Well. This does just figure, doesn't it? What other (theoretically) sane person would hire her? And aren't the excuses Horowitz makes for just ever so special? "Careless formulation", indeed. (And don't fool youself, Davey boy. She meant it. She just likes, you know, earning a living. People will tolerate all sorts of things for a paycheck. And you like stirring people up. A match made in archconservative heaven, really. But don't think you wouldn't be in the second group of people against the wall if she had her druthers.)
@ 04:59 PM CST [Link]
FBI, CIA Warn Congress of More Attacks As Blair Details Case Against Bin Laden (washingtonpost.com)
I believe the only possible response to that is ... DUH.
Let's get real, shall we? anyone who thought that September 11 was all that there would be is not very bright.
Then again, Ashcroft apparently thought that the media -- a media which has been in war frenzy for a solid three weeks now, and pouncing on the administration's every utterance -- would somehow not notice that he'd said that there would be more attacks. On a morning news show. Yes. Well. Perhaps some of the dimness is in the Justice department.
Interestingly, it looks like some people will receive warning of moves on Afghanistan. The FBI is apparently going to be given notice so that it can go on hyperalert. I daresay that means that anyone who has ever been suspected of even thinking about looking at a terrorist will be detained for the maximum amount of time possible; the number of arrests by the FBI will probably spike sharply just before the attack. Which, I dare say, terrorists would be looking for.
@ 04:48 PM CST [Link]
I dare say Israel doesn't really need to worry about becoming Czechoslovakia. However deserved it sometimes may be, the US will not abandon them at this point. We will not tell the terrorists, "Go ahead, take the country." It's an utterly ludicrous statement.
"There is no good terrorism and bad terrorism," Sharon said. "It is worse than murder. We have been fighting terrorism for over 100 years...."
OK, see, two problems with that statement: (1) terrorism IS murder -- that's part of the point, making people fear random attacks and death -- and (2) Israel's only been around since 1948. It's kind of hard to fight against guerilla attacks on the state for 100 years when the state is only 53.
One of Mr Sharon's aides quickly said that the prime minister had not meant to imply that the United States was acting in a "dishonourable way".
Um ... right. You compare the US to pre WW2 Britain, imply that we're telling the terrorists to partition up the country, we won't mind, and then you say that you didn't mean to say that we're acting in a "dishonorable way." Yeah. Right. Sure.
You'd think that Dubya and friends could have said something slightly stronger than that the remark was "unacceptable", though. (You wonder exactly how Fleischer said what he did to provoke the staid Beeb into talking about "White House fury." It sounds like a pretty mild response to me.)
But as long as the US needs Israel's superior Central Asian intelligence, then, no, they don't need to worry about being abandoned. We won't say a word about anything they should choose to do.
No matter how "unacceptable."
One wonders exactly who is appeasing whom.
@ 04:36 PM CST [Link]
Proposal 1, if adopted by city voters in November, would prohibit the city from enacting any ordinance or policy which makes specific reference to sexual orientation. The cities of Kalamazoo and Huntington Woods are voting on similar measures next month. [...] "If we pass Proposal 1 we will be saying Traverse City no longer welcomes some people," [Paul Heaton, the co-chair of the Traverse City Campaign Against Discrimination] said. "It does send a bad message on what kind of place this is."
Um ... yeah? So? Your point being?
Let's face it, Mr. Heaton: if Proposal 1 passes, it will send a precise and accurate message on the kind of place Traverse City is, now won't it? (Note that I am not saying that having the proposal on the ballot says anything about the town. I'm saying that if Proposal 1 passes, Traverse City's people will have made a plain and unarguable statement about what kind of city it is.)
We can, of course, ignore the fact that Proposal 1 flies directly in the teeth of the Romer v. Evans Supreme Court decision that said that states (or, in this case, state actors), cannot single out groups in this way. After all, Traverse City is ignoring it, now aren't they?
If it passes -- and I expect that it will -- the law resulting from Proposal 1 will almost certainly be challenged in court. Said challenge will be complicated by Michigan's sodomy laws. In other words, technically, what Traverse City is doing is to say that you may not protect people who engage in activities that are against the state's law.
@ 03:43 PM CST [Link]
Well, I suppose this can't be considered in the least surprising. I do wonder why they apparently haven't sued Audiogalaxy yet, though. After all, it does have a central server -- although the central server is used primarily for legitimately licensed music; the trade in pirated MP3s is theoretically somewhat incidental. If the primary use of the service can be considered incidental.
On the other hand, I suppose they could just be waiting for the company to collapse under its own weight, and maybe they'll give it a good firm shove over the edge near the end.
@ 12:53 AM CST [Link]
Oh. Well. How very ... special? I mean, it's always nice to see that opportunities for transvestites in our society are expanding, but, still, you'd think he could have found a better field for work ....
