A few feet away, I could see police officers and orange-vested security agents holding the crowd back. It wasn't long before everyone realized we were being delayed until Bush had completed his entrance into the stadium.
After only a minute's pause, people started grumbling. Soon, they started yelling at the security detail. A few minutes more and they'd turned their ire on the president himself.
"We want to see the race, not Bush!" shouted someone in the crowd.
"Why didn't that SOB stay in Washington?" screamed Doug Shelby, the loudest of the voices.
[...]
Doug Shelby was denouncing Bush's policies -- and drawing agreement from the crowd. "We're $500 billion in debt and it's only getting worse!" he shouted.
Overhead, Lee Greenwood sang "God Bless the USA." The crowd started chanting obscenities.
After LeAnn Rimes sang the national anthem, the crowd above the grandstands started cheering; those below booed.
Then Bush's motorcade drove by. One middle finger went up in the crowd, then another, and soon they were everywhere.
In America, it's where you sit in the stadium that helps determine your ideology. As fewer and fewer people gain entry into the expensive seats and skyboxes and corporate suites, the Democratic base must grow.
[Henry] Bunting [a former employee for Halliburton in Iraq] displayed a towel that was monogrammed with the logo of a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, saying a company manager insisted on ordering the towels for between $4.50 and $5.50 each, instead of $1.60 for cheaper towels.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said the allegations concerning Halliburton were particularly grave, given that some U.S. soldiers couldn't get life-saving protective vests and body armor due to the prohibitively high cost.
Durbin also said he was troubled by the "millions of wasted dollars spent in the name of defense."
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called on Halliburton to disclose if it has been trading with Iran, in violation of U.S. sanctions.
"This week, my staff uncovered documents from the Department of Commerce revealing a flurry of business activities between Halliburton and the Iranian government when Vice President Cheney ran the company," Lautenberg.
"The documents indicate contacts between an Iranian oil company called Kala Ltd. and a subsidiary of Halliburton, Halliburton Products and Services, which has 'offices' in Dubai but is registered in the Cayman Islands," Lautenberg said.
"Despite the possibility that Halliburton - under Vice President Cheney's watch - was deliberately bypassing U.S. sanctions law to conduct business with the terrorist regime in Tehran, this administration, which purports to be waging a global war on terror, has given Halliburton contracts exceeding $9 billion to rebuild Iraq," Lautenberg said.
The New Jersey Senator said he has requested official Senate hearings to investigate billing abuses in Iraq for the last nine months but has so far received no reply from Republicans.
Surely this is getting uncomfortable even for stoic Cheney. This would be a good Rovian opportunity for a carefully-timed vice presidential heart attack.
Rather than picking the best scientists, the White House instead chooses people who are most likely to agree with their own ideological preferences. As the report puts it, "the current administration has repeatedly allowed political considerations to trump scientific qualifications in the appointment process."
The UCS report, which is endorsed by 20 Nobel prize winners, makes clear that it has no problem with arguments over policy. After all, there are usually plenty of facts and arguments on both sides of any policy question.
But suppressing actual research itself simply because you don't want to believe it is another thing entirely. It's hard to think of anything more corrosive to the scientific process, and the extent to which the Bush administration does this is unprecedented. Nixon didn't do it, Reagan didn't do it, and Bush Sr. and Clinton didn't do it. Only the current administration has done this on a regular and sustained basis.
Kevin has written the post I would have wanted to write, but his is only a hundred times better and with much more evidence systematically presented in his trademark manner.
Jeff Skilling, Enron's former CEO and COO, was likely indicted by the Enron grand jury in a sealed indictment today and is expected to surrender to the FBI in Houston early Thursday.
Sources told the Chronicle that the indictment named 50-year-old Skilling, who now becomes the top Enron executive to be accused of a crime in the trading giants stunning downfall.
Skilling has consistently denied any wrongdoing and testified before Congress rather than invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination, as other executives did.
The foreman of the specially formed Enron grand jury told U.S. Magistrate Judge Frances Stacy at about 4:00 p.m. today that he had one sealed indictment from the panel, which met part of Tuesday and most of Wednesday. Enron Task Force prosecutors Sam Buell, Kathryn Ruemmler and Sean Berkowitz asked that the indictment be sealed and the courtroom be cleared of spectators.
The specially formed Enron grand jury that will consider these charges against Skilling is nearly 2 years old and has been working more frequently as this investigation intensifies.
The charges against Skilling by Enron Task Force prosecutors follow the Jan. 21 indictment of ex-Enron Chief Accounting Officer Rick Causey and the Jan. 15 guilty pleas of former company Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and his wife.
Attorneys involved in the Enron criminal cases expect that Fastow, who agreed to serve 10 years in prison for two counts of conspiracy, gave prosecutors information that will add to the case against Skilling.
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration and Citigroup Inc. are proposing a joint $200 million arrangement to finance Iraq's imports, with the bank's revenue from the project guaranteed by Iraq's oil sales.
The plan, led by the federal Overseas Private Investment Corp., has raised some eyebrows inside the administration because it comes just a few months before the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority is to turn over sovereignty to a still-undetermined Iraqi government. It is far from clear whether the trade-finance project would get much done before the scheduled June 30 handover or whether the new Iraqi government would abandon it.
