Hi, whenever they play that video of Bush saying what he said about the way they would deal with the leaker I always catch the double inuendo. You are so right. Karl Rove will be promoted.
Bush distains the opinion of Americans.

There are no Americans anymore, lazyboy!

There are REPUBLICANS, who are a special breed apart, and then, there is the rest of us, and George W. Bush gives no more thought to what we might think than he does to what some cow out in a feedlot might be thinking when he orders it slaughtered for his supper that night!

No more thought than a Samurai gave to what an "untouchable's" name might have been when he cut off their head to make sure his new sword had a blade on it that was all the sword maker claimed it would be!

Well, I was wondering how you would see that, jeffmoskin, this "deal" that has been done, ON YOUR BEHALF, of course!

jeffmoskin, if it were not for geese who lay golden eggs like you Californians, what would all these Kenny "BOY" Lay's do when they needed more gold?

Don't you know that is why they tolerate keeping you people around out there, for your remaining "life force" which they have not yet had a chance to suck out of you?

Watch your bones, jeffmoskin, lest they covet marrow, next, and as always, keep your head down and your temples firmly covered at all times, and especially in the safest recesses of your own home ....

And if you have any extra money left over, George Pataki wants some too ....

"Bankroll called clue to Pataki's intentions - Some political watchers say relatively small pool of funds raised for state campaign points to national ambitions"

By ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Saturday, July 16, 2005

ALBANY - News Friday that Gov. George Pataki has raised less than $1 million for his state campaign committee since January, coupled with his current trip to Iowa, has reignited speculation that he won't seek a fourth term in 2006 and will instead pursue a national office in 2008.

The Friends of Pataki committee took in $785,811 over the past six months, according to a financial report filed with the state Board of Elections.

It has $2.7 million on hand -- a fraction of the $12.3 million Democratic state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has amassed while ramping up fund-raising efforts for his 2006 gubernatorial run.

Aware that the governor's low fund-raising numbers would raise questions about his future, Pataki's aides sought to downplay the figures.

They pointed out that Pataki is a champion fund-raiser who could quickly restock his campaign coffers if he so desired.

Pataki's six-month fund-raising record is $12.7 million, set in the first half of 2002 -- the year he successfully ran for a third term.

"Everyone knows that the governor is one of the top fund-raisers in the nation and that he'll raise the necessary funds should he decide to seek re-election," said Pataki spokesman Kevin Quinn.

A filing later this month will show Pataki's Virginia-based federal political action committee, the 21st Century Freedom PAC, which the governor uses to pay for national activities, has raised more than $1 million since January, Quinn said.

Quinn said Pataki's focus at the state level this year has been on policy, not fund-raising.

He cited the unusually productive legislative session, which saw passage of the first on-time budget in 21 years as well as approval of ethics and lobbying reform measures.

In recent months, Pataki has sent out mixed signals regarding his next political move.

His delay of an announcement about his intentions caused many Capitol observers, who long believed he would run for national office and not a fourth term, to reconsider.

The late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate Republican like Pataki, was the only governor in New York's history to run for a fourth term and win.

Conjecture about Pataki's future shifted again this week with the news that he would appear at the National Governors Association summer meeting, held this year in Iowa, home of the first state-level contests of the presidential primary season.

Unnamed "associates" of Pataki's were quoted Friday in The New York Times as saying the governor viewed his Iowa trip as an opportunity to see whether a moderate Republican could actually land the presidential nomination from a party that is increasingly controlled by conservatives.

During his three-day trip, which began Friday, Pataki was scheduled to attend a fund-raising lunch for the Iowa Republican Party and a Little League baseball game.

This isn't Pataki's first visit to the state.

He was the keynote speaker at the Iowa Republican Party's annual Ronald Reagan dinner in November 2003.

He also courted Iowa Republicans at the GOP's national convention in Manhattan last year and in Washington, D.C., at President Bush's reinauguration.

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

And outside of Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE, which is George W. Bush's "political arm", which is to say "muscle", is there anyone in OUR America who is surprised at this next story, I wonder?

"National Guard Issues Concern Governors"

By ROBERT TANNER, AP National Writer

5 minutes ago

DES MOINES, Iowa - The nation's governors voiced sharp worries Saturday for the National Guard troops they share with the federal government, with concerns about recruitment targets, benefits and job prospects.

Ark. Gov. Mike Huckabee, incoming chairman of the National Governors Association, said more attention must be paid to the needs of guardsmen returning from overseas deployments, especially younger Guard members who need to find work.

More than 30 governors gathered here for their summer meeting.

Both Democrats and Republicans said changes caused by the huge demands placed on the Guard and Reserves for the war in Iraq need more examination.

"It is working today," said South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican.

However, troops returning from the war zone may be affected by objections raised by their spouses and parent, Rounds said.

"The second time around, will they be allowed to re-enlist?"

"That's the question," he said.

"Most governors would say we're putting more strain on our Guard and Reserves than many people are fully comfortable with," said Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican.

The governors are scheduled to meet privately Monday with top officials of the Guard, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Homeland Security Department.

There has been an easing of worries among governors that the overseas demands would leave states without the National Guard members needed to respond to state emergencies, said Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat.

Guard officials have offered assurances they would limit call-ups, he said.

Bigger questions remain, he said.

"I don't feel we've had the full deliberations about what the role of the Guard will be," said Warner, who has been exploring a possible presidential bid.

Leaders need to consider ways to accommodate older members of the Guard and Reserves who want to do their part but can't be expected to commit to long-term, overseas deployment when they've got careers and families, he said.

States often rely on their Air and Army Guard units to help in emergencies such as hurricanes, earthquakes or riots.

The part-time soldiers are not often brought under federal control for missions such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"You haven't seen these kinds of participation from the states since the Civil War," Idaho's GOP Gov. Dirk Kempthorne said.

More than 250,000 National Guard soldiers and airmen have been mobilized for active duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, the Army general in charge of National Guard forces, said last week.

National Guard soldiers represent about 40 percent of the U.S. ground force in Iraq.

That is scheduled to drop significantly next year when the Army deploys two newly expanded active-duty divisions — the 101st Airborne and the 4th Infantry.

"2003 memo seen central to CIA leak probe - Investigators seek to learn who in White House knew of document related to diplomat's mission to Africa"

New York Times
First published: Saturday, July 16, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Prosecutors in the CIA leak case have shown intense interest in a 2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission and the role of his wife, a CIA officer, in the trip, people who have been officially briefed on the case said.

Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the CIA officer's identity from the memorandum.

They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists and if officials were truthful in testifying about whether they had read the memorandum, the people who have been briefed said, asking not to be named because the special prosecutor heading the investigation had requested that no one discuss the case.

The memo was sent to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, just before or as he traveled with President Bush and other senior officials to Africa starting on July 7, 2003, when the White House was scrambling to defend itself from a blast of criticism a few days earlier from the former diplomat, Joseph Wilson IV, current and former government officials said.

Powell was seen walking around Air Force One during the trip with the memo in hand, said a person involved in the case who also requested anonymity because of the prosecutor's admonitions about talking about the investigation.

Investigators also are trying to determine whether the gist of the information in the memo, including the name of the CIA officer, Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, had been provided to the White House even earlier, said another person who has been involved in the case.

Investigators have been looking at whether the State Department provided the information to the White House before July 6, 2003, when her husband publicly criticized the way the administration used intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, the person said.

The prosecutors have shown the memo to witnesses at the grand jury investigating how the CIA officer's name was disclosed to journalists, blowing her cover as a covert operative and possibly violating federal law, people briefed on the case said.

The prosecutors appear to be investigating how widely the memo circulated within the White House and the administration, and whether it might have been the original source of information for whoever provided the identity of Plame to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist who disclosed it in print.

On Thursday, a person who has been officially briefed on the matter said that Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser, had spoken about Plame with Novak before Novak published a column on July 14, 2003.

Rove, the person said, told Novak he had heard much the same information, making him one of two sources Novak cited for his information.

But the person said Rove first heard from Novak the name of Wilson's wife and her precise role in the decision by the CIA to send her husband to Africa to investigate a report, later discredited, that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear material there.

It is not clear who Novak's original source was, or whether Novak has revealed the source's identity to the grand jury.

Rove also talked about the Wilsons with Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter, on July 11, 2003, two days after he discussed the case with Novak.

After his conversation with Cooper, The Associated Press reported Friday, Rove sent an e-mail message to Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about the exchange, saying he "didn't take the bait" when Cooper suggested that Wilson's criticisms had been damaging to the administration.

Rove told the grand jury in the case that the e-mail message was consistent with his assertion that he had not intended to divulge Plame's identity but instead to rebut Wilson's criticisms of the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq, the AP reported, citing legal professionals familiar with Rove's testimony.

Dozens of White House and administration officials have testified to the grand jury, and several officials have been called back for further questioning.

The special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has sought to determine how much Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman at the time of the leak, knew about the State Department memo.

Lawyers involved in the case said Fitzgerald asked a number of questions about Fleischer's role.

Fleischer was with Bush and much of the senior White House staff in Africa when Powell, who was also with them, received the memo.

A spokeswoman for Powell said he was out of the country and could not comment on the memo.

Fleischer said in an e-mail message this week that he would not comment on the case.

Fitzgerald has also looked into any role that might have been played by Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

Lawyers with clients in the case have said that their clients have been asked questions about Libby's conversations in the days after Wilson's article -- in part based on Libby's handwritten notes, which he turned over to the prosecutor.

In addition, several journalists have been asked about their conversations with Libby.

At least one, Tim Russert of NBC News, has suggested that prosecutors wanted to know whether Russert had told Libby of Plame's identity.

After Russert met with Fitzgerald, NBC said in a statement that he did not provide the information to Libby.

On Friday, for the second day in a row, Rove was at President Bush's side in a highly public appearance, a signal that Bush continues to support his powerful adviser as the political pressure mounts over Rove's role in discussing an undercover CIA officer with reporters.

Bush made no public statements about Rove, and during a trip to North Carolina ignored questions from reporters about whether he still had faith in Rove.

Aides to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the minority leader, spent the day preparing a 16-page background memorandum for senators that appeared designed to take the debate beyond Rove, raising questions about what Bush knew and when.

On another front Friday, the Washington Post reported that lawyers in the CIA leaks investigation are concerned that Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, may seek criminal contempt charges against New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a rare move that could significantly lengthen her time in jail.

Miller, now in her 10th day in the Alexandria, Va., jail, already faces as much as four months of incarceration for civil contempt after refusing to answer questions before a grand jury about confidential conversations she had in reporting a story in the summer of 2003.

This article was reported by Douglas Jehl, David Johnston and Richard Stevenson and was written by Stevenson.

And when I read articles like this one, I have to wonder exactly why we are wasting any PUBLIC TAX MONEY at all on this EPA, and corrupt political agencies like the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which, along with other corrupt agencies like the Rensselaer County Department of Health in the State of New York, are BID-NESS's best friend, and honest folk's worst enemies .....

"Effort to cap gases denied - Federal court says EPA is not required to regulate greenhouse pollutants"

By MIGUEL BUSTILLO, Los Angeles Times
First published: Saturday, July 16, 2005

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was justified in refusing to regulate carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas linked to global warming, as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, a federal court ruled Friday in a major legal victory for the Bush administration.

A coalition of 12 states, including New York, and numerous environmental groups had argued that the EPA was legally bound to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act because global warming was a demonstrable threat to public health and safety.

But in a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia concluded that EPA officials acted within their authority two years ago when they rejected a petition demanding that they begin regulating carbon exhaust from new cars and trucks.

The decision ensures that the federal government will not force businesses to make reductions in greenhouse gases while President Bush is in office unless it is compelled to do so by Congress.

A spokeswoman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Friday that the states that brought the suit are considering whether to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bush promised to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants during his first campaign for president, but he reversed his position after he took office.

He now argues that mandatory measures to cut greenhouse gases would cripple the U.S. economy.

Under Bush, the United States formally rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an international pact to reduce greenhouse gases.

The administration instead has chosen to pursue only voluntary reductions programs to address scientists' concerns that global warming will lead to dangerous increases in temperature and rises in sea level.

The United States, the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, are the only two major developed nations to reject the Kyoto Protocol.

It requires participating countries to reduce greenhouse gases to about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

"We are pleased with this ruling and glad the court supported our decision to use voluntary programs ... to reduce carbon and greenhouse gases, instead of mandatory regulations and litigation that don't promote economic growth," said EPA press secretary Eryn Witcher.

Although many coastal states and conservation groups joined the legal challenge, several Midwestern states and industry groups entered the case in support of the administration's position, showcasing significant national differences on the proper response to global warming.

The ruling was cheered by attorneys general from Texas and Michigan, who were among the 11 states that filed arguments in favor of the administration's stance, as well as the automobile industry, which also intervened in the case.

However, California officials and other supporters of regulation noted that the court did not offer an opinion on whether the EPA had the authority to curtail greenhouse gases if it wanted to, a central issue in the dispute.

Moreover, California officials said the federal decision did not prevent states from adopting their own measures to combat global warming -- a step many states around the country have begun to take.

The International Center for Technology Assessment initially petitioned the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases in 1999.

The request came a year after a former EPA general counsel wrote in a memo to President Clinton's EPA administrator, Carol Browner, that greenhouse gases might qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

But the EPA reversed its position after Bush took office, and rejected the petition in 2003.

The decision came after agency General Counsel Robert Fabricant stated in a memo that agency lawyers had revisited the issue and concluded that Congress never intended to give the EPA the power to address climate change.

In Friday's ruling, two of the three circuit judges on the panel, A. Raymond Randolph and David B. Sentelle, concluded that EPA officials had correctly decided not to regulate carbon dioxide based on their interpretation of the evidence at the time, asserting that the link between greenhouse gases and global warming had not been proven.

"In addition to the scientific uncertainty about the causal effects of greenhouse gases on the future climate of the Earth, the administrator relied upon many 'policy' considerations that, in his judgment, warranted regulatory forbearance at the time," the judges wrote.

In a lengthy dissenting opinion, David S. Tatel wrote that the EPA should not have rejected the petition, arguing that greenhouse gases appeared to clearly fit the criteria of pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

And by the way, just WHERE is all that gold?

You know, the gold they ROBBED from us Kah-lee-FAWN-yuns.

We were gouged 9 BILLION dollars.

Where did it go?

Cayman Islands?

Brunei?

First National bank of Bush?

Maybe one of George W. Bush's federal judges would know!

Or Tommy DeLay!

And then, there is always George Pataki and Eliot "Big EL" Spitzer, to ask, of course!

"Rove was first source on CIA agent - Time reporter"

By Randall Mikkelsen

Sun Jul 17,11:34 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House political aide Karl Rove was the first person to tell a Time magazine reporter that the wife of a prominent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy was a CIA agent, the reporter said in an article on Sunday.

Time correspondent Matthew Cooper said he told a grand jury last week that Rove told him the woman worked at the "agency," or CIA, on weapons of mass destruction issues, and ended the call by saying "I've already said too much."

He said Rove did not disclose the woman's name, Valerie Plame, but told him information would be declassified that would cast doubt on the credibility of her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had charged the Bush administration with exaggerating the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs in making its case for war.

"So did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert?"

"No."

"Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him?"

"Yes."

"Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'WMD'?"

"Yes," Cooper wrote in Time's current edition.

"When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible?"

"I don't know."

"Is any of this a crime?"

"Beats me," Cooper wrote.

He also wrote that he was not certain what Rove meant by commenting he had already said too much.

Cooper testified on his conversations with Rove under court order before the grand jury to avoid going to jail, and had received a last-minute waiver from Rove allowing him to break a confidentiality pledge.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to testify.

A federal prosecutor is investigating whether any government officials broke laws against exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent.

Columnist Robert Novak first revealed Plame's identity in July 2003, citing two administration officials, shortly after Wilson published an opinion piece in the New York Times that accused the administration of twisting intelligence on Iraq.

Wilson wrote that on a 2002 mission funded by the CIA he was unable to substantiate allegations that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear materials from Niger, as the White House asserted.

Cooper also reported on Plame's identity, attributing the information to Novak's column and administration officials, in a piece on Time's Web site shortly after Novak's column.

Wilson says the Bush administration leaked his wife's identity in retaliation for his article; Rove's lawyer said the aide had done nothing wrong and was not a target of the investigation.

Other defenders have said Rove is the victim of a smear campaign.

President Bush has said he would fire anyone responsible for the leak, but said last week he would withhold judgment on Rove's role pending the investigation.

Cooper also wrote in Time that in previous testimony to the grand jury he had discussed Wilson and his wife with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

He said he asked Libby whether he had heard anything about Wilson's wife sending her husband to Niger, and Libby replied, "Yeah, I've heard that too."

Rove had used the same language in discussing the issue with Novak, according to media reports.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/opinion/...ddd9319&ei=5070

New York Times

July 17, 2005

"Follow the Uranium" By FRANK RICH

"I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here."

- Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972.

Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.

"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president."

"They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the president's confidence."

- Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday.

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it.

He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame.

We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history.

Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way.

In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable).

In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian.

The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries.

The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far.

Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak.

This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein.

It is about the president of the United States.

It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail.

It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight).

But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it's set against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three appearances before the grand jury.

Therein lies the rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury.

Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship.

But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide.

What's most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller's fate.

That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.

Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush's fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself.

Hence, last week's erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are "totally ridiculous."

The morning after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room - "We've secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters," observed Jon Stewart - the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12.

That conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the right.

Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.

These attacks, too, are red herrings.

Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson.

He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops."

Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."

This case is about Iraq, not Niger.

The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons.

The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa.

The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney.

It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."

The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September.

Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America.

But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson.

In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious."

A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."

AS if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction.

In fact, they were blatant forgeries.

When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts.

The administration's apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the State of the Union address - and could not be dislodged.

As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live."

The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war.

But the administration knows how guilty it is.

That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa.

But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut.

Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation.

As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.

"Official: Dennis Ruined Fla. Cotton Crop"

Sun Jul 17, 4:15 AM ET

JAY, Fla. - Hurricane Dennis destroyed up to 50 percent of the cotton crop in parts of the state, making it the second straight year that some farmers will struggle to make a profit after a hurricane, agriculture officials said.

