Palestinians demonstrate for the Peacemakers

I hadn't heard of this ever happening before for people kidnapped in Iraq -- a demonstration by Palestinians calling for the release of the four Christian Peacemakers:


AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
Also, sign the petition here -- 4000 people have already, including Cindy Sheehan -- and keep up with the latest news about the Peacemakers here.

Bush cartoons and jokes

First, the cartoons:


Cam Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch


Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

And a couple about Cheney:

RJ Matson, The New York Observer


RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch

And one more:

Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

Now the jokes:
-President Bush's approval rating now down to 35%. To give you an idea about how unpopular President Bush is right now, he wasn't even invited to the White House Christmas party. --Jay Leno
-President Bush spent the Thanksgiving weekend at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. A lot of anti-war protesters showed up. On the news they said that 12 pro-Bush supporters were also there. Twelve? Really? That's it? That's pretty bad isn't it? Even Scott Peterson had more people than that waiting for him." --Jay Leno
-Bush's overall approval ratings have hit an all-time low ... If Bush's numbers don't improve, he could become the first president held back and forced to repeat his presidency. --Tina Fey
-President Bush was at the Mexican border yesterday. Apparently his poll numbers are so low that he was trying to make a run for it. --Jay Leno
-According to the latest poll, if George W. Bush were to run for president today he would lose to the Democratic candidate. And today George W. Bush said 'Again?' --Jay Leno
-President Bush was called for jury duty in Texas. Whew, finally some good news for Tom DeLay. --Jay Leno
-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush says he wants to be president. Well that's good, somebody will have to pardon his brother. --David Letterman
-The big White House Christmas tree arrived in Washington yesterday. This is President's Bush's favorite holiday tradition. Anything that involves cutting down a tree, Bush has a great time. --Jay Leno
-The big story from Washington today is that President Bush may have lied to investigators about the CIA leak. The theory is that President Bush may have been playing dumb. Well good luck getting anyone to believe that one." --Jay Leno
-In his speech President Bush said we need to rebuild Iraq, provide the people with jobs, and give them hope. If it works there maybe we'll try it in New Orleans. --Jay Leno
-For the first time ever, Republicans in Congress -- Republicans! -- are demanding to know the president's exit strategy from Iraq. Yeah, in response the president said I have an exit strategy, I'm leaving office in 2008. --Conan O'Brien
-It seems the Pentagon has been paying Iraqi journalists to promote a proWhite House view in Iraqi newspapers. See, luckily, we don't have that kind of thing here. We have Fox News. --Jay Leno
-Insiders say that if Karl Rove resigns, President Bush will not function effectively. Wait a minute, all this time he's been functioning effectively?" --David Letterman
-A chunk of marble fell off the facade of the Supreme Court building. Just fell off, boom. Engineers believe it may have fallen off because the building was leaning a little too far to the right. ... Here's the sad part, it didn't hit one lawyer. --Jay Leno
-[On freedom's progress): Here in Baghdad, freedom. In outer Baghdad, free-ish, gradually becoming liberatory. The southern regions, somewhat under-oppressed. The city of Umm Qasr, vaguely unshackled. The Western provinces, still a little kidnappy. --"Daily Show" correspondent Rob Corddry

Scum

That piece of inhuman scum named Rush Limbaugh thinks that it serves the Christian Peacemaker Teams right that they got kidnapped -- he thinks it is outrageous that they should evey try to achieve peace through, well, acting peacefully, when Georgie and the US of A is trying to achieve peace through war.
I guess he'd be even happier if they got killed. Boy, that'd really show them how wrong they were, I guess.
From Rush Limbaugh's show of Nov. 29:

LIMBAUGH: "Aljazeera has broadcasted an insurgent video today, shows four peace activists taken hostage in Iraq . . . Yeah, all right. Now, let's take this at face value just for a moment. This could all be BS. I mean, we've never heard of the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. This could all be a stunt, but let's take it -- well, let's take it both ways. We'll take it face value at first, then we'll look at it as a stunt second. I said at the conclusion of previous hours -- part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, "Rush, that's horrible. Peace activists taken hostage." Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality. So here we have these peace activists over there. I don't care if they're Christian or not. They're over there, and as peace activists, they've got one purpose. They're over there trying to stop the violence. . . . Fine, they get kidnapped. They get kidnapped at gunpoint. If that version of this is true, then -- OK, you've met the bad guys, and you tried your technique on them, and now you're blindfolded in a room with guns pointed at you and knives at your throat. I don't like that. But any time a bunch of people that walk around with the head in the sand practicing a bunch of irresponsible, idiotic theory confront reality, I'm kind of happy about it, because I'm eager for people to see reality, change their minds if necessary, and have things sized up.

