Lemley Political Homepage

And we’ve been thinking about what a bad person Sadaam was when he ran Iraq under martial law. He had a secret police and killed at least 5000 people although the 400,000 figure that Tony Blair had been using and Bush adopted has been discredited.

The strange thing is that the new Prime Minister Allawi who is a product of the CIA and hasn’t lived in Iraq for at least twenty years is thinking of declaring martial law and he has reconstituted the secret police and night time sweeps where folks are rounded up and taken to jail. We know that kind of stuff warms John Asscroft’s heart but it hardly is a democracy. Of course the thinking is that Allawi has to do this for a while to get control of the situation. Funny thing, so did Sadaam. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Our bet is that if the Bushies win there will be no elections in January. If there are Allawi will be the candidate and win. The U.S. will then have gone to war to replace one dictator with another and the new dictator will be our friend as was Sadaam initially. And the folks rounded up and killed will be Saddam loyalists instead of Sadaam haters. The more things change the more they stay the same.

And Condoleezza Rice says the Nation is safer now than at any time since 9/11 although according to her and Shrub and Big Time and Rummy the U.S. is subject to a big attack at any time. Empirically, if the U.S. is subject to a big attack and there hasn’t been one in three years then the U.S. is three years closer to the big attack than it was and that would mean it is less safe not more safe unless Rice is not talking about the U.S. being attacked as a measure of the safer comment.

Maybe she meant we are safer from George Bush and Big Time Dick and their friends since it is only 108 days until the November elections.

And from what we have read the bipartisan commission in its need to be bipartisan is placing blame for inaction on both the Bush and Clinton administrations. The report according to the NYT does give credit to Clinton and Berger for trying to keep track of Bin Ladin while the Bushies led by Rice seem to have taken no action.

We have noticed that Bush in his public appearances has begun linking Clinton to himself by saying “over the last ten years” whenever 9/11 is mentioned.

One omission that has conveniently slipped reporters minds is that hundreds of FBI folks and probably more than a few CIA agents were tied up for many years by a Republican Congress investigating Clinton’s sex life. To the Republicans and the national media Clinton’s sex life was the most important event occurring on the planet. Moreover the Director of the FBI aligned himself with the Republicans as did the CIA director when it looked like Clinton was toast. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were less than cooperative with the Clinton White house and Clinton spent a good deal of time getting his people in charge at the Pentagon and then getting the Pentagon underlings to cooperate with his policies. The Republicans opposed intervention in Bosnia and accused Clinton of diverting attention from whatever sex investigation they were conducting when Clinton tried to take Osama with missiles.

And Fed Governor Moskow is on the tape saying that the Fed stands ready to provide liquidity to the markets in the event of a terrorist attack. So we have Asscroft, Rice, Ridge and now the Fed suggesting an imminent terrorist attack. Yet in every speech Bush gives he mentions how Americas is safer now. How so George?

And the NYT reports that military detention operations suffered from poor training, haphazard organization and outmoded policies (could that be torture?) but those flaws didn’t directly contribute to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

We always find it comforting when the folks who are being criticized investigate themselves and find nothing wrong. The Bush White House does this often and with a Republican Congress is home free. It does save money for the taxpayers to do it this way.

And we said yesterday that the Berger burglary of archive documents is an inside Washington kind of story. But the WaPo this morning had an article that contained new information.

For one Joe Lockhart the former Press Secretary at the Clinton White House is acting as Berger’s spokesperson and doing an excellent job.

Secondly, Susan Schmidt doesn’t have her name on the WaPo story below but at the end of the story there is a squib that she contributed to the story. That is important because Schmidt is a mouthpiece for the Republicans and especially the Bushies. To say she has an in at the White House is an understatement. Whenever there is a leak from a high government official to the Washington Post Susan Schmidt is involved in the story.

“For the second day in a row, administration officials said yesterday that more of President Bush's aides knew about an investigation of former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger than the White House originally acknowledged...

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that some National Security Council officials knew Berger -- who has resigned from his position as informal adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry -- was suspected of mishandling National Archives documents that were being sought by the commission…

Former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart, who is serving as a spokesman for Berger during the controversy, said the expanding circle of officials who the White House acknowledges knew of the criminal investigation heightens his suspicion about the timing of the disclosure that Berger is under investigation…

"This is the third day in a row that the story has changed," Lockhart said. "Did the political operation know? Did [adviser] Karl Rove know? I think it's time for them to come clean, say what they knew, when they knew it, and what role if anything they had in leaking it…

Berger has acknowledged removing copies of a classified "after-action report" that he had ordered to study the Clinton administration's handling of terrorist threats at the time of the millennium, but he said the removal was unintentional. He returned some copies after being contacted by Archives officials, but some copies are missing and were apparently discarded.”

The last paragraph (the bold is ours) makes it clear that the Republicans are saying that Berger allegedly took copies of a report that he (Berger) ordered written and had already read. What can be sinister about that? We will reiterate that we believe Berger’s actions were clumsy or stupid and that the Kerry folks should have seen this coming. But be that as it may, in the words of someone, there is no there there.

Not to risk blasphemy, but shouldn't a special commission look into whether God provided the warrior President with faulty intelligence? Recall that George W. Bush has confided to Bob Woodward that in shaping his plans for invading Iraq he relied on advice from a "higher father," not on Poppy Bush in Texas, the former President. Now we learn from advance news leaks that the 9/11 Commission has concluded from its investigation that it was Iran, not Iraq, that collaborated with Osama bin Ladin's Al Qeda terrorists before their attack on America. Oops. Have we gone to war against the wrong country? One assumes it was not the Almighty who confused the two nations. Maybe Bush suffered from a fuzzy connection in his prayer circuitry. So close to God, yet so distant from the truth.

