A fantastic woman

One of the WaPo op-ed writers, I forget who, nailed the problem with Harriet Miers: no other president would have nominated her. Without her personal connection to Bush, her nomination is inconceivable, she wouldn’t have been on a list of the top 100 candidates, and no one can argue otherwise. What I’m enjoying is that with all the right-wing opposition, the Bushies may not be able to get away with refusing to release her papers. So that could be fun. The wingers (Bork of all people attacked her today) are in fact taking the line that I did with John Roberts, that the default position with a candidate you don’t know enough about should be rejection. Bush says “when she’s on the bench, people will see a fantastic woman who is honest, open, humble and capable of being a great Supreme Court judge.”

Maureen Dowd and others keep talking about how much Bush likes to surround himself with strong women, but then how do you explain Jenna and Not-Jenna?

Still, for corrupt cronyism you can’t beat Silvio Berlusconi. While he has often sponsored measures that weakened the Italian judicial system to save his own ass, and decriminalized bribery and corruption, now he is pushing a new law through intended to save his own personal lawyer from going to jail for bribing judges to ensure the success of one of Berlusconi’s personal business deals, but which will have the little side effect of striking down half the cases before the highest court, setting free murderers, embezzlers, etc etc.

During his visit to Nicaragua, Zoelick didn’t just threaten to cut off aid if political events there did not go as he liked, but went so far as to warn businesses that if they supported the Sandinistas they would be banned from doing business with the US.

Holy towering inferno, Batman!

Stately Wayne Manor (or the building that stood in for it in the tv series) has burnt down. It was in Pasadena. (Update: another story says that the mansion used in “Being There” has burned down; evidently it is the same place. I may never be able to watch that movie again.)
[Correction: Holy mistaken identity, Batman! The mansion was not in fact Stately Wayne Manor, although I think it was the one used for Being There and other movies. Same street, though.]

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain must allow prisoners to vote, although Britain seems to be planning to implement the ruling only partially, excluding those convicted of murder and rape.

The Israeli Supreme Court has banned the military’s use of human shields.



Of course, there’s been an injunction against that practice (which the IDF calls the “neighbor procedure”) since 2002 and it hasn’t stopped them. The decision rested on the question of whether consent could freely be given; the IDF claimed it always asked people nicely if they’d like to be human shields. The court said, “In light of the inequality which exists between the apprehending force and the local resident, the civilian cannot be expected to resist the request to pass on an alert.” D’ya think? Naturally, there are various members of the Knesset ready to defend the practice, just as there are 9 US Senators ready to support torture.

One of the winners of the IgNobel Prizes, Dr. Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow, author of “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh: Calculations on Avian Defecation,” was denied a visa to enter the US to collect his prize.


Other winners included two U of Minnesota professors, who conducted a study to answer the age-old questions: can humans swim faster in a pool filled with water, or a pool filled with syrup (guar gum powder). About the same, as it happens; the increased power of their strokes made up for the increased drag. See, you learn something new every day. And not just that people get really bored in Minnesota, which you already knew. Gauri Nanda of MIT won an award for inventing an alarm clock that hides from you.

No act of ours invited the rage of the killers

This morning Bush gave what was billed as a major speech on The War Against Terror (TWAT), which turned out to be yet another attempt to redefine the enemy, to make terrorism more scary than if it were simply, well, terrorism, and to declare a counter-jihad. Shortly after 9/11 he got into trouble for using the word crusade. Now he’s trying to declare a crusade by the back door: it is a crusade, but they started it, he’s saying. He even used the obnoxious term Islamofascism, I think for the first time.

The speech attempted to construct an image of terrorists and terrorist acts as rational, part of a long-term strategy, “evil, but not insane.” “All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness,” but they are not random he says, they are an attempt, using tactics “consistent for a quarter-century,” to create a “totalitarian empire” from Spain (Spain? are the Moors coming back?) to Indonesia, sort of like the Ottoman Empire (which he’s probably never heard of). Bush’s military have never been happy about fighting an enemy without a geographic basis, haven’t known how to do it, which is why the immediate response to 9/11 was to go after a nation, Afghanistan, whose government, while nasty, had only a peripheral relationship to it, and why Rumsfeld’s immediate reaction was to start planning to invade Iraq, which had no relationship to it. So now Bush is creating a fictional geographically based enemy. “They” want to force the US out of the broader Middle East, then “use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country,” you know, any old country, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan, Venezuela, Liechtenstein, whatever, and spread outwards like, I don’t know, dominos, to create this, oh call it the Bin Laden Empire since he seems to be speaking the Dread One’s name again, for some reason no longer embarrassed by the failure to capture him. The name Bush can’t mention any more is Saddam Hussein’s, since he can’t acknowledge that the most dangerous, terrorist-friendly vacuum is the one caused by Hussein’s removal from power and the introduction of an American presence.

