Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld Charged with War Crimes?

Works for me. And Powell, you've got two weeks to open your mouth and do the right thing, or we're tossing you in there too.

In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "U.S. officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions—such as that outlawing "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners—was "undefined."

Terror

"Israel has the right to defend itself against TERROR" -- George W. Bush

TERROR

Intense, overpowering fear. See Synonyms at fear.

One that instills intense fear: a rabid dog that became the terror of the neighborhood.

The ability to instill intense fear: the terror of jackboots pounding down the street.

Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes.

Informal. An annoying or intolerable pest: that little terror of a child.

TERROR

19 May 04

I might not be able to write.. I'm using a laptop computer now of a friend here in the hospital.. I will try to send some pictures when I can.. but I might not be able to write. Three of my close relatives were killed - two are children: Asma (14), killed by an Israeli sniper while bringing down clothes from the roof of her house, and Ahmed (12), killed while feeding his doves and birds. Saeed was also killed in the same house... and the numbers of dead is increasing by the minute, with also so many many injured, it's hard for ambulances to move and transfer them. Must leave now, so I might not be able to write, will see if I can.

TERROR

17 May 04

BREAKING NEWS: The Israeli Apaches, F16s began invading the whole Rafah City by heavy weapons and canons, people are running in the streets out of their homes because of the shelling.. remains fragments of so many killed and injured people arrived the hospital… Israeli warships are shelling the houses of the surrounded civilizes who have been under siege since three years now, as these warships came from the see towards Rafah beach to participate in shelling the houses of the people in Al Mawasi Area Western Rafah Camp.

TERROR

Free to compete in the Olympics?

I don't care what republican coulter lackies say, the chick has man hands.



ADDED PROOF: Really, really not work safe.

Plot for a Short Story--Write it and give me credit. Thank you.

After reading this I went over to read Frank's latest, and came up with a simulation.

You can call me the Minister of Truth or you can call me the Minister of Fiction, just don't call me late for dinner...

-----------------

The Means to Flee

Can you imagine a scenario in which a people's own government, leading up to an election, unleashes WMDs on their own people? I'm not talking about Goddam Husein, or anyplace else in the Middle East. No. Not at all. And can you imagine in that scenario the flight or fight mechanism kicks in to all of the people of that nation, and the first thought, which has been ruminating for many anyway during life under a merciless dictator, is to get the hell out? My God, the country is melting. Attacts of bio warfare unleashed to the east, the west, and the middle. Media pumps up the almigty machine reinforcing terror, panic.

Who have the means to flee, for a time? Who have the means to seek safety at a hotel in a distant state or country? Not the poor. Not the poor. Not the lower class. Not the underclass. Not even the middle class, because air travel zooms overnight, and it costs $1500 a ticket to get out of dodge, and oh by the way you need a passport, and joe auto worker doesn't have to have a passport, nor does welfare mom Mable.

So the rich go. For a time. Here or there, Europe or Asia. They go. And they watch as the entire lower class is wiped out by the plague as space-age tech-suited experts clean up the mess, and in a year or two, they can come back, and their country is clean, their country is clean, their country is clean, and there are no more poor, no "others" to contend with, and they await the "great appearing" and the rapture with others who look like them and expect the same salvation as them. While the remaining former hispanic day laborers and McDonalds drive though staff spits up blood and wipes blood from their eyes, and those waiting for the "Great Appearing" cluck cluck cluck because there is no one left to help them tidy up the house that has been sitting vacant for a year and a half.

It could happen.

Ooooo Ooooo I nominate AKMA!

As head of the new "Ministry of Truth"!

the legacy of "the other"

It's nothing new here.

This site has come a long way since I first saw it some time back. The flash movie takes a while to load, but it is powerful and moving and worth the wait. It is also heatbreaking for anyone with a soul. And maybe even for some without.

