Earlier this week it was Monday

The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 207 - Democratic Underground

And that is it for me for a week or so, but some things might pop up here now and then, so don't forget to come on back now - ya hear?

Also don't forget to check out some of them fine sites we have links to over there on the right.

- rob 5:32 PM - [PermaLink] -

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just a bunch of articles that you could read (if you were so inclined):

• Pakistan Connection Seen in Taliban's New Tactics
  
  
• Judge Gets in Swipe at Bush Administration

  U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said the successful prosecution of Ahmed Ressam should serve not only as a warning to terrorists, but as a statement to the Bush administration about its terrorism-fighting tactics.
  
  "We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel," he said Wednesday. "The message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart."

• Deal for DeLay district added to energy bill, Democrat says

  The final draft of the energy bill produced by House and Senate negotiators early Tuesday includes a 10-year, roughly $500 million research program for ''ultradeep drilling" of oil and gas from beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
  
  The provision directs that 75 percent of that money be administered by a nonprofit ''corporation that is constructed as a consortium." Henry A. Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, said the provision was worded to ensure that the contract will go to the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, a nonprofit energy consortium based in Sugar Land, Texas, DeLay's hometown.
  
  ''At its essence, this provision is a . . . giveaway to the oil industry, Halliburton, and Sugar Land, Texas," Waxman, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter sent yesterday to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. ''[It] is an indefensible giveaway to one of the most profitable industries in America."

  It's called "looting"
  
  
• U.S. General Seeks Iraq Pullout by 2006
  
  
• Military's Opposition to Harsh Interrogation Is Outlined

  Rear Adm. Michael F. Lohr, the Navy's chief lawyer, wrote on Feb. 6, 2003, that while detainees at Guantánamo Bay might not qualify for international protections, "Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values?"
  
  Brig. Gen. Kevin M. Sandkuhler, a senior Marine lawyer, said in a Feb. 27, 2003, memorandum that all the military lawyers believed the harsh interrogation regime could have adverse consequences for American service members. General Sandkuhler said that the Justice Department "does not represent the services; thus, understandably, concern for service members is not reflected in their opinion."

- rob 5:30 PM - [PermaLink] -

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It's official: Our President is 14 years old.

onegoodmove: Bush Flips Out

If you have quicktime you can watch the video of our President giving the bird to the press.

Remember its all about restoring dignity to the White House.

A primetime address featuring fart jokes are next.

- rob 11:41 AM - [PermaLink] -

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Washington recasts terror war as 'struggle'

WASHINGTON The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, according to senior administration and military officials.


In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the country's top military officer have spoken of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than "the global war on terror," which had been the catchphrase of choice.

Does the Bush Administration put more time in marketing research then it does in actually finding Bin Laden? And sorry War on Terror markets well - its snazzy - sharp - gets you in the gut. Its a Hollywood blockbuster. Struggle against violent extremism? Sounds like some kind of thoughtful foreign flick. Is Bush becoming French? What's with all this talk about diplomacy and nuance... sounds damn sissy.

- rob 5:57 PM - [PermaLink] -

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As an answer as to why digital cameras are popular
(do we now have to think twice before we hug our own children?)

Couple Cleared Of Child Sex Charges

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Parents who were charged with child abuse last August have been exonerated and reunited with their children.
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The photo that raised alarms shows a naked Kristoff, now 16-months-old, getting a kiss from his father on the belly button, Teresa Hamaty said.

When the photos were shown to the police, the couple was arrested, and Kristoff was put in protective custody, while his half-sister, Victoria, was handed over to her birth father.

Teresa Hamaty was released on bond, but wasn't allowed contact with her children for months.

Charbel Hamaty spent six months in prison before the charges were dropped because of a report submitted by an expert saying there was no criminal intent in the photos.

- rob 5:51 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Lawyer's are expensive.

Keep that in mind when you realize that Rove and Libby got raises: White House Staff Salaries: Who's Making What

The top pay rate at the White House for senior aides like Chief of Staff Andy Card and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove is now $161,000, according to an internal White House list of staff salaries compiled as of July 1.

Honestly I shouldn't be harshing on them guys, the kind of lying and manipulation Rove pulls could easily bring in multi-millions in the private sector.

- rob 5:49 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Report: China military build-up aims to project power beyond Taiwan operation

Well looky here a new cold war!

WASHINGTON -- China is building up its military for the long-term goal of projecting its power well beyond Taiwan, the self-governing island that draws most of the mainland's attention today, a Pentagon report says.

