Driving the Turkmen way

Saw Bush on tv today, being asked questions about his plans to restructure the intelligence bureaucracy, and he remembered that his handlers had told him he opposed making the intelligence czar a cabinet post, but clearly couldn’t quite remember why. Kerry is saying that if Bush was really serious about this, he’d call Congress back into session. Of course Kerry wasn’t serious about that. A special session would make no particular demands on Bush’s time, but force Kerry and Edwards to abandon campaigning and do their senatorial jobs for a change.

The NYT cites a US intelligence report from 1991 saying that Colombia’s current president slash warlord, Alvaro Uribe, was closely associated with Pablo Escobar. The Sunday Times (London) said the same thing nearly 2 years ago, and I mentioned it here. The US State Dept rushed to defend him, saying that Uribe’s gov extradites lots of drug suspects to the US, although he spent his career as a legislator slash cartel flunky fighting any extradition. Ah, but is he doing that with all the cartels equally?

In Turkmenistan, applicants for driver’s licenses will have to demonstrate knowledge of the sacred writings of wacky megalomaniacal president-for-life Niyazov (the guy who renamed the months) to "ensure future drivers are educated in the spirit of high moral values." And you can bone up, too (a cache file because the book's website went out of business).

Speaking of wacky megalomaniacs, Governor Schwarzenegger has settled his lawsuit with the company making bobble-head dolls of him. They will continue to make them, but they will no longer carry weapons. Remember: when toy guns are outlawed, only toy bobble-headed outlaws will have toy guns.

The Second Annual Homeless World Cup was just held. 26 teams of homeless people from all over the world compete in soccer. Italy won.

Signs you’ve been spending too much time online: I just read the headline of an AP story, "Assault on Afghan Site," and for a second I actually thought they were talking about a website.

Orange alert: no rhyming for the duration

So Tom Ridge raised the alert color, displaying a naive belief that it still works to the administration’s advantage to scare the American people because they have such faith in the Bushies’ competence on security matters. (By the way, I’ve noticed that John Kerry now uses the abominable phrase "homeland" security). According to the WaPo, the orange alert is because documents found in that suspiciously timed raid in Pakistan revealed this stunner: "The information that emerged confirmed that al Qaeda continues to plan operations and conduct surveillance against targets inside the United States." Gosh, and I thought they’d all retired to Florida.

If you’re looking for a conspiracy theory about this that doesn’t involve the election, you can read one between the lines of another WaPo story, by Walter Pincus, who I believe is the guy who usually writes whatever the CIA wants him to. Pincus’s story spells out the lesson you’re supposed to draw from this little morality shadow play right in the headline: "Agencies Shared Intelligence That Led to New Alert." So there is no need for a reorganization which would shift power away from the entrenched intel bureaucracy.

Happily, this threat, if real, just targets the financial sector. Remember: if they don’t go on cheating little old ladies out of their pensions and making sure Fortune 500 companies pay no corporate income taxes, the terrorists win.

Our Lady of Survival

Kuwait bans Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, because it insults the Saudi royal family.

Must-read Robert Fisk article on the current state of Iraq.

In what was either a Freudian slip or a bad translation, the BBC said today that one of the Christian churches bombed in Iraq was "Our Lady of Survival." That would be: Our Lady of Salvation.
Update: the NYT calls it Our Lady of Deliverance. Squeal like a piggie.

Speaking of churches and survival, Kerry went to church today. Now if he needs to prove to the god-botherers that he’s one of them, fine, whatever, but does he need to denigrate rational thought at the same time? "More physicists and more and more scientists, the more they learn in some ways the less they know about some things and the more they believe in that power," he said.

It will be the 90th anniversary of the start of World War I on Wednesday, and the British papers are talking to veterans. Unlike Kerry, who won’t shut up about Vietnam, these men didn’t talk about their experiences. One is described by the Telegraph as never discussing it with his wife of 68 years, his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren or great-great grandchildren. Another, who was at both Jutland and Passchendaele, says, "I used not to think about it at all, but now that I keep getting bothered by people like you, because I am one of the few left, I suppose I think about it more."

