schwarzenegger will not be able to eat in a restaurant without having his food spit in by the staff.

A post with no politics at all

The South Park people are having trouble with their new movie Team America, because the ratings people want to give them an NC-17 because of a scene of explicit sex between two marionettes.

A 72-year old Malaysian man is getting married for the 53rd time, remarrying his first wife. Sheesh.

For science-as-art, check out the Visions of Science awards, photos of scientific stuff, like this picture of a brain aneurism, with a platinum wire inserted to keep it from spreading.

Substance will always trump spin

Britain’s Channel 4 just aired cockpit footage from an American fighter that bombed civilians in Fallujah in April. He asked mission control whether he should “take them out.” The Indy points out: “At no point during the exchange between the pilot and controllers does anyone ask whether the Iraqis are armed or posing a threat.”

Thought you’d like to see the amusing rhetoric in the email sent by the Bush-Cheney campaign to supporters--and my cat:

“Even as one of the nation’s best trial lawyers, Edwards could not explain the inexplicable - the deficiencies of Kerry’s record. Edwards failed as a credible advocate for John Kerry last night and Dick Cheney proved that substance will always trump spin. There’s no evidence that John Kerry has any convictions - despite Edwards’ best attempt at political spin. Every time Edwards had an opportunity to explain John Kerry’s record to the American people, he chose to attack the Vice President, and his low moment came 40 minutes into the debate when a befuddled-looking John Edwards latched onto Halliburton - a political attack proven false by the nonpartisan FactCheck.org.”

Befuddled-looking. Love it. So the argument here is that Edwards, I guess because he was a defense lawyer, was supposed to be “defending” Kerry, and it was simply a dirty trick to question Cheney’s record. The article at FactCheck.org is about Kerry ads overstating the significance of the fact that Cheney continues to receive more per year from Halliburton than his VP salary, an issue Edwards never brought up, so the reference is beside the point. Still, they wouldn’t be Republicans if they didn’t leap to the defense of an evil multinational corporation.

The secret energy task force--how could Edwards not mention Cheney’s secret energy task force?

Veep debate blogging: What’s wrong with a little flip flop from time to time?

Transcript.

I can’t really tell who “won,” I’m not good at judging those things. Edwards seemed a little glib and shallow. Cheney made no effort to make himself likable, seemed defensive to me, but he might have looked quietly authoritative to people (undecided and/or ignorant voters) who don’t know better. A friend said he looked like he spent 90 minutes trying to take a poop. Wouldn’t it be funny if he really has just been constipated all these years? It would explain a lot.

Certainly, like Bush last week, he looked like he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to have to explain himself or answer questions, felt it was beneath him.

Also, Cheney’s head is twice as big as Edwards’s.

They both stuck closely to just one or two themes, probably too closely, since if you don’t buy the argument, for example, that Iraq and 9/11 aren’t linked, the theme of Bush-Cheney being misleading falls flat.

Cheney said Kerry & Edwards have a very limited view of how to use US force. Like that’s a bad thing.

Cheney cited the El Salvador elections of the 1980s as a model.

Edwards says under Kerry, “we’re going to go back to the proud tradition of the United States of America and presidents of the United States of America for the last 50 to 75 years. First, we’re going to actually tell the American people the truth.” There’s a tradition of telling the American people the truth?

Cheney: If they can’t stand up to Howard Dean, how can they stand up to Al Qaida? Yeah, but Howard Dean is scarier (kidding, kidding).

Edwards keeps mentioning Kerry’s name in a question where the rules required him not to. Cheney doesn’t have that problem, and it occurs to me that he doesn’t really respect Bush that much.

Similarly, Edwards was able to refer to Mary Cheney, and the Dickster replied by giving up his turn. I foresee an awkward Thanksgiving.

Gwen Ifill asks, “What’s wrong with a little flip flop from time to time?” Well, as Wonkette would say... no, I won’t go there.

He saw a threat

Dubya is often at his most entertaining not when he’s extemporizing but when he’s on autopilot. Attacking Kerry’s 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, Bush: “In 1991, when my dad was president, he saw a threat, and that was that Saddam Hussein was going to overrun Kuwait.” Gee, what do you think was the first sign of that threat? Oh yeah, when Saddam actually overran Kuwait.

