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Today, George and Laura Bush went to the Providence Family Support Center in Pittsburgh, as part Laura wants to help steer children away from “bad choices.” Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.
Laura said, “Statistics show boys are having a particularly tough time growing up.” She added, “For example, George here still has the reading ability and maturity of a six-year old.”
(Update: the LA Times writes about this under the headline “First Lady Takes Stage With Her No. 2.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.)
“Say Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
Today’s NYT’s front page has, side by side, 1) a story about the Pentagon’s slowness in provided armor for troops in Iraq, which says “the Army’s equipment manager effectively reduced the armor’s priority to the status of socks” -- actually, one might argue, the Army reduced soldiers’ priority to the status of socks, and 2) “US Checkpoints a Deadly Gantlet: Iraqis Killed or Injured in Troops’ Security Effort.” These stories are of course linked: in the absence of proper defensive self-protection, soldiers have resorted to offensive self-protection, i.e., shooting anything that moves. In a classic case of shit rolling downhill, Washington demonstrated a clear lack of interest in the lives of American soldiers, who evinced the same lack of interest in preserving the lives of Iraqi civilians.
Also, note to the NYT: gauntlet, not gantlet. The London Times also uses the word, but correctly, in a story on the same subject tomorrow.
Today, Kuwaiti women demonstrated for women’s suffrage, while in Germany, Free Democratic MEP, Silvana Koch-Mehrin shows off her naked, very pregnant stomach in glamor photos in this week’s Stern, because “showing your stomach is both a provocation and a dramatic symbol of emancipation”. The Christian Democrats respond by officially denying that pregnancy is political. The London Times story on this little piece of self-promotion promotes her age, which is actually 34, to 44. But they did get the gauntlet/gantlet thing right.
The Thai government, worrying about the effects of the tsunami on tourism, has come up with an answer, albeit the wrong answer: a tsunami museum, complete with “a Universal Studios-style simulated tidal wave”.
John Bolton, new American ambassador-designate to the UN, today: “my record over many years demonstrates clear support for effective multilateral diplomacy”. And two years ago: “There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.” A couple of months later he threatened Iran, Syria and North Korea with war, suggesting they “draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq”. (I’ve also mentioned Bolton here and here.). (Annoyingly, while I have 4 posts on Bolton, the Google search box only brings up 2, the Pico box 3. Blogger has a perfectly good search function available to me but not to you, that even returns results in chronological order.)
More on Bolton here.
Does anyone know who the reporter was who kept asking Scottie McClellan why, if rendition wasn’t about torture, we would need to send prisoners to Uzbekistan? Scottie’s answer: a) that’s classified, b) “The war on terrorism is a different kind of war.” c) the Uzbeks are better at rendering: they use every part of the prisoner.
I don’t think all the talk about the FEC regulating blogs will come to anything, but you never know. My question is, if I link to a campaign website in order to make fun of it, does that count as a contribution?
The New Scientist reports on the military’s attempts to use research designed to eliminate pain in order to create a weapon Pulsed Energy Projectiles which can generate pain within the brain without doing actual physical harm -- immaculate torture, if you will. As every blogger in the universe has noted, this can be used against protests. And once it’s possible, it’s only a matter of time. In my 1971 edition of the Yale student paper-produced “Insiders’ Guide to the Colleges” (which is a lot of fun, by the way, and well worth the 25¢ I paid on impulse for it some years ago), it warns, “A gas mask is a must at Berkeley, because no matter what your political shade, you are likely to be tear gassed during your stay.”
As long as I’ve got the book out, here’s a bit from the entry for USC: “The typical SC student reads Mad magazine and Superboy comics and suffers from megalomania (otherwise known as the SC syndrome), rich parents, and general illiteracy. It has often been rumored that reading is a prerequisite for some SC classes, but this is vehemently denied by the administration”.
Speaking of literacy, I’ve been sort of following the SAT’s addition of an essay-writing segment. The WaPo has an article about the test prep classes, and evidently you’d all be more impressed if I wrote larger and used words like esoteric and equivocal. I’ll get right on that.