But OPIC officials believe their plan to facilitate letters of credit for Iraqi importers will help the economy recover and modernize. OPIC officials stress the assistance the project would provide to Iraqi private companies and private banks. It is an attempt to "put in the foundations that will achieve economic freedom for the Iraqis," said OPIC President Peter Watson.
The project would work through a series of guarantees for letters of credit, a standard tool used to smooth the flow of trade. Letters of credit guarantee payment to the seller -- say, a German drug company or an American tractor maker -- at the time it delivers the goods. Without such a letter, Iraqi importers -- who are by virtue of the country's situation considered huge credit risks -- would have to put up the cash beforehand and trust that the goods would eventually arrive.
In the case of the OPIC/Citigroup project, a Baghdad bank might issue a letter of credit for a local company's imports. An international bank would confirm the letter, assuming the risk of nonpayment. A separate institution, set up by Citigroup, would then guarantee that the international bank gets paid. Citigroup and OPIC would guarantee that the separate institution -- still nameless -- gets paid. Finally, the coalition would pledge to use Iraqi oil revenue to cover any Citigroup and OPIC losses.
Is it normal to accept letters of credit from invaded nations without governments? The arrangement sure stinks at first sniff.
At least we Americans can sleep better at night knowing Citigroup's revenues are guaranteed by the fruits of our taxes, although the job security, baseline medical coverage, and increasingly privatized retirement savings of our citizens are not.
Q: Did he have to do any community service while he was in the National Guard?
Scott McClellan: Look, Helen, I think the issue here was whether or not the President served in Alabama. Records have documented --
Q: I'm asking you a different question. That's permissible.
Scott McClellan: Can I answer your question? Sure it is. Can I ask you why you're asking it? I'm just -- out of curiosity myself, is that permissible?
Q: Well, I'm interested, of course, in what everybody is interested in. And we have a very --
Scott McClellan: Let me just point out that we've released all the information we have related to this issue, the issue of whether or not he served while in Alabama. Records have documented as false the outrageous --
Q: I asked you whether he had to do any community service while he was in the National Guard.
Scott McClellan: Can I walk through this?
Q: It's a very legitimate question.
Scott McClellan: And I want to back up and walk through this a little bit. Let's talk about the issue that came up, because this issue came up four years ago, it came up four years before that -- or two years before that, it came up four years before that --
Q: Did my question come up four years ago, and was it handled?
Scott McClellan: Helen, if you'll let me finish, I want to back up and talk about this --
Q: Don't dance around, just give us --
Q: It's a straightforward question.
Q: Let's not put too fine a point on it. If I'm not mistaken, you're implying that he had to do community service for criminal action, as a punishment for some crime?
Q: There are rumors around, and I didn't put it in that way. I just --
Q: Could you take that question? I guess apparently that's the question, that he had to take time out to perform community service --
Scott McClellan: That's why I wanted to get to this because --
Q: -- as a sentence for a crime.
Xymphora follows up on this line of questioning with a blunt hypothesis about the evidence for the probable crime of cocaine possession:
Rove is on his game here. By holding back the military records he has made the military records the issue, and has has managed to divert the media from the real issue, which is the community service. If those legal files ever get out, showing that Bush was convicted of a serious drug offence, his political career will be finished. The real reason that Bush went AWOL was that he couldn't afford to take a drug test. The real reason he couldn't afford to take a drug test was that it would have been a condition of his sentencing that he remain clean. If word of the failed drug test had filtered back to the court, he would have gone to jail. His fear of the criminal legal consequences is why he went AWOL, and that's why the community service is the key to understanding what is going on here. By concentrating on the military records, the media is walking right into Rove's trap.
So, you see, kids, drugs are bad. They can make you lose your illegitimate residency in the White House even thirty-odd years after you stopped snorting them.
In the crowd: It must have been some dish served up the other night at PlumpJack Cafe in the Marina.
There, gathered in one place, were billionaire Gordon Getty, his son Billy Getty, downtown tycoon and Democratic rainmaker Walter Shorenstein, mega- attorney and Democratic powerhouse Joe Cotchett and, the guest of honor -- Sharon Bush, soon-to-be ex-wife of Neil Bush, President's Bush's politically radioactive brother.
In case you've missed it, Sharon and hubby Neil have been providing more than their share of tabloid headlines lately with their nasty divorce proceedings.
The juicy disclosures go beyond just adulterous sex and a child possibly born out of wedlock. There's the more sensitive question of whether Neil used his White House ties to land a deal that could be worth millions, consulting for a computer chip company managed in part by the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
As for why Sharon Bush was sharing a table with this Democratic A-team, nobody is talking for the record. But a spy says Cotchett has been advising her on a book deal that could come on the heels of an upcoming piece about her and the "Bush family values'' in Vanity Fair.
Sharon's book could be much more explosive than David Brock's or Ron Suskind/Paul O'Neill's.
Here's the back story on the "child possibly born out of wedlock," and other Neilsie shenanigans.