Nearly 4,700 Santa Rosa County farms and 56,000 acres of cropland were affected by Hurricane Dennis, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The county's cotton crop alone was worth $14 million in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available.

Preston Blackmon was only able to harvest 250 pounds of cotton per acre after Hurricane Ivan, far less than the 800 to 1,000 pounds an acre during a good year.

Many of his plants snapped or were stripped by the latest storm and the crop that should be up to his waist is growing barely above his ankles.

"It can't get no worse," said Blackmon, who owns 1,200 acres of cotton and peanut fields.

"You just borrow money as long as they'll let you and go at it again."

Hurricane Dennis also may end up hurting farms far from where it made landfall last Sunday.

Experts feared the hurricane's remnants could bring more than rainfall to the Midwest's parched fields: The storm clouds may have carried spores of a potentially devastating soybean fungus.

Dennis swept an area of southwestern Alabama where fields are infected with soybean rust.

Farmers and agricultural scientists nationwide will be looking for any signs over the next few weeks that the fungus has spread.

The rust appears as pustules on the leaves of soybean plants.

Heat and high humidity could fuel its development.

Fungicides can control soybean rust, but only if they are applied immediately after it is detected.

And from REPUBLICAN-controlled Rensselaer County, in the corrupt REPUBLICAN EMPIRE of New York .....

"Mining opponents dig up a bit of news - Meeting at board member's home worries some, but officials say mines weren't the topic"

By BOB GARDINIER, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Friday, July 15, 2005

NASSAU -- A political gathering last week at a Town Board member's home attended by some elected officials and the owner of a mining company who has an application for a hard rock mine pending before the town has opponents of the application worried the applicant may have political pull.

But officials involved said that during the gathering at board member Barbara Fausner's home last Thursday, following a board meeting, neither town business nor a secret mining pact was on the agenda, although the meeting was political.

Melissa Toni, a mining opponent, said that following the board meeting that night she was driving home on Route 20 and saw Jude Clemente, owner of Troy Sand & Gravel, stop at Fausner's home and go inside.

Also there, Toni said, was Supervisor Carol Sanford, board member Ian Hart and other town officials whose automobiles she recognized in the driveway.

Those officials have confirmed their presence at the gathering but said that at no time was there a quorum of the board there, and no town business was discussed anyway.

"But Mr. Clemente has an application before the board," Toni said.

"Were they discussing mining?"

"Mining interests and the upcoming election are so closely intertwined that it does not look right."

In December, 2003, the Sand Lake-based Clemente family company filed an application with the state and the town to mine a hard stone called graywacke from 95 acres of a hilltop off Route 66 southeast of Pikes Pond.

Clemente said he went to Fausner's home to find out what happened at the board meeting that night since he could not attend.

A public hearing was held and the board approved another six-month extension on a mining moratorium while they rework town zoning law.

"I stopped by to see Barbara, who I know, to find out what happened at the meeting and I did not know they had a political meeting going on," Clemente said.

"I then left."

Opposition to the mining plan has been heated as some residents of the Hoags Corners/Dunham Hollow area formed Residents Against Mining.

In addition, the Dunham Hollow Civic Association is in the process of forming their own village to wrest zoning control from the town.

Meanwhile, in May, the mining controversy became more political when the majority town Republicans nominated a slate of candidates that excluded Republican Sanford and incumbent Republican Councilman William Lobdell.

Instead, the Nassau Republican Committee endorsed its chairman, David Fleming, to run for supervisor; Don Carpentier to run for his current seat on the board; and Ray Seney to run for Lobdell's seat.

That slate has spoken in opposition to the Clemente proposal, as well as in opposition to a second mining application from Callanan Industries for a site in Dunham Hollow.

A GOP primary race is heating up for September.

Sanford, Lobdell and newcomer Carole Quinn, a member of the town mining committee and a Dunham Hollow horse farmer, have mounted a campaign to primary the committee's picks in September.

Sanford said that the meeting last week was to review nominating petitions for the primary.

Officials also said that Clemente was not involved in circulating nominating petitions for any elected officials.

"I think this is an act of desperation from people who are trying to make mining the central issue in the election this year," Sanford said.

"More and more residents are learning that as supervisor, I have done more than anyone to protect Nassau from mining, including drafting a comprehensive mining law that will be considered later this year."

Sanford added that she is feeling good about September after receiving 340 nominating signatures.

Fleming garnered 248 signatures, according to the petitions on file at the county Board of Election.

The candidates needed only 66 signatures each to get on the ballot.

Bob Gardinier can be reached at 454-5696 or by e-mail at bgardinier@timesunion.com.

"Measure seeks to curb use of eminent domain - Saying process favors companies over property owners, lawmaker proposes restrictions on takings"

By MARK JOHNSON, Associated Press
First published: Thursday, July 14, 2005

ALBANY -- Not enough is being done to protect private property owners facing the seizure of their land by local governments pushing economic development projects, a state assemblyman said Wednesday in announcing a bill to change New York's eminent domain law.

The bill by Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat, follows last month's 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court saying cities may bulldoze people's homes to make way for shopping malls or other private development.

The ruling gave local governments broad power to seize private property to generate tax revenue.

Brodsky, who has led investigations of industrial development agencies and local development corporations, said while economic growth is a legitimate goal, in many cases, local authorities have done more for private companies than public good when seizing property for business development projects.

Under the bill, the time property owners have to appeal condemnation decisions would be increased to 90 days from 30 days.

Displaced residents would be paid at least 150 percent of the market value of their homes, Brodsky said.

The measure also would require eminent domain be used for economic development purposes only to forward a comprehensive plan developed in public meetings and approved by local legislators.

"We haven't seen the bill, but the governor is a strong supporter of property owners' rights," said Kevin Quinn, a spokesman for Republican Gov. George Pataki.

"He believes that while eminent domain can be utilized to accomplish important public projects, it must be used judiciously."

Republican Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno echoed those thoughts.

"You've got to understand that people have rights and government can't just walk over people's individual liberty and rights," Bruno said.

"Sen. Clinton's jab called 'insulting' - Potential '08 candidate compares Bush to "Mad" magazine icon"

By MARC HUMBERT, Associated Press
First published: Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Correction: In an earlier version of this story, a paragraph was incomplete.

It should have read: "I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington," Clinton said during the inaugural Aspen Ideas Festival, organized by the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

The former first lady described Bush's attitude toward tough issues with Neuman's catch phrase: "What, me worry?"

ALBANY -- Republicans took aim at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., on Monday for comparing President Bush to Mad magazine's fictional freckle-faced icon, Alfred E. Neuman.

A Republican National Committee official said the former first lady was "part of today's angry and adrift Democrat Party," while a spokesman for one of her potential 2006 Senate rivals said she was guilty of "insulting the President."

"At a time when President Bush and most elected officials are focused on the security of our nation, Mrs. Clinton seems focused on taking partisan jabs and promoting her presidential campaign," added New York's GOP chairman, Stephen Minarik.

"New Yorkers deserve better from their senator," Minarik said.

Clinton's attack on the President -- not the first time she has likened him to the Mad magazine character -- came Sunday during a speech in Colorado.

"I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington,'' Clinton said during the inaugural Aspen Ideas Festival, organized by the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

The former first lady described Bush's attitude toward tough issues with Neuman's catch phrase: "What, me worry?''

Back in New York, Clinton was asked Monday if she felt some people might be offended by her comparing the President to Alfred E. Neuman.

"That is for people to decide, but I think if you look at the facts, the real concerns of the American public are not being addressed."

Asked if Bush had a "what-me-worry" attitude, she said, "I think Washington does."

Clinton said Monday she was targeting Washington's failure to deal with long-term issues such as health care, energy independence, global warming and national security.

As Clinton gears up for a Senate re-election race in New York next year and a possible White House presidential bid in 2008, her attacks on Bush have become sharper.

In her speech Sunday, she accused the President of damaging the economy by overspending while giving tax cuts to the rich, depriving U.S. soldiers of equipment needed to fight the war in Iraq and cutting funding for scientific research.

"Hillary Clinton's opportunistic attempt to market herself as a centrist is like a wolf dressing up in sheep's clothing," said RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt.

"Such thinly veiled rhetoric doesn't change the fact she is part of today's angry and adrift Democrat Party."

"While Senator Clinton is busy insulting the President across the country, she is failing to produce the homeland security and transportation funding needed to protect New Yorkers from the terrorist threat they face," said Thomas Basile, a spokesman for Manhattan lawyer and potential Senate challenger Edward Cox, a son-in-law of the late President Richard Nixon.

"If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow!"

- George W. Bush in a very rousing political speech on the Freudian and Jungian aspects of macro- and micro-economics that goes a long way, indeed, in explaining to the Californians what Enron did with all that money it hoodwinked the State of California out of, to the tune of BILLIONS, Rochester, New York; January 7, 2000

"Run Hillary, run", says the bumpersticker on the front bumper of the large black REPUBLICAN van that ferries George Pataki from place to place in the State of New York ......

"Pirro is seen as tough sell"

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Monday, July 11, 2005

There has been a lot of talk about the trouble Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro's husband, Albert Pirro, will cause her if she runs for statewide office.

Albert Pirro, a lobbyist, did time in a federal prison in 2001 after being convicted of income-tax evasion and is alleged to have ties to organized crime.

But another, perhaps bigger, problem for Jeanine Pirro is landing a third party line for the 2006 election -- historically, a necessity in winning statewide office in New York.

If the soon-to-be-former DA chooses to challenge Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as state GOP leaders hope, she would be hard-pressed to take the state Independence Party line.

Clinton refused to seek the party's support in 2000.

The Independence Party has again weathered criticism this year because one of its leaders, Lenora Fulani, refused to repudiate past anti-Semitic comments and is being investigated by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a 2006 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, for allegations of child abuse.

That leaves the state Conservative Party line, without which no Republican has won statewide office since 1974.

But party Chairman Michael Long so far seems lukewarm about Jeanine Pirro, who may be a tough-on-crime prosecutor but is also pro-choice.

Two Republicans interested in running against Clinton in 2006 -- former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer and Edward Cox, an attorney and son-in-law of the late President Nixon -- are "clearly more conservative" than Jeanine Pirro, Long said, "and that makes her job, if she decides to go for U.S. Senate, a tougher lift to get the nomination."

"My hope is to put up a candidate with the Republican Party," Long said.

"I think we're stronger when we do that."

"But I'm not going to do that by throwing the principles of my party out the window."

Long went the ideological route in 2004 when he backed Long Island ophthalmologist Marilyn O'Grady against U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., saying former state Assemblyman Howard Mills, an Orange County Republican who supports abortion rights, was too liberal.

Schumer defeated his little-known opponent with an historic 71 percent of the vote.

Mills was later tapped by Gov. George Pataki to be the state's insurance superintendent.

A highly placed Republican insisted Long will back Pirro, if she's the candidate, because "Mike wants to win; he wants to beat Hillary."

"Last year was the year for ideology."

New GOP spokeswoman

Jaime King, who most recently worked in legislative affairs at the state Department of Motor Vehicles, is the state GOP's new spokeswoman.

King, a former legislative analyst at the now-defunct lobbying firm of Powers Crane & Company, will handle day-to-day press at the party's State Street headquarters.

Before arriving in New York, King was a television news producer in Georgia.

Contributors: Capitol Bureau reporter Elizabeth Benjamin. Got a tip? Call 454-5081 or e-mail ebenjamin@timesunion.com.

"The best way to find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data."

- George W. Bush, in the rousing political speech focusing on the security of OUR nation that moved New York State GOP Chairman Stephen Minarik to tearfully proclaim, in tones of rapture and awe, that George W. Bush was "God, Jesus, and Satan" all wrapped up in just one man, Washington, D.C.; December 15, 2003

"Republicans still see Kerry as viable Democratic target"

By CHUCK RAASCH

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, July 17, 2005

When Republicans circled the wagons around embattled White House guru Karl Rove this past week, it was no coincidence that their counterattack centered on three Democrats.

The first was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a potential presidential nominee in 2008.

The second was Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

And the third, somewhat surprisingly, was Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, whom the Republicans not long ago battered into defeat in the 2004 presidential campaign.

In a rough week for the White House, President Bush and White House advisers tried to remain mum on the allegation that Rove had confirmed the identify of a CIA agent to Time reporter Matt Cooper two years ago.

There is a raging public relations battle over whether Rove's actions violated federal law, and a federal grand jury is investigating.

In a classic diversion, Republican political operatives tried to paint the three Democrats as leaders of the "angry left" that was out to smear Rove, regardless of the truth.

For their part, Democrats portrayed Rovegate as part of a broader White House campaign to manipulate intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Clinton is an obvious target for the Republicans.

Like it or not, the 2008 campaign is well under way, and no one will pass up an opportunity to nick the hide of the other side's presumptive front-runner.

Dean will always be an obvious target because of his cannonades against Republicans in general.

He may be supplanting Teddy Kennedy as the Democrat the Republicans most love to hate.

Dean is to Republicans what Newt Gingrich was to Democrats in the early 1990s.

Kerry's inclusion in the gang of three is the most interesting.

He remains a target because he's acted so unlike most vanquished presidential candidates.

Not since George McGovern in 1973 has a defeated presidential candidate of a major party returned to national office.

The losers -- from Gerald Ford to Al Gore -- took more obscure paths into history.

Remember Gore's hermitlike retreat after his devastating, split-decision loss to Bush in 2000?

Out of office for the first time in two decades, he emerged as Angry Man, delivering infrequent but memorable outbursts at Bush and his policies.

But now it looks like Kerry viewed 2004 as the midpoint of an eight-year campaign.

He's made no declarations about whether he will run again, and some pundits and politicos wonder if his time has passed.

Yet since the election, he's given or helped raise about $5 million for Democrats, including $2.5 million in money transferred from his presidential campaign to the national party, which is struggling to keep up with the Republicans' powerful fund-raising machine.

Kerry is in constant e-mail contact with a network of 3 million supporters left over from 2004.

He's called for Rove to resign and urged his supporters to write Bush to ask the President to fire Rove.

Kerry has held fund-raisers for Clinton and other Democratic candidates.

He's contributed to 10 state parties around the country, and he's traveled to about as many on behalf of candidates.

His presidential campaign gave $250,000 in leftover funds to support the Democrats' successful recount efforts in the Washington state governor's race, a razor-thin outcome that wasn't settled until this spring.

Additionally, Kerry coaxed his network of supporters to contribute $650,000 to the USO.

Some cynics might call that the most obvious sign that he's running again -- a political design to rebuild bridges with military veterans after the battering that Kerry took from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in '04.

Others might point out that Kerry is the most vivid example that modern campaigns never end -- even for the losers.

But Kerry aides spin his postelection vigor as a cause, not a campaign.

"It is a continuation of the fight for change in America," said John Giesser, director of Keeping America's promise, a political action committee that Kerry began in March.

Too early for '08 speculation?

Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware is already running.

Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana just finished a presidential test drive through New Hampshire.

Others, like Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, will preen for party centrists at a Democratic Leadership Council meeting in Columbus, Ohio, this month.

Kerry is only staying in the game that never ends.

"White House Mum on Disclosure in CIA Leak"

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 8 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The White House is maintaining silence over the leak of a CIA officer's identity despite a journalist's disclosure that Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was a source for a story about the intelligence agent.

A role for Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby is among details revealed Sunday by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, who wrote a first-person account in this week's issue.

Recounting a July 11, 2003, conversation with senior Bush political adviser Karl Rove, Cooper recalled that Rove told him, "I've already said too much" after revealing that the wife of administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently worked at the CIA.

Cooper speculated that Rove could have been "worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else."

"I don't know, but that signoff has been in my memory for two years," Cooper wrote.

Until it refused to issue more denials last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that Libby and Rove had no connection to the leak of the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

On Sunday, Bush administration spokesman David Almacy declined to comment about Libby, citing an independent counsel's ongoing investigation of the case.

Cooper said the 2003 phone call with Rove was the first time he had heard anything about Wilson's wife.

He said he had a subsequent conversation about Wilson and his wife with Libby.

According to Cooper, "Libby replied, 'Yeah, I've heard that too' or words to that effect" when Cooper asked if Libby had heard anything about Wilson's wife sending her husband to the African nation of Niger to investigate the possible sale of uranium to Iraq for nuclear weapons.

As part of Patrick Fitzgerald's criminal probe of the identity leak, Cooper testified about his conversation with Libby in a deposition at his lawyer's office in August 2004.

Libby, as Rove did this month, provided a specific waiver of confidentiality.

In a grand jury appearance last Wednesday, Cooper gave his account of what Rove told him.

Cooper also said there may have been other government officials who were sources for his article.

Time posted "A War on Wilson?" on its Web site on July 17, 2003.

In an effort to quell a chorus of calls to fire Rove, Republicans said Sunday that he first learned about Plame's identity from the news media.

"The information exonerates and vindicates, it does not implicate" Rove, Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"Folks involved in this, frankly, owe Karl Rove an apology."

There were no takers.

The White House's assurance in 2003 that Rove was not involved in the leak of the CIA officer's identity "was a lie" and Rove's credibility "is in shreds," said John Podesta, who was chief of staff in the Clinton White House.

It is unclear whether a journalist first revealed the information to Rove, as Mehlman said.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony said Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the media or from someone in government who said the information came from a journalist.

The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because the federal investigation is continuing.

Appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation," Wilson said, "I believe that using the West Wing of the White House to be engaged in a smear campaign is an outrageous abuse of power."

The CIA sent Wilson to check out intelligence that the government of Niger had a deal for the sale of yellowcake uranium to Iraq.

Wilson did not find that such a deal took place.

Five days before Cooper's conversation with Rove, an op-ed piece by Wilson had appeared in The New York Times suggesting the Bush administration had manipulated pre-war intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq.

In 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the idea that Rove was involved in leaking information about Wilson's wife was "ridiculous."

"There's no evidence that (Rove has) done anything criminally wrong," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on CBS.

He said the American people are taking the controversy "for what it is — politics."

