Exploiting the opportunity

Something else Prince Charles doesn’t have to squeeze out of a tube himself, because he has one of his valets do it: toothpaste (from a crested silver dispenser). Actually, Chuck has recently economized, cutting down to four valets, but the Guardian still asks “why exactly does one man need so many people to help him get dressed?”

In analyzing GeeDubya, here are a couple of quotes from him, from the Post’s piece on Bob Woodward’s new book on the Afghan war:

“I can be an impatient person." He spoke about his "instincts" or his "instinctive" reactions a dozen times during the ranch interview. "I'm not a textbook player; I'm a gut player," he said.

Ignoring the content, which just proves again what I’ve said about him in the past, that he thinks “instincts” are an adequate replacement, indeed superior than, intelligence or knowledge, look at the sentence structure. Maybe he’s been doing this all along and I just noticed it, but I’ll be on the lookout in the future. He’s thinking of himself in the third person; he’s using nouns where normal people would use adjectives or verbs. Most people would say “I can be impatient,” how many people that you know would say “I can be an impatient person”?

This isn’t scary at all: Britain is considering replacing electronic tags for paedophiles with surgically implanted ones, that can be used to track them at all times via GPS and monitor their heart rate and blood pressure, sending out the police if they think he’s getting too excited.

Fans of urine-related sports should click here.

Sharon plans to expand settlements in the West Bank. Yeah, we know he does that anyway, but usually he lies about it. He says on radio that Israel must “exploit the opportunity to create new facts in the field and create contiguity” (that means ethnic cleansing). I assume the opportunity he’s so eager to exploit is the latest attack on Israelis. Think he’ll get into trouble for the word “exploit”? Me neither.

Former Italian Prime Minister Andreotti is sentenced to 24 years in prison for getting the Mafia to assassinate, in 1979, a journalist who was close to the story of Andreotti’s complicity in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. No one thinks he’ll actually have to go to jail, though. I don’t think anyone ever does in Italy.

For the first time North Korea says that it has nukes. Not that this means they do, of course.

The new Pakistani Parliament has finally been allowed to convene. It has a record number of 1) mullahs, 2) women (many of whom are standing in for male politicians Musharaf barred from running). Should be fun.

Not the camel fair! Is nothing sacred?

Doug Ireland talks about Nancy Pelosi’s record, suggesting that she’s not much of a leftie after all, and that her reputation for it rests on only a small portion of her voting record--her advocacy of homosexuals and AIDS sufferers and support for civil rights in China--which was basically forced on her by the demographics of her SF district. Also she’s been bad recently on Israel, Iraq, and she’s an airhead. So as usual we get all the right-wing rhetoric about lefties taking over the Democratic Party, without the benefit of any of the left-wing policies we’d get if that ever really happened.

Speaking of heiresses to the political elite, it’s getting curiously little attention, but Chief “Justice” Rehnquist’s daughter, the inspector general at Health & Human Services, liked to keep a gun in her office, which is generally not good either for health or for human services, to say nothing of being illegal. At least she’s not wearing a robe with stripes on the sleeves. She’s also accused of politicizing the office and forcing non-partisans out (at least she didn’t shoot them, although she did try to force them to take loyalty oaths).
(yes it’s the Wall Street Journal, but you can access it)(also Molly Ivins’s current column, quoting the Journal).
Janet Rehnquist prefers that health care companies that have previously defrauded the government be dealt with on a voluntary basis, because forcing them to use strict reporting would have a financial impact on the poor babies. She also halted an audit of Florida’s pension fund until after the election.

In Macedonia, NATO soldiers attack some terrorists and hold them at gunpoint. Well, not actually terrorists, but actors in a movie being filmed.

Labour MP Alan Simpson: “I think Bush will hit Iraq in the same way that a drunk will hit the bottle.”

The State Dept warns Americans to stay away from the annual camel fair in Rajasthan, India, as there is a risk of terrorist attack. Plan your vacations accordingly. I’m beginning to think that The Onion is writing State’s press releases.

The Russian Duma rejects investigating the mishandling of the Moscow theater siege, giving in to authoritarian President Vlad the Impaler Putin.

The US House rejects investigating the mishandling of intelligence before 9/11, giving in...aw, you get the idea. And by a party-line vote. You might think that means that there really is a difference after all between the parties on foreign policy, but actually they were both alike in thinking of an inquiry in terms of partisan advantage.

The R’s also snuck some other stuff through in the Homeland Security Bill, like letting companies which use offshore tax havens contract with the department, and anyone else it contracts to, like airport screening companies and makers of smallpox vaccines, are completely immune from lawsuits. Oh, and Eli Lilly is protected from liability for a previous drug which may cause autism; this has nothing to do with the Homeland Security Agency in any way, but it got inserted into the bill anyway. You’ll remember the R’s ran ads accusing the D’s of being worried about extraneous things like government workers being ordered to leave their unions instead of the national security.

Judging from the tone of Iraq’s acceptance of the UN Security Council ultimatum, which is described by newspapers with hilarious understatement as “grudging,” if I were the UN inspectors before handling any list of weapons programs handed over by the Iraqis that they hadn’t used it as toilet paper first. “No no, my infidel friend, that is only coffee stain.” As Jon Stewart said after reading bits of it out, imagine what the draft of a rejection was like.

I mentioned the proposed (or has it been passed?) Hong Kong treason statute dictated to them by the evil overlords in Beijing. The Chinese vice-premier has a good explanation for the (weak) opposition to it: they must have done something wrong.

The Mother Jones website has an ad for Viagra on it. Well sure, have you seen the picture of the actual Mother Jones at the top of the page?

What would Jesus drive?

There was a UN conference last week which for the first time ever decided that the way to solve overpopulation and poverty is to give women control over their own fertility. Oh, except for the US, which is now threatening to cut all funding to the UN family planning thingy, having decided that there is something horribly wrong about the phrases “reproductive rights” and “reproductive health services.” Evidently they might lead to dancing. Sorry, I mean abortion.