Russian state tv’s (that’s all of them, now) coverage of the Bush-Kerry debate edited out the two candidates’ criticisms of Putin.

The US will give money to something called the Independent Women’s Forum (Lynne Cheney used to be on its board) to train Iraqi women in democratic skills. The IWF’s website says it was “established to combat the women-as-victims, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism.” In the US, that is. The website (iwf.org) seems to be down, but you can use Google’s caches.

Patrick Cockburn points out in a story behind a pay barrier in the Indy that while the US is so gosh-darned proud of capturing Samarra, this is the 3rd time it has done so. Personally I’m assuming that this is just more guerilla warfare stuff, with the insurgents having simply faded away to fight another day. The US conquest of Samarra is thus another “catastrophic success.” Cockburn: “The aim of the bombing is to prove to American voters that their army is on the offensive, but without substantially increasing US casualties.”

“Operation Days of Penitence,” the Israeli invasion of Gaza, launched after two Israeli children were killed by rockets, has so far taken the lives of 22 Palestinian children, because 2 wrongs don’t make a right, but 22 do.

Tippecanoe and Hamid Karzai too

Michael Kostiw will not take the CIA position after all. What he shoplifted turns out not to be lingerie, darn it, but bacon. Maybe he just liked the feel of it when he slipped it down the front of his pants. So the petty theft of a package of delicious bacon now disqualifies someone from a career undermining Latin American democracies, assassinating Fidel Castro and falsifying evidence to support plans to invade Muslim nations.

Speaking of bacon shoved into pants (some segues work better than others), Karzai is still on track to be “elected” president by a country 99.9999% of which he is afraid to set foot on. However today, as a BBC headline puts it, “Karzai Braves Rally Outside Kabul.” In fact, his first campaign event outside Kabul. He bravely travelled 60 miles to Ghazni, bravely accompanied only by a fleet of helicopters, fighter jets, shitloads of soldiers and bodyguards etc. Pretty much like Bush, really.

Out of the business he loved most--bringing about nuclear Armageddon

The pope has beatified the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Karl I, who approved the use of gas warfare in World War I. Karl I is not to be confused with Austro-Californian Emperor Ahnuuld I, who banned smoking in prisons but likes a good cigar.
(Update: the miracle Karl performed: healed a Brazilian nun’s varicose veins. Almost makes up for the whole poison gas thing. The nun was praying to him in 1960. Why a Brazilian nun was praying to an Austrian emperor, I do not know.)

My cat is on the Bush-Cheney email list. Be warned: they’re recruiting R’s to go door to door on the Oct. 16-17 weekend. So you have plenty of time to dig a mote, fill water balloons, and... I was going to make a joke about showing them your assault rifle, because Republicans love a good assault rifle, but I won’t because neither my cat nor I wish to be visited by the Secret Service.

On CNN, Condi Rice spun Bush’s debate comment that A.Q. Khan had been “brought to justice”: “I think we all know that A.Q. Khan was a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero... A.Q. Khan is out of business and he is out of the business that he loved most. And if you don’t think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He’s nationally humiliated.” OK, it’s not George-Bush-during-the-debates nationally humiliated, but it’s still nationally humiliated I suppose.

Since the debate, GeeDubya has been going on and on and on about Kerry’s ill-chosen phrase “global test,” a phrase combining the two things Chimpy hates most: tests, and the world.

Does pork really go over that well in Afghanistan?

More on Afghan elections. This will come as a shocker: Karzai’s opponents accuse the US ambassador of acting as his campaign manager. The Times (reprinted here): “In the past week, the US Ambassador has appeared three times at Mr Karzai’s side at the opening of US-funded reconstruction projects, some of which have not even been completed. ...After two years of doling out meagre reconstruction funds, the Bush Administration has pumped in an extra $ 1.76 billion this election year.” The irony is that Karzai was already a favorite, but the landslide Saturday is going to wind up making him look less legitimate because it will be seen as resulting from American meddling.

Under Bush’s faith-based marriage promotion program, the gov is hiring Moonies and funding Moonie programs. Moonie marriages, of course, are mass marriages between strangers, but those unions produce children free of the taint of original sin, so, uh, good deal.

