For God, Harry, tallow, gellatin and semen!

The British war on Europe continues in earnest. While a Cabinet minister back home is admitting it could take 6 years for British cattle herds to be clean of BSE, Br reps in Europe are vetoing all measures that arise. So far, in the war to get Europe to take British tallow, gellatin and semen (and you thought the War of Jenkin's Ear was silly), they have vetoed measures on AIDS, 3rd World Refugees, cutting red tape for small businesses....

So Yeltsin promised to "go to Chechnya" like Ike, before the election, but his people told him it was way too dangerous. So yesterday he signs a peace accord that settles none of the main or even the minor issues, and today to everyone's surprise he turns up in Chechnya, not least surprise of the Chechen leaders and officials who are still in Moscow. Repeat: who are still in Moscow, and suddenly realizing that they have become in effect hostages for Yeltsin's safety. This isn't my paranoia, this is the London Times. What a sneaky little fucker Yeltsin is!

Summary of Romer v. Evans Decision (fwd)

My impression is that this decision is even narrower than we had guessed, that it was more the pre-emption of future political processes that was the problem for the Court.

Scalia's dissent was especially apalling, as per usual. I liked his approving reference to Kulturkampf. I'd have stayed away from the German terminology if I were him....

John Major formed a beef war cabinet today. The man thinks that trying to force his beef down the throats of hapless Europeans (British beef, you'll never get better) is going to be his Falklands.

Clinton was on McNeil-Lehrer (or whatever) today talking about how uniforms cut down violence in schools. Yeah, right, like it worked in the post office (that's someone else's joke), and like the Chief of Naval Operations didn't just die over some jewelry, just like they do in South-Central LA (that's mine).

A true Clinton appointee, United States Attorney for Southern Florida Kendall Coffey, resigns after getting into a fight in a bar with a topless dancer, biting her on the arm.

Warren Christopher wants to have regular Cabinet-level meetings with the Chinese. Great, appeasement on the installment plan.

Finally, a physicist got a postmodern deconstructionist spoof published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was passed by 6 editors who didn't know what that meant either. The article, evidently modeled after a real trend towards lit crit deconstruction of
physics just like they do for literature, says that "physical `reality', no less than social `reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific `knowledge', far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations fo the culture that produced it." Basically, gravity, and pi, are just what the dominant culture chooses to believe.

Who needs sitcoms when you have the New York Times?

Yes it hurt. Yes it worked

James Miller III, Reagan's budget director, who evidently thinks that that is a qualification for higher office, running against John Warner for the Republican nomination for Senate from Virginia, visits so many gun shows that his staff have to make sure he doesn't violate the state's one gun per month law.

Speaking of idiots in the South, since the Olympics committee re-routed the Olympic torch route away from Newt's Cobb county because of its 1993 anti-homosexual ordinance, Spartanburgh (!) SC, on the new route, has decided that a bunch of foreigners won't push them around, and passed their own anti-gay ordinance for no other reason than to annoy the Olympics. Since the Olympics originated in a bunch of Greeks watching a bunch of naked Greek guys run around sweating, I don't know what they're complaining about. The whole torch thing only goes back to 1936 anyway, when Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl thought it would look neat (especially if they were naked).

New Tory party ad campaign: "Yes it hurt. Yes it worked."

De Klerk left the South African government, claiming that the ANC was racist.

The latest victim of the Yugoslav break-up: the language of
Serbo-Croatian. The Bosnian Muslims are bringing in Arabic words, while Croatians are reviving 15th century words and voting on a law on the Quebec model. President Tudjman personally came up with new tennis terms, but forgot when meeting Clinton that he was supposed to be sretan (happy) to meet him, not srecan (happy). Croatian tv edited it out.

Sigh.

NY Times headline: "Dole attacks Clinton Asia policy although he supports part of it", and actual Dole quote: "As we have seen in Bosnia, Iran, Cuba and elsewhere, when President Clinton is faced with a fork in the foreign policy road, he takes it." (huh?)

Or in this case, chop sticks presumably.

Speaking of which, the US decision not to punish China as required by law for selling nuclear equipment to Pakistan is based on our belief that they were telling the truth. And what they said, that we believed, is that the transfer never happened, that the government didn't know that it had happened, and that it wouldn't happen again.

In return, they promise to believe that Clinton didn't inhale.

If Clinton really believes all that, then he has passed the qualifying test for jury duty in LA.