"Study: U.K. at ‘risk’ for supporting Iraq war - Government rejects think tank’s analysis, says terrorism is a global problem"

Updated: 7:13 a.m. ET July 18, 2005

LONDON - Backing the United States in Iraq has put Britain more at risk from terror attacks, an influential British think tank said Monday.

In a report that may make uncomfortable reading for Prime Minister Tony Blair after the London bombings on July 7, terrorism experts said Britain had suffered by playing “pillion passenger” to the United States.

Experts Frank Gregory and Paul Wilkinson said the Iraq war had boosted recruitment and fund-raising for al-Qaida, which is suspected of being behind the bombings that killed 55 people.

“The U.K. is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States,” the security experts said in the report from the Royal Institute of International Affairs, commonly known here as Chatham House.

Defense Secretary John Reid rejected the report’s conclusions, arguing that terrorism was a global problem that the whole international community had to confront.

“One of the lessons of history is that if you run away from this it doesn’t actually get better,” Reid told the British Broadcasting Corp.

“Every child in the playground knows the idea that if you just avoid the bully, the bully will not come for you is refuted by every piece of historical experience,” he added.

The report was issued as Britain’s interior minister, Charles Clarke, meets opposition party leaders to find political consensus in drawing up tougher anti-terror legislation.

Blair has always refuted the notion that Britain’s role in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has made the country less safe.

He argues that terrorism, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was a threat well before those conflicts and has affected many different countries.

Threat underestimated

The security experts said British intelligence services had been preoccupied with Irish Republican extremists and had looked in the wrong direction for years.

“As a result of giving low priority to international terrorism, the British authorities did not fully appreciate the threat from al-Qaida,” they said.

Wilkinson and Gregory said conducting counter-terrorism measures shoulder to shoulder with the United States was a key problem because London was in no way an equal partner with Washington.

“Riding pillion with a powerful ally has proved costly in terms of British and U.S. military lives, Iraqi lives, military expenditure and the damage caused to the counter-terrorism campaign,” they said.

They said al-Qaida’s profile has also been raised by the war in Iraq.

“It gave a boost to the al-Qaida network’s propaganda, recruitment and fundraising,” the report concluded.

But they conceded it was “notoriously difficult to prevent no-warning coordinated suicide attacks, the characteristic modus operandi of al-Qaida."

“It is the most dangerous form of terrorist threat ever posed by non-state actors,” they said.

Reid, the defense secretary, argued that bombings in Turkey and Iraq since the London attacks had underlined that terrorism was an international problem.

“The terrorists want to kill anyone who stands in the way of their perverse ideology,” he said.

As an American, myself, as a disabled American veteran, as an American who knows OUR own American version of history, as an American who knows something about bullies, having been confronted by one in the fifth grade who used to torture and torment me every day, as well as some here in the State of New York today who continue to torment and intimidate me, and as an American living in one of the original American "independent states" which won its own independence from thug-like England in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, FOURS YEARS BEFORE the present United States of America came into existence in 1787, I personally have to wonder, and here, I am asserting a God-given right to question and challenge these statements above by this Britisher Reid, where is there any evidence of this "PERVERSE IDEOLOGY" that he is spewing forth about, above here?

"WHERE THE HELL IS THE BEEF, JACK?"

Where?

Because without evidence, this is nothing but hate-mongering, and demagoguery, pure and simple, and as an American, a real American, an American who believes in RULE BY LAW, I personally am getting damn sick and tired of hearing this crap from these people, thank you very much!

As an American who was born in the State of New York, and still resides there, when I think of "PERVERSE IDEOLOGY", quite frankly, I think of HIS MOST BRITANNIC MAJESTY, GEORGE III OF ENGLAND, and HIS lap-dog Parliament, and what I think of is how many American lives were lost in securing OUR independence in the State of New York from England, and I also think about the fact that in securing OUR independence, that we severed ALL political ties with England, and its peoples, and quite frankly, right now, I am still for that, especially when I listen to another BRITISH DEMAGOGUE spewing forth in the same manner today to drum up support for yet another ENGLISH WAR against one more people on the face of the earth, as they tried with us, back in 1775, and after, until 1783, and the TREATY OF PARIS, which made the State of New York a free and independent nation on the face of this earth, with no political ties to England, whatsoever.

AND THAT IS AMERICAN HISTORY, FOLKS!

Real American history, and not this codswollop and drivel that is spewing forth from the likes of Scott McClellan and this DEMAGOGUE Jack Reid, over there in England.

And here I have to say exactly how disgusting it is to have to listen to this outright crap, day after day after day after interminable day!

"HATE THEM, HATE THEM, HATE THEM ....."

On what evidence?

On what evidence, Jackie boy?

TERRORISM IN ENGLAND IS AN INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM, is it Jackie boy?

Well, guess what, I don't believe you, myself, because of real history, instead of your demagoguery!

YOU SAY, Jackie boy, that “One of the lessons of history is that if you run away from this it doesn’t actually get better,” and I say in response that that is exactly why WE, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE finally decided that the only way we personally would ever have peace over here was to kill every single one of you, over there, and the only reason you still draw breath today, Jackie boy, in a land that was not itself snuffed from existence back in 1783, is because WE, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, are a compassionate people, and so, we let you live, when you had the real good sense to finally call it quits over here, and to get your bloody lobsterbacks, and your filthy Hessians out of OUR country.

THAT IS HISTORY, AND THAT IS FACT!

And still, you did not learn!

You never seem to learn over there, to be truthful and if there is one bully on the face of this earth that HISTORY, real American history can determine, it is ENGLAND, and you are right Jack Reid, the only way to really deal with a true bully is to smash him right hard in the face as I did with mine, and so it seems to be with you BRITS one more time again.

And like the bullies that you always have been, here you are whining and sniveling and crying, like always, after the smaller guy has given you the clout you need, as the Irish did, time and time again, until you learned to leave them alone, too, at least in the lower counties, anyway.

In 1777, it was most certainly determined that TYRANNY AND TERRORISM were real international problems, and so, the French joined with us to deal with you people over there in England to end your terrorism here, and still you did not learn, even after all of that!

WHAT AN ARROGANT, DOG-STUPID PEOPLE YOU ENGLISH MUST BE, is my thought on the matter, anyway, Jackie boy, especially after listening to your puerile mewlings above about "PERVERSE IDEOLOGY".

To a REAL AMERICAN, England the oppressor, England the tyrannizer, is the true home of PERVERSE IDEOLOGY, and when you sow seed, Jack, expect a bumper crop sometimes, as you got from us, way back when, at Lexington and Concord, at Bunker Hill in Boston, at Saratoga, and Walloomsack, at Yorktown, at Cowpens, and countless other places, like the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 where you Brits ran through the swamps so fast to get away from us that the best hounds we had at the time couldn't even catch up with you, as you went, and good riddance, to boot!

And now, we here in America have to listen to a whole 'nother dose of this same crap from you people, who tyrannized and oppressed us all those years ago!

Well guess what, Jack!

In a country based on laws, such as this one is, as a direct result of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, DEMAGOGUERY AND BRITISH HATE-MONGERING JUST DON'T CUT IT, with this American, anyway, SO CUT THE CRAP!

If you want my support, then lay some evidence on the table, because we have a system over here known as tiral by jury, and that is me!

I am the jury, and I want to know what this pervese ideology is, before I will give you a further nickle of my precious time.

So there .....

Five inches of rain in Greene County in the State of New York, just a bit ago, which is south of Albany, and north of New York City.

Closed the Thruway for awhile.

Hmmm.

But since George W. Bush and his REPUBLICAN LAWYERS and his lapdog EPA say there is no global warming, I guess this is just another lie cooked up by the "enviros" to politically embarass George W. Bush, George Pataki and Mehlman's REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE!

It's amazing how much control these left-wing enviros have over the news media in the State of New York, being able to make us think that Greene County got five inches of rain which shut down the New York State Thruway.

Well, George W. Bush said "BRANG'UM ON", and now, they are coming, and I don't think that boy knows if he afoot or horseback, and he is all that stands between us and the hoardes!

Oh, well...

"Thailand Set to Impose State of Emergency"

By APICHART WEERAWONG, Associated Press Writer

Mon Jul 18,12:48 PM ET

NARATHIWAT, Thailand - Thai authorities prepared Monday to impose a state of emergency for insurgency-hit areas of the country's Muslim south, as violence continued unabated with two slayings and a bombing that wounded seven security personnel.

A raid on the southern city of Yala by militants last week that left two policemen dead and 22 people injured prompted the Cabinet to adopt a decree Friday giving Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra sweeping new emergency powers.

The decree expands the government's authority to impose curfews, ban public gatherings, censor news, close publications, limit travel, detain suspects without charge, confiscate property and tap telephones.

Critics complain that the decree is unconstitutional and dictatorial.

The measure would be imposed in the provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat and parts of nearby Songkhla province, Cabinet Secretary Bowornsak Uwanno said.

The Cabinet was expected to approve the recommendation and put the state of emergency into effect Tuesday, he said.

Former Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, head of the National Reconciliation Commission assigned with seeking solutions to the problems in the south, met with Thaksin Monday night to discuss the measure.

Anand earlier expressed concern about how the government was exercising power and whether human rights would be considered.

The Foreign Ministry on Monday briefed 58 foreign diplomats, including 12 ambassadors, on the new law.

Thaksin says the measure is necessary to curb violence in the south, where about 900 people have died in hundreds of drive-by shootings and scores of bombings since Islamic separatists launched their insurgency in January 2004.

The southern provinces — Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat — are the only predominantly Islamic areas in Buddhist-majority Thailand, and southern Muslims complain of discrimination in jobs and education.

Den Tohmeena, a southern Senator, said the new law is meaningless to people in the south who consider the government corrupt.

"The local people are used to abuse of power by government officials and security personnel, so whatever decree or law is imposed will make no difference to them," Den said.

On Monday, suspected separatists in Narathiwat set off a bomb hidden on a bridge while a truck carrying soldiers and police passed by.

Five soldiers and two policemen were hurt.

In other attacks, a motorcycle gunman fatally shot a teacher in Pattani and a rubber plantation worker was slashed to death.

A soldier was shot to death while on patrol Sunday night in Narathiwat.

end quotes

Sounds like Viet Nam to me, but that can't be, can it?

No, probably not.

Must be that PERVERSE IDEOLOGY at work!

Let's ask Jack Reid about it, he'll probably know, if anyone does.

"Bush says he will fire anyone who breaks law - President appears to qualify standard for firing in CIA-leak case"

July 18: The vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was a source along with the president's chief political adviser for a Time story that identified a CIA officer, the magazine reporter said Sunday.

Updated: 12:49 p.m. ET July 18, 2005

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Monday that if anyone on his staff committed a crime in the CIA-leak case, that person will "no longer work in my administration."

His statement represented a shift from a previous comment, when he said that he would fire anyone shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of a CIA officer.

At the same time, Bush yet again sidestepped a question on the role of his top political adviser, Karl Rove, in the matter.

"We have a serious ongoing investigation here and it's being played out in the press," Bush said at an East Room news conference.

Bush, appearing with visiting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, spoke a day after Time magazine's Matthew Cooper said that a 2003 phone call with Rove was the first he heard about the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently working for the CIA.

Bush said in June 2004 that he would fire anyone in his administration shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

On Monday, however, he added the qualifier that it would have to be shown that a crime was committed.

Asked at a June 10, 2004 news conference if he stood by his pledge to fire anyone found to have leaked Plame's name, Bush answered, "Yes."

"And that's up to the U.S. attorney to find the facts."

2003 phone call

Bush spoke a day after Time magazine's Matthew Cooper said that a 2003 phone call with Rove was the first he heard about the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently working for the CIA.

A tempest has swirled around the leak of the CIA agent's name, apparently by Bush administration officials, in July 2003.

Some Democrats have called for Rove, whose title is deputy chief of staff, to be fired.

They have suggested that he violated a 1982 federal law that prohibits the deliberate exposure of the name of a CIA agent.

“It's best people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions."

"I don't know all the facts."

"I want to know all the facts," Bush said.

"I would like this to end as quickly as possible."

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration."

"Greenspan sees oil prices hitting US growth"

Mon Jul 18, 3:32 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan believes that high oil prices could shave 0.75 percentage points off US economic growth this year, according to congressional testimony.

But the economy is still doing pretty well despite oil hovering around 60 dollars a barrel, he said in a letter to Representative Jim Saxton, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress.

Greenspan said that Federal Reserve forecasts suggest that high oil prices since the end of 2003 have shaved "roughly half a percentage point off real GDP growth last year".

He said that oil prices "look to restrain growth this year by approximately three-quarters of a percentage point".

But the Fed chairman added: "Aside from these head-winds, the US economy seems to be coping pretty well with the run-up in crude oil prices."

The Fed expects US growth to reach 3.75-4.0 percent this year.

The letter contained Greenspan's answers to supplementary questions posed by Saxton after he appeared at a joint committee session on June 9, when he warned of "froth" in parts of the US housing market and an abysmal savings rate.

"Rats invade central Hong Kong"

Mon Jul 18, 9:11 AM ET

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong's central business district, famous for gleaming skyscrapers and fashionable bars, is facing an invasion of rats.

Between January and June, the densely populated area's rodent infestation rate swelled to 17 percent from zero, based on the number of rats attracted to every 100 pieces of bait.

"Central was virtually rat-free a few months ago, then the situation deteriorated."

"We have to tackle the problem actively."

"What is important is sustained action," said Ho Yuk-yin, a consultant with the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department.

He attributed the influx to poor vigilance at restaurants in the area's old, run-down and poorly-maintained buildings and maze of dank alleyways.

Government officers are distributing pamphlets to educate restaurant workers about hygiene, food storage, rubbish disposal and rat prevention.

Workers were also putting out poisoned bait.

The district is now the second-worst rat infested area in Hong Kong, behind a shopping center in rural New Territories.

A rodent infestation rate above 20 percent is considered high.

end quotes

WOW!

Sounds like they have the Rensselaer County Department of Health in charge of sanitation and public health over there, too!

I didn't know Hong Kong was also REPUBLICAN-controlled!

How about that, will you!

And while we here in the State of New York are being told by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and George Pataki and Rudolph Guiliani and this Minarik of the New York State REPUBLICAN COMMITTEE that they are protecting us from TAY-RISTS abroad, the REAL REALITY of how we are being screwed right here at home emerges .....

July 18, 2005

"New York Medicaid Fraud May Reach Into Billions"

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and MICHAEL LUO

It was created 40 years ago to provide health care for the poorest New Yorkers, offering a lifeline to those who could not afford to have a baby or a heart attack.

But in the decades since, New York State's Medicaid program has also become a $44.5 billion target for the unscrupulous and the opportunistic.

It has drawn dentists like Dr. Dolly Rosen, who within 12 months somehow built the state's biggest Medicaid dental practice out of a Brooklyn storefront, where she claimed to have performed as many as 991 procedures a day in 2003.

After The New York Times discovered her extraordinary billings through a computer analysis and questioned the state about them, Dr. Rosen and two associates were indicted on charges of stealing more than $1 million from the program.

It has drawn van services, intended as medical transportation for patients who cannot walk unaided, that regularly picked up scores of people who walked quite easily when a reporter was watching nearby.

In cooperation with medical offices that order these services, the ambulettes typically cost the taxpayers more than $50 a round trip, adding up to $200 million a year.

In some cases, the rides that the state paid for may never have taken place.

School officials around the state have enrolled tens of thousands of low-income students in speech therapy without the required evaluation, garnering more than $1 billion in questionable Medicaid payments for their districts.

One Buffalo school official sent 4,434 students into speech therapy in a single day without talking to them or reviewing their records, according to federal investigators.

Nursing home operators have received substantial salaries and profits from Medicaid payments, while keeping staffing levels below the national average.

One operator took in $1.5 million in salary and profit in the same year he was fined for neglecting the home's residents.

Medicaid has even drawn several criminal rings that duped the program into paying for an expensive muscle-building drug intended for AIDS patients that was then diverted to bodybuilders, at a cost of tens of millions.

A single doctor in Brooklyn prescribed $11.5 million worth of the drug, the vast majority of it after the state said it had tightened rules for covering the drug.

New York's Medicaid program, once a beacon of the Great Society era, has become so huge, so complex and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited.

Though the program is a vital resource for 4.2 million poor people who rely on it for their health care, a yearlong investigation by The Times found that the program has been misspending billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste and profiteering.

A computer analysis of several million records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law revealed numerous indications of fraud and abuse that the state had never looked into.

"It's like a honey pot," said John M. Meekins, a former senior Medicaid fraud prosecutor in Albany who said he grew increasingly disillusioned before he retired in 2003.

"It truly is."

"That is what they use it for."

State health officials denied in interviews that Medicaid was easily cheated, saying that they were doing an excellent job of overseeing the program.

"This continues to be an area where we think that we have made substantial progress," said Dennis P. Whalen, executive deputy commissioner of the State Health Department.

"But by no means are we sitting back and resting on the accomplishments that we have made."

Nonetheless, after being informed of The Times's findings, the Republican majority in the State Senate began a push recently to overhaul the system intended to protect Medicaid, which has been sharply reduced even as Gov. George E. Pataki and lawmakers have nearly doubled the program's budget over the last decade.

The Democratic majority in the Assembly has remained on the sidelines.

So has Mr. Pataki.

New York's Medicaid program is by far the most expensive and most generous in the nation.

It spends far more - now $44.5 billion annually - than that of any other state, even California, whose Medicaid program covers about 55 percent more people.

New York's Medicaid budget is larger than most states' entire budgets, and it spends nearly twice the national average - roughly $10,600, more than any other state - on each of its 4.2 million recipients, one in every five New Yorkers.

That generosity was born of good intentions when Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the program into law in 1966, following the state's tradition of creating big antipoverty programs.

But Medicaid has become far more than the child of that altruism, having morphed into an economic engine that fuels one of the state's biggest industries, leaving fraud and unnecessary spending to grow in its wake.

There are no precise estimates for the cost to the state's program.

Officials who have spent their careers chasing unscrupulous doctors and other providers in New York Medicaid say the losses to taxpayers here are probably higher than typical estimates of overall health care fraud.

The Government Accountability Office in Washington and others have estimated that 10 percent of all health care spending nationally is lost to "fraud and abuse."

