america

This video seems to be going up and down all over the Internet, so we’re posting it here to seed it as widely as possible: classic footage of Bill O’Reilly goes totally nuts it on the set of Inside Edition when a teleprompter malfunctions. Warning: F-bombs and full heads of hair.

Link to download the QuickTime .mov of the amusing incident is here (3 MB).

• Turkey reforms a controversial law prohibiting insulting “Turkishness”, but the reforms may not go far enough.
• E911 mistakenly sends help to Toronto rather than Calgary. Someone dies.
• In Israel, an Orthodox backlash against ultra-Orthodox domination of civil and religious institutions.
• Israel provides medical care to sick and injured Palestinians from Gaza. A bit of a bright spot in the middle of swirling chaos.
• A substitute teacher claims that accusations of wizardry cost him his job.
• The New York Times discovers (in the Fashion and Style section, naturally) that transgendered spouses face legal challenges in the United States. Feministe has some interesting and important reactions.
• Gas Tax Spam:
  

  If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a “GAS TAX HOLIDAY”. You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

If you ask Google Maps to calculate directions between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario—the only point where you go due south to enter Canada from the United States—and then ask for directions via public transportation, here’s what you get:

And here’s what you get if you reverse those directions:

There are, of course bus services operated by both cities’ transportation systems, naturally. I am uncertain as to whether you can walk through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, though.

• Privacy
  • Agents at the U.S. border can search your laptop without cause, on the legal grounds that they already have an exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows them to search any paper documents you have with you. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s JFK Airport will start using a new technology to electronically strip-search passengers. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • An atheist soldier sues the U.S. Army over personal threats because of his choice of religion. Privacy—and freedom of religion—advocates are concerned.
• Politics
  • A college student utterly pwns John Ashcroft during a campus appearance. If you haven’t seen this one yet, go read it; it’s amazing.
  • How does the Democratic primary end? There are three possibilities, and none of them are good for the future of the party.
  • On the other hand, if Clinton somehow manages to win, it’s payback time in Clintonland.
• Culture
  • Sun Myung Moon, worldwide cult leader and lesser-known owner of the right-wing Washington Times, was crowned as the Second Coming—in a U.S. Senate office building.
  • Richard Dawkins’s open letter to an unsuspecting victim of Ben Stein’s awful creationist propaganda film Intelligent Design-informed exposé of Charles Darwin, Expelled.
  • In Alabama, an experiment in gay hand-holding in public by the newsmagazine 20/20 generates an emergency call to 911 by a concerned citizen under the impression that laws were being broken.
  • Textbooks cost too much. What can be done about it, realistically?

• From the Slog: “Log Cabin Republican: Fuck Gays Who Live in Other States!” (That’s not the good kind of “fuck”, either.)
• From the Arizona Republic, via Feministing: Arizona’s “Squaw Peak” to be officially renamed “Piestewa Peak” after Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier who was killed in combat in Iraq in March 2003.
• From the BBC: A new American liberal pro-peace Jewish lobby called J Street, a sort of liberal counterweight to the conservative-dominated AIPAC. It’s been high time for something like this for years; I’m glad it’s got off the ground with as much fanfare as it’s been getting.
• From my good friend Friar Yid: “They All Look Alike”. This appears to be the opinion of some Haredi Jews regarding non-Orthodox or secular Jews. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Your must-watch for today: Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Hillary Clinton and the Geraldine Ferraro debacle. Seriously, take the ten minutes. It’s worth it for both the news/commentary value but also the journalistic candor that has been so lacking from the media lately.

I have long thought that the Pacific Northwest (i.e. Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and some of northern California) possesses the most ridiculous place names of anywhere in North America (and possibly the world). Much of this is a product of local Native languages, as it is all over North America, but some of it is just human silliness. Some of the pronunciations are reasonable (enough), but some are maddeningly unintuitive and therefore—rightly or wrongly—employed as shibboleths to identify ‘true’ PNWers from everybody else (mostly Californians, even those who moved to the area years ago and are now locals).

If I’ve left anything off this list that you feel merits inclusion in such a, uh, worthy list, please leave it in a comment.

