Link: http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

One of the more fascinating documents to have emerged from the shadows since the Iraq War concept first took shape is what is now known as the "Downing Street Memo". This is the minutes of a meeting from the Summmer of 2002. The minutes have been published in UK newspapers, and the British government has not denied the accuracy of what has been published, so for the time being we have to assume that the published minutes are an accurate record of what actually occurred.
If this is true, then we are dealing with the possibility that the decision to invade Iraq was taken as early as the Summer of 2002, and all of the maneuvering, attempts to get additional UN resolutions etc. that followed were merely a smokescreen - a means of building enough support for the implementation of a decision that had already been taken.
If this is true, then both the US and British governments have been guilty of a stunning level of deception.

According to News8 Austin, House Bill 1476 has been deferred indefinitely.

Maybe somebody down in the Legislature had an attack of common sense...

Well, George Galloway did not disappoint in his appearance before the Senate Committee. He certainly believes that offense is the best form of defense:

"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

"I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

Now...while George Galloway is no saint, and he has a propensity for self-publicity, it was interesting to see the reaction in the US to his appearance...a number of left-leaning discussion forums have been galvanized by his performance. Many contributors are remarking that Galloway has badly shown up the inability of US politicians and Democrats to challenge the administration's policies.
It probably helps that Galloway does not have to run for re-election in the USA. He did not need to worry about offending any interest groups here. He was, in many respects, playing to the gallery back in the UK. Nonetheless, he certainly has sent something of a shock down spines here in the US. It will be interesting to see if any of the mainstream US media outlets will have the intestinal fortitude to follow-up on some of his rebuttals and counter-accusations (hint: I'm not holding my breath...).

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

New Worker Outrages Frederick Official

A worker's refusal to remove his hat during a Frederick County Board of County Commissioners meeting made one board member so angry he moved to have the man fired.

The motion failed, but Commissioner Michael L. Cady prevailed in getting $35,000 -- the approximate value of the groundskeeper's wages and benefits -- removed from the Department of Parks and Recreation budget.

"I want that position eliminated, and with it, he goes," Cady said yesterday, a day after he confronted Westley B. Etters at a public meeting.

Etters didn't return telephone calls to the parks department and his home. Department head Paul Dial said the matter was under review, and he declined to comment further.

Etters, who is in his late twenties, according to the LexisNexis information service, was hired recently for the full-time job. He was at the morning meeting to be introduced to the commissioners, a custom with new employees.

Cady, 61, an Olympic weightlifting coach and former Marine, said he noticed during the Pledge of Allegiance that Etters was wearing a knit stocking cap and "basically going through the motions rather than showing the proper respect to the flag."

Somebody who grew up in that part of Maryland has written a suitably waspish demolition of this sort of megalomaniacal nonsense here.

Link: http://www.masson.us/blog/archives/2005/03/cheney_sticks_e.html

In which the City of Evansville is hung out to dry by the Secret Service...

Link: http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/2005/05/15/niobrara/

This posting explains why so much of the whole Kansas evolution debate is nonsense that is not grounded in reality. I especially liked the evasive responses of the Intelligent Design advocates when asked to estimate the age of the Earth...

Link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0505140247may15,0,7153551.story?page=1&coll=chi-newsopinionperspective-hed

Bishop John Shelby Spong argues why current religiously-motivated campaigns in the USA are extremely dangerous:

Today we are experiencing the Bible being used by religious and political leaders to enable them to define the morality of birth control, abortion, racial and sexual discrimination and even acts of aggression against our "enemies."
To oppose this mentality, they not so subtly assert, is to oppose God and thus to be anti-religious. These are nothing less than the steps people take on the road to transforming a democracy into a theocracy, which is to walk in the direction of the cruelest form of government that human beings have devised.

He continues:

Theocracies always turn demonic because they justify everything in the name of God.
Non-religious people and people whose religious tradition is different from the prevailing point of view should be alarmed at these trends, especially when their voices, raised in protest, are dismissed as anti-Christian.

That is why I urge those who like myself are Christians, steeped in this religious tradition that we love, to speak publicly in powerful opposition to this current use of religious power.

Christians please take note. Islam was a mostly benevolent force for good until it was captured by theocratic clerics. Ditto Christianity in the Middle Ages. It appears that a lot of Christians here in the USA have not read enough European history to understand what happened in Europe in the Middle Ages (hint: this period was not given the nickname of "The Dark Ages" for nothing). That era was ended by The Reformation, when religions in a number of countries were forced out of the theocratic tyranny business. Unless enough people are awake here in the USA, we may yet prove that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.

Although this has temporarily dropped off the radar scope, the Ward Churchill affair has not exactly disappeared. His university is investigating claims of academic plagiarism made against him (in the academic world, plagiarism is one of the cardinal sins), various First Nations groups have alleged that Churchill is not really of American Indian descent, or is "insufficiently Indian", and Churchill himself continues to attempt to corner the role of the Pat Buchanan of left-leaning academia. It would be fair to say that he is so far not exactly repentant about his utterances in the aftermath of 9/11.
However, the Ward Churchill affair is more significant for what it says about the increasing intolerance of modern America. Here is a message I posted to The Well when the media feeding frenzy was at its peak a few weeks ago:

The whole Ward Churchill affair is fascinating...there are also some
parallels to another incident that Noam Chomsky became involved
in some years a go, when a tenured professor at one of the East Coast
universities was found to have written an article (in a private
capacity) where he showed himself to be a Holocaust denier. Needless to
say, the wrath of just about everybody descended on the professor,
with a sustained campaign being mounted to have him fired from the
university, hung drawn and quartered etc. Chomsky went along to a
meeting at the university called to protest the professor's tenure,
marched up to the podium, and said to the audience in as many words
"stop this nonsense immediately", explaining eloquently that you cannot
have degrees of free speech - you don't allow free speech only until
somebody says something you don't like. This was all shown on a British
TV documentary about Chomsky. As usual, Chomsky was utterly fearless,
totally blunt, and intellectually polished. The film showed him arguing
afterwards with a number of Jewish attendees, some of whom were trying
the "you're a disgrace to your religion" line on him - which he was
having none of, reminding them that they were arguing in favour of
driving a coach and horses through one of the fundamental tenets of
modern America, simply because the professor had written something
odious that they didn't like.
If Ward Churchill is going to be fired for academic fraud, then that I
could understand and accept, providing that a due process is followed.
What is not acceptable is for him to become a victim of a lynching simply because people don't like what he wrote, or don't like him as a person. That would represent the worst kind of ad hominem attack, and would undermine the concepts of freedom of speech and honest, rigorous examination of ideas and concepts that I thought universities were supposed to hold as core values.

I stand by my suspicion that the reaction to Ward Churchill's utterances tells us more about the hyper-sensitivities of modern America than it does about Ward Churchill.
Churchill is to academia what John Bolton is to international diplomacy, and the best reaction to Churchill's utterances ought to be polite disavowal, not mean-spirited attempts at a lynching.

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/05/05/cheerleaders.law.reut/

Every so often in Western-style democracies, we are treated to an outbreak of a syndrome that I will call the "We Must Be Seen To Be Doing Something" Syndrome. This usually occurs when electors (either singly or in groups) bring a matter that they consider to be a harbinger of the collapse of Civilization As We Know It to the attention of elected representatives. Theose elected representatives then proceed in short order to draft up a legislative response, (designed to eliminate This Evil Thing from society with immediate effect), then then proceed to give it cursory debate, twisting arms for affirmative votes in the legislative chamber along the lines of "if you don't vote for this you obviously don't mind the country declining into a sink of depravity".
The result is that everybody feels good and righteous because We Did Something. However, what also happens is that another half-baked, dimwit unenforceable statute just appeared in a law book somewhere, creating yet more work for law enforcement agencies (who are already over-worked, thanks to the modern approach of praising law enforcement while not funding it properly). Since most of these statutes are so badly worded, the new law is also a gift for defense lawyers.
Enter (stage left) - Texas House Bill 1476.
This little legislative gem meets all of the criteria I outlined above. Clearly somebody somewhere decided that explicit displays of cheerleader charms offend public decency and the morals of society, and need to be restricted.
This is an idiotic bill. It is idiotic on several counts:

1. As currently written, it is bad legislation. It is unenforceable, since there is no precise definition of what constitutes "overtly sexually suggestive" (the statement of the offense that this bill is designed to prevent). Absent any definition or measurement standard, many prosecutions under this bill if it becomes law will not succeed. The defense will argue about the definition of "overtly sexually suggestive", and a jury will shrug its shoulders, become confused and be unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
2. The supporters of the bill have provided no documented, cogent arguments for why this is an important societal matter requiring legislation. All that appears to have happened is that some people were disturbed by the displays of high school cheerleaders and want the displays to be circumscribed or stopped. It begs the question of where those people were when the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders started the sex-objects-as-cheerleaders trend over 20 years ago in the NFL. But I digress, and I acknowledge that logic generally does not play any part in this kind of initiative....
4. All legislatures have limited time for debating and passing legislation. I refuse to believe that debating and voting on this bill was an effective use of House time. This is a bill designed to regulate behaviour in an activity which is peripheral even to a sports curriculum. What about considering legislation to address academic performance issues?

Folks, I have never seen a more egregious, vapid, ill-considered waste of legislative time. If your elected representative voted for this bill, they need a good shaking. I intend to find out if my local representative voted for the bill, and if she did, I will be reminding her of the need to focus on what is truly important, and to resist the urge to Be Seen To Be Doing Something.
I'll leave the last word to Rep. Senfronia Thompson, who summed up my reaction perfectly in the debate:

"I think the Texas Education Agency has enough to do making sure our kids are better educated, and we are wasting our time with 'one two three four, we can't shake it any more?"' Thompson told legislators.

Kraft is coming under a lot of pressure from "Family values" pressure groups to discontinue its sponsorship of this event.
I weighed in with my own message to Kraft. Here it is:

I understand that Kraft has agreed to be a sponsor for the 2006 Gay Games.
I also understand that a number of political and religious pressure groups, including the American Family Association, are running campaigns to apply pressure on Kraft to withdraw from this sponsorship.
I urge you to resist this pressure. The American Family Association seeks by its campaign and other campaigns to abridge the civil rights of gay Americans. This campaign is part of an attempt to undermine the ongoing efforts to eliminate discrimination against Americans based on their sexual orientation.
Their campaign is bigoted, mean-spirited and fundamentally un-American. Many of the people who founded the modern United States were escaping from persecution for their beliefs elsewhere in the world.
If Kraft capitulates to this pressure campaign from the AFA and other organizations, you will be sending the message to consumers that you are acquiescing in the continuation of attitudes that are fundamentally discriminatory.
I urge you to resist narrow-minded pressure of this kind, and continue to sponsor the Gay Games. This sponsorship is not good because it is commercially expedient. It is good because it is fundamentally right. It is in alignment with the best values of the United States.