U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay admitted Thursday he provided Texas Speaker Tom Craddick with the same information that state police used to enlist a homeland security agency in the search for runaway Democratic legislators.
DeLay said his staff used public information at the Federal Aviation Administration to track former Texas Speaker Pete Laney's airplane.
Laney was among 55 Democrats who broke a House quorum on May 12 to kill a congressional redistricting bill sought by DeLay, R-Sugar Land. Craddick and DeLay wanted the errant legislators arrested and returned to the House to force a vote on the bill.
"I was told at the time that that plane was in the air coming from Ardmore, Oklahoma, back to Georgetown, Texas," DeLay said of the FAA's information, which he said was also available on the agency's Web site. "I relayed that information to Tom Craddick."
Texas Department of Public Safety officers working in Craddick's office had the same information when it contacted a federal air interdiction agency to seek its help in finding Laney's airplane. The federal agency has since said it was misled into believing Laney's airplane was missing and possibly had crashed.
Homeland Defense Secretary Tom Ridge, meanwhile, said Thursday his agency is investigating "potentially criminal" misuse of the federal air interdiction service by the DPS.
DeLay said he played no part in the DPS' decision to contact the federal air interdiction service. And Craddick denies knowing anything about how the DPS came to call the agency.
DeLay's admission is the latest revelation that state and federal Republican officials were directly involved in the widespread manhunt.
DeLay has said his office contacted justice officials May 12 "about the appropriate role of the federal government in finding Texas legislators who have warrants for their arrest and have crossed state lines."
Craddick had signed an order requiring any Texas "peace officer" to arrest the missing members. But Craddick's command was not a "warrant," which is an arrest order issued by a court for an accused criminal.
DeLay, in an impromptu interview with Texas reporters, said his office tracked Laney's airplane by contacting the FAA in Washington.
FAA officials told DeLay's staff that public information showed the airplane was en route from Ardmore to Georgetown, north of Austin.
State Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Round Rock, was in the DPS command center outside of Craddick's office May 12. He has said there was a belief that Laney was ferrying lawmakers from Georgetown to Ardmore and the DPS thought some legislators might be caught when the plane landed.
When the plane did not arrive, Krusee said people worried that it had crashed. He said he did not know if that is what prompted DPS to call the homeland security agency, which could not locate the plane.
At 9:39 a.m. on May 14, the DPS ordered all records of the search to be destroyed. DPS claims the records were destroyed because the investigation was over, but the House did not drop the order to arrest the wayward members until 11:25 a.m.
Ridge told the House Select Committee on Homeland Security he cannot release tapes of the May 12 DPS telephone call because of the ongoing investigation.
"This is now a potentially criminal investigation," Ridge said.
The assistant inspector general conducting the investigation is looking for evidence of "fraud, waste, and abuse." As if there could be any doubt — they are three of the chief characteristics of Republican power. Add hatred, mendacity, and divisiveness, and there you have the state of Texas-bred conservatism in a nutshell.
The operators of the Book-of-the-Month Club announced Tuesday that they are forming a new club, as yet unnamed, devoted to works with a conservative point of view. Within the past month, Penguin Putnam and the Crown Publishing Group have started conservative imprints.
"We don't think we've done enough in this area. We have featured conservative authors like Bill Bennett, but we've never presented them in a coherent way," says Mel Parker, senior vice president and editorial director of Bookspan, which runs the Book-of-the-Month Club and several other clubs.
Bookspan is co-owned by Bertelsmann AG and AOL Time Warner Inc., and its new club is scheduled to begin by early next year. Brad Miner, a former literary editor with the conservative National Review, will serve as editor.
Miner should have plenty of material. Penguin and Crown, a division of Random House, Inc., each plan to publish about 15 conservative books a year. Regnery Publishing, a conservative press based in Washington, D.C., puts out between 25-30.
Does genuine demand really exist for all of these planned books? Relative to its already-exaggerated status, how much bigger can the market for specious reasoning, inaccuracy, and hatred be?
A proposal on termination benefits for senior executives was defeated Wednesday by Halliburton (HAL) shareholders but gathered a large number of votes.
The proposal urged the board of directors to seek shareholder approval of any future severance agreements that would pay senior executives more than twice the sum of their base salary plus bonus.
The motion was defeated when 61% of shareholders present voted against it, but 36% of shareholders voted for the proposal. The others abstained.
Halliburton's board of directors had opposed the measure. "If this proposal was adopted, it would have undermined Halliburton's ability to attract and retain highly qualified senior executives*," Wendy Hall, Halliburton's public relations manager, said in a statement.
The American Ireland Fund benefits Special Olympics with its garden dinner at the River Oaks home of Paige and Tilman Fertitta, with special guest entertainment by Irish tenor Ronan Tynan.
AUSTIN -- While under heavy criticism of its investigation into the House Democratic walkout, the Texas Department of Public Safety ordered all records related to that investigation destroyed.
[…]
The order to destroy the records was made May 15.
Democrats involved in the walkout began complaining May 13 that the agency investigation involved the harassment of their families.
Congressional Democrats also raised questions May 14 about whether the DPS misused a federal Homeland Security Department agency in searching for former Speaker Pete Laney's airplane on May 12.
A DPS officer had called the Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center asking for help locating Laney's aircraft.
The federal agency last Thursday put out a statement saying the DPS had mislead the interdiction service into believing it was searching for an aircraft that was missing and possibly crashed.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has refused to release tapes of the telephone call from DPS.
A total of 55 Texas House Democrats vanished on May 13 in order to break a quorum to keep the House from debating legislation to redraw the state's congressional district boundaries.
As soon as Speaker Tom Craddick, a Republican, knew a quorum was not present, he ordered the missing lawmakers to be arrested and returned to the House. The state Constitution gives the House and Senate presiding officers the power to do that.
The DPS set up a command post in the reception room adjacent to Craddick's office.
All but four of the missing legislators had gone into hiding in Ardmore, Okla. DPS was following a rumor that Laney was using his airplane to ferry lawmakers between Georgetown north of Austin to Ardmore.
Hmm, I wonder who started that rumor. Craddick's unseemly behavior was previously discussed here.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Reuters) - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed into law on Tuesday a sugar industry-backed bill relaxing requirements to clean up the Everglades, which critics say threatens the health of the massive Florida wetland.
The bill has come under fire from U.S. lawmakers who say it threatens federal funding critical to the $8 billion restoration of the Everglades, the unique "River of Grass" that supplies drinking water to millions of people and is home to numerous endangered species.
The U.S. District judge overseeing a decade-old cleanup agreement between the state and federal governments expressed grave concerns about the bill, which critics say eases water-quality standards and delays a 2006 deadline.
Judge William Hoeveler said he would forge ahead with the 1994 pact even if Bush, younger brother of President Bush, signed the measure.
The governor said the bill needed work, but that its underlying premise was sound. He asked lawmakers to "clarify" language in the new law.
