"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.

Freudian slip?

Probably not, but it's pretty funny all the same. From the official transcript of Bush's press conference with Prime Minister Blair yesterday:

I believe that we will find the truth. And the truth is, he was developing a program for weapons of mass destruction. Now, you say, why didn't it happen all of a sudden? Well, there was a lot of chaos in the country, one. Two, Saddam Hussein has spent over a decade hiding weapons and hiding materials. Three, we're getting -- we're just beginning to get some cooperation from some of the high-level officials in that administration or that regime. But we will bring the weapons and, of course -- we will bring the information forward on the weapons when they find them. And that will end up -- end all this speculation.

Well, isn't this interesting?

Oh my. Take a look at this.

Judicial Watch, which has gone after Bush as resolutely as it went after Clinton, has the results from its Freedom of Information Act request on the secret energy task force meetings led by Dick Cheney. And interestingly enough:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org.

The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each country’s oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the projects, costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date.

Judicial Watch has been seeking these documents under FOIA since April 19, 2001. Judicial Watch was forced to file a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch Inc. v. Department of Energy, et al., Civil Action No. 01-0981) when the government failed to comply with the provisions of the FOIA law. U.S. District Court Judge Paul J. Friedman ordered the government to produce the documents on March 5, 2002.

The documents were produced in response to Judicial Watch’s on-going efforts to ensure transparency and accountability in government on behalf of the American people. Judicial Watch aggressively pursues those goals by making FOIA requests and seeking access to public information concerning government operations. When the government fails to abide by these "sunshine laws" Judicial Watch files lawsuits in order to obtain the requested information and to hold responsible government officials accountable.

"These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Click here for: MAPS AND CHARTS OF OILFIELDS: CHENEY ENERGY TASK FORCE

Yes, I'll just bet Cheney wants those records sealed. As Tom Tomorrow adds:

If this is on the level, the implications are extraordinary. I always had it in the back of my mind that Cheney was stonewalling on the energy task force to hide the corruption, the ties to Enron and so on. But what if the sons of bitches were sitting around deciding how to divvy up Iraq? What if that most reductionist of slogans is a simple statement of fact: it's all about the oil?

If this is on the level? Like the FBI would lie to the Vice president's disadvantage.

Hat tip to Jorge, who sent the tomtomorrow link. Also at that site, just below that post, is a link to this disturbing article. Apparently reading a Hal Crowther column in a coffeeshop is enough to get you questioned by the FBI these days.

UPDATE (7/18, 11:02 am): In the comments, Froz questions the noteworthiness of these documents. This story has been picked up by Daily Kos, and the debate over their noteworthiness continues in the comments there, too. Concensus seems to be that absent further documentation, these tell very little.

I'll agree with Froz's comment, though, that this is the real scandal surrounding the Energy Task Force, and there's nothing speculative about it.

Never break up over e-mail.

Another intern scandal! Well, sort of.

The Washington Post has the story of the e-mail you might already have been forwarded. Kelly Tripplehorne was, until very recently, an intern for Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. In a spell of spectacularly poor judgment, he emailed a particularly spiteful and nasty break-up letter to a fellow intern. NEVER break up over e-mail. You'd be better off doing it on the Jerry Springer Show.

Now, of course, millions have read it and come to the conclusion that he's a sub-literate jerk with possible sociopathic tendencies. If you're one of those millions and want a face to put to the words, the Post has his picture with the article, which does strike me as odd. In case you missed the original text, you can read it at Snopes.com. Notice that his email address is "tripplehorny@hotmail.com." You couldn't make this stuff up.

First 100 orders get a free gas centrifuge

I'm sure Niger is very pretty this time of year, and probably very cheap, even with a weakened dollar. All the same, it's kind of a hassle to get there. So if you want to save a lot of time and effort, you should just order your uranium ore over the web.

United Nuclear also sells sparklers.

Morale plummets.

Think Bush has the military vote sewn up in 2004? Think again.

CNN interview with the fiance of a soldier:

We have actually, since this deployment began, we have decided that we will no longer be in the army. [...] It's hard on the families, it's hard on the soldiers, and it's especially hard to know that you put your faith and trust into a president, and they continue to lie to you, they break promises, and it's hard to fight for somebody like that.

From ABC News:

The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. "I've got my own 'Most Wanted' list," he told me. [...] "The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz," he said.

[...]

In the back of the group, Spc. Clinton Deitz put up his hand. "If Donald Rumsfeld was here," he said, "I'd ask him for his resignation."

[...]

It is [Sgt. Felipe ] Vega's job to maintain morale. That's not easy, he told me, when the Army keeps changing the orders. "They turn around and slap you in the face," he said. When asked if that's the way it feels, he said, "Yeah, kicked in the guts, slapped in the face."

[...]

"Well it pretty much makes me lose faith in the Army," said Pfc. Jayson Punyhotra, one of the soldiers grouped around the table. "I mean, I don't really believe anything they tell me. If they told me we were leaving next week, I wouldn't believe them."

From the LA Times:

The office of Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) says it has fielded hundreds of calls and letters from angry families at Ft. Stewart, Ga., which is the headquarters of the 3rd Infantry Division. Other lawmakers have expressed similar concerns. Military experts said that such significant numbers of soldiers or entire units have not been asked to serve in combat for such an extended period of time since the Vietnam War.

[...]

The defense secretary is openly criticized by privates and officers alike in Fallouja, where soldiers face rifle fire, mortar shells or rocket-propelled grenades almost daily. "People say Rumsfeld needs to get out of office," one soldier said, to nods from two fellow GIs.

[...]

"Tell Donald Rumsfeld the 2nd Brigade is still stuck in Fallouja," said Sgt. Siphon Phan, "and we're very angry."

If this is what they are willing to say publicly, what do you figure is being said when the reporters aren't there? The predictable right-wing response will be that folks like myself take special pleasure in reading stories like this. I do not. I wrote before the war started that Bush was lying to the military and the country about the reality of the occupation that would necessarily follow the invasion. Asking American soldiers to endure this is horrific, especially when you ask the central question: What have we gained?

Nothing. We are not safer as a country, because Saddam was never a threat to begin with. A blow against terror? Yeah, right. Ask the Islamicists how recruitment is going. Our troops are stuck for years in a hellishly hot desert awash in toxic chemicals and radiation, defending against daily attacks, and for what? So that the American government can auction off reconstruction and oil contracts to US conglomerates, and so we can maintain forward bases in the Middle East. Bases that we already had in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey (but these are rent-free!).

