Terrific tribunals for terrible terrorists

The R’s have started calling the military commissions Bush wants “terrorist tribunals.” Subtle, huh? And alliterative. But appropriate: the phrase presumes guilt just like the commissions will.

I’m taking bets on how long it takes for Joe Lieberman to start using this Republican rhetorical device.

It occurs to me that I don’t know where people actually convicted by these kangaroo courts (that’s also alliterative) would be sent to serve their sentences. Back to Gitmo? Military prisons in the US?

Compliance and colonoscopies in Guantanamo

Long article in next Sunday’s NYT Magazine on Guantanamo, a narrative history of relations between the detainees and the prison authorities – well, the guards rather than the interrogators, the interrogations aren’t really covered. It gives the longest account I’ve seen of the abortive attempt last summer to establish a prisoners’ council. The author, Tim Golden, is as reasonable and even-handed as he can be under the circumstances, which is also the impression the article gives of the military authorities, who were obviously (and unavoidably) his main sources. But in a place like Guantanamo, doing the job that Guantanamo does, reasonable and even-handed are traits that are irrelevant, even obscene. The authorities were willing, indeed eager, to negotiate about details like bottled versus tap water or not blasting the Star-Spangled Banner during the call to prayer (or, as Gen. Craddock once said, the color of the feeding tubes inserted into the noses of hunger-strikers), in an effort to achieve “compliance,” so long as larger issues like the prisoners being held indefinitely were not broached.

Indeed today Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist commented that the Guantanamo detainees are getting “24/7 medical care - better than many Americans”. Why, 16 colonoscopies have been performed there, he marveled.

Frist’s other priority in The War Against Terror this week is tacking onto the bill authorizing military operations a provision against paying off internet gambling debts with credit cards.

You’re still waiting for me to say something about the colonoscopies, aren’t you? I have way too much class for that.

Stifling

Gen. Richard Zilmer, the US commander in western Iraq, insists that we haven’t “lost” Anbar province and that we are “stifling” the rebels. Call it the Archie Bunker approach to counter-dingbatteryinsurgency.


Here’s Condi meeting with South Korean President Roh today. Not sure which one of them needs the really large spittoon.


And here’s Condi meeting with one of those creepy (and evidently tiny) Polish twins. In a scintillating exchange of dialogue, he said, “It is true I’m visiting the U.S.” You can see why he’s the prime minister.

To arms! (two arms good, four arms bad)

Headline of the day, from the WaPo: “Four Armed Men Attack U.S. Embassy in Damascus.” Now what we need to know is whether the terrorists are recruiting people who were born with extra appendages, or if they’re somehow attaching extraneous limbs to their existing recruits. We could be in an... please forgive me... arms race, people! Well, forewarned is... ok, I’ll stop now.

Invigorating

All day bloggers have been pointing out that George Allen’s campaign website has pictures of Allen meeting Saturday with members of the Macacan-American community at an “ethnic rally.” Many of those bloggers took screen shots under the mistaken impression that Allen’s people would be embarrassed by the ridicule into taking them down. But maybe Allen’s people all have Confederate paraphernalia and nooses in their offices too, cuz it’s all still up there. At the Ethnic Rally, Allen declared it to be “invigorating to be here with people from all sorts of different and diverse backgrounds”.

Doesn’t he look invigorated?

Speaking of invigorated, Condi Rice is pursuing America’s foreign-policy goals in a place I’m told is not part of the United States, some place the natives call Canada (I’m not sure what we call it in English). The Toronto Star has a slide show of “Condi’s Canadian adventure,” including this photo of her sampling the exotic local cuisine.


A Virginia woman who smoked pot with her 13-year old son as a reward when he finished his homework is facing charges of being the coolest mom ever.

Where are the mothers organizing against terrorism?

In an editorial in USA Today, Karen Hughes asks why there isn’t more “concerted moral outrage of everyday citizens” against terrorism. “[W]here are the mothers organizing against terrorism as American mothers did against drunken driving? Where are the fathers promising to teach their sons to choose to live rather than choose to die?” She wants there to be a “terrorism is bad” movement, with petition drives and bake sales and the like, modeled after the abolitionist movement.

