Democratic Leaders to Finalize Iraq Plan WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Democratic leaders are developing an anti-war proposal that wouldn't cut off money for U.S. troops in Iraq while requiring President Bush to acknowledge problems with an overburdened military. The plan could draw broad bipartisan support but was expected to be a tough sell to members who said they don't think it goes far enough to assuage voters angered by the four-year war.
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Feingold: Dems' Iraq Proposal "Reads Like New Authorization" Of War
Melinda Henneberger Posted February 27, 2007 06:56 PM
READ MORE: Iraq
Wisconsin's Russ Feingold says the Iraq bill his fellow Senate Democrats are working on is so weak that it "basically reads like a new authorization" of the war. "I am working to fix the new proposal drafted by several Senate Democrats," Feingold said in a statement this afternoon. "I will not vote for anything that the President could read as an authorization for continuing with a large military campaign in Iraq."He hasn't given up on "using our Constitutionally-granted power of the purse to bring this catastrophe to an end," he said, though the Senate leadership has not only rejected that approach, but said it would be tantamount to abandoning the troops. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced on Sunday that the leadership would try to repeal the October 2002 authorization of the use of force instead. The authorization, which was predicated on the notion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, could be replaced with something more narrowly drawn, and more relevant to the current situation. On NBC's Meet the Press, Levin appeared to have accepted the Bush administration's position that de-funding the war would imperil American soldiers on the ground: "Most of us do not want to cut funding for our troops for two reasons," he said. "One is, it's wrong. Our troops deserve our support as long as they're there, and we're not going to repeat the mistake of Vietnam, where we took out on the troops our differences over policies with the Administration."
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He was a pro-choice, he's anti-choice, he's multiple choice."-- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), on Hardball, discussing his 1994 Senate challenger, Mitt Romney (R).
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Dallas Morning News reports that Mexican workers here sent a record $23 billion dollars home in 2006.
BTW that is money not spent here as it would have been had that money been earned by American workers.
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Managers of IFCO Systems Enter Guilty Pleas Relating to Employment of Illegal Aliens
ALBANY, N.Y., Feb. 27 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Five current and
former managers from the Pallet Management Division of IFCO Systems North
America have entered guilty pleas, U.S. Attorney Glenn T. Suddaby of the
Northern District of New York announced today. The defendants pled guilty
to felony and misdemeanor offenses relating to the employment of illegal
alien workers.
The following defendants pled guilty today: Robert Belvin, 43, of
Stuart, Fla.; James Rice, 37, of Houston; Michael Ames, 44, of Shrewsbury,
Mass.; Dario Salzano, 36, of Amsterdam, N.Y.; and Scott Dodge, 44, of
Elmira, N.Y. Charges remain pending against three other managers and the
investigation is continuing.
The guilty pleas stem from the investigation of illegal
employment-related practices at IFCO plants nationwide. On April 19, 2006,
agents arrested seven current and former managers and executed search
warrants at nine IFCO facilities, including the Houston headquarters of the
company. At the same time, a worksite enforcement action was conducted at
over 40 IFCO plants nationally. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) was able to detain nearly 1,200 illegal aliens working at the plants
at the time.
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Gov. to seek insurance for all children
Illegal immigrants would be covered in his plan to overhaul the state health-care system.
By Jordan Rau, Times Staff Writer9:35 AM PST,
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will propose that all Californian children, including those in the state illegally, be guaranteed medical insurance as part of the health-care overhaul he intends to unveil next week, according to officials familiar with the plan.If enacted by the Legislature, his proposal would affect about 763,000 children who now lack insurance. Although the administration has not revealed details of how it would pay for such a program, officials estimate that extending insurance to all children could cost the state as much as $400 million a year.
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A Mexican bandit made a specialty of crossing the Rio Grande from time to time and robbing banks in Texas. Finally, a reward was offered for his capture, and an enterprising Texas ranger decided to track him down.
After a lengthy search, he traced the bandit to his favorite cantina, snuck up behind him, put his trusty six-shooter to the bandit's head, and said, "You're under arrest. Tell me where you hid the loot or I'll blow your brains out."
But the bandit didn't speak English, and the Ranger didn't speak Spanish. Fortunately, a bilingual lawyer was in the saloon and translated the Ranger's message. The terrified bandit blurted out, in Spanish, that the loot was buried under the oak tree in back of the cantina.
"What did he say?" asked the Ranger.
The lawyer answered, "He said 'Get lost, you turkey. You wouldn't dare shoot
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Deja vu all over again: Burglary at Democratic headquarters _ in New Hampshire
HOLLY RAMER AP
No, you're not having a flashback to 1972 and the infamous event that ultimately led to the greatest scandal in U.S. political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency.
Instead of Washington's Watergate complex, this burglary took place at the New Hampshire Democratic Party's headquarters over the weekend. Neither police nor party officials will comment on what was stolen and whether the break-in was politically motivated.
Office workers reported the break-in to police on Monday. Concord Police Sgt. Mike McGuire said some items were taken, but he declined to be more specific. The assessment was the same from Kathy Sullivan, the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party.
"Some things were taken, but I don't really want to get into that right now," Sullivan said on Tuesday.
There was no indication that any personal financial information was taken, said party spokeswoman Kathleen Strand.
"We want to assure our donors that their personal financial information, as far as we can tell, has been protected, and we hope to find out who did this soon," she said.
On the night of June 17, 1972, in the midst of Nixon's re-election campaign, five men were arrested during a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building. In all, 25 people eventually went to jail for their roles in the break-in or the White House's attempt to cover it up.
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RFK Jr. rips President Bush for environmental policy
Speaking at Virginia Tech, the son of a 1960s Democratic icon said the nation is living a "science-fiction nightmare."
By Greg Esposito
BLACKSBURG -- The crowd that nearly filled Virginia Tech's 3,000-seat Burruss Hall Auditorium to hear environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak probably had an idea about what he thought of the Bush administration before he took the podium.
Some of Kennedy's books were on sale in the auditorium lobby, including his most recent -- "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy."
But early on in a rambling speech Monday night that lasted more than an hour, the son of a 1960s Democratic icon made it clear that he wasn't critical of Bush because of his political affiliation.
He was critical of him, he said, because Bush has implemented policies and circumvented the law in order to enrich his donors at the expense of thousands of lives and America's environmental future.
"You can't talk honestly about the environment today ... without being critical of the president," he said.
The speech capped a day of discussion and events that were part of Tech's Dean's Forum on the Environment. The event was designed to stimulate conversation and showcase the university's latest research and activity on environmental issues. Tech trails many universities in areas such as sustainability and environmentally friendly policies but is in the process of implementing several initiatives that could close the gap.
Kennedy, whose speech was titled "Our Environmental Destiny," is a member of several national environmental organizations. He's president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a grass-roots advocacy group dedicated to preserving water and protecting it from pollution. He's also senior attorney for the National Resources Defense Council and chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper organization.
The university paid $20,000 for his visit. This was the second trip to Virginia Tech in three years for Kennedy, who visited Blacksburg in March 2004 as part of a symposium series on smart growth in the New River Valley.
While he pointed out good work and sound perspectives from past Republican and Democratic presidents Monday, he labeled the Bush administration the worst in history when it comes to the environment. To make his point he outlined a litany of what he sees as Bush's offenses -- from rolling back environmental regulations to dropping lawsuits to naming lobbyists for oil, timber and utility companies to head federal organizations designed to curb environmental abuse.
But Kennedy's attacks weren't reserved for Bush. He criticized what he called a "negligent and indolent press" for perpetuating the idea that there's still a debate about global warming despite overwhelming scientific evidence that it is real. He went after scientists -- he called them "biostitutes" -- hired by big oil and big coal who churned out reports for pay after decades of not publishing anything.
And while he said he loathed partisanship and said the worst thing that could happen to environmentalism would be for it to become the province of one political party, Kennedy fired a few more zingers at the Republicans. The one that drew the most laughter was in reference to a study done by the University of Maryland after the 2004 presidential election showing how misinformation affected the way people voted.
"Eighty percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on," he said.
But aside from a few cracks, Monday's speech had a somber tone and warned of what today's actions could mean for future generations, not to mention the current one.
"We're living in a science-fiction nightmare in this country ... because somebody gave money to a politician," he said.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Bush's Inner Reality
US 'plans to bomb Iran', despite denials
By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Published: 26 February 2007
A Pentagon unit is planning for a bombing attack on Iran which could be carried out "within 24 hours", according to a report in the United States, issued just as the Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinejad warned that Tehran's nuclear programme had "no reverse gear".
The generally authoritative New Yorker journalist, Seymour Hersh, reported in the latest edition of the weekly magazine that a "special planning group" had been set up in recent months under the joint chiefs of staff. Quoting a former intelligence official, Hersh said the unit was "charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the [US] President, within 24 hours".
The report appears to contradict the Bush administration's denials that it is planning for war on Iran, despite a US military build-up in the Gulf.
Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon's spokesman, said: "The US is not planning to go to war with Iran. To suggest anything to the contrary is simply wrong, misleading and mischievous."
But the American leader most identified with possible military action against Iran, Vice-President Dick Cheney, repeated in Australia last week that "all options" were on the table.
He arrived on a surprise visit last night in Oman, a Gulf state strategically located across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran.
The Iranian deputy foreign minister, Manouchehr Mohammadi, said yesterday: "We have prepared ourselves for any situation, even for war."
The Iranian President was also characteristically defiant on the eve of a meeting of UN Security Council powers called to discuss ratcheting up the pressure over Tehran's possible nuclear weapons programme.
President Ahmadinejad, who says the programme is peaceful, compared Iran's production of nuclear fuel to a train "which has no brake and no reverse gear".
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, told an American television interviewer: "They don't need a reverse gear. They need a stop button".
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Frank Rich Frank Experts Warn Al Qaeda "Going To Detonate Nuclear Device" In US, But Bush Punts On Threat Where Were You That Summer of 2001?By Frank Rich The New York Times
Sunday 25 February 2007
Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole's decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week's terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American "intelligence and counterterrorism officials" leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda's comeback, and ask yourself: Haven't we been here before?
If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and shark attacks. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week's Times, culminating in the President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." The system "was blinking red," as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.
The White House doesn't want to hear it now, either. That's why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, "are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States" (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on "24"). Al Qaeda is "on the march" rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces - it's "not ready for transition," according to the Pentagon's last report - but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
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Why Bush's Inner "Reality" Has Poisoned His Own Troop Plan By John P. Briggs, M.D., and JP Briggs II, Ph.D. t r u t h o u t Guest Contributors
The president has included an extraordinary fatal flaw in his plan for additional US troops in Iraq, a fact that may not make much sense to his advisers and allies, but is psychologically understandable in terms of a mechanism that governs his inner reality.
The escalation plan's strongest proponents warn that his requirement dictating two separate and independent command structures for Iraqi and American forces portends disaster, according to Mark Benjamin of Salon.
Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the US forces commander in Iraq, has agreed with Senator John McCain that "I know of no successful military operation where you have dual command." American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Kagan, the neoconservative architect of the "surge plan" itself, says this provision means "the plan is going to fail
Pundits may rationalize that the self-defeating element of the surge derives from political expediency to get the Iraqi prime minister on board, but that's hardly a sufficient explanation.
As with many other aspects of the president's sometimes odd behavior, the root of this new self-subverting plan lies not in political expediency, in the advice he's received, or in his intellectual abilities as such, but in a psychological twist that begins with his long and well-documented history of failure (and his sense of his own failure) within his family of origin. Where his father was a standout as a scholar, athlete and businessman, the son, following with remarkable fixedness in his father's footsteps, stumbled repeatedly. In November 2006, the father's emissary, James A. Baker III, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, came to deliver what must have been a familiar verdict: "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." Read, Son, once again you failed.
To protect his psyche against humiliating feelings - inadequacy, isolation, incompetence, guilt - Bush has developed during his life several defenses that suppress, disguise and deflect those feelings. These defenses have included alcoholism, clownish behavior, emotional bullying, and Christian salvation. Six years ago, Bush found what must seem to him the near-perfect defense (though it was also a trap): The "presidential defense" allows him to avoid any feelings of humiliation by presenting himself as the plain-spoken, divinely inspired "decider" whose choices can't be seriously challenged as incompetent or inadequate, because only distant history (or a guiding Divinity) can judge a president's actions.
But Bush's lifelong feelings of inadequacy clearly haven't gone away. They appear in his nervous laugh and awkward smile - the smile of a man who seems not quite certain of himself but is intent on convincing you that "there's no doubt in my mind" (a favorite phrase).
Most importantly, they also appear in a long string of presidential decisions containing elements that subvert the very goal he insists he's accomplishing: failing to provide enough troops to occupy Iraq, disbanding the Iraqi army, failing to implement the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, failing to set right the failures of the Katrina relief effort.
Therapists are well-acquainted with the psychodynamic where an individual constructs his reality unconsciously by attempting to escape a set of circumstances, but using strategies that serve to reproduce those circumstances. So a person who grew up feeling abandoned in early life mysteriously manages in later life to find others who will abandon him or will behave toward others in ways that eventually provoke them to abandon him.
By planting the poison pill of a dual command structure inside the purported remedy of his surge plan, George W. Bush sets out to reiterate his distorted inner reality: he takes action in a way that guarantees failure and will therefore soon require him to deploy his defenses to disguise his failure. Karl Rove has been the past master at helping Bush fashion these disguises.
On Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney plays another role, channeling the president's "bullying" and "presidential " defenses into specific policies of aggression and rigging the intelligence to make the aggression plausible. Psychologically, this works for Bush on two levels: 1) it helps to ensure that actions for success will fail because they're out of touch with reality; and 2) it reinforces the idea that only Bush's reality is important. Hence, the unintentionally ironic statement of a Bush aide to journalist Ron Suskind, "We [in the White House] create our own reality."
With the public increasingly turning away from the illusions spewed out by his defenses, Bush's self-defeating reality comes more sharply into view. The public now faces the question of whether the president will soon fall prey to one of his "gut" inspirations telling him that to save the Middle East situation from failure, he will need to attack Iran. The fatal flaw in that approach would be obvious to almost everyone. But in his own mind, the aggression would offer momentary protection from feeling incompetent while at the same time guaranteeing that the terrible specter of his incompetence would soon return. It would confirm an inner reality he has always known.
John P. Briggs, M.D., is retired from over 40 years of private practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Medical Center in New York City for 23 years, and was a long-time member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York.
By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Published: 26 February 2007
A Pentagon unit is planning for a bombing attack on Iran which could be carried out "within 24 hours", according to a report in the United States, issued just as the Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinejad warned that Tehran's nuclear programme had "no reverse gear".
The generally authoritative New Yorker journalist, Seymour Hersh, reported in the latest edition of the weekly magazine that a "special planning group" had been set up in recent months under the joint chiefs of staff. Quoting a former intelligence official, Hersh said the unit was "charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the [US] President, within 24 hours".
The report appears to contradict the Bush administration's denials that it is planning for war on Iran, despite a US military build-up in the Gulf.
Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon's spokesman, said: "The US is not planning to go to war with Iran. To suggest anything to the contrary is simply wrong, misleading and mischievous."
But the American leader most identified with possible military action against Iran, Vice-President Dick Cheney, repeated in Australia last week that "all options" were on the table.
He arrived on a surprise visit last night in Oman, a Gulf state strategically located across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran.
The Iranian deputy foreign minister, Manouchehr Mohammadi, said yesterday: "We have prepared ourselves for any situation, even for war."
The Iranian President was also characteristically defiant on the eve of a meeting of UN Security Council powers called to discuss ratcheting up the pressure over Tehran's possible nuclear weapons programme.
President Ahmadinejad, who says the programme is peaceful, compared Iran's production of nuclear fuel to a train "which has no brake and no reverse gear".
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, told an American television interviewer: "They don't need a reverse gear. They need a stop button".
_____________________________________
Frank Rich Frank Experts Warn Al Qaeda "Going To Detonate Nuclear Device" In US, But Bush Punts On Threat Where Were You That Summer of 2001?By Frank Rich The New York Times
Sunday 25 February 2007
Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole's decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week's terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American "intelligence and counterterrorism officials" leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda's comeback, and ask yourself: Haven't we been here before?
