The Distant Ocean

The hits just keep coming

Israeli president Simon Peres allows that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities may not be the "best solution", because despite the extremely enjoyable violation of international law and the exciting opportunity to massacre hundreds of Untermenschen, "You cannot destroy the know-how to create centrifuges."  But hey, that hasn't stopped them from trying:

Israel has launched a covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran's nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed.

It is using hitmen, sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime's illicit weapons project, the experts say. [...]

Mossad was rumoured to be behind the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, a top nuclear scientist at Iran's Isfahan uranium plant, who died in mysterious circumstances from reported "gas poisoning" in 2007.

Other recent deaths of important figures in the procurement and enrichment process in Iran and Europe have been the result of Israeli "hits", intended to deprive Tehran of key technical skills at the head of the programme, according to Western intelligence analysts.

"Israel has shown no hesitation in assassinating weapons scientists for hostile regimes in the past," said a European intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. They did it with Iraq and they will do it with Iran when they can."

There was no need for Peres to mention this, though, since I'm sure everyone here is already aware of it; after all, if a story had been published saying that Iranian hitmen were assassinating Israeli scientists and other officials it'd be all over the news here, right?  And nobody could ever accuse the U.S. media or high government officials of double standards.

(As a fun mental exercise, try to imagine the circumference of the smoking-hole-that-used-to-be-Tehran if the Iranian government were in fact killing off Israelis this way.)

"Little Real Change"

The Center for Constitutional Rights just released its assessment of Obama's first 100 days, titled "Small Glimmers of Hope, but Little Real Change".  Which is as good an illustration as I can imagine of why I love CCR; unlike some organizations, they haven't abandoned their skepticism and gone all weak in the knees in the face of Obama's mesmerizingly centrist liberalism.

The baffling enigma of low turnout in Haiti

U.S. ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson ponders the low turnout in Haiti's recent senatorial elections (less than 10%, according to initial reports):

U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson, who toured the tabulation center Monday, remarked that "Historically, off-year elections in the United States as well as in other countries tend not to be as well-attended as presidential elections. We'll have to see."

Yes, what a conundrum.  And I'm sure the boycott organized by Haiti's largest party in response to its exclusion from the election couldn't possibly have had anything to do with it, which is why Sanderson didn't even bother to mention it.  The organizers, however, foolishly believe otherwise:

A spokesperson for grassroots organizations aligned with Haiti's Fanmi Lavalas party demanded the Obama administration remove current US Ambassador Janet Sanderson. Reached by telephone in the capital of Port-au-Prince a leader of a group calling itself the Popular Initiative stated, "She is lying about last Sunday's elections by not acknowledging it was our boycott that kept voters away." He continued, "She claims it was because this was not a regular election year and that people may be tired of the political process. The only voter fatigue we have in Haiti is with undemocratic elections. Allow Fanmi Lavalas to participate and we'll show you the voters have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for an authentic democratic process. She is out of touch with reality in Haiti."

"Out of touch with reality in Haiti"?  Clearly this person has failed to understand that "reality" in situations like this is entirely determined by U.S. interests—not by piffling trifles like the facts on the ground.  We'll know if Haiti's senatorial elections were free and fair if 1) the results turn out as the Obama administration wants them to, and 2) they can be shoved down the throats of the Haitian people through the usual combination of suppression,  violence, and diplomatic subterfuge.

Radio silence

Posting is going to come to a screeching halt until the end of the week or so, as I flee an unseasonable bout of local warming.  Until then, be excellent to each other.

A light at the end of the torture tunnel

Are you upset that Obama doesn't think he needs to prosecute torturers?  So is this guy:

President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA interrogators who used waterboarding on terrorism suspects amounts to a breach of international law, the U.N. rapporteur on torture said.

"The United States, like all other states that are part of the U.N. convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court," U.N. special rapporteur Manfred Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

Yeah, well, every Joe Schmoe rapporteur on torture's got an opinion.  But we should all just relax, because some people may actually end up in jail as a result of their involvement with torture!

