Uber Alles

The Onion | Iraqis Arming Selves For Independence

2004-04-21T14:13:00.000-04:00

With little more than two months remaining until the American-led occupation force hands sovereignty to an interim government, Iraqi citizens are joyfully arming themselves in anticipation of independence.

"Saddam is overthrown! Praise Allah! Iraq is ours once more!" Baghdad native Alaa al-Khawaja said, as he busily shoved boxes of 7.62mm ammunition beneath the bed in his two-room home on the outskirts of Baghdad. "Now is the time for all citizens to prepare for our nation's glorious future—a future certain to contain wave after bloody wave of sectarian violence."

"Excuse me, now," al-Khawaja added. "I must barricade these doors and windows with sheet metal before the wonderful day of freedom arrives."

Also readying himself is Thaer Abbas, a Tikrit shopkeeper who sells handmade baskets, earthenware pots, and surplus AK-47s.

"God bless the USA! God bless Bush!" Abbas said. "America has delivered our country back into our hands, and soon, thousands of those hands will be raised in anger as mullahs and imams lead the fight over what little remains."

As the June 30 date for transfer of full authority to the interim government approaches, the dozens of political factions that comprise the liberated nation are readying themselves to assume rule.

"Finally, we will have the opportunity to lead our own nation and decide what is best for our people," said Shi'ite Muslim cleric Namir al-Safy. "Of course, by 'we,' I mean the Shi'ites."

Unfortunately this is probably more truth than parody.

MSNBC - Iraq war may require more money soon

2004-04-21T08:03:00.000-04:00

"Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, charged that the president is playing political games by postponing further funding requests until after the election, to try to avoid reopening debate on the war's cost and future.
Weldon described the administration's current defense budget request as 'outrageous' and 'immoral' and said that at least $10 billion is needed for Iraqi operations over the next five months"

Now anybody that has been paying attention, knew this months ago, I'll be curious to see how much, if any, air play this gets and what the reaction from the fiscal consevatives will be. Note, that this was a Republican making the above charges, Bush better start watching his back or he may get it from his own party in the end.

Fortune.com - Investing - A Conservative Case for Voting Democratic

2004-04-21T07:31:00.000-04:00

Democrats obviously are no pikers when it comes to spending. But the biggest impetus for higher spending is partisan uniformity, not partisan identity. Give either party complete control of government, and the Treasury vaults are quickly emptied. Neither Congress nor the President wants to tell the other no. Both are desperate to prove they can "govern"—which means creating new programs and spending more money. But share power between parties, and out of principle or malice they check each other. Even if a President Kerry proposed more spending than would a President Bush, a GOP Congress would appropriate less. That's one reason the Founders believed in the separation of powers.

Consider the record. William Niskanen, former acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has put together a fascinating analysis of government spending since 1953. Real federal outlays grew fastest, 4.8% annually, in the Kennedy-Johnson years, with Congress under Democratic control. The second-fastest rise, 4.4%, occurred with George W. Bush during Republican rule. The third-biggest spending explosion, 3.7%, was during the Carter administration, a time of Democratic control. In contrast, the greatest fiscal stringency, 0.4%, occurred during the Eisenhower years. The second-best period of fiscal restraint, 0.9%, was in the Clinton era. Next came the Nixon-Ford years, at 2.5%, and Ronald Reagan's presidency, at 3.3%. All were years of shared partisan control.

Bush officials argue that it is unfair to count military spending, but Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan also faced international challenges that impeded their domestic plans. Moreover, if you do strip out military spending and consider only the domestic record, GOP chief executives emerge in an even worse light. In terms of real domestic discretionary outlays, which are most easily controlled, the biggest spender in the past 40 years is George W. Bush, with expenditure racing ahead 8.2% annually, according to Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth. No. 2 on the list is Gerald Ford, at 8%. No. 3 is Richard Nixon. At least the latter two, in contrast to Bush, faced hostile Congresses.

Given the generally woeful record of Republican Presidents, the best combination may be a Democratic chief executive and Republican legislature. It may also be the only combination that's feasible, since in 2004 at least, it will be difficult to overturn Republican congressional control: Redistricting has encouraged electoral stasis in the House, while far more Democrats face reelection in the Senate. Thus, the only way we can realistically keep Congress and the President in separate political hands is to vote for John Kerry in November.

Shiite may hit the fan.

2004-04-16T13:46:00.000-04:00

Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, warned of a strong Shiite response if U.S. forces entered Najaf or Karbala to capture al-Sadr.

The holy cities are a “red line,” Mahdi al-Karbala’i, al-Sistani’s representative in Karbala, said during a sermon. “We are calling for peaceful solutions, but if the coalition forces are to cross the red line, then we'll take a different stronger position.”

Al-Sistani, a moderate who has opposed anti-U.S. violence, has enormous influence among Iraq’s Shiite majority.

If this happens, all bets are off in Iraq. The coalition (yeah right) has to back to here or face a general uprising in the south, which will be disasterous to say the least. Sistani, now having thrown his glove into the arena, is putting some weight behind Al-Sadr regardless of the eventual outcome.

Kerry's Strategy

2004-04-14T13:52:00.000-04:00

Is this John Kerry's strategy--lay low and let Bush self destruct? If it is then we are in serious trouble. I know that the campaign season is not yet officially upon us, but letting the other side frame the debate and steal all of the free media attention, whether its good or bad, seems to me to be a fundamental mistake. Kerry should be pounding on Bush right now, giving the American people a contrasting and seductive alternative message and capturing hearts and minds while there is some lingering doubts about Bush's ability to perform the office. What I am seeing from my vantage point, from Kerry, has been anemic at best and I keep having Dukakis flash backs. Hope that that analogy doesn't carry any further forward for all our sakes. I'm not sure this country will survive another four years of this administration at its absolute worst (mark my words, it will be worse without re election hanging over its head). I was kidding my wife about going to check out Vancouver this summer to see how we liked it up there, but I was only partly kidding and she knew it.

MSNBC - Panel says Bush saw repeated warnings

2004-04-14T11:35:00.000-04:00

I can't wait to see the apologist defense of this one. Kinda knocks heads with what Condi and Bush have been saying, now doesn't it?
'Blinking red'
"The system was blinking red," Tenet told the commission in private testimony, the panel's report noted.

In this context, Bush "had occasionally asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States," the report said. Or as one U.S. senior official more intimately involved in the summer reporting paraphrased the president's question to the CIA: "This guy going to strike here?"

Press Conference

2004-04-14T07:48:00.000-04:00

I will admit that I missed most of the opening remarks, but that had to be the worst performance that I have ever seen by an elected official in the public arena. You would be hard pressed to come up with a coherent paragraph out his responses. I'm also glad that we are now spending our nations' resources doing God's work of freedom spreading, I'm guessing he consulted Falwell on that point to get the specifics.

I'm also glad to see that Saddam was a really bad guy and that we've removed him as a threat, though we don't exactly know now exactly what threat he posed...but hey we might just find some old mustard gas under a turkey farm, ya never know, and besides he had something to hide, that's for sure. If only those Iraqi's that knew where these things are weren't so scared (here's an idea for you, offer them a couple of million dollars and asylum in--- say, Malibu. Naw, they'd probably still be too scared to come forward, have you seen the size of the jugs on some of those infidels in Malibu? Better to sweat it out safely in the desert of Iraq.)

I'm guessing, and I'm going to go even farther out on my usual limb here, that we still don't have the foggiest idea how we're going to get those brown skinned guys over there to buy into a representative democracy--remember, the freedom thing is all God's idea, so if it doesn't work out don't blame Bush, it's God's fault.

Tet Offensive of 2004?

2004-04-12T11:35:00.000-04:00

I would like to move beyond Kennedy's assertion that Iraq has become Bush's Viet Nam to posit that the current devolution into civil war by the native insurgents aided by Islamists from outside has become Bush's Tet Offensive. This action by the Viet Cong has come to be seen by Vietnam historians as the turning point in American support for that war. While we in fact WON every major engagement of that war, these victories came at horrid costs - costs that the American public was palpably unwilling to pay.

THAT is the deciding factor. When the moms and dads of our young soldiers no longer are willing to support the mission upon which Bush has committed them, when the 19-year-old with the rifle realizes that the nation no longer supports him, the people he is supposedly liberating want to kill him, and the politicians (including his commander-in-chief) are lying to him ...... hope dies.

