Roundup: Pottymouth Jar Edition
- It’s the foreign policy, stupid: This great post at Crooks and Liars takes apart the simplistic and unhelpful notion that terrorists “hate us for our freedoms.” As Michael Scheuer, former station chief of the CIA’s Osama Bin Laden task force, says:
“The fundamental flaw in our thinking about Bin Laden is that ‘Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than what we do.’ Muslims are bothered by our modernity, democracy, and sexuality, but they are rarely spurred to action unless American forces encroach on their lands. It’s American foreign policy that enrages Osama and al-Qaida, not American culture and society.”
- Mitt Romney thinks we should “double Guantanamo.” I guess if he’s elected we’ll lose another half of our commitment to justice, and leave the world only a fraction of its freedom. And maybe just one little tattered shred of the Constitution, for academic purposes.
- John McCain needs to drop a couple of quarters in the pottymouth jar. One of the conservatives’ favorite talking points is how foul-mouthed liberals are (coarsening of the language!), so it’s always amusing when McCain or Dick Cheney or whichever of them it is this week starts dropping the f-bombs.
- An open letter to Gonzales, from his Harvard Class, placed as ad in the Washington Post.
- Bloggers in Italy outraged Catholic authorities by posting a BBC documentary on the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church, which was shown on the BBC last October but had never been aired in Italy. The Italian bloggers translated and subtitled the video before posting it to Google Video Italia, where it became the top-ranked offering. Italy’s Roman Catholic newspaper Newspaper Avvenire responded with a furious front-page editorial calling the documentary “slander.”
- A capuchin monkey at the Denver zoo died of bubonic plague last week, and five squirrels and a rabbit found dead on zoo grounds also tested positive for the disease, which is carried by fleas. Although none of the zoo’s other animals have shown signs of infection, the zoo is taking the precaution of treating all of its capuchin moneys with antibiotics and moving them inside. “Zoo veterinarian Dave Kenny said that the risk of plague spreading to humans was extremely low but that visitors were being urged to avoid squirrels and rabbits.”
- Via Atrios, a pernicious smear against Rachel Carson is debunked.
- A false-advertising lawsuit has been filed against Apple by users who say MacBook and MacBook Pro screens aren’t actually capable of displaying millions of colors, as Apple claims. The suit alleges that the laptops use a dithering technique to produce the illusion of more colors than they can truly display. So far Apple has declined to comment.
- Waiting for the iceboat: Thai people with HIV stuck using inferior drugs due to the usual pharmaceutical company profit-gouging.
- Johnny Is a Man and He’s Bigger Than You has a great memory piece about discovering glam rock in the 70s with the help of a very groovy aunt — with references to Bowie, Suzi Quatro, Sweet, and Nick Gilder.
- Susan Vega’s first new album in six years, Beauty & Crime, to be released July 17.
- Comics by guys (and insects) named Tom: Tom Toles gets word of a resignation at the Justice Dept. Tom Tomorrow weighs in on the “Breck Girl” meme. And Tom the Dancing Bug (okay, Reuben Bolling) has “The Spy Who Cherry-Picked Me,” and also, what the Frito Bandito is up to these days.
- Also, Bob Geiger’s Saturday cartoon roundup is a treasure of the Intertubes.
- If you didn’t click on the jump to this post, you missed the part about the kite-flying spider boxes.
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Love that Gonzales letter! And I’d love to see him respond to it on “Larry King Live” or “Meet The Press.” Except of course, that none of our public figures deign to appear for the press anymore. I wonder if he finds them “quaint” as well.