Old Fashioned Patriot

Shell signs up for world's biggest gas field in Qatar. Qatar, a traditional monarchy with a "discretionary system of law controlled by the amir" apparently won't need its natural gas fields liberated.

What do you know? First item up, Bush's uncle who has made piles of money from Bush's war crimes. (Making money dealing with war criminals seems to run in the family, right Prescott Bush?) From New Patriot (no relation) we see Uncle Bucky denies favoritism by claiming he never dials the 202 area code. (Washington DC for those who don't have corporate lobbyists' offices on their phone bill.)

Talk about a non-denial denial. Of course, Uncle Bucky doesn't use 202. Everyone who is anyone knows 254 is the Crawford area code.

Which reminds me, if you wanted to reach me while I was gone you wouldn't use the 714 area code but the area code my cell phone is in...

Hi Ho!
It's off to an undisclosed location I go!

See you next month.

Suburban Guerilla alerts us to the conviction of a 15 year old for murder. He was tried as an adult and may get out at age 45. Zoloft usage was raised as a contributing factor.

Pfizer denies and the jury disbelieved that Zoloft could have led this teenager to commit double homicide. What the jurors were not told might have changed their minds.

Zoloft is sold in Canada and is chemically identical to what is sold in the US. There is one difference. Zoloft: "In Canada, the drugs carry an additional warning of a potential increase in hostility, aggression and 'harm to others.'" (Page 2 of the article)

Pfizer itself notes that Zoloft should only be used for OCD in adolescents and not for major depressive disorder.

The young man's doctor had prescribed Zoloft for depression.

Bush appoints Negroponte to be in charge of America's intelligence community. Another data point proving Beck's Axiom

Hacktacular!
The Jamie Swift article hit piece is headlined:

CAO opponents crash meeting - Democrats had hoped to keep county executive's appearance to themselves

and quickly goes downhill from there.

First paragraph:

ISSAQUAH -- Fifth District Democrats, fearing a mob of rural property owners angry over the recently passed Critical Areas Ordinance, chose not to publicly advertise a Wednesday night meeting fearing opponents would crash the event.

Those mean Democrats they didn't publicly advertise their monthly meeting on the third Wednesday except here and here. Maybe Swift wants the State Legislative District 5 Democratic Party to take out full page ads in the King County Journal?

Further down:

In a Feb. 3 e-mail, the chair of the 5th District Democrats wrote to other Democrats, ``We don't want this event to be confused with `The Jerry Springer Show.'''

Democrats had hoped to ``pack the floor with over a hundred Democrats so that any vocal GOP opposition that shows up can be kept under control,'' according to the e-mail.

I guess that email to their members was part of the Democrats not advertising their monthly meeting. The monthly meetings probably reach a 100 or so right before a big election; after that they probably range in the 20 to 50 range depending on the weather and what's on TV. How dare the Democrats wish that their meeting not be interrupted by Republicans and mocked in the local newspaper?

Protesters snickered and sneered, then voiced their displeasure when it was announced Sims would be taking just three questions, and only from Democrats.

The horror. The guest speaker will only take questions from Democrats at the monthly Democratic meeting! They must be on the side of terrorists! But wait - strike a blow for freedom! The third questioner was a Republican!

But a curve ball was thrown when the final question was asked by a woman who turned out to be a Democrat no longer.

Those Democrats are so mean! They only wanted to take questions from Democrats at their monthly meeting - how dare they! So did Swift report the meeting's organizers' reaction? That's not in the article. Did Swift quote any of the regular attendees about the intrusion? No quotes from them either. Maybe Swift ran out of space? Nope. There are quotes at length from two of the protestors and none from the organizers or regular attendees of the meeting. Yep, sounds fair and balanced to me.

Torture Guy
For the HTML impaired:
<a href="http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/aggonzalesbio.html">Torture Guy</a>

Less than a month ago CondoLIEza Rice was saying the time for diplomacy is now.

Diplomacy is so last month. Now:

While acknowledging that the United States does not know who was behind the Monday bombing that killed the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, Ms. Rice said Syria should be held at least indirectly responsible, "given their continued interference in Lebanese affairs."

Yeah! What's up with that? A country occupying a sovereign state; its presence triggering terrorist attacks. Syria should be ashamed.