Bush rhetorically positions the terrorists as non-human, engaged in a “war against humanity.”

Just as during the Cold War the belief in a monolithic enemy enabled Americans to ignore local conditions and history and to paint Khrushchev, Mao, the Viet Minh, the Parti communiste français, etc etc as identical, Bush justifies, even demands, a similar ignorance today. “The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution.” Since local and national grievances are only excuses used by people who are really advancing the cause of the Neo-Ottoman Empire, we can dismiss those grievances from our thoughts. Indeed, we can dismiss them with all the contempt inherent in those phrases “culture of victimization” and “someone else is always to blame,” phrases which demonstrate once again the inability of the rich and powerful to empathize with those who are neither. Thus, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, etc, are merely a “litany of excuses for violence,” not real grievances. “No act of ours invited the rage of the killers,” he says, and if that isn’t the culture of victimization in which someone else is always to blame, I don’t know what is.

Deploying even greater irony and lack of self-awareness, Bush goes on to disparage bin Laden as a rich kid “who grew up in wealth and privilege” [Kennebunkport], who now tells poor Muslims what is good for them [“[our] beliefs... are right and true in every land, and in every culture.”], “though he never offers to go along for the ride.” [Texas Air National Guard]. “[T]hey wish to make everyone powerless except themselves.” Pot, kettle, black.

Indeed, while he insisted that despite its petty disagreements Iraq is a perfectly healthy democracy because “that’s the essence of democracy: making your case, debating with those who you disagree, who disagree, building consensus by persuasion,” this is the man who ran scared from Cindy Sheehan.

Crisp decision-making

A Guantanamo prisoner transferred to Spain is sentenced to 6 years for belonging to Al Qaeda. To add insult, well, injury really, to injury, the two years he spent in Guantanamo won’t count towards that 6 years.

Asked yesterday whether he would release any of the papers Harriet Miers worked on in the White House, Bush replied, “I just can’t tell you how important it is for us to guard executive privilege in order for there to be crisp decision-making in the White House.” He did not give any examples of this alleged crisp decision-making.

Creeping coups and other alliterative bogeymen

The Karzai government has arrested the editor of the magazine “Women’s Rights” for advocating women’s rights, such as not to be whipped 100 times for adultery. We don’t really hear so much about how America liberated Afghan women these days, do we?

The Iraqi legislature has voted for applying the death penalty to “those who provoke, plan, finance and all those who enable terrorists to commit” terrorist acts or gives shelter to a terrorist. The terms “provoke” and “enable” are awfully vague, vague enough to be used against any political opponent, and so is the law’s definition of terrorism as any act which “aims to hurt security, stability and national unity and introduce terror, fear or horror among the people and cause chaos.”

In Nicaragua, another country where the US claims the right to call the shots, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick has been visiting in order to show support for President Bolaños against the majority of the legislature, which has been trying to strip him of much of his power. Zoellick may even be right to call this move a “creeping coup,” I haven’t been following Nicaragua all that closely the last few years, but maybe the country that backed the Contras’ terror campaign (and Zoellick was in the State Dept for some of that period) should just shut up. Zoellick hasn’t been shy about calling the anti-Bolaños alliance of the conservatives and the Sandinistas “corrupt,” even though he’s there to use American aid as a stick, threatening to withhold the $175 million if the legislature doesn’t toe the line.

A steller record

Doug Ireland argues that Miers’ positions when she ran for Dallas city council in 1989, including opposing legalizing sodomy and abortion, are reason enough no Democrat should vote for her. I agree. Ah, you might say, that was 16 years ago, and people’s views change over the course of time. Not according to Shrub, who said that her views 20 years from now will be exactly the same as they are now because “she doesn’t change over the course of time” (remember, in Bush’s view, stubbornness and lack of adaptation are virtues). So her views 20 years ago are fair game. Molly Ivins adds that Miers also supported discrimination against homosexuals in hiring, such as that then practiced by the Dallas police dept (Ivins also writes about Miers’ religious beliefs).