Silly-sounding place names

• Agassiz, BC (pronounced ag-uh-SEE)
• Aloha, OR (pronounced uh-LO-uh)
• Boring, OR
• Champoeg, OR (pronounced sham-POO-ee)
• Chehalis, WA (pronounced sha-HEY-liss)
• Chilliwack, BC
• Cle Elum, WA
• Coos Bay, OR (pronounced so that coos rhymes with goose)
• Coquitlam (and Port Coquitlam), BC
• Ekalaka, MT (pronounced ee-kuh-LAH-kuh)
• Estacada, OR (pronounced es-tuh-KAY-duh, like the name Kay)
• Esquimalt, BC (pronounced ess-KWAI-malt)
• Issaquah, WA (pronounced IZZ-ah-kwah)
• Klickitat (and Klickitat County), WA
• La Center, WA
• Moscow, ID (pronounced MOSS-koo)
• Nisqually, WA (not to be confused with Old Nisqually, WA)
• Onalaska, WA
• Osoyoos, BC (pronounced oh-SOY-yooz)
• Owhyee, ID (pronounced oh-WHY-yee)
• Pe Ell, WA (pronounced like the letters P and L)
• Puyallup, WA (a true shibboleth: pronounced pyoo-AL-up)
• Sequim, WA (pronounced skwim)
• Skamokawa, WA (pronounced ska-MOCK-a-way)
• Snohomish and Snohomish County, WA (pronounced snow-HO-mish)
• Snoqualmie, WA (pronounced snow-KWAL-mee)
• Sprague, WA (pronounced spreyg, in one syllable)
• Steillacoom, WA (pronounced STILL-a-koom)
• Squamish, BC
• Wahkiakum County, WA
• Walla Walla, WA
• Whatcom County, WA
• Willamette and the Willamette River, OR (another classic shibboleth: pronounced to rhyme with dammit)
• Yreka, CA (pronounced why-REE-kuh)

However, the one Cree village in Québec definitely deserves to be on this list too: Whapmagoostui, PQ. Also, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is pretty good.

Google Calculator is pretty nifty, and able to handle some rather complex high-level (i.e. English-like) syntax. For example, it handles 1.190 CAD per litre in USD per gallon quite nicely, to let you figure out just how much that tank of gas you bought this afternoon cost (the answer, if you can’t be arsed to click on the link, is about USD$4.55—that’s what you get for having high oil prices combined with the recent woes of Alberta oil companies), compared with what they’re paying in the States (more than a dollar less, on average, per gallon). And Google Calculator is pretty awesome for this sort of thing.

But try stringing together several conversions, and even though it gets the parentheses right, it still utterly fails. The calculation 1.19 CAD per litre per 16 litres should parse as 1.19 $/L x 16 L, which reduces to $(1.19 x 16), but the calculator fails utterly on the calculation. Just look at the ridiculous answer: 75,111.0894 USD/metres to the sixth power! U.S. dollars weren’t even mentioned, and metres to the sixth power?? Now I truly understand what they mean by ‘a higher plane of existence’.

I’ve been horribly busy the last few days with a research project—it is done for the moment, however, so in the time in between now and when I can calm down enough to write a ‘real’ post, here’s a list of interesting tabs that have been open in my Firefox since a few days ago:

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

In an op-ed in today’s LA Times, Aaron Miller takes a stab at explaining why large segments of the American Jewish population seem to have it in for Barack Obama—or anybody else who can even be remotely connected with criticism of Israel:

Don’t get me wrong. Jews—and yes, I am one of them—worry for a living. Their history compels them to and to be always vigilant. Yet in America, where they have achieved a level of security, acceptance and power unparalleled in their history, their existential worries paradoxically seem to have grown even greater. When Jimmy Carter writes a book—a bad book, incidentally—comparing Zionism to apartheid, many American Jews go crazy. When two university professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write another bad book—about what they call “the Israel lobby”—many Jews react as if the sky is falling.

Essentially, what’s going on is a severe overreaction to any perceived threats against Israel. Israel is equated with the Jewish people both there and in the Diaspora. Never mind that the ultra-Orthodox elements in Israel, which have de facto control over the country’s civil life, hate—to the point of considering Not Jewish—liberal Jews, or even Orthodox Jews who don’t wear the right hat. (In case you missed it, Gershom Gorenberg had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine demonstrating the extent of this ultra-Orthodox control and craziness when it comes to ‘proving’ your Jewishness for the purpose of marriage in or immigration to Israel.) Back to Miller:

This “us versus them” mentality still runs deep, and it is particularly harmful when it comes to the Arab-Israeli issue. That conflict is not some kind of morality play in which the forces of evil do battle against the forces of light. It is a conflict in which both sides have legitimate needs and requirements and do both good and bad things in pursuit of them.

This point, unfortunately, is correct in its essence. However, as we’ve learned time and time again, nuance simply doesn’t sell. And if your message is at all nuanced—not 100% rah-rah Israel, all Arabs are terrorists, etc.—then you are, by definition, an enemy not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. How pathetic is the discourse, how sad is the conversation? There is neither discourse nor conversation, because the attitude is ‘us versus them’—nuance equals betrayal.

