"the senator reminded her of Robert F. Kennedy"

Ryan Lizza in the New Republic:

Edwards spent the first half of the year largely focused on raising money, and he now barely tops Carol Moseley Braun in most polls. But, for months, his advisers have cautioned that it is all part of the plan. "We've been operating under this quaint theory that the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary take place in January, and we've calibrated our strategy accordingly," says David Axelrod, one of Edwards's top advisers. The town-hall-style meeting in Nashua is just one in a long series of late summer stops in Iowa and New Hampshire to finally introduce the senator to the voters. But, while this tour has long been anticipated, what wasn't foreseen was the metamorphosis that has accompanied it. Whereas the old Edwards often replied to queries with Southern-accented platitudes, the new Edwards spews statistics and answers voters' questions with a sometimes overwhelming arsenal of specific proposals. Indeed, while the media have focused on the improbable success of Howard Dean, over the last few months Edwards has developed perhaps the most detailed and coherent domestic agenda of any of the Democratic candidates.

[...]

For what it's worth, at five events I attended in New Hampshire over two days, voters seemed impressed. In Nashua, the first voter to speak after Edwards delivered his stump speech began by declaring, "I'm convinced you're the only candidate who can beat Bush." A swooning Elizabeth Pelletier, an older woman from Nashua, told me she came to the meeting undecided but was now won over because the senator reminded her of Robert F. Kennedy. Yet another woman approached the senator after the meeting broke up and told him, "I brought my six children here to show them how awful politicians are, but I'm leaving impressed." She asked for a picture with all her kids and the senator. I thought for sure the last person to ask a question that day was a campaign plant. Robert Vaughn rose and explained that he can't afford to send his kids to college, that he hates paying the tax burden for the wealthy, and that he's sick of pols owned by lobbyists--three of Edwards's top issues. After the speech, he walked up to the senator, gave him a sturdy handshake, and looked him in the eyes. "I'm voting for you," he said. He was even choking up a little bit, as if he was about to cry.

Underestimate John Edwards at your own risk. As Kerry and Dean swing at each other's chins, he's preparing to unleash his multi-state advertising blitz. His numbers will move, and the man knows how to turn a jury. I don't know if he can get the nomination, but he still seems to me like the guy most likely to pick off Bush.

The jokes write themselves.

From The Guardian: "The Green party's spokesman on drugs has been jailed for six weeks for cultivating cannabis, it was announced today."

Not quite what I expected.

http://www.eatyourmeat.org/

How alarming.

Plucky Rubber Duckies

Quack.

They have bobbed through storms that would have wrecked larger vessels, to drift deliberately down the Bering Strait. They have patiently borne a four-year spell trapped in Arctic ice packs, to float freely into the Atlantic.

And now, buoyed perhaps by the prospect of an end to their pelagic paddling, a flotilla of yellow bathtub rubber ducks, lost at sea when they fell off a container ship in the North Pacific in 1992, is about to wash up on Europe's western shores, according to an oceanographer who has been tracking them for years.

That's the hook. The article gets even more interesting from there.

Does Not Logically Follow

VOA News: U.S. Issues New Suicide Hijacking Warning (July 29, 2003)

ABC News: U.S. Aims to Reduce Air Marshalls (July 30, 2003)

I don't get it.

UPDATE (5:06 pm): Apparently, somebody else didn't get it either. MSNBC: Flip-flop on air marshal schedules

In an apparent reversal of policy, the Transportation Security Administration will immediately begin scheduling air marshals back on cross-country and international flights, MSNBC.com has learned. The move comes less than 24 hours after MSNBC.com reported that air marshals were being pulled from those flights because of budget problems associated with the costs of overnight lodging for the marshals.

So in response to the worst terrorist attack in US history, we're okay with spending $4 billion a month to occupy a country that had no connection to 9/11, but we're going to get all chintzy on hotel costs for airplane cops? Priorities, people, priorities. I wonder who noticed the looming PR disaster first?

"I'm not really an air marshal, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express."

Loched and Unloaded

After an exhaustive search of Loch Ness using 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation technology, the BBC has announced the murky Scottish waters definitively free of any trace of Iraqi WMD. No, wait, I mean free of any trace of a large living animal, to the great disappointment of cryptozoologists the world over.

American intelligence documents on the matter remain classified, but administration sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suspect that the Scots may have transferred Nessie to Syria just before the start of the search.

No comment

Killer D's Redux

They're at it again in Texas, with legislators crossing the border into New Mexico, and Charles Kuffner has all the details. Ironically, the Texas Republican Party is doing the national Democratic Party a huge favor. This is a classic Gingrichian overreach and highlights the GOP's petulance and penchant for dirty pool. And the Texas Democrats are providing inspiration across the country for other Dems to realize they don't have to just lay there and take it. Washington Democrats finally began acting like an opposition party after the scramble to Ardmore, and the guy who comes out looking the worst in all of this is Tom DeLay.

Score.

The Divine Fright of Kings

STOP. If you're just breezing through here and not hitting links, I'd rather you read this from Jim Henley than anything I've written on this page. I mean it. Don't finish this 'til you've read it.

You will hear in response, "That's how you have to deal with these people." But if holding women and children hostage is how we must deal with them, then we should not be dealing with them at all. We should be minding our own damn business and steering clear of the whole debacle. Of course, it's a little late to realize that now. When a government decides that the ends justify the means, that the agreed-upon rules of civilized nations can simply be ignored, that war crimes can be shrugged off, then all of its people have come to a very dangerous crossroads. And "he did it first" is not a defense.

