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Al Kamen has announced the winners of the “Brownie’s next gig” contest, and the results are so-so (he says bitterly, his own entry – World’s worst midwife: “Well how was I to know the waters would break?” – not having been chosen, possibly because Bill Maher did a similar joke several days later). The only one of the winners I really liked: next Iraqi information minister.
I vaguely thought of a contest of my own. Tom DeLay’s replacement, Roy Blunt, seems to lack any sort of nickname, like “The Hammer.” Can’t be taken seriously without a tough-guy nickname.
DeLay’s website really likes this picture, and has others of him with guys dressed like a flag. Flag, I said.
Speaking of uncomfortable couplings, some more London Review of Books (LRB) personals:
When, oh when will they re-make Falcon Crest? Man. 43. Obviously gay. Duh! Box no. 19/07
Man. 37. Famous for his soup. No longer sure of the existence of other people beyond the four walls that have held him these last 37 years. If you are more than a rumour, citizens of earth, reply to box no. 19/08. If you are not, don’t bother.
Researchers at the Australian National University recently employed a technique called electromagnetically induced transparency, in which a beam of laser light puts the atoms in a solid sample into a state in which a signal light pulse can be trapped. They succeeded in stopping light for more than one second. Despite this remarkable advance in science and technology, I still can’t get a man. If you can explain why in 2,000 words or less, I’ll share my ideas for nuclear toast extraction with you. And possibly have sex. Woman. 41. Intelligent, austere and mentally-troubled like all good forty-something women should be. Box no. 19/09
List your ten favourite albums. I don’t want to compare notes, I just want to know if there’s anything worth keeping when we finally break up. Practical, forward-thinking man. 35. Box no. 19/10
If I were a type of shrub I’d be euonymus. Go figure. Euonymus-esque woman (37) Box no. 18/11 [I include this one because the euonymus grows on the island of Lesbos, so if I’ve cracked the code...]
Whenever I try to cancel my LRB subscription, I suffer stigmata and holy visions dance around my bedroom like so many drunken midgets. Man, 41, Leicester. Possibly the Messiah, or something. Box no. 18/12
For all my favorite LRB personals, click here.
Just in case you were wondering whether the Pentagon considers it okay for soldiers to post pictures of dead Iraqis on porn websites, spokesmodel Bryan Whitman says, “Obviously, it is an unacceptable practice.” The soldiers will still be allowed, indeed encouraged, to kill Iraqis. The BBC helpfully points out that the US never signed on to the part of the Geneva Conventions requiring “The remains of persons who have died for reasons related to occupation or in detention resulting from occupation or hostilities [to] be respected.”
Speaking of disrespecting the dead, I’ve been enjoying watching Bug Boy squirm. Tom DeLay, displaying the quiet dignity for which he is known, accused the prosecutor who indicted him for criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws of being a “partisan fanatic” engaged in a “political witch hunt.” Funny, just yesterday Rep. Steve King was praising Joe McCarthy; one day they like political witch hunts, the next day they don’t. Flip floppers.
Reading the White House transcript of the Gaggle today, I was struck by the fairness of the transcription, which shows accurately how the reporters, kinda feisty today, smelling blood in the water, interrupted McClellan when he was evading their questions:
Q Do you have any papers showing the President has issued a directive against torture?
MR. McCLELLAN: We’ve actually put out paper previously about the directives that he’s made --
Q An actual order?
MR. McCLELLAN: -- and he has publicly stated it very clearly to everyone in his administration and to the American people.
Q Then why is it still going on?
Q Does the President take the allegation of wrongdoing seriously, that Tom DeLay used the Republican National Committee as a money laundering operation to fund local elections in Texas? That’s what the grand jury is indicting him for.
MR. McCLELLAN: That’s what the legal process will proceed to address. And --
Q How seriously does the President take that allegation?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Terry, Leader Delay’s office has put out a statement --
Q I’m not asking Leader DeLay’s office.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- disputing the assertions. We need to let the legal process proceed. And that’s what the President believes.
From the AFP: “The Danish Air Force paid damages to a professional Father Christmas after the noise from a fighter jet caused Rudolph, one of his reindeer, to die from shock. Olovi Nikkanoff was awarded 30,000 kroner (£2740) to buy a new reindeer.”
