Life in OUR America, Volume 5, the Livyjr Files Options

[Livyjr]

Dear Mr. Kerry:

I am an honorably-discharged, twice-wounded, fully disabled Viet Nam war veteran who is a life member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, the D.A.V., the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Tri-County Viet Nam Veterans in the Albany, New York area.

In that capacity, as an honorably-discharged, fully disabled Viet Nam combat veteran, I am asking you personally on behalf of all other disabled veterans in this area of the State of New York who must rely upon the integrity of the medical health and public health fields in the State of New York to not allow New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer an opportunity to speak at the podium of the Democratic National Convention on the grounds that he is pandering to partisan political interests in the State of New York by countencing blatant acts of discrimination against a disabled veteran in the State of New York who has been working to expose corruption in county government in the capital district area of State of New York.

Presently, Mr. Kerry, as this appeal is being written to you personally in this community forum, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is actively engaged in defending in Federal District Court for the Northern District of New York what can only be termed blatant acts of discrimination and retaliation against this disabled Viet Nam veteran in New York State by Republicans in the State of New York who wish to permanently suppress this individual and his testimony to the Federal Bureau of Investigation concerning Hobbs Act corruption involving Republicans in the Capital District area of the State of New York.

To stifle that testimony and evidence, in August of 2001, in the weeks before 9-11, as the record shows, this disabled veteran was the victim of what has become known in the Albany, New York area of the State of New York, as a "psychiatric takedown".

A "psychiatric takedown" is a defensive political manuver by which the Republicans in the capital district area of New York State have a witness against them removed by the vehicle of having a "pet doctor" sign a psychiatric arrest warrant for the individual which directs the New York State Police to take the individual into custody and transport them to the secure mental health facility of a local hospital, for psychiatric "care and treatment".

In this manner, the witness is removed, their crediblity is destroyed and their effectiveness as professional witnesses on behalf of the public health of the community is robbed forever.

In the face of all of this, which is known to the veterans' community in capital district area of the State of New York, to then allow Eliot Spitzer to stand up at your side and speak at the Democratic National Convention would be an abomination, a travesty, as far as the protection of the rights of the disabled to equal protection of law goes, and well as the public health protection of the disabled veteran population of the State of New York.

For the disabled veterans population of this area, from a civil rights and equal protection of law for the disabled perspective, having Eliot Spitzer standing by your side at the Democratic National Convention would be just like having George W. Bush or George Pataki themselves standing there.

Help us make this point by keeping Eliot Spitzer off the podium at the DNC.

Thank you on behalf of the disabled veterans of the Capital District area of the State of New York in the United States of America for considering this request.

I remain, sincerely and respectfully, a patriotic disabled American veteran.

Livyjr

Thursday, July 29, 2004:

"New Yorkers make do in off-peak slots"

by Elizabeth Benjamin, Albany, New York Times Union:

Why some New Yorkers received coveted speaking roles while others remained on the sidelines was something of a mystery.

Meanwhile, state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who built a national reputation fighting Wall Street corruption and flew to Mexico to endorse Kerry when President Bush's campaign attacked Kerry for his ties to "special interests", wasn't tapped to speak.

This fact caused a brief uproar when it was reported that Schumer used his clout to block the attorney general from speaking, the political explanation being that the two are considered possible rivals for the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

Schumer has insisted he had nothing to do with Spitzer's absence behind the podium.

[Livyjr]

Thursday, July 29, 2004:

"New Yorkers make do in off-peak slots"

by Elizabeth Benjamin, Albany, New York Times Union:

Meanwhile, state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer ....

Who built a national reputation fighting Wall Street corruption .....

Wasn't tapped to speak.

Friday, December 12, 2003

"Fund-raiser nets Spitzer $2 million - luncheon for likely gubernatorial candidate attracts hedge fund managers, lawyers"

by Matthew Cox, Bloomberg News:

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer collected more than $2 million at a political fund-raiser, with hedge fund managers and lawyers among the big donors, and said HE COULD ACCEPT CAMPAIGN FUNDS FROM THE INVESTMENT COMMUNITY WITHOUT COMPROMISING HIS ENFORCEMENT ROLE.

Spitzer, the leader of investigations into Wall Street conflicts of interest and mutual fund trading, has said he is interested in running for governor in 2006.

Though he hasn't officially declared his candidacy, Thursday's fund-raiser was Spitzer's biggest ever.

His investigations of "certain aspects of the securities market doesn't mean there can't be or shouldn't be contributions from anybody within that sector, any more than it would mean because we bring consumer-type cases, no consumer manufacturer could contribute," Spitzer told reporters.

He said his campaign committee has "a very careful vetting process" to avoid accepting gifts from donors under scrutiny by his office.

A Spitzer campaign aide who declined to be identified said HEDGE FUNDS, LAWYERS AND THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY were among his LEADING SOURCES of campaign MONEY.

The luncheon at the Sheraton New York Hotel drew hedge fund manager Daniel Nir of Gracie Capital LP, who with his wife, Jill Braufman, donated $50,000 in June; Cablevision President James Dolan; Miramax Film Corp. co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, and Melvyn Weiss, one of several lawyer donors who has sued securities firms for investors based on Spitzer's investigations.

"There are a lot of hedge funds that have not been trading the way the naughty ones have," said Roy Smith, a professor of finance at New York University.

"THEY WOULD LOVE TO HAVE MR. SPITZER INVESTIGATE ALL THEIR COMPETITION that's been too aggressive."

Spitzer's investigative work "gives investors a sense that someone's keeping an eye on what's in their best interest," said donor George Fox, founder of Titan Advisors, a hedge fund consultant.

Cynthia Darrison, managing director of the Spitzer campaign committee, said that the event attended by nearly 700 people generated more than $2 million.

"This is meant as a preemptive strike" with 35 months to go until the election, said Douglas Muzzio, professor of public affairs at Baruch College in New York.

"He's saying 'I can raise huge amounts of money.'"

end quotes

Yes ....

He certainly can ......

But by "selling" what?

Or "who", perhaps?

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8777

March 29, 2006
Fasten Your Seat Belt
The war in Iraq is about to escalate
by Justin Raimondo
With the American raid on the Mustafa mosque, the occupation of Iraq is rapidly reaching a point at which it is no longer tenable: as the Shi'ite giant awakens, the country is about to become a battleground in a much larger war, one that will envelop much of the Middle East.

The raid has provoked outrage, not from our ostensible enemies – the Sunni-led insurgency, al-Qaeda, and the rest – but from our supposed allies, the elected government whose installation was hailed by George W. Bush only a few months ago as the epitome of his much-touted "global democratic revolution." Abd al-Karim al-Enzi, the security minister, gave this account:

"At evening prayers, American soldiers accompanied by Iraqi troops raided the Mustafa mosque and killed 37 people. They [the victims] were unarmed. They went in, tied up the people, and shot them all. They did not leave any wounded."

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr denounced the killings:

"Entering the mosque and killing worshippers was a horrible violation. Innocent people inside offering prayer at sunset were killed."

The governor of Baghdad, Hussein Tahan, announced:

"The Baghdad provincial council has decided to stop dealings in regards to services and politics with the coalition forces because of the cowardly attack on the mosque."

While all these officials belong to various Shi'ite parties – Da'wa, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), etc. – they are united in their outrage at the American aggression and wanton murder on a holy site. Iraqi state television ran shocking footage of the bodies piled on the ground and described the scene as a massacre: only later did they give an American official airtime to dismiss the charges as just "rumors."

There is, naturally enough, much dispute as to what actually happened: the Americans say they were fired upon first, and that the mosque was a base used by the Shi'ite militia to store weapons and hold hostages, while the Iraqis say the murdered were unarmed and simply praying. The Americans are now claiming the Iraqis "staged" the massacre and moved the bodies to make it look like unarmed worshippers were set upon and wantonly killed.

Whatever the truth of the matter, this much is clear: the Americans have crossed the Rubicon, and are in for a head-on collision with the Shi'ite majority, the very forces their invasion and occupation have brought to power. The volatility of this incident is ramped up by its context: a looming political confrontation between U.S. officials and the Shi'ite Alliance, which has a majority in the newly elected parliament. The Americans are not too keen on having the Da'wa Party's Ibrahim Jaafari installed as prime minister, and have been bringing pressure on the coalition to find someone else. But the Shi'ites must have been listening to President Bush's many speeches about the wonders of capital-D Democracy, because they have insisted on keeping Jaafari, and, what's more, have defied the Americans' preference for a decentralized political structure, much to the chagrin of the Kurds.

The Americans, it seems, are turning on their one-time allies and launching a two-front war against both the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. This seems like a military strategy straight out of the Bizarro World version of Clausewitz. It makes no sense – unless, that is, the Americans are planning on extending the war into Iran.

They have certainly set the stage, on the diplomatic front, with a full-scale assault on Tehran's nuclear ambitions in the UN. On the political front, they are accusing the Iranians of interfering in Iraq's internal affairs – an odd charge, coming from the overseers of a military occupation – and of sending arms to their Iraqi proxies.

The big problem for the Americans, however, is that these proxies constitute the elected government of Iraq, which was supposed to be a model for the entire region to follow. Did American soldiers fight and die – to say nothing of the tens of thousands of dead Iraqis – so that we could declare Iraq's fledgling democracy a spoke in the Axis of Evil?

This policy pivot will prove bewildering to the American people, who have been told that our big enemy in Iraq is Zarqawi and al-Qaeda, but only for a little while. The situation will clarify itself as the new enemy – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – takes the place of the old Ba'athist bogeyman, embodied by Saddam Hussein. Now that Saddam is safely stowed away in a prison cell awaiting rough justice, and his alleged "weapons of mass destruction" have dissolved like desert mirages, we'll be served up images of the mad mullahs of Tehran wielding nukes. That these nukes – which are 10 years away, in any event – will be aimed at Tel Aviv, and not Toledo, matters little, at least to American policymakers. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt point out in a pathbreaking paper [.pdf] published by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, our governing classes consistently favor the former while ignoring the clear interests of the latter.

