Globalization of Onomatopoeia
“Whereas Albanian dogs apparently go ‘ham ham’ rather than ‘woof woof’ and Hungarian pigs go ‘rof rof rof,’ not ‘oink oink,’ there are few language communities in the world that do not represent the sound of laughter with some variant on ‘ha ha’ or ‘hee hee.’
– Mary Beard in the New York Review
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A Tzipi Move Up the Ladder
“The Israeli prime minister’s declaration clears the way for rivals to form a new government. Several Kadima ministers, including the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, have already thrown themselves into the succession battle.”
– news item
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Welsh (or Scottish or American) actuary can tell you how many people are going to die over the next ten years. A Sicilian actuary can tell you how many people are going to die and who they are.
– CNBC interview
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This Just In
(Recent headlines. They’re all real, but on the scans we got by e-mail, we couldn’t make out most of the newspapers’ names.)
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Volunteers Search for
Old Civil War Planes
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Army Vehicle Disappears
An Australian army vehicle worth $74,000 has gone missing after being painted with camouflage. Police are seeking public help…
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Caskets Found as Workers
Demolish Mausoleum
subhead: ‘We had no idea anyone was buried there’
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Utah Poison Control Center Reminds
Everyone Not to Take Poison
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Statistics show that teen
pregnancy drops off
significantly after age 25
Disclosure: I am not a lawyer or a judge. I don’t own a black robe – or a white one with a hood, for that matter.
Thus you can be reasonably well assured that I haven’t been paid to dress up somebody’s crimes in the costumes and cosmetics of hallucinatory constitutional precedent in order to make them look perfectly legal and otherwise acceptable, despite their perversion of cherished American freedoms.
I’m explaining this just so you know that everything I say will be even-handed and unbiased, which is a stunning achievement for a citizen living in a country being run by war criminals.
Here is my LLD-free legal opinion.
The Bush administration decided that the prisoners it is torturing at Guantanamo and elsewhere have no right of habeas corpus and no standing in U.S. courts because they are held not in an American prison but in foreign territory. Guantanamo is part of Cuba, though it’s under American control.
Now, John McCain was born at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, which is in Panama but at that time was also under American control. Thus, by the logic of Bush administration lawyers, he was born in a foreign territory.
So is John McCain eligible for the presidency?
He would have been, under the old rules, and I know the question has been hashed out and pretty much laid to rest in his favor – but that was before Bush administration lawyers began to dismantle the constitution, with the partial blessing of the Supreme Court and the whole-hearted blessing of the court’s four reflexive conservatives.
Lawyers for the Bush Justice Department adamantly insist that prisoners held at Guantamo are outside the sovereign territory of the United States, thus beyond the reach of our judicial system.
If persons held in a foreign territory have no access to U.S. Courts, why should someone born there have access to the Oval Office?
Under the original constitution – the one we were using before Bush, Cheney, Addington, Yoo, Gonzalez, craven congressmen, and right-wing justices ripped out a few of its vital organs — you didn’t have to be born in the U.S. to qualify for the presidency, as long as you were born to U.S. citizen parents. Alexander Hamilton’s problem was not that he was born in the British West Indies or that his parents weren’t married, rather that his mother was of French descent and his father was the son of a Scottish laird.
Under the present (and, one hopes, temporary) crippled constitution, things are different. Over a million citizens are now on the Watch List of people who get pulled aside for questioning and invasive searches at airports, many of them profiled simply because they are foreign born, or look like they might be, or have exotic names.
Obviously, one cannot campaign across the country for the presidency if he or she is badgered and detained at every airport.
So foreign-born citizens are clearly being denied the right to run for president, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, and John McCain is one of the chief advocates of such restrictions. When the Supreme Court ruled recently that 37 Guantanamo detainees have a constitutional right to challenge their detention, McCain called the decision “one of the worst in history.” He has also supported every unconstitutional grab for power made by Bush, Cheney, and assorted mouthpieces.
As I say, I’m not a lawyer. Neither is McCain. His unindicted co-conspirators – those apostles of criminal torture Yoo, Gonzalez, and Addington – they’re the lawyers.
In layman’s jurisprudence — aka the real world — it’s hard to see how any foreign-born vandalizer of America’s rule of law has any claim to eligibility for the presidency until we restore the original version of the constitution that he’s been helping to sabotage.
