Emir el Bahr.
The Week—Felix Dennis’ Readers’ Digest for polijunkies—had their 3rd Annual Opinion Awards ceremony last night. One of the awards they give is “Blogger of the Year”; Joshua Micah Marshall won the first one ever given out, Powerline got it last year, and last night, Ed Morrissey was so honored. “Who?” I said to myself. [Google.] Oh. Okay. Maybe I need to get out more? —Meanwhile, the Koufax winners have been announced, and Felix Dennis is selling Dennis Publishing, purveyors of Blender, Stuff, Maxim, and The Week. Chin-chin.
Still a tool after all these years.
Andrew Sullivan cranks up the conveyor belt to help mainstream the dangerously stupid and disastrously reductive bullshit attacks on ecologist Eric Pianka. Roy tells you why it’s stupid and reductive, and PZ tells you why it’s dangerous and disastrous, and the Panda’s Thumb has some links to what really went down. Death threats and creationist anti-intellectualism, ahoy!
Aphorism.
When New Yorkers say “Fuck you,” they mean “Hello,” and when Angelenos say “Hello,” they mean “Fuck you.” —When the right wing says “Fuck you,” they mean “I want to take an axe handle and beat you to death, you traitorous cunt, and hang your faggot body from a tree branch for all the world to see.”
Stupidity is a process, not a state.
Pam Spaulding patiently explains how hair works to a baldly racist smashmouth prick.
I mean, I knew somebody’s daughter went to see her father and he killed her.
According to statistics obtained from the World Bank, about 113 million total number of women are missing as a result of female infanticide (female fœtuses being aborted or newborn girls being killed) and neglect of young girls, which has led to a severe gap in the demographic composition of the population of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and Turkey.
—Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, “Making the World a More Secure Place: Combating Violence Against Women”
Just to put it in a little perspective, that’s about the number of women and girls in the US.
—zuzu
This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Women and ‘gendercide’”
I’m not intimidated by the threats and the attempts to make me shut my mouth, because living in a rich western European country like this one, I have protection that I otherwise would not have in Somalia or in Africa or in any other Islamic country.
—“Moving stories: Ayaan Hirsi Ali”
In our remaining minutes, I learned that Bill doesn’t believe that women don’t always have a choice about whether or not to have protected sex. He swore that I was the first woman ever to tell him that sometimes contraception fails. And he doesn’t believe that women who do choose to abort take that decision very seriously and aren’t happy about it. He claims that 99% of the 800+ abortions that were performed in South Dakota last year were “abortions of convenience”—whatever the heck that means.
—Nancy Goldstein, “My dinner with Napoli”
I returned to the office. Mayor Blount was sitting down, looking very tired. He had cleaned himself off. He said, “I did it for you. Do you understand?”
He seemed like my father, I can’t say it better than that. I realized he was under a terrible strain, he had taken a lot on himself for me. He went on to explain how Dr. Fay was very dangerous, she was what they call a cripto-female (crypto?), the most dangerous kind. He had exposed her and purified the situation. He was very straightforward, I didn’t feel confused at all, I knew he had done what was right.
We discussed the book, how man must purify himself and show God a clean world. He said some people raise the question of how can man reproduce without women but such people miss the point. The point is that as long as man depends on the old filthy animal way God won’t help him. When man gets rid of his animal part which is woman, this is the signal God is awaiting. Then God will reveal the new true clean way, maybe angels will come bringing new souls, or maybe we will live forever, but it is not our place to speculate, only to obey. He said some men here had seen an Angel of the Lord. This was very deep, it seemed like it echoed inside me, I felt it was inspiration.
Then the medical party drove up and I told Dr. Premack that Dr. Fay had been taken care of and sent away, and I got in the car to drive them out of the Liberated Zone. However four of the six soldiers from the roadblock refused to leave. Capt. Parr tried to argue them out of it but finally agreed they could stay to guard the oil-drum barrier.
I would have liked to stay too the place was so peaceful but they needed me to drive the car. If I had known there would be all this hassle I never would have done them the favor. I am not crazy and I have not done anything wrong and my lawyer will get me out. That is all I have to say.
—Racoona Sheldon, “The Screwfly Solution”
Yup. Still trying, Ringo.
“I will no longer link to any writer who does not disclose his identity and affiliations in an obvious place or manner, or reply to online commenters who decline to disclose their names.”
Stupid fucking bigots.
Remember when they told us the ban on “a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effect of marriage” in Ohio’s anti–same-sex marriage amendment wouldn’t affect domestic violence protections for unmarried couples? —Turns out they’re as good at crafting amendments as they are at balancing budgets, or running wars. (Or spotting satire. Or plucking beams from their eyes. Or getting ahead without cannibalizing their own. Or anything at all but dazzling a handful of pundits at Beltway cocktail parties. Well, that, and bleeding us all dry.)
