And red friends in the gay states

Today I mostly watched the convention while doing other things. Can’t say I was as impressed by Barack Obama as everybody else: his speech seemed to be a superior version of the sort of gosh-ain’t-America-diverse speech we get every convention, which is not a particularly compelling speech to me. You’ll notice his "We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states" line carefully avoided creeping out the homophobes of Middle America by keeping the Little Leaguers and the gays in separate states.

At one point I looked up and saw Little Orphan Annie, founder of Kids for Kerry (the horror, the alliterative horror!), scolding Cheney for saying a bad word.

Ron Reagan Jr. gave a serious speech in favor of stem cell research in the cadences of a bad nightclub comic.

And Teresa Heinz Kerry seemed drugged, or sleepy, and bored by the speech she was giving. I was watching C-SPAN, so I missed hearing the cable news channels scramble to explain Portuguese and Portuguese colonial history, which should have been a hoot.

If you’ve been reading too many convention bloggers, this is something of an antidote.

Let's all just assume I came up with a humorous title for this post, cleverly linking kidnapping and gay marriage

The press is catching up to the tactical nature of kidnapping in Iraq. Of course it took the kidnapping of Westerners to make them notice that kidnappings of Iraqis aren’t always about ransom. The Wednesday London Times has a story about doctors being kidnapped in large numbers and being told to leave the country, which is evidently a surprise to them; the LA Times had the story 2 or 3 months ago, but no one else ever followed up. As with the people killed in Iraq, you can probably find a number for the non-Iraqis kidnapped in Iraq, but the hundreds of Iraqis kidnapped every month go unenumerated.

STUPID KIDNAPPER TRICKS: A few days ago some Egyptians were seized by people who evidently thought that Egypt had troops in Iraq, and released when they found out Egypt does not.

The first gay marriage in France, 7 weeks ago, was just invalidated. Gay marriage will, however, come to Homer Simpson’s Springfield.

Go In, Stay In, Tune In

The British government is planning to distribute to every household a pamphlet on what to do if the terrorists attack. It’s on the web at preparingforemergencies.gov.uk, and speaking of preparedness, the uk.gov should really have snapped up the URL preparingforemergencies.co.uk as well....

Actually, it’s a little hard to parody the real one, whose slogan is "GO IN, STAY IN, TUNE IN." Although at least it doesn’t say a thing about duct tape and plastic sheeting.

Strength and wisdom are not opposing values

There’s something a little bit askew about Clinton giving a speech for Kerry. The disparity between the two would have been a million times more obvious had the two appeared on the same platform, which will never happen, because Kerry is too afraid that the newspaper captions would all be: "Former President Bill Clinton (left) and some guy." Clinton was able to insult Bush’s intelligence in a way Bush will need to have explained to him: "Strength and wisdom are not opposing values." And he was able to come out as both a Vietnam draft avoider, and as a member of the non-non-rich [if you don’t get the reference, click here], which Kerry and Bush are afraid to do: "When I was in office, the Republicans were pretty mean to me. When I left and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them."

Do Bostonians actually like their town being called Beantown?

Juan Cole says much of what I was going to about the way the Iraq war is being treated at the Dem convention, which is that it is being mostly ignored. You’d think Bush’s biggest failures were not going to Vietnam, and stealing the 2000 election. The D bosses made sure that no resolution against the war even came to a vote--which is actually fine, I suppose, ‘cause who really cares what the opinion of the delegates is? But then they issued a fatwa against any significant criticism of the way the war was conducted, much less discussion of whether it should have been conducted at all. Juan Cole: "The attack on Bush is not that he went to war against Iraq. It is that he did so virtually unilaterally, ‘walking away from our allies.’"  Me: which is the least criticism of the war you can have and still be criticizing the war, which is obviously exactly why that line was chosen. It still suggests that the US should, somehow, have talked Germany, France, etc into joining our splendid little war, and fails to acknowledge that they were pretty much correct not to get involved, and neither should we.