Speaking of crappy writing, here’s an AP headline: “South Florida to Vote on Slot Machines.” Turns out, they’ll be voting on whether to legalize slot machines, they’re not actually using slot machines AS voting machines, appropriate as that might be in Florida.
Not much to say about the NYT story on extraordinary rendition not already well said by Rising Hegemon and LeftI. The official spin is hilariously incompetent and uncredible: it was done to save the American taxpayers the cost of housing these people; it had nothing to do with torture, even though prisoners were sent only to countries which routinely practice torture like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc and not, say, Denmark.
The key detail, which I think is new, in the NYT is that the CIA was given blanket permission to transfer anyone they want anywhere they want, without individual review by the White House, the Justice Department or the State Department. Remember, the CIA is not a law enforcement agency. Its employees don’t, for example, have the (legal) power to arrest anybody or charge them in a court of law. Giving them this sort of power is therefore an admission that America is no longer a nation of laws.
So when Alberto Gonzales testified to Congress in January that he was “not aware of anyone in the executive branch authorizing any transfer of a detainee in violation of” the policy against transferring people to countries where it’s more likely than not (!) that they’ll be tortured, the weasel word wasn’t “aware,” it was “a.” Bush didn’t authorize a detainee -- one specific named human being -- being rendered for the purposes of torture, but any detainee.
The White House says that Syria’s plans for a gradual withdrawal from Lebanon, as opposed to beaming all their troops back to their starship simultaneously, are “half measures” which are “not enough.” About one-half of enough, right? The spokesmodel quoted by the WaPo adds, “The United States and the world stand with the people of Lebanon at this critical moment.” Gee, isn’t Lebanon already part of “the world”? I know the United States isn’t.
Responding to recent allegations by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that the US planned to assassinate him, the American ambassador says, “That would be a violation of our federal law.” Phew, and I was worried for a minute there.
Speaking of reassuring statements, the WaPo says that the Bush admin is adopting a “preemptive counterintelligence strategy.” I’m pretty sure that phrase has no meaning in the English language and if it does, shouldn’t. Here’s another great quote from the article: “we need strategically orchestrated operations directed against prioritized foreign intelligence threats”. This is a strategically orchestrated preemptive strategy to keep America’s secrets safe by speaking in complete gibberish.
From the BBC:
The government of Niger has cancelled at the last minute a special ceremony during which at least 7,000 slaves were to be granted their freedom.
A spokesman for the government’s human rights commission, which had helped to organise the event, said this was because slavery did not exist.
It’s still unclear whether released hostage Giuliana Sgrena’s car was shot at by US soldiers at a checkpoint, as the US claimed, or a patrol, as Sgrena says. The US has been rather slow in responding to her refutation of their original story. The car seems to have been close enough to the airport to have passed through all the checkpoints. But 300 to 400 bullets were shot at the car, which I dunno to me supports the trigger-happy-cowboy theory of the event rather than the justifiable-concern-about-car-bombs theory. Sgrena’s boyfriend told reporters “either it was an ambush or those soldiers were complete idiots.” I don’t see it as either/or.
The Sunday Times of London says that the queen has to approve the design of a stamp for the marriage of Charles & Camilla. Given her attitude to the marriage, we cannot entirely rule out it being this one (from the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras):
Bush, talking in New Joisey about Social Security: “Well, I'm going to keep telling people we've got a problem until it sinks in... I like going around the country saying, folks, we have got a problem.”
So American soldiers shot up a car carrying released Italian journalist hostage Giuliana Sgrena to Baghdad Airport, killing an Italian secret service agent. The Americans claim it approached their checkpoint too fast. Really, an Italian driving too fast. What’re the odds.
See how many religious terms you can spot in this single sentence from Bush’s weekly radio address: “Freedom is the birthright and deep desire of every human soul, and spreading freedom’s blessings is the calling of our time.”
