Nobody's Business

Banking on Taxpayers

Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter needs a little support for his lower jaw:

Have you seen the application the banks had to fill out to receive their slice of the multi-billion-dollar TARP pie? It runs just two pages, with a mere 20 questions. Two pages. Twenty questions. If you wanted to open an account with FedEx to send the application back to the Treasury, you'd have to fill out a three-page, 74-question form. Even when you're giving money to the bank, not the other way around, a checking-account application at Citibank (with minimum required deposit) is six pages long and has 46 questions. The California food-stamps application is five pages long and comprises 38 questions. The Treasury must have some misplaced trust in bankers and other such miscreants, for, unlike on the California food-stamps application, there is no place on the tarp form where someone has to certify "under penalty of perjury" that all the information provided on the application is "true, correct and complete."

Whole thing here.

Ukraine Bans All Porn

Amazing.

Porn is now illegal in the Ukraine, unless used for medicinal purposes. On June 11, [the Ukrainian parliament] made possession of pornography — not extreme porn, but any porn — a criminal offence. It will be punishable by a fine of 850 hryvnia [about 95 dollars] or up to three years in prison. ... [T]his is a significant shift in the law, which previously only concerned itself with those who produced or distributed pornography.

I bet that there are millions of Ukrainians who'll soon discover they have a (cough) sexual dysfunction that qualifies for them for a "medicinal purposes" exemption.

Justice Demands It

Massachusetts is going to demand a $25 fee from people who dare to contest a traffic ticket in court. Yes, even if the judge clears the defendant of any wrongdoing.

The move is expected to yield the state $5 million in revenue in the current fiscal year.

Well, why stop there? Perhaps anyone charged with a property crime should fork over $500 for the right to a hearing. Think of how much money that could add to the state's coffers.

And people charged with capital murder ought to pay a couple of grand, at least, if they're uppity enough to insist on their day in court.

I had no idea the government could recast justice as a pay-to-play enterprise. How creative. There's a reason to fly the flag tomorrow.

The Essence of the Jobsworth

An anglicism I love for its descriptive scorn is jobsworth, a noun that connotes a low-ranking bureaucrat or other officious busybody who derives a peevish pleasure from enforcing petty rules (and sometimes from dreaming up new ones).

Here, courtesy of the Daily Mail and Overlawyered, is a pretty good example of what jobsworths do all day.

It may seem obvious that things left out in the rain will get wet. Not obvious enough, though, for authorities in central London, who have responded to the danger of damp public benches by sticking notices on them, warning: 'Caution: seats may become wet.'

The paper has a photo gallery of many other jobsworthy signs. Not sure whether it's funny or depressing. See for yourself.

Les Otten and the Sincerest Form of Thievery

Most politicians need to be in office before they can turn their attention to robbing other people. Clearly, Maine gubernatorial candidate Les Otten is in a much more talented category of thieves.

God's People

Just doing God's work.

Ethiopian police have shot and killed two people who were helping to build a Christian church at a site which is also claimed by Muslims, officials say. Violence broke out when police tried to stop the construction in Dessie, 250km (155 miles) north-east of Addis Ababa. The police say they were responding to an attack on them by the Christians, but campaign groups say the police ambushed the workers.

The population of Dessie is about two-thirds Christian, one-third Muslim. Information Minister Bereket Simon told reporters that the Christians had "stormed the place" and tried to continue building the church "unlawfully". "Unfortunately three lives have been claimed. Two of them were killed by bullets, one of them fell off a cliff," he said. Several other people were also hurt in the violence.

You Must Remember This, a Kiss is Just a Kiss

Another photo ban in the U.K., with a twist: this time it's not the taking of the photo that is decreed verboten, it is the publication of the shot.

10 people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) saying that the suggestion of a kiss between a priest and a nun [in an ad for Italian ice cream] was offensive. They said it was demeaning to people who followed a "religious vocation". The ASA announced on Wednesday that the complaints had been upheld and banned the advert from future use.

"The ad played on the theme of giving into temptation but stopped short of showing the nun and priest kissing," the ASA said. "The ad stated 'kiss temptation' and the two were portrayed in a seductive pose, as if they were about to kiss passionately. "We considered that the portrayal of the priest and nun in a sexualised manner — and the implication that they were considering whether or not to give in to temptation — was likely to cause serious offence to some readers."

Euro Lawmakers Undo Ban on Ugly Fruit

After 20 years of insisting that fruit must adhere to shapes mandated by law, EU bureaucrats have graciously decided that Mother Nature may take her own course again:

Curly cucumbers, crooked carrots and mottled mushrooms — odd-looking fruit and vegetables are making a comeback as 20-year-old EU rules are lifted. Marketing standards for 26 types of produce have been scrapped, in a drive to cut EU bureaucracy. ...

"July 1 marks the return to our shelves of the curved cucumber and the knobbly carrot," said Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. "We don't need to regulate this sort of thing at EU level. It is far better to leave it to market operators."

The depth of Ms. Fischer Boel's conviction is unknown, however, considering that

The [shape] standards will remain in place for 10 of the most popular types.

A Teenager's Superior Judgment

It's official, even though we knew this already: Safford (AZ) Middle School assistant principal Kerry Wilson, administrative assistant Helen Romero, and school nurse Peggy Schwallier are not reasonable people. They will now have to live with the hard-to-expunge infamy that comes with strip-searching a 13-year-old female student on the (unfounded) suspicion that she possessed a few ibuprofen pills, a mild and legal painkiller. I wrote about it here.

The search would have been a sexual assault under almost any other imaginable circumstances; as Popehat noted at the time, "If this had happened anywhere but school, they'd be all be in jail."

In a rare 8-1 Supreme Court decision, the school authorities have finally been slapped upside the head for violating Savana Redding's rights. Justice John Paul Stevens opined

It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude.

It does not, and it clearly is. In fact, a 13-year-old middle schooler knew it was wrong. We owe Savana Redding a debt of gratitude for seeing this through till the end. With students like her, the future of liberty appears to be in good hands. There's a fine video interview with Savana here. I like the slight smile of her mom. I'd be proud of her too. In fact, I am.

Killing Dogs: How is the SPCA Different?

The Agitator's Radley Balko offers a link to an extra-disturbing animal-cruelty story:

A Columbus firefighter admits that he took his two dogs to the basement, tied them up and blasted them with a rifle so he and a girlfriend could vacation without paying to board the animals. "He said chunks of concrete were flying everywhere," Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Heather Robinson said. ... According to Robinson, [firefighter David P.] Santuomo laid down a plastic sheet in his basement and tied the dogs to a pipe, partially suspending their bodies. He shot them at least 11 times. At first, he said the dogs were suffering after drinking antifreeze, but a necropsy proved that he lied.

Neighbors had actually offered to take care of the dogs in Santuomo's absence. The guy evidently preferred killing the animals.

