So it's like with injured horses and Jell-O! Anyway, I know suicide bombers don't write notes, maybe because a good carnage photo speaks a thousand words as they say, but here is what I imagine one of them might have written:

Dear Allah,
Go to Hell.
If you existed I would ask to be reincarnated as the lesbian test tube spawn of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pamela Geller.

Or maybe:

Dear Allah,
And maybe bring back Lynndie England to guard my husband's cell.

Or:

Dear Allah,
I just don't see why the Sunnis and the Shiites can't come together to celebrate all the beliefs they share, such as the one about how women who have sex before marriage need to be killed. Come to think of it, a lot of religions commit "honor killings," right? How come no one ever stops and thinks about how much we all have in common?

Dear Allah,
Because then people would stop killing each other so much and spend all their time fucking. I get it.

Dear Allah,
If you pack our torsos with explosives, do we not bleed?
Rhetorical question.

Love, Blackmail and Rape: How Al Qaeda Grooms Women As "Perfect Weapons" [Times]
Muslim Extremist Women Fight For Right To Join Al Qaeda [CBS 13]
Why Women Become Suicide Bombers [Newsweek]

Photo via Photobucket

MOE: Yo I am here, barely, at an airport hotel that is not actually an airport hotel, more an airport adjacent hotel located nearby a Westfield Mall, but this is where the JetBlue flyer with the friendly Nationwide Hospitality Inc. operator got me the $69 rate, and my god, I am tired, maybe because here it is five in the morning, but news that New Jersey school officials want to ban Red Bull just reminded me I am no longer in school and therefore should probably go locate myself something containing Guarana.

MEGAN: Doing Crappy Hour from the West Coast sucks balls in a way that no one who hasn't done it can ever understand. But that might be because I consider 5 am a time to strive to stay up until, not an hour to get up at.
MEGAN: If it helps, check out the long cool drink of water in this picture and rejoice that somewhere in the bowels of CNN.com, there is a Jezebel looking out for us.
MOE: Yeah I actually forgot to reset my alarm and so woke up around 3:45, but holy SHIT that picture is ridiculous. The gun is um scary though. Also, Obama's hip is hurting? Isn't that a body part whose inflammation we'd usually associate with John McCain…or his mom? Unless…

MEGAN: Um, I'll just say that sometimes after sex my hips hurt, but I have an old ballet injury to explain that, but if that's why Obama's hurts, well, go Michelle!
MEGAN: In other flotsam, by the way, SF mayor Gavin Newsom got straight-married this weekend... in Montana.
MOE: Yeah I bet the wedding I was at was better. Um before I forget can I just say I am fucking sick of shit like "Caroline Kennedy for VP???!!?" which is the only thing worse than "Chuck Hagel for VP????!!!?" which is to say, "WHY AM I READING THIS GO ON VACATION!!!!??!!!"
MEGAN: Everyone for VP!!!

MEGAN: I mean, McCain's got to pick someone before the Olympics start because no one will be paying attention otherwise, or so goes the meme, but I'll bet Obama's VP will interrupt Olympic coverage.
MOE: And then there's this story. I guess I'll listen to it, because really what better things do we have to do? Discuss the half trillion dollar budget deficit planned for 2009 — that's a record, by the way — or how the Frannie Freddie bailout is supposedly the largest government bailout since the New Deal?? Yeah, didn't think so. Although who knows, it's still early, I could see us getting into that shit.
MEGAN: We could talk about the protests at the Vatican to lift the ban on birth control, too.
MOE: Oh how serendipitous I was thinking of lifting my personal ban on that in response to public sentiment as well. I wonder if someone told the Vatican about me and they were like "oh jesus christ we do not want to be responsible for that person procreating." Seriously though, I don't know if this is going to have much of an impact in the Benedict administration.

MEGAN: I'm going to say... exactly none. The Pope listens to God, not the people of the world OR the AIDS rate in Africa. That's God's plan, or do Catholics not believe in predestination? It's so hard to remember CCD.
MOE: In other news does another fifty pointless deaths indicate violence returned to The Iraq? Petraeus seems to think maybe . Oh, and is Afghanistan a narco-state …I kind of want to actually read that one, because I found myself realizing the other day that I really did not know how Colombia had come to control 90% of the cocaine trade exactly and whether there are other countries with power vacuums and the climate and topographical conditions to get in on that, since heroin is, like, probably not as big a moneymaker.
MEGAN: Hahahaha, "returned" to Iraq. You're such a comic genius. Or else Petraeus is.

MOE: Hey I am going to miss how you actually get it when I am being sarcastic.

MEGAN: Although my dad got up and made me coffee this morning, I have yet to get a chance to get up and drink it because in your honor I read Maureen Dowd. That was painful.
MEGAN: But probably not quite as painful as Barack having to submit to an interview in Paris from La Dowd.

MOE: oh GOD.
MOE: I'm not bothering to blockquote this because there's no way anyone would confuse it for anything I would write and even if you charged me with parodying Dowd I could never come up with Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.

MEGAN: Or how about this awfulness: Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp. I mean, in my mind, she says this in a little girl voice even more highly pitched than my own.
MEGAN: OK, also, now I have to ask what the fuck?
MOE: Okay this Afghanistan story is really fucking interesting. Basically, post-September 11 Afghanistan is the one kind of situation where this drug war we've been fighting for the past 20 years really comes in handy, as we learned previously from the story of that narcotics guy who successfully interrogated KSM. But the Pentagon, by some combination of generalized Bush Administration wrongheadedness, generalized Bush Administration ineptitude, generalized turf protection and listening to Hamid Karzai, not only systematically undermined the DEA's mission in the country and everyone involved with the drug war, but the whole idea that heroin was bad at all, which in turn just led to the continued flow of this massive spigot of funding to the Taliban and sundry other evildoers.

MEGAN: Wait, Karzai is pro-heroin? Or just anti doing terribly much about it? Anyway, didn't you know that Mary Jane is the Great Satan of our time? Or is it oxycodone? Or meth? Or can we just ask what it is about modern life that so many people feel the need to alter their consciousness to escape it? Because I know what it is about my life, but I'd sort of be interested to know if I'm unique in that.
MOE:

A lot of intelligence — much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here — indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people.

MEGAN: Is there some reason it matters that they're both Pashtun? Also, in an barely-stable government, I can sort of see the reason if he thinks that the narco-corruption isn't one of the destabilizing forces.
MOE: Well the news here is that no only has opium production grown — a UN report says 80% of poppies in the south were planted in the last two years — it is funding the insurgency and making farmers rich and Afghan officials all the way up to Karzai continue to say things like "it's tradition and poverty makes them do it and we don't want you to dust our crops aerially with pesticides because our poor farmers will think it is poison coming from the sky" when such things are demonstrably not true.
MEGAN: Crop dusting didn't really make us — or the Colombian government — a ton of friends when we did it there either but we didn't exactly stop doing it.
MOE: Well we haven't apparently started doing it in Afghanistan. The point is twofold, though. It's not so much that, according to this guy, how do you keep Afghanistan from becoming the Colombia of opiates, but whether you can use what you learned in Colombia to cut off the flow of funds to the insurgency, I think, I am not through yet though. I mean, I guess eventually, as in Colombia, everyone is in the business, on both sides, and then everything is just …really violent until someone like Uribe comes in and decides to grant wholescale amnesty to pretty much anyone who asks.

