McScience

Realizing that sex has made its way into about half of this week's entries, I decided to focus on a different deadly sin: Gluttony. Hei Lun at Begging to Differ has some surprising insights regarding Morgan Spurlock's performance-oriented documentary, Super Size Me. Hei Lun contrasts Spurlock's results—he got real fat—with another documentarian (Soso Whaley) who repeated the experiment—she got slightly gassy—and recognizes a difference:

Whaley is eating about 2,000 calories a day. Spurlock ate 5,000.

Pretty significant detail, don't you think? Inspired by Hei Lun's investigation, I decided to outline my own prospective regimen for one day spent filming a bullshit documentary and then count the calories after the fact—to see which number better reflects a McDiet. By my account, Hei Lun's wrong—Spurlock isn't far off the mark.

For what it's worth, I'm 6'2", 1?5 lbs., and devastatingly handsome. I sketched out these meals before looking at this WaPo table to find the calorie counts. I'd call these pretty filling meals, and though taken altogether the day sounds more than gluttonous, none of the meals taken independently seems unreasonable for a person who isn't watching his weight:

McBreakfast

McItem	Calories	Fat Grams
Sausage/Egg Biscuit	490	33
Sausage/Egg Biscuit	490	33
Hashbrown	130	8
OJ	80	0
Coffee	NA	NA
TOTAL	1190	74

McLunch

McItem	Calories	Fat Grams
6-piece Chicken McNuggets	290	17
BBQ Sauce	45	0
Garden Salad	100	6
Honey-Mustard Dressing	160	11
Medium Coke	210	0
TOTAL	805	34

McDinner

McItem	Calories	Fat Grams
Big Mac	590	34
Cheeseburger	330	14
Massive Fries	610	29
Massive Coke	410	0
TOTAL	1940	77

McGluttony

I'm fat now!	Calories	Fat Grams
TOTAL	3935	145

Now of course I could tone down these substantial meals, but the point stands that a more or less unexceptional McDonald's order can easily eclipse 2,000 calories. Even the lunch here—smaller than the other meals because I frankly never eat more than an apple for lunch—repeated thrice daily wouldn't be good for you. It would be quite an exercise in restraint to curb your McDiet to under 2,000 calories per day—an effort that I imagine most of the billions served did not go to McDonald's to make. Lun's point still stands that Spurlock's documentary is a crappy scientific effort, but it takes some stretch of the imagination to argue that the McDonald's menu stands to do you any good.

And everyone knows Burger King is far superior in the first place.

Let's Just Wrap Up This Abortion Debate Once and for All

Kevin Drum has some choice words for a few visible pro-lifers who are sticking up for Karen Hughes, whose comment

I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life....The fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life.

irritated at least a good million people this past weekend. The Calpundit:

This is typical of the pro-life crowd: most of them are plainly unwilling to face up to the logical consequences of their beliefs and too cowardly to make their real case to the American public.

[The pro-lifer in question, NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru] is right: if abortion is murder, then anyone who gets an abortion should be jailed. Anybody who performs an abortion should be put on death row. Anybody who supports abortion rights is little better than a mobster or a terrorist.

But if that's what they believe — and they do — why does he think it's unwise to admit it in public? The question answers itself, doesn't it?

I came up with a similar formulation in an argument with an anti-abortion individual a while back. In all honesty, it's an unwieldy argument, and the line I was using was even tackier. The person with whom I debated vehemently asserted that there was no distinction whatsoever between abortion and murder—but there most certainly is. If a person has some indication that mass murder is taking place, and can even reasonably identify who the murderers are, wouldn't you doubt that person's dedication to stopping the evil of murder if he in fact did nothing to stop it? I of course don't hold baseball-bat wielding conservatives crowding around the clinic in high regard, but that would in a sense be an action consistent with the rhetoric.

Again, let me say that this reasoning was introduced after the debate turned nasty, and it's not a line of reasoning that I'm terribly interested in defending here, so put your damned trigger-typing-fingers down. Allow me to start from the gutter and work my way out, because I think I can rephrase that chain of thought into my fundamental answer to criticism of abortion.

So the absence of that justifiably violent crowd obviates the fact that people inherently recognize that abortion does not explicitly equal murder. (I'm assuming here a level moral playing field, in which all of us would go to extraordinary lengths to prevent a murder the details of which we were privy beforehand. Certain Objectivists may understandably exclude themselves from such consideration.) Without getting into the particulars about why this is, I'm going to bracket that effect and slide over to the viability question. I see an extraordinarily appreciable difference between a human being (say, me) and a zygote. For instance I just typed everything you just read, and at the same time made myself a sandwich, turned on ESPN, and filled my dog's food bowl. Not only can a zygote do none of those things, you can't even see a zygote. Zygotes are dull. It's tremendously difficult for me to imagine despairing over the loss/disorganization of a zygote, except inasmuch as I would empathize with a woman's or couple's disappointment over such. But I would be appreciably more grief-struck by the loss of, say, that woman—which would be a death.

There is always an effort on the part of anti-abortion advocates—in lieu of a "bright line" distinguishing measure at which point a fetus becomes a human—to slide that point to conception. It's a reasonable enough effort, considering the none-too-daunting bundle of questions surrounding life and souls and what-not. My stab at an answer to that one, frankly, is that complexity will have to do—and it obviously suffices. The real consequences of legalized abortion do not amount to the state of affairs that extreme conservative rhetoric implies.

I understand that my foetal readership may take umbrage with my explicitly stated preference for Born-Americans, but let me state that my estimation of a being progresses significantly from its conception, evolving even into fundamental respect at birth. Like most Born-Americans I feel uncomfortable with late-term abortions. While my defense of the right to abortion at any stage arises after other considerations, the healthier society is the one that witnesses fewer abortions. I'm led to believe that is also a goal of the conservative right, and yet I'm stunned at every turn to find that they do not, in fact, lead the cause to make contraception universally acceptable.

I recognize this essay is moral/metaphysical teeball—and useless as far as policy is concerned—but 1) Kevin said it first, blame him, 2) it's not easy to frame an answer to the fundamental question of life without getting into serious inside baseball, which you can find elsewhere, and 3) this complexity definition is my best stab at trying to answer the question conservatives always ask, about when life begins. So far as I can tell, it never "begins," and our society heeds those scare quotes in its general tolerance for abortion.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

Eugene Volokh titillates us with this article about sex in space:

Douglas Powell, a psychology professor at Harvard University who was recruited in 1999 by Nasa to investigate the behavioural needs of long-term space trips, said: "Like anywhere, these are normal healthy people in their prime and they are sexually active so they are going to get involved with each other. So what's going to happen in space? It's a serious question and it needs to be confronted."

Unusually for a space issue, it is one where physical problems would not arise, as the presence or absence of gravity doesn't affect body mechanics.

But scientists such as Professor Powell are concerned that the emotional fallout from having a crew where some are happier than others, or where relationships are made and then fall apart, could be disastrous. He noted the comments of one Russian cosmonaut about time spent cooped up in the Mir space station that "when you have two people locked up in a very small environment for months at a time, all the conditions for murder are met." Mix in sex, and you almost have the script of Othello in space.

[...]

[T]here were allegations that Russia claimed a space first in 1982 when Svetlana Savitskaya shared the Salyut 7 space station with two Russian male colleagues. Online postings say there were "experiments" to try to conceive the first space child. But there is no independent confirmation of this; instead Savitskaya, who was the second woman in space, and the first to carry out a space walk, says in her memoirs that the two male cosmonauts "welcomed me at the hatch with an apron". She threw it aside and "established a working relationship."

