After reading the below and everything else being said about the new CIA Director, as well as looking at the DOD budget, I'm beginning to wonder whether the blame for 9/11 should be placed at the foot of DOD.



http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarnin...e_is_not_t.html
William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

Military Intelligence is Not the CIA's Problem

The President's nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to be CIA director has some fretting about an out-and-out Pentagon power grab, with Donald Rumsfeld winning the final battle over who will control U.S. intelligence.

Hayden, a four star Air Force general who declines to seek retirement, symbolizes the tensions that have existed since 9/11 between the Secretary of Defense and the top civilian intelligence agency.

The Defense Department consumes the lion's share of intelligence dollars and employs far more intelligence related personnel than the CIA. Under Rumsfeld, in addition, DOD has installed a new intelligence czar, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, and has moved to improve its human intelligence capabilities.

It is certainly the case that Rumsfeld can't stand to be told that his Defense Department can't get what it needs because of some other agency's priorities or weaknesses, but are military intelligence efforts really the biggest problem facing the CIA?

No -- at least not based on my information about what's going on with military intelligence.

If there is a theory behind changes in DOD intelligence these days, it is that the Cold War model for intelligence is no longer applicable.

The old model, as described by DOD intelligence types, was that intelligence served primarily as a staff function, handled by a closed society that "supported" actual military operations with threat materials prepared for war plans and specific missions. Intelligence mostly prepared "finished" products -- reports -- everyone else "consumed" them.

Certainly, during my experience in military intelligence in West Berlin in the early 1970's, there was a complete separation between intelligence and what we used to call the "combat arms." We did warning for the big boys and wrote reports -- and a select few in the Berlin Brigade might even have read some of them. But since most combat officers only had Secret-level clearances, any "threat" data they used to man those Cold War front lines was packaged and generic "opposing" forces material prepared especially for their supposedly feeble minds. At least, that's how us egg-heads saw it.

Intelligence "data" -- radar signals, enemy emanations, communications traffic patterns -- was a different matter, and that flowed abundantly to what we today call the warfighters. As information technology proliferated within the military -- much the same way it has proliferated in our society -- raw electronics and signals intelligence data were specifically formatted to provide a constant feed.

For some activities, including air operations, electronic countermeasures and jamming, artillery counter-battery radar and fire direction, the intelligence feed of enemy locations and activities has been the unsung hero of the U.S. military. If there is one thing that the United States does better than anybody on the planet, it's winning the electronic battle. And that is to the credit of defense intelligence.

The new intelligence revolution underway in the military today is an attempt to create the same feed of raw data of other types to support soldiers and commanders. The theory is that the substance of voice communication intercepts or news reports or reconnaissance imagery or even human intelligence reporting can be tagged and broken down and fed immediately to those who need it. Think of an RSS feed or an IM window always open that's always open, displaying the right intelligence to the right consumers.

Wonder why $45 billion plus is being spent on intelligence? Building an all-sensing network with the ability to self-report in real time is an expensive dream.

In the short term, the new Pentagon intelligence paradigm is being applied to find the bad guys in the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. The wall between intelligence and operations has already been lowered and the dream is eventually to do away with it altogether. The biggest fight is, of course, about power. And since we know that information is power, great tensions have been created between the old "need to know" concept and the new "need to share" one. The Bush administration is a long way from resolving this tension, particularly given its own basic impulse for more secrecy and less openness.

The changes afoot in defense intelligence to implement the new paradigm have also led to monumental white elephants in the fields of computing, information processing, data mining, link analysis, and other building blocks to ingest and distribute the new data. The true benefits are still to be realized; even the feasibility of collecting and identifying the killer piece of information remains in question.

Since military intelligence is about supporting military forces, and since those forces are out there around the globe looking for bad guys, another element of the new system is to build a more robust and diverse "feed" of intelligence of value for military operations. This has led the military to move into territory formally occupied only by the CIA.

The DOD dream, just getting underway, is for military intelligence operatives and special operations collectors -- linguist case officers, skilled, close-in eavesdroppers, clandestine observers -- to conduct "operations" as scouts for bigger operations to follow. These are not collectors collecting for collection sake, intelligence officers say. They are directly supporting the commander.

"We are running intelligence operations every day on the streets of Baghdad and Afghanistan," Lt. General Jerry Boykin told Congress last year. "Action creates intelligence."

"We're talking about looking at intelligence as an operation, much like the CIA does," Boykin continued. "They run operations. …you need to recognize that these are operations, and have a structure that supports these as operations." (New York Times, February 4, 2005)

These new Pentagon intelligence "operations" have reportedly caused friction with the CIA because the military is working in areas where the civilian agency has been the top and only dog. The Pentagon's theory is that the CIA supports "national priorities" and sees its customer base as being mainly the civilian government and the White House. That being the case, the thinking goes, the military just has to get into new areas to support its own broader and more aggressive activities.

Sure, there are issues of coordination and "deconfliction" and, sure. the CIA's alumni and defenders complain of activities that go on without adult supervision (theirs, that is), but those are the issues that a Director of National Intelligence is supposed to resolve. I imagine that the cabal of CIA defenders and alumni just can't stand the notion of anyone elbowing in on their territory.

A more interesting question right now is whether the new Pentagon paradigm is sound. It is still an open question whether some substantive human intelligence data feed can be created to mirror the electronic feed. The bigger question is whether "strategic" analysis -- understanding potential adversaries culturally and socially, forecasting change, appreciating America's position in the world -- won't get short changed in the frenzy to produce data immediately.

By William M. Arkin | May 9, 2006; 9:15 AM ET | Category: Intelligence

"E-Mails show Brown disputed levee breach"

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:35 p.m., Tuesday, May 9, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Former FEMA director Michael Brown disputed that floodwaters had breached New Orleans' levees in the early hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, new e-mails released Tuesday show.

The 928 pages of e-mails, obtained and released by the Center for Public Integrity, also portray Brown and the Federal Emergency Management Agency as obsessed with media coverage in the days leading up to and immediately following the Aug. 29, 2005, disaster.

At one point early that morning, Brown reported to an aide that he was "sitting in the chair, putting mousse in my hair," as he waited for media interviews to begin.

Later that morning, at 9:50 a.m., a FEMA staffer at the National Hurricane Center sent department brass an alert from a local TV station report "a levee breach occurred along the industrial canal" near the Ninth Ward.

More than two hours later, at 12:09 p.m., Brown sent a message back to one of his aides, saying: "I'm being told here water over not a breach."

The aide, Michael Lowder, replied: "Ok."

"You probably have better info there."

"Just wanted to pass you what we hear."

Brown did not immediately respond to messages left on his cell phone and e-mail Tuesday afternoon.

Since quitting FEMA on Sept. 12, Brown has sharply criticized the Bush administration for failing to respond quickly to reports about levee breaches.

He has said previously he was convinced of a levee breach by 1 p.m. the day Katrina roared ashore.

Delays in confirming the levee breaches held up repair efforts and allowed flooding to worsen.

Back when I was in the Army ...

In the Viet Nam times ...

The term MILITARY INTELLIGENCE was said to be ...

An OXYMORON ....

And since that time ...

I don't think much has really changed ....

Despite all the techo-toys and gizmos and what-not these boys have to play with today ....

A case that is really brought home ...

In the book, Blackhawk Down ....

Which is a real case study .....

In just how stupid ....

What is called INTELLIGENCE in the military ....

Really is .....

And I don't believe that it was the responsibility of military intelligence to have detected these hi-jackers ....

If indeed that is what they really were ...

As opposed to "civilian contractors" .....

Which is how I see them .....

"Civilian contractors" whose job it was to inflict some terror on the American public ...

Just as terror was unleashed on the German population during World War II .....

By the British ...

And the Americans ....

By fire-bombing civilian population centers in Germany ....

And just as terror was unleashed on the civilian population of Japan ....

During WWII ....

By fire-bombing cities full of women and children ....

Who are always favored "targets" of the goons who run the various militaries out there ...

Because generally ...

Women and children are pretty helpless ....

And so ...

And just as George H(e). W(hines). "BIG Bush" Bush inflicted terror on the civilian population of Baghdad ...

During what is known as "BIG BUSH'S WAR TO PUT A SYBARITIC EMIR BACK ON THE THRONE OF KUWAIT" ....

For somebody's "end" ....

Because, Snuf .....

In the world of REAL MACHO MEN ....

And this would include the United States Air Force ....

Which spawned this BUSHCO Hayden ......

Infliction of TERROR on civilian populations ....

Is a legitimate "goal" of war ...

Which by and large, the American public endorses .....

So long as those being terrorized are somewhere else ....

And so ....

And today ....

In the case of 9/11 ....

That "somebody" .....

That "BENEFICIARY" ....

Always ends up looking like the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE to me ...

And so .....

I used to think ...

After getting back to here from Viet Nam ...

That the only thing that was really saving us from the Russians ...

Was the fact ...

That their leadership was as stupid as ours ...

And so .....

And now ....

That the Russians are gone ...

At least for the moment .....

Well ......

And speaking about Donny Rumsfeld ....

The "MAN WHO CAN'T GET IT DONE" .....

Because he don't know how to do it ....

Other than through the infliction of acts of sexual perversion on Arab men .....

Which is also now a LEGITIMATE AMERICAN GOAL OF WAR .....

In this day and age .....

Of the SON OF BIG BUSH ASCENDENT ......

We have .....

May 5, 2006

"Stakes high in battle between Rumsfeld, generals"

By James Kitfield, National Journal

The matter of Rumsfeld v. the Generals bears close scrutiny.

The controversy represents the worst breach in civil-military relations since Harry Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for his conduct and his criticism of the president during the Korean War.

It has proven an unwelcome distraction for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs, and has added to the already considerable woes of President Bush in his role as a wartime commander-in-chief.

Notably, the calls from a group of recently retired generals that Rumsfeld should resign has also thrust senior military leaders and, by proxy, the uniformed services into the middle of a hyperpartisan political argument -- territory from which the U.S. military rarely escapes unscathed.

Given the nearly unprecedented nature of the controversy, what is perhaps most remarkable is how utterly unsurprising it is to anyone who has spent time with senior military officers, in the field, over drinks at the officers' club, or especially on the ground in Iraq.

The fact that the Army chief of staff came out of retirement to take the job after sources say at least three active-duty generals declined it, and reports that the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, may retire before his term is up, speak volumes about the frayed state of civil-military relations in today's Pentagon.

Practically from the moment they first occupied the E Ring, Rumsfeld and his tight circle of senior aides demonstrated a dismissive attitude that has grated on uniformed leaders.

In the view of Bush's civilian team, President Clinton had allowed the generals and the admirals to run roughshod.

Rumsfeld and his band of reformers were a rude awakening for senior military leaders conditioned to expect a measure of courtesy from civilian bosses as a privilege of their rank; instead, Bush's team set out to show the generals who was boss.

Rumsfeld's incessant needling of the Army, in particular, to more rapidly reshape itself into an expeditionary force, at a time when the service has been run nearly ragged by back-to-back-to-back deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, added insult to injury.

From the beginning, the Rumsfeld reformers have also considered themselves bold revolutionaries who deal only in transformative ideas, and their "roll the dice" spirit in nearly all things has often been at odds with the more cautious nature of a uniformed military pledged to securing the Republic.

In response to Pentagon policies -- set by Rumsfeld and his inner circle -- pushing the envelope on prisoner treatment, for instance, eight retired generals and admirals have written to Bush asking for an independent, 9/11-type commission to investigate detainee abuse.

Two of those senior officers, including the Navy's former judge advocate general, have joined a lawsuit seeking to hold Rumsfeld directly accountable for policies that gave rise to torture and abuse of U.S.-held prisoners.

Above all, the other eight (and counting) retired generals who have called for Rumsfeld's resignation are wrestling to win the narrative of the Iraq war.

Privately, most generals will tell you that a new Defense secretary is unlikely to change the dynamics of an Iraqi campaign now mostly defined by missed opportunities and foreclosed options.

Notably, two of the eight served as division commanders in Iraq and saw firsthand how decisions made by their civilian bosses limited their military choices.

Whatever the final outcome of the conflict, they and a large number of senior officers on active duty believe that the Office of the Secretary of Defense -- Rumsfeld and his top civilian advisers -- is responsible for the most poorly analyzed and mismanaged U.S. military intervention since Vietnam.

For these commanders, who have returned home with 2,400 fewer troops than they led into Iraq, that calls for some accountability.

"My primary issue with Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership is accountability, because I grew up in a culture where the captain of the ship or the commander of the unit is held responsible, and Rumsfeld has committed acts of gross negligence and incompetence," retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni told National Journal.

As head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees all American troops in the Middle East, Zinni and his staff planned and war-gamed an invasion of Iraq for years, plans that active-duty officers assured him were constantly updated right up to the moment that Rumsfeld discarded them.

"We knew that you would need a lot of troops to establish law and order over a traumatized population, and to combat all kinds of troublemaking elements coming from outside Iraq," Zinni said.

"We knew that you had to secure the infrastructure and that reconstruction would be a huge and expensive task."

"We knew that Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi had zero credibility in the region."

"All of that was foreseeable, and yet our warnings were brushed aside and we were personally attacked," the general continued.

"Rumsfeld said our planning was 'old and stale.'"

"That this was going to be a 'cakewalk,' with 'shock and awe' and flowers in the streets, and Iraqi oil paying for reconstruction."

"Those were wild-eyed and patently ridiculous ideas."

High-Stakes Showdown

Regardless of the emotional content of the generals' arguments, the stakes of the controversy could hardly be greater.

On a strategic level, the issues raised go to the fundamental judgment and competence of those entrusted with the nation's most lethal levers of power at a time of great uncertainty.

The dangers include a potential confrontation with Iran over its supposed pursuit of nuclear weapons, while North Korea is waiting in the wings.

And the war on terrorism continues.

The U.S. military is also poised to attempt the delicate process of extricating itself from Iraq within the next two years without setting the scene for that country, and the region, to descend into sectarian war.

Meanwhile, another military manpower crunch is coming late this year and early next as planners search for soldiers and marines to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan for their third -- and in some cases fourth -- combat tours, an effort necessitated by Rumsfeld's stubborn refusal to increase the size of U.S. infantry forces from pre-9/11 levels permanently, despite wars on multiple fronts and urgings from some in Congress.

In breaking with two centuries of military tradition, the retired generals asking for the head of Donald Rumsfeld have essentially gone around their former civilian bosses to put the question directly to the American people: Do you want to confront the crises ahead led by the person who brought you Iraq?

"My own decision to speak out goes back to watching firsthand the arrogant and contemptuous attitude of Rumsfeld as he ignored the advice of military experts during preparations for war, and then living with the impact of those strategic blunders as a division commander in Iraq," retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste said in an interview.

After serving in the Pentagon as chief military aide to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- where he was privy to many high-level meetings -- and then commanding the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, Batiste declined promotion to lieutenant general and command of an Army corps.

"That was a gut-wrenching decision for me, but at some point I realized that in order to try and change course and have this debate, I had to retire," he said.

"Secretary Rumsfeld and his team turned what should have been a deliberate victory in Iraq into a prolonged challenge."

"My concern now is that we still have a long way to go in the Iraq war, and other monumental decisions are coming just around the corner."

"Don't the American people deserve senior leaders whose instincts and judgments they can trust?"

Not surprisingly, Bush has vigorously defended his Defense secretary, having already declined the resignations that Rumsfeld tendered in 2004 over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

The era when President Clinton's Defense secretary, Les Aspin, resigned over a single bad day in Somalia and a controversy over gays in the military now seems almost quaint.

One irony of the current controversy, however, is that in speaking out the generals may have actually helped secure Rumsfeld's job.

No wartime president can bow to such public pressure from senior military voices without appearing weak, and firing Rumsfeld would also amount to an admission by Bush that the defining issue of his presidency was fraught with strategic mistakes.

Yet the seriousness of the controversy warrants at least an examination of the generals' writ.

It's not just that the military leaders have called for Rumsfeld's resignation, it's that they cite specific decisions that they say he got terribly, terribly wrong.

The list of particulars was perhaps best summarized by retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, the top operations officer on the Joint Staff in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Before he stepped down, Newbold was a strong candidate for future commandant of the Marine Corps.

"What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures," Newbold wrote in Time magazine.

"Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, initial denial that insurgency was at the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of other agencies of U.S. government to commit themselves to the same degree as the Defense Department."

Here are the details behind the generals' specific complaints.

The Intelligence

The failure to find Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush's casus belli for the invasion, still tops many after-action assessments.

As was detailed in the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report on intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction, an intelligence failure of that magnitude has many fathers.

The question posed by the generals is whether Rumsfeld and his top aides were prominent among them.

In fact, despite the general assumption within the vast U.S. intelligence network that Saddam almost certainly retained some residual or reconstituted chemical and biological (but not nuclear) weapons capabilities, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were not satisfied with the often qualified and inconclusive intelligence on Iraq's WMD programs that filtered up through the intelligence bureaucracy.

Nor was Rumsfeld's confidant, Vice President Cheney.

So Wolfowitz had the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, establish a new intelligence shop on Iraq called the Office of Special Plans.

OSP operated outside normal intelligence channels and was known to have very close ties to Cheney's office and to Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi and his network of Iraqi defectors, who had a vested interest in overthrowing Saddam.

The vice president's chief of staff and top national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, was a former protege of Wolfowitz's, having worked with him in the Pentagon in the early 1990s on issues involving weapons of mass destruction.

Many experts believe that OSP circumvented the normal vetting and filtering process by which intelligence made its way up the pyramid of collection and analysis, and instead relayed essentially raw intelligence gathered from Chalabi's defectors directly to the vice president's office, where it found its way into Cheney's speeches.

In August 2002, for instance, Cheney proclaimed, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" and is pursuing "an aggressive nuclear weapons program" that Cheney surmised would soon produce a weapon.

Nor was there any doubt, Cheney said, that "he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

In his address to the United Nations in October 2002, Bush thus posited the case for pre-emptive war against Iraq:

"We cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Notably, at the time of Cheney's speech the Pentagon, and not the CIA, was circulating a detailed intelligence briefing on Baghdad's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs to key allies and members of Congress, and was reportedly working on a report that would show links between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

The Pentagon official spearheading that briefing was J.D. Crouch, Rumsfeld's assistant secretary of Defense for international security policy.

The Robb-Silberman report concluded that two Chalabi-supplied Iraqi defectors were "fabricators."

The use of another serial liar, a source code-named "Curveball," who was behind reports of Iraqi mobile biological weapons labs, was, the report noted, "at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source ...."

The 9/11 commission report, meanwhile, found no credible operational links between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime.

Since the reports' release, both Bill Luti, who ran the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, and Crouch have gone on to work for the National Security Council, in the White House.