Oops. Never mind.

Howard Kurtz needs an editor:

Judith Miller has her share of detractors in the news business, but almost everyone who takes notes steno for a living is rooting for her now.

If you, for some reason, you wish to torture gonzales yourself by reading Howie's column then I suggest you play this as background music.

A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield It mentions that the "$127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history." This is a win-win situation for Bush. He can invade more countries with fewer American deaths and his family can make a boatload of money from their Carlyle Group investment which owns the company that owns the company that makes the SWORD robot.

What a coincidence. The Bush family stands to make money from the biggest military contract in history.

ChoicePoint - the company that "helped" Kathleen Harris with the voter rolls in Florida and is part of the Fatherland Security Department's project to keep data on every air traveler has an oopsie to report. AP says:

ChoicePoint Inc., which sells such data to government agencies and a variety of companies, acknowledged Tuesday that several hackers broke into its computer database and purloined data from as many as 35,000 Californians.

When does a US soldier death not count as a war casualty? When he steps on an American made cluster bomb.

The new remote control robots that can kill people will not only make the Bush family a ton of money but will allow them to outsource the military. Make money, outsource jobs and kill people - hey, once again Bush hits the trifecta! When I say trifecta I am not referring to the tasteless joke that Bush told at the expense of 9/11 victims.

Who Will Be The White House's Next Top Fake Reporter?

Thanks to New Patriot for the link.

In the strongest indication that Rice will run for President in 2008 to continue Bush's miserable failures, she, like Bush, has taken to debating herself.

Rice at her confirmation hearings said:

The time for diplomacy is now.

Now that she has the job - well now doesn't appear to be the time. In response to a question about why she was reluctant to open contact with Iran, Rice responded:

And we shouldn’t get caught up in this question of what contact we are prepared to have or what contact we are not prepared to have and have the Iranians change the conversation to that, when the conversation is about Iran.

Apparently Hotmail has forgotten who owns them. I can no longer access Hotmail using Outlook Express. My gmail address is hiding in plain sight on this page. Please use that for future correspondence.

BTW, I have 10 gmail invites.

What do you know? The GMail spam filter actually seems to work.

The Bush agenda has long relied on class warfare and it is now relying on generational warfare. He is betting that young people don't want to pay for caring for old people in our society. He is appealing to their greed (Snark alert - Greed: Moral value or one of the seven deadly sins?). He is enticing them with the siren song of better than average gains. The media isn't giving play to Barbara Boxer's question - How many of you have lost money in the stock market? It also ignores one very important thing.

Demographics.

While the Baby Boomers have this annoying habit of thinking they are the first at everything. they aren't. There have been other baby booms after other wars. The major difference is the infant mortality rate post Civil War and post WWI was higher than in the post-WWII boom. (Extra snark for free - Bush is working on increasing infant mortality rates - take that pro-lifers.)

1929 happened when Civil War baby boomers hit 63. 1982 was when WWI baby boomers hit 63. WWII boomers have started turning 60. (Gratuitous snark alert - if you don't know the significance of '29 or '82 you might want to bone up before you invest your payroll taxes. Hint: this is the risk part of the risk/reward formula.)

There are periods when the stock market "underpeformed" and we are about to hit one of those patches as boomers retire and live off their stock holdings. Those in their twenties or thirties are young enough that they will have a great buying opportunity at the end of the WWII baby boomer stock market sell off. Those between 40 and Bush's "magic" 55 are not so lucky and they won't have the benefits that voters over 55 today have.

Why are Republicans afraid of cutting benefits for people over 55? The old farts vote.

Iraq Dispatches with some chilling stories from the American siege of Fallujah:

“One of my colleagues, Dr. Saleh Alsawi, he was speaking so angrily about them. He was in the main hospital when they raided it at the beginning of the seige. They entered the theater room when they were working on a patient…he was there because he’s an anesthesiologist. They entered with their boots on, beat the doctors and took them out, leaving the patient on the table to die.”

The typewriter fetishists at Power Line show up in a Google news search? I can understand the raving rovers appearing very high on a google web search but on Google News as a news provider? Google News, once a trusted source for indexing NY Times, Chicago Times, Seattle Times and the Houston Chronicle put "The Big Trunk" on an equal footing with real newspapers?

