Expousing

Bush has reverted to “war on terra.” Guess Global Struggle against Violent Extremism was a bit long for him to remember.

John McCain on the transportation bill: “I wonder what it’s going take to make the case for fiscal sanity here?” That a rhetorical question, Johnnie?

2003 UB313 is not a real planet, sorry Caltech, nice try.

Lots of blogs are linking to the Jean Schmidt interview. They’re focusing on her continuing attacks on Paul Hackett in their Congressional race for “expousing” the philosophy of Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy. It’s hard to believe that she’s ever held legislative office or spoken in public before, but there it is. Expousing. I’m pretty sure she mispronounced nuclear too. A true Bushian. Do they come that ignorant or are they consciously imitating their leader?

Viva Cuba Librium

I thought Eli was exaggerating for dramatic effect, as we bloggers do, when he said that the United States government now has a post of “Cuba Transition Coordinator.” He wasn’t. It really is as blatant as that. The new Cuba Transition Coordinator is one Caleb McCarry (!) and his mission is to “accelerate the demise of Castro’s tyranny.” Condi Rice says we are “working to deny resources to the Castro regime... and to broadcast the truth about its deplorable treatment of the Cuban people.” Which I take to mean we’ll be telling the Cuban people how badly treated they are, because otherwise they might not understand how badly treated they are. A quick googling indicates that Mr. McCarry has already brought democracy to Haiti, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

As ever, I’m impressed by the sophisticated grasp of other cultures and languages displayed by the State Department website, which quotes McCarry thus:

We are committed to seeing the day when Cubans around the world in the fullness of liberty can in every corner of Marti’s homeland speak the words that were born on the lips of Cuba’s first patriots. (Speaking in Spanish.) (Applause.)

Those words that so baffled the monolingual Staties, according to the AFP, were: “Viva Cuba libre.”

Luring men under the pretext of EKG or ultrasound

London Times article on the not-so-creeping Talibanization of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, including banning women voting. The central government keeps saying this sort of thing won’t be tolerated, and then keeps tolerating it. The article leaves out some important details, including the size and population of the province, and, while it mentions that male doctors have been banned from treating female patients, doesn’t say how many female doctors, if any, there are in the province. I know that when this was enacted two years ago, there were no women trained in ultrasound, and just one in EKGs. The worry was that the doctors would be sexually stimulated, and that women would “lure men under the pretext of ECG or ultrasound.” Hoo baby.

There’s a whole big thing going on between Poland and Belarus, which is more than just a diplomatic confrontation since there is a large ethnic Polish population in Belarus. Lukashenko is claiming that not just Poland and Lithuania but the US are actively trying to depose him.

It was on the bottom of the NYT’s front page, but got no play elsewhere: in the run-up to yesterday’s vote on the godawful energy bill, which does nothing to make automobiles more fuel efficient, the EPA delayed the release of an annual report showing that American vehicles are now less fuel-efficient than they were in the 1980s.

Liberty in Samarra

A sure sign that Russia has entered the modern capitalist world: a Russian woman is suing McDonald’s after she was burnt by a cup of coffee. She’s only asking $32,000, so they still have a way to come yet.

The US has imposed a total, indefinite curfew in Samarra after an attack on a convoy. The Press Association story has this line:

“There is currently, and until further notice, no vehicle or pedestrian activity allowed in Samarra,” said a spokesman for Task Force Liberty.

They might want to rethink the name of that task force.

The Israeli Knesset votes to stop Palestinians suing the state for damages inflicted on them by the military. Retroactive to 2000. And also to limit the ability of Israeli women to pass their citizenship to their husbands, if those husbands happen to be Palestinian.

The family of the Brazilian man shot dead by the Metropolitan Police say that he was not in fact wearing a bulky jacket, nor did he jump a ticket barrier, as the police had claimed. Their lawyer, who seems to be a woman named Gareth Peirce, comments that everyone is talking about the “shoot to kill” policy as if it were a legal term with some sort of legitimacy.

Do you want freedom fries with that?

