Thanks to you, millions of little girls are going to school

Although she spent less than 6 hours in Afghanistan, Laura Bush evidently ran out of Afghans worth speaking with, and decided to hang out with American troops instead. She told them, “Thanks to you, millions of little girls are going to school in this country.” Great, they’re like the world’s most heavily armed school crossing guards.

Follow-up: Juan Cole says that the reason Allawi stalked out of the National Assembly after the cameras were turned off and the press expelled was that his choice for Speaker was rejected for having been too close to Saddam.

The NYT has a story, “U.S. Helped to Prepare the Way for Kyrgyzstan’s Uprising.” The US supplied paper and a printing press and money to an opposition newspaper, and broadcast its stories on the local Radio Free Europe. All relatively mild activities, and Akayev was certainly on my list of Top 40 Dictators Who Need to Be Sent Into Exile, but it still amounts to the US considering it its right to undermine willy nilly any government it dislikes. The difference between this and the covert actions which overthrew the governments of Arbenz, Mossadegh and Allende is one of degree only. It will also give other dictators the ability to paint their oppositions as American puppets, in much the same way that Robert Mugabe is currently campaigning in Zimbabwe’s fake elections as if Tony Blair were running against him.

Also, the NYT puff piece on these activities was pretty obviously spoon-fed to the Paper of Record by someone in State or the CIA.

We want them to develop their education that works for them

Laura Bush is going to Afghanistan to demonstrate America’s deep commitment to women’s education there. She will spend a total of 5 hours in the country, but they will be a deeply committed 5 hours. She had this to say: “We want them to develop their education that works for them, just like we do the same thing in our country.” They say married couples begin to look alike, but hanging around with George has obviously done horrible things to her verbal skills. Also, she says she plans to tell Karzai “how moved we are by their efforts, by the big huge vote that turned out earlier this year”. Actually, that was October of last year. Hopefully she’ll demonstrate her deep commitment to Afghanistan by figuring out the difference between it and Iraq before she touches down.

Evidently there will be an “American University in Afghanistan,” which sounds like a really bad idea, and why have I not heard of this before? A cursory googling doesn’t really say who’s behind this, although the US military is currently building it a $370,000 wall (it has to be of good quality because of all the student-hostages who will be shot in front of it)(graduates wear a mortar board and blindfold).

Laura says that Georgie was right to intervene in the Schiavo affair — “It is a life issue that really does require government to be involved” — but also told reporters that she and George both have living wills, presumably so that the government isn’t involved. Aren’t you curious about the details of Chimpy’s living will?

Standing on the side of those who defend life

Headline in The Onion: “History Sighs, Repeats Itself.”

The Iraqi parliament met today and, as predicted, accomplished nothing. In fact, it descended into chaos and the acting Speaker (they can’t agree on a Speaker) ordered the tv cameras turned off. Iraqi viewers were then treated to an orchestra playing the national anthem. Disharmony followed by harmony. So they missed “Comical” Allawi storming out and the acting Speaker (chosen because he’s the oldest man there) telling everyone to go home.

Asked about Terri Schiavo, Scotty McClellan said no fewer than six times that Bush is “standing on the side of those who defend life.” I suppose it’s better than standing on their foot.

I don’t know if that joke means I’ve taken too many Vicodin (back trouble) or not enough.

One thing about Bush’s repeated claim that he is “erring on the side of life”: at least he’s finally admitting that he is capable of error.

Bring out your dea... uh, people in a persistent vegetative state

Not to suggest that the Terri Schiavo protesters are becoming Pythonesque, but I couldn’t help noticing in yesterday’s NYT that some of them were disabled people holding signs saying “Not dead yet,” while elsewhere in the paper the same phrase appears in an article on Spamalot, the theatrical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which has a song of the same name.

Another juxtaposition that might or might not mean anything: yesterday there was a segment on McNeil-Lehrer on the attempt to insert “intelligent design” into school curricula. The sorts of people who were insisting that they could discern an intelligence behind the development of human life are the same sorts who persist in discerning an intelligence in the living corpse of Terri Schiavo.

As long as we’re talking about intelligent design, here’s today’s Tom Toles:



The Supreme Court let stand a state supreme court ruling allowing newspapers to be sued for accurately reporting false statements made by politicians. This is extremely dangerous. It would be nice if it made them fact-check politicians more, but more likely it will make them even more timid than they already are.

Dude, no one even heard of Kyrgyzstan before last week, they still can’t find it on a map, so I wouldn’t get too worked up over its street cred

Kyrgyz politicians, in a backroom deal, have agreed to retain the newly, but fraudulently, elected parliament, although presumably without the two offspring of Akayev who were elected it. No one seems to be talking about holding new elections, maybe free and fair ones this time. Akayev fired off another email saying the “revolutionaries” have “ruined our nation’s reputation for the entire world.” Yes, Kyrgyzstan’s... reputation.

