Allowed to vote

Bush: “The positive and incredibly amazing development, when you take a step back and look at history, is that Iraqi citizens will actually be allowed to vote.” Allowed. By an army of occupation. Bush says democracy in Iraq is “hard”--there’s that word again--because “there are a handful of folks who fear freedom.” A handful if you know someone with 200,000 fingers. He accused this handful of having “this dim vision of the world that says, if you do not agree with us, then you’re of no count.” Pot. Kettle. Black.

Remember two months ago when Shrub said that Iraqis would be eager to vote when they “realize that there’s a chance to vote on a president,” except of course that it’s not a presidential election? Well, he still doesn’t know what the elections are actually for: today he said, “Once the elections take place, we look forward to working with the newly constituted government to help train Iraqis as fast as possible so they can defend themselves.” The elections are for an assembly to write a constitution, not to constitute a government.

Why Bush is the exact opposite of Batman

Naturally, the most important moments in the Gonzales hearings occurred after I posted my last. They fall into two categories: 1) the I-don’t-remember moments, when he was repeatedly asked about various details of the torture memo he was busily distancing himself from, but which he helped write. Specific methods of torture were discussed in meetings he was in, but he has no recollection of this. In other words, he claims that he was in a meeting in which whether mock executions are ok was discussed, but can’t remember the meeting, or what he might have said. I’d say that sort of disinterest, or forgetfulness, or treatment of torture as an issue so routine as to be forgettable, disqualifies someone from the attorney generalship. 2) He was repeatedly asked if a president may authorize people to break the law, specifically the Torture Act, and he repeatedly refused to answer, saying it was hypothetical, which is not a valid reason why he can’t answer it (this is well discussed in Slate). Incidentally, when they replaced the memo last week, I couldn’t understood how it was supposed to help Gonzales in the hearings, but now I realize that “that’s so last week” is actually considered a valid reason not to discuss something.


Working on his Bushite smirk, but not quite there yet.

The Iraqi interim puppet government has extended the state of emergency, with enhanced police powers including warrant-less arrests, and curfews, in order to allow “the peaceful participation of Iraqis in the political process.” On that day, the entire country will be locked down, with travel bans and curfews. Freedom, ain’t it grand?

Favorite correction from the newspaper of record:

An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers.

“The best ten” British websites, including The Ugliest Cars in Britain;
a site of pictures of “derelict London,” including galleries of pubs, buildings, graffiti, toilets, World War II bunkers, etc., and another for pictures of cafes serving bad English food.

The Gonzales hearings: “We are nothing like our enemy; we are not beheading people.”

The Gonzales confirmation hearings are ongoing as I write.

Gonzales says, “Torture and abuse will not be tolerated by this administration.” Tolerated? He’s still pushing the “a few bad apples” theory, and we’re way past that. “This administration” ordered torture, wrote memos justifying torture, and dotted every i in those memos with little smiley faces.

G. refuses to say whether the torture at Abu Ghraib was criminal, because there might be court proceedings. Oh please, Ashcroft did a little victory dance in public every time a shoe bomber or Al Qaeda gofer was arrested.

“We are nothing like our enemy; we are not beheading people.” Phew.

To apply the Geneva Conventions to Al Qaida “would really be a dishonor to the Geneva Conventions. ... It would honor and reward bad conduct.” The Geneva Conventions are about the laws of war: war is not “good conduct.”

I wish the D’s would stop praising Gonzales’s “rags-to-riches” story. Patrick Leahy: “The road you traveled... is a tribute to you and your family.” That road was paved over dead bodies in Texas and broken ones in Guantanamo; the toll on that road was too damned high.

Gonzales refuses to answer questions on torture, since all such questions are hypothetical, because “the president has said we’re not going to engage in torture.” There’s something faulty in that logic somewhere, but I just can’t put my finger on it....

The distinction he keeps making between his role as White House counsel and that of the attorney general seems to be an acknowledgment that in the former role he always told Bush exactly what he wanted to hear.

(Update: More on the hearings in my next post, above.)

Hippocratic oafs

Howard Zinn on the Daily Show tonight.