Emphasis mine. Yes, as soon as these people get kidnapped, well, they'll turn into the same kind of scum that Limbaugh is himself.
Limbaugh, by the way, has on his website a whole Club G'itmo section, with photos from all his chickenhawk listeners who think they're contributing to the war effort by putting on their Club G'itmo hat and taking a photo standing in front of a Democrat's office. Wow, talk about putting yourself at risk! Why, those Democrats might actually come out and yell at them!
I guess Limbaugh thinks those Christian Peacemaker Teams should be doing stunts like this, instead of actually living their faith and risking their lives in Iraq and other war zones around the world.
And this is the kind of crap that the American military are listening to on their Armed Forces radio.
The Mennonites should demand an apology.
And when did Rush Limbaugh ever do one single charitable thing for any other American, much less for someone in another country? Never. Even his much-promoted "gift" to soldiers is a scam. It consists of getting donations from his listeners so that he will send the soldiers a 'membership' in his website plus a monthly newsletter. He says he's not profiteering because for every $50 donation for each subscription, he himself is "matching" this -- in other words, for each 'subscription' he is actually collecting $25.

Hand Ignatieff his hat

If he survives the nomination, I hope the voters of Etobicoke-Lakeshore hand Michael Ignatieff his hat.
This is NOT a fellow who should be sitting in our House of Commons, not at a Liberal at least. His writings may have been insulting to Ukrainians -- I'm not sure of the larger context for a sentence like "Ukrainian independence conjures up images of peasant embroidered shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks in cloaks and boots . . ." so perhaps he can actually claim the benefit of the doubt -- but certainly his other writings are offensive to me.
This July, 2005 article "Exporting Democracy, Revising Torture: The Complex Missions of Michael Ignatieff" exposes the moral bankruptcy of this man.
Torture? Well, that's OK really, because its necessary, and its just human nature anyway:

"the issue then becomes not whether torture can be prevented, but whether it can be regulated". [Ignatieff] goes even further, and seems to like the idea that when the police need to torture a suspect they could apply to a judge for a 'torture warrant' that would specify the individual being tortured and set limits to the type and duration of pain allowed . . . "The problem is to . . . maintain the limits, case by case, where reasonable people may disagree as to what constitutes torture, what detentions are illegal, which killings depart from lawful norms, or which pre-emptive actions constitute aggression." . . . we know what torture is. From the Spanish inquisition, from the Nazi era, from Augusto Pinochet in Chile, from the apartheid police in South Africa, from Antonio Salazar in Portugal and Francisco Franco in Spain, from Mobutu Sese-Soko in Zaire and now from those digital snapshots of Abu Ghraib, all 'reasonable people' know what torture is. The United Nations charter and half a century of juridical development inside and outside the UN have showed us in detail what torture is, and the rights that we have and must protect. Ignatieff, apparently speaking from some distant world, tells us that, yes, the repressive instincts of the executive power and the security forces should be counterbalanced by the judicial system . . .

The Bush administration, the neocons, the Republicans in general? Just wonderful folks, really, because their hearts are in the right place:

He attacks Europeans as anti-democratic and selfish. He criticises John Kerry as a “risk-avoiding realist” . . . he enthusiastically praises Ronald Reagan, “who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians”. For him, “the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy” started with Reagan. Somehow, the director of the Carr Center fails to mention the effects of the Reagan doctrine in Central America and Africa, the Iran-Contra affair, the illegal attacks on Nicaragua and the promotion of the freedom fighters in Afghanistan – a policy with powerful consequences in today’s terrorism. Ignatieff has no historical context. Fatally attracted by the style of instant journalism, he frivolously mixes history and propaganda. . . . Ignatieff does not even know about the country he lives in. He has “an imagined community” in his mind, a homogenous and coherent American society embodying Jeffersonian ideals. And he dreams of a fair and normal electoral process: “Judging from the results of the election in 2004, a majority of Americans do not want to be told that Jefferson was wrong.” US society, with its deep fragmentations and its millions of immigrants whose hearts and minds are in the Dominican Republic, Russia, Honduras or India, has a diversity that mocks such generalisations as “the American electorate seems to know only too well how high the price was in Iraq, and it still chose the gambler (Bush) over the realist (Kerry). In 2004, the Jefferson dream won decisively over American prudence.” It may be difficult to explain all the reasons behind last year’s presidential vote, but we can be sure of this: not many people voted for democratic ideals in the middle east. . . . Ignatieff chooses to applaud a government that goes to war in defiance of the Security Council, that actively promotes the failure of the United Nations, that refuses to sign international treaties, that opts out of international justice and that ignores human rights in prisons – a government that is violating rather than promoting the Jeffersonian dream. In his militaristic patriotism, Ignatieff is blind and wrong.

Please, Etobicoke-Lakeshore, save us from this guy. Or else we will all have to listen to him pontificate during Question Period day after day.
And he probably expects a cabinet post, too. Gag me with a spoon.

"Those people"

So now that Foxy fellow Bill O'Reilly, who was sued for sexually harassing a coworker, is making a list of "those people" -- you know, the ones who "want an America free from spirituality and judgments about personal behavior."
He doesn't like them.
He wants his millions of listeners not to like them either.
Except, I guess, that no one is supposed to make judgments about O' Reilly's own personal behaviour. Nope, its just the personal behaviour of "those people" that is now supposed to be judged and found wanting.
And I presume, as some point, all "those people" should be rounded up and put into re-education camps or maybe work camps where they will learn how to be spiritual and how to make judgements about other people's personal behaviour, or something like that ...

Kidnapped in Iraq - and this time they're ours

Here is the Christian Peacemaker Teams website talking about their four workers who were kidnapped. In a blog a couple of months ago I noted how courageous I thought these people were because they have been operating outside the Green Zone.
Canadian James Loney has worked in Iraq to take testimony from families of prisoners. The other Canadian captured, Harmeet Singh Sooden, is working toward a Master's degree in English literature. American Tom Fox is a Quaker, while Briton Norman Kember taught medicine in England.
And here is the most recent CPT update on Iraq -- a posting from earlier this month describing what is happening now in Falluja. CPT was one of the first groups to identify and document the prisoner abuse issue in Iraq.

Mr. Putz

So what is the one thing that everyone told Harper to just leave alone?
Just move on, Stephen, everyone said -- its settled now and a majority of Canadians support it and just about nobody except a few diehards even want to see it debated anymore?
So what is the first thing out of Harper's mouth? "Harper vows free vote on gay marriage"
Great judgement, Stevie -- exactly the quality of political decision-making we've come to expect from you. Mr. Putz.

Nuts and dolts

Well, here we go again.
I say right out front that I hope Harper and his Reform Lite party does not win.
Its not so much Harper himself that I object to -- though he doesn't manage his caucus very well and I doubt his ability to run a government. But what I am most afraid of all the right-wing nuts and dolts who would flood into Ottawa with him.
We don't need to refight all of the battles of the last 20 years -- same sex marriage, abortion, gun registration, Kyoto, missle defense, Iraq - but we will have to if some of Harper's supporters have their way.
And personally, I like Paul Martin - always have, always will. He loves this country -- all of it, including the parts that don't love him. I think the campaign will energize him, like the last one did.
So I'll be keeping track of progressive campaign coverage at Progressive Bloggers . And I'll be keeping track of the atrocities by monitoring the Blogging Tories site too -- hey, some of them are already talking about "librull" bias in the campaign coverage.

Great line of the day

From Americablog: "Say what you will about Bill Clinton, we never had to worry about whether he had gone crazy."

Great line of the day

Digby writes:

"Yea! President Bush has finally achieved consensus for his Iraq pull-out plan. . . . As you know, Democrats have long been insisting that the US stay in Iraq indefinitely. It was only through the wise counsel and patient persuasion of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that they were convinced that a timed withdrawal was the best way to go. While it's great news that the Iraq war is over and done with (and the liberals can finally stop obsessing over it) it's going to take some work to get them to stop lobbying for more tax cuts and destroying social security. When are they going to get some responsibility and recognize that there is no free lunch? At least the Bush administration finally got the liberals to let the poor Katrina victims keep a roof over their heads until after Christmas. Jeez, what Scrooges. "

Emphasis mine. Yep, those awful democrats!
Well, I guess the Bush administration lied their way into this war, so why should anyone be surprised to see them lying their way out?