This is what democracy is all about

When delegates and speakers at a party convention are stage-managed, that’s not good. When George Bush speaks over and over to crowds of military personnel, ordered to be there and under threat of military discipline if they express any disapproval, that’s bad. But when Team Chimpy starts requiring signed endorsements of his candidacy from members of the general public before they are allowed into a public appearance by Dick Cheney (key word = public), that’s...and here’s a word you won’t often if ever hear me use...unAmerican. In March, John Kerry earned my respect--something else I haven’t said too often--when he responded to a heckler by questioning him in return, and then defending him against his own supporters, who he told, "This is what democracy is all about."

In 1950, the London Times ran an editorial entitled "A Good Word for Hecklers," which argued that too much polite applause only shielded politicians from the facts of political life and did nothing for their performances, that (this is a rough quote) a few well-timed interventions and a sprinkling of laughter in the wrong places, would hasten politicians’ political development and promote their spiritual welfare. George Bush stands in desperate need of greater contact--hell, any contact--with the real world, which he is as unfamiliar with in his bubble as is Michael Jackson in his. Maybe the first sign was when he started giving everyone nicknames. Then he started rubbing the head of every bald man he passed, and wiping his glasses off on the sweater of whoever was standing by. If he gets elected in November, within two years he’ll be just like Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.

Listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting

Bush starts a "Heart and Soul of America" tour. If I had Dick Cheney on the ticket, I wouldn’t be reminding people of hearts (not that their souls are any healthier, of course).

Update: that Vatican document I mentioned in my last post says feminism has created "a new model of polymorphous sexuality". Apologists for the document point to its acknowledgment that women work. Big deal. It says women "should be present in the world of work and ... have access to positions of responsibility which allow them to inspire the politics of nations and to promote innovative solutions to economic and social problems." Notice how women’s functions here are all passive ones--to inspire, to promote. Clearly the real work is to be done by men. Oh, and this is priceless: women’s characteristic traits are "Listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting."

The Sunday Telegraph says that Paul Wolfowitz is dating an Arab (born in Tunisia, raised in Saudi Arabia) feminist. For whatever that’s worth.

In Chechnya, the strongest challenger to Moscow’s choice for president was disqualified from running this week, along with several other candidates.

Results matter

TRUST, BUT DON’T VERIFY: the US supports an international treaty banning production of weapons-grade uranium & plutonium, but this week decided to oppose any inspections to enforce such a treaty. Well, they didn’t believe in the inspections in Iraq, either, and that went all right didn’t it? Didn’t it? The Bushies claim that inspectors would be too expensive--too expensive, to prevent stray plutonium being sold to the highest bidder? Didn’t we just spend $200 billion on a war to prevent the smoking gun being a mushroom cloud?

Evidently, in order to participate in a program for federal employees to give to charities through payroll deductions, those charities have to promise not to employ anyone on watch lists of suspected supporters of terrorism. Blacklists of suspected sympathizers, that’s not even slightly reminiscent of McCarthyism, is it? One definition of a police state is where the police have draconian powers; another is where many non-police organizations are expected to enforce the law. Why should charities be punishing terrorist-symps? The NYT says there is controversy within the ACLU, which signed such a promise, but will not look at the lists, and will not therefore knowingly hire such a person.
Update: once it became public, the ACLU pulled out of the program, foregoing $500,000 per year.

Two days ago I said that Kerry’s refusal to say whether the Iraq war was a war of choice or necessity undermined his line about never going to war because we want to. A letter in today’s NYT points out that Kerry said in his acceptance speech, "I defended this country as a young man." That does suggest a rather expansive definition of wars we "have to fight," since Vietnam is surely the most discretionary of all America’s wars. He used to know better.

Similarly, Chimpy is now attacking Kerry with the line "Results matter," although Shrub’s entire resumé and indeed his entire life constitute a definitive refutation of that idea.