The FBI is warning of domestic terrorist attacks against the media at the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Maybe folks will watch with the same fascination they watch NASCAR racing.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/http://atrios.blogspot.com/ points out that Bush and Rice and Cheney keep saying that there have been no major terrorist attacks since 9/11. What was the anthrax attack all about? One fellow who wasn’t a Moslem shut down the office buildings in Washington and forced the Federal and State Governments to spend over a billion dollars. And our Homeland Security folks still don’t have a clue as to who did it. Feel safer now?

The

U.S.

Postal Service issued a George W. Bush stamp. It soon discovered that the stamps were not sticking to envelopes, so it established a commission to investigate the matter. The commission reported the following findings:

And Bloomberg reports that the White House was made aware of the Sandy Berger investigation before it was made public. But the White House disclaims any knowledge of how the info became public. Their answer is the same as the Valerie Pflame outing, “Who us?”

In our readings of various stories the consensus seems that Berger kept copies of some documents and also took notes on some documents. Taking notes is a no-no for then those notes become classified? The reports that are missing are reports that he ordered Dick Clark (the terrorism guy not the bandstand guy) to write. This matter has been under investigation since November of 2003.

The Kerry folks were nuts or blindsided to have Berger as an Advisor. The Bushies are overplaying this since it is basically an inside Washington story and is only meat or poison for the cognoscenti not the average American voter.

From http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/ Iran/Al Qaeda Stupid Question Time

President Bush said on Monday that the United States was actively investigating ties between the Iranian government and Al Qaeda, including intelligence unearthed by the independent Sept. 11 commission showing that Iran may have offered safe passage to terrorists who were later involved in the attacks.

Can I ask a really dumb ass question here? Three years after 9/11, we're just now asking whether Iran was involved in 9/11? Why was a link not explored in the immediate weeks and months following the attacks?

If this is all really about defending our country, wouldn't our leaders have aggressively pursued all possible links to the terrorists IN THOSE EARLY WEEKS and then developed a comprehensive plan to defeat them in all quarters? Why did it take the 9/11 Commission to unearth these "facts?"

Really, I want to know if we're fighting terror or if it has just become a Pentagon water cooler euphemism for "we can do whatever we want."

WASHINGTON, July 20 (Reuters) - Economic reports showing the U.S. economic recovery has primarily benefited the well-off are accurate, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday.

"That's what our data show as well," the Fed chairman said in response to questions from the Senate Banking Committee after testifying on the economy.

Greenspan said the

U.S.

education system has failed to provide many citizens with skills that will let them earn high wages.

The movie Fahrenheit 9/11 will surpass the $100 million mark in revenues this week end. That suggests over 10 million viewers of the movie. The video disk is going to be released in September so closet Republicans can watch it in the security of their own homes.

1. From http://americablog.blogspot.com/ we learn that the AP reports that Pope John Paul II appointed an Austrian bishop to investigate a scandal involving alleged sex acts and pornographic pictures at a Catholic seminary near Vienna. And there is the saying about casing stones that the Archbishop of St Louis might take to heart. There is an awful lot of bad stuff going on the Catholic Church for Bishops to worry about and clean up before they begin running the United States.

3. from yesterday’s Washington Post we gleaned the following:

"This problem doesn't start in the waiting room," Cheney said in remarks released by the campaign. "It doesn't start in the operating room. The problem starts in the courtroom."

An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office said the malpractice bill would benefit physicians and the government but would reduce private health insurance premiums a scant 0.4 percent.

"The Bush administration largely gets it backwards," said Columbia University law professor and physician William M. Sage. "They say health care is expensive because of lawsuits. I say lawsuits are expensive because of our health care system."

"The solution that organized medicine and the White House are supporting is a fix for the doctors to some degree," said Martin J. Hatlie, president of the Chicago-based Partnership for Patient Safety, which advises hospitals on safety improvements. "It helps keep their premiums down. It does nothing to advance the quality of care, nothing to advance the safety of care, nothing to more fairly compensate claimants or address the other really significant problems in the current medical-legal system."

On the Senate floor July 14, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said, 'Will activist judges not elected by the American people destroy the institution of marriage, or will the people protect marriage as the best way to raise children? My vote is with the people' ['Ban on Gay Marriage Fails,' front page, July 15].

Mr. Frist should know that a majority (28) of state supreme courts are elected directly by the people. In another 11 states, judges are appointed by the governor for one term but then must be elected by the people for any successive terms. Only six state supreme courts are directly appointed by the governor, while the remaining five are elected by the legislatures.
If the senator wants to talk about a branch of government not elected by the people, see the executive: President Bush lost the popular election by more than 500,000 votes.

From an April 20, 1998 article in Bernama, a Malaysian wire service (not available online):

States Defense Secretary Dick Cheney today hit out at his government for imposing unilateral economic sanctions like the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, saying they have been "ineffective, did not provide the desired results and a bad policy".

"I have made it clear that our (the US unilateral) sanctions policy is wrong," he said when asked to comment on the Iran-Libya Act which contains provisions for sanctions to be imposed by the US against foreign companies making investment beyond US$ 20 million a year in the oil and gas sector of the targeted countries.

Malaysia, which is against the extra-territorial law, has said that Petronas and other Malaysian companies will continue to invest abroad despite the US threat of sanctions under the Act.

Petronas is currently involved in a US$ 2 billion gas field project in Iran undertaken jointly with SA Total of France and Gazprom of Russia.

Speaking to reporters after calling on Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad at the Prime Minister's office here, Cheney, who is now the chairman and CEO of Halliburton, said: "The US needs to be much more restraint then we have been in terms of pursuing unilateral economic sanctions."