Torture case lawyers may face jail for letter

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who accused a Bay Area company of flying him to foreign torture chambers for the CIA is at the center of a bizarre new case, in which his lawyers face possible jail sentences for writing a letter that asked President Obama to disclose how brutally he was treated.

The government says the letter falsely accused a Pentagon review team of censoring details of the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed from a document the attorneys wanted to send to Obama. The lawyers stand by their accusations but have been summoned to Washington, D.C., by a federal judge for a hearing next month on whether they should be held in contempt of court, punishable by up to six months in jail.

No word yet from Attorney General Eric "you should never put bananas in the refrigerator" Holder on whether or not the government would provide legal representation to Mohamed's lawyers, at no cost to them, in any state or federal judicial or administrative proceeding brought against them based on torture-related conduct and would take measures to respond to any proceeding initiated against them in any international or foreign tribunal, including appointing counsel to act on their behalf and asserting any available immunities and other defenses in the proceeding itself.  Nor whether, to the extent permissible under federal law, the government will also indemnify them for any monetary judgment or penalty ultimately imposed against them for such conduct and will provide representation in congressional investigations.  But I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

(More hijinks with Eric "any way you want to eat them, it's impossible to beat them" Holder here and here.)

Haiti democracy prevention still coming along nicely

Here's the latest on "democracy" in Haiti:

In February it was announced that Haiti’s Conseil électoral provisoire (CEP) would not recognise candidates from Fanmi Lavalas (FL) in the upcoming senatorial elections. The reason given was that the candidates - listed in two different slates - did not have the signature of the party’s head, former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted by the George W. Bush administration in 2004.

FL is in a process of reorganisation that even sympathetic observers have termed "disarray." After the initial failure of the two separate FL slates to gain CEP approval, the factions came together agreeing upon a unified slate. The slate was signed by Emmanuel Cantave - keeper of the party's seals - who has approved FL slates for the past 13 years.

Still, the CEP rejected the list. Its stated objection was that the list lacked Aristide’s signature; giving just days notice, it requested a non-fascimilied signature from Aristide, exiled in Pretoria, South Africa.

You've got to admire the Kafkaesque elegance of that last bit.  So what did our new Secretary of State have to say about this travesty on her recent visit?

CLINTON: The U.S. removed a military dictatorship in 1995, clearing the way for democracy. And after several years of political disputes, common in any country making a transition, Haiti began to see progress. And the national and presidential elections in 2006 really moved Haiti’s democracy forward. What the president and the prime minister are seeking is to maintain a strong commitment to democratic governance which will take another step forward with elections for the senate on Sunday.

To translate from the vulgar Clintonian dialect: 1) "political disputes" refers to the overwhelmingly popular presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which was "disputed" (and continually undermined) by the U.S. and its fifth column in Haiti; 2) Haiti "began to see progress" thanks to the U.S.-backed coup of Aristide in 2004; and 3) the 2006 elections that "really moved Haiti's democracy forward" excluded both Aristide and FL's preferred candidate in his stead (Father Gerard Jean-Juste, thrown in prison on invented charges by the U.S.-backed government in order to prevent him from running), resulting in the ascension of Rene Preval—who understands clearly who's the boss, and therefore merits a pat on the head from Clinton.

Which brings us to today's senatorial elections, in which the U.S./Haitian "strong commitment to democratic governance...will take another step forward" via the calculated suppression of the majority party's ability to run a slate of candidates.  The result?  Fewer than 10% of Haitians even bothered to participate in the charade that so impressed the Obama administration's Secretary of State.

So the centuries-long U.S. project of democracy prevention in Haiti is still going swimmingly.  And anyone who feared that our first black president might be  less sympathetic to the need to smash the democratic aspirations of the first free black nation in the hemisphere can rest assured: Obama will never let race—or anything else—stop him from doing the empire's dirty work.

One of these things is not like the other

Obama on the prosecution of the torturers among us:

But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence.

Obama on his willingness to reverse the U.S.'s vicious, decades-long, unilateral war against Cuba:

Now, a relationship that effectively has been frozen for 50 years is not going to thaw overnight. And so having taken the first step, I think it's very much in our interest to see whether Cuba is also ready to change. We don't expect them to change overnight.