The battle will not be joined all at once, however: don't expect a full-scale frontal assault on Iran any time soon. The struggle will break out between Iranian proxies – the Shi'ite party militias, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iranian-backed factions based in Syria – and the U.S. and its allies in the region, including not only the Israelis but also the Kurds and the Christian Lebanese factions.

Eric Haney, a founding member of Delta Force, the U.S. military's elite covert counter-terrorist unit, and author of Inside Delta Force, succinctly summed up where we are in a recent interview. Asked his assessment of the war in Iraq, he averred:

"Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for taking this nation to war were not what they stated. [Army Gen.] Tommy Franks was brow-beaten and … pursued warfare that he knew strategically was wrong in the long term. That's why he retired immediately afterward. His own staff could tell him what was going to happen afterward. We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies."

The great mystery of how and why we got ourselves bogged down in this quagmire is going to provide scholars, and quite possibly the law enforcement community, with enough to do for quite some time. There are two ways to look at this question: if we accept the official version, then our invasion of Iraq based on the "certainty" that Saddam possessed WMD, and otherwise represented a direct threat to us and to his neighbors, was the consequence of a massive failure in our intelligence-gathering and evaluation procedures. And of course we couldn't have known that the invasion, conquest, and military occupation of the country would spark a persistent guerrilla resistance – could we? After all, it's not like anybody in the top echelons of military intelligence and policymaking circles knows any history, and as for having common sense – well, let's not go there.

The other, unofficial, version – and the one I wholeheartedly endorse – is this: the U.S. knew perfectly well what it was doing when it charged into Iraq, guns blazing. They knew the Sunnis and Shi'ites would soon be at each other's throats, they anticipated the insurgency and the depth of Iranian influence in post-war Iraq, and their attitude toward all this was expressed by none other than the president, albeit inadvertently, when he infamously bellowed: "Bring it on!"

Well, now it has been brought on, and in spades – and that's just what the neoconservatives in the administration were hoping for. Phase two of their war to "liberate" the Middle East is about to begin – and it promises to be far bloodier, and to encompass a much bigger battlefield, than the initial stage of what Haney calls the third world war.

Actually, the proponents of launching this twilight struggle call it "World War IV," as Norman Podhoretz and his fellow neocons would have it. World War III was the Cold War, which they wanted to turn hot, and the fourth, they hope, will be a "war of civilizations" – which, in their view, is already in progress.

Whether that is just wishful thinking on their part, or a horrific reality, we will see in the next few months. As American forces begin to take on the Shi'ites in Iraq, and Iran is drawn into the conflict, this new turn – as I predicted here, and quite a while ago here – could not be more ominous. If you thought the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a major military production, with more shock and awe than anyone was prepared to withstand, then wait until you get a gander at what's coming next. All I can say is: fasten your seat belts, because it's going to be a very bumpy ride.

[Livyjr]

A bumpy ride, indeed ....

It's going to be like a bucking bronco .....

Hang on tight ....

Or get bucked off in the dust ....

And so ....

[Livyjr]

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8777

March 29, 2006 

"Fasten Your Seat Belt - The war in Iraq is about to escalate"
 
by Justin Raimondo

The great mystery of how and why we got ourselves bogged down in this quagmire is going to provide scholars, and quite possibly the law enforcement community, with enough to do for quite some time.

There are two ways to look at this question: if we accept the official version, then our invasion of Iraq based on the "certainty" that Saddam possessed WMD, and otherwise represented a direct threat to us and to his neighbors, was the consequence of a massive failure in our intelligence-gathering and evaluation procedures.

And of course we couldn't have known that the invasion, conquest, and military occupation of the country would spark a persistent guerrilla resistance – could we?

After all, it's not like anybody in the top echelons of military intelligence and policymaking circles knows any history, and as for having common sense – well, let's not go there.

The other, unofficial, version – and the one I wholeheartedly endorse – is this: the U.S. knew perfectly well what it was doing when it charged into Iraq, guns blazing.

They knew the Sunnis and Shi'ites would soon be at each other's throats, they anticipated the insurgency and the depth of Iranian influence in post-war Iraq, and their attitude toward all this was expressed by none other than the president, albeit inadvertently, when he infamously bellowed: "Bring it on!"

Well, now it has been brought on, and in spades – and that's just what the neoconservatives in the administration were hoping for.

Phase two of their war to "liberate" the Middle East is about to begin – and it promises to be far bloodier, and to encompass a much bigger battlefield, than the initial stage of what Haney calls the third world war.

Actually, the proponents of launching this twilight struggle call it "World War IV," as Norman Podhoretz and his fellow neocons would have it. World War III was the Cold War, which they wanted to turn hot, and the fourth, they hope, will be a "war of civilizations" – which, in their view, is already in progress.

Whether that is just wishful thinking on their part, or a horrific reality, we will see in the next few months.

As American forces begin to take on the Shi'ites in Iraq, and Iran is drawn into the conflict, this new turn – as I predicted here, and quite a while ago here – could not be more ominous.

If you thought the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a major military production, with more shock and awe than anyone was prepared to withstand, then wait until you get a gander at what's coming next.

All I can say is: fasten your seat belts, because it's going to be a very bumpy ride.

Well, Snuf .....

The sun is out up here where I am ...

And the days are getting longer ...

And so ....

I am getting back here to the computer later and later each night it seems ...

And so ...

I didn't have time to "properly digest" this article of yours above here last night ...

Before it was time to sign back off again ....

And so .....

This BID-NESS with IRAQINAM surely is a conundrum, and that is a fact .....

BUT ...

Still in all ...

There is some real "HISTORY" that Mr. Raimondo is missing here ....

And that is that we did not go into IRAQ with guns blazing, per se ...

NOT THE ACTUAL ARMED INVASION BY THE HUMAN COMPONENTS OF THE VAUNTED BUSHCO MILITARY MACHINE, ANYWAY .....

Which essentially was the Third Armored Division .....

Followed by the 101st Airmobile Division ....

And some assorted Marines ...

And "others" .....

Actually ....

We went in ...

Without firing a shot ...

AND WITH NO AMERICAN FLAGS SHOWING ....

Because it wasn't supposed to be an INVASION ...

It was supposed to be a LIBERATION ...

And so ...

The VAUNTED BUSHCO's apparently believed that all these tanks and stuff coming into Iraq, without American flags being displayed, would not be viewed as hostile to the Iraqi people ....

Now ...

Whoever came up with that cock-a-manie idea ought to be put out on public display, here in OUR America ...

As the most perfect example of a pure fool that has been discovered on the face of this planet to date ...

And that might end up being George W. Bush ...

Although in all likelihood ....

That man is far too stupid to be classified as a fool ....

Like everyone else in America who is over the age of two-and-a-half years old ....

I was actually "there", here in OUR America, along with everyone else, during the days before the actual INVASION ....

And to be truthful ....

I never once thought that anyone down there in Washington, D.C. who was promoting this FARCE ....

To include all these IVORY-TOWER INTELLECTUALS who are the NEW CON MEN and women here in OUR America ....

Had a lick of sense whatever ...

Although they had arrogance ....

And conceit ...

By the barrel-full ...

And so ....

WHAT IS STARTED WRONG ....

Can only finish right ...

With great difficulty ...

And so ....

Here we now are ...

And the "control" of the situation ....

Is no longer in the hands of this pack of fools down there in Washington, D.C. ....

Despite any continued rhetoric from them ...

That they are actually in control of the destiny of anything .....

Let alone the Middle East ...

Which if I recall ...

Has actually been around ....

For a year or two longer than OUR America has been .....

There are 294 MILLION people here in OUR America .....

And it seems to me ...

That what has happened over time ...

Is that there has been a kind of "diffusion process" going on here in OUR America ....

Some kind of "osmotic pressure" perhaps ....

With Washington, D.C. acting as a kind of anode ...

Or cathode ....

That attracts all the very worst elements of society here in OUR America ...

As opposed to the "BEST AND BRIGHTEST" .....

And concentrates them down there in Washington, D.C. .....

As a kind of human "TOXIC SLUDGE" ......

With ABSOLUTE POWER ....

Not only over us ...

And OUR lives ...

But the lives of every human being ...

On the face of this earth of OURS ...

And so ....

And here ...

I think of all these "know-it-all" NEW CON IVORY-TOWER INTELLECTUALS who are the NEW CON MEN AND WOMEN of OUR world today ....

People like Billy Kristol at the Weekly Standard ...

Or whatever that rag he writes for is properly named ....

And all the other "pundits" down there ...

Who still don't know ...

Whether the sun rises ...

In the east ...

Or west ...

Or north ...

Or south ...

And so ....

Peddlars of PURE CRAP .....

And not much else .....

And so .....

My thought ...

From up here in the admittedly primitive HINTERLANDS OF CIVILIZATION here in OUR America ....

Where common sense is still a required commodity to make it through a long hard winter ....

Is that when you take a pack of arrogant conceited fools such are Washington, D.C. ......

And you put that pack of fools in charge of anything ...

Be it an invasion of IRAQINAM ...

Or diplomacy ....

Or hurricane-preparedness .....

That all you are going to get in return ...

Is a demonstration of pure stupidity in action ...

And so ....

No surprise up here, then, that such is now the case in IRAQINAM ....

And so ....

Cinch up your belts, boys, because hard times are a'comin ....

And so ....

[Livyjr]

And speaking of history ....

Which the IVORY-TOWER INTELLECTUALS of the BUSHCO regime don't need to know about ...

Since they are the ones actually re-writing the history of the world ...

To make it seem as if they have an inkling of what they are about in the world of today ....

And other "kings" ....

On the face of this earth of OURS ...

Before the present one named BUSH THE ALL-KNOWING AND ALL-POWERFUL came into ascendence ....

Here in OUR America ....

We have ....

"Archaeologist Links Ancient Palace, Ajax"

By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS, Associated Press Writer

Wed Mar 29, 9:09 PM ET

ATHENS, Greece - Among the ruins of a 3,200-year-old palace near Athens, researchers are piecing together the story of legendary Greek warrior-king Ajax, hero of the Trojan War.

Archaeologist Yiannis Lolos found remains of the palace while hiking on the island of Salamis in 1999, and has led excavations there for the past six years.

