Love conquers all, or at least it does in the case of Neil Bush and Maria Andrews. President Bush's beleaguered brother and his girlfriend became engaged in France earlier this week.
Details are sketchy and the betrothed couple are not talking, but Houston friends say Bush popped the question over a romantic dinner in a château in France's Champagne country.
Bush ordered champagne and chocolates (Andrews' favorite) for dessert and used the interlude of sweets, we are told, as the moment to propose. She said, "Yes."
Bush said from Paris that he had other pressing matters on his plate at the moment and that discussing his engagement and marriage plans was "not appropriate."
The romance between the reluctantly high-profile love birds has survived press scrutiny into their personal lives, a nasty post-divorce battle with Bush's ex-wife Sharon Bush, paternity tests to prove that Neil Bush is not the father of Andrews' 2-year-old son, and endless rounds of gossip.
Andrews moved to Paris in late summer with her three children for a long-planned year abroad. She and ex-husband Robert Andrews had agreed that the children could benefit from learning French in Paris.
Bush has been a frequent visitor, spending Thanksgiving in Paris with Andrews and her children.
Even if they can't have an Iraqi reconstruction contract, at least we know France, part of Rumsfeld's "Old Europe," had a real turkey for Thanksgiving.
Let us all join hands and give thanks for Shelby Hodge, society columnist for the Houston Chronicle.
Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-authorized newspaper of the U.S. military, is bucking for a court-martial.
When last we checked in on Stripes, it was reporting on a survey it did of troops in Iraq, finding that half of those questioned described their units' moral as low and their training as insufficient and said they did not plan to reenlist.
With the Pentagon just recovering from that, Stars and Stripes is blowing the whistle on President Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad, saying the cheering soldiers who met him were pre-screened and others showing up for a turkey dinner were turned away.
The newspaper, quoting two officials with the Army's 1st Armored Division in an article last week, reported that "for security reasons, only those preselected got into the facility during Bush's visit. . . . The soldiers who dined while the president visited were selected by their chain of command, and were notified a short time before the visit."
The paper also published a letter to the editor from Sgt. Loren Russell, who wrote of the heroism of his soldiers and then added: "[I]magine their dismay when they walked 15 minutes to the Bob Hope Dining Facility, only to find that they were turned away from their evening meal because they were in the wrong unit. . . . They understand that President Bush ate there and that upgraded security was required. But why were only certain units turned away?"
Russell added that his soldiers "chose to complain amongst themselves and eat MREs, even after the chow hall was reopened for 'usual business' at 9 p.m. As a leader myself, I'd guess that other measures could have been taken to allow for proper security and still let the soldiers have their meal."
And the premise of Racicot's email — that liberals are supported by billionaires and Bush enjoys grassroots support — is exactly backwards. Howard Dean gets the most small contributions over and over — the real mark of grassroots success.
It's only logical that the president who gave three successive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans would receive the most generous contributions from them. This is no example of grassroots support — it's another example of not politically twisted truth but outright lying.
Furthermore, the fact that criticism of Bush comes from one of the world's richest men, a man who would be poised to benefit from Bush's ludicrous tax and fiscal policies, only underscores Soros's credibility.
Small contributors to Bush-Cheney '04 are the most self-defeating people in the entire world, not because they don't embrace a progressive ideology, but because they enrich the rich at their own expense.
...and another thing. Stop ceding the goddamn debate. Who here thinks Howard Dean can beat Bush? Why Ted, you ignorant slut, Fred Flintstone could take Bush with Barney Rubble as his campaign manager. Wesley Clark should stop saying that he needs to be the nominee because someone needs to be able to match Bush at foreign policy. What Clark should say is that Joey Tribiani could match Bush at foreign policy, though he, Clark, has the most experience. Stop acknowledging that Bush is strong on anything. He's a big loser. He's a miserable failure. He's lost 3 million jobs. He got us into a screwed up war. Our soldiers are being killed by terrorists. The Middle East is a mess. Afghanistan is a mess. OBL is alive. Hussein is alive.
And even if they're both dead, by Bush's misguided policies we're encouraging millions of others to fill their shoes.
The Air Force said in a statement that it has asked the Pentagon's inspector general to look into several contract awards, including $278 million for upgrades on E-3 Airborne Warning & Control System aircraft provided to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The contract, publicly awarded in mid-December 2002, was negotiated in October of that year by an Air Force team that included principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management Darleen Druyun.