Bush is a disgrace to his family, to his office, and to this country. If you voted for him, well, everybody makes mistakes, but you should be mailing letters of apology to the soldiers stationed there. If you're planning on voting for him again, I have one question for you: Why don't you support our troops?

(links from this Daily Kos post and the comments that follow)

Yuck.

Y'know, I like potty humor as much as the next guy, and I'm certainly no stickler for good taste when it comes to parody. All the same, this cartoon in the Guardian seems more like something out of Hustler Magazine.

In hock, in perpetuity.

The Bush administration and their lackeys controlling both houses of Congress keep shattering their own record for history's largest budget deficit. The constant revisions of the projected shortfall make it challenging to even keep up.

Since April 2001, when the president forecast a $242-billion surplus for the 2003 fiscal year, the estimates for the same 2003 budget have changed to an $80-billion deficit in February 2002 to $304 billion last February to $455 billion yesterday. [...] Since the 2001 forecast, spending has increased from $2 trillion to $2.2 trillion, while tax revenues have fallen from $2.26 trillion to $1.76 trillion.

Well, heck, they were only off by seven hundred billion dollars the first time around. More than that really, since even as massive as a $450 billion dollar deficit sounds, it still understates the case. Those figures don't include the $4 billion per month we're spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, and that four billion per month doesn't include reconstruction costs, so let's just round it up to an even fifty billion for $505 billion.

But the fun doesn't stop there! The deficit figures they posted, in continuing with the shameful accounting trick that both parties have shamelessly used, figure in money borrowed from the Social Security surplus to hide the actual size of the shortfall. So add in another $160 billion dollars or so, and now we're up to $665 billion dollars. And given these guys' track record on forecasting such things, you should expect at least one or two more upward revisions before the official figures come out. And even they admit that next year will be worse than this one.

Wait! It gets better still!

The far bigger problems, though, are down the road. The administration projects that things will improve dramatically after the next two years, with deficits dropping to 1.7 percent of GDP by 2008. These figures benefit from projected spending levels that other budget experts see as entirely unrealistic. Moreover, this analysis ignores costs that will kick in later. The administration's projections conveniently cut off in 2008, before many of the costs of the tax cuts start to pile up -- especially if the administration gets its way and the supposedly temporary cuts are made permanent. Its projections also ignore the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax, and the larger problem of dealing with Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Bolten's former colleagues at Goldman Sachs project deficits totaling $4.5 trillion over the next decade.

The total federal debt, according to the National Debt Clock stood at just under 6.7 trillion dollars this morning. It took us over 225 years to run up that total. Now we are going to add on about 2/3 of that figure in just ten years. Impressive.

Of course, the Bush economic team would have you believe that absolute deficit numbers are misleading and they do have a point. After all, a million dollar credit card bill is one thing to Bill Gates and quite another to most of the rest of us. However, as the estimable Billmon illustrates quite clearly, even figuring it as a percentage of GDP or of private savings, we are in terrible budgetary shape.

Even if the Democrats succeed at knocking Bush out of office next year, the size of the mess that they will inherit from this crowd is simply staggering. If this was your accountant who had handled your finances this poorly, you'd bring suit. If it was your spouse, you'd kill him/her while they slept out of anger and a need for the insurance money. Republicans everywhere should be ashamed to even try and defend this debacle. This level of mismanagement borders on criminality, which should be no surprise coming from the good buddies of former Enron CEO (and inexplicably, still a free man) Ken Lay.

CEO presidency, indeed. If this is what "the adults" being in charge looks like, I'd like to have the kids back, thanks.

Finally some good news out of Palestine.

Israeli troops rescue taxi driver

In a dramatic rescue late yesterday, Israeli commandos stormed a house in the West Bank where Palestinians had been holding an abducted taxi driver since Friday and freed him without harm, officials said. The driver, Eliyahu Goral, was being held near the town of Ramallah by Palestinian criminals who had tried to hand over their hostage to one of the militant groups operating in the West Bank but could find no takers, according to Israeli television.

I think most people expected that, at best, they would find this guy's corpse. Interesting that the kidnappers couldn't find any takers among the militant groups operating in Palestine. You'd expect them to have worked that part out ahead of time. Perhaps not the best and brightest involved here, you think?

...drip...drip...drip...

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel:

"Listen, it wasn't just the CIA involved here," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska. "We had the vice president and his office involved, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, [National Security Adviser] Condi Rice, [Secretary of State Colin] Powell's people. This wasn't just a one-man show."

Hagel voted to give Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq, but he told reporters last week the Bush administration's case for war was looking "weaker and weaker." Monday, he told CNN, "There's a cloud hanging over this administration."

"Anybody who knows anything about this understands that we didn't go to war because of 16 words in a speech," he said. "But this is a part of a bigger mosaic here, a bigger framing of an issue that we need to know more about."

Silvio Rocks!

The dignified Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi adds fire to the burning separated at birth rumors...

Another swing and a miss

Another thread unravels. Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University writes the following letter to the Guardian:

You quote Mr Blair's statement to parliament (Leaders, July 12) that "if he [Saddam] were able to purchase fissile material illegally, it would only be a year or two" before Iraq possessed a nuclear weapon. But uranium ore is not fissile material. If it were, Niger would be a nuclear state.

Uranium ore contains just 0.7% of the fissile isotope uranium 235 and to make nuclear weapons this fraction has to be increased to 90% in an enrichment plant. The US and the UK knew Iraq did not possess any enrichment plants, since they were all dismantled by UN inspectors before 1995.

So what if Iraq sought the supply of uranium from Africa? Iraq already has hundreds of tons of uranium at its disposal. Without enrichment facilities this material is useless for nuclear weapons.

When I reviewed the September dossier for the London Review of Books last year, I wrote that "it is also very possible that this African story is an intelligence sting: those with long memories can remember the capacitors destined for Iraq found at Heathrow in 1990 which turned out to be an FBI sting". According to the CIA, the intelligence sting this time seems to have originated in London.

Add this to the statement by Joseph Wilson, the man who was sent to Niger by the CIA at the Office of the Vice President's request to investigate the rumors:

Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.

The idea that neither of these complications to the story ever occurred to the administration when they were formulating their case is just laughable. Simply put, they knew full well that this story was false, and then went about constructing their "sixteen words" about it in the most deceptive manner possible, while maintaining "technical" truth by dropping in the "British intelligence has learned" as an appoggiatura.

