cheese it, the cops!

bork and rivkin argue that the courts' decisions to demand some semblance of due process for "enemy combatants" is "judicial activism" and a serious challenge to the president's constitutional war powers. i just want to point out to them that their argument would justify a worldwide gulag in which people suspected of terrorism - including american citizens - or of anything else (and note, again, it begs the question to call these people terrorists in the absence of any evidence) can be held forever without charge and tortured by americans or by foreign governments to whom we render prisoners. it could not be more obvious that the people who are already doing this cannot be trusted with that authority: people have been abused or held for long periods, then released because the detention was unjustified in the first place. and it could not be more obvious that these people want to make this system grow all over the world. forget the constitutional question for a minute. is this compatible with the basic ideas of the founders? is it compatible with the ideals we purport to stand for? is it even good or effective anti-terrorism policy? bush talked, amazingly, yesterday, about how oppressors will be destroyed. perhaps he is contemplating suicide.

bush stresses theme of freedom at second inaugural .bush begins second term stressing freedom .

my prayer for bush's second term: may god give him precisely what he deserves.

yo. um. suddenly i'm wondering: how'd they measure the weight???

ok. dig it. dave matthews's bus dropped 800 lbs of shit on some friendly cincinatti tourists . um, let's not read that as a metaphor. as keef said in a line i'm still trying to parse profoundly: "the pool's in but the patio ain't dry" (she's my little rock 'n roll. her tits, her ass got soul, baby.) anyway, as i'm sure you realize: kind of. dave matthews kind of sucks.

According to authorities, Wohl was alone in the bus of band violinist Boyd Tinsley on his way to a downtown hotel on Aug. 8 when he allegedly emptied the bus' septic tank as it crossed the metal grates of the Kinzie Street bridge.

The waste poured through the grates and onto the open deck of the Chicago's Little Lady tour boat, which was passing below with more than 100 people on board

you know what?

fuck you.

overheard tonight: my wife to our 14-year old son, doing an, um, "research paper," for french class, about the pompidou center: "change the words around so it's not plagiarism." i guess it pays to have writers as parents.

it must be a profoundly liberating experience to lose a presidential election, after having compromised any belief you ever had. i remember al gore: "if i had it to do all over again, i'd just let it all hang out." then he grew a beard and a conscience. kerry just voted against rice : a bizarre move considering he accepted every argument she ever made for everything. but i guess the beard can't be far behind, and jk the peace activist, abortion rights advocate, freak for marijuana legalization.

ok: you can ridicule and regret the fact that people still believe that god created the world. but you're going to have to deal with it. banning the teaching of evolution in public schools would be sick and wrong. but preventing textbooks pointing out in whatever fashion that people disagree with it is just epistemic hubris, especially because the alternative is a school system completely insulated from the belief-systems of their students and parents. as i keep saying, it's a contest between faith and reason, and neither is equipped to refute or so much as disturb the other. there is no reason why science should not be placed in a social context; indeed it ought to be. galileo's clash with the church, for example, is a vignette in many science books. so why not evolution's clash with biblical literalism.? you don't have to decide the issue. and there is no church hierarchy enforcing some orthodoxy. really, there's not. it ain't nothing like 16th/17th  c. europe. just put it in a context, cause who the hell knows????

thank god,  big media has finally gotten the message of decency: no naked cartoon baby butts

this, sadly, from michelle malkin , reiterating the "official statement" on seymour hersh's expose of american special forces activities in iraq. please. i guess you accept "offical statements" at face value? where you live, woman? even malkin has to realize that invading iran would be a beyond-belief bad idea. but i also would admit this: the reasons to do so are infinitely more convicing than in the case of iraq, and the only serious reasons not to are...practical. let me say this - as i have again and again - one of the important justifications for cheney of the invasion of iraq was that saddam did not have any wmd's: that is, there would be no serious resistance. this, because the bush admin - despite the belligerent attitude - is essentially almost as chickenshit as someone like kerry. obviously, an even better, a much better case, can be made with regard to north korea. however, if we actually cared about anything we purport to, we'd have invaded the sudan some time ago.

thank god, or whomever, for people like zhao ziyang , who reach their moral limit at some point. kill communist dictators whenever you get a clear shot.

Conference organizers said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.

well, now. it *is* disconcerting that lawrence summers suspects that women are less able mathematicaly than men based on hormones or whatever. if i was a woman, i'd be pissed off. if i was a woman student at harvard, i'd, er, go to yale. as a numberphobic man, however, i feel impressed by my own incredible intelligence. but what i really like is the "as a" constrcution, where one instantly insulates this or that aspect or function of oneself from the rest. "as a" - soldier, asshole, sadist, whatever, charles graner would stack people on top of each other in a gay-rape cheerleader pyramid. but "as a" average guy from pa, graner was a real decent basic american.

well the ebadi embargo is over . evidently someone has some common sense. 

the horror . in a once-in-a-lifetime heist, someone stole "an irreplaceable plastic piggy bank" from a canadian museum.

"I'm devastated," said Samantha Sannella, CEO and president of the Design Exchange on Bay St. "It's the cutest little pig. All I can imagine is someone hurting him or sending ransom notes with pictures of him on the subway."

the ransom theory is interesting, but i'm thinking that it's either a serious piggy bank collector, or a crackhead who's hoping the thing is packed with loonies.

first off. this prince harry swastika shit. get over it, children. and second, the idea of a total european ban on nazi symbols . please. try to get down with this idea of freedom. and try not to make nazism completely seductive.

jackson diehl's argument  today that the reagan administration brought democracy to central america, which is now crumbling, is deeply bizarre. i guess that was the point of ollie north's covert ops from the white house basement? of death squads and contras? and i guess the biggest threat to democracy in latin america is hugo chavez. how did chavez take power? let's see...oh yeah: he was elected, then elected again, by large margins. "democratic" to ideologues like diehl, just means "aligned weith the u.s." i wonder if he condemned fujimori with anything like the enthusiasm he brings to bashing chavez.

my column this week is going to be about the addition of an essay to the sat, a big issue around my house cause we've got 2 high school juniors out here. anyway, michael dobbs' piece in the washpost  is actually pretty encouraging; it indicates that rather tha some mechanical set of rubrics, the grading may end up being flexible and based on the overall impression of the essay.

thanks to hairy fish nuts for drawing my attention to this report from "new scientist":

THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.

