DOD v. peace

The US military is about to deploy in Iraq a new, untested weapon, says arms control expert William Arkin in the March 7 Los Angeles Times. It's never been used in combat or in peacekeeping. But here it comes anyway.

The device is a powerful megaphone the size of a satellite dish that can deliver recorded warnings in Arabic and, on command, emit a piercing tone so excruciating to humans, its boosters say, that it causes crowds to disperse, clears buildings and repels intruders. ...

American Technology says its new product "is designed to determine intent, change behavior and support various rules of engagement." The company is careful in its public relations not to refer to the megaphone as a weapon, or to dwell on the debilitating pain American forces will be able to deliver with it. The military has been equally reticent on the subject.

Certainly the company's description sounds like it was written by an apprentice PR flack. "Determine intent?" What the hell does that mean? If you don't run away screaming in pain you're proving you're an enemy to be killed? "Change behavior?" There's a good one. Gentle persuasion can change behavior. So can a nuclear explosion - that could permanently change the behavior of the residents a whole city. "Support rules of engagement?" That's ad-talk for "use it anywhere you want to." (I recall during the Gulf War that the Pentagon defended bombing bridges, telephone centers, and other seemingly civilian targets on the grounds that they actually were military targets because "they could help Iraq's military," a definition by which, I noted at the time, it became difficult to think of anything that was not a military target.)

The weapon - for there's nothing else to call it - can produce 145 decibels at 300 yards. That's more than four times louder than the threshold of pain, sufficient to cause not only severe pain but permanent hearing loss and possible cellular damage.

Proponents argue that pain, no matter how bad, and hearing loss, no matter how acute, are "humane" alternatives to death. But there are three flaws in that argument. One is that weapons whose primary effect is to maim are generally considered illegal under international law. Second is that it's indiscriminate: There's no way to just affect the people you want to affect. Third, as in the case of another "humane" weapon I mentioned recently, tasers, the very "humaneness" of the weapon can make it easier to use in situations were less violent methods might have been used previously.

Arkin mentions another flaw: The argument "ignores realities on the ground."

The Council on Foreign Relations recognized that the effect of nonlethal weapons is mostly "psychological - persuading people that they would much rather be someplace else, or on our side rather than opposing U.S. military forces." [But i]t warned that "television coverage of encounters involving [nonlethal weapons] can still be repugnant, and it would be desirable to provide reliable information to minimize unwarranted criticism."

In other words, it could just as well push people toward defiance as toward submission. Even so, this - and apparently other "nonlethal" weapons - are to become part of our ever-expanding arsenal of means to dominate.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is zipper?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Five-Syllable Words for $400

Part of anthropology, it's the study of the remains of past societies.

Rove v. Plame

According to the American Prospect, Karl Rove told the FBI last October that he was not the source of the leak that outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative - but he did admit that he circulated and discussed damaging information about her

with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter. ...

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

So, the story is, he didn't originate the leak, he just played it up, pushed it, spread it as aggressively as he could, all for political payback.

Oh, well, that's all right, then.

Link via Daily News Online.

Kennedy v. Pryor

Ted Kennedy has proposed that Shrub's recess appointment of William Pryor to the US Appeals Court in Atlanta during a one-week congressional recess may be unconstitutional. He did in a letter to the court that raised some of the same issues I did on February 22.

Recess appointments can only come "at the end of a Congress or the recess between the annual sessions of Congress," Kennedy wrote.

"No other Article III judge in the nation's history has ever received a recess appointment during a brief holiday period in the midst of a session of Congress," Kennedy added in a memo attached to the letter. ...

"The judges of the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit cannot and should not allow its upcoming cases to be tainted by the presence ... of a judge who may well be constitutionally or statutorily ineligible to sit," Kennedy said.

White House officials claimed the appointment was in accordance with well-established custom. They went on to add that a photo of John Kerry doing the mambo with Jane Fonda has been authenticated and that it's "well-documented" that the Moon is made of green cheese.

Airbags v. privacy

Big Brother, moving like Sandburg's fog, comes a step closer, the Toronto Globe & Mail informs us.

Montreal, March 10 - The airbag in Eric Gauthier's car was designed to save his life. But it could put the 26-year-old behind bars.

Unbeknownst to Mr. Gauthier, the airbag in his Chevrolet Sunfire had a data recorder that proved he was driving at three times the 50-kilometre speed limit [that is, he was going about 95 mph] on a Montreal street when he hit another car, killing the driver. ...

Known in the industry as EDRs - event data recorders - the black boxes have grown increasingly sophisticated and common. General Motors, for example, has put them in its new models since 1999 and Ford since 2000.

And, of course, the information contained in them, typically a five-second loop that locks in the data for the period before an airbag inflates, is increasingly being used as a tool by prosecutors both in Canada and the US. If you think having some electronic gadget you may not have even known about keeping constant track of your car's speed, engine rpms, brake and accelerator pedal positions, and whether or not your seatbelt is fastened is an invasion of your privacy, think again.

Mr. Gauthier's defence argued that using the data in the recorder was a violation of his privacy. Quebec Court Judge Louise Bourdeau ruled that any infringement was minimal....

And if you think you'll just avoid certain cars, here at home

the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is considering making EDRs mandatory in all new vehicles.

And what do you want to bet that if you object you'll be told it's for your own good?

And by the way, why is every new invasion of our lives described as a "minimal intrusion?" Does the death of 1,000 cuts ring any bells?

Privacy is an area where left and right, libertarian and socialist, combine and diverge in odd combinations. I normally wouldn't have thought I'd have cause to favorably cite William Safire and a senior editor of "Reason" magazine, but believe it or not, here I go.

Safire first, from the New York Times for March 10:

[A]fter 9/11, the passion went out of advocacy of privacy. The right to be let alone had to be balanced against the right to stay alive.

Accordingly, we readily submit to preboarding searches, right down to our shoes. We tolerate foreigner-fingerprinting at our borders. We live with hidden security cameras near national monuments or bridges.

Benumbed by the fear of appearing insufficiently vigilant, we accept "cookies" on our computers that track our habits and electronic location devices in our cars that guide our way but never let us wander about unobserved. We don't know whether our nosy neighbor is taking his cellphone call or taking our picture. We let our most confidential e-mail be shared among our spies, our cops and our military. To keep our national defense up, we have let our personal defenses down.

Terror's threat is real. But as we grudgingly grant government more leeway to guard our lives, we must demand that our protectors be especially careful to safeguard our rights. Officials all too often fail to see both sides of their jobs.

Safire goes on to describe DOJ's contention in its attempts to get medical information on abortion patients that they "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential" as "abhorrent" and criticizes a pilot program where hospitals in Pennsylvania and West Virginia are expected to notify an FBI unit of any "suspicious event."

For his part, Brian Doherty of Reason magazine wrote in the Los Angeles Times on March 9 about the case now before the Supreme Court of Larry Hiibel, who was arrested in Humboldt County, Nevada, in May 2000 for refusing to give his name to a police officer.

Under current precedent, being ordered to give your name to a police officer, if you are stopped under reasonable suspicion of being involved in a crime, is generally considered a reasonable and minimal intrusion on your privacy and dignity. ...

[But police] now potentially have at their disposal such databases as the National Criminal Information Center (which the Justice Department exempted from requirements that data in it be "timely, relevant, complete and accurate") and the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (which the American Civil Liberties Union thinks contains some of the data-mining aspects of the controversial and supposedly scuttled Total Information Awareness program). ...

Not only the guilty have reason to fear. As the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote in its amicus brief in Hiibel's case, "a name is no longer a simple identifier: It is the key to a vast, cross-referenced system of public and private databases, which lay bare the most intimate features of an individual's life. If any person can be coerced by the state to hand over this key to the police, then the protections of the 4th and 5th Amendments have been rendered illusory."

There is one important difference between what is slowly enveloping us and Sandburg's fog: It won't "move on."

DOJ v. Planned Parenthood

In the wake of stinging rebuke from a federal judge in San Francisco, the Injustice Department has dropped its demand that six Planned Parenthood clinics around the country produce medical records on abortions, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Privacy advocates and abortion rights supporters called the action "bittersweet," partly because DOJ specifically reserved the right to renew the demand later. But for now, they can savor the victory.

Meanwhile, DOJ is still demanding abortion records from at least a half-dozen hospitals as part of a separate lawsuit brought in New York over the same abortion restrictions involved in the Planned Parenthood suit. Federal judges in that case have split on the issue, with one in Chicago quashing the subpoenas and one in New York upholding them.

The geek returns

He's been away for a while, but he's back and will make further guest appearances in the neat future. First up, two dandies from the Beeb for March 10. First:

Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity has begun recording eclipses on the Red Planet, the first time the phenomenon has been witnessed on another world. ...

