Into the lion's den

Bush finally finds an almost-receptive-or-at-least-polite black audience to speak to, the National Urban League, after turning down the NAACP. I’d missed that after claiming he had a scheduling conflict, he actually went bike-riding that day. Imagine Shrub speaking to an audience that included Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in the front row.


Oh Lord, get me out of here alive


He asked the audience, "Is it a good thing for the African American community to be represented mainly by one political party? ... How is it possible to gain political leverage if the party is never forced to compete?" The question is, as he says, legitimate, but here’s the problem with it: it suggests tactical, collective voting. Communities don’t vote, individuals do. How would they go about following his advice, anyway--draw up lots and 25% of black voters would have to vote Republican? I’m waiting to hear this speech denounced for its cynicism toward the democratic process: a Republican "president" giving advice to black people on how to put pressure on the Democratic party, how to increase their "leverage" by voting for the R’s. On the cynic-o-meter, it’s right up there with R’s funding the Ralph Nader ballot-access campaign (which, by the way, I consider, yes, cynical, but hardly the dastardly dirty trick so many on the left seem to find it. After all, most of those people are supporting Kerry more to get rid of Bush than for Kerry’s own sake).

HELLO MUDDA, HELLO FADDA: a summer camp on Sakhalin, in Siberia, has been found actually to be a training center for young thieves, aged 12 to 18.

Does life begin? Yes, it begins

The Army’s inspector general releases a report slash whitewash on the prisoner abuse scandal which is also clearly the product of a committee, but falls into a different genre than the 9/11 report. Rather, it is a "the system is perfect, it’s the individuals--lots and lots and lots of individuals--who failed" report. While that genre might seem to be the exact opposite of the approach of the 9/11 report, both have the effect of absolving everyone--everyone who counts--of any responsibility.

MISTAKES WERE MADE: In the interests of full disclosure, in my first-ever post mentioning bin Laden, in August 1998, I wrote "I suspect this bin Laden character has been promoted, and probably promoted way out of his league, to Darth-Vader-of-the-year to put a human face on the Enemy."  Oops, I guess.

The 9/11 commission blamed a failure of imagination. Bill Clinton can’t be faulted for lack of imagination: think of the innovative uses he found for cigars. Actually, the Clintonites more or less understood the dangers, but weren’t clear how to respond to them and didn’t want to screw up their doomed efforts to secure Middle East peace. The Bushies were the ones who didn’t get it, and I suspect this was because they were so ideologically contemptuous of the wimpy Clintonites that they were unwilling to be briefed by them or take their concerns seriously. It’s the partisanship, stupid.

Kerry answers a question on whether early-term abortions are murder: "No, because it's not the form of life that takes personhood in the terms that we have judged it to be in the past. It's the beginning of life. Does life begin? Yes, it begins. Is it at the point where I would say that you apply those [criminal] penalties? The answer is, no, and I believe in choice. I believe in the right to choose, and the government should not involve itself in that choice, beyond where it has in the context of Roe vs. Wade." And by the time he’s finished answering the question, another trimester has passed.

Uncomfortable reading

A BBC reporter said that the 9/11 Commission report would make “uncomfortable reading” for GeeDubya. Granted, most things make uncomfortable reading for our Functional Illiterate in Chief, except maybe:
http://sadlyno.com/uploads/sadlynogoats.htm

Yet another strangely unsatisfying report. Anyone can cite it as vindication of their own actions or their pet theories--and they have--because it goes in all directions, like any report written by a committee. Everyone is to blame but no one is to blame. There were a million chances to prevent 9/11, but we don’t know if 9/11 could have been stopped. It’s a bureaucratic report, suggesting that the only problems were in bureaucratic structure, and will therefore encourage members of the intelligence “community” in the future to continue to act like members of a bureaucracy, which was the problem in the first place.  (UPDATE: James Ridgeway sets out a similar view of the report at greater length.)
 
And some of the talk about centralization looks good on paper but would kill creativity at the bottom, where a lot of the hints about 9/11 were uncovered.  The problem is one of encouraging independent thought at the bottom while coordinating better at the middle and upper levels.  Similarly, the talk about Congressional oversight being so weak because of fragmentation is only partly right.  A super-committee with all-powerful senior politicians, which is basically what the commission called for, sounds like leaving foreign policy in the hands of dinosaurs.