If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and shark attacks. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week's Times, culminating in the President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." The system "was blinking red," as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.
The White House doesn't want to hear it now, either. That's why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, "are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States" (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on "24"). Al Qaeda is "on the march" rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces - it's "not ready for transition," according to the Pentagon's last report - but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
_______________________________________
Why Bush's Inner "Reality" Has Poisoned His Own Troop Plan By John P. Briggs, M.D., and JP Briggs II, Ph.D. t r u t h o u t Guest Contributors
The president has included an extraordinary fatal flaw in his plan for additional US troops in Iraq, a fact that may not make much sense to his advisers and allies, but is psychologically understandable in terms of a mechanism that governs his inner reality.
The escalation plan's strongest proponents warn that his requirement dictating two separate and independent command structures for Iraqi and American forces portends disaster, according to Mark Benjamin of Salon.
Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the US forces commander in Iraq, has agreed with Senator John McCain that "I know of no successful military operation where you have dual command." American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Kagan, the neoconservative architect of the "surge plan" itself, says this provision means "the plan is going to fail
Pundits may rationalize that the self-defeating element of the surge derives from political expediency to get the Iraqi prime minister on board, but that's hardly a sufficient explanation.
As with many other aspects of the president's sometimes odd behavior, the root of this new self-subverting plan lies not in political expediency, in the advice he's received, or in his intellectual abilities as such, but in a psychological twist that begins with his long and well-documented history of failure (and his sense of his own failure) within his family of origin. Where his father was a standout as a scholar, athlete and businessman, the son, following with remarkable fixedness in his father's footsteps, stumbled repeatedly. In November 2006, the father's emissary, James A. Baker III, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, came to deliver what must have been a familiar verdict: "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." Read, Son, once again you failed.
To protect his psyche against humiliating feelings - inadequacy, isolation, incompetence, guilt - Bush has developed during his life several defenses that suppress, disguise and deflect those feelings. These defenses have included alcoholism, clownish behavior, emotional bullying, and Christian salvation. Six years ago, Bush found what must seem to him the near-perfect defense (though it was also a trap): The "presidential defense" allows him to avoid any feelings of humiliation by presenting himself as the plain-spoken, divinely inspired "decider" whose choices can't be seriously challenged as incompetent or inadequate, because only distant history (or a guiding Divinity) can judge a president's actions.
But Bush's lifelong feelings of inadequacy clearly haven't gone away. They appear in his nervous laugh and awkward smile - the smile of a man who seems not quite certain of himself but is intent on convincing you that "there's no doubt in my mind" (a favorite phrase).
Most importantly, they also appear in a long string of presidential decisions containing elements that subvert the very goal he insists he's accomplishing: failing to provide enough troops to occupy Iraq, disbanding the Iraqi army, failing to implement the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, failing to set right the failures of the Katrina relief effort.
Therapists are well-acquainted with the psychodynamic where an individual constructs his reality unconsciously by attempting to escape a set of circumstances, but using strategies that serve to reproduce those circumstances. So a person who grew up feeling abandoned in early life mysteriously manages in later life to find others who will abandon him or will behave toward others in ways that eventually provoke them to abandon him.
By planting the poison pill of a dual command structure inside the purported remedy of his surge plan, George W. Bush sets out to reiterate his distorted inner reality: he takes action in a way that guarantees failure and will therefore soon require him to deploy his defenses to disguise his failure. Karl Rove has been the past master at helping Bush fashion these disguises.
On Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney plays another role, channeling the president's "bullying" and "presidential " defenses into specific policies of aggression and rigging the intelligence to make the aggression plausible. Psychologically, this works for Bush on two levels: 1) it helps to ensure that actions for success will fail because they're out of touch with reality; and 2) it reinforces the idea that only Bush's reality is important. Hence, the unintentionally ironic statement of a Bush aide to journalist Ron Suskind, "We [in the White House] create our own reality."
With the public increasingly turning away from the illusions spewed out by his defenses, Bush's self-defeating reality comes more sharply into view. The public now faces the question of whether the president will soon fall prey to one of his "gut" inspirations telling him that to save the Middle East situation from failure, he will need to attack Iran. The fatal flaw in that approach would be obvious to almost everyone. But in his own mind, the aggression would offer momentary protection from feeling incompetent while at the same time guaranteeing that the terrible specter of his incompetence would soon return. It would confirm an inner reality he has always known.
John P. Briggs, M.D., is retired from over 40 years of private practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Medical Center in New York City for 23 years, and was a long-time member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Power Broker
Lieberman Hints That He May Not Follow Dave Weigel's Advice
Posted on February 23, 2007, 10:11am Ronald Bailey
Earlier this month, my very politically perspicacious colleague Dave Weigel advised Sen. Joe Lieberman (CFL-Conn.) not to switch to the Republican caucus and thus flip the Senate. However, Politico is reporting that the senator may ignore this advice if the senate Democrats try to defund the war in Iraq. To wit:
"I have no desire to change parties," Lieberman said in a telephone interview. "If that ever happens, it is because I feel the majority of Democrats have gone in a direction that I don't feel comfortable with."
Asked whether that hasn't already happened with Iraq, Lieberman said: "We will see how that plays out in the coming months," specifically how the party approaches the issue of continued funding for the war."
Hmmm. I wonder what extra goodies, e.g., committee assignments, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is offering Lieberman for the jump
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Brent Budowsky
02.24.2007
Joe Lieberman Blackmails The Senate, Part 1 Joe Lieberman ran against Ned Lamont for the Democratic nomination for Senate and told the voters of Connecticut how he votes with Democrats in Congress more than 90% of the time.
Having campaign as a true blue loyal Democrat in the primary, Lieberman campaigned in the general election as an independent Democrat who would vote with Democrats to organize the Senate.
Lieberman gave his word of honor to senior Democrats. Lieberman gave his word of honor to the voters of Connecticut.
Now, Joe Lieberman is blackmailing the Senate and proving his word of honor has the same honor as the false presentation of pre-war Iraq intelligence.
By threatening to vote with Republicans, Joe Lieberman has already broken his word of honor. Less than two months into a six year term, Lieberman is telling the voters of his state that his word during the primaries is null and void, and his word during the general election is null and void.
This is an act of dishonor unprecedented in the history of the United States Senate. Whether he changes parties or not (and I predict he does not) Lieberman is saying this:
A man's word is his bond. Except for Joseph Lieberman. Lieberman's word is his bond. Until he decides to break it. This from the man who talks so righteously of his personal values.
Had Lieberman told the voters of Connecticut in October 2006 that he promised to blackmail the Senate to support an escalation of the Iraq War, Senator Lamont would be giving true voice to his constituents.
The only thing lower than Joe Lieberman's self-respect for Joe Lieberman's word of honor, is Joe Lieberman's lack of respect for the voters of Connecticut.
They should have asked for a lie detector test before voting last November.
More on this sorry subject, soon
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« previous Horses Mouth Home
A Care Package For The Media: Ten Examples Of Lieberman Vowing To Stay With DemsFebruary 23, 2007 -- 01:31 PM EST // View Comments (42) // Post a Comment
Okay, so we've prepared a little Joe Lieberman care package for people to email to reporters and/or commentators when they talk about Lieberman switching parties.
Here's what's in it. We've compiled lots and lots and lots of examples of Lieberman swearing up and down to the voters of Connecticut that he'd stay with the Dems. And all this research can be yours -- for free!
As we've detailed here lots of times, we think the "will he switch" storyline is a crock. It seems apparent to us that he won't do this, mainly because the Dems are positioned to increase their majority in 2008 and if Lieberman switched he'd risk ending up in the minority for years, reducing him to irrelevance. Lieberman doesn't want to think of himself as irrelevant. He wants to think of himself as important. Yet when speculating on the question of whether he'll switch, the big news orgs simply refuse to address it with any basic skepticism, thus puffing up Lieberman's importance and telling the story precisely the way he wants it told.
No, the real reason to highlight Lieberman's switch talk is this: It shows that in the quest for attention Lieberman is cheerfully willing to threaten to break a promise he made to Connecticut voters again and again and again. Weirdly, the fact that he vowed repeatedly before Election Day to stick with the Dems is frequently absent from reports on his switch hints -- even though it's hard to think of a piece of information that's more vital to this topic. So, in view of the fact that Lieberman appears determined to keep this storyline alive, we're hoping that this modest care package will somehow find its way to reporters and commentators who are dealing with the subject. We stopped at ten examples
Examples on request if you really need them! We know he is a SOB always has been and now he is in a position, thanks to the dumb CT voters, to decide which party controls the senate and his ego is out of control. He wants to continue the Iraq war at any and all costs for his own personal reasons that have nothing to do with Iraq itself.
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The reality-based community!A Fredericksburg man is facing several assault charges after police say he hunted down a group of Republicans and confronted them in their home over their beliefs.Police said Andrew Stone, 23, recently went to a home in Fredericksburg at around 5:30 p.m. after he saw a name and nearby address on a Republican Web site.Stone confronted three residents about their political viewpoints, police said. When he found out the residents supported the Republican-led war effort in Iraq, police say Stone became enraged.Stone then hit the homeowner and his roommates several times as they tried to force him out of the door, police said.Stone faces three counts of assault and battery
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Fitzgerald: "There Is a Cloud Over the Vice President"
Wednesday 21 February 2007
For the first time since the investigation into the leak of a covert CIA operative began more than three years ago, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has suggested that Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the effort to unmask the officer, the wife of a vocal critic of the administration's Iraq policy.
During closing arguments Tuesday in the obstruction of justice and perjury trial of former vice presidential staffer, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald told jurors that "there is a cloud over the vice president. ... a cloud over the White House over what happened," according to a copy of the transcript of Fitzgerald's statements.
"We didn't put that cloud there," Fitzgerald said. "That cloud's there because the defendant obstructed justice. That cloud is something you just can't pretend isn't there."
Moreover, Fitzgerald told jurors that Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, discussed aspects of the investigation with the vice president only when he was told by investigators not to talk about the probe, according to the transcript. Libby is "not supposed to be talking to other people," Fitzgerald said. But "the only person [Libby] told is the vice president. Think about that."
The suggestion by Fitzgerald that Cheney was complicit in the unmasking of Valerie Plame Wilson's undercover CIA status led to immediate speculation by pundits that the special prosecutor is widening his probe and may have Cheney in his crosshairs.
A year ago, truthout published a series of investigative reports that stated Fitzgerald was digging deeper into the role Cheney played in the leak itself. Those reports were largely ignored and in some cases dismissed by other media organizations.
Fitzgerald also excoriated President Bush for failing to uphold a promise to fire anyone in his administration that was found to have been involved in the Plame leak. Fitzgerald reminded the jury that in October 2003, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters of the president's intentions during a morning news briefing at the White House.
"Any sane person would think, based on what McClellan said in October 2003, that anyone involved in this would be fired," Fitzgerald said, referring to the leak, according to the transcript of the prosecutor's remarks.
The charges leveled against Libby stem from how and when he discovered the CIA-employed Plame and whether he shared the information with reporters. Libby told FBI investigators that NBC News reporter Tim Russert disclosed Plame's identity to him in July, 2003, but evidence presented at the trial shows Libby was told about Plame by Cheney nearly a month earlier and [Libby] divulged the information to several journalists on numerous occasions thereafter.
Libby's attorney, Theodore Wells, told jurors Tuesday that Libby innocently forgot about the conversation his client had with Cheney because he had been dealing with more pressing issues, such as the war in Iraq and national security. Wells added that Russert did not have any notes to back up his assertion that he did not tell Libby about Plame, and told jurors it boiled down to Libby's word against Russert's.
But Fitzgerald rejected Wells' argument saying Libby discussed Plame with reporters on a Monday and then claims to have forgotten the information and learned about her for the first time on a Thursday.
"This is not 'he said, she said,'" Fitzgerald said. "He [Libby] made up a story and he stuck to it. If Tim Russert were run over by a bus and had gone to the great news desk in the sky, you can still find plenty of evidence that the defendant lied."
Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor, told jurors earlier in the day Tuesday that Libby had "nine conversations about [Valerie Plame]. He remembers none of them. The one conversation he says he has, with Tim Russert, is a conversation we now know never happened."
Libby "lied to the FBI and the grand jury about how he learned about [former ambassador] Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie [Plame] Wilson, who he talked to about Mr. Wilson's wife and what he said when he discussed Mr. Wilson's wife with others," Zeidenberg added, according to the court transcript.
Wilson had traveled to Niger in February, 2002, to investigate claims that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium to build an atomic bomb. He reported back to the CIA that the allegations were baseless, but the claims were cited as fact in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. Wilson spent months criticizing the White House's use of the Niger claims in background interviews with reporters before publishing an opinion column in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, saying he was the special envoy who was sent to Niger to check out the intelligence. He asserted that the administration knowingly misled the public and Congress into war.
Fitzgerald said Libby and Cheney were incensed at Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who publicly accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to win support for a US led invasion against Iraq. Fitzgerald said Cheney was "obsessed" with Wilson and had taken the former ambassador's attacks against the administration personally. "Cheney," Fitzgerald told jurors, "enlisted Libby to act as his surrogate and personally respond to reporters' queries about the veracity of Wilson's allegations by authorizing his chief of staff to leak classified information to journalists. The classified information that was leaked may have included Plame's covert status," Fitzgerald said, "in retaliation for her husband's stinging rebukes of the administration's Iraq policies."
Cheney had suspected that Plame set up her husband's trip to Niger, Fitzgerald said, and the prosecutor told jurors that in July 2003, "the number one question on the vice president's mind" had been to find out who was responsible for sending Wilson to Niger."eopold
Posted on February 23, 2007, 10:11am Ronald Bailey
Earlier this month, my very politically perspicacious colleague Dave Weigel advised Sen. Joe Lieberman (CFL-Conn.) not to switch to the Republican caucus and thus flip the Senate. However, Politico is reporting that the senator may ignore this advice if the senate Democrats try to defund the war in Iraq. To wit:
"I have no desire to change parties," Lieberman said in a telephone interview. "If that ever happens, it is because I feel the majority of Democrats have gone in a direction that I don't feel comfortable with."
Asked whether that hasn't already happened with Iraq, Lieberman said: "We will see how that plays out in the coming months," specifically how the party approaches the issue of continued funding for the war."
Hmmm. I wonder what extra goodies, e.g., committee assignments, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is offering Lieberman for the jump
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Brent Budowsky
02.24.2007
Joe Lieberman Blackmails The Senate, Part 1 Joe Lieberman ran against Ned Lamont for the Democratic nomination for Senate and told the voters of Connecticut how he votes with Democrats in Congress more than 90% of the time.
Having campaign as a true blue loyal Democrat in the primary, Lieberman campaigned in the general election as an independent Democrat who would vote with Democrats to organize the Senate.
Lieberman gave his word of honor to senior Democrats. Lieberman gave his word of honor to the voters of Connecticut.
Now, Joe Lieberman is blackmailing the Senate and proving his word of honor has the same honor as the false presentation of pre-war Iraq intelligence.
By threatening to vote with Republicans, Joe Lieberman has already broken his word of honor. Less than two months into a six year term, Lieberman is telling the voters of his state that his word during the primaries is null and void, and his word during the general election is null and void.
This is an act of dishonor unprecedented in the history of the United States Senate. Whether he changes parties or not (and I predict he does not) Lieberman is saying this:
A man's word is his bond. Except for Joseph Lieberman. Lieberman's word is his bond. Until he decides to break it. This from the man who talks so righteously of his personal values.
Had Lieberman told the voters of Connecticut in October 2006 that he promised to blackmail the Senate to support an escalation of the Iraq War, Senator Lamont would be giving true voice to his constituents.
The only thing lower than Joe Lieberman's self-respect for Joe Lieberman's word of honor, is Joe Lieberman's lack of respect for the voters of Connecticut.
They should have asked for a lie detector test before voting last November.