And here I thought there was nothing to be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past, and that we should be moving forward rather than focusing profitlessly on, oh, say, the past 50 years.  But in fairness to Obama, these statements were made several hours apart, so maybe he just had a change of heart in between.

Bowdler's heirs

The rabid censors at CommonDreams are apparently still at it.  And the biggest irony?  If you read down in the comments there you'll see that they even banned Joe Hope.  Yes, that Joe Hope.

There've been many responses over the past year and a half to my previous posts about CD's control freakery, and in those comments some of the other undesirables have speculated about the reasons they were banned (nobody knows for sure because CD never says, nor will they inform you if you ask).  But what's become crystal clear is that the power-drunk nimrods at CD don't need something so picayune as a reason to excommunicate someone from the site; if anything you say catches them the wrong way on the wrong day, they just reach for the delete key without a second thought.  You'd think the irony overload would fry their brains, but apparently they're made of sterner stuff.

With allies like these, who needs enemies?

[ My apologies to the ghost of Thomas Bowdler, who was practically a free speech hero compared to these cretins. ]

What a president with genuine courage looks like

Evo Morales just finished a 5-day hunger strike in support of a package of electoral reforms:

Bolivian President Evo Morales ended a five-day hunger strike today after Congress approved a new electoral law that will boost the voting power of his core constituency.

Morales had canceled a diplomatic visit to Cuba to maintain a vigil inside the presidential palace, where for almost a week he consumed only water and coca leaves, the raw ingredient in cocaine and a folk remedy used in Bolivia to suppress hunger. He slept on a bare mattress on the palace floor, surrounded by fasting union leaders who form part of his coalition party.

"The Bolivian people will never forget this revolutionary process," Morales, 49, said today in the presidential palace, moments after concluding the strike. In remarks on state television, Morales said he hoped the fast would strengthen Bolivians’ support for "profound economic, social and cultural changes."

(This was nothing new for Morales, who once fasted for 18 days when he was a union leader to protest coca eradication.)

The superficial similarities between Morales and Obama only serve to highlight the critical differences: Bolivia's president is a former union leader who draws directly on his experience to fight for his principles, whereas our erstwhile community-organizer president trades on his past to gain votes while actively betraying the principles he formerly espoused.  To put it another way, Morales uses his power to further the goals of the popular movement that made him president, while Obama co-opts the power of the popular movement that made him president to undercut its goals.

Just for a moment, imagine what it would be like to have a president who actually possessed (positive) core, non-negotiable convictions, and for whom going on a hunger strike was well within the range of sacrifices they were willing to make to fight for those convictions.  While you're at it, imagine what it would be like to have a populace that demanded this level of conviction in exchange for their support—and refused to settle for less.  And finally, imagine how far short of those goals we could fall and still be light years beyond where we are today.

It's no surprise that we're constantly told the most we have a right to expect is tiny incremental steps toward positive change, but what's tragic is that so many people have not only accepted that but have internalized it as though it's some sort of immutable law of nature.  They never seem to notice that those same restrictions don't apply to negative changes—like (say) massive restructuring of the entire system of world trade, radical financial deregulation, or the repurposing of a "defensive" military organization as a weapon of U.S. foreign policy, to name just a few.  They end up excusing and rationalizing the most craven compromises (and even outright betrayals) with carefully-inculcated arguments about pragmatism and political feasibility and the need to lower their expectations.

As a great philosopher once said: you get what you settle for.

Everything old is new again

The always-worthwhile Jeremy Scahill recently started his own blogesque site, rebelreports.com.  Go take a look.

And did you know Obama said this (last month)?

The same afternoon, [Obama] brought members of the House New Democrat Coalition to the White House and told them, "I am a New Democrat." According to Politico, Obama went on to describe himself as a fiscally responsible, pro-growth Democrat who supports free and fair trade and opposes protectionism.

Because I did not know Obama said this.  In case you've purged your mind of the definition of "New Democrat", the article's author (Bruce Reed) explains:

Full disclosure: I've always loved the term New Democrat and in the early '90s launched a magazine by that name for the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization I now head.  The label and the philosophy behind it were an attempt to think anew and move past the ideological logjams of that era.

