Shakesville

Breaking News: Fox Viewers are Stoopid

Transcript: From time to time around here, we like to read from the stacks of emails we get on a daily basis, and those we have selected for tonight all pertain, as so many of them do, to what we say and how we say it, beginning with this one, following our live interview here last week with President Clinton: Carolyn from Pennsylvania writes: "Where does Brian Williams get off addressing Bill Clinton as 'Mr. President'? No FORMER president should ever be addressed this way! Our president is George W. Bush and I wish you all would respect this fact, even though you make it quite obvious how much you hate it! I'll go back to the real news at Fox, thank you!" Carolyn, I hope we caught you in time; we got a lot of letters like this from different viewers saying all the same thing, and they were all sadly mistaken. The title 'Mr. President' is for life. And it's the only way, polite way, to address the president, current or former.

Bronzer?

A bitch just read this news bit about a Halloween party hosted by Julie Myers, who is head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was a costume party…some sort of office thing…and there was a costume contest. One employee dressed up in prison garb…and sported a wig of dreadlocs…and a face made up with brown makeup.

Blink.

There’s even photographic evidence of Ms. Myers getting her party on with the browned up employee, but those pictures were cleansed from the public record once it was explained to Julie that they were offensive. Julie originally thought the costume was wicked cool and “original”.

But, painting your face black or brown then behaving and dressing in a way that validates and perpetuates racial stereotypes isn’t new or original. That’s the shit that made Al Jolson a star way back in the day.Calling it bronzer, though...now that’s newish.

I've always wondered about the people in charge of enforcement. It's nice to know that my tax dollars are paying the salary of some ig’nant motherfucker exploring his inner minstrel through the magic of bronzer.

Bronzer?

Mercy.

Am I the only person…

…who cannot abide the unqualified statement that Ron Paul is such an awesome advocate for civil rights and personal freedom, or even that his is a coherent, consistent, and/or principled ideology, when he is virulently anti-choice?

There is absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, even remotely consistent about claiming a passionate support for personal freedoms and being simultaneously anti-choice.

I acknowledge that Paul has tried to jury-rig together something vaguely coherent by proposing federal legislation to define conception as the beginning of life, thereby suggesting he's a zealous defender of the civil rights of blastocysts, but that doesn't change the fact that he's still advocating forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term against her will, which, by any definition, is—at best—an encroachment on her civil liberty.

That is the very definition of hypocritical hackdom.

And it's but one example of such inconsistencies. Yes, he commendably voted against the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, but he also voted to ban gay adoptions. If you're a white, straight, Christian, American-born male with limitless self-interest, Ron Paul's a great candidate who surely does look like a grand champion of personal freedom.

For everyone else, not so much.

UPDATE: Glenn responds to my post with an argument that despite the appearance of tension between Paul's anti-choice position and "personal freedom" ideology, there nonetheless remains "a consistent, anti-choice libertarian position."

Libertarians generally believe that government coercion is illegitimate except to prevent one from directly harming another (hence the justification for laws prohibiting murder, assault, etc.). Thus, libertarians who believe on scientific grounds that a fetus is a "person" are arguably acting consistently (even if misguidedly) by advocating anti-abortion laws.

I acknowledge that the position as it relates to fetuses presumed to be persons is consistent. The failure of consistency is not as the policy relates to fetuses, but as it relates to pregnant women.

I'm mystified, quite frankly, by the argument that government coercion to prevent harming an "unborn person" makes for a consistent libertarian philosophy, despite the fact that said coercion does, by any definition, limit the freedom of the women who are forced into indentured servitude in service to the "unborn person." Like any other anti-choice argument, it only makes sense if the rights and interests of women are eradicated from the argument.

Federal law, state law, Jude Law—I don't care about the federalist consistency or the fetus-as-a-person framework. I'm saying, and I don't know how to make this any simpler, that if I have an wanted pregnancy, and Paul doesn't support my right to terminate it should I so choose, then he does not support my personal freedom, not to mention my basic right to bodily autonomy.

That's inconsistent with a libertarian ideology of personal freedom—unless libertarianism is only applicable insofar as it seeks to defend the freedom of men and "unborn persons."

UPDATE 2: Also Drum.

Senate Judiciary Approves Mukasey Nomination

The vote was 11-8. If Schumer (D-Asshole) and Feinstein (D-Idiot) hadn't voted with the nine Republicans on the panel, it would have been 10-9 blocking the nomination instead. So thanks a lot, douchebags.

The nomination now goes before the full Senate for a vote.

