The Islamic state of Iraq

To find out what is really going on in Iraq now, I go to Juan Cole's Informed Comment and to Today in Iraq.
Today, Cole is writing about the Sunday talk shows "The Republican Party spin machine was bouncing around the airwaves like an overloaded washing machine on Sunday attempting to obscure from the American public that they had by their actions managed to install a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq."
My personal response to Cole's post, actually, was to wonder, to whom is this news? I guess its a surprise to the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, but not to anyone else with half a brain.
Of course the Shiites were going to elect a people who would write an Islamic constitution - its what they want. It's what they've always wanted. Its what Iran wants, too. And the Kurds don't care as long as they are left alone to keep democracy in their own way, which the new constitution will also ensure.

Straws in the wind

Buzzflash points to this important article -- Hunger for Dictatorship from The American Conservative magazine. Even conservatives are becoming concerned about the rising tide of American fascism:
"I don’t think there are yet real fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency for them —hungry to bomb foreigners and smash those Americans who might object. And when there are constituencies, leaders may not be far behind. They could be propelled into power by a populace ever more frustrated that the imperialist war it has supported—generally for the most banal of patriotic reasons—cannot possibly end in victory. And so scapegoats are sought, and if we can’t bomb Arabs into submission, or the French, domestic critics of Bush will serve."

No Way!

TheStar.com - Canadian troops to Iraq?
Not only would it be stupid in and of itself for Canada to send troops to Iraq -- because the US is the agressor and the occupier and the insurgents are right to want them to leave -- but it would also allow Bush to announce how Canada had finally seen the light and recognized that he was right and we were wrong, so there, nayh nayh nayh nayh nayh nayh big fat razzberry bzzzzzzz!
Thanks, Ross, for the heads up.
So what can we do about it? Who is organizing the protests?

"Outside agitators"

FOXNews.com - Politics - Capitol Hill Mulls 'Regime Change' in Iran
Does anyone else remember the times when US leadership at various levels was opposed to "outside agitators"?
This was the right-wing ephithet hurled at everyone from the union activitists who worked to get unions certified in factories, to civil rights workers who signed up Southern voters, to Communists and "fellow-travellers" who were supposed to be "infiltrating" various progressive groups like the Sierra Club and the Democratic Party and the peace movement in the 60s.
At that time, the "outside agitators" were awful, stirring up the poor folks and the darkies and the workers and the students, getting them to protest when they should have known better.
So now, the US is making itself into the "outside agitators" in Iran? Well, what goes around, comes around, I guess.

Iraqi sayings

LRB | Eliot Weinberger : What I Heard about Iraq
This is almost too painful to read, but it has a deadly fascination that keeps you going. From All Spin Zone.

The best thing Ted Kennedy has ever done

Ted Kennedy speaks out against that lying toady Gonzales -- MyDD :Kennedy Letter Claims 'Smoking Gun' Against Gonzales.
Read it all.

Two solitudes

Here is the Associated Press' SOTU story on the Yahoo website: Bush Urges Congress to Save Soc. Security
and here is the Associated Press' SOTU story in the Globe and Mail Bush's pitch only tells half the story
Both apparently written by the same organization, but opposite in their approach and content.

John Ibbitson's column

I can link to today's Globe article about gay marriage: Skip gay marriage vote, Liberal MPs told which buries the news that at least three Conservative MPs (Jim Prentice from Calgary, James Moore from BC and Belinda Stronach) will vote in favour of gay marriage.
But behind the Globe's firewall is John Ibbitson's great column.
Ibbitson makes the point that the Conservatives and the church leaders talking up their opposition to gay marriage are lying to people about the real basis of their concern -- hiding their anti-gay discrimination in a cloak of religious victimhood:

