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Arnold Schwarzenegger announces that he will run for re-election. Imagine my relief.
That banner says “Rebuild California,” which evidently no one considered an inappropriate metaphor in the light of Katrina. But then they’re not known for sensitivity or good taste in Team Terminator, whose website (meaningless and badly punctuated slogan: “Let’s Reform California So That Together, We Can Rebuild It”) features this remarkably creepy image.
Hugo Chavez on Nightline tonight.
The US decertifies Venezuela as a country helping the US on drugs (keep in mind that Venezuela, unlike Colombia or Peru, doesn’t actually produce any coca, but coca does transit Venezuelan territory on the way to the US). Here’s what I like about the State Dept statement: it says the people in charge of anti-narcotics efforts “were fired and replaced with Chávez loyalists who lack the necessary training.” Cuz the Bush admin is definitely opposed to that sort of thing.
Today was the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. I hope you all prayed and remembered, in accordance with federal law.
The Cabinet that prays together, stays together.
On the Pentagon website we learn that “Terror Occurs During Times of Iraqi Progress, General Says.” Must be a definition of progress with which I’m not familiar. General Rick Lynch (what is it with these guys’ names?) says that the recent epidemic of car-bombs is “predictable around the times that highlight progress towards democracy.” So that’s ok then. If they were so predictable, what is it you did to prevent them? Lynch says that counterinsurgency operations usually take a decade to succeed. That would be 2013. He said the terrorists have “zero effect” against Iraqi, US and coalition forces and so target civilians instead. That’ll be news to the 23+ Iraqi police and Interior Ministry commandos killed today alone. Perhaps they can have “zero effect” engraved on their tombstones.
Now, this is why I read the British newspapers. The Times provides the information that the bathroom Bush went to after handing the famous note to Condi “is famous in UN circles because a high-ranking protocol official once allegedly tried to fondle a messenger boy there.” In a further burst of journalistic exuberance, The Times interviews a urologist who says that when you gotta go, you gotta go. And they have a separate article on the importance of peeing and farting in diplomatic history.
The British government, having learned exactly nothing from the many miscarriages of justice perpetrated during the war against the IRA in the 1980s, or worse, not caring, is planning to use “supergrasses” against Islamic terrorists. For those who don’t remember, supergrasses were IRA members who testified against their former compatriots in exchange for immunity and money on such generous terms that perjury was inevitable.
And it gets better: Tony Blair is, as we know, planning to outlaw the glorification of terrorist acts. So they’re going to draw up a list of terrorist acts which can’t be legally glorified until 20 years later, except for 9/11, which there is an indefinite ban on glorifying, but you can go ahead and glorify the Easter Rising (Dublin, 1916) if you like.
What makes the sight of John Roberts refusing over and over to answer any substantive question is that it reeks of a sense of entitlement. In his mind the default position in this process is that he be confirmed, that is, that unless they can find something seriously wrong with him, they must confirm him, rather than that he must convince them that he is worthy of this job. I think the default position should be rejection, and if he isn’t willing to provide enough information that senators can see how he’d perform in the job, rejection is what it should be. He has tried to portray their attempt to ask him legitimate questions as a corrupt act:
It is not a process under which senators get to say, I want you to rule this way, this way and this way. And if you tell me you’ll rule this way, this way and this way, I’ll vote for you. That’s not a bargaining process. Judges are not politicians. They cannot promise to do certain things in exchange for votes.
Judges aren’t politicians? Funny, because demeaning the motives of your senatorial inquisitors like that, Swift-Boating them, looks a lot like politics to me.
Bush finally goes to New Orleans, having ensured himself of a non-hostile reception by emptying the city entirely. Did you like how he color-coordinated his shirt with the color of the lighting on the buildings? Did you like the statue of Andrew Jackson over his left shoulder? Did you pay much attention to what he said in that robotic voice? Me neither. I could swear he promised to rebuild church steeples. I bestirred myself to take a couple of notes. “We have seen our fellow citizens left stunned and uprooted.” I’m pretty sure you were already stunned, and ok, so you were “uprooted” from your vacation a couple of days early, we’re sorry you were inconvenienced.
He acknowledged that “As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well.” Poverty for Bush is always something he saw once on the teevee.
