Strong

In the last couple of days, Bush has several times referred to both Tony Blair and Wowie Allawi as “strong” prime ministers. What does that actually mean? In terms of ability to control events, both are Bush’s sock pockets, so that’s not it. They have strong handshakes? Strong convictions, I suppose is what he intends, although it could just be another of those phrases with no particular meaning he uses because he thinks it sounds good. The verbal equivalent of a Rorschach test.

Maureen Dowd on the Bill Maher show: “Kerry gives nuance a bad name.”

3 years ago, the Italian supreme court, a collection of elderly men which exists, as far as this blog is concerned (see here, here, here, here, here and here) to issue stupid rulings about sex, issued one which said that patting a woman’s bottom did not constitute sexual harassment. It has now reversed this in the case of a magistrate who patted the butts of three...supreme court employees.

In the few days since Putin announced his plan to appoint all 89 governors himself, at least 10 have joined his “United Party.” Can you say one-party state?

Speaking of democracy at work, the elders of an Afghan Pashtun tribe, the Terezays, rule that if anyone votes for someone other than Karzai, their houses will be burned down. This ruling was broadcast on radio.

After stone-walling for several days, the Republican Party fesses up to mailing out those leaflets in Arkansas & W. Virginia saying that the D’s would ban the Bible and promote gay marriage. Next question: how many were sent out?

In which my presidential ambitions are quashed

Bush complains that Kerry “chose to criticize the Prime Minister of Iraq. ... You can’t lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility.” I didn’t realize that America’s choice of its own president was subject to veto by the guy Bush picked to pretend to run Iraq (oops, I just questioned Comical Allawi’s credibility, I guess that means I can’t be president now either).

Matthew Yglesias of American Prospect suggests that Bush’s postponing of the military push in Iraq we all know is coming until after the US and before the Iraqi elections will make that campaign all the bloodier. “The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they’ve been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It’s appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists.”

I may have been unduly alarmist about the security legislation before the Duma. Yesterday it rejected a bill banning reporting on hostage-taking incidents until they are over. We’ll see.

Unambiguous

There are 2 initiatives on the Cal. ballot relating to casinos. California being California, the commercials against one of them attack it for threatening to make our morals worse. Did I say morals? I meant traffic.

Turkmenistan’s president-for-life-or-until-the-men-with-the-butterfly-nets-catch-up-to-him-whichever-comes-first Saparmurat Niyazov preempted programming on all tv channels so that he could read his poetry to the nation for an hour and a half. When was the last time Bush did that?

The Russian foreign minister reassured the UN yesterday: “President Vladimir Putin has stated unambiguously that Russia will remain a democratic state.” See, and you were worried about Russia not being democratic, but Putin has decreed that it is and Putin’s word is law in Russia, to be followed absolutely. Aren’t you reassured? If not, Putin will crush you like an ant.

Nothing’s perfect in life

The first episode of the new radio series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available now on the BBC website. NOTE: that episode will disappear from the site a week from today, replaced by episode 2, and so on, so don’t procrastinate.

Rummy on the possibility of holding Iraqi elections in only part of the country: “Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life, so you have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.” National elections that cover only part of the, you know, nation aren’t “not quite perfect”--they’re not real elections. And, as I said a day or two ago, the electoral system we’ve imposed on Iraq means there won’t even be vacant seats under those circumstances, but seats will be distributed just as if the election were truly national.

Yesterday Bush asked the UN to set up a fund to foster democracy--however and by whoever that might be defined. Today, in a sort of mirror-image of that, Russia proposed the creation of a UN list of terrorism suspects--however and by whoever that might be defined--who every nation would be required to extradite. I thought it was incredible that no one noticed the revolutionary nature of the UN vote last year to demote Iraq from the status of a sovereign nation and hand control of it over to the US, a power to judge the legitimacy of its member states that I really don’t think the UN has. Now it’s supposed to decide which of its members are legitimate democracies under Bush’s plan, and eliminate political asylum under Putin’s, deferring to the labeling by member states of its internal opponents as terrorists. New world order, indeed.

We’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq

I read the transcript of Bush’s press conference with “Comical Allawi”, so you don’t have to.

