All the film does is add another tallish tale to the deadlocked mythology of the Middle East, and all the controversies will do is stoke its sense of earnestness, which has to be its least appealing aspect.I was disappointed mainly because I erroneously thought that, given the political criticism of the movie, it might have elaborated the complexity of the relationship between Israel and Palestine. But it's mostly a spy thriller in 70s outfits. For that, it was good enough. But as a political statement, it was trite. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of it was the ongoing conversation between the protagonist and Geoffrey Rush's character. There's lots of language about "home" and this seems to be Spielberg's main statement. But he pays quick lip service to the Palestinian idea of home in favor of home as Israel.
Churches, social service agencies and immigration groups across the country are rallying against a provision in the recently passed House border-security bill that would make it a federal crime to offer services or assistance to illegal immigrants.The measure would broaden the nation's immigrant-smuggling law so that people who assist or shield illegal immigrants would be subject to prosecution. Offenders, who might include priests, nurses or social workers, could face up to five years in prison. The proposal would also allow the authorities to seize some assets of those convicted of such a crime.
Iraqi police commandos are regularly accused of abusing detainees, but in the central Iraqi former rebel bastion of Samarra they say psychology, not force, is what gets suspects to talk.
"It's true, when they're arrested, suspects expect to be tortured, like they were under the former regime" of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, said Colonel Bashar Abdullah Hussein, who heads the police commandos' "Lions" brigade.
"But we resort to psychology, we talk to them for hours and offer them tea to destabilise them.
"Anyway, why should we have to beat them? If we found evidence of them being terrorists, there's a law and they could be sentenced to death," said the 40-year-old Turkmen officer who used to head the old regime's police quick reaction force.
"We don't allow detainees to be beaten. Abusing my power won't help me, it would only give terrorists arguments to use against me," said Hussein.
A live hand grenade was seized from a drunken passenger in the Moscow metro on Thursday evening, the Interfax news agency reports.
The agency quoted a source from the city police as saying that the GG-42 grenade was in the possession of a 40-year-old man who was described as a deputy director of a private Moscow security firm. The incident took place at the Serpukhovskaya station south of the city center.
Signatures, a restaurant formerly owned by embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff (according to the Boston Globe), wants a new name and is taking suggestions from the general public. Have fun!
The decade when coral reefs turned pallid and died; when Alaskan caribou butted their heads against pipelines; when what seemed like a marginal rise in oceanic temperatures translated into hurricanes that ate entire shorelines, was also the decade of the Hummer. Just as Paul Fussell identified the Jeep - light, speedy and tough - as the symbol of the war that America wanted to fight in the 1940s, so the Hummer will forever get remembered as the Supersize emblem of imperial hubris in the noughties: comical in its swaggering, pseudo-military fantasy; obese sheet-metal in denial; the self-dooming guzzler to end all guzzlers; blitzkrieg at the shopping mall - while the real thing - Humvees with teenagers in uniform - get taken out by rocket-propelled grenades in Falluja.
Earlier today, I read a story in Newsweek that included a graphic noting some good news from Iraq. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to the paper version I was reading. You'll have to trust me.UPDATE (11:04am, Dec. 30th):
The claimed fact: in the past few years, Iraq's economy has increased nearly 50%. It went from about $20 billion to around $30 billion.
Should we be pleased?
First, note that the US government estimates Iraq's 2005 economy at closer to $25 billion, so the stats may have been wrong.
Second, the US is reportedly planning to spend at least $50 billion in Iraq in 2006. Thus, this doesn't seem like such good news. How can the US spend nearly double Iraq's economy -- and not make even more of a difference in the size of Iraq's economy? In less than three, years, the US has already spent nearly $230 billion.
Long lines formed at gas stations in Baghdad on Friday as word spread that Iraq's largest oil refinery had shut down in the face of threats against truck drivers, and fears grew of a gas shortage.
Heading a military service isn't quite the position of power it used to be. In a Bush administration revision of plans for Pentagon succession in a doomsday scenario, three of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's most loyal advisers moved ahead of the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon's intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld. The second spot would be the deputy secretary of defense, but that position currently is vacant. The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth.
Alito encouraged students to take risks and rewarded those who did. Former student Robert Marasco argued in his final paper that torture should never be allowed. Alito gave him an "A" on the paper and for the class, Marasco said.An "A" indeed! And for a paper arguing against torture! Well, I have been wrong about this Alito fellow, I now see. Despite what must have been his repugnance at a student's brazenness, the brave and open-minded professor--surely swallowing back his bilious gags--managed to ignore his own political perspective.
