The Age today has a piece that almost defies description. Just go read it.

And marvel that the world still contains people that are this stupid.

Unfortunate timing on the Onion's part - compare and contrast:

• The Onion: "Thank You, But That Was Siegfried's Idea"
• The Observer: "Magician mauled in stage horror"

Oops.

EFA has a rather harsh report on the new "anti-spam" bill going through Federal Parliment at the moment.

I think it says pretty much all you need to know that it exempts anything sent by "registered political parties" from ever being spam. But it's much, much worse than that. It allows the Australian Communications Authority to search and seize computer equipment, without a warrant. I'm sure our new Minister for IT, Darryl "Never saw a warrantless search he didn't like" Williams will be fixing that soon.</laughter class="hollow">

For fuck's sake, can't these clowns do anything right?

The chief law officer of the United States doesn't seem to understand fairly basic concepts like "prejudicing a trial" or "gag order", and might be cited for contempt as a result.

I'm so glad we don't have a reactionary bigot as our Attorney-General. Oh, wait. Damn.

But how long before all the Vicodin spam starts including "As preferred by Rush Limbaugh!"

See, aside from the whole "tax-dodging professional whiner" (thanks Berke Breathed for that great phrase), you get stuff like this posting to the normally sane Politech.

Seems the ex-Canadian Privacy Commissioner has been accused of rorting his office for money. A libertarian response? Obviously this shows that we shouldn't have Privacy Commissioners. A more nuanced response might be that this shows that we should have tighter checks over bureaucrats spending, or that maybe the process by which the Canadian government handles expenses needs to be tweaked. But, nooo. Must... push... barrow...

Oh, and of course it wouldn't be a libertarian response without a gratuitous slam at the European Union:

See, I can play the gratuitous link game too - obviously this shows why "libertarian intellectual" is an oxymoron.

(but hey, what can you expect from folks who think Ayn Rand had anything worthwhile to say...)

Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day:

Suprisingly, no, this isn't about Robert Novak, who's a whole different class of idiot journalist.

Go read this piece from Media Watch. Seems some lovely ABC journo wanted to do a piece on a bunch of dangerous weapons left lying around in Baghdad. All good and fine. Unfortunately, as out-takes obtained by Media Watch show, she actually got the kiddies to pose with the dangerous missiles.

This isn't a "oh, what bad people the ABC are" issue. This is a "that journalist needs to be sacked" issue. Jesus christ.

(thanks to Liz and Damien for pointing this one out)

Assume Bush was telling the truth last week when he said he only got news from his advisors at the early morning meetings. Can you imagine the bad day that Rice, Card &c are going to have this morning, presenting the weekend's news? And you thought your Mondays sucked...

Of note in Howard's reshuffle announced today:

• Abbott to Health - there's not likely to be much more that the Libs can jam through in the Industrial Relations area, and the next target for Howard is Medicare, so this makes sense.
• Dazzling Dazza to Alston's old spot - IT, Communications and the yartz. While almost anyone would be better than Dick Alston, Dazza's a pretty useless specimen. Expect to see his authoritarian bent (remember the ASIO "grabbing 14 year olds for questioning without a lawyer" idea?) come through in various Internet-related issues.
• Amanda Vanstone to Immigration? Jesus. What did the refugees do to deserve that?
• Tuckey's back to the back-bench. Again. Wonder how long he'll spend there this time? His efforts on behalf of his son made Howard's government look utterly stupid, so with a bit of luck he'll stay there. Or better yet, leave parliment and fuck off back under whichever rock he originally crawled out from.

Course, the other thing this shows is what a sparkling bunch of non-entities the Federal Liberal party contains. I guess for reasons of balance, or something, they had to appoint some MPs from WA, but christ. Julie Bishop as a minister?

Go back and re-read Ron Suskind's piece from January on Karl Rove. Tell me that the description of Rove from this piece doesn't sound exactly like the sort of person who'd pull a dumb stunt like outing a CIA agent in an act of petty revenge.

TPM also points out that Rove got fired from the Bush 1992 campaign for planting a negative story with... Robert Novak. The same Robert Novak who put the Plame allegations into print.

My money's on Rove and Fleischer being the perps. Assuming the White House can't cover it up (which seems less and less likely) I'd also guess Spurious George might be forced to play the presidential pardon game.

Another front page thumping by the WPost, this one pointing out that the Vice-President of the United States is an out-and-out fabulist. Despite the evidence being debunked time and time again, despite every sane intelligence expert that's ever looked at it saying "no, this is nonsense", Cheney continues to insist that somehow, he knows better, and that Saddam was linked to 9/11.

This sort of behaviour is mildly disturbing in a sad old newspaper hack, but the violent disconnection from the world of actual facts is deeply troubling when it's the man who's a single mis-chewed pretzel from the Presidency of the United States.

So the Plame story is "too complicated" for the instapundit? Jesus H. Christ on a stick, how much simpler can it get? This guy is a professor of law?? Some senior WH figures committed a felony, not once, but "at least 6" times. Other WH figures must have known about this, after the fact, if not before, and did nothing. Also a felony.