"The Everglades bill recently passed by the House and Senate is strong legislation built upon good policy," Bush, a Republican, said in a prepared statement prior to the signing. "(It) reinforces our commitment to restore water quality in the Everglades by providing a strategic plan to achieve this goal."
Critics say the bill eases water quality standards meant to reduce the level of phosphorus in the Everglades, polluted for decades by fertilizer-tainted runoff from sugar plantations.
The sugar industry, led by U.S. Sugar Corp., helped push the bill through the Florida legislature.
Environmental groups, which worked for years to establish the 1994 "Everglades Forever Act," have derisively dubbed the latest legislation the "Everglades Whenever Act."
[...]
Bush, who met with federal officials in Washington this month, said he has asked lawmakers to tighten language that now states restoration efforts should be concluded at the "earliest practicable date" and pollutants be reduced to the "maximum extent practicable."
Bush has repeatedly brushed aside questions about Florida's commitment to Everglades restoration, saying the state has already earmarked $500 million toward restoration and ongoing efforts have already significantly reduced phosphorus levels in 90 percent of the region.
Sugar and spice, industrial vice, that's what little Jebs are made of.
It would be nice if some clever programmer with a conscience infiltrated this stupid effort and created back doors in the code, leaked its overseers' LifeLogs, and generally mucked things up enough to disgrace and ruin the program. Otherwise, the USA will likely become Brazil.
Clear Channel left-wing radio? I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion of this article. Is the move by Clear Channel just a spin ploy that will last only until the big media dereg push wins the FCC on June 2?
"The days of the locally developed TV show, the locally developed TV talk show or children's shows don't exist anymore. It's not right or wrong. It's simply the time we live in," [Mark] Hyman [vice president of corporate communications and government relations for Maryland's Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc.] said.
Actually, the death of local programming is wrong. The airwaves are a public resource and we have a right to see to it how they are used — as well as who gets to use them. If large corporations don't want to invest in local production infrastructure, THEY SHOULD STAY OUT OF OUR MARKETS. And we should enforce that concept by limiting the amount of ownership across markets and across media.
We have a duty to see to it, through the FCC, that what remains of mass media does not dissolve inevitably into a soup of corporate sludge.
Make your voice heard: Stop the FCC from giving more opportunity to fewer corporations.
Hypocritical scoundrel Tom Craddick rewrites his own history, decrying the disappearing Democrats in the Texas legislature "when he was one of 30 members of the Texas House who disappeared during the 1971 legislative session."
Link via Liquid List. We last wrote about Craddick, his "emergency" tax breaks concocted with co-conspirator Guvna Dubya, his lobbyist daughter, and his energy industry pimping here.
UPDATE 5/20/03: This May 19 Washington Post editorial puts the whole issue into perspective: "The Texas Republican plan is a naked power grab that pushes in the opposite direction [of a rational system]. The Post's Lee Hockstader reported that one street in Austin would cross four districts -- one of which snakes 300 miles to the Mexican border. Democracy is supposed to be about voters picking their representatives, not the other way around."
Aaron Sorkin's 25th Amendment. Richard Just writes in an online-only article for The American Prospect about the departure of the creator of The West Wing from his own show, and the loss we viewers will feel: "When the show was firing on all cylinders -- which was not always, but often enough -- it had the sophistication of literature."
Agreed. The intellectual passion that Just rightly identifies as the heart and soul of the show — as opposed to its liberal ideology — will be sorely missed. Its expected disappearance will serve as yet another reflection of the pandering coarseness of our times, and of the sad homogeneity of the broadcast networks, the conjoined quadruplets of marketplace mediocrity.
Now that an auction of Enron's precious objets d'art has taken place, the first of several planned to raise funds for its 23,000 creditors, we learn that a piece she bought for $590,000 three years ago sold earlier this week for $360,000, an investment return of –39%, still a much better return than her husband and Ken Lay were able to produce on Enron stock.
Bankrupt Enron Corp. raised nearly $1 million to pay creditors during an art auction that sold prized possessions such as Claes Oldenburg's pop sculpture "Soft Light Switches," which fetched $360,000.
A U.S. bankruptcy judge earlier this week authorized Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, an international art auction house, to conduct the sale.
The five-lot collection had been expected to bring between $720,000 and $1.03 million, Enron spokeswoman Karen Denne said. In Thursday's auction, it raised $952,000 for Enron, including $135,000 for Jack Pierson's sculpture "Stardust" and $265,000 for Donald Judd's untitled minimalist sculpture of two boxes.
Enron creditors have filed 23,000 claims worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
If I owed you a few hundred thousand dollars, and managed to raise one dollar, how happy would you be? Proportionally, that's what the auction proceeds of $1 million will be to the creditors — nothing.
Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, on the other hand, got commissions both ways — on the original sale and on the auction. Round trip trading in the art world mirrors that of the energy industry.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Retired Houston oil executive Philip Carroll, the Pentagon's handpicked adviser overseeing the reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry, acknowledged Thursday that he faces potential conflicts of interest because of his financial holdings in American companies planning to bid on Iraqi oil contracts.
[…]
Carroll had a 32-year career with Shell Oil Co. in Texas, where he retired as its chief executive officer, and another four years as the head of Fluor.
"You have to realize that oil occupies a very important and unique place in the minds of the Iraqi people," the Texas oilman said. "It constitutes the overwhelming, dominant economic force in the country. It provides the wherewithal of building a better life for the Iraqis.
"There are also feelings throughout the population that oil represents, in essence, the national heritage of Iraq."
Securities and Exchange Commission documents show Carroll continues to be paid more than $1 million a year by Fluor Corp. in retirement benefits and bonuses. He also owns about 1 million shares of the company's stock, documents show.
Fluor has said it plans to bid on an Army Corps of Engineers contract to rebuild Iraq's oil industry to prewar levels.
Last fall, Carroll said, he began working for the Pentagon, developing contingency plans for Iraq's oil sector in the event of war. He assumed his work was completed, he said, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called him shortly after the U.S.-led invasion began and offered him the oil adviser's job.
"My response was, `Well, this is not high on my hit parade list right now,' " Carroll said. "But under the circumstances, you just can't say no."
We're the ones who should be saying no to government by, for and of CEOs, especially the Texas variety.
The "national heritage of Iraq" is, oddly enough, one of the foundations of Western civilization, a point that is beyond the comprehension of your average Houston oil executive. And everything we've seen so far about this administration's grasp of foreign policy and homeland security is well below average, so it follows that a clueless joker like Carroll would equate Iraq's national heritage with the object of his desire — its oil.
Thanks to Junior's administration, soon not only our entire country but all those under its influence will become the carcinogenic, larcenous, murderous shithole that Texas is.
Lunar eclipse tonight. "If the weather is clear, skywatchers across most of the Americas, Europe and Africa will have a view of one of nature's most beautiful spectacles: A total eclipse of the Moon." Link via Plep.