James Mehmet, who retired in 2001 as chief state investigator of Medicaid fraud and abuse in New York City, said he and his colleagues believed that at least 10 percent of state Medicaid dollars were spent on fraudulent claims, while 20 or 30 percent more were siphoned off by what they termed abuse, meaning unnecessary spending that might not be criminal.

"So we're talking about 40 percent of all claims are questionable," Mr. Mehmet said - an amount that would approach $18 billion a year.

Despite the debate, and the enormous sums at stake, Albany has never formally studied how much of the huge government investment in Medicaid is lost to criminal activity and abuse.

For their part, federal auditors have made New York a leading target for inspection as Washington has begun to crack down on Medicaid spending abuses.

The federal government shares the cost of Medicaid with the states.

In New York, it pays half the bill; Albany splits the rest of the cost with its counties and New York City.

The lax regulation of the program did not come about by chance.

Doctors, hospitals, health care unions and drug companies have long resisted attempts to increase the policing of Medicaid.

The pharmaceutical industry, which has spent millions of dollars annually on political contributions and lobbying in Albany, has defeated several attempts to limit the drugs covered by Medicaid; other states have saved hundreds of millions of dollars annually with such restrictions.

Earlier this year, after the Legislature agreed to impose such a limit and steer patients to generic drugs, the industry won a major loophole that allowed any doctor to substitute a higher-priced brand name with a simple phone call to the state.

Governor Pataki would not be interviewed about Medicaid for this article, and his aides referred questions to the State Department of Health, which is part of his administration.

The health commissioner, Dr. Antonia C. Novello, also declined to be interviewed.

In defending the department's performance, Mr. Whalen, the executive deputy commissioner, said it had saved $9.3 billion in recent years through investigations of providers, a new computer system and other measures.

Asked repeatedly to provide an in-depth explanation of their claim of major savings or for any state records or other documentation to back up the figures, department officials would not supply any.

The Times investigation drew upon interviews with scores of current and former officials and health-care providers, including several former investigators who say they left the state disillusioned about its commitment to fighting fraud.

A review of thousands of pages of state, federal and local records turned up repeated examples of cost savings and waste reduction used by the federal government and other states, but not by New York.

The investigation found audits on Medicaid spending that were brushed aside, and reports on waste that appear to have been shelved.

There have been multiple warnings from watchdog agencies in New York and in Washington that indicate that the program is becoming increasingly porous.

Prosecutors said state regulators had all but lost interest in bringing Medicaid thieves to justice, preferring instead to focus on recouping money through a few civil cases that have little deterrent value.

The Dentist

On the streets of Downtown Brooklyn, the young men would regularly fan out to drum up business for Fulton Gentle Family Dentistry.

"Got a Medicaid card?" one of the men shouted one day last November.

"Come in and get your free CD player right now!"

But inside the office at 575 Fulton Street, Dr. Dolly Rosen seemed to make money whether or not the barkers did their job.

She simply invented the dental work she did, according to state prosecutors alerted by The Times, and then billed it to Medicaid.

And the breadth of her deception was enormous, the prosecutors said.

In 2003, less than two years after joining Medicaid, Dr. Rosen and an associate reaped $5.4 million, more than the amounts garnered by 98 percent of providers of all types in the entire New York program, according to the analysis of Medicaid billings.

Dr. Rosen claimed to be doing thousands of procedures every month, far more than any group of dentists could possibly perform, according to the analysis and interviews with dental experts.

In September 2003, she charged Medicaid roughly $725,000 for 9,500 individual dental procedures, many of them expensive and complicated, such as filling cavities that had rotted away much of the tooth.

On a single day that month, she billed for 991 procedures, or more than 100 an hour in a typical workday.

In criminal complaints, an investigator said that more than 80 percent of the procedures for which the dental office billed were not performed, were unnecessary or were improper.

Dr. Rosen, who is 48 and lives in Manhattan, was licensed in 1995 and joined the Medicaid program in 2002.

Since then, she has billed taxpayers more than $7 million.

She and her lawyer, Jeffrey A. Granat, would not comment.

The allegations of fraud in this case involved dentistry, but in the world of New York Medicaid, this kind of scheme is not unusual in any specialty, although it rarely occurs on such a scale.

Many doctors, clinics, pharmacists and other providers routinely exaggerate their billings, investigators say, often claiming to do more work than they really performed, or substituting an expensive procedure for a minor one.

Others invent visits that never occurred.

"This is an age-old problem in New York," said Professor Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard, who has written extensively on health care fraud.

Albany stood by as Dr. Rosen's Medicaid billings went from zero in 2001 to $4 million in 2003, according to the analysis of her billing records.

Her 2003 billings were by far the highest of the 50,000 dentists or doctors in New York Medicaid - $1 million more than those of the next highest, the records show.

Dr. Rosen had an associate in the Brooklyn office, Dr. Alex Silman, who sent his own bills to Medicaid.

His billings showed a similar spike, rising to $1.4 million in 2003 from $115,000 in 2002, records show.

The Department of Health and the state attorney general's office blamed each other for failing to stop Dr. Rosen and Dr. Silman.

The department said it had alerted the office that it should investigate possible improprieties with their practices.

The office said the department had botched its inquiry.

Last fall, The Times brought its findings on Dr. Rosen and Dr. Silman to the attention of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which is in the state attorney general's office.

On March 24, prosecutors in the unit had Dr. Rosen and Dr. Silman arrested.

This month, the two were indicted on charges of first-degree grand larceny, each accused of stealing more than $1 million from the program.

Another associate, David Ibragimov, who handled billing for the office, was also indicted.

All three have pleaded not guilty.

The Times found Dr. Rosen's extraordinary billings using a laptop computer and commonly available software after spending a few hours studying New York Medicaid billings.

And she was only one of scores of medical providers who turned up in the search with similar spikes in revenues, including three Brooklyn pharmacies, a Manhattan doctor and a Queens medical supply company.

None had even been audited by the state.

The AIDS Drug

The woman said her name was Pamela Borden, but it was not.

She told the doctor that she had AIDS and had been losing weight rapidly, but she did not have AIDS and was overweight.

Yet when she walked out of Dr. Mikhail Makhlin's Brooklyn office in February 2002, she was clutching a prescription for a very expensive synthetic growth hormone intended to treat wasting syndrome, a side effect of AIDS.

The cost of the drug, entirely borne by taxpayers, was $6,400 a month.

The woman's real intention for the synthetic hormone, Serostim, had nothing to do with AIDS.

Serostim is highly sought in a thriving black market among bodybuilders, who use it like a steroid to bulk up.

And Dr. Makhlin wrote far more prescriptions for Serostim than any other Medicaid doctor in the state, more than even prominent AIDS specialists with large practices.

From 2000 to 2003, Dr. Makhlin prescribed 12 percent of all the Serostim purchased by New York Medicaid, costing the program $11.5 million, according to the Times analysis of Medicaid billings.

Medical records and interviews with state officials suggest that the woman's visit was part of an elaborate series of scams involving Serostim that stole tens of millions of dollars from New York Medicaid, long after other states realized what was going on.

In 2000, New York Medicaid paid $7 million for Serostim, but the following year, after the schemes took off, the state spent $50 million on the drug.

The money was spent despite national publicity that had led other states to realize that Serostim was being abused, and to begin reining in their spending on the drug.

Florida, for example, put restrictions on Medicaid payments for Serostim in 1997.

The same year, federal officials broke up a Medicaid fraud ring that recruited people from Washington Square Park and paid them $20 to $50 to get Serostim illegally.

At the Health Department, Mr. Whalen and his aides described the department's handling of the drug as a success.

They said they had detected the increase in Serostim prescriptions and required doctors to get special approval to prescribe the drug after January 2002.

But billing records show that Dr. Makhlin wrote 80 percent of his Serostim prescriptions after the restrictions were adopted.

Serostim was approved in the mid-1990's to treat wasting syndrome, a side effect of AIDS.

It is injected under the skin and causes a significant increase in lean body mass and weight.

The drug's manufacturer, Serono Laboratories, is the subject of an extensive federal criminal investigation into whether its executives paid kickbacks to doctors to prescribe Serostim.

The company said it was cooperating with the inquiry.

Federal authorities would not say whether Dr. Makhlin had been questioned in the federal inquiry.

What is clear is that Dr. Makhlin played a pivotal role in the epidemic of Serostim abuse on the East Coast.

Even now, he retains his Medicaid privileges and medical license, and has not been a subject of a state criminal inquiry.

Dr. Makhlin, who was educated in Russia and arrived in New York in 1989, maintains that he was unwittingly duped by a parade of patients he tried to help, and that he received no benefit for prescribing a drug he considered necessary.

But he and his lawyer, Nathan Dembin, will not explain how he ended up prescribing far more Serostim under Medicaid than any other doctor in the state.

Thirty of his patients each received more than $100,000 worth of the drug.

The State Department of Health did not try to discipline Dr. Makhlin until late 2003, seeking to suspend him from the program for five years and fine him $164,000.

But Dr. Makhlin has successfully fought the penalties, and retains his Medicaid privileges while an administrative law judge in the department weighs his case.

"I did not intentionally or knowingly violate any Medicaid regulations," Dr. Makhlin said in court papers.

"I was simply exercising my best medical, professional judgment."

It was not until 2004 that the amount of Serostim purchased by New York Medicaid returned to where it was before the spike.

The true identity of the woman who received the prescriptions from him in February 2002 will probably never be known.

The real Pamela Borden was found in Brooklyn and said her Medicaid card had been stolen in late 2001.

She said no one from the state had contacted her about Dr. Makhlin.

The Ambulettes

With an immense public transit system and fleets of taxis and car services, New York is one of the nation's easiest cities to get around in, even for the old and the sick.

But instead of reimbursing patients for a $2 bus ride to their doctor's office, or a $10 fare for a car service, Medicaid typically pays $25 or $31 each way for these rides, and it adds up.

New York Medicaid paid far more than any other state to get patients to hospitals and doctor's appointments: $316 million in 2003.

The state accounts for about 15 percent of all the nonemergency Medicaid transportation spending in the country, according to a 2001 report by the Community Transportation Association of America, and spends more than the next three states - California, New Jersey and Florida - combined.

The largest chunk of the $316 million spent on transportation went to some 450 ambulette services, about a fifth of which are clustered in Brooklyn.

And much of that spending appears to be entirely unnecessary.

That was clear on a recent afternoon in southern Brooklyn, when an elderly woman strolled out of a doctor's office and clambered into the front seat of a van owned by M. J. Trans Corporation, a medical transport company that billed Medicaid for more than $2 million last year.

After a 25-minute ride across the borough, she got out in front of her apartment, again without help, and walked inside.

The van is called an ambulette, and Medicaid is supposed to pay for it only when a patient cannot walk without help or requires a wheelchair.

In fact, the state refers to the service as an "invalid coach."

But on three days spent following M. J. vans over several months, a Times reporter found that almost all of the company's passengers walked easily, without assistance.

The pattern was repeated as recently as last month.

Many doctors, therapists and clinics regularly order ambulette transportation for their patients when cheaper alternatives should have been used instead, according to a 2003 audit of Medicaid transportation expenses in New York City by the state comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi.

The state has known about abuses in the ambulette industry for years, and about the neighborhoods where kickbacks and other questionable activity takes place.

In the early 1990's, regulators discovered that a quarter of the entire state's transportation billings were coming from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where a few companies had cornered the market with an elaborate set of kickback arrangements, according to a 1996 report on waste in the industry by the New York City public advocate's office.

The report, along with others on the industry, suggested that many ambulette services billed Medicaid for rides that were never delivered.

But even though these schemes date back years, government records show that the state has spent almost no time looking into the ambulette industry.

Prosecutors and outside auditors say that fraud, including the kind in which van services pay kickbacks to medical offices that order rides, remains rampant.

Only five ambulette providers who billed Medicaid in the 2004 state fiscal year had even a portion of their billings audited by state officials, according to state records.

Mr. Whalen, the senior state health official, maintained that the industry was properly regulated, adding that in an effort to detect fraud, the department had begun requiring providers to supply more information on their operations.

"Transportation and ambulettes are on our radar screen as an active area of inquiry," he said.

One of the ambulette companies that has never been audited is M. J. Trans, though it had more billings per vehicle than almost any other of its size in the state.

Its Medicaid billings jumped to more than $2 million annually in 2004 and 2003 from $700,000 in 2001.

Yuri Levitas, a manager at the ambulette company, said none of its billings were illegal or improper.

"We do only legal business," he said.

In fact, an analysis of its Medicaid billings raises questions about whether the company is abusing the system, or possibly allowing individual patients and doctors to do so.

The records indicate that the company has business relationships with medical practices in southern Brooklyn that often bill Medicaid for what seem an inordinate number of trips.

A doctor at a pair of clinics that specialize in pain relief and massage therapy often ordered more than 90 trips a day, as did a colleague of his.

At another doctor's office, Medicaid was billed 153 times by M. J. for transporting a single passenger in 2003, or essentially two or three times a week for an entire year.

Another recipient went 152 times.

Still others made the trip in M. J. vans more than 130 times.

M. J. Trans said most of those rides were ordered by the office for recipients receiving physical therapy there.

"They order, and we go," Mr. Levitas said, adding that he was not responsible for ensuring that the rides were necessary.

Several physical therapists expressed skepticism that anyone would need so much therapy.

"There is always the difficult or complicated case here and there that requires extensive and intensive therapy, but as a general rule, 153 visits would seem excessive," said Gabriel E. Yankowitz, a physical therapist for more than two decades and an official with the New York Physical Therapy Association.

But Gail Bednik, the manager of the office, at 280 Quentin Road in Gravesend, that is in the records as having ordered the 153 rides, said there was nothing surprising about the patients who took scores of ambulettes annually at taxpayer expense.

"It's old people," Ms. Bednik said.

"They want to come every day because they're bored at home."

The School Districts

In just a few hours on a single day in September 2000, a senior official in the Buffalo school system wielded a rubber signature stamp and cost millions of dollars in questionable Medicaid payments for children.

Her name was Sheryl Carswell, and at the time she was Buffalo's director of special education.

Moving her rubber stamp with assembly-line speed that day, she put 4,434 special-education students on the Medicaid rolls by recommending that they receive speech therapy, according to a federal audit.

That represented nearly 60 percent of the district's special-education population, roughly twice the national average of special-education students who require speech therapy.

Yet she had not evaluated more than a few of those 4,434 students, according to the audit, issued by the inspector general of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, nor had she reviewed their case files.

Ms. Carswell was not stealing the money for herself or maliciously abusing the system.

Instead, she was doing business in a way that has become increasingly common in Buffalo, New York City and around the state, collecting millions of Medicaid dollars for her school district by putting students into health and speech programs, often without any apparent effort to see if the students really needed them.

All told, the schools in New York State misspent $1.2 billion in Medicaid payments on speech services from 1993 to 2001, federal audits concluded.

In an interview, Ms. Carswell said she was simply following longstanding school procedures.

"I just filled out the paper," she said.

"Nobody bothered me about it."

Since 1990, schools in New York have been able to bill Medicaid for speech, hearing, and other school health services, and the state has become the most aggressive in the nation at taking advantage of this benefit.

Around the state, school districts short on cash discovered in Medicaid a new revenue source.

As a result, in recent years, school health services have become an $800 million annual expense, rising to the point that New York accounts for 44 percent of this type of Medicaid spending nationally, according to federal statistics.

Licensed speech professionals quickly realized what was happening, and many have complained that schools are cutting corners and using the funds to pay for services that have nothing to do with helping poor children speak or hear better.

"We have been seeing a lot of very suspicious billing practices in New York," said James G. Potter, director of government relations and public policy at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, which has 118,000 members.

"At times, folks in the schools have been just plain making it up out there when it comes to billing."

This spending was routinely approved by the state, but the federal government was not as credulous.

The questionable spending touched off two audits in 2002 by the inspector general, and a civil inquiry by the federal Department of Justice.

In an audit released last month, the inspector general revealed that in New York City schools, 86 percent of the Medicaid claims that were paid from 1993 to 2001 lacked any explanation for why the services had been ordered or violated other program rules.

In Buffalo and other upstate schools, the auditors concluded that the figure was 56 percent for the same period, according to a report released last year.

The audits should not have come as a shock.

In the mid 1990's, a private consultant told New York City school officials that their record-keeping was in such disarray that 51 percent of attendance forms for speech students could not be found.

Yet school officials did not change their practices, according to the subsequent audit.

When the upstate school districts found out about the audits in 2002, some tried to cover their tracks, the inspector general found.

Digging through their filing cabinets, they backdated records to justify Medicaid spending for services performed as many as eight years earlier.

Now, after the audits, federal officials say Washington is likely to begin demanding its money back, and so this misuse of Medicaid money could haunt either the districts that spent it, or the state, or both.

Many districts are worried that the repayment could devastate their education budgets.

School officials, including those in New York City, have sharply disputed the audits, and called for them to be withdrawn.

The Justice Department suspended its civil inquiry after complaints from Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and other politicians, and federal health officials have agreed, for now, not to seek restitution from school districts.

But the state itself could still be liable, and could then in turn penalize the districts.

Pataki administration officials say Washington has never been clear about what kind of school services it will pay for and how children should be referred to these programs, accusing Washington of changing the rules.

"There is no question that school districts actually provided health services to poor, disabled children," wrote Kathryn Kuhmerker, a deputy health commissioner, in her response to the upstate audit.

The state, however, did not meet its responsibility to make sure the money was properly spent, the federal audit found.

The State Health Department reviewed the books of the Buffalo district only once from 1993 to 2001, and told the district its records were "well organized."

The Executives

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the Medicaid program have been executives of the state's nursing homes and clinics, many of whom earn substantial salaries and profits from the program.

According to records obtained from the Health Department under the Freedom of Information Law, 70 executives of nursing homes and clinics personally made more than $500,000 in 2002, the last year for which figures are available.

Twenty-five executives made more than $1 million.

For the nursing home executives, that money was earned in salaries and profits, most of which came directly from the daily fee that Medicaid pays for caring for each low-income patient, usually in the range of $200.