Nasa will create animations of the phenomena by combining multiple still pictures taken at different stages during the eclipses. The pancams cannot capture continuous video.

But the moons' passes across the Sun are very fast, so mission scientists have to carefully time when to take the pictures.

"They both happen very quickly, Deimos ones take about one minute to pass across the Sun and the Phobos ones take about 20-30 seconds or so. We can only take images about once every five to 10 seconds," said Dr Bell.

I'm looking forward to those animations.

And second:

The Hubble Space Telescope has obtained the deepest ever view of the cosmos - which means, actually, the farthest back in time anyone has ever seen, to a time when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. Since it's now believed to be about 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, that's roughly the equivalent of a 50-year old adult looking at a photo of themselves taken when they were less than 2 years old.

To get the image, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the telescope was repeated focused on a small patch of sky centered in the constellation Fornax over a period of nearly four months. The sum total exposure time was over 11 days.

The result? In an area that appears nearly empty to ground-based telescopes, Hubble found an estimated 10,000 galaxies. The image is

studded with a wide range of galaxies of various sizes, shapes, and colours.

There is also a "zoo" of oddball galaxies littering the field. A few appear to be interacting. Their strange shapes are different from the spiral and elliptical galaxies we see today.

These unusual galaxies chronicle a period when the Universe was more chaotic; order and structure were just beginning to emerge.

Recently I read an article - the link for which I have unfortunately misplaced - critical of programs such as these as simply wasteful so long as there is more to be done or learned right here. "Will they cure a single disease?" asked one. Another insisted that we know more about Mars than we do about our own oceans.

The latter claim came from a marine scientist, so maybe her choice of example was not exactly an unbiased one, but both points are well taken: It's not easy to see any clear practical result from the Mars mission, the Hubble telescope, or related extraterrestrial investigations and there are regions of Earth - including the depths of the oceans - which are largely still mysteries to us. Certainly, there is still much to be done, much to be explored, much to be accomplished right here. (On the other hand, the computer I'm typing at is full of microcircuits, the development of which was largely driven by the desire for fuel-saving miniaturization during the "space race" of the 1950s and '60s - and the claim that we know more about Mars than our oceans is frankly over the top.)

What disturbs me most about such sentiments, however, is that they almost always pit one science against another, one sort of research against another. Again, "will it cure a single disease?" The argument is not to spend more on health care research, it's to spend less on space-related research in order to spend more on health care research. And that's absurd.

What should be asked isn't "Why are we spending $800 million to send probes to Mars when there are needs here on Earth" but "Why are we giving tax cuts to gazillionaires while health care research funds are sickly," "Why are we sinking special favors into Big Business instead of sinking bathyscaphes into the ocean," "Why are we researching Star Wars instead of the stars."

There is an underlying value to space exploration - and by that I don't mean setting up colonies on the Moon or whatnot, I mean things like the Mars missions, astrophysical research and the like - that as far am I'm concerned can't be denied and is in fact the basic driving force behind it: answering the desire to learn, to understand, to discover. Answering the desire to know. To know what's out there, how it got there, how it works, what's going to happen to it. That desire to know is what makes us most human. It's the same desire that drives all so-called "pure" research. It's one that in all cases should be honored, not ridiculed or face demands for proof of immediate practical application.

Science research can't be allowed to become a zero-sum game.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is evolution? (Acceptable: natural selection)

JEOPARDY!
The 1920s for $1000

This name that Goodrich used for its galoshes with slide fasteners became a generic term for the fasteners.

Cheney v. Bush

See if you can guess the source of this TV ad running in seven states considered "swing" electoral votes in 2004.

The ad features grainy black-and-white footage of Dick Cheney talking encouragingly about gay relations during an October 2000 vice presidential debate in Kentucky.

"The fact of the matter is we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody," said Cheney, whose daughter Mary is openly gay and works on his campaign.

"We don't get to choose, and shouldn't be able to choose, and say you get to live free but you don't. People should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. That matter is regulated by the states."

On screen, key phrases appear. "States can choose for themselves," followed by "Federal law protects them from what other states decide."

More Cheney: "I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area."

The ad concludes, "We agree. ... Don't amend the Constitution." Fade to black.

MoveOn.org's latest salvo? Nope. The ad comes from the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of gay Republicans. It's their first TV ad in their 27-year history and the most open criticism of a Republican president they've ever made. It's now running in Ohio while Bush is campaigning there this week.

Repeat offenders

CNN reported a few days ago, March 6 to be exact, that the RNC is warning TV stations not to run ads produced by MoveOn.org, claiming they're paid for with money raised in violation of campaign-finance laws.

"As a broadcaster licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, you have a responsibility to the viewing public, and to your licensing agency, to refrain from complicity in any illegal activity," said the RNC's chief counsel, Jill Holtzman Vogel, in a letter sent to about 250 stations Friday.

"Now that you have been apprised of the law, to prevent further violations of federal law, we urge you to remove these advertisements from your station's broadcast rotation."

I knew that sounded familiar, so I rummaged through some old stuff and found this from Joel Bleifuss' column in the August 1 issue of In These Times:

The Republican National Committee is threatening television stations that dare to air a Democratic National Committee ad reprising the misleading statements President George W. Bush made in his State of the Union address. ...

In a letter to station managers in Madison, Wisconsin, where the ad has run, Caroline Hunter, a Republican Party lawyer, wrote:

"It has come to our attention that your station will begin airing false and misleading advertisements. ... The Democratic National Committee ... has no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people. ... As an FCC licensee you have a responsibility to ... avoid deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. Such obligations must be taken seriously. This letter puts you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading; therefore, you are obligated to refrain from airing this advertisement."

Apparently, the RNC believes that ads critical of Georgie Porgie are by definition illegal.

Footnote: I tried to find a direct link to the item on ITT's website but was unsuccessful. If anyone else has better luck, please let me know.

RIP

Spalding Gray, 1941-2004

Warm-up to the main event

By now, I expect that everyone has heard about the Pentagon report that presents global climate change as a real threat and a national security issue. The headline grabber was the possibility of a "tipping point" that could cause a rapid shift in climate along with the prediction that such a tipping point could come within the next 20 years, a tipping point that would plunge northern Europe into a deep freeze.

I actually made note of the fact that the Pentagon had such a report over a month ago, on February 4. And the idea on which it's based was being discussed by climatologists a few years ago - so it's the attention being given to it that's news, not the idea itself.

Since it can be hard to understand how global warming can lead to a significantly colder Europe, here's a simplified explanation. (NASA has a more detailed explanation here.)

First thing is to realize that by latitude, London is around 51 degrees north - about the same as the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador. But it's winters are much milder. That's because there is a current that carries warm water from the tropics into the northeast Atlantic, moderating the climate. What keeps that stream going is that the northern waters are colder and saltier - the latter because a good amount of fresh water is locked up in ice. That colder, saltier water is denser (has more mass per unit volume) than the warmer, less salty water, so it sinks below it. As more such water sinks behind it, that water gets pushed south underneath the northbound warm current, back to the topics, where it is gradually warmed, becomes less dense, rises to the surface, and the pattern continues.

The point is that one of the main things that keeps that current going is the difference in salinity - and therefore density - of the waters from the tropics and from the poles. With global warming, the average temperature of the Earth rises. If it rises enough, the polar ice caps begin to melt - as in fact they already are doing. That dumps fresh water into the polar oceans, reducing their salinity. Reduce it enough, and the difference between tropical and polar water is no longer enough to cause the polar water to sink below the tropical water. The result: The current shuts down, the warm water stops being brought north - and London becomes Labrador.

However, my real reason for raising this is that one of the less-noted aspects of that report is that it predicted that future wars will be more over resources like water than over borders or ethnicities.

With that in mind, consider this from the BBC for March 7:

The 10 states that share the Nile waters are meeting in Uganda on Monday to discuss the future of the river.

The talks - held under the auspices of the Nile Basin Initiative - come amid growing regional tensions over the world's longest river.

Egypt is reported to have said it would regard any attempt to alter the Nile status as an act of war.

A 1929 treaty said no work would be done on the river that would reduce the volume of water reaching Egypt.

The Nile is vitally important to the survival of 160 million people who share the basin in which it flows, but to Egypt the river is a matter of life and death, as the country has almost no other source of water.

But the 1929 treaty - signed between Britain and Egypt - is now being questioned.

Tanzania is building a pipeline to extract drinking water.

Kenya is calling for a revision of the treaty, and Ethiopia is planning to use the water for irrigation.