MOE:

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.

MEGAN: Awww, he's like a mini GWB, just with drugs instead of oil!
MOE: Hahaha the chief of the anticorruption commission is a convicted heroin dealer.
MOE: And here's our little microcosm of the whole damn thing:

At the same time, the 101st Airborne arrived in eastern Afghanistan. Its commanders promptly informed Ambassador Wood that they would only permit crop eradication if the State Department paid large cash stipends to the farmers for the value of their opium crop. Payment for eradication, however, is disastrous counternarcotics policy: If you pay cash for poppies, farmers keep the cash and grow poppies again next year for more cash. And farmers who grow less-lucrative crops start growing poppies so that they can get the money, too. Drug experts call this type of offer a “perverse incentive,” and it has never worked anywhere in the world.

Sort of like the drug war has never worked anywhere in the world?

MEGAN:

KarzaiBush was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Talibanin Iraq; Karzai’sBush's friends could get rich off the drugoil trade; he could blame the Westliberals for hisour problems; and in 20092004 he would be elected to a new term.

MOE: Or Bush could blame the Middle East for his problems?
MEGAN: Hell, that shit doesn't even work in U.S. farm policy. You pay subsidies for wheat, they grow more wheat. You pay subsidies to let marginal lands grow wild, people plant on marginal lands for a year or two to collect the subsidies.
MOE: It would be a more direct counterpart.
MOE: Okay here is something depressing (or heartening?) Check the fucking comments. Some of the stuff that has been "recommended" is basically illiterate.

MOE: Such as

2008 8:35 am
After I saw American Gangster, I knew that the increase in heroin production was no accident. I'm sure the DEA is involved in shipping the drugs back to American cities. It's no wonder we can't see the coffins unloaded at Andrews Airforce Base.
— Jane, Royal Oak, MI
Recommended by 7 Readers

MEGAN: You know, there's a growing debate about whether to allow comments on newspapers' websites for exactly that reason. Like, I know Gawker employs a person (hey, Kaila! your hair is probably lovely today!) whose job it is to weed out the crazies and I've looked in the bin and WHOO boy are there some crazy people out there who write some crazy ass shit. But I guess because newspapers have higher comment volumes, or higher crazy volumes or haven't been able to figure out how to monetize their websites, they can't manage that shit?
MOE: Incidentally that other drug is in the news today too.

MEGAN: OH, speaking of drug wars, I've seen so many freaking meth heads back here. Upstate NY was slow to come to the metholution because of the easy access to good Canadian weed, but I do believe we've finally made it into the 21st century!
MOE: Yesterday I found this old story on Gabriel Garcia Marquez advocating "outlaw American chemists" develop a kind of synthetic cocaine to rival the real deal as a way to combat his own country's addiction to easy money. But um I sort of feel like, that's how we got meth, and meth did not do much good for Colombia.
MEGAN: Or Afghanistan! Meth is for people that can't afford crack, let alone coke, or heroin shipping in for Afghanistan, and who don't mind the side effects like the black teeth and the faster progression to heroin chic and the complete wasted crazy look that horrifies me in a bar to the point where my friend has to remind me to stop staring at the meth head.

In the global economy of the moment, the United States itself is too big to fail.

The logic for that assurance goes like this:

The American consumer has for decades served as the engine of world commerce, using borrowed cash to snap up the accoutrements of modern living — clothes and computers and cars now manufactured, in whole or in part, in factories from Asia to Latin America. Eliminate the American wherewithal to shop, and the pain would ripple out to multiple shores.

Globalization, in other words, allowed China and Japan to amass the fortunes they have been lending to the United States.

But globalization also emboldened American capitalists to take huge risks they might have otherwise avoided — like borrowing to erect forests of unsold homes from California to Florida, delivering the speculative disaster of the day. They were operating with bedrock confidence that money would never run out. Someone would always buy American debt, delivering more cash for the next go.

And this same interconnectedness appears to have reassured regulators in Washington about the health of the American financial system, as they declined to intervene against highly speculative lending during the real estate boom. Mortgages were being distributed to investors around the globe, and so were the risks, the regulators reasoned. Anyone who bought into that risk would have a strong interest in seeing that the American financial system stayed upright.

In other words, in the estimation of people in control of money, the United States cannot be allowed to collapse, just as Fannie and Freddie cannot be allowed to fail. Too much is riding on their survival.

"Whoa, the G8 summit just produced a fundamentally toothless multilateral agreement to cap carbon emissions at the currently wholly unsustainable levels following days of pointless talks one participant called "gloriously incoherent" about which the only positive thing anyone could say is that the inability to agree on anything was a sign governments are "finally getting serious" about climate change. I guess the only thing this means is that I won't be needing to save much disposable money for a new coat, so yeah, I'll take these…"

Sunglasses Replace The Bag As The Must-Have Luxury Item [NYT]

MOE: Okay, this is the kind of paragraph too good to check, but I kind of wish they'd checked it anyway:

They have reason for concern: News last year that the biggest named beneficiary in Mrs. Helmsley’s will was Trouble, her Maltese, led to death threats against the dog, which now requires security costing $100,000 a year.

I really don't see how this is possible, unless there is a business more lucrative than supplying ammunition to the Pentagon or starting an Iraqi resistance organization. How hard would it be to just take Trouble to some sort of doggie day care, where he could relax and meet other dogs and begin a new life away from all the old ghosts and outrageous comments? Which reminds me,
MOE: If someone has a hit out on your dog, do the police have any responsibility to keep it alive?
MEGAN: Who would put a hit out on a dog? Like, a for-real hit? Didn't people see A Fish Called Wanda?
MOE: And isn't this whole story sort of a study in how people who have excessive affection for animals — maybe there is something wrong with them?
MEGAN: Anyway, I would think the cops would dismiss both the threat and the person reporting it as cracked.
MOE: And that
MOE: is when you call in the $100,000 ex-KGB pet security service.
MEGAN: I mean, if you have $5-$8 million to spend in, what, like 10 years or less, given that the dogs were a certain age when Leona died, why now?
MEGAN: I mean, why not, Freudian typo.
MEGAN: Anyway, so did you see the harbinger of the economic apocalypse? Starbucks is closing 600 stores.
MOE: Leona Helmsley was once heard saying, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." And in that vein I think we need to remind readers that Barack Obama, double Ivy Leaguing arugula-chomping card-carrying member of the elitist elite, got a home loan that may have saved him $300 a month. THREE HUNDRED A MONTH. Don't get me wrong, I'd love an extra $300 a month but if they went through some shady unethical business to save that no one can ever accuse them of being too highbrow ever again.
MEGAN: It doesn't even sound like they got it somewhere shady. It looks like they went through a local bank (support your local businesses!) who probably don't see a ton of wealthy customers or super-jumbo loans, showing nearly $500,000 in annual income, a $2 million windfall payment and the potential for book earnings. I'd bend over backwards to get those people as customers, too. Did I tell you back when I was trying to find an interesting job out of grad school, before I decided stupidly to be a lobbyist, I interviewed for a position in private banking? That's banking for super-rich people. It's all about relationship-building. The .375% they maybe lost on the loan discount they gave to get the business (in that world) is more than made up for the volume of business you get from making a wealthy customer happy. I wish I'd gotten that job.
MOE: Yes I know all about private banking. I had a friend whose dad was a client. The guy kept her on a budget but she would call at all hours to get funds. This sort of blew my mind. Starbucks, meanwhile, is a terrible terrible thing. I mean, these stores represent less than 5% of their stores, and apparently 70% of the closures are happening at stores that opened after 2005, so your Starbucks is probably safe, but for the exurban power centers and lifestyle strips that it will effect, the trickle-down (ha!) effects will be intense. Because those guys rely on Starbucks to pull in other tenants! And if they can't get Starbucks they're left with a 60% vacant strip mall!! Enough of those in your zip code and people might have to start moving back to cities.
MOE: Oh in other news, and I thought Pennsylvania state senators were sleazy. And also, how is this even possible. And also, Helmsley originally tried to leave $12 billion to her dog but the judge reduced that to $2 billion and even pitched in a few million for some grandchildren Helmsley had deliberately left out of her will.
MEGAN: You know how you know the Massachusetts guy is a bad politician? Unlike a Congressman, he's not running for re-election.
MOE: Oh god and thank the deities Obama nabbed the critical Streisand endorsement.
MEGAN: Well, that and Michelle's speech last week should help him corral some of the LGBT Hillary supporters that are still upset.
MOE: Yeah he's no Vito Fossella.