Speaking of conferences, NATO is holding one in Prague next week. Belarus is not invited. So President Lukashenko has threatened that if he is not given a visa, Belarus will cease guarding its borders and flood the Czech Republic (and through it, all Western Europe) with immigrants and drug smugglers.

A new series of commercials by a Christian group in the Mid-West asks the burning question: What Would Jesus Drive? Evidently not an SUV. Funny, because most SUV owners drive as if they think they’re the flipping son of God. Actually, I believe traditionally Jesus drives in a side-car. Somebody help me out here, because “What would Jesus drive” is a fantastic straight line but I can’t seem to think of anything funny. Usually they just pop into my head fully formed, but here I’ve just got the elements of a joke. See what you can do with these: a pogo stick, “my other car is a...”, when the van’s a-rocking..., a Yugo.

Evidently there’s another tripwire in the UN resolution on Iraq: it requires Iraq not to shoot at anyone enforcing a UN resolution. According to the US, they’ve been doing just that for years, shooting at US planes enforcing the no-fly zone, which was not of course declared by the UN but by the US, which claims it was necessary to enforce UN resolutions. Asked about this, Rummy Rumsfeld waffled, "That's for the United Nations and the president of the United States to make judgments like that. At what point does Saddam Hussein's behavior reflect compliance and cooperation, and at what point does it reflect something other than that?"

Pure theater

Two months ago, The Onion ran a piece about commemorating the one-week anniversary of the 1-year anniversary of 9/11 (I think I was funnier last year when I wrote about July 4th as the 25th anniversary of the Bicentennial). That was satire. This week we commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C. Judging from the grim expressions, this wasn’t satire.

Bush dismissed the Iraqi parliament, which voted to reject the UN Security Council’s terms, as "nothing but a rubber stamp for Saddam Hussein." He probably meant because the vote was unanimous, you know, like the vote of the UN Security Council. The White House says the vote was “pure theater.” Of course the Security Council vote was a puppet show, and the US Congress, well, each day’s session opens with a tiny car pulling onto the House floor and dozens of Congressmen pouring out, if you catch my drift.

More on the Japanese kidnapped by N. Korea: when it claimed that most of them had mysteriously died in car crashes and whatnot and the graves of all but one were mysteriously washed away by floods, it returned bones purportedly of that one--which tests show were actually the bones of someone 20 years older, and a woman.

Herat, a city in Afghanistan, has reimposed the Taliban ban on wedding celebrations in restaurants, because it might lead, shudder, to dancing.

Iraq was “caught” trying to buy antidotes to nerve gas, which the US says (while trying to get Turkey not to sell the stuff to Iraq; Turkey says it will investigate the issue for long enough for the sale to go through) proves Iraq intends to use chemical weapons against the US. 1) If you don’t want people trying to kill you, don’t invade their country; 2) Is the US complying with the chemical weapons treaty? If not, shut up (an article in this week’s Village Voice suggests that one of the reasons the outrage over Russia’s use of fentanyl in the theatre died down so fast was that the Pentagon is testing that drug for its own use. The article also mentions that in 1997 Mossad tried to use fentanyl to assassinate a Hamas leader by spraying it in his ear); 3) I strongly suspect Iraq just did this as a cheap way of throwing a scare into US troops and making it that much harder for them to fight, constrained by all that heavy decon equipment.

http://www.theonion.com/onion3842/wdyt_3842.html

China’s party congress doesn’t just usher in the era of the communist plutocrats, but also of nepotism on a grand scale. The sons of Jiang & Li Peng are to be elevated to the party central committee, along with a bunch of other sons of current leaders.

The Wash Post has a story on all of Tom DeLay’s lackies taking over the R leadership in the House. According to him, "It's the cream rising to the top." Tommy, the only things we see rising to the top when we look at you are 1) our lunches, 2) a really cheap toupée.

1.49 million tv ads during this year’s elections.

I think we need a larger can of Raid.

There’s a piece by a former UNSCOM spokesman in the Guardian saying that there can be no real proof found by inspectors one way or another, esp as you can’t prove a negative. Consequently, Hans Blix will at some point have to make a decision that is more properly a political one. This is in part why the Bushies are not talking about inspections, but about disarmament: it makes Iraq have to prove that it is innocent, which is pretty much impossible. Incidentally, the inspectors are supposed to issue a report in February, but Colin Powell says that the US won’t wait that long.

I’m told that Oklahoma and South Carolina (which the Daily Show described as being known as the South Dakota of the Carolinas) ban tattooing.

Evidently I fell asleep for a really long time and it’s now Christmas. Did I mention that when I had to go to the supermarket twice in one day to buy an apple that I had to go past a Salvation Army bell-ringer each time? And me without my chainsaw.

On the bright side, I’ve just received my first ever Nigerian scam email (actually claiming to be from Burkina Faso, but close enough). I feel like I have finally joined the cyber community.

Seen the pictures of US-held POWs yet?

I guess every vote count must have gone ok, because I didn’t see a single story on whether the new voting machines in various places were actually working. Unless of course you count the state that realized a couple of days later it had misplaced 100,000 ballots. No prizes for guessing which state.

Under the subject heading But is it art? I sometimes have stories of weird art. For example, the Belgian artist Jan Fabre, who has dabbled in the media of blood (his own and his girlfriend’s menstrual), sperm and steak (uncooked, naturally). So naturally they gave him the job of renovating the royal palace in Brussels. On the ceiling: 5-foot long iridescent green beetles.

Speaking of art, a follow-up: the artist who kept the embalmed body of a dead tramp, that was found only after the former died? The coroner has decided that the body can go on display as a work of art.

The doctor who performed the first successful re-attachment of a limb died this week. That operation was in 1962.

Vladimir Putin warns of a worldwide Islamic radical plot to kill all non-Muslims and establish a world-wide caliphate. Chechen rebels are a part of this, and are certainly not just trying to establish their independence from a state that periodically tries to exterminate all Chechens.

Here’s a good Veterinarians’ Day story: so this guy lends his car out and his ancestors are still trying to get it back 88 years later. The vehicle in question is a lovely 1910 open-topped limousine in which the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, now residing in the Vienna military museum.

