cheese it, the cops!

like a lot of folks, i've been watching all day the president-elect is a captor story. so far i tend to think it's true. in a way it's a yawn except that it is likely to affect profoundly the domestic american political situation. it matters so much because the hostage situation was a signal moment and emblem of american humiliation (cf defeat in vietnam) which the republicans have dedicated their political lives to redressing, and to the symbolic redressing of which they owe their political identities and successes ever since. remember that reagan owed much of his victory in 80 to the "crisis." now all of this is extremely ironic because, for example, ollie north and co were negotiating with the mullahs and, er, arming them, in exchange for the release, while carter actually tried special forces-type action. also, whatever anyone tells you, the bush admin cannot possibly be thinking of military action against iran: we can't even handle iraq, and we would get our, um, asses kicked very very badly. still: it changes the whole dynamic to country-under-siege, us-against-the-world, republicans saved our asses. it gets maybe jeb elected etc. it will be huge. huge.

when i said that i found it hard to distinguish between rick santorum's underwear and the holocaust, i promptly apologized. but now i'm forced to compare rick santorum's brain to a cinder block. here  he is in "catholic online," discussing the celibates-have-sex-with-altar-boys-as-their-superiors-wink-and-nod scandal:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

we ought to blame this thing on michael dukakis, or feminism, rather than on a religious culture that has implicitly promoted and protected homosexual pederasty for 1500 years. possibly when your average catholic priest asked himself: should i force this little boy to have sex with me? he said to himself: michael dukakis would approve! hillary clinton would dig it! the various cardinals who helped conceal the matter (no doubt many were also participants), certainly take their moral bearings from the women's studies program at harvard. possibly, rick santorum's flatline iq is due to the atmosphere of moral permissiveness in tierra del fuego. i guess, though, when he says that the people who are most disturbed by the scandal are academics and other liberals, he means that he himself and like-"minded" people aren't upset about it at all, or perhaps even that they're way into it.

from adam: now here's a good idea. 

i unconditionally support school voucher programs, and in particular aggressive voucher programs for the dc public school system, of which i am an alumnus, sort of. do a little research on levels of violence in the schools, levels of stupidity and corruption in the administration etc over the decades and you'll understand why i say: requiring your child to attend a particular dc public school can be tantamount to imprisoning your child without trial.

like i say, this yields the right result, because i want to see this person and his boss and his boss go down. but here's what they should have done. time should have leaked the name to newsweek; then we'd all know and there'd be no need to buckle under to the courts. you'd accomplish your goal through actual journalism not through acquiescence.

ok . let me repeat this. the valerie plame case is exactly the opposite of "investigative journalism," where instead of us ferreting out your insane abuse of power, you are enlisting us in your insane abuse of power. where instead of revealing the machinations, the greed, the cover-ups, the journalist is being enlisted in the machinations, the greed, the cover-ups. investigative journalism would try to demonstrate that the justifications for war were fabricated; in non-investigative non-journalism - what the hell - we'll fabricate them for you. but if i give up scooter libby, i.e. dick cheney , no one - not even scooter libby, i.e. dich cheney - will talk to me again. fear, instead, that these vicious fucks *will* talk to you again, and again try to use you to destroy their enemies and, like, truth and goodness and shit. i can respect the idea that a promise is binding. i can also see that the promise you made to some vicious tyrant to help them destroy dissidents - and made under false pretenses - could be broken in the name of truth and freedom.

yow! now that's nasty...whatever, celebrity dish. anyway, i hate the whole idea of terry mcmillan, but then again i'm not a middle-class black woman. at least until late at night, when no one's watching...

ask yourself homeboy : if we'd spent the same amount of money and attention on directly fighting terrorist organizations (including those connected to governments) and on promoting democratic change in the middle east as we've spent on the (merely tangentially connected) war in iraq, what might we have accomplished? that's why calling iraq part of the war on terror is useless.

don't lose: heart, faith, nerve. lose: life, money, credibility, purpose.

kinda odd that both piglet and tigger died in the last couple of days. they're definitely yin and yang, kind of a johyn adams/thomas jefferson thing. don't tell my five-year-old!

the congressional delegation that went to gitmo apparently witnessed an interrogator reading harry potter to a detainee for something like an hour. even stalin in his gulag never resorted to prose so labored to break the will not only of prisoners but of eminent legislators.