But then, as Steve Soto points out, that has been this administration's modus operandi since long before l'affaire Iraq.

Getting the story straight. Sort of.

At Eschaton, Lambert summarizes everything you need to know about this Washington Post article:

... Bush's position was at odds with those of his own aides. ... The president's assertion ... appeared to contradict the events. ... Administration officials have responded with evolving and sometimes contradictory statements ... The administration has offered changing explanations ... Bush's remarks added to contradictions that have been presented by administration officials ... Fleischer's words yesterday contradicted his assertion a week earlier ...

Mm-mmm! Smells like moral clarity.

Intelligence Unglued

At the Nation Institute, Tom Engelhardt publishes an open memo from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to the president. They present a jarring rundown of the intelligence failures and abuses and make three suggestions:

1. Fire Dick Cheney.
2. Appoint Brent Scowcroft to head an independent investigation into the use and abuse of intelligence regarding Iraq.
3. Get UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq.

Worth the read, along with Tom's comments that precede it.

...drip...drip...drip...

CBS News: Bush Knew Iraq Info Was False

Senior administration officials tell CBS News the President’s mistaken claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was included in his State of the Union address -- despite objections from the CIA.

Before the speech was delivered, the portions dealing with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were checked with the CIA for accuracy, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin. CIA officials warned members of the President’s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.

"There is no final draft of history."

At the National Archives, employees were moving Harry Truman's book library when they made a whopping find.

The account is the most revealing of 42 handwritten entries in a diary that until now, was mistakenly catalogued and filed with the book collection of the Truman Library. It remained in the stacks, apparently undisturbed, for 38 years until library staff began moving the collection earlier this year.

Sent to Truman as a gift from the president of the Real Estate Board of New York Inc., the slim volume bears the board's name on the cover, and the first 160 pages contain member listings and advertisements. "Unless you look at the papers in the back of the book and see President Truman's handwriting, it doesn't look like a diary," said Ray Geselbracht, archivist at the Truman Library in Independence, Mo.

Excerpts here. One big revelation that Truman had always denied: he did approach Eisenhower about running as a Democrat with Truman as his VP, fearing that Douglas MacArthur would run on the Republican ticket.

People voted for him for president?

And Taylor, too.

Some comedians are too far ahead of their time for the audiences to really get the joke. Lenny Bruce. Andy Kaufman. Pat Robertson.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson accused President Bush of "undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels" by asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, recently indicted for war crimes, to step down.

"How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,'" Robertson said Monday on "The 700 Club," broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.

How dare he indeed? (coughArafatcough)

"It's one thing to say, we will give you money if you step down and we will give you troops if you step down, but just to order him to step down? He doesn't work for us." Robertson, a Bush supporter who has financial interests in Liberia, said he believes the State Department has "mismanaged the situation in nation after nation after nation" in Africa.

"So we're undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country," he said in the broadcast.

Heh heh heh. That ol' Pat. He's one funny, funny fellow.

"Frankly, the president's call for Taylor to step down immediately is not wise, because if Taylor leaves immediately, the country will descend into chaos," he told the paper.

Well, I suppose that is a valid concern, except that when you have no running water or streetlights and rebels are attacking your capital, I'd say you already hit the state of chaos some time ago. And as this story says, "Mr. Taylor has been singled out for spreading chaos throughout West Africa."

Heh heh. Crazy ol' Pat. He cracks me up.

In the war crimes indictment, Mr. Taylor was described somewhat differently: in the Sierra Leone war, it said, "victims were routinely shot, hacked to death and burned to death." The indictment also noted that "mutilations included cutting off limbs and carving" the initials of rebel groups on the victims.

Mr. Taylor originally was a rebel warlord in his own country and his accusers say that when he came to power he formed alliances with groups in neighboring countries, including Sierra Leone, where he was accused of supporting a war on civilians that left more than 200,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands maimed or raped in the late 1990's.

Mr. Taylor escaped from an American prison in 1985 while awaiting extradition to Liberia on embezzlement charges. Starting in 1989, he led a seven-year insurgency against his predecessor, a military dictator and onetime American ally named Samuel K. Doe, before being elected president in 1997.

From Christianity Today:

In an interview yesterday, Robertson told Cooperman that Freedom Gold was intended to fund humanitarian and evangelical efforts in the country, such as a February 2002 Liberia for Jesus rally, where Taylor reportedly told 65,000 of his subjects, "I am not your president. Jesus is!"

"There are people who say that's phony baloney, but I thought it was sincere," Robertson told Cooperman. "He definitely has Christian sentiments, although you hear of all these rumors that he's done this or done that.

Hee hee. Rumors. He's killing me. What a card...

Steve Verdon Has an Opinion

Apostropher: Self Admitted Liar?

Previous opinions:
Sanford Wagner

Economic Performance by Party

Dwight Meredith at PLA gave this list of employment growth by president since 1929:

1) Roosevelt (1933-45): +5.3%
2) Johnson (1963-69): +3.8%
3) Carter (1977-81): +3.1%
4) Truman: (1945-53): +2.5%
5) Kennedy (1961-63): +2.5%
6) Clinton (1993-2001): +2.4%
7) Nixon (1969-75): +2.2%
8) Reagan (1981-89): +2.1%
9) Ford (1975-77): +1.1%
10) Eisenhower (1953-61): +0.9%
11) Bush (1989-93): +0.6%
12) Bush (2001-present): -0.7%
13) Hoover (1929-33): -9.0%

The interesting and obvious trend: #1-#6 are Democrats, #7-#13 are Republicans. No Republican in the modern era has produced jobs at the rate of even the worst-performing Democrat. Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information took issue with the meaningfulness of the list, saying, in effect, that just pulling out one statistic obscures the larger picture of economic performance, which is a fair criticism. So Dwight went back and pulled more into the analysis, which actually bolstered his argument, rather than tempering it.

On chance:

If my math is correct, the probability of every Democrat outranking every Republican through random chance is about 0.05% or about a 1 in 2,000 underdog.

On external factors:

Jane argues that external factors may have had more influence on the rankings than policy. She is certainly right that external factors may be influential. Jane mentions the following:

Reagan was the unlucky bastard whose Fed chief had to shut down the party by raising short term interest rates to 20% to get the inflation under control, which sadly hurt his employment numbers. Eisenhower too had to induce a recession to tamp down inflation. GBI got the S&L crisis and GBII got a collapsing asset price bubble.

