the Shackle Report

Wanting to clarify a past article written by Elena Kagan which called Supreme Court confirmation hearings “a hollow, vapid charade”, several senators went on the attack on the first day of her own hearings, gesticulating wildly, pulling on their ears, and pointing at their eyes as they desperately tried to convey their meaning.

Senator Orrin Hatch brought out a dusty old dictionary and laboriously gestured through the definitions of “hollow”, demanding to know which she meant: “having a cavity” (he cupped his hands)“having a depression” (looked very unhappy) “without worth” (pretended to have no job and inject drugs) “having an empty feeling” (pretended to disembowel himself – faint cheers from the gallery), or “a valley” (He never managed to convey this. Everyone agreed it was a very hard one)

Ms Kagan gestured back that she meant “without worth”, by mimicking the Senator’s shooting drugs move, which brought frowns to the faces of everyone in the room, both because she was saying the hearings were worthless, and because even faked drug use in the Capitol made people uneasy. When Ms. Kagan tried to convey that the comment had been taken out of context, no one quite got it despite her balletic contortions, though there were some who motioned that they thought people were being willfully ignorant.

Patrick Leahy then took the floor to demonstrate the meaning of “vapid” – “without liveliness or spirit” – and everyone got it before he made a move. Ms. Kagan signaled that this was indeed the meaning she meant to convey with the comment, bringing another round of exaggerated frowns to everyone in the room.

Joe Barton had considerable difficulty signaling the word “charade”, for which difficulty he mimed an expression of apology, but he was much helped by people already knowing the word charade was coming, though some made crazy, disdainful expressions that suggested that people were feigning not getting it for a while just to punish him for his excessive and somewhat gay affection for BP while everyone else wants to pointlessly vilify them.

Having confirmed what Ms Kagan meant by her comment – what she said – an intermission was called for by signaling eating chex mix and talking about their pets, their lawns, and their children who have handcuffed themselves to their beds to avoid looking for a job.

Scot Crawford

Senator Orrin Hatch has raised some controversy in Washington over his proposal to force people receiving unemployment to submit to drug tests, and if found positive, to withhold benefits and then put those people into treatment. Then, all that money saved from withholding money from those people could be used to pay the new people required to administer the tests. Mr. Hatch has gone himself one better and suggested that the states hire the people who fail the drug tests to administer the drug tests, adding an important element of job training to the formula, and tying the whole thing up in a neat bow, like a gift from the GOP.

The move is part of Mr. Hatch comprehensive plan to alleviate the unemployment problem the nation faces, which plan includes not extending benefits for those whose allotted time has run out, since they should have planned for the future and set some of those benefits aside for this moment. This will lower the unemployment rate because many of those people will simply kill themselves, and the rest can be hired to carry the corpses to a Potter’s ground. Some will sit down somewhere and get high until they’ve sold all they own, then recover with a bout of entreprenurial spirit arising from the power of soul shattering desperation.

He also has suggested reducing the amount of time people qualify for benefits to three days. Also, since the drug testing proposal does away with any search and seizure concerns, he has suggested subjecting them to waterboarding to determine if they have committed a crime, had thought about it, were a terrorist trying to finance an operation with the hard-earned money of American what-used-to-be workers, or if they had really spent every single day looking for a job for eight hours with a half hour lunch and two fifteen minute breaks in an economy where there are no jobs.

When some question the wisdom of taking the only source of income away from people who in theory have a drug problem, Mr. Hatch said; “I have been to those drug treatment centers, and I will tell you, there are none who are more true to the American ethos of rugged individualism than those broke and broken people sitting there in a cloud of despair. They will pick themselves up, beat the odds with God at their side, and be back in the saddle rustlin’ doggies before you can pull your pistol. Anyway, they don’t have to pay to sit in an AA meeting, unless you count those donations, but I think those are voluntary.”

Mr. Hatch also offered to submit to drug testing himself, to show solidarity with the unemployed and under the notion that the economy crashed on his watch, but the pharmaceutical industry objected, saying Mr. Hatch and all three tablespoons of his blood was proprietary and testing him would bring up intellectual property issues.

Mr. Hatch also noted that is important to always have the citizenry terrified that the tiny but wildly efficient government is going to show up at the door with needles looking for blood.  “Keeps ‘em on their knees…I mean toes…”

Scot Crawford

After Tony Hayward’s latest gaffe, in which he claimed the Gulf Coast brown pelicans weren’t bothered by the oil because they’re already brown, BP has offered huge incentives to anyone who will deal with the oil spill, including giving them Ireland.

No one immediately started clamoring for the job, but there are reports that the Israel Defense Forces have expressed interest.  Some have speculated that Israel wants Ireland as a potential first colony, thinking that the shared history of persecution would be fertile ground for a new infinite conflict.

Benjamin Netanyahu said that his elite forces were perhaps the only ones capable of stopping the oil, by rappelling into the pipe and overreacting as hard as they can out of irritatingly justifiable sanctimony and a rightful suspicion that the oil is anti-Semitic. That, plus the pressure of uncontrollably gushing international condemnation from anti-Semites with short memories and no taste for history could very well overwhelm the oil coming out at 5,000 psi, and blow it out the other side of the globe. There, Israel could then sequester the oil for its own uses, freeing it from the need to buy anti-Semitic oil from anyone and everyone who has any, including Hamas when one of their IDF tanks runs out of gas in Gaza.

BP is weighing it’s options, including appointing Helen Thomas new spokesperson.

Scot Crawford

BP, the energy giant responsible for the Gulf oil spill, has finally hit upon a clean-up and capping plan they claim is much more feasible than trying to fill the hole with golf balls, now that Tiger Woods has hurt himself.

