"It's absolutely essential that ... on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States...."
He's right.
On November 2, make the right choice. Vote for John F. Kerry.
I will no longer be writing between now and Election Day.
God bless America — and God damn George W Bush and Dick Cheney to hell everlasting.
The U.S. Army, in what could be the final twist in a complicated and drawn-out controversy, is laying the groundwork to let Halliburton Co. keep several billion dollars it was paid for work in Iraq that Pentagon auditors say is questionable or unsupported by proper documentation.
The Army has acknowledged that the Houston-based company might never be able to account properly for some of its Iraq work, and has hired a consulting firm to estimate what Halliburton's services "should cost."
[...]
...some disgruntled Pentagon officials describe the effort to broker an outside settlement with KBR as unusual in a contract of this magnitude. The company has taken heavy criticism from inside the Defense Department and from Congress for its accounting practices in Iraq.
KBR so far has billed about $12 billion in Iraq; almost $3 billion of that remains in dispute. Pentagon records show that $650 million in Halliburton billings is deemed "questionable," a term government auditors use when they see strong evidence of overcharges or contracting irregularities. Another $2 billion is considered "unsupported," meaning that KBR remains unable to provide sufficient paperwork.
[...]
Some Defense officials claim that despite a series of similar alerts running into this summer, Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputies applied little pressure on the Army to force KBR to clean up its act. Instead, they say, the problems continued to mount into 2004 as massive bills piled up that lacked sufficient documentation or were branded as questionable by Pentagon auditors.
[...]
To lead the effort to reach a settlement, the Army early this month hired Virginia-based Resource Consulting Inc., which does a wide range of government contract work, mainly for the military, and is heavily staffed with retired military officials. The Army also has assembled a "Special Cost Analysis Team," made up of Army contracting and financial officials, to work alongside the consultants.
Bills still under scrutiny include charges for services rendered as far back as the spring of 2003. Auditors have concluded that of nearly $900 million in outstanding bills for fuel and transportation costs from Kuwait to Iraq, about $250 million is regarded as "questionable."
The biggest area of dispute surrounds the way that KBR and its subcontractors billed for millions of meals, totaling more than $900 million, served to U.S. and coalition troops last year. Auditors have completed reviews for billing at about a quarter of the dining facilities in Iraq and Kuwait and have reported to the Army that KBR overcharged by an average of around 40%. Questionable charges could approach nearly $400 million after a final review of the remaining dining facilities, Defense officials say.
This story and the mammoth deceits behind it dovetail nicely with the Iraq "reparations" slush fund, from which Halliburton will be paid by the UN for "lost corporate assets and profits" from the first Gulf War.
[LAWRENCE] O’DONNELL: [On Scarborough Country] Well, this is a God—this is also a God who gives the gift of freedom. He says that‘s a gift from the almighty, that the Afghan people got this gift from the almighty this year. What was George Bush’s God doing to those people up to now? You see, that’s the problem with this. For very simple-minded religious people, that stuff works. That is a minority of the American population.
[DAILY HOWLER:] Yikes! It’s been years and years since major scribes took pot-shots like that at professed religion. As the debate proceeded, Bob Zelnick sensibly said that he’d judge Bush’s policies, not his faith. But O’Donnell wasn’t finished:
O’DONNELL: The danger of simplification is that God wants him to do what he is doing. God wants people to be free; therefore, I, George Bush, will free them. That‘s a dangerous political implication.
Any privileged connection to supposedly divine truths should be suspect in the reality-based community. And public announcement of the frivolousness of private logic becomes more important every day, as the religious charade increasingly enters discourse between citizens who are forced to question each other's unquestionable beliefs.
I'm voting for John Kerry because I'm a Christian. I know that my second cousin, George Bush, claims that he is the anointed leader of the American people and that God told him to run for office. I believe he may even believe that. I don't.
My Christian faith leads me to a concern for the poor and the marginalized, yet Bush's actions in office have repeatedly cut funding for health care, aid to failing schools, jobs programs, after school programs, Head Start, and many more services that provide real help and hope to those living in poverty. Under the Bush administration, over a million additional people have dropped below the poverty line. 1.2 million more have gone into "deep poverty," which is one-half the $18,810 for a family of four that defines "poverty."
The Bush Administration has decided that it will stand by its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Despite telling members of Congress and the public that the legality and appropriateness of the National Park Service offering a creationist book for sale at Grand Canyon museums and bookstores was “under review at the national level by several offices,” no such review took place, according to materials obtained by PEER under the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, the real agency position was expressed by NPS spokesperson Elaine Sevy as quoted in the Baptist Press News:
“Now that the book has become quite popular, we don’t want to remove it.”
[...]
“Promoting creationism in our national parks is just as wrong as promoting it in our public schools,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, “If the Bush Administration is using public resources for pandering to Christian fundamentalists, it should at least have the decency to tell the truth about it.”
The creationist book is not the only religious controversy at Grand Canyon National Park. One week prior to the approved sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, NPS Deputy Director Donald Murphy ordered that bronze plaques bearing Psalm verses be returned and reinstalled at canyon overlooks. Superintendent Alston had removed the bronze plaques on legal advice from Interior Department solicitors. Murphy also wrote a letter of apology to the plaques’ sponsors, the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary. PEER has collected other instances of what it calls the Bush Administration’s “Faith-Based Parks” agenda.