Caption contest: here, Bush talks about the War on Terra whilst surrounded by purty flowers.
Posada will not be deported to Venezuela, the judge in the case ruling that he would likely be tortured in Venezuela, which is nonsense. While the judge does seem like a twit, he really had no choice but to rule as he did, since the Bush admin refused to submit evidence in favor of its ostensible position; as I said this morning, they took a dive. He could only rule based on the evidence before him, and the sole testimony was the opinion of one of Posada’s old cronies.
Condi Rice was in Haiti today, urging that “each and every citizen of Haiti should take it as his or her personal responsibility and personal obligation and personal honor to vote”. Can you imagine what it must feel like to hear those words from the representative of a government that facilitated the coup that displaced your last elected president? Asked about Aristide, she supported his continued forcible exile: “Well, in fact, the international community is of one mind that it would not be a good thing for Mr. Aristide to return. I think that is very clear. The Haitian people are moving on.”
In the course of torpedoing the naming of a post office in Berkeley after long-time activist Maudelle Shirek, Rep. Steve King of Iowa made various unsubstantiated charges against her. When accused of McCarthyite tactics, he called McCarthy “a hero for America.” Isn’t it nice to know that there are congresscritters still willing to defend Tailgunner Joe? I wonder how many others there are.
Al Kamen at the WaPo has a contest to suggest next career moves for Mike Brown. I sent in an entry myself, but I have to bow to the master, whatever ironist put Brown in charge, evidently, of investigating FEMA’s failure to respond adequately to Katrina. I forget, who was the head of FEMA at the time? because he must really be quaking in his boots right now.
How did I not know that Hugo Chavez’s father was the governor of a Venezuelan province? Anyway, here’s an AP headline that gave me warm fuzzy feelings: “Land Reform Rankles Venezuela Businesses.” Isn’t it just too, too bad when business feels “rankled”? And isn’t that a fun word? Rankled rankled rankled. Er, anyway, the state just seized a disused plant from a large food company under a program under which economically idle property can be expropriated (and then, what, sold? used by the state? stories like this one never manage to say). The business federation Fedecamaras is bitching; its president says, “Businesspeople are indispensable for fighting poverty and underdevelopment, that’s what we are here for.” Wow, that’s what they’re there for. One had wondered. He didn’t explain how a food plant not actually in use was fighting poverty and underdevelopment. He also said that Fedecamaras would cooperate in land reform, but demanded that private property rights be respected. I know there’s a contradiction in there somewhere, just can’t put... my finger... on it.
The Dept of Heimat Security has taken a dive in its prosecution of Luis Posada Carriles, if prosecution is the correct word for a case in which no witnesses were called against the terrorist. His claim that he would be tortured if deported to Venezuela went unrebutted and indeed, the government lawyer suggested that under the Venezuela-Cuba Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, Cubans could go to Venezuela to interrogate and torture Posada.
Bush has finally called for sacrifice. “Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it,” he said. So those of you who bought gas you didn’t need in order to pour it out onto your driveway in a display of conspicuous consumption to impress the neighbors with your wealth, and those of you who kept full gasoline cans on your mantles as decorative items, stop it.
Since Blogger insisted on screwing up the search box at the top of the page so that it only covers the last few months, I’ve added a Google search box at the very bottom of the page that can search all of my posts.
China will restrict internet content to “healthy and civilised news and information that is beneficial to the quality of the nation.” It’s always nice when censorship is civilized.
Amnesty International explains why the figures given by the officials of Stalag Guantanamo for the number of hunger strikers is so low: they only count people who refuse 9 meals in a row, but the prisoners know that and are taking one meal in 3 days and flushing it down the toilet in order to avoid being force-fed, taking advantage of that bit of military bureaucratese.
Lynndie England has been convicted of abusing prisoners, but not of conspiracy (no, sorry, she was convicted of one count of conspiracy, but not another count). Even as yet more evidence of prisoner abuse/torture is emerging, England’s prosecutors were eagerly pushing the line that this was the work of a few bad apples, and certainly in no way related to orders from above to soften prisoners up for interrogation. No, according to them, “This was simply for the amusement of Private England and the other soldiers.” Amused England certainly was, but this doesn’t mean she was acting outside the parameters of the job she was given; she just happened to enjoy her work.
