Uber Alles

"President Bush said Friday he wants 'to know the facts� about any intelligence failures concerning Saddam Hussein�s alleged cache of forbidden weapons of mass destruction, but he declined to endorse calls for an independent investigation.

The issue of an independent commission has blossomed into an election-year problem for the president, with Democrats and a handful of Republicans including influential maverick Sen. John McCain of Arizona supporting the idea. Former chief weapons inspector David Kay has concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, which Bush had cited as a rationale for going to war against Iraq.
Bush said he wants to be able to compare the administration's prewar intelligence with what will be learned by inspectors who are now searching for weapons in Iraq. There is no deadline for those inspectors, the Iraq Survey Group, to complete their work.
�Saddam ... was a growing danger"
"One thing is for certain, one thing we do know ... that Saddam Hussein was a danger, he was growing danger," the president told reporters during a brief question and answer session after a meeting with economists."

Incredible, this BS leaves me speechless. Just like the Plame affair they want to get to the bottom of it but they don't want anyone to find out anything or let anyone investigate anything. The Dems in congress have got to grow some balls and shut down government until something is done about the stonewalling and obstruction of this administration.

"A record-high 375,000 jobless workers will exhaust their unemployment insurance this month and an estimated 2 million workers will find themselves in the same predicament during the first half of the year, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities."

Looks like the unemployment rate is set to take another tumble. In lieu of creating new jobs, we just let people drop off the rolls and bam the unemployment rate drops, the Bush miracle continues and everyone is happy. Those 2 million people probably will flock to the polls to vote for Bush and the Republicans in congress, so that they can make sure that the taxes that they would be paying if they had a job, don't get raised by those damn tax and spend Democrats, just like those whom are not wealthy want to protect the tax breaks they are going to get as soon as they themselves strike it rich. It's all about looking at the imaginary future and pandering to our fantasy rich and prosperous selves after all, ya never know.

"Rice said the administration would not change its position that Saddam had to go. 'The judgment is going to be the same: This is a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world and it was time to do something about this threat,' she said. "

Now this is what pissed me off about this war to begin with. "it was time to do something about it." is total an utter Bullshit (is that French, or Freedom language?). It was precisely the opposite, it was the worst time possible to start an unnecessary war in the middle east. I argued until I was blue in the face that we were fulfilling Bin Laden's wet dreams invading Iraq at the time and I think that I will be proven out on that point. You don't go looking for another war when the one you are in is not near finished and that is exactly what the administration did. The war on terror had become more covert and there weren't as many good things for the TV crews to show pictures of so they wagged the dog. It was a dumb war, for dumb reasons, carried out by dumb people, and you don't have to be a mathematician to see what that adds up to.

Great stuff from the guys over at Washing the Blog.. They are always good for a comical twist on things but this one is a classic.

"EVIL COMMUNIVERSITY
When John Ashcroft said earlier this week that Iraq was developing Evil Biology and Evil Chemistry, we got to thinking.....if you're REALLY into evil, then why not take classes? I would certainly call my high school biology class evil, and Lucifer knows that my college chemistry teacher was evil. So we at WTB bring you: Evil Communiversity."

"President Bush's new budget will project that the just-enacted prescription drug program and Medicare overhaul will cost a third more than previously estimated and will predict a record deficit exceeding $500 billion for this year, congressional aides said Thursday."..."Bush just signed the Medicare measure into law last month. While it was moving through Congress, Bush, White House officials and congressional Republican leaders had reassured doubting conservatives that the costs would stay within the $400 billion estimate.

Some conservatives voted against the legislation anyway, and many of them are already angry that Bush has presided over excessive increases in spending and budget deficits.

“I’m not the least bit surprised,” said conservative Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., who voted against the Medicare bill in November and who said he had heard that the cost estimate would rise. “Historically, our estimates of what these programs will cost have been so far off as to be meaningless.”

Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, would not comment on the Medicare figures."