Now, he's confident he's found the site where Ajax ruled, which has also provided evidence to support a theory that residents of the Mycenean island kingdom fled to Cyprus after the king's death.

"This was Ajax' capital," excavation leader Lolos, professor of archaeology at Ioannina University, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

"It was the seat of the maritime kingdom of Salamis — small compared to other Mycenaean kingdoms — that was involved in trade, warfare and piracy in the eastern Mediterranean."

Ajax was one of the top fighters in the legendary Greek army that besieged Troy to win back the abducted queen of Sparta, Helen.

Described in Homer's Iliad as a towering hero protected by a huge shield, Ajax killed himself after a quarrel with other Greek leaders.

On a wooded hill overlooking the sea at Kanakia on Salamis' southwestern coast, Lolos' team has excavated a town surmounted by a fortified palace complex.

The site flourished in the 13th century B.C. — at the same time as the major centers of Mycenae and Pylos in southern Greece — and was abandoned during widespread unrest about 100 years later.

Scholars have long suspected a core of historical truth in the story of Troy, and archaeological evidence from the Kanakia dig appears to agree.

Lolos also believes that, faced by an external threat, part of Salamis' population left for Cyprus, founding a new town named after their homeland.

"There is no other explanation for the creation on Cyprus of a city named Salamis," he said.

"We established that there was a population exodus from Salamis, which was completely abandoned shortly after 1200 B.C. ..."

"They must first have gone to Enkomi on Cyprus, which was already an established center."

Salamis was founded around 1100 B.C., when Enkomi — some 2.5 miles away — was abandoned.

"It was probably the refugees' children that moved there," Lolos said.

The emigration theory would explain why almost no high-value artifacts were found at the Greek site, which bore no signs of destruction or enemy occupation.

"The emigrants, who would have been the city's ruling class, took a lot with them, including nearly all the valuables," Lolos said.

The rest of the population moved to a new settlement further inland that offered better protection from seaborne raids.

Kanakia was first inhabited around 3000 B.C.

The Mycenaean settlement covers some 12.5 acres, and features houses, workshops and storage areas.

So far, archaeologists have uncovered 33 rooms in the 8,000-square-foot palace, including two central royal residences containing what appear to be two bench-like beds.

"This recalls a reference by Homer to the king of Pylos sleeping at the back of his house," Lolos said.

Finds include pottery, stone tools, a sealstone and copper implements.

Lolos is particularly pleased with a piece of a copper mail shirt stamped with the name of Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled Egypt from 1279-1213 B.C.

"This is a unique find, which may have belonged to a Mycenaean mercenary soldier serving with the Egyptians," he said.

"It could have been a souvenir, a mark of honor or even some kind of a medal."

Excavations will continue in September, while future targets include the settlement's cemetery, which Lolos has located nearby.

Situated just off the coast of Athens, Salamis is best known for the naval battle in 480 B.C., when the Athenians defeated an invading Persian fleet.

The ancient playwright Euripides was born there, and a cave excavated by Lolos in 1997 has been identified as a hideout where the poet composed his work.

end quotes

Of course, since according to Karl Rove, the world is only a few thousand years old ....

This history could not have happened, as reported ....

Because it would have had to have happened before the world actually existed ....

And so ...

FOR THE SAKE OF NATIONAL SECURITY .....

Which is especially tenuous today .....

Where maybe five or six TAY-RISTS can take over an entire nation of 294 MILLIONS of people in maybe five or six hours .....

PLEASE ....

Disregard this history as a likely fabrication ....

And then ....

Put your thumbs back in your mouths ....

And stay tuned for further instructions ..

From Karl Rove and Scottie "BOY" McClellan ....

On what to think in order to be a "GOOD AMERICAN" circa 2006 ....

And so ...

Will their "truth" set you free?

Well ...

That remains to be seen ...

But as for me ...

Well ..

I don't think so ...

And so ...

Stay tuned ...

And tomarrow ...

Well, if there is one ...

Likely we will hear about it on FOX NEWS FAIR AND BALANCED YOU DECIDE ....

And so ...

Then, we'll all know ......

And so ....

[Livyjr]

And so ...

Stay tuned ...

And tomarrow ...

Well, if there is one ...

Likely we will hear about it on FOX NEWS FAIR AND BALANCED YOU DECIDE ....

And so ...

Then, we'll all know ......

And so ....

And it looks like I was right ....

For here comes something off the wire ....

Right now as we speak ...

And so ...

You get to decide .....

Just like if this was FOX FAIR AND BALANCED ....

And so ....

Let's see if FOX talks about this one tomarrow ....

And so ....

"Ex-FBI agent indicted in mob killings"

By TOM HAYS, Associated Press
Last updated: 5:56 p.m., Thursday, March 30, 2006

NEW YORK -- A retired FBI agent was indicted on murder charges Thursday for allegedly taking bribes from a mobster to supply him with inside information that led to four underworld slayings in Brooklyn.

R. Lindley DeVecchio, 65, was arrested in a case of "confidential leaks, payoffs and death" dating back two decades, District Attorney Charles Hynes said.

DeVecchio pleaded not guilty and was released on $1 million bail.

He did not speak at his arraignment.

One of the two alleged mob hitmen behind the slayings was jailed without bail.

The other was in Florida, awaiting extradition.

Colleagues of the FBI veteran were quick to defend him against the charges.

"We all know Lin, and we all know he's not capable of doing these kinds of things," James Kossler, a former supervisor with the FBI's New York office, said Wednesday.

"It's so sad it could happen to a guy like this."

Hynes said the charges stemmed from the unusually close relationship between DeVecchio -- then head of the FBI's Colombo crime family squad -- and Gregory Scarpa Sr., a government informant and Colombo captain nicknamed "The Grim Reaper."

The pair met each week during the 1980s and '90s and discussed a bloody civil war within the Colombo family.

In exchange for bribes, DeVecchio "counseled Scarpa to protect himself by eliminating imminent threats," Hynes said.

In 1984, DeVecchio allegedly warned Scarpa that the girlfriend of a high-ranking Colombo figure was cooperating with federal authorities.

As a result, authorities say, she was shot and killed in a Brooklyn social club -- a pattern prosecutors said was repeated in three slayings of Scarpa rivals, the last one in 1992.

Scarpa gave DeVecchio weekly payments and also enhanced the agent's reputation within the FBI by helping him solve important cases, Hynes said.

DeVecchio surrendered Wednesday night at the Brooklyn district attorney's office.

He had no comment as he entered.

Kossler, former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom, ex-agent Joe Pistone, known for infiltrating the mob as Donnie Brasco, and other supporters in law enforcement have begun raising money for DeVecchio's defense on a Web site.

The site notes that the agent was cleared in previous investigations, and it attributes the renewed allegations to convicted mobsters eager to lie in exchange for leniency.

DeVecchio retired in 1996.

Scarpa died in prison in 1994.

------

On the Net:

The Friends of Lin DeVecchio Trust: http://www.lindevecchio.com

Brooklyn District Attorney: http://www.brooklynda.org

[Livyjr]

And then ...

There is this, too ....

News straight from the BIZARRO-WORLD that George W. Bush has instituted here in OUR America as his standard of what OUR America should be in this NEW CENTURY .....

Where five or six TAY-RISTS armed with old blunderbusses and such like ....

Are able to stall George W. Bush's whole military machine ....

And bog it down ....

In the quagmire ...

Of the deserts of Iraq ....

"Army bans use of privately bought armor"

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:25 p.m., Thursday, March 30, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Soldiers will no longer be allowed to wear body armor other than the protective gear issued by the military, Army officials said Thursday, the latest twist in a running battle over the equipment the Pentagon gives its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Army officials told The Associated Press that the order was prompted by concerns that soldiers or their families were buying inadequate or untested commercial armor from private companies -- including the popular Dragon Skin gear made by California-based Pinnacle Armor.

"We're very concerned that people are spending their hard-earned money on something that doesn't provide the level of protection that the Army requires people to wear."

"So they're, frankly, wasting their money on substandard stuff," said Col. Thomas Spoehr, director of materiel for the Army.

Murray Neal, chief executive officer of Pinnacle, said he hadn't seen the directive and wants to review it.

"We know of no reason the Army may have to justify this action," Neal said.

"On the surface this looks to be another of many attempts by the Army to cover up the billions of dollars spent on ineffective body armor systems which they continue to try quick fixes on to no avail."

The move was a rare one by the Army.

Spoehr said he doesn't recall any similar bans on personal armor or devices.

The directives are most often issued when there are problems with aircraft or other large equipment.

Veterans groups immediately denounced the decision.

Nathaniel R. Helms, editor of the Soldiers for the Truth online magazine Defense Watch, said he has already received a number of e-mails from soldiers complaining about the policy.

"Outrageously we've seen that (soldiers) haven't been getting what they need in terms of equipment and body armor," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who wrote legislation to have troops reimbursed for equipment purchases.

"That's totally unacceptable, and why this directive by the Pentagon needs to be scrutinized in much greater detail."

But another veterans group backed the move.

"I don't think the Army is wrong by doing this, because the Army has to ensure some level of quality," said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

"They don't want soldiers relying on equipment that is weak or substandard."

But, Rieckhoff said, the military is partially to blame for the problem because it took too long to get soldiers the armor they needed.

"This is the monster they made," he said.

Early in the Iraq war, soldiers and their families were spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on protective gear that they said the military was not providing.

Then, last October, after months of pressure from families and members of Congress, the military began a reimbursement program for soldiers who purchased their own protective equipment.

In January, an unreleased Pentagon study found that side armor could have saved dozens of U.S. lives in Iraq, prompting the Army and Marine Corps to order thousands of ceramic body armor plates to be shipped to troops there this year.

The Army ban covers all commercial armor.

It refers specifically to Pinnacle's armor, saying that while the company advertising implies that Dragon Skin "is superior in performance" to the Interceptor Body Armor the military issues to soldiers, "the Army has been unable to determine the veracity of these claims."

"In its current state of development, Dragon Skin's capabilities do not meet Army requirements," the Army order says, and it "has not been certified to protect against several small arms threats that the military is encountering in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The Marine Corps has not issued a similar directive, but Marines are "encouraged to wear Marine Corps-issued body armor since this armor has been tested to meet fleet standards," spokesman Bruce Scott said.