I just spent a half-hour speaking with a man I have known for 20 years or more - but never knew was a Viet Nam vet. He was speaking to these issues in Iraq. I asked him if he saw any parallells to Tet .... and the tears flowed. He said it felt EXACTLY like Tet, shattering beyond belief. He said he feels for the young men caught in this situation, knows their horror and despair. It was utterly moving to see this composed, successful businessman come apart in my office.

He HATES Bush, despises him in a way that only one who lived through such a betrayal could. I dare to think that there are hundreds of thousands like him out there. I almost dare to hope.

Bush's Vietnam?

2004-04-07T08:57:00.000-04:00

At first blush, I just waved off Kennedy's speech about this being Bush's Vietnam as over-the-top political rhetoric. The kind of straw man thing that the Republicans do all the time. But having reflected on it for a couple of days, I now see that I was wrong. The Vietnam analogy is indeed very apt here.

The very fact that this country will forever be divided about, the motives, execution, cost and outcome of this war places it very firmly into the Vietnam realm on the scale of bad decisions. If there was a way for this to be half-assed by the political backers of this war, it was.

The military did a splendid job of taking the country, but were not given the resources, manpower and plan to be successful thereafter. The problem for Bush is his and his administration's utter unwillingness to admit that any of this is anything but according to plan. I think that most Americans can see that things have not gone as planned for the most part, and that simply shrugging and saying that the deaths of our soldiers a year into this thing is all part of the plan and completely expected, is just as unbelievable as them saying that they had absolutely no idea what the cost of the war was going to be before hand.

I realize that there are a great many people who think that they see a 'long term' solution in play here, and that the seeds of a peaceful, cooperative middle east are being sown at a bearable short term cost. I would ask those same people, what they have seen so far about the way this administration has gone about its business that points to their ability to deliver on any kind of sensible long range planning?

If we'd put the boots on the ground to be able to pacify and provide security in Iraq to begin with, I do not believe that we would be having nearly as many problems as we have had. First of all the looting could have and should have been stopped in the beginning, with more boots this would have been possible. Secondly, it would have been far easier to win hearts and minds in a secure environment.

It's kind of hard to get people to see their 'liberation' as a good thing if they are worried about their and their family's basic security and amenities--again, more boots up front would have smoothed the way.

The insurgents have found purchase in Iraq, because the people there don't see any real difference between what they are offering them and what the Americans, canned up in the Green Zone, are offering them. We brought in a cadre of exiles to rule Iraq under the auspices of the CPA, tell the Iraqis that we want to let them pick their own leaders but then do not offer a plan as to how that is going to happen and expect them to embrace this with all their hearts?

These are for the most part a tribal people, used to a oppressive regime to keep their tribal traditions and feuds in check. We have let that djinni completely out of the bottle without offering any real alternative or future that they can understand. They know nothing about American style democracy there, they don't have the vaguest idea of what western style freedom means to their daily lives or their religion.

The Koran, bleeds into the secular life of its followers in a way the Christianity never came close to. The middle east is much more akin to the European middle ages that was ruled by feudal lords with the backing and blessing of the Church, than it is to the Enlighment period in early America. This is not simply a matter of opening up polls and letting the sunshine in, this is a major paradigm shift in a culture that has not been prepared for it. Democracy had to evolve, the idea that Church and State needed to be separated from each other for each of them to thrive was a huge step in thinking on the part of a few influential European outcasts and was brought about because of cultural movements that do not exist in the middle east now.

Think about it, if the Koran is god's law, and it provides the answers to all questions in daily life, the imposition of the 'law of man', in the form secular, modern constitution, has to, in many ways supplant that. There are a great many people here in the US who can't wrap their minds around the idea of a law outside of the Bible, and the Bible is not near the tome that the Koran is with respect to law. Hell, most of the cultural divide that we have in this country is still about the separation of religious law from secular law. The founders won a battle early on but the war still rages in full fury after 200 years. Now we expect the Iraqi's to some how get this in a matter of a year and a couple of months, then go along their merry way and start pumping oil for us?

The problem here is not that the idea of a democracy in Iraq is impossible, it is that there obviously and admittedly was no thought put into how it was going to be done. Saying that that will be left to the Iraqis is like asking a toddler to pick their college major and stick to it. Half-assed planning and execution is what is going to doom this Iraq endeavor and put it side by side with Vietnam in the annals of great American foreign fuck ups, not the idea of making a free society there. "Gooooood morning Iraq!"

MSNBC - More GIs die; cleric threatens further violence

2004-04-06T10:53:00.000-04:00

"The confrontation with al-Sadr - whose militia waged fierce battles with coalition troops on Sunday - and the offensive against Fallujah appeared to be a tougher approach by U.S. forces ahead of a planned June 30 handover of power to an Iraqi government."

Well, I was kind of hoping that this had come to a head yesterday and that things would settle down, but unlike the Bush administration I generally don't use hope as the basis for my policies, and I am yet to draw my family into any unnecessary wars or prolonged nation building exercises, and I have not been attacked by terrorists yet either.

I am, thinking of raising taxes on my childrens' allowances to help pay for some public works projects (landscaping) this spring, but I'm not sure I can muster the super majority to pass that one (my wife is a notorious household tax hawk--I won't even mention the usage tax fight that we had last session, we wrangled endlessly on what was going to be considered 'usage' and in the end I completely withdrew the proposal.)

I didn't mean for this to devolve into that, but what else is there to say. Josh Claybourne had a post about changing Iran and Iraq's images by changing their names to Persia and Babylonia respectively, I thought maybe Bushylonia or Clusterfuck (The name consensus name given by the troops getting shot up there now.)

I've added some more excellent blog links over to the side if anyone is interested. The new ones are Annatopia a nice progressive blog that's been around for quite awhile, I finally got a link up to The Washington Monthly, where Calpundit's Kevin Drum now eloquates, the Tacitus link is now pointing to his new site, though the content isn't any better, the site is a bit more legible. I've added the very popular libertarian Volokh as well. Basically I got tired of going to other blogs to hit those links and finally encoded them here. And while I'm on the subject of blogs I would like to point out that Michael (one of my few readers here) at 2millionthweblog has been doing some of the very best work in the blogsphere recently and if you haven't checked out his site you are cheating yourself of some very nice reads and insight.

Iraq beginning of the end?

2004-04-05T13:40:00.000-04:00

Can we all agree now that Iraq is not a blossoming paradise in the sand and that the occupation hasn't gone near as well as Bushco. told us it would?

The blogsphere is all over this one for sure, and I won't pretend to know what the hell the CPA was thinking, but I will go out on a limb and say that this was 'not' a good week for our efforts to bring the American dream to the middle east.

I expect that operation 'ignore it and it will go away', otherwise known as the Bush Presidency, is going to have a hard time spinning this pile of shit into gold. One thing that is for certain is that if we take Sadr into custody all bets are off. He has been consolidating power and biding his time for months, the hat has been tipped early, but I suspect that we have forced him to make his grab now rather than after the hand over. If I were him, I would disappear for a while and let the Americans go back to ignoring me until there was a real opportunity to grab real power.

Taking a jaunt

2004-03-29T16:10:00.000-05:00

I'm taking my monthly jaunt to Mexico through the rest of the week, so I'll probably not be blogging (for the 5 or so people who actually read this drivel). It was a beautiful weekend here in Indiana and I spent as much time outside landscaping as I possibly could, so I feel kind of politically cleansed. I didn't watch Condi Rice, or Meet the Press, or any of the other get-your-ire-up shit that I normally do. I dug holes and got incredibly sunburned and lost about five pounds of that post hernia surgery weight that I had put on (another five and I'll be buff again.)
I've been perusing the blogsphere as usual this morning, but I can't quite get fired up enough to rip anything particularly insightful so I'll leave it at that.

Maybe a few Negra Modelo's and some real taco's will put the spirit back into me. Nothing like seeing a two class society like Mexico to put the good ole rage back in place. I once remarked to a friend after returning to US after a long stay in a nice villa in central Mexico that the rich people there have it particularly nice, 8 bucks a day to buy someone's labor for anything and constant reinforcement for how superior you are. Kick backs and bribery are a way of life and business there (starting to sound like I'm describing the GOP convention, doesn't it).

Just jokin'

2004-03-26T15:41:00.000-05:00

I really don't care about whether Bush was joking about not being able to find WMD's. I think anyone predisposed to tar him will tar him for it and those who would forgive a gay relationship with the prince of darkness will look the other way as well.

