Change the channel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Less casualty, except among the military age males

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

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

Iraqi soldiers are refusing to participate in the bloodbath.

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

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

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

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

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

Our will is being tested

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not skiing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was necessary to destroy Fallujah in order to save it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thou shalt not be negative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outlaw

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

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

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

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

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

Spending time with their respective families

Bumper sticker: “Defeat Bush again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that’s all right then.

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

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

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

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

What I said

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

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

Email from an aeolist

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

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

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

Good Krugman column on Bush admin lying.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

It will be at the time and place of our choosing

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

And Bahrain bans The Passion of the Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wonder how much he was paid to make that speech?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In these times, we can't ignore anything

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

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

The George Bush Conspiracy Generator.

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

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

Just what Berlin needed: talking garbage cans.

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

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

Supporters of God’s wrath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An enemy of God and Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would Jesus confess to?

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

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

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

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

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

Mean and nasty people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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