The idea of the meeting is to "thrash out" a common agenda for the river - but the very fact that such a meeting is necessary is significant.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are baby foods?

JEOPARDY!
The 1920s for $600

The sides warring over this theory that took shape in the nineteenth century were the modernists and the fundamentalists.

Another forgotten country heard from

Beaten up but not down, reformers in Iran are trying to carry on - and perhaps becoming more militant. This is from the Toronto Star.

Tehran - Scuffles broke out in Iran's parliament yesterday when a reformist called on Islamic clerics to question the supreme leader's performance.

Hardliners consider Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, to be above the constitution and answerable only to God.

Legally, the Experts Assembly, a clerical body that elects the supreme leader, supervises Khamenei's performance but it has never issued a report.

"Was the performance of the supreme leader and bodies under his control compatible with honesty, prudence and fairness in the recent sham legislative elections?" outspoken reformist Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoeini asked. ...

"This question should be put to the Experts Assembly, whose most important responsibility is to supervise the leader's performance," Khoeini said in a session aired live on state radio. ...

"Shut up!" Mousa Qorbani shouted, as fellow hardliners ran to the podium, to shove and kick Khoeini. Other lawmakers intervened to calm the fray.

Apparently, "beaten up" should be taken literally.

Speaking of Afghanistan

Human Rights Watch has accused the US of needless civilian casualties, lawless arrests and prison torture in Afghanistan, reports the Toronto Star.

"The behaviour of the United States sends the message that the U.S. operates on a set of double standards," the New York-based rights group said, referring to Washington's criticism of other countries' human rights records.

Among other things, the report cited cases of excessive force in making arrests, including one where a farmer was killed in an operation aimed at a different man - who was subsequently released. It also notes that 15 children were killed in two incidents a day apart and described

"credible and consistent" allegations that prisoners were beaten, deprived of sleep and shackled for long periods.

The HRW press release is here; the report itself is here.

Footnote, Unintentional Humor Dept.: The Star also says that

[t]he U.S. military rejected the rights watchdog's findings, saying the agency "confused the situation" in Afghanistan with one where peacetime methods could be used.

I thought Afghanistan was "stable and peaceful." No?

Did he say "milestone" or "millstone?"

With George Bush calling it an "historic milestone," the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council signed an interim constitution on Monday.

Council members smiled and congratulated one another on finally having reached agreement over the constitution, even trading quips as they lined up to sign the historic document.

The signing had been scheduled for Friday (after having been postponed in the wake of the dreadful bombings at Shia shrines in Karbala and al-Kadhemiya last Tuesday, which killed some 200 people and injured hundreds more) only to be put off again in a last-minute dispute over two provisions in the proposal after Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani objected to them. Over the weekend, Shiite council members persuaded Sistani to drop his objections and allow the signing to proceed and the deal was back on. The Institute for War and Peace Reporting says that

[a]sked why the Shia had accepted the document as it stands, Hajim al-Hassani, deputy to Mohsen Abd al-Hamid, a Sunni of the Iraqi Islamic Party, told the French news agency AFP, "They realised there was no other choice but to go this way."

But Muwaffiq al-Rubaie, an independent member of the GC, was quoted by the New York Times as saying that Sistani "does not want to provoke a crisis".

I believe, however, that the word "yet" should be appended to that sentence. The BBC's analyst calls the document "remarkably progressive by the standards of the Middle East, seeking to strike a balance between respect for Islam and regard for liberal democratic rights" - but it still is an interim constitution, set to expire no later than December 31, 2005. And as the Christian Science Monitor notes,

[t]he protracted wrangling over the document, which took on religious and ethnic dimensions, does not bode well for what will surely be a sharper debate over a permanent constitution.

Indeed, IWPR says that

[d]espite the apparent unanimity that accompanied the signing of the constitution, an element of disagreement remained just under the surface....

GC member Ibrahim al-Jaafari read out a statement by 12 of the 13 Shia council members declaring they had signed the document without demanding changes in order to safeguard national unity. ["We say here, our decision to sign the document is pegged to reservations," Jaafari said, according to the New York Times.] And in a further indication of Shia reservations about the new law, key Shia member Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI did not attend the ceremony, sending a deputy in his place.

The BBC adds that

[a] representative of the Shia Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), Abdel Adel Mahdi, [said] the Shias still had reservations and that the interim constitution could be amended "later on".

As if to underline exactly that point, the IWPR notes that "hardly was the ink dry" when Sistani made clear he still wasn't satisfied.

"Any law prepared for the transitional period will not gain legitimacy until it is endorsed by an elected national assembly," Sistani said in a fatwa, or religious ruling, released on his website.

"Additionally, this law places obstacles in the path of reaching a permanent constitution for a country that maintains its unity [and] the rights of its sons of all sects and ethnic backgrounds," he said.

That is, Sistani has effectively declared that anything an interim government does has no legitimacy. In fact, it could be argued that by his statement, the interim constitution itself has no legitimacy, since it is not the product of "an elected national assembly."

So why at this point agree to such a document? That goes back to Mahdi's "later on" and my own "yet." Right now there is one huge factor pushing for acceptance: June 30. Everybody, each for their own reasons, wants the "handover" to take place as scheduled, and further wrangling about the constitution would threaten to derail that. So on the one side Paul Bremer has cause to push the process forward and on the other Sistani has cause to not be too much of an obstacle. As long as June 30 looms, the pressure is on the Shiites to reach an agreement, even one that doesn't give them all they want. So despite conflicting interests and deep mutual suspicions, there is this interim constitution.

But what happens after June 30? Even assuming the "transfer of authority" comes off as planned, the US, with 100,000+ troops on the ground (and the expectation they will be there for years), will still be the 800-pound gorilla on security issues. But, significantly, it legally will no longer be "the occupying power" and therefore technically no longer able to issue demands. Meanwhile, work toward national elections will supposedly continue, with a target of early 2005. According to Sistani's fatwah, the national assembly coming out of such elections - an assembly expected to be dominated by Shiites because of their majority of the population - would have to ratify any act of any interim government, including, perhaps, the interim constitution itself. And even if that doesn't work, another date starts to loom: December 31, 2005, when the interim constitution will expire and the (presumably Shiite-dominated) national assembly can do as it pleases, unconstrained by the now-dead agreement.

In short, after June 30, time starts to work for the Shiites instead of against them. I suspect that was the substance of the argument presented to Sistani over the weekend. "Now is not the time," I imagine him being told. "After the transfer, then we can go after what's rightfully ours. Then we can make the changes to insure our position and our dominance with a permanent constitution to our liking."

And what will be the reaction of the Kurds and the Sunnis if events start to play out this way? Impossible to say for certain, of course, but quite possibly quite bloody. I fear there are still dark days ahead.

I could be wrong. I hope I am. Maybe things will take a different course. Maybe I'm even right about what the Shia members of the IGC said to Sistani over the weekend but wrong about their intention: Maybe they said all that, but just to stall Sistani because they're political realists who know that they have to allow for genuine minority rights and power-sharing for Iraq to survive and a unified nation and they're just trying to, if you will, nurse the old boy along until such an arrangement is a fait accompli. Maybe.

I doubt it. I really do. But I'll hope that I'm wrong.

As for the Bushites, they're just hoping the lid stays on until after the election, they get another term, and everybody has a chance to forget all about Iraq.

Think people won't forget? Tell me, how are things in Afghanistan these days?

Possible Irony Dept.: Back on January 30 I mentioned a study that indicated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, not only do Shiites not make up 60% of the population of Iraq, there're not even a majority. Wouldn't it be odd if the Shiites went through all these machinations to obtain for themselves a dominating position in a national assembly only to find when the votes were actually cast that they're in the minority?

Footnote: From IWPR.

Twenty men slinging Kalashnikovs, Sterling sub-machineguns, and an assortment of pistols saunter down a main street in the Baghdad neighbourhood of al-Adhamiya one Friday afternoon.

As locals watch anxiously, the men tear down pro-Baathist and anti-Coalition posters, which are a common sight in this predominantly Sunni district.

They replace the posters by sticking up leaflets of their own, which vow attacks on "terrorists" and their allies in the name of a militia called the "Black Flag". ...

Members of several more established movements said that they had heard of the militia, but condemned it as a threat to stability.

"We are against the idea of militias, as they carry weapons," said Salah al-Taher, an official of the Iraqi National Accord, the group led by Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi. "Ordinary citizens cannot distinguish them from saboteurs and thieves, and it will be difficult for the police to avoid clashing with them."

Sheikh Abbas al-Rabei, representing the Sadrists, a radical Shia movement, agreed, saying that armed militias "open the door wide to other organisations and armed movements to settle accounts and impose their own private law.… These organisations help stir up chaos and trouble."

