Monster Creation

Every day or two now, large piles of bodies are discovered in and around Baghdad.
Twenty in an abandoned minivan two weeks ago, all shot execution-style. Thirty a few days later - all beheaded, missing the heads. Most events this last year or two have gone unreported as it's become too dangerous for Western correspondents to work in Iraq anymore.

Apart from just the ghastly nature of these events, I have a few other thoughts on this. First, a civil war is already well in progress.

There are several militias with active death-squads, at least in the four Sunni provinces. When forty people are being killed every day.. In an area with a population of 5+M.. That makes it roughly 80 times as dangerous as the most scary city in the America. The next step will be large internal refugee dislocations as people flee certain neighborhoods for their lives. These will be absorbed by nearby relatives for a while, but when that become impossible, large tent cities will emerge, with all the attending problems - disease, food and water shortages.. Great.

Completely aside from all the tragic deaths, a civil war environment will generate hundreds, or even thousands of people who will become literal monsters. Every life is unimaginably precious. Even when bloodshed cannot be avoided, each killing is a nihilistic act, an extinguishing of a whole world of possibility, full of sorrow, which effects the killer forever. Soldiers are traumatized, but they live within rules. Militia/guerillase who become acclimated to such violence, who are able to execute civilians, are virtually destroyed inside and are unlikely to ever be rehabilitated.

They'll be able to murder people over a parking spot incident, at the drop of a hat. Their lives will become sterile and flat, and only their bloodlust will give it meaning. When and if events calm down, they'll be just incredibly dangerous to have as neighbors.. Like holocaust guards after WWII. This is a rare state for a society to find itself in, one unfamiliar to American civilians since the Civil War.

Condoleeza has publiclyy admitted that they've made 'thousands of tactical errors' in Iraq, but toppling Saddam was still the right decision. Fine. Humility is a virtue, even with stupid people. Now if she had any personal honor after making such a statement she'd resign in disgrace. But she doesn't, or she has whatever condition Rumsfeld has, where she tries to resign but Bush refuses to allow it. In a perfect world, they would all be transported to Baghdad to live out the war in the death-zone, and feel the deep fear that they've visited on millions of others with such easy lack of concern. Playing God wouldn't be such a rush if they were ever forced to live with the consequences.

Professional Talking Heads

I was furious when I first saw this screen-catch - see below. But after some time to reflect, I can see it's a sign of desperation for Fox news. They've given up the 'middle ground' where independents can watch their news and take them seriously. They're committed partisans and they can't switch horses, but Bush is polling at 37%.. in Red Indiana. The Democrats have some momentum, although they still can't seem to put forward a solid message, other than 'we're not Bush'.. Surely they'll find the way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. To much of America they're the party of plaintive whining. It's their own fault.

Bush has been shown on video three days before Katrina being warned that the levees would break, a week before he said on TV that nobody expected the levees would break. Which once again shows that he'll lie easily and at the drop of a hat. But finally the South is paying attention. It's a minor screw-up on camera which might have fallen into a grey area if he'd just picked competent people to run FEMA in 2001. But Bush has always seen government as a game to amass power, so loyalty has always been the higher priority.

Demanding competence would mean breaking apart the inner circle and submitting to outside professional authority and judgement, something he's always actively avoided. Elevating underqualified people actually makes these appointees more dependent on Bush than if they had their own earned authority - they have less to fall back on and can't rock the boat. So in effect he's surrounded himself with incompetent psychophants for years, and it's finally caught up with him.

The rest of the world must constantly wonder that we've submitted ourselves to this ridiculous buffoon, but he's a lame-duck. Soon he'll be out of office, and without the presidential props and protections behind him and the 'Royal We' he's been able to use in language, he'll live like a the broadside of a barn covered with targets. He'll yet regret winning that 2nd term. He's a fool. It's his own fault for pretending stubbornness is a primary virtue.

