An article in Slate reminds us that it was 6 months ago this week that Clinton was impeached, which was supposed to be alter the political landscape forever. Hey, yeah, Clinton was impeached once, I vaguely remember that.

There’s actual talk of Clinton running for the Senate from Arkansas in 2002. It won’t happen, but if it did, it would make him the 4th ex-president with a Congressional career (not 3rd, as the London Times said). Can you name them? Of course you can’t. John Quincy Adams served in the House, Andrew Johnson of all people was Senator from Tennessee, and
the one the Times missed, John Tyler was elected to the Confederate Congress.

A sad day in British politics: Tony Benn will retire from the House of Commons at the next election, if that means anything to anyone here besides me.

The president of the Philippines decided to stop an execution yesterday, but couldn’t get through.

The reason China doesn’t believe that the US, excuse me, NATO, bombed its Belgrade embassy by mistake is that at least 2 of the 3 people killed were Chinese spies and the bomb hit the intelligence section of the embassy.

Good article in Sunday Washington Post on the growing conservatism of the Supreme Court and how the liberal wing of the court has no liberals on it.

Khrushchev’s son has passed his citizenship test, missing only the question on what sort of government the US has. I know you’re all waiting with bated breath, so the answer is evidently supposed to be: a democracy.

Another war ends and guess what, the Pentagon was wildly over-optimistic about its successes again. Who’da thunk it? NATO bombing destroyed all of Yugoslavia’s tanks except for, um, those 250 that rolled out of Kosovo. Evidently we took out a lot of cardboard tanks.

The Village Voice has a guide to the many many scandals of Hillary Clinton. Remember the White House travel office? Castle Grande? The $100,000 won in a single day playing the cattle futures? Channeling Eleanor Roosevelt?

Speaking of families with peculiar finances, what is it with the Bushes? Jeb Bush’s wife spent $20,000 on a little shopping spree in Paris and then lied to Customs. Whatever happened to Neil Bush, anyway? Or Roger Clinton? And how did Reagan ever get to be president without an embarrassing brother? Dubya’s finances could use a little wholesome sunshine themselves. Although he insists that since being born in the family compound on Third Base he never actually benefited from having well-connected relatives, it seems that his oil skills were minuscule, and he was paid a suspicious amount of money for his involvement in that, um, what, football team? basketball? Another one of those deals where the sales tax got put up so that investors like Dubya could walk away with a fortune.

The Supreme Court has released a raft of silly decisions this week. Under the guise of “federalism,” states evidently have complete sovereign immunity to break any law they feel like. Death penalty trials can be shoddier than ever, with juries given inaccurate or non-existent instructions on the alternatives if they deadlock. Also, in the same case the Supes ruled on whether the 2 necessary aggravating factors required for the death penalty can be basically the same one. Actually, the two were “the victim was a chick” and “her family liked her”, neither of which seem to me to count, unless you admit that some people have more legal protection than others and accept as mitigating factors “the victim was only a black person” and “he was a shit anyway”. The case was from Texas, where “he needed killing” is considered a defense, which is about all you can expect for the $500 or so most counties allocate for the defense in criminal cases. Dubya just vetoed a bill that would have provided a lawyer within 20 days of arrest (everywhere else it’s 72 hours).

Well, I'd like to think it was all about something

An e-mail making the rounds asks the disturbing question “What if the hokey pokey *is* what it’s all about?”

The one thing I don’t think the NY Times, which has been coming woefully inadequate over the last few years in providing maps in general, has bothered showing is a map of the zones in Kosovo. If they did, we might have to ask the question, why were the French given the zone with the highest concentration of Serbs? The French are the most pro-Serb and the least willing to do anything aggressive. As the ethnic Serbs are creating no-go areas in the north, the French are standing around and watching, saying that ethnic separation is a good thing. I have to assume that’s NATO policy as well. Indeed, they seem to be encouraging the Serbs to return immediately (as is Milosevic, who has difficulty declaring victory with all these refugees hanging around), but the Albanians to wait a couple of weeks while NATO futzes around with mines. If the Serbs succeed in grabbing and walling off the north, with all the mines (um, mine mines, not landmines) and other economic resources, the Kosovars have much less of an economic base and are therefore less likely to declare independence, at least I think that must be the reasoning.

