Last Straw

If you haven’t yet got your head around the Down­ing Street Memos Justin Rai­mondo, a liber­tarian (i.e. a right winger who occa­sion­ally talks a bit of sense), gives a pretty good run­down, and explains why the most import­ant thing is not the lies they uncover, but the liars they uncover.

Robert Stein­back, a colum­nist for The Miami Her­ald, had this to say about the slight­ing of John Con­yers after Con­yers had car­ried a let­ter to the White House, signed by more than 120 House mem­bers, ask­ing for answers to ques­tions pro­voked by the Down­ing Street Memos:

White House Press Sec­ret­ary Scott McCle­l­lan, in a press brief­ing that day, dis­missed Con­yers as “an indi­vidual who voted against the war in the first place and is simply try­ing to rehash old debates that have already been addressed.”

Did you catch the irony? Con­yers has no cred­ib­il­ity to chal­lenge the president’s actions toward Iraq, the White House argues, because Con­yers has opposed the war from the begin­ning. Yet just a few months ago, the Bush people ridiculed Sen. John Kerry because Kerry allegedly sup­por­ted the war before being against it — remem­ber all the giddy sup­port­ers chant­ing ‘Flip-flop! Flip-flop!’

Stein­back goes on to write:

I never hear any­more from the con­ser­vat­ive read­ers who once admon­ished me for not trust­ing that Bush had secret intel­li­gence about weapons of mass destruc­tion. Or who said the Brit­ish wouldn’t have joined us if the case for war wasn’t solid. Or who insul­ted the French and Ger­mans for not going along with the madness.

I do miss those spir­ited exchanges. But if it means that at long last, a reck­on­ing is under way, I’ll manage.

Iraq’s Justice Min­is­ter accuses the U.S. of try­ing to hinder the invest­ig­a­tion into Sad­dam by lim­it­ing his access to inter­rog­at­ors and says “it seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide.” Yup.

Reu­ters reports on some of the loot­ing that took place in Iraq:

The United States handed out nearly $20 bil­lion of Iraq’s funds, with a rush to spend bil­lions in the final days before ‘trans­fer­ring power’ to the Iraqis nearly a year ago, a report said on Tues­day. A report by Demo­cratic Rep. Henry Wax­man of Cali­for­nia, said in the week before the hand-over on June 28, 2004, the U.S.-led Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity ordered the urgent deliv­ery of more than $4 bil­lion in Iraqi funds from the U.S. Fed­eral Reserve in New York. One single ship­ment amoun­ted to $2.4 bil­lion — the largest move­ment of cash in the bank’s his­tory, said Wax­man. Cash was loaded onto giant pal­lets for ship­ment by plane to Iraq, and paid out to con­tract­ors who car­ried it away in duffel bags.

Robert Fisk, in an inter­view worth watch­ing on ABC Aus­tralia, explains some of the frame­work behind Middle East­ern polit­ical culture.

Tony Benn out­lines the found­a­tions being laid for a police state in Britain.

One­Good­Move has pos­ted another blinder from The Daily Show’s Jon Stu­art. This guy’s good.

And this weeks Harper’s Weekly includes:

An autopsy showed that Terri Schiavo had never been abused, was blind at the time of her death, and had a brain half the nor­mal size. When asked about his earlier state­ments on Schiavo, Sen­ator Bill Frist, who on March 17 said from the floor of the Sen­ate that he had reviewed video­tapes of Schiavo and that the “foot­age, to me, por­trays some­thing very dif­fer­ent than per­sist­ent veget­at­ive state,” said, “I never, never, on the floor of the Sen­ate made a diagnosis.”

A nun in Romania, under­go­ing exor­cism, died after she was tied to a cross, gagged, and left alone for three days in a cold room. “I don’t under­stand why journ­al­ists are mak­ing such a fuss about this,” said the priest who organ­ized the exorcism.

Philip Cooney, the chief of staff at the White House Coun­cil on Envir­on­mental Qual­ity, who achieved notori­ety when he revised gov­ern­ment reports on global warm­ing to cover up the link between green­house gas emis­sions and rising tem­per­at­ures, quit his job to become a lob­by­ist for Exxon­Mobil. “Per­haps he won’t even notice he has changed jobs,” said the dir­ector of the Nat­ural Resources Defense Council.

And in New Zea­l­and we have some of our own ostrich types. Don Brash is offi­cially a global warm­ing skep­tic while HB Today editor (and fam­ily friend) Louis Pier­ard argues that global warm­ing is self-evident but is quick to point out that we shouldn’t just blame humans and, uh hell, what’s the point we prob­ably can’t do any­thing about it any­ways: appar­ently the Kyoto Pro­tocol, rat­i­fied by 141 coun­tries, is “pious, feel-good ideo­logy.” Surely, he asks, “there are more effi­cient and cost-effective ways of cut­ting reli­ance on fossil fuels.” How long he thinks we should pon­der this ques­tion he doesn’t say.

Reminds me of a piece I wrote for his paper back in 2000 about genet­ic­ally modifed food, which includes:

We are being told [GE food is safe as houses] by the same people who told us the Titanic could not be sunk, the same people who told us asbes­tos was fine, the same people who told us global warm­ing does not exist, the same people who now admit that global warm­ing exists but deny that humans have a major part to play, the same people who told us CFCs do not deplete the ozone layer, the same people who told us it was safe to pump preg­nant moth­ers full of Thalidomide, …

Mean­while, in a piece headed The Wall Street Journal vs. The Sci­entific Con­sensus Real­Cli­mate (a site run by actual sci­ent­ists) tears the Wall Street Journal into shreds over the paper’s claims that sci­entific evid­ence for cli­mate change “looks weaker all the time.”

No Right Turn has the latest news on Ahmed Zaoui.

Tze Ming Mok pon­ders why she didn’t make it onto these clown’s ‘hit list’ of “com­mun­ists, anti-facists, anarch­ists, homo­sexu­als, and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ists.” Were these guys not breast fed as chil­dren or something?

It appears a long-lost Da Vinci mas­ter­piece has been found behind a wall and the Louvre has revamped their already very good web­site, which is def­in­itely worth a gander.

And, on a final note, appar­ently the Aus­sies were claim­ing Michael Cam­bell as their own when he won the U.S. open the other day, this from Rus­sell Brown:

PS: Just heard from someone in Mel­bourne that the radio there was describ­ing Camp­bell as “an Aus­tralasian who lives in Sydney.” No, he’s a New Zeal­ander who lives in Brighton, Eng­land, you des­per­ate buggers.