The odious John Hagee, supporter of John McCain, has added yet another stupid set of assertions to the racist and ridiculous things he’s done lately, like organizing a ’slave sale’ and calling the Catholic Church ‘the great whore’. Now, I know it’s unfair to hold candidates accountable for every last thing said and done by their supporters, as people are doing with Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama, but the difference here is that Obama has repudiated Farrakhan while McCain appears to be sticking by Hagee and his endorsement. (There’s a serious double standard with how the media are handling both of these cases, but what else is new.)

And now, Hagee apparently believes that Jews are responsible for their own suffering and persecution:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day. …

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come … it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.”

That was me, sorry. My personal rebelliousness and disobedience brought on God’s wrath, and made Him send John Hagee and Louis Farrakhan to earth to let me know just how bad I was for eating a California roll with real crab that one time, or for driving to Seattle yesterday on the Sabbath. My bad.

This is not a new idea, theologically speaking—the Bible provides this justification over and over when bad things happen to the Jewish people, notably in the Book of Lamentations (check out 1.8, 3.39–47, and 5.16–18 for some typical examples). However, nobody except religious nuts and douchebags takes this ‘line of reasoning’ seriously. Kingdoms and countries are always getting sacked by other kingdoms and countries. This is the human race we’re talking about, people. What a douchebag, this religious nut Hagee.

(Hat-tip: AMERICAblog.)

Update: Josh Marshall has video and analysis of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) both totally blowing it on McCain and Hagee on television today.

A clearly mentally unbalanced fifty-year-old married man with six children tried to hire a hit man to kill his wife. The hit man in question turned out to be a police informant, and the man subsequently got fifteen years for his troubles. What is amazing, though, is the motive:

James Gau pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder for asking a police informant in July to go to his wife’s American Fork, Utah, home, pretend to be a robber, and strangle her.

Gau said left his family and moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual.

The article (from the AP) makes note of this point twice in its five sentences: he wanted, apparently, to ‘live as a homosexual’. What does that mean, and just how much underlying homophobia is there in this particular formulation? (On the other hand, the jokes basically do write themselves…)

The phrase to live as X generally entails, I believe, the notion to adopt the characteristics of other Xs. If the article said ‘moved to Brooklyn to live as a Hasidic Jew’ we would know what it meant: we would suppose he grew a beard and sidelocks, stopped watching television, and attempted to commit fraud on federal subsidies. Of course, I don’t mean to paint Hasidim with such a broad brush, but this is exactly my point: the phrasing to live as X brings up a particular set of images, not all of which may be appropriate, but many of which would certainly be present, rightly or wrongly. So what does ‘he moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual’ entail? Certainly it evokes particular images—both of Reno and of a specific type of homosexual—again, rightly or wrongly. Does this reflect latent homophobia? Possibly, but I’d be more inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, if only because ‘to adopt a homosexual lifestyle’ would have been far too obvious and ‘because he realised he was gay’ doesn’t really have the same ‘ring’ as a motivation for murder, does it? Mental instability, sure, but homosexuality? Doesn’t really work.

Hat-tip: Jess.

Over the last weekend, the rules for crossing the Canadian-American border changed: Canadians must now present a passport at the border to enter the United States. Previously, they’d let you across with nary a second thought, sometimes not even demanding to see your driver’s licence or any other form of identification: if you were driving a car with Canadian plates and appeared non-threatening, they would simply let you pass. This happened to me several times; usually they just asked me (on the American side) where I was coming from, where I was going, and waved me on through. I am given to understand that when you work in a profession like one with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or the Canadian Border Services Agency, or even security in general, you develop, over time, something of an eye for what might be trouble, and what will probably be fine. Now, of course, much of this is—consciously or otherwise—probably based on some underlying profiling (you’re white and drive a car in reasonably good shape? excellent, you’re neither a terrorist nor a drug smuggler), but that’s life, I’m told, in this kind of a world.

The one exception to this rule, in my experience, has been the crossing at Point Roberts, a small exclave of Washington State that was created when the border was determined to lie at 49° north latitude, but before they had done the mapping to see what was out there (besides Vancouver Island, which was accounted for separately in the treaty). There are only two (major) reasons Canadians go to the Point: (1) cheap(er) gasoline and (2) visiting the U.S. post office or some other shipping outlet for sending or receiving purposes. Therefore, when you enter and leave the Point, they usually know what you’re on about, and therefore the litany of questions is very specific—if it even gets asked at all.