Afghan elections just as silly as ours: let freedom reign

The Sunday Times notes: “Karzai cancelled his last election broadcast because of security concerns although Kabul Radio City, where it was due to be recorded, is less than a mile from the palace and across the road from the headquarters of the Nato led peacekeeping force.” “[T]he 18 candidates include a vodka swilling warlord who likes to crush his enemies with tanks but is running on a human rights platform; a poet returning from exile in Paris; a woman paediatrician and one man who submitted an old black-and-white passport photograph remarkably similar to the only known image of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.” And it’s still a better choice than Bush v. Kerry.

Something called International Foundation for Election Systems is passing out picture-only election literature described thus by the Sunday Times: “a series of pictures begins with a map of Afghanistan with a Kalashnikov at its centre and scenes of devastation. Then pictures of people voting are followed by images of Afghanistan with a sun in the centre radiating out to roads, hospitals, schools and wheat fields.” Yes, by all means encourage magical thinking about the electoral process. And, um, wheat? (If anyone comes across this, or indeed any Afghan election lit., please email me.)

It notes the problems in preventing voter fraud by putting indelible ink on people’s fingers when so many are amputees because of landmines.

All the bad guys all gone now

The level of lying is increasing. The US is claiming that in Samarra, 125 rebels were killed and no civilians. None. Zero. They’re not even bothering to come up with half-plausible lies anymore. Area hospitals of course tell a different story. The Iraqi interior minister also tells a story, a children’s story to judge by the vocabulary: “We cleaned up the city from all the bad guys and terrorists.”

David Avery, running the Afghan presidential elections for the UN, says that there will be many irregularities, but not enough to undercut their legitimacy or affect the outcome. Of course the elections and the irregularities haven’t happened yet, so Avery is obviously prepared to overlook any amount of violence or chicanery.

Yes, I used the word chicanery. Everybody should use the word chicanery once in their lifetime.

When the Germans occupied France, they set up an internment camp. It was kept going secretly until 1949, evidently mostly housing foreigners it would have been embarrassing to release because to do so would be to admit that French guards had collaborated with the Germans. So the French government effectively kept collaborating with Nazis who were no longer there because they had been defeated 4 years before. Shows real dedication to the fine art of collaboration.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza (the 5,934th invasion, I believe) is being called Operation Days of Penitence, which just seems obnoxious to me.

Tim Dunlop is right: the voices that wouldn’t let Bush finish were not in an earpiece, they were the voices in his chimp-like head.

Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan

The UN is funding PR advisers to teach the candidates in the Afghan presidential elections the finer points of spin-doctoring.

Gen. Dostum, a whisky-drinking mujahideen leader whose Northern Alliance forces helped defeat the Taliban, had to be dissuaded from posing for a campaign poster among the graves of "martyrs" who died fighting the Taliban.

Tactfully, they pointed out that he might look for a more positive image. “Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan,” Mr Marie said. The general eventually agreed to pose at a building site instead.

The UN, according to the Observer, has 115,000 election officials in Afghanistan, with 5,000 satellite phones, 1,150 jeeps and 4 helicopters. Also donkeys: some of the ballot boxes will be sent by donkey. Meanwhile, in Iraq, they have 8 people working on the elections. Not that the 115,000 officials etc aren’t working in the service of a farce, of course. It would help keep everyone’s understanding of this focused if the media used language more carefully. For example, The Observer says that “More than 10 million voters have registered,” but since there are fewer than 10 million eligible voters in the whole country, so that statement is false, disregarding the large and unknown level of fraud.

Badly chosen BBC headline: “Nigeria Spearheads Polio Campaign.” Glad to find that it didn’t involve actual spears. Given the obscurantism in some of the Muslim states, this would not be out of the question. This time President Obasanjo himself personally administered the vaccine to the daughter of the governor of Kano, one of the states that had previously banned the vaccine.

Porter Goss has picked as executive director of the CIA a guy, Michael Kostiw, who was an oil company lobbyist--natch--after he was forced out of the CIA in 1981 for shoplifting. Well, for getting caught shoplifting, anyway. Hopefully the Post won’t stop investigating until it can tell us exactly what he shoplifted, but somehow I think we all know it was women’s underwear.
(Update: pink women’s underwear, no doubt in my mind)

Bush and Kerry agreed that nuclear proliferation was an important issue. In fact, Bush said US spending had gone up by I think he said 30%. Turns out, that includes the cost of getting rid of the US’s own unwanted nuclear materials. This means he came prepared with a fake number, on an issue he claimed to consider really important.