Noting that Greece is in a financial bind these days and that the Greek people are famously hirsute, and that the hair socks sent to the Gulf from salons around the world have protected the Gulf wetlands like the levees protected New Orleans, BP has floated the following proposal to the Prime Minister of Greece: If Greece will send its citizens to swim in the Gulf for as long as it takes to soak up the oil, BP will pay down the beleaguered nation’s debt, promise not to drill for oil off Greek shores, and return some of the antiquities taken by the British over the years. The people will be squeegee’d off to collect the oil for refining, and the well will be allowed to gush until it runs dry on its own. This will mean that there will be no need for future drilling, the field being dry, and no risk of future oil spills.

Initial responses to the proposal were subdued, with the Greek Prime Minister noting frostily; “It is the Turks that are really hairy. Have the barbarians at BP never heard the phrase; ‘he has a body like a Greek god’? Does ‘The Discus Thrower’ have fur?”

The Turkish Ambassador said that he was surprised the Greeks said anything without hiding in a horse first.

BP is now considering withdrawing the proposal, not wanting a blood spill to get out of control in the Mediterranean before they have the technology to cap it.

                                                                                                                                            Scot Crawford

“The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” by Maggie Cutler ran as a biweekly (and later a monthly) column from November, 1999 through January, 2002 in the Web-based literary magazine (and subsequent dating service) nerve.com. The column’s premise was that Kitty, like the rest of America, could not pry sex and politics apart.

It was the height of the dot.com bubble. Kitty was spending her days trading online in the loft she shared with her documentary filmmaking husband, Max. At lunchtime, while cruising news and gossip sites, she would get so excited, she’d have to lie down on her red plush couch and fantasize graphically about being as close to power as a girl can be, which was usually closer than girls who have all their clothes on can ever get.

The column also ran in Nerve Magazine, nerve.com’s shortlived foray into print. When HBO made a documentary pilot about nerve.com, it included a two minute animated short starring Kitty as drawn by Ward Sutton, whose strip, Sutton Impact, is now widely syndicated. His version of Kitty appears in her logos. HBO’s pilot aired under the title, “Downloading Sex,” and was played frequently during the hours of the night when children and snakes are presumed to be asleep.

Kitty began her career at the height of Monicagate. Republican hypocrisy on the subject of fucking underlings was either hilarious or spikes-in-your-head-like, depending on your own personal way of handlng government duplicity.

Many people thought the column was simply pornographic, only I was never one of them. Kitty got me hot, but not in that way. All 40 some-odd of the Kitty columns were extensively researched via Nexis, and a surprising amount of the erotic content in them was extracted or extrapolated from the way media were framing events. The image of Dick Cheney as an octopus, for example, a fleshopod with slimy, over-active tentacles, came straight off of CNN. John Ashcroft’s ties were big and phallic enough to frighten horses without any help from me, and women who had any proximity to powerful men — whether as wives, daughters or appointees, were treated to endless speculation as to their sexual preferences. I saw sex being used by the mass media as a distraction from serious issues, and I was trying to turn that around.

Then, after 9-11, many people called a moratorium on humor. Kitty’s fantasy about Osama bin Laden, for example, was decreed “offensive” — and was published carrying a disclaimer by several editors at nerve. It didn’t seem to matter that Kitty fantasized capturing Osama after she had her way with him; to them she had stepped over the enemy line just by imagining him as human. Clearly, the terrorists had won.

For that, and various other reasons, the “fit” for Ms. Lyons at nerve.com was no longer juicy, and, (although all the columns are archived there, still accessible to members) she went into exile, surfacing only briefly in a theatrical review entitled “No Exit Strategy,” directed by Steve Williford at Makor in the pre-election fall of 2004, in which Cynthia Mace brought Kitty’s Ashcroft fantasy to a nightly pitch of ecstasy.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m bringing Kitty back at this particular moment. These are not sexy times, although sex seems to remain at the top of the political agenda, albeit in the topmost half of the missionary position. But I think it’s because Kitty is so clever at turning her pain and her helplessness into her pleasure — however momentarily or foolishly— that I still find her touching and germane.

I will gradually put selected columns from my archive up online in clumps of three or four. I’m grouping them by the type of her imaginary playmates rather than by chronology. The new episodes in Kitty’s life will appear irregularly in the main pages of the Shackle Report under the banner “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa.”

— M. C.

Click here for “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” archive index

Click here for the new column, “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa”

BOOKS — ADDICTION LIT — CDs and DVDs — SMART-WEAR

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Not all shackles are undesirable. Not the ones we sell here, anyway.

Connect to Amazon.com through our site, and we get a little kickback from whatever you buy during that session. So, please bookmark this page, and click one of the books below to enter Amazon. Thanks.

Oh, BTW, the gentleman pictured above was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of Bristol, a brilliant 19th Century engineer. He is posed beside his ship, the SS Great Britain, the first large ocean liner to use a screw propeller. His proud irrelevance reminds us of our own.

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Self-loathing for Beginners

by Lynn Phillips

(If you’re going to do it, do it right.)

Self-Loathing for Beginners is a wickedly funny guide to appreciating self-loathing properly done. Whatever your current level of self-loathing expertise, SL4B will help you to style your self-loathing to succeed in fashion, show business, interpersonal relationships and art. And that is great news, because maximizing your self-loathing is a trend you’ll hate yourself if you miss.