Prosecutors alleged in a news release that Marzilli told one woman, "The sex is sweet, the sex is sweet, you want it, and you want to go with me."
He allegedly asked the second woman "Do you have any undergarments under that?"

I'm trying not to mention Italy's dismally low birth rate right here.
MEGAN: Well, Congressman Fossella could've helped out with that, what with his 2 kids with his wife and one with his mistress, he's totally beating the replacement rate!
MEGAN: Also, "the sex is sweet"? Was he fucking high? That shit wouldn't get a boyfriend laid, let alone a stranger on the street.
MOE: Oh check it out Obama beat out McCain as barbecue guest even though I hear McCain, inexplicably given what we know of Obama's iPod, did better on the "who'd you rather carpool to work with." Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a poll yet addressing the question, "Which candidate would you rather have holler at you on the street?" James Marzilli might have just won the Worst Holler
MEGAN: In other insult news, Paul Begala would like to apologize to dirt for calling Republican lobbyists dirtbags:

"I think it was wrong for me to call those fat cat lobbyists dirtbags," said the longtime Clinton confidante. "It is an insult to bags for dirt around the world."

MEGAN: Even the RNC spokeperson laughed at that one.
MEGAN:

"A bag of dirt will have the occasional fecal matter, but generally dirt is good," he said. "I'm a gardener and I grow tomatoes. I love dirt. I should have said oil bag [when talking about GOP donors], or a chemical bag or toxic bag. After all life grows out of dirt."

MOE: I would have suggested he said "bag of coal" but that would be insulting to the barbecues Americans are so eager to invite the Obamas to. Did you check Harry Reid's YouTube performance? It's gone viral. I'm not sure why? But I endorse!
9:15 AM
MEGAN: While I'm watching that, you should read Attackerman's post on our using 70s Chinese torture manuals to train our soldiers on how to torture effectively and watch the video of Christopher Hitchens getting waterboarded, but not for any prurient interest.
MOE: I was going to bring that up with you, first you do it, then this graffiti artist does it and now the Hitch signs up. Does he address whether it's more painful than getting his balls waxed? Actually, can we just do that from now on? Wax the balls of these guys? And I read the story on how we got our interrogation tactics from the Chinese, who also incidentally invented water torture except no wait they didn't they just got wrongly accused of that, and I feel the same way in this sense. Also remember about the INS using Soviet drugs to sedate detainees?
MEGAN: I do remember the sedating detainees thing, that's just fucked up. I wonder if Hitchens saw the video of me waterboarding Jim (lost in the Wonkette server transition when they got sold, RIP waterboarding video) and thought it looked less crappy and scary than it was?
MEGAN: Also, I would think that ball-waxing would be Geneva-compliant, as long as it wasn't women doing it.
MOE: Thomas Frank digs through the Library of Congress on McCain adviser Charlie Black and finds a cynical former officer of some young fascist society that employed nasty smear tactics and liked to take money from poor and give it to fatcat oil bag Republicans.
MEGAN: Black founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which, if what Franks says is true, explains why people think PACs are all shitty and dirty and not just money clearing houses for the most part:

NCPAC's calling card was slime. It constantly attacked members of Congress for votes they hadn't cast and positions they hadn't taken – "there have been a few mistakes made in terms of research," was all Mr. Black would admit – and the group's main accomplishment was dodging the campaign-finance laws of the day.

Why does McCain keep this guy around? He's the Pied Piper of bad press.
MOE: And it's not like the McCain campaign is wary of downsizing! Um, do you think that when rich evil people are irrationally devoted to their pets it's a sign that there is something just fundamentally fucked up about pets in general? Because I sort of do.
MEGAN: I think it's something fundamentally wrong with the lives of those rich people.
MOE: She evicted her own widowed daughter-in-law.
MEGAN: Like, they're so alienated from other people and feel like the only unconditional love they get is from their pets (which may be true — God knows Leona wasn't known as a great humanist and treated people like shit, so they probably didn't like her).
MOE: Yeah but do you feel like you know a fair amount of people who, given the money, might become even more pet-obsessed and gradually distance themselves from all humanity? Because I feel like I do. I don't know. Maybe I'm just sort of a hater.
MEGAN: I can't really say, I know, like 6 friends with pets and one of them is you.

MEGAN: I'm sure there's something more prescient to say about this article about Stevie Wonder and Obama, but the geek in me totally wants to see his phone in action! It's got software that allows his camera phone to convert text to audio and now I am completely covetous and I don't even have an iPhone.
9:25 AM
MEGAN: Also, I now totally have My Cherie Amour in my head and I know it isn't going away.
MOE: That's cool, but you know what would be even cooler is if you could choose to have your messages relayed to you in the voice of Dimitri the stud.
9:30 AM
MEGAN: This will make you understand the depths of my nerdiness, but my uncle's GPS speaks in the voice of Jean-Luc Picard. For real. And I'm jealous. Also, if you read that article about Stevie Wonder, how bad do you want to hear his rendition of Lil Wayne's "Lollipop"? Because I want that AP reporter's tape for real.

