Well, it's been a wonderful hiatus from the blogger world. I used my time off to indulge in my other nerdy obsession, Lord of the Rings workship. Saw Two Towers twice and spent the past two days poring over the extended Fellowship DVD. If you don't have the extended version buy it now. It satisfies all those purists who want to see more detail. Atrios has been faithfully blogging so check him out.

Dear Lord, wake me up from this nightmare.

"Terrorists most likely wouldn't come to the INS to register," said Sabiha Khan of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

She said the detainees were "being treated as criminals, and that really goes against American ideals of fairness, and justice and democracy".

Boycott Nestle.

The multinational coffee corporation, Nestle, is demanding a $6m (£3.7m) payment from the government of the world's poorest state, Ethiopia, as the country struggles to combat its worst famine for nearly 20 years...

The famine, brought on by the failure of rains for the third year in a row has been intensified by a collapse in the price of coffee which supports a quarter of the country's population. Nestle, the world's largest coffee processor, made $5.5bn in profits last year.

Aid agencies have reacted furiously to the company's demand.

"At the very least Nestle ought to be accepting the settlement offered by the Ethiopian government," said Sophia Tickell, a policy analyst at Oxfam. "But frankly they should be thinking about how the money could be spent on famine relief and drop the claim altogether."

Ethiopia has the lowest income per head in the world, with the average person surviving on $100 a year. More than a tenth of its children die before their first birthday.

And how weird is it when Sully almost makes sense?

Isn't it nice to know that we can always count on Ann?

I hate getting to blogger late. Oh well. Atrios has the good stuff anyway today. Krugman's plugging him so I might as well too.

Hey, NPR. What the hell is the difference between a racist remark and a racially insensitive remark?

Joe reveals more white hoods in the closet.

The political result has been a form of racial schizophrenia. The President’s father sided with Barry Goldwater and the National Review against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A few years later, the senior Bush voted for an open-housing law. When he ran for President in 1988, his supporters employed the inflammatory racial symbolism of the Willie Horton ad to win over white voters.

Leading figures in the Republican hierarchy today carry heavy racial baggage. As a Supreme Court clerk, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote memoranda supporting the notorious "separate but equal" jurisprudence of Plessy v. Ferguson. As governor of Missouri and later in the U.S. Senate, Attorney General John Ashcroft maintained ties to "white power" advocates in his home state and displayed little concern for racial equality. The President himself, and many of the conservatives who now demand the ouster of Mr. Lott, have never evinced much concern about the blatant bigotry of Jesse Helms, another ancient symbol of the bad old days.

The truly annoying thing here is that NONE OF THIS IS NEWS. Which isn't to say that it doesn't bear repeating over and over. All of us black people here in the present are shrugging our shoulders because racist politicians have always been there. And we know who all of them are. Now the rest of you are finding out.

Curiouser and curiouser.

The two Pratt and Whitney engines and propellers made by Hartzell were thoroughly examined and ``no evidence of pre-impact engine or propeller failure was found," the report said...
..Toxicological reports revealed no evidence of drug or alcohol abuse by pilot Richard Conry or the first officer, Michael Guess. The NTSB said based on radio transmissions it believes Conroy was at the controls at the time of the crash.

The report said investigators have documented the crew's activities for three days before the flight through interviews with Conry's wife and Guess's fiancee. They still are reviewing employment, pilot and medical records.

Gore revives Saturday Night Live.

First he won the popular vote; now Al Gore has won the Nielsen race as well.

NBC's Dec. 14 edition of "Saturday Night Live," hosted by the former vice president, scored the sketch show's best household ratings of the season in the top "metered" markets, and ranked as its best performance since last February (an episode hosted by Britney Spears).

I think I've reached a point where I'm not quite as bummed as I was. For one thing it clears the road for Kerry who is the only one with chops, though I'm still chaffing at his decision on Iraq which smacks of the namby-pambiness of the DLC.

Last night I went to my parents' house with a visiting friend to watch the taped SNL episode with Al Gore and ended up staying for dinner. My brother, father, friend and I were eating and chatting when my mother came downstairs. Now my mom has had the really bizarre cold that she hasn't been able to shake for a month and her medication makes her drowsy. So she was upstairs falling asleep to NPR before she stumbled downstairs.

She gives us this bewildered glassy-eyed stare and says, "Gore's not running. They just announced it."

I say, "Are you sure?'