Yes, I'm upset about this too. But then, I was upset back when something not so dissimilar happened in my neck of the woods, and when that dog killer turned out to be the boss of the Hancock County (Maine) SPCA in Trenton. The guy is still sitting pretty today. Not only were he and his organization not held accountable; to this day they solicit donations for their [cough] "no-kill" shelter, and are celebrated for their [double-cough] selfless work by citizens who have no idea what occurs behind the facility's closed doors.

I'm not saying there are no differences between SPCA executive director Doug Radziewicz and the loathsome shell of a human being that is David Santuomo. I'm saying the differences between Radziewicz killing dogs and Santuomo killing dogs are more meager than you'd assume.

Let's look at how the cases are similar.
• An animal, just "taking up space," becomes an inconvenience — check.
• Good people step forward offering to take care of it, but the offer is rebuffed — check.
• Instead, the animal ends up being deliberately killed — check.
• The person in charge of the dog lies about what happened — check.

I trust that the SPCA's execution of Baxter, the Saint Bernard, was not as relentlessly brutal as the killing of the firefighter's animals. Then again, Baxter is still quite dead, regardless of the method used by his killer.

In some ways, I find SPCA deaths harder to take, because we'd all like to suppose that the organization is run by non-sociopaths who would do everything in their power to save the creatures in their charge.

Sanford's "Family Values": Schtupfing Foreign Lover

South Carolina governor Mark Sanford disappeared for six days, unexpectedly abandoning the ship of state he is paid to steer. Now he's back with a bombshell: Unbeknownst to his family (wife Jenny and four sons) and his aides, he's been in Argentina, where he has cheated on his wife with a "dear, dear friend." (Whether the friend is a gay prostitute and a meth fiend remains to be seen, I suppose.)

Father's Day must have been a hoot at the Sanford mansion this past Sunday.

I honestly wouldn't care whom Mr. Sanford beds, except for the small fact that he is another one of those ramrod-straight 'family values' Republicans who like to stick their repressed cocks where they don't belong while crafting legislation to "protect" marriage from tidal waves of adultery and gayness. See here, and here.

And while the governor is keen on keeping American jobs from being taken by foreigners, he seems to make a special exception for blowjobs. Come now — was there really no female (or male, for that matter) in the greater Columbia area who might have provided relief for Mr. Sanford's throbbing stimulus package, and at a fraction of the cost of a plane ticket to Buenos Aires? America First, governor!

By the way, the news of Sanford's South-American love fest comes 24 hours after fellow Republican John Ensign apologized to his Congressional colleagues for his own extramarital affair and was welcomed back into the GOP fold with hugs and applause.

Do you remember that both Ensign and Sanford voted to impeach president Clinton for his tryst with Monica Lewinksy? Funny as hell, that. Just last year, Sanford recalled his own high-minded efforts at the time:

I voted to impeach, because I think that, you know, moral legitimacy is one of the precursors to a legitimate [political] legitimacy.

The holier-than-thou-ness is a pattern with him:

Sanford was one of a handful of Congressmen who said they could not support Rep. Bob Livingston for Speaker after his admission of an extramarital affair in late 1998.

Ensign and Sanford have both been mentioned as future presidential candidates. Presumably, they'll take take their head-of-state cues from Don Juan, or possibly Silvio Berlusconi.

The Perils of Peer Pressure

Laugh-out-loud-funny shtick from Paul Krassner, whom I wrote about yesterday:

I smoke marijuana every day. Listen, I was seventy-six in April, and the reason for my relative longevity is that I never take any legal drugs — except a few months ago. I was at a party, and I took an aspirin. I didn't even have a headache. I just gave in to peer pressure.

A Kinder, Gentler Focus on the Family?

Props to newish Focus on the Family president and CEO Jim Daly for not being a horrible, bigoted ass like his predecessor. He sounds like a guy who even libertarians and liberals might like to break bread with.

I would like to sit down with those who may be pro choice when they say, "Let's make abortion rare." I obviously am pro life and would like to see that practice ended because I think in our humanity we can find better solutions to bringing children into the world. From what I understand, there are far more parents looking for infants than there are abortions. It would be nice to create a national database of parents waiting for kids.

[We need to find] a kinder, gentler way to approach this topic and see if we can make abortion rare without, as pro-lifers, abandoning our desire to see it eliminated altogether. That would be a great starting point. The very fact that those who support abortion would say, "We would like to make it rare," says something about the fact that they must not feel good about it. So let's start the dialogue.

So far, just words. But encouraging ones, and on a topic that the Christian right has always cast as a simple binary choice between 'good' and 'evil.'

Cinderella's Bare Ass, or Pluto Pissing on Mickey?

Choices, choices.

Boing Boing reports that Yippie co-founder and publisher of the Realist, Paul Krassner, has a new book coming out entitled Who's To Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today.

Then, over at Amazon, I noticed something peculiar. There's quite a difference between what Boing Boing presents as the cover, and what Amazon says it looks like. If you compare the version at left to the one on the right, various naughty bits — including the featureless pelvic area of a nude Tinker Bell, Cinderella's equally smooth nether regions, and what looks to be a little girl in flagrante delicto with a unicorn — have been shifted so as to become unobjectionable. On the other hand, we now see Pluto impishly relieving himself on a likeness of Mickey Mouse.

It's all pretty funny, given the topic of the book. I can almost picture the graphic designer moving around the layers in Photoshop, muttering under his or her breath ("Come on, think — what's worse, a unicorn fucking, or Pluto's golden shower?"), trying to position the images strategically so as to give the least offense. Obviously, such decisions entail getting into the heads of a good cross-section of the book-buying public. I hope that reading Krassner's manuscript helped!

Or did the shift go the other way? Which version is the real cover?

So I called the publisher, City Lights in San Francisco. Spokeswoman Stacey Lewis explained that the different covers were intended as a "comment on censorship." When I prodded a bit, asking if the change had been made to make the book more shocking, or less — if it was done as some kind of deliberate gesture to  booksellers and -buyers alike — she said she wasn't sure, and gave me Krassner's e-mail address. He got back to me just now, and seems about as baffled as I am.

Thanks for your email...and for pointing out the cover contrast...this is the first I've seen of it...the original cover is the one on the right, with red stripes across, the one Amazon shows...the one on the left is a surprise to me, the one on BoingBoing which has tan stripes and Arianna Huffington's [name] beneath mine...now you can't see Pluto pissing on Mickey Mouse's image, but you can see Cinderella's bare buttocks...I've forwarded your email to the publisher.

A subsequent message from Krassner said, simply:

Thanks for catching that foolish double standard.

I'm not implying there's something terribly important going on here — I'm mostly just amused by the morphing of the cover (again, considering what the book is about). No big deal, I suppose. I've asked Krassner to keep me posted, and assuming he does, I'll let you know what he finds out.

I'd say that in terms of courting possible controversy, the book is off to a fine start. And just maybe, that was the point from the get-go?