From the Daily Telegraph: A girl aged 10 was married off to a 40-year-old man in southern Pakistan to compensate him for a borrowed buffalo that died in her father's care. The village council, or jirga, decreed that the father could use his daughter as compensation for the loss of the animal, said Shahnaz Bukhari, of the Progressive Women's Association. The girl recently fled her husband after five months of marriage and returned to her family in the remote village of Dadu, Ms Bukhari said.

A George Monbiot column.

What the butler held

Something I missed: GeeDubya repeated the charge that D’s in the Senate don’t care about national security, for the third time, the day before the election.

An op-ed piece in the Post says that the D’s lost the battle of ideas. Of course R ideas are pretty much “Iraq bad, fire good.” A bit like losing an arm wrestling contest with Stephen Hawking.

The memoryhole.org site includes some stuff purged by the Bushies from the NIH website: evidence countering the urban myth that abortion increases the likelihood of breast cancer, on the effectiveness of condoms, on sex education programs....

2 items today in the I Told You So department: the UN resolution on Iraq was indeed written so that France & Russia can say it requires a second vote before war begins but the US & Britain will say it does not.

And on the DC snipers, Ashcroft not only chose the state, but even the counties, in which to prosecute, solely on the basis of the likelihood of execution. Evidently he had the power to do this not because of any law, god forbid, but for no other reason than that the prisoners were in federal custody. This is how a legal lynching begins. Sentence first, verdict second, trial we might as well skip.

On Iraq, the US ambassador to the UN, the war criminal John Negroponte says “noncompliance is no longer an option.” Bush admin people are using that “not an option” construction way way too often.

Princess Di’s butler is spilling the beans to the tabloids. What’s with all the homosexual rapes among the palace staff? I know royal gossip is the reason you all read these emails, so here’s a paragraph from the Guardian:

Among Burrell's revelations we learned that when Charles was in hospital and needed a wee, he got his valet to hold the bottle. I suppose it's better than Charles holding the bottle and the valet doing the other bit. "Shall I give it a little shake now, Your Majesty?" We also learned that Diana had a crush on Dr Hasnat Khan, and turned up at his house wearing a sumptuous fur coat under which she was completely naked. The great British public were appalled by this. They don't mind their future queen having it off with all and sundry and jeopardising the future of the monarchy; but wearing fur, well, that's just beyond the pale. Diana also had lovers smuggled into Kensington Palace in the boot of her car. Except on the nights when no one was available, when she went to bed with a spare wheel and a load of newspapers that they'd been meaning to take for recycling.

Also, Burrell would keep the queen company while she watched tv, only he wasn’t allowed to sit down. Queen Victoria used to do this to Gladstone, without the tv obviously.

Guardian headline: “Powell Says US Sensitive to Arabs.” Is that like being allergic to them, like shellfish?

Capitalist entrepreneurs are now allowed to join the Chinese Communist Party. Evidently they’re “workers” too.

A Nevada referendum banned gay marriages. Must...avoid... Sigfried and Roy...joke...

I don’t know how many of you are interested in this, but here’s a rather good piece on homophobia in British politics, and how the Tory party, bizarrely enough, is being shattered by the homosexuals.

The British government is planning to force people in motorized wheel chairs to take out collision insurance.

WaPo on redistricting and why almost all the Congressional incumbents managed to be re-elected.

Nord-Est, the Russian musical interrupted so rudely by the Chechen hostage-takers, is performed again, as a requiem. That must be a weird experience, given that it’s a musical comedy.

People want something to get done

Or the Terrorists Win: the government argues in court that refugees from poverty-ridden Haiti are an ominous threat to national security. Says the Post: INS officials told the judge that if the Haitians are released, they will spark a mass migration from Haiti to South Florida, endangering lives and causing the U.S. government to deploy too many resources in patrolling the seas. "We're concerned that very important resources of the Coast Guard and the Department of Defense would be diverted from their primary mission of protecting the homeland and fighting the war on terrorism," said Mario Ortiz, an immigration officer. "It sends the wrong signal of mass migration. The primary focus of this country should be in fighting terrorism."

Evidently GeeDubya Bush’s [that one’s from Molly Ivins] little education act passed earlier this year included a provision that high schools must give military recruiters names and addresses for every student, or have all federal money revoked.

If you’re looking for a fresh face to hate, given the retirement of Thurmond, Gramm and Helms, I recommend you start with Thurmond’s replacement, Lindsey Graham. And with Orrin Hatch back as chair of the judiciary committee, you might resume thinking about him, which will inevitably lead to despising him.

On the bright side, I guess, Loretta Sanchez, who displaced the amusing but psychopathic Bob Dornan, is joined in the House by her sister, which hasn’t happened here before, although the British Parliament beats them all to hell with the Eagle sisters, Labour MPs who are twins, and one of whom is a lesbian.

Another story on Israeli settlers attacking Palestinian olive-pickers. It does mention Israeli peace activists who help, but gives no sense of the scale, probably not many.

Shrub sheds his brilliance on the elections: “If there is a mandate in any election, at least in this one, it’s that people want something to get done.”

This was the year of the po’ white ignorant Southern voter. According to the NY Times, the Dem. governor of Georgia was ousted because he sponsored changing the flag to remove the image of the burning cross, or whatever. Blacks to a great extent failed to vote at all. One of the things the D’s have failed to realize over the decades is how much they depended on hereditary Democratic voters: blacks, Irish, unionists, Hispanics, Hawaiians, etc., who have now largely stopped voting the way their ancestors did. D’s now actually have to fight for votes and plainly most of them don’t know how. None of this bodes well for the future.

It could have been worse. Consider that one result of the election was that D’s are now a minority of state legislators for the first time in 50 years, meaning that D’s had a large hand in the reapportionment that went into effect this year.

Slate analyses a US sting operation in Colombia and notes that the headlines in the Times and Post saying that an arms-for-drugs deal (and something similar in Pakistan) had been “foiled” was inaccurate and might as well have been written by John Ashcroft; since one side of the deal consisted only of American undercover agents, no actual deal existed that could have been “foiled.”

