Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Who's afraid of Cherie Blair? When the Bush and Blair couples get together for a private evening, sometimes the wives freak out:As the two couples sat down to dinner, with the officials no longer there, Mrs Blair could not resist an argument. She is a human rights lawyer and turned to the death penalty, a subject on which she has blunt views.
Judicial executions were an immoral violation of human rights, an affront under the US Constitution as much as under European laws to the fundamental principles of justice, she said. This opinion was delivered to a man who as Governor of Texas signed warrants for more than 150 executions.
Mr Blair was reported to have “squirmed”, even though he shares her opposition to the death penalty. The author says that when he asked Mr Blair about the incident during research for the book he looked uncomfortable — all he would say was that Cherie had raised the issue but as far as he was concerned the United States and Britain simply had different systems.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “She has always had a good relationship with President Bush and has of course discussed many issues with him, including capital punishment. The discussions have always been good-natured.”
Stephens also states that later in the evening Mr Bush had been embarrassed by his wife. Laura Bush had made it clear that her views on abortion were a great deal more liberal than his. Link via the crucial Cursor.
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"An epitome of white Christian morality." When you hear a phrase like that, you know they must be talking about Neil Bush:Moral indignation; arrogant, rude hypocrite; a known thief; an abusive husband; incapable of loving own wife and own children; incapable of raising own kids. How many times have you heard about him? How many times have you heard about millions like him, who determine how others live, who mold the thoughts others must think, who enact the laws under which others must live? Henry Hyde, Bill Clinton, Gary Bauer, Dan Burton, Tom Delay, Bob Livinston, Bobb Barr, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Baker, Philip Marquardt;
purveyors of Christian/American/white morality.
Because not publicized, you are led to believe that they and their depraved ways do not exist. But of course Neil Bush and his adulterous fiancee Maria Andrews do exist, cavorting in France ("Old Europe," according to Donald Rumsfeld). Presidential brother Neil spends his time in Paris avoiding his wife Sharon Bush and their children when he isn't in Asia sucking stock options and fucking pre-paid prostitutes.
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Monday, January 26, 2004
Sure, now he shuts up. The chief disseminator of fake intelligence (thanks to his bud Ahmed Chalabi) abruptly clams up (FindLaw):Vice President Dick Cheney defended the U.S.-led Iraq war Monday but did not address mounting criticism over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and his own part in U.S. charges that Iraq had stockpiled them.
"Today the former dictator (of Iraq) sits in captivity; he can no longer harbor and support terrorists, and his long efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction are at an end," Cheney told Italian political and business leaders.
But in his speech in the Italian Senate, he made no mention of earlier U.S. charges that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons -- the heart of the U.S. case for invading the country last March.
At a photo-call later with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Cheney did not answer a reporter who asked whether U.S. intelligence problems were behind the administration's argument that Iraq had unconventional weapons stockpiles.
[...]
Cheney's spokesman declined to comment. Cheney said in a National Public Radio interview last week: "I believe they (the Iraqis) had programs designed to produce weapons of mass destruction. We still don't know the whole extent of what they did have ... it's a tough intelligence problem." Cheney's sudden silence is quite a contrast with his belligerence a year ago.
Shame about the 519 dead Americans, thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, and hundred of billions of dollars gone from the US Treasury.
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Leave no surplus behind. Those tax cuts and that WMD-free spider hole photo op turned out to be the most expensive purchases in history (WSJ, sub. req'd.):The federal deficit will hit a record $477 billion this year and get worse if lawmakers cut taxes or increase spending, the Congressional Budget Office projected Monday in a report sure to become ammunition in the election-year fight over red ink.
[...]
The budget office also estimated that deficits for the decade ending in 2013 would total nearly $2.4 trillion. The August report foresaw deficits totaling $1.4 trillion over 10 years. The added red ink was due in part new costs, such as the prescription-drug benefit created last year.
[...]
The deficit hit $375 billion in 2003, the highest-ever in dollar terms. The previous record was $290 billion in 1992.
[...]
Many analysts say the budget office's deficit projections will probably prove too low -- especially in the long-term -- because they omit expenses the president and Congress are likely to approve.
[...]
The two parties are already fighting over the red ink that has materialized during the Bush years.
The budget's health has taken an abrupt nosedive after four straight years of annual surpluses that ran through 2001. Only last January, the budget office estimated 10-year surpluses -- not deficits -- of $1.3 trillion. And in January 2001, when Mr. Bush took office, the projection was for a decade of black ink totaling $5.6 trillion.
