Why, oh why... would any spammer think I'd be likely to open a message from someone named Aline Meade with the subject heading "Prescotte itu nwvwb ysj"?
Well, you know what I'd like to say to Aline Meade? I say "fljkdsafakj dfasdghpoopsadfjast retfg err quoot and your penis could be bigger too!"
This man, Kojo Bentsi-Enchill, is heading a project to put all of Ghana's laws, regulations, court cases, etc. on CD-ROM, on the theory that knowledge is power. "Universal access to the law, he thinks, could make Ghana's legal system fairer and deepen its nascent democracy. As he put it, 'A law-savvy populace is surely harder to dupe or deprive of its rights than a law-ignorant populace.'"
--> "FOR THE RECORD: Kojo Bentsi-Enchill believes the best check on Ghana's judiciary is information", Nicholas Thompson, Legal Affairs, July/August 2003, www.legalaffairs.org/issues/July-August-2003/story_thompson_julaug03.html
Last week, I walked by Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland and saw a sign offering "Cremation Tours".
This morning, I walked by Justin Herman Plaza and saw a big tent offering the exciting attraction: "Colossal Colon Tour"
Wiggedy-wiggedy-wack!
I posted this message on my mailing list tonight...
Here we go again...
From the Chronicle: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? f=/news/archive/2003/06/17/national1410EDT0606.DTL
He's been too much of an apologist for Bush lately (and having to put himself through more and more contortions to explain how he supports Gulf War II, but not for the reason the Bush adminstration gave, but still...) However, I'll forgive him, because this is a good column, properly critical of Sharon's actions over the last few years, which have not increased security.
--> June 15, 2003, "The Reality Principle", New York Times , www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/opinion/15FRIE.html
President Bush does something I agree with... and he gets yelled at for it. His crime? He told Israel that their attack on a leader of Hamas wasn't going to help Israel's security. Yes, it's unfair to tell them they can't do preemptive attacks when we can... but we shouldn't be doing it either (especially if we can't back up our story afterwards.)
Anyway, an excerpt from the story...
Reflecting dismay that a new round of violence might undermine the spirit achieved in Aqaba and Sharm el Sheik, Mr. Bush said the attack on the Hamas leader would not help Israel's security. His statement drew fire from those saying that Israel had carried out the attacks to defend itself, just as the United States has done.Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, said Israel's use of military force to protect itself against "a ticking time bomb factory" was "100 percent justified."
Representative Tom Lantos of California, the ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, defended Israel's right to protect itself, saying that the Palestinian Authority under Mr. Abbas was unable to do the job. If the Palestinians will not disarm terrorists, "then Israel clearly will do so," he said.
"We would do so," he continued. "Any self-respecting society will do so. People in government have to defend their citizens."
--> www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/ international/middleeast/12DIPL.html
In this Chronicle/AP story, GOP rejects Democratic call for probe on Iraq weapons intelligence, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is quoted expressing a rather interesting concern...
Roberts said some of the criticism of intelligence has "been simply politics and for political gain.""I will not allow the committee to be politicized or to be used as an unwitting tool for any political strategist," he said.
Too bad he didn't feel the same way about, oh, say, using the Homeland Security Agency... or many other aspects of the government... not to mention the years and taxpayer dollars wasted on investigating Clinton for his supposed "crimes". Did he really say all this with a straight face?
OK, everyone else is posting them and sending them too... but rather than spam people, I'm posting them here. Author unknown, but brilliant...
You must scratch me there! Yes, above my tail! Behold, elevator butt.
Whitney Huston and Bobby Brown go to Israel and meet Ariel Sharon.
And they get all dressed up.
The obvious (if unworthy) thought is, "What, doesn't Israel already have ENOUGH problems?!?!"
Good column by John Dean in Findlaw (other than him repeating the erroneous version of the Wolfowitz quote from the Guardian article I wrote about earlier this week...) He lists off all the specific allegations Bush made about Iraq's capabilities in the lead-up to the war, gives the reasons that the President could have been given the benefit of the doubt at the time (surely there were checks and balances in the White House, as there usually are in each administration...) Of course, nothing found since has backed up those allegations, and now it seems that there was political pressure on the CIA and on the Pentagon to produce evidence that would support the rush to war. (Even so, the Pentagon released a report last year stating that although the Iraqis were behaving suspiciously, there was no reliable information that Iraq was producing or stockpiling WMDs.)
Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."
Some guy took notes during a presentation by Apple to indie music labels. He was asked to remove the notes from his site, but not before other people had a chance to see it first. And you can always count on Slashdot to make the information available! An excerpt on stats...
In an object lesson on why you should double-check and triple-check everything you see and hear, the Guardian posted a notice on its front page today retracting the news story I posted about yesterday. They've also removed it. However, it's found new life elsewhere. It's unlikely Khilafah.com will reprint the retraction, though. Anyway, I post all three documents here for your amusement...
(Edited to add: the Guardian has some more information about this misinformation here)
So all of my assertions that Gulf War II being more than about oil have just been blown out of the water. "'No blood for oil'" is too simplistic!" I said. But then Paul Wolfowitz opens his yap...
"Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil", London Guardian, June 4, 2003. www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,970331,00.html
The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.
Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."
Mr Wolfowitz went on to tell journalists at the conference that the US was set on a path of negotiation to help defuse tensions between North Korea and its neighbours - in contrast to the more belligerent attitude the Bush administration displayed in its dealings with Iraq.
His latest comments follow his widely reported statement from an interview in Vanity Fair last month, in which he said that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction."
At least you can't say he puts a pretty face on his true beliefs, unlike some of his cronies. Wonder if he's still going to have a job by the end of the week.
Addition: Yeah, he'll still have a job. The quote was taken out of context (and apparently translated from English to German and back to English)
www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/ tr20030531-depsecdef0246.html
www.colehardware.com/quikfrme/paint/removal.htm
Did I mention I'm painting my living room?
Did I mention I'm kind of sloppy with paint?
