RW RESEARCH

Guide to Greener Electronics | Greenpeace International

2012-02-04T12:18:00.002-05:00

Guide to Greener Electronics | Greenpeace International

7.5 mile run this morning

2011-05-27T14:57:00.006-04:00

Put your cursor on the map to pause and control the map
This was an "out and back" run on the Monon Train in Indianapolis.

&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/view/35411558"&amp;amp;amp;gt;Monon 7.5M&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt; and more runs in Indianapolis, IN on MapMyRUN. &amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com"&amp;amp;amp;gt;Find run&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Save our Health Insurance Companies

2009-09-23T23:47:00.001-04:00

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Forgotten History

2009-07-15T12:01:00.001-04:00

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

Thomas Jefferson, (Attributed)
3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)

THE "FED", a private bank, has been issuing our currency ever since 1913, by the way.

Public Service Administration

2009-05-06T12:46:00.006-04:00

An Idea Worth Spreading

2008-05-28T01:43:00.004-04:00

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

Watch this video at TED.com

YES WE CAN... REPAIR THIS WORLD

2008-02-18T12:02:00.006-05:00

GET INSPIRED

Click Here to Visit:
Visit Barack Obama For President

............................................................................................
Don't be Mired

The Real Reason Why The Rich Should NOT Be Taxed

2008-02-11T08:32:00.000-05:00

From Fox News interview:

WALLACE: How does [McCain] overcome all of that and…

BUSH: Because there’s two big issues. One is, who’s going to keep your taxes low? Most Americans feel overtaxed and I promise you the Democrat [sic] party is going to field a candidate who says I’m going to raise your tax.

If they’re going to say, oh, we’re only going to tax the rich people, but most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.

We’ve had — we’ve been through this drill before. We’re only going to tax the rich and all you have to do is look at the history of that kind of language and see who gets stuck with the bill.

He is really serious too. Why tax them if they won't pay anyway? If that makes any sense to you then go crawl back under your rock.

H/T Crooks and Liars

Delete Censorship

2008-01-01T20:34:00.000-05:00

From Delete Censorship.Org

Freedom of speech and freedom of the
press include your right to knowledge
and the expression of ideas. Support the
imaginative and courageous authors of all
books, including those that open our eyes
to controversial topics. Exercise your
First Amendment rights by reading a
banned or challenged book. Encourage
others to build libraries, not bonfires.

Support the First Amendment, because it CAN happen here and those in power, left or right would love to control what you and I can say, write and read.

AND HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!! 2008, I can't believe it!!!

Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -- all of you on the good Earth

2007-12-23T17:24:00.000-05:00

1968 was a year of assassinations, war and riots, the country was in turmoil.
A picture was taken on Christmas Eve that year which no human had ever seen before.
It was the picture that saved 1968...

Christmas Eve 1968

From Nasa:

This photo of "Earthrise" over the lunar horizon was taken by the Apollo 8 crew in December 1968, showing Earth for the first time as it appears from deep space.

Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders had become the first humans to leave Earth orbit, entering lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. In a historic live broadcast that night, the crew took turns reading from the Book of Genesis, closing with a holiday wish from Commander Borman: "We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -- all of you on the good Earth."

The End of Privacy

2007-12-22T16:39:00.000-05:00

War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength...

From Reuters

FBI aims for world's largest biometrics database
Sat Dec 22, 2007 6:40am ET144

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build the world's largest computer database of biometrics to give the government more ways to identify people at home and abroad, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The FBI has already started compiling digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns in its systems, the paper said.

In January, the agency -- which focuses on violations of federal law, espionage by foreigners and terrorist activities -- expects to award a 10-year contract to expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives, it said.

At an employer's request, the FBI will also retain the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks, the paper said.

If successful, the system, called Next Generation Identification, will collect the biometric information in one place for identification and forensic purposes, the Post said.

(Reporting by Rachelle Younglai; Editing by John O'Callaghan)

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

It can happen here...

Kent State 1970

Women in Basra Face Death For Islamic Violations

2007-12-10T07:25:00.000-05:00

The British plan to turn over control of Basra. Who will be in control and what kind of life will the local population face now?

Vigilantes kill 40 women in Iraq's south

By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer Sun Dec 9, 6:14 PM ET

BAGHDAD - Religious vigilantes have killed at least 40 women this year in the southern Iraqi city of Basra because of how they dressed, their mutilated bodies found with notes warning against "violating Islamic teachings," the police chief said Sunday.

Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf blamed sectarian groups that he said were trying to impose a strict interpretation of Islam. They dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves, he added.

"The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior," Khalaf told The Associated Press. He said men with Western clothes or haircuts are also attacked in Basra, an oil-rich city some 30 miles from the Iranian border and 340 miles southeast of Baghdad.

More At Yahoo News

U.S. Alone Among Industrialized Countries

2007-12-05T15:28:00.000-05:00

No, this isn't about torture.

From National Geographic News:

Australia Signs Kyoto Protocol; U.S. Now Only Holdout

By Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia
Associated Press
December 3, 2007

Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd signed the paperwork Monday to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, making good on an election promise that will leave the U.S. isolated among industrialized countries in shunning the international global warming pact.

The dramatic step just nine days after Rudd was elected looked likely to send Australia's standing soaring at international climate change talks that started Monday in Indonesia and to intensify pressure on Washington to join the Kyoto framework.

Environmental Defense Action Fund TV ad

2007-12-04T10:19:00.000-05:00

3 western Governors step up and show leadership.

From The Environmental Defense Action Fund

Three western governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) and Jon Huntsman (R-UT), challenge Congress to cap America's global warming pollution in a new Environmental Defense Action Fund TV ad.

These governors and many others have already taken state action to curb global warming pollution. This is smart leadership, but there is no substitute for national action. Congress must act now.

Breakthrough on Fuel Economy???

2007-12-04T09:50:00.000-05:00

It seems to me the bar has been set way to low. 35 miles per gallon by 2020 is hardly a major accomplishment. Better than nothing but hardly putting pressure on the industry to change.

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

House Reaches Historic Breakthrough on Fuel Economy
35 mile-per-gallon minimum standard locked in for 2020

On Friday, November 30, House leaders announced an agreement that represents the first meaningful improvement in vehicle fuel economy in more than 30 years. The agreement would raise fuel economy standards of America's cars, light trucks and sport utility vehicles to an average of at least 35 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2020, a 10-mpg increase over current levels.

"This agreement breaks 30 years of gridlock on fuel economy and could not have happened without strong congressional leaders who are committed to curbing America's oil addiction," said David Friedman, the research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean Vehicles Program. "This is a victory for Americans struggling to pay $3 for a gallon of gasoline. If passed, it will deliver consumer savings of more than $20 billion in 2020."

An argument for civil rights.

2007-12-03T09:12:00.000-05:00

I just bought the book "The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot" by Naomi Wolf (not to be confused with Naomi Klein, another great author). She was on Democracy NOW with Amy Goodman and it's worth taking a look and stream the interview. Thom Hartmann also interviewed viewed her recently on his radio show.

Stream at Democracy NOW!

Stream at Thom Hartmann, one of the 05NOV07 archives.

If you want a review give me about a week :)

Solar Power for Africa

2007-12-03T08:22:00.000-05:00

Maybe Africa will become a leader in energy development.

From The Guardian:

Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.

More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.

Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.

Last week Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan presented details of the scheme - named Desertec - to the European Parliament. 'Countries with deserts, countries with high energy demand, and countries with technology competence must co-operate,' he told MEPs.

