When I read it all in one sentence like that is makes me sick

Why have we not risen up in arms? We deserve this.




ITMFA

It bothers me that a lot of people don't understand how complicated ecology is

It seems we've messed something up and we don't really even know how. Honeybees. Without bees we're in a shitload of trouble.

Where the pallet loads of cash have gone

I was hearing about all this money a couple of years ago. CIA guys carrying around tupperware tubs full of cash. And it should come as no surprise that it's finding its way to Sunnis. After all, the Bushes's business partners are Sunnis -- y'know, the Saudi royal family and that other family, oh, what is their name? Oh! Yeah! The bin Ladens.

Treason is a pretty nasty thing to charge the president with.

I hearby charge President George Walker Bush with treason.




ITMFA

Generals and admirals to resign if ordered to attack Iran

That's not a very American military kind of thing to do. It happens more often in parliamentary-style democracies; they sorta have a culture of resigning on principle.

Hmm. This is an interesting test of civilian control of the military, don't you think?

Sometimes we act like we don't know that the Russians are xenophobic and paranoid

I mean, we build anti-missile bases on their front door step. Sheesh.

He told a sweet old man to go fuck himself on the Senate floor

Do you think he's going to hesitate to accuse Pelosi of treason? Whatever happened to the idea that domestic American politics doesn't go overseas?

That didn't take long

Barak and Hillary and John (and Al) have already hosed up the money and promises of money. Let's all wave good-bye to Tom (I'm really a Republican anyway) Vilsak.

So Jesus has returned and nobody noticed

Well, maybe some people have noticed. Be sure and follow the links at the bottom of the page; they lead to actual news stories. Of course, I think the numbers of followers they claim this guy has are bogus. They undoubtedly just took his word for it. But, why wouldn't you take Jesus's word for something?

So what makes us different from the chimpanzees?

This is the source for the "chimps using spears" stories that are all over. Be sure and watch the movies. They're down near the end as "supplemental" stuff.

Murder. Rape. Language. Tool-making. Caves as shelters. Can identify self in a mirror. Family bonds that last a life-time. Seems to me that it's time for one and all to accept that human beings are animals and not special ones, even.

Let's impeach Cheney first

Then we can go at Dear and Glorious Leader before he appoints a new veep.

This lays out the case against Cheney pretty effectively.




ITMFA

Again, I wish someone would do a poll and find out how many average Americans even know of the existence of extrasolar planets

Some really fascinating stuff. Again, we don't seem to be living in any science fiction universe I know of. At least I've never read about a ship dipping into a jupiter-class planet to refuel a hydrogen tank and getting shredded by silicon dust.

Everybody should read the Daily Howler every day

http://www.dailyhowler.com/

We've really got difficulty in determining what goes on in our country and in the world when we are lied to (or, at best mis-led) by the media on a daily basis. I'm not suggesting that the media should be "fair" or "balanced" or even "unbiased." What I'm saying is they should keep their opinions to themselves but call a liar a liar when they catch one.

Not gonna happen, but I can still wish.

It's hard to fault this kind of logic

It seems that Iran is willing to stop enriching uranium if the West will. Y'know, Dear and Glorious Leader says

"See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction." —George W. Bush, Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 3, 2003

Who knew?

Did I mention I was shocked?

This is about how we have to think about the eternally dwiindling budget for manned space exploration.

Why the surge?

The little discussed aspect of the rebels' attacks in Iraq is that they have blown the hell out of all the pipelines. The oil is being transported to the refineries by trucks. Very, very inefficient and vulnerable.

So. Let's put a stop to those attacks. Let's impose some law and order. Let's have Operation Imposing Law. O.I.L. They think we are the stupidest creatures on the face of the planet, don't they?



ITMFA

Doc Harris also says...

...

Presented without comment

http://www.obleek.com/iraq/index.html

Tony: But I've got one. Some people are visual learners.




ITMFA

Geology is cool

My pal Doc Daniel Harris says:

A bit of Geology.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2281376.ece

I am shocked -- shocked -- to learn that we pay too much for health care

It seems that the McKinsey Global Institute has figured out that we are getting a terrible, terrible deal on health care. There's a summary of their report here. The summary of the summary is this: we pay doctors and hospitals and pharmaceutecal companies too much. Like I said, I'm shocked.

Written English needs a punctuation mark that is at the opposite end of the excitement spectrum from the exclamation point. If we had one, the last sentence of the preceding paragraph would have ended in it.

It is suggested that we paid too much attention to the lesbian daughter and should have been paying more attention to the straight one

Or at least to her husband.

My pal Greg suggested that I needed to take a look at _Washington Monthly_ via Salon. I did.

Seems Dick Cheney's son-in-law has helped make sure that the chemical industry doesn't have to make itself secure from terrorist attack. 'Cause that would, like, you know, cut into profits and god knows that we can't have that. The threat posed to our security by terrorist is so grave that we must sacrifice our most sacred rights and liberties but, Joshua Crust man, you can't hurt corporate profits for something as unlikely as a terrorist attack!?!!

Oh, I also cribbed by post header from Greg.

Why is it so difficult to get Americans outraged? Surely we aren't so hypnotized by plastic crap and high sugar diets that we will just take whatever sort of assfucking they want to give us, are we? Are we?

Why don't the pundits consider Kucinich a serious candidate?

He's the only one who has said what he would do.


From the Congressional Record, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, February 14, 2007

The War is Binding, the Resolution is Not

As Congress prepares to debate a nonbinding resolution on Iraq, this
Administration is already on its way to the next war, against Iran. We are
losing our democracy to war and massive debt. Our political climate is
poisoned by fear and suspicion, our civil liberties have been undermined.
The American people need Congress to stand up and save our nation.

Some call this resolution a first step toward getting out of Iraq. I would
like to believe that. I would like to believe that this Congress can
respond to the will of the people expressed in the last election. I would
like to believe that my party will lead the way out of Iraq, the same way
we led people to believe last November that we opposed the war.

