Noticed I'd been getting a bunch of email from "support@microsoft.com," and made the obvious assumption that it was more virus nonsense. Turns out I was right, according to this email:

There is a new computer email virus called the Palyh Virus (a.k.a. Mankx, Sobig.B). It is a rapidly spreading worm, and was discovered Sunday, May 18th. Pretending to be an email from support@microsoft.com, the Palyh worm dupes users into opening its infected attachment.

Do not open any emails coming from
"support@microsoft.com." Delete 'em.

Literally.

IN AN INTERVIEW in the next issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is quoted as saying a “huge” reason for the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

“For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” Wolfowitz was quoted as saying.

“Almost unnoticed but huge” was the need to maintain U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam was in power, he was quoted as saying.

(More here.)

Of course it was about the goddamned oil. Anyone who fails to comprehend this now desperately needs to take a refresher course in Basic Distinctions Between One's Ass and a Hole in the Ground.

Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq, the Guardian has learned.

Their deep concerns about the intelligence - and about claims being made by their political bosses, Tony Blair and George Bush - emerged at a private meeting between the two men shortly before a crucial UN security council session on February 5.

The meeting took place at the Waldorf hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis. The exchange about the validity of their respective governments' intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation.

Story here.

I'm sorry to report that I've just been informed by the editor of Columbus Alive, which has run This Modern World since 1993, that due to "page-count and budgetary limitations," they're going to drop the strip as of June 5.

I'm deliberately not posting any contact info here because I don't want them to be deluged with astroturf from people who have never seen an issue of the paper in their lives. But if you live in Columbus and you're a regular reader of Alive, you might want to drop them a line and let them know if you think this is a good decision on their part. Or, um, not.

Trapped on the other side of the country aboard Air Force One, the President has lost his cool: "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!"

His Secret Service chief seems taken aback. "But Mr. President . . ."

The President brusquely interrupts him. "Try Commander-in-Chief. Whose present command is: Take the President home!"

Was this George W. Bush's moment of resolve on Sept. 11, 2001? Well, not exactly. Actually, the scene took place this month, on a Toronto sound stage.

The histrionics, filmed for a two-hour television movie to be broadcast this September, are as close as you can get to an official White House account of its activities at the outset of the war on terrorism.

Written and produced by a White House insider with the close co-operation of Mr. Bush and his top officials, the movie The Big Dance represents an unusually close merger of Washington's ambitions with the Hollywood entertainment machinery.

More.

Afterthought: this story of American heroism is, of course, being filmed in Canada.

Second afterthought: via Atrios, I see that the actor playing our Hero-in-Chief is the same actor who played him in That's My Bush. I wasn't a big fan of that show, but this does offer great possibilities for some creative editor-type who might be inspired to put together a bootleg version of the movie.

"Get Rich or Get Out," by Thomas Frank, in the current Harper's (not online). Frank does a typically brilliant if depressing job, cutting through the obfuscations and outright bullshit of the Bush budget.

The righties have been crowing about the fact that "only" a hundred or so pieces are missing from the Iraqi National Museum, rather than the tens of thousands initially reported. Leaving aside the question of how Westerners might feel if "only" a hundred pieces were looted from, say, the Met or the Louvre, I'm kind of unclear as to how this exonerates the US. My understanding of the story is that various historians begged the military to guard the museum, and the military failed to do so (though they did go all out to keep the records at the Oil Ministry safe). The fact that the museum's curators managed to hide the majority of the museum's treasures in advance does not make the US indifference to that museum's looting any more ethically palatable. If a police officer stands by and watches a mugger shoot a victim and does nothing to stop it, he's still guilty of negligence even if the victim lives because he happened to be wearing a bulletproof vest.

Before the last six months disappear completely into the memory hole, here's a useful compendium of Bush administration quotes regarding Iraq's WMDs. (Via Atrios.)

PALESTINE, W.Va. - American POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch's parents said Thursday they are not permitted to discuss details of their daughter's capture and rescue in Iraq.

Greg and Deadra Lynch also said they couldn't comment on media reports that dispute military information released on Lynch's April 1 rescue from an Iraqi hospital.