"As someone doing consulting work for the CIA right up until the war started, I saw the intelligence on Iraq's WMD, and I can tell you that the administration's talk of an imminent danger of 'mushroom clouds' wasn't just a stretch," Zinni said.

"Quite frankly, it was outright BULL****."

"I asked the CIA analysts where that was coming from, and they just stared at their shoes."

McNamara-Like Micromanagement

Did Rumsfeld micromanage the Iraq operation to the degree that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Johnson did with Vietnam? ("I won't let those Air Force generals bomb even the smallest outhouse without checking with me!" Johnson used to brag.)

Bush asked about Rumsfeld's management approach when talking to the Pentagon's top civilian in Iraq, Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003-2004.

"I like Don, Mr. President."

"I've known him for 30 years, admire him, and consider him highly intelligent."

"But he does micromanage," Bremer recalls in his book My Year in Iraq.

"Don terrifies his subordinates, so that I can rarely get any decisions out of anyone but him."

From a military standpoint, Exhibit A in the micromanagement charge is Rumsfeld's insistence in the critical period leading up to the Iraq invasion that the Joint Staff and the Central Command jettison the Time Phased Force and Deployment List.

What the military calls the "Tip Fid" is the matrix by which theater commanders identify the forces needed for a specific campaign and the services prioritize the deployment of those forces and requisite support units.

The methodical, timed, and phased nature of such a deployment scheme assaulted Rumsfeld's notions of "transformational war," and he derided the Tip Fid as part of the military's "Industrial Age" thinking.

Rumsfeld and his aides favored a "just in time" buildup to war fashioned more on the FedEx model -- hold everything back until you absolutely need it.

War is not package delivery, however, and the Pentagon civilians' insistence on scuttling the Tip Fid infuriated commanders in the Middle East, who were ordered to move into Iraq even as units needed to guard their exposed supply lines were still pouring off ships in Kuwait.

Often those forces arrived in the wrong order of priority and with inadequate supplies and transport.

"Rumsfeld insists that the Tip Fid process is too ponderous and slow, and it may well be, but it's the only process we have for managing the flow of forces into theater and matching them with needed lift and support," a senior general involved in planning the invasion told National Journal at the time.

"Since we've been ordered to abandon the Tip Fid, it would be really nice if those of us responsible for executing this campaign knew and understood what the hell is supposed to replace it."

"And we don't!"

Too Few Troops

When then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress before the Iraq war that it would take on the order of "several hundred thousand" troops to stabilize the country, the general was actually being conservative.

Central Command's war plan for Iraq originally called for a minimum of 380,000 troops to topple the regime and secure the country.

Studying force-to-population ratios in seven previous occupations, ranging from Germany and Japan in the 1940s all the way to Somalia and the Balkans in the 1990s, the Rand think tank prepared a report shortly before the Iraq war that was brought to Rumsfeld's attention.

Rand put the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq at 500,000.

Yet Wolfowitz derided Shinseki's "notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops" as "way off the mark," and OSD made Shinseki a lame duck by naming his replacement more than a year before his scheduled retirement.

After constant pressure from Rumsfeld prompted Central Command's Gen. Tommy Franks to whittle the invasion force down to roughly 140,000 U.S. troops, it became clear that in their overriding focus on transformation and bold new ideas, Pentagon civilians had ignored the lessons of even recent history.

Rumsfeld has never acknowledged that those forces proved manifestly inadequate to the task of taming an ethnically fractious country of 27 million inhabitants.

Ultimately, there were too few troops to stop the looting and the growing sense of anarchy and lawlessness that took hold in the weeks and months after Saddam's regime fell, or to guard abandoned Iraqi army ammo dumps from raids by the nascent insurgency.

As a result, the U.S. military saw its critical honeymoon of liberation cut short in Iraq, and some senior commanders have never forgotten it.

The generals are, however, at least partly responsible for the lack of sufficient troops in Iraq.

Knowing after the Shinseki affair that OSD would deem a request for more troops most unwelcome, and understanding that if a larger force were committed to Iraq it would hasten the day when deployments would break the back of their Army and National Guard combat and support units, the generals kept mum or played word games in public.

In early September 2003, for instance, the senior commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, insisted that he had enough troops for the mission "currently assigned."

At the time that mission did not include fighting an all-out insurgency, confronting renegade militias, training a new Iraqi army, securing the porous border against terrorist infiltration, or holding ground cleared of insurgents by U.S. military sweeps.

"If a militia or internal conflict of some nature were to erupt ... that would be a challenge out there that I do not have sufficient force for," Sanchez said then.

When those challenges and more arose in the fateful spring of 2004, however, the generals still bit their tongues in public about the need for more troops.

They did so even after Rumsfeld pulled what many of them saw as a bait and switch.

He originally assured uniformed leaders that the Army's 1st Cavalry Division was in the pipeline to reinforce the U.S. invasion force, and then he abruptly canceled the deployment.

So, did Rumsfeld fail to supply his generals with adequate forces in Iraq?

The Bush administration's top man there certainly thought so.

As early as July 2003, well before the insurgency had fully coalesced, Bremer spoke with then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, as he recalls in his book.

"In my view, the coalition's got about half the number of soldiers we need here," Bremer told her.

"And we run the risk of having this thing go south on us."

Disbanding Iraq's Army

When Bremer signed Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 2 on May 23, 2003, formally dissolving all Iraqi military formations, he had some compelling reasons.

Iraqi security forces were an instrument of Saddam's brutal repression; they were viewed as a threat by both the Kurds and the Shiite Iraqi exiles like Chalabi who were so favored by OSD; and, anyway, those uniformed forces had largely melted away after the regime collapsed.

After discussing the idea with his civilian staff, Bremer vetted his plan to abolish all Iraqi intelligence, security, and military forces with Rumsfeld and Feith.

Both approved the idea.

For many military commanders in Iraq, however, the idea was pure folly.

As opposed to Saddam's brutal Republican Guard, the regular Iraqi army was a relatively respected institution into which many Iraqis had been conscripted and had served honorably, especially during the Iraq-Iran war.

Because the Iraqi army also had its own command-and-control systems and mobility, U.S. military experts believed that if the force were reconstituted quickly, it could prove critical in establishing security and helping with reconstruction.

Did military experts share their concerns with Bremer?

One who did was retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the initial American postwar overseer in Baghdad.

Bremer later replaced Garner.

The retired general advised Bremer that abolishing the Iraqi army would be a huge mistake.

Once again, however, military advice went unheeded.

With Iraq's long, hot summer of occupation just beginning in 2003, the second edict of Bremer's Pentagon-led occupational authority threw hundreds of thousands of military-age Iraqi men out of work, with every last one of them nursing a grudge and trained to bear arms.

The CPA's first edict?

Feith's "De-Baathification of Iraqi Society" order.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the process was eventually entrusted to Chalabi, who predictably took the purge to draconian levels and further inflamed the Sunni-based insurgency.

That may be why Franks, the top U.S. commander of the Iraq war, wrote in his autobiography that Feith was "getting a reputation around here as the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet."

"Why de-Baathification was handed to Chalabi was one of the great mysteries to all of us, because it was absolutely the wrong thing to do," said a senior active-duty general who was in Iraq at the time.

"Chalabi had a vested interest in the total elimination of the Baathist structure in Iraq as a way of clearing the political field."

"To say that his de-Baathification efforts undercut our attempts to bring the Sunnis into the political process would be an understatement."

No New Iraqi Army

If U.S. military commanders in Iraq were outraged at the formal dissolution of the Iraqi army, they were absolutely confounded by the CPA's noted lack of urgency in training a force to take its place.

Because Saddam had used the Republican Guard to keep his boot on the necks of the Iraqi people, Bremer believed that any new army should have only external security responsibilities -- guarding borders and the like.

With the old Iraqi army formally dissolved, no new one on the horizon, and growing signs of an organized insurgency by fall 2003, however, U.S. commanders viewed that plan as sentencing U.S. troops to indefinite service in Iraq.

U.S. commanders in Iraq understood better than most that raising an army from scratch was a mammoth enterprise likely to take years.

In the end, they won approval to create a small number of "Iraqi National Guard" battalions, but the training and equipping of even these units had to come out of the hides of coalition forces in Iraq, already stretched thin.

A year after the invasion, there were not enough personal weapons for even the new Iraqi National Guard battalions.

Meanwhile, Bremer assigned responsibility for overseeing creation of the New Iraqi Army to a civilian on his staff, Walter Slocombe, who announced the rather modest first-year objective of forming a single army division of roughly 12,000 troops.

Even that effort, according to U.S. military commanders, was plagued by chronic underfunding and a lack of adequate manpower, resources, and high-level attention.

"History will have to sort out the pros and cons of disbanding the Iraqi army, but even proponents of the idea understood that you would have to immediately devote a lot of resources and manpower to replacing it, and the fact that never happened is a damning indictment of Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership," retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who led the initial effort to create a New Iraqi Army, told National Journal.

"Instead, I fell in on a staff of five guys borrowed from Central Command's staff, and we were supposed to build an army for a country of 27 million people."

"And I never did get the people and money that were promised to execute the mission, and that same lack of urgency persists even today."

When some of the Iraqi National Guard battalions and units of the New Iraqi Army were thrown into battle in the simultaneous Sunni and Shiite uprisings in spring 2004 -- what Bremer called "the most critical crisis of the occupation" -- most of the poorly trained and ill-equipped Iraqis went AWOL or refused to fight.

That left the mission of quelling the uprisings to U.S. forces in Iraq.

At the time, those forces included one of Paul Eaton's two sons in uniform.

"Some people have criticized my comments as counterproductive to the war effort, but with two children in uniform this is very personal for me," said Eaton, who called for Rumsfeld's resignation in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

"I looked at the terrible path Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has led us down, and I thought two and a half more years of that leadership was too long for my nation, for my Army, and for my family."

Alienating Allies

From the beginning, the Rumsfeld team viewed NATO and other venerable U.S. alliances in a suspect light.

A multilateral alliance might be useful for nation-building operations in the Balkans and for keeping the peace in Europe, but such mundane missions held no allure for the Rumsfeld reformers.

Certainly in terms of combat, OSD viewed such alliances as too much of a constraint on its vision of transformational warfare.

This opinion comported with some air-power advocates in uniform who derided the "war by committee" character of NATO's 1999 campaign in Kosovo.

So when NATO proudly invoked its collective defense clause for the first time in history to come to America's aid after the 9/11 attacks, allied nations were stunned by the Pentagon's reply of "thanks, but no thanks."

As Rumsfeld memorably told NATO members when the U.S. set out unilaterally to topple the Taliban and take the fight to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, "The mission will define the coalition."

Even when that mission entailed invading and occupying a country of 27 million people, however, OSD seemed remarkably cavalier about the need for a broad coalition.

Rumsfeld infuriated European allies when he responded to German and French reluctance to invade Iraq by rhetorically dividing the Continent into "old Europe" and "new Europe."

Wolfowitz's suggestion that the Turkish military should help overcome civilian resistance there to the war upset many civilians in the Ankara government, which eventually denied a U.S. request to launch a northern front in Iraq from Turkish territory.

After Saddam's regime fell, the Pentagon further alienated allies by suggesting that French and German contractors would be barred from the anticipated spoils of Iraqi reconstruction.

Did the Pentagon's incursions into prewar diplomacy help alienate venerable U.S. allies?

One person who thought so was the official frequently tasked with trying to mend those frayed relations.

"Terms like 'old Europe' didn't exactly have a confidence-building effect, and clearly helped turn public opinion in Europe against us," former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the German magazine Stern in an interview last year.

Although the Bush administration eventually cobbled together a coalition of some 30 nations in Iraq, the generals have always understood that their support from allies is a mile wide and an inch deep.

The lack of allied help denied them the much-desired northern front during the invasion, cost them a multinational division planned for fall 2003, and left them without the legitimacy that major Arab allies might have bestowed on a genuine coalition operation.

Several key allies have announced plans to pull their forces out of Iraq this year.

Perhaps most important, polls taken before the war clearly showed that the American public would have been much more supportive of the war if the U.S. were perceived as being part of a broad coalition.

None of that would have mattered if OSD's optimistic assumptions going into Iraq -- that U.S. forces would be viewed overwhelmingly and lastingly as liberators, that the basic structures of government would remain intact, that Iraqi oil would pay for the country's reconstruction, that democratic reforms could surmount long-standing ethnic divisions -- had proven true.

But because those assumptions proved wrong, and with the U.S. military entering its fourth year in Iraq, that lack of broad and deep support at home and abroad matters a lot.

"I have nothing personal against Rumsfeld; I've never even met him," said Zinni, who has a son in uniform serving in Afghanistan.

"But how can we change course, move forward, and win allies back to our cause when the same person who put us on this disastrous path and burned those allies in the past is still at the helm, saying nothing has changed and no mistakes have been made?"

"I just don't think you can be open to new ideas and courses of action if you have a vested interest in constantly defending old decisions."

Not Fading Away

Rumsfeld is reportedly worried that the revolt of the generals has weakened the principle of civilian control of the military, and in that concern he has much company.

Whatever blame Rumsfeld shares for a civil-military relationship in tatters, the active-duty and retired flag officers who have rushed to his defense recognize that their comrades have violated an important tradition.

One reason that the U.S. military consistently polls as the most respected institution in America is that it's viewed as being above politics.

In particular, the Joint Chiefs, hand-picked by Rumsfeld, understand the implied criticism in the generals' writ against their boss: that the chiefs have too often acted as "yes men," insulating Rumsfeld in an echo chamber.

"I haven't noticed any shrinking lilies among the Joint Chiefs, and we all understand our responsibility to state our advice, and for the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] to take that advice to the secretary of Defense and the president," Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said recently to defense reporters.

"That doesn't mean our bosses always agree with our advice," he said.

"At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: Is a decision legal, ethical, and can I live with the consequences?"

"If you can't, then you do have a responsibility to do something about it; but in my opinion, you should do it while still in uniform."

"If you've gone through the debate and lived with the decision, I think it's inappropriate to go around cleansing your conscience in public after the fact."

"I certainly don't want civil authorities distrusting military advice because they're worried about what someone is going to say publicly down the road."

By tradition, old soldiers who can no longer in good conscience obey their civilian masters are supposed to state their case in private, offer their resignation, and then quietly fade away.

Air Force Chief of Staff Ron Fogleman did that in 1997 over disagreement with the Clinton administration's military drawdown and OSD's disciplining of one of his generals over the Khobar Towers terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia.

Despite being treated shabbily, Shinseki in retirement has largely declined to publicly criticize Rumsfeld.

Ever the old soldier, Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has refused to directly criticize Rumsfeld and Cheney for their largely successful efforts to marginalize him in the Iraq debate.

Especially for the post-Vietnam generations of officers, however, this burden of silence weighs uneasily.

Nearly all of them have read Dereliction of Duty, a seminal book by Army Col. H.R. McMaster, published in 1997, that was once on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs' required reading list.

In it, McMaster excoriates the Vietnam-era Joint Chiefs and other senior military leaders for not speaking out more forcefully against misguided policies that many in uniform believed cost them a war and the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers.

President Johnson's "plan of deception depended on the tacit approval or silence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," McMaster wrote.

"LBJ had misrepresented the mission of U.S. ground forces in Vietnam, distorted the views of the chiefs to lend credibility to his decision against mobilization, grossly understated the numbers of troops General [William] Westmoreland had requested, and lied to the Congress about the monetary cost of actions already approved and of those awaiting final decision ...."

"The 'five silent men' on the Joint Chiefs made possible the way the United States went to war in Vietnam."

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey was one of the most decorated combat veterans of Vietnam and a division commander in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"You know, when people ask me whether Secretary Rumsfeld should resign, I tell them it would be inappropriate for me to comment on such a personal matter, but I will provide my objective view on some of his policies that have gotten this country and our military into serious trouble," he told National Journal.

"I still think our national leadership has the unquestioned loyalty of our senior military leaders in uniform."

"These retired generals who are speaking out, however, I view as combat veterans with the full rights of U.S. citizens to talk about the security challenges they see facing the country."

For the Vietnam generation of officers and those who mentored at their shoulder, the quintessential model of a leader struggling with the dilemma of divided loyalties is not Gen. George Catlett Marshall, but rather Gen. Edward (Shy) Meyer.

Given that the Senate Armed Services Committee recently announced possible hearings on the matter of Rumsfeld v. the Generals, his case is worth contemplating.

In the spring of 1980, the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan, U.S. diplomats were still being held hostage in Iran, and the U.S. military was reeling from a post-Vietnam decade of poor morale and defense cutbacks.

As Army chief of staff, Meyer knew that speaking out publicly on that sorry state of affairs would be viewed as an act of disloyalty by his civilian bosses in the Pentagon and by President Carter, who was entering a difficult re-election campaign.

A veteran of Vietnam, Meyer was also mindful that the United States military was nearly unique in taking its oath of allegiance not to an individual leader, political party, or monarch, but rather to the principles and ideals in the Constitution.

The Constitution prescribed not only civilian control of the military but also a separation of powers, establishing the president as commander-in-chief but giving Congress the responsibility for the raising of armies.

So when members of Congress asked the general in public testimony about the state of their army, Meyer told them that the United States had a "hollow Army."

Pointedly, Meyer did not directly criticize the commander-in-chief or call for the resignation of the secretary of Defense.

He privately offered his own resignation.

It was not accepted.

When the secretary of the Army, his civilian boss, demanded that Meyer rescind his comments about a "hollow Army," however, he flatly refused.

Gen. Shy Meyer just told the truth and trusted in the Constitution.

The American people did the rest.

The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

Editorial

Harper's Weekly, August 24, 1867

After Congress adjourned, President Johnson suspended Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and directed General Grant to take charge of the War Department ad interim.

This riled Congress and stirred up impeachment talk once again, but he still had not committed an overt violation of the Tenure of Office Act.

In January 1868, the Senate passed a resolution reinstating Stanton as Secretary of War.

Grant surrendered his ad interim office to Stanton, and Johnson was left with another congressional move to stalemate him.

THE SECRETARY OF WAR

If the request of the President to Mr. Stanton that he would resign the Secretaryship of War means that he is about undertaking to change all the military personnel under the Reconstruction bill, substituting men like Steedman and Rousseau for Sheridan and Schofield and Sickles, the deluge will not be after Mr. Johnson, but upon him.

We do not believe that the country will submit to such a plain paralysis of its purpose.

The services of Mr. Stanton to this country are incalculable.

It is not easy to conceive of a more efficient Secretary of War at a time when that office was of the very highest importance.

The faults which were popularly ascribed to the Secretary, his abruptness, his brusqueness, were often merely a necessary decision and rapidity of action.

