Democracy, freedom, demonstration, human rights, Taiwan independence....

Dick Cheney: “My own personal view of it is that those who are most urgently advocating that we shut down Guantanamo probably don’t agree with our policies anyway.” Oh, he so totally has my number.

So let me make sure I understand this: the only opinions that matter come from people who agree with you. Anyone else’s views may simply be dismissed. Dialogue and discussion are for wimps.

I know the Bushies think that way, but are they supposed to say it out loud like that?

Taking that logic one step further, Microsoft, which is “just following local laws,” is censoring blogs in China that use words like democracy, freedom, demonstration, human rights, Taiwan independence, and Netscape. Microsoft says it “is a multi-national business and as such needs to manage the reality of operating in countries around the world.” Amoral capitalist logic at its finest.

Sicilian authorities suspended a man’s driver’s license when they found out he was gay. So if you’ve ever been in Italy and wondered if they have any standards at all for driver’s licenses, now you know.

Nambia Pambia

The Senate is about to apologize for its predecessors having failed to make lynching a federal crime. I’m sure I won’t be the only one to say this today, but somewhere between lynching black men for looking the wrong way at white women, and Michael Jackson being acquitted, there must be a happy medium.

The Senate vote not be a roll call vote, because 12 senators still consider lynching too controversial, or possibly they support the practice of lynching, we’ll never know.

Today Iraq’s Special Tribunal released the first new footage of Saddam Hussein in over a year. It won’t say when it was taken, the audio was blocked (and not a single media outlet seems to have thought to find an Arabic-speaking lip-reader), and while he seemed to be calmly responding to questions, the tribunal also had control over editing. This is not the sort of thing an unbiased court does, and the court is itself being pressured to get the show trial on the road by an Iraqi regime anxious for seedy speedy justice.

The Italian referendum on in-vitro fertilization, stem-cell research and other such issues is a clear demonstration of why setting a quorum of voters (half of eligible voters had to cast ballots for the results to be valid) is a bad idea. Citizens shouldn’t have to check opinion polls to guess whether voting no or abstaining from voting is the best tactic. Indeed, ideally, voting is never tactical. When the Catholic Church ordered the faithful not to vote in this referendum, saying “Life Cannot Be Put to a Vote - Don’t Vote,” it effectively eliminated the secret ballot, allowing reprisals against anyone seen entering a polling station.

Bush met today with the presidents of 5 African countries he can’t locate on a map, including one country he called “Nambia,” which can’t be located on any map.


Bush could swear that the president of Niger was whispering “yellow cake” over and over.

Ungrateful and grumpy

I’ve now read Time magazine’s extracts from the interrogation log. Some of it’s intriguing and unexplained: “SGT A runs ‘love of brothers in Cuba’ approach.” But mostly it’s just creepy.

0320: The detainee refused to answer whether he wanted water. SGT R explained with emphasis that not answering disrespects SGT A and embarrasses him.

With emphasis? And what’s with the passive-aggressive crap? He’s brought in with a hood over his head, bolted to the floor, and told that he’s embarrassing them? It gets stupider:

13 December 2002
1115: Interrogators began telling detainee how ungrateful and grumpy he was. In order to escalate the detainee’s emotions, a mask was made from an MRE box with a smily face on it and placed on the detainee’s head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labeled the "sissy slap" glove. The glove was touched to the detainee’s face periodically after explaining the terminology to him. The mask was placed back on the detainee’s head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instruction with the detainee. The detainee became agitated and began shouting.

It’s like being interrogated by evil 6-year olds.

Let me quote the Pentagon rejoinder again: “Kahtani’s interrogation during this period was guided by a very detailed plan and conducted by trained professionals”. Somewhere there’s a military manual which takes seven pages describing how to make a smiley-face mask out of an MRE box.

And did Halliburton provide this contraption?

Humane

The Palestinian government revives, and implements, the death penalty. Terrific.

In the last Iranian elections, the young (and the voting age in Iran is 15) turned out to vote for change, and didn’t get it. So this time candidates need to offer them something else:

Rafsanjani has reinvented himself, attracting the high-society set of north Tehran with beautiful girls on rollerblades handing out posters wearing short tight Islamic gear

The Times failed to include a picture, but here’s one from AFP:



Cheney says that Guantanamo won’t be closed: “The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people.” And that’s just the guards (rimshot). More Gitmo leaks today, in Time magazine (link, but only for subscribers, so go here instead). Mohammed al-Qahtani, a suspected Al Qaida guy, one of the many people tied for 20th hijacker, was tortured with Christina Aguilera music, “sissy slaps,” and being ordered to “bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog.” So it’s not the gulag of our times, it’s the dog obedience school of our times. But as Cheney said, the people that are at Guantanamo have been very bad! Bad! Bad boy!

The Pentagon has issued a response to the Time article, which you should read. It says basically: 1) yeah, we tortured him, but it worked, 2) hey, remember how afraid you were back then, remember anthrax and the shoe bomber, huh, huh? 3) This was all done according to a detailed interrogation plan. I’m unsure in what way that is supposed to be reassuring. It adds, “The Department of Defense remains committed to the unequivocal standard of humane treatment for all detainees.” Of course by humane, what it’s referring to is the Humane Society.

When I’m ready: more on the language of reproductive rights

On the heels of George Lakoff’s wrong-headed article on the language of abortion rights, which I discussed here nine days ago, has come a similar piece by William Saletan in Slate, advocating the linkage of reproductive rights to something he vaguely refers to as “responsibility.” I’ve been corresponding with Bionic Octopus (who was good enough to praise my previous post in her blog) about Saletan’s article, and she has now posted an excellent dissection of it, including excerpts from my side of our correspondence (i.e., material I haven’t posted here). Read it now, then hit the back key for some final stray thoughts from me.

Hello again. Good, isn’t she? BionOc quotes an earlier Saletan article which recommended that the message should be that “The abortion is not the end of the story. Kids and family are the story, ‘when I’m ready.’” She responds: “If the supposed left has ever produced a more crystalline formulation of the idea that a woman's body is ultimately, teleologically a reproductive vessel, I have yet to see it.” Right: Saletan does not consider a rejection of the (perceived) duty to reproduce an acceptable option. The “when I’m ready” approach infantilizes women, by suggesting not that they’re mature enough to be trusted with the choice of abortion, but that they’re too immature to be trusted with a child. He empowers women by disempowering them (and probably expects to be thanked for it). And it relegates abortion to a stage of life women are expected to grow out of. However it is society which has, hopefully, grown out of its paternalistic phase, and people like Mr. Saletan must outgrow their desire to circumscribe the rights of others.

US military plans are virtually silent on this point

Another Downing Street memo surfaces. Transcript of the document. Favorite sentence: “US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community.” No kidding. Also: “A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point.” No fucking kidding.

The British government has decided that the best way to reduce crime is to target “potential criminals” early, like when they’re... three. “Tearaway toddlers,” they’re called by the Nursery Nazis.

Speaking at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, Dick Cheney said that the war on terror “will be with us for a good many years to come.” He told the assembled military types, “You do a great job, and our kids and grandkids ... will be a lot safer with the challenges and the difficult duties that you’ve all accepted.” He then added, “Well maybe not your kids, they’ll be fighting in Syria and Iran, and maybe not your grandkids, cause they’ll be fighting in North Korea, but your great-grandkids, they’ll be sittin’ pretty.”

There’s a show on the Discovery Channel in which Americans decide who is/was the greatest American ever. The producers are just afraid it will vote for Oprah, who’s evidently in the top 25. Because Americans have so little sense of history, many of the top 100 nominees are people who are now living, including Barbara Bush and Laura Bush (what, not Jenna?). Compare this to the Czech republic, where a similar show on Czech tv just revealed that the greatest Czech was Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1316-1378).

Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni (pictured below) has been released after being held hostage for nearly 4 weeks. Is anyone keeping track of how many hostages there are in Afghanistan and Iraq? Western hostages I mean, obviously the locals don’t count. The Afghan government earlier told the Italian embassy to butt out (a large bribe was almost certainly paid); the Afghan way seems to have been to take its own hostages, including the kidnapper’s mother.