He called for a Gulf Opportunity Zone (GOZ), where there will be a few incentives for “entrepreneurs” (or storm profiteers, call them what you will), and, I’m gonna guess, a lot of relaxed labor and environmental regulations. He wants an “urban homesteading act” to give away some federal land in the region by lottery. Two weeks and that’s the best they came up with? And a generous $5,000 for job training and education (and child care while they’re looking for work). Funny, I thought the reason they have no jobs was this fucking big hurricane, not that they were untrained and uneducated.
And something about how the federal government was only prepared for a “normal” hurricane, and this wasn’t a normal one, it had, like, super-powers. And he ended by talking about New Orleans jazz funerals. He really shouldn’t be talking about New Orleans jazz funerals.
This poster is currently on display in the University of Colorado at Boulder, sponsored by the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.
William Saletan explains how John Roberts affirmed a right to privacy in a way that stripped it of any actual meaning.
The Iraqi justice minister, Abdul Hussein Shandal, has been complaining that the US military keeps arresting people and detaining them without any warrant from an Iraqi judge. Isn’t it cute when the natives pretend they’re in charge? He’s also bitching about the extraterritoriality (immunity from Iraqi laws) (defined by the distinguished jurist Stephen Sondheim in these terms:
...your laws
Do not apply
When we drop by;
Not getting shot,
No matter what:
A minor scrape,
A major rape,
And we escape.
That’s what is extraterritoriality.)
that the UN granted to American military forces (and Bremer extended to the various imported mercenaries, security guards, soldiers of fortune etc). He’s also been talking about removing the latters’ right to carry firearms without a license, so he’s obviously some sort of communist. And he criticized the US for arresting journalists. Oh yeah, definitely a pinko.
Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in. Sure John Roberts is deadly dull, but Biden emotes enough for the both of them. And then there’s Tom Coburn. You might think that to become both a doctor and a senator, you’d have to be something other than a complete idiot. You’d be wrong. (Hazzah and kudos, by the way, to the Daily Show for skewering this homophobic ass yesterday). Somehow he weaseled his way onto the Judiciary Committee, where he addressed these remarks to John Roberts:
As you have been before our committee, I’ve tried to use my medical skills of observation of body language to ascertain your uncomfortableness and ill at ease with questions and responses. ... And I will tell you that I am very pleased, both in my observational capabilities as a physician to know that your answers have been honest and forthright as I watch the rest of your body respond to the stress that you’re under.
But not in, like, a gay way, cuz we know Coburn isn’t down with the gayness, though he does have an odd fixation on lesbians in high school bathrooms. Coburn also had some point or other to make about the concept of brain-death, possibly having something to do with Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, and asked Roberts, “Would you agree that the opposite of being alive is being dead?” Roberts took a moment, and then agreed.
For a state somewhere between life and death, we must look to Guantanamo, where the hunger strike now involves more than 1/4 of the prisoners. According to Sgt. Justin Behrens, a military spokesmodel, talking about forcible feeding, and presumably intending to sound reassuring rather than threatening, “We’re going to take care of everyone.”
Other NATO countries are resisting American pressure to expand NATO’s role in Afghanistan beyond “peacekeeping” to offensive operations against the Taliban (Rumsfeld wants to reduce the American contingent without reducing the number of occupation troops). Rummy says “it would be nice if Nato developed counter-terrorist capabilities.” Nice. Violence in Afghanistan is increasing, but unless they target Americans no attention is paid in the US, where most people have forgotten that we’re still occupying Afghanistan. With elections coming up Sunday, there has been none of the usual rhetoric from Bush about purple fingers, 90-year olds braving the terrorists to cast their ballots, etc., presumably because he doesn’t want scrutiny of an election process that will not look especially democratic and which will return some quite unsavory warlords. Karzai said that it was ok that warlords hadn’t been expunged from the ballot, since voters could simply refuse to vote for them. Several former Taliban officials are also running, including the foreign minister, who had been held by the Americans for three years, and the head of the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, who claims to have been misunderstood, why he wasn’t against girls being educated, they just didn’t have the money for it.
In a speech last week, which I keep forgetting to blog, Bush praised the efforts in relieving Katrina victims of the faith-based community and the “community-based community.”
Speaking of faith-based, Bush – that’s him in his bar mitzvah suit – celebrated the history of Jews in American life today.
Whoever’s in charge of the White House website is also down with the Jewish people, quoting Bush thus: “This may sound a little odd for a Methodist from Texas saying this, but I just came from shool [sic!].” Bush took the opportunity to blast “the desecration of synagogues in Gaza that followed Israel’s withdrawal.”