From the London Times:
WHEN an international news agency referred to Moldova as being “sandwiched” between Romania and Ukraine, a Moldovan official called to complain. “We are not a sandwich. We are a country,” he said.
I think they should put that on the flag and the money and every public building.
The Times notes that all the front-runners in Sunday’s parliamentary elections want to withdraw Moldova from the Commonwealth of Independent States (remember that?) and join NATO. This is the, sigh, “grape revolution,” because Moldova produces cheap wine. Also illegal migrants in the building and prostitution sectors elsewhere in Europe, so I guess grape revolution isn’t the worst of the available options.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Mississippi may soon be the first state in which abortion is not available, as its last remaining clinic is being severely harassed by protesters and the state.
This week Bush and Rice have been making a big deal of emphasizing that Syria “needs to” remove not only its troops from Lebanon, but also its intelligence agents. While I can see the logic of that, I can’t help thinking that this is a way of keeping America’s options open by allowing the Bushies to accuse Syria of doing something which is not easily disprovable, just as Iraq couldn’t prove that it was not making nuclear weapons. Hard to prove a negative.
When Bush says that Syrian troops need to pull out before the next scheduled elections in Lebanon, only two months away, because “I don’t think you can have fair elections with Syrian troops there,” I just don’t know what to call it, because “irony” usually implies some degree of subtlety. As someone recently said when Tom DeLay accused the prosecutors of his associates as being partisan, that’s like a frog calling someone ugly. The problem is that Bush’s case for Syria not having a right to occupy another country, but we do, and for Iran and North Korea not having a right to nuclear weapons, but we do, rests purely on those countries being bad guys and the US being good guys, which means that to comply with our demands, those countries must also tacitly admit to being bad guys. This is also behind the Bushies’ attempts to scuttle any efforts to reward Iran and North Korea for complying, as if they’d rather have those two countries nuclear than give them the tiniest of figleaves. Like all classical bullies, the Bushies want their opponents not only to lose, but to be seen to lose, to be humiliated.
Sen. Robert Byrd defended the practice of filibusters, saying, “We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.” The predictable shitstorm arose. Thing is, should people advocating the “nuclear option” to silence their enemies actually be complaining about the analogies other people use?
Correction: yesterday I described a lawyer in the Ten Commandments case as an ACLU lawyer. He is not, but a Duke Law professor.
The House voted to allow “faith-based” groups using federal job-training money to discriminate on the basis of religion in their own hiring. They can still take the tainted tax money of heathens, who would just spend it in heathenish ways.
The granddaughter of Rev. Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps has entered politics, ran for Topeka City Council against a lesbian incumbent, and lost big time. The man-bites-dog aspect of this story: a relative of a prominent gay-basher does not, repeat NOT, turn out to be gay.
Bush on the failure to capture bin Laden: “We’re keeping the pressure on him, keeping him in hiding.” Way to lower the bar. And demonstrating his unique grasp of how terrorist organizations operate, he said, “If al Qaeda was structured like corporate America, you’d have a chairman of the board still in office, but many of the key operators would no longer be around -- in other words, the executive vice presidents, the operating officers, the people responsible for certain aspects of the organization have been brought to justice. A lot of them have been.” You know, the kid who gets the coffee, the toner guy...
The California Supreme Court overturns the death sentence of a man convicted of a murder. Two men were convicted in separate trials, and at both trials the same prosecutor presented conflicting versions of the facts, in each case claiming that that defendant had delivered the fatal ax blow.
The Credit Card Company Profits Protection Act Bankruptcy Bill exempts trusts used by rich people to protect their assets during bankruptcy. Of course it does.
Prince Charles is in Australia, where today they showed him an outhouse, tried to feed him live insects, and made him shake hands with topless Aboriginal women “of whom,” said the Times, “the description ‘willowy’ would be misleading”.