Fascinating.

Remember all those well-timed terra alerts that would help Bush when his numbers were slipping? The alerts that when Dean pointed out they were just political manipulations he was derided as a quack. The alerts that were supposedly based on terrorist chatter. A post on the DemocraticUnderground Forums shows the alerts were based on chatter from GopUSA and the much discredited Talon News.

How much pain has Bush, DeLay, Santorum, Ashcroft, Rice, Rumsfeld and Gonzales inflicted upon you? How much is it worth to you to fight back? $10? $25 $50 $100 $1000? Give what you can afford to the ActBlue We've Got Howard's Back fundraiser.

The Rude One notes:

Bush knows that he's gotta be a gamblin' man. The problem is, of course, that real gamblers know, well, when to walk away. Bush is a gambling addict, and he's got the biggest wad of cash in history on loan from the nation. Problem is that the vig on that wad's a motherfucker, and it's gonna come due. And you can bet that it ain't Bush's legs that're gonna be broken.

The old, Bush one-two: a sucker bet followed by a sucker punch.

Bush is proposing another unfunded mandate. The Real ID national identity number. Here is an early prototype of the "Real ID".

Don't be alarmed. It's "only" a database.

From World O'Crap (as mentioned on MSNBC) Talon "News" is looking for a reporter to replace "Jeff Gannon" Actually, you will be replacing Guckert you will be given press credentials for Jeff Gannon. The bad news? It is a volunteer position.

Was Guckert a volunteer? How did he afford to sit around the press room for hours on end?

Bush, pontificating about budgets in 2001, before he had squandered all of the Clinton surplus:

The first temptation, when it comes to budgeting, is what we call the temptation of the false emergency. Now, our budget system provides for special consideration for emergency, as it should. We've had natural disasters, and we need to have money set aside. That's an emergency, and we need to get money quickly into the communities when there's a natural disaster. An economic recession is an emergency. A declaration of war is an emergency.

But far too often in the past, the normal has been declared an emergency, in order to increase the budget.

From the NY Times:

"America has everything to gain from having a stronger Europe as a partner in building a safer and even a better world," Ms. Rice said. "So let each of us bring to the table ideas, experience and resources, and let us discuss and decide, together, how best to employ them for democratic change."

Translation - "You Europeans seem to have something against countries that invade other countries - that is sort of funny coming from Germany. You told us it was a bad idea to invade Iraq and I want you to forget that you told us. On to Iran! Help America build democracy one invasion at a time."

Howard Dean wins race for head of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday. On Sunday, the talking heads will discuss "Is Dean too partisan for the post?"

"Jeff Gannon" calls it quits in the news business. Did asking softball questions of the most criminal Administration get to be too much? So that whole journalism thing didn't work out? What's next, Jeff? Are you going to be a heart surgeon? Dick Cheney might need some work done.

No More Mister Nice Blog brings us yet another Iraqi Groundhog day.

New Patriot (no relation) has it right. If Bush has lost US News & World Report on his Social Security Piratization plan then there is no hope for it. Now the only question is this: when Bush finds himself in a hole (see not to Jonah Goldberg below), will he stop digging?

I think not.

Apparently, your mother never taught you that when you find yourself in a hole. Stop digging.

Tim Roemer:

"If there's one reason Senator Kerry lost the presidential race, it was because he failed to make the American people feel safer," Roemer said, adding that he also wanted to encourage talk within the party about developing a stronger position on values.

What kind of Vichy Democrat thinks the guy who stood atop a pile of rubble that happened on his watch makes us feel stronger? Is it because for many white Americans "making us stronger" is code for killing Arabs?

What kind of values is he talking about? Would he get on board Bush's Social Security Piratization scheme if it thought it would win votes?

$9 Billion there. Soon it adds up to real money!

James Wolcott and Juan Cole. Wolcott sells popcorn to the smackdown:

Goldberg, a.k.a. "Jabba the Hack," presumed to challenge Cole on the subjects of Iran and Iraq, venturing into the field of combat armed with nothing save a brazen gall that could be sold on the open market as seal blubber.

The smackdown of Jabba the Hack in person:

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters?

Juan Cole's site is called Informed Comment. It makes sense that he would be attacked by uninformed comment.

