Thursday, September 04, 2003
Tough to catch up after a 9 day break.
I was 'down South.' A few snippets from my time away.
(1) At a gas station in Chapel Hill, "Scott Desmond", a 45-ish man in torn clothing who was homeless, approached and began to talk persuasively of the deserved trouble that Tony Blair was enduring, spelling out particulars re testimony, and noting that Bush deserved a similar fate. Pleasantly bizarre.
(2) I actually stopped at Colonel Sanders' initial cafe/restaurant w/ his signature chicken. I did not hold forth re the work of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who have targeted the KFC Corporation with a seven-month boycott to improve the way chickens are raised and slaughtered for the company. The animal rights group wants the fast-food chain's vendors to phase out several practices, including forced rapid growth of chickens, which cripples their leg bones, and to kill chickens with painless gassing rather than electric stunning and throat-slitting.
Since the boycott began, the campaign has won endorsements from a former Beatle, Paul McCartney, and the actor Alec Baldwin. Protests against the treatment of chickens have taken place at KFC's restaurants in the United States, Europe and Asia.
(3) Sign next to house/shak in West Virginia: "We're too blessed to be depressed." Indeed, lots of religion down South, and much poverty straight out of Michael Harrington's The Other America in West Virginia.
(4) The United Seniors Association, with spokesperson, 91 year-old Art Linkletter and chief celebrity Elizabeth Dole, reminded people in radio spots that I heard in Tennessee that Bush is trying hard to give them the Medicare prescription drug plan that they deserve.
9/11- Still no Outrage: Again, another confirming report, that while everyone was grounded in the wake of 9/11, the bin Ladens were rounded up by the FBI and spirited out of the country. All the more reason for both the Dems to grab it, and to look forward to Michael Moore's upcoming movie on the ties between the Bush family and the bin Ladens.
The Corruption that is the Bush Administration:
Here's a par for the course item. You might remember in my last blog last Monday I referred to the latest environmental transgression, allowing power plants to avoid regulation that would make them more environmentally-friendly Well, now we learn that the very officials who pushed this rendering will personally benefit from their ruling. From the Kansas City Star (kansascity.com, Seth Borenstein):
Two top Environmental Protection Agency officials who were deeply involved in easing an air pollution rule for old power plants just took private-sector jobs with firms that benefit from the changes.
Days after the changes in the power-plant pollution rule were announced last week, John Pemberton, the chief of staff in the EPA's air and radiation office, told colleagues he would be joining Southern Co., an Atlanta-based utility that's the nation's No. 2 power-plant polluter and was a driving force in lobbying for the rule changes. Southern Co., which gave more than $3.4 million in political contributions over the past four years while it sought the changes, hired Pemberton as director of federal affairs.
Ed Krenik, who had been the EPA's associate administrator for congressional affairs, started work Tuesday at Bracewell & Patterson, a top Houston-based law firm that coordinated lobbying for several utilities on easing the power-plant pollution rule.
Chocolate Lovers Unite! You might recall that in the spring some European countries talked of banding together in an ongoing military alliance outside of NATO, as they were no longer wanting to be consistently bullied by the U.S. Now, some open sneering is happening from the Administration. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher referred to the countires (Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg) as "chocolate makers." Real smart approach, as we had best get on our knees so as to secure their help in Iraq.(see below)
Economy:
(1) Jobless/Jobloss recovery. Signs continue to point to this being a unique period. The Wall Street Journal reported that renewed strength in manufacturing is likely a sign that business investment is picking up, yet manufacturing is not producing jobs, and is in fact still cutting them.