More on this sorry subject, soon
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« previous Horses Mouth Home
A Care Package For The Media: Ten Examples Of Lieberman Vowing To Stay With DemsFebruary 23, 2007 -- 01:31 PM EST // View Comments (42) // Post a Comment
Okay, so we've prepared a little Joe Lieberman care package for people to email to reporters and/or commentators when they talk about Lieberman switching parties.
Here's what's in it. We've compiled lots and lots and lots of examples of Lieberman swearing up and down to the voters of Connecticut that he'd stay with the Dems. And all this research can be yours -- for free!
As we've detailed here lots of times, we think the "will he switch" storyline is a crock. It seems apparent to us that he won't do this, mainly because the Dems are positioned to increase their majority in 2008 and if Lieberman switched he'd risk ending up in the minority for years, reducing him to irrelevance. Lieberman doesn't want to think of himself as irrelevant. He wants to think of himself as important. Yet when speculating on the question of whether he'll switch, the big news orgs simply refuse to address it with any basic skepticism, thus puffing up Lieberman's importance and telling the story precisely the way he wants it told.
No, the real reason to highlight Lieberman's switch talk is this: It shows that in the quest for attention Lieberman is cheerfully willing to threaten to break a promise he made to Connecticut voters again and again and again. Weirdly, the fact that he vowed repeatedly before Election Day to stick with the Dems is frequently absent from reports on his switch hints -- even though it's hard to think of a piece of information that's more vital to this topic. So, in view of the fact that Lieberman appears determined to keep this storyline alive, we're hoping that this modest care package will somehow find its way to reporters and commentators who are dealing with the subject. We stopped at ten examples
Examples on request if you really need them! We know he is a SOB always has been and now he is in a position, thanks to the dumb CT voters, to decide which party controls the senate and his ego is out of control. He wants to continue the Iraq war at any and all costs for his own personal reasons that have nothing to do with Iraq itself.
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The reality-based community!A Fredericksburg man is facing several assault charges after police say he hunted down a group of Republicans and confronted them in their home over their beliefs.Police said Andrew Stone, 23, recently went to a home in Fredericksburg at around 5:30 p.m. after he saw a name and nearby address on a Republican Web site.Stone confronted three residents about their political viewpoints, police said. When he found out the residents supported the Republican-led war effort in Iraq, police say Stone became enraged.Stone then hit the homeowner and his roommates several times as they tried to force him out of the door, police said.Stone faces three counts of assault and battery
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Fitzgerald: "There Is a Cloud Over the Vice President"
Wednesday 21 February 2007
For the first time since the investigation into the leak of a covert CIA operative began more than three years ago, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has suggested that Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the effort to unmask the officer, the wife of a vocal critic of the administration's Iraq policy.
During closing arguments Tuesday in the obstruction of justice and perjury trial of former vice presidential staffer, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald told jurors that "there is a cloud over the vice president. ... a cloud over the White House over what happened," according to a copy of the transcript of Fitzgerald's statements.
"We didn't put that cloud there," Fitzgerald said. "That cloud's there because the defendant obstructed justice. That cloud is something you just can't pretend isn't there."
Moreover, Fitzgerald told jurors that Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, discussed aspects of the investigation with the vice president only when he was told by investigators not to talk about the probe, according to the transcript. Libby is "not supposed to be talking to other people," Fitzgerald said. But "the only person [Libby] told is the vice president. Think about that."
The suggestion by Fitzgerald that Cheney was complicit in the unmasking of Valerie Plame Wilson's undercover CIA status led to immediate speculation by pundits that the special prosecutor is widening his probe and may have Cheney in his crosshairs.
A year ago, truthout published a series of investigative reports that stated Fitzgerald was digging deeper into the role Cheney played in the leak itself. Those reports were largely ignored and in some cases dismissed by other media organizations.
Fitzgerald also excoriated President Bush for failing to uphold a promise to fire anyone in his administration that was found to have been involved in the Plame leak. Fitzgerald reminded the jury that in October 2003, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters of the president's intentions during a morning news briefing at the White House.
"Any sane person would think, based on what McClellan said in October 2003, that anyone involved in this would be fired," Fitzgerald said, referring to the leak, according to the transcript of the prosecutor's remarks.
The charges leveled against Libby stem from how and when he discovered the CIA-employed Plame and whether he shared the information with reporters. Libby told FBI investigators that NBC News reporter Tim Russert disclosed Plame's identity to him in July, 2003, but evidence presented at the trial shows Libby was told about Plame by Cheney nearly a month earlier and [Libby] divulged the information to several journalists on numerous occasions thereafter.
Libby's attorney, Theodore Wells, told jurors Tuesday that Libby innocently forgot about the conversation his client had with Cheney because he had been dealing with more pressing issues, such as the war in Iraq and national security. Wells added that Russert did not have any notes to back up his assertion that he did not tell Libby about Plame, and told jurors it boiled down to Libby's word against Russert's.
But Fitzgerald rejected Wells' argument saying Libby discussed Plame with reporters on a Monday and then claims to have forgotten the information and learned about her for the first time on a Thursday.
"This is not 'he said, she said,'" Fitzgerald said. "He [Libby] made up a story and he stuck to it. If Tim Russert were run over by a bus and had gone to the great news desk in the sky, you can still find plenty of evidence that the defendant lied."
Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor, told jurors earlier in the day Tuesday that Libby had "nine conversations about [Valerie Plame]. He remembers none of them. The one conversation he says he has, with Tim Russert, is a conversation we now know never happened."
Libby "lied to the FBI and the grand jury about how he learned about [former ambassador] Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie [Plame] Wilson, who he talked to about Mr. Wilson's wife and what he said when he discussed Mr. Wilson's wife with others," Zeidenberg added, according to the court transcript.
Wilson had traveled to Niger in February, 2002, to investigate claims that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium to build an atomic bomb. He reported back to the CIA that the allegations were baseless, but the claims were cited as fact in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. Wilson spent months criticizing the White House's use of the Niger claims in background interviews with reporters before publishing an opinion column in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, saying he was the special envoy who was sent to Niger to check out the intelligence. He asserted that the administration knowingly misled the public and Congress into war.
Fitzgerald said Libby and Cheney were incensed at Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who publicly accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to win support for a US led invasion against Iraq. Fitzgerald said Cheney was "obsessed" with Wilson and had taken the former ambassador's attacks against the administration personally. "Cheney," Fitzgerald told jurors, "enlisted Libby to act as his surrogate and personally respond to reporters' queries about the veracity of Wilson's allegations by authorizing his chief of staff to leak classified information to journalists. The classified information that was leaked may have included Plame's covert status," Fitzgerald said, "in retaliation for her husband's stinging rebukes of the administration's Iraq policies."
Cheney had suspected that Plame set up her husband's trip to Niger, Fitzgerald said, and the prosecutor told jurors that in July 2003, "the number one question on the vice president's mind" had been to find out who was responsible for sending Wilson to Niger."eopold
Friday, February 23, 2007
Birds and the Bees
Keeping Bees Among Us By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Mention honeybees, and most people think two things: stinging and industriousness. A beekeeper thinks: jubilation, harmony, the civilization of insects. Nothing in nature is more vibrant — literally — than a strong hive on the increase in late spring and early summer. And few things are more depressing than opening the lid on a hive and pulling apart the supers, the boxes where bees raise young and store honey, and finding that the colony inside has died.
It is far more than the death of individual bees. It is the death of prosperity itself.
My dad kept bees when I was young, and now I keep them. There were problems in my dad’s day: ants, skunks, wax moths and a couple of deadly but well-known bee diseases, like foulbrood and nosema. But my dad’s day — the late 1950s and early ’60s — looks, in retrospect, like a golden age. No one had heard of tracheal mites or varroa mites — two tiny pests that have decimated hives in the past 15 years and made beekeeping much more complicated than it used to be.
Now there are alarming reports of a new bee problem, called colony collapse disorder. "Disorder" is something of a code word. It means that no one really knows what is causing the sudden death of hives. There were heavy losses last fall, mainly among migratory beekeepers, who move their colonies from crop to crop as fields and orchards come into blossom. The threat of this new disorder isn’t merely the loss of bees. It’s also the loss of crops — a long list of them, including most tree fruits — that depend on pollination by honeybees.
Scientists are already hard at work searching for the cause of this disorder, which may be fungal. It may even be that transporting hives from crop to crop stresses bees more than we think. But I know from my own experience with bees — as someone who keeps only a couple of hives, never moves them and leaves most of the honey for the colony itself — that we must do everything we can to keep these creatures among us, as much for their sake as for our own
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Mystery Ailment Strikes HoneybeesFebruary 12, 2007A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.
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Genetics Reveal 15 New North American Bird Species
OSLO -- Genetic tests of North American birds show what may be 15 new species including ravens and owls -- look alikes that do not interbreed and have wrongly had the same name for centuries, scientists said on Sunday.
If the findings from a study of birds' DNA genetic "barcodes" in the United States and Canada hold true around the world, there might be more than 1,000 new species of birds on top of 10,000 identified so far, they said.
A parallel study of South American bats in Guyana also showed six new species among 87 surveyed, hinting that human studies of the defining characteristics of species may have been too superficial to tell almost identical types apart.
"This is the leading tip of a process that will see the genetic registration of life on the planet," said Paul Hebert of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, a co-author of the report in the British Journal Molecular Ecology Notes.
"You can't protect biodiversity if you can't recognise it."
The scientists found 15 potential new species among 643 types of bird studied from the Arctic to Florida. The sample covers almost all 690 known breeding species in North America.
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Britain in bloom - when it's not meant to be
By Jonathan Brown
Published: 17 February 2007
Trengwainton, eight miles from Land's End, enjoys perhaps the most favourable gardening conditions in mainland Britain.
In Cornish it means the "settlement of spring" in honour of the temperate climate with which it is blessed. But even by these standards, the spring of 2007 is proving exceptionally fecund.
With two weeks of winter officially still to run, the gardens of the National Trust house in the west of Cornwall are a riot of colour after one of the warmest winters on record.
Gardeners at Trengwainton House taking part in a survey by the trust across Devon and Cornwall recorded 426 varieties in flower, nearly twice the number as at this time last year. The gardens' Magnolias, Camelias and Rhododendrons have already sprouted while the South African bottle brush is exhibiting its spiny red blooms three months ahead of schedule.
But the warm winter has thrown up some unexpected difficulties for the gardening team. Lawns have had to be mowed all year round for the first time and the machinery has struggled to cope with the volume of grass. Other plants such as the garden's varieties of Hydrangeas have also not stopped growing
_______________________________________
Burning Coal
The Huffington Post Melinda Henneberger melinda@huffingtonpost.com
READ MORE: John Riley, United States
AUSTIN - A lawyer for TXU Corp has told the judges who will rule on whether it can build a slew of new coal-burning power plants here that global warming is not on the docket, and none of their concern.
"It's for kings and presidents and world leaders to decide how to address global warming," argued TXU attorney John Riley. "It's not for air permit hearings."
With no kings in sight, Texans who oppose TXU's plan to build 11 new plants across the state are nonetheless looking to two administrative judges to block the plan.
They argue it would double CO2 emissions here overnight. Texas already emits more of the greenhouse gas than any other state in the country.
But in court Wednesday, Riley said all that was beside the point.
"What we can do to forestall global warming?", he asked. "The scientists still quarrel over it. But it is a very big issue."
"For instance, India is going to build 300 of these plants over the next 10 years, and China 500. My point is, 10 plants is not the significant contributor to the problem that the counsel" is trying to make it into.
In a courtroom where the air conditioner was running on an 80-degree day in February, Riley also questioned whether the US should even want to get ahead of India and China on the issue.
"Does the U.S. want to take that step before others do?"( YES).CO.
Mention honeybees, and most people think two things: stinging and industriousness. A beekeeper thinks: jubilation, harmony, the civilization of insects. Nothing in nature is more vibrant — literally — than a strong hive on the increase in late spring and early summer. And few things are more depressing than opening the lid on a hive and pulling apart the supers, the boxes where bees raise young and store honey, and finding that the colony inside has died.
It is far more than the death of individual bees. It is the death of prosperity itself.
My dad kept bees when I was young, and now I keep them. There were problems in my dad’s day: ants, skunks, wax moths and a couple of deadly but well-known bee diseases, like foulbrood and nosema. But my dad’s day — the late 1950s and early ’60s — looks, in retrospect, like a golden age. No one had heard of tracheal mites or varroa mites — two tiny pests that have decimated hives in the past 15 years and made beekeeping much more complicated than it used to be.
Now there are alarming reports of a new bee problem, called colony collapse disorder. "Disorder" is something of a code word. It means that no one really knows what is causing the sudden death of hives. There were heavy losses last fall, mainly among migratory beekeepers, who move their colonies from crop to crop as fields and orchards come into blossom. The threat of this new disorder isn’t merely the loss of bees. It’s also the loss of crops — a long list of them, including most tree fruits — that depend on pollination by honeybees.
Scientists are already hard at work searching for the cause of this disorder, which may be fungal. It may even be that transporting hives from crop to crop stresses bees more than we think. But I know from my own experience with bees — as someone who keeps only a couple of hives, never moves them and leaves most of the honey for the colony itself — that we must do everything we can to keep these creatures among us, as much for their sake as for our own
_______________________________________
Mystery Ailment Strikes HoneybeesFebruary 12, 2007A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.
_______________________________________
Genetics Reveal 15 New North American Bird Species
OSLO -- Genetic tests of North American birds show what may be 15 new species including ravens and owls -- look alikes that do not interbreed and have wrongly had the same name for centuries, scientists said on Sunday.
If the findings from a study of birds' DNA genetic "barcodes" in the United States and Canada hold true around the world, there might be more than 1,000 new species of birds on top of 10,000 identified so far, they said.
A parallel study of South American bats in Guyana also showed six new species among 87 surveyed, hinting that human studies of the defining characteristics of species may have been too superficial to tell almost identical types apart.
"This is the leading tip of a process that will see the genetic registration of life on the planet," said Paul Hebert of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, a co-author of the report in the British Journal Molecular Ecology Notes.
"You can't protect biodiversity if you can't recognise it."
The scientists found 15 potential new species among 643 types of bird studied from the Arctic to Florida. The sample covers almost all 690 known breeding species in North America.
_______________________________________
Britain in bloom - when it's not meant to be
By Jonathan Brown
Published: 17 February 2007
Trengwainton, eight miles from Land's End, enjoys perhaps the most favourable gardening conditions in mainland Britain.
In Cornish it means the "settlement of spring" in honour of the temperate climate with which it is blessed. But even by these standards, the spring of 2007 is proving exceptionally fecund.
With two weeks of winter officially still to run, the gardens of the National Trust house in the west of Cornwall are a riot of colour after one of the warmest winters on record.
Gardeners at Trengwainton House taking part in a survey by the trust across Devon and Cornwall recorded 426 varieties in flower, nearly twice the number as at this time last year. The gardens' Magnolias, Camelias and Rhododendrons have already sprouted while the South African bottle brush is exhibiting its spiny red blooms three months ahead of schedule.
But the warm winter has thrown up some unexpected difficulties for the gardening team. Lawns have had to be mowed all year round for the first time and the machinery has struggled to cope with the volume of grass. Other plants such as the garden's varieties of Hydrangeas have also not stopped growing
_______________________________________
Burning Coal
The Huffington Post Melinda Henneberger melinda@huffingtonpost.com
READ MORE: John Riley, United States
AUSTIN - A lawyer for TXU Corp has told the judges who will rule on whether it can build a slew of new coal-burning power plants here that global warming is not on the docket, and none of their concern.
"It's for kings and presidents and world leaders to decide how to address global warming," argued TXU attorney John Riley. "It's not for air permit hearings."
With no kings in sight, Texans who oppose TXU's plan to build 11 new plants across the state are nonetheless looking to two administrative judges to block the plan.
They argue it would double CO2 emissions here overnight. Texas already emits more of the greenhouse gas than any other state in the country.
But in court Wednesday, Riley said all that was beside the point.
"What we can do to forestall global warming?", he asked. "The scientists still quarrel over it. But it is a very big issue."