Now available in Britain via Aurum Press Ltd. as I Can Make You Loathe Yourself

The Eight O’Clock Ferry From the Windward Side

Clive Stafford Smith’s strangely charming memoir of his days defending detainees at the Guantanamo Bay gulag meanders into a real-life critique of pro-torture theory. Without ever fully defusing the logic of the “ticking bomb” rationale for torture, Smith reminds us in a civil, almost bemused way that this argument has little relevance to the reality of the cases he has seen. In the safety vs. justice debate, Smith’s argument amounts to: “Our safety will be procured by torturing men who, if they ever had any useful information, have it no longer? You’ve got to be kidding.”

The Dark Side

With the cheerful perversity of a forensic entomologist, Jane Mayer dissects the Bush administration’s dark materials. You can get a taste of her journalistic thoroughness and glee from her July 14th Harper’s interview. The main thrust of her investigation is into the illegality as well as the inefficacy of “The Program” as the fasces of Cheney’s sadistic interrogation policies are known. Mayer kicks ass and names names. A staff reporter for teh New Yorker since 1995, she has been filing regular reports on the war on terror since ’03, and a number of her pieces can be found on their site.
The Search for Osama — The Dark Sites — Outsourcing Torture — and more.

>Get Your War On

Without an inside track or an investigator’s skills, Rees cuts to the war’s quick. He’s clear-eyed, profane and funny. His computer-graphic everybodies, like us, find themselves sinking in quicksand; we know better than to struggle; but that doesn’t mean that we can’t complain. David Rees rocks.

Life Without Shackles

Sexy, loose, boozy, rich and notorious. What’s not to like about Ava? Well, okay, maybe her ex-husbands Mickey Rooney, Howard Hughes and Artie Shaw, or her other ex-husband and sparring partner, Frank Sinatra. But she’s all yours, now, thanks to Lee Server’s Ava Gardner : “Love Is NothingӅ. If you’re still hungry for large-living, dead icons, Server can also offer you his equally amusing bio: Robert Mitchum : “Baby I Don’t Care””. Server can’t conjure up the tabloid soul of Hollywood like Nathanial West in Day of the Locust, Bruce Wagner in The Chrysanthemum Palace, or Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon, but he’ll do well enough on a cloudy day, when you’re tired of counting the number of people who think dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

Torture 101

How best to celebrate this blessed new day than by giving your nostalgic uncles, sadistic bosses and boyishly morbid nephews a book all about the vile things people of every religion and clime have contrived to do to each other throughout history? Author Daniel P. Mannix was a frequent contributer to “True: The Man’s Magazine.”, and his prose style has that jokey but lurid twang men in the Fifties, who are now in their fifties, so loved. Before you wrap it, you might want to dip into it a bit yourself. Reading about bloody, genocidal Aztec sacrifices might help you understand what scale of discomfort your government is referencing when it claims it isn’t torturing detainees.

Cosmos-politan

If you’ve ever wondered whether the human mind is a sort of shackle all on its own, this is the book you can’t finish that thought without. It is a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s classic (40’s) excursion into the joys and pitfalls of obsessive paranoid narrative, the nearly universal impulse to imagine that one thing leads to another. Droll, sexy and smarter than a slap, Witold has accomplished the impossible and made serious philosophy fun. A pleasure and a charming antidote to every conspiracy theory on your list. Buy two. You’ll want one to cuddle with on snowy nights.

Torture, Ow!

Here we have a book that is everything we hope not to be: Self-serious, depressing and certain. But someone’s got to do it, and who better to edit a compendium of essays on torch-ah than than Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, the group that goosed McCain into falling out of goose-step with the administration on this issue. This is the perfect gift for all those on your gift list who would like to save the world, but need to be tortured into doing it.

Contributors include — Michael Ignatieff on whether torture is ever justified, Juan Méndez on the victim’s perspective, David Rieff on why the human rights community is naive about torture, Jamie Felner on domestic torture within US prisons, Sir Nigel Rodley on negotiating with torturers, Julia Hall on rendition to torturing countries, Jim Ross on the history of torture. Stop! Enough! Just buy it and give it away to the deserving.

…………….

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From the Times:

C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones

The role of [Blackwater] in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater.

—Or we’ll resilient your fucking ass.

In interviews on Thursday, current and former government officials provided new details about Blackwater’s association with the assassination program, which began in 2004 not long after Porter J. Goss took over at the C.I.A. The officials said that the spy agency did not dispatch the Blackwater executives with a “license to kill.” Instead, it ordered the contractors to begin collecting information on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s leaders, carry out surveillance and train for possible missions.

“The actual pulling of a trigger in some ways is the easiest part, and the part that requires the least expertise,” said one government official familiar with the canceled C.I.A. program. “It’s everything that leads up to it that’s the meat of the issue.”

—”I mean, we’re not gonna have the pathetic government drones with the great health care benefits and pension plans do the hard stuff. They’re not incentivized. They don’t have the fire in the belly. Anyway, the more the government gets involved with anything the worse it gets. You’ll have people waiting in lines, getting euthanized by beaurocrats sitting at computers… FREEEEEEDOOOOOM!”

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.

—Except to say; “What if Blackwater provides information on my whereabouts to a Predator?”

A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not respond to a request for comment.

—Because she doesn’t work for Blackwater. She works for Xe.

Blackwater employees assigned to the Predator bases receive training at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to learn how to load Hellfire missiles and laser-guided smart bombs on the drones, according to current and former employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting the company.

—I’m running out of things to say myself.

The role of contractors in intelligence work expanded after the Sept. 11 attacks, as spy agencies were forced to fill gaps created when their work forces were reduced during the 1990s, after the end of the cold war.

—Fucking Clinton. That fucking guy’s legacy just seems to have no end. Ten years after he leaves office and we’re still suffering his sickening pacifism.

More than a quarter of the intelligence community’s current work force is made up of contractors, carrying out missions like intelligence collection and analysis and, until recently, interrogation of terrorist suspects.