More at The Guardian
and
The DKFactor

Finally I made a post, hopefully I'll be updating again regularly

Still here....

2007-08-25T10:41:00.000-04:00

Moving has turned into commuting instead, which has made posting difficult. I need to prioritize my time better.

So what has changed since my last post?

Doesn’t seem like much, unless your one of the 347 Americans that lost their life in Iraq since May 8th.

Bush is still a jackass. Only now a brainless jackass since Turd Blossom has left the White House.

Congress? They’re on Vacation I think.

Next President? I’m having nightmares about this....... Rudy or Hillary? Sheeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I need some coffee.

I’m still making the rounds, reading your blogs to keep sane.

Peace

Moving

2007-05-08T22:40:00.000-04:00

Making a move, no time to post for a while.

In the mean time I'm gonna repost this at the top:
Did You Know?

glumbert.com

Bill Moyers Back On PBS

2007-04-21T09:27:00.000-04:00

Bill Moyers returns to PBS with the new weekly series Bill Moyers Journal, airing Friday nights at 9 on PBS. The series premieres at a special time on Wednesday, April 25 at 9 p.m. with "Buying the War," a 90-minute documentary that explores the role of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Bill Moyers was interviewed by Rolling Stone for their 40th anniversary edition
From DailyKOS:

Moyers on Obama

Who do you see as a key figure in the time ahead?

I wish I were wise enough to answer that question. Who would have thought that an obscure black preacher from Montgomery, Alabama would become Martin Luther King? I believe that elites have to let go. Hillary Clinton would make a good president, but the same old crowd would come back with her. But when I look at Barack Obama, I think about John F. Kennedy, who leaped over Hubert Humphrey's generation to bring in fresh voices and fresh ideas. I keep thinking that we need to let that happen again. People say, "Obama is so inexperienced." No, he's as experienced as Lincoln was when Lincoln went into the White House. Lincoln had two years in Congress and eight years in the state legislature. Obama represents a generational metaphor. He opens up new gates so that younger people can feel that there's opportunity for them, that they can come in with him and create new possibilities. That's what's important. I've been around a long time in journalism and politics, and I come down to "Put not your trust in princes, they will disappoint you every time."

2007-04-17T14:39:00.000-04:00

Chomsky and Zinn Unplugged

2007-04-16T12:33:00.000-04:00

In a Democracy Now! special from Boston, two of the city's leading dissidents are interviewed together. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, sit down with Amy Goodman for a hour long interview on Vietnam, activism, history, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq.
The interview can be streamed at Democracy Now!.

I'd love to change the world

2007-04-14T00:19:00.000-04:00

The story changes but the song remains the same.

Ten Years After

Plastic Oceans

2007-04-04T11:50:00.000-04:00

Great article on the plastic that is floating in the oceans and will NEVER degrade.

From Best Life

Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?
By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal
Nov 6, 2006 - 12:03:05 PM

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.
[snip]

“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.

Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.

Compassionate Authoritarian

2007-04-02T11:12:00.000-04:00

Two leading Republican Candidates are willing to arrest YOU (or any U.S. citizen) with NO review. This is where the Republican party has been taking us under Bush. He has laid the ground work and his party will continue down this road. Think Bush was bad, you ain't seen nothing.

From Glenn Grennwald

Your modern-day Republican Party

Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:
Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.
Mitt Romeny can't say -- at least not until he engages in a careful and solemn debate with a team of "smart lawyers" -- whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind. But in today's Republican Party, Romney's openness to this definitively tyrannical power is the moderate position. Ponnuru goes on to note:

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.
It sounds like Giuliani is positioning himself in this race as the "compassionate authoritarian" -- "Yes, of course I have the power to imprison you without charges or review of any kind, but as President, I commit to you that I intend (no promises) to 'use this authority infrequently.'"
Two of the three leading Republican candidates for President either embrace or are open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents in the U.S. -- including those arrested not on the "battlefield," but on American soil.

More...

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan cites the views on this matter of Winston Churchill -- whom Bush followers love to trot out (manipulatively) as their prop to symbolize endless warfare -- expressed when Churchill was, as Sullivan puts it, "fighting a war against the greatest evil imaginable, when the very survival of Britain as an independent and free country was in the balance":
The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist.
The extent to which the dominant factions of the Republican Party are hostile to our most basic constitutional traditions and defining political principles really cannot be overstated. They simply do not believe in them.

The News

2007-03-30T21:24:00.001-04:00

What We Call the News | Send To Friends | Funny Animations at JibJab

Backdoor Draft

2007-03-28T17:04:00.000-04:00

Men and women who have already served their four year active duty obligation are being recalled to serve in Iraq. These are people that have been out of the Marines up to 4 years. They are working and raising their families again in civilian life. They are NOT in the "regular reserves". Now they are asked to give up jobs and their lives for Bushes War. They should ONLY be needed in an EXTREME emergency. This is another Bush disaster that NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED!!! It's only because of the MASSIVE incompetence of this "president" and his Chickenhawk administration that our young men and women have to risk their lives to clean up the mess he is leaving this and future generations to clean up.

Marines Call 1,800 From Ready Reserve

Associated Press
Tuesday, March 27, 2007; Page A09

The Marine Corps is recalling 1,800 reservists to active duty, citing a shortage of volunteers to fill some jobs in Iraq.

Members of the branch's Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) will receive letters this week about plans to mobilize them involuntarily for a year, said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Riehl of Marine manpower and reserve affairs.

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates approved the action, under which reservists would report for duty in October and deploy early next year, Riehl said.

From the 1,800 Marines called, officials hope to get 1,200 for aviation maintenance, logistics support, combat arms and other skills needed for the early 2008 rotation into Iraq.

More at The Washington Post

Ohio 2004 Stolen Election

2007-03-21T15:18:00.001-04:00

Forced resignations and stiff prison sentences intensify the escalating blowback from Ohio’s 2004 stolen election

By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman Online Journal Guest Writers
Mar 21, 2007, 00:34

In a bold move “to restore trust to elections in Ohio,” Ohio’s newly-elected Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has requested the resignation of all four members of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. The two Democrats and two Republicans were formally asked to resign by the close of business on March 21. Cuyahoga County includes the heavily Democratic city of Cleveland. Brunner is a Democrat who was elected, last November, to be Ohio’s Secretary of State.

Felony convictions have also resulted in 18-month prison sentences for two employees of the Cuyahoga BOE as a result of what the county prosecutor in the case calls the “rigging” of the outcome in the recount following the 2004 presidential election. Further problems surfaced in the conduct of Cuyahoga County’s May, 2006 primary, in the wake of which Michel Vu, Executive Director of the county’s Board of Elections recently resigned.
[snip]

In the 2004 presidential election, Cuyahoga County suffered serious election irregularities that worked to the disadvantage of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Among them: the purging of 24.93 percent of all the voters in the city of Cleveland, where Kerry won 83 percent of the vote; mysterious and suspect vote totals for third party candidates in majority African American wards; unexplained “security” problems that caused the last-minute shift of voting locations in the inner city Cleveland Public School polling places; improbably low apparent turnouts in heavily Democratic inner city wards, and more.

more

Quagmire Anniversary

2007-03-19T11:13:00.000-04:00

DoD Confirmation List

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD: 3204

Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation: 13

Total 3217

Latest Coalition Fatality: Mar 17, 2007

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Russia Tightens Control of Papers and Bloggers

2007-03-17T06:45:00.000-04:00

Putin is looking more and more like he has no need for an open and free democracy.