A must-read on the Pentagon’s budgeting for Star Wars, which is essentially $7.4 billion for whatever they feel like spending it on, and the 39¢ for defense against biological or radiological threats that might actually be real.

I’ve just read the 50th analysis of the elections that says the D’s lost because they were seen to have no plans of their own, and the R’s did (otherwise not a bad election analysis). I said something like this myself, but I didn’t say what they all seem to be implying, that any plan no matter how crazy, slanted towards business and the rich, unilateralist etc etc is considered ok, as long as they, you know, have a plan. And this is a must-read indictment of the D’s.

My own analysis is all over the map, I know. I’ve said that the D’s as opposition party didn’t oppose, and I’ve said that partisanship á la Britain would be a bad thing. What I’d really like to do is get rid of any recognition of parties as institutions in the Congressional rules. Parties are not in the constitution, which is the only document that should give institutionalized power. The decision of a Jim Jeffords, a single senator, to change parties shouldn’t have a dramatic effect. The replacement of might-as-well-be-Republican Democrats like Max Cleland and Zell Miller by actual Republicans with similar positions but more arms and legs should not be made artificially significant by the party names they chose.

NATO has a new policy, or will later this month: sending troops anywhere in the world to help countries defeat “terrorist groups” on their territory. I don’t see how that could possibly go spectacularly wrong.

What does it say about Dick Cheney that Bush was only able to promise to keep him on as VP after the 2002 elections were over?

The Commerce Dept is fining and threatening any companies that participate in unofficial boycotts, like say that of Israel.

The EU finally comes to agreement to ban animal testing for cosmetics, phased in over a number of years, overcoming fierce objections from France, which may cave in to any dictator that comes along but evidently isn’t afraid to take on bunnies.

More depressed ramblings

The Bushies are doing something rather ungracious, which is insisting that Bush is responsible for all the R’s being elected. Possibly this was just to convince them that they now owed him. I happen to think that a president thinking of members of another branch of government as his personal cannon-fodder is not good for the republic, but that’s me. It also emphasizes the growing trend towards partisanship, which everyone thinks they’re talking about when the talk about the “atmosphere” in Washington, but I mean true partisanship, which is the increasing trend over the last years for the party of a congresscritter being predictive of their vote on any given issue. This is also not good for the republic, and if you want to see why, well I mentioned yesterday that the British Tory party insisted on telling its MPs how they were to vote on adoption by unmarried people, and IDS getting all hysterical about the party not uniting behind him when members didn’t march in lock-step. Trust me, we don’t want the political parties to have that much power; people may like individual D’s or R’s, but they all know that the parties themselves are evil.

I knew there was something wrong when the Democratic Party said, We need a savior, I know, let’s get Walter Mondale.

Has any other user of the Opera browser found that those annoying banner ads are suddenly all in German?

Paul Burrell, Princess Di’s butler who blackmailed the palace into keeping him out of prison, is to host a quiz show featuring questions on the royal family and scandals. Title: What the Butler Saw.

Angelika, Dowager Countess of Cawdor, is trying to have her stepson, the 7th Earl of Cawdor, removed from the family castle. These are the descendants of The Scottish Play, I mean Macbeth, so this may not end well.

Morocco’s king rejects the UN referendum in occupied Western Sahara, stalled by Morocco for lo these many years.

Egypt has broadcast the tv show based on a Protocol of Zion type conspiracy theory. OK, the show is obviously bad and stupid, but the US tried to get the Egyptian government to censor it, which is also bad.

US also complains that the Swedish foreign minister quite rightly describes the assassination in Yemen (which we now learn wasn’t even authorized directly by Bush, but delegated to people lower down) as a “summary execution that violates human rights.” The US trade rep castigated Sweden, asking when it had last been in a major war (answers on a postcard please), as if that was a bad thing.

Oklahoma banned cockfights.

Oddly, Oregon rejected a measure to label genetically modified food. Of course the opposition was very very heavily funded.

One unilateralist Bush foreign policy idea I’d favor: delivering food to opposition-controlled areas in Zimbabwe that Mugabe is trying to starve. Although whether or not this would include GM food is another question. And there are implications for the future that aren’t especially good (undermining governments, sending people in to be taken hostage in order to spark military interventions, all that good CIA shit).

Musharaf prevents the newly elected National Assembly from convening. If this is the beginning of another coup, it will certainly have the US’s backing.

Depressed ramblings about the election

Gosh, I can’t wait to see Shrub looking even smugger than he already looked. Well, the D’s really did have nothing going for them this year except that they weren’t R’s. The election was a pudding without a theme, in that it’s impossible to say what the results mean because no one stood for anything. A billion dollars in ads and nary an issue raised. I wonder, if Paul Wellstone had died, and received all that adulation, two months ago, would the D’s have learned anything from it, and campaigned differently? Which of the remaining congresscritters would you miss if they died in a plane crash tomorrow?

But let’s not blame the politicians, not entirely, for this was a consumer-led failure. The politicians were so timid because the voters demanded nothing of them. There were no campaigns worthy of the name holding their feet to the fire on, for example, the environment, or health care, even the war, there’s no strong demand for a war with Iraq. People may see it as necessary, but no one’s especially enthusiastic except Rumsfeld and his ilk.

And the Bush administration, which looks to be so heavily backed right now, has totally failed in all its stated objectives. The tax cuts didn’t revive the economy, and won’t. No one thinks the US is any safer from terrorism than it was a year ago, and they haven’t even found the anthrax guy--well, haven’t arrested him anyway--much less Bin Laden or Mullah Omar. Remember the story I mentioned 3 weeks ago about the CIA distributing a picture supposedly of him, but with one more eye than Omar actually possesses? I think that came from a British source--why has no one domestically even mentioned it? If ever there was proof that the Bush admin was incompetent in its stated number one goal, this was it. Instead, Bush has raised Iraq, which does not threaten the US but could probably be beaten in a straight war, the only sort the US is actually any good at, into a bogey man.