(By "think anew and move past the ideological logjams of that era" Reed means "act even more like Republicans", of course.)

So assuming this account is accurate—and certainly the anointed one has given us no reason to believe otherwise—Obama is on record as identifying himself as a DLC Democrat.  So when you're arguing wth friends/family/cow-orkers who cling to the desperate hope that Obama's a closet liberal, you now have the canonical refutation from the shoddy charlatan's very mouth.

Greenwald gets the Nader treatment

After citing candidate Obama's obnoxious habit of contradicting President Obama's policies, Glenn Greenwald nozzles up the sarcasm hose from garden to fire:

My, what a ringing and inspiring defense of habeas corpus that was from candidate Barack Obama.  So moving and eloquent and passionate.  And that George W. Bush sure was an awful tyrant for trying to "create a legal black hole at Guantanamo" -- apparently, all Good People devoted to a restoration of the rule of law and the Constitution know that the place where the U.S. should "create a legal black hole" for abducted detainees is Bagram, not Guantanamo.  What a fundamental difference that is.

...and in doing so predictably incurs the enmity of liberals.  But lest we conclude there's some target-dictated hypocrisy going on here, the liberals in question assert that they actually "weren’t all that impressed" with Greenwald even while he was bashing Bush.  And I'm sure we all remember the scorn so many Democratic voters poured on Greenwald back when he was attacking the Republicans, right?  So there's no reason to doubt them on this.

In any case, I'm glad to see that Greenwald has fully abandoned his former pseudo-defense of Obama's detainee policies, though I'm sorry to see him getting beaten with the Ralph Nader stick for having the temerity to question our benevolent Democratic overlords.  But there is a bright side.  I've never bought the "if we pressure Obama he may eventually do what we want" line; Obama is far too insulated and ensconced, and it would take pitchforks and boiling oil at this point to nudge him in the right direction.  But Greenwald is much closer to his public, and continued negative reinforcement from Democratic hypocrites may finally push him over the sinister edge he's been sidling toward for a long time now.

No matter what happens, though, I give him a lot of credit for sticking to his convictions in the face of the inevitable backlash.

Weekend gallimaufry

SHOULD YOU BUY A PASSEL OF FOREVER STAMPS BEFORE THE PRICE INCREASE?  In a word, no.  In more words: you should always buy forever stamps if you're buying stamps, but 1) this is only true if you're sure you'll use them for first-class mail (i.e. you can't plaster them all over a package), and 2) you shouldn't buy any more than you'd normally buy unless you'll be using them very soon.

CAN YOU POINT ME AT ANOTHER GOOD MOVIE?  Why, yes I can: Synechdoche, New York.  I'm a huge fan of Charlie Kaufman, and although my expectations were modest for this movie (in part because I'm not as big a fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman) I was pleasantly surprised.  Be warned that this is not a traditional film with a traditional plot—but whether you like it or not, it'll stay with you and make you think, and at the least I'm sure you'll agree it's a singular effort.

DID KNUT GNAW?  No, it was some other Polish bear.  As one of the foremost publicizers of Knut's cuteness (and defenders of its continuation), I'm proud to say that Knut apparently didn't even consider taking a bite out of the zany Teuton who thrust herself into his enclosure.  That's just the kind of bear he is.

How I miss the transparency and openness of the Bush White House

[ WARNING: The following posting contains pointless ranting over nothing of consequence.  You've been warned! ]

When Bush was president, you could go to whitehouse.gov and easily find any word he'd uttered in a public context.  The items of interests were organized into two main sections—Current News and Press Briefings—both of which were indexed for easy perusal, and updated practically to the minute.  And the same goes for Clinton's version of whitehouse.gov, which didn't quite reach the heights of the Bush administration's version but was still straightforward to navigate.  In both cases, you could wade into that vile cesspool, quickly find what you needed, and be out of there in the minimum amount of time, leaving plenty of time to hose yourself down with disinfectant.