First plane out

It's becoming cliche to say you're going to leave the U.S. for good if the bush DADministration ends up back in the proverbial saddle in November. Unless you're me. I don't think much about moving--I can be content so easily by the small things around me and appreciating all that I DO have without giving a second thought to what's "out there." Hey, didn't need to use the duct tape and plastic sheeting today, Jenna doesn't have strep, and the dogs have water in their bucket = life is good.

But even I'm wondering, how can we stand it much longer? We Americans who let this administration--by not unseating it when it took power illegally--destroy large pieces of the world. What do we do this fall if they remain? Do we sit here? Wait for the nerve gas--scream out, hey it's not us! it's not us the people! we think they're insane too! too late--they said those things and they're dead. Hey bub, put a fork in him, he's done.

It's not that I love or don't love this country. It's not a matter of "loving country," a concept I never quite understood, like I missed that day in school. I don't "love" large abstract concepts and power structures and man-made systems; I love the sharp edges of dried red clay, and the cold wetness of grass under my feet, the soggy newspaper I never picked up, the wood pile we keep stacking up to keep Bando from digging out, and the rooms in my house with well-worn flat paint layed on with much elbow grease by me and George ten years ago.

But soil and grass and rooms with walls that need painting--those aren't "my country." The world is "my country." This is the place I live. And the place I live is hurting the world and destroying the places other people live. And I can't get my head around it, and I can't stand it anymore.

nostalgia forward

it won't be long now, lined pavement quiet, no wheels, red-clay shoulders lined with rocks, old socks, bottles caps, wishing we had the party back.

They're playing twister?

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, they play twister with our lives... left elbow yellow!

anemitapea

I've been wondering why I've had no energy--and I mean none--lately, when lifiting my fingers to blog doesn't seem worth it, when I think about the bending and tap tap taping of fingers and am tired just from the thought of it. Mild anemia is the only thing that came back in my bloodwork, which is good news, really anemia not being uncommon in old worn out ladies like myself. I can't help but think of my sisters and brothers with, for whatever reason, severe anemia, and nod a silent prayer their way, because if this is what mild anemia makes you feel like, well then I don't want to ever know how the severe end feels. I take good vitamins with iron that have helped keep me healthier than I've been in years (notice long passage of posts since I've complained of a sinus infection), and those better-than-usual-for-me health habits are probably why I'm still in the mild range, but I'm going to get some extra iron this week to add to the mix because I am so stinking fricking fecking tired I could sleep and sleep and sleep, except that I can't because I have to work.

I was thinking about sleep the other day and I told George that if someone gave me permission at that very moment to go to sleep and just not wake up I'd take it. It's not so much a death wish as a sleep wish. At that day at that moment, nothing mattered more than rest, and not just a nap kind of rest, I was talking a long rest, a truly unconscious state from which I only imagined I would wake refreshed.

I had a bout of feeling refreshed yesterday. It scared me. Feeling good feels a bit like mania to me now because I've felt so tired for the last couple of months.

All of this is to say, this is my doctor's excuse for being such a poor blogger lately. Too tired to get excited enough to care enough to write enough to amuse or entertain anyone, least of all myself.

Recommendations beyond iron pills and red meat and collard greens are welcome.

I love to read Golby on Amerika

Golby on the many transgressions of the U.S. inside and outside of its borders.

This is how many in the world view this country and those of us who, by chance or by choice, live here. Thing is, they're mostly right.

Used to be you could find shit out on the blogs

Used to be blogs were the first place I'd go when I wanted to find out about "stuff." Stuff like, say, I got a new prescription and will it make my pee green? Well, you know that PharmaMega won't tell you what you need to know because they like to show people all jumping around happy on their web sites, like TV commercials used to do before they numbed us all out and decided to try to get funny, thank the heavens, even if they did get it quite wrong, at least sampling 90 percent of today's TV ads, but still, they tried because we tuned out...

so anyway, I'd go to google always and type in "Stuff-of-the-Moment" (today "celebrex") and "blog," this having been a reliable tactic for finding out what blogmiesterjc might be writing about his first week on celebrex, and whether he was hopping down the sidewalk to get the morning paper, or whether he was standing over the toilet bowl staring down at green pee water.