The WaPo article on the participation by military doctors in torture sessions in Guantanamo buries the money quote, from deputy assistant secretary of defense David Tornberg, that such doctors are acting as combatants and therefore are not obligated by the Hippocratic oath, and that there is no doctor-patient relationship. (The Post also neglects to say that Tornberg is himself a doctor.) Even if doctors could ever be absolved of their ethical obligations by virtue of being “combatants,” Guantanamo was not a combat zone. See the New England Journal of Medicine article.

And the LA Times, in an article rightly pointing out that only a fraction of the money pledged by nations after a disaster is actual delivered, fails to ask the obvious question: what’s the US record?

Torture, yea or nea?

Some (but not enough) Democrats in the Senate are showing some interest in turning the Gonzales hearings and vote into a referendum on torture. I say not enough D’s not only because I’d like to see Gonzales sunk but also because I’d be genuinely interested in knowing what the result of an up-or-down vote on torture in the United States Senate would actually be.

Bush picks one of those failed judicial appointees, Claude Allen, to be his domestic policy adviser. Allen (whose record I discussed here) admitted during his confirmation hearings having used the word “queers” but said he didn’t mean it in a bad way.

Evidently for several decades in Israel, Shin Bet could veto the hiring of any Palestinian teacher, a fact Ha’aretz describes as a “well-known secret.” They’ve just abolished that.

Scientists scanning the brains of shepherds in the Canary Islands find that Silbo, a system of communicating via whistling they have used for centuries, utilizes the same parts of the brain as spoken Spanish. In other words, it’s a language, albeit a limited one. (Nature article.)

And here are a bunch of doctors (you can tell by the fact that they’re all wearing white lab coats) preparing to scan the brain of a test monkey to see if it utilizes any part of its brain when giving a speech on medical liability reform:



One thing missing from a speech dealing with malpractice law: any mention of actual victims of medical malpractice. Thus Shrub says that “lawyers”--not patients, not survivors--“are filing baseless suits against hospitals and doctors” (he also blamed juries at one point). Lots of stories about doctors whose premiums are rising, pregnant women losing their OBGYNs, but no mention of victims of botched diagnoses, etc, and certainly nothing about how you can scale down the punishment for incompetence and laziness on the part of doctors without creating a rise in incompetence and laziness on the part of doctors. By the way, most of the rise in malpractice insurance premiums is due to the tanking of their investments in the stock market during the economic downturn, not rising jury awards.

No substantive conversation

The group that claims responsibility for killing the governor of the Baghdad region issued a statement: “We tell every traitor and everyone who is loyal to the Jews and the Christians that this will be your fate.” See, I knew having the Iraqis we appoint to office swear loyalty to the Jews and Christians was a bad idea.

Afterwards, “Comical” Allawi called up Bush in order not to talk about postponing the elections. Actually, the US says there was “no substantive conversation” about postponement, which is the sort of denial that raises more questions than it answers.

The assassinated governor was thought to have been running in the elections, but one of the great advantages of the electoral system we imposed on Iraq is that candidates don’t actually have to announce their candidacies, for example if they want to stay alive.

Trying to be more sensitive to the Afghan culture

SOME CHEEK! Col. Gary Cheek, in charge of US forces in eastern Afghanistan, says he has given orders for fewer prisoners to be taken, because prisoners bitch about being tortured, and just killing them is so much easier. OK, fine, he didn’t say the last part, but what on earth else is he supposed to have meant? Here’s the full quote, judge for yourself: “We are always adapting to the changes in the environment, and our commanders, our soldiers, are also trying to be more sensitive to the Afghan culture. I’ve told our commanders, for example, to minimize the number of Afghan nationals or others that they detain.” I’m not sure if killing captured Afghans is really more sensitive to their culture than torturing them.

That put me in a nostalgic mood. Here’s something I clipped from one of the British papers for November 2, 1996:

IN THE School of Islamic Thought that has shaped the ideology of the Taliban, there is an active debate on the appropriate punishment for homosexuals.