The administration talking points on this will lambaste the press and leakers as subverting the power of the president (and therefore as traitorous, etc.), as they always are. The point to remember is that the basis for appeals is that the president does not have the power implied in the forthcoming talking-point lambasting of the press and leakers. That is, unless the claim is ultimately that this president is above the law. If you're a journalist, please force that issue.Defence lawyers in several terrorism cases in the United States are planning to appeal against the convictions of their clients on the ground that evidence may have been garnered from illegal wiretapping by a federal government surveillance agency.
The threat is the latest repercussion of the disclosure two weeks ago that the Bush administration had used the National Security Agency (NSA) - supposed to go after foreign targets - to conduct electronic surveillance without warrants inside the US, and against American citizens.
PLAYBOY: So you can't accept that we descended from monkeys and apes?
GIBSON: No, I think it's bullshit. If it isn't, why are they still around? How come apes aren't people yet?
Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan. Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable....
The interviews with Kurdish troops... suggested that as the American military transfers more bases and areas of control to Iraqi units, it may be handing the nation to militias that are bent more on advancing ethnic and religious interests than on defeating the insurgency and preserving national unity.
God sees embryos as "full and complete" humans, Pope Benedict said on Wednesday in an address that firmly underlined the Roman Catholic Church's stance against abortion and scientific research on embryos.
American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict - the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs - are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed.Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war.
Back in the old days, we used to believe - did we not? - that journalists should "tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version.
So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.
Where is the shame in Washington today? How does Donald Rumsfeld not blush in the presence of the soldiers he so routinely betrays? How does Dick Cheney maintain that straight face, treating core values as a joke? The recasting of the nation's moral meaning - a blatant embrace of ends-justify-the-means - is happening in plain daylight. No shadows here.Every time the Bush administration is caught in one of its repugnant purposes (Thank God, again this year, for Seymour Hersh), the White House declares its intention to stay the course. Torture? Wiretapping? Kidnapping? Deceit? The president's eyes widen: Trust me, he says with a twisted smile. Then he leans closer to display a snarling defiance. The combination reduces his critics to sputters.
Perhaps Bush's savviest achievement has been to make the public think that Rumsfeld and Cheney are the dark geniuses behind the administration's malevolence. If Bush is taken as too shallow to have a fascist ideology; as too weak to stick with hard policies that undermine democracy; as a religious nutcase whose apocalyptic fantasies don't matter; as a man, in sum, the average citizen can regard as slightly less than average - then what he is pulling off will not be called by its proper name until it is too late. 2005? Oh yes, that was the year of the coup.
The rest of the story suggests that that flattening might not take place after all, given political and military pressures, so go figure on the message.Everyone at the conference was hanging on the words of Ryan Henry, and it was not difficult to figure out why.
Mr. Henry, a top Pentagon planning official, was giving an early glimpse of the Defense Department's priorities over the next four years to an industry gathering in New York of executives of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and other leading military contractors.
For his listeners, there was one question hanging in the air: What will the impact be on me - and on my company?
Some of the answers were already clear, even if there were few details. Mr. Henry, whose official title is principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy, said the Pentagon's spending binge of the last several years - its budget has increased 41 percent since 9/11 - cannot be sustained. "We can't do everything we want to do."
It was a message that the industry has been bracing for. The Pentagon budget, James F. Albaugh, chief executive of Boeing's $30 billion military division, said at the conference, has "been a great ride for the last five years." But, he added: "We will see a flattening of the defense budget. We all know it is coming."
"My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants," Powell said."And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that."
There is no incompatibility between being decisive and recognizing the fallibility and limitations of our choices and decisions. On the contrary, this is what is required for responsible action. We must recognize that whatever we do, there will always be unintended and unpredictable consequences. Acknowledging and intelligently assessing these consequences may require altering our conduct.... And because of human finitude and limitation, we cannot avoid making mistakes. "Steadfastness" and "staying the course" are not virtures but vices when they involve ignoring the undesirable consequences of our choices and actions....