Actually in a SJ Mercury interview (registration), Kerry refuses to say the Iraq war was a mistake, and his only goal is to reduce troop levels there to somewhat below where they are now by the end of his first term, 4½ years from now. Asked how he would create the stability in Iraq that he says is required before troop withdrawal, Kerry said, "There are a number of different game plans, none of which I can put in play until I'm president. I can't negotiate this publicly, and I'm not going to." Ah, so he has a secret plan (or actually "a number" of them), just like Richard Nixon.

Never trust a text message from God

No doubt the Bushies did many sneaky things this week while the press’s attention was distracted the bright, shiny object that was, um, John Kerry, but here’s one: the EPA changed its rules on approving pesticides so that they don’t have to find out first whether they might harm endangered species.

Colin Powell, in Iraq, accuses the various kidnappers of "doing it for the purpose of returning to the past". Nostalgic kidnappings? I hope it’s not another 1970s revival: Patty Hearst, "death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people" thing. Maybe he meant the Lindbergh kidnapping, since a return to Great Depression chic, if there is such a thing, would be more within Iraqi budgets, and involve a lot less hairspray, and I’ll stop now.

A couple of weeks ago I made the case that "The argument against gay marriage...is a sexist one at its base." Well, today the pope proved my point by making the obverse case, attacking feminists for "call[ing] into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and mak[ing] homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent", in other words blaming gay marriage on feminism.

Speaking of religious types and marriage: "A Swedish pastor has been jailed for life for faking text messages from God to get his nanny-lover to murder his wife and try to kill the husband of a second mistress."

Knee deep in the big muddy

The Census Bureau gave Homeland Security breakdowns of how many Arabs & Arab-Americans live in each zipcode, sorted by country of origin. HeimatSecDept claimed this was only to help it identify in which airports they should post signs in Arabic; the NYT does not say if the spokesborg who told them this kept a straight face.

The Kerryites ordered Penn. Governor Rendell to remove a pretty good line from his speech about our energy policy having been written by big oil, of big oil and for big oil (the "of big oil" part doesn’t really work). He was told it was because big oil also gave money to the D’s. Oh good.

I missed that the filmed biopic on Kerry that ran at the convention skipped his time as lt. governor of Massachusetts under Michael Dukakis (or, indeed, his time in PIRG under Ralph Nader). But then the Clinton biopic in ‘92 mentioned him standing up to his abusive step-father without mentioning that he’d been a Rhodes scholar, ‘cuz Americans don’t cotton to that there book larning. Actually, not a lot has been said about Kerry’s Senate career either (or his first wife). Instead, it’s all Vietnam, all the time. Evidently, his several decades in politics didn’t prepare him to be president nearly as much as did the several months he spent hunting Victor Charlie. He’s like one of those 40-year old failures who go on and on about their glory days playing high school football. With Kerry, you get the impression that life since The Nam hasn’t been entirely real to him.

With all the talk about Kerry distancing himself from big ol’ loser Dukakis, I can’t wait to see the same commentators point out how much Bush distances himself from the winner in that election, his own father.

All in the same boat--just like in Apocalypse Now

(40 minutes before Kerry’s speech): The convention is almost done, and unless Kerry makes a brilliant speech for the first time in his life, I’d call it a failure. But Kerry would call it a success, because it didn’t do any particular damage, didn’t give the R’s any ammunition to replace Shove-It-gate (I wonder if it makes a difference that Cheney’s similar mini-scandal involved a phrase that can’t be broadcast, unlike Teresa H-K’s).

But the convention neither strengthened anyone’s understanding of Kerry, nor damaged Shrub. In their efforts to do no harm, they wound up doing nothing at all. In retrospect, the way to take on Bush without seeming like meanies beating up the retarded kid would have been to leave Bush mostly alone and attack Ashcroft, Rumsfeld etc.

Oh dear Christ, Alexandra Kerry is relating a story about Kerry having given mouth to mouth to a hamster. Well, I’m sure no one will make fun of that story, and we’ll never hear about it again.

(Later): Now Kerry is speaking, and it would have been a good speech, if it been shorter (although the "reporting for duty" line at the beginning had me sick to my stomach for the next several minutes). He even kind of attacked Ashcroft & Rummy, for a couple of seconds, just like I advised, before veering off.