Hott. What else are you supposed to do up (out?) there?

ALTERNATIVE POST TITLE: The Zero G-Spot

If I Knew Picasso...

...I would buy myself a grey guitar and play. A Picasso painting named Boy With a Pipe is expected to sell at Sotheby's for anywhere from $70 to 100 million, and may eclipse the world record set in 1990 by the sale of Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet ($82.5 M).

At first glance, those numbers seem both shallow and ill-timed, don't they? Prices under 10 digits seem reasonable, but much art you see is considered priceless, so the best of that which is bought and sold isn't the same as the best or highest-valued art. As far as the investment is concerned, the art market, like the housing market, tends to reflect crashes and spikes some time after the fact. Art sales are buoyant since people only recently stopped making oodles of money off the Internet (as far as the market is concerned). Paintings, less ephemeral than photography or other contemporary media, tend to endure the market better; and really, extraordinary paintings like this one will always fetch big money. Too rich for my blood, though.

Fuck Decency

I'm more juvenile than brash, for sure, but I'm altogether sick of the FCC. Our national school ma'arms have pushed too successfully. The debate about decency no longer centers around any question about essence—the paring of words, sounds, and images to find if they intrinsically can be necessarily offensive. We have come so far that we find ourselves instead engaged in a subcerebral indexing of stimuli into Soviet categories: "It is permissible, tovarisch!" and "Nyet, forbidden, comrade!" NPR will not say the word "suck." Suck, folks! This is the United States of A-fucking-merica and we can't say suck!

I'm here today to correct a mistake made by Tyler Green, who writes a damned fine and mostly mistake-free art blog. You see, there's an artist named Jeff Koons—perhaps you don't live underground and you've heard the name—and his deal is that he's sort of a prick, and his art schtick mostly involves being really combative and nigh-obsessed with pop iconography. You might've known that, but you might not've known that some time ago he married Cicciolina, an Italian porn star (who went on to become a member of Parliament). So back in '91, Koons and his bride start shooting hardcore porn and selling the prints for a few hundred big ones. That was the 90s for you. Anyhow, Tyler Green alerts us to just such an auction, but buries the link under a "Not Safe For Work" disclaimer.

Whatever Jeff Koons's work isn't—valuable, literate, provocative—it certainly isn't porn:

There you have it. Sexin', folks, right here on a Web site in the United States of America. If your boss is looking over your shoulder, I'd suggest you tell him or her that there are a lot of things wrong with the above image, but human nudity doesn't make that cut. And it certainly is safe for work—it doesn't even meet the SCOTUS "appealing to the prurient interest" litmus for porn. If boss doesn't buy that... scroll down to that Kerry pic. Now that's obscene.

JKIADBBIVFHA

On the Metro this morning I overheard a bedraggled young Democrat bemoaning the unfair personal criticism lumped on John Kerry. I felt a surge of nostalgia for those mixed emotions that Al Gore provoked in me, back in those heady days of 2000—the devotion, the insecurity, the rage at a world that just doesn't understand, man. And true to form, no noblesse oblige compels Kerry to prove his man right:

Sigh. The wallpaper is most certainly from Kerry's campaign Web site (courtesy of Meghan Keane). I swallowed the bitter pill of disappointment and acknowledged Kerry's preeminent douchebaggery long ago. At least there's Teresa Heinz, who promises to be one of the saucier First Ladies the White House has seen....

Minimalize This

A fine review of the bicoastal LA|MoCA and NYC|Gugg minimalism retrospectives, by Peter Schjeldahl. Schjeldahl politely introduces the borders of that which is being retrospected (Are Malevich and Mondrian given the nod? Ad Reinhardt? Ellsworth Kelly?) and notes the distinct differences between the coasts, at least as far as these shows are concerned. Just briefly he wanders into the post-min world (topic of my future studies) of Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, and Sol LeWitt; Schjeldahl even deigns a distracted glance at poor, minimalist-exhibit-less DC, noting that we host the seminal min contribution to American civ: The Vietnam War Memorial. Chalk up another unsatisfying mark for the District. (He also coyly whispers that Maya Lin owes Richard Serra an eternal debt.)

I take exception to his rather common observations of minimalism being cold, academic, clinical. Sigh, we know all that. And he kind of says that minimalism is appropriately empty for a secular society, and we know all that too—as if we needed art to make us feel guiltier. But these days I'm more and more convinced that the contributions of American minimalism amount to a thorough revision of art and artistic strategy, much as three-point perspective altered art, midwived the Renaissance, made Italy wonderful, etc.

To make the broadest (worst) argument for minimalism that I can, I'd say a piece is successfully minimal to the extent that it needs you. Very generally, minimalist art tends toward the zero-sum: The more reductive the piece is, the less evident the hand of the author becomes, the more it requires you to recognize (its formula, strategy, whatever). Picasso, Warhol, Pollock, whoever you want to look at before minimalism, you're certainly invited to witness the conversation but you're not crucial to its success. Participation would be one way to define it but it's more or less forced incorporation of the viewer into the art.

More on this later, once I've started and finished graduate school.

Always Something There to Remind Me

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle has come under fire for rejecting a bill renaming US Highway 14 "Ronald Reagan Highway," on the grounds that Reagan has nothing to do with Wisconsin. Today's WaPo profiles the push for Ronald Reagan University, which a coworker tells me will feature not so many "academic faculty" as "distinguished speakers," which in turn is more or less the story of supply-side economics. (At the same time, I always wished I'd been able to major in Star Wars.) Try asking a DC cabbie to take you to "Reagan" airport rather than "National" and see where you end up.

But a vastly larger slate of honorifics awaits Reagan once he passes from this plane. We'd all do well to get very comfortable with that fact now. I have a feeling that my kid's gonna be sharing classes with more than a few Ronnies. I imagine that if conservatives get their way with all the griping about liberalism in academia, our children will no doubt be studying Reagan's SW program—but I'm confident that my li'l Chewbacca will outperform any Ronald in his grade.

Show a Little Skin

Someone wrote me to ask if I had any notes on this article, about a Dutch artist named Joanneke Meester who fashioned a tiny pistol from her own skin. I can say for sure that I found this remark hysterical:

"If everyone made a pistol from their own skin, I think they would think twice about using a gun. I think there would be less violence in the world," she said. "But it's not that easy. Violence will always exist."

The end of the article links her to a few other contemporary artists, perhaps without realizing that all of the examples are not only British, but from a singular school of British art, the Thatcher-era Young British Artists (YBAs). Probably the most shocking aspect of skin-gun artist Meester's work is that it comes from somewhere other than the UK, and that other places in the world do this sort of thing.

Still, had that Reuters reporter been on his game, he would've mentioned the original master of mutilation, Vito Acconci.

UPDATE: If you're reading the G.p from NYC, I definitely recommend you check out the mini-retrospective of Vito Acconci's work on display at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery (until 1 May!). If you're reading from Holland... steer clear of Ms. Meester.

Scrubbing (Data) Is a Job for a Man

Salon:

If you'd logged onto the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau Web site in 1999, you would have found a list of more than 25 fact sheets and statistical reports on topics ranging from "Earning Differences Between Men and Women" to "Facts About Asian American and Pacific Islander Women" to "Women's Earnings as Percent of Men's 1979-1997."