The Sadrists still maintain their "Army of the Mahdi", a force which many Iraqis regards as a militia although it does not bear arms in public.

But some members of the public interviewed by IWPR took exception to such dismissive comments about the Black Flag, and commended the group for doing a job no one else seems ready to tackle.

"I would like to join this organisation, as no one [else] can control the violence," says Khaled Nusaif, a resident of the west Baghdad neighbourhood al-Karkh, sitting in a coffeehouse where one of the militia's statements was posted.

Vigilante justice? Or a Shiite hit squad? The one thing that is clear is that, as everywhere else, the appearance of self-styled enforcers is a sign of a lack of security, safety, and stability.

Update: Edited for clarity.

The story continues

A few quick updates on Haiti, based on BBC reports for March 8.

- Gunmen believed to be associated with pro-Aristide militias opened fire on a crowd of 10,000 anti-Aristide demonstrators in Port-au-Prince on Sunday. At least six people were killed. (Update via CNN: US Marines admitted killing one of those who died on Sunday, insisting it was a gunman firing on the soldiers. The death toll reached 10, plus at least 59 more injured.)

- Speaking at a news conference in the Central African Republic, Aristide insisted that he remains the elected head of his country and called for "peaceful resistance" in Haiti and the restoration of democracy. He also repeated claims that US agents kidnapped him and forced him to leave Haiti. Some suggested that his appearance was intended to squash rumors that he was a virtual prisoner and CAR Foreign Minister Charles Wenezoui read a statement by Aristide saying he had been "well looked after." However, one of Aristide's lawyers said officials at the presidential palace prevented him from passing a note to his client.

- The insurgents continue to escalate their demands beyond getting rid of Aristide. Demonstrators demanded he be returned to Haiti for trial. Opposition figure Evans Paul went beyond even that, saying "his people must also be tried for looting state coffers and murdering civilians."

Unintentional humor award

This is just too good. The March 15 issue of Newsweek, reporting on concerns among Rethuglican strategists over the reaction to Bush's exploitation of 9/11, says that there is

[a]nother, less publicized aspect of the ad flap: Everyone but the firefighters were paid actors. The firefighters posing in a firehouse was "stock" film footage of volunteer firefighters - shot and available for purchase to the general public.

These people can't even lie honestly.

Update March 10: Turns out even that was better than the truth. This is the original version of the paragraph, which was amended to the one above but has now reappeared on the posted article at MSNBC.com:

Another less-publicized aspect of the ad flap: the use of paid actors—including two playing firefighters with fire hats and uniforms in what looks like a fire station. "Where the hell did they get those guys?" cracked Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which has endorsed John Kerry, when he first saw the ads. (A union spokesman said the shots prompted jokes that the fire hats looked like the plastic hats "from a birthday party.") "There's many reasons not to use real firemen," retorted one Bush media adviser. "Mainly, its cheaper and quicker."

Some years ago, photographer Jill Freedman said in her book Firehouse that firefighters wore "the only uniform I can respect, fighting the only war I can believe in." As someone who agrees with that sentitment, I can only look at the Bush team and go "ewwwww."

The economy giveth and - you know the rest

According to a study for the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., as reported in the Christian Science Monitor for March 1, the "economic well-being" of American households and families is "a bit" less unequal than government numbers indicate. The study

takes account of the value of work in the home (such as child care, cleaning, shopping), government transfers (including welfare and disability payments), tax factors, income from wealth, employer contributions for health insurance, and actual rents or imputed rents for housing, some of it subsidized - as well as the paid work noted in government statistics.

Their goal is to measure how many goods and services members of a household can buy or otherwise obtain - not just their income.

The difference between these two numbers is substantial - nearly 30 percent. In 2000, for instance, median money income - the level at which as many households had less income as those with more income - stood at $42,000. But adding in the other factors to achieve "household economic well-being" raises the median to $68,529.

So does mean we're richer than we thought? Not really; it's just a different means of measurement. It in effect says that someone earning $42,000 a year lives as well as someone making $68,500 a year who pays out of pocket for housecleaning and the like, who pays the full cost of their health insurance, and so on.

There are, as there are with all models, some problems. For example, there are imputed costs for work in the home such as, again for example, child care. So if child care services raise their prices, by this model your "economic well-being" goes up along with them.

Still, the "good" news is that

Americans earning less than $50,000 in money income are a bit better off in terms of their being able to obtain goods and services than the government's income statistics indicate.

However -

[o]ne reason the income gap isn't even worse is that some members of households are working more hours to keep up with their bills. In many cases, both spouses work or one tackles two jobs.

The median annual hours of total work for households increased from 4,401 in 1989 to 4,727 hours in 2000, the equivalent of more than eight weeks of full-time work.

Running as fast as we can to stay in the same place.

Apparently Donna is not alone

Noted without comment. No need for any, I would think.

Washington - A majority of people in Canada, Mexico and five European countries have an unfavourable view of the role U.S. President George W. Bush plays in world affairs, Associated Press polls found.

Only in the United States did a majority of those questioned, 57 per cent, have a positive view of Bush's role.

"Canadians know Bush much better than Europeans but they do not particularly like him better," said Darrell Bricker, president of public affairs polling of Ipsos-Reid in Canada, where two-thirds of those polled had a negative view of Bush's role.

The polls were conducted by Ipsos, an international polling firm, in Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Spain and the United States.

Just more than half of those polled in Mexico and Italy had a negative view of Bush's role. In Britain, the closest U.S. ally in the war in Iraq, two-thirds had a negative view. Three-quarters of those in Spain and 80 per cent in France and Germany had a negative view of Bush's role.

As reported in the Toronto Star.

Another touching story

One last (I think) catch-up item.

Problems continue to plague the modern miracle of touch-screen voting. As Mother Jones noted,

Nearly 10 million people are voting via computer this primary season. Most election officials in e-voting states hailed the outcome of Super Tuesday as a success for the largest test of electronic kiosks to date. Still, some of the six million California citizens who tried it found machines that didn't boot up and coding software that failed to match votes with those who cast them. Some poll workers found that the programs they were called on to administer weren't the ones they'd been trained for. Encoding problems even omitted propositions from some ballots.

An article MoJo linked to in California's Tri-Valley Herald had some disturbing details on some of the problems.

At about one in every six polling places in Alameda County, touchscreen voting ground to a temporary halt, and poll workers doled out paper provisional ballots to voters in dozens of precincts.

Voting technicians scrambled to get electronic voting running again, and troubleshooters hurried to keep precincts supplied in paper ballots. But paper ballots ran out in several precincts, and poll workers told voters to come back later.

Some did. Some didn't.

It was a similar story in San Diego County.

As of election day evening, state officials had no idea if the breakdowns and provisional balloting would have an impact on the results of the elections or even how many provisional ballots were cast.

Roughly 125 precincts got back up and running within an hour or two of the opening of the polls, according to Diebold and local elections officials. But they missed much of the morning rush hour.

At least 43 precincts took longer. At one San Leandro church, poll workers scrapped one encoder and used a backup machine for 15 minutes before it, too, stopped working.

One voter who had a problem was advised to call the county registrar, only to be told "there had been so many complaints they couldn't call them all back."

This is California's third election with touchscreen voting and even now there are breakdowns and confusions that resulted in an unknown number of miscast votes, provisional votes, and even people being turned away from polling places. And there is still no paper trail.

When is it going to sink in that technologically this system still isn't ready for prime time and that philosophically, so long as there is no paper trail, it never will be?

My most recent of several posts on this was on February 16.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are cherry trees?

JEOPARDY!
The 1920s for $200

In 1928, Daniel Gerber introduced his new line of these to be sold through grocery stores.

Updating a footnote

Earlier today, I mentioned in a footnote that Reuters had used the terms "bloody rebellion" and "anti-Aristide gangs" in an article about Haiti, noting how such terms appeared now that Aristide had been kicked out. Here's an even better example. All the following quotes come from today's New York Times in an article pushing the new meme of the just terrible, terrible difficulties facing the noble Americans trying to help the pitiful, strife-ton Haitians put their "failed" nation back together:

- "Many of the armed rebels who rose up in Haiti this past month are veterans of the junta that overthrew Mr. Aristide in 1991. They have not put down their arms as they have promised."

- "The Haitian government, torn between rival elites, has traditionally ignored the needs of Haiti's poor, who saw in Mr. Aristide a champion of their interests."

- "The question of the Haitian Army also overshadows the country's future. Mr. Aristide dissolved it in 1995; the armed rebels have announced its resurrection. The army was created by the American military after it occupied the country and imposed martial law in 1915. Mary A. Renda, author of 'Taking Haiti,' an award-winning history of the American occupation, said the Marines created 'a military that was intended to be used against the Haitian people.'"

