DISPATCHES
April 30, 2003
Dishonoring the Victims
AOL tonight shows the Ground Zero skyline and says, "How would you honor the victims?" I'd start with a real, thorough, open investigation of why it happened and all the governmental failures that allowed it to happen, to the connections between the Bush and bin Laden families and that would be a start. See The Guardian on the killing of 14 Iraqis who wanted their school back. Molly Ivins, in "Coming Soon, the United Serfs of America", writes: "Boy, there is no shortage of creatively terrible ideas from the Republican Party these days. Those folks are just full of notions about how to make people's lives worse -- one horrible idea after another bursting out like popcorn -- and all of them with these sickeningly cute names attached to them. Consider the Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act (Senate version) and the Family Time Flexibility Act (House version). The Bush administration is leading the charge with proposed new rules that will erode the 40-hour workweek and affect more than 80 million workers now protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act." At the White House Correspondents' Dinner Al Franken had a little exchange with deputy secretary of defense and world domination madman Paul Wolfowitz, according to Salon. It was short. Franken: "Clinton's military did pretty well in Iraq, huh?" Wolfowitz: "Fuck you." Fredric Alan Maxwell, the author of "Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft", wrote in the New York Times about his little encounter with the Secret Service. They looked for him for eight months, they said, though he was in the phone book. They were investigating him because, they said, they received a report that, on Oct. 12, 2000, he was overheard in a D.C. bar saying, "I have friends in the C.I.A. who will make sure Bush doesn't enter the White House." They had a huge file on him. They spelled his name five different ways. See "Spooked".