@ 12:32 AM CST [Link]
Milwaukee ranked No. 1 for lesbians.
Really?
...Milwaukee?
@ 01:49 PM CST [Link]
Why did Muslim societies fall behind? Given the diversity of Islamic civilizations, of course, and the complexity of historical change, there are many, many answers. But one that has received too little attention--both in the West and in the Islamic world--is the evolution of Islamic societies' treatment of women. That treatment, needless to say, differs in different parts of the Muslim world. Indeed, to take just one example of Islamic society's openness to female power, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Indonesia have all been ruled in recent years by women. But nonetheless, compared to the West, the lives of women in most of the Muslim world are remarkably circumscribed. While Christian theology has, to a significant degree, reformed its backward views of women, Islamic theology has been much slower to do so. Muslim women are excluded from much of public space and, according to the Hadith, Mohammad said, "I was shown the hellfire and that the majority of its dwellers are women." This fundamental inequality makes Muslim societies substantially less productive--not only by denying opportunity to women, but by inhibiting a meritocratic spirit among men.
An interesting article, examining a possible cause why the Muslim world, which was far more advanced than the West until relatively recently in the course of both areas, suddenly fell so far behind. (And while it is interesting to note that many of those countries have been ruled by women, it's also interesing to note that it would be inconceivable today, only a few short years later, that Pakistan and Indonesia would even consider such a thing, considering their efforts at both resisting and placating their substantial fundamentalist minorities -- I don't seriously believe that Turkey would, either, and I don't know enough about Bangladesh to hazard a guess.)
Falwell and his ilk should take note. Of course, they'd probably say that the inhibition of women is the one thing that society has gotten right; for some reason, fundamentalists of most stripes seem particularly opposed to women having opportunities and advancement.
@ 01:13 PM CST [Link]
My my my. Apparently, it really IS possible to push the National Review too far. Whoda thunk? (She even pushed the Washington Times too far. Who knew you could go too far to the right for BOTH of those publications!)
Mind, the National Review, if this Post article is reasonably complete, pointedly does not say they disagree with her columns, that they think she was wrong. They just don't want to be associated with the mess it created. (And, to be sure, her response WAS immature. Girly boys, indeed.) You can't find a word about this on their website, despite the fact that it was updated yesterday. They simply removed the link to her directory from their front page. The column that provoked such ire is still on the website if you know where to look -- you just follow the pattern from the other columnists, and there it is.
However, I would like to know: exactly how is it even possible to misconstrue "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"? Where is even the slightest bit of ambiguity in that sentence? For some reason, these days, pundits and commentators are awfully fond of saying something and then when people blow up at them, instead of saying, "Yeah, I said it, I meant it, and if you don't like it, them's the breaks," suddenly the world is misconstruing remarkably bald statements. Coulter didn't call for invasions, murders and forced conversions. Falwell didn't blame everyone he doesn't like for causing the attack. Andrew Sullivan didn't call Sontag and Moore and other liberals "fifth columnists". (And yet somehow he's instituted the "Sontag Award" for people who say things he virulently disagrees with. How reasoned of him. How mature. But I digress.) Bill Maher didn't mean to call people who fire cruise missiles "cowards". You wonder just how many more people will say that they didn't say what everyone thinks they said and if they did say what people say they said, they didn't mean it to be interpreted the way they said it. (Confusing, isn't it?)
A side note: the Review is now teeing off on a multicultural curriculum. Apparently, studying something in addition to the usual dead white guys made it possible for the terrorists to attack because it meant that we no longer understood our own culture ... You know, I just want to know what they're on, because, frankly, that's got to be some damn good drugs there, you know what I'm saying? It's made their logic circuits just completely cut loose.
@ 12:05 AM CST [Link]
Minimum wage earnings won't cover housing costs.
And this surprises ... whom, exactly?
More importantly, who is going to do anything about it? Congress is, at the moment, not remotely concerned with such things. (And leave us not excuse them because of the current crisis; they haven't been concerned with such things for quite some time.) Business isn't interested in making sure their workers have a true living wage; it would cost too much. After all, in order to ensure profitability, businesses will lay off higher-paid nonexecutive workers when they can get away with it; paying low-end workers enough to live on is well down on most businesses' list of things to do. Housing providers aren't terribly interested in building low income housing. (In Chicago, at least, they want to build condos! More more more! now now now! $180,000 and up per condo! And the city is demolishing high-crime but lower rent housing projects and selling the land to developers much faster than it's building or buying replacements. And Chicago is assuredly not alone in this; the housing market has been tightening up across the country for years.)
So now that we know this, what happens next?