Salaries are earned by employees of the homes, and profit is earned by owners, although owners are often executive directors or chief executives of the homes, allowing them to benefit in both ways.

Consider three homes in the Bronx.

The operator of the Laconia Nursing Home, which receives 90 percent of its revenues from Medicaid, earned $3 million in salary and profit.

At the Grand Manor Nursing Home, also 90 percent financed by Medicaid, the operator and three family members earned a total of $2.4 million in salaries and profit.

The owner and operator of the Morris Park home, 75 percent financed by Medicaid, took in $1.5 million in salary and profit.

Advocates for nursing home residents acknowledge that the homes' operators and executives are entitled to make decent profits and salaries.

But the advocates insist that it is unseemly for the profits and salaries to reach such high levels, given what the advocates contend is the industry's longstanding record of poor care.

They point out that at New York nursing homes, the staffing levels are lower than the national average, a crucial indicator.

All three of the Bronx homes have staffing levels lower than the national average, according to federal statistics.

"It's unconscionable to give yourself high salaries and not give some more money to hire people so some of these quality problems can be dealt with," said Cynthia Rudder, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, an advocacy group for nursing home residents.

Trade groups representing nursing homes counter that most homes in the state are actually in financial distress because Medicaid does not pay enough.

Many hospital executives in New York also receive high salaries, but hospitals earn significant revenues from sources other than government social programs, including H.M.O.'s and private insurance.

The 550 public, private and nonprofit nursing homes around the state, by contrast, earn more than two-thirds of their revenues from Medicaid, taking in roughly $6 billion last year from the program, according to state records.

Many clinics receive most of their revenues from Medicaid as well.

Morris Berkowitz, operator of the Morris Park home, said he deserved his profits because he worked long hours and provided excellent care.

"Do you know how much I have invested in this place?" he said.

"A lot of money."

"And I am constantly investing in this place."

Earlier this year, after residents repeatedly wandered from Morris Park, federal and state officials accused the home of grievously poor supervision, and it was fined $86,000.

Mr. Berkowitz said the home had done nothing wrong.

"It was a political thing, and we got caught up in it," he said.

"People with power, they abuse their power."

Martin Liebman, operator of Grand Manor, said it was misleading to focus on salaries and profits.

"This is a family-owned business," said Mr. Liebman, an officer of the state trade group of private nursing homes.

"I'm third generation in the business."

"We have taken care of thousands of residents and given quality care for many, many years."

Barry Braunstein, operator of the Laconia home, did not respond to three calls seeking comment.

Besides their high salaries, some executives profiting from Medicaid were also taking part in another tradition: cheating the program.

In 2002, the two owners of the AllCity Family Healthcare clinics in Brooklyn collected a total of $1.4 million in salaries, according to state records.

Last year, the company was forced to return $6 million to the state, and one of its owners, Rossia Pokh, pleaded guilty to grand larceny in a case brought by the attorney general.

At the AllCity clinics, it turns out, thousands upon thousands of the Medicaid claims were fraudulent.

"Hackers shift focus to swiping ID information"

By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

Tue Jul 19, 6:54 AM ET

Computer attacks cost U.S. companies, government agencies and universities far less than they did a year ago, a new survey says.

But what was good for them may be bad for consumers and employees.

Figures from the Computer Security Institute, an organization of information-security professionals, and the FBI show that more computer systems are better prepared to identify and fend off computer attacks.

Yet the report, released last week, also concludes that profit-minded hackers are targeting enterprises with large customer and employee databases.

"The crooks are shifting their focus" to stealing the personal information of individuals, says Robert Richardson, CSI's editorial director.

"That's where the money is."

Last year, U.S. enterprises lost, on average per respondent, $203,606 to 13 forms of cyberattacks, down from $526,010 in 2003, according to the survey of 700 businesses, government agencies and universities.

But hackers are pinching proprietary data with greater frequency by exploiting holes in Web sites and applications, and through phishing, says Erik Caso, vice president of business development at NT Objectives, a computer-security company.

In those types of breaches, respondents who said they were victims of unauthorized access to information reported, on average, about $300,000 in losses last year.

That's up from about $50,000 in 2003, the survey says.

Meanwhile, the average loss from the theft of proprietary information was $355,000 last year, vs. $168,000 in 2003.

The survey supplies more evidence that fraud is proliferating on the Internet, as thieves find new ways to exploit security weaknesses associated with online transactions.

Police say one type of criminal specializes in stealing names, addresses, birth dates, driver's license numbers, Social Security numbers, account log-ons and passwords.

Another type makes use of stolen IDs to finance all aspects of elaborate schemes to move electronic goods and cash out of the USA.

A USA TODAY investigation found that the latter group widely recruits unwitting citizens to accept and reship goods, as well as help carry out fraudulent cash transfers.

And here is some interesting news, perhaps, as turmoil continues to grip that part of the world, thanks in large part to the efforts of George W. Bush and "Teflon Tony the Appeasor" Blair to have it be so .....

"Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to U.S. Resigns"

By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer

1 hour, 19 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Saudi Arabia's U.S. ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, is resigning for what the Saudi foreign ministry said Wednesday were "private reasons."

Bandar, whose father, Prince Sultan, is the Saudi defense minister, has been in the post for 22 years and is considered the dean of Washington's diplomatic corps.

As ambassador from the world's largest oil-producing nation, Bandar has enjoyed considerable White House access and influence in Washington circles.

He worked hard at maintaining strong ties between the United States and the conservative oil-rich monarchy.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, however, the Saudis have come under pressure to counter terrorists more aggressively and to block any financial support going to militant groups from within Saudi Arabia.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.

That, and reports that some of his and his wife's charitable contributions may have ended up in the hands of two Saudis believed to have close ties to the hijackers, contributed to tensions with Washington.

"This is a war and we are in it together," Bandar said in an interview with The New York Times in November 2002.

His wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, said she was outraged by any suggestions of a connection to terrorists.

"All I wanted to do was to give some help to someone in need," she told the Times.

On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said, "We are saddened by his depature."

"He was a great friend and valued adviser."

At the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan released a statement saying, "In troubled times, U.S. Presidents past and present have relied upon Ambassador Bandar's advice."

"In good times, they have enjoyed his wit, charm, and humor."

"Throughout his tenure Ambassador Bandar has remained a close, steadfast friend to the United States."

Bandar's resignation coincides with uncertainty about the country's ruling hierarchy.

King Fahd is seriously ill, and Prince Sultan could move up in any reshuffling of authority.

Bandar himself has been rumored to be in line for a top security post in Riyadh.

Bandar has been on a summer-long vacation, fueling reports that he was resigning.

Saudi officials had been disputing those reports.

In Riyadh, a foreign ministry official told The Associated Press that Prince Turki al-Faisal, another member of the extensive Saudi royal family, would replace Bandar as ambassador.

My, my, my, who's surprised?

Sounds like it's time for George W. Bush to nuke that whole part of the world, and turn it into a glowing cinder for generations to come, just to let the rest of the world know that you do not, upon pains of instant death, let your shadow touch the hem of the robe of a REPUBLICAN ....

"Sudanese guards rough up Rice delegation - Secretary of state wants apology; NBC reporter among those manhandled"

MSNBC News Services

Updated: 6:20 a.m. ET July 21, 2005

KHARTOUM, Sudan - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a congratulatory round of meetings with officials of the new unified Sudanese government Thursday, but expressed outrage after security forces manhandled aides and reporters accompanying her.

“It makes me very angry to be sitting there with their president and have this happen,” she said.

“They have no right to push and shove.”

Rice made her remarks to reporters after she and her entourage were aboard an airplane preparing to leave the Sudanese capital.

Earlier, Rice told journalists she wanted an apology, Reuters reported.

“Diplomacy 101 says you don’t rough your guests up,” Rice senior adviser Jim Wilkinson had said earlier as he and reporters traveling with Rice faced off with guards at the ultra-high-security residence of Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir.

El-Bashir’s guards elbowed Americans and tried to rip a tape away from a U.S. reporter.

At another point, Rice’s interpreter and some other aides accompanying her were blocked at a gate.

Ambassador Khidair Haroun Ahmed, head of the Sudanese mission in Washington, attempted to smooth over the situation.

“Please accept our apologies,” he told reporters and Rice aides.

“This is not our policy.”

NBC correspondent roughed up

But there was yet another scuffle with security shortly after he apologized when NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell tried to ask el-Bashir a question about his involvement with alleged atrocities.

"Why should the U.S. believe the Sudanese government will stop the killing when the government is still supporting the militia?" Mitchell asked, before guards grabbed her and muscled her toward the rear of the room as State Department officials shouted at the guards to leave her alone.

The session at el-Bashir’s residence capped a morning of meetings before a scheduled visit to the western Darfur providence, where the United States blames his government for recruiting and equipping rebel militiamen to massacre rural villagers and burn their homes.

He denies government involvement, but the United States and international organizations say his military sent helicopter gunships to bomb small villages before rebels swept in with horses, guns and knives.

Rice points to positive developments

Prior to her meeting with el-Bashir, Rice said the United States is making a difference to relieve a refugee crisis and African peacekeeping troops are helping to stop atrocities.

“We are not where we were a year ago,” Rice said Wednesday, ahead of her first trip to Sudan as secretary of state.

“We are in a different circumstance and the United States has spent a great deal of money and a lot of diplomatic and other energy to try and bring this conflict to a conclusion.”

War-induced hunger and disease have killed more than 180,000 people and driven more than 2 million from their homes in what Rice reaffirmed Wednesday was a case of genocide.

Rice was touring a refugee camp in Darfur on Thursday, and meeting privately with women to discuss recurring sexual violence against women refugees.

The camp, Abu Shouk, is the second-largest in Sudan, with more than 70,000 residents in mud brick huts.

Some rebels wore uniforms provided by the Sudanese Army, U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios said Wednesday.

Sudan formed a new reconciliation government this month, following a peace agreement to end a 21-year-year civil war between the Muslim north and the mainly Christian and animist south that killed an estimated 2 million people.

That conflict was separate from the Darfur killing, which began after black African tribes took up arms in February 2003, complaining of discrimination and oppression by Sudan’s Arab-dominated government.

The Sudanese government then allegedly responded by backing a counterinsurgency by Arab militia known as the Janjaweed.

El-Bashir remains in charge of the new government with former black African rebel leader John Garang installed as a new vice president.

On Tuesday, Garang dissolved his guerrilla movement and dismissed all government officials in 10 former rebel-controlled southern states.

The United States has held the Arab-dominated former government at arm’s length, operating an embassy without a full ambassador and listing Sudan, Africa’s largest country, among the nations sponsoring terrorism.

Still, the Bush administration has made Sudan a focus of diplomatic and humanitarian efforts, with $700 million spent for humanitarian needs over the past two years.

The United States also supplies logistical help for African troops newly installed as peacekeepers.

Improved situation?

The period of “ethnic cleansing” has largely ended, Natsios said, and the Darfur crisis has now shifted to peacekeeping and the administration of huge refugee camps.

“The level of attacks has clearly diminished,” Natsios said.

“The major reason for that, frankly, is there are not many villages left to burn down and destroy.”

The United Nations has estimated that 2,000 Sudanese villages have been completely or partially destroyed.

In addition to short-term humanitarian needs, the United States and others are trying to prevent the temporary camps from becoming permanent fixtures in Darfur.

“I think the people in those camps want to go home,” Natsios said, although some refugee organizations say that is far from universally true.

“They want their land back and they want their animals back,” Natsios said.

He acknowledged that the camps can be attractive for people without many resources, and that some Sudanese city dwellers who were not victims of the Janjaweed have moved in to take advantage of food and services, including education.

NBC News staff, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

And since we're on the subject of double-standards and rank hypocrisy ........

"Plame’s identity marked as secret - Memo central to probe of leak spelled out information’s status"

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei

Updated: 12:21 a.m. ET July 21, 2005

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said.

The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said.

It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

Three key questions

The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the Plame case:

* Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame's CIA role?

* Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity?

* And, who leaked it to the media?

Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger.

Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife.

The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One.

Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later.

Wilson has said his wife's identity was revealed to retaliate against him for accusing the Bush administration of "twisting" intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

In a July 6 opinion piece in the New York Times, he cited a secret mission he conducted in February 2002 for the CIA, when he determined there was no evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program in the African nation of Niger.

White House officials discussed Wilson's wife's CIA connection in telling at least two reporters that she helped arrange his trip, according to one of the reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, and a lawyer familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have shown interest in the memo, especially when they were questioning White House officials during the early days of the investigation, people familiar with the probe said.

Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, has testified that he learned Plame's name from Novak a few days before telling another reporter she worked at the CIA and played a role in her husband's mission, according to a lawyer familiar with Rove's account.

Rove has also testified that the first time he saw the State Department memo was when "people in the special prosecutor's office" showed it to him, said Robert Luskin, his attorney.

"He had not seen it or heard about it before that time," Luskin said.

Several other administration officials were on the trip to Africa, including senior adviser Dan Bartlett, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and others.

Bartlett's attorney has refused to discuss the case, citing requests by the special counsel.

Fleischer could not be reach for comment yesterday.

Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have been identified as people who discussed Wilson's wife with Cooper.

Prosecutors are trying to determine the origin of their knowledge of Plame, including whether it was from the INR memo or from conversations with reporters.

Niger trip discussed

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the memo made it clear that information about Wilson's wife was sensitive and should not be shared.

Yesterday, sources provided greater detail on the memo to The Post.

The material in the memo was based on notes taken by an INR analyst who attended a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA where Wilson's intelligence-gathering trip to Niger was discussed.

The memo was drafted June 10, 2003, for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

The description of Wilson's wife and her role in the Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA was considered "a footnote" in a background paragraph in the memo, according to an official who was aware of the process.

It records that the INR analyst at the meeting opposed Wilson's trip to Niger because the State Department, through other inquiries, already had disproved the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.

Attached to the INR memo were the notes taken by the senior INR analyst who attended the 2002 meeting at the CIA.

On July 6, 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on NBC's "Meet the Press" and in The Post and the New York Times discussing his trip to Niger, the INR director at the time, Carl W. Ford Jr., was asked to explain Wilson's statements for Powell, according to sources familiar with the events.

He went back and reprinted the June 10 memo but changed the addressee from Grossman to Powell.

Ford last year appeared before the federal grand jury investigating the leak and described the details surrounding the INR memo, the sources said.

Yesterday he was on vacation in Arkansas, according to his office.

"Sunni Arabs Continue Constitution Boycott"

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 5 minutes ago

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Sunni Arabs decided Thursday to continue boycotting the committee drafting Iraq's new constitution, casting doubt on whether the group can meet an August deadline to complete its work.

Insurgent attacks, including two car bombings, killed 15 people, officials said.

Kamal Hamdoun, one of the 12 remaining Sunnis appointed to the commission last month, said the Sunnis would continue their boycott pending an international investigation into the assassinations of two colleagues Tuesday and until other demands are met.

Even if the Shiite and Kurdish committee members decided to try to meet the August deadline without Sunni participation, questions would be raised over the legitimacy of a charter and whether it would win Sunni approval in an October referendum.

Fifteen Sunnis were appointed to the parliamentary committee last month in a move to lure many in the influential minority away from the insurgency.

Two members resigned under rebel threats, and two prominent Sunnis — committee member Mijbil Issa and adviser Dhamin Hussein al-Obeidi — were assassinated in front of a Baghdad restaurant two days ago — prompting other Sunnis to suspend participation in the drafting.

"Our decision is to go on with suspending our participation until our conditions are met," Hamdoun told The Associated Press.

He said the conditions include an international investigation into Tuesday's killing and a greater role for Sunnis in drafting the constitution.

He also demanded that the chairman of the committee, Shiite cleric Humam Hammoudi, withdraw a statement made Wednesday that the final draft would be finished by the end of the month.

Elsewhere, two suicide car bombings and a string of other attacks in and around Baghdad Thursday left 15 people dead, police and army officials said.

A suicide car bomber rammed into an Iraqi army checkpoint, killing six soldiers in Mahmoudiyah, about 20 miles south of the capital.

Thirteen others were injured, army Lt. Odai al-Zeiadi said.

A second Iraqi army checkpoint in the southern Baghdad suburb of Bueitha was also hit by a suicide car bomber, killing one soldier, al-Zeiadi said.

Six other soldiers were injured, he said.

Hamdoun said there were no plans to name a replacement on the committee for Issa, a law professor from Kirkuk, until all the Sunni demands are met.

The United States has been pressing for Iraq's parliament to approve the new constitution by Aug. 15 so it can be submitted to a national referendum two months later.

If the charter is approved, then a new election for a fully constitutional government will be held in mid-December.

A broad-based constitutional government could enable the United States and its international partners to begin scaling back their military presence in Iraq next year.

Even if the constitution is finished, the lack of an endorsement by the Sunni community could cast doubt on whether the charter wins approval in the referendum.

If two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces vote against it, the constitution cannot be approved.

Sunni Arabs constitute about 20 percent of Iraq's 27 million people but form a majority in several provinces including Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh.

In other violence, unidentified gunmen assassinated three members of the Qadisiyah provincial council as they were heading to an Internet cafe in the western neighborhood of Khadhra, said police 1st Lt. Mohammad Al-Hiyali.

In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, an employee of the Ministry of Trade was killed in a drive-by shooting, said police 1st Lt. Talib Naim said.

Explosives were thrown into the compound of a British security firm in western Yarmouk, killing one Iraqi guard and injuring two others, said police Maj. Falah Al-Mihamadawi.

Witnesses said the armed attackers had driven up in a speeding car.

Meanwhile, a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi patrol detonated at dawn in Latifiyah, killing three and injuring another three soldiers, said a Babil provincial police spokesman.

Latifiyah is located about 20 miles south of Baghdad in a Sunni insurgent-heavy area known as the Triangle of Death.

And in all likelihood, this following story is FALSE, completely FALSE, and I am waiting for Rush Limbaugh to confirm that, as soon as he checks in with George W. Bush and his WHITE HOUSE LAWYERS to figure out how it is that these LEFT-WING TREE-HUGGERS have got so much control over OUR CONSERVATIVE media, so as to have them putting out all these lies about GLOBAL WARMING, and getting them past George W. Bush's CENSORS, who are there, of course, to tell us that there just is no GLOBAL WARMING .....

