Dark Eyes

By: Bernard Chazelle

Why I am happy to belong to the human race.

— Bernard Chazelle

US Constitution: Part II -- The "Don't Step in It" Session

By: Bernard Chazelle

On this we all agree, liberty lovers around the world worship the US Constitution as others do the Holy Bible or the Holy Koran or the Holy "Our Kampf."

Which makes perfect sense. After all, the US Constitution not only condoned slavery but actually promoted it.

What sort of twisted liberty lover would not worship a document that does not even wait until Article II to declare its eternal devotion to slavery. In Articulo Numero Uno, we learn that blacks are worth 3/5 of a human being (Sec.2) and that Congress may not outlaw the slave trade (Sec.9).

On the liberty front, I'd say we're off to a flying start.

It gets better. In Article 4 (Sec.2), we're told that slaves who've escaped to another state must be returned to their owners.

Ah, the sweet smell of freedom!

Article 5 does not specify when and where white men could rape female slaves. But that's because the US Constitution is not about sex, or for that matter liberty, but about property. When Madison talked about protecting minority rights against the tyranny of the majority, rest assured he didn't have black women in mind: he had Bill Gates in mind. The "opulent minority" needed protection from the starving masses and excessive taxation.

Then you have the bizarro notion of an Electoral College, which, when the Internets were a bunch of horses running around, may have made some sense. Well, of course, a mismatch with the popular vote will never happen, so why worry?

Jury duty? The Founders' gift to Hollywood! Imported to the US from England, which had imported it from France, which had imported it from Rome, which had imported it from Athens. I once had a really bright student, Jared Kramer, who did a wonderful senior thesis with me -- he was Princeton valedictorian -- but disappointed me greatly by rejecting my advice to be a scientist and instead becoming a corporate lawyer (he was president of Harvard Law Review just a few years after Obama). When the Enron trial was going on, I asked him: "Jared, how in the world can a jury follow these complex proceedings?" His reply: "They can't." So they declare guilt about something of which they don't have a clue. Cool.

The Constitution tells you what government can do. The Bill of Rights tells you what it cannot. It's got a few gems, too.

The 3rd Amendment talks about quartering troops. Not sure what that means. I guess you can't kidnap a US soldier and quarter him by attaching 4 horses to his limbs. Or at least you cannot do it in your own house. Anyway, I'm glad it's there.

The 2nd Amendment is a treat. It's all about commas. Depending on your understanding of 18th-century punctuation, it means that you can have guns or that you can't. Old Church Slavonic at its best!

Amending the Constitution is virtually impossible, unless it's about drinking beer. Then you can do it twice within 14 years.

To be fair, the Constitution was amended to tell us that the bits about slavery were intended as a joke: an 80-year joke, mind you. So, the US Constitution is a bit like a house with dog waste all over the place. Do you clean up the mess? Of course, not. It's not just crap, it's historic crap. So, instead, you post signs all over the house with the words "Don't Step in It." And you think to yourself, What a beautiful house!

— Bernard Chazelle

US Constitution: Part I

By: Bernard Chazelle

Since I've never taken Constitutional Law, since I slept through the only law class I took in college, and since I don't understand why no one has ever bothered to translate the Bill of Rights into English (from the original Old Church Slavonic), I feel uniquely qualified to pontificate about the Great American Bible, also known as The US Constitution.

I'll begin with the Supreme Court. I propose the following Amendment:

Atr shduwerh dofje andjfdoow Sjdjeoe Ojdjowhfeo wsis sodwdol iiiiiii rta.

Or, if your Old Church Slavonic is a bit rusty,

All Supreme Court decisions shall require a supermajority of at least 7 votes.

Explanation: When lower courts are stumped, they turn to the experts, the Supreme Court. A 5-4 decision means that the experts don't have a friggin' clue. They might as well decide by tossing a coin or checking if Scalia's dog wags his tail clockwise or counterclockwise. A 5-4 decision also means that life-or-death decisions are left in the hands of a senior citizen, usually named Kennedy, who gets to play "Master of the Universe" between long naps.

Last time a country submitted itself to the whims of unelected, sullen-looking fogies in drab outfits, we called it the Soviet Union.