Surprise, surprise. The only question that I really have is, will the true fiscal conservatives in the party defect or sit out the next election, or will they hold their noses and hope that he is just buying votes? I've heard the clap trap several times now from Repubs. "Oh, he's going to really crack down after the election, he's just throwing this out there now to 'buy' votes.", as if that is the kind of man you would want running anything, much less your counrty. Talking about setting low standards for someone, "he's just fleecing the country so that he can get enough votes to do a job that he couldn't get votes for if he weren't a liar." Happy, happy, joy, joy, must be nice to be so morally ambiguous and care free. So the best that they can hope for is that Bush is getting the government good and pregnant and planning on a late term abortion to kill his own baby. VOTE!!!!

"WASHINGTON - The Bush administration issued a veto threat Thursday against legislation that would scale back key parts of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act.
In a letter to Senate leaders, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the changes contemplated by the Security and Freedom Ensured Act, or SAFE, would "undermine our ongoing campaign to detect and prevent catastrophic terrorist attacks."
If the bill reaches President Bush's desk in its current form, Ashcroft said,"the president's senior advisers will recommend that it be vetoed."
The threat comes a week after Bush, in his State of the Union address, called for Congress to reauthorize the Patriot Act before it expires in 2005. The law, which was passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, expanded the government�s wiretap and other surveillance authority, removed barriers between FBI and CIA information-sharing and provided more tools for terror finance investigations.
Civil liberties groups and some lawmakers, including Republicans, believe the act goes too far and endangers the privacy of innocent citizens."

He's bluffin, he would have to learn 'how' to vetoe a bill in order to do that and he's too 'incurious' to find out right now, he's got ass kickin' to do in da middle easht against the terraist.

"He argued that the increased use of health savings accounts would lower people's overall health costs by encouraging them to push for better and more economical health care and to live healthier lives. He also argued the accounts would make it easier for some uninsured to buy health insurance
He also touted his call for association health plans, which he said are prohibited by many state rules.
'Imagine the combination of health savings accounts and association health care plans together,' Bush said. 'I mean, you're talking about providing interesting opportunity for the small business sector in America.' "

Asinine. I personally use a Health savings plan, because it is a big tax savings for me and I can afford to go with a higher deductible insurance for a lower premium. But to say that this is going to encourage me to seek better health care costs is just stupid. I have little or no bargaining power with my health care provider, if I don't like the size of the bill it's pretty much tough shit. I use the savings plan to cover the costs of my deductibles and out of pocket every year, and if I had enough money I would use it to take myself out of all but catastrophic insurance, thus making insurance for others go up since I do not typically use near what I put into the system (I filed my first major medical claim in 12 years this year and still paid the lions share of it out of pocket.) Medical savings accounts hurt the overall insurance system by taking people out of it.

"The U.S. military is planning a spring offensive against remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, a senior Defense Department official has said.
Authorities have ordered troops, supplies and logistics into place to carry out the operation, the official said Wednesday, without detailing whether the new offensive would require more troops.
The news comes amid increased violence in Afghanistan and on a day in which the U.S. military said it thinks it will find Osama bin Laden and fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in eastern Afghanistan.
The manhunt for bin Laden is now in its third year but a military spokesman said confidence is high that he will be captured.
'I can say that Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar represent a threat to the world, and they need to be destroyed and we believe we will catch them in the next year,' U.S. Army Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a coalition spokesman, said Wednesday."

Again, every decision that this administration makes is being carefully timed for the election. I'm sure there will be more resources and money spent trying to catch Bin Laden in the next few months than in the previous 2 and a half years combined. Rove is pulling all the strings in this country right now. It is what the Repubs always accused Clinton of doing taken to new extremes.

I have, for the most part, tried to stay out of the Democratic horse race blogging.

I came out leaning strongly to of Clark a couple of months ago, but truth be told he has disappointed me with his one act play. He doesn't fully grasp that in order to win this war, the Democrats are going to have to attack the Republicans on their weakest flanks, not right up the gut strength on strength. Those weaknesses are the way they treat working class Americans and their families to benefit the upper echelon. Clark seems preoccupied to a fault with foreign policy and homeland security. The best thing that he has come up with is his tax policy and he almost never talks about it. He didn't say a single word about it at the last debate. I think he would be a great Secretary of State, mending fences with Europe and helping broker settlements in the middle east, but I don't have much faith in his ability to campaign effectively enough for the Presidency at this time.