The Iraqi parliament is due to meet again Tuesday, and then to adjourn again, having again accomplished nothing. 8 weeks since the election and they haven’t agreed on the shape of the conference table yet. And remember, this is the body that’s supposed to write an entire constitution. I think it’s obvious that’s not going to happen; not these people, not in less than 20 years. So what now?

RX: obnoxious paternalistic moralism

How far has Russia come since the days of repressive godless communism. The organizers of an art exhibition at the Andrei Sakharov Museum which was attacked by Russian Orthodox thugs have been fined for blasphemy (the thugs were not charged). The exhibit included an icon with a hole for the face where visitors could put their own faces, a Coca Cola logo next to Jesus’s face with the words “This is my blood,” and so on. So the proper charge should not have been blasphemy but first degree triteness.

Speaking of religious zealots, there have been several articles recently about pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions they morally disagree with, like contraception, or contraception for unmarried women. No word on pharmacists who refuse to sell Viagra to unmarried men.

And verily the Lord said, “There’s Oil in them thar hills. Black gold, Texas tea...”

An Evangelical businessman from Michigan has started a company, Zion Oil and Gas, to drill in the spot in Israel where he thinks the Old Testament says oil is located.

Kyrgyzstan now has two parliaments, with different members and government declaring allegiance to one or the other, and the electoral commission and supreme court on opposite sides. Felix Kulov, who would not have his current job as security chief (and indeed would still be in prison) if not for the protests against the patently rigged elections, says the parliament “elected” in those elections is the legitimate one and threatens to arrest any member of the old parliament who protests (and no, I don’t know how much overlap there is, because no reporter has thought to ask that question). The 2000 parliamentary elections were actually probably not much fairer than this month’s.

Dresden city council wants to require dog owners to register their dogs’ DNA so that any poop not picked up by the owners can be tested.

The notion that this might infringe “canine rights” has been dismissed by Saxony's data protection commissioner, Andreas Schurig, who ruled that as dogs were not human they had no rights over their data and could not object to the compulsory tests.

Michael Jackson explained why he showed up at court in pajamas in an interview with Jesse Jackson. No, I won’t tell you why, I didn’t read the article because I don’t care (and neither should you), but I did want to point out that Jesse Jackson interviewed Michael Jackson about why he wore his jammies to court.

If you haven’t seen this comparison of Tom DeLay and Jesus, run click, do not walk.

Old World Order

Rumsfeld can’t imagine what Venezuela wants with automatic weapons. And Cheney says “Nobody can figure why [the Iranians] need nuclear as well to generate energy.” Yes, it’s all part of a new strategy to preserve American security by making the entire rest of the world... Amish. From Timbuktu to Riyadh to Machu Picchu, it’ll be all buggies and barn-raisings. And quilts, lots of quilts.

The Culture of Life

Egypt announced that it would allow more than one candidate for president run in the September elections. It made this announcement after the deadline for voter registration. Subtle, huh?

Bush finally spoke about the Minnesota school massacre today, in his weekly radio address, after he spent several minutes somehow linking Easter and Christ rising from the dead with the US military. It wasn’t too bad, if a bit generic and a lot late. But what to make of this: “To keep our children safe and protected, we must continue to foster a culture that affirms life and provides love”. Ah yes, the “culture of life,” that term which covers a range of issues from abortion to Terri Schiavo and creates linkages between them, performing the same function for cultural conservatives that the “right to privacy” performs for those who oppose them on these same issues. So in Bush’s latest presentation of the culture of life, the banning of abortion would, presumably, stop future school shootings. Or something. (Actually, it would make the schools more crowded, and crowded with unwanted children at that).

Back to Terri. While some people have doubtless truly deluded themselves into believing she is other than vegetable matter, or that Jesus or Elian Gonzales will come riding in on the back of his magic dolphins and restore her to sentience, I suspect that a great many of the politicians bloviating about this case don’t really want what they say they want. If they “win,” all they’ve got is a brain-dead woman with a feeding tube, not much of a victory prize. If they lose, they’ve got an issue and an icon, poor martyred St. Terri. The fact that this proved not to be a particularly popular issue with the general public may have been a miscalculation, or it may not, because the faithful, for whom this was a crusade, will remember it long after the general public, for whom it was an entertainment, like the Michael Jackson trial, will have forgotten.

Isolated

Condi Rice tells the WaPo that “It’s very important that Russia not get isolated.” Isolation is something with which she often threatens nations. Last month I was startled by her warning to North Korea that it was isolating itself further, when any intelligent observer of the Hermit Kingdom would see a country not eager to be anything other than very isolated indeed. The Russia quote impelled me to search Rice’s speeches on the State Dept website, which brings up such remarks as:

• “It’s the North Koreans who are isolated, not the United States. It’s North Korea that is isolated.”
• “It’s the Iranians that are isolated, not the United States.”
• “we need to remember that the Iranians are the ones who are isolated.” “the Syrians, who I do not believe want to be as isolated as they are now. They are very isolated.”