Cutest Primate Preservation News Evah!

National Geographic: "A new population of [shy, white-bearded] De Brazza's monkeys, a species thought to be near extinction in eastern Africa, has been discovered in Kenya, a scientist has reported. The discovery of the group, as well sightings of other rare monkeys in a remote northeastern reserve, is a happy note at an otherwise grim hour for the world's primates."

If Matilda were a monkey, she'd totally be a De Brazza, perched in her pizza box tree.

When All Else Fails...

The Kentucky governor's race ends today with incumbent Republican Ernie Fletcher behind Democrat Steve Beshear by double digits, so desperation set in over last weekend to the point that Pat Boone, the squeaky-clean 1950's crooner and evangelical Christian, recorded a robo-call to the electorate warning against -- wait for it -- gays taking over Kentucky if scandal-plagued Fletcher isn't re-elected.

Down to the last two days before voting booths open, Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher urged supporters to disregard polls that show him behind, while his running mate referred to the Democratic candidates as “San Francisco treats.”

Several Republicans — including the entertainer, Pat Boone — criticized Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear and his running mate Daniel Mongiardo this weekend for being endorsed of the Committee for Fairness and Individual Rights, a group that advocates equal treatment of gays and lesbians.

Boone, the singer and descendent of Daniel Boone, recorded a phone message for the Kentucky Republican Party that asked voters whether they “want a governor who’d like Kentucky to be another San Francisco.” Those calls went out to tens of thousands of homes Friday.

Then, last night, Fletcher’s lieutenant governor candidate Robbie Rudolph echoed that to a crowd of more than 200 GOP faithful in Lexington. “Do you want a couple of San Francisco treats or do you want a governor?” he asked.

Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, called it Rudolph’s “Rice-a-Roni speech” — referring to its famous jingle.

Beshear’s campaign dismissed it as a last minute ploy “to divert voter attention from the issues of honesty and integrity in state government.”

“Apparently the Fletcher camp has hit the panic button,” said Vicki Glass.

In a way it's kind of flattering to be a part of a group that can hold such power over the electorate that the mere suggestion that voting for a candidate will empower us to determine how things will get done by the new governor of Kentucky. I'm guessing that the number of gay people in Kentucky is probably the same number proportionally as it is everywhere else in the country -- roughly five to ten percent of the population -- yet we have such power. Wow.

You would think, however, if we really had that much power, then issues that are really important to us, such as equality in health benefits, inheritance, property ownership, adoption, and freedom from discrimination in employment or accomodation -- you can still get fired for being gay and landlords can refuse to rent to same-sex couples -- would all be relics of the past. But they're not, and the fact that the gay community is still fair game for discrimination and fearmongering shows that true equality and fair play awaits us.

I also think the Republicans in Kentucky flatter themselves when they get freaked out that the state will be overrun by the LGBT community. I've been to Kentucky many times, it's a beautiful state in a lot of places, and there are a lot of nice people there as well, but when you think of places that could be the next Gaytopia, the Bluegrass State doesn't immediately spring to mind. Besides, even if we did all move there, all we'd be looking for is a nice place to live and work and just go about our lives like everybody else, just like they do in Lexington, Louisville, Harlan, Henderson, Frankfort, Paducah, and San Francisco.

(HT to TPM.)

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Olbermann Special Comment on Torture

Transcript below.
Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the meaning of the story of former U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin.

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed:

The Presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity;

All the invocations of World War Three, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets;

All the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists…

All of it is now — after one revelation last week — transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating Attorney General — and the others — from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

“Waterboarding is torture,” Daniel Levin was to write.

Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protestor.

He was no troublemaking politician.

He was no table-pounding commentator.

Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American, and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances — even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared — or bought — off.

Charged — as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday — with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora’s box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation,” Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them… was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be water-boarded.

Mr. Bush — ever done anything that personally courageous?

Perhaps when you’ve gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?

Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you’ve spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you — whether they were your own Generals, or… Max Cleeland, or… Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame… or Daniel Levin?

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.

Instead, he was forced out as Acting Assistant Attorney General, nearly three years ago, because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn’t do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

And they water-boarded him and he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die — still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us — the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love — he could not convince his being… that he wasn’t drowning.

Water-boarding, he said, is torture.

Legally, it is torture!

Practically, it is torture!

Ethically, it is torture!

And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country’s 43rd President: “The United States of America… does not torture.”

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Water-boarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about — except, Sir, for the one detail you’d forgotten — that there are rules, and even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we’re Americans, Sir, and we’re better than that.