They'll turn themselves inside out

The White House has jumped the shark and is now doing EXACTLY what Murtha said they should do. And the Bush bloggers are going to have to turn themselves inside out on this one.
The White House is now saying they had a withdrawal plan all along and - suprise, surprise - its just about exactly the same as Joe Biden's plan. (Of course, really, it is John Murtha's plan that both Biden and the White House are now claiming as their own.)

The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was 'remarkably similar' to its own . . . the United States will move about 50,000 servicemen out of the country by the end of 2006, and "a significant number" of the remaining 100,000 the year after. The blueprint also calls for leaving only an unspecified "small force" either in Iraq or across the border to strike at concentrations of insurgents, if necessary.

Murtha wanted them all out sooner, but it was his idea to move the troops 'over the horizon' - out of Iraq but still in the neighbourhood.
So the White House will now be trying to revise history, chattering on all the talk shows today about how they had a withdrawal plan all along -- I wonder how this will go over with the general public and with the media, who can look up for themselves all the "withdrawal = treason" quotes from the White House for the last three years.
But I also wonder whether Bush's few remaining supporters are going to be able to twist themselves into knots to support this, when they've spent the last several months gleefully trashing everyone who even used the words "withdrawal plan". All those blog posts that trashed Murtha and all democrats as cowards and traitors for even daring to suggest that the US should get out of Iraq -- well, I guess they're all now "inoperative". And all those OpEds and comment pieces about that bitch Cindy Sheehan and that traitor Michael Moore and those cowardly liberal "out of the mainstream" democrats -- well, never mind.
What are these people going to do now? Will they go back over all their recent blog posts and just delete the ones that talked about how stupid it would be to announce a withdrawal plan? Or willl they also start writing now about how they actually always supported the idea of having a withdrawal plan all along -- oh, and by the way, Oceania was always at war with Eastasia and anyone who remembers it differently obviously requires some reeducation from the Thought Police.

John Bolton makes the US look ridiculous again

The Bush administration thinks Bolton is hot stuff, but the rest of the world knows he is just a jerk. The British are not impressed by John Bolton's 'hold my breath til I turn blue' option at the UN, his heavy-handed attempt to shut down the budget until he gets his way. Not surprisingly, neither the Brits nor the European Union are backing Bolton -- I guess he can run down the hallway screaming and see how effective that is. The Telegraph story also reports that Bolton hasn't bothered to make friends or influence people at the UN -- "British diplomats express surprise that he has not made greater efforts to cultivate them or build alliances." Well, mainly, its because he doesn't know how.

Well, duhhhhh!

JoshMarshall says:

. . . there is no debate about withdrawing American troops from Iraq. That's over. What we have is posturing and positioning over the political consequences of withdrawal. The White House and the president's partisans will lay down a wall of covering fire, calling anybody who considers withdrawal an appeaser, to allow the president to go about the business of drawing down the American presence in Iraq in time to game the 2006 elections.

Well, OF COURSE that is what the Bush administration is doing. Is anyone surprised?
By the time of the Congressional midterms next year, the Republicans will all be saying "War? What war? Oh, we won that one, don't ya know!"

Go sofa, go

The other day, I said I wanted to see a photo of the world's fastest sofa.
Well, here it is, from the Cummfy Banana website:

It has a top speed of 87 miles per hour, and its in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Thanks very much to reader Lindsay for sending this along.

Torture -- don't ya just LOVE it?

Yesterday's Hardball showed an odd Chris Matthews performance -- it was about torture, and Matthews came across as lovin' it. The whole interview gave me a creepy-crawly sensation, like he was feeling himself up under the desk while he was talking about all these delicious torture techniques.
Matthews was interviewing an FBI interrogator named Joe Navarro, who has just published a text on interview techniques -- something needed, I think, considering how poorly trained the CIA and military interrogators apparently are these days.
While Navarro kept trying to deal with the issue seriously, Matthews kept chattering about Famous Torturers I Have Known and Loved. Here are some of the things Matthews said during the interview:

MATTHEWS: . . . I love this title - 'Advanced Interviewing Techniques.' Is that meant to be sarcastic or what? Interviewing techniques --I mean, if somebody has their thumbs in screws, is that an interview technique?