I watched the press conference, for my sins, but Bush said so little and at such length and spoke so slowly that it was like a torture specifically designed for bloggers. The things I endure for you people. The reporters, who haven’t had an opportunity like this for months, turned out to have no questions. I knew I was in for a long ride when the first one was “Mr. President, of all the people in the United States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most qualified to serve on the Supreme Court?” If you’re wondering, yes, yes she is. “I picked the best person I could find.” By which he means the best person he could find without doing more than shouting out the Oval Office door, “Hey, is anyone here a lawyer?”

I could have occupied myself with minor amusements like counting the number of times Bush said “In other words...”, or counting the spelling errors in the CNN scroll (Bush said Miers has a “steller record”); mostly I just contemplated switching back to the Kolchak marathon on the Sci Fi Channel.

A reporter gave Bush yet another chance to admit that he personally had made a mistake re Katrina. He declined once again to do so. He was asked if he’d ever discussed abortion with Miers and responded by saying – four times, yet – that he has no litmus test. The reporter tried again, pointing out that he had known Miers for a decade. No, Bush said, I didn’t ask her about abortion during the interview, ignoring all but one hour of that decade (well, 5 minutes, knowing Bush). Asked yet again,

Q In your friendship with her, you’ve never discussed abortion?

THE PRESIDENT: Not to my recollection have I ever sat down with her -- what I have done is understand the type of person she is and the type of judge she will be.

So they never talked about abortion while in a seated position...

The sounds of peace

A NYT story about Operation Iron Fist – a name that could only be surpassed for aggressive manliness by grunts or growls: Operation Grrrr – buries the money quote in the very last paragraph. Marine Col. Stephen Davis told the residents of one town, who had been subjected to the usual forms of occupation-type harassments, “Some of you are concerned about the attack helicopters and mortar fire from the base. I will tell you this: those are the sounds of peace.” He probably also thinks that napalm in the morning smells like victory. Could be a brain tumor; he should have it checked out.

The London Times, by contrast to its young New York cousin, buries nothing, indeed headlines one of its stories, “Bombers’ Severed Heads Are Key to Bali Terror Trail.”

Must-read article about a Gaza Palestinian family forced to co-exist in its home with the Israeli army for five years.

WaPo on Harriet Miers: “As Bush’s staff secretary, she was known to correct spelling, grammar and even punctuation errors in memos to the president.” Yes, because Bush would really have noticed spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.

Harriet Miers: cannon-fodder in size-six shoes

I’m not surprised by Harriet Miers’s gender – he wasn’t going to appoint another white male – but I was surprised by her age.


The choice of Miers shows how nonsensical was the idea of some Dems that they could leverage their votes for John Roberts into a demand for “another” John Roberts, thus warding off the possibility of another Scalia or Thomas or Bork. But the strategy of giving Bush what he wants in hopes of a payoff has about the same chance of working as, well, buying a ticket in the Texas lottery. Bush believes in the leadership principle (führerprinzip in the original German); he does not believe in the concept of collegiality, and the whole idea of nine equals coming to a collective decision simply does not compute for the boy prince. He views Roberts as the leader of the Court, and there can be only one Roberts, one leader. Miers was chosen for the virtue of loyalty; she is expected to be a follower, cannon-fodder if you will. Roberts will write the reactionary decisions, and Miers will dutifully nod her head.

California proposition recommendations

Update: there is another Mencken saying: democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it -- good and hard. But not this time. Every proposition was voted down.

The overall theme of this election is a variation on H.L. Mencken’s dictum that “there is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” Several of these are plausible, on the surface, but wrong, although they tend to be hilariously over-complicated rather than neat.

Prop. 73. Parental notification and a waiting period for abortion for minors. I’d be against this anyway: parents should no more be able to force their daughters to carry a pregnancy to term than to force them to abort against their will. But this version also has problems with the way the judicial-bypass alternative is set up: it can take so long that parental notification might become, well, 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 prop’s agenda of punishing the little trollops is made even clearer in the ballot argument: “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, which is creepy and worrisome. No.

