A Separate Peace
America is in trouble--and our elites are merely resigned.
PEGGY NOONAN
Wall Street Journal
Thursday, October 27, 2005
It's beyond, "The president is overwhelmed." The presidency is overwhelmed. The whole government is. And people sense when an institution is overwhelmed. Citizens know. If we had a major terrorist event tomorrow half the country--more than half--would not trust the federal government to do what it has to do, would not trust it to tell the truth, would not trust it, period.
I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."
You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making yor life a little fortress.

The Neocon Plumbers and The Conspiracy For War
The details of the neocon conspiracy for war are infuriating and intriguing and educational and often times, as in the case of Judy Miller, fun to pick apart. But here's to hoping the pending indictments will bring into focus the larger conspiracy: the systematic attempt to defraud and undermine the American people and the world abroad in a carefully planned effort to wage war for dubious purposes.

Bushies feeling the boss' wrath
Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say.
"The President is just unhappy in general and casting blame all about," said one Bush insider. "Andy [Card, the chief of staff] gets his share. Karl gets his share. Even Cheney gets his share. And the press gets a big share."
Bush is so dismayed that "the only person escaping blame is the President himself," said a sympathetic official, who delicately termed such self-exoneration "illogical."

How Scary Is This?
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Monday 24 October 2005
The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense - its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence.
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration's arrogance and ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by Washington standards.
"We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," said Mr. Wilkerson. "Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita ... we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."
"You've got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."
While not "evaluating the decision to go to war," Mr. Wilkerson told his audience that under the present circumstances "we can't leave Iraq. We simply can't." In his view, if American forces were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would end up returning to the Middle East with "five million men and women under arms" within a decade.
Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted, and outraged by "the detainee abuse issue." In 10 years, he said, when this matter is "put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen."
Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for speaking out, but feels that "as a citizen of this great republic," he has an obligation to do so. If nothing is done about the current state of affairs, he said, "it's going to get even more dangerous than it already is."

US troops fighting losing battle for Sunni triangle
The mob grew more frenzied as the gunmen dragged the two surviving Americans from the cab of their bullet-ridden lorry and forced them to kneel on the street.
Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight. Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to stoke the flames.
Within minutes, four American contractors, all employees of the Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown & Root, were dead. The jubilant crowd dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-US slogans.
Perhaps fearful of public reaction in America, where support for the war is falling, US officials suppressed details of the Sept 20 attack, which bore a striking resemblance to the murder of four other contractors in Fallujah last year.

FEMA was in New York the Night Before 9/11
"We're currently one of the first teams that was deployed to support the city of New York for this disaster. We arrived on late Monday night, and went into action on Tuesday morning. And not until today did we get a full opportunity to work the entire site."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has said it did not have urban search and rescue teams in place in New York City prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, contrary to an Internet-based rumor alleging otherwise. ... FEMA officials said Kenney, in the heat of the moment, misstated his team's arrival date.
FEMA in NYC prior to 9-11 for Project TRIPOD terror drill, scheduled for 9-12
As of this writing, June 2, 2004, the transcript of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony to the 9-11 Commission during the May 18-19, 2004 hearings in New York is the only transcript of that hearing omitted from the Commission website
(http://www.9-11commission.gov).
Did Rudy say something wrong?
"... the reason Pier 92 was selected as a command center was because on the next day, on September 12, Pier 92 was going to have a drill, it had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was gonna be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there, so we were able to establish a command center there, within three days, that was two and a half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed."
Major questions exist as to why FEMA would deny being in New York City prior to 9/11 without mentioning the 9/12 bioterror drill. These questions must now be addressed as the initial suspicions of those who learned of the Tom Kenney statement have been clearly validated. The coincidental presence of a large FEMA team in NYC at the location, Pier 92, which became the Command Center for the entire emergency operation is disturbing. An alert press and a legitimate 9-11 Commission should have raised this issue long ago.