(2) Unemployed Numbers. Always misleading, as so many have given up. In July, 500,000 gave up their search, according to the U.S. Labor Department. And, the economy lost an additional 44,000 jobs that month, even as economists were expecting an increase. Early indications are that August showed no job gains, so the Administration's record as the worst since Hoover will continue, with losses of between 2.5 million and 3.1 million
(3) Fiscal Outlook: Jubilee Research at the New Economics Foundation, the group that raised global awareness of a third world debt crisis, has provocative new research. They posit that the “first world” is approaching a major debt crisis. Open Democracy has a summary that notes: The report predicts that a giant credit bubble, created by central bankers and finance ministers (the engineers of decades of “easy money”) has now reached a “tipping point”. This point – at which the “bubble” of financial assets exceeds GDP by nine times – has triggered financial crisis elsewhere. Another “tipping point” would be a rise in interest rates – not unlikely for economies like the US and UK which have massive foreign deficits. More at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-6-28-1463.jsp
Education: More lies: Those who wanted to know knew that Bush was not an Education Governor or President, that Leave No Child Behind was a compassionate conservative slogan for some testing with no funding that wouldn't improve the teaching, buildings, teacher-student ratio or anything else. Now, Richard Cohen in Thursday's Washington Post lays out the fraud that was the Texas "accomplishments" of Rod Paige and George Bush. But some of the numbers were bogus. Worse, they were plain unbelievable. Schools simply concocted numbers to please headquarters. Dropout rates went down to zero; every high school student was heading off to college, even those in schools where most of the students failed to take the SATs or, when they did, scored dismally. Everything in Houston worked perfectly. The records said so.
To these revelations, Paige has responded with detailed silence. Bush, too, has said nothing. Up to now, Houston has been Exhibit A in Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, which it now seems is a slogan supported by a statistical shell game... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8782-2003Aug31.html What's Happening: Iraq:
About-Face: They won't say it, but now they admit they're in over their heads. The scuttlebutt is that the Joint Chiefs are going w/ Colin over Rummy, in fact doing an 'end-run' around the Defense Secretary whom they've never liked. And so, it's back to the UN, but thus far, we've been rebuffed. Bless Germany and France, who are not happy with the US plea to bail us out. And why should they? The Bushies heaped scorn on them and now seek their money and bodies to rescue a catastrophic policy. Russia is also leery about taking bullets and bailing out the Bushies. Real surprising! As the Pakistan Times notes, For many countries, the difficult decision of sending peacekeepers to Iraq has become all the more risky. A UN mandate would still help, but it no longer seems sufficient. The US needs to understand that nobody would voluntarily jump onto a sinking ship.
$: Since the Administration wants another $65 billion, the deficit will approach or exceed #500 billion. But who's counting!
Casualties: Playing with the numbers: Seems that all those "accidents" are not exactly accidents. For example, when a convoy came under attack and vehicles went out of control, deaths resulted. They were then recorded as "accidental deaths." Additionally, Vernon Loeb in the Washington Post notes the growing number of injured: U.S. battlefield casualties in Iraq are increasing dramatically in the face of continued attacks by remnants of Saddam Hussein's military and other forces, with almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared "wounded in action."
The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues press releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported.
Indeed, the number of troops wounded in action in Iraq is now more than twice that of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The total increased more than 35 percent in August -- with an average of almost 10 troops a day injured last month.
Civilian Casualties: The Village Voice’s Jim Ridgeway has a thorough look on what those figures might be, Here's his lengthy summary: "Amid increasing suspicions that the U.S. media have been underestimating Iraqi casualties, here are the latest more or less reliable figures culled from several sources, including the government:
"Iraq Body Count (iraqbodycount.net) reported that the number of civilian deaths
in Iraq ranges from 6,113 to 7,830. Military.com reports that as of August 28 a
total of 281 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the start of the invasion-that
includes 143 since major fighting was declared "over" on May 1. The Iraq
Coalition Casualty Count (lunaville.org/warcasualties/summary.aspx), based on
tallies from Centcom, the Defense Department, and the British Ministry of
Defence, shows that, as of August 27, 281 U.S. soldiers, 50 British soldiers,
and two "other" coalition soldiers have been reported killed. The estimated
wounded? 1,212.
