If you respect life

The archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, went on tv to tell Zelaya he shouldn’t come back to Honduras. He cited the commandments against lying (the archbishop, by the way, once said that Jews were using the media to exploit the accusations of sexual abuse against priests in order to divert attention from the Israeli-Palestinian issue), stealing and murder. “If you respect life, if you love life. . .please meditate because if not it could be too late.” Archbishops supporting coups; it really is the 1980s all over again.

Curiously, you no longer hear the Honduran coupsters claiming that Zelaya resigned, although the Honduran Congress voted, not to depose Zelaya, but to accept a forged written resignation.

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If you’re looking for something to read about the nature of the United States on this July 4th, you could do worse than Stephen Fry’s recent talk to the Royal Geographical Society. Have some lemonade with it.

Only dead fish go with the flow

An Indian court overturns the ban on gay sex (dating from the Raj, indeed from the Victorian period), although only in New Delhi. Plan your vacations accordingly.

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Sarah Palin has resigned as governor of Alaska (transcript).

First she explained how important Alaska is: “We’re strategic IN the world as the air crossroads OF the world, as a gatekeeper of the continent.” (The odd capitalizations are from her office’s press release.)

WHAT GOD GAVE US: Also, too, “This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, AND oil and gas. It’s energy! God gave us energy.”

WOULD THAT BE FRIVOLOUS ETHICS OR FRIVOLOUS VIOLATIONS? “Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations”

IF – AND IT’S A BIG IF – SHE’S LEARNED ONE THING: “If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!”

SHE CHOOSE TO WORK VERY HARD ON A PATH FOR FRUITFULNESS AND PRODUCTIVITY. BY QUITTING. “I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose NOT to tear down and waste precious time; but to build UP this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!”

ONLY DEAD FISH. AND MAYBE USED CONDOMS: “Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: ‘Sit down and shut up’, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow. Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow’.” So by quitting, she’s not taking a quitter’s way out.

“And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it!” By quitting!

WHAT SHE’S NOT PUTTING ALASKA THROUGH: “I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that’s what’s wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and milk it.” Mmm, duck milk. “I’m not putting Alaska through that - I promised efficiencies and effectiveness! ? That’s not how I am wired.” Yeah, it would be so unlike her to take freebies.

PASSING THE BALL – FOR VICTORY! “Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports... basketball. I use it because you’re naïve if you don’t see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN. And I’m doing that - keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities - smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it’s time to pass the ball - for victory.”

“In fact, we will look to swear Sean in - in Fairbanks at the conclusion of our Governor’s picnics.” I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like the timing of her resignation is based on... picnics.

WHAT HER CHILDREN WON’T ALLOW: “I cannot stand here as your Governor and allow millions upon millions of our dollars go to waste just so I can hold the title of Governor. And my children won’t allow it either.” She’s referring to those expensive ethics investigations.

THE HELL YEAH SEALED IT: “this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life - my children (where the count was unanimous... well, in response to asking: ‘Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children’s future from OUTSIDE the Governor’s office?’ It was four ‘yes’s’ and one ‘hell yeah!’ The ‘hell yeah’ sealed it - and someday I’ll talk about the details of that.”

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS MORE OF: “I think much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently.) Um, by the way, sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we ALL could learn so much from someone like Trig - I know he needs me, but I need him even more... what a child can offer to set priorities RIGHT - that time is precious... the world needs more ‘Trigs’, not fewer.” So everybody go out and give birth to a Down Syndrome baby – do it for the world.

REAL CLIMATE CHANGE: “I don’t want any Alaskan dissuaded from entering politics after seeing this REAL ‘climate change’ that began [when McCain picked her] in August. ... And I will support you because we need YOU and YOU can effect change, and I can too on the outside.”

CALLING AN AUDIBLE (BUT NOT AN INTELLIGIBLE): “We need those who will respect our Constitution where government’s supposed to serve from the BOTTOM UP, not move toward this TOP DOWN big government take-over... but rather, will be protectors of individual rights - who also have enough common sense to acknowledge when conditions have drastically changed and are willing to call an audible and pass the ball when it’s time so the team can win! And that is what I’m doing!”

I CAN SEE IT FROM MY HOUSE: “Remember Alaska... America is now, more than ever, looking North to the Future.”

What a very strange person she is.

(Update: and she concluded with a quote from Douglas MacArthur, which as it happens was not actually a quote from Douglas MacArthur.)

I’m very much afraid that this will leave California the new proud possessor of the stupidest governor in America.