Addressing Zowie Allawi: “Mr. Prime Minister, America will stand with you until freedom and justice have prevailed.” Man, are his legs gonna be tired. “the vast majority of Iraqis remain committed to democracy.” Of course since there is no democracy in Iraq, it’s just guesswork what “the vast majority of Iraqis” are committed to.

Asked “Why haven’t U.S. forces been able to capture or kill al Zarqawi, who’s blamed for much of the violence?”, Bush responded: “We’re looking for him. He hides.” That explains that.

“Anybody who says that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in power is wrong.” I quote that because it bugs me that the man has less grasp of verb tenses than the average 5 year old (but then, whoever did the transcript for the White House doesn’t quite get the it’s/its distinction).

GeeDubya, naturally, flounders badly in response to several of the questions, including my second favorite question: “If General Abizaid says he needs more troops and the Prime Minister says he does not want more troops, who wins?” Bush: “Obviously, we can work this out. It’s in the -- if our commanders on the ground feels it’s in the interest of the Iraq citizens to provide more troops, we’ll talk about it. That’s -- that’s why -- they’re friends; that’s what we do about friends.”

He takes back the comment of a few days ago that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in July by the CGA (Central Guessing Agency) was just a “guess.” “I should have used ‘estimate.’” Yeah, it’s a three-syllable word, we all understand that’s beyond your comfort level. “But what’s important for the American people to hear is reality. And the reality is right here in the form of the Prime Minister.” Later, he added, “One reason I’m optimistic about our ability to get the job done is because I talk to the Iraqi Prime Minister.” Reminds me of his comment a while back that he never reads newspapers because he gets the real facts from Condi and Andy Card.

A reporter asked Bush about his comment that there was only a “handful” of people trying to disrupt the Iraqi elections. He said, “Well, it’s a handful if you happen to have several thousand fingers.” OK, he didn’t say that.

Somebody asked a really good, important question, which I’ll paraphrase: When you talk about mixed messages being bad, do you mean if Kerry is elected, or do you mean right now. Bush filibustered for a really long time and didn’t come within a mile of answering.

And there’s the quote the blogosphere likes so much: “we’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq.” Yeah, you definitely don’t want suiciders driving. Remember that scene in Annie Hall with Christopher Walken driving Woody Allen?

Attack of the terrorist cats

The Moscow police have arrested more than 10,000 of the usual suspects in response to Beslan, according to the Link, but I think it'll expire tomorrow.) The “Great Terror” of 2004 begins. Proposals include: Soviet-type resident registration (which was supposedly abolished by Yeltsin, but local governments just ignored it), restrictions on media coverage of terrorist actions, restrictions on cars, the ability of the Kremlin to declare a state of war in event of a terrorist attack, thereby suspending civil rights, etc. The Duma rejected proposals to discuss the government’s Chechen policy and to ask Putin and the security chiefs to explain their actions.

In other words, just like the US, where the Republicans are planning to tighten up on identification cards, border controls, etc. Next step, no doubt: internal passports.

The Iraqi terrorist-types are just making up demands at random now. When they demanded the release of all women prisoners, did they even know there were just two? What I enjoyed, especially after the story in today’s WaPo asserting with a straight face that the Iraqis were in charge of pretty much everything now, was watching them prepare the way to meet the demands, claiming, also with a straight face, that by an amazing coincidence the two were just about to be released anyway, and then to have the Americans put their foot down.

The Telegraph’s News in Brief section today contains the following stories: “Woman Crushed by 6ft Crucifix” (in Italy); “Man Mistook Wife for a Monkey” (and shot her to death; Malaysia); “Wife Asks for Weekly Beating” (in an Iranian court; as opposed to daily: “‘I don’t want a divorce. My husband is violent. It is in his nature. I just want him to promise to beat me only once a week,’ she told the judge, who burst out laughing.”

From the Press Association, a wonderfully silly headline for an unwonderfully silly action by the FBI: “Cat Refused Entry for Hamas Support.”

Terrorist cats. Don’t tell the Duma.

The right to enrichment

President Khatami defends Iran’s uranium enrichment program: “We clearly demand that our right to enrichment be recognized by the international community”. Who says Iran’s government doesn’t believe in rights?