What I do find amusing is that after doggedly refuting that WMD's didn't exist even after the Kay report came out, that the President doesn't see that his credibility in this regard is totally blown. There were those who still held onto his and Cheney's insistence that even though David Kay said that they weren't going to find any weapons that they were still probably there.

I guess the slide show was his way of letting these people down easy--hah, hah... I meant that we should invade Iraq because Saddam's really, really, really, really bad, I mean much worse than you probably think, and the Iraqi's well they might not seem grateful now, but give them a few months and they will be welcoming us with parades and flowers like we said they would. People who are sticklers for the truth are tainted and unpatriotic--everyone knows that, that's why there are so many of these lying crooks quitting our administration and saying bad things about us. They all sound the same, cause they are all telling the same lies, no doubt a liberal conspiracy to impeach the integrity of the president.

I love the retreat into morality that the supporters of this have gone into. There were tons of reasons to go into Iraq, WMD's were just a side show. If they weren't actively sponsoring the terrorists they at least look and sound an awful lot like those guys, right? Look how grateful those people are.

Those heathens needed liberating and it is incumbent on the US to provide liberation and rebuilding help to those who need it (unless you are Tutsi, Congolese or other such oil poor chattel). The great healing of the middle east is at hand folks, let there be no mistake and evidence to the contrary be damned.

More on Clarke

2004-03-25T09:50:00.000-05:00

I knew that Richard Clarke was going to do some damage to Bush yesterday. I had absolutely no idea about the depth and completely damning nature of that damage though. The fact that the White House is in full battle, spin, nuance and flat out lie mode points to how damaging they see his revelations.
If all the Republicans can come up with is that he is waffling (where have we heard that line of attack before? hmmm.) and trying to sell books, then they really have been caught red handed. I kind of fear for Clarke's life now, no kidding. Fox news released a patched together, scurrilous transcript (see Talking Points Memo). How can this even be legal? It shows how utterly desperate that they are, hell maybe no one will notice. Rush will spout it back to the faithful and Condi will repeat it (shameless liar) and it will enter into the cult fiction circle of the trashy right wing media/blog sphere.

Richard Clarke road in on a pale horse yesterday and laid waste to the core of Bush's presidency. Whether the American people will see that is the real question. The core on the right has their heads buried up to their ankles in the sand right now, so it to those who still have not made up their minds, and those who are not lock step and blind on the right that we must now put our faith in. It is a long time until November, but the Bush camp is bloodied and reeling right now. Here's to hoping that this is their Waterloo.

Refreshing candor

2004-03-24T15:54:00.000-05:00

Hearing Clarke's opening testimony today, saying that the government and he personally had failed the American people, silhouetted poignantly how no one and I mean no one, in the Bush admin has taken the personal blame for a single thing that has happened in this country since they came into power.

If nothing else that should stand in stark contrast to the mealy mouthed excuse peddling and blame shifting that Powell and Co. spewed yesterday.

Clarke stopped the Buck just stopped for the first time in three years and it didn't come even close to where it should have and that is the real tragedy of our current Government. That is what people are really Hungary for, that is why they always demonized Clinton.

Please, someone stand up and say 'hey, I screwed up and am willing to live with the consequences." Give the American people some shred of integrity that they can go to the mat for. The ability to convey forgiveness is the ultimate power that can be bestowed on a person and our politicians absolutely refuse to allow us that.

Most of this country has suffered some form of trauma over the past three years, whether it was from terror, war, or the economy. The fact that there is no sense of shared sacrifice of accountability weakens the whole fiber of our society. The Right likes to couch this feeling in terms of 'moral drift', the Left in 'inequity', but it is neither, it is the erosion of the sense of shared burden, shared reward. All we get from our leaders is, have more money in your pocket, don't worry about where it is coming from. People are dying, but they aren't you or your children so don't worry be happy, enjoy the tax rebate, hope it makes up for your lost salary. Go on, go buy yourself something pretty, do it for America.

I'm back

2004-03-23T09:34:00.000-05:00

Had to take a break for a while and reassess my writing priorities. But I'm back to blogging, at least lightly for a while.

It has been utterly amazing and predictable, this discussion about whether Bush did anything about terror prior to 9/11 and his assertion that he was 'all up in it'. Both are utterly ridiculous.

It is obvious that Bush came into the White House intent on doing things as differently from Clinton as he possibly could. I'm absolutely positive that Clarke's account of what happened is mostly accurate, but I am also sure that there is a tilt in the he said/she said nature of the back and forth.

Anyone who believes that Bush was taking terrorism seriously and had a 'plan' to take out Al Queda before 9/11 must also believe in the tooth fairy as do those who think that he was some how complicit in the attack by looking the other way.

I find it more appalling personally that the Bush team will not, under any circumstances admit to anything but full competence and foresight on any issue. Anything that trips them up is or was 'beyond their control' or the work of evil. The President was reveling in his new power, loping taxes and preparing for the 'remoralization' of the nation after the sinful Clinton years. Fighting terrorism wasn't even remotely on his agenda. It was Clarke's job.

I'm in charge of a multi company IT infrastructure, the CEO of the company doesn't give the smallest bit of a shit about what my priorities are for the most part. He knows I exist and that what I do is important to his company, but it isn't until there is a major disaster on the network somewhere that my problems become 'his' priority. My boss comes running to me to see what went wrong so that he can explain it to his boss and the CEO all of a sudden becomes an IT expert for an hour while he explains the problem to some customer who didn't get what he was expecting because of the network problem.

Now the fact that I might have warned my boss that this problem could occur and asked for something to be done about it, doesn't mean that the CEO was willing to give us the budget to fix the problem before it happened, he had other things to worry about that seemed far more important than replacing an expensive router in Mexico or putting in a backup frame relay circuit.

Am I pissed?

Hell yeah, the shit is coming down on me because of something that I had warned them about.

Everyone in the company knows about the bad thing that happened and knows that I had a part in it.
I tell everyone who will listen that the Jackasses up top wouldn't give me money or resources to head off the problem.

They deny that they really ever knew it was a problem, or say that they were working on it, because they found my email about it and remembered that they hadn't done anything about it (if they ever intended to in the first place.)

Everyone's mad, I get my money, fix a bunch of other problems as well, because I am a priority now and deep down the CEO knows he screwed up in the first place and the cycle repeats in a couple of years.

I think that this is exactly what happened in the Government. In fact I'd be willing to bet just about anything on it. Both sides look at the shadows that they cannot see into and see evil. It's just a fucking closet.

"Free to Pee in Your Morning Cereal"

2004-03-02T14:54:00.000-05:00

This is one seriously great over-the-top rant on a deadly serious issue:

"Give The Breakfast Cereal Industry Immunity from Law Suits!

Call your congressman today and let them know that if Tony the Tiger wants to take a big steaming dump in your breakfast bowl, he should be able to do so without fear that some whining idiot like you will file a lawsuit against him. If Captain Crunch wants to put heroin and crack in your morning meal, the good Captain should be able to do so knowing you can't do a damn thing about it."

"If the gun industry gets immunization from "pending and future lawsuits," I want immunization for my products, too. It's just that simple -- the freedom to screw up your life and then give you the finger."

Follow the links on the site for some quality background information on this legislation (or just sit back and enjoy the flaming sarcasm!)

Peace and Prosperity marches on: Blasts kill scores at Iraqi Shiite shrines

2004-03-02T07:23:00.000-05:00

Hate to say it but this is the US's fault, we are directly and lawfully responsible for security in the captured country and we can't provide even the most basic level of stability and security in that country. Every one of those deaths is at our feet. The very fact that these sites are being guarded by armed militia brings up strains of Somalia. The American forces there have pulled back into their hardened fortresses and are letting the country try to stabilize itself, but I guess with an election coming up here, we have to do what is necessary--heh George.