For a limited time

Just like the big boys, for $25,000 to $250,000, I am offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to my cat.

You’re offering what, now?

That’s why he’s a United States senator, and you’re not

Joe Lieberman puts his finger on the problem with a government-run health insurance option: “If we create a public option, the public is going to end up paying for it.” Gosh, I never considered that. I feel so foolish now.

I think that “If we create a public option, the public is going to end up paying for it” is going to go down in history as the new “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

Speaking of chronic diseases

Acting within the law

Honduras’s interim puppet president Roberto Micheletti told the Wall Street Journal that the coup was conducted in order to protect the constitution from Zelaya, and also it wasn’t a coup. “We are acting within the law,” he said. The Journal doesn’t seem to have followed up with a request for the specific statute which specifies a punishment of being dumping in another country in one’s pajamas.

Democratic vocation, redux

At a press conference, Hillary Clinton called “for the full restoration of democratic order in Honduras,” saying that events there had “evolved into a coup.” When asked explicitly whether the US was demanding the return of the elected president, she said no, going only so far as to say that “we think that the arrest and expulsion of a president is certainly cause for concern that has to be addressed.” One could be forgiven for thinking that she doesn’t want to look like supporting a coup, but wouldn’t mind taking advantage of the situation to get rid of Zelaya through some sort of negotiated settlement with the people who seized power.

Later in the day, though, Obama belatedly made the statement he should have made immediately: “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the democratically elected president there.” He has not, however, according to press spokesmodel Robert Gibbs, picked up a phone to offer that support to the democratically elected president, which doesn’t suggest that he plans to offer much in the way of practical help.

What we can’t allow

The man the Honduran coup leaders have installed as interim president, Roberto Micheletti, says, “We can’t allow that this government take us to communism or socialism.”

Henry Kissinger, 1973, about the Chilean coup: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Democratic vocation

Israel claims to be building within the settlements only for "normal life." (Has anyone noticed if American Likudniks have picked up this deeply cynical phrase?) But in fact, it's also building new houses for settlers evicted from unauthorized outposts.

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Statements from Obama and Hillary Clinton on the coup in Honduras more or less condemn it and talk a lot about "democratic norms" and whatnot (I especially like Clinton's call for "all parties in Honduras... to reaffirm their democratic vocation" – I'm sure the military will get right on that), but I have yet to see a clear call for Zelaya to be reinstated.

The NYT's front-page headline today (which has been changed on the website) was "Honduran Army Ousts President Allied to Chavez." Subtle, huh?

Flies are traditional

Today is Christabel and my 1st anniversary. I plan to give her as a present some of her favorite toys by letting in a few flying insects for her to chase. Hours of fun.

I should mention that one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget proposals is to reduce the time county pounds are required to keep strays before killing them to three days, and it would be nice if some pressure were put on him not to do that.

Also, if someone could adopt that black cat at my local Humane Society who I seriously considered last year but passed on and whose picture still shows up in the Society’s ads in the local paper, making me feel a little guilty each time I see it.

The pleasure of conquest

Silvio Berlusconi has denied paying for sex, saying “I never understood what the satisfaction is when you are missing the pleasure of conquest.” Somehow Silvio makes not paying a prostitute sound more skeezy than paying a prostitute.

Thou shalt not park

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem have been protesting the opening of a municipal parking lot on Saturdays, which violates the command to rest on the sabbath. They just had a major riot, throwing rocks and bottles at police for hours. On the sabbath. After Friday prayers. Is there some part of “rest on the sabbath” I don’t understand?

They also attacked journalists, because taking pictures of the riot also violates sabbath law.

Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Safford Unified School District #1 v. Redding that school authorities stip-searching a 13-year-old girl for drugs is “unconstitutionally skeezy.” The lone dissenter was of course Clarence Thomas, whose opinion shows him drooling over the thought, not so much of naked 13-year-old bodies, but of power. Raw, unchecked power. Especially power over naked 13-year-old bodies.

Where the other justices considered whether the search violated Savana Redding’s 4th Amendment rights, Thomas suggested that she should have no such protection against school authorities, that we should “return to the common-law doctrine of in loco parentis” (from a time before school attendance was mandatory), under which teachers had absolute authority over pupils and complete “discretion to craft the rules needed to carry out the disciplinary responsibilities delegated to them by parents.” Just as children have no 4th Amendment right against their parents searching their room, so too they would be subject to any search a school wanted to perform upon them. “Preservation of order, discipline, and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution.”

Thomas wrote that any search for pills is reasonable and thus permissible so long as it is “limited to the areas where the object of that infraction could be concealed” (i.e., boobies) (of course by his standard cavity searches would also be reasonable). “Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments.”

