Black Tuesday

Since you all didn’t listen to me to vote for Republicans, November 7^th will be remembered as ‘Black Tuesday’. However, I have the scoop about the jobs these people out of office, or now ineffective in it, will be doing:

Donald Rumsfeld: Has been given an advance of $1.2 million to write a murdered mystery: “The Fog of Baghdad”

George Allen: Has given up plans to run for President in 2008. Instead, he is being sent by the Wrong Wing Christian Collusion, Inc. to Africa. He will conduct research on monkeys (macacas) to prove that humans did not descend from them.

Michael Steele: will volunteer his work as a Big Brother to inner-city children. He wants to atone being in the wrong party.

Lincoln Chafee: Will join and run for election in the AFL-CIO.

Mark Foley: has announced that he’ll pen a book, which will be about 400 pages. He is not sure how long the book will be.

The Rev. Ted Haggard: has applied to a train as a masseuse at the Community College in San Francisco, CA

Ken Mehlman: plans to buy and manage an olive farm in California.

Dick Cheney: has decided to give up hunting and enter rehab.

John Bolton: Anticipating he’ll not be in the UN much longer, he has been thinking of making use of his mustache to be a lead star in the porn film industry. He has also been contemplating doing ‘Got Milk’ commercials.

Carl Rove: will be assuming the post of a Professor in the Department of American History at the Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, OK

Biggest “What if” of the campaign: If Harold Ford Jr. had said that he is gay, would the Playboy Club ad have had any effect on his lead and could he have won?

Other developments:

In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Bush said that he is not going to abandon his principal. Carl Rove and Dick Cheney breathed a sigh of relief.

The Justice Department is going through the Constitution to see if it is possible that Bush 41 can take Bush 43^rd’s place for the next two years. The senior Bush may have to have a legal name change where he will drop the “Herbert” from his middle names.

It is said that friends are always supportive, but if an enemy praises you, you have really done something good. Last Wednesday, Mr. Al-Masri, the Chief of Al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, congratulated the American voters for making the right choice. He indicated that he too wants a change in Iraq policy, and help us cut and run.

Germany's top prosecutor will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld and others, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Gitmo. He has assured the plaintiffs that judge presiding over the trial will be the same one who tried Saddam.

Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi is hiring Martha Stewart as her Chief of Staff to help her clean the House.

Howard Dean has called Bush to borrow the “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Vladimir Putin has announced that he will step down in 2008. A top-secret Republican committee is flying to Moscow to recruit him to run for President of USA that year. They are convinced that he shares their values more than any other 2008 presidential prospects: he is tough on terror, doesn’t care about civil liberties or the Geneva Convention, has dealt with prisons that are worse than Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, believes in an absolute authority of the Executive branch, and always had a vision to turn all of America ‘RED’.

Politics makes strange bedfellows: Mark Foley

First Foley, then Haggard, lost their poise
Lost in the ruckus and all that noise
The party grand old
Should have told
They’re good ol’ boys after good young boys!

Another Republican said something sublime
But his Party has lost that paradigm
It was his view
Which is so true
That you can’t fool everyone all the time.

The Reps have lost their moral grace
In House and Senate could lose their place
Will Rove the prick
Along with Dick
Then shoot each other in the face?

But now the Dems are so confused
To deal with the issue so far refused
To be honor bound
On moral high ground
And the Christian Right is not amused.

BEWARE: The Terrorists are Coming?

11 reasons why you should vote for Republicans this election

If Democrats win, the terrorists win. President Bush is correct. VP Cheney has illustrated how the terrorists are trying to influence the outcome of these mid-terms; they have made sure that October has the highest deaths of US soldiers ever. The terrorists do want the lily-livered Dems to win. I’m sure that if the Republicans keep their legislative majority, there will be investigations and hearings on which Democratic candidates the terrorists supported.