Kerry has a good line, that the US must never go to war because it wants to but because it has to, but he always undercuts the line by his refusal to say which one of those categories the Iraq war falls into.

(15 minutes later): No, he’s lost it completely. "Help is on the way," indeed. No word on whether hope, which was on the way yesterday, has shown up yet.

He wants an America where we’re all in the same boat, like he was on the Mekong, where "No one cared about our race or our backgrounds" and they just killed gooks. Thanks, I’ll walk. I get motion sickness anyway, even without VC shooting at me.

Speaking of models of democracy, the Iraqi convention was just postponed. A Sunni party pulled out because of death threats during the meetings that were supposed to select delegates, and the meetings were held in fewer than half the provinces.

Just as The New Republic predicted, a "high-value" Al Qaida target is captured by the Pakistanis during the Dem convention (actually a few days ago, but the news was mysteriously not released until today).

The US has decided not to push for sanctions against Sudan after all, but will give it more time to stop killing black people.

The Florida Republican party is advising party members to vote absentee, because you can’t trust those machines.

Rural electrification for everyone!

Daily Telegraph: "A gang of big women is terrorising stores in Durban, South Africa, police said yesterday."

Best description of the convention, by thepoorman.net: "It’s No Exit choreographed by Busby Berkeley."

Médecins sans Frontieres is pulling out of Afghanistan. After decades of operating there, it took an American occupation to make it too unsafe. There are frontiers after all, and they were largely created by the US, which is treating aid as an instrument of war, giving aid only to villages that inform on the Taliban, having soldiers operate out of uniform, putting the real aid workers at risk. 30 have been killed this year.

After Tony Blair’s relentless smooch-fest with GeeDubya’s ass, the Republican party has banned Labour MPs from its convention.

Today a suicide car-bomber killed dozens of people waiting on line to apply to join the Iraqi police. The idiots keep making applicants for the police or military line up in the streets, completely vulnerable to this sort of attack, which happens every 2 or 3 weeks.

Al Sharpton tells the convention that if Bush had appointed the Supreme Court in 1954, Clarence Thomas wouldn’t have gotten to law school. The crowd erupted in applause, possibly for Clarence Thomas having gone to law school, or for Bush not having been Ike, or something. Too deep for me.

I could swear I heard Dennis Kucinich refer to the D’s as the party of rural electrification. Who said the convention was content-free? It didn’t turn out to be as big an applause line as the Clarence Thomas thing.

John "Dizzy" Edwards keeps repeating "Hope is on the way." Maybe Hope got stuck in traffic, or is being cavity-searched by security. Oddly, a lot of people were waving pre-printed signs that said "Hope is on the way," which means they expected Hope to be late. Maybe it’s a Waiting for Godot thing. I guess if hope isn’t here yet, we’re hoping for hope, but wouldn’t that mean hope was already here? Too deep for me.

Mind-clearing

What I would give for the Dem. convention to go negative. Optimism is just plain boring. Since the speakers are unwilling to go into policy specifics, staying positive just means bland speeches about unifying America which won’t change the mind of a single swing voter. [Right after writing that, I came across the results of a competition in the Guardian for a definition of Blairism, one of which sums up the Dems’ strategy perfectly: "The intangible in pursuit of the electable."] Why not admit that you’re pissed off at the direction Bush has taken the country and explain why? Do you think the only swing voters are those who don’t really have any problem with Shrub, but would like a more boring president? If Kerry loses, it will be because of people not voting at all.

And Bush is actually cooperating this week, by falling off his bike again, and giving an AP reporter the perfect straight line: "mountain biking, he said, has a certain ‘mind-clearing’ effect." If he pedaled in reverse, would he get smarter?

Meanwhile, over in that other great democracy, Iraq, Appointed Fake Prime Minister Allawi has created a committee to censor the press. The head of the new committee said that restrictions will include a ban on "unwarranted criticism" of Mr. Allawi, and is already threatening to close down Al Jazeera.

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.