Republicans say Mr. Bush isn't to blame for the turnabout. Analysts say the surpluses have dissolved due to the recession, the tax cuts Mr. Bush pushed through Congress and growing spending for defense, Medicare and other programs. From a surplus of $5.6 trillion to a deficit of $2.4 trillion. $8 trillion vanished from the US Treasury into thin air entirely on George W. Bush's watch.
The previous record deficit was in 1992 back when his daddy was president, protecting Neil Bush from the S&L regulators.
It's all Barbara's fault — her and her entire family of leeches. Barbara is the matriarch of a dynasty raised to destroy America by fiscal bleeding.
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Friday, January 23, 2004
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Everything to fear, and nothing to gain. How to scare the American population, as analyzed and catalogued by Tom Engelhard:In the first half of the [State of the Union] speech, the words "terror" or "terrorists" were used 14 times; some form of "kill" ("killers," "killed," "killing") 10 times; war 7 times; and that doesn't count the various stand-ins for war or warlike actions ("aggressive raids," "attack," "offensive," "patrols," "operations," "battle," "armored charges," "midnight raids," "on the offensive," and the slightly more opaque "pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the Greater Middle East," a favorite phrase of our vice president as well);"weapons" was used 8 times (usually in the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" or "of mass murder," or in one case in the extraordinarily convoluted phrase, "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities"); "threat" appeared 4 times, "hunting" or "manhunt" 3 times; "capture" 3 times; ditto "tracking"; "plotting" four times; "danger" in some form four times including "ultimate danger"; some form of the word "violent" three times; "thugs" twice; some form of "enemy" 3 times.
Among other words occurring at least once were: patrolling, vigilance, assassins, disrupt, seize, tragedy, trial, catch, fear, chaos, carnage, torture, tyrant, tyranny, despair, anger, brutal, hateful propaganda, prison cell, shake the will.
And even some normally positive words fell into this category in a process akin to guilt-by-association as in the phrase, "enemies of reform and allies of terror." Irrational fear is a wall that divides people. Words like these are bricks that build the wall of fear.
The ultimate mission of the Bush administration is to slake the greed of its donors by capitalizing on the fears it manufactures among voters.
Bush is building a fortress of artificial fears to distract us from his own incapacity to face actual threats. Let's face it, Bush couldn't catch the real Osama bin Laden so instead he went after his imagined enemy — his daddy's and Cheney's nemesis.
Link via the glorious Cursor.
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And they say he's not stupid.
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Halliburton: "Kick me." Cheney's minions get caught with their greasy hands in the Kuwaiti kickback cookie jar (WSJ, sub. req'd.):WASHINGTON -- Halliburton Co. has told the Pentagon that two employees took kickbacks valued at up to $6 million in return for awarding a Kuwaiti-based company with lucrative work supplying U.S. troops in Iraq.
The disclosure is the first firm indication of corruption involving U.S.-funded projects in Iraq and raises new questions about Halliburton's dealings there. The company's work already is being scrutinized because of accusations that the U.S. government was overcharged for gasoline under another controversial contract.
Halliburton has strenuously defended its Iraq work as fairly priced and free of taint. A discovery of kickbacks could expose the company to hefty fines and other punishments such as potential fraud charges. At the least, contracting experts say, Halliburton will be required to reimburse the money.
[...]
The latest revelation, though, is sure to increase the already intense scrutiny Halliburton has received from congressional Democrats, some of whom charge that the Houston-based company benefited from political favoritism in securing lucrative work in Iraq. The news also is likely to further raise suspicions abroad that Iraq reconstruction work is largely benefiting U.S. companies and their employees.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who was chairman of Halliburton until he left in 2000, defended the company Wednesday in a Fox Radio Network interview. "They get unfairly maligned simply because of their past association with me," he said.
[...]
The Pentagon has had to reject two huge proposed bills from KBR, including one for $2.7 billion, because of myriad "deficiencies," the memo says. "We consider [the company's] estimates in the area of subcontracts to be inadequate," the memo says. The agency is now auditing proposed KBR bills totaling $2.1 billion, the memo says.
Pentagon auditors last month said that KBR's Kuwaiti supplier, Altanmia Commercial Marketing Co., was charging the U.S. almost double the market price for gasoline. Auditors said the overcharging amounted to $61 million through September, and as much as $20 million a month since then.
The Army Corps defended the company's hiring of Altanmia in a lengthy Jan. 6 report. The report said KBR had "urgent and compelling needs" to use the Kuwaiti supplier, even at significantly higher prices than other potential suppliers.