I’m surprised, but I shouldn’t be, at how many headlines I’ve seen like this typical one, from the WaPo: “Bush Takes Storm Responsibility.” As if he hadn’t coupled it with a non-acknowledgment that there were any mistakes to take responsibility for, and as if it actually meant anything. We’re so starved for a little accountability that even the miming of a pretense of a mockery of a sham of a simulacrum of accountability makes people who should know better go weak at the knees.
Speaking of a pretense of a mockery of an etcetera, I’ve given up on watching the Roberts confirmation hearings. They ask questions, he doesn’t answer them, gets old real fast, and you’re left watching his bland-beyond-bland face, which takes “normal” to such an extreme that it becomes something else entirely, like Terry O’Quinn in “The Stepfather,” a comparison only reinforced by how he’s got his family dressed.
Here he locks down Bill Frist’s vote by describing his cat-strangling technique.
Bush, on Katrina: “To the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility.” The conditional means that if we ask what it is he’s actually taking responsibility for, we’re playing the blame game. Or if we ask what “taking responsibility” actually entails, since I assume he’s not planning to resign and join Michael Brown in that stiff margarita. Also, George, you already took responsibility when you took the oath of office; don’t come in today acting like it’s optional.
Laura Bush tells the Heritage Foundation that the evacuees from Katrina are all thankful for how well they’ve been treated. “And that’s what I’ve seen at each of the shelters I’ve visited. I’ve never heard a single word of complaint.” But then she also thought the hurricane was named Corinna, so clearly an ear examination is in order. Or possibly she couldn’t hear the words of complaint over the voices in her head.
The Metropolitan Police say that, despite their murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, the shoot to kill policy is the “least worst option” and will be retained. But not explained to the British public, who don’t know what the “rules of engagement” are under which the police operate, that is, what they have to do in order not to be shot in the head seven or eight times. So to my British readers: good luck with that, and try not to make any sudden movements.
Don’t hate me for this, but I have to pass on the grossest news story of the week: “A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe”. Collagen.
662 Russian soldiers have died this year, not counting those killed in Chechnya. 182 suicides, and who knows how many of the rest “hazed” to death. That is one seriously fucked up army.
The Israelis have sort of ended their occupation of the Gaza, unless you count the borders, the airspace, water supply, power supply, and their claim to have the right to send in the IDF any time they feel like it. Still, Gazan children can bathe in the Mediterranean for the first time, which is not nothing. Synagogues and settlements are ablaze. The last thing the IDF did Sunday before leaving was to put new signs on the former saying “Holy Place” in English and Arabic but not, you’ll notice, Hebrew, allowing Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom (in Hebrew, shalom means hello, goodbye and hypocritical douchebag) to decry “This... barbaric act by people with no respect for holy places.”
Schwarzenegger, defending his $45m special election: “People say it’s a waste of money to have the election. I say it’s a waste of democracy not to have an election.” Um, does that actually mean anything?
John Roberts: “I come before the committee with no agenda.” Funny, I never heard of him working for a Democratic administration. He’s been a Republican hack lawyer from the start. Suddenly we’re supposed to ignore his entire life before he started wearing black robes to work two years ago, just like we’re supposed to ignore Shrub’s life before he turned 40. Also, “ump,” enough with the baseball metaphors. We’ve heard about all the confirmation coaches he’s been spending his time with, and I strongly doubt there was even a word of his oh-so-unthreatening opening statement that came from his own pen and hadn’t been focus-grouped, including his claim to be a mere umpire: “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” You’ll notice his speech writers didn’t include a mention of home runs, and it’s the home runs he’s planning to call for Chimpy that worry me. This whole “judges are umpires” line may play well in the country, but anyone who knows anything more about the Supreme Court than that there are nine of them and they wear black robes knows it to be arrant nonsense.
As I write, Orrin Hatch is giving a long speech to John Roberts, imploring him not to answer any questions.
Bush finally goes to New Orleans, the town he used to get drunk in. He does so in order to look all manly and in-controlly.
Sorry, don’t know how that got in there. The real picture:
He went armed with a set of canned responses. Like everything else from this administration lately, they arrived a week late and were totally inadequate. Asked how racial considerations affected the response to Katrina, he sidestepped the issue and responded to an absurd accusation no one actually made: “The storm didn’t discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort. When those Coast Guard choppers ... were pulling people off roofs, they didn’t check the color of a person’s skin, they wanted to save lives.”