Wherein is revealed what C.I.A. stands for (shhh, it’s a secret)

Yesterday I glossed over Bush’s speech on the Patriot Act a little too quickly. The ACLU response points out that while Bush claimed there have been no abuses under the Patriot Act, he still hasn’t bothered to appoint or fund the Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was supposed to keep track of those very abuses. And of course any subpoena, search, etc under the Act is accompanied by a gag order. Also, and I did notice this but forgot to blog it, Bush assured us that “The judicial branch has a strong oversight role”, without mentioning his plans to eliminate that oversight and let the FBI write its own subpoenas.

Today Bush visited the National Counterterrorism Center, whose acronym is NCTC despite the fact that its name treats counterterrorism as one word, so it should really be NCC: just one way in which the NCTC is keeping terrorists off balance. You’ll be happy to know that George Bush is not thrown off balance by acronyms; he said, “I went out to the CIA the other day and I reminded the good folks who work there that CIA stands for Central Intelligence Agency.” He talked about the importance of “men and women from different agencies, of different backgrounds, work side-by-side to share information” (such as what “CIA” stands for), “to analyze information, to integrate information”. Sounds like hippy affirmative action to me. Does Clarence Thomas know about this? “I appreciate the fact that here you pool your expertise and your computer systems”. Sounds like rank hippy communism to me. Does Milton Friedman know about this? He explains, “See, the strategy is we’ll defeat them before they attack us”. Yes, it’s the National Counterterrorism Center, they’ve probably heard tell of that strategy.


Half of the National Counterterrorism Center’s budget is spent on really big tv’s

As secret weapons go, sheep urine is not the most impressive I’ve heard of

The Guardian: “A British bus company is testing a new secret weapon that it hopes will help forward its push to cut its polluting emissions - sheep urine.”

The British ambassador to the US is Sir David Manning, who had been Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser. In turn Bush, to show the regard in which he holds the “special relationship,” has named a high-ranking professional diplomat a car dealer (and, you’ll be surprised to hear, a major fundraiser) to be next ambassador to Britain. His name is Robert Tuttle. Or possibly Buttle.

You know firsthand the nature of the enemy

Bush made a speech about the Patriot Act today. He told the audience,

As sworn officers of the law, you’re devoted to defending your fellow citizens. Your vigilance is keeping our communities safe, and you’re serving on the front lines of the war on terror. It’s a different kind of war than a war our nation was used to. You know firsthand the nature of the enemy. We face brutal men who celebrate murder, who incite suicide, and who would stop at nothing to destroy the liberties we cherish.

He was speaking at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy.

The Daily Show last night (and by the way, I’m also disappointed by Jon Stewart’s obsequiousness when face-to-face with the powerful, or in this case Colin Powell, but jeez, lighten up everybody and let’s not depend too much on comedians to conduct the tough interviews) showed competing clips, Bush in 2000 saying we needed to know more before doing anything about global warming, and Bush this week saying we needed to know more before doing anything about global warming. Bush said, “It’s easier to solve a problem when you know a lot about it.” Now how would he know what it’s like to know a lot about a problem? Or indeed what it’s like to solve a problem.

What Haiti needs

WaPo story whose headline suggested a much more interesting story: “Texas Sophomore Hooker Off to Strong Start.”

The US knows exactly what Haiti needs: more guns.

Continuing strain

My favorite bit of bureaucrateze today, in the NYT story about Philip Cooney, the non-scientist former lobbyist for the oil industry now rewriting all the Bush administration reports on global warming, comes from a White House spokesmodel: “We don’t put Phil Cooney on the record. He’s not a cleared spokesman.”

Bionic Octopus wonders what Israel would have to do to be considered in violation of the ceasefire. After she posted, the Indy opined that the ceasefire “was under continuing strain after Israel launched a missile at Hamas militants in response to a Gaza rocket attack which killed three people on Tuesday”. “Continuing strain” is British understatement for “fucked up the ass.” That sentence also contains the media’s standard characterization of Israeli violence as always being in response to Palestinian violence.

After the so-called Afghan National Army finally deployed a unit outside of Kabul, half the soldiers deserted.

Bush, interviewed on Fox: “You know, I’ve always tried to lower expectations, and I feel like if people say, well, you know, maybe, you know, I don’t think you handle the tough job, and when you do, it impresses people even more.” Are we impressed yet? Actually, only on Fox could Bush come off as less of a doofus than the interviewer, Neil Cavuto, who kept trying to get Bush to say that the Michael Jackson trial is getting too much coverage, and actually asked him whether Laura would run for president.

Um, no she isn’t.

An email from the British Tory party contained this image, carefully chosen to appeal to yoofs.

Thrilled to be able to work with you to be able to spread freedom and peace over the next years

Photo-essay on the Museum of Rubble that is Fallujah.

Monday I mentioned that the Australian government had turned down a Chinese diplomat’s plea for asylum. You can read more about that on Road to Surfdom, who has many links. In one of them, we learn that Australia determined that Chen Yonglin would not face persecution if forced to return to China. How did they determine that? They asked the Chinese ambassador.

Apostate Windbag has a nice post on events in Bolivia. Also, of course, Narco News.

Yesterday Senator Jeff Sessions took Chuck Schumer to task for asking if Janice Rogers Brown, who puts her own personal views above the law, wanted to be nominated as “dictator or grand exalted ruler”. Sessions decided this was “some reference to the Ku Klux Klan” and he was shocked and appalled. In fact, the Klan’s leader is called a Grand Wizard; it’s evidently the Elks who have a “grand exalted ruler.” What makes all of this worth pointing out is that Sessions himself was rejected by the Senate in 1986 for a circuit court judgeship in large part because he had said that he used to think the Kluxers were okay, until he found out they smoked marijuana.

Although I linked to the Sunday Times story on the Downing Street Memo mere minutes after it was posted to the web, I didn’t consider the information that Bush lied us into war with Iraq to be breaking news. I knew it, you knew it, everyone who today has the faintest idea what “Downing Street Memo” refers to knew it. Still, if it will keep the story alive, I’m all for it, and will even impute importance to the Downing Street Memo by referring to it repeatedly with initial caps.

I rather enjoyed the moment in the Bush-Blair press conference yesterday when a reporter asked about the, ahem, Downing Street Memo, and Blair leaped, almost literally, in front of Bush to take the bullet, to answer the question before George could open his mouth and screw it up. Of course Chimp Boy couldn’t help himself, and followed Blair with his own incoherent denial, including an attack on the motives of the leaker and the Sunday Times. “They dropped it out in the middle of his race,” Bush said, as if we hadn’t just had a week of debate over whether Deep Throat’s motives were good and pure, a debate leading to the conclusion: who cares what his motives were as long as he was speaking the truth. Both Bush and Blair said that the DSM was written before they went to the UN to ask for a war resolution. I’m still not sure what that’s supposed to prove.

Blair’s punishment for Poodleness in the First Degree is to be stuck standing next to Bush at these events over and over, trying not to look appalled at the words coming out of Bush’s mouth. I didn’t see the expression on Blair’s face when Bush congratulated him on his election victory and said, “I’m really thrilled to be able to work with you to be able to spread freedom and peace over the next years,” but I don’t imagine he greatly resembled a child receiving a puppy for Christmas. To paraphrase Sartre, hell is other world leaders.

Thunk

Kenya’s tourism minister told a travel agents’ conference that Mt. Kilimanjaro was “among the top tourist attractions in Kenya”. Except it’s in Tanzania, which is not amused.

Many fine news organizations have brought us the story of a plane stowaway’s body parts raining from the sky, but New York Newsday reports the vital news that the sound made by the leg was a “thunk.”

His record is apparent and speaks for itself

Bolivia is in the middle of a major crisis, as you will no doubt know from the paragraph about it on the bottom of page A27 of whatever newspaper you read. There have been demonstrations for weeks, with roadblocks keeping La Paz in an economic stranglehold. President Carlos Mesa has again offered to resign (the last president was forced out by protests 19 months ago). Protesters want nationalization of the natural gas industry and more rights for indigenous peoples (that’s one of their leaders in the hat).



American Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega hints in his usual subtle way that all of Bolivia’s problems are caused by Hugo Chavez: “Chávez’ profile in Bolivia has been very apparent from the beginning. His record is apparent and speaks for itself.” In other words, Noriega has absolutely no proof of anything.

The Miami Herald is the only paper that has that, by the way. On its website, I also discovered that Katherine Harris, “who had flirted with the idea of running for Senate in 2004, said Tuesday that after ‘months of encouragement’ from supporters, she had decided to risk her congressional seat and run against [Senator Bill] Nelson.” For the sake of humanity, Miami Herald, I implore you never to use the name Katherine Harris and the word flirted in the same sentence, ever again. Harris says, “one of the greatest honors in life is having a chance to make a difference in the lives of others.” Gee thanks, but you’ve done enough already.

Rep. Harris

Let history record you had me jumping in my seat

On the White House website: “President Celebrates Black Music Month at the White House.” Sure he does. “Let history record you had me jumping in my seat,” George said.

Bush also got to practice his Spanish today, whi the OAS (quoting Jose Marti, with whom Bush has soooo much in common) that “La libertad no es negociable.” And freedom is evidently a tide, which one day will reach Cuba. And then, presumably, go away again, as tides do. He said that democracy must deliver results: “They need to see that in a democratic society, people can walk in the streets in safety, corruption is punished, and all citizens are equal before the law.” He was in Florida at the time. Then he told the assembled delegates of 34 nations, “Let history record you had me jumping in my seat.”

Tuesday marks the same length of time elapsed since 9/11, 1365 days, as between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan.

Whatever else you can say about the 6-3 Supreme Court decision that the feds can enforce federal laws even when they are stupid and conflict with state laws, in this case state laws legalizing marijuana for medical use, it did produce some uncharacteristic responses. The LA Times reports: “Marijuana Patients Remain Defiant.” Dude, there is no such thing as a “defiant” pothead. Mellow, that’s the word you’re looking for. And the head of the DEA says, “We don’t target sick and dying people.” Isn’t that nice to know? Can we have it in writing? Of course if enforcement of federal policies were effective, the sick would get sicker and the dying dyinger.

I’m of two minds about the legal basis of the case. I have a fairly expansive idea of the legitimate powers of the federal government, which I consider derive not just from the commerce clause but are inherent in its nature, its federal governmentness if you will. But the majority on the Court found that the power to ban non-economic distribution of marijuana (or indeed just possession, since you could be arrested for growing the stuff for your own use, pot that not only didn’t cross state borders but never even left your house) derived from Congress’s right under the commerce clause to ban economic sales of illegal drugs, and that’s a logic I don’t accept, a slippery-slope logic that allows for unlimited government intervention into citizens’ lives, if that intervention had some tenuous, seven-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection to illegal activity. (Update: oh dear lord, that’s the same argument Clarence Thomas made. I have agreed with Clarence Thomas. Unclean, so unclean....) (And O’Connor, who writes that this broad interpretation “threatens to sweep all of productive human activity into federal regulatory reach.” Which may be the first time toking up has been called productive human activity.)

The biggest asshole in all this: John Walter, the Drug Tsar, who responded to the ruling thus: “We have a responsibility as a civilized society to ensure that the medicine Americans receive from their doctors is effective, safe and free from the pro-drug politics that are being promoted in America under the guise of medicine.” So support for medical marijuana, such as the support expressed by 56% of Californian voters in 1996 (including me), is insincere, compassion for cancer and AIDS and MS and glaucoma patients merely a guise, a ruse, a cunning deception to cover our fiendish pro-drug politics.

Walter also said, “Our national medical system relies on proven scientific research, not popular opinion.” Unless it involves stem cells, condoms, persistent vegetative states....

What to do with the Bastille of our times

When Laura Bush visited a school in Egypt, all the teachers and all the students were replaced by others who didn’t look so... poor.

The Chinese consul for political affairs in Australia tried to defect, offering to tell all about Chinese spies operating in Oz, but was turned down. I don’t know if anything’s behind this other than the Aussie government being scared of China, but there might be an interesting story here.

Eric Umansky argues that closing Guantanamo might make the US even less transparent and accountable, while failing to actually reduce the amount of torture or the number of secretly held prisoners, and increasing the resort to “rendition.” What he’s really worried about though, and rightly, is that without the symbol, the world (and especially Americans) will lose all interest in the treatment of prisoners (Umansky says shutting down Gitmo would be only a symbolic victory, but he values it precisely for its symbolic value). Guantanamo is the brand name for torture news; a generic won’t capture the same share of America’s attention span (nearly a year and a half after the Abu Ghraib revelations, when we were told Abu Ghraib would be handed over to the Iraqis or possibly razed, neither has happened and no one pays much attention to what happens inside its walls anymore). Guantanamo does have propaganda value, but sometimes you just have to storm the Bastille because it’s the right thing to do. Rumsfeld, Gonzales and the other supporters of “stress positions” and detention without trial claim to be pragmatists; those of us on the other side must be idealistic and absolutist in our rejection of torture.

One positive about Guantanamo having become another of those place names that stands in for historical events, like Vietnam, Hiroshima, and Intercourse, Pennsylvania, is that it becomes less usable for other purposes. In the early 1990s, Bush the Elder held Haitian refugees intercepted at sea there; like his son, he refused Amnesty International requests to interview the prisoners and claimed that American political asylum laws didn’t apply there. It will be a long time before Gitmo can be put to such a use again.

Condi divides the Americas

Condi Rice spoke to the general assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) and once again made democracy sound like a threat.

“The divide in the Americas today is not between governments from the Left or from the Right. It is between those governments that are elected and govern democratically -- and those that do not.” Condi does not agree to disagree; she does not have to debate or discuss with governments that have different ideologies and polices from her own, because she can dismiss those governments as illegitimate, even if they happened to win an election. “Together, we must insist that leaders who are elected democratically have a responsibility to govern democratically. And ... governments that fail to meet this crucial standard must be accountable to the OAS.” Governing democratically is a good thing. I’m in favor of leaders who are elected democratically governing democratically. But that’s a pretty subjective standard, and I don’t see that the OAS has the standing, the moral authority or the freedom from United States dominance to apply it.

She mentioned plans to build an “International Law Enforcement Academy” to train Latin American police. Sounds like the School of the Americas, only hidden away in El Salvador so it can operate below the radar.


Obey me! OBEY ME!!

Can’t... resist... really... obvious... joke....

Joe Biden criticizes Howard Dean for saying that many Republicans have never earned an honest living. Guess that means that when you run for president in ‘08 you’ll be plagiarizing someone else’s speeches, huh Joe?

What kind of asshole is John Bolton?

After the tsunami: forced or coerced marriages of under-aged girls in India.

Under the Same Sun has a 2002 George Monbiot column from the Guardian about the United States’s successful effort, led by John Bolton, to fire and trash the reputation of Jose Bustani, the director-general of the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Bustani’s efforts to get his inspectors – who unlike UNSCOM’s inspectors did not also work covertly for the US government – into Iraq, threatened to undercut Bush’s rationale for going to war. I’m not sure this makes Bolton less qualified to be ambassador to the UN than he was before: where some of the earlier stories suggested he was an out-of-control asshole, chasing women down hotel corridors and yelling at them, this one suggests that he was an asshole-for-hire, doing exactly the hatchet job he was supposed to do. Not that he can’t be more than one type of asshole. I think it’s called multi-tasking.

RSS feeds

A nice mention of this blog in the Google discussion group Informed Dissent today said that I don’t have an RSS feed. I do. Two in fact. I created a Feedburner feed last week in a failed (?) attempt to eliminate the problem where Bloglines doesn’t always display my photos. The addresses of those feeds are now in the right-hand column, below the archives.

If there’s anything else I can do to make this site more easily accessible, short of telephoning you all individually to read you my latest post, or if you have any other suggestions, short of fucking myself or stop hurting America by criticizing the president, drop me an email.