P.S.: The drawing used on the book cover — depicting a "memorial orgy" in Disneyland — was commissioned by Krassner for the Realist in 1966, on the occasion of Walt Disney's death. The artist was Wally Wood, of Mad magazine fame. It's a classic of sorts, as you can read here and here. You can admire the artwork up close here — probably not safe for work though. It's available as an 18''x24'' poster for $38 including shipping, directly from Krassner's website.

Cops Prize Anonymity, Arrest Women Asking Questions

In democratic countries, people have a right to — as our Bill of Rights puts it beautifully — "peaceably to assemble." Because police officers are our in our service and we are their bosses, we also have the right to ask them questions, some of which they must answer by law; no cop may withhold his name and badge number from a citizen interested in learning them.

Here's footage of how those rights are working out in practice in the U.K. — footage that also shows what happens when you train a camera on a police officer. It ain't pretty.

The video is one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it jobs that may evolve into a cultural touchstone of sorts, a watershed moment — along with the video of a bystander at another recent demonstration who actually died after being needlessly attacked by his uniformed protectors.

England seems to turn a little scarier every week. Good to see some people (such as the Kingsnorth protesters) refuse to stand idly by while their country descends into soft totalitarianism.

Warning, Water!

Also, watch out — sand ahead! And careful, sun may cause redness!

[via Failblog]

Liz? Lizzie? Liddy? Beth? Betty? Betsy?

The next guy who calls me Roger or Rodge can get a free nut-ectomy.

I borrowed the lovely sentiment (if not the proposed procedure) from Elizabeth Becton, an office manager and scheduler who works for Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash). Ms. Becton went ballistic when a hapless constituent addressed her as "Liz" in a friendly e-mail, and she continued to badger her mortified victim despite receiving a half-dozen written apologies. Politico has the whole e-mail exchange. Becton sounds like a real barrel of laughs.

Elected officials with a Sun King complex, that's nothing new. It is sort of annoying, though, when even the hired help demands the same worshipful treatment.

Taser PSA

Note to police officers: Tasering a man more than 20 times, killing him, kinda defeats the purpose of using your "non-lethal" weapon. You follow me?

P.S.: Even twice may be too much.

Anti-Stab Knife Debuts in U.K.

The point is that it's pointless (in more ways than one, perhaps). You can still cut someone's throat with this wondrous new invention, but you can't cause much damage by stabbing a person with it (except hard in the eye socket, maybe? Just a helpful suggestion). A steel steal at around $70 per knife.

Industrial designer John Cornock

...was inspired by a documentary in which doctors advocated banning traditional knives.

Something tells me Cornock and said doctors aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.

Meanwhile, according to civil-libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh's blog, the Obama administration moves to ban 80 percent of folding knives, though the exact percentage is disputed in the comments. Knives with thumb nubs ("one-handed-opening" knives) are targeted, and even Leatherman tools appear headed for illegality. Hard to believe — I'd like to see other reputable sources weigh in on the scope and meaning of the proposal. If there's substantial truth to the Volokh post, the plan is boneheaded beyond belief, not least because it will fuel the fear and outrage among millions of NRA types who'd already convinced themselves that Obama is preparing to take their guns away. Their "I told you so" moment is here.

Food Nannies Gone Wild

MeMe Roth, an anti-obesity crusader, is pretty happy with the healthy lunches served in PS7, her kids' public school in Manhattan. For all other foodstuffs offered at the school, though — cake on birthdays, a lollipop as a reward for a task well done — she demands that the school first obtain parent-signed permission slips.

On reflection, "happy" may be the wrong adjective to describe Ms. Roth's general disposition toward food. Maybe "Scrooge-like" and "miserable" would be more fitting. "Smug" might work too.

Consider:

The police were called to a YMCA in 2007 when she absconded with the sprinkles and syrups on a table where members were being served ice cream.

More recently, when asked to discuss her concerns at her children's school, she attended the meeting only to reportedly end up cursing, and throwing candy.

The PS7 staff has now politely suggested that maybe the Roth children — that is, the Roth parents — would be happier if they picked another school. Makes sense, no? This is what seriously dissatisfied customers do, after all: They take their business elsewhere, in a fine display that they understand the power of markets and the power of voting with one's feet.

Ms. Roth won't hear of it, however, complaining that she is being "pushed out." Evidently, she is hellbent on continuing to make the school administrators' lives, and those of the multitude of parents who think she's off her rocker, as difficult as possible.

It would be one thing if Roth were just your run-of-the-mill self-obsessed shrew (MeMe is an interesting name, don't you think?) — an unpleasant but inconsequential crank. But as a self-anointed obesity expert ("Let's finally recognize obesity as child abuse," she intones on her website), she does frequently get the media's ear.

If her name rings a bell, perhaps you've seen her on TV railing against the size of Santa Claus's belly. Or you may have caught her when she called the Girl Scouts perfidious "cookie pushers," or when she had a few choice words for a bride-to-be trying to lose a few pounds for her wedding day ("a fraud" she called the young woman, among other things).

Ms. Roth ought to have every right to decide what her kids eat. She may instruct them accordingly. Other people's kids, not so much.

As she further enhances her résumé with petty demands, obnoxious ultimatums, and noisome hissy fits, we're sure to hear from her again — my guess is, as a top pick in a future Obama or Bloomberg administration.

Which Country Calls Protesters "Low-Level Terrorists"?

(a) North Korea
(b) Iran
(c) China
(d) United States

Here's the correct answer:

Among the multiple-choice questions included in the [U.S. Defense Department's] Level 1 Antiterrorism Awareness training course — an annual training requirement for all DOD personnel that is fulfilled through Web-based instruction — the department asks the following: "Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorist activity?" To answer correctly, the examinee must select "protests."

[hat tip: the Agitator]

Police With Military Weapons? Mass. Halts the Insanity.

Good for Massachusetts: governor Deval Patrick has ordered the suspension of a program that

...distributes high-powered US military weapons to police departments across the state, amid growing concerns with the scale of guns handed out and the lack of oversight involved. Terrel Harris, spokesman for the department [of Public Safety], said yesterday that the program will remain suspended until the completion of a thorough review looking at the way it is run, the weapons involved, and the communities that get them.

[A Boston] Globe review has found that even the most quiet of hamlets have received high-powered weaponry, including M-16 fully automatic machine guns and M-14 semiautomatic rifles. In West Springfield, police received two military issue M-79 grenade launchers. [emphasis mine, RvB] In most cases, the departments obtained the weaponry without any type of community or legislative input.

The Long Arm of the Law: Grabbing What's in the Till

You remember, of course, the still-unfolding U.K. expenses scandal, the orgy of greed and fraud that involves fully half of that country's parliamentarians.

Now auditors have found essentially the same pattern at the storied crimefighters' headquarters of Scotland Yard, where several hundred "elite detectives" are revealed to have grossly abused their government-issued American Express cards.