And check out this masterful piece of hackwork from media "commentator" Howie Kurtz:

So in the first case Howie uses as an example that "federal investigators are unlikely to discover who the leakers are", they did, in fact, discover the leakers, but they were unable to prosecute because there had been no crime committed. This is obviously not the case here - there has been a number of serious felonies committed.

In the second case, they were unable to figure out who leaked the information, presumably because a large number of people had access to the information. This is hardly the case here. There's the 6 or more journos who were originally shopped the story, the ones who got the WP front page yesterday, their editors, anyone else they told... in addition, it's presumably quite easy for someone to look at the phone records in the WH to see who made the calls.

My guess is that if push comes to shove, the WH will attempt to claim that the white house phone records are protected under some sort of "executive privilege". How well this will go down is anyone's guess.

TPM interviews Joseph Wilson. The opening line is fairly simple summary of the US position.

So after the recent incident with the guy with a gun holding up traffic on the Westgate bridge, what seems to be the main complaint? That people were inconvenienced, and it's the fault of the Victoria Police for not shooting him.

Jesus christ. Get a sense of proportion, people. I got caught in the traffic too, but my irritation was mostly at the clowns pulling bogus right-hand turns and blatantly illegal traffic maneuvers to somehow try and get out of the mess.

And given the state liberal party's pro-speeding, pro-road-fatality stance of recent times, it's quite refreshing to see them only advocating that the police use stun guns. I think they're softening over time - under Jeff, they'd have been calling for some sort of large caliber armoured vehicle to blast the inconvenience to traffic into the bay.

Thank christ the guy didn't block traffic that was trying to get to a football final, or else the Herald Sun would've been calling for street protests and rioting. Although I'm sure the "man of the people" Andrew Bolt will call for capital punishment for anyone who holds up traffic.

Tom Friedman totally loses it:

Here's what Friedman thinks France should do:

So, after being denigrated as "chocolate makers", "weasels" and "cheese eating surrender monkeys", after being ignored and dismissed by the Bushies, after trying to stop a war that was opposed by the vast majority of the European people, France "needs" to throw a whole pile of money and people into helping the Americans fix the mess that they created. Oh, and in doing so, they should do it without wanting any say in how policy is formulated in Iraq. What the fuck is Friedman smoking? This is someone who's part of the neo-liberal "intelligentsia"?

Apparently France should get involved because otherwise radical Muslim groups in France might become "energized". Or, alternately, if the French were stupid enough to get involved in something that is widely seen in the Muslim world as "American Imperialism", the radical Muslim groups in France might not just be "energized", but "fucking incandescant with rage".

See, it's not that the French have looked at the almighty screwup of Iraq and said "bugger that for a game of soldiers", it's because they have a secret "Operation America Must Fail". No doubt run by some evil French version of S.M.E.R.S.H., with a secret headquarters deep in the catacombs of Paris.

And once again we see the attempt to spin the issue to even if you opposed the war that Friedman barracked for, you're not "serious" about it unless you now become an unconditional backer of it.

Tom Friedman, you're a fucking idiot.

Demanding levies now, I see.... (link via Demosthenes)

I have to wonder what sort of pressure Howard's under to "voluntarily" "contribute" to Iraq. To his credit(?), so far he's ruled out sending any troops back into the hellish disaster that the neo-cons have created (with his help, of course).

This piece, by the WP's Milbank and Pincus, pretty much calls Cheney a liar, repeatedly, and it's from page A01 of the paper.

There's oh-so-much more. Josh Marshall has also snapped after this recent interview:

Cheney truly is a special, special individual. His loathsome carcass corrupts the very air and ground around his repulsive presence, and he's a disgrace to the office of the Vice-President. He exemplifies the crony capitalism and "revolving door" school of US government-corporate relations, he's fouled up most things he's touched, and in a decent world, should probably be on his way to jail.

[Update: Uggabugga has a nice simple table for Richard "lies like a cheap hairpiece" Cheney. So many lies, from a single hour-long interview!]

Slate's invaluable Today's Papers scores again with this section from today's edition:

TP is worth reading on a daily basis just for it's efforts to supply the context and background to stories. It must be frustrating for the authors of TP to have to continually add back the context that lazy/cowed journalists have failed to add to their work.

This obit in the NYT covers the life of the man in black pretty damn well. And if you've somehow managed to miss hearing his recent version of Trent Reznor's song "Hurt", you're a danger to yourself and a burden on others. Go. Seek out "American Recordings 4". Now.

Paul Krugman's longer piece in the NYT on the tax-cut maniacs in power in Washington.

See also this note from Calpundit's interview with Krugman.

As a break from the normal levels of snark, I should note that this week has had some good news. First, Berke Breathed is bringing back Opus in a new strip. Next, news that The Pixies are reforming.

And finally, dear friends of mine just had a cute little baby boy. Welcome to the world, Jesse, and I hope that we can fix up the shocking mess that the world has become so that you can have a wonderful happy life.

Gummo Trotsky pointed out this Andrew Bolt column where Bolt decries the "messages" of Finding Nemo.