"For instance, India is going to build 300 of these plants over the next 10 years, and China 500. My point is, 10 plants is not the significant contributor to the problem that the counsel" is trying to make it into.
In a courtroom where the air conditioner was running on an 80-degree day in February, Riley also questioned whether the US should even want to get ahead of India and China on the issue.
"Does the U.S. want to take that step before others do?"( YES).CO.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Time for a change I Did
How many pilots does it take to change a light bulb?None, it is done by the automatic pilot.
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Q ?How many Australians does it take to change all the light bulbs?
A. One - Prime Minister John Howard, who banned incandescent light bulbs yesterday, making Australia the first country to take such direct action to stop global warming
By Cahal Milmo
After almost a decade as a pariah in the battle against global warming because of its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, Australia scored an environmental first yesterday by becoming the only large economy to ban the traditional incandescent lightbulb.
In a move that environmentalists hope will spark a similar move in Britain, the government Down Under said the sale of all incandescent bulbs will be phased out by 2010 and replaced with low-energy versions to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The enforced switch to new high-efficiency fluorescent bulbs will cut Australia's carbon emissions by four million tons by 2012 and reduce domestic power bills by up to two-thirds, the Environment Minister, Bill Turnbull, claimed. Mr Turnbull, whose right-of-centre government is a recent convert to action on global warming, said: "It's a little thing but it's a massive change. If the whole world switches to these bulbs today we would reduce our consumption of electricity by an amount equal to five times Australia's annual consumption of electricity."
The initiative follows a study by the International Energy Agency last year which found that a global switch to fluorescent bulbs would prevent 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the world's atmosphere over the next 25 years. It would also save £1,300bn in energy costs.
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Reprieved hedgehogs may be no safer on the mainland
It was a welcome piece of good news in an increasingly sad tale. The decision this week to halt the cull of hedgehogs on the Western Isles of Scotland and instead transport them alive from the wilds of the Uists back to the mainland was heralded by conservationists as a crucial step in the fight to save the creatures.
But, while animals rights campaigners celebrate, the creatures themselves have every right to feel nervous about their impending relocation - hedgehog populations across the UK have dropped by up to an estimated 50 per cent in the past 15 years and there is concern over the mysterious decline.
Research from Mammal's Trust UK reveals an average population decrease of 20 per cent - the figure is as high as 50 per cent in parts of East Anglia.
"If it continues at this rate it will be a cause for concern. We need to find out whether this is a trend or simply a population blip," said Jill Nelson, Chief Executive of the People's Trust for Endangered Species.
"There is something drastic happening to the hedgehog population."
For centuries Britain's discreet, nocturnal hedgehogs have scavenged their way into the folklore, thanks to writers such as Beatrix Potter. Yet while the image of Mrs Tiggywinkle continues to enthral, it is estimated the animals are dying out at a rate of almost a fifth of the population every four years.
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Israeli Chief Rabbi Issues Fur Edict
February 21, 2007 — By ReutersJERUSALEM -- Jews must not wear fur skinned from live animals, Israel's chief rabbi said in a religious ruling on Tuesday.
"All Jews are obliged to prevent the horrible phenomenon of cruelty to animals and be a 'light onto nations' by refusing to use products that originate from acts which cause such suffering," Rabbi Yona Metzger said.
Animal rights campaigners in Israel and abroad say that animals are skinned alive at fur farms in China.
Metzger issued the edict in response to an appeal by an Israeli legislator who looked into the reports of animal cruelty in China at the request of a constituent.
The ruling stopped short of banning the use of fur from animals skinned after they were slaughtered.
Mati Korinio of Israel's Nature and Parks Authority, which oversees fur imports, said much of the fur sold in the Jewish state did not originate in China
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Rare Loon Deaths in New Hampshire Faze Scientists
February 21, 2007 — By Brian Early, ReutersMANCHESTER, N.H. -- Scientists are struggling to explain the rare death of 17 loons in New Hampshire, saying warm weather may have confused the threatened species of bird which typically heads to the ocean for winter.
Twenty-two male and female Great Northern Divers, known as Common Loons, were found Saturday and Sunday on Lake Winnipesaukee, many them covered in snow from wind gusts with their heads tucked into their wings to keep warm.
Biologists are unclear why the loons congregated on the ice deep in New Hampshire when they normally migrate to open water such as the ocean in winter. The five that survived were transported to the ocean and released.
"This is the first time I ever have seen this," said senior biologist and executive director of the Loon Preservation Committee, Harry Vogel. "It's unprecedented."
The mild early winter -- including the warmest December on record in New Hampshire and an unseasonably warm January -- may have contributed to the confusion of the loons, biologists said.
Lake Winnipesaukee, which usually freezes by the first week of January, did not fully ice over until Jan. 25, said Don Miller, a large lake fisheries biologist with New Hampshire Fish and Game.
Initial evidence suggests that the loons were in the process of molting new flying feathers, an annual event that usually happens after the birds have migrated for the winter.
If that was the case, Vogel said, there must have been some open water on the lake for them to live.
Last winter, large expanses of the lake did not fully freeze, and some of the loons did not migrate to the ocean. Vogel suggests that the stranded loons may have stayed at the lake last year as well.
Loons, which number about 500,000 in the United States, are heavy birds that need open water to fly. They take off like planes, requiring a runway of 100 yards of water to gather enough speed to lift off.
Their feet are placed in the back of their bodies, which makes them great swimmers and divers, but terrible walkers on land or ice.
Emily Brunkhurst, a conservation biologist with New Hampshire Fish and Game, said the deaths are worrisome for the loon, which has been on New Hampshire's threatened species list since 1980. The 17 represented about 3 percent of New Hampshire's loon population.
"The loss of so many adult birds has a stronger impact on the populations of loons than other species because they don't breed as often as other species," Brunkhurst said.
Loons, which live from 25 to 30 years, don't breed until they are about 7 years old, and on average, produce a chick every other year.
Vogel, who has the birds' carcasses, will send them to Tufts University in neighboring Massachusetts for a necropsy, where they will be tested for lead, mercury and other viral diseases.
But, if his early suspicions are right, the loons thought they could get away this winter without migrating.
"They gambled and lost
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Q ?How many Australians does it take to change all the light bulbs?
A. One - Prime Minister John Howard, who banned incandescent light bulbs yesterday, making Australia the first country to take such direct action to stop global warming
By Cahal Milmo
After almost a decade as a pariah in the battle against global warming because of its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, Australia scored an environmental first yesterday by becoming the only large economy to ban the traditional incandescent lightbulb.
In a move that environmentalists hope will spark a similar move in Britain, the government Down Under said the sale of all incandescent bulbs will be phased out by 2010 and replaced with low-energy versions to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The enforced switch to new high-efficiency fluorescent bulbs will cut Australia's carbon emissions by four million tons by 2012 and reduce domestic power bills by up to two-thirds, the Environment Minister, Bill Turnbull, claimed. Mr Turnbull, whose right-of-centre government is a recent convert to action on global warming, said: "It's a little thing but it's a massive change. If the whole world switches to these bulbs today we would reduce our consumption of electricity by an amount equal to five times Australia's annual consumption of electricity."
The initiative follows a study by the International Energy Agency last year which found that a global switch to fluorescent bulbs would prevent 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the world's atmosphere over the next 25 years. It would also save £1,300bn in energy costs.
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Reprieved hedgehogs may be no safer on the mainland
It was a welcome piece of good news in an increasingly sad tale. The decision this week to halt the cull of hedgehogs on the Western Isles of Scotland and instead transport them alive from the wilds of the Uists back to the mainland was heralded by conservationists as a crucial step in the fight to save the creatures.
But, while animals rights campaigners celebrate, the creatures themselves have every right to feel nervous about their impending relocation - hedgehog populations across the UK have dropped by up to an estimated 50 per cent in the past 15 years and there is concern over the mysterious decline.
Research from Mammal's Trust UK reveals an average population decrease of 20 per cent - the figure is as high as 50 per cent in parts of East Anglia.
"If it continues at this rate it will be a cause for concern. We need to find out whether this is a trend or simply a population blip," said Jill Nelson, Chief Executive of the People's Trust for Endangered Species.
"There is something drastic happening to the hedgehog population."
For centuries Britain's discreet, nocturnal hedgehogs have scavenged their way into the folklore, thanks to writers such as Beatrix Potter. Yet while the image of Mrs Tiggywinkle continues to enthral, it is estimated the animals are dying out at a rate of almost a fifth of the population every four years.
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Israeli Chief Rabbi Issues Fur Edict
February 21, 2007 — By ReutersJERUSALEM -- Jews must not wear fur skinned from live animals, Israel's chief rabbi said in a religious ruling on Tuesday.
"All Jews are obliged to prevent the horrible phenomenon of cruelty to animals and be a 'light onto nations' by refusing to use products that originate from acts which cause such suffering," Rabbi Yona Metzger said.
Animal rights campaigners in Israel and abroad say that animals are skinned alive at fur farms in China.
Metzger issued the edict in response to an appeal by an Israeli legislator who looked into the reports of animal cruelty in China at the request of a constituent.
The ruling stopped short of banning the use of fur from animals skinned after they were slaughtered.
Mati Korinio of Israel's Nature and Parks Authority, which oversees fur imports, said much of the fur sold in the Jewish state did not originate in China
_______________________________________
Rare Loon Deaths in New Hampshire Faze Scientists
February 21, 2007 — By Brian Early, ReutersMANCHESTER, N.H. -- Scientists are struggling to explain the rare death of 17 loons in New Hampshire, saying warm weather may have confused the threatened species of bird which typically heads to the ocean for winter.
Twenty-two male and female Great Northern Divers, known as Common Loons, were found Saturday and Sunday on Lake Winnipesaukee, many them covered in snow from wind gusts with their heads tucked into their wings to keep warm.
Biologists are unclear why the loons congregated on the ice deep in New Hampshire when they normally migrate to open water such as the ocean in winter. The five that survived were transported to the ocean and released.
"This is the first time I ever have seen this," said senior biologist and executive director of the Loon Preservation Committee, Harry Vogel. "It's unprecedented."
The mild early winter -- including the warmest December on record in New Hampshire and an unseasonably warm January -- may have contributed to the confusion of the loons, biologists said.
Lake Winnipesaukee, which usually freezes by the first week of January, did not fully ice over until Jan. 25, said Don Miller, a large lake fisheries biologist with New Hampshire Fish and Game.
Initial evidence suggests that the loons were in the process of molting new flying feathers, an annual event that usually happens after the birds have migrated for the winter.
If that was the case, Vogel said, there must have been some open water on the lake for them to live.
Last winter, large expanses of the lake did not fully freeze, and some of the loons did not migrate to the ocean. Vogel suggests that the stranded loons may have stayed at the lake last year as well.
Loons, which number about 500,000 in the United States, are heavy birds that need open water to fly. They take off like planes, requiring a runway of 100 yards of water to gather enough speed to lift off.
Their feet are placed in the back of their bodies, which makes them great swimmers and divers, but terrible walkers on land or ice.
Emily Brunkhurst, a conservation biologist with New Hampshire Fish and Game, said the deaths are worrisome for the loon, which has been on New Hampshire's threatened species list since 1980. The 17 represented about 3 percent of New Hampshire's loon population.
"The loss of so many adult birds has a stronger impact on the populations of loons than other species because they don't breed as often as other species," Brunkhurst said.
Loons, which live from 25 to 30 years, don't breed until they are about 7 years old, and on average, produce a chick every other year.
Vogel, who has the birds' carcasses, will send them to Tufts University in neighboring Massachusetts for a necropsy, where they will be tested for lead, mercury and other viral diseases.
But, if his early suspicions are right, the loons thought they could get away this winter without migrating.
"They gambled and lost
Monday, February 19, 2007
Last Post ???
I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned," the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who "strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench."
Most Loathsome persons .
John McCain #1
Charges: The most consistently mischaracterized politician in the country, even McCain’s most nakedly self-serving machinations are universally hailed as the bold moves of an independent maverick who really, really, like, cares, man. By virtue of his five-year stay at the Hanoi Hilton and a completely ineffectual campaign finance reform bill (which was itself only PR damage control for his long-forgotten role in the Keating Five), McCain has so successfully snowed America the he could go around kicking puppies all day and he’d be applauded for his authenticity. In reality, McCain is as phony as slimeballs come, having reversed his positions on Roe v. Wade, Bush’s tax cuts, the gay marriage amendment and Jerry Falwell in the last year alone, while the mainstream press looked away and whistled nonchalantly. Keeps changing the number of additional troops he thinks should be sent to Iraq, in hopes of extending the disaster beyond the next presidential election, so his decorated veteran status will still be relevant.
Exhibit A: "I hated the gooks, and I will hate them for as long as I live."
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Worst. President. Ever.
USA Today founder Al Neuarth:
A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying "this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst.""She's wrong," I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon. "It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list," I added.I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top.
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Fox News Poll: Majority Of Americans Would Vote To Defund Escalation
By Eric Kleefeld bio
Here are some numbers to consider for Dems who fear getting attacked for cutting off funding for the "surge": A new poll finds that an astonishing 54% of Americans would vote to cut off funding for escalation if they were in Congress. What's more, the new poll was done by Fox News. The survey asked: "If you were a member of Congress, how would you vote specifically on increasing U.S. troop levels in Iraq — would you vote for or against funding the increase in troops?" Only 37% said they would vote for funding. Among Independents, the numbers were even more striking: 62% were against funding, and only 30% for funding. If Congressional Democrats do move to defund escalation, a majority of Americans would be
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The new Congress is promising far tighter oversight of Bush administration spending programs, and few targets are more in need of scrutiny and daylight than the outsourcing of government programs to private contractors. This highly lucrative world quietly ballooned by 86 percent — to $377 billion annually — during the first five years of the Bush administration, according to Congressional estimates. Outsourced spending, on Iraq, Katrina and other bonanzas, has grown twice as fast as other discretionary spending, according to Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the oversight and reform committee.
Mr. Waxman is fairly itching to finally map the waste, fraud and abuse in private contracting that went largely ignored by the previous Republican Congress. Taxpayers should wish him well.
In a preliminary glimpse, 118 contracts worth $745 billion were found by government auditors to be rife with questionable award procedures, mismanagement, overcharging and skimpy to nonexistent oversight. Full inquiries and public hearings are vital if the rich and shadowy world of privatization is ever to be plumbed for the scandal it is nurturing. Taxpayers have only a vague notion of what’s gone on, mainly through reporting on the fantastic good fortune of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, whose contracts increased a whopping 600 percent across five years as the Iraq war costs cascaded. Not incidentally, privatization has been a cash cow in stirring campaign donations from successful contractors.
According to one recent audit reported in The Washington Post, among 49 privatized contracts, three out of five were awarded noncompetitively, lacked oversight, and raised questions of legality. What’s been going on out there? This question cries out for an answer from the new Congress.
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Rep. Rohrabacher: Global Warming May Have Been Caused By ‘Dinosaur Flatulence’
This week, Congress held its first hearing on the landmark IPCC report on climate change. That report concluded that global warming is "unequivocal" and human activity is the main driver, "very likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.
During the hearing, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) — one of the 87 percent of congressional Republicans who do not believe in man-made global warming — questioned the authors of the report about a period of dramatic climate change that occured 55 million years ago. "We don’t know what those other cycles were caused by in the past. Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know, or who knows?’
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US must abandon Iraqi cities or face nightmare scenario, say experts
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.
This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush's last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country - but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.
Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.
US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.
The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.
It warns of radicalisation and possible secession movements in adjacent countries, an upsurge in terrorism, and of intervention by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ending an all-out civil war, the report says, would require a force of 450,000 - three times the present US deployment even after the 21,500 "surge" ordered by President Bush this month.
Everywhere looms the shadow of Iran. In a "war game" testing US options, the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution found that, as the descent into civil war gathered pace, confrontation between the US and Iran intensified, and Washington's leverage on Tehran diminished. Civil war in Iraq would turn Iran into "the unambiguous adversary" of the US.