Story.

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

In 1997, Oxnard police thought farm worker Oliverio Martinez was a drug suspect. He was never charged with any crime, but in the scuffle of arrest they shot him 5 times, leaving him partially blinded and paralyzed.

While Martinez writhed in agony, believing he was about to die, patrol supervisor Ben Chavez climbed into his ambulance and began a hostile interrogation which continued all the way into the emergency room -- all with no lawyer present -- in what Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has called "the functional equivalent of an attempt to obtain an involuntary confession from a prisoner by torturous methods:"

Martinez: "I don't want to say anything anymore."
Chavez: "No?"
Martinez: "I want them to treat me, it hurts a lot, please."
Chavez: "You don't want to tell what happened with you over there?"
Martinez: "I don't want to die, I don't want to die."
Chavez: "Well, if you are going to die, tell me what happened, and right now you think you are going to die?"
Martinez: "No."
Chavez: "No, do you think you are going to die?"
Martinez: "Aren't you going to treat me or what?"
Chavez: "Look, think you are going to die, that's all I want to know, if you think you are going to die? Right now, do you think you are going to die?"

And so on, for about 45 minutes. Again, all with no lawyer present -- and with the clear implication that life and death were bargaining tools in the interrogation.

However, the Supreme Court's majority has ruled, in an opinion written by Clarence Thomas, that Martinez' constitutional rights were not violated, torturing the 5th Amendment itself until it admitted that, in Thomas' words, "Martinez was never made to be a 'witness' against himself... because his statements were never admitted as testimony against him in a criminal case... the Self-Incrimination Clause simply cannot support the 9th Circuit's view that the mere use of compulsive questioning... violates the Constitution."

The Court says the victim can still sue in civil court (by only a 5-4 margin, believe it or not), but let's keep our eye on the ball here. To paraphrase -- and I invite you to download the ruling here and read it yourself -- because Martinez was innocent, his constitutional rights don't apply, and anyway, coercive questioning is, in fact, A-OK as a constitutional matter.

Every innocent person reading this should be gravely concerned.

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Three quick points about the Bush tax "reform" signed yesterday:

The NY Times reports the $400-per-child credit will not apply to families with incomes under $26,625.

The day before the bill was signed with such pomp and fanfare, Bush very quietly signed another piece of paper raising the national debt ceiling by a record near-trillion dollars. How quiet is quiet? The White House statement on this subject was only a single sentence.

Finally, the Financial Times reports that a Treasury Department report forecasting a future deficit of 44 trillion dollars was shelved by the White House, which omitted the findings from the annual budget report in the interest of selling tax cuts.

Since that crippling number is hard to fathom in real terms, read the following -- information the Bush White House knows but doesn't want to tell us -- and just try not to quiver in fear:

The study asserts that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or a painful mix of both are unavoidable if the US is to meet benefit promises to future generations. It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66 percent across-the-board income tax increase.

The Bush White House: screw the poor now, screw the rest of us later.

Update: the word "deficit" in the Financial Times story refers to accumulated debt, not annual deficits. British English can be a bit confusing to us yanks -- they also refer not to $44 trillion but $44,000 billion -- and so, as emailers have pointed out, if you don't use the link, the meaning of "deficit" here isn't clear in American usage. My bad. No need to nick me off to gaol...

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Again, I thank our host for his kind words. That said, we actually met at the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia. Working Assets had a booth along Radio Row, the customary media-management one-stop-shopping facility used to ferry a given mouthpiece rapidly from one talk show to another, to which media companies eagerly agree, knowing they're being managed, since access is falsely equated with credibility.

So suddenly, there I was, surrounded by Michael Medved, Oliver North, Sean Hannity, and various lesser-known avatars of the angry and oversimplified. Your cartoonist-in-chief stopped in to say howdy, which in this context felt surprisingly like meeting an underground Resistance contact in an old WWII movie.