Other ideas included chemical weapons that attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Another was to develop a chemical that caused "severe and lasting halitosis", making it easy to identify guerrillas trying to blend in with civilians.

maybe this is a hoax? anyway, this was supposed to be circa 1994, back when the argument was popular that gays in combat hurt morale. actually, though, it seems to me that this might forge your enemies into a single incredibly aggressive and cohesive force, bent on going way gay with the army of the invader.

ok. on the other hand there's this , also from the tribune, by the excellent steve chapman. this is certainly the best treatment the armstrong williams case has gotten, identifying the much larger problem.

dude . good luck with "the new liberalism." talk about a stale strategy: trying to repossess terms like "family values" etc. everyone understands what "family values" means in the mouth of a conservative, and they vote for it. anyway, instead of itty-bitty rhetorical feints or whatever, i'd try saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

truly the apocalypse is nigh. prince harry attended a costume party in an american-football get-up, then pretended to moon the entire group of pseudo-aristocratic wanksters, while randy moss appeared before a sellout crowd at the frozen tundra in complete islamofascist regalia. .

you know, the armstrong williams case is trivial. what's really bad is that, however they do it, the administration creates a kind of total atmosphere of propaganda, in which everyone uses the same terms at the same time, in which think tanks mobilize to get an approved view out there, almost sentence by sentence dictated by the official line. one center of such activity is the the op-ed page of the chicago tribune . the piece today "by" victor davis hanson of the hoover institution is as egregious example as you will ever find: it contains not a single thought, not a singlwe sentence, that does not emerge from the propaganda machine, starting with the headline "islamists hate us because of who we are": namely proponents of democracy and free markets. in the now-mechanical fashion of those representing the state's position, it calls islamists "fascists" then goes on to describe their benighted state in terms culled from press releases, speeches etc of the bush admin. it's not that there ain't some truth here: i myself would rather live here now than under an islamist regime. but the deal is very complicated, and people are fighting for traditional ways of life against an onslaught of the debased pop culture which these same ideologues attack, as well as economic, political, and military domination. i still don't quite understand the term "fascist" in this regard, which is now unanimous, though maybe it's just a blanket term of abuse. but i would have thought of fascism as ultra-nationalism, racialism, and extreme industrial capitalism: obviously none of those are islamist positions.  but whatever: i don't understand on what basis an op-ed ed selects this boilerplate recitation of the words of the authorities from a thousand other identical expressions. and i don't understand what makes "hanson" a writer or a thinker: there is no voice and no idea, just rote repetition.

adam sends this  along with the subject line "tyler durden eat your heart out." after the love rug, why not overthrow the government of the united states of america?

guess it's  never too late to  repatriate  .

i don't understand why tom friedman  would just blithely call all the iraqi insurgents "fascists" over and over, except maybe he's still trying to justify his own support for the invasion. anyway, it seems likely that there a host of different agendas in the insurgency. some of these folks are islamists. some are baathists. some are maybe iraqi or arab nationalists who essentially simply can't stand the idea that their nation is occupied by the us. it would be cool if some of them were radical democrats or socialists or anarchists or moderates or something, but if so i haven't heard about it. anyway, obviously there are many factions with many agendas (including maybe some actual fascists!). calling them all fascists - if it's not the merest propaganda - surely obscures rather than illuminates the situation. it would be nice to have a good account of who is fighting and why, but no one will produce one if the picture is of a monolithic group of brownshirts.

george will's column today  on armstrong williams, no child, and the use of taxpayer money for "puffery" is a needed reminder of what conservatism is, or used to be. it's pretty cool that there's one left.

hey i got an advance copy of the new sage francis album, "a healthy distrust" (epitaph ) it's amazing. samrt, political, confessional: where hip hop can go after everyone finally gets sick of merely bragging. there is hope for the white race .

the mighty adam draws out attention to this . it's not easy to be persecuted the way tom delay is persecuted. nor is it easy to die of bleeding hemmorhoids, as tom delay deserves to. actually i think tom delay has been visited upon america as punishment for our, um, stupidity.

545.2 nonsense, stuff, poppycock, folderol, bosh, buncombe, bilge, balderdash, piffle, niaiserie, flummery, trumpery, rubbish, trash, truck, blatherskite, moonshine, fiddle-faddle,  fiddledeedee, flumdiddle, flapdoodle, fudge, humbug. 3. tommyrot, rot, hogwash, malarkey, tosh, kibosh, bunk, hokum. hooey, bushwah, blah, huftmagufty, whoopla, hoopdedoodle, monkey-doodle, gook, applesauce, baloney, tripe, horsefeathers. 4.  twaddle, twattle, twiddle-twaddle, blather, babble, bibble-babble, gabble, gibble-gabble, blabber, gibber, jabber, prate, prattle, rattle, bavardage, guff, gash, clack, gas, hot air, bull, blah-blah, gammon, claptrap, skimble-scamble, slipslap, wish-wash, drivel, dribble, drool, slaver; gibberish, jargon, mumbo-jumbo, double-talk, gobbldegook, bafflegab.