Customary policy of deference to the president

Good news on the Supreme Court striking down mandatory sentencing guidelines. Now we can go back to Southern states sentencing litter-bugs and sodomites to life in the stocks, and San Francisco sentencing mass murderers to aromatherapy and past-life regression.

What, you can’t figure out my position on mandatory sentencing based on that joke? Well, I don’t trust the federal government to set sentences irrespective of the details of individual cases, I don’t like gross regional disparities in sentencing, I don’t trust juries, I don’t trust judges with lifetime tenure, hell, I don’t trust the court stenographers, so I’m a little hard put to come to an opinion on how sentences should be arrived at.

The Supreme Court’s been all over the lot this week. They ruled that people can be convicted for conspiring to commit a crime without even starting to put the conspiracy into practice. This seems to me to be thought crime. The NYT forgot to include what the vote was.

And the Supes ruled that Cuban criminals can’t be held forever after serving their sentences, because Cuba won’t take them back, but it ruled that Somalis can be deported because of the Court’s “customary policy of deference to the president,” even though Somalia has no actual government, so we’d be literally just dumping people--convicted criminals, yet--in another country.

You don’t have a relationship, George, you are a stalker

Headline of the day, “I’m Sorry for Wearing Nazi Swastika, Says Prince Harry.” He was attending a “colonial and native”-themed party. Prince William went as a lion, which I assume is his idea of a native.

A London Times article on the Iraqi police:

Most policemen conceal the nature of their work even from their neighbours. They hide their faces behind ski masks or head scarves, and when they carry Kalashnikovs and man roadblocks it is difficult to tell them from guerrillas.

Sometimes the guerrillas are in uniform and the police in civvies: you only know which is which when they wave you through without kidnapping you. Last week a Times translator was stopped and searched at a guerrilla checkpoint only 100 yards from the main police headquarters in Baghdad.

Whoops, an even better headline, from the Daily Telegraph: “Thatcher Escapes Jail.” Sadly, it’s not about Margaret Thatcher going over the wall (oh man, I’m gonna have the Great Escape theme in my head the rest of the day now), but her idiot son Mark taking a plea bargain in South Africa for his role in financing the “time-share” coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. He’s getting away with a fine.

Oh, wait, it’s just gonna be one of those days. Also from the Telegraph: “Village Celebrates its Past with £10,000 Statue of Dinosaur Droppings.”

The Russian Duma is working on a law to deny visas to people showing “disrespect” for Russia or harming its values, whatever those might be.

Bush, in an interview with the Moonie Washington Times, says, “I don’t see... how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord.”

Doing “what we see fit to maintain security”

The US military has shot more Iraqi children, fatally in the case of a 13-year old girl, and, as with those other “possibly innocent lives” three days ago, immediately started casting aspersions on the victims: spokesmodel Major Neal O’Brien said, “This is an absolute tragedy. We do not know at this time what the children were doing in the area.” They live there, you moron, what were the American soldiers doing in the area? Oh yeah, shooting at anything that moved.

Posters issued in Anbar province of Iraq, by the Secret Republican Army, which CBS describes as “previously unknown”--oh, they’re good--say that voters in Wasit--which is next to Whatchamacallit--will be shot by 32 snipers. The governor of the province, who I assume plans to vote absentee, says, “We do not care about such statements” and that the government will do “what we see fit to maintain security.” Very reassuring.

Speaking of lame elections, Britain is gearing up for its next one, with these posters, masterpieces of the propagandistic arts:

I assume I’m right

Bush has named Michael Chertoff to head Heimat Security. He says that after 9/11, “He understood immediately that the strategy in the war on terror is to prevent attacks before they occur.” Because preventing attacks after they occur is, you know, hard work.


Must...resist...urge...to rub the bald guy’s head.


Bush gave an interview to the Wall St Journal, flanked by “senior aides,” because god knows he can’t be trusted on his own. He said, “I understand there are many who say, ‘Bush is wrong.’ I assume I’m right.” And you know what they say about people who assume...

Wherein I coin the phrase “one-sodomy rule”

A WaPo editorial notes that the Team Chimpy is planning to stick DC with the huge costs of security for the inaugural, a break with previous practice. DC will be allowed to use homeland security funds for this instead of for, say, homeland security, as clear an admission as you’d like that homeland security funding (I just used the phrase homeland security three times in a row without gagging, a sure sign of desensitization--what will we be accepting as normal in 2009?) is nothing but pork.

Speaking of abnormal, I just went to the supermarket, and why are all the oranges bigger than the grapefruit? When did that happen? I’m pretty sure this is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Speaking of...well no, I won’t go there.... The Supreme Court refused today to hear challenges to Florida’s ban on gay adoption (which only Florida has, by the way). The 1977 law says: “No person eligible to adopt under this statute may adopt if that person is a homosexual.” This raises questions similar to those I asked about Muslims last month, when a poll showed 27% of Americans thought they should be required to register, namely, who gets to define “homosexual.” This is a law--Stat. § 63.042(3)--so you’d think it would include a legal definition of “a homosexual,” but it doesn’t. Indeed, the Christian evangelical types like Anita Bryant who got this law passed are the ones who insist that homosexuality is a “lifestyle” rather than an innate sexual identity (I’ve seen a similar argument from the other end, so to speak, of the spectrum, by Gore Vidal, who insists that there are no homosexuals, just homosexual acts). If a would-be adoptive parent denies being homosexual, how do the state and courts determine otherwise, by what standard? Measure blood flow to their genitals when they’re exposed to pictures of Brad Pitt? Do they have to fuck someone of the opposite sex in open court--and none of that fancy sex like we hear they have up north either. What about “ex-gays”? What about bisexuals? Is it ok if you just experimented in college--Lesbians until Graduation (LUGs) they called it at my college--or got really drunk this one time (at least that’s what you tell everyone), or is there a one-sodomy rule?