The American people believed us in November. They expect us to take real
action, not with symbolic, non-binding votes but by fully asserting our
constitutional responsibility to take action to get out of Iraq. Congress
can take America out of Iraq by refusing to provide any more funding for
the war. That is our right. And that is our duty. We have a duty to be a
co-equal branch of government. We have a duty to restrain an
Administration which is conducting an illegal war. We have a duty to hold
to an accounting a President and a Vice President that sent us into a war
based on untruths.

I led the effort against the Iraq war resolution. With unanimous consent I
ask to put into the record an analysis of the President's war resolution
presented to Congress in October of 2002, where it was pointed out that
there was no proof that Iraq posed an imminent threat, no proof that it
had Weapons of Mass Destruction at the ready, no proof it had anything to
do with 911 or Al Queda's role in 911. It is not as if we had no idea.

Despite that fact that 60% of our Democratic Caucus voted against the war,
the resolution passed. The war was based on lies. Now we must tell the
truth, not about escalation but about the occupation. We are illegally
occupying Iraq. We attacked a nation which did not attack us. The only
moral thing to do now is to recognize the wrong which has been done and to
move to right it.

Since some have made it clear that this will continue to fund the war what
in fact does this resolution mean? If we have already told the President
that Congress will give him a supplemental appropriation for the War, what
does this resolution mean?

The war is binding. The resolution is not. This resolution will not end
the war. It will not bring our troops home. It will not even stop the
administration from sending more troops. That is because this resolution
is non binding.

The war is binding. The resolution is not. 3,100 hundred troops are bound
in death. 650,000 innocent Iraqi civilians are bound in death.

The war is binding the resolution is not. The American taxpayers are bound
in debt. This war could cost over $2 trillion dollars according to Nobel
Prize- winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. We are bound to more foreign
debt, borrowing money from China, Korea and Japan to fight a war in
Baghdad. As a result of the massive spending in Iraq, our domestic policy
is bound to oblivion. Money for housing, health care and education is
being cut to pay for the war.

Every time Congress votes to fund the war, it votes to reauthorize the
war. Federal court cases have made it abundantly clear that Congress' real
power is to cut off funds. Money is in the system to bring the troops home.
We should be approaching the White House, not with nonbinding resolutions
but with the resolve that binds the Administration to a new direction: Out
of Iraq. That is exactly what the twelve point plan I have been discussing
with members of congress will accomplish. This plan, crafted with the help
of experts in international peace keeping, specialists with UN experience
and veteran military advisers, creates a peace process which will enable
our troops to come home and stabilize Iraq with international peace
keepers.

The Kucinich Plan:

1 The US announces it will end the occupation, close military bases and
withdraw.

2 The US announces it will use existing funds to bring the troops and the
necessary equipment home.

3 Order a simultaneous return of all US contractors to the US and turnover
all contracting work to the Iraqi government.

4 Convene a regional conference for the purpose of developing a security
and stabilization force for Iraq.

5 Prepare an international security and peacekeeping force to move in,
replacing US troops who then return home.

6 Develop and fund a process of reconciliation.

7 Reconstruction and jobs.

8 Reparations

9 Political sovereignty for Iraq: not privatization of Iraq's oil assets.


10 Stabilize and keep low Iraq's energy and food prices.

11 Economic sovereignty for Iraq, without structural readjustment measures
of IMF and the World Bank.

12 A process of international truth and reconciliation between the United
States and the people of Iraq.

We must take a new direction. The war is binding. The resolution isn't.
This Administration cares little about Congress' opinion in a non-binding
resolution, but they care plenty about what we do. This resolution is
about what congress thinks. What we need to do is cutoff funds for the
war, with the simultaneous implementation of the plan I have presented.
This is the way to peace in Iraq.

Librarians are funny -- especially children's librarians

The funniest quote from this article about the latest Newberry award winner is "The inclusion of men's genitalia does not add to the story one bit and that is my objection."

No no no wait!! It's: "Because of that one word, I would not be able to read that book aloud.There are so many other options that the author could have used instead." Perhaps she would have preferred "nut sack."

I give UNICEF all those dimes for all those years and this is the thanks I get?

Nothing really surprising in UNICEF's report on the state of children in the industrialized world: American children are the worst off -- they are the least healthy, the poorest, and they're getting the worst eduction. We oughta be ashamed. The richest country on earth and we shit on our kids.

Richest country on earth. Of course, 60% of the US population owns 4% of the wealth. And we're not angry about it. Sorta points to the power of advertising, doesn't it?

Air Force noncoms posing nude

There's something troubling about this. I'm a big believer in freedom of expression and I don't see how it could hurt anything -- in most walks of life -- for a woman to pose nude for photography. But she was a drill instructor, someone who is supposed to become a symbol of absolute authority for her trainees. I'm thinking that the Air Force made a mistake in sending her back to the Guard and in demoting her but I think they did the right thing in removing her from drill instructor responsibilities.

As to how titillating seeing a woman nekkid wearing dogtags would be....hmm. I think Playboy made the right decision.

My pal Greg is a nut

But apparently, there is growing reason for him to claim that people are following him.

He doesn't really claim people are following him. He's just been worried about invasive RFID technology for a long time. He owns a paper shredder, too.

Words fail me

I don't know what to say. This is Texas.

And here is the link to the fixed earth people.

An exceptionally cool biology clip

I wonder if I can embed it?


Worked on it a while and couldn't. Here's the link.

I don't post enough on history

The Etruscans have always been one of those mystery groups. Where did they come from? How were they assimilated by the Romans? What was the relationship of the early Romans with the Etruscans?

The first question is being answered by looking at cow mitochondria.

Let's take some time and think about China

It is becoming abundantly clear that the Chinese don't really care if we perceive them as a threat. That can't be good.

It is worth noting that the newspaper that published that editorial is owned by a Korean, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

Muqtada is playing a dangerous game

And it's not just dangerous for him. Look for us to demand that the Iranians turn him over to us for investigation of his crimes. They'll refuse, of course, and we'll rattle sabres so loud that you might not be able to tell the difference between rattling them and using them. I mean, why in Joshua Crust's name do we need *three* carrier groups in the gulf?