Hunger striking, forcible feeding and the torture of prisoners. Was this blog post healthy & civilized enough to pass Chinese standards, do you think?
Yesterday I thought I was being clever in spotting the Israeli defense minister’s implicit use of the “language of collective punishment.” Turns out it wasn’t so implicit: according to AP, Mofaz “told security chiefs in a meeting... that he wanted to exact a high price from Palestinians everywhere, not just the militants”. Also, targeted assassinations have officially resumed, not just been threatened. Sharon says there will be “no restrictions regarding the use of all means to strike at the terrorists”. One wonders what restrictions there were in the past. Israel has arrested hundreds of Palestinians, including many candidates in the January PA elections.
This program of murderous assholery goes by the name Operation First Rain. Does anyone know to what that refers?
The British papers are full of stories about Basra, including ones in the Times and Indy that purport to tell what the SAS soldiers were up to when they were caught, but which don’t actually answer the question in any convincing manner; there is nothing to learn from these articles, so I haven’t bothered with links. By the way, when I was writing my earlier posts, I wasn’t satisfied with calling them soldiers, since, as I said, people operating without uniforms disguised as locals are not acting as soldiers. Someone in comments in Lenin’s Tomb used the term I was groping for: illegal combatants. These illegal combatants’ commander, Brig. John Lorimer, tells the Sunday Telegraph that “It would be inappropriate for the British Army to apologise.” Indeed, heaven forfend they do something inappropriate, like fail to extend their pinky when drinking tea, or not curtsey to the queen, or apologize for shooting at cops, knocking down the wall of a police station and firing on a crowd of civilians. Heaven forfuckingfend.
It’s a measure of how mainstream opposition to the war in Iraq now is that pro-war politicians are unable to impugn the motives of its opponents. Yesterday Bush said something about advocates of pull-out being well-intentioned but mistaken. Compare this with the taunts hurled at opponents of the war in Vietnam and you can see the difference. Bush and his claque are not able to call war opponents traitors, to suggest that they love America or leave it or even to suggest that they don’t support “our troops.” Bush used the same rhetoric about the terrorists only being able to win if America’s will is sapped, but at the same time in the same press conference had to acknowledge the legitimacy of the anti-war position. Rhetorically, he’s lost the argument, or at least ceded a lot of ground.
The US military is using more than 250,000 bullets for every insurgent killed. Really bad shots, I’m guessing.
Earlier yesterday I wrote up my recommendations for the California ballot, which I’ll post a little closer to the poll date. Coincidentally, Governor Arnold announced his recommendations a little later. I must have done something right, because we disagree on all 8.
Here’s a non-surprise: Israel is already back to bombing Gaza, in “response” to Hamas rocket attacks (remember, Israel is always presented, as in the WaPo story on this, as responding to violence initiated by others; one could equally say that Hamas was responding to the killing of 3 of its leaders and an explosion at a Hamas rally which might actually have been an accident, not Israel’s fault). The Israeli defense minister said, “We have to make it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will not let the recent events pass without a response. The response needs to be crushing.” Note that although the rockets were fired by Hamas, his response is aimed at “the Palestinians,” all Palestinians. This is the language of collective punishment. Eli at Left I on the News notes that while the defense minister also threatened to “resume” targeted assassinations, Israel never actually stopped targeted assassinations.
SUN KING: Bush cancelled his trip to Texas because it was sunny, screwing up his brave-leader-facing-down-the-hurricane imagery. Without the right imagery, it wasn’t worth his while to make the trip at all.
Yet more evidence of the abuse & torture of Iraqi prisoners. And not recently either: if some idiot didn’t take pictures, this stuff tends to remain buried for quite some time (the incidents took place Sept 2003 to April 2004). “Some days we would just get bored so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did that for amusement.” Indeed, they did it as a substitute for sex: in the soldiers’ lingo, to “fuck a PUC [person under control]” meant to beat or torture them.
