~ y’all probably missed the announcement because you were swimming through dozens of articles on the fact that the electricity is out in miami, but the position of the bush administration has been stated to be that the torture of anyone in the custody of the united states is wrong, except when it is alright:

The White House wants the CIA to be exempted from a proposed ban on the abusive treatment of terrorism suspects being held in United States custody. –the guardian

a lot of fucks can make indian summer hay that the indictments on tom delay’s money laundering, the investigations on bill frist’s insider trading, the questions about harriet miers’s competence/intelligence, and who knows what the fuck about the grand jury investigation of security leaks all being politically motivated (as though that makes them unsubstantiated or fraudulent) but how on earth can someone defend the administration at the point where it insists that the united states exists at the same moral ground as saudi arabia, syria, al qaeda and russia?

~ speaking of torture, the temperature in philadelphia has dropped from the 70’s to the 40’s in less than a week. we left our gloves in clichy or new jersey; feel free to peep the gloves on our wish list!

~
terra cimmeria: i said earlier that there would be 2000 dead troops in iraq by xmas?
xxxxxxx xx xxx: y
terra cimmeria: it looks like it will be halloween, instead

~ to mark this milestone, some u.s. senators who voted for invasion of iraq -when it was perceived by them to be the politically popular thing to do – mention that, now that the u.s. has failed to secure a victory, and the president’s 37% approval rating means it is safe for them to criticize him, they were ‘misled’ into believing that the war was a great idea, because the administration told them so:

dodd of ct:
‘had i known then what i know now, the answer would have been ‘no’, categorically’

feinstein of ca:
‘had i known that the intelligence that i reviewed in a classified form and in a nonclassified form was both bad and wrong, i would not have voted’

do they really take everything the administration says at face value? do we need senators who are this trusting and ingenuous? are u.s. senators really this fucking blockheaded? maybe feinstein should have been reading the papers that these people were reading, because two and a half years later, they are still right, and she is wrong.

~ at least, however, kurds can wear pleated pants in public:

“It wasn’t all that long ago if he had of worn this outfit and was captured by Saddam Hussein’s thugs he would have been killed for wearing it,” Bush said. “He feels comfortable wearing it here because we’re a free land.”

~ anatomy of a fall break:

continue reading…

~ here is an excuse to link to the green line review at cafe tableaux:

“we’re out of smilk”
“you’re going to have some angry vegans!”
“i’ll kill you…but i won’t eat you.”

~ as cafe tableaux [w] continues to frame the cafe experience in a more polished, cultivated manner than that in which it has been discussed in the past, upenn reintroduces us to the base standards which are held by the typical coffee ‘fan’ with whom we share the streets:

“[Penn Current] bought ‘small’ cups of regular coffee from six local coffee shops, cafes, and other stores…”

• starbucks
• cosi
• au bon pain
• bucks county coffee
• wawa
• dunkin donuts

~ by the way, the fact that bush informs us this morning that we need to occupy iraq because terrorists are scary and the fact that mayor bloomberg rolls out a few hours later and tells us that scary terrorists are threatening the nyc subway is an amazing coincidence!

~ speaking of rolling out, cafe tableaux is online!

~

did they appear out of thin air? perhaps you had just ordered a coffee, and instead were presented with a cadre of bible thumpers in bad suits? were they beamed down from a spacecraft?

this is all very disturbing.

no! there is an unnerving trend in west philadelphia which involves the use nubile, sensually dressed young ladies who are dispatched to your neighboring table in the cafe and your front door at home. they pose as normal students, only upon close inspection does one realize that they are, in fact, actual christians; the text they are studying is the ‘holy bible’ and the syllabus before them is actually a list of ‘watchtower’ drop off points. you speak to these cafe spies at the risk of a lecture with the intent to convert.

on one occasion, however, we were able to observe a clearly collared priest proselytizing on the sidewalk; he was informing a boy in a foam hat and testament t-shirt of the harm in drinking beer from a coffee cup at 9am.

~ sansom street vignette:
‘we know you weren’t expecting us, but we thought you might be interested in talking about some of the things on the news’
‘is that a bible?’ (pointing)
‘yes! it sure is!’
‘i’m not interested. thank you’
‘ok, bye bye.’

~ overheard in alley behind angry red planet offices:

“get off that bike! give me that bike!”
“do you want to come take it?”
“yeah!”..”pussy!”..”i’ll smack you!”..”queer!”

~

BATON ROUGE, Sept 12 (Reuters) – U.S. federal authorities may have to take care of some evacuees from Hurricane Katrina for as long as five years, an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Monday.

“We’re planning to have to take care of a significant number of people for three to five years, until somebody can give us some better information,” said Brad Gair, the head of FEMA’s housing relief effort in the U.S. Gulf Coast region.

He said information on how much housing would be needed and for how long was still uncertain, but the agency estimated it would have to provide what he called “direct housing”, like trailers or motor homes, for 200,000 households.

they are already anticipating housing people for five years, and the only thing on their minds is lining up a bunch of trailers? with 200,000 households in the area, they should be able to set up a crew with a stack of s.i.p. and churn out long term housing. if one knows in advance the term for which they will need the habitats, can foresee the decline in quality of a trailer park after this amount of time, and knows that there are already groups at work on developing large scale refugee/disaster housing, why would one plan on doing a shitty job at the outset of the project?

“It may not be quite on the scale of building the pyramids, but it’s pretty close,” Gair told a news briefing.

dumbass.