Shameless, utterly utterly shameless:

Yep, she's just like Mandela, if Mandela had been convicted of deliberately defrauding the taxpayers, rather than standing up against a hideous political system that ground his people into the dirt. Apparently Hanson's in jail for representing the views of the oppressed. I didn't realise that white middle-class bigots were all that oppressed-- for an oppressed group, they sure do seem to have rather a lot of media exposure.

I'm not sure that ripping off the taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars can actually be classed as "a different political view".

For those interested in hypotheticals - if Hanson was in Howard's ministry, would he have asked for her resignation by now? Based on the ever lower standards of ministerial "responsibility", I suspect not.

There's violence on the television,
And letter bombs in the mail
But things can't be all that bad
'cause Pauline Hanson went to gaol

Famine eats up children,
The peace talks; they always fail
But things can't be all that bad
'cause Pauline Hanson went to gaol

You might have double malaria,
The doctors look at you; they go pale
But things, they can't be all that bad
When Pauline Hanson goes to gaol

Christ himself on the cross
Told the guy who banged in the nail
'Mate, things, they can't be all that bad
When Pauline Hanson goes to gaol'

I've mentioned to a few people in conversations my idea for "fixing" the legal/insurance tort reform shambles - briefly, you allow the judge to award costs against the plaintiff and their lawyers for utterly egregious cases. This would only need to happen once or twice for the dodgy legal firms to get out of the game of pushing bogus legal cases in the hope of getting fuck-off money. I'd not got around to working out the details of this idea. Fortunately Dwight at PLA has already done this for me <wink>.

What's more, this system is already in place in Georgia, and according to Dwight, "works well and has worked well for over a decade". Of course, since this isn't actually what the insurance companies want (they want to limit their liability in all cases, regardless of the merits of the situation), it's unlikely to get much traction here.

A couple of pieces (for instance this Boston Globe piece) have noted that "questions are being raised about Schwarzenegger's link to US English Inc., which advocates the passage of English as the country's official language".

Aside from the obvious cheap shot that this is rich coming from Conan the Enunciator, quite frankly, making English the national language of the United States can't come soon enough. Then it's onto the bonfires with that Noah Webster nonsense, and back to primary school English for the lot of them.

And I will no longer have to cringe when I see another piece of collateral at work labelled with "travelers" (there's two Ls in traveller, dammit!)

This piece from the ABC should be a nice heads-up for the free-trade skeptics:

Gosh, how dare Australia think it's allowed to set it's own policies on issues such as agriculture. This form of militant free-trade rhetoric shows (to me, at least) that the folks who are trying to point out that many FTAs are designed to subvert local democracy are pretty much on the money.

Disclosure: I'm something of a GM-skeptic - if it can be grown under controlled circumstances (with little or no risk of contamination) and if the products are labelled as GM, then I don't mind them being grown. The GM-boosters who insist that labelling is somehow a bad thing are pretty much full of it. If their products are so wonderful (e.g. the stories we hear about the new miracle health-giving crops that are somehow always just a little bit in the future), then surely advertising that would be a good thing? Trying to sneak GM crops in underneath the public's view, or ramming them through under the banner of "free trade", is only going to do more harm to the cause of GM crops.

So today's the day Neal Pollack has declared a "Fair and Balanced" jihad of satire against Fox News for their pathetic attempts to silence Al Franken.

Here's some fun background reading: From Buzzflash, an amusing exchange of emails with the head toad at Fox, Roger Ailes. (The repulsively ugly one, not the debonaire and witty one).

"Fair and Balanced" Fox News. That's not a trademark dispute, it's a consumer fraud issue. From when I had cable, I think I managed about 10 or 15 minutes of Fox at a time before I found myself hurling abuse at the television set. There's nothing even remotely balanced about them. What they are (and I think this court case backs it up) is a pack of whining bullying crybabies deliberately marketing themselves to other whining bullying crybabies. Your life's not fair? It's because Someone Else is holding you back. Preferably someone weak and powerless - you can't have them actually standing up for themselves.