Pentagon spokesmodel John Skinner responded to the report by Human Rights Watch, which revealed the incidents, by attacking it as “another predictable report by an organization trying to advance an agenda through the use of distortions and errors in fact. ... Humane treatment has always been the standard no matter how much certain organizations want people to believe otherwise.” I’d be interested to know what “agenda” Skinner thinks Human Rights Watch has. If he’s going to impugn their motives, he really needs to be made to answer that.
Watch this Kinky Friedman commercial.
Thomas Shannon, the nominee to replace Roger Noriega as assistant secretary of state for hemispheric affairs, worries about Chavez-style “populism.” “The United States went through a similar process of populism, and our party structure found a way to contain it,” he said at his confirmation hearing. That’s what these people mean when they pretend to support something they call democracy: doing the minimum necessary to hold off populism. Shannon says he wants to engage Chavez in a “battle of ideas,” which would be a change of pace from his predecessor, unless “You suck” is an idea.
Bush today went further, I believe, than he has before in putting the blame for 9/11 squarely on Bill Clinton (and Reagan too, I guess):
To leave Iraq now would be to repeat the costly mistakes of the past that led to the attacks of September the 11th, 2001. The terrorists saw our response to the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings in the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. The terrorists concluded that we lacked the courage and character to defend ourselves, and so they attacked us.
Bush’s language strikes me as getting even odder, more disjointed, with more going back and rephrasing things: “Now, look, they’ve been successful on attacks. They were successful here. They’ve been successful in London and Madrid. In other words, they have had attacks.”
He explains the philosophical underpinnings of his foreign policy: “See, democracy trumps their view of the world. Democracy trumps Taliban-type regimes, because it’s free.”
Not 90 minutes later, displaying no sense that he was aware of any contradiction, he was welcoming the King of Jordan to the White House, telling him, “Your Majesty is a leader and the United States of America respects his leadership a lot.”
Sir Ian Blair has told the BBC that he considered resigning as head of the Metropolitan Police after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, but didn’t because “the big job is to defend this country against terrorism and Kate Moss.” OK, I added the “and Kate Moss” part, but according to the Telegraph, he took time off from the fight against terrorism, in which he is so very indispensable, to take the lead in the decision to investigate the model’s reported drug use.
Blair’s interesting juggling of priorities matches that of Alberto Gonzales, now gearing up for the struggle to rid America of pornography, picking up Ed Meese’s baton, but not in, you know, a gay way. The records of the Meese Commission on pornography, by the way, are stored at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, because if there’s one thing the Hoover Institution needed, it was a really extensive collective of hard core ‘80s porn.
Today Bush hung out with some Jews at the anniversary of something called the Republican Jewish Coalition. He paid tribute to Simon Wiesenthal, who “insisted that we remember that hatred prepares the way for violence,” which he used as a hook for this: “As we saw in the recent desecration of the synagogues in Gaza, the ancient hatred of anti-Semitism still burns in the hearts of men.” Then he went on for some length about Hurricane Katrina. Maybe he thought it sounded like a Jewish name. He talked about rebuilding communities, but assured them that no Jews would actually have to go live in Mississippi, because “you’ve suffered enough.” Oh, okay, he didn’t, but this is his idea of an appropriate joke:
Rabbi Stanton Zamek of the Temple Beth Shalom Synagogue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, helped an African American couple displaced by the storm track down their daughter in Maryland. When Rabbi Zamek called the daughter, he told her, “We have your parents.” She screamed out, “Thank you, Jesus!” (Laughter.) He didn’t have the heart to tell her she was thanking the wrong rabbi. (Laughter and applause.)
I suspect that whoever’s running the White House website is being punished for something. This is someone so concerned with correct English that they insert a [sic] when Bush says “inspector generals,” and the poor schmuck is in charge of transcribing George Bush’s speeches.
Also, “armies of compassions [sic]”.
This is the group that once paid for him to go to Israel, when he was governor of Texas. Ariel Sharon “said, would you like to go on a helicopter ride and take a look at the West Bank. I said, “Are you flying?” No -- (laughter.) I said, you bet.” Yes, that’s our George: went to a Jewish group and told a fat joke about the Israeli prime minister.
“Does the nose on that eagle look a little Jewy to you?”
