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.

November 22, 1963

Anybody here seen my old friend John?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young
I just looked around and he's gone
. . .
Didn't you love the things that they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
And we'll be free
Some day soon, it's gonna be one day

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin, and John

Endorsed by the Klan?

Harper will be just thrilled with this, I'm sure:

Ontario MP Pat O'Brien . . . announced Tuesday that he has founded Defend Marriage Canada with a Conservative ally. . . ex-Tory MP Grant Hill . . . the group will raise money, publish letters, and lobby voters to elect candidates who oppose same-sex marriage.

I'm sure they'll have a website, and I bet I'll be just one of the thousands of people watching it to see just which candidates they endorse.
Its like being endorsed by the Klu Klux Klan. Or the Communist Party. Thanks but no thanks.

Great lines of the day

Steve Gilliard writes about Iraq. First, why the Iraqi army is being left in the dust:

Why is the soldiering so low in most Iraqi units? Because the real soldiers are the ones fighting us, we've got the desperate and the unmotivated. We also have a military structure which continues the worst of the old Iraqi Army. The resistance is a meritocracy. Only the best and brightest can lead there. Rank matters little. There is little margin for error in guerilla warfare . . .

Second, why US politicians are being left in the dust:

People like Clinton and Biden will be left in the dust as the American people embrace an anti-war stand. They vilified Cindy Sheehan and failed. They attacked Jack Murtha and embarassed themselves. The next person they go after will turn people against the GOP. The war is over, we're only debating how we end it.

Emphasis mine.

Haggling about the price

There's an old joke that goes like this:

A fellow approaches an attractive girl and says "would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" and she says "Well, sure!" Then he says "Would you sleep with me for a dollar?" and she says "Certainly not! What do you think I am?" and he says "We already know what you are. We're just haggling about the price."

I thought of this joke when I read Digby's article about torture and what the current torture discussion demonstrates about America:

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo --- you didn't question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it's wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it's immoral --- and, more shockingly, whether it's a positive good . . . When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" he couldn't ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It's not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than "pain equavalent to organ failure." People no longer instinctively recoil at the word --- it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there. When the smoke finally clears, and we can see past that dramatic day on 9/11 and put the threat of islamic fundamentalism into its proper perspective, I wonder if we'll be able to go back to our old ethical framework? I'm not so sure we will even want to. It's not that it changed us so much as it revealed us, I think. A society that can so easily discard it's legal and ethical taboos against cruelty and barbarism, is an unstable society to begin with. At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them.

Emphasis mine.
I have a couple of thoughts about this. It makes me wonder just how synthetic was American democracy, that a single horrific event, 911, could produce such an hysterical overreaction of the Patriot Act, imprisonment without trial, loss of habeus corpus, the doctrine of preemptive war, Guantanamo, assertion of a Presidential 'divine right of kings', and now Vice President Cheney -- the Vice President! -- promoting torture as state policy.
Maybe it was just the bad luck that Bush and Cheney happened to be in power when 911 happened - they are bombastic, incompetent and fearful men whose every instinct takes them toward the dark side. But no one stepped up to stop them, not in Congress nor in the media.
Maybe there really is some basic difference between Canadians and Americans -- even though there is a lot of rhetoric in the United States about democracy and freedom, maybe we Canadians actually do value our freedom and democracy more because we're had to fight for it in our own quiet way. Maybe our democracy has been tested more, and has matured, so we wouldn't haggle it away in a fool's trade-off for mythical security. Over the last fifty years, Canada has acknowledged Aboriginal self-government, dealt with the FLQ and the October Crisis and the War Measures Act, met many of the challenges of Quebec separatism and western alientation, adopted bilingualism and multiculturalism, approved gay marriage. And even though it took us a few months, most Canadians were eventually outraged at Mahar Arar's ordeal and the abuse of civil liberties which it represented. We are still grappling with separatism, I know, but even if Canada eventually loses that battle, I don't think we would let our country degenerate into violence. We know what we are, and what we are worth.