Sources have told the Observer that some detectives had fallen into the habit of withdrawing hundreds of pounds at a time from cashpoints. Other officers appear to have filled in blank receipts from restaurants to account for cash payments.

One source said: "Some people bought three-piece suits while in the far east and claimed that they needed them for work. But it would not have taken much nous [common sense, RvB] to realise that it was 45˚C in the shade, and not the weather for a waistcoat."

Early reports say that almost one in ten detectives has been found to have engaged in expense fraud.

The news comes just days after it emerged that the families of at least a dozen deceased cops have illegally continued to claim pensions after the officers' respective deaths.

Polish Papists Protest Prancing Pop Personage!

Madonna has slowly morphed into the most irrelevant and hard-to-watch of pop tarts, so I actually felt a fleeting sympathy for the Polish Catholics who want to stop her from performing in Warsaw, their capital. Emphasis on fleeting.

Mediawatchwatch explains what the "problem" is:

Not only is her show "anti-Christian", but it is also scheduled for August 15th — and we all know what day that is, don't we? No? Why it's the Feast of the Assumption, you heathen swine! That's the day that Jesus' mummy died and got scooped up to heaven, body and soul. Clearly you can't have a rival "Madonna" prancing about in stage in fishnets while pious Catholics are busy celebrating this most holy of miracles.

That's not entirely correct — August 15 is the Assumption of Mary, the day that the Holy Virgin, "having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory," to hear the Church tell it. Or, as it shall heneceforth be known, the Day the Madonnas Duked It Out.

Comical Misnomer of the Month

I was fascinated to learn that the pro-book-burning group leading the charge against this dangerous young-adult novel calls itself the "Christian Civil Liberties Union." 'Cause nothing says civil liberties like organizin' a good bookburnin'!

More here, including an amusing video.

[thanks, Anita!]

To (Not) Catch a Thief

In London, a thief who defrauded a camera retailer of $74,000 worth of equipment decided to try his luck again with the same store. Soon after his first successful attempt, he dispatched a taxi to pick up another batch of cameras that he'd just "purchased" from the store, again using falsified paperwork. Dumb move, right? All the police needed to do to catch the swindler (and probably recoup the pricey gear) was tail the taxi, or have an undercover officer take the place of the driver.

The cops' reply? "Not interested, thanks."

Presumably, British police officers are too busy paying homage to Franz Kafka, mostly by refusing to disclose the exact locations throughout the country where picture-taking is prohibited.

"Nice People Take Drugs"

That slogan, part of a campaign by a drug policy reform group, has been belatedly banned from British buses. 'Cause we wouldn't want anyone to think that drug users can be anything but dope fiends and immoral morons, right?

Weekend Wildlife Blogging

One of the eagles I wrote about yesterday seemed ready for his closeup at dusk this evening, so I got out the camera and the long lens. Meanwhile, my seven-year-old was more interested in Cattey, her new pet caterpillar. Cattey briefly had a boyfriend, Eric, but my daughter lost him — somewhere between the couch cushions, she thinks.

What Americans Don't Get About Muslim Immigration in Europe

I have a few issues with Andrew Murphy's little riff on Geert Wilders. Wilders, of course, is the right-wing Dutch parliamentarian who's been clamoring for immigration reform. He's (in)famous internationally for making Fitna, a short movie in which he lets extremist Muslims hang themselves with their own words and deeds.

Murphy, guest-blogging at Harry's Place (a U.K. outfit that's long been on my blogroll), can't complete his short essay without throwing in an oft-repeated canard about Wilders, so let's start there:

Wilders refers to the Koran as a 'fascist' book. ... If Wilders truly believes the Koran is a fascist book, then why has he not demanded 'Mein Kampf' or any of the other fascist tracts that circulate in book stores be thrown into the book burning pyre as well?

Murphy is either misinformed or happy to perpetuate the falsehood. Selling copies of Mein Kampf is already illegal in the Netherlands (and in some other European countries, such as Austria). It has been for as long as I've been alive.

More to the point, though I'm hardly a big Wilders fan, the man is actually being entirely consistent, and merely expecting consistency of others. I make amends right here and now for having previously gotten this wrong, as it's really simple enough: Wilders' point is that because Mein Kampf is considered so dangerous that the state has declared the sale of the book illegal, therefore the same limitation ought to be placed on the hate-filled tract that is the Koran. He's not in fact pushing for either book to be banned.

The Dutch are seriously wedded to the idea of gelijke monnikken gelijke kappen (which can be roughly translated as 'equal treatment,' though the closer expression in English is probably 'What's good for the goose is good for the gander'). Wilders is furthering this ur-Dutch principle. Nothing wrong with that — on the contrary. (For the record, I think banning books is by definition silly and wrong, and I will always fight for the unfettered availability of the Koran, Mein Kampf, the Bible, and even anything written by Robert James Waller.)

But let's return to Murphy. He fails to show why Wilders' fears are allegedly overblown. The politician warns of Western culture being under assault from unenlightened religionists whose beliefs are incompatible with the values that the West stands for. Why worry, Murphy writes a bit cavalierly, when

Muslims only make up about 4.5% of the entire population of Europe. Wilders doesn't take into consideration that eventually, many of these first generation immigrants will have assimilated into society and intermarried with Brits, Germans, French, etc. — and their children and grandchildren will be very much European.

For Murphy's statistic to be of any real-world consequence, you'd have to suppose that the spread of Muslims is geographically more or less even; that you can take a sample of a thousand people anywhere on the European continent and come up with 45 Muslims, give or take. But the reality for millions of Europeans is that they live in neighborhoods and cities where Muslims are now either a majority, or very nearly so. The population of the Schildersbuurt in the Hague, for instance, now consists of 90.6 percent immigrants (no typo), most of them Muslims. Citywide, the percentage is 46.2 — and growing. The nearby city of Rotterdam is on the verge of having a majority-immigrant population, with Muslims again making up by far the biggest demographic slice. If current trends continue, it'll be Amsterdam's turn in about a dozen years (this seems irreversible, considering that already, more than 50 percent of Amsterdam's children have a "non-Western background."

A reasonable question is "So what?" Yes, there is something enormously appealing about the idea of a polyglot, harmonious, multicultural society where hookah bars appear next to Japanese restaurants, and where the Turkish rug-store owner can be seen shooting the breeze with the burly tattooed white guy next door who's working on his motorbike. I savor such scenes. Parts of Amsterdam are like that. I am as susceptible as the next person to pangs of positivity when I read that my erstwhile city is home to the largest number of nationalities in the world (177, compared to New York's 150).

But you don't have to be a bigot (as many of Wilders' followers are) to see the problems outweighing the benefits.

