Profane or sexual:

President Bush Thursday signed a decency bill into law that increases tenfold the fines levied against broadcasters who violate decency standards with profane or sexual material. The new fine is $325,000 per violation, instead of $32,500.

During the signing ceremony, Bush said "parents have the final responsibility over the television shows that their children watch, or the websites they visit, or the music they listen to."

"One thing they can do if they're worried about people watching a bad program is to turn off the TV," said Bush.

Melanie Hunter/CSN 15.Jun.06

"If not for America, who would rally likeminded countries in the global fights against HIV/AIDS? As Southern Baptists, you are not new to this struggle. You are a part of a vast international coalition that aims to turn the tide. And Americans are, by far, the largest contributor to these global efforts.

So here, ladies and gentlemen, is the choice before our country, before us as Americans. Will we lead in the world or will we withdraw? Will we rise to the challenges of our time or will we shrink from them? America is a country of vast wealth and power, to be sure. But just as important, we are a nation of great compassion and conscience and democratic principle. So as we consider our future role in the world, we must reflect on some important questions. We must ask ourselves: If not for America, who would rally other nations to conscience to the international defense of religious liberty?

President Bush has made clear that the best relations with the United States are reserved for those governments that respect the beliefs of their people. When you go to a place like China as I have and you sit in a church with Chinese Christians, you cannot help but marvel at their faith and their courage. If America does not rally support for people everywhere who desire to worship in peace and freedom then I ask you: Who will? (Applause.)

You see, religious freedom is an issue that demands moral clarity. And ladies and gentlemen, America's message could not be clearer. Government simply has no right to stand between the individual and the All Mighty. (Applause.)

If America does not serve great purposes, if we do not rally other nations to fight intolerance and to support peace and to defend freedom, and to help give all hope who suffer oppression, then our world will drift toward tragedy. The strong will do what they please. The weak will suffer most of all and inevitably, inevitably, sooner or later the threats of our world will strike once again at the very heart of our nation."

Remarks at the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting
Condoleezza Rice
ScoopNZ 15.Jun.06
-

Since 2003, the U.S. has doubled its emergency aid paid to Uganda to fight AIDS to about $170 million. However, the Bush administration has made the policy that at least one-third of all HIV prevention aid money must be earmarked for abstinence-only programs instead of teaching safe sex. The new message has confused the population and made them skeptical that using condoms can prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

FreeMarketNews 08.Jun.06

...55mm

no pattern emerges:

In the last couple of weeks these two news aggregators
California Chronicle and
180news
have vanished and
rigorous intuition was hacked and/or blocked

Serge July, the CEO and founder [with existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1973] of the financially struggling French daily Liberation, unwillingly resigned today under pressure from the paper's principal stockholder, Edouard de Rothschild.
Le Monde/Editor's World 13.Jun.06
-

Florence Aubenas was working for Liberation in Iraq when she was abducted.
-
The estimable Nidra Poller in the estimable Front Page Magazine on Aubenas, and hypocrisy, of a kind.

Left I on the News has a pretty clear and very readable explanation for the stench of bogosity and deception around the media's clamorous barking at Fema.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz has said in a separate statement that Israel will act with force against any group that attacks them.

"We showed the necessary restraint in light... of the international uproar that resulted, but it's over," Peretz said.
-

"The accumulating evidence proves that this incident was not due to Israeli forces," he said at a news conference on Tuesday.
"The intention to describe this as an Israeli event is simply not correct."
Meir Klifi, the Israeli general who led the committee, said the army had shelled areas north of the beach but could account for each one.

"There is no chance that a shell hit this area. Absolutely no chance," he said.

Klifi said Palestinian fighters "could have placed something in the area in order to prevent operations by our forces".
Israel has been pounding northern Gaza for weeks with artillery shells in an effort to prevent Palestinian militants from launching rockets into Israeli territory.
[...]
Marc Garlasco, a military analyst for rights group Human Rights Watch, said it was "patently not the case" that the blast was caused by a mine.
"The injuries of the people in the hospital were all to the torso and head, so a land mine couldn't have done this," he added.

AlJazeera 13.Jun.06

The disaster robbed China of 35 of its best electronic warfare technicians

"I don't want them to be under any inhibition at all in going after those people..."

"I appreciate the fact you realise the future of your country is in your hands.
The decisions you make determines whether Iraq succeeds."

Piecing Together Haditha at Obsidian Wings

you're never going to go home

Staging:

"This illustrates to me the true nature of the men we have detained here," says Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr., overall commander of operations at the detention center for 460 detainees. "They are dangerous men and committed jihadists willing to die and order others to commit suicide."
In a series of disruptions spanning 18 hours across the prison camps here on Thursday, four captives staged suicide attempts and briefly fought U.S. guards with light-bulb shards, broken fans and metal bars they had ripped from their prisoner-of-war-style barracks.
At one point, to quell a five-minute brawl between 10 detainees and an equal number of soldiers, a U.S. Army rapid strike force fired pepper spray and rubber bullets.
Adm. Harris said the guard force charged inside a medium-security, POW-style barracks last night after suspecting a detainee inside of staging a suicide attempt.