In the name of security and protecting the homeland from people who hate freedom of the press (irony or what) it is easy to get people to surrender their rights.

Russians fear blow to press freedom
Last updated at 20:28pm on 16th March 2007

Russia's creation of a super agency to regulate the media and Internet has led to fears of a return to Soviet-style repression.

President Vladimir Putin has decided to merge two authorities to license and oversee the editorial content of broadcasters, newspapers and websites.

Officials claim this will improve efficiency but some of Russia’s top journalists are uneasy.

Under Putin’s rule, domestic media are under heavy pressure not to criticise the government.

Raf Shakirov, who was dismissed as editor of the Izvestiya daily after critical coverage of the 2004 Beslan school siege, said Putin’s decree could extend Soviet-style controls to Russia’s online media.

‘This is an attempt to put everything under control, including personal data about people such as bloggers,’ he said.

Roman Bodanin, political editor of news website gazeta.ru, said the superregulator could make it easier for the government to pressure the media because it would also control the granting of licences.

Original

From The Gulf News

Tired of stifling official control over mainstream television and newspapers, Russians have increasingly turned to the internet to find independent sources of information.

Russians are the second largest group represented on the big US-based blog www.livejournal.com. Their blogs often feature political debates and advertise protests by opposition leaders. But authorities have already fired a warning shot across the bows of one leading news website, www.gazeta.ru, which got an official warning last year for "extremism" after writing about cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).

Roman Bodanin, gazeta.ru's political editor, said the new super-regulator could make it easier for the government to track and pressurise independent media because the same agency would control the granting of licences and the supervision of content.

Valerie Plame Was Stirred Not Shaken

2007-03-16T19:53:00.001-04:00

Two big questions were answered today at the House Oversight and Government Reform Ctme. hearing on the disclosure of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity.
1. Valerie Plame was covert... PERIOD.
2. She had worked outside the country within the last 5 years on classified programs.... period.
Outing her was despicable. Will anyone ever pay a price for such a heinous crime? Unlikely. But the FACT is the White House outed an undercover, covert CIA agent who was working on IRAQ's WMD intelligence program and they did it for political dirty tricks.
Valerie Plame's testimony was strong, composed, direct and just plain incredible. CSPAN has the hearing on their videos. The video is also on the Oversight Committee web site.

AP:

“It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover,” she told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“If our government cannot even protect my identity, future foreign agents who might consider working with the Central Intelligence Agency and providing needed intelligence would think twice,” Plame said in response to a question.

The hearing was the first time Plame has publicly answered questions about the case, which led to the recent perjury and obstruction of justice conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Her appearance was a moment of gripping political theater as Democrats questioned whether the Bush administration mishandled classified information by leaking her identity to reporters. No one has been charged with leaking her identity.

More

Who told who about Valerie Plame Wilson?
From the Oversight Committee web site:

What Would You Say To Cheney?

2007-03-13T10:17:00.000-04:00

Former Senator Max Cleland is a decorated Vietnam Vet who came back from Vietnam a triple amputee. He had something to say to Cheney about his recent comments.

Why is Chevron's Oil Underneath Iraq?

2007-03-13T09:36:00.000-04:00

Freedom is on the march for the oil companies. Once they get the new Iraqi oil law passed Bush and Cheney can claim victory.

From The NYT:

March 13, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?
By ANTONIA JUHASZ

San Francisco

TODAY more than three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn’t always this way.

Until about 35 years ago, the world’s oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They are among the world’s largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.

Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.”

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.

In March 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force), which included executives of America’s largest energy companies, recommended that the United States government support initiatives by Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve. It does so to the benefit of the companies, but to the great detriment of Iraq’s economy, democracy and sovereignty.

Since the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has been aggressive in shepherding the oil law toward passage. It is one of the president’s benchmarks for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a fact that Mr. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Gen. William Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and other administration officials are publicly emphasizing with increasing urgency.

The administration has highlighted the law’s revenue sharing plan, under which the central government would distribute oil revenues throughout the nation on a per capita basis. But the benefits of this excellent proposal are radically undercut by the law’s many other provisions — these allow much (if not most) of Iraq’s oil revenues to flow out of the country and into the pockets of international oil companies.

The law would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model closed to American oil companies except for limited (although highly lucrative) marketing contracts, into a commercial industry, all-but-privatized, that is fully open to all international oil companies.

more

Madness

2007-03-11T19:08:00.000-04:00

Viewable

Printable

Bush is Bad juju

2007-03-09T09:26:00.000-05:00

The Bush juju is well known even in the jungles.

Priests to purify site after Bush visit

By Juan Carlos Llorca, Associated Press Writer | March 9, 2007

GUATEMALA CITY --Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.

"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.

Read at The Boston Globe

The rest of Bush's Latin American spring break tour has been a riot too.

Bush Latin-American Tour Sparks Protest

Police in Brazil and Colombia Clash With Protesters Demonstrating Against Bush Visit

By STAN LEHMAN

SAO PAULO, Brazil Mar 9, 2007 (AP)— The beginning of President Bush's five-nation Latin American tour sparked protests across the region, with thousands of demonstrators and police clashing in Brazil and students in Colombia lobbing explosives at authorities.

More than 6,000 students, environmentalists and left-leaning Brazilians held a largely peaceful march through the heart of Sao Paulo before police fired tear gas at protesters and beat them with batons. Hundreds fled and ducked into businesses to avoid the chaos, some of them bloodied.

Authorities did not disclose the number of injuries, but Brazilian media said at least 18 people were hurt and news photographs showed injured people being carried away.

From ABC News

Libbygate

2007-03-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

Libby is guilty, fall guy or not. He will do less time than he deserves and those he has protected will do no time. Justice has not been served.
Bush/Cheney were trying to stop the story that their phony intel led us into a fiasco that never should have been.
It wasn't about political revenge to trash Wilson, it is about lying us into a war and getting caught.

Walter Reed Scandal

2007-03-03T12:56:00.000-05:00

The Republican ideology of privatizing all government services may be at the core of the Walter reed scandal.

Privatizing everything from fighting a war with Blackwater mercenaries to counting our votes, running our prisons and on and on is destroying this country. If you still vote Republican it's time to reevaluate your priorities. Letting government services be run by the greed driven corporocracy must end.

Will General Wesley Clark Run?

2007-03-03T10:33:00.000-05:00

Gen. Wesley Clark, retired 4-star US Army general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War, says he is still considering a run.

Amy Goodman interviews him on Democracy NOW.
excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: Today, an exclusive hour with General Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general. He was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, he unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He recently edited a series of books about famous US generals, including Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses Grant, both of whom became president after their military careers ended.

On Tuesday, I interviewed Wesley Clark at the 92nd Street Y Cultural Center here in New York City before a live audience and asked him about his presidential ambitions.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of these generals who run for president?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I like them. It’s happened before.

AMY GOODMAN: Will it happen again?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: It might.

AMY GOODMAN: Later in the interview, I followed up on that question.

AMY GOODMAN: Will you announce for president?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, I haven’t said I won’t.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you waiting for?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I’m waiting for several different preconditions, which I’m not at liberty to discuss. But I will tell you this: I think about it every single day.

Watch the interview at Democracy NOW!

The Punisher of Hubris and Arrogance

2007-02-28T10:36:00.000-05:00

Chalmers Johnson was interviewed on Democracy NOW about his new book Nemesis.

excerpt:

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in human beings. You may recall she is the one that led Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to me that she's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her -- to carry out her divine mission.