Mr. Godfrey Bloom, the MEP I mentioned a couple of days ago, has been kept off the women’s rights committee, except as an alternate. He was challenged by, among others, Allesandra Mussolini, the Duce’s granddaughter, who questioned whether he himself could clean behind a fridge. Link.

New Ben & Jerry's flavors. Or not

NYT headline: "Bush Tells Iowa Crowd What He Learned From Sept. 11." Something about a pet goat, probably.

Most repulsive news story of the day, until you get to my next item: A 14-year old British girl had a miscarriage. The hospital gave her the 11-week old fetus in a specimen bottle to take home. No one is quite sure why.

Most repulsive news story of the day, until you get to my next item (it’s been that kind of a day): JAPANESE ice-cream makers are testing taste boundaries with this summer’s flavours, which include eel, shrimp, oyster, ox-tongue, octopus, squid and highly popular raw horse. "I don’t know why someone would make horse ice-cream, but I’m surprised that it tastes so good," said Miona Yamashita, 23. "It has a vanilla taste but you can really get the flavour of the horse meat if you bite into a piece." But Kanako Hosomura, 22, said the oyster ice-cream tasted "really bad".

Mad scientists working for the military have developed dried food that soldiers can carry and rehydrate by adding water or...peeing on it. While the stories on this development all ask the reader whether he or she would eat food cooked in their own urine, trying to find where people draw that line, I notice they all automatically assume that the urine you’d use would be your own, drawing their own unconscious line.

Federal prosecutors are looking into whether Halliburton illegally did business with Iran when Cheney was in charge. Halliburton says it is a witch-hunt. Excellent: let’s throw Cheney and the other executives in a vat of crude oil and see if they float.

In a nice line, the Independent’s sketchwriter Simon Carr says of Michael Howard’s attempt at a self-deprecating comment during Prime Minister’s Questions, "his self-deprecation takes work away from those who need it more."

Big Watermelon

A Guardian piece sees a rise in conspiracy theorists in the US, such as the theory that the US has Osama bin Laden on ice somewhere and will bring him out in October, as a semi-legitimate response to an administration itself so excessively secretive and conspiratorial, an administration that took the tactics of the "War on Terror," the "tactics for conducting a secret, asymmetric war and applied them wholesale to the day-to-day governance of the US." And the market for Michael Moore’s "connect-the-dots paranoia" is so strong because "People are hungry for classified information on their rulers, in part because their rulers are so busy collecting classified information on them, and Fahrenheit 9/11 promotes the happy illusion that, for once, the magnetometers and security cameras have been turned on the president and his gang."
 
And Jon Carroll is holding a "Guess the October Surprise" contest:

Operatives from al Qaeda could be discovered staffing the office of the Ohio Democratic Party. Jeb Bush could discover that he had "misplaced" 40,000 eligible Cuban American voters. An "old friend" of John Kerry's could reveal that Kerry spent the entirety of the Vietnam War in the basement of a brothel in Berlin. Dick Cheney could rush into a burning building and save 17 orphans from certain death. Then he could reveal that he is really Spider-Man and that he does whatever a spider can.

The LA Times looks into the source of Shrub’s accusation that Fidel Castro supports prostitution--it came from an unsourced paraphrase in a paper written by an undergrad that the Bushies found on the Web, the font of all true information. What’s curious is that the story, like the initial stories about Shrub’s speech, doesn’t mention that he accused Castro of supporting not just prostitution but child prostitution, as I mentioned earlier.

According to the London Times, when the Chinese sell pirated editions of books, they make stuff up. So a Mandarin edition of Bill Clinton’s My Life now on sale begins, "The town of Hope, where I was born, has very good feng shui." It demonstrates for the first time Clinton’s intellectual indebtedness to the Little Red Book, and says this of Monica: "She was very fat. I can never trust my own judgment." And describes meeting Hillary for the first time: "She was as beautiful as a princess. I told her my name is Big Watermelon". Ok, that part’s probably true.