...[The heart of the matter] is the unspoken assumption that "tough-minded realism," strength, forcefulness, decisiveness, and persistence are based upon unwavering moral certainty. For without a firm, absolute, moral conviction, we will lack the determination to do what is required to fight evil. But here is where we detect the gross fallacious slide from subjective moral certitude to alleged objective moral certainty. The strength of one's personal conviction is never sufficient to justify the truth or correctness of one's claims. This is the primary lesson of pragmatic fallibilism. Furthermore, we need to expose the vulgar form of the Cartesian Anxiety that corrupts so much of current political rhetoric. We are presented with the alternatives of either steadfast moral certainty or a wishy-washy vacillating relativism. And the not-so-hidden implication is that pragmatic fallibility is effeminate and tender-minded; it lacks the guts to cope with the evil of terror. Over and over again, so-called tough-minded realists affirm this in conscious and subliminal ways. We need to bring this attitude out into the open and expose it. It is based on confusion between subjective certitude and objective certainty. Ideologists, fanatics, and fundamentalists are always claiming certainty. History is full of discarded certainties.... The fervor with which one asserts the possession of moral certainties is no evidence whatsoever for the truth or validity of one's claims....
VLADIMIR Putin has sparked fears of a new arms race between Russia and the United States by deploying a nuclear ballistic strike force system that officials made clear could penetrate US anti- missile defences.
On Christmas Eve, the Russian army activated a new fleet of Topol-M missiles that can fit a nuclear warhead and travel 6,000 miles, changing trajectory to foil any enemy interception device.
The accompanying hawkish rhetoric of the Russian military commanders and the frenetic response of the US navy have stoked concern that the former Cold War adversaries have quietly resumed the arms race.
Sometimes the most satisfying instigations are inadvertent. Without meaning to, I seem to have incited the most promising catfight since Krystle and Alexis went after each other's wigs in Dynasty. I recognize "catfight" is a word charged with sexism, and apologize to those it may offend, yet my mission to sow dissension and create camp melodrama takes precedence over searching for a proper synonym. I'm sure the late Clare Booth Luce would concur.
...Most of those who made that switch [from God to Enlightenment] took for granted that the West would retain its hegemony long enough to bring liberty, equality, and fraternity to the rest of the planet. But that hegemony is over. The West has reached its acme; it is as rich and powerful as it is going to get. Even the United States of America can deploy military power only by risking bankruptcy. The American Century has ended, and the Chinese Century has begun. America, while in the saddle, did more good than harm. Nobody knows what China will do—least of all the Chinese.
Yet economic and military decline is not the only problem for the West. It may be frightened into renouncing its ideals even before it loses its influence. Suppose a dirty nuclear bomb, hidden in the bowels of a container ship, were exploded in San Francisco Bay. Could a free press and an independent judiciary survive martial law? Would Germany remain a constitutional democracy if such a bomb went off at the Hamburg docks? The first terrorists to containerize a stolen nuclear warhead may be able to preen themselves on having demolished institutions that took two centuries to build....
But the postwar impetus has faltered, and the attacks of September 11, 2001, have made us realize how unlikely it is that the West will be able to determine the world’s future. It is dawning on non-Western nations that their fates will rest with Beijing rather than with Washington. How long Europeans and Americans have to stroll the gardens depends upon how long keeping them open remains in the interests of Cathay.
The tragedy of the modern West is that it exhausted its strength before being able to achieve its ideals. The spiritual life of secularist Westerners centered on hope for the realization of those ideals. As that hope diminishes, their life becomes smaller and meaner. Hope is restricted to little, private things—and is increasingly being replaced by fear....
Two days after a U.S. judge struck down the teaching of intelligent design theory in a Pennsylvania public school, the journal Science on Thursday proclaimed evolution the breakthrough of 2005.
Wide-ranging research published this year, including a study that showed a mere 4 percent difference between human and chimpanzee DNA, built on Charles Darwin's landmark 1859 work "The Origin of Species" and the idea of natural selection, the journal's editors wrote....
Other breakthroughs in the journal's Top 10 include research in planetary exploration, the molecular biology of flowers, the violent ways of neutron stars, the relationship between genetics and abnormal human behavior, the new field of cosmochemistry, a protein that controls the flow of potassium ions to cells, fresh evidence of global warming, an engineering approach to molecular biology and superconductivity.
Flood watch remains in effect from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon for the Pudding River in Clackamas and Marion counties.
--National Weather Service
Back in the 1980s, when I was living in Johannesburg and reporting on apartheid South Africa, a white neighbor proffered a tasteless confession. She was "quite relieved," she told me, that new media restrictions prohibited our reporting on government repression. No matter that Pretoria was detaining tens of thousands of people without real evidence of wrongdoing. No matter that many of them, including children, were being tortured - sometimes to death. No matter that government hit squads were killing political opponents. No matter that police were shooting into crowds of black civilians protesting against their disenfranchisement. "It's so nice," confided my neighbor, "not to open the papers and read all that bad news."
