Posts from — February 2005

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Andante took note of a woman who accidentally carried a butcher knife through airport security screening in her purse.

That’s because all of the screeners were busy in Detroit removing fake passports for an art exhibit.

. . .The items belonged to an art group headed by Vienna artist Robert Jelinek, and included what the government described as “fantasy passports”, along with ink pads, rubber stamps and ink. They were taken from Jelinek’s luggage February 9 in Detroit as he headed for Cincinnati. . .

. . .”I think it says a lot about the condition of our world today, that everyone is understandably on the alert”, said Contemporary Arts Center director Linda Shearer.

The items were supposed to be included in the museum’s exhibit titled “State of Sabotage”, which focuses on government or corporate power over the individual. . .

Some snarky arty-type put the receipt that TSA left in Mr. Jelinek’s luggage in the space reserved for his objects.

How are fiction writers and satirists supposed to compete with this alternate reality?

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The BBC Middle East news has just been hopping: Iran blast cause remains mystery, because no one buys the several different stories that have been floated by different groups.

My guess is that it is related to the following story: US ‘using spying drones on Iran’.

When a fighter goes into combat mode the pilot dumps external fuel tanks, which lightens the aircraft and improves aerodynamics. If they launched against the drone, the explosion could have been such a fuel tank, or an air-to-air missile that failed to lock on to a target and fell to earth when it ran out of fuel.

And, of course, it has nothing to do with the September explosion which North Korea says was part of a construction project. No, it’s simply coincidence that members of the “Axis of Evil” that are suspected of developing nuclear weapons keep deciding to have large, unannounced “construction explosions”.

Bush is certainly uniting people: Iran to aid Syria against threats.

Syrian Expatriate Affairs Minister Buthaina Shaaban said she was “baffled” by the US reaction to the killing.

“To point to Syria in a terrorist act that aims at destabilizing both Syria and Lebanon is truly like blaming the US for 9/11,” she told the BBC.

The minister said Mr Hariri had been a “great ally” to Syria and his death was “a scandal against Syria and against Lebanon”.

Isn’t it nice that Dubya has managed to convince a secular Ba’athist Arabic country and a theocratic Shi’ia Persian country to subsume their differences and work together.

If you’ve finished your coffee and want something stronger, you might want to drop by the Whiskey Bar and read: Gimme That Old Time Religion, a look at Ibrahim Jaafari, the man who may become Iraq’s Prime Minister.

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The basic underlying concept in privileged communication is the right against self-incrimination, the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The assumption is you will tell your spouse, your lawyer, and your minister everything under the expectation of confidentiality. The prohibition is not a protection for said spouse, lawyer or minister; it is a protection of the rights of the suspect. The state may not compel these groups to testify. These privileges are also found in English Common Law.

Lawyers are officers of the court, which means they may not be compelled to testify about information they have about past behavior, but they must report information to prevent future crimes.

In some jurisdictions not only may these classes not be compelled to testify, they may not volunteer to testify.

Note that the privilege is prevent information from being revealed by people who are known. The claim to press privilege is based on preventing people from being revealed after the information is published. The claim is also based on the First Amendment, not the Fifth.

In the case of Cooper and Miller, they are claiming that their status as reporters should be privileged. The argument is that without the ability to shield sources, they would be unable to gather the news. I could point out that the media has no idea whether or not they can gather the news without unnamed sources because they make little effort to do so with such sources.

While it is all well and good to point to the Pentagon papers and Watergate as examples of stories that began with sources, and there are any number of stories of corporate malfeasance that began with “whistle blowers” as justification for this claim, no right is absolute.

Bob Novak revealed that convicted spy Robert Hanssen was one of his sources for several stories, and Newsweek famously outed Oliver North as the source of several leaks, after North attacked the media for printing leaks. This would indicate the media doesn’t hold to the concept of absolute protection of sources.

Some have noted that those in this case have not seen the evidence filed by the prosecutor. What lawyerly piffle. This matter is before a grand jury and all grand jury testimony is secret to protect people if there is no indictment. That some prosecutors choose to “leak” to the media and the media chooses to print those leaks doesn’t alter the fact that the testimony is secret.

Freedom of the press means the press is free to print whatever it wishes without prior restraint; it does not mean the press is not responsible for what it prints. The press has extra protection from libel suits, but it can still be sued.

I might have more sympathy for these people if they had supported Susan McDougal when she was jailed for refusing to cooperate with “The Starr Chamber” or had actually done a little reporting of the facts in the last decade.

The question is simple who is the victim? Is the “victim” the government or a faceless corporation that has been exposed as incompetent or criminal? No, the victims are a “whistle blower” and his wife. This is not a case of the media serving the general good; this is a case of the media cooperating with the government to punish an opponent of those in power.