7. We continue to be disturbed by the fact that everyone accepts as fact that the Socialists won in Spain because of the Madrid bombings. This UPI article http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040316-014634-4441r - puts the lie to that factoid. In fact the Socialists were up by 2% in some polls before the bombing. The bombing and subsequent reaction of the Spanish government did seal the victory for the Socialists. But many experts including this article suggest that is was the governments attempt to lie to the people that was discovered and resulted in the more impressive victory for the Socialists.

8. Another interesting article by Maureen Farrell can be found at http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/07/far04023.html and it discusses the reaction of the radical right to the possibility of an untoward event around election time.

9. It’s all one happy family as Jenna and her sister Barbara are traveling with dad around the country as he campaigns. One knee slapping incident occurred yesterday that so amused the press and reporters following the campaign. As the AP reports the happy occurrence: after Bush got in the back seat beside Jenna, the 22-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin started smiling through the window at about 10 to 12 news photographers and radio reporters stationed on a platform.

Then she stuck her tongue out and began to laugh.

As everyone on the platform started to laugh and snap photographs, Jenna Bush looked at them for a few more seconds, smiling and laughing.

SAFER? President Bush, in remarks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on July 12:

America is safer....the American people are safer....the American people are safer....the American people are safer....the American people are safer....the American people are safer....the American people are safer....America and the world are safer.

Ever since a hijacked jetliner crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, parents whose children attend day care there have been assured their kids were safe. But last week, Defense Department officials told them the center would close in the fall because they could no longer ensure the children's safety.

...."The threat assessments have determined it would be imprudent to continue," said Glenn Flood, a spokesman for the Defense Department.

2) California Governor Arnold’s crude comment about “girlie men” is receiving overwhelming approval on AOL and from the Cable talking heads. One can say consider the source and dismiss the approvals. And one can say Arnold was only using a line from Saturday Night Live which was used to make fun of Arnold but he reality is that the manner in which the phrase was used is what is objectionable. Arnold is no longer an entertainer and what he says affects more than his fans. For the same reason that Dick Cheney’s use of an expletive on the Senate floor and directed toward a Senator was an abhorrent and despicable act, Arnold’s use of the term was derogatory to a whole class of people. We know we are in the minority on this topic but that doesn’t make us wrong. it only places us in the minority.

3) Reuters reports that U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday urged transparency in an August recall referendum against Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and backed calls for open access for observers monitoring the vote. His comments could draw criticism from left-winger Chavez who has clashed frequently with Washington over what he says is U.S. meddling with his government in the world's fifth largest oil exporter. "The referendum must be conducted in an honest and open way," Bush told reporters after meeting with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, whom he said agreed.

4) With the Bushies out to embarrass the Dems at very opportunity it is very strange that Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor to President Clinton would have either intentionally or unintentionally taken documents being reviewed by him for the 9/11 Commission. Ashcroft on his minions are going to be all over this and reporter Susan Schmidt at the Washington Post and columnist William Safire at the NYT are going to have a field day with this. Dumbbbbbbbbbb.

5) Joe Wilson who said there was no uranium being sought by Iraq in Africa has now become the whipping boy of the Republican right. The sixteen words in Bush’s state of the Union address about Niger yellowcake has spawned a billion words on a thousand websites. It is interesting how folks on both sides get bogged down in the minutiae of an idea when the overall reality is that Bush and Powell and Cheney and Rice and all the neocons were wrong about Iraq. Whether the American people want to believe or not believe the Bushies is not dependent on Joe Wilson or his wife Valerie Pflame but on the common sense of the American electorate. It all revolves around the smell test.

6) Going back to Sandy Berger, we will bet that Berger gets indicted before the Asscroft folks find the anthrax killer or the person in the White Hose who outed Valerie Pflame.

7) In the following blog post our favorite irreverent website explains that it is currently being monitored by a government agency set up to watch for potential traitors to the cause of American freedom. The website is patrioptboy.blogspot.com and goes by the Name of Jesus’ General.

Monitoring Dissent

My blog, Jesus' General, and at least one other liberal-oriented blog, Call of Cthulhu , are being monitored by the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), a domestic intelligence organization formed following the Sept. 11 attacks. This monitoring appears to be ongoing, because Cthulhu alerted me to it last spring when his logs recorded a visitor from CIFA who had been referred from a link at Jesus' General. Today, I noticed another entry for CIFA.MIL in my log (see the screen cap at right)--I use a free logging service which only captures the last 100 viewers, so I've had a hard time documenting it until now.

Another little-known Pentagon group, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, was set up two years ago. With 400 service members and civilians stationed around the globe, the CIFA was originally charged with protecting the military and critical infrastructure from spying by terrorists and foreign intelligence services. But in August, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, issued a directive ordering the unit to maintain a "domestic law-enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense."

The CIFA also works closely with the FBI and is conducting some duties for civilian agencies. For example, according to Department of Agriculture documents, the CIFA is in charge of doing background checks on foreign workers and scientists employed by the department's agricultural-research service. The group also provides information to the Information and Security Command, or Inscom, the Army's main intelligence organization, based at Fort Belvoir, Md.

Quietly created post-September 11, CIFA has a broad charter to provide counterintelligence and security support to the Defense Department around the world and within the United States.

"Worldwide, more than 400 civilian and military employees work for CIFA with the ultimate goal of detecting and neutralizing the many different forms of espionage regularly conducted against the United States by terrorists, foreign intelligence services and other covert and clandestine groups," according to the Defense Security Service.

"The threats posed by these adversaries include actions to kill or harm U.S. citizens; to steal critical information or assets (military or civilian); or destroy critical infrastructures."

Are Cthulhu and I suspected of being "terrorists" or members of "foreign intelligence services and other covert and clandestine groups?" If not, why are we being monitored by CIFA? Is it because we are opposed to the Bush regime?

The funny thing about this is that CIFA could hide their IP address if they chose to do so, but they don't. Are they just too stupid to do it, or are they brazenly attempting to intimidate us? If it's the latter, they've failed in my case. In any event, it's beginning to look like COINTELPRO may be making a comeback.