Military officials have acknowledged that some troops -- often National Guard or Reservists -- went to war with lesser-quality protective gear than other soldiers were issued.

"We'll be upfront and recognize that at the start of the conflict there were some soldiers that didn't have the levels of protection that we wanted," Spoehr said.

Now, he added, "we can categorically say that whatever you're going to buy isn't as good as what you're going to get" from the military.

In interviews Thursday, Army officials said aggressive marketing by body armor manufacturers was fueling public concerns that troops are not getting the protection they need.

Army Lt. Col. Scott Campbell said the Army has asked Pinnacle to provide 30 sets of the full Dragon Skin armor so it can be independently tested.

He said Pinnacle has indicated it won't be able to provide that armor until May, and the company said that is still the plan.

Campbell said initial military tests on small sections of the Dragon Skin armor had disappointing results.

He said Pinnacle has received $840,000 in research funding to develop improved armor.

Spoehr said he believes the directive will have little impact on soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan because it's likely that nearly all are wearing the military-issued body armor.

There have been repeated reports of soldiers or families of soldiers buying commercial equipment or trying to raise thousands of dollars to buy it for troops who are preparing to deploy overseas.

------

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

Pinnacle Armor: http://www.pinnaclearmor.com

[Livyjr]

Friday, December 12, 2003

"Fund-raiser nets Spitzer $2 million - luncheon for likely gubernatorial candidate attracts hedge fund managers, lawyers"

by Matthew Cox, Bloomberg News:

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer collected more than $2 million at a political fund-raiser, with hedge fund managers and lawyers among the big donors, and said HE COULD ACCEPT CAMPAIGN FUNDS FROM THE INVESTMENT COMMUNITY WITHOUT COMPROMISING HIS ENFORCEMENT ROLE.

A Spitzer campaign aide who declined to be identified said HEDGE FUNDS, LAWYERS AND THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY were among his LEADING SOURCES of campaign MONEY.

And here is what some in OUR America ....

Might label ....

As a pot ...

Calling a kettle black .....

"Spitzer slams Bush policies- Gubernatorial hopeful touts record on environment as he leads rivals in new poll"

By ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, March 30, 2006

ALBANY -- Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Eliot Spitzer outlined an environmental policy Wednesday focusing on renewable energy, cleaning the Hudson River and beefing up staffing at the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Speaking to a friendly audience of about 200 people at WAMC's Linda Norris Auditorium, Spitzer railed against President Bush, whose policies have angered many environmentalists.

The state attorney general called Bush "hands down the worst president on environmental and energy issues that this country has ever seen" and said it will be increasingly up to state and local governments to safeguard their own air, water and land.

Spitzer said he has sued the Bush administration "no less than 17 times to block their attempts to dismantle our environmental protection laws."

He called for more incentives for renewable energy such as solar, hydro and wind power, and said the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County should be closed as soon as replacement sources can be found for the 2,000 megawatts it produces.

Spitzer praised Republican Gov. George Pataki's open space conservation efforts, which include a goal to protect 1 million wilderness acres.

But, he said, more preservation needs to be done in urban and suburban areas.

Spitzer also called for "adequate" staffing at the DEC, saying that with 800 fewer employees today than in the mid-1990s, inspection and oversight jobs go unfilled.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found Spitzer leading fellow Democrat Tom Suozzi, 69 percent to 14 percent among Democrats.

A January Quinnipiac poll had Spitzer leading the Nassau County executive 72 percent to 8 percent.

Spitzer and Suozzi both polled ahead of the Republican hopefuls: former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, former state Assembly Minority Leader John Faso and former state Secretary of State Randy Daniels.

The poll showed Faso passing Weld, 22 percent to 16 percent, with Daniels at 8 percent.

The poll of 1,674 voters was conducted March 21-27 and has a 2 point margin of error overall, 3.7 points among Democrats and 4.2 percent among Republicans.

Elizabeth Benjamin can be reached at 454-5081 or by e-mail at ebenjamin@timesunion.com.

[Livyjr]

And to start out the day ....

Since we left off talking about "politics" in the State of New York .....

And New York State Attorney General Eliot "Big EL" Spitzer .....

Whose record of disregarding local land-use regulations ...

Along with environmental and public health protection in the State of New York ...

Likely rivals that of George W. Bush ....

We have some local "American history" ....

From back in the days ...

When it was still a feudal society ...

Up here in the State of New York ....

And so ....

"200 years of feisty freedom - Controversy has been a constant in Nassau since town's founding"

By BOB GARDINIER, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Friday, March 31, 2006

NASSAU -- From tarring and feathering the sheriff over land rents to picketing a rash of graywacke rock mining proposals, this town has been no stranger to controversy for 200 years.

European settlers put down stakes in the area as early as the mid-1700s and on March 31, 1806, a law created Philipstown, in honor of patroon and landowner Philip Van Rensselaer.

Two years later, the name was changed to Nassau.

Today this southern Rensselaer County town of roughly 5,000 people will officially celebrate its bicentennial with an evening of historic displays and festivities.

To help mark the occasion, the Rensselaer County Legislature earlier this month passed a resolution recognizing the rich history of the town, which is less than 20 miles outside of Albany.

The first town meeting was in the tavern of Pliny Miller in what is now East Nassau, according to county historical records on file at the Nassau Free Library.

Joseph Hicks, Chester Griswold and Asa Upham were appointed the "Overseers of Swine" and "Voted that hogs may run in the highway provided they have on their necks a sufficient yoke and in their noses a sufficient ring and not otherwise."

Early inhabitants found the land too steep for profitable farming.

Former Town Supervisor Carol Sanford said her family knew too well the problems.

"There were little farms all over the place in town at one time, but farmers used to say if there was money in rocks, we'd be rich," Sanford said.

That old saying proved prophetic.

The town has existing gravel mines and two companies have three different proposals for mining hard rock out of the hills.

Leaders of grass-roots opposition to hard rock mining on Snake Mountain on the southern edge of town formed the village of East Nassau in 1997.

More recently, a group failed to secede from the town to form the village of Dunham Hollow.

"People here have always been proud and connected to their land and property and have resisted outside influences trying to tell them what to do with their property," Sanford said.

In 1844, a group of radicals who hung out at the old Martin Tavern in Hoags Corners fomented a revolt aimed at stopping the feudal-like payment of rents to the rich landowners, or patroons.

The leader of the rebels, who called themselves the "Calico Indians," was "Big Thunder" -- Dr. Smith A. Boughton, according to a history of Nassau by George Baker Anderson.

Big Thunder's home still stands on Route 43 in the town's secluded hills, called Alps.

On July 4, 1844, Hoags Corners residents were setting up their traditional Independence Day celebration with a parade, muzzle-loading shooting matches, games and political speeches.

In the midst of one of the speeches "suddenly arose a chorus of tin dinner horns and the sound of horses' hoofs."

The rebels circled the stunned crowd, according to historical accounts.

Big Thunder mounted the stage and announced:

"Brother serfs of Lord Van Rensselaer, these Indians have a battle cry that means your safety and your future."

"Down with the rent!"

The "anti-rent wars" leading to the abolition of the patroon system had begun.

It got nastier.

At one point, the rebels waylaid Sheriff Gideon Reynolds and a posse of 25 men.

Their horses were turned loose and the posse marched back to the Alps.

"The legal papers in possession of the force were found on the deputy (sheriff) who was summarily treated to a dose of tar and feathers and sent home with his comrades," the historical account reads.

Some of the anti-rent activists fell out of favor after turning more violent.

Boughton was one of the first prisoners at the new Clinton State Prison at Dannemora.

He was later pardoned by the governor for his medical work saving prisoners and guards during an epidemic in the prison.

Beginning in 1983, the residents of Hoags Corners re-created that Fourth of July revolt as part of their annual celebration, but the practice waned.

In 1987, Rensselaer County Sheriff W. Warren McGreevy played the part of Reynolds, without the tar and feathers.

Town bicentennial

What: Town of Nassau Bicentennial Celebration

When: 7 to 9 p.m. today

Where: Donald P. Sutherland Elementary School on John Street in the village of Nassau

Events: Participants will re-enact characters from the town's past and town elders will share their memories. Residents are encouraged to dress in period attire. There will be demonstrations of early games for children, displays of historic artifacts and food.

[Livyjr]

And since we are on the subject of New York State Attorney General Eliot "Big EL" Spitzer in here this morning ...

Let's go see what his opponent, the UNDERDOG Tom Suozzi, is up to today ...

Or yesterday, to be more precise ...

Since it is me who is a day behind in here .....

Due to nice weather and a lot of sunshine out there ....

In the non-virtual reality ...

That I have to occupy ....

Some part of the day, anyway ...

"Suozzi says Spitzer fudging data - Rival questions attorney general's claims on Medicaid fraud money"

By CANDICE CHOI, Associated Press
First published: Thursday, March 30, 2006

ALBANY -- State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's announcement that investigations into Medicaid fraud last year recovered a record amount of money by his office is misleading, a political opponent said Wednesday.

Tom Suozzi, who is battling Spitzer for the Democratic nomination for governor, said the vast majority of the recovered money came from a federal lawsuit led by the Department of Justice, not by Spitzer's office.

Spitzer spokesman Paul Larrabee said the investigation was led by a prosecutor from the Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.

The attorney general's office is required to report all financial recoveries, including those that were part of nationwide settlements, he said.

"Of course some of it comes from multistate efforts ... that is the nature of how we do it," Spitzer said.

The Nassau County executive's criticism came a day after Spitzer's office announced it had recovered $274 million in 2005, up from $63 million the previous year.

Suozzi said $171 million of last year's total came from a federal settlement.

"This is not the first time that the attorney general has released misleading recovery numbers," Suozzi said in a statement.

Suozzi said Spitzer also inflated numbers in 2004 by including the state's $31 million share of a nationwide settlement with two pharmaceutical companies over drug pricing.

Suozzi also said that between 1999 and 2003, Spitzer's office spent $142 million to investigate Medicaid fraud, yet recovered only $149 million.