Etc, etc, etc.

So evidently for this black woman, feeling isolated is the worst possible thing, and can be avoided by conforming to the values of the big boys. Poor Condi, she just needs a hug. Not that I’m offering; that woman scares me.

From: ousteddictator@hotmail.com

NRA vice president Sandra Froman responds to the school shooting in Minnesota by suggesting that teachers be armed. Gee, why didn’t I think of that.

80% of the tsunami fatalities were women.

Kyrgyzstan’s ousted president Akayev insisted he was still president because he hadn’t resigned and that he will return from wherever he’s hiding. In a nicely modern touch, this message came by email. No word on whether Akayev used any emoticons.

Putin denounces the change in government as illegitimate and says in the next breath that he can work with the new illegitimate government. The man who turned Chechnya into a charnel house then denounced the violence in Kyrgyzstan, which so far has mostly consisted of looting and is on a smaller scale than, say, the Rodney King riots.

Rummy’s imagination

Kyrgyz dictator Akayev has been forced to flee by a popular uprising which still hasn’t settled on a name, although it seems now to be more tulip than lemon. He has been replaced by former-cronies-turned-opponents as prime minister and president, so look for the authoritarianism to be dialed back a notch, not for actual democracy. Street protests can create a power vacuum, but that’s it.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld speaks in ominous tones about Venezuela’s efforts to purchase assault rifles. “I can’t imagine what’s going to happen to 100,000 AK-47s,” he said. And then resumed military aid to Guatemala, proclaiming its army a lot less death-squad-y now. I don’t know if this means Rummy can’t imagine what the Guatemalan military will do with its weapons... or that he can.

Terri Schiavo: a modest proposal

I haven’t followed the Robert Blake trial, but I do know that LA County District Attorney Steve Cooley should be forced to resign for saying that the jurors were “incredibly stupid” and the Blake is “guilty as sin.” While both may very well be true, a district attorney doesn’t get to say so. He either believes in the principle that only juries get to decide who is guilty, or he shouldn’t be in the job. His remarks are as unprofessional as Dr. Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist’s video diagnosis of Terri Schiavo.

The LA Times comments that in flying to Washington to sign the Terri Schiavo bill in his jammies, but not saying a word about the Minnesota school massacre, Bush is responding to the demands of his core constituencies: “Conservative Christians pressed Bush to intervene for Schiavo, while the National Rifle Assn. and other gun-owner groups generally look to minimize the relevance of political responses to mass shootings.” So there could be a compromise here. If Terri is as functional as Frist says she is, and if she were to “accidentally” shoot herself while cleaning her gun....

The future

The Pentagon website is particularly grotesque at the moment. The picture they thought appropriate for a story on the “Faces of the Fallen” exhibition at Arlington is this one, because children in camouflage ARE the future.



Next to that is this logo, which evidently depicts a heart with dog tags, not an open zipper and really patriotic genitalia, as I first thought.



If you click on that logo at the DOD site, you go here where there’s a picture of Jamie Farr, MASH’s Corporal Klinger, because men wearing dresses to escape the military ARE the future.

Below that is a link to this story, about 48 new military recruits being publicly sworn in before a crowd of 43,000 at the... wait for it ... Houston Livestock and Rodeo Show. How... appropriate.

And a bit below that is this inanity:

People who have hope plant flowers. And Kabul, Afghanistan, will be blooming this spring, according to Mary Jo Myers, wife of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Afghan women are planting flowers and enjoying the rain that seems to have finally broken the decade-long drought in the country. “Given the importance of flowers in the country, the actions of these women show they have hope for the future of the country,” Mrs. Myers said.

Because these flowers ARE the future of Afghanistan:

Big border

Recently I’ve been seeing these stories about how Bush actually reads books, and does not amuse himself in his off-hours, as most of us had thought, with a ball of string. George, these stories try to convince us, is smarter than we think. But if he’s reading all these big-boy books, why is most of his vocabulary still that of a 3-year old? Today, for example, in a news conference with the heads of Canada and Mexico, Bush kept saying that the US has a “big border” with those countries. Long, you moron, the word is long.

Jeb Bush trotted out a “renowned” neurologist to claim that Terri Schiavo was not without brain function but had “minimal consciousness.” At this precise moment I’m suffering from a surfeit of consciousness, as five million Florida jokes all seek to emerge at once. The doctor himself suffers from false consciousness, telling anyone who will listen that he was a nominee for the Nobel Prize, which he was not.

There’s one significant datum in the Terri Schiavo affair I haven’t seen: the cost of sustaining her vegetable existence year in and year out.