Brownie has re-entered the press-fray. The new word is that he was unqualified, but he took his job seriously and was an improvement on his predecessor, the lobbyist-in-office Joe Albaugh. Brownie didn't like playing the scapegoat and as revenge he's coming back and going after the incompetent head of Homeland Security chief Ron Chertow. Good for him. The whole system failed and he shouldn't be the only one to live in infamy for it.

These horrible gasbags will continue to pretend to be experts, no matter what happens. I wonder if they have any shame at all. Sure, a million people may be killed in the next year, but .. think of the upside! And of course the worst of them is Rumsfeld, who ignored intelligence and advice from every direction, and thus who's legacy will be similar to McNamara. If he has any soul at all, will live out his life as a bloodstained, haunted man.

Bush in India, Stolen Elections?, fighter sale

Quote from Rediff, Feb. 9th.

George W Bush's protocol handlers have notified South Block that the American President's deep belief in his born again faith precludes his visiting Mahatma Gandhi's Samadhi at New Delhi's Raj Ghat -- during his forthcoming visit to India.

When asked -- by reporters on a recent trip aboard Air Force One -- if he will be breaking a decades long tradition of foreign dignitaries visiting India paying respect to the Father of India, Mr Bush, as is his wont, was caught off guard and mumbled something about how the Gospel of Jesus Christ views cremation as a pagan practice.

Of course all educated people know that Hinduism is a Pagan, polytheistic religion much older than Christianity ... with 1,000 million followers in the world's largest democracy, one which we might want to stay friendly with. So Bush has a Two-fer! He deftly insults their George Washington and their religious practice as unholy in one quick shot. What a wonderful guy.

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I think it's at least possible that the 2004 election was stolen, but it's unknowable.
This certainly makes for an interesting story. I'm surprised this reached the AP wire and the LA Times.. With Bush polling in the 40's this may yet have traction. If it does, let's see about getting Alito booted. Bush's supporters, however, will surely fight like sceaming banshees for their dark prince. Interesting times ahead. Hopefully.. Maybe.

Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Fla. Vote
By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press ,February 23 2006

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- An examination of Palm Beach County's electronic voting machine records from the 2004 election found possible tampering and tens of thousands of malfunctions and errors, a watchdog group said Thursday. Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, said the findings call into question the outcome of the presidential race. But county officials and the maker of the electronic voting machines strongly disputed that and took issue with the findings.

Voting problems would have had to have been widespread across the state to make a difference. President Bush won Florida -- and its 27 electoral votes -- by 381,000 votes in 2004. Overall, he defeated John Kerry by 286 to 252 electoral votes, with 270 needed for victory.

BlackBoxVoting.org, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizens group, said it found 70,000 instances in Palm Beach County of cards getting stuck in the paperless ATM-like machines and that the computers logged about 100,000 errors, including memory failures. Also, the hard drives crashed on some of the machines made by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, some machines apparently had to be rebooted over and over, and 1,475 re-calibrations were performed on Election Day on more than 4,300 units, Harris said.

Re-calibrations are done when a machine is malfunctioning, she said. "I actually think there's enough votes in play in Florida that it's anybody's guess who actually won the presidential race," Harris added. "But with that said, there's no way to tell who the votes should have gone to." Palm Beach County and other parts of the country switched to electronic equipment after the turbulent 2000 presidential election, when the county's butterfly ballot confused some voters and led them to cast their votes for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

The Supreme Court halted a recount after 36 days and handed a 537-vote victory to Bush. Palm Beach County election officials said the BlackBoxVoting.com findings are flawed, and they blamed most of the errors on voters not following proper procedures.
"Their results are noteworthy for consideration, but in a majority of instances they can be explained," said Arthur Anderson, the county's elections supervisor. "All of these circumstances are valid reasons for concern, but they do not on face value substantiate that the machines are not reliable." Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer disputed the findings, saying the company's machines worked properly.