The Democrats will ‘cut-and-run’. It is important we stay the course in Iraq, and be there until it is either converted to a model democracy in the Middle East or is divided into three parts: the Kurdish North, the Sunni Middle and the Shia South. Surely no one other than us Americans can ensure this. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Republicans have ensured safety of the Homeland. Remember, this is not the Communist ‘Motherland’ or the Nazi ‘Fatherland’; it is the American ‘Homeland’. Republicans have a lock on containing catastrophes: there has been no terrorist attack since 9/11, or a devastating hurricane since Katrina. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Democrats have no respect for the Armed Forces. This is exemplified by comments of the Swift Boat veteran, John Kerry. President Bush has correctly stated that words have consequences. Who should know better than him; his challenge to the Iraqis – “Bring it on” – intensified violence against US troops. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

The DOW’s slipping already. Just on the possibility that the Democracts may control the House and the Senate, the DOW has started it’s downward plunge, going below 12,000. This was a number the President had worked so hard to achieve by giving ample tax-cuts to investors, reducing their capital-gains tax, promising to eliminate the ‘death-tax’, and keeping the minimum wage low. If this is a sign of things to come, the DOW may go back below 11,000 if the Democrats win. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Democrats like immigrants. Especially the illegal kind. If they win, they would increase the quota of legal immigration, and will have a accelerated path to citizenship for illegals. The more ‘brown’ the country becomes, the more is the loss of the American way of life. And many immigrants could be terrorists. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Democrats will raise your taxes. They could roll back the tax-cut scheduled to expire in 2010. They will hurt people with money first, who would not then be able to trickle down their wealth to poorer people. Everyone will eventually lose. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Democrats will increase the minimum wage. This will hurt Business, and increase unemployment. Businessmen will have less free money to invest, which will bring the DOW down and to spend on their fringe benefits, which will slow the economy. In addition, they will be forced to hire more illegals, which will compound the immigration problem. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Immorality will be back. The Republicans, with the help of the Christian Right, have ensured that Washington is a moral city. Mark Foley was immediately dismissed from the party once the public found out about his misdeeds. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Corruption will be back. Republicans have little tolerance for people like Jack Abranoff and Tom DeLay. They are jailbirds now and the remaining Republicans are clean. In contrast, Democrats are the masters of corruption; none of their corrupt people are in jail. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Gays will be able to marry. The Democrats will pass laws that will make gay marriage acceptable, and the activist judges will uphold them. Gays will then be able to marry, divorce, re-marry, divorce again, re-marry and have children. A child born of a gay union will be gay; soon we will have gays running the place, taking over the American lay of wife. If Democrats win, the terrorists win.

Varanasi in the time of terror

This is an edited piece of “Varanasi in the time of terror”, written by Ms. Vidya Subrahmaniam for The Hindu; it appeared in the July 26, 2006 online edition of the news paper. For the full article, go to http://www.hindu.com/2006/07/26/stories/2006072602271000.htm

State action against terrorism will succeed if Muslims have the confidence that the community as a whole will not be called to account for terror executed by a few. Communal harmony is not a pseudo-secular cliché, it is a necessity in the aftermath of terror, and for proof there is Varanasi.

Calm returned to Varanasi…within hours of the March 7 bomb blasts. The primary target was the outlying Sankat Mochan temple — a quaintly uplifting shrine, large of heart and eclectic in spirit, much like Varanasi itself. The strike on the temple was intended to inflame passions, to pit injured Hindu religious sentiment against perceived Muslim savagery. But Varanasi rose so superbly to the occasion that columnists doffed their hats to its indomitable strength, marvelling at a people who said they were nothing without their composite culture. Kashi Nagri, of the conjoined Vishwanath temple and Gyanvapi mosque, of Hindus and Muslims as silken in manner and speech as the beautiful Banarasi saree, and as interlinked as its warp and weft, became a byword for peace and harmony.


The Varanasi example

This is not political correctness, and for proof there is Varanasi, where two men of religion, one Hindu, the other Muslim, showed the way to mutual trust, the amazing spin-off from which includes voluntary Muslim action to regulate the functioning of madrassas, searching questions within the community on the place of terrorism in Islam, and, above all, the ringing denunciation of terrorism by Islamic scholars belonging to different schools

The process was started by Veer Bhadra Misra, the learned Mahant of the Sankat Mochan temple, who today commands an iconic following among Muslims for his expert management of the post-blast fallout. Having reopened the temple within hours of the blast and resumed puja and aarti, the Mahant did the one thing that needed to be done — eviction from the complex of those looking to start trouble, among them the volatile Vinay Katiyar.

The return to normality was essential to prevent communal distrust. The Mahant was to find a friend in Abdul Batin Nomani, Mufti-e-Benaras and Imam of the Gyanvapi mosque. The first Sunday after the blast, the young Muslim priest was in the temple, receiving ganga jal from the Mahant. The Mahant and the Mufti jointly visited hospitals and attended to the comfort of the injured. Inspired by them, leaders from both communities, including a dozen or so Muslim clerics, followed suit.