In this post is revealed, at long last, what is wrong with the world

Not being British, I often only hear about BBC radio shows when there’s only an episode or two left in their current run. Anyway, I just listened, online, to “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue,” a comedy in quiz show format sort of thing. For example, 2 panelists have to invent a letter from Sir Walter Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth I, speaking alternate words. Sing the lyrics from “You’ve lost that loving feeling” to the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; do the same for “Who let the dogs out” to the Toreador Song from Carmen. I think that episode will be replaced online by the next episode sometime Monday.

The judge who will try Saddam Hussein says that Saddam’s morale has collapsed because “He understands the extent of the charges against him and that he will stand trial before an impartial court.” An impartial judge wouldn’t be making statements like that to the press. The Observer adds that it isn’t clear if Saddam knows about the pictures of himself in his droopy underpants appearing all over the world, including this very website.

Bush’s rejection of the US doing anything to support Tony Blair’s plan to increase to aid to Africa, “It doesn’t fit our budgetary process,” seems especially blithe and dismissive not just towards Africa, which we know he doesn’t care about, but towards Tony Blair, his most reliable ally in the world. Didn’t throw him even a bone, just a bland and not very meaningful phrase (budgetary process?) such as you might use before hanging up on a telemarketer or walking past a pan-handler. Bush’s preferred alternative is forgiving African debt, and then reducing future money to the continent by the exact amount of the forgiven debt.

Condi Rice, in an interview with the Miami Herald which the paper points out more than once is an exclusive, pushes the idea of the OAS stepping up its intervention in the politics of its member states. Well, she calls it being proactive in supporting democracy, but the only two countries she brings up are Haiti and Venezuela, in both of which the Bush admin has supported coups against democratically elected leaders. Speaking about the UN force occupying Haiti, she says, “We’re going to need to look hard at whether not the force posture there is adequate as we get to the run-up in elections”. Because nothing says free and fair elections like a really strong “force posture.”

I mentioned Rumsfeld’s latest attack on Al-Jazeera in my last post, but now I’ve seen more of it, and it’s not pleasant. “Quite honestly, I do not get up in the morning and think that America is what’s wrong with the world. The people that are going on television, chopping off people’s heads is what’s wrong with the world.” In case you were wondering exactly what’s wrong the world, now you know. “And television networks that carry it and promote it and are Johnny-on-the-spot every time there’s a terrorist act are promoting it.” The Johnny-on-the-spot thing is of course a not terribly veiled accusation that Al-Jazeera is in cahoots with terrorists and knows about terrorist acts before they occur.

Does my use of the word cahoots in the previous sentence indicate that when I read Rummy’s words I begin to talk like him? Why goodness gracious no.

Governments have to be accurate. Extremists don’t

Secretary of War Rummy Rumsfeld criticizes China for the increase in its military budget: “Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: why this growing investment?” No nation threatens China? Isn’t it kind of a threat when the nation with the largest military budget suggests to the nation with the third-largest that its military is too well-funded and acquiring too many advanced weapons? What did Rummy hope to accomplish? Obviously China wasn’t going to respond by saying Why you’re right, what were we thinking, building ballistic missiles when no nation threatens us, our bad. Mostly I expect the speech was a threat that if China didn’t put more pressure on North Korea, he’d start berating them in public.

That said, while Rummy is a terrible spokesmodel, calling for the US to have “rods from God” and bunker-buster nukes and so on while telling everybody else who tries to upgrade their military (Venezuela as well as China) to content themselves with pointed sticks, it is true that China’s military expansion is designed to give it offensive capabilities, so it can operate outside its borders and invade or coerce Taiwan, and this is a Bad Thing. And this is the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, so I’m not having especially warm & fuzzy thoughts for Beijing today.

Rummy also criticized Al Jazeera, again, for daring to broadcast the views and actions of terrorists, especially the beheadings, Rummy has a real thing about beheadings. He thinks terrorists are bad, and terrorism is bad, but doesn’t trust that people watching them on tv will draw the same conclusion. The problem, he says with a straight, albeit troll-like, face is that the bad guys can lie: “Governments have to be accurate. Extremists don’t.”


The South Korean minister of defense (left) is still laughing, not realizing that Rumsfeld wasn’t joking when he told him to lick his shoes.

There is a 70% to 80% chance you will be OK

I’ve seen 132 of the 149 movies on the USC film school’s must-see list, and 91 of Time magazine’s top 100 films. For whatever that’s worth.

The Pentagon, which has been allowed to get away with not specifying just how Korans were defiled in Guantanamo, releases — gee, is it Friday already? — details of one of the incidents, in which a guard accidentally urinated on a Koran when he was trying to urinate on a prisoner. So that’s ok then. (Actually, he claims the whole thing was an accident, he just happened to pee near an air vent.) Also a guard kicked a Koran, and an obscene inscription was written in another — two words, they don’t say which ones.

Basra announces that its tourism business is now open again. They suggest that foreigners disguise themselves as natives, dye their hair black, and travel with armed bodyguards, but if they do that, “Then there is a 70% to 80% chance you will be OK,” says the head of the tourism office. Plan your vacations accordingly. The Guardian says, “When not disguised, westerners tend to be greeted warmly, if curiously. ‘Problem in the head? Why are you here?’ one waiter asked the Guardian.”

Lakoff and the language of reproductive rights

Lately, the Republicans have made great efforts to take control of the vocabulary in which issues are discussed. They’re personal accounts, not private accounts, and don’t ever call it privatization, we’re told; it’s the constitutional option, not the nuclear option; the prisoners were mistreated or at worst abused, not tortured, and certainly not in a gulag. For a party led by a man who doesn’t know the difference between disassemble and dissemble and can’t pronounce nuclear, the R’s sure know how to control a debate by grabbing the commanding lexical heights.

As someone interested in the use, abuse and misuse of language in politics, I’ve been following linguist George Lakoff’s work off and on since reading an article of his — this one I think — during the first Gulf War about the use of metaphor by Bush the Elder et al in their arguments in favor of going to war. I haven’t gotten around to Don’t Think of an Elephant — expensive for such a short book, and always checked out of the library — but I got the impression that he was better at deconstructing how Republicans framed their arguments than at helping Democrats construct their frames. His AlterNet article posted yesterday on reproductive rights issues suggests that he has now put the cart entirely before the horse, suggesting that D’s drop not only the words “abortion” and “choice,” but back down from the policies themselves in favor of ones that can be better framed. Being smart about how one presents policies to the public is one thing, subordinating the, uh, choice of policies to PR is quite another.

The word abortion, Lakoff says, suggests a situation in which “something has gone terribly wrong,” and the word choice comes from a consumerist vocabulary, whereas “life” comes from a moral vocabulary, and morality trumps consumerism. So whoever uses the most pompous, sanctimonious language wins? That would only be the case if everyone shared the same view of morality; Jerry Falwell and Tony “I’m not even going to swat that fly” Perkins may use the word “life” all they want, but it won’t be persuasive to those who don’t think like them.

Having stripped us of the words choice (he prefers decision, as less frivolous-sounding — Margaret Sanger coined the term “family planning” for similar reasons — but the word choice entails not only the act of choosing but the right to choose; also, “pro-decision movement” sounds goofy) and abortion (to which he offers no alternative), he wants to shift the debate to issues he thinks can be better packaged, like “zero tolerance [!] for unwanted pregnancies,” which R’s are helping to increase the number of by preventing access to contraception and sex ed., and the excessive infant mortality in America, mercury and other toxins in breast milk from right-wing environmental policies. On these issues, he says, the left’s policies are the ones that value life. Which is true, of course, but all those issues are practical, pragmatic ones, but he’s suggesting giving up or severely downplaying support of human rights — the rights of privacy and bodily integrity — in favor of them, which does not seem to me like taking the moral high ground, but ceding it.

He then suggests foregrounding rape victims as the women most in need of access to abortion, which is the mirror-image of the right-to-lifers’ slippery-slope strategy of making inroads on the right to abortion by first eliminating the most squirm-inducing type of abortion, so-called partial-birth abortion.