Mullah Mohammed Hassan, Governor of Kandahar, the fundamentalist movement’s home province, explained the dilemma: "There are two kinds of strong punishment. There are those who say homosexuals should be thrown to their death from a high fort, and those who favour putting them in a pit and pushing a wall on top of them.”

Back to the 1st story, in which Col. Cheek claimed that a prisoner who died in September was not beaten to death as his family claims, but died of a snake bite. Cheeky says the dead guy complained of having been bit, but no bite mark was found, no autopsy performed, and the guy certainly can’t confirm or deny that story, now can he?

Whenever Bush has talked about disaster relief, he talks about American generosity and compassion and “the good heart of the American people,” and I get a little more creeped out each time he does it, without being sure why. At first I thought it was because it’s unseemly and contrary to a generosity of spirit to be constantly harping on your own generosity, but now I think it’s because he’s making it all about us, not about the victims. A true Christian, like he claims to be, would have felt that it was a duty to relieve suffering, but nothing he’s said indicates that the suffering of others imposes any obligation on the rest of us.

Oh: when, in my last post, I referred to Bush the Elder’s “Message: I care” line, I hadn’t seen him on CNN, denying that he and Billy Bob were called in for damage control after Shrub’s lackadaisical first response: “That’s not what this is about. It’s about saving lives. It’s about caring, and the president cares.”

Poppy and Bubba to the rescue

George Monbiot makes the obvious point that the US spends much more on killing foreigners than it does helping them after natural disaster, but adds a less obvious one: “For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness.”

Which helped me realize what was bothering me about this picture on the White House website today, of Shrub roping in his father (“message: I care”) and Bill Clinton (“aren’t you the guys who made snide comments about feeling people’s pain just last week?”) to help him recover after his first fumbling reactions to the tsunami: a big-ass painting of Teddy Roosevelt, in uniform, bringing freedom to the benighted heathens of Cuba.




The British Freedom of Information Act went into effect today, and lots of old files were opened, including one showing the 18-year (1963-81) campaign by civil servants to get softer, but more expensive, toilet paper. An epidemiologist “concluded that, for reasons that might not be appropriately described in a newspaper without risk of offence, hard paper was less hygienic than soft.”

Idiot of the day (from the Daily Telegraph):

A 33-year-old Italian was in serious condition in hospital after he was run over when he laid down on a pedestrian crossing following an argument with his girlfriend. The man had refused to get into the car his girlfriend was driving and was hit by a vehicle travelling in the other direction in Wohlen, Switzerland, police said.

Illimitable dominion over all

Well, the American contribution to disaster relief is finally within the respectable range. I figured at some point they’d notice that the Day 2 pledge of $35m was less than they planned to spend on Bush’s inauguration. Speaking of Bush’s inauguration, before the tsunami it just promised to be tacky and vulgar and nausea-inducing, but now it’s especially inappropriate and, according to the NYT, his committee is still raising money, $5.5m this week. Any person or corporation who contributes a dime to that unworthy cause after the day of the tsunami needs to be named and shamed, and Team Chimpy needs to stop asking for donations.

London Times headline: “Remote for Sick Woman’s Brain Is Stolen.” They’re not kidding, either, it really is a remote control, for an implant which eliminates violent tremors. They can’t turn the device off so that she can go to sleep.

I’ve said it before: Brits will bet on anything. But here’s a pleasant betting story: ten years ago a 90-year old placed a bet with William Hill (bookies) that he would survive to 100, and has won £7,000 at odds of 66:1. He’s gonna have a party, and I wish him (unlike Shrub) a good one.

And for Shrub’s little shindig, may I suggest a theme:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Just a thought.

“Go ahead. Find someone who doesn’t respect you or themself.”

Douglas Adams was right (but then, Douglas Adams was always right): London Times headline: “Family Saved by Their Towels” (tied themselves to a palm tree in Thailand).

Observer piece on Burma, whose military junta is refusing to admit that more than a handful of Burmese died in the Tsunami Tsuris, and more generally on why forms of government matter following disasters.