So, now we know, thanks to Steve Greenhouse's analytical story about the fight over the pension issue, that the entire savings to the MTA--an authority that has a surplus of at least $1 billion--if it got its pension demand (which both sides agree triggereed the strike) would be a whopping $20 million over the next three years. This is a story that needs widespread attention.Also, up next: The London Tube on New Year's Eve.
For those people here and elsewhere who blame the union, please, get a grip. It can' t be more clear now that the M.T.A. forced a strike over a pittance to its coffers--but a 4 percent cut to workers. The union's position was: we are not going to hurt the people who want to work in the future. Lord, here's a union standing up for the principle that it has a responsibility to protect the interests of workers who are not even paying dues to the union!!!
Helmut is the world's finest German stand-up comedianCan Germans be funny? We think only HELMUT is capable of the laughings. You will soon be fortunate enough to hear his views on Europhobia, British Seaside postcard humour and the pointlessness of Wales. Inefficient Service? Shoe Express? Nothing escapes his rapier wit. Dry, deadpan, and most odd, HELMUT is a comic gem. A true original, with a unique take on the world.HELMUT has been storming the London comedy circuit during 2003.... You will enjoy his comedy jokes.
Winter in South Texas: we sat outside, last night, as the temperature dropped rapidly from around 70 to about 45 (it dropped into the 30s as we slept) & roasted eggplants in a chiminea over mesquite embers & drank beer.
"This is the saddest day of my life," Stevens told senators after finally reappearing on the floor for the final debate.
Here's the most chilling line in Posner's column, taking euphemism to a new level: "It is no surprise that gaps in domestic intelligence are being filled by ad hoc initiatives." That's Posner's kinder, gentler way of saying "It is no surprise that current federal laws, which unwisely criminalize this conduct, are being circumvented by the President's authorization to commit felonies."Here's the Posnerian line, the one we're going to see popping up throughout the rightwing: "if you're not a terrorist, you have nothing to fear." And, "hey, it's not like you can't trust us to do a little bit of ad hoc correcting of laws/statutes that we don't like." Basically, that this administration has the private power to rewrite laws it deems "too restrictive" (Posner's terms) in the war on terror, and keep that rewriting from the public, even when "the public" means here "Congress." That, folks, is abuse of power in a constitutional and ostensibly representational democracy.
In addition to 2.8 tons of food, water, books, DVDs and scientific equipment, the ship is also bringing cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and astronaut William McArthur chocolate, two red holiday caps....I have, in fact, asked Mrs. Helmut for one red holiday cap.
No seasonal pieties were mocked during the making of this recording. This is a radical remix of a recording done last year, with quite a few added bits and a lengthened Beethovenaceous ending.
The Republican-controlled Senate passed legislation to cut federal deficits by $39.7 billion on Wednesday by the narrowest of margins, 51-50, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote.
The measure, the product of a year's labors by the White House and the GOP in Congress, imposes the first restraints in nearly a decade in federal benefit programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and student loans.
Soon after Bush spoke of the Iraqi election as “a landmark day in the history of liberty,” early returns representing 90 percent of the ballots cast in the Iraq election established that the clear winners were Shiite and Sunni religious parties not the least bit interested in Western-style democracy or individual freedom — including such extremists as Muqtada al-Sadr, whose fanatical followers have fought pitched battles with U.S. troops.
The silver lining, of course, is that the election did see broad participation, if not particularly clean execution. And because all of the leading parties say they want the United States to leave on a clear and public time line, this should provide adequate cover for a staged but complete withdrawal from a sovereign country that we had no right to invade in the first place.
What we will leave behind, after hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lost lives, will be a long ways from the neoconservative fantasy of creating a compliant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. It is absurd for Bush to assert that the election “means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror,” ignoring how he has “lost” Iraq to the influence and model of “Axis of Evil” Iran. Tehran’s rogue regime, which has bedeviled every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, now looms larger than ever over the region and most definitely over its oil. “Iran wins big in Iraq’s election,” reads an Asia Times headline, speaking a truth that American policy makers and much of the media is bent on ignoring: “The Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), not only held together, but also can be expected to dominate the new 275-member National Assembly for the next four years,” the paper predicts based on the returns to date. “Former premier Ayad Allawi’s prospects of leading the new government seem virtually nil. And Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Accord suffered a shattering defeat.”
White House chef Cristeta Comerford is carefully pouring batter for savory souffles into enormous two-gallon molds. Lots of them.