Thomas suggests that if parents do not intend to delegate their intrusive-searching authority to schools under the in loco parentis doctrine he proposes to restore (which came from a time before school attendance was mandatory), they may (he is quoting his own opinion in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case (Morse v. Frederick), “seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or home school them; or they can simply move.” No problemo.

Right now I command you to leave!

Haven’t watched it myself, but there’s a video making the internet rounds of some church in Connecticut holding an exorcism to expel the “homosexual demons” from a 16-year-old boy. I thought of running a contest for what a “homosexual demon” might be like – “Everything in Hell is so red, which is awful for me because I’m totally an autumn,” “Queer eye for the straight incubus” etc. But I don’t know, I’d hate to offend my gay and/or demon readers.

You have urinated on my jacket

Headline of the Day (Daily Telegraph): “Monkey Urinates on Zambian President.”

Or wait, is the Headline of the Day “Zambia Leader Hit by ‘Press Leak’” (BBC)? You be the judge.

Breaking!

Mark Sanford to run for prime minister of Italy.

I think there have been times where we’ve made mistakes

Today Obama met Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. A Chilean reporter told a little joke about how there’s never been a coup in the United States because there’s no American embassy here, then asked if Obama would maybe like to apologize for CIA interventions in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America. O: “I’m interested in going forward, not looking backward. I think that the United States has been an enormous force for good in the world. I think there have been times where we’ve made mistakes.” Mistakes? So no apology, but a heart-felt “Whoops, we accidentally conspired to foment a coup in your country and kill your elected president, but in a force-for-good kind of way”?

Obama press conference: 95% cured

Transcript.

Obama opened with a stronger condemnation of the violence in Iran (which the White House helpfully translated into Persian), although, he said, “the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran”. Although, since the election was stolen, the concept sovereignty is a little dicey at the moment. I’m not sure why election theft creates such confusion in language; Obama also said, “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people.” Of course if it heeded the will of its own people, the guys currently running it wouldn’t be the government anymore. Also, he thinks governments only get the respect of the international community if they respect rights and heed the will of their people – isn’t that just adorable?


He again suggested that it is “up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government” without suggesting how they might do so, given the, you know, stolen election. Not that he should be issuing marching orders, of course, but he’s the one who said that the Iranian people should decide their leadership, when there is no functioning mechanism for them to do so. He did say that “those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.” But very often they also wind up dead.

Still, as Obama keeps saying, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I think that’s the liberal equivalent of the Laffer Curve.

“This tired strategy of using old tensions to scapegoat other countries won’t work anymore in Iran.” Er, why not?

Asked by CBS’s Chip Reid if his stronger words about Iran were “influenced at all by John McCain and Lindsey Graham accusing you of being timid and weak,” he replied “What do you think?”


A PROBLEM: “I think that when a young woman [Neda Agha-Soltan] gets shot on the street when she gets out of her car, that’s a problem.”

There was a lot about health care, which I won’t get into, except to note that Obama refused to say that inclusion of a public option was non-negotiable.


About his own smoking: “I don’t do it in front of my family.” Insert Bill Clinton joke here. Also, he declared himself “95% cured.”


OPTIMISTIC, OR JUST STUPID? YOU BE THE JUDGE: About the economic depression: “What’s incredible to me is how resilient the American people have been and how they are still more optimistic than -- than the facts alone would justify.”

(UPDATE: The best question was one I only half-heard. After Obama said that he’d seen the Neda video and it was heart-breaking, Helen Thomas – who had not been called upon – interjected to ask why then he was suppressing the Guantanamo photos. Obama, in a rather condescending tone, and to the supportive laughter of the press corpse, told her that was “a different question,” and proceeded to ignore her.)

A very Hope-y Father’s Day

Barack Obama has an article in Parade Magazine about fathers. Evidently, “their job does not end at conception”. Who knew?

He castigated absent fathers: “I would often walk through the streets of Chicago’s South Side and see boys marked by that same absence – boys without supervision or direction or anyone to help them as they struggled to grow into men.” I’m not a single mother, but I think I can respond to that on behalf of all single mothers: Fuck you, Barack.

Insert quarter

This blog notes the passing of John Houghtaling, the inventor of Magic Fingers.

Some daddy figures won’t go away:

It’s the least we can do

Obama was interviewed by CBS. Asked about Iran, he said, “And the world is watching. And we stand behind those who are seeking justice in a peaceful way.” So the world is watching their butts, is what he’s saying.