Steve Lopez has a Harper’s Index-type piece on Kallyfohrnian politics:

Number of times Gov. Schwarzenegger used the term "girlie men" to describe state legislators during a 16-minute speech at an Ontario mall: Twice.

Number of star-struck legislators who have cuddled up to Schwarzenegger for months and deserve the title: Dozens.

Ratio of time Schwarzenegger has spent applying makeup to time spent by all the female legislators: 3:1.

Last national celebrity with hair the color of Schwarzenegger's: Woody Woodpecker.

Number of budget deadlines missed by Woody Woodpecker: Zero.

Schwarzenegger's whereabouts just hours after vowing to stay in Sacramento and fight like a warrior to end the budget stalemate: Beverly Hills fund-raiser.

Amount raised at Beverly Hills fund-raiser by Schwarzenegger, who earlier promised to end fund-raising during budget season: Roughly $400,000.

Amount Schwarzenegger has raised for himself and committees he controls since the day he said he doesn't need anyone's money because he has his own: $30 million.

How can I rejoice when I haven't joiced yet?

I’m not sure how to explain the depth of Tony Blair’s stupidity today. More than 20 years ago, Margaret Thatcher suggested that the British people "rejoice" over the re-occupation of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, a word taken to sum up her callousness. Today, Blair: "Let us rejoice that Iraq is liberated."

Speaking of history repeating itself after 20 years: Sandy Berger = Fawn Hall.

The Cheney-Leahy debate continues: "Mr. Leahy then suggested that the president of the Senate take his gavel and use it to perform an act that, while not technically impossible in anatomical terms, would certainly be considered both unseemly and unhygienic, and which would require an unusual combination of single-minded ambition and physical relaxation."

The Science Museum in London is thinking about using visitors’ shit to generate electricity. Says the museum’s director, "With free admission it would be a great way for visitors to give something back to the museum and help keep the overheads down".

I suppose a little internal contradiction is what you should expect from someone elected to the European Parliament on a platform of pulling Britain out of the EU: newly elected UK Independence Party MEP Godfrey Bloom--sounds like a character out of Jeeves & Wooster, doesn’t he?--has joined the European Parliament’s committee for women’s rights, saying "I want to deal with women's issues because I just don't think they clean behind the fridge enough."

The battle of the one-word weapons

The WaPo has two campaign stories that would have been better if either acknowledged the existence of the other; a compare & contrast would have been nice. Dana Milbank writes of "The Kerry Campaign’s One-Word Weapon," "There is seemingly no charge the Bush campaign can level against John F. Kerry that will not produce a one-word retort: Halliburton." (At least the word isn't Llanhyfryddawelllehynafolybarcudprindanfygythiadtrienusyrhafnauol). And Ceci Connolly writes about Cheney, who usually has a two-word retort at the ready, speaking about malpractice. Or actually, malpractice awards, since the Bushies continue to say nothing about reducing actual malpractice. Cheney essentially kept shouting lawyer lawyer lawyer at Edwards. The Milbank piece is a touch snide, and the Post should really leave snide to me, thank you very much. The Connolly article loses its critical thinking at a key point in its opening sentence. Read it and see if you can spot the problem: "Vice President Cheney, with a swipe at his Democratic trial-lawyer counterpart, yesterday blamed rising health care costs on 'runaway litigation' and promoted a $250,000 cap on medical malpractice awards as the central tenet of the White House program to improve access, affordability and quality of care." Did you see it? Well, you can maybe make a case that reducing awards would improve affordability and access to medical care, especially care by incompetent doctors, whose premiums wouldn’t keep going up, and who wouldn’t be forced into "defensive medicine," like running tests, spending more than 45 seconds on a patient, or showing up sober. But how does it have anything to do with quality of care? Cheney said, "This problem doesn't start in the waiting room [where they should be reading about this speech in about 3 years, if I know doctors’ waiting rooms]. It doesn't start in the operating room. The problem starts in the courtroom." Except, of course, it does start in the operating room, because awards only follow findings of malpractice. When Cheney says, "the Bush-Cheney ticket is on the side of doctors and patients," he means the doctors who fuck up.