Case For WTC Tower Demolition Sealed By Griffin
Theologian Says Controlled Demolition is Now a Fact, Not a Theory

In two speeches to overflow crowds in New York last weekend, notable theologian David Ray Griffin argued that recently revealed evidence seals the case that the Twin Towers and WTC-7 were destroyed by controlled demolition with explosives. Despite the many enduring mysteries of the 9/11 attacks, Dr. Griffin concluded, "It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government."
Dr. Griffin listed ten characteristics of the collapses which all indicate that the buildings did not fall due to being struck by planes or the ensuing fires. He explained the buildings fell suddenly without any indication of collapse. They fell straight into their own footprint at free-fall speed, meeting virtually no resistance as they fell--a physical impossibility unless all vertical support was being progressively removed by explosives severing the core columns.

The towers were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 and 160 mile per hour winds, and nothing about the plane crashes or ensuing fires gave any indication of causing the kind of damage that would be necessary to trigger even a partial or progressive collapse, much less the shredding of the buildings into dust and fragments that could drop at free-fall speed.
The massive core columns--the most significant structural feature of the buildings, whose very existence is denied in the official 9/11 Commission Report--were severed into uniform 30 foot sections, just right for the 30-foot trucks used to remove them quickly before a real investigation could transpire.
There was a volcanic-like dust cloud from the concrete being pulverized, and no physical mechanism other than explosives can begin to explain how so much of the buildings' concrete was rendered into extremely fine dust. The debris was ejected horizontally several hundred feet in huge fan shaped plumes stretching in all directions, with telltale "squibs" following the path of the explosives downward. These are all facts that have been avoided by mainstream and even most of the alternative media. Again, these are characteristics of the kind of controlled demolitions that news people and firefighters were describing on the morning of 9/11. Those multiple first-person descriptions of controlled demolition were hidden away for almost four years by the City of New York until a lawsuit finally forced the city to release them. Dr. Griffin's study of these accounts has led him beyond his earlier questioning of the official story of the collapses, to his above-quoted conclusion: The destruction of the three WTC buildings with explosives by US government terrorists is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact that has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Plame plans to sue White House officials
WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame are preparing to file a civil suit against Bush administration officials.

Bush whacked Rove on CIA leak
New York Daily News
WASHINGTON - An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.
"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."
A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.
"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.

The Mindless American: A Tragedy In The Making
As a behavioral scientist, I am grieved at what appears to be a near pandemic of disinterest in what is happening to our country...
It appears that a vast share of folks in our nation have chosen to relinquish a quality no doubt essential to authentic human life….. an existential responsibility to think for themselves...

Beam me up, Scotty
I can’t think of a more fitting send off than having some of his fans attend this, his final journey. If you wish to send a few words of tribute, they will be digitized and sent with Jimmy, as part of the payload on this launch.
For those who wish to attend the launch, you are more than welcome. And for those who can’t, just look to the heavens on launch date and know that you are sharing a WorldWide Memorial for James “Scotty” Doohan.
Most Sincerely,
Wende C. Doohan

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 16 October 2005
There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.
As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho."
Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.
Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.
The soldiers all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation.
The president also got praise from the Iraqi soldier who was part of the chat.
"Thank you very much for everything," he gushed. "I like you."
Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.
"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

And speaking of dimwits...
Richard Daughty
...the angriest guy in economics
The Mogambo Guru
Oct 12, 2005
And so when we worthless employees try and get a little raise to offset these rising prices, they laugh in our faces, and say "But the government says that inflation is only 2%!"
So the final consumer, me and you, gets screwed, and we get it good and hard in the checkout line, and the cashier is ringing up our purchases by scanning the bar code across the scanner, all day long, pick it up and scan it, pick it up and scan it, and so it is a real crappy job, and she is plenty angry about the rotten job and the lousy pay which does not even keep up with inflation and her husband's Social Security check doesn't seem to go as far, and then she gets all testy with me like it is MY fault or something...