Not anymore. Those fact sheets no longer exist on the Women's Bureau Web site, and have instead been replaced with a handful of peppier titles, like "Hot Jobs for the 21st Century" and "20 Leading Occupations for Women." It's just one example of the ways in which the Bush administration is dismantling or distorting information on women's issues, from pay equity to reproductive healthcare, according to "Missing: Information About Women's Lives," a new report released Wednesday by the National Council for Research on Women.

You've probably heard about some of the other examples in "Missing" -- for instance, the time the Centers for Disease Control removed an online guide to condom use and changed the fact-sheet language to indicate that studies on condom use were inconclusive, focusing instead on abstinence. But the power of "Missing" comes not from its dozens of individual examples, but from the depth and breadth of its findings about the small ways in which the Bush administration is draining the well of dependable public scientific and sociological information.

Why doesn't President Delete Key stop fucking around and just scrap the whole goddamned Internet? While he's at it he might as well set our Date/Time back to 1957, before all this science/facts/transparency BS.

Spencer Defeats Pencil-Dick

I was pleased to see the news. Spencer's incumbency might make a tougher contest for Hoeffel, but at least we're spared the months of annunciations regarding a newly ascendant asshole conservatism. The best part of all was that turnout was so weak for the most hotly contested Republican contest of the year. Not that Democratic primaries are going to fare so much better—it's just that this contest was consistently described as crucial to the future of the party, and I'm happy to hear that the anti-tax, anti-gay, anti-progress jihad is neither as expansive nor as mobilized as some might have you believe.

UPDATE: I disagree with Yglesias (or, his roommate, anyway):

Contrary contrary view, due to my roommate, is that the damage fretted about above has already been done by Toomey's impressive performance vis-à-vis Specter. Given that, it's better for the damage to at least result in the nomination of the less-viable GOP candidate for the general election.

That "damage" is the threat that, with a high-profile Toomey victory, right-wing lunacy would come to be seen as the must-have accessory for legislative contests in 2004. Surely for the folks who are already crazy it doesn't matter that Toomey lost—others will follow, this is only the beginning, the 1950s will rise again—and those guys will still be checking for your Reaganite credentials at the door. But relatively normal Republicans have been polled, and they aren't falling in line to the same overwhelming degree that the conservative media establishment has. Most importantly, Toomey lost, and losers never prosper. Without a public forum for Toomey, or at least an equivalent, high-profile race elsewhere, who but the same old talking heads will be bringing the message of pure ideology to the people?

If there's "damage" to be assigned in this contest, I think it goes with Bush. How can he be so despicable to Democrats and liberals worldwide, yet at home, push the Republican Party toward new frontiers of vile?

That's Not Me in the Corner

Specter vs Toomey:

The nation's most expensive, closely watched and hard-fought U.S. Senate primary will be decided by Pennsylvania Republicans today as they choose between the experience of moderate incumbent Arlen Specter and the zeal of his conservative challenger, U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey.

[...]

Raising the stakes further is the role of the race in determining the balance of power in Washington. The Republicans' narrow majority in the Senate could be in jeopardy if Democratic Rep. Joseph Hoeffel, who has no primary opponent, prevails in November against the winner of today's GOP race.

[...]

Though Hoeffel's camp said yesterday that it was ready to take on either Republican, analysts said Hoeffel had a better chance of beating Toomey.

"If Specter is renominated, I think it's very hard for Hoeffel to get much traction," said Stuart Rothenberg, a political analyst in Washington. "If Toomey wins, we immediately move it to a toss-up."

This is sort of an NCAA contest for me, where I root for the Big XII team because Texas isn't in contention. Except, of course, if that Big XII team is Oklahoma, and in this case I'd say that The Corner's endorsement of Toomey qualifies him for honorary Sooner status in my book. I'm not awaiting the results with baited breath, but I don't like Bob Stoops, The Corner, or pencil-dicks like Toomey, so I want to see Specter eek out a close victory.

I've Got Your Schism Right Here

A few thoughts on this detestable business of Catholic officials threatening to refuse John Kerry the Eucharist:

1. Would anyone agree that, as of late, the Catholic Church in America has lost some measure of moral clout one might call requisite to pursue this business of divvying up Communion?

2. Is it categorically more sinful to affirm the potential for sin (e.g. voting for abortion rights) than to explicitly approve sin (e.g. ordering an execution)? OK, I understand an answer to this question would require a more robust theology than anyone's prepared to read before noon. The lowercase point I'm making is that while a priest could choose to suspend Communion for a woman on, say, the Sundays that fall between her decision to seek one and the procedure itself, a pro-choice political alignment disqualifies a person permanently—even though that political person does not (apparently) carry the "mortal sin" in his or her heart, but rather a vaguely unrepentant or agnostic disposition. That might very well be theologically sound and I just don't know, but I would expect a thorough if not exhaustive litmus test before approaching the altar if it's true. There are Biblical passages that suggest both that 1) all sin is equal, in which case being pro-choice would be more or less a discrete sin for which you can ask forgiveness, and 2) the mental suggestion of sin is as sinful as any action—in which case, I suppose, the Catholic Church ranks the pro-choice down there with the Nazis. (See also homosexuality.)

3. If a bishop rules that he would not extend the Eucharist to some person, how strong is the hierarchical pressure for priests to abide by the ruling? So far no priest has threatened to cut Kerry off, so I guess it's not mandatory.

4. Let's say that getting an abortion is a discrete sin, but being pro-choice is categorically worse, a sin for which you can't repent without realigning your political views (clearly the Church's goal). By the Church's own (sorry) logic, doesn't it seem that they're letting off pro-choice Catholics awfully easy?

5. No wonder you guys are crazy guilty. What the hell?

I'm cooking up something about the 00s being a time to rediscover your Dante, regarding the way that religious-types are filling Hell and naming names. Let the excommunications commence!

PS: I am curious about these questions if you've got the answers. I don't recall anything so dramatic (or theologically subtle) from my distant Baptist roots. No one gets between a country boy and his cracker n' grape juice.

Dear World: Do Something

Is it even possible for this little to happen in a day? This post has nearly been several others alternately throughout the afternoon: Some point about how I don't like Bush, some bullshit about how I do like art, something about how Deadwood is the best TV show since Twin Peaks, some post in which I cleverly transformed Marquis Daniels's name into de Sade and told you how he brings the pain but in a not-so-obvious way as all that, something about how someone wrote something on his weblog about something at some point.

Someone, please, do me a favor and write something worth reading. Are you for the draft? NFL, military, both? For the record I consider myself chiefly pro-draught. Speaking of, I'm off to pub quiz, where the weekly challenge of inventing a "witty and topical" team name will likely require a few more beers than usual. Consider this an open thread and behave yourselves while I'm gone.

Gaza Stripped

Scary Sunday speculation from the WaPo suggesting that Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and our unwavering support of Sharon's plan, means that responsibility for Gaza may very well fall upon us.

[O]ne of the articles of Sharon's disengagement plan declares that it will "obviate the claims about Israel with regard to its responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."

But who's going to take over that responsibility? Not the tattered Palestinian Authority. Not cautious Egypt, which once ruled Gaza. Instead, de facto responsibility for what happens in Gaza once Israel withdraws will fall to the United States. That's the hidden meaning in the president's letter of assurance to Sharon saying that the United States will lead an international effort to build the capacity and will of Palestinian institutions to fight terrorism and prevent the areas from which Israel withdraws from posing a threat.