“There are skills we don’t have in government that we may have an immediate requirement for,” Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who ran the C.I.A. from 2006 until early this year, said during a panel discussion on Thursday on the privatization of intelligence.

—”Pulling triggers, that’s what we do. We practice on our fingers.”

General Hayden, who succeeded Mr. Goss at the agency, acknowledged that the C.I.A. program continued under his watch, though it was not a priority. He said the program was never prominent during his time at the C.I.A., which was one reason he did not believe that he had to notify Congress.

—”I mean, c’mon people it’s no big deal. It’s not like we were hiring mercenaries we pay many times what we pay our own agents to torture people and provide us with the intelligence we need to drop bombs on people. Just because mercenaries work for whoever pays them best is no reason to get all worried. We’ll just always outbid everyone. Relax.”

Some background…or blackground…or backwash…

[Blackwater] announced on February 13, 2009, that it would operate under the new name “Xe”. In a memo sent to employees, President Gary Jackson wrote that the new name “reflects the change in company focus away from the business of providing private security.” A spokesman for the company stated that it feels the Blackwater name is too closely associated with the company’s work in Iraq.[9] Spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said there was no meaning in the new name, which the company spent over a year to arrive at in an internal search.[10]

—They’re nihilists, and it took a year of internal searching to figure that out.

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From the Times:

Mental Stress Training Is Planned for U.S. Soldiers

The Army plans to require that all 1.1 million of its soldiers take intensive training in emotional resiliency, military officials say.

—Well, you may want to go easy at first. Too much of the “Drop and give me twenty feelings, soldier!” might break ‘em.

Usually taught in weekly 90-minute classes, the methods seek to defuse or expose common habits of thinking and flawed beliefs that can lead to anger and frustration — for example, the tendency to assume the worst. (“My wife didn’t answer the phone; she must be with someone else.”)

—Oh boy. That dear John letter’s gonna leave a mark.

In one role-playing exercise, Sgt. First Class James Cole of Fort Riley, Kan., and a classmate acted out Sergeant Cole’s thinking in response to an order late in the day to have his exhausted men do one last difficult assignment.
“Why is he tasking us again for this job?” the classmate asked. “It’s not fair.”
“Well, maybe,” Sergeant Cole responded. “Or maybe he’s hitting us because he knows we’re more reliable.”

—Or maybe he’s doing the other Sgt. and doesn’t want to lose his boy. Or maybe he just doesn’t like your attitude and would rather see you get killed. Or maybe the other guys have their boots off already. Or maybe he’s trying to build character by pushing you. Or maybe he wants to test your emotional resiliency by making you hate him and seeing if you’ll frag him. Or maybe he’s just inept as shit and it hasn’t registered that you’re exhausted. Or maybe he just doesn’t give a shit because he’s drunk, or stoned, or going home in a month. Sounds like you might be replacing possibly accurate thinking with some fresh, steaming tripe. But, whatever, as long as they’re more resilient. Didn’t the Bible used to take care of this kind of shit?

Col. Darryl Williams, the program’s deputy director said: “For years, the military has been saying, ‘Oh, my God, a suicide, what do we do now?…

—…oh, oh, I’m gonna kill myself!’ Now we’ve really decided to suck it up and get control of ourselves.”

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From the Times:

2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11’s Wake

Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

…the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

With the backing of [the CIA] Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep.

Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times. The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up.

But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

—The same two psychologists are also credited with coming up with the diagnosis; ‘closure’.

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From The Times:

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security

WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

—Although…there’s this:

9 Dead After Copter and Plane Collide Over Hudson

—…and this:

Regional pilot’s life: Hardly glamorous
Investigation into N.Y. crash sheds light on problems

:

Alex Lapointe, a 25-year-old copilot for a regional airline, says he routinely lifts off knowing he has gotten less sleep than he needs. And once or twice a week, he says, he sees the captain next to him struggling to stay alert.

But many regional pilots, paid entry-level wages that are sometimes no better than a job at McDonald’s, can not afford even a crash pad.

“I know a guy who bought a car that barely ran and parked it in the employee lot at his base airport, and slept in his car six or seven times a month,” said Frank R. Graham Jr., a former regional pilot and airline safety director who runs a safety consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C.

—Seems more likely we’re all gonna die of pilot error.

—So let’s see…Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are in for a tough time…and just when things over there were really starting to settle down…

You know what I have to say to Climate Change? Bring it on!

This is fun
:

Iraqis Take the Lead, With U.S. Trailing

The Iraqi company’s sole armored Humvee, an American hand-me-down, had no spare tire, so they left it behind.
Marching up the canal under a scorching midday sun was hot work, and the Iraqis soon used up their water. The Americans replenished it for them.

“These guys are really competent, though.”

—They left the water behind because the bottle didn’t have a cap?

Now, he said, the challenge is for the Iraqis to take control after years of depending on the Americans. “We got to kick the crutch out from under them,” he said.

—Then you could tie a string across the doorway so a bucket of water falls on them. That’d be funny, too, since they forgot to bring some.

Judging from the weapons-hunting patrol, that kick is still a way off in reality, even if expectations on the Iraqi side have significantly changed.
At least Sergeant Jassim had already been trained on the metal detector.

—”I find Humvee!”

The goal was to sweep about two miles of canal bed; after a bit over one mile, the Iraqis stopped and insisted that it must have been about two miles by then. Then they complained that the saw grass was getting too thick to continue; one of the American sergeants urged them on, demonstrating how easy it was to break the brittle fronds and move them out of the way.
“We haven’t had our lunch yet,” one of the Iraqi soldiers said.