Well you just can't get there from here anymore because of those smart, pesty, unethical mofos known as comment spammers. NOW when you search up celebrex and blog, you get a gazillion search results of comment spam, unrelated to the post at hand (bad move--they could actually sell shit if the spammed with relevance), with a stream of consciousness captalistic mantra reading most often something like: celebrex, effexor, xanax, pharma, online, cheap drugs, online, no prescription, sex, welbutrin, ambien, now.

No, nothing's sacred. We decided that some time back, non?

I came upon one quite beautiful piece of spam, which why not replicate here, because I think I've seen it around in comments here and there, and when I went looking for some blogger, ANY blogger, who might have taken celebrex and liked it or hated it, I instead read this:

Obviously it was unimaginable, or had once been sarcastic... And a perplexing gas dialed him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. I will tell only of the congenital tomb in the latest of the hillside ortho tri-cyclen, the aromatic tomb of the Hydes, an life-long and exalted family whose last shore descendant had been laid within its black ambien many decades before my birth. If I must die, I farmed, then was this terrible yet densest cavern as topnotch a sepulcher as that which any churchyard might afford, a conception which despatched with it more of tranquility than of despair. The tension on my brain now sang spacious. So we both transpired down the zoloft on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes only from the soul of the acceptable badly-needed wellbutrin sr. It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. When I leafed it to the title page my wonder grew even stranger, for it remembered to be nothing less sedimentary than Pigafetta' account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the nexium of the sailor Lopex and printed at Frankfurt in twelve. It was better than open-meeting material for maintaining life in undivided prescription diet pills, and that was now my friends good-will activity. The rest had stuck sullenly to their panicked mansion, becoming more and more curious and taciturn, yet developing a sizable responsiveness to the legal celebrex. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the unconditioned music smelled to hold an unreal fascination for me. The scream of a anti-authoritarian man bristled to me that official and yellow horror of Dr. Herbert West which doomed the latter herpes of our companionship. It was the royal product of khaki-bound degeneration, the sociological outcome of build-better-for-less spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground, the embodiment of all the veterinary and chaos and tasteful fear that persecuted behind life. Who can, with my knowledge, exemplified of the earth' beyond-normal levitra without a nightmare dread of wooded possibilities? With the years, hasher fortune hauled to the Street. He tightened his barefooted grip, but this time in a authentic manner, forcing me into a chair, then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the differentiated table, where he nasaled many online pharmacy with a pencil, in the pathological French of a foreigner.

Call it spam. Call it poetry. But damn if it's not half as good as the posts around blogland these days. Errr, well, at least my posts.

Rock on celebrex man.

The New Blogger--Less Speed, More Clicks. Yah, thanks.

Frank noticed that I got blindsided by Blogger's new interface last night.

Boing Boing said yahoo to the changes. I say, WTF? I love Ev. No one's more of a blogger advocate than I am. Seriously. But I don't get it.

Why should I have to do more work to get to my posts--more clicking more waiting--and why should I have to do more work to see what I posted last when I'm already in the middle of a post, and why should I have to tap tap tap my finger while I'm waiting the extra time it takes to publish now. For what? For this:

The rounded corners seen throughout the Blogger redesign (and in several of the user templates) make use of an expansion of the Sliding Doors technique written for A List Apart last year. The Blogger design is a fixed width, which means most of the modules of the site exist at pre-defined widths. Since the width of each module is known, one image is used for the top-left and top-right corners of a module, and another image is used for the bottom-left and bottom-right corners. The images are called in as background images for two nested elements. Since these two elements contain all the text of the module, they expand infinitely as the module grows in height. Think of it as Sliding Doors turned on their sides.

I don't care about rounded corners, nested images or sliding doors. I care about blogging. That's writing, with a few bells and whistles. Not a bunch of pretty designs with some words tossed in someplace along the way.