CarolRosenberg/MiamiHerald 19.May.06
-

Three detainees at the U.S. military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the facility said Saturday.
Harris and Craddock said no riot or uprising accompanied Saturday's suicides.
Harris said detainees have been spreading rumors around the prison's camps that it would take three suicides to garner international attention.
To help prevent more suicides, guards will now give bed sheets to detainees only when they go to bed and remove them after they wake up in the morning, Harris said.
Craddock said the three had left suicide notes, but he refused to disclose the contents.

WashPost/SeattleTimes 11.Jun.06
-
Sanity's like morality now, it has only to do with what works. There's no longer any higher thing against which the immoral and the insane are measured. It's about what works and what doesn't.
In an awesomely bizarre way that's more accurate than any other view.
Darwinian truth and biological accuracy.
Harris is:

• more sane than the average American
• right in the heart of the median demographic
• a lunatic

But what does that mean? A Doberman behaviorally-modified to kill on a one-word command is insane, but not in a utilitarian sense. Not in a military or police sense.
Only in a happy-dog happy-world sense.
We don't seem to have that anymore as a possibility.
So now, just like with the moral exigencies of murdering women and children for military objectives, we judge these things, these events, by their outcomes, and since none of this has resolved into anything clearer than more of the same, we can't say - it's nuts.
We have to wait until it's over.
And just like with global climate disruption, by the time the evidence is irrefutable in the public's very short sight, it won't matter.
Harris is nuts to call that "asymmetrical warfare", even though it is, in some real ways, exactly that.
It's just that an enemy who's willing to die like that for his cause, or from grief or despair, shames the home team, and by his dying exposes the selfishness that has become the national religion for what it is.

Alberto the wake-up call

In the very simple mind of the very large thing inside the media corral ruminating the dribbled-into-its-food-information about bad-things-in-the-world, the arrest of "terrorists" in Canada leads directly to the death of al-Zarqawi and that line becomes a road that runs right over the dusty bodies of the executed children of Haditha.
There's a rhythm to it.
Had to arrest them, had to kill them - to get him.
Winning the war against evil.

Unfortunate incidents had occurred, mistaken ideas had been current. It had been felt that the existence of a farm owned and operated by pigs was somehow abnormal and was liable to have an unsettling effect in the neighbourhood.
Too many farmers had assumed, without due enquiry, that on such a farm a spirit of licence and indiscipline would prevail. They had been nervous about the effects upon their own animals, or even upon their human employees. But all such doubts were now dispelled.

Leverage xenophobia response

Goff on al-Zarqawi

Compare and contrast:

Blow by Blow - As American as Apple Pie
-
this

Nothing up my sleeve.
Presto!
No doubt about it, I got to get another hat.

NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth's changing climate and environment.
The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture -- a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.
And in its 2007 budget, NASA proposes significant delays in a global precipitation measuring mission to help with weather predictions, as well as the launch of a satellite designed to increase the timeliness and accuracy of severe weather forecasts and improve climate models.
The changes come as NASA prioritizes its budget to pay for completion of the International Space Station and the return of astronauts to the moon by 2020...

BethDaley/BostonGlobe/CommonDreams 09.Jun.06

"Victory diminishes the significance of war crimes; defeat magnifies them into defining events"
MaxBoot/LATimes 07.Jun.06
-
That's a little more profound than Boot seems to realize. And it doesn't lead quite so directly to sending more troops into the valley of death, either.
If you loop it back in to what that semi-anonymous neo-con said back whenever it was that he said it - that they're creating the reality we're responding to - and extend it to morality's most particulate elements, you end right back where so many of our heroes started.
You have to grab some plank and insist that it's enough.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
Something outside and beyond the immediate, something universal or close enough to it.
Otherwise anything you did to win becomes good, and whatever the losing enemy did in his failed attempt to win becomes bad.
And that's it, there's nothing else going on.
So executing children, and worse, becomes a regrettable necessity if you're on the side that did it, and then won.
And it becomes a war crime if it was done by the losers.
It's pig morality, the moral code of sentient swine.

Swords into ploughshares
ploughshares into thin air:

Four decades after first visiting as a young congressman at the height of a divisive war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured Vietnam on Monday amid increasingly warming relations between the onetime enemies and made unexpected progress toward improving military relations.
U.S. officials were cautious to lower expectations ahead of Rumsfeld's visit here, particularly given Vietnam's occasionally tense relations with its northern neighbor China. But after meetings with Defense Ministry officials and Prime Minister Phan Van Khai, Pentagon officials emerged upbeat, saying Hanoi appeared eager to deepen defense cooperation, despite the possibility of antagonizing Beijing.
"Both sides agreed we wanted to expand things," said one Pentagon official involved in the talks.
Rumsfeld also said Monday that the U.S. is pressing Vietnam for underwater searches and access to aging witnesses in stepped-up efforts to recover remains of Americans missing from the Vietnam War.
xxxxChicago Tribune 06.Jun.06
-
The United States won't compensate Vietnam's Agent Orange victims but will offer advice on dealing with the wartime defoliant, a US official said during a visit by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
When Rumsfeld met Defence Minister Pham Van Tra and military officials, the Vietnamese side had raised the issue of dioxin exposure and contamination from Agent Orange, the senior official said on the sidelines of the visit.
"What we can do is make scientific information available, historical archival information we might have, ... technical advice on how to deal with the situation," the official said.
xxxxAFP/CommonDreams 05.Jun.06