A man in such an office at such a time may be pardoned if he does not stop to make bows, and if he speaks too crisply for common courtesy.

Coming into the War Department at a time when the headquarters of General George B. M’Clellan were fast becoming the head bureau of the Government, and when even the President went to the General, instead of requiring the General to come to him, the Secretary of War taught General M’Clellan that the President was to be respected as his Commander-in-Chief.

Mr. Stanton was never deceived in the character or the capacity of General M’Clellan.

The Secretary’s comprehensive grasp of the vast duties of his office, his unquailing energy, his exhaustless industry, his silent fidelity, were no less remarkable than his heroic faith in the people and his inflexible determination that the war should be fought to an unconditional overthrow of the rebellion.

When that result was almost accomplished he instantly repudiated the immense error of General Sherman; and when President Lincoln was murdered, and there was a moment of inexpressible confusion, it was the steady hand of the Secretary of War which seized the government and passed it to Mr. Lincoln’s lawful successor.

During the melancholy and humiliating administration of Mr. Johnson, which has sought in every way to defeat the national victory and to demoralize the national mind, Mr. Stanton has tenaciously clung to the real issue, and he alone in the Cabinet has represented the national conviction and the national purpose.

He, therefore, has been the especial object of the President’s hostility, and after a thousand rumors of his designed or attempted removal the President has at last formally summoned him to resign.

Mr. Stanton’s retirement would be a national misfortune.

Upon the part of the President it would be another impotent blow at the purpose of the country, which he can not change.

But if, as we said, he should go further, and by appointing his own creatures show an evident intention to defeat the objects sought by the Reconstruction bill, he would be hoist with his own petard.

http://www.impeach-andrewjohnson.com/08Ove...ngress/v-11.htm

And speaking of the reasons the REAL MACHO MEN ...

Like to go "off to war" ....

In foreign countries ...

Where the people have no rights ...

Because unlike us ...

They are not Americans ...

We have ....

"Peacekeepers, teachers prey on Liberia girls: report"

By Alphonso Toweh

Mon May 8, 1:10 PM ET

MONROVIA (Reuters) - UN peacekeepers, aid workers and teachers are having sex with Liberian girls as young as 8 in return for money, food or favors, threatening efforts to rebuild a nation wrecked by war, a report said on Monday.

Save the Children UK said an alarming number of girls were being sexually exploited by men in authority in refugee camps and in the wider community, sometimes for as little as a bottle of beer, a ride in an aid vehicle or watching a film.

"This cannot continue," Save the Children UK Chief Executive Jasmine Whitbread said.

"Men who use positions of power to take advantage of vulnerable children must be reported and fired."

"More must be done to support children and their families to make a living without turning to this kind of desperation."

The 20-page document said local people reported sexual exploitation by peacekeepers in every location where a contingent of the UNMIL peacekeeping force was stationed, highlighting the continuing problem of sex abuse by UN forces.

Allegations of sexual misconduct have dogged UN operations in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the world body has accused members of its biggest peacekeeping force of rape, pedophilia and giving children food or money in return for sex.

The UN force in Liberia said in a statement eight cases of sexual exploitation and abuse involving UN personnel had been reported since the start of 2006.

One of those had been substantiated and the member of staff suspended.

"We are appalled with any activity, the sexual exploitation or abuse by aid workers, be they international or Liberian."

"It's unacceptable behavior," Jordan Ryan, UN humanitarian coordinator in Liberia, told BBC radio from Monrovia.

Save the Children urged Liberia's new government, UN agencies and donors to set up a government-led ombudsman office to ensure sex abuse allegations are investigated.

Countries which contribute troops to the UN force should also ensure soldiers who sexually exploited children are charged and those found guilty removed from the force, it said.

The report highlighted the relationship between food aid, poverty and sex, in particular accusations that some men involved in distributing food rations demanded sex in return.

"The World Food Programme (WFP) together with the other UN agencies will obviously be looking into these allegations very seriously because obviously we have zero tolerance for any sexual exploitation," WFP spokeswoman Caroline Hurford told Reuters TV in Rome.

"MAN BUSINESS"

Liberian society has been shattered by a 1989-2003 civil war which caused an estimated 250,000 deaths in a country of barely 3 million people, forcing around 1.3 million people from their homes into camps around the capital Monrovia or abroad.

Elections late last year saw Harvard-trained former World Bank economist Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf voted in as president, but her government faces a massive task to rebuild an economy and society torn apart by years of bloodshed.

The report's compilers spoke to more than 300 people in camps for displaced people and communities where people had recently returned to their pre-war localities.

"All of the respondents clearly stated that they felt that the scale of the problem affected over half of the girls in their locations," it said, adding aid workers, teachers, camp and government employees, policemen and soldiers were involved.

"The girls reportedly ranged in age from 8 to 18 years, with girls of 12 years and upwards identified as being regularly involved in 'selling sex'," it said.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Thomson in Dakar, Tim Castle in London and Cristiano Corvio in Rome)

end quotes]

Yes, indeed, Snuf ....

It sure is Saigon ....

All over again ....

And so ...

WHAT DOES REALLY EVER CHANGE?

And speaking of alleged "MILITARY INTELLIGENCE" .....

In this day and age ...

Of BUSH THE SMALLER ....

Who is the son ....

Of BUSH THE BIGGER ....

We have ...

From page 300 ....

Of the book CRUSADE ....

About BIG BUSH'S WAR in Iraq ....

By Rick Atkinson .....

As follows:

"As in Viet Nam and eventually in Korea, the PERSIAN GULF WAR (BIG BUSH'S WAR) would be fought for relatively modest objectives."

"Unlike those earlier wars, the objectives in the gulf were plainly stated and rigidly maintained."

"BUSH (BIG BUSH) AND HIS MEN CONCLUDED THAT THE EXCESSIVE PRICE OF TOTAL VICTORY WOULD BE INDEFINITE RESPONSIBILITY FOR REBUILDING A HOSTILE NATION WITH NO TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY BUT WITH IMMENSELY COMPLEX INTERNAL POLITICS."

"THIS WAS - AND REMAINS IN RETROSPECT - A SENSIBLE STRATEGIC CALCULATION."

BIG BUSH'S "men", then, of course, included Richard Bruce Cheney, who now calls himself, appropriately, just plain DICK, as SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, the job that RUMMY is holding now, and failing miserably at, and this Paul Wolfowitz character, who then was Richard Bruce Cheney's MAIN MAN .....

And Colin Powell .....

And so ...

BEFORE THEY WERE FOR IT .....

The invasion of IRAQ ...

And the deposing of Saddam ....

At whose feet, Donny Rumsfeld once fawned, calling him, in alleged "tones of affection", or endearment .....

"MR. PRESIDENT" .....

What are now the FABULOUS FLYING BUSHCOS .....

WERE AGAINST IT .....

And so ...

Talk about FLIP-FLOPS .....

If you will ...

To me .....

This one takes the cake ...

And so ...

WHO THE HELL IS GEORGE W. BUSH ....

And the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ....

To call anyone here in OUR America ...

A "flip-flopper" ....

When history clearly demonstrates ...

That the BUSHCOS are the real American CHAMPIONS at that art ....

Here in OUR America ...

And so ....

Send the BUSH-LEAGUE BUSHCOS back to Podunk .....

Would seem to be the message that emerges from all of this ...

And so ....

"5 issues redraw playing field for Election 2006"

By Susan Page, USA TODAY
Tue May 9, 7:09 AM ET

All politics is local.

Except when it's not.

Republicans have counted on financial advantage, redrawn district lines and the power of parochial issues and constituent services to hold narrow majorities in Congress since they won control 12 years ago.

A handful of issues is shaping the landscape for competitive contests nationwide, driving down the standing of President Bush and Congress and creating formidable hurdles for the GOP.

Democrats are banking that unhappiness over the Iraq war - plus record gas prices, divisions over immigration, snags in Medicare's new prescription-drug benefit and corruption - will make this election a referendum on the president and the direction of the country.

In a sign of Republican travails, Bush's approval rating fell to a record-low 31% in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday.

"At this moment, it doesn't look like the Republican Party can dig out of this hole," veteran Republican pollster Lance Tarrance says.

"You have a mosaic of things coming together, and that creates challenges," says former House speaker Newt Gingrich, architect of the GOP takeover in 1994.

He questions, though, whether Democrats led by such liberals as national Chairman Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, and House leader Nancy Pelosi of California can seal the deal with voters.

"It's not guaranteed that the Democrats will be able to sell a contract with Vermont and San Francisco," he says, a reference to the "Contract With America" that Republicans employed in 1994.

During the past three decades, three elections have taken place in a similar environment: One party controlling the White House and Congress, and both branches of government getting low approval ratings.

In those elections, the party in power lost 15 House seats in 1978, 34 seats in 1980 and 54 seats in 1994.

Democrats need to pick up 15 seats in November to regain control of the House, six seats for the Senate.

Pelosi is confident enough that she's begun discussing the Democrats' agenda for their first week in power, from raising the minimum wage to reinstating deficit controls.

Winning either chamber would enable the opposition party to more aggressively challenge Bush's proposals, scrutinize his appointments and launch investigations.

"I think of it as a 'mood' election or a 'wave' election," says analyst Amy Walter of the non-partisan Cook Political Report.

That's "wave" as in "tidal wave."

They happen about once a decade and are almost always bad news for the people in power.

And now ...

For something completely different ...

Just because .....

I need to get as far away from politics ...

As I can ...

For at least a moment ....

Just to get some "clean air" to breathe ....

And so ....

We have ....

"Climate Change, Not Humans, Killed Large Beasts"

Bjorn Carey, LiveScience Staff Writer, LiveScience.com

Wed May 10, 2:00 PM ET

Failure to adapt to a drastically changing climate, and not overkill by humans or disease, most likely lead to the extinction of mammoths, wild horses, and other large mammals after the last Ice Age, a new study suggests.

But this fresh take on an old argument might not be the final word.

Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska has added 600 radiocarbon-dated fossils to the established collection, and his examination reveals that mammoths and wild horses were in serious decline before humans arrived on the scene in Alaska and the Yukon Territory.

Like the end of the dinosaurs, the topic of large mammal extinctions is a hot one.

While the new results might be true of the far North, some researchers still believe over-hunting contributed to the demise of the beasts across the rest of the continent.

The study, which also analyzed the fossil record of bison, elk, moose, and humans in the far North between 18,000 and 9,000 years ago, is published in the May 11th issue of the journal Nature.

Pushed to the brink

It's generally accepted that humans first entered North America from Siberia around 12,000 years ago.

Since mammoths and wild horses became extinct roughly 11,500 and 12,500 years ago, some scientists have figured that hungry humans might have hunted them into oblivion.

"The old idea, that I once had, was that these animals were killed off and then the modern large mammals expanded and took their place," Guthrie said.

According to Guthrie's new data, however, bison and elk populations were doing well during this period, and those species had expanded dramatically long before other species went extinct.

So why weren't bison and elk over-hunted to extinction as well?

Interestingly, the fossil record shows the two beasts were hunted more vigorously, yet they endured.

"I imagine humans were hunting anything they could get," Guthrie said.

"Horse meat is probably just as tasty as bison."

"But their campsites don’t show many mammoth and horse remains—they're full of bison and elk."

Guthrie's interpretation of the fossil record is that something else pushed mammoths and horses to the brink, and if humans did play a role in the extinctions, it was limited to just killing stragglers.

The fossil record also casts doubt on the possibility of a mega-disease that wiped out animals across the board, Guthrie said.

A deadly disease would create a distinct end for each species, which isn't reflected in the fossils.

Also, diseases that infect and kill multiple species are extremely rare, and unlikely in this case since bison, elk, and moose weren't affected.

So what happened up North?

The period between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago was a great transitional time for the far North.

Although scientists don't know exactly what happened during this period, they can tell certain things from the geologic and fossil record.

"We know that animals' body size changed, there was a mass extinction, temperature changes, and humans came in," Guthrie said.

"A lot of animals, such as bison, didn't do real well before that time."

"Then they really prospered for a while and didn't do real well after that."

Before 13,000 years ago, the food available in the region was mostly short, dry grass of little nutritional value, Guthrie said.

Then, as the Alaska and the Yukon warmed up, and water returned to the land, the dry grass was replaced with tall lush grass and bush—the type of plants grazers like elk and bison prosper on.

"Long before horses and mammoths became extinct, bison and elk began to expand," Guthrie said.

"The only good way to account for that expansion would be the availability of a more abundant and nutritious food source."

But as the region continued to warm and received more rain, the plants kept growing.

Boreal forest—which includes inedible trees such as pine, spruce, and birch—began sprouting and limited the amount of grassy areas for grazing.

Bison and elk populations decreased with this transformation, but, Guthrie said, they adapted to the habitat change and out-competed mammoths and horses for the remaining food.

"Humans were probably hunting some of the animals that went extinct, but 1,000 years after humans came in, [bison and elk] were still doing fine," Guthrie said.

Continental overkill?

David Steadman, a researcher at the University of Florida who believes humans drove the giant sloth to extinction, agrees that encroaching boreal forest may have been the end for large mammals in the North.

But what about across the rest of the continent?

"It's a great piece of evidence—I don't doubt it; I trust his data," Steadman told LiveScience.

"What happened in Alaska and the Yukon is swell, but why did these things die out in Texas and Mexico and Arizona and Florida?"

Like many researchers in the field, Steadman attributes a combination of factors to the extinction of these beasts.

But he believes humans, and not climate, played the leading role throughout the New World.

"There are so many things going on, and to me it's illogical to think that warming up and getting rid of ice sheets at 40 degrees latitude is a bad thing for large mammals," Steadman said.

"They went through 20 glacial cycles in the last million years, and got through every one except for the last one."

"It has a certain odor to it, and that odor is of humans."

And while scientists ponder what really did happen to the mastodons ...

And mammoths .....

And such ....

America needs to ponder ....

Exactly how many more Bush presidents it can stand ...

Before it too becomes extinct .....

And so ....

"A 3rd President Bush? First 2 all for it"

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:36 a.m., Thursday, May 11, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Could there be a third President Bush?

The current chief said Wednesday that younger brother Jeb would make a great one, too, and has asked him about making a run.

The first President Bush likes the idea as well.

Jeb Bush, the Republican governor of Florida, has one asset that his presidential brother doesn't right now -- approval from most of his constituents.

While George W. Bush's approval ratings are in the low 30s, some 55 percent of Florida voters surveyed last month by Quinnipiac University said Jeb was doing a good job.

The governor has repeatedly said he won't be a candidate for president in 2008, but that doesn't stop his family from encouraging him to go for it some day.

"I would like to see Jeb run at some point in time, but I have no idea if that's his intention or not," the president said in an interview with Florida reporters, according to an account on the St. Petersburg Times Web site.

He said his brother would make "a great president" and that he had "pushed him fairly hard about what he intends to do."

"I truly don't think he knows," Bush said.

Jeb Bush, 53, will end his second term as governor in January.

His brother George ends his second presidential term in January 2009.

Neither can seek re-election because of term limits.

The governor got the buildup from his brother on the same day that he got some bad news out of Tallahassee.

Florida House Speaker Allan Bense said Wednesday that despite personal appeals from the governor, he will not challenge Rep. Katherine Harris for the party's nomination for U.S. Senate.

Jeb Bush has said he doesn't think Harris, the former secretary of state famous for her role in the 2000 Florida recount that clinched George Bush's presidential bid, can win the seat.

The Bush name could hurt as well as help in national politics right now.

But because of that familiar name and family connections throughout the country, Jeb Bush has the luxury of being able to wait and decide if he wants to run while other candidates have to get to work early.

"Right off the bat, if he decided to run, he's got the advantage over many of the others who might be contenders," said Republican political consultant Rich Galen, who has known the family since George H.W. Bush was vice president.

"He doesn't have to establish his name."

"He's got it."

And, Galen points out, Jeb Bush has dealt with a lot of high-profile issues including hurricanes, immigration and sprawling development in one of the most important political states.

His own father says no one believes him when he says he's not interested in running at some point.

Former President Bush told CNN's "Larry King Live" last year that he would like Jeb to run one day and that the son would be "awfully good" as president.

The Florida governor laughed when asked about his father's comments last June and said, "Oh, Lord."

He simply shook his head no when asked if he was running.

The brothers Bush appeared together Tuesday during the president's visit to the Tampa area.

Gov. Bush was waiting on the tarmac when Air Force One arrived and greeted the president with a politician's handshake and "Welcome to Florida."

The president brushed aside the formality and playfully adjusted his younger brother's necktie.

Jeb Bush introduced his brother at a retirement community in Sun City Center.

They had a private lunch together with political supporters, then visited a fire station and appeared together before television cameras to express concern about wildfires that were blazing across the state.

The governor was not with the president during his visit to The Puerto Rican Club of Central Florida in Orlando Wednesday -- George W. Bush's final stop on a three-day trip to the state.

But the president was sure his brother still got some attention.

"Yesterday I checked in with my brother," President Bush said as he took the stage.

"Make sure everything's going all right."

"I'm real proud of Jeb."

"He's a good, decent man and I love him dearly."

------

On the Net:

http://www.whitehouse.gov

Politics ...

The DANCE .....

SMOKE ...

MIRRORS ...

BUT ...

Generally ...

No real substance .....

And so ....

The DANCE .....

"Heat turned up on reform - Advocates of change gather at Capitol to try to reignite movement as next round of state elections approaches"

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

First published: Wednesday, May 10, 2006

ALBANY -- Government reform advocates gathered at the Capitol Tuesday in hopes of reigniting a movement that burned hot when legislators were up for re-election two years ago, but has cooled as the next round of state-level contests approaches.

After being dubbed the nation's most dysfunctional state legislature in 2004 and seeing several incumbent lawmakers lose their seats that fall -- a near-unheard-of phenomenon at the Capitol -- state leaders passed two on-time budgets in a row.

Since then, the issue of reform has largely moved onto Albany's back burner.

"Where is reform?"

"What happened to reform?" Senate Minority Leader David Paterson, D-Harlem, the running mate of Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Eliot Spitzer, asked advocates who gathered at The Egg's Hart Lounge before they fanned out to lobby legislators in honor of "Reform Day."

Paterson later said legislative redistricting should be done by an independent nonpartisan committee, rather than legislators, to make elections more competitive.

"Now this is the real reform, not passing a budget on time in 2005 and calling that reform," Paterson said.

"That's not a reform."

"It's a mandate."

"They wrote that in the Constitution."

Reform supporters say there is much left to do, including revamping campaign finance laws, allowing same-day voter registration and closing ethics law loopholes.

But the bills that would accomplish such things are bottled up in legislative committees, and so far show no sign of moving toward passage this year.

Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, the underdog Democratic gubernatorial candidate, made the day's most radical proposal.

He called for the ouster of Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, saying "they have failed to fight for the reforms that we seek."

Suozzi, the only gubernatorial candidate to speak at Reform Day, said rank-and-file legislators are too afraid of losing member items, stipends and other perks that leaders control to truly represent their constituents in Albany.

He said advocates should target one incumbent majority member in each house who is not working for reform every election cycle.

Suozzi angered fellow Democrats when he created a political action committee, FixAlbany.com, that supported several challengers who ousted incumbent majority members in the Assembly and Senate in 2004.

Suozzi, who has postured himself as a political outsider, said if voters elect him it will be "a clear message that there needs to be dramatic change in Albany."

He questioned Spitzer's ability to change Albany when he has been endorsed by most Democratic state legislators and a host of special interests, from labor unions to environmental groups.

Spitzer, the state attorney general, was on a fund-raising trip in California Tuesday.

His campaign spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, did not respond directly to Suozzi's call for new leadership in the Legislature, but said "nothing will ever change" if the focus is on individuals and not the system itself.

"To renew people's faith in government, we desperately need independent leadership that's not afraid to fight friend and foe alike to bring about real change that puts money back in taxpayers' pockets," Anderson said.

Silver, who is supporting Spitzer for governor and has long been at odds with Suozzi, said the county executive's comments were motivated by political desperation.

"He's getting nowhere in the polls," Silver said after addressing the Reform Day participants.

"He spent millions of dollars, and he's now found that maybe you'll pay attention to him and some people will pay attention to him if he says things out of desperation."

Bruno's reaction was similar, albeit slightly more muted.

"He's got his problems," Bruno said of Suozzi.

"His problems are he's hardly getting any traction."

"So, you know, he's making news in whatever ways he can."

"That's his prerogative."

The two Republican candidates for governor -- former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld and former Assembly Minority Leader John Faso -- said scheduling conflicts prevented them from attending Reform Day in Albany.

Faso sent a letter outlining some of his reform positions, with a focus on fiscal responsibility.

Neither Spitzer nor Weld sent a letter, which Reform Day organizers had requested, but author Malachy McCourt, who is seeking the Green Party nomination for governor, did.

McCourt proposed eliminating the state Board of Elections and Ethics Commission and replacing them with a nonpartisan commission whose members would be selected by a panel of state judges and political party representatives.

Blair Horner, lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group, which helped organize Reform Day, said determining where the gubernatorial candidates stand on government reform is crucial.

"The new governor will have the opportunity to drive real reform," Horner said.

"He will set the ethical tone for Albany."

And this following is a sign of the times, perhaps ....

As the news becomes more and more available over the internet .....

And up here ...

There is also what I call a "WORTHLESSNESS" factor as well .....

Where the rags that are called newspapers up here ...

Aren't worth the paper they are printed on ...

Especially the Troy RECORD ...

Although I do have to say ...

That to improve its sales ...

The Troy RECORD people ...

Changed the size of their "newspaper" .....

So that it now more easily fits .....

Into the bottom of a cat litter box ...

And so ....

That's something, anyway ....

"Circulation decline continues at newspapers - Of region's dailies, only Saratogian saw gains in daily and Sunday numbers"

By KEVIN HARLIN, Business writer, Albany, New York Times Union ....

First published: Tuesday, May 9, 2006

ALBANY -- Daily newspaper circulation continued to erode in the Capital Region, led by a 2.7 percent weekday drop from a year earlier at the region's largest paper, the Times Union, new data released Monday show.

The declines mirror circulation losses across the country as readers increasingly go online for news.

The Times Union's Monday-through-Friday circulation averaged 98,501 in the six-month period that ended in March, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which tracks the numbers for advertisers.

The paper's Sunday circulation declined 4.4 percent to 133,787 copies.

The Daily Gazette of Schenectady saw weekday circulation dip 0.38 percent, to 48,089.

Its Sunday edition fell 0.71 percent, to 49,449.

Only The Saratogian in Saratoga Springs reported slight gains in daily and Sunday circulation.

Five other area dailies reported weekday losses while two -- the Register-Star in Hudson and the Daily Mail of Catskill -- posted slight gains on Sunday.

Nationwide, circulation dropped 2.5 percent daily and 3.1 percent on Sunday, according to the Newspaper Association of America, which analyzed the ABC figures.

Times Union Publisher Mark E. Aldam said much of the paper's decline came from single-copy sales as the paper focuses more on selling subscriptions.

And some of Sunday's reductions were from wholesale distribution deals the paper discontinued in outlying areas, such as downstate and parts of Vermont and Massachusetts, he said.

He predicted the next ABC audit would show improvements in individual days, such as Thursday and Friday -- key times for advertisers hoping to influence weekend spending decisions.

"We're clearly focused on home-delivery, subscriber-paid circulation as our priority," Aldam said.

Diane Kennedy, president of New York Newspaper Publishers Association, an Albany-based trade group representing daily newspapers, said paid circulation figures are an unfair measure because readers going to newspaper Web sites are typically uncounted.

The Newspaper Association of America said Monday that newspaper-run Web sites had an 8 percent increase in viewers in the first quarter.

The data from Nielsen/NetRatings found that newspaper Web sites averaged 56 million users in the period, or 37 percent of all online users.

According to Audit Bureau data, Gannett Co.'s USA Today remained the top-selling newspaper with 2.27 million copies, up 0.09 percent from the same period a year ago, while The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., was second at 2.05 million, down 1 percent.

Harlin can be reached at 454-5442 or by e-mail at kharlin@timesunion.com.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Daughty/printerfr...may102006p.html

Doing Exactly What They Said They Would Do

By Richard Daughty
"The Mogambo Guru"

May 10, 2006

www.dailyreckoning.com


- The Federal Reserve is still increasing Total Fed Credit, which increases credit in the banks, which increases loans, which increases the money supply, which increases prices, which increases my wailing and crying about how we are all freaking doomed by inflation, and last week they increased it by only another $3 billion, which was used (apparently) to buy stocks and bonds. A quick look at the Repo market ("peep") shows that the Fed is providing money like crazy, and last Thursday there were more than $20 billion of Repos in one day! One day!

The foreign central banks are still plowing money into the US, and last week Custody Holdings of US Debt held at the Fed ballooned up another $8.2 billion, which seems to demonstrate a very, very low level of intellectual capacity, as the dollar lost about 7% of its value in the last month alone, socking them with nice losses! Hahaha!

Probably because of the huge amounts of credit and money being created by the world's central banks, I seem to notice more and more people referring to this massive and irresponsible "printing" of money as the beginning of a new Weimar era, which is itself a reference to the massive printing of money by post-WWI Germany and the utter economic devastation that resulted.

But this not about whether the rulers of the old Weimar Germany were buttheads (they were) or whether the rulers of America's economy are buttheads (they are) but about the horrible economic price that a nation pays for such irresponsible stupidity. And don't look to me for a solution, as there isn't one, because if there was a painless solution to this insane system of a fiat currency created by debt, then at least one other person in all of history would have thought of it already. And when you also allow banks to operate with zero reserves (and thus infinite multiplication of deposits), the absurdity of thinking that there is a solution becomes even more ludicrous. And when you further allow the massive increase in the size and cost of government, then asking for a solution becomes so ludicrous (the audience shouts out "How ludicrous, Mogambo?") I can do little but laugh hahahaha!

The sad, ugly truth (SUT) is that there is no way out of a devalued currency caused by a government printing up too much of it. That is why the Founding Fathers specifically wrote into the Constitution that money shall only be of silver and gold, because the government cannot print silver and gold, and this prevents the necessity of a "solution"!

A hand goes up in the front row. "So, if so," he says quizzically, "whither silver and gold in such a situation?" Well, instead of endless theoretical debate, that question can perhaps be answered more easily by seeing what happened in the last "Weimar" over-production of money and credit. And for that we owe thanks to Phil for the chart showing that in 1919 Weimar Germany you could sell (or buy) an ounce of gold for 170 Reichmarks. In 1923, a mere four years later, you got 87 trillion Reichmarks when you sold an ounce of gold. Nice investment there, in nominal terms! Of course, a Reichmark couldn't buy very much in 1923, as the money was devalued to essentially zero. But 87 trillion of them would buy you an ounce of gold!

As for silver, it went from 12 Reichmarks an ounce to, in the same four years, 543 billion Reichmarks. Nice investment from, again, a nominal standpoint!

- Judging by the tone of the panicky emails I have been getting recently, people other than I think that things are getting weird and inexplicable. Relatively predictable ratios are not making sense anymore, open interest is behaving weirdly, share prices and fundamentals are diverging, etc. etc. etc., resulting in more sense of unease, trending to frantic panic, and these poor, deluded people think that an idiot like me could possibly supply some explanation.

Well, it is my Tremendous Mogambo Pleasure (TMP) to announce that I actually DO have an answer for all of this current weirdness! And the reason I am so happy is that the answer is simplicity itself: The Federal Reserve is on record as saying that they will happily intervene in any market, at any time, with any level of participation, and that they have the legal authority to do it by virtue an Executive Order of the President of the USA! So the answer is easy, my Darling Mogambo Grasshoppers (DMG); the Federal Reserve (in cooperation with all the other central banks of the world who are in this thing up to their eyeballs) is doing exactly what they said they would do!

And why are they doing this? Because our creditors have us right where they want us, which is when they can dictate terms to us, because they have the power to destroy our economy with the flick of a finger. Yes, they would suffer, too. But they will not die, unlike our stupid, malignant economy composed primarily of the twin idiocies of financial services and massive government spending.

And with that kind of pure power, they can get otherwise-unattainable items, such as modern, up-to-the minute weapons and war technology that we paranoid, gold-bug, gun-nuts can't get from the Army-Navy Surplus store, and when we insist on Second Amendment grounds, they almost break their fingers dialing the FBI to "report" me.

This is not to mention, of course, their new ability to extort us to use our military muscle as hired goons, doing the dirty-work of some Asian Big Bosses (ABBs), primarily the Japanese and Chinese, who hold our economy in their hands by holding our debt in their hands.

And if you don't think that such slimy business is not being commonly done, more and more all the time, then let the Mocking And Scornful Laugh Of The Mogambo (MASLOTM) ring in your ears, my optimistic young ones! Hahahaha!

Even Bill Bonner at DailyReckoning.com seems to have has his finger on this pulse of rampant corruption when he writes " 'Cheney rebukes Russians,' the front page of today’s International Herald Tribune tells us. We had to a laugh. What’s his beef with the Russians? Get this. They’re using oil and gas as 'tools of intimidation and blackmail.' In other words, they’re using their resources to get what they want, just as America does with its trade policies and foreign aid." Hahaha! Exactly!

But to show you how out of touch Cheney is, it is not just Russia, but Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and others who are forming anti-bully, anti-American alliances, and they are using oil to hurt us back.

Now, let's also be sure and understand why Cheney uses the word "blackmail" which I assume he used correctly, as blackmail involves somebody knowing something nasty about something Cheney has illegally done, and now they are using it to extort money and cooperation.

And since we are talking about extortion by blackmail, let's not forget the warehouses full of incriminating evidence of felonious misdeeds of our politicians. And if you don't think that there is a lot of THAT going on in the world, then I am glad to meet you! This proves that you are one of the few people in the world (it seems) who are not blackmailing the poor, beleaguered Mogambo with copies of those embarrassing photos, showing him standing there with that stupid towel wrapped around him in the locker room while the Danish cheerleading squad is laughing and mocking him, which is, as I have previously explained, not the reaction I had expected, according to the graffiti I read on the men's room wall. So who's the real victim here?

So the Federal Reserve is intervening in the markets, and one of the ways to do that is to buy stock futures, and for them to then to tell the Wall Street houses, which is the other side of this trade, to buy stocks to cover their short position in futures, and for the Fed to buy some bond futures, and for them to then tell the Wall Street houses, which is the other side of this trade, to buy bonds to cover their short position in bond futures, too. This will keep stock prices high, keep bond prices high (and thus interest rates low), allow the Asian Big Bosses to make some more money on their hoard of American money, stocks and bonds, and let Wall Street make a nice pile of cash in the process, too.

And how much money are we talking about? Well, from 'Nihon Keizai', which is supposed to be Japan's leading economic newspaper, we learn that "Brazil, Russia, India and China, referred to as BRIC group that currently manifests the world's highest economic growth rate, have surpassed G7 countries in their forex /gold holdings for the first time in history.

"As of the end of March, the aggregate holdings of BRIC amounted to $1,292,200 million, according to estimates. As compared with the state of affairs in this respect as of the end of 2004, the forex/gold holdings of BRIC went up by 40 per cent.

"At the same time, the forex /gold reserves of G7 countries (Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, France, and Japan) amounted to $1,253,900 million."

So relax, maybe take a little time away from yelling at your hateful, brain-damaged children, and get some more gold and silver, or maybe add another comforting layer of protective armor to your own version of the Mogambo Bunker Of Screaming Panic (MBOSP), or maybe even holding a few Mogambo Family Emergency Response (MFER) drills, which actually boils down to making sure that they get to the bunker before I do, what with that unfortunate "Shoot first and ask questions later" policy, which I have been meaning to change, but never did. But, man, on the other hand, you should see them hustle their little fannies now!

And this meddling in the markets by the Federal Reserve has not gone unnoticed in the cosmos. You puny Earthlings don't know it, but most of the UFOs visiting Earth these days have bumper stickers that say "Glorb blaanga Earth!" which is difficult to translate into English, but is, surprisingly, a literal translation from an ancient Germanic-Nordic phrase "Grosse bigga dum auf dem Stupum kopfen glob glob globber" which means, again literally, "Big stupid mistake, diggers of mushrooms!"

- Alert reader Jerry D. writes that he eats a lot of oats, and that oats cost $1.58 per bucket for a couple of years, but "yesterday I paid $2.08 for them. That's roughly 25 percent on plain raw oats in less than 12 months from the same local grocer."

Perhaps it is the oats talking, but he also opines "I believe that there is no longer any nobility in any major government, and that a large network of collaborators are inching us toward Orwell's worst-case scenario." Exactly! And if that is any indication of the clear thinking that oats give you, then I am now a big fan of them, too!

And it is not just oats that are costing more, as we found out from alert reader Rebecca I., who says "I have definite proof I am personally experiencing inflation. I just received the breakdown of my benefits package and its costs. In 2004, the total cost was $15,731, as compared to 2005 when it was $17,469, for a total increase of 11%."

- For those of us who are dismayed at the decision by the Federal Reserve to no longer publish the M3 numbers, which is the broadest measure of the money supply, alert reader Tom McC. thinks like we do, but with a nautical bent. He says "I refer to the government's refusal to publish M3 statistics going forward as the Depth Gauge gambit, as it is akin to disconnecting the depth gauge as a means of combating flooding in a submarine."

- From the AP we get the headline "Ginsburg: Congress' Watchdog Plan 'Scary' " by Gina Holland. She reports that Sen. Charles Grassley said last week that "the judiciary wasn't doing enough policing of itself." Naturally, he has a plan. Ms. Holland writes "His plan would create an inspector general to oversee federal courts including the Supreme Court. The inspector general would be directed to report any judicial misconduct to the Justice Department."

Naturally, here comes Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, one of the most worthless of the Supreme Court judges, and Ms. Holland reports that that Ginsburg "told a gathering of the American Bar Association that lawyers should stick up for judges when they are criticized by congressional leaders." Hahaha! What chutzpah!

It's apparently okay with Ms. Ginsburg and her precious Supreme Court for the Congress and our idiotic President to ride roughshod over the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and to monitor, regulate and spy on every detail of every American's life, but she is aghast that she and her loathsome Supreme Court ilk should have to suffer the same indignities! She says that "My sense now is that the judiciary is under assault in a way that I haven't seen before." I agree, as we have never had a Supreme Court as so deserving of contempt before! Well, maybe back in 1933 when the Supreme Court let FDR ignore the Constitutional requirement that money will only be of silver and gold, which started us on the path to where we are today, a country bankrupted by a fiat currency.

But she doesn't mention her own calumny, but instead wails about how she was upset by "proposals by senior Republicans who want an inspector general to police judges' acceptance of free trips or their possible financial interests with groups that could appear before them." Hahaha! Now she has apparently found that the Constitution allows corruption by the Supreme Court! Hahaha!

- If you want to know the kind of idiocy that is being taught in upper-level economics these days, economics student Anna says that she spends her time taking "the second order partial derivatives of a generic Cobb-Douglas equation and then solving for the input equations in terms of the constants." Hahahaha! This is economics? Hahaha!

But this is the incredible stupidity that passes for economics these days, and then you wonder why I am always standing on the side of 49th Street, yelling at people in cars "Your money is doomed and you are doomed!"

- Perhaps as a result of gasoline being more expensive, as a result of oil being more expensive, as a result of the dollar becoming more worthless in terms of buying power, the Consumer Confidence indicator dropped to 67.1 in May, which was down a lot from April's 89.4 reading. People don't spend when they are not confident.

- Bob Wood, of KMA, was commenting on the jobs reports released last Friday, and specifically referred to the "birth/death model" that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to estimate the number of jobs created by new businesses (which are so new that the jobs created are not counted yet, including an estimate of the number of businesses that went under and whose employees are now looking for new jobs, even though they are still counted as "employed"). He writes, "Wow, another 138,000 new jobs, and only 271,000 of them are fake."

And, not content with the wry bon mot, he goes on to note that Table A-12 is "where we see that the unemployment rate is really 8.2%, not the 4.7% miracle engineered by the Bush team."

Perhaps this all squares with the government reporting the bad news of "Unit labor costs -- a key gauge of profit and price pressures monitored by the Federal Reserve for clues on wage inflation -- increased at a 2.5 percent annual pace." But the good news, I guess, is that when companies dump employee benefit programs, "Manufacturing unit labor costs actually declined, at a 2.6 percent annualized pace, after dropping at a 3.3 percent rate in the fourth quarter of last year, while compensation per hour advanced at the tepid rate of 1.5 percent."

Or maybe is has something to do with the news that, the Labor Department said new claims for state unemployment insurance benefits increased to 322,000 in the week ended April 29.

Or perhaps it was Ashraf Laidi writing the essay entitled "US Payrolls: Ominous Justification for Further Dollar Selling" and posted on SafeHaven.com. He sums it up as "It was the worst of both worlds (slower growth and rising inflationary threats)."