Update: Cthulhu points out that a whois query for CIFA.MIL leads us to a nameserver belonging to nipr.mil. What is nipr.mil:

Nipr.mil is not a single domain but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations."

We were traveling over the week-end and so in preparing these comments which we glean from other liberal websites and also news organizations we were not able to give full credit for all. We will do so in the future. For informational purposes the websites we visit on a regular basis are:

1) the NYT reported several days ago that the White House is refusing to give the Senate investigating committee the one page “President’s Summary” of the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate dealing with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

We guess one page is about the limit of Shrub’s reading attention. The original document was 93 pages. Whoever condensed it to one page must be a master of discernment.

3) Mike Ditka decided not to run for the Senate in Illinois after all was said and done. He may have had a few problems convincing the voters of his respect for democracy and elections when it was reported that Ditka had never registered to vote in an election while living in Illinois.

4) The Gay Marriage amendment failed in the Senate last week. But the Republicans have the issue they wanted to run on in the Presidential elections. With the Republicans it is more important to have the issue than to win the vote

5) U.S. retail sales fell in June by the most since February 2003, underscoring forecasts that consumer spending slowed in the second quarter from the previous three months.

6) Tax cuts for the richest 1 percent of Americans are costing about as much this year as the combined budgets for Veterans Affairs, Energy, Environmental Protection and Homeland Security. The Bush administration's "Planning Guidance for the FY 2006 Budget" projects cutbacks in all those areas plus education, housing, health care and nearly every domestic responsibility.”

7) Another potential Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois withdrew when it was revealed that an internal White House inquiry found that Andrea Grubb Barthwell, a top official in the drug policy office, engaged in 'lewd and abusive behavior'.

In front of her staff, Andrea Grubb Barthwell made repeated comments about the sexual orientation of a staff member and used a kaleidoscope to make sexually offensive gestures, according to the findings of a March 19, 2003, 'hostile workplace memorandum' prepared by drug policy office staff.

8) and The American Spectator (TAS,) July 16, 2004: Democrats think they've come a long way, but sexism remains institutionalized in their ranks. Hillary, as a woman, didn't stand a chance to get on this year's ticket. It’s good to see that this conservative rag is worried about women’s rights. Not.

9) Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell today halted deployment of Diebold Election Systems’ electronic voting devices in Ohio for the 2004 General Election. The decision is based on preliminary findings from the secretary of state's second round of security testing conducted by Compuware Corporation showing the existence of previously identified, but yet unresolved security issues. Hardin, Lorain and Trumbull counties had selected to use new Diebold equipment this November. Those counties will use their current voting devices in 2004.

“As I made clear last year, I will not place these voting devices before Ohio’s voters until identified risks are corrected,” Blackwell said. “Diebold Election Systems has successfully addressed many, but not all, of the problems that were identified in our first security review. The lack of comprehensive resolution prevents me from giving county boards of elections a green light for this November.

“I look forward to working with Diebold Election Systems and our other qualified election system vendors as they continue to bolster security and develop voting devices that meet Ohio’s requirement for voter-verifiable paper audit trails.”

10) and family values in Oklahoma coupled with the Hippocratic oath lead us to the Republican runoff in Oklahoma where former Congressman Tom Coburn has managed to separate himself from his competition since Coburn, a practicing physician, caused a political uproar this week by declaring in an interview that he favors the death penalty for "abortionists and other people who take life."

11) Billmon at http://billmon.org/ has an excellent post on the recent scheming of Jeb Bush's Florida machine. As Billmon explains, Florida refined its list of felons who could not vote (in light of the abuses in 2000), but refused to submit copies of that list to the press. CNN sued and eventually obtained the copies of the list, which lo and behold, had a bunch of African-Americans but almost no Latinos.

According to the article the state had tried to keep the list a secret. It fought a lawsuit aimed at opening the records to the public. A series of errors emerged once a Tallahassee judge rejected the state's arguments and released the records on July 1. The error that proved final — and garnered national attention — was that Hispanics were largely overlooked because of glitches ["glitches" would be more appropriate] in how the state records information about race and ethnicity. The list was created by cross-checking voter registration and criminal records. Of the more than 47,000 voters on the potential felon list, Hispanics made up one tenth of 1 percent — this in a state where nearly 1 in 5 residents is Hispanic. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a written statement Saturday saying the exclusion of Hispanics was "unintentional and unforeseen." "We are deeply concerned and disappointed that this has occurred," Hood said. . . . Many Hispanic voters vote Republican.

The Cuban population votes overwhelmingly Republican. Only 50 — yes, 50 — Latinos were on a list of 47,000 names.

12) For the third year in a row, the Bush administration will withhold funds from the U.N. Population Fund because the agency cooperates with activities in

China

that promote abortion. The decision to withhold $34 million has dismayed supporters of the agency, who say it does not condone abortion and advocates voluntary family planning. The debate has election-year overtones.

13) comments made by Dennis Miller -- producer and host of CNBC's Dennis Miller -- at a Wisconsin rally for President George W. Bush July 14 drew no media fire, despite the fact that, as Washington Post "Reliable Source" columnist Richard Leiby reported July 15, Miller "impl[ied] a homosexual attraction between Kerry and Edwards."

14) And on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that hourly earnings of production workers – non-management workers ranging from nurses and teachers to hamburger flippers and assembly-line workers - fell 1.1 percent in June, after accounting for inflation. The June drop, the steepest decline since the depths of recession in mid-1991, came after a 0.8 percent fall in real hourly earnings in May.

Coming on top of a 12-minute drop in the average workweek, the decline in the hourly rate last month cut deeply into workers' pay. In June, production workers took home $525.84 a week, on average. After accounting for inflation, this is about $8 less than they were pocketing last January, and are the lowest level of weekly pay since October 2001.