The Spanish government is moving forward with plans to allow gay marriage and gay adoption. The Vatican calls this a “sad step.” Yes, and we should listen because the Catholic Church’s record of social policy in Spain is so good:

Never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant

A 1977 patent for the comb-over (don’t miss the drawings), via the 2004 IgNobel prizes.

Contrariwise, a French Muslim schoolgirl shaved her head to protest the headscarf ban, just as I suggested.

Bush keeps making fun of Kerry’s plan to call a summit on Iraq: “I’ve never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant, or bring a terrorist to justice.” Then open a history book, you ignoramus:

We'll be bombing ya tamarrah, Samarrah

Bill Maher says the FCC is upset about the televising of the debates, because they showed the emperor without clothes.

DO AS WE SAY... : Two BBC website stories: 1) “US pushes to take Iraq rebel town: More than 100 people die as US and Iraqi forces launch a major attack to regain control of the town of Samarra.” 2) “US urges Israel to show restraint: Washington calls on Israel to limit its offensive in the Gaza Strip, as tanks move deep into militant strongholds.”

The Samarra operation’s raison d’être is to allow it to participate in the demonstration elections (a phrase coined by leftists in the 1980s for the hilariously fake elections Reagan ordered be held in El Salvador and Honduras, which I’m happy to see coming back into widespread use) in January. In the debates, Shrub castigated Kerry for allegedly setting a deadline for leaving Iraq, but his Iraq policy is being distorted to pull off a meaningless “election.” The descriptions of the Samarra campaign by American military types suggests not just a counter-insurgency, but a coup: the WaPo quotes an Army spokesmodel: “We recognized some time ago the police chief, the city council and the mayor were ineffective.” By ineffective, he means not enforcing American diktats.

September the 11th been very, very good to me

The debate has brought out the urge of many people to illustrate it or write parodies.

Augusto Pinochet may finally be taken down, not for disappearing hundreds or thousands of members of the opposition, but for not paying his taxes. Well, if it’s good enough for Al Capone...

Putin now also plans to take control of the body that appoints, disciplines and removes judges.

The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin word admonere, meaning to moderately chide someone with no sense of shame) Tom DeLay for having tried to bribe (I’m using the term in its legal sense) Rep. Nick Smith, offering to support his son’s run for Congress if he voted for the Medicare drug bill. DeLay issued a statement noting that the committee hadn’t previously addressed such conduct, so how could he possibly have known that bribery was unethical?

DeLay is also proud of the House vote to overturn the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, because it’s more important for DC residents to have a gun than a vote.

Impertinent

The Official God FAQ.

Responding to the new video of hostage Ken Bigley, Comical Allawi called the kidnapping “impertinent.” That’ll put ‘em in their place. But what he really dislikes is the fact that the Western media air the videos.

Bush: “The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.” Actually, Khan was pardoned after making a confession that he did it all, without anyone in the government knowing anything about it and...and here’s the part everyone always leaves out...he was allowed to keep all the money he made!

Evidently, watching the debate on PBS as I did was the equivalent of listening to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on radio. Where my weak impression (which is why I didn’t declare a winner in the last post) was that Kerry had probably lost the debate, everyone else whose opinion I’ve since read online watched it on C-SPAN, which evidently often ran a split-screen, and they thought Bush looked irritated, the down-market version of Gore’s 2000 debate performance (like Gore, he seems to feel his opponent is beneath him or that he is above having to debate when he is self-evidently superior). The problem is, most of America didn’t watch it on C-SPAN. The other question is how many of the oh-so-important undecided voters watched the whole debate. As I said, Bush came with only 30 minutes of material, and so looked less and less competent as the debate went on.
(Update: Actually, this lovely two-minute clip of Bush squirming and rolling his eyes while Kerry was speaking comes from ABC.)