And after a week, here’s what Karl Rove came up with as an explanation for Bush’s remarks that no one anticipated the breaching of the levees: he meant AFTER the storm had bypassed New Orleans, when it was said that it had “dodged a bullet.” That’s not what he said, that’s not what he meant, he’s fooling no one.
Asked about federal failures, he snapped that the reporter was playing the blame game. Another reporter specifically asked him to name a single thing, just one, that had gone wrong. He stood in the middle of all that wreckage and devastation (his credibility I mean, although yeah New Orleans looked pretty trashed too) and couldn’t think of even one.
(Update: Here’s his answer to that one, in its full gibberishy glory:
Oh, I think there will be plenty of time to analyze, particularly the structure of the relationship between government levels. But, again, there’s -- what I think Congress needs to do -- I know Congress needs to do -- and we’re doing this internally, as well -- is to take a sober look at the decision-making that went on. And what I want the people of this state and the state of Mississippi to understand is that we’re moving forward with relief plans. And we’re going to move forward with reconstruction plans, and we’re going to do so in a coordinated way. And it’s very important for the folks of New Orleans to understand that, at least as far as I’m concerned, this great city has got ample talent and ample genius to set the strategy and set the vision. And our role at the federal government is -- obviously, within the law -- is to help them realize that vision. And that’s what I wanted to assure the Mayor.)
And I’m sure he felt very assured indeed.)
From WaPo, “World in Brief”:
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Soldiers who fired at the defense minister’s convoy Saturday were not trying to assassinate him, but were shooting at other troops they were angry with, a government spokesman said.
“It was not an assassination attempt on the defense minister,” Gen. Mohammed Saher Azimi, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference. “It was just a clash between soldiers.”
So that’s ok then.
From the same section comes more evidence of the benefits of privatization: the privatized Nicaraguan electricity company, now owned by a Spanish multinational, not being allowed to increase rates, has started “rationing” electricity, blacking out the capital (this is also indirect Katrina fallout, as most of Nicaragua’s electric plants are oil-fueled; expect a lot more of this throughout the Third World).
Bush is thinking, “I was told there’d be balloon animals.”
The WaPo Saturday
on security contractors/mercenaries in Iraq is a must-read.
From the Sunday Times:
The world testicle cooking championships have fallen victim to a hoax. Kangaroo testicles were specially imported for an contestant who phoned the organiser claiming to be Australia’s top testicle chef, but he never showed up for the competition in Serbia. “We were disappointed when no Australians arrived,” says organiser Gornji Milanovac. “We even had a band ready to welcome them”. Co-organiser Ljubomir Erovic said: “We would like to compare the testicles of a kangaroo to those of wild boars and bulls.”
Another September 11 is upon us, a sort of anti-July 4th in which we celebrate our collective victimhood. It’s a sullen, unlovely form of nationalism. Bush said in his Saturday radio address, speaking of 9/11/01, “Every American has memories of that day that will never leave them.” Yeah, I remember watching it on CNN on a tv screen from 3,000 miles away. Really, I no more have “memories” of the attacks than I do of Luke destroying the Death Star (one good thing you can say about Vader’s management style: Michael Brown wouldn’t have lasted very long. “But Lord Vader, I sent you a report, ‘Skywalker determined to attack inside the Death Staaaarrrrgh.’”). Let’s not pretend it was something every American went through; most of us were just spectators.
Bush continued, “And in the days and weeks that followed, America answered history’s call to bring justice to our enemies and to ensure the survival and success of liberty. And that mission continues today.” In other words, still haven’t caught that bin Laden fella.
“Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and loss of life.” FEMA? Michael Brown? You? “This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind.” Notice how he anthropomorphizes nature, attributing “fury” to it for rhetorical balance to “malice”? You know in private he refers to Hurricane Katrina as an “evildoer.” The man is a Manichean down to his toes, just could not exist without an enemy to define himself against.
The underlying message, of course, is “You guys liked me after the last disaster, really rallied around and stopped criticizing me all the time, why can’t it be like that again?” But like Fat Elvis doing a medley of his hits when he was Thin Elvis, it’s not really working anymore.