Indeed, everything indicates that that is already happening. The study appeared on the same day as the Iranian ambassador in Iraq told The New York Times that Tehran intended to expand its influence in Iraq. US commanders now claim that thousands of Iranian advisers are arming and training Shia militias.
Nonetheless, the Brookings report urges the creation of a regional group to help contain a civil war. That would see exactly the contacts with Iran and Syria that the Bush administration steadfastly refuses. An alternative in the report would be "red lines" which, if crossed by Tehran, could lead to a military attack by the US on Iran.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Oil part 2
Part 2,
From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots With Oil By Richard W. Behan AlterNet
Iraq
The Project for a New American Century, a D.C.-based political think tank funded by archconservative philanthropies and founded in 1997, is the source of the Bush Administration's imperialistic urge for the U.S. to dominate the world. Our nation should seek to achieve a "...benevolent global hegemony," according to William Kristol, PNAC's chairman. The group advocates the novel and startling concept of "pre-emptive war" as a means of doing so. On
January 26, 1998, the PNAC, sent a letter to President William Clinton urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The dictator, the letter alleged, was a destabilizing force in the Middle East, and posed a mortal threat to "...the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's oil supply..." The subjugation of Iraq would be the first application of "pre-emptive war."
The unprovoked, full-scale invasion and occupation of another country, however, would be an unequivocal example of "the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state." That is the formal United Nations definition of military aggression, and a nation can choose to launch it only in self-defense. Otherwise it is an international crime.
President Clinton did not honor the PNAC's request.
But sixteen members of the Project for a New American Century would soon assume prominent positions in the Administration of George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage and John Bolton.
The "significant portion of the world's oil supply" was of immediate concern, because of the commanding influence of the oil industry in the Bush Administration. Beside the president and vice president, eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor had direct ties to the industry, and so did 32 others in the departments of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.
Within days of taking office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was composed of the relevant federal officials and dozens of energy industry executives and lobbyists, and it operated in tight secrecy. (The full membership has never been revealed, but Enron's Kenneth Lay is known to have participated, and the Washington Post reported that Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, Shell, and BP America did, too.)
During his second week in office, President Bush convened the first meeting of his National Security Council. It was a triumph for the PNAC. In just one hour-long meeting, the new Bush Administration turned upside down the long-standing focus of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Over Secretary of State Colin Powell's objections, the goal of reconciling the Israel-Palestine conflict was abandoned, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was set as the new priority. Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty, describes the meeting in detail.
The Energy Task Force wasted no time, either. Within three weeks of its creation, the group was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" - dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of negotiations for exploring and developing Iraqi crude.
Not a single U.S. oil company was among the "suitors," and that was intolerable, given a foreign policy bent on global hegemony. The National Energy Policy document, released May 17, 2001 concluded this: "By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."
That rather innocuous statement can be clarified by a top-secret memo dated February 3, 2001 to the staff of the National Security Council. Cheney's group, the memo said, was "melding" two apparently unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies toward rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." The memo directed the National Security Council staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as the "melding" continued. National security policy and international energy policy would be developed as a coordinated whole. This would prove convenient on September 11, 2001, still seven months in the future.
The Bush Administration was drawing a bead on Iraqi oil long before the "global war on terror" was invented. But how could the "capture of new and existing oil fields" be made to seem less aggressive, less arbitrary, less overt?
During April of 2002, almost a full year before the invasion, the State Department launched a policy-development initiative called "The Future of Iraq Project" to accomplish this. The "Oil and Energy Working Group" provided the disguise for "capturing" Iraqi oil. Iraq, it said in its final report, "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war ... the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources."
Capture would take the form of investment, and the vehicle for doing so would be the "production sharing agreement."
Under production sharing agreements, or PSAs, oil companies are granted ownership of a "share" of the oil produced, in exchange for investing in development costs, and the contracts are binding for up to 30 years. What would happen, though, if the companies' investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were obscenely, disproportionately large?
This is hardwired. According to a UK Platform article titled "Crude Designs," production sharing agreements have now been drafted in Baghdad covering 75 percent of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, waiting to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162 percent on their investments. And the "foreign suitors" are not quite so foreign now: The players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.
The use of PSAs will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the "investment" program. They would be far better off keeping in place the structure Iraq has relied upon since 1972: a nationalized oil industry leasing pumping rights to the oil companies, who then pay royalties to the central government. That is how it is done today in Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries.
Production sharing agreements, heavily favored by the oil companies, were specified by George Bush's State Department. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority drafted an oil law privatizing the oil sector, and American oil interests have lobbied in Baghdad ever since then for the PSAs. Apparently successfully: The Oil Committee headed by Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih is said currently to be "leaning" toward them.
With the capture of Iraqi oil resources prospectively disguised, the Halliburton company was then hired, secretly, to design a fire suppression strategy for the Iraqi oil fields. If oil wells were to be torched during the upcoming war (as Saddam did in Kuwait in 1991), the Bush Administration would be prepared to extinguish them rapidly. The contract with Halliburton was signed in the fall of 2002. Congress had yet to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy" - national security policy and international energy policy - have become indistinguishable.
To be cont,
From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots With Oil By Richard W. Behan AlterNet
Iraq
The Project for a New American Century, a D.C.-based political think tank funded by archconservative philanthropies and founded in 1997, is the source of the Bush Administration's imperialistic urge for the U.S. to dominate the world. Our nation should seek to achieve a "...benevolent global hegemony," according to William Kristol, PNAC's chairman. The group advocates the novel and startling concept of "pre-emptive war" as a means of doing so. On
January 26, 1998, the PNAC, sent a letter to President William Clinton urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The dictator, the letter alleged, was a destabilizing force in the Middle East, and posed a mortal threat to "...the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's oil supply..." The subjugation of Iraq would be the first application of "pre-emptive war."
The unprovoked, full-scale invasion and occupation of another country, however, would be an unequivocal example of "the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state." That is the formal United Nations definition of military aggression, and a nation can choose to launch it only in self-defense. Otherwise it is an international crime.
President Clinton did not honor the PNAC's request.
But sixteen members of the Project for a New American Century would soon assume prominent positions in the Administration of George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage and John Bolton.
The "significant portion of the world's oil supply" was of immediate concern, because of the commanding influence of the oil industry in the Bush Administration. Beside the president and vice president, eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor had direct ties to the industry, and so did 32 others in the departments of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.
Within days of taking office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was composed of the relevant federal officials and dozens of energy industry executives and lobbyists, and it operated in tight secrecy. (The full membership has never been revealed, but Enron's Kenneth Lay is known to have participated, and the Washington Post reported that Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, Shell, and BP America did, too.)
During his second week in office, President Bush convened the first meeting of his National Security Council. It was a triumph for the PNAC. In just one hour-long meeting, the new Bush Administration turned upside down the long-standing focus of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Over Secretary of State Colin Powell's objections, the goal of reconciling the Israel-Palestine conflict was abandoned, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was set as the new priority. Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty, describes the meeting in detail.
The Energy Task Force wasted no time, either. Within three weeks of its creation, the group was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" - dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of negotiations for exploring and developing Iraqi crude.
Not a single U.S. oil company was among the "suitors," and that was intolerable, given a foreign policy bent on global hegemony. The National Energy Policy document, released May 17, 2001 concluded this: "By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."
That rather innocuous statement can be clarified by a top-secret memo dated February 3, 2001 to the staff of the National Security Council. Cheney's group, the memo said, was "melding" two apparently unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies toward rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." The memo directed the National Security Council staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as the "melding" continued. National security policy and international energy policy would be developed as a coordinated whole. This would prove convenient on September 11, 2001, still seven months in the future.
The Bush Administration was drawing a bead on Iraqi oil long before the "global war on terror" was invented. But how could the "capture of new and existing oil fields" be made to seem less aggressive, less arbitrary, less overt?
During April of 2002, almost a full year before the invasion, the State Department launched a policy-development initiative called "The Future of Iraq Project" to accomplish this. The "Oil and Energy Working Group" provided the disguise for "capturing" Iraqi oil. Iraq, it said in its final report, "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war ... the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources."
Capture would take the form of investment, and the vehicle for doing so would be the "production sharing agreement."
Under production sharing agreements, or PSAs, oil companies are granted ownership of a "share" of the oil produced, in exchange for investing in development costs, and the contracts are binding for up to 30 years. What would happen, though, if the companies' investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were obscenely, disproportionately large?
This is hardwired. According to a UK Platform article titled "Crude Designs," production sharing agreements have now been drafted in Baghdad covering 75 percent of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, waiting to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162 percent on their investments. And the "foreign suitors" are not quite so foreign now: The players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.
The use of PSAs will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the "investment" program. They would be far better off keeping in place the structure Iraq has relied upon since 1972: a nationalized oil industry leasing pumping rights to the oil companies, who then pay royalties to the central government. That is how it is done today in Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries.
Production sharing agreements, heavily favored by the oil companies, were specified by George Bush's State Department. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority drafted an oil law privatizing the oil sector, and American oil interests have lobbied in Baghdad ever since then for the PSAs. Apparently successfully: The Oil Committee headed by Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih is said currently to be "leaning" toward them.
With the capture of Iraqi oil resources prospectively disguised, the Halliburton company was then hired, secretly, to design a fire suppression strategy for the Iraqi oil fields. If oil wells were to be torched during the upcoming war (as Saddam did in Kuwait in 1991), the Bush Administration would be prepared to extinguish them rapidly. The contract with Halliburton was signed in the fall of 2002. Congress had yet to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy" - national security policy and international energy policy - have become indistinguishable.
To be cont,
Saturday, February 10, 2007
IS THERE
Photobucket Album
If Only Doug Feith Had Big Tits By Marty Kaplan
If Doug Feith looked like a Courtney Love's bad dream of Marilyn Monroe, would the cable "news" networks clear their schedules when evidence of his manipulation of pre-war intelligence hit the wires? If "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," as Gen. Tommy Franks called Feith, were a now-dead Playmate, would Wolf go wall-to-wall with the story of the neocon Fifth Column within the Pentagon?
What would it take for "Today" to pay as much attention to the silent coup that lied us into Iraq -- Wolfowitz in a platinum wig? Perle in a paternity suit? Cheney in methadone rehab a diaper? MSM: RIP
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Weapons of Mass Distraction, Again
READ MORE: Harry Shearer
While Keith Obermann blames the Republicans for seeking distractions (like carping about Nancy Pelosi's desire to fly nonstop) from their effort to block the Iraq war debate, his own MSNBC, joined by CNN, spent hours this afternoon on the sadly premature death of a notorious quasi-celebrity (name supplied on request), bumping the first feed of Hardball and its coverage of the Scooter Libby trial. News network, heal thyself.
Meanwhile, while highbrow journalistic institutions ponder the need for an independent investigation of the media's pre-Iraq war performance, the lessons remain resolutely unlearned. On CNN, Lou Dobbs led with a brace of stories on Iran, referring at one point in his own copy to "Iran's escalating nuclear weapons program". In case you weren't scared enough, Christine Roman's followup piece asserted that "America's enemies are challenging America's interests around the globe." That list of enemies, in addition to North Korea and Iran, included China and Russia. Has Dobbs been fed some fine custom-tailored intel that provides actual evidence of an "escalating nuclear weapons program"?
Or is he just uncritically repeating the assumptions of the administration?
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digby 2/08/2007
They're Baaack
by digby
If you doubt that we are now operating under Clinton Rules, just check out C-Span right now where you will see Dan "Scumbag" Burton railing on the floor of the House about Nancy Pelosi wasting money by requesting a huge airplane to ferry her and her entourage back and forth to gay orgies in San Francisco. (Ok, I made up that last part.) We're back on the tarmac with Republican spendthrifts accusing the democrats of being wealthy elitists who are ripping off the taxpayers. They do this by picking one little example, usually false or exaggerated, and then ppound on it relentlessly, getting the utterly irresponsible morons in the press to turn it into a "scandal." Get ready for "scandal" after "scandal" after "scandal." They haven't missed a beat. We have just lived through a dozen years of these miserable crooks stealing the country blind. Many of them, including Burton, are under ethical clouds and others are literally in jail for ripping off the taxpayers. The country is in such breathtaking debt that it will take a generation to fix it, if we can. They rubber-stamped the most unpopular, failed presidency since Hoover for six long years until the American people finally got sick of it. And here they are unctuously whining for hours about how they are just trying to "save the taxpayers money" by having a hissy fit over Nancy Pelosi's travel. But here we are. CNN is lapping it up, suggesting that Pelosi should be willing to puddle jump through the nation if she doesn't have a tailwind that night, and generally giving this completely bullshit (Pentagon lie) story legs. All the cable bloviators are shivering with excitement about covering their favorite kind of story again -- trivial, bitchy, tabloid stories about Democrats. Yum.The good news is that I just heard Anthony Weiner refer repeatedly to the "Republic" party on the floor of the House. I like it.
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WE have 55 submarines! What are they doing and do we need to spend 2.5 billion dollars for another one? As included in new Bush budget.
Reagan lives on in the new Bush budget 15.5 billion dollars for Star Wars, I thought that died with him? The budget is loaded with this kind of crap while reducing funds for programs that help people.And if the Budget a hugh pork barrel that will break the bank of course 500 billion of it borrowed we will also give money to Lockheed Martin. Read the following
guest blogged by Logan Murphy)
On his radio show, Ed Schultz interviewed Lloyd Chapman, President of American Small Business League. Chapman accused CNN and Lou Dobbs of scrubbing a story produced months ago about the Bush administration giving away billions of dollars in loans to Lockheed Martin and Boeing that were meant to go to small businesses. He suggested that perhaps the reason the story was quashed had to do with these companies purchasing advertising on CNN even though they provide products and services that are unavailable to the public. Audio of the interview available here.
Apparently this has been going on for years. Who would believe that a news outlet would decide not to run a story that is clearly in the public interest in exchange for some ad dollars?
Don't forget, the Republicans refused to sign the minimum wage hike without breaks for small businesses (.pdf), because they were just so concerned for them. Stories like this only magnify the hypocrisy of the "Republic" Party and their claptrap about supporting small business.
_______________________________________
Have a Little Feith in Him
02.09.2007 Lizz Winstead
Had I known this altering intelligence thing wasn't illegal but merely inappropriate, like asking some ones salary, or the Paris Hilton sex tapes, I would have fixated on something waay more substantial.
Well don't I have egg on my face.
I am sure I will get plenty of comments about this post as to why I am writing about such fluff on a website that is SUPPOSED to be about things of importance, not "inappropriate" tabloidy stuff like the homicidal astronaut with poopy pants or Dougie Feith's secret mission to link Iraq to Al Qaeda with shoddy evidence.
Mea Culpa ok?
My sheepishness was heightened when I read Feith's further explanation to the Post.
"This was not 'alternative intelligence assessment,' " he said. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."
Oh my God, I am so embarrassed for myself again! I guess I just assumed he was endorsing it since it was crafted by Feith and Cheney and Rummy and the Perle and then presented to the Congress as empirical evidence to convince the public about why we needed this war.
As you can imagine, I am just kicking myself for jumping to conclusions. Why didn't I just ask someone if he endorsed its substance?
I always jump to conclusions, next time I will for sure ask.
Mea Culpa II.
I am glad DF cleared up all the details for me. I, like so many of you was just so inundated with the 24/7 coverage of this story that I let myself get caught up in his silly, inappropriate behavior instead of focusing on stories that really matter.
Now I can finally start digging around on the internet to see if anyone is talking about Anna Nicole.
____________________________________
Well we all know that this country is populated by airheads who are fixated on celebs alive,dying or dead. Most are not affected nor touched or hammered as the case may be, by the war. I blame the MSM for a lot of this and would like to put all those commentators in a space capsule somewhere and forget about them.But it is the public, sensationalism is what they want. Pop culture is dreadful and many years ago HL Menken said " no one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public". So true today.
In the meanwhile read the blogs it's where the real news is!
Friday, February 9, 2007
What a mess!
Todays Laugh,
One weekend, the husband is in the bathroom shaving when the kid he hired to mow his lawn, a local kid named Bubba, comes in to pee. The husband slyly looks over and is shocked at how immensely endowed Bubba is. He can't help himself, and asks Bubba what his secret is.