A story in the Sunday NY Times on the Son of Sam says that he is now a mental health peer counsellor at his prison.

Stalin lives, and he’s photographing royal wedding! In the official pictures of the Prince Edward-Sophie Rhys whatever wedding, which had a smaller audience share than the average Eastender’s episode, but still screwed up my tv schedule all weekend, one picture had Prince William not smiling until they digitally stuck his head from another picture in it. Creepy. As her wedding present, Queen Elizabeth, rather than give one of those $20,000 tea pots on the register, gave them a couple of new titles. Otherwise, Sophie would evidently have been known as Princess Edward.

The Joint Military Intelligence College is offering a Masters degree in intelligence. I could tell you what my dissertation was about, but then I’d have to kill you.

Bumper sticker seen in Berkeley: I (heart) Big Brother

Fortune cookie: “You have an unusual magnetic personality. Be aware of your polarity.” If I remember my high school physics correctly, that means a fortune cookie just told me that I’m repulsive.

Stupidest idea of the week: The Godfather IV, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (as Sonny Corleone, formerly James Caan, who found out what happens when you don’t have exact change in the exact change lane).

Netanyahu declares that the Israeli people are just ungrateful bastards who won’t have him to kick around anymore. He also accuses the Labor government of being run by “rich industrialists and capitalist fat cats.” In other words, Jews.

Some doctors in Britain are offering aversion therapy to “cure” homosexuality on the National Health.

Speaking of which, Prince Edward got married today. He had trouble getting Sophie’s finger into the ring, which is probably a metaphor.

Serbia seems to have taken all its Kosovar political prisoners with it when it left. You’d like to think NATO would have noticed that. But then, while British troops were escorting Serbs out of Kosovo, the Serbs actually stopped to burn a few buildings.

Sensitive headline of the week: “Ageism Code Condemned as Toothless” London Times.

The longest-serving political party leader, Lord Screaming Sutch of the Monster Raving Loonie Party, is dead, evidently of suicide, at 58.

[Hello to Googlers in 2005: you are here because you misspelled Loony, as I did when I wrote this post. If you are looking for the 2005 Monster Raving Loony Party manifesto, click here.]

In what I can only assume is a tribute, Blair responds to the crushing defeat at the European elections by reinstating plans to ban fox-hunting.

Icky Kosovo story of the week: a family returned to their home to find that Serb soldiers had been using it to rape women. They had a large pile of underwear to burn.

“I’m dead, Jim”: DeForrest Kelley put on his red shirt yesterday.

The German chancellor’s brother is on the dole.

Prince Charles met the Artist Formerly Known as Prince this week. It is not known what they talked about.

Well, I tried to give the Russians the benefit of the doubt and assumed yesterday that the troops really did move into Kosovo on their own accord (not that a military that out of control would be much less scary), but I was wrong. Today their commander was promoted. And Kremlin finally admits that Yeltsin gave the order. It’s the sneakiness of the whole thing that’s the worst aspect, along with the childishness. All the lying and the denying and stalling, and pretending that Yeltsin was asleep and couldn’t be called to the Batphone.

Please someone tell me that we’re not starting one of those Cold War races for territory again. Evidently no one, including in Moscow, thought that the Russian troops were just going to storm into Kosovo like that. Did no one notice that in all the UN talk, the Russians never agreed to be ordered around by NATO or even coordinate, and that their proposal of last week to establish zones of occupation in Kosovo, which I commented at the time (whether in e-mail form or not I can’t remember) was wonderfully retro (no doubt Russia’s tribute to the new Austin Powers movie), was simply going to be put into effect on the ground unilaterally.

