Worth the wait

Bush: “The Iraqis are showing the world that democracy is worth the wait”. Maybe, but if my dinner arrived more than four months after I placed the order, I sure wouldn’t tip 15%.

Evidently chants of “death to Arabs” are common at Israeli soccer matches. Charming.

I just found an LA Times clip from God knows when with suggestions for California license plate slogans:

California: Omigod! Omigod!

Millions of People, Dozens of Stories

Where Anyone Can Get Elected Governor

Whatever

Bush went to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, and demonstrated his “aren’t I the cutest thing ever” face. No one was buying.

No choice but to become suicide bombers

Bush: “And the doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist you are equally as guilty as a terrorist, came right from my soul.”

Managed care: a shoot-out at the Palestinian health ministry was caused, according to the BBC, by Fatah gunmen “seeking better treatment for a hospital patient”.

A few days ago, I linked to a London Times article about postal carriers in Baghdad. Today’s Sunday Times has one about garbage men, who are increasingly being targeted. The Iraqi version of “First they came for the communists...” is gonna be a little strange. According to a Sunni militant interviewed by the paper, it is because they spy for the government and report when they find booby traps in rubbish heaps (at no point is there an explanation for why anyone would booby-trap a rubbish heap).

In a followup to the story about Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Christian convert, which doesn’t actually mention what he’s doing now that he’s in exile, the WaPo quotes an imam saying that if it’s Afghanistan’s democratic decision to kill apostates, “we ask that you not interfere, or else we will have no choice but to become suicide bombers.” No choice. None at all.

George W. Bush’s Earth Day

Bush celebrated Earth Day today; he went to “commune with nature” in a state forest in California. As always when communing with nature, he brought a crowd.


His bike has a name. It’s called Mountain Bike One.

He then went to Sacramento to see a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered car.


And a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered bus (exact change only, Mr President!).


He said that hydrogen is the “fuel of the future.” He said that hydrogen is “domestically produced” (in hydrogen factories, I assume).

He arrived in Sacramento on his personal helicopter.


He left Sacramento on his personal airplane.


Here’s the motorcade that took him to his environmentally friendly bike ride.


He even walked at one point, but he didn’t look very pleased about it.

She was yelling at the president

So what assistant US Attorney prosecuting Wang Wenyi said when she denied that Wang’s speech was actually speech was, “She was yelling at the president. You can’t walk into a theater and yell ‘Fire!’ The First Amendment does not permit her to engage in criminal conduct.” You have to go to law school to learn that sort of logic, or possibly Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV.

Which doesn’t explain the logic of the WaPo, which editorializes that she shouldn’t go to prison. So far so good. Then they say “The Secret Service was right to hustle her off the grounds.” Okay. Then they say, “President Bush was right to apologize.” Wrong wrong wrong, and wrong. As the Danish government rightly said when asked ever so politely by the Muslim world to apologize for those cartoons, it is not the place of the government of a free people to apologize for the speech of its citizens. That’s what free speech means.

Bush came to California today, which he doesn’t do often because his staffers like to feed him made-up stories about the weird sex habits of Californians, just to see what they can get him to believe. This is why he said, “I know people here are suffering at the gas pump.” I’m not sure what he thinks we do at, or possibly with, the gas pump...

Speaking of pumping, he met with our beloved governor, so once again I’m disguising my laziness with a CAPTION CONTEST! YAY!

Going beyond political speech

At heckler Wang Wenyi’s hearing, the federal prosecutor said (according to the Reuters paraphrase), “Wang had gone beyond political speech and that the verbal attack was personally directed at Hu.” Political speech can’t be directed towards an actual person?

A CIA employee from its inspector-general’s office has been fired for leaking details of the secret prisons in Eastern Europe to the WaPo (which got a Pulitzer for the story). So we can take that as an official confirmation, right?

Iraq seems finally to have a new prime minister, Jawad al-Maliki, who is exactly in the mold of Jaafari: a sectarian Shiite who the Sunnis will never trust, who spent most of his adult life in exile outside Iraq, mostly in Iran. What’s not to love?

And in Afghanistan, Karzai named a new cabinet, mostly a reshuffle of the old cabinet, including removing all but one token woman (minister of women’s affairs). He tried to get the parliament to vote on them as a slate, but they refused, and rejected several of his choices, including, you guessed it, the woman, and also the minister of culture, who is accused of not censoring enough culture.