We’re better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not water-boarding was torture, had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight-suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn’t black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines…

And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Le Vin was branded “too independent” and “someone who could (not) be counted on.”

In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn’t count on to lie for you.

So, Levin was fired.

Because if it ever got out what he’d concluded, and the lengths to which he went, to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned water-boarding, and who-knows-what-else… anybody — you yourself, Sir — you would have been screwed.

And screwed you are.

It can’t be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest Attorney General Nominee.

Another patriot somewhere, listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he’d never heard of water-boarding, and refuse to answer in words… that which Daniel Levin answered on a water-board somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.

And this someone also heard George Bush say “The United States of America does not torture”… and realized either he was lying or this wasn’t the United States of America any more, and either way, he needed to do something about it.

Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.

We have United States Senators who need to do something about it, too.

Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said “enough.”

Senator Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system and he has failed.

What Senator Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.

It is obvious that both those Senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey’s confirmation.

And they should look into their own committee’s history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon, a guarantee of a Special Prosecutor (ultimately a Special Prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new Attorney General, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, you — before you confirm the President’s latest human echo tomorrow — you better be able to get a “yes” or a “no”… out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed — or fifty of them — but I’m not holding my breath. The “yes” or the “no” on water-boarding will have to suffice.

Because, remember… if you can’t get it, or you won’t… with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the water-boards — symbolic and otherwise — of George W. Bush.

Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn’t… who approved the water-boarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: why were they water-boarded?

Study after study for generation after generation, sir, has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn’t a problem, if you don’t care if the terrorist plots they tell you about, are the truth… or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a President simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared…

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he**didn’t** interrupt…

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a President pillage the Constitution…

Well, heck, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you… than an actual terrorist?

He’ll tell you every thing he ever fantasized doing, in his most horrific of daydreams — his equivalent of the day you “flew” onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you’d won in Iraq.

Now if that’s what this is all about — you tortured not because you’re so stupid you think torture produces confession — but you tortured because you’re smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then… you’re going to need all the lawyers you can find… because that crime wouldn’t just mean impeachment, would it Sir?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin’s eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding… has to vanish — and him, with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning, to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney, has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique, would somehow help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of water-boarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed…

[Video care of Petulant, of course.]

Colbert Drops out of Presidential Race

And a great wailing and gnashing of teeth arose from the Colbert Nation:

Stephen Colbert has dropped his bid for the White House.

His announcement came after the South Carolina Democratic Executive Council voted last week to keep the host of "The Colbert Report" off the state's primary ballot. The vote was 13-3.

…"Although I lost by the slimmest margin in presidential election history—only 10 votes—I have chosen not to put the country through another agonizing Supreme Court battle," Colbert said Monday in a statement. "It is time for this nation to heal."

…"I want to say to my supporters, this is not over," Colbert said. "While I may accept the decision of the Council, the fight goes on! The dream endures! ... And I am going off the air until I can talk about this without weeping."

Heh. It might also have something to do with that pesky writers' strike…

If you need me, I'll be watching Strangers with Candy reruns and quietly sobbing.

Don't Forget Your Daily Vote!

The 2007 Weblog Awards

As requested, this is your daily morning reminder to vote!

Happy Birthday, Mr. Shakes!!!

It’s my burfday!
I've mentioned before that when Mr. Shakes and I were dating, separated by an ocean and 4,000 miles, I once emailed to him a quatrain by Omar Khayyám quatrain on a day I was missing him even more than usual. He responded only by telling me to keep my eyes on my mailbox.

The next day, a package arrived from Britain that Mr. Shakes had sent nearly a week before, containing The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, with one dog-earned page. On that page was the exact same quatrain I had emailed.

Whenever someone asks me one of Those Questions, like what's your perfect date or what's your favorite way to pass an afternoon or what makes you happy, I always think of Mr. Shakes and "A book of verses underneath the bough, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou." I usually say "Hanging out with Mr. Shakes," lest I seem an even bigger pretentious geek than I've already revealed myself to be, but I'm thinking of our quatrain.

I love you, Mr. Shakes—and I'm damn glad you were born. Happy Birthday.

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Gentle Ben

Question of the Day

Well, I'm in Atlanta this week again on business. While I was on the phone with Melissa, she suggested that I bathe in champagne to help conserve water, and relieve myself in the empty bottles to avoid flushing the toilet.

And so, today's question is: What other creative conservation ideas do you have for me while I'm in town, Shakers?

