Nutt sacking

Headline of the Day (London Times, headline on the UK News page; the one on the story URL is different): “Nutt Sacking ‘Threat to All Expert Advisers.’” If I were an expert adviser, being threatened with a nutt sacking would be very worrying indeed. (Prof. David Nutt was fired as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in Britain, for noting that the legal penalties for use of various drugs do not correlate with scientific evidence about their actual harmfulness. He has pointed out that alcohol is more dangerous than pot and horse-riding more dangerous than ecstasy.)

Why we fight

Iraq gets ready for its first public hanging since Saddam. Freedom, ain’t it grand?

I never expected that anywhere, someone would make such a big statue of me

Bill Clinton attends the unveiling of an 11-foot-tall bronze statue of himself in Pristina, Kosovo. That’s actually the first statue of Clinton I’ve heard of. Does anyone know of another? Bill said, “I never expected that anywhere, someone would make such a big statue of me.”


Actually looks more like Kennedy, doesn’t it? Those papers bear the date March 24, 1999, the day NATO started bombing Serbia.

And here Bill is holding a traditional Albanian prophylactic hat.

Unprecedented

Hillary Clinton says that Abdullah²’s likely decision not to contest the fixed presidential race, given Karzai’s refusal to fire his sycophantic election chief and the decision to increase the opportunities for fraud by creating still more ghost election stations, does nothing to reduce the legitimacy of that election: “When President Karzai accepted a runoff without knowing what the outcome would be, that bestowed legitimacy from that moment forward, and Dr. Abdullah’s decision does not in any way take away from that.” Yes, if there’s one thing that’s a complete fucking mystery, it’s the outcome of an Afghan election.

Hillary has also praised Bibi Netanyahu for his great, ahem, restraint, on settlements: “what the prime minister has offered in specifics, of restraint on the policy of settlements, of no new starts, for example, is unprecedented”.

So, I have to ask you, the discerning reader,

poll by twiigs.com

(Update: Eli wrote practically the same post, though without a nifty poll, 41 minutes earlier. I blame Google Reader’s lackadaisicalness for my not having known that.)

Headline/Bad Pun of the Day

“Beauty Spots May Get New Homes.” (Sunday Times of London). I guess Cindy Crawford can afford to buy a house for hers.

In the end the people of Connecticut will respect me for that

Holy Joe Lieberman says that his constituents overwhelmingly support the public option because they are “confused.” He just hopes that when he votes against their wishes, “in the end the people of Connecticut will respect me for that.” If they do, I guess it proves his point about them being confused. Really, really confused.

My favorite anti-public option line, which Mary Landrieu and Lieberman and others have used, is that the public option is so popular because people think it’s performed gratis by the health care elves. Landrieu: “I think when people hear public option they hear free health care. Everybody wants free health care. Everybody wants health care they don’t have to pay for.” I’m not surprised that they’re so contemptuous of the American public, but I’m a little surprised that they feel free to express it so openly.

George Bush, speaking in India, said that because there was a law calling for regime change in Iraq (“It was a law passed by the Congress and the previous administration”), it was his “official duty” to invade Iraq. So that’s okay, then.

WHO GEORGE DOESN’T HATE: “Please don’t let the propagandists tell the people that George Bush and America hate you [Muslims].”

WHO GEORGE DOES HATE: “I hate people who hijack a great religion to murder innocent people.”

“It wasn’t nobody’s fault. People shouldn’t be pointing fingers.”

LA Times reporter Sandy Banks, on the Richmond gang rape: “The students I talked to after the fact at Richmond High all said they would have intervened. And yet, none of them denounced the kids who didn’t.”

Oh, seeing Dick Cheney is treat enough

The American Prospect asked “What will Dick Cheney give trick-or-treaters this year?” Some of the answers:

“A playful waterboarding, followed by threats, if they don’t tell him which house is handing out the fun-size Snickers.” -- Megan Carpentier, Air America

“An unexpectedly warm and firm hug.” -- Baratunde Thurston, The Onion

“Buckshot in the face, naturally.” -- Eric Alterman, The Nation

To which I would add, “A terrifying look inside his man-sized safe.”

Or, “A pod, the exact same size of the trick-or-treater, to be kept in their basement...”

Or, “A glimpse into the empty void that is his soul. So cold. So very, very cold.”

Other suggestions?

Thought crime

Just saw someone objecting to the new hate crimes provision protecting LGBTs as creating a “thought crime.” A standard Republican talking point. Don’t see them objecting to the distinction between first-degree murder and manslaughter as a thought crime.

Wherein is revealed what makes Hillary Clinton a happy person

Before her trip to Pakistan, Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with Dawn tv, in which she in no way pandered to her Pakistani viewers: “I love the food, I wear shalwar kameezas. I mean, I want people to know that I am no stranger to Pakistan or Pakistani culture. ... I mean, give me a seekh kebab and some gow and I’ll be a happy person.”