By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just hype to sell books -- “The Last Days of the American Republic.” I’m here concerned with a very real, concrete problem in political analysis, namely that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is -- that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire -- that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

The interview can be streamed at Democracy NOW

FDA Safety Tests Drop

2007-02-27T11:03:00.000-05:00

Another casualty of the Republican led administration, your food supply.

FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION | Agency conducts far fewer inspections

Food safety checks slashed
An analysis of records shows a drop in oversight at a time of several high-profile product recalls.

By ANDREW BRIDGES and SETH BORENSTEIN
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON | The federal agency charged with warning people about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.

The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.

“We have a food safety crisis on the horizon,” said Michael Doyle, the director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.

Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to an analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.

That is not all that is dropping at the agency in terms of food safety. The analysis also showed:

•FDA field offices have 12 percent fewer employees who concentrate on food issues.

•Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the country’s food system was vulnerable to terrorists. Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but both have since fallen enough to erase the gains.

More At The Kansas City Star

Open Congress

2007-02-26T14:12:00.000-05:00

A new site, OpenCongress.org, “brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.”

It covers:
Latest Votes
Most Viewed Bills on OpenCongress
Bills Most Covered in the News
Bills Most Covered in Blogs
Issue Areas

Along with other useful info, STAY INFORMED!!! Check out OpenCongress.

H-T Think Progress

Clinton Arrogance On The March

2007-02-23T10:55:00.000-05:00

Clinton has not been anointed yet and with any luck never will. There ARE others to chose from.

Clinton To Anti-War Voters: Bring It On

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate.
Posted February 21, 2007.

Clinton invites voters to turn elsewhere for an anti-war presidential candidate, and they will oblige.

Hillary Clinton is a once and future warrior. Campaign events in New Hampshire suggest the majority anti-war electorate has problems with her vote for the Iraq War and with her position on Iran.

On Feb. 10, New Hampshire resident Roger Tilton asked Sen. Clinton at a town-hall meeting: "I want to know if right here, right now, once and for all and without nuance, you can say that war authorization was a mistake."

Clinton responded: "Well, I have said, and I will repeat it, that knowing what I know now, I never would have voted for it. ... The mistakes were made by this president who misled this country and this Congress into a war that should not have been waged."

A week later, in Dover, N.H., she dug in:

"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from. But for me, the most important thing now is trying to end this war."

{snip]
Fully a year before she died, columnist and arch Bush critic Molly Ivins wrote: "Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. ... Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her."

And then there's Ralph Nader. He admits that there are good anti-war candidates, but that if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, he would be more likely to run.

Sen. Clinton has drawn the line in the sand over Iraq. She will not admit that her vote to authorize Bush to use military force in a unilateral, unprovoked war based on lies was a mistake. She is open to a military strike on Iran. Her latest message to voters: "There are others to choose from." Anti-war voters already know that, and are lining up behind candidates Barack Obama, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and, perhaps before long, Ralph Nader.

More At AlterNET

Freedom On The March

2007-02-23T10:38:00.000-05:00

On Thursday Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, 22 was convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced to four years in prison in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger. Although I think Bush, Cheney and their followers may see this as a good thing.

The Blogger-Martyr of Egypt
Friday, Feb. 23, 2007
By AMANY RADWAN/CAIRO

A chill has just gone through the collective spine of the bloggers of the Middle East. On Thursday, Egypt sentenced Abdel Kareem Suleiman (a.k.a. "Kareem Amer" online) to four years in prison — three years for blog posts that insulted Islam and one year for similar writings that defamed President Hosni Mubarak. While bloggers have been harrassed and a couple arrested by Mideast governments in the past, this is the first time one has been sentenced to prison. Before Kareem's arrest and conviction, internet writing was considered a safe and open venue for many young men and women in the region, a vehicle to freely express their opinions, doubts and misgivings about thorny issues in their tightly controlled societies.

Kareem's blog posts would not have been that different. For example, he wrote about how he wanted to become a human rights lawyer working for the betterment of "Muslim and Arabic women." But his blog also condemned sacred Muslim rituals like fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. He mocked Islamic liturgies by saying "there is no God but the human being." He also posted his opinions on Coptic blogs — set up by the remnant of Egypt's pre-Islamic Christian community — which made him a target for accusations of heresy and apostasy. In November Kareem was detained, interrogated and held in an Alexandria jail without trial for two months before he was charged with spreading information disruptive of public order, incitement to hate Islam and defaming the president of the republic. The arrest had inspired rallies in support of Kareem around in Washington, Rome, Paris, London and Stockholm.
[snip]

The blogs act as a pain in the tooth for many Arab governments which fear citizens gaining the means to reveal their illegal and anti-democratic practices." Dismayed by Egypt's conviction of Kareem, Eid told TIME, "It is a gloomy day for all the advocates of freedom of expression not only in Egypt but also in the whole world."

More at Time

Breaking News... that wasn't reported

2007-02-21T11:21:00.000-05:00

The past week of "Breaking News" from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and of course the KING of the Main Stream Tabloid news... FOX has been pathetic.

In the mean time, this from Matt Taibbi.

Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted February 20, 2007.

While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.
[snip]

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

More at AlterNet

A Plan

2007-02-21T09:55:00.000-05:00

U.S. Adm. Joe Sestak commanded a carrier battle group and was director of the Navy's anti-terrorism unit. He is a newly elected Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania. He outlines his plan to exit Iraq.

Former admiral says all American forces should pull out by year's end
By Renee Schoof
McClatchy Newspapers
Feb. 20, 2007

WASHINGTON - After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Adm. Joe Sestak commanded a carrier battle group in combat near Afghanistan, then in the Persian Gulf in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Now a freshman member of the House of Representatives, Sestak, a Pennsylvania Democrat, has introduced a bill calling for withdrawing all American forces from Iraq by the end of this year, while strengthening the U.S. military presence in the region and in Afghanistan.

Sestak, who defeated 10-term Republican incumbent Curt Weldon in November, has a Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard University. He served as the director for defense policy on President Clinton's National Security Council and once was the director of the Navy's anti-terrorism unit.

His bill would cut off most money for military operations in Iraq by Dec. 31.

"I honestly believe that in the next few months we will move to this position," Sestak said in an interview. "It may not be my bill, but it will be something very similar."

The main reason, he said, is that the war in Iraq is hurting American national security: It's diverted resources and attention from the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and from other challenges to U.S. interests around the world.

"We diverted our attention, our resources and our forces ... to Iraq," he said. "To my mind Afghanistan is the poster child for what isn't being done in this world where the real war on terrorism is elsewhere, not Iraq."

Raed More At McClatchy Newspapers

Libby Trial Update

2007-02-21T09:34:00.000-05:00

Closing Arguments.

From FireDogLake

Hillary's Advice

2007-02-21T08:40:00.000-05:00

Senator Clinton gives some good advice, vote for someone else.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast a vote [to authorize the war] or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” she said in New Hampshire last week, confusing contempt for antiwar Americans—now a majority—with the courage of her indefensible conviction that she bears no responsibility for the humanitarian, economic and military disaster our occupation has wrought.

Read More at Truthdig

Martial Law

2007-02-20T14:49:00.000-05:00

Bush was able to sneak a provision into a law known as the Insurrection Act making martial law easier. Of course, this was done with no public hearings. All 50 governors oppose the law. Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri have introduced a bill that would repeal revisions.

from Democracy NOW!