Quote Of The Day

From today's White House presser:

Q: Is it ever reasonable to restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism?

MS. PERINO: In our opinion, no.

Caption This Photo

President Bush asks whether Big Oil would
prefer a handjob, or...something else.
President Bush responds to reporters questions as he meets with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, Nov. 5, 2007. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

We Need to Fix This

Ugh. There's so much wrong with this story, I hardly know where to begin. I guess I'll just begin with the way it's reported, the biggest problem with which is the headline: "Mentally disabled man gets probation for assaults." Pretty innocuous headline for a story that's reporting a man who confessed to sexually assaulting three young girls has been given probation at a judge's discretion, though the crimes to which he pleaded guilty (which were reduced after his plea) carry a mandatory prison term of 6 to 30 years.

But Judge Kathryn Creswell of DuPage County in Illinois decided that for 23-year-old Matthew Lucas, "Four years of probation, with treatment, is more appropriate than prison."

Now I'm not sure why the fuck it's an either-or proposition—although it reminds me of this story from last year in which a repeat rapist was sentenced to a mere 60 days in jail and compulsory treatment for sex offenders, because the judge didn't believe that punishment alone works and the system didn't provide for in-prison treatment. This appears to be a similar situation, given that Judge Creswell noted: "Prison would protect the public 100 percent, but he would get no treatment."

As part of his sentencing, Lucas will receive constant psychiatric counseling and monitoring. He has to appear before Creswell every two months and allow authorities to review all of his future mental health records.

Defense attorney Michael Norris presented evidence last week from Lucas's psychologist that the defendant, who works as a bagger at a local grocery, has the intelligence of an 8-to 10-year-old, approaching retardation, and is bipolar with psychotic tendencies.

"I acknowledge . . . that the defendant has led a difficult life," said Assistant State's Atty. Alex McGimpsey. "But we still have to protect the children. He has an impulsive desire to do these things he knows are wrong and he admits attraction to young female children."

McGimpsey said he was bothered by the fact that after Bloomingdale police begun investigating two of the incidents and interviewed Lucas, he committed a third offense.

I'm bothered by that, too—because it's clearly a compulsive disorder, from which psychiatric counseling and monitoring will likely do little to dissuade him. I'm wondering on what, precisely, Judge Croswell based her opinion that four years of probation with counseling is more appropriate than prison.

I don't really have a conclusion here, other than to wonder why on Planet Earth we are still forcing judges into an either-or scenario re: treatment/prison when it comes to sex offenders. In the best case scenario, a repeat offender (especially an admittedly compulsive one) would be incarcerated away from the prison's general population with intensive therapy. This either-or horseshit is worthless.

And, to be frank, I'm getting pretty tired of seeing judges err on the side of what's most "appropriate" for the offender (as here, too). Seems to me, in an imperfect world, it ought to be a sex offender's victims and potential victims who get the best end of the bargain, not the sex offender.

Wounded Iraq Veteran Loses Three Children in Car Crash

I don't even know what to say about this story, except fuck this fucking war and fuck the twisted fates that turned these events:

Army Spc. John Austin Johnson was waiting for his wife, Lisa, and their three kids to visit him at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio when the deadly crash occurred on Interstate 10 about 12 miles east of Ozona.

Lisa Johnson overcorrected the steering in her sport utility vehicle after encountering a blast of wind on the drive from El Paso, causing the car to roll at least four times, officials have said.

The couple's youngest children, 2-year-old Logan and 5-year-old Ashley, died at the scene. Tyler Johnson suffered massive head injuries [and died Saturday after hanging on for three weeks].

…Johnson, who is stationed at Fort Bliss, has survived five brushes with improvised explosive device blasts during two years in Iraq, Schmidt said last month. The latest left him with a traumatic brain injury, and he speaks with a severe stutter.

In the comments section at the link, there's a lot of blaming going on because the two older children were not wearing seatbelts, and I don't want to see that here. My parents were always ferociously insistent that my sister and I wore seatbelts—and, at that age, there was more than one occasion when I quietly slipped out of it during long road trips without their knowing. Even the most responsible parents in the world have kids that do stupid things, and the difference between doesn't matter and a life-altering tragedy happens in a mere moment.

According to the El Paso Times, Bank of America has established a memorial fund in the youngest children's names. "A contribution may be made at any Bank of America in the country by giving the teller the exact fund name ["the Ashley and Logan Johnson Memorial Fund"] and noting that it is domiciled in Texas."