As a form of delusional but protected speech, I have less problem with the sale of the book in the store (assuming accounts of the actual geologic record are also for sale) than I do with the plaques defacing the canyon overlooks, an aesthetic/environmental defamation that removes options rather than provides new ones. The schools are another matter altogether.
Lay wanted to be tried last month. Prosecutors have asked Lake to set the Enron trial for March 2005. And Skilling and Causey have requested a March 2006 trial.
Court watchers expect the judge may split the difference and schedule the three-defendant case for the summer or fall of 2005.
"Lay wanted to be tried last month." Yeah, right before the election. Sure. What a transparent piece of theater.
Isn't it obvious that Enron's political terrorists would never be tried during the reign of the administration they helped install, the same administration that let them write US energy policy in the secrecy of Dick Cheney's office in March 2001?
The Selective Service has been updating its contingency plans for a draft of doctors, nurses and other health care workers in case of a national emergency that overwhelms the military's medical corps.
In a confidential report this summer, a contractor hired by the agency described how such a draft might work, how to secure compliance and how to mold public opinion and communicate with health care professionals, whose lives could be disrupted.
On the one hand, the report said, the Selective Service System should establish contacts in advance with medical societies, hospitals, schools of medicine and nursing, managed care organizations, rural health care providers and the editors of medical journals and trade publications.
On the other hand, it said, such contacts must be limited, low key and discreet because "overtures from Selective Service to the medical community will be seen as precursors to a draft," and that could alarm the public.
[...]
Under the plan, [Richard S. Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System] said, about 3.4 million male and female health care workers ages 18 to 44 would be expected to register with the Selective Service. From this pool, he said, the agency could select tens of thousands of health care professionals practicing in 62 health care specialties.
"The Selective Service System plans on delivering about 36,000 health care specialists to the Defense Department if and when a special skills draft were activated," Mr. Flahavan said.
The contractor hired by Selective Service, Widmeyer Communications, said that local government operations would be affected by a call-up of emergency medical technicians, so it advised the Selective Service to contact groups like the United States Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties.
Doctors and nurses would be eligible for deferments if they could show that they were providing essential health care services to civilians in their communities.
But the contractor said: "There is no getting around the fact that a medical draft would disrupt lives. Many familial, business and community responsibilities will be impacted."
Moreover, Widmeyer said, "if medical professionals are singled out and other professionals are not called, many will find the process unfair," and health care workers will ask, "Why us?"
If Kerry can so dramatically change how people perceive him in just 90 minutes on television — without benefit of any real knockout punches by him or serious blunders by Bush, without a genuine, confrontational debate format — it suggests to me that the media hadn't fulfilled their responsibility to tell voters what Kerry is really like, what he stands for, what he would do, who he is.
In other words, Kerry should have been leading by a wide margin all along.
Media failure and voter suppression — the only things in Kerry's way.
Unless that October Surprise Red Alert rumor is true.
In addition to the usual political ranting, there is also this incisive observation from a self-described energy economist
Read their 2003 10K - the publicly held Class A shares have about 10% of the votes - the class B shares held by the Smith family the other 90%.
The 10K spells it out for you - they may make decisions that are in their interest that will disadvantage other equity holders - why is ANYONE long in this POS?
Any investor in SBGI is fooling themselves that they own anything but the table scraps. Ten percent of the vote for shareholders is a farce.
But voter suppression is indeed the GOP's theme du jour.
Since Saddam was toppled in April, Iraq has paid out $1.8bn in reparations to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi tribunal that assesses claims and disburses awards. Of those payments, $37m have gone to Britain and $32.8m have gone to the United States. That's right: in the past 18 months, Iraq's occupiers have collected $69.8m in reparation payments from the desperate people they have been occupying. But it gets worse: the vast majority of those payments, 78%, have gone to multinational corporations, according to statistics on the UNCC website.
Away from media scrutiny, this has been going on for years. Of course there are many legitimate claims for losses that have come before the UNCC: payments have gone to Kuwaitis who have lost loved ones, limbs, and property to Saddam's forces. But much larger awards have gone to corporations: of the total amount the UNCC has awarded in Gulf war reparations, $21.5bn has gone to the oil industry alone. Jean-Claude Aimé, the UN diplomat who headed the UNCC until December 2000, publicly questioned the practice. "This is the first time as far as I know that the UN is engaged in retrieving lost corporate assets and profits," he told the Wall Street Journal in 1997, and then mused: "I often wonder at the correctness of that."
But the UNCC's corporate handouts only accelerated. Here is a small sample of who has been getting "reparation" awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18m), Bechtel ($7m), Mobil ($2.3m), Shell ($1.6m), Nestlé ($2.6m), Pepsi ($3.8m), Philip Morris ($1.3m), Sheraton ($11m), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam's forces damaged their property in Kuwait - only that they "lost profits" or, in the case of American Express, experienced a "decline in business" because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. One of the biggest winners has been Texaco, which was awarded $505m in 1999. According to a UNCC spokesperson, only 12% of that reparation award has been paid, which means hundreds of millions more will have to come out of the coffers of post-Saddam Iraq.
No wonder the Mission Unaccomplished Bush administration is more eager to make nice with the UN again. Once again, the priorities of their so-called "war on terror" become clear. There's money involved.