@ 06:36 PM CST [Link]
So, let's see: Kansas has decreed that evolution doesn't exist, they have a female state senator who doesn't believe that women should have the vote ... what else can they do? .... Oh, yes. They can sentence an eighteen-year-old developmentally disabled boy to 17 years in jail for having oral sex with another developmentally disabled youth.
If he were straight, he'd have been sentenced to only a year in jail, and given the circumstances, it's likely that it would have been suspended.
The problem is, Kansas has a criminal sodomy statute. Interestingly, as far as I can tell from the PlanetOut article and from the ACLU press release, it has not been invoked; otherwise, the older youth would be required to register as a criminal sexual offender. However, what it means is that the activity itself is criminally sanctioned independent of any equal protection challenge; if they get him out from this charge, it's quite likely that the hot-to-trot attorney general who brought the original charge will simply turn around and charge him with criminal sodomy. To be sure, it's only a six-months sentence, which is almost certainly why it wasn't invoked in the first place, but it is a separate charge proceeding from the event.
The fact that the criminal sodomy is in and of itself illegal in Kansas means that this case will receive a cold reception from the Kansas Supreme Court. In a previous case, they held, in their judicial wisdom, that: Homosexual sex is not intimate to the degree of being sacred and has no such foundation as marriage finds in Griswold. ... Homosexual sex has not been long recognized and is not necessary for existence and survival, once again preventing a comparison between marriage and homosexual conduct. Although there are additional fundamental rights, protected from government infringement, which exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically mentioned in the first eight constitutional amendments, homosexual intimacy is not one of them. It cannot be said that homosexuality and homosexual conduct are like or to be treated the same as marriage which is a relation as old and as fundamental as our entire civilization. One might argue that under the totality of the constitutional scheme under which we live, liberty demands protection of a right of intimacy, regardless of heterosexual or homosexual intimacy. However, no state or federal courts have ever declared that homosexual sex requires the same protections as interracial marriage or contraceptive use, for example. ... A line can be drawn between protected private acts and public conduct, even though in this case it does not matter since neither are protected. The Kansas Supreme Court in this matter found that a city, pursuant to police power, has the right to promote morality and that the legislature is the proper body to address morality issues. ...
To put it in a nutshell: Kansas' legislature and court believe that homosexuals and homosexual conduct do not warrant equal protection under the United States Constitution, and certainly not under the Kansas Constitution.
Purely as an aside, I find it ... amusing that the Kansas Supreme Court holds that marriage is as old as our civilization, but that homosexuality and homosexual conduct are not. This would come as a terrible surprise to the Leviticus quoting biblethumpers -- which, clearly, would include the members of the Kansas Supreme Court -- since Leviticus itself predates our American civilization. (Mind, not a terribly helpful comparison.) If nothing else, people who have intimate relations with members of their own sex have certainly been around for more than 235 years.
@ 05:49 PM CST [Link]
Oh, for the love of ... would the stupid scumvermin just make up his damn mind? He said it, he didn't say it, he meant it, he didn't mean it, he didn't understand what the other guy said, no he REALLY meant it yahoo!
So.
If we've insulted god by allowing "abortion and rampant Internet pornography", why aren't terrorists (or, apparently, messengers from god if you allow Robertson's logic) crashing planes into Europe? Or Canada? Or other countries with comparatively liberal laws and comparatively few fundamentalists of Robertson's ilk? This country is so favored by Robertson's version of god that his god is throwing planes at us because he's that pissed off? Because, frankly, if this is what it's like to be favored by god, I'll take being ignored; it's apparently a damn sight safer.
What strikes me as vastly amusing is that by advancing this proposition, Robertson actually accepts the terrorist position that they are messengers from god. (Granted, perhaps not the version of god either he or they quite intended, but Islam and Christianity technically have the same god, if different visions thereof and differently named.) Somehow, I don't really think he meant to do that; then again, logic hasn't always seemed a terribly strong point for the man.
@ 04:02 PM CST [Link]
President Bush told reporters on Tuesday that a Palestinian state was always "part of a vision" if Israel's right to exist is respected.
Um ... WHAT? A part of whose vision, exactly? I'm pretty sure that until relatively recently, it wasn't on Israel's radar; they rather hoped they could shove all the Palestinians into Jordan and Lebanon. The US position has wandered all over the place in the last few administrations, and THIS administration tried ardently to disengage from the issue entirely.
Even if everyone agrees that there should be a state and that Israel should recognize it, many of the problems are almost impossible. Jerusalem alone remains an utterly intractable issue. (The only way around that would be to make it an open city, unaffiliated with any specific nation -- a city-state, in this day and age; what a concept -- move the Israeli capital to Tel Aviv or some such, and the Palestinian capital would not be allowed to be in East Jerusalem. Now how likely do you think that is?) Considering that increased US involvement not only has not led to fewer Palestinian deaths to date, but that the positions became even more entrenched after we became involved, exactly what help do they think we'll be?