It's a mid-morning weekday at the start of the holiday season, and Comerford is working alone in one corner of the heavily used, no-frills kitchen. It's a modest, utilitarian space with 12 burners, five sinks and a hanging rack with batteries of pans. She is concentrating on a particularly popular dish at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
White House guests "enjoy Cris's menus . . . made with the freshest ingredients," first lady Laura Bush said in an e-mail message. "Cris even transformed one of our family's favorite holiday recipes, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, into an elegant honeyed sweet potato souffle, which we are sharing with our guests during the White House holiday receptions."
There are lots of those, too: 26 different events for 9,500 people. Comerford's shopping list includes 300 smoked turkeys, 3,400 racks of lamb and 2,100 pounds of sweet potatoes.
At this time of year, it is all in a day's work. "Today doesn't seem too hectic," Comerford says. "There are only two receptions for 500 people."
But all together, that's 1,000 people at back-to-back events with only an hour or so between them.
And that's not counting the daily breakfasts, lunches and dinners. One day later, she will make dinner for 134 Bush friends and family members. "It will be busy," she says calmly. "The house is full."
The concept of “free trade” arose as a moral
principle even before it became a pillar of
economics. If you can make something that others
value, you should be able to sell it to them. If
others make something that you value, you should
be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom
for a person—or a nation—to make a living.
...The War on Christmas is a little like Santa Claus, in that it (a) comes to us from the sky, beamed down by the satellites of cable news, and (b) does not, in the boringly empirical sense, exist. What does exist is the idea of the War on Christmas, which, though forever new, is a venerable tradition, older even than strip malls and plastic mistletoe. Christmas itself, in something like its recognizably modern form, with gifts and cards and elves, dates from the early nineteenth century. The War on Christmas seems to have come along around a hundred years later, with the publication of “The International Jew,” by Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, whom fate later punished by arranging to have his fortune diverted to the sappy, do-gooder Ford Foundation. “It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they”—the Jews—“preach and practice,” he wrote. “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and certain patriotic songs shows that.” Ford’s anti-Semitism has not aged well, thanks to the later excesses of its European adherents, but by drawing a connection between Christmasbashing and patriotism-scorning he pointed the way for future Christmas warriors....UPDATE: really, the last word:
(In 1921, Henry Ford attacked from the opposite flank, sneering that “the strange inconsistency of it all is to see the great department stores of the Levys and the Isaacs and the Goldsteins and the Silvermans filled with brilliant Christmas cheer.”)....
...A Jew married to an Irish Catholic, [Irving] Berlin raised his three daughters as nominal Protestants. Who better to write a non-Christian Christmas song? (Berlin's may have been an extreme case, but in the middle of the 20th century, Jewish assimilationism was so pervasive that it gave rise to the following crack: What's the difference between Reform Jews and Unitarians? Unitarians don't have Christmas trees.)"White Christmas" was one of a dozen numbers that Berlin wrote for "Holiday Inn," each song commemorating a specific holiday. One hesitates to impute anything so vulgar as a message to a Crosby-Fred Astaire musical, but the message of this musical is that we are all Americans and these are our holidays. Easter belongs to all of us, even if it is about little more than strolling down Fifth Avenue. Christmas belongs to all of us. The religious content of those holidays was fine for Christian believers, but the composer of "God Bless America" preferred to celebrate a common national identity, complete with common holidays that had nonsectarian meanings.
Berlin kept Christmas in the public square and, more than anyone before or since, sent it out over the public airwaves. But it was an American, not a Christian, Christmas. And by the crass index of number of recordings sold, and the not-so-crass index of number of spirits touched, Berlin's nonsectarian holiday has been the predominant version of Christmas in this country for the past 60 years.
Now the Fox News demagogues want to impose a more sectarian Christmas on us, supplanting the distinctly American holiday we have celebrated lo these threescore years with a holiday that divides us along religious lines. Bill O'Reilly can blaspheme all he wants, but like millions of my countrymen, I take attacks on Irving Berlin's America personally. If O'Reilly doesn't like it here, why doesn't he go back to where he came from?
"None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee.
Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you. [emphasis added]
All of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.
"It's drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fucking circumstances turn this massive apparatus on an American citizen," one source says. "You do a lot of weird shit. But at least you don't fuck with your own people."
The intensification of mechanisms for the production and distribution of evils and their global interweaving are also responsible for this: they have created new forms of care for the other, new truth games within which the distress of others, individuals, and masses lies in the balance, as well as new subject positions vis-à-vis this distress.... Parties with a moral interest use political and economic interests as others use the discourse and tools at their disposal. The innovation here is the degree of autonomy, of relative differentiation of the fields of discourse and action whose interest is distinctly moral, as well as the global scope of action.