Quis custodiet ipsos immane?
During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the US Constitution or international conventions, adding he was “astounded” at the “hypocritical” reaction in Europe to Gitmo. “War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts,” he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. “Give me a break.” Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don’t have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: “If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.”
—Newsweek, “Should Scalia Recuse Himself from the Gitmo Case?”
There are now about 490 prisoners at Gitmo, and “55 percent of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or coalition allies.
“Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as Al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
“Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. [A total of] 86 percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were turned over to the United States at a time at which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.”
—Nat Hentoff, “Gitmo: The Worst of the Worst?”
Cheney shuns Electoral College requirement
In written statement, he says results may impede performance of the executive’s constitutional duties
Mon Dec 15, 2008
When Vice President Cheney received the tallies of electoral votes from the fifty states and the District of Columbia, he issued a statement saying that he did not feel bound by requirements that he inform Congress as to the results of the election.
Cheney indicated that he felt he could withold the information if he decided that disclosure would “impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.”
Cheney wrote, citing President Bush: “The executive branch shall construe the provisions… that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch… in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withold information…”
The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which the Bush administration has cited its constitutional authority to bypass a law.
After The New York Times disclosed in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans’ international phone calls and emails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.
And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.
Past presidents occasionally used such signing statements to describe their interpretations of laws, but Bush has expanded the practice. He has also been more assertive in claiming the authority to override provisions he thinks intrude on his power, legal scholars said.
Bush’s expansive claims of the power to bypass laws have provoked increased grumbling in Congress. Members of both parties have pointed out that the Constitution gives the majority the right to select the electors who choose the president, and the executive branch the duty to abide by that choice.
“Can you imagine the turmoil if the electoral college upholds the results of the popular vote?” said Cheney at the reception ceremony, referring to the November election which saw unprecedented landslide victories for Democrats at state and national levels.
“Some Democrats in Congress have decided this president is the enemy and the work he’s done keeping this nation safe and secure is grounds for removing him from office,” Cheney said. “The American people have already made their decision. They agree with the president.”
When asked if the electoral college votes would ever be tallied, Cheney was quick to add: “I never said never. This is a long war we’re facing. National security has to be taken into account. We’re examining every option. Nothing’s off the table.”
He went on to say, regarding the Democrats: “If they are competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol.”
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee agreed with the vice president, saying: “It’s true. Cheney can’t sing a note.”
This newspaper did not respond to repeated Democratic requests for a chance to comment on this story.
Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Domenech?
He certainly is. Oh, dear Lord, is he ever.
The Domenech post linked above has been removed from the Red America queue and archives, though the individual article link still works; in case that, too, goes dark, posterity might ask I point you hereabouts. I rather doubt it has anything to do with the post as it is and far more to do with the perfect storm battering the Post; some are already speculating it was the last missive from this particular iteration of Red America. If so, it’s rather like nailing Capone for tax evasion, or more to the point, like fighting a symptom and not the disease. Still, if you’re smiling into your coffee as you read this, take a moment to dwell on us and them and remember: arrogant racist homophobic incompetent crony apparatchiks are people too.
Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had he from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About his neck was hung.
So I’m reading the Wege (check out his anti-Paddy’s set—and why would you be up in arms against the good saint? Well, he needs to get back down here and finish the job), and he points me to this Tom Tomorrow post, which in turn directs me to among other classics this shining piece of punditry courtesy the Ole Perfesser, from back in April of 2003.
You remember: VI Day. Don’t you?
Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen’s cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn’t rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a “quagmire” were wrong—again!—how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong—again!—how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error—again—and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about “civilian casualties” now seem almost disappointed that there weren’t more—again—and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American “liberators” were proven wrong—again—as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn’t stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It’s probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.
Nah.
I have a dream. And in that dream there is a memorial, somewhere on the idyllic campus of the University of Tennessee. The particulars do not matter much: a small pedestal, a little fountain in a quiet corner somewhere, an eternal flame by someone else’s memorial bench, even a mere cornerstone. So long as there is enough room for a simple plaque: and on that plaque, the above words are carved. Over it, perhaps, a title:
LOOK ON HIS WORKS YE RAVAGED AND DESPAIR
(Of course I went back and looked at where I was in April of 2003, when the Zipless Cakewalk tumbled Saddam’s statue and flowers hung just for a moment in the air, and it turns out I was maybe too worried about libraries and vases and not enough about the people, and all I can say was the libraries and the vases were as much as I could grasp from there and then of the enormity of what we’d done; the staggering awfulness of how far wrong we’d gone, and every day since then the news as filtered and stunted and slanted as it’s been has driven the enormity and the awfulness home, again and again and again and again and AGAIN—)
The net treats censorship as yadda yadda badda-bing.