Obviously, he hadn't read the book -- he actually thought it described how to torture someone. Then he continues with a 'torture' example, metaphorically licking his lips as he describes a scenario:

You see a snake pit in front of you, all these snakes down there, killer snakes, horrible looking creatures, and you say to a person, if you don't answer the next three questions, you are going in that, and you are going to die in that pit. That doesn't work?
NAVARRO: It doesn't, because what may happen is, what that will generate is, they may just begin to provide superfluous information.
MATTHEWS: Well, then you say that is not good enough, buddy. You're going in the pit unless you tell us the truth.
NAVARRO: We don't—you need to establish the truth. For instance, if you harass someone long enough or even torture them, one of things that happens is it attenuates our ability to detect deception. The best way to detect deception is to establish some sort of norm. If we are torturing somebody or harassing them, we are, in fact, affecting their limbic system and our ability to read them. So it works against us.

Then Matthews starts into his Famous Torturers riff. First, how about the Mafia?

MATTHEWS: If it doesn't work, why does the mob use it? Don't they use it to find out who ratted who out? They used to do it in the movies.
NAVARRO: They use it because they are psychopaths, Chris.

Next, how about Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer -- the Hollywood script where the good guy KNOWS that the bad guy knows the secret and the-bad-guy-must-talk-or-the-child-will-die:

MATTHEWS: So you don't buy the Alan Dershowitz, the professor at Harvard, who says if you've got somebody in the 11th hour and they know that it's going to be doomsday for the planet like a nuclear weapon in New York, a real nuclear bomb in New York, in the subway system, you don't think you would go to extreme measures?
NAVARRO: Look, Dershowitz is a brilliant attorney. He is not a world-class interviewer. I have talked to world class interviewers, I have taught these individuals. We don't need to torture these individuals.
MATTHEWS: What is the risk though in doing it? If you're really brutal about it, you needed to get the information, what's wrong with torturing somebody if it's a million people or 100,000 people are going to die the next day.
NAVARRO: Number one, the person may die. Number two, he may lie to us. Number three, he may lead us astray. Number four ...
MATTHEWS: Well, what do you have to lose at that point, if they're not talking?
NAVARRO: What do you have to lose? A lot. Because what if he has other information.

Finally, how about those Third-World Secret Police?

MATTHEWS: . . . We send them to parts of the world that don't have this intellectual approach to this. They may have some psychopaths on the payroll down in the basement of some truth ministry in Cairo or Amman or somewhere else over there in that part of the world. Why do we do that if we don't think torture works? Why do we have these renditions to these dark basements in the third world?
NAVARRO: I've never been party to it. And if it is going on, I don't agree to it. I think everything that we do should—or we do should stand up to judicial scrutiny . . . good interrogators don't need these techniques, they don't want these techniques. We just absolutely don't need them . . .
MATTHEWS: Do the Israelis keep their prisoners naked for weeks at a time, like in “Little Drummer Girl,” that movie?
NAVARRO: That I don't know.
MATTHEWS: Do they turn the lights on, like in “Darkness at Noon?”
NAVARRO: You know, a lot of books have been written about some of the techniques. I think they have gotten away from that because the Israeli Supreme Court said knock it off.
MATTHEWS: Do you believe that it's torture to keep a person awake for long periods of time, to use sleep deprivation to weaken their resistance? Is that torture?
NAVARRO: Yes I do. I do. I don't think it works.
MATTHEWS: It doesn't. I bet you become very hallucinatory and weak-minded if you are awake for days after days without getting enough night time.
NAVARRO: Look, if I have a subject I'm working on I want his mind to be lucid.

And at the end of the interview, Matthews still has techniques for torture on his mind:

MATTHEWS: Is there anybody who disagrees with you on this, who thinks torture works?
NAVARRO: There may be, but I'll tell you what, it's not something the FBI has ever taught and I still teach there. And we don't teach that. And we never will.
MATTHEWS: No thumb screws, no electric charges, nothing like that?
NAVARRO: Absolutely not.
MATTHEWS: God, it makes me surprised. I'm amazed there is no effort like that, even in extreme cases?
NAVARRO: We don't want it.

But Matthews does.