For people that supposedly tout self-reliance and all those other square-jawed noble American virtues, they sure do spend a lot of time trying to find someone else to blame for any wrongs they see in their lives. It's the niggers, it's the jews, it's the single mothers, it's the liberals, it's the democrats, it's the feminazis, it's the environmentalists, it's the illegal immigrants, it's the muslims. Pretty much anyone that can be pigeonholed and labelled with a convenient stereotype can be blamed.

And, like any bullying crybabies, whenever someone actually stands up to them, they completely lose it. Witness Bill O'Reilly attacking the son of a WTC victim who refused to be bullied, then cutting his mike. See O'Reilly (again) totally losing it when Al Franken called him on his bullshit at the recent book fair. See the chumps on the various Fox talking head channels smugly lying to the poor bastards who think this is news, ignoring any news that might show them up to be the lying scumbags that they are.

The US doesn't need a "liberal" TV network to counter Fox News. Just a single hour a week of something like the Australian "Media Watch" would be enough. If someone stood up to these children and called them what they are - a weak-willed insecure spineless bunch of cowardly children - they'd totally flip out and explode. It's when you push back that you expose this - look at how Andrew Bolt totally lost it when Media Watch called him on his spinning and dissembling. Raving, ranting, frothing at the mouth.

It doesn't need much to achieve this. A simple smack across the nose with the rolled-up newspaper of truth is all it takes.

WashingtonPost reports:

How long until we see some sort of agribusiness fake science trotted out to try and counter this? Oh, about half an article:

What a pathetic argument. Here's a hint: hospitals and doctors are already aware of the problem, and are working on it. There's also the minor difference that giving people antibiotics in a hospital is because they're trying to save some lives, while feeding them to pigs is just to try and make a few extra percentage points of profit off the meat. There's not even a remote similarity between the cases.

Of course, with the current inmates in Washington and their "faith-based" approach to science, I'd say the chances of anything actually happening are close to nil. I'm sure we'll see a bill labelled something like "The Healthy And Happy Pig Lifestyle Bill" passed to make sure that no-one dares cut back on feeding anti-biotics to food animals. Idiots. Such utter, utter, utter idiots.

Slacktivist points to this Guardian piece on the Spanish troops soon to be taking their place in the coalition of the billing.

Doesn't anyone there have the thinking stick? Really? How is this even remotely a good idea? (Unless you're of the LGF "all muslims need only to be dealt with in as violent a way as possible" persuasion, I guess)

The WashPost thoroughly spanks those who pushed bogus war talk. As Atrios put it "There's little reason the WaPo couldn't have published this article back in, say, February". This piece by Walter Pincus from a couple of days ago also lays out just how much the bogus Niger Uranium story was being pushed by the current inmates.

When is napalm not napalm? When it's called "Mark-77 fire bombs". Apparently napalm is a brand name, and the US military's moved to generic brands of terror weapons (presumably the generic brand is cheaper than the name brand).

Howard's spoken out against the idea of gay marriage. What a shock. And he's taking the dumbest-of-the-dumb approach, that it's only about procreation, and the "survival of the species". Jesus. When you're spouting the same lines as dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers Rick Santorum in the US, you know you're struggling for an argument.

So, since "marriage" is only for a man and a woman who want to make babies, is staying childless a reason for the government to break up a marriage? What about people like myself and my partner? We're married, but have no intention of children. Worse yet, with three cats we're actually helping the survival of another species, which must make us some sort of traitor to the women-are-for-making-babies school of thought.

And how does locking families and children up in prison camps in the middle of the desert help with the survival of the species? Or is it only the survival of the bits of the species that happen to be white and living in the burbs with 2.3 children that Howard's interested in? (You don't have to answer that.)

And let's look at the "voice of compassion and reason" Peter Costello.