"Relentless Heat in Phoenix Kills 18"

By BETH DeFALCO, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 53 minutes ago

PHOENIX - A record heat wave has led to the deaths of 18 people, most of them homeless, leaving officials scrambling to provide water and shelter to the city's transient population.

For the first time in years, homeless shelters opened their doors during the day to offer respite from the blistering sun, which has delivered above-average temperatures every day since June 29.

Police began passing out thousands of water bottles donated by grocery stores, and city officials set up tents for shade downtown.

"I don't know why I'm not burnt to pieces," said Chris Cruse, 48, after taking refuge in a shelter.

Four more bodies were found Wednesday.

Fourteen of the victims were thought to be homeless.

Authorities did not know if a man found by the side of a road Sunday had a permanent residence.

The other three victims were elderly women, including one whose home cooling system was not on, police said.

"Most of us just run from air-conditioned box to air-conditioned box, so it's hard to imagine how omnipresent the heat really is for the homeless here," said Phoenix police Sgt. Randy Force.

In all of last year, the state Department of Health Services documented 34 heat-related deaths among Arizona residents.

The number of illegal immigrants killed by heat-related illnesses while trying to cross the desert are counted separately.

The first deaths were reported Saturday.

By Wednesday, the high still climbed to 109 degrees.

Even during the coolest part of the day, the mercury has failed to descend lower than 89 degrees.

David Waing, a former truck driver who's been living on the streets of Phoenix for the past year, said he's been staying close to water by sleeping near one of the city's irrigation canals.

"In the mornings, about 9 or 10 o'clock, when it starts getting really hot, we just jump in and take a swim," he said.

"The nights aren't much better."

"When the wind does blow, it feels like a blast furnace."

Both he and Cruse spent Wednesday at the Phoenix Rescue Mission watching movies in the shelter's chapel, which was opened Monday to anyone needing a break from the heat.

The shelter was also turning on hoses so transients could wet their clothes and had ordered 300 neckerchiefs that can be dipped in water and tied around the neck, said Bob Reed, a shelter manager.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon said his office was asking Congress to provide utility assistance for soaring cooling bills the same way it provides for heating bills in Eastern states.

"Fair is fair."

"There are too many individuals dying of heat here," Gordon said.

Maricopa County, including Phoenix and its suburbs, has a homeless population between 10,000 and 12,000 people, said Gloria Hurtado, the city's human service director.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, high temperatures dipped below the 115-degree mark Wednesday for the first time in five days.

Authorities were investigating six deaths since July 14 to see if they were heat-related.

http://www.manoramaonline.com/servlet/Cont...el=Home&count=9

India Prime Minister Says US Invasion of Iraq a mistake

Washington: In a candid submission made on the American soil, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the 2003 US invasion of Iraq was a ''mistake''.

Answering questions after his address at the National Press Club here, he said, ''it was our sincere view that it (invasion of Iraq) was a mistake but it is now a thing of the past and we must look to the future.''

Singh said India would like democratic institutions to take deeper roots in Iraq and New Delhi believed it had a contribution to make in this effort. The Prime Minister said he had written to his Iraqi counterpart immediately after the latter's elections that India would like to work with the government and render assistance in the reconstruction work and the economic development of the war-torn country.

Singh is perhaps the first foreign leader to criticise the US invasion of Iraq while being in Washington. His statement drew a thunderous applause from senior American journalist.

Good catch, Snuffsmith, and thanks for the heads-up for all the rest of us, here in OUR America who are vitally interested in the world around us, and who also need to know these things if we are to be good and knowledgeable citizens, here in OUR America, where good government in OUR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC is based upon informed consent of the citizens, 24/7!

And an era in American history slowly, and inexorably, passes ......

"Last of WWII Comanche Code Talkers Dies"

Thu Jul 21, 1:32 PM ET

OKLAHOMA CITY - Charles Chibitty, the last survivor of the Comanche code talkers who used their native language to transmit messages for the Allies in Europe during World War II, has died.

He was 83.

Chibitty, who had been residing at a Tulsa nursing home, died Wednesday, said Cathy Flynn, administrative assistant in the Comanche Nation tribal chairman's office.

The group of Comanche Indians from the Lawton area were selected for special duty in the U.S. Army to provide the Allies with a language that the Germans could not decipher.

Like the larger group of Navajo Indians who performed a similar service in the Pacific theater, the Comanches were dubbed "code talkers."

"It's strange, but growing up as a child I was forbidden to speak my native language at school," Chibitty said in 2002.

"Later my country asked me to."

"My language helped win the war and that makes me very proud."

"Very proud. "

In a 1998 story for The Oklahoman, Chibitty recalled being at Normandy on D-Day, and said someone once asked him what he was afraid of most and if he feared dying.

"No."

"That was something we had already accepted," he said.

"But we landed in deeper water than anticipated."

"A lot of boys drowned."

"That's what I was afraid of."

"I wonder what the hell Hitler thought when he heard those strange voices," he once told a gathering.

Chibitty was born Nov. 20, 1921, near Medicine Park and attended high school at Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kan.

He enlisted in 1941.

In 1999, Chibitty received the Knowlton Award, which recognizes individuals for outstanding intelligence work, during a ceremony at the Pentagon's Hall of Heroes.

"We could never do it again," Chibitty told Oklahoma Today.

"It's all electronic and video in war now."

And what was it that people like him were fighting for, anyway?

Does anyone today even know?

Like this guy from George Pataki's capitol city of Albany, New York?

"Brown takes Fifth in lawsuit - Albany councilman uses constitutional shield against self-incrimination more than 160 times in ballot dispute"

By BRIAN NEARING, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Thursday, July 21, 2005

ALBANY -- A Common Council member embroiled in a lawsuit over the absentee ballot scandal in last year's county legislative primary elections took the Fifth Amendment more than 160 times while under oath.

Michael Brown of the 3rd Ward invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination on nearly all questions posed during an hour-long pretrial deposition July 14 in a downtown law office, according to a transcript obtained by the Times Union.

The lawsuit alleges Brown and 3rd Ward Democratic Leader Jamie Gilkey schemed with other Democrats to divert about 160 absentee ballots from the county Board of Elections in the 2004 primary for the Albany County Legislature.

On June 20, Brown was served with a subpoena prior to a Common Council meeting to give his deposition.

Under questioning by Albany attorney Paul DerOhannesian, Brown did not admit knowing or working with his longtime ally Gilkey, 4th Ward Council member Sarah Curry-Cobb or Joseph Jennings, the 4th Ward leader who is Mayor Jerry Jennings' brother.

Brown even refused to confirm his long membership in the Democratic Party.

The Fifth Amendment protects defendants from being forced to provide potentially damaging testimony against themselves, said Dan Moriarty, a professor at Albany Law School who teaches criminal law.

He said some defendants choose to invoke the protection early and often out of concern that once a question is answered, a judge can decide that further testimony on that same topic cannot be denied under the Fifth Amendment.

"That is meant to ensure that half-truths aren't allowed during testimony," Moriarty said.

In a January deposition on the lawsuit, Gilkey took the Fifth Amendment 60 times when asked about his role in the disputed primary and handling of absentee ballot applications.

Those ballots were issued to predominantly poor and minority tenants of the Albany Housing Authority, where Gilkey worked, but diverted from the Board of Elections to Brown and Gilkey to deliver prior to the election.

During his deposition last week, Brown also refused to say whether he had ever been inside Board of Elections offices in the county courthouse or had ever seen or carried an absentee ballot application.

He also would not say whether he knew Justin Williams, who was the candidate Brown was backing in a primary challenge to County Legislator Lucille McKnight.

DerOhannesian represents McKnight, County Legislator Wanda Willingham, the Albany NACCP chapter and several voters who sued in April 2004 under the federal Voting Rights Act, claiming voting irregularities in the primary election.

Brown and Gilkey were supporting Williams and Marilyn Hammond for county legislative seats against incumbents McKnight and Willingham.

In the primary, Willingham held a narrow lead over Williams, while Hammond led McKnight by a handful of votes.

State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Teresi ordered a revote in the Willingham-Williams race and Willingham won.

In the November general election, McKnight ran on the Working Families Party line and defeated Hammond.

"Apparently Mr. Brown almost has amnesia."

"He has blacked out that whole period of his life," McKnight said Wednesday.

"I hope he realizes that this case is coming to trial."

On July 12, U.S. District Magistrate Judge David Homer denied a request by the county to dismiss the lawsuit and scheduled it for trial in November.

"There is no way an elected official should take the Fifth that many times," McKnight said.

Brown, who works for the state Dormitory Authority, could not be reached for comment.

But in a statement issued last month two days after he was subpoenaed, he blasted the lawsuit as a "cheap political stunt ... by a group of hypocrites who wouldn't know an honest day's work if they fell over it."

In the statement, Brown used racially charged language to describe his opponents, saying they wanted to "keep us on the back of the bus ... It is just like on the old plantation."

Brown, McKnight, Willingham, Hammond and Williams are all African American.

In March, U.S. District Norman Mondue issued a default judgment against Brown, Williams, and three other Democratic Party workers for ignoring the lawsuit for nearly a year.

That judgment means the group could be liable for thousands of dollars in legal fees stemming from the lawsuit if it is successful, and it also raises the possibility of federal fines or jail time for contempt of court if any of them commit future violations, DerOhannesian said.

The federal lawsuit also named the Albany Housing Authority, where Gilkey and Williams worked.

In February, the housing authority settled its part of the litigation by agreeing to prohibit its employees from having anything to do with residents' voting activities.

"AG seeks tools for Medicaid fraud fight - Spitzer calls for passage of legislation that would reward whistle-blowers, stiffen penalties for cheaters"

By MARC HUMBERT, Associated Press
First published: Thursday, July 21, 2005

ALBANY -- State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, under fire along with Gov. George Pataki for not doing enough to combat Medicaid fraud, called Wednesday for the state Legislature to return to Albany and immediately pass legislation that could help him do a better job.

Spitzer's letter to state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno came after The New York Times began an investigative series this week faulting Pataki, Spitzer and other state officials for failing to match the success of many other states in catching those who cheat the health care program for the poor.

New York's $44.5 billion Medicaid program is the nation's largest.

On Tuesday, Pataki announced efforts to beef up Medicaid anti-fraud efforts, including creation of a new Medicaid inspector general's office that would be under his control.

Medicaid fraud prevention is largely the responsibility of the state Health Department and Spitzer's office.

In his letter to Silver and Bruno, Spitzer called for lawmakers to approve two bills proposed by the attorney general that have stalled in the Legislature for years.

One would encourage the reporting of false claims by allowing for whistle-blowers to get a share of any money recouped.

The other measure would stiffen penalties for Medicaid fraud.

Silver spokesman Charles Carrier said there were no plans to call the Assembly back into session to act on the Spitzer bills, but that the chamber's Democrats would continue to review such legislation, the governor's initiatives and possibly even hold public hearings.

A spokesman for Bruno, a Republican, also said he had no plans to call his colleagues back from their summer vacations to act on the Spitzer measures.

Bruno said Wednesday that a Senate task force would be holding public hearings on the issue.

end quotes

GEORGE PATAKI, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, ARE ALSO IN CONTROL OF THE NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH!

And so this "inspector general" under "his control" is a bunch of crap, intended to impress the unthinking and the unwary, and no one else, actually!

George Pataki is as much a part of this problem as anyone, because it's how politics is played up here, down and dirty, and deal from the bottom of the deck every chance you get.

The solution is for Pataki, Bruno, Novello, and Spitzer to all go!

Resign!

For the GOOD of OUR America!

Sounds like "CON-JOB Connie" Rice is over there trying to drum up somemore WAR BID-NESS for the "security industry", from the sounds of things here, after her fabrications helped to get them one in Iraq!

Warmongers are like locusts, they can't stay in the same field too long, since their BID-NESS is destruction, and they can do it so well these days, which of course, gives BID-NESS then, to Dick Cheney's Halliburton, and Bechtel, of course, to have to rebuild what has been destroyed, and well, that is what counts, because like everything else, WAR just is good for BID-NESS ....

"Rice Makes Surprise Visit to Lebanon"

By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer

26 minutes ago

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise visit to volatile Lebanon under heavy guard Friday to encourage a new democratic government outside Syrian control.

Rice met with Saad Hariri, son of assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Together, they visited the seaside grave of the elder Hariri, an anti-Syrian politician slain in a February car bombing.

Afterwards, she went directly to the Presidential Palace for a meeting with Lebanon's pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud.

This will be an opportunity first of all to congratulate the Lebanon people on their incredible desire for democracy," Rice said en route to Beirut.

Rice's visit comes three days after formation of a new Cabinet led by Prime Minister-designate Foud Saniora.

"They keep pressing forward and they have now formed a government," Rice said.

"I look forward to meeting and see how the international community and the United States in particular can be supportive."

Rice is the first senior U.S. official to visit Beirut in more than two years.

She arrived from Jerusalem, home base for a long weekend of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders that included a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at his desert ranch Friday morning.

The Lebanese opposition blamed Syria and its agents for Hariri's slaying.

And a new government emerged from a season of political change following the assassination.

Hariri's son leads the newly dominate anti-Syrian faction in parliament and a protege of his father will be the new prime minister.

On Wednesday, the State Department said it was prepared to work with the new government but not with any Hezbollah Cabinet members.

The new 24-member parliament includes one member of the militant group the U.S. calls a terrorist organization.

Rice's predecessor, Colin Powell, was the last senior American diplomat to come to Beirut.

At the time of his May 2003 visit, Syria was still firmly entrenched as the dominate political and military force in Lebanon.

The United States helped lead international demands that Syria end its three decades of dominance in Lebanon.

Syria withdrew its 14,000 troops in April, after weeks of street protests and political turmoil set off by the Hariri killing.

Rice went to Jerusalem in a hastily arranged visit in an effort to rescue a shaky Mideast truce amid an escalation of violence before Israel's mid-August withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Her schedule was left loose deliberately so Rice could shuttle between the leaders with last-minute concerns.

Although Rice repeatedly has said the United States would take a back seat as the Israelis and Palestinians work out their differences, her trip was seen as a sign that she planned to keep up the pressure for progress.

The hastily planned trip was Rice's third to Jerusalem and the West Bank since she took over at the State Department in January.

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=6726

Iraq Seen as Weakening Terror War
Jim Lobe
July 22, 2005

A plurality of the U.S. public now believes that Iraq war has undermined U.S. prospects for victory in the larger war on terrorism, but a majority still believe that Washington should not yet begin withdrawing its troops, according to a major new poll released Thursday shortly after Britain reported four new bombing incidents in London.

The survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, also showed, however, that a slight plurality of respondents (49 percent) now believe that Washington should set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, which is strongly opposed by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, compared to 45 percent who disagree.

After heated debate Wednesday, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted 291-137 in favor of a nonbinding resolution opposing "premature withdrawal" of U.S. troops from Iraq and declaring that setting a date for withdrawal would "embolden" terrorists.

The findings of the latest survey, which was conducted July 13-17 among 1,502 adults, were generally consistent with those of a Gallup poll that was released just before the July 7 London bombings that killed 56 people, suggesting that the impact of those incidents on public opinion here has not been as great as might have been expected.

That earlier poll found that a small plurality of respondents had already come to believe that the war in Iraq had made the U.S. less safe from terrorism. It also found that only a third of the public (36 percent) believed that the U.S. and its allies were winning the war on terrorism, while an all-time high of 20 percent of U.S. citizens said the "terrorists" were winning.

The new poll found that nearly half (47 percent) of the public now believes that the war in Iraq has actually undermined the war on terrorism, the highest percentage expressing that view since the war was launched in March 2003.

In addition, it also found a higher percentage of respondents now believe that the war in Iraq has raised the risk of terrorism in this country. Nearly half of respondents (45 percent) said they believe that the war has increased the chances for terrorist attacks in the U.S., up from 36 percent last October.

Currently, only about one in five (22 percent) of citizens were found to agree with the Bush administration's thesis that the Iraq war has lessened the chances of terrorist attacks in the U.S.

In addition, an all-time low of just 27 percent of the public – and an even lower 23 percent of political independents – said they believe that Bush has a plan for bringing the war in Iraq to a successful end. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (64 percent) now believe that Bush has no clear plan.

The new poll also confirmed Gallup's finding that more U.S. citizens are skeptical about Bush's handling not only of Iraq, but also terrorism, which has long been one of the president's main strengths.

Since January, the percentage of respondents who have voiced approval of the way Bush has handled the situation in Iraq has fallen 10 points – from 45 percent to 35 percent. Over the same period, according to the new poll, public confidence in Bush's handling of the war on terrorism has fallen from a strong majority of 62 percent to a bare plurality of only 49 percent.

Despite the view that the war in Iraq has, at best, diverted the U.S. from more effectively prosecuting the war in Iraq, as well as the declining confidence in Bush's leadership in both wars, public opinion remains remarkably upbeat.

Just over half (52 percent) of respondents said they believe the war is going "very" or "fairly well," as against 44 percent who said they believe it is going "not too well" or "not well at all." That split has been relatively stable since June last year.

Similarly, a small plurality (49 percent) still believe the decision to resort to military force in Iraq was correct, compared to 44 percent who believe it was wrong. That split is largely consistent with findings since last September, although, earlier this month when violence in Iraq captured more headlines, 53 percent majority told a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll that they believed the war was mistake.

The new poll also found that 60 percent of respondents believe that the U.S. will eventually succeed in establishing a stable government in Iraq, while 33 percent believe that it will not.

Skepticism was considerably higher among self-described Democrats; people aged 50 years or older – presumably those with a stronger memory of the Vietnam War; and those who believe that most Iraqis oppose U.S. policies in Iraq than among self-described Republicans, younger respondents, and those who believe who believe that most Iraqis support U.S. policies.

On the question of whether and when to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, a narrow majority believes the U.S. should remain until the situation there has "stabilized," while 43 percent favor bringing home troops as soon as possible.