Rep. Wes Cooley, arch anti-environmentalist Republican from eastern Oregon, class of 1994, who called Federal Fish and Wildlife Service agents a Gestapo & told a wildlife conservationist during Congressional hearings not to set foot in Oregon, who mistook an April Fools story for real and made a speech about it, then threatened to punch (his office claims whip, so that's all right then) the (6-month pregnant) Oregonian reporter who questioned him about it, is in almost as much
trouble as I am trying to figure out how to end this sentence before it goes on too long. He either lied in the 1994 voters' pamphlet, a federal crime known as voter fraud, about being married, or he and his wife have been fraudulently collecting collecting her 1st husband's death benefits from the Marine Corps. Not that fraud would be new to him. He collects
a tax break for his farm although he does not farm there, he manufactures vitamins (from snake oil, no doubt). Also on the voters' pamphlet, he claimed to have been in Phi Beta Kappa. Well, maybe it was Alpha Beta Epsilon.... And said he'd served in Korea. Then he said he was doing secret demolition work and wasn't allowed to talk about it. Then he admitted he was lying.

And he didn't even make the Progressive's 10 stupidest Congresscritters list a few months back.

That'll show him!

REUTERS

KEY WEST, Fla. A tiny flotilla of Cuban exiles sailed toward international waters near Cuba Wednesday to toss flowers and human rights pamphlets into the sea in protest against Fidel Castro's May Day celebration.

Ooooo, soggy pamphlets. Castro must be shaking in his boots....

Helmut Kohl is in Britain. They gave him a nice big plate of British beef, with no alternative dish prepared. Fortunately for their little publicity stunt, none of the German delegation turned out to be vegetarians. (I'm trying to think of a segue to Hitler having been a vegetarian, but I can't)

Do you think Governor Engler will be denied the chance to be Dole's running mate solely on the basis that he was too fat to be drafted to go to Vietnam?

The Alabama Prison Commissioner, renouned for making prisoners who masturbate in front of female guards wear pink uniforms, has resigned in disgust because they wouldn't let him start up female chain gangs (evidently the state is being sued by male prisoners for discrimination).

Dole, continuing the attack on judges that Clinton so skillfully turned aside last month by caving like a kleenex full of snot, said yesterday that the Supreme Court is just one appointment away from being the most liberal court since Warren.

Clinton may not be able to stand up to Dole, but he sure gets tough on 13-year old girls who get in his way. When those 2 were arrested for sending him crank letters a week ago, I really thought it would be laughed out of court by now, but no....

I understand Dole is now taking warmth lessons. "Bob Dole feels your pain." Rather like when they locked LBJ in a room for six months to teach him to say negro. "Niggra-o." "No, no. Try again, Mr. President." (old Dick Gregory joke, I believe)

Did you see where Mississippi is mandating equal admissions standards for all its public universities, ensuring a 50% drop in black enrollment in the 3 traditionally-black U's?

So Judge Baer reversed himself. Not because of all the intense political pressure of course, but because of new evidence, including the testimony of a cop that blatantly contradicted his written report after the arrest. And Clinton suggests that all he did was to comment on the case, as if he had never threatened to demand the judge's resignation. Judicial integrity is being beaten like a dark-skinned person after a chase in southern California.

Tony Blair: "Our government will fail if it sees its task as dismantling Thatcherism." Boris Yeltsin: "No one with a heart can but regret the end of the Soviet Union. No one with a head can think of creating an exact copy." And US reform rabbis voted to support gay marriages but not actually to perform them.

The House ethics committee gave Gingrich another walk, without
questioning anyone or examining any documents.

Did you see where the law against "partial birth abortions" was so badly written that a) its definition included other types of abortion, b) its exclusion to save the life of the mother wasn't one, because it specified if the life was endangered by a physical disorder or such, but most women who have late-term abortions are threatened by the actual pregnancy, which is not a physical disorder.

The Treasury Dept forbids its law-enforcement officers to exhibit any bias off-duty on basis of sex, religion, etc etc. Intended to keep them from the Good Ol' Boys Roundup, it's actually so broad as to punish ethnic jokes, say, told privately.

What does it take nowadays to be insane?

What about Daumer? Don't you have to wonder about a state in which someone who kills loads of people and keeps them in the fridge for munchies and the court says, nope, not insane, seems perfectly reasonable behaviour to me. I'd hate to meet the real loons in that state.

Favorite news stories of the week: mad cows and Englishmen (yes you have less chance of catching mad cow disease from a Wimpyburger than of winning the lottery, but have you noticed how popular the lottery is?); the rise in cannibalism in Russia; the report that the Federal Reserve is horribly mismanaging its own budget; the 58-yr old black female cashier of the Senate coffee shop fired for calling her customers baby, sweetheart, and such, a complaint being filed by an aide to...Mitch McConnell. Sonny (I got you, babe) Bono is running scared.

After vituperating at President Lee for months, China is now suggesting that his reelection is a vindication of the one-China policy, so they've won anyway. Speaking of political reality, some of the op-ed pieces in the NY Times calling on Lee to accommodate China more, and coming from good liberals like Thomas Friedman and I think Anthony Lake and the Times itself, sound an awful like the advice the west offered Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Speaking of which, Germany recently refused to acknowledge that the Munich agreement of 1938 was illegal.