- "The political opposition [is] led by Haiti's elites," many of who "supported the rebel cause - the overthrow of Mr. Aristide and the reconstitution of the army, which has always served the elites at the expense of its poor."

- "Many of Haiti's poor ... remain loyal to Mr. Aristide...."

How much of that appeared - did any of that appear - in the pages of the Times (or, for that matter, any other major mainstream news outlet) in the preceding weeks when we were being deluged with stories of a "populist uprising" and a "nonviolent opposition" pressing the "widely unpopular" Aristide, who had "lost support" because of his own "failures?"

And did that meme - or the new "noble American" one - give any consideration to the US's role in this newest disaster? (One estimate of the damage caused in the course of the slow-motion coup is an amount equal to Haiti's annual national budget.) The closest we got was an occasional reference to the cutoff of aid - but even that was usually presented as something Aristide provoked.

No wonder some people have started referring to it as the New Pravda Times.

By the way, there are also those who argue the US actually financed and perhaps even directed the overthrow of Aristide. I don't agree, just as in the case of Chile I disagreed with those who insisted that the US ordered the army to overthrow Allende. Rather, I maintain, in each case the US sought to create the conditions that would promote a coup of one sort or another and then just sat back and let it happen.

Precise technical difference ratio: high
Actual practical difference ratio: low
Ethical equivalence rating: 100%

Shocking developments

According the manufacturer, over 4,000 police departments in the US are now using tasers. Tasers are guns which instead of bullets shoot wire-connected barbed projectiles that can impart a painful and temporarily-paralyzing electric shock to a victim.

A lot of people sing their praises, says Sunday's New York Times, because they give police a nonlethal way to defuse situations that otherwise might lead to bloodshed.

There are, however, real concerns. One is the potential for abuse.

But as the Taser spreads rapidly, it is raising questions about whether the weapon, which can also be applied directly to the skin as a stun gun, could be abused by the police. The Taser zaps suspects with 50,000 volts of electricity, disabling them for five seconds at a time. Critics say the weapon is ripe for abuse because the shock leaves no obvious mark, other than what looks like a small bee sting. Human rights groups in the United States and abroad have called Tasers potential instruments of torture. ...

[C]ritics and watchdog groups say the Taser could be used to torture suspects and prison inmates to extract confessions or taunt them, and Amnesty International has called for a ban on their use pending studies on their long-term effects.

Another is the fact that even though

police say that 50,000 volts is a safe amount of electricity to absorb and that suspects shot with a Taser recover immediately,

I have no idea why we're supposed to regard police departments as experts on the physiological effects of electric shock. (In fact, voltage is not the real issue with regard to harm; even the little shocks you get from touching a doorknob after scuffing your feet on a carpet can be several thousand volts. Current in the more serious concern. Just 30 milliamps - that's 0.03 amps - through your heart could kill you.) In any event, there are real risks in using the device. People have died in the wake of being hit by tasers, although police invariably claim other causes unrelated to the device.

The thing that concerns me the most, however, was not really mentioned in the article, except once, indirectly.

"Surely it's better than being killed," said Dan Handelman, a founder of Portland [OR] Copwatch, a group that has been critical of that city's growing use of Tasers over the last year. "But it's not necessarily an acceptable replacement because it's not being used - at least in Portland - in place of lethal force, it's being used for compliance."

The infliction of pain, sometimes intense, to "secure compliance" - better described as meek and unquestioning obedience - is well-established practice among police forces everywhere. With the increasing availability of tasers, especially combined with repeated assurances that they are safe and even "humane," will come the increasing temptation to use them routinely, no longer in lieu of lethal force but in lieu of persuasion and patience, no longer against someone posing a physical threat but against someone giving "a hard time," no longer for protection but for dominance.

The movement for nonlethal alternatives in police work is a good one. Tasers should not be regarded as part of that effort.

Footnote: Supporters of tasers say there's nothing to fear regarding abuse because of built-in safeguards.

Each Taser, which is powered by batteries, has a data port that records each shock and is used by police departments when they prepare incident reports, allowing supervisors to count how many times a Taser was fired.

So our protection against abuse by police is internal police reports? I feel so much better.

Update: Minor edits for clarity and correction of typos

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "The Incredible Journey?"

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Trees

Each March, a festival in Macon, Georgia, celebrates the blooming of over 100,000 of the Yoshino variety of these trees.

There's no good way to give bad news

The piddling, puny, pitiful, pathetic, piss-poor job growth - if you can even call it growth - of 21,000 in February wasn't as bad as it sounded.

It was worse.

First, consider that the average prediction among economists was for about 125,000 new jobs - six times the actual figure. It was the fourth month in a row that even conservative predictions had proved too rosy. Oh, and January's figures got revised downward at the same time. (And even 125,000 new jobs would have been below the roughly 150,000 required to keep pace with population growth.)

But beyond even that, by almost any measure the jobs picture is bleak, CNN/Money reports. The facts are cold:

Since the start of the last recession in March 2001, the nation has lost 2.35 million jobs - 700,000 of them since the recession ended that November. It's the longest stretch of labor market weakness since the Labor Department started keeping track in 1939.

Unemployment held steady at 5.6%, but that was only because the labor force dropped by nearly 400,000. The official number of "discouraged workers," who have simply given up trying to find jobs, stands at 484,000.

The labor force participation rate of 65.9% is the lowest in 16 years; the average duration of unemployment is 20.3 weeks, the highest in 20 years; the percent who've been unemployed 27 weeks or longer (meaning, in many cases, having exhausted their unemployment benefits) is 22.9, which is almost the highest in 21 years.

Manufacturing employment, traditionally high-wage work than the service sector, lost 3,000 jobs, the 43rd straight month of falling factory payrolls.

The sector has lost 3.3 million jobs since early 1998, and many of those jobs are never coming back, having been moved overseas or made obsolete by technological improvements.

And despite productivity growth, which we were told over and over by the corporate flacks was the engine of wage growth, average hourly wages have grown just 1.6 percent in the past year, the slowest growth since 1986.

According to Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo, "the economic recovery is almost three years old, and the economy should be producing 200,000 to 300,000 jobs per month." So why isn't it? After all,

[b]y almost every measure, the economy has been expanding at a healthy pace for six months [says the March 6 New York Times]. But the nation's employers remain stubbornly reluctant to add jobs in the United States.

Outsourcing abroad, particularly the shifting of work to China and India, so much in the news, is one reason hiring at home has been sparse. Another is rising productivity, squeezing more work from existing staff and other efficiencies.

But these are only two aspects of a much broader syndrome that might be described as just-in-time hiring. Instead of optimistically adding workers in anticipation of demand, as in the past, the new mind-set is to hold off until the demand for a company's product or service is so great that an employer has no choice but to hire, and then add as few people as possible.

In search of profit maximization, employers are reducing inventory-to-sales ratios and moving toward just-in-time production of goods and even services. Instead of having skilled staff to manufacture products or provide services, they will have a small core of such people surrounded by rings of less-skilled, lower-paid, often-temporary workers who can be taken up or let go as market conditions indicate.

In short, we are even more than we were just disposable - and increasingly interchangeable - parts.

So what happens now?

"What we are looking at now is a more extreme version of the early 1990's, when we also experienced a jobless recovery but not as severe as this one," said Edward McKelvey, a senior economist at Goldman, Sachs. "We have no way of knowing when hiring will pick up; we don't have models for what is happening now."

Oh, well, in that case it's obvious what we have to do: Cut taxes on corporations and the rich. Isn't that what we always have to do?

The fat lady has yet to sing, it seems

What had seemed to be a coda for Haiti is increasingly appearing to have been a quarter rest. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, now in the Central African Republic with his family under virtual house arrest, has said that he was made to leave Haiti by American forces under a threat of "thousands" of deaths in a thug attack on Port-au-Prince and flatly denies that he resigned. That story was first broken by Democracy Now! on March 1 in a broadcast interview with Rep. Maxine Waters and Randall Robinson of TransAfrica, both of who had spoken to Aristide by phone.

Colin Powell called the allegation "absolutely baseless, absurd." (Then again, this was the guy who claimed "irrefutable" evidence that Saddam Hussein held massive amounts of illegal biochemical weapons.) But as the Guardian pointed out on March 3,

[w]hile it is unlikely that Mr Aristide was led to the airport in handcuffs, it is equally disingenuous to suggest that his departure was in any way voluntary. In either case it is significant that he resigned to the US rather than to the chief supreme court justice, his constitutional successor.

The fact that the day before he fled he vowed to remain and fight, and that he left without any clear destination in mind, suggests that he left in a hurry.

