Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Just dumping some linkage today with a little bit of commentary. We’ve got Uzbekistan, Belinda Stronach’s surprise turn, Bob Novak being a $!% again, the DOJ being partisan, the British teachers’ union being antisemitic, and a surprise tidbit on Congressional culinary bigotry.

Hundreds
are reported to be dead in Uzbekistan after police opened
fire on what are being alternately described as rioters or
protesters.
Billmon has a quick
review of the history of the US presence there.
BBC has a
timeline and
an analysis of the situation. Also,
Crooked
Timber has some more information.

In the interrrresting department,
a prominent member of
the Canadian Tories just joined the Liberal Party.

The British Association of University
Teachers has declared a boycott of two Israeli universities, declaring
Israel’s policies “colonial and racist” and offering an exemption for
any Israeli academics who are anti-Israel. There is no similar boycott of universities run by the Palestinian Authority, a government supporting terrorism and founded on the principle of genocide, nor of any under
any other government anywhere in the world. The American
Association of University Teachers has condemned the British boycott.

Bob Novak
says the filibuster is responsible for “establishing racism and segregation
in the South” and says Democrats filibustering the most extremist of Bush’s
judicial appointments are like Nazis “going to a concentration camp
and picking out which people go to the death chamber”.
All the racism and segregation in the South over the past 400 years
since black slaves were first brought over? According to Novak, it’s
all the fault of the filibuster! And that’s notwithstanding the Nazi quip.
If Molly Ivins had said that Bush reappointing judges who had been dropped
by the Senate was like sending Jews to the death chamber, that might end
her career as a pundit. I’m fairly sure that Novak will be invited back.

Interested in how the “Nuclear Option” would work? Here’s a picture.

Abuse of authority: The Justice
Department issued a statement smearing Democratic Senate Minority Leader
Harry Reid for mentioning the existence of an FBI background check
on a judicial candidate that had been delivered to Congress over
a year ago and has been common knowledge since.

Guatemalan
prosecutor assassinated

A hacker camping
trip in the Netherlands is being banned because the local mayor has
“grave fear that
the organisation of this event will endanger law and order as well
as public safety”.

The Congressman
who replaced french fries with “Freedom Fries” (or as I call them,
Arbeit Macht Fries) on the Congress cafeteria menu now thinks
it was a bad idea.

A long time ago, I recall reading in some liberal magazine — it
might have been Mother Jones or the Village Voice — about the
food-for-oil scandal in Iraq, wherein US corporations were being
allowed by the government to pay the Iraqi government
extra money under the table. Whereas payments for Iraqi oil were
supposed to be used on foods and medicines, this extra money went
straight to bolstering Saddam Hussein’s military regime and the
US (I believe under Clinton at the time) refused to do anything about it.

I barely heard another mention of it for about four or five years,
when suddenly it erupted as the UN oil-for-food scandal
with the United Nations the focus of the story rather than the Clinton
administration. The US government and its corporations were now
portrayed as blameless in the matter, and
less hawkish countries France, Germany, and Russia were blamed
for the near totality of the kickbacks.

Finally, though, facts get out:
52% of the kickbacks to Iraq were paid by US companies.
I’m sure that quite a bit of that remaining 48% also went to France,
Germany, and Russia because that’s where many of the other
big energy companies are, but the problem of bribes and kickbacks
for Iraqi oil is not entirely nor even mostly a European matter. It’s something
that all the major nations are guilty of, and blaming only the other side
is not only hypocritical but unhelpful towards solving the problem.

A Houston oil company, BayOil, is being described as a “key” “puppeteer” in the oil-for-food scandal.

Light of Reason has a lot of writing on the Newsweek affair, which is described as a “censorship campaign”. Follow the “Update” links for more postings there. See also our coverage.

A few from DC Media Girl:
First,
CNN
exec Jonathan Klien takes credit for being “the first to throw all
of our resources against the Schiavo story, and we really put that story
on the national agenda”, and
CJR slamms
Klien for CNN’s excessive coverage of the Runaway Bride.
Also, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge
admitted that the terror alert raises, which coincidentally matched
low points in Bush’s approval rating, were ordered by other Cabinet members
against his will, and
ABC’s political analysts say the Iraq war, “what is hands down
the biggest story every day in the world will get almost no coverage”
because both major parties support it.