Says US must prevent oil fields from falling into hands of terrorists
President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh
reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the
country's vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the
control of terrorist extremists.
The president, standing against a backdrop of the USS Ronald Reagan,
the newest aircraft carrier in the Navy's fleet, said terrorists would
be denied their goal of making Iraq a base from which to recruit
followers, train them, and finance attacks.
''We will defeat the
terrorists," Bush said. ''We will build a free Iraq that will fight
terrorists instead of giving them aid and sanctuary."
Appearing at Naval Air Station North Island to commemorate the
anniversary of the Allies' World War II victory over Japan, Bush
compared his resolve to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's in the 1940s
and said America's mission in Iraq is to turn it into a democratic ally
just as the United States did with Japan after its 1945 surrender.
Bush's V-J Day ceremony did not fall on the actual anniversary. Japan
announced its surrender on Aug. 15, 1945 -- Aug. 14 in the United
States because of the time difference.
Democrats said Bush's leadership falls far short of Roosevelt's.
''Democratic
Presidents Roosevelt and Truman led America to victory in World War II
because they laid out a clear plan for success to the American people,
America's allies, and America's troops," said Howard Dean, Democratic
Party chairman. ''President Bush has failed to put together a plan, so
despite the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, we are not making the
progress that we should be in Iraq. The troops, our allies, and the
American people deserve better leadership from our commander in chief."
The speech was Bush's third in just over a week defending his Iraq
policies, as the White House scrambles to counter growing public
concern about the war. But the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina
in the Gulf Coast drew attention away; the White House announced during
the president's remarks that he was cutting his August vacation short
to return to Washington, D.C., to oversee the federal response effort.
After
the speech, Bush hurried back to Texas ahead of schedule to prepare to
fly back to the nation's capital today. He was to return to the White
House on Friday, after spending more than four weeks operating from his
ranch in Crawford.
Bush's August break has been marked by problems in Iraq.
It has been an especially deadly month there for US troops, with the
number of those who have died since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003
now nearing 1,900.
The growing death toll has become a regular
feature of the slightly larger protests that Bush now encounters
everywhere he goes -- a movement boosted by a vigil set up in a field
down the road from the president's ranch by a mother grieving the loss
of her soldier son in Iraq.
Cindy Sheehan arrived in Crawford
only days after Bush did, asking for a meeting so he could explain why
her son and others are dying in Iraq. The White House refused, and
Sheehan's camp turned into a hub of activity for hundreds of activists
around the country demanding that troops be brought home.
This
week, the administration also had to defend the proposed constitution
produced in Iraq at US urging. Critics fear the impact of its rejection
by many Sunnis, and say it fails to protect religious freedom and
women's rights.
At the naval base, Bush declared, ''We will not
rest until victory is America's and our freedom is secure" from Al
Qaeda and its forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab alZarqawi.
''If
Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a
new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. ''They'd
seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more
terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and
our coalition."
On the day after Hurricane Katrina was declared to be not as bad as
originally feared, it became clear that the effects of the storm had
been, after all, beyond devastation. Homeowners in Biloxi, Miss.,
staggered through wrecked neighborhoods looking for their loved ones.
In New Orleans, the mayor reported that rescue boats had begun pushing
past dead bodies to look for the stranded living. Gas leaks began
erupting into flames, and looking at the city, now at least 80 percent
under water, it was hard not to think of last year's tsunami, or even
ancient Pompeii.
Disaster has, as it almost always does, called up American
generosity and instances of heroism. Young people helped the old onto
rafts in flooded New Orleans streets, and exhausted rescue workers
refused all offers of rest, while people as far away as Kansas and
Arizona went online to offer shelter in their homes to the refugees. It
was also a reminder of how much we rely on government to imagine the
unimaginable and plan for the worst. As the levees of Lake
Pontchartrain gave way, flooding New Orleans, it seemed pretty clear
that in this case, government did not live up to the job.
But
this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to
point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in
American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation. All the
focus now must be on rescuing the survivors. Beyond that lies a long
and painful recovery, which must begin with a national vow to help all
the storm victims and to save and repair New Orleans.
People who think of that graceful city and the rest of the
Mississippi Delta as tourist destinations must have been reminded,
watching the rescue operations, that the real residents of this area
are in the main poor and black. The only resources most of them will
have to fall back on will need to come from the federal government.
Those
of us in New York watch the dire pictures from Louisiana with keen
memories of the time after Sept. 11, when the rest of the nation made
it clear that our city was their city, and that everyone was part of
the battle to restore it. New Orleans, too, is one of the places that
belongs to every American's heart - even for people who have never been
there.
Right now it looks as if rescuing New Orleans will be a
task much more daunting than any city has faced since the San Francisco
fire of 1906. It must be a mission for all of us.