In the meantime, the rebel demands have escalated. Recall that they and their "political" allies insisted that the goal was to get rid of Aristide. Having accomplished that, however, they immediately started demanding more. First, the Guardian notes, the political opposition

refused to negotiate with Mr Aristide's prime minister, Yvon Neptune, about forming a new government.

After the rebel leader, Guy Philippe, said he intended to have Mr Neptune arrested on corruption charges, a rebel group converged on the prime minister's official residence, from which he had to be rescued by US marines.

Again, the international community caved to the rebel demands, this time without even the pretense of objection. A tripartite commission of one representative each chosen by the opposition, the government, and the occupying powers is to form a "council of elders" to prepare for a new government. (Noted in passing: This gives the "opposition," which had never polled more than about 12% in elections, 1/3 of the power in arranging for a new government and 1/2 the Haitian role in that.) But one of the first tasks of the commission is to find a replacement for Neptune, which they hope to do by Tuesday, says AP.

Meanwhile,

Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a convicted killer who led army death squads and is accused of ordering hundreds of executions, has demanded a voice in the new political settlement. "What's mine is mine," he said.

For his part, Philippe said he wanted to re-establish the Haitian army (having declared himself the "military chief" of Haiti's security forces on Tuesday) and was clearly disappointed when US officials demanded he disarm. He promised to comply but as of Friday

[US Commander] Gen. James T. Hill said the rebels had not laid down their weapons as they had promised, though some had withdrawn from the capital.

Their most prominent leader, Guy Philippe, "is still in the city, and we are still looking for him to lay down his arms," said General Hill,

according to Saturday's New York Times. If they have been laid down, they're apparently still within easy reach, as AP notes in a March 6 story datelined Gonaives.

Rebels who choose not to show their weapons in public openly admit they have stashed them for later use. At a street corner where an offering of metal and herbs burned for Ogun Feray, the war god, reminders abound that Haiti's bloody uprising might not be over.

"In terms of where the guns are and who we will surrender them to, that's a secret," said local rebel commander Winter Etienne, 40. "When you lay down your arms you always want to have them someplace where you can pick them up again if you need them." ...

Until a new government and electoral commission is formed - and their pro-Aristide enemies forcibly disarmed - the rebels have no plans to surrender their weapons.

While this was going on, the pro-Aristide side had been stunned into silence by the suddenness of the changes and his departure. But they've found their voice again.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 5 (Reuters) - Thousands of outraged supporters of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide poured out of Haiti's slums and into the streets on Friday, marching on the U.S. Embassy to denounce the "occupation" of their homeland and demand Aristide's return.

Hurling slurs at U.S. Marines and calling President George W. Bush a "terrorist," a crowd estimated at more than 10,000 materialized in the capital, seething with anger at Aristide's flight to Africa five days ago after a bloody rebellion and U.S. pressure.

"Bush terrorist! Bush terrorist!," chanted the crowd...

Hundreds held up their hands with five fingers extended, shouting "Aristide five years," the rallying cry of his supporters who wanted him to finish his five-year term in office....

Aristide partisans vowed to demonstrate daily for the return of their president.

They blamed Haiti's wealthy elite, Bush and French President Jacques Chirac for what they called the "foreign occupation" of Haiti.

It's reasonable to think that some of the nations involved here, especially those from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), have at least some interest in genuine justice for Haiti. It's also reasonable to think that others, such as the US, don't. Indeed, the US has done a great deal to undermine Aristide, as I've previously mentioned, noting disturbing parallels between what's happened to Haiti under Aristide with what happened to Chile under Salvador Allende. Whether or not there will be a Haitian Pinochet (or, I should say, another Haitian Pinochet) is yet to be seen. But if there isn't, it certainly won't be the result of anything we've done as a nation.

But apparently that's a good thing, or so says the State Department. You see, Aristide was a "failed" leader, and

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that even if the United States "recognized a leader had been elected," he could not rely on U.S. support against an armed revolt if America considered he had misgoverned.

"We can't be called upon, expected or required to intervene every time there is violence against a failed leader," Boucher told reporters. "We can't spend our time running around the world and the hemisphere saving people who botched their chance at leadership."

Boucher said that's not "ultimately good for democracy in the hemisphere." Which means, apparently, what's good for democracy in the hemisphere is to act in accordance with US wishes. Obedience is Freedom. And War is Peace. And Up is Down. And Aristide, even after being chastened by Clinton as the price for being restored as president, still wasn't completely with the program. So we set him up and giggled as he came down.

Footnote 1: The Reuters story linked above twice refers to what happened as a "bloody rebellion" and says it began with "an anti-Aristide gang." Isn't it interesting that before Aristide's ouster, it was a "popular uprising" by "disaffected" people and "former supporters" upset over "flawed elections?" And now that he's (apparently safely) out it's okay for the media to use different descriptions?

Footnote 2: It's widely thought that Boucher's dismissal of "failed leaders" who won't get help was also aimed at leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has been a thorn in the Bushites' collective side. He was briefly overthrown in a 2002 coup which the White House seemed to welcome until it became obvious it was going to fail. Boucher's remarks could easily be taken as - and I do take them as - a signal that the US would not oppose another military coup.

Footnote 3: According to the BBC, South Africa has joined with CARICOM in calling for an investigation of the circumstances surrounding Aristide's flight from Haiti. On behalf of the Bush administration, Boucher rejected that call, saying there's nothing to investigate.

Oh, now I really do want an investigation!

Whew! Safe at last!

The Christian Science Monitor for February 26 covered testimony before Congress on the progress in the "war on terrorism." An overview of what officials had to say, based on that account:

CIA Director George Tenet:
- Al-Qaeda has been "transformed ... into a loose collection of regional networks that operate more autonomously. These regional components have demonstrated their operational prowess" in attacks from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Indonesia.
- "The insurgency we face in Iraq comprises multiple groups with different motivations but with the same goal: driving the US and our coalition partners from Iraq."
- "A hard core of former regime elements - Baath Party officials, military, intelligence, and security officers - are still organizing and carrying out attacks."

FBI Director Robert Mueller:
- "There are strong indications that Al Qaeda will revisit missed targets until they succeed, such as they did with the World Trade Center. The list of missed targets now includes the White House and the Capitol."
- Al Qaeda "has a cadre of supporters within the US." Those are not just of Middle Eastern origin, but include other ethnic groups as well.

DIA head Lowell Jacoby:
- "Capable but less experienced individuals are replacing those captured. Al Qaeda continues to enjoy considerable support and is able to recruit terrorists."
- Iraq is the "latest jihad for Sunni extremists."
- "Iraq has the potential to serve as a training ground for the next generation of terrorists where novice recruits develop their skills, junior operatives hone their organizational and planning capabilities, and relations mature between individuals and groups as was the case during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and extremist operations in the Balkans."

Most significantly,

"[s]upport for America has dropped in most of the Muslim world," Jacoby noted. In Morocco, for example, he cited public opinion surveys showing support for the US dropping from 77 percent in 2000 to 27 percent in the spring of last year. In Jordan, it fell from 25 percent in 2002 to 1 percent in May 2003. And in Saudi Arabia, it fell from 63 percent in May of 2000 to 11 percent in October 2003.

So let's just consider for a moment whether or not, based on its own descriptions, the Bush administration in particular and the US government in general a)have actually made any advances in their "war on terror," b)have actually made Americans, Afghans, Iraqis, or anyone else safer, c)know their asses from their elbows.

Personally, I think the answer is in all cases no, but hey, who am I to say. I report, you decide, right?

Hopefully, third time is not the charm

Still more catching up. I will eventually.

For the third time, the House of Representatives has voted to make attacks on a pregnant woman into two attacks: one on her and one on the fetus. That is, any harm to the fetus would be regarded as a separate crime from harm to the woman, thereby according a fetus a legal status independent of the woman's.

The anti-woman crowd, ever-vigilant for some means to restrict and ultimately outlaw abortion, has latched onto the tragedy of Laci Peterson as a backdoor means to advance their agenda, even going so far as to call their assault on logic the Laci and Conner Peterson Act.

But of course at the same time they insisted that abortion was the furthest thing from their minds. In fact, they pointed to language in the bill that specifically protects those carrying out legal abortions from prosecution. But even so, they just couldn't contain themselves.

"There are two victims in these kinds of attacks," said Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Pa., chief sponsor of the legislation. "That is so clear from the Laci and Conner Peterson case." ...

"You deny personhood, which is a legal concept, to the unborn," Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., a strong opponent of abortion, said to critics of the bill.

