The strength of postal ... and CSC

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | Cycling | Armstrong rides into yellow

But Tuesday's stage was thrown into turmoil when Ullrich attacked up the first-category Colde l'Echarasson, at one stage pulling more than a minute clear of Armstrong.

The American refused to panic, though, and reeled Ullrich in with the help of his US Postal team and Basso's CSC riders.

The group were reduced to just four riders in the final sprint after the climb to Villard-de-Lans, with Armstrong edging out Basso, Ullrich in third and Andreas Kloden back in fourth.

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I wish I understood more of this. There appears to be a defacto alliance between Basso/CSC and Armstrong/Postal. Armstrong/Postal's calculated cool is fascinating.

Osama's candidate: the movie version

The New York Times > Opinion > Krugman: The Arabian Candidate

... The Arabian candidate wouldn't openly help terrorists. Instead, he would serve their cause while pretending to be their enemy.

After an attack, he would strike back at the terrorist base, a necessary action to preserve his image of toughness, but botch the follow-up, allowing the terrorist leaders to escape. Once the public's attention shifted, he would systematically squander the military victory: committing too few soldiers, reneging on promises of economic aid. Soon, warlords would once again rule most of the country, the heroin trade would be booming, and terrorist allies would make a comeback.

Meanwhile, he would lead America into a war against a country that posed no imminent threat. He would insinuate, without saying anything literally false, that it was somehow responsible for the terrorist attack. This unnecessary war would alienate our allies and tie down a large part of our military. At the same time, the Arabian candidate would neglect the pursuit of those who attacked us, and do nothing about regimes that really shelter anti-American terrorists and really are building nuclear weapons.

Again, he would take care to squander a military victory. The Arabian candidate and his co-conspirators would block all planning for the war's aftermath; they would arrange for our army to allow looters to destroy much of the country's infrastructure. Then they would disband the defeated regime's army, turning hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers into disgruntled potential insurgents.

After this it would be easy to sabotage the occupied country's reconstruction, simply by failing to spend aid funds or rein in cronyism and corruption. Power outages, overflowing sewage and unemployment would swell the ranks of our enemies.

Who knows? The Arabian candidate might even be able to deprive America of the moral high ground, no mean trick when our enemies are mass murderers, by creating a climate in which U.S. guards torture, humiliate and starve prisoners, most of them innocent or guilty of only petty crimes...

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Wicked! All this piece needs is the recent Doonesbury strip with Osama's Bush campaign ad. Every word is correct, GWB is the terrorist's unwitting ally.

The Economist's editorial this week is saying surprisingly similar things, though weakened by their desperate desire to find some face saving way to endorse Bush for the presidency. It's fun to watch the Economist writhe in pain; their editorial policy has been spectacularly craven over the past 6-8 years (since they went mainstream). They know that they'll lose a chunk of their readership when they endorse Bush; I'm looking forward to reading something else for a while.

Team Postal: a different view

Armstrong catches the Blue Train to Tour de France glory

Just before the final climb, his legs still whirring, Armstrong suddenly sat straight in his saddle, limbered up by twisting side-to-side, wiped his nose with his right hand and unzipped the top of his blue jersey. Let the carnage begin.

Led by Hincapie, the Postals stormed into the steep, 9.9-mile ascent like a typhoon. Behind, the trailing pack slowly disintegrated.

Jose Luis Rubiera, a powerful climber riding with his shirt open, took over when Hincapie was spent. Rivals gasped like fish out of water. Fewer than a dozen cyclists continued to cling to Armstrong's group.

And still the Postals had unused reserves. Sunglasses propped on his head, Portuguese mountain-tamer Jose Azevedo stepped in for Rubiera to perform the coup de grace with another burst of uphill pace. First to go: Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour champion who simply couldn't keep up.

When Azevedo peeled off with 5 miles still to climb, only two riders had survived: Armstrong and Italian Ivan Basso, who rode together through the massed crowds. Armstrong beat Basso with a sprint finish.

The stage standings read like a list of wounded. Ullrich, 2:42 back, his Tour all but done. Roberto Heras, who quit the Postals to try to beat Armstrong, 21:35 back. Mayo, 37:40 behind -- nearly 11 minutes slower even than Ekimov, Armstrong's trusted Russian sidekick still going strong at age 38.

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Most of the Tour coverage reads like plagiarism run amok. John Leicester's article is different. It really gives some insight into the race.