But now, an American law passed in the wake of 9/11 is mandating that everyone provide proof of citizenship (i.e. a passport) when entering the United States by sea and, more importantly, land. As of last January—over a year ago—the rules changed to mandate passports from all passengers entering the United States by air, which people appear to have dutifully followed, taking it as one of the many necessary of unnecessary changes that have taken place since 9/11, and for better or worse, going along with it. And carrying a passport for flights between the U.S. and Canada is a good idea anyway; it simplifies matters when you go through customs and immigration control—remember, they really are two separate countries.

I’ve been using the word passport relatively interchangeably with the phrase proof of citizenship; I should clarify that what is actually required is proof of identity and citizenship. A passport proves both those things, but so do some other things, which are listed in the NPR story linked to at the beginning of this post. A NEXUS card, for example, will serve these functions just as well as a passport, though I once tried to use my NEXUS card as identification in San Francisco Airport, which though totally legal, didn’t quite work because the agents I was talking to had no idea what it was. The other relatively new—and potentially quite scary thing that you will soon be able to use is an enhanced driver’s licence, which are now being rolled out in both British Columbia and Washington State. I will skip lightly over these except to note that people of the privacy-advocating sort are worried that these licences are the first step toward a national ID card in both Canada and the United States. But this is a discussion for another time.

What is amazing, though is that what with all the new regulations on the books, the U.S. border guards are not enforcing these policies. Let me repeat that: these new laws say you have to present a passport at the border, but those guys who work for the Department of Homeland Security will not turn you away if you don’t have a passport. They’ve pushed back the date on enforcement of law by at least eighteen months, meaning that it will come into effect in July 2009 at the earliest; until then you can expect to receive ‘an educational flyer’ when you cross the border sans passport. There appears to be some question, furthermore, as to the next step—that is, whether or not to press on with the regulations at all. Leading the opposition are three U.S. Senators: Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and Ted ‘Series Of Tubes‘ Stevens (R-Alaska). These politicians all come from border states, surprise, surprise—guess whose economies are going to lose money if cross-border traffic is hindered further than it already is.

But one of the most salient objections I can think of—and one that, to my knowledge, hasn’t really surfaced yet—is that we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration, for years and years, how insecure and unsafe America’s borders really are, and how desperately needed are new measures to strengthen border security. Well, the new measures just came into place, and guess what? Bush’s own government isn’t enforcing them! What blinding hypocrisy and idiocy!

President Bush welcomed the Anaheim Ducks, winners of the 2007 Stanley Cup, to the White House today, and made some stupid jokes about Dick Cheney shooting an old man in the face:

President Bush quipped to the Anaheim Ducks: “Like, have you noticed a lot of security around here? It’s because the Vice President heard there were some Ducks around.”

This guy just cracks me up. Actually, he doesn’t. But he still does, y’know. What a doof.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that a county school district in Maryland has implemented a controversial—even illegal—new policy that ‘directs Howard County school officials to notify parents when students reveal they are pregnant’. Way to go, Howard County, to ensure that more girls who need medical help will be even less willing to seek it out.

Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.

Ugly, gross, crazy, and stupid. The way to help pregnant high schoolers is to provide them with medical assistance and the love and support of their community, not to sic their parents, their school officials, and the full weight of The Law on them.

Tip of the hat to Cara at The Curvature, via Ann at Feministing.

Excellent news today for gay rights in the States! First, an appellate judge in New York has ruled that the state must recognise marriages performed in Canada between two people of the same sex. Excellent news for both Canadians in America and American gays who came up here to get married when Canada legalized gay marriage earlier this decade. Of course, the judgment recognises that a law might eventually be passed that would deny recognition to those marriages, but until such a law is on the books the marriages must be legally recognised in New York. This is a terrific victory, because it marks the first time any entity at the Federal level in the United States has afforded recognition in this kind of situation.

Second, and more legally interesting, a judge in Oregon has thrown out a lawsuit challenging a law passed by the legislature last year allowing the official recognition of domestic partnerships, allowing the law to come into effect immediately. The point being argued in court was whether or not one has a constitutional right, if one signs a petition, to have that signature officially tabulated. There had been a petition circulating in Oregon to put a referendum before the voters to ban any other form of union between two people of the same sex (read: gay marriage), but it barely did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot. The judge concluded that it is not a constitutional right to have one’s signature counted on a petition, which sounds like a counterintuitive position, but it is very soundly argued in the (surprisingly readable and understandable) ruling (PDF). Here’s the interesting bit from the ruling (pages 15–16):

I believe the State, through a variety of sources, has demonstrated to the average signer of a petition that it’s not making any promise that your signature ultimately will be counted. Some of those we’ve talked about. Some have to do with the fact that when you sign a petition, there are any number of ways in which your petition may never see again the light of day.