MOE: Ugh speaking of technology my computer is the wackness right now and I fucking don't know what the matter with Firefox is. I really fucking hate it though. It like, uses 19 times as much RAM as Safari, but Safari is really finicky and volatile and will crash if I touch it the wrong way. It's like they both have browser personality disorder. Anyhowwwww. Why don't the Clintons just fucking pay her campaign debt and be done with this??? Nice of Obama to make a goodwill gesture and all, but seriously, couldn't that $2300 pay someone's subprime mortgage payment? I don't understand.
MEGAN: Dude, Firefox and I had issues earlier this week, so I totally feel you but I can't get down with Safari either. I wonder if it had to do with bugs in their new roll-out somehow?
MEGAN: Anyway, I mean, Clinton technically can't give her campaign the money.
MEGAN: Under FEC regs, that's why the $12 million or so was technically a loan, which the campaign can (and seemingly might) default on but they have to make a good faith effort to even pay that back to avoid complications. It's a weird and fucked up system.
MOE: Even after the Supreme Court ruling this week favoring millionaires financing their campaigns with their millions? Because I didn't read much about that ruling but what I did read led me to believe that sort of shit was okay.
MEGAN: Either way, the Clintonistas that are still peeved about Obama getting the nod were all like, if you really wanted your donors to contribute to Clinton's campaign to pay down the debt then you yourself would max out to her and for $2,300, he bought himself a lot of support and a lot less annoying whining and it would be worth it to me, too. Hell, if these people would promise to STFU and vote Obama, I would give her money.
MEGAN: Yeah, the millionaire's amendment ruling isn't that millionaires can spend the money, it's that by spending it their opponents' donors aren't allowed to exceed spending limits.
MEGAN: On the other hand, strangely, I think you're also right that self-financed campaigns don't totally run afoul of election law but the Clintons are on record that they violate the spirit of campaign finance reform.
MOE: Yo David Addington — "Cheney's Cheney", a man with the "grace of Gollum" — was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday and man I forgot all about that guy. Here's the New Yorker profile in which Colin Powell is reputed to have said, when someone in his office expressed dismay over the warrantless wiretapping crap when it came out : "It's Addington, He doesn't care about the Constitution."
MOE: Key graf of that story:

Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”

MOE: And today's:

David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn't happy about it.
Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? "I'm not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of," Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? "That's irrelevant," he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee's child? "I'm not here to render legal advice to your committee," he snarled. "You do have attorneys of your own."

MEGAN: That Milbank piece was pretty epic, but the end of it my hatred for Addington was actually visceral. I really could not believe he got away with that shit.
MEGAN: I mean, Spencer also did really great piece on it where he basically points out that Addington fails to remember shit that other people testified to last week, including an entire trip to Gitmo. How can you forget going to Gitmo?
MEGAN:

Last week, the Senate disclosed that Addington was among a handful of senior administration lawyers who visited the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in the summer of 2002, when the administration began expanding the list of permissible interrogation methods beyond those authorized by the Geneva Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on Interrogations, then known as FM 34-52. Yet Addington said he did not recall meeting with then-chief Guantanamo attorney Col. Diane Beaver — who last week recalled meeting with Addington — and said he had more extensive involvement with the CIA's interrogation program than with the Pentagon's.

As though being all up in the CIA torture program is totes better.

MOE: Oh dude Liz Glover's sister is quoted in that story calling Addington "efficient, discreet, loyal, sublimely brilliant and, as anyone who works with him knows, someone who, in a knife fight, you want covering your back."
MOE: Republican "legal activist" Bruce Fein, a Reagan deputy AG, was not so magnanimous! He's

staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’

MEGAN: I don't think I'd want Addington anywhere near my back with a knife, thanks.
MEGAN: Also, I love how even Republicans are arguing that's the case and Addie (let's call him Addie) is all like, whatevs, I ain't gonna tell ya, get your own lawyer.
MOE: it's funny because if you go on …there's a lot of Fein doing as Reagan and Bush The Firsties are wont and criticizing the Bush team for its basic malevolent Forest Gumpness, lack of intellectual rigor etc.

Bruce Fein said that the Bush legal team was strikingly unsophisticated. “There is no one of legal stature, certainly no one like Bork, or Scalia, or Elliot Richardson, or Archibald Cox,” he said. “It’s frightening. No one knows the Constitution—certainly not Cheney.”

Which brings me to yesterday's gun ban ruling. Did you read it? The portion excerpted by Colbert King turned my stomach. Megan McCardle thinks us feminists should be stoked though. I'm coming down to DC this weekend. Maybe we should try to find a gun show this weekend and celebrate?? Is there a waiting period in Virginia?
MEGAN: I did read parts of it, but, I mean, it was all pretty well telegraphed in oral arguments that they were going to find in favor of an individual right.

MEGAN: On Megan, though, seriously, what the fuck?
MEGAN: I feel like she's betrayed our common bond in a rejection of the silent, patriarchal "h" in our shared name. Feminists should all own guns to thwart attacks?
MEGAN: Like, feminism is all about not being raped? Like no person has ever had a gun turned on them? C
MEGAN: Apparently, it's also a gay issue.
MOE: I actually got more pissed when she said she really didn't believe that the way our market is set up rewards superficial short-term results and financial engineering over innovation and long-term strength. But yeah, I don't know; I might feel differently if I lived in the Congo but I don't see gun ownership this way at all and somehow I don't think the Founding Fathers did either especially not Thomas Jefferson.
MEGAN: I don't buy Megan's economic theories a lot, I have to admit.
MEGAN: Yeah, in 2000, I got a push-pollster who called and was all asking legit questions until she got to "Did you know Al Gore thinks that the 2nd Amendment refers to a collective right and not an individual right to own guns and would appoint justices who agree with his interpretation?" And I said "No, I totally didn't, but thanks for telling me! Now I totally know that I'm going to vote for him!" She hung up in my ear.
MEGAN: I mean, personally, I love that the strict-constructionalist school of Constitutional interpretation are all about strictly parsing the words of the amendments... except for this one where Scalia's all like, well, obviously the Framers meant for everyone to have guns because people hunted even though that's not in the text anywhere.
MOE: Noonan is snoozin today but she did wake me up with this little snippet of McCainanity:

"[He] volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, 'has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands' and that she earned it by 'dealing drugs.' Previously, Mr. McCain had identified Ms. Buchanan as 'Pat Buchanan's illegitimate daughter,' 'bipolar,' 'a drunk,' 'someone with a lot of boyfriends,' and 'just out of Betty Ford.'"

To which, all I have to say is, that crack he made about how he just stopped beating his wife — did you post on this yesterday? — because I was going to, until I read it, and I was like, "Oh Jesus Christ go to the beach already guys, there is nothing to see here."

MEGAN: I did post on it, actually. I mean, like, is it the worst thing he's ever said? No. Is it part of a larger pattern of behavior and a lack of personal insight into the sexism he was inculcated with and how not to see the world that way anymore? Yes.
MOE: Ugh, the guy is OLD. Who fucking cares? I am totally fucking with Nancy Pelosi on this stuff mostly, even though I don't think being a woman has as many advantages as it does shitty parts. I don't want to be bothered with shit like this. In other news: I also don't want to be bothered with that Imus thing which should have never blown up. Totally OT: has Garry Kasparov always been a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal? Since when did their edit page become so friendly to enemies of the plutocracy anyway?
MOE:

The elite circle of oligarchs surrounding Mr. Putin have much greater power and riches than did Yeltsin's entourage. They dominate the media, and thus very little is known about how they amassed their fortunes. In 2000, there were no Russians on the Forbes magazine list of the world's billionaires. By 2005 there were 36.
Today there are 87, more than Germany and Japan combined, in a country where 13% of our citizens live under the national poverty line of $150 a month. This massive concentration of wealth is mirrored in the Russian stock market. In 2007, the top 10 listed companies accounted for 68.5% of the primary Russian bourse. Gazprom alone represented over 27%.

MEGAN: I don't think he's been writing for them all the time or anything, but I think there should be an official Jezebel decree that everyone who can should see the documentary on Anna Politkovskaya that he mentions.