I know nothing of the Tour, so I can't comment on whether Armstrong has really won. It seems as though there are many ways to lose the Tour, and few ways to win. It is incredible, however, to read of his team -- including Ekimov "the ancient".

The 9/11 commission report: the interesting parts and the assault on Iran

9/11 Panel Calls for Major Changes (washingtonpost.com)

The commission staff has already absolved Saudi Arabia's government of direct support for al Qaeda and debunked widespread reports that Osama bin Laden inherited $300 million. (He received a $1 million annual allowance for about two decades, the commission found.) Panel members also have knocked down questions raised by last year's congressional investigation into Sept. 11 intelligence failures involving possible help for the hijackers by the Saudi Embassy in Washington....

... The report will expand on the commission's earlier findings that al Qaeda's contacts with Iran were far more advanced than previously believed, and that the two may have developed a relationship of convenience that included cooperation in attacks such as the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. Time magazine reported that the commission has found that eight to 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have passed through Iran before joining the hijacking plot.

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I suspect most of the interesting parts of the report aren't going to get much press attention. If not for the spur of the professional journalist bloggers (eg. not hobbyists like myself) I think journalism would have died in the US last year.

On a related tack, a plot of co-occurences of "Iran", "al Qaeda" and "9/11" would show a steep rise in the past few months. It looks like Bush is preparing to go after Iran next. Of course since he has no credibility left outside of a core group of supporters, the question of Iran's true guilt or innocence is almost irrelevant. Bush's deception and incompetence has made it impossible for him to make any kind of case at all.

Korean: Meat Pancakes (Gogi-Jun)

New York Times Recipe: Meat Pancakes (Gogi-Jun)

Time: 45 minutes

1 pound firm tofu
1 pound ground beef
10 scallions, trimmed and minced
2 long hot red chili peppers, or about 1 teaspoon crushed red chili flakes
1 teaspoon black pepper
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Large pinch salt
2 tablespoons minced chives
2 eggs
Corn oil or other neutral oil as needed
1 cup poo-chim karo (vegetable pancake mix, available at Korean markets) or Wondra or other fine flour.

1. Put the tofu in a fine kitchen towel, and wring as much water as possible out of it. Combine it in a bowl with the next 9 ingredients (through the chives). Squeeze the mixture with your hands for a minute or two, until it is very fine and well combined. Adjust seasoning as necessary; the mixture should be well seasoned but not very hot.

I'm not as extreme as I thought I was

The Independent Weekly: With trembling fingers

I thought I was reasonably extreme in my extraordinarily low opinion of our President, but by comparison to Hal Crowther I'm quite restrained. Quoting Goering is hitting pretty low -- though the quote is rather fitting.

... But the Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one can stop these people except you and me, and the other 100 million or so American citizens who may vote in the November election. This isn't your conventional election, the usual dim-witted, media-managed Mister America contest where candidates vie for charm and style points and hire image coaches to help them act more confident and presidential. This is a referendum on what is arguably the most dismal performance by any incumbent president--and inarguably the biggest mistake. This is a referendum on George W. Bush, arguably the worst thing that has happened to the United States of America since the invention of the cathode ray tube.

One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush is much too strong. Just to spell it out is to sound like a bitter partisan. I sit here on the 67th birthday of Saddam Hussein facing a haystack of incriminating evidence that comes almost to my armpit. What matters most, what signifies? Journalists used to look for the smoking gun, but this time we have the cannons of Waterloo, we have Gettysburg and Sevastopol, we have enough gun smoke to cause asthma in heaven. I'm overwhelmed. Maybe I should light a match to this mountain of paper and immolate myself. On the near side of my haystack, among hundreds of quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one thing leaped out at me. A quote I had underlined was from the testimony of Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, not long before Hitler's vice-fuhrer poisoned himself in his jail cell:

"It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

... Kerry made a courageous choice at least once in his life, when he came home with his ribbons and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But Sen. Kerry could turn out to be a stiff, a punk, an alcoholic and he'd still be a colossal improvement over the man who turned Paul Wolfowitz loose in the Middle East. The myth that there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans, which I once considered seriously and which Ralph Nader rode to national disaster four years ago, was shattered forever the day George Bush announced his cabinet and his appointments for the Department of Defense.

... As Kevin Phillips recounts in American Dynasty, officials of the Reagan and first Bush administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with arms while he was using chemical weapons on the Kurds. They twice sent Donald Rumsfeld to court Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the dictator was in the glorious prime of his monsterhood.