[Livyjr]

"New name possible in Senate race" 
 
By ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, February 12, 2006

ALBANY -- A former high-ranking national security official in three Republican presidential administrations is contemplating a challenge to U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

But state GOP and Conservative leaders say it may be too late for her to mount a credible campaign.

Christian Winthrop, a spokesman to former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, who is the front-runner for the GOP nod in the Senate race and appears poised to land the Conservative line as well, derided McFarland as a "pro-abortion, big government, elitist liberal."

"If she wants to run for Senate, he added, "I suggest she try the Democrat Party."

"To me , a liberal is someone who supports civil rights for people," McFarland said.

"I don't know what liberal means to Mr. Spencer."

"We haven't had that conversation."

"Clinton's foe draws out-of-state money - Two-thirds of larger contributions to Spencer aren't from New Yorkers" 
 
By JAY JOCHNOWITZ, State editor, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Monday, March 27, 2006

ALBANY -- More than two-thirds of U.S. Senate candidate John Spencer's larger contributions have come from outside New York, with people from Maine to Alaska and Hawaii donating to the conservative who hopes to unseat Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Federal Election Commission records show less than 29 percent of the itemized donations to Spencer's campaign came from New York.

Fewer than one in five of those donors -- 19.6 percent -- were from the state.

Spencer's backers, he said, are "just grass-roots everyday voters who just want to see Hillary Clinton out of the Senate."

Clinton's campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said Spencer's low numbers in his home state suggest "he has very little support in New York."

Spencer, he said, is using an "extreme, over-the-top" conservative message to raise funds nationally.

"John Spencer is not running to represent the people of New York in the U.S. Senate," Wolfson said.

"He's running to rough up Hillary Clinton."

"Anything that can beat Hillary Clinton and put her out of the running, that would be good," said George Benesch, a retiree from Anchorage, Alaska, who gave Spencer $2,100.

He reasoned the Senate is her "first step" to the White House.

Joan Camp of Kahaluu, Hawaii, chairwoman of a construction supply firm, said she thinks Spencer's "got a snowball's chance in hell," but she nonetheless gave his campaign $750, one of the few political donations she's made.

"Anyone to go up against Hillary Clinton," she said.

"We're not too happy with her."

And then ...

There is Ms. Hillary ....

Who it seems ...

People either like ...

Or hate ....

Can the REPUBLICANS beat Ms. Hillary?

Or more specifically ...

Can this Spencer dude who is taking in all of this "out-of-state" money ....

Can he beat Ms. Hillary?

For that matter ...

Can he even "beat" his way out of a wet paper bag?

Let's look and see what the pundits or polls are saying ....

And so ....

"Senate poll picks new GOP hopeful - "KT" McFarland holds early lead in pick to challenge Clinton for seat with many voters undecided"

By MARC HUMBERT, Associated Press
First published: Friday, March 31, 2006

ALBANY -- Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, the new contender in the battle to challenge Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's re-election bid, holds a double-digit lead over her main rival for this year's GOP Senate nomination in New York, a statewide poll reported Thursday.

The good news for the embattled candidacy of the Reagan-era Pentagon official came one day after state GOP Chairman Stephen Minarik endorsed the rival Senate candidacy of former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer.

The poll, from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, had McFarland leading Spencer, 35 percent to 22 percent, among Republican voters, but also showed 37 percent of the voters undecided.

It was the first statewide poll matching McFarland against Spencer since she announced her candidacy in early March.

The poll found Clinton with 2-1 leads over both her potential challengers.

The former first lady led McFarland, 60 percent to 29 percent, and topped Spencer, 60 percent to 30 percent.

Clinton had the same lead over Spencer in a January poll from Quinnipiac.

"In the Senate race, there's a generic Republican vote of a bit less than a third. Clinton gets the rest," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Hamden, Conn.-based polling institute.

The GOP nomination is also being sought by a little-known tax attorney from Sullivan County, William Brenner, but his name was not included in the polling.

The new poll had Clinton's approval rating among New York voters at 57 percent, down from a high of 65 percent recorded in a Quinnipiac poll out in February of last year.

The Spencer campaign quickly dismissed the poll results, with strategist John McLaughlin questioning the methodology of the survey and saying "this poll right now is way too early for any real judgment to be made."

"The fact is that while primary voters don't know much about either candidate, Republican and Conservative leaders already know and that is why they are backing John Spencer," added Spencer aide Kevin Collins.

"KT McFarland's candidacy is a joke perpetrated by consultants who make a living fleecing wealthy yet naive candidates."

The telephone poll of 1,674 registered voters was conducted March 21-27 and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

end quotes

Now ...

There is a statement that just may come back to haunt this mouth-runner for this REPUBLICAN PICK, Spencer ....

Telling all the candid world that this woman's campaign is a joke ....

Because Ms. McFarland is allegedly naive .....

Now ...

With that statement made ....

My attention has been caught ...

And so ...

Mr. Spencer ...

And the REPUBLICAN PARTY who backs you ....

Let's see what happens between now ...

And November ...

And then we will all know ...

Won't we?

And so ...

[Livyjr]

And then ...

What would life in OUR America be ....

Without the corrupt United States Congress ......

Which has become ...

A big part of ...

OUR national symbol .....

Out there on the world stage ....

"HEY, HEY, GET YA SENATORS HERE ..."

"THREE FOR A DOLLAR ..."

"BEST POLITICIANS IN THE WORLD THAT MONEY CAN BUY ..."

"HURRY, HURRY, HURRY, STEP RIGHT UP HERE, FOLKS ..."

"NO PUSHING ..."

"NO SHOVING ..."

THEY'RE ALL FOR SALE ..."

"AND WE HAVE PLENTY TO GO AROUND ..."

And so ...

"Dereliction of duty - The Senate's idea of lobbying reform is no substantive reform at all"

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Friday, March 31, 2006

If only the events of Wednesday, when Jack Abramoff, who used to wine, dine and buy congressmen, was sent off to prison for almost six years and the Senate voted for a mockery of lobbying reform, had come just three days later.

It would have made for a wonderful April Fools' Day spoof.

Instead, the joke is on all the people the Senate is supposed to represent.

The lobbying laws passed by a vote of 90 to 8, with both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Charles Schumer in the ignominious majority, don't go nearly far enough to effectively stop a culture of corruption in Washington.

Their emphasis is on disclosing the unseemly relationships between legislators and lobbyists, not severing them.

Oh, the ban on members of Congress taking free meals and other gifts from lobbyists that the Senate voted for is overdue.

But what changes, really, when the lobbyists themselves are required to disclose their dealings with lawmakers four times a year, rather than merely twice a year?

Or when congressmen's junkets are still permitted under certain circumstances?

Lobbying laws and ethics laws worthy of the name require an independent office to enforce them.

Congress needs that, and every bit as much as the New York Legislature needs the state lobbying commission and needs the powers of the state ethics commission extended to cover it.

Any chance of a law with real teeth was gone by Wednesday, though.

On Tuesday, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have created an Office of Public Integrity to investigate charges of ethics violations in the Senate.

Both houses of Congress have made it all too clear that they're incapable of investigating their own members.

"Trust is the foundation of our Democratic government," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Wednesday as his colleagues prepared to vote for these tepid reforms.

"We have to do a better job of retaining that trust and that confidence."

Talk about a waste of breath.

It was Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who better got to the point, taking note of the Abramoff scandal.

"There will be more indictments and we will be revisiting this issue," he predicted.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., gets it as well.

He says there will be a political price to pay for not passing stringent reforms of how Congress operates.

"You can wash the outside of the cup all you want," he said.

"If the inside is still unclean, you're going to have the same problems."

In addition to Mr. McCain and Mr. Coburn, those voting against the lobbying curbs were Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

Reassuring proof, then, that not everyone in the Senate is won over by farce.

[Livyjr]

And while we are on the subject of polls here in OUR America ...

Here is an interesting one ...

"Bush tops Dahmer, barely"

By JOHN KELSO

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, March 30, 2006

AUSTIN, Texas -- President Bush beat the rest of the field like an orchestra timpani in my poll to find out who's least admired among a list of shaky characters.

A couple weeks ago, I asked y'all to vote on who you thought should have the lowest approval rating:

* George W.

* Saddam Hussein

* Kenneth Lay

* O.J. Simpson

* Barry Bonds, and

* Jeffrey "Let's Do Lunch" Dahmer among them.

One guy e-mailed me all honked off for including Osama bin Laden in the same poll with George W.

I never mentioned bin Laden in my poll, and I told the guy so.

Seems he had gotten bin Laden and Saddam mixed up.

Bush was a shoo-in for lowest approval rating with 534 votes, or 62.17 percent of the vote.

A nasty old former bartender from a local saloon came in a distant second with 89 votes, or 10.36 percent.

The rest of the field came in like this: Hussein, 83 votes (9.66 percent); Dahmer, 47 votes (5.47 percent); Simpson, 45 votes (5.24 percent); Bonds, 32 votes (3.73 percent) and Lay, 29 votes (3.38 percent).

So Bush didn't do so well.

But I always figured that even if George W. Bush's dog hauled off and bit him, he could always head out to his old oil patch stomping grounds and be universally loved.

Even out in conservative Odessa, the newspaper last week ran an editorial attacking the administration's "aggressive promotion of democracy" through military conflict.

I spent a couple of days last week in Odessa, not exactly hippie territory.

Inside La Margarita, a Mexican restaurant, a guy was wearing a red Halliburton jumpsuit.

In Austin, that's a Halloween outfit.

Still, the Odessa American had an editorial last week saying the Bush administration's policy "bids fair to have the United States involved in open military and lower-level conflicts for years and even decades to come."

"... The administration seems to have learned nothing from experience over the last four years," the editorial concludes.

"Sadly, America could be the worse for it."

Is there no place this guy can go and not get bagged?

To be fair, Ken Brodnax, the American's editorial page editor, says "this is still Bush country, and this is generally a pretty conservative area, so he still has huge support out here," Brodnax said.

Hey, it's nice to know there's at least one place left where people would vote for Bush over Jeffrey Dahmer.

Although there might be a runoff.

John Kelso writes for the Austin American-Statesman. His e-mail address is jkelso@statesman.com

[Livyjr]

And since we are talking about subjective opinions ....

