NYT Intel Bombshell

I was going to title this post: "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!" As I purchesed the NYT this morning prior to logging on and checking the front page online..Anyway, the Douglas Jehl piece that E&P referenced here, and we(well me actually) reported here is available online. *sigh*

There goes my coffee allowance for a day ;)

Moving right along, here is the NYT piece. The article is essentially a verbatim review of the information that E&P released yesterday. There is more detail, but the bullet points outlined by E&P are the major, relevant ones.

It'll be interesting to see if this issue is brought up on any of the Sunday 'news shows.' The tie-in to the Democrat's call for a closed session of the Senate makes for the obvious segue.

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Since I already 'spilled the beans' on the NYT's really big story, here's another from the Grey Lady concerning the White House's attempts to distance itself(themselves?) from the Plame outing case.

No spoiler here, just this bit near the end:

He[President Bush] will be away from Washington for much of the rest of the month. After returning from a trip to South America, Mr. Bush will leave for a week in Asia and then will spend Thanksgiving at his ranch in Texas.

When he returns, allies of the White House said, he hopes to regain traction by moving smoothly ahead with Judge Alito's nomination, shifting the focus to the policies he intends to emphasize next year, including reduced government spending and an overhaul of the immigration and border control systems, and making a more effective case for why victory in Iraq is vital.

The whole reduced gov't. spending issue has to viewed from the vantage point of: from what level? Hey, the National Debt. is only a touch over 8 TRILLION DOLLARS. Not to worry, I'm sure that George has a plan that'll not only cut taxes, but pass the debt onto generations yet unborn. And we know how precious the unborn are to the GOP...If that's not irony, then I don't kno...Okay, I forgot where I was going with that ;)

Remember, The Boondocks tonight.

The Boondocks

Premiering on [adult swim] tomorrow night 11 PM Eastern.



Being a huge fan of the strip, I know I'll either really ♥ or loathe the show.

See you there!

NYT To Release 'Smoking Gun' on Cooked Iraqi Pre-War Intel?

According to the ever resourceful folks at Editor and Publisher(E&P), the answer seems to be....Maybe.

Tomorrow, in its print edition, The New York Times starts to answer the question, with reporter Douglas Jehl disclosing the contents of a newly declassified memo apparently passed to him by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

It shows that an al-Qaeda official held by the Americans was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the basis for its claims that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to this Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002.

It declared that it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for al-Qaeda's work with illicit weapons, Jehl reports.

"The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility," Jehl writes. "Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as 'credible' evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

"Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that 'we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."

I'll not rush to judgement - especially given The Times penchant for mis-handling recent events - but I'll have to pop for a copy on the morrow.

If this claim has merit, it could blow the White House's denials regarding pre-war intelligence manipulation right into the hopper.

Stay Tuned!

WH Dispenses 'Alitoganda' - To the GOP!

Fascinating bit of cherry-picking.

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's opinions on abortion, discrimination and other contentious issues are the work of a mainstream jurist, not the ideologue depicted by critics, the White House argues in a voluminous briefing book meant for Republican senators.

Alito's dissent in a 1991 abortion ruling showed "concern for the safety of women," the material says. By approving a requirement for spousal notification, he "reflected the position advanced by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania."

A 1996 dissent in a sex discrimination case in which Alito sided with the employer shows he "simply questioned the wisdom of a 'blanket rule'" on dismissing such complaints before trial, in the White House view.

For an argument that his guy is mainstream, the material presented is pretty thin. There is more at the link, but it looks pretty inconsistent.

If the White House feels that Alito needs shoring up with the GOP, it certainly signals something - or perhaps a series of things.

The fact that Bush is really weak right now is all too clear, and if Alito fails to get confirmed, it'll be a further sign of weakness.

The other thing that may be happening here is that the White House is showing the Republican senators that while this guy is firmly in the conservative camp, he's palatable enough to dish out to the public as a mainstream(whatever the hell that means) jurist.

I don't buy a bit of it. I mean look at this, the White House is trying to point out that Alito's views are nuanced, but what I mostly see are his limitations as a representative of all Americans.

In Whitehousespeak: "Well sure, he voted this way on this case, BUT..." That my gentle reader, is pure spin.

Weird (polling) Science

This really leaves one with an uneasy feeling. The results and a partial abstract of this AP-Ipsos poll are troubling from the first sentence.

The Associated Press-Ipsos poll on public attitudes about President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito, is based on telephone interviews with 1,006 adults from all states except Alaska and Hawaii and areas heavily damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Wilma. Because of hurricane damage, Ipsos did not try to interview respondents in Louisiana, southern Mississippi and central and southern Florida.

The interviews in the rest of the country were conducted Oct. 31-Nov. 2 by Ipsos, an international polling firm.

Results were weighted to represent the population by demographic factors such as age, sex, region, race and income.

No more than one time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than 3 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all Americans were polled.

There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions. Results may not total 100 percent because of rounding.

Well, I guess some folks just plain count(no pun intended) for more than others. Of course it has always been so. Okay, I understand not wanting to spend the money in the states affected by the hurricane season - ya know, busy signals, downed lines and the like. Or, it may be that (dons tin-foil blogging hat) Ipsos felt that the people in Lose-yana and the other places most affected by the hurricane-season-that-won't-end might have a less favorable view of anything with Bush's name attached. I cannot fathom as to why.

But why exclude Alaskans and Hawaiians? Again, I think the short answer is money.

What follows is why quickie polls are inherently flawed. This taken from the above referenced article.

1. As you may know, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring,
 and President Bush has nominated Samuel Alito to replace her. Is your opinion of 
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito favorable, unfavorable, or haven't you heard
 enough about Samuel Alito yet to have an opinion?

_Favorable, 20 percent _ Miers-19, Roberts-25

_Unfavorable, 14 percent _ Miers, 13, Roberts 14

_Haven't heard enough to yet have an opinion, 64 percent _ Miers-67, Roberts-59

_Not sure, 2 percent _ Miers-1, Robert-2

2. Do you think the U.S. Senate should or should not vote to confirm Harriet Miers
 as a Supreme Court justice? Do you feel strongly or not strongly about that?

Total should vote to confirm _ 38 percent _ Miers-41, Roberts-47

_Feel strongly, 22 percent _ Miers-19, Roberts-36

_Do not feel strongly, 16 percent, Miers-22, Roberts-11

Total should not vote to confirm _ 22 percent, Miers-27, Roberts-24

_Feel strongly, 13 percent _ Miers-13, Roberts-16

_Do not feel strongly, 9 percent _ Miers-14, Roberts-8

Not sure, 40 percent _ Miers-32, Roberts-29

Sorry about the formatting. But that is how it is displayed.

Okay, at least people were given a 'haven't heard enough' option. However, this is a far cry from 'don't know enough.'

And I guess we may never know how much the people in our 49th and 50th states feel about the Miers miasma, the Alito (right-wing) annointing, or the Roberts reassurance.

The 'Other Americans' Say NO to FTAA!

This piece comes from CBS Marketwatch a Dow Jones Co. aligned with the 'business community'(code phrase: Bush sycophant)

Note: Access to source article may require registration, or simply a copy and paste into Google(that works, too)

Okay. Without further ado:

Hopes of uniting the hemisphere from Canada to Chile within a common free trade zone were stalled until further notice as the Americas Summit wrapped up Saturday without even a blueprint for advancing the proposal.

President George Bush attended the two-day summit in Mar Del Plata, Argentina hoping to burnish relations between the United States and the region, as well as inject new vigor into the decade-old proposal to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

But the resort area just south of Buenos Aires quickly became a magnet for anti-U.S. demonstrators led by Venezuela's populist leader Hugo Chavez and became the scene of fiery violence as some protestors torched stores and battled with riot police.

Chavez, who has repeatedly accused Bush of wanting to invade his oil-rich nation, triumphantly gathered with local icons, such as famed soccer player Diego Maradona, and declared the deal dead at a peacefully stadium rally that attracted more than 20,000 protestors.

"Every one of us has brought a shovel, because Mar del Plata is going to be the tomb of F.T.A.A.," Mr. Chavez told a crowd carrying banners calling Bush a "fascist," "child-killer" and "genocidal-beast," the New York Times reported.