Bush is certainly not responsible for a natural disaster like Katrina.
He is responsible for removing the safety net that used to be available
to cushion the blow. Bush has this country running on the edge of solvency to fund his war
& reward his friends. All we need is one good push and this
country's economy will crash taking the rest of the world with us. If
Katrina is not that one good push that puts us over the edge the next
disaster will be.
The
stories of the fleeing residents, however, paint the picture of an
America where many people struggle. As Treasury Secretary John Snow
noted recently, the fruits of economic growth are not being shared equally. In New Orleans, many such low wage earners have congregated at the Superdome. Their stories reveal the conditions faced by the poor in America:
"No funds,"
a 41-year-old woman surrounded by four children, ages 2 to 14, said
when asked what brought her to the shelter. The woman didn’t want to
give her name as she waited with stacks of bedding and a few children’s
toys resting on the sidewalk.
Eighty percent or so of New Orleans is under water right now, and word
came from an aerial survey that the southern peninsula of Plaquemines
Parish is gone, as in "reclaimed by the water."
The Mayor of Biloxi was right - this was their tsunami.
I saw on CNN that the rest of the Louisiana National Guard will return from Iraq in eight days. According to this news report,
Gulf state National Guardsmen stationed in Iraq are devastated by the
news of Katrina, however this is disturbing and the man who said it
must have had a gun to his head as we all know that you don't sign up
for the National Guard if you want to fight wars overseas:
Asked
how his troops felt being in Iraq while their state was in such
difficulty, Jones replied: "Well, we all know our primary mission is
the federal one."
"The secondary mission is to serve at the pleasure of the governor in disaster-relief and other missions," said Jones, 44, who works for a company managing the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
I read that US Agencies are slow to respond
to major US health threats such as botulism, anthrax, smallpox and
bubonic plague. Of 19 public health agencies in 18 states, only two consistently met
federal guidelines to return calls from physicians within 30 minutes.
Three agencies didn't respond at all to the first five calls they
received. This is bad news as the areas ravaged by Katrina,
particularly New Orleans will soon be a petri dish of disease
as bodies from cemeteries may emerge, the sewage system has overflowed,
there are chemical spills and I see kids swimming in the flood waters.
Oh baby, we're talking about cholera, tuberculosis, malaria, West Nile
virus, and dengue fever. US agencies had better get their acts
together. This is a tremendous catastrophe.
If you'd like to help agencies who work in the field of emergency response to this disaster, check out networkforgood.org.
I would advise
everybody to fill up their vehicles with gas today because if Katrina
maintains its course and intensity gasoline could easily be $4/gallon
by the end of next week, probably higher because of the damage to the
nation's oil infrastructure.
This post is not
meant to downplay the likely catastrophic damage to life and property
in the region affected by Katrina, just to make everyone aware that the
effects of this Hurricane will likely be nationwide. I hope for anyone
on the board has friends or relatives in the NO, Biloxi, Mobile area
that those friends or relatives are hunkered down somewhere safe out of
the path of what looks like being a monster hurricane.
The LOOP is the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port in Port Fourchon, LA. It
handles 30% of the oil imported by the US, about 3-4 million barrels
per day and is the only facility that can handle VLCC's (Very Large
Crude Carriers: Supertankers). On its present course, Hurricane Katrina
will pass close to if not directly over Port Fourchon with the result
that a significant fraction of US oil supply will be cut off for some
indeterminate period of time. There is also a lot of refinery capacity
in the neighbourhood of Port Fourchon and New Orleans that will likely
be affected by the Hurricane.
If all the
refineries within the band of hurricane force winds goes offline, the
US loses 1.8 million barrels per day of refining capacity or about 10%.
In addition, 3 million barrels per day of imported crude and petroleum
products will be lost from the LOOP. Get ready for a huge spike in
energy prices and possible gasoline shortages.
VMA131Marine posted the map shown above says: Hurricane Katrina's projected path in relation to the oil supply and
refinery facilities in the region. Note in particular the LOOP and Port
Fourchon: Louisiana Petroleum Resources
If
all the refineries within the band of hurricane force winds goes
offline, the US loses 1.8 million barrels per day of refining capacity
or about 10%. In addition, 3 million barrels per day of imported crude
and petroleum products will be lost from the LOOP. Get ready for a huge
spike in energy prices and possible gasoline shortages.
It is still a problem that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is in Louisiana, if there are logistics
issues in the coming weeks? Also, the SPR is crude, so you would still
have fuel shortages if the refineries are out of commission. The SPR may well require an off-shore rig to get
to as it will probably be under water and without power for an extended
period. We don't know about the conditions of roads and bridges in the area;
we don't know about the condition of the facitities at the port of New
Orleans; we don't know enough to make a decisions at this time.
