Instahoglets 8th June 06

If you're reading this then the techies at Blogger (may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their asses) finally got their sh*t together. For now. 'Till next time. Which is likely to be in the next five minutes...

Anyway, here's some "news less travelled" you might have missed this week.

It is kinda nauseating to see Democrat hawks try to manouver to the Right of the wingnuts on national security just so that they can stick one to Bush rather than by truly believing their position is a correct one. A case in point - the "Bull Moose":

The Moose was warned by his conservative friends that if he voted for Kerry we would capitulate to our enemies. If the reports on the latest Iranian deal are to believed, the right wing buddies of the Moose were right. The Moose voted for Kerry and we have just offered the store to the mullahs.

This is the kind of half-assed uninformed nonsense progressives have been fighting from the neocons throughout the Bush reign. To hear it from a supposed Dem...well...excuse me while I go scrub my neurons with Lysol.

Peter Dyer has a great article over at Consortium News which sets out, clearly and concisely, why the Nuremberg precedents definitely apply to Bush, Blair and their cabinets. A must read. As American prosecutor U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson put it at the time:

“The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind's desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world's peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.”

But as we now know, might makes right. Bush, Blair and their crew will never come to trial.

Dedalus at Blah3 brings you the other, other side of illegal imigration - the soulless mindset that creates a criminal out of a 14 year old girl who is an honor student and has been awarded a JROTC leadership award. Dedalus writes a kid like this who thought of America as a land of opportunity for people who work hard and love this country is now learning the real message is, "you bought into that, you sucka?"

British Labour MP Ian Gibson takes a look at the power of the American grudge. Cuba, despite 45 years of economic blockade, has a doctor-patient ratio of 1:170 (better than the US average of 1:188), outstanding literacy levels and rates of infant mortality and life expectancy that outstrip Washington DC. It also humanitarian missions in 68 countries and, in 2005 alone, 1,800 doctors from 47 developing countries graduated in Cuba under a free scholarship scheme. The reason given for the economic blockade is invariably that of human rights abuse yet Amnesty International claims that 72 prisoners of conscience are detained in Cuban jails while the International Red Cross has meanwhile reported that up to 40,000 people are detained by coalition forces in Iraq without charge.

So why is the U.S. pressuring the European Union to formalize a new set of sanctions and economic barriers? Maybe it's because the U.S. blames Cuba for some of its loss of prestige in Central America recently. Maybe it is just because, as Iran has found out, America bears long grudges.

Via the website of Anita Roddick, millionairess and founder of the UK's Body Shop beauty chain, I come to a page of the PhysOrg Forum. Wow. Every statistic and graph you ever could need to show just what an utter failure for the nation Bush's domestic policy has been. Check it out.

Just recently, some of the madder-than-usual Malkinite minions were heard to scream that the London Times was just another fifth columnist liberal newsrag set on doing down the Dear Leader and all His ways. As an antitode to such stark raving idiocy I recommend this article by the London Times' US editor writing for the wingnut Real Clear Politics website - in which he castigates the BBC for being exactly what his own rag was being called just last week. Eye-opening partisan demagogery from one of the London Times' "finest."

(I've news for the Malkinites - it is accepted conservative wisdom in the UK that the Iraq war was a truly f*cking terrible idea!)

Does it make you feel better to know that, at a recent Texas GOP convention, a party leader could stand up and assure the faithful that God was watching over them and was, in fact, the Chairman of the Texas GOP?

No, me neither.