Space-y computer wallpaper

I know that most of you are capable of finding your own images on the web but, today, these are all really, really appealing to me.

This guy is the weatherman for WBKO, a Kentucky teevee station

And, he seems to be insane.

A word from Dennis Kucinich

Dear Friends,

This week, Congress will have another great debate about Iraq.
Unfortunately, Congress is going to be discussing a nonbinding resolution
at a time when Congress ought to be taking a stand to cut off funds, to
implement a plan - my plan, the 12-point plan to get out of Iraq.

But instead, Congress engages in these meaningless resolutions. We need
the Congress to take a stand, but we also need presidential candidates to
take a stand. As you know, I led the effort in the House of
Representatives in 2002, in challenging the Bush Administration's march
towards war. As you remember, among all the presidential candidates today,
I not only voted against authorization, but I voted against each and every
effort to try to fund the war. The only way we stop the war is stop the
funding.

Yesterday, 60 Minutes had a show which credited Senator Obama with being
the only Democratic presidential candidate who opposed the war. The fact
is that Senator Obama wasn't in the Senate at the time, he didn't vote
against the war, and the fact is that, as a Member of the Senate, he's
voted eight times to fund the war.

Now, I can't say the media is always going to tell the truth. But it's
important for you to fund this campaign, so we can get our message out.
It's important for you to fund this campaign so I can challenge Senator
Clinton, who, in voting for the war and voting to fund the war, now says
that if she's elected President, she'll end the war immediately, and, if
she had been President at the time, we wouldn't have gone to war.

Now think about it. The role of Congress is superior to the President when
it comes to war-making power. The role of Congress is to give the President
permission to go to war. The Democratic Senate could have stopped the war.
Senator Clinton, Senator Edwards gave George Bush permission and, in
effect, made it possible for the war to occur.

It's good that, now, everybody thinks the war is a bad idea. But the real
question the American people are going to have to face is who had the
clarity, who had the vision, who had the judgment to make the call at that
time that the war was not supportable, that there was no evidence that
merited a war.

I stand before you, not only as the only candidate who can say that, but
as the one who is prepared to lead this nation forward in the cause of
peace, in the cause of a world where we use diplomacy to solve our
differences.

We're at the threshold of a war with Iran, right now. The same people who
were buying the drumbeat for war against Iraq are basically buying into
the necessity of challenging Iran aggressively.

We need a whole new approach, and I'm prepared to take it, with your help.
So go to the website right now. Please contribute if you haven't already
done so. And if you have, thank you, and help us more. Do everything you
can to contact your friends. America doesn't have to be in the position
it's in. We're going to lose our nation unless we stand up and assert that
war is not inevitable, that peace is inevitable if we stay with the truth
and if we insist that our public officials stand up for the American
people.

We have so many things that we need in our country today. Our children
need better education. American people need health care. We need to create
jobs. We need to work on focusing on cleaning up our environment. But our
entire domestic agenda is being shoved aside in favor of war mongering.
This has to stop. And you can help stop it.

Go to the website right now. Make your contribution. I'll stand in there
for you; I need you to stand there with me.

Thank you,
Dennis J Kucinich
___________________________

Please support Dennis's work by making a contribution at
http://kucinich.us/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1, and by
forwarding this message widely.


Original distribution paid for by Kucinich for President 2008, Inc.

Where the White House says they're gonna save money

This is a long, boring read. However, if you will read between the lines and use this as a place to start a little research on the web, you'll find that the Dear and Glorious Leader is up to his usual "rape the poor, shit on the middle class, and reward the wealthy" schemes. Oh, and don't forget, ""Environment"? Is there any way to make money offa that?"

Is there a better Democratic candidate for '08 than the guy who won in '00?

Go here. Sign the petition. Give some money.

A "Draft Gore" scheme is an excellent idea. Imagine a Gore/Clark ticket with the current political climate. Landslide, I suspect.

Of course, the enemy will attempt their same shit as in '00. But this time, one would hope, Gore would be ready for them. And we would be ready for them. And the media is mostly ashamed now of their part. He'd be hard as hell to swift-boat. Their only hope would be to bamboozle us about the environment and, lord knows, they've got lots of experience with that. That's why we have to keep talking about the ecological problems we're facing.

James Howard Kunstler is the "peak oil" guy

And this is his article in response to people wailing "But what are we gonna doooooo?"

Kunstler is essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of the human race or the future of the United States or the future of their family.

Among the many, many sins of the multinationals...

...is the blatant manipulation of oil prices for political ends.

I've never watched the Grammies so I didn't know about this

But I truly do not understand the American people. Either they were horrible traitors or they were honest assessors. They can't be both. But for Americans, we have the shortest goddamned memories in the whole world.

Sigh.

Prospect theory, game theory, heuristics, and other stuff about security

My pal, Greg Girkin, thinks this is an interesting paper, and I agree. It's long but it doesn't use much, if any math, to talk about the circumstances under which people are willing to trade liberty for security or vice versa.

I know a lot of history. And I'm learning more and more mathematics all the time. I'm thinking about changing my name to Harry Selden.

Oh, and if anyone cares, I was pleased to see that Dwayne McDuffie had sense enough to know that Reed Richards was acting seriously out of character during Civil War.

For anybody writing a novel about the ISS that needs the station to be out of communication with the earth for a while

It seems that it can happen. Must be pretty scary for the guys on the ground. Less so for the guys at the station.

I know that there routinely periods of time (minutes rather than hours) when the station is handed off from one communications net to the next during which they are incommunicado. But 31 hours is a long time.

Why are they limiting themselves to foreign countires?

I suspect that they, like many in the US, do not understand the true extent of poverty in the US. I'd say that fewer than 25% of the kids in the Little Rock School District have access to the web at home. Back when I was a education politician, I had long-range plans for the school district providing wide-area access for the entire city. Probably in cooperation with the city government to mitigate the costs. Of course, Comcast wouldn't have like it. I would then have pitched *hard* for somebody to provide low-cost computers to all the elementary school kids. Pipe dreams, now.

What exactly goes through the minds of the leaders of Hamas?