'I could have stayed at home and watched my roof blow off,'' said one
of the refugees, Harald Johnson, 43. ''Instead, I came down here and
watched the Superdome roof blow off. It's no big deal; getting wet is
not like dying.''
This is where about 8,000+ of New Orleans' poorest residents have taken
shelter, in the Superdome. The NYTimes reports now even that imposing structure is taking damage from Katrina:
"Strips
of metal were peeled away, creating two holes that were visible from
the floor of the huge arena. Water dripped in and people were moved
away from about five sections of seats directly below. Others
watched as sheets of metal flapped visibly and noisily. From the floor,
more than 19 stories below the dome, the openings appeared to be 6 feet
long."
Superdome and government emergency officials stressed that they did not
expect the huge roof to fail because of the relatively small breaches,
each about 15 to 20 feet long and 4 to 5 feet wide.
''We think the wind somehow got into the vents and got between the
roof's (waterproof) membrane and the aluminum ceiling tiles,'' said
Doug Thornton, regional manager of the company that manages the huge
arena.
The dome was filled with the sound of metal rattling, which Thornton said was produced by the metal ceiling tiles.
They're stuck sitting in the stadium seats
because the authorities don't want to risk the possibility that the
field may flood, which will start to get damned old in about 24 hours.
Aside from the tear in the huge roof, the 77,000-seat
steel-framework stadium, home of the NFL's New Orleans Saints, provided
few comforts but at least had bathrooms and food donated by charities.
The
wind that howled around the dome during the night was not heard in the
interior of the building where the refugees were kept.
''Everybody
slept last night. They didn't seem to have any problems,'' said Dr.
Kevin Stephens Sr., in charge of the medical shelter in the Superdome.
''They slept all over the place.''
Power failed in the Superdome
around 5 a.m. Monday, triggering groans from the crowd. Emergency
generators kicked in, but the backup power runs only reduced lighting,
not the air conditioning.
Residents lined up for blocks, clutching meager belongings and
crying children as National Guardsman searched them for guns, knives
and drugs.
Then Katrina's rain began, drenching hundreds of
people still outside, along with their bags of food and clothing.
Eventually, the searches were moved inside to the Superdome floor,
where some people wrapped themselves in blankets and tried to sleep.
It
was almost 10:30 p.m. before the last person was searched and allowed
in. Thornton estimated 8,000 to 9,000 were inside when the doors closed
for the 11 p.m. curfew.
More than 600 people with medical needs
were inside. ''And we sent another 400 to hospitals,'' said Gen. Ralph
Lupin, who commands the 550 National Guard troops in the Dome.
''We've
got sick babies, sick old people and everything in between,'' Stephens
said. ''We're seen strokes, chest pain, diabetes patients passing out,
seizures, people without medicine, people with the wrong medicine. It's
been busy.''
Thornton worried about how everyone would fare over the next few days.
''We're
expecting to be here for the long haul,'' he said. ''We can make things
very nice for 75,000 people for four hours. But we aren't set up to
really accommodate 8,000 for four days.'
God help these folks, and all the rest down there.
A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement
claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was
fabricated.
The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher -
has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board
crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.
The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the
statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi,
currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.
The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a
retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission
(SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the
reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.
The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police
Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent
that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.
[...]
But Esson, who retired in 1994, questioned the officer's motives. He
said: "Any police officer who believed they had knowledge of any
element of fabrication in any criminal case would have a duty to act on
that. Failure to do so would call into question their integrity, and I
can't help but question their motive for raising the matter now."
An insider told Scotland on Sunday that the retired officer
approached them after Megrahi's appeal - before a bench of five
Scottish judges - was dismissed in 2002.
The insider said: "He said he believed he had crucial information. A
meeting was set up and he gave a statement that supported the
long-standing rumours that the key piece of evidence, a fragment of
circuit board from a timing device that implicated Libya, had been
planted by US agents.
"Asked why he had not come forward before, he admitted he'd been wary of breaking ranks, afraid of being vilified.
"He also said that at the time he became aware of the matter, no one
really believed there would ever be a trial. When it did come about, he
believed both accused would be acquitted. When Megrahi was convicted,
he told himself he'd be cleared at appeal."
The source added: "When that also failed, he explained he felt he had to come forward.
"He has confirmed that parts of the case were fabricated and that
evidence was planted. At first he requested anonymity, but has backed
down and will be identified if and when the case returns to the appeal
court."
The vital evidence that linked the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Megrahi
was a tiny fragment of circuit board which investigators found in a
wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity.
The fragment was later identified by the FBI's Thomas Thurman as
being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives,
and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to
Libya and the East German Stasi.
At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a
regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's
headquarters.