The sort of good news is that Tom Daschle will almost certainly think better of running for president, which he had no chance of succeeding in. Of course that puts Gore back more firmly as the likely D candidate, and he has no chance either.

You sleep with us, you vote against us!

Far be it for me to focus on constitutional niceties no one else cares about, but I am now unrepresented in the state senate. Reapportionment put me in the district of an incumbent I have never had presented to me in an election, and he is not up for reelection this year. As far as I’m concerned, for the next 2 years I don’t have to pay any state taxes.

A warning: if you have any videotapes that might contain something recently recorded from commercial tv, burn them now, or you may be in the hideous position two or three weeks from now of finding yourself watching a campaign commercial again. That way madness lies.

In British Tory news, Iain Duncan Smith is demanding that his party unite behind him. They say no. He misquoted Benjamin Franklin as follows: "We cannot go on in this fashion. We have to pull together, or we will hang apart." As one columnist points out, “All this talk of hanging and pulling seemed to suggest only one thing: curtains.” Oddly enough, his demand to his party to “unite or die” came after a rebellion on whether to allow gays and unmarried couples to adopt (IDS said no, tried to impose a whip on the sort of issue usually left to MPs’ consciences, then said there would be no punishment for disobeying the whip, then today claimed there was a conspiracy against him because 43 MPs either voted against his position or abstained).

More oddly, I am about to mention Posh Spice for the second time in a week: she is suing a football team, Peterborough United, for trademarking its nickname since 1923, posh or The Posh.

Mel Brooks’s musical version of The Producers is going to play in...Germany. Hopefully in the spring.

A sure sign of the apocalypse, number 754: NASA is putting out a publication to answer the conspiracy theorists who say they never landed on the moon.

Oh bother. Oh bother.

A couple in China set the record for world’s longest marriage (85 years). [Mildly racist joke deleted here]

Al-Jazeera is suppressed in Kuwait as being not “objective.”

A good summary of the oil motivation in US foreign policy in Central Asia, Iraq, Latin America...

In all the stories about the assassination of several alleged Al Qaida in Yemen, I have yet to see any hint about whether it was with or without the Yemeni government’s permission or knowledge.

Ariel Sharon says that after the “free world” defeats Iraq, it should go after Iran. And then maybe Libya.

The Turkish electoral system was evidently brilliantly set up so that the votes of 47% of the voters, those who voted for any of the 16 parties that got less than 10% of the vote, were just thrown in the garbage. Because as we know from our own country, there really is no need for more than two parties, when the full spectrum of ideas is covered in a debate between, say, Gray Davis and Bill Simon (whose neck seems to be getting thicker by the day). Of course when we get a third party guy in office, it’s some moron like Jesse Ventura, whose neck is even thicker than Simon’s and whose skin is so thin as to put the princess and the pea princess to shame. Where was this sensitivity when Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich implied he was going to Cuba for sex tourism?

I have just received a call from Martin Sheen asking me to vote for Gray Davis. Now is this the good President Martin Sheen from West Wing, or the bad President Martin Sheen from The Dead Zone?

In searching the IMDB researching that last sentence, I came across a short film called Apocalypse Pooh (under 8 minutes, they will make you see a 30 second preview first) which superimposes dialogue from Apocalypse Now over a Winnie the Pooh film. Hilarious.

Well, I will vote after all. Today’s Tom Toles cartoon suggests that my vote really will count, because the negative ads will have so turned everyone off that only 3 people will vote in the entire country.

So that's how Bush maintains his human visage

In the Idaho race for US Senate, both candidates are pro-gun, but the D, Alan Blinken, is accusing his opponent of not using his own gun enough. This from his tv ad: “Larry Craig talks about the rights of gun owners but he hasn't even had a hunting licence in Idaho for years. I came to Idaho to hunt and fish.” My god, Craig is practically a communist.

On the local news last night, saw Gray Davis trying to start a chant of Four More Years among some not very enthusiastic members of some union. Uh, isn’t someone other than the candidate supposed to lead the chanting?

In a discussion of the right to die in the Observer, a writer refers to the existing state of affairs, in which terminally ill patients are assisted by unqualified family members or secretly by doctors, as “back-alley suicide.”

Here’s a story from “liberated” Afghanistan:

The Afghan Supreme Court has dismissed a female judge for not wearing an Islamic headscarf during a meeting with US President George Bush last month. Marzeya Basil was attending computer courses in Washington at the invitation of the US government when pictures of her, bareheaded, standing with Bush were carried by the world media. She was sacked days after her return to Afghanistan.

Sacked for not wearing a sack. I trust you’ve also been following the stories of girls’ schools there being burned down or threatened. But they can still fly kites, right? I just read a review of a book in which an article appears, saying that Islamic fundamentalist revolutionaries promise utopia but because they reject history as a deviation from early Islamic purity they lack institutional models for social transformation so that, for example, Iran retained traditional ideas of property. The result is that revolutionary transformation winds up being restricted to the sphere of individual conduct, burquas and kites and so on.

Belarus has banned any religious organizations which have been in the state under 20 years (i.e., those which were not banned by the communists), has introduced censorship of relig literature and bans foreigners from leading relig groups. All very retro. I especially like that 20 year thing, which I believe Russia tried but abandoned. The Orthodox Church using the repressive laws of the godless Soviet communists to prop up its own monopoly, you have to admire the irony, you really do.

The Russians are meanwhile reimposing controls on the increasingly puppified media. During the theater siege they shut down web sites and tv stations, pressured various news outlets and removed normal encoding from all mobile phones, and has since passed a law barring reporting of anti-terrorism operations or any criticism of same.

And continuing our theme of the day of a slide to the bottom, the US has given up, or at least postponed for a year or more, plans to set up military tribunals, because it has realized it has no need of even the pretense of rule by law.

The Islamist party wins Turkish elections. The BBC shows them dancing in the streets, which will no doubt soon be outlawed. The party’s head is barred from office because he once read a poem the authorities didn’t like. Interestingly, the Islamists state their highest priority to be joining the EU (which will never happen). The US also wants to force the EU to admit Turkey, and has told Germany that the way back into Shrub’s good graces is to push this.