—Check the temperature on your wrist before you give them the bottle, Sarge.

Another Hurdle for the Jobless: Credit Inquiries :

Digging out of debt keeps getting harder for the unemployed as more companies use detailed credit checks to screen job prospects.

Business executives say that they have an obligation to be diligent and to protect themselves from employees who may be unreliable, unwise or too susceptible to temptation to steal, and that credit checks are a help.

“If I see too many negative things coming up on a credit check, it’s one of those things that raises a flag with me,” said Anita Orozco, director of human resources at Sonneborn, a petrochemical company based in Mahwah, N.J.

—If you look close, you’ll see the white flag raised by the applicant. And, uh, not to seem like too much of a pollyanna like I do so often, but isn’t it possible that someone who’s in dire financial straits might be a darn good hire, what with them needing money so bad? I mean, why aren’t you guys doing credit checks to see who’s so bad off they’ll work long hours for shit money just to get a paycheck? It’s just a version of what employers who hire immigrants do. Though, I guess that could set off a financial firestorm through the country where people renege on debts they could pay just to get a job. That wouldn’t be good. Also, hasn’t it been amply shown that financial wizards are anything but that, so somebody whose money life tanked isn’t necessarily someone with poor judgement? This sounds akin to the argument that we shouldn’t provide single-payer health care because all those damn gold-bricking poor folks will be running off to the doctor every time they get a boo-boo, and thus bankrupt the country. I know I’d enjoy being sick all the time if I knew it was free.

Chris Durang blogged about torture on Huffington today to promote his new play. It’s called, he writes. . .

Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, and — hoping you’ll forgive the “advertisements for myself” quality of this — it is a comedy, kind of in the Dr. Strangelove style but with a few more likable characters.

He agrees with Rich (see below) that the purpose of using techniques adapted from Chinese torturers seeking false confessions was not information discovery but rationales for pre-fab policy objectives (Iraq).
He doesn’t use the word treason.
He wants Obama to let investigations go forward without involving himself in them.
All very decent and moderate.
His post is neither in the Strangelove style, nor comedic, and it goes on and on and on.
Hopefully the play is tighter.
Its main characters are, he says, “a bit like Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.”

I’ll wait to see it on YouTube.

Frank Rich, in his NY Times column last Sunday, is one of the few torture pundits who seems to get the point of why Bush administration architects of US torture policies should stand trial: the White House used torture, to produce not valuable truths, but useful lies.

The four recently released White House torture memos were designed to sanction the torture of “mastermind” Abu Zubaydah, a man known by then to be mentally unstable, a hireling who had not produced any new intelligence in the many years of his confinement. As Rich says:

…there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

In other words, the use of torture by the Bush White House was possibly not intended to produce intelligence — it was more likely designed to manufacture it. Pundits currently cogitating about “24,” ticking bombs and leaders “acting in good faith to protect our freedom” all know that this is what torture does best: it extracts from the victim whatever words the master wants or needs him to say, and the White House knew it.

When you look at the chronology of the recently released torture memos as Rich has done, and when you contemplate the obscenely inhumane treatment of Zubaydah (he was waterboarded at least 83 times in ’02, long after any information he might ever have had would remain relevant), it’s hard to imagine that the intentions and actions of the administration in this case were strategically designed to protect our country. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that the administration’s intentions were anything but criminal, and if this is wrong, the parties concerned should have a chance to clear their ames of suspicion.

Obama needs to find another way to get this hot potato off his plate than to announce he’s not hungry. He can’t dismiss US approval of torture techniques as “The Past.” As had been pointed out by people who give a damn, all criminal acts take place in the past. Politically motivated uses of torture are not “mistakes” made in the fog of war; they are threats to our freedoms as great as any the enemy has thrown at us. You could go so far as to call it treason, and I wish one of those pussies with a pulpit would.

Andy Worthington has been doing superlative coverage of US torture-policy contortions now-in-progress. Among the gifts he has on offer are, 1) his book (click it to order) 2) this link to a piece by Philip Zelikow, the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia and ex-deputy to Secretary Rice at Department of State, 2005-2007, and 3) the following comprehensive list of issue-links:

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? (all April 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

see here for his definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

• About me
• Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 1)
• Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 2)
• Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 3)
• Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 4)
• Links
• The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (1) – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (2) – Tora Bora
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – “Osama’s Bodyguards”
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (4) – Escape to Pakistan (The Saudis)
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (5) – Escape to Pakistan (The Yemenis)
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (6) – Escape to Pakistan (Uyghurs and others)
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (8) – Captured in Afghanistan
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One)
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (10) – Seized in Pakistan (Part Two)
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six “Ghost Prisoners”
• The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (12) – The Last of the Afghans (Part Two)
  

Blackwater Inc., the mercenary army company known for its tendency to slaughter Iraqi civilians, is changing its name to “Xe,” according to AP.
Said a company spokesperson: ”It’s part of a re-branding effort to de-emphasize our private security work. It’s pronounced like the letter “Z,” and we chose it because “KKK” was already taken.”

AS TRUE
AS IT GETS
AS LONG
AS YOU GET IT

CZAR OUT!

In a surprise move evidently pointed at reconciling the opposing sides of the torture divide, Barack Obama has appointed the character Dr. Gregory House of Fox Channel’s hit show “House” to be his new Torture Czar.