I have no idea whether or not the Palestinian Authority's presence is as "tattered" as writer Martin Indyk claims, but I'm willing to believe that regardless, the opportunity for terrorist types will be absolutely magnetic. Ergo, Bush wants Sharon to forestall the withdrawal until after the elections:

...Bush's endorsement of the Sharon plan means that the United States will end up inheriting the problems of Gaza. Recognizing that Bush's new posture carries real consequences, the National Security Council staff has plunged into the most intensive negotiations with Israeli officials since the breakdown of Clinton-era efforts. And in a sign of White House anxiety about those consequences, Bush has asked Sharon to postpone the Gaza disengagement until after the U.S. elections, according to Israeli news reports.

Now, Indyk's thesis is predicated upon two claims: first, that Gaza will go badly once Israel jets. Sounds more or less right, especially when you consider that Israel isn't fully disengaging:

Heightening the president's new Gaza security dilemma is the fact that Israel is planning to retain control of the "Philadelphi" corridor that separates Gaza from Egypt, as well as the sea and air space around Gaza, in order to prevent the smuggling of terrorists and weapons into and out of the Strip. But this will enable the terrorist groups within Gaza to claim justification for continuing their attacks on Israel and refusing to disarm on the grounds that Israel has not really ended its occupation.

Stir in the PA's inability to police its terrorist factions and you have all the makings of the nasty sort of terrorist-backing state that Bush is convinced he fought in Iraq. The second condition to Indyk's scenario is that Bush would actually engage this sort of state if he saw one rising, or, more importantly, do what was necessary to prevent it from being born. (Cf. Afghanistan.)

Frankly, I'll set the idle speculation aside and say that Sharon's plan sounds bad for us, really bad for Blair, and really terrible for I/P.

Proscrastination is a Hard Habit to Break

Jesse Taylor reads Townhall so we don't have to, and spots this headline-grabber from Bob Novak:

WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is being urged by colleagues to threaten to close down the Senate for the rest of the year unless Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle ends his disruptive tactics.

In addition to menacing all judicial nominations, Daschle is now preventing legislation from being sent to Senate-House conferences to resolve differences in bills passed by both Houses unless the outcome is guaranteed.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, and other conservatives want Frist to counter Daschle by bringing the business of the Senate to a halt. This would mean passing an omnibus appropriations bill and then awaiting the outcome of the elections. Democrats could not offer their pet amendments, but it also would prevent passage of a budget resolution and, therefore, kill any chance of making the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Brush off Novak's partisan dish, and the story you find is that Bill Frist wants to close Congress until America no longer has this annoying two-party system. I initially questioned with wisdom of this approach, but it occurred to me that President Bush won't really need his rubber stamp until after November anyway, since the executive branch has also put off all policy actions until after the election. (November will be a busy month!) For a minute there, I was concerned that the majority party was behaving in an excessively partisan manner or something.

Get It While the Getting's Good

I know Jack Kelly is old news, and these journalists-behaving-badly stories are so lame—but wouldn't you rather open up your morning edition to this?

Among the stories now disavowed by USA Today are Kelley's reports "that he found diaries alongside the corpses of Iraqi soldiers in 1991; traveled to a village in Somalia to interview an aid worker in 1992; discovered matches made from napalm that could burn through glass ashtrays in 1993; trekked into the mountains of Yugoslavia with the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999; listened to a tape that captured the downing of a missionary flight over Peru in 2000; visited with Elian Gonzalez's father inside the father's house in Cuba in 2000; visited Osama bin Laden terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 2001; and spent time near the cave complexes of Tora Bora in 2001."

Had I only known that USA Today ran Jack Ryan installments.

Pro-Not Getting Your Ass Killed

Overheard, while walking from Dupont Circle, where pro- and anti-choice activists are congregating before tomorrow's big marches, near a "Best Shuttle" minibus:

You're gonna go here if you're picking up the pro-choice people, and you're gonna go here if you're picking up the pro-life people. Put up this pink sign [in the window] if you're picking up pro-choice people and use the blue sign if you're picking up pro-lifers. If you forget and mix these up you won't get paid because they will probably kill your ass.

Word to the wise.

POSTSCRIPT: My friend Steve-O emailed me a few days ago asking if I would be attending. Lest I give anyone the impression that I was activizing today, the answer's no. I was out walking my dog and intended to sit in Dupont Circle, enjoy the sun, and read Rushdie's Midnight's Children, but my afternoon delight was overrun by a caravan of U-Haul-sized trucks (with oversized pictures of aborted foetuses imprinted on the sides, circling Dupont slowly, blaring Scripture) and angry women (screaming/singing into megaphones, peddling "RAPED"-emblazoned shirts, distributing crappy chocolate granola). Not quite the pastoral Saturday I envisaged.

Much as I support the cause, I am unmoved by protests. I'd say that I'm not inclined toward activistism, but by virtue of the dedication some people put into protesting, I'm convinced this is a sort of career track on which I'm not set. So, no, I'm not in the business.

From Russia With Bile

I can't recommend strongly enough this ARTnews piece on religiously motivated art censorship in Russia, by Konstantin Akinsha. I realized today that I recognized Akinsha's name because I read something a piece he wrote about the Russian art group AES back in school. (The point being that while ARTnews is typically a facile publication, Akinsha knows what he's talking about.)

If you browse through the piece you will see mention of the Sakharov Museum—named after Andrei Sakharov, one of my heroes. Akinsha writes:

In January 2003, a gang of Russian Orthodox activists destroyed an exhibition in the Sakharov Museum and Public Center called “Caution! Religion.” Last December two Sakharov Museum officials and three of the exhibition organizers were charged by the state prosecutor with inciting religious hatred. They face prison terms of up to five years. The vandals, meanwhile, were hailed by church officials as heroes and martyrs, and all criminal charges against them were dismissed.

[...]

In December 2003, Sakharov Museum director Yuri Samodurov was charged with actions “leading to the provocation of hatred and enmity.” If he is found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

The article goes on to say that Samodurov probably won't face prison time, but those charges and/or the threat of fines hangs over the head of the nation's curators. Some context might clarify the gravity of the threat: The Sakharov Museum is a tiny, tiny facility. I braved the inner rings of Moscow when I was there a few summers ago to see the Sakharov Center, in hopes of seeing something about his life, but the gallery itself is little more than a room and does not benefit from exceptional arts coverage, funding, etc. For the Duma to bring its weight to bear on this 'museum' is patently absurd; the pressure on curators at full-fledged arts institutions in Russia must be enormous. (No loss of irony, either, in the fact that this heinous law was first applied against a gallerist at the Sakharov gallery, of all places.) Sakharov's wonderful wife, Elena Bonner, explains:

“It’s a tragic situation,” Elena Bonner told ARTnews in a telephone interview from Boston, where she lives part of the time. Bonner, the widow of Nobel Prize–winning physicist and famous dissident Andrei Sakharov, is chair of the Sakharov Center, which was founded to educate Russians about their totalitarian past. “The events around the exhibition discredit the Russian Orthodox Church, just as the fatwah condemning Salman Rushdie to death discredited Islam,” she said. Bonner pointed out that the vandals had come to the museum prepared to be offended, with axes, hammers, and cans of spray paint in their pockets.

Lots more good stuff through that link.

The Hippocritical Oath

From Atrios:

Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.

The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.

The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.

The bills now go the Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans.

The Conscientious Objector Policy Act would allow health care providers to assert their objection within 24 hours of when they receive notice of a patient or procedure with which they don't agree. However, it would prohibit emergency treatment to be refused.

The site from which Atrios clipped focuses on the effect on the gay community, but remember that Catholics hate all sorts of people. I'd like to believe that anyone who's taken the Hippocratic Oath couldn't be so foolish or insincere to pay attention to this political pandering, but then only recently those Dallas pharmacists refused to full prescriptions for contraceptives because of "personal beliefs." What's with the medical activism?