After a brief exchange of passwords -- "Clean environment?" "National health care!" "Good, keep your head down" -- he suddenly thrust a cell phone in my hand, saying, "here, talk to this guy for a second." I didn't know it, but the voice on the other end belonged to Harold Moss, animator of the TMW cartoons and, more recently, the NRA-history segment of "Bowling For Columbine." Without knowing it, I was auditioning as the voice of Sparky.

In other words, it only took Dan about five minutes to decide that I sound a lot like a testy little penguin. And Harold took maybe three minutes to agree.

So yeah. Talk radio probably is an appropriate career.

Readers are starting to get responses from Time concerning the astroturf:

Thank you for commenting on the letter from Thomas J. Stokes, which appeared in the May 26 Letters column. We included it for balance, since in the same section we also published three letters that were critical of the President. We appreciate your pointing out, however, that Stokes' comments were from a form letter scripted by the Republican National Committee, and we certainly regret having included it in what is indeed meant to be a forum for the comments of individual TIME readers. Form letters are not new, of course, and just as we've resisted granting them space in the past, we assure you that we will be even more vigilant about screening them from here on in. We certainly regret that this one got through.

Our thanks again for registering your concern with the editors. We value your attentive interest in our efforts, and we send you our best wishes.

TIME Letters

I still think we should keep the pressure on until they print a correction/clarification in the magazine itself, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. At minimum, you can bet they'll be keeping a much closer eye on the GOP Team Leader site.

Accounts of the horror in Ituri have the quality of Hieronymus Bosch’s grotesque tableaux of apocalypse: torched villages; macheted babies in the streets; stoned child warriors indulging in cannibalism and draping themselves with the entrails of their victims; peacekeepers—mostly Uruguayans—using their guns only to drive off waves of frantic civilians seeking refuge in their already overflowing compound; a quarter of a million people in frenzied flight from their homes. For nearly five years, such suffering has plagued much of the eastern Congo along the tangled battle lines of warring political and tribal factions, stirred up and spurred on by the occupying armies of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have been killed in the fighting, and many more have died as a consequence of the displacement, disease, and hunger that attend it. By any measure, Congo is one of the most hellish places on earth, and of all the hells within that hell Ituri province has come to be known as the most infernal.

--snip--

During one of the 2000 Presidential debates, the moderator, Jim Lehrer, raised the issue of Rwanda. “There was no U.S. intervention,” he said. Then he asked George W. Bush, “Was that a mistake?” In a rare show of solidarity with the Clinton White House, Bush answered, “I think the Administration did the right thing in that case. I do. It was a horrible situation. No one liked to see it on our—you know, on our TV screens. But . . . they made the right decision not to send U.S. troops into Rwanda.” In the run-up to the Iraq war, it appeared that Bush had changed his mind. Speaking on Al Jazeera television, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice dismissed the U.N.’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq by reminding her interviewer, “The U.N. Security Council could not act when in Rwanda there was a genocide that cost almost a million lives. There was a very poignant statement by the President of Rwanda recently when he said sometimes the Security Council is not right when it does not act. President Bush believes that, too.” And, lest the mantle of the memory of Rwanda’s dead be wasted on only Arab audiences, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, struck the same note: “From a moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda . . . the U.N. Security Council will have failed to act once again.” The disingenuousness of these remarks lies, of course, in the fact that it was the United States that prevented the Security Council from acting during the Rwandan genocide, even though no American troops were ever involved or required for the U.N. force there.

Much more.

I went to a party hosted by an Iranian American friend over the weekend, at which there were, predictably, a number of Iranians. They seemed to have pretty complicated feelings toward their homeland, with certainly no love lost for the mullahs, but also seemed absolutely clear on one point: any US invasion or intervention will be the death knell of that country's fragile democratic reforms, and will serve only to strengthen the power of the theocratic right. Purely anecdotal; take it for what it's worth.

On a related note, I mentioned this before, but Persepolis is really worth reading.

Max links to this clever Rube Goldberg-esque Honda ad with the comment, "How the Bush Tax Cut Will Create Jobs." With all due respect to Max, who is much, much smarter than I am, I would add one caveat: the contraption in the ad actually seems to work.

In, um, Maryland:

The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria.

The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside.