I love many of Dean's policies, balanced budget and health care are winners, but he has never come across for me on a personal level. I really want to get behind the guy, but every time I see him speak I find myself turned off despite his message, and my guess is that a broad swatch of the American voting public will as well. This will give the Republicans their best defense, in that they excel at style over substance. You can lie and demagogue all you want in a style over substance debate and win every time. Democrats cannot think that the media will give equal treatment to the candidates from both parties.

For Bush mispeaking, stumbling and bumbling are terms of endearment (ain't it cute, you expect it so it's not news), for a Democrat those are signs of weakness that prove that they are unreliable or a waffler. It's been that way for the past 30 years and I don't see why it will change now, especially with the right wing media machine going full tilt.

I like Edwards populist message and his charm, and I think, as I have from the beginning, that he is an ideal VP consideration because of his ability to charm and his Southern roots. Also, I would love to see him groomed as a successor to whomever becomes President. With eight years under his belt he would be truly formidable at the top of the ticket. Right now, I think that he is a bit too green and unsecured in the areas that the Republicans want to attack in. Namely he has zero foreign policy experience and he doesn't handle questions on defense and international relations well.

Kerry, is an enigma. He has a good resume, but he just doesn't seem to make the right stands when the heat is on. He has been getting much better the last few weeks, but I think that many of us are still very concerned with his stances on things in the near past. One thing that has been brought up as a negative for Kerry, that I see as quite the opposite, is his willingness to use under the board tactics. I think that we will need someone who can fight a guerilla war while seeming to remain above the board in the general election. If he can manage to dig his spine out of his Vietnam memorabilia and take his case to the Capital lawn to fight for what is right, people will follow, if not, they'll turn off and resign themselves to four more years of the worst that political machine that this country has ever seen.

There's still a long way to go, we're at the first post, Kerry has sprinted to the inside and leads by a length. I hope the others can keep the heat on the President, as well as help the eventual nominee polish his rhetoric and policies into a winner this fall.

"While inspectors have been unable to unearth weapons of mass destruction, they have found new evidence that Saddam's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, Kay told The Washington Post in an interview in Tuesday editions.
Kay said the evidence consisted of contemporaneous documents and confirmations from interviews with Iraqis and indicated Saddam did make efforts to disarm well before Bush began making the case for war.
Democratic presidential contenders have grabbed onto Kay's conclusion on the absence of banned weapons.
"The administration did cook the books," Howard Dean told reporters Tuesday. "I think that's pretty serious."

"The federal deficit will hit a record $477 billion this year and get worse if lawmakers cut taxes or increase spending, the Congressional Budget Office projected Monday in a report sure to become ammunition in the election-year fight over red ink.

In its annual wintertime economic outlook, lawmakers' nonpartisan fiscal analyst also estimated that the deficit would ease to $362 billion in 2005, according to numbers obtained by The Associated Press.
The budget office also estimated that deficits for the decade ending in 2013 would total nearly $2.4 trillion. The August report foresaw deficits totaling $1.4 trillion over 10 years."

No, no, Bush promised that he has been and will spend less than the Clinton administration did on 'non homeland security' spending. That's a real laugh, because technically there was no 'home land security spending' when Clinton was in office. He ain't lying, he's just ain't tellin the truth.

By the way, they mention at the end of the article that those numbers are not taking into account making the tax cuts permanent or any other spending not already budgeted, say for instance the 40 to 100 billion that Bush will have to ask for for Iraq and Afghanistan next year.

"The CIA would not comment Sunday on Kay's remarks, although one intelligence official pointed out that Kay himself had predicted last year that his search would turn up banned weapons.

Kay said his predictions were not coming back to haunt me in the sense that I am embarrassed. They are coming back to haunt me in the sense of 'Why could we all be so wrong?'

The White House stuck by its assertions that illicit weapons will be found in Iraq but had no additional response on Sunday to Kay's remarks."