Sequoia's machines are used in five Florida counties and in 21 states. "There was a fine election in November 2004," Shafer said. She said many of the errors in the computer logs could have resulted from voters improperly inserting their user cards into the machines. The remaining errors would not affect the vote results because each unit has a backup system, she said. Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections, said she was not aware of the report and had no comment.

Harris said one machine showed that 112 votes were cast on Oct. 16, two days before the start of early voting, a possible sign of tampering. She said the group found evidence of tampering on more than 30 machines in the county. However, Harris said it was impossible to determine what information was altered or if votes were shifted among candidates.

I can think of no honest, sincere argument in defense of paperless untracable voting machines. Anyone who puts one forward is either a fool or a closet-fascist or royalist who doesn't believe in Democracy. This would perhaps be a first for America, but democracy is inherently unstable and stranger things have happened in history.

I expect that large-scale tampering would (or will) eventually break down, because it would require the dozens or hundreds of people who participated to keep a world-changing, radioactive secret..forever. And humanity is a weak vessel for such things.

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Air Force Plans to Sell F-22As to Allies
(I.E. Our collective Organism Buys, New Improved Teeth and sells extras to it's friends)
The airforce is working on plans to sell the F-22 Raptor to Japan. They need to do this for economies of scale in manufacturing so the US can keep the Lockheed pipeline active. This action will then bring the F-22 directly into China's sphere, both there and in South Korean bases.. So China will redouble efforts to build a comparable fighter.. which will then lead Congress to order more F-22's..

The insane, eternal cycle continues. Each plane costs $100M each. That's 1,800+ kids' full college education. Each. Terrific.

This isn't an American issue per say, - it's just part of the human condition which plays out everywhere. The Lockheed employees have to pay the mortgage and the Chinese would probably build those fighters anyway. But I wish we could for once open our eyes and not go down this road.

Aliens have not visited.

If aliens existed, they must be so different that earthly resources are of no value to them. Or they have plenty of resources of their own and don't need to invade.

Both possibilities are unlikely, so I don't think they've visited despite all the science fiction and imaginative fantasy over the years. The reason: There's only one type of DNA code. If aliens ever arrived I would expect them to have brought in their own biological language. And then we'd have two or more genetic-models in competition on earth. But there's only one code. There's also no sharp point where evolution jumps to something completely new and different.. So evidence shows that there's only one evolutionary story on earth these last 2+ billion years.
If they came, they would have stayed.

So aliens I guess the unspoken premise of the UFO meme out there is that the Greys or whoever are treating the earth like a zoo.. This seems unlikely and in any case, in the long run it's unsustainable. Assuming the same rules of life out there as exist right here - i.e. - constant searching for growth, Darwinian competition, destruction and absorption of the weak by the strong, etc. Columbus and the Americans did not go to the new world to have a look around and sight-see. After discovery pressure for invasion came from every direction in European society, just as it would in an 'Alien society' counterpart.


Given physical law and the natural order of things, which are universal, there is no other scenario I can comprehend in which they would exist, but choose to stay away.

Life doesn't work that way. It seems more likely that nobody has visited at all. Logic points against any contact. Maybe interstellar flight truly is beyond the sumit of evolutionary biology, here and elsewhere. We might indeed just be too small to ever make the jump.

Of course aliens are usually a tool in cinema and fiction for different psychological facets of human experience.

These include:
1) A stand-in for God / Higher Power among scientific/secular types like myself.

2) A way to give a three-steps-removed perspective on human events and foibles from an outsider's point of view.

3) A way to explore monsters/demons, politics & social situations in our imagination which do not correspond to earthly Nature. - I.E. - to wipe the earthly slate clean and allow the writer and reader to fiddle with parameters of a story which would be inflexible in more down-to-earth fiction.

4) As a way to speculate about the future of science and it's impact on humanity, a field which the Aliens will developed in some curious and unexpected direction.

Our curiousity is endless. What we're interested are basically a group of questions about convergent evolution, both biological and technological. I.E. - How are we the same, how do we differ, and why?