Still, Pentagon officials are likely to home in on the circumstances under which KBR hired Altanmia. The Army Corps report says KBR picked Altanmia on May 5 after making phone calls to just two other bidders. Officials say there is no indication of kickbacks involving Altanmia.
A number of anonymous whistleblowers have come forward in recent weeks with often-detailed allegations of KBR wrongdoing in Kuwait, including accusations of paybacks from companies that received lucrative subcontracting work from KBR, according to U.S. officials and congressional sources. These reports in turn have been taken up by the Pentagon's IG office. "They get unfairly maligned simply because of their past association with me," Cheney says, apparently unaware that he himself is one of the greatest examples of "conflict of interest" in American history — a CEO who resigns to become vice president and then to wage a war based on fake evidence to provide multibillion no-bid contracts to his company.
Correction: Halliburton is fairly maligned because of their past association with Cheney.
Note also the magnanimous depth of the gratitude Kuwait shows the United States for our role in supporting its monarchy, thanks to not one but two Bush Gulf wars.
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Thinking out of the lockbox. A leading Social Security privatization advocate was captured yesterday at a Houston motel (Houston Chronicle):A Southern California investment adviser authorities believe bilked $814 million from thousands of clients in a nationwide scam was arrested early this morning at a Houston motel, an FBI spokesman said.
James Paul Lewis Jr., 57, was expected to appear before U.S. Magistrate Frances Stacy today. He was arrested without incident at a Houston motel sometime after midnight , said Bob Doguim, a Houston FBI spokesman.
[...]
Doguim said Lewis is accused of "stealing from Paul to pay Mary."
"That money was never invested in anything," he said. "All he was doing was finding others (investors). That is the money he used to show some kind of return."
When the FBI raided his office Dec. 22, Lewis was supposed to have $814 million on hand for the firm's clients, but bank accounts held about $2.3 million. Federal authorities have frozen those accounts.
[...]
The FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission allege Lewis fabricated more than $730 million in interest payments. Even accounting for the fictitious funds, Lewis still should have $75 million more than investigators can find, the SEC said. A temporary receiver appointed to find more assets put the shortfall at $100 million. Speaking of nationwide scams, all retirement funding privatization schemes lead to stories just like this one. Which is not to say that all privatization advocates are crooks, but they are advocates of an inherently riskier system that allows for criminal negligence of the types we've seen in a number of mutual fund companies — thanks largely to the investigations of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
"Stealing from Paul to pay Mary" is Lewis's variation on the Republican theme of "stealing from working taxpayers to pay corporate donors."
James Paul Lewis Jr. was captured only because his namesake father did not have the foresight to fix the Supreme Court, get him appointed president of the United States, and turn his crimes into federal policy.
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It's the year of the monkey. And hopefully the last year of the chimp.
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Thursday, January 22, 2004
"...for you were a stranger..." This past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend a preview of a new play opening Friday, January 23, entitled "...for you were a stranger..."
The play tells the story of two women, an Arab and a Jew, who meet three times across the 4000-year span of their common heritage. First they meet as Sarah and Hagar, the matriarchs of the Bible; later they move to medieval Spain as daughters of the Golden Age of Muslim/Jewish culture; and finally to the modern Middle East of 1967.
What's especially notable about the play is how the experiences of motherhood and femaleness relate to the rival sibling nations of Israel and Palestine — as dramatized by the two women who, quite literally, gave birth to the Jews and to the Muslims. We see their goddess-based polytheism eclipsed by a pair of monotheisms in the form of their sons, who grow up to become both patriarchal and unkind to their mothers' feminine traditions.
The play asks us to bear witness to the women on both sides of the political/religious equation as history began to take its terrible course. As only great political plays can do, "...for you were a stranger..." transforms daunting and abstract political situations into something immediate, palpable, and human.
Actress/playwright Donna Blue Lachman collaborated on the work with Rula Sirhan Gardenier, an Arab actress and playwright who lives in Chicago. Lachman has played Frida Kahlo, Rosa Luxemburg and Peggy Guggenheim, among others, in her solo performance career. The Piven Theatre Workshop's Jennifer Green directs the piece, which is scheduled to run through March 21.
There was a preview feature in the Chicago Sun-Times, and Tony Adler also wrote a fascinating preview piece in the Chicago Reader that I was unable to locate on their site. Next week I'll post more reviews as they come online.
Here is the show's listing at the HotHouse, where the show is being performed and where you can also buy tickets online.