Safire’s language column points out that the Bushies are careful to refer to the key element of their Social Security privatization plan as “personal” accounts, never private accounts.

Speaking of personal, an Observer article on American abstinence-only sex ed. programs mentions a program widely used in Texas called “Worth the Wait.” But that phrase is in no way applicable to an abstinence program: the only reason you’d care if something was worth the wait was if you actually had to wait for it. If something is worth the wait but you can have it now, why wouldn’t you? Anyway, they have a website, which is very orange. Right at the top of each page are fun facts, some of them even true, although there’s also this: “FACT: It is illegal to have sex under a certain age, 17 in most states.” The most entertaining pages, if mocking abstinence websites is your idea of entertainment, are:

• “101 Fun Things To Do (Besides Having Sex)”: Have a picnic; have an 80’s movie marathon (looking at ‘80s fashions will put you off sex); play capture the flag (guess that’s not a metaphor); groom your pet then take it to the park to it show off; learn how to play a musical instrument (guess that’s not a metaphor); visit a nursing home (looking at old people will put you off sex).
• Advice scenarios: “I have been having oral sex with my boyfriend of a year. He’s been pressuring me to go all the way, but I don’t really want to. He says that since we’ve gone this far, I might as well do it. Am I not a virgin any more?”
• Refusal skills: Actually a list of responses to requests for sex, many of them rather contemptuous in tone (“The Come-on: If you won’t have sex with me, I’ll just find someone who will. The Come-back: Go ahead. Find someone who doesn’t respect you or themself.”).

Revealed in that bit is a belief that sex actually isn’t worth the wait, that it’s something only people with low self-esteem do. Indeed, most of the site, and presumably the program, presumes that sexual desire is something that other people have. All it offers to teenagers coping with their own sexual impulses, as opposed to those of their partners, is picnics and fear of STDs. And of course all it offers homosexuals is a lifetime of solitary, um, contemplation. Now, any program trying to tell teenagers that sex is just degrading and tawdry (degrading and tawdry in a bad way, I mean, not the good kind of degrading and tawdry) or, more positively, that tries to teach them to operate rationally as well as groinally, runs the danger of presenting relationships and sex in a dreary, emotionally impoverished manner. “Love is your choice,” the site says, “You have the right to choose whom you love”. Is love that’s a matter of choice worth having?

Although if you try to declaw a cougar, we’d like to watch

Here’s the annual list of new laws in California, taking effect Jan. 1, always a wacky mixture. Some highlights: .50 caliber rifle sales are banned. You can’t film someone in a bedroom without their knowledge. You can’t declaw a cougar or a lion or a tiger. Equal insurance benefits for same-sex domestic partners. Motor scooter users require driver’s licenses. Mandatory sexual harassment training for supervisors in any business with more than 50 employees. Smoking banned in state prisons. Spyware is banned.

Colombia has extradited left-wing FARC rebel leader Ricardo Palmera to the US. President Uribe had threatened to do so unless FARC released 63 hostages. Right-wing death squad types who play ball with the government have had their extraditions quashed. In other words, the United States’s justice system is being cynically used as part of the internal politics of Colombia.

Not bloody likely

Anyone really interested in the year 1974 should look at the Jan. 1 British newspapers, which report on the annual release of official papers under the 30 Years’ Rule. Multiple British newspapers, since they all focus on different things, but this is a good entry point. Actually, nothing hugely exciting, except that Harold Wilson was a bigger jerk than I realized, and Princess Anne told a would-be kidnapper, “Not bloody likely!”

Qatar is banning child jockeys from camel-racing, so they’ll be replaced by robots. Something to look forward to in 2005.

The farce of democracy

Note to London Times: was it necessary that a story about a move towards employing fashion models with more normal weights be headlined “Purge on Anorexics”?

Most useful information of the day: the NYT says that while pressing 0 in automated phone systems usually no longer gets you a live human being, hitting it 3 or 4 times may.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Two women aged 34 and 38 have been charged with prostitution for offering sex from their hot-dog stand in Long Island, New York, which traded under the name Double Delicious.