Why are some religious and political leaders deliberately trying to deceive voters by complaining that churches could be forced to perform same-sex marriages? The ministers, priests, rabbis, imans and Conservative politicians who are leading the fight against the same-sex marriage legislation introduced yesterday must know as a matter of plain fact that no religious institution will ever be compelled to marry a gay couple. They know this. Yet they don't seem to care.
Yesterday, they were at it again. "The protection for religious freedom is an empty promise," declared Janet Epp of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Conservative Leader Stephen Harper echoed her: "The Liberal bill provides little in the way of assurance that religious freedoms will be protected if the legal definition of marriage is changed." Why do they say such things? Both referred to last December's Supreme Court reference, in which the court stated that "it would be for the provinces, in the exercise of their power over the solemnization of marriage, to legislate in a way that protects the rights of religious officials." Taken that far, it sounds as though only the provinces have the power to protect churches from compulsory marriage of homosexuals. But Mr. Harper and Ms. Epp neglected to tell you what the court said next: "Human rights codes must be interpreted and applied in a manner that respects the broad protection granted to religious freedom under the Charter." And "absent unique circumstances with respect to which we will not speculate, the guarantee of religious freedom in Section 2 (a) of the Charter is broad enough to protect religious officials from being compelled by the state to perform civil or religious same-sex marriages." The court couldn't be any plainer. Barring circumstances the judges can't even imagine, the Charter's guarantees of religious freedoms protect the clergy from being forced to marry anyone. The court went on to emphasize that the same protection would apply to religious spaces as well as religious figures. The added protections contained in the legislation are actually redundant. The Constitution provides the churches will all the protection they need.
So why do these religious and political leaders deliberately seek to mislead by claiming they could be forced to marry gays? Some Catholics and evangelical Protestants, in particular, hope to demonstrate the growing power of the religious right in Canada by winning a big political fight. But if they declared, "Homosexuality is evil. Same-sex marriage is a moral perversion," which is what they actually believe, a lot of people would turn away from them. Instead, they portray themselves as victims.
As for Mr. Harper and his advisers, part of their motive is sheer devilment. The same-sex issue is splitting the Liberal caucus in two. And it is a political maxim, which the Conservatives know only too well, that voters will not support a divided party.
More important, the Conservatives believe that fighting same-sex marriage will win them votes among immigrants from socially conservative countries. The Tories are desperate to win ethnic voters away from the Liberals. They are hoping that South Asian and Chinese immigrants in BC's lower mainland and in the riding around Toronto, in particular, are so uncomfortable with the idea of gays getting married that they will switch their support, delivering a dozen or more seats to the Conservatives in the next election. This is a dangerous strategy. Hands up, everyone who has a child more socially conservative than you are. The Tories risk permanently branding themselves as homophobes in the eyes of younger voters. But Mr. Harper obviously believes short-term advantage outweighs long-term harm.
We are about to get dragged through five months of agonizing debate on this legislation. We need to accept that people of goodwill can be found on both sides of this issue. But there is no goodwill in arguing that churches will be forced to marry gays. It is misleading. It is deceptive. It is a lie.

Right on, John. And as the months go on, keep reminding people about this deception.

I wrote my letter

The Globe and Mail: Same-sex bill introduced in House of Commons
Well, I wrote my email to Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton and their caucuses, to support the gay marriage legislation. Apparently they are getting lots of mail, so my one little email may not have any particular impact, but I wrote it just the same.
Here is the list of MPs. There doesn't seem to be a bulk email list, but clicking on the name will bring up the individual's email address.

Gomery staying

Well, Gomery is staying on, though he won't likely be speaking to the media again.
But its pretty funny, really. The Globe and Mail story Gomery to stay as head of sponsorship probe notes the dastardly things that Gomery said: "In one of the interviews, Judge Gomery told The Globe and Mail that he disagreed with the government's decision in the 1990s to pay $1,200 to print Mr. Chretien's signature on golf balls, describing the move as 'small-town cheap.' Judge Gomery also referred in another interview to Chuck Guite, who ran the program from 1996 to 1999, as a 'charming scamp.' On Tuesday, in reading his decision, he apologized for those comments. "
Funny, isn't it, that he had to apologize for telling the plain truth -- putting the Prime Minister's signature on golf balls is pretty cheap, really, and undoubtedly Guite would never have been able to do what he did unless he was both charming and scampish.
Now, the "small town" comment, though -- it really was an insult to small towns across the country, so I guess maybe they were entitled to an apology after all.

The more we know, the worse it gets

Senate Debates Gonzales's Role in Prisoner Policy
What? Only "25 to 30" democratic senators will vote against Gonzales? It should be all 44.
The more that comes out about the torture at Guantanamo, the more disgusting it gets. Now MSNBE has a news story - Tapes show Guantanamo squads’ tactics - describing "guards punching some detainees, tying one to a gurney for questioning and forcing a dozen to strip from the waist down . . . One squad was all-female, traumatizing some Muslim prisoners." Later the article also notes previous descriptions of Guantanamo interrogations where "female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood."
Who are these people, and particularly, who are these "Rosa Klebb" women? This makes me ashamed to be female.
And in the media coverage of all this, perhaps reflecting the Pentagon attitude that gave the nod-nod-wink-wink to these tactics in the first place, I also pick up a subtextual hint of male Bondage and Discipline fantasies -- if you checked this link, you may have them too!