But with Obama, those days of easy access are over.  There are now multiple seemingly-overlapping potential locations under the Briefing Room for Obama's utterances.  Is that speech you're looking for in Speeches?  Official Statements?  Press Briefings?  Press Releases?  Presidential Actions?  Your Weekly Address?  Or is it an entry in the vomit-inducingly named "Blog"?  Good question.  You may naively think that a speech would be included under "Speeches", but if you check out that section you'll be surprised to discover that the last time Obama delivered a speech was February 27th.

And you may never find it.  In my experience thus far, the stuff I'm looking for often falls under none of these categories; I can spend minutes going through each section with a fine-tooth comb and still never manage to track it down.  For instance, when I was searching last week for Obama's March 30th auto industry speech I tried each of the sections in turn (and multiple times) but couldn't locate it anywhere.  I eventually hunted it down by grabbing a key phrase from the New York Times article about it and then doing a Google search using that phrase plus a "site:whitehouse.gov" qualifier.  In looking now I see just a link to it from an article on the blog (which wasn't there when I was originally searching)—and nothing else.  So to find the text of Obama's last major speech on the auto industry at this point, you have to grovel through the entire White House "blog" page by page looking for the relevant link.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the cherry on top of my list of petty grievances is the fact that the new whitehouse.gov won't let you use Alt-left arrow in either Firefox or IE; if you want to go back to the last page you have to use the mouse.  God, I feel so dirty.

I'd hoped this was all just a result of settling in with a new IT group, but sadly, it appears that this is the whitehouse.gov we're going to be saddled with for the next four (or eight) years.  Will our trials never cease?

GEEK RANT: There were endless valid reasons to criticize the Bush administration when it comes to secrecy, but one of the silliest I ever saw was the claim that Bush was blocking search engines from seeing over 2000 pages on whitehouse.gov, on topics like Iraq, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc, always with some nefarious intent imputed by the Democrat-voting geek in question.  This was a reference to the robots.txt file, which tells search engines which pages on the site should not be indexed—and although it's true that the Bush whitehouse.gov robots.txt file was thousands of lines long, almost every single one of the entries was intended to prevent duplicate indexing of text-only or search versions of pages which were already indexed.  So the "Bush is blocking Google" meme was a red herring.

Nonetheless, there are people claiming the Obama administration's much-shorter robots.txt file "points to a hopeful, open future."

INDEPENDENT VERIFICATION: The American Presidency Project quantifies my beef:

Continuing Inconsistency in White House "Transparency."

By our count, Obama has given at least 10 media interviews for which transcripts have not been released by the White House or included in the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents (DCPD).  In addition, the American Presidency Project continues to detect inconsistencies in the record published by the National Archives (NARA) in the DCPD.

I'm sure all of this is just shoddy management.  Nonetheless, I think it's telling to compare how much attention the Obama administration pays to pandering to its hipster constituency (the President has his own blog!) vs. the effort they put into boringly crucial work like keeping their transcripts current.  The Obamaites view whitehouse.gov primarily as a marketing site for the President (much more than even Clinton and Bush did), and giving us accurate and complete information is a much lower priority.

Caterpillar, take note

Better 15 years late than never:

A United States judge has ruled that lawsuits can go ahead against several companies accused of helping South Africa's apartheid-era government. [...]

The judge disagreed with IBM's argument that it was not the company's place to tell clients how to use its products.

"That level of willful blindness in the face of crimes in violation of the law of nations cannot defeat an otherwise clear showing of knowledge that the assistance IBM provided would directly and substantially support apartheid," she said.

When it's finally their turn Caterpillar won't be able to plead any kind of "blindness", willful or otherwise, since they've got plenty of people documenting exactly what's being done with their equipment and advising them to stop selling it to inveterate human rights abusers like Israel.

You know you're an empire when...

...your wars keep dropping...:

"Afghanistan has already dropped off the radar screen," Senator Joseph Biden (Democrat, Delaware) said on February 26 [2002], at a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was addressed by President Karzai.

...off the radar:

U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Iraq on Tuesday returned the spotlight to a war that has all but dropped off the news radar screen in the United States, which is preoccupied by its economic crisis.

Television news, chat shows and other media are dominated by reports of massive job losses, home foreclosures, collapsed banks and automakers on the verge of bankruptcy.