Prop. 74. Tenure for public school teachers only after 5 years, and makes it easier to fire teachers after that. Under the current system, teachers can be fired for any or no reason during their first two years, and after that you need dynamite to get them out. I guess that’s what passed as a compromise: one manifestly unfair system that after 2 years turns into an equal but opposite manifestly unfair system. 74 is a solution, but a stupid one, for this problem. 74 is Schwarzenegger’s attempt to blame teachers for the failures of the educational system and to propose a “solution” that doesn’t involve spending actual money, especially on those teachers. 74 would increase the incentive for school districts to replace fairly experienced teachers with younger cheaper ones. And it would shift power from teachers (and their unions) to administrators. Job security is one of the reasons we get away with paying teachers so little; removing it is a wage reduction just as surely as eliminating their health insurance would be. Give me half an hour and I could come up with a better system than Prop. 74 (or the existing one) on the back of a napkin, perhaps involving rolling tenure, in which the level of job protection increased in stages, but should this even be decided at the state level as a one-size-fits-all scheme rather than by the school districts? This proposition is a bad solution to a phony crisis – there are indeed bad teachers, but it’s not the tenure system that creates them, and 74 does nothing about training or hiring or rewarding better teachers. Oh, and if you’re wondering whether crappy job performance can be detected in two years: look at the governor’s current poll numbers; he took office in November 2003. No.

Prop. 75. Requires written consent, every single year, possibly signed in blood in Swahili, from government employees before their unions can use their dues for political purposes. In theory, someone should not be forced to fund candidates they do not like, and in fact union members now have the right to opt out of political spending (or indeed not to join the union in the first place), despite Arnold’s claim that “that is not a contribution, that is a tax.” So, again, an attempt by Schwarzenegger to hobble his political opponents by creating a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Furthermore, it’s clearly partisan, intending to hobble public-sector unions without offering similar assurances that holders of stock in a corporation can veto its political contributions. But here’s the principled reason to vote no: this is an internal union matter, for the union members to decide, not the rest of us; interference by the state in the affairs of voluntary associations is a threat to liberty. Don’t make me quote Tocqueville. No.

Prop. 76. Does complicated – too complicated for the voters to have to decide on – things to the budgetary process. It’s impossible to predict how this monstrosity would operate in the real world or who would wind up making budgetary decisions in any given year. Parts, like the provision that if the state budget is late – and when isn’t it? – the previous year’s budget continues, violate the principle of no taxation without representation, which by itself is enough for me to vote against it. 76 would loosen the formula previously imposed by the equally undemocratic Prop 98, which dedicated a proportion of the budget to education, while adding a new formula restricting annual budget growth. As Katrina has shown, budgetary requirements are not so predictable. 76 would give enormous powers to the governor to seize funds appropriated for education and screw with the over-all budget unilaterally. Of all the initiatives on the ballot, this power-grab is the most dangerous, and the most likely to poison Sacramento politics permanently. No.

Prop. 77. Reapportionment. Again. Sigh. This is another bad solution to a real problem. And the insistence on rushing this onto the ballot in a special election, and implementing it immediately instead of following the next census, demonstrates 77 is not, as advertised, an attempt to remove redistricting from the political arena, but is in fact another effort, like that of Tom DeLay in Texas, to shift the balance of power in Congress towards the Republicans. Redistricting would be done by three retired judges, ‘cuz you really want old guys in robes making these decisions in between naps. Also, the judges could be federal judges: federal judges have no business participating in state matters. The judges would be nominated in the first place by party leaders, which brings party (well, the two largest parties, no Greens or Libertarians need apply) (also, it should be pointed out that 18% of Calif. registered voters state no party preference; only 78% are registered as either R or D) right into the heart of redistricting where they absolutely do not belong. Ah, but the party leaders (2 D’s, 2 R’s) have to nominate judges only from a party other than their own! Which means the judges have to be known partisans, even though the whole point of bringing in judges in the first place was their supposed independence and disinterestedness. Then everybody gets to veto one, then they draw names out of a hat (really). It’s like one of those board games where by the time you’ve read all the rules, no one wants to play it anymore (and I’ve actually simplified it). And then, dear god, submitted to a referendum, with all the dishonest campaign ads, special-interest money and suchlike that that would entail, and the referendum would come only after the districts had already been used in one election. The ballot argument in favor of this says “The time for accountability is now”; no, pardon me, it says “THE TIME FOR ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOW!” Does this Rube Goldberg contraption sound like accountability to you? Me neither. No.