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The Missile Defense System has failed again, but it wasn’t the same failure as the last time. Last time it failed because the fault-tolerance on the missile wasn’t “tolerant” enough, so they lowered the bar. This time the ground support equipment failed. The only thing that seems to work is the target missile. I hope that the fact that the US is skilled at throwing “skeet” makes the $8.8 billion worth it for those who back this joke. Remember: it would only cost $1 billion to update the Hubble telescope, something that actually works.

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A small reminder to one and all: “Gannon” is about White House security and the professionalism of the White House press corps. An unqualified individual was given access to one of the nation’s most secure locations. Everything else is a distraction from the real problem.

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According to an NPR report, a federal appeals court has ruled that Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times have to talk to a federal grand jury or go to jail. The case will be appealed to the Supreme Court.

A small suggestion to journalists: you would have more gravitas if you occasionally used information from people who have names and are willing allow you to use them. Background is nice, but where is the foreground?

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A prominent politician was killed by a roadside bomb, and the blame is being placed on a foreign government with a military presence in the country.

The country is Lebanon, and the country being blamed is Syria. The US has recalled its ambassador to Syria for “consultation”. At this point no one really knows much about the incident, but a lack of facts hasn’t stopped Bush before.

I see. When it happens in Lebanon, it is the fault of a foreign military presence, but not in Iraq.

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Why are you being hustled by street vendors to buy sad and drooping former roses, vegetative matter that missed the cut for bouquets, or were too late to the hospital?

Blame Esther A. Howland (1828 – 1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her guilt is writ large by the Greeting Card Association’s Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary. She imported the concept to the US from Britain to bolster her father’s stationery store in 1847.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the stationers had infiltrated school boards and imposed the now mandatory exchange in the classroom to push the low end product of Asian children and prisoners.

Seeing the success of the card merchants, the confectioners jumped on board to fill the lull between Christmas and Easter with the benefit that the bulk of purchases would be made by desperate men with less sense of taste than a golden retriever. If the box was red, heart-shaped, and said chocolate, a man would buy it.

There were at least three Saint Valentines and all were martyrs, as they should have been for the trouble they’ve caused. None are the reason for the “holiday”, only the excuse. They lived at a time when life and men were short and brutal, so the romantic aura of the holiday is pure piffle. At least one was reportedly part of a draft dodging scheme during the Roman Empire, marrying people so the men could avoid being deployed to foreign wars, bachelors being preferred for catapult fodder.

It is to be hoped that the individual who first wrote: “Roses are red, violets are blue” was eaten by rabid wolverines, or had hemorrhoids.

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Dave Neiwert at Orcinus specializes in domestic US terrorism, and the lack of a firm definition in this country as to who is a terrorist.

This CNN story talks about William Krar and reports that he had collected an arsenal:
“A raid in April found nearly two pounds of a cyanide compound and other chemicals that could create enough poisonous gas to kill everyone inside a space as large as a big-chain bookstore or a small-town civic center.

Authorities also discovered nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, more than 60 pipe bombs, machine guns, silencers and remote-controlled bombs disguised as briefcases, plus pamphlets on how to make chemical weapons, and anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-government books. ”

He was arrested and afforded all of the protections of the American criminal justice system.

Jose Padilla, a Muslim, was arrested at an airport and only a protracted legal battle has enabled him to receive some constitutional protections. He is reportedly suspected of planning to build a “dirty bomb”, in spite of the fact that he lacked the knowledge and materials to do so, and there is no physical evidence of any crime. An American citizen, he was declared an “enemy combatant” and held without charges by the military. Even the Cato Institute protested his treatment.

The US is not unique in its selective identification of terrorist.

The CBC tells us that Israeli ministers threatened by Jewish extremists. “Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer read a threatening letter to the cabinet. Had it been written by an Arab, the writer would have been jailed, he said.”

And TV New Zealand tells us of right-wing extremists who attempted an attack on Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a wedding.

“Rightists regularly heckled and threatened politicians in the days leading up to the 1995 assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish ultra-nationalist opposed to his peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians.”

For some reason it doesn’t make any difference what you do, it is your ethnicity and/or religion that would seem to determine if you are a “terrorist”.

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You may have heard about the middle-aged British couple that has finally decided to get married. One of the supposed problems is the status of the gentleman as he may become the titular head of the Church of England and he and his future wife are both divorced.

The raison d’être of the Church of England was to facilitate the divorce of the first head of the Church, Henry Tudor. Henry was certainly in favor of marriage: he had six of them, and divorce: he had two of them.

The Six Wives Of Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon [m. 1509 – 1533, Divorced], Anne Boleyn [m. 1533 – 1536, Executed], Jane Seymour [m. 1536 – 1537, Died], Anne of Cleves [m. 1540 Jan. – July, Divorced], Kathryn Howard [m. 1540 – 1542, Executed], Katherine Parr [m. 1543 – 1547, Widowed].