"F.T.A.A. is dead, and we, the people of the Americans, are the ones who buried it."

Chavez believes Latin American and Caribbean nations should band together and reject U.S. style capitalism, instead adopting more socialist inspired ideals.

Whether or not Chavez is paranoid should certainly be open to reasoned debate, but what is beyond debate is that the US will allow capitalism without democracy, but is not openly fond of democracy without capitalism. Indeed, a close look at US trade policy shows the second option to be intolerable.

Even I don't think that Bush deserves the epithets cast his way. Not ALL of them anyway.

As I noted in an earlier post, I'm not going to address all the negative aspects of neo-liberal trade policies. In fact, I'm not going to address any of them without a proper exegesis. So there!

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For a much fuller view of the FTAA breakdown - other than Chavez is the root of all evil - see News A La Mexicana

WH Staffers To Go To School!

In an effort - one can presume - to purge his administration from any further improper handling of classified information, GW Bush has instructed his staffers to attend ethics classes. Reuters has the goods. A snippet:

White House officials will be required to attend briefings next week on ethics and the handling of classified information after the indictment last week of a senior official in the CIA leak probe, according to a memo released on Saturday.

The White House counsel's office will conduct a series of presentations on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for those aides with security clearances.

"Your attendance at one of these sessions is mandatory," said a memo to White House staff from White House counsel Harriet Miers.

The memo was released in Mar del Plata, where President George W. Bush was attending a 34-nation Summit of the Americas.

The briefings will provide a refresher course on general ethics rules, including "the rules governing the protection of classified information," the memo said.

How quaint. White House staffers, who may or may not be still under the microscope of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigatory team, need a little brushing up on how to properly out a CIA operative. Oops. That's clearly not what I meant.

Anyway, one session, and you get a gold star from the president. How did we ever get to this point?

Sources in the WH have told pure bs that the classes are to be called: Handling Intelligence - If it Ain't Illegal, it's cool with George.

Stuff of Note

Just a few things from the usual suspects.

John Dean sees more in the Libby indictment than most(and let's face it, this guy knows a thing or three about federal cases) It's good.(hint: RBC)

Those fine folks at E&P have the lowdown on Lawrence Wilkerson's(Powell's former chief of staff) latest bombshell..Cheney responsible for prisoner abuse. I though Rummy was the chief player here.

And finally, also via E&P by way of the AP, the Orange Park, FL principal censors(nixes, really) an article about the reality of homosexuality. (spoiler - the student gets the issue almost exactly as scientists describe, and the gendarme of the school freaks)

So, two Cheney revelations(maybe) and a freedom of the press/speech/civil rights issue for your perusal.

If you are looking for a relatively impartial US source of news, Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau is a good bet. On today's front page, there's a good read about 'wrongful incarceration in Iraq,' and the erosive effect that long, wrongful detainment is having on Iraqi's new government. These are Iraqi run facilities, not a US run prison, the abuses of which we're now so used to hearing.

Gotta bail for a while.

Drilling Polar Bears, and Still Screwing the Poor

From the NYT

The budget bill, the most ambitious effort to curb federal spending in eight years, was approved by a vote of 52 to 47. Five Republicans opposed the measure; two Democrats voted for it.

Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said, "This bill is a reflection of the Republican Congress's commitment to pursue a path of fiscal responsibility."

It will, Mr. Gregg said, reduce the deficit and save roughly $35 billion over the next five years.

Democrats said the savings would disappear and the deficit would increase if Republicans carried out their plan to cut taxes by $70 billion later this year.

The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, called the budget "an immoral document" that "harms vulnerable Americans to provide another round of large tax breaks for the elite of this country, special interests and multimillionaires."

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a Congressional committee on Thursday that lawmakers should not extend President Bush's tax cuts if they could not make up for the lost revenue.

Sure. After spending us into an 8 trillion dollar deficit - not in any small part due to a certain unneccessary, unpopular and quite probably illegal war, these 'deficit hawks' are now crowing about their "fiscal responsibility." Give me a break.

For the record, the Senators that 'broke party ranks' are:

The Republican senators who voted against the budget bill were Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike DeWine of Ohio, and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine. The Democrats voting for the bill were Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Gregg's voting record has almost always been in lockstep with Bush's desires..Despite his self described pride as being 'an independent voice' in Washington - he's a foot soldier for Bush. In NH, this is pretty common knowledge.

I think that all Senators' voting record should be front and center in 2006 and 2008.

How did your Senators vote? Roll Call has the goods.

I was going to post something earlier about my feelings regarding neo-liberal trade policies, as the Argentinians would most likely enjoy Bush tarred and feathered or worse, but it's such a vast complex topic, that I need to do some real work before making the case against liberalised trade.

Template Update!

Well, for my one reader that has been following along ;) My new and compliant template is ready for primetime. Expect it to go live by Sunday evening, whilst I test it out in the more obscure browsers.

The only thing that I cannot seem to get to display properly, and I have tried every CCS trick that I know of, is that when viewed in IE, there is ugly whitespace above the subject division. This is due to some bizarre interaction with the new Javscript used to display the Blogger header. *sigh* I'll live with it for now.

Sharp readers will no doubt see that I have added a link(right upper) to my soon to be off-site Lefty Resource Center. It's actually live now, so feel free to click. My plan is to expand the Resource Center with four columns of stuff that Left-of-Center minded individuals might find of interest. I may even use a script-generated page that requires no database that I wrote in PERL a while back for a photographer friend.

That issue will remain fluid as I decide on how I want to update The Center. Since I keep all my HTML files locally, it's sort of a toss-up as to how I'm going perform updates.

If you have any ideas on what I could add - or subtract - please do not hesitate to email me, or respond with a comment.

Another option that I toyed with was having a javascript popup display on this page when the link was opened. Because The Center is something I'd like to grow, I've decided that I'll simply add a bit of code to have the page open in a new broswer window.

Again, any thoughts to the contrary are always appreciated.

EDIT: New template now live!

A Day, Sans Blogging

Well, I did it. I didn't blog at all yesterday.

I do a bit of teaching two nights per week. It's a little intro. to computers thing that is kind of fun to do. If I had to assign a title to last night's class, it might be something along the lines of, 'The Windows Registry: Fragile and a pane in the ass.'

I wouldn't bring this up, but last night, one of my darling students gave me Al Franken's latest, The Truth (with jokes)..in audiobook format no less!

I only casually mentioned during my introduction to this crop of students that my political philosophy lies somewhere to left of Chomsky.

Then I get this wonderful gesture.

I can hardly wait to wake up, caffeinate heavily, and start listening!

Why Did The GOP 'Re-Open the Investigation?'

Perhaps this piece by Murray Waas has the answer. (hat tip to C&L)

The Senate Democratic leadership over the course of the last several days has had discussions among themselves, along with senior congressional staff, about the possibility of pressing the Senate to appoint a special Senate select committee to investigate both the misuse of pre-war intelligence by the Bush administration to make the case to go to war with Iraq, as well as the Plame affair, according to at least three people who have been involved in those discussions.

"There is just a resolve on this issue that is not going to go away," said one person involved in the leadership discussions. One source said that although the discussions are preliminary, they were contemplating such a select committee in the tradition of the Senate Watergate committee, the Church committee-- which investigated abuses of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in the 1970s, or the joint congressional Iran-contra committees: "There is a historical model as to how this might be done."

As always, much more at link.

Surely the GOP either knew about this prior to yesterday's 'demonstration,' or if Waas' account is accurate, they unquestionably must now know.

One must always follow the ball. It's too close to the 2K6 elections to have the WH, and their minions in the Senate - of which one-third will be up for de-selection, erm....re-election, embroiled in controversy. The appointment of a special committee to get to the heart of a metter that the GOP claimed that they would handle, plainly looks bad.

Because of the likely, long nature of the investigation, and the gravity of the issues it would have been addressing, it's a no-brainer that the GOP would prefer to compromise..To which they really didn't agree - rather merely pledge to finish a job that they half-finished in July 2004.

A fun quote from yesterday:

Bill Frist: "They[Democrats] are without convictions"

Terrific quote for a guy under invstigation by the SEC and the Justice Dept.

pure bs Correction!