On the off-chance that this isn’t just a parody that didn’t make it into The Onion, I’d like to help. Contest time! Yay! Provide a slogan, motto, bumper sticker or chant for Mothers Against Terrorism (MAT) (or a better name for the organization). “Hey hey, ho ho, the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes, has got to go!” “Friends don’t let friends drive explosive-laden cars into the American embassy.”

Bush 9/11 speech: leading the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty

Even if you think that war is the appropriate response to 9/11, was it in good taste for Bush to make a broadcast on its anniversary entirely oriented towards war? But of course this was not a commemoration of 9/11, but of the start of The War Against Terror (TWAT).

Evidently it’s not a clash of civilizations, it’s a struggle for civilization. Which is us, I guess. Maybe that’s just a piece of rhetoric, but it sounds to me like a rejection of pluralism and a denial of Muslim civilization. Elsewhere in the speech he said that the response of people who tried to rescue the victims of the 9/11 attacks was “distinctly American.” Presumably anyone not an American would just start going through the victims’ pockets for loose change.


If the speech was ethnocentric, it was also Christian-centric, like that bit about how they brought America to its knees, but “united in prayer.” Uh, dude, you do know that some religions expressly forbid kneeling when praying?

Terrorists, he felt the need to say in various ways over and over, are bad. We “saw the face of evil,” they “kill without mercy,” blah blah blah. And they are still “determined to attack America”. Funny, where have I heard that phrase before? Let’s see: “bin Laden determined to attack...”


The people of the Middle East “have one question of us: Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia?” Um, incinerate their cities?

I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom

Cheney at the Pentagon: “Nine-eleven is a day of national unity. The memories stay with all of us because the attack was directed at all of us.” Obviously if it had been directed against brown-skinned people somewhere, we... or at least Cheney... would have forgotten all about it by now. “We were meant to take it personally, and we still do take it personally.” Yes, it’s all about us. Everything is always all about us.


“We have learned that there is a certain kind of enemy whose ambitions have no limits, and whose cruelty is only fed by the grief of others.” Cheney has met the enemy, and it is him.

“Yet in the conduct of this war the world has seen the best that is in our country.” I would really like to think that the “best that is in our country” has nothing to do with how we fight wars.


AP looks at the children in that Florida classroom, five years later. “[Bush’s] face just started to turn red,” says Tyler Radkey. “I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom.”

“Not any more ah don’t.”

President Poopy Pants was interviewed by Matt Lauer (no transcript, and the video seems only to be playable in Internet Explorer). Nothing new, although the 11-minute interview was conducted standing, about a foot apart. Lauer asked Bush, who kept talking about fighting terrorism “within the law,” about secret CIA prisons. Bush, in pissed-off mode: “So what? Why is that not within the law?” He also tells us that he’s been “assured by our Justice Department that we were not torturing.”

There are intelligence reports and conflicting intelligence reports all the time

I skipped “The Path to 9/11” (which isn’t quite the same thing as skipping down the path to 9/11), because life is too short and, you know, The Simpsons was on. I will also skip most of Monday’s coverage, with the mournful music and slow motion footage of the towers falling and whatnot, and you probably should too. Feeling sad about a tragedy is not obligatory because the calendar tells you that today is the day to feel sad about it. And you’re unlikely to hear anything that will make you a wiser or better person, just as 9/11 did not make us a wiser or a better nation.

5 months after 9/11, Bush was so embarrassed about not having captured bin Laden that he never spoke the man’s name. For some reason, 5 years of failure is less embarrassing than 5 months, and Bush has taken to quoting him in every speech. I suppose he’ll do it again today, but one could wish that he’d quote Jefferson or Paine, one of the idealists who helped create that freedom for which they, you know, hate us. Making us secure at any price is not the high moral calling Bush seems to believe it to be.

Condi went on no fewer than three talk shows this morning. She came close to admitting that the intel on WMDs in Iraq was wrong, but “once you’re in Iraq you can learn things that you could not possibly know before you were in Iraq.” Have to invade a country to learn whether it was worth invading. Asked on a different program about a 2002 CIA report that Iraq was not supplying chemical or biological weapons or training to Al Qaida, she said, “There are intelligence reports and conflicting intelligence reports all the time.”