Now, admittedly, some of the most common of those have nothing to do with anybody acting on behalf of the State. The chief petitioner can simply give up and go home or raise some question in his or her own mind about a particular sheet and throw that sheet away just to save themselves the trouble of a challenge later. There are any number of ways when you sign a petition that you have no reasonable expectation that the State is promising it will make it all the way to home plate. …

If you’ll forgive kind of a folksy example, if one of my kids claims I promised them a Lamborghini when they graduated from high school, the fact that I cannot do so is some evidence that I never promised I would. And if the State is being said to have promised something that would be extraordinarily difficult to do, that’s some evidence, in my view, that it never promised it in the first place; it’s not within the original entitlement.

Legally, at least from the point of view of the common law, impossibility excuses a party from failing to fulfil a contract. But there was no contract here; the specific objection raised by the plaintiffs is that the state denied due process to those people who signed the petition expecting their signatures to count, and in doing so violated the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the ruling found that the state never created the entitlement to having their signatures counted in the first place.

The upshot is that gay people can now go ahead and register their domestic partnerships in Oregon and receive many (but not yet all) of the benefits conferred by marriage in other situations. Thank goodness for two happy outcomes to cap off the week.

With John Edwards out on the Democratic side and Rudy Giuliani out on the Republican side, this leaves only a few candidates remaining in the party primaries in the U.S. presidential race. Obama is looking increasingly strong, having raised $32 million from over 170,000 new donors in January alone, Romney is looking more and more like the doofus we all know he is, Hillary is wisely telling Bill to tone it down for fear he lost South Carolina for her, and the McCain train looks like it’s leaving the station, to the chagrin of much of the American right-wing. This is looking increasingly like a Hillary-Obama race that will be decided on Super Tuesday, versus McCain on the Republican side. But lest we overlook the positive demographic side of all this: the Democratic nominee is now guaranteed not to be a white male! As Jon Stewart put it on last night’s A Daily Show:

Edwards’ departure leaves the Democratic nomination down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which means that the Founding Fathers finally have a winner in their ‘How Long Will It Take Our Nation To Nominate A Non-White Male’ betting pool. Oh, I can’t wait to find out who is the winner. Ladies and gentlemen, George Mason of Virginia correctly guessed—two hundred and nineteen years! Congratulations, Georgey!

In related news from the world of primaries, Slate’s ‘Explainer’ column has an excellent explanation of what happens to Edwards’s delegates at the Democratic National Convention now. And it will be interesting to watch what happens with the first ever global primary for Democrats living abroad, which will be electing state-level delegates to be seated and vote at the Convention on behalf of the millions of Democratic voters residing outside the United States. This will be fascinating on both a political and a technological level: will it even ‘work’—however we define that—and what, if any, will be its long-term effects?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the solar system, Ron Paul’s campaign is, apparently, still going strong, and America is still, apparently, deeply in love with him. In fact, he is, apparently, the only Republican even bothering to show up in some states, which shows that he at least thinks that he can reciprocate that love to large portions of the country. Just check out some of his vastly impressive press releases if you aren’t prepared to take my word for it. And from even further reaches of our solar system, Ralph ‘I-didn’t-cost-Gore-the-election-but-Bush-and-Gore-cost-me-the-election’ Nader is thinking about throwing his hat into the ring once again. (Surely it’s no coincidence, as Chris Beam points out, that this is coming to light right after Edwards, the Democrat whom Nader had endorsed, dropped out of the race.) I can only sigh and wonder who’s funding Nader this time around.

Bush’s (thankfully last) State of the Union is on tonight at 9 pm Eastern time. You can probably watch it live on every single channel your television gets. It might even be dubbed into Spanish on one or two of those channels. Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of the state of Kansas, will be delivering the response for the Democrats. But my reaction, I’m afraid, is similar to my reaction to the bit of news about WMDs in my last post: So what? Who cares?

Throughout the political sphere, and more significantly on both sides of the aisle, nobody seems to care. Hillary Clinton is treating this non-event with downright disdain, though Fox News did attempt to spin her reaction into the headline ‘Hillary Excited About Bush’s State of the Union’. Tony Blankley, on last weekend’s Left, Right, and Center, noted that this is the first time in recent memory that the press hasn’t even really mentioned the speech in the week beforehand. John McCain will skip the speech entirely to campaign in Florida.

Bush’s opportunity to create a legacy for himself is over, both on the international and on the domestic fronts. The most he can do is to create the appearance that he did something about the economy before it becomes someone else’s problem in a year’s time. No action will be proposed or taken on Iraq, besides the vague and fuzzy feeling he’ll try to project, for the nth time, that things are going well. On the economy, Bush will propose some vague and ill-defined action, thus giving people—especially the Democratic candidates—a chance to continue last week’s competition in comparing the relative sizes of their stimulus packages. Generally, the speech will suck—and if Bush’s handlers have any brains left about them, it’ll be short.