C4 News - World - US Politics - The unseen cost of the war in Iraq

2004-02-26T10:07:00.000-05:00

"More than 11,000 medical evacuees have come through Andrews in the past nine months, the Air Force says.
Most, we suspect, from Iraq. But that's 8,000 more than the Pentagon says have been wounded there.
Most of those wounded in action come through the vast Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington...The Pentagon lists 2,604 wounded in action and just 408 'non-hostile wounded'.
But the Army says many thousands more have been medically evacuated from the conflict zone.
Why the discrepancy? Well, the Pentagon doesn't count as victims soldiers who come back with brain injuries or psychiatric disorders, those hit by friendly fire or those who've crashed in their military vehicles.
You could call them 'the missing wounded' of Operation Iraqi Freedom....Steve Robinson is no anti-war liberal. A former Special Forces soldier with 20 years' service, he now briefs Presidents. He believes we're not being told the full story.
"People don't want bad news stories coming out from this war and at every level where I need information, every time I need information from the Department of Defense or the Department of Veterans' Affairs, about the injuries of this war, I run unto obstacles. None of this is national security. None of this will cause the collapse of the coalition. It's just information that we need to understand what's happening."

Day from hell

2004-02-25T16:18:00.000-05:00

I've been backed up like crazy today and have not had a moment to even peruse the news much less comment on anything. I will say a couple of things off the cuff though, I'm kinda pissed so hang with me here.

Gay marriage--first of all who really cares other than religious tight asses. I have commented in the past that the state ought to be out of the marriage business altogether, that it should be a church sanctioned institution and that the state should impart legal partnership status to all people who want it asterms of their relationship. I know it sounds cold, but hell they already have 'common law' marriage anyway, this basically protects mutual assets in a long term relationship where one party does not want to get married legally. The whole practical basis for the state to sanction and pass laws concerning marriage was to protect women who could not necessarily fend for themselves if their husbands left them. Now of course that goes both ways, why not add a third and call it done. If the word 'marriage' makes some bible thumpers prickly remove it from the debate and let them stammer (BTW I'm a Deist, so it doesn't matter to me in the least).

Bush is doing his one trick pony act in the way he is going at Kerry right now. He's too undependable, you need steady leadership not a 'waffler' for President. Blah, blah, blah da dee, fucking blah. Steady leadership has shown itself to be no more than backfilling ends management. No matter what the problem they have the exact same solution. Remember the initial tax cuts he proposed, they were because the surplus was so large that the money needed to be given back to those who had earned it, then the recession started so that exact same tax cut was now 'economic stimulus', then jobs started going away in droves so it mutated to a 'jobs bill', I won't even get into the reasons we needed to invade Iraq. If that adds up to 'steady' leadership, I'll take schizophrenic, bi-polar, mad waffler leadership any day.

Whether the American (read gullible) electorate can see the difference I have little faith, but maybe that will be enough. Georgie has genuinely pissed off a great many people who voted for him last time and maybe the boogie man that they are trying to turn Kerry into won't be as frightening as what these people have had to go through for the past 4 years.

My NEA rant.

2004-02-23T22:46:00.000-05:00

When the secretary of fraud education calls the NEA a terrorist organization, his ass needs to be ridden out on a rail. I listened to a Republican pundit the other night (yeah, I'm horrible with names) saying in the same breath that teachers' unions were the cause of all the public school system ills and then that teachers were underpaid, and I almost puked.

My lovely wife has taught in public schools for 19 years, has a masters plus a crap load of credits towards her doctorate and has taught for three years without a contract or a dime of pay increase and the only thing that has kept her from taking massive cuts in pay and benefits numerous times over the years is the pesky education ruining teachers' union.

The Union provides legal services for teachers who get sued, and the only collective bargaining power that they could hope to have since as state employees they cannot legally strike or withhold services. I made half again as much teaching as an adjunct on weekends at a local private university as she does teaching full time at the top of the pay scale. The administrators in the schools system have gotten a double digit increase in pay over the same period of time that she has worked without a contract and the union is only asking for 2.5% which will barely cover cost of living, not to mention the 40+% that her health insurance out-of-pocket has gone up over that period. To put that into perspective the administration has given the bus drivers a 3% per year increase over this time without any negotiations to speak of.

Here in the state of Indiana we have one of the very highest rates of teachers with Master's degrees of any state in the country yet we lag way behind in pay and benefits and there is absolutely no binding arbitration.
In fact, the state appointed arbiter that has been trying to work through the impasse quit last week because the administration refused to acknowledge the language that they had agreed to with her in her written notes, basically told her that she was lying and took everything that they had offered off of the table. There is absolutely no recourse that the teachers can take and the administration has no reason to settle anything. Sound shitty?

I want the Secretary of Education to explain how that is any way sane. If teachers were paid any worse, treated with any less respect, vilified or trivialized any more, we would have to get illegal immigrants to do the job, because no one in the US in their right mind would do it (maybe that is another outsourcing market to tap for the good of America--Phir Melingi, Danuwad).

CNN.com - Pakistan forces in bin Laden hunt - Feb. 23, 2004

2004-02-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

Hurry, there's and election coming! Time to get serious about this war on 'terra', and mop it up before the summer campaign season starts. It doesn't look like there are any more low hanging rogue nation fruit to pick, and people are growing a bit weary of the constant non-threat threat alerts.

The economy is not going like gangbusters (at least for the average American) and no new jobs seem to be forthcoming so we had better go ahead and try to get Osama now.

Unlike many of my more zealous left side brothers, I hope that we catch Bin Laden sometime soon. Parade him or his body out in front of the world and let Bush do a mug shot holding a revolver to his head. He'll get his 'Osama' bounce and then in a month or so, people will realize that they really don't feel all that much more secure because they still don't know if they will have a job in six months, or money to pay for their kids' College, or decent health care.

Foreign policy is usually mostly a secondary vote for all but Republicans and the Dems are not going to get that vote anyway. It is the disenfranchised independent and the core Democrat that we have to make sure get to the polls, they are the ones who are going to vote the pocket books over machismo. That is what is going to determine the election ultimately, not whether Bush finally has gotten Bin Laden.

MSNBC - U.S. troops expected to remain in Iraq for years

2004-02-20T08:42:00.000-05:00

Senior Pentagon officials said Thursday they were confident that the Iraqis, once given political control, would agree U.S. troops should stay. But some outside the government question whether that would hold true once an elected Iraqi government took over.

Anthony Cordesman, a close observer of the Iraq situation as a strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that if political control was turned over on July 1 to an Iraqi body that is not elected, it likely would align itself with U.S. objectives and therefore welcome a continued U.S. military presence. But once elections were held, the U.S. role would be in doubt, he said.

If the new Iraqi government decided it wanted American forces to leave, "We would certainly be obligated to leave, under international law," Cordesman said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's chief spokesman, Lardie Di Rita, told reporters at the Pentagon that there is a "fairly confident belief" that most Iraqis accept the U.S. view that American troops will be needed over the long haul to ensure a stable transition to democracy.

The basis for a continued U.S. military presence under the authority of a transitional Iraqi government is "being developed," Di Rita said without elaborating.

Well, if we've spent something like $150 billion in Iraq, they elect a hardline government more sympathetic to Iran than to the US and ask us to leave, have we not just completely pissed away the $150 billion so that Iraq can become the land of the political assassination once more? Would the Bushies just stand by and take it like the 'men' that they proport themselves to be? Me thinks something doesn't smell right with that scenario.

There is no way in hell that the new Iraqi government can be 'democratically' elected and stable. That is why you are seeing all of this, 'there are many ways of selecting a new government' rhetoric.

This is a country where historical regime change has meant death not transition teams. It's kinda like expecting fair elections in Russia, or a dog to meow, or Bush to tell the truth. It flat ain't gonna happen more than once in a row.

The upshot to this whole mess, is that we didn't get the security situation on the ground handled correctly to begin with. If we had deployed a massive force to quell the looting and bring order to Iraq from the go, many of those who are now calling for death to Americans because they have become the prey of crime gangs or lost loved ones in attacks or don't have electricity or water or a job, would not exist and there would be a great deal less sympathy and help for the resistance.

Everyone keeps saying that we are making the best of a difficult situation, but the fact is that it wouldn't be as difficult a situation if the post combat portion of the war had been properly planned. They basically fired a top general (name escapes my rant-fogged mind right now) before the war for saying that we would need 300,000 plus troops to maintain order there after the invasion. That guy should be getting a medal pinned to his chest while they tar and feather Rumsfeld for ignoring him, but all we get are stupid excuses that the media parrots back to us every night. Poor Bush, he couldn't have known, who could have? Hell, I did, and I don't know shit, so what does that tell you about dear leader and his cronies who rushed us in this mess so that it could be wrapped up before his recoronation in 2004?