Bush's inadvertent use of the word "crusade" during the build-up to the Afghanistan war no longer seems so inadvertent. It took zealotry to get us into this situation. Many people get very nervous about Bush's evangelical beliefs not just informing but invading his foreign policies. But in this Guardian article, George Monbiot is on to something: the bigger peril is that the real fundamentalist religion driving the Bush administration is not so much Christianity, but Americanism.

[W]e must first grasp a reality which has seldom been discussed in print. The United States is no longer just a nation. It is now a religion. Its soldiers have entered Iraq to liberate its people not only from their dictator, their oil and their sovereignty, but also from their darkness. As George Bush told his troops on the day he announced victory: "Wherever you go, you carry a message of hope - a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'To the captives, "come out," and to those in darkness, "be free".'"

So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons. The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of little horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were opponents from a different realm was transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former dictator of Iraq.

[...]

The flag has become as sacred as the Bible; the name of the nation as holy as the name of God. The presidency is turning into a priesthood.

So those who question George Bush's foreign policy are no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or "anti-Americans". Those foreign states which seek to change this policy are wasting their time: you can negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests. The US has a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: "to defend ... the hopes of all mankind", and woe betide those who hope for something other than the American way of life.

The dangers of national divinity scarcely require explanation. Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced, like George Bush, that it possessed a heaven-sent mission to "liberate" Asia and extend the realm of its divine imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki predicted: "light the darkness of the entire world". Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell.

Particularly when they also happen to spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined and have the new King James as their leader.

"...his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: 'If you want your family released, turn yourself in.' "

Arnold Cuomonegger

Will he?
Won't he?
Will he?

Whatever. I just want to know who in the hell thinks governor of California in 2003 is a job they'd want to have? I'm as power-hungry as the next guy, but I'd scream like a girl and run if they offered it to me.

Any monkey can quit smoking...

...but it takes a real man to face cancer.

Researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University (hi Sandi and Giselle!) have found a wide range in the presence of "free-base" nicotine - the most powerfully addictive form - across cigarette brands, indicating that certain brands could be much more difficult to quit.

"The rate of absorption of nicotine from a tobacco product into the blood stream influences the addictiveness of the product, and the rate of absorption of nicotine from cigarette smoke is dependent on how much of the nicotine is in the free-base form. [...] They found more than 10-fold variation in levels of free-base nicotine among American cigarette brands. This is the first research to make such observations and will certainly help to guide future research into differences in the addictiveness of different brands of cigarettes."

The study is up in all of its incomprehensible, scientific-ese glory here, and the last page has the by-brand details, which I've summarized below. My old stand-by, Camel, does pretty well (not that any lessened addictiveness could be proved by my behavior), but all of you folks smoking American Spirits because they're "chemical-free," take note. No wonder I can't smoke those things standing up.

Hacked Off

The arch-conservative National Review's Don Luskin admits that the Bush administration's outing of a covert CIA operative is a major scandal that still has been met with relative silence in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. And I agree with him that it is not going to go away. Still, I'm not sure I grasp his reasoning here:

But outing Ms. Plame was not to punish Wilson, but to refute him: Ms. Plame's involvement in Wilson's selection for the Niger assignment trivializes him, makes him seem less an expert and more of a hack on a nepotistic boondoggle.

Huh? The former ambassador to Gabon, a French-speaking, uranium-producing African nation, is sent to Niger, the only other French-speaking, uranium-producing African nation, to investigate rumored uranium contacts, and the fact that his wife works for the CIA somehow makes him seem less of an expert? Is this really somebody's idea of a strategy?

But then, a paragraph later, Luskin implies that Wilson's credentials are weakened by the fact that he's (gasp!) a Democrat, so I guess Luskin's bar is low.

Just a little social geometry

I find very interesting the size of the intersection of these two sets:

A: people who will fulminate about the wastefulness of spending, say, 10 million dollars a month on the NEA.

B: people who are relatively sanguine about spending four billion dollars a month to occupy Iraq.

A thousand monkeys typing...

...will eventually become the number one google link for every conceivable search string. And I just noticed from a link in my referral logs that this site is now the first link returned if you search google for "necrophilia rape story archives free."

I'M NUMBER ONE! I'M NUMBER ONE!

Update (10:53 pm): Just 21 hours later, and I'm down to third. That didn't last long. I didn't even get my parade.

The Face of the Street

I haven't ever paid much attention to fotologs, though I was aware they had devoted followers. But following a link from Shock and Awe, I landed at a portfolio of photographs of the homeless in NYC (and a few in Rome) shot by Gary Clark, a Professor of Art at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Each of the pictures has a few sentences about the subject and the unpreachy matter-of-factness makes these powerful and beautiful photographs even more so. The main page is here, just keep hitting "previous" through the pictures.

Wow.

Filipino Mutiny

A coup attempt is underway in the Philippines.

Rebellious soldiers stormed a major commercial centre in Manila early Sunday, hours after the Philippine government ordered the arrest of officers believed to be plotting a coup. The president warned the mutineers to surrender or face military action.

With demands that the government resign, troops in camouflage uniforms set up gun posts and rigged explosives at 3 a.m. around the outside of the Glorietta complex, which includes one of the capital's largest shopping malls. The military responded by sending marines to positions nearby. Television footage later showed them shaking hands with some of the rogue officers, raising questions about what government forces would do if ordered to mount an assault.

