I thought I'd share this with everyone.

We've been had.

We struck a match across the entire Middle East.

[We] not only failed, we created a civil war.

We did exactly what the British said we were doing, we fixed the facts around the policy because the President wanted to go to war.

They've been cut off at the pass, because they don't understand one thing : people fight for their country. I mean what else are they gonna do, where else are they gonna go.

We are only compounding the problem.

-- quotes from Helen Thomas, the David Bender show, 19 October 2006

I love Helen Thomas, the 80 something veteran journalist. Listen to your grandmother boys.

Bottomless pit of corruption.

This is the average hours of electricity in Baghdad from 2005 to 2006. Baghdad is a modern city of 10 million people. Prior to the invasion, there was an average of 16 to 24 hours of electricity per day.

[SOURCE]

And now ...

Thanks to bartcop.com

I was just blogging about this event, and lo and behold, Paul Krugman mentions it too in his op-ed column today.

The current Congress has shown no inclination to investigate the Bush administration. Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison: when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only 12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Click here for the full story in the Houston Chronicle

WASHINGTON — Former FDA chief Lester Crawford has agreed to plead guilty to charges of failing to disclose a financial interest in PepsiCo Inc. and other firms regulated by his agency, his lawyer said Monday.

The Justice Department accused the former head of the Food and Drug Administration in court papers of falsely reporting that he had sold stock in companies when he continued holding shares in the firms governed by FDA rules.

It's called the Government to Industry revolving door. After doing favorable things or making favorable interpretations of the law, one goes from being a congress person or government employee to getting hired at top dollar to be a consultant or lobbyist for the corporations and their lobby agencies.

Vice President Dick Cheney is the perfect example, where Cheney goes back and forth from private industry to government a number of times in 30 plus years time. It began in, of all places, the Nixon administration, continued as a consultant for the oil industry, then he was a congressman from Wyoming, then defense minister, then top CEO of Halliburton, and then finally Vice President. Granted this is a vast over-simplified timeline, but it works for the point I'm clarifying. If you want more info, you need to read.

Click here for a Mother Jones article that details some of the long sordid history of Cheney's travels through the revolving door. Click here for a list of various sources for more articles about Dick Cheney

Click here for plenty more examples.

Just like Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito both refused to recuse themselves before court cases even though they had blatant conflicts of interest. In Alito's case, he had investments with Liberty Financial at the same time the company was being litigated in his Massachusetts court. Scalia's son ( Eugene Scalia ) was appointed to direct a bureau of the labor department so he could gut worker safety rights after the 2000 election. The son Eugene "has said that employees should pay for their own safety equipment, when the equipment is required by law" ( source ). The father Antonin Scalia, spent the weekend hunting ducks with Dick Cheney one month before Scalia was to oversee the Cheney Energy Documents legal battle. Incidentally the case took an interesting turn. Click here to read the excellently written findlaw.com summary of events by John W. Dean.

Ask yourself, is it proper for the judge to spend a close personal bonding event hunting over the weekend with the defendent one month before the trial, and then attempt to exonerate that defendent? Scalia went ballistic when a reporter asked him this question, angrily defending his right to be impartial and having security take the reporter's camera away because Scalia didn't want digital evidence.

This is the man who is chief justice of the supreme court.

Now I remember when the Rethuglican's stromed the bastille when it was rumored that Lobbyists were buying access to the Christmas card list of the Clinton's White House (later proven untrue) or when the White House Travel Office was seen as "graft ridden" or (according to Wikipedia )

The White House Travel Office is in the residential section of the White House, and as such, staffers serve strictly at the pleasure of the president. Historically, a change of administrations usually resulted in a brand new Travel Office staff. Despite the established presidential privilege of replacing staffers at will, Congressional Republicans alleged that friends of President Bill Clinton, including his cousin Catherine Cornelius, had engineered the firings in order to get the business for themselves.[1] The House Government Reform and Oversight Committee eventually launched an investigation into the White House Travel Office firings. After a three-year investigation, the Chair of the committee, Pennsylvania Republican William Clinger, accused the Clinton administration of having obstructed the committee's efforts to investigate the Travelgate scandal. [2] Clinger also challenged the White House access to Billy Dale's FBI records in the Filegate affair. [3] Ultimately, a president's right to staff his residential quarters with persons of his choosing prevailed and no grounds for legal action could be established.