Just step back for a moment and focus on your own town or neighborhood. Mentally remove half the current population and substitute lots of women in hijabs and burkas, and men who've grown up in a culture where honor killings are widely tolerated and Sharia justice is preferred. Now imagine that virtually none of the women are gainfully employed, and that only about 38 percent of the 40-to-64-year-olds have jobs (that's the official number for the Moroccan population in the Netherlands). The others — 62 percent — depend on welfare.

When you picture your now-transformed living environment, sprinkle in a lot of Muslim teenagers (school dropout rate roughly 60 percent) who, in the Netherlands, are disproportionately responsible for petty street crime. Almost 70 percent of under-24 Moroccan males in Amsterdam have been detained at least once, and many have an actual criminal record. Then imagine that there are in fact many more young street hooligans than the official crime statistics let on. Moroccan youth, especially, are widely observed to act out with great disrespect — calling Dutch girls hos, publicly hurling insults at white people and black Dutch citizens from Surinam for no apparent reason, openly jeering at gays, and so on.

How would you like to live in that social environment? I imagine Andrew Murphy's rainbow-colored opinions would be quite different if he were forced to live in districts like The Hague's Schildersbuurt, or Amsterdam's Slotervaart, or Utrecht's Kanaleneiland.

(Incidentally, the dropout rate alone makes an instant mockery of Murphy's belief that the way out of the problems is the "education, education, education" of immigrants. And considering that the crime wavelets I just described are mostly the work of second- and third-generation Moroccan troublemakers, I wonder if Murphy would like to reassess his somewhat blinkered view of "assimilation" leading inevitably to an identity that's "very much European.")

The stats from which I'm quoting, by the way, do not come from Mr. Wilders or some organization of Aryan weasels. They were revealed last month in the broadsheet NRC Handelsblad, Holland's newspaper of record, and the closest thing that Dutch journalism has to a New York Times or a Washington Post.

So I ask again: post-sea-change, how do you like your new city, or your new neighborhood?

The Muslim-immigrant surge in Europe's major cities is poorly understood by American journalists, who tend to paint the people alarmed by it as Chicken Littles, Islamophobes, or worse. To put matters in perspective, this, I think, is the proper analogy: Take Chicago or New York or Denver, and subject those cities to the thought experiment above. If you can honestly say that you would not mind living in a city in your own country where foreign fundies with a welfare addiction and a crime problem have begun to outnumber the original population, you're a more tolerant person than I am.

Are you?

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P.S. Americans have their own unique take on the immigration issue, and are generally less likely to find the arrival of any large group of immigrants, including Muslims, problematic. That's laudable — being a first-generation immigrant myself, I appreciate and share the sentiment. I'm generally pro-immigration (and always pro-assimilation).

But there are reasons why U.S. Muslims do not pose anywhere near the dilemma to American society that European Muslims pose across the Atlantic. Ayaan Hirsi Ali talked knowledgeably about the differences when I interviewed her for Reason two years ago. Excerpt:

For one thing, America doesn’t really have a welfare system. Mohammed Bouyeri had all day long to plot the murder of Theo van Gogh. American Muslims have to get a job. What pushes people who come to America to assimilate is that it's expected of them. And people are not mollycoddled by the government.

There's a lot of white guilt in America, but it's directed toward black Americans and native Indians, not toward Muslims and other immigrants. People come from China, Vietnam, and all kinds of Muslim countries. To the average American, they're all fellow immigrants. The white guilt in Germany and Holland and the U.K. is very different. It has to do with colonialism. It has to do with Dutch emigrants having spread apartheid in South Africa. It has to do with the Holocaust. So the mind-set toward immigrants in Europe is far more complex than here. Europeans are more reticent about saying no to immigrants.

And by and large, Muslim immigrants in Europe do not come with the intention to assimilate. They come with the intention to work, earn some money, and go back. That’s how the first wave of immigrants in the Netherlands was perceived: They would just come to work and then they’d go away. The newer generations that have followed are coming not so much to work and more to reap the benefits of the welfare state. Again, assimilation is not really on their minds.

Also, in order to get official status here in the U.S., you have to have an employer, so it's the employable who are coming. The Arabs who live here came as businessmen, and a lot of them come from wealthy backgrounds. There are also large communities of Indian and Pakistani Muslims, who tend to be very liberal. Compare that to the Turks in Germany, who mostly come from the poor villages of Anatolia. Or compare it to the Moroccans in the Netherlands, who are for the most part Berbers with a similar socio-economic background. It’s a completely different set of people.

And finally, there's the matter of borders. In America, Muslim immigrants typically pass through an airport, which means the Americans have a better way of controlling who comes in — a far cry from Europe's open borders. Forty years ago, when Europe began talking about lifting borders between countries to facilitate the free traffic of goods and labor, they weren't thinking about waves of immigrants. They thought of Europe as a place people left. America, on the other hand, has always been an immigration nation, with border controls that have been in place for a long time.

Eaglefeathers, Horsefeathers

A pair of bald eagles have taken up residence in a tree about 200 yards from my home. Here's hoping they don't fly over my property and accidentally shed one of these. I could be fined $100,000.

Cops and Obedience

Boston Globe employees have rejected contract concessions demanded by the paper's owner, the New York Times Company, a move that may turn out to be semi-suicidal. Over at the Daily Beast, Alex S. Jones uses this analogy:

[T]he situation was like mouthing off to a cop. It may offer momentary satisfaction, but you pay a severe price.

I don't think Jones is wrong about the propensity of police officers to punish anything less than complete subservience on the part of the public. It's a bit chilling to see it so matter-of-factly and breezily laid out though, as if it's an accepted fact of life, 2+2=4.

Like the Talking Heads, we may ask ourselves, How did we get here?

Quote of the Day: Atheism as Sex

If atheism and religion were sex, atheism would be like masturbation — you know you're there by yourself, but hell, you’re having a good time. Religion would be like masturbating with a happy face drawn on your hand — it's still only you, but you like pretending that you're not alone.

[via Atheist Revolution]

Man of God

Another one the Lord's earthly representatives speaks:

On a recent webcast of his daily radio talk show, Wiley Drake, former second vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention, called [the recent] murder of [abortion doctor George] Tiller "an answer to prayer." Then during an interview with Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio, Drake said he was praying the same type of "imprecatory prayer" against the president of the United States.

It put me in mind of this rather catchy and seriously well-crafted song: Eliza Gilkyson's Man of God. The YouTube video isn't the latest in audiovisual clarity, but the track is also available from iTunes. Check it out.

Lying About Religion (Especially That One)

President Obama's recent speech in Egypt, on Islam, was ignorant at best, mendacious at worst, says Luis Granados. Granados' conclusion:

Obama's hubris is that he thinks he can use religion. He can't — it's too big. Religion is using him. He is an enabler, like the alcoholic's spouse who buys the booze and makes the excuses.

To me, that goes for the way the president "plays" Christianity, as much as for how he says he sees Islam. Obama held forth almost breathlessly on the great religion of peace, intoning: "As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed."