And Israel’s government is lurching to the right, if possible. Who knows what secret deals are being made, but the parties that might be brought in to prop Sharon up tend to be of the Death to All Arabs variety, people whose very presence in government amounts to a declaration of war. The new defense minister is being investigated for war crimes.

In further bad news, a plot to kidnap Posh Spice was foiled. I’m thinking “The Ransom of Red Chief.”

The future is now

The Republican lamb being sacrificed to Walter Mondale, Norm Coleman, is using the slogan “The future is now,” which shows a disturbing lack of understanding of the space-time continuum. Although if the future is now, I’m putting in for Social Security.

A letter to the NY Times on the snipers suggests that where the trials should be based on where the crimes were committed, not who has the nastiest death penalty. Just one more example of ends having become significantly more important than means.

So after the Moscow hostage thing, will Bush stop saying of Saddam Hussein that he used chemical weapons on his own people?

The butler did it: I wasn’t following the story of Princess Diana’s butler, who was on trial for stealing a lot of her stuff after her death, until today when the trial collapsed because the queen suddenly “remembered” that he’d told her he’d be storing the stuff, for safe keeping like. In other words, as any three-year old instantly understood, he had blackmailed the queen.

From the New Republic, a story on how the US is encouraging other countries to deal with terrorism through extra-legal means, something I’ve been saying for a year. Also how the US is transporting suspects to countries like Egypt and Jordan for torture. Here’s an especially smug Hosni Mubarak: "[W]e were right from the beginning in using all means, including military trials... There is no doubt that the events of September 11 created a new concept of democracy that differs from the concept that Western states defended before these events, especially in regard to the freedom of the individual."

Florida just figured something out about it’s brand-new voting system: even if the machines work this time, as they didn’t in the primaries, given the length of the ballot, there literally isn’t enough time for everyone to vote, and the wait is likely to be very very long. Oh, and those new voting machines? They were not distributed according to the number of voters in each district.... There was also something in Salon that only subscribers could read and no one else has picked up except the Guardian in Britain (and I checked the Miami Herald), that they’re still using the highly inaccurate list of alleged felons they used in 2000 to disenfranchise mostly black people. 94,000 are still on the list, of whom only 3,000 are known to be legitimate felons, so to speak. The list includes 8 people whose “convictions” pre-date their birth date, and 400 whose crimes are listed as happening at dates in the future. The future is now. The state plans to fix the list... next year.

Stuff like the accountancy oversight board is actually important, if unexciting. Honest capitalists should be expressing outrage today that Webster was nominated despite his own involvement in firing an accountant who told a truth about fraud in the firm he was director of. They should be demanding Pitt’s resignation as chairman of the SEC. They are not. This suggests that corporations are indeed all up to their necks in corrupt and fraudulent practices, or at least would like to be. Look at the way businessman candidates like Bill Simon have been pounded this year and you can see that the reputations of corporate directors as a group are racing those of politicians and priests to the bottom. You don’t have to have money in the stock market to worry about the effect of all this on the economy.

Speaking of which, it seems that in 1990 Harken’s lawyers warned directors who had negative information about the company to refrain from selling their stocks. A week later, Dubya sold off $848,000 of his, triggering an SEC inquiry (while Daddy was prez). The letter from the lawyers was suppressed, not given to the SEC until the day after the inquiry was concluded.

A big Paris baker, something to do with bread but not baguettes, died today. Headline: “Master baker dies in helicopter accident”. That’s baker, with a k.

I do not pretend to be an accountant

William Webster, defending his qualifications to head the accountancy oversight commission, admits that “I do not pretend to be an accountant.” What, not even to impress chicks?

I just saw a political ad on the Daily Show that you have to see, but which I can’t find on-line. It shows Alex Sanders, a candidate to replace Strom Thurmond as senator for SC, and his wife, shooting guns off. Even without the sniper, this would be a scary ad. And the scariest thing, as the Daily Show pointed out, is that this guy is the Democrat. But the ad isn’t on his website. Evidently the Senate race in SC is largely about whether or not to ban burning the flag. Also, there is evidently an Alex Sanders who is a Harlem Globetrotter. Somehow I doubt either one wants to be mistaken for the other, any more than I would wish to be mistaken for my namesake who went into, shudder, politics.

I’ve said it before: the British will bet on anything. Evidently Keith Tyson is favored 11 to 8 to win the Turner Prize, the arts award everyone makes fun of (unmade beds, lights that go on and off, etc). Up this year: a detailed description of a pornographic film Asswoman in Wonderland (or Arsewoman in Wonderland as the Guardian Anglo-centrically put it--it’s an American film); a film produced by a camera on a toy plane, which had two critics barfing on their shoes, and a giant finger pointing at the center of the galaxy.

In the how-stupid-do-they-think-we-are department, I got a slate mailer yesterday, purporting to be “an election guide for independent voters.” Of the 14 persons or propositions it endorsed, 11 paid them money. So there’s independence, and then there’s independence.

Did you see those inmates who doddered out of the geriatric wing of the Guantanamo Detention Camp for Really Dangerous Arch-Villains? One claimed to be 105, and looked not far short of it.

Franco was yet another one who kidnapped the children of his political enemies.

Speaking of kidnapping children, Saddam Hussein took a 4th wife earlier this year, a 27 year old. Well if it’s good enough for Tony Randall...

Today’s political junk mail includes dueling attack mailers in the DA race. Evidently Mike Menesini really fucked up a murder prosecution 4 years ago. And Bob Kochly failed to prosecute a cop who shoved his gun up his wife’s butt. Which is not a practice you often read about in campaign literature, even in the Bay Area.

The one good thing you can say about American reaction to 9/11 was that there were surprisingly few hate crimes against Muslims. The same cannot be said about Australians after the Bali bombing, and it’s still going on, little noticed by the outside world.