Bush, in Mississippi today:
And that can-do spirit is -- these county commissioners -- we call them county commissioners -- county supervisors and mayors who are dealing with unbelievable trauma, and, you know, they’re right there on a front line of trying to comfort people who hurt. And, yet, amidst all that agony and pain they’re going through was this comforting spirit. The can-do spirit is, you know, seeing progress being made. And inside this tent there’s a can-do spirit of taking a horrible situation and making this part of the world better. And so I’m impressed.
Me too, by the amount of gibberish packed into just five sentences.
Bush has not only allowed the workers rebuilding after Katrina to be paid less than prevailing wages, but has also suspended affirmative action requirements.
In order to justify their Great-Escape-but-with-helicopters-and-tanks-instead-of-Steve-McQueen-on-a-motorcycle, the British have been spinning it as a rescue from imminent death (Defence Secretary John Reid: “When it is necessary to protect British servicemen, we will take that action. And by God it was effective.”) and trashing the Basra police, who they say 1) are heavily infiltrated by the militias, 2) failed to release the British soldiers when ordered to do so by the central gov, and 3) handed them over to a Shiite militia. Now Basra’s finest may be eminently trashable, but the soldiers did just shoot two of them, so basic human nature might have been all that was at work here. When 4 American “security contractors” were killed in Fallujah last year, for example, we responded by reducing the city to smoking rubble. So a reluctance on the part of the Basra constabulary to see them walk free with impunity, or even a decision to give them to people who would mete out a little (or a lot) of the rough justice they could not, would be understandable regardless of their extracurricular affiliations. What’s more entertaining is watching the British, after a couple of years of constantly talking about how much superior their occupation strategy is to that of the Americans, are justifying yesterday’s actions by making accusations that amount to an admission that their approach has been a miserable failure. They’re less willing to admit that they are also less than beloved amongst the civilian populace. Says Brig. John Lorimer, “British armoured vehicles being attacked by a violent crowd, including petrol bombs, make graphic television viewing. But this was a small, unrepresentative crowd.” So that’s all right then. How would he know whether or not the crowd is representative? Did he send men with clipboards to ask the petrol-bomb throwers, “Are you 18-35, 35-49...?” Lorimer added cheerily, “It was a difficult day yesterday but we have put it behind us and we shall move on.” I’m sure the people of Basra feel the same way.
The two soldiers were in plain clothes (and they had wigs with them!) and were armed with assault rifles and... an anti-tank missile. Oh yeah, nothing suspicious about that.
The British are now claiming that the soldiers had been turned over by the police to a militia, and therefore weren’t in the prison when they knocked its wall down. They also deny that any prisoners escaped through the hole in the wall. If you don’t like this British version of the story, don’t worry, there’ll be another one along in about ten minutes. None of the versions include any real explanation for what soldiers were doing dressed in Arab garb or why they shot at the Iraqi police. The central Iraqi government is giving an entirely different version than either the British or Basra officials, denying that any unpleasantness took place at all.
A couple of days ago, the NYT reported Ariel Sharon as threatening to block elections in Palestine (scheduled for January) if Hamas was allowed to take part. “I don’t think they can have elections without our help,” he said. In fact, he went further. Ha’aretz has him also demanding that Hamas be disarmed and that it revise its charter and declare that “Yentl” didn’t suck.
New Zealand MP Keith Locke (Green Party) made a campaign pledge to run naked through the streets of Epsom, a suburb of Auckland, if the leader of the right-wing Act party was re-elected for the constituency. Which he was. Locke intends to keep his pledge, as soon he’s worked out the... choreography. He says his streaking “will be artistic and it will involve body paint.”
There was a wee incident in Basra today involving two undercover British soldiers. Let’s pause there, because the concept of undercover soldiers is a bit... faulty, and in fact violates international law. If they’re not in uniform, they are not soldiers but spies. I don’t imagine we’ll ever know what they were actually up to. When Iraqi police tried to stop their car at a checkpoint, they fired at the police, killing one of them. When they were captured, the British army effected a jail break using tanks, which are very handy during a jail break. The BBC calls this a “daring rescue operation” but honestly how daring do you have to be IN A FUCKING TANK, I mean that show on Fox would have a much shorter season IF THEY HAD A FUCKING TANK. The pissed-off civilians had sling shots.