Harassing, intimidating or threatening

Yesterday, Bush apologized to Chinese President Hu for Wang Wenyi’s heckling of him, but nothing says “I’m sorry” like a stiff jail term. Wang has been charged with “harassing, intimidating or threatening a foreign official,” for which she could be imprisoned for up to six months. And they may also go after her under local laws for disorderly conduct. I’m guessing she doesn’t get to call Hu as a witness to ask him if he felt harassed, intimidated or threatened. Chinese presidents are notoriously sensitive to such examples of lèse majesté: when protesters were actually allowed within the sight-lines of Jiang Zemin in Switzerland in 1999, he said the Swiss had “lost a good friend.” And yesterday Chinese foreign ministry officials cancelled a briefing session out of pique. On one thing the Chinese, Bush and the penal code all agree: it is the duty of government to keep its subjects quiet in the presence of foreign leaders.

Jon Carroll:

The Bush administration embraced the arrogance of power with gusto. Its motto was “Never complain, never explain,” which morphed into “Never explain, frequently complain,” which morphed into “Always complain, pretend to explain.”

Hu’s your daddy

The museum at the site of the Majdanek death camp in Poland has thought better of its plans to stage a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Speaking of awkward, when that woman heckled Hu, it was blacked out in China. Bush later apologized to Hu for this egregious case of freedom being exercised. The free speech, it burns, it buuuuurrrrns!!! Whenever Bush, or Condi, or whomever, visits China, they always have the common courtesy of arresting all their dissidents to prevent just such an occurrence. Oh, and the White House announcer thought that China’s name is “the Republic of China.” Oops.

What do you mean by a democracy?

Saw a commercial for Steve Westly, one of the D’s running for governor in California. It says he’d be a “different kind of governor.” Thank you for making that clear, or we might have thought you planned to be another Austrian-former-bodybuilder-action-film-star-married-to-a-Kennedy-harasser-of-women kind of governor. No, you plan to be different from that. Not the same. Dissimilar.

Karl Rove has given up one of his titles... no, not Boy Genius, but rather “deputy chief of staff for policy.” I’m wondering if his pay will go down accordingly. OK, I’m not really, but shouldn’t it?

Jay Rosen at Salon thinks that Scott McClellan’s incompetence (“McClellan’s specialty was noncommunication; what’s remarkable about him as a choice for press secretary is that he had no special talent for explaining Bush’s policies to the world. In fact, he usually made things less clear by talking about them.”) was the reason he had the job in the first place: “Not to be persuasive, but to refute the assumption that there was anyone the White House needed or wanted to persuade -- least of all the press! ... The very notion of persuasion conceded more to democratic politics than the Bush forces wanted to concede. ... McClellan was there to make executive power more illegible... The intended result: a presidency that is less questioned in the eyes of the world. That’s not news management; it’s a new balance of power between them and us.” Read it. It’s an interesting argument, but whether or not you are persuaded by it, which comes down largely to whether you believe the Bushies are smart enough to have that coherent a strategy, it is an explanation that fits the facts, and that’s frightening enough.

Bush met Chinese President Hu Jintao today. Said, “The United States and China are two nations divided by a vast ocean -- yet connected through a global economy”. That must be the ocean we used to think would protect us. Afterwards, they took questions from reporters, a reversal of the earlier plan to avoid such an encounter, a plan for which the WaPo editorially spanked the White House (they rather adorably assumed it was Hu and not Bush who wished to avoid questions). One reporter asked Hu when China would become a democracy. Hu replied “what do you mean by a democracy?” I hope he didn’t look to GeeDubya to explain it to him.

Bush says the US & China have a common goal “that Iran should not have the nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, or the know-how to how to make a nuclear weapon.”

But fuck the nukes issue, what Bush is really interested in is sports. He mentioned a Chinese basketball player, the visit of the US ping pong team to China 35 years ago, the Olympics, and here he is with Michelle Kwan.

Multiple picture caption contest:

Red Beard the Palestinian Pirate

Some Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset met with a Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament, Mohammed Abu Tir today, and.... Um, uh, what the fuck is up with that beard?