Speaking of awards, the Indian government may finally pay Bohpal victims some of that all-too meager compensation money Union Carbide paid in 1989, little of which was actually distributed.

Llanhyfryddawelllehynafolybarcudprin-danfygythiadtrienusyrhafnauole

Transcript of the Daily Show discussion of talking points.

For a sense of the current health of Russian political life, look no further than an Indy story wonderfully headlined: "‘Winnie the Pooh’ Is Elected Mayor of Vladivostok after Rival ‘Trips’ on Grenade." Mr. Pooh (Vinni-Pukh in Russian) is actually Vladimir Nikolayev, a mafioso with a record, whose mob nickname is less than terrifying (and completely unexplained).

Israel clarifies Sharon’s comments about anti-Semitism in France, saying that it isn’t as bad as in Germany in the 1930s. I’m glad they cleared that up. In his first insulting comment (Sharon insulting the French, it’s hard to know what side to take), Sharon said that Jews were in danger because Muslims were now 10% of the French population, which of course they aren’t (6%), and anyway, Israel is 20% Muslim even if you exclude the Occupied Territories.
 
Reminds me: I read somewhere an article on how the news media don’t explain things enough, which was illustrated by a poll saying that many Americans think the phrase Occupied Territories refers to occupation by Palestinians.

Tony Blair tries to win back support through a get-tough-on-crime campaign. He calls for an end to "the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order."  I thought the only ‘60s consensus on law and order was that everyone liked watching Diana Rigg karate-kick bad guys while wearing cat suits.

Oddest protest of the week: "People in a remote Welsh beauty spot have renamed their village in a protest against a wind farm. The village of Llanfynydd, south Wales, has been transformed into Llanhyfryddawelllehynafolybarcudprin-danfygythiadtrienusyrhafnauole. The Carmarthenshire village will temporarily eclipse Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwchllanty-siliogogogoch in north Wales, the longest name title, by eight characters. ... The village’s new name means ‘a quiet beautiful village, a historic place with rare kite under threat from wretched blades’."

With little notice

A WaPo article on the US slippery slope towards war with Iran in a 2nd Bush term has the nerve to say that Congress has been moving in that direction "with little notice." Jeez, it’s too bad that the Washington Post has no means of bringing information like that to the public attention, like shouting it on street corners or, I don’t know, printing it on sheets of paper. I mentioned more than 2 months ago that the House had voted to "use all appropriate means to deter, dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons." I was surprised then that it had happened without any advanced discussion, but there’s also been nothing in the last 2 months. 
 
Israel has also been speaking quite loudly of late about bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.

The US bombed Fallujah again today, killing 14, including children. Humorously, Allawi claims to have been asked permission, and to have given it. The US claims to have hit a "known terrorist fighting position," whatever one of those might be, especially in a town where "they" won completely and absolutely and where, consequently, there is no fighting, just air strikes. Robert Fisk reports: "This is how they like it. An American helicopter fires four missiles at a house in Fallujah. Fourteen people are killed... But no Western journalist dares to go to Fallujah. ... The US authorities say they know nothing about the air strike; indeed, they tell journalists to talk to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence - whose spokesman admits that he has "no clue what is going on"." The country is now so dangerous that the war, certainly Fallujah, is uncoverable.

Anti-Semites gone wild

Ariel Sharon suggests that anti-Semitism is growing in France, and does his best to help by urging all French Jews to emigrate to Israel. Sharon blamed the increasing Muslim population of France for "the wildest anti-Semitism."

Given that the US has put a bounty of $25m on Zarqawi, I can’t wait to hear US officials (if they ever speak to the press again) explain how Zarqawi is an evil-doer for putting $280,000 on Allawi’s head.

After a day of careful consideration, Governor Ahnuuld has decided that yes, he stands behind calling the California Legislature a bunch of "girlie men." They can evidently prove their manliness (especially the women legislators) by giving him everything he wants in budget negotiations. The manly venue for these manly taunts from our manly governor? The food court of a mall. More ominous is his rhetoric denigrating the democratic credentials of everyone except Arnold "L’etat, c’est moi" Schwarzenegger: "I am representing you, and the people know they [leigslators] are representing the special interests rather than the public interest."