Bush's ratings sink amid public pessimism
Bush's approval rating dropped below 40 percent for the first time in polls by the Pew Research Center and NBC News/Wall Street Journal, and fewer than 30 percent of Americans believed the country was on the right track amid violence in Iraq, high gas prices and growing budget deficits.
A new Fox News poll also showed Bush's approval rating dropping to its lowest level in that survey, falling to 40 percent from 45 percent since late September.
"Bush's numbers are going from bad to worse, and there is no silver lining," said Pew pollster Andrew Kohut. "People just see more and more bad news everywhere and they don't see a way out."
The Pew poll, released on Thursday, found 29 percent satisfied with the country's direction. For the first time, a majority of Americans thought the Iraq war was not going well and solid majorities said Bush had made the economy and budget deficit worse.
"What people don't like is uncertainty," said independent pollster Dick Bennett of American Research Group. "What they really don't like is a president who doesn't acknowledge uncertainty and deal with it. Americans can take bad news, but they want a way out of it and they don't see that from Bush."
"Not only is it not unusual for a president to have an approval rating at 38 percent, it's almost predictable," Republican consultant Whit Ayres said. "Every president has rough patches, it says nothing about the ultimate historical judgment."
He said an improvement in gas prices, a dip in violence in Iraq or other good news for Bush could start to brighten his political picture quickly.
"There is no question the country is in a funk and some kind of event will have to turn it around," he said.

News Orgs Working On Stories Tying Cheney Into Plamegate… Developing…
The Huffington Post
Posted October 11, 2005 07:28 PM
The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are working on stories that point to Vice President Dick Cheney as the target of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name.

This should be simple:
U.S. doesn't OK torture
Does President Bush really want to be on record against language passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. Senate that would ban torture?
By a 90-9 vote, 43 Democrats and 46 Republicans voted last week to prohibit U.S. soldiers from torturing prisoners. It bans "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States government."
The measure would serve two purposes:
It would clarify rules for U.S. troops serving around the world by requiring use of only those interrogation techniques allowed by a new Army Field Manual.
And it would tell the world that America does not stand for torturing military prisoners.
Now the measure goes to a conference committee. House legislation did not contain the anti-torture language. It is up to U.S. representatives to decide whether they, too, believe in prohibiting torture.
It shouldn't be a difficult choice.

Money, Debt, Hyper-Inflation & Deflation
Today, money is created through borrowing - pure and simple. When you receive that new creditline/mortgage/loan, money is created out of thin air. This is how money is created...
Paper money eventually resorts to hyperinflation without fail.
In hyperinflation, most public aren't affected seriously since most of them are broke. Your job as a saver is to identify things to keep that will preserve your savings. Things to stay away are paper currency and leveraged assets. Things to get into are unleveraged tangibles of necessity - soybean, copper, gold, oil, land. Those are basic commodities that survive through the ravage of hyperinflation.

We Can't Pay It Off
President Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, turning the U.S. dollar into a fiat currency. A fiat currency, for those of you who don’t know, has nothing to back it up. It’s just paper, unredeemable for gold or anything else of true value. Since Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971, the U.S. dollar has lost over 70% of its purchasing power. The government has been able to borrow and spend money at will, borrowing from the kids and grandchildren in order to buy votes today. Our national debt stands at nearly $8 trillion. Our federal deficit, which had been scheduled to decline this year, will be about the same as last year (over $450 billion) after the disastrous costs of the hurricanes are added in. President Bush continually declines to say how we’ll pay for the costs.
U.S. bonds are considered the safest investment around. They are given top ratings by all ratings firms and are considered the least likely to default. But the pressure on the almighty dollar is building at such a rapid pace - $1.8 billion a day in trade deficits and over $1 billion a day in budget deficits - that the bond will have to cry “Uncle” at some point. It may be a year from now or ten years from now, but it will happen. I predict that by the time President Bush leaves office, the U.S. Treasury bond will no longer be rated investment grade.
Imagine what it will be like when you get no Social Security check. Or when your military pension stops. Or you can’t afford the medicine you need to stay alive. Or, if you do get a check, it will be virtually worthless due to hyperinflation. We are headed to a system where those who have money - real money, that is - live, and those without it die. We’ve seen it with the government’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. Expect it to be far worse when Hurricane Uncle Sam hits.