Around 10 a.m., seven hours after the takeover began, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo went on national television and set a 5 p.m. deadline for the rebels to surrender. [...] Unlike the two "people power" revolts that peacefully ousted two presidents in recent years, there appeared to be little public support for the mutiny. The military chief of staff declared loyalty to Arroyo.

Rumours of a coup plot had been spreading for the last week. Arroyo took action Saturday, publicly announcing that she had ordered the military and police to hunt down and "arrest a small band of rogue junior officers and soldiers who have deserted their post and illegally brought weapons with them." The officers responded in a video released just before the takeover, accusing the government of selling arms and ammunition to Muslim and communist rebels, staging recent deadly bombings to justify more aid from the United States, and preparing to declare martial law to stay in power.

This is going to be ugly. Right now, we're about six hours away from the deadline...

He is still better than you.

Following up on the intern email break-up scandalette I mentioned last week, Ted Barlow notes that the inevitable Paul Kelly Tripplehorne fan page has appeared. By next year, this poor nitwit will be a celebrity judge on MTV Spring Break with Joey Buttafuoco and Tonya Harding.

Any bets on how many days until the first Paul Kelly Tripplehorne ate my balls! page?

Owl Monkeys

Yeah, owl monkeys.

Little, nocturnal, South American tree monkeys with honking huge eyes.

Just because.

Uh oh.

The url for the UPI article that Josh Marshall cited now says:

9/11 report:
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Published 7/25/2003 1:50 PM

WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) -- On July 23 2003, United Press International published an article about materials believed to be in a report to be released July 24 regarding investigations into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. UPI cannot further stand by this story as originally filed and will have a corrected version soon.

Back on the Autobahn

If you happen to be in your mid-to-late 30's or older, you may remember when Kraftwerk, the massively influential German robot-pop band, actually released albums. The last official release by the band, Electric Cafe, came out during my senior year in high school, way back in 1986. Since then, the members have assiduously avoided publicity of any sort, becoming a Kraut-synthesizer version of J.D. Salinger.

Now, though, they are set to release a new album, Tour de France 03, which was supposed to have coincided with this year's Tour de France, but got delayed due to Kraftwerk's borderline obsessive-compulsive perfectionism. But don't think they are coming out of their hermitic shell. Their infrequent concerts are still performed more often than not by "painstakingly constructed robot doubles" (pictured below) and the remaining members refuse any interviews that might touch - however tangentially - on their music.

The Guardian's Alexis Petridis went to great lengths to try to track down the hyper-reclusive musicians after negotiations for an interview broke down. After all was said and done, though, Petridis did manage to uncover the following:

I have flown from England to Düsseldorf, made innumerable telephone calls, wandered around its streets for a day, illegally entered a building, and really annoyed one of the city's top photographers. And what is the sum total of knowledge gleaned from this experience? Have I gained any insight into the fascistic overtones of some of their early statements? Have I discovered the key to an appeal so vast that people will fill a venue just to see the band's former percussionist play live, a decade after his departure? Have I even found out whether or not the Düsseldorf accent is a Teutonic equivalent of Brummie? No.

My investigations have exclusively revealed that one of Kraftwerk's members owns a collapsible bike.

The veil remains unpierced...

My brain still hurts.

Admission: big swaths of this Scientific American article may as well have been written in Sanskrit for all the sense they made to me, but the parts I could get my head wrapped around were pretty fascinating. Seems there's decent possibility we only exist in two dimensions, with the information needed for us to perceive the third dimension encoded on the plane, much like a hologram.

...tiny...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the fellow who attached an outboard motor to the back of a dead pig and rode it across a lake. It's the sort of gag you really only get to do once. Nobody will pay attention the second time unless you could figure out some really radical twist to it, right? Well, two points awarded for conceptual continuity:

Only 15 years after University of California, Berkeley, engineers built the first micro-scale motor, a UC Berkeley physicist has created the first nano-scale motor - a gold rotor on a nanotube shaft that could ride on the back of a virus.

"It's the smallest synthetic motor that's ever been made," said Alex Zettl, professor of physics at UC Berkeley and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Nature is still a little bit ahead of us - there are biological motors that are equal or slightly smaller in size - but we are catching up."

[...]

Such motors could have numerous uses, Zettl said. Because the rotor can be positioned at any angle, the motor could be used in optical circuits to redirect light, a process called optical switching. The rotor could be rapidly flipped back and forth to create a microwave oscillator, or the spinning rotor could be used to mix liquids in microfluidic devices.

The motor is about 500 nanometers across, 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. While the part that rotates, the rotor, is between 100 and 300 nanometers long, the carbon nanotube shaft to which it is attached is only a few atoms across, perhaps 5-10 nanometers thick.

[...]

Interestingly, the rotor does not continue spinning for long once the electricity is turned off. It is so small that it has little inertia, so any tiny electric charges remaining on the device after it's turned off tend to stop the rotor immediately.

"The nanoworld is weird - different things dominate," Zettl said. "Gravity plays no role whatsoever and inertial effects are basically nonexistent because things are just so small, so that little things like residual electric fields can play a dominant role. It's counter intuitive."

The link has an animated picture of the spinning micromotor that was shot through an electron microscope. I have a certain fascination with nanotech and read about it fairly often, but I had to laugh at this quote from Dr. Zettl: "The real breakthrough came a couple of years ago, when we discovered a method for peeling shells off multiwalled nanotubes and grabbing the core with a homemade nano-manipulator operating inside a transmission electron microscope." Every time I read that sentence, it sounds funnier. Especially reading it aloud.