Four months after the Mahant and the Mufti joined hands in an affirmation of Hindu-Muslim solidarity, the tentative "reaching out" has flowered into a movement the impact of which is plain to see. Joint campaigns, composite music festivals, seminars on communal amity, invitations to the Mahant from Muslims and to the Mufti from Hindus, and the incredible sight of burqa-clad women reciting the Hanuman Chalisa at the Sankat Mochan temple — it is competitive secularism of a kind rarely seen, wonderfully elevating, and all the more special for daring to take root on holy soil defiled by terrorists intending to spread doubt and disharmony.

Is this merely showcase cohabitation? How long will it be before another bomb blast, or a deliberate provocation from a disgruntled element from either side, disrupts this joyous celebration of unity? Communal harmony is easier extolled in seminars than achieved on the ground, and to pretend that Varanasi's unique experiment has no detractors would be to oversimplify the achievement.

The Mufti received flak from orthodox Muslims for his foray into the temple to accept ganga jal as did the Muslim women who recited the Hanuman Chalisa. The Mahant is a disliked figure among Hindu extremists. But as the Mufti told The Hindu, "terrorism, fundamentalism, are all threats to communal harmony. The important thing is that we have understood and defeated that design. We have emerged stronger from terrorism. Today Varanasi is a model of communal amity. Let other cities follow our example."

Faced with terror, Kashi Nagri showed courage, returned to normal, and embraced peace. It does not matter to Varanasi's Muslims that the state pursues Islamist militants. Spunk and harmony may not foil terrorism, but they do foil the design to divide and disrupt.

Activesync 4.2 is here

Microsoft has posted a new version of Activesync on its web site. Changes in ActiveSync 4.2 help solve connectivity-related problems with Microsoft Outlook, proxies, partnerships, and connectivity.

For more details, or to download ActiveSync 4.2, visit Microsoft's web site. This is a free update.


For Windows Mobile 5.0 Only

Microsoft suggests that only those using Windows Mobile 5.0 handhelds and smartphones use the latest version of this software.

Those with handhelds or smartphones running earlier versions of this operating system might be happier with ActiveSync 3.8, as the newer versions lack several features some people may have become accustomed to.

For security reasons, it is no longer possible to synchronize over a Wi-Fi connection, for example. It still allows users to synchronize via Bluetooth, though.
Despite the drawbacks, there are some advantages to ActiveSync 4.2, like integration with Windows Media Player on the desktop.

Those running Windows Mobile 5.0 must use ActiveSync 4.0 or above.

Upsetting the apple cart?

In a June 14 op-ed article in the Washington Post, “Rethinking Nuclear Safeguards”, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has stated that “…under the NPT, there is no such thing as a "legitimate" or "illegitimate" nuclear weapons state. The fact that five states are recognized in the treaty as holders of nuclear weapons was regarded as a matter of transition; the treaty does not in any sense confer permanent status on those states as weapons holders.”

Mr. ElBaradei points out that the three states outside the NPT who have weapons (India, Pakistan and Israel) are not going to give them up and therefore suggests to the international community that “Either we begin finding creative, outside-the-box solutions or the international nuclear safeguards regime [NPT] will become obsolete.”


(Since its creation, the five Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) have touted the NPT as litmus. If you weren’t a NWS by 1968, when this treaty was formalized, you could not have any nuclear weapons. Other countries were coaxed to sign it, which meant that they agreed not to build any nuclear weapons, and, in return, they were given means to run civilian nuclear programs.

The basic premise of the NPT was, and is, that since nuclear power is lethal and dangerous, and not every Tom, Dick and Harry should be allowed to have one. It can be argued that the five NWS wanted to have this nuclear edge in power, and found a way, through NPT, to refuse any more members to this exclusive club. In that sense, the NPT is discriminatory.

This was pointed out by India (and therefore Pakistan too, of course), and it refused to sign the NPT (as did Pakistan, no wonder!). Consequently, after the first nuclear test by India in 1974, the US congress enacted laws that punished India, by refusing it access to nuclear fuel or technology. After the second test in 1998, further restrictions were imposed, and Pakistan joined the sanctions after in followed India in testing its own device.