- Noting that illegal aliens who came sneaking across the border into the USA assert that they have somehow acquired "rights" in doing so, I am now finally able to solve the problem of the homeless in America! So the next time that the Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded, along with that million dollar prize that would come in real handy right now, I am sure to win with my Fabulous New Mogambo Plan To Eliminate Homelessness (FNMPTEH). In a nutshell, if you are homeless, merely find a house being occupied by illegal aliens, wait until they go to bed, sneak into their house and relax! When they wake up in the morning, merely tell them that you agree with them that illegal trespassers have "rights"! They will, I assume, be happy to immediately oblige, providing you with a nice breakfast, and free housing, food, medical care and education for as long as you live! The problem of homelessness is thus solved! In my notes, I see where I have written "Appear humble as the adoring crowd applauds in awe and gratitude."

- An interesting essay entitled "Bull in Bear's Skin?" by Antal E. Fekete, who is a Professor Emeritus at Memorial University of Newfoundland, has some tips for those of you who like techniques for timing markets, especially metals. He explains, "Basis is the name for the spread between the nearby futures price and the spot price. Backwardation is the market phenomenon whereby nearby futures are selling at a premium over the more distant. The normal condition for monetary metals is the opposite, contango, indicating that supply is plentiful. Backwardation in monetary metals is a foolproof indicator that supplies are getting tight. Its shrinking reveals that short selling is becoming counter-productive so that the shorts may be getting ready to cover. Conversely, the widening of the basis tells you that shortages may soon end, and the shorts are likely to start selling once more."

- On FinancialSense.com we read the essay "The Silent Dollar Crash & Parallel Investment Universe" by Econotech which notes "When measured in the price of gold, the dollar and U.S. financial assets have already crashed. For example, relative to gold, as of Friday’s close, since their last relative highs in June-July 2005, the U.S. dollar index has declined 39%, the 10-year Treasury bond 43%, and the S&P 500 31%. These declines have become free-fall in the last month or so."

They go on to write that, surprisingly to the International Monetary Fund, "capital is flowing from emerging markets to industrial countries (notably the United States), the opposite of what would be predicted by economic theory."

Econotech goes on to note that the International Monetary Fund, in their "Stability" report, notes that the risks of derivatives is pretty dramatic. Specifically, they say “credit derivative products have significantly enhanced the 'transferability' of credit risks by allowing for the increased specificity of credit exposures, to meet different investor demands, particularly in the 'primary' risk transfer markets." By this time I am starting to sneer in Utter Mogambo Disrespect (UMD), as I expect this to be just another laughable explanation (a la the Federal Reserve) about how "derivatives are so wonderful." I am halted in mid-spit, however, when they immediately go on to say "However, once transferred, secondary market liquidity risks and related contagion effects remain, and may constitute the most significant stability risk emanating from the structured credit markets.”

Wiping the dribbled sputum from my chin at this surprising admission, the IMF correctly concludes “In the structured credit markets, we believe the risk of liquidity disturbances is material." What to do about it? Well, the IMF has an answer! "Whether and how these new risks materialize, and the severity of their impact, will critically depend on the degree to which the diversity of market participants increases, the various structural frictions are reduced, and market surveillance is improved.”

In short, there has to be some new ways devised to, somehow, get more of the public to assume the risks ("diversity of market participants"), make it easier to lay on more derivatives (reduction of "structural frictions") and use some lies about "improved market surveillance" to get them to swallow it. Hahaha! The IMF! Hahaha! Some things never change!

- John Spence and Myra P. Long wrote the essay "Weighing Gold Miners Against the Metal" in which they note "Two gold ETFs alone (GLD and IAU) have already pulled in over $7.1 billion dollars." In existence as financial entities for less than a year, and already they pulled in over $7 billion dollars? Wow!

They also weigh the pros and cons about mining stocks. They write "Mining stocks tend to be more volatile than the metal, though stocks receive kinder tax treatment than bullion. At the same time, holding gold removes the risk of company missteps and other factors, while giving precious-metals bugs - who tend to be a bearish bunch - the peace of mind of owning the physical bullion."

"But," I cry out in my anguish "there comes a point when all available room in the house is already being used to store huge quantities of gold, silver and ammunition, and everybody is always bumping into something, and then they are all whining and complaining! What do I do?"

Sensing my plea for him to please, please, please recommend holding stocks instead of bullion, Jon Nadler, an investment products analyst at Kitco.com., said "'Mining company shares are simply that -- 'a paper promise of performance by the company. Investment in the shares leads to currency, management and general stock-market risk."

Just as I was giving up the idea of owning mining stocks, Brien Lundin, editor of Gold Newsletter, jumps in and says "Mining equities leverage the gains or losses in metals themselves. On the way up, this can be a wonderful thing. On the way down, it can become quite a painful thing."

He added, "Investors need to know that sometimes this effect is muted, or even works against them." To prove it, he reveals that "Through the end of March, the StreetTracks Gold Trust ETF was up 27.2% for the previous 12 months, versus 63.5% for the average precious-metals mutual fund."

Mr. Nadler added that with gold bullion, holding it is equal to holding "pure value or pure asset; no one can default on it, there is no credit risk, there is no risk of issuing more shares or printing more money. It is the asset you would buy to protect against a potential decline in your other assets," he said. It "performs when paper does not."

Mr. Nadler is straightforward in his opinion about owning gold bullion, and said "There is no doubt that we remain strong advocates of fully-owned and fully-paid physical bullion. If one wishes to purely speculate, they could entertain ETF or options on gold, perhaps a smattering of mining shares, but that is about it." I couldn't have said it better myself, and God knows I've tried!

And speaking of ETFs, Jason Hommel of SilverStockReport.com reports that the Barclays silver ETF is going gangbusters. "Ominously," he writes "this week, 42 million ounces of silver were bought by the Silver ETF in the first 5 days of trading!" He goes on to note, continuing in the ominous vein, that things are heating up on the futures exchanges, too. "For a long time, only 1% of futures contracts resulted in delivery. Today, it is increasing toward 10% or more, which is growing ominous." Commenting on all of this, he says "The Silver ETF, which is acquiring allocated physical silver, may soon bring the paper silver trading games to an abrupt end." Thus you realize why he uses the word "ominous," especially if you are one of the market-rigging scumbags who is massively short silver as a result of this long-term market-rigging scam.

- If you wanted real proof that demand for oil will continue to rise for a long, long time, then look no further than Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin at the PrudentBear.com site. He reports that “China’s total power consumption during the first half of this year is expected to increase 11.5%, said the China Electricity Council.” Twelve percent increase in a half year! Wow! And where did they get the fuel to produce that power? Oil!

And furthermore, they are building lots and lots of paved roads, avenues, streets, lanes, expressways, turnpikes and thruways, which is highly freaking significant (HFS) because merely creating roads is, as it turns out, the One Sure Thing (OST) to lead to macro- and micro-economic growth. And it takes oil, lots and lots of oil, to power all that construction. And the Chinese will be buying millions more cars per year with which to ride upon these selfsame highways and byways, all of which requires oil. Lots and lots of oil. And you thought oil might one day go DOWN in price? Hahahaha!

But Mr. Noland is not done pummeling us, and instead takes direct aim at my heart with a sharpened rapier when he quotes Bloomberg's Alex Tanzi as reporting “More homeowners received cash from home refinancings in the first quarter, according to Freddie Mac." I leap to my feet in surprise, which was unfortunate, as I was then immediately knocked to the floor with the further news "In the first quarter of 2006, 88 percent of Freddie Mac owned loans that were refinanced resulted in new mortgages of at least five percent more than the original mortgages." Five percent more debt in 88% of mortgage refinancings? Yow! Perhaps this headlong dive into the Lake Of Financial Stupidity explains the fact that the increase in the debt level "was up from 81 percent the previous quarter and is the highest since the third quarter 1990.”

- I would like to take this lull in the festivities to answer a of scenario suggested by readers who are probably a whole lot smarter than I, and seem to have no compunctions about demonstrating the fact, to the un-ending delight and amusement of my family and co-workers.

I refer to the conspiracy to eliminate cash money, and going to a completely electronic money. I declare with my usual Mogambo Supercilious Sneer (MSS) that it will not happen, as only cash is anonymous. Going to a purely electronic debit/credit format would require computer entries for every transaction, and thus there would always be a paper trail as evidence. Oops!

Therefore, there could be no political corruption and graft, no illegal activities of any kind involving money, and the IRS would be able to easily verify every taxable dime made by any taxable entity, including the kids who mow lawns and baby sitters. Like I said; it ain't a-gonna happen.

- If you think this brouhaha with Iran will one day blow over, wrong-o. Iran wants, and needs, to have a war with the USA. Why? Let me quote from the Milken Institute Journal of Economic Policy. They note that in "1979, Iran's GDP roughly equaled Spain's; it pumped one-tenth of the worlds oil and nurtured a vibrant middle class. Today, per capita income is one-third that of Spain, oil production is down by 30% and the middle class is being squeezed by inflation, unemployment and stagnant wages." And it ain't just the middle class suffering, and by a long, long shot.

In short, the Iranian morons need a scapegoat for their self-inflicted problems just as much as American morons and the loathsome Bush crowd needs one, and for the same reasons; bankruptcy from sheer economic stupidity. And that has always meant war, and I have no reason to think that "this time is different." Ugh.

Pardon my ignorance, but I learned something today. Did you know that the National Security Administration was transferred into the Department of Defense by Executive Order many years ago?

I didn't. I didn't know it was (1) in the Department of Defense for starters - always thought it was an independent agency outside the DOD) and (2) it got to DOD by Executive Order and not Congressional mandate.

Learn something everyday.

Won't be long before the CIA may wind up there. Maybe.

Well, Snuf ....

One thing that I have learned over time ....

In here ...

Is that there are all kinds of people ...

Out there ....

With all kinds of "slants" on things ....

And so ....

Here is one more above ...

With this "MOGAMBO GURU" ....

Whatever in the world that might be ...

And so ....

When I saw his words above here ...

On the Constitution ....

And "coinage" ....

I was curious ...

As I did not recall the constitution saying anything like what he was implying ...

And so ....

Where I ended up ...

Was at the United States Supreme Court ....

In 1870 ....

With what are known as the LEGAL TENDER CASES, 79 U.S. 457 (1870)

KNOX v. LEE ....

And PARKER v. DAVIS.

December Term, 1870

Where we have ....

Money is used in the Constitution in two senses.

In the second subdivision of the section relating to the powers of Congress, the Constitution speaks of the power 'to borrow money'; and there the word must be used in the larger sense of strict money, or of anything received instead.

But in the fifth subdivision of that section, which gives Congress power 'to coin money and regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coins,' it must be evident that Congress referred only to metallic money.

From time immemorial, in all countries, in all ages of the world, the precious metals have been the medium of exchanges, and the strict moneys.

The value of these metals has been designated by a stamp upon them indicating their fineness and weight; that is, indicating the value at which the coins were rated.

When the coins have possessed the value indicated, they have passed from hand to hand as of that value.

When they have been found not to possess that value, they have, except within very narrow limits, failed to so pass.

It is true that, at certain periods in the history of some of the States, the skins of the beaver passing by tale; strings of shells, known as wampum, passing by measure; and packages of tobacco of defined weights were, in the absence of the precious metals, used as money, and were made the medium of exchanges.

But none of these was a 'legal [79 U.S. 457, 465] tender' as money, or ever had anything but a local and limited circulation, or ever was used as a substitute for money, after money was introduced.

While in all ages of the world, in all countries, the precious metals, when stamped with a designated value, have been known as moneys; and (with representatives of such moneys) have always been the great and universal medium of exchanges.

Not only has 'money' meant metallic money, but, upon looking at the public history of the times (which this court has established as a proper guide to the construction of the Constitution), we find that in the history of the country there was no period in which 'money' was more distinctly understood and meant to be hard money than at the period when the Constitution was framed and adopted.

'Its framers had just passed through all the horrors of an unredeemed paper currency.'

'The history of that currency had been, within the view of those who staked their property on the public faith, always freely given and grossly violated.'

'The mischiefs of the various experiments that had been made were fresh in the bublic mind, and had excited general disgust.'

With the bills of the government unredeemed - indeed, become at last so hopelessly beyond redemption as to be entirely given up as worthless, - the country had returned for circulation to a specie currency, to absolute money having an intrinsic value; and neither had nor wished any other currency.

But the context as well as the word itself shows that the power is confined to metals.

This grant is not a grant to create money, but simply 'to coin money' - a power that can be exercised only on money that admits of being coined; that is, a bare power to 'strike coin,' which was the phrase used in the Articles of Confederation as the equivalent of 'to coin money.'

It was from those Articles that the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof was transferred to the existing Constitution.

And that this provision only [79 U.S. 457, 466] gave Congress power to strike coin and regulate its alloy and value, was declared at the time, and undisputed.

The Federalist, No. 43, tells us:

"The right of coining money, which is here taken from the States, was left in their hands by the Confederation, as a concurrent right with that of Congress, under an exception in favor of the exclusive right of Congress to regulate the alloy and value."

"In this instance, also, the new provision is an improvement on the old."

"Whilst the alloy and value depended on the general authority, a right of coinage in the particular States could have no other effect than to multiply expensive mints, and diversify the forms and weights of the circulating pieces."

Indeed, the very next clause of the Constitution (subdivision 6) which gives Congress power to punish the 'counterfeiting of the securities and current coin of the United States,' expressly distinguishes between the coins and the obligations of the government.

If, however, Congress could take the power of stamping leather, or paper, under this clause, and the leather or the paper so stamped could be considered as coined money,' the value whereof could be regulated by Congress, even that would not support the legal tender provision of the Treasury notes.

With such a power, Congress might, indeed, stamp a lump of leather, or a ream of paper, so that they should circulate as current money; that, however, would not make these notes such stamped paper, nor current money.

Treasury notes have, as substance, no appreciable value.

They are not declared to be, and do not purport to be, of any value as substance.

They are not stamped with any intrinsic value.

They are not, so far as they possess value, things at all, but only things in action.

The material holds the evidence of the promise; but it is the promise, and the promise alone, which is, and which purports to be, of value.

One dash of the pen across the signature of the Treasurer of the United States at their foot, and the note is not a Treasury note; not a thing in action; not a matter which bears the government stamp of value; not ten dollars at all, but a worthless rag of paper, once used to hold a promise, [79 U.S. 457, 467] now cancelled.

If, therefore, 'money,' in the phrase 'to coin money,' could be considered as embracing other substances beside those precious metals, alone in use throughout all the world as coin, none the less would it remain that to utter promises to pay money would not be 'coining,' or 'to coin money.'

I cannot find that before the passage of this legal-tender act it had ever been supposed by any court, or by any judge of any court, or by any commentator or statesman, that this power 'to coin money' had reference to anything but a metallic currency.

Indeed, of all the judges who have given opinions, as well in the support of as against the legality of this law, I find hardly any who do not concede that to 'coin money' was a grant of power relating to the coining of the precious metals.

Nevertheless, although the power to coin money has not sufficed to support the right to make these Treasury notes a legal tender, the power to 'regulate the value thereof,' that is, of coined money, has been taken as one of the most effective arguments to support this law.

If, under this power to regulate the value of coined moneys, Congress may debase the coinage; if it may put upon the coined moneys any other than their true intrinsic value; if it may declare that one-half or three- fourths of a dollar, when stamped by it as a dollar, shall be taken to be equal to a whole dollar, and may thus impair the obligation of contracts and transfer one man's property to another; why, it is asked, under the constitutional power to borrow money, and other delegated powers, and the powers necessary and proper to enable it to exercise the delegated powers, may Congress not do a like thing to produce a better result with these Treasury notes?

To this I answer:

II. This power cannot be implied from the power to regulate the value of money.

For, 1st. Congress has no power given it to regulate the value of the money it borrows, but only of the money it coins, and of foreign coins.

The analogy claimed would exist if the Constitution gave Congress power to borrow [79 U.S. 457, 468] money and regulate the value thereof.

But that it does not give.

And, 2d. Congress has no power to even materially debase the coin.

A power to regulate is not a power to destroy.

I quite agree that 'a uniform course of action involving the right to the exercise of an important power for half a century, and this almost without question, is no unsatisfactory evidence that the power is rightfully exercised.'

But a careful review of the legislation of Congress on this subject, will show not only that Congress has not (as the Court of Appeals in New York, and the other tribunals which have affirmed the validity of this law have assumed) exercised plenary power over the subject of currency and the legal tender laws, but that, on the contrary, the legislation of Congress from first to last has been strictly confined to designating the value of coined money, and to discriminating with reference to its real value.

Let us review the legislation on coinage.

From the establishment of the government to the passage of the act authorizing Treasury notes, the legal tender coin has been three times debased, and three times only.

Once, in June, 1834, when the gold coinage was reduced about 6 per cent in value; once, in 1851, when the three-cent pieces were first coined; and once, in 1853, when the fractional silver coinage was reduced some 6 per cent in value.

But the pieces of these latter coinages were restricted as legal tender within such very narrow limits, and for such fractional and special uses, that, practically, these laws did not operate as debasements of the coin at all.

From the first issue of coin by this government to this time, the unit of calculation and of coinage, the silver dollar, has remained the same.

It remains still of the same intrinsic value as when first coined; whatever changes have been made, have been made to bring the other coin into more actual and just relation to it.

When the subject of coinage was first considered by the [79 U.S. 457, 469] Confederation, it was proposed to have a unit of account and of coinage much smaller than the dollar, and to employ the decimal system.

Jefferson, while recommending the adoption of the decimal system, suggested a coin equal to the then existing Spanish milled dollar as the unit of value.

His recommendation was adopted, and the dollar has ever since remained the same.

The first coinage was under the act of April 2, 1792, and that act provided that the coinage should be of both gold and silver, and that the relative value of the two metals should be as fifteen to one, that is, that 1 ounce of gold should be taken as the equal in value of 15 ounces of silver.

By that act 'dollars or units,' as they were styled, were each to contain 371 4/16 grains of pure silver, and to weigh 416 grains according to the then standard, which was, for silver, 1485 parts pure or 'fine' to 179 parts alloy; and eagles, 'each to be of the value of 10 dollars or units,' and to contain 247 4/8 grains of pure gold, and to weigh 270 grains, according to the then standard for gold, which was 11 parts pure to 1 part alloy.

Both of these precious metals were, after that, coined as money; both became lawful money, and therefore, ex necessitate, a tender in payment of debts due in money, even if not so declared by law; just as coals of the specified kind are a lawful tender in discharge of a contract for coal, and cotton, of a contract calling for cotton.

But in the lapse of years, the relation in value existing and established by Congress in this act of 1792, between the two precious metals, was lost.

Owing to the increased produce of silver, and perhaps to the increased demand by the commerce of the world for gold, their relative value had so materially altered that, by 1823, the Secretary of the Treasury called the attention of Congress to the fact that gold had relatively appreciated in value, so that their true relation was then as 16 to 1, and to the evils resulting from the erroneous standard maintained. [79 U.S. 457, 470]

For as soon as gold had advanced or silver declined in relative value so that they really bore to each other the relation of 16 to 1 in value, instead of 15 to 1, as they were valued by the law, every person who could secure an ounce of our gold coinage for 15 ounces of silver secured what was intrinsically worth 16 silver ounces; that is, made a profit of about 6 per cent.