And she insisted, contrary to Friday’s Senate committee report, that there were “multiple contacts going back a decade between Osama bin Laden and Iraq.” And when asked what about all the countries that sponsor terrorists who we haven’t invaded, she offered this: “Well, but Saddam Hussein was special in this case. This is somebody against whom we went to war in 1991.” Um, so?


Really, for someone with a doctorate, you have to wonder about her inability to use facts to support a thesis. Here’s how she responds to a rather apposite question (but with no follow-through) from Chris Wallace:

Q: Secretary Rice, what evidence do you have that the homegrown Sunnis and Shia fighting each other in Iraq, and of course that at this point is the vast majority of the violence, that they have any interest in attacking the U.S.?

RICE: Well, clearly the person who set off much of the sectarian violence, who plotted the notion that Shias should go after Sunnis and you should try and spark civil conflict, actually was the al-Qaida leader at the time, Zarqawi, who we later killed.

Q: But he’s gone.

RICE: Well, but it was his strategy and we know that, to try and set off sectarian violence.

Back to Saddam: “We were still at war with him in 1998 when we used American forces to try and disable his weapons of mass destruction.” We did what now?

Validating the strategy of the terrorists

The WaPo, in a long story about why we still haven’t found bin Laden (short answer: Pakistan isn’t helping, and the US has starved the mission of resources), has an anecdote that if properly sourced should by yet another reason why Rumsfeld has to go: in November 2002, after the CIA assassinated an Al Qaida leader in Yemen, Rumsfeld was livid that it wasn’t the military that had done it, and ordered NSA head Michael Hayden to stop sharing intel with the CIA of the sort that had made it possible. The article says that Hayden claims not to recall the conversation, which is funny because you’d think that would have been an important one to remember. The Post doesn’t seem to have asked Rummy for his recollections. And while the paper is evidently sure enough of its source’s accuracy to put Rummy’s words in quotation marks, its failure to name that source renders the story merely interesting rather than usable (that is, you can’t demand Rummy’s resignation on the basis of this sort of hearsay).

I wonder if the 9/11 tv programs will rerun footage of the many times Bush said that bin Laden “can run but he cannot hide”?

The LAT has an analysis piece that starts by saying that the US military won’t say how it came up with that figure of a 50% reduction in sectarian deaths in Baghdad because, shh, it’s a secret.

During weekly news briefings deep inside barricaded compounds, commanders regularly display slick charts, multicolored bar graphs and PowerPoint presentations, all heralding good news.

“One more indicator that operations are in fact reducing the amount of attacks on civilians is shown here on this graph,” Caldwell assured reporters the other day, pointing to a bar chart dutifully placed on an easel by a stone-faced uniformed subordinate. But all the numbers had been carefully scrubbed. They were classified.

The Iraqi government’s contribution to opacity: the Baghdad morgue has just been banned from releasing death figures, which will now come from the Shiite-dominated Health Ministry, and “Morgue officials who previously provided details have abruptly ‘retired’ or left the country.”

The article also discusses the recent use of the term “death squads” by the Pentagon to describe the groups responsible: “By unmooring death squads from the context of government-backed Shiite militias, U.S. officials have redefined the problem — and avoided a direct confrontation with the U.S.-backed Iraqi leadership.” Now that you mention it, the US used that term in the 1980s to deflect blame from the Central American governments backed by Reagan, applying it to those killing leftists in El Salvador, where the death squads were closely linked to the military, and Honduras, where the death squads were the military.

On the talk show circuit today, Condi and Cheney both denied the Senate report (which Cheney said he hadn’t read) that Saddam Hussein had no connection to Al Qaida.

Cheney also hadn’t read the WaPo article on the hunt for bin Laden. Or the NYT story saying that his ascendancy over the White House is weakening. Evidently he didn’t think he’d be asked about any of this on Meet the Press on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, although he was prepared to discuss current cinema – “‘Snakes on a Plane’ was a real hoot, Tim, a real hoot.”

What else did Cheney, wielding his Index Finger of Doom, have to say? Well, as always he supported a free and open discussion of American foreign policy: “And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States, suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”


He refused to say whether there are more or fewer terrorists now than there were 5 years ago.


He claimed that everything he ever said was correct, that we were in fact greeted as liberators, and that when he said the war would be over quickly, “that’s true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly.” And the “last throes” thing, that was also true, I forget how, but it was true, goddamit!


