Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

NEWS UPDATE

There STILL may be news on the horizon for me. It STILL may be good.

And NO, the news is not that I am asking Ms. Twink to marry me. (She already gave her heart to Michael Stipe, anyway.) posted by Carlton at 4:48 PM

MY NEW FAVE WEBSITE

Is here. posted by Carlton at 6:16 PM

NEWS

This is simply an announcement that there may be some news with me in the next couple of weeks, which may be good. Let's hope this works out.

posted by Carlton at 5:40 PM

FROM THE MAILBAG

My anonymous correspondant has reared her ugly (?) head again, this time with a two-parter, which I hope can be viewed here. Including these, I have received about twenty-five of these cards since last December (give or take, I may have lost a couple when I moved). Anyone who knows anything about this should feel free to let me know.

And yes, I recognize that I am rewarding this person with attention, but I'm not too concerned, really.

posted by Carlton at 5:32 PM

THE HARSH TRUTH

I'm getting to this late, but Bush's comment about his reading habits confirms what we didn't want to believe.

The comment: "I glance at the headlines, just to get kind of a flavor," he told Brit Hume of Fox News last month. But, "I rarely read the stories" because "a lot of times there's opinions mixed in with news." Instead, "I get briefed by [White House Chief of Staff] Andy Card and Condi [Rice, the national security adviser] in the morning." The president concluded, "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world

The conclusion: Our president, our head of state, commander-in-chief, sole propounder of our policies and perspectives to the world, is a retard. He is an empty suit, a puppet, a tool -- and not the sharpest tool in the shed, either.

How do we let this go by? He doesn't READ THE NEWSPAPER? He only knows what his sycophants and courtiers want to tell him? It is unbelievable that I, Carlton King, read more newspapers than the President of the United States -- even if I just read the Metro on the subway every morning. And before anyone objects, do we really think that he's holed up in the White House reading anything else -- State Department position papers, CIA intelligence summaries -- if he can't make it past page A1 of the Washington Post?
posted by Carlton at 3:47 PM

ER, WELL

Or should I say ORWELL, everyone's favorite author to use as a reference in these wacky times. I think that's all well and good -- although whether all of these people making the references have actually read much George Orwell is an open question. In a classic case of brand confusion, you get the idea that a lot of people out there think that Orwell was actually a bad guy himself, rather than an incisive writer commenting on the dark forces he saw gathering. This confusion is itself a tribute to his writing, I think, since the ideas themselves ("doublethink", Big Brother, the Thought Police) have taken on a life distinct from the texts themselves. But what do I know?

I have myself only read a bit beyond the high school reading list: Animal Farm, 1984, the essay/story "Shooting an Elephant" and a book entitled Burmese Days which was interesting but not as engaging as the others. I'd be interested in getting some kind of omnibus reader of his writing and curling up by the fire with it some winter. I think that would be time well spent.

Here is a link to a blog posting which uses a relatively intelligent comparison of the "chocoration" phenomenon in 1984 and the current dismal jobs numbers ("The lowest unemployment rate since February!"). posted by Carlton at 9:53 AM

HEARTBREAK FOR GREG

But he's nowhere to be found! Greg -- please weigh in on the misfortunes of your beloved Cubs!

As far as the Sox, go -- well, the games have been good thus far!

Would anyone watch a Marlins/Yankees World Series? I guess the players have families. posted by Carlton at 8:28 AM

MORE OF THE POLITICS OF WEAPONRY

I think this speaks for itself:

I wonder if the US even noticed that at the funeral in East Baghdad, people were walking around with G3 rifles. Guess which Army uses the G3. Not the Iraqis. Not the Americans. Not the Syrians. That would leave.....Iran. Is Sadr getting help from the Iranians, or are Iranian arms being smuggled across the border. The G3 is a Heckler&Koch rifle first used by the German Army in 1959 and exported where the AK, FN/FAL or M-14/16 didn't get shipped. This, not the AK-47 and varients, are the descendents of the SG-44 Assault Rifle used at the end of WWII by the Nazis.

More here. (October 14) posted by Carlton at 4:01 PM

A DUMB THEORY ABOUT THE CURRENT DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY RACE

In the weird documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, one of the persons studied is an elderly lion tamer of the circus variety, and he answers a question: Why do lion tamers use chairs? (Whips, we understand, or think we understand.)

His answer is pretty interesting. Lions, while fierce and noble creatures, are not very bright. If a lion has one opponent to focus on (Roy Horn?), the lion can easily tear the opponent to shreds in about one second. But if you give a lion multiple things to focus on, he gets confused and becomes inactive. The four legs of a chair apparently count as separate items, even though they are all part of a single object and guided by the same hand, and even though the chair itself is really not even much of a threat.

You probably see where I am going: the big right-wing beast is currently confused by the fact that we have nine or ten constantly shifting candidates stuck up in its face, even though they are all from the same party and saying most of the same things. The beast is having a hard time focusing on any one of them to destroy, and so is strangely quiescent.

My hope is that the beast will remain confused until early into next year, when we trade the chair for a whip, in the form of a single candidate. With Al Gore, last time, it was apparent for a long time that he was going to be the candidate, and the beast attacked him relentlessly for twenty months or so. If we give it less time this go 'round, it may have less time to attack, and we will be able to whip it back into its cage. posted by Carlton at 3:12 PM

WHAT?

File this one under 'S' for "So Crazy I Can't Believe It!"

US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."

It's things like this that really make me lose heart. I mean, what do we think we are doing? What are we trying to accomplish?