How I learned to stop worrying and love regime change

I have changed my mind on the subject of the phrase “regime change.” I now embrace it as the most honest expression to come out of the Bush White House. There isn’t a trace of idealism in it, no pretense that Iraq will be turned into a democracy or that we even care what form its government will take, as long as it’s headed by someone else, and is subservient to our interests. I’d rather see pure power politics and a US military proconsul than continue to hear words like democracy and liberty be polluted by their passage through the larynx of George W. Monkeyboy.

On the choice of Mondale, the NY Times quotes a Minnesota political science professor who says that Mondale is a guy who used to be famous, that anybody under 30 is probably thinking “Oh yeah. That guy. I remember hearing about him from my parents.” Yes, folks, that’s exactly how exciting a place Minnesota is, they sit around on cold winter nights and tell stories about Walter Mondale.

For Paul Wellstone’s great old election commercials, click here, where you can also get his other ads. Try the radio ad “Names” as well as the Roger & Me-type ad this link is to.

On American biological warfare programs.

You can tell how busy the CIA must be now by the fact that it allowed a leftist to be elected president of Brazil, where the nuts come from (sorry, that’s a tic). Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill generously welcomed the election, saying that foreign investors should continue monitoring Lula until he can “assure them he is not a crazy person.” O’Neill himself is known to be as crazy as a soup sandwich.

Speaking of which, AP reports that the army is trying to perfect a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that can be kept unrefrigerated for 3 years.

On Russian censorship and intimidation of the media during the hostage crisis.

German insurance companies have decided to keep 1/4 of the fund for the Holocaust victims they previously stiffed, as “administration costs”. That idea was rubber-stamped by Lawrence Eagleburger--remember him? how could you forget when McNeil-Lehrer keeps dredging him out of his swamp to pontificate stupidly--who is chairman of the international commission, salary $340,000, part of those administration costs.

The Observer on a phenomenon I’ve been noticing more stories on, Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinians, poisoning their water supplies, stealing their crops, killing them and generally trying to force them out. Possibly it’s just the stories that are new, since in the case they talk about, this has been going on for 5 years.

Bush, in a very Bush-like move, appoints William Webster, the 78-year old former head of the FBI & CIA, to be chairman of the new accounting oversight board. This makes it look like Bush is taking corporate fraud seriously by putting in charge a heavyweight--but one who will need to take a lot of naps.

Speaking of wrinklies, the Desperate Dems have been reaching for retired pols to fill the sudden gaps in important Congressional races--Mondale, Lauchtenburg--who will probably not be able to serve out their terms. Even if the Dems keep control of the Senate, they could lose it to demographics.

A large part of Kuwait was just declared a colony of the United States. Or a free-fire zone, depending on how you want to interpret it. In this area, US soldiers will build up for their war, out of the public eye, and all Kuwaiti citizens have been ordered to leave.

The Department of Agriculture has decided to allow irradiated meats in school, as part of a program of energy self-sufficiency, in which we save electricity by letting children be their own night-lights.

According to North Korea, it was actually Bush who abrogated the 1994 nuclear treaty, by saying that it was part of an axis of evil, which was, according to the North Koreans, a declaration of war and a statement of intent to hit them with a nuclear attack. Before resuming the treaty, they want a non-aggression pact in which the US promises not to launch a nuclear first strike against them. OK by me. There’s also something mentioned glancingly in the NY Times, that they also think the US ambassador has been interfering in the thaw of relations between the Koreas. It would be nice to know what was meant by that.

Some weeks back I asked why the US was insisting that a UN resolution on Iraq had to say that it had violated previous agreements. The answer: as a hidden tripwire that would allow the US to then say that Iraq had violated the 1991 cease-fire, justifying resuming the first Gulf War.

So if the US resolution is rejected and it goes to war anyway, going against the decision of the Security Council, shouldn’t its seat be taken away? Shouldn’t the minimum requirement for having standing to ask a body’s permission to do something be agreement to abide by its decision? Even the People’s Court tv show insists on that. “Heads I win, tails you lose” is not supposed to be one of the principles of international law.

Can’t wait to find out what “sleeping gas” the Russians used. They’re not letting the families near the hostages who are still in hospital, which I’m assuming is a sign of something nefarious. And the doctors aren’t being told what it is they’re treating, either. No one’s mentioned whether they’re releasing bodies, which if they’re not would be another sign. It now looks like very few of the 117 or so dead were shot, maybe 2 of them, the rest were all poisoned. That said, it’s hard to see what the alternative was, although Putin is still a shit, and is conducting a war of extermination against the Chechens, who haven’t been left much alternative either. The initial claim by the government that they acted because hostages were being shot is not actually true.

The German military attaché in Israel is holding a ceremony to honor SS and other World War II (and WW I) soldiers. So he invited some Israeli army officers along. This is not going over very well.

That law Berlusconi passed to allow him to challenge judges, take it to appeal and run out the clock? It seems members of his party in parliament voted illegally, pressing their absent neighbor’s button, or taping down their own button so the machine would vote in their absence.

I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living

More news of remakes/sequels that should never be made: a remake of The Stepford Wives, starring Scientologist Nicole Kidman. There’s a creepy joke in there somewhere.

Another similarity between North Korea and Iraq: Iraq has ordered its diplomats to send their children back home as hostages to their loyalty, while N Korea only allowed the kidnapped Japanese--as if N Korea had a right to “allow” anything in relation to its victims--to visit Japan if their children stayed behind. (Later: Japan has decided to hold on to the 5). Incidentally, remember that kid in the photo with Saddam from before the 1st Gulf War, one of the foreign hostages? There was an interview with him in the London Sunday Times. He says that he was scared shitless, and is about to become a fireman.

We got trouble: Uzbekistan bans pool halls.

A completely over-the-top attack radio ad against Paul Wellstone (60 seconds).
[I wrote that before Wellstone died, but the ad is still worth a listen]

Wasn’t it Bush who said when he stole office that he wanted his staff to spend time with their families? Now he wants them to spend their vacation days stumping for R candidates.

The latest reality show, in planning, is The Will, in which a billionaire’s relatives vote each other out of his or her will.