Granados, it must be said, is the better student of history. Rejecting the blinders that pandering politicians routinely don, he performs a righteous fisking:

Algebra? The word is Arabic, but the concepts aren't; they were developed by Babylonians, Indians, Egyptians, and Greeks long before Muhammad. The magnetic compass? That was developed by the Chinese, not the Muslims; it was Chinese fleets who visited Arabia and Africa in the early 15th century, not vice versa. Printing? Not only did Muslims not invent the printing press, they absolutely forbade its use for nearly three centuries until 1727, and then shut down the first operating press after a few years because the ideas it was pumping out threatened the supremacy of the God experts. Printing in the Muslim world did not resume until 1783, by which point the West had Newton's laws of physics, the steam engine, joint stock companies, etc. Understanding how disease spreads? As late as the 19th century, a Sufi brotherhood in Morocco attacked the authorities for ordering the evacuation of towns in an attempt to curb the spread of a plague, because the spread of disease should be left to the decision of God. ...

[Also,] Obama fantasized that "In ancient times and in our times, Muslim communities have been at the forefront of innovation and education." What planet is he referring to? Since the Enlightenment freed Europe and America from the religious constraints on the growth of knowledge, what innovations have we seen from the Muslim world? The short answer is: "none."

I attended a speech myself this past weekend, one in which a nice white liberal man quoted the same passage from the Koran that Obama reverently cited in Cairo:

Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.

Pretty, isn't it? In the audience, I observed a young Muslim lady with a headscarf doing a little "Yay for us!" fistpump. I'm sure she's totally lovely, and I don't begrudge her the respect paid to her favorite book by the speaker. But in the interest of honesty and academic rigor, let's look at the full Koranic verse, and thereby at the context of that nicey-nice one-liner, shall we? Granados does just that:

[T]hat is not what the Koran says. It does not say "kills an innocent," it says "slays a soul, unless it be for manslaughter or for mischief in the land." It then defines "mischief in the land" as opposing the messenger Muhammad, who had come "with clear signs" of divine favor. The next verse prescribes the punishment for those who make "mischief in the land" by opposing Muhammad: "they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides."

Sleights of hand (excuse me) don't get much more shameless than that. Or do they?

Perhaps Obama's dishonesty on the topic of religion reached its apex when he lauded the "golden rule" supposedly imposed by all faiths, including Islam: Treat other people as you would like to be treated.

For real? Does he think anything resembling a golden rule is what drives Christian attempts to crush marriage equality and modern-day witchcraft alike? Does he believe the golden rule has taken root among the Christian-folk who kill little children and pro-choice doctors for not adhering to biblical pronouncements?

More to the point, does the president truly assume that 91-million-plus Muslim terrorists and terrorist sympathizers could find anything about a golden rule in their holy book if they tried? How about the much more numerous peaceful Muslims, even?

I can't think of a faith — certainly no mainstream one — that shits all over this so-called golden rule with as much faux-pious, bloodthirsty hatred as that which the Koran habitually inspires. Granados is probably with me on that:

[The golden] rule does lie at the heart of humanism, because humans have figured out over time that it makes sense. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and even Obama's busy imagination could not find a single verse of the Koran to twist into support for it. The word Islam means "submission," and the rule that lies at its heart is that men and women must abjectly submit to the word of God as related by Muhammad, which often requires them to do unto others in a manner they would not at all wish to be done unto themselves.

Tiananmen Square: It Was 20 Years Ago Today

I did appreciate learning more about the four different photographers who captured 'tank man' on that historic day — the still-anonymous Chinese gentleman who stepped in front of the tanks that were on their way to wreak more carnage among the Tiananmen Square demonstrators.

Still, something also bothered me about their accounts, and about the rather reverent way the Times writes about the photojournalists in question. Commenter Jack Rice puts his finger on it, though he's harsher than I would've been:

Typical of today's journalists, too shiftless and incompetent to do the job of tracking down the nominal subject of the story — the real hero. So the story is no longer about the tank man and his heroism but about the self-annointed heroes who covered him. Congratulations, boys, yet another paean to your favorite subjects — yourselves. Hey, it’s the maxim for today's media types — Why just report the news when you can star in it?

It might very well be impossible to find out what happened to tank man. But even a fruitless quest might make for a fascinating, ominous story about Chinese secrecy and the unrepentant dictatorship that's still in place twenty years on.

Anyway, while mentioning the Tiananmen Square slaughter has consistently been off-limits in China — the event is effectively whitewashed from the country's recent history — people in other parts of the world can and do commemorate the bloodbath. Here's a photo of a massive pro-democracy vigil in Hong Kong, of all places, courtesy of the BBC website:

Big Bad Bible Ban Another Manufactured Hoax

It began with this fairly unremarkable news:

Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday. The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there.

Then Bob Livingston, former Louisiana Representative and Republican family man cum serial adulterer, saw the perfect opportunity to make religious hay out of the situation. Here's an action alert Livingston sent out by e-mail:

The Obama Administration's military spokesman just acknowledged seizing and burning the privately owned Bibles of American soldiers serving in Afghanistan [emphasis mine]. When Al-Jazeera television showed a VIDEO of our troops with Christian Bibles, Muslim extremists and American atheists complained. In response, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Jennifer Willis told Reuters reporters, "I can now confirm that the Bibles shown on Al Jazeera's clip were, in fact, collected by the chaplains and later destroyed."

Her careful words "later" and "now" indicate the Bibles were destroyed this month, not last year, because of the recently publicized video. Why is the Obama Administration now forcing atheistic silence on our troops, in violation of their private rights?

Pedantic P.S.: "Sign petition and WE WILL FAX all 435 members of Congress," Livingston urges. Maybe he could also pass the hat around for fourth-grade tuition and learn a few basics about the U.S. government. Between the House and the Senate, Congress has 535 members.

You Don't Say

One critic's assessment of mainstream porn:

It's nasty, misogynistic, anatomically improbable, hideously normative of deviance ..., narrow-minded, narratively impoverished and unspeakably dull.

That you, Andrea Dworkin? Or you, James Dobson?

Actually, it's Michael Bywater in the New Humanist, the magazine for freethinkers.

Grown Men and Their Diminutives

Having visited online photography forums for years, I've seen scores of Hasselblad aficionados refer to their cameras as "Hassies."

Other photographers swear by their "Olys" or their "Bronnies" (Olympus and Bronica cameras).

Hey, whatever floats their boaties. They can call their gear "babycakes" or "snookums" for all I care, and spoon it nightly.

Just thought I'd point out that to some of us with a well-developed gag reflex, this inclination is unfortunate, roughly on a par with a grown man referring to his ride as his Bimmer or, in at least one case, his Bimmy (I needed ear bleach after that one).

Anyway, don't mind me. To each his binkie, blankie, or Hassie.