News story of the day: "A man was arrested in Florida yesterday after allegedly beating his girlfriend with a pet alligator which he kept in the bath. David Havenner, 41, faces misdemeanour charges of battery and possession of an alligator. ... But Mr Havenner's version of the story differed. He told investigators that Ms Monico bit his hand because she was upset they had run out of alcohol." Did I mention they live in a mobile home? Did I have to?

Updates

Remember how Bremer started a major uprising in Najaf in March by banning a newspaper?  (Link.  Other link.)  Allawi just let it reopen.

When I talked about Rumsfeld (and other Iraq war bigmouths) having disappeared, I missed an AP piece on Rummy’s pariah status. But a check of the DOD website shows that he was allowed to meet the president of Mongolia.

We are an oriental people and it is the will of the people

Some Iraqi judges have started sentencing people to death without waiting for the death penalty to be restored first. Said a Karbala judge who sentenced 3 men to death, "We are an oriental people and it is the will of the people."

Allawi has not denied shooting 6 prisoners, but he has denied chopping off the hand of a prisoner with an axe. Have to draw the line somewhere. You know he’s starting these rumors himself don’t you? Oriental people, indeed.   (Update: ok, NOW he's denied shooting 6 prisoners.)

Here in California, we Occidental people are led by a man who can pretend to kill more people before breakfast than Allawi can actually kill all day. Says the Governator: "I will fight like a warrior for the people of California. There is no one that can stop me. Anyone who pushes me around, I will push back". Oh, don’t let it bother you, little boy.

Team Chimpy has to return a donation from an Iraqi-American businessman who had dealings with Saddam Hussein’s government. Guess that means they can’t take donations from Rumsfeld either.

Negroponte has finally held a press conference, mere hours after I commented on the previous lack of one, showing that even though my daily readership is in the high single digits, my influence is like unto a god’s. AP headline: "US Ambassador Optimistic at Iraq Future." Someone has to be. Flying cars and robots for everyone, no doubt.

Speaking of sexing up intelligence (and depending on your idea of sex, I suppose), Blair has said repeatedly that mass graves with 400,000 bodies have been found in Iraq. In fact, the British government has now admitted that at most 5,000 bodies have been found. What’s a couple of orders of magnitude between friends?

First Whoopi, now Corrine Brown....

Congresscritter Corrine Brown (D-Fla) suggested on the floor of the House that the 2000 election was a coup d’etat (during a debate which resulted in a 243-161 vote to ban any federal official asking the UN to monitor US elections, as Brown had suggested). So they censured her, threw her out for the day, and struck her words from the record. She didn’t tell anyone to fuck themself, didn’t call anyone a name, she just expressed an opinion. The justification for the party-line censure was that she accused other members of a crime, viz, stealing an election.

Today the NYT reported that investigations by the Senate into prisoner abuse incidents in Iraq have been shut down or postponed. The story has certainly slipped off the radar screen, so that Seymour Hersh’s comments and German tv reports about more incidents involving rape and child prisoners, and no doubt rape of child prisoners, haven’t been picked up by almost anyone.

One reason for that is that the Bushies have stopped putting people forward to talk about Iraq, except for Shrub’s "Americans are safer" speech. Where has Bremer been since he left Iraq? When’s the last time you saw Mark Kimmitt, Military Moron? Or even Rumsfeld? Has John Negroponte gone in front of the press once? Hell, they refused even to comment on the report, which I can’t say I believe, but it’s not entirely implausible, that Kapowie Allawi personally shot 6 prisoners dead last week.