MSNBC - Kerry's past to get star role in Bush's ads

2004-02-20T07:05:00.000-05:00

"Campaign officials said in interviews that they plan substantial positive advertising about the president, focused on his proposals rather than accomplishments, when they begin spending tens of millions of dollars on the airwaves next month. But they made it clear that many of the ads will accuse the Democratic front-runner of 'hypocrisy,' in McKinnon's word, in part by reaching back into his early career"

Gee, I wonder why they are having to smear the opponent about his past, but can't focus on the President's achievements? Ummm maybe because ole' Georgie doesn't have any thing to actually crow about? The most pathetic President in modern history wants us to believe that somehow the next 4 years, things are going to change. I

I'm sure that by the time they have pumped out $100 million in slander and lies over the coming months, Kerry's own family will be looking at him sideways. What makes us think that the President's campaign will be more principled than the President himself?

Republican's will be running around like the mindless parrots that they are, saying "How can I know what Kerry stands for when he evidently doesn't know himself?" It'll be the new catchy song of the summer and the Dems will stand around shaking their heads at the flawed, fallacious logic trail that has led the nation away from our guy and back to the big spending, big borrowing, warmonger.

I know that sounds like doom and gloom, but this is a very efficient machine that we are talking about, not a 10th grade drama production. These guys know how to lie, and lie on a scale and to an extent not seen before in civil society. It simply won't matter that they are making shit up, the public doesn't pay that much attention. They are just looking for something catchy that they can hang their decision on, and all the policy positions in the world won't matter in the end. (Sorry, I'm having a Greg moment this morning).

MSNBC - Bremer says Iraq handover date is firm

2004-02-19T11:22:00.000-05:00

".S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer said Thursday that the formula for establishing a new Iraqi government could be changed but the date for the U.S.-led coalition to hand over power remains firm."

So what happens if this new government in Iraq tells us to leave immediately? Will be comply? How can we say that we are going to support a Government in Iraq when we have no idea what that government will morph into once it is handed power. If the Shia grab power, will they order us out of Sunni areas and start cracking down there themselves? Will the Kurds declare independence and finish the ethnic cleansing that they are pursuing in the North, thus bringing Turkey into the picture?

It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where we truly let Iraq govern itself. That is not to say that the same naivete that brought us the botched war and aftermath to begin with is still not in play, but you would think that the possibilities that I listed above would have at least be planned for as contingencies.

Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts

2004-02-18T15:05:00.000-05:00

he Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

The sweeping charges were later discussed in a conference call with some of the scientists that was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. The organization also issued a 37-page report today that it said detailed the accusations.

Together, the two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

"Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front," the statement from the scientists said, adding that they believed the administration had "misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies."

Obviously these "scientists" can't appreciate that our non-statistician president is also, not a scientist, so any bad policy based on science is not his fault. Could we just give this poor guy half a break here? Step back for a moment and ponder the wonder that is America under our dear leader. That's what we should be talking about, that and war on terra (though not in the way them dumb scientists think the word means). If a few million trees have to die, or a few thousand poor people get cancer or some other illness from pollution, or a species or 50 gets wiped out, then that is just the price that we have to pay to make America great again. These unpatriotic quacks make me ill! No wait, that was the tap water.

MSNBC - Bush team retreats from job-growth forecasts

2004-02-18T14:36:00.000-05:00

"The White House backed away Wednesday from its own prediction that the economy will add 2.6 million new jobs before the end of this year, saying the forecast was the work of number-crunchers and that President Bush was not a statistician."

Wow now that adds to the long list of things that GWB is 'not', say like a purveyor of truth, or a nation builder, or a diplomat, or a uniter, or a communicator, or a war hero, or a good business man, or a theologian, or a linguist, or an above average student, or a self-made man, or ....____. Awe shucks the economy is going gang busters now, they should be able to blow away that 2.6 million number, hell all they were shooting for was average for Christ's sake! When mediocrity is a bar too high, it's about time to hang it up, way past time.

MSNBC - Federal prosecutor sues Ashcroft

2004-02-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

"Convertino is seeking damages under the Privacy Act, alleging he has been subjected to an internal investigation as retaliation for his cooperation with the Senate and that information from the internal probe was wrongly leaked to news media.
The lawsuit states Convertino first complained to his superiors more than a year ago about the Justice Department's interference in the Detroit terrorism trial, saying Washington supervisors had continuously placed perception over reality to the serious detriment of the war on terror.
The lawsuit includes excerpts of an e-mail from another prosecutor in the case that Convertino says identified some of the gross mismanagement which was negatively impacting the ability of the United States to obtain convictions in a major terrorist case."

MSNBC - U.S. general: Time �running out� for bin Laden

2004-02-17T14:44:00.000-05:00

"We are looking at that, we have put together a program that we hope to model on what we consider to be very successful in Iraq," he said.

"We have 200,000 Iraqis now in different kinds of units. We have a civil defense unit, we have a unit that protects facilities, we have a border protection unit as well as the Iraqi army.

"So we have seen a lot of success there, and this is building on that idea, and with time you will see it will materialize. We are asking our Congress for funds to support that."

Afghan army plagued by desertions
Nearly 10,000 soldiers have been trained for the fledgling Afghan National Army, but it has seen many desertions because of low pay and tough conditions. The goal is an army of 70,000 soldiers."

Talking about low expectations. The spectacularly successfulsfull model in Iraq is being slaughtered by their own people and security situation there has deteriorated, if anything.

The first hand account I have from a friend in Afghanistan at the moment is that the missions that the US forces are carrying out are extremely shoddy and ill prepared (he's an officer so I am just guessing he knows what he is talking about).

The true shame in this whole 'war on terror' is that we aren't going to leave Afghanistan or Iraq in much if any better shape than we found them. Both countries are in for years of civil war and strife and as the American attention wanders back within its own boarders so will the will to do anything about it.

I backed the invasion of Afghanistan, but I thought that we should have really tried to do something for those people, made a real improvement in their lives and made it a model for how to proceedocede when military intervention is necessary. Regretfully we have a half-assed administration doing its usual half-assed job and that is not going to be the case. We move into the future, poorer, weaker and more maligned than we were two years ago, but hey, we kicked some ass didn't we!

Statement from woman and parents about rumors linking her to Sen. John Kerry

2004-02-16T14:56:00.000-05:00

Game over. Drudge can go back to licking the bottom of the litter box for his 'scoops'.

Friday Roundup (Yee Haa!)

2004-02-13T10:57:00.000-05:00

Counterspin has a nice link to TimesOnline Article saying that Drudge is full of shit (like we didn't know that already) Leonard Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, mentioned by Drudge, said: "This is the first we've heard that we're working on a story that we're not working on."

A reporter with Time magazine, also cited by Drudge, said that the weekly magazine was as puzzled by the story as the rest of the world.

The mainstream media in the US has so far not reported on the claims.

Sources within the Clark campaign blamed Republican "dirty tricks", and gave warning that it was a taste of things to come. "They are just throwing mud," he said. "

On another front it looks as if there's a pretty good case to be made that Bush never showed up in Alabama as has been claimed. But to tell you the truth, the Republicans have framed this in such a way that no one outside of the punditry really cares one way or the other. Bush has given the Dem's a veritable cornucopia of issues on which to attack him, using something that he has covered up but happened 30 years ago is just not going to play with the undecided voting public to the extent that they seem to think that it is. I say, use the energy to attack closer to the voter's pocketbook. It's still the economy, stupid, and the sooner the Dems get their shit together and start hammering on Bush about his poor handling and callousness toward the nation's unemployed, the better.

The UN
says that there is no way in Hell (Iraq, no real difference in the Summer), that elections can possibly come off before the hand over date of June 30 no matter how much that might impede Heir Bush's reelection campaign plans. If Bush had started the unnecessary war a couple of months sooner he could have made it, but that damned Tony Blair had to do his CYA thing with the UN so they are now going to have to stage something even more phony than they had originally planned on staging--pity that. Like the insurgents were going to let people gather in public places to vote for a government that they don't want without killing a bunch of them. Hell, our boy couldn't make it from his Hummvee to the head without getting shot at yesterday and they think people will actually show up at the polls?

Speaking of polls my uncanny prediction below about the direction of Bush's polling numbers seems to be bearing out. It should be very interesting to see the Rightwing machine getting cranked up here. I think that the Drudge bullshit is the first shot across the bow, "You know that we can just, basically make shit up and a lot of people will believe it about those dirty trickster Democrats."