Half of U.K. Parliament to Be Kicked Out

What do you call 325 cheating, money-grubbing politicians whose careers are doomed?

A good start.

At least half of the House of Commons' 646 MPs will be swept away at the general election, as voters take revenge on the political classes for the expenses scandal. The departure of 325 members of parliament as a result of forced resignations, retirement and defeat at the polls would represent the biggest clear-out of parliament since 1945. As many as 30 will be forced to resign directly because of the expenses scandal, while whips expect more than 200 to quit because they are unable to cope with continued public anger. Up to 90 MPs will be voted out in the election.

Some are not ready to take their lumps, and are now appealing to the populace with a half-vomitous, half-comical kind of emotional blackmail.

Conservative legislator Nadine Dorries claimed there could be potential suicides among members of Parliament. "I think people are seriously beginning to crack," she told BBC Radio. "There is real serious concern that this has gotten to the point now which is almost unbearable for any human being to deal with."

The scandal's fallout is also beginning to spread to the European Parliament.

Good times.

Hell Freezes Over

The New York Times Magazine, in a piece about gay marriage, says something complimentary about libertarians (which might be a first since John Tierney ruled the paper's op-ed page). I've been looking at the skies, scanning for flying hogs.

This is the final paragraph from Matt Bai's article:

When historians look back on the culture clashes of the 1990s, perhaps the closest thing they will find to a political trendsetter is an oddball like Jesse Ventura, who embodied the enlightened libertarianism that would ultimately enable many Americans to accept a once unthinkable idea. History will record that neither then nor later was there a national party he could call his own.

Freedom Highway

This happened in January, in Missouri.

A neo-Nazi group has joined the state's "Adopt-A-Highway" volunteer litter pickup program, taking advantage of a free speech court fight won four years ago by the Ku Klux Klan. The Springfield unit of the National Socialist Movement has committed to cleaning up trash along a half-mile section of Highway 160 near the Springfield city limits.

Neither lawmakers nor bureaucrats fought to keep the brownshirts from adopting a stretch of highway and putting up their promotional sign. Which is exactly as it should be. People with ugly little minds have as much right to speak them — and to pick up fast-food wrappers — as anybody else.

But the other day, one legislator did manage to get the last laugh. Most excellent pwnage:

Rep. Sara Lampe, D-Springfield, got an amendment added to a transportation bill to rename a portion of West Bypass from Farm Road 142 to West Sunshine [the part serviced by the White Power folks] the "Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway." Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Selma, Ala., Civil Rights march in 1965.

Awesome.

In lieu of sending a Halmark card, I'm dedicating this YouTube video to Lampe. It features the cool illustrations of Anthony DiFatta, set to my favorite song by the North Mississippi Allstars — Freedom Highway.



[miter tip: Popehat]

Weekend Kid Blogging

When it's still too chilly to go swimming outside, building an impromptu little water park in the kitchen sink turns out to be no impediment to true happiness.

Chinese Humpty Dumpty Really Was Pushed

File under 'Helping Hand.'

Chen Fuchao, a man heavily in debt, had been contemplating suicide on a bridge in southern China for hours when a passer-by came up, shook his hand — and pushed him off the ledge. Chen fell 26 feet (8 meters) onto a partially inflated emergency air cushion laid out by authorities and survived, suffering spine and elbow injuries, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.

The passer-by, 66-year-old Lai Jiansheng, had been fed up with what he called Chen's "selfish activity," Xinhua said. Traffic around the Haizhu bridge in the city of Guangzhou had been backed up for five hours and police had cordoned off the area. "I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest," Lai was quoted as saying.

Funniest Story You'll Read All Day

Trust me.

Atheists "Not Fully Human," Catholic Childfuckers A-OK

It's been quite a month for the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom.

First, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor thoughtfully unveiled his take on agnostics and atheists: they're "not fully human," His Eminence intoned. Watch:

To make sure the message would be crystal clear, he then clarified, a few days later, that "lack of belief" is truly "the greatest of evils."

Ah. Right. Greater, one surmises, than starving a one-year-old boy to death for not saying "amen" after his meal; greater also than priests teaming up with fascist dictators and preaching mayhem and bloodshed, causing the violent deaths of untold thousands; greater, certainly, than members of the clergy forcibly ramming their blessed cocks up the rectums of underage altar boys, with centuries-long impunity no less.

May was off to a fine start.

Then, a couple of days ago, a long-awaited report on child abuse in the Irish Catholic Church came out, nine years in the making.

A nine-year inquiry into child abuse by Ireland's Catholic religious orders showed a system that shielded child-molesters from justice and trapped generations of Ireland's poorest children in misery from the 1930s to the 1990s. Irish President Mary McAleese on Thursday denounced what she called an "atrocious betrayal of love" by Catholic clergy toward these children.

And what did the Church say in response? This: Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the spiritual leader of more than four million Catholics in England and Wales, commended the bravery of Irish members of the clergy who eventually acknowledged their guilt.

Not making that up. Here's the London Times' religion correspondent on the matter:

Archbishop Nichols praised the courage of those priests in the wake of the Irish child abuse scandal who had owned up to the abuse — even though none actually have. Instead, and quite incredibly, they managed to secure protection from the Government against their identities actually being known — even the dead ones. [emphasis added]

The Catholic Church, steeped though it is in Latin, still does not know how and when to properly utter the words mea maxima culpa. Its morality is as irreparably tattered as its credibility.

Doubt it? See also this.

Water Torture

First Christopher Hitchens volunteered to get waterboarded, last year. Then radio shock jock Mancow Muller did the same thing the other day — although unlike Hitchens, Muller sought to prove that waterboarding was surely no big deal.

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture. They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I really thought, I'm going to laugh this off."

Like Hitchens, he lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

Make of that what you will.

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UPDATE, May 29: The fucker faked it, kind of.

Heather Brooke: Journalism's Erin Brockovich

England is in the throes of a full-fledged constitutional crisis — a very enjoyable and long-overdue spectacle. The woman at the heart of it all is a London-based, American-born and -educated freelance journalist named Heather Brooke.

I frequently flog the media in this space, but I've been filled with pride over the recent accomplishments of Ms. Brooke, and you should be too.

Fearless and principled, Heather Brooke has been pivotal in bringing down an as-yet-unknown number of corrupt politicians. Some members of Britain's Parliament have already been sacked, others will follow, and even the ministers in Gordon Brown's cabinet (including the boss himself) have every reason to fear for their political future. The execrable Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, for one, is rumored to be toast — in small part due to her husband, whom she employs as her taxpayer-funded personal assistant. He was found to have bought pay-per-view movies, including pornographic ones, for which the couple then billed the government. (That's the least of it though; read on.)

Brooke is an expert at using Freedom-of-Information techniques she learned while being schooled and employed in Washington State. The U.K. Guardian gave her her due late last week; the Seattle Post Intelligencer follows suit with a nice profile today.

