cheese it, the cops!

and what the heck, let's not omit the president.

Abramoff was so closely tied to the Bush Administration   that he could, and did, charge two of his clients $25,000 for a White House   lunch date and a meeting with the President. From the same two clients he took   to the White House in May 2001, Abramoff also obtained $2.5 million in contributions   for a non-profit foundation he and his wife operated.

  Abramoff’s White House guests were the chiefs of two of the six casino-rich   Indian tribes he and his partner Mike Scanlon ultimately billed $82 million   for services tribal leaders now claim were never performed or were improperly   performed. Together the six tribes would make $10 million in political contributions,   at Abramoff’s direction, almost all of it to Republican campaigns of his   choosing. On May 9, 2001, when he ushered the two tribal chiefs into the White   House to meet the President, The Washington Post story that would end   his lobbying career and begin two Senate Committee investigations was three   years away. (When the Post story broke in February 2004, however, Abramoff   and Scanlon, a former Tom DeLay press aide, were already targets of a U.S. Attorney’s   investigation in Washington.)

this:

Along the way, Abramoff directed the tribe to make tens of thousands of donations and once directed tribal leaders to cancel $55,000 in checks to House Republican leader Tom DeLay and divert them to other groups.

DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority and Americans for a Republican Majority never reported receiving any checks from the Louisiana tribe to federal or state regulators, their reports show. The donations, however, are recorded in memos and ledgers kept by the tribe.

"Enclosed please find a check for $10,000 to the Texans for a Republican Majority. This check needs to be reissued to America 21," Abramoff, now under criminal investigation, wrote the Coushattas in a May 2002 letter obtained by The Associated Press.

America 21 is a Nashville, Tenn.-based Christian group focused on voter turnout that helped Republican candidates in the pivotal 2002 elections that kept DeLay's party in control of the House.

Months earlier, the tribe was asked to cancel a $25,000 check to Americans for a Republican Majority and send that money instead to a group called Sixty Plus that helped Republicans in their two-year effort to get a Medicare prescription drug benefit through Congress.

People familiar with Abramoff's transactions with the Coushattas, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of ongoing grand jury and Senate probes, said Abramoff redirected the checks at the request of one of DeLay's assistants.

The aide asked Abramoff to get the checks changed, expressing concern that donations from tribal casinos shouldn't appear on the rolls of DeLay's conservative political groups, the sources told the AP.

one thing that's so repulsive about this whole mega-scandal wherein you enrich yourself by buying or  exercising political influence is the moral absolutism and certainty expressed by such participants as delay and ralph reed . if the christian right is theocratic, self-righteous, intolerant etc, that's to be expected. but simultaneously greedy, corrupt etc? the taliban were horrendous, but incorruptible. those were the days.

speaking of great patriots and the deep religious convictions that fuel their ethical lives, these people are filth.

what chumps: defending their "symbol of freedom" by the repression of political expression. but at least there'll be no more of this kind of insane desecration:

here, via adam, is a useful group of suggestions for  persecuting christians . try to do all of things things as much as possible, as we prosecute the w.o.p.o.f. with extreme prejudice. and don't forget to oppress george w. bush, michelle malkin, john ashcroft, and the other pathetic victims of anti-christian prejudice.

don't know quite how oliver willis got on my blogroll, but he's gone now, cause as this makes clear as anything does, only real idiots are like "democratic" or "republican" bloggers with "message discipline" and shit. please, assmonkeys, replace message discipline with actual independent ratiocination. what's the point of a blog? that we all mumble the same crap in unison?

i think, as is usual with such things, the way the iranian run-off is being portrayed in the american press is pretty simplistic. it's just reformer (rafsanjani) vs hard-liner (ahmadinejad). of course reformer=good, islamist=bad, and perhaps the only way the reformer loses is by fraud. but by all accounts rafsanjani is corrupt and out of touch, ahmadinejad incorruptible and of admirable character and connection to his constituents as mayor of tehran. it's a mild version of the way the taliban was portrayed. you too might be surprisingly susceptible to rule by incorruptible religious fanatics after a few decades of money-grubbing warlords and narcolords etc. anyway the la times has a good story this morning.

the women who did this study showing that the scent of grapefruit makes women seem precisely six years younger were no doubt having an orgasm during the research. anyway, emma says we ought to try it on jane, who turns five tomorrow.