Those who believed that the war in Iraq is going at least fairly well and were optimistic about successes were more inclined to keep the troops in place, while those who took the opposite view were more inclined to favor withdrawal. The survey found a sizable gender gap on this question as well, with women roughly evenly divided and men – particularly military veterans – more inclined to want the troops to stay.

On the question of setting a timetable for withdrawal, a suggestion that has gained considerable support over the last several months, the public roughly evenly split.

A growing number of Democrats and even some Republicans who have argued in favor of a deadline for withdrawal say they believe the very presence of U.S. forces in Iraq is acting as a recruitment tool for the insurgency and for al-Qaeda.

(Inter Press Service)

George W. Bush!

The boy don't know if he is afoot, or horseback, and the people who follow him, apparently can't tell the difference, either, but from my perspective, this pushing/shoving incident in Sudan is indicative of the sheer and utter contempt that George W. Bush and his crowd are getting held in around the world, precisely because each day George W. Bush's massive and cumbersome army fails to beat the 200 or 300 rag-tags arrayed against it, he is broadcasting a weakness to the world, that some will seek to exploit and so ....

He reminds me of this big, old beefy boy we had in basic training in the Army, who first chance he got, went down to the PX on a saturday afternoon, which was really just down the street from the barracks, and he got to drinking 3.2 watered-down beer, and next thing you know, like clockwork, he's on to all the "minorities" that were also at the PX, and then he was up on top of a picnic table, yelling out that he was going to take on the biggest n-word in the place, because n-words had to be shown their place, alright, and well, there were quite a selection of those guys there, and well, they sized themselves up to each other, and such and after some time of making measurements and such to make sure this big, old beefy boy was going to have his wishes properly fulfilled, one of them come over to the picnic table, and he told that big, old beefy boy that he wasn't sure if he really was the biggest one, but he was the one the big, old beefy boy had got, and with that, he punched that big, old beefy boy right in the face, and launched him over onto the ground, a ways away, and blacked both his eyes in the process, and that was that.

None of the other "white race" there did anything to help the big, old beefy boy, because, after all, t'were him that said, "BRANG"UM ON!"

You can't whip an old boy, maybe you shouldn't call him out in the first place, especially if he is one of those who will come when his name is called, and if you can't beat a few rag-tags in a fair-sized city, well, maybe you shouldn't be calling out nations, instead!

But George W. Bush was born on third base thinking that he had hit a triple, and he had people to do this kind of stuff for him, see he got home alright, get him up in the morning, get him dressed, and such, and so, he don't know you shouldn't call someone out, if you're just going to project weakness when it turns out in public that you just got no punch!

A lot of mouth!

No punch!

No wonder Condoleeza Rice got goosed over there in Sudan!

"Ex-CIA Officers Rip Bush Over Rove Leak"

By DONNA DE LA CRUZ
The Associated Press
Friday, July 22, 2005; 3:22 PM

WASHINGTON -- Former U.S. intelligence officers criticized President Bush on Friday for not disciplining Karl Rove in connection with the leak of the name of a CIA officer, saying Bush's lack of action has jeopardized national security.

In a hearing held by Senate and House Democrats examining the implications of exposing Valerie Plame's identity, the former intelligence officers said Bush's silence has hampered efforts to recruit informants to help the United States fight the war on terror.

Federal law forbids government officials from revealing the identity of an undercover intelligence officer.

"I wouldn't be here this morning if President Bush had done the one thing required of him as commander in chief - protect and defend the Constitution," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst.

"The minute that Valerie Plame's identity was outed, he should have delivered a strict and strong message to his employees."

Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff, told Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in a 2003 phone call that former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction issues, according to an account by Cooper in the magazine.

Rove has not disputed that he told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the agency, but has said through his lawyer that he did not mention her by name.

In July 2003, Robert Novak, citing unnamed administration officials, identified Plame by name in his syndicated column and wrote that she worked for the CIA.

The column has led to a federal criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's undercover identity.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller - who never wrote a story about Plame - has been jailed for refusing to testify.

Bush said last week, "I think it's best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions."

"And I will do so, as well."

Dana Perino, a White House spokesman, said Friday that the administration would have no comment on the investigation while it was continuing.

Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel and defense intelligence officer, said Bush's silence sends a bad signal to foreigners who might be thinking of cooperating with the U.S. on intelligence matters.

"This says to them that if you decide to cooperate, someone will give you up, so you don't do it," Lang said.

"They are not going to trust you in any way."

Johnson, who said he is a registered Republican, said he wished a GOP lawmaker would have the courage to stand up and "call the ugly dog the ugly dog."

"Where are these men and women with any integrity to speak out against this?" Johnson asked.

"I expect better behavior out of Republicans."
___

On the Net:

CIA: http://www.cia.gov

"America wrestles with privacy vs. security"

By Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Fri Jul 22, 4:00 AM ET

The recent attacks in London by home-grown terrorists have intensified attention on homeland security in the US.

And that in turn has raised new questions about protecting civil liberties and privacy during a new kind of war that knows no national borders.

There's no doubt that Americans are concerned about both.

A poll this week finds that 86 percent of those surveyed believe it's likely that another major terrorist attack will occur in this country, with nearly half saying such an attack is "very likely."

Americans clearly favor stronger measures to protect US borders and facilities like chemical and nuclear plants, according to the survey conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.

Most people also favor renewing the USA Patriot Act, according to the poll.

This controversial law, passed just after the attacks of September 11, gives law enforcement agencies more powers to identify and detain suspected terrorists.

Many of its key provisions are due to expire this year, and there's an effort in Congress to extend those provisions or make them permanent.

But there are also a cluster of legal and political threads that - woven together - could act as a restraint on efforts to strengthen domestic security at a time of increased terrorist threats.

Among them:

• The case of Brandon Mayfield in Portland, Ore.

He's the young American lawyer, a convert to Islam and the husband of an Egyptian woman, who was erroneously linked to the 2004 Madrid bombings that killed 191 people.

Although the federal government officially apologized, Mr. Mayfield is suing to find out what information federal agents had gathered on him.

In a case in federal court now underway, he contends that FBI wiretaps and secret searches of his home, not to mention locking him up for two weeks - all conducted under the Patriot Act - are unconstitutional.

• Recent revelations that the FBI has been gathering thousands of pages of intelligence on such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the environmental group Greenpeace.

Other groups that have been part of peaceful protests find that they are being investigated as well.

"There is no need to open a counterterrorism file when people are simply exercising their First Amendment rights," says Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU.

• Efforts to use state driver's licenses as a tool for intelligence gathering on foreigners.

At the annual meeting of the National Governors Association recently, chairman Mike Huckabee ® of Arkansas, echoed other critics in warning that driver's licenses could become de facto national identity cards.

• The extension of US military activity into domestic intelligence-gathering and law enforcement.

This raises questions about the legal restrictions on domestic military activity known as "posse comitatus," restrictions that date back to 1878.

The Pentagon justified this extension in a report last month titled "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support."

Pentagon officials wrote: "Our adversaries consider US territory an integral part of a global theater of combat."

"We must therefore have a strategy that applies to the domestic context the key principles that are driving the transformation of US power projection and joint expeditionary warfare."

What military leaders see as a new threat at home, others see differently.

"In the absence of clear guidelines and effective oversight, the US military is becoming increasingly involved in domestic operations, including surveillance activities that blur the traditional distinction between foreign intelligence and domestic security," warns the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.

Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee last month approved an expansion of FBI investigative powers enabling it to issue "administrative subpoenas" for personal information without judicial authorization.

Senator Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon warns that the move "raises the risk of real abuse."

"Doing so would give the FBI the authority to demand just about anything from just about anybody, with no independent check, simply by claiming that it is relevant to a national security investigation," says Mr. Wyden.

For now, the focus is on reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

A bill in the House of Representatives, which was taken up on the floor Thursday, would extend all provisions of the law that are set to expire in December.

But proposed amendments would limit the law, ending "roving wiretaps" and adding judicial oversight to search and seizure provisions.

On Tuesday, a coalition of organizations - ranging from Americans for Tax Reform on the right to the ACLU on the left - urged caution in reauthorizing the act, noting that some sections now violate civil liberties.

Speaking in Baltimore Wednesday, President Bush said, "This is no time to let our guard down, and no time to roll back good laws."

"The Patriot Act is expected to expire, but the terrorist threats will not expire," Mr. Bush said.

"I expect, and the American people expect, the United States Congress and the United States Senate to renew the Patriot Act, without weakening our ability to fight terror, and they need to get that bill to my desk soon."

The President would like to see that happen without amendments to the law, but that seems unlikely.

Sen. Wyden, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, describes the process of reauthorizing this controversial legislation as a "high-wire act."

"Success means striking a balance, an equilibrium, between fiercely protecting our country from terrorism while still preserving the privacy and civil liberties that make our democracy so precious," he says.

"Iraqi refugees spur housing boom"

By Rhonda Roumani, Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Fri Jul 22, 4:00 AM ET

DAMASCUS - When Abu Omar left Baghdad late last year to escape the war, he was desperate to find a safe home for his wife and three children in Syria.

So when he arrived in Damascus he took the first apartment he found - a sparsely furnished one-bedroom in Masaken Birzeh, a working-class neighborhood outside the capital.

What he didn't anticipate was having to pay some $300 a month for a bare, run-down apartment - double the cost of what a modest one-bedroom would have rented for just two years ago.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis have been fleeing the violence and kidnappings for the safety and conveniences of nearby Damascus and Amman.

And with their influx to Syria's and Jordan's capitals, the high demand for housing has sent rents skyrocketing and caused a real estate bubble that will probably be deflated only when Iraq is free of the daily barrage of suicide bombings that has made it so treacherous.

While the high cost of post-invasion living has made it harder for poorer Iraqis to find housing, it has been a boon for many Syrian and Jordanian homeowners and real estate developers who are profiting from the influx of Iraqis.

"When they see someone who is desperate, they know they can charge a lot," says Abu Omar, who now lives in a similar one-bedroom for about $220 per month.

"When we were in Baghdad all we saw were people with guns."

"So when I came here I wanted anything."

"And my financial situation is much better than others."

Just before the invasion of Iraq, rich Iraqis flooded Amman and Damascus' wealthier districts, bought and built homes, and helped raise the cost of real estate prices in both cities - often causing Jordanians and Syrians to no longer to be able to afford the rising costs of homes and putting added pressure on the newer waves of less-fortunate Iraqis also escaping the violence.

"One of my Jordanian friends wanted to buy a home and the real estate agent told him he won't sell except to Iraqis - Iraqis pay with cash and pay high prices," says one Iraqi man who knows the community well, but asked to be called Mr. Ameen because of his sensitive working situation.

Ameen says that Iraqis continue to come to Amman looking for real estate despite the rising costs.

Apartments that were sold in Amman for 70,000 Jordanian dinars ($99,000) are now being sold for 85,000 dinars ($120,000), he said.

While the high prices may not deter a wealthy Iraqi Batthist, for instance, from moving to Damascus or Amman, many poorer Iraqis have also begun to trickle into these dense capitals to find there way to neighborhoods now mainly occupied by Iraqi refugees.

Unlike their wealthier countrymen, they have been struggling to keep up with the rising prices.

Ronnie Mokhles Harmoz, an Iraqi Christian, is living in a basement with his two children and wife.

He pays 10,000 Syrian pounds, or about $200 a month, for the apartment that, like many basements now occupied by Iraqi refugees, wouldn't have even been lived in before the war.

And if it was, he says, it would have rented for half as much.

Unable to work under Syrian law, Mr. Harmoz is relying on his parents to send him money from abroad.

In Syria, Iraqis often rely on their families to send them money, since they are unable to work inside the country.

"We wanted to find a better house and all we could find were apartments for 20,000 Syrian pounds [$400]," says Harmoz.

"My aunts who moved here four years ago are paying 4,000 Syrian pounds [$80] for a better apartment in the same area."

Ali Laith, who works at Al Mona Real Estate Agency in Garamanah, a Druze and Christian suburb that has attracted mostly middle class Christian Iraqis, says prices will continue rising.

"A two-bedroom apartment that used to rent for 4,000 Syrian pounds [$80] before the fall of Baghdad is now renting for 10,000 Syrian pounds [$200.]"

"And now there's a demand all year-round, whereas before the demand was just in the summer."

"Now people are coming in the winter as well."

Earlier this year, the International Organization for Migration estimated that at least 250,000 Iraqis were living in Syria, but other estimates have the population closer to 500,000.

In Jordan, there are an estimated 400,000 Iraqis.

In the Shiite suburb of Sit Zeinab just outside of Damascus, bus loads of Iraqis arrive daily.

Many are coming only for the summer vacation (Damascus is much cooler than the Persian Gulf states in the summer), others are here until conditions improve in their country.

While some Syrians are indeed profiting from the Iraq war by renting their homes for higher prices and moving to cheaper places or building new apartments above their homes, other Syrians are no longer able to afford rents or buy homes in areas where they have lived for years.

Some Syrians also complain that their neighborhoods have become dominated by Iraqis, who have also brought in the problem of rising prostitution.

This year, in order to control the rising prices, the Syrian government instituted a law that prohibits Iraqis from buying homes.

But, for some, the law was too late to stem the tide of rising home prices.

"An apartment for 2 million now sells for 3 million here in Garamanah," says Itidal Iskander, who works as a translator for a company and has been living in Garamanah for 18 years.

"My sister wanted to buy a home."

"Before she would look at homes worth 1 million [Syrian pounds] and it was possible."

"Now 3 million is impossible," he says.

I wish someone would do something about the LEFT-WING TREE-HUGGERS AND ENVIROS who have taken over OUR CONSERVATIVE media, and are having them print all these GLOBAL WARMING SCARE STORIES that everybody knows aren't true, and are just an attempt by the "angry" and "adrift" Democrats in America, and let's face it, the world too, come on, OLD EUROPE, you know it's true, to embarass Mehlmann, and Karl Rove, and the REPUBLICAN PARTY, and yes, George W. Bush too, and his LAWYERS, all of whom know that there just is no such thing as GLOBAL WARMING ....

"At 117 Degrees - No One Escapes the Heat"

By ANGIE WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 30 minutes ago

LAS VEGAS - When it's 117 degrees, the beads of sweat feel as big as golf balls, and gamblers still want their cars parked.

Casino valet attendants have only one hope: Pray for a Cadillac.

"Cadillacs are awesome."

"The Cadillac A/C just fires right up," Tommy Clements said as he shuttled cars at Boulder Station hotel-casino.

Sure, people all over the country are complaining about record heat this week.

But for the straight story, talk to those who head out into the midday Las Vegas sun to make a living.

They are the ones who must know how to hack the heat.

Somehow, life goes on in the desert, even when logic and a decent thermometer suggest it's time to seek shelter and a cold drink.

That's not an option when you're an air conditioning repairman, a mail carrier or countless others who just have to find a way to cope and carry on.

How do they do it?

Lots of water and a good sweat rag, they say — and plenty of rest breaks in the shade.

Dale Curry, a 56-year-old electrician at a construction site, feels like a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, one that's been getting crispy for hours.

He guzzles water and rests, but still he aches and can hardly move when the temperature spikes.

He often utters a few choice words, but "it's not a language for small children and ladies," he said.

Even in a place accustomed to triple-digit heat, this has been one hot summer already.

Tuesday's 117 degrees tied the record set in 1942.

And don't try dismissing it as a dry heat.

Twenty-one people, mostly homeless, have died from similar heat in neighboring Arizona, and authorities in Las Vegas are investigating whether 10 deaths were heat-related.

Step outside if you dare, and see how long it takes for the sweat to start trickling down your cheeks and back.

Air conditioners are pumping overtime, errands are run in the morning and at night, parks are deserted until after sundown and only the brave or the crazy hit the links in the middle of the day, despite discounts at some courses.

Some construction crews have shifted work to nighttime to try to beat the heat.

This kind of heat cracks dashboards, makes steering wheels too hot to grip and fries feet unfortunate enough to touch pavement.

Even swimming pools offer little relief because of bathtub-like temperatures.

Those who must venture outside try the all-A/C route: from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned shops and offices.

And then there are guys like Darnell Newman, a sales director at Findlay Toyota who has to pound the pavement when a customer wants to look around the car lot.

He came from California in March and is near deciding that Vegas isn't for him.

This, he said, this is crazy.

"I've never dealt with anything like this."

"I almost had a heat stroke," he said, grabbing some shade by the dealership's doors while he could.

John Graybill, owner of Aire-force One air conditioning repair company, endures even hotter temperatures atop roofs when he becomes the savior in the desert for sweltering customers.

His phone hasn't stopped ringing this week, but he takes the summer in stride.

"Heat is heat," he said.

"It's part of the job."

Workers atop the Stratosphere hotel-casino gulp water as fast they can.

There is no shade, just exhausted, parched and broiling thrill ride operators.

Security officer Joseph Cunico spends four hours a day patrolling the tower pod 906 feet up.

"When you first come up you almost get to the point where you can't stand it," he said.

This summer, Bob McAndrew might be the luckiest guy in Las Vegas.

He delivers milk for Anderson Dairy and when the heat starts inching up, he climbs into the back of his truck, where it's a cool, refreshing 40 degrees.

"Never seen it hotter," he said, taking his lunch break inside his truck.

"It's a killer."

But no streak lasts forever in Las Vegas, even when it comes to the weather.

Temperatures have eased from the terrible teens and will come in under 110 this weekend and next week.

"So we've got a cold wave for Vegas," Cunico joked.

And while we are on the subject of "gross unfairness", here in OUR America, how about this?

"Legal Problems, Taxes Drag Drug Makers"

By LINDA A. JOHNSON, AP Business Writer

Fri Jul 22,12:18 AM ET

TRENTON, N.J. - Large one-time charges hurt the bottom lines — and lowered share prices — of three major drugmakers Thursday, slashing second-quarter net income at struggling Merck & Co. and triggering losses at Eli Lilly & Co. and Schering-Plough Corp.

But excluding the one-time items, for legal problems and a big tax bill, Merck and Lilly managed to meet Wall Street expectations.

Schering-Plough surpassed analysts' forecast by 8 cents per share.

"There are some signs of encouragement with some of the companies," said Robert Hazlett, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.

"The group in general looks reasonably inexpensive at this point."