Sorry, this was a NY case, so I guess it gets more coverage there, though I thought of it as a national story. A judge excluded a trunkfull of cocaine and heroine saying that the police did not have reasonable cause to pull over a car that a bunch of men were putting bags into the trunk of at 5 in the morning, and that since Washington Heights police were known to be thugs (which is very true), it was not unreasonable for the men to run away. Not surprisingly, a lot of ink has been spilled over this case the last month. The judge is Harold Baer, Southern District of NY, appointed by Clinton 1994, and Clinton just ordered him to reverse himself or resign (not that Clinton can make him, of course), since Republicans intend to go after him on his judicial appointments. Newt demanded that Clinton ask for the resignation, Dole has been mentioning it. All this including the Clinton threat comes in advance of a rehearing. Mike McCurry is going after Reagan and Bush judges as being
too soft on crime (the judges who struck down Megan's law, the SF judge who wants drugs legalized....)

Incidentally, Pataki removed a Bronx district attorney for refusing to act within his discretion to ask for the death penalty for a man who killed a cop.

Another month, another proposed constitutional amendment from the
Republicans. I know the constitution isn't etched in stone, but on an etch-a-sketch?

Now even Fed Courts of Appeal can ignore the Supreme Court and set their own affirmative action policy, so why don't you try to persuade the 9th district to follow the 5th?

What must John Gummer be thinking today, the former British Agriculture Minister who fed his 4-year old daughter a hamburger on national tv to prove that British beef was safe despite the mad cow disease.

The House voted to let states deny public education to children of illegal immigrants, including those born in the US (the latter by a vote of 269-151, actually higher than for the bill as a whole), proving that they too can ignore the Supreme Court.

A Texas grand jury decides that a man taking advantage of the new
concealed weapons law to settle a traffic accident dispute with extreme prejudice was within his rights. Not even a trial.

In Berkeley I saw a sign for a candidate for Assembly who proposes to abolish the IRS.

I've been trying to pick someone for superior court judge from the meaningless candidate statements. So I'm asking myself whether the one whose law degree came from Catholic University Columbus School of Law would be against the death penalty. I may wind up voting for the one I know was a defense attorney, who still somehow tries to fool the death penalty voters by noting that "My last case before taking the bench was a death penalty jury trial." I can see a thousand voters underlining death
penalty with highlight markers and voting for him. My mother says she has someone who brags that as a judge he saved taxpayer money by sentencing people at the prelims. Um, doesn't that mean he just ratified plea agreements, or is this some new thing implemented by Dan Lungren to eliminate juries. In LA, you could see how that might be popular. I personally blame whatever consultant took the Menendez brothers out of their cable-knit sweaters and into suits and ties for their conviction.

I've decided to vote in favor of giving unemployment insurance to prisoners.

Maybe we could send our mountain lions to Australia and thus solve our lion problem and their koala problem at the same time?

An alternate juror in the Whitewater case was expelled, not because she'd worn her home-made Star Trek uniform to court every day, but for talking to TV about it. She evidently wears it to all formal occasions.

Thu, 7 Mar 1996

The Village Voice, commenting on a Forbes reference to the liberal media distorting his flat tax idea, notes that of the remaining candidates, Keyes and Dornan are radio hosts, Buchanan is a columnist and is on CNN, and Forbes owns a multibillion dollar media empire.

Question I'd have liked to hear someone ask Dole when he was posing with George Bush yesterday: "So, is he lying about your record now?"

Buchanan says that he will look like something out of Deliverance...

Yesterday I found the lock-picking web-site and Dave's Web of Lies, on which everything is guaranteed to be inaccurate.

Today I have found "Dave's Web of Lies" on which everything is guaranteed to be false, and the Web-site containing a guide to lock-picking. Contrary to my assumption that the latter would turn out to be a joke, it does indeed seem to be a guide to lock-picking. Just in case you were looking for a new career.

I have also been running into problems relating to the Web-browser I am using more frequently today than is usual. When you choose an option from the British comedian/actor/writer/show-off's home page called Instant Orgasm, and the result is a message that this cannot be displayed on your screen, well, disappointment hardly begins to describe it.

Former Governor Carroll Campbell of S Carolina on Lamar Alexander: "I don't think people perceive him as a fellow-Southerner. They perceive him as a nice guy."

Another great Republican debate. C'mon Dole, should a raped woman be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, or not. I understand that Dole will soon hit his legal spending limit, thanks to Forbes. Did you hear that Alan Keyes went on hunger strike to protest being left out of the debate? I knew Dick Gregory; Dick Gregory was a friend of mine... While inside, Buchanan kept trying to get everyone to join him in a chorus of
Dixie...