few quick comments on today's supreme court decisions:
(1) the ten commandments cases are probably decided in a pretty reasonable way. a judge sticking a big 10 command sign in his courtroom in ky is telling you: i'm gonna judge you biblically, not by the laws of the united states. and note: it's a list of laws but also an assertion of the supremacy of the judeo-christian god. but i personally am not gonna go crazy about some 10 command plaque on the grounds somewhere.
(2) i'm not that upset about the failure to review the judith miller/source case. i'd like to see protection for journalists. but this is the worst case ever in this regard, where the "source" was, like, dick cheney's office, trying to kill their political enemies by using reporters.
(3) file sharing i guess is too good to be true in a culture in which everything is owned and ownership is everything. still, a sad outcome.

my column this week is about how to get better "opinion journalism."

pope urges motorists to be careful . and i, the atheist pope, does likewise. only i don't really harbor the  illusion that it will have any effect.

i always really wanted to like burning spear, and i had one album (rocking time) that i did actually think was great. but the tuneless vocals, and later very artificial or even creepy production put me off. i got hold of "creation rebel" a heartbeat collection of his very earliest work for studio one. many of these songs were re-recorded at higher production quality later. but never better. the strength, passion, even the scumbled-up production make you understand people's decisions to rank winston rodney at the very top of reggae artists.

it would be hard to be a member of a tiny, powerless persecuted minority, but even harder to be a member of a huge persecuted majority that controls all three branches of government, the military, and so on. still, you would have some redress. you could whine, for example.

e.j. dionne today :

Thus did Obey offer an amendment to the military appropriations bill calling on the secretary of the Air Force to "develop a plan to ensure that the Air Force Academy maintains a climate free from coercive intimidation and inappropriate proselytizing."

Obey's all-American assertion of religious liberty was, for Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.), part of "the long war on Christianity in America [that] continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives. It continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats. . . . Like a moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians."

we certainly welcome the democratic party as our allies in the war on people of faith. next week: napalming christians is fun, says howard dean!

damn.

Furious that their romance was ending, a 78-year-old great-grandmother shot her 85-year-old ex-beau to death as he read a newspaper in a senior citizens home, police said.

"I did it, and I'd do it again!" Lena Driskell yelled to officers who arrived at the home June 10, according to testimony. Police said she was wearing a bathrobe and slippers and waving an antique handgun with her finger still on the trigger.

mahmoud ahmadinejad's victory in iraq displays the exquisite contrast between iranian and american theocracy. how does it become a religious man who aspires to lead a people to live? ahmadinejad lives in self-enforced humility, with no ostentatious wealth. that's one reason he killed the lapofluxury rafsanjani. ahmadinejad makes the redress of poverty a religious and political issue: the whole thing hangs together beautifully and is politically compelling. here, "religious" politicians such a delay have a cheesey reverend ike thing going in which faith entails wealth and wealth entails selling your soul for a world series skybox or renovations on the mansion. you get the absolute worst of all possible politicians: corrupt, incredibly rigid and self-righteous, deeply self-deluded and incoherent, a huckster religion that worships wealth more than god. 

according to the amnesty international report the u.s. holds about 70,000 prisoners in detention facilities outside the u.s in connection with the war on terror. that strikes me as extremely high, and given the practices of interrogation as described by a hundred reports, why should we hesitate to call this a "gulag," for example? obviously it's not on the scale of the soviet gulag, but it is a worldwide system of secret detention and torture facilities, many of them perhaps built by halliburton . the u.s. gov evidently regards even a raw number as a security secret, or perhaps merely as a massive embarassment, but i have also not heard any official denial of the ai numbers. and it's not clear whether, for example, it includes prisoners rendered to (other) torture-friendly governments. it certainly encompasses many secret facilities.