Most of science believes that, like Dolphins and sharks and long-extinct ichtheosaurs, or wolves vs. Tasmanian Tigers, or Birds vs. Pterosaurs, or modern trees vs. prehistoric fern-trees, we may be substantially similar in many details, a subject of endless sci-fi speculation. There is only one way to build a car - with four wheels. Five is too many, three is not enough.

Similarly there may be only one way for intelligence to evolve - through a quadruped, standing upright and developing brainpower to add functionality to it's freed for-limbs.. There are embryonic developmental-reasons why all advanced earthly lifeorms all are designed through bilateral mirror-symnetry, that is, two eyes, opposing arms, legs, ears, etc.

And then a vast variety of other questions come to mind. Do they sleep? Do they have religion? Do they have crime/war/poverty/ morality/ mortality/gender & individuality & politics? What does their music sound like? How do their social structures work? Are they hive-minds? Do they have castes? What do they look like? Do they want our women? - (probably not).

Although an alien planet would is almost infinitely distant, the physical rules should still apply. And of course, our brain and psyche has evolved in certain ways to meet our needs. Are they down the same path, or not? Have they taken control of their own evolution, as humanity is likely to do in the next 200+ years? How's that worked out?

They don't really answer spiritual questions, though. If they created us, the next question is .. who created them? And then who created the creators, etc. It's the standard infinite-regression problem, which religious folks refuse to recognize, but which Darwinism has proven to be the only logical answer.

Cheney at the trigger

Darth Cheney had a hunting accident and apparently shot his friend over the weekend. On the one hand it's sad, but it does pierce his fake air of infallibility, and it also shows Cheney's reaction, which is to be secretive and deceptive in the details until finally smoked out of his fortress by an unusually rabid press. The fourth-estate's dominant skill-set of focusing in on personality-driven car chases/crashes and infotainment has for once served them well here.

I'm sure it was an accident, and Cheney was likely waiting to see whether his friend would die from his injuries. Let's see him take the heat. He will..briefly, then his supporters will jump to Cheney's defense, as his feelings are being hurt by all these pestering reporters. On one radio show one said 'why do I have to know this'? i.e. - I'm a sheep and I want to be led by the nose.. And then the news cycle will close and will then re-focus on the world's largest garden tomato or someone who taught a squirrel to waterski.

The old guy's alive and well, and he's also a shmuck. When someone apologizes for being shot and wounded.. it isn't about politics - this is a deep bow to royalty.

His subserviance is total. He's probably pleased that he gets to save Cheney's hide this way & get closer to the inner circle.

He's the victim but he refuses to play the part, leaving nothing to write about. The story will fade away quickly.

S

Congress Is No More. And the Google shakedown.

I listened to parts of Gonzales's hearings before the Senate last week and it struck me as the most brazen political power-grab I've ever heard in my life. Forget the Democrats who rail and moan at the sky every day to little effect, the drama here was on the Republican side.

They were like loyal ranch dogs who had happily watched the cowboys turn bulls into steers for years now leaving the Democrats a bunch of whiny eunichs, but which have suddenly finding their master's staring right down at them with the clippers in their hands..

There was a chill in the room. They'd played a faustian bargain, and now it was time to play the piper. Their last five years of smooth sailing has given birth to a genuine monster. Finally their eyes are open but it might just be too late.

Bush will again say he's the de-facto emperor because of the War President BS.. despite the fact that there's no draft and no clearly defined enemy that could be defeated to resolve the conflict. It's an endless war.. The whole thing sounds like a the cliff notes summary to Orwell's 1984.

And of course Arlen Specter allowed Gonzales to testify without being sworn in, so he could lie all day without any repercussions. That's how beaten down and pathetic these men have become - they don't even want to take the risk that brazen lying might become a political football for the opposition - as if the truth mattered at all... They're a bunch of career politicians who have nothing to fall back on. Their jobs are their lives. Their leadership don't respect them, but they can't rock the boat... And although much of the hearing was very contentious, everyone knows this is a talking shop. The lack of an oath for Gonzales' testimony confirms it - this was all an ass-covering excersize for the media from start to finish.