In the Supreme Court hearings today on displays of the Ten Commandments, Justice Kennedy complained about “this obsessive concern with any mention of religion,” and by “obsessive” he did not mean the Christian protesters yelling outside the Supreme Court building, but rather those obsessively concerned with following their nation’s foundational documents and principles. The plaintiff's lawyer pointed out that the crowds and the people sending him hate mail weren’t concerned with preserving the image of the Commandments as a secular symbol. “Obsessive concern.” Kennedy is such a dick.
Kennedy says removing the display might “show hostility to religion.” No, the existing displays show favoritism towards a religion. Not having such displays merely shows neutrality. To show actual hostility would require a monument saying “There is No God,” or “Jesus Sucks,” or “Go Ahead and Lust After Your Neighbor’s Oxen, See if We Care.” Kennedy says, “If an atheist walks by, he can avert his eyes, he can think about something else.” Like about how Kennedy is such a dick.
Fat Tony Scalia, who wouldn’t find it unconstitutional if a law were passed requiring the Ten Commandments be tattooed on everyone’s body, says “It’s a profoundly religious message, but it’s a profoundly religious message believed in by a vast majority of the American people.” He thought that included Muslims, until someone explained it to him. Although right after this display of ignorance, he blithely went on, “You know, I think probably 90 percent of the American people believe in the Ten Commandments, and I’ll bet you that 85 percent of them couldn’t tell you what the ten are.” He says the majority of Americans believe that “government comes from God.” They do?
Actually, I prefer the honesty of Scalia’s position (while totally opposing that position, of course), which at least admits to the religious intent of religious symbolism without pretending it’s secular or historical, to Kennedy’s position that not displaying them is “asking religious people to surrender their beliefs”.
From the AP: “The United States accused Iran on Wednesday of ‘cynically’ pursuing nuclear weapons”. As opposed to the usual idealistic, utopian pursuit of nuclear weapons.
And Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA wants “transparency, transparency and more transparency” from Iran on its nuclear program. As opposed to glowing in the dark, presumably.
A bit more on “faith-based” initiatives, which there was a McNeil-Lehrer segment on after my earlier post. There’s an interesting rhetorical inversion in the White House spin on faith-based programs, including in Bush’s speech today: they paint themselves not as trying to funnel tax dollars to religious groups and break down the church-state barrier, but as common-sense pragmatists willing to go with whatever program works, and they denigrate the opponents of those programs as unpragmatic ideologues, “radical secularists” Tooey called us -- a title I’ll happily accept -- pursuing a fanatical hatred of religion at the expense of the poor people these programs could be helping.
Turkmenistan closes all hospitals outside the capital. Says President-for-life Niyazov (the guy who renamed all the months, banned beards and gold fillings, etc): “Why do we need such hospitals? If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat.” Also rural libraries, because peasants don’t read.
E.J. Dionne on the bankruptcy bill.
Condi Rice says there is “firm evidence” that Syria was behind last week’s bombing in Israel. Well, if someone in the government tells me there’s firm evidence that a foreign government is up to no good, I just have to believe them, don’t I?
The Supreme Court rules that people who were 16 or 17 when they committed their crimes cannot be executed, because of the “instability and emotional imbalance” that produced their crimes. But if you want proof that instability and emotional imbalance are not the exclusive property of adolescents, you have only to read Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia’s dissent (warning: pdf).
In a footnote, he says that the standard for the 8th Amendment should be what was legal in 1789 when “the death penalty could theoretically be imposed for the crime of a 7-year-old.” The standard the Supreme Court established the last time it dealt with this issue in 1989 took as proof of public support of a death penalty the passage by a state legislature of a law. In other words, a law allowing execution of minors was constitutional because there was a law allowing execution of minors. In 2005, with several states having revoked such laws, the Justices are debating which states have a vote. Scalia denies that states with no death penalty for anyone should be counted as opposing the death penalty for minors. That, he says, would be like including the Amish “in a consumer-preference poll on the electric car.”