The Shiite-Sunni “strife,” he said, is entirely the fault of Zarqawi and the mosque bombing.

In an interesting slip when defending Maliki’s visit to Iran (“It also visits the Saudis”), he admitted, “the new government in Iraq. It is a Shia government, no question about it.”


On the Iranian nuclear program, Cheney cited information from the International Atomic Energy Agency, “an international body that I think most people wouldn’t question.” Russert reminded him that he did in fact question the IAEA during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: I asked you on this very program...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s correct.

MR. RUSSERT: ...about ElBaradei and you said he’s wrong.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yes. It wasn’t consistent with our report.

MR. RUSSERT: But he was right about Iraq.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I haven’t, I haven’t looked at it. I’d have to go back and look at it again.

You do that.

They’re violent in Iraq for a reason

The Republicans have put out what purports to be a newspaper from 2007 showing what would happen if, heaven forfend, the Democrats win the 2006 elections. Bush impeached! Star Wars dismantled! Tax cuts for the rich repealed! Michael Moore eating! Universal health care! Don’t miss the horoscopes.

Bush gave an interview to ABC’s Charles Gibson. Here are some quotes, taken out of context, just because I feel like it:

“You know, when you have Republicans hugging Democrats, it really does inspire the nation.”

“No question the Iraq War has been a divisive, you know, war”.

“Some say, ‘Well, it’s impossible for democracy to take hold in the Middle East.’ Well, that’s true if we leave.”

“We have learned since that [Saddam] did not use them, but he had the capacity to use weapons of mass destruction.”

“No question they’re violent in Iraq, but they’re violent in Iraq for a reason”.

“The short term objective is to understand the stakes in this war against extremists. The long term objective is to ... win the ideological struggle.”

I mean, they are all very hot

The LAT got hold of a recording of Gov. Schwarzenegger with his advisers, speculating about the ethnicity of a state legislator (“She maybe is Puerto Rican or the same thing as Cuban. I mean, they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it.”). His people are claiming it was a joke. No one mentioned that other Austrian who had theories about the blood of different races. But the best part of the story was when the LAT set the scene for us:

The meeting probably took place in the Ronald Reagan Cabinet Room, the governor’s de facto office that adjoins his smaller official quarters. The conference room faces east toward lush Capitol Park and has a long conference table that serves as a giant desk. The sword from Schwarzenegger’s movie “Conan the Barbarian” rests on a nearby table.

I don’t see dead people

So the Pentagon touted an astounding 50% drop in civil war-related deaths in Baghdad, thanks to Operation Forward Together, but then the Iraqi Health Ministry revised its figures up drastically, showing the number of deaths basically the same. Not that the Pentagon is admitting it, as shown by that hapless general on McNeil-Lehrer yesterday, still saying “well that’s not what our numbers show.” Dude, their numbers come from the Baghdad morgue. They get dead bodies, they count dead bodies. You’re not disputing numbers, you’re disputing the existence of 750 corpses you evidently didn’t know about. So the next question is: we’re occupying their country, we have responsibility for security, we’re running a major operation to reduce sectarian violence in the capital... and we don’t know how many fatalities there are in the capital to within plus or minus 50%? We had no one on the ground with enough of a sense of the overall picture to realize that the claim that deaths were down 50% did not accord with that overall picture?

Best line in the WaPo story: the Health Ministry is planning to build some more morgues, get more refrigeration units and hire more personnel to cope with the influx of dead bodies, but said it had “nothing to do with the violence and killing.”

Restoration tragedy

In the NYT today, David Sanger writes, “Mr. Bush is challenging Congress to restore to him the authority to put the United States’ worst enemies on trial on terms he has defined.” Restore? The whole point of the federal court rulings has been that Bush does not have and never had that authority either under law or the constitution.

O.J. Simpson has failed to give the heirs of Ron Goldman the $33.5 million they were awarded, so Goldman’s father is asking LA County Superior Court to transfer to him O.J.’s “right of publicity,” including the rights to his name, image and likeness.

The Iraqi government announced that it hanged 27 “terrorists” Wednesday. Which seems to be all it’s willing to disclose; it wouldn’t say where this took place, and I don’t think it released their names. Secret mass executions are back, baby! Freedom, ain’t it grand?