The New Republic has an article by Jonathan Chait that places that blackout in the context of the many things Congress no longer bothers to oversee, and how the Bushies routinely simply refuse to testify or supply information, with no consequences. Chait notes that the admin has gotten many of its signature policies passed by hiding information--the cost of Medicare changes, how much Iraqi oil revenues would really amount to, etc. "over the last few years, misinformation has become fundamental, rather than incidental, to the political process." The article also goes into the abuse of process in Congress, where anything proposed by the D’s isn’t allowed to reach the floor, while everything else goes through with little or no debate allowed, the abuse of conference committees to rewrite legislation in secret, etc. Bush has yet to veto a single bill, because he doesn’t need to. If all this seems familiar material--I’ve certainly written about every example he cites--it’s woven together into a scary picture indeed. His conclusion: "most of the abuses under Bush--things like suppressing cost estimates, or redistricting more than once a decade--have violated norms, not rules. When you violate norms, you're limited only by your sense of shame and your party's willingness to stick together. Which suggests the most frightening lesson of the Bush administration: The institutional restraints on an anti-democratic presidency are weaker than we believed."

Right after Blair is exonerated--or so he claims--by the Butler report, comes news that his government essentially lied to two previous inquiries, not telling them that MI6 had reversed itself on several key issues. That’s called a cover-up, although at present they’re trying to blame MI6 for it.

Bush accuses Cuba again of welcoming sex tourism and indeed child prostitution.  "We have put a strategy in place to hasten the day when no Cuban child is exploited to finance a failed revolution and every Cuban citizen will live in freedom." There's probably a really bad pun about No Left Child's Behind that I could use here, but I'll refrain.

Baghdad has a city council of 750. It has to be that large because they keep getting killed, 61 this year, 6 since the "handover." The same is happening with other councils. The councils were actually almost sorta elected, under an indirect process overseen by the American occupiers and their private contractors.  Link.

Bringing down the barriers that stand in the way of our democracy--with extreme prejudice

Iraq announces the formation of a new secret police, or should I say death squad, since PM Owie Allawi says its purpose is to "terminate" insurgents (the LA Times translation is "annihilate"; you say tomato, I say terminate with extreme prejudice, let’s call the whole thing off) and to "bring down all the hurdles that stand in the way of our democracy." Freedom, ain’t it grand.

But at least there's the freedom to demonstrate, or at least to demonstrate in favor of Saddam Hussein being executed. "Let every fool listen, Saddam has to be executed," they chanted in Baghdad.

The Poor Man has a quote from John Kerry from October 2002 before he voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which makes clear that he was indeed voting to authorize war only to disarm Iraq of weapons we now know it didn’t have. It should acquit Kerry of the charge of hypocrisy relentlessly thrown at him by Team Chimpy, although not the charge of having been outwitted by a half-wit.

I guess I failed to mention a while back that Israeli Mossad agents were caught trying to acquire a New Zealand passport under the name of a cerebral palsy victim who cannot travel. It used to be fake Canadian passports; they kept getting caught and kept promising not to do it again (I posted on this 6 Nov 1998)(in a post that also said I was happy to see Minnesota hit at the two-party system, "as long as it's another state that elects the wrestler.") Israel hasn’t so much as offered an explanation to NZ, which just did everything short of cutting off diplomatic relations (and put the 2 agents in prison for 6 months). This is the sort of thing that can get real Canadians and New Zealanders killed.

The Florida felons list is not dead after all. Individual counties can still choose to use it, and those run by Republicans doubtless will.

No one wants to discriminate against gays

Orrin Hatch: “No one wants to discriminate against gays. Simply put, we want to preserve traditional marriage.” I’m sorry, did you say that no one wants to discriminate against gays? NO ONE? Oh, I don’t fucking think so. I just SO don't fucking think so.

I’ve had it up to here with talk about “traditional marriage” from the party that last month wouldn’t shut up about Saint Ronny, who was divorced and whose second wife was pregnant when he married her, and whose 1996 standard bearer had this memorable line about marriage, spoken to his first wife: “I want out.” If I were a reporter or had more time on my hands, I’d find out how many Senators have been divorced, and how that relates to the way they voted (how do you count Teddy Kennedy, who got an annulment from the church and a divorce from the secular authorities?)
(Update: it's not the complete list I want, but this article talks about divorced Senators.)
(Later): and it seems that an activist is planning to name married supporters of the Unequal Rights Amendment in Congress who are having affairs.