Putting aside the fact that Paul Volker was appointed as Chairman of the Fed by Jimmy Carter, every president faces external factors. Carter, Nixon and Ford faced rising energy prices as OPEC exercised its muscle. Clinton inherited high budget deficits, spiraling health care costs and faced both Asian and Mexican financial crises. It is the job of Presidents to overcome external problems, not use them as excuses for poor performance.

On almost any other economic measure:

Jane’s larger point is that there is a weak link between presidential policies and any one measure of economic performance and, therefore, we should be very careful not to place too much emphasis on any one data set. Jane is surely correct on that point.

After I became interested in the issue of economic performance by the political party of the president, I looked at unemployment, inflation, GDP growth, overall federal spending and federal non-defense spending, budget deficits, and increases in federal non-defense employees. Others have looked at stock market returns.

The performance under Democratic presidents was superior to the performance under Republicans in each of those measures.

Ka-boom. In any event, it is time to lay to rest the canard that Republicans are better stewards of the economy. They just don't have much evidence to support that claim. And kudos to Dwight for the statistical heavy lifting.

Terrence J. Who?

Well, of course it was too good to be true, and I hedged because it seemed so. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made that somebody high up enough to be in White House meetings would be google-invisible. Terrence J. Wilkerson isn't a CIA consultant and he isn't named Terrence J. Wilkerson. But damn if he didn't pull an elaborate one over on CapitolHillBlue. Twenty years - now that's milking it for all it's worth.

The New Enemy

Now that the Bush administration's twisting and concealing of intelligence is coming back to bite them in the ass, the new policy for dealing with it is becoming clear: the CIA is anti-American.

The U.S. military has captured an Iraqi intelligence officer who may have met in Prague with a key al Qaeda hijacker five months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. officials confirmed last night. The military captured the intelligence officer, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, last week in Iraq, the officials said.

Czech authorities said in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Ani had met in Prague with hijacker Mohamed Atta in April 2001, but the FBI and the CIA later determined there was no evidence that Atta left the United States and traveled to or from the Czech Republic during the time he supposedly met with al-Ani. Czech authorities, who initially told the Bush administration they believed al-Ani and Atta had met to plot the bombing of the Prague offices of Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Iraq, subsequently reported that they were no longer certain of the meeting.

[...]

Richard Perle, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board who has contended al Qaeda and Iraq are linked, said he is hopeful al-Ani's capture will lead to a corroboration of his stance. "If he chose to, he could confirm the meeting with Atta," Perle said. "It would be nice to see that laid to rest. There's a lot he could tell us. Of course, a lot depends on who is doing the interrogating," said Perle, adding he fears that if it were the CIA, it could skew the interrogation so as to play down evidence that the alleged meeting with Atta occurred.

After poring over travel records, the agency said it could find no evidence that the meeting occurred. Perle, a longtime agency critic, has said CIA officials failed to give proper weight to the evidence that the pair met. CIA spokesman Bill Harlow described Perle's charge as absurd. "His comments do a disservice to all the men and women of the CIA who every day call it as they see it, not as some wish it to be," Harlow said.

One agency official, who asked not to be quoted by name, denied that the CIA failed to give proper weight to evidence suggesting that Atta and al-Ani had met. "We're open to the possibility that they met, but we need to be presented with something more than Mr. Perle's suspicions," the official said. "Rather than us being predisposed, it sounds like he is. He's just shopping around for an interrogator who will cook the books to his liking."

The intelligence agencies are pissed off and aren't about to let themselves be anybody's scapegoat. Ditto with the career State Department folks. The knives will be coming out shortly. This could get ugly. Or beautiful, in the eye of this beholder. As for Perle, I think that smell I'm noticing is panic...

Well, that explains it.

Turns out Bush isn't a liar. He's just f***ing nuts.

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

"The report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."

Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said. "He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

Whoa. Stop the presses. Now, google returns only one hit on this guy's name, and I'm assuming it's a different Terrance Wilkinson that was directing movies for Disabled Peoples International a decade ago in New South Wales. And I've yet to see this confirmed elsewhere, so this could turn out to be complete fiction. If it is not fiction, however, that presents a couple of options (three if you go with the obvious one and just admit he's a habitual liar). First option: Bush is 'round-the-bend delusional and believes he has superhuman powers of cognition. This option also includes the possibility that Bush "knew" they were there because it was one more thing that God told him in their late-night policy sessions. Second option: he's such a walking sucker that he believed Ahmed Chalabi's hot insider tips over the entire US intelligence and foreign service community.

I can't decide which scenario is more frightening. Granted, Chalabi can be convincing. He did, after all, manage to successfully embezzle millions fom the bank he once owned in Jordan, slipping away to London just as the Jordanians caught on. If he ever sets foot in Jordan again, he'll begin serving the 32-year prison sentence they handed down in absentia. And he did manage to get Dick Cheney to restart the federal dollars flowing to his Iraqi National Congress after the State Department discovered that 2 of the 4 million they'd already received had vanished into thin air.

But given that track record, and the wealth of inside info the president has at his fingertips, if Bush hadn't wised up to Chalabi by then, I might just feel safer knowing Dubya was simply insane, because otherwise he's the biggest, easiest mark in world politics today. Either way, if this pans out, then the plausible deniability angle that Ari Fleischer tried and failed miserably to spin yesterday is deader than Strom Thurmond. (link via Daily Kos)

Slave to the Rhythm

No safe time of month for sex: Ovulation occurs up to 3 times a month

In a finding that is expected to rewrite medical textbooks, Canadian researchers have discovered that, for many women hoping to avoid pregnancy, there is no safe time to have sex. For 50 years, doctors have believed that about a dozen follicles, or egg sacs, grow at one time during a woman's menstrual cycle. From this group, only one follicle actually bursts and releases an egg, while the others shrivel and die. But in a finding that left even the researchers "flabbergasted," University of Saskatchewan scientists found this pattern of follicular development occurs two to three separate times during a woman's menstrual cycle. What's more, 40 per cent of women have the biological potential to ovulate more than once during a cycle.

[...]

Normally, women have a 28-day menstrual cycle, and the belief was that most women ovulate once, around day 14. The cycle begins on the first day of bleeding. By about the fifth day, the theory held, about 15 to 20 egg sacs start to mature and then, by day 14, the most mature follicle ruptures, releasing an egg. But those assumptions were largely based on blood samples and menstrual diaries. "We actually looked at the ovaries to find out what they were doing during the cycles," Pierson says.