The word of the day at the Pentagon website today is “laud.” One headline: “Secretary Lauds Deployed Servicemembers.” Another: “McDonald’s Lauded for Support.” Evidently that support is “super-sized.” And high in saturated fats. Oh, and McDonald’s D’s “also offers career opportunities to disabled servicemembers and military veterans”. Sarcastic responses to that in comments, please.

Rummy told the future burger-flippers troops that he expected terrorist attacks to increase until the new Iraqi constitution is finalized, oh and until the referendum on it, and gosh who knows, maybe after that as well. And that’s an excellent sign, because suicide bombings are “a sign of weakness” and desperation. Can you believe they’re still pushing that line?

Scotty McClellan justified the White House refusal to turn over various documents written by John Roberts because “we have a responsibility not only to preserve the attorney-client privilege for this administration, but also for future administrations.” “Future administrations,” boy that’s a blast from the Nixonian past, a leaf out of the Big Book O’ Stonewalling. He slyly followed this up by saying that to release the docs would “stifle” the advice given to the solicitor general by his staff in the future, clearly a subtle reference to that staple of the Nixon era, All in the Family, part of a ‘70s nostalgia thing.

By the way, if the president or the solicitor general were the “client” part of the attorney-client relationship, shouldn’t they have paid Roberts’ salary out of their own pockets?

I’ve been reading Prop 73 on California’s November ballot (pdf file), mandating parental notification of abortion for minors. I’d be against this anyway, but there are one or two problems with the judicial bypass provisions: it can take so long that parental notification might become redundant; and if there is any sort of abuse, including “emotional abuse,” the court must inform Protective Services, a provision which seems less about protecting abused pregnant minors than it is a “nuclear option” designed to raise the stakes for girls opting for abortion. The agenda of punishing the little trollops is made even clearer in the ballot argument for the prop.: “When parents are involved and minors cannot anticipate secret access to free abortions they more often avoid the reckless behavior which leads to pregnancies.” Also, the prop. requires doctors to report abortions performed on minors to the state. That can’t be good.

Are you now or have you ever been...?

Chuck Schumer’s list of questions for John Roberts to evade answering, doesn’t suck, although it avoids issues relating to the death penalty and the Second Amendment. Just as Schumer has given Roberts the questions in advance, Roberts should be pressured to give his answers in advance, in writing, so that he may be cross-questioned about them.

So Roberts can’t remember whether he was ever a member of the Federalist Society? How credible is that? There are organizations I once gave some money to but haven’t in 10 or 15 years that still send me “renewal” notices on a regular basis. Here’s the helpful comment of John Cornyn on the subject: “It’s not like being a member of the Communist Party.”

I know that lawyers’ ideas of ethics are not those of normal people, but I was always under the impression that lawyers weren’t supposed to lie in court. So while Roberts may have been arguing the position of the Bush 1 administration, was it ethical to make an argument that Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided and should be overruled” unless he actually believed that position to be correct?

Speaking of lawyers with retarded clients, a jury is being empaneled in Virginia solely to decide whether a man already convicted of murder is mentally retarded or not; if the latter, he will be executed. And while I know it’s a civic duty and all that, let’s face it, we’re all thinking the same thing: a man’s IQ will be determined by a group of people who couldn’t get out of jury duty. The man’s tested IQ has risen from 59 to somewhere in the 70’s, above what counts as retarded in Virginia, an increase which is attributed to the mental stimulation he received by working with his lawyers on his case, mental stimulation entirely lacking from his life previously. Sometimes irony gets you executed. To ensure that the trial not be fair, the judge has ruled that the jury may hear the details of the murder, which are of course entirely irrelevant to determining whether he is retarded.

Pakistani dictator Musharaf claims that “Al-Qaeda does not exist in Pakistan any more.” Although it hasn’t stopped him using the London bombings as an excuse to further criminalize speech acts, which will now be tried in anti-terrorism courts.

There is no conspiracy to shoot people

Bush has called, several times now, for the confirmation process for John Roberts to be “dignified.” First, let’s all take a moment out of our busy day to contemplate Flight Suit Boy lecturing other people about dignity. I can’t even imagine how he defines dignity in this context (but then, I can’t imagine him spelling dignity). Possibly for him, nothing says dignity and gravitas like abject capitulation and subservience, like that butler he always calls Jeeves, whose name is not actually Jeeves, who always says Yes sir, at once sir, in that fruity accent.