I mean WHAT the FUCK??

Hard to replace Scott

Little Scotty, the over-sized, sweaty, sputtering face of the White House, is out! Sez Chimpy, “It’s going to be hard to replace Scott”. Yes, yes it will.


The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case of two Chinese Uighurs who have spent four years in Guantanamo for no very good reason, were “cleared” (determined to no more be enemy combatants, whatever that means) more than a year ago but not released because they can’t be sent back to China and no one else wants them. The Bush admin argued that their case shouldn’t be heard at all because their continued Gitmoization “does not establish that they are suffering irreparable harm requiring this court’s immediate intervention” and “The Executive’s power to detain enemy combatants necessarily includes the authority to wind up detention in an orderly fashion after a determination has been made that it is no longer necessary to hold a detainee for war-related reasons.”

Bush said today, “we also recognize that vacuums in the political process create opportunity for malfeasance and harm.” You knew he meant Iraq, right?

Name of the day

I’ve mentioned the, to me, obnoxious idea of Alabama “pardoning” Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists. I’m not revisiting that, but I need to give the prestigious Name of the Day award (sorry, Suri Cruise, you lose) to its sponsor, who I just found out is one Thad McClammy.

Just call it idiosyncratic

Rumsfeld explained today that retired generals were criticizing him because he had modernized the military and they’re stodgy old fogeys who don’t like change, such as cancelling the Crusader artillery piece, closing bases, adjusting our global posture and, oh yeah, totally and completely fucking up Iraq. No, “people like things the way they are, and so when you make a change like that, somebody’s not going to like it... It’s hard for people who are oriented one way to suddenly have to be oriented a different way.” I think he’s trying to tell us he’s gay. Sort of like Vito Spatafore on The Sopranos.

The worst use of “jazz hands” ever

Another of his great ideas that people have obstructed: performance pay. “The idea of paying for performance is stunning for some people.” It’ll be really stunning for him when he finds out he owes the federal government several billion dollars because of his performance.


He was asked a rather good question: why did he offer to resign twice during the Abu Ghraib scandal, when there wasn’t evidence that he was involved or knew about it, but not now, when there are questions about decisions he actually did make. Rummy: “Oh, just call it idiosyncratic.” That’s one word for it.

Here he deploys the “Rummy Scowl of Doom” on a hapless reporter
Gen. Peter Pace made an interesting comment about militias coming under central government “control.” Asked to elaborate, he said that when (and if) there is a central government, it will have to decide “either... to assimilate them back into civilian society without weapons or into the police forces or the army with weapons”. Huh.

Bush goes to school, learns nothing

Bush went to a magnet school in Maryland today, and learned all about magnets. Science, he said, is “cool.” Except for climatology and evolution and genetics and...

You know, just once I’d like him, when he goes to a school, to go to a crappy one, or even an average one, and sit in on a real average class. He just has no idea. He sees the dog and pony show, he sees “people using little devices to look for sun spots,” and he thinks that’s what it’s like every day. Here he is defending No Child Left Behind:

And, oh, by the way, I’ve heard every excuse not to measure -- you know, You’re teaching the test. No, you’re teaching a child to read so he or she can pass the test, that’s what you’re doing. Or, All you do is test. No, good schools are those who [sic] have got a curriculum that enables a child to be able to pass a standardized test. That’s what we’re talking about.

Piffle.

Today the Parkland Magnet Middle School for Aerospace Technology, tomorrow, ze world!



Here he greets students of the magnet school while standing on the chest of the photographer taking this picture.


Here a student explains his science project for the fourth time, using even smaller words, but Bush still just doesn’t get it.



And finally a couple of random pictures from the visit of Bush looking like a doofus.

I’m the decider, and I decide what is best

Bush: “I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.” (video here) A condescending but infantile moron who hears voices, and reads the funnies front page.

Oh, and he also refused to take the option of hitting Iran with nuclear weapons off the table.

(“Brando” suggests reasons the Iranians are enriching uranium, including: “Giving President Bush a reason to say “nuc-u-lar” a lot. That always cracks us up.”

What can’t The Decider decide? What to do with his hands. Here he is with Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora.




Bad touch! Bad touch!

Hey, you know Dick Cheney’s daughter is also Lebanese.

