crime against humanity.

From the AP:

Pakistanis Order Betrothal of 2-Year-Old

By Khalid Tanveer

MULTAN, Pakistan - A tribal council in Pakistan has ordered the betrothal of a 2-year-old girl to a man 40 years older to punish her uncle for an alleged affair with the man's wife, police said Monday.

The council decreed the girl must marry 42-year-old Mohammed Altaf, her uncle's cousin, when she turns 18, police said.

Altaf, a farmer, divorced his 32-year-old wife over her alleged love affair with his 20-year-old cousin, Mohammed Akmal. Akmal, a bachelor and also a farmer, has no children.

Altaf asked tribal elders in the village of Kacha Chohan, about 215 miles west of the city of Multan in Punjab province, to convene a panchayat, or council, on Feb. 15 to arbitrate and propose a punishment. As punishment, the elders ordered the girl's betrothal and ruled Akmal should also pay a $3,800 fine to the husband. Read more.

Somebody please tell me Amnesty International -- or SOMEBODY IN THIS WORLD -- will see to it that this never comes to pass. The mere fact that a two-year old girl is used as the prize in a punishment is sickening and tragic. Clearly somebody's got to roll up on these tribal folks and alert them to the fact that women are not chattel and are accorded certain human rights that nobody can take from them.

I'm hoping this will be stopped. This is no time to invoke the prime directive. Sometimes culture is wrong and something must be done.

conservative media elite exposed.

Now that President Mandate is underway in his second term, it's nice to see some of the "real" stories coming to light. Salon.com reported today a very telling story about how GOP cheerleaders are crashing the press room.

In the story, Fake News, Fake Reporter, Salon exposes purported reporter "Jeff Gannon" as nothing more than a Republican plant. Worse yet, he asks questions using false quotes in attempts to trash the Democratic party (as though they need any help looking bad).


"Jeff Gannon" sucks up to Dubya amidsts the liberal, media elite.

From the Salon.com article: Gannon's star turn quickly piqued the interest of many online commentators, who wondered how an obvious Republican operative had been granted access to daily White House press briefings normally reserved for accredited journalists. Two weeks later, a swarming investigation inside the blogosphere into Gannon and Talon News had produced all sorts of damning revelations about how Talon is connected at the hip to a right-wing activist organization called GOPUSA, how its "news" staff consists largely of volunteer Republican activists with no journalism experience, how Gannon often simply rewrote GOP press releases when filing his Talon dispatches.

It also uncovered embarrassing information about Gannon's past as well as his fake identity. When Gannon himself this week confirmed to the Washington Post that his name was a pseudonym, it only added to the sense of a bizarre hoax waiting to be exposed. Read more of the Salon.com article.

This story is simultaneously troubling, ironic, funny, frightening and enraging. I've been saying for years that this administration has veiled ever-so-thinly its relationship with its "grassroots" cheerleaders in the so-called media. If you continue reading the piece about Jeff Gannon, you'll learn he is not a reporter but a true partisan hack worse than the rest of them (Drudge, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc.). He's worse because he presents himself as a journalist, yet wears very blatantly his GOP ties on his sleeve.

Look at how much shit has been thrown at journalists in general over the last 15 years or so. "Liberal media elite" is such a locked-and-loaded phrase among Fox News sycophants that it's equal parts stupid and annoying (not to mention utterly baseless). And here we've got a party operative who sneaks in under a fake name and as much journalistic cred as a cub reporter for the community college newspaper.

What's scary is this has ties higher up the food chain. No, not directly to Dubya; but his people (who answer to Godfather Rove) orchestrated the move to further lie to the rest of the country and world in attempts to sell Bush's election victory as a "mandate."

There's something scary going on in politics when a marginal, bumbling oaf of a president is able to bask in such an enormous amount of glory.

I'm not sure which concerns me more, the dog or the tail that's wagging the dog. Either way, the moral of the story is this: don't take your eyes off these fuckers for one minute. And by "these fuckers," I mean the uber-righties who are ceasing the airwaves.

self-loathing americanism.

I very recently became familiar with a fellow by the name of Ward Churchill. He is a professor of American Indian Studies with the Department of Ethnic studies, at the University of Colorado (home of the Buffaloes). He's come under fire for post-9/11 statements.

"I am not a 'defender' of the September 11 attacks," Churchill stated. "But simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people should engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy.

You can go here to read the full statement. A fellow LiveJournal-er wrote about it, which is how I found it. Here was my response:

The fundamental problem I have with statements such as those made my Ward Churchill is one of self-loathing, American guilt. Far be it from me to be confused with a hyper-jingoistic flag-waver, but I also don't believe in casting Original Sin back upon this country when someone does something horrendous.

It's almost like people in the U.S. want to feel like we deserved it.

I disagree.

But please do not equate my views -- as some are wont to do -- to that of the overly-simplistic "they hate us for our freedom" ilk. No, I get it. I get the hatred and anti-American sentiment around the world is deep-rooted. But to start down the deconstructing 9/11 road and arrive to a point that nudges people into nodding along with the "we had it coming" notion is to assume responsibility. Wrong.

If this level of thinking can be carried down to the level of a single homicidal robber, could "the system" be help culpable of said criminal's decision to hold up a liquor store?

The balance between all sides is a very simple one: shit happens and yeah, we probably should have seen it coming. But are we at fault? Nope. I can’t take it to that level.

There was a time not so long ago that autoworkers in the U.S. were furious with the U.S. government and the Japanese auto industry for asskicking U.S autos were taking by Honda and Toyota in America. There were protests and, sadly, anti-Japanese rhetoric. But at no point did a group of irate, angry AFL-CIO members undertake a plot to crash planes into Tokyo commerce centers to punctuate their rage.

But let's say they did. With whom would the blame lie?

While I try to be as conscionable as possible, there comes a point when I have to draw a line. And I just can’t get behind the “we had it coming philosophy.” I sometimes think of such thought to smack of cultural elitism. I mean, to think that we as Americans must always be the first to succumb to hyper-introspection when it comes to such horrendous acts and give the actual perpetrators a free pass because we took advantage of their culture or some such thing seems just as ethnocentric as the thinking behind blowing up a coffee shop or supermarket.

And just to be sure we’re all clear, this is not a plea to absolve the U.S. of any purported wrongdoings abroad. But that thinking must be balanced against the reality that U.S. business is big money for other countries. Just look at India. For better or worse, it's a seller's market for U.S. business. Sadly, that reality often comes at the expense of American labor as well.

In terms of 9/11, I blame the U.S. government about as much as I blame Allah. They’re both involved in some tertiary way, but it ultimately comes back to 19 hijackers, their cartel and that cartel’s investors.

It’s important to be socially pragmatic in business. But it’s always easier to armchair-quarterback your way out of tragedy when watching the instant-replay.