WIR SIND PAPST!
"WE'RE THE POPE!" That was the idiotic German tabloid "Bild" headline just over a week ago when Ratzinger was installed as pope. In the online edition, it was right over a picture of an attractive lady in front of a car suggestively headlined "I'll show you my airbags" -- a keepsake for the ages.

Anyway, German blogger Malcolm Bunge ("eye said it before") was so overcome with joy that he started a movement of WIR SIND PAPST! pictures and photoshops:

Shave the words “WIR SIND PAPST!” on your cat, decorate Grandma, paint the house walls, show Ratze how happy we are!

The response was overwhelming. If you've read this far, you know 99% of the German you'll need.

Favorites nevertheless requiring some translation: 30 (top of linked page)--"I'm pope. And my wife is pope, too!"; 56 --"Your eminence is looking dazzling again today!" (attached to bathroom mirror); various: "Ich bin sowas vom Papst" -- "I am so very the Pope". Favorite requiring no translation: 94--The Incredible Papst from Outer Space. Very creative use of aluminum foil, I think.

The story has made it to the newsweekly SPIEGEL now -- and "Bild" is making lemonade with a new headline: "A headline becomes a cult!" (Via Jens Scholz)
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:40:00 PM -- |  

 
Well, I think it's funny

Air Force Hand Signals, via Stryker at DigitalWarFighter.

Manly men: don't let this happen to you. Worth paying a little extra, innit? Makes me wonder what really goes on in all those cramped balloon rides of his.

It puts the lotion on its skin: YIKES!! But better this than writing a "my head is exploding" screed about the revolting TIME Magazine love letter to Ann Coulter. By Mark Twang -- "Pushing the envelope of visual jingoism" -- via Democratic Veteran.

Fafblog interview with Tom DeLay:

FAFBLOG: So, how's things, Tom Delay?
TOM DELAY: Terrible, Fafnir. I'm a fugitive from the law... hunted by partisan Democrats obsessed with my capture and accused of killing my own wife!
FAFBLOG: Oh no! We have to team up an find the real culprit an clear your good name!
TOM DELAY: Well, actually I did kill my wife. But is it really that big a deal when you consider how many Democrats have killed their wives?

Brad LeVeck ("Bounded Rationality") uses emoticons to explain why the administration is sticking with Bolton no matter what:

If they are forced to on someone who has shown undying loyalty, other politicians might say to toeing the party line on Bush initiatives that are less than popular, which happens to be most of them. Then the rest of Bush's term could amount to .

Something to look forward to! "View the rest scale: 5 out of 5" (with apologies and best wishes to Gary Farber). Via Jim Henley.

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EDIT, 2/10/06: "Lotion" link fixed, previously here. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:50:00 PM -- |  

 
Department of followups
How To Execute an Innocent Man, December 11, 2004 --- The Chicago Tribune's Steve Mills reports that the Texas Senate is investigating the very strong possibility that Texas executed an innocent man in February 2004. Governor Rick Perry is pretending to -- a special committee he's set up doesn't have the power to issue subpoenas or order forensic testing. A superb Chicago Tribune investigation by Mills and Maurice Possley showed that Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted of murder based on poor arson forensics: the fire that killed his daughters was in all likelihood an accident. My take: no matter the forensics, there will always be the possibility of error, and thus of executing an innocent man. So end the death penalty. (Via Stygius, taking a brief break from his indispensable Bolton-blogging.)


Bankruptcy bill passes House, 302-126, April 15, 2005 --- Bush signed it, of course. But the TPM: Bankruptcy edition blog lives on; back in mid-April, Elizabeth Warren wrote that there are rumors of a "technical amendments bill" that would remove a couple of loopholes for the rich and for corporations. I'd trade that for some relief for seniors, veterans, and health emergency related bankruptcies.


"True Paper Trails Bills" in Maryland, March 25, 2005 --- From TrueVoteMD:

Paper Trail Bills Blocked: Study Bills Pass and Await Gov Signature

April 20, 2005: Once again Senator Paula Hollinger and Delegate Sheila Hixson thwarted citizen efforts to restore integrity to Maryland elections by refusing to bring HB107 or SB9 to a vote in their committees which would have mandated paper ballots for the paperless Diebold voting machines. Instead they passed 'study bills' SB849/HB479 which place the issue directly back into the hands of anti-paper Elections Administrator Lamone. The bills are expected to be signed by the Governor though that remains to be seen.