Bush-Kerry debate blogging: it’s hard work, but I’ll try not to send mexed missages

Kerry: “I’ve never wilted in my life.” I think I’ll leave the response to that line to Wonkette.

Kerry says the biggest danger in the world is nuclear proliferation, and although he makes a good case for it and I don’t disagree, we all know he just wanted to force Bush to try to pronounce the phrase. We know his problems with nukyular, and proliferation is at least two syllables beyond Shrub’s comfort zone (he did try “vociferously” at one point, but he didn’t use it correctly)(to be fair, Kerry early on warned about “radical Islamic Muslims”).

Notably, Bush tried to reshape that issue, as if nuclear proliferation only mattered in terms of terrorists getting their hands on nukes.

The guys controlling the cameras (Fox, actually) did occasionally show reaction shots in violation of the agreement between the campaigns. But not enough. Kerry started one response, “the president just said something extraordinarily revealing.” I’d have loved to see the look on GeeDubya’s face, since saying something revealing was the last thing he wanted to do. The revealing thing was “the enemy attacked us” as an excuse for invading Iraq; Kerry was going after Bush for conflating Al Qaida and Iraq, or, as Kerry phrased it, copying Bush’s annoying tendency to personalize foreign policy, Osama and Saddam. Bush’s response: “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us.” Well, I’m reassured.

Bush came to the 90-minute debate with enough prepared material for 30 minutes. He wasn’t just on message, he was on repeat. No doubt someone is doing a word count, but he kept saying “it’s hard work” about various things [Update: 11 times], presumably to indicate that he doesn’t spend all his time clearing brush in Crawford and leaving the work to other people. It just occurred to me that other people were barely mentioned. Powell was, but shouldn’t Kerry have been pounding on Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc?

Another phrase Bush used over and over and over was “mixed messages” (or mexed missages, in one case). Evidently you can’t lead if you give mixed messages. For someone who speaks as if he has no first language, he places a great deal of faith in the power of words. The suggestion seems to be that other countries, and American troops, are so unsophisticated that any deviation from the script will demoralize. “Not in front of the children” is the message.

Joe Lockhart is spinning that Shrub had an “annoyed smirk,” whatever that might be.

Rich cultural heritages

It was only a matter of time: www.kerryhatersforkerry.com

The trial on sex charges of the majority of adult males on Pitcairn Island, a place so far from anything that no plane can reach it, has begun, and I’m disappointed. I’d always heard that the descendants of the Bounty mutineers spoke with 18th-century accents, but hadn’t heard any actually speak until the BBC news yesterday. The women interviewed had only a mild accent, vaguely Australiany, not at all how I imagined Pitt the Younger and Daniel Defoe speaking. Pitcairn, which already has too few people to be really viable as an economy (or, indeed, a gene-pool, if you catch my drift), will become a ghost island if the men are convicted. They insist that having sex with 11-year old girls is part of their rich cultural heritage.

While the Italian government has been issuing non-denials about paying ransom for 2 women hostages in Iraq. The ransom was reputed to be one million American dollars, so the US has had some cultural influence on Iraq after all. Italian politicians, newspapers and polls have all said, So what? You’d think a country with a rich cultural heritage of kidnappings would know so what.

Uplifting accounts with good news messages

There are times when I despair of this country. The R’s try to sneak a provision into the omnibus intelligence restructuring bill to allow any non-citizen, without trial or hearing, to be turned over to countries that are likely to (or asked to) torture them. And in the House Judiciary Committee, the vote was along party lines. A vote in favor of torture, in favor of violating international laws and American due process, and the vote is determined by no higher principle than partisan freaking politics. And in the new favorite tactic of the right, American courts would be deprived of the ability to overturn the rules governing “rendition.” And just to ensure there isn’t a constitutional protection unviolated, it will apply retroactively. And people could be sent to any country we feel like sending them to, whether they were born there or had ever set foot there in their lives.

WaPo headline: “U.S. Effort Aims to Improve Opinions About Iraq Conflict.” By, among other things, censoring reports about the increasing violence. Congress won’t even get them anymore. I assume the headline is sarcastic, or something. The Pentagon will also pay for Iraqi-Americans and the CPA officials who did such a wonderful job getting Iraq back on its feet, to deliver “uplifting accounts with good news messages” at military bases--here in the US, not in Iraq, they’re not complete idiots--where soldiers will be encouraged to attend “voluntarily” and to refrain from asking, “So if Iraq is so great now, when are you moving back?”