It followed, of course, that all the gold was taken up as fast as coined and sent out of the country to be recoined, and that the country retained, instead, only silver, and the gold coins of those countries whose gold coinage bore a true relation to the existing value of gold and silver.

In fact, our gold coin went regularly directly from the mint as fast as coined to the foreign packet; and, out of some $12,000,000 of gold which had been coined, it was computed there was hardly a gold piece to be found in the whole United States.

As was said in Congress: 'Hitherto, like the tracks to the lion's den, the coins have gone all one way-to Europe; and not one solitary eagle has ever made good its cisatlantic flight.'

This evil led at last to the introduction into Congress of a bill to regulate the value of the gold coinage of the country, by adjusting the rate for gold coin to its true relation to the existing and continuing silver coin.

The debate upon the bill, shows how anxious Congress was to get at the true relative value of the two precious metals, and to fix the coinage accordingly.

Opinions as to the relative values of gold and silver ranged from 15.60 to 1, to 16 to 1.

The majority of those best qualified from their pursuits to understand the subject, including the New York banks, regarded the true ratio to be as 15.62 to 1, although for the previous few years it had averaged 15.80 to 1.

But Congress, at the instance of the friends of metallic money, determined to adopt 16 to 1 as the relative value; partly because that seemed to be the ratio which had proved practically the most correct in the nations which had adopted it; partly because the [79 U.S. 457, 471] variation from the true relation was, if any, so small it might safely be disregarded; and partly because it was believed that the relative appreciation of gold which had been so long going on would continue, and that the slight over-valuation of it, if any there was, would be thus in time corrected.

By that act the eagle was reduced from 247 4/8 grains of pure gold, as required by 9 of the said act of 1792, to 232 grains of pure gold, or about six per cent in intrinsic value.

But, so far from Congress assuming any power to materially depreciate the coinage or impair the rights of creditors, the power of Congress to make depreciated coin a legal tender was expressly disclaimed in the debate.

And the statesman at whose instance, and by whose will, this bill was mainly carried through was, of all men who ever had part in the government of this country, the last to be quoted on the side of the power of Congress to make promissory notes a legal tender in payment of private debts, - Thomas Hart Benton.

The court will thus see that while Congress did indeed reduce the standard and value of gold coinage, so that $100 of the new gold coins were hardly equal in intrinsic value to $94 of the former gold coinage, yet that in fact Congress did absolutely nothing to impair the obligation of contracts or to destroy the rights of the creditor.

For, from the beginning, the debtor had the right to pay in the coinage of either of the precious metals.

At first these were of equal value, and payment in either was indifferent.

Gradually the gold appreciated or the silver depreciated, and then, of course, the debtor, as he had the option, paid in silver; so that, in 1834, the debtor who owed $1000, and had $940 of the then gold coinage, could exchange his gold for $1000 in silver coin, and discharge with these his debt of $1000.

Therefore, although Congress did reduce the value of the gold coinage in 1834, the debtor, after 1834, could no more pay his $1000 with money of less intrinsic value than he [79 U.S. 457, 472] could before.

True, he could take $940 in gold of the old coinage, and get with it $1000 in gold of the new, with which to pay his debt.

But so, before the law, he could take this same $940 of gold coinage, and purchase $ 1000 of the then, and still, equivalent silver coinage, with which to pay the debt.

Indeed, that law, so far from taking 1/16 of the debt from the creditor and giving it to the debtor, as at first appears, actually gave the debtor no new privilege, and deprived the creditor of no property.

It remained optional with the debtor, after the law as before, to pay in the gold pieces of the old coinage.

True, it became possible, after the law, for the debtor to pay in the new gold coinage; but it had been optional with him before the law to pay in the constant silver coinage equivalent in value to the new gold coinage.

The law was, in fact, but an adjustment and recognition of the true relation between the values of the two metals, the selection of which had always remained optional to debtors, and, so far from being an attempt by Congress to regulate money without reference to or differing from its intrinsic value, it was, on the contrary, a most careful and earnest effort to bring the recognizable value of its money more closely to its intrinsic value.

Following this act of June 28, 1834, Congress passed an act on the same day, conforming the value at which foreign coins were to be rated to their true intrinsie value.

In 1837, Congress fixed the standard of both gold and silver coin at 9/10ths fine; that is 9 parts of pure metal to 1 of alloy.

By this change the gross weight of the dollar was reduced to 412 1/2 grains, but the fineness was correspondingly increased, and the dollar therefore continued to contain 9/10ths of 412 1/2 = 371 4/16 grains of pure silver, as provided for the dollar when first coined, and to remain therefore of the same intrinsic value as before.

And the gross weight of the eagle was, by the same act, somewhat increased, but it continued [79 U.S. 457, 473] to contain, however, 232 grains of pure gold, as provided by the act of 1834.

This change in the gross weight of the silver coinage has led to the idea it was then debased, the corresponding increase in its fineness having been overlooked.

Let us refer to later changes in the silver coinage?

For nearly twenty years after the passage of these laws of 1834, the relations between the precious metals remained undisturbed, so that no action by Congress was required.

But the unlooked for discoveries of gold in California disturbed again, and in a reverse direction, the relation between the two metals, and thereafter silver advanced and gold declined in relative values; so that, by 1853, silver attained a marked premium over the gold coined since the act of 1834, and a scarcity in silver coin had been felt.

Congress, however, did not thereupon generally depreciate the silver coinage.

It was, indeed, urged upon Congress to appreciate the gold coinage.

Instead, however, of doing this, thinking, probably, that this gold harvest was to be of short duration, and its disturbance of the relation, then so long subsisting between the two metals, not likely to continue; and striving to meet the evil of small notes issued by every kind of corporation and of paper tokens for change, then pressing - Congress did depreciate the silver coin, for parts of dollars only, about 6 per cent (so that two half-dollars or four quarter-dollars are no longer equal to one dollar piece).

But these depreciated coins were restricted from being legal tender for any sum greater than $5 in all, although the smaller silver coin of the earlier coinage remained a tender for any amount.

Prior to this, in 1851, Congress had directed the coinage of three-cent pieces of a fineness and weight which gave them a value of only 80 cents on the nominal dollar of these pieces (i. e., 33 pieces of three- cent coinage were worth intrinsically only 80/100 of one silver dollar); but these pieces were only made tender to the extent of 30 cents in the aggregate, [79 U.S. 457, 474] and their issue was very limited and was shortly stopped, and by the act of 1853 their intrinsic value was raised to the standard of that of the other fractions of the dollar.

Then as to change in the copper coinage.

Congress, also, in 1793 and 1796, reduced the weight and the intrinsic value of the cent to accord with the increased value of copper, the planchets for which government had to import.

These cents, however, were not made a legal tender.

The interference by government with the rights of creditors by regulations of the coin have, therefore, been:

1. By the acts of 1834, a possible, but disputed and doubtful depreciation, if of anything, of less than 1 per cent.

2. By the act of 1851, a depreciation of fractional silver coin (the three-cent piece) to an extent which could not, in the largest tender, exceed 6 cents; shortly, however, altered, so that it could not exceed in the aggregate 2 cents.

3. By the act of 1853, a depreciation of fractional silver coinage to an extent which could not exceed in the largest tender 30 cents.

Now, if these debasements of fractional coin be deemed merely such; nevertheless, from their minute and fractional nature, they would form no precedent for future material debasements of the coinage, or indicate any acquiescence by the people and the courts in an assumption by Congress of the right to put a false or arbitrary value upon its coined money.

De minimis non curat lex.

But, indeed, these acts of 1851 and 1853 were practically not at all infringements upon the rights of creditors or debasements of the coinage below its value.

As already remarked when coins were struck with a value which they did not possess, they have, 'except within very narrow limits,' failed to pass at more than their true intrinsic worth.

But there are limits within coins, somewhat depreciated below their true value, will circulate as [79 U.S. 457, 475] well as if they had not been depreciated.

Those limits are when the payment is so small that the difference between the nominal and intrinsic values, does not leave it worth while to regard the difference, or when some particular convenience about the coin, such as its portability or denomination, overbalances the intrinsic depreciation; that is, the peculiar fitness for the fractional purpose required, will, in such cases, actually make good the depreciation, and carry the small coin, for all purposes of use, up to the stamped value.

All will recollect how often, in the days of the Spanish piece for 12 1/2 cents, we accepted 12 cents instead, and took Spanish quarters with holes drilled through them equally with perfect coin.

Those who have been in England know that the sovereign has so depreciated by wear that a large majority of the coins in circulation in Great Britain are intrinsically worth less than the standard value-2d. per sovereign it is said - and yet, for all minor payments, they pass from hand to hand by tale equally as of full weight; while in large transactions they are always paid out by weight and not by tale.

So with the depreciated three-cent pieces of 1851; within the very narrow limit at which they were legal tender, their portability and convenience made up what they wanted in intrinsic silver value.

And so, too, with the depreciated coinage of 1853.

It was confined to fractions of a dollar, which were so slightly depreciated, and the convenience of which was such, that the trifling intrinsic loss was not to be regarded.

But the depreciated coins were made a legal tender only to twice the amount of the lowest tenderable gold coin, Congress still keeping to its idea of a double money standard, and still holding to its unchanged unit of value, the silver dollar.

Now it is submitted that all these exercises of the powers of Congress to 'coin money and regulate the value thereof' were within the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Congress has, indeed, established the value of certain foreign coins at one time and changed it at another; made them a tender, and deprived them of that quality; and changed [79 U.S. 457, 476] from time to time the standard of value of coin struck at its mint.

But how has it done this?

Without regard to the intrinsic value of the coin struck?

By fixing upon it any arbitrary value, and making it a tender at anything but its true value, as all the courts which have supported the constitutionality of the provision we are considering have assumed?

Not at all; but, on the contrary, by uniformly seeking to conform the stamp upon its coin to its true value, and by scrupulously limiting the departures from intrinsic value for special purposes within limits so narrow that the special usefulness of the coin within those limits has actually made good the trifling deficiency in weight.

In the same spirit, Congress has provided that its coin shall be a legal tender at its stamped valuation only when of full weight; if of light weight, only proportionately, according to its weight.

In fine, Congress, under a power to coin money and regulate the value thereof, has done only and exactly what those words in their plain signification imply; has struck metallic coins, and has regulated the value thereof and of foreign coins; and has done this on every occasion with careful regard to their true intrinsic value; manifesting as well by the particular purposes and narrow limits within which they have departed from intrinsic value, as by their general strict regard for such values, not their belief that they could strike any metal and stamp it with an arbitrary value, but that they could rightfully regulate the value of money only by truly declaring the value thereof.

Not that they 'possess a magic power to give, by their omnipotent fiat, a precious value to inanimate and valueless things,' but that they possessed only power to regulate the coin stamped, by declaring its value according to the fact - according to the value stamped upon it when of full weight, and of only proportionate value when of light weight.

In the opinions which have been given in various legal tender cases, nothing has seemed to go so far toward supporting the authority of Congress to make treasury notes a legal tender as the assumption that Congress had been left [79 U.S. 457, 477] by the Constitution at liberty to impair private rights and the obligation of contracts by debasing the specie coinage, and that it had actually debased that coinage and impaired those rights to the extent of 1/16, without question or challenge.

Had this been the action of Congress, it would not indeed have established its power or right to do this.

One permitted invasion of an established right does not do away with the right.

That Congress had debased the coinage 1/16th would not establish the right to further debase it; would, at most, indicate that the power to regulate it extended up to that limit, and would, of itself, furnish no justification for a more general or further invasion.

Nevertheless, the assertion, in all the opinions, that government had assumed to debase the coinage to the extent of 1/16th, impairing to that degree the recovery of all creditors, and that this action had been submitted to without question, has seemed to me the strongest argument for the power of government to exercise plenary control over coined money.

Indeed, it was through inquiry as to how it was possible that creditors could have submitted to so serious an infringement of their rights without contest in the courts that I learned that in fact nothing of the kind really took place.

On the contrary, we see that, so far from 'Congress having claimed and exercised unlimited power over legal tender,' so far from having assumed the power to make even coin a legal tender, without regard to its real intrinsic value, as all the decisions supporting this law assume, its legislation [79 U.S. 457, 478] shows that for seventy-five years, from the beginning of the government down to the act authorizing these legal tender notes, through all the most pressing exigencies of peace and war, Congress - not only by its direct efforts to regulate the coinage from time to time, according to its intrinsic value, but also by the narrow limitation it imposed on the right of legal tender when diverging slightly from intrinsic value for special and temporary purposes - has shown a determination, as uniform as just, to keep the stamp upon the government coins a true index to their value, and to so regulate these coins as that they should have and express their actual values.

Nay, by reference to the debates in Congress, it will be seen that the right of Congress to debase the coin and make the debased coin legal tender, in such wise as to materially affect the rights of the creditor or debtor, was not only never professed or asserted, but that, so far as the question has arisen, the right has been directly repudiated.

So, therefore, the difficulty, judges and other persons have had in perceiving why, if Congress, under this power to coin money, could coin any metallic substance and stamp it with an arbitrary value, it would not have equally the power to declare its treasury notes a legal tender without reference to their intrinsic value -is a difficulty that this court is freed from, and that should never have existed.

Indeed, I look in vain to-day for the production of the declaration, prior to these legal tender days, of one judge, one statesman, one commentator, that Congress, by the power 'to coin money and regulate the value thereof,' possessed the right of striking even metals with false and arbitrary values.

And so ....

Is it as this MOGAMBO GURU dude says it is?

Or is it a bit more complicated than that?

And so ....

George Bush's references to dictatorships:

DICTATORSHIP DEFINITIONS
http://dict.die.net/dictatorship/

Source: WordNet ® 1.7

dictatorship
n : a form of government in which the ruler is an absolute
dictator (not restricted by a constitution or laws or
opposition etc.) [syn: absolutism, authoritarianism,
Caesarism, despotism, monocracy, one-man rule, shogunate,
Stalinism, totalitarianism, tyranny]
http://www.allwords.com/word-dictatorship.html

dictator
noun

1. A ruler with complete and unrestricted power.

Thesaurus: tyrant, despot, autocrat, fascist, sultan, rajah, czar, emir, khan.
2. Someone who behaves in a dictatorial manner.
3. In ancient Rome: a person given complete authority in the state for a period of six months at a time of crisis.

Derivative: dictatorial
adj

Characteristic of, like or suggesting a dictator; fond of using one's power and authority and imposing one's wishes on or giving orders to other people.
Thesaurus: tyrannical, despotic, oppressive, totalitarian, autocratic, authoritarian, domineering, dogmatic, magisterial, imperious; Antonym: democratic, egalitarian, liberal, tolerant.


http://www.couplescompany.com/Features/Pol.../Structure4.htm
Dictatorship:

Generic term used to describe any government controlled by a single individual and giving the people little or no individual freedom. Typically a person who rules by threat of force. People who are loyal to a dictatorship swear allegiance to the person first and the country second. Fascism, Theocracies, Monarchies and Communism can all be dictatorships. A Republic cannot be a dictatorship. Examples of Dictatorship include North Korea and Cuba.

Theocracy:
A government which claims to be immediately directed by God, and divinely blessed. The country tends to be intolerant either passively or overtly to faiths other than that recognized by the state. The country identifies itself and its laws within religion and religious doctrine. There is no legal separation between church and state, and citizens of other faiths are often excluded or hampered from participation or expelled. Because a theocracy is exclusionary, it can never be a democracy which requires inclusion without exception of all equally. It cannot be a republic because a republic requires the separation of church and state and equal rights to all.

Examples of theocratic countries include Israel and Iran



http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
[edit]
Speech to United Nations General Assembly (September 21, 2004)
UN Headquarters, New York, NY [5]

For decades, the circle of liberty and security and development has been expanding in our world. This progress has brought unity to Europe, self-government to Latin America and Asia, and new hope to Africa. Now we have the historic chance to widen the circle even further, to fight radicalism and terror with justice and dignity, to achieve a true peace, founded on human freedom.
We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terrorists in their midst. We know that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies.
1998
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier...So long as I'm the dictator."
Responding to the difficulties of governing Texas ("The Taming of Texas," Governing Magazine, July 1998 [10]. Also cited in Is our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush by Paul Begala.)
[edit]
[edit]
2000
"I told all four [congressional leaders] that I felt like this election happened for a reason; that it pointed out — the delay in the outcome should make it clear to all of us — that we can come together to heal whatever wounds may exist, whatever residuals there may be. And I really look forward to the opportunity. I hope they've got my sense of optimism about the possible, and enthusiasm about the job. I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's okay. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier... [Bush chuckles, audience laughs] ...just so long as I'm the dictator [more laughter]."

Washington, DC, December 18, 2000, during his first trip to Washington as President-elect [12]. The last sentence is also included in Fahrenheit 9/11.
[edit]
2001
"Dealing with Congress is a matter of give and take. The president doesn't get everything he wants, the Congress doesn't get everything they want. But we're finding good common ground. A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it."
Washington, DC, July 26, 2001 [13].

2004
"It's not a dictatorship in Washington, but I tried to make it one in that instance."
Describing his executive order making faith-based groups eligible for federal subsidies, New Orleans, Louisiana, Jan. 15, 2004

Would George W. Bush .....

Be president ...

Here in OUR America .....

Without CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD-WIDE, I wonder?

And while we are on the subject of CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD-WIDE .....

And life in OUR America ...

In this present day and age ....

Of REPUBLICAN DOMINANCE ....

Here in OUR America ....

"DJ out on bail after on-air sexual rants"

Associated Press
Last updated: 6:55 a.m., Sunday, May 14, 2006

NEW YORK -- A syndicated hip-hop disc jockey arrested after making on-air racial and sexual rants about a rival radio personality's wife and young child has been released on bail.

DJ Star, whose real name is Troi Torain, was charged with endangering the welfare of a child after a broadcast on Power 105.1 FM.

Transcripts show he hurled racist insults, threatened to sexually abuse the 4-year-old daughter of his rival, Hot 97's DJ Envy, and offered $500 for information about where she went to school.

"I will come for your kids," Torain said, according to a transcript provided by New York Councilman John C. Liu.

Torain was arraigned after 11 p.m. Friday and posted $2,000 bail within an hour, authorities said.

Police originally had indicated he also would be charged with harassment, but prosecutors decided against it for now, district attorney's spokeswoman Barbara Thompson said.

Torain's lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said his client's conduct was inappropriate but not criminal, and was "never intended to frighten the family."