"We're encouraging investors to consider this group."

Earlier in the week, three other U.S. pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer Inc., Wyeth and Johnson & Johnson — reported higher net income and sales, generally by 10 percent or more.

Each beat analysts' forecasts by 2 cents.

Independent analyst Hemant Shah of HKS & Co. said it is still "a pretty challenging environment" for drugmakers dealing with, or about to face, loss of patent protection and subsequent lost sales for their top drugs, particularly Merck and Schering-Plough.

"In my opinion, another cycle of consolidation is inevitable," with companies not producing enough new drugs to make up for lost revenues, Shah said.

Merck, wounded by its September recall of blockbuster painkiller Vioxx over safety questions, posted its second-straight quarter with significantly lower revenues, down 9 percent this time.

Its net income plunged 59 percent to $720.6 million, or 33 cents per share, due to lost revenues from Vioxx, slumping sales of its top drug Zocor, and a whopping $740 million charge for repatriating about $15 billion in foreign profits.

A year ago, net income was $1.77 billion, or 79 cents per share.

Excluding one-time items, Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based Merck's operating income was $1.36 billion, or 62 cents per share.

Revenues totaled $5.47 billion, down from $6.02 billion last year, with 11 percent of the decrease coming from the lack of Vioxx sales.

Sales of cholesterol reducer Zocor fell 16 percent to $1.2 billion, but higher sales of asthma drug Singulair, osteoporosis medication Fosamax and the related blood pressure drugs Cozaar and Hyzaar helped compensate.

Eli Lilly posted a quarterly loss of $252 million, or 23 cents per share, thanks to a charge of $1.07 billion, or 90 cents per share, for a product liability settlement and related costs involving Zyprexa, its top-selling anti-psychotic treatment.

A year earlier, the Indianapolis company had a profit of $656.9 million, or 60 cents per share.

Excluding the settlement and related charges, Lilly posted earnings of $728 million, or 67 cents per share.

Sales of Zyprexa and the attention deficit disorder medication Strattera continued to fall, offset by revenues from a combination of eight newer products, including the new anti-depressant Cymbalta and the osteoporosis medication Forteo.

Schering-Plough Corp. posted a second-quarter loss of $70 million, or 5 cents per share, citing a charge of $259 million, or 18 cents per share, for reserves to resolve litigation related to questionable marketing practices in past years.

Excluding that, the Kenilworth, N.J., company's operating income would have been 13 cents per share, 8 cents better than Wall Street expected.

In the same quarter of 2004, the allergy and hepatitis drug maker posted a loss of $65 million, or 4 cents per share.

But revenues surged 18 percent to $2.5 billion as sales of cancer drug Temodar, arthritis drug Remicade and ovarian cancer drug Caelyx all grew by 30 percent or more.

Sales of the new cholesterol drugs Schering-Plough and Merck sell in a joint venture — Zetia and Vytorin — more than doubled in the quarter, to more than $500 million.

In trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Merck shares fell 47 cents, or 1.48 percent, to close at $31.38; Lilly shares fell $1.01, or 1.8 percent, to $56.25; and Schering-Plough shares fell 9 cents to $20.11.

"There are companies that seem to be doing well — Wyeth, Schering and maybe Pfizer," which is planning a reorganization and job cuts, said Tony Butler, pharmaceuticals analyst at Lehman Brothers.

He noted results are being driven by much faster growth of drug sales outside the United States as companies get their newer drugs approved in other countries.
____

AP Business writers Bonnie Pfister and Ashley M. Heher contributed to this report.
____

On the Net:

http://www.merck.com

http://www.sgp.com

http://www.lilly.com

Taking the pulse of Republicans on the Hill:


http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zeese.php?articleid=6730

July 23, 2005
Republican Opposition to Iraq War Growing
Now There Are Nine
by Kevin Zeese

First it was Walter Jones (R-NC) who began to speak out in favor of an exit strategy for Iraq. Now there are nine. This is still a trickle – but it is a growing one. And as the support for the war decreases, evidence of the failure of the occupation and the increased risk the occupation poses to security at home becomes more apparent, this trickle could develop into a pounding river.

Rep. Jones has called for an exit strategy for two reasons. First, he recognizes that he was misled into supporting the war by misinformation about weapons of mass destruction. Second, he cares deeply for U.S. troops and after writing hundreds of letters to the families of soldiers who died in Iraq he thought it was time for them to begin to come home. The U.S. has toppled Saddam, arrested him and many of his top leadership and the first vote in Iraq has occurred – the U.S. has done its job – it is time to take U.S. troops out of risk.

Rep. Jones was joined by Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) in co-sponsoring the Homeward Bound Act with Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Neil Abercrombie (D-HI). Rep. Paul is a Republican with strong libertarian instincts. He has written critically about the "NeoCon Global Government" because he sees it hurting "the United States in blood, money, and sovereignty." And in a column, "Ignoring Reality in Iraq" written on December 13, 2004, he points out that "a recent study by the Pentagon's Defense Science Task Force on Strategic Communications concluded that in the struggle for hearts and minds in Iraq, 'American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.' This Pentagon report flatly states that our war in Iraq actually has elevated support for radical Islamists. It goes on to conclude that our active intervention in the Middle East as a whole has greatly diminished our reputation in the region, and strengthened support for radical groups. This is similar to what the CIA predicted in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, before the invasion took place." Further, he chides those who opposed the war for supporting the occupation. This includes many Democrats, like the candidate for Senate in Maryland, Ben Cardin, who initially opposed the war but now votes to keep funding it and opposes an exit strategy. Rep. Paul said of these types:

"Even opponents of the war now argue that we must occupy Iraq indefinitely until a democratic government takes hold, no matter what the costs. No attempt is made by either side to explain exactly why it is the duty of American soldiers to die for the benefit of Iraq or any other foreign country. No reason is given why American taxpayers must pay billions of dollars to build infrastructure in Iraq. We are expected to accept the interventionist approach without question, as though no other options exist."

Recently, Rep. Paul was joined on the House floor by Rep. John Duncan, Jr. (R-TN) discussing why true conservatives should oppose the "undeclared and unnecessary war" in Iraq. He began his June 28 speech "The Situation in Iraq" saying: "Madam Speaker, last year William F. Buckley, Jr., said if he had known in 2002 what he had since learned, he would have opposed the war in Iraq. A few weeks ago, he wrote that it is now time for the U.S. to get out and leave Iraq to the Iraqis."

In a speech two weeks earlier, "Hidden Costs of War," Rep. Duncan pointed out the sad realities of the war: "the most unfortunate thing has been the more than 1,700 young Americans who have been killed there now, and the some 12,000 who have been wounded, many of them severely wounded, maimed for life, in what was a totally unnecessary war." He reminded people that before this war started he told people "that there was nothing conservative about this war; that it was going to mean massive foreign aid, which conservatives have traditionally been against; that it was going to mean huge deficit spending, which conservatives have traditionally been against." He highlighted the comments of Lawrence Lindsey, who was the President's leading economic adviser until he was fired for his comments on the war, who said before the war started that "it would cost $100 billion to $200 billion. Now, by the end of this fiscal year, we are going to be at the astounding figure of $300 billion. And I think the only reason more people are not upset about that is that it is humanly impossible to truly comprehend a figure as high as $300 billion."

Another Republican, Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) has joined in co-sponsoring the Homeward Bound Resolution. He represents the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a Republican stronghold. His website features commemorations of U.S. troops and a more than 100 year old essay "The Present Crisis," by poet James Russell Lowell that examines the choices between good and evil that people and nations must make. He wants to see a cautious withdrawal from Iraq – one where Iraq is left stable and U.S. troops are protected.

James Leach (R-IO), a moderate Republican who has differed with the president on Iraq from the outset, this week voted against a proposal opposing an early exit from Iraq. He has quietly questioned the war. In a speech on December 23, 2003 on Iraq he said: "America is in a strategic pickle and Americans are in a judgmental quandary." He addressed the limits of a superpower's power by asked a series of important questions:

"Does, for instance, overwhelming military might protect us from terrorism or, if used unwisely, increase our vulnerability to terrorism?

"Likewise, does overwhelming economic power ensure loyalty or buy friendship even from the countries most indebted to the US?

"In other words, can military and economic might ever become a substitute for sensible and sensitive foreign policy?

"And given the dilemma of Iraq, could it indeed be that the most important 'multi-billion' problem America faces is not deficits measured in dollars, fiscal or trade, but the antagonism of billions of people around the world who object to our current foreign policy?"

He noted "Many are not convinced by our words; many are appalled by our actions" and concluded the speech saying: "The lesson of the past year is clear: America does better as a mediator and multi-party peace maker than as a unilateral interventionist."

There were some surprises in the vote for opposing an early exit strategy from Iraq.

Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN), who made national news recently for his comments on Christianity saying: "the long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives" and "continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats." Rep. Hostettler is a member of the Armed Services Committee, his website is silent on Iraq, highlighting instead his efforts to prevent gay marriage and to place the ten commandments in government buildings.

Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN) who is the second ranking Republican on Homeland Security Committee and who has spoken out against terrorist beheadings of captives in Iraq, contrasting that with "the serious mistakes of a few Americans at the Abu Ghraib prison."

Rep. Don Young (R-FL) who has served in the Congress for 34 years and is a strong advocate for the military. He describes himself as "a staunch supporter of our brave men and women in uniform who are fighting daily in defense of freedom." And, who proudly proclaims that he has made "certain that defense contracts awarded benefit the workers and economy of Pinellas County. The defense programs Congressman Young has brought to Pinellas County have created thousands of new jobs here, and have helped create a world-class research and technology sector in the Tampa Bay area."

Rep. Thomas Petri (R-WI) who is in his 14th term in Congress is most known as someone who closely monitors the budget. There is very little on his website about Iraq. The only mention is somewhat tangential – a column noting how the New York Times which is "reflexively hostile" to President Bush had something nice to say about him because of the movement toward democracy in the Middle East. Petri notes: "Freedom, it seems, is on the march." In another column "Some Good News From Iraq" he states:

"Continuing American deaths and injuries in Iraq make me ill. I want to reduce the exposure of our troops as fast as possible. Also, I would much prefer to spend American money here at home, and I have raised plenty of questions about our aid programs in Iraq and elsewhere. But since we're in Iraq, we have to make the best of it."

Progress seems to be being made in the House. The vote against the amendment opposing an early exit from Iraq totaled 137 against the amendment and two voting present. A majority in the House is 218 so we are 81 votes away from the majority. On May 28 when the House voted on the Woolsey Amendment for an exit strategy the vote was 128 in favor of the amendment and five not voting. Congress will soon be taking a summer recess. They will be hearing from their constituents on Iraq when they speak at community meetings. This September the antiwar movement is getting behind a major demonstration and lobby day on September 24-26. Momentum is building as the 2006 elections approach.

Point, counter-point, Snuffysmith!

And then there is this:

"Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely"

By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer

34 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Americans are far more likely than the Japanese to expect another world war in their lifetime, according to AP-Kyodo polling 60 years after World War II ended.

Most people in both countries believe the first use of a nuclear weapon is never justified.

Those findings come six decades after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The war claimed about 400,000 U.S. troops around the world, more than three times that many Japanese troops and at least 300,000 Japanese civilians.

Out of the ashes, Japan and the United States forged a close political alliance.

Americans and Japanese now generally have good feelings about each other.

But people in the two countries have very different views on everything from the U.S. use of the atomic bomb in 1945, fears of North Korea and the American military presence in Japan.

Some of the widest differences came on expectations of a new world war.

Six in 10 Americans said they think such a war is likely, while only one-third of the Japanese said so, according to polling done in both countries for The Associated Press and Kyodo, the Japanese news service.

"Man's going to destroy man eventually."

"When that will be, I don't know," said Gaye Lestaeghe of Freeport, La.

Some question whether that war has arrived, with fighting dragging on in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism.

"I feel like we're in a world war right now," said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y.

The Japanese were less likely than Americans to expect a world war, less worried about the threat from North Korea and less inclined to say a first strike with nuclear weapons could be justified.

"The Japanese people take peace for granted," said Hiroya Sato, 20, of Tokyo.

"The Japanese people are not interested in things like war."

President Truman decided to try to end the war by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later.

The first two atomic bombs killed tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; thousands more gradually died with severe radiation burns.

Those bombings led to Japan's announcement on Aug. 15 that it would surrender.

Two-thirds of Americans say the use of atomic bombs was unavoidable.

Only 20 percent of Japanese felt that way and three-fourths said it was not necessary.

Just one-half of Americans approve of the use of the atomic bombs on Japan.

Bob Garapedian, an 81-year-old retiree from Colchester, Conn., was preparing to fly fighter planes over the planned invasion of Japan when the war ended.

Asked whether using the atomic bomb was appropriate, he said without hesitation: "Absolutely!"

But military instructor Hugh "D.J." Carlen, who lives near Fort Knox, Ky., said: "I don't think we really needed to do it."

"We darn near had the country starved to death."

"We could have effected a blockade."

Skepticism about the bombings is widespread in Japan.

"I often hear the bombings were not necessary," said Toyokazu Katsumi, a 27-year-old engineer from Yokohama.

"They just wanted to experiment with them."

For 63-year-old Masashi Muroi of Tokyo, the attacks with atomic bombs "were mass, indiscriminate killings and perhaps violated international law."

For younger people, World War II is something seen only on newsreel footage, in the movies and in history books.

For those who lived through it, the memories are vivid.

Hideko Mori, a 71-year-old Tokyo housewife, said that as a child in Nagano in central Japan, she and her neighbors had to take refuge to avoid American air raids.

"Around the time I was in the 5th grade, when we went to school, instead of attending classes, we plowed the school grounds and planted potatoes and pumpkins, and we dug up bomb shelters," she said.

People in both countries overwhelmingly perceive the other country favorably now.

Four in five Americans have an upbeat view of Japan and two-thirds of Japanese feel that way about the U.S.

But older people were not quite as enthusiastic.

"I dislike the Japanese military, but not the Japanese people," World War II veteran William Aleshire, 84, of Peachtree City, Ga., said during a recent visit to a war memorial in Washington.

Some of the good feelings may stem from the close cooperation between the U.S. and Japan in postwar rebuilding and from America's financial support.

During the years when American troops occupied Japan, economic reforms enabled Japanese farmers to own their own land.

With U.S. help, Japan grew into an economic power.

"The Americans contributed so much to the reconstruction of Japan after the war."

"I think their influence was very significant and positive," said 62-year-old Yasuzo Higuchi of Tokyo.

"Even now, because of their presence in our country, North Korea can't attack us."

Americans' good will about the Japanese extends to their government, with six in 10 in the U.S. regarding it as trustworthy.

But more than half of the Japanese distrust Washington.

Asked whether a first strike with nuclear weapons ever could be justified, a majority in both countries said no.

But Americans were twice as likely as the Japanese to think such a strike might be justified in some circumstances.

Since the war, the U.S. military presence in Japan has come to be accepted in most of Japan, but stirs resentment on the island of Okinawa.

The Japanese are evenly split on whether the U.S. troops should stay or go, the polling found.

Three-fourths of Americans said this country should keep its military in Japan.

"Any country that will allow us to keep a base there as a forward lookout post, I think we ought to do it," said Wade Hill, a copier technician who lives near Dallas.

"We need a buffer zone."

The strongest rivalry between the U.S. and Japan now is economic.

The presence of Americans products has increased in Japan, though Tokyo continues to have a large trade surplus with Washington.

Japanese are most likely to name the U.S. as the most important country for their economy, possibly a reflection of the success among Americans for Japanese automobiles and electronics.

Americans were most likely to name China as most important for the U.S. economy.

Trade tensions have increased between the United States and China after America ran up a $162 billion deficit with China last year, the largest ever with a single country.

Some see economic competition as the most important battle between countries these days.

"I don't think it will be like World War II," said James DiVita of Sandusky, Ohio, who works in manufacturing.

"It will be more of a silent takeover with dollars, buying up companies."

The poll of 1,000 adults in the United States was conducted for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling company, from July 5-10 and the poll of 1,045 eligible voters in Japan was conducted for Kyodo by the Public Opinion Research Center from July 1-3.

Each poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
___

Associated Press writers Chisaki Watanabe and Aiko Hayashi in Tokyo, and AP's manager of surveys Trevor Tompson contributed to this report.

On the Net:

An interactive detailing poll questions and responses is available at:

http://wid.ap.org/polls/japanus/index.html

"Weather for a price - The EPA pays a popular cable channel to broadcast reports on climate change"

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, July 24, 2005

Time was when Armstrong Williams had a following as a respected television commentator.

But his image was badly marred last winter when it became known that the Department of Education had paid him $240,000 to promote the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program.

At the time, President Bush reacted by swiftly assuring the American public that their tax dollars would not be used for government propaganda in the future.

But that was then.

Now, six months after the Williams controversy, comes a Washington Post article detailing how the Environmental Protection Agency paid the Weather Channel $40,000 to produce and broadcast videos about climate change.

Topics have included ozone depletion, ultraviolet radiation and urban heat.

From all appearances, the videos are based on sound science and are devoid of a political agenda.

But neither is there any mention of a paid government connection.

The EPA argues, rightly, that each video contains a disclosure that it is a co-production of the Weather Channel and EPA.

But there is no mention that federal dollars are involved -- an omission the EPA now says will be corrected.

The larger issue, though, is the government's apparent attempt to influence the public by stealth.

The EPA, for example, had the right to review scripts and make content suggestions.

That's a concern in itself, given the White House's position on such climate issues as global warming and atmospheric pollution.

Of equal concern is the pattern of behind-the-scenes media manipulation.

The Williams contract was only part of that pattern.

There were also pre-packaged news videos prepared by several government agencies and disguised to look as if they were independent, objective news reports.

More than a few low-budget television stations aired them to unsuspecting audiences.

Some of these videos were used to promote Mr. Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan.

The Government Accountability Office investigated the videos, pronounced them "covert propaganda" and said they represented an illegal use of taxpayer funds.

Given that scolding, the White House should have warned all agencies against any further attempts to masquerade policy as news.

As Mr. Bush said last winter during the Armstrong controversy, "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press."

But what part of independent didn't EPA understand?