"My colleagues say I'm a phenomenal fighter, despite my looks," Marina said. "Women are the sparkle in the army. If women, the flower of life, are present, then the army will be reborn."

Russia crowns Miss Shooting Range (BBC).

Lucky for her Marina's not in the US Air Force, where 54 accusations reveal a culture of rape.

{ 4:32 PM }

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Capozzola. That's One P, Two Z's.

{ 1:27 PM }

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Tomorrow's astroturf today. Here are the two canned letters the GOP is feeding their zombie shills today:

Improving Medicare

After all the empty talk in Washington about fixing important entitlements programs, something refreshing happened this week: the President delivered a remarkably sensible blueprint for fixing Medicare and dramatically improving the quality of health care for all seniors.

Choice is an important element of this proposal. Seniors would be given the same kinds of choices currently available to members of Congress, with traditional Medicare still an option, and they wouldn't be forced into HMOs. Also included is long overdue relief for runaway prescription drug costs, with a new discount card and an additional subsidy for poor seniors.

The partisan bickering in Washington over Medicare has gone on for too long, and it's time for Congress to come through for seniors this year. The President's plan, with its emphasis on giving Medicare the funding it needs and providing better benefits, seems like an excellent starting point.


Shame on you, Marcy Kaptur!

I'm outraged by Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur's comparison of terrorist Osama bin Laden to our Founding Father George Washington.

I agree with Paul Begala when he said, two nights ago on CNN's Crossfire, "Disgraceful. Absolutely disgraceful. You were right to call her on it and I just -- I can't defend it. I never will -- the notion that anybody could compare this murderer to our Founding Fathers is insane," Begala said.

Shame on you, Marcy Kaptur!

Watch for these letters, and their telling phrases (like "remarkably sensible blueprint" [zero hits right now] and "Shame on you, Marcy Kaptur!" [also zero hits]), in Letters to the Editor across the country in the coming weeks.

On your mark, get set, Google!

{ 6:31 PM }

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Feasting at the Cheney trough. The silly uproar over a parody of Lynne Cheney made us want to look a little closer into the family's numerous conflicts of interest and compromises of reality.

First of all, Atrios asks the question why White House legal counsel — paid for by American taxpayers — is being inappropriately called in to head the anti-parody effort on behalf of Dick's wife. "God, we spent 6 months arguing about which phone Al Gore used to call donors," says Atrios.

Meanwhile, back at the Halliburton trough, things are looking rosy (WSJ, subscription required):

The Pentagon said it is tapping a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, to oversee efforts to control oil-well fires, should Saddam Hussein torch Iraq's oil fields in the event of a U.S. attack.

The Pentagon said it intends to use a plan developed by Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., a unit of Houston-based Halliburton, if Mr. Hussein sabotages his fields. The plan also addresses assessing damage to oil facilities, the Pentagon said.

Mr. Cheney served as chief executive of Halliburton until 2000, when he stepped down to become the running mate of President Bush.

The development positions Kellogg Brown & Root as a leading candidate to win the role of top contractor in any petroleum-field rehabilitation effort in Iraq. The job could involve coordinating dozens of smaller specialty contractors that do everything from helping clear mines and build roads to putting out fires and repairing damaged wells.

But Halliburton is also playing its own special role in the War on Terror — for the other side (also WSJ):

Halliburton Co. says an oil-field device that contains radioactive material was stolen in early December from its operations in Nigeria.

Atomic-watchdog officials are concerned that the material -- americium 241 -- could be used to create a so-called dirty bomb, an explosive to scatter radioactive agents in a densely populated area.

[...]

The theft occurred between the towns of Wari and Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta, in the heart of the country's oil-producing region. The well-logging device, which was in a locked storage box that weighs about 200 pounds and is the size of a small car engine block, is used to detect the presence of oil at various depths, said Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall.

Michael Levi, director of the Strategic Security Project for the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington think tank, said these devices typically contain about 10 curies of radioactive americium. If this were combined with a pound of TNT and exploded, an area covering 60 city blocks would be contaminated with a radiation dose in excess of safety guidelines of the Environmental Protection Agency, he said.

Thanks to Halliburton, this will put a whole new spin on Nigerian email scams.

Back to wife Lynne Cheney. Although this gentle flower requires legal princes paid for by American taxpayers to defend her dubious virtue, she's doing okay in the financial department. Since leaving defense giant Lockheed's board of directors in 2001, she's helping to destroy wealth by decimating shareholder value in mutual funds (Forbes):

Politicos and their friends feast at the fund trough. American Express' stock funds were the worst performers among the largest 25 fund families, says Lipper. Yet for 45 of its 47 retail funds, directors still signed off on expense-ratio increases last year. Guarding fund shareholders' interests are Lynne Cheney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Senator Alan Simpson. Each earned $122,000 for fund stewardship last year.