Well, Hixson has lost my vote -- assuming it's counted properly. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:05:00 PM -- |  

 
The Pentagon protects its own
Say what you want about the United States Army -- they seem to know how to leak an embarrassing report: on Saturday, when most of us are running errands. The April 23 Washington Post headline was "Top Army Officers Are Cleared in Abuse Cases." Staff writer Josh White reported:

An Army inspector general's report has cleared senior Army officers of wrongdoing in the abuse of military prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, government officials familiar with the findings said yesterday. [...]

The investigation essentially found no culpability on the part of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and three of his senior deputies, ruling that allegations they failed to prevent or stop abuses were "unsubstantiated." A military source said a 10-member team began the investigation in October and based its conclusions on the 10 major defense inquiries into abuse and interviews with 37 senior officials, including L. Paul Bremer, who led the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. The report has not been released.

Of those 10 major inquiries, the inspector general's was designed to be the Army's final word on the responsibility of senior leadership in relation to the abuses. It was the only investigation designed to assign blame, if any, within the Army's senior leadership.

While there's a chance the Post got the story or the report wrong, they probably didn't. Looks like Tech. Sgt. Stryker was actually optimistic a year ago with his predictions:

Officers: Buried, gone. You're never going to hear about them again unless some blogger decides to track them on a regular basis. Enlisted: One or two are made examples, the rest get off with relatively light sentences.

Veteran officer, reservist, and military legal expert Phillip Carter ("Intel Dump") said it well:

I dare say that this story sends a staggeringly bad message to the soldiers and junior leaders now on the front lines: we will hold you, your sergeants and your lieutenants responsible for their actions, but we will not hold your colonels and generals responsible for theirs. It is hard to see how that message can possibly support the "good order and discipline" which is so essential for maintaining an effective fighting force.

I'd say "indeed" or some such, but what good would that do? As Mr. Carter lays out in exacting detail, the upshot of the weekend announcement threatens to be a dereliction of the armed services' responsibility to their own legal codes of leadership responsibility.

This sends a staggeringly bad message to us civilians as well, in the United States and in the world. Remember Colin Powell after the Abu Ghraib story broke? From a May 17, 2004 State Department press release:

I also told [Arab leaders] that, in their disappointment about America right now: Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing. Watch what a nation of values and character, a nation that believes in justice, does to right this kind of wrong. Watch how a nation such as ours will not tolerate such actions.

I told them that they will see a free press and an independent Congress at work. They will see a Defense Department, led by Secretary Rumsfeld, that will launch multiple investigations to get to the facts. Above all, they will see a president -- our president, President Bush -- determined to find out where responsibility and accountability lie. And justice will be done. The world will see that we are still a nation with a moral code that defines our national character. (Applause.)

But for all such stout talk of values, character, moral code, blah, blah, blah, the first time the Pentagon was seriously challenged to display those traits, it collapsed. Yup, watch what we do: as close to nothing as we think we can get away with.

Some "bad apples" were doubtless more easily tempted or self-selected to engage in abuse. But I think that many and probably most of the soldiers who committed crimes and atrocities did so in the belief, generally well-founded, that their actions were thought necessary and worthwhile by higher ups -- their perverse pride in their actions was too evident to allow any other conclusion.

To me, the abuse that has been revealed -- from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Baghram to Gardez -- was the result of intentional confusion about and failures of interrogation policy and oversight, carried like a virus between Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, and spread throughout the military like the disease it has become. Less than a week earlier, another Washington Post story (Josh White: Soldiers' 'Wish Lists' Of Detainee Tactics Cited) reported:

Army intelligence officials in Iraq developed and circulated 'wish lists' of harsh interrogation techniques they hoped to use on detainees in August 2003, including tactics such as low-voltage electrocution, blows with phone books and using dogs and snakes -- suggestions that some soldiers believed spawned abuse and illegal interrogations.

At minimum officers like Sanchez, Pappas, and Miller should have faced disciplinary hearings, if not courts-martial. At minimum Rumsfeld should have resigned within days of the revelations, (if not within days of getting the news months earlier). Instead, with unerring instinct, the investigation seems to ensure that the one person likely to have had the least control over the three-ring circus at Abu Ghraib -- General Janet Karpinksi -- will get stuck with the lion's share of the blame.

