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Bumper sticker seen yesterday: “I achieved my learning goals at Salvador Elementary.”
Thanks a lot, Britain, for making me have to side with Michael Savage in the interests of civil liberties. By the way, it may not have been clear in the news reports that when Britain released the list of people it was banning from entering the country because their opinions are too unpleasant for Brits to cope with, those people hadn’t actually applied to enter Britain. Indeed, some of them are Russian skin heads currently serving long prison terms. So it was just sort of a random list of People We Don’t Like. Of course the real point of the exercise is that Britain’s policy of excluding “radical imams” was beginning to look anti-Muslim, so, like Bush tacking non-Muslim North Korea onto his “axis of evil,” they decided to include Savage and the skinheads. But they couldn’t say that that was the reason they were releasing the list to the press, so it was presented as “naming and shaming” hate-mongers.
Important follow-up: the cat is still not warming to the tennis balls.
Where can I get me one of those hats?
More profundity from the maverick:
Things Sen. John Thune said about his opposition to a gay person being appointed to the Supreme Court that sound pretty darn homoerotic themselves:
“I know the administration is being pushed”
“but I think it would be a bridge too far right now”
“my hope is that he’ll play it a little more down the middle”
John McCain and his aged catamite Lindsey Graham have an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, mostly about how “preventive detention” of enemy combatants should go on for as long as The War Against Terror (TWAT) continues (i.e., forever) and how America’s silly criminal courts aren’t up to the task of dealing with such prisoners. They also reiterate McCain’s position on the legal memos that it is time to “move on from debates about the past,” i.e., torture, which is interesting from John “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live” McCain.
I was in a dollar store today. The cat is currently staring dubiously at the tennis ball I bought her. It’s just sitting there, but she’s seen it roll, and that’s pretty suspicious in her book. Wait till she finds out there are two more tennis balls.
But the real question of the day is, who would buy a home pregnancy test at a dollar store?
Besides a member of the Palin family, I mean.
Joe (“I would not, could not, on a plane, I would not, could not, on a train”) Biden gave a speech at the AIPAC conference today. He has been widely reported as having been tough on Israel, in that he said there needs to a two-state solution and that Israel should stop with the settlements already (new ones, anyway). Of course most of the actual speech was a big wet kiss.
SHARED VALUES: “The bond between Israel and the United States was forged by a shared interest in peace and security; by shared values and to respect all faiths and for all faiths and for all people; by deep ties evidenced here today among our citizens, both Christian and Jew”. Muslims, not so much.
AS THEY SAY IN THE SENATE: “I want to congratulate my friend, Prime Minister Netanyahu -- and as they say in the Senate, he is my friend -- for his victory.”
FUNNY, HE DOESN’T LOOK...: “[Obama’s] support is rooted in his personal connection to the Zionist idea”.
AND IF I LIFT MY FOOT, YOU CAN SEE THAT RIGHTFUL PLACE: “We want Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations, politically and economically.”
He seemed to accept the current Likud claim that without outside agitators (i.e., Iran), there would be no problems in the Middle East: “Iran also has played a dangerous role in the region supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and undermining many of our friends and those who claim to be our friends. Indeed, these proxies are the tools in my view, our view, that Iran uses to exploit conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- use it to their advantage.”
However, he didn’t entirely buy into the corollary of that theory, that Iran will have to be crushed before Israel even attempts any dialogue with the Palestinians. “In this way the continuation of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab -- Arab-Israeli conflicts, strengthen Iran’s strategic position.”
GREEN LIGHT: “We will continue to defend Israel’s right to defend itself and make its own judgments about what it needs to do to defend itself.”
“This administration sees and seeks a future of lasting peace and security in which Israeli children can leave behind the tyranny of rockets and terror; when Israeli mothers, as they send their children off to school, do not have to worry about whether or not they will come home; or Palestinian children have full opportunities to live out their dreams, and the entire Middle East does not have to live under the dread of a nuclear cloud.” You’ll notice that only Israeli children are the ones at risk of death from rockets and terror, while Palestinian children only seem to face socio-economic problems, not getting full opportunities to live out their dreams.
Speaking of living out their dreams, afterwards Biden and Obama went out for a burger at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington. They went dutch. Obama looks like he’s never seen a hamburger before.
A history teacher in Mission Viejo has been found guilty by a US District Court judge of violating the First Amendment by saying that Creationism is “religious, superstitious nonsense.” The judge wrote, “The court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement”.