In the post below titled, "Reid Dumps Alito From News Cycle!," I made a sweeping statement about closed Senate sessions.

Then there is CBS' Bob Fuss' assertion that, "There has not been a closed session in 25 years." Um..Wrong!

On 8, Jan. 1999, the Senate had a closed session to discuss the impeachment process of one William Jefferson Clinton. There were six sessions about the fellated fellow. Of course there have been a few other instances in the last quarter century..But hey, I'm a semi-conductor engineer. My work depends on accuracy ;)

Since my work does indeed depend on accuracy, it is my duty to give you, my gentle readers the whole truth.

CBS News political corresondent Bob Fuss was probably mis-quoted. A more correct statement about closed Senate sessions would read something like, "There has not been a closed session in 25 years, where the other side wasn't consulted beforehand"(publicly, one can only assume, as what goes on - or went on behind closed doors - prior to Reid's remarkable day can never really be known)

You may think that this is a trifling distinction, but in the interest of accurate blogging, it needs to be aired.

Sorry about any mis-conceptions my earlier post may have caused.

G WTF? Bush

"In my administration, we will ask not only what is legal but what is right, not just what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves." - GW Bush Oct. 26, 2000

So, George...Wtf?

Reid Dumps Alito From News Cycle!

Give 'em hell, Harry!
I must say...I know, I'm breaking my self-imposed day off, but this certainly warrants comment.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has, by virtue of forcing a closed-session in the Senate today, has blown Alito from the headlines.

Call it partisan, call it what you will, Reid's questions are something that all Americans should be demanding answers to.(ending sentence with a preposition, eh, I'm tired)

His timing was simply genius.

Volleying the ball back to the Rove-Iraq-war-rationale-Wilson-outing was almost too good to believe.

There are a couple of things noteworthy about the press coverage. Read Bill 'serial cat killer' Frist's foaming ad-hominem attack.

Then there is CBS' Bob Fuss' assertion that, "there has not been a closed session in 25 years." Um..Wrong!

On 8, Jan. 1999, the Senate had a closed session to discuss the impeachment process of one William Jefferson Clinton. There were six sessions about the fellated fellow. Of course there have been a few other instances in the last quarter century..But hey, I'm a semi-conductor engineer. My work depends on accuracy ;)

So, the cover-up of an exra-marital affair gets six closed sessions, while matters of grave national security deserve none? That's the GOP's take.

Wrapping up, the WH got a one-day pass. Brilliant!

No-Blogging Tuesday!

I'm really tired, and hence will not be adding any innuendo, rumor, or facts, to your day today.

Truth is, my mom has the 'Big C'(hepatic lymphoma), and I've been caring for two households. Her prognosis is very good, but I am emotionally and physically exhausted.

Hope to see you tomorrow!

Eyes On The Prize

Enough about Alito on 'change the subject Monday.' Let's get back to the outing of a CIA operative, and the rationale for the Iraq War redux. One Elizabeth de la Vega, a 20 year veteran federal prosecutor(ret.) puts to bed many of the Right's talking points in this magnificient piece.

Go. Read. Learn.

I got the link via a trip to Crooks And Liars..then I followed it to the source.

Alito Oil Soaked?

Business Week is reporting on Judge Alito's holdings..And whaddya know..He's an oil man! Thank Gawd fer that!

The skinny:

Court nominee Alito holdings top $615,000

OCT. 31 12:31 P.M. ET Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has more than $615,000 in assets, including stock in Exxon Mobil Corp. worth more than $100,000, according to his 2004 financial disclosure statement.

Alito received the Exxon-Mobil stock, which could be worth as much as $250,000, as a bequest in May 2004. His disclosure form did not provide the source of the bequest, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for more information.

While the Exxon-Mobil stock was his largest holding in 2004, Alito also owned stock worth $15,000 and $50,000 each in fast-food giant McDonalds and Intel, the computer chip maker; and stock worth less than $15,000 each in drug-maker Bristol Myers Sqibb and Disney.

Glory!

As I noted in the 'It's Alito: It's War!' entry below, this is 'change the subject Monday.' Let's put this one on a burner, but not lose sight of the other issues on the stove.

Victory shall yet be ours!

Kay Daly Is Happy: Be Very Afraid

This should bring shivers to the spine of anyone that has one.

Kay Daly, president of the conservative Coalition for a Fair Judiciary: "The president has made an excellent choice today which reflects his commitment to appoint judges in the mold of (Antonin) Scalia and (Clarence) Thomas. Sam Alito, a 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals judge, has consistently embraced the original intent of the Constitution."

Courtesy NPR.

Run like Hell.

Here's a link to the viper's lair

Well, Bush is still trying to make this country what it once was: An artic wasteland covered with ice.

I know that I can feel the chill already.

It's Alito: It's War!

This guy is a real stinker. He may very well have halitosis, as 'alito' is Italian for 'breath.' That said, let's hope this is Bush's last gasp to get a hard right-wing out-of-touch-with-the-21st-century judge appointed to the SCOTUS.

People For The American Way has a .pdf file regarding Alito here (Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader required) and for those amongst us with short attention spans....Now, where was I? ;) Oh, yeah(see below)

People For The American Way's sister site, Save The Court has a quick synopsis of this reactionary's big votes.

Of course it's change the subject Monday, but this cannot stand. Let's do the left thing, and throw back this throwback ;)

Game on, Bush!

The White House: Then and Now

Or, Karl and Dick told me - along with God - to move the goalposts.

This is the kind of baseball-bat-to-the-head hypocrisy that leaves a non-partisan stunned. An excerpt from Ari Fleischer's WH Press Briefing of 26 Sept. 2001

Q As Commander-In-Chief, what was the President's reaction to television's Bill Maher, in his announcement that members of our Armed Forces who deal with missiles are cowards, while the armed terrorists who killed 6,000 unarmed are not cowards, for which Maher was briefly moved off a Washington television station?

MR. FLEISCHER: I have not discussed it with the President, one. I have --

Q Surely, as a --

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm getting there.

Q Surely as Commander, he was enraged at that, wasn't he?

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm getting there, Les.

Q Okay.

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm aware of the press reports about what he said. I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself. But assuming the press reports are right, it's a terrible thing to say, and it unfortunate. And that's why -- there was an earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party -- they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.

So, Bill Maher, a person known for irreverent commentary makes a statement about 9/11 and is berated by the WH, and most everyone else...That was then.

...This is now. It is now okay to obfuscate, tell all tales, and out CIA agents while working in the freakin' White House with this same president as long as you are not found guilty of a crime. If anything, given the state of war that exists with Iraq, anyone even suspected in the White House of malfeasance should be terminated immediately, and then allowed to clear their name(s).

The only high profile government official to lose their job indirectly due to - 9/11, up until now is - I. Lewis Libby.

Bill Maher lost his job - for essentially doing his job - shortly after making the above referenced statement that the WH has gotten essentially correct.

What Maher actually said was this:

"We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

His show, Politically Incorrect wasn't given that title on a whim.

The White House should not move the goalposts over the outing of CIA operatives on a whim either.

Meanwhile In Iraq..

Tommy Franks, where are you? Apparently, we do indeed do body counts. But the figures released are only those that make Iraqmire seem more urgent to 'Mericans. Here's the bit:

(CNN) -- A recent U.S. military report estimates that nearly 26,000 Iraqis were killed or wounded by insurgent attacks from January 1, 2004, through September 16, 2005.

"Approximately 80 percent of all attacks are directed against coalition forces, but 80 percent of all casualties are suffered by Iraqis," the Pentagon report said.

CNN has the goods. You can see the spin machine now. We must stay the course to keep the Iraqis safe. However, it is noted that the Iraqis were not directly targeted, but in military parlance, 'collateral damage.' How sanitary.

In other Mesopotamian mayhem, it looks like some sectarian violence is aflare as Gunmen Kill Iraq Vice President's Brother, and our sevicepeople continue to die.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Gunmen killed the brother of Iraq's Shiite vice president Sunday and a top trade ministry official escaped assassination in another part of the capital, while the death toll in a major truck bombing the day before rose to 30. A U.S. Marine was fatally injured in another bombing.

