The Attorney General wants the power to strip you of your citizenship. — Nat Hentoff, Village Voice

Also:

Bush is Out of Control. Bush is out of control. Come and get me. truthout Read William Rivers Pitt’s missive. Then, if you can find it in your heart, publish the statement “Bush is out of control” somewhere, in solidarity. They’re watching. They’ll notice. But can they come for all of us?

Bush’s War on Women: From the FDA’s prayer-against-PMS to the battle over Title IX, the Bush administration’s policies and postures seem designed to erode women’s rights. Village Voice

An early test version of the next major release of Microsoft Windows has been leaked onto the Net, offering a glimpse of the company’s plans for the new software. ZDNet

A boycott of Delta Airlines is being mounted in response to the airline’s decision to test a controversial program that requires airline passengers to undergo background checks. Wired

It’s folk wisdom that the Academy favors films about mental illness and disability, yet few legends are so statistically well-founded. — Andrea Clark, AlterNet

The widening rift within the Security Council and NATO is not about Iraq

but the U.S. plan for global dominance. AlterNet

Another Poster for Peace: download any poster for free by clicking on the image.

by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest: a collection of industrial-strength, real-world, tested solutions to practical problems. This concise book offers a variety of interesting ways for power users to mine the enormous amount of information that Google has access to, and helps you have fun while doing it. You’ll learn clever and powerful methods for using the advanced search interface and the new Google API, including how to build and modify scripts that can become custom business applications based on Google. Google Hacks contains 100 tips, tricks and scripts that you can use to become instantly more effective in your research. Each hack can be read in just a few minutes, but can save hours of searching for the right answers. O’Reilly

In this reprise of an April, 2000 post from FmH I just stumbled upon while looking back for something else, a prescient Mikhail Gorbachev Warns The US Of Its Dangerous “Superiority Complex” ‘and said that, if the 21st century became known as the second “American Century”, the rest of the world would have suffered. Speaking in New York, the former Soviet President criticised Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, for saying that there were exceptional circumstances in which the US had the right to use military force unilaterally, even if other countries objected.’ Times of London [via Common Dreams]

‘It will be soon, it will be swift and it will be short’.

War will commence against Iraq in 10 days, reports The Sun.

Citing a top United States intelligence source, the newspaper said a crucial United Nations Security Council vote authorizing military force is expected a week from Wednesday, and U.S. airstrikes will be launched hours later.

“The moment we know we have the nine votes needed, we will go for it. The military won’t hang around after that,” The Sun quotes the source as saying. WorldNetDaily

But what do you make of this, from the same source? Jews Saved Saddam From Abortion:

An Iraqi Jewish family took in Saddam Hussein’s mother in 1937 and talked her out of an abortion, according to Israel’s leading expert on Iraq and the large traditional Jewish community that once prospered there.

“The story is true,” says Amatzia Baram. “I’ve pretty much confirmed all of the details, but the family doesn’t like to talk about it. There was this fear that people would blame the Jews for Saddam. WorldNetDaily

When Suffering Becomes an Abstraction:

Jeff Gates, at Life Outtacontext, meditates on the faith-based moral instigations that flow from Joe Klein’s troubling observation that

George W. Bush lives at the intersection of faith and
inexperience. This is not a reassuring address, especially
in a time of trouble.

To paraphrase the sense Gates makes of Klein, Bush is a concrete thinker whose faith, perhaps truly humble when faced with suffering and distress firsthand, becomes messianic and dogmatic “when suffering becomes an abstraction —a budget item or deposing a despot— Bush loses his sensitivity.” With such rigidity, Bush has no uncertainty about his assumed righteousness and is unswayed by dissent.

For reasons that don’t seem necessary, however, to the flow of his essay, Gates chooses to lump Andrew Sullivan in with Bush’s genre of moral certainty. Sullivan, though — yes — equally morally blind, seems not really to be of a piece with Dubya. I’m reminded of what I wrote below, on a seemingly different topic — that there are multiple species of self-deception, some more insidious, and some more conscious, than others. Since his emergence as the Republican candidate, I have felt that Bush’s intellectual limitations — the same ones Gates broods over in this essay — make him a puppet of handlers who are more adept, more manipulative, and have a variety of other agendas. It has always seemed laughable that pundits discuss the messages in Bush’s speeches as if they were his own ideas rather than those of a committee of speechwriters vetted by the likes of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Similarly, all the motives ascribed to the administration for the war —

• that it is for moral rectitude,
• for self-defense,
• to punish and chasten terrorists,
• to vanquish the infidels,
• to strike a blow against the Axis,
• for the greater glory of God,
• for American hegemony,
• to solve the Middle East problem,
• to end dependence on foreign oil,
• to line the pockets of the administration’s ruling class cronies,
• to prevent US humiliation,
• to liberate an oppressed people,
• to end history,
• as a proving ground for bigger and better things to come,
• to win reelection 
• for Daddy; or to prove that you’re as good or better than him,
• because you can

— are operative… somewhere inside the Beltway among those impelling us toward Baghdad. One aspect, Jeff, of the cognitively rigid Bush’s blinding by his certainties may be that all these motives run rampant with no policy helmsman arbitrating and cohering them. That may be why this war, and the world of hurt into which it will plunge us, the rest of the world, and our children, is inexorable.