playing ketchup:
1. i havent got a clue about what is happening with iraqi president - it seems like a complete mess and shitfight. if u are interested, joshmarshall gives a running dialogue, starting at http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_23.php#003009 then work your way back up the page.
2. while you are there, you might as well read what he says about chalabi. i havent worked out what is happening with ahmed baby, but it seems to be getting louder (todays times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/02/politics/02CHAL.html?hp) seems to suggest that some senior shitehouse types are in some deepdoodie. my best assumption is to assume that all news re chalabi continues to be disinformation. what it means though im not sure. without understanding any of the new detail, my best guess is to maintain the idea that iran and syria have always looked 'next', and that all this latest chalabi news should be viewed (till further notice) thru that prism.

2. the pakistan situation is still a problem - musharraf claimed the other day that the assassination attempts in dec were conducted by junior military folk in conjunction with alq, just as we get more assinations and bombs and riots - and we are hearing about spooky farooqi who was involved with pearl and 911 via ksm - and then this helpful bit:
"Without identifying Farooqi, Musharraf described him as a very intelligent person who managed to evade the dragnet spread against him."
we havent seen the end of pakistan in this ugly mess. remember it was only in march that we had all that HighValueTarget rubbish on the pak/afgh border - and about the same time when the whole dr aq khan pardoning thingy was going on... which is perhaps the most egregious of all the mistakes theyve made. and its hard to speak of pak without mentioning india, who have been largely silent throughout the last 2 years. im amazed that kashmir hasnt 'flared' again...

3/ quickly back to oz for a minute - i mentioned recently the debate about 'what is a spouse?' immediately prior to the banning of gay marriage. im beginning to wonder whether this latest terror/bail issue might be similarly pre-emptive. ten bux says within a month, muslims oops terrorists wont be allowed bail, and not long till the presumption of innocence goes the francais way. (lol - irony is still delicious.) - the legislation is probably pre-written - Patriot Act style.

4. i dont think i mentioned krugs latest article about ecopnomics - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/01/opinion/01KRUG.html - terrible title, but u get the idea. its nicely juxtaposed against certified neocunt brooks on the same day http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/01/opinion/01BROO.html - ostensibly talking about the same thing. a few things about brooks article: a) note the lie where he says we had to give huge tax cuts to the rich cos the economy was teetering - the rub of course is that the taxcuts were originally sold as giving people their money back cos the govt was so loaded. brooks is a clever guy, so u have to watch him closely
"There are four big objections to the tax cuts. The first is that you don't cut taxes in a time of war. This is the least persuasive. Some outside economists say the cuts created or preserved 1.5 million jobs. It's hard to see how the war effort would have been enhanced with those people out of work. If we had wanted to create a sense of shared sacrifice, which we should have, it would have been far better to institute an ambitious national service program."

note that switcheroo from tax cuts to saying the draft is a good idea - and then we get to the last para "After all, this election will probably hinge on Iraq anyway. The Bush folks might as well roll the dice with some attention-grabbing domestic ideas. That way if Bush is re-elected, he'll have a mandate to do something big."

its not obvious to me how a referendum on iraq leads to a domestic mandate. what is obvious is that 41.5's domestic agenda includes drafting 30mill people and abortion bans and decimating public/social benefits and christofascistracism and the abolition of the presumption of innocence and all those things that we hold dear.

5. not much news on the pix lately that ive seen. did i mention that im amazed that there havent been any leaks of any of the photos? the only one that 'leaked' was some grunt at abug proudly showing off a zionist tatoo. im not convinced.

6. ashcrofts bust up with ridge and tenet about the terra announcent was kinda funny. ashcroft is way outta line as usual - he's not even allowed to make those statements. more funnyscary praps was how quickly they all fell back into line - someone there in the shitehouse has a very big whip.

7. speaking of ashcroft, interesting that he kept his head down and gave dep.a.g. comey the mike for the padilla case. praps it was too absurd even for johnny.