What do they think will happen? That suddenly, after 60 years, the Israelis will just vanish? Or that the Israelis will cease to be able to dominate them -- utterly -- militarily? Or that even *if* the oil disappeared tomorrow that we would withdraw our support of Israel? Or even if we did withdraw our support that a single Israeli soldier would somehow immediately cease to be worth 10 Palestinian gangsters?

I do understand the idea of fighting on for a lost cause -- as a resistance. Not as a government. They have an obligation to the Palestinian people that they aren't recognizing. If they want to continue the fight, they need to get out of the government. Government is about civilization and society. If you want to be a leader of a nation-state, you have to follow the rules. If you don't want to follow the rules, you don't get to lead the country. Now, if, through their underground efforts, they manage to drive the Israelis out of the Middle East, *then* they can enter the politics of Palestine. But while Israel exists as a legitimate, UN-recognized entity, Hamas as a political entity has to follow the rules of civilized nations.

Sigh. Why are the problems of the Middle East intractable? Or am I being entirely to Ameri-centric? Are there civilized solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I don't see? Is there a way for Sunnis and Shi'as to get along? Is there a compromise between Islamists and democracies? Can the Saudi royal family be persuaded to move their form of government out of the Middle Ages? Will ethnic differences ever be unimportant on the edges of the Middle East?

Y'know, the humanist in my is keenly interested in seeing the problems solved. The purely jingoistic American in me is inclined to tell them to drink their goddamned oil and let them go back to constant internecine squabbling. Tribes with flags, indeed.

Look how well "the surge" is working!

My pal, Greg Girkin, pointed this out earlier today but I couldn't find anything to post until now. Seems that al Maliki wants the US Army to thump the Sunnis while he, Malaki, negotiates some sort of compromise with Muqtada al Sadr. Just lovely. Simply lovely.

It wouldn't take too much shit like this for me to be of the opinion that we need to bulldoze all the mosques and go home.

I knew there had to be a reason for Perry to support the vaccinations other than decency

Seems that Rick Perry, governor of Texas and supporter of universal vaccination against HPV, is probably still a slug. Hard to imagine that somebody of his background would do the right thing other than for the wrong reasons, isn't it?

Swimming the length of the Amazon

Lordy, lordy, this sounds dangerous. And exciting. And stuff. I'd like to see it as an IMAX movie.

Edwards steps up to the plate on universal health insurance

A brave move but you have to be brave when you're in third place. Brave, not because the American people don't want something like this, but brave because the financial, insurance, and real estate industries represent over half the GNP and they will go all out to stop his nomination over this.

I think this just might be a GOP-biased site.

My pal, Gill Rogers, says:

...they wait until MID-ARTICLE to point out the reason behind the request, a place most readers won't get to.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/02/09/D8N69CA00.html

That paragraph should have been second, after the first reporting that republicans accuse the 2nd in line for the presidency of being a greedy traveller.

This is tricky -- these are executive appointments

From my pal, Greg

Speaking of grounds for impeachment, this is the kind of thing that would have had the Republicans filing articles if a dem was doing it.

Democrats MUST change the Patriot Act to remove this (and SO many other) loophole. Either that, or just go ahead and admit that the Patriot Act pretty much makes the president an emperor.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/02/09/united_states_attorneys/

Greg


Tony says: this is almost exactly what Andrew Johnson was impeached over. The whole thing has been news here in Little Rock because, apparently, Bud Cummins is going to be the poster boy for the issue.


ITMFA

A smoking gun

Will Bush and Cheney get yet another pass from the media and from Congress, even?

Isn't it about time that if the Democrats don't start impeachment proceedings that they explain why they are willing to forswear their own oaths?

Impeach the Mother Fuckers Already and demand that your Congressman explain himself.

Follow the oil

The following is from alternet.com and it is long but it should be required reading for all Americans.

From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots with Oil

By Richard W. Behan, AlterNet. Posted February 5, 2007.

In the Caspian Basin and beneath the deserts of Iraq, as many as 783 billion barrels of oil are waiting to be pumped. Anyone controlling that much oil stands a good chance of breaking OPEC's stranglehold overnight, and any nation seeking to dominate the world would have to go after it.

The long-held suspicions about George Bush's wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.

The "global war on terror" began as a fraud and a smokescreen and remains so today, a product of the Bush Administration's deliberate and successful distortion of public perception. The fragmented accounts in the mainstream media reflect this warping of reality, but another more accurate version of recent history is available in contemporary books and the vast information pool of the Internet. When told start to finish, the story becomes clear, the dots easier to connect.

Both appalling and masterful, the lies that led us into war and keep us there today show the people of the Bush Administration to be devious, dangerous and far from stupid.

The following is an in-depth look at the oil wars, the events leading up to them, and the players who made them possible.

Iraq

The Project for a New American Century, a D.C.-based political think tank funded by archconservative philanthropies and founded in 1997, is the source of the Bush Administration's imperialistic urge for the U.S. to dominate the world. Our nation should seek to achieve a "...benevolent global hegemony," according to William Kristol, PNAC's chairman. The group advocates the novel and startling concept of "pre-emptive war" as a means of doing so.

On January 26, 1998, the PNAC, sent a letter to President William Clinton urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The dictator, the letter alleged, was a destabilizing force in the Middle East, and posed a mortal threat to "...the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's oil supply..." The subjugation of Iraq would be the first application of "pre-emptive war."

The unprovoked, full-scale invasion and occupation of another country, however, would be an unequivocal example of "the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state." That is the formal United Nations definition of military aggression, and a nation can choose to launch it only in self-defense. Otherwise it is an international crime.

President Clinton did not honor the PNAC's request.

But sixteen members of the Project for a New American Century would soon assume prominent positions in the Administration of George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage and John Bolton.

The "significant portion of the world's oil supply" was of immediate concern, because of the commanding influence of the oil industry in the Bush Administration. Beside the president and vice president, eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor had direct ties to the industry, and so did 32 others in the departments of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.