Chain of Command

One of the rules in the 32 pages of rules for tomorrow’s debate is that when one candidate is speaking, the camera will not show the other candidate--looking at his watch like Bush the Elder, sighing like Al Gore, sweating like Nixon. Of course there is no reason for the networks to abide by this agreement between the two candidates.

Seymour Hersh will be on the Daily Show tonight. I finished his book Chain of Command a couple of days ago, but have held off writing about it, because while it is a pretty good if uneven book, it didn’t add that much to what I already knew. Of course I’m a blogger and by definition know everything, and had already read the New Yorker articles that form the basis of much of the book, and that might be the same for many of my readers as well. I also wasn’t thrilled with all the good quotes being anonymous.

Hersh doesn’t go into much detail about the actual torture of prisoners. In fact, given the importance of the pictures in giving this story the traction it has had, it’s interesting that the book has no pictures. Hersh’s main purpose is to demonstrate the culpability of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc in the torture of prisoners from Guantanamo through Abu Ghraib. If you’re not convinced, definitely read the book. He also throws in material, some of it a little cursory, on many of the failures of intelligence and wrong-headed foreign policy of the Bush admin, adding up to a thesis that they tend to see what they want to see. In his last sentences, Hersh wonders whether Bush is actually a big ol’ liar:

“But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there. A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility.”

It was funny to read that, since I’ve been speculating recently myself (in the lead paragraphs of this and this post)
about Bush’s relationship to the words he uses, if any.

Bush’s relationship to logic and evidence is another matter. During the 2000 campaign, those of us who had contempt for the man’s intellectual capacities assumed that he understood how ignorant and incompetent he was. It was really the only reassuring assumption to make, since it meant he would leave the decisions to smarter people. As Colin Powell has found out, this has not been the case, because Bush--this is what we failed to understand--thinks of himself as wise. Facts are secondary to him.

I didn’t really understand this until early in 2002. A month or so after the State of the Union address in which he referred to the “axis of evil,” he was in South Korea. I saw him on television talking about something he’d just heard, which was that in North Korea there was a peace museum in which was displayed an ax with which a NK soldier had killed two American soldiers. In a peace museum, was Bush’s point. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” he said. That sentence involved a reversal of deductive reasoning: he was pleased to be able to show evidence in support of what he already believed. In normal logic, the evidence comes first. But for Bush, facts are, as Ronald Reagan once said, stupid things. A real man derives his understanding of people and events from his “character” rather than his intellect. Bush can, he believes, look into Putin’s eyes and understand his soul.

If you wanted perfection

Missed one: kerrywrongforevangelicals.com. Identical to wrong for Catholics, which is identical to wrong for Mormons.

See if this sounds familiar: Secretary of War Donald “What, me worry?” Rumsfeldis quoted in a WaPo article on Star Wars, explaining why the US will deploy a system that won’t work: “Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first rifle, our first ship? I mean, they’d still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for God’s sake, if you wanted perfection.’” Yes, that’s just what he said about Iraqi elections. The article mentions that he used to be a pharmaceuticals exec: be afraid.

Followup on handshakes: the Guardian, in an article on the subject, says that Prince Charles refused to shake Idi Amin’s hand in 1978, that Helmut Kohl refused to shake PW Botha’s in 1984, and Fidel Castro believed that the CIA intended to poison him through a handshake, which isn’t sillier than anything else they tried, and so kept a cigar in his hand as an excuse.

Bumper sticker: Osama still has his job. Do you still have yours?

Russia is dealing with the danger of Beslan-type incidents in schools: all schoolchildren will now wear dog tags, “designed to withstand a fire or bomb blast.” I suppose it’s still better than “duck and cover.”

No American pressure behind the handshake

I have a theory. Colin Powell said Sunday about the Iraqi insurgency: “Yes, it’s getting worse, and the reason it’s getting worse is that they’re determined to disrupt the election.” My theory: what if the reason the Bushies are insisting on a totally unrealistic deadline for sham elections is to provide just this excuse for their failure to get the insurgency under control?