The complaint details occasions in which EBS [Enron Broadband Services] executives allegedly misled investors by painting a rosy picture of the division's prospects, despite their knowledge of actual difficulties. Mr. Skilling was present at some of those meetings and participated actively, according to attendees and, in some cases, documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. [Kenneth] Rice, along with the others, was charged with defrauding the investors while reaping millions of dollars in Enron stock sales. He is the person closest to Mr. Skilling to have been indicted in the continuing government investigation into the collapse of the onetime energy-sector highflier. Mr. Rice, who resigned from Enron before Mr. Skilling left in August 2001, worked with Mr. Skilling for more than a decade and was one of a handful of company officials who accompanied the chief executive on so-called mighty man adventure vacations to Mexico, South America and Australia.
That these dickless wonders committed fraud is hardly doubtful:
Earlier, in July 2000, Mr. Skilling, in a recorded conference call, told analysts that the broadband division was experiencing "breakout performance" in the content-service business and that the Blockbuster contract could be valued "well over $1 billion."
What listeners had no way of knowing was that the venture struggled from the start. Enron soon set up an off-balance-sheet partnership, called Braveheart, to convert into earnings a portion of the value supposedly embedded in the fledgling content-services business. The company realized more than $110 million in profit in late 2000 and early 2001, essentially with money borrowed from a Canadian bank, even though the actual underlying venture with Blockbuster had revenue, during its brief life, of only a few thousand dollars. Enron reversed those gains during the third quarter of 2001, contributing to the erosion in investor confidence that led to the company's downfall.
Later in that same July 2000 call, Mr. Skilling lauded the capabilities of Enron's fiber-optic system, claiming that it, alone, was able to deliver movies-on-demand for Blockbuster. In the conference call, Mr. Skilling said the ability to deliver "television-quality video ... is something that our entire network is devoted to." He said Enron's unique software could "control the signal ... all the way to the end user. We believe at this point we're the only people that could provide this comprehensive service to Blockbuster or anybody for that matter.... That's kind of our space, and that's the one that we want to dominate."
Whether this was hyperbole common to the technology firms at the time or constituted fraud is something prosecutors will have to decide. Even as the broadband business was collapsing, Mr. Skilling sought to allay investor concerns. "EBS is coming along just fine," he said in an earnings conference call on March 23, 2001. "We're in a situation where we clearly have a surplus in supply, and we have real fast declining prices, so that's good. In fact, that is better for us as time goes on. So EBS is looking good."
Shortly after Mr. Skilling resigned [four months later in August 2001], Enron shut down the entire broadband business and wrote off most of its investment.
Lying on this scale is no longer lying. The garbage that flowed so effortlessly from the lips of Jeffrey Skilling represents something much bigger and more harmful than lying, because it simultaneously destroyed the livelihoods and retirement savings of thousands of Enron employees — and helped to put another dickless wonder, a Texas governor who suffers from the same susceptibility to ersatz manhood (fake ranch, borrowed military uniform, etc.), into the White House.
Patricia Ireland is also an admitted bisexual who has had a husband living in Florida and a female homosexual "partner" in Washington, DC. In her biography, What Women Want, she wrote: "I have a husband, and he is very important in my life. I also have a companion, and she is very important in my life, too."
"We fear the focus will now become homosexual indoctrination among young girls," says Don Wildmom, Chairman of American Family Association (AFA). "Ireland has a long history of promoting a radical agenda and will not hesitate to incorporate her left-wing values into the mission."
Wildmon says the YWCA made a concious decision in hiring Ireland and wants parents to be aware of the organization's dangerous direction. "Lesbianism, cross-dressing, and abortion are all part of Ireland's history. It will soon become YWCA's present."
The email goes on to suggest a three-point plan of action:
1. Refuse to support the YWCA organization. The dangers presented to young girls, by far, overshadow any positive public image the group may project.
2. Most local United Way programs help fund the YWCA. Make United Way donations exempt from going to the YWCA.
3. Send a letter to YWCA, letting them know you oppose Patricia Ireland as their leader.
YWCA stands for "Young Women's Christian Association," and those words are inconsistent with the new president of the group, according to Andrea Lafferty Andrea Lafferty: "I hate you" of the Traditional Values Coalition. Lafferty insists that Ireland, who was a self-proclaimed bisexual and formerly head of the radical feminist group, National Organization for Women, should not be in charge at the YWCA.
"She is none of the above. She's not young ... and she's not a Christian," she said. Lafferty noted that, in an appearance on the popular FOX News channel show The O'Reilly Factor, Ireland would not answer host Bill O'Reilly's specific questions concerning whether or not she was a Christian. "She wouldn't respond and called that 'McCarthyism,'" Lafferty said.
When the YWCA — a Christian organization — is targeted by the right wing's cultural revolutionaries, it's Cannibal Time at the Trough of Greed. Circuits are shorting, sparks are flying, and the whole ugly machine is going haywire.
How sad and immature these people are, because sexual topics never lose currency with them. Their president can be an ex-drunk AWOL deserter, his married brother can ditch his wife and family for the former First Lady's assistant, and their morality czar can rack up $8 million in losses at the slots in Vegas, and still their focus remains on the private and often imagined sex lives of qualified and responsible adults.
In the third paragraph, despite the fact that the AFA's Fearless Leader's name is Wildmon, the typo "Wildmom" was in the original email — a Freudian slip, no doubt.
Mitchell Scruggs hardly fits the profile of an activist.
A 53-year-old Mississippian, Scruggs runs a cotton gin and owns the biggest farm in three counties surrounding Tupelo. Until a few years ago, he had never protested over civil rights, the environment or anything else.
That changed when he found that Monsanto forbids those using its product from the age-old practice of saving seeds from one crop to plant the next. The licensing agreement says they must buy new seed each year.
Now Scruggs is fighting in the courts, by word of mouth and just about any way he can. He helped form Save Our Seed, a farmers' rights group that advocates seed recovery as it has been done for generations.
"I'm opposed to what Monsanto's about," Scruggs said in an interview last week. "They're raping farm communities and breaking farmers, because farmers do not have any other place to go to get this planting seed."
The manufacturer says it is entitled to protect the value of its "intellectual property" and to recover research costs. It says those who violate the licenses commit "seed piracy."
Scruggs, whose family has farmed in Mississippi for more than a century, is among 73 farmers sued by Monsanto in the past five years on civil claims of patent violations. He countersued, saying that the patents are invalid and that Monsanto enforces a monopoly over the seed industry. The case is pending in U.S. District Court in Tupelo.
Another illustration of the stupidity of patenting lifeforms, turning family farms into indentured corporate servitude. How does saving something you own constitute "piracy"?
Reliant Resources' bogus power trades and transactions designed to shift earnings from one period to the next have drawn the minimum punishment from securities regulators.