Within days of taking office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was composed of the relevant federal officials and dozens of energy industry executives and lobbyists, and it operated in tight secrecy. (The full membership has never been revealed, but Enron's Kenneth Lay is known to have participated, and the Washington Post reported that Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, Shell, and BP America did, too.)

During his second week in office, President Bush convened the first meeting of his National Security Council. It was a triumph for the PNAC. In just one hour-long meeting, the new Bush Administration turned upside down the long-standing focus of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Over Secretary of State Colin Powell's objections, the goal of reconciling the Israel-Palestine conflict was abandoned, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was set as the new priority. Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty, describes the meeting in detail.

The Energy Task Force wasted no time, either. Within three weeks of its creation, the group was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" -- dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of negotiations for exploring and developing Iraqi crude.

Not a single U.S. oil company was among the "suitors," and that was intolerable, given a foreign policy bent on global hegemony. The National Energy Policy document, released May 17, 2001 concluded this: "By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."

That rather innocuous statement can be clarified by a top-secret memo dated February 3, 2001 to the staff of the National Security Council. Cheney's group, the memo said, was "melding" two apparently unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies toward rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." The memo directed the National Security Council staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as the "melding" continued. National security policy and international energy policy would be developed as a coordinated whole. This would prove convenient on September 11, 2001, still seven months in the future.

The Bush Administration was drawing a bead on Iraqi oil long before the "global war on terror" was invented. But how could the "capture of new and existing oil fields" be made to seem less aggressive, less arbitrary, less overt?

During April of 2002, almost a full year before the invasion, the State Department launched a policy-development initiative called "The Future of Iraq Project" to accomplish this. The "Oil and Energy Working Group" provided the disguise for "capturing" Iraqi oil. Iraq, it said in its final report, "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war ... the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources."

Capture would take the form of investment, and the vehicle for doing so would be the "production sharing agreement."

Under production sharing agreements, or PSAs, oil companies are granted ownership of a "share" of the oil produced, in exchange for investing in development costs, and the contracts are binding for up to 30 years. What would happen, though, if the companies' investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were obscenely, disproportionately large?

This is hardwired. According to a UK Platform article titled "Crude Designs," production sharing agreements have now been drafted in Baghdad covering 75 percent of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, waiting to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162 percent on their investments. And the "foreign suitors" are not quite so foreign now: The players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.

The use of PSAs will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the "investment" program. They would be far better off keeping in place the structure Iraq has relied upon since 1972: a nationalized oil industry leasing pumping rights to the oil companies, who then pay royalties to the central government. That is how it is done today in Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries.

Production sharing agreements, heavily favored by the oil companies, were specified by George Bush's State Department. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority drafted an oil law privatizing the oil sector, and American oil interests have lobbied in Baghdad ever since then for the PSAs. Apparently successfully: The Oil Committee headed by Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih is said currently to be "leaning" toward them.

With the capture of Iraqi oil resources prospectively disguised, the Halliburton company was then hired, secretly, to design a fire suppression strategy for the Iraqi oil fields. If oil wells were to be torched during the upcoming war (as Saddam did in Kuwait in 1991), the Bush Administration would be prepared to extinguish them rapidly. The contract with Halliburton was signed in the fall of 2002. Congress had yet to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy" -- national security policy and international energy policy -- have become indistinguishable.

Afghanistan

The strategic location of Afghanistan can scarcely be overstated. The Caspian Basin contains up to $16 trillion worth of oil and gas resources, and the most direct pipeline route to the richest markets is through Afghanistan.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the first western oil company to take action in the Basin was the Bridas Corporation of Argentina. It acquired production leases and exploration contracts in the region, and by November of 1996 had signed an agreement with General Dostum of the Northern Alliance and with the Taliban to build a pipeline across Afghanistan.

Not to be outdone, the American company Unocal (aided by an Arabian company, Delta Oil) fought Bridas at every turn. Unocal wanted exclusive control of the trans-Afghan pipeline and hired a number of consultants in its conflict with Bridas: Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush Administration), Zalmay Khalilzad (a signer of the PNAC letter to President Clinton) and Hamid Karzai.

Unocal wooed Taliban leaders at its headquarters in Texas, and hosted them in meetings with federal officials in Washington, D.C.

Unocal and the Clinton Administration hoped to have the Taliban cancel the Bridas contract, but were getting nowhere. Finally, Mr. John J. Maresca, a Unocal Vice President, testified to a House Committee of International Relations on February 12, 1998, asking politely to have the Taliban removed and a stable government inserted. His discomfort was well placed.

Six months later terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and two weeks after that President Clinton launched a cruise missile attack into Afghanistan. Clinton issued an executive order on July 4, 1999, freezing the Taliban's U.S.-held assets and prohibiting further trade transactions with the Taliban.

Mr. Maresca could count that as progress. More would follow.

Immediately upon taking office, the new Bush Administration actively took up negotiating with the Taliban once more, seeking still to have the Bridas contract vacated, in exchange for a tidy package of foreign aid. The parties met three times, in Washington, Berlin, and Islamablad, but the Taliban wouldn't budge.

Behind the negotiations, however, planning was underway to take military action if necessary. In the spring of 2001 the State Department sought and gained concurrence from both India and Pakistan to do so, and in July of 2001, American officials met with Pakistani and Russian intelligence agents to inform them of planned military strikes against Afghanistan the following October. A British newspaper told of the U.S. threatening both the Taliban and Osama bin Laden -- two months before 9/11 -- with military strikes.

According to an article in the UK Guardian, State Department official Christina Rocca told the Taliban at their last pipeline negotiation in August of 2001, just five weeks before 9/11, "Accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."

The Great Game and Its Players

The geostrategic imperative of reliable oil supplies has a long history, arguably beginning with the British Navy in World War I. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill repowered the British fleet -- from coal (abundant in the UK) to oil (absent in the UK), and thus began the Great Game: jockeying by the world powers for the strategic control of petroleum. (Churchill did this to replace with oil pumps the men needed to shovel coal -- a large share of the crew -- so they could man topside battle stations instead.) Iraq today is a British creation, formed almost a century ago to supply the British fleet with fuel, and it is still a focal point of the Game.