Now there's something you don't see everyday*

I'll bet your local newspaper didn't cover this -- the world's largest motorized shopping cart:


The photo cutline reads: "This photo supplied by Guinness World Records shows Edd China talking to a shopper while driving his way into Guinness World Records book in Henley-upon-Thames, England,Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005, after engineering what the book calls the largest motorized shopping cart in the world. The 11.4 feet tall, 9.8 feet long and 5.9 feet wide cart was created to celebrate the book's self-proclaimed first ever Guinness World Records Day on Wednesday Nov. 9, 2005. Edd is also currently featured in the Guinness World Records 2006 edition book for his record for the World's Fastest Sofa."(AP Photo/Guinness World Records/Tim Anderson)
I would have liked to see a photo of the sofa, too.

*And yes, this is my favorite line from Ghostbusters, said by Bill Murray when the StayPuft Marshmallow Man makes his appearance.

Preparing to declare victory and leave

Well, looks like the strategy is changing again:

After fiercely defending his Iraq policy across Asia, President Bush abruptly toned down his attack on war critics Sunday and said there was nothing unpatriotic about opposing his strategy. 'People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq,' Bush said, three days after agreeing with Vice President Dick Cheney that the critics were 'reprehensible.' The president also praised Rep. John Murtha as 'a fine man' and a strong supporter of the military despite the congressman's call for troop withdrawal as soon as possible. Bush brought up the growing Iraq debate when he met reporters . . .

Bush brought it up himself? Sounds like the White House war room has realized that if you move too far along the road of branding Iraq questioners as "unpatriotic" then you leave Bush without enough wiggle room to pretend to be listening to the voice of the people, so that he can declare vistory and leave. And leave he will, before the congressional midterms.

Blame the Republicans

I just posted this as a diary at Kos:

Amid all the criticism of the Democrats for their role in voting to permit Bush to go to war in Iraq, it seems to me that the Republicans in congress are getting off the hook.
If ANYONE had even a faint hope of deflecting Bush and Co from the rush to war, it was the Republican congressmen, not the Democratic ones. These people didn't do their job, and they are even more to blame because they actually could have influenced the war decision much more than the Democrats ever could have.
Imagine if a significant block of Republican senators and representatives, say 10 or 15, had gone to Bush in October, 2002 and said, "stop this pell mell rush to war, you've got to let the inspections work. Listen to what the anti-war marchers are saying, listen to the Security Council, don't send our boys into an illegal war" -- why, that point of view, forcefully expressed, might have made a difference. Instead, they went along to get along.

Great line of the day

In The Salvadoran Option II, Billmon writes:

. . . the U.S. and U.K. embassies have been aware for some time that Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has been turned into what the old National Guard used to be in El Salvador, or the Presidential Intelligence Unit in Guatemala, or the National Directorate of Investigation in Honduras, which is to say: death squad central . . . so now we have Iranian-backed Shi'a death squads hunting their political enemies through the slums of Baghdad under the pretext of fighting the insurgency, while Sunni Baathists (and/or their jihadist allies) blow up Shi'a mosques at prayer time under the pretext of fighting the American occupation . . . Meanwhile, back here . . . the ruling party is reliving Joe McCarthy's glory years, while the leaders of the so-called opposition party try to hide their worthless carcasses behind an ex-Marine congressman who finally saw one too many broken bodies warehoused at Walter Reed and suffered a temporary fit of sanity, causing him to blurt out the ugly truth that the war is hopelessly lost . . . Truly, to quote Leonard -- the psychotic recruit in Full Metal Jacket -- we are in a world of shit.

Emphasis mine.

"Review of key objectives & critical success factors"

Hey, Lawyers, Guns and Money points out that today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
And here, in tribute, is one of the funniest things I have ever read, the Gettysburg address done as a powerpoint presentation. And don't miss the powerpoint essay that goes with it.

Good, bad, ugly

Good

Sandy Huffaker, Cagle Cartoons

Bad

Tab, Calgary Sun


Ugly

Daryl Cagle, Slate.com

Stupid is as stupid does

The mark of a stupid person is someone who just won't grow up: "An atheist who has spent four years trying to ban the Pledge of Allegiance from being recited in public schools is now challenging the motto printed on U.S. currency because it refers to God."
There have been too many of these kind of pointless junk lawsuits in the States, and in Canada too -- running to courts to stop harmless things like opening the school day with a prayer or singing a hymn at Christmas. Too often organizations like the ACLU get sucked into defending this kind of tripe. It doesn't do our society any good, and just contributes to giving 'liberals' a bad name.