Bush Given Power to Deploy US Troops Domestically & Declare Martial Law
In news from Capitol Hill, Congress is coming under criticism for approving a little noticed provision last year that makes it easier for President Bush to declare martial law and to send US troops into American cities. At the administration's request, Congress approved the changes to a law known as the Insurrection Act without ever holding a public hearing. Under the new law, the president now has the authority to use both active-duty armed forces and the National Guard on American soil -- not just during a rebellion -- but also a natural disaster, terrorist attack, pandemic or other chaotic situation. All 50 of the nation's governors have opposed the rule changes. Earlier this month Senators Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Republican Christopher Bond introduced legislation to repeal the changes Congress approved last year.

From The New York Times:

Editorial
Making Martial Law Easier
Published: February 19, 2007

A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration’s behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president’s use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.

The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any “other condition.”

Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation’s governors.

There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation’s governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate.

Supporting The Troops in Bushworld

2007-02-19T09:43:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post has a two part series on outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In the republican world of spin what does support the troops mean? Maybe we need to contract out hospital care to Halliburton.

From part 1:

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page A01

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially -- they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 -- that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

more

From part 2:

THE OTHER WALTER REED
The Hotel Aftermath
Inside Mologne House, the Survivors of War Wrestle With Military Bureaucracy and Personal Demons

By Anne Hull and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 19, 2007; Page A01

The guests of Mologne House have been blown up, shot, crushed and shaken, and now their convalescence takes place among the chandeliers and wingback chairs of the 200-room hotel on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Oil paintings hang in the lobby of this strange outpost in the war on terrorism, where combat's urgency has been replaced by a trickling fountain in the garden courtyard. The maimed and the newly legless sit in wheelchairs next to a pond, watching goldfish turn lazily through the water.

more

In Saturn's Shadow

2007-02-16T21:36:00.000-05:00

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun's blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

From NASA

Speaker Pelosi's Blog

2007-02-15T15:42:00.000-05:00

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a new blog up on her web site called The Gavel.

However, Republicans are crying because she is using You Tube to show C SPAN clips. They are moron to the bone.

The Daily KOS has more.

Humvees Lack Armor

2007-02-12T14:51:00.000-05:00

Support the troops is the congressional mantra. WHY is it that after four years this is STILL a headline? Bush has no problem sending troops to fight in his war and STILL has not supplied them with what they need to survive. Bush never put this country on a "war-footing" that would get the troops everything they need. Four years and he is still fiddling while Baghdad burns and our troops are killed and blown to pieces.

Thousands of Army Humvees Lack Armor Upgrade
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 12, 2007; Page A01

The Army is working to fill a shortfall in Iraq of thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs -- including a rising threat from particularly lethal weapons linked to Iran and known as "explosively formed penetrators" (EFP) -- that are now inflicting 70 percent of the American casualties in the country, according to U.S. military and civilian officials.

The additional protection is needed for thousands of U.S. reinforcement troops flowing into Baghdad, where these devastating weapons -- used primarily by Shiite fighters -- are particularly prevalent, the officials said.

U.S. Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan lack more than 4,000 of the latest Humvee armor kit, known as FRAG Kit 5, according to U.S. officials. The Army has ramped up production of the armor, giving priority to troops in Baghdad, but the upgrade is not scheduled to be completed until this summer, Army officials said. That is well into the timeline for major operations launched last week to quell violence by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias, which the U.S. military now views as the top security threat in Iraq.

Read At The Washington Post

Foreign Policy?

2007-02-11T16:51:00.000-05:00

Where on the planet has the Bush/Rice/Cheney foreign policy been a success? Asia, Europe, South America, Central America the MIDDLE EAST? Even the Eskimo's are pissed for melting the Arctic ice cap. There is the jackass Prime Minister JohnHoward in Australia I guess, he still likes Bush. He's deployed a grand total of 1400 troops to help out in Iraq. Of course he'd like to make sure we keep 140,000 of our troops there, what a jackass.

I'm no Putin fan but Bush did see his soul or some bullshit a few years back. Putin had some pretty tough statements about his old soul buddy at the Munich Conference on Security Policy.

Putin: U.S. pushing others into nuclear ambitions

MUNICH, Germany (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday blamed U.S. policy for inciting other countries to seek nuclear weapons to defend themselves from an "almost uncontained use of military force."

The stinging attack underscored growing tensions between Washington and Moscow.

"Unilateral, illegitimate actions have not solved a single problem, they have become a hotbed of further conflicts," Putin said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, an annual forum attracting senior officials from around the world.

"One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way."

The Bush administration said it was "surprised and disappointed" by Putin's remarks.
.......[snip]

'A world of one master, one sovereign'

But Putin said it was "the almost uncontained hyper-use of force in international relations" that was forcing countries opposed to Washington to seek to build up nuclear arsenals.

"It is a world of one master, one sovereign. ... It has nothing to do with democracy. This is nourishing the wish of countries to get nuclear weapons," he said.

"This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law," Putin told the gathering.

Science Saturday

2007-02-10T17:04:00.000-05:00

Some physics and interesting thoughts from Michio Kaku.
Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilizations

The late Carl Sagan once asked this question, “What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old... an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque.”

Although any conjecture about such advanced civilizations is a matter of sheer speculation, one can still use the laws of physics to place upper and lower limits on these civilizations. In particular, now that the laws of quantum field theory, general relativity, thermodynamics, etc. are fairly well-established, physics can impose broad physical bounds which constrain the parameters of these civilizations.

The Surge Has Started

2007-02-09T09:28:00.000-05:00

Kurdistan is the one area of Iraq that has been under relative calm, so we bomb them.

Report: U.S. airstrike kills 8 Kurds
By LAUREN FRAYER, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. airstrike hit a Kurdish position in northern Iraq, killing at least eight Kurdish troops and wounding six, Iraqi officials said Friday. The U.S. military said it was looking into the report.

The strike hit just before midnight Thursday in Mosul, according to officials with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party headed by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a staunch supporter of U.S. efforts in Iraq.

Sheik Kabir Goran, deputy in charge of the party's branch in Mosul, said U.S. warplanes hit a guard post that was protecting the PUK branch in eastern Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad. He said eight Kurdish guards were killed and six were wounded in the strike.

Goran identified those killed as peshmerga, members of the Kurdish militia that fought Saddam Hussein's regime for decades. Many peshmerga fighters have been incorporated into the Iraqi military since the U.S.-led invasion.

Maj. Gen. Wathiq Mohammed Abdul-Qadir, the commander of the provincial police, confirmed the airstrike and gave the same casualty toll.

Goran said U.S. forces went to the post after the airstrike and provided care to the wounded before returning them to the PUK branch. He said the Americans promised to return later Friday to explain what happened.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the reports were being investigated.

Prominent Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman, who is not a PUK member but has strong ties to the community, expressed anger over the attack.

"This is not a good sign for the new security plan that they (U.S. forces) have started by attacking the people who support them," he told The Associated Press.

Read More at Yahoo News

Three U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq: military
Fri Feb 9, 3:02 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three U.S. soldiers died on Thursday of wounds sustained in combat in the western Anbar province, the U.S. military said on Friday.

"Three soldiers assigned to Multi-National Force-West were killed Thursday from wounds sustained while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar Province," it said in a statement.

The deaths bring to at least 14 the number of U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq in the past three days.

Anbar province, a Sunni Arab insurgency stronghold, is the deadliest place for U.S. troops in Iraq.

From Yahoo News

Libby Trial Update

2007-02-08T22:01:00.000-05:00

From FireDogLake

The bloggers coverage of the trial has been excellent.