Darth Nader

Via AngryBear, I came across this Washington Post article about the Green Party's recent national meeting.

But participants said the discussions came to at least a symbolic close when they were asked to stand in different parts of the room depending on how they felt about the presidential race. Those who wanted a presidential candidate who would run the strongest possible campaign were asked to stand in one area. Those who wanted someone who would run only in areas where electoral votes would not be pulled from the Democratic presidential candidate stood in another. Those who wanted to skip the race altogether and, instead, support the Democratic candidate stood in yet another. The unusual exercise was intended to help participants visualize where the highly decentralized and often fractious party stood, literally and figuratively, on the issue.

Of course, the Quixotes carried the day. How many Greens does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

"Okay, everybody who thinks we should change the lightbulb, stand on the left side of the room. Everybody who thinks we should leave the burned-out bulb in place, stand on the right side of the room. All those who think we should go get a bulb but only change it in the event of total darkness, stand in the middle."

In the meantime, the GOP has shut off the convention hall's electricity at the main breaker.

On the subject of the Greens, The American Prospect's Michael Tomasky argues that the Democrats should rain missiles down on Nader.

So here's a thought for an enterprising Democratic candidate: Attack Nader right now, and with lupine ferocity. Say he's a madman for thinking of running again. Blast him especially hard on foreign policy, saying that if it were up to the Greens, America would give no aid to Israel and it would cease to exist, and if it were up to the Greens, America would not have even defended itself against a barbarous attack by going into Afghanistan. Have at him, and hard, from the right. Then nail him from the left on certain social issues, on abortion rights and other things that he's often pooh-poohed and dismissed as irrelevant. Cause an uproar. Be dramatic. Don't balance it with praise about what he's done for consumers. To the contrary, talk about how much he's damaging consumers today by not caring who's in charge of the Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Communications Commission.

This would be, for some clever Democrat, the defining Sister Souljah moment of this campaign. Except times 50, because Sister Souljah was a second-tier rapper no one had heard of and Ralph Nader is one of the most famous Americans of the last half-century. Anyone who did this would automatically look tough. The candidates are running around now saying things like, "I'll be as tough as Bush." Well, you can say that 7,000 times and it doesn't matter. You have to do something to show people you're tough. That's the only way a message like that is delivered in a campaign. Then, people will look at what you've done and say, "Hey, that guy's pretty tough."

He's spot-on, except for labelling Nader "one of the most famous Americans" of the last 50 years. Excuse me? Would Nader even crack the top 500? Anyhow, the Greens running a candidate in 2004 is not a political strategy, it's a temper tantrum. Third parties are simply not viable in American politics, thanks the calculus of our electoral system. You can either function as a caucus within one of two (as the religious right does), or you can continue wandering in the wilderness, waiting for one of the two parties to implode. Just ask the Reform Party.

The Greens' blinkered insistence that there isn't "a dime's worth of difference" between the Democrats and the Republicans is absurd. The parties haven't been this far apart in a hundred years. If they can't even recognize this basic fact, then the Democrats really have no choice but to go on the offensive against them. The Greens aren't opposing both parties, they are opposing only the Democrats. They do not steal a single vote from the Republicans. I respect the argument that it would be better to try to bring them into the party, but if they don't get it yet, then it's a lost cause.

CUZ I SAID SO!

Did the bald guy piss him off or terrify him? Clever captions in the comments, please.

The Wasps and the Vultures

It doesn't sound like Dick Baker has actually done anything illegal, but the principal of Largo, Florida's Community Christian School still sounds like a complete freak.

The middle school-age girls told police they had been to Disney with Baker 20 times, 30 or 40 times. One girl said she had been 81 times. Sometimes they shared a room with him, but not a bed. Sometimes Baker, 52, was the only adult on the trip. He slept in Disney pajamas, one girl said.

There was no need to bring a swimsuit - Baker had a bag full of Disney suits that the girls could choose from so everyone would match. Detectives learned that he gave them matching dresses and took pictures of them wearing Tinkerbell and other costumes, complete with wands and crowns.

The girls talked with investigators about swimsuit changing contests. About hugs, massages and lots of tickling. About the difference between "good touches" and "bad touches." The girls said Baker never touched them in a bad way. A ninth-grader cried when she talked about how much he meant to her.

[...]

His school reflects his values: no bleached hair, no dancing at homecoming, tuck in your shirt, keep six inches apart in the halls. One year, Baker gave a lesson on the birds and the bees in chapel, according to Barbarita Clark, a former teacher. He called it "The Wasps and the Vultures."

[...]

Baker is by all accounts a Disney fanatic. He told police that on his 900th visit to the Magic Kingdom, he got to be grand marshal of the Main Street Parade. At such a small, insular school, most everyone knows that he takes children to Disney, Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon. He chaperones swimming trips in town and American Girl doll tea parties.

Some of the trips are class trips with large groups and other adult chaperones. But one group of girls seems to go on more trips than the rest, parents, students and teachers say. Baker kept a list of some of those girls in his computer. It was labeled "Princess." Each girl's name was typed below the name of a Disney character, such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Many of the girls known as Princesses are daughters of school staff and board members.

(This one was special for you, boxman.)

Another pillar crumbles.

