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.
You can't die for the life of you.
“Sympathy for the Almighty,” The Kleptones; “Baltimore,” Lyle Lovett; “Hunter’s Kiss,” Rasputina; “Let Me Love You Up,” Sophie B. Hawkins; “Segue in C,” Duke Ellington & Count Basie; “Alech Taadi,” Khaled; “The Prince,” Madness; “Too Hot to Hold,” Big Ella; “Pickapart,” John Butler Trio; “Right Out in the Street,” Steve Espinola.
It’s not just the size of a walnut.
So I’m browsing the latest New York Review of Books and the ad for Manliness can’t help but catch my eye. “Why do men need to feel important? It’s their manliness. But is manliness obsolete? Is it even a virtue?” —How disappointing to discover the author’s rather limited notion of manliness, when the questions are so patently leading. It is, I suppose, cute enough to picture him patiently reinventing a crude wheel, all the while imagining he’s taking the discourse to grounds that aren’t already worn thin by the traffic. Strength is for the weak, Professor, and would you please stop sullying my family’s good name?
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.
Before I forget again.
September, 2006
(Is it just me, or is the touch of grey in the Scott icon a little disconcerting?)
Going to Pine Ridge
“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.” —She being President Cecilia Fire Thunder of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. (Thanks, 
ginmar.)
Terrence Malick has released two films in the time since you released your last one.
Metropolitan has gotten the Criterion treatment, so Josh Horowitz asks Whit Stillman what he’s been up to. Lately. (Thanks, Anita.)
Feeding Dicebox.
Ordinarily, it updates every Wednesday, but the schedule’s been a little erratic lately, what with the freelance work and all. (I never did get around to saying anything about the zombies that couldn’t be zombies, did I. They went with the swamp instead. Some other time.) —Anyway: wouldn’t it be great if you had a program or a website that checked your favorite blogs and webcomics and suchlike for you, and let you know when they updated?
The Spouse has set up a couple of RSS feeds for Dicebox: this one will send a link to the latest page whenever it updates; this one feeds the update itself straight to you. Fire up the feedreaders and hit that add button.
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—)
I do think there is a tendency on the part of some on the left to criticize conservative politicians on the basis of their religious views.
“Church,” Lyle Lovett; “Orleans Parish Prison,” Johnny Cash; “Angel,” Massive Attack; “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps,” Doris Day; “The Choring Song,” Jeannie Robertson; “Good Tradition,” Tanita Tikaram; “Sugartooth,” Arms; “Minion,” Toenut; “I Tried to Believe,” Robin Holcomb; “S’on me regard; Prennés i garde; Hé, mi enfant,” Anonymous 4.
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.
My, what a week it’s been.
“Can’t Stop Killing You,” Kirsty MacColl; “Miss Otis Regrets,” Ella Fitzgerald; “True Individuals,” Arms; “My Mother was a Chinese Trapeze Artist,” the Decemberists; “Everything I’m Not,” The Veronicas; “Exchange,” Massive Attack; “So Straight and Slow,” Robin Holcomb; “Spirit,” the Waterboys; “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” Paul Simon; “Cornflower Blue,” Lara Michell.
It figures that my current favorite song in all the world—
—would also have my current favorite video:
Jens Lekman; “You are the Light (By Which I Travel Into This and That).” (MP3 available here.) (Yes, this would at one point have been a deltiolographic post. I’m working on it.)