No excuse or justification is possible

Secretary of War Rumsfeld told Rush Limbaugh today that if we’d listened “every time there were critics and opponents to war... our country would be a totally different place,” adding, “for example, if we hadn’t started the Spanish-American War, we wouldn’t have that nice base in Guantanamo to torture prisoners in.”

The White House issued a statement about the bombing in Tel Aviv, in which 9 people died. They’re against it. Indeed, “no excuse or justification is possible.” And the Pentagon issued a statement about the killing of 7 Afghan civilians by American troops. In that case, evidently some excuse or justification was possible. But not apologies, and I stress this because some news reports said that the military apologized for killing innocent bystanders. In fact, it said that it “regretted” the deaths, but blamed them on “terrorists” for “expos[ing] innocent civilians” to the “grave risk” that Americans would shoot them.

A nice piece of reporting from the Times (London) Monday about those brave men walking a beat in Baghdad: postmen. They have to take different routes to avoid being kidnapped, figure out where people have disappeared to, and sort out mail sent to addresses that no longer exist.

You’ll remember I linked to this Sunday Times story about plans for a “second liberation of Baghdad,” described this way by a Pentagon adviser: “If you cut up the city into pieces neighbourhood by neighbourhood, you can prevent it from becoming a major urban fight.” And we see in the NYT that troops have already “sealed off” a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. If these tactics sound at all familiar, well, today’s Ha’aretz says that one response to the suicide bombing (besides the shelling of Gaza, which has killed at least 25 this month) will be “Stricter implementation of the policy of separating the West Bank into sections, in an effort to prevent Palestinians from moving from one section to another”. Great minds think alike, or something.

Stoned

China is bestowing upon a no-doubt grateful Tibet a 35-ton, 24-foot statue of Mao, which they decided was a cheaper way of “marking” their territory than the original plan, which involved tanker trains full of urine.


The sculptor claims that he tried to make Mao look a bit like Buddha. Searching for stories on this, I couldn’t help but notice that Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, also features prominently a story, “Cruise: Holmes is a Scientologist.” Evidently that’s big news in China. Big “Dawson’s Creek” and “Risky Business” fans, I’m guessing.

Speaking of granite (the Mao statue, not Tom Cruise’s acting) (or the contents of Katie Holmes’s head for getting involved with Tom Cruise), Bush today visited a Europa Stone Distributors. Here, he is seen mesmerized by his own reflection in a polished granite table.


Little-known fact: Dick Cheney casts no reflection.

Here, he is seen hangin’ with some of the workers there, in a picture which is in no way awkward.


And for this picture, you may provide your own caption:

Gay marriage is not the magic bullet to get us out of our situation

The pope weighs in on the Iranian nuclear issue: “May an honourable solution be found for all parties, through honest and serious negotiations.” Now why did no one else think of that? That must be why he’s the pope.

Iyad “Comical” Allawi and Adnan Pachachi suggest a coup to “save [Iraq] from its current deadly crisis,” with a government of strong men modesty forbids them from naming, ignoring the results of the December elections.

The Chicago Tribune (via Juan Cole, reg./BugMeNot, void where prohibited) asked how the US was following the Leahy Amendment, which requires no military aid to foreign security units connected to human rights violations, in Iraq. You will be surprised and amazed and shocked to hear that it isn’t. In fact, the US isn’t really tracking where the tens of thousands of guns it has given the Shiite-militia-riddled Interior Ministry are going. And the US embassy has no system in place for tracking allegations of human rights abuses. And despite the discoveries of secret Interior Ministry torture prisons, Americans still don’t inspect Iraqi detention centers.

In case the US invades, Iran has started recruiting martyrs. They sign a “Registration form for martyrdom-seeking operations.” Who knew there’d be paperwork?

The NYT says that inflammatory social issues may not do it for the Republicans in the 2006 elections. Lindsey Graham utters this rather wonderful sentence: “Gay marriage is not the magic bullet to get us out of our situation.” The article has this picture, featuring the international symbol for unisex bathrooms heterosexual marriage.

Representing Satan and not God

Shimon Peres, Israel’s former prime minister and current #2 man in Kadima, says that Iranian President “Ahmadinejad’s statements remind those of Saddam and he will end up the same way as Hussein has.” In other words, he is threatening Iran with American invasion. That should go over well in the Muslim world. Also, “Ahmadinejad represents Satan and not God.”