The anthrax was a non-virulent strain, and the discoveries are apparently remnants of an abandoned germ warfare programme. They merited only a local news item in the Washington Post.

But suspicious finds in Iraq have made front-page news (before later being cleared), given the failure of US military inspection teams to find evidence of the weapons that were the justification for the March invasion.

From BushWars:

Rightly or wrongly, my notion about al-Qaeda from the start has been that the American media and (so far as we can say from public signs) American intelligence has completely and willfully misunderstood the nature of the so-called network. They have approached it as though it's a single entity with a command/control structure analogous to the sort we're most familiar with--the top-down hierarchy of US corporations and the American military.

It always struck me as more ad hoc and opportunistic than that. I've always suspected that what we call "al-Qaeda" is really just the most prominent node in an emerging, loosely confederated network of insurgent anti-imperialist/anti-US cells the world over. If you want a more American frame of reference, say that they are one venture capital firm in a growing industry, rather than a company.

There is, or course, much more.

And ironically enough, all of those wingnuts and chickenhawks -- the same people that were oh-so-concerned about Saddam's brutality -- can't bother themselves with caring about the suffering of the Uzbeki people.

But just watch -- 10-20 years from now, when we suffer the inevitable blowback and have to go to war against Uzbekistan, those same wingnuts and chickenhawks will accuse the Left of "coddling" the Karimov dictatorship. We'll be "objectively pro-Karimov".

Read the whole thing here. Hesiod is all over this too.

Saudi bombing targeted U.S. 'executive mercenaries'

YOU HAD probably never heard of the Vinnell Corp. before the brutal bombing that killed at least nine of its employees in Saudi Arabia, but you should have.

This is the second time Vinnell's Saudi operations have been targeted. The first attack, in November 1995, hit the headquarters of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, or SANG, and a nearby office complex that housed Vinnell employees. Though both attacks were decried by U.S. officials as senseless violence, they actually had a chillingly clear, brutal logic.

Vinnell's job in Saudi Arabia is to train the national guard, which Jane's Defence Weekly has described as "a kind of Praetorian Guard for the House of Saud, the royal family's defence of last resort against internal opposition." That is why company employees were targeted in 1995 and again this month.

The story of how an obscure American firm ended up becoming an integral part of the Saudi monary's handpicked internal security force is a case study in how unaccountable private companies have become a central tool of U.S. foreign policy.

Story here, via the indispensable Arms and the Man blog which you must. Go. Bookmark. Now.

In his Life in Hell strip, Matt Groening used to occasionally give us lists of trendy words and phrases which really, really needed to be banned--i.e., you go girl, do the math, things like that. Well, this is a dead horse I've thrashed many times already, but the tiny world of the blogs has a disproportionate number of these. For instance:

Fisking--I hope any left/liberal blogger who uses this one understands that by doing so, you are reinforcing its underlying message--which is, essentially, that left/liberal types are idiots. It's a handy word, I understand how it can creep into your vocabulary, but we...must...resist...must not...give in...

In the classic words of the heroes of Galaxy Quest: never give up, never surrender.

Second on my list: money quote. What can I say? That one's just, well, icky.

Update: how about the word 'blog' itself? Sounds like a slang term for vomiting. I had way too much to drink, and man, I was up blogging all night.

You want to know who would make a terrific host? This page's very own guest contributor, Bob Harris. He's got a lot of experience in the business, between his radio commentaries and his show on Working Assets Radio--that's actually how we first met, I was a regular guest on his Friday shows for quite awhile. (I'm sure Bob will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we ever met face-to-face until the Democratic convention in Los Angeles.) Anyway, if these perennial rumors of a liberal talk radio network ever pan out, I hope whoever's running the thing is aware of Bob.

PS: Have I mentioned he also has a book you can buy?

Here.

There are spoilers, so I'm putting it on a separate page. You have been warned.