Oh, and it would also help if I were president of the United States. And had Bill’s balls in a box. A nice teak one.

Headline of the Day

London Times: “Sarkozy Plans New Patriotism Based on Values of ‘La Douce France.’” That’s douce. Douce! Not that other word!

I know, I know. I’m a little ashamed of myself.

If we don’t do that, we’ll be insulting democracy

Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Hamid Karzai asserted that the first round of the presidential election had been “defamed, was called a fraud,” and that he had, in fact, won 54% of the vote in a “clean” election. The decision to have a run-off anyway was his and his alone: “I decided -- for peace, for stability and for the future of democracy in Afghanistan and for the future of institutional order in Afghanistan -- to call for a runoff.” The runoff must now go ahead, he says (i.e., no power-sharing deal), because “If we don’t do that, we’ll be insulting democracy”.

And if there’s one thing Karzai hates, it’s an insult to democracy.

Some adult content

A Saudi court has sentenced a woman journalist to 60 lashes for being coordinator on a show that had on a man who talked about sex (he gets 1,000 lashes).

It’s just like America, really: sex bad, violence good.

Criss cross

The Taliban bomb a wedding party in Pakistan, possibly by mistake. Are they us now?

Michelle Obama and the Socialist Hula Hoop of Doom

At the Healthy Kids Fair on the White House south lawn Wednesday. CAPTION CONTEST (alternatively, how will Fox News spin this (geddit, spin this, geddit, geddit?) as showing that Michelle hates whitey and/or America?

He’s the Motivaterer

Every blog has already pointed out the “Get Motivated!” seminar in Fort Worth with motivational speaker George Bush (hey, I’m always motivated when George Bush speaks, aren’t you?).


One of the other speakers is Colin Powell. What I like about the idea of Bush and Powell crossing paths is that, sure, it’ll be incredibly awkward, but Bush will never know why.

Everyone’s a critic

The Denver alt newspaper Westword (motto: nothing can go wrong can go wrong can go wrong) is planning to hire a pot reviewer. It has received 120 applications so far, “many of them offering to do the reviews for free.”

Compare with this NYT story (Well this sucks. The NYT has disabled the program by which bloggers could insert links to stories that wouldn’t go dead in a few days.) about the AP reporter whose job it is to attend executions in Texas – 300+ of them – and how fewer and fewer other news outlets even bother anymore.

Chilling thought of the day: they could probably easily find 120 Texans offering to do that job for free.

(Some of you are thinking it, so I’ll just pre-empt it appearing in comments: even more people would offer to combine the two jobs. But really, do you want to have a case of the munchies in the death chamber viewing room? And showing up with cheetos is just bad manners.)(Even if you offer to share.)

Your daily dose of batshit crazy

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, foams at the mouth all over the pages of the Washington Post (or is it on the website only?) about the threat from “secular saboteurs” and the gays and “moral anarchists” and the gays and “sexual libertines” and the gays and Hollywood and the gays and the ACLU and the gays and Democrats and the gays. It must be read to be believed. Last paragraph:

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

I don’t know: every time you walk your dog, an angel dies.

Keeping faith with the best interests of the Afghan people

With 1/3 of Afghan ballots tossed out as probably fraudulent, it is, evidently, time to declare the Afghan presidential election a resounding success.

Hillary Clinton: “And after many weeks of counting ballots and much debate over the flaws in the vote, Afghans showed today that their processes work.” One of those processes (I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere in the Afghan constitution): begging, cajoling, blackmailing and threatening Karzai into accepting the necessity to steal a second round of elections. Indeed, “The leadership shown by the President, Dr. Abdullah and all of the other candidates...” If by leadership, you mean ordering their followers to stuff ballot boxes “...has strengthened Afghanistan and kept faith with the best interests of the Afghan people.” You’d almost believe that all the fraud existed in spite of the candidates.

Obama: “This is an important step forward in ensuring a credible process for the Afghan people which results in a government that reflects their will.” Like a mirror reflects a vampire. Or something. “President Karzai’s constructive actions [not defying the ruling of the election commission] established an important precedent for Afghanistan’s new democracy.” Some precedent. Some democracy.

Throughout the two-month-long post-election wrangling, we’ve been told, essentially, that if only we removed most of the fraudulent ballots, whatever remained would be a legitimate election. This is to willfully ignore the large number of people in areas without polling stations, or who were turned away from polling stations, or whose ballots were thrown out, or who didn’t bother participating in an obvious farce. Further, the process of weeding out fraudulent ballots involved discarding entire precincts whose results were unbelievable, disfranchising all their residents.

The run-off will now be done so quickly, in order to beat the Afghan winter, that the only question is whether the election monitors or the ballot-stuffers can organize faster.

(Update: the Guardian anatomizes the failed election.)

Name of the Day

The composer (and singer) of the Addams Family theme song, who just died at 93: Vic Mizzy. Somehow the perfect name.