Met Chief Sir Ian Blair says the “shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect” policy will remain, acknowledging that a few more innocent civilians may well get wacked, but what the hey. He suggests Londoners cheerfully accept the risk they now face because the intentions of the police who may soon be shooting them in the head are just so darned good: “there is no conspiracy to shoot people.” No indeed, my computer’s dictionary defines a conspiracy as “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful,” and there’s nothing secret about this, Sir Ian just announced the plan before God and everyone.

And in fact Londoners have pretty much done what he suggests. Bionic Octopus points to a comments page on the BBC website which is just full of outpourings of sympathy for the true victims of this whole affair: the poor, poor peelers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes repeatedly in the head.

Fortunately, Pope Benny has prayed for God to stop terrorism, so that should take care of that problem.

It’s only a shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect policy

So on the bottom of a page well inside the Saturday edition of the NYT we find a story to the effect that American forces are involved in military operations in the Philippines. Are they actually in combat, as “numerous reports” say, or merely supplying intelligence and communications support, as the military claims? Who knows? Who can even keep track of how many countries the US military operates in? Didn’t we send troops into Yemen at some point? I’m just saying it would be nice to know precisely how many wars and civil wars we’re participating in.

Metropolitan police chief Sir Ian Blair sort of admits the shoot-to-kill policy and says, yeah, they’ll probably wind up shooting a few other innocent people. The “sort of” is because what he actually said was, “I am very aware that minority communities are talking about a shoot-to-kill policy. It’s only a shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect policy.” So that’s ok, then.

The word in that sentence that makes it high comedy: “only.”

I don’t know anybody in America who is pro-abortion

The White House has been lobbying in favor of retaining the military’s right to engage in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners. It would have been interesting to hear what exactly Cheney said to former POW John McCain, the sponsor of the proposed legislation, in support of the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners.

Speaking of cruel, inhuman and degrading, Howard Dean has signed on to the Hillary Clinton suck-up–to-anti-abortionists position, telling college D’s, “I think we need to talk about this issue differently. The Republicans have painted us as a pro-abortion party. I don’t know anybody in America who is pro-abortion.” He should get out more. “You have to respect people’s positions of conscience,” he said, failing to add, “especially when those people want to impose those ‘positions of conscience’ on other people.”

Plain-clothes London police chased and shot dead a Brazilian man yesterday. Today they fessed up that it was all a big misunderstanding, which is refreshing compared to, say, the LAPD, which recently shot dead a baby held by a man with a gun and won’t admit there was anything wrong with that, or the LA County Sheriffs, who fired 120 rounds at an unarmed black man in Compton in May (without killing him, so they’re trigger happy and they can’t hit the side of a barn, a perfect combination), and don’t think they violated his civil rights. The Peelers now seem to have a policy where if they see someone doing something suspicious near some form of mass transit, like a dark-skinned man running away when he suddenly finds himself being chased by a mob of people not wearing police uniforms, they will shoot him in the head, in case he was planning to detonate something.

The clearest orders I have ever received

Billmon has a must-read post on the Patriot Act, which the House today voted 257-171 to extend and to make most of it permanent.

A CIA agent has a book out in which he says that one week after 9/11, he was on a plane to Afghanistan with a team of agents and $3m in hundreds, with orders to bring back Osama bin Laden’s head – literally. The agent, Gary Schroen, claims to have responded, “Sir, those are the clearest orders I have ever received. I can certainly make pikes out in the field but I don’t know what I’ll do about dry ice to bring the head back - but we’ll manage something.” It’s that can-do spirit that made America great.

For a can of beans and a dickhead to be named later.

Stepping up

Rumsfeld, talking about the assassination of the two Sunnis: “the perspective I would give to it is the fact that these kinds of problems have occurred month after month after month, and yet, we always see more people step up to participate in the elections, more people step up to participate in the Iraqi Transitional Assembly and to run for public office, more people step up to serve in the Iraqi security forces.” So that’s his version of optimism: we haven’t run out of Iraqis yet.