As I said at the start, the right wingers have been attempting, with a great deal of success, to force their opponents to debate using a vocabulary chosen by the right. Yesterday the NYT noted that the groups which place excess embryos created during fertility treatment in the wombs of good Christian women have been trying to replace the term “embryo donation” with “embryo adoption,” and that that language has been dutifully taken up by the government. The term is intended to implant the notion that life begins at conception. Personally I worry less that this sort of thing will increase the status of clumps of cells to that of human children, than that blurring the line between them will subtly reduce the status of actual living human beings, whose minds and meat are just casings for a soul which was already perfectly realized shortly after daddy ejaculated.

You know, I don’t worry all that much, frankly. ... I’ve got peace of mind.

Bush: “I spend most of my time worrying about people losing their lives in Iraq, both Americans and Iraqis”. But, “You know, I don’t worry all that much, frankly. ... I’ve got peace of mind.”

Which piece?

I could have gone so many different directions with that: references to peas, the peace that passeth all understanding, etc etc. Seriously, dude, you’ve gotta give us more challenging straight lines than “I’ve got peace of mind.” The American people expect better — nay, they deserve better.

Nay?

So before the US sent Canadian (and Syrian) citizen Maher Arar to Syria to be tortured in 2002, they offered to return him to Canada if it promised to arrest him and put him in jail. Canada responded that it had no grounds to do so, and you’re not the boss of me, and so off Arar went for a year of hell. Bill Graham, then foreign minister, now defense minister, apologized — boy, Canada is not America — to Arar for not getting him out of Syria earlier.

The Latvian parliament ignores the French and the Dutch and votes 71-5, with 24 abstentions, to ratify the EU constitution. An earlier attempt was aborted when it turned out to be a really bad translation, with hundreds of mistakes.

3 years ago (Feb. 2002), after 6 Israeli soldiers were ambushed and killed, the Israeli government ordered a revenge operation to kill unarmed Palestinian cops, preferably at least 6 of them (12 were, plus 3 other people) according to 2 of the soldiers who took part in those missions. The Israeli army responded today by claiming that the cops, who manned checkpoints, had let terrorists pass through them. So it was good revenge, not bad revenge. Either way, that’s not what the 2 soldiers say; they say it was pure tit for tat.

Izvestia is in the process of being bought by the state gas company. Having taken over all Russian tv, Putin is now trying to neutralize the print media.

Responding to less than complimentary statements by Dick Cheney about North Korea, NK responds: “Cheney is hated as the most cruel monster and blood-thirsty beast as he has drenched various parts of the world in blood.”

And your point is?

The g-word

The ferocity of the concerted verbal assault by Bush, Cheney, Myers and Rumsfeld on Amnesty International caught me by surprise. I’d have expected a mock-dignified silence, in the hope that it would go away, which, sad to say, would probably have worked. But after successfully demonizing Newsweek, they’ve decided that vicious attacks might silence critics of Guantanamo altogether. Sadly, that may work too.

The message is that Amnesty’s use of the g-word somehow means we can ignore them now. Cheney: “For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously.” (Somehow? We saw the pictures.) Rummy: “those who make such outlandish charges lose any claim to objectivity or seriousness.” The word “absurd” has also been bandied about.

Myself, I was critical of Amnesty when it failed to condemn the US for force-feeding hunger-striking inmates at Guantanamo.

Secretary of War Crimes Rumsfeld suggested that the word gulag can’t be used because “Most would define a gulag as where the Soviet Union kept millions in forced labor concentration camps,” as if an analogy has to be exact, right down to the uniforms and haircuts, before it has any salience. Using that standard, we’d never learn anything from history, which is of course the point.

A reporter asked Rummy whether removing the prisoners from Cuba to the US would increase transparency and oversight. Rummy: “Oh, my goodness. There’s so much transparency in Gitmo and so much oversight.”

The suggestion that Amnesty didn’t pay attention to Saddam Hussein’s crimes against his people is, to steal a word from the Bushies, absurd. In fact, one of Britain’s pre-war “dossiers” was largely culled from old Amnesty reports.

Somebody threw that number out there, and it stuck

Operation Lightning is evidently lightening. Although the operation was designed to make it appear that the Iraq military could handle the country’s security, it was clear that it fielded nowhere near as many soldiers as the 40,000 claimed by the Iraqi regime. Yesterday, Pentagon spokesmodel Bryan Whitman said, “Somebody threw that number out there, and it stuck. I don’t know where it came from. We certainly didn’t put it out.”

Sure, if by “we” you don’t mean George W. Bush, General Carter Ham (possessor of the WASPiest name in Christendom), General Richard Myers, Katie Couric, the WASPiest woman in Christendom (during an interview with Myers, who doesn’t correct her), etc. I was about to ask why they bother lying about things so easily googled, when I realized that the NYT hadn’t bothered to fact-check him. Whitman added, “More important than the total numbers is that this is a sizable Iraqi operation that demonstrates that Iraqi security forces are operating in greater numbers and with greater effectiveness.” Don’t try giving that answer on a math quiz: “More important than how many balls Susie had after she gave 3 to Jimmy...”

The Knights Who Say Nee: By a vote of more than 61%, the Dutch have crushed the dreams of the Eurocrats beneath their shoes, which rumor says are made of wood. Don’t know myself; the one time I tried to go to the Netherlands, Belgium was on strike and my train stopped at the border.

British soldier Mark Cooley — the one driving the forklift —

was sentenced to 2 years, but only served 4 months before being released, his sentence reduced by a closed-door hearing news of which the military clearly hoped wouldn’t leak out.

Turkey’s new penal code abolishes legal leniency for honor killings and the annulment of rape convictions if the victim marries the rapist, and makes several other welcome steps forward. Criticizing the state or asserting that the Armenian genocide actually happened are still illegal.

Meet Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin

A British couple will celebrate their 80th anniversary tomorrow. The secret is evidently saying sorry and Yes dear. Oh, and not dying. (The Telegraph’s front page has their wedding photo.)

As expected, Jacques Chirac fired his prime minister, blaming the failure of the EU referendum on Raffarin’s unpopularity rather than his own or that of the proposed constitution. And because French politicians have been considered out of touch lately, Chirac replaced him with Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin (which is French for Little Lord Fountleroy), who is both a poet and an aristocrat. Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin has never run for elective office, because he considers himself above that sort of thing, saying “My only party is France,” which is very Charles de Gaulle of him, very Sun King. French people consider him to be arrogant.

After a suicide bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Pakistan, Shiites retaliated by burning down a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, possibly because they think Americans worship fried chicken, or because there is a little-reported religious war between Shiites and Kentuckians, who can say for sure?

From the Onion:

U.S. Intensifies Empty-Threat Campaign Against North Korea

WASHINGTON, DC—During a recent press conference, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued another warning to North Korea, escalating the U.S. empty-threat campaign against the nation. “Make no mistake, if Kim Jong Il does not put a stop to the manufacturing of plutonium in his nation, we will come down on him quite hard,” Rice said. “We demand compliance, and if we don’t get it, then watch out.” Rice went on to say that noncompliance would result in some action that “would be very bad indeed,” adding that North Korea does not want to know what it will be in for.

And an excellent What Do You Think? too:

The House recently passed a bill lifting restrictions on stem-cell research, but Bush has threatened to veto the bill if it passes the Senate. What do you think?

“The Democrats and Republicans-and most of the American public-are actually in agreement over an issue. You can see how Bush would want to put a stop to that right away.”

“Some things are just morally reprehensible, like using science to save people’s lives.”

“Hey, if it weren’t for scientific research, Christopher Reeve would’ve died on that polo field and none of this would even be an issue in the first place.”

“The Democrats want stem-cell research so they can cure multiple sclerosis. The GOP wants it so they can grow an army of zombies. So Bush is in a tough spot politically.”

“They’re not stems, they’re babies! And they’re not cells, they’re babies! And it’s not research, it’s babies!”

