Where’s the peanut butter?!

The South Carolina Democratic Debate from the University of South Carolina
was last week. C-SPAN has the href="http://www.c-span.org/videoarchives.asp?Cat=Current_Event&Code=Vote_2004">archive
available online. Here are the candidates official web sites:

• Fmr. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL)
• Fmr. Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT)
• Sen. John Edwards (D-NC)
• Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
• Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-MO)
• Sen. Bob Graham (D-FLA) - (campaign doesn’t seem to have gotten an official site up yet)
• Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
• Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT)
• Rev. Al Sharpton

To briefly editorialize - I don’t know which criteria Joe Lieberman
satisfies that qualify him as a candidate for the Democratic bid at all. Why
are people supporting him? The href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_2004">wikipedia
has an entry watching the timeline and the href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/">Center for Public Integrity are
running another 2004 election site called the href="http://www.bop2004.org/">Buying of the President 2004.

Robert Fisk asked recently href="http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395412">Is
there some element in the US military that wants to take out
journalists? Well we can all sleep happily knowing that no, there’s no
plan to take out journalists - somebody just happened to show such poor
judgment as to href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=564&e=20&u=/nm/iraq_journalists_dc">use
binoculars on the top of the Palestine Hotel. Hopefully someone has
warned Audubon. In other news, it seems
Sherman Alexie thinks href="http://www.thestranger.com/2003-04-17/city5.html">vegetarianism
won’t win the war. I sadly agree.

-5.62, -6.46

Christopher
Lydon writes:

“The [media] crisis has everything to do with the evidence that more than
half of the citizenry came to believe that Saddam Hussein was the author
of the World Trade Center attack.

If half of New York believed that that Martha Stewart was the Mets’
shortstop, The Times would not only set us straight, it would inquire how
the misconception arose–even ask if their pages had contributed to it.”

MichaelMoore.com has a list of href="http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/">works cited for
Fahrenheit 9/11 - awesome ( href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/">c/o jwz).

It seems the Iraqis are href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030418/161/3u6nu.html">demonstrating
their href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&u=/nm/20030418/ts_nm/iraq_dc_1601">unhappiness
with the American occupation in Iraq. Were they ever very happy with our
“liberation”? Maybe not as much as the href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ucru/20030417/cm_ucru/how_we_lost_the_iraq_war">images
in the media might lead us to think.

Maybe they’re frustrated that US troops href="http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2571384">stood
by while the Iraqi National Museum was looted (probably by professionals
who href="http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/5648587.htm">used
glass cutters and left the replicas) and while the href="http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=397350">National
Library and Archives burned. The three members of the White House
Cultural Property Advisory Committee who href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=536&e=3&cid=536&u=/ap/20030417/ap_on_go_pr_wh/iraq_museum_protest">resigned
in protest seem to think there’s a legitimate beef here.

Hopefully we can learn from the mistakes in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict
and href="http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=278241">not
let Iraq become our Palestine.

href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=68&e=9&u=/nyt/irking_n_r_a___bush_supports_ban_on_assault_weapons">The
NRA is frustrated with President Bush for his support for the ban on
assault weapons. This is clearly an effort to construct public perception of
Bush as a moderate Republican against the backdrop of one of the most
conservative, least open administrations ever. Meanwhile, Howard Dean also
supports upholding the assault weapon ban but his advocacy of href="http://www.deanforamerica.com/dean.cfm?section=about&page=issues&drill=gun">sensible
gun laws could be just as appealing to some who had been Bush
supporters. Let’s hope so.

“Every one of those other [Democratic candidates] — they ameliorate, they
move around . . . I’m sick of it. Let me tell you something about Howard
Dean. This isn’t some laid-down, namby-pamby liberal. This mother is tough.”

- Rob Reiner, Dr. No and the Yes
Men
1 June 2003 New York Times Magazine

The href="http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=386906">General
Assembly appears to have the authority to clearly identify invasions
like the US is involved in as illegal href="http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/landmark/pdf/ares377e.pdf">if the Security
Council can’t reach consensus. This won’t stop the war(s) and it’s
pretty unlikely that anybody from the US will be tried or punished for these
was crimes (we ignored the ICJ’s ruling regarding href="http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/icases/inus/inusframe.htm">Nicaragua in
the 80’s).

Also on the failure of to reach Security Council consensus in March: France
threatened to withold their vote (qualifying as a veto but technically
different and not doing anything the United States hasn’t done dozens of
times) but is this why the resolution was abandoned or is it because of
coverage from the London Observer that we had plans to bug the sitting
members of the Security Council to get “an edge in obtaining results
favourable to US goals”?

Of course it doesn’t really matter but href="http://middleeastreference.org.uk/index.html">Glen Rangwala, a
lecturer in politics from Newnham and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge, has a
page titled Claims and
evaluations of Iraq’s proscribed weapons that details numerous primary
sources and the weak justification for what’s already happened.