USA’s “war on terror” detainees, April 2005 (approximate totals/estimates)(11)
USA: Naval Brig, Charleston, South Carolina	2 “enemy combatants”
Cuba: Guantánamo Bay naval base	520 (234 releases/transfers)
Afghanistan: Bagram air base	300
Afghanistan: Kandahar air base	250
Afghanistan: other US facilities (forward operating bases)	Unknown: estimated at scores of detainees
Iraq: Camp Bucca	6,300
Iraq: Abu Ghraib prison	3,500
Iraq: Camp Cropper	110
Iraq: Other US facilities	1,300
Worldwide: CIA facilities, undisclosed locations	Unknown: estimated at 40 detainees
Worldwide: In custody of other governments at behest of USA	Unknown: estimated at several thousand detainees
Worldwide: Secret  transfers of detainees to third countries	Unknown: estimated at 100 to 150 detainees
Foreign nationals held outside the USA and charged for trial	4
Trials of foreign nationals held in US custody outside the USA	0
Total number of detainees held outside the USA by the US during “war on terror”	70,000

giblets the great lays down the law on flag-burning.

i have mixed feelings about the current debate about pbs and cpb . overall, i don't think the gov should be in the broadcasting business at all. on the other hand, it's pretty annoying to place enemies of programs into the position of stewarship over them: government by sheer irony. but republicans deep-fry big bird  is getting to be a pretty tired flourish. i've spent countless hours of my life watching clifford, sesame street, mr rogers, barney, arthur, teletubbies, cyber-chase (please), dragon tales etc etc. obviously various of my kids have liked various of these shows at different times. but they are painful. some of them (barney, rogers, tubbies) are flat weird, like they were made by space aliens or mental patients. all of them (except sesame street) are utterly humorless. and without exception they are painfully, painfully politically correct, a nonstop parade of tokens and earnest, empty moral lessons. also i tend to doubt their "educational" quality. sesame has some charming characters, but reciting the numbers 1 through 10 18 billion times isn't exactly an education.

remarkably, overall it looks like both left and right blogs hate the supreme court decision on eminent domain in new london. btw, unpartisan is a really useful blog aggregator, although of course the idea that all blogs are either liberal or conservative, and that mine is liberal, is a trifle...narrow-minded.

george will has an excellent column today about yesterday's miserable supreme court decision essentially permitting local governments an unlimited right to dispossess their citizens in order to increase their tax revenue. it's the reverse of communism, wherein we dispossess the rich in favor of the poor. here we hand a perfectly good working-class neighborhood to private developers so they can generate large profits. the "liberal" majority on the court should be ashamed. they are enemies of freedom, and advocates of unlimited state power.

i apologize . i really really fucking apologize. for comparing rick santorum to jeffrey dahmer. that was inappropriate. i only wish i'd thought it through before i said that shit. when i compared michael jackson and georges bataille, i must have been in one of my typical psychotic episodes. it won't happen again, and no one should believe what i said, or believe that i believe what i said, though i said it with total sincerity and commitment. when i claimed that donald rumsfeld "might as well have been" josef mengele, or when i  equated dick cheney to spiro agnew, i was just completely fucking stupid.  when i said that the bush admin was similar in spirit to the wicked witch of the west, in particular because it employed flying monkeys, i opened myself to criticism in a way i now acknowledge was imprudent. fuck you. and fuck america.

so you must apologize for x . stupid. redundant. counter-productive. and profoundly boring.

want to see a really vicious backlash? use the military to promote evangelical christianity in iraq.

"The way the preachers arrived here . . . with soldiers . . . was not a good thing," said Baghdad's Roman Catholic archbishop, Jean Sleiman. "I think they had the intention that they could convert Muslims, though Christians didn't do it here for 2,000 years."

sometimes   Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William H. Rehnquist are right, while Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer are wrong

.

yeep!

and speaking of grover norquist and the taliban, you never can tell who you're going to crawl into bed with if you don't give a damn where the money is coming from as long as it's money: read this. (tx observer again ):

  Norquist has not responded to inquiries about using the White House as a fundraiser.   It is, however, a regular ATR practice to invite state legislators and tribal   leaders who have supported ATR anti-tax initiatives to the White House for a personal thank-you from the President. A source at ATR said no money is ever accepted from participants in these events. The $25,000 check from the Coushattas suggests that, at least in this instance, Norquist’s organization made an exception. The $75,000 collected from the Mississippi Choctaws and two corporate sponsors mentioned in Abramoff’s e-mail suggests there were other exceptions. Norquist recently wrote to the tribes who paid to attend White House meetings. His story regarding that event is also evolving. The contributions, he told tribal leaders in letters that went out in May, were in no way related to any White House event. That doesn’t square with the paper trail Abramoff and Norquist left behind, which makes it evident that they were selling access to the President.