The officers, Pentagon officials, and Donald Rumsfelds who nudged and prodded soldiers at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere into abuse and torture with hints, memos, and yo-yo "policies," deserve nothing but scorn and contempt. The investigative bodies, Donald Rumsfelds, and George Bushes who have seen fit to exonerate them deserve the same in spades.

Still, just when recent events had convinced me I had a workable political rule of thumb -- "Republican Senators are shameless, spineless hacks" -- George Voinovich (R-OH) grows a small but measurable conscience about John Bolton... and John Warner (R-VA) promises hearings on the detainee abuse issue with words that sound fairly ominous for any DoD witnesses he'll be calling:

Warner did not specifically address the findings, but he vowed to have another Armed Services Committee hearing about detainee abuses after the reviews are complete, saying that he wants "to examine the adequacy of those reviews, and to offer the opportunity to senior Department and military leadership to address the issue of accountability."*

Sadly, it's already too late for another collective reputation. It will be a long time before I look at a senior United States officer again without thinking "Abu Ghraib," "buck-passing," "coverup," and "so it was the all the enlisted soldiers' fault, huh?" I'm truly sorry about that; I've noticed and silently welcomed the occasional ".mil" visitor to this site, and I still do (not that I assume they're senior officers!). As I understand it, some of Rumsfeld et al's biggest critics are within the military's higher brass. But either they're outnumbered, they don't matter, or both. I hope that will change.


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* Interestingly, it looks like most of even the wingnuttiest blogs have chosen to lay low about this story (with one telling exception) : check out the conservatoid-free or nearly so memeorandum and technorati listings. If Warner fumbles this -- and I hope he does not -- this might signal some political embarrassment and vulnerability, maybe because of a My Lai-like "field vs. senior command" theme. But the definition of "not fumbling," as far as I'm concerned, would be a ringing, bipartisan slap in the face for Bush and Rumsfeld. Demanding the DoD fix the IG report to bring it into line with prior ones would be a start.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:02:00 AM -- |  

 
Love Mom, not Wal-Mart
Via eRobin ("fact-esque"), who's been beating the drums for this for the last couple of weeks, the "Love Mom, not Wal-Mart" Mother's Day action by the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) "Wake Up Wal-Mart" campaign.

The "discriminating against women" charge on the banner, as most people following Wal-Mart are aware, is that Wal-Mart is accused of paying men better than women for the same work, and promoting men more than it does women in its stores nationwide. As the "Wake Up" fact sheet "Wal-Mart and Women" notes, this has led to the largest class-action suit in U.S. history.

In an earlier post, eRobin pointed out that there's a holiday nearly every month, and that Wal-Mart counts on holiday sales to goose its quarterly receipts. So remember: every little bit hurts! Particularly at a time when Wal-Mart stock has been flat to negative over the past five years.

A second point, in "newsrack" observer mode, is that this seems like a case of fruitful union competition. The UFCW has been beating its head into the wall trying to organize Wal-Marts, and is now apparently re-orienting its strategy towards building consumer boycotts like this one. Meanwhile, the SEIU is part of a "Fair Share Health Care" oriented strategy in Maryland and hopefully elsewhere.* For all the talk of quarrelsome intra-union relations -- the SEIU and the AFL-CIO are at a crossroads about how to reverse declining union membership and other issues -- what may matter more is everyone pitching in with novel, imaginative strategies of their own.

If you feel like doing more than signing a pledge and not shopping somewhere you weren't going to shop at anyway, you can download some fliers and post them around your community -- maybe even at Wal-Mart! While you're at it, you can order some Mother's Day flowers via UnionPlus.

Have fun! And on Mother's Day you can tell Mom not just what you didn't do for her, but what you did do (harp music, wavy fade):

..."Relax, Mom! I didn't buy any of this at Wal-Mart! And I put up these posters all over town!"

"Oh darling, I'm so glad!"

You'll see -- she'll be so proud of you she'll give you an extra slice of apple pie. Of course, she would have anyway, but this one will be special.


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* Factoid from the" Wal-Mart on Women" fact sheet: "According to statements made by Wal-Mart, more than 45% of Wal-Mart’s employees—500,000 people—are not covered by the company’s health plan." posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:00:00 PM -- |  

 
90 years ago: Armenian genocide begins
The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) remembers:

During the night of April 23-24, 1915, Armenian political, religious, educational, and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested, deported to the interior, and mercilessly put to death. Next, the Turkish government ordered the deportation of the Armenian people to "relocation centers" - actually to the barren deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. The Armenians were driven out brutally from the length and breadth of the empire. Secrecy, surprise, deception, torture, dehumanization, rape and pillage were all a part of the process. The whole of Asia Minor was put in motion.