I'm guessing there's no one in either Afghanistan or Iraq for whom the U.S. war against them has "dropped off the radar screen."  But if it does ever temporarily slip their minds, they have the roar of F-16s and the night terrors of their one-legged children to remind them.

One billion reasons

Why do people like Noam Chomsky say the United States was responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge?  Because it's true:

The former chief of the Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison said his group would not have risen to power in the 1970s if it weren't for the policies of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and his top diplomat, Henry Kissinger. [...]

Duch's remarks on U.S. influence in the region were part of his account of the years before the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 regime. They echoed U.S. critics such as Noam Chomsky, who charged that Washington's policies ensnared Cambodia in the Vietnam War, destabilizing the country to the point that the Khmer Rouge could take over. [...]

Duch said he believed the Khmer Rouge would have died out by 1970 if the United States had not supported Cambodia's military-led government following the 1970 coup d'etat that removed Prince Norodom Sihanouk from power and installed Gen. Lon Nol.

Sihanouk reacted by allying with the Khmer Rouge, his old foes, lending them respectability among many Cambodians, which allowed them to build up power during their 1970-75 war against the Lon Nol regime, Duch said.

"The policies of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and his top diplomat, Henry Kissinger" included the unfathomably vicious and criminal bombing of Cambodia, in which over one billion pounds of bombs were dropped on the country—more than were dropped on Europe during World War II.

I was joking in that first paragraph, though; when Chomsky said the U.S. was responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge he clearly had no way of knowing it was true, which proves that he only said it because he hates America to the very core of his being.  And you shouldn't listen to Chomsky anyway because he luv-luv-luved the Khmer Rouge—which you can apparently verify for yourself by reviewing the complete lack of quotes in which he expresses any support for the Khmer Rouge.  Or you can skip this daunting exercise and just listen to the spittle-flecked ravings of Chomsky haters, for whom this delusional critique is the ultimate proof of why you shouldn't listen to a word he says.

Of course for reasons I've never quite been able to discern (despite direct requests for an explanation), this same standard shouldn't be applied to the United States, which unambiguously did support Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge long after their worst atrocities were well known.  Apparently there's some subtle difference in these two cases that requires the use of a completely different standard which just happens to give the United States a pass.  I may never understand it, but I'm confident that these same people will find Duch's verification that the U.S. bombing led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge similarly inconsequential.

End the ban on Cuba travel

Bored? The Center for Constitutional Rights has something worthwhile for you to do:

Since 1962, the U.S. government is the only country to restrict travel to Cuba. After nearly 50 years, the Cold War rhetoric behind the restrictions is tired and obsolete. The world is different from what it was in the early 1960s, and even then, the ban was misguided, ineffective and unconstitutional. The Cuban government survived without a U.S. lifeline and is building relationships with many other nations. The travel ban hurts American citizens by keeping families apart and denying our right to travel freely. Learn more about the travel ban.

If passed, H.R.874 would "allow travel between the United States and Cuba" for all Americans with no exclusions. Similarly, S. 428, the Senate companion to H.R.874, calls for lifting travel restrictions so all Americans to travel freely to Cuba. "Travel for All" is an important step toward a changed Cuba policy, and we need your help to make this a reality. Contact your Representatives and Senators and ask them to co-sponsor H.R.874 and S.428!

Please give that last link a click and send some messages; it's almost literally the least we can do, and it has a reasonably good chance of succeeding.

A new order of intelligence

Robot Theorizes, Proves Own Scientific Discoveries:

Scientists at the United Kingdom's Cambridge and Aberystwyth universities have created a "robot scientist" that they believe is the first automaton to make its own scientific discoveries.

The robotic computer system, named Adam [...] used artificial intelligence to hypothesize that some genes in baker's yeast code for specific enzymes cause biochemical reactions in yeast. The robot came up with experiments to test the hypothesis, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results, and repeated the cycle.

Hypothesis: all people are a threat, not just the ones on the other side.  Centuries' worth of conclusive empirical data render controlled experimentation unnecessary.  Suggested course of action: extermination.