Manhandling Condi’s staff

BBC headline: “US Fury as Sudan Manhandles Staff.” Sounds really gay to me, but you’ve gotta appreciate the sense of proportion. Genocide in Sudan? Sure, whatever, blah blah. But push around some staffers, and face the wrath of the Condi.

A “good” law

On C-SPAN today I saw some of Bush’s latest speech calling for renewal of every last creepy provision of the PATRIOT Act. He said this was “no time to roll back good laws”. He called the Act “good” twice, and while that may mean he simply has a diminutive vocabulary (as I just found out while trying to locate the quote, he used the word good a goodly number of times in the course of the speech), it’s not really a word you’d expect even the Act’s supporters to apply to it. It infringes on people’s freedoms and privacies, so you might argue that it’s a necessary evil, but a positive good?

So two Sunnis on the drafting committee for the Iraqi constitution were assassinated, four others have quit in protest/fear, but the head of the committee says everything is “on schedule.” Sure, if the schedule said, “Tuesday: shoot Sunnis.” Which it probably did. Given that the drafters have been quietly dismantling women’s freedoms, and threatening to do the same to Kurdish autonomy, I’m happy to see the process fail completely.

A German man lost a court case in which he demanded the state provide him a toupee, claiming discrimination since the state insurance system would provide a wig for a bald woman. The court ruled that the state need pay only “when a bald head disfigures a person so severely that they would be ostracised from public life. That is not the case with men.” Indeed.

Refusing to choose

Two of the Sunnis who were cajoled into serving on the committee drawing up the Iraqi constitution have been assassinated. Although in Iraq, that may simply be part of the constitutional process.

Except for the last couple of years, John Roberts has been a hired gun, so it’s hard to tell how many of the heinous positions he’s argued over the years coincide with his own views. Especially since, I predict, he will stonewall the Senate like it’s never been stonewalled before. Don’t bother watching the Senate hearings, nothing will be learned there.

Here’s one hint: Kevin at American Street reports that Roberts’ wife used to be a veep at something called Feminists for Life, which does not signify life-long feminism but opposition to abortion, “if you refuse to choose between women and children”, its website says, next to a deliberately misleading quote from Susan B. Anthony intended to make her sound like an anti-abortion advocate. “Women deserve better than abortion,” their site says. “We are dedicated to systematically eliminating the root causes that drive women to abortion,” they say, which is both a disempowering notion that women don’t choose but are “driven,” and it’s the Hillary et al position about reducing abortion taken very slightly further--just a couple of baby steps, if you will.

Merit

My computer is in the shop, with a perfectly good draft post sitting on it, which I will now attempt to recreate.

On the same day that Bush announces his new standard, under which Rove won't be fired unless he is actually convicted of a crime in a court of law, the WaPo has this headline: "Bush Aims to Expand System of Merit Pay." George, define "merit" for us.

Asked about it yesterday, Bush said something (only 30 minutes online in the public library, no time to look it up!) about wanting to get all the facts before acting. Too easy to make fun of. (Update: "And I think it’s best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. And I will do so, as well. I don’t know all the facts. I want to know all the facts. The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who’s spending time investigating it.")

Speaking of knowing all the facts, Tony Blair, says the Guardian, "At last week's cabinet meeting, Mr Blair likened Islamic extremism to the Trotskyist Militant Tendency that infiltrated Labour in the 80s, and argued it was only when the party recognised the depth of the infiltration that a tough counter-strategy was implemented." Yeah, Islamic terrorists, Trotskyists, same dif, both beardies.

Contest

In comments, Mike Capone asks if a worse name could have been found for an organization than “Nashis.” With uncharacteristic brevity, I responded, “No.” But then I got to wondering if it was in fact possible, and while I couldn’t come up with anything, I thought I’d see if the collective perversity of my readership could do better. Responses in comments, please, and extra points if the initials are NAMBLA or something funny.

Defusing tensions

Best headline of the day, from the BBC: “China to Send Pig Sperm to Space.” Everyone has to have a hobby, I suppose.