Here is one that strikes a chord with me ...

Who am an "older American" ....

Which means ...

That I too recall ...

Another America ...

That was much nearer ...

And dearer ...

To my own liberty-loving heart ....

Than is this current version imposed upon us ...

By George W. Bush ....

And so ...

"We can thank Bush for all of this"

Letter to the Editor, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Where is the America I grew up with?

We are a people more divided than ever.

Congress has just raised the ceiling on our already gigantic debt.

We are a pariah to the Third World and a disappointment to our friends.

Our civil rights erode by the day.

We are spied upon by our own government.

We have a president who believes that he and his administration are above the law.

Fear mongering is a common political tactic.

The separation of church and state is a thing of the past.

We have been transformed in less than six years.

Thank you, George W. Bush.

RICHARD R.

Berne

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...30-112745-2009r
Commentary: Rebuilding Iraq while the U.S. decays
By Arnaud de Borchgrave and Harlan Ullman
United Press International
Published March 30, 2006


WASHINGTON -- By the end of this year, the U.S. will have spent almost half a trillion dollars on Iraq since the 2003 invasion. This could easily double by the time the U.S. successfully nurtures a new Iraqi democracy to viability including returning basic services such as water, electricity and transport even to pre-war levels. To paraphrase the late great Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, that is getting to be "real money."

Meanwhile, as we "rebuild" Iraq, what is happening here to our own society and its infrastructure?

From hospitals to bridges, highways, roads and streets, mass transit systems, power grids, drinking water systems and hospitals and health care facilities, America is in a sad state of disrepair. One third of all bridges are deemed "structurally deficient" by the American Society of Civil Engineers. U.S. infrastructure thus gets a falling "D" grade, down from D+ five years ago. Estimated costs to put America's infrastructure back on its feet: $1.6 trillion.

According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 75 percent of America's school buildings are "inadequate" to meet the needs of school children. Some $300 billion are needed to bring school plants and teaching faculties up to scratch. The country's 16,000 wastewater systems face a $12 billion shortfall for infrastructure needs not counting funding to protect them from terrorist attack. Some sewer systems are over 100 years old. As Katrina demonstrated, our domestic infrastructure problems are a lot more urgent than the meritorious attempt to democratize 25 million Iraqis.

For the most part, America's managerial class does not use public transportation and is unaware of the extent of crumbling infrastructure, from public schools to unsafe neighborhoods. Nor as Congress grapples with immigration reform has anyone raised the social, economic and legal costs arising from this witches brew of failing infrastructure, illegal aliens, health care and rampant crime.

In Los Angeles, 95 percent of outstanding homicide warrants are for illegal aliens. The lethal 18th Street Gang has an estimated 20,000 members, over half illegal aliens, according to a ranking member of the LAPD, speaking not for attribution. The LA-based MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha), whose membership was originally limited to street-tough Salvadorans, now numbers 50,000 (10,000 in LA alone). These gangs thrive where infrastructure decays.

This criminal imprint stretches from coast to coast and is present in every major city. MS-13 arose from the defeated Marxist FMLN in El Salvador and now has links with the Cosa Nostra. FBI counterintelligence agents worry about al Qaida infiltration through Central America. MS-13 has an estimated 300,000 members in Mexico and Central America. Interestingly, its MO is to redistribute the fruits of its crimes to a network of corner stores owned and operated by Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants that sell at heavily discounted prices and causes them to think they steal from the rich to give to the poor, uncynically pirating the Robin Hood sobriquet.

With one out of four illegals caught crossing the 1,940-mile border with Mexico, the net illegal influx into the United States is between three and four million each and every year. So 20 million illegals now in the U.S. is probably a safer bet than the 12 million figure bandied about Congress. All of this adds huge costs to the nation, especially for healthcare. Pregnant women who deliver "anchor" babies shortly after eluding border patrols have an instant U.S. citizen in the family. The 14th Amendment stipulates anyone born in the U.S. is a U.S. citizen. Anchor strains on emergency facilities have bankrupted scores of hospitals in the Border States.

The 1985 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, an unfunded federal mandate, requires emergency departments to treat any uninsured emergency free of charge. Anchor babies pull illegal mothers, fathers and siblings into permanent residency -- and public welfare aid.

Scams are common. In one clinic, some 300 people were diagnosed as "mildly mentally retarded." They all had the same translator, psychiatrist, symptoms -- and similar stipends. All of these put further pressure on a health care system whose costs are soaring out of sight.

Iraq has been debated politically, strategically, legally and emotionally. It must also be examined in the harsh light of "how much is enough" and what the nation must forego to pay for Iraq.

As for America's infrastructure, no doubt it would take an event comparable to September 11, 2001, or worse, for us to react. Whether we can afford for that to happen or not can easily become the dominant issue in the 2006 and 2008 elections. But consider first the costs of failing to take action now before the expense of "spending real money" is really unaffordable

[Snuffysmith]

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm

PREWAR INTELLIGENCE
Insulating Bush
By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, March 30, 2006

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.


As the 2004 election loomed, the White House was determined to keep the wraps on a potentially damaging memo about Iraq.



Policy Council: Sponsored Links

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Position papers, expert contacts and other resources from Policy Council members are available below.




Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

The previously undisclosed review by Hadley was part of a damage-control effort launched after former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged that Bush's claims regarding the uranium were not true. The CIA had sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate the purported procurement efforts by Iraq; he reported that they were most likely a hoax.

The White House was largely successful in defusing the Niger controversy because there was no evidence that Bush was aware that his claims about the uranium were based on faulty intelligence. Then-CIA Director George Tenet swiftly and publicly took the blame for the entire episode, saying that he and the CIA were at fault for not warning Bush and his aides that the information might be untrue.

But Hadley and other administration officials realized that it would be much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding the aluminum tubes, for several reasons.

For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.

For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

And finally, full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the administration's conduct in the months leading up to war.

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

The President's Summary
Most troublesome to those leading the damage-control effort was documentary evidence -- albeit in highly classified government records that they might be able to keep secret -- that the president had been advised that many in the intelligence community believed that the tubes were meant for conventional weapons.

The one-page documents known as the "President's Summary" are distilled from the much lengthier National Intelligence Estimates, which combine the analysis of as many as six intelligence agencies regarding major national security issues. Bush's knowledge of the State and Energy departments' dissent over the tubes was disclosed in a March 4, 2006, National Journal story -- more than three years after the intelligence assessment was provided to the president, and some 16 months after the 2004 presidential election.

The President's Summary was only one of several high-level warnings given to Bush and other senior administration officials that serious doubts existed about the intended use of the tubes, according to government records and interviews with former and current officials.

In mid-September 2002, two weeks before Bush received the October 2002 President's Summary, Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren't certain that the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons, according to government records and interviews with two former senior officials.

Official records and interviews with current and former officials also reveal that the president was told that even then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts that the tubes might be used for nuclear weapons.

When U.S. inspectors entered Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime, they determined that Iraq's nuclear program had been dormant for more than a decade and that the aluminum tubes had been used only for conventional weapons.

In the end, the White House's damage control was largely successful, because the public did not learn until after the 2004 elections the full extent of the president's knowledge that the assessment linking the aluminum tubes to a nuclear weapons program might not be true. The most crucial information was kept under wraps until long after Bush's re-election.

Choreography
The new disclosures regarding the tubes may also shed light on why officials so vigorously attempted to discredit Wilson's allegations regarding Niger, including by leaking information to the media that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. Administration officials hoped that the suggestion that Plame had played a role in the agency's choice of Wilson for the Niger trip might cast doubt on his allegations.

I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of staff and national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted on October 28 on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice in attempting to conceal his role in outing Plame as an undercover CIA operative. Signaling a possible defense strategy, Libby's attorneys filed papers in federal court on March 17 asserting that he had not intentionally deceived FBI agents and a federal grand jury while answering questions about Plame because her role was only "peripheral" to potentially more serious questions regarding the Bush administration's use of intelligence in the prewar debate. "The media conflagration ignited by the failure to find [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq and in part by Mr. Wilson's criticism of the administration, led officials within the White House, the State Department, and the CIA to blame each other, publicly and in private, for faulty prewar intelligence about Iraq's WMD capabilities," Libby's attorneys said in court papers.

Plame's identity was disclosed during "a period of increasing bureaucratic infighting, when certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability," the attorneys said. "The White House and the CIA were widely regarded to be at war."

Only two months before Wilson went public with his allegations, the Iraq war was being viewed as one of the greatest achievements of Bush's presidency. Rove, whom Bush would later call the "architect" of his re-election campaign, was determined to exploit the war for the president's electoral success. On May 1, 2003, Bush made a dramatic landing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce to the nation the cessation of major combat operations in Iraq. Dressed in a military flight suit, the president emerged from a four-seat Navy S-3B Viking with the words "George W. Bush Commander-in-Chief" painted just below the cockpit window.

The New York Times later reported that White House aides "had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the 'Mission Accomplished' banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot."

On May 6, in a column in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof quoted an unnamed former ambassador as saying that allegations that Saddam had attempted to procure uranium from Africa were "unequivocally wrong" and that "documents had been forged." But the column drew little notice.

A month later, on June 5, the president made a triumphant visit to Camp As Sayliyah, the regional headquarters of Central Command just outside Qatar's capital, where he spoke to 1,000 troops who were in camouflage fatigues. Afterward, Rove took out a camera and began snapping pictures of service personnel with various presidential advisers. "Step right up! Get your photo with Ari Fleischer -- get 'em while they're hot. Get your Condi Rice," Rove said, according to press accounts of the trip. On the trip home, as Air Force One flew at 31,000 feet over Iraqi airspace, escorted by pairs of F-18 fighters off each wing, the plane's pilots dipped the wings as a sign, an administration spokesperson explained, "that Iraq is now free."

There were few hints of what lay ahead: that sectarian violence would engulf Iraq to the point where some fear civil war and that more than 2,440 American troops and contractors would lose their lives in Iraq and an additional 17,260 servicemen and -women would be wounded.