The annoying thing is, I found myself in partial agreement with Fat Tony: by making the standard of what constitutes “cruel and unusual” dependent on evolving standards, the Court’s majority made itself a weather vane -- “a mirror of the passing and changing sentiment of American society regarding penology” in Scalia’s words -- and you can see that in the way it cherry-picked the evidence it used to support its claim that there is a consensus against executing kids that didn’t exist 15 years ago, including taking into account international standards, which Scalia correctly points out are not considered for other constitutional issues such as abortion and the separation of church and state. Of course using the community standards of the 18th century is also stupid. And so is Fat Tony’s other idea, leaving it up to the jury to consider. One of the problems with the death penalty is that people who oppose the death penalty are excluded from juries in capital cases, so those juries don’t represent community standards.
In truth, I don’t care if there is or is not a “national consensus” on executing juveniles, and I don’t much care if the Supreme Court uses intellectually dishonest arguments to ban the practice, as long as it gets banned.
Shrub speaks to a conference of “faith-based” groups: “when I think about government, I think about law and justice, I really don’t think about love.” Joke 1: You really don’t think, period. Joke 2: That’s where you differ from Bill Clinton, if you know what I mean. Joke 3: You think about law and justice?
“Government has got to find ways to empower those whose mission is based upon love in order to help those who need love find love in society.” But use a condom. No, wait, we don’t believe in those either, do we?
And then he misquotes Tocqueville. Then, “I appreciate the leaders in the armies of compassion, one of my favorite phrases -- the armies of compassion. It’s a strong word, isn’t it?” (Yes, that’s actually 4 words. Later he says that one of his favorite words is “social entrepreneurship.”) Later still, he refers to “the helping hand offered by the armies of compassion,” which is an oddly mixed metaphor. He adds, “I can’t think of a better motto for an army, to love a neighbor just like you’d like to be loved yourself.” Yeah, let’s paint that on the side of all our tanks.
He says that you can choose your faith or to have no faith (I’d actually like to praise the fact that Bush is always careful to affirm the rights of non-believers) (while giving their tax money to the God-botherers, of course). But he kind of ruined it by saying that that right is “sacred.”
“faith-based programs are changing America one soul at a time.” Brrr.
A woman in a religious “tough love” drug treatment program feels she has an “angel on her shoulder.” Meth’ll do that to ya.
He and Towey have been using the term “roadblocks” (on the road to Paradise, no doubt) for state & local government refusal to give money to religious organizations -- Bush is trying to impose “faith-based” programs at all levels of government now.
His “culture of compassion” includes letting these groups discriminate against non-believers. And, no doubt, homosexuals, women...
He wants to let retired people give money from their IRAs to charities tax-free.
Interviewed by the Guardian, Grover Norquist confirms what I wrote 3 weeks ago, that Social Security privatization is intended to create a permanent pro-business, anti-regulation, Republican majority in which, to quote myself, “Almost every aspect of a progressive agenda would be measured against the Dow Jones and found wanting.”
Norquist: “If 100% of Americans at age 18 knew they were going to retire with a savings account, it would change their attitude to regulating companies, it would change attitudes towards envy, and how they feel about rich people. The entire secular growth in the Republican vote can be explained by the growth of stock ownership. It changes what you read, what you watch, and what you think.”
So does a well-placed pod.
Addendum: At American Leftist, which has linked to this post, Richard Estes has this comment, “Norquist better be careful. Extreme poverty has a tendency to change attitudes as well.”
Continuing its Puritan Crusade, the Bushies are 1) forcing AIDS organizations that work overseas and take some federal money to sign a pledge opposing prostitution (I would love to see the wording of that pledge. Has anyone seen it?)
2) At a UN conference to reaffirm, 10 years on, the commitment to women’s rights in the Beijing Conference, the US is insisting that no right to abortion be even hinted at, and that governments should be free to punish women who have had abortions.
Speaking of crusades, in Iraq today anti-queuing militants struck again, killing at least 125 men applying to join the military & police as they were standing in line for medical exams. As we know, Sunnis believe that queues are distasteful in the eyes of Allah, while Shiites insist that forming orderly lines is a mitzvah, and require young men to form such lines NO MATTER HOW FUCKING MANY TIMES THOSE LINES GET BLOWN UP. The total number of dead is unknown because, to quote a hospital official, “there are many body parts still to be counted.”