MOE: This is interesting:

There are no similarities between American soldiers in Iraq and Americans at home. Which means you cannot prevent yourself from loving them — and hating them too. I can’t understand how Americans are so nice over there, and many of their soldiers are bullies and aggressive… But there is another thing which surprised me more than that. Poor people in America are more interested than the rich ones to know about the conditions of life in Iraq. They asked me how we are living there, how we are dealing with our security problems and what we are thinking about the future.

That's an Iraqi Times reporter on his trip to Washington for a State Department conference.
MEGAN: Well, but I mean, most rich people aren't really concerned with the conditions on the ground here, why would they give a shit about them there? It's cute that he thinks that they would, though.

MOE: I guess we have to talk about campaign finance today. But first I'd like to draw the readers' attention to this handy guide to why you can't really blame the war for the crap economy, despite what Stiglitz says, and even Stiglitz says the war has only added like $5 or $10 to the price of oil, but basically the point is that every globalization has its discontents and our objectivist malcontents didn't pay attention to that when they were setting policy so now we have more discontents over here while some folks in India and China are starting to enjoy better lives/deeper carbon footprints. ANYHOW
MEGAN: Prosperity brings global warming hooray! But only the rich can afford to reduce their carbon footprints. And I always find it difficult to believe that people really think that the war brings the bad economy when war generally makes the economy better. It was one of the reasons Hitler and WWII were initially so popular in Germany — taking shit over improved the economy almost immediately. War spending did its part for ending the Great Depression, etc.

MOE: Well yeah but as Stiglitz pointed out in 2003 Iraq was hardly "total war" and the economic benefits were thus hardly going to be evenly spread around. And as this report points out tax cuts, airline bailouts and No Child Left Behind played their early part in deficit spending. Oh man there are really cute dogs on my Fox News right now. Oh how sweet and all their owners have swaddled them in American flags and "freedom"-themed accessories!
MEGAN: Do they have freedom-themed leashes?

MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, while Bush was cutting taxes he was also presiding over the largest expansion in government history. I was at a speech by Andy Card in 2005, I think, and he went through all these verbal gymnastics to deny that the Administration had expanded the government which made the ambassador from an unnamed country next to whom I was seated marvel at his stones. It basically required that he exempt from consideration the Defense Department or DHS, which are (naturally) where all the increases have been, so it was absurdist in its brilliance. Sort of like if you don't want to be quoted, just curse every other word.
MOE: Hey, speaking of the defense budget is Israel trying to save us some money by just bombing Iran for us? Because that's awfully generous, considering all those fears we are about to elect that Muslim Marxist guy to lead the country and who knows what that means for the Jews…
MEGAN: Well, I mean, we are a leetle busy right now, I think we thought we'd be done enough in Iraq (the same way we're, like, totally Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan) that we could've started bombing Iran on our own.

MEGAN: Anyway, so, campaign finance?
MOE: Oh right, that's not my issue. And I must admit, I was occupied with this crazy Botox bandit story…and also vaguely transfixed by some story they're running on Fox now about some woman who lit up on an airplane, and in her mugshot she just looks kind of drunk or high so it kind of makes sense that she would do that, especially with fares so high these days you'd think you could do whatever you damn well please — ha! On my Virgin flight they wouldn't even let me use the blanket during takeoff, which was insane — and anyway, oh yes, Obama. We should talk about this. I guess it's disappointing but not surprising? I dunno

MEGAN: Well, but they all opted out of public financing for the primary and there were rumors McCain was going to for the general. Plus, I mean, it restricts him to $85 million which is maybe one of the reasons that, you know, Democrats don't go to states they "can't" win and ditto with Republicans and so everyone fights for Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida and concedes the others to one another.

MOE: I will say that even if it is blatantly hypocritical it also appeals to that side that worries about his ability to play dirty/be pragmatic/blahblah. Which seemed to be a big concern of Clintonites.
MEGAN: Oh, sure. I mean, I think the real issue is that 99% of Americans probably don't know anything about the public financing system so they whole OH MY GOD WHAT HAS HE DONE thing is probably right over their heads.
MEGAN: Which is why it's smart, release the video, let the talking heads pontificate for 24 hours just before the weekend, then release a new ad and start airing it in red states and let them think about that.

MEGAN: But, also, I think he makes an interesting point. Public financing comes from the $3 check-off on your tax return, so it's like small donations from small people funneled through the government. He's got 1.5 million donors, half of which are small-amount donors. He's practically creating his own public financing system, it's just one in which there are no limits on what he can spend after the convention.
MEGAN: Which is an interesting thing, actually. The party that has the Presidency gets the last convention, which means that the party without it gets a week or more where they are hamstrung by the public financing limits and hte incumbent party is not. In 2004, it was a full two weeks because the Dems went before the Olympics, then the Olympics and then the Republicans went and Bush became subject to the spending limits.
MOE: Hey check this out we're using one percent less gas than last year! And this is unrelated but here's a pleasant photo of a highway in Beijing, where starting July 20 they will also be using less gas, for obvious reasons. Okay, now I'm headed to Peggy and Brooks. Krauthammer and Krugman both wrote today about McCain's offshore drilling blah blah, one of them is for it and one of them is against it I'll let you guess who!

MEGAN: Gosh, so hard! Also, by the way, the DC metro system had 2 top-10 ridership days this week alone, and they're blaming it on gas prices.
MOE: David Brooks likens Obama to Mr. Rogers playing Ari on Entourage. (Would that be good for the Jews?) Anyway, he proceeds to do exactly the thing I was talking about where Obama actually gets praised for "selling out" in a move that should disappoint his starry-eyed media fans but actually makes them cream their pants because they are ashamed of their idealism and also, masochists:

MOE:

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

MEGAN: I think it's funny that Clinton supporters either think he's the worst of the Chicago political machine or a naive waif and never anything in between.
MOE: Although uh Noonan isn't feeling the sentimentality shame so much today:

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn't. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn't, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better.

MEGAN: Yeah, she was on Scarborough this morning and they all got maudlin about Tim Russert.
MOE:

That's what we talk about in eulogies, because that's what's important. We don't say, "The thing about Joe was he was rich."

MEGAN: Also, her site is down.

MEGAN: Off-topic, our friend Calderone has the story of the wacky Hardball ad about Michelle's supposed make over and an even funnier fake one for Cindy McCain.
MEGAN: I also think the whole thing is funny, like Michelle needs a fashion makeover? The figures aren't dancing ladies in the Obama ad as much as fake runway models
MOE: I hate sentences like that. How many eulogies have any sort of basis in the reality of someone's life? I went to a very rich guy's funeral once. All the eulogies were like "great guy worked hard loved the outdoors cared about his family" and meanwhile half the family is sitting there seething over what a cold unemotional terror he'd been. But yeah, I dunno. Anyway I failed to mention that the Bush Administration's spying on Americans thing may, like the shitty economy and the shady no-bid multibillion dollar overbudget defense contracts and chaos/anarchy/fear in Iraq, get to outlive the Administration.

MEGAN: I also love that the Dems rolled over on retroactive immunity for telecoms as part of it, giving just enough judicial oversight to make it look like there will be some if we aren't paying attention, but little enough that it will make any difference to the telecoms.

