Wampum

The moving van arrives in a few hours and a cat and I are watching the pre-dawn.

Duncan linked to Hoffmainia, where there's a verbatium of the Beeb's piece on IO. That's a good thing. Since that might get some readers I've stuffed some material in the comments to the Hoffmania piece. Something may come out in the WSJ tangential to the piece that Christopher Rhodes called me about on Wednesday. Then again, had I known the WSJ was going to re-run the extermination-is-good OpEds Baum-the-Oz-man wrote to for The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, to white-wash the assassination of Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee, by someone previously as indifferent to the existance of Indians and Indian Country as William F. Buckley, but now tasked with being point-white-man on the defensive white-wash of the Trust Fund liability-in-chief -- the independent audit authority of Tribal Governments and Trust beneficiaries, I would have declined Mr. Rhodes' request for my time.

The proper way to refer to South Piikini (South Piegans) is Aamsskáápipikani. That's "Blackfoot" in the Cobell v Norton case.

Via Dawn, the next best starting place on Pakistan on-line and in English after the final posts of Shaheen Sehbai's South Asia Tribune, there is news that David Mulford (Under Secretary and Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for International Affairs, 1984-1992, large-scale privatisation line of business at Credit Suisse First Boston, 1992-2003), publically linked the nuclear cooperation agreement that everyone knew was the pay for India's vote against Iran at the IAEA and the UNSC, with India voting against Iran at the IAEA and the UNSC.

To be fair, Ambassador Mulford's only got one week to "close" the deal before the IAEA vote, and four weeks to get India whipped into shape before King George visits, and democratic societies are run by small groups of morally dead white men. I read that somewhere on an NSA approved media outlet so it must be true and the way things simply have to be.

To be completely fair, less than 48 hours after David Mulford's bon mot, Condi Rice, not a "morally dead white man", just "married" to one, did one better: In order to move on to a new phase in which civil nuclear power would be available to India, India has to make some difficult choices.

The funniest line in the whole farce was this:

But it's very important to understand that in order to satisfy the concerns of the American Congress and our laws and the concerns of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, that there will have to be some steps taken to make sure that the proliferation risks are not enhanced by this deal.

The notion that the US Congress (a) exists in a meaningful sense, and (b) is independent from the Executive Branch, and (c) that the Frist/Cornyn/Santorum and Hastert/Delay-2/Pombo leaderships could be gotten from the loot-the-continental-US-oil-and-gas table with anything more subtle than tasers to the shortribs and take a glance at the merits of the July 18th agreement on civil and military nuclear programs in India, now that is funny.

Headline shamelessly appropriated from the Hindustani Times. A "dots to feathers" nuclear rhetoricology transfer.