Blame The CIA
The pre-election damage-control effort in response to Wilson's allegations and the broader issue of whether the Bush administration might have misrepresented intelligence information to make the case for war had three major components, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials: blame the CIA for the use of the Niger information in the president's State of the Union address; discredit and undermine Wilson; and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong.

On July 8, 2003, two days after Wilson challenged the Niger-uranium claim in an op-ed article in The New York Times, Libby met with Judith Miller, then a Times reporter, for breakfast at the St. Regis hotel in Washington. Libby told Miller that Wilson's wife, Plame, worked for the CIA, and he suggested that Wilson could not be trusted because his wife may have played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. Also during that meeting, according to accounts given by both Miller and Libby, Libby provided the reporter with details of a then-classified National Intelligence Estimate. The NIE contained detailed information that Iraq had been attempting to procure uranium from Niger and perhaps two other African nations. Libby and other administration officials believed that the NIE showed that Bush's statements reflected the consensus view of the intelligence community at the time.

According to Miller's account of that meeting in The Times, Libby told her that "the assessments of the classified estimate" that Iraq had attempted to get uranium from Africa and was attempting to develop a nuclear weapons program "were even stronger" than a declassified White Paper on Iraq that the administration had made public to make the case for war.

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has said that he considers the selective disclosure of elements of the NIE to be "inextricably intertwined" with the outing of Plame. Papers filed in federal court by Libby's attorneys on March 17 stated that Libby "believed his actions were authorized" and that he had "testified before the grand jury that this disclosure was authorized," a reference to the NIE details he gave to Miller.

In the same filings, Libby's attorneys said that Hadley played a key role in attempting to have the NIE declassified and made available to reporters: "Mr. Hadley was active in discussions about the need to declassify and disseminate the NIE and [also] had numerous conversations during [this] critical early-July period with Mr. Tenet about the 16 words [the Niger claim in the State of the Union address] and Mr. Tenet's public statements about that issue."

Three days later, on July 11, while on a visit to Africa, Bush and his top aides intensified their efforts to counter the damage done by Wilson's Niger allegations.

Aboard Air Force One, en route to Entebbe, Uganda, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a background briefing for reporters. A reporter pointed out that when Secretary Powell had addressed the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he -- unlike others in the Bush administration -- had noted that some in the U.S. government did not believe that Iraq's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for nuclear weapons.

Responding, Rice said: "I'm saying that when we put [Powell's speech] together ... the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did.... The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view." Rice added, "Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or me."

In fact, contrary to Rice's statement, the president was indeed informed of such doubts when he received the October 2002 President's Summary of the NIE. Both Cheney and Rice also got copies of the summary, as well as a number of other intelligence reports about the State and Energy departments' doubts that the tubes were meant for a nuclear weapons program.

Discrediting Wilson
After Air Force One landed in Entebbe, the president placed the blame squarely on the CIA for the Niger information in the State of the Union: "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services." Within hours, Tenet accepted full responsibility. The intelligence information on Niger, Tenet said in a prepared statement, "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed." Tenet went on to say, "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. The president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

Behind the scenes, the White House and Tenet had coordinated their statements for maximum effect. Hadley, Libby, and Rove had reviewed drafts of Tenet's statement days in advance. And Hadley and Rove even suggested changes in the draft, according to government records and interviews.

Meanwhile, as the president, Rice, and White House advisers worked to contain the damage from overseas, Rove and Libby, who had remained in Washington, moved forward with their effort to discredit Wilson. That same day, July 11, the two spoke privately at the close of a White House senior staff meeting.

According to grand jury testimony from both men, Rove told Libby that he had spoken to columnist Robert Novak on July 9 and that Novak had said he would soon be writing a column about Valerie Plame. On July 12, the day after Rice's briefing, the president's and Tenet's comments, and the conversation between Rove and Libby regarding Novak, the issue of discrediting Wilson through his wife was still high on the agenda. According to the indictment of Libby: "Libby flew with the vice president and others to and from Norfolk, Virginia on Air Force Two." On the return trip, "Libby discussed with other officials aboard the plane what Libby should say in response to certain pending media inquiries" regarding Wilson's allegations.

Later that day, Libby spoke on the phone with Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. Cooper had been told days earlier that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. During this conversation, according to Libby's indictment, "Libby confirmed to Cooper, without elaboration or qualification, that he had heard this information, too." Also that day, Libby's indictment charged, "Libby spoke by telephone with Judith Miller ... and discussed Wilson's wife, and that she worked at the CIA."

On July 14, Novak published his now-famous column identifying Plame as a CIA "operative" and reporting that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger.

On July 18, the Bush administration declassified a relatively small portion of the NIE and held a press briefing to discuss it, in a further effort to show that the president had used the Niger information only because the intelligence community had vouched for it. Reporters noted that an "alternate view" box in the NIE stated that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (known as INR) believed that claims of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Africa were "highly dubious" and that State and DOE also believed that the aluminum tubes were "most likely for the production of artillery shells."

But White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett suggested that both the president and Rice had been unaware of this information: "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document." Later, addressing the same issue, Bartlett said, "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."

Because the Bush administration was able to control what information would remain classified, however, reporters did not know that Bush had received the President's Summary that informed him that both State's INR and the Energy Department doubted that the aluminum tubes were to be used for a nuclear-related purpose.

(Ironically, at one point, before he had reviewed the one-page summary, Hadley considered declassifying it because it said nothing about the Niger intelligence information being untrue. However, after reviewing the summary and realizing that it would have disclosed presidential knowledge that INR and DOE had doubts about the tubes, senior Bush administration officials became preoccupied with ensuring that the text of the document remained classified, according to an account provided by an administration official.)

On July 22, the White House arranged yet another briefing for reporters regarding the Niger controversy. Hadley, when asked whether there was any reason that the president should have hesitated in citing Iraq's procurement of aluminum tubes as evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions, answered, "It is an assessment in which the director and the CIA stand by to this day. And, therefore, we have every reason to be confident."

Later that summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee launched an investigation of intelligence agencies to determine why they failed to accurately assess that Saddam had no viable programs to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion.

As National Journal first disclosed on its Web site on October 27, 2005, Cheney, Libby, and Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, rejected advice given to them by other White House officials and decided to withhold from the committee crucial documents that might have shown that administration claims about Saddam's capabilities often went beyond information provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among those documents was the President's Summary of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

In July 2004, when the Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on its investigation of prewar intelligence by the CIA and other agencies, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in his own "Additional Views" to the report, "Concurrent with the production of a National Intelligence Estimate is the production of a one-page President's Summary of the NIE. A one-page President's Summary was completed and disseminated for the October 2002 NIE ... though there is no mention of this fact in [this] report. These one-page NIE summaries are ... written exclusively for the president and senior policy makers and are therefore tailored for that audience."

Durbin concluded, "In determining what the president was told about the contents of the NIE dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- qualifiers and all -- there is nothing clearer than this single page."

-- Previous coverage of pre-war intelligence and the CIA leak investigation from Murray Waas. Brian Beutler provided research assistance for this report.

[Livyjr]

The fruits of Connie's CON JOB ....

Ripen on the vine ...

For all the candid world to see ....

"WE ARE INCOMPETENT ..."

"DO YOU HEAR US, WORLD?"

"UNDER GEORGE W. BUSH ..."

"AMERICA IS INCOMPETENT ..."

And so ...

"Rice Concedes 'Tactical Errors' in Iraq"

By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer

Fri Mar 31, 3:30 PM ET

BLACKBURN, England - Heckled during a visit to Washington's closest ally, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday the United States has made thousands of mistakes but is pursuing worthy goals in Iraq.

"I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," Rice said at a foreign policy gathering, but history will judge whether the larger aims and decisions were correct.

The top U.S. diplomat also said international sanctions must be an option if the nuclear standoff with Iran continues.

That made explicit what had been an unspoken threat now that Iran's case is before the United Nations Security Council.

The United States has avoided for months talking about economic sanctions or other tough consequences for Iran if it does not comply, out of deference to allies and partners who oppose any punitive moves.

Rice defended the three-year-old Iraq war as the right way to rid the world of a threatening dictator and said Iraqis will make a success of their new democracy.

"Saddam Hussein wasn't going anywhere without military intervention," Rice said.

She gave no timetable for withdrawal of U.S. or British forces.

Britain has the second-largest contingent of troops in Iraq after the United States, and Prime Minister Tony Blair has stuck by President Bush despite widespread opposition to the war at home.

Rice met loud anti-war protests in the streets of this northern industrial town, including chants of "Hey, Condi, hey, how many kids did you kill today," at one stop.

At a Liverpool performing arts school once attended by Paul McCartney, one group of students sang for Rice while others booed her.

"People have a right to protest," Rice told students at a Blackburn high school.

It's part of her job to listen, Rice said.

"I'm not just going to visit places where people agree with me."

Police estimated that 1,500 people crowded an intersection near a Liverpool Philharmonic concert Rice was attending.

Amid a cacophony of whistles, steel drums and mock police sirens, they chanted songs accusing Rice of war crimes.

Police on horseback formed a barrier around a short stretch of road between the venue and Rice's hotel, with other officers wearing riot helmets and body armor on standby, hidden from view down a side street.

The protests were the reverse of the warm reception Rice received last fall when she invited British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for a down-home tour of her native Alabama.

Then, elderly white women lined up to shake the hand of a black native daughter made good, football fans cheered and the tantalizing possibility of a run for president — something she discounts — surrounded Rice.

To reciprocate, Straw is hosting Rice for two days in his largely working-class legislative district.

Rice faced skeptical questions about U.S. involvement in Iraq at a question-and-answer session organized by the British foreign policy think tank Chatham House, including one about whether Washington had learned from its "mistakes over the past three years."

Rice invoked her academic background to answer.

"I'm quite certain that there are going to be dissertations written about the mistakes of the Bush administration, and I will probably even oversee some of them when I go back to Stanford," Rice said.

She batted away questions about whether she might run for president, saying she intends to return to teaching when she leaves government.

Rice was a professor and provost at Stanford University before becoming Bush's first-term national security adviser and second-term secretary of state.

Rice was a chief architect of the Iraq war now in its fourth year.

That history was at the center of the opposition she faced Friday, although demonstrators also objected to U.S. policies in pursuit of terrorists.