“Though a notoriously difficult person,” said Mr. Obama at a press conference given at one of Dick Cheney’s undisclosed locations, which was disclosed as a WW II era Sherman tank on display on the median of I-70 in the Wormwood District of Washington DC, “Dr. House has a good heart, and is well-versed in pain in all its many, many facets. He is conversant in both physical and mental agony, and is an authority on the speculative link between the two. He is uncannily proficient at making inferior people give him information by telling them what lying shits they are and not touching them, which, although not covered in the Army Field Manual, seems to be remarkably effective. He has also single-handedly made neediness cool, which is something for which liberal Americans have been hungering forever. His show is also broadcast on the network that has supplied us with some of the most egregiously fascistic and bullying conservative commentary that has ever been inflicted on the world. It is my hope that these two sides can come to a detente with this appointment.”

“For too long”, the President went on to say, “Americans have been required to stand idly by while their elected officials and military personnel have carried out their countries’ torture policies in secret, except for all the news coverage. They have felt left out, needy, isolated, tormented. Every day has been Black Friday; great sales, can’t get to them. No more. From this day forward, the torture of our enemies will be televised weekly on Fox, where Dr. House will grapple with tough moral cases about how much torture is ok, is it good torture or bad torture, who should be tortured, and whether or not medical personnel should engage in torture. I smell Emmys.”

Asked for comment, Jack Bauer of the Fox show “24″, contacted via a secure cell-phone connection that was surprisingly clear, lacking in the usual dead spots and break-ups, said: “That appointment was mine. Chloe, get me the president. I don’t want to do it, but if I have to beat the shit out of Greg House to save my country, I will. Inwardly, I’ll be conflicted about it, but it will be the right thing to do. We are running out of time, Chloe! And…I love you.”

— Scot Crawford

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From Global Research:

BAILOUT THIS!
The Stabilization of the Financial Sector: The Holy Grail of Economic Salvation

Idiocy is usually described as “endlessly repeating the same process, hoping for a different result”.

—Is it? I thought that was insanity. Or life. Or being human. Or just me.

Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden et al are straining at the leash to get the Bailout Ball rolling once again. The stabilization of the financial sector, as elusive as it has been so far, has become the Holy Grail of Economic salvation… The Knights of the Oval Table are gathered to plan their mission as their beleaguered subjects are trying to batter down the castle gates….

—Oh, I get it, it’s like medieval times, you’re saying, but without the Black Plague and an average life-span of three months. And the country is being run by god-appointed monarchs and their cabal of the privileged, and everyone else is a filthy, illiterate, expendable serf. I don’t know. My credit cards still work, my car still runs, and I can still get a job. If I wanted to buy a cow and get to whatever status is just above peasant, I could, though it would stink up my apartment like crazy, though I could maybe sequester the methane and cook with it.

The question begs to be asked, and this is where the cynic in me dominates, what’s the plan?

—I wasn’t begging. I was waiting. Is it cynical to imply that the Dark Ages are returning? Might be just fuckin’ batshit.

When they [ the recipients of the TARP funds ] do fall will the Government nationalize the last one standing for the good of the country? This would be the coup of the millennium…To have this complete before the economy and society have completely broken down would be a good reason to declare a real National Emergency and declare Martial Law, the legislation, executive orders and infrastructure of which are already in place. How can one not be a cynic when we reflect on what has happened so far?

—You could start by slapping your inner cynic like you might a whimpering child. Sometimes corporal punishment works well. Then you could recall that America has gone through the boom and bust cycle of its economy since the outset, and we’re still here! And that corruption and cronyism and cooking the books have always been a sad but necessary and inevitable part of politics, and that transparency in government is always in part fictional. Or you could just take a xanax and calm the fuck down, and think about how far away from Martial Law the inauguration of this president was.

The numbers are in and the scam stands exposed to those who will look. Which way the story unfolds from here is anyone’s guess. But I am ready to bet that Congress will not include the OCC data in the upcoming debate on the next round of cash for the Banks.

—They probably won’t, but then, you already have the numbers so it would be kind of redundant and boring for you, so you’d have to change channels and watch Law and Order.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, probably our last, dammit. Now we’ll have to watch jousting….hey…I like that idea…

—Scot Crawford

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

—Ah, the old “Old West” analogy. Would that it were accurate, and we could just hang you, you fucking idiot.

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From the NY Times:

PURPLE HEART IS RULED OUT FOR TRAUMATIC STRESS

The Pentagon has decided that it will not award the Purple Heart, the hallowed medal given to those wounded or killed by enemy action, to war veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because it is not a physical wound.

—Right. Brains aren’t physical. They’re like…dreams or something…

The disorder, which may go unrecognized for months or years, can include recurring nightmares, uncontrolled rage and, sometimes, severe depression and suicide. Soldiers grappling with PTSD are often unable to hold down jobs.

—Because they’re pussies. And we have to watch them, cuz they might shoot themselves in the head just to get that medal, and the great jobs that go along with it…

“I’m glad they finally got something right,” said Jeremy Rausch, an Army staff sergeant who saw some of the Iraq War’s fiercest fighting in Adhamiya in 2006 and 2007. “PTSD can be serious, but there is absolutely no way to prove that someone truly is suffering from it or faking it.”

—Never been a purple heart awarded to someone who faked a physical wound.

Kevin Owsley, 47, who served in the Ohio National Guard in 2004 as a gunner on a Humvee and who is being treated for PTSD and traumatic brain injury, said he disagreed with the Pentagon’s ruling.
Unable to hold a job, Mr. Owsley supports his family on disability payments. This week he told his Veterans Affairs doctor he was fighting back suicidal impulses, something he has struggled with since his return. “You relive it every night and every day,” he said. “You dream about it. You can see it, taste it, see people getting killed constantly over and over.”
“It is a soldier’s injury,” he said, angrily, in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

—Yeah? Prove it, smart guy. Whoa, put the gun down!

But a Pentagon-supported service group, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, has strongly opposed expanding the definition to include psychological symptoms, saying it would “debase” the honor.