The Chinese military is buying new weapon systems while developing new doctrine for modern warfare and improving training standards, the report released Tuesday says.

And just like the cold war of our nostalgia random rundown dysfunctional dyspots are treated like warm friends if they also hate the other guy. The west is the other guy. China is sending a message, but Bush can't hear because he is too busy talking to God about Supreme Court justices and tax cuts.

China will 'protect Mugabe at UN'

China will use its veto to stop the United Nations Security Council from criticising Zimbabwe's slum clearance, President Robert Mugabe says.
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Asked about the moves to discuss the demolitions at the Security Council, the state-owned Herald newspaper quotes Mr Mugabe as saying: "I know, of course, China will never allow that nonsense to happen".

Details of the trade deal signed by Mr Mugabe and Chinese President Hu Jintao have not been made public but it is expected to involve loans in exchange for trade and mineral concessions.

Zimbabwe has adopted a "Look East" policy since increasing criticism from the west for alleged human rights abuses and electoral fraud.

- rob 5:46 PM - [PermaLink] -

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A Rover-Riffic Rove Roundup

Eight Days in July

PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

Do read it all.


Prosecutor In CIA Leak Case Casting A Wide Net
White House Effort To Discredit Critic Examined in Detail

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.
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Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

Operation Coverup

Scandals metastasize. That is the pattern since Watergate. What starts out looking like a small, isolated incident gradually reveals itself to be part of a larger abuse of power. Meanwhile, an unraveling coverup adds new elements. Is that happening now with the scandal over White House leaks of the identity of a CIA agent?
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President Bush says he won't publicly comment about the Plame case while the investigation continues. But the reason the investigation continues is partly his fault. He should have determined early on who leaked Plame's CIA identity to members of the press, and dealt with it.

Why didn't Bush two years ago just ask Karl Rove and a few others in the administration whether they had leaked Plame's identity to Bob Novak and the others? Why doesn't he ask Rove now? Is it because he knows the answer? Or because he doesn't want to have to fire Rove?
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The coverup, in short, is going well.

- rob 5:36 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Bush Loves Canada - He keeps sending them our jobs

(leave no child behind is just a new level of funding bureacracy)

Krugman: Toyota, Moving Northward

There has been fierce competition among states hoping to attract a new Toyota assembly plant. Several Southern states reportedly offered financial incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But last month Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-S.U.V.'s, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a U.S. location, the company cited the quality of Ontario's work force.

What made Toyota so sensitive to labor quality issues? Maybe we should discount remarks from the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, who claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment.

But there are other reports, some coming from state officials, that confirm his basic point: Japanese auto companies opening plants in the Southern U.S. have been unfavorably surprised by the work force's poor level of training.

There's some bitter irony here for Alabama's governor. Just two years ago voters overwhelmingly rejected his plea for an increase in the state's rock-bottom taxes on the affluent, so that he could afford to improve the state's low-quality education system. Opponents of the tax hike convinced voters that it would cost the state jobs.

(refusing to admit there is any problem in our healthcare system beyond lawyers [which is not the source of increased costs] is hurting American businesses)

Canada's other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States.

- rob 5:31 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Bush wanted to run America like a business.

Maybe a business like Morgan Stanley? You know a company full of Wall Street analysts who yell at Costco for paying employees decent wages, but sing the praises of the geniuses at Enron.

Morgan Stanley tells us how a business should be run:

In June, Co-President Stephen S. Crawford of the financial giant Morgan Stanley (who was installed in the job in order to ensure management ''stability'' during the company's currently shaky status with investors) signed a two-year contract at $16 million a year which allowed him, if he changed his mind, to resign and promptly collect all $32 million. A few days later, he resigned.

Wow, there be some really bright folk over at Morgan Stanley.

Next: the entire firm of Morgan Stanley tries to screw in a lightbuld (they fill the room with stock options and cash assuming the lightbulp will then screw itself in, and, as part of this business strategy, will lay off the maintenance and janitorial staff to save money).

- rob 6:21 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Read: A neighbor's view of Valerie Wilson's 'outing'

- rob 5:43 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Whoa, like dude, not that weed. Bummer

GM crops created superweed, say scientists

Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed", the Guardian can reveal.

The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government's three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.

The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.
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The scientists also collected seeds from other weeds in the oilseed rape field and grew them in the laboratory. They found that two - both wild turnips - were herbicide resistant.