Putting an end to a near yearlong investigation, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a cease-and-desist order Monday against Reliant Resources and Reliant Energy, now CenterPoint Energy.
The Houston-based companies received no fines or other penalties.
Neither company admits nor denies the agency's findings of reporting and record-keeping violations and securities fraud in the settlement that was advanced by the companies.
The 17 round-trip trades between 1999 and 2001 involved the same-day purchase and sale of power, to the same company at the same price.
For the most part, these trades resulted in no profit or loss to either side, the commission said.
"Instead, the trades were designed for the sole purpose of increasing trading volumes to improve respondents' standing in the gas and power trading rankings in industry publications," according to the commission.
These were giant transactions, ranging from 30 times to 46 times the size of a normal large trade.
An article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) adds the following details:
The SEC said its probe showed that Reliant, starting in 1999, set out to become one of the nation's top-tier traders. The company arranged so-called wash trades with smaller competitors, buying and selling identical amounts of electricity or gas at identical prices on the same days. These transactions boosted revenue and trading volumes without lifting earnings.
During the period from 1999 through 2001, Reliant did 17 "wash" trades for a total of 134.43 million megawatt hours of electricity, with the average false trade, by the end of 2001, nearly 50 times the size of a normal large trade.
With that push, investigators said, Reliant was lifted from the No. 10 position in electricity trading to No. 7 by 1999, to No. 5 by 2000 and, finally, to No. 3 by 2001, when widespread allegations of trading improprieties began unraveling the wholesale-electricity market. Among gas traders, it was lifted to No. 7 from No. 8 through a smaller number of fake trades.
Fake, fake, fake. In two years, Reliant went from No. 7 to No. 3 in electricity trading on the basis of... nothing at all.
And yet these unfined and unpunished frauds were useful to someone else — George W. Bush. The architects of Reliant's brilliant fake business plan, former Reliant CEOs Don D. Jordan and R. Steve Letbetter are both Bush Pioneer donors, having raised well over $100,000 each.
No fines, no penalties, not even the sound of another shoe dropping.
Texas swindled California and gave the crooked money in record amounts to its governor to run for president.
"I also want to say how proud I am of the work my good friend Jay Garner and the people who are working for him, how proud I am of everything they have done here in the last couple of weeks under extraordinary circumstances," [L. Paul Bremer III] said after arriving in Basra.
He said he wanted to "pay public tribute to Jay and all of his people for the great job they have done."
[...]
Bremer said former U.S. ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was coordinator for central Iraq, including Baghdad, within the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, was being reassigned back to Washington by the State Department "for their own reasons."
[...]
Bremer, 61, is a former assistant to former Secretaries of State William P. Rogers and Henry Kissinger. He was ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism from 1986 to 1989, and he also has served as U.S. ambassador to Holland. He most recently has been chairman of the Marsh Crisis Consulting firm.
Bremer reports directly to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Gen. Tommy Franks, the Central Command chief, remains in charge of all U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and the region.
Further evidence of how Defense is trumping State — not that Garner and Bodine were especially intelligent choices in the first place, as pointed out here (Garner) and here (Bodine).
Wondering how Bremer got the gig? A public presidential blow job might have lubricated the way. This Kissinger crony and Reagan worshipper is moving his lips with a vast amount of sycophantic energy, as witnessed by his remarks in March 2003 in the New York Times:
...Europeans call the American President a "cowboy" blundering into an "unnecessary war" with Iraq. But like Reagan before him, this President [has] a clearer worldview than his critics.
For a year and half, with remarkable clarity President Bush has laid out his understanding of the threat posed by a new breed of terrorists. These Islamic extremists are motivated by a burning hatred of all things western — not just the superficialities of the West, our films, magazines and culture, but the very foundations of our societies — the separation of Church and State, universal suffrage, women's education, a free press and trade unions. To understand their vision of an ideal society, one need look no further than the hideous Taliban regime.
As this administration attacks the very same foundations of our society that the "extremists" are accused of attacking, it selects another zealot against Islamic zealotry — too dense not to confuse Hussein with bin Laden — and sets Bremer loose in newly conquered lands of the Middle East.
It probably didn't hurt that
L. Paul Bremer: "Star Wars will save you from Osama bin Laden"Bremer authored a 2002 Heritage Foundation study entitled "Defending the American Homeland" that prioritizes domestic security interests. Examples: Infrastructure: "Priority #4: Enhance the private sector’s role in infrastructure protection." Intelligence and Law Enforcement: "Priority #2: Rapidly improve information-gathering capabilities at all levels of government." The task force for the study, "chaired by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and former attorney general Edwin Meese III, reviewed the homeland security proposals in circulation and created a set of priority recommendations for preventing and responding effectively to potential terrorist attacks on the American homeland."
Now, I’m not second-guessing a former Attorney General (that would be Mr. Meese, for all you Gen Xers; he served under Reagan) on policy, but from an analytical point of view, this is scary stuff. Solutions include more surveillance and drastically improved civil defense. It’s a strange mix of horrific language ("an all-source, Federal level, information fusion center") and one bleak possibility. For 170-plus e-pages, what you get is this message: "Spend this money this way, or lots of you will die. Implement these programs, or lots of you will die. Use our military this way, or lots of you will die. Beef up this part of our infrastructure, or lots of you will die."
Tragically, these self-misled homeland security "experts," supposedly insulating our collective future against suitcase bomb and bioweapon attacks, are actually more willing to spend the money on Star Wars missile defense systems.
And the ironies accumulate. In this age of Bush-crony corporate malfeasance, Bremer's day job is supposedly as an expert in corporate governance, which, in Bremer's Orwellian doublespeak, actually means "strikebreaking":
When a massive labor strike threatens a company's ability to achieve its financial goals or even survive, Management needs to be ready to manage that challenge with a comprehensive, fully integrated Crisis Readiness program.
Postwar Iraq report card: Bodine: F. Garner: F. Bremer: Too soon to tell, but our bet is on F.
Art Chicago 2003, the best annual large-scale art fair in Chicago and perhaps the country will be here today through May 12.
As the show producers say, "No other venue in this country offers such a dynamic and concise survey of contemporary art to the public." And they're not kidding — it's a great show.
The problem, and the essential challenge for the news business right now, is that we are living through a moment that's inhospitable to our deepest talents and inclinations. The best journalists are troublemakers, pot-stirrers, naysayers, dirt-eaters. When the whole culture is saying "Yes, yes, yes" to some sparkly idea or popular leader, we love nothing better than to be the ones who rush in screaming "No, no, no," brandishing the ugly evidence. To the noble hack, there is no smell sweeter than the skunk spray of a major political scandal.
[...]
Maybe none of these stories are as solid as their promoters suggest. Maybe it's all a bunch of thinly disguised partisan trash. But then, some of the best stories have intensely partisan origins. The point is, we seem to have lost our appetite for this stuff, at exactly the moment when we should be indulging it. When flags are waving everywhere, it's time for journalists to get back in touch with their nasty, scandal-loving inner selves. It's the most patriotic thing we could possibly do.