Summer reading

Oopsy: This is the Pentagon statement on the seizure of Mohsen Abdul-Hamid: “Following the interview it was determined that he was detained by mistake and should be released. ... Coalition forces regret any inconvenience...” First, don’t blame it on a “coalition” when it was a purely American operation. Second, an “interview” starts with being asked to sit and would you like some coffee, not with having a hood thrown over your head and being dragged out of your house. Third, a bigger lexicological problem continues to be that word “mistake”: it’s a day and a half later, and the Pentagon still hasn’t clarified the nature of the mistaken behooding and seizure of the head of the largest Sunni party, and nobody seems to be asking them to do so.

Gary Indiana’s new book The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt sounds like fun, if a bit pricey ($13.57 at Amazon for 140 pages), according to the Village Voice review. Here’s a quote: “to the bewildered and traumatized who continued to imagine that ‘fascism’ described a condition other than the merger of the state with corporate capitalism, ‘hasta la vista, baby’ sounded like as workable a program as anything else.”
(Update: on the other hand, Marc Cooper hates the book.)

And as long as we’re talking books, Human Events, right-wing morons since 1944, list the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century, starting with the Communist Manifesto and including the Kinsey Report (#4) and The Feminine Mystique (#7), but not the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which actually was and is harmful. Not even in the honorable mentions. Marx is the only author who appears twice, and yes Das Kapital could be very harmful if you dropped it on your toe. I only own 3 or maybe 4 (I’m not sure if Beyond Good and Evil is among my very modest Nietzsche collection), so perhaps I haven’t been too badly damaged. Next up from the Human Eventers: the 10 most harmful ballets of the 19th and 20th century.

Bush press conference: trained in some instances to disassemble

Bush held a press conference today, in which reporters with names like Stretch asked questions, and Bush responded by stuttering through a series of catch-phrases. He is not getting more articulate over time.

Asked about the Amnesty International "new gulag" report, he repeated the word "absurd" over and over. Reading rather than listening to the press conference, I imagined him flapping his arms and uttering "absurd" in the voice of Daffy Duck, but that's just me.

In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

Thousands detained, and for some reason, they hate America. And they've been trained to "disassemble" -- oh how I hope that isn't a transcript error -- as opposed to picking it up the street, or in the backroom of a Houston bar, like you did George.
(Update: it isn't an error, he really said it! The man is Cliff Claven and Ted Baxter rolled up into one!)

Asked to condemn the massacre in Uzbekistan, George seemed to think there wasn't enough evidence yet, and called for the International Red Cross to investigate. Preferably for two or three years.

He described the demand by Senate D's for documents about John Bolton as a "stall tactic." Like every one of his answers at this press conference.

Says progress on Social Security is "like water cutting through a rock." No, no, it's paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors, how many times do we have to explain it to you, but each time Dick Cheney makes a fist (and Dick Cheney always does rock), you urinate on his hand and yell "Ha ha, I win."

(Update: writing this post quickly at the library, I missed what Bob caught: the wonderful counterpoint of Bush defending Gitmo while lecturing Putin about the 9-year sentence given to Yukos chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky today: "as I explained to him, here you're innocent until proven guilty, and it appeared to us, or at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial. In other words, he was put in prison, and then was tried." Because of course, first you put them in prison, and then you declare them enemy combatants who hate America.)

Nightline

A friend in Vermont informs me that Nightline’s reading of the names of dead tonight has commercials, including one for the Vermont National Guard. What other commercials have people seen? Drop me an email at:

whateveritisimagainstit
at
gmail
dot
com.

Include the city the station is located in.

A mistake

I guess as part of “Operation Lightning,” the US first arrests — sorry, I meant to say seizes; arrest, the verb widely used in news stories, suggests a process of law — the head of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, throwing a bag over his head (why do American police never do that when they arrest people, or will the practice be imported from Iraq within a year or two, I wonder), then releases him, saying the arrest was a mistake. No fucking kidding. Some news media are taking that to mean a case of mistaken identity, but that’s not what was said. Here’s a detail I like: Prime Minister Jaafari ordered an investigation. Hey, the American military didn’t even inform you before grabbing up Hamid, how are you going to get them to cooperate with an investigation? Isn’t it cute when they pretend to be in control?

The chief of police in Basra says he’s lost control of the police force, which is heavily infiltrated by sectarian groups who are using police cars in assassinations. And Basra’s the one peaceful area outside Kurdistan.

Cheney: “For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights [in Guantanamo], I frankly just don’t take them seriously.” The head of Amnesty’s US branch responds nicely, “He doesn’t take torture seriously; he doesn’t take the Geneva Convention seriously; he doesn’t take due process rights seriously; and he doesn’t take international law seriously.”

Cheney went on, “Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment. But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released ... to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.” I’ve said before, the Bushies have lost the ability to distinguish between proving a case and just making an assertion. Notice how he starts as if he had actual evidence he was going to present — “if you trace,” “in nearly every case,” “it turns out” — and then peters out into, well they were lying. An argument, it has been said before, isn’t just contradiction, the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes. And in denying that any human rights were violated in Gitmo, he’s also gainsaying the photos we’ve all seen. And the 1,000 pages of Gitmo tribunal documents released to AP under the Freedom of Information Act on this fine holiday weekend, which show the tribunals ignoring every complaint. You can read the documents here.

By the way, in the same interview, Cheney accused Kim Jong Il of running a police state.

Speaking of big round cheeses, today was the traditional Gloucestershire cheese roll, in which a 7-pound circular cheese is rolled down a hill, reaching speeds of up to 70 mph, and a bunch of crazy Brits roll after it. The survivor gets the cheese. Yes that’s him, clutching his prize as they take him to the hospital. The head of PETA complained that the event was not vegan.

Memorial Day

For someone with my beliefs and political perspective, blogging about Memorial Day may be a no-win situation, and I’d have happily avoided it if I hadn’t read and been deeply repulsed by Bush’s speech at Arlington today, in which he exploited the deaths of servicepersons in the service of his own goals. He quoted the farewell letter of Sgt Michael Evans (which I think means not his last letter, but a letter written to be opened if he was killed): “My death will mean nothing if you stop now.” Bush adds, “And we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives”. I don’t resent the sentiment coming from Evans; in the mouth of George W. Bush it becomes an obscenity. He’s hiding behind the honored dead.

Here are some more high points from Bush’s speech: “Across the globe, our military is standing directly between our people and the worst dangers in the world... freedom is on the march... blah blah liberty blah”.

What does he mean by worst dangers in the world, by the way? Wouldn’t those be biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, the things Iraq did not have?

The precariousness in rising to protest that bilge is that while I stand in awe of the idealism of those who volunteer to risk their lives in the what they see as the cause of liberty and freedom, I consider them to have been flim-flammed. I do consider Michael Evans’s death to have meant not very much, at least not what he wanted it to mean, and what he had a right to have it mean, if he was going to be sent into harm’s way. There aren’t so many idealistic people in the world, even among the young (Evans was 22), that we can afford to have their idealism canalized into the wrong paths.

Under George Bush, 1,647 soldiers have died, 12,630 wounded.


No, Mr. President, the pretty flowers are not for you.

It is your sovereign decision and I take note

In Latvia, hundreds of farm animals have been killed this weekend by swarms of flies.

A NYT Styles section article on how expensive it is to provide teenagers all the toys they require to maintain their social standing (iPods, portable DVD players, cellphones with cameras, etc) is headlined, “‘But I Neeeeeeed It!’ She Suggested.” (The author was probably thinking of what an English professor once described as the greatest sentence in English literature, by Ring Lardner: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”)

The rest of this post will be devoted to the French referendum.

I’m moderately pleased with the French rejection of the proposed European Union constitution (55% to 45%, on a turnout of 70%), a document I disliked for its failure to significantly democratize the EU’s institutions, for its subordination of EU foreign policy to NATO, and because I think it will be bad for workplace rights. Apostate Windbag makes roughly the same arguments, at greater length, as does Doug Ireland, who also makes some predictions for what the rejection will mean in France and beyond.