the good news is that, if the nun had been possessed by a demon, she would no longer be.

yay! tom cruise and katie holmes got engaged. that's sort of what my column is about this week.

the july national geographic has an excellent summary of the history and state of chechnya. their figures are a bit different than those i've published in the past, but fundamentally in the same ballpark, their very open-endedness emphasizing the crackdown on information.

population in 1981: 1.1 million
killed since 1994: 100,000-300,00
currently displaced: 210,000

the rejection of the library provision of the patriot act by the house is not thyat huge a thing. but it's encouraging.

stacy schiff - the current dowdsub - is actually pretty damn good. this piece, though, is a bit random, especially in lumping wikipedia into a general decline in the truth. it's not like there's never been an error in the brittanica, and the wiki concept is good in part precisely because it will lead to truth in the long run, because it makes use of the expertise of thousands. on the other hand, she's certainly right to be puzzled by the wikitorial concept. on the third hand, i never really quite got hold of the idea of the editorial period, because the concept of group opinion, much less of opinions of institutions, are deeply problematic. the locus of opinion is a human individual and the expressive tool for it is an individual voice or pen. is an editorial the opinion of the paper's owner? of the consensus of the editorial board? the fact that it's no one's and everyone's opinion is reflected in the fact that editorials are usually dull, predictable, and  plodding. you need a voice to articulate an opinion.
'

actually, "upheavel" is probably a pretty good idea for editorial pages, though this particular set of ideas doesn't exactly set my blood racing. and as huge a fan as i am of wikipedia and the wiki idea in general, i'm not really glomming onto this idea of a "wikitorial": it will just be people who disagree with each other overwriting each other. that's exactly the wrong context for a wiki.

my creators column is in philly inquirer today.

fuck! it's the fucking scientologists!

so people. i told you my "if i could sleep with anyone." what about yours? though i also gotta admit i'm kind of partial to veronica lake, who's probable more my, um, stature. you know a lot of it's about the voice. and that's one thing i will say for the radio star, the lovely but rapaciously flirtatious marion winik. great voice.

so yesterday i went to the wedding - over in gettysburg - of the person who i think is the best philosopher of my generation - karmen mackendrick - to cooldude alan griffin. twas lovely, and not only because her sisters and nieces belly-danced at the reception, though that helped.

ok, so i got this  off michelle malkin. but the fact that tears were streaming down my cheeks by the end indicated that maybe i should link it too.

time magazine is going to publish the the interrogation log of a prisoner at gitmo. it includes many moves directed against the prisoner's religious beliefs, including being "straddled" by a female guard, being prohibited from praying, and being forced to wear poictures of scantily-clad women around his neck. the sexual stuff is just bizarre and comical: it's pretty hard to see how this is going to get someone talking. but it's worth saying that it is obvious that identical practices were in place at abu ghraib and at  bagram air force base in afghanistan, and at gitmo. does anyone think this is a mere coincidence? somewhere there is a memo from rumsfeld or one of his immediate subordinates specifically prescribing the use of psychological warfare directed against islamic beliefs and suggesting sexual themes as a means to that end. or else all these female guards here there and everywhere are spontaneously thinking to themselves: maybe if i straddle this guy...

The worst treatment in Afghanistan seems to have been reserved for those who have been, in effect, kidnapped by the US from third countries, held in Afghanistan, and subsequently transferred to Guantanamo. In a previously unpublished sworn affidavit obtained by the lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a teacher of Islamic law with Palestinian citizenship, describes how he was arrested in Pakistan in May 2002, handed over to the Americans and taken to Afghanistan.

While at Bagram air force base, Hussain said, he was blindfolded, tightly handcuffed, gagged, earplugged and sodomised with a stick while three soldiers held him down. "It was excruciatingly painful," said Hussain. "I have always believed that I am not a person who would scream unless I was really hurt. Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream. But I could not stop screaming when this happened. This torture went on for several minutes, but it felt like hours, and the pain afterwards was almost as bad as anything I experienced at the time."

Hussain said that besides the physical pain, he could not go to the toilet to this day without remembering what had happened. "The Americans never said anything about why they were doing it to me," he said. "I think maybe they wanted to make me so embarrassed that it would live with me for the rest of my life. It would dehumanise me."