He needs more than 40 acres just for his hair-care products

Friday I said I was waiting for Bush’s speech to the Urban League to be denounced for its cynicism. It has been, by Al Sharpton: "The insult there was that he acted like we have become Democrats by some unthinking process, rather than that we had been rejected and treated hostile by the Republican Party." Then he brought up that 40 acres and a mule thing again. Can someone just give Al Sharpton 40 acres and a mule, so he’ll shut up about it, and because it would make a great photo.

The trial of Pitcairn Islanders for sexual abuse of children has finally begun, although the defendants are claiming that they declared independence from Britain in 1790 when they burnt the Bounty. I keep hearing that the Pitcarinites speak in something like 18th-century English (combined with Tahitian), and I’d love to hear it. I have no idea of guilt or innocence, but if 7 men in a population of under 50 are sent to prison, the island ceases to be viable.

Well-known torturers and mass killers

The Sunday Times (London) reports that Allawi is hiring some of Saddam’s secret police, as long as they are not, "as one intelligence official put it, ‘well-known torturers and mass killers’". It’s nice that they’re giving the lesser-known torturers and mass killers a chance to make a name for themselves. The secret police have their headquarters inside the Green Zone, under the protection of the American military.

Chain letter

100,000 Israelis form a human chain to demand retention of the settlements in Gaza. Like "We are the world," but with ethnic cleansing. Said one link, "We are all holding hands to return to the land of Israel". Since these are people capable of being lost for 40 years in a remarkably small piece of desert, that makes a certain amount of sense.

I can’t find a single follow-up today on the state of the porta-potties for the media at the Dem. convention.  Dammit, we need to know!  America needs to know! 

And it's still better than an election in Florida

Sometime next week, an interim parliament will be elected in Iraq. We don’t know when or where or by whom, for security reasons. Jefferson would be so proud.

Speaking of Jeffersonian democracy: AP headline: "Media Upset With DNC Restroom Facilities."

An Iranian court--and I use the term loosely--has acquitted an agent of beating a Canadian journalist to death.

The British government is talking about vaccinating children against experiencing pleasure from cocaine, heroine, maybe even nicotine (the vaccines are not on the market yet). The vaccine would also work on adult addicts, but the idea is to prevent addiction. This is certainly a good idea, but there’s still a lingering creepiness factor, isn’t there?

Bush: "One thing is for certain, though, about me—and the world has learned this--when I say something, I mean it." But do you understand it? And can anyone else?

My cinematic mid-life crisis, with elephant battle scenes

This week I watched a Thai film that turned up on one of the cable channels, "The Legend of Suriyothai," and I watched it because of a fear that I’m getting old (some people would have bought a red sports car or gone bungee-jumping; me, even my mid-life crises are sedentary). See, in the last semi-annual rejuggling of channels by my cable company, which they do so that when you sit down to watch the "Daily Show" you thought you taped, you find yourself with half an hour of golf, I started getting the Sundance Channel, and I’ve been finding that my approach to which movies I’m willing to watch on that channel is much more unadventurous than it would have been twenty years ago. I mean, I’m a person who has watched more than one movie with an all-midget cast, and more than one movie in which the actors were hypnotized (movie adepts will have recognized that one in each category was directed by Werner Herzog, who has much to answer for), but now I find that my reaction to the prospect of watching a partly-improvised Icelandic movie directed by an American who could not understand the language his actors were speaking in ("Salt") is to reject it utterly. So in reaction to my own newfound conservatism, and since it’s been a while since I’ve added to the list of countries I’ve seen movies from, I felt I had to watch the Thai film, despite not very good reviews, because I couldn’t remember ever having seen a Thai film before (I’ve seen several Icelandic movies, so that wasn’t an issue; a few months ago I saw an Icelandic, updated version of King Lear--in case you liked the Shakespeare play but thought it didn’t have enough herring). And since you ask: the Thai movie was an overlong lavish historical spectacle, with cardboard characters, beautiful to look at, and its battle scenes had elephants, like all good battle scenes should.

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.