16) and from The Observer

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a

government pamphlet on

Iraq

's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

The admission that the figures were widely inflated came in a week when Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

17) and the September 11 commission's report, due out Thursday, says Iran may have facilitated the 2001 attacks on the United States by providing eight to 10 al-Qaeda hijackers with safe passage to and from training camps in Afghanistan, US media reports said.

Time and Newsweek, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, said Iran relaxed border controls and provided 'clean' passports for the so-called 'muscle hijackers' to transit Iran to and from Osama bin Laden's camps between October 2000 and February 2001.

18) The

U.S.

has withheld its contribution of $34 million from its yearly obligation to the U.N. Population Fund, because they think that somebody in

China

is using that money to "FORCE" abortions upon unsuspecting, obviously Christian women who would otherwise never use birth control or abortion.

They have no actual "intelligence" to support these accusations, they have no EVIDENCE that any of this has actually taken place, but Colin Powell wrote a letter to Congress saying that, since Dumbya is a bible-banging right-wing woman-hater, that we should not support the U.N. in their efforts towards sex-education, disease prevention, or birth control.

A quote from the article: "The U.N. group estimated that the money blocked by the Bush administration could have helped prevent two million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 abortions, 4,700 mothers' deaths in childbirth and more than 77,000 infant and child deaths."

19) Chalmers Johnson at the LA Times reports that quietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan.

This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster.

Operation Summer Pulse '04 was almost surely dreamed up at the Pearl Harbor headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command and its commander, Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, and endorsed by neocons in the Pentagon. It is doubtful that Congress was consulted. This only goes to show that our foreign policy is increasingly made by the Pentagon.
...

Needless to say, the Chinese are not amused. They say that their naval and air forces, plus their land-based rockets, are capable of taking on one or two carrier strike groups but that combat with seven would overwhelm them. So even before a carrier reaches the Taiwan Strait, Beijing has announced it will embark on a crash project that will enable it to meet and defeat seven

U.S.

carrier strike groups within a decade.

20) And in what has now become the Cheney non apology for Republicans the Governator Arnold refuses to apologize for a remark calling Democrats who refuse to support him ‘girlie men’. That type of stubborn ignorance equals the “I feel much better’ comment of Dick Cheney after telling Senator Patrick Leahy to “go fuck yourself” on the Senate floor.

1) We will be traveling for the next few days bringing our grandchildren to the farm and so this will be the last post till Monday.

2) We see that ‘Slim Fast’ has fired Whoopi Goldberg as a spokesperson because she made some derogatory and “obscene” references to Shrub in a comedy routine. Whoopi has been making obscene comments for years. The thought police are coming back for the election season.

3) If Whoopi can’t speak then it looks like Big Time Dick won’t get any Viagra gigs when his time runs out this fall since his obscene epithet was as bad as they get.

4) For some reason AOL has chosen the worst pictures of Martha and Hillary to write about Martha’s upcoming sentencing Friday and Hillary not being given a speaking spot at the Democrat convention.

6) Times change and Hillary is a Senator and Barbara Mikulski is a very good speaker and the deaconess of the women senators.

1) And we wish all our Francophile friends and relatives a happy Bastille Day. As far as we know neither the Republican Congress nor the White House have any special plans to celebrate the day.

2) We may have been too kind to Condi Rice yesterday since we saw an interview she had with Wolf Blitzer last night where she disclaimed any knowledge of any efforts by anyone in the Administration’s to explore the possibility of delaying the elections for any reason. Our presumption is that the idea didn’t fly and is quickly being returned to the Cheney Cave from where it probably originated.

3) The Kerry ads with Edwards doing the talking and Kerry doing the motions are quite good. We wonder if Powell will begin doing the talking for Bush or whether the Repubs will stick with McCain as Bush’s spokesperson.

4) Bush keeps hitting Kerry on abandoning the troops in Iraq which is a ludicrous charge. But Kerry has to develop a one liner to counter the charge.

5) From this morning’s NYT comes the report that new government estimates suggest that employers will reduce or eliminate drug coverage for 3.8 million retirees when Medicare offers such coverage in 2006. And that means lower benefits. Way to go Shrub.

6) Another item in the NYT says that the White House and CIA refuse to give the Senate Committee investigating pre-war intelligence the one page memo given to President Bush about WMD etc. Given Bush’s well known dislike for reading that memo was probably all he read before declaring war.

7) Go to http://www.bostonphoenix.com/medialog/index.asp for the complete discussion of how the NYT distorts Kerry’s vote on the $89 billion Iraq supplemental and the actual words Kerry has used to describe his vote. It is a good discussion of the issue.

8) At http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040719&s=coleweb which is the Nation website there is an interesting article by David Cole about how O’Reilly edits what folks-at least us- thought was a live show. It’s worth reading if you wonder why the folks on his show always seem so passive.

1) On Monday National Security Advisor Rice: “style='mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>We've had elections in this country when we were at war, even when we were in civil war. And we should have the elections on time. That's the view of the president, that's the view of the administration." Thank You and we hope that is the end of the story. Somehow we don’t think it is.

3) If you missed Krugman today he is a must read. Krugman is always a must read. He talks about Tom DeLay and the manner in which he used Enron money to take control of redistricting in Texas. He also mentions in passing the electrical bills created for folks by the shenanigans of the Enrons of the world that the FERC has hand slapped as punishment. The link is http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/opinion/13KRUG.html?hp

4) The Philippine Government has decided to withdraw its mighty force of 59 human rights workers from IRAQ in order to save the life of the hostage. The tough guy and gal cable TV brigade is probably all over them about wimping out. So goes the Coalition of the Willing. And after 200 years of misuse by the United States (even WWII saw decisions made for American interests versus Philippine folks as MacArthur bypassed a lot of islands in his campaign) the Philippine government is correct to save one person’s life.