Jacques Chirac is claiming to have personally given approval or vetoed every one of the 22,000 NATO bombing runs, and saved the historic bridges of Belgrade and stopped NATO doing a lot more damage to Montenegro.

I can’t wait to see what a UN protectorate actually looks like. Presumably it gets to set its own tax rates and everything. Does the UN actually get to vote on whether the Kosovars get to vote for an elected assembly, and if so, whether refugees not in the country get to vote?

John Cleese has signed on to play George Washington in a movie directed by Ben Stiller.

Justice Antonin Scalia issues his silliest opinion since the last one he wrote. In saying why he thought Chicago police should have been able to order loitering people who might or might not be gang members and might or might not have a reason for loitering, to move or be arrested, he quotes large chunks of West Side Story. If this is not the first Supreme Court opinion to contain the words “Gee, Officer Krupke, krup you,” I don’t want to know about it.

Scalia, I just met a jerk named Scalia.

Hillary Clinton & such

The Daily Telegraph, which often gets American things wrong, seems to think that Hillary faces a constitutional problem in holding an executive branch office and becoming Senator (if she were elected, these would overlap for 17 days). Has anyone else heard anything along these lines? I doubt the Constitution had the office of First Lady in mind, but it is a fact that the First Lady has an office and staff paid for by the taxpayers, so she is exercising some sort of Executive branch function. Of course there is one obvious solution...divorce Bill.

The London Times says that the Dark Ages were brought on by ivory. In the 6th century ivory ships brought the Black Death from Zimbabwe.

The Wash Post says that 1% of US gun dealers sold 45% of the guns used in crime last year.

Virgin Atlantic Airlines is installing private cabins. I think they were tired of catching people initiating each other into the Mile High Club in the bathrooms.

If they’re Greek, how about some hemlock?

It has been pointed out to me that today’s McNeil-Lehrer featured a segment on boozing on campus that at one point mentioned an association of sororities which were “substance-free”--as if they were ever anything else.

Bringing crap to Newcastle: McDonald’s is to start selling pizza in its restaurants in Italy.

The death penalty in Russia is ended.

In the most important news of the week that you won’t read much about and couldn’t understand if you did, the euro is beginning to collapse.

And the United Nations was abolished today. You may not have noticed, but that was certainly the implication of the peace agreement with Serbia, which specifically says that the occupation force will have “NATO at its core”. Ignore the presence of Russian and other non-NATO troops; they are window dressing, and in the absence of proper UN action they too are illegal. The occupation will have force behind it, not law. That it may have morality behind it as well is to some extent beside the point. Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia in order to protect the poor Sudeten Germans. The US invaded Panama because some American woman got felt up, or something like that. In the absence of international law, there is always someone with a good excuse for military action. So all hail NATO, the new world’s policeman, when and where it feels like. Since this precise agreement could have been come to before the bombing started if the US was willing to accept a UN rather than NATO occupation, or a month ago if it had been willing to stop bombing, who is to say that the real purpose was not to give an excuse for the continued existence of NATO.

The inventor of the hovercraft died today. Last week it was the inventor of nylon, and the inventor of trucks going beep beep beep when they back up.

The Ku Klux Klan is starting up in Australia. Throw another cross on the fire, cobber.

Friday is the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The square is closed for renovations and curiously enough all western tv stations were taken off the air for maintenance. So who was that guy who stood in front of that column of tanks? We still don’t know.

NATO has been a busy little beaver this weekend, hitting a hospital, an old folks’ home, an apartment building, and a crowded bridge. Incidentally, under the War Powers Act, which is still the law of the land, this war actually ended last Tuesday. You’d think after all these accidents, NATO would change its tactics, and it has: it’s stopped apologizing. NATO (motto: it’s war, watcha gonna do?) bombed a bridge that even if it were a legitimate military target, could have been hit some other time than in broad daylight on market day, if it cared in the slightest about civilian damage. Now I can remember when the Israelis were roundly condemned, and justly so, for using cluster bombs on Lebanon, nasty and extremely indiscriminate little fuckers. NATO is using the same bombs with impunity. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, has practically surrendered, agreeing to a military occupation of the whole country with a NATO component, but it would prefer the troops have a non-NATO commander. Since there is no legal basis whatsoever for NATO to occupy a whole country, you’d think they’d jump at the chance to pass the buck. Of course it would be easier to feel sympathy for the Serbs if just once in all those interviews you’ve read and heard, had even one Serb said “It’s awful what our government is doing to the Kosovans, but bombing us isn’t nice either.”