State of denial. The pieces of the story have come together rather nicely. The White House, wanted to finish the job in Iraq. They mulled all of the possible reasons that they could sell to the American people.
Sept 11, 2001 comes around, bingo, but how are they related. Direct link to the attack is a tenuous sell at best. Making the world a better place is a non starter. We know that they probably have some chemical weapons, lets go at it from the WMD angle. Its easy to skip stones from there to Al Queada, and we know that Saddam has used them before. Once we get in we'll find enough of the stuff buried in the desert or laying around in storage to silence our critics and shore up our base. We'll build our case based on the intel that we already have that supports this position. You don't need good analysis or vetting, because there's enough material out there stating that they have all of the this stuff that you can just cherry pick the good stuff and downplay the rest. Good enough lets go to war. If someone can convince me that this not exactly how this all went down, I'll buy you a doughnut.

"Two Halliburton Co. officials accepted up to $6 million in kickbacks from a Kuwaiti company that was awarded contracts to supply U.S. troops in Iraq, according to a newspaper report.
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Halliburton disclosed the alleged impropriety to the Pentagon inspector general's office this week, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Friday.
The two employees, who have been fired, worked for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root in Kuwait, the same division of the company involved in a highly scrutinized gasoline contract, the Journal said.
The newspaper said the new allegations do not involve the gasoline controversy, in which the company charged the Army more than double the price for fuel brought in from Kuwait than for gas from Turkey."
Boys will be boys.

Again, maybe I should be a CIA guy, I've been saying this for months and I don't even have field agents to tell me what I can figure out for myself by bothering to 'read'. /snark>
"Yesterday's warning starkly contradicts the upbeat assessment given by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address earlier this week.
The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington, said officials.
The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the US occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.
Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue. 'Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time,' said one intelligence officer."
'They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both feel they've been betrayed by the United States before.'
These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Mr Bush, his top national security aides and the chief US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer.
Another senior official said the concerns of a civil war were not confined to the CIA.
They were 'broadly held within the Government,' including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.
Top officials are scrambling to save the US exit strategy after concluding that Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by June 30.
The CIA has not yet put its officers' warnings about a potential Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior official said he expected a formal report 'momentarily'.
'In "

Hans Christian Cheney at it again, spinning shit into gold to please rumpletheyaintgotnowmdskin. It's not just a river in Egypt, it's what's for breakfast and the American people are eating it by the handsfull.

Saw this linked on Kos. Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say."

This makes me completely sick. The government has truely and utterly been taken over by despots. The laws mean nothing to these people and the press gives them a free pass at every turn. Again we'll have to see how this is glossed over and forgotten. The audacity of this cadre is an unbelievable as the press that is complicit with their agenda. I have long held out against the doomsayer, conspiricy crowd but I cannot fathom any scenario where a Democrat can possibly win the fall election.

"President Bush (news - web sites) may seek an additional $40 billion or more for military operations in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) next year -- on top of the $400-billion military budget he will send to Congress next month, congressional sources and budget analysts said on Wednesday.
But Bush is unlikely to send the request to Congress until after the November presidential election to minimize any political damage, the sources said....
Kosiak said the emergency request could total $40 billion to $50 billion.
Other analysts and congressional aides said it could be closer to $75 billion or $100 billion. U.S. military plans hinge on a smooth hand-over of political power by June 30 and rebuilding the Iraqi Army.
"They're playing it week by week because they don't know ... Things could go worse than expected or they could go better than expected," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy research group. "

This is what happens when you let your political advisor run the country. Iraqi elections shoved into the campaign time frame, and spending pushed back. Want to put money on whether they plan the Syria hit for just after the elections as well?

In a letter to U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert dated Jan. 20 and obtained by Reuters on Wednesday, 10 former CIA analysts and operatives called the disclosure of Plame's identity a "shameful event in American history" that had damaged national security.
"Congress must send an unambiguous message that the intelligence officers tasked with collecting or analyzing intelligence must never be turned into political punching bags," the letter said, saying such leaks jeopardized the work and safety of intelligence professionals and their sources......
Separately, a group of Democrats led by Rep. Rush Holt (news, bio, voting record) of New Jersey on Wednesday introduced a "resolution of inquiry" that asks the president, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and Attorney General to give the House of Representatives all documents in their possession relating to the disclosure of Plame's identity.
The documents sought included telephone and electronic mail records, logs and calendars, personnel records, and records of internal discussions for the period May 6 through July 31 last year, a statement from Holt, who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said.
"Six months after a syndicated columnist disclosed the name of an undercover CIA operative, the White House and the Department of Justice (news - web sites) have yet to find and hold accountable the person or persons who revealed her identity," Holt said.
"The Department of Justice investigation has the full support of Congress and should be vigorously pursued, but it is not enough," he said.