"But by far the most interesting and quite possibly most realistic report comes
by way of Jude Wanniski, the supply-side economist and ex-Wall Street Journal
reporter who has struck up a correspondence with Mohammad al-Obaidi, an Iraqi
doctor living in Britain. Al-Obaidi told Wanniski that "hundreds of our party's
cadre" spent five weeks interviewing undertakers, hospital officials, and
ordinary citizens in all of Iraq (except for what's controlled by the Kurds) and
came up with a total figure of 37,137 civilians killed since the beginning of
the invasion, 6,103 of them in Baghdad. Those figures, according to al-Obaidi,
do not include members of unofficial militias, paramilitary groups, or Saddam's
Fedayeen units." And so as we see the actual death toll is likely much higher
than the reported one. For its part the US military says "We don't do death
counts."
Victory in the "Courts" Miguel Estrada, nominated by Bush to serve as an appelate judge, withdrew his name from consideration after a successful Dem filibuster. Maybe the Dems will learn that fighting a principled fight is a 'winner'...
Africa: Fighting Stereotype: The general take is that Africans are dying in such numbers in part because of their lack of 'discipline'- read, primitiveness. Donald McNeil in the NY Times has a "surprising" finding: that Africans take their medicines more regularly/faithfully than Americans who are beset w/ HIV/AIDS.
What's Happening, Afghanistan: Arab Times reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government has started negotiations with Taliban officials in several parts of the troubled southeastern province of Zabul. And the Kansas City Star (Kathy Gannon) carried an AP report that again noted that the Taliban are strengthening: They are "no longer on the run and have teamed up with al-Qaida once again, according to officials and former Taliban who say the religious militia has reorganized and strengthened since their defeat at the hands of the U.S.-led coalition nearly two years ago.
The militia, which ruled Afghanistan espousing a strict brand of Islam, are now getting help from some Pakistani authorities as well as a disgruntled Afghan population fed up with lawlessness under the U.S.-backed interim administration, according to a former Taliban corps commander. "Now the situation is very good for us, It is improving every day. We can move everywhere," said Gul Rahman Faruqi, a corps commander of the Gardez No. 3 garrison during the Taliban's.
-R
I was 'down South.' A few snippets from my time away.
(1) At a gas station in Chapel Hill, "Scott Desmond", a 45-ish man in torn clothing who was homeless, approached and began to talk persuasively of the deserved trouble that Tony Blair was enduring, spelling out particulars re testimony, and noting that Bush deserved a similar fate. Pleasantly bizarre.
(2) I actually stopped at Colonel Sanders' initial cafe/restaurant w/ his signature chicken. I did not hold forth re the work of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who have targeted the KFC Corporation with a seven-month boycott to improve the way chickens are raised and slaughtered for the company. The animal rights group wants the fast-food chain's vendors to phase out several practices, including forced rapid growth of chickens, which cripples their leg bones, and to kill chickens with painless gassing rather than electric stunning and throat-slitting.
Since the boycott began, the campaign has won endorsements from a former Beatle, Paul McCartney, and the actor Alec Baldwin. Protests against the treatment of chickens have taken place at KFC's restaurants in the United States, Europe and Asia.
(3) Sign next to house/shak in West Virginia: "We're too blessed to be depressed." Indeed, lots of religion down South, and much poverty straight out of Michael Harrington's The Other America in West Virginia.
(4) The United Seniors Association, with spokesperson, 91 year-old Art Linkletter and chief celebrity Elizabeth Dole, reminded people in radio spots that I heard in Tennessee that Bush is trying hard to give them the Medicare prescription drug plan that they deserve.
9/11- Still no Outrage: Again, another confirming report, that while everyone was grounded in the wake of 9/11, the bin Ladens were rounded up by the FBI and spirited out of the country. All the more reason for both the Dems to grab it, and to look forward to Michael Moore's upcoming movie on the ties between the Bush family and the bin Ladens.