Although not much of a surge, frankly, given that most Americans still think he's a clod.
President Bush's approval rating has surged in recent weeks, reversing what had been an extended period of decline, with Americans now expressing renewed optimism about the future of democracy in Iraq, the campaign against terrorism and the U.S. economy, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News Poll.Bush's overall approval rating rose to 47 percent, up from 39 percent in early November, with 52 percent saying they disapprove of how he is handling his job. His approval rating on Iraq jumped 10 percentage points since early November to 46 percent, while his rating on the economy rose 11 percentage points to 47 percent. A clear majority, 56 percent, said they approve of the way Bush is handling the fight against terrorism -- a traditional strong point in his reputation that nonetheless had flagged to 48 percent in the November poll.
RBC, 19.12.2005, Moscow 19:03:32.The UN General Assembly has adopted an anti-Nazi resolution, initiated by Russia. Some 114 countries supported the document, with 4 states against and 57 abstentions. The resolution expresses a serious concern about the growing activity of extremist, racist and xenophobic organizations in the world. The Russian Foreign Ministry is concerned that some countries (i.e. the US and Japan) voted against the document, while many countries (all EU members) abstained. States such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia abstained as well, although these nations suffered a lot during World War II, the ministry's information and press department claimed.I cannot find anything about this, however, from the UN News Service.
Here's a bit from the ABC News article:We can no longer pretend otherwise: our leaders are war criminals who have blatantly violated the Geneva Convention time and time again.
This warrants a full Congressional investigation leading directly to impeachment and removal from office.
No other response is even close to honorable or Constitutional.
"We're not talking about torture in the abstract, but the real thing," said John Sifton, terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch. "U.S. personnel and officials may be criminally liable, and a special prosecutor is needed to investigate."Criminals and thugs, folks. We're living in bad times, and the longer we go along as happy motoring nation, as Kunstler puts it, the longer we are simply complicit in these crimes committed by our government supposedly in our name. It's not only a matter of criminality, unconstitutionality, immorality, it's also a matter of complicity.The report said Benyam Mohammad, an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee who grew up in Britain, claimed he was held at the facility in 2004.
"It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time," he was quoted as telling his lawyer. "They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days."
Mohammad went on to say that he was forced to listen to Eminem and Dr. Dre for 20 days before the music was replaced by "horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds."
"The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night," he was quoted as saying. "Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."
The paradoxical thing about all this is that if the President is willing to tell America that we should grow up and get serious about national security, then why doesn't Mr. Bush tell America the cold, hard, grownup truth that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis that will force us to live differently? Or tell America the truth that we are occupying Iraq in order to maintain a foothold in the region where two-thirds of the world's remaining oil is? And that the basic equation is that our current way of life depends utterly on continued access to this oil -- so either change that way of life or get used to the necessity of maintaining a garrison in the Middle East.
If Mr. Bush was consistent with these messages, the public might actually gain a sense of purpose -- that is, of devoting our patriotic spirit to prepare for the great changes we face, instead of just pretending that the funburger fiesta-on-wheels can continue indefinitely?
House lawmakers opened the way for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as one of their last acts of an all-night session Monday bringing their legislative year to a close.The ANWR provision was attached to a major defense bill, forcing many opponents of oil and gas exploration in the barren northern Alaska range to vote for it. The bill, passed 308-106, also included money for hurricane relief and bird flu preventive measures.
The vote came at 5 a.m. as bleary-eyed legislators struggled to wrap up their work for the year. Democratic anger over the process was put aside briefly as lawmakers greeted Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who returned to vote after suffering a heart attack Thursday.
...As you know, one of the greatest threats America faces is the deterioration of our commitment to traditional family values. It's every bit as great a threat to our national security as the distribution of Mao's Little Red Book to college students. We need to oppose it with every means at our disposal.
My neighborhood is currently under assault by those who are trying to undermine our nation by attacking our traditional family values. I hope we can use your new extra-legal power to provide us with cover as we do what must be done to defend our community.
You see, Mr Garcia, the neighbor across the street, often stands in front of his large picture window wearing nothing but a pair of extremely tight bicycling shorts. Nothing is left to the imagination. His unnaturally large manly bulge of glory draws every eye in the neighborhood, tempting its beholders with demonic invitations to engage in acts of unspeakable depravity.