The team tracked 50 women with normal menstrual cycles who volunteered to undergo high-resolution ultrasound for a month so researchers could follow the fate of individual follicles. They found follicles grow in waves "like you see in the ocean," Pierson says. Forty per cent of women had multiple, major waves, while 60 per cent had minor waves, followed by a major wave.

The finding helps explain how some women get pregnant while on the birth control pill - the week off of the active hormones can be just enough time to drop an egg - and why there are so many Catholics. The researchers say this discovery will eventually lead to more effective contraceptives, but in the meantime, your best bet is either sterilization for you or your partner, or only sleeping with men with an established track record of good genes and parenting skills.

My son is handsome, healthy, top of his class, and extraordinarily well-behaved, by the way...

"Turn me loose, before I kick the natural stuffing out of you!"

Ever wonder why Northern Iraq is so much quieter than the rest of the country? I have a hunch that it's because they know that the real war for northern Iraq hasn't started yet. The real war isn't between the United States and Saddam, it's between Turkey, the Kurds, and the northern Arabs. No point in wasting bullets on G.I.'s - they are going to need them when and if the Marines leave. If we didn't have troops sitting in northern Iraq, the Turkish military would already have rolled entire divisions through it, and our rapidly deteriorating relations with Turkey are a very bad omen.

The Turkish army chief of staff, General Hilmi Ozkok, frustrated by the waning Turkish influence in northern Iraq, vented his fury at the US yesterday, declaring a "crisis of confidence" between the two countries. His outburst in Ankara came after 11 Turkish commandos were arrested by US soldiers during a weekend raid. Newspaper headlines in Turkey condemned the US forces as "Rambos" and "ugly Americans".

[...]

A Kurdish intelligence official claimed that the Turkish soldiers had been linked to a plot to assassinate the newly elected governor of Kirkuk to destabilise the region so that Turkish forces would be needed to restore order. American soldiers seized 15kg of explosives, sniper rifles, grenades and maps of Kirkuk, with circles drawn around positions near the governor's building when they raided Turkish offices in Sulaimaniya. The episode has stirred old Washington resentment at Turkey's refusal to support the war and roused new concern about its designs on Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq.

Ironically, the US military presence in the north is probably all that is keeping a bloody war from erupting (or more accurately, re-igniting) there. So far.

Kurdish guerrillas opened fire on a convoy of vehicles carrying a provincial governor on Tuesday killing two Turkish soldiers in troubled southeastern Turkey, officials and witnesses said. Another soldier was injured in the attack launched by around 10 gunmen from dense forest surrounding a road some 22 miles east of the town of Tunceli, according to a Reuters reporter who was traveling in the convoy.

Turkey has launched several operations in recent weeks to track down hundreds of Kurdish militants it says are returning from the mountains of northern Iraq to Turkey after the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein earlier this year. Tunceli governor Ali Cafer Akyuz escaped unharmed from the 10-minute firefight between the militants and Turkish soldiers guarding the 13-vehicle convoy. Some 5,000 soldiers with air support were mobilized in the hunt for the assailants, none of whom were reported killed or injured.

Turkey's powerful military has fought a decades-long battle against armed Kurdish separatists at the cost of around 30,000 lives, most of them Kurds. The fighting has largely subsided since the 1999 capture of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of rebel group the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), now known as KADEK. Turkey stations more than 1,000 soldiers inside the border with northern Iraq in a controversial deployment it says is necessary to guard its territory from attack by KADEK militants.

Reminds me of a story:

"And then you're always getting into something that's none of your business," says Brer Fox, says he. "Who asked you to come and strike up a conversation with this Tar-Baby? And who stuck you up the way you are? Nobody in the round world. You just jammed yourself into that Tar-Baby without waiting for an invitation," says Brer Fox, says he. "There you are and there you'll stay until I fix up a brushpile and fire it up, 'cause I'm going to barbecue you today, for sure," says Brer Fox, says he.

It's starting to look like we're three limbs deep in the Tar-Baby already, except we don't really have a briar patch to get thrown into now, do we?

Are we already exporting Iraqi oil?

Iraqis are fuming at having to wait in interminable lines for scarce gasoline while standing on top of the world's second largest proven oil reserves, and you could hardly blame them. Boy, are they going to be pissed off if this guy is right. Read the article for a bit of his work history and I think you'll agree that he's not a fellow whose opinion is dismissed by anybody.

On May 25, while scanning the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program images pipelined into his desktop from 450 miles in orbit, Hank Brandli skidded at a nighttime photo of Iraq. It looked familiar. But not exactly. Brandli retrieved another DMSP image he'd archived from May 3. He compared the two. The most recent photo showed a blazing corridor of light running the length of Kuwait, south to north, all the way to the Iraqi border. The image wasn't there on May 3.

"It's going right up to Iraq's oil fields," says the retired Air Force colonel from his home in Palm Bay. "Maybe I'm full of s---. Maybe all they're doing is building a highway to put in McDonald's and sell hamburgers. But why go that way? I think we're in bed with Kuwait. I think we're pumping oil out of Iraq to pay for this war."

That's an audacious observation. Especially considering those labyrinthine lines of exasperated motorists waiting to gas up at the fuel pumps in Baghdad. Not to mention the fact that Iraq's infrastructure officially won't be capable of exporting oil for another week or so.

[...]

At the State Department in Washington, D.C., David Staples on the Future of Iraqi Projects desk says he doesn't know if Iraq's oil is flowing into Kuwait. He referred the query to the Defense Department. A DoD spokesman suggested contacting the Office of Coalition of Provisional Authority (OCPA) in Baghdad. OCPA was not immediately available for comment.

Speaking of Kuwait, looks like the neo-cons' divine mission to roll back political Islam in the Middle East is starting to have an effect. But maybe not the one they'd been expecting.

Kuwaiti voters ousted most of Parliament's Westernized liberals in favor of fundamentalist Muslims and supporters of the royal-led Cabinet, results showed Sunday. The shift raised fears of spreading extremism in one of the United States' key Arab allies. The government's firmer control of the legislature following Saturday's vote makes it easier to pass long-delayed economic reform plans, including the sale of state utilities, in a country that has relied on oil wealth to maintain pampered lifestyles.

[...]

Liberals and their supporters -- who have called for allowing women to vote -- won just three seats, down from 14. [...] The poor showing by liberal candidates was a cause for joy for leading Islamist Abdul-Razzak al-Shayeji, who believes they paid the price for backing the United States. Liberals sided with the U.S.-led war on terrorism and wanted the Kuwaiti government to clamp down on a perceived "culture of hate" promoted by extremists against the West.