MSNBC - Weekly U.S. jobless claims rise again

2004-02-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

"Wall Street had expected claims to drop to 345,000 from the originally reported 356,000 in the Jan. 31 week.
'The last two weeks don't necessarily reflect a deterioration in labor market conditions. It's more weather-related,' a government official said. Cold weather had been a factor in the Southeast, he said."

Hey didn't Clinton like nature, and isn't weather a 'natural' phenomenon. Ergo, Clinton caused the jobless claims to go up. Man once you get used to the three degrees of separation from Clinton logic of the Right, the mysteries of life just open up before your eyes like moon flowers on a hot summer evening. If jobs are priority one for the Bush administration now, it looks as if he's doing about the same job with that that he has managed with all his other top priorities. If you can't be the best in American history at something, you might as well go for worst, everything in between is just half-assed.

MSNBC - Bush call job creation a top priority

2004-02-12T13:40:00.000-05:00

MSNBC - Bush call job creation a top priority: "As we overcome the recession and war and emergency, we better make sure we got a work force that's prepared for the higher paying of the 21st century," Bush said during an informal discussion with students, education officials and others in the school's gymnasium."

Grade for sentence: F
Grade for Job Creation: F
Lying to school admininstrators: Presidential Library detention.

Yahoo! News - U.S. Commander Unhurt in Mideast Attack

2004-02-12T10:01:00.000-05:00

Good catch at Fester's Place"At a briefing later in Baghdad, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for Coalition Joint Task Force 7, said three rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the group, but that no one was injured. He said he believed the attack was done by 'a small number' of Iraqis.
Abizaid appeared unfazed. Speaking in Arabic to one member of the Iraqi security force after the gunfight, the general asked about the attack and was told, 'This is Fallujah. What do you expect.' ",

Ummmm, I don't know, how about some basic level of security. You want these people to go to the polls in a couple of months when you can't even get out of your HumVee in a secure compound without drawing fire? There is absolutely no way that we are going to get out of there and leave anything resembling an intact country. "Ill concieved, poorly executed and left in a shambles!" should be the Bush/Cheaney 2004 campaign slogan.

MSNBC - GAO: DOD paying billions to tax cheats

2004-02-11T14:32:00.000-05:00

"The Department of Defense paid billions of dollars in 2002 to more than 27,000 contractors that owed $3 billion in unpaid taxes, according to a draft copy of a General Accounting Office investigation obtained by NBC News.

Despite mechanisms in place since 1997 to help the government reclaim back taxes from federal contractors, the DOD has failed to fully implement those procedures, a move that would have �offset and collected at least $100 million,� the GAO says.
Instead, inconsistent participation by the DOD in the tax levy program, similar to those used to collect delinquent child support payments, has resulted in only $332,000 being collected from tax delinquent military contractors.
Most of the tax-dodging claims stem from contractors simply refusing to give the government the range of payroll taxes �Social Security, Medicare and federal income tax � they deduct from employee paychecks. Some of these contractors have unpaid taxes dating to the 1990s. "

So if I don't want to pay my taxes all I have to do is say 'uh, I don't wanna'? This should raise the hackles of everyone who has ever sat in fear while the IRS audits their returns looking for a $100 or two in missed liability (not me btw, I always play it straight with my taxes). Boys will be boys, I guess.

Bush: Crony Capitalist

2004-02-10T16:04:00.000-05:00

Given the choice between serving the national interest and favoring the rich, George W. Bush has opted incessantly, even obsessively, for the latter.

That is the main reason why he may well be unseated in November. If Bush tax policies are not class warfare, then the term has no meaning at all.

Finally, even some in the mainstream press have begun to notice the nudity of our emperor! About freakin' time....

Bush Supports the Shift of Jobs Overseas

2004-02-10T15:52:00.000-05:00

This title is NOT a political slam on my part. This - incredibly - is the actual headline in the LA Times! God help us. Check the lead on the story:

The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.

The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."

Go read the entire thing ..... but have a barf bag handy. I suppose that next they will alleviate healthcare costs by convincing us all that terminal illness is a priviledge, and that amputations - even without anaesthesia - are not only fun but fashionable! And 50% of this damn country will believe it.

The WMD Inspector No One Heeded

2004-02-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

Very nice piece at Common Dreamsthat raises some very good points.

"He's a former U.S. Marine Corps major and former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He's the answer to the question of whether the Bushies knew before the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

They knew, or could have known, and certainly should have known.

Before we attacked the Iraqi people, Ritter was often seen on television as a laughable "expert." The Fox News talking heads treated him as a lunatic. How could he be anything else when he disagreed with George W. Bush?

And Ritter has a temper, so that added to the fun. It was a treat to see him get all red faced and wonder when he'd explode.

It mattered not that Ritter was painfully honest and knew exactly what he was talking about. ...

We keep losing troops in Iraq, well over 500 now. God only knows how many arms and legs were lost over there, how many pairs of eyes destroyed. The total cost to each American taxpayer before it's over has been estimated at around $3,000, and when you consider the disability payments we'll be making for the next 50 years or so, that's probably a low-ball guess.

That's quite a price for going after weapons that we had been told do not, and did not, exist. It's too high a price for getting rid of Saddam.

But the real mystery of Iraq is why we're still there. There are no WMDs; Saddam is in custody. Why, now, are we still sacrificing troops and dollars on a guerilla war that will never be won?

What is today's price for funding a president's effort to save face? "

Hell Freezes!

2004-02-10T12:58:00.000-05:00

Someone check to see if Hell has actually frozen over or if that's just a light frost.
"Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.

"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." ...Then he passes the buck"While critical of President Bush, O'Reilly said he did not think the president intentionally lied. Rather, O'Reilly blamed CIA Director George Tenet, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton.

"I don't know why Tenet still has his job."

He added: "I think every American should be very concerned for themselves that our intelligence is not as good as it should be."

I think we should be asking that same question about the man whom actually 'makes' the decision on whether or not to go to war and expend our lives and treasure for nothing more than an atta boy.

Doubts, dissent stripped from public Iraq assessment

2004-02-10T09:47:00.000-05:00

"The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows.

As a result, the public was given a far more definitive assessment of Iraq's plans and capabilities than President Bush and other U.S. decision-makers received from their intelligence agencies.

The stark differences between the public version and the then top-secret version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate raise new questions about the accuracy of the public case made for a war that's claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. service members and thousands of Iraqis."

9/11 Panel Threatens to Issue Subpoena for Bush�s Briefings

2004-02-10T09:32:00.000-05:00

"Members of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks warned the White House on Monday that it could face a politically damaging subpoena this week if it refused to turn over information from the highly classified Oval Office intelligence reports given to President Bush before 9/11.
The panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and the former governor of New Jersey, said through a spokesman that he was hopeful an agreement would be worked out before the commission's next meeting, on Tuesday. Commission officials said that negotiations continued throughout the day on Monday and into the evening with the office of Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel."....""This thing has dragged on for months," Mr. Ben-Veniste said Monday, adding that he was not convinced by repeated statements from the White House that it intended to cooperate fully with the commission.

"Saying that they have cooperated just doesn't get them over the finish line," he said."

Saying not doing, is this administration's modus. It is the only way they know to do business, to expect anything more would be...well, unamerican.

Bush Aides Testify in Leak Probe (washingtonpost.com)

2004-02-10T07:22:00.000-05:00

"The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to columnist Robert D. Novak shortly before July 14, when he published a column quoting "two senior administration officials" saying that Plame, "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," had suggested her husband for a mission to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to acquire uranium there as part of an effort to develop nuclear weapons.

White House witnesses have been asked about cell phone calls and have been shown handwritten, diary-style notes from colleagues, as well as e-mails from reporters to administration officials. In at least a few cases, the FBI questioning was portrayed as very aggressive, with agents homing in on specific conversations with journalists. "Even witnesses that they describe as being potentially helpful are being treated as adversaries," a source close to the investigation said."

There have been many theories floated by the right, and by Novak himself wherein there was no criminal intent here, that the persons divulging the information did not realize the scope of Plame's undercover status. My question is if this is the case, then why haven't they all just come forward and cleared up the mistake instead of continuing to cover it up. At this point, whether there is a crime (and I am sure there was) that started this whole thing or not, there certainly are crimes being perpetrated now with regard to the investigation. Whether any of that gets any play will be interesting to see.