Godsmack

Weighing in on what Julian Sanchez, Matthew Yglesias, Amy Sullivan, and Kevin Drum have said about Air America's use of areligious or sacrilegious humor—and acknowledging that the subject looks pretty much tapped out—I just want to note that Kevin Drum is wrong about PC humor:

I'm about as nonreligious as you can get, but even I understand the basics of in-group comedy: only blacks get to make fun of blacks, only Jews get to make fun of Jews, and only religious folks get to mock religion. That's both common sense and common courtesy.

It's not in-group but sub-group comedy we're talking about here, right? Because not only can blacks make fun of blacks, blacks can make fun of whites. Same with Jews and WASPs. Everyone, really, can make fun of the default state, and in America the default is more or less white WASPs.

It's excessively whiny for protestants to complain about a couple of Jewish or athiest comedians making a joke at their expense, and refreshingly, protestants generally don't overreact to this kind of humor. (Hell, their god is on everyone's money, so what do they care?) Dave Chapelle, on the other hand, gets accused of being racist against whites all the time. Humor can't really be racist, in my opinion, without the corresponding threat of power—which is why humor works when it's directed up the power hierarchy. Humor works to correct the imbalance of power.

No Peace

Surprising, oh, nobody, the RIAA wasn't terribly serious with its offer of amnesty late last year, and has now suspended the program by which file-pirates could give the industry association extensive personal contact information and an admission of guilt and the industry would promise to leave them be. Believe it or not, 1,108 people are that stupid.

The program was dropped after Californian Eric Parke sued the RIAA for being pricks ("fraudulent business practices"). So what happens to those kids now? Will those be the next 1,108 subpoenas issued, or do they benefit from some sort of weird, double-jeopardy loophole?

When All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Starts to Look Like Gays

Last night I attended a panel discussion hosted by a conservative/libertarian social club, and the topic of discussion was gay marriage. Panelists included former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga), some total dick who looks like Ed Helms from the Daily show, some guy with extremely small, soft-looking hands from AEI, and Andrew Sullivan; the panel was moderated by Grover Norquist.

Let me start by saying that you are in a bad way if the most reasonable person in the room is Grover Norquist.

Norquist started the proceedings by saying that the panel included representatives from all four quadrants of the conservative Punnet square (for/against gay marriage x for/against a constitutional amendment on the issue). He may have been right, and it was at least an admirable effort, but the debate was more or less an everyone-pile-on-Sully-but-not-like-that-well-maybe-like-that-for-the-soft-handed-AEI-guy sort of evening. (You have to feel for Sully, because you know he plays token fag for all of these clubs.) For what it's worth, Bob Barr opposed gay marriage, but did not support a constitutional amendment to prevent it; Ed Helms-lookalike and legal-beagle dickwad opposed gay marriage by namedropping a bunch of court cases beyond just Lawrence and Goodrich and looking at the other panelists and saying things like, "Oh, well it's clear that you support State v. Obscure Legal Reference" and man, that guy was a dick; Andrew Sullivan made awkward appeals to "our humanity" and the rights of "souls to merge into One" and by the end sounded as if he might break into a songful proclamation of the Bohemian ideals of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Above All, Love; and finally, the AEI guy did not fool anyone into thinking he was straight by opposing gay marriage.

Where the panel's temperature measured coolly conservative, the audience, however, ranged from opposed-to-gay-marriage to I've-got-a-pitchfork-in-my-Beamer-let's-do-this. Sully was more dismissed than debated (his poor arguments didn't bolster his standing) but several people were absolutely unforgiving when DoMA architect Barr mentioned that he didn't support federal intervention. A few people not only derided this position, but claimed it was not properly federalist to suggest that the Federal Government not interfere with the wishes of the States. (Asked on his opinion about the difference between the legislative and judicial approaches to the question, he said, "Whether it's through the front door or the back door, someone's coming through the door." Indeed.)

After a while I became—I'll only say this once—truly grateful to hear Grover's voice when he interrupted some blue blazer's give-me-a-job pitch/question. Especially after the discourse, quite predictably, descended into a tedious referendum on polygamy/polyamory. Here Sullivan was directly challenged, but he refused to take the moral-relativist bait. He smartly pointed out that the polygamy scare tactic was an anachronistic one, used—in the same room, I have no doubts!—as an anti-miscegenation argument way back when.

I left when an audience member mentioned the slippery slope toward pedophelia—that's as logically unsound as it is horrible. Suffice it to say, though, that I'd heard quite a bit of bullshit before that point, and in the interest of not subjecting you to that experience in microcosm/post form, I'm tying up this bitch up with a contest. I give you the two worst comments I heard last night, and you tell me which is better proof that the right is vacuous!

• Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Marriage: This assertion came from a representative of the greater blogosphere—Meghan Keane of Swamp City. Sort of tucked into a question during the polygamy scare round, Meghan clarified that the real next impending quite bad threat to marriage would be gay couples marrying the surrogate mommies and sperm-donin' dads of their kids. Sully responded with an eww-gross-vagina stare, but picture Anne Heche, Ellen Degeneres, and David Crosby curled up together—naked—and I think you'll get behind that constitutional amendment in a hurry. Is the Will, Grace, & Jack Scenario an imminent threat to the United States of America?

• The Meta-Amendment: Judicial activism is dangerous, said many from the right last night. One young blue blazer intoned that the gay marriage question sidestepped the real problem in America—all these judges interpreting the Constitution. He proposed a measure that would certainly bypass this argument: A constitutional amendment explaining how the Constitution is to be interpreted. Why didn't they think of that in the first place?

Pick your choice and let us know in comments, but remember, this is a family place. We all have friends on the right, and we should agree to disagree and respect each other's opinions and be a good get-along gang. Unless you're gay—then you can fuck 'em in the ass.

Noted Without Comment

Courtesy of Atrios, a picture of Ambassador Negroponte from the Coalition Provisional Authority's site:

All too easy. I'm not going to to harp about our good proconsul today, but if you need a helping of hate I'd suggest checking in with Matthew Yglesias.

I Believe in a Thing Called Defense

Just listen to the rhythm of my heart. Despite the triple-double, despite the awful shooting, despite the last 19 seconds, despite the fact that Doug Christie and Brad Miller continue to exist, I could watch last night's Mavs v Kings game again. Eduardo Najera is easily one of my favorite players, and whether or not the game's unusually low score signified a defensive battle, I think he showed grit and really made the game. Mavs didn't take it but I wasn't disappointed.

I will say, though, that it pisses me off to no end that, despite the fact that Vladi Divac will never, ever, ever play in the final minutes of a Dallas/Sac game, I am nevertheless treated to continuous coverage of his floptasticness as he loafs across the bench. Every cut from the floor and I'm reminded of Vladi's existence, and time left in the game is inversely proportional to the screen time given to Vladi's horrible, prosimian face. You know, Bobby Jackson sits the bench the entire game and yet I don't see him every time the camera cuts from the floor, and even if I did, he probably wouldn't be acting like an asshole. I don't want to see Vladi at all, but I really don't need constant reminding of his existence while I'm already anxious about the game. Can't Adelman let him go chain-smoke or something when the clock hits 2:00?