This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was briefly called "Iraqgate," and, yes, among the names of those officials implicated you'll find most of the engineers of our current foreign policy. (They also signaled their fractious client, Saddam, that it might be all right to overrun part of Kuwait; you remember what happened when he tried to swallow it all.) Does any of this trouble you? Does it worry you that Dick Cheney, as president of the nefarious Halliburton Corporation, sold Iraq $73 million in oilfield services between 1997 and 2000, even as he plotted with the Wolfowitz faction to whack Saddam? Or that Halliburton, with its CEO's seat still warm from Cheney's butt, was awarded unbid contracts worth up to $15 billion for the Iraq invasion, and currently earns a billion dollars a month from this bloody disaster? Not to mention its $27.4 million overcharge for our soldiers' food.

Does it bother you even a little that the personal fortunes of all four Bush brothers, including the president and the governor, were acquired about a half step ahead of the district attorney, and that the royal family of Saudi Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and other Bush family enterprises? Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that it's much easier to establish links between the Bush and bin Laden families than any between the bin Ladens and Saddam Hussein. Do you know about Ahmad Chalabi, the administration's favorite Iraqi and current agent in Baghdad, whose personal fortune was established when he embezzled several hundred million from his own bank in Jordan and fled to London to avoid 22 years at hard labor?

That's just a sampling from my haystack. Maybe I can reach you as an environmentalist, one who resents the gutting of key provisions in the Clean Air Act? My own Orange County, chiefly a rural area, was recently added to a national register of counties with dangerously polluted air. You say you vote for the president because you're a conservative. Are you sure? I thought conservatives believed in civil liberties, a weak federal executive, an inviolable Constitution, a balanced budget and an isolationist foreign policy. George Bush has an attorney general who drives the ACLU apoplectic and a vice president who demands more executive privilege (for his energy seances) than any elected official has ever received. The president wants a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage from homosexuals, of all things. Between tax cuts for his high-end supporters and three years playing God and Caesar in the Middle East, George Bush has simply emptied America's wallet, with a $480 billion federal deficit projected for 2004, and the tab on Iraq well over $100 billion and running.

... All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at "liberals" and maybe a name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke, whom most of them have never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous but not harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college fraternity prank" (and who once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog"--you don't have to worry about shame when you have no brain).

I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most sophisticated political campaign in human history.

Bush's crusaders: the cancer he can't oppose

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Jesus and Jihad

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of 'Glorious Appearing' and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.

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By Kristof's description the last book in the series is sick, brutal, and ugly. The cult of Left Behind has created an "alternate Jesus" who would be very comfortable in the Old Testament, and completely antithetical to the New Testament. These writings legitimize any act of cruelty against the unbeliever -- who are unworthy of compassion.

These are Bush's Crusaders, and he cannot part from them.

Time to stop buying Slim-Fast products ....

The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > Advertising: Marketers Run to Pull the Plug When Celebrity Endorsers Say the Darnedest Things: "Slim-Fast has dumped Whoopi Goldberg from its advertising for having crudely mocked President Bush at a political rally, marketers are left to ponder once again the risks of celebrity endorsements."

Hersh makes accusations of the most extreme degree

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004): a Weblog

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

'The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking,' the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was 'a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.'

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Hersh has been right too often to be dismissed as insane. Bush has lied too often to be trusted at all.

On the other hand, this accusation is extraordinary.

Now we will see how the Pentagon responds. If Bush had any shred of integrity left, he'd resign.

Bush and the gay marriage ban: crushed in the senate

Top News Article | Reuters.com: "On a 48-to-50 vote, six Republicans broke ranks as proponents of a proposed amendment fell 12 votes short of the needed 60 to end a Democratic procedural hurdle."

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This wasn't even close -- to be a serious threat it needed at least 60 votes. I'd bet many of those voting for it did so knowing there wasn't a chance in heck of it passing -- and thus felt free to earn bennies from Bush.

In the face of a fairly smashing defeat, will Rove reconsider putting this front and center? Rove's goal is to use the gay marriage ban to increase turnout among the religious radical right (I suspect neither Rove nor Bush have much personal devotion to banning gay unions); but I'm sure he was banking on more support in the senate. Rove's secondary goal was to have Kerry and Edwards on record voting against the ban -- but the vote was so lopsided both of them were able to be conveniently absent.

A good day for the good guys.