She nods,takes a deep breath, and turns to go back upstairs. My dad calls out to her, "How do you feel?" Meaning of course physically.

She turns back, pauses, and says, "Shocked."

So Gore's out. And after SNL I was so ready to believe again.

Clinton said Sunday night: “Al Gore was the best vice president America ever had. He would have been a fine president had history taken a different course two years ago.

Despite the ugliness, I am oddly comforted by the uproar over Lott's comments. I've been walking around lately with the horrible sensation of being time-warped back to a darker era, and the fact that this story has yet to die reminds me that, yes, despite everything, there has been progress.

Reading Krugman is always comforting too.

Let's be clear that last week's remarks were in no way out of character. On the contrary, they were entirely consistent with Mr. Lott's statements on many other occasions.

The great majority of Americans don't share Mr. Lott's views. For example, he opposed declaring Martin Luther King day a holiday, telling Southern Partisan magazine that "we have not done it for a lot of other people that were more deserving." Most Americans, I think, believe that King was pretty deserving.

Now it's your turn to fire Trent Lott.

I'm still not sure about Kerry, especially now that Gore seems to be really hitting his stride. Still, he did say Lott has to go. What troubles me is this statement here:


No one has put more effort than George W. Bush into ending the image of the Republican Party as a whites-only haven. For all the disagreement that many African-Americans have with his policies, few can doubt Mr. Bush's commitment to a multiracial America.


I don't doubt that Bush has a tendency towards colorblindness. But he is still far from his goal of promoting the Republicans as "ethnic friendly."

I have mixed feelings about celebrities embracing political movements, although anytime they use their power for good is fine by me.

Wellstone Suspicions

If so many people feel this way why can't we do anything about it?

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I'm certainly not a conspiracy theorist. But to be honest, I know I wasn't alone in my initial reaction at this week's horrible and tragic news: that being my surprise that Wellstone had lived this long. Perhaps it's just my anger and frustration at losing one of the few reputable politicians in Washington, but I also felt shame. Shame for not writing in my column, months ago, that I felt that Paul Wellstone's life, more so than any other politician in Washington, was in danger. I felt that such speculation was unprofessional and would ultimately undermine my credibility. In the end, my own self-interest triumphed, and I never put my concerns into print. Neither did any other mainstream journalist, though I know of many who shared my concern.

New links I've been checking out. Plus more scary stuff on Kissinger courtesy of Smoking Joe.

In 1995, Kissinger showed up for the signing ceremony in New York that sealed Unocal's agreement to build a $2 billion, 1,000-mile pipeline from the gas fields of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The torturous negotiations leading to that aborted deal -- including Kissinger's cameo -- are fully described in Chapter 12 of "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia," by Ahmed Rashid, an authoritative journalist who now works for the Wall Street Journal. Unocal eventually withdrew from Turkmenistan, amid charges of bribery and influence-peddling. (Working for the rival bidder at the time was Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal, director of the kingdom's intelligence agency.)

What makes that old story interesting again is the role of Unocal's partner, described in the Los Angeles Times in May 1998 as "a small and mysterious Saudi company called Delta Oil Co. Ltd." At the time, Unocal and Delta were cultivating the friendly leaders of the Taliban to win approval for their pipeline.

Anyone who read Corn's excellent piece on Jerry Falwell will understand my own disgust at the debate here. Barney Frank should never be put on par with a nutcase like Falwell.

Hee hee hee.

The debate over whether George W. Bush is a moron continues to sputter. Morons are outraged at being lumped in with the U.S. president. Americans, meanwhile, are mildly amused that it has taken Canadians so long to discover the obvious.

The controversy exploded last week when Francoise Ducros, an adviser to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, was overheard at a NATO meeting in Prague saying, "What a moron," apparently in relation to Bush.

Morons say this is an outlandish slur. "We're nice people," explained one. "We don't threaten other countries or use the courts to steal elections. George W. Bush may be a dangerous lunatic. But he's no moron."

Chrétien seems to agree. "He's not a moron at all," the Prime Minister told reporters on Thursday, referring to Bush.
Still, the opposition parties are not content. The Canadian Alliance argues that if Bush discovers he is a moron, this could affect Canada-U.S. relations.

Chrétien, however, says there is nothing to worry about. Bush, he said, doesn't read Canadian newspapers. According to the International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology, most morons are "educable and do not require institutionalization but need some supervision in working at some simple job by which they can become self-sustaining members of society."