Koolhaas Rock

Scott pointed me toward this slideshow on Rem Koolhaas drawn up by Slate's Christopher Hawthorne. Clicky clicky, folks, it's good for you. One of the (many) reasons I prefer Koolhaas to Frank Gehry is that Koolhaas manages some signature looks without his buildings necessarily becoming Koolhaases, whereas I imagine Gehry couldn't make a carrot cake that didn't look like twisted metal. OK, I'm overstating my dislike for Gehry's look—and actually, I think there is a reason for his repetition: One way by which Gehry's pigeonholed himself is by investing thoroughly in the advanced mathematical modeling techniques necessary to achieve his style. With this focus he makes these superlative achievements at a very fine level of detail, but the complexity of the operation stymies the innovation at the general scale. Sort of an evolutionary biology process—beetles can just wake up more or less with a bunch more legs and horns or whatever, but mammals can't. Something like that.

I think that tangent evolved into a knock on Koolhaas, but the design for the Central Chinese Television HQ in Beijing alone qualifies him for vertebrate classification:

Another reason I'm drinking the Kool-Aid (yep, I said it) involves his collaborations with Jacques Herzog. (You can see a fantastic example in the slideshow, a NYC design for hotellier Ian Schrager, but unfortunately it's been scrapped.) Herzog (and de Meuron) doesn't quite fit this side of the Atlantic, I think, but their work is stimulating and I'll never forgive my alma mater for rejecting H&dM's design for the university museum.

Collaborations often give way to competition, and you can judge for yourself which Prada location you prefer—Herzog and de Meuron's Tokyo store or Koolhaas's NYC branch—but my money is with Herzog. In fact I'd say the reason I don't wear more of the Prada line is because I can't make it to my preferred outlet.

The Pull-Out Method

UPI reports that the US is withdrawing troops from the Najaf's border, but details are scant. De-escalation is great, but better would've been to not go all I'm-gonna-get-you-sucka in the first place; the US brass made that "dead or alive" pledge more than once, so even if this crisis passes we don't have much of a resolution.

Also, Juan Cole notes that Zapatero accelerated the withdrawal of Spain's Coalition forces precisely because Spanish troops were based from and around Najaf. (They were scheduled to leave July 1st.) Cole continues:

A problem for the US: A lot of other countries may well decide to follow suit. Most "Coalition partners" signed up for peacekeeping or reconstruction, not to fight against guerrillas (there is a difference between peacekeeping and peace-enforcing). The US could well lose half a division this way, and it doesn't have half a division to spare.

If the US were to provoke a struggle with the Shiites, the British in Basra might well leave, as well, rather than risk being overwhelmed. In the midst of such a Shiite revolt, with British commanders frantically signalling they didn't have the manpower to handle it in the South, if Tony Blair wouldn't finally come to grips with reality, he might well be unceremoniously dumped by his own party, the way Maggie Thatcher was. That is, the Spanish model, of a Bush/Cheney induced move to the left might not stop, among US allies, with Madrid.

Nothing fun about that. Doesn't bode well for UN involvement if we lose any more support from Willing nations, since the UN includes not only those but more than a few non! nations to boot.

Negroponte: Easy Rider

Bush officially named John Negroponte as the US ambassador to Iraq and I'm shocked at the easy hand that the major media outlets are giving him. Robin Wright of the WaPo doesn't even note the pick as controversial—or that Negroponte's original appointment as ambassador to the UN stoked a fire. I suppose Wright's larger point is about whether or not the ambassador will be a functionary of the State or the Pentagon, but doesn't a record of human rights abuses suggest he'll be bad for either? The AP at least does the reader the courtesy of mentioning the Hondoran death squads, but only after maintaining that Negroponte's selection "was widely praised," and then giving Negroponte the only word on the issue:

Negroponte testified that he did not believe the abuses were part of a deliberate Honduran government policy. "To this day,'' he said, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras.''

And the Reuters reports is similarly disengaged. Before we're all hemming and hawing over how fascist/communist the media leans, I'll just note that it's important to highlight major, death-tinged scandals when evaluating a presidential appointee. Might even mention the other death-tinged appointments of Bush's administration. And maybe I'm asking too much, but it seems perhaps noteworthy that the appointee for the most prominent diplomatic post in US history has no language skills applicable to any area within a few thousand miles of Iraq, or that it's all sort of ridiculous since there's yet no sign of this government to whom Negroponte is supposed to ambass.

MORE: From Yglesias:

David [Adesnik] also raises the subject of the media's (egregiously bad) coverage of the situation. The trouble here, really, is that Democrats haven't raised any hackles, meaning there's "no story" in Negroponte's record, so it doesn't bear mentioning. One might think that this is a totally inane way to cover the news, and one would be right, but that's the way it always goes and I wouldn't say demonstrates some kind of special fondness for Negroponte. The other thing is that the press seems to have decided sometime around 1993 or so that the unofficial statute of limitations for Iran-Contra and related stories had passed and stopped exhibiting any interest in subjects like Bush I's mysterious last-minute pardons or his son's habit of appointing felons to high office. One could say something similar about Watergate which (obviously) was vigorously pursued by the press at the time (eventually), but then seemed to vanish off the radar screen as various Nixonites began to infiltrate the media and re-integrate themselves into the Republican Party apparat.

I was going to post something further about how I'm frustrated by the lack of outrage on the part of office-holding Democrats—especially those in the Senate, who will probably vote to confirm Negroponte—but in a sense the lack of outrage in the media is worse. The whole government is giving this asshole a pass and so it's obviously not about liberal or conservative media, but I think that a sort of self-consciousness about bias has sufficiently affected the media that they will tiptoe around this stuff. I understand that a Senate Democrat is forced into that—I mean, good Lord, look at how Daschle leads the party—but the media needs to call a spade a spade.

In Which I Write About Porn Without Succumbing to the Ready Font of Shallow Humor

I'm shocked to find that commenters at this site gravitate toward the dirty talk. Unfamiliar as I am with the pornographic genre, I did a bit of research today and found there's a real crisis brewing: Two veteran industry performers, Darren James and Laura Roxxx, were diagnosed with HIV this week. Despite what you might think, HIV is quite rare in adult entertainment (the last case was in 1999), and the industry has responded quickly, if confusingly. Various "Porn Valley" studios have agreed to at least a 60-day quarantine on employing any of the stars recently associated with James or Roxxx; most studios (or, independently, stars) have agreed to a moratorium on all production for the foreseeable future.

(I should note now that all these links are SFW. Safe for work—like you didn't know.)

Check out the quarantine list itself—which shows up to two "generations," or degrees of separation—provided by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM). You quickly come to understand why strict and precise regulation is so important, because when "DP Guy??" comes up on the chain of relations, you have a wildfire on your hands.

While that's not comforting, what oversight there is certainly recommends pornography over prostitution, pace the discussion below about the negative attributes of both. Here's the thing about the sex industry—it's really, really old, and has proven to be somewhat enduring. I'm in full agreement with the sex industry's detractors that it has wide-ranging negative effects, and I'm not sympathetic to the post-feminist thesis re prostitution-as-power (if that's still a relevant argument—I don't think it's so strong within the academy, these days). But so long as people keep doing things I perhaps don't think they should, I want them to be safe, and not subject to rampant abuse by the more powerful—in other words, subject to oversight. Some dare call it "liberalism."

On a lighter note, a performer by the name of Jenna Jameson, with whose work I'm unfamiliar, has launched an Adult Industry Assistance Fund (AIAF) to assist those whose wallets might suffer from the moratorium. Like in so many other barely legal industries, porno industry workers tend to work from paycheck to paycheck, and it's nice to see a big star giving the little guy a hand. (I'm told she has some talent in this regard.)

Holy Effin' Hell

Atrios, dipping from Bob Woodward's awesomely titled newest, Plan of Attack:

"President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?' What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret," says Woodward.