The players have changed as national supremacy has changed, as oil companies have morphed over time, and as powerful men have lived out their destinies.

Among the major players today are the Royal family of Saudi Arabia and the Bush family of the state of Maine (more recently of Texas). And they are closely and intimately related. The relationship goes back several generations, but it was particularly poignant in the first Gulf War in 1990-91, when the U.S. and British armed forces stopped Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, before his drive reached the Arabian oil fields. Prime Minister John Major of the UK, and President George H.W. Bush became the much esteemed champions of the Arabian monarchy, and James Baker, Bush's Secretary of State, was well regarded, too. (Years earlier, Mr. Baker and a friend of the royal family's had been business partners, in building a skyscraper bank building in Houston.)

The Carlyle Group: Where the Players Meet to Profit

After President Bush, Secretary Baker, and Prime Minister Major left office, they all became active participants and investors in the Carlyle Group, a global private equity investment firm comprised of dozens of former world leaders, international business executives (including the family of Osama bin Laden); former diplomats, and high-profile political operatives from four U.S. Administrations. For years, Carlyle would serve as the icon of the Bush/Saudi relationship.

Carlyle, with its headquarters just six blocks from the White House, invests heavily in all the industries involved in the Great Game: the defense, security, and energy industries, and it profits enormously from the Afghan and Iraqi wars.

In the late 1980s, Carlyle's personal networking brought together George W. Bush, the future 43rd U.S. president, and $50,000 of financial backing for his Texas oil company, Arbusto Energy. The investor was Salem bin Laden (half-brother of Osama bin Laden) who managed the Carlyle investments of the Saudi bin Laden Group. (After the tragedy of 9/11, by mutual consent, the bin Laden family and Carlyle terminated their business dealings.) George Bush left Carlyle in 1992 to run for governor of Texas.

Ex-President Bush, Ex-Prime Minister Major, and Ex Secretary Baker, in the 1990's, were Carlyle's advance team, scouring the world for profitable investments and investors. In Saudi Arabia they met with the royal family, and with the two wealthiest, non-royal families -- the bin Ladens and the bin Mahfouzes.

Khalid bin Mahfouz was prominent in Delta Oil, Unocal's associate in the Afghan pipeline conflict. He was later accused of financing al Qaeda, and named in a trillion dollar lawsuit brought by the families of 9/11 victims. (It was Mr. bin Mahfouz who had been Mr. Baker's business associate in Houston.)

Carlyle retained James Baker's Houston law firm, Baker-Botts, and Baker himself served as Carlyle Senior Counselor from 1993 until 2005. (Other clients of Baker-Botts: Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Shell, Amoco, Conoco-Phillips, Halliburton, and Enron.)

Mr. Baker has long been willing to put foremost the financial advantage of himself, his firm, and his friends, often at the expense of patriotism and public service. As President Reagan's Secretary of the Treasury, he presided over the savings-and-loan scandal, in which S&L executives like Charles Keating and the current President's brother Neil Bush handed the American taxpayers a bill to pay, over a 40-year period, of $1.2 trillion. His law firm willingly took on the defense of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Azis, the Saudi Defense Minister sued by the families of 9/11 victims for complicity in the attacks.

We will encounter Mr. Baker again soon.

September 11, 2001

In September of 2000, the Project for a New American Century published a report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." It advocated pre-emptive war once again, but noted its acceptance would be difficult in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

President Bush formally established the PNAC's prescription for pre-emptive, premeditated war as U.S. policy when he signed a document entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" early in his first term.

Still nothing illegal or unconstitutional had been done.

But the rationale and the planning for attacking both Afghanistan and Iraq were in place. The preparations had all been done secretly, wholly within the executive branch. The Congress was not informed until the endgame, when President Bush, making his dishonest case for the "war on terror" asked for and was granted the discretion to use military force. The American people were equally uninformed and misled. Probably never before in our history was such a drastic and momentous action undertaken with so little public knowledge or Congressional oversight: the dispatch of America's armed forces into four years of violence, at horrendous costs in life and treasure.

Then a catastrophic event took place. A hijacked airliner probably en route to the White House crashes in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon was afire, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were rubble.

In the first hours of frenetic response, fully aware of al Qaeda's culpability, both President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld sought frantically to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks, as we know from Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies. They anxiously waited to proceed with their planned invasion of Iraq.

If the Bush Administration needed a reason to proceed with their invasions, they could not have been handed a more fortuitous and spectacular excuse, and they played their hand brilliantly.

9/11 was a shocking event of unprecedented scale, but it was simply not an invasion of national security. It was a localized criminal act of terrorism, and to compare it, as the Bush Administration immediately did, to Pearl Harbor was ludicrous: The hijacked airliners were not the vanguard of a formidable naval armada, an air force, and a standing army ready to engage in all out war, as the Japanese were prepared to do and did in 1941.

By equating a criminal act of terrorism with a military threat of invasion, the Bush Administration consciously adopted fear mongering as a mode of governance. It was an extreme violation of the public trust, but it served perfectly their need to justify warfare.

As not a few disinterested observers noted at the time, international criminal terrorism is best countered by international police action, which Israel and other nations have proven many times over to be effective. Military mobilization is irrelevant. It has proven to be counterproductive.

Why, then, was a "war" declared on "terrorists and states that harbor terrorists?"

The pre-planned attack on Afghanistan, as we have seen, was meant to nullify the contract between the Taliban and the Bridas Corporation. It was a matter of international energy policy. It had nothing to do, as designed, with apprehending Osama bin Laden -- a matter of security policy.

But the two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy" had been "melded," so here was an epic opportunity to bait-and-switch. Conjoining the terrorists and the states that harbored them made "war" plausible, and the Global War on Terror was born: It would be necessary to overthrow the Taliban as well as to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

(In retrospect, the monumental fraud of the "war on terror" is crystal clear. In Afghanistan the Taliban was overthrown instead of bringing the terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice, and in Iraq there were no terrorists at all. But Afghanistan and Iraq are dotted today with permanent military bases guarding the seized petroleum assets.)