"Patriotic" is a word that desperately needs a couple of viable variant definitions beyond the one promoted by the Bush-Rove Dictionary of Electable Language, Second Edition.
There's a lot of power to be had by journalists if they could shake off their slumbers. If these be dirt-eaters, bring on the dirt!
HOUSTON (AP)--A subsidiary of Halliburton Co. paid a Nigerian tax official $2.4 million in bribes to get favorable tax treatment, the company disclosed in a federal filing.
In a filing made Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said its KBR subsidiary "made improper payments of approximately $2.4 million to an entity owned by a Nigerian national who held himself out as a tax consultant when in fact he was an employee of a local tax authority."
The filing stated that the payments were found during a routine audit, and that several employees were fired as a result.
Halliburton said it was cooperating with the SEC in its review, and added that none of the Houston company's senior officers were involved.*
A company spokeswoman told the Houston Chronicle for its Friday editions that the bribes were paid between 2001 and 2002.
Company officials are trying to determine how much it owes Nigeria in back taxes. It could be as much as $5 million, the filing said.
*Such ineptitude would never have "happened" while former CEO Dick Cheney was running the company, you can be sure. Because it would be filed under "secret" and therefore "nonexistent."
Talk about your sucker bets — first Bill Bennett's $8 million to slots and video poker, and now Cheney's $2.4 million to some Nigerian scamster. How's this for a new right wing slogan: Pretty fucking stupid.
Mr. [John M.] Poindexter* told a California audience then that "we must become much more efficient and more clever in the way we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge and create actionable options." He described a system that could tap into Internet mail, culling records, credit card and banking transactions and travel documents.
*On March 16, 1988, Poindexter was indicted on seven felony charges arising from his involvement in the Iran/contra affair, as part of a 23-count multi-defendant indictment. As of 2002, he is a Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office.
Rove fancies himself an expert in both policy and politics because he sees no distinction between the two. This matters for a number of reasons. There is always a time during any president's administration when what is best for the future of the country diverges from what best serves that president's political future. If Rove is standing with George W. Bush at that moment, he will push the president in the direction of reelection rather than the country's best interests.
The United States is best served when political calculations are not a part of the White House's most important decisions. Rove's calculus is always a formula for winning the next election. He was less concerned about the bombing of Iraqi civilians or the bullets flying at our own troops, according to people who have worked for him for years, than he was about what these acts would do to the results of the electoral college, or how they influence voters in swing states like Florida.
There needs to be something sacred about our presidents' decisions to send our children into combat. The Karl Roves of the world ought to not even be in the room, much less asked for advice.
Measured against Junior's shot at re-election, the lives of Iraqi civilians and our "volunteer" armed forces, consisting largely of the lower classes, count for nothing.
It is depressingly amazing to witness not only the ignorance of the national interest, but also the extreme lack of morality within this sham-religious administration.
Last February, the Defense Policy Board, a group of outside advisors to the Pentagon, received a classified presentation from the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency on the crises in North Korea and Iraq.
Three weeks later, the then-chairman of the board, Richard N. Perle, offered a briefing of his own at an investment seminar on ways to profit from possible conflicts with both countries.
Perle and his fellow advisors also heard a classified address about high-tech military communications systems at the same closed-door session in February. He runs a venture capital firm that has been exploring investments in that very area.
[…]
On Feb. 27, 2003, two speakers — Henry D. Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon advisor under Feith — gave [classified] presentations to the Defense Policy Board on the risks and prospects of U.S. conflict with North Korea. The same day, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which works for the Pentagon, also briefed the board on North Korea and Iraq among other subjects, according to several people in attendance.
Three weeks later, Perle participated in a Goldman Sachs conference call in which he advised investors on opportunities tied to the war in Iraq. Perle's talk was called "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?"
[…]
Retired Rear Adm. Thomas Brooks, who served on the policy board during the Clinton administration, said Perle's actions were "certainly questionable."
"It sounds like he's squeezing every nickel out of the Defense Policy Board," he said.
[…]
Defense Policy Board members are not paid but are subject to government ethics prohibitions that bar the use of public office for private gain. They are required to file a disclosure form with the Pentagon listing their business interests. The forms are not made public.
At the time Rumsfeld appointed him chairman of the board, Perle was just forming his new investment fund.
Planning documents from early July 2001 show that he and his partners hoped to raise $500 million, which they aimed to "invest in emerging growth companies," including defense and aerospace firms.
Perle would be "fully engaged in the investment activities of the Partnership," said the prospectus. Gerald Hillman, Perle's friend and business partner, would be the fund's "primary deal-maker." The following month, Hillman was named to the policy board.
Membership on the board, says its charter, "will consist primarily of private sector individuals with distinguished backgrounds in national security affairs."
Perle, who worked at the Pentagon during the Reagan years, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank and directed its Commission on Future Defenses. He has also advised members of Congress and is frequently called to testify at defense hearings on Capitol Hill.
The biography of Hillman included in the draft prospectus lists no national security or defense qualifications. It says Hillman has "a strong background in industrial policy, corporate strategy and finance."
During a brief phone conversation, Hillman said he has known Rumsfeld for 35 years. He invited further questions by e-mail, but did not respond.
Several military experts said they had never heard of Hillman.
"He doesn't seem to have any apparent credentials for the board other than being a friend of Richard's," Brooks said. "To not see a causal relationship [between Perle being named as chairman and Hillman being named to the board] strains credulity."
In November 2001, the investment fund was incorporated in Delaware under the name of Trireme Partners.
Trireme is part of the story that Seymour Hersh broke in March 2003, as described by the LA Times: "The New Yorker magazine first reported on Perle's involvement with Trireme while he was serving as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Its story, written by Seymour Hersh, revealed that Perle had met with Adnan Khashoggi, a controversial Saudi arms dealer, and Harb Saleh Zuhair, a Saudi businessman, and sought investments in the fund from them."
The appearance of the fabulously inexperienced Gerald Hillman on the Defense Policy Board is another coup for the Trireme venture capital vultures.
The terminology is somewhat troublesome. To experienced casino gamblers like Bill Bennett, a "nickel" is slang for $500. But "squeezing a nickel" must be venture capitalist slang for "bilking taxpayers out of $500 million."
On Tuesday, a key House Democrat continued his attacks on the Army Corps of Engineers' decision to hire Houston-based Halliburton Co. under an exclusive, but short-term, contract to perform emergency repair work in Iraq's oil fields.
In response to inquiries from Rep. Henry Waxman of California, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, commander of the Army Corps, said Halliburton's contract called for not only the putting out of oil fires and the cleanup of crude spills, but the "operation of facilities" and the "distribution of products" as well.
Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, pounced on the language to suggest that Halliburton's contract "is considerably broader in scope than previously known."