Now is as good a time as any to remind everybody that Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait was precipitated by Kuwait slant-drilling into Iraq's oilfields and selling the oil to the US below market prices. And interestingly, from the Kuwaiti election article:

The outgoing Parliament strongly opposed privatization, the introduction of income taxes and allowing foreign companies to develop Kuwait's northern oil fields. Most lawmakers feared the steps would mean monopolies, the sacking of Kuwaiti civil servants and handing Kuwait's only natural resource to foreign firms after decades of nationalization.

So, if this all pans out, we're secretly pumping Iraqi oil into Kuwait, who is selling it on the open market as Kuwaiti oil and covertly helping fund the American occupation. And the new parliament makeup clears the way for Kuwait to start taking bids from American oil companies as well. You think just maybe the Hallliburton subsidiary hired to put out oil fires (fires that mostly didn't occur) is involved?

Just when I thought it was safe to go ahead and recycle my tinfoil helmet...

(first link via Road to Surfdom)

Spaniards are horny.

Time for the running of the bulls in Pamplona, which can only mean one thing: here comes PETA.

Not that they don't often have a legitimate point, but has there ever been a protest organization that was more difficult to take seriously? I understand the power of humor in politics, but for the sake of your cause, could I suggest a little more Bill Hicks and a little less Carrot Top?

Mullet Haiku!

This distributor
Cap is from my ex-girlfriend's
El Camino. Bitch.

(from the SFGate's Mark Morford's email newsletter)

You know why I can mock the mullet people without fear? Because once, I was their king. This was me circa 1990. By posting these pictures publicly and voluntarily, I am henceforth immune to all accusations of taking myself too seriously (plus, y'know, the eighties had only just ended, so appropriate slack must be cut).

These days, I look respectable enough to take home to your mama. As long as she doesn't bring up politics or religion, that is.

Norwegian, um, comedy

It's still obscure to me exactly what the Norwegian Quart Festival celebrates, though in trying to find out, I discovered that a-ha is still topping the charts in Norway, Germany and Estonia. The big news out of the festival on Wednesday was a Norwegian "radio comedian" who made a bit of a splash.

Animal rights activists are furious after a Norwegian comedian attached an engine to a dead pig and used it as a boat. Kristopher Schau and his colleagues also tried blowing up rats and hamsters with helium to make what they called "organic balloons". The animals exploded and the remains splattered over the audience at the Quart Festival in Kristiansand, reports Nettavisen. After the boat stunt, Mr Schau told the audience: "This is one of the greatest things I have ever seen."

So the next day, how does one top pigboating and organic balloons?

At a new show on Thursday, Schau soaked the pig [apostropher: yes, the same pig] in petrol before setting fire to it while making a flaming speech against sausages, saying "We are talking about squeezing pig's tissue into the pig's own guts, then cooking it and giving it to children," Schau said.

The entertainers had originally planned to serve the barbequed meat to the audience. "But then we got a list from the local medical centre with all the diseases one could get by eating this meat, so we decided against it," said Schau. On Thursday the rest of the show consisted of putting a white BMW at sea, voting on the festival's nicest penis and the annual enema competion. "The show on Friday will be gigantic and it will be better than anything we have done before," said Schau.

Guess it takes a lot more work to be outré than it used to.

Happy Independence Day

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

They brought 'em. Now what?

Wednesday, July 2nd: George Bush challenges would-be Iraqi attackers to "bring 'em on."

Thursday, July 3rd:

(via Shock and Awe)

More responses:

Sen. John Kerry: "Unwise, unworthy of the office and his role as commander in chief, and unhelpful to American soldiers under fire. The deteriorating situation in Iraq requires less swagger and more thoughtfulness and statesmanship."

Rep. Dick Gephardt: "He's president -- you don't taunt the enemy. You try to keep our troops safe, you try to help them in what they're doing .... This phony, macho business is not getting us where we need to be."

Sen. Bob Graham: "[That] may be appropriate for a referee in a Las Vegas boxing match, but not for the man we trust to lead our men and women who are in harm's way."

Gov. Howard Dean: "These men and women are risking their lives every day, and the president who sent them on this mission showed tremendous insensitivity to the dangers they face."

You Will Respect My Authori-tie!

While I understand the communicable disease thing, a life sentence seems mightily out of proportion for spitting on a police officer.

An Oklahoma man, arrested on suspicion of beating his wife, faced a year in prison and a fine. But when he spat in an arresting officer's face, he got a life sentence instead. John Carl Marquez, 36, was convicted of "placing bodily fluid upon a government employee," a felony that can carry a life sentence because of the possibility of transmitting a potentially deadly disease. State judge April Sellers White sentenced Marquez this week even though Marquez and the officer tested negative for any communicable disease.

Patently bizarre

Scientific American runs down a few of the patents awarded recently by the US Patent and Trademark Office. They note that the Wrigley Co. got a patent for delivering Viagra through chewing gum, but somebody else snapped up the patent for a semen taste-enhancement dietary supplement. I see synergy potential here, like the toothpastes that whiten your teeth and fight cavities. Brave new world, indeed.

The patent awarded for the "warren portal identification and tunnel resident disgorger system" seems odd, since it's just backing a jet engine up to a cave to asphyxiate terrorists hiding therein with exhaust fumes. Alternatively, the patent notes, you could run the engine at cruise speed, causing "significant airflow and force to be applied to those persons and objects in the warren. Therefore, the terrorists are assaulted through their sense of touch as they are blown about in the warren." Assaulted through their sense of touch? That's an odd phrase to describe being slammed into rocks at high speed.

The registered pedigree stuffed animals patent is just downright creepy. "A pair of opposite sex 'parent' toy animals are sold together with a serial number by which the parent's genotype and phenotype may be identified. The owner or owners of the 'parent' toy animals may register the parents with the manufacturer and subsequently request 'breeding' of the animals, whereupon the manufacturer makes at least one 'offspring' toy animal randomly selected from a litter having phenotypes [traits] determined according to the registered genotypes of the parents and the Mendelian laws of inheritance."