The HotHouse, in case you don't know, is Chicago's greatest venue for nightclub-scale performing arts, especially world music. The HotHouse is in downtown Chicago next to the Chicago Hilton and Towers on Grant Park. With this new play they are expanding their lineup to include cutting-edge theatre.
See it!
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Let us praise Margaret Cho who can take a routine piece of hate email and turn it into a brilliant, streetsmart debate.
Link via Atrios.
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Krugman on class immobility. In "The Death of Horatio Alger" in The Nation, Krugman states that "over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically," and chronicles exactly how, if you like that sort of thing, you can promote further class immobility.
In other words, the Bush administration has worked tirelessly to tear down the American Dream that was a reality only a generation ago — and replace it with a caste society in which tremendous wealth creates family dynasties that employ and govern the rest of us. But you had to be paying attention to see it coming.
(Look! Over here! Christian prisons! Men on Mars! Athletes on steroids!)
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Monday, January 19, 2004
The Silence of Cheney: a poem. While reading Mark Leibovich's profile of Dick Cheney in the Washington Post yesterday, I realized there was a poem lurking in his reportage.
So, with some cutting but without reordering, here is his poem, a meditation on the silence of Dick Cheney:The Silence of Cheney
by Mark Leibovich
Cheney doesn't like to talk
unless he has to.
He sits for long stretches of conversation,
holding his fingertips
together at his lips,
peering over his glasses.
When he does speak,
it is in a brisk cadence
and often in partial sentences,
as if to conserve every word.
He has no use for self-revelation,
yours or his own.
He is impatient
with small talk and niceties.
"Not enough hours in the day"
is his recurring platitude
for anything he deems wasteful.
Cheney relishes quiet and solitude,
the better to absorb information.
Excess words can bloat and complicate.
Information escapes.
And you never learn anything
when you're talking.
Cheney is the one known for disappearing,
into a "secure undisclosed location."
("There are a few of them, actually," he says.)
Few people know where he is much of the time,
where he resides at night.
Only that he's somewhere.
And powerful.
And if he feels your pain --
double gosh forbid --
he's certainly not going to say so.
Cheney rarely gives interviews.
The media has changed
a great deal, he says.
"As an institution.
Evolved.
Kind of thing where it's almost impossible
to catch up with a bad story.
Factual errors."
He mentions Lexis-Nexis, search engines,
24-hour news cycles, cable news.
"Nobody goes back to check the accuracy,"
he says.
"Can be frustrating."
He likes to ask questions,
pointed and at times rapid-fire.
This is a variation on silence
in that he does not explicitly express his views
or divulge information.
He just acquires.
You hear Cheney cough.
You see Cheney's lips move.
If you're standing close enough,
maybe you'll hear a quick mutter.
But it's next to impossible
to decipher his words.
Cheney then retreats to a corner
and digs his hand into a bag
of Werther's hard caramels.
Cheney deploys his quiet
to great, sometimes intimidating effect.
Cheney is ardently unsentimental,
especially in business settings.
He is not prone to teary speeches,
elaborate goodbye ceremonies
or, for that matter,
thoughtful reassurances.
Cheney stares at his shoes
as he makes a slow walk from Air Force Two
to a group of servicemen and their families
in a hangar at McChord Air Force Base.
They are hoisting camcorders,
raising toddlers up
for a better view of the
balding adult
in a navy blue suit.
Cheney has a long-standing curiosity --
obsession, some have said --
with catastrophic scenarios
involving biological,
chemical and
radiological weapons.
This long precedes Sept. 11, 2001.
In his skull
resides the nation's most chilling intelligence.
Lynne and their daughters never ask about it.
Is this too much information
for a man
with a sick heart?
Cheney was found best-suited
to being a funeral director.
His voice is soft and even,
like an airline pilot's.
When shaking hands,
Cheney grips hard for a split-second
then pulls away quickly,
as if he's touched a hot stove.
You can't hear what Dick is saying.
At one point, Dick is posing
with Staff Sgt. Denise Caspers.
Their hands rest awkwardly
on each other's backs.
But the camera keeps misfiring.
Cheney endures this
for several seconds.
His face is frozen
in a smile,
his hand limp
on Caspers's spine.
His body slumps
until a replacement camera is found,
and he is finally delivered.
He is professorial
but hard to hear.
Cheney has much to share,
except that he doesn't.
He is asked if he will write a memoir.
The question elicits a slight wince.
But he's not thinking about it.