I'm back

2004-02-09T10:03:00.000-05:00

Had the usual whirlwind, no sleep, long work day, no cooperation trip to Mexico, but I managed to survive.

I did have a very entertaining (in retrospect) trip through security at my US connection in Texas, however.

I had just gone through the metal detector and failed, so I went back through and removed my belt. Just as I stepped into the metal detector again, sirens and lights go off all around in the entire airport. The security woman in front of me looks at me in a panic and I am surrounded by the other security personnel and told not to move. Everyone else is ushered away from me and I am left standing there while all hell is breaking loose. To my credit, I managed to remain perfectly calm, and I suppressed the devil inside me that was telling me to say 'Allah Akbar'. After about five minutes a security person came to tell everyone that had me pinned down, that someone had pulled an alarm on the lower level and to not let anyone through yet. I was disappointed that the full body cavity search was going to be cancelled (I understand that you usually have to pay extra for that), two of the women keeping me at bay were very nice looking and I had been envisioning a Penthouse Forum interlude (to my wife: just kidding honey!)
I could see by the looks on everyone's face that they were relieved that I wasn't going to detonate myself and eventually the woman let me through despite having been told not to by her superior. I got a chuckle, when I said 'see I told you it wasn't me' as I passed by. I am thinking of suing for my full body cavity search rites though, and the spike of adrenaline that probably cost me a good 20 or 30 minutes of my oh so productive life. I think I'll see if Scalia wants to go duck hunting this weekend and run it past him.

In Mexico for a few days

2004-02-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

Had to make and emergency trip to Mexico last night, and my connection here is too slow to be useful so I won't be back to blogging until Monday (Lunes). A few quick comments.

Looks as if Bush is in full damage control mode now. If the latest head to head and approval polls don't have them in a panic nothing will.

I think that Kerry has all but wrapped up the nomination. I'm not thrilled, he was my 4th choice for the nod, but he does seem to be getting better as a campaigner and he's not a wimp/weakling that the GOP can push around like they did poor Duky.

I still think the economy is in for another dip, I've been predicting this since the end of last summer, and I am still putting money on it. There's too much underlying instability, the Fed can't go any lower with interest rates to prop up this shit for brains recovery attempt. You can only spend money on nothing for so long before it becomes painfully apparent that you have got nothing for your money.

Asta la vista

The Bush Miracle Economic recovery continues

2004-02-03T21:55:00.000-05:00

Only a 117,000 + jobs lost last month, if only we had more tax cuts for business and the wealthy. Looks as if the Bush miracle (on ice, maybe) just keeps on rolling. Thank god all of those newly jobless people are getting rich on the stock market and tax cuts, otherwise you could probably think that this was bad news. I will say however that my company did give out a bonus last month for the first time in six years, and it almost made up for about 2% of what I gave up in salary when they asked us to take a cut a year and a half ago. At that rate, It'll only take me another 100 years or so to get back my money. At least I am not redundant yet, lord knows I can't fall back on blogging for income.

MSNBC - Tests confirm ricin�in Senate mail room

2004-02-03T11:52:00.000-05:00

" Tests have confirmed that a white powder found in a mail room in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office is the deadly poison ricin, the Tennessee Republican announced Tuesday. Three Senate office buildings remained closed as other mail was removed for testing"

Glad to see we've gotten a handle on the Homeland Security thing now. Only two and a half years later, the same fucking ploy that worked last time works again. You'd think that the Congresses mail, would be the last place someone could send something like this and expect to get it through, but with Mr. Ridge on the job now, I guess that much can't be expected.

MSNBC - Powell: Arms doubts might have affected view on war

2004-02-03T11:45:00.000-05:00

"Asked if he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, Powell replied: 'I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world.' He said the 'absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get.'"

I remember driving to a college basketball game (Indiana University) last winter with a friend of mine who is a Captain in the reserves and having a conversation about the situation in Iraq with him. The person is a dyed in the wool republican and generally typical gung ho military type, but he said something then that goes through my head every time I see something about how WMD's aren't really important.

He said "Bush had better hope to hell those inspectors find something soon, because I am not sure I can justify, to my wife and son, putting my life on the line for a 'maybe' threat. Afghanistan needed to happen. They helped Bin Laden and we had to take them down. I'm a Bush guy all the way, but there better be a damned good reason before we go back into Iraq."

He wasn't being unpatriotic, or a chicken shit (he is in Kandahar Afghanistan right now w/ a special forces unit, you want to call him a chicken shit you wait until he gets home and tell him face to his face). He really saw things in very simple terms as far as Iraq was concerned. Either they have weapons and are a danger that will need to be dealt with or they don't and they should be left alone, or at least weren't dying for. So I see all the goal post moving and relabelling by the administration, and I look at the faces of the fallen linked to the left and I get an angry knot in my stomach that will not go away.

These aren't just troops that are dying for no reason, they are sons and daughters, moms and dads and friends that will never come home again because some dumbass with no more than 'maybe' an election at stake has sent them to die for a 'maybe' threat that wasn't there at all. Someone needs to pay for the mistake, and it shouldn't be the soldiers and their families this time, the buck needs to stop at the top.

MSNBC - Bush to order inquiry of Iraq intelligence lapses

2004-02-02T07:29:00.000-05:00

"President Bush will sign an executive order to establish a full-blown investigation of U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq, a senior White House official said Sunday."

Bush is trying to bury this one and hope that it goes away until after the election. They are relieving themselves from responsibility to about sending us into an unjustified war, and at the same time tying the facts up in an investigation that will last well beyond the next election.

Regardless how this administration wants to frame things now, the fact is, that they did frame the reason for going to war in terms of Saddam posing a danger to America. This argument is now all but thoroughly debunked, and I suspect that a great many people who bought into this notion are now disenchanted. You can't tell someone that what they thought you said was totally wrong, when they know that that is what you told them. The first and lasting reaction to that is visceral anger and resentment.

I'll be very interested to see what Bush's approval rating does over the next couple of weeks. This also, unwittingly gives cover to someone like Kerry, or Edwards, who voted for the resolution. Now they can say that Bush duped him just like he did the American voter, and there will be sympathetic ears. At least, this is my most optimistic assessment.

MSNBC - Bush declines to endorse outside intelligence inquiry��

2004-01-30T14:23:00.000-05:00

"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.

MSNBC - Record number to lose jobless benefits

2004-01-30T09:20:00.000-05:00

"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.

CNN.com - U.S. acknowledges Iraq intel flaws - Jan. 30, 2004

2004-01-30T08:04:00.000-05:00

"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.

Evil Communiversity

2004-01-29T15:54:00.000-05:00

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."

MSNBC - White House raising Medicare bill by a third

2004-01-29T14:03:00.000-05:00

"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!!!!

MSNBC - Bush would veto trims in Patriot Act

2004-01-29T13:40:00.000-05:00

"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.

The Atlantic | January/February 2004 | Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong | Pollack

2004-01-29T11:49:00.000-05:00

CNN.com - Bush continues promoting election-year health care agenda - Jan. 28, 2004

2004-01-29T11:21:00.000-05:00

"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.

CNN.com - U.S. eyes spring offensive in Afghanistan - Jan. 29, 2004

2004-01-29T08:31:00.000-05:00

"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.

Horse Race

2004-01-28T10:11:00.000-05:00

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.

MSNBC - Kay to testify about search for Iraq�s weapons

2004-01-28T08:09:00.000-05:00

"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."

MSNBC - Hill budget office sees record deficit in '04

2004-01-26T12:20:00.000-05:00

"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.

MSNBC - Missing WMD point to failure of U.S. intelligence, Kay says

2004-01-26T07:57:00.000-05:00

"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.

MSNBC - Halliburton execs accepted kickbacks

2004-01-23T09:35:00.000-05:00

"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.
advertisement

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.

Herald Sun: CIA sounds alarm on Iraq civil war [23jan04]

2004-01-22T15:31:00.000-05:00

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 "

MSNBC - Cheney confident of Iraq weapons find

2004-01-22T15:15:00.000-05:00

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.

Boston.com / News / Nation / Infiltration of files seen as extensive

2004-01-22T14:00:00.000-05:00

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.

Yahoo! News - Bush May Seek Billions for Iraq After Election

2004-01-22T11:21:00.000-05:00

"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?

Yahoo! News - Ex-CIA Officers Ask Congress to Probe Plame Leak

2004-01-22T07:24:00.000-05:00

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.