Kerry didn’t like Bush’s scolding speech to the UN yesterday: “The President of the United States stood before the stony-faced body and barely talked about the realities at all of Iraq.” Kerry, whose own face is less expressive than those on Mt Rushmore, then went on to accuse Al Gore of being boring, and Dukakis of being a crappy campaigner. Stony-faced, indeed.

Responding to Kerry’s comments, Scotty McClellan today, and Bush yesterday, referred to him as “continuing his pattern of twisting in the wind”--are we supposed not to notice when Bush and his henchmen use identical phrasing? Also, not to get all William Safire on y’all, but they’re not even using that expression correctly.

Details matter

We talk of “democracy” and “elections” as if there was one model, as if the terms were unproblematic, but the details matter.

Charles de Gaulle knew this. When he graciously accepted the offer to become dictator of France in 1958 to save it from a military coup (Pakistan’s Musharraf cited de Gaulle this week as his role model), one of his conditions was that the electoral law be rewritten. Rather than proportional representation in which parties were given seats in accordance with their share of the votes, there would be a run-off system, favoring the right, which could sink its differences in the second round. Result at the next election: the Gaullists, with 18% of the vote, got 40% of the seats, and the Communists, with 19% of the vote, got 2% of the seats. Both the pre- and post-1958 systems were forms of representative democracy, but geared towards generating different results.

The elections in Iraq will be based on a form of proportional representation based on party lists. Something like Putin wants in Russia, actually. PR is good for the representation of minorities, which is good for countries like the Netherlands where politics are based on ideas and ideology, but in a country like Iraq, divided by ethnicity and religion, it is good in that it ensures some representation of, for example, the Kurds, but bad in that it encourages politics to remain divided on the basis of ethnicity and religion. The real point of this form of election is that voters do not select individual candidates (which should cut down on the number of assassinations), and MPs will not represent geographic constituencies. There will be no representative of, say, Fallujah; votes will be counted on a national basis. So if participation is uneven across the country, if no one at all votes in Fallujah, if--oh fuck it--WHEN the election is a failure in real-world democratic terms, this electoral system will gloss that over. There won’t be any vacant seats; rather, the system will just give more political weight to areas not in rebellion, or where more fraudulent votes are created.

It also won’t effect the system if candidates do get assassinated. Unlike Afghanistan, where if any of the presidential candidates get offed, the election would be postponed 3 months. The candidates, you’ll be surprised to hear, aren’t doing a lot of whistle-stop tours.

Made up to be seen from 30 feet away

Raymond Chandler described one of his characters this way: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” George Bush’s pronouncements are increasingly just a collection of words he likes, formed into things that look like sentences from 30 feet away, but which dissolve into nonsense if you look even a little more closely at them: “Iraqi citizens are seeing a determined effort by responsible citizens to lead to a more hopeful tomorrow, and I am optimistic we’ll succeed.”

Kerry’s new position on Iraq (yeah, I know, I sound like Bush when I say that, but it really is a new position) is that if Bush hadn’t cut off the UN inspections process prematurely, it would have shown that Iraq had no WMDs, and that fact being made public, by itself, would somehow have caused Saddam Hussein to fall, because his regime was based on his having WMDs. Oh, I don’t think so.

Renaissance Man

So whatever happened to those French hostages, now that the ban on headscarves has gone into effect?

And whatever happened to Saddam’s doubles?

Musharraf says that he’ll renege on his promise to step down as army chief because that would end the national “renaissance” in Pakistan. ‘Cuz you know how the quality of Florence’s paintings and sculpture declined after Cesare Borgia stopped wearing camouflage uniforms.

The US will sell Israel 500 missiles which could be used to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (the story has mysteriously vanished from the Ha’aretz website).

Beware the ides of the march of democracy

A must-read in the Guardian suggests that the NATO war on Yugoslavia was in large part about opening the country to takeover by multinational corporations, states that the bombing campaign targeted state-owned industries while leaving privately owned ones alone, and that the UN administration in Kosovo is now selling off the provinces state-owned enterprises, which are surely not the UN’s to sell.