"...The end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done. They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. ...Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this."

But Atrios, Clinton got a blowjob in office. Don't you get how impeachment works? No one cares if Bush siphoned money from the Afghan humanitarian purse without congressional knowledge because, hello, no one from the Middle East was blowing Bush.

...well, maybe Chalabi, but that only halfway counts.

The War on Your Bedroom

I caught a bit of 2000/early 2001 nostalgia when I read this Cato column by Volokh. You remember, back when the Bush administration was only concerned with radicalizing domestic policy. Now that our nationbuilding is out of the way, John Ashcroft is directing a share of the Justice Department's resources and focus to bear on the all-important problem of obscenity, which (in the age of the Internet) is almost as futile an exercise as it is unwarranted.

Volokh expands about the various ways that Ashcroft can go about prosecuting an industry that rakes in more annually than Hollywood and comes to a few conclusions:

(1) The crackdown on porn is doomed to be utterly ineffective at preventing the supposedly harmful effects of porn on its viewers, and on the viewers' neighbors.

(2) The crackdown on porn will be made effective -- by implementing a comprehensive government-mandated filtering system run by some administrative agency that constantly monitors the Net and requires private service providers to block any sites that the agency says are obscene.

(3) The crackdown on porn will turn into a full-fledged War on Smut that will be made effective by prosecuting, imprisoning, and seizing the assets of porn buyers.

Porn—and, you know, I never touch the stuff myself—is not only constitutionally protected, it benefits from an overwhelmingly large mandate of support from Americans. That not only makes for right, it makes for might. Even if you agree with Ashcroft on the wickedness of porn, it's a massive operation and will only breed success with an investment of millions. Tackling this equation from the supply side is a ridiculous undertaking.

Amazing to me that there are any small-government adherents on the right still supporting Bush. Federal oversight of your person—national priority. Maybe someone out there can explain why this works for Republicans, and do so without invoking the Bible. If you can show me even hypothetically how this policy (and its costs) benefits Americans without invoking some chapter-verse Scriptural tautology, you'll win my respect. Note before we start: Bill Clinton is not running for president.

A nod to (obvious porn fiend) Charles Kuffner for the link.

You Say You Want a Resolution

Juan Cole, a guy who reads the real stuff:

az-Zaman reports that Muqtada al-Sadr has accepted a solution of the problems between him and the Coalition on the basis of a deal. It would provide for the senior ayatollahs to issue a ruling or fatwa dissolving the Army of the Mahdi, Muqtada's militia. Muqtada surrender to the grand ayatollahs and agree to have Abdul Karim al-Unzi (an official of the Da`wa Party) negotiate for him with the Americans, in the name of the top religious leaders. Muqtada would accept the outcome of those negotiations without condition. Iran would offer him temporary asylum, until June 30 and the formation of a sovereign Iraqi government, at which time he could report to Najaf for his trial. In return, the US would withdraw its forces from the environs of Najaf.

Sounds good to me, but as Tacitus notes, you have to do something about that potential standing army. Perhaps if Paul Bremer had heeded the numerous warnings before he disbanded the Iraqi army, there wouldn't be roving bands of angry, unemployed men looking for a reason.

Exceptionally good news from Najaf, is this is true, but until those troops are clear and al-Sadr neutralized the bull's at the door of the china shop.

ALSO: Osama bin Laden is whining to the Europeans. This is what happens when the West doesn't discipline consistently. Terrorists go to us when they want to call someone the Great Satan, but go to Europe when they want to arrange a truce.

Multiple Man

These are the guys responsible for the new site design I'm enjoying:

Hit them up for all your trompe l'oeil/web-design desires.

Sadred

Garance Franke-Ruta describes the very real crisis gathering outside Najaf, as 2,500 soldiers stand ready for a stand-off with Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia. An attack against the city bearing the holiest Shia site—the Imam Ali Shrine (which, if I remember correctly, houses Muhammed's remains)—threatens to fuse the disparate Shi'ite factions into an anti-occupation regime-in-waiting.

Last night I recall that President Bush pledged that he authorized the military to take "decisive force" as necessary. This showdown is a moment where "decisive politics" would be better warranted. Assuredly there are crazies ready to take potshots at a standing Coalition force; why are we more or less entrusting the negotiation process with them? Even the commander of the force in question knows this:

Col. Dana J.H. Pittard, the commander of the force, said his troops were aware that a "single shot in Najaf" by U.S. soldiers could outrage Iraq's powerful Shiite majority.

"Look at this as the Shiite Vatican," Pittard said before the deployment.

I'm not second-guessing our military, but I do question the wisdom of the authors that brought the match to the powder-keg. It just takes that one shot—just one insurgent, watching the dreaded occupation encircle the holiest city in the land—and then escalation isn't up to either the Americans or al-Sadr.

The Death Star

What with Henry Kissinger goofing up his last assignment, Darth Maul in the can, and Professor Snipe just not quite passing the evil litmus, the healm of frontrunner status for the position of Ambassador to Iraq falls on the shoulders of one John Negroponte. Take a minute to meet your new proconsul:

From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras. During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.

Negroponte supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site.

Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnaped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two with a contact in the Honduran armed forces The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any US involvement, despite Negroponte's participation in the scheme. Other documents uncovered a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government.

During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military and he claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post. When the Reagan administration came to power, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Later, the Honduras Commission on Human Rights accused Negroponte himself of human rights violations.

Speaking of Negroponte and other senior US officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which in 1995 published an extensive investigation of US activities in Honduras:

Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.

The Sun's investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of numerous abuses but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensured that the embassy's annual human rights report did not contain the full story.

When President George W. Bush announced Negroponte's appoint to the UN shortly after coming to office, it was met with widespread protest. However, the Bush administration did not back down and even went so far as to try to silence potential witnesses. On March 25, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his Senate confirmation hearings. One of the deportees was General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16. In the preceding month, Washington had revoked the visa of Discua who was Honduras' Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Nonetheless, Discua went public with details of US support of Battalion 3-16.

Guys... (wiping a tear) ...I think we've found our man.

EVEN BETTER: Mark Kleiman points out that Negroponte speaks English, French, Greek, Spanish, and Vietnamese; Matthew Yglesias notes that Negroponte doesn't speak Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, or Turkish. More importanly, Negroponte's fluent in the universal language of illicit violence.

You Had Me at Hello

President Bush's conference, from the start, convinced me that anything he has to say isn't going to make me like him any less. If you want the full-frontal fisking, check in with Norbizness, who appears to have exhausted a few keyboards in the process. Even the reverb from the echo chamber is a bit mute.

Why wouldn't the President come correct to his third-ever primetime press conference? It's one thing for the WaPo's Mike Allen to hand Bush his ass—Allen went for the jugular. Bush doesn't have an answer to why he and Cheney must appear jointly when the commission requested them separately, or to whom authority is being granted on June 30th. So Bush swallows those hits, fine. But he fumbled a softball question when he was asked what he'd do differently to prevent 9/11. That's not a question, it's a forum, an opportunity for a bit of tear-wiping humility, and Bush's meandering response amounted to "I'm put on the spot here" and "WMD could still be there." Nevertheless, I did smile when Bush mentioned "a gathering threat"—Kenneth Pollack was asking for it.

The minor irritations aside, I was apoplectic when Bush touted A.Q. Khan's capture pardon as some Bush administration victory—Seymour Hersh delivered the details from that pregnant bitch some time ago. How in 2004 can this administration still refuse to differentiate the state-sponsored threat from the actual terrorism we're prosecuting?