Props. 78 & 79. Oh goody, competing props, my favorite kind. In this case, 78 is the evil twin, and pretty obviously so. Both offer discounts on drugs to the poor and others, but 79 covers more people and is not completely voluntary for the drug companies. 78 is literally designed to fail: if the drug companies sponsoring 78 refuse to participate in the program, the program simply terminates. 79 is a little bit patchy and it’s impossible to tell how many drugs will actually be discounted, and by how much, under it, but it’s still better than what we have now. No on 78, yes on 79. Do not vote for both: 78 has a provision that would invalidate 79 if 79 passes but 78 gets more votes.

Prop. 80. Something or other about energy regulation, like 76 just way too complicated for the likes of us poor mortals. Whenever something like this appears on the ballot, state legislators are asking us to do the job they’re supposed to be doing and should have their salaries docked by $10,000. I think 80 would be an improvement, and the ballot pamphlet argument against it is pretty underwhelming, so I’m provisionally recommending a yes vote.

Comments are welcome. Don’t forget to include the prop. number.

(Update: both the LA Weekly and the SF Bay Guardian agree with me on every proposition. The governor disagrees with me on every proposition.)

Extremely reasonable

In Afghanistan, another country in which elections were held, last month, while it was occupied by the United States military, there were, you will be surprised to hear, significant levels of fraud, although the guy in charge of the elections, one Peter Erben, says that everything considered, the level of voter fraud is “extremely reasonable” and “I do not believe that these irregularities give any reason to doubt the integrity of the elected institutions.” But then again, maybe the person who failed to prevent the fraud isn’t the best person to evaluate the significance of that failure.

Under cover of night

Facing defeat in the referendum on the draft constitution, the Iraqi parliament simply rewrote the rules, not two weeks before the balloting, requiring that the 2/3 vote by which a province would be deemed to reject the constitution be 2/3 of registered voters rather than of actual voters. The fix is in.

Possibly they could learn something from last week’s referendum in Algeria, where the interior minister explains why he is claiming an 82% turnout when so few voters were actually seen: everyone voted at night.

Maureen Dowd, in one of those columns non-subscribers supposedly can’t read online, but here it is in Taiwan, points out that the Bushies, after years of talking down the capabilities of Al Qaeda, are now claiming that we are in fact directly engaging them militarily in Iraq. Indeed, Gen. Richard Myers warned this week that if the US left Iraq, there might be another 9/11. Says Dowd, “The Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext for invading Iraq and now says it can’t leave for fear of spurring another 9/11.”

NYT on the ever-increasing number and proportion of prisoners who are in prison for life, without parole. 16% of them for drug trafficking.

Consistent with Al Qaeda training

An Egyptian is released from Guantanamo. Never willing to admit a mistake, the Pentagon rules that he is “no longer” an enemy combatant. C’mon, he either is or he isn’t, I’m pretty sure they don’t enlist for a fixed period of time.

Speaking of Guantanamo, the hunger strike continues. The Pentagon never uses the phrase hunger strike, preferring “voluntary fasting” (force feeding is called “assisted feeding,” and suicide attempts are “Manipulative Self-Injurious Behavior”) A Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin told the BBC that the practice is “consistent with al-Qaeda training” – also Mahatma Gandhi training (actually I strongly doubt AQ is training anyone in the technique of hunger striking, but it shore do sound ominous when you put it that way, don’t it?) – and “reflects detainees’ attempts to elicit media attention.” Fat lot of good it’s doing them, then; the BBC report refers to the “first” Guantanamo hunger strike in June, but there was one in 2002 the BEEB’s evidently forgotten about, and who knows how many we’ve never heard about. Martin (the BBC never identifies his job, by the way) says the detainees are all being treated well and are given “culturally appropriate” food and drink, albeit sometimes through a tube down their noses.