The only good thing about all the bad stuff going on in Iraq is that it is bad for Bush -- worse for the Iraqis, of course, but bad for Bush all the same.

posted by Carlton at 1:45 PM

I'M UP TO MY EYEBALLS IN DEBT

Per an email exchange with Scott yesterday, I'd like to register my outrage at how much it costs to educate oneself in this country. Many, many of my friends who have advanced degrees are in the high-five and low-six figures in student loan debt, and that doesn't even begin to address the credit card debt that is almost inevitable after several years with NO INCOME to speak of. I was lucky in that I was able to keep my housing costs to a minimum during law school, which is pretty difficult in Boston -- if you consider it "lucky" to live in a room which is theoretically uninhabitable for two years.

I think our society wants to encourage people to educate themselves, right? I would like to think that includes education in fields that don't have any immediate economic rewards, like nineteenth century French literature, or medieval studies, or classics or some of the more obscure fine arts. So . . . why must it cost so much?

Of course, I did volunteer -- no one made me -- to go to a PRIVATE law school, which would be maybe five times more expensive than a state school. My current state of domicile, Massachusetts, is notable for the fact that it doesn't have a public law school and apparently doesn't want one.

And, for the record, I applied and was accepted to Ole Miss, which offered me a nice fat scholarship . . . UNTIL they realized that I had registered to vote in another state (Indiana) and was therefore no longer a resident of Mississippi and not eligible for the scholarship. Indiana, naturally, wanted nothing to do with me. So the prospect of public education was foreclosed to Carlton.

But don't we want people to pursue these degrees? Shouldn't we support higher education in a more effective way that simply allowing students to borrow themselves into debtor hell? posted by Carlton at 1:17 PM

PRURIENT INTEREST ANYONE?

This should be no surprise, but you increase your hits tremendously if you start writing about nude pictures of Valerie Plame. Or even pictures of Valerie Plame in a bathing suit. Or Valerie Plame's wedding pictures.

Many of these hits are from pentagon.mil.

Go figure. posted by Carlton at 1:02 PM

FILTHY LUCRE

For a cogent explanation of why we really need an 18-cent coin, go here. posted by Carlton at 11:47 AM

WHAT THEY REALLY WANT

Calpundit starts a very interesting discussion of what the Republican Party is really all about today by taking a look at the Texas Republican Party Platform. Comments discuss whether this is an accurate gaugue of what the national party is all about.

They are crazy. Crazy, I tell you. (Return to the gold standard?) posted by Carlton at 9:04 AM

WHERE IS GREG?

I have been paying attention to baseball lately, which is very unusual for me. This is a baseball town, unlucky in love, and the Sox have actually won a few. The game last night was quite a good one.

But my point is -- where is Greg? I want his commentary on the Cubs' success. I want it, I tell you.

posted by Carlton at 8:51 AM

TIMELINES

In case anyone in interested, here's a timeline of the events leading up to and including the Plame affair.

And you should click on this timeline/summary of Bush's tireless efforts to get to the bottom of this matter. He wants the truth! posted by Carlton at 10:17 AM

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

. . . about Valerie Plame: she's hot.

The mother of 3-year-old twins, Plame turns heads when she steps into a room, sources said.

"She has classic good looks: very shapely, long legs and blond shoulder-length hair," a source said. "She would be a star in her own Hollywood picture."

And she's also, uh, involved in some, um, important stuff.

Plame "ran intelligence operations overseas," said Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA counterterrorism operations chief.

Her specialty in the agency's nonproliferation center was biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and "recruiting agents, sending them to areas where they could access information about proliferation matters, weapons of mass destruction," Cannistraro said.

What you need to know is this: the White House is chewing it's own arm off by outing the very specialized agents it needs to accomplish its stated mission regarding weapons of mass destruction.

posted by Carlton at 10:34 PM

PLAME NAME BLAME GAME

L'Affaire Plame has succeeded in pulling me out of my general depression regarding the state of our democracy and making me genuinely angry. Here's the big one this weekend:

After playing White House stooge and outing Ambassador Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, which compromised her and her legitimate intelligence assets in foreign countries (as well as any, you know, friends or acquaintances she might have had while working undercover), journalist Robert Novak continued his voyage of insanity. Just this week, he argued on CNN that Valerie Plame couldn't have been an undercover CIA operative because -- ok get this -- on a form she had to fill out in making a contribution to the Gore campaign, she listed a suspicious-sounding (to Novak) employer: Brewster-Jennings and Associates.

Aha! cries Novak. CIA agents are supposed to list REAL companies as their employers on such forms, therefore Plame must not be undercover. Even if you accept this as a logical argument, which I can't quite bring myself to do, there are two facts which Novak didn't have on hand when he made the announcement:

1. Brewster-Jennings is a real company, and

2. It's a CIA front for covert operations.

Which means, well . . .

The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame's identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.

A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities.

And now, of course, they can run the front company's name through the database as well and identify every agent using that company as a cover in the country.

Why did Novak (and by extension, the Administration) want to reveal this information? To show that Plame gave money to AL GORE, and is therefore not "one of us". That's all. Damn the torpedoes.

How much more damage can these people do? I am convinced that the administration is thrashing about in desperation,
not caring what or whom it harms as it attempts to get at its enemies. posted by Carlton at 10:27 PM

HOWDY

Just to keep everyone updated on what a loving, accepting and supportive environment the Baptist church has created for all God's children, we have a few churches being expelled from a state organization simply for accepting gay people as members.

I have nothing further to say. Draw your own conclusions. posted by Carlton at 10:03 PM

YES, I HAVE BEEN LAX ABOUT POSTING

I'm getting back into it, however. In case you really need something funny to read (and I swear, this is the funniest thing I have ever read on the internet), go here for a discussion of bad baby names, if you haven't already seen it.

I'm quite fond of "Otis", myself. For a girl. posted by Carlton at 2:51 PM