[ Runtime estimate: .000001 sec ]

Obama, Moore on

In case you haven't seen it yet, here are a few choice tidbits from Michael Moore's latest letter:

Nothing like it has ever happened. The President of the United States, the elected representative of the people, has just told the head of General Motors -- a company that's spent more years at #1 on the Fortune 500 list than anyone else -- "You're fired!" [...]

He has the massive will of the American people behind him -- and he has been granted permission by us to do what he sees fit. If you liked this week's all-net 3-pointer, stay tuned. [...]

I await the President's next superhero move.

The one tiny potential ray of light I can see here is that the letter was dated April 1st.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that Moore says he's writing this in memory of fired autoworkers, but meanwhile, out here in inconvenient reality land, his 3-point shootin' superhero is warning that the auto industry plan "will require unions and workers who have already made extraordinarily painful concessions to do more."  And to put the cherry on top, the failure to force those concessions down the throats of autoworkers is likely one of the reasons Obama asked Wagoner to resign.

Overcome with curiosity, I decided to scan Moore's letters since the election to see if he'd offered any criticism of some of Obama's more egregious moves over the past two months.  You'll be shocked to hear that there wasn't so much as a peep.  But I did find this hilarious and obviously satirical bit he wrote the day after the election, describing what we can expect now that Obama is king:

Anything is possible! We can wrestle our economy out of the hands of the reckless rich and return it to the people.

(Or the Obama administration can force the people to purchase the toxic "assets" of those reckless rich.)

Anything is possible! Every citizen can be guaranteed health care.

(Or every health insurance company can be guaranteed continued profits by a White House determined to declare single payer off the table.)

Anything is possible! We can stop melting the polar ice caps.

(Or the Obamaites can ignore the iron dictates of the science and prattle on about "the art of the possible," following the Bush administration's script on the Bali targets with statements like "It’s not possible to get that kind of number. It’s not going to happen.")

Anything is possible! Those who have committed war crimes will be brought to justice.

("Will be"?  We've gone from conditional to predictive?  Aww, what touching faith.  Sadly, back here in reality Obama keeps instructing us that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.")

Will Michael Moore eventually recognize that his superhero is pissing on his every most cherished goal, and start sounding like this guy once again?  Hey, anything is possible.

ALSO: Moore's mention of "the Commander in Chief of the Free World" isn't going to win him any points with this guy.

Good thing we don't negotiate with terrorists

Binyamin Netanyahu is now officially Israel's prime minister.  And what was he doing three years ago?

The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.

They have erected a plaque outside the restored building, and are holding a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack.

So this open glorification of terrorism has disqualified Netanyahu from discussions with U.S. officials, right?

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) and Prime Minister-designate Benyamin Netanyahu pose before their meeting at the King David Hotel on March 3, 2009 in Jerusalem, Israel [sic].

I mean, right?

Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Netanyahu aside from their aides to a corner of the room in the King David Hotel.

Hmm, apparently not.  How perplexing.  And that last article also contains this wonderful nugget:

"You and I have a lot in common," Mr. Obama said, according to Mr. Netanyahu’s account. "I started on the left and moved to the center. You started on the right and moved to the center. We are both pragmatists who like to get things done."

(The next time someone cites Chicago Obama's positions as proof of Washington Obama's liberalism, don't forget to mention that even the anointed one himself rejects the notion.)

I could spend hours unpacking and properly mocking all the hypocrisy, irony, and no-changery contained in these citations, but today I have a mountain to go climb.  If the inspirations strikes you, please go wild.

UPDATE: Some questions for Netanyahu, in case some intrepid Israeli reporter runs out and needs a few:

1. If Hamas bombed the King David Hotel today, killing 92 people, would it be terrorism?
2. If Hamas had phoned in a warning 25 minutes before the bombs went off, would that change your assessment?
3. If after the establishment of a Palestinian state the Palestinians erected a plaque commemorating the bombing, would you find anything objectionable about that?
4. Can you explain why the Irgun was a "resistance movement" while Hamas is a "terrorist group"?
5. More specifically, can you explain the difference between Deir Yassin and the Netanya Passover bombing?