The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya - and Megrahi
- to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was
later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American
murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of
scientific qualifications.
Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi's lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.
The decision of a former Scottish police chief to back this claim
could add enormous weight to what has previously been dismissed as a
wild conspiracy theory. It has long been rumoured the fragment was
planted to implicate Libya for political reasons.
The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group
backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic
relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.
Following the trial, legal observers from around the world,
including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the
verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland.
Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from
the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more
than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the
bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.
A source close to Megrahi's defence said: "Britain and the US were
telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications
they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.
"The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the
script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected
agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a
manufactured case, mistakes were made."
Dr Jim Swire, who has publicly expressed his belief in Megrahi's
innocence, said it was quite right that all relevant information now be
put to the SCCRC.
Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the atrocity, said last
night: "I am aware that there have been doubts about how some of the
evidence in the case came to be presented in court.
"It is in all our interests that areas of doubt are thoroughly examined."
A spokeswoman for the Crown Office said: "As this case is currently
being examined by the SCCRC, it would be inappropriate to comment."
No one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland was available to comment.
The war was based and sold on lies. Nothing this administration has
said has been accurate or truthful. A majority of the American people
now believe this.
Smearing a mother who lost her child for no valid reason won't change this.
The rapidly dwindling minority of Americans who continue to search for
some rationale for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq has been driven to the
brink of breakdown by the success of Sheehan's protest. Go to the
website of William F. Buckley's National Review magazine and you will
find Sheehan described in headlines as "nutty," dismissed by columnists
as "the mouthpiece... of howling-at-the-moon, bile-spewing Bush haters"
and accused of "sucking up intellectual air" that, presumably, would be
better utilized by Condoleezza Rice explaining once more that it would
be wrong to read too much into the August 6, 2001, briefing document
that declared: "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." Human
Events, the conservative weekly newspaper, dismisses Sheehan as a
"professional griever" who "can claim to be in perpetual mourning for
her fallen son" -- as if there is some time limit on maternal sorrow
over the death of a child.
Fox News Channel spinner-in-chief Bill O'Reilly accuses Sheehan of
being "in bed with the radical left," including -- horrors! -- "9-11
families" that are still seeking answers about whether, in the first
months of 2001, the Bush administration was more focused on finding
excuses to attack Iraq than on protecting Americans from terrorism. And
Rush Limbaugh was on the radio the other day ranting about how,
"(Sheehan's) story is nothing more than forged documents. There's
nothing about it that's real..." (Just to clarify for Limbaugh
listeners: Cindy Sheehan's 24-year-old son Casey really did die in Iraq, and his mother really
would like to talk with President Bush about all those claims regarding
WMDs and al-Qaida ties that the administration used to peddle the
"case" for war.)
The pro-war pundits who continue to defend the occupation of Iraq
are freaked out by the fact that a grieving mother is calling into
question their claim that the only way to "support the troops" is by
keeping them in the frontlines of George W. Bush's failed experiment.
Bush backers are horrified that Sheehan's sincere and patriotic
anti-war voice has captured the nation's attention.
What the pro-war crowd does not understand is that Cindy Sheehan is
not inspiring opposition to the occupation. She is merely putting a
face on the mainstream sentiments of a country that has stopped
believing the president's promises with regard to Iraq. According to
the latest Newsweek poll, 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's
handing of the war, while just 26 percent support the president's
argument that large numbers of U.S. military personnel should remain in
Iraq for as long as it takes to achieve the administration's goals
there.
The supporters of this war have run out of convincing lies and
effective emotional appeals. Now, they are reduced to attacking the
grieving mothers of dead soldiers. Samuel Johnson suggested that
patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But, with their attacks
on Cindy Sheehan, the apologists for George Bush's infamy have found a
new and darker refuge.
So a surrogate war has produced a surrogate antiwar movement. This
time, mass protests would only cloud the issue. As the parent of a dead
soldier, Sheehan has so much moral authority precisely because so few
Americans including so few of us who supported the war risk sharing
her plight.
But if Sheehan's vigil says something important about Iraq, it also
says something important about President Bush. Sheehan, after all, has
only one demand: She wants to confront the president face to face. The
demand is so provocative because one of George W. Bush's defining
qualities is his aversion to exactly this sort of challenge. According to former Environmental
Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman, "There is a
palace guard, and they want to run interference for him." Former
Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill described Bush as "caught in an echo
chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle
around him that's tiny and getting smaller and in concert on
everything."
If our president could take the time to dress up in a flight suit
and travel to an aircraft carrier, an executive version of a Super Bowl
touchdown dance, why can he not take the time to answer Cindy Sheehan?