The “Council of Sages” in Haiti wants Aristide’s party banned from elections.

Condi Rice is going to the Middle East to “defuse tensions.” Dunno, Condi doesn’t really seem like a defusing-tensions kind of person.



It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with the Putin Youth Movement, aka the “Nashis.” The Times has a story about the Nashi summer camp, at which 3,000 of Vlad’s Impalers (they use the term “commisars”) have been training to fight back the barbarian hordes.


Here’s the head of the Nashis, interviewed by Moscow News about the funding for the camp:

Everyone knows that the Kremlin supports Nashi, everyone knows that the president met with our commissars. The support of the Kremlin allows us to talk with any businessmen and to get financial support. To refuse financial support for our project would be viewed as an unpatriotic decision.

The Tom DeLay school of fundraising.

Necessary and appropriate force, and sex with horses

Because there can never be enough invocations of the Holocaust in political dialogue, Gaza settlers have taken to writing their i.d. numbers on their arms as a protest against being asked to show their i.d.’s, part of an effort to prevent the nut-jobs flooding the settlements with protesters against the pull-out. The settlers, poor sensitive lambs that they are, say they feel as if they are in ghettoes.


A panel of the Court of Appeals rules that military commissions can resume trying prisoners in Guantanamo. This is victor’s justice so naked that I’m not sure what function a court of law even plays. The court rules that the Geneva Conventions “do not create judicially enforceable rights.” American military law doesn’t apply either: although the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires that detainees be tried in the same way as American soldiers, the court says that different rules can be applied, like not showing the detainee the evidence against him. The court finds Bush’s power to disregard the rule of law in the resolution (note: not a law) passed by Congress giving Bush authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for 9/11, and any other terrorist types. What the court is saying is that those words cover any sorts of arbitrary acts that Bush’s chimp-like mind can conceive.

Enough with the frivolity. This here is a blog, and as such I am bound by law and blogger standards & practices to present to you this story: a man in Seattle has died after having anal sex with a horse. Cause of death was a perforated colon, which I guess answers the question raised by the phrase “anal sex.” Bestiality is legal in Washington, which explains a lot. The man had his little... encounter ... on a farm that specializes in that sort of thing.

Oh, the horse is ok.

Acts (of Parliament) preparatory to fascism

Tony Blair will introduce a new thought crime: “indirect incitement to commit terrorist acts.” Indirect incitement could hardly be more subjective, which just makes the chilling effect that much greater. Courts will be expected to consider elements such as tone and glorification of terrorism. According to the minister introducing the measure, “It would depend on what words were used. Were they an endorsement, were they a glorification? In some cases, the tone of your endorsement might take it into glorification.” There will also be a new crime of “acts preparatory to terrorism,” such as receiving training abroad or accessing certain websites.

The Teflon Terminator tarnished

Edward Wong begins his NYT story about the continuing strength of insurgency in Fallujah with this excellent first sentence: “Transformed into a police state after last winter’s siege, this should be the safest city in all of Iraq.” He then treats the fact that Fallujah is still being run by the Americans as a police state slash prison camp as unproblematic. In fact, you get the sense that it’s the damned foreigners who keep mucking it up. The Iraqi regime, for example, has only disbursed 1/5 of the money that was supposed to go to rebuild the city, and none for the last several months. And the very last paragraph of the long article quotes a Fallujan sheik accusing the Iraqi army of killing people: “They’re killing people. They’re shooting people in the head. You’re not in the street. You don’t see what’s happening.” And neither is the NYT, which is why that charge goes completely uninvestigated.

Bush, responding to a question about whether he still planned to fire whoever leaked Valerie Plame’s name: “Yes, and that’s up to the US attorney to find the facts.” I always thought an employer had some responsibility to supervise the actions of his employees. No reporter seems to have asked Bush if he has ever asked Rove whether he did it or not.

Although Schwarzenegger’s many acts of sexual assault didn’t much damage his reputation, he does seem to be in some trouble for his little magazine deal. His handlers are having to explain that he’s still primarily focused on the people’s business, that he was really expected to do very little actual work for the $8m they were paying him. The problem, of course, is that that just makes it look more like a bribe.