—Fuckin’ A right. And after being one of the losers who manages to get wounded fighting a bunch of cavemen when you’ve got laser guided missiles, predator drones, f-16′s, battleships, aircraft carriers, nuclear warheads, body armor, tanks, Subway sandwich shops, Netflix, Dick Cheney, the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders, nightvision goggles, and a $14 trillion dollar economy on your side, well, you don’t need any more debasement.

There have been recent changes in awarding Purple Hearts. The criteria was expanded in 2008 to include all prisoners of war who died in captivity, including those who were tortured. “There were wounds there,” Mr. Bircher said.
“You have to had shed blood by an instrument of war at the hands of the enemy of the United States,” he said. “Shedding blood is the objective.”

—Objective Accomplished! Where’s my aircraft carrier? Boy, we’re gonna run out of purple dye what with all the American troops being captured and tortured. It’s testament to the courage and fortitude of our troops that none of them have cracked and told the enemy how to make fire.

—Pesky question though, this medals thing. After all, the Purple Heart was originally given to troops who were good at soldiering, they didn’t have to get shot, like, back in the American Revolution days, when all of three soldiers were awarded the medal, George Washington’s “Badge of Military Merit” for “unusual gallantry” and “extraordinary fidelity and essential service.” Then, later, the military decided that you didn’t have to do anything but stand in the way of a bullet to get a medal. Wee debasement there, perhaps. Maybe the thing to do is come up with a new, debasement-proof medal, to be given to any soldier whose life is utterly destroyed by their service in pointless wars which have been totally misrepresented to them by their leaders! Like, the “Bloody Brain” for those with PTSD. The “Pallid Womb”for women who don’t conceive because their hubby got blown up by an IED. How about the ‘Torn Hair” for civilians whose government carries out policies over which they have not a speck of control!? We gotta open this thing up a little….

— Scot Crawford

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From HuffPost

MIAMI — State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic.

—Wow. Quite the press conference. Try the Islamic League of Journalists, they’ll take them.

Lt. Pat Santangelo says the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes Friday morning. Santangelo says he’s not sure where the shoes came from.

—Isn’t it obvious? They came from the feet of all the dead Islamic journalists our Special Forces guys eliminated. It’s a fucking warning: America never forgets. Not even the little shit.

We’ve been unaccountably bad about staying on top of the flood of disaster lit pertaining to America’s various wars ( on crime, on terrorism, on drugs, on warming), but here are a few to busy you in your dungeon.

The Eight O’Clock Ferry From the Windward Side

Clive Stafford Smith’s strangely charming memoir of his days defending detainees at the Guantanamo Bay gulag affably meanders into a boots-on-ground critique of pro-torture theory. Without ever fully defusing the logic of the “ticking bomb” rationale for torture, Smith reminds us in a civil, almost bemused way that this argument has little relevance to the reality of the cases he has seen. In the safety vs. justice debate, Smith’s argument amounts to: “You say our safety will be bought by torturing a bunch of people arrested at random for bounty? Does that mean that if I whomp your manroot with a mallet, you’ll come up with the unified field theory?”

The Dark Side

With the cheerful perversity of a forensic entomologist, Jane Mayer dissects the Bush administration’s dark materials. You can get a taste of her journalistic mojo and glee from her July 14th Harper’s interview. The main thrust of her epee skewers the illegality as well as the inefficacy of “The Program” (as the fasces of Cheney’s sadistic interrogation policies are known). Mayer busts the users and dares to speak their names. A staff reporter for the New Yorker since 1995, she has been filing regular reports on the war on terror since ’03, and a number of her pieces can be found on their site:
The Search for Osama — The Dark Sites — Outsourcing Torture — and more.

and don’t forget these two:

>Get Your War On

Without an inside track or an investigator’s skills, Rees cuts to the war’s quick. He’s clear-eyed, profane and funny. His computer-graphic everybodies, like us, find themselves sinking in quicksand; we know better than to struggle; but that doesn’t mean that we can’t complain. David Rees rocks.

Self-loathing for Beginners

by Lynn Phillips

(If you’re going to do it, do it right.)

Self-Loathing for Beginners is a wickedly funny guide to appreciating self-loathing properly done. Whatever your current level of self-loathing expertise, SL4B‘s quizzes, lists, and sidebars will help you to style your self-loathing to succeed in fashion, show business, interpersonal relationships and art. And that is great news, because maximizing your self-loathing is a trend you’ll hate yourself if you miss.

David Rees’s Get Your War On is a great running satire of how the Iraq war gets embedded in middle-class workaday culture. Already out in print and theatrical forms, it’s now being animated and appearing online weekly

Anthony Lane’s review of Mamma Mia! in the July 28th New Yorker Magazine is a zealous and amusing tit-biter. Here’s a taste:

The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take “Mamma Mia!” to be a useful contribution to that debate. In a way, the whole film is a startling twist on the black art of rendition: ordinary citizens, often unaware of their own guilt, are spirited off to a secure environment in Eastern Europe, there to be forced into a humiliating and often painful confession of sins past. “I tried to reach for you, but you have closed your mind,” in the bitter words of Sam.

Mangiate!

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

I’m inspired. To kill myself…

DISSIDENT’S TALE OF EPIC ESCAPE FROM IRAN’S VISE

WASHINGTON — After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran’s border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.

At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, subjected to torture and twice taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose, Mr. Batebi had fled.

His awakening began in fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: “Go out and read other things to try to get the truth.”

A few weeks later came the stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete. A mullah standing atop a wall gave the orders, and an ambivalent crowd of neighbors looked on.