Dock Howard provides a much-needed perspective on the lost art of spelling. Chided for misspellings on a Facebook post, Dock replied:
“Spelling on the Internet is like punching a mime. There is no wrong way to do it.”
Forget 007. British Intelligence now advertises in The Economist to recruit new spies. To apply online, go to www.mi6officers.co.uk. Of course you have to be a British citizen. And if you’re insane, alcoholic, taking illegal drugs, or bankrupt — forget the whole thing. One other reminder for would-be spooks: “We can’t overstate the importance of a sense of personal integrity.”
They wouldn’t want you to go out and fool somebody.
Next up at The New Yorker …
Look — up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
It’s John McCain!
The Hindenburg was inflated with hydrogen (bad move). The Goodyear Blimp uses helium. Met Life’s Snoopy 1 and Snoopy 2 are filled with insurance. It’s basic physics — empty promises are lighter than air.
And now, like a giant manatee galumphing through the troposphere, comes the latest, largest, most bloated, bulging gas bag of them all, pumped full of hyperbolic flatulence by grasping lobbyists like Phil Gramm – posing as an economist – and great, fat oil company tycoons standing by as alternative fools.
What is this amorphous, colorless, odorous, and utterly tasteless behemoth? Why, it’s the John McCain economic plan! Get out your secret decoder ring because, without it, the rest of this will make no sense whatever.
In the alternative universe of McCainsian economics, George Bush’s tax cuts for the richest people in America – which McCain once reviled – are anointed to go on forever. And there will be other tax reductions – in the alternative minimum tax, the federal gasoline tax, and of course generous tax cuts for corporations.
Don’t tell McCain, but hardly any company ever pays the 35% corporate rate.
That’s because people like Phil Gramm have spent their entire careers perforating the law with loopholes. Many companies pay zero – or less. Some get more in tax breaks and credits and handouts than they ever pay in taxes. In a McCain administration, corporations might be able to shut down their factories and refineries entirely and just live on corporate welfare and unregulated commodity futures.
So who’s left to tax?
He’d better find some patsies somewhere because McCain is promising to spend big on wars and healthcare, and yet he’s promising to balance the federal budget before his first term is over.
How? Nobody knows, certainly not McCain. He talks vaguely about trimming pork and earmarks, but the entire total of earmark funds wouldn’t pay for two months of the Iraq war that he wants to pursue in perpetuity.
Maybe he has a secret plan – say, to sell California and Florida and dismantle Social Security and Medicare.
Possibly he’s counting on the reduction in waste and corruption that would have taken place because Gramm left the Senate, except that the Senator then became a lobbyist to keep stoking the boiler on the gravy train.
Phil Gramm is one of McCain’s oldest and dearest friends, his primary source of economic guidance (McCain told the Wall Street Journal that Gramm is his “financial guru”), and a likely McCain pick for Secretary of the Treasury. When Gramm ran for president in 1996, McCain chaired his campaign. He is also a darling of the financial industry, which has given him many millions.
Not that he hasn’t earned it.
It was Gramm who engineered the Enron Loophole when he was in the Senate – exempting energy trading from regulators, leaving Enron free to turn the California electricity market inside-out, costing rate-payers and taxpayers billions (after which his wife Wendy joined Enron’s board).
Gramm is also the principal enabler of the subprime mortgage meltdown. Mother Jones has dubbed him Foreclosure Phil. He sneaked a measure into the 2000 budget, largely written by financial industry lobbyists, that barred the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating exotic swindles like bundling worthless mortgages – which has led to the current threat of a global financial meltdown.
This also paved the way for the next looming crisis we’ll be shuddering about – in credit default swaps, which account for far greater exposure than subprime mortgages ever did. But why worry?
In Phil Gramm’s America, you don’t have to spend any money except on him.
Nobody else really needs anything, and there are no problems to solve. Poor people are faking it. The recession is all in your head. We’ve become a nation of whiners. Suck it up – you were meant to be miserable.
So, come to think of it, who needs a federal budget?
Maybe that’s the plan. Just make sure you’re not standing in the shadow of that bloated blimpful of noxious nonsense if anyone sticks a pin in it.
Frank Haller reports from the Royal & Ancient Society of Geriatric Golfers:
——
Recently I was asked to play in a golf outing.
At first I said, “Naaahhh….”
Then they said to me, “Come on, it’s for handicapped and blind kids.”