"Well," says Bubba, "every night before I climb into bed with a girl, I whack my penis on the bedpost three times. It works, and it sure impresses the girls!"
The husband was excited at this easy suggestion and decided to try it that very night. So before climbing into bed with his wife, he took out his penis and whacked it three times on the bedpost. His wife, half-asleep, said, "Bubba? Is that you?"
________________________________________________
Huffington Post:
The committee chairman, Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, noted in his opening statement that the contractors' deaths in Fallujah opened America's eyes to the fact that civilian contractors -- some 50,000 of them -- were in effect also fighting in Iraq, and that many of them are doing work done by the military itself in previous wars.
Government oversight has been so lax, he said, that, "It is now almost three years later, and we still don't know for sure the identity of the prime contractor under which the four Blackwater employees were working."
(Blackwater was hired by a Kuwaiti company called Regency, which was a subcontractor for ESS Support Services, which was a subcontractor for both the Halliburton subsidiary KBR and Fluor Corporation
_________________________________________________
Me Too Tim!
Lawyer claims Russert was elated when Libby was indictedWashington Post
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's lawyer on Thursday suggested that Tim Russert had a personal animosity for the vice president's former chief of staff and was elated when Libby was indicted in 2005. Carol D. Leonnig and Amy Goldstein write: "Russert sounded giddy in an audiotape played in court this afternoon of his on-air interview with radio personality Don Imus on the morning of Oct. 28, when charges were expected against Libby."
_________________________________________________
Lieberman: Independent DEMOCRAT? I don’t think so!
NYTimes:
It came as little surprise that when Senate Republicans blocked debate Monday on a resolution that would have opposed President Bush's plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, erstwhile Democrat, sided with them.
But Mr. Lieberman also went further, accusing Democrats of giving strength to the enemy and abandoning the troops, and arguing that an alternative resolution that he and many Republicans backed was "a statement of support to our troops."
That was too much even for one Republican member, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, a sponsor of the bipartisan resolution against the president's policy.
"I forcefully argue that ours is in support of the troops," Mr. Warner said tersely. "And there is no suggestion that one is less patriotic than the other."
[..]Joe Lieberman, independent, sees himself as Joe Lieberman unchained.
"I feel liberated, free somehow," he said during an interview in his office.
Good job, Connecticut voters. I hope you're happy.
CNN–please wake up. Lieberman is not a Democrat!
_________________________________________________
Most Loathsome People
24. Glenn Beck
Charges: If the dumbing down of political commentary continues along this trajectory, the next pundit to make the grade will be a hyena. Even the leather-winged shouting heads at Fox News look like intellectual giants next to this bleating, benighted Cassandra. It’s like someone found a manic, doom-prophesying hobo in a sandwich board, shaved him, shot him full of Zoloft and gave him a show. What makes Beck special, aside from appearing to have derived his entire geopolitical outlook from a five-minute segment about Iran on "The 700 Club," is the folksy "golly gee" manner in which he accuses his guests of collaborating with terrorists. At least Hannity and O’Reilly have the decency to act like bellicose pricks when they’re engaging in breathtaking cheap shots.
Exhibit A: "When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, ‘Oh shut up!’ I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining."
Sentence: Stripped bare, trussed like a turkey and air dropped into Waziristan with an apple in his mouth and an American flag in his ass.
_________________________________________________
Feingold Excoriates Fellow Democrats for Failing to 'Play Hardball' to End Iraq War
During Conference Call with Bloggers, the Wisconsin Senator Highly Critical of Colleagues, 'Washinton Insiders' and Even John Edwards for 'Playing it Safe on This One'
Says 'Dems Trying to Have it Both Ways' While 'Americans are Dying Unnecessarily'...
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) had a number of harsh words concerning today's procedural bickering and fillibustering by Republicans in the Senate, which stifled both votes on his own resolution to end the Iraq War as well as allowing amendments to several non-binding resolutions that also failed to come to the floor for a full vote.
Feingold's remarks were highly critical not just of the Republicans, but even moreso of his own Democratic party. "This is an important moment to see if we're gonna try and end this war. Frankly, I'm disappointed that Democrats are playing it safe on this one."
"We need to play hardball on this. We're gonna have to take the lead on this issue and we're gonna need to tie this place up as long as it takes," he said in describing what he sees as a fear and timidity in his colleagues who now hold a slight majority in the Senate.
"The problem is a whole lot of middle-of-the-road Democrats who refuse to pull the trigger, who refuse to do what needs to be done," Feingold stressed. "Even people who voted against the war" seem afraid, he explained. "It requires courage. It requires brinksmanship."
"Washington insiders, particularly from the previous administration...who say if you're going to take a tough stand, they're going to tear you apart."
He said the advice of the "media consultants" and "power structure in Washington" has led fellow Democrats to believe they'll be criticized if they withhold funding for a war they previously supported. Those same insiders, he explained, previously supported the war and are now scared to death about what would happen if their clients -- many of whom who have now admitted their initial support for the war was a mistake -- now took a tough stand to undue that initial mistake.
"They want their cake and to eat it too since they voted for the war. They're trying to have it both ways. That has to end because Americans are dying unnecessarily. Too many of my colleagues are trying to massage this and have it both ways. That has to end
_________________________________________________
Todays Quote Speaking of Administrations Spokepersons
Imus: Mary Matalin Is A Liar: Imus, “None of you can tell the truth, it’s insane. It’s like a disease you guys have.”
_________________________________________________
US must abandon Iraqi cities or face nightmare scenario, say experts
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 30 January 2007
The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.
This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush's last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country - but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.
Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.
US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.
The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.
It warns of radicalisation and possible secession movements in adjacent countries, an upsurge in terrorism, and of intervention by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ending an all-out civil war, the report says, would require a force of 450,000 - three times the present US deployment even after the 21,500 "surge" ordered by President Bush this month.
Everywhere looms the shadow of Iran. In a "war game" testing US options, the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution found that, as the descent into civil war gathered pace, confrontation between the US and Iran intensified, and Washington's leverage on Tehran diminished. Civil war in Iraq would turn Iran into "the unambiguous adversary" of the US.
Indeed, everything indicates that that is already happening. The study appeared on the same day as the Iranian ambassador in Iraq told The New York Times that Tehran intended to expand its influence in Iraq. US commanders now claim that thousands of Iranian advisers are arming and training Shia militias.
Nonetheless, the Brookings report urges the creation of a regional group to help contain a civil war. That would see exactly the contacts with Iran and Syria that the Bush administration steadfastly refuses. An alternative in the report would be "red lines" which, if crossed by Tehran, could lead to a military attack by the US on Iran.
_________________________________________________
I told myself not a word to be posted about her but couldn't resist this.
CNN on the news that Anna Nicole Smith just died: "This is certainly an unexpected and very tragic turn of events for Anna Nicole Smith"
by John in DC - 2/08/2007 04:08:00 PM
Gee, you think?
________________________________________________
Hey Don't forget, make your reservation now!
A White Castle Valentine's Day
White Castle is taking reservations for their annual Valentine's Day Dinner, which includes candles and a waiter.
One weekend, the husband is in the bathroom shaving when the kid he hired to mow his lawn, a local kid named Bubba, comes in to pee. The husband slyly looks over and is shocked at how immensely endowed Bubba is. He can't help himself, and asks Bubba what his secret is.
"Well," says Bubba, "every night before I climb into bed with a girl, I whack my penis on the bedpost three times. It works, and it sure impresses the girls!"
The husband was excited at this easy suggestion and decided to try it that very night. So before climbing into bed with his wife, he took out his penis and whacked it three times on the bedpost. His wife, half-asleep, said, "Bubba? Is that you?"
________________________________________________
Huffington Post:
The committee chairman, Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, noted in his opening statement that the contractors' deaths in Fallujah opened America's eyes to the fact that civilian contractors -- some 50,000 of them -- were in effect also fighting in Iraq, and that many of them are doing work done by the military itself in previous wars.
Government oversight has been so lax, he said, that, "It is now almost three years later, and we still don't know for sure the identity of the prime contractor under which the four Blackwater employees were working."
(Blackwater was hired by a Kuwaiti company called Regency, which was a subcontractor for ESS Support Services, which was a subcontractor for both the Halliburton subsidiary KBR and Fluor Corporation
_________________________________________________
Me Too Tim!
Lawyer claims Russert was elated when Libby was indictedWashington Post
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's lawyer on Thursday suggested that Tim Russert had a personal animosity for the vice president's former chief of staff and was elated when Libby was indicted in 2005. Carol D. Leonnig and Amy Goldstein write: "Russert sounded giddy in an audiotape played in court this afternoon of his on-air interview with radio personality Don Imus on the morning of Oct. 28, when charges were expected against Libby."
_________________________________________________
Lieberman: Independent DEMOCRAT? I don’t think so!
NYTimes:
It came as little surprise that when Senate Republicans blocked debate Monday on a resolution that would have opposed President Bush's plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, erstwhile Democrat, sided with them.
But Mr. Lieberman also went further, accusing Democrats of giving strength to the enemy and abandoning the troops, and arguing that an alternative resolution that he and many Republicans backed was "a statement of support to our troops."
That was too much even for one Republican member, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, a sponsor of the bipartisan resolution against the president's policy.
"I forcefully argue that ours is in support of the troops," Mr. Warner said tersely. "And there is no suggestion that one is less patriotic than the other."
[..]Joe Lieberman, independent, sees himself as Joe Lieberman unchained.
"I feel liberated, free somehow," he said during an interview in his office.
Good job, Connecticut voters. I hope you're happy.
CNN–please wake up. Lieberman is not a Democrat!
_________________________________________________
Most Loathsome People
24. Glenn Beck
Charges: If the dumbing down of political commentary continues along this trajectory, the next pundit to make the grade will be a hyena. Even the leather-winged shouting heads at Fox News look like intellectual giants next to this bleating, benighted Cassandra. It’s like someone found a manic, doom-prophesying hobo in a sandwich board, shaved him, shot him full of Zoloft and gave him a show. What makes Beck special, aside from appearing to have derived his entire geopolitical outlook from a five-minute segment about Iran on "The 700 Club," is the folksy "golly gee" manner in which he accuses his guests of collaborating with terrorists. At least Hannity and O’Reilly have the decency to act like bellicose pricks when they’re engaging in breathtaking cheap shots.
Exhibit A: "When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, ‘Oh shut up!’ I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining."
Sentence: Stripped bare, trussed like a turkey and air dropped into Waziristan with an apple in his mouth and an American flag in his ass.
_________________________________________________
Feingold Excoriates Fellow Democrats for Failing to 'Play Hardball' to End Iraq War
During Conference Call with Bloggers, the Wisconsin Senator Highly Critical of Colleagues, 'Washinton Insiders' and Even John Edwards for 'Playing it Safe on This One'
Says 'Dems Trying to Have it Both Ways' While 'Americans are Dying Unnecessarily'...
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) had a number of harsh words concerning today's procedural bickering and fillibustering by Republicans in the Senate, which stifled both votes on his own resolution to end the Iraq War as well as allowing amendments to several non-binding resolutions that also failed to come to the floor for a full vote.
Feingold's remarks were highly critical not just of the Republicans, but even moreso of his own Democratic party. "This is an important moment to see if we're gonna try and end this war. Frankly, I'm disappointed that Democrats are playing it safe on this one."
"We need to play hardball on this. We're gonna have to take the lead on this issue and we're gonna need to tie this place up as long as it takes," he said in describing what he sees as a fear and timidity in his colleagues who now hold a slight majority in the Senate.
"The problem is a whole lot of middle-of-the-road Democrats who refuse to pull the trigger, who refuse to do what needs to be done," Feingold stressed. "Even people who voted against the war" seem afraid, he explained. "It requires courage. It requires brinksmanship."
"Washington insiders, particularly from the previous administration...who say if you're going to take a tough stand, they're going to tear you apart."
He said the advice of the "media consultants" and "power structure in Washington" has led fellow Democrats to believe they'll be criticized if they withhold funding for a war they previously supported. Those same insiders, he explained, previously supported the war and are now scared to death about what would happen if their clients -- many of whom who have now admitted their initial support for the war was a mistake -- now took a tough stand to undue that initial mistake.
"They want their cake and to eat it too since they voted for the war. They're trying to have it both ways. That has to end because Americans are dying unnecessarily. Too many of my colleagues are trying to massage this and have it both ways. That has to end
_________________________________________________
Todays Quote Speaking of Administrations Spokepersons
Imus: Mary Matalin Is A Liar: Imus, “None of you can tell the truth, it’s insane. It’s like a disease you guys have.”
_________________________________________________
US must abandon Iraqi cities or face nightmare scenario, say experts
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 30 January 2007
The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.
This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush's last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country - but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.
Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.
US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.
The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.
It warns of radicalisation and possible secession movements in adjacent countries, an upsurge in terrorism, and of intervention by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ending an all-out civil war, the report says, would require a force of 450,000 - three times the present US deployment even after the 21,500 "surge" ordered by President Bush this month.
Everywhere looms the shadow of Iran. In a "war game" testing US options, the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution found that, as the descent into civil war gathered pace, confrontation between the US and Iran intensified, and Washington's leverage on Tehran diminished. Civil war in Iraq would turn Iran into "the unambiguous adversary" of the US.
Indeed, everything indicates that that is already happening. The study appeared on the same day as the Iranian ambassador in Iraq told The New York Times that Tehran intended to expand its influence in Iraq. US commanders now claim that thousands of Iranian advisers are arming and training Shia militias.
Nonetheless, the Brookings report urges the creation of a regional group to help contain a civil war. That would see exactly the contacts with Iran and Syria that the Bush administration steadfastly refuses. An alternative in the report would be "red lines" which, if crossed by Tehran, could lead to a military attack by the US on Iran.
_________________________________________________
I told myself not a word to be posted about her but couldn't resist this.
CNN on the news that Anna Nicole Smith just died: "This is certainly an unexpected and very tragic turn of events for Anna Nicole Smith"
by John in DC - 2/08/2007 04:08:00 PM
Gee, you think?
________________________________________________
Hey Don't forget, make your reservation now!
A White Castle Valentine's Day
White Castle is taking reservations for their annual Valentine's Day Dinner, which includes candles and a waiter.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
It's your money
Todays Laugh,
KFC: Our Daily Chicken
A salesman from KFC walked up to the Pope and offers him a million dollars if he would change "The Lord's Prayer" from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken." The Pope refused his offer.
Two weeks later, the man offered the pope 10 million dollars to change it from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken" and again the Pope refused the man's generous offer. Another week later, the man offered the Pope 20 million dollars and finally the Pope accepted. The following day, the Pope said to all his officials, "I have some good news and some bad news. 'The good news is, that we have just received a check for 20 million dollars. The bad news is, we lost the Wonder Bread account
______________________________________
Bremer Paid "Ghost Employees" To Avoid "Real Trouble"
The Huffington Post Melinda Henneberger
READ MORE: Iraq, United States, Henry Waxman, Danny K. Davis, Illinois, California
Paul Bremer told members of Congress today that he was aware that nonexistent "ghost employees" were on America's payroll when he was administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
But because the real employees - who provided security for Iraqi ministries - were "74,000 armed men, it seemed a lesser risk to continue paying" everyone while trying to figure out who was actually showing up for work.
"On the streets, you'd call that protection money," remarked Congressman Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat. When Davis asked whether any of that money had wound up in the hands of insurgents, Bremer said he didn't know. But "if we stopped paying them, my judgment was we could have real trouble."
Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, also testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today, and told the panel that the problem of ghost employees was not a major reason that $8.8 billion distributed to Iraqi ministries is unaccounted for.
The real problem, Bowen said, was a general lack of transparency: the only accounting Americans asked for was assurance from the various ministries that the money was indeed being spent. The Coalition also failed to follow its own rules on securing money sent to Iraq; in one case, Bowen said auditors found the key to a safe containing a huge amount of cash left in a duffel bag left in plain view in the Coalition comptroller's office.