Ha’aretz says that Israel’s master plan is to wait until Palestine is reduced to complete chaos, and then offer to release Marwan Barghouti, who would ride in and save the day from Hamas, but only if the US released Jonathan Pollard. The paper doesn’t name its sources, so who knows how serious this really is. One thing about Pollard: Israel has been demanding the release of their spy for 20 years, but has never been willing to reveal just what information he gave them.

By the way, Israel has been shelling Gaza very heavily in recent days, and has reduced the distance they’re supposed to keep between their targets and civilian housing to exactly the same as the distance that fragments fly from the point of impact. All to the news media’s usual deafening silence, blind indifference, and, oh, some metaphor involving the sense of smell.

Sarah Baxter of the Sunday Times of London says that the US is planning a “second liberation” of Baghdad when/if an Iraqi government forms (four months today since the elections!), in essence a re-invasion involving rockets, attack helicopters, etc etc.

The article says that Baghdadis now carry two ID cards, one for Shiite militia checkpoints, one for Sunni militia checkpoints.

Energetic and steady leadership

A DEA agent who literally shot himself in the foot while demonstrating gun safety to children is suing the agency because the tape of the incident somehow leaked out into the public domain, causing him emotional distress, preventing him from doing undercover work, and also for some reason they won’t let him make those presentations anymore.

I was hoping for a transcript of Scalia’s comments at the U of Conn. Law School, but no such luck. I’d forgotten that all his appearances are subject to the rule of omertà. We do know that Fat Tony said that his refusal to recuse himself from the case involving Cheney’s secret energy task force was the “proudest thing” he has done whilst on the Supreme Court. Yes, for centuries to come, Scalia’s words of wisdom will resound throughout legal history: “quack quack.” He suggests that “if you can’t trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life.” Coming from a man supposedly skilled in logical argumentation, the second half of that sentence doesn’t have much to do with the first half. You start off expecting him to put some sort of case for the integrity of the judiciary – rather an important cornerstone of the third branch of government, since there is no recourse against an unethical justice – and instead get a blank dismissal, indeed an insult directed against anyone who vests less than blind, unquestioning faith in the Infallible One.

Speaking of infallible, Bush has issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld, in which he repeatedly called him Don. Evidently, Don’s “energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period,” adding “if you can’t trust your securrtery of dee-fense more than that, get a life.”

Rummy Don spoke energetically and steadily in an interview with Al-Arabiya yesterday (scheduled for C-SPAN today 6:45pm PST).

Asked how the situation in Iraq differed from a civil war, Rummy Don said that “If you go to civil wars historically and look at them in different countries around the globe, they have existed in time.” Um, right. They’ve also existed in height, width and depth. What’s your point? “I’m not going to get into the debate as to semantics as to what is or is not a civil war. ... I personally think of it as a situation where in 18 provinces of the country about 14 are at peace.”

Asked about Guantanamo, Rummy Don trashed the UN report because the UN team hadn’t been to Gitmo. The reporter pointed out that this was because they wouldn’t have been allowed to speak to any prisoners. He said this was because the Red Cross goes there and “To let any other group go down there, and then you have to open the floodgates and let everyone go down there.” Everyone? The United Nations is not “everyone.” The Red Cross, says Rummy Don, “do, in my view, a job that is representative for the world of what the actual situation is.” Except in as much as they’re not permitted to speak publicly about conditions there.

Rummy Don repeats his recently acquired mantra that it’s all Turkey’s fault. If it had allowed US troops to enter Iraq through Turkey, the Sunnis could have been crushed early on. Or greeted us as liberators. Or something.

And said that if secretaries of defense quit every time a bunch of retired generals criticized them, it would be like a merry-go-round. Whereas now, it’s like another ride.

Irresponsible

At yesterday’s Gaggle, McClellan sounded really upset at the WaPo, saying, “That is absolutely false and it is irresponsible, and I don’t know how The Washington Post can defend something so irresponsible.” He added, “Really, I don’t know how and I wish they’d give me some pointers on how, cuz no one ever believes me when I defend irresponsible shit.”