"Why should we be seen to endorse the policies of this woman?" demanded Jon Netton, 22, an acting student at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts who said Rice's visit had disrupted his practice schedule for an upcoming concert.

A planned visit to a mosque in Blackburn for Friday prayers was canceled because of concern that demonstrators would be too disruptive, mosque leaders said.

About a quarter of the town is of South Asian heritage, and many are Muslims.

A prominent poet and actress pulled out of planned appearances at an evening concert in Liverpool in protest of U.S. policies.

[Livyjr]

"Dereliction of duty - The Senate's idea of lobbying reform is no substantive reform at all" 

Albany, New York Times Union 

First published: Friday, March 31, 2006

If only the events of Wednesday, when Jack Abramoff, who used to wine, dine and buy congressmen, was sent off to prison for almost six years and the Senate voted for a mockery of lobbying reform, had come just three days later.

It would have made for a wonderful April Fools' Day spoof.

Instead, the joke is on all the people the Senate is supposed to represent.

The lobbying laws passed by a vote of 90 to 8, with both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Charles Schumer in the ignominious majority, don't go nearly far enough to effectively stop a culture of corruption in Washington.

And while we are on the VERY RIPE subject of the CULTURE OF CORRUPTION in Washington, D.C. .....

Here's Tommy ...

You know ...

TOMMY THE REPUBLICAN .....

Yeah .....

That Tommy ...

"Former DeLay aide pleads guilty"

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press
Last updated: 5:36 p.m., Friday, March 31, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A former top aide to Rep. Tom DeLay pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy and promised to help with an investigation of bribery and lobbying fraud that has already netted three convictions and sparked calls for ethics reform in Congress.

Tony Rudy, DeLay's former deputy chief of staff, admitted conspiring with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- both while Rudy worked for the Texas congressman and after he left the lawmaker's staff to become a lobbyist himself.

He is the second former DeLay staffer to plead guilty to federal charges in connection with the lobbying probe.

The plea agreement makes no allegation that DeLay did anything wrong.

Rudy faces up to five years in prison but could receive much less based on the extent of his help with the investigation.

Court papers for the first time also referred to a third former DeLay aide, Ed Buckham.

Buckham, a onetime DeLay chief of staff, is described only as Lobbyist B, but is easily identifiable because the documents say Rudy worked with him after a brief stint at Abramoff's lobbying firm.

Beginning in 1997, Abramoff, his clients and Buckham's clients plied Rudy with expensive meals, trips, sports tickets, golf games and clubs, according to the plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

The gifts included a trip to Hilton Head, S.C., in 1999 with Rudy's wife and a trip to Pebble Beach, Calif., for the 2000 U.S. Open.

Rudy was given use of a suite and seven more seats to host a bachelor party at a Washington Redskins game in August 2000.

He received tickets to the Daytona 500 stock car race.

Rudy also arranged payments through Abramoff and Buckham to a consulting firm that he created and his wife, Lisa, ran.

Liberty Consulting received $86,000 in payments from or at the direction of Abramoff and others while Rudy worked for DeLay.

At the same time, according to the court document, Rudy agreed to "perform a series of official acts."

These included:

--Working to get federal money for the Northern Mariana Islands, which both Abramoff and Buckham wanted.

--Getting DeLay to oppose a postal rate increase that was opposed by magazine publishers who were represented by Abramoff.

--Persuading DeLay and other leading Republicans to defeat legislation that would have restricted Internet gambling.

Later, while working as a lobbyist, Rudy also was involved in arranging a golf trip to Scotland for Rep. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican described as Representative 1, and congressional staffers, the court papers said.

He also helped attract $50,000 from two Abramoff clients to Abramoff's Capital Athletic Foundation that eventually was used to pay for the Scotland trip.

Richard Cullen, DeLay's lawyer, called Rudy's plea good news for his client because there is nothing in it that suggested DeLay was aware of Rudy's actions.

"DeLay has said repeatedly for many months that he took official actions and cast votes based only on his principles and his beliefs, and clearly nothing in the filing today indicates anything to the contrary," Cullen said.

Cullen said he has turned over to prosecutors e-mails from DeLay's congressional office that involve Abramoff, Rudy and Buckham.

Other ethics lawyers and experts, however, said the Rudy plea could be ominous for DeLay, who already is under indictment in Texas.

Prosecutors "are not going to lay out a case against him in this indictment," said Stanley Brand, a Washington lawyer and former counsel to House Democrats.

"There is a kind of well-worn method at the Justice Department to trade up by indicting the lower-downs."

After leaving DeLay's staff at the end of 2000, Rudy first joined Abramoff's lobbying team at the Greenberg Traurig law firm.

Soon after, he signed on with Buckham at the Alexander Strategy Group.

DeLay's wife, Christine, also worked there.

Rudy is the first person to plead guilty in the case since Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges in January.

Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay press secretary who later became a lobbying partner with Abramoff, pleaded guilty in November to conspiring to bribe public officials.

Abramoff was sentenced to nearly six years in prison this week for fraud in connection with a separate case, a casino boat business deal, but was allowed to remain free while helping the congressional corruption investigation in Washington.

As part of the deal Friday, Rudy pleaded guilty to the single conspiracy count and prosecutors agreed not to pursue other possible charges against him or his wife.

"The American public loses when officials and lobbyists conspire to buy and sell influence in such a corrupt and brazen manner."

"By his admission in open court today, Mr. Rudy paints a picture of Washington which the American public and law enforcement will simply not tolerate," said Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division.

Rudy, a 39-year-old lawyer, answered U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle's questions in a strong voice but seemed more subdued when she asked if he understood that he was pleading guilty to a felony and would lose some rights.

"Yes your honor," he said quietly.

His lawyer, Laura Ariane Miller, objected when Huvelle described the allegation that he took things "in exchange" for official acts.

Instead, Miller said that her client sought and received gifts.

Rudy was allowed to remain free pending the sentencing.

He and his lawyer left the courthouse without commenting to reporters.

While the court papers said nothing damaging about DeLay, prosecutors again alleged that Ney took action in exchange for trips, meals and tickets provided by Abramoff, Rudy and others.

Ney's lawyer, Mark Tuohey, said a guilty plea by Rudy doesn't change Ney's situation.

The congressman continues to maintain his innocence.

Tuohey said he hadn't seen the court papers filed Friday and couldn't comment in detail on them.

------

Associated Press writers Gina Holland and David Hammer contributed to this report.

[Snuffysmith]

Moral: The More Things Change, The More They Remain the Same



Intelligence Redo Is Harshly Judged
A Judge Critiques 9/11 Overhaul, and Finds It Top-Heavy

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 31, 2006; Page A17

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner sharply criticized the restructuring of U.S. intelligence agencies last week, telling CIA lawyers that the overhaul has done nothing to rectify flaws exposed by al-Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that the changes "in the end . . . will amount to rather little."

Posner, who has written extensively on intelligence matters, questioned "the wisdom and consequences" of the intelligence overhaul passed by Congress in December 2004, which he said was based on "a deep misunderstanding of the limitations of national security intelligence."

That misunderstanding, Posner said, came from a naive belief that intelligence agencies can somehow be made infallible. "Failure in a democratic society," he said, "demands a response that promises, however improbably, to prevent future failures. [And] the preferred response is a reorganization, because it is at once dramatic and relatively cheap."

Posner made his remarks last Friday at an off-site conference of the CIA's office of general counsel, and a revised text was made available to The Washington Post.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said yesterday that the judge was invited because he is a well-known writer on intelligence issues and that "the CIA believes its officers should hear a range of informed opinion on issues affecting their work." Posner has a book being published next week, "Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform." His book "Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11" was published last spring.

In Posner's analysis, the director of national intelligence (DNI), created by Congress to be the president's top intelligence adviser, was given too much to do. DNI John D. Negroponte oversees the CIA and 15 other intelligence agencies, including those at the Pentagon. Negroponte's staff, which has grown to about 1,000, "has become a new bureaucracy layered on top of the intelligence community," Posner said.

In the process, he said, the DNI's office has absorbed "many of the responsibilities of the CIA and demoted the agency to little more than a spy service." He points out that Negroponte runs the National Counterterrorism Center, which used to be part of the CIA. The agency also prepared the President's Daily Brief, the most sensitive intelligence delivered to President Bush and his top national security team each morning, but that now is prepared by the DNI.

At the same time, the DNI has floundered in its task of coordinating the agencies within the intelligence community, according to Posner, in part because of "three distinct and largely incompatible intelligence cultures that are poorly balanced: military intelligence, civilian intelligence and criminal investigation intelligence."

The military culture, with its "up-and-out promotions system . . . discipline and strong mission orientation," views the CIA with "a degree of hostility and disdain, which the agency reciprocates," Posner said. In addition, CIA and Pentagon intelligence officers compete in strategic intelligence work, a situation aggravated by the fact that the military operates the spy satellite agencies, whose capabilities it often does not wish to share.

Meanwhile, the FBI culture, focused in the past on catching criminals, is having problems with intelligence gathering because, as Posner put it, "the aim is to prevent the crime, not punish the criminals." Counterterrorist intelligence, he said, requires "casting a very wide net, following up on clues, assembling bits of information, and often failing because there is as yet no crime."

Complicating these differences, he noted, was the "profound political imbalance" extant among the three intelligence cultures. The military "is immensely popular, immensely powerful politically" and "ambitious to expand its intelligence activities under the forceful leadership of Secretary [Donald H.] Rumsfeld and Under Secretary for Intelligence [Stephen A.] Cambone." Posner added that for "all these reasons" Pentagon intelligence is "out of the practical control of the DNI."

He said the FBI "is also immensely popular . . . and politically powerful . . . and stubbornly resistant to change." The CIA was left, Posner said, "in a situation of considerable vulnerability, as an unpopular agency and therefore a natural scapegoat" for intelligence failures of Sept. 11 and prewar Iraq.

Posner said that the DNI should have been given only a coordinating role in U.S. intelligence, and that the CIA director, now Porter J. Goss, should have remained the president's senior intelligence adviser. That approach would have eliminated the requirement that the DNI's office build its own bureaucracy of analysts, he said.