The Corruption that is the Bush Administration:
Here's a par for the course item. You might remember in my last blog last Monday I referred to the latest environmental transgression, allowing power plants to avoid regulation that would make them more environmentally-friendly Well, now we learn that the very officials who pushed this rendering will personally benefit from their ruling. From the Kansas City Star (kansascity.com, Seth Borenstein):
Two top Environmental Protection Agency officials who were deeply involved in easing an air pollution rule for old power plants just took private-sector jobs with firms that benefit from the changes.
Days after the changes in the power-plant pollution rule were announced last week, John Pemberton, the chief of staff in the EPA's air and radiation office, told colleagues he would be joining Southern Co., an Atlanta-based utility that's the nation's No. 2 power-plant polluter and was a driving force in lobbying for the rule changes. Southern Co., which gave more than $3.4 million in political contributions over the past four years while it sought the changes, hired Pemberton as director of federal affairs.
Ed Krenik, who had been the EPA's associate administrator for congressional affairs, started work Tuesday at Bracewell & Patterson, a top Houston-based law firm that coordinated lobbying for several utilities on easing the power-plant pollution rule.
Chocolate Lovers Unite! You might recall that in the spring some European countries talked of banding together in an ongoing military alliance outside of NATO, as they were no longer wanting to be consistently bullied by the U.S. Now, some open sneering is happening from the Administration. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher referred to the countires (Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg) as "chocolate makers." Real smart approach, as we had best get on our knees so as to secure their help in Iraq.(see below)
Economy:
(1) Jobless/Jobloss recovery. Signs continue to point to this being a unique period. The Wall Street Journal reported that renewed strength in manufacturing is likely a sign that business investment is picking up, yet manufacturing is not producing jobs, and is in fact still cutting them.
(2) Unemployed Numbers. Always misleading, as so many have given up. In July, 500,000 gave up their search, according to the U.S. Labor Department. And, the economy lost an additional 44,000 jobs that month, even as economists were expecting an increase. Early indications are that August showed no job gains, so the Administration's record as the worst since Hoover will continue, with losses of between 2.5 million and 3.1 million
(3) Fiscal Outlook: Jubilee Research at the New Economics Foundation, the group that raised global awareness of a third world debt crisis, has provocative new research. They posit that the “first world” is approaching a major debt crisis. Open Democracy has a summary that notes: The report predicts that a giant credit bubble, created by central bankers and finance ministers (the engineers of decades of “easy money”) has now reached a “tipping point”. This point – at which the “bubble” of financial assets exceeds GDP by nine times – has triggered financial crisis elsewhere. Another “tipping point” would be a rise in interest rates – not unlikely for economies like the US and UK which have massive foreign deficits. More at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-6-28-1463.jsp
Education: More lies: Those who wanted to know knew that Bush was not an Education Governor or President, that Leave No Child Behind was a compassionate conservative slogan for some testing with no funding that wouldn't improve the teaching, buildings, teacher-student ratio or anything else. Now, Richard Cohen in Thursday's Washington Post lays out the fraud that was the Texas "accomplishments" of Rod Paige and George Bush. But some of the numbers were bogus. Worse, they were plain unbelievable. Schools simply concocted numbers to please headquarters. Dropout rates went down to zero; every high school student was heading off to college, even those in schools where most of the students failed to take the SATs or, when they did, scored dismally. Everything in Houston worked perfectly. The records said so.
To these revelations, Paige has responded with detailed silence. Bush, too, has said nothing. Up to now, Houston has been Exhibit A in Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, which it now seems is a slogan supported by a statistical shell game... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8782-2003Aug31.html What's Happening: Iraq:
About-Face: They won't say it, but now they admit they're in over their heads. The scuttlebutt is that the Joint Chiefs are going w/ Colin over Rummy, in fact doing an 'end-run' around the Defense Secretary whom they've never liked. And so, it's back to the UN, but thus far, we've been rebuffed. Bless Germany and France, who are not happy with the US plea to bail us out. And why should they? The Bushies heaped scorn on them and now seek their money and bodies to rescue a catastrophic policy. Russia is also leery about taking bullets and bailing out the Bushies. Real surprising! As the Pakistan Times notes, For many countries, the difficult decision of sending peacekeepers to Iraq has become all the more risky. A UN mandate would still help, but it no longer seems sufficient. The US needs to understand that nobody would voluntarily jump onto a sinking ship.
