WELL, THAT’S NOT MUCH, but I’m blogging from an Internet cafe, and I’ve got to get back to the hotel so I can go to dinner. More later, maybe.
Archive for 2002
October 20, 2002
AL QAEDA’S FUNDING MAY BE more narrowly based than we realized:
WASHINGTON — The United States has identified the sources of Al Qaida funding and found they were fewer in number than earlier estimated.
Officials said U.S. intelligence has determined that Al Qaida is supported by 12 financiers, most of them Saudis. They said the Bush administration is sharing the findings with Washington’s allies in NATO and the European Union.
Hmm. Twelve tragic accidents? No, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Do we?
BRAD DELONG IS NO ED LAZARUS, according to Juan Non-Volokh.
WILL VEHRS BLOGS from near the scene of the latest sniper attack.
And Jim Henley, of course, has more.
DEBKA reports that Bin Laden is hiding out in Saudi Arabia. This isn’t a huge shock to me, if it turns out to be true, since we’ve recently learned that Saudi money is still flowing to Al Qaeda.
Of course, it may not be true at all. But it’s certainly the case that connections between Saudi Arabia and the Ladenites remain too close for a country that purports to be an ally. Can you say “Hashemite?”
I knew that you could.
BLOGGUS INTERRUPTUS: I’ll be on travel for most of today, so blogging will be limited. I’m taking the laptop, though, and will update as time and internet connections allow.
ANOTHER ARMED CITIZEN THWARTS CRIME — though I guess the NRA won’t be touting this case too strongly:
A would-be car thief died Friday after he was shot by the car’s owner, a camouflage-clad hunter toting a bow and arrow, police said.
The thief was moments from a clean getaway when the hunter happened upon his car, police said. The man told the hunter he had a gun and threatened to kill him, said Sgt. T.E. Kiser of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department homicide division.
The hunter drew his bow and shot at the man, hitting him in the hip and buttocks area.
Is there a National Bowmen’s Association? (Via Rachel Lucas).
UPDATE: In a different vein of nontraditional armed citizenry, here’s a BBC story on the Mount Holyoke Chapter of the Second Amendment Sisters.
WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED AT THIS:
OSAMA BIN LADEN has been linked to the Bali bombing by the testimony of one of his senior lieutenants.
The man has told CIA interrogators that thousands of dollars from an account controlled by Bin Laden was used to buy explosives by the Islamist group suspected of the attack.
A confidential American intelligence document, seen by The Sunday Times, reveals that $74,000 (nearly £48,000) was transferred from an account in the name of Sheikh Abu Abdullah Emirati, one of Bin Laden’s pseudonyms, to pay for three tons of explosives bought from the Indonesian military.
That it’s possible to buy three tons of explosives illegally from the Indonesian Army without anyone noticing isn’t exactly comforting.
ANOTHER HUMAN RIGHTS TRIUMPH for the Bush Administration: Saddam is apparently freeing all political prisoners in response to criticism of his regime as dictatorial:
The amnesty and the referendum come amid attempts by the Iraqi Government to rally domestic and international opposition to US demands for a change of regime in Baghdad.
In his UN speech on Iraq last month, US President George W Bush demanded that the leadership end internal oppression in Iraq, as well as stop its alleged programme to develop weapons of mass destruction.
You get more with a kind word and a gun, than with a kind word alone. Especially when dealing with crazed dictators.
A POSITIVE BLOG REVIEW of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. “Let me state for the record that I liked Bowling for Columbine a lot. It’s hilariously funny in a number of places, and highly entertaining.”
October 19, 2002
ANOTHER SHOOTING outside D.C.
UPDATE: Meryl Yourish comments. And Jim Henley and The Guardroom have more.
REID STOTT ON COPY PROTECTION: “It’s not really about copyright at all. It’s about total control over distribution, for up to a century. Copyright is just the bludgeon they use to try and get it. They don’t ‘create’ anything. They just control it.”
UH OH. This new legislation could be bad news for warbloggers. . . .
MAUREEN DOWD’S LATEST is up, in which she calls President Bush the “Boy Emperor,” suggests he’s stupid, and closes with a reference to a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. (A Juicy Juice box plays a role, too.) I leave it as an exercise for the reader to compare this effort with Josh Chafetz’s The Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd.
UPDATE: For those readers inclined to cheat on this exercise, Josh Chafetz has his own post on the piece. Excerpt:
I just read Maureen Dowd’s column for Sunday, and I just don’t know what to say. She’s gone way beyond the Immutable Laws and made a precipitous plunge into utter incoherence. Can anyone, for instance, tell me what the hell is going on in this paragraph?
Not me.
GARETH PARKER points out what we’re fighting.
UPDATE: Then there’s this from Andrea Harris.