Allawi is now under pressure to apologize for shaking the Israeli foreign minister’s hand. “Allawi said there was no American pressure behind the handshake.” Sounds like my mother reminding me to write thank-you notes. Yesterday I commented about political handshakes. I think that in the secret religion shared by all politicians, a handshake can steal your soul, like cameras for some Native American tribes.

Google has set up a news.google in Chinese, but searches won’t display the sites the Chinese government doesn’t like. Google says it’s just efficient not to show a lot of links that will just be blocked to Chinese internet users anyway.

No concern for the Iraqi people

The Department of Homeland Security is buying a town, Playas, New Mexico, a former mining town with only 50 residents remaining, from its owner, Phelps Dodge, to use for practicing responses to suicide bombings, anthrax attacks, poisonings of water supplies, etc. Try not to think of this as a metaphor.

Life should be interesting for the 50 residents.

When the US government, after first trying to pretend that Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was some sort of terrorist-symp, changed excuses to claim that the problem was a misspelling, I was going to make a joke about the government not being able to handle C-A-T, but decided it was too obvious. But there’s a real issue here.

It was the Yusuf bit they had problems with, of course. Three years after 9/11, when several men who weren’t supposed to have been allowed into the country got onto planes they also shouldn’t have been allowed on because the gov didn’t have a standard for transliterating from Arabic, they still haven’t fixed the problem. Now we hear that there’s a huge and growing backlog of tapes not being translated from what the NYT calls “languages commonly associated with terrorism” by the FBI (motto: Terrorist Not Spoken Here). The reason they don’t learn from their hideous mistakes is that there are no consequences for their major intelligence failures (other than 2,900 dead on 9/11/01, I mean). Also: stop recording every conversation spoken in Arabic anywhere in the world. They’re not all terrorists. Really.

Colin Powell says the “major thrust” of US military efforts in Iraq in the near future (i.e., after the US election) will be to go into “no go” areas. You know who might have an opinion on this? A guy whose entire mission in another war was to take a boat up a river for no other reason than to show that there were no areas the US military couldn’t go?

Uh, Kerry. We were all clear on that, right?

The LA Times article that provided the Powell quote contains several instances of US military assholery related to aerial bombardment of Sadr City. The US talks about a “precision strike”...that lasted for hours. Army spokesmodel Lt. Col. Jim Hutton blamed casualties on insurgent mortars, saying “The enemy shows no concern for the Iraqi people.” Did I mention we just bombed a crowded suburb of Baghdad for several hours? Another spokesmodel called reports of civilians killed by bombing in Fallujah “propaganda,” and “suggested that local hospitals had been infiltrated by insurgent forces.” Please, just fucking spare me.

But is he good for the Zoroastrians?

The Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, which is a serious center of learning in economics & stats, really, suspended classes because students were complaining about a ghost.

Yesterday I posted a link to www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com. Guess what I found today: www.kerrywrongformormons.com. They’re word-for-word identical because, Mormons, Catholics, pretty much the same thing, right? Those are evidently the only religions Kerry’s bad for, because there’s no kerrywrongformuslims.com, or kerrywrongforjews.com, or kerrywrongforsatanworshippers.com. Yet. Consider that a hint to anyone with the inclination to write a parody.

From the Daily Telegraph: “Poland’s state railway is claiming £320 compensation from a man who delayed services by being run over by a train. But the company said yesterday it may relent after learning that his house had burned down. ‘We are acting in accordance with article 415,’ said a spokesman. Pawel Banaszek, 19, who was paralysed in the incident, said he was beaten by a gang and left on the track. He would pay the compensation from disability allowance.”

The British foreign minister accidentally shook the hand of Zimbabwean dictator at a reception in NY last week, to his embarrassment (there’s a long description in Clinton’s memoirs of the lengths he went to to avoid being filmed shaking Arafat’s hand)(and the rules for the Bush-Kerry debates make a handshake mandatory). Still, let’s not bring race into it (Indy headline: “Straw Shook Mugabe’s Hand ‘Because It Was Dark’”). Oh, wait, they meant the room was dark.

Free at last, free at last, to practice naked yoga in public

San Francisco prosecutors have dropped public nuisance charges against “Naked Yoga Guy,” having decided that naked yoga is not illegal in the city. Plan your vacations accordingly.