Netanyahu, who amazingly is still in power, takes the opportunity to expand a West Bank settlement. Barak (and isn’t Barak a perfect name for a Klingon?) is still trying to put together a coalition that doesn’t involve #3 party Shas (motto: Who’s a black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks? SHAS!).

When the Turks kidnapped Ocalan, I said that he had obviously been drugged to the gills. On the other hand, given his plea in court to arrange a complete surrender of the Kurds if they wouldn’t hang him, maybe he’s just a coward.

Arkansas voters turn down a 1 cent sales tax increase to fund the Clinton presidential library, in the same week that Hillary announces plans never to set foot in Arkansas again if she can possibly help it.

A woman is to go on trial in Italy for not having sex with her husband.

A school has announced a weapons amnesty for the turning in of guns and knives. The school is Eton, in which an air gun was recently fired. The school officials are worried that Prince William and Harry’s secret service will see a weapon and blow away the heir to a dukedom.

An article in the Washington Post today (Thursday) details some of the sillier cases of school district over-reactions since Columbine. Worth reading. Similarly, Salon takes the WB to task for cancelling the season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Today NATO is to start bombing Serb telephone and computer centers. According to Tom Hayden (also in Salon), the US ranks 26th in countries taking Kosovo refugees. I know that Britain (22nd) has such stringent standards that the planes bringing refugees to Britain are actually arriving with empty seats.

Speaking of US bombing, we killed a kid yesterday. In Vietnam, where an unexploded bomb exploded. Didn’t see a single mention in the Washington Post or the NY Times.

Yesterday on McNeil-Lehrer saw Congresscritters Cox and Dicks (Dix?) talking about the penetration of nuclear labs. And when Cox and Dicks talk about penetration....

Of course you can hardly blame China for espionage, unless you think the US doesn’t spy on China at all. You can, however, blame them for spreading nuclear technology. It’s bad enough they have it, but they also sold it to Pakistan, which coincidentally may be about to enter its semi-annual war with India over Kashmir.

The Dolly the sheep cloning may not have been so successful after all; she may have been born middle-aged on the cellular level.

The Welsh Assembly opened today. The house is not going to have the pomp and tradition we’re used to from the House of Commons, I’m afraid. Today one member referred to another as the “honourable member” from wherever. The speaker reminded him that there are no honorable members here.

The Louisiana Senate votes to require elementary school students to say Yes ma’am and yes sir and no ma’am and no sir to their teachers. An armed society is a polite society. Of course it’s Louisiana, so a lot of the 6th graders are older than the teachers.

Bumper sticker seen in Berkeley: Who died and made you Darth Vader? I’d like to point out that this week saw the removal from power of the two world leaders with the names that were the most fun to say: Bibi Netanyahu and Sitiveni Rabuka of Fiji. Coincidentally, they were both shits. In breast reduction surgery news, two stories from the London Times. A Manchester woman police constable had hers done in order to fit comfortably into the body armor they have to wear all the time now. The force does seem to have made every effort to help with this first, by the way. (Actually, Dave Barry’s column last week mentioned that the Canadians were trying to develop a combat bra, whatever that means) The second story wins my award for best headline of the week: News Presenter to Have Breasts Removed on TV. The size of the Yugoslav military in Kosovo is precisely the same as it was 8 weeks ago. With reports of desertions on their side, and German opposition on ours, it remains to be seen who will fall apart first. It might go a long way to a solution if the US stopped insisting that any occupying force has to be NATO. The NATO invasion was always illegal under international law and no country should have to legitimize such an occupation. And it will be an occupation, and extend to all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. If you haven’t seen a map lately, Kosovo is surrounded by Yugoslavia. Thus the Rambouille accord gave NATO troops permission to move anywhere in Yugoslavia unhindered, and why Yeltsin’s statement that NATO wished to make all of Yugoslavia a protectorate (rather than just Kosovo), which sounded to me at first like another Yeltsinism, was in fact accurate.