Somewhere behind the scenes, we've somehow directly threatened (pardon, had "frank and forthright discussions with") both sides, no doubt. I'm not sure what it would be, but considering as both sides are making moves to talk to each other, it must have been unusually blunt and vicious. Something like saying to the Palestinians, "Negotiate, or we'll let them do as they will without saying a word against it," and to the Israelis, "We'll withdraw all military, financial, and intelligence support unless you start negotiating in something resembling good faith."
@ 02:43 PM CST [Link]
You know, I thought they'd discovered recently that fingerprints were not as distinctive and individual as they'd once thought. If that's true, then this is probably not the best idea in the world. For one thing, the databases would be monstrous large. For another, once the sensor had been used by a couple, three hundred people on a very busy day, wouldn't it get difficult for it to read anything at all?
@ 02:03 PM CST [Link]
This ... is utterly REVOLTING. I hope that it does miserably in Europe; we don't need to give programmers over here any more bad ideas.
@ 12:59 PM CST [Link]
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a ruling that overturned the death sentence for a murderer from California because the prosecutor told jurors that God sanctioned the death penalty for evil people.
Well, yes, I should think they would let that ruling stand. I dare say that, depending on how California law works, they may just redo the sentencing phase; then again, if their law works such that the trial jury has to also be the sentencing jury, they maybe up a creek -- the only thing they could do is retry the case, in which case they'll probably move it to life without parole to avoid the trial.
Though that does bring up the question: what is it that jurors actually think they're doing when they decide to sentence someone to death? I don't imagine that most jurors in that trial really thought, "This is what god wants us to do," but what were they actually thinking?
@ 01:42 PM CST [Link]
The United States should retaliate with nuclear weapons if terrorists launch chemical or germ warfare against the nation, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Friday during a town hall meeting. "I can't think of any other appropriate response in the case of a massive attack with biological weapons. We have to let terrorist states know that nothing is off the table."
And just when the rest of the world was marvelling that we've apparently actually been thinking about our response, too.
To be sure, massive attack with biological weapons is much more likely to be a state action rather than a simple terrorist action. Depending on your definition of "Massive", of course.
Still, it seems rather excessive to say, in essence, "You've killed many of our people with biological weapons; therefore, we will make of your country a glowing cinder that poisons a goodly chunk of the planet for the foreseeable future, including possibly the land of allied countries who have helped us in the past." Just a bit.
@ 11:17 AM CST [Link]
You have to wonder ... if the attack on the WTC hadn't happened, would the Supreme Court have agreed to hear this case? Or would they have agreed to hear the case about the scarf? My sense of the court is that they might well have declined -- they frequently tend to run from controversial cases until the issues become utterly intractable -- but it's hard to tell. They might also well have realized that even stickier cases would be forthcoming, and they didn't want to set any more precedents than they already had.
@ 10:48 AM CST [Link]
Pious invocations of the Japanese internment are absurd. For one thing, those were U.S. citizens. Citizens can't be deported. So far -- thank God -- almost all the mass murderers of Americans have been aliens.
You know, if he were still alive, McVeigh would be seriously pissed off by that slight.
It's also wondrously sophistical. Yes, at the moment, the largest mass murder of Americans seems to have been carried out by aliens. But we kill 15,000 of each other every year. Americans are typically murdered by other Americans. Usually friends or relatives. She should get a grip.
Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims -- at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours.
Leaving aside the fact that she's operating from a stunning lack of evidence -- how on earth do we know that all terrorists capable of doing what was done were Muslims? it's entirely reasonable that someone like the Aryan Nations or some such group could do such a thing -- in fact, the only time anything remotely like that was perpetrated in this country, it WAS domestic.
And, of course, most Muslims in this country are native-born African-Americans. One wonders what she does plan to do with them. Presumably, forced conversion to Christianity, at the least, and execution for those who refuse to convert. It would, after all, only be consistent.
There will be two fail-safes: (1) Muslim immigrants who agree to spy on the millions of Muslim citizens unaffected by the deportation order can stay; and (2) any Muslim immigrant who gets a U.S. senator to waive his deportation -- by name -- gets to stay.
THAT is a fail-safe? To be forced to be a spy (in a situation in which most of your reports would amount to "Nobody did nothin'" -- now THAT is an effective use of people, right?) or to somehow get a senator -- who won't have a clue who you are -- to allow you to be his or her pet Muslim?
You know, the problem with Coulter isn't her policies. (Well, OK, not just her policies.) The problem is that she's so extreme that she makes other policy proposals from people look vaguely sane and doable. (Such as the secret evidence laws, for example.) While people are watching her froth at the keyboard, other stuff can possibly sneak right in.
@ 10:24 AM CST [Link]
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!