Bush keeps talking about the “march” of democracy. The evidence is against him:

• The leading opposition candidate for president in Ukraine’s elections next month is now in the hospital with a mysterious case of poisoning.

• In Kazakhstan’s elections, the dictator Nazarbayev’s party comes in first, and the not-exactly-opposition party led by his daughter comes in second.

• Indonesia’s presidential elections are won by (retired) general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (remember when Indonesian rulers only had one name? and not silly ones like Bambang), just 6 years after the end of more than 30 years of military rule.

Of course Bush, in his response to Kerry’s speech, seemed to define Iraq as a democracy, so his standards aren’t terribly high.

Kerrycaterwauling

Why don’t you all read the transcript of Kerry’s speech, so I don’t have to?

Oh, all right. Some of it, quoted below, constitutes the best rhetoric I’ve heard yet from Kerry (actually, I’ve only read it so far, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good when I hear it in Kerry’s own irritating voice).

On the one hand, it’s a strong indictment of Bush’s failures and misjudgements, but on the other hand he says that he’ll fight the same crusade, but do it better. “The terrorists are beyond reason. We must destroy them. As president, I will do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to defeat our enemies.” You’ll note he never defines “the terrorists,” so it’s a little hard to tell who all these people are he plans to “destroy.”

“To win, America must be strong.” Check. “And America must be smart.” Uh oh.

“His two main rationales – weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda/September 11 connection – have been proved false… Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.”

“The President now admits to ‘miscalculations’ in Iraq. That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment – and judgment is what we look for in a president.” This line is almost too clever, or needed a bridging sentence; it took me a second to realize that the bit about “accounting errors” was a criticism of Bush’s use of the word “miscalculations” to minimize his own incompetence.

He quotes the Republicans (McCain, Lugar, Hagel) now criticizing Bush’s Iraq policy in order to deflect the charge that his own criticisms are partisan, without adding that McCain (not sure about the other 2) wants a massive attack on Fallujah.

And Kerry’s own ideas for Iraq are anemic: get other countries to give aid, bribe them with shares in Iraq’s oil industry in exchange for sending troops. Turn the page. A fresh start. A lot about dealing with Europeans, not a lot about how to deal with the Iraqis, except training a lot more of them to be soldiers.

Rummyrantings

I read transcripts of Secretary of War “Rummy” Rumsfeld’s “media availabilities,” so you don’t have to.

Rumsfeld: “At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed.” Didn’t we say that about the Vietnamese?

Rummy also threatens to take back the cities and regions that have become “sanctuaries” for “people who are determined to overthrow the Iraqi government, the legitimate Iraqi government.” Someone needs to get that man a dictionary, if he thinks that places which are bombed every single day are sanctuaries, and that there is a “legitimate” government in Iraq.

Rummy is asked about Seymour Hersh’s book on Abu Ghrab (which I’m now reading). Given that he never bothered reading the Taguba report, it won’t come as a surprise that he hasn’t read Hersh’s book (the DOD transcript misspell’s Hersh’s name), but shits on it anyway.

He also praises the voter registration drive in Afghanistan for registering more people than are eligible to vote, which you’d think would be embarrassing, but Rummy does not know the meaning of the word embarrassing (or sanctuary, or legitimate, etc etc), and that 41% of them are women (or one guy in a burqa who registered 4.2 million times).

More weight, more weight

Tony Blair declares war, again. “Whatever the disagreements about the first conflict in Iraq to remove Saddam, in this conflict now taking place in Iraq, this is the crucible in which the future of this global terrorism will be decided. Either it will succeed and this terrorism will grow, or we will succeed, the Iraqi people will succeed and this global terrorism will be delivered a huge defeat.” So if you didn’t like the “first conflict,” we’ll just keep rebranding it until we find one you’ll like. New Coke anyone?

German voters in the East (Saxony & Brandenburg) vote in large numbers for neo-Nazis to punish the hapless Social Democratic government’s scaling back of social programs. In Saxony, the National Democratic Party, which hadn’t had any legislative presence since 1968, almost matches the vote of the SPD. German governments of both major parties have really badly served the East Germans, so their limited commitment, 15 years after unification, to a political system that largely ignores them is understandable, but still creepy.