Ghalib Abdul-Mahdi, brother of Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, died along with his driver when a vehicle pulled alongside their car on bustling Palestine Street about 7:45 a.m. and gunmen inside opened fire. Ghalib Abdul-Mahdi was en route to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's office, where he served as an adviser, two aides to the vice president said.

Later Sunday, a top official in the Ministry of Trade, Qais Dawood Hasan, was wounded and two of his bodyguards were killed when gunmen ambushed their convoy in the upscale Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour, scene of several high-profile kidnappings and armed attacks on government officials and foreigners. Five other bodyguards and a bystander were injured, police said.

The U.S. command also announced Sunday that a Marine died of injuries suffered the day before in a roadside bombing near Baghdad. At least 2,016 U.S. military members have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

As always, much more at links.

Mission Accomplished!

Bush Gone Mad?

I know the answer to that question seems like a foregone conclusion, but if the latest from Time is any indication, he may just be really cracking. The salient points are here:

[Regarding the second term of a Presidency] Your team gets tired, the ideas stale, and the fumes of power more toxic. It was through those badlands that President George W. Bush trudged last week, and for once he was walking alone. "The problem is that the President doesn't want to make changes," says a White House adviser who is not looking for a West Wing job, "but he's lost some of his confidence in the three people he listens to the most." Those three are his Vice President, Dick Cheney, whose top aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, has been charged with brazenly obstructing the investigation into who leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame; Bush senior adviser Karl Rove, who while not indicted has still emerged as a player in the scandal; and chief of staff Andrew Card, who gets some of the blame for bungling the response to Hurricane Katrina and even more for the botched Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. "All relationships with the President, except for his relationship with Laura, have been damaged recently," the White House adviser says. The closest aide who is undamaged is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—who is off minding the rest of the world—and, of course, Bush himself. "The funny thing is everybody's failing now, in which case perhaps it's time to look at George Bush's relationship with George Bush."

Much more good stuff at link. Hat tip to Buzzflash for putting me onto the trail of the article. Buzzflash has a link to an article about Scooter, and I found my way to this.

The simple thing to bring away from this - if the unnamed WH advisor is to be believed - is that to expect a different outcome without changing the starting conditions is a sign of serious issues with one's mental wiring.

Of course Bush is under stress. But to stick with the same players and expect to turn his second term around is, well, crazy. Loyalty is a serious liability here, not a strength.

Full Disclosure: I wanted to title this entry, "The Madness of King George." But as this a purely speculative post, eh, I did not.

Samsung: Apple's William Tell?

Remember when Samsung electronics sucked? It wasn't too long ago. Now that are the top dog in many core electronics fields. Their famous-among-the-computer-gaming-crowd 'TCCD' DDR DRAM chips are found are found on the best PCB you can buy.

They've had lots of recent announcements, mostly unnoticed by the press, but actively watched by their competitors(and technogeeks, like me). Their announcement today in the Korea Times to start a music download service similar to Apple's iTunes should come as no surprise.

Nor should their desire to build what one can only imagine are iPod like devices with which to store and play the downloaded music.

What Apple acolytes should really be concerned about is that Samsung recently announced industry leading data storage densities.

Put all together, unless they really screw it up, Samsung will be able to undercut the iPod's cost structure - by how much is unknown - and produce the first real contender for portable digital music supremacy that Apple has had since 2001.

Innovation can only take the iPod so far. Samsung makes nearly(if not all) the components that will be incorporated into their version of what a portable music player should be....If you don't think that this is a serious threat, ask any executive at Sony, or Matsushita(Panasonic)

Rapper '50 Cent' to Suffer Markdown

Sorry. Sometimes the copy writes itself ;)

ABC News has the details.

Do I hear a quarter?

NH Audubon Screws Pooch

This is a local issue that I take personally. Normally, I respect all copyright, and never print out a full article without getting permission first. However, in this case, it is likely to get dumped from the paper's website without any way of retrieval. I also donate annually to the NH Audubon Society, and think this a travesty.

Without further ado:

'It wasn't a job to her. It was fun.' Ruth Smith says she worked hard to tell kids about nature
By CHELSEA CONABOY
Monitor staff

Ruth Smith began planning her career as an environmental educator when she was in the fourth grade. That was when Mrs. Phinney, an instructor with Massachusetts Audubon, visited her class and brought a female possum. Smith said she can still remember how warm the possum's belly was when she stuck her fingers in its carrying pouch.

Later, she wondered if she could do Mrs. Phinney's job when she grew up. Until one week ago, Smith, now 42, was Mrs. Phinney for hundreds of children in the Concord area as the educational director for the Audubon Society of New Hampshire.

On Oct. 20, after 18 years on the job, Smith was laid off, along with seven other employees.

Audubon management wants to direct resources to more action-based education and land protection. Many parents and students of Smith's have reacted in anger and sadness, saying the camps won't be the same without her energy, calm discipline and the assurance she offered to parents that their children were learning and safe.

"Ruth holds Audubon together," said Colleen Twomey, 16, of Chichester, who has been an assistant instructor at camp for three years.

Twomey began attending Audubon's camps when she was 10. Being a councilor under Smith helped her realize that she wants to work with kids.
"She knows so much about nature and children, and the combination of the two is incredible," Twomey said. "It wasn't a job to her. It was fun."

Twomey had planned to return as an instructor this summer. Without Smith, she isn't sure she will.

"She was such an important part of it," she said.

A sense of wonder

Smith developed a dedication to both the environment and nonprofit work at a young age. She passed summer days as a kid at an Audubon camp in Massachusetts. Many nights, she sat at the kitchen table with her parents, writing out address labels for fundraising letters for the museum her father directed.

She came to New Hampshire's Audubon through an internship during her junior year at the University of New Hampshire. She quickly found her passion in environmental education.

"I just love the opportunity to show a child something that they've never experienced before," she said.

At camp one day, a preschooler was playing with colored water that was part of a demonstration on rainbows. He started playing with droppers of red and yellow. When he mixed the two together, his eyes got big, Smith said.

He threw his hands up and announced at the top of his lungs, "I made orange!"

To him, it was a "massive discovery," Smith said. She said she has stayed committed to her job because of those opportunities to witness that "magical sense of wonder."

Smith said she worked hard to bring those discoveries to more kids. As camp director, she added a program during the school year called Fledgling Fun for preschoolers and their parents. She also started a teenage leader-in-training program and a trip program for older students. Most recently, Audubon added day camps in Durham at the Mill Pond Center and in Newbury at The Fells.

The second reason she's stayed at Audubon is the people. For the last five years, all the assistant instructors at the Concord camp have been former campers. "I have literally watched children grow up through my programs," she said.

Learning lessons

Smith said she has tried to teach her campers about more than the environment. She's tried to teach them about connectedness, among animals and plants in nature and among people.

Adlai Gordon, 11, of Concord said he learned that lesson well. He started going to the camp in preschool. Adlai said his favorite things about it included the zip line and a skit at the beginning of each session that showed "this is a camp where everybody's nice to you, and you try to give back," he said.

Adlai's father, Joshua Gordon, went through four years of Fledgling Fun between his son and 9-year-old daughter, Nina. He said Smith could engage his children in the lessons, whether they were in a classroom making paper bats or in the field looking at birds' nests.

Gordon said it was difficult to tell his kids that she was no longer at Audubon.

"To them, Audubon is Ruth," he said.

Gordon said he won't be donating to Audubon anymore. "I'm just angry at them," he said. "How can an organization get rid of such an essential component to it?"

Smith said she saw her work with kids as important. But, when Audubon president David Houghton began pushing to spend more time and money educating adults about the urgency of protecting wildlife habitat from the state's rapid development, Smith said she joined the effort.

"I wholeheartedly endorsed that need to do more adult education . . . because I worry about what our children are going to inherit," she said.

Smith is pursuing a master's in environmental education at Antioch College in Ohio and this fall began working on a program to bring smart growth concepts to local planners.

What comes next

When Houghton began talking about cutting some programs, Smith couldn't agree. When she was laid off, she said, Houghton told her the organization couldn't raise enough money to support the education department at the current level.

"I don't think he tried very hard," she said.