Decisions on abortion, gun control, and the death penalty should be left to, wait, how do we say it in Old Church Slavonic... oh yes, "We, the People."

Happy 4th!

— Bernard Chazelle

Iran Air Flight 655 Shot Down By America 20 Years Ago Today

Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down over the Straight of Hormuz by the USS Vincennes 20 years ago today on July 3, 1988, killing all 290 people aboard, including 66 children.

When asked about the incident soon afterward, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush stated, "I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are."

While the US officially blames Libya for the subsequent bombing of Pan Am 103 in December, 1988, the preponderance of evidence suggests it was carried out by Iran in revenge for Flight 655.

In a strange series of events, the bombing of Pam Am 103 soon led to the death of my high school biology lab partner as well as three other teenagers.

Thanks, human propensity for mindless violence.

—Jonathan Schwarz

What Bin Laden Wants, Bin Laden Gets

By: Bernard Chazelle

On October 14, 2001, Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, cited this quote from bin Laden in a Times interview:

[Bin Laden] said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel'' -- about six times what it sells for now.

In today's news:

Oil prices raced above $145 a barrel for the first time.

h/t Jerome a P.

— Bernard Chazelle

Barry Crimmins' Personal Revenge

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of children is unconstitutional. Barack Obama immediately said he disagreed with the decision.

Barry Crimmins explains his perspective here:

Does it really matter? The decision has been made and won't soon be reversed and so Obama's views don't particularly matter. Even if the Supremes had ruled the other way, the worst case scenario would only involve the execution of some vicious rapists of children, right? No one else would be affected. No one, that is, except for the raped children and they'd be all for the state-sponsored elimination of these human jackals, wouldn't they?

I can't speak on this issue as a raped child. I can only speak as an adult who was raped as a child and I oppose capital punishment for those who rape children. I was much younger than 12 when I was assaulted so in theory, my rapist could have been sent to the death chamber by Sen. Obama's rules...

Pronouncements of lynch mobsters notwithstanding, I wouldn't have wanted my rapist put out of his own misery and into mine. I started life without blood on my hands and I aim to keep it that way. Had the man who raped me on numerous occasions not died in prison while serving his third term for sexually abusing very young boys, I might have gone to see him. My personal revenge would have been to show him that I did not become what I resisted, that I hadn't grown into a cruel and heartless man.

The rest.

Thank you, Barry Crimmins. (And thank you, internet, for allowing people to communicate with each other about things that matter.)

—Jonathan Schwarz

Savage Mules

As of 5 pm ET, Dennis Perrin's new book Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War is #8 on Amazon's political bestseller list. This is a pretty amazing performance, given that all the competition is by people with prominent media perches.

And since the book is all about mindlessly going along with the herd, this is a perfect moment to buy it.

—Jonathan Schwarz

ATL

By: Donald Johnson

There needs to be a term for what the New York Times does in their Monday editorial, "Israel's Diplomatic Offensive." Perhaps it should be "Arguing to Lose."

When you are ATL, you start by granting every premise of the people with whom you're arguing. In this case, the NYT begins like this:

Few countries can afford the luxury of limiting their diplomacy to friendly countries and peace-loving parties. National security often requires negotiating with dangerous enemies.

That sets the tone. By implication, Israel is peace-loving and its enemies are dangerous, whereas Israel is not dangerous and its enemies are not peace-loving. Of course, reality demonstrates both sides are dangerous, and neither is particularly peace-loving. Israel's love of peace has led it to steal Palestinian land and then negotiate over how much it can keep. Like many conquerors, they would love it if the conquered's response were peaceful.

A little further on, there's this:

There are clear risks. Hamas may not respect or enforce the cease-fire; there have been almost daily violations.

This suggests that Israel is doing its best to abide by the ceasefire, but Palestinian terrorists just keep violating it. But that's at best a half-truth. As always, the media rule seems to be this: a truce which is holding is one where all the violence comes from the Israeli side. A truce is violated when Palestinians are violent.

If one were unfamiliar with NYT editorials, it would be remarkable to see alleged liberals arguing for peace by repeating the kind of one-sided nonsense one normally would associate with warmongers, Presidential candidates, and government spokesmen. Of course, anyone familiar with NYT editorial won't find it remarkable at all. But this still leaves the question: why is the NYT always ATL?