Why, that's almost as much as the $105,000 Dick would have saved on his taxes in dividend income alone!

It all adds up to the same thing: rewarding incompetence is a family value if you're a Cheney Republican.

For further reading: American Prospect, CNN, ABCNews

{ 11:15 AM }

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2.8 million people have lost their jobs under the Bush Jr. administration. (Houston Chronicle):

Nearly 2 million jobs have been lost since hiring peaked in March 2001.

In February alone, 8.5 million people were unemployed, a 2.8 million increase since the fall of 2000. The number of long-term jobless tripled during this period. About 1.9 million people have been jobless for 27 weeks or more, comprising 22 percent of total unemployment.

Businesses have been wary of making long-term hiring and spending commitments as the economy struggled toward recovery. But any improvements in the jobs market now appear to be quashed as the nation inches toward war with Iraq.

It was that same climate of uncertainty that dampened business confidence in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- and which soured job prospects for the unemployed.

So much for the recovery due to the first tax cut, which W wants to worsen with a second tax cut on passive dividend income.

No wonder Home Depot is sold out — the rich are duct-taping billions of dollars to the bodies of their heirs as the estate tax withers. Meanwhile, only working people bear the financial brunt of this insane march to a needless war.

{ 10:10 AM }

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Fighting back. Seeing the Forest offers a number of ways to ease your level of frustration by resisting the right wing. Go!

{ 5:11 PM }

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Terry Lynn Barton goes to jail. The US Forest Service employee got the maximum sentence of 12 years in state prison on Wednesday for starting Colorado's worst wildfire, destroying 138,000 acres and 133 homes (San Francisco Chronicle):

"More of a sentence than she already has will hurt even more," Brandy [daughter, 15] said between sobs. "And for those of you who have lost your houses, I'm so sorry, but if you knew my mom you would never, ever, hate her. You would love her."

I don't hate Terry Lynn Barton. I hate disproportionate sentencing. Because after all those acres and homes were destroyed by someone who should know better, I still can't help but think that she got off relatively light.

{ 2:58 PM }

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The picture the White House doesn't want you to see. There's no sense of humor at all in the White House, as evidenced by this story (Associated Press via FindLaw):

An Internet lampoon of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife is no laughing matter at the White House, which has asked a satirist to remove pictures of her - complete with red clown noses - from his Web site.

But the New York Civil Liberties Union struck back Wednesday on behalf of John A. Wooden, 31, threatening a lawsuit to protect his First Amendment rights to parody the White House and Bush officials on his site, whitehouse.org.

The official White House site is whitehouse.gov.

Cheney counsel David S. Addington warned Wooden's Chickenhead Productions Inc. that Lynne V. Cheney's name and pictures - altered to show her with a red clown's nose and a missing tooth - could not be used to make money without her consent, and asked Wooden to delete the photos and "fictitious biographical statement about her."

Instead, Wooden cautioned Web site visitors that the vice president "wishes you to be aware ... that some/all of the biographic information contained on this PARODY page about Mrs. Cheney may not actually be true."

Here's the deal: We'll remove the picture of his wife from this site on the day Dick Cheney releases the minutes of all six secret energy task force meetings between his and Enron's staff in early 2001.

If the GAO can no longer sue Cheney for his secrets, maybe we can shame the coward. Put Lynne Cheney's parody picture on your blog. And join the ACLU.

UPDATE: More from Reuters/FindLaw here.

{ 1:46 PM }

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Six card monte, or How a company without money helped "elect" a man without scruples. From today's Houston Chronicle:

In his report to the court, [bankruptcy] examiner Neil Batson said that in the [Enron-funded Bush campaign] year 2000, for example, Enron reported net income of $979 million but actually earned only $42 million. And its cash flow was a negative $154 million, instead of the reported $3 billion.

To conceal its poor performance, Enron used special purpose entities to employ six accounting techniques, outlined in voluminous detail by Batson in a 2,000-plus page report.

[...]

The report is likely to bolster the case of shareholders who are suing the company, legal experts said.

It also said that because many of the transactions were improper -- if not illegal -- as much as $5 billion in cash and assets could be recovered by the bankrupt company and, thus, its unsecured creditors.

[...]

The examiner several times specifically states Enron broke Securities and Exchange Commission rules and, in the case of special purpose vehicle and prepay transactions, materially misrepresented its financial condition.

"I think the fact that he used the word 'materially' is important. It expresses his belief that there is a substantive violation of criminal law," said Jacob Frenkel , a former federal prosecutor and SEC lawyer in Washington, D.C.

Frenkel also said he reads Batson's statements to be asking, "Why is it taking the feds so long to figure this out?"