Gosh. His stance is softening, and now he "understands" and "respects" that gay folks can have relationships. How big of him. What the fuck was his previous opinion, that this is the newer softer view? Costello really is just like Howard, only without the rat-cunning. Same shit, different bottle.

When are chemical weapons not chemical weapons? Of course, it's when they're being developed by the US military. This piece pointed to the Sunshine Project, and their page on what are euphemistically called "Incapacitants". There's also a piece on the US military's patent on grenades for dispersing chemical weapons.

So I was all set to mock the Catholic Church and their interesting moral standards ("Aiding and abetting the systematic rape of children: fine. Committed loving relationship between two adults that happen to be the same sex: Ewww, icky, burn-in-hell"). But the more I thought about it, the more angry I got. So this is pretty much just vicious abuse.

The Catholic Church has shown that they're pretty much out of touch with the world today. Fortunately, in the civilised parts of the world, more and more people are seeing this, and the Church continues it's long slide into irrelevance. This is unquestionably a very very good thing. The Catholic Church as an organisation is designed only as an instrument of power. Their desperate squeaks for attention should be viewed as the despairing attempts of a pack of pathetic old men trying to somehow pretend that the world hasn't changed around them.

It amuses me greatly to think that if the Catholic Church is correct in their beliefs in their invisible superfriends, then there's probably not a single person in any senior level of the hierarchy that's not going to spend an eternity being boiled alive while something unspeakably horrible is done to their nether regions.

A few commentators, trying to reconcile their faith with the obviously demented old fuckwits in charge of it, have suggested that this will somehow get magically better after the current old fossil croaks. They're in deep denial. Read up on Ratzinger, the head of the Inquisition (or as it's known now, the "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith") responsible for this fine piece of work. Read up on Opus Dei. If anything, I suspect the next pontiff will be even more crazed with power and willing to push the most reactionary garbage that he can find.

On that note, at what point are people going to wake up and stop pretending that the Vatican's actually a country, and stop giving them a seat at various international bodies? They're useful as a marker - on the most extreme reactionary side of any debate, you'll find the Vatican - but that's about it.

Who really gives 3/8ths of a fuck what a pack of nominally celibate (apparently raping children doesn't count as "sex") drooling loons in silly capes have to say about, say, the status of women in society today? At least the Society for Creative Anachronism actually make their own capes, which gives them at least one useful skill. This is one more than your average Cardinal. [Update: Apparently, the SCA don't make capes, they make cloaks. I think the point still stands.]

I'm not calling for the Vatican to be firebombed -- after all, there's a bunch of very pretty buildings there. However, it will be a great day when the Vatican is finally used for an appropriate purpose - a museum and theme park. Maybe we can let some of the less socially stunted members of the College of Cardinals stay on as tour guides and those funny looking clowns that make balloon animals for children. Actually, no, scratch that. Probably not a good idea to let them near children.

To sum up: I hope the lovely folks at the Catholic Church get what they deserve when they die, and they get it good and hard.

Dana Milbank continues to ensure he won't be getting a Christmas card from the Bush White House this year with his latest little piece on Bush's culture of responsibility, as in "everyone but me is responsible".

TBogg picks on Steven Den Beste as a RISK-playing wannabe. It occurs to me after briefly scanning SdB's "strategic overview" that what we're actually dealing with here is the blogosphere's own Tom fucking Clancy. Like Clancy, SdB prefers his reality Manichean. Like Clancy, he writes desperately lifeless prose that can be only be disposed of by specially trained technicians using the latest in anti-bore technology. Like Clancy, he hails from an unrelated field (Clancy was an insurance salesman, Den Beste a telecoms engineer). Like Clancy, he fancies himself as a "big thinker". And, like Clancy, he's a dick.

(One final cheapshot: Den Beste's bio shows him to be a GURPS fan. I would have picked him as a hardcore d20 type, myself, or possibly Magic: The Gathering. His prose style certainly manages to effortlessly convey the experience of being trapped in a room listening to a bunch of M:tG nerds discuss strategy tips for all eternity)

Some kind person left a copy of yesterday's Herald Sun in the kitchen at work. The front page, I kid you not, is given over to an enourmous piece on the shocking revelation that Australian Navy sailors drink a lot. Oh. My. God. Sailors drink? Noooo.