Support democracy or suffer populism

Condi Rice, at Princeton of all places, on Why We Fight: “This is not some grassroots coalition of national resistance, these are barbaric killers who want to provoke nothing less than a full-scale war among Muslims across the entire Middle East.” Bush too has been saying repeatedly that the terrorists have a strategy, that they are acting according to some plan. This is all straight out of the Vietnam War playbook, denying the existence of Iraqi nationalism. And for most Americans, the reason for the continued violence is rather beside the point, the fact of it is sufficient proof that American policy isn’t working. But what’s interesting is watching the Bushies get ever more radical in their rhetoric about their supposed transformational agenda for the Middle East, coupled with a contempt for idealism that is not intertwined with the use of violence. Rice said, contemptuously, “Any champion of democracy who promotes principle without power can make no real difference in the lives of oppressed people.” And the greater the idealism, the more violence is required.

Speaking of idealism, Sen. Mel Martinez gave a speech (pdf) about the threat of a spread of “populist Chavismo” in Latin America. As I noted a few days ago, populism is the new swear word amongst the anti-Chavez crowd. Martinez also refers to “mindless populism,” and warns that one must “support democracy or suffer populism.” Come to think of it, he sounds a little like Vladimir Putin warning that Ukraine-style populist Orange revolutions won’t be tolerated in Russia. The Bushies don’t seem to be defining what this populism thing they’re castigating actually is, but the label is meant to somehow delegitimize leaders they dislike who nonetheless have the effrontery to win elections.

The Miami Herald page reporting that speech contains a Google ad for toilet paper with Fidel Castro’s face.

A new California law requires pharmacists to fill prescriptions they have a moral objection to, or make alternative arrangements that don’t inconvenience the customer.

The number of deaths on the US-Mexico border has set a record, 460 over the last year, the majority dying of heat in the Arizona desert. This is the easily predictable cost of increased border enforcement.

Nonetheless

Serenity: shiny.

Rumsfeld, on the questionable loyalty of Iraqi police: “It’s a problem that’s faced by police forces in every major city in our country, that criminals infiltrate and sign up to join the police force.” He’s done this sort of thing before, suggesting that Baghdad is no more unsafe and violent than, say, the District of Columbia. It’s interesting how his rosy vision of Iraq and his scary image of American cities meet exactly in the middle, so that one is no worse than the other. On the subject of the Congressional hearings at which Gen. Casey admitted that the more Americans trained the Iraqi military, the fewer Iraqi battalions were combat-ready, Rummy mused on the wonders of the democratic process, suggesting that Al Qaeda terrorists wouldn’t fare any better under such questioning. It would be “awkward,” he said, “if they were called to account for the state of their strategy,” ‘cuz they’re all losing and shit. An odd place, Rummyworld.

So a brothel was raided in Birmingham, England, and some foreign sex slaves freed, but while sexual slavery is, you know, bad and wrong and icky and all, I can’t get beyond the name of the brothel: Cuddles.

Despite his denunciation of “partisan witch hunts” a couple of days ago, there DeLay was, claiming, in the best McCarthyite manner, to have proof that DA Ronnie Earle coordinated his prosecution in conjunction with Congressional Democratic leaders, but he won’t tell us what this proof is until “it’s timely.” You’d think it was timely now. Also, isn’t that some sort of crime he’s accusing Earle of? Who can this sort of slander possibly fool?
(Update: I see Think Progress has made exactly the same point, and has a more complete transcript than my original link did.)

Elections are the opiate of the media. Any elections, no matter how fraudulent, turn their brains into mush. Case in point, the Algerian referendum on whether they should just forget about all those people getting massacred a few years back and issue a blanket amnesty. The government is claiming that more than 97% voted in favor of the referendum, which seems unlikely even though various groups called for a boycott, but the turnout figure of 79% is patently false, according to anyone who watched the trickle of voters, so, and this is just me speaking, that would rather seem to call into doubt the whole thing. But on the BBC World News, they mentioned the doubts about the turnout but then in the very next sentence said that “nonetheless” President Bouteflika had a mandate to yadda yadda. Nonetheless? The figures are false but nonetheless they impart a mandate? How does that work?

If I had a Blunt....

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.

Obviously, it is an unacceptable practice

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 update

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.

A hero for America

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.

Rankled

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.

Healthy and civilised news and information that is beneficial to the quality of the nation

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?