In reading it I suddenly realised what Bolt has become: he's the right wing equivalent of those humourless lefties that would pull stuff like agitating for Noddy to be removed from school libraries because the gollywogs sent bad messages to kids.

I find this delightfully ironic. Bolt, being the humourless fucktard that he is, would probably not see the funny side.

Mark Kleiman, who Knows Stuff about drug policy, has some fairly harsh words about the retracted MDMA research, and the people responsible.

It appears that we have a pretty substantial failure of the scientific process here. The researcher was known to have biases that had led to prior criticism on similar work. The president of the body that publishes Science was the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse that handed out the original grant for the work, and is also known to have biases about MDMA. Kleiman also suggests that the only reason Science retracted the original piece was that the US ABC network about to show a piece that was highly critical of the research. Kleiman finishes up with a suggestion that a bit of soul-searching is almost certainly in order:

As I said originally, a very bad result for science (and Science). If this sort of rank political biases can so seriously distort results in a major publication, the credibility of science in general is at risk. Look at how the war against some drugs has managed to convince many/most people that the people who put out anti-drug ads are peddling incomplete and over-hyped information. By trying to tell people that marijuana is just as bad as heroin, that one toke will turn you into a washed-up criminal, that illicit substances are always going to ruin your life, they instead damage their own ability to get across actual real important information, like "don't share syringes", or "if you're addicted to something, seek a doctor's advice".

So I only catch Denton's wonderful interview program most weeks. And one of the weeks I miss, he interviews Helen Thomas. Thomas is a long-time White House correspondent (back to the time of JFK) who described Bush as "the worst president in American history". Since then she's been frozen out by the White House, denigrated by the fabulous folks on Fox news, and generally shown the truly compassionate side of the Republicans.

(Thanks to Southerly Buster for pointing it out)

Both Dana Milbank in the WP and David Brooks (new to the NYT's opinion pages) hit similar notes today - while the Bushies are reversing course in Iraq, they're trying to pretend that of course this was their plan all along.

Maybe it's just me, but covering your ears and screaming "LALALALALALA I can't hear you" is irritating in a small child. In the leadership of a major country, it's terrifying.

Milbank goes further than Brooks, with many examples of "Person A said ...." "In fact, in May ... " which is about as close as the US media gets to calling someone a liar to their face. Of course, since it's actually presenting facts, it's on page 21 of the paper, rather than the front page that's for Steno Sue and her ilk to peddle the latest propaganda.

(And well done to the NYT for hiring Brooks. Based on the first column, he's actually able to write and to think about what he's writing. A welcome change from the necromantic ravings of Safire.)

Remember the report last year that not-huge doses of ecstasy gave monkeys brain damage? Well, it turns out that there was a minor flaw in the study. Just a teensy one. They gave the monkeys speed, not pills.

What a suprise. Anti-drug hysteria led to a completely stupid failure of science. Too be fair, it's really hard to test for ecstasy in a pill. It took me at least 15 seconds to enter the phrase "MDMA test kit" into google to find a whole pile of vendors of kits - most are US$50 or less.

You'd think that when you've got a paper showing results that are a) controversial, b) quite different to all prior studies, c) at odds with common sense (the original study had a 20% death rate after 3 pills - look at the vast numbers of corpses being carried away from your average rave), at least one of the peer reviewers would have said "um, guys, did you actually check the pills were MDMA?"

Me, I just have a mental image of monkeys with glowsticks and fluorescent fluffy leggings. A monkey on speed, though, not as funny.

All in all, not a great day for peer reviewed science.

Walter Pincus reviewed the memoirs of Richard Helms in the WP a couple of weeks ago. Far too many unfortunate parallels in the events that the ex-CIA director writes about with the events of today.

It's a must-read review, and I think the book sounds like it'll be worth reading.

Bill Safire, just making shit up now, opens with:

Uh huh. Really. That's what he thinks. You know, from here it looks more like the US desperately trying to get someone, anyone, to contribute bodies on the ground. Oh, and money. Lots of money.

Perhaps Safire can channel some dead European and tell us why the French or the Germans want to "wrest control" of the shocking fuckup that is Iraq? Mitterand's been dead a few years now, he should be good and ready for a speaking-from-the-other-world gig.

"Iraq is now the central front" in the war on terror. Well, yes, it is. Now. Because you fucking made it the central war, in your brilliant campaign to get yourself re-elected.

"Members of the United Nations now have an opportunity, and the responsibility, to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation." Hm. Here's a succinct response: "Fuck off". Here's a longer response: The UN Security Council, whose will you defied in attacking Iraq, has no responsibility to come in and clean up your mess. You broke it, you fix it.

And as far as I can see, Bush is actually attempting to use the idiotic "flypaper" theory -- how desperate is he getting? Well, pretty desperate. Looks like the Bushes, père et fils, are about to make a matched set of Men Without Hats one-hit wonders.

For me, the questions that are interesting are: how desperate and dangerous are the current inmates likely to be in order to build up Bush's base? And will he actually fall far enough that he gets a serious challenger in the Republican primary?