MEGAN: So what did you miss most about the States besides good burgers? I was shocked in Europe in 1998 when I got served a horsemeat hamburger.
MOE: Well annoyingly I missed that you already covered the story of the rush to buy ships to drill for oil in the News Roundup, which is an interesting tale of the insatiable demand for deep-sea rigs, which cost half a billion dollars apiece, not that that's that's a big deal when, you know, just by way of example, Exxon's earnings before interest/taxes/depreciation/amortizaiton for the past 12 months (during which oil futures have probably averaged half today's price) was $77 billion…
MEGAN: And, hey, if we built them here (ha!) it could revitalize the dying shipbuilding industry.

MOE: South Korean shipyards are making most of these things, incidentally. Didn't we used to have shipyards in this country? I feel like they've all been turned into luxury condo developments and office parks. Where are the world's cruise ships and container ships built?

MEGAN: I think the only thing our few remaining shipyards build are navy vessels. I'm sure the cruise and container ships are all built in low-wage, non-union countries.
MOE: Yeah but that doesn't really describe South Korea and it definitely doesn't describe Singapore.
MEGAN: I have two words that do, though: industrial subsidies.
MOE: Hahaha yes and its evil cousin INDUSTRIAL POLICY.
MEGAN: We have an industrial policy! It's called reducing the capital gains tax! And R&D tax credits.

MEGAN: Well, we could discuss this article in which a former DeLay staffer bothers to notice that Republicans are losing in moderate states by being too Christian conservative and not Republican enough, and rejects calls for the party to get more conservative and praises Rahm Emanuel.
MEGAN: So, he's making friends.

MOE: Is it possible to be in an industry that manufactures single products that weigh thousands of tons, provide the backbone of billions of dollars of global commerce, are giant combustible moving targets for terrorism and pirates and cost $500 million apiece and are generally ordered in eleven or twelve figure (often government) contracts…and not involve the government? No. And you know, shipping isn't going anywhere and shipbuilding = jobs. So why does it seem like the EU and the US just, like, gave that industry to Asia while they took the aerospace stuff? Admittedly I don't fucking know anything.
9:10 AM
MEGAN: I think the margins aren't that great, subsidies aren't passing muster with the WTO and we'd rather spend our government money on bombs and guns than big ass ships.
MOE: See, that is just our problem. The "the margins aren't that great" problem. Well, guess what, Samsung Heavy just raised prices $100 million, so 25%, and they know they could charge more. So the margins are pretty damn good now, because you're not just going to see someone open a competing shipyard specializing in deep-sea vessels down in Bangalore. Beyond that, with all the government intervention, the opaque accounting of the contracts involved, blah blah blah, the margins can seem almost impossible to calculate. Whatever, "the margins aren't that great" is just code for "it's hard." It's hard because the capital expenditures are huge, the labor costs are huge, and the price of fucking up is huge. But the thing about those cyclical industries we're always trying to get out of: for all those reasons the jobs aren't going anywhere.

MEGAN: I don't know that it's just capital intensivity, though. We have plenty of capital intensive industries in this country (like: heavy equipment manufacturing, for whom I used to lobby) that has survived despite it being cyclical and all the rest. I'm going to guess that the reason military shipbuilding has survived while commercial hasn't is partially because the margins on the military contracts are better.
MOE: Hahaha today on Fox they're trying to get everyone to back down from the accepted conventional wisdom that lifting the ban on offshore drilling would take 7 years to have an impact by finding some nutjob who claims it will only take 2. Since so much sentiment is packed into oil prices I suppose he could be right, but then we'd be willing that the markets are somewhat irrational or something?
MOE: Oh god now they're talking about the laxative cake.
MEGAN: I mean, it would take that long to have an impact on supply, not that I think supply is the problem or that drilling offshore would have a huge impact on it. But I'm sure the markets would get all irrationally exuberant about it and prices would dip briefly and then continue on their steady upward path.
MOE: Ah, Obama opted out of public financing.
MEGAN: Because the system is broken! And he has lots of money.
MOE: I love how all the people behind this inane Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less campaign are citing polling data that tells us 64% of Americans "Expect It Will Lower Prices." I wonder what those 64% of Americans thought invading Iraq would do! Besides destroy Al Qaeda which was financed by Saddam Hussein who was the half-brother of Barack Hussein Obama's Indonesian father?? Speaking of which, Iraq oil contracts…did you read that story?

MEGAN: 64% of Americans expect it will lower prices because the news media keeps repeating the fact that John McCain and George Bush want to do it to lower prices.
MEGAN: I didn't read the Iraq oil contracts story but, let me guess... corruption?
MOE: Well, the winners of the "unusual" no-bid contracts were Exxon, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, who won out over some 40 companies including Chinese and Russian ones, and while they only last a year they give those companies a head start international observers are headscratching etc. etc.

It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

MOE: Here the Iraq is calling it a "stop-gap measure" just to get people in and digging etc. etc.
MEGAN: Right. Because what Iraq needs is obviously more US and European-based multinationals exploring for oil that everyone knows is there. Talk about capital intensive industries.
MEGAN: Once they're in there, they'll stay and everyone knows it.
MOE: And all but Chevron were original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company so it's really like a Restoration of sorts!
MEGAN: Aw, how sweet, it's like a family reunion! Only with more money!
MOE: Holy shit two Bear Stearns executives were just arrested at their homes for…knowingly bilking some investors out of $1.6 billion

MEGAN: Wow, the government cares about that now? Also, by the way, Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) hs called for the nationalization of U.S. oil refineries.
MOE: Right I'm reading about that. The "Drill Here Drill Now Pay Less" of the Left is apparently some outfit called Oil Change International, or at least they're spinning it that way. Remember that Crappy Hour a few glorious months back when we actually read long stories where we discussed the pros and cons of the global shift toward the nationalization of oil? Yeah I don't really remember either.
MEGAN: Do I remember Crappy Hour yesterday?

MEGAN: Hey, do you remember when we were all shocked that the Air Force mistakenly sent nuclear components instead of batteries to Taiwan? Well, it turns out that they're actually missing like 1,000 sensitive nuclear parts and that's why the dudes got fired. Hopefully we didn't ship those to, like, China or something.
MOE: That reminds me there was something in the paper about Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou's new China policy which isn't really a new policy, it's just more like an attitude, because Ma is "mainland Chinese" meaning his first language is Mandarin and he came over with Chiang Kai-shek and the last president was a "native Taiwanese" meaning his first language was Hokkien and for most of his adult lifetime he was one of the majority of the population who had Japanese colony nostalgia (this nostalgia did not go over well with the mainland Chinese) .. anyhow but see, we're missing the real meme here, which is Larry Sinclair at the National Press Club.
MEGAN: I sooooo wanted to go, but I had to blog yesterday.
MEGAN: By the way, the HuffPo story on it is even more epic.

MEGAN: I love, too, that they get Clinton supporters on the record being all like, well, the crazy guy might be telling the truth, he really could've sucked Obama's dick.
MOE:

And pay Sinclair did — for the venue and its microphone, as well as for a kilted lawyer (with a suspended license) named Montgomery Blair Sibley, who informed those assembled that his preferences in dress were arrived at as a way to secure comfort for his unusually large sexual organs. "I don't know why men wear pants," he said with a poker face. "It's a function of male genitalia. If you're size normal or smaller, you're probably comfortable with [pants]. ... Those at the other end of the spectrum find them quite confining."
"I asked him to wear a suit and tie," Mr. Sinclair said ruefully. Then, he admitted to suffering from a brain tumor.