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Digby has an interesting post on attempts to label liberals as supporters of terrorists.

I have a few questions:

Who were the liberals that gave chemical and biological weapons to Saddam Hussein?
Who were the liberals that sold weapons to the government of Ayatollah Khomeini?
Who were the liberals that opposed going after bin Laden following the bombing of the USS Cole?
Who were the liberals that ignored warnings and eliminated the FBI counter-terrorism budget on September 10, 2001?
Who were the liberals that ignored over 50 warnings to the FAA about the possibility of a hijacking and suicide mission in 2001?
Who were the liberals that advocated abandoning the hunt for Osama bin Laden to attack Iraq?
Who were the liberals that exposed a CIA operative?
Who were the liberals that turned down three plans to eliminate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the Iraq invasion?
Who were the liberals that made killing American troops easier by failing to provide body and vehicle armor?

The liberals haven’t been making the decisions and spending the money. If the right doesn’t like getting blamed for the messes they create, they need to tuck tail and crawl back into their holes.

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Bush came into office talking about people’s money and how he was going to return it to them. He then proceeded to take the Social Security surplus and gave it to people who did not pay Social Security taxes. There was no income tax surplus; the income tax revenues were still a bit short of balancing the budget, all of the “extra” money belonged to those who paid FICA withholding taxes. Having done this he now claims there is a Social Security crisis because the taxes he has left can’t cover his profligate spending plans.

I went through this “Supply-side – borrow and spend” tripe under Reagan and Bush I, and the only way to described it, if you wish to avoid labeling it criminal, is fiscal mismanagement.

As people all over the world are beginning to worry about Bush’s ability to pay his debts, he presents a budget based on what his father described as “voodoo economics”. His current tax cuts produced no revenue or job gains, so he wants more. And to calm his critics while he awaits a monetary miracle he proposes to cut funding to women, children, college students – anyone with little income and little power.

When some call for changing the Medicare drug benefit to allow for negotiating prices, the normal practice in the free market, he threatens to veto any such bill. He has yet to veto a bill, so there is no way that the blame for any of this mess can fall on anyone except Bush.

Steve at Yellow Doggerel Democrat set me off with this post about a Krugman article.

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On this day in 1809 Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born. During their lives and after, it would be hard to find two men who generated such total polarization in the world. Heroes to some and the devil incarnate to others.

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Remember all the warnings about pilots being blinded by lasers? Gee, I guess some might be skeptical of NORAD’s plan to use lasers to notify pilots that they are entering restricted airspace around Washington.

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The people talking about Bush’s attempts to cancel the “Even Start” education program with his budget priorities for some reason fail to mention that it was his mother’s project when she was First Lady. Remember the Millie the First Dog book and reading to children.

Maybe it’s time to exhume the deceased First Dog, Spot, a daughter of Millie, who was born in the White House, and perform an autopsy. Eliminating your mother’s program is really cold. Perhaps the dog and the program reminded him of his own problems with books, the years of “See Spot run. Run, Spot. Run.”, were too much. Spot was also a witness to the pretzel incident.

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No doubt in response to stern warnings from the Bush administration, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has held its first election. Yes, democracy is spreading in the Islamic world. . .sort of. . .if you look at it in the right light, standing on one foot, and squint.

Only one in twelve Saudi citizens was eligible to register for the election, none of them women, and not many bothered. They are voting in local elections for councils, but only for one less than half of the council seats, the majority being appointed by the King.

From reports it would appear that the hard-line religious candidates have won all the seats. Both CBS and the BBC have reports on the elections which seem to track with the Iraqi elections indicating that when allowed to vote, Muslims vote for Islamic republics.

The freedom thing doesn’t seem to be working out for Bush any better than WMDs. It’s beginning to look like Bush couldn’t give away ice water in Death Valley during the Summer.

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This has nothing to do with Reptar, it is a global avatar for use in comments and discussion groups. Haloscan recently added gravatars to its comments, which is why that little box has been showing up in the upper right.

If you want to have your own, you need to create an 80 by 80 graphic and go to gravatar.com to register it. The key to using a gravatar is your e-mail address, so if you don’t use an e-mail address in comments, save your time and energy.

Update: The gravatar feature is apparently part of a beta test, like preview, so it will show up and then disappear.

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Arthur Miller died yesterday but his works live on in performances.

Death of a Salesman is important for the warning it gave the world about corporate culture. When it was written the old paradigm of “loyalty to the company was rewarded by loyalty to the employee” was beginning to disappear. Miller presented this reality, but most people missed its importance. Rumsfeld is a prime example of the new business model where employees are “fungible” and disposable. These managers don’t understand what the people below them do, and don’t care.

The Crucible was about the McCarthy era, but it can be applied to the Rove era. These periodic spasms of insanity and mass hysteria are really annoying to those who study history. It is stunning how often demagogues are permitted to drag the nation down to their level.

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