licentious radio

Sunday, January 19, 2003
[10:14:17 PM]

For the record, people, remember that there is no statute of limitations for desertion from the military during time of war, but the Vietnam war was never declared to be a "time of war", so Deserter-in-Chief is not actually, necessarily subject to the death penalty.

Then again, there's a Korean war deserter who can't come home yet because the statute of limitations hasn't quite run out.

Licentious minds want to know: is running away from the Air National Guard's border patrol enough to get you the death penalty? Seems unlikely. What *is* the statute of limitations for Vietnam war desertions? What does Colin Powell think about rich white men using influence to get out of the draft, and then deserting when they become subject to drug testing?

[2:22:52 PM]
It's about oil [independent.co.uk].

Fisk points again to the smoking gun: Rummy, Cheney, and the gang signed letters arguing the US should grab the oil. "We should establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests [sic] in the Gulf -- and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power". Our vital interest is access to oil.

[2:08:06 PM]
What if you had family in Iraq?

It's not at all a question of whether Saddam has bad weapons. The Soviet Union had plenty of bad weapons, *and* the means to deliver them. Iraq made war on Iran and Kuwait, but that's history. The fantasy of Iraq giving bad weapons to Al Qaeda relies on deterrence not being effective. Deterrence is known to work. How long would Saddam live if Al Qaeda used Iraqi-provided chemical or biological weapons? Not very long.

Even so, if there is no immediate apocalyptic danger, is it worth the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis to make regime change? And if we do, aren't we likely to make things worse? Saddam -- seeing the end -- could go ahead and turn whatever bad stuff he has over to Al Qaeda.

At which point we've killed large numbers of Iraqis, created huge suffering and instability, and created the nightmarish fantasy that Cheney claims to be afraid of.

No. Chemical weapons for use on a large scale require infrastructure that Al Qaeda doesn't have. If you want terrorism on a small scale, a little sarin gas might be fine, but a single Bush-Master is known to be effective, as well. There's plenty of effective terrorism left using tactics more like flying planes into skyscrapers.

None of the fear-mongering adds up to a justification for invasion and the slaughter of innocents.

The people in countries with less war-mongering in the media have no problem seeing that. Plenty of people here see it, too, and more are getting the idea every day.

[1:50:08 PM]
Tom Ridge's most public contribution was the pathetic color scheme for terror threat. Mercifully, it has faded away, but we're left with Ridge. He's a shoe-in for appointment as Fatherland Security Minister.

"That idiot?" you might ask. But a White House source says Ridge and Bush are "like-minded". There's not much argument with that, though it seems like an insult to Ridge.

[1:36:51 PM]
The Great Demancipator [Boston Globe].

[1:32:36 PM]
New York Times does it again -- disses the peace marches. They mention "tens of thousands" and "thousands" in DC and "swarms" in SF, as well as "thousands" in Portland.

Sources other than Lynette Clemetson of the New York Times quoted DC police officers refusing to estimate the crowd size, but acknowledging it was among the largest since the Vietnam war.

Police in SF estimated 50,000 on Saturday. licentious radio calls on police to stop giving wrongly low estimates. "BART counted 30,000 early on at its Embarcadero Station alone," according to a reporter for a local paper. Did 60% of the crowd arrive by Bart before noon? No. Not nearly. Maybe that BART estimate wasn't based on actual data, but BART really does have pretty good information about their traffic. I hope reporters follow up on that.

For the march in December, there were four or five of us who took the CalTrain substitute bus from Palo Alto. This time there were hundreds.

I can't imagine anyone who was at both marches would say yesterday's was less than twice the size of December's. If someone claimed there were five times as many people there, I wouldn't argue against it.

What I don't get is why this is left as an open question. Somebody should make a few passes taking aerial photographs, and then do the analysis. I suppose Corporate Media is too cheap and too lazy -- not to mention that they seem to prefer estimates that could make you think the crowd was twenty or thirty thousand, rather than estimates that would let you know that there were some number of hundreds of thousands -- maybe two, maybe five. The police are uninterested. Maybe the organizers would rather be free to embellish. I think organizers would be better off providing a count that would be difficult to question.

[12:19:06 PM]
We all have family in Iraq.