Her tale is the stuff of movies. All the Prime Minister's Women might not be such a great title (unless it refers to the sort of flick that Jacqui Smith's hubby would probably enjoy), but you know what I mean.

The scandal that Heather Brooke helped uncover with years of persistent digging, and despite threats and bullying from parliamentarians and their now-disgraced Speaker, is both outrageous and delicious. It involves politicians padding their expense accounts in various creative ways, often to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds per person per year.

Where to start? The London Times has a lineup of the 10 most jawdropping personal purchases that MPs expensed to taxpayers. The list includes a glitter toilet seat, a sack of horse manure, and the cleaning of a moat — an honest-to-God fucking moat! — on the country estate of one of the parliamentarians.

Such expenses are trifling but telling; they lay bare the uninhibited arrogance and sense of entitlement displayed by scores of once-high-flying British politicians.

The pols made some real money, however, with a practice now known as flipping (in the U.K., the word, as it relates to real estate, has acquired a meaning different from the U.S. definition.) By frequently changing the "primary residence" designation of their two or three homes (Sarah Palin-style, you might say), the MPs were able to bilk taxpayers for, essentially, phantom housing expenses. Jacqui Smith is among the bumptious overlords guilty of such fraudulence: she has been staying at her sister's house a few nights a week so as to be able to claim her family home as a write-off.

There are worse examples, however. Some enterprising parliamentarians, who owned their homes free and clear, set up a trust to which they transferred the property; then they rented it from the trust and billed the government for the rent.

Now it's all come crashing down. The scandal is the talk of the town everywhere in Britain. For the first time in more than 300 years, the Speaker of the House was forced out (he'd normally receive automatic peerage — that is, he'd be "elevated" to the House of Lords — but given the popular anger, that's an unlikely outcome). The normally staid Guardian senses there is "revolution in the air," and welcomes it. The paper calls for "a radical shakeup of our constitution," which presumably would start with something slightly more current and relevant than the 800-year-old Magna Carta.

Amazingly, the U.K. has never actually had a written constitution; the country has relied instead on a combination of hodge-podge laws and settled jusrisprudence (rather a lot of it keeping real power and oversight out of the hands of the populace). Writes the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland:

[Tony] Blair promised Labour would be "servants of the people." But now we know they never truly saw themselves that way. If they did, they would have had to undertake the revolutionary move our ancestors shied away from more than 300 years ago — and which has eluded us ever since. It is the shift from our current system — which rests on the belief that the crown-in-parliament is sovereign — to the simpler notion that it is the people who are sovereign in their own land.

Plenty of other nations have made that move, most famously the US, whose founding document asserts that power starts with "We the people". But we never did. Instead, in Britain, power still belongs at the top — with the crown and the palace of Westminster — unless our rulers deign to "devolve" some of it outward. That's why MPs could claim hundreds of thousands of pounds of our money: on some gut level, they believed it belonged to them.

It's going to be an interesting ride.

Heather Brooke has filed 600 Freedom on Information requests over the past four years, and thankfully it doesn't look like she's anywhere close to done. There's no telling where her sleuthing will take her. But I hope she or some tenacious colleagues will eventually probe into the questionable expenses that the British royal family sees fit to charge to taxpayers, and into the gaping conflicts of interest that have followed the Windsors for generations, only to be swept under the rug time after tiresome time.

Then Brooke and her fellow muckrakers could perhaps move on to laying bare the equally blood-boiling entitlement culture that is the European Parliament.

I doubt they'll run out of worthy targets anytime soon. I send them my very best, and my gratitude.

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P.S.: I should clarify that Heather Brooke ultimately did not break the story. The Daily Telegraph did, after it bought a terabyte's worth of government expense-sheet data from a whistleblower. However, Brooke was the journalist who placed the issue on the front burner by suing the government over its refusal to release the expense reports. Last year, the British High Court sided with her in the high-profile case, and the controversial information was scheduled to be officially released next month. The Telegraph's revelations stole some of Brooke's thunder, but they don't diminish her fine feats of journalism for a second.

P.P.S.: Over the past 14 or 15 months, Nobody's Business has been following the developments from a distance (see here, here, and here). As most bloggers do, I've piggy-backed on solid in-the-field reporting by newshounds who keep pushing and prodding, often for measly pay. I don't acknowledge this nearly enough, and gladly make amends here. They really do deserve our collective appreciation. A special shout-out goes to the journalists who belong to the excellent Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a U.S. group that, among other things, has traveled to England repeatedly to run workshops for local journalists interested in filing Freedom-of-Information requests (the U.K. law has only been in effect since 2005).

Makes Perfect Sense

What's the difference between your family and the U.S. government?

If your family has a house built and the contractor accidentally kills a bunch of your relatives with dangerous plumbing and electricity, I'm gonna guess that, at a bloody minimum, you'll get a different contractor next time.

The U.S. government, by contrast, will publicly commend the contractor, renew the contract, and pay the firm generous bonuses.

The Lord Will Provide, Right?

Churches and other places of worship clamor for tax exemption as if it's a God-given right. Then, when there are real-world consequences to their coveted tax-exempt status, they find it all wholly surprising (and probably terribly unfair).

Some people recently laid-off from religious institutions in Virginia said they were shocked

— just shocked! —

to find the state does not offer them unemployment benefits. Carol Bronson, who was laid off from her secretarial job at Temple Emanuel synagogue in Virginia Beach, said she was told her unemployment claim was denied because the tax exemptions for religious organizations under Virginia law include an exemption from paying unemployment taxes.

May I suggest to my religious friends that they play the tiny instrument above?

Superstition of the Day

Nigerian men and women of God will not put up with children who are witches. There are tens of thousands of possessed youngsters in Nigeria, to hear these concerned Christians tell it. They can identify kids who harbor demons by the fact that the children appear rebellious, or by their epileptic convulsions (which less knowledgeable people might attribute to, oh I dunno, epilepsy perhaps).

Now, these underage devils must be stopped — using beatings, illegal incarceration, starvation, torture, and exorcisms.

A most interesting fact is that it's frequently done with the help of the friendly neighborhood church.

"Children accused of witchcraft are often incarcerated in churches for weeks on end and beaten, starved and tortured in order to extract a confession," said Gary Foxcroft, program director of Stepping Stones Nigeria, a nonprofit that helps alleged witch children in the region. ...

Pastors have been accused of worsening the problem by claiming to have powers to recognize and exorcise "child witches," sometimes for a fee, aid workers said. But some are true believers, such as one minister in Lagos, Nigeria. He pinpoints children affected by witchcraft for free, he said. "Sometimes, we get a dream that shows us a certain person is suffering from witchcraft," said the Rev. Albert Aina, a senior pastor at Four Square Gospel Church.

Got that? The good reverend habitually fingers demonically possessed children — condemning them to what's truly a prolonged hell on earth — because of a dream.