Desperate

How often have we heard from American officials that increasing Resistance activity in Iraq is a sign of their desperation? Now Puppet PM “Comical” Allawi has made the same argument--“getting more desperate...last stand...we are winning...Iraq is fighting this war on behalf of the civilized nations...yadda yadda yadda.” This is an astonishingly stale piece of rhetoric, unchanged by as much as a syllable in over a year. In fact, Bush gave the same speech over a year ago; on 8/27/03 I called it a “massively silly argument”: “Yeah, it’s a sign of desperation if they attack us, a sign of boldness and resolve if we attack them, yeah yeah yeah. ... It’s the last gasp of a dying regime, it’s an all-out war for the security of the US and what Bush calls ‘civilization.’ It’s a floor wax, it’s a dessert topping.” It may or may not be the last gasp, but it’s an incredibly long one. You have to be impressed by their breath control.

Fontgate followup: An WaPo article on how CBS got the Killian memos wrong says they failed to test their authenticity adequately because the White House wasn’t challenging their authenticity. This lends credence to the “conspiracy theory” that the Mayberry Machiavellis created this trap for CBS to walk into. Yeah, it was criminally careless, but you can see why they wouldn’t spend a lot of effort checking out a piece of evidence no one was disputing.

Here in California, Gubna Ahnuuld, who must be one of the top 10 richest people in the state, has vetoed an increase in the minimum wage, because if $6.75 an hour is good enough for the guy whose job it is to lick Arnie’s Hummer clean every day...

If every day could be Tet

There is worry in Iraq of coordinated attacks breaching the Green Zone; the talk is of something like the Tet Offensive. And in Afghanistan too, the American ambassador has been warning of a possible, guess what, Tet Offensive in the cities in the period leading up to the Afghan presidential elections next month. It’s like having Christmas every day, only with Tet. Which is the day when an American soldier sticks his head out of his armored personnel carrier, and if he shoots at his own shadow, there’ll be another year of guerilla warfare and military quagmire. If his shadow shoots back, two years.

Older Viet Cong are complaining that Tet used to be about peace and love and smashing imperialism, but now it’s being commercialized by the greeting card industry.

The Afghan Tet fears are reported in the Indy which says that Karzai “is widely expected to be re-elected.” Of course, Karzai was never actually elected, at least not by the Afghan people. Still, this is a phrase I expect to hear and read often.

Speaking about the Baghdad branch of Tet Offensive, Inc., Under-Secretary of State Richard “The Giraffe” Armitage: “We never thought it would be easy; we do expect an increase in violence as we approach the January elections.” Never thought it would be easy. Never FUCKING thought it would be fucking easy. Sure you didn’t.

When they established a hard, inflexible deadline for the fake “hand-over of power” in Iraq in June, the Bushies left many hostages to fate. And then they repeated the mistake with inflexible timing of elections in January 2005, no matter how unprepared and chaotic the country is. So vast resources are now being diverted to those farcical elections. With daily kidnappings and car bombs, soldiers and police will now have to protect election offices and workers--“I’m gonna try and register that guy--cover me!” And new offences are being planned for Fallujah and elsewhere so that not too many areas will have to be excluded from the voting, to give a tiny amount of legitimacy to elections held during a civil war and under foreign occupation. 3 point something billion dollars was just diverted to security from projects to restore sewerage and electricity, and now security personnel are being diverted from real security to this piece of play-acting.

The NYT has a story on this, which seems to be drawn from a single anonymous source, so you know it must be true. The source, an American commander, is confident that the upcoming siege of Fallujah will go so much better than the last 3, because “this time...unlike in April, there was a sovereign Iraqi government, and one that seemed willing to absorb the political storm that such an assault was likely to set off.” A government willing to support an attack on its country’s population is a GOOD thing?

White House spokesmodel Scott McClellan implied this week that Kamp Kerry is behind the Killian documents: “It’s our position that there are orchestrated attacks going on by the Democrats and Kerry campaign to tear down the President because they are falling behind in the polls.” Speaking of orchestrated attacks: McClellan’s salary is still being paid by the American taxpayers, of all political parties, and not by the Republican Party, right?