Boozer Bush

It doesn’t explain everything, but it explains a lot: George Bush, our president, is hitting the bottle again. The drinking rumors have been making the rounds for months, and even before that people speculated that Bush’s “accidents”—choking on a pretzel, dropping his dog, crashing his bicycle—were “alcohol-related.” For someone who makes such a point of flaunting his physical prowess, his habitual clumsiness is somewhat suspicious.
But the recent revelations about Bush slugging down Southern Comfort as Iraq goes down the tubes and New Orleans goes down the drain calls into question whether he actually gave up booze and gave his life to Jesus in the first place. That Bush continued to hit the sauce after taking the pledge explains a good deal of his weird behavior, one minute scared s—tless, the next, after a secret swig of Early Times, inflated with Texas swagger.
One minute Bush goes limp with fright when desperate aides inform him that planes have crashed in the World Trade Center; the next minute, stiff with bravado, he boasts of his resolve to get Osama “dead or alive.” One minute, when he hears Hurricane Katrina howling, he cringes like a scaredy-cat behind his Mama; after a few pops of Old Granddad, he’s full of phony bluster, telling his feckless FEMA chief, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.”

A Cruel Nationalism
The reality is that FEMA worked perfectly -- a planned exercise of bureacratic incompetency in order to expand Bush's powers to declare martial law in the next disaster. It was a well-oiled machine that thwarted every attempt to get help to those who were too old, too ill or too poor to leave. Looking back at FEMA's success in orchestrating "Operation Ethnic Cleansing," I have to agree with Bush -- Brownie did, indeed, do a heckuva job...
Hurricane Katrina ripped the mask from the Bush administration and, for a brief moment, exposed the sheer evil, and the bigotry, racism and greed that lies just beneath the surface. Those who dared to look upon the face of Bush's god cannot go home again. They know that the reality these greedy monsters create for us is one of relentless, non-stop chaos.
Because of world opinion and media coverage, we lucked out on this one, but the next "national emergency" -- possibly a flu pandemic -- could be democracy's last hurrah. Bush is already boasting of using the military to "quarantine" those affected. And it won't be in our homes -- this isn't the measles with the school nurse tacking a "quarantined" sign on our front doors. Last year, Bush authorized preliminary studies for the rapid construction of a National Detention Center Program, complete with a series of detention centers, to be added to the existing 600 units now in place. Also, The Department of Homeland Security is consulting with an Israeli company, Israeli Prison Systems, Ltd., for the expedited construction of modular internment camps to be located in rural areas throughout the continental US and Alaska.

'Worse things took place at Abu Ghraib'
Washington, October 3: A US soldier convicted of humiliating and abusing Iraqi prisoners has said she knew of "worse things" happening at Abu Ghraib and insisted military commanders were fully aware of what was going on in Iraq’s infamous jail.

DeLay indicted on money laundering charge
Associated Press
A Texas grand jury today re-indicted Rep. Tom DeLay on charges of conspiring to launder money and money laundering after the former majority leader attacked last week's indictment on technical grounds.
The new indictment, handed up by a grand jury seated today, contains two counts: conspiring to launder money and money laundering. The latter charge carries a penalty of up to life in prison. Last week, DeLay was charged with conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.

When Will Rumsfeld Face the Music?
Perhaps most disturbing of all, “the torture of detainees reportedly was so widespread and accepted that it became a means of stress relief for soldiers.” In the Mercury base lingo, a detainee was called a PUC (which stands for “Person Under Control” and is pronounced “puck”). “On their day off, people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent,” one sergeant told Human Rights Watch. “In a way, it was a sport.
The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day [a sergeant] shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger, a metal bat. He was the fucking cook. He shouldn’t be in with no PUCs.”

Homeowner Kills Bear On His Porch
Tom Reyburn, a homeowner in Lake City, Colo. shot and killed a mother bear this week, but it was an action that the Colorado Division of Wildlife says could have been avoided.
The man who shot the mother bear is not to blame, the DOW said, and he was not cited.
However, the community is responsible because the bear and her two cubs were given easy access to food in town and were too familiar with human contact, said Lucas Martin, district wildlife manager for Lake City.
(The whole community is responsible; but the man who shot the bear is not.)