Nothing in Time this week, but since they seem to have a bit of a lag time, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Our story so far, for those of you just tuning in (if you've been keeping track, just skip down to the bottom of this entry):

Through its GOP Team Leader site, the Republican Party officially encourages people to cut-and-paste Republican talking points, sign their own names, and email them to news media as letters to the editor purportedly written by average, concerned citizens. There's a word for this. Actually there are several: deception, fraud, deceit, sham, hoax--take your choice. And it gets better: for partaking in this act of officially-sanctioned deception, GOP Team Leaders are awarded points which can be redeemed for swag such as tote bags and caps and so on.

I first made note of the latest in this series of RNC-approved duplicities on May 5. Since then, numerous papers have fallen for the subterfuge, including the Kalamazoo Gazette, the Huntsville (AL) Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Anchorage Daily News, the San Diego Union, the Gallitin (TN) News Examiner and the Glasgow (KY) Daily Times. I am told that USA Today and Money magazine also got suckered.

And in their May 26 issue, Time magazine fell for it. I noted it here, suggested you (politely, always politely) write them and let them know they'd been, well, snookered, and over 180 of you did, at last count.

Why do I keep harping on this? Because I think it's extraordinary that the Republican Party officially encourages its members to lie and misrepresent themselves to newspaper and newsmagazine editors. And I think when a newsmagazine of Time's stature is hoodwinked, they owe their readers an explanation.

So I want to keep the pressure on. Politely. This site gets an average of about 15,000 unique visitors a day, which means there are some 14,820 of you who will read this today, give or take, who haven't sent a note to Time yet. So let's get on that. I want to turn over the rock and expose the deceptive practices of the GOP Team Leader site to the light of day. (To avoid the inevitable cheap editorializing on Time's part, let's make sure we're not fighting astroturf with astroturf. Write them in your own words, explaining the situation and why it concerns you. Don't just cut-and-paste my entries.)

(Afterthought: Hell, just to keep everything above-board, make a point of mentioning that you saw it here. Unlike the GOP, I'm not trying to hide my involvement or pull the wool over anyone's eyes--I'm just trying to get their attention so they'll run a clarification.)

I'm going to post the address they list in their magazine, which is different from the one I found online and posted last week, and who knows?--maybe last week's email all got routed to some low-level intern who just dumped it all in the trash. I'm also cc'ing myself again here, so I can keep a rough count of how many of you write in.

Did I mention about being polite? Polite, polite, polite. Honey, vinegar, flies. As someone who gets a, shall we say, wide range of email myself, I can promise you that people are far more likely to listen to what you have to say when you are, well, polite.

Here's the email. You can also send faxes to 212-522-8949. Now go, and be fruitful.

Whenever I click on a Blogspot site, I am reminded of the old days, when my primary connection to the internet was a 14.4 modem.

Just sayin'.

Update: Reader Chris K. says there's an important difference between a 14.4 modem and waiting for Blogspot to load: at least with the 14.4 modem, you knew you'd get the page eventually.

Oh, what wacky Blogspot-bashing fun we are having.

Wacky right wing satire...

Sen. Rockefeller, D-WV, said Congress must determine whether the administration "intentionally overestimated" Iraq's weapons program, or "just misread it. ... In either case it's a very bad outcome."

Mr. Rumsfeld agreed, "What an awful outcome. We deeply regret freeing the Iraqi people from a murderous gang of thugs masquerading in the United Nations as a representative republic. We're sorry that the Iraqi people have discovered thousands of graves of their Saddam-murdered relatives. It's none of our business if people want to live like that."

...put into context:

The other method that was used to oust Saddam was equally horrific from a moral standpoint: encouraging the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow their government by force on the basis of an assurance given by President George H.W. Bush that U.S. forces would come to their assistance. That assurance, of course, turned out to be a horrible and deadly lie. When thousands of Iraqis rose up against their government, U.S. officials knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately stood by and watched Saddam’s forces slaughter the Iraqi rebels. Those dead rebels fill the mass graves that are now being used as the ex post facto justification for President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Hesiod wants to know.

Bill O'Reilly questions the administration on WMDs:

The bad news for President Bush comes on the weapons of mass destruction front. CIA chief, George Tenet, wants a panel to investigate whether U.S. intelligence was faulty on that issues vis-a-vis Iraq. A panel? Shouldn't tenet know what the heck is true and what isn't?