Perhaps the feds are having difficulty recovering the $5 billion stolen from Enron shareholders, employees and creditors because they are so intently focused on quickly rounding up the purveyors of bongs.

{ 1:22 PM }

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The newest power voting bloc: the uninsured. From Reuters:

Just under 75 million Americans — nearly one of every three people under age 65 — were uninsured for at least part of the last two years, according to a study released Wednesday to announce the kick-off of "Cover the Uninsured Week."

Hello? Democrats? Anybody there? Is this thing working?

{ 5:50 PM }

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"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets."

From Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, page 105. Emphasis added.

Via Pynchonoid.

{ 5:37 PM }

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World War H₂O. Who gets access to the world's fresh water will influence many future conflicts, according to this report in The Economist.

One particular tidbit about the past jumped out at me:

...there have been 37 violent conflicts involving water between nations in the past 50 years, 18 of these involving Israel.

Israel represents about half of all global water-based conflicts. Given the size of the planet surface, that seems like a lot for a country with the tiny footprint of Israel.

In its single-minded march toward Iraq, the current administration is undermining the United Nations at the time we may need it most. Solving the Israel problem might solve a number of smaller, seemingly intractable problems. But that would of course require "the vision thing" — something that escapes the White House inventory whenever a Bush occupies it.

If international markets for water are, as some suggest, a viable solution, is the international market for breathable air far behind?

Sounds like a job for President Gore.

{ 3:50 PM }

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A wild free-for-all media bias smackdown debate has been called for by TomPaine.com, challenging Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter to defend their books, Bias and Slander, which supposedly prove that liberals dominate the news media.

In the left corner is Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?:

Alterman shows that both books rely on unfounded assertions strung together with low invective.

Coulter’s errors "are even more egregious than the insults, and her footnotes are ... a sham," Alterman says. "The sheer weight of these, coupled with their audacity, demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of a journalistic culture that allows her near a microphone, much less a printing press."

Give them a couple of weeks to respond, but bet on a no-show. If no Coulter or Goldberg publicist comes to call, Eric wins by forfeiture.

{ 7:17 PM }

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Suddenly we're getting welcome hits from ScientologyWatch.org, which will be added to the permanent links at the next update.

You guys must be psychic. How did you know we watched an unbelievably bad Tom Cruise film last night?

Vanilla Sky — Skimble says: 3 out of 10. (Roger Ebert was much more generous.)

{ 3:36 PM }

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How conspiracy theories get turbo-charged. The essential ingredient of any conspiracy is secrecy. It doesn't hurt when you combine leading CEOs, the powerhouses of American business media, attorneys general, and the Senate Majority Leader, and swear everyone to silence:

One might expect a lot of news when the nation's top CEOs, the Senate majority leader and the head of the New York Stock Exchange get together.

Not this time.

Except for a three-hour press conference, the recent meeting of the Business Council at the Boca Raton Resort & Club was kept secret. Even reporters who participated in sessions are mum.

The Feb. 19-21 event hosted the likes of conservative columnist George Will, NYSE Chairman Dick Grasso, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and attorney generals from Iowa and Pennsylvania.

Panel discussions focused on business leadership, corporate litigation brought on by states, health care costs and the future of retirement benefits.

But don't click on CNBC or pick up the Wall Street Journal to find out what happened.

Their journalists were there, but they agreed not to report on the event.

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo and the Wall Street Journal's editor for management news, Joann Lublin, were invited to participate in panel discussion before a ballroom full of CEOs.

But the journalists, along with their fellow panelists and attending CEOs, agreed to a code of silence that the powerful and private Business Council requires.

The organization counts the heads of Wal-Mart, General Electric, General Motors, Dell Computer, Sprint, Bank One, Hewlett-Packard and Merck & Co. among its 125 members.

In the 1990s the US stock market and its various bubbles formed the casino economy.

Now we have The Sopranos' economy — honor among thieves. Specifically, conservative thieves.

Now, more than ever, silence is golden.

{ 1:12 PM }

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Underappreciated blog of the day. One of the prevalent themes of Skimble is that power, and the potential for abuse of power, resides in the boring shit: financial information, regulatory matters, scientific data, ownership schemes, economic reports. We ignore these at our collective peril — and one of the best sites for finding new insights into a host of less-exposed topics is bad things.

With a subtitle like "things that piss me off," how can you resist?

{ 10:37 AM }

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Lysistrata Chicago.

{ 5:10 PM }

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Boing Boing supplies us with nearly a full day's worth of important posts about media and spectrum. Start with the linked post and scroll down — much goodness to be had.

{ 1:41 PM }

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Plagiarism as seen from the vantage point of the plagiarized. From The Morning News.

{ 10:32 AM }

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