I would be more than moderately pleased if 1) xenophobia and racism didn’t play such a large part in the defeat, albeit alongside more worthy motives, and 2) I had a clearer idea what will happen next (it would also be nice if the progressives who oppose the draft constitution were clearer in expressing an alternative). The constitution will be enacted if 20 nations (of 25) sign up, and many are ensuring that by refusing to hold a referendum, as was the case with all 9 which have already ratified. But if it also fails in the Netherlands’ referendum Wednesday, Britain will have to cancel its own referendum plans. Blair was hoping that the majority opposing the EU const now would be changed by the time of referendum by a sense of inevitability, which is now lost. While he could skip the referendum and get his tame Parliament to sign up, it would look bad, really really bad, and do great damage to the Labour party.

The constitution can, and may well be, forced through against the wills of the majority of the population of Britain, France and several other EU nations (possibly after some minor cosmetic rewriting), but that would just increase Europeans’ estrangement from their own governments and the EU’s. Once it became clear that today’s referendum would fail, if not by how much, French politicians started talking about holding a second one later in the process (the Danes were forced to re-vote on the Treaty of Maastricht after first rejecting it in 1992), to give the French people the opportunity to see the error of their ways and make the right and inevitable decision, which is exactly the sort of elite arrogance that the French voters threw le poop at today. They’ve been treated for years (all Western Europeans have) to condescending talk about the inevitability of EU integration and the free market, the sort of thing Thomas Friedman says about globalization, and you know how irritating it is listening to Friedman talk about globalization.

This defeat also puts off for years any possibility of Turkey entering the EU, I would think.

(Update:) Chirac: “France has expressed itself democratically. It is your sovereign decision and I take note.” Great, ‘cause their may be a short quiz later.

Lightning!

Operation Lightning has begun, whereby 40,000 Iraqi and 10,000 American soldiers will entirely shut down the sprawling city of Baghdad, thus ending attacks in the city because, as we know, the insurgents all live in the suburbs and commute to work every morning, just like the dads in old sitcoms.

Extry, extry, read all about it

Many news sites (according to news.google.com) used this Reuters story, but only the Washington Post had the flair to headline it “Pakistanis Find Bloodied Head of Suicide Bomber.” Really, let’s all take a moment to bask in the exquisite gruesomeness of those words.

The Democrats who are clamoring for this have already voted against John Bolton

The White House is determined to distance itself from any attempts at bipartisanship, refusing to hand documents over to the Senate which the D’s say bear on John Bolton’s fitness to serve as ambassador to the UN. Sez Scotty McClellan, “The Democrats who are clamoring for this have already voted against John Bolton. This is about partisan politics, not documents. They have the information they need.” What Scotty is forgetting is that the Senate is supposed to be a deliberative body, in which decisions arise out of open discussion and debate: the “clamoring” D’s may have made up their own minds, but they still have a perfectly legitimate need for information they can use to try to convince others to reconsider. That would be how it would work in a truly deliberative body where decisions weren’t based on party label, where congressional members of the president’s party are not expected to support his every decision mindlessly and automatically.

While the anti-immigrant lobby in the US talks about making driver’s licenses “real” identity cards, a London School of Economics study estimates that Tony Blair’s plan to introduce mandatory identity cards, with those neat biometrics and all the Orwellian bells and whistles (by the way, Eddie Albert’s obit says he played Winston Smith in a 1953 tv version of 1984; there’s probably a joke in that), would cost £300. Can you say “poll tax?” And the American government is insisting that it be able to read those cards too.

A NYT article about a federal case being tried in Vermont says that John Ashcroft overturned a deal reached by the US attorney to avoid the death penalty in this case, but fails to mention that it was Ashcroft’s policy to go for the death penalty in states that did not have it at the state level (the Clinton admin was more or less deferential to states’ policies). Remember, the next time Bush talks about the “culture of life,” that states which oppose the death penalty are being forced to host trials and provide jurors for these death-fests.

Speaking of the culture of life, Bush, in his weekly radio address, said: “Throughout our history, America has fought not to conquer but to liberate. We go to war reluctantly, because we understand the high cost of war.” Oh dear God I’ve gone blind! The glare of the whitewash has blinded me!

Do they really want to get this done

The WaPo stuffs some intriguing but underdeveloped Iraq stories inside a less interesting Iraq story, so you might have missed them: after a suicide car-bomb attack on an Iraqi military unit, American forces shot an Iraqi policeman and an ambulance driver arriving at the scene, the latter fatally.

Also, an Iraqi was shot dead “during the Marine and Iraqi forces sweep at Haditha, Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a military spokesman, said by e-mail.” The thing is, the Iraqi was a prisoner inside Abu Ghraib when he was hit. More details, please. Which reminds me: I read a brief item a day or two ago that said 3 prisoners had escaped Abu Ghraib; haven’t seen anything since. I’m not specifically blaming the WaPo, which went with what it had today, but the American media in general seem to have lost all interest in covering the details of military operations in Iraq.

The US turned down Venezuela’s request for the detention of Luis Posada Carilles Friday, despite the fact that he is under detention. Eli at Left I On the News was (justifiably) outraged that a State Department official who told the media that Venezuelan documents requesting the detention of Luis Posada Carilles were inadequate, did so anonymously. It was worse than Eli knew: a Saturday WaPo article quotes the official as suggesting Venezuela deliberately did this as part of a cunning plan:

But the Posada arrest request was so inadequate, the official said, that some U.S. diplomats believe Venezuela purposely drafted it so the United States would reject it.

“It leads one to ask the question, ‘Do they really want to get this done or is this in some way a public relations issue?’” said the State Department official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The official trashes another country this way from the shadows because of sensi-fucking-tivity? And lets him attribute opinions to “some US diplomats”: the person with such high standards of proof is allowed by the Post to give anonymous hearsay evidence. The Post calls this clown a “high-ranking” State Department official, which narrows it down considerably: I’d bet cash money it was Roger Noriega.

The US claims Venezuela gave no statement of evidence against Posada, which is just as insulting as the “Do they really want to get this done” speculation, since the US is in possession of much more evidence of ex-CIA employee Posada’s crimes than Venezuela is. If Venezuela has “inadequate” information, whose fault is that?

Give this turd a knock

In Hebron, an Israeli patrol stopped a Palestinian youth and asked if his family had satellite tv, then took over that house and kept the family locked in one room while they watched a soccer final in which Liverpool beat AC Milan.

Another day, another military acquittal for prisoner abuse in Iraq. Today it was Navy SEAL lieutenant Andrew Ledford who led a platoon which beat a prisoner who died a little later, but probably because of torture in Abu Ghraib (for which no one has been charged) rather than from the beating. Prosecutors suggested that he had failed as a leader because he not only didn’t order his men to stop the beating, but took his turn when asked to “give this turd a knock,” then posed for pictures (which don’t seem to be available). Although the other men didn’t testify to seeing him hit the prisoner, he had confessed to it himself in a sworn statement; on the stand, he recanted. His lawyer, who was also Sabrina Harman’s lawyer, asked, “Were they supposed to give (al-Jamadi) tea and cookies on the way from his apartment to a CIA interrogation?” Ledford will now be promoted.

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Censorship returns to South Africa. The Mail & Guardian, which used to run afoul of the apartheid regime, has been hit with a pre-censorship order, preventing the publication of the second part of a story about the ANC’s relations with an oil management company which funneled funds to it from a parastatal oil company. The judge found this story to infringe on the company’s privacy and dignity.

I can’t believe no one thought of it before: paid product placements (from Pepsi, as if more alliteration were needed) in a political ad. Schwarzenegger is a genius, I tell ya, a genius. I think all of us bloggers need to convince Arnie to start his own blog, ‘cause if anyone can figure out how to make blogging profitable...

The Poor Man on media balance:

1) I don’t know how many sides there are to each story. I know that a cube has six sides, and a record has two, but I don’t really know how many sides a story has, and I suspect it depends rather strongly on the particular story. If you decide that there are two sides to every story, remember that the two sides you are looking at are just the two loudest sides, and volume is very poor measure of quality.