And fucking why does FOX spell it "Usama?"

Speak, Memo II

Washington Monthly's West-coast correspondent quotes Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball from a 2003 column:

Some sources who have read the still-secret congressional report say some sections would not play quite so neatly into White House plans. One portion deals extensively with the stream of U.S. intelligence-agency reports in the summer of 2001 suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning an upcoming attack against the United States—and implicitly raises questions about how Bush and his top aides responded.

One such CIA briefing, in July 2001, was particularly chilling and prophetic. It predicted that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike “in the coming weeks,” the congressional investigators found. The intelligence briefing went on to say: “The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”

You can connect your own dots, and I think that President Bush will spend tonight's press conference obviating how little he understands the concern at hand. He's going to deny the smoking gun that no one's pushing, and talk a bit about the state-sponsored terrorism that didn't bring about 9/11. He'll tell you tonight, as his actions have done since 9/11, specifically where they stood before the attacks.

Have to admire the savvy scheduling that slots President Bush's conference through American Idol and 24. Erstwhile critics (Justin?), I don't envy your conflict—I wouldn't miss America's Next Top Model to see Dita von Teese spank John Ashcroft.

UPDATE: FOX is rescheduling its flagship programs in deference to President Bush's conference. Let the spanking begin! (Or, find something, anything, better to do.)

What a Kurd Wants, What a Kurd Needs

Andrew Sullivan on the political reality of Iraq:

We are trying to hand over power to a new government; but the effective components of that government have long been hard to identify. Such leaders need to be competent and respected, as many in the Governing Council are. But they also have to represent real power bases; have followings they can deliver; have constituencies who will respect and listen to them. One by-product of the current violence is that leaders will have to emerge to represent the various factions; and with imagination and leadership, a new government can be nailed down.

[...]

...We need above all Shiite leadership to navigate a way past al Sadr to power. Sistani now has many cards and it does not hurt the coalition to defer to him. In fact, deferring to such leaders while reinforcing civil order is exactly what our strategy must be. We mst not get trapped into insisting that we run Iraq. We must remember that our goal is to give Iraq back to the Iraqis. If that means lowering our standards - and I do not mean as low as al Sadr - then lower them.

I was talking with a friend last night, and we were discussing how this approach is the right one, but lamentably not the one we're taking.

With Sadr's emergence, there's a contest for the leadership of the Shi'ite majority, and it's within Sistani's interest to see the United States neutralize Sadr's army (in the political sense). But that's not the same as saying that Sistani has a political stake in US victory—since the US is going to fight Sadr anyway, Sistani can refuse to meet with Bremer, sit back, and watch the US do the dirty work.

As what's not politically palatable grows clearer—by that I mean a leadership involving Ahmed Chalabi—we're left with a few real options in Iraq. We need to determine what it will take to get the Kurds and Sistani to sign on, and then we need to give them a legitimate incentive to work with us as a bloc. That means that they either work with us, or we go home and let them have the civil war that we're more or less fighting for them right now.

You might rightly speculate that while Sistani sees it to his advantage to have us beat up the extremists, our departure plays his way as well—fine. We won't know that until we take stock of all the players involved, identify whom it is we want for the post-6/30 Iraq, and then give them a reason to stick up for us. As it stands, no one in Iraq has a stack in our presence there, and changing that should be top priority in our exit strategy.

I am Trying to Break Your Art

The excellent Dust Congress notes a conversation at TMFTML on art critic Robert Hughes. Hughes writes that Lucian Freud is the greatest contemporary British artist and proves such with a line-up of strawmen Young British Artists: Damien Hirst, David Falconer, and Tracey Emin. The YBAs, if you don't know, are responsible for the slutty, tawdry stereotypes under which contemporary art constantly labors. Hughes knows this and knows Freud bears no relation to that crowd but sounds off anyway because he's a hack.

The consistent challenge in popular writing about art, or any specialty topic, is to provide enough context about the contemporary dialogue among foreground artists to frame your topic. Hughes writes for a popular crowd that is mildly acquainted with art, so his task with Freud would be to analyze his work in its quite obvious visual context—which obtains Rembrandt or Rubens or whomever—and then comment on how Freud anticipates the contemporary dialogue, which really isn't about those guys' concerns. But, no, Hughes's anti-conceptual bent ensures that he employs the tactile, pornographic nature of a rarified set of shock artists to promote an artist that has no relation with the YBA but a shared nationality—ignoring a potent revival in painting. You don't talk about Radiohead and the Spice Girls, you talk about Radiohead and Brian Eno.

If you're interested in a real and accessible art critic, ditch this Sister Wendy knock-off and read the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl for a solid start.

Stamos!

Gentlemen, I submit. It would appear that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is coming back to me. The best part:

The actress appeared in "X-Men," "X2: X-Men United," "Femme Fatale" and "Rollerball." Her upcoming films include "The Punisher" and "Godsend."

Stamos, best-known for his role as Jesse in the TV sitcom "Full House" from 1987 to 1995, played John Sears in last year's cable TV movie "The Reagans."

Thanks to blogless Kevin for the emergency instant message.

Next: The Nas/Pet Sounds Mash-Up

From a column in Frieze:

It's 37 years since Brian Wilson abandoned the album that would have done for the Beach Boys what Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band (1967) did for The Beatles: Smile. In 1966 Wilson was at the top of his game. Although ostensibly by the Beach Boys, the recently released Pet Sounds (1966) had essentially been a solo album, and hailed as the work of a genius, while 'Good Vibrations' (1966), a recent number one on both sides of the Atlantic, was arguably the most innovative and complex 45 rpm to date. Everyone, it seemed, was hanging on Brian's every move, The Beatles included.

Doesn't the timing suggest that Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club was the response to Pet Sounds? Paul felt that he had to do something to ante up after he heard Brian Wilson's sound and all the advances he'd put into the album—that's the way I've always heard it go.

But don't ask me, I just heard "Rocky Raccoon" for the first time in the last month or so. I'm trying to bone up on my Beatles knowledge, since it keeps killing me at pub quiz; at least I know enough to know that, indisputably, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" just edges out "Paperback Writer" for their best song.

Speak, Memo

I think that with Bush's press conference tomorrow re the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB memo—notably, his first press conference of the year—we'll see some cautioned return-fire. Really, there are only a few ways to pivot this memo: Either it was all the information Bush needed, so why didn't he act; or it wasn't enough information to act on, so where was the intelligence?

Kevin Drum notes that where Richard Clarke is critical of Bush, he's absolutely incensed with the FBI. It doesn't surprise me that a terror hawk would scorn the people who are supposed to be working most closely with him, so I don't know if it's valid to suggest that the FBI deserves more blame due to Clarke's frame of reference. Ultimately, though, I think that's how we'll see Bush respond: Some fine-tuning of the CIA, some shuffling within the FBI. I'd prefer to see how the Bush administration reinterpreted this evidence after 9/11 and wound up with Iraq, but I guess we all know that story by now. And how that's working out for the war on terror.

I used the word blame just now, but clearly that's not what it's about. There's some temptation in the press to assign relative levels of smoking gun-ness and responsibility to both memos and officials, to create a hierarchy of culpability. That's not going to come forward, but we can figure out the extent to which Bush was serious about this part of his job both before and after 9/11 and I for one have a feeling about both cases.

On Brows

Just over the last two days, we've got Gawker laughing at Herbert Muschamp (NYT architecture critic), Crooked Timber scoffing at Anne Applebaum, and a panel of fas