No, really, ain’t it?

Wherein is revealed why America is a wonderful country

Another day, another Bush speech. Fortunately, right near the start, he tells us, “Many Americans look at these events and ask the same question: Five years after 9/11, are we safer? The answer is, yes, America is safer. (Applause.)” Who really needs to know more than that?

Making the case that one of the major goals of The War Against Terror (TWAT) is to deny “safe haven” to the terrorists (no one thought to excise this bit after Pakistan ceded Waziristan to the loons?), he quotes a “fatwa” issued by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, “by the grace of Allah, a safe base here is now available.” Notice how Bush subtly included the “by the grace of Allah” bit, which doesn’t add anything substantive to the quote except to remind us that Osama is a Muslim.

Actually, this is another speech with a more clever and effective rhetorical strategy than we’re used to hearing from Chimpy. He narrates the 9/11 plot as it unfolded, interpolating at various points how it could have been stopped if there had been in place the visa screening and unified watch-lists we now have, or the warrantless surveillance he wants Congress to legalize. Most of this is Bush congratulating himself for closing the barn door after the horse has, um, hijacked an airplane with box-cutters, but someone has put better than usual words into his mouth.

How they come out of his mouth is another matter entirely: “And the United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act -- the Patriot Act. (Applause.) The Terrorist Prevention Act, called the Patriot Act.”


He went on to a fundraiser, where he said:

I fully understand why Americans are troubled by the death and destruction they see on their television screens. I know that. You see, it’s easy to understand because I understand the compassion of the United States of America. Isn’t it a wonderful country when people suffer when they see a child maimed by an extremist’s car bomb. It’s the nature of our country.

Makes you proud to be an Amurriken.

Re-branding Guantanamo

One effect of transferring prisoners from CIA custody to Guantanamo is that Gitmo now has real terrorists people have heard of, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They’re trying to restore Gitmo’s reputation (!) as the place where “the worst of the worst” are stowed (albeit with volleyball courts and Harry Potter), rather than the place where low-level go-fers, wannabes and innocents sold out for the reward money are tied down in restraint chairs and forcibly fed (how many prisoners are still hunger-striking, by the way?).

The US Senate refuses (70-30) to limit the use of cluster bombs near civilians, or to restrict their sales to countries like Israel that refuse to do the same.

Harper’s follows up a Guardian story I must have missed, that a UN report on the history of human rights abuses in Afghanistan has been suppressed because it names those responsible, some of whom are currently prominent in the Afghan government, parliament or military (click here for the report in pdf).

I think you understand why

Somewhat unfortunate headline of the day: “Bush Taps Peters for Transportation.”

Bush gave a broadcast speech in support of secret prisons and torture. He surrounded himself with lots of American flags in case you were wondering if this is still America.


The centerpiece of the speech was a story about how the torture of Abu Zubaydah (who many analysts doubt is as important as the US claims he is, or indeed as important as he claims he is). It’s a rather odd and not hugely believable story, or maybe it’s just the way Bush tells it. Zubaydah, who the US had shot and was holding in a secret prison, “declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information,” including descriptions of Al Qaida members planning a terrorist attack in the US, and where to find them. Then he clammed up, and “it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. ... I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why... But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” So they extracted information from him through these unnameable “procedures,” and then “confronted” other prisoners with it, whereupon they immediately caved: “When confronted with the news that his terror cell had been broken up, Hambali admitted that the operatives were being groomed at KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]’s request for attacks inside the United States -- probably [sic] using airplanes.” Evidently despite being trained to resist interrogation, they never considered the possibility that interrogators might lie to them.

The [sic], by the way, is in the transcript, rather mysteriously. There’s another mysterious sic, a reference to Al Qaida and Taliban fighters being “held secretly [sic]”.


According to him, any number of plots to blow things up, fly airplanes into things, or spread anthrax, have been thwarted because of data given by prisoners held secretly [sic] after alternative sets of procedures were used upon their persons. And yet he claimed once again, “the United States does not torture.” As proof of this, he cites the McCain Act, neglecting to mention his signing statement. So he won’t tell us – “I think you understand why” – the procedures that induced fanatical terrorists to betray their ideals, their plans, their friends and their cause, but the United States does not torture. Phew.