At the whim of a tin-foil hat

The Florida Supreme Court puts Ralph Nader back on the ballot. Says a Nader spokesman, “The Democrats should stop trying to win this election in court and start competing for votes on the issues.” Yeah, at least in courts stacked with Republicans.

If there’s a phrase that right-wingers use that effectively puts their opponents instantly on the defensive, it’s “conspiracy theory.” Team Chimpy deployed this weapon Friday against Kerry’s assertion that Bush has a “secret plan” to call up more reservists and national guards after the election is safely over, and send them to Iraq. The Pentagon gave a better answer: of course we’re planning to screw those guys, it’s not a secret. Which is true, except that it is a secret which guys are going to be screwed, which makes it hard for people to plan their lives (or deaths, as the case may be).

So the “conspiracy theory” charge hangs like a Damocles sword over the heads of journalists and bloggers who write about the doings of the Mayberry Machiavellis, like the right-wing blogger named... Buckhead (yeah we’re all thinking the same thing, but we have too much class to say it) who was able to damage the credibility of the CBS documents within a suspiciously short period of time (i.e., within the same news cycle), and who turned out to be a lawyer who works for right-wing groups. Of course we don’t know for sure if this was a scheme concocted in the feverish brain of Karl Rove, but if we ask “cui bono,” we see that the issue of Bush’s draft-dodging has been effectively defused, or obscured, just as it was becoming a real threat.

Incidentally, it was becoming a threat not because we now know all that much more than we knew years ago (for example, my 1st reference to it in my proto-blog--archived on this site--was way back on 7/8/99; I reported on 9/9/99 that it was the speaker of the Texas Lege who got him into the Guard, on 6/17/00 that he missed his medical on the first year it included a drug test, etc), but because of a slight semantic shift in the way it was being presented: not just as a spoiled rich kid goofing of, but of that rich kid refusing direct orders. And what gave that semantic framing of the Guard issue its salience in 2004, as opposed to in 1999-2000, is precisely the fact that Shrub pushed us into the longest combat situation since Vietnam with an inadequate military, which he’s desperately shoring up with stop-loss orders, national guard units (fun fact: more members of the national guards have already died in Iraq than did in Vietnam).

The problem with Kerry making the “secret plan” accusations is that his plans for Iraq are equally secret, and, since he plans to continue to occupy Iraq until at least 2009 and doesn’t plan on a draft, he will also be using reservists and national guards. Secret plan, unless you possess the powers of logic and common sense.

On the march

The supposed mastermind of the Beslan hostage-taking has been heard from. One thing is explained: the hostages were to have gotten food and water by stages, as the demands for Russian withdrawal from Chechnya were met.

Bush says that “Freedom is on the march in Iraq.” There may be marching, but it ain’t freedom. Patrick Cockburn has a bleaker assessment in this Indy article detailing the many forms of violence.

Cockburn also has an op-ed piece, behind a pay barrier, which notes that the pattern of violence has changed: it’s no longer in a few geographic areas, but all over Iraq. Also, “August was the first month in which more US soldiers were killed and wounded by Shia fighters than by Sunni guerrillas.” And the US is losing even the Green Zone: “This week, the US army was reduced to using rocket firing helicopters for crowd control in Haifa Street a few hundred yards from the Green Zone, the American and Iraqi government headquarters.” Crowd...control.

At the whim of a hat

GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE.... Bushism: “Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.”

Depends on the hat, I suppose.



The French never have this problem.

In uniform

Pakistan’s self-chosen president, the coup-leader Musharaf, insists that his decision to break his promise to give up being army chief and prez simultaneously, says it’s because most Pakistanis “want me in uniform.” So it’s all about the fetish.

The woman sterilized by the wannabe senator for Okl., Tom Coburn, comes forward to say that she did not want him to sterilize her. The question not being asked is: by what right has Dr. Coburn been revealing private details of her medical history to the press?

Sri Lanka’s national handball team vanishes in Germany after playing really badly in several tournament games, and before anyone realized that Sri Lanka doesn’t actually have a national handball team. The 23 members of the “team” are believed to have come to Europe to find work and not for the love of the game of handball.