MOE: What?
MEGAN: I know, how sad are you that we weren't there? By the way, Sibley was the DC Madam's lawyer and is somehow connected to Larry Flynt and Sinclair was hinting around that he was going to have a special surprise guest so the media showed because they thought Larry Flynt would be there.

And basically, we got some emails and contact information, and an offer from a Guardian staffer to let us use their bank account since the women's NGO in question lacks its own, so if you would like to help, email us and we'll pass on the info. Because while stunningly horrific, the case is not exactly rare. Four years ago George Packer wrote a New Yorker piece that sorta-prophesied the current rash of honor killings under the rationale that Iraqi citizens, who were much more religiously puritanical than we'd given them credit for before the war, would react to the lawlessness and moral corruption unleashed by the invasion by killing prostitutes, in a warped sort of Fixing Broken Hymens theory of criminology. Here's a relevant passage:

An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine in Iraq deals with virginity, Shaker said. In any criminal case involving a woman, it’s the most important piece of information. “It rules our life,” he added. The surprising thing about these details of his profession is their ordinariness. In the West, Iraqis developed a reputation for cosmopolitan modernity that is now decades out of date. In order to win the support of Iraq’s clerics, Saddam obliged people to adopt a harsh form of traditional Islam. In private matters of religion, family, and the treatment of women, the vast majority of Iraqis are far more conservative than most outsiders understand.
In March, 2003, a week before the start of the war, a sixteen-year-old girl whom the Baathist police had found wandering disoriented through the streets was brought to the Medico-Legal Institute. Upon examining her, Shaker found that her virginity had been recently and violently taken. The girl, named Raghda, was beautiful, with pale skin and large, dark eyes, and she was so miserable she could hardly speak. Raghda seemed nothing like the teen-age prostitutes Shaker examined, and he gently persuaded her to tell him what had happened.
Raghda had gone to audition as a television announcer at the studio owned by Uday Hussein, Saddam’s psychopathic older son. Along with the six other finalists, she was taken to a room where Uday — crippled from a 1996 assassination attempt—was seated in a chair, holding a pistol in his lap. He ordered the girls to undress and walk in a circle around his chair. When one girl begged to be excused, Uday shot her dead. After that, the other girls, including Raghda, did as they were told. In the following days, Uday (who was committing some of his last crimes in power, while an invasion force gathered along Iraq’s southern border) raped the girls, then threw them out on the street, drugged, with a wad of cash, which was how Raghda was found by the police. When she told them her story, they gave her a beating and then took her to the Medico-Legal Institute.
“If you want to help me,” Raghda told the doctor, “go tell my parents their daughter was found dead.”
On March 18th, two days before the war started, Shaker completed Raghda’s paperwork. “Notice that there is the appearance of complete hymen rupture from the top to the base,” he wrote. “In conclusion, the hymen membrane was ruptured longer than two weeks ago; I cannot say how long. End of report.” Raghda was returned to the police; Shaker never learned her fate.
…
I assumed that this forward-thinking man of science—with a flat-top haircut and clean-shaven jaw—wanted a relatively secular, liberal Iraq. I kept waiting for him to catch my eye in the middle of one of his clinical descriptions and shake his head over the backwardness of a society obsessed with virginity and prostitution. It never happened

Before the war, it was the other way around; Shaker used to perform five or six virginity exams a day. Shaker is a Shiite Muslim, and he was appalled by this inversion of the normal order. In his view, a fragile moral relationship existed between the two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute—as if the social control of virginity offered a defense against the anarchy that led to murder. He noted that in Iran, an Islamist theocracy, prostitutes were publicly whipped. He thought the same practice should be instituted in Iraq—where the sex trade, he claimed, had reached epidemic proportions in the lawlessness of the occupation. “It’s strict, it’s horrible, but it has good results,” he said of Islamic law. “Prostitution now is normal here.” He blamed the Americans for the moral laxity in Baghdad, and especially L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, for threatening, in February, to veto any interim constitution that declared Islam to be the principal basis of federal law. “When they give everybody their rights, it’s causing bad things in society—it’s corrupting us,” Shaker said. “If Islam is the main source of law, none of these things would happen.”

Mother Who Defied The Killers Is Gunned Down [Guardian]
Caught In The Crossfire [New Yorker]

Technology is not our friend today, so we'll make this short.
• Dana Perino used the word "puzzled" to describe the Bush Administration's reaction to Scott McClellan's takedown, which is funny because, as we "reported" earlier, he used the word "puzzled" to describe his reaction to President Bush's puzzlement over the fact that people would get upset about him starting a trillion dollar war for no actual reason. [AP]

• The shitty way economic growth begets famine. [NY Times]
• The thing no one mentions about this "Rock Band" game, which I have only experienced as an observer, is how listening to people playing it is sort of like that time Roseanne sang the national anthem, only for hours because it's so "addictive." [Salon]

• "The strange class war that defined Nixonland renews itself endlessly, with different leaders and different symbols, but always with the same dynamic: the striving squares revenging themselves upon the hip and the snooty. Backlash is a chronic condition now, and one of the reasons is that hipness is chronic, too. The '60s culture that infuriated Nixon and his followers is everywhere today, because hipness and 'revolution' have become a default mode of corporate speech. Youth had nothing to do with it: It happened thanks to the need for ever-accelerating novelty, reverence for a supposedly enlightened cyber-vanguard, and the great god 'creativity.'" Sooooo…basically the primacy of such resilient and defiantly unhip pop cultural touchstones as The Hills and American Idol paved the way for Obama? [WSJ]

• Not that he is necessarily a candidate! [Gallup]

Sometimes the dream would be of losing her, or of desperate searches unfulfilled. The breakup argument in the spotless white penthouse apartment. Recriminations, tears. Running down rain-slicked city streets, locked doors, impassive doormen, and always that perfect angelic face; leaving with someone else, or seen in a blank stare through a limousine window .Even the specter of losing Natalie Portman was better than that; even the memory of imaginary heartache is preferable to the slow feeling of turning into a vampire. Perhaps it is the curse of all men; the sad final truth that the male half of the human race might only confide in one another over a few too many beers: you only truly love a woman when she walks out the door.

He is back now. He has a wife and dog. But the extremeness of the putridness of his actual reality empowers ever-grander and more glamorous wishful delusions? Sounds about right. At home with his Xbox, he's either happy or miserable in the realization that he will "never dance the lambada with Natalie Portman" although maybe she'll read his column in the Times and forgive him the whole "lambada" thing because at least he's being honest that he'd probably fuck it up with them anyway, even if he can't yet admit exactly why.

May I Have This Dance? [NY Times]
Related: A Quilt Of Lost Memories [Newsweek]

• George W. Bush is in Israel right now where he equated Obama with Hitler over his suggestion that he meet with Ahmadinejad. I guess in Israel they have to smile when he talks but Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik doesn't look like her heart is in it. [Wash Post]
  
• Joe Biden and most Democrats not named Joseph Lieberman rejected and denounced Bush's "bullshit"/"malarkey." [Politico]
  
• Oh wait, but the Bushes were actually great friends with the Nazis. So maybe he meant the Hitler thing as a compliment? [Guardian]
  
• (Dear Jews: Just remember, no one forgets what they learned at summer camp!)