Going nowhere fast.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Just when you thought the Bush administration's disdain for America's working families couldn't get any worse, along comes another cynical move to prove you wrong.

This time it's the Labor Department putting out tips for employers on how they can avoid paying overtime to low-income workers when the government's new rules on overtime pay go into effect in March.

A cheat sheet, if you will, for employers.

{snip}

The ink is still wet on the new overtime eligibility rules, but Bush administration officials are already offering employers tips on how they can cheat these low-income workers out of their new overtime benefits. Suggestions include a "payroll adjustment" to convert workers' annual pay to an hourly rate, then cut the hourly rate so that annual pay is unchanged after overtime is paid.

*************************************

It is time, it seems, to bring back the classic question from the McCarthy hearings: "In the end, Mr Bush, have you no shame, sir? Have you, sir, no shame at all?"

"President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May, officials said last week.


A growing number of commission members had concluded that the panel needs more time to prepare a thorough and credible accounting of missteps leading to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the White House and leading Republicans have informed the panel that they oppose any delay, which raises the possibility that Sept. 11-related controversies could emerge during the heat of the presidential campaign, sources said"

Politics at it's worst. Putting the 'election' ahead of every other national priority, it makes me sick to the core of my being that they are being given a free pass by the press and the American People, for what should get them ridden out on a rail.

"Consider these events and revelations earlier this month:

• The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released an exhaustive study, which concluded: ``Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.''

• On the same day, State Secretary Colin Powell finally conceded that there never had been any ''concrete evidence'' of Iraqi ties to al Qaeda, contradicting himself on the ''sinister nexus'' that he conjured up for the U.N. Security Council last February.

• Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said that during his two years in the president's cabinet, ``I never saw anything I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction.''

• But the most damaging revelation came from an internal Iraqi document -- this time, happily, not a forged one -- confirming that a high-level order to destroy all chemical and biological weapons was carried out in the summer of 1991 (there were no nuclear weapons). U.S. officials learned of this in mid-1995 from what intelligence officers would call ''a reliable source with excellent access.'' Everything else he told us has checked out"

Was I the only one who saw the 20/20 interview with Hussein Kamel, where he said that he had given the order to destroy all of their WMD's. He was later lured back to Iraq and killed. Now that could have been an elaborate ruse, but, don't you think 'someone' in the Bush administration could have told the President of this information. My guess is, and I think it has been pretty much borne out, that they wouldn't have cared.

WOW!
"Gun appears in court tomorrow accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly leaking details of a secret US 'dirty tricks' operation to spy on UN Security Council members in the run-up to war in Iraq last year. If found guilty, she faces two years in prison. She is an unlikely heroine and those who have met her say she would have been happy to remain in the shadows, had she not seen evidence in black and white that her Government was being asked to co-operate in an illegal operation.

The leak has been described as 'more timely and potentially more important than The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated whistleblower who leaked papers containing devastating details of the US involvement in Vietnam, in 1971. Ellsberg has been vocal in support of Gun. She was arrested last March, days after The Observer first published evidence of an intelligence 'surge' on UN delegations, ordered by the GCHQ's partner organisation, the National Security Agency."

Now, if true, this takes things to a whole new level. Now we'll have to see if this gets any traction at all in the US press. My bet is 'no'. (Bold type above added by me)

"An Idaho lab has released conclusive results showing 36 mortar shells recently unearthed in southern Iraq contained no chemical warfare agent, the Danish army said Sunday.

Initial examinations by Danish and British troops had indicated a blister agent was in the shells, which apparently date to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The shells were found north of Basra on Jan. 9.

But tests by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho came back negative, the Danish Army Operational Command said in a statement. The results confirmed earlier findings by a U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group that was dispatched to the site in southern Iraq after the shells were found."