Not with the general public anyway. Joe Lieberman will still roll over for his tummy to be rubbed, and a Fourth Circuit panel just ruled that Bush can detain any American citizen “enemy combatant.” The opinion said that Jose Padilla was “associated with Al Qaeda, an entity with which the United States is at war.” How many problematic words can you find in that sentence? “Entity” is the lynchpin from which the problematicity of the other words derives, because by refusing to define what exactly Al Qaeda is (the word entity means, literally, something which exists; where words like navy or school or legislature or wife-swapping club give you some idea what those organizations do, the word entity only tells you that it exists), it’s hard to say what being at war with it means or what constitutes being “associated” with it. The Bush admin uses these calculated ambiguities to insist on being allowed the maximum discretion to define who the “enemy combatants” are and what it can do with them, and the court has given it exactly that.
And no, problematicity isn’t a real word, but you all knew what I meant.
Still refusing to admit that Brownie is an incompetent fuck-up, Chertoff spins his “reassignment” to a nice quiet office far away from where he can do damage thus: “Michael Brown has done everything he possibly could.” And the sad thing is that probably really is everything he could do. He has now been tasked to stay in his office and make paper-clip chains, which he’s been told are vitally important to the rescue work.
And of course he’ll continue to get a hefty paycheck for that vitally important work, as opposed to the people who actually haul away wreckage, restore electricity, etc. I’ll be interested to see how much play is given to Bush’s suspending the Davis-Bacon Act in order to let Halliburton (and other federal contractors) pay its workers in the storm-damaged areas less than the prevailing wage. My gift to the unions is a term I just made up that should be applied to this and future attempts to screw workers using the pretext of “national emergency”: storm profiteering.
Hunger-striking prisoners are being forcibly fed by tube in Guantanamo. Guantanamo spokesmodel Maj. Jeff Weir says, “No detention facility in the world will deliberately let their people commit suicide, so we can’t let that happen.” Obviously he’s never heard of Bobby Sands and the other 9 IRA men who were indeed allowed to starve themselves to death in 1980. This is a form of torture which is considered by the medical profession (and more importantly, by me) to be unethical when the hunger striker is not insane. The military seems to be unclear, or lying, about the numbers involved in the strike, and didn’t see fit to inform the outside world until the second month of the strike, and Weir claims not to know their demands.
Iraqi “president” Talabani says that US troops are needed in Iraq not only to fight insurgents, but also “to frighten our neighbours and prevent them from interfering in our internal affairs”.
Time says most of Brownie’s resumé was hash. Geddit, hash brownie? Other, competent people have now been appointed to do the job for which Brown will evidently still be getting a paycheck. Bush had his chance to fire Brown and offload some of the blame onto him, but it’s a little late in the (blame) game now, to say nothing of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” and “What didn’t go right last week?” but possibly he’s trying to game the blame game, figuring that if he attributes all the incompetence so far to Brown and fires him but things continue to be as fubar as ever, then he might be in trouble. A good scapegoat is hard to find.
The Iraqis are still negotiating the text of the constitution, and the UN is refusing to print it for the citizens who are supposed to be voting on it, since it was never ratified by the National Assembly.
The WaPo reports on the stringent security arrangements for the DOD’s 9/11 Freedom Walk and Hootenanny, or whatever they’re calling it. There will be walls and cops to keep out people who didn’t register with the Pentagon, and the press will be restricted. “Freedom” – the thing “they” hate us for – post-9/11-style. At the Pentagon website you can still “register to walk.” Ever since I first saw that, I’ve been itching to juxtapose it to a picture of a veteran in a wheelchair who can’t, you know, walk. My regular readers may be surprised to find that there are some things too tacky even for me (I also thought it would be disrespectful to use someone’s image for my own political ends like that).
Also on the Pentagon website, “Cheney Impressed by Can-Do Attitude of Katrina Survivors.” Everyone he met, he said, “is positive and upbeat.” The International Herald Tribune not too subtly says “Standing before piles of debris, he said that ‘the progress we’re making is significant’”.
Caption contest:
Chimpy has finally leapt into action, declaring a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, although oddly enough for next Friday. If it takes 8 whole days to prepare for prayer (try saying that ten times fast), it can only be because FEMA is making the arrangements. (Update: the Poor Man finds some irony.)