"Only now, over five weeks after the contract was first disclosed, are members of Congress and the public learning that Halliburton may be asked to pump and distribute Iraqi oil under the contract," Waxman wrote in a letter to Flowers.
Meanwhile, the taxpayers who funded this war are still waiting for the appearance of the anthrax and the other purported WMD that the seriously flawed (and probably fictional) intelligence provided by Rumsfeld and the Pentagon was supposed to have identified.
Cheney's oil industry intelligence on the Iraqi reserves, however, turns out to have been quite accurate.
An elite network of big-dollar donors to George W. Bush called "the Pioneers" was far more extensive than previously known, producing perhaps half the record-smashing $100 million for his 2000 presidential race, according to court documents.
While the Bush campaign initially made public a list of 226 members of the Pioneer network, there actually were more than 500, newly released court records show.
The size and scope of the Pioneer network revealed in the documents underscore how a relatively small group of wealthy energy company officials, corporate executives, lobbyists and others accounted for a sizeable portion of the money that helped catapult Mr. Bush to the White House.
Moreover, as the president prepares for re-election, he is expected to tap the same network of wealthy donors to build what Bush advisers hope will be a $200 million campaign treasury.
Was it understood that the earlier list of 226 names was meant to be complete? Isn't it illegal to disclose this information so late in the game? See the original article for the full list of all names.
Surely these people are in favor of a tax cut for the rich, no matter how ill-timed and in total defiance of common sense.
Okay, readers, let's get busy. Check the list and make note of your state's names. Then scour your hometown media, and send links to good stories here. To defeat these "Pioneers" and their bottomless pockets, we need scandalous local stories about each of these 500 people and their various business conflicts of interest, religious manias, hypocrisies, etc.
If they're going to bring down the whole country, they're coming with us.
The U.S. government this week launched its Arabic language satellite TV news station for Muslim Iraq.
It is being produced in a studio -- Grace Digital Media -- controlled by fundamentalist Christians who are rabidly pro-Israel.
That's Grace as in "by the Grace of God."
Grace Digital Media is controlled by a fundamentalist Christian millionaire, Cheryl Reagan, who last year wrested control of Federal News Service, a transcription news service, from its former owner, Cortes Randell.
Randell says he met Reagan at a prayer meeting, brought her in as an investor in Federal News Service, and then she forced him out of his own company.
Grace Digital Media and Federal News Service are housed in a downtown Washington, D.C. office building, along with Grace News Network.
When you call the number for Grace News Network, you get a person answering "Grace Digital Media/Federal News Service."
According to its web site, Grace News Network is "dedicated to transmitting the evidence of God's presence in the world today."
"Grace News Network will be reporting the current secular news, along with aggressive proclamations that will 'change the news' to reflect the Kingdom of God and its purposes," GNN proclaims.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. government agency producing the television news broadcasts for Iraq, likes to say it is the BBC of the USA.
BBG runs Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and Radio Sawa -- Arabic language radio for the Middle East.
"Our mission is clear," BBG's Joan Mower told us. "To broadcast accurate and objective news about the United States and the world. We don't do propaganda, leafleting -- we are like the BBC in that respect."
Well, then why hook up with Grace?
BBG's Joan Mower said that Grace Digital Media is a mainstream production house used by all kinds of mainstream news organizations.
"Grace will have nothing to do with the editorial side of the news broadcast," she said. "They are renting us equipment, space, studio. The Grace personnel we use include technicians, production people but no editorial people."
But Mower said she couldn't get us a copy of the contract between BBG and Grace Digital media. Nor could she say how Grace Digital was chosen as the production studio.
Grace News Network proclaims that it will be a "unique tool in the Lord's ministry plan for the world."
"Grace News Network provides networking links and portals to various ministries and news services that will be of benefit to every Christian believer and seeker of truth," according to the company's mission statement.
The CEO of Grace News Network is Thorne Auchter.
The same Thorne Auchter who began the dismantling of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under Presidents Reagan and George Bush I.
Surely this was not the only production facility available in the Washington area. The contract and the decision-making criteria were unavailable because they doubtlessly contain the unmistakable overtones of the editorial meddling for which Christian Republicans are so notorious.
When asked to disassociate with the Pittsburg Comic Convention last month, your chapter assured families the Pittsburgh Comicon would not subject children to pornography.
But according to eyewitnesses, the Comicon and the benefit activities subjected children to gratuitous amounts of porn, gambling, and alcohol throughout the convention.
I encourage you to re-evaluate your chapter's association with those who promote events that damage the reputation and trustworthiness of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
I will strongly consider your response to my concerns before making donations to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
The insane base of the Republican Party is no longer content with threatening run-of-the-mill liberals — now even charities that help dying children must kowtow to their cultural revolution.
A parade of big companies is under investigation for inflating their earnings during the stock-market boom of the 1990s. Now some of them see an unusual silver lining: They want back the taxes they overpaid along the way.
In the latest wrinkle in the unfolding series of corporate scandals, MCI and Enron Corp. are in the process of collecting or filing for tax refunds or credits from the Internal Revenue Service because of tax payments on billions of dollars they falsely claimed to have earned. Qwest Communications International Inc., which plans to restate $2.2 billion in revenue, also is likely to seek a refund. Embattled HealthSouth Corp., accused of overstating its earnings by more than $2 billion, said that it hasn't made a final decision to file for a refund but is considering it.
Fraud or not, the current tax code makes no distinctions. It is a basic tenet of tax law -- both for individuals and corporations -- that those who overpay are entitled to a refund.
[...]
With the number of corporate scandals and expected financial restatements at a historic high, no one knows just yet how much the federal government could have to forfeit on the refunds and credits. Even if such credits are ultimately lowered as part of settlements, observers believe that the federal government will probably be out hundreds of millions of dollars.
Investigations into fraud at MCI, which recently changed its name from WorldCom Inc., have uncovered accounting irregularities that are now expected to reach $11 billion. The fraud masked two years of losses at the country's second-largest long-distance company during the height of the telecommunications and technology boom of the late 1990s.
Already, as MCI prepares to emerge from bankruptcy in September, a person close to the situation says it has collected tax refunds of nearly $300 million on those now-discredited profits.
[...]
Richard Lipton, a tax attorney for the Chicago-based law firm Baker & McKenzie, said corporate fraud should have no effect on the ability of companies to recoup tax overpayments. "It's not the government's money, it's the shareholders' money," Mr. Lipton said, adding that corporate penalties for making a false tax return are capped at $500,000.
The overpayments are one more thing for shareholders to be upset about, since companies were deprived of the use of that cash. "You are really in a sense shortchanging shareholders," says Henry Hu, a corporate and securities-law professor at the University of Texas Law School. "It is a perverse set of circumstances. You are basically making gifts to the government in order to make yourself not look bad."
[...]