The only reason I can figure that they are letting these reports out, before they know for sure is to keep up the publicmisperceptionn that we have found WMD's. There can be no other reason to bring in reporters and splash unsubstantiated claims across the airwaves and print media. It's propaganda for the terminally short attention spanned public. WE'VE FOUND THEM!!! No wait, it wasn't anything after all (whisper).

"President Bush will use next week's State of the Union address to try to revive a proposal that would allow younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market, the White House said Friday.
His election-year agenda also calls for pressing Congress to make already-enacted tax cuts permanent, such as the elimination of inheritances taxes and reductions in capital gains taxes. Bush is likely to renew his push for a new kind of tax-preferred savings accounts that could be used for retirement, college, health care or other purposes."

Hear that giant flushing sound? That's your social security going down the corporate toilet. Shove as much money as you can into the coffers and let them take it all. Also, since the extremely wealthy don't have enough tax shelters already he'll create a new hure one, I wonder if a new Range Rover is counted in 'other purposes'.

As per usual, one cannot improve on the fine rants of columnists Mark Morford. From the headline to the closing comments, he is a force of nature. For example:

Mars Needs Dim Republicans
Dubya dons a shiny spacesuit, dreams of spending billions to meet little green men. The nation cringes

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, January 14, 2004

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------




Oh right, like this is exactly what we need.


Let us imagine the discussion: "Boys, the nation's in massive reeling record-breaking debt and morale's at an all-time low and disposable American soldiers are dying brutal horrific deaths every day over nothing at all except our greed and flagrant cronyism and corporate petrochemical profiteering.

"Our cities are gasping and health care is a joke and we've mauled Medicare beyond recognition, and we're plundering the living hell out of Social Security, the last remaining stable and sound fund left, to try and shore up our rapacious and gluttonous spending.

"There are no WMDs and our former allies openly resent us and the poll ratings are slipping and the big glops of warmongering lies are drying like blood stains into a carpet. And it's an election year. Damn.

"What's to be done? What could rally a wary country during its time of humiliated need and force-fed ignorance? What could turn this troubled nation around in the face of oily corporate war and fiscal gluttony and environmental savagery?

"Why, neato space stations on the moon, and sending men to Mars, that's what!"


*******************************************

I urge all readers of this blog to follow the link in the next story down, from ABC News. Learn and remember (before the story disappears from the site) that O'Neil is guilty of nothing more that inconveniently blurting truth.


He will be savaged over the next weeks, and likely prosecuted on a tissue-thin indictment. Today, while the link survives, we can learn that O'Neil's honest assessment truly does support the claims of the most wild-eyed liberal critics of this administration. Great catch, Gary!

"President Bush ordered the Pentagon to explore the possibility of a ground invasion of Iraq well before the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, an official told ABCNEWS, confirming the account former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill gives in a book written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind."

I'm in Central Mexico for a couple of days, glad to see Greg picking up my slack. Thanks Greg.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the O'Neil affair exposes White House hypocricy in its purest, most blatant form? Barely six months after the Plame outing, which took four months to be noticed .... and THEN took the Justice Department another week to secure the documents from the White House AND STILL allowed the White House Counsel's Office to review each document before turning it over......!

NOW, with O'Neil embarrassing the pResident politically, less than 24 hours elapse before they swing into high gear in his investigation with NO warning, NO legal screen. He will be crucified as the "liberal" media stand around pointedly NOT watching, filing their nails and filing reports on Jacko and Scott Peterson.


We are so screwed........... Any who dare oppose this junta must prepare and expect to be destroyed, and no one will speak up for them. No one.

"A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat."
Like say, ohh, I don't know, errr....Iraq.

"Civilians in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office are pushing for military action against Syria and have drawn up plans for punitive airstrikes and cross-border incursions by U.S. forces, three officials said. They are not considering an invasion, they said.

But Bush's White House advisers, backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department, are arguing against the military venture with much of the U.S. military tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan and a presidential election year under way.

That view appears to have prevailed for now.

"We've got all we can handle, and then some, in Iraq, and our military is either stretched to the breaking point or already broken," said one senior administration official."

"Kurt Cobain was, ladies and gentleman, a worthless shred of human
debris." Rush Limbaugh the very day the lead singer of Nirvana
committed suicide due to a drug addiction.


