…as a wise man once said.

Leading on from comments about freedom of speech made by the Prime Minister’s senior policy adviser, his former press secretary and the director of the Press Complaints Commission, we have this: Keith Olbermann (again) on former US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s musings on the First Amendment.

It’s said from time to time by bloggers prepared to sail close to the wind on matters such as libel, that their blogs can’t be touched under British law because they’re not hosted in the UK. One or two bloggers like to point out that their blogs are hosted on blogspot in the US. Well, they might want to keep an eye on Newt and his own ideas about freedom of speech:

“This is a serious, long-term war,” Gingrich added, “and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country. It will lead us to learn how to close down every Web site that is dangerous.”

And now the apposite quote from a significant piece of prescient fiction (it’s 1984’s day off today unfortunately - it’s knackered through overwork):

Goose-stepping morons [...] should try reading books instead of burning them.

‘It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.’

The ‘when did you stop beating your wife?‘ smear just got a makeover. Here’s CNN’s Glenn Beck interviewing Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to congress.

BECK: History was made last Tuesday when Democrat Keith Ellison got elected to Congress, representing the great state of Minnesota. Well, not really unusual that Minnesota would elect a Democrat. What is noteworthy is that Keith is the first Muslim in history to be elected to the House of Representatives. He joins us now.

Congratulations, sir.

ELLISON: How you doing, Glenn? Glad to be here.

BECK: Thank you. I will tell you, may I — may we have five minutes here where we’re just politically incorrect and I play the cards face up on the table?

ELLISON: Go there.

BECK: OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I’ve been to mosques. I really don’t believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I — you know, I think it’s being hijacked, quite frankly.

With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, “Let’s cut and run.” And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, “Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

Why not just get Ellison to swear on the bible?

Watch the video for the full flesh-creeping effect.

(Cheers to Tim for the link.)

Update: More enemies right here. (via The Nether-World)

The stench of death and defeat that’s now hanging around George Bush’s presidency is reminiscent of downtown Baghdad on a hot day. There are bodies all over the place. And just as Saddam, the architect of Iraq’s pre-war abattoir got notice of his come-uppance this week (a long drop and a short stop), the architect of its post-war slaughter was also pushed from his perch (with an admittedly softer landing, cushioned, no doubt, with lucrative job offers from the defence industry).

(more…)

Right here.

No YouTube version yet - I’ll post one if it comes up.

Update: Here it is…

Well, he’s gone. At last.

I heard about it from my Dad who texted with ‘did Rumsfeld jump or pushed?’. I sent back ‘almost certainly pushed’ although, serendipitously and satisfyingly, the predictive text on my Nokia first gave me ‘purged’ instead of ‘pushed’.

Rumsfeld becomes the Republican’s Charles Clarke - fired less for his failings in his job and more as the fall guy for a poor show at the polls.

Just what’s changed since October 25, other than the mid-term results, when George Bush said of Rumsfeld ‘I’m satisfied with how he’s done all his jobs’ and called him ‘a smart, tough, capable administrator’, isn’t clear.

Ten days later, however, there’s been a change of heart and things in Iraq are deemed now to be ‘not working well enough, fast enough’ according to the President.

So, it’s farewell as Donald retires, left only with his lucrative job offers and his memories. I’ll leave you with my favourite piece of his ‘poetry‘. It’s a sliver of wistful Americana that almost makes you forget the mountains of corpses and the oceans of misery, the imperial arrogance and the gritted-teeth malevolence. Almost.

Glass Box
You know, it’s the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you’re using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can’t find it.
It’s—

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

Update: Flying Rodent reminisces:

“Destroy our credibility as a freedom-loving nation!”, they cried from Oregon to Florida, and he did. They howled, “Let the blood of the foreigner stain the front pages of the world’s media, and to hell with them!”, and Rummy was on hand to give the country what it demanded.

Update updated: Steven Poole is his customary dry self:

‘Steps down’ as a euphemism for ‘resigns’ or ‘is fired’ is part of the metaphor of verticality in talk about power. You reach ‘high office’ and then ’step down’ from it afterwards, if you manage not to ‘fall’ or get ‘pushed’. (I suppose the ‘corridors of power’ must be steeply sloped.)

