Weapons of Mass Torture. Never mind Saddam — the Bush administration won't let the inspectors in. "The UN's special investigator on torture has turned down an offer to visit Guantánamo Bay after the US refused to grant the UN's experts unfettered access to the prison."

{ 11:33 AM }

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The needle's eye. In Iraq the local civilians get white phosphorus, while the occupying authorities get kickbacks and real estate in North Carolina. The cesspool of corruption known as the American occupation of Iraq continues to live up to its ever-worsening reputation (WSJ):

An American businessman living overseas paid at least $630,000 in kickbacks to U.S. occupation authority officials to win reconstruction contracts in Iraq, according to a federal affidavit made public Wednesday.

Philip H. Bloom, a U.S. citizen who has lived in Romania for many years, was arrested recently at Newark International Airport in New Jersey. He made a brief appearance Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington and remains in federal custody.

[...]

A government affidavit alleges that Mr. Bloom conspired with officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority and U.S. military to rig bids for contracts in Al-Hillah and Karbala, two cities 50 miles to 60 miles south of Baghdad. In some cases, Mr. Bloom's companies performed no work, Patrick McKenna Jr., an investigator in the IG's office, said in the affidavit.

Mr. Bloom or companies he controls made bank deposits of $353,000 on behalf of at least two CPA officials and bought them real estate in North Carolina as well as vehicles and jewelry worth more than $280,000 in 2004 and 2005, Mr. McKenna said.

[...]

At one point, Mr. Bloom allegedly was paying at least $200,000 a month to CPA officials and others, although the affidavit does not say for how long.

Projects won by Mr. Bloom's companies included a new police academy for Al-Hillah and renovation of the public library in Karbala.

The affidavit did not include the entire value of all contracts awarded to Mr. Bloom's companies but said he received at least $3.5 million between January and June of last year.

Cash, vehicles, and real estate are bad enough, but jewelry? Someone from the Coalition Provisional Authority will have to explain the bling to the families of the 2,175 American military dead.

While we're on the subject of freedom and democracy, it must have been a liberating feeling for a fraudster like Mr. Bloom to operate with such impunity, just as it continues to be for his thieving plutocratic clients in the Bush administration.

But, if the teachings of Jesus have any meaning at all, not for much longer. Mr. Bloom and his CPA camel are working their way through the eye of a needle.

{ 9:28 AM }

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Judy Woodward!

{ 2:58 PM }

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The curiosity deficit. Incurious George and his cast of incompetent fools represent a deeper cultural trend:

Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.

Naumoff began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"

After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."

"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the person teaching the course."

The floodgates were opened and the other UNC professors at the dinner began sharing their own dispiriting stories about the troubling state of curiosity on campus. Their experiences echoed the complaints voiced by many of my book reviewers who teach at some of the nation's best schools.

All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

Exactly. It's not the ignorance but the pride in the ignorance that is so depressing to those of us who still value old-fashioned knickknacks like facts and knowledge.

Incurious George's actions, however, are a strange mixture of the truly ignorant and the willfully deceitful. The lack of normal curiosity, combined with a calculated disregard for the truth, suggests the foundation of a criminal mind. In the old days we would have recognized such ignorant/deceitful behavior as a sign of severe intellectual underdevelopment and described it as juvenile deliquency.

Except in Dubya's case, thanks to being the most powerful person on earth, his incuriosity may kill a lot more than the cat.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

UPDATE: From a comment left by Michael Miller at Informed Dissent at The Sideshow, the amazing tale of Curious GWB.

{ 1:18 PM }

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What the fuck does it take to get a vice president impeached around here? Repeat after me: "It wasn't the blowjob, it's the lying":

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

[...]

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who posed the question about the task force, said he will ask the Justice Department today to investigate. "The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force," Lautenberg said.

Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on the document. She said that the courts have upheld "the constitutional right of the president and vice president to obtain information in confidentiality."

The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.

[...]

The person familiar with the task force's work, who requested anonymity out of concern about retribution, said the document was based on records kept by the Secret Service of people admitted to the White House complex. This person said most meetings were with Andrew Lundquist, the task force's executive director, and Cheney aide Karen Y. Knutson.

As an aside, here's a wrong-headed memo from Haley Barbour during that same blissful period (pre-9/11) when he reminded Dick Cheney that "Clinton-Gore policies meant less energy and more expensive energy. Most Americans thought Bush-Cheney would mean more energy and less expensive energy."

Bzzzt. Wrong! Try again.

{ 9:27 AM }

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The president, his mother, and his three wives. "The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes."

{ 2:48 PM }

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Enhanced for commercial sensitivity. Guess who's paying less taxes? (WSJ):

Oil companies operating in the U.S. typically pay taxes at or above the 35% rate on corporate profits. But for about one in four big oil companies, tax rates have fallen recently, even as profits have soared.

Of the 87 publicly traded oil companies with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion, the effective tax rates of 21 companies fell in the most recent quarter compared with average rates paid over the trailing 12 months, Reuters data show.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC's tax rate fell to 37% in the third quarter from 41%, BP PLC's declined to about 27% from more than 30% and Burlington Resources Inc.'s dropped to about 33% from 37%. The rates were derived by dividing the amount of income tax paid by taxable income.

A Shell spokesman said the company wouldn't discuss why its tax rate changed because the information was "commercially sensitive."

For the corporatist spinners of the Bush Junior era, the phrase "commercially sensitive" is a new euphemism that means "secretly screwing the working taxpayer."

In that way it is a close cousin of Nixon's "limited incursion" (meaning "invasion") or facts that "are at variance with certain of my previous statements" — a euphemism for the fact that he had lied repeatedly.

Neither Bush Senior nor Ronald Reagan is Dubya's political father — his historical legacy will endure as the spawn of Nixon.

{ 10:04 AM }

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