Houghton said he isn't thinking about scaling back programming. Instead, he wants to "freshen it,"he said, and add more family and adult programs. The summer camps will continue, he said.

Houghton wouldn't speak specifically about Smith's layoff except to say he has "a great fondness for her."

"I wish her all the success in the world," he said. "She's a terrific person, and she is missed here at Audubon." He added that summer campers won't be disappointed in the changes being made.

Smith said she has been overwhelmed by the support she has received in the last week. Some people call to express sadness and anger, she said. Others call with possible job and volunteer opportunities.

She said she's using this as a chance to re-examine what she wants to do.

"I'm going to be okay," she said. "It's Audubon that I worry about."

Photos hanging at the Silk Farm Audubon Center portray a younger Smith sitting with children in a circle on the grass. An Audubon poster down the hall reads, "Who cares if the kids want to explore the world? We do."

------ End of article

Link to Article

Ruth Smith is a treasure. Her efforts made the NH Audubon Soc. what it is today. She in unlikely to be truly replaced. Both my niece and nephew adored her as they both attended the Society's summer camps.

I have spoken to a some of the Society's largest local donors, and a couple of them are so outraged by this action that they are discontinuing financial support immediately.

My mother knows a bunch more donors than I do, as she used to practically live there during the summer, and she too is hearing the same thing from many of those to which she has spoken.

The Board may want to consider action against Pres. Houghton. It is, as the article correctly states, mainly through his 'initiatives' that a huge clowd has formed over future private donations to the NH Audubon Society - and in a cheap-ass state like NH, without private donors, well, you figure it out.

Of Mailboxes and Polls

First, a personal anecdote(don't worry, it is boring, but I'll be brief)

Sometime around 1 Oct. I received a threatening letter from the USPS. I was told that, lest my mailbox be raised 12"-14" I would suffer the ignominy of not having my mail delivered after 31 Oct. Oh, the horror.

Naturally, I procrastinated, as my mailbox has been at its current height since at least 1986, when I bought the property.

I politely asked my mail carrier why I had to raise it now? I next received a note from the postmaster telling me essentially, to just do it. How thoughtful.

In the interest of uninterrupted mail service I raised my mailbox the required 12" this A.M.

Because I'm in a rural setting, there aren't a great many other mailboxes to go round and measure to see if they're in 'compliance' with this new USPS edict.

There is, however a new housing project with a common mailbox drop point approximately 1/8 mi. from my now compliant box. Each of the 24 mailboxes there is under the new and improved 36" minimum height requirement. I called the delveloper, and he told that he had received no word about any height requirements, and added an expletive or three for effect.

I don't think I'm being singled out, but there does seem to some sort of multiple standard issue here. I know when to pick and choose my battles, and my newly scarred knuckles notwithstanding, I think I'll opt out of this one.

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New Bush Poll Numbers

Bloggers on the reality side of the political equation; that would be those with a left bent, cannot seem to easily come to terms with the fact that with all of Bush's cockups, his approval rating stands at 39% in a recent WaPo-ABC poll, and in typical MSM fashion, neither the abstract of the poll is given, nor the margin of error. *sigh*

Frankly - and without seeing the abstract - I'm surprised that Bush still doesn't have more support.

What I mean by that is simply this, is that you need to provide those polled with the latest information regarding all of the relevant facts about true knowns. Examples of these knowns are the the recent sag in the sale of durable goods, the facts of the Libby indictment, the knowns and unknowns about intelligence data manipulation, and a host of other things to bring the polled individual up to speed on the latest developments. Even people that consider themselves well-informed often miss when I ask them a direct question about a current policy issue, or recent happenings in Congress - truly, it can be anything.

So, the pollster needs to qualify the polled. This is not done in the name of expediency, and one can certainly see why. Some of these matters require an underlying grasp of the concepts involved in order to truly make sensible decisions about them.

Next, people generally want to please. They are apt to tell the pollster what they believe the pollster wants to hear. This is pretty basic human psychology. Couple the above point with the fact that large segments of the populace lack critical thinking skills, and you have a recipe for higher approval ratings on most any issue. Reality is very subjective for all of us. But, it is demonstrably far more objective for some than for others.

Dropping all the analogies, new paradigms, and metaphors brings us to where we really need to be to understand polling behaviors.

It's partly about evolution; that some behaviors have been reinforced for so long that they are now pervasive in the population. Being a pleaser is one of these behaviors selected for transmission - It's not difficult to see why. This fact is not contested.

It's also about a polled individual's grasp of - and ability to grasp - all the relevant facts and process them in a reasonable manner.

And finally, it's about the polling process itself. It is inherently flawed because of the factors mentioned above, and many more as well. But it is, unfortunately, the primary tool used to gauge public opinion on wide ranging sets of data.

Liberals? How Dare You!?!

I was plonking around a bit at the Center for American Progress, and came across this little bit of sage advice that MSNBC management allegedly gave to host Keith Olbermann regarding the political slant of his guests on two whole consecutive nights!

Speaking on October 25 to comedian and talk show host Al Franken, Olbermann said the following:

You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president‘s office here and told, "Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?"

Olbermann added, "Al, can you believe that the country was actually at that point that recently?" Later he would answer his own question, saying, "Thank goodness we have steered out of that time."

Franken was interviewed on September 2, and Garofalo on September 4. Apparently having them both on over three days--a period of time in which Olbermann's show interviewed a total of 9 guests--was grounds for being called on the carpet at MSNBC.

Thanks to FAIR for the media heads-up. You can read the entire article at the referenced link, and the transcript of Olbermann's appearance on Countdown, here.

I urge readers to at least read the FAIR piece, as it deals with MSNBC's apparent liberal phobia. Coincidently(heavy sarcasm), MSNBC does not seem to have ant issues whatever trotting out those in lockstep with Bush policy(I'd say 'conservative,' but the Bush admin. is anything but conservative)

Ahh, yes. That good ol' liberal controlled media strikes again!

Scooter catches Reaganitis

I just pulled this from the wire:

Libby defense: I don't recall
29/10/2005 12:51 - (SA)(that's South African time ed.)

Washington - The lawyer for US vice president Dick Cheney's former top aide is outlining a possible criminal defense that is a time-honoured tradition in Washington scandals: A busy official immersed in important duties cannot reasonably be expected to remember details of long-ago conversations.

Friday's indictment of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby involves allegations that as Cheney's chief of staff he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury.

Libby, who resigned immediately, was operating amid "the hectic rush of issues and events at a busy time for our government," according to a statement released by his attorney, Joseph Tate.

"We are quite distressed the special counsel (Patrick Fitzgerald) has not sought to pursue alleged inconsistencies in Mr Libby's recollection and those of others and to charge such inconsistencies as false statements," Tate continued.

If this report is to be believed, Scooter is going to blame his erroneous statements to FBI agents, the Grand Jury, and (?) on his failing memory - The Reagan defense in Iran-Contra.

Unfortunately, in this time of email, and other means to track a persons communications, this is unlikely to fly. Unless you think that Scooter didn't receive some coaching on these matters, AND was so incompetent that he was unable to figure this out for himself. Oh well, I guess this is the only plausible defense open to him at this juncture. The alternative would seem to be to 'drop a dime' on his boss, one Richard B. Cheney. I think Scooter would do the entire thirty years before telling the whole truth about this sordid affair. That is, if his memory can jarred into functioning again ;)

Another odd phrasing, if reported correctly is this:

"We are quite distressed the special counsel (Patrick Fitzgerald) has not sought to pursue alleged inconsistencies in Mr Libby's recollection and those of others and to charge such inconsistencies as false statements," Tate continued

Pardon me, but isn't Fitzgerald's case regarding Libby - as far as we know from the indictments - based on these mysterious 'inconsistencies.' The curious part of this statement is that as of yet Fitzgerald has chosen not to "Pursue alleged inconsistencies in Mr Libby's recollection and those of others and to charge such inconsistencies as false statements."

The obvious, yet unstated signal here is that Tate knows that others mis-lead the Grand Jury with 'inconsistencies.' Here at pure bs, we just call 'em lies.

By the way, I got the source material from this source.