How Low Can We Go?/US Labor Dept Advises Cheating

2004-01-20T11:27:00.000-05:00

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?"

9/11 Panel Unlikely to Get Later Deadline (washingtonpost.com)

2004-01-19T10:08:00.000-05:00

"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.

The Miami Herald | 01/19/2004 | Will speech lack hyperbole that 'justified' war?

2004-01-19T10:01:00.000-05:00

"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.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | US stars hail Iraq war whistleblower

2004-01-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

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)

MSNBC - Lab: Iraq mortar shells had no chemical agents

2004-01-19T07:10:00.000-05:00

"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 EnergyÂs 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).

MSNBC - Bush's State of the Union plans disclosed

2004-01-16T15:56:00.000-05:00

"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'.

Mars Needs Dim Republicans!

2004-01-15T13:19:00.000-05:00

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!"

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

URGENT: Truth Alert!

2004-01-15T10:24:00.000-05:00

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!

ABCNEWS.com : Official Confirms O'Neill's Iraq Claim

2004-01-15T07:23:00.000-05:00

"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."

Out for a couple of Days

2004-01-13T13:24:00.000-05:00

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

Hypocricy 808 Graduate Seminar

2004-01-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

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.

Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror's Scope (washingtonpost.com)

2004-01-12T12:37:00.000-05:00

"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.

Star Telegram | 01/10/2004 | Bush aides debate attacking Syria

2004-01-12T07:34:00.000-05:00

"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."

Thought for the Day-from RackJite

2004-01-09T21:21:00.000-05:00

"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

Reuters | Former Treasury Sec. Paints Bush as 'Blind Man'

2004-01-09T14:55:00.000-05:00

"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.

Reuters | Former Treasury Sec. Paints Bush as 'Blind Man'

2004-01-09T14:54:00.000-05:00

US Companies Added Few Workers in December

2004-01-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

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.''

MSNBC - Powell: No proof links Saddam, al-Qaida

2004-01-08T16:08:00.000-05:00

"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.

MSNBC - Joy, tears and chaos as U.S. frees prisoners

2004-01-08T15:47:00.000-05:00

"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.....

More thoughts on immigration reform.

2004-01-08T12:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper (washingtonpost.com)

2004-01-08T09:47:00.000-05:00

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.

Bush's Immigration reform idea.

2004-01-08T09:42:00.000-05:00

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.

MSNBC - 8 die when U.S. helicopter goes down in Iraq

2004-01-08T08:40:00.000-05:00

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.

Terror concerns scrub more flights to U.S.

2004-01-02T15:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Ethnic Division in Iraq (washingtonpost.com)

2004-01-02T15:29:00.000-05:00

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"

CNN.com - Neil Bush makes one-day profit over $170,000 - Jan. 2, 2004

2004-01-02T12:23:00.000-05:00

"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....

Plame Affair Thoughts

2004-01-02T10:31:00.000-05:00

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.

Military Ends Halliburton Deal To Supply Gasoline to Iraq (washingtonpost.com)

2003-12-31T08:30:00.000-05:00

"Pentagon officials said that the change had been under discussion for months and that the timing was not related to allegations that KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary that held the contract, had overcharged the government at least $61 million by buying more expensive fuel from Kuwait instead of Turkey. "

On a related note, the Pentagon announced that it was opening up for sale all of it's prime Arizona ocean front property.

And...
"The task of transporting fuel into Iraq was always understood by KBR to be temporary," said Cindy Viktorin, a spokeswoman for the company. "We have worked and will continue to work with the Corps of Engineers to provide a permanent solution to the fuel needs of the Iraqi people."

By temporary they mean, until someone found out that they were robbing us blind. They also state the KBR didn't profit from this, which is utter bullshit, since they get a guaranteed profit margin on costs, as I understand it.

Banning Sale of 'Downer' Meat Represents a Change in Policy (washingtonpost.com)

2003-12-31T08:28:00.000-05:00

"For years, the politically potent and well-financed cattle and meatpacking industries have held sway in the debate over the practice of slaughtering and marketing non-ambulatory, or downer, cattle. They repeatedly blocked efforts by urban Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans to end the practice -- which provides producers with millions of dollars of profits each year but also represents the biggest potential source of contaminated meat. "

Just a note for the hard core libertarians that might stop by, this is what Government regulation are about. I guess you can kill all your own food, but then again, do you know what is in that stream the squirrel has been drinking out of? Little sideline history for you, the FDA was created partially because, a medicine maker decided that to get kids to take their medicine, it needed to be sweat, so they added a sweetener to it, and it worked, sales went up and everything was peachy, except they used PEG as the sweetener and several hundred children died from it. About the same time the famous story about the conditions in meat packing plants hit and all of a sudden FDR had the backing to create a regulatory agency to 'protect' us from this shit. Too bad those who fought the FDA's creation to begin with (or rather those of like mind) are now back in power, stripping all consumer and environmental protections as fast as their corporate interests can come up with them. How long until another Love Canal at this rate? Worse yet, it'll be up to 5 years before anyone who was hurt by this lapse will start dying from it. Guess who won't be in office then to care?

Correction: The Upton Sinclair book "The Jungle" about the conditions in meat packing plants which helped lead to the Food and Drugs act was in 1906 time frame. The meat inspection process was initiated under Teddy R.'s administration not FDR's, I had orginally thought that the Food, Drugs and Cosmetics act of 1938, which is accurately represented above, was also about the same time as the original meat packing scandle, saddly I was off by a couple of decades and this distorts the true chronogy of events as I represented them and the point to a lesser extent, though it was the latter act that actually gave the FDA it real teeth and led to what we expect in terms of a safe food supply today. Thanks to Dick Fitzgerald, who commented correctly below, for setting me straight on this point.

Economic Reports Reflect Underlying Concerns (washingtonpost.com)

2003-12-30T16:51:00.000-05:00

"Job worries continue,' said Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center.
That sentiment may reflect a disconnect that Americans feel between the upbeat economic numbers trumpeted in the press and their own experiences, Bernstein said. The economy grew at a stellar 8.2 percent pace between July and September, but inflation-adjusted wages rose a scant 0.2 percent over that period and figures for the final quarter of 2003 are expected to show an actual decline. "

Could it just be that, as I have argued before, this is a borrowed economic surge with no real sustainable underpinnings?

A Nuclear Headache: What if the Radicals Oust Musharraf?

2003-12-30T14:14:00.000-05:00

"Two recent assassination attempts against Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, have renewed concern in the Bush administration over both the stability of a critical ally and the security of its nuclear weapons if General Musharraf were killed or removed from office."

I have been spouting about this since Sept. 11. Pakistan is unstable, has and probably still is supporting terrorists and has a history of violent political change. But these guys are our buddies now, so we don't have to be worried. Why on earth would we be more scared that Saddam would somehow resurrect his nuclear program and give away material or a weapon, when Pakistan already has an abundance of material as well as an undisclosed number of functioning weapons on hand. Not to mention that much of the country is at least sympathetic to Al Qaida if not out and out abetting them.

It doesn't take Tom Clancy to see a scenario where someone high up in the intelligence agency in Pakistan, helps a terrorist get his hands on material to make a dirty bomb because he wants to undermine or take out the current government there. After all these guys funded and actively helped the Taliban and Al Qaida for years. Al Qaida trained people for Kashmir attacks for Pakistan for heaven's sake.

The stupidity and short-sightedness of this administration is breathtaking to say the least.

MSNBC - Ashcroft to step aside from leak probe

2003-12-30T13:29:00.000-05:00

Wow, now this one has been totally buried for a while. But good to see that they know for 'certain' that it wasn't anyone important in the White House who did, it. That really inspires confidence in the investigation, if they just take everyone's word on everything, the perp should be found in a matter of hours, right?

Boston.com / Business / Pentagon freezes Iraq funds amid corruption probes

2003-12-30T08:24:00.000-05:00

"The Pentagon's decision to delay Iraqi reconstruction is another setback for a process already hobbled by political insecurity and, increasingly, concerns over corruption and misconduct. The success of the US-led bid to remake Iraq politically depends largely on efforts to reverse the country's chronic unemployment by repairing it economically. But lawmakers in Washington and businesspeople in Iraq say the bidding process lacks transparency and favors a growing class of monopolists and oligarchs that could overwhelm the country's infant regulatory framework"