I can understand the selfish callous disregard of conservatives, it's their pride in it that passes me by

"Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts on Friday from a CBS interview. "

Confidence inspiring isn't it.

"Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts on Friday from a CBS interview. "

COnfidence inspiring isn't it.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent in December to the lowest level in 14 months, but employers finished the year without many help wanted signs for the holidays, adding just 1,000 new jobs.

The 0.2 percentage point drop in the jobless rate occurred because fewer people were looking for work, the Labor Department said Friday. More than 300,000 people gave up their search for jobs and dropped out of the pool of available workers.



``The rate is going down, but it is going down for the wrong reasons,'' said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services, noting that it fell not because people were finding work. ``That doesn't make you feel really good about the state of the jobs market.''

"Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged Thursday that he saw no “smoking gun, concrete evidence” of ties between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida terror network, but he insisted that Iraq had dangerous weapons and needed to be disarmed by force....

Three experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a report Thursday that the Bush administration systematically misrepresented the weapons threat from Iraq and that U.S. strategy should be revised to eliminate the policy of unilateral preventive war.

“It is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons that officials claimed were present without the United States detecting some sign of this activity,” said the report by Jessica T. Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich.

Mathews is president of Carnegie, an independent research group, while Cirincione is director of the proliferation project and Perkovich is vice president for studies.

"One man said that now he was out, he would take any opportunity to attack U.S. troops.
“I’m free, but now I will attack them,” he said.

The man, who would not give his name, said he was detained in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, several months ago and had been poorly treated by the Americans in Abu Ghraib, the prison where former President Saddam Hussein once kept his worst enemies.

Hearts and minds, hearts and minds, hear.....

Picking up with my earlier post, it occurs to me that everyone is talking about the illegal immigrant 'problem' in this country instead of asking the fundamental question of why we have so many illegal immigrants.
"Well dope, it's because they are coming here to get jobs and a better life for their families." is the answer. Right? Just get INS to ship them all back.
The problem is not that these people are coming here looking for a better life and doing so illegally, it is that there are businesses in the US that are willing to break the law to hire them illegally.
It is those businesses that must be shut down in order for the illegal immigration problem to slow down if not go away. And I do mean 'shut down', fining is obviously not a deterrent, shut them down and jail their owners. Those businesses provide the money that they are coming here looking for, take that away and the numbers will diminish. If the Mexican government shut down all the pharmacies illegally selling prescription drugs to Americans coming across the border to get them, would Americans cross the border to get their prescription drugs there? Hell no. This debate is being turned on its head on so many fronts it's not funny. One camp says deport them all, the other camp says let them stay and work if they are employed. It's a non-sequitur, if you don't dry up demand, the supply will just keep coming.

But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Now it's either one of two things, either people at the CIA need to lose their jobs for bungling the intelligence gathering, or someone at the White House, screwed the pooch on the call. My guess is probably both.

Lost in the debate, is the fact that the people who are currently employing these people are 'BREAKING THE LAW'!
It's one thing to grant amnesty to illegals, but the reason they are here is that there are businesses willing to break the law and hire them at slave wages to make a buck (yeah, I know the price of lettuce would go up otherwise yada yada). Is this an amnesty for the workers or the employers, or both? Is the demand for below the radar wages going to decrease? Will lettuce prices go up now anyway? Will guest workers be afforded any rights, or is this the modern day legalized slave trade?
Just curious.

34 wounded 1 killed, in another attack. and this also in the article : "Earlier Wednesday, U.S. troops said they destroyed a home in Fallujah, where enraged neighbors said a married couple was killed and their five children were orphaned.
The neighbors insisted the couple was innocent in an attack on the troops that led them to shell the house.
‘This is democracy? These corpses?’
'This is democracy? These corpses?' Raad Majeed asked at the hospital, gesturing at the remains of the couple, on gurneys covered with bloody sheets. 'It's a crime against humanity.'
The 82nd Airborne Division said its paratroopers acted after receiving 'two rounds of indirect fire' around 9 p.m. Tuesday."

and a C5 cargo plane was hit by a surface to air missle. Busy day for the 'Bring'm on!' crowd.