I got the above redundant sentence phrasing from the pure bs affiliate Redundancy Help ;)

So, Reaganitis from another former Reaganite. Mr. Libby served in Reagan's State Department from 1981 to 1985. Hey, it worked for Ronnie, why not Scooter, too?

Total Recall

It seems that Governor Ahnuld is suffering from flashbacks. In a interview with the AP on Thusday(10-27-05) the Governator said this regarding Cali-Forn-I-Ay's democrats having a less than sanguine response to his 'government reforms.'

"I want to move things forward and ... they want to destroy me. It's a self-serving government that's all about them rather than serving the people, and it's wrong."

I think Arnold was having a stress related reaction causing him to paraphrase from his role in 1990's Total Recall, where as Douglas Quaid, the Austrian oak uttered:

"Get your story straight. That idiot over there, Richter, has been trying to kill me ever since I went to Rekall.

The Governor's quote comes from the AP..Here's a link, the film quote is from memory, and the issues that the Cali. Dems. are having issue with are quickly spelled out in this brief Reuters article.

With his re-election(?) coming up soon, this is likely to be a referendum about not only these policy moves, but also his chances in the upcoming election.

As Ahnuld might say: "I'll be bach...Unless I lose, den I guess I wone be bach. Zee you. I gotta go fill da Hummer."

GWB Today

We take a page - okay a phrase - from Bob Somerby's excellent Daily Howler and, "Try to believe he said it."

"Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision." - GW Bush

Apparently, Neither Dick nor Karl have briefed George on the concept of irony. Or more likely, they have, and it somehow escaped that porous sponge atop his shoulders(sorry for the overly snarky remark)...Okay, I'm not really sorry.

The man definitely has a penchant for turning a phrase ;)

Courtesy of AFP, a photo of the great man at said today's speech regarding the warren terrah:


BTW, this was taken pre-Scooter indictment release.

All You Need to Know About CIA Leak Case

Scooter is charged with 5 indictments

Everything else you hear is so fluid that it isn't worth your energy to pay it much heed. Yes, I know that the most common meme is that Rove may be in really deep, but until there are additional indictments handed down, this is as good as it gets.

I just watched Fitzgerald on TV. He's a pro. If there are bigger fish to be caught, he'll do his job. From all appearances he's a real stand-up lad.

From Arlene To Beta

I know that the official climatological view is the warming trend in sea water surface temperature is only calculated to produce stronger tropical stroms, rather than more frequent storms, but now that tropical storm 'Beta' is assaulting the south western Carribean one can't help but wonder if global climate change will not in fact spawn more storms as well.

(gawd, that was a run-on sentence ;))

Here's the rundown of the busiest named tropical storm season in the history of the western Atlantic by name:

• 01. Arlene


• 02. Bret


• 03. Cindy


• 04. Dennis


• 05. Emily


• 06. Franklin


• 07. Gert


• 08. Harvey


• 09. Irene


• 10. Jose


• 11. Katrina


• 12. Lee


• 13. Maria


• 14. Nate


• 15. Ophelia


• 16. Philippe


• 17. Rita


• 18. Stan


• 19. Tammy


• 20. Vince


• 21. Wilma


• 22. Alpha


• 23. Beta

It's a good thing that I have a long history about being wrong about most things. Likely this is an anomaly(just don't tell that to anyone affected by any of these storms)

Indictment Anxiety Relief!

If you're like me - and if your are, your parents are quite likely openly sobbing even as I type - then you may need a break from the mis-reports and just plain sloppy, baseless opinions being bandied about by the MSM, bloggers, and well, pretty much everyone with any manner of interest in what only Fitzgerald and very few others know.

Take a vacation.

If you've been following this for a time, you've earned it(not like the last one my employer bestowed upon me :))

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go over to Media Matters and poke around a bit.

There is a lot more going on than what I loathe to call 'Plamegate.' The reason that I am so very hesitant to use that term is that Watergate was essentially a cover-up of a burglary, whilst this latest White House criminal enterprise concerns the cover-up of the outing of a US intelligence person - in a time of war no less. AND, no one can say with any degree of certainty just how deep this rabbit-hole goes.

The difference in real harm done to the country differs by orders of magnitude - and that is from what we already know with a very high degree of probability.

So.....Go on over, and read most anything - or most everything. You'll emerge a truly more informed person, and with a little luck, just maybe your parents will be able to put down the box of tissues for a moment ;)

Template Watch!

Well, things are progressing at a snail's pace regarding the development of an it-works-with-the-new-Pyra/Blogger/Google-template with all browsers. I can alter the color to fix it in IE,(an ugly non-fix) but with my browser of choice -Firefox - the latest post has a huge area of whitespace under it. I am not a CSS guru, but I have done some tableless design, and usually can figure this stuff out.

I guess I'll burn the midnight oil over the weekend unless I get some revelation as to how to get this to display properly.

Updte: I just had a breakthrough of sorts. I now know what I need to do. I need to decouple(release the parent-child relationship) of two elements. That should put things right.

Those Wacky Iraqis

The CS Monitor is reporting that the Sunnis are putting together an anti-American coalition to give them some additional clout in Iraq's new parliament.

This vigorous new effort to participate is a complete reversal from the Sunni position last year that voters should boycott polls to select the transitional national assembly. But if the coalition has decided to join in a process it once rejected, it is also beginning to articulate a Sunni political agenda that is Islamist, vehemently anti-American, opposed to foreign troops, and discreetly pro-insurgency.

Many of the old Sunni leaders are gone, entangled in the insurgency, or in jail. These new leaders are hoping that they can begin to reverse a political posture that was hobbled in part by the January boycott.

"We will insist on participating in the next election by the help of almighty God," says Adnan Dulaimi, head of a group called Ahl Iraq, who has a reputation for religious devotion and toughness that elicits respect in some and fear in others.

The political platform of this evolving Sunni coalition, named the Iraqi Accord, still lacks focus beyond ensuring Sunnis aren't persecuted by a Shiite government. Nonetheless, the groups in the coalition so far are drawing up a list of candidates and have begun calling for Sunnis to vote in December elections.

Remember the name 'Iraqi Accord.' Whilst this initial step - a fight with words, rather than arms - is vastly preferred, it is almost certainly not the last we'll hear from the war torn country.

I urge my dear readers to take a moment and read the full article. It provides much more color than I have provided here; man on the street interviews and such.

Shorter Sunni issues: "We got dissed."

Fashionably Late

Okay, rather than bore my gentle readers with a long winded post about Intel's dropping of a great many of their server processors, I'll keep it brief.

Intel has stuck to its processor roadmap for far too long. The now quaint notion that the legacy style processor/core logic/front side bus is still a valid opttion for future development has finally been dropped by the Santa Clara chip giant.

They've wisely opted to adopt a strategy much like their small rival AMD has done. It's unclear what Intel will call this technology, but anyone familiar with the architecture of AMD's Opteron processors will immediately recognize this as a variant of HyperTransport.

For anyone that wants to really dig into this, and that probably amounts to a tiny fraction of my readers, I would suggest not reading anything more about the matter, and wait until either Brian Neal or Johan De Gelas at Ace's Hardware cut through the hype, and give you the story straight.

There's a lot of odd speculation by people not in the field at this point. I don't see that as serving anyone particularly well.

Diversity :)

Who'da thunk it?

"If a squirrel and a bunch of puppies can hang harmoniously, why can't we?" - SD McConnell (the headlock is nice touch :))

This is not a photoshop job. I have a full video clip sent by a friend.

On Edit: My niece DEMANDED credit for the caption quote. Sheesh.

Why 2K?

CNN is reporting that the 2000th American 'casualty' has died in Iraq.

Frankly, CNN(Certainly Not News) is by no means the definitive source on this matter, but the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is reporting 1999 confirmed as of 23 Oct. 2005, so it looks like CNN is most likely correct.

The post title wasn't meant to be snarky. I really do want to know why. Any readers here will more than likely have their own opinions - and they may all play a part, but in the final analysis it was all enabled by packs of lies and redirections.

Additional: 2000 American dead is more than we had in the first four years of Vietnam.

On Edit: Confirmed.

Hey, They're Only Iraqi Cops

From Knight-Ridder comes the latest in DOD graft.