I don't know what goes on in their heads, but they seem to have a policy of always portraying "the West" in general as having good intentions, though of course there may be individual leaders who fall short of our usual high standards of decency. (They love that term "the West", though it does not appear in this particular piece.) Arguing to win would require them to acknowledge "the West" not only isn't always in the right, but quite often is in the wrong. If they have to chose between that and losing the argument, they'll chose the latter every time. So this is part of the usual pattern. Maybe it is all quite consciously done, or maybe it is unconscious bias or some mixture of the two.

In this case one can be more specific about the pattern. The "peace process" with Israel/Palestine has a way of turning into another war, and so what I think the NYT is doing is establishing the "correct" narrative if Israel invades Gaza again. Just as they did with the 2000 intifada, they are going to give us a storyline where the Israelis have done everything they could for peace and yet those crazy Arabs just can't get their act together. It's important to omit facts as needed, to get the picture firmly planted in everyone's head, before the ratio of dead Palestinians to dead Israelis goes even higher. Similarly, unless I've missed it, the NYT never refers to the evidence that the fighting between Hamas and Fatah was instigated by the US, even though it's easily available in Vanity Fair and other places. Rather, the NYT storyline is that Hamas was solely responsible, with no complicating factors.

So maybe this is wrong, and the correct term for what the NYT is actually up to here isn't ATL. What they're doing is writing morality plays where the good guys (the West) try to bring peace, but are hobbled both by the weakness of their non-Western allies and the perfidy of their non-Western enemies. ATL is just a byproduct of the main process of generating the morality play via deception, like CO2 is a byproduct of the main process of generating energy via burning gas.

—Donald Johnson

New Tomdispatch

link

How Ignorant Are We?
The Voters Choose… but on the Basis of What?
By Rick Shenkman

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

Just how stupid are we? Pretty stupid, it would seem, when we come across headlines like this: "Homer Simpson, Yes -- 1st Amendment 'Doh,' Survey Finds" (Associated Press 3/1/06).

"About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey.

"The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms."

But what does it mean exactly to say that American voters are stupid? About this there is unfortunately no consensus. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who confessed not knowing how to define pornography, we are apt simply to throw up our hands in frustration and say: We know it when we see it. But unless we attempt a definition of some sort, we risk incoherence, dooming our investigation of stupidity from the outset. Stupidity cannot mean, as Humpty Dumpty would have it, whatever we say it means.

The rest.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Clay Felker, RIP

By: Michael Gerber

Legendary editor Clay Felker has died at 82; here's the NYT obit.

Along with his one-time Esquire-mate Harold Hayes, Felker has always been a bit of a hero of mine. His New York continued in the 70s what Hayes had demonstrated in the 60s: the vision of a magazine as a beautiful, lively, important thing. "Beautiful" because it was written and designed passionately, by artists like Tom Wolfe and Milton Glaser. "Lively" because it was fully integrated into the culture, not apart from it, and examined it all. (In a magazine like Hayes Esquire or Felker's New York, nothing was too small that it did not deserve a bit of intelligence to illuminate it; nor too big that it could escape a bit of puncturing wit.) "Important" because it had some power of its own.

The great magazines of the 60s and 70s--Esquire, New York, Rolling Stone, National Lampoon--these were the last batch that introduced ideas into the culture in the way only TV and movies do today. Not coincidentially, Felker's generation was the last group of really top-flight creative people to enter the business, and I would guess that was because they grew up before TV began rewiring our brains. There is something about having to come up with the images on your own that gives print and radio a different kind of imaginative rigor, and all our misplaced populism about TV and movies (really a sort of wishful present-ism) doesn't change that.

In Felker's magazines there was a willingness to address any topic, in any way that suited it best. This is a function of intellectual confidence, in themselves and their product and above all their readers, that editors simply don't show anymore. (I suspect they could have it, in the right environment; my friend Ed Park did some great editing at The Believer.) Heading down the chain of command to artists and writers, the uncertainty only increases--a magazine's content is only as audacious as the editors controlling it.