I have to wonder if the Terrorists are using our intel system against us now. If you wanted to disrupt an economy and air travel, you could go about hijacking an airliner somewhere and doing the damage, or you could just make the government think that is what you were going to do, over and over again, refining how they are getting their intelligence and ferreting out those who are a real danger to your organization or have been compromised. You also get the collateral benefit of the 'boy who cried wolf' syndrome or misdirection of defense resources while you carry out another plot by another method.
Just musing, been reading to many Tom Clancy novels, I guess.

Incredibly I had a conversation with a conservative friend of mine (long term conversion project) that mirrored this article almost precisely, from the British colonial history and methods to the Balkinazation of Iraq.

"Iraq's ethnic and religious dynamics involve conflicts that cut across and among Kurds, Turkmens, Shiites, Christians and Sunnis; many horrendous massacres; wholesale confiscations; and deep feelings of hatred and the need for revenge. Iraq's Shiites represent a 60 percent majority, which has suffered cruel oppression at the hands of the Sunni minority. While Iraq's Shiites are far from homogeneous, liberation has already fueled religious demagoguery among vying Islamic clerics and unleashed powerful fundamentalist movements throughout the country. Needless to say, these extremist movements are intensely anti-American, anti-secular, anti-women's rights and illiberal. Meanwhile, Iraq's 20 percent Kurdish minority in the north, mistrustful of Arab rule, represents another source of profound instability. Finally, as many have pointed out, Iraq's oil could prove a curse, leading to massive corruption and a destructive battle between groups to capture the nation's oil, its main source of wealth."

I'll refer back to my post on 11/14/03 on this matter:

"Between Iraq and a hard place

Is anyone surprised that the Bush administration's policies in Iraq are blowing around like the shifting sands of the desert? The more they try to dig out the deeper the hole gets, do you cut and run and leave a failed. Balkanized state in your wake as it appears we are content to do in Afghanistan, or do you sacrifice more lives to try to straighten out a poorly conceived, planned and executed war that is going to suck the life out of your presidency and your country. I commented on my blog early on that I saw no real way for their to be a happy ending in Iraq. It is a fractured society that was held together through brute force and tyranny much like Yugoslavia under Tito. There are real, deep and valid hatreds between the disparate groups in Iraq, and simply waving an American flag and giving out TV's is not going to solve that.

I foresee years of fractious conflict inside Iraq, with Turkey and Iran directly and indirectly supporting factions that support their interests. There's a lot of oil under that sand, so we can't let it go to complete shit like we are going to let Afghanistan. 'Elections' will be tainted with heavy doses of violence, so only areas with strong local security forces (Shiite areas) will likely see any turn out. Is America willing to accept an Islamist Shiite regime, pore billions into propping it up and leave it to fight off the Baathists for years of bloody conflict? That's the only outcome I can foresee with the 'plans' that the administration unveiled this week"

"Neil Bush's big paydays in the stock of Kopin Corp. of Taunton, Massachusetts, included the July 19, 1999, purchase and quick sale of stock as the company announced good news about a new Asian client that sent its stock value soaring.
Bush said he did not have any inside information from Kopin, and simply acted on a recommendation from his financial adviser.
'Any increase in the price of the stock on that day was purely coincidental, meaning that I did not have any improper information,' Bush said in e-mails to The Associated Press. 'My timing on this transaction was very fortunate.' "

Well if it looks, feels and smells like....

# posted by Gary @ 1/02/2004

After a few days to digest the Ashcroft recusement, I have come to the conclusion that the likely scenario is not that he had a conflict of interest and that some big fish is going to netted by the FBI, but that this move will, in the end make it more politically feasible for the investigation to draw no conclusion and hand down no real findings.
Notice that Ashcroft's people made point of noting that this new investigator is 'apolitical', even though he is a political appointee. By distancing himself and his office from the investigation, while at the same time keeping the reins on by giving it over to someone still obstensibly under his influence, Ashcroft can now let the investigation wither on the political vine from a safe distance and avoid it becoming an issue for his boss and his buddies in the months to come.
At some point the new investigation will find that there was probably misconduct on the behalf of members of the administration, but that there is insufficient evidence to hand down an indictment--Game Over.