Which is exactly the point: The bill aims to provide "personhood" to a fetus, affording it legal status and legal rights. In fact, the bill

defines "unborn child" as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

Critics said that under this definition even a fertilized egg would have the same rights as the born, setting the stage for future challenges to abortion rights.

That supporters of the bill would deny that effect shows how far they are prepared to twist reality to suit their ends.

The battle moves to the Senate, where prospects are better. The previous two times the House has passed such legislation, 1999 and 2001, the Senate declined to consider it. This time, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he will bring it up, but it's doubtful he has the votes to pass it.

Footnote: The House rejected an alternative that would have made injury to the fetus an aggravating factor in any assault on the woman, again showing that their purpose was not the protection of either but the elevation of the fetus to equal legal status with the woman.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back?"

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Puff-fect Books for $2000

It was Tao the cat, along with two dogs, on this Sheila Burnford title trip.

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
Trees

Another small victory in the struggle

As well as another catching up item.

Back on December 17 (scroll down to the item headed December 2) I mentioned the case of Joshua Davey, who was suing the state of Washington because it refused scholarship money to study for the ministry. Davey claimed that amounted to an unconstitutional restriction on his ability to practice his religion.

In a 7-2 decision handed down on February 25, the Supreme Court issued a

decisive rejection of the proposition that a government that subsidizes a secular activity must necessarily, as a matter of the constitutional free exercise of religion, subsidize the comparable religious activity as well. ...

"The state has merely chosen not to fund a distinct category of instruction," [Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority,] said, adding that "training for religious professions and training for secular professions are not fungible."

That from the February 26 New York Times report on the case.

The outcome was a bitter disappointment to those who want to use public money to subsidize private religious instruction as well as to the Bush administration, eager for endorsement of its "faith-based initiatives." They had hoped that the Court would extend its previous finding in a school voucher case that it is constitutionally permissible to include religious organizations in public programs to one that would say that at least under some conditions it is constitutionally required. But thankfully, the Court very clearly found otherwise. The classic wall of separation between church and state has become thinner and weaker over the past few decades, but it has not completely fallen.

Footnote: In what I would have considered an astonishing stretch of illogic were it not for the source (from whence such is the norm), Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, writing in dissent, claimed the case was about "discrimination against a religious minority." The case actually involved public support of religion, not a religion, so the statement is on its face nonsensical - but what I'm really wondering is when Christians (which Davey is) got to be a minority.

Just say no

Something else from the "I missed it during my time in the phoneless desert" file.

On February 12 I mentioned the attempts by the Injustice Department to force a number of hospitals to hand over confidential patient data about their abortions in response to a suit challenging a ban on a method of late-term abortion called intact dilation and extraction. It turns out hospitals weren't the only targets; Planned Parenthood, another party to the suit, has also seen its clinics hit with demands for confidential patient information - and at least one such clinic is going to the mat, as reported by TheSanDiegoChannel.com on February 27.

San Diego, CA - The San Diego chapter of Planned Parenthood said it will not comply with a court order demanding it hand over hundreds of confidential medical records to the Justice Department, 10News reported. ...

"Rest assured Planned Parenthood will not release the names of any of our patients. We value the trust the community has given us and we will not violate patient privacy," said Planned Parenthood President and CEO Mark Salo. ...

"We're getting calls in our centers and our front reception desk from terrified patients saying, 'Will my name be given to the Justice Department?' Our answer to the question is, 'No,'" Salo said.

The DOJ claims it needs to information to defend the law, but that is nonsense. The law involves late-term abortions, but the subpoena demands "all records of surgical abortions performed 20 weeks after the last menstrual period in the last year," according to the news report, most of which information is not even relevant to the issue. Rather, the Ashcroft crew is engaging in what could only be called intimidation via subpoena, trying to bully abortion providers (and terrify abortion recipients) into dropping the suit with the threat of exposure of privileged information.

My gosh, these people are scummy.

Footnote: Link via Daily News Online.

Update: A federal judge in San Francisco has rejected a DOJ demand for access to abortion records from a public hospital there and from six Planned Parenthood affiliates in the county, says the New York Times for Saturday.

The judge, Phyllis J. Hamilton, said forcing the providers to turn over the records would undermine the privacy rights of patients and could dissuade some from seeking treatment.

"There is no question that the patient is entitled to privacy and protection," Judge Hamilton said. "Women are entitled to not have the government looking at their records."

This doesn't affect the San Diego subpoena directly, but it does provide a precedent to give weight to an appeal.

The Times article also notes how, in pursuing these demands, the Bush administration is going back on its own pledges to protect patient privacy. As I said in my original post, "in the world of Bush, ideology always trumps decency."

Oops

Five Shia members of the Iraqi Governing Council have thrown the proverbial monkey wrench into US plans for a "handover of power" in June. They failed to show up for a scheduled signing of a draft constitution because they want to renegotiate part of it, making changes which would strengthen their positions.

The document, intended to establish a framework for governing Iraq between the "handover" target date of June 30 and elections for a new government (supposedly taking place by early next year), had seemed to be a "remarkable compromise between the two most cohesive political groups in the country, religious Shia and the Kurdish parties," the Institute for War and Peace Reporting says. But, as the BBC reported on Friday,

[t]here is apparently a dispute over two elements of the draft - named the Transitional Administrative Law - which, until now, had not seemed to be at issue.

Shia members of the IGC are apparently calling for a collective presidency that includes three Shias, one Kurd and one Sunni Muslim.

The draft stipulates a president and two deputies.

It is believed Shias also want to change the mechanisms by which a permanent constitution could be ratified, removing safeguards that would give minority groups a veto.

The IWPR notes that

[a]ccording to the original wording, the constitution will go into effect "if a majority of voters in Iraq approve and if two-thirds of the voters in three or more governorates do not reject it" - wording which essentially gives veto power over the constitution to any regional grouping....

Significantly, the autonomous Kurdish region has three governorates in it, so if the Kurds strongly rejected a proposed constitution, it could not be ratified. It's this provision the Shias on the IGC want to remove. While all the parties had looked upon this as a temporary measure, the IWPR suggests that

the Shia delegates' refusal to accept this clause may also mean that they envision holding off on key demands during the transitional phase, but will use their status as a majority to insert these demands into the constitution.

That is, make compromises now but use their dominant position to force through a Shiite-friendly final constitution (which only requires majority support) which a minority will no longer be able to block. As the BBC tellingly notes,

reports suggest the Shias may have now gone back on a pledge to give Kurds constitutional guarantees.

Seems to me there's no maybe about it.

Footnote: It should be noted that one of the issues driving this is what the draft doesn't say. It specifies neither who will take over from the US at the end of June nor sets a date for elections. Majority Shiites suspect that in the absence of a fixed date, minority Kurds and Sunnis will stall on elections to deny them the political power they feel is their by right. As a result, senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani rejected the draft as inadequate. It was in the wake of that rejection that the demands for renegotiation arose.

However, it also should be noted that the changes demanded did not address those concerns, raising the question if Sistani's rejection was the cause of the renewed dispute or the excuse for it.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "Socks?"

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Purr-fect Books for $1200

In 1958, Dr. Seuss wrote this sequel.

Some things just make you stop and blink

As reported in the February 28 new York Times, the federal government

has warned publishers they may face grave legal consequences for editing manuscripts from Iran and other disfavored nations, on the ground that such tinkering amounts to trading with the enemy.

Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace "inappropriate words," according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.

Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. ...

The Treasury letters concerned Iran. But the logic, experts said, would seem to extend to Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other nations with which most trade is banned without a government license. ...

In theory - almost certainly only in theory - correcting typographical errors and performing other routine editing could subject publishers to fines of $500,000 and 10 years in jail.

The transparent idiocy of it being legal to publish a manuscript but a major felony to edit it arises from the fact that Congress has tried to exempt information from trade embargoes, even barring the executive branch from interfering "directly or indirectly" with trade in information. "Critics said the Treasury Department had long interpreted the amendment narrowly and grudgingly," the Times says. What Treasury has done now is to argue, in effect, that while the information can't be restricted, actually doing anything to it to prepare it for publication can be. The net effect, of course, is to make it harder for literary or scientific works from embargoed nations to get published here, which would clearly seem to violate a prohibition on indirect interferences.

But the George Bush team isn't one to be concerned with such niceties as legalities, not when there's a nation to be protected! Their interpretation affords the White House greater control over the flow of information from real or perceived "enemies" - which I suspect is the actual idea. You never can be too careful with those people, you know. After all, "Satan himself [can be] transformed into an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14) so you never know what sort of evil propaganda may be slipped into a Cuban paper on metallurgy or, worse yet, some Korean poetry.