In a recent study of 27 companies charged with fraud, a University of Chicago accounting professor, Merle Erickson, found that top management apparently was willing to sacrifice tax payments made in cash in order to publicly report sham earnings and revenue gains. His study found that, on average, companies "sacrificed" 11 extra cents in taxes for each dollar of fraudulent earnings.
As it turns out, companies committing fraud were more afraid of the IRS than of their own auditors. Also, tax payments in the late 1990s weren't too much of an impediment to earnings as companies touted the measure known as Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization as a more accurate gauge of their results and growth potential.
Even Enron, which paid just $63 million in taxes between 1996 and 2001, is seeking tax credits, say people familiar with the matter. That may be tough to collect, however, since the IRS has claims of its own, one person familiar with the company said. Enron spokesman Mark Palmer said that the company is "in settlement discussions with the IRS."
As Richard Lipton and Henry Hu point out above, it really is the shareholders' money that was stolen and given as a gift to the government to prop up the appearance of respectability. The IRS acted as an unwitting toll booth on the way to legitimizing the imaginary profits. These companies couldn't have achieved have the results they did simply by doing business, so they created a house of mirrors that included paying hundreds of millions of dollars in actual taxes that protected the illusion from further scrutiny. For a while, anyway.
Getting the money back from the IRS, out of the hands of the Bush administration (which helped to create this haze of corporate irresponsibility), and into the deserving hands of the shareholders who were swindled is therefore, in the words of an embattled Martha Stewart, still a good thing.
"Fighting AIDS on a global scale is a massive and complicated undertaking, yet this cause is rooted in the simplest of moral duties," President George W. Bush said Tuesday. "When we see this kind of preventable suffering, when we see a plague leaving graves and orphans across a continent, we must act. When we see the wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not, America will not pass to the other side of the road."
Among those applauding Bush's speech were Focus on the Family's James Dobson, Prison Fellowship's Chuck Colson, and evangelists Franklin Graham and Anne Graham Lotz.
"Americans can do something about this modern plague—and we must," Colson and William J. Bennett wrote in a Washington Times op-ed that same day (which was very similar to Colson's March 17 Breakpoint radio commentary): "President Bush has correctly identified African AIDS as a humanitarian catastrophe of staggering proportions—one that a strong and merciful nation must throw its considerable resources into fighting. His $15 billion plan to do so is both simple and sensible."
In yesterday's Breakpoint commentary, Colson again affirmed the President's plan, but added a warning: "There's a danger that the president's initiative may be derailed in Congress. The House International Relations Committee failed to pass two critically needed amendments."
One would have set aside at least one third of the funding for abstinence and monogamy programs, and the other would have provided a conscience clause exempting faith-based groups from having to hand out condoms (some say the amendment would also allow groups to hire workers consistent with their religious beliefs).
A third amendment that some other religious conservatives were pushing for would limit funding to the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is affiliated with the United Nations.
Who decided that it would cost at least $5 billion to say "stop having sex"? Only a theo-Republican without any understanding of virology or public health could have come up with that highly imaginative budget.
What do you expect from a felon who had a piety makeover?
Bush and Colson have so much in common, Colson wrote in his commentary yesterday:
The president made it clear that the House and Senate must act quickly, not only to pass a law, but also to make it clear that the faith-based community will be full participants. At the end of the meeting the president said, "We need to do this because it is the right thing."
I added, "It's not only the right thing, Mr. President—it works."
"I know that," he replied. "That's what delivered me from alcohol, and I wouldn't be sitting at this table otherwise."
I responded, "I wouldn't be sitting at the table either."
And think of all the Africans we could save if neither the ex-drunk deserter nor the Nixon felon were sitting at that table.
Fighting viruses with Bibles is not only bad medicine, it's another example of the fraud that passes for policy in the Bush administration.
Tell your representatives not to allocate AIDS in Africa money to any faith-based groups.
All but one are expected to surrender to federal authorities this morning and will likely be paraded into the courthouse in handcuffs.
The former executives to be named today are Ken Rice and Joe Hirko, co-chief executive officers of Enron Broadband Services; Kevin Hannon, chief operating officer of EBS; F. Scott Yeager and Rex Shelby, EBS executives; Ben Glisan, Enron treasurer; Dan Boyle, vice president; and [Lea] Fastow, who is married to former CFO Andrew Fastow and was a one-time assistant treasurer of Enron.
By 7:30 a.m., Rice, Hirko, Hannon, Yeager, Glisan and Boyle had surrendered at FBI headquarters on East T.C. Jester. "Prosecuting this guy is like prosecuting a piano player in a whorehouse," said Boyle's attorney Bill Rosch on the steps in front of the FBI building.
Piano players in the whorehouse indeed. What about the proprietors of the joint?
The best we can hope for is that Lea Fastow's indictment is a prosecutorial strategy to get her husband to implicate the twin madams of the best little whorehouse in Texas: Enron CEOs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Hopefully this will happen sometime next year in the period leading up to the Republican convention in New York City, as fresh reminder of the damage these people and their lavish campaign contributions of fraudulent profits did to the office of the presidency.
As the US military grapples with the most ambitious peacekeeping and nation-building operation in 50 years, you might think that planners in the Pentagon are looking at ways to increase resources that support peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Well, you would be mistaken. The Department of Defense has just decided to eliminate its only institute devoted to such operations: the Peacekeeping Institute at the US Army War College in Pennsylvania. The Institute will close in October.
With only 49 peacekeeping centres in the world, some military and some civilian, Canada will have the sole remaining centre in North America.
The Peacekeeping Institute was created in July 1993 to guide the Army's strategic thinking on how to conduct peacekeeping and to document lessons-learned. It has operated with a staff of ten and a yearly budget of about $200,000 (out of an $81 billion annual Army budget).
[...]
Now we have come full circle, with US forces having to make the transition from war fighters to peacekeepers in Iraq in a matter of days. The looting and lawlessness in Iraq's major cities suggests that the US military is ill-prepared to perform as peacekeepers. So, at a time when US soldiers are doing civilian reconstruction in Afghanistan and are the stewards of post-conflict Iraq, how could it happen that the Peacekeeping Institute will shut its doors?
The Pentagon's rationale is simple: the Peacekeeping Institute is a casualty of "force realignment". All bodies are needed at the front to fight the Global War on Terror. The institute's former director, Colonel George Oliver, has himself been deployed overseas to work with the Pentagon-led reconstruction effort in Iraq.
The absence of political champions for the only federal organisation dedicated to thinking strategically about the US military in peace operations points to an increasingly obvious disconnect in Washington: the Institute has no strong political constituency. It is a post-Cold War policy orphan, regarded with suspicion from the Left for being a child of the military and scorned by the Right for having the word "peace" in its name.
Not spending $200,000 in peacekeeping strategy, versus spending $100,000,000,000 in post-looting reconstruction costs. Brilliant.