The other piece that amused me far too much was on Ricky Martin. Apparently he suprised the media by turning up in Melbourne, with a girlfriend. That sound you can hear is hundreds of Melbourne gay boys all opening a vein simultaneously. I have to say that I find Ricky's alleged heterosexuality disturbing, because that means there must be some other as yet undiscovered reason for why his music is so utterly gingy in the sponge.

Following up on a piece from last night - the latest neologism that's been seriously getting up my nose is that wonderful word "detainees". It's such a nice sounding word, isn't it? "I'm terribly sorry sir, we just need to detain you for a moment". Of course, when governments start using nice neutral sounding words like "detainee" rather than perfectly serviceable words like "prisoner", you know why. They're trying to hide something that they're not keen to see exposed to the full light of day.

In general I've noticed that when you do see the word "detainee", you can be pretty sure someone's getting their rights pretty heavily beaten. Really. Go search Google News for "detainee", and you'll see some pretty solid abuse of the normal rule of law. Our leaders seem to be trying to push the meaning of "detainee" to mean "like a prisoner, only without that whole charges/evidence/lawyers/trial thing, or in fact any rights whatsoever". On Google News right now the top page of links for "detainee" consists of refugees in detention centres, "detainees" in Guantanamo Bay, Iraqi civilians "detained" by the US for information, Palestinians "detained" by Israel. On the third page there's finally a link to a story of the police arresting someone variety that uses the word "detainee".

Just remember, "detainee" == "massive fucking human rights violation".

According to the New York Times, the banks that aided and abetted Enron have been taught a severe lesson:

Let's see, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank. According to Yahoo's finance section, JPMChase made a profit of just over US$2B over the last year, while Citigroup made a smidge over $14.5B. (Note that JPM's been doing it tough lately - if you look at, say, 1999, when Enron was in full flight, they brought home nearly $7B). That's final profit-as-delivered-to-the-shareholders, after all those nice toys for the senior managers and those generous tax concessions we helped write.

So JP Morgan Chase will pay just under 7% of their annual profits, while Citigroup pays around 0.7%. To put this in perspective, Citigroup's top 5 senior executives took home around US$36M in compensation and another $21M in options trades. JPM's top 4 took home US$31M in compensation and nearly US$13M in option profits.

My gods, those strict and harsh penalties - I mean, what are they trying to do, punish the companies just because they broke the frickin law?!? That's just crazy talk.

Note that these aren't just "whoops, we didn't notice that" errors of omission here. Re-read the analysis piece I linked to before. They eagerly assisted - in Citigroup's case, even offloading the dodgy Enron loans to pension funds and the like. JP Morgan tried to help Enron fool their auditors. If a human committed crimes on such a scale and was prosecuted, they'd be locked away for years and years and years. Citigroup, on the other hand, is fined nearly three whole days of profits. Gosh. I imagine the folks in the big offices at major banks in the US are just looking at each other today saying, "No, no - the risk is too great. On the one hand, we might get away with it and pull in squillions and squillions of dollars for our company and ourselves. But if we get caught - oh my god, the risks! They might fine us for several days worth of the illegally acquired loot!"

So this will no doubt be a firm lesson to all crooks and shysters. If you're going to fiddle the system, beware! "Crime has a price, and sometimes the price can be almost noticeable!"

This would've merited "outrage of the week", but, hey, it's only (just) Wednesday, so I'm sure there's plenty of time to top this.