That October has become a pivotal month in the Pentagon investigation. At that time, Ms. Druyun began discussing employment opportunities with former Boeing chief financial officer Michael Sears, Darleen Druyun: The face only Michael Sears could lovecompany officials said. She didn't recuse herself until Nov. 5 from making Boeing-related decisions. Federal law prohibits government acquisition officials from having such discussions until their oversight role ends.
Ms. Druyun joined Boeing in January 2003. Two weeks ago, she and Mr. Sears were both fired for cause after the company uncovered the employment discussions as well as an attempt to hide them. Boeing has turned over e-mails and other documents related to these findings to the Pentagon inspector general. That agency is already investigating Ms. Druyun over whether she provided Boeing with competition-sensitive information while negotiating a plan to lease Boeing aerial tankers to the Air Force.
The hilarious aspect is that Druyun's Boeing mentor Michael Sears was about to publish one of those "you too can manage your pitiful company as brilliantly as I managed Boeing" self-help management books that are meant to inspire wonder and awe in the middle-management book-buying class that still clings tenaciously to something resembling a sense of right and wrong.
With all the dead bodies, and the absence of gas and electricity, and the looting and the crime, the Americans have made much of the supposedly wonderful job they have done in restoring the Iraqi school system. Leaving aside the fact that the Iraqi school system needed restoring largely because of the American sanctions and the American bombs, not to mention the looting which took place because the Americans failed in their obligations under international law to keep the peace, it should not be surprising that the story told by the Americans about the Iraqi school system is another big lie. Bechtel got $1.03 billion to work on the school system, which is, needless to say, the real point of the exercise. They then subcontracted the work to shoddy Iraqi subcontractors, presumably in order to keep as much of the $1.03 billion as possible, and the subcontractors did lousy work. Bechtel never checked the work or even appeared at the school sites. American soldiers occasionally turn up at the schools to ask perfunctory questions of what they can do to help, but the schools never receive any of the requested help. Khadija Ali Medshwal of the Naguib Pasha Primary School in Baghdad said:
"I hate it when they turn up unannounced. The first time they came here, they went from classroom to classroom with guns dangling over their shoulders, asking the terrified children whom they loved more, Saddam Hussein or George Bush."
And in five or ten or fifteen years, chances are those children will fondly remember the American invasion by wanting to kill us all. Thanks to us, every school in Baghdad is now a school for potential terrorists. From the children's point of view, is there any significant difference between Hussein and Bush?
It might seem unlikely that the Great Lakes state could see water shortages. But in at least three Michigan counties, limited water supplies have led to finger-pointing and lawsuits between families and businesses. Some predict that as demand increases, it's only going to get worse unless the state makes sure the water supply is protected.
"If there are not limits, we're going to see more and more communities run dry," says Cheryl Mendoza of the environmental group Lake Michigan Federation. "It's a different time, there's millions more people and what we do impacts our neighbor."
According to the state Department of Environmental Quality, more than 1.1 million Michigan households use private wells, more than any other state. The amount of groundwater available in each area depends on geology, how it's being used and how fast it's being restored.
[...]
The state is trying to help. Gov. Jennifer Granholm in August signed two new groundwater laws designed to resolve disputes and determine where, and in what quantities, Michigan's groundwater exists.
The first law asks the DEQ and Department of Agriculture to investigate disputes, such as those in Saginaw County, and help negotiate an agreement. One remedy for homeowners could be replacement of their wells.
Under the other law, the state will create a list of major water users and map the state's aquifers, the underground water sources reached by wells. The maps will help officials figure out where groundwater is less plentiful to avoid future water conflicts.
[...]
Environmentalists and others say the state should go further and establish a water-use law that would encourage conservation and restoration. Such a law might require big users to make sure water isn't being removed from an aquifer faster than it's being replenished, and to certify that, by taking the water, they aren't damaging the aquifer or the environment, Mendoza says.
Perhaps part of the problem is the fact that Perrier (i.e., Nestlé) has a permit to remove 200 million gallons per year from Michigan. Perrier brands of spring water sold in the US include: Arrowhead (sold in the West), Calistoga (West), Deer Park (East), Great Bear (Northeast), Oasis (Texas), Poland Springs (in the Northeast), Ozarka (in the South), Zephyrhills (Florida), and its Midwest brand, Ice Mountain. Here's a primer in water privatization in Michigan, courtesy of waterissweet.org. Business Week covered this story in 2002.