"We’ve never seen hot-dogs mixed with sex before," said a police spokesman. "There are so many jokes, so little time."

The Massachusetts Lottery Commission went to court to defeat a lottery winner’s wish to be paid in a lump sum. So instead, 94-year old Louise Outing will get her $5.6m in installments over 20 years.

Several Sunni groups describe polling stations as “centers of atheism” and warn Iraqis against “the farce of democracy.” They’re not so big on farce; they prefer more sophisticated forms of entertainment like public stonings.

All the election workers in Mosul have quit following death threats.

Whatever Happened To...?

Welcome to the annual
“Whatever Happened To...?” Awards for 2004,
in which I pick out a few news stories, individuals, phrases, etc. that were seen briefly, if you were alert enough (like Janet Jackson’s nipple), and then dropped out of sight with major questions still unanswered (unlike Janet Jackson’s nipple).

Let’s begin:

What was the US’s precise role in the Haitian coup in February? What did we know and when did we know it? Did we actually require Aristide to resign the presidency as a condition for saving his life?

In October 2003 the Toledo Blade ran a series about a US military unit that went on a mass killing spree in Vietnam in 1967. In February, the Pentagon announced it would investigate. So?

Before Yushchenko, there was President Chen of Taiwan, who during that country’s elections (March 2004), claimed to have been the victim of a weird assassination attempt, with homemade bullets, and no one was really sure what actually happened if anything, then nothing.

Abu Ghraib: Seymour Hersh and even Rumsfeld said that there was much worse to come in the way of photographs and film, so where is it? Rummy said (in May) that he would really love to release all the pictures, but the darned lawyers wouldn’t let him. Guess the lawyers still have him all tied up, metaphorically speaking, with a hood over his head, pointing at his genitals and laughing, metaphorically speaking (or not). Also, weren’t we supposed to have torn down Abu Ghraib by now?

The lists of casualties in Iraq issued by the Pentagon never include contractors, security guards, and mercenaries of all sorts. It continues to be the case that we rarely find out who any of these people (alive or dead) are, just where the US, Halliburton etc are recruiting these people who are then imported into Iraq, given guns and immunity from the local law, and turned loose. However in April there was this article about one who had been a death squad assassin for South Africa’s apartheid government.

May: the Sunday Times (London) reported that one of the intended 9/11 hijackers, Niaz Khan, had turned himself in to the FBI a year and a half before 9/11, was questioned and then let go. Silly me, I expected a shit-storm of vituperation and investigations. When an FBI person told the Independent, “Every effort was made,” I wrote, “Hopefully, that phrase will be very slowly, very firmly shoved up the FBI’s collective ass over the next few months.” Didn’t happen. The Sunday Times article is here; there are links to other articles here and here.

Friendly militias. In August, Paul Wolfowitz proposed to the House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon build a “global anti-terrorist network of friendly militias,” death squads, warlords and the like. There were no angry editorials, denunciations by John Kerry, nothing, so in October they slipped it into a Pentagon authorization bill, and away we go.

September: Insurgents took over a school in Beslan, and Russia let loose a blizzard of lies that remain unresolved, even while Putin used the incident to tighten his authoritarian grip on all of Russia and eliminate democratic election of governors. Two reporters who might have negotiated with the rebels were, respectively, poisoned and arrested. Russia low-balled the number of hostages, then claimed with no proof that the rebels were Arab rather than Chechen, and kept their demands, which were related to Chechnya, out of the media, even while the authorities took hostages of their own, the families of Chechen rebel leaders.

September: did N Korea test a nuclear device, or what?

October: the Al Qaqaa Cock-Up. 380 tons of explosives were looted from a military base after US forces searched it, then left the doors unlocked.

October: bombed a wedding in Fallujah. Never admitted it was a wedding.

November: The Marine who shot the unarmed wounded prisoner in the mosque, was he ever, like, arrested, or given a stern talking to, or something?

November: Colombia claimed there was an attempt to assassinate Bush while he was in the country.

Did we ever find out who was responsible for the provision in the appropriations bill allowing committee chairs the right to look at anyone’s tax returns?