An aide hands him
a folded piece of paper,
which Cheney looks at and closes.
He runs two fingers across the fold
to reinforce the crease.
He looks at the paper again.
"I gotta call I gotta take,"
the vice president says.
He excuses himself and
the moment fades to silence. There was also this somewhat less poetic passage:
"One of Cheney's favorite recent books is An Autumn of War, a collection of essays published by historian Victor Davis Hanson in National Review after 9/11. Hanson, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece and a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute, believes that bloodshed is a natural condition of humanity. Evil exists in the world and the evildoers need to be met head-on."
Evil exists in the world, but those Iraqi WMDs apparently didn't.
Tough luck for the silent Dick Cheney and the 512 dead US soldiers, their grieving families, and the thousands of Iraqi civilians whose disprove Cheney's silent theories with their tears and their lives.
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Hubble's loss is Halliburton's gain. Actual science takes a back seat to Cheney's actual cronies (Center for American Progress, scroll down to "Mars – Red Planet Motivations"):HALLIBURTON ACTIVELY PUSHING FOR MARS FUNDING: In the 4/24/00 edition of Oil & Gas Journal, Halliburton scientist Steve Streich pointed out why a Mars program would be so lucrative for Halliburton. He says a "Mars exploration program presents an unprecedented opportunity" for the industry and that it "warrants the support of both government and industry leaders." He says "one area of great importance is finding out of what the inside of Mars consists. That's where the petroleum industry comes in." Specifically, benefits for "the oil and gas industry may lie in technology that NASA will use for drilling into the surface of Mars." He says there is "great potential for a happy synergy between space researchers" on a Mars project and "the oil and gas industry."
HALLIBURTON ALREADY INVOLVED IN MARS PLANS: The 4/24/00 edition of Oil & Gas Journal also reported that Halliburton is already involved in a preliminary consortium of industry and academia "organized to support the development of new technology required for the Mars mission." A 2/28/01 report in Petroleum News confirmed that "NASA has been working with Halliburton and others to identify drilling technologies that might work on Mars." As if we needed it, here's further proof of the Cheney-Halliburton presidency.
If you want to know what's being sacrificed to make way for Halliburton on Mars, take a look at the Hubble gallery.
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Friday, January 16, 2004
"Who moved my cheeseburger?" Julian Borger in the Guardian on the saga of Paul O'Neill:By his own account, Mr O'Neill actually warned the president-elect and his deputy not to hire him. When he was flown in for a secret meeting in a Washington hotel, he took a list of his past pronouncements that could prove embarrassing to a conservative administration.
He had called for a petrol tax, and worse still, he believed global warming to be a real threat. But in the Washington hotel room, the book suggests, Mr Bush was not listening. Mr O'Neill was telling a long anecdote about an encounter with an environmental pressure group when Mr Bush held up his hand and asked: "Where's lunch?". The president then upbraided his chief of staff for failing to produce a cheeseburger on time.
[...]
Wall Street was less impressed. The trip [to Africa with U2's Bono] confirmed it in its view of Mr O'Neill as a lightweight, blissfully unaware that his words and behaviour had a direct effect on the markets' faith in the US economy. In his first months he had caused a small run on the exchange markets by suggesting to a German newspaper that the administration did not have a strong dollar policy. Events have since proved the remark to be true, but it broke a taboo.
[...]
The fundamental question remains as to why any of them were hired at all by an administration that had no time for their views. Mr O'Neill concludes they were there simply as "cover", to make the Bush White House appear reassuringly moderate. In that case, the president and Mr Cheney made the wrong choice in Mr O'Neill. He was never going to be happy serving as someone else's window dressing. It's an honor to be fired by a petulant son-of-a-bitch brat. It took more testicular fortitude for O'Neill to say what he actually thinks than for Bush to thoughtlessly mouth what his speechwriters and political advisors hand him — without comprehending a word or being held accountable for the outcome.
Still no one within the administration is talking about the truth of O'Neill's remarks. The next State of the Union speech is on its way. What new lies will Bush disavow later this year?
And where's lunch?
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Thursday, January 15, 2004
South Park Christians. 
 Here's a disturbing headline: "Bush seeks billions for religious groups."
Last night I was reminded of South Park Republicans while watching a rerun in which the following exchange takes place (Kyle is questioning Cartman's motives in starting a Christian rock band):Kyle: But you don't know anything about Christians!
Cartman: I know enough about them to exploit them. I guess I never noticed Cartman's resemblance to Karl Rove before. Right down to his chinny-chin-chin.