Torain -- along with his brother Timothy Joseph, known as Buc Wild -- was the host of Clear Channel Radio's syndicated morning show on Power 105.

The company fired Torain after city officials complained.

Their show aired in markets including Philadelphia, Miami and Richmond, Va.

That says what needs to be said ......

Right there .....

And then ...

He didn't stop with just that one instance .....

Nor is that where he started ...

And so ....

And the real expert at "dictatorship" .....

In my estimation, anyway ....

Is not George .....

Who certainly has the character for it ...

But Dick .....

America's Dick .....

And while we are on the subject of America's Dick .....

Let's see what is going on with him ...

Out there in the world these days .....

Where we have ....

"Cheney the Focus of CIA Leak Court Filing"

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 59 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - In a new court filing, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten references to CIA officer Valerie Plame — albeit not by name — before her identity was publicly exposed.

The new court filing is the second in little more than a month by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald mentioning Cheney as being closely focused with his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who is married to Plame.

With the two court filings, Fitzgerald has pointed to an important role for the vice president in the weeks leading up to the leaking of Plame's identity.

In the latest court filing late Friday, Fitzgerald said he intends to introduce at Libby's trial in January a copy of Wilson's op-ed article in The New York Times "bearing handwritten notations by the vice president."

The article was published on July 6, 2003, eight days before Plame's identity was exposed by conservative columnist Bob Novak.

The notations "support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant — his chief of staff — on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in the article and on responding to those assertions."

The article containing Cheney's notes "reflects the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president to Mr. Wilson's Op Ed article," the prosecutor said.

"This is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant's immediate superior, including whether Mr. Wilson's wife had 'sent him on a junket,' the filing states.

The reference is to the fact that the CIA sent Wilson on a trip to Africa in 2002 to check out a report that Iraq had made attempts to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful an agreement to purchase uranium had been made.

The Bush administration used the intelligence on supposed efforts by Iraq to acquire uranium from Africa to bolster its case for going to war.

After the invasion, with the Bush White House under pressure because no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, Wilson wrote the op ed piece for The Times.

In it, he accused the Bush administration of exaggerating prewar intelligence to exaggerate an Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

Defending the administration against Wilson's accusations, Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove promoted the idea that Wilson's wife, Plame, had sent him on the trip to Africa.

Administration critics have said such a move was an attempt to undercut Wilson's credibility.

The prosecution's court papers also stated that Cheney told Libby around June 12, 2003, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, a month before her identity was outed.

end quotes

SO ....

Do we have a "DICK-O-CRACY" down there in Washington, D.C. .....

Or what?

And then ...

There is the weather ....

"N.H. floods force 100 people from homes"

By DAVID TIRRELL-WYSOCKI, Associated Press
Last updated: 12:35 p.m., Sunday, May 14, 2006

CONCORD, N.H. -- Torrential rain washed out roads and forced about 100 people from their homes in one central New Hampshire town Sunday.

Some areas had seen 7 inches of rain by early Sunday and forecasters said as many as 5 more inches might come during the day.

About 100 residents were evacuated from their homes in Wakefield because of concerns about two dams in the area, the state Office of Emergency Management said.

Officials also reported a railroad culvert and embankment washed out in Milton, with train tracks suspended in mid air.

And the local emergency management office in Hooksett said the town essentially was closed because so many roads were flooded.

Tom Johnson said water was flowing on Sunday into the basement of his Salem home, where a pump that handles 1,500 gallons of water an hour was not keeping up.

"There are areas in my backyard that are probably 3 feet deep and climbing as we speak," Johnson said.

In Maine, dozens of roadways were flooded in southern part of the state and shelters were set up in Kennebunk and Ogunquit.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney declared a state of emergency on Sunday, activating the National Guard and various state services to help communities respond to the storm.

Boston had picked up 4.35 inches of rain in 24 hours.

Farther north, Newburyport collected 5.83 inches over the same period, according to the National Weather Service.

"Agents Search Home, Office of CIA No. 3 Leader"

By MARK SHERMAN, AP

WASHINGTON (May 12) - Federal agents searched the home and office of the CIA's departing No. 3 official on Friday as part of a corruption investigation that has sent a former congressman to prison and now involves CIA contracts.

Investigators from five federal agencies acted under search warrants at the home of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo in Vienna, Va., and his office at the CIA's Langley, Va., campus, FBI spokeswoman Debra Weierman said.

Both locations are in the Washington suburbs.

The warrants themselves were sealed and officials would not discuss what agents were seeking.

Foggo agreed to step down as the CIA's executive officer under pressure because federal authorities are investigating whether he improperly awarded contracts to San Diego businessman and friend Brent Wilkes, according to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because investigations were ongoing.

Prosecutors have implicated Wilkes in a scheme to bribe former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., but he has not been charged and his lawyer has said Wilkes did nothing wrong.

Among the contracts under scrutiny is one that dates from Foggo's previous job of running the logistics at a secret facility in Europe that supplies CIA personnel in war zones, the law enforcement official said.

Foggo gave the multimillion-dollar contract to supply bottled water to a Wilkes-related company, the official said.

Foggo, who was in the process of clearing out his office at the end of a 25-year CIA career, has denied any wrongdoing.

"Mr. Foggo maintains that government contracts for which he was responsible were properly awarded and administered," the CIA said in a statement last week.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck said Friday that top CIA officials were informed of the warrants shortly before the searches began.

"The agency is cooperating fully with the Department of Justice and the FBI," she said.

The agencies taking part in the searches are: the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the U.S. Attorney's office in San Diego and the CIA's inspector general, Weierman said.

The inspector general has been investigating Foggo's relationship with Wilkes for more than two months.

The inquiry stems from the investigation of Cunningham, who is serving a prison term of more than eight years after admitting last year that he took $2.4 million in bribes from government contractors.

Mitchell Wade, another contractor, pleaded guilty in February to conspiring with Cunningham and is cooperating with investigators.

Wilkes is described in court papers as an unindicted coconspirator.

The investigation includes allegations, raised by Wade, that Wilkes provided Cunningham with prostitutes, limousines and hotel suites.

Foggo has acknowledged participating in poker games organized by Wilkes at the hotel rooms, but he has said nothing untoward went on while he was there.

"If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more," the CIA statement said.

Lawyers for Wilkes and the limousine company, Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., of Arlington, Va., also have denied any involvement with prostitutes.

Foggo announced his retirement from the agency this week, three days after CIA Director Porter Goss said he would be stepping down.

Dyck said the Foggo investigation has "absolutely nothing, zero" to do with Goss' resignation.

Goss asked Foggo to step down as executive director last week because he felt the accusations had become a distraction and could damage the agency's reputation, the unnamed intelligence official said.

Foggo's associates have said he received the Intelligence Commendation Medal for supporting the war on terror in 2002.

Before becoming the agency's No. 3 leader in 2004, he was the chief of base at a secret facility that supports the war on terror.

As executive director, Foggo had the powerful position of overseeing the day-to-day operations of the CIA.

One FBI agent told reporters from Copley News Service, who were at Foggo's residence, that Foggo was not at home in his quiet suburban neighborhood near CIA headquarters and had not been detained.

The agents refused to answer other questions about the raid.

A neighbor told Copley that the agents arrived about 8 a.m. EDT.

A white Chevrolet van was backed up to the carport of the split-level brick home and, at one point, a man wearing latex gloves emerged from the house and went around back.

Associated Press writer Katherine Shrader contributed to this report.

Hey ...

How about that economy, now, will you .......

"Global economy spreads the wealth - Developing nations' growth creates boom, but some see it coming at counterparts' expense"

By TOM PETRUNO, Los Angeles Times
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

The global economy is on a growth streak that is shaping up to be the broadest and strongest expansion in more than three decades.

Rising spending and investment by consumers and businesses worldwide are boosting national economies on every continent, pushing down unemployment rates in many countries, and lifting business earnings and confidence.

Of 60 nations tracked by investment firm Bridgewater Associates, not one is in recession -- the first time that has been true since 1969.

Yet this is a different kind of boom from any other in the post-World War II era, analysts say.

The soaring economies of China, India, Russia, Brazil and other emerging nations increasingly are setting the pace, overshadowing the slower growth of the United States, Europe and Japan, where the benefits of the expansion have eluded many workers.

"This is the first recovery where developing economies are playing a dominant role," said James Paulsen, chief strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis, which manages money for big investors such as pension funds.

The trend is being driven by free trade, which has created millions of new jobs in emerging nations in recent years, fueling stunning new wealth in those countries.

China's meteoric rise has been well-ocumented, but the boom has spread far and wide to include much of the rest of Asia, as well as Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa.

For Russia, the global hunger for energy and other raw materials has created a financial windfall.

The country has become the world's largest exporter of natural gas and second-largest exporter of oil, as well as a major supplier of metals, timber and other resources.

Wealth from those exports now is filtering down to drive growth in the country's retail and consumer goods sectors, said Al Breach, chief economist at investment bank Brunswick UBS in Moscow.

"Culturally, you always had a middle class here, but it was extremely poor," Breach said.

"Now, increasingly, that class is getting money, especially the younger generation."

The simplest yardstick of economic success is a country's growth in real gross domestic product, or how fast its total output of goods and services is rising, after inflation.

For the developing world, that growth is expected to be 6.9 percent this year -- more than double the 3 percent pace of the developed world, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The breakaway growth of the developing world is why the global economy overall is on track to post its fourth straight year of 4 percent-plus expansion, the IMF estimates.

The last such streak was in the early 1970s.

With the developed world's growth lagging well behind that of emerging economies, however, workers in industrialized nations may not feel as if they are part of the global boom.

Wages in the United States, for example, have been slow to rise in recent years.

In Western Europe, unemployment rates remain stubbornly high.

The United States and other countries in the developed world have lost jobs to emerging nations as a result of free trade, triggering protectionist sentiment here and in Europe.

Also, zooming prices for oil and other commodities, which have enriched the developing nations that export them, have come largely at the expense of the West.

But while there is no question that some of the developing world's gains are, in effect, a transfer of wealth from the industrialized world, experts say that emerging countries' success also is flowing back to the United States, Europe and Japan -- which combined still account for about two-thirds of the global economy.

What's more, low-cost goods from developing nations have helped keep inflation pressures muted despite the jump in oil prices, economists say.

"A lot of people are benefiting from globalization and they don't know it," said Paul Kasriel, economist at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago.

"If you're buying things at lower prices, and you still have your job, you're benefiting."

end quotes

Ah ....

Buying exactly what at lower prices?

Has the price of something actually come down over here?

Has anyone actually seen that happen?

Because everything that I have to buy ...

Has just gone up and up ....

And so ....

"NSA limited spy plan - Cheney blocked in bid to intercept purely domestic calls, e-mail"

By SCOTT SHANE, New York Times
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON -- In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But NSA lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any warrantless eavesdropping, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The NSA's position ultimately prevailed.

Details have not emerged publicly of how the director of the agency at the time, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, designed the program, persuaded wary NSA officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits.

Whatever the internal deliberations, Hayden was the program's overseer and has become its chief salesman.

He is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing this week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Criticism of the surveillance program flared again last week with the disclosure that the NSA had collected the phone records of millions of Americans to track terror suspects.

By several accounts, Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency in April last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country.

Later, Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program.

Spokespeople for the NSA and for Hayden declined to comment.

Even with the NSA lawyers' reported success in narrowing the program, critics say it is nonetheless illegal and it should have never been created.

For the first time since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978, the NSA was targeting Americans and others inside the country for eavesdropping without warrants.

Okay .....

Now ...

Getting back to matters or real importance here in OUR America .....

That being George W. Bush's GLOBAL WAR OF TERROR on whomever he likes to inflict terror on, that week, anyway ....

Without looking either to the right ...

Or the left, here ....

What we now all know ...

From this Kyle "DUSTY" Foggo CIA incident ....

Is that somewhere over there in Europe .....

Whether OLD EUROPE ....

Or NEW EUROPE ....

We can't yet tell ...

BECAUSE IT IS A (HUSH) SECRET ....

But anyway ....

Somewhere in Europe ....

We have a SECRET AMERICAN FACILITY .....

That is responsible for ....

Providing BOTTLED WATER ....

To CIA AGENTS ....

In what George W. Bush has declared to be war zones .....

And so .....

This "DUSTY" dude ....

Was in charge of providing this bottled water ...

To these CIA agents ...

For which he got a medal .....

From George W. Bush, apparently ....

Since by providing this bottled water to these CIA agents ....

This Foggo dude .....

Was considered by George W. Bush .....

To be a real hero of the REPUBLIC ...

And so he was, I guess, anyway ...

Since he did get the medal ...

And so ....

Who can argue with any of that ...

Which is not my point, anyway ....

What has got me real curious here .....

Is exactly how CLANDESTINE .....

Are these CIA spooks out there in the field .....

When they are walking around .....

In these foreign war zones ....

Drinking imported bottled water .....

That was somehow infiltrated to them ....

By Kyle "DUSTY" Foggo .....

From this SECRET AMERICAN FACILITY somewhere in either OLD or NEW Europe .....

Wouldn't that be a kind of "give-away", I wonder .....

All these alleged undercover CIA spooks wandering around in foreign lands that George W. Bush has declared to be war zones .....

Wearing their little sunglasses ...

And sipping their bottles of bottled water?

And I wonder how "DUSTY" Foggo was infiltrating this bottled water into these war zones ...

From this SECRET AMERICAN FACILITY somewhere in either OLD or NEW Europe ....

So that the bad guys ...

Would not know ...

That the ones showing up at some distribution point ...

In one of these war zones ...

To pick up their resupply of American bottled water ....

Were really American CIA agents ....

Supposedly in some kind of disguise ...

That would have them blend in with the indiginous population ....

If the indiginous population ....

Also drank that same brand of American bottled water ....

And so ...

And while the CIA does its darndest ....

To make sure that our CIA agents ....

In all of George W. Bush's war zones .....

Have all the bottled water that they can drink ....

"Suicides expose Army flaw - Military, facing troop shortages, neglect soldiers' mental health"

By LISA CHEDEKEL and MATTHEW KAUFFMAN, Hartford Courant
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

Army Spec. Jeffrey Henthorn, 25, of Choctaw, Okla., was sent back to Iraq for a second tour even though his superiors knew he had twice threatened suicide.

He killed himself in 2005.

Army Pfc. David L. Potter, 22, of Johnson City, Tenn., was diagnosed with anxiety and depression while serving in Iraq in 2004.

Records show Potter remained on active duty in Baghdad despite a suicide attempt and a psychiatrist's recommendation that he be separated from the Army.

Ten days after the recommendation was signed, he slid a gun out from under another soldier's bed and shot himself.

These deaths are among the most extreme failures by the U.S. military to properly screen, treat and evacuate mentally unfit troops, a Hartford Courant investigation has found.

Pressed by troop shortages, the military has increasingly sent, kept and recycled troubled service members into combat -- practices that undercut past assurances it would improve mental health care.

Besides suicides, experts say gaps in such care can fuel violence between soldiers, accidents and critical mistakes in judgment during combat operations.

Among the newspaper's findings:

Despite a congressional order that the military assess the mental health of all deploying troops, fewer than 1 in 300 service members see a mental health professional before shipping out.

Once at war, some unstable troops are kept on potent antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs with little or no counseling or medical monitoring, in violation of the military's own regulations.

Some troops who developed post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after serving in Iraq are being sent back to the war zone, increasing risk to their mental health.

These practices helped fuel an increase in the suicide rate among troops serving in Iraq, which reached an all-time high in 2005 when 22 soldiers killed themselves -- accounting for nearly one in five of all noncombat Army deaths.

The Courant investigation found that at least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress.

The Army's top mental health expert, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with PTSD back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.

"The challenge for us ... is that the Army has a mission to fight."

"And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge," she said.

"And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers' personal needs."

Bomb damages shrine

A series of roadside bombs and explosions damaged a Shiite shrine east of the volatile city of Baqouba late Saturday -- the second time this year that a site sacred to Iraq's Shiite majority has been targeted.

The bombing at the Imam Abdullah Ali al-Hadi shrine, which caused no injuries, could have significant repercussions -- particularly in the Baqouba area, a mixed Sunni Arab-Shiite region where sectarian tensions are running high.

The blasts occurred at about 11 p.m. at the shrine, according to the Diyala provincial police Joint Coordination Center and Interior Ministry Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi.

On Feb. 22, bombs heavily damaged the Golden Dome in Samarra, which holds the tomb of Imam Abdullah's father.

That attack triggered a wave of reprisal attacks against Sunnis, dramatically escalating sectarian tension and pushing the country to the brink of civil war.

Meanwhile, attacks outside Baghdad killed a U.S. soldier and five Iraqis.

The U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, the military said.

The attack raised to at least 2,437 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Children face malnutrition

Health and aid workers told the Los Angeles Times that one in four Iraqi children suffers from chronic malnutrition, as poor security and poverty take their toll on the youngest generation.

The situation is worse in remote rural areas, where as many as one in three children suffers from problems associated with poor diet such as stunted growth and low weight, according to a recent government report that surveyed 22,050 households in 98 districts around the nation.

The study shows that Iraq's current food-rationing program has not been able to meet many families' needs.

Iraq's continued instability is the main culprit, health experts said, disrupting food distribution networks, along with lack of sanitation and clean water.

"Fired agent believes CIA lied - Friends say McCarthy not an ideologue, but became disenchanted"

By R. JEFFREY SMITH, Washington Post
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees, during interrogations it conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But another CIA officer -- the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was startled to hear what she considered an outright falsehood, according to people familiar with her account.

It came during the discussion of legislation that would constrain the CIA's interrogations.

That CIA officer was Mary McCarthy, 61, who was fired April 20 for allegedly sharing classified information with journalists, including Washington Post journalist Dana Priest.

A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that "CIA people had lied" in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading.

Whether McCarthy's conviction that the CIA was hiding unpleasant truths provoked her to leak sensitive information is known only to her and the journalists she is alleged to have spoken with last year.

But the picture of her that emerges from interviews with more than a dozen former colleagues is of an independent-minded analyst who became convinced that on multiple occasions the agency had not given accurate or complete information to its congressional overseers.

McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted U.S. counter-terrorism policy.

After seeing -- in e-mails, cable traffic, interview transcripts and field reports -- some of the secret fruits of the Iraq intervention, McCarthy became disenchanted, three of her friends say.

In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer, McCarthy told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a full account of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing of the House intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat.

McCarthy also told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the agency's creation of "ghost detainees" -- prisoners removed from Iraq for secret interrogations without notice to the International Red Cross -- because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such practices.

Almost all of McCarthy's friends and colleagues interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because her case still could be referred for prosecution and because much of her work involved highly classified information.