Just Don't Think About What's Next

2007-02-08T12:36:00.000-05:00

This is the kind of blind faith that has gotten us into the Iraq Fiasco. Block all debates, talk about non-issues (like the Pelosi airplane BS) and follow Bush into oblivion.

Lieberman: I just — I'm going to do everything I can to support it and I hope it does work and that we won't have to think about what's next.

So Lieberman doesn't want to worry his sorry ass about what's happening in Iraq. He doesn't want to THINK ABOUT IT! Just send in the troops and forget about it. How did this guy get re-elected?
Somebody better have a plan for when the shit continues to fly.

H-T Crooks and Liars

Bush Budget

2007-02-07T12:36:00.000-05:00

From the office of Senator Bernie Sanders (D) Vermont.

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS, MEMBER OF BUDGET COMMITTEE: THE BUSH BUDGET IS A DISASTER The President punishes the middle class and the poor to provide tax breaks for the rich. -- 02/05/2007

Among many other cuts proposed by the President there is:

A complete elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), a vital nutrition program primarily for low-income seniors but also serving mothers, infants and children across the country. The CSFP provided more than 6.4 million food packages for over 400,000 low-income seniors, mothers and children across the country in 2006, including over 4,000 Vermonters.

A $379 million cut to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program at a time when senior citizens on fixed incomes and low-income families with children struggle to pay to heat their homes this winter.

A $100 million cut for Head Start, at a time when only about one-half of the children eligible for this program actually participate due to a lack of funding.

A complete elimination of the Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Program even though each and every year more people are diagnosed with TBI than those who suffer from breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, Spinal Cord Injury and Multiple Sclerosis combined.

A complete elimination of the $630 million Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) program, one of the most successful anti-poverty programs in the country, that has provided millions of Americans with emergency food assistance, employment, affordable housing and heating assistance.

An 87 percent cut in Rural Health Programs.

A $310 million cut in the National Institutes of Health.

A $1 billion cut in job training and employment services at the Department of Labor.

A $172 million cut in elderly housing and a $115 million cut in housing for persons with disabilities.

Libby Trial

2007-02-07T11:25:00.000-05:00

Libby Trial update from FireDogLake

Dancing for Lashes

2007-02-07T09:33:00.000-05:00

Freedom is on the march. From our friends in Saudi Arabia:

20 sentenced for attending party
From Times Wire Reports
February 5, 2007

A Saudi Arabian judge sentenced 20 foreigners to lashings and several months in prison after convicting them of attending a party where alcohol was served and men and women danced, a newspaper reported.

The defendants were among 433 foreigners, including 240 women, arrested by the kingdom's religious police for attending the party in Jidda, the state-guided newspaper Okaz said. It did not identify the foreigners, give their nationalities or say when the party took place.

The paper said the rest of those arrested were awaiting trial.

Saudi Arabia's religious police enjoy wide powers, roaming malls, markets, universities and other public places looking for violations of the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Original at The LA Times

Game Day

2007-02-04T08:34:00.000-05:00

Could be Wet and Wild in Miami.

Date/Time: Feb. 4, 6:25 p.m.
Network: CBS

Current conditions in Miami 08:00 am
Light Rain Fog/Mist 65°F

Forecast: Rain likely, mainly after 1pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 74. Northeast wind around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%.

Current conditions in Indy 08:00 am
Fair -1°F

Feingold Friday

2007-02-03T12:43:00.000-05:00

A few words from Senator Russ Feingold on Friday:

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold
On the National Intelligence Estimate Released Today
February 2, 2007

“The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq released today confirms what has been apparent for some time – the Bush Administration’s policy of fighting an indefinite war in Iraq is not working and will not work. The NIE also confirms that what is going on in Iraq is indeed a civil war. We shouldn't ask our brave troops to police a civil war.

“What the Intelligence Community was not asked to do is to find a way out. That’s the job of the policy-makers. Congress must exercise the power of the purse to redeploy U.S. forces from Iraq so that we can refocus our efforts on defeating al Qaeda and other global threats.

“Over the past month, I have asked State Department officials, military generals and the leadership of the Intelligence Community about strategies to deal with the mess this war has created in Iraq as we redeploy our troops. I am deeply concerned that this Administration, which went to war in Iraq without a plan, has no plan for leaving. The failure thus far to develop these strategies is irresponsible.”
From Russ Feingold

How To End The War
Russ Feingold
February 02, 2007

Russ Feingold is a United States senator from Wisconsin.

Our founders wisely kept the power to fund a war separate from the power to conduct a war. In their brilliant design of our system of government, Congress got the power of the purse, and the president got the power of the sword. As James Madison wrote, “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded.”

Earlier this week, I chaired a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee to remind my colleagues in the Senate that, through the power of the purse, we have the constitutional power to end a war. At the hearing, a wide range of constitutional scholars agreed that Congress can use its power to end a military engagement.

The Constitution gives Congress the explicit power “[to] declare War,” “[t]o raise and support Armies,” “[t]o provide and maintain a Navy” and “[t]o make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” In addition, under Article I, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” These are direct quotes from the Constitution of the United States. Yet to hear some in the Administration talk, it is as if these powers were written in invisible ink. They were not. These powers are a clear and direct statement from the founders of our republic that Congress has authority to declare, to define and, ultimately, to end a war.

If and when Congress acts on the will of the American people by ending our involvement in the Iraq war, Congress will be performing the role assigned it by the founding fathers—defining the nature of our military commitments and acting as a check on a president whose policies are weakening our nation.

There is plenty of precedent for Congress exercising its constitutional authority to stop U.S. involvement in armed conflict.

Read More At Tom Paine

Who Do You Trust?

2007-02-02T11:07:00.000-05:00

Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness of climate change.

The Bush administration has the lobbists raise "awareness".

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

More at The Guardian

Gore nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Thu Feb 1, 2007 11:29am ET147
By John Acher

OSLO (Reuters) - Two Norwegian parliamentarians have nominated former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness of climate change.

Since leaving office in 2001 Gore has lectured extensively on the threat of global warming and last year starred in his own documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth" to argue for immediate action to deal with the problem.

"I think climate change is this century's most important and most threatening environmental issue, and I think Al Gore has made a difference in putting climate change on the global agenda," Conservative MP Boerge Brende told Reuters.

More at Reuters

Libby Trial Update

2007-02-02T09:55:00.000-05:00

Marcy Wheeler (aka emptywheel) of TheNextHurrah talked about the day's events at the Libby trial on Thursday outside of the Courthouse in Washington, DC.

It is becoming clear that Cheney was very much involved in the outing of a CIA operative and evidence that Bush was also in the loop.

H-T FireDogLake

Michael Ware on Iraq

2007-01-31T12:50:00.000-05:00

Michael Ware was interviewed on Anderson Cooper's 360. This is an excellent interview. Ware details how he narrowly escaped execution by al-Qaeda in September of 2004 in Baghdad.
Ware has been reporting from Iraq since the beginning and his insight and opinions should be taken very seriously.

The video can be streamed here.

Climate Spin From The Toxic Texan

2007-01-31T11:17:00.000-05:00

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chaired an Oversight Committee hearing, "Political Influence on Climate Change Research," regarding political interference in the work of government climate change scientists.
I think the conclusion any sane person outside the administration and Fox News would have to conclude is that the Bush administration has "interfered".
The hearing can be streamed at CSPAN.