I’d like to give a special blogger’s fond farewell to two phrases that helped make 2004 so much fun: “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities” (from the State of the Union Address) and “member of the reality-based community.”


And then there are the people of 2004:

A.Q. Khan, we hardly knew ye.

That woman sterilized by Tom Coburn.

Vincent White. American adviser to the Afghan government, tossed in prison on trumped up sex charges when he interfered with corrupt contracts.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. At the beginning of the year we’d never heard of him, then he was the biggest terrorist ever, although the US seemed unsure even about the number of legs he possessed, then the US military razed a city to the ground for refusing to hand him over, before admitting he had probably left Fallujah before the bombing started, then evidently stopped caring where he was or what he was doing.

Also riding the roller coaster that is the American attention span: Achmed Chalabi, “hero in error”: he was under indictment for money laundering, then he wasn’t; he was America’s bestest bud, then Bush said he might have met him on a rope line one time; he was on the governing council, then it looked like they reduced the number of seats in the National Council just to get rid of him, then he showed up anyway, and now he’s reinvented himself as a Shiite anti-American, and no one’s even mentioning the whole spying-for-Iran thing anymore.

Chalabi’s nephew. The head of the war crimes trial of Saddam, then wanted for murder, now... still in exile, I think.

Iyad “Comical” Allawi, catapulted into power by the US without some basic questions about his past being answered. In London in the ‘70s, did he just spy on Iraqi exiles for Saddam, or did he kill them? I don’t know the answer, does George Bush? Does he care?

Mary Cheney. She’s still a lesbian, right?

We will prevail over this destruction

Bush’s emptiest piece of phrase-making about the Tsunami Tsuris (missed it earlier): “We will prevail over this destruction.”

Speaking of empty swaggering rhetoric, Yanukovich is refusing to resign as prime minister of Ukraine (the parliament’s vote to fire him was non-binding, and the presidential election hasn’t been certified yet), saying, “It is my firm position that I have no intention of resigning. They are insisting on this because, before as now, they are quaking in their shoes.” There should be some sort of three strikes law on cowboy rhetoric by politicians, punishable by exclusion from all public offices. Also, wrong week to be talking about “quaking.”

For the sake of Iraq’s children

China passes a law making it illegal for Taiwan to declare itself independent.

If someone doesn’t come up with a proper name for the disaster soon, I’m going to start using Tsunami Tsuris, and none of us want to see that.

The London Times describes a cartoon being used to recruit Iraqis to join the police:

an evil foreigner — a cigar-smoking bald thug with a handlebar moustache — wants to blow up Iraq’s electricity pylons. To do so, he hires a bug-eyed junkie, a jailbird who will do anything for money. Armed with sticks of dynamite, the drug addict carries out his mission, plunging hospital surgeries and terrified children into darkness. Angry locals, tired of the chaos, call in a squad of super-muscled policemen, who race to the scene, guns blazing, on motorcycles. The baddies are handcuffed and the final message from the hero is to call the police — “for the sake of Iraq’s children”.

They have only this one (hilarious) image from it. If anyone comes across more, please drop me an email.

I’m trying to set an example

Patt Morrison on why Bush should run for president of Iraq:

• Bush could wear his "mission accomplished" flight suit all the time.
• Iraq is running out of its own politicians.
• Unmarried daughters have to live at home and stay out of trouble.
• No term limits.
• Iraqis love faith-based initiatives.

More.

Shrub finally talks publicly about the earthquake (I guess he got all that brush cleared--first things first), but his statement seemed fuzzy even for him. Bush being Bush, his notions of how to respond were very top-down, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, there is no call for Americans to help, although I gotta think American generosity would provide a little more than the $35 million Bush has promised. In the q&a, he does say, “the American people will be very generous... there’s... a lot of individual giving in America.” Not exactly a rousing rallying cry, and he doesn’t say that he’s setting an example, not in the generosity department anyway:

Q Any plans for New Year’s Eve?

THE PRESIDENT: Early to bed.

Q New Year’s resolutions?

THE PRESIDENT: I’ll let you know. Already gave you a hint on one, which is my waistline. I’m trying to set an example.