Tara Bradshaw, a Treasury Department spokeswoman, confirmed the restrictions on manuscripts from Iran in a statement. Banned activities include, she wrote, "collaboration on and editing of the manuscripts, the selection of reviewers, and facilitation of a review resulting in substantive enhancements or alterations to the manuscripts."

She did not respond to a request seeking an explanation of the department's reasoning.

I'll just bet.

I'd call this unintentional humor except that they knew exactly what they were doing

According to a summary of a March 1 Wall Street Journal article (available only by subscription) by PR Watch, a number of big business organizations have formed a new front group for the purpose of lobbying against state and federal efforts to retain US jobs and otherwise restrain globalization. "O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports the coalition 'may hire a national PR firm to get its message across that globalization is a benefit to this country's future.'"

The outfit is called the Coalition for Economic Growth and American Jobs.

Scumbag Medal

...with dripping garbage clusters.

Washington (AP) - A Senate measure to extend federal unemployment benefits failed by two votes Thursday despite the election year support of 12 Republicans from states hit hard by layoffs. ...

The measure would have extended the emergency benefits program for six months, providing 13 weeks of extra unemployment benefits to people who exhaust their state benefits - usually after 26 weeks. ...

"I think we have to determine when's enough," said Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla. "And I happen to think that we've crossed that line."

Nickles said jobless workers have more incentive to find a job when the extra unemployment benefits stop. "The more you pay people not to work, the less inclined they are to work," he said.

Yes, all those people just lazing in luxury in the comfort of unemployment, falling behind on their rent/mortgage, electricity being shut off, phone service being ended, but what do they care? They have unemployment benefits! Ah, happiness!

Beyond the obvious crude inanity, though, is what his remarks reveal about the way such bozos regard the rest of us: as lazy good-for-nothings who would like nothing better than to have the chance to do nothing at all. What we need is a little more discipline! A little more hard work! A little more self-reliance! It's the way the overlords always seem to regard the underlings, the way the powerful always think of the powerless. We are simply here to serve their needs and any time we are not in that role it's a personal failing on our part.

Historically, this is the way, always the way, the slaveowners thought of the slaves, the rich thought of the poor, the racists thought of their victims, the nobility thought of the peasants - and now the way our own elite thinks of the rest of us.

Bear that in mind the next time one of them - any of them - tells you they're on your side. Admittedly, they may be telling the truth, at least on the particular issue at hand. But don't count on it.

Footnote: Nickles is retiring. Which is good, since he appears to have now used up his last remaining brain cells.

Feeling a little like Ambrose Bierce

One line from a Christian Science Monitor story about people who believe in the "rapture" and an imminent "Second Coming" of Jesus caught my eye:

A 2002 survey showed that 59 percent of Americans believe that the events in the Bible book of Revelation will occur in the future.

It reminded me of the polls that indicate that more Americans believe Earth has been visited by space aliens than accept evolution. It's so frustrating. It's just - I mean - it's just that as individuals we Americans can be amazingly bighearted and generous. But as a group, we are a pile of insular ignoramuses.

Some bad news - which I did sort of predict

The strike by supermarket workers in southern California about which I posted on January 6 is apparently over after a bitter 4-1/2 month struggle, reports the New York Times. Workers had struck two Safeway-owned chains (Vons and Pavilions) over health care and pension issues; two other chains, Ralphs (owned by Kroger's) and Albertsons, locked out their workers and pooled resources with Safeway, the better to battle - and hopefully break - the union.

(Interestingly, secondary boycotts are illegal and sympathy strikes can be. Apparently "sympathy" lockouts and collusion by corporations aren't.)

Officials knowledgeable about the negotiations said the union had agreed to a lower wage tier for new workers. These officials said that the companies had pressured the union into agreeing to have newly hired workers pay some weekly premiums for their health insurance, which is a departure from the policy with current workers, who pay no premium. In addition, these officials said, the union agreed in large part to the companies' demand to freeze their contributions to the health plan for current workers. But these officials said the union achieved its objective of persuading the companies to set aside their demand for a separate health and pension fund for future employees.

In short, especially considering that with normal turnover in a few years most workers will be in that lower-benefit tier, basically the workers lost. Follow the link to my previous post and note what I said there. It still stands.

I need some help here

(Sidebar: I'm still playing catch-up here, so a few of the items over the next or two will actually refer to bits that came up during my enforced absence. Like this one, for example.)

According to a forthcoming book by Thomas Reed, a former Air Force secretary and member of the National Security Council, as reported by The Age (Australia) for February 28, in 1982

Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the Soviet Union's economy through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a gas pipeline, according to a former White House official. ...

"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes.

"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." US satellites picked up the explosion.

Okay, what I need is for someone to explain to me, slowly and in careful detail, exactly why this was not an act of international terrorism.

Quick site update

I've added Trackback capability to the site. It don't expect much activity on it for the same reason I expected I wouldn't get a lot of comments: I don't get a whole lot of traffic. Yet, he added hopefully (or egotistically, take your pick).

The explanations you get of what Trackback does are usually written in geekspeak, a language designed to be unintelligible to non-bitheads. I don't speak the language but I can usually plow my way through it well enough to get the gist. Briefly, Trackback is a way for sites to alert each other to related information. That is, if I see a post on another blog that has Trackback (or an equivalent) and I comment on that post here, I can use Trackback to let the other site know that I've done so. Similarly, if anyone comments on something I've said here, they can let me know they did.

So suppose, for example, Atrios (who does have Trackback) says something I think is great. Or baloney. Whatever. I comment on it here. I can ping his site to let it know of my comments. Then anyone reading his site could, if they chose, click on the Trackback link to get a link to my post. In a way, it works much like the Comments except without the limitations of length or (for those that use them) lack of graphics.

So if you see something here worth commenting on, please do. Either via Comments or Trackback.

This is beyond warped

From the Miami Herald for March 2.

Jean-Claude ''Baby Doc'' Duvalier, the deposed Haitian dictator living in exile in Paris since 1986, said Monday he wants to return to his homeland as soon as possible.

Wouldn't surprise me if he feels right at home among the rich elite who are back in their mansions - especially since it's believed he fled Haiti with $400 million.

Link via Buzzflash.

Oops

I just realized I had the source for my Quote of the Week (which is now going to be the Quote of the Two Weeks 'cause I'm not going to bother changing it now only to change it again on Sunday) wrong. It's been corrected.

Jeopardy! Catch-up

Here are the Jeopardy! answers and questions for the days I've been unwillingly absent. All in one big post.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION (FOR FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27)
What is custard?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY! (FOR SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28)
"C" Foods for $2000

Originally from Naples, it's a single-serving stuffed pizza in the shape of a turnover.

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
Letter Perfect

--------

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION (FOR SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28)
What is a calzone?

FINAL JEOPARDY! (FOR SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 29)
Letter Perfect

This 1969 Costs-Gavras thriller has the shortest title of all movies to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

--------

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION (FOR SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 29)
What is "Z?"

JEOPARDY! (FOR MONDAY, MARCH 1)
-Ologies for $200

Heliology is the study of light from this source.

--------

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION (FOR MONDAY, MARCH 1)
What is the Sun?

JEOPARDY! (FOR TUESDAY, MARCH 2)
-Ologies for $600

An expert in sinology is familiar with the history and customs of this country.

--------

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION (FOR TUESDAY, MARCH 2)
What is China?

JEOPARDY! (FOR WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3)
-Ologies for $1000

This study of man is divided into several branches including physical and cultural.

--------

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION (FOR WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3)
What is anthropology?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY! (FOR THURSDAY, MARCH 4)
Purr-fect Books for $400

This Beverly Cleary tale shares its name with the cat who lived at the White House with the Clintons.

Back! Finally!

You don't realize how much the phone has become part of your life until you're without one for a week. I finally got my phone service at the new digs at about noon today. And that was only after threatening to call the state utilities board to complain about the fact that they'd first turned the service off at the old address a day early and then as of Wednesday afternoon were saying "maybe" I'd have service by Friday - after originally promising it for before noon on Tuesday.

(I should mention that because we were phoneless, my wife was the one who handled making complaints and threats, calling from work. You go, tigerwoman!)

It's going to take me a bit to catch up and get reoriented, so I may still be a light poster until tomorrow, but since -

- John Kerry has apparently convinced a sufficiently large number of people that the best alternative to reactionary Republican wackoism is centrist Democratic corporatism;

- the sweatshop owners and death squad leaders are back in charge in Haiti (and wasn't it sweet of George Bush to call on Haitians to "reject violence" after the bastards had won); and

- it now appears certain that Mars used to be a warm, wet planet and there may still be a considerable amount of water underground there;

at least we have somewhere to go.