Move America Forward's Shady Dealings. Max Blumenthal
has some great information about the front group that has bankrolled
the Creepy Caravan tour to attack Cindy Sheehan. Here's a little about
Sal Russo:
"If Kaloogian wants to fight
corruption, he should get up, turn the light on, and take a look in his
own slimy bed. After all, Move America Forward's "Chief Strategist,"
Sal Russo, who handled Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial
campaign, is knee-deep in unethical business dealings and scandals."
and this: "That's right. Move America Forward's Sal Russo ran tax shelters and bilked campaign donors out of $200,000.
Oh, and then there's the little thing about Russo and Simon being in
bed with a major drug trafficker, something they still can't explain" ...read on
Freeper Bust Update: 08/28/05 "Ken Robinson, of Richardson,
Texas, who described himself as a Vietnam veteran, was carrying a sign
at a “You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy!” rally. The sign read, “How to
wreck your family in 30 days by ‘b**** in the ditch' Cindy Sheehan and a picture of the sign appears above in this post. .”
Kristinn Taylor, an event organizer with FreeRepublic.com, heard about
the sign and rushed up to Robinson. “This is our rally and you can't
do that here,” he said, only for Robinson to insist he was within his
rights....
“Just get outta here!” Robinson yelled, and aimed
a kick at Taylor's midsection. Taylor called for security, and a young
Woodway policeman quickly showed up."
To follow on to Scott Peck's People of the Lie,
one of the current memes in the business press is that oil prices are
high because there market speculation over "instability in Venezuela."
This
sort of flagrant public hypocrisy would be bad enough coming from any
individual, but coming from people who are providing investment advice,
they amount to malfeasance. Consider these points that might weigh in
judging the stability of a country stable:
1. Government. The
legitimacy of the vote for Hugo Chavez is almost unquestioned. The
legitimacy of the vote for George Bush is widely questioned. Chavez
handily survived a recall election in which his opposition had a huge
media advantage. Could George Bush do the same?
2. Financial.Venezuela has balanced its budgets. The US is running massive
government deficits. Venezuela has a huge trade surplus, becoming a
creditor nation. The US is running a huge trade deficit and is becoming
a debtor nation.
3. Social.Chavez is loved by the 70% of the
population that is poor and hated by the 10% of the population that is
wealthy. Bush's disapproval is approaching 60%, while his approval may
have fallen below 40%.
4. Global.Venezuela is at peace. The
United States is in an intractable war. Venezuela is widely admired
among its peers in Latin America and is building ties to Asia. The US
is increasingly disliked among its European peers, and is on a path to
confrontation with Asia.
Calling Venezuela "unstable" amounts
to up-is-downism. It is Washington, DC that is unstable, so unstable
that they want to assassinate an elected leader (and indeed overthrew
him several years ago, but were checkmated by his superior planning).
Financial
advisors who obey their fiduciary duty should be advising investors to
move investments out of this most unstable of nations, not printing
what amounts to Administration propaganda.
Over the past few years
this anxious opposition has made several attempts to get rid of Chávez,
with the tacit encouragement of Washington. They organised a coup in
April 2002 that rebounded against them two days later when the
kidnapped Chávez was returned to power by an alliance of the army and
the people. They tried an economic coup by closing down the oil
refineries, and this too was a failure. Last year's recall-referendum,
designed to lead to a defeat for Chávez, was an overwhelming victory
for him.
President Bush and his followers have now launched a full-scale
defense of his policy in Iraq and a full-on assault on his detractors.
And yet their weapon of choice is spin, not strategy. Listening to the
president speak about Iraq this week, one had the feeling that he must
be living in a parallel universe. Is he unwilling to level with the
American people about the cold reality that is Iraq today? Or is he
unaware of the minefield he has walked the country into?
The truth hurts. More than 60 U.S. troops have died
in Iraq since President Bush went on vacation. Iraq's interim
government has twice missed the deadline for presenting a constitution.
The current draft of the constitution not only threatens to create an
illiberal Shia theocracy that doesn't respect the rights of women and
religious minorities, but also risks intensifying the current
undeclared sectarian civil war. And the president's approval rating has
dropped to an all-time low of 36 percent -- lower than Richard Nixon's approval rating at the height of Watergate. Cindy Sheehan is not the only American who thinks that things aren't going so well in Iraq.
The
White House’s solution to its problems? Sending the president to the
friendly environs of Utah and Idaho and putting its spinmeister Dan
Bartlett on television to simply insist that "we have the right
strategy to prevail."
As a former White House chief of
staff, I can say that the most important duty of a senior advisor is
not to say "yes, sir," but to honestly present the facts and the
options available to the country. If the president's advisors can't
confront the truth or don't have the courage to tell the president the
truth, they shouldn't have taken the job in the first place.