"Antination-ism"

Here is the essay -- Some People Push Back - that caused all the fuss: College Cancels Event Amid Protests on Panelist's 9/11 Essay
Churchill also writes a bit of an apologia, linked on the essay page, which tempers the offensive language and guilt-by-nationality argument in his original essay.
Coming so soon after Orcinus' discussion of hate crimes, linked below, I found this whole story interesting. Did Churchill commit a "hate crime" against the people killed on 9/11? Can they all be tarred with the imperialist-Americans-deserved-it brush -- blaming secretaries and stockbrokers to every American international outrage from the Phoenix project in Vietnam to the deaths of Iraqi children caused by the UN sanctions against Saddam?
Some might say yes; personally, I say no.
It is exactly this kind of thinking that blames all Israelis for Israel's settlement policies, that blames all Palestinians for suicide bombers, that blames all Englishmen for Irish oppression, that blames all Germans for the concentration camps, etc, etc, etc. There is no name for this blame-by-nationality kind of thinking -- its not racism as we usually define it, nor is it some kind of phobia. Perhaps it should be called "antination-ism", for lack of any better term.
Yes, in a democracy, people are generally accountable for the actions of the government they have elected. But to blame every single citizen, individually, for every single military action taken by that government, and, by so doing, give yourself license to discriminate, hate, or kill, any citizen of that nation -- well, it is both ridiculous and intellectually lazy. Patriotism may well be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but so is antination-ism.

This is great fun!

General asshats
Circle I Limbo

Rednecks and, in general, Albertans
Circle II Whirling in a Dark & Stormy Wind

Mop & Pail columnist Margaret Wente
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow

Conservatives
Circle IV Rolling Weights

Catholic bishops
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled

River Styx

Stephen Harper
Circle VI Buried for Eternity

River Phlegyas

Anti-abortionists and Creationists
Circle VII Burning Sands

James Dobson
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement

Who else but George Bush
Circle IX Frozen in Ice

Design your own hell

Go to the link to design your own hell. Thanks to WTF Is It Now? for the link.

SpongeBob and Friends

See the story at United Church of Christ News Release: SpongeBob welcomed by UCC
What a great photo of happy people. And thanks so much to Sharkbabe for the link.

Hate crimes

Orcinus has the best post I have ever read about hate crime laws and why they are important. Its a deeper perspective which gives context to the recent uproar in Vancouver about whether a prosecutor should have called the beating death of a gay may a hate crime. I know the circumstances of this particular case were not as sympathetic as perhaps the prosecutor would have liked -- a gay man was beaten to death by a gang, yes, but he was naked in the park at the time. That said, however, the crime would certainly have qualified as a hate crime uncer Orcinus' description. Here is part of the piece:

"Actually preventing crimes, as always, is hard and often complex work; there are no panaceas when it comes to hate crimes. But a good place to start is understanding the mindset of the people motivated to commit them.
Typically, we're talking about a young male age 16-20 who has both a strong sense of racial identity and a persecution complex, perhaps even an antisocial personality disorder. He is most likely a broadly accepted member of his community (only about 8 percent of all bias crimes are committed by members of so-called hate groups) with some likelihood of previous police contact.
Most are so-called "reactive" offenders: that is, they react against what they perceive as an "invasion" of their community by "outsiders," often spontaneously. What's remarkable about the crimes is their real viciousness, particularly in the case of gay-bashing, in which an overkill of violence is the norm.
But many if not most hate-crime offenders refuse, even after incarceration, to admit that what they did was morally wrong. This is because they believe they are acting on the unspoken wishes of their previously homogeneous community, and thus taking action on a moral plane all their own.
This is why it's important for communities to stand up and be counted when hate crimes occur in their midst. Making public their utter condemnation of such acts sends an important message to the would-be perpetrators: the community does not condone violence to expel outsiders. Using the stiff arm of the law to back that message up is essential, especially when the need is so clear.
Conversely, pretending that a swastika on a synagogue is just another case of vandalism, or treating (especially in law enforcement terms) a "fag bashing" as just another bar fight, sends quite another message, one that in the mind of a hate-crime perpetrator equates with approval. A slap on the wrist is too often seen as a pat on the back; equanimity as forbearance."