But Bremer argued that a number of the accounting problems were actually due to the fact that "we had no idea" how hobbled the economy and infrastructure had been in Saddam's Iraq. "It's a fair question to ask why we didn't know more about how run-down the economy was. They were focused on the WMDs, though we didn't get that right, either."
He also faulted pre-war planning, and said he did not have anywhere near enough staff to do the job: "If we'd been focused on the basis of a plan, we would have been more in touch with reality" from the first.
But Bremer has backed the Bush administration's proposal to send more troops to Iraq.
When auditors first confirmed that there were ghost employees in a couple of ministries, "we asked what they had done about it," Bowen said, "and they said they had made the decision to keep paying it, to keep the peace." In one ministry, about 25 percent of the total 8,200 could not be "validated," - matched with a person, Bowen said. In another, "just a fraction" of the 1,400 employees could be located.
After the committee chairman, California Democrat Henry Waxman, said that continuing to pay ghost employees struck him as reckless, Bremer responded that the only alternative, as he saw it, was "74,000 armed men who are angry at us," if payments were held up for any reason. "I would certainly do it again today."
Waxman also questioned the wisdom of sending billions in cash to Baghdad - 363 tons of bills, sent in enormous pallets via military planes and passed out from the back of pickup trucks.
But Bremer, unruffled throughout the hearing, said he was responding to an urgent request from the Iraqi minister of finance, who wanted the cash delivered ahead of the planned handoff to his own government.
"He said, "I am concerned that I will not have the money to support the Iraqi government expenses for the first couple of months after we are sovereign. We won't have the mechanisms in place. I won't know how to get the money here.'"
Republicans on the committee repeatedly defended Bremer's decisions: "Maybe even billions were not spent the way it should have been spent," said Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican. "And I'm not happy about that, but tell me how he could've gotten that money out" where it was needed otherwise. "The Iraqis spent the money badly, right?"
Democrats on the committee also wondered why the president was asking American taxpayers for $1.7 billion more for reconstruction in Iraq when Iraq has not spent $12 billion it has already been sent for that purpose." "Perhaps," Waxman suggested, "That's to pay for ghost employees."
_______________________________________
Edwards Broke Clinton's Stride" The Evans-Novak Political Report: "Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) was the winner of the parade of Democratic presidential candidates at last week's Democratic National Committee meeting in Washington. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was not exactly a dud, but she was not very inspiring, either. The breaking of support for her in Hollywood, where there is substantial backing for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), indicates there will be no unopposed coronation for the nomination as she had hoped."
_________________________________________________
Matthews drops the
F-bomb about 'Southern guys'
Once again allowing his emotions to get the better of him, Hardball host Chris Matthews told Don Imus this morning that he’s “so sick of Southern guys with ranches running this country. I want a guy to run for President who doesn’t have a f**king — I’m sorry, a ranch.” Watch it:
_________________________________________________
From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots With Oil
By Richard W. Behan
AlterNet
Monday 05 February 2007
In the Caspian Basin and beneath the deserts of Iraq, as many as 783 billion barrels of oil are waiting to be pumped. Anyone controlling that much oil stands a good chance of breaking OPEC's stranglehold overnight, and any nation seeking to dominate the world would have to go after it.
The long-held suspicions about George Bush's wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.
The "global war on terror" began as a fraud and a smokescreen and remains so today, a product of the Bush Administration's deliberate and successful distortion of public perception. The fragmented accounts in the mainstream media reflect this warping of reality, but another more accurate version of recent history is available in contemporary books and the vast information pool of the Internet. When told start to finish, the story becomes clear, the dots easier to connect.
Both appalling and masterful, the lies that led us into war and keep us there today show the people of the Bush Administration to be devious, dangerous and far from stupid.
To be Con't!
KFC: Our Daily Chicken
A salesman from KFC walked up to the Pope and offers him a million dollars if he would change "The Lord's Prayer" from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken." The Pope refused his offer.
Two weeks later, the man offered the pope 10 million dollars to change it from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken" and again the Pope refused the man's generous offer. Another week later, the man offered the Pope 20 million dollars and finally the Pope accepted. The following day, the Pope said to all his officials, "I have some good news and some bad news. 'The good news is, that we have just received a check for 20 million dollars. The bad news is, we lost the Wonder Bread account
______________________________________
Bremer Paid "Ghost Employees" To Avoid "Real Trouble"
The Huffington Post Melinda Henneberger
READ MORE: Iraq, United States, Henry Waxman, Danny K. Davis, Illinois, California
Paul Bremer told members of Congress today that he was aware that nonexistent "ghost employees" were on America's payroll when he was administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
But because the real employees - who provided security for Iraqi ministries - were "74,000 armed men, it seemed a lesser risk to continue paying" everyone while trying to figure out who was actually showing up for work.
"On the streets, you'd call that protection money," remarked Congressman Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat. When Davis asked whether any of that money had wound up in the hands of insurgents, Bremer said he didn't know. But "if we stopped paying them, my judgment was we could have real trouble."
Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, also testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today, and told the panel that the problem of ghost employees was not a major reason that $8.8 billion distributed to Iraqi ministries is unaccounted for.
The real problem, Bowen said, was a general lack of transparency: the only accounting Americans asked for was assurance from the various ministries that the money was indeed being spent. The Coalition also failed to follow its own rules on securing money sent to Iraq; in one case, Bowen said auditors found the key to a safe containing a huge amount of cash left in a duffel bag left in plain view in the Coalition comptroller's office.
But Bremer argued that a number of the accounting problems were actually due to the fact that "we had no idea" how hobbled the economy and infrastructure had been in Saddam's Iraq. "It's a fair question to ask why we didn't know more about how run-down the economy was. They were focused on the WMDs, though we didn't get that right, either."
He also faulted pre-war planning, and said he did not have anywhere near enough staff to do the job: "If we'd been focused on the basis of a plan, we would have been more in touch with reality" from the first.
But Bremer has backed the Bush administration's proposal to send more troops to Iraq.
When auditors first confirmed that there were ghost employees in a couple of ministries, "we asked what they had done about it," Bowen said, "and they said they had made the decision to keep paying it, to keep the peace." In one ministry, about 25 percent of the total 8,200 could not be "validated," - matched with a person, Bowen said. In another, "just a fraction" of the 1,400 employees could be located.
After the committee chairman, California Democrat Henry Waxman, said that continuing to pay ghost employees struck him as reckless, Bremer responded that the only alternative, as he saw it, was "74,000 armed men who are angry at us," if payments were held up for any reason. "I would certainly do it again today."
Waxman also questioned the wisdom of sending billions in cash to Baghdad - 363 tons of bills, sent in enormous pallets via military planes and passed out from the back of pickup trucks.
But Bremer, unruffled throughout the hearing, said he was responding to an urgent request from the Iraqi minister of finance, who wanted the cash delivered ahead of the planned handoff to his own government.
"He said, "I am concerned that I will not have the money to support the Iraqi government expenses for the first couple of months after we are sovereign. We won't have the mechanisms in place. I won't know how to get the money here.'"
Republicans on the committee repeatedly defended Bremer's decisions: "Maybe even billions were not spent the way it should have been spent," said Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican. "And I'm not happy about that, but tell me how he could've gotten that money out" where it was needed otherwise. "The Iraqis spent the money badly, right?"
Democrats on the committee also wondered why the president was asking American taxpayers for $1.7 billion more for reconstruction in Iraq when Iraq has not spent $12 billion it has already been sent for that purpose." "Perhaps," Waxman suggested, "That's to pay for ghost employees."
_______________________________________
Edwards Broke Clinton's Stride" The Evans-Novak Political Report: "Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) was the winner of the parade of Democratic presidential candidates at last week's Democratic National Committee meeting in Washington. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was not exactly a dud, but she was not very inspiring, either. The breaking of support for her in Hollywood, where there is substantial backing for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), indicates there will be no unopposed coronation for the nomination as she had hoped."
_________________________________________________
Matthews drops the
F-bomb about 'Southern guys'
Once again allowing his emotions to get the better of him, Hardball host Chris Matthews told Don Imus this morning that he’s “so sick of Southern guys with ranches running this country. I want a guy to run for President who doesn’t have a f**king — I’m sorry, a ranch.” Watch it:
_________________________________________________
From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots With Oil
By Richard W. Behan
AlterNet
Monday 05 February 2007
In the Caspian Basin and beneath the deserts of Iraq, as many as 783 billion barrels of oil are waiting to be pumped. Anyone controlling that much oil stands a good chance of breaking OPEC's stranglehold overnight, and any nation seeking to dominate the world would have to go after it.
The long-held suspicions about George Bush's wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.
The "global war on terror" began as a fraud and a smokescreen and remains so today, a product of the Bush Administration's deliberate and successful distortion of public perception. The fragmented accounts in the mainstream media reflect this warping of reality, but another more accurate version of recent history is available in contemporary books and the vast information pool of the Internet. When told start to finish, the story becomes clear, the dots easier to connect.
Both appalling and masterful, the lies that led us into war and keep us there today show the people of the Bush Administration to be devious, dangerous and far from stupid.
To be Con't!
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Billion here Billion there
Todays Laugh,
Doctor, doctor, I've only got 59 seconds to live.Wait a minute please.
_____________________________________
Reuters ...
The Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said Tuesday.
The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.
Bills weighing a total of 363 tons were loaded onto military aircraft in the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, said Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.
On December 12, 2003, $1.5 billion was shipped to Iraq, initially "the largest pay out of U.S. currency in Fed history," according to an e-mail cited by committee members.
It was followed by more than $2.4 billion on June 22, 2004, and $1.6 billion three days later. The CPA turned over sovereignty on June 30
_____________________________________
Reconstruction Official on Iraqi Billions: By Paul Kiel - February 6, 2007, 2:06 PM
What happened to billions in Iraqi funds that were overseen by the Coalition Provisional Authority? That's not "important," according to David Oliver, the former Director of Management and Budget of the agency.
A recording of the unfortunately candid remarks, previously made by Oliver to the BBC, were played during this morning's oversight hearing by Rep. Diane Watson (D-CA). The hearing has focused on the CPA's administration of nearly $9 billion in Iraqi funds in 2003 and 2004 -- money that Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has said was inadequately accounted for.
"I have no idea, I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't - nor do I actually think it is important," Oliver says on the tape . "Billions of dollars of their money disappeared, yes I understand, I'm saying what difference does it make?"
______________________________________
Posted by: randronDate: February 6, 2007 04:43 PM
The key to knowing that this reconstruction money was never going to be used for its intended purpose is that the money came into Iraq in CASH. That's right ... billions in CASH. No wonder it disappeared and is unaccounted for. Are we to believe that the US team did not know what would happen when they gave the Iraq reps billions in cash. Did they even get a receipt. How inept and stupid. They also knew in advance that there would be nothing we would be able to do about it. If it was your personal money you would never let someone like this even touch it without a hundred safeguards Bush. God what our country could have done for Katrina victims with that money and all you can say is "oh well..." How did you get to be in charge of anything?
_______________________________________
Feingold For President
Feingold: "It's Time To Play Hardball" On Iraq War
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) spends a lot of time roaming Wisconsin on his "listening sessions" and he says there's one common refrain that he hears from even his most conservative constituents: They want America out of Iraq."This attitude about what should be done in Iraq is a consensus -- everywhere but in Washington," said Feingold. "People don’t want us just to slow walk this, they don't want us to just worry about the escalation, they want us to get out of Iraq."The Wisconsin Democrat held a lengthy conference call with leading Progressive bloggers Monday night just an hour after Senate Republicans voted down any debate whatsoever on the bipartisan Warner-Levin resolution opposing George W. Bush's escalation of the Iraq war.Feingold said that, while he voted to allow debate on the Warner resolution, he finds it "unacceptable" and that he is "determined to support whatever will help us end this mistake quickly and in an orderly and safe manner."He came down hard on the Warner-Levin amendment, saying that it is weak to begin with and gets worse by making damaging concessions that support the status quo in Iraq. And, even worse, Feingold says, the resolution potentially blocks what he calls the "logical next steps" of getting out of Iraq completely, by proposing a surge in Anbar Province which, Feingold maintains, is a "formula for disaster" because of the number of troops America is losing there."Al Anbar is an attempt to try to subdue an insurgency with a huge supply of ground troops -- that's not going to work. And yet the Warner amendment explicitly endorses that kind of an escalation at this time," said Feingold. "And then there's also a provision that attempts to throw roadblocks at any attempts by Congress to use the power of the purse, which is an entirely Constitutional and appropriate step for us to consider at this point."Feingold, who has announced that he will not seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, spent a good part of the call discussing his fellow Democrats, whom he believes are not seizing the power of the majority party or heeding the message sent by voters in the midterm elections when they blindly support the Warner resolution."It's going for some kind of a political point instead of getting at the heart of this matter. Who was thinking about whether or not to escalate in Iraq on November 7? That wasn't the issue," said Feingold. "The issue that determined that election was whether we should be in Iraq at all and the answer was 'no.' So we should not sign on to something that, in my view, looks almost like a reauthorization of what's going on right now.""It is incredibly weak, even dangerous and I think it reminds me more of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution than it does a resolution that really gets us out of this situation."But Feingold, who voted against the original Iraq war resolution in 2002, seems increasingly fed up with Democrats too wimpy to fight the White House -- even with an incredibly unpopular president -- and who seem more comfortable playing it safe and doing nothing than making the tough decisions.Here's Feingold on timid Democrats on Capitol Hill:
"This is not a time to finesse the situation. This is not a time for a slow walk. This almost reminds me a little bit of the way Democrats behaved in October 2002, which was trying to play it safe, trying to use words such as 'well, we're going to vote for this resolution, but what it really means is that the president should go to the UN. That stuff doesn’t fly. And this kind of attempt to go a little bit of the way just to show you're on the other side of the president doesn’t fly either."This is an important moment to see if we're really going to try to end this war and, frankly, I am disappointed that Democrats are playing it too safe on this."This goes back to the beginning -- remember most of these guys voted for the war, so they’ve got a heck of a lot of baggage on this thing. So they’re afraid, as they have been all along, of standing up to these phony arguments of the White House. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be able to say they’re against the war, but they’re not for a timeline to withdraw the troops, they’re not for cutting the funding -- you know, they’re not for anything that's actually going to get the job done."So essentially it's trying to have it both ways and that has to end because Americans are dying unnecessarily. Too many of my colleagues are out there trying to massage this thing and finesse it -- it needs to end."They want to be immune from criticism from the White House. That's not how you win, by being afraid of the criticism. You stand up to the criticism and you say 'they were wrong. They took us in there on a fraudulent basis, they’ve screwed this up, they've screwed up the war against terrorism, they’ve weakened out military. We are going to take a completely different approach.'"But the tragedy that we're facing, is that people simply will not do the strong thing when it needs to be done. They wait and they wait and they wait -- and in the meantime, thousands of Americans have died unnecessarily."