American troops in Iraq ("the good guys") have taken a new and ethically interesting approach to getting hold of Iraqis that they want ("the bad guys"). This involves, well, let's go to the tape, from the Washington Post:

The Washington Post merely refers to these tactics in the following terms: "a more nimble approach against unseen adversaries and found new ways to gather intelligence about them"

Yes, "a more nimble approach". They are seizing family members of people they want as fucking hostages, and this is "a more nimble approach". Note - this was not because there was some imminent threat to life and limb, but simply "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." Now, one thing I've noticed is that when someone starts using the word "detainees", what they actually mean is "massive fucking human rights violation". And in this case, the "detainees" merely "have info".

The same page from the WaPo has a little sidebox "Your Questions Answered". At the moment this contains "Who is Governing Iraq?" "Who Are the Kurds?" and "Who Are the Shiites?" Here's a couple of suggestions for some other little questions for their box:

• Which bit of "rules of war" were unclear in the initial briefing?
• What fucking brainiac thought that this was a good way to win "hearts and minds" in Iraq?
• Please explain, in your own words, your understanding of the meaning of Article 34 of the Fourth Geneva Convention? Here's a talking point to get you started: Art. "34. The taking of hostages is prohibited." And here's a another helpful pointer: "497 g. Hostages. The taking of hostages is forbidden (GC, art. 34)"

Plus, of course:

• Have you lost your tiny little minds?

To be fair to the WaPo, they at least reported this. I'm sure that home of subversive lefties the NYT will be all over this story. </mocking hollow laughter>. And our good friends Instapundit, Sullivan and their little happy followers will also no doubt closely follow this story. (I haven't bothered checking Little Green Footballs, but I'm sure there'll be a post there complaining that "the family were exchanged as hostages, rather than being butchered and having their heads paraded around on sticks to intimidate the rest of the savages" or some such sickening crap.)

Atrios was the first I saw to note this piece, with a followup here, with links to other commentary. The normally quite reasonable Tacitus tries a weasel way out, claiming that "if the family would have been released unharmed in due course regardless of the general's actions, then they were never hostages." Uh huh. Try bringing that before an actual judge as a defence, and let us know how it went.

Why is this so hard to understand? This is goddammed completely and utterly wrong, and also totally stupid. I hope the person responsible is dragged before a court of inquiry very bloody quickly, if only for the sakes of the US military still in Iraq. Because if it becomes widely known in Iraq that the US troops are pulling this sort of thing and are being allowed to do so by their superiors, all possible good will towards the US troops will vanish in a flash.

According to Newsday, the Valerie Plame story is getting more traction. The original story, as reported by David Corn in the Nation, was that someone in the administration leaked to columnist Robert Novak that Joseph Wilson was only chosen for his Niger mission (to check the uranium-Niger story) because his wife was a CIA operative. This was in some way supposed to discredit Wilson.

Unfortunately, whoever did this broke the law. In this case, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (1982), Title 50, Chapter 15, Section 421.

What amazes me is that they'd so casually break the law for such a pathetic attempt at discrediting an inconvenient critic. Even Novak in the original column simply notes the fact, but doesn't use it to attack Wilson.

Keep an eye on Google News for more on this. Let's see if the US media with their shiny new case of spine actually follow up on it.

(Additional work on this from Mark Kleiman and Calpundit)

William Greider seems to have his own sort-of blog going. One of the first pieces discusses the violent, angry confusion of a public that's been lied to, and about the idiocy of trying to impose democracy by force.

He finishes by reminding us of Senator George Aiken's Vietnam peace plan, "Declare victory and get out."

Much amusement of late watching supporters of Bush trying to spin the lies and deceit away. For instance, the Insta-hack links to this piece, which sets a new low for serial mendacity in an attempt to respond to The Independent's 20 Lies about Iraq story. For instance:

Who's splitting hairs here? The author manages to deliberately blur "weapons program" and "weapons", past and present possession of weapons, as well as adding in a non-sequiter about "Saddam with WMD is a bad thing". Well, yes, it would be, except, of course, that it seems he didn't have any.

To adapt a quote from a previous lying scumbag Republican president(*), "We are all Clintonians now".

Nixon. As opposed to lying scumbag Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.