Under intense political pressure, the Guardian further abases itself for the Wolfowitz story. But granting that their headline gave the quote more spin than it deserved, the discussion posted on the Department of Defense web site does clearly establish that Iraq's possession of really a lot of oil entered into the decision to invade. Wolfowitz really said that.

Were not both the President and the Vice President of the United States former oil executives, I might be willing to give the DoD the benefit of a doubt about this fuss simply being a matter of Iraq having deep pockets because of their natural reasources. But to claim, on the one hand, that Iraq's oil figured into the calculus as to whether to invade and, on the other hand, claim that aquisition of control of said mineral rights was not at issue, strains all credulity.

To quote from the website Famous Texans:

In the West Texas energy business, George W. Bush started out researching who owned mineral rights. He later traded mineral and royalty interests and invested in drilling prospects.

The significance of Wolfowitz's statement is that it is now publicly established by an administration official that were Iraq not an oil rich coutry, we might well not have invaded. I've never believed that the war was all about oil. But now we all know that oil lubricated the machinery of war.

MEANWHILE, Cynthia Tucker suggests we invade the Congo on humanitarian grounds:

But now that the Bush White House has established human rights as a legitimate reason to invade a country that represents no immediate threat to the U.S., I've got a list of other countries we ought to invade -- Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe... and, oh yes, Afghanistan, which is once again in thrall to brutal warlords. But Congo is at the top of the list.

The nation at the heart of the African continent -- it was once called Zaire -- is embroiled in a 4 1/2-year civil war whose horrors are unspeakable. So far, an estimated 3.3 million people have died, either in attacks by various factions or from the famine and disease that accompany conflicts such as this.

A chipmunk just peered through the sliding glass door at me. I think it was the chipmunk that's spent two days in here that we couldn't manage to catch. I think it went ouside when I intended it to, and was now trying to come back inside to its newfound "home."

I've been having too much fun posting on M. John Harrison's forum discussing the New Weird, getting into heated discussions of whether genre boundaries are good or evil, whether we would be willing to die for our literary beliefs, and generally hashing out what the New Weird is. I've arrived at a formulation I'm rather pleased with (though someone may chime in in radical disagreement at any moment): the New Weird is deeply opposed to is the corrupt linkage between marketing category and genre product.

David's off to the IAFA Board Meeting in Florida. I drove him to White Plains airport this morning. We pass by the IBM Corporate Headquarters.

The entry to IBM doesn't look like much. Just a driveway with a sign in a grassy field. I've never been up the driveway, so I don't know what it looks like just over the rise. Leaving, I continued north past the resovoir where the Town of Kensico used to be, past Peter's elementary school, past Old House Lane where the Clintons live when they're in town, on up 117 through Mt. Kisco and Bedford Hills to Katonah where Peter had an appointment.

Katonah is a nice Victorian town with lots of grand old houses. We went to their Fireman's Parade on Wednesday even though it was raining. Their parade is a good half-hour longer than Pleasantville's, and it seems to have a higher density of marching bands. Also, the parade kicks off a four-day Fireman's Carnival which lasts 'til Saturday. Peter went on rides in the rain. He went on the Dragon Wagon four times. The Dizzy Dragon, his favorite last year which he went on until he turned green, is not in evidnce this year.

This morning, while Peter was occupied, I browsed Katonah's art and craft galleries, of which there are a number.

My favorite for sheer atmosphere is Antipodes, an Australian imports gallery with many fine paintings and crafts beyond my financial reach, but which also has a few shelves of very good books. The proprietor is friendly and charming, and has excellent taste. When I was in there this morning, he recommended Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a thriller.

Another gallery I visited today, which I don't usually go into, is the Katonah General Store II which currently has several interesting exhibits: Museum Folk Art of the Southwest, an engaing collection of folk art animals that Elizabeth was quite taken with, and a photography exhibit, David Michael Kennedy: A Retrospective, 35 Years of Photography. My favorite thing at KGS II was a folk art armadillo studded with beer-bottle caps.