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Capitalist against Bush: Warren Buffett. America's leading investor is less than bullish on what's happened to the dollar. He doesn't specify a personal target but he does specify the date of his realization that, for the first time in his life, the dollar is FUBB. Meanwhile, the disengaged president goes fundraising and planning trips to Mars as the dollar continues its sustained plunge against foreign currencies (Fortune, sub. req'd.):Through the spring of 2002, I had lived nearly 72 years without purchasing a foreign currency. Since then Berkshire has made significant investments in—and today holds—several currencies. I won't give you particulars; in fact, it is largely irrelevant which currencies they are. What does matter is the underlying point: To hold other currencies is to believe that the dollar will decline.
Both as an American and as an investor, I actually hope these commitments prove to be a mistake. Any profits Berkshire might make from currency trading would pale against the losses the company and our shareholders, in other aspects of their lives, would incur from a plunging dollar.
But as head of Berkshire Hathaway, I am in charge of investing its money in ways that make sense. And my reason for finally putting my money where my mouth has been so long is that our trade deficit has greatly worsened, to the point that our country's "net worth," so to speak, is now being transferred abroad at an alarming rate. "In fact, it is largely irrelevant which currencies they are" signals that right now any currency is better than the dollar in Buffett's view.
"Capitalists against Bush" is one of our cherished themes here in Skimbleland, as when we talked about Seth Glickenhaus.
Link via bloggy.
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"Much wants more." For those of you who come here looking for this sort of thing, today's Houston Chronicle features a good biography of Andrew and Lea Fastow.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Are they fucking nuts? Now, just when we need it most, Republicans want to ban the F-word. How else are we going share our outrage about Colin Powell's lying piece of shit son Michael and his fucking media consolidation, the stupid motherfucking $1.5 billion marriage "promotion" plan, and the goddamn asslicking cocksucking $1 trillion moon/Mars initiative?
Now, more than ever, we need the F-word. We must not relent and yield to pious hypocrites who mortgage our future while they attempt to control our speech.
We must preserve the right to public swearing for the people who will need it most — our children.
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Fastow children vs. Enron children. One of the things that has consistently amazed me about the reportage on Andrew and Lea Fastow, who are expected to plead guilty today, is the implicit concern for the welfare of their two small children should their parents go to jail. The "two small children" argument is repeated ad nauseum in nearly every article about their legal situation. Here are a hundred examples.
In the past several years of following this story, nowhere did I see similar concern about the thousands of children of Enron's other employees — the crime-free mothers and fathers who were bilked out of their privatized retirement savings by these devious, conniving, rich Fastows and the Lay/Skilling Axis of Enron.
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
That ultra-super-top-secret map of Iraqi oil fields revealed by Paul O'Neill the mainstream media is all in an uproar about was published (i.e., borrowed from Judicial Watch) right here at skimble on Friday, July 18, 2003.
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The fascist ACLU. The increasingly insane ironies of right-wing rhetoric from the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh should become obvious  even to people who don't immerse themselves in these kinds of issues.
Bill O'Reilly has called the ACLU a "fascist" organization — although it is defending Rush Limbaugh's right to privacy (TalkLeft). For the ACLU to act as Rush Limbaugh's advocate, it must be guided by a higher calling than his behavior and rhetoric warrant. Unlike the monolithic right, the ACLU doesn't respond to reflexive fits of appearances of "loyalty" whenever the loyalist pecking order starts pecking (e.g., the current defamation and investigation of former Bush Cabinet member Paul O'Neill). The ACLU is acting on principle, not on the particulars of a single case.
If our law enforcement agencies also acted on principle, Limbaugh would be in jail right now. And someday maybe the ACLU will come to O'Reilly's aid when his nonsensical blatherings are no longer in vogue.
But that's one of the essential differences between Bush league conservatism and the left — we have principles; they don't.
P.S. Join the ACLU.
O'Reilly image found at Media Whores Online.
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If Bush's sudden inexplicable interest in Mars is just a joke, Billmon locates the punch line: it's Halliburton.
Funny how little NASA interested him while he was governor of Texas.
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Paul O'Neill: terrorist and traitor. If investigative momentum is any measure, the Bush administration is taking Paul O'Neill more seriously than 9-11 or the Plame outing.
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"You can't have a war, cut taxes, have the economy in a garbage pail and spend billions going into space," said Dallas Hodgins, a 76-year-old retired University of Michigan researcher from Flint, Mich. "How are they going to pay for all this? I don't see how it's morally justifiable. In Flint, there isn't a school roof that doesn't leak."