And when it comes to the other side of the aisle, Feingold says that it's time to take off the gloves and stop trying to extend bipartisanship on an issue as important as war when the Republicans are clearly not interested in doing the right thing."When the other side is in their turtle shell and in denial and doing something that nobody believes in, this escalation, the answer isn't to try to have some kind of a half-baked, middle-of-the-road approach and get everybody on board. The answer is to firmly stand with the American people," said Feingold. "It's time to play hardball on this issue. And that means that we should, as the majority party in the Senate and the House, say 'look, we are going to take the lead to try to end this war and we're going to tie this place up as long as it takes.'"While saying that he has some disagreements with how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has approached Republicans on the anti-escalation resolutions -- saying "this sort of weak-tea approach didn’t work" -- Feingold is clear in his reluctance to second-guess what Reid will do next."He's a tough guy and he does know that this war has become a terrible mistake and I want to give him the chance to think over what they did to us today and see if he'll pull the trigger," said Feingold. "He has surprised me in a very positive way on a number of occasions so I don’t consider him to be the person who's dragging his feet the most here by any means."Feingold himself is proving to be very tough on the escalation issue -- to the point of saying that the president's "troop surge" is almost irrelevant to the larger point of getting American troops out of Iraq entirely. Feingold's measure, which would carry the force of law if passed, would cut off funding for the entire Iraq effort in six months and place the onus on the Bush administration to get all troops home on that deadline."It has historical precedence and it’s one that is surely at its core in our Constitutional role in that it says -- as we did with regard to Somalia in the early 90s, as we did with Cambodia -- it says 'look, this mission will end by this date and that's how it is.' And it’s worked in the past and it can work here…. It’s only the notion of a timeline and backing it up with some kind of date by which the funding is ended that really has any teeth and that's really going to get us out of this war."And it's the mantra of getting the United States out of Iraq completely that Feingold says are his personal marching orders in the new Congress."I simply can’t go home every week knowing that Wisconsin men and women are going to die for no good purpose at this point. Simply because politicians want to play it safe," he said quietly, near the end of the conference call. "There comes a point where it’s against my conscience to put up with that. So I am for as tough an approach as is necessary to end this
______________________________________
One of the FEW Democrats in Congress with GUTS !!!!!!!!!1
Waxman Readies Oversight
A New York Times profile of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) notes the feisty Congressman is "promising the sort of oversight that the Bush administration has not experienced before.""Waxman has already made things difficult for the Bush White House. Last week, he held a televised hearing on accusations that the administration was interfering with the work of climate scientists to protect polluters. On Tuesday, he has scheduled a hearing on reports of fraud in multibillion-dollar reconstruction projects in Iraq. The main witness will be L. Paul Bremer III, the former American civilian administrator in Baghdad, who is expected to be questioned about his role in awarding some of the most troubled contracts."
_______________________________________
Republican Senators Block Iraq War Debate
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has really tried to begin the 110th Congress with a degree of bipartisanship never shown to Democrats when they were in the minority and has now found that he needs to relegate his attempts to the "no good deed goes unpunished" file.And I'm sure Reid thought that a bipartisan resolution against the Bush-McCain Doctrine of escalating the Iraq war would be a slam dunk, given that the majority of the American people want no part of that plan and many Republican Senators had quickly stepped up to express their skepticism or outright disapproval.What happened procedurally on the Senate floor Monday can get a bit confusing -- which plays into the Republicans hands as they now try to avoid debating the Iraq war at every turn -- but when you break it down it really becomes quite simple.The new Democratic Senate, with cooperation from Republicans such as Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and John Warner (R-VA) immediately set out in January to debate some form of resolution to let the White House know that the Senate disapproves of the plan to send 20,000 to 40,000 more troops into Iraq.Democrats and Republicans came up with their own, separate resolutions and, after a bit of haggling and finding common ground, settled on the resolution put together by Warner and Carl Levin (D-MI), which was to begin debate Monday.Everyone agreed. It was all set -- until yesterday, when Senate Republicans showed up for work with a bad hangover, which obviously came from a few days of heavy arm twisting by the White House. This made them decide that they might not have the stomach to actually debate sending more American troops to die for nothing in Iraq and thus started a GOP filibuster to stop all debate."For the republicans now, in their minority status, to put a stop to this debate, is to try to put a stop to a debate that's going on across America," said Durbin on the Senate floor. "I will tell them this: They may succeed today, but they won’t succeed beyond today. There will be a debate on this war. It may not be this week. It may not be this bill. It may not be this resolution. But there will be a debate because the American people made it clear in the last election that it is time for a new direction."Republicans succeeded in blocking debate on the Iraq war by filibustering a "motion to proceed" to debate on the Warner-Levin amendment. That motion failed 49-47, with 60 votes needed to move forward.Reid and Senate Democrats must now decide how to respond and whether its time to drop any attempt to behave in a bipartisan way with Republicans and just fight them tooth and nail on this."Let's make no mistake about what's happening today. The Republican side is afraid to debate even a non-binding resolution as to whether this Senate supports an escalation or not," said Chuck Schumer (D-NY). "This is a filibuster so that we cannot debate the war in Iraq. The lack of debate on this war, in this Senate in this administration and in this country has led to the muddled debacle that we are now in, where 70 percent of the people don’t support this war."Cynical little devils that they are, Senate Republicans know that all they have to do is stall a few days because Harry Reid has a freight train rushing at him in the form of a continuing resolution which must be passed by February 15 to keep the government running. A $463.5 billion continuing resolution to cover the cost of running the government for the remainder of the 2007 fiscal year passed the House last week and now comes to the Senate, where Republicans hope they can use it to stall the Iraq war debate even more.Majority Leader Reid made it clear on Monday that, by filibustering debate on Iraq, Republicans are effectively voting for the unpopular policy of escalating the Iraq war."The president must hear from Congress, so he knows he stands in the wrong place — alone," said Reid.
Doctor, doctor, I've only got 59 seconds to live.Wait a minute please.
_____________________________________
Reuters ...
The Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said Tuesday.
The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.
Bills weighing a total of 363 tons were loaded onto military aircraft in the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, said Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.
On December 12, 2003, $1.5 billion was shipped to Iraq, initially "the largest pay out of U.S. currency in Fed history," according to an e-mail cited by committee members.
It was followed by more than $2.4 billion on June 22, 2004, and $1.6 billion three days later. The CPA turned over sovereignty on June 30
_____________________________________
Reconstruction Official on Iraqi Billions: By Paul Kiel - February 6, 2007, 2:06 PM
What happened to billions in Iraqi funds that were overseen by the Coalition Provisional Authority? That's not "important," according to David Oliver, the former Director of Management and Budget of the agency.
A recording of the unfortunately candid remarks, previously made by Oliver to the BBC, were played during this morning's oversight hearing by Rep. Diane Watson (D-CA). The hearing has focused on the CPA's administration of nearly $9 billion in Iraqi funds in 2003 and 2004 -- money that Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has said was inadequately accounted for.
"I have no idea, I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't - nor do I actually think it is important," Oliver says on the tape . "Billions of dollars of their money disappeared, yes I understand, I'm saying what difference does it make?"
______________________________________
Posted by: randronDate: February 6, 2007 04:43 PM
The key to knowing that this reconstruction money was never going to be used for its intended purpose is that the money came into Iraq in CASH. That's right ... billions in CASH. No wonder it disappeared and is unaccounted for. Are we to believe that the US team did not know what would happen when they gave the Iraq reps billions in cash. Did they even get a receipt. How inept and stupid. They also knew in advance that there would be nothing we would be able to do about it. If it was your personal money you would never let someone like this even touch it without a hundred safeguards Bush. God what our country could have done for Katrina victims with that money and all you can say is "oh well..." How did you get to be in charge of anything?
_______________________________________
Feingold For President
Feingold: "It's Time To Play Hardball" On Iraq War
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) spends a lot of time roaming Wisconsin on his "listening sessions" and he says there's one common refrain that he hears from even his most conservative constituents: They want America out of Iraq."This attitude about what should be done in Iraq is a consensus -- everywhere but in Washington," said Feingold. "People don’t want us just to slow walk this, they don't want us to just worry about the escalation, they want us to get out of Iraq."The Wisconsin Democrat held a lengthy conference call with leading Progressive bloggers Monday night just an hour after Senate Republicans voted down any debate whatsoever on the bipartisan Warner-Levin resolution opposing George W. Bush's escalation of the Iraq war.Feingold said that, while he voted to allow debate on the Warner resolution, he finds it "unacceptable" and that he is "determined to support whatever will help us end this mistake quickly and in an orderly and safe manner."He came down hard on the Warner-Levin amendment, saying that it is weak to begin with and gets worse by making damaging concessions that support the status quo in Iraq. And, even worse, Feingold says, the resolution potentially blocks what he calls the "logical next steps" of getting out of Iraq completely, by proposing a surge in Anbar Province which, Feingold maintains, is a "formula for disaster" because of the number of troops America is losing there."Al Anbar is an attempt to try to subdue an insurgency with a huge supply of ground troops -- that's not going to work. And yet the Warner amendment explicitly endorses that kind of an escalation at this time," said Feingold. "And then there's also a provision that attempts to throw roadblocks at any attempts by Congress to use the power of the purse, which is an entirely Constitutional and appropriate step for us to consider at this point."Feingold, who has announced that he will not seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, spent a good part of the call discussing his fellow Democrats, whom he believes are not seizing the power of the majority party or heeding the message sent by voters in the midterm elections when they blindly support the Warner resolution."It's going for some kind of a political point instead of getting at the heart of this matter. Who was thinking about whether or not to escalate in Iraq on November 7? That wasn't the issue," said Feingold. "The issue that determined that election was whether we should be in Iraq at all and the answer was 'no.' So we should not sign on to something that, in my view, looks almost like a reauthorization of what's going on right now.""It is incredibly weak, even dangerous and I think it reminds me more of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution than it does a resolution that really gets us out of this situation."But Feingold, who voted against the original Iraq war resolution in 2002, seems increasingly fed up with Democrats too wimpy to fight the White House -- even with an incredibly unpopular president -- and who seem more comfortable playing it safe and doing nothing than making the tough decisions.Here's Feingold on timid Democrats on Capitol Hill:
"This is not a time to finesse the situation. This is not a time for a slow walk. This almost reminds me a little bit of the way Democrats behaved in October 2002, which was trying to play it safe, trying to use words such as 'well, we're going to vote for this resolution, but what it really means is that the president should go to the UN. That stuff doesn’t fly. And this kind of attempt to go a little bit of the way just to show you're on the other side of the president doesn’t fly either."This is an important moment to see if we're really going to try to end this war and, frankly, I am disappointed that Democrats are playing it too safe on this."This goes back to the beginning -- remember most of these guys voted for the war, so they’ve got a heck of a lot of baggage on this thing. So they’re afraid, as they have been all along, of standing up to these phony arguments of the White House. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be able to say they’re against the war, but they’re not for a timeline to withdraw the troops, they’re not for cutting the funding -- you know, they’re not for anything that's actually going to get the job done."So essentially it's trying to have it both ways and that has to end because Americans are dying unnecessarily. Too many of my colleagues are out there trying to massage this thing and finesse it -- it needs to end."They want to be immune from criticism from the White House. That's not how you win, by being afraid of the criticism. You stand up to the criticism and you say 'they were wrong. They took us in there on a fraudulent basis, they’ve screwed this up, they've screwed up the war against terrorism, they’ve weakened out military. We are going to take a completely different approach.'"But the tragedy that we're facing, is that people simply will not do the strong thing when it needs to be done. They wait and they wait and they wait -- and in the meantime, thousands of Americans have died unnecessarily."
And when it comes to the other side of the aisle, Feingold says that it's time to take off the gloves and stop trying to extend bipartisanship on an issue as important as war when the Republicans are clearly not interested in doing the right thing."When the other side is in their turtle shell and in denial and doing something that nobody believes in, this escalation, the answer isn't to try to have some kind of a half-baked, middle-of-the-road approach and get everybody on board. The answer is to firmly stand with the American people," said Feingold. "It's time to play hardball on this issue. And that means that we should, as the majority party in the Senate and the House, say 'look, we are going to take the lead to try to end this war and we're going to tie this place up as long as it takes.'"While saying that he has some disagreements with how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has approached Republicans on the anti-escalation resolutions -- saying "this sort of weak-tea approach didn’t work" -- Feingold is clear in his reluctance to second-guess what Reid will do next."He's a tough guy and he does know that this war has become a terrible mistake and I want to give him the chance to think over what they did to us today and see if he'll pull the trigger," said Feingold. "He has surprised me in a very positive way on a number of occasions so I don’t consider him to be the person who's dragging his feet the most here by any means."Feingold himself is proving to be very tough on the escalation issue -- to the point of saying that the president's "troop surge" is almost irrelevant to the larger point of getting American troops out of Iraq entirely. Feingold's measure, which would carry the force of law if passed, would cut off funding for the entire Iraq effort in six months and place the onus on the Bush administration to get all troops home on that deadline."It has historical precedence and it’s one that is surely at its core in our Constitutional role in that it says -- as we did with regard to Somalia in the early 90s, as we did with Cambodia -- it says 'look, this mission will end by this date and that's how it is.' And it’s worked in the past and it can work here…. It’s only the notion of a timeline and backing it up with some kind of date by which the funding is ended that really has any teeth and that's really going to get us out of this war."And it's the mantra of getting the United States out of Iraq completely that Feingold says are his personal marching orders in the new Congress."I simply can’t go home every week knowing that Wisconsin men and women are going to die for no good purpose at this point. Simply because politicians want to play it safe," he said quietly, near the end of the conference call. "There comes a point where it’s against my conscience to put up with that. So I am for as tough an approach as is necessary to end this
______________________________________
One of the FEW Democrats in Congress with GUTS !!!!!!!!!1
Waxman Readies Oversight
A New York Times profile of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) notes the feisty Congressman is "promising the sort of oversight that the Bush administration has not experienced before.""Waxman has already made things difficult for the Bush White House. Last week, he held a televised hearing on accusations that the administration was interfering with the work of climate scientists to protect polluters. On Tuesday, he has scheduled a hearing on reports of fraud in multibillion-dollar reconstruction projects in Iraq. The main witness will be L. Paul Bremer III, the former American civilian administrator in Baghdad, who is expected to be questioned about his role in awarding some of the most troubled contracts."
_______________________________________
Republican Senators Block Iraq War Debate
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has really tried to begin the 110th Congress with a degree of bipartisanship never shown to Democrats when they were in the minority and has now found that he needs to relegate his attempts to the "no good deed goes unpunished" file.And I'm sure Reid thought that a bipartisan resolution against the Bush-McCain Doctrine of escalating the Iraq war would be a slam dunk, given that the majority of the American people want no part of that plan and many Republican Senators had quickly stepped up to express their skepticism or outright disapproval.What happened procedurally on the Senate floor Monday can get a bit confusing -- which plays into the Republicans hands as they now try to avoid debating the Iraq war at every turn -- but when you break it down it really becomes quite simple.The new Democratic Senate, with cooperation from Republicans such as Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and John Warner (R-VA) immediately set out in January to debate some form of resolution to let the White House know that the Senate disapproves of the plan to send 20,000 to 40,000 more troops into Iraq.Democrats and Republicans came up with their own, separate resolutions and, after a bit of haggling and finding common ground, settled on the resolution put together by Warner and Carl Levin (D-MI), which was to begin debate Monday.Everyone agreed. It was all set -- until yesterday, when Senate Republicans showed up for work with a bad hangover, which obviously came from a few days of heavy arm twisting by the White House. This made them decide that they might not have the stomach to actually debate sending more American troops to die for nothing in Iraq and thus started a GOP filibuster to stop all debate."For the republicans now, in their minority status, to put a stop to this debate, is to try to put a stop to a debate that's going on across America," said Durbin on the Senate floor. "I will tell them this: They may succeed today, but they won’t succeed beyond today. There will be a debate on this war. It may not be this week. It may not be this bill. It may not be this resolution. But there will be a debate because the American people made it clear in the last election that it is time for a new direction."Republicans succeeded in blocking debate on the Iraq war by filibustering a "motion to proceed" to debate on the Warner-Levin amendment. That motion failed 49-47, with 60 votes needed to move forward.Reid and Senate Democrats must now decide how to respond and whether its time to drop any attempt to behave in a bipartisan way with Republicans and just fight them tooth and nail on this."Let's make no mistake about what's happening today. The Republican side is afraid to debate even a non-binding resolution as to whether this Senate supports an escalation or not," said Chuck Schumer (D-NY). "This is a filibuster so that we cannot debate the war in Iraq. The lack of debate on this war, in this Senate in this administration and in this country has led to the muddled debacle that we are now in, where 70 percent of the people don’t support this war."Cynical little devils that they are, Senate Republicans know that all they have to do is stall a few days because Harry Reid has a freight train rushing at him in the form of a continuing resolution which must be passed by February 15 to keep the government running. A $463.5 billion continuing resolution to cover the cost of running the government for the remainder of the 2007 fiscal year passed the House last week and now comes to the Senate, where Republicans hope they can use it to stall the Iraq war debate even more.Majority Leader Reid made it clear on Monday that, by filibustering debate on Iraq, Republicans are effectively voting for the unpopular policy of escalating the Iraq war."The president must hear from Congress, so he knows he stands in the wrong place — alone," said Reid.
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