Oh ok, one of the tanks was set on fire, I admit, but still.
The Brits killed a couple of civilians and let out a few prisoners during the jail break. By the way, the BBC link above shows the undercover soldiers with their faces disguised, as per British government request. That would be these guys.
Headlines in the British press: “Rioters Attack British Troops” (Daily Telegraph); “Army Storms Jail to Free Seized Soldiers” (The Times); “British Tanks Storm Basra Jail” (Guardian); “Under Fire: British Soldiers Attacked in Basra” (Independent); “UK Soldiers ‘Storm’ Basra Prison” (BBC). No mention of the soldiers shooting the Iraqi policemen.
In fairness, I must add that the Basra police are known to be a partly or wholly owned subsidiary of the insurgency, and may have intended to hold the soldiers in order to exchange them for captured militia leaders. In other words, the Brits didn’t trust the Basra police enough to leave their soldiers in their hands, but evidently they are willing to leave the entire population of Basra in their hands.
North Korea agrees to abandon its nuclear program in exchange for exactly what it always said it wanted in exchange for abandoning its nuclear program: a promise by the US not to invade or nuke it. That wasn’t so hard, now was it? Also, the US declared that it didn’t have nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, although if I have this right didn’t actually guarantee not to in the future.
New Yorker piece by Paul Rudnick, “Intelligent Design”:
And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”
“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”
Riverbend notes that the Iraqi draft constitution (which is finished now, really it is, no foolin’ this time) seems to exist in various incompatible versions, and suggests that this is a problem because “this is a constitution – not a blog”. Hmmm, I wonder what a constitution in blog form would look like. Any ideas?
The WaPo reports with a straight face that “Afghans have demonstrated enormous enthusiasm for the election -- about 12.4 million people have registered to vote, 2 million more than for last year’s presidential election”. Right, last year more people were registered to vote than there were actual people qualified to vote in all of Afghanistan, with voter registration reaching 140% in some areas, and this year they’ve topped that by 20%.
At the national prayer & remembrance thingy, Bush said, “As we clear away the debris of a hurricane, let us also clear away the legacy of inequality.” Really, George, is that really what you want us to do? Because no one’s life history shows the legacy of inequality more than yours does. Or do you not consider privilege, cronyism, nepotism and favoritism, which got you out of Vietnam, into Yale (you were even called a “legacy”), and smoothed your way through every economic venture you ever participated in (God knows it wasn’t skill and hard work), etc etc etc to be part of the legacy of inequality? Because while he may say that “poverty has roots in generations of segregation and discrimination that closed many doors of opportunity,” he doesn’t acknowledge or understand that his wealth and privilege and power are rooted in precisely the same discrimination, but discrimination in his favor. Deep down, he still believes that everything he has was earned, that he is entitled to them. And many of his followers’ biggest worry about Katrina is that it will derail their plans to eliminate permanently the legacy of inequality tax estate tax.
The NYT seems to have finally decided to report in more detail on the mass hunger strike in Guantanamo (which the military likes to call a “fast”) and the forcible feeding of prisoners (which the military likes to call “assisted feeding,” as if they were cutting up their meet for them rather than shoving a tube into their nostril and aaaaall the way down into their stomachs). A month late, but welcome nonetheless. Still, the Pentagon has been able to keep a pretty tight lid on the facts, which was of course the whole point of keeping the prisoners on a military base in Cuba in the first place, so the story is more frustrating than illuminating. The NYT reports, for example, that a “senior military official” told it that camp officials “had tried several ways to end the hunger strike, without success.” What on earth could those several ways have been? We do not know. A prisoners’ grievance committee was chosen (by whom? how organized are the prisoners?), began negotiations, and was almost immediately dissolved by Gitmo officials, we do not know why. What are their demands, and are the guards really desecrating Korans again? The Pentagon is also withholding information on the prisoners’ health, has lied about the numbers participating in the hunger strike, and won’t release the names of those on hunger strike, to the distress of prisoners’ relatives.
As I read that story (in Opera), I got Google ads for 1) “Club Gitmo” t-shirts, 2) the tv show “Prison Break”.
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.