Bahrain has the first elections in a Gulf state in which women are allowed to vote. Other than that, it’s not a great advertisement for democracy in the Arab world, with Shiites boycotting and Islamic fundies still managing to win a probable majority (there will be a second round).

So the sniper(s) have been caught. This is the guy who left a note saying “I am God.” Oh good, God is black, Muslim, pissed-off, and armed.

About Paul Wellstone’s death I have only this to say: fuck.

Water intifada--would that be a super soaker?

A piece in the NY Times on how the US is training for urban warfare in Baghdad buries its lead rather deep: the model they’re using is the recent Israeli incursions into Jenin, as in “Massacre of”.

Some death penalty facts, in the week that the Supreme Court refused to deal with the execution of minors: About 70 countries have abolished it for all crimes, with a further 23 countries having a “de facto” abolition, with no executions in the past ten years. Since 1990, 34 countries have abolished the death penalty, including Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Turkmenistan.

And this week, the last territory under British rule, the Turks and Caicos islands, abolished it. The last execution in British territories was in 1977 in Bermuda, two men for the assassination of its governor.

Godfather IV. Please god no.

The US will release some of the Guantanamo prisoners. The harmless ones. Did you know we had an octogenarian in custody?

Israel has banned Palestinians drilling for water, accusing them of conducting a “water intifada.” Also, no picking of olives (this is the season for that), because they figured it was easier than to protect Palestinian pickers from attack by settlers.

Another downtrodden minority is organizing: the insane. I just for the first time saw this marvelous expression--“mad pride”--but I googled it and evidently it’s widespread.

Free regime world change

Currently on auction at Christie’s: the employment log of a Turkish bath attendant on the Titanic. They decided that her wages terminated the second the ship went down. After all, she wasn’t working any more, now was she?

Last month a Canadian (with Syrian citizenship) was seized by the INS at Kennedy Airport, where he was actually just changing planes on his way back to Canada. He was then deported to Syria. That’s a man with a Canadian passport, who lives in Canada. And the US won’t share any of its alleged evidence with Canada. That was 3 weeks ago, and they can’t find him in Syria, where he is liable for arrest for missing his military service (he has lived in Canada since he was a teenager).

Dubya’s relationship with the English language is getting odder, if that’s possible. In the last couple of weeks he keeps talking about the “free world” taking on Iraq. I’d love to see a list of countries that constitute this free world. He also says that “regime change” could mean Iraq complying with Security Council diktats. So when he says “the policy of the United States is regime change”, it means what, exactly?

Today’s another day when the newspapers might as well be reporting from different planets. The NY Times has Bush saying that he was trying diplomacy over Iraq (another misuse of a word: issuing orders to be complied with without question, with the threat of military force behind those orders, is not diplomacy), while the London Times, which comes today from that alternative universe where Spock has a goatee, says that the US is promoting “zero tolerance” (a phrase to be found nowhere in today’s NY Times), meaning the slightest deviation by Iraq--a single weapons facility left off a list (and remember the US likes to define anything chemical, including drug factories and water purification plants, as potential dual-use facilities for chemical warfare), a delay of two hours in letting inspectors into some facility-- would lead to war.

There’s a good piece in today’s Wash Post on how Bush supports his policy with lies.

Speaking of lies, FAIR examines 10 media outlets (LA Times, AP, ABC, etc etc), comparing their 1998 reports of the UN pulling inspectors out of Iraq with current reports falsely claiming that Hussein kicked them out.

Focus

The Vatican has vetoed the American bishops’ zero tolerance policy for child sexual abuse. One complaint was that the policy “did not give a more detailed description of abuse”. Oh just go out and buy your own porn.

Most condescending sentence from a court this week: a panel of the 6th Circuit, upholding drug testing of welfare recipients in Michigan, said "We think it is beyond cavil that the state has a special need to insure that public moneys expended [on welfare] are used by the recipients for their intended purposes."

If you missed it on the business pages, the Bush admin tried to torpedo the brand-new legislation on corporate fraud, proposing to underfund it by 27% less than the law authorized.

In the stories about North Korea, no one is really exploring whether the US kept its end of the 1994 agreement, but there are certainly hints that at the very least it was well behind schedule. We need to know more.

Dick Armey, trying to get in his last few stupid comments before leaving Congress, has found a new political role model: “Al Qaeda doesn’t have a Senate. Al Qaeda doesn’t have a Sen. Daschle who has another focus. Al Qaeda has a clear focus. Terrorizing America is the first and only focus.” Also cheese. They like cheese.

Maybe states just shouldn’t have poet laureates. New Jersey’s is being accused of anti-semitism, California’s just resigned because he fudged his resumé, said he finished college when he didn’t. Let me repeat: fudged his resumé, to be poet laureate. He hadn’t gone through the state senate confirmation process, either. Let me repeat: a senate confirmation process, to be poet laureate. What would that be like? “Mr. Troupe, can you tell this committee what rhymes with vanilla?” Could have been worse, I suppose; Davis could have appointed Johnny Cochrane (If the poet laureate-ship don’t fit, you must re-submit) or Nipsy Russell.

Not to agree with the anti-Europe nutters, but Ireland’s referendum today was a mockery of a fraud of a sham. Last year they rejected the Nice Treaty (Nice the place, not the condition of being pleasant) expanding the EU to the East but also shifting some power away from the member states towards the not hugely democratic EU government. So, as is always the case when the people don’t do what they’re told in relation to Europe, they were made to vote again today, and get it right this time. To be sure, Ireland scrapped rules requiring equal time on tv and a pro & con pamphlet delivered to every household, and changed the question to a compound one, did they want to ratify the Nice Treaty *and* reject membership in a European army. The contempt for democratic practice seems to be growing everywhere. If it weren’t for the ferret guy I’m not sure I’d even be voting next month.


Tokyo: For office jokers unsatisfied with photocopies of their bottoms, a Japanese company has developed a copier with a large plastic screen that can print images of the entire body with “warts and all” definition. It costs £57,000. (AFP)