And so people with the capacity of a Felker or Glaser or Wolfe don't go into magazines today, because what a magazine is, and what it is for, has devolved into something unworthy of them. With very few exceptions, the American magazine business can be seen as an arm of advertising, and shares with advertising all of its flaws: its lack of substance; its obsession with surface; its confusion of currency with importance; its manipulative aspect; and above all its tendency to repeat itself. But unlike advertising, there is no driving force behind the modern magazine. In our time, selling something is an utterly elemental pursuit; a magazine is simply a vehicle, one among many, no more beautiful or necessary than a billboard.

Most really intelligent people aren't interested in, say, Justin Timberlake; and those really intelligent people who must force themselves to keep up with such things are, in my experience, gloomy tending toward miserable. Successful or not, they live in the chilly shadow of their own wasted potential. You cannot work in American magazines without ceding some portion of your brain over to topics that really only enthrall 13-year-olds, and though the same thing is true to a certain extent in TV and movies, the brute amount of money flowing through those industries means that a lot of offbeat and interesting stuff happens in spite of itself. Not so with magazines.

Felker said, "I believe that print — now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media — has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.” This is undoubtedly correct, on both the ad and edit sides, and grows more so by the day. As print retreats, its few gestures towards mass appeal are merely cross-promoting truly popular forms like TV or movies. But it is a shame; there are certain things that print can do better than other media, and need to do if we're going to have a well-functioning country. The newspaper experience can be replicated via internet; for the moment magazines are still trapped on paper. Killed by the old technology, not yet saved by the new one, those few magazines that still insist on their own territory--that demand the reader come into their sphere, not simply consume more facts about famous strangers in a slightly different way--are more irrelevant than ever.

Felker's New York probably hastened that slide, in that what it spawned wasn't a new generation of Glasers and Wolfes, but a puffy lifestyle magazine for every mid-sized city. Art is difficult, and the gap between success and failure large and obvious. Commerce is a much more predictable transaction; and so without someone at the top who is completely committed by the idea of creating a new world of the mind via ink on paper, a magazine inevitably declines into just another way to make a buck, and a not very efficient one at that.

—Michael Gerber

The Good News

With all the horrible news of the past decade, it's easy to miss how much better some parts of the world have gotten. Certainly there's much better and more interesting information available than ever before. For instance, these two Big Con posts wouldn't just have been hard to get a hold of pre-internet; they never would have been written, because there would have been no place to publish them.

• Rick Perlstein explains how the South's bizness "conservatism" contributed to current water shortages in Georgia: "Atlanta: Finishing What General Sherman Started"

All told over the entire United States, the Army Corps of Engineers built and runs 464 lakes in 43 states, one of them Atlanta's life-giving Lake Lanier; but the notion of the federal government actually coordinating all these resources for the common good would just be too, too un-American to contemplate. Instead, this civil war has ratcheted up to Israel-Palestine levels. "In March, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kepthorne finally put the bickering governors in a collective time-out after they missed a deadline to come up with a tri-state agreement."

• Sara Robinson examines the tremendous challenge we face due to basic human craziness: "Why The Right Isn't Future-Ready"

According to Dr. Robert Altemeyer and other social psychologists who study authoritarian behavior, roughly a quarter of Americans organize their lives around authoritarian thought patterns. That's a lot of potential resistance to change. But at this moment in history — when we are faced with the epic task of renewing America and re-structuring the very economic and technological foundations of our civilization, both of which will require rapid, large-scale change efforts — we need to take those people's deep suspicion of democratic process and knee-jerk resistance to change into serious account. If we're not factoring their inevitable fear and fury into our strategic plans, we will very likely doom ourselves to failure. If these people get frightened enough, they can make the changes we seek impossible.

I accept that "lots of great blog posts" doesn't necessarily balance out war, famine, pestilence, etc. But I'm trying to look on the bright side.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Kim Phuc Speaks

By: Bernard Chazelle

NPR is paying attention to this blog (who isn't?) and posted a fascinating essay by "the girl in the napalm-bombing picture."

Besides sheer terror, what's running through the head of a 9-year old child as she is running naked, badly burned, on the Saigon to Phnom Penh road in 1972? The answer is both obvious and surprising.

I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way.

The road to recovery was long and painful.

I lost my consciousness. Several days after, I realized that I was in the hospital, where I spent 14 months and had 17 operations. It was a very difficult time for me when I went home from the hospital. Our house was destroyed; we lost everything and we just survived day by day.