What's going on? The U.S. has captured enough scientists like Dr. Germ and Ms. Anthrax, or whomever, to get a picture of what Saddam Hussein had or didn't have. The Bush administration needs to begin explaining the situation. "Talking Points" understands time is needed, but the right wing spin that Saddam was a deadly weapon himself isn't going to cut it here.

The American people must have honest, accurate intelligence in a world this dangerous. This is a vital issue that we hope will be candidly addressed by the President and soon.

Here (scroll down).

Three nuns are facing eight years in prison for--well, for this:

Sister Hudson, 68, Sister Ardeth Platte, 66, and Sister Carol Gilbert, 55, were charged in federal court with a felony for defacing a Minuteman III missile silo on Oct. 6 and are scheduled to be sentenced July 25.

The three, dressed in white chemical weapons suits, trespassed on federal land in northeast Colorado, swinging hammers and painting a cross on the silo with their own blood. They argued it was a symbolic disarmament that did not jeopardize national security.

The nuns said they were compelled to act as war with Iraq moved closer and because the United States has never promised not to use nuclear weapons.

Whatever you think about their choices here--I'm personally not entirely comfortable with overly theatrical civil disobedience--the penalties they're facing seem excessively harsh. A reader forwards the following information concerning the case:

Many persons have been asking, "What can I do for Jackie Hudson, OP (facing 6-7 years), Carol Gilbert OP and Ardeth Platte OP both facing 6 1/2 to 8 years? We have met with our presentence investigation officers the week of April 14 and they suggested that letters of support be mailed to their probation department. These could take the form of your awareness of the Sisters personally or their character as an individual, or the letter could combine all three persons. Letters are due before June 1. Please write the letters to Judge Robert Blackburn but mail them to Susan Heckman at the address below. Mail the letters to: Susan M. Heckman Senior US Probation Officer 1961 Stout St.. Suite 525 Denver, CO 80294-0101 Fax (303) 844 5439

As always, if you choose to send a note, be polite. It's true what your mother always told you about honey, vinegar, and flies.

According to Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post:

A dustup between two New York Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein.

An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?

There are probably some real scandals at the Times which should explode, but never will--one of which is certainly the reliance on sources such as Chalabi. If it's true that the guy who was angling for a US invasion in hopes that it would leave him in power (a hope which has been recently sidelined)--if it's true he was feeding the media information to bolster support for that invasion, then the case of the young liar/reporter is not the only thing the Times ought to do some soul searching over. Blair seems more and more like a scapegoat, a way of saying, my gosh! how could this happen at a paper which never makes mistakes?

Tell it to Wen Ho Lee.

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.

Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.

The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.

The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months.

General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber.

Story.

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Here's how well the search to save Bush's credibility is going:

... on a tip from the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment patrolling the area, he took his team to what had been described as a "suspicious-looking town."

It turned out to be a farm recently taken over by a family of shepherds. Harrington talked with the head of the household, then viewed his sheep pen, an untended field of lavender and several mangy dogs.

Meanwhile, rape has become so common that Iraqi women are afraid to step outside, American soldiers continue to die on almost a daily basis, and the death toll of Iraqi civilians is fast approaching two World Trade Centers.

On to Iran!

Update: the typo "Calvary" (for "Cavalry") is in the original. I didn't notice it while cutting and pasting. Thanks to Peter in California. Onward, Christian Soldiers, indeed...

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Aside from the pending June 2 FCC ruling turning over all American media to the Imperial Death Star (OK, again, I exaggerate a teeny bit), there's also this proposed merger creating a Spanish language mega-broadcaster in the hands of GOP-allied broadcasters, including Clear Channel's CEO.

This isn't a panic-button thing -- it's probably not going to get much worse than it is. Univision's programming, for example, is already para la mierda, with "news" programs like Primer Impacto, a long-running Hispanic "Hard Copy" which has become the highest-rated TV news magazine show in 15 countries, not least because it's hosted by an endless parade of glassy-eyed cyborg spokesmodels narrating footage of things blowing up.