How does water end up diverted into the hands of commercial interests? Here's an example ("Out of Sight, Cheney Is Power," by Greg Hitt in WSJ, sub, req'd.):
Late one Friday afternoon about a year ago, Vice President Dick Cheney put a call through to an unsuspecting lawyer at the Department of the Interior. On his mind: water rights in Oregon's Klamath River.
A prominent Oregon Republican had lobbied the vice president to allow more water to be diverted from the river for farmers, and Mr. Cheney was irked that the Interior Department wasn't moving fast enough. Instead of delegating the matter, as might be expected amidst the larger worries of terrorism and Iraq, Mr. Cheney took matters into his own hands. "What are you doing?" he said in a terse voicemail message left for the attorney, recalls a person familiar with the call. "Why are we doing this?"
The water eventually got released. But Mr. Cheney's role in the seemingly small-time drama never came to light, underscoring the way he prefers to do business: far behind the scenes.
That Mr. Cheney would plunge into the issue at all underlines how he has turned the very job of vice president upside down. Normally vice presidents have limited duties and make maximum efforts to publicize them. Mr. Cheney does the opposite. Never in modern times has there been a vice president who has taken on such extensive responsibilities, and never has there been a vice president who so assiduously sought to escape the public eye.
Upside down is the politest possible way to characterize the priorities of this administration. Peace, prosperity, air, water... nothing is safe from their thieving interventions.
None of Cheney’s Oregon interventions have any direct bearing on the Michigan situation so far as I know. But both cases are representative of the overwhelming GOP-led trend to move as many public resources as possible (clean water, Medicare, radio spectrum, the US Treasury) into fewer and fewer private hands (Nestlé, Pfizer, Clear Channel, Halliburton).
Sunday's poll delivered a clear victory to allies of President Vladimir Putin.
But the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said Russia's Government used resources and control of the media to dominate the election.
The White House said Washington shared European concerns at how the United Russia Party achieved its success.
The election was "overwhelmingly distorted" by pro-government bias, the OSCE said.
Huh? Since the sixties, have there been any three years of more consistently pro-government bias in the US media than those following the dimly remembered events of 9-11-01?
Tough luck. Instead of a fanciful frolic in New York harbor, you'll go back to the usual drudgery of Republican fundraising, campaigning against gay marriage, habitual toadying, and the occasional furtive grope interspersed with self-loathing. All courtesy of your political orientation.
(On the other hand, you could become Democrats. Our tent is bigger and more colorful.)
*See The Reagans on CBS Showtime for more information.
Pentagon adviser Richard Perle came under fire on Friday for failing to disclose financial ties to Boeing Co., even while championing its bid for a controversial $20 billion-plus defense contract.
Perle co-wrote a guest column in The Wall Street Journal newspaper this summer praising the plan to lease then buy 100 modified refueling planes, a year after Boeing committed to invest up to $20 million in Trireme Partners, a New York venture capital fund in which Perle is a principal.
[...]
Chicago-based Boeing pledged in the middle of last year to invest up to $20 million over eight to 10 years in Trireme Partners, Richard Perle: "Hurry up and give me $2 million."which invests in defense- and homeland security-related technologies. It is one of 29 such investments in cutting-edge technology funds worldwide totaling $250 million, said Anne Eisele, a Boeing spokeswoman. To date, Boeing has invested $2 million in Trireme, she said.
[...]
Boeing said it had briefed Perle on the tanker deal in his capacity as a resident fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, a private research group. President Bush, at the institute's annual dinner in February, said it was home to "some of the finest minds in our nation ... at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation."
Warmonger Perle threatened a lawsuit over Seymour Hersh's exposé on him in the New Yorker, calling him "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist," as reported in the WaPo.
Why all the suspicion? Lunching with controversial Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi and a Saudi industrialist a couple of months before your invasion of Iraq is about to commence would be one clue.
Now with Perle's ties to Boeing suddenly in the spotlight, another pillar of the Bush administration's infrastructure of corruption and conflict of interest is revealed.
American soldiers, reservists, and taxpayers deserve better than this.