Instead
of spending time plotting motorcade routes to avoid Cindy Sheehan
protests, the president’s advisors should be spending their time laying
out the situation on the ground and the impact the war is having on
terrorist networks, regional stability, sectarian conflict within Iraq,
our overstretched ground forces, and U.S. security.
The Center for American Progress has drafted a memo that outlines the facts and challenges in Iraq. This is the memo that the White House Iraq Group should – but probably won’t – send the president.
Jay Chase of Davenport New York rides
his 12-year-old horse, Will, past a gas station in Oneonta, New York.
Chase said this was the first time he had ridden his horse to run
errands instead of driving his car.
They started a war for oil that has actually decreased the number of
barrels produced by Iraq and they just rammed through Chimpy's energy
bill that does nothing but give tax breaks and kickbacks to the oil
industry. The GOP is not the party of responsibility, it's the party responsible.
At a town hall meeting this week, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) wanted to
talk about Social Security and Medicare, but the session quickly turned
to gas prices.
When Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) toured a Veterans
Affairs clinic Wednesday, the first question put to her was: "What are
you going to do about the high price of gasoline?"
And a growing number of GOP officials worry that, as the party
in power, Republicans will pay their own high price — at the ballot
box. They are scrambling to find ways to respond.
"People are mad as hell," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said.
Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) predicted: "When [voters] start to see
that this is not the end but the beginning [of high prices], they are
going to be kind of harsh."
[Rep. Joe] Barton [R-Oil Indusrty], the House Energy Committee chairman, said complaints about high prices were hard to escape.
Because his car has a congressional license plate, people have
come up to him and asked, "Are you Congressman Barton?" But with public
irritation so high, he said, "My temptation is to say, 'No, I'm just
working for him.' "
No doubt the oil companies have been gouging us for years and have
gotten more agressive about it, with the Enabler in Chief in office.
But, it doesn't matter if we have tons of the stuff! We have to get off
of petrol before the planet completely burns up. Commander Collins of
the recent Shuttle trip said that atmosphere looked like a very fragile
egg from up there and you could actually see not only holes in the
ozone and there was a noticable difference in where the coasts lines
are compared to where they were just a few years ago. This is about 90%
due to burning fossil fuels. We have to get off of this stuff and fast
or there really won't be anything left but oil.
And anyone who is running on high gas prices should make sure to point
out that it's the almighty "free market" that got us into this. Destroy
the supply while boosting the demand. Nice work, clowns.
A
painting of the United States sinking into a toilet now on display in
the cafeteria of the state Department of Justice has raised the ire of
the California state Republican Party, which is demanding that Attorney General
Bill Lockyer remove the image.
The
painting -- part of an exhibit of more than 30 works by lawyer artists
and pieces with overt legal themes -- has an American flag-painted
continental United States heading into a toilet. Next to it are the
words: "T'anks to Mr. Bush."
The
artist, Stephen Pearcy, a Berkeley lawyer with a house in Sacramento,
won earlier notoriety for hanging an effigy of an American soldier on
the outside of his home here with a sign saying "Bush lied, I died."
Angry residents tore the effigies down.
To support his thesis, Pearcy recites a litany of government actions he
objects to including torture of detainees, censorship, hiring "more cops
rather than teachers," SUVs and lack of corporate accountability.
In front of Pearcy's painting is a pair of ceramic Western boots whose
creator, Corrine Singleton, said represented Western justice.
Other artists also expressed political sentiments:
John K. Landgraf, who created the Blind Justice in her cell with blood
spattered across it, said "the current administration's constraint and abuse
of Justice (for whatever reason) cast an ominous shadow over our nation's
moral integrity."
Another artist called for an end to genocide in Rwanda.
"I
don't know why we need to tolerate the cheap artwork of a gadfly with a
world view that is so offensive to a majority of the people," said
Karen Hanretty, a spokeswoman for the California Republican Party.
Didn't I see Ms. Hanretty leaving WalMart the other day with a shopping cart full of Bill of Rights toilet paper? I think I did!
AOL Case Points to a Trend: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
The Internet service firm is not alone in making it difficult for customers to move on.
America Online Inc. agreed Wednesday to pay $1.25 million to settle
allegations that its customer service representatives ignored
cancellation requests in a case that highlighted how far companies were
willing to go to keep customers.
AOL, the world's biggest Internet service provider, withheld bonuses
from "retention consultants" who could not change the mind of nearly
half of those who called to cancel, according to a settlement agreement
between the company and New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer. With
thousands of dollars in monthly bonuses at stake, some customer service
agents who couldn't persuade a customer to stay simply didn't process
the cancellation order, Spitzer said.
Although AOL's case was extreme, aggressive tactics for keeping
customers are becoming increasingly common, say consumer advocates who
field complaints from people frustrated with how difficult it can be to
cancel a wide range of services.