5) There is a story about Pitney Bowes and spiraling health care costs in the WSJ today. The gist of the story is that not even large companies can control costs because they are up against powerful interest groups.

The average cost of each hospital visit for Pitney Bowes employees last year rose 9% to $10,600 even though Pitney Bowes had been able to keep the average hospital visit the same as the year before at 3.7 days. The WSJ reporter goes on to say: “One of the biggest culprits? Increasingly powerful hospital groups in California, whose price increases pushed the company's average cost of a hospital admission in that state to $20,500, twice what it paid elsewhere.”

Other contributors to higher costs were local hospital mergers, doctors prescribing MRIs and CT-scans at their own privately owned facilities, and the increased marketing of expensive drugs. Pitney Bowes had 46,000 claims and saw the overall cost of its medical insurance rise by 12% so imagine the bargaining power of individual insurance purchasers.

6) Some Republicans in Illinois are pushing Mike Ditka to run as the Republican nominee for Senator in the November election. And Ditka says he is considering it. As we said in the olden days, Far Out.

7) Slate online magazine reports that Theresa Chambers, a National park Service police Chief has been terminated. It seems she told a Washington Post reporter that budget constraints had forced a reduction in police patrols in parks and parkways around Washington. Such honesty is a no-no in the Bush regime. The whole story is contained at http://slate.msn.com/id/2103739/ .

VP Cheney is glad he vented and we would presume he wants all the demonstrators at his rally to vent if it makes them feel good too. Unfortunately, demonstrators who vent or who wear t-shirts that vent tend to get arrested.

The folks who gave us the Supreme Court appointment of President Bush are seeking to determine whether the Constitution allows them to delay the November Presidential elections if there is a terrorist attack near election time. We had chuckled and dismissed those far left kooks who suggested that the Bushies would do most anything to stay in power. Now they look prescient. See: http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/

The Washington Post has a story this morning about Tom DeLay taking $100,000 from Enron for his Texas re-districting effort. You have to be registered to read the WaPo article but the pertinent sentences are here (third story down). The first story also poses and interesting question: http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/ . By the way, four of the five Republicans investigating DeLay for the House Ethics Committee received donations from DeLay’s PAC. See: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/politics/2674446

Ron Reagan Jr. is going to address the Democratic National Convention. We don’t think he’ll have nice things to say about the Bushies. Now all the Dems need to do is to get Mary Cheney, Big Time Dick’s daughter to address the convention on gay rights. Won’t happen but it would be sweet if it did.

After all the brouhaha about having professional screeners at airports the private screeners are coming back. The Bushies are great on make announcements and then when everyone has moved on they change or neglect to fund the programs. See the NYT editorial on July 11, 2004.

Officials say information from prisoners (at Guantanomo) has derailed plans for attacks during the Olympics and may have averted attacks elsewhere. Human rights groups are skeptical.

The prisoners have been there for at least two years. We doubt they know where the Olympics are being held much less have any useful information. This kind of “boy have they been helpful” gibberish is like Cheney saying he has info that proves the Al Qeda connection to Iraq. Nixon also had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam and that is where all this ‘we know more than you do and we wish we could tell you but we just can’t for national security reasons’ started.

The State of Florida dropped its attempt to wipe off a bunch of supposedly non eligible felons from its voting roles. The state discovered that some Hispanics down in Miami were going to be removed and that’s a no-no for Republicans since the Cuban American population is who elects them as long as they keep saying bad things about Castro.

We are as dismayed as anyone by the corporate corruption extent in the land but sending Lea Fastow the wife of Andy Fastow of Enron infamy to jail for a year with no parole for a misdemeanor violation is a crime. So is the Martha Stewart conviction.

And the Senate is debating a marriage amendment that has no chance of passing while Iraq burns. It is good the Repubs have their priorities straight.

Portland Oregon’s Catholic Diocese files Chapter 11 to get out from under the legal judgments against it for clergy molesting folks. What can we say except we are glad we no longer are Catholic?

We have been self excommunicated because we don’t believe the Catholic Church follows the teaching of Christ, as in, would Christ file Chapter 11?

From the NYT of July 6 we learn that: An internal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services confirms that the top Medicare official threatened to fire the program's chief actuary if he told Congress that drug benefits would probably cost much more than the White House acknowledged. Unbelievably HHS determined that “neither the threat nor the withholding of information violated any criminal law, the report said. It accepted the Asscroft Justice Department's view that Mr. Scully had "the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress.'' Moreover, it said, the actuary "had no authority to disclose information independently to Congress.'' By the way, Mr. Scully resigned in December, to become a lobbyist for health care companies, and has denied threatening Mr. Foster but had acknowledged having told him to withhold the information from Congress. Scully obviously wasn’t questioned under oath.

The Repubs just confirmed another dimmer of a Federal judge for Arkansas who thinks wives should be subservient to their husbands.

Orrin Hatch the unctuous Senator from Utah read on the floor of the Senate from St Paul to the Ephesians to cement support for that judge.

By the way, the judge’s name is J. Leon Holmes and we’ll let you guess what he J stands for. Anyway this fellow also wrote a letter to a newspaper in 1980 saying that rape victims should not be allowed to have abortions since pregnancy from rapes occurs about as often as snow falls in Florida. We can only wish the best to his wife and daughters.

We apologize to Ann Coulter since the article we referred to about doctors and pharmacists not providing contraceptives to women was not her website but from Prevention magazine.

CNBC the business station carried Bush’s entire boring speech on the economy last week. This morning they carried a few minutes of Kerry’s announcement of Edwards as his running mate.

Reuters is reporting that yesterday Tony Blair admitted that WMD may never be found.

"We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but we know we haven't found them," Blair said. "I have to accept we have not found them that we may not find them." style='mso-spacerun:yes'> Unfortunately he also won’t accept the fact that maybe what he knew he didn’t know.