Separated at Birth

But only one of them cranks it up to 11, bitchez.
(Mr. Shakes gets the credit for noticing the resemblance when we were watching Spinal Tap for his first time and my nonillionth or so yesterday.)

Hey, SJP—Why don't you STFU?

You know, I used to love Sarah Jessica Parker. She was Patty Greene! She was Rusty! She was Janey Glenn! She was Carolyn! She was SanDeE*, for crying out loud!

Then she was Carrie Bradshaw—a character with whom I have a very love-hate relationship, much as the show of which it was the star, because for all the infuriating, anti-feminist, anything-for-my-guy claptrap that the character and the show offered up for consumption, there was even more groundbreaking, moving, anything-for-my-girls messaging that spoke to the abiding friendships among women outside of the usual narratives of cattiness, competition, and other disparaging clichés.

And I always had this sense that SJP was, in real life, a sort of really progressive, woman-positive geek girl like me.

But here's the thing: Progressive, woman-positive geek girls don't give public cover to abusers of women, and they don't respond to being named Maxim's Unsexiest Woman Alive by saying they don't care about the survey and: "What they don't know is that one day I'll wake up fat. But I'll still be happy, just like I am now."

Because, ya know, if you're fat, you can't possibly be sexy. I'm relieved to hear, however, that SJP will still manage to find happiness despite being a hideous monster, when she wakes up fat one day.

He's Our Son of a Bitch

From the New York Times:

The government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, making no concessions a day after seizing emergency powers, rounded up leading opposition figures and said Sunday that parliamentary elections could be delayed for as long as a year.

Security forces were reported to have detained about 500 opposition party figures, lawyers and human rights advocates on Sunday, and about a dozen privately owned television news stations remained off the air. International broadcasters, including the BBC and CNN, were also cut off.

The crackdown, announced late Saturday night after General Musharraf suspended the Constitution, was clearly aimed at preventing public demonstrations that political parties and lawyers were organizing for Monday.

“They are showing zero tolerance for protest,” said Athar Minallah, a lawyer and a former minister in the Musharraf government.

In Islamabad, police forces continued to block the Parliament and Supreme Court buildings. But the day was mostly quiet, there was no formal curfew, and most people went about their business as usual. Several small protests were broken up, including one involving two dozen people who scuffled with the police.

Police officers armed with tear gas broke up a meeting at the headquarters of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission in Lahore and took dozens of people away in police vans, including elderly women, schoolteachers and about 20 lawyers, according to people at the meeting. In all, about 80 lawyers were detained, and many others who faced arrest warrants remained in hiding, according to members of a nationwide lawyer’s lobby that has grown increasingly influential as an anti-Musharraf voice.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration is a little flustered by this event, not that it wasn't predictable. The Pakistani Supreme Court was on the verge of ruling that Musharraf couldn't become the president and remain the head of the army, so he pre-empted their ruling by declaring the state of emergency. (Now there's one way to deal with "activist judges.") But as far as the Bush administration is concerned, they say the most important thing is the war on terror, so if a few million people get denied their constitutional rights, opposition leaders get arrested, and the media is shut down, it's all for the right reason, right?

For the last seven years, the United States has propped up a dictator because he's nominally said he's on our side. As one statesman noted back during the Cold War in talking about a brutal dictator who was also anti-Soviet (and echoing American statesmen going back to the Civil War), "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Simple Answers to Simple Questions

OMFG. Some days I swear to the fates I just want to crawl back into bed.

Jessica points to an article in the Times Online which asks, right in its subhead, if feminism has "gone too far" by giving women control of their sex lives. I can't believe the idea women having control of their own sex lives is even seriously at issue, but so it is:

The simple answer to the question posed therein is no. No—feminism has not gone too far by giving women control of their sex lives. And the simple answer about a relationship that's risked by saying no to sex when you don't want to have it is that it's a relationship not worth bloody saving in the first place.

To paraphrase Jessica, the whole article smacks of "Imagine the nerve of a woman thinking that her sexuality belongs to herself!" And the last time I saw that attitude was…two posts ago, in which comments in response to the assertion that a woman's body is her own were recounted, one after the other exhibiting the attitude that a woman's body shown in public is assumed to be there for the taking.

The difference between "dont wear the uniform if you cant play the game" and "too many women see the sexual side of their lives as something to be claimed completely and utterly as their own" is effectively nothing. Whether it's a random dude suggesting that women who dress provocatively owe something to the men they titillate, or a doctor suggesting that women must "share" their sexuality with male partners and regard sex as a duty, it's just the same shit being sold in different packages.