$: Since the Administration wants another $65 billion, the deficit will approach or exceed #500 billion. But who's counting!
Casualties: Playing with the numbers: Seems that all those "accidents" are not exactly accidents. For example, when a convoy came under attack and vehicles went out of control, deaths resulted. They were then recorded as "accidental deaths." Additionally, Vernon Loeb in the Washington Post notes the growing number of injured: U.S. battlefield casualties in Iraq are increasing dramatically in the face of continued attacks by remnants of Saddam Hussein's military and other forces, with almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared "wounded in action."
The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues press releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported.
Indeed, the number of troops wounded in action in Iraq is now more than twice that of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The total increased more than 35 percent in August -- with an average of almost 10 troops a day injured last month.
Civilian Casualties: The Village Voice’s Jim Ridgeway has a thorough look on what those figures might be, Here's his lengthy summary: "Amid increasing suspicions that the U.S. media have been underestimating Iraqi casualties, here are the latest more or less reliable figures culled from several sources, including the government:
"Iraq Body Count (iraqbodycount.net) reported that the number of civilian deaths
in Iraq ranges from 6,113 to 7,830. Military.com reports that as of August 28 a
total of 281 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the start of the invasion-that
includes 143 since major fighting was declared "over" on May 1. The Iraq
Coalition Casualty Count (lunaville.org/warcasualties/summary.aspx), based on
tallies from Centcom, the Defense Department, and the British Ministry of
Defence, shows that, as of August 27, 281 U.S. soldiers, 50 British soldiers,
and two "other" coalition soldiers have been reported killed. The estimated
wounded? 1,212.
"But by far the most interesting and quite possibly most realistic report comes
by way of Jude Wanniski, the supply-side economist and ex-Wall Street Journal
reporter who has struck up a correspondence with Mohammad al-Obaidi, an Iraqi
doctor living in Britain. Al-Obaidi told Wanniski that "hundreds of our party's
cadre" spent five weeks interviewing undertakers, hospital officials, and
ordinary citizens in all of Iraq (except for what's controlled by the Kurds) and
came up with a total figure of 37,137 civilians killed since the beginning of
the invasion, 6,103 of them in Baghdad. Those figures, according to al-Obaidi,
do not include members of unofficial militias, paramilitary groups, or Saddam's
Fedayeen units." And so as we see the actual death toll is likely much higher
than the reported one. For its part the US military says "We don't do death
counts."
Victory in the "Courts" Miguel Estrada, nominated by Bush to serve as an appelate judge, withdrew his name from consideration after a successful Dem filibuster. Maybe the Dems will learn that fighting a principled fight is a 'winner'...
Africa: Fighting Stereotype: The general take is that Africans are dying in such numbers in part because of their lack of 'discipline'- read, primitiveness. Donald McNeil in the NY Times has a "surprising" finding: that Africans take their medicines more regularly/faithfully than Americans who are beset w/ HIV/AIDS.
What's Happening, Afghanistan: Arab Times reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government has started negotiations with Taliban officials in several parts of the troubled southeastern province of Zabul. And the Kansas City Star (Kathy Gannon) carried an AP report that again noted that the Taliban are strengthening: They are "no longer on the run and have teamed up with al-Qaida once again, according to officials and former Taliban who say the religious militia has reorganized and strengthened since their defeat at the hands of the U.S.-led coalition nearly two years ago.
The militia, which ruled Afghanistan espousing a strict brand of Islam, are now getting help from some Pakistani authorities as well as a disgruntled Afghan population fed up with lawlessness under the U.S.-backed interim administration, according to a former Taliban corps commander. "Now the situation is very good for us, It is improving every day. We can move everywhere," said Gul Rahman Faruqi, a corps commander of the Gardez No. 3 garrison during the Taliban's.
-R