Vietnam is ancient history? Not for Kim Phuc.

I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days.

Did the US pay any war reparations? No, it enforced a 25-year embargo against Vietnam (thus making the US world champ in soreloserness).

Today, Kim Phuc lives in Toronto. Canada did not fight in the Vietnam war, yet it opened its doors to nearly twice as many Vietnamese refugees per head as the US.

Read the full essay. Or, better, listen to it.

— Bernard Chazelle

ADDED BY JON: An extremely striking recent picture of Kim Phuc is available here.

Wow, That's A Lot Of Not Nearly Enough Wind Power!

According to the European Wind Energy Association, the wind industry is now "able to celebrate the installation of 100 Gigawatts of operating capacity."

100 billion watts! That sounds like a lot!

Except...yearly energy usage on earth is about 15 Terawatts, or 15 trillion watts. So wind now provides about two-thirds of one percent of the energy we need. And clearly we'll need much more energy in the future.

On the bright side, some claim we could generate 12% of the world's electricity with wind by 2020, and the Bush administration recently released a report saying the US could produce 20% of our electricity needs with wind by 2030. (Note both of these estimates are for electricity usage, which of course is different from total energy use.)

By that point, I assume we'll discover some horrible problem with wind power, but won't be able to do anything about it because of the massive political power of giant wind conglomerates.

—Jonathan Schwarz

In French, They Are Called Les Mulets Sauvages

Dennis Perrin's new book Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War is bouncing around the Amazon political bestseller list. Right this second it's at #16, but it's been higher before, and if I have anything to do with it, will be again.

—Jonathan Schwarz

New Tomdispatch

link

The Good News in Iraq
(Don't Count on It)
By Tom Engelhardt

On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was being launched, George W. Bush addressed the nation. "My fellow citizens," he began, "at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." We were entering Iraq, he insisted, "with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people."

Within weeks, of course, that "great civilization" was being looted, pillaged, and shipped abroad. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship was no more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been officially disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying Coalition Provisional Authority and the President's viceroy in Baghdad. By then, ministry buildings -- except for the oil and interior ministries -- were just looted shells. Schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, just about everything that was national or meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in their new offices in Saddam's former palaces, America's neoconservative occupiers were already bringing in the administration's crony corporations -- Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others -- to finish off the job of looting the country under the rubric of "reconstruction." Somehow, these "administrators" managed to "spend" $20 billion of Iraq's oil money, already in the "Development Fund for Iraq," even before the first year of occupation was over -- and to no effect whatsoever. They also managed to create what Ed Harriman in the London Review of Books labeled "the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East." (No small trick given the competition.)

Before the Sunni insurgency even had a chance to ramp up in 2003, they were already pouring billions of U.S. tax dollars into what would become their massive military mega-bases meant to last a millennium, and, of course, they were dreaming about opening Iraq's oil industry to the major oil multinationals and to a privatized future as an oil spigot for the West.

The rest.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Hersh: Cheney Trying To Create Casus Belli For War With Iran

According to a new Seymour Hersh article, the Bush administration has ramped up covert action inside Iran, and has notified the congressional leadership that it's planing to spend up to $400 million on it. Thanks, Democratic-controlled Congress!

But the most important part of the piece is this:

But a lesson was learned in the incident [in January when tiny Iranian boats sailed near US battleships]: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

Recall that the Bush administration also made plans to create a pretext for war with Iraq if the WMD stuff didn't work out. This is from Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

DB/Anabasis was the code name for an extensive covert operations plan that had been drawn up by the CIA to destabilize and ultimately topple the regime of Saddam Hussein...

Over an intense forty-five day period beginning in late 2001, [two CIA operatives] cooked up an audacious plan...

Anabasis was no-holds-barred covert action. It called for installing a small army of paramilitary CIA officers on the ground inside Iraq; for elaborate schemes to penetrate Saddam's regime; recruiting disgruntled military officers with buckets of cash; for feeing the regime disformation...for disrupting the regime's finances...for sabotage that included blowing up railroad lines...It also envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war. A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border. They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way. If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by U.S. fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by UN edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war.

On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees—including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat—were briefed.

"The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out" [said CIA operative John McGuire]. If all went as planned, "you'd have a premise for war: we've been invited in."