"My concern is, what message does this send to the world?" Oliver told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his office in Carlisle, Pa [in 2002]. "It's going to say that the U.S. military doesn't really care about peacekeeping." (Via the Cato Institute.)
A bit of retrospective looking at the transition between Clinton and Bush from Government Executive Magazine:
The National Security Council [in 1993] brought together senior officials (mostly assistant secretaries) from a range of agencies to consult on the shape of the Haiti operation as a whole, while assigning each one clear responsibility for a particular problem: establishing security to the Pentagon, lining up allies to the State Department, reforming the police to Justice, rebuilding the economy to Commerce. The resulting plan was detailed and comprehensive, yet still flexible enough that President Clinton could turn an invasion around in midair when the Haitian junta backed down and allowed U.S. forces to enter peacefully.
The coordination for Haiti became the model, embodied in a document called Presidential Decision Directive 56. Admittedly, "PDD-56 never quite worked the way I wanted it to," said retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who helped write the doctrine while a Pentagon staffer and then saw it truncated in the Balkans. But at least there was a plan for how to plan. Said Col. George Oliver, director of the Army's Peacekeeping Institute: It "was only a partial step forward, but it was a big step—sort of like the first step on the moon."
In February 2001, the newly inaugurated Bush administration effectively revoked the Clinton directive. Whereas Clinton had formalized coordination and centralized control through the National Security Council, Bush prefers a looser process that relies on his powerful (and sometimes competing) Cabinet secretaries, such as Defense's Donald Rumsfeld and State's Colin L. Powell.
Our national interests are not being served. Our allies have seen through the lies. Iraqi civilians are suffering because of the poorly planned nature of the invasion. But at least we've secured the oil fields.
The Bush administration is less a government than a cult.
Tuesday's 75-minute meeting was Bush's first face-to-face with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist since the Tennessee Republican cut a surprise Senate deal to limit the president's proposed tax cut to $350 billion -- less than half what the White House was initially seeking.
"I apologized. I made a mistake," Frist said before the White House session, which included House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican. "My goal is to grow the number as high as I possibly can," Frist added.
Nothing is more sacred to Republicans than moving hundreds of billions of dollars from the US Treasury into the groping hands of the rich — it just took Frist a little while longer than usual to have the logic of it spelled out for him. Now he has seen the light, and is a changed man.
Bush shrugged off the trappings of Harvard and avoided the official clubs that would showcase him in the yearbook and look good on his resume. Instead, he showed up for class looking like he had just rolled out of bed in the morning, often sat in the back of the room chewing gum or dipping snuff and made it clear to everyone he had no interest in Wall Street.
He was one of the few people who posed for his yearbook mug shot in a sports shirt, a wrinkled one at that. The other prominent picture of him in the book showed him sitting in the back row of class with longish hair blowing a huge bubble.
"This was [Harvard Business School] and people were fooling around with the accouterments of money and power," recalled April Foley, who dated Bush for a brief period and has remained friends with him. "While they were drinking Chivas Regal, he was drinking Wild Turkey. They were smoking Benson and Hedges and he's dipping Copenhagen, and while they were going to the opera he was listen to Johnny Rodriguez over and over and over and over."
April Foley was just nominated by her ex-boyfriend, now the president of the United States, to the Export-Import Bank board, which has been called "a tool for an elite group of politically well-connected corporations to get sweetheart deals and cheap financing courtesy of American taxpayers."
Which well-connected corporations? "The bulk of Export-Import's benefits go to a small number of large companies that are sophisticated enough to get financing on their own: Boeing, Halliburton, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, Lucent Technologies, ChevronTexaco, Caterpillar and Dell Computer, among others...."
Go read all the gory details — including the international finance loops that include Osama bin Laden and Riley Bechtel — at bad things, who rightly points out that April Foley is a cipher as far as the Internet is concerned.
The families of those whose remains he will desecrate with his cheap political stunt feel otherwise (New York Times letter to the editor):
To the Editor:
Re "Bush's Aides Plan Late Sprint in '04" (news article, April 22):
Since the worst terrorist attack in American history, which took the life of my brother, occurred in New York on Sept. 11, it seems appropriate that President Bush will be making his re-election bid from that city at that time in 2004.
Perhaps the millions of unemployed Americans, veterans whose benefits have been threatened, families of dead civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, working people who lost their pensions to corporate fraud, and 41 million Americans without health insurance can come to town and join him in celebrating the other achievements of his first term.
DAVID POTORTI
Cary, N.C., April 23, 2003
The achievements of Bush's first term are substantial. Too bad they're the wrong ones, having nothing at all to do with those who harm America. The Iraqi oil fields are open for business — but where's Osama bin Laden? The first tax cut for the rich was enacted and the second is on its way — but where's Ken Lay?
In 2000 [while Clinton was still in office], 8 percent of Houston area residents called "economy, poverty" the biggest problem facing the area. In 2003, that figure more than tripled to 25 percent.
Job opportunities were considered "excellent" or "good" by 73 percent back in 2000. In 2003, that figure is nearly halved to 39 percent. The proportion that considers job opportunities "poor" quadrupled over the same period.
A majority (53 percent, compared with 45 percent in 1997) support civil rights initiatives for gay men and women.
What a difference a few years make. Houston was of course hard-hit when Bush financier Enron went all MOAB on the region.
Funny how a governor of Arkansas can be more in step with what Texans want than a governor of Texas.
KUWAIT CITY, April 24 -- Nearly three weeks after U.S. forces reached Iraq's most important nuclear facility, the Bush administration has yet to begin an assessment of whether tons of radioactive material there remain intact, according to military officials here and in Washington.
Before the war began last month, the vast Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center held 3,896 pounds of partially enriched uranium, more than 94 tons of natural uranium and smaller quantities of cesium, cobalt and strontium, according to reports compiled through the 1990s by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Immensely valuable on the international black market, the uranium was in a form suitable for further enrichment to "weapons grade," the core of a nuclear device. The other substances, products of medical and industrial waste, emit intense radiation. They have been sought, officials said, by terrorists seeking to build a so-called dirty bomb, which uses conventional explosives to scatter dangerous radioactive particles.
Defense officials acknowledge that the U.S. government has no idea whether any of Tuwaitha's potentially deadly contents have been stolen, because it has not dispatched investigators to appraise the site. What it does know, according to officials at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command, is that the sprawling campus, 11 miles south of Baghdad, lay unguarded for days and that looters made their way inside.
First was the radioactive material from Halliburton and now this. How many ways do we need to supply anarchists with ingredients for dirty bombs?
And how many impeachable offenses do we need to get the ball rolling and end this perverse administration?
What the world needs now is Spy Magazine. This Rake Magazine interview with Kurt Andersen, founding co-editor of the brilliant Spy magazine, reminds us that there is a gaping hole in the somnolent 2003 media world — a hole that could be filled with smart, skeptical humor as an antidote to the arrogance, conformity and faux piety that saturates the American mainstream.