The California state Supreme Court let stand a ruling that California Lutheran High School (motto: “Molding the Christian Leaders of Tomorrow”) is not subject to civil rights law and was perfectly within its rights to expel two (supposedly) lesbian girls.
Billmon notes and/or links to some of the dickishness of Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, now top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, but leaves out one of the quotes that helped torpedo Sessions’s nomination by Reagan to district court, that he “used to think the Klan was all right until I learned they smoked marijuana.”
(Update: a WaPo article on Sessions mentions the comment, but for some reason only as “remarks Sessions made about the Ku Klux Klan.”)
I didn’t have anything nice to say about Arlen Specter just because he left the Republican Party, and I have nothing nice to say about Jack Kemp just because he’s dead. That is all.
What I want as a replacement for David Souter: an actual, for God’s sake, criminal trial attorney. Someone who’s seen the inside of a court. Would be the first since Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991.
Silvio Berlusconi’s wife has been emailing news organizations complaining about his attempt to fill the European Parliament with hot young women, which she calls “entertainment for the emperor.” Silvio responded that she was being manipulated by left-wing media and said that the hot chicks will be a nice contrast to the “evil-smelling, badly-dressed people who represent certain parties in Parliament.” However, he seems to have dropped several of the showgirl candidates from the official candidate list, retaining only Barbara Matera.
Speaking of entertainment for the emperor, Obama held a prime time press conference to mark his 100th day in office.
He gave some advice to the American people: “So wash your hands when you shake hands. Cover your mouth when you cough.” He’s still trying to wash the Arlen Specter off his hands.
Asked whether waterboarding is torture and whether the Bush administration had sanctioned torture, he answered the first part in the affirmative and wiggled out of answering the second, going only so far as to call waterboarding a “mistake.” He said that “waterboarding violates our ideals and our values,” but evidently letting the people responsible for waterboarding get off scot-free does not violate our ideals and our values.
He said, “we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.” Tickling. Merciless, relentless tickling.
Also, remember to always wash your hands after torturing.
That sort of pragmatic talk about what should be a moral issue always makes me nervous, since he didn’t exactly rule out using torture in circumstances in which information can’t be gotten in other ways.
He applied that pragmatism as well to a question about abortion. He said that the Freedom of Choice Act “is not highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on.” In other words, the real problem, as far as Obama is concerned, is not maintaining women’s ability to exercise their rights but tamping down anger.
He added, “I think that those who are pro-choice make a mistake when they -- if they suggest -- and I don’t want to create straw men here, but I think there are some who suggest that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations.” There may be other considerations, but women’s freedom, i.e. their constitutional right to abortion, trumps them.
Also, remember to always wash your hands after an abortion.
NYT reporter Jeff Zeleny asked what most surprised, enchanted, humbled and troubled Obama in his first hundred days. He was surprised by the shitstorm that fell on him, enchanted by the military, troubled by how slowly Washington moves, and humbled by not having the god-like powers he expected. “And so I can’t just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want”. He should definitely work on that, cuz that would be cool.
Also humbling: “I don’t know how to create an affordable, well-designed plug-in hybrid.” Yes, Obama has really been a great disappointment.
Also humbling, or possibly enchanting: somehow everyone who becomes president, even a black guy from Chicago, winds up saying “doggone it”: “But I know that, if the Japanese can design an affordable, well-designed hybrid, then, doggone it, the American people should be able to do the same.”
As long as they remember to wash their hands afterwards.
Arlen Specter appeared this morning alongside Obama and Biden.
Specter, perhaps forgetting that people who vote in Republican primaries sometimes show up for general elections as well, said, “I was unwilling to subject my 29-year record in the United States Senate to the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate”. You know, I can’t say I have much respect for Republicans either, but it’s unseemly for an elected official in a democracy to speak quite so disdainfully about “subjecting” himself to voters. Insulting the party leaders is one thing, dismissing the 3,169,194 registered Republicans is something else.
Anyways, the following homoerotic-sounding things were said during the photo op:
Biden: “We’ve ridden the train for so many years... it’s just a delight to have no separation.”
Specter: “We’ve ridden that train together again and again, and we’ve supported that train.”
Specter: “And I appreciate what you have in the stimulus package, Mr. President.”
Specter: “When I talked to the president yesterday, I said, I haven’t seen you in the elevator lately.”
Obama: “I don’t expect Arlen to be a rubber stamp.”