Usually it is better late than never to admit being at least half wrong, except when thousands of humans have been killed because of the mistake.

9/11, the movie is at $60 million in sales in its third week of release and on its way to a $100 million sales number.

From: http://www.dailykos.com/ : Expect much hand wringing over Edwards' trial lawyer background. But amidst the hoopla over the Bush ads featuring McCain, let's see if the Republicans can explain this, from the back cover of Edwards' book:

Ann Coulter posted this on her website. No we don’t read her website we saw it on

http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/ which is also known as Jesus’ General and is one of the more interesting websites we visit every day. The General as he likes to be called got the message from the rubber nun at http://www.rubbernun.net/ :

Melissa Kelley, 35, was just as stunned when her gynecologist told her she would not renew her prescription for birth control pills last fall.

"She told me she couldn't in good faith prescribe the Pill anymore," says Kelley, who lives with her husband and son in Allentown, PA. Then the gynecologist told Kelley she wouldn't be able to get a new prescription from her family doctor, either. "She said my primary care physician was the one who helped her make the decision."

Lacey's pharmacist and Kelley's doctors are among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of physicians and pharmacists who now adhere to a controversial belief that birth control pills and other forms of hormonal contraception--including the skin patch, the vaginal ring, and progesterone injections--cause tens of thousands of "silent" abortions every year. Consequently, they are refusing to prescribe or dispense them.

The tying of birth control to abortion is the ultimate goal of the religious right. Why we don’t know but the RR has a great need to run everyone’s sex life or rather to negate everyone’s sex life. Having attended Catholic College we almost flunked a course in marriage doctrine because of an argument with the professor over contraception. We know that there is very little give in the old style conservative catholic doctrine that currently runs the Catholic Church.

And that is too bad for the millions of women and children and fathers and teenagers who are doomed to a life of turmoil and temptation because a bunch of old farts in Rome and Bishoprics around the world are too full of themselves to understand human nature.

The Prairie man is journeying to Chicago tomorrow for a weekend of relaxation an so there will be no post till Monday July 12.

***

How about calling it even and bringing the troops home. The U.S. has killed at least 15,000 Iraqis who had nothing to do with 9/11 and an unknown number of Afghans. Reuters reports that there have been 702 combat deaths of coalition forces since Bush the invasion of Iraq with 588 coming since Bush declared “Mission accomplished.” There have also been a total of 263 non-combat deaths with 212 occurring after the mission was accomplished. It is estimated that between 4000 and 6000 Iraqi military have been killed and at least 10,000 civilians. There are no estimates given for Afghanistan. There is also no official report of American and coalition forces wounded.

***

The NYT reported over the week end that five Saudi terrorism suspects were released from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as part of a secret three-way deal intended to keep allies on board for the invasion of Iraq. The Saudis released three Brits that they were holding as “terrorists” three months after the five Saudis were transferred back to Saudi Arabia The NYT suggests that the officials involved never could decide whether the Saudis released were really bad guys or just bad guys and since they are no longer in custody the officials will never know.

The Saudi prisoners were transferred to Riyadh, the capital, in May 2003. The five Britons and two others were freed three months later, in August.

The releases were public-relations coups for the Saudi and British governments, which had been facing domestic criticism for their roles in the Iraq war.

At the time there was no indication the releases were related. On Friday, a spokesman for the National Security Council denied that the Saudi detainees had been transferred in exchange for the British prisoners. "There is no recollection here of any linkage between these two actions," said the spokesman, Sean McCormick. He described the return of the Saudis as "part of the normal policy of transferring detainees from Guantánamo for prosecution or continued detention."

But American officials involved in the Saudi case described it as highly unusual and said the backgrounds of those detainees raised greater concerns than those of others. Some officials also said the case showed how considerations other than security and intelligence could influence releases of prisoners.

Saudi officials gave contradictory accounts of the current whereabouts of the five men, saying at first that one or two of them had been released, and then denying that any had been freed. The officials also gave contradictory accounts of the suspects' legal status, first saying they had been tried and convicted of seeking to join Taliban forces in Afghanistan, but later saying prosecutions were still pending.

Neither American nor Saudi officials would identify the five, or describe in detail the evidence on which they had been held at Guantánamo.

This action would seem to give credence to Moore’s 9/11 scenario of Saudis being allowed to leave the country without questioning. It also calls into question the oft heard assertion that the U.S. never negotiates for the release of terrorists. That assertion must now be amended to include the caveat, unless they are from Saudi Arabia and the King wants them back.

***

VP Big Time Dick Cheney emerged from his Cheney Cave over the weekend to visit Parma Ohio and dish some negative comments on John Kerry. Funny how he had to stay in his cave for so long but now is free to move about the country when it is election time. Could the whole cave thing been a “scare the populace” ploy?

Kstyle='mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>erry campaign spokesman Phil Singer took a jab at the notion of a Cheney bus tour, saying, "It's fitting that the vice president is on a bus trip, because this White House has taken style='mso-bidi-font-family: Arial'>Americastyle='mso-bidi-font-family: Arial'> for a ride on everything from jobs to the war to Halliburton. John Kerry is going to change all that."

***

FROM http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/ the American Street:

Bush Nativity Day to Replace July 4

Attorney General John Ashcroft will announce Sunday that this year’s celebration of July 4 will be the last. “The Bush administration’s patriot squad has taken a closer look at the terrorists involved in signing the manifesto known as the ‘Declaration of Independence,’ “Ashcroft announced. “We find these truths self-evident, that these insurgents were nothing more than band of terrorists bent on destroying civil order and doing away with King George’s pursuit of happiness.”