As I said, first things first.

Internationally too, it’s all about government action: “This morning, I spoke with the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia... I praised their steadfast leadership during these difficult times” (the White House website even has a carefully posed picture of him speaking on the phone to the Sri Lankan president); “The United States will continue to stand with the affected governments as they care for the victims.” If he has also called the International Red Cross or any other relief organization to ask what they need, offer to stand with them and praise their steadfast leadership, he doesn’t mention the fact. I’m especially worried about this because so much of the devastation was in the Indonesian province of Acheh, where the government has been fighting separatists ruthlessly, and I don’t trust it not to take advantage of this situation. Ditto Sri Lanka.

In the q&a, a reporter asked about the Sunnis pulling out of the Iraqi elections, and while Bush correctly pointed out that it was actually just a Sunni party (albeit the largest one), he then said that he’d talked to Prez Yawer, “who happens to be a Sunni,” and he’d rather take the word of, well, the only Sunni he can actually get on the phone (and that’s only because Bush appointed Yawer to his current position).

Bush also quoted Osama bin Laden’s statement, even though the tape hasn’t been authenticated yet. Also, you can tell that the American elections are over, because Bush actually said out loud the name of He Who Must Not Be Spoken Of.

The United States is not stingy

Ron Suskind refers to the Bush cabinet as an “anti-meritocracy.” Spread it around.

YOU’RE SO VAIN, YOU PROBABLY THINK THIS IMPUTATION OF STINGINESS IS ABOUT YOU: Colin Powell asserts that “The United States is not stingy,” in response to a comment by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator that didn’t actually mention the United States. Bush, by the way, hasn’t said a word about the disaster in public. (Update: the White House says it doesn’t want to be all touchy-feely like Clinton, and that “actions speak louder than words.” For example, Bush expressed his concern with the victims today by riding a bicycle and clearing brush.)

On the one hand, Russia is saying that it could work with Yushchenko, provided he not get too uppity, but it’s also claiming that Sunday’s re-run was as fraudulent as the first two rounds, and has failed to acknowledge Pock-Faced Mr. Y as the winner.

Detail from a story in the London Times about life in Baghdad:

When the vehicle was 15m away, the soldier opened fire and shot the two occupants dead. The children down the street did not even stop their game.

After World War II, Pope Pius XII opposed returning Jewish children whom the church had protected to their families unless they promised to bring up as Christian those who had been baptized.

Missouri legalizes fishing with bare hands (and feet).

Appropriate

Bush’s immediate response to the earthquake + tsunami (does anyone have a name for the disaster yet? I haven’t been watching CNN, but they must have a name and graphics and theme music by now, that’s what CNN is there for) was to offer “all appropriate assistance”. Turns out, this was just $15 million. Will some intrepid reporter ask Scottie McClellan to give the administration’s definition of “appropriate”? (Later: they’ve added another $20 million. Color me unimpressed.)

Election fun ’n games

The largest Sunni party in Iraq is very careful to state that is withdrawing from the election, not boycotting it. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean either. With barely a month left, Americans are still talking about tinkering with the system so that the Sunnis won’t feel left out. They might have seats set aside in the “transitional assembly” (which in practice would give vastly disproportionate influence to the few Sunni voters who were both willing and able to vote, like they were Vermont or something), or they might be given a share of seats in the administration, in which case why bother having an election at all? Either way, January 30 is likely to be run on the basis of an election law written on the back of an envelope the night before, which doesn’t inspire that much confidence, even if it’s a really nice envelope.

Yanukovich is refusing to accept that he lost the Ukrainian election, claiming there were at least 5,000 irregularities, not counting the ones he was responsible for. He’d be a bit more credible if he hadn’t announced before the first vote was cast that he wouldn’t accept any results which didn’t show him winning. He clearly thinks he can do the “people power” thing that Yushchenko did, but he lacks a color. Orange did so well for Yushchenko, but he doesn’t even seem to have thought about his color.


Maybe he can hire Tom Ridge; he’s got a lot of free time now.