The weather is wonderful today, but we're supposed to have rain all weekend. This afternoon I will take Elizabeth to the Lapsongs program for pre-walkers at the Chappaqua Library. Peter used to love that. This will be her first time.

There's a really important piece of good news in publishing: AOL Time Warner Won't Sell Books Division.

While this may seem like a really boring bit of business news, in our household at least we've been on the edge of our seats waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one: If Bertelsman (which owns Random House) had bought the AOL Time Warner Book Division, this would have dropped the number of book distribution systems from four to three. And Random House has become a proponent of streamlining the number of titles. A Bertelsman aquisition of the AOL Time Warner Book Division looked to be a serious blow to science fiction, and probably the novel (and perhaps even the book) as such.

In the mail recently, I've received several ads noteworthy for their bold claims.

One yesterday offered a device with the headline: Makes meetings more powerful and efficient! Hmmm. Now, close your eyes and hold hands. Visualize the table lifting off the floor. . . .

An ad received today offers The Most Effective Way to Re-Define Your Body! Really? I thought. How interesting.

MEANWHILE, discussion of the New Weird continues fast and furious. Participants include M. John Harrison, Cheryl Morgan, China Miéville, Paul McAuley, Farah Mendelson, Charles Stross, Jeffrey Ford, Farren Miller, Gabe Choinard, and others.

DISAPPEARING NEWS: The Guardian has pulled yesterday's story in which Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying "Iraq swims on a sea of oil." I found something that looks like it may be the original text of the Guardian article at a Moslem site, khilafah.com.

Explanation from the Guardian:

A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq." The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

OK, so Wolfowitz said what he said. We are asked by the Department of Defence to understand him differently.

It's now a little clearer why he said what he said -- it wasn't just Xtreme in-yer-face you-gotta-problem-with-that? Republicanism. But I think we understood him the first time.

I've got a busy morning -- I've got to enter all the corrections in the new issue of NYRSF and send it to the printer, and I'm taking Peter's frogs to visit at CCW, his morning Kindergarten program -- and so had decided to wait 'til later in the day blog, but here's something that make me choke on my coffee:

First, I should say that just yesterday David and I had a discussion of the Martha Stewart ImClone scandal as an example of non-news, the kind of news story that got in the way of real news getting through, and we both agreed she was probably guilty, but so what? She shouldn't be headline news. So here I am the next morning blogging Martha.

In this morning's NYT, prosecutors explain why they single out celebrities for prosectution:

Prosecutors Have Reasons for Stalking Celebrities

"Is it for publicity purposes, because Martha Stewart is a celebrity?" her lawyer, Robert Morvillo, asked in a statement challenging the motives behind her indictment on charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice.

The lead federal prosecutor in the case, James B. Comey, insisted that the answer to that question was no. "Martha Stewart is being prosecuted not for who she is, but because of what she did," said Mr. Comey, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Yet many longtime prosecutors said yesterday that Mr. Comey was being unnecessarily coy. Celebrity, they said, almost certainly played a role in the decision to commit resources to the Stewart investigation, and ultimately try to convince a grand jury to charge her with a crime. And, they added, "So what?"

After all, the purpose of law enforcement is not simply to punish people for crimes they have committed, but to deter crimes that are being contemplated. That pushes prosecutors to send strong signals about the dangers of crossing the line by bringing cases that penetrate the public consciousness. If yesterday's indictment had been against Martha Jones rather than Martha Stewart, no one would be reading this article ? primarily because it would not have been written.

"The deterrent effect is immeasurable," said Christopher Bebel, a former lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a former federal prosecutor. "Even if the government puts a thousand hours into building this case against Martha Stewart, the risk-reward ratio is enormously positive and constitutes a very prudent allocation of government resources."

The prosecutors speaking to the NYT clearly come from an alternate universe in which 1868 happened a little differently: we can tell they are from an alternate timestream because their US Constitution lacks section 1 of the 14th amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any prosecutor from our universe would certainly have read the constitution and all its amendments. Keep your eyes peeled. There may be more of them: watch for law enforcement officials unaware of basic elements of the bill of rights. When you spot one, call in an anonymous tip the INS reporting an illegal alien. Remember, aliens are eveywhere.