—Jonathan Schwarz

We Must Destroy The Terrorist Infrastructure Of Massachusetts

I've been watching HBO's John Adams miniseries. And as I've mentioned before, it's odd how much it seems as though it could be about Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just with frillier costumes and fewer beards. I assume the makers of John Adams didn't do this on purpose; it's just that human nature and human war never change. Still, perhaps a few Americans will learn something from it about what it's like to be occupied and oppressed.

The second episode begins in 1775 as the British marched on Concord to capture munitions "illegally" held by the colonists. Soon afterward John Adams goes to Philadelphia from his home near Boston for the Second Continental Congress. The debate there is presented like every other debate about violent resistance through history—including that between, say, Hamas and Fatah. Note the position of the miniseries hero:

EDWARD RUTLEDGE: Rash action does not merit a rash response. Might must be met with reason, not arms!

SAM ADAMS: I remind Mr. Rutledge and Mr. Dwayne that blood has been shed. Massachusetts blood. While we debate, our militia is left without munitions, without arms, without even the slightest encouragement.

JOHN DICKINSON: One colony cannot be allowed to take its sister colonies headlong into the maelstrom of war...I move this assembly consider a humble and dutiful petition be dispatched to his Majesty, one that includes a plain statement that the colony desires immediate negotiation.

JOHN ADAMS: Mr. Dickinson, the time for negotiation is past. The actions of the British army at Lexington and Concord speak plainly enough. If we wish to regain our natural born rights, we must fight for them.

JOHN DICKINSON: We must provide a plan to convince Parliament to restore those rights.

JOHN ADAMS: Mr. Dickinson, my wife and young children live on the main road to Boston, fewer than five miles from the full might of the British Empire. Should they sit and wait for Gage and his savages to rob them of their home, their possessions, their very lives? No sir, power and artillery are the surest and most infallible conciliatory measure we can adopt!

JOHN DICKINSON: If you exclude the possibility of peace, Mr. Adams, then I tell you now, you will have blood on your hands.

JOHN ADAMS: And I tell you, Mr. Dickinson, that to hold out an olive branch to Britain is a measure of gross imbecility!

JOHN DICKINSON: If you continue to oppose our methods of reconciliation, then you will leave us no choice but to break off from you entirely and carry on the opposition in our way.

JOHN ADAMS: Your Quaker sensibilities do us a great disservice, sir. It is one thing to turn the other cheek, but to lie down in the ground like a snake and crawl toward the seat of power in abject surrender, that is quite another thing, and I have no stomach for it!

Soon afterward we see Abigail Adams and their children, left alone since John Adams is off in Philadelphia. And just like women and children in every colonial conflict that's ever existed, they're participating by manufacturing weapons. (In this case, musket balls.)

Clearly these "Americans" (which is some made-up name they've given themselves) are vicious lunatics. There can never be peace until they give up their insane culture of incitement!

And incredibly enough, even their women carry arms! How can we possibly negotiate with barbarians so utterly different from our peace-loving selves!?! (Click here to order pizza for our brave redcoats!)

(I got the John Adams DVD from HBO as part of their blugger publicity.)

—Jonathan Schwarz

Corruption at the UN

By:Bernard Chazelle

A major corruption scandal is brewing at the UN.

Already under fire after having granted Lockheed Martin a no-bid $250 million contract to build peacekeeping camps in Sudan, the UN on New Year's Eve convened an emergency meeting to give Lockheed subsidiary Pacific Architects & Engineers another $12 million on an emergency basis, records show.

Once they're done trading sex tips, I fully expect Craig and Vitter to take up this matter.

I note with interest that the no-bid contract is to feed the peacekeepers, not to feed the people of Darfur.

Funny how, in all major recent UN scandals (like the Oil-for-Food program), the US always manages to be the main beneficiary.

— Bernard Chazelle

The Craig-Vitter Amendment

By: Bernard Chazelle

Senators Larry Craig and David Vitter are co-sponsors of S. J. Res. 43: "A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to marriage." As ThinkProgress puts it:

If passed, the bill would amend the Constitution to declare that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.”

They're still haggling over the precise language. Vitter is pushing for "marriage shall consist only of the union of a man and his diaper." But Craig stalls.

— Bernard Chazelle