Let’s all just acknowledge that the laws governing marriage have actually changed over time as social customs have evolved. Watching the Senate on C-SPAN today, I saw John Cornyn waxing on about how guys in tuxedos and chicks in white dresses have been marching up aisles since before there were aisles or organized religion, how marriage hadn’t changed in thousands of years. You don’t have to go back very far to see that this is nonsense. Go back to the birth of this republic: wives had no control over their own money, could not sign contracts, were not the legal parents of their own children while their husbands were alive or even after, and could legally be beaten (“chastised,” “corrected”) or raped by their husbands. Marital rape was considered an oxymoron by most people and by the legal system within our lifetimes. All of these husbandly powers were considered essential, fundamental elements of marriage, without which it could not survive. In Britain, after a court case (Jackson v. Jackson) ruled against a husband who had kidnapped his estranged wife and held her prisoner in 1891, the London Times said, “one fine morning last month marriage in England was abolished.”

Most of those aspects of marriage were, of course, predicated on sexist notions of the appropriate roles for men and women. Today you could hear the senators struggling to make a heterosexist case for banning gay marriage that was not also an obviously sexist one. This is not really possible, since the argument that marriage must consist of one member of each gender entails the notion that men and women are fundamentally different. They can’t really get away with making such an argument--and gay marriage is no longer considered so absurd that they can laugh it away or dismiss it with that "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" nonsense, the way they could just a couple of years ago--but come closest when they talk about marriage as being about child-rearing and that you need role models from each gender, an argument that only really works if you consider the sexes as having fundamentally distinct attributes, if gender determines identity completely. Otherwise, it would not matter if parents are both of the same gender. The argument against gay marriage, therefore, is a sexist one at its base.

Baghdad calm

Headline of the day, London Times: “Baghdad Calm Shattered as Bomber Kills 11.” Baghdad calm?

Charming: “Israel has drawn up contingency plans to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trying to bury Yasser Arafat at the disputed holy sites of Jerusalem when he dies.”

Jonathan Idema, that gonzo ex-Special Forces guy who kept a private dungeon in Afghanistan, captured at least some of the people he was hanging upside down by their feet in raids he tricked NATO forces into helping him with--three times.

Remember when the KGB was broken into separate agencies by Yeltsin? Putin just reversed that.

“Bush Twins Help Dad with Spread in Vogue.” Uh, right. This is supposed to “humanize” Shrub, although “simianize” might be a bit more accurate for Chimp Boy.

The Butler Report

Blair says he acted in good faith. In fact, he says he will take “full responsibility for any mistakes in good faith.” Very big of him. Simon Carr of the Indy supplies the missing part of the sentence: “I take full personal responsibility, so shut up.” Blair: “That issue of good faith should now be at an end,” which Simon Hoggart of the Guardian translates as “Now, will you stop picking on me?”

The Labour spin is that Butler cleared him, and this is simply not true, although god knows he tried. Actually, Butler’s relationship to reality is an exact mirror of Blair’s. Butler says that the “Dodgy Dossier” Blair used to justify going to war went to the “outer limits” of the available intelligence and that it’s language was, ahem, “fuller and firmer” than intel warranted. Most of us would call that deliberate misrepresentation, but not Butler, who himself takes the facts to their outer limits with his claim that there was no “deliberate distortion or culpable negligence.”

The Indy offers this helpful summary of Butler:

The intelligence: flawed
The dossier: dodgy
The 45-minute claim: wrong
Iraq's link to al-Qa'ida: unproven
The public: misled
The case for war: exaggerated
And who was to blame? No one

There are many stories in the major British press. Here’s a good summary.

Defending the peace, protecting the peace and extending the peace

Headline of the week: “Daschle Denies Hugging Moore.” [Michael, not Demi or Roger]

The Justice Dept releases a report detailing some of the successes it attributes to the use of the Patriot Act. Many of these cases had nothing to do with terrorism, the purported justification for the Act, like the rescue of a kidnapped 88-year old woman. The report misses the point: those of us who object to the police state Ashcroft is constructing do not criticize it on the grounds of its not being an efficient enough police state. No one ever said that letting law enforcement violate people’s rights wouldn’t enable them to solve some crimes they could not solve otherwise. Imagine what the FBI could do with Abu Ghraib techniques. Not really the point. Vlad the Impaler’s Wallachia had a really low crime rate, from what I’ve heard.