We've tried everything we can think of to put an end to it. Even my wife, Ofjoshua, spends much of her day over there unsuccessfully trying to convince Mr. Garcia to end this practice. Nothing's worked.
It's time to take it up a level by beating Mr. Garcia and burning down his house. I'm hoping that we can get your support to do so. Inasmuch as you are not bound by any constitutional or legal restraints, you could grant us the authority to commit this assault and arson on your behalf in the name of national security.
Heterosexually yours,
Gen. JC Christian, patriot
I told myself I would just ignore this whole "War on Christmas" thing. It seemed like just another fabricated cultural war dreamt up in Punditville by Bill O'Reilly to boost ratings and sell O'Reilly Christmas ornaments. But now the stupidity has crossed over from Pundtiville to the U.S. House of Representatives. Claiming Christmas is under attack in America, Virginia Rep. Jo Ann Davis has submitted a resolution in the House "expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected."
The Union was strong, the economy was strong. Slavery had been eliminated. Even though some of the senior citizens were freezing to death, they had plenty of drugs. Brainman had seen to that. Sure, some of the senior citizens were confused, but senior citizens are always confused, and that's what the infomercials were for.
Peasant leader Evo Morales, who has harshly criticized U.S. policies in Latin America, won a major victory Sunday in the race for this fractured country's presidency, adding to a rising wave of leftist governments in the region.
According to a survey of 1,250 polling places conducted by a group of Bolivian media, Morales had won 51 percent of the vote, with former President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga coming in second with 30 percent. Businessman Samuel Doria Medina won 8 percent of the vote.
In American proconsul Paul Bremer's 2003 master plan, last week's election was meant to be the culminating act in entrenching democratic rule in Iraq. Instead it marks the nadir of the American enterprise there. The brutal failure of that enterprise, and of the similarly unlawful tactics employed in the war on terror, has boosted terrorist ranks worldwide, dealt grievous blows to the notion that human rights and the rule of law are essential elements in building democracy, and brought the US's standing to its lowest point in generations.
But the real victim of the war is Iraq. Despite the exercise of awesome US power and the expenditure of billions of dollars, the security situation grows worse by the month. Iraq remains the most violent country in the world, with a leadership that dare not set foot among its people. But President Bush is not prepared to countenance any compromise in his original war goals. Despite recent talk of pulling down troop levels, he finally declared that "we will settle for nothing less than victory".The carnage in Iraq is not primarily caused by the insurgents. It is the death squads run by the Shia and Kurdish militias - according to former US diplomat James Dobbins, who is now with the Rand Corporation - who bring about a greater threat of civil war. Indeed the former US-appointed Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi has accused Jalal Talabani's regime of committing human-rights abuses against Sunnis that are as egregious as those under Saddam Hussein.
...the meeting in Santa Marta, 465 miles north of Bogota, was upbeat, at times even playful.Chavez, a close ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro, called Uribe "my brother." Uribe said when asked about their differences that "a higher truth" emerges whenever they debate.
"That's a Marxist point of view," Chavez joked, drawing laughter from an audience of government officials with a reference to the Marxist tenet that change takes place through a struggle of opposites.
Uribe, who like Chavez enjoys strong popular support ahead of 2006 elections, replied wryly that many of his university classmates were Marxists and he studied their slogans well because he was a leading opponent of their ideology.
The meeting came a day after a rare confrontation between the U.S. and Uribe, who has sought a free-trade deal with Washington while taking a hard-line approach against leftist rebels.
Uribe sharply criticized U.S. Ambassador William Wood for "meddling" after Wood urged Colombia to better prevent right-wing paramilitary groups from tainting next year's elections through corruption.
When a reporter asked Uribe if he was distancing himself from Washington, Chavez smiled widely and turned to the Colombian leader — also interested in what he would say.
"This is not the moment nor the place to talk about the issue," Uribe replied.
SCIENTISTS have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.
Former Venezuelan soldiers plotted against President Hugo Chavez's Government at a Colombian military intelligence building, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe says. Mr Uribe made the statement after a meeting with Mr Chavez and analysing documents furnished by the Venezuelan leader. "The Venezuelan soldiers who are in Bogota [Colombia's capital] went to a building to meet with members of the Colombian military. President Chavez gave us these documents ... we analysed them and this morning I said to President Chavez: 'I must tell you the truth: this is a building of Colombia's public forces'," he said. Mr Uribe says intelligence efforts against the Venezuelan Government are conducted in the building, and assumed responsibility for the affair. "I assumed responsibility before President Chavez and I assume it in public, because the Government of Colombia, which suffers from terrorism, cannot permit anyone to plot conspiracies, especially against a brother country," he said.