Josh Marshall is covering what will undoubtedly be explosive new revelations about the Bush administration's blatantly false case for the war on Iraq, and they have nothing to do with uranium. The first piece of breaking news, which you can rest assured will be front page news for some time to come, is the report of the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 that Bush fought so ardently to suppress. The UPI article says:

The report of the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, to be published Thursday, reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida, United Press International has learned.

"The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida," said a government official who has seen the report.

Former Democratic Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was a member of the joint congressional committee that produced the report, confirmed the official's statement. Asked whether he believed the report will reveal that there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, Cleland replied: "I do ... There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by some of (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden's terrorist followers."

[...]

Although the committee completed its work at the end of last year, publication of the report has been delayed by interminable wrangles between the committees and the administration over which parts of it could be declassified. Cleland accused the administration of deliberately delaying the report's release to avoid having its case for war undercut.

"The reason this report was delayed for so long -- deliberately opposed at first, then slow-walked after it was created -- is that the administration wanted to get the war in Iraq in and over ... before (it) came out," he said. "Had this report come out in January like it should have done, we would have known these things before the war in Iraq, which would not have suited the administration."

Bush's "evidence" for the al-Qaeda link rested on four arguments:
1. A meeting in the Czech Republic between 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence, a claim that Czech intelligence has now retracted. Based on extensive reviews of travel records, US intelligence believes Atta was in the United States at the time.

2. Iraq was harboring Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zakawi. But as the government official who saw the report rebutted, "Because someone makes a telephone call from a country, does not mean that the government of that country is complicit in that. When we found out there was an al-Qaeda cell operating in Germany, we didn't say 'we have to invade Germany, because the German government supports al-Qaeda.' ... There was no evidence to indicate that the Iraqi government knew about or was complicit in Zakawi's activities." German intelligence now believes that Zakawi never belonged to Al-Qaeda in the first place, but to a rival extremist group.

3. Defectors' claims that hijacking training was being conducted with a plane fuselage in Salman Pak. This has not yet been disproven, but evidence indicates this may actually have been anti-terrorist training, common in every Middle Eastern state, for obvious reasons.

4. Meetings between Iraqi officials and Al-Qaeda members during the '80's and '90's, especially in Sudan. Same official: "Intelligence officials, including ours, meet with bad guys all around the world every day. That's their job. Maybe to get information from them, maybe to try and recruit them. There are a series of alternative explanations for why two people like that might meet, and that's what we don't know." Given the known animosity of bin Laden toward the Ba'athist regimes, it seems likely that any meetings that did occur were not fruitful.

The government official is never identified, but I suspect it is somebody in the CIA. And the second piece of breaking news that Marshall is reporting just happens to be about the CIA. He cites several passages from the latest Nelson Report that indicate that the CIA and the White House are now openly at war with one another, and that the Al-Qaeda (non-)revelations are far from the last in the pipeline.

And the war has just begun, intelligence community sources warn. The Iraq/Niger debacle is but one of "a whole series of stories which are ready to break", a source told us today, adding, "I've never seen such hostility and disdain as now being expressed between the White House and the CIA. Never…"

[...]

As one Administration source put it, privately, today: "Between Tenet and Hadley, Condi now has the choice of saying she's a fool, or a liar…if not both. Bottom line is she failed to protect the President…look at all this lame stuff about him not being a 'fact checker'. It's just incredible."

-- even before last week, a source close to the White House told us, "the President now sees that he's exposed on the intel problems. And he now sees who's been manipulating him, and he's not happy about it. No president likes to be embarrassed, but this stuff goes to the heart of all the reservations, pre-9/11, about his intelligence, his attention span, and his interest in foreign affairs."

Why, yes it does. All the right-wing talk of Bush as a shrewd mastermind is as overblown as the left's insistence that he's functionally retarded. But what should be clear to anybody that approaches it without preconceptions is that Bush, while not a moron, is nonetheless in way over his head. A few years holding the weakest governorship in the country in no way prepared him to be president - especially in a time of crisis - and he is left relying utterly upon the people around him. Unfortunately, the team he had assembled for him isn't that whippy, either. But in the end it's Bush who will be left holding the bag.

I've been saying for the past two years, often to the disbelief of even my most rabidly anti-Bush acquaintances, that this is a deeply vulnerable incumbent, one that won in 2000 effectively by virtue of a coin flip. Winning the war in Iraq will not bring new support to his side: it was a foregone conclusion we could decimate their military. Bungling the aftermath, however, will cost him dearly. And as much as I wish that bungling could be avoided, I must admit to having precious little faith in this gang to avoid it.

In the end, it may be true that Bush wasn't lying, but simply refused to acknowledge any evidence that contradicted the assumptions he had already made. That certainly would be in keeping with his evangelical religious beliefs, which require a heightened ability to ignore the plainly obvious. But, as with Condi Rice, that leaves his options at liar or sucker. You should expect to hear the words "revisionist history" coming out of GeeDubya's mouth about a hundred times over the coming weeks. Ridiculous as that sounds coming from his mouth, he has little else left, and the media has turned on him.

This is all about to get veeeeery interesting...

And the story changes yet again.

How do this administration's supporters continue to defend its honesty when the story changes every couple of days?

The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa, White House officials said yesterday.

The officials made the disclosure hours after they were alerted by the CIA to the existence of a memo sent to Bush's deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, on Oct. 6. The White House said Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, on Friday night discovered another memo from the CIA, dated Oct. 5, also expressing doubts about the Africa claims.