Seriously: yes, celebrities should receive no special immunity from prosecution. However, singling celebrities out for special prosecution and, yes, stalking, is not only illegal, but also a very scary practice.

This is not the first time I've heard about this sort of thing: A well-known writer of space opera told me an annecdote about law enforcement in his state stalking him regarding his gun collection because he was a celebrity. He wasn't a TV personality, but in the state he lives in, he was all they had, so they tried it. He solved the problem before even getting arrested, but it was clear he was being stalked and he was able to find out why.

Now, off to the other computer to do the NYRSF corrections.

I love those moments when media control slips, exposing things as they really are. The NYT recounts one such yesterday: Apparently, Egyptian TV accidentally broadcast Bush talking (unscripted) to Arab leaders:

Anyone who has regularly watched Mr. Bush in speeches and news conferences could tell in an instant that he had no idea that his remarks to five moderate Arab leaders were being broadcast for public consumption. . . . Mr. Bush was also evidently comfortable enough to talk to the Arabs about his own religion. "I believe that, as I told the Crown Prince, the Almighty God has endowed each individual on the face of the earth with -- that expects each person to be treated with dignity," Mr. Bush said in the remarks that he did not know were being broadcast. "This is a universal call. It's the call of all religions, that each person must be free and treated with respect."

The grammar comes as no surprise: it is a family trait. I know why he doesn't generally refer to "Almighty God" when talking ot the American public -- because of the separation of Church and State. What I'm puzzled by is why he might believe that Arab leaders would be more responsive to that mode of discourse. This was, after all, not the Christian Leadership Breakfast.

(Via technorati.com.)

MEANWHILE, go sign the online petition Reclaim the Public Domain. The late Senator Sonny Bono worked to get us a copyright law that vastly favors Hollywood at the cost of extending copyright long past the time when one can expect creator's widows and orphans can be expected to benefit from income or to administrate estates. Under current law, many works that should pass into the public domain won't for a very long time, whether there's anyone there to administer permissions or not. This petition proposes a change to the law that makes good sense. I recommend that you read it and sign it.

(Via Joi Ito.)

LOCAL NEWS: Just received an automated call that Congresswoman Nita Lowey will be in the Thornwood A&P from 9-10AM on Saturday, June 7th, to meet with constituents. Head on out to the grocery store and tell her what you think!

My brother in in the New York area for a trade show. When I was driving him to the train this morning, we were discussing the uses and uselessness of various PDA-like objects. He has a pocket PC and was telling me what he used it for, hence the following annecdote:

John was in a Best Buy trying to buy a computer cable. The salesman directed him to the cable he needed. The price was $40 which seemed like too much for just a cable. John whipped out his pocket PC right there in the aisle, typed the info on the package into a technology search engine, and discovered that the cable in question could easily be had on the web for $10. He showed the web price to the salesman and said, "I know you guys have to make money, but you charge four times as much as this place on the web, so I think I'll buy it from them instead." (Knowing my brother, he probably suggested that this was not what he called a Best Buy.) Then he walked out.

(Cory or somebody like that is going to say, Oh, I do that all the time.)

If you live around here, today is that day to go vote for the school budgets. Go vote.

There's a Gary Wolfe review of all three year's best sf annuals, the Dozois, ours, and the Silverberg/Haber in the new Locus. He says our Year's Best SF 8 is the most unaffectedly entertaining of the three annuals.

I have just discovered Howard Gardner's notion of Naturalist intelligence. I find it striking, because I look at the description and that's my son Peter.

Taking Peter to the pool yesterday, in the car the remaked that the bird overhead must be a hawk because of the way it circled. As I was getting the baby out of the car, he crouched down on the ground and said , "Look at all these mites. I wonder what kind they are." I didn't bend down because I was carrying the baby and the pool stuff. We crossed the parking lot, stopping briefly for a tiny anthill and streams of tiny ants. I've had to learn a lot about nature to keep up.