The NYT has a couple articles on the hearings:

Panel Hears Climate 'Spin' Allegations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 31, 2007
Filed at 12:54 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal scientists have been pressured by the White House to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats' first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations that White House officials for years have micromanaged the government's climate programs and has closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public.

''It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change,'' said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Waxman is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a critic of the Bush administration's environmental policies, including its views on climate.

Climate change also was a leading topic in the Senate, where presidential contenders for 2008 lined up at a hearing called by Sen. Barbara Boxer. They expounded -- and at times tried to outdo each other -- on why they believed Congress must act to reduce heat-trapping ''greenhouse'' gases.

More

Scientists Criticize White House Stance on Climate Change Findings
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: January 31, 2007

Under its new Democratic chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took on the Bush administration’s handling of climate change science yesterday, and even the Republicans on the panel had little good to say about the administration’s actions.

The subject of the hearing was accusations of administration interference with the work of government climate scientists. Almost to a person, Republicans on the panel introduced themselves by proclaiming their agreement that the earth’s climate was warming and that the principal culprit was greenhouse gases generated by people and their machinery.

And when witnesses spoke in defense of the administration, it was often to say only that there were still some scientists who doubted that climate view or that the administration’s approach was not unique.

“Cherry-picking” science to suit policy or political goals is at least as old as the Eisenhower administration, said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado. The committee itself is guilty of it, he added, pointing to a news release linking rising ocean temperatures to bigger and more frequent coastal storms, something about which there is still debate.

But the other witnesses spoke about how the administration had delayed, altered or watered down the findings of government scientists, the kind of thing they said they had not experienced in the Clinton administration.

Drew Shindell, a NASA scientist who said he was speaking as an individual, not for his agency, described research he and his colleagues did on ozone depletion and greenhouse gases over Antarctica.

Dr. Shindell said the findings helped explain recent cooling on the continent, a phenomenon cited by climate dissidents as challenging the mainstream view. And, he said, the findings suggested Antarctica might warm rapidly in the future, melting ice and sharply raising sea levels. By the time the administration had signed off on the work, he said, its importance had been played down and references to “rapid warming” had been deleted.

More

Bush Will Stay in His Bubble

2007-01-30T10:35:00.000-05:00

Bush will only listen to one side of any issue no matter what the issue. This type of government has led us into disaster after disaster. His propaganda machine continues on overdrive.

Bush Directive Increases Sway on Regulation
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: January 30, 2007

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

Read More At NYT

Groups allege pressure on global warming
By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Two private advocacy groups told a congressional hearing Tuesday that climate scientists at seven government agencies say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming.

he groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report.

Read More At Yahoo News

When Does The Greed Stop

2007-01-26T16:57:00.000-05:00

Ted Kennedy on Republicans and Minimum wage

h-t Crooks and Liars

"Do you have such disdain for hard-working Americans that you want to pile all your amendments on this? Why don’t you just hold your amendments until other pieces of legislation? Why this volume of amendments on just the issue to try and raise the minimum wage? What is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it? Something. Something! What is the price that the workers have to pay to get an increase? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"

Iraq, Iran, Syria

2007-01-23T13:24:00.000-05:00

The Shite led Iraqi government has established close ties with both Iran and Syria. So who are we fighting for? The Iraqi government will be a very close ally of Iran no matter what we do. The Bush FUBAR policy.

Joe Conason: Our Iraqi Friends Befriend Our Enemies
Posted on Jan 18, 2007
By Joe Conason

Should the United States attack Iran, which side would the Iraqi government support? The answer to that simple question is far from clear, despite the thousands of lives and billions of dollars we have sacrificed to support the ruling coalition in Baghdad. While the Bush administration seeks to isolate and even overthrow the Iranian regime, as well as its Syrian ally, its partners in Iraq are establishing closer relationships with both.

Indeed, the most powerful elements of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s political coalition regularly collude with the Iranian intelligence apparatus—which the Bush administration has accused of arming the insurgents and terrorists who are attacking our forces, committing sectarian atrocities and undermining the new Iraqi democracy. The Maliki government has resumed diplomatic relations with Syria, signed a billion-dollar aid agreement with Iran and encouraged the expansion of Iranian consulates and border stations.

Friendship with Iran and Syria is endorsed not only by Shiite fundamentalists such as Moqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army warlord, and his rival Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, chief of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq—but also by President Jalal Talabani and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Kurdish leaders who believe in secular democracy and actually like the United States.

Nothing better illustrates the profound differences between the U.S. and Iraq over relations with Iran than the recent raid by American soldiers on an Iranian office in the northern city of Irbil, where they arrested five alleged Iranian subversives. During a tense confrontation, the Americans faced the cocked weapons of Kurdish troops, who surrounded the Iranian facility.

Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, described those prisoners as “foreign intelligence agents in this country, working with Iraqis to destabilize Iraq and target coalition forces that are here at Iraq’s request.” But Zebari rejected that accusation and demanded their immediate release. He told the Los Angeles Times that his government’s policy is to “engage [Iran] constructively”—notably in a security agreement just signed between the two countries.

So in Iraq, the friends of our enemies are ... our best and only friends.

That lethal contradiction is among the many reasons why the president’s plan to send more troops to Iraq won’t achieve his objectives—and why the basic framework of his policy is fundamentally flawed.

Governor Bill Richardson to Announce For President

2007-01-20T12:13:00.000-05:00

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson intends to announce his plans this Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
Senator Clinton has all the headlines and Governor Richardson has to overcome the Main Stream Media's love affair with their "Big 3" (Clinton, Obama and Edwards).
I think Governor Richardson is a serious contender and highly qualified candidate. Hopefully he will get the press he will need to get the name recognition he lacks.
The picture is from the Governor's trip to Sudan where Sudan's government and Darfur rebels agreed to a 60-day cease-fire and a peace summit sponsored by the African Union and the UN (read at CNN). This is not the end of the Sudan problem but it is great progress. Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball asked the Governor how he managed to do it in the Sudan; his response is pure Richardson:
“Negotiating, diplomacy … If you engage them, and conduct hard bargaining, you get things done.” (h/t billrichardsonblog)

Richardson to Launch Presidential Bid

By NEDRA PICKLER
The Associated Press
Saturday, January 20, 2007; 7:22 AM

WASHINGTON -- After years of freelancing his diplomatic skills from the unlikely position as governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson is taking the first step toward a bid to become president and put his skills to work in the White House.

Richardson plans to announce Sunday that he will soon file papers to create a presidential exploratory committee, several officials with knowledge of his plans said Friday. The governor is scheduled to appear Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
[snip]
Richardson, 59, is a former congressman, U.N. ambassador and Energy Department secretary. He brings a wealth of experience in international affairs that has extended even into his governorship of a sparsely populated but politically important swing state.

He has hosted talks on North Korea's nuclear program in New Mexico and most recently traveled to Sudan to meet with the country's president to press him for an end to the bloodshed in Darfur.

Both Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., considered Richardson as their running mate because of his impressive portfolio, his potential to win over Hispanic voters and his home in a western swing state.

Gonzales and Habeas Corpus

2007-01-19T10:33:00.000-05:00

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday. After hearing what this smirking piece of crap said about how he views habeas corpus, there is no longer any doubt how this administration views YOUR Constitutional rights... they don't exist.

From Consortium News

Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus
By Robert Parry
January 19, 2007

In one of the most chilling public statements ever made by a U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales questioned whether the U.S. Constitution grants habeas corpus rights of a fair trial to every American.