I was wondering why I was suddenly inundated with searches for “without a trace teen orgy.” —Out of curiosity, you think the American Family Association will also be fined? After all, they’re still hosting a clip of said “teen orgy,” shorn of any mitigating narrative context, and they used it rather prominently in a lurid fund-raising appeal...
“Quite frankly, sir, the sooner the better.”
Y’know, I’d forgotten about this.
Thou shalt put evil away from among you.
Ken Blackwell, the theocratic candidate for governor in Ohio, auditioned before the innocuously named Council for National Policy. Bad news for Ohio. Then, it was Bush’s audition before the Council on National Policy that got us all where we are today, and we can’t walk for tripping over the fruit that has fallen from that particular tree. Jesus + Nothing 4evah.
Let’s you and him fight.
Okay, see, there were these two students? And they were terribly jealous of each other. (Does it matter why?) Their master was old and infirm and had not one bum leg, but two. Withered, pale, stick-like things. Poor circulation. Feet like two blocks of ice in the morning. And each student was given charge of a leg, to rub and pinch and powder and clean, and every day they’d set to it, glaring all the while at each other over their teacher’s lap.
And it came to pass that one day one of the students had to get up and leave during the who leg-rubbing foot-massaging bit. Maybe to get a glass of water, maybe to take a leak, maybe they were out of talcum powder. And while that first student was gone, the second student took up a rock and bashed away at the opposite leg, the one the first student had charge of. Just beat it until it snapped in three or four places. Shattered.
When the first student came back and saw what had been done, what do you think? That first student picked up a stick and laid into the opposite leg, the one the second student had charge of. Blood flew. Bone splintered.
Our moral? Beats me. Something about the Mahayana and the Hinayana. You figure it out, let me know. My question: why the fuck didn’t the teacher get all Pai Mei on that second student’s ass the minute he picked up the rock? There was a perfectly serviceable sword sitting right there.
Okay, see, there was this snake? And one day, this snake’s tail speaks up (for back then, the tails of snakes could speak), and the snake’s tail says, you know what? I’m sick of this shit. (It’s speaking to the snake’s head.) You get to go first in everything you know? You just lead and lead and lead and drag me around through the dust and I’m sick of it. We’re gonna try things my way for a bit. And the head’s all, like, what? Is there an echo in here? Somebody say something? And the head just keeps on keepin’ on.
Anyway, the tail of the snake is so pissed it does the only thing it can do, which is coil itself about an opportune tree. And the head pulls and pulls, and the tail holds on and holds on, and there’s a lot of hissed swears leaking back and forth until finally, exhausted, the tail lets go, and, exhausted, the head can’t keep the snake from rolling into a firepit and burning to death.
Our moral? It’s a toughie: that opportune tree is none other than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the tug-of-war shook loose a fateful apple. I don’t have to tell you what happened next. —Aren’t we much better off these days, when nobody talks out their ass anymore?
Okay, see, there’s these two flesh-eating demons, right? Or maybe they were superheroes. Anyway, they’re fighting tooth and bloody nail over a chest and a stick and a ratty-ass pair of sandals. Just that: these epic killer combos unleashed over a wooden box you maybe saw on a shelf in Target in the World Beat Home Furnishings aisle, and a stick that, okay, might make for a nice walking stick if you ever went on walks anymore, and a couple of sandals too far gone to even make it as dumpster chic. Somebody’s already walked too many miles in them. But these two demons don’t show any signs of letting up. Biff! Pow! Blammo!
Until this guy walks up and he somehow manages to get their attention and he yells whoa, whoa, and they manage to stop, glaring at each other, taking these big deep panting breaths, wiping the sweat off. And the guy, he’s just this guy, not a demon or a superhero, he says, wow, I mean, this is incredible, but why are you fighting over this junk?
And the first demon says, that trunk isn’t junk; it contains everything you might ever possibly need in this world. Put in your hand and pull out gold, books, food, a house, beautiful paramours, the ear of the king. And the second demon says, the stick isn’t junk. You hold that in your hands, all your enemies are subdued. And he’s glaring at the first demon. Who says, those sandals? And the second demon says, yeah, those sandals. Look like crap. But, says the first demon, you put them on, and you can fly.
Okay, says the guy. I see. But still. You’re both such amazing fighters. It would be a damn shame to see you kill each other over this stuff. Just back up a minute, let me get in there, and I’ll split it up for you. Okay?
So the demons, reluctantly, backed away, and the guy leaped in and picked up the stick and shook it at them both, then scooped up the trunk and kicked into first one and then the other sandal, and he swooped up into the air. And he laughed and laughed and said, see? Now you no longer have any reason to fight!
Our moral? Demons can fly, too. So can superheroes. The guy was so scared when he saw them coming that he dropped the stick, and they totally smeared him into steak tartare and spread him on a loaf of bread they pulled out of the trunk.
Okay, there’s these two guys, see? And they walk into a bar. And the first one turns to the second and says, my dick is so big—