The information, provided in a briefing by Hadley and Bush communications director Dan Bartlett, significantly alters the explanation previously offered by the White House. The acknowledgment of the memos, which were sent on the eve of a major presidential speech in Cincinnati about Iraq, comes four days after the White House said the CIA objected only to technical specifics of the Africa charge, not its general accuracy.

In fact, the officials acknowledged yesterday, the CIA warned the White House early on that the charge, based on an allegation that Iraq sought 500 tons of uranium in Niger, relied on weak evidence, was not particularly significant and assumed Iraq was pursuing an acquisition that was arguably not possible and of questionable value because Iraq had its own supplies.

Yesterday's disclosures indicate top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation. The claim was a major part of the case made by the Bush administration before the Iraq war that Hussein represented a serious threat because of his nuclear ambitions; other pieces of evidence have also been challenged.

Look, if they were being straight, the excuses wouldn't constantly evolve in response to every new bit of info that leaks out. Interesting the timing of the release of this memo, though. Think the CIA might be pissed about Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame?

Yes, we have no bananas. Or scruples.

A couple of agriculture stories caught my eye today. First is a story from the Globe and Mail that is going to send my child into a full-on panic. Experts predict that the banana as we know it will be functionally extinct within the decade.

The banana's main problem is that it has become sterile and seedless as a result of 10,000 years of selective breeding. It has, over time, become a plant with unvarying genetic sameness. The genetic diversity needed to cope with environmental stresses, such as diseases and crop pests, has long ago been bred out of the banana. Consequently, the banana plantations of the world are completely vulnerable to devastating environmental pressures.

According to Emile Frison, newly appointed director-general of the Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, science is helpless to prevent the demise of the banana. Already, he says, as much as 50 per cent of the world's banana harvest is lost to insects and disease.

When humankind first encountered this fruit thousands of years ago we were probably not impressed by the almost inedible giant wild bananas. Historic mutations, rare and accidental, produced seedless bananas through chromosome triplication. Ancient humans focused on these seedless, pollen-less mutants to generate progressively more edible crops. Eventually, edible banana flesh retained only a few vague traces of the viable seeds once carried in the ancestral wild stock.

Ancient plant breeders grew edible bananas by grafting sterile mutants onto wild stems. This process was repeated for thousands of years to produce the emasculated, sterile -- and defenceless -- plantation banana that currently feeds millions of people globally.

But the stage was set for the final act in the story of this beloved yellow fruit in the 1950s. By then, generations of selective breeding had long since inhibited natural banana reproduction, and genetic tinkering had all but obliterated most commercial varieties. Eventually, one morph remained, the Gros Michel variety. All domestic stock was its clone, an exact genetic copy of that one variety. Every tree was equally vulnerable to plant disease, crop pests and climate variables.

Then Panama disease, a soil fungus, attacked banana plantations and the genetically enfeebled Gros Michel banana was virtually wiped out. By 1960, the Gros Michel was no longer a viable crop. Tireless agricultural research eventually produced a successor, the Cavendish. For the past 40 years or so, the Cavendish has been virtually the only commercially grown stock available on store shelves in developed nations.

In the tropics, you can still find other, less desirable banana varieties, mainly grown as a starchy food staple rather than a sweet treat. But these tropical bananas aren't much like their commercial cousins in North American supermarkets. They taste bland. Their texture is often fibrous and mealy. North American consumers would probably find them quite unpalatable compared to the Cavendish, which is sweeter and smoother-textured.

But like its genetic predecessor, the Cavendish is also sterile, equally unprotected from diseases and crop pests. And now a powerful plant pathogen, the Black Sigatoka fungus, has appeared on the scene, attacking the Cavendish stock around the world. Banana yields have already dropped by 50-70 per cent, and banana-tree life spans have been reduced from about 30 years to just about two years. The genetic uniformity among Cavendish bananas has made them helpless to fight Black Sigatoka.

It's hard to fathom a world without bananas, but even harder to fathom is how Monsanto lawyers can look at themselves in the mirror. PLA and Ampersand have both blogged an infuriating story about the strong-arm legal tactics Monsanto ($4.6 billion revenue in 2002) is using toward the tiny Maine company OakHurst Dairy ($85 million revenue in 2002). OakHurst markets milk from cows that have not been given growth hormones, which, in a free country, seems fair enough. Unless you are a multi-billion dollar chemical company that produces bovine growth hormones. From the PLA post:

Monsanto took exception to Oakhurst’s “no artificial hormone” policy and filed suit against Oakhurst. According to one report:

The suit against Oakhurst claims unfair competition, unfair business practices and interference with advantageous business relationships. According to the suit, the business relationships between Monsanto and dairy producers who use the artificial growth hormone have suffered because the farmers will stop using the treatments.

Another report notes:

Monsanto claims that Oakhurst is misleading customers with labels and a marketing effort that includes the statement, "Our farmers' pledge: No artificial growth hormones."

Monsanto said Oakhurst's slogan implies there's something wrong with milk produced by cows that have been injected with the growth hormones, even though the federal Food and Drug Administration has found that the milk is not affected by the hormones.

Does giving dairy cows Bovine Growth Hormone make their milk any less safe? I do not have a clue. The FDA approved the use of BGH here but it is banned in Canada and Europe.

An Oakhurst spokesman makes clear that he doesn’t know either:

"We have said from the beginning that we make no claims to understand the science involved with artificial growth hormones," he said. "We're in the business of marketing milk, not Monsanto's drugs."