—I have an idea. Let’s invade Iran and kill all the religious leaders. And hey, let’s get the “ambivalent neighbors” too. Has anyone thought of that?

Years later, he would witness public hangings and dismemberments. “But nothing had the impact of that stoning,” he said. “I thought, This can’t be Islam.”

—Oh, but it is. When my country tortures people, especially innocent ones, I think; “This can’t be America.” But it is.

Mr. Batebi described 17 months in solitary confinement, including repeated torture by interrogators trying to force him to say on television that the famous T-shirt was stained with paint or animal blood.

His jailers thrashed him with a metal cable, beat his testicles and kicked in his teeth, he said. They held his face down in a pool of excrement. They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night, cutting him and rubbing salt into the wounds.

To stave off madness, he said, he fought back. “If the interrogator cursed me, I would curse him back,” he said. “If the interrogator hit me, I’d try to hit him back.”

—Hey, now, that’s the wrong approach to getting tortured. You’re supposed to get all pliable and helpful. I’ll send you the manual.

The United Nations was arranging a placement in Sweden when Ms. Mazahery called to say that the United States had granted Mr. Batebi’s request for “humanitarian parole,” a relatively rare measure used in cases of danger or political importance.

When his flight from Vienna landed at Dulles Airport in Virginia in late June, Mr. Batebi was astonished to see that the airport worker waving the jet into the gate was a Muslim woman wearing a tight head scarf.

—You were astonished? To see a symbol of Islam? Huh. I’d think you’d be all like, “Oh, fuck, Islam! Noooooooo!”

Mr. Batebi speaks of working from afar for peaceful change in Iran. He recoils when asked about the possibility of American military action against Iran, saying that if the United States attacked, “I might go back and fight for my country myself.”

—Well, ok. But we’ll have to torture you first. You know the drill.

He has some ordinary goals, the dreams of a man who spent most of his 20s in a prison cell. He wants to study politics and sociology, he said, and work as a photojournalist. He wants to play guitar. He thought for a moment, then he remembered one more modest ambition.

“I want to fish!” Mr. Batebi said, his face relaxing into a smile. “I’m going to go fishing!”

—Oh, great. So you’re gonna throw a baited hook in the water, jam it into a fish’s mouth, yank him from his environment, club him to death, and eat him. Gonna try and get some information from him? Because he might get mad and just fight back to keep from going insane. This can’t be Islam.

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

Makes it all seem worth it:

ATHLETES DISABLED BY WARS LEAD IRAQI TEAM IN WORLD GAMES

Iraqis love sports. Anyone who doubts it should consider the rat-a-tat of automatic weapons fired after every Iraqi soccer victory.

—Well, I’m not gonna doubt it unless they put the guns down. But maybe the shooting of the guns isn’t a good way to measure their enthusiasm. They seem to kind of do that whatever happens.

Yet after five years of war, Iraq’s chances of fielding a competitive Olympic team are vanishingly small.

—Give it time. When Head Drilling makes it out of the Special Olympics and into the big time, they’ll take the gold. Weird the Scots didn’t come up with that one.

And a blind athlete, Qasim Muttar, who was a promising player of goalball — soccer played with a ball that contains bells — died after being run over by an American convoy while crossing a street.

— Americans are notoriously competitive, you can tell by the missiles and bombs if you doubt it, and goalball is starting to really take off in America. Here they call it “Libertyball”, though.

The poverty that forced Rasul Kadhim to hawk nuts from an iron street cart in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum, as a child also paved his road to Beijing. In a story typical for the mostly poor, disabled men on his team, Mr. Kadhim, a weight lifter, sculptured his torso into pure muscle by pushing the 200-pound cart, though polio had paralyzed one of his legs. “I pushed the cart with only one leg,” he said. “But I always had the strength, the power.”
And in a sad twist, also not atypical, Mr. Kadhim’s older brother, who had inspired him to leave the cart and go into sports, was killed by a car bomb in 2006 on the same dusty street where Mr. Kadhim had worked.
“God willing, I will win a medal for Iraq,” he said.

—He’s shown himself to be pretty much on your side so far.

Two years ago, for example, all 18 members of the Olympic tae kwon do team were kidnapped and killed in Anbar Province in western Iraq while returning from a match.

—Ok, Ok, you guys love sports! Got it!

— Scot Crawford

AS TRUE
AS IT GETS
AS LONG
AS YOU GET IT

HAIL MARY!

In an effort to burnish his already resplendent environmental legacy, President Bush has initiated a full-scale propaganda campaign aimed at reducing global warming; smiling.

“Some people in this world seem to think that things are going bad,” said the President. “They like to complain. They’re like a bunch of Chicken Livers, running around saying, you know, the sky is comin’ down cuz a bomb fell on their head. But I’m an optimist. I believe in folks. I got my own version of that old saying; ‘let a smile be your umbrella.’ It goes like; ‘let a smile be your humvee.’ So we’re gonna put a stop to this whole global warming thing. And I have every confident that I can do this before the end of my presidency. Cuz, I’m not done. I’m gonna sprint for that door. So, we’re gonna turn them frowns upside the other way. Way I understand it, there’s too much sun gettin’ through makin’ things hotter than we want it, and folks are gettin’ discomfortable. So we’re just gonna ‘put on a smile and cheer up’, and shoot that sun back into space, as the song goes. Ever’body that goes to the dentist and gets them teeth polished up, gets a little present from the government; a hundred dollars. And I’ve instructed Congress to approve a bill that lets our police forces check on folks, see if they’re smiling. If they’re not, well, the Homeland Security folks are gonna know why. Except the Jews. They don’t wanna smile, they don’t have to.”

— Scot Crawford