Oh well. If your State of the Union parties need some spicing up—which they no doubt will—this year’s drinking game looks pretty good.

According to the recent report of an FBI agent who interviewed Saddam Hussein after the former leader of Iraq was captured in 2003, Iraq wanted to trick the rest of the world into believing that it had weapons of mass destruction to intimidate Iran:

Saddam Hussein let the world think he had weapons of mass destruction to intimidate Iran and prevent the country from attacking Iraq, according to an FBI agent who interviewed the dictator after his 2003 capture.

According to a CBS report, Hussein claimed he didn’t anticipate that the United States would invade Iraq over WMD, agent George Piro said on “60 Minutes,” scheduled for Sunday broadcast.

“For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that (faking having the weapons) would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” said Piro.

Kind of like Israel, but in reverse, I guess—trying to make a deterrent out of making everybody think you have WMDs when you actually don’t.

The report will show up on tonight’s 60 Minutes, but I plan to be watching the rebroadcast of the 2008 U.S. figure skating championships, which will be sure to hold my interest for much longer, for two (related) reasons. One, who the hell remembers or cares about weapons of mass destruction? WMDs as a justification for war with Iraq went out of fashion about six months after the invasion, when none were found. At that point, it became all about turning Iraq into a democracy, ending the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and other reasons that seemed to come out of the blue. So I have to wonder how much impact this is going to have on either the political policy or the public consciousness of the United States. (Though I might look for Bush to throw in a veiled dig or two at this report in tomorrow night’s State of the Union speech). And second, this report doesn’t change anything: Hussein was already executed back in 2006, the U.S. military is still bogged down in a war in Iraq with no end in sight, and at this point what does it matter whether the initial justification was right or not? Not that it would have changed anything back during the run-up to the war years ago anyway…

Update: Think Progress has a video and transcript of the original interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes here.

Today, in the United States, is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which essentially held that women may elect to have an abortion for any reason up until the point when the fetus becomes ‘viable’. Ever since this ruling, social and religious conservatives have attempted to curtail or even reverse this crucial right, and unfortunately have been seeing some successes in various parts of the country with measures like parental-notification laws, laws mandating waiting periods before the abortion may be carried out, and laws restricting particular kinds of abortion techniques.

Jill Filipovic has an excellent post up at Feministe, which is also posted in the Huffington Post, outlining ‘10 Reasons to Support Reproductive Justice on Roe Day’. There’s nothing there I feel I can improve upon—just go read it. Also check out her roundup of the best Roe Day commentary out there.

Eugene Robinson has a very interesting piece in today’s Truthdig that wonders what exactly the deal is with Bill Clinton these days. Clinton, by far the most popular living ex-president, has been joining the attacks on his wife Hillary’s opponent for the Democratic nomination for President, Barack Obama, to such a fierce degree that Obama recently told an interviewer, ‘I feel like I’m running against both Clintons.’ The fundamental problem, Robinson suggests, is that Obama is peddling the message—or more importantly, the Clintons see him as peddling the message—that Bill Clinton’s accomplishments during his eight years of tenure as President were insufficient, or have been reversed by the Bush administration, or never really achieved much anyway in the way of actually uniting people. Bill Clinton seems to be taking this as a personal affront and is responding in kind, going after Obama himself, the media (for what the Clinton camp sees as biased pro-Obama media coverage), and by extension quite a large segment of the American electorate.

Furthermore, at least some of Obama’s appeal is tapping into the feelings of some Democrats that sure, Clinton was great, but do the people of the United States really want another four or eight years of triangulation, centrism, and the appearance of two straight all-in-the-family dynasties? Going a rather unfortunate step further, Republican author and ex-Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan suggested over the weekend that ‘Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton’ is a ’sickness’—a feeling she ascribed to ’so many people’, with no foundation at all. While she may be hyperbolic in her language, I have to wonder to what extent this issue is present and underlying much of what we’re seeing happen in the Democratic primaries, and what impact it will have on the general election come November. Expect more to be made of this as Bill Clinton’s involvement in Hillary’s campaign grows, along with his willingness to play the bad cop.

After providing crucial confirmation of his views that the United States Constitution should be amended to conform to ‘God’s word’, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has, in the same interview, directly equated homosexuality with bestiality. And this isn’t what is usually meant by ‘equates’, which is something like ‘mentioned in the same breath’. He means to draw the direct equivalence between that two men having sex with one another and a man having sex with an animal:

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

This has already been kicked around by the blogosphere a bit, especially by Talking Points Memo and by John Aravosis, who rightly points out that it’s about time the media start treating Huckabee’s nutty religious views as the same sort of fair game as he seems to treat Mitt Romney’s supposed beliefs, as a Mormon, in the siblinghood of Jesus and the Devil.