Obama: “And I’m also grateful that Joe Biden paid him a little attention on the train.”
Scalia, in the 5-4 decision that the FCC was not being arbitrary in fining tv stations for fleeting profanity (a lower court detected arbitrariness because the FCC had changed its policy without warning, subjecting broadcasters to fines for shit they’d gotten away with in the past): “There are some propositions for which scant empirical evidence can be marshaled, and the harmful effect of broadcast profanity on children is one of them.” He then went on about the difficulty of performing this experiment on children, exposing some to a non-stop diet of profanity, but only from tv, to determine its effects. Yes, that would be difficult, although it might explain how Glenn Beck came to be Glenn Beck. Scalia continued, “The FCC did not need empirical evidence proving that fleeting expletives constitute harmful ‘first blows’ to children; it suffices to know that children mimic behavior they observe.” The first blows are always the best, aren’t they?
Mitch McConnell, pathetically explaining the insignificance of Arlen Specter’s switch in party affiliation: “This is not a national story. This is a Pennsylvania story.” Katharine Hepburn was especially good in that one.
Fun fact about The Philadelphia Story: screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, who won an Academy Award for the movie, was later blacklisted.
Andy Zaltzman of The Bugle on the logic of waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times: “if the fear of drowning didn’t crack him – and it clearly didn’t – the sight of his fingers going all wrinkly would have been just too much to bear.”
Obama issues a statement for Armenian Remembrance Day. He says, “My interest remains the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.” However, throughout his statement he fails, as he did in Turkey, to use the word genocide. In fact, the event is actually called Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, not Armenian Remembrance Day. And while he says that Armenians were “massacred” in “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century,” he uses the passive voice a lot, failing to mention who might have been doing the massacring (much like Bush’s Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day statements). Oh well, we know he’s all about the looking forward.
As has been noted here before, Silvio Berlusconi tends to promote women into politics for reasons other than competence and experience. Among his picks to liven up the next elections for the European Parliament are Angela Sozio, best known from Big Brother (Grande Fratello),
Eleonora Gaggioli, a tv actress,
Camilla Ferranti, star of soap opera and nudie calendar alike,
and Barbara Matera, a former Miss Italy contestant and tv announcer.
As with his Minister of for Equal Opportunities, you can find topless pictures of some of these women online (hell, it was hard to find a picture of Angela Sozio where she wasn’t topless, but this is a family blog). Sez Silvio, “I want new, young faces.” That was my excuse for this post. But then, I’m running a blog, not a country.
Israeli Foreign Minister Unholy Avigdor Lieberman says that the US will only work for Middle East peace if Israel tells it to. “Believe me, America accepts all our decisions.”
Headline of the Day: “Nazi-Bred Super Cows Roam Farm in Devon.” Heck cattle, they’re called.
The lawyer for Master Sgt. John Hatley, convicted last week of killing four bound and gagged Iraqi prisoners, says: “He loved his soldiers too much, that was his crime.”
Today Obama visited the CIA. He gave a little talk, standing in front of the wall commemorating the spooks who died in our many, many secret wars.
WELL, IT’S BETTER THAN EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION: “Well, thank you for the extraordinary welcome.”
And why not an extraordinary welcome? He gave them nothing but praise. They’re doing God’s work, they’re “fundamental to America’s national security,” they’re “the tip of the spear,” but not in a gay way. Basically he went to reassure them that just because he released those memos about their having tortured people doesn’t mean he doesn’t love and appreciate them.
WHICH IS TOO BAD, BECAUSE THAT’S KIND OF WHO YOU HAVE TO PROTECT AGAINST: “I understand that it’s hard when you are asked to protect the American people against people who have no scruples and would willingly and gladly kill innocents.”
UNLIKE THE CIA??? “Al Qaeda is not constrained by a constitution.”
WELL ISN’T THAT SPECIAL? “What makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy; even when we are afraid and under threat, not just when it’s expedient to do so.” This as he reassures torturers etc etc.
POTENTIALLY: “So don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks. Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes.” Mistakes? Or, rather, some potential mistakes? Okay, I could see how you could accidentally waterboard somebody thirty or forty times, but I’m pretty sure if you do it 183 times, you’re doing it on purpose.
He continued, “That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States, and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the CIA.” So he’s proud because we’re willing to acknowledge torturing people, so long as there are no consequences for the torturers, and then we “move forward.” That’s how we learn.