Lou Dubose article on the eerily familiar failures of FEMA under Bush the Elder and the rebuilding of the agency by Clinton, who urged Congress not to let, ahem, future presidents dump their cronies, and college roommates of their cronies, on the agency: “In any future administrations, I challenge you as members of Congress to never let a director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency be appointed and confirmed without having the background of emergency management and that experience.” Dubose doesn’t mention the contribution of Ronald Reagan, who redirected FEMA’s focus away from natural disasters and towards building bomb shelters and preparing for the Reagan myth of a survivable and indeed “winnable” nuclear war, a myth Bush Senior believed in (Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, page 29). We heard a lot of dark muttering in those days about the Moscow subway system, in which Russians would huddle cozily until the radiation went away, emerging as the new Red Overlords of a world of mutated cockroaches, or something like that. FEMA was cheerily optimistic about its ability to cope with nuclear holocaust with, as Scheer’s title quote puts it, enough shovels. Here’s a FEMA report from December 1980: “With reasonable protective measures, the United States could survive nuclear attack and go on to recover within a relatively few years.” (p. 111) Not that that cockeyed optimism has completely gone away.
From the BBC: “Dick Cheney has arrived on the country’s Gulf coast for a tour of the areas worst affected by Hurricane Katrina. Mr Cheney will review whether enough is being done to tackle the disaster... His visit comes as 25,000 body bags are sent to New Orleans”.
Schwarzenegger plans to veto the gay marriage bill, not because he is against gay marriage, why heaven forfend, but because the voters passed a ballot measure in March 2000 not to recognize gay marriages entered into outside California. Very respectful of “the will of the people” (it does not sound better in the original German) is the governator, except perhaps for the November 2002 re-election of Gray Davis. Der Arnold is of course trying to have it both ways, claiming to be a friend of the gays, why he’s perfectly happy to let them marry, it’s just his pesky constitutional scruples that get in the way. The LAT asks, “Schwarzenegger has also indicated that this is an issue best left to voters and the courts, not mere lawmakers. Does he not believe in the American system of representative democracy?” That’s a trick question, right? The gay marriage bill’s author, Mark Leno, says Arnie is “pandering to the far right.” He makes it sound so... dirty.
George Skelton points out that the California electorate voted in 1964 to overturn the Legislature’s recent ban on racial discrimination in housing.
Sen. John Cornyn says of the second Supreme Court vacancy, “I don’t know whether John Roberts has a twin, perhaps a sister or, uh, someone with a Hispanic last name.” So hilarious, and not racist or sexist or terminally cynical at all.
Jon Stewart says that those who don’t want to play the “blame game”... are the ones who are to blame.
Did the military really set up a recruitment drive among the refugees in the Astrodome? Fucking vultures.
More London Review of Books personals:
My ad comes in the medium of whistles: ppfffttttt, ssshhhhhhhwwwwt, peeffwt, pfftpt. Man. 36. Bad at whistling. Box no. 17/02
Employed in publishing? Me too. Stay the hell away. Man on the inside seeks woman on the outside who likes milling outside hospitals guessing illnesses of out-patients. 30-35. Leeds Box no. 17/08
Don't speak, you'll only destroy my already low opinion of you. And put your pants back on. And your wig. Terminally disappointed woman (38, Barnstaple) WLTM a man. Form a queue, then I'll negotiate the criteria. Box no. 16/03
Gynotikolobomassophile (M, 43) seeks neanimorphic F to 60 to share euneirophrenia. Must enjoy pissing off librarians (and be able to provide the correct term for same). Box no. 16/04
American man, 57. I just want a girlfriend. What the hell is going on here? Box no. 16/08
[More of my LRB favorites here.]
The interesting thing about the California Legislature’s vote in favor of legalizing gay marriage is that it was almost entirely partisan, with the support of 41 of 47 Democrats (with only 4 against and 2 abstaining) and zero Republicans (1 abstaining).
The Miami Herald notes that the US plan to “contain” Hugo Chávez isn’t working. The Herald is happy to pass along that “administration officials say they’re unwilling to reveal the most damning evidence against Chávez for fear of compromising intelligence sources.” Oo, where have we heard that one before. I’ve been trying to track for a while how serious the Bushies are about overthrowing Chavez, and the Herald isn’t that helpful, which is annoying because it is paying attention to the issue, unlike say the NYT or WaPo. But just because it’s interested doesn’t mean it can get anyone to give it the inside scoop. The article conveys echoes of strong intra-Bushie arguments about what to do about Venezuela without saying what the various sides are or what they’re advocating, giving us unhelpful hints like “There was at least one proposal that would have affected Venezuela’s oil industry.”
It’s not out of the question that the US will cut a sub rosa deal with Chavez, a quicker and less risky way of ensuring a continued flow of oil than attempting an overthrow.