The argumentation in this morning's NYT editorial More News, Less Diversity by Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier, concerning media consolidation, is really interesting:

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to decide today whether decades-old regulations on news media ownership should be loosened. It is expected to do so -- in part on the rationale that the Internet increases the number of information sources that Americans see. This reasoning is mistaken.

There are, of course, millions of Web sites, and in theory they provide a diverse spectrum of viewpoints, which is one rationale for restrictions against any one company owning too many news outlets. In practice, however, almost all this diversity is ignored. Users may be able to choose from millions of sites, but most go to only a few.

This isn't an accident or the result of savvy branding. It's because Internet traffic follows a winner-take-all pattern that is much more ruthless than people realize.

Relying on links and search engines, most people are directed to a few very successful sites; the rest remain invisible to the majority of users. The result is that there's an even greater media concentration online than in the offline world.

If restrictions on media ownership are loosened today, this will be a bad thing. It does seem inevitable, given the political situation. But the behavior of search engines is a whole other matter: the web is a somewhat self-governing entity, and we can change! How seach engines could be changed to preserve information diversity is a topic we should all think about.

Josh Marshall does a nice job with the willfully obtuse William Safire editorial in this morning's NTY. Here's Safire:

When weighing the murky evidence of an aggressive tyranny's weapons, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were obliged to take no chances. The burden on proof was on Saddam. By his contempt, he invited invasion; by its response, the coalition established the credibility of its resolve. There was no "intelligence hoax."

The Safire piece seems to me a fairly cynical counterpunch to the accusations that the Bush administration lied to get us into a war. I don't think Safire really expects to be believed in the long run, only to muddy the waters.

The burden of proof was on Saddam. Now there's spin for you! Safire takes a statement which is true in a very limited context having to do with cooperation with weapons inspectors and pastes it into a different context, implying that Sadaam and not George should be answering all these questions about the whereabouts of the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction. What an ingenious excuse!

I THINK I'VE HAD THIS BUG: Human metapneumovirus, profiled on CNN, sound an awful lot like whatever put me in the hospital in October of 2001. Reseach on this newly identified respiratory virus has so far focused mainly on children.

SO I'M THE 81ST PERSON TO BLOG THE SINGING HORSES, but I just wanted to mention that when David started them up this morning, one of our Australian White's tree frogs thought they were really cute and possibly mate material and so began croaking in response. That was the first time the frogs had ever tried to talk to (let alone mate with) the computer.

FAMILY UPDATE: My brother, John Cramer, is in Electronic Business News today:

John Cramer, marketing and business development manager at the Plymouth, Mich., company, said, "There's an ASIC that predicts the next frame and makes the display suited for gaming and medical applications." The ASIC improves inter-grayscale response time for a TFT-LCD from an average of 84ms to less than 20ms, he said.

[I fixed the link. John, who came over for dinner last night, pointed out that I'd linked to last month's quote, not this month's.]

Spider Robinson, in a Ballardian mood, appears in the Toronto Star:

The 'space age' in total eclipse

Spider Robinson was sitting on a rain-soaked tour bus at the Kennedy Space Center when reality gave his eyeglasses a good, hard flick.

It was there, through a bus window, that the gangly B.C. science fiction writer spotted the rusting hulk of a Saturn V rocket among the palmettos. Once responsible for blasting his childhood heroes to the moon, the Apollo-era behemoth had been left to die the death of old washing machines.

"I still find myself using the term 'space age' to mean modern and forward thinking," Robinson says. "But it hurts to realize that the space age has been over for 30 years."

Robinson, who grew up with his nose wedged in Robert Heinlein novels, has a hard time understanding why NASA's space program has retreated from the stars and instead contented itself with flying in circles around the Earth.

He's been waiting for a bold new direction -- and, like many others, thought he had found it in scorched pieces of the space shuttle Columbia, which fell from the skies over Texas on Feb. 1.

MEANWHILE, happy 2nd birthday to Ken Houghton and Shira Daemon's daughter Valerie. And congratulations to Caitlin and Scott Blasdell on the baptism of their son, James, at which I was present this morning at church.