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Monday, January 12, 2004
Although there is in all likelihood some culpability, Martha Stewart's treatment is wildly disproportionate to her so-called crime (not insider trading, but lying), especially in a world where thieving corporate maggots like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling continue to wriggle unindicted.
Marthatalks.com is her act of virtual self-defense.
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Frist: "Gimme shelter." Look who's buried at the end of this long article about tax shelters for the "superrich." Senate Majority Leader Bill "Pussycat" Frist's taxes are looking a bit dodgy (Houston Chronicle):Rich Americans are stealing billions of dollars from average wage earners through creative tax-dodging scams involving idyllic Caribbean islands, Byzantine accounting ploys and the rarefied world of high art, experts claim.
[...]
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimates tax cheats cost the federal government an estimated $11 billion to $15 billion a year.
If the cheats paid up for just one year, it would nearly cover the $18.3 billion Congress recently devoted to rebuild Iraq.
Instead, the rest of the taxpayers will carry that burden.
[...]
"The IRS always seems to be catching yesterday's hot new fraud, and today there are five or six to take its place," said Bill Allison of the Center for Public Integrity and co-author of The Cheating of America, a study of tax evasion by "the superrich."
[...]
The Senate subcommittee on investigations recently found that KPMG ignored warnings from its own staff that the shelters were bogus and concocted legal opinions to the contrary.
"I think everybody here knew what they were doing was wrong," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., the subcommittee's chairman.
The committee reported that KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, collected fees of $124 million from 1997 through 2001 on shelter plans — saving clients $1.4 billion in taxes.
The clients included Maurice Marciano, co-chairman of Guess; Dale Earnhardt, the late race car driver; and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., according to documents filed an IRS lawsuit against KPMG. Of course, somewhere it must be noted that "saving" KPMG clients $1.4 billion in taxes is also known as "cheating" honest taxpayers of $1.4 billion in taxes.
Another way of looking at it: For every $1 KPMG collected for its "bogus" shelters for Frist and Co., an extra $11 was taken from your pocket in the form of taxes deflected to the middle class.
Here's a peek at Frist performing for the other vast right-wing conspirators in the boardroom of anti-tax Gollum Grover Norquist. (This astonishing article on Norquist is a must-read.)
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401(krazy). Slacktivist on Bush's new 401(k) contribution limits, which allow owner-manager Republicans to "sock away" more money for retirement than the employees who render their profit-making enterprises possible:Most Americans have more debt on their credit cards than money in their mutual funds.
A tax-cut plan that increases 401(k) contribution limits beyond the means or dreams of the majority of workers is irrelevant and regressively redistributive in a nation in which this is true. And we indeed live in a nation in which this is true, thanks to the owner-manager Republicans who are already talking about another tax cut, as if the joblessness of this jobless recovery weren't joblessly jobless enough.
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Sunday, January 11, 2004
New celebrity group blog. The American Street, where left-o-blog celebrities David Neiwert, Jeralynn Merritt, skippy, and Kevin Hayden live. Check it out.
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"Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?" With a statement like that, Paul O'Neill may have a few things yet to learn about his old boss's pals (CBS/60 Minutes, airs tonight).
UPDATE: CalPundit locates the explanatory backstory.
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Friday, January 09, 2004
Here's today's Lea Fastow update — Houston Chronicle.
And here's a trip down Enron memory lane: Cliff Baxter's suicide note.
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"A blind man in a room full of deaf people." Who said it? No, not Dean or Clark or Gore or Sharpton — a member of Bush's own Cabinet (WaPo):Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts Friday from a CBS interview.
O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour.
"As I recall it was just a monologue," he told CBS' "60 Minutes," which will broadcast the entire interview Sunday.
In making the blind man analogy, O'Neill told CBS his ex-boss did not encourage a free flow of ideas or open debate.
"There is no discernible connection," CBS quoted O'Neill as saying. The president's lack of engagement left his advisers with "little more than hunches about what the president might think," O'Neil said, according to the program.
CBS said much of O'Neill's criticisms of Bush are included in "The Price of Loyalty," an upcoming book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind. O'Neill was fired for his hand in demonstrating how Bush's insane tax cuts contribute to $44 trillion in chronic US deficits.
"Blind," "no discernible connection," "lack of engagement" — he's the Stepford president.
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Bush on Mars. Props to No More Mister Nice Blog for connecting "Beat Street Breakdown" by Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five to Dubya in space.
