TW3

March 27th, 2007

That Was The Week That Was … increasingly conflicted; I’m mindful that Mars conjuncted the Neptune-Saturn op over the weekend and things got sharp and pointy there for a bit. Our weekly Harpers piece is a “little picture” and takes us in a specific direction — the “big picture” is as difficult, from what I can tell. Nation after nation is growling and grumbling at their neighbor … maybe it’s in the Air[es.]

There is a bit of [quite remarkable] good news to report THIS week, in that the factions in Northern Ireland came together in an historic agreement to unify leadership; and bad — Elizabeth Edwards has also found a cancerous “hot spot” in her hip bone, and White House mouthpiece Tony Snow, a colon cancer survivor, has had a mass removed from his stomach and was informed that the cancer has moved to his liver. Meanwhile, the situation with the UK sailors detained by Iran is heating up and not in a good way, since Dubby is half-cocked anyhow by his internal rebellion and Blair has a limited time left in office to kick some ass and redeem himself.

We need some Miracles … and we need ‘em now.

Jude

HARPERS WEEKLY REVIEW

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a timetable for
ending the Iraq war by a six-vote margin. The bill
mandates American withdrawal in September 2008 if the Bush
Administration meets certain benchmarks, earlier if it
does not. Several Democrats voted against the timetable
because it was not sufficiently antiwar, and Republicans
derided the inclusion of domestic provisions benefiting
spinach growers, citrus farmers, salmon fishermen, and
peanut storers. “What does throwing money at Bubba Gump,
Popeye the sailor man, and Mr. Peanut have to do with
winning a war?” asked Representative Sam Johnson of
Texas. “I will veto it,” said President George W. Bush,
“if it comes to my desk.” British troops pulled out of
Basra; two days later, rival Shiite factions began
battling over a government building that had been been
evacuated by the military. In the Green Zone, a press
conference held by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was interrupted by a
nearby rocket attack. Ban, frightened, ducked behind a
podium, and the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to
impose new sanctions on Iran. Iranian officials claimed
that American authorities had prevented President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad from attending the Council meeting by delaying
his visa, and in the Iraqi territory of the Shatt al-Arab
waterway, Iranian forces captured and detained 15 members
of the British Royal Navy. Oil reached $62 per
barrel. John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations, discussing last summer’s conflict in Lebanon,
said that he was “damned proud” of U.S. efforts to delay a
cease-fire, and White House press secretary Tony Snow
announced that he would soon undergo surgery to remove a
growth from his lower abdomen.

Al Gore returned to Capitol Hill to testify that global
warming is a planetary emergency. Rep. Ed Markey of
Massachusetts called Gore a prophet, and Rep. John Dingell
of Michigan addressed him as “Mr. President.” Joe Barton
of Texas, the leading Republican on the House Energy and
Commerce Committee, told Gore he was “totally wrong” and
that, if need be, Republican lawmakers would stay late for
an “all-out cat fight” with Democrats. Ralph Hall, also of
Texas, speculated that Gore’s attack on the energy
industry could result in war “when and if OPEC nations
abandon the U.S.A.,” and Roscoe Bartlett (R., Md.) said
that he thought it was “probably possible to be a
conservative without appearing to be an idiot.” Czech
President Vaclav Klaus said that a new “anti-greenhouse
religion” had replaced Communism as the paramount threat
to global freedom. “This ideology preaches earth and
nature, and under the slogans of their protection–
similarly to the old Marxists–wants to replace the free
and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central,
now global, planning of the whole world.” In Beijing,
weather officials were now using the word “mai,” meaning
“haze,” to denote a denser concentration of pollutants
than “wu,” which means “fog,” and Taiwan’s freeway bureau
closed 600 yards of highway in Yunlin County in
preparation for a massive migration of milkweed
butterflies. After two black Labrador retrievers sniffed
out a shipment of nearly a million black-market DVDs in
Johor, Malaysian disc pirates offered a bounty to anyone
who kills the dogs, which were on loan from the Motion
Picture Association of America. Lucky and Flo were
subsequently moved to a safe house. Celebrity chef
Wolfgang Puck announced that his restaurants would no
longer serve foie gras, but that he would continue to
slice lobsters in half without first stunning them.

Jamaican police continued to search for the murderer of
Bob Woolmer, the coach of Pakistan’s cricket team, who,
hours after Pakistan lost to Ireland in the cricket World
Cup, was strangled in his room at the Pegasus Hotel in
Kingston. In her denial of an application for divorce
filed by a battered Muslim woman, a female judge in
Frankfurt, Germany, quoted a verse of the Koran that
suggests husbands may beat unchaste wives. “It’s a
religious thing,” she explained. A study sponsored by
Kleenex facial tissues found that Americans do not let
their feelings out often enough, and a Florida man who
pleaded guilty to homicide was ordered to exhibit a
two-foot-wide picture of his victim in his home. The judge
specified that the image should be displayed prominently
and include the phrase “I’m sorry I killed you.” After it
was discovered that he was drinking the blood and eating
the flesh of their young women, a man named Black Jesus
was captured by villagers in Papua New Guinea. Four
teachers in Xhyre, Albania, were censured after their
students caught them drinking and having sex behind a
blackboard. “I saw them acting shamefully,” said
fourth-grader Elton Cuka to the Shqip daily. “Would you
call someone a teacher,” asked Xhevahir Hohxa, a father,
“who drinks raki at ten in the morning and gets drunk and
chases the schoolgirls?” Gay policemen in Manila were
ordered not to swing their hips while on duty, and to test
the integrity of ten local hospitals, journalists in
Hangzhou, China, replaced their urine samples with tea;
six of the hospitals diagnosed the reporters with urinary
tract infections. Russian peasants were refusing to
collect their pensions because the payment slip barcodes
contained Satanic symbols, and in the Mojave Desert, a
wandering photographer in search of a striptease museum
stumbled across an estimated acre of rotting food
discarded by a food bank, including cases of eggnog and
tooth whitener. “Creepy, spooky, gross, disgusting,” he
said. “Filled with animals and bugs.” Families of victims
of the World Trade Center attacks filed an affidavit that
accused New York City of using the remains of the dead to
pave roads and fill potholes.

– Miriam Markowitz
http://www.harpers.org/WeeklyReview2007-03-27.html

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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