One day a young monk came before Bush and said to him, "There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no threat from Saddam. Why then is there a war?"
Bush replied, "True, there was no threat to justify the war. But still there was a threat, and the war is justified."
Apart from being ethically and legally repugnant, these revelations are also disastrous for America’s moral standing in the world. For the US, as for other democracies confronted with the threat of terrorism, the question of torture has become a crucial political dilemma. In the course of a debate with Vice-President Dick Cheney, who took a hard line on the subject, the Republican senator John McCain said that there are some punishments that a democratic government must never inflict on a human being and that the strength of democracy lies in its ability to forgo the use of certain kinds of force, the first being torture.
Perhaps Bush feels safe to talk about civilian deaths because the United States is no longer responsible for the majority of them. In the first six weeks of the invasion, according to calculations by Iraq Body Count, US-led forces were responsible for 94 percent of the 7,299 civilian deaths. Today, as the invasion/occupation remains riddled with suicide bombings, flickers of a civil war and general lawlessness, the percentage of civilians killed by the US forces has receded to 32 percent.
Perhaps Bush felt that the passing of time erased the fact that the US killings -- under his false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction -- remain the most intense of the war. US forces killed an average of 315 Iraqi civilians a day, nine times more than the worst month of anti-occupation and criminal violence during the next 23 months, according to Iraq Body Count.
Whatever Bush felt, he still shows no emotion for the men, women, and children who will never enjoy his liberation. He stated the 30,000 figure and went on to the next question. He claims to take responsibility for going to war on bad intelligence, then turns around and says in Philadelphia, ''Knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again."
That illustrates just how far Iraq has removed Bush from his own humanity. Without evidence of weapons, he would still order a war that kills thousands of innocent people. Bush now admits knowing the scorecard. But it still remains only a game.
It is not surprising that an authoritarian regime would build powerful databases and snooping equipment and Internet-censoring devices to punish dissent and limit information. But China's system is impressive for the sophistication of its technology, the precision of its reach, and the speed of its creation. More startling, the software and hardware for Golden Shield, Policenet, the Great Firewall, and other tools of this chillingly effective network were largely made in America.
THE UNITED STATES THRIVES ON A SYSTEM OF MARKET FREEDOM that encourages American companies to sell their legal products generally wherever and to whomever they choose. In China, few companies take advantage of market freedom more profitably than Cisco Systems of San Jose, Calif., one of the world's most successful Internet companies, with revenues of $25 billion in 2005. Cisco makes Policenet, as well as the watchdog router that prevents Internet users in China from gaining access to banned websites. Although the company does not specify its sales figures for China, the Chinese telecommunications research firm ChinaNex estimates that Cisco earns $500 million a year in revenues there and holds 60 percent of the Chinese market for routers, switches, and other sophisticated networking gear. The company anticipates that China will soon become its third largest market, just behind the U.S. and Japan.
Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez, is widely expected to spend more on his government's social programmes, both at home and abroad.
The opportunity comes following his party's landslide victory in parliamentary elections on December 4th, after opposition parties boycotted the elections and withdrew their candidates.
Just consider the government's recently proposed 2006 budget, where a colossal 41% of total expenditure, or $16.6bn (£9.4bn), earmarked for social programmes, is now bound to sail through parliament unopposed.
Both Anna Lucia d'Emilio, the director of the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) in Venezuela, and Ramon Mayorga, the representative of the Inter American Development Bank (IADB), all agree that the country's social programmes are easily the biggest and most comprehensive in Latin America.
The target of the huge spending is Venezuela's huge poverty problem, afflicting more than half the population, and the profound social and economic inequalities which cause it....
More people are going to elect this time around- not because Iraqis suddenly believe in American-imposed democracy under occupation, but because the situation this last year has been intolerable. Hakim and Ja’affari and their minions have managed to botch things up so badly, Allawi is actually looking acceptable in the eyes of many. I still can't stand him.
Allawi is still an American puppet. His campaign posters, and the horrors of the last year, haven’t changed that. People haven’t forgotten his culpability in the whole Fallujah debacle. For some Iraqis, however, he’s preferable to Hakim and Ja’affari after a year of detentions, abductions, assassinations and secret torture prisons.
There’s a saying in Iraq which people are using right and left lately, and that I've used before in the blog, “Ili ishuf il mout, yirdha bil iskhuna.” He who sees death, is content with a fever. Allawi et al. seem to be the fever these days…