The Rittenhouse Review notes American hostage Roy Hallums doesn't rate an America Held Hostage - Day 96 like the media did when Carter was President.

I was somewhat bemused when I read your latest rant:

An interim report by a commission investigating the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq said the former head of the program had violated the United Nations Charter by helping a company owned by a friend to obtain valuable contracts to sell Iraqi oil.

For a moment, I will forget your role in selling Bush's illegal, ill-advised, ill-planned war to America. What I want to know, you fucking tool, is why this is news but you have not written one goddamned word about Cheney, Halliburton and no-bid cost plus contracts in that god forsaken war that you were instrumental in promoting.

Republicans with a brain decide it isn't a good idea to touch the third rail after all.

Piratization bonus points - "The White House has made a lot of Republicans walk the plank on this. Now it sounds as if they are sawing off the board."

I love it when the other side uses imagery from our rhetoric.

U.S. General Says It Is 'Fun to Shoot Some People'

As punishment, will Bush and Gonzales decide to put Gen. Mattis in charge of Abu Gharib?

"Clearly the rhetoric of that organization raised some questions and we had some strong objections as a Jesuit university" Aw, c'mon you don't see the moral values in "1 Shot 1 Kill No Remorse I Decide." What kind of a Christian University is that place?

Bush piratization has over 14,000 hits as of this writing.

America Held Hostage - Day 95.

From the WaPo:

House Republican leaders tightened their control over the ethics committee yesterday by ousting its independent-minded chairman, appointing a replacement who is close to them and adding two new members who donated to the legal defense fund of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

DeLay keeps saying he is innocent of all charges. I wonder what he would do if he was guilty?

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 2000, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in the United State. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

Subsitute 2000 with 1933 and the United States with Germany and you have a passage from They Thought They Were Free. I know; I know; it's just another one of those annoying Bush - Hitler comparisons but I thought it appropriate considering how much the Chimperor is throwing the word freedom around as he strips centuries old American liberties away from us.

Bush also seems to mangle Mao a lot lately. It appears Bush believes freedom flows from the barrel of a gun. Or is it democracy that flows from the barrel of a gun? I find his message confused and confusing.

What Bush said:

To soothe the nerves of those at or near retirement he said he would leave current benefits alone for Americans 55 or older.

What he meant:

To prevent wholesale ouster of Republicans by senior citizens who vote he said he would leave current benefits alone for Americans 55 or older.

No one has explained how George "Mission Accomplished" Bush is going to secure Social Security's future by depriving it of payments.

I doubt if Democrats noticed that all of the bad things he wanted to do to Social Security he attributed to Clinton and other Democrats. This should be a warning what appeasement will bring the Democrats.

Jeff Gannon, Ed Gannon, kneepad specialist who asks the White House softball questions. I know conservatives don't do this stuff for free. Who pays him? Any thoughts on this, Mr. Armstrong Williams?

It's not a plan?
No, it's more what you call a set of guidelines.

America Held Hostage - Day 94

SullyWatch says good-bye to what's-his-name.

An easy prediction - SWORD robots will become a major expense in the Pentagon budget. The ability for American soldiers to kill without being killed will be enticing so the Pentagon will definitely buy them.

Here is an interesting tidbit I found: Foster-Miller makes these robots. In November 2004 they were acquired by QInetQ which has the Carlyle Group among its owners. People may or may not remember the Bush - Carlyle Group connection any better than they remember James A. Baker, III.

So after $280 billion dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and spending all of America's political capital abroad Bush is crowing about how his illegal invasion brought elections to Iraq.

What he won't tell you:
Washington dismissed Iraq's peace feelers, including elections and weapons pledge, put forward via diplomatic channels and US hawk Perle.

Before warfloggers get all giddy that an election justifies all the dead Iraqi children, I must remind them that so far, everything Bush touches turns to crap. The Bush junta has $9 billion dollars of unaccounted American money supposedly spent on Iraq. I am sure some of it will go to ohio the Iraqi elections as they blackwell votes.

David Letterman's opening monologue consisted entirely of jokes that Carson had sent over the last few months. Unlike Leno's and Letterman's regular fare, there wasn't a single Clenis joke in the lot. No wonder Johnny Carson was King of Comedy for so long - he knew how to stay topical.