But I haven’t yet seen anybody raise the question: if two gay men having sex is like a man having sex with a (non-human) animal, which of the participants in the H. sapiens-on-H. sapiens sex is equivalent, from a physical, metaphysical, and/or moral standpoint, to the non-human participant in the latter case? Follow-up question: how far removed from ‘human’, taxonomically speaking, does Huckabee intend this equivalence to extend? Surely he means to exclude things in kingdoms other than Animalia, thus permitting the usage of, say, vegetable matter in lawful sexual relations between husband and wife as God intended. I foresee some tricky grey areas here.

Oh, and one other question: if we are to take the bible at its word–you know, literally–the prohibition on bestiality would seem to apply specifically, if perhaps not exclusively, to women (Leviticus 18.23)):

וּבְכָל־בְּהֵמָ֛ה לֹֽא־תִתֵּ֥ן שְׁכָבְתְּךָ֖ לְטָמְאָה־בָ֑הּ וְאִשָּׁ֗ה לֹֽא־תַעֲמֹ֞ד לִפְנֵ֧י בְהֵמָ֛ה לְרִבְעָ֖הּ תֶּ֥בֶל הֽוּא׃

Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

I have chosen the King James Version translation–which is close enough here to the Hebrew for my purposes–to try to reflect some of the theology underlying, as it were, the sexual philosophy of people like Mike Huckabee. What about it, Mike? Do you believe that women need to be specially interdicted from animal-human relations? Does this require a Constitutional amendment–perhaps in the same vein as an anti-abortion amendment? Why not just have a whole anti-female amendment while you’re at it? Oh wait, it’s halfway there already.

If New Hampshire doesn’t go well for Hillary, which seems more and more likely now that the polls are consistently finding double-digit leads for Obama, you can bet she’s going to go through with some sort of shake-up to her campaign staff, most likely involving replacing the weird and ever-reliable-to-make-your-campaign-fail strategist Mark Penn. But it probably won’t be as drastic as this:

In what some party insiders are calling a Hail Mary bid to win Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton today attempted to repackage herself as a black man. … Speaking at a rally in Manchester, N.H., Clinton thanked her supporters for “keeping it real” and promoted her just-released autobiography, The Bodacicty of Hope. “This election is about whether or not America is ready to elect a black man president of the United States,” she said. “I believe I am that black man.”

As Little Buttercup once famously noted, “The poor bumboat woman has gipsy blood in her veins, and she can read destinies! … There is a change in store for you … be prepared!” And I fear that though a mystic tone she borrows, Hillary will learn the truth with sorrow. Here today, and gone tomorrow.

Yes I know—that is so!

Bill O’Reilly is up to his old tricks again, pushing an Obama staffer at a rally at a New Hampshire school, causing Obama’s Secret Service agents to get involved in the fray. I’d been wondering what happened to the O’Reilly of the late 1990s-early 2000s. Well, good news: he’s back, apparently! Now imagine Fox’s—and O’Reilly’s—reaction if it had been a more mainstream or left-leaning television personality, like Anderson Cooper or Keith Olbermann. Just ponder that for a second. Imagine the letters of apology, the resignations, the anger management courses, the right-wing hysteria over the uncontrollable left-wing media. Now compare that to the reaction we’re going to get to this incident. That’s what I thought.

The Iowa caucuses are over, and with Barack Obama’s and Mike Huckabee’s rather stunning and convincing wins over the rest of the Democratic and Republican fields, respectively, I though I would add my admittedly paltry two cents to the fray—what’s the blogosphere for, anyway?

The winners: Obama and Huckabee rightly deserve the praise for winning by such impressive margins, and at least in Obama’s case a clear front-runner has emerged and everybody else is playing catch-up. John Edwards, however, made a strong showing, and finished second—barely ahead of Hillary, but the only thing that registers with many people is the ordinal numbers in front of the names. He will definitely also be a factor in the upcoming weeks. The other clear winner is John “100 years in Iraq is fine by me” McCain, who seems to be getting a hell of a lot of media attention from various sources that for whatever reason simply love to fawn on him. He didn’t do very well in the caucuses, but he’s going to have lots of media momentum on his side.