DID ABC NEWS GET AN IRAQI VOTER KILLED? A reader asks that very question, and sends this from an ABC story:
However, we did find one man who voted “no.” We followed him outside to ask why. “You are mistaken, I voted ‘yes’ for our great leader Saddam Hussein,” he told the government minder who is our translator.
Did he lie to use? Was he scared of the minder? Did he mistakenly vote “no?” We’ll never know. But he was the nearest thing to a dissenting voice that we found in Kerbala; a city that rebelled against Saddam in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War.
That rebellion was brutally crushed and, if appearances are to be believed, none of its spirit remains.
But why did our dissenting voter’s ballot not show up in the tally announced this morning? The 100 percent result was not 99.9 recurring that was rounded up for ease. Iraq claims that every single person eligible to vote voted for Saddam.
I’d be interested in a followup. . . .
I CAME TO IT A BIT LATE, but this Iraqi presidential ballot is pretty funny.
IT’S SKBUBBA’S 6-MONTH BLOGGIVERSARY! Drop in and wish him well.
BRIAN DOHERTY says that Michael Moore represents the impotence of the American Left:
The documentary is, on its surface, a meditation on American gun violence. But it functions in effect as a general summation of lefty complaints about America. In its feckless collection of sad plaints with only the barest glimmer of a hope of solution, it is also a good summation of the progressive left’s intellectual impotence. . . .
In the end, Moore, like the progressive left he stands for, has no valid solutions. Gun control laws won’t stop gun crimes; Canadians also have plenty of guns and not many gun deaths. No one thinks that a life on welfare is a better option in the long term than trying to work for a living. Grander socialist dreams died with the Soviet Union. All the progressive left has are laments, tears, and tragedies. That suffices to sell movie tickets—moviegoers have always loved tragedy. It isn’t enough for a lively and effective political movement.
No, but it’s enough to help Moore, and his fans, feel morally and intellectually superior to other Americans, at least until the credits roll. And that, it seems, is what it’s all about nowadays.
MADONNA BEATEN BY ANIMATED ASPARAGUS: And there’s a bit of un-Christian gloating about it.
UPDATE: Reader Scott Helgeson writes:
Not only is Madonna being beaten by asparagus, so is Michael Moore. Madonna’s movie made half a million in a week. Moore’s movie has grossed $200,000 in the 3 days its been out. If it continues at that rate, in 4 days Madonna and Moore will be neck and neck. (I apologize for the visual image that conjures up.) Now the box office over the weekend will probably be higher, but this seems like a story worth watching. Moore vs. Asparagus! Who will win?
If the asparagus has cheese sauce, I’m betting on Moore. More seriously, this is probably an unfair comparison to Moore — documentaries don’t usually do as well as feature films — but on the other hand he’s gotten an extraordinary amount of coverage.
THE IMMUTABLE LAWS OF MAUREEN DOWD look to be getting a workout tomorrow.
NICE HITCHENS COLUMN in the Washington Post:
Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.
But some don’t even bother to make this disavowal. In the United States, the main organizer of anti-war propaganda is Ramsey Clark, who perhaps understandably can’t forgive himself for having been Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general. However, he fails to live down this early disgrace by acting as a front man for a sinister sect — the International Action Center, cover name for the Workers World Party — which refuses to make any criticism of the Saddam regime. It is this quasi-Stalinist group, co-organized by a man with the wondrous name of Clark Kissinger, which has recruited such figures as Ed Asner and Marisa Tomei to sign the “Not In Our Name” petition. Funny as this may be in some ways (I don’t think the administration is going to war in the name of Ed Asner or Marisa Tomei, let alone Gore Vidal), it is based on a surreptitious political agenda. In Britain, the chief spokesman of the “anti-war” faction is a Labour MP named George Galloway, who is never happier than when writing moist profiles of Saddam and who says that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst moment of his life.
For the democratic and libertarian Left, that same moment was a high point and not a low one. But there were three ruling parties in the world that greeted the liberation of Eastern Europe with unreserved gloom. These were the Socialist Party of Serbia, the Ba’ath Party of Iraq and the Workers’ Party of North Korea, guided by their lugubrious yet megalomaniacal leaders.
Who, sadly, can still find useful idiots in the West. Read the whole thing.
CHOMSKY WILL BE SPEAKING IN AUSTIN TOMORROW — where he’ll reportedly face protesters.
Funny, isn’t it? The first time around, it was the government speakers who garnered protests. Now it’s the antiwar speakers. Maybe Shiloh Bucher will give us a report.
BELLESILES UPDATE: Here’s a response on History news Network to Jon Wiener’s attack on Jim Lindgren. For more, including a link to the Nation piece in question (if you somehow missed this yesterday) read this post and this post.