Myself, I couldn't care less whether my milk comes from BGH-enhanced cows. The ability to dismiss almost any health hazard as trivial is one of the lesser-discussed advantages of cigarette smoking. "BGH? Pfff - I'll worry about it after the next round of chemo. Wheeeeeeeeze..."

Nonetheless, the merits of Monsanto's case are non-existent. Just because the FDA has approved your product, that doesn't mean that everybody is therefore legally bound to use it, and OakHurst's entire approach on their website is that consumers deserve to have a choice about the milk they buy and to know what's in it. Neither idea is subversive, or for that matter, even arguable. So why the suit? Intimidation. Monsanto could drive OakHurst out of business just with legal fees alone. They don't have to win the suit; all they have to do is frighten other small dairies.

There's a word for that: racketeering.

Vacation destinations

Given your druthers, which seems the better vacation destination:
The Mexican village of Poop or Canada's Dildo Island?

The problem is licked.

New Scientist reports that Austrian physicians have carried out the first successful human tongue transplant on a 42-year man with a malignant oral tumor. Begin preparing yourself for the inevitable "Enlarge your tongue naturally" spam.

UPDATE (10:59 am): The Kansas City Star has more.

The team will consider the operation successful if the patient, who could no longer open his mouth because of the tumor, regains his ability to eat and speak. Surgeons worked meticulously to attach the nerves of the tongue to the severed nerve endings.

"It's very unlikely he'll regain his sense of taste," Ewers said. "But (regaining) feeling and primarily, movement, would be an optimal result."

Traditionally, in cases where patients lose their tongues, surgeons remove a piece of their small intestines and graft that onto the tongue stump, the doctors said. Such patients are never able to speak clearly or swallow again, however, and must be fed through tubes.

The recipient's "new" tongue was removed from a brain-dead donor by a separate team of doctors in an adjacent operating room and quickly handed over for transplantation, said Dr. Franz Watzinger, one of the leading surgeons. The donor - chosen because his blood type and tongue size matched that of the patient - was then taken off life support.

Sophia Loren is screaming.

The Guardian has the lead-in: "Europe's great tits have learned to raise their voices above the roar of urban traffic and overhead aircraft."

Nature headlines the story: "City tits hit the high notes to beat traffic hum."

I'm sorry, was that sophomoric? Well then, how about Mr. Brain's Pork Faggots? "We pride ourselves on using the finest pork and pork liver for our faggots, topped with a generous serving of delicious West Country sauce. It's no wonder 100 million faggots are eaten in the UK every year!" (via cruel.com)

Word for the Day

Quadrumanous: the reason you never see photos of George W. Bush barefoot.

"Take Mexico Instead"

In Egypt's al-Ahram Weekly, which really is one of the finest sources of thoughtful political commentary on the web, Abdel-Moneim Said argues, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that America's Iraqi occupation is not a sign of a neo-colonialism. His reasoning? Such a shift in foreign policy would have made an invasion of Mexico far more sensible and inviting. He lays out the arguments for and against, coming to the conclusion that the country that really ought to be looking over its shoulder is Canada (maybe that's why their soldiers are stockpiling weapons at home?).

It's an amusing commentary, and leaves me wondering whether Mr. Said saw the South Park movie. Random statistic from the article that I never would have guessed: "[Canada's] GDP, in terms of purchasing power, stands at $933 billion -- $200 billion more than the GDP of Arab countries put together."

(Props to Froz Gobo for the link)

It's Hitleriffic!

This isn't really a new story, but it has re-emerged after a vacationing Polish couple brought back a bottle of Italian winemaker Alessandro Lunardelli's Hitler Merlot.

The tourists bought the bottle for 5.30 euros ($9.13) in a supermarket in northern Italy and, upon their return home, they handed it over to Poland's biggest-selling newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, which displayed the offensive item on its front page. Adolf Hitler was splashed across the bottle's label, his arm raised in the Nazi salute, while the regime's motto "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer" - One People, One Empire, One Leader - was written across the bottom.

"We were shocked. It's disgusting," said one of the tourists, quoted by Gazeta in Warsaw. "We hid the bottle in the trunk of the car when we crossed the Polish border because we were afraid that customs officers would think we were Nazi sympathisers," he added.

Ananova ran a story on Lunardelli's line of dictator wines a couple of years ago. Apparently the Hitler wine is bought mostly by German and Austrian tourists. He also has wine carrying the likenesses of Rommel, Goering, Mussolini, Tito, Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Che Guevara. I'm assuming the last five are reds.

Some of the labels are scanned here. Trotsky had it all wrong. It's the vineyard of the proletariat, not the vanguard...

UPDATE (Sept. 5, 4:20 pm): There has been a tidal wave of search engine hits coming into this post since Germany lodged an official protest against the Hitler wine. There are two more posts on this site about this story: one from September 4th that contains many links to related news stories, and another one from September 5th that contains a link to the Lunardelli website, where you can view all of the wine labels.

Hope that helps you find what you were looking for, and I hope further that you'll hit the "Main Page" link below and spend some time wandering through the rest of our site. Pleased to make your acquaintance...

Are they even aware...

...of the words that come out of their mouths?

"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq," said [U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz, who is touring the country to meet U.S. troops and Iraqi officials.

Ummm, I'm not saying that's bad advice or anything, but...

(via Atrios)

Texas Last Meals

At the website of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is a list of the final meal requests of the past 307 inmates executed by the state. Nearly all of them have a link to a summary of their crimes and vital statistics and in most cases mugshots. It's an oddly fascinating, if subtly unsettling, wander through.