WASHINGTON - When the Pentagon went shopping for seven armored cars for senior Iraqi policemen, U.S. officials turned to an Iraqi supplier to provide them some hardened Mercedes-Benzes.
After spending nearly $1 million, here's what they got: six vehicles with bad armor and run-down mechanics. They also were a little more than slightly used: The newest model was a 1996; the oldest, a 1994.

According to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, the seventh auto is missing.

In a report released Monday, the inspector general said the Pentagon couldn't get its money back because it did such a bad job negotiating the no-bid deal.

In June, the Pentagon's Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq bought the seven Mercedes-Benzes for $135,000 each. They were supposed to include high-quality armor that could withstand high-velocity rifle shots.

There's much more at the above link.

Now, one would think that our people in Iraq would at least kick the tires before spending roughly a million dollars for seven, yes only 7 'armored vehicles.'

And some adjutant bean-counter should have maybe asked something like: "Hey, I see six vehicles here. Didn't we pay for seven?"

Somehow, the pollyanna-ish adage; "When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade" doesn't appear to fix this situation. The DOD bought lemons for sure. But these lemons are too bitter a pill. That the 'lemonade' adage doesn't apply here would be the main bullet-point of this paragraph. (I know how lousy that ghastly attempt at phrasing is..moving right along..)

On a more positive note, maybe the DOD will start using the newly designed vehix.com before purchasing any more vehicles. I know that their listings for armored personnel transport is small at present, but I'm told by an insider that they are moving forward with that module ;)

Testing Update!

If you can bear with me until I get my old template to work with the newish, ugly, off-site JS that Blooger/Google has deposited at the head of the page, I'll be blogging in earnest again.


Quick tip: In FireFox, only the top post seems to be effected - I LOATHE white space - and in IE, the layout looks okay, but again, there are things that I need to rectify prior to activley blogging again.


I'm not going to violate the TOS agreement simply to have a 'pretty' blog. I'll figure it out.

For the few of you that have been peeking in, I sincerely appreciate the conituned interest.

Additional: To see what the blog should look like, access this archived page

Update: I'm closing in the desired effect. Using a CSS editor, and removing some inline styles, the page displays like it did in the good old days.

Stay tuned!

TESTING!

Trying to get my template sorted

This new format doesn't like my perfectly usable old template. *sigh*

Today's GOP

Goering's Own Party

Select quote:

"Every person who opens the door -- as long as they're white -- I'll say, 'I'm James Hart. I'm running for Congress. My name will be on the ballot in the Aug. 5 Republican primary. I think white children deserve the same rights as everyone else.'"

This guy is a sick puppy.

Zoinks!

Awfully sorry about the lack of updates this past week.
 
I pulled another marathon week at the old lithography mill. We're doing work for Analog Devices.
 
I think that all I would post has already been said by others far more eloquently than I could ever hope.
 
One new and noteworthy item is that the DNC gave Kerry a far bigger boost in the polls than I would have thought...Actually, I did have that thought :)
 
********************************************
 
The only other item is one of a personal nature. An emailer asked me about my political philosophy.
 
In the interest of full disclosure, here it is:
 
Ideologically, I am an anarchist on the order of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. However, pragmatism trumps ideology in my case. Hence by practice I am somewhere in the liberal/libertarian sphere. This is not the neo-liberalism as evidenced by current trade policies which have done nothing to empower the third world. It can easily be shown that neo-liberal policies have been repressive and in fact have insured that the poor remain so..Or that their situations even worsen.
 
I'll expound on this in the near future.
 
One final note. I was in Boston during the past week, and whilst I noticed a increased police presence, this may be due the fact that I was conditioned to notice their increased presence. The big media tells us what to think about. They tell us what's important to their interests. Security issues are big news events in the post 9-11 world. The media insures that this remains so.
 
Corporate/government media(propaganda?) doesn't always tell us how to think, but they do tell us what to think about. The jump to the manipulation of how we think about issues is easily breached. We are indoctrinated at a young age, and fed a steady diet of half-truths, untruths and other assorted distortions. We are raised to be manipulated.

General Stuff

The Dems Bostonian lovefest begins in earnest today. C-SPAN has the goods. Tonight's scheduled speakers include: Fmr. Pres. Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), Fmr. Pres. Jimmy Carter, and Fmr. Vice Pres. Al Gore.

*************************************

The housing market checked in with a surprisingly strong performance. Wall Street isn't impressed. It is almost a certainty that June's report will be the high-water mark for home sales(in this cycle). Last week's dismal report on building permits is the forward looking indicator..and it's not pretty.

*************************************

Buy Google at IPO? Is Google worth $39.1 Billion?

I won't be amongst the buyers.

*************************************

The newly free Iraqis are displaying oddly autonomous behavior. Don't they know that this is a conditional freedom?

Things are as deadly as ever in Iraq.

*************************************

Moore's film is in uncharted territory - for a documentary. $103.5 million and counting.

*************************************

Poll de jour

In a show of just how undemocratic the electoral process truly is, USA Today has polled 'battleground states.' You know, the few states that get all the money and attention lavished upon them because these states could go to either candidate.

For what it's worth, Kerry is polling better than Gore did in 2000 in the polled states, except for Florida.

The GOP and Science

It is stupefying that some members of the GOP think that there is a magical place where scientific research and politics meet and flourish.
 
From BioMed Central:

WASHINGTON, DC—Members of a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel yesterday (July 21) challenged senior Bush administration officials over the propriety of asking the political affiliations and policy positions of scientists being considered for federal government advisory committees.

"Is it inappropriate to ask their party affiliation?" John E. Porter, NAS committee chairman, questioned government witnesses yesterday. "There is no specific prohibition against asking it," replied Robert Flaak, senior policy adviser in the General Service Administration, which oversees laws regarding federal advisory committees. "I see no reason why that would be important. [But] there are cases, in a policy-related committee advising the president, where perhaps it could be of interest."

Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, and Standards, told the NAS panel that political viewpoint questions are indeed appropriate because scientific advisory committees represent "the nexus between politics and science."

"Scientists should not consider themselves to be a privileged class that is somehow above politics," said Ehlers, who is also a research physicist. "Scientists must be in touch, even in tune, with the political realities around them. Only by understanding the political process can scientists fully integrate science into decision-making."

But Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee who has issued his own allegations of Bush administration interference with government science, disagreed. "When it comes to scientific advisory committees, I don't think that the politics of the president or the administration should play any role in the selection. It ought to be solely on the basis of the competence of the scientists."

The NAS Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy is seeking ways to encourage greater participation by scientists in government. Yesterday's meeting assumed heavy political overtones, coming amid continuing complaints by research and public interest groups that the Bush administration is politicizing science and science policy. The committee plans to release its recommendations shortly after the November elections.

The Union of Concerned Scientists earlier this month issued a report claiming "new evidence that the Bush administration continues to suppress and distort scientific knowledge and undermine scientific advisory panels." The report cited several instances in which candidates for National Institutes of Health (NIH) councils said they had been asked during interviews if they had voted for President Bush and whether they supported his policies.

Waxman is correct. The GOP has one engineer in the House. There are a couple of physicians, and that's all for those trained in 'hard science.'

The only "nexus between politics and science" should be whether to fund research project A or B. The same rules regarding scientists' voting patterns, and or party affiliations should be applied as religion is in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution wherein it states:

...The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

If you're from Michigan, and in Ehlers' district..send him home for the holidays. I think it's a good message to send :)
 
This is an issue that touches all of us. From real, unfettered research on climate change to stem cell work, there is arguably no more an important long term issue confronting us.

Lack of Updates

Sorry about the recent lack of updates. It is not that I have not read much to comment about, but a combination of home improvements(repairs?) and an awful case of some influenza-ish physical malady have left me without time and energy to post much.
 
I'll make an attempt to update tomorrow.

Housing - Down and Out?

I've held the view that this so-called economic recovery has been a lot weaker than the usual suspects have proclaimed.
 
(a quick search using the form in the LH column will give you a few dozen mentions)
 
This morning the Census Bureau released it's June 2004 numbers concerning new housing activity.
 
It's not pretty.
 
I'll give you the highlights as I see them.

• Construction of new homes in the U. S. slowed in June, falling 8.5 percent from May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.802 million.