Then I thought……….
SHIT — I could win this thing!!!
Out of the reptilian brain of Karl Rove,
beneath the spleen, through unimpeded
airspace, ear to ear, of George W. B.
and on to the Pentagoing, going, gone,
to polished brass at Vandalbird AFB,
the ultimate ultimatum – strike at dawn!
“Bomb anywhere they bow to East, not West,
Iran, Waziristan, and in between
plus Denver, when the Democrats convene,
the blue states’ inner cities and all the rest,
and load up all the B-1 undercarriages
for San Francisco and those same-sex marriages.”
Meantime,
By writ of Yoo/Gonzales/Addington obsessives,
“It’s legal to use nuclear munitions
in questioning non-caucasoid progressives
or scientists or liberal academicians
or any Muslim-looking beard or stubble.
“Post Armageddon, we control the rubble.”
From the July 4 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a capsule obit on the front page:
Larry Harmon, 83, who turned the character of Bozo the Clown into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died yesterday of congestive heart failure. His wife of 29 years called him the perfect Bozo.
Hmm.
Once on a charter fishing boat off Miami, I noticed a discreet sign on the topdeck:
Marriages performed by the Captain are valid only for the duration of the voyage.
I assume the same protocol holds true for a campaign bus such as the “Straight Talk Express.” All the journalists who have fallen in love with John McCain — to the point of being blinded to his endearing faults, contradictions, blunders, and closet Bushism — will eventually go back to their wives, and husbands, but mostly wives.
In their post-traumatic sycophancy syndrome, they may begin to remember what their job was supposed to entail when covering a candidate. They can detoxify from excess consumption of free booze and spare ribs, get treatment for their busted moral compasses, and, one by one, recover feeling in the five w’s of a classic news lead – none of which stands for “Who cares about the actual facts?”
But their lovesick symptoms may get worse before they get better.
McCain just bought a Boeing 737 with a plush interview area, and his aides say that reporters will have to “earn their way in” to that privileged precinct – fair warning to any who have so far failed to be comprehensively unprofessional.
A similar band of groupies once traveled with George W, looked deeply into his eyes, and knew in their hearts that anyone who was fun to have a beer with, blithering idiot or not, would make a perfectly gorgeous president.
The Fourth Estate is currently running about eighth and is about to be lapped by the blogosphere.
In the current issue of The Nation, Eric Alterman and George Zornick chronicle just how blind love can be when it’s the love of a gaggle of mainstream media reporters in thrall to a charming shape-shifter running this way and that for the presidency.
On the question of flip-flops alone, here is their closing summary:
The anti-torture candidate supports torture.
The pro-immigration candidate opposes immigration.
The candidate who opposes tax cuts for the rich (now) supports them.
The pro-campaign finance reform candidate has a campaign that is run almost exclusively by lobbyists, and exploits loopholes in the law to skirt spending limits – even the laws the candidate wrote.
The candidate who opposes ‘agents of intolerance’ in the Republican party embraces them.
The candidate with the foreign policy experience frequently confuses Sunnis and Shiites and misreads Iranian influence in the region, but is proposing permanent war.
The candidate who claims to be a fiscal conservative wants to bust the budget.
The candidate who claims to take global warming seriously does not want to take any serious action to address it.
They can’t find a single issue on which McCain has stood his ground against his party’s extremists – including all of the above, plus judicial appointments, Roe v. Wade, and same-sex marriage.
But you would hardly know that from reading the fawning reports of the mainstream political journalists, on or off the bus. Alterman and Zornick quote “spontaneous testimonials” for McCain, untempered by facts, from Jake Tapper (Salon); Jacob Weisberg (Slate); Fareed Zakaria and Michael Hirsch (Newsweek); Terry Moran (ABC); Chris Matthews and Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC); David Nyhan (Boston Globe); Richard Cohen, Dana Milbank, and David Broder (Washington Post).
Candidates have always been a bit slippery (though McCain takes the cake). Journalists are supposed to keep them honest. Now that the major media reporters have gone over to the dark side, it’s up to a few unblinkered publications like The Nation and to bloggers like DailyKos , TPM, and Andrew Sullivan to pick up the torch.
Still, one can always hope. For any of the big media managers who repent of their sins, here is the path to redemption:
Reassign your McCain reporter to Obama (ignore the tears and tantrums) and your Obama reporter to McCain.