So what happened in the world while I was gone? Well, I only had the L.A. Times, which is fewer steps up the evolutionary ladder from the SF Chronicle than it used to be, so I don’t really know. My favorite Times headline was “Man with One Leg, Not Accepted by LAPD, Sues”. You laugh, but he passed the physical tests. Turkey dealt with the new woman MP who insists on wearing Islamic headgear by revoking her citizenship. NATO bombed a bunch more refugees and the Chinese embassy, notably the only time it really took credit for its own accidents. This week it is saying that the Serbs are to blame for the refugees our bombs killed because they were, allegedly, used as human shields. “Stop hiding behind those refugees so we can bomb you from the safety of our airplanes.”

The D’s & R’s of California, after ordering the voters of the state to take back the open primaries and failing, have decided to simply ignore them, taking separate counts according to party affiliation. That is not what we voted for, twice.

Milosevic offered to pull half his troops out of Kosovo. The US called it a half measure. Duh.

The US, never learning from its past mistakes, is to train the Indonesian police in riot control. One of the biggest under-reported stories of the last few years is how the US has gone back to this sort of thing, especially in Latin America under cover of the “drug war”. In just this way, the US trained the security forces of the juntas in the 1970s and the
Central American death squads in the 1980s.

The Kuwaiti Parliament is dissolved because the government printed some Korans with typos.

While I was gone, Russia got a new prime minister, a man whose university thesis was on The Ideology of Firemen. And speaking of death squads, Israel’s new prime minister is famous for having led revenge attacks on Palestinians in the 1970s, wearing a dress and disguised as a woman. When all the news reports refer to him as Israel’s most decorated general, I think they mean best accessorized.

A deer almost stepped on my cat today.

Speaking of animals, the fields along I-5 are getting increasingly exotic. On this trip, in addition to the ostriches I’ve noticed before, I saw llamas. I think it’s becoming the world’s longest, narrowest petting zoo.

In Saugus, CA, a 13-year old was given a bag of marijuana by a friend. He took it to his parents who took it to the police, presumably exactly what he was supposed to do. But since he was given it on school property and there is a zero tolerance rule, he has been suspended and transferred to a different school.

I said some time ago that Gen. Wesley Clark would turn out to be a hawk, given that he had a wimpy name that must have resulted in his getting frequently beaten up as a kid, and I was right, wasn’t I? Well, I saw the Star Wars movie (superb special effects, shame about the script) and young Anniken Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, is called by the abbreviation “Annie”.

So back to Kosovo. Yesterday I was thinking that Milosevic may have done the future state of world politics a favor by responding to NATO’s demand that he jump not with “How high?” but with “No.” Today, though, everyone is praising the efficacy of air power without ground troops, and that doesn’t bode so well. Before bowing down before the almighty bomber, it might be remembered that NATO not only killed an estimated 1,200 civilians through accidents but bombed several different whole other countries accidentally, to say nothing of the Chinese embassy. Also, military analysis suggests that the much greater military efficacy of bombing in recent days was due to the fact that there was in fact a ground force in the field, a little thing called the KLA, which a) told NATO where the appropriate targets were, and b) drove Serb soldiers and tanks and such out from under cover so that they could be bombed. Which suggests that simply arming the KLA earlier would have been a better strategy than indiscriminately bombing every farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in Yugoslavia. If I see one more story saying that Clinton was really a military genius after all, I may puke. Here is the man who ruled out ground forces, making it necessary to bomb every farmhouse etc in order to reverse the impression that he really wasn’t serious, who never seriously tried to negotiate or any other non-military method, who touted the Apache helicopters as the magic bullet to win the war, then marched them to the top of the hill and marched them down again....

