Do you still beat your wife?, or, Yes, these are our allies

Fun time Saudi Cleric Muhammad Al-‘Arifi on a Ramadhan show (shown on LBC network) explains to young men the steps toward beating their wives:

1. Admonish them

2. Move out of the bedroom

3…and I’m quoting here:

If neither method works with her, what is the third option?Guest: “‘And beat them.'”

Al-‘Arifi: “That’s right. How is this beating performed? What do you think?”

Guest: “Light beatings.”

Al-‘Arifi: “Light beatings in what way?”

Guest:” For example, I wouldn’t beat her in the face…”

Al-‘Arifi: “Beating in the face is forbidden, even when it comes to animals. When a person is beating an animal… Even if you want your camel or donkey to start walking, you are not allowed to beat it in the face. If this is true for animals, it is all the more true when it comes to humans. So beatings should be light and not in the face.

Next week on the show: stoning those pesky women who don’t cover their face..

Every bit of this post is absolutely real except that last sentence. Kind of speaks for itself, eh?

h/t: Cranky

One thumb partially up, and one thumb way down for the Prez..

Let’s start with the razzzberry.  The federal government has often engaged in what could be called in some circles as creative accounting (shocking, I realize).  Other circles might be in debtor’s prison if they engaged in those practices, but the government is sovereign, so they get to do that kinda stuff.

According to USA Today, today, we, the people, unknowingly absorbed a 1.3 TRILLION dollar loss last year.  Not billion, but TRILLION.  Not the $248 Billion deficit reported by the Bush team.  This is six years into a REPUBLICAN administration.

I’d just like to remind the fiscally responsible Republicans in the viewing area that Bill Clinton (a Democrat), balanced the budget and actually left the incoming Prez with a surplus.  Yeah, he had some help from the GOP in congress, but he was the President and he get’s a lot of the credit.  Just like the one occupying the Oval Office right now.   I thought that THESE were the bizness guys???

Thumbs kinda up for President Bush for his news conference this AM announcing sanctions against Sudan and for some of the folks who do bizness with Sudan.   I understand that the Sudanese government has resisted pressure by not allowing outside peace-keepers into their world of genocide, but it’s past time to make a stand.

Thumbs will go way up for the President if he puts his muscle to work with China’s involvement in the Sudanese crisis.  China imports a lotta oil from Sudan and swaps at least some of that oil for weapons.  Will we have the conjones to point that out publicly?  Will we use the upcoming Olympics in Beijing as a platform to condemn the Chinese for the blood on their hands?

Keep the pressure on Mr. President..keep the pressure on.

Hey, Let’s Blame the Media, or the ass that cried Wolf(owitz)..

I wish I could have blamed the media many years ago when I made a disastrous choice regarding retirement funds accrued from my first ‘real’ job.  I won’t go into the painful details, but the ramifications lingered for years. It was my choice, but I should have realized that the media with all their advertisements and economic fruit hanging from the tree of good and stupid were really to blame.  If I’d only been well-known enough to chastise the digitally stained nee’ ink-stained wretches responsible for my debacle.

I say this after reading that Paul Wolfowitz is blaming the media for his resignation from the World Bank.  I guess it was Forbes Magazine, or maybe was it the Washington Post, that dictated the overly-generous terms of departure from the World Bank for his girlfriend.  Maybe it was WKRN that ensured that exclaimed ‘AHA”, let’s get a job for Shaha.  Maybe the State Department would be a great place for her to gain new employment.

Paul, you make me sick.  You and your neo-con pals helped engineer what is turning into the worst foreign policy fiasco of our generation.  And no, the media didn’t kill one damn American military member or wound the hundreds of thousands of our troops, many of whom lost limbs for your obscenity.  NBC didn’t kill 80,000 Iraqi civilians, and foment the civil war that your folly was supposed to pave over with democracy.

The media didn’t reward your folly with a position at the World Bank, and I don’t think anyone at the New York Times opined that your girlfriend should get the golden parachute from your peers at the Bank.

So…here’s my little guy advice to Paul Wolfowitz.  Shut the f**k up.

Meanwhile, not in Virginia

Jackson wrote a provocative post yesterday that ties the two recent headlines together:

The more important question to me is why does the country not have the same ‘stop what you are doing and fly the flag at half mast’ sort of reaction when 33 people are senselessly murdered in Iraq. If you ask me, that is the real racism in today’s world.

The shooting in Virginia was jarring because things that extreme just aren’t supposed to happen here. We’ve come to expect daily body counts from Iraq because many of us have become numb..numb to the effects of a ruinous intervention..numb to the effects of a civil war in which we don’t belong even though ‘we’re’ trying to do something right,

The news-channels are doing their best grief pimping and will somehow manage to grind this story into numbing pixilation. When daily body counts become fodder for the news-monster, and death becomes as mundane as the pablum that passes for intelligence on sit-com TV, we still get temporaily  jarred when violence explodes in the wrong place. But, it won’t take long for Virginia Tech to be just another item on the crawl at the bottom of the screen. Apparently, death in Iraq is already that trivial.

Grieving relatives retrieved bodies from hospital morgues Thursday, and passers-by gawked at the giant crater left by a market bomb in one of four attacks that killed 183 people on the bloodiest day since the U.S. troop increase began nine weeks ago.

A time to mourn…

Someone you know, or someone who is connected to someone you know is intimately connected with the horror that occurred today at Virginia Tech.   This is a day to mourn.   This is a day to pray or meditate for the families and friends of those who were massacred today.  This is a day to pray for the wounded.   This is not the day to argue guns or issue polemics.  That day will come.   This is a day for quiet humility and tears.    This is not the day to beat your chest and archly opine.

April is a damn cruel month.