Olbermann’s Special Comment (11/1/06) on Vimeo. Fiery.

(Text transcript here.)

After Keith Olbermann’s tour de force of last week, here he is again on the excrescence that is Rush Limbaugh:

Looks like Olbermann’s going to be a weekly must see.

Mr Cheney was responding to a conservative radio interviewer who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a “no-brainer” if the information it yielded would save American lives. “It’s a no-brainer for me,” Mr Cheney replied.

read the rest…

(link from Tim)

The Military Commission Act 2006. I don’t think Keith Olbermann likes it:

Essential viewing.

(via The Friday Thing)

This from today’s Independent:

After his stop-over in Washington, Mr Blair will fly on to California tonight to attend a conference with the media magnate Rupert Murdoch. An ally of Mr Murdoch, Irwin Stelzer, insisted Mr Blair was not Mr Bush’s “poodle”, but his “guide dog”, particularly over the Middle East.

Blair’s visit to Washington is a ’stop-over’. Fortunately the Lebanon crisis has emerged at the same time as Rupert Murdoch putting on his Californian shindig. Blair was going to America anyway, so now he can squeeze in a quick meeting with George. Synchronicity in action.

The guest list for Murdoch’s conference is impressive, Al Gore, John McCain, Bono, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton - faces you don’t see collected together outside Bilderberg Group jollies.

I also like the fact that Murdoch ‘ally’, Stelzer, His Master’s Voice in other words, referred to Blair not as a Bush’s ‘poodle’ but as his ‘”guide dog”, particularly over the Middle East’.

Now, you can get two types of guide dog, dogs for the deaf and dogs for the blind. Which of these did Stelzer have in mind?

There are many questions raised by George Bush’s veto of the embryonic stem cell research bill, not least those about a legislative system that lets both Houses of Congress pass a bill only for it to be quashed by a collision of church and state. Aren’t there constitutional arguments against the veto?

Chris Dillow beats me to the question of the kind of morality that lets Bush rescue potential human beings while sitting by watching actual human beings being caught between the the hammer and the anvil in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel. It’s time to trot out the old George Carlin quote which I use all the time: ‘If you’re pre-born, you’re fine. If you’re pre-school, you’re fucked!’

Bush making his announcement in front of a backdrop of ‘snowflake children‘ was a nice touch. ‘Each of these children was adopted while still an embryo, and has been blessed with the chance to grow up in a loving family,’ he said. Lucky them.

Screw the memory of Christopher Reeve. Screw Michael J Fox and his unfortunate ilk - you can’t have your photo taken with them anway, the picture would be blurred. What happens though if some of these snowflake kids get Parkinsons? Or spinal injuries? Can they still have their picture taken with the President?

Apparently, 400,000 fertilized embryos are discarded every year in the US by fertility clinics. No doubt the Bush Administration is lining up nice stable, affluent WASP couples (I noticed there were no black faces amongst the photo opportunity) to adopt every single one of them.

If not, why not? Don’t they all deserve a shot at life, George? It would solve the cheap labour crisis at a stroke. Or NASA could just pack the embryos in a rocket and send them off to look for another life-supporting planet like in Arthur C Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth.

Get thawing and get gestating, George. Leave no child behind.

So, if (still an if, please note) a link could be found between Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, his information of a plot to bomb the tube or his associates, and those involved in the 7/7 London terrorist attacks, could we then, by pretty much the same logic as [Zacarias] Moussaoui’s prosecutors are using, hold the US accountable for the 7/7 bombs?

read the rest…

I haven’t yet had time to read the second of Tony Blair’s three foreign policy speeches (Episode II: Attack of the Clones) to see if there’s any nutritional value in it. The way it’s being reported suggests not and anyway, the speech will now get zero coverage as the pundits ponder the Prime Minister’s unwise choice of words in a radio interview.

However, the speech was notable for the repetition of one of the Prime Minister’s favourite baseless smears. To wit: that criticism of the Bush Administration - implied, explicit or imagined - is anti-American:

But the strain of, frankly, anti-American feeling in parts of European politics is madness when set against the long-term interests of the world we believe in.