How to join the dept of homeland security watch list

HoustonChronicle.com - I write badly, therefore I am a would-be terrorist

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This is pathetic, sad, and scary in two big ways. Scary in one way because it illustrates the astounding incompetence of our security apparatus. Scary in another way because of the abuses ahead.

If Bush wins, I'll be taking Greyhound too.

Rankism -- not so silly?

The New York Times > Arts >Tilting at Windbags: A Crusade Against Rank

Western society has denounced racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, mobilized against ageism and genderism, anguished over postcolonialism and nihilism, taken arms against Marxism, totalitarianism and absolutism, and trashed, at various conferences and cocktail parties, liberalism and conservatism.

Is it possible there is yet another ism to mobilize against?

Robert W. Fuller, a boyishly earnest 67-year-old who has spent most of his life in academia, thinks so, and he calls it 'rankism,' the bullying behavior of people who think they are superior. The manifesto? Nobodies of the world unite! — against mean bosses, disdainful doctors, power-hungry politicians, belittling soccer coaches and arrogant professors.

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The journalist starts off with a somewhat dismissive lead, but provides a bit more reasoned review later in the piece. Scorn it not -- this isn't going to go away.

Most human societies have aligned power and moral superiority. We think of talent, brilliance, charm, strength, physical beauty, good character as things worthy of praise. Moreover, we consider success itself as praiseworthy -- some of us (Republicans, conservative christians) consider all of these things as signs of God's approval, and thus a sign of godliness and goodness.

These common sentiments are better than many alternatives, alternatives such as the anti-intellectual assaults of the Red Guard, the Nazi party, and the Iraqi insurgency (which has been assassinating Iraq's intellectuals). They're better than the revenge of the envious common to revolutionary movements from France to Russia.

But times change. We don't praise luck as much as we do brilliance. And yet what is brilliance, but a form of luck? Luck to have the right genes, luck to avoid disease, poverty, injury, neglect. Luck to have a measure of schooling, to be born in a setting where brilliance was approved.

We are human, and we are unlikely to change our genetically programmed responses to the gifted (lucky) and the powerful. Still, were we all knowing, and all wise, I think we would blend an appreciation for the luck of the gifted with compassion and appreciation for all people fast and slow. An appreciation not that far, really, from the most enlightened teachings of that extraordinary radical, J Christ.

A changing dynamic in Iraq

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraq's Rebellion Develops Signs of Internal Rift

The establishment of the sovereign government may have set in motion a subtle but real shift in perceptions among some Iraqi rebels. Some argue that Mr. Allawi's Baathist past — he was a hard-liner before he ran afoul of Mr. Hussein — is swaying some former Baathists toward loyalty to the new government.

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A separate article describes the return of jihadi to Saudi Arabia -- from Iraq.

I've wondered what deals were done to get Sistani to accept Allawi. Bush was right to stick to the transition date (one decision I never criticized -- because I agreed with it). If the Kurds and Shias can live with Allawi, then he's the key to reassuring the Sunni. The next step to watch is what Allawi does with Falluja. By focusing on "foreigners" there he seems to be preparing for an attack.

I'm Osama bin Laden and I approve this message ...

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose July 11th, 2004 The July 11 Doonesbury is wicked. And so true. If Osama knew how to reelect GWB, he would.

Informed Comment : 07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004

Informed Comment : 07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004

The US military and possibly Coalition partners have in many cases taken women and children hostage in order to force their male relatives among the guerrillas to surrender. Since this practice is a form of collective punishment and was undertaken while the Coalition occupied Iraq, it is a war crime.

From Der Spiegel:

IRAQ: US soldiers are said to have abused arrested children.

More than hundred children have been detained in Iraqi prisons--including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, according to information provided by the international red cross. According to the TV magazine show "Report" Coalition troops are may also have abused children and young people. "Between January and May we registered altogether 107 children, during 19 visits at six different prisons", the spokesman of the International Red Cross (IKRK), Florian Westphal, said in a Geneva interview with the SWR magazine "Report Mainz". She said that these places of detention were controlled by coalition troops. The number of the children imprisoned held could also be higher, according to Westphal. In addition, the TV magazine reported references and testimonies, according to which US soldiers in Iraqi prisons also abused children and young people.

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I'd seen mention of this as an aside earlier. Guerilla's fight from home, and frequently fight as a family. They may even consider such tactics to be harsh, but rational.

For the rest of us though, war crime sounds about right.