• And what does the presumptive nominee of the political party equivalent of bad dog food have to say about the idiotic musings of the ignorant shit who not only most likely laid waste his own chances of being elected president but also did more in eight years to undermine democracy, world peace and stability than anyone who had ever held the office? Yeah, John McCain, you are an asshole. [Wonkette]
• "If the fear of Baghdad and Falluja is what keeps foreign powers from saving huge numbers of Burmese from their own government's callousness, that will be one more tragic consequence of the Iraq war." [New Yorker]
• I've been meaning to compile some fave Moments In Schlafly in honor of the honorary degree she's receiving tomorrow so...you know where to tip me. [TNR]

In which we adopt the persona of Women's Voices. Women Vote robocaller and misinformation chief Lamont Williams, if he only had a voice.

MOE: Oh look at this, Obama's "aura of inevitability" has diminished. Remember when that happened to Hillary? How can we ever democratically elect a president if he/she doesn't have that "aura of inevitability"? It's unamerican!
MEGAN: You have to have an aura of inevitability, it's sort of like an aura of infallibility and of course the President is infallible!
MOE: This is uplifting. Troops don't want to seek counseling for their psychological/psychiatric issues for fear it will hurt their careers. And with good reason: up until now you've had to given extensive interviews if you report that you've sought mental health help when applying for security clearance.

One in four of the troops surveyed said he or she knew "nothing at all about effective mental health treatments for issues that may arise from their service in a war zone," Robinowitz said.

The interviewer later prefaced a question by saying she wanted to "turn the page" from the Wright controversy.
"No, you don't," Mrs. Obama replied.

MEGAN: Anyway, so, the mental health in the military thing, it's sort of like Dodai wrote only with greater consequences. Also, it's my experience that your can get a clearance as long as you're honest about stuff, it just takes longer.
MOE: Sometimes Dick Cheney really sorta steps out of character, you know?
MEGAN: Sometimes, it just seems like he's fucking with us.

MEGAN: Sort of like Bush with that whole Mission Accomplished" thing
MOE: Yeah you wouldn't think that what with orchestrating the sophisticated propaganda effort to recruit, brief and dispatch retired military commanders to defend the war on teevee and such that...he'd have the time to advocate against trying to save the whales? He is truly a multitasker.

MOE: Did you read that story, by the way? It came out on a weekend so I think we never got to it but it's worth checking out (all ninety pages of it, probably!) The fascinating thing was how the appearance of these supposedly "objective" pundits was used within the administration to give officials a sense that the tide of public sentiment was turning.

"The impressions that you're getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false," Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.
The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on "Today." "There's been over $100 million of new construction," he reported. "The place is very professionally run."
Within days, transcripts of the analysts' appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

MEGAN: What does he hate about whales? Or if it just that they are yummy?
MOE: Sometimes they get in the way of fast ships transporting oil or nukes or whatever I guess.
MEGAN: Or sweet, sweet babies for him to drink the blood of?
MEGAN: Anyway, yeah, I did the story although it sorta didn't surprise me. I kinda figure everyone on TV has an agenda, I guess it's more the coordination part that seemed too much like walking and chewing gum for this administration.
MOE: My ex-boyfriend led a "Mission Accomplished!" wheat paste postering campaign throughout Philadelphia about...three years ago I guess. Now I'm getting nostalgic! Over 3,000 troops have probably died since then. And, oh yeah, at least half a million Iraqis.
MEGAN: Well, really, obviously their lives are not as important as our ability to keep driving SUVs and ignoring the human costs of the war, so, you know, shhhhhh.

MOE: Moving on to matters slightly more obscure but, sadly, no less significant when it comes to our choice of Custodian Of the Unaccomplished and to that end Iraqi lives, this Women's Voices Women's Vote voter fraud conspiracy-type thing is sooo fascinating.
MEGAN: No, totally. It's like, completely shady and bad, very Rovian. I should go find their tax returns.
MOE: It's like oh I get it. Women get more representation if we dispatch a man named "Lamont" to call "single women" aka "black folks" and give them all the wrong dates, times and deadlines for registration to vote. I'm kinda slightly more annoyed about my primary nonvoting experience now.
MOE:

* Michigan officials ended up "fielding tons of calls from confused voters" after Women's Voices did a February mailing to "380,000 unmarried women" — including numerous deceased voters and even more that were already registered. Sarah Johnson of Women's Voices "seemed confused by the confusion," the Lansing State Journal reported.

MEGAN: Ha, also, Page Gardner has a ton of donations to groups like EMILY's List (supporting Clinton) and, slightly strangely, Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz (committed Clinton superdelegate) and state Democratic committees but not one Presidential candidate this cycle.
MOE: And this is why I love Barack Obama: What's he spent, close to half a billion dollars on television commercials? And yet he tells people at rallies they should turn the TV off.
MEGAN: She gave to Kerry in 2004, though, and to Clinton's Senate re-election campaign.

MEGAN: Podesta's on the board.
MOE: Obama is probably just trying to keep people like Page and the Pentagon from polluting people's brains. What do people like Page get from a Clinton administration? Jobs? Or the "aura" of access?
MEGAN: I think it's the aura of access. I mean, people really, really, really, really get off on the idea that they can call the White House and someone will return their phone calls, and on those grip-and-grin pictures.
MEGAN: Like, I went to a dinner thing when I was still a lobbyist last year, very high-end, extremely rich people there. And they all queued up and waited for an hour to get a grip/grin with Mitt Romney.
MOE: ew.
MOE: Did you catch any Hillary on O'Reilly? Bc I missed it.

MEGAN: I can't watch O'Reilly. I keep seeing clips of her saying Wright's comments were offensive.
MEGAN: O'Reilly... it's like, I don't even get the smallest sense that he knows how unintentionally ironic he is. The only reason I can watch Shephard Smith in the afternoon is half the time I think he's winking when he says outrageous stuff. That, and I'm a total hag.

Propaganda via Jesse Goldstein of Space 1026.

• Oh my GOD POLITICIANS WHO UPHOLD THE RIGHT TO A BABYKILLING RECEIVED THE BODY OF CHRIST DESPITE KILLING BABIES. What is next, women who actually have submitted their wombs to this murderous murder method? The abortion doctors themselves? WHAT IF THE VIRGIN MARY HAD MADE THIS SO CALLED "CHOICE"?? No one would have believed her rape kit! [AP]
  
• Oh fuck, a debate tonight. [Philly]
  
• With apologies to SinisterRouge...[Huffington Post]
  
• And here's a concession: Barry started wearing the flag pin again. Authentic! [LAT]
  
• Maybe he is just proud of the country for embracing its own bitterness and John McCain for praising his race speech and Hillary Clinton for getting drunk. Hey, I'm proud almost proud myself... [AP]
  
• Which brings us to...where can you see the word "fuck" more than Jezebel? Our military barracks' bathrooms in the Middle East. A fucking awesome photo essay. [Walrus]

• And yes, I am going to need this. [WSJ]
• And speaking of oppressive bureaucratic organizations from which you don't want to receive angry paperwork...Al Qaeda! [LA Times]
• And speaking of the funny ways of terrorists, the Las Vegas ricin attacker is an unemployed 57-year-old graphic designer. [AP]