TW3 — or — Show Me The Pony!

December 12th, 2007

That Was The Week That Was … epitomized by the snip in the first paragraph about the horse manure — I think that about says it all.

On a Sagittarian note — there must be one HELL of a pony hiding in there somewhere! And have you TV wonks seen the Sprint Christmas commercial for razer phones with the little girl who got the pony instead? Clever clever clever — makes me grin every time!

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
December 11, 2007

A new National Intelligence Estimate by all 16
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran ended its
secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, in contrast to a
2005 report that claimed with “high confidence” that such
a program was still active. Former CIA officials explained
that at the time the earlier report was written the
agency’s Iran Task Force had been reduced from nearly a
hundred analysts and officers to fewer than a dozen, and
National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, attempting to
explain why the earlier report was not “so wrong,”
reminded reporters that Iran is “very good at this
business of keeping secrets.” “It is all right,” responded
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “It is enough that
you are confessing to your mistakes.” In Iowa, Democratic
candidates debated the Iranian nuclear threat as well as
the safety of toys made in China. “My toys,” said Senator
Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), “are coming from Iowa.” At a
dinner in Des Moines, a reporter summarized the Iranian
nuclear report for Republican presidential candidate Mike
Huckabee, who hadn’t heard the news. Huckabee, a Southern
Baptist preacher, also recalled that he was still learning
about the AIDS virus in 1992, when he proposed putting
AIDS patients in quarantine. It was revealed that the CIA
destroyed at least two videotapes of harsh interrogations
of suspected Al Qaeda operatives. CIA director Michael
Hayden claimed that this was done to protect CIA employees
from possible retaliation by militants, and that
congressional oversight committees had been
notified. Representative Rush Holt, a Democratic member of
the House Intelligence Committee, recalled asking “many
times” whether such tapes existed. “They said, ‘What
tapes?’” A hundred-ton pile of horse manure mysteriously
appeared in an empty lot in Anchorage, Alaska. The Supreme
Court debated the limits of habeas corpus, and an inmate
at Guantanamo Bay was placed under observation after he
slashed his own throat with a sharpened fingernail.

A 19-year-old man recently fired from McDonald’s visited a
mall in Omaha, where he shot and killed eight people then
himself. Dr. Joseph Stothert, director of the trauma ward
that reconstructed one survivor’s arm, noted that bullets
from an assault rifle move two to three times as fast as
bullets fired from handguns. “Velocity,” he explained, “is
transmitted to the tissue as energy.” There was talk of
breeding the last known female Yangtze giant soft-shell
turtle, an 80-year-old displayed behind bulletproof glass
at a zoo in Changsha, China, with the last known male, a
100-year-old that lives in Suzhou. “The main problem,” said
a herpetologist, “is really to get a viable sperm sample
from the old male.” Methods under consideration include a
series of electric shocks and manual massage. President
George W. Bush put forth a plan developed by mortgage
lenders to freeze interest rates for some homeowners, and
watched Hootie and the Blowfish perform “California Girls”
for ex-Beach Boy Brian Wilson. A dancing blue dreidel
joined Attorney General Michael Mukasey as he helped light
a giant Chabad-Lubavitch menorah in front of the White
House, and a Georgia man who had been issued the license
plate HA8 JWZ two months ago became aware that it could be
interpreted as anti-Semitic. “I would be at a grocery
store or the Wal-Mart and people would say ‘Hate Jews?’”
he said. “I had no idea what they were talking about. You
know how people just say things that don’t make any
sense.”

A new poll showed the very rich were planning to spend an
average of $10,000 on their pets for Christmas, and eleven
slaughterhouse employees in Austin, Minnesota, were
diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating
polyneuropathy, a rare neurological disorder that they
appear to have contracted as part of their work
airblasting brain tissue from pig heads in order to get at
the meat. Six French charity workers held prisoner in
N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, went on hunger strike to
protest the charges against them, which include trying to
kidnap 103 children from Chadian villages near Darfur. The
prisoners claim that they thought the children were
orphans. United Forces for Democracy and Development, a
Chadian revolutionary group, declared war on France, and
scientists discovered a mysterious black fungus growing on
the cave paintings of Lascaux. Some thought it might be
the effect of global warming, noting that soil
temperatures around the caves have risen two degrees
centigrade since 1982. As a tribute to Washington Redskins
safety Sean Taylor, who was shot and killed last month,
the team’s defensive line took the field against the
Buffalo Bills with only ten players. After the Bills
gained 22 yards on that play, an eleventh man was brought
in, and the Redskins went on to lose 17-16. “It makes your
heart drop all the way to your feet,” said quarterback
Jason Campbell. “We wanted to come out here and win one
for Sean.”

– Sam Stark
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/WeeklyReview2007-12-11

CORRECTION
The author of last week’s Weekly was Gemma Sieff, not Gemma Seiff. The Weekly Review regrets the transposition.

“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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