OUTAGE UPDATE, 8:58 PM: All services now restored. We've got our dialtone back and David can now get at his email. (The phone service had been out for about 29 hours.)

Our main phone numbers are now forwarded into my cell phone, so in principle, within the next hour we will have incoming phone service. Verizon says they may have our regular service restored by midnight or tomorrow.

To email David, send email to my account at kec [at] panix [dot] com. We cannot dial in to retrieve David's email at present.

DEPARTMENT OF NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED: When driving the kids to church this morning (I'm an atheist who goes to church, but that's another story), I encountered a large snapping turtle which had wandered into the road. I stopped the car, got I out, picked up the turtle carefully from behind by the sides of its shell and began to carry it back to the swamp where it belonged. Now, I have plenty of experience picking up frogs and I know that frog pee when frightened. I didn't know that turtles do this too. So I arrived at church with my pants quite soaked with turtle pee. Big turtles have big bladders. Luckily, turtle pee is very much like water.

Marduk's Babylonian Musings claims I have a "a simple-minded political agenda" in response to my remarks about Grover Norquist. I tried to post a response there, but his comments box isn't working properly, so I'll post it here:

I'll ignore part about simple-minded agendas and say that you make a good point about occasional bizarre remarks from the Democratic side suggesting some kind of Jewish conspiracy.

This was most notable, to me, in March. When a Democratic politician shot off his mouth, suggesting that the Iraq war would be fought to protect Jewish interests (which struck me as a piece of startling nonsense), I thought it was just one guy shooting off his mouth. A few days later, when I was staying with friends, there was a call-in TV talk show on in the background on the subject of Iraq. (I never voluntarily watch such things, so this kind of discourse is usually truly off my radar, but in a different way than you mean.) Caller after call brought up the Jewish conspiracy thing. It crossed my mind that the politician's remark was not necessarily accidental; rather, I suspected that he knew (perhaps even via polling) that there was a constituency for such remarks, and he expected approval from some quarters for suggesting the Iraq war was the result of a Jewish conspiracy. I might have blogged these thoughts, had I not been on an extended car trip at the time.

Regarding the matter at hand, Grover Norquist's remarks, I do not believe that political strategists in either party say things to the media by accident. Norquist said what he said because he expected someone to approve and, probably, because he expected this approval to come in the form of campaign donations. Similarly, Bush campaign strategists have already announced, via a reporter in the NYTimes, their intention to exploit the timing of the 9/11 anniversary to the Bush campaign's advantage. I find their remarks quite loathsome, but strategists wouldn't have explained their plans to the NYT if they didn't want them to be public knowledge. I am not their target audience.

As the descendent of old-fashioned Texan Democrats, I am well aware that there are plenty of racists in the Democratic party. They just aren't handed the mike very often. But for better or worse, we have a two-party system.

When random, or even well-known right-wing, loud mouths say outrageous things, I ignore them. When political strategist say outrageous things, I sit up and pay attention. (I also sit up and pay attention when political strategist in the Democratic party say outrageous things.)

While I do have agendas I pursue, they are literary agendas within science fiction and fantasy, pursued through our magazine, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and anthologies. In my political commentaries, I paint what I see.

So, are you saying this guy Norquist is a jerk with no power with whom you disagree and who misrepresents the tactics of today's Republicans? Or is it his tone which you feel is not representative?

Those who have been on the NYRSF staff will recognize descriptions of work weekends that begin against all odds. We're having one of those.

A tree fell on the other side of the block about 3:30 yesterday afternoon, knocking out power, phone service, and cable service for the immediate area. The power came back on at about 8 PM. Our cable internet service is back today, but we still have no dialtone.

Anyone trying to reach David by email TODAY should also send to my email address (which is kec at panix dot com), since he reads his mail through a dialup connection to Compuserve. I will delete this portion of this post when it is fixed.

I will update this as necessary, assuming the cable connection stays up.

UPDATE: The Verizon guys tell us it will be at least midnight before our phone service is restored, possibly tomorrow. I'm going to try to get our regular phone service forwarded into my cell phone.