And of course they're still giving Bush the benefit of the doubt on the real purpose of spying. I would be surprised - but not very, to find out in 2010 that it was all to gather info on Howard Dean and the congressional democrats, among others. These guys are profoundly untrustworthy. We've never needed a Woodward and Bernstein more than we do today.

• Oh, won't you please, please
  give us some authority?

I expect there is significant but unsuccessful back-room pressure to have Gonzales fired. And the senate may yet gain a more solid footing as Bush's lame-duck status grows and they try to flee the White-House's sinking ship. Time will tell.

** You need 51% to rule ** if you have 51% of the party, you control the party - so you effectively need 26% to rule. **
(Attributed to Hitler in the 1930's).
Bush's general approval #'s hover at 38+%.


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Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2006 10:31 a.m. EST
Google Rankles GOP
Google Inc. has few friends in the Republican Party – and that could have
consequences for the Internet powerhouse.
"Republicans can’t seem to forgive what they see as Google’s leftward tilt,” Business Week reports. In the 2004 election cycle, Google employees gave Democrats 99 percent of their campaign contributions, and the company has hired as its first lobbyist Alan Davidson, a Democrat.
Google has also taken positions on two issues that rankle many in the GOP: resisting subpoenas to help track child pornographers, and acceding to the censorship demands of China’s communist government.

Google is also infamous among Web searchers for a word search feature that demeans President George W. Bush. If a Google user types the word "failure" into the search box and hits Google's "I Feel Lucky" tab, the president's White House bio page opens.
To mend fences with the GOP, Davidson is trying to hire an in-house Republican lobbyist, but so far no one has been willing to come aboard.
Google could "get a first taste of potential repercussions from its GOP problem” when it is grilled about its China policy at a hearing of the House Global Human Rights Subcommittee this week, according to Business Week.
It is "astounding” that Google would cooperate with China "just to make a buck,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Chris Smith, R-N.J.
As for the company’s reluctance to cozy up to the GOP, "Washington has a record in dealing with big, arrogant, growing companies,” reports Business Week, which goes on to warn: Remember Microsoft, whose dismissive attitude toward Washington helped fuel an antitrust case.

I'm sure it's written by a base-level hack journalist who was just casting around for something to feed his seething, hateful constituency, but it could be taken up by the party and become a real blackmail/shakedown.

It's flawed on several levels.
As for the kowtow to China, I'm not surprised by Google's subserviance on this. Google has a pile of money but it's not a sovereign nation and doesn't have a military. Their options were very limited. It actually seems kind of pathetic that the congress expects US companies to play this risky, losing bluffing game to enforce our foreign policy, especially considering how poorly the Bushies have done these last five years.

That is to say.. we have no foreign policy vs. China. We're at their mercy on almost all trade issues. The five richest people in America are the owners of WalMart which is 80% a conduit for importing consumer products directly to America (and the rest of the world)..from a nation with no democracy or unionization, making much of it's industry into de-facto slave-labor. There's no easy answer to this. Google wants and needs to make money, and that means going East.

The second part here is how Microsoft is an example of what can happen when palms aren't greased. This is garbage. First there's the ugly premise - that laws are enforced differently depending on who companies are contributing to. I.E. - government shakedown is the norm. That's illegal and unethical, but I would hardly expect Newsmax to even notice such a fundamental lapse.

But every other part of this statement is also false as well. Microsoft was able to stretch out it's anti-trust issues for over a decade until all of the rulings against it were rendered moot. This is an example of a company successfully breaking the system by spending perhaps $100M of its $100B+ fortune, less than 0.1% of it's wealth, on foot-dragging lawyers. The anti-trust people in government were all Democrats anyway. The current GOP is Lassaiz-faire at best, kleptocracy at worst, although I expect they'd pretend otherwise to pursue their supposed enemies if the occasion warranted it.