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Tax breaks to scrape national resources. You can't give energy industry lobbyists any credit for having an original idea. Here's their big new suggestion — let's privatize the Rocky Mountains and national forests and wilderness areas of the American West, so Bush donors can provide inexplicable blackouts to the Northeast and SUVs can continue to get ever-lower gas mileage (Arizona Republic):America's insatiable demand for energy will require the development of vast new sources of natural gas, coal and oil and the construction of billions of dollars worth of pipelines, transmission lines and power plants, experts say.
That will require new tax breaks and other incentives to encourage businesses to invest in new infrastructure and more liberal policies about extracting natural resources from government lands, including national forests and wilderness areas.
And, at the bottom line, Congress needs to pass a controversial national energy bill proposed by the Bush administration.
That was the message delivered by a panel of government officials and energy industry leaders Thursday at the annual Summit of the West conference sponsored by the Western Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Jim Glotfelty of the U.S. Department of Energy tried to assuage audience members' fears that the Bush administration may put the National Energy Bill on the back burner now that the president's popularity is on the rise.
[...]
He [C. Michael Smith, the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for fossil fuel energy] acknowledged there are environmental challenges to developing some of the reserves and the pipelines needed to bring the gas to market.
Passage of a national energy bill would remove some of those challenges by making it easier to access government land.
Conn Lass, chief of staff to Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Clark, said the agency would cooperate by opening up more formerly protected land to drilling and mineral exploration.
"We are making efforts to help energy production on public lands in the West," he said. He noted that the agency recently approved the first drilling permits for Otero Mesa in New Mexico, which had been proposed for wilderness status.
Otero Mesa is one of the largest remaining tracts of Chihuahuan Desert grassland and home to many threatened or endangered species. The height of folly is to destroy something permanent to gain something impermanent. The Bureau of Land Management apparently serves as a welfare office for the energy industry, with Congress at the counter cheerfully asking, "How may we help you? How much more of the nation's land would you like?"
The report above shows one the few examples of me agreeing with the right wing that the word "liberal" equals "treasonous evil incarnate": "...more liberal policies about extracting natural resources from government lands, including national forests and wilderness areas."
I heard a report on this story on NPR this morning but couldn't find a transcript.
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Thursday, January 08, 2004
499 dead.
⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ Each circle represents a US soldier killed in Iraq — and behind each soldier an American family in grief, forgotten and unrecognized by its government.
And for what did they die? An administration that was "systematically misrepresenting" the threat:The Bush administration will today [Jan 8] be accused of "systematically misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings.
The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to reignite calls for a commission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims. As Kos puts it, "They just made shit up."
Count of casualties from Cryptome.
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The sad thing is, it's plausible. A prediction from Xymphora:If Rove needs the votes, and the Republicans can't get sufficient paperless computer voting machines in place before the next election, Americans will see a terror attack by 'dirty bomb', probably in one of the cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco or Seattle, at a time, May or June, to set up the Republican National Convention with jingoist nonsense and the message that only Bush is tough enough to protect America, and the clear warning that the country cannot afford to shift horses in its time of crisis. The commandos who will set off the attack are laying the paper trail now to be associated with whatever group the neocons wish to attack next. I guarantee that suitable patsies will be picked up in a few days of the bombing, and the FBI will have bursting files on each of them connecting them with the next country on the neocon wish list (almost certainly one or more of Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba). If Americans hadn't fallen for the obvious lies about September 11, and had demanded a real investigation of what really happened, they could have avoided this next fake terrorist attack, so in a sense it is a deserved attack. The saddest thing is that Americans are already falling for the new terror, and the real fear is starting to build to its Republican crescendo. San Francisco, with its new-economy atheist homosexual leftism threatening the old-economy Christian hetero right wing, seems the most likely target because of its godless dispensability.
That an argument like this should be plausible shows how far we as a formerly great nation have fallen in less than three years — not because of 9-11, but because of all the politically motivated lies and secrecy and theft and carnage that were carried out in its name.
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GOP: "Give your prescription money to your old boss." Another head-slapping Republican recipe for corporate plunder: You retire, and your Bush prescription drug benefit subsidy goes to your old boss (Ellen E. Schultz and Theo Francis, WSJ, sub. req'd.):Some companies with many retired workers are expected to post big earnings gains for 2003 or 2004, thanks to accounting guidelines for subsidies under the federal prescription-drug program.
When Congress approved prescription-drug benefits for Medicare recipients last year, it granted benefits for the 65% of large e |