Hussain has never been charged with a crime. He was kept without explanation and released without apology after more than two years. When he got out, he learnt that his eldest son had died.

if you could sleep with anybody... last night i was watching the big sleep and i'll tell you: lauren bacall.

more on the bolo brouhaha . brouhaha? brouhaha.

no one, not anyone, is as stupid as public high school administrator . this one didn't let a kid graduate because he was wearing a bolo tie, thus i guess violating the dress code through the rather obscure provision therein that a bolo tie is not a tie. bizarrely, the post story does not even identify any of the administrators at mcdonough high school. here they are:

Garth Bowling - Principal

Patrick Cunniff - Vice Principal

Chrystal Benson - Vice Principal

Kenneth Schroeck - Vice Principal

mark anthony neal's op-ed in the latimes today is just kind of silly. i take absolutely seriously white people's sexual phobia about black men (and i've written about it a lot, e.g. in "act like you know"). but both the race and the (alleged) sex are so twisted around in this case that this stuff does not apply. i could sort of see it in the oj case. but if you think that the crazy white fears that large brutal black men are going to rape their wives and daughters extends to a crazy white fear that squeaky-voiced, bleached little michael jackson is going to rape their sons, you're just smoked.

more from the latimes tillman story :

Withholding the information amounted to "an administrative error," said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the head of Army public affairs.

Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, had been told it was a case of friendly fire at the time of the Silver Star award. The Tillman family was not told what had actually happened until a memorial service had been held. Jones recommended changes to Army rules, including a more explicit directive that troops not destroy evidence in the event of friendly-fire deaths. After Tillman's death, soldiers burned his uniform, saying it was a biohazard.

um. ok. and despite the fact that we were wiping our fingerprints off the weapons etc, no one covered up anything.

just watched the mighty james sensenbrenner absolutely preclude debate and also ridicule witnesses (including the arab-american leader james zogby, an immigration activist, and an official with amnesty international) in the judiciary committee hearings on the patriot act. he simply talked over everyone and refused to yield, then gaveled the proceedings to adjournment. various democratic members stuck around, including jerrold nadler and sheila jackson-lee  and sort of even continued asking the witnesses questions. seems like they turned off the mics etc.

this is ridiculous. and pathetic. and vicious. the outcome of the "investigation" runs like this: the army knew from the moment it occurred that pat tillman's death was caused by friendly fire. but it announced that he had died heroically, storming a hill and stuck by that account for weeks. however, there was no attempt to mislead anyone or conceal any facts, only a confusion about regulations. it's not that this is an unlikely scenario; it's that it is baldly inyourface contradictory: it cannot possibly be true. the investigation - obviously - is simply part of the cover-up. however, "cover-up" may be too strong, since, like a kindergartner's alibi or something, it is incapable of deceiving anyone even for a moment.

FT. BRAGG, N.C. — The Army general investigating the death of Pat Tillman acknowledged that the Army knew almost immediately that he had been killed by fellow soldiers rather than enemy fire, but blamed confusing regulations — not a coverup — for its failure to tell his family what really happened until after he was buried.

Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones, speaking publicly on the matter for the first time, detailed the events surrounding the April 2004 death of the professional football player-turned-soldier in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Shortly after Tillman's death, the Army said he was killed while leading troops in battle, scaling a hill to ensure the safety of other U.S. soldiers following him. Days after his death, the Army awarded him the Silver Star, praising his gallantry under enemy fire. A few weeks later, the Army said he probably died as a result of so-called friendly fire.

In an interview, Jones expressed sympathy for the family of the 27-year-old onetime NFL star, who gave up a lucrative football contract in 2002 to join the Army. But Jones defended the Army's handling of the incident and said he had found no evidence of an attempt to hide the truth.

"The evidence from my investigation tells me that no one attempted to cover up or conceal anything in the course of this investigation," Jones said in the interview earlier this week at the Army's Special Operations Command. On Thursday, Army officials issued a statement saying they stood by those findings.

el serr has an amazing testimony to the fact that the usa is #1 . protect the homeland, bitch.

did you dig the claim that a guard accidentally pissed on a koran? dude even my 4-year-old doesn't have accidents like that. they then removed him from all further contact with prisoners, which on their own account would be arbitrary and unjust.