Providers of phone and Internet plans, credit cards and cable TV as
well as newspapers and magazines do everything they can to keep
customers from leaving. Stiffer competition and the national Do Not
Call list, which blocks more than 100 million phone numbers from
telemarketers, make it harder for many businesses to win new customers
— so they're trying harder to hold on to the ones they have.
Their tools: pushy customer service agents, hidden charges and early-termination fees.
"It's very clear that these are blockades keeping consumers from making
competitive choices to move to another company," said Morgan Jindrich,
who runs a Consumers Union website dedicated to airing gripes about
telecommunications industry practices.
Jindrich, for instance,
said she tried to cancel her cable TV service because she was moving.
The automated phone prompts eventually led to an instruction to leave a
recorded message with her name, address and date she wished to have her
service suspended.
Five months later, she's still waiting.
However difficult it might be, even being able to switch to a company's
rival is a relatively new phenomenon, the result of explosive growth in
a host of services. For instance, when phone service was a monopoly,
the only option that disgruntled customers had was to go without a
phone. Before satellite TV, unhappy cable subscribers were left with
dusting off their rabbit-ear antennas.
Long before Wednesday's settlement, AOL had earned a reputation as
notoriously difficult to cancel. Frustrated members have dubbed its
customer service "AO-Hell."
AOL, owned by Time Warner Inc., has
reason to fight for every customer. Although still the largest online
service, AOL has lost nearly 6 million customers in the last three
years — falling to 20.8 million subscribers in the U.S. during the
second quarter from a peak of 26.7 million in September 2002.
Spitzer's office launched the investigation after about 300 New Yorkers
complained that AOL kept charging for service after they had requested
a cancellation.
Dulles, Va.-based AOL did not admit wrongdoing
in the Spitzer case, nor had it in previous settlements with the
Federal Trade Commission and Ohio's attorney general over similar
allegations. The company agreed to provide refunds for as many as four
months of service to New Yorkers who file claims. It will also change
its customer service practices nationwide, including an end to tying
bonuses to minimum "save" rates and use of an independent company to
verify cancellation requests.
AOL spokesman Nicholas J. Graham
said that many Internet companies designate certain employees to field
calls from customers intending to cancel and that those employees can
often allay members' concerns by suggesting new price plans or services.
"We have provided them with a compensation structure that provides
incentive to help them solve members' problems," Graham said.
But in their effort to keep customers, companies sometimes just tick them off even more.
Technology magazine Wired faced a backlash last month when collection
agencies began sending threatening letters, seeking $12, to subscribers
who had let their subscriptions lapse. Editor in Chief Chris Anderson
said those customers had signed up for an automatically renewing
subscription, but he said the practice was "a poor way to treat
customers" and promised to stop it immediately.
Although
perfectly legal, the tactic that rankles consumer advocates the most is
the early-termination fees imposed by mobile phone providers.
Phone companies say they charge these fees — generally $150 to $240 —
to recoup the costs of providing lower monthly fees and free or heavily
discounted phones. They also note that customers could choose plans
without such early-termination fees but that clients often don't want
to pay the extra monthly cost.
"The different industries have different ways to do it," said
Mierzwinski, referring to customer retention. "The cellphones have a
bigger hammer than a lot of others do: the early-termination penalty."
Most companies that offer subscription services deliberately make it
much easier to sign up than to cancel, said Charles Golvin, a principal
analyst for Forrester Research who follows consumer telecommunications.
Financial analysts and investors closely watch the rate at which
companies' customers cancel their service each quarter.
"I
won't necessarily ascribe evil intent to this," Golvin said, "but if
they make it a little more difficult for you to get out of that
service, even for a month or two, then that's better for their
financials overall."
President Bush vowed anew that there would be no
retreat from the war in Iraq as he addressed a rocking crowd of
military families Wednesday, a supportive contrast to the anti-war
demonstrators who have been shadowing him wherever he goes.
In all, more than 2,000 U.S. military service members have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Outside, Brenda Mansell of Boise was among the
protesters standing in one of the small close-in zones set up for
demonstrators. She said she put her 20-year-old son, a Marine, on a
plane Tuesday for his second tour of duty in Iraq.
"This has to stop," Mansell said, holding a photo of her son, Scott,
and a sign calling for his return home. "Maybe if it starts with the
mothers, the rest of the world will follow."
President
Bush, defending his Iraq war policy in the face of anti-war opposition
and slumping approval ratings, says pulling out before the mission is
complete would dishonor the memory of all the Americans who fought and
died inpursuit of freedom.
Translation: "Death before
dishonor, as long as it's someone else's kids doing the death part...
9/11. Support our troops in the noble cause. 9/11. Stay the course...
Terra... 9/11. You can't get fooled ...9/11 again!"