Time magazine claims that the Bushies dropped a plan for the CIA to “aid candidates favored by Washington” in the Iraqi elections, after getting negative reactions from several congresscritters (the article condescendingly refers to Nancy Pelosi, who come to think of it is Naked Yoga Guy’s representative, as coming “unglued” over it). I know I’m reassured.

I’m also reassured by the US ambassador to Afghanistan’s denial that he pressured rival candidates to Karzai to quit the race.

In the Iraq story, Time says the Bushies considered that intervention in the elections was justified as a counter-balance to Iranian resources. Because an election that was unfair when one foreign nation is trying to influence it becomes completely fair when two foreign nations are doing so. And by the way, the reason I put “aid candidates favored by Washington” in quotes is that Iraqis will be voting for parties, not for candidates. The Time piece shows a total ignorance of the electoral system the US foisted on Iraq.
(Update: Juan Cole has made all those points about the Time story at greater length and with greater expertise, although a day later.)

Everybody reports on Turkey’s revision of its criminal justice code, which were largely in a liberal direction in the hopes of getting EU membership. Since that isn’t gonna happen, I worry about what will happen when the day finally comes that Turkey realizes it isn’t gonna happen. Will they re-criminalize adultery? Reinstitute lesser penalties for rape if the man marries his victim and greater ones for rape of a virgin? Probably not, but it would have better had they come to this on their own. Only the Daily Telegraph, that I can find, mentions, in rather vague terms, something about restricting discussion of issues such as the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Mickey Mouse President

Wrong for Catholics

Take a quick look at this website:
www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com
Did you notice who paid for it? It’s at the very bottom of the page.

I am nothing to you

In Britain, much of whatever support remaining for the Iraq war dissipated this week because of the videotape from hostage Ken Bigley (pictured), a civil engineer, pleading with Tony Blair for his life. Bigley is the man threatened with execution (the two Americans captured with him have been killed) unless the two women prisoners are released.

I am Ken Bigley from Liverpool in the Walton district. I am here in Iraq and I think this is possibly my last chance to speak to someone who will listen from Europe. ... Mr Blair, I am nothing to you, it’s just one person in the whole of the United Kingdom that’s all. With a family like you’ve got a family, with children, like your children, your boys, your wife. Please you can help, I know you can. These people are not asking for the world, they’re asking for their wives and the mothers of their children.

Full transcript.
He also has an 86-year old mother who collapsed a few days ago.





Blair finally responded publicly, with his own plea to the British public (he evidently had nothing to say to the kidnappers), against compassion (Bigley’s family must have known they were fucked when Blair praised their stoicism): “What these terrorists understand is that they can use and manipulate the modern media to gain enormous publicity for themselves and put democratic politics and politicians in a very difficult position.” Poor baby. Really, modern media and technology have made it so difficult to ignore suffering. So unfair.

Except that the mirror image (if I may mention older representational technology) of that is that, as Mary Riddell writes in the Observer, “When history is a string of macabre Kodak moments, those slaughtered off-camera evaporate as if they had never lived. ... On the day Ken Bigley’s video played in millions of British living rooms, 22 people were murdered in Baghdad.”

Similarly, on the day in April when those 4 mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, and their bodies burned and hung from a bridge, with pictures, several US soldiers were also killed, with little fuss. But the crispy critters pictures caused the US to mount another invasion attempt, evidently against the advice of the Marine general in charge of the area. And Rumsfeld ignored the torture at Abu Ghraib, explaining that he didn’t consider it important enough to inform Bush because “The problem at that point was one-dimensional. It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t photographs and video.” The “problem,” of course, was very much three-dimensional to the people involved.

Back in May I wrote about the Bushite obsession with images, “like the flight deck landing, the statue toppling and all the other carefully stage-managed moments, as if they’re constantly auditioning for a postage stamp. ... Bush, who is less fixated on words, for obvious reasons, thinks that once he has the right visual, he’s fixed in place the meaning of an event. Ironically, it was the two words Mission Accomplished that really turned Flight Suit Boy’s million-dollar photo op into a sick joke, and it was the photos of the prisoners that made torture into a live issue.”