Speaking of religious militants, Jim Towey, director of Bush’s Faith-Based program, had an online q&a at the White House website today. It’s an uninformative as such events usually are. Rick, from Worcester, Mass. asks, “Considering that Faith-Based initiatives enrich the community and provide increased safety, why do you suppose so many oppose them?” and Towey responds that he doesn’t understand why people are like that either. And Bush doesn’t want to destroy the separation between church and state, just to “restore balance to the public square [was it a trapezoid before?] and allow faith-based organizations and faith-filled people to be there like any one else.” Somehow the phrase “faith-filled people” fills me with no confidence. Towey closes by saying that he’ll have another q&a “God willing” and asks everyone to “pray for the President, Mrs. Bush, his family, and all of us here.” Would it be wrong of me to pray that you’ll all form an orderly line in Tikrit?
“Cedar Revolution” is the new Orange Revolution: that’s what someone in the State Department, if nowhere else, is calling the protests in Lebanon that forced the government to resign today. Scottie McClellan said, “The new Government will have the responsibility to implement free and fair elections that the Lebanese people have clearly demonstrated they desire.” Clearly demonstrated? By a few protests? I take it this new test applies only to countries whose regimes the US wants changed and doesn’t apply to, say, Haiti, where pro-Aristide protests were shot at by police today, killing two.
To head off a Borscht --or whatever-- Revolution, Putin is organizing a youth movement, Nashi. I was going to called it Putin Youth, but I hardly need to point out the similarities to the Hitler Youth when it’s already called Nashi, do I? Nashi is variously translated as Ours or One of Us; I like the latter for its invocation of Tod Browning’s “Freaks”: One of us, one of us, we accept you, we accept you, one of us... A journalist, and someone from a liberal youth movement, infiltrated the first, secret meeting, and were beaten up. When you’ve got an Us, you’ve gotta have a Them.
Democracy Now (thanks to Eli at LeftI for the heads-up) has been covering the anniversary of the ouster of Aristide. Here’s a transcript of their interview with Aristide a couple of weeks later, in which he described his removal from Haiti by American troops as a kidnapping. Some of the details of that day are still murky to me -- was he told by Americans that he would not be rescued from murder at the hands of the death squads unless he resigned the presidency? how did he wind up in the Central African Republic? When I wrote last night that the US had collaborated “tacitly or otherwise” with those death squads, I meant that I don’t know if there was direct contact and coordination. It really doesn’t matter, because even without direct contact, a green light was given by American officials, quite openly. From my own archives:
2/12/04. While former death squad types were reentering the country and violence growing, a State Department official briefed the press that Aristide should step down before the end of his term.
2/17/04. Colin Powell talked of a “political solution,” presumably meaning negotiations between the elected government and the scum trying to overthrow it, and says “there is frankly no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence,” a green light if ever I heard one. I wrote, “Boy, when even the Bushies have ‘no enthusiasm’ for invading a country, you know all the joy has gone out of this administration. Evidently it didn’t pass the ‘Little Rummy’ Test, by which all foreign policy decisions are now made: if Secretary of War Rumsfeld gets an erection just thinkin’ about it, we invade.”
2/28/04. Colin Powell refers to the death squads as “the resistance.”
3/1/04. With Aristide on a plane, Bush says, “The constitution of Haiti is working. There is an interim president, as per the constitution, in place.” I wrote, “Well, maybe the Haitian constitution does actually establish a process involving death squads, coups and US Marines in order to select a new president, something like the electoral college. I mean have you ever read the Haitian constitution?”
3/2/04. I wrote -- I won’t repeat the whole thing here -- that while the Bushies were trying to refute the kidnapping charge by reducing it to a single moment, and if Marines didn’t actually have guns pointed at Aristide’s head when he boarded the plane, it wasn’t kidnapping, the US had shaped the circumstances that led up to that moment.