Words are funny, they run and hide
They carry poison, they get you high
Marvelous, but better yet
Words are something
We haven't yet destroyed...completely
Life is funny, full of pride and pain
Happy people, some of them insane
Beautiful, but oh so fleeting
Life is something
We haven't yet destroyed...completely
Raise a glass
To the silent ones
Raise a glass
And look around the room
Raise a glass
And make a toast
A toast to noble causes
A toast to noble causes
To the silent ones
God is love, and surely god is hate
Hire him, he'll jump right out your cake
Mysterious, in the cool of the garden
God is something
We haven't yet destroyed...completely
Ghosts are made, a thousand different ways
Carry them, carry them all of your days
Curious, in the void
Ghosts are something
We haven't yet destroyed...completely
Raise a glass
To the silent ones
Raise a glass
And look around the room
Raise a glass
And make a toast
A toast to noble causes
A toast to noble causes
To the silent ones
Words are funny, they run and hide
They carry poison, they get you high
Marvelous, but better yet
Words are something
We haven't yet destroyed...completely
Life is funny, full of pride and pain
Happy people, some of them insane
Beautiful, but oh so fleeting
Life is something
We haven't yet destroyed...completely
Raise a glass
To the silent ones
Raise a glass
And look around the room
Raise a glass
And make a toast
A toast to noble causes
A toast to noble causes
To the silent ones
+++
Mortaljive: This song is dedicated to Cindy and Casey Sheehan.
Taylor: Troops short of armor
BILOXI - U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor said Tuesday night in a town hall
meeting that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has made it difficult
to get armor for troops in Iraq.
Since the war began in 2003, he said he has been contacted by parents
of military personnel about the lack of adequate body armor and he has
seen through visits to Iraq that soldiers are armoring their vehicles
themselves. Taylor said the Department of Defense is using words to
trick people about the degree to which vehicles are armored by saying
they meet standards but, in reality, only six in 10 vehicles are
armored.
"I can't tell you how frustrated I have been asking questions about it," Taylor said.
He also said there were problems with the production of armor for
vehicles. He said he visited the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois and,
in a defense factory equal to "three Superdomes," there were only four
production workers at their stations at 2 on a Friday afternoon.
He also said there was not much
information from the Defense Department given to the congressional
delegation related to technology available to soldiers. He said he saw
a device on a Humvee that was made to destroy the signal insurgents use
to remotely detonate the improvised explosive devices that they use to
attack convoys.
Taylor said Rumsfeld told him he could not say how many of the
signal-jamming devices were being sent to Iraq because that information
was classified, leaving Taylor to wonder if the government is doing an
adequate job of protecting combat forces in Iraq.
President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh
reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the
country's vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the
control of terrorist extremists.
On the day after Hurricane Katrina was declared to be not as bad as
originally feared, it became clear that the effects of the storm had
been, after all, beyond devastation. Homeowners in Biloxi, Miss.,
staggered through wrecked neighborhoods looking for their loved ones.
In New Orleans, the mayor reported that rescue boats had begun pushing
past dead bodies to look for the stranded living. Gas leaks began
erupting into flames, and looking at the city, now at least 80 percent
under water, it was hard not to think of last year's tsunami, or even
ancient Pompeii.
This is where about 8,000+ of New Orleans' poorest residents have taken
shelter, in the Superdome. The NYTimes reports now even that imposing structure is taking 
A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement
claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was
fabricated. 
The rapidly dwindling minority of Americans who continue to search for
some rationale for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq has been driven to the
brink of breakdown by the success of Sheehan's protest. Go to the
website of William F. Buckley's National Review magazine and you will
find Sheehan described in headlines as "nutty," dismissed by columnists
as 
The pro-war pundits who continue to defend the occupation of Iraq
are freaked out by the fact that a grieving mother is calling into
question their claim that the only way to 
To follow on to Scott Peck's People of the Lie,
one of the current memes in the business press is that oil prices are
high because there market speculation over 
President Bush and his followers have now launched a full-scale
defense of his policy in Iraq and a full-on assault on his detractors.
And yet their weapon of choice is spin, not strategy. Listening to the
president speak about Iraq this week, one had the feeling that he must
be living in a parallel universe. Is he unwilling to level with the
American people about the cold reality that is Iraq today? Or is he
unaware of the minefield he has walked the country into?
They started a war for oil that has actually decreased the number of
barrels produced by Iraq and they just rammed through Chimpy's energy
bill that does nothing but give tax breaks and kickbacks to the oil
industry. The GOP is not the party of responsibility, it's the 
America Online Inc. agreed Wednesday to pay $1.25 million to settle
allegations that its customer service representatives ignored
cancellation requests in a case that highlighted how far companies were
willing to go to keep customers.