Cheeseburgers come in at #1, and some of the meal requests are quite detailed. Liver and onions appear more often than you might expect. The weirdest one to me (despite lots of competition): a jar of dill pickles.

Anybody else find it strange that the last line of each of these reports is "Race of victim"?

Like Coals to Newcastle

Obviously, it's because Florida didn't have quite enough giant, carnivorous lizards yet.

Biologists in southwest Florida hope to trap a species of giant, carnivorous lizards native to Africa that appear to be spreading in the region. Cape Coral has become a haven for Nile monitor lizards, and their population has possibly reached the thousands, said Todd Campbell, a University of Tampa biologist who has started a project to monitor the monitors. Options include relocating or killing them.

Relocate thousands of giant, carnivorous lizards to where, exactly? Georgia? The EPCOT Center?

Brute Sleep

It's late Tuesday night, the six-year-old junior apostropher is asleep in his room upstairs, and I step out on the front porch to have a cigarette. But when I go to re-enter the house... Uh oh. The knob's locked. My keys are inside. And my wallet. And the phone. And my shoes.

Sigh. I've only been in this house a month and haven't gotten around to hiding a key anywhere. After a good ten minutes of ringing the doorbell, it's clear that strategy won't be sufficient to rouse him. Gravel at his window. Not pebbles, gravel. Lots of it. Nothing. Either he's deep deep asleep, or he's terrified and hiding under the sheets. Clearly this is going nowhere.

The good news is that nobody's breaking in through my windows without shattering glass. Deadbolts are locked on all the other doors. It's just the knob on the front door, but after a thorough search of the grounds, nothing in my vicinity approximates the strength and flexibility of a credit card to try that method. The corroding piece of aluminum from the little grill would almost work, except it keeps crumbling into showers of red dust.

I haven't gone and bought a ladder yet, but pushing the yard waste bin over by the lowest part of the roof, I manage to clamber up onto it. In front of my bedroom windows lies a good six or seven feet of shingled roof; in front of his window, about a foot. I had already established earlier that short of breaking glass, the windows in this house are frustratingly secure.

I crawl onto the little one-foot ledge and knock on his window. Nothing. Again. Nothing. For twenty minutes I pound on the glass, crouched up against the cedar siding, and I do mean pound. He never once even stirs. Dammit. Getting down off of the roof is a little more daunting than getting up was.

Walking back past my windows, though, I notice that the latch is not quite closed on one. I wrench the screen off, hoping I can jiggle the latch free. One touch, snaps shut. Everything is making me laugh now, and the laughter has an unsettling edge. I'm pouring sweat. Getting back off of the roof involves a shingle burn here and there, but all in all a successful dismount.

I'm going to have to break a window. I really, really don't want to break a window. But for some reason, it seems okay to try to break down the door instead. On the fifth shot with a lowered shoulder, the door actually flies open. The door frame was intact and unharmed, the piece of the door where the lock protrudes had given way enough to force the lock past the plate in the door jamb. Miraculously, the door still closes fine and can be locked with the deadbolt.

The kid never did stir. And I've got some serious doubts about the effectiveness of my neighborhood watch program. But I gotta say it's a seriously satisfying feeling to successfully run through a solid wood door.

John Dean Smells a Rat

Former Nixon counsel John Dean has another article up at findlaw.com arguing that the Niger contretemps is just one thread in a fabric of deception and exaggeration.

What I found, in critically examining Bush's evidence, is not pretty. The African uranium matter is merely indicative of larger problems, and troubling questions of potential and widespread criminality when taking the nation to war. It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony.

Most of his points are nitpicks, instances where Bush presented estimates or suspicions as facts, and any one of them taken alone would amount to little. Taken together, however, they do start to have a snowball effect. One can argue about the "technical" truth of the statements, but such defenses during the previous administration produced much derisive snorting from the same criticasters wielding them now.

The administration's case regarding illegal weapons seems to weaken by the day, especially as the search for any trace of them continues to come up empty. Could this be the reason why they were in such a rush to get it started? Could this be why they were unwilling to allow the inspectors to work through the summer? After all, had they waited through the summer, they likely could have brought several more countries into the alliance and given it a sheen of international legitimacy. But had the inspectors spent the next few months confirming the absence of weapons that would present an imminent threat, it gets questionable whether Bush could have maintained public support for the invasion.

There remains no smoking gun, but it nonetheless smells worse every day. And the implications of it all are of an entirely more serious nature than the nonsensical snipe hunt of Whitewater, on which some forty million dollars were spent. Since it is a felony to give false information to the Congress, I have to agree with Mr. Dean when he says:

There is an unsavory stench about Bush's claims to the Congress, and nation, about Saddam Hussein's WMD threat. The deceptions are too apparent. There are simply too many unanswered questions, which have been growing daily. If the Independent Counsel law were still in existence, this situation would justify the appointment of an Independent Counsel.

Because that law has expired, if President Bush truly has nothing to hide, he should appoint a special prosecutor. After all, Presidents Nixon and Clinton, when not subject to the Independent Counsel law, appointed special prosecutors to investigate matters much less serious. If President Bush is truly the square shooter he portrays himself to be, he should appoint a special prosecutor to undertake an investigation.

If Bush has nothing to fear from a close examination, then he should be just as gung-ho in issuing another "Bring 'em on" challenge.