2) There is a natural tendency to think that all opinions have some validity, and, by carefully plotting a conservative course somewhere between two representative arguments, you can make a serviceable approximation to something you could call “truth”. This is an admirable impulse, and often a constructive one, except if one (or both) of the positions is horseshit. Then, you’re fucked.

Credible, redux

A front-page article in the Thursday NYT said that the Guantanamo prisoner who made the Koran-flushing charge had been interviewed by the FBI but “was not able to substantiate the charge.” When I read that, I was going to make fun of it here, asking what sort of proof they were expecting, and then I realized, oh yeah, the smoking gun would be a soaking Koran. So I dropped the matter like, well, a soaking Koran, until I saw some military type on McNeil-Lehrer saying the prisoner had recanted. Gee, he’s being held without the benefit of any legal process in the “gulag of our times,” and he failed to repeat charges against the people who’d be watching over him, possibly for the rest of his life, far away from the eyes of the world. Quel surprise. The Pentagon repeats yet again that it has seen no “credible” allegations of Koran-dumping, and still fails to say what makes the allegations not credible. What I’m asking here is, what is the standard of evidence? A Pentagon spokesmodel quoted in the NYT disparaged the accuser as an “enemy combatant,” not to be believed. By that standard, you could do pretty much anything to an enemy combatant without fear. And indeed, am I right in thinking that the only soldiers convicted of prisoner abuse are the ones stupid enough to have done it while being photographed?

I’ve been enjoying the Pentagon’s flourishing of instructions it issued on the proper handling of the Koran. Reminds me that in the early days of Gulag Guantanamo, a lot of the interrogators were using a scholarly book from the 1970s about Islamic culture, which was used, to the horror of the family of the guy who wrote the book, who had quite liked Muslims, as a guidebook on what things to do to upset Muslims. The instructions no doubt served the same function.

Thursday two separate courts martial, one in the Army, one in the Marines, acquitted men who had killed unarmed Iraqis who had supposedly made threatening moves (in separate incidents). The killings may have been lawful acts of perceived self-defense, let’s assume they were. But the Marine also got away with having pumped 60 bullets into his two corpses and leaving them as an example with a sign saying “No better friend, no worse enemy,” and the Army sgt got away with having planted a gun on the body to make it look more like self-defense.

Maybe somebody will run on a war platform -- you know, vote for me, I promise violence

Meeting with Palestinian President Abbas, Bush makes the Palestinian elections sound like a Medieval mystery play: “Palestinians voted against violence, and for sovereignty, because only the defeat of violence will lead to sovereignty.” Later he speculated, “The President ran on a peace platform; you know, maybe somebody will run on a war platform -- you know, vote for me, I promise violence. I don’t think they’re going to get elected, because I think Palestinian moms want their children to grow up in peace just like American moms want their children to grow up in peace.”

When it came to Israeli actions, he was rather more muddled, making what Palestinians would see as distinctions without differences: “unauthorized outposts” must go, but not settlements, the Wall is ok only if it’s a security barrier, not a political barrier.

Shrub explains that he has a unique understanding of the Middle East: “You know, one of the things when you are in the position I’m in, I’m able to observe attitudes and opinions, and clearly there’s a lot of mistrust, and you can understand why.” Yes George, only you can see that there’s a lot of mistrust between the Israelis and the Palestinians, we bow before your superior insight.

He continues, “The only way to achieve all the objectives is for there to be a democracy living side-by-side with a democracy. And the best way to see -- to solve problems that seem insoluble now is for there to be a society which evolves based upon democratic principles.” If this means anything more than a string of his usual clichés, it’s that he’s placing the whole burden on the Palestinians to change their society before there can be peace, since Israel is already supposedly a democracy. Abbas responded strongly: “But democracy is like a coin; it has two sides. On one side is democracy; on the other side of the coin is freedom. It’s true, now we lack freedom and we are in dire need to have freedom. We do not live in freedom in our homeland. This will weaken the hope to continue this democracy, and will weaken the democratic march.”

Reuters and AFP photographers agree: Bush and Abbas look so much more impressive when shot from below.

The Americans have sold us out

In a story about the reintroduction of the death penalty in Iraq, the WaPo points out the irony that Coalition of the Willing (COW) countries like Britain which don’t have the death penalty, are fighting and dying to install and keep alive Iraqi politicians who then start executing their subjects. No executions have been carried out yet, legal executions I mean, but all the COW countries will be complicit in them.

A couple of days ago Laura Bush endorsed Egyptian President Mubarak’s plan to reform the electoral law by the smallest amount humanly possible, just prior to a referendum on those changes. This sort of intervention in another country’s elections is strictly verboten in international relations, and whoever it was — Condi Rice I assume — who fed Laura her words should not be sending messages to the Egyptian electorate through the First Lady, who was probably just lucky no reporter asked her to describe any details of the changes she was praising. Since then, demonstrators protesting the referendum, who evidently hadn’t gotten the word about Laura’s stamp of approval, and who were chanting “The Americans have sold us out” (which is simply incorrect: the Americans don’t care enough about them to sell them out; they gave them away) (also, were they really surprised to be sold out?) were beaten up by police. Robert Fisk has a useful article on Egypt in the Indy behind a pay barrier, but this search or this link should bring it up within a day or so.

The Post’s article on the centralization of power in fewer and fewer hands in both the executive and legislative branches in the Bush years, and the increase in secrecy and lack of transparency, is a good summary of these trends. I would have liked a longer analysis of the greatly increased practice, which I consider unconstitutional, of legislation being rewritten in conference committee. These process issues keep getting bound up with policy issues and they’re at least as important for the long-term health of the republic, but they’re harder to get the American people interested in. I was heartened that the polls consistently showed support for the right to filibuster; I was afraid that the R’s would successfully spin it as unfair and undemocratic, the minority threatening the majority, but Americans still like an underdog and dislike a bully, which is good to know.

And my government strongly supports stem cells

Since I keep seeing Google hits here from people looking for New York Magazine competitions, I’ve put all of the ones I ever excerpted in one place. These were comps very much like the Washington Post Style Invitational (something like the New Statesman comps, for my British readers).

A reporter asked Bush today why discarding 400,000 frozen embryos or leaving them frozen was better than using them for scientific research. He sidestepped completely: destruction of life, federal dollars, yadda yadda. Didn’t suggest what should be done with the 400,000. No one’s mentioning the millions of orphans that will be institutionalized until they’re 18 while Christian couples donate to other Christian couples their leftover (but Christian) embryos. Indeed, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the amusingly named president of Indonesia, a country with a much larger orphan population thanks to the tsunami, was standing right next to Bush while all this discussion was going on, possibly bemused by which ethical issues do or do not exercise the minds of the rich people of the West.


Evidently they don’t have milk cartons in Indonesia.

Here, George moves in to see if Bambang means what he thinks it means.




Later, and sweatier, Bush added, “And my government strongly supports stem cells.” He meant research on adult stem cells, but it’s still a telling slip. I’ve said before that by the end of his second term, fetuses (and now embryos) will have the right to vote, but their mothers won’t.

He went on, “there must be a balance between science and ethics.” By ethics, he of course means religion, and his use of the word balance shows once again that he thinks of science as being something intrinsically unethical, amoral, and irreligious, which must be balanced, i.e., kept in check by, ethics/religion.

It is not funny. It is cruel.

William Saletan makes at greater length the same point I did yesterday, that Bush’s rationale for opposing stem-cell research is precisely the opposite of his rationale for supporting the death penalty. And he’s got Bush quotes on each subject in neat parallel columns.

As you all must know, a hitherto obscure congresscritter from Alabama who rejoices in the name Spencer Bachus has issued a fatwa against Bill Maher, demanding that HBO cancel his show, which “is not funny. It is cruel,” without also telling them to get the next season of the Sopranos on the air sooner than 2006, the motherless motherfucks.

Do feel free to contact his office and tell them that his behavior is not funny, it is fascistic. If you need a few adjectives to add to that, you might watch an episode or two of Deadwood first.