8. john howard is in the us at the mo - arnie today and 43 tomorrow. and foreign minister downer had to make an emergency trip today to new guinea or some such. parliament has been a screaming match this week about abug. speaking of schedules, im starting to watch them a bit more closely, just cos im interested when people are outta town in case it mite point to a terra attack - specially since congress rushed thru that law bout replacing hundreds of senators at a time. senators/congressmen - i havent got a clue about the amchinations of am politics - so u'll have to excuse me when i get them all mixed up - but one thing occured to me - i wondered if the democrat congresspeople/senators might be in one spot at the same time, say, dc, when the cons are elsewhere, say nyc for the gop thingy? if so, the good news is that nyc is prolly the safest place to be for the gop convention (altho if u can get outta your house, best u avoid the riot police, and please wear a benign tshirt and dont carry a sign).

dc on the other hand may not be on my itinerary those days. i can see the spin already "all our defenses were focussed on protecting nyc and we left washington wide open - we couldnt have guessed"

9. ive mentioned the nyt 'most emailed' a bit recently with krugman apparently attracting a lot of attention holding both #1 and #2 - todays top story is "Antidepressant Seen as Effective in Treatment of Adolescents - A government-financed study has found that Prozac helps teenagers overcome depression far better than talk therapy." (with a vegas stripper story at number 3). now its not like me to speculate but i wonder if someones being playing funny buggers given that 2 fluff pieces 'rise to the top', praps more like scum than cream... there seems to be two goals (or at least two outcomes) - krug has been relegated, and an 'antidepressants are good' story is getting a lot of attention - which is odd on a day where gsk shares fell 4% as it was fined $150m for lying about kids killing themselves who were on these drug. a quick check of the media today and it seems easier to find the story that ssris are good for kids, than it is to find the story of the charges. pam will know much better than i. (i cant bring myself to read the article at the top of the nyt list). the ft prolly says it best re gsk "Over the past decade, two controversies have consistently circled the pharmaceuticals industry: the safety of its anti-depressant drugs and the ethics of the way it publishes research." http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1085944480083
basically gsk (and others) lied about the suicide impact in their studies. as best as i can tell, thats a pretty clear case of murder for dollars. and i dont like it a bit. and it seems that the military inoculation cocktails are equally scary, leading to familyfragging amonst other things. i never had any urges to kill others, but i have some sense for what might happen to a poor disturbed teenager when their brain screams at them to hurt themselves.

try this which i blogged separately yesterday "Scientists are routinely cherry-picking and, in some cases, altering the results of clinical studies to present the findings they want, a study by academics at Oxford University shows.
"The research, which assessed the published results of more than 100 scientific trials, also found that inconvenient findings were often not disclosed to the public. In several cases, the stated purpose of the trial was altered as it progressed so that acceptable findings, rather than inconvenient results, could be published." http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/31/1085855496939.html

10. oh yeah, and how could i forget? (praps the same way that everyone else seems to have) - theres a 911comm that is apparently going on somewhere. ya know, to try to solve/fix the greatest american disaster ever - due to report soon apparently. and btw - did anyone notice that cheney didnt testify, other than as manservant to he who struggles with conversation? (speaking of evildick - didja see the halliburton email thingy this week???) and did anyone notice the mindbending decision of hamilton and kerrey to leave? im almost certain there was a purpose behind that one - stay tuned. (its so hard to keep up with em all)

11/ oh yeah, and the plame thing - also in obscurity - despite willsons book. and the j'accuse story line. speaking of books - rememebr when clarkes book was 'explosive' just a few months ago? at 911comm testimony time. how soon we forget. how intimately the rove machine knows that.

12/ itd be remiss of me not to mention that i saw a story that the saudi escapeehostagekillerscarjackers were killled in a desert somewhere. yada fukking yada - they can escape thru 3 layers of protection to get out of a compound and carjack, and they get picked off in the desert. wait for it - one of them 'was dressed in womens clothing' according to the oz abc (bbc) - i wish theyd all fukking stop lying.

13. what happened to the scalia/cheney thingy?

so much news, so little time. i guess thats the point.