Check out the site -- there's exactly one obscure link to "Noticias" ("news"), while the more-prominent list of "Enlaces Directos" ("direct links") directs you almost entirely to pictures of large-breasted women.

Who, on the other hand, will probably tell us at least as much about 9-11 as anyone in the Bush administration ever will...

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. It's a memoir of a post-revolutionary childhood in Iran, in graphic novel format, newly translated into English. An Iranian-American friend loaned it to me over the weekend; I haven't finished it yet, but from what I've read so far, I recommend it highly.

...than your humble host really needs to take a whack at this New York Times Magazine piece, another of those perennial "conservatism is hip" pieces (the title of this one is, I kid you not, "The Young Hipublicans"). It's ripe for a merciless deconstruction: the "self-reliant" young conservative who depends on (presumably taxpayer-subsidized) financial aid; the young woman who argues that Republicans are "inclusive" enough to encompass pro- and anti-abortion views, whereas "the National Organization for Women has never supported a pro-life candidate." And on and on.

Several years ago, while Bill Clinton was still in office (and before anyone had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky), I went to a Young Republicans gathering in Connecticut with my friend Bruce Shapiro, and we watched speakers such as Oliver North and Gary Aldrich contort themselves like human pretzels, trying to portray liberals and Democrats as immoral and decadent without alienating an audience of young college students with the usual enthusiasm for partying. For instance, while literature at the conference suggested that "Bill Clinton's glib attitude toward the obvious immorality and criminality of recreational drug use is understandable--he is, after all, a dyed-in-the-wool sixties liberal," Gary Aldrich (the former FBI agent who carved out a second career denouncing the depravity of the Clinton White House) shrugged off the obvious immorality and criminality of recreational drug use with a wink and a nod, noting that he had not smelled any marijuana smoke in the hotel's hallways the night before, and drawing the obvious conclusion: "You see, conservatives have learned how, in their early years, to be discreet!" The audience, if memory serves, responded with appreciative applause.

Those damned decadent liberals--they're just not discreet.

The meeting took place around the time the Republicans were trying, ludicrously enough, to co-opt Martin Luther King, and Bruce and I listened politely as one young Republican explained to us that her father had been in law enforcement and had "inside information" about the FBI's surveillance and harassment of Dr. King. You see, according to her father, "Dr. King was a peace-loving man--but everywhere he went, he was followed by riots and violence! The FBI was just trying to figure out why!"

Uh huh. And subsidized, low-interest, guaranteed student loans aren't really a social program, and the Republican party is both pro-choice and pro-life. Ignore that screaming you hear in the background, it's just the sound of logic being tortured without mercy.

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Forgive me for not seeing this sooner...

You and I are completely contaminated! So is Bill Moyers!

I hereby vow not to swallow or breathe again. It's just too damn dangerous.

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Full-scale invasion seems off the table, but the Washington Post reports there's a big White House shindig on Tuesday, during which discussion the Pentagon will reportedly be all "bang-bang, yay" while the State Department will be more like "hey, dude, whoa."

The pivotal evidence that the Shi'a leaders of Iran are now so urgently Of The Bad? The usual classified "intercepts," already so keenly unreliable at predicting Al-Qaeda's protection by another blood enemy (Iraq), a wide variety of imminent terrorist strikes, and Saddam's overimagined WMD.

Supposely, Al-Qaeda is now sheltered by Shi'a Muslims in Iran. Sure. Never mind that the Taliban executed Shi'as by the boatload. No hard feelings, I guess.

If you'd like to read a nice historical piece reviewing the brilliance with which urgent matters, affecting millions of lives, are so often slapped together by uninformed sociopaths, go check out the Book section of today's L.A. Times -- specifically this review of 60 Minutes producer George Crile's book about the arming of the Mujahedeen:

Crile's account is important, if appalling, precisely because it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy.

Those who cannot learn from the past... now advise Bush over at the Project for a New American Century.

Update: Here's a current BBC article on the struggle the popular reformist leadership is having with their own religious right. Over here is a decent background report.

For your scorecards: Khatami's the reformer, Khameni's the ayatollah.