Right now Microsoft's larger obstacle is the EU, which has an actual anti-trust division with teeth, and Linux, which was an grassroots repulsion away from Microsoft's heavy-handedness, which occured in industry with no government support at all.

The third peculiar part is about Google's lack of cooperation with the administration's request for search stats. This has nothing to do whatsoever with child-exploitation. It has to do with keeping the camel's nose out from the circus tent. -that is, once the nose is in, the camel will inevitably follow. Google is not an arm of the government and sees a need for separation from authority as a necessary barrier to maintain trust with the public.

To take this stand and lump them in with protectors of child-traffickers is a telling manipulation. Apparently your either with the (_blank_) terrorists/rapists/monsters or you're against them. There is no in-between. And if there was, the wingnuts fringe would knowingly lie about it and browbeat Google into submission with hash rhetoric. It's worked on every other issue. It's their chief M.O. If you start with a bold, simple lie, the adversary is confused and starts its defense from a deep hole. - The Cheney Principle.

But Google has a lot of money, and it won't be easily beaten down. They have no anti-trust pendulum over their heads that I know of.. What will the Bushies do? Put out a pro-Bushy search engine?

Only the Newsmax wingnut faction can read this with a straight face.

Obama vs. McCain

Fierce acrimony between Barak Obama, the newly anointed leader of the Democrats who's radiant charisma lights up the party, and John McCain. Barak wants to use corruption to break the GOP while McCain wants to use his bipartisan appeal to form a coalition to fix the earmark-system, which has turned congress into such a dark place this last five years.

At this point McCain has such wide appeal as the non-reactionary Republican that he will most likely be president in 2008. Far worse things could happen, but I'd rather see a Democrats in office if such a thing is possible. So many in Congress are so corrupt that any GOP-led correction will be half-hearted and will only placate the swing voters into staying in their comfort zone on the wrong side of the aisle, like frogs in hot water negotiating a two-year delay-of-boiling, but leaving the stove burner-knob in the wrong hands.

The super-suave Obama is playing a very high-stakes game. If he loses this gambit and the Bush-Fundy-corruption wing of the GOP consolidates it's position, we will have NO reform and NO Democratic resurgence until 2008 or beyond, all to get on top of McCain for leadership in the Senate.. It may be a losing bet which could severely hurt the country. The chess-piece has been put forward.. Time will tell.

The ominous story which informs all this is that .. a great part of the population in the Red States are not concerned about the Abramoff scandal.. That is to say that nothing Bush can do will ever make them reconsider their support for either him or his successors, who are learning from him now how the government operates.

If rank corruption is more acceptable than voting for Blue then we are truly two nations intertwined in one state - and we may yet drift towards civil war in the next 30 years - one the North would lose, given current population trends. This indifference to truth and it's consequences will be Bush's real legacy. It will either implode the GOP in his absence, as it's unlikely they'll find as bold and strong a liar as W, or with the GOP in control, the American Dream of Greatness, - shining beacon to the rest of the world, etc.. always to some extent an idealistic fantasy-vision, will be be eroded to a state of collapse.

*****
The Air America radio podcasts are no longer available for free.. It was a great service, but they're not a charity, so this was to be expected.

Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King died last month and virtually every famous African American and many dignitaries from around the world are attending the enormous funeral today, with four living presidents it will be far larger than MLK Jr.'s own funeral in 1968. It's hard to tell whether they're deeply moved or just hounds for the spotlight. In any case as the Russians say, it is easy to love the deceased.

It's hard to think of Mrs. King as a proper celebrity, as her only accomplishment was to keep her husband's flame alive for these last forty years. But her passing marks the end of that chapter of the civil rights movement as MLK's stature has grown over time and nobody has stepped into his shoes.