But the winner, awarded to Hendricus G. Loos of Laguna Beach, California, is the patent for nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors. A pulsed electromagnetic field, from either a television set or a computer, can be created to manipulate the human nervous system, inducing sensations that range from relaxation to a "tonic smile," to sexual excitement or "sudden loose stool." The ability to create sudden loose stools in, say, teenagers giving you the finger in the car next to you, or GWB on a campaign stop . . . now for THAT I would drop some serious coin. Long live the new flesh.

"Bring Them On"

"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is 'bring them on'." - GWB

It's easy to spout a bunch of cowboy rhetoric when you're halfway around the world from the killing. If these were your friends or loved ones, you might have the good sense and taste to think before you open your mouth. We're bringing home about one dead soldier a day, most of whom had just barely reached adulthood, and the commander-in-chief, who declared combat operations over two months ago, is publicly egging on more attacks?

What an ass.

Update (9:40 am): From Yahoo News, some responses to Bush's macho bluster:

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."

"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander — let alone the commander in chief — invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."

Rep. Dick Gephardt , D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric. We should be focused on a long-term security plan that reduces the danger to our military personnel," said Gephardt, who is running for president. "We need a serious attempt to develop a postwar plan for Iraq, and not more shoot-from-the-hip one-liners."

On Tuesday, assailants traveling in a vehicle in central Baghdad fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a U.S. military vehicle, wounding three soldiers. Another grenade slammed into a U.S. truck on a road south of Baghdad, injuring three soldiers, one of whom died at a field hospital overnight.

The man who brought the flute to jazz.

Herbie Mann, Jazz Musician, Is Dead at 73

Cohen on Coulter

Richard Cohen in yesterday's Washington Post:

I am happy to report that Ann Coulter has lost her mind. The evidence for this is her most recent book, "Treason," a nearly unreadable slog through every silly thing anyone on the left has ever said. Coulter conflates dissent with treason, opposition with treason, being wrong with treason, being right with treason and just about anything she doesn't like with treason. If the book were a Rorschach test, she would be institutionalized.

[...]

It is also good news for liberals. It suggests that the right, at least the hard right, has finally dumbed out. This is the predictable cycle for all movements. They start with a genuine grievance and proceed from there to the totally ridiculous -- or, in some cases, to the downright macabre.

In some ways, the nutso American brand of archconservatism mirrors traditional anti-Semitism. Jew-haters proclaim that Jews control the media, international finance and almost everything else of importance -- but, somehow, Jews have accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally, the mass murder of the Holocaust. It is the same with American liberals. They control everything, and yet, somehow, the White House, both houses of Congress and, with the exception of several delis in New York, the entire business community are in the hands of conservatives. It's hard to figure.

It's not that hard to figure, really. The woman is a nitwit blissfully devoid of social graces or any sense of proportion. Hell, her most recent crusade is to restore the good name of Joseph McCarthy, a "brave man" who was "cut down" by the Left (which apparently includes the Eisenhower administration, those sneaky commie bastards). Such wisdom isn't surprising, of course, from a woman who believes voting for the Democratic Party is a form of treason, or who believes that the country has been decidedly worse off for having given women the vote, or that the answer to Middle East violence is to convert them all to Christianity. In case you're not well-acquainted with Miss Coulter, those are not distortions or taken out of context. Here are a few more lovely peeks inside her head from an October 2001 Washington Monthly article:

The "backbone of the Democratic Party" is a "typical fat, implacable welfare recipient" --syndicated column 10/29/99

To a disabled Vietnam vet: "People like you caused us to lose that war." --MSNBC

"Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores." --Salon.com 11/16/00

"I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote." --Hannity & Colmes, 8/17/99

"I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote." --Politically Incorrect, 2/26/01

"If you don't hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don't love your country." --George, 7/99

"I think we had enough laws about the turn-of-the-century. We don't need any more." Asked how far back would she go to repeal laws, she replied, "Well, before the New Deal...[The Emancipation Proclamation] would be a good start." --Politically Incorrect 5/7/97

"My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that's because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism." --MSNBC 2/8/97

Or these lovelies from coulterwatch.com:

"Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do."

"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn into outright traitors."

Explain to me how the entire Left in this country is tarred and expected to apologize when one assistant professor of anthropology from New York - that nobody had ever heard of previously - makes a surpassingly silly statement, but this shrieking harridan may as well pitch a tent at the studios of the cable news networks, who eagerly lap up her bile like pigs at a trough? The Ann Coulters and Michael Savages can scream about "liberal treason" all they like, but the only point they prove in doing so is that the defining characteristics of today's conservative movement are sociopathy, bigotry, and paranoia.

Pain is a game.

Following up on the Painstation post below, partner-in-crime Rick alerted me to the DIY instructions for turning your Xbox controller into a similar device. Vibrating controllers? Screw that noise. If that's your speed, go join the Girl Scouts. Replace that wimpy rattler with 20,000 volts from a pest shocker and take it like a man.

Now, for comparison, a stun gun packs about 100,000 volts of gaming fun, but tends to end the game quickly. So 20,000 is enough to deliver a fair amount of unpleasantness, but still leave you conscious and in control of your bowels (sorta like Celine Dion). The link gives the instructions on how to perform the mod, all the while warning (wink wink) that nobody except a licensed electrician should ever do it. I especially liked this warning:

We made sure to keep the shocker in one hand! You never want to split the ground/voltage between two hands. If you do, the voltage runs through your heart, which is bad. As in really, really bad. It could stop your heart.

Lovely! Thousands of fourteen year old boys got a rise in their pants when they read that. "Dude, we have got to make one of those. I'll go get my dad's solder gun." Next up, the arcade machine that kicks you in the nuts every time you lose a man and the GameBoy that randomly shoots barbed hooks out the back.

You Vill Giff Me Your Knückles!

The Painstation. Be sure to watch the trailer.

It's a two-man console Pong game, but one hand stays on a sensor field - the "Pain Execution Unit" - that delivers shocks, burns, and whips with a metal wire across the knuckles when targets are hit. Game ends when one player can't take it any more and lifts his or her hand from the PEU. I found this via Beth at Navel, who muses:

The bit on On The Media gave an explaination of the device, talked a little about reaction to/criticism of it, and then interviewed the designers. As if the concept of a Painstation was not wild enough, the whole situation got pushed over the top when one of the designers first spoke in a distinct, commanding, German accent. Too, too perfect.

Two German guys design a gaming console that inflicts pain on the players. Beautiful. The interviewer brought up the concept of getting pleasure out of inflicting pain and then asked if the designers ever considered designing a console that would inflict pleasure on the players instead. The designer who answered her said, without a moment of hesitation, no. That was never a consideration. And then he laughed. And it was art.