Responding to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, Gonzales argued that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bestow habeas corpus rights; it merely says when the so-called Great Writ can be suspended.

“There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales’s remark left Specter, the committee’s ranking Republican, stammering.

“Wait a minute,” Specter interjected. “The Constitution says you can’t take it away except in case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there’s a rebellion or invasion?”

Gonzales continued, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion.

“You may be treading on your interdiction of violating common sense,” Specter said.

While Gonzales’s statement has a measure of quibbling precision to it, his logic is troubling because it would suggest that many other fundamental rights that Americans hold dear also don’t exist because the Constitution often spells out those rights in the negative.

Read More: Consortium News

To hear the testimony between Sen. Specter and Attorney General Gonzales, click here: Hearing and scroll to about 23 minutes into the segment.

Bush's Savage War of Peace

2007-01-17T08:32:00.000-05:00

During his “60 Minutes” interview Bush said Henry Kissinger recommended that he read Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace.” The story of the Algerian War, an insurgency (French occupied) that turned into a civil war, sound familiar? Now, if Bush actually reads this account of a colonial war against Muslims in Algeria he may be in for one of those "OH SHIT" moments. Things didn't work out so well in that one. It's kind of hard to believe that Kissinger read it or maybe he feels that if only the French had stayed the course they would have won.
The French did eventually leave, that didn't end the slaughter however. The killing continued as it will in Iraq.

From NYT Book Review:

A Savage War of Peace
Algeria 1954-1962
By Alistair Horne

With a new preface by the Author

The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It caused the fall of six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, brought De Gaulle back to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and as many European settlers were driven into exile. Above all, the war was marked by an unholy marriage of revolutionary terror and state torture.

The conflict made headlines around the world, and at the time it seemed like a French affair. From the perspective of half a century, however, this brutal and intractable conflict looks less like the last colonial war than the first postmodern one—a full-dress rehearsal for the sort of amorphous struggle that convulsed the Balkans in the 1990s and that now ravages the Middle East, from Beirut to Baghdad, struggles in which religion, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism assume previously unimagined degrees of intensity.

Originally published in 1977, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace was immediately proclaimed by experts of varied political sympathies to be the definitive history of the Algerian War, a book that not only does justice to its Byzantine intricacies, but that does so with intelligence, assurance, and unflagging momentum. It is not only essential reading for anyone who wishes to investigate this dark stretch of history, but a lasting monument of the historian's art.

Previously posted at RW Research: Lessons of Military History.

A Fighting Dem

2007-01-13T09:29:00.000-05:00

Senator Jim Webb (D) Virginia made some great comments at the Armed Services Cmte. Hearing on Iraq Policy.

From Daily KOS:

I also want to say something about my longtime friend, Senator McCain's comments when he was talking about the consequences of pulling out of Iraq and in your statement, Secretary Gates, you list some of these as an emboldened and strengthened Iran, a base of operations for jihadist networks in the heart of the Middle East, an undermining of the credibility of the United States. In many ways, quite frankly, those have been the results of the invasion and occupation. There's really nothing that's occurred since the invasion and occupation that was not predictable and in fact, most of it was predicted. It was predicted in many cases by people with long backgrounds in national security...and in many cases there were people who saw their military careers destroyed and who were personally demeaned by people who opposed them on the issues, including members of this administration. And they are people in my judgement, who will be remembered in history as having had a moral conscience.

The hearing can be seen at CSPAN and Webb is speaking at the 3:04:45 time stamp of the hearing.

Attack on Iran

2007-01-12T17:13:00.000-05:00

Does Bush need a new authorization to attack Iran? Bush believes not. Senator Biden warns Rice that an attack on Iran would "generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate". Congress did not authorize an attack anywhere beyond Iraq (and the previously authorized Afghanistan).

2 good posts at Unclaimed Territory and Dover Bitch spell it out for ya.

Dover Bitch brings up the point that the "first draft" for authorization of force against Iraq (back in 2002) was not accepted by Congress. They believed it may allow Bush to continue his crusade elsewhere.
From Dover Bitch on the first draft of the AUMF that was not accepted by Congress.

But there was another, crucial reason why the first go at an AUMF [Authorization to Use Military Force] didn't stand a chance: It was not limited to Iraq.
Even U.S. lawmakers who support authorization of use of force said they do not like the last line of the draft resolution, which says that "force" should be used against "the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region."

That line, say some members of Congress, is too vague and could allow the president to use force in other Mideast nations beyond Iraq.

"That is probably a bit ambitious," said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Indiana. "Would this authorize an invasion of Iran? Or how about Syria? They're in the region. I think we ought to stay focused here, and that is staying focused on Iraq."

The language could lead to a "miniature Armageddon" or "potential World War III," claimed Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings, who said he will write an alternative resolution with fellow liberal Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, that would place more pre-conditions on Bush before he could use force in Iraq.
The Bush Administration recognized that they were not going to be authorized to use force wherever they wanted and they conceded in the draft that actually passed.

Reading the quotes from that time it is obvious Congress DID NOT want to give Bush any authorization beyond Iraq and to run around the middle east blowing shit up everywhere.

The Mercenaries

2007-01-12T11:51:00.000-05:00

The vast use of mercenaries in Iraq has gotten very little coverage lately. Along with all the other "contractors" in Iraq, Congress needs to investigate and oversee what these people do.

100,000 mercenaries, the forgotten "Surge"

Posted by Barry Lando at 12:33 PM on January 8, 2007.

Barry Lando: Nobody's got it right on the number already there...

What is striking about the current debate in Washington - whether to "surge" troops to Iraq and increase the size of the U.S. Army - is that roughly 100,000 bodies are missing from the equation: The number of American forces in Iraq is not 140,000, but more like 240,000.

What makes up the difference is the huge army of mercenaries - known these days as "private contractors." After the U.S. Army itself, they are easily the second-largest military force in the country. Yet no one seems sure of how many there are since they answer to no single authority. Indeed, the U.S. Central Command has only recently started taking a census of these battlefield civilians in an attempt to get a handle on the issue...

The private contractors are Americans, South Africans, Brits, Iraqis and a hodgepodge of other nationalities. Many of them are veterans of the U.S. or other armed forces and intelligence services, who are now deployed in Iraq (and Afghanistan and other countries) to perform duties normally carried out by the U.S. Army, but at salaries two or three times greater than those of American soldiers.

They work as interrogators and interpreters in American prisons; body guards for top U.S. and Iraqi officials; trainers for the Iraqi army and police; and engi-neers constructing huge new U.S. bases. They are often on the front lines. In fact, 650 of them have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion

Their salaries, are, in the end, paid directly by the U.S. government - or tacked on as huge additional "security charges" to the bills of private American or other contractors. Yet the Central Command still doesn't have a complete list of who they are or what they are up to. The final figure could be much higher than 100,000.
[snip]

Which raises another question. Who has jurisdiction over these private contractors if they run afoul of the law in Iraq? Also, are they supposed to follow the Geneva Conventions? Or George W. Bush's conventions?

For instance, according to The New York Times, although 20 civilian contractors working in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq - including Abu Ghraib - have been charged with mistreating prisoners, none has ever been successfully prosecuted.

Another point, which brings us back to the discussion about increasing American troop levels in Iraq: It would seem that the Pentagon could outsource a "surge" by a simple accounting sleight of hand, quietly contracting for another 10,000 or 20,000 mercenaries to do the job, and the Congress and press would be none the wiser.

Read at AlterNet

Also See: BarryLando.com for Iraq and Middle East information.