On October 7, 2001 the carpet of bombs is unleashed over Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, the former Unocal consultant, is installed as head of an interim government. Subsequently he is elected President of Afghanistan, and welcomes the first U.S. envoy -- Mr. John J. Maresca, the Vice President of the Unocal Corporation who had implored Congress to have the Taliban overthrown. Mr. Maresca was succeeded by Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad -- also a former Unocal consultant. (Mr. Khalilzad has since become Ambassador to Iraq, and has now been nominated to replace John Bolton, his PNAC colleague, as the ambassador to the UN.)

With the Taliban banished and the Bridas contract moot, Presidents Karzai of Afghanistan and Musharraf of Pakistan meet on February 8, 2002, sign an agreement for a new pipeline, and the way forward is open for Unocal/Delta once more.

The Bridas contract was breached by U.S. military force, but behind the combat was Unocal. Bridas sued Unocal in the U.S. courts for contract interference and won, overcoming Richard Ben Veniste's law firm in 2004. That firm had multibillion-dollar interests in the Caspian Basin and shared an office in Uzbekistan with the Enron Corporation. In 2004, Mr. Ben Veniste was serving as a 9/11 Commissioner.

About a year after the Karzai/Musharraf agreement was signed, an article in the trade journal "Alexander's Gas and Oil Connections" described the readiness of three US federal agencies to finance the prospective pipeline: the U.S. Export/Import Bank, the Trade and Development Agency, and the Overseas Private Insurance Corporation. The article continued, "...some recent reports ... indicated ... the United States was willing to police the pipeline infrastructure through permanent stationing of its troops in the region." The article appeared on February 23, 2003.

The objective of the first premeditated war was now achieved. The Bush Administration stood ready with financing to build the pipeline across Afghanistan, and with a permanent military presence to protect it.

Within two months President Bush sent the armed might of America sweeping into Iraq.

Then came the smokescreen of carefully crafted deceptions. The staging of the Jessica Lynch rescue. The toppling of the statue in Baghdad. Mission accomplished. The orchestrated capture, kangaroo court trial, and hurried execution of Saddam Hussein. Nascent "democracy" in Iraq. All were scripted to burnish the image of George Bush's fraudulent war.

The smokescreen includes the cover-up of 9/11. Initially and fiercely resisting any inquiry at all, President Bush finally appoints a 10-person "9/11 Commission."

The breathtaking exemptions accorded President Bush and Vice President Cheney in the inquiry rendered the entire enterprise a farce: They were "interviewed" together, no transcription of the conversation was allowed, and they were not under oath. The Commission report finally places the blame on "faulty intelligence."

Many of the 10 commissioners, moreover, were burdened with stunning conflicts of interest -- Mr. Ben Veniste, for example -- mostly by their connections to the oil and defense industries. The Carlyle Group contributed to Commissioner Tim Roemer's political campaigns. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean was a Director of Amerada Hess, which had formed a partnership with Delta Oil, the Arabian company of Khalid bin Mahfouz, and that company was teamed with Unocal in the Afghan pipeline project. Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton serves on the board of Stonebridge International consulting group, which is advising Gulfsands Petroleum and Devon Energy Corporation about Iraqi oil opportunities.

The apparent manipulation of pre-war intelligence is not addressed by the 9/11 Commission, the veracity of the Administration's lies and distortions is assumed without question, and the troubling incongruities of 9/11 are ignored: The theories of controlled demolition, the prior short-selling of airline stock, the whole cottage industry of skepticism.

The doubters and critics of 9/11 are often dismissed as conspiracy crazies, but you needn't claim conspiracy to be skeptical. Why did both President Bush and Vice President Cheney pressure Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to forego any investigation at all? Failing in that, why did the President then use "Executive Privilege" so often to withhold and censor documents? Why did the White House refuse to testify under oath? Why the insistence on the loopy and unrecorded Oval Office interview of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney simultaneously?

There is much we don't know about 9/11.

The Iraq Study Group

Viewing the carnage in Iraq, and seeking desperately to find a way out of it, the U.S. Congress appointed on March 15, 2006 the Iraq Study Group. It was also called the Baker-Hamilton Commission after its co-chairmen, the peripatetic problem-solvers James Baker and Lee Hamilton. It was charged with assessing the situation in Iraq and making policy recommendations.

The Commission assessed the situation as "grave and deteriorating" and recommended substantive changes in handling it: draw down the troop levels and negotiate with Syria and Iran. These recommendations were rejected out of hand by the Bush Administration, but those about the oil sector could hardly have been more pleasing.

The Commission's report urged Iraqi leaders to "... reorganize the national industry as a commercial enterprise." That sounds like code for privatizing the industry (which had been nationalized in 1972.) In case that wasn't clear enough, the Commission encouraged "...investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international energy companies." That sounds like code for Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Conoco/Phillips, BP/Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell. The Commission urged support for the World Bank's efforts to "ensure that best practices are used in contracting." And that sounds like code for Production Sharing Agreements.

Mr. Baker is a clever and relentless man. He will endorse pages and pages of changes in strategy and tactics -- but leave firmly in place the one inviolable purpose of the conflict in Iraq: capturing the oil.

A Colossus of Failure

The objectives of the oil wars may be non-negotiable, but that doesn't guarantee their successful achievement.

The evidence suggests the contrary.

As recently as January of 2005, the Associated Press expected construction of the Trans Afghan Pipeline to begin in 2006. So did News Central Asia. But by October of 2006, NCA was talking about construction "... as soon as there is stability in Afghanistan."

As the Taliban, the warlords, and the poppy growers reclaim control of the country, clearly there is no stability in Afghanistan, and none can be expected soon.

Unocal has been bought up by the Chevron Corporation. The Bridas Corporation is now part of BP/Amoco. Searching the companies' websites for "Afghanistan pipeline" yields, in both cases, zero results. Nothing is to be found on the sites of the prospective funding agencies. The pipeline project appears to be dead.