The greatest torment was reserved for the women and children, who were driven for months over mountains and deserts [see map], often dehumanized by being stripped naked and repeatedly preyed upon and abused. Intentionally deprived of food and water, they fell by the hundreds of thousands along the routes to the desert.

Historians estimate one and a half million people died.

No doubt this seems long ago and far away. But if you're tempted to think you don't "have a dog in this fight," one of the interesting -- in a bad way -- things about this is how one element of this genocide lives on and on.

That element is denial. The Turkish government continues to fight any characterization of what happened in 1915-16 as a genocide. Think what your opinion would be of Germany if its leadership denied the Holocaust had ever happened, or that it was genocidal in intent and execution. In my opinion, that's thankfully not the case; as a whole, German society and its state continue to acknowledge and wrestle with this dark past, rather than deny it or cover it up.

That's pretty much the opposite of what the Turkish government is doing; sadly, denying the Armenian genocide seems to be one of the unifying principles of its political leadership, no matter whether Muslim or secular parties are in power.

A recent case in point: the German Bundestag debate this week about a resolution remembering the events of 1915-1916. The statement, introduced by CDU opposition member Christoph Bergner, was phrased and debated in exceedingly mild terms. It acknowledged German wartime official neglect of the horrors,* and even avoided the words "genocide" or its German equivalent Voelkermord -- perhaps to avoid coloring the debate about Turkey's application for European Union membership. But even this met with vehement Turkish opposition. As German newsweekly SPIEGEL's Severin Weiland reported:

One day before the Bundestag debate, Turkish ambassador Mehmet Ali Irtemçelik commented again about the Armenia debate in the mass periodical "Hürriyet." He repeated the Turkish position that it was not the job of parliaments to make judgements about historical events. Should the sponsors of the Bundestag resolution "and the organizations behind it succeed in attaining their goal, it will be unavoidable that Turkey and the nearly three million Turks living here will draw the consequences of this position."

The ambassador continued that he feared that if "this resolution or one like it is adopted, despite official efforts to prevent it, the damage to [Turkish-German] relations will be of a scope and dimension that can not be foreseen at this time."

The Turkish position is that Armenians constituted a fifth column for the Allies inside the Turkish Empire, and that the entire population therefore had to be relocated from near the Russian front, with most arriving safely at their destinations in present-day Syria.

This is untrue. There were isolated anti-Turkish Armenian groups and actions, but none justifying the scale of slaughter that Turkish government and local tribesmen committed during 1915-1916. The sheer scale of the exodus gives the lie to military necessity at the Turkish northeastern front.** Whole towns like Musa Dagh -- where Armenians waged a heroic resistance immortalized by Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh -- were besieged by the Turkish military and their inhabitants massacred. Refugee columns from elsewhere in eastern and central Turkey were effectively defenseless, by design, and were attacked mercilessly by soldiers and locals alike, by design. Turkish leader Talaat Pasha launched the genocide with an unambiguous command:

Kill every Armenian woman, child, and man, without concern for anything.

Despite being on the losing side of World War I, Turkey avoided facing any consequences for what happened. One world leader took note -- Adolf Hitler. In 1939, he remarked:

Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?

What happened was genocide, and Turkey needs to face both that and its coverup to earn a place in civilized society. It appears that will not happen any time soon.


Further resources:
-- Armenian Genocide Institute-Museum, Armenia
-- the forgotten (ABC news program with survivor eyewitness accounts, and photos smuggled out of Turkey by German soldier/observer Armin Wegner)
-- Armenian Genocide Contemporary Articles: news reports in the New York Times and other papers at the time
-- Hye Etch (Armenian internet site): Armenian genocide
-- Genocide1915.info; ArmenianGenocidePosters.org
-- Selected prior posts on this site: Armenian genocide: now it's fit to print; Genocide: "Never again" or "Again: whatever"?
-- Stop the Genocide in Darfur (Armenian National Committee of America)


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* Resolution sponsor Bergner cited a message by then German chancellorTheobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to the German ambassador to Turkey: "our single goal is to keep Turkey on our side until the end of the war, regardless whether the Armenians are destroyed because of that or not."
** Maps: ANCA, genocide1915.info posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:50:00 AM -- |