Happy Canada Day!

Today is Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the founding of the central Canadian government on July 1, 1867. I have long had a deep fondness for our neighbors to the north; as a college student in 1990, I ran the UNC-UToronto exchange program one year with my buddy Dave and a fellow named Karleton Fyfe (who, sadly, was on the first plane that hit the World Trade Center). My view of Canadians had mostly been summed up by a line from a Kids in the Hall skit: "No, I'm Canadian. It's like an American, but without the handgun."

But recently, the divergence between American and Canadian public policy has grown so stark that I'm not sure the line fits any longer. Legalized marijuana, gay marriage, refusal to join in invading Iraq, strict gun control, universal health care, no death penalty, more liberal immigration and stricter environmental policies. Good lord, I'm in the wrong country!

At one time all you needed to know was that America was created through revolution under the slogan "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Canada was born of evolution and compromise under the slogan "peace, order and good government." America invented itself, Canada sort of happened.

[...]

Adams found that Americans were adopting more conservative stances while showing more pessimism about the world. Canadians were moving in the opposite direction. Adams considers attitudes about "patriarchy" to be particularly revealing. He asked Americans and Canadians their view of the statement: "The father of the family must be the master in his own house." In 1992, 42 percent of Americans agreed strongly or somewhat, and 26 percent of Canadians did. By 2000, 49 percent of Americans agreed, 18 percent of Canadians.

Adams and other scholars point to the varying influence of religion in the two societies. Two-thirds of Americans think religion is important, while a third of Canadians do, according to polls. Nearly half of Americans say they attend church weekly, compared with one in five Canadians. "We don't have Pat Buchanans and we don't have powerful religious movements shaping social policy the way you do," says Neil Nevitte, professor of political science at the University of Toronto, who also has measured national values.

On religion and related moral questions, the United States is off the charts when compared with other industrialized societies, say those who have studied the subject. America looks most like Ireland. Canada is more in line with Scandinavia, and the rest of Europe.

Sigh. If we don't succeed in knocking this administration out of power next year, Canada might find itself with its own southern border problem, interdicting truckfuls of half-frozen progressives...

Drug Policy and Budget Shortfalls

Mark A.R. Kleiman and David Boyum have an excellent article up at Public Interest's website entitled "Breaking the Drug-Crime Link" that attempts to sidestep the stalemated debate between the abolitionist and legalization blocs.

Thus, the question that supporters and opponents of drug prohibition endlessly debate, "Do drugs, or drug laws, cause crime?" presents a false dichotomy. The answer to both halves of the question is "Yes." In this essay, we will try to answer a more productive question: What drug policies would work best to minimize predatory crime?

That, of course, should be the million dollar question, but seldom is, precisely because of the millions of dollars involved. The "War on Drugs" (and just how inept is our government to be losing a war to inanimate objects anyhow?) has become a cash cow for too many organizations for a sane national debate on its merits and disadvantages to occur. But perhaps the nationwide state budget crises signal that the time for that debate is arriving.

Almost every state in the nation is in fiscal trouble. Unable to emulate the federal government and just run endless deficits, governors and state assemblies are scrambling to make up enormous shortfalls. University tuitions have soared, state agencies have had their budgets slashed and staffs cut, benefits have been sliced across the board, and still revenues aren't covering outlays. Sure, simple logic would dictate raising taxes, but most legislators, having been bludgeoned with the Republican "no new taxes" brickbat, are unwilling to do more than raise fees and cigarette taxes, which are hardly revenue enough.

So what's left? The single largest drain on most state coffers is Medicaid, the primary healthcare service for the poor, but as a federal mandate, most states are relatively powerless to control it. Something has to give, right? What else is costing states arms and legs? Prisons. In 1979, the US prison population was 263,000. At the beginning of this year, that number had passed 2.1 million. I'm old enough to remember 1979, so I know that there has not been an eight-fold increase in crime since then to match the eight-fold increase in inmates. Keep in mind that those numbers don't reflect the numbers on parole.

Here in North Carolina, the inmate population in mid-April was just shy of 34,000 and Locke Clifford, a member of the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, testified to the state House that "North Carolina is taking in roughly 21,000 new inmates and releasing 20,000 each year. To keep up with that pace, the state will have to spend $90 million to build a new 1,000-bed prison each year and spend more than $30 million a year to run it." Those costs are over and above what we already spend on prisons.

Where is the crime wave responsible for such a burgeoning count of prisoners? According to the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, around 13.5% of NC's prisoners (almost 4500) of them are jailed on drug charges (and fewer than 40% of those are incarcerated on trafficking charges). North Carolina makes a little over 40,000 drug arrests each year, over half of them for marijuana. Just for perspective, that puts the number of drug arrests at about the same level as the combined arrests for murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

Policing, prosecuting, and jailing drug offenders makes for a gigantic outlay. At an average of $25,000/year to house an inmate, that comes to well over one hundred million dollars a year NC spends just providing room and board for drug offenders. While jailed dealers are on ice, demand remains steady, which means somebody else fills that spot on the street. When the first guy is released, the number of dealers then doubles, driving down retail prices. This is the epitome of ass-backwards public policy, one of those frustrating situations where the enacted policy exacerbates the very problem it was supposed to address.

As the Public Interest article points out, one of the biggest downfalls of our current drug policy is the dogged refusal to look at the different risk profiles of various drugs. Nobody can doubt that legalizing methamphetamines, for example, would lead to an increase in crime; it is powerfully addictive and often produces aggressive and antisocial behavior. On the other hand, the only crime most marijuana users commit is the marijuana use itself. Yet, it accounts for over half of all drug arrests, in a state where it is technically considered decriminalized.

State assemblies are beside themselves trying to figure out how to close their revenue gaps. Sooner or later (and I think, given the size of the problem, it's probably sooner), they will have to come to the undeniable conclusion that continuing with a zero-tolerance policy for drug use is clogging their courts and prisons and killing their budgets. It is time to jettison the notion that drug use is a moral issue; it is a public policy issue. Instead of viewing it as an evil unto itself, it must be viewed as a persistent feature of modern society, like poverty or communicable disease, that can have its impact contained. Kleiman and Boyer close their article with the realistic appraisal that the US and state governments have avoided making:

No drug policy can deliver a drug-free society. But smarter policies can give us a safer one.

And one that costs far less than what we're spending currently for the unsafe one.