Oprah Winfrey is now the voice of mainstream Black America, and although she is a good and honest broker she's generally apolitical and is mostly dedicated to her light-entertainment empire, thinking mostly in terms of personal improvement and empowerment.

It's amusing to see Bush speaking at this occasion, as MLK would have properly designated him as the adversary to be demonstrated against. But Bush as president is the center of every event he attends and he is completely shameless. Everyone has to be polite and defferential despite disagreements that go down to every fiber of their being. That's what living in an organized society requires.

Of course Bush would claim King's friendship and call them fellow-travellers, but his version of Freedom is 100% Freedom-of-Association, which translates roughly to Freedom from being pestered by people like MLK, the freedom to exclude and ignore.

So a few of the other speakers gave Bush a very harsh reception, sermonizing against him for many hours as he sat in the audience right behind the podium, unable to escape. The right wing blogosphere was irate that their golden boy had been trapped outside of his usual protective bubble of psycophants and that everyone was so impolite, but they should have known better.

It was a political decision for Bush to attend. He was playing statesman and working in a subtle way to claim the MLK legacy for the GOP, and MLK's family and friends were duly able to set the tone for this event and were not going to let their loved one's memory and life's work be coopted and diffused by people who they knew to their enemies in every occasion except for the most shallow level of smalltalk and polite genialities.

The premise that a funeral is not a political event is a sham in any case. Bush played up Reagan's funeral in 2004 to the hilt for electoral advantage (and to my annoyance, as even as I disagreed with Reagan he was vastly better than Bush has turned out to be, and W's attempt to jump on his large old coat-tails was kind of tacky.) If one's life's work and deeply held beliefs cannot be celebrated and spelled out clearly at the funeral, when can it be? MLK's legacy was as a proud Left-Wing agitator on many issues. Bush wasn't welcome. He should have sent his wife and stayed at the Whitehouse.

*********

In other news, huge riots have been going on for days in Lebanon and Tehran and other countries as the radical nutcases are furious over some recent political cartoons which represent Muhammad, a religious verboten. Poor Denmark.. Several embassies have been torched, which is incredible as these cartoons appear pretty innocuous and tepid.

But this was an intentional provocation done in very poor taste. Denmark has a far-right regime in power. They're a lilly-white country with a 3% Muslim minority which feels isolated and under seige. There are always the permenantly furious factions, waiting and hoping for a spark in the powderroom, such that this falls into the gray area where the Danish government should have gently asked the newspaper to excersize restraint.

But Denmark refused to even meet with the Muslim nations united group of 12 ambassadors.. Such arrogance reaps the whirlwind. They had it coming. Anyway, it has escaped no one that brutish violence is their answer to being depicted as brutally violent. A catch-22 if ever there was one.

Since then they've played a sharp and risky game by refusing to talk to certain Danish Imams who incited this madness and have played both sides of the game by supporting a Danish embargo to the Arab foreign press and then telling a different story back at home. The Danes are basically saying that these people are the problem. Which is true.. but they might need these clerical nutcases to talk to their nutcase-followers. Time will tell.

It's now come out that the three worst cartoons of the group were never even published by the Danish paper. They were included later by the Imams during their middle-East tour to provoke uproar. This shows the true nature of this group of leaders - they're a bunch of race-bating jerks. People died in those riots.. They're following the Cheney model of leadership - if you put forward a strong lie, your adversary starts from a defensive position. That's the world we live in. 1984 isn't that far away.

Update:
Two new cartoon contests have sprung up in responst to this kerfuffle.
1) The Iranian newspaper is having a make-fun-of-the-holocaust cartoon contest.
These guys really know how to take the high road.

2) In response to the Iranians, Dimona Comix, an Isreali publishing company, has started it's own anti-Semitic cartoon contest.. showing exactly how these things should be viewed - i.e. with a thick skin and a sense of the ridiculous. A curious development.. But one man's humor is another's overt racism. Only an African American can call himself a nigger (with apologies.)