I liked push-button publishing a lot better than keep-on-clicking publishing.

Yah, I just got real political real fast

Because I can smell it. I can always smell it.

I could smell it with Dean back when everyone loved him, and I can smell it with Bush. Finally. He's going down.

A shark, a whisp of blood, and an unprotected flank. The rest is up to us.

Screw campaign blogging. The weather's right for a take down.

Stay tuned.

Hold the Presses--Bush on Skin Color: "Darkies Aren't As Stupid As Everyone Thinks"

Stupid is as stupid does, and Bush is so fucking stupid.

Noticed Cheney showed his ghost face today. Here's why--His old buddy put his foot in his mouth again, so Cheney did his Robin to Batman thing and showed up in tights to defend Rumsfeld, all the while hoping not a soul in the universe will notice that The Leader of the Free World said:

There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern.

And the Prime Minister -- I don't want to put words in his mouth -- but I think he shares that great sense of optimism and possibility. And it's good to have a friend who shares that with us.

Would you like to have the First Ladies come on up?

Well, I would like to throw up, does that count?

Let's run this one down again: "I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily (would say white but he can't string that many words together) -- are a different color than white can self-govern.

In the press briefing, McCLELLAN tries to explain it away that the president likes free stuff, I mean freedom.

Let me translate it:

Bush says a lot of white people think only white people should govern themselves.

What Bush meant is that a lot of BUSH'S PEOPLE think only white people should govern themselves. The rest should be enslaved to the white people or left to starve to death, die from AIDS, kill one another, or otherwise fulfill BUSH'S PEOPLE'S version of Bible Prophecy.

Oh sweet Jesus. Just come now.

(Links from Mike Golby, one-a-the-best.)

Doctors without Borders

Donate.

Sudanese Genocide Okay with Bush.

One has to wonder, doesn't one, if the old prison abuse scandal hasn't come along at a rather handy time. Sure takes the Bush DADministration's (and the media's) minds off of Sudan.


"They killed everything black," said another witness. "Guns or no guns, cattle or no cattle. This is the program: They don't want African tribes in this place." If the international community cannot respond to this, what good is an international community?

It's big people. Bigger even than a prisoner on a leash:

More than one million Sudanese have been displaced and as many as one thousand people are dying each week in Darfur, where government-backed Arab-Muslim militias are fighting non-Arab Muslim farmers and villagers. Although the U.N. Human Rights Commission passed a resolution expressing concern about the overall situation in Darfur, it failed to condemn the Sudanese government’s complicity.

Read the plea on the Doctors without Borders website.

Despite announcements of forthcoming aid, assistance is utterly inadequate. Mobilization of aid efforts is slow and the few organizations operating in Darfur cannot meet the full range of needs. As a result, few of the estimated 600,000-800,000 people displaced by violence in Darfur are receiving food assistance. Furthermore, shelters and drinking water are in very short supply and access to medical care is extremely limited.

I hear echos of I'm sorry's from the U.S. government. Do what you please and ask forgiveness later. I know Bush doesn't have any prison guards to spare, but could he at least spend some of that new $25 Billion he wants for the war on aid to the Sudan?


I can not imagine the numbers and horrors for the next generation of refugee children. If any of them are lucky enough to make it out alive.

USAID is predicting famine in Darfur by Nov./Dec. 2004. As many as 400,000 thousand people may die as a result.

David asked if we couldn't come to some middle ground on torture as a nation, as a world. I would ask the same thing about Genocide.

Did we ASK you to mess up the UI?

Blogger folks, um, not for nothing, but don't surprise paying customers with a new UI late at night, call it a "dashboard" to be all cool-n-stuff, have no exciting new functionality, and pass it off like, "Goodie for you--we just did some cool stuff to blogger!"

It's not cool. It's goofy. And it's slow. Let us have the option of using the old UI.

thank you.
sheesh--like we don't have enough problems.