The Production Sharing Agreements for Iraq's oil fields cannot be signed until the country's oil policies are codified in statute. That was supposed to be done by December of 2006, but Iraq is in a state of chaotic violence. The "hydrocarbon law" is struggling along -- one report suggests it may be in place by March -- so the signing of the PSA's will be delayed at least that long.

The U.S. and British companies that stand to gain so much -- Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Concoco/Phillips, BP/Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell -- will stand a while longer. They may well have to stand down.

On October 31, 2006 the newspaper China Daily reported on the visit to China by Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani. Mr. Shahristani, the story said, "welcomed Chinese oil companies to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi oil industry." That was alarming, but understated.

Stratfor, the American investment research service, was more directly to the point, in a report dated September 27, 2006 (a month before Minister Shahristani's visit, so it used the future tense). The Minister "... will talk to the Chinese about honoring contracts from the Saddam Hussein era. ... This announcement could change the face of energy development in the country and leave U.S. firms completely out in the cold."

The oil wars are abject failures. The Project for a New American Century wanted, in a fantasy of retrograde imperialism, to remove Saddam Hussein from power. President George Bush launched an overt act of military aggression to do so, at a cost of more than 3,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and half a trillion dollars. In the process he has exacerbated the threats from international terrorism, ravaged the Iraqi culture, ruined their economy and their public services, sent thousands of Iraqis fleeing their country as refugees, created a maelstrom of sectarian violence, dangerously destabilized the Middle East, demolished the global prestige of the United States, and defamed the American people.

Richard W. Behan lives and writes on Lopez Island, off the northwest coast of Washington state. He is working on a new book, To Provide Against Invasions: Corporate Dominion and America's Derelict Democracy. He can be reached at rwbehan@rockisland.com. (This essay is deliberately not copyrighted: It may be reproduced without restriction.)

Winning Iraqi children's hearts and minds

Again, my pal, Greg:

This about sums it [George Bush's War] up:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/07/soccer_balls/

Greg

Jim Webb's son is in Iraq, too

My pal, Greg Girkin says:

Everything he says is correct, except he should have spent more time jumping up and down screaming “ARROGANCE, INCOMPETENCE, AND NEGLIGENCE! ARROGANCE, INCOMPETENCE, AND NEGLIGENCE!”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/02/07/webb/

Greg

I know that Medicare stories are boring, but...

We need to remain up to speed on the Dear and Glorious Leader's latest efforts to destroy the American middle class and to spit on the poor. A scheme of means testing that results in people who today are making $40,000 being ineligible for Medicare in 40 years and those who take his tax break on insurance get their Social Security benefits slashed by as much as 60%.

This man is evil.

I am shocked -- shocked -- to find that this Administration would cut the shuttle replacement budget

This is call your congressmen time. We need to have access to space. We need to have manned spaceflight capability. We need to return to the moon. Why? Because that's what monkeys like us are supposed to do: go places and do things.

Oh, and for those of you who have oft complained that it doesn't do any good to call your congresspersons because they're Republicans, this time, it'll work. The GOP is traditionally a better friend to NASA than the Democrats.

UPDATE: This says what I was trying to say in the first 'graph better than I did. I was going for brevity. He went for clarity.

Quick! Get my agent on the phone! There's a novel in this!

Seems that we now have enough astronauts to reflect the demographics of the population as a whole. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a nut.

UPDATE: Wooooo. It seems that the ante has been upped a bit. Attempted murder one. Which somehow makes it seem less nutty.

Big Oil and the run-up to the elections

There's nothing wrong with the big oil companies cutting their profits in the weeks before a Congressional election. But we should make sure that everybody knows how stupid the oil companies think they are.

The oil companies think you're really, really stupid. And they laugh at you. And steal your money. And try to make sure that you continue to elect the people that make it easy for them to steal your money.

GOP wants the knife to *always* cut their way

My pal, Greg, writes:

And here the Republicans are, telling us we can’t object to the war without endangering the troops (Remember Kosovo? “The blood will be on Clintons hands! This will fail!”) and that it’s okay to share command with foreign troops (Remember Kosovo? “NATO troops in command of American forces! It’s an outrage!”).

This would piss me off a LOT less if Kosovo hadn’t happened during the tenure of most sitting GOP senators. Fuck these guys.

From Salon:

“McCain and the other key supporters of a surge of troops into Baghdad, including the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Kagan and former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Jack Keane, have warned that sharing command with the Iraqis could make success in Baghdad impossible. Under the potentially risky scheme, Americans and Iraqis will fight beside each other in Baghdad -- but report to their respective commanders. McCain late last month told the incoming commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, "I know of no successful military operation where you have dual command." Hawks like Kagan have called for the Americans and Iraqis to work side by side, but with the more competent Americans in control.”

The power of the subpoena was what I was looking forward to

And it seems that John Conyers was, too. Now, if he will just follow all the way through with the logic of asking these kinds of questions and getting the answers that he's going to get, we can get on with the business of impeaching this president and vice president, put all this "bi-partisanship" and "cooperation" shit on the shelf and get on with reversing the course of empire and environmental destruction and get back the business of being the United States of America the way its supposed to be.

This is just lovely

I keep seeing more and more of word of the US preparing to go to war with Iran. Is the administration this stupid? Yes, the US military can do the job of destroying Iran's nuclear ambitions. No question about that. If there was a real war, with a real objective, I don't doubt that the US military could win it, too. But if Bush & Co think that a military attack on Iran will go unanswered by the rest of the Muslim world, they're as insane as well as stupid.

Why are Biden's remarks news?

I don't see what was wrong about what he said. Jackson, Mosely-Braun, and Sharpton were certainly not mainstream candidates and if anybody claims they were, they are deluded. So, in order to be sure and be on the Obama bandwagon, Reuters elects to paint Biden's remarks as racist.

I think that the news media is going to think that if the race for the Democratic nomination is not a horse race between Hillary and Obama that it won't be interesting. Whyowhyo can't the race turn on issues? What is it about asking Americans to think that terrifies the media?

Oh. Wait. I know. The "media" is owned by people with a lot of money. And if the American people ever stop and think for a couple of minutes about the money, they'll realize that they don't have any. And that they're never going to get any. Ah. I see.