The sort-of winners: Mike Huckabee may have won the caucuses by a 9% margin, but the Republican side is still extremely muddled. Giuliani finished sixth in the caucuses, except he had never really paid much attention to Iowa at all, and still definitely has the wherewithal to do well in many other states, especially those that hold their primary elections on Super Tuesday. The other person who had some kind of victory was Ron Paul, who managed to pull out a whopping 10%. This from a guy everyone wishes would just go away. Giuliani came in sixth with 3.5%, and he’s still getting invited to Fox News’s debate, whereas fifth-place Ron Paul is still being unceremoniously excluded. Ron Paul won’t win the Republican nomination, but be on the lookout for a possible third-party bid that could Naderize the Republican side of the 2008 elections. He certainly has the fundraising apparatus and crazy robot-like supporters—almost à la another erstwhile also-ran and his cult-like following—to make a fight of it.

The losers: Mitt Romney doesn’t come out of this looking good, but Hillary Clinton, obviously, is the big loser of the night. Her whole campaign was based on the inevitability of her candidacy, and now that approach is obviously broken and in need of some serious (and fast) rethinking. So she’s now reduced to insinuating that Obama is ‘too liberal‘ and that he has has associations with left-wing intellectuals. Err, the 1920s called; they want their rhetoric back. (Actually, it wasn’t historically just rhetoric: sometimes it was blatant xenophobia too.)

The whole primary/caucus process in the United States is silly, with various states wielding disproportionate influence. Complaining about this is old hat, however, and there’s really nothing new to be said about it. Nothing is going to change until the abolition of federalism and the recognition of all citizens of the great ‘democracy’ of the United States as truly equal—not just those who happen to live within arbitrary boundaries that for stupid historical reasons dictate that they can proceed to dictate to the rest of the country who’s going to be on their ballots in November.

So yeah, look for that.

Northern California viewed from the air en route from Vancouver to San Francisco at daybreak is a fine enough sight, if you happen to like lots of rolling brown hills. The hills are brown because the vegetation is so sparse: aside from the inevitable pine trees, all there really is on the hillsides is browner grasses and bare dirt. And the hills don’t so much roll as thrust upwards and outwards in very large clusters. It almost looks as if someone has scooped up some dirt and squished it together between her fingers, dropping it back onto the ground in great heaps. Millions of years of plate tectonics have more or less dictated that California—its northern part together with its south—is destined to receive pretty much the ass end of the deal when it comes to geology. So if you happen to be fond of endless miles of not-so-gentle slopes and somewhat uninspiring evergreen forests—and I know more than a few people who seem to be—then the hills of Northern California would be for you.

The U.S.’s National Public Radio aired an important story yesterday on its All Things Considered programme about soldiers who return from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exhibit all sorts of classic PTSD-indicative symptoms, are diagnosed with PTSD, and then receive ‘less-than-honorable’ discharges, which deny them medical benefits.

Matt McLauchlen … spent months in military hospitals after a rocket explosion in Iraq almost severed his spinal cord and caused permanent disabilities. When he told a colonel he was so depressed that he had smoked marijuana, commanders at Camp Pendleton sent him to court martial—and discharged him with only partial benefits.

This is only one example: the news item is full of other half-forgotten soldiers: remembered long enough to get kicked out of the armed forces and denied their rightful benefits. Veterans’ groups have been trying to raise awareness of this issue, but their efforts have only accomplished so much. And of course the U.S. government had nothing to say about it on or even off the record.

The Vietnam War and the first Gulf War rightly focussed attention on the realities of PTSD and ultimately turned it into a recognised medical condition. Treatments exist to help those it affects. So why aren’t they getting to those soldiers who need them? Why are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans denied their rights to help? Unfortunately this is yet another item on a long list of things the Bush administration needs to be held accountable for, and it’s probably not very high up on that list priority-wise. But just take a listen to the NPR story linked above: would that more media outlets still possessed that sense of journalistic integrity and passion.

This is what passes for Environmental Protection these days? And from the Environmental Protection Agency itself? My god.

“The question is how to have an effective strategy. Is it more effective to let each state make a decision as to how to proceed in curbing greenhouse gases or is it more effective to have a national strategy,” Bush said at a news conference Thursday.

Johnson said California’s emissions limits weren’t needed because Congress just passed energy legislation raising fuel economy standards nationwide.

By this logic, no state should have to have a state highway system, because there’s a federal highway system that’s both already in place and qualitatively better. Generalized: no state should have laws that legislate any matter peripherally touched on by federal law. You’ve got to admire the Bush administration: ‘we don’t torture detainees, only logical argumentation’. Anyway, the one bright spot: the Governator Schwarzenegger has announced that the state will sue the federal government, and several other states, including Washington and Oregon, are apparently going to join the fray. Good for them. What a crock. What a total crock. Honestly, I simply can’t believe it.

And meanwhile we’re worried about Mitt Romney’s pizza-eating habits while the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Words cannot describe.