He does tell us that CIA interrogators “had to complete more than 250 additional hours of specialized training”. Oddly enough, he says that like it’s supposed to be reassuring.

Today marks the first time that the White House has admitted that the CIA holds prisoners in secret prisons outside the country. It has not said under what legal authority it does so, or where those prisons are. Or did so, since Bush says that the CIA’s prisoners are all being transferred to DOD control at Guantanamo. Since they’ve denied up until now that there were secret prisons and secret prisoners, I can’t imagine why we would take that claim seriously.

Also, the Pentagon today released a new interrogation manual, which bans hooding, the use of dogs, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, etc. None of this applies to the secret CIA prisons.

Bush demanded that Congress pass laws establishing military tribunals and ensuring that interrogators using alternative procedures cannot face prosecution under the War Crimes Act.

Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?

Bush gave the first in the latest series of “pretty please won’t you support my war?” speeches today. It’s actually a kind of interesting speech, containing many quotes from documents and speeches of Al Qaida leaders and others showing that they don’t like us very much and that they think Iraq is important to their cause and so on. He says ignoring these statements would be like ignoring Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” He says that “Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?” but intentions are not capabilities. Al Qaida may want to take over Iraq and Afghanistan and establish a caliphate from Basra to Boise, or wherever, but...

OK, right in the middle of that sentence I realized that just as Bush was treating bin Laden’s wet dreams as sensible strategic thinking, I was attempting to engage Bush’s speech with logic, which is about as sensible as punching jello. Moving on...

Condi Rice has translated the “people who oppose the Iraq war are like Nazi-appeasers” argument into African-American, telling Essence magazine, “I’m sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold.” She also added that she’s sure there are some people who think Captain Kirk should have “taken a peace” with the Tribble-hating Klingons...

Like Bush’s logic, Condi’s charge is too fatuous to merit a response, but let’s compare & contrast their tone with that of members of the Democratic Congressional leadership. Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, Biden, Lantos et al have written to George Bush asking him to “consider changes to your Iraq policy” and “consider changing the civilian leadership at the Defense Department”. It’s the tone of supplication that annoys me. Not just that they don’t dare to say R*msf*ld’s name out loud, but that in requesting not that he do these things but only that he “consider” doing them, they are reaffirming his contention that only he has any say over foreign and military policy. They are speaking as if they are humbly offering advice to an emperor, not as if they are people with any share of power themselves. Bush, while paying utmost attention to Al Qaida fantasists with delusions of grandeur, will not have to ask “Will we listen?” about this letter.

(Update: which is why the reply to a letter written by a bunch of United States senators was delegated to White House chief of staff Josh Bolten.)

Just treat us the way we treat you

I’ve had one report of problems with this site in Internet Explorer 6. Has anyone else experienced that? My current stats show that 39% of you are using IE6 to access my blog, but they don’t say if that’s the last thing you ever did.

Bush gave a little Labor Day speech at the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education. He doesn’t have much to offer actual working-class people, so he talked about tax cuts: “I like it when people are working for a living, have more after-tax money in their pocket. That’s what I like.”



And he talked about dependence on foreign oil: “I mean, the problem is we get oil from some parts of the world and they simply don’t like us.” You know what they call parts of the world that don’t like us? The world.


He talked about opening up foreign markets to American goods: “See, we got 5 percent of the world’s people here in the United States, which means 95 percent are potential customers.” He added, “And my message to the world is this: Just treat us the way we treat you.” There’s a truly scary thought.


I’ll leave you with a better one, which I stumbled upon on the Internet Movie Database: there will be a Futurama movie (for video).

Whaddaya want, an engraved invitation?

Israeli PM Olmert claims to have made repeated offers to Lebanese PM Siniora (which Siniora says he never received and wouldn’t accept) to “sit down together, shake hands, make peace and end once and for all the hostility, fanaticism and hatred that part of his country feels towards us.” I don’t understand Siniora: who wouldn’t accept such a gracious offer? In a variant of that sentence, Olmert said he wanted to “sit, shake hands, make peace and end once and for all the hostility and jealousy”. I’d be interested to know what he thinks the Lebanese are jealous of.