The British elections are moving along nicely, with Michael Howard running a campaign that’s a never-ending quest to find people to attack who are more repugnant to the British public than he is. I check in on the Tory website every few days to see who’s on the menu of hate, and yesterday it was “travellers,” aka gypsies, people who have caravans. Mark Steel of the Indy comments:

Having got through burglars and asylum-seekers, he’s running out and has had to go back to historical groups such as Gypsies, with six weeks still to go. Soon he’ll tell us that decent people are having their lives ruined by hordes of Huguenots. He’ll hold a press conference to say: “I was speaking yesterday to an old-age pensioner who can no longer hear her pet cat crying to come in because of the noise of all the Huguenots in her street speaking Flemish and making cloth. The time has come to say Enough is Enough. If you want to weave - you’ll have to leave’.”

This picture of Blair comes from the Tory website:

God.co.uk is an Englishman

In a great victory for evil drug companies, India’s parliament, under severe pressure, has passed a drug patent law that will result in the deaths of millions of people not only in India but in places like Africa that relied on cheap Indian generic drugs.

To prove how modern and yet traditional he is, Tony Blair spoke at a church today. Well, a “church.co.uk” webcast. With the Catholic church urging Catholics to vote Tory, and Michael Howard advocating reducing the cut-off date for legal abortions from 24 to 20 weeks, Labour had been trying to keep religion out of politics — “We don’t do God,” said Blair’s spin doctor — but evidently God.co.uk is another matter.

After writing that, I checked. There actually is a god.co.uk website, where you can download the New Testament in MP3 format.

Eric Umansky asks if the use of a .gov url makes this
strengtheningsocialsecurity.gov propaganda site illegal. If it makes him feel any better, there’s also, heh heh, a
strengtheningsocialsecurity.com.

A certain investor class

First Draft points out that Bush, so successful in branding critics of No Child Left Behind as racists harboring the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and branding the opponents of the “liberation” of Iraq and the whole Middle East as racists who don’t believe Muslims capable of democracy, is now branding those who oppose “personal” retirement accounts as racists who think “there’s only a certain investor class in America.” So the new motto is “Investment Accounts: Not Just for Jews Anymore.”

The tulip/lemon/kalpak revolution

Dick Cheney thinks this is a reassuring thing to say about Social Security: “In effect, what we are saying is we are going to tie your future as you retire to the overall health and function of the American economy.” I so look forward to spending my retirement checking the stock market prices every morning to see if I get to have the good cat food for dinner.

Kyrgyzstan’s lemon revolution — or possibly tulip revolution, they still haven’t made up their minds, which probably does not bode well for the future — continues. Or, if you listen to the government, “a putsch and a coup” organized by “criminal elements connected to the drug mafia,” which doesn’t sound very tulipy to me.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I am now an expert on Kyrgyzstan. I know that Kyrgyzstan women are “diligent, faithful, good-natured, loyal, responsible, stable, traditional, understanding, intelligent.” And I know that in Kyrgyzstan it’s all about the hats:


The protester in the center is wearing a seized soldier’s helmet, the guy on the right isn’t actually wearing a hat, that’s his real hair, while the guy at the left is wearing what news stories refer to as Kyrgyzstan’s “traditional felt hats,” which are called kalpak. They account for, oh let’s say 98% of the Kyrgyz economy, so the Kyrguys and Kyrgals get very upset if you don’t look good in one:

Other ways

Crowds protesting the, shall we say, flawed elections in Kyrgyzstan (Motto: It’s Pronounced Just like It’s Spelled!), elections backed, naturally, by Vladimir Putin, the patron saint of stolen elections, have taken over the country’s second city, which even they were surprised to find out is named Osh.

Condi Rice says if North Korea doesn’t return to talks, we will have to find “other ways” of making it comply with our wishes. No, I don’t see any reason they’d feel a need to arm themselves with nukes for self-protection, no reason at all.

The Republicans are finally advocating universal health care. In the future, everyone in the country will have a doctor. Unfortunately, they’ll all have the same doctor, Bill Frist, who will glance at a video of them and make an instant diagnosis. Neurology, gastroenterology, opthamology, podiatry (but not gynecology, he’s a good Christian man and not into that sort of thing), you name it and he’ll issue a pompous, ill-informed pronouncement.


More.

Darned careful

Secretary of War Rumsfeld says Iraqis should “be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group.” That describes how George Bush got every job he’s ever had.

Rummy also blames Turkey for the current insurgency, because its refusal to be used as a springboard for the invasion of Iraq slowed us down, allowing “regime elements” to disperse and live to fight another day. The Road to Surfdom points out that this directly contradicts Bush’s “catastrophic success” theory.

Watched a bit of the Terri Schiavo coverage on Fox and it wasn’t too bad, although not terribly competent, saying that the judge in the case was appointed by “President Clinton in 1990.”