The fact that the existing NWS were supposed to have progressively reduced their nuclear armaments under the treaty has been overlooked.)


The article tackles the necessity of the US-India nuclear cooperation deal. Under this deal, the United States will amend its laws that will provide waiver specifically to India to exchange nuclear technology.

In addition, the US will lobby the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) to export nuclear fuel to India. Further, since India is not a signatory to the NPT, the IAEA will have to come up with India specific safeguards that will allow it to inspect the civilian Indian nuclear reactors.

Mr. ElBaradei is well respected as the head of the IAEA, and enjoys the confidence of all the major powers, including that of the US Administration. He is a qualified international lawyer and an expert in public international law; he and the agency won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever he says carries a lot of weight.

Under the NPT, India and Pakistan are treated as illegitimate NWS. Even though Mr. ElBaradei is correct under the international law, why would he make such a radial statement and not let the illusion legitimacy under the NPT continue? Why would he permit a new interpretation of the NPT?


Especially now, with concerns of proliferation ever higher, the fear of ‘dirty’ bombs getting in the hands of non-state actors soaring, and the reality of ‘dangerous’ countries like North Korea and Iran either already being a NWS or aspiring to become one?

I would very much doubt that he made these statements without the nod of some of the major players. The arguments in the article support the position of the Indian government and the Bush Administration.

Of the five major NWS, only China is the one to lose from India becoming a de facto ‘legitimate’ NWS, because it would dilute its regional supremacy. This, in itself, could be one reason why the other four (UK, France, Russia and US) may want the Indo-US nuclear deal to go through.

Besides, there is a lot of money to be made by private corporations and the governments of the NWS and NSG by transferring technology, selling fuel and building nuclear plants in India. Does Halliburton deal with this stuff too?

The Indo-US deal is now before Congress. It is interesting to note that the Administration is pulling all punches to get it through, despite some early reservations by many representatives of both parties.

Either Mr. Bush wants to be remembered as the President who opened the gateway to India (like Nixon’s China legacy) or he is finally recognizing what the US should have had, a long time ago.

Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka?

Is it the 21st century in India yet? India may be shining, but not in Kerala. According to the newindpress.com, “The Travancore Devaswom Board, which manages the hill shrine of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala, on Monday informed the Kerala High Court that it proposed to order a vigilance enquiry into the alleged defilement of the temple idol by Kannada actress Jaimala.”

This is because “The revelation by the actress that she had visited the temple when she was in her late twenties and touched the idol has sparked off a row, as women devotees between 10-50 age group are barred from offering worship at the shrine.”

It will be interesting to see what the reaction Indians in general and of the BJP (the Hindu Nationalist party) in particular, will be to this news.

This gender discrimination is not limited to this temple alone. According to the Hindustan Times, “Harking back to the same ‘traditional’ not-for-women-for-their-own-good argument, women pilots in the Indian Air Force are denied the right to operate/fly fighter aircraft. Reasons cited include ‘concerns’ that in the event of being captured as PoW[s], women will receive a worse deal than their male counterparts. The message is clear: women can storm male bastions only to the extent that they are ‘allowed to’.”

If Indians are anxious to be a global force of significance, they have to shed this thinking. They have to treat their Constitution, which allows equal opportunity for all, more than a piece of paper.

Not all Justices are lapdogs of Bush

On June 30 2006, the Financial Times ran a headline: “Justices prove to be no lapdogs of Bush”. It said so because “The US Supreme Court that dealt a historic blow this week to the executive powers of the Bush administration was, ironically, a court dominated by Republicans, and headed by a brand new chief justice hand-picked by President George W. Bush.”

Well, not quite.

As could be predicted, the arch conservatives of the Court (Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas), voted in dissent of the judgment that the military commissions that the Bush Administration planned to use to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval base in Cuba, were unauthorized by statute and violated a provision of the Geneva Convention.

Chief Justice Roberts (the fourth arch conservative) did not participate in the case as he had heard it in a lower court, where he had voted to uphold the legality of military commissions. However, even if he would have voted, it would not have made a difference in the outcome.

Four moderate-liberal or liberal justices (Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens) were the ones who voted for the ruling, which became the majority opinion because of Justice Kennedy, a moderate-conservative, also voted for it.

The headline should have read: “Some Justices prove to be no lapdogs of Bush”, or "Only some Justices prove to be lapdogs of Bush". I am surprised that the Brits can make such errors in the English language!