 

• Starts of new single-family homes declined 9.5 percent in June to 1.489 million seasonally, the lowest level since May 2003.

 

• Building permits, a forward looking indicator, for single-family houses slid 6.2 percent to 1.51 million.

 

• Overall building permits tumbled 8.2 percent to 1.924 million units. It's the sharpest decline in permits in 10 years.

 

• Over the past five months, housing starts have averaged 1.926 million, down from last month's 1.952 million.

The number of homes already in the process of being built remains at high levels, but, and this is a big butt, building permits crashed.
 
As the housing market and consumer spending were the two legs holding this fragile economy together, if these housing start figures prove to be more than an aberration, then this could prove very damaging to the so-called economic recovery.
 
"The recent weak patch of economic news for June, on consumer spending, employment and industrial production, has not dented most economists' view of an economy reaching cruising speed". So reads a snippet of this Reuters' article detailing some poll numbers of economists' expectations for the balance of this year and next.
 
Me, I'm not an economist, but I do watch broad indicators of economic activity. I'd say that the glass is half-full, and someone's treating themself to a quenching drink.
 
The $64,000 question is of course, who is correct? Or are we all wrong?
 
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the University of Michigan's Consumer Confidence Index rose slightly for July. Consumers are slightly more optimistic about the near future than in June, but will they continue to spend? Do they have any more credit with which to continue to spend?
 
Wages have lost money to inflation, and personal debt is at or near all-time record levels. Energy and food costs are way up, and this of course erodes consumers abilities to purchase hard goods - durables.
 
So, I'm less sanguine than the surveyed economists. This is not news. Time will tell if any of us are reading the tea leaves accurately. I use the price of copper as a measure of economic activity. While copper prices remain high, it is off it's peak, and the trend is beginning to turn murky. Copper could go either way at this juncture.
 
************************************
 
Iran? Show me.
 
So, if some the 9-11 hijackers merely passed through Iran on their way to wherever, that's a lot less aid than the U.S. gave all of them. Now that's ugly.

Town Haller Needs History Lesson

At TownHall.com, where "The Conservative Movement Starts Here"(is conservatism a moving experience?), columnist Paul Jacob opines about Washingtonian hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle(which is really just one side).
 
Unfortunately, Mr. Jacob hits an area that I'm pretty well versed in. The writings of Madison are a special source of intrigue for me, and I know some of his writings quite well.
 
Here's what Jacob claims:

Much of the hypocrisy in Washington politics involves partisanship. It appears that ideas don't matter nearly as much as whether there is an R or a D stitched onto the chest of the idea's advocate.

Partisanship is winning out: Politics has become a football game with a blue team and a red team competing for all the prizes of power and money. The goal is to win the game by staying in office and by getting or keeping your team in the majority - so you as a congressman get the bigger and better slice of perks, pork, privileges, and power.

That's much different than the body of citizen representatives our Founders envisioned - men who would act not as part of the factions so feared by Madison, but as an independent board of directors to run government according to the rules, the Constitution, and for the benefit of us all as shareholders.

But our Founders' dreams are not today's reality. This can be seen in the reckless disregard for principle, and in the routine trivialization of ideas. The issues that so animate the citizenry have become mere objects to be used to win the game by the partisan professional politicians populating the nation's capitol.

First of all, the founders' of this country were indeed professional politicians. Or, at the very least, white men that could afford to take the necessary four months off in order to draft the Constitution and Articles of Amendment. This situation applied to all centralized governmental processes wherein those attending needed to physically meet.
 
Does that sound like the common worker of today, or does it more likely reflect the moneyed and privileged?
 
Madison was very class conscious. When he uses the word 'factions' he is using it as means to differentiate between the gentry - of which he was part - and the proletariat. The founders' - very much a class of ruling elites - wanted to control the political and social processes of the new country. Why else would the electoral have been written into the Constitution?
 
Lest you think I am in error, and that Madison meant something else when he used the term 'factions,' I refer you to the following text from Madison's Federalist Paper number 10:

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Now there you have the real Madison. Far from being a democratically minded product of the enlightenment, Madison was, as he wrote above, supremely conscious of class. He was a member of the ruling elite of the eighteenth century. Madison considered he and his class above the rabble, and together, they structured government in a way that would solidify and perpetuate his conceptions. Read the whole document. Ideologically, Madison had more in common with Marx than he does with the fabricated history that we are taught in school.
 
I'll be emailing Mr. Jacob with the entirety of Federalist Paper No. 10
 
He just might learn some real history :)
 
Before anyone asks me what I was doing at TownHall.com, I sometimes go there to see how much I don't fit into the reactionary cheerleader mold. It can be quite invigorating.
 
Besides, it's my birthday!
 
Birthday Update: Sarah McLachlan will not be performing at my birthday party later today. Something about 'doing her hair.' :)

Unsorted Stuff

First of all, I'd like to wish the folks at Blogger/Pyra/Google success with the new WYSIWYG blog editor. I think it sucks, but it should enable people even less qualified than me to publish their spurious opinions via a blog.
 
Now, on to a couple of news items.
 
I see that Allawi is going to get tough on terrorists. Which terrorists? USA Today reported earlier in the week that 2% of people being held in Iraqi jails and prisons were foreigners.
 
Allawi learned his lessons from the MI6 and the CIA very well. He's establishing a "security service" to deal with the "terrorists." One must keep in mind that Allawi was the teller of the infamous "45 minutes" claim.
 
Of course we don't know how much real support Allawi has amongst the Iraqi populace. Time will tell.
 
Relatedly, the unconflicted U.S. government is scolding the Filipino government for pulling troops out to spare a man's life. The U.S. NEVER negotiates with terrorists.
 
See: 1983 Beirut, Lebanon when another faux cowboy in White House, we did much the same...Nevermind, you're supposed to forget about that.
 
The other thing that caught my otherwise sleep deprived attention this morning was that Martha got 5 months in the joint, and another 5 months of "home detention." I'm sure she'll somehow make it through the 5 months confined to her stately Connecticut manor.
 
Now, we have to look at Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay. If Martha gets 10 months for making what - $20K? - Kenny Boy should get an "Arabian Crew Cut" if convicted :) (yes, I just made that up)
 
This WYSIWYG editor is a real step backwards. *sigh*

Success!!

The blog now renders acceptably well in IE at 800 x 600.

I think I'm done messing with the CSS for a while - okay, maybe a tweak here and there - but that's all.

Once I fill the blog up with topical stuff over the next week or so, I'll be engaging in a link swap drive.

I do have one really interesting item for you(at least I found it interesting). Karen Kwiatkowski was interviewed by Philip Dru back in May. You can D/L and listen to the interview by clicking on → this link ←. Neocon strategy explained by someone that was right there listening. There is a lot of material covered. It's almost an hour and a half, and well worth your time. In my humble opinion. It's a 10MB D/L. If you'd rather listen to the interview in streaming audio, here's a dial-up friendly 16k stream.

Die Wirtschaft

Sorry about my use of German for the entry title(The economy) but I'm reading Marx. I'm concurrently reading Keynes so I'm more than a little confused about economic theory at present :)

No worries though, as real world economics are vibrant and many faceted things that seem bent on confounding theories and rendering equations useless..or else we're all being mislead. Nah. That could never happen.

The state of the U.S. economy seems to be wiltering under the summer heat.

The labor market is loosening, producer prices slipped unexpectedly in June, and the housing market - which has been the bulwark of economic strength all throughout the last four years - is cooling as sure as interest rates are rising.

All told, the stimulus from the Bush tax cuts appear only in the rear-view mirror. The various talking heads that were raving about Bush's economic plan were directly benefitting from it.

For those of you using IE at a resolution of 800 x 600, help is on the way. I have a couple of days to reapply the old template and it'll be right as rain.

Back on Thursday

I have been on a data recovery crusade..I lost the working template to pure bs - that is, that template that works in the utterly useless IE browser at 800 x 600.

So, I'm using a linked stylesheet to reconstruct the template...essentially reverse engineering the blog template via a stylesheet.

If I could spend a few uninterrutpted hours on the template, I'd have it done. Unfortunately, Thursday July 15 is the soonest I'll be able to work on it.