Ashcroft says that in a second Bush administration, the July national holiday will simply be moved by 48 hours to mark the anniversary of the second coming of the Messiah . “That George W. Bush was born on July 6, is reason enough to celebrate,” Ashcroft noted. “That he has come to save mankind from celebrating its weaknesses such as liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is reason to demand immediate canonization of our forthright leader while he can be alive to enjoy it. “

Ashcroft said a close look at the Declaration of Independence will convince Americans that celebrating the likes of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin is no different than celebrating Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. “Can you imagine someone writing down on paper:

It is clear that the so-called “founding fathers” had terrorist connections, Ashcroft added. These were no less than rebel scum attempting to undermine a power by the George, for the George and of the George. “Read these words and weep,” Ashcroft implored.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Ashcroft sneered at the infuriating absence of credibility within the document, noting that given its schedule of lies, abominations and attacks upon an incumbent government, it might as well have been written by filmmaker Michael Moore.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

“Hell, I’m no historian, but I happen to know for a fact that Fox News did not even exist back then… how could they believe that the liberal media of their time would actually tell the facts to a 'candid world?'"

Most importantly, these guys were a bunch of Northeastern politicians with little fortunes, who wore powdered wigs and probably had woodpeckers for brains. Yet, they thought themselves better than King George.

Ashcroft noted that Bush Nativity Day, as the new holiday will be called, will become America’s foremost holiday. In keeping with the desires of the Messiah, Ashcroft said, bushes will be burned in national parks and forests until the last of these environmental pariahs is burned down. Also, to celebrate the Bush work ethic, the national holiday will span the entire month of July.

Posted by Barbara Sehr at 11:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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class=header>PBS News Reports More than 16,000 Wounded and Injured from Iraq War Bill class=SpellE>Moyers NOW with Bill Moyers http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transcript325_full_print.html Posted 6/29/2004 5:25:00 PM

The Pentagon keeps a close watch on the grim tally in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latest figures: 922 killed. 5,457 wounded in action. And the press reports those numbers.

But there's another figure neither the Pentagon nor the press are talking about — the more than 11,000 soldiers coming home disabled, injured, sick who aren't on the Pentagon's casualty list because the military says they weren't injured in combat.

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Brigadier General Janis Karpinski alleged Sunday that Israeli interrogators were active at Abu Ghuraib prison. She said she even met one who admitted his nationality to her. AP reports her saying, ' “I saw an individual there that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet before, and I asked him what did he do there, was he an interpreter — he was clearly from the Middle East,” Karpinski told British Broadcasting Corp. radio in an interview broadcast Saturday. “He said, ‘Well I do some of the interrogation here. I speak Arabic, but I’m not an Arab; I’m from Israel.’ “I was really kind of surprised by that ... He didn’t elaborate any more than to say he was working with them and there were people from lots of different places that were involved in the operation.” '

4/5 July 2004

And from:

Give Us Back Our Damn Flag

The leftist case for patriotism

by Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks

1 July 2004

And the pictures of Saddam in court are a welcome relief from the pictures of head lice checking that we’ve seen for the last 8 months. Allowing Saddam free TV time is going to backfire on the Bushies. He is not a stupid man and he knows more than a lot of folks want known.

***

And the ever solicitous Attorney General John Asscroft on the Supremes decision on prisoner rights: (from http://scoop.agonist.org/ )

"The Supreme Court accorded to terrorists, in a variety of cases this week, a number of additional rights," he said. “We’re digesting those opinions in terms of making sure that we adjust or modify what we do, so that we accommodate the requirements as expressed by the Supreme Court."

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And last night we were watching a talking head refer to 9/11 and how it had changed the world. 9/11 didn’t change the world. The Rove/Bush/FoulMouthBig Dick/DeLay cabal changed the world-- for the worse.

When the Oklahoma City bombing killed 300 folks no one said that bombing changed the world even though it was committed by American citizens in a treasonous act against their government. In fact, Congressional Republicans made it extremely hard for the Clintonians to take action against the freeper folks in Idaho and the west. One might guess that one reason for this was that sympathizers with those folks vote Republican.

Moreover, during the late 1990s the resources of the FBI were tied up in finding semen on underpants. A president’s private sex life was considered the greatest threat to the security of the country.

9/11 offered the country the opportunity to approach a terrible act in a reasonable manner. Certainly the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was a reasonable objective since they had sheltered and encouraged Osama. Unfortunately the U.S. had supported the Taliban and even were paying them in foreign Aid for not growing poppies. Turning to a military dictatorship that had overthrown a democratically elected government in Pakistan for help made no rational sense but it was the way business has always been done.

We think 9/11 offered an opportunity to approach our enemies in a different way. Unfortunately George II was not up to the task. In the future we will offer our ideas on how it might have been done differently.

***

And the AP is reporting that Viacom’s twenty television stations could face a fine of $550,000 for Janet Jackson’s breast baring incident at the Super Bowl. That’s stupid since the TV stations didn’t know it was going to happen. And the delicious irony is that it is a Republican FCC that is going to impose the fine. The Republicans are the folks who want government off our backs except when it will get class=GramE>them votes from the religious right. Janet Jackson can’t be fined so the TV stations are the targets.

Michael Powell, FCC Chairman, who earned his job by being born to the right father, sort of like the president, supposedly has his job resume already floating around legal media circles. Ted Olson is leaving. Are the rats abandoning the ship of state before it sinks?

***

And www.Newsday.com reports that in a survey by the NYT 79% of the public thinks Bush is hiding something about Iraq. The WaPo has respondents on the question of whether Bush or Kerry is ‘honest and trustworthy’ saying that only 39% think Bush is while 52% think Kerry is. There goes $85 million of ads smearing Kerry down the drain.

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And from the Washington Post (WaPo): The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has sent a detailed plan of action to religious volunteers across the country asking them to turn over church directories to the campaign, distribute issue guides in their churches and persuade their pastors to hold voter registration drives.