What must it feel like to be bombed by a country that doesn’t change its bombing tactics one iota when it’s hitting hospitals, old age homes etc etc on a daily basis, that is waging what feels like total war from the ground but is an unimportant sideshow on the other side, which never so much as figured out how one pronounces Kosovo, and which is willing to sacrifice thousands of Serb and Kosovar civilians to the cause but not a single US soldier? If Milosevic had had any understanding of the US psyche, he wouldn’t have had those 3 US soldiers taken prisoner, he’d have made sure they were found riddled with bullets on the wrong side of the border.

And speaking of things that piss me off, have you noticed the pull-quote in the ads for the movie The Thirteenth Floor in which the movie is supposed to be a cross between “Phillip K. Dick” and Orson Welles? What they mean is not the novelist Philip K. Dick, who they have probably never read, but the movie Total Recall, which similarly misspelled the author’s name in its credits (the movie didn’t really bear any resemblance to anything Dick wrote, but it’s common practice to buy the rights to something in order to immunize yourself from people claiming you plagiarized the script they’ve been circulating for years). (Speaking of which, I once wrote “boom” on a piece of paper in 1970, so I want 10% of the gross of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace based on their theft of my intellectual property.

As long as I’m rambling, there is nothing even vaguely resembling a phantom menace in the movie. I know that Lucas was really pissed off when Reagan’s missile defense program started being called Star Wars and I think this title is just to make sure that whenever a politician calls for Star Wars, an opponent can say something about it offering protection only from a phantom menace.

The Washington Post has articles about one-man vast right wing conspiracy Richard Mellon Scaife in the Sunday and Monday papers (still available at least until Tuesday’s paper comes on line).

Before Jesse Jackson went to Belgrade I was wondering why the Clinton admin was so vehemently opposing a trip that I figured had a good chance to get the hostages/kidnap victims/POWs (the Pentagon never really did get its story straight on that one or decide on what side of the border they were patrolling, did it?). And then I saw Jackson meeting with Milosevic and talking about giving peace a chance and the lion lying down with the lamb (London Times comment: some lion! some lamb!) and I could see what the problem might be. Am I right that Jesse only called for a cease-fire after his mission had succeeded? did he really negotiate his call for peace? I’m certainly not one to call a traitor someone who questions American foreign policy, for obvious reasons, but this is the sort of behaviour that turned Jane Fonda into Hanoi Jane and Lord Haw Haw into a corpse.

Queer as a $5 bill: according to Larry Kramer, Abraham Lincoln was gay. I don’t have anything to say about that, but that $5 bill joke did spring to mind.

The US unfreezes the assets of the guy who owned the chemical factory in Sudan that the US bombed, officially admitting to being unable to prove any terrorist connection for him or chemical warfare capability for the factory. I predict that this story will be completely ignored.

Which should serve as a warning for the Kosovars, who might be tempted to believe that after Clinton declares victory and goes home, that they might have some level of protection when Milosevic turns nasty again. Americans have the attention span of my cat, who I expect will not even recognize me when I return in two weeks. Note, for example, the engrossed attention not given to the elections in Panama this week, a country I believe the US has invaded more than a few times. The widow of a former president was elected president. He served three incomplete terms, being deposed by coups all three times. Her opponent was the son of a coup leader. Another example: tomorrow’s Washington Post notes that while the US claimed as one of its reasons for invading Haiti five years back that its generals were engaged in drug trafficking, the amount of cocaine funneled through Haiti has skyrocketed since then, now being about 1/5.

The Supreme Court by 9-0 says that the US can deport political refugees who have also committed non-political crimes, even if they will be persecuted, tortured or murdered in their home countries. It says that these matters are really none of the business of any courts, but that the executive “knows best” how to deal with issues that affect international relations. It is now official: human rights are a bargaining chip, not an absolute right.