In Britain, the Butler Report on Iraqi intelligence claims came out today. More later, when the British papers come out, but it seems to admit to many many flaws in intel while finding no one in particular at fault. The thing about “group-think” as a criticism is that it’s also a way to avoid blame.

Jon Stewart asked at what point “intelligence” becomes its own oxymoron.

Speaking of words that sound funny when spoken by GeeDubya, more from the Oak Ridge speech: “We are defending the peace by taking the fight to the enemy. We have followed this strategy--defending the peace, protecting the peace and extending the peace--for nearly three years.” Someone get that boy a dictionary.

Lightning "Rod"

How does the Pentagon come up with names for military operations? It must be something like the formulas used to determine one’s porn name, since you so often wind up with two macho but completely unrelated terms. Case in point: Operation Lightning Resolve, just launched in Afghanistan. Which means what? That our resolve never strikes the same place twice? That our resolve has the duration of a bolt of lightning? That the thunder of political verbiage can be heard long after the event is over? Op Lightning Resolve has something to do with voter registration in Afghanistan, where “rock the vote” refers to what happens to any woman who dares to register.

Governor Terminator has gone through the Cal. gubernatorial rite of passage, negotiating a sweetheart deal with the prison guards. He got very short-term delay in wage increases in return for larger benefits and even greater autonomy for the guards and their supervisors. But the part I like best is that the union gets to have the video of prison incidents to use in PR--commercials showing how hard their jobs are and why they should be paid so much more than teachers.

Israel bulldozed a house in a Gaza refugee camp, killing the 70 (or 73)-year-old, wheelchair-bound man trapped inside. Israelis have risen as one in outrage and put a stop to the bulldozing of houses. Just kidding.

The Guardian: “A man who shot himself in the testicles with a sawn-off shotgun was jailed for five years yesterday.” Beer was involved (you knew that). After the 15th lager, he got into an argument with a friend over whose turn it was, went home to get the gun, shoved it in his trousers...

Robert Fisk reports that at least 13 professors at the U of Baghdad, and more at other universities, have been murdered since the invasion. Including history professors, which is totally uncalled for.

Dictator Mugabe bans the color red, associated with the opposition, from Zimbabwean tv. Link

Diddle the Vote

Shrub [I’m trying to minimize my use of “B*u*s*h*,” in the hopes that there’ll be fewer sponsored ads for Republican sites at the top of mine; the problem is that “B*u*s*h*” is so much shorter than His Fraudulency, Smirking Chimp Boy, etc, and I’ve fallen victim to my own laziness, often using his name with no mockery of any kind] today, defending the war: “Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder [this speech was given at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons lab!] and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.”

The problem with that rationale, of course, is that it would equally justify invading at least a dozen other countries.

Chimpy also said that Saddam refused to give a full accounting of weapons to the UN in 2002. Of course GeeDubya made that assertion at the time, when he was claiming that Iraq had all manner of infernal devices, but has someone actually checked out the long report which Iraq submitted against what we now know?

THE QUALITY OF MERCY IS NOT STRAINED: The Iraqi “government” is going ahead with an amnesty for people who have not committed “too many atrocities.” An interesting concept. Presumably those eligible have committed just the right number of atrocities. Sort of a Goldilocks thing.

IT DROPPETH AS THE GENTLE RAIN FROM HEAVEN UPON THE PLACE BENEATH: The brother of an Australian surfer killed by a, what else, killer shark (the more politically correct term is great white shark, which really isn’t very PC at all, is it?), has asked for the shark not to be killed. Authorities are not moved, and are trying to track the shark through its dental records (it left bite marks on the surf board).
Link.

The Philippines will pull its troops out of Iraq a bit earlier than planned to get a hostage back. By the way, he was wearing an orange jumpsuit too. Where are the hostage-takers getting them? Is there a store that sells kidnapping supplies? Maybe a chain? Can I invest in it?

Oh dear. Last post, it was Fuck for Forest, this post: Fuck the Vote. Oh deary dear.

The Indy rips the lid off Kerry’s college soccer career. Ready? His nickname was “the Diddler.”