Turkey mulls criminalizing adultery

Story.

Turkey's parliament is debating reforms to the country's penal code which would include making adultery a crime. Many of the reforms - which include outlawing torture and imposing stiffer penalties on human traffickers - have been welcomed by the EU and human rights activists.

But the clause to make adultery a crime has been greeted with dismay by women's groups and liberal commentators who plan to demonstrate outside parliament against the bill.

Details of the anti-adultery legislation have not yet been made public but Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said the measure could only be applied if the spouse complains.

Moby explains politics

"you know what politics is/are like in the united states? It's like pop-music.
Example a: pop-music. republicans are like ashley simpson, and democrats are like radiohead. radiohead fans will forever be mystified as to why someone would buy an ashley simpson cd, but ashley simpson's handlers/managers understand what the lowest common denominator are looking for and they give it to them. radiohead fans think 'that disposable pop music is terrible, and someday people will see the error of their ways and buy radiohead cd's instead of ashley simpson cd's', meanwhile ashley simpson and her managers are selling millions of records…

my point? yes, radiohead are better than ashley simpson.

Newt on how to beat Kerry

Memo.

There is a temporary narrow partisan division among Americans but there is no narrow values division. On a wide number of issues Americans average about four to one in favor of Center-Right values. In one set of 34 issues the American people averaged 77% on one side and 17% on the other side. [Therefore] the 2004 campaign is actually very simple:

1. Define the Kerry-Edwards ticket as the left and prove that its values and its history make it unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans;

2. Communicate what President Bush and the Republicans have accomplished for the American people despite the bitter opposition of the left;

3. Explain the nature of the terrorist threat against America and the historic and moral importance of President Bush's strategy to defend America, including the decision to liberate Iraq;

4. Communicate what President Bush and the Republicans will accomplish in 2005 for the American people if they are given the opportunity;

5. Use September and October in Congress to demonstrate vividly the difference on core values between the Senate based Kerry-Edwards left and the Republicans and therefore the difference in the future they would create;

6. Focus on this clear choice so the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates will be acts of repeating the clear differences and the historic record;

7. Slow the campaign down to emphasize the big difference, focus on the facts and allow the American people to realize how big their choice is.

Britain in Constitutional Crisis

Story.

The trust question leads to a concern that should transcend left and right. It is far bigger than party politics. Put simply, the country is in the grip of a constitutional crisis. That may sound overheated: there are no judges hanging from lamp-posts, no tanks rolling down Whitehall. Yet the phrase is not mine. It is the word of the hour among that most restrained set - the mandarin class. In the past week, I have heard from three different and wholly credible sources that Britain's senior civil servants, present and former, are shocked at what they see as a gross breakdown in our system of government.

Kerry campaign sinking by the day

A message posted on Michael Moore's website today advises Kerry supprters to stop being so gloomy - it'll be all right. No, really - it will! The opinion polls are just wrong!

Unfortunately for Mike, he seems to have disregarded he first law of reality, which states that political dogma cannot survive unfavorable contact with experiential reality. As of today's polls, Bush leads Kerry by over a hundred votes in the Electoral College. For those unfamiliar with this site, instead of going for the big headline (yet Constitutionally irrelevant) "national average" polls, it takes the results of respected opinion pollsters, state-by-state, to build a predicted electoral college. By that yardstick, Kerry is going down by the nose; he commands solid support in only eight states to Bush's nineteen.

Put simply, in my view, Kerry must win PA and FL, or he loses the election. Bush currently leads in both.

Preparing to feel overwhelmed again.

It's that anniversary tommorow. It still feels too close, too real. So real that the news that the Port Authority of New Jersey is taking legal action against Saudi Arabia over the WTC attack seems somehow shocking - although the question has to be asked, if Afghanistan was liberated for providing shelter and traning ground for the 9/11 masterminds, given that virtually all of the hijackers were Saudi, their masters were Saudi and their funds provided by Saudis, and given that Saudi isn't that much better than Iraq in the human rights stakes - can we assume that a campaign to liberate the Kingdom is not far off?

Photo

My wife and I, earlier today:

McDonalds outsources drive-thru guy

I swear, the first time I ever went to a Sonic's, I knew this day would come:

McDonalds outsources drive-thru staff

McDonald's franchisees in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Brainerd, Minn., and Norwood, Mass., recently began outsourcing their drive-thru order-taking to a call center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Thus, a Big Mac order shouted into a microphone in Missouri gets typed into a computer in Colorado (and a digital photograph of the customer's car is taken in order to reduce errors) and then clicked back to the originating restaurant's kitchen, which has the order ready in less time (30 seconds less, on average, with fewer errors) than the average McDonald's takes. [International Herald Tribune-New York Times, 7-19-04]