Wild Turnips man, that used to be the name of my band, sweeeet.

Since charlock seeds can remain in the soil for 20 to 30 years before they germinate, once GM plants have produced seeds it would be almost impossible to eliminate them.

Although the government has never conceded that gene transfer was a problem, it was fear of this that led the French and Greek governments to seek to ban GM rape.

Emily Diamond, a Friends of the Earth GM researcher, said: "I was shocked when I saw this paper. This is what we were reassured could not happen - and yet now it has happened the finding has been hidden away. This is exactly what the French and Greeks were afraid of when they opposed the introduction of GM rape."

Dude, aren't we all, like, you know, Friends of the Earth?

- rob 3:44 PM - [PermaLink] -

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New US tactic: Common Sense

New U.S. tactic: Employ poor Afghans

URGUN, Afghanistan --With escalating violence threatening Afghanistan's future, the U.S. military has a new focus: employ as many of the poor as possible to rebuild schools and medical clinics so they don't join the Taliban or al-Qaida.
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"I'd rather have an Afghan national working on a road or helping build a clinic than getting three to five bucks or whatever the Taliban or al-Qaida-associated movement pays him to plant an IED (improvised explosive device)," he told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Can I just point out that when we went into Iraq we immediately fired the entire military (gee, that'll be a lot of unemployed fighting age men... don't ya think). We fired pretty much all the Baathists in the government (gee that won't make for any bitter unemployed men will it).

Ah... but it wasn't enough to make them unemployed, we had to rub it in.

We made sure to contract out to foreign firms at higher prices to do the reconstruction effort. The foreign firms hired... foreigners to do the work.

If they had put any thought as to what to do after the bombs had stopped dropping things would actually be better for the citizens of Iraq now then it was under Saddam.

The obvious truth now thanks to the Bush league is that Iraqis were actually better of under Saddam. And that is horrible - because he was a murderous tyrant.


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It looks like women actually had more rights under Saddam.

Iraq Constitution May Erode Women's Rights

The civil law section, one of six to make up Iraq's new charter, covers the rights and duties of citizens and public and private freedoms. The language is not final, but members of the drafting committee said there was agreement on most of its wording.
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Most worrying for women's groups has been the section on civil rights, which some believe would significantly roll back women's rights under a 1959 civil law enacted by a secular regime.

In the copy obtained by the AP on Monday, Article 19 of the second chapter says "the followers of any religion or sect are free to choose their civil status according to their religious or sectarian beliefs."

Shiite Muslim leaders have pushed for a stronger role for Islam in civil law but women's groups argue that could base legal interpretations on stricter religious lines that are less favorable toward women.

Committee members said they had taken account of women's concerns but were not planning to make changes, since the National Assembly will have final say on the wording.

Committee member Khudayer al-Khuzai said Muslims would be free to choose which Islamic sect they want to be judged by under the proposed civil law.

"We will not force anyone to adopt any sect at all. People are free to choose the sect they see as better or more legitimate. This is implemented in marriage, inheritance and all civil rights," he said.

Not all Shiite laws are disadvantageous for women. Many Sunni Muslims who have only daughters prefer to follow Shiite religious law when it comes to inheritance, since daughters inherit everything their parents leave. Under Sunni rules, daughters have to share their inheritance with uncles, aunts and grandparents.

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It is always good to remember that this fiasco was paid for buy you, the good tax paying American.

As Bush once pointed out: Remember its your money. How has it been spent lately?
Despite $2 billion spent, residents say Baghdad is crumbling

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Talib Abu Younes put his lips to a glass of tap water recently and watched worms swimming in the bottom.

ADVERTISEMENT

Electricity flickers on and off for two hours in Muthana Naim's south Baghdad home then shuts off for four in boiling July heat that shoots above 120 degrees.

Fadhel Hussein boils buckets of sewage-contaminated water from the Tigris River to wash the family's clothes.

The capital is crumbling around angry Baghdadis. Narrow concrete sewage pipes decay underground and water pipes leak out more than half the drinking water before it ever reaches a home, according to the U.S. military.
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With about $2 billion already invested, Baghdad should be sparkling, said its mayor, Alaa Mahmoud al Timimi. He hasn't been consulted on American projects, besides signatures for completed developments, and has threatened to resign if he doesn't get a larger budget to solve his city's problems. The $85 million he was allocated can't keep up with the city of 6.5 million, he said.

- rob 3:39 PM - [PermaLink] -

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