Bill Clinton later described the allegations and investigation as "a fraud".[4]

Now these false accusations got splashed across the front-page of the corporate newspapers, but buried the eventual proof that there were no grounds for legal action in the back pages -- if ever mentioned at all. How can this be ? Don't we have a "free" press?

Sure we do, and a large multinational holding company that owns hundreds of media companies is free to do and print what it wants. It's just that ignorant people may be what the huge financial interests want. Right now, news media companies like newspapers and local television and radio are getting bought up and downsized so the mother holding company can suck more money and make more profits. If this diminishes the quality of news, so what. The monopoly on ad space still ensures lucrative ad sales, even if the circulation and audience shrinks. Excessive profits are more important than journalism.

A book I suggest to everyone about this rise of corporate consolidation in the news media is written by two 35 plus year veteran's of the Washington Post. It's called the News About the News. Get yourself a copy.

As for the recent wave of corruption due to conflicts of interest, how come these same Rethuglican's can't seem to apply the same vociferous indignation when it comes to actual illegal action by their own. Republican Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma actually says he's "outraged about the outrage" ?

Isn't that despicable?

John Murtha has op-ed in the Washington Post this weekend. Click here

Here is the last 30% of his heartfelt piece.

The United States is about to begin its fifth year of occupation and fighting in Iraq. That makes this war longer than U.S. participation in World Wars I and II, and longer than the Korean War and our own Civil War. With every year of occupation, our efforts to fight global terrorism and our military's readiness to fight future wars have further deteriorated, along with our standing in the world. Meanwhile, the radical Islamic cause wins more and more recruits.

Despite the presence of more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 Americans injured or killed, tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the expenditure of nearly a half a trillion dollars, here are the dismal results:

In September, 776 U.S troops were wounded in Iraq, the highest monthly toll in more than two years.

Over the past year, the number of attacks against U.S. personnel has doubled, rising from 400 to more than 800 per week.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, recently acknowledged that sectarian violence has replaced the insurgency as the single biggest threat to Iraq.

In the past two months, 6,000 Iraqis died, more than in the first year of the war.

Last week, electricity output averaged 2.4 hours per day in Baghdad and 10.4 hours nationwide -- 7 percent less than in the same period in 2005.

A Sept. 27 World Public Opinion poll indicated that 91 percent of Iraqi Sunnis and 74 percent of Iraqi Shiites want the Iraqi government to ask U.S.- led forces to withdraw within a year. Ninety-seven percent of Sunnis and 82 percent of Shiites said that the U.S. military presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing." And Iraqi support for attacks against U.S.-led forces has increased sharply over the past few months, from 47 percent to 61 percent.

Now, Karl Rove may call me a defeatist, but can anyone living in the real world deny that these statistics are heading in the wrong direction? Yet despite this bleak record of performance, the president continues to stand by his team of failed architects, preferring to prop them up instead of demanding accountability.

Democrats are fighting a war on two fronts: One is combating the spin and intimidation that defines this administration. The other is fighting to change course, to do things better, to substitute smart, disciplined strategy for dogma and denial in Iraq.

That's not defeatism. That's our duty.

some wonderful part-time journalist has composed a list of Republican sex scandals

click me baby

This is a quote from Pulp Fiction (1994) that Samuel L. Jackson would utter before he shot people dead ( you'd have to see the movie ) . For a long time a lot of people started thinking this was a real passage in the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible. Some ( myself included ) thought the quote was the original passage that was mistranslated by the Catholic church from the original Hebrew, but nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, this quote is just the leftover ingenious comments from Quentin Tarantino -- who is in my opinion, one of the all time great in the film medium of artistic expression. Tarentino is in the 0.1% of worthy film producers to which I (uber-lord of subjective testimony that I am) subscribe.

Anyway, I digress, ... here's the quote.

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

The British government is currently considering charging the US military with war crimes because of an apparently deliberate killing of a British journalist. The coroner and witnesses on the ground say it was deliberate. The US military investigation disagrees, and provided a video of which there is 15 minutes editted from the tape during the time the shooting occurred

The London Guardian story

Here's the first paragraph of the London Guardian story by Leigh Holmwood :

ITN reporter Terry Lloyd was shot in the head by American troops as he was being driven to hospital, the inquest into his death was told today.

Here is a story in the Melbourne Sun.

This isn't the first time reporters have been found killed under suspicious circumstances. When an Italian Journalist Giuliana Sgrena was nearly killed while investigating where the fake yellowcake Uranium documents came from, the Italian Prime Minister publically denounced the actions of the US Military.

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" ---Ghandi