This is what happens when the state intrudes into people’s personal lives.

“I look forward to welcoming him here to Washington if he chooses to come here”

Today is the 3rd anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo for business as a gulag. I just looked it up: the traditional third anniversary gift is leather. Oh dear.

Mahmoud Abbas has won the legitimacy that only comes, the world media imply, from an invitation to the White House. I mean sod the elections, if Chimpy invites you to break bread (now that I think of it, I’m not sure if a meal was actually mentioned; maybe better to nosh a little first), then you have been well and truly anointed.

Shrub added that he envisioned “a day when he and president-elect Abbas and Israel’s leaders could stand together and say, ‘We have peace.’” Hey, you can always say it. You say stuff all the time.

We’ve got torture, yes we do, we’ve got torture, how ‘bout you?

The lawyer of Abu Ghraib torturer Specialist Charles Graner asks the important question: “Don’t cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?”


Also, that leash thing, “A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections,” and hell, parents have their kids on tethers at the mall. Why, “In Texas we’d lasso them and drag them out of there.” Yee hah.

So in the same package of rule changes that gutted ethics inquiries was a provision that in event of “catastrophic circumstances,” a quorum is no longer needed in the House of Reps, just whoever shows up. No, I can see no way in which that could go wrong.

Lashing out

There’s a good essay by Gary Younge in the Guardian on how the Right’s backlash continues, even while the Left increasingly lashes in the first place. The national debate is thus conducted entirely within terms framed by the Right. Younge blames Clinton, which is too easy, for turning the occasional necessary capitulation by the left from a matter of pragmatism into a dogma, “triangulation.” Younge:

“The absence of the lash simply changed the nature of the backlash. It is no longer an act of political retribution: the right has turned it into an art form.

“First it finds an enemy - preferably a weak minority - gays, unmarried mothers, Muslims, the irreligious, international law or small countries that break international law, asylum seekers, Gypsies etc. In the inconvenient instance that a real enemy, no matter how exaggerated, cannot be found, it constructs one: the "liberal establishment", the "armies of political correctness", the "liberal media" or "feminazis". Then, with the enemy, real or invented, in place, it simply creates and inflates the crisis to suit, and bingo - the bespoke backlash. No lash required. Add venom and mix recklessly.”

Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle

So despite its promises not to interfere with the Palestinian elections, Israel interfered with the Palestinian elections. Quel surprise. They turned away voters in East Jerusalem (most East Jerusalahoovians weren’t going to be allowed to vote inside the city anyway, but make their way through checkpoints to the West Bank). Combine that with inadequate voter registration, harassment of candidates (Israel had the nerve to say that Barghouti was courting arrest as a publicity stunt--he was arrested Friday for trying to pray at a Jerusalem mosque without a license!), and voting under military occupation. All the reasons I’ve cited as making Iraqi elections illegitimate apply to Palestine. The infrastructure for free and fair elections simply does not exist. (Although that said, the Palestinians have a thriving political culture, unlike the Iraqis.) Israel has put its thumb on the scale in favor of Mahmoud Abbas, who they think is enough of a ruthless thug to deal with the other ruthless thugs. They’re even willing to ignore the little matter of Holocaust denial, just this once.

North Korea launches a campaign against long hair on men: “Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.” Evidently long hair hinders intellectual development by diverting nutrition from the brain to hair growth. Clean shoes are also important.

Possibly innocent lives

The US bombed the wrong house, near Mosul, killing 14 people (the US says 5 without saying how they would know that), but issued the semi-apology that it “deeply regrets the loss of possibly innocent lives.” Or maybe it possibly regrets the loss of deeply innocent lives. I’ve deleted the rest of what I wrote about that crack, because UnFairWitness had the exact same thoughts and posted them first:

Like maybe they killed 14 people in a house they weren’t even supposed to be targeting and just got lucky? Or maybe there are so many bad guys in Iraq that you can randomly bomb a house and get a few?

The insertion of that adverb shows the presumption of guilt Americans apply to all Iraqis.

A Romanian woman with two wombs got pregnant in each simultaneously. She had the first baby a month ago, prematurely, and will have the second in 5 weeks.

Don’t know about the American price of either, but the Observer claims that in Britain, cocaine is now cheaper than a cappuccino.

Responding to complaints from animal rights activists, McDonald’s in Britain is considering killing its chickens more humanely, by sending them to the gas chamber. PETA approves of this.

Yes, we have no banana revolutions today

Belarus’s dictator, and king of the combover, Aleksander Lukashenko insists that unlike Georgia or Ukraine, there will be no people’s revolution in Belarus, whether “rose, orange or banana.”


Long live the Banana Revolution!

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.