Most of us are, thankfully, capable of more sophisticated differentiation. George Bush, to pick an American at random, is a fool whereas Terry Gilliam is a genius. Dick Cheney (say) is the devil while Harper Lee is an angel. Of course, being an equal opportunities generaliser, Blair applies this same perceived failure to nuance to himself by prefacing the remark with:

I don’t always agree with the US. Sometimes they are difficult friends to have.

Not accustomed or inclined to hearing truth spoken to his own power, it’s not surprising that Blair is incapable of speaking it to others. We all know that “the US” means the Bush Administration but I suppose it was too much to expect the Prime Minister to say:

I don’t always agree with President Bush. Sometimes he is a difficult friend to have.

There’s always talk that Blair chooses to wield his so-called (and much vaunted) influence over Bush in private. To which the rest of us are entitled to demand: prove it. The softly, softly, catchy monkey approach hasn’t put many exhibits in the Blair zoo’s primate house.

The thing is, when talking about the Bush Whitehouse, Blair always sounds like a man at a party who’s brought a drunken rugger bugger with him. His friend is staggering around, insulting the other guests, breaking the furniture and throwing up in the corner but Tony says to everyone else: “Shhh! Look, don’t say anything horrible to George. He might get in a huff and leave.” Blair can’t admit that yet another rendition of “The hairs on her dicky dido” and the ostentatious farting accompanied by shouts “better out than in” from his companion offends those with better manners.

So anyway. It turns out that this bunch of boffins are working on bacteria-powered fuel cells. Could have important ramifications for cheap energy production, you might think. Particularly in these days of thirst.

But hold your horses. The project is funded by the US Department of Defence because “[t]he Air Force has long been interested in micro-scale air vehicles – some as small as insects – but it has been stymied by the lack of a suitable, compact power source”.

Now excuse me, but isn’t this a little like finding a previously undiscovered Van Gogh in the attic and, instead of lending it to a museum where the most people can appreciate it, hanging it in the outside bog?

Micro-scale air vehicles. As small as insects.

Donald Rumsfeld is 73.

After more than an hour of fierce and emotional debate, the senators Wednesday rejected exceptions for incest or rape or for the health of a mother and voted, 23-12, to outlaw all abortions, except those to save a mother’s life.

more…

(Via Warren Ellis and his Grim Meathook Future.)

Two Labour MPs have defied the Official Secrets Act by passing on the contents of a secret British document revealing how President George Bush wanted to bomb the Arabic TV station, al-Jazeera.

The document, a transcript of a meeting between Mr Bush and Tony Blair in April 2004 when the prime minister expressed concern about US military tactics in Iraq, is already the subject of an unprecedented official secrets prosecution in Britain, against an aide to one of the MPs and another man.

read the rest…

(There’s still a bunch of us willing to publish (a la Craig Murray’s telegrams) if anybody out there has a copy of the memo they want to pass on.)

The Guardian: US troops seize award-winning Iraqi journalist
American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.

WASHINGTON - When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ‘’signing statement” — an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law — declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

more…

George likes to keep his friends close but his torturing friends even closer.

As does Donald, bless him.

Lenin has more.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

read the rest

On the day of the London bombings, President Bush proclaimed: “The war on terror goes on.” Through the 2004 campaign, his winning theme was terror. He achieved the logic of a unified field theory connecting Iraq to Afghanistan by threading terror through both, despite the absence of evidence. He insisted that if we didn’t fight the terrorists there, we would be fighting them at home. In January, the CIA’s thinktank, the National Intelligence Council, issued a report describing Iraq as the magnet and training and recruiting ground for terrorism. The false rationale for the invasion had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With his popularity flagging, Bush returned to the formulations that succeeded in his campaign.

read the rest…

The cruel, evil jerks who blew up the London subway last week, despite appropriating al-Qaeda’s name for their website and T-shirts, have about as much to do with al-Qaeda as a Beatles tribute band has to do with the Fab Four.

read the rest…

(I have a lot of time for Palast but he’s a better investigative reporter than polemicist. I imagine this piece was meant more for an American than UK audience but I can’t help feeling it was spectacularly misjudged.)

It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. “Subject: Rove/P&C,” (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. “Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation …” Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, “please don’t source this to rove or even WH [White House]” and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.

read the rest

Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O’Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name–and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

read the rest