As a former director of intelligence programs in the Clinton administration's National Security Council, McCarthy was entrusted with deep secrets regarding the nation's covert actions overseas.

She was a contributor in 2004 to the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry, and a former colleague of two Clinton aides -- Richard Clarke and Randall Beers -- who had publicly assailed what they considered Bush's misguided focus on Iraq.

By many accounts, those traits helped fit McCarthy precisely into the current White House's model of a disloyal intelligence officer: She dissented from Bush administration policy, and let others know.

But McCarthy's friends, including former officials who support aggressive interrogation methods, resist any suggestion that she handled classified information loosely or that political motives lay behind her dissent and the contacts she has told the agency she had with journalists.

She was, in the view of several who know her well, a convenient CIA scapegoat for a White House that they say prefers intelligence acolytes instead of analysts, and reflexively sees ulterior motives in any policy criticism.

They allege that her firing was another chapter in a longstanding feud between the CIA and the Bush White House, stoked by frictions over the merits of the war in Iraq, over whether links existed between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida, and by the CIA-instigated criminal probe of White House officials suspected of leaking the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"When the President nominated Porter Goss (as CIA director in September 2004), he sent Goss over to get a rogue agency under control," Steven Simon, a former colleague of McCarthy's at the National Security Council from 1994 to 1999, said Goss's aides told him.

Simon said McCarthy's unusually public firing appeared intended not only to block leaks but to suppress dissent that has "led to these leaks."

"The aim was to have a chilling effect, and it will probably work for a while."

Goss himself was forced to resign earlier this month.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck -- without naming McCarthy -- denied the firing was meant to suppress dissent.

She said it was provoked solely by the officer's admission to CIA investigators to having provided classified information to the media.

"You can't ignore an officer ignoring their secrecy agreement," she said.

Many lawmakers have said they share this viewpoint, and some have called for tougher CIA sanctions to enforce the secrecy rules.

But McCarthy, in e-mails to friends, has denied leaking anything classified.

She has not denied speaking to Priest, but said she was unaware that the CIA had secret prisons in Eastern Europe, the most attention-getting detail in Priest's articles last year.

Her lawyer has said the same thing publicly.

Assessing whether politics played a role in the firing is difficult, given the reluctance of those involved to lay bare the underlying facts.

The CIA has declined to disclose the evidence it collected against McCarthy.

McCarthy declined to be interviewed for this story and her attorney, Ty Cobb, said the CIA has precluded him from discussing what McCarthy said in a series of CIA interviews and polygraph examinations between February and April 18

end quotes

SSSSssshhhhhh .....

It's all a SECRET .....

But don't tell anyone that I told you ....

And so ....

"'I made a serious mistake' - Senior aide to Pataki faces DWI charges after car crash in Albany"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Saturday, May 13, 2006

ALBANY -- Joseph Conway, a top aide to Gov. George Pataki, was placed on paid leave Friday after pleading not guilty to charges of driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident.

Conway, 40, of Slingerlands, is accused of driving his state vehicle into the rear of a car parked at Delaware Avenue and Leonard Place about 10 p.m. Thursday, said Department of Public Safety spokesman Detective James Miller.

The unoccupied car was "totaled," Miller said.

Records show Conway's blood-alcohol level was 0.23 -- nearly three times the threshold for DWI.

He was arrested at 10:20 p.m.

"I made a serious mistake," Conway said in a statement released after consultation with his lawyer, Andrew Kirby.

"It's something I deeply regret and I will take responsibility for it."

Kirby and Conway did not take calls for comment.

Wanda Maddex, 42, of Clifton Park, said she was visiting her ex-boyfriend after a late shift at her job at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

She was about to return to her 1994 Chevrolet.

"I heard the crash," Maddex said.

"I looked out the window and saw my car pushed into the telephone pole and this car trying to get away ..."

"My ex-boyfriend was able to run down the car in bare feet."

Will Bink, 53, a maintenance worker, said he ran out of the house and saw a 2001 Impala wedged into Maddex's car, which had been pushed several feet from its parking spot.

The driver dislodged his car after a few minutes of maneuvering, Bink said.

Maddex called police and waited with her damaged vehicle as Bink took off in pursuit, he said.

"He had two flat tires, so I knew he wasn't going to go far," Bink said.

"When he made a turn on Park Avenue, he couldn't get any further."

"He tried to get away."

"I ran up to him and said, 'You aren't going anywhere until the cops get here.'"

"He said, 'Sorry.'"

"I said, 'You're sorry I caught you.'"

"I reached in, got the keys."

Miller confirmed the story, saying witnesses called police and followed the car, and officers found Conway in the driver's seat parked near the accident scene.

Conway failed a field sobriety test and was described by officers as slurring his speech and having glassy eyes, and later took a test to determine the alcohol content of his blood.

Conway was arraigned Friday morning before City Court Judge Thomas Keefe and pleaded not guilty to two DWI misdemeanor counts and to leaving the scene of an accident.

The car he was driving is registered to the state Office of General Services, according to state Department of Motor Vehicle records.

Conway, who started with the Pataki administration in 1998 as a Budget Division spokesman, served as the governor's press secretary and works as director of special projects.

Conway has been a state employee since 1988.

He worked for Senate Republicans for a decade before joining the governor's staff.

David Catalfamo, Pataki's director of communications, said Conway was put on paid leave from his $143,000-per-year post "as he takes the appropriate steps to address the ramifications" of the arrest.

"Joe is a longtime and valued staff member and we will continue to stand by him as he addresses these serious issues," Catalfamo said.

Friends say Conway had been drinking at the Fort Orange Club before the accident, but a person who identified himself as the bartender at the downtown members-only landmark said he was unaware of Conway being at the tavern on Thursday.

The club's manager did not return a call for comment.

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/opini...herbert.html?hp

America the Fearful
By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 15, 2006
In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.

Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.

If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.

Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak of yet another presidential power grab: the administration's collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.

The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country. It supposedly wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.

Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.

The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its fearmongering and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of government checks and balances.

Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.

The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war." But George W. Bush, employing an outrageous propaganda campaign ("Shock and awe," "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"), started an utterly pointless war in Iraq that he still doesn't know how to win or how to end.

If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.

So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.

The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.

Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.

There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8992

May 15, 2006
Fascism: Are We There Yet?
The surveillance state and the dangers of 'data-mining'
by Justin Raimondo
The lies keep coming. During the run-up to war with Iraq, we were told this administration knew for sure that Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction," and not only that, but knew exactly where they were. When no WMD turned up after the invasion, the Bushies came up with a bushel of excuses and denied ever saying that in the first place.

Oh, but don't worry – their real motive for going to war was to export "democracy" to Iraq – which, as anyone can see, is happening – so none of that matters anyway.

When it came out that the U.S. government was intercepting and listening to all overseas calls, the president himself stepped up to the plate and declared that they weren't spying on domestic calls – and now we learn that the biggest database in the world is being compiled by the National Security Agency (NSA) in which a record of every phone call made in the U.S. since 2001 is kept.

Oh, but don't fret – no one in government would ever allow this vital and potentially sensitive information to be put to unsavory purposes, such as blackmailing political opponents or similar dirty tricks. That anyone in Washington would do such a thing – why, it's unthinkable!

Trust us, say the biggest liars since the boy who cried wolf. Scooter Libby really doesn't remember outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and Ahmed Chalabi really is a "hero in error." All the lying war propaganda vomited forth by this administration and its media toadies on the front page of the New York Times, then dutifully lapped up by administration talking heads on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, was just an honest mistake. They didn't mean to deceive us, you see, and this is supposed to make us feel better as well as let the War Party off the hook.

It does neither. It won't matter in the long run, however, if the neocons get what they're after. What's really at stake here is the continued relevance of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founding Fathers. Listen closely – you can hear them turning in their graves.

What is significant about this new revelation is the way the White House is spinning it: they claim it's all perfectly legal, because the president – according to their creative interpretation of the Constitution – has the "inherent" authority to create such a database. Congress may object, but it isn't up to them – it's up to "the decider," as Dubya has recently begun referring to Himself. Instead of a president, we now have a decider in chief, who combines the qualities of a chief executive, a military chieftain, and a king. Not a modern monarch, all of whom are merely symbolic reminders of fallen empires, but a king of old, who could dismiss Parliament and rule by decree.

The phone record database is ostensibly a weapon to be used against terrorists plotting another 9/11: by employing a technique known as "data-mining" the authorities are supposed to be able to detect "bursts" of unusual calls and reveal a pattern that will somehow lead them to the bad guys. A piece in the Christian Science Monitor says this "can be used to identify a 'social network' of interconnected people – including, perhaps, would-be terrorists." Yes, and also including the "social network" of the political opposition, antiwar leaders, and – yikes! – antiwar writers.

Data-mining is the Big Idea now energizing the burgeoning "anti-terrorist" industry, and its purpose is nothing less than to build databases that can be "cross-referenced in the hope of matching patterns, relationships, and activities that bear investigating." The Monitor goes on to cite Silicon Valley security expert Bruce Schneier, of Counterpane Internet Security:

"You should presume that phone numbers are being collated with Internet records, credit-card records, everything."

That's why they call it totalitarianism – because they want access to everything. The totality of your life must be available at the touch of a button. Remember "Total Information Awareness," the scheme cooked up by John Poindexter and Donald Rumsfeld that Congress ordered dismantled? Well, this "data-mining" business is it: Rummy, it appears, just embedded the program in a different bureaucratic rat-hole, and they've been pursuing their quest for omniscience ever since, without the knowledge or oversight of Congress. This usurpation has so riled Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and 50 other members of congress, that there will be a congressional investigation into the matter.

"Privacy nuts," sneers The Weekly Standard, which wheels out good old reliable Heather MacDonald to explain why "only a paranoid solipsist could feel threatened" by this latest intrusion. After all, Heather explains, your name won't be attached to the number: it's just a bunch of digits, silly. And even then, there's just so much data that getting anything out of it is going to be very difficult. There, there – now go back to sleep.

But if there's too much data to glean meaningful patterns in anything close to real-time, then doesn't that invalidate the entire "data-mining" procedure as a useful tool in tracking terrorists? As William Arkin put it in a fascinating piece on this subject of "harvesting" useful intelligence from a massive database:

"An all-seeing domestic surveillance is slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to track the activities and 'transactions' of any targeted individual in near real time."

And digits can always be attached to a name, as MacDonald admits:

"True, the government can de-anonymize the data if connections to terror suspects emerge, and it is not known what threshold of proof the government uses to put a name to critical phone numbers. But until that point is reached, your privacy is at greater risk from the Goodyear blimp at a Stones concert than from the NSA's supercomputers churning through trillions of zeros and ones representing disembodied phone numbers."

The mere fact that "it is not known what threshold of proof the government uses" before implementing this Orwellian technique tells us all we need to know about this very imminent threat to what is left of our civil liberties. What threshold of proof must be reached before the government arrogates to itself the "right" to ferret out the perhaps intimate details of your life? If we are talking about this government, one shudders to contemplate the answer. The Bush administration considers itself above the law: it recognizes no law but itself, and to hell with the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.

The old republic passes away, but what will take its place? The outlines of the new system emerging from the ruins of the Constitution are beginning to take shape, and it isn't a pretty sight. One of my favorite bloggers put the issue in context, warning against:

"The ultra-conservative legal scholars who invented the doctrine of the unitary executive and turned into our own home-grown version of the Fuhrerprinzip – now backed by the ability to process 10 billion bits of telecommunications data per second. Big Brother, eat your heart out."

Last year, a number of writers, including Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute, Scott McConnell of The American Conservative, and myself, among others, took up the question of whether or not America is going fascist. A unique confluence of various factors gave rise to this kind of speculation: the leader cult that had grown up around the president, the worship of the military, and a foreign policy stance somewhere between old-style British imperialism and Soviet-style "liberation" (as when the Red Army "liberated" Afghanistan in the 1970s). Rockwell started the discussion with his perceptive comments on "Red State Fascism," and the topic soon became a subject of debate all over the Internet, as well as in print. I chimed in on several occasions with my own somewhat pessimistic prognosis. Scott was more optimistic, yet still clearly worried about the future prospects of a genuinely fascist regime taking hold in the land of the free. The existence of government "data-miners" with full access to our phone records, our financial records, and every other bit of data they can dig up, provides yet more evidence that Rockwell is right about the rising fascist danger. As he put it:

"The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing."

The Bushies and their media megaphones are loudly touting a recent poll that shows majority support for increased surveillance. This, I think, underscores the prescience of Rockwell's analysis. The present regime is busily building up the structural basis of a police state, one in which they will have the power to see into everything with the possible exception of your very soul – and that, I can almost assure you, is coming.

Yes, data-mining can be used to track those millions of Americans who aren't plotting terrorist attacks – and, heck, Big Brother can even watch us from space. I suppose executive orders could be used to lock up political dissidents without charges or a trial: and, yes, the U.S just possibly might use its doctrine of military "preemption" to defeat a threat that was never there. Luckily for us, we're governed by angels. Otherwise, I shudder to think what might happen…

Well, Snuf .....

You sure are right on the money with this article, alright .....

Especially that line about "the Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings" .......

It makes me recall a series of conversations that I ended up having with a newspaper editor out in Arizona, I believe he was .....

http://www.asiantimes.com/asiantimes.htm

This in the months leading up to the November 2004 presidential elections .....

And this newspaper editor had come here from the Phillipines ....

As a child .....

After WWII ....

And his vision of America was formed by watching cowboy movies as a child, over there .....

Plus his contact with American soldiers after the war was over, and the Japanese were routed from his homeland .....

This man was apparently quite influential as a newspaper editor, in his own mind, anyway ...

And he didn't know the first thing about the United States Constitution .....

NOR DID HE GIVE A DAMN ABOUT SOMETHING CALLED THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION .....

Because it meant nothing to him, at all ....

In that it put no money in his pocket .....

Which is what "life in OUR America" is really all about, what, what .....

"LAND OF THE GREEDY, HOME OF THE SLEAZY" .....

"Move over, let me in, I want some, too ......"

His market out there was mainly the Asian community ...

And he was recommending in his editorials that they support George W. Bush ..

Because he was a STRONGMAN .....

Which is to say, a dictator .....

And his position was that the Asians want that kind of leader ...

In fact, need that kind of leader ...

And so ...

Despite OUR United Constitution, we should really have Phillipines-style STRONGMEN over here .....

As opposed to a more "constitutionally-inclined" leader ....

Who this guy saw as being too weak for America .....

And that series of conversations ...

Plus my own observations ...

And studies ...

Have pretty much convinced me ...

That to the "man (woman) on the street" .....

The United States Constitution is really nothing at all .....

And when that is so ...

Which it is ...

Then there are no "checks and balances" .....

Because there is no SOURCE for them to spring forth from ....

And that is where we are right now ....

Which is why we have a Ferdinand Edralín Marcos ......

Or a Manuel Noriega-type of TINPOT DICTATOR ....

On the THRONE .....

Here in OUR America these days ....

As opposed to an FDR-style statesman .....

And it goes directly to what are called "the people of America" .....

When the "people" of America have gone through sufficient "devolution" ....

Which is to say "retrograde evolution" ........

From rational, thinking, discerning human beings ...

Down into being little more than two-legged "cud-chewing" fearful beasts ...

"CONSUMERS" .....

Like feed-lot cattle ....

Or farm-raised rabbits ....

Then you get to where we are right now .....

And so .....

No surprises, whatsoever, Snuf .....

No surprises at all ....

We are where we are ...

Because this is where we have descended to, ourselves ...

And so .....

Of course they can, Snuf .....

Since as far back as August 22, 2001, at least .....

Which is what we have been talking about for over a year now .....

Over in the JUDICIARY section of this forum .....

In a thread entitled "Bush-appointee in Northern District of New York deals right to dissent a death blow" .....

Why don't we hear about this in our local news?

http://commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/...php/t24721.html

The EXCECUTIVE simply "contracts" with a CORPORATION .....

And when the EXECUTIVE wants to "GET RID" of somebody ....

The EXECUTIVE simply has the CORPORATION issue an "arrest order" for the person ....

On trumped-up "psychiatric" grounds .....

Which directs the "STATE'S" POLICE to go out and "capture" this person ....

For transport to a "political re-conditioning" facility operated by the CORPORATION ....

And then ...

They are simply gone .....

Which is really the old Soviet-model ...

For dealing with dissidents ...

Simply have the "STATE" declare them to be mentally ill and dangerous .....

And then ...

They are gone ...

No muss ...

No fuss ...

No civil rights BULL**** to have to worry about ....

Since these people so branded have no civil rights ....

And so ....

Justin should get out more, perhaps .....

Find out what is really going on here in OUR America ...

Instead of just speculating ....

Because while he is speculating about what might happen .....

It is long since a reality ...

Albeit unknown to him, apparently ....

And so ....

And up from some subterranean lair ....

Where they have been keeping him hidden away from view ....

Comes Karl Rove ...

And Karl just might be on to something here ....

But then ...

Karl is .....

THE ARCHITECT .....

And so ....

He would be ....

Wouldn't he?

"Rove blames Iraq war for low Bush numbers"

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:16 p.m., Monday, May 15, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Presidential adviser Karl Rove blamed the war in Iraq on Monday for dragging down President Bush's job approval ratings in public opinion polls.

"People like this president," Rove said.

"They're just sour right now on the war."

Rove said that Bush's likeability ratings are far higher than his approval ratings.

"There is a disconnect" because of the Iraq conflict, Rove told the American Enterprise Institute.

"I think the war looms over everything."

"There's no doubt about it," Rove said during a question-and-answer session after a speech on the economy at the conservative think tank.

Rove, who is deputy White House chief of staff and Bush's top political adviser, brushed aside a question on his own role in the federal CIA-leak investigation, saying he would not go beyond statements by his attorney.

"Nice try," Rove told the questioner.

On the economy, Rove credited the president's fiscal policies, particularly a series of first-term tax cuts, for a recovery that has gone on since late 2001.

"The reality is, the tax cuts have helped make the U.S. economy the strongest in the world," Rove said.

He said the president in his address to the nation Monday night would propose "a comprehensive solution" on immigration, including tougher border enforcement.

Asked about criticism from some conservatives for his proposal for a guest worker program, Rove said, "This is about getting the right policy, and the politics will take care of themselves."

"I mean, we've seen this about four or five times before in American politics, and it's always seemed to work its way out politically, and I'm confident this will as well," Rove said.

"You'll hear the president talk tonight about steps that we're going to take to increase our security along the border immediately and to deal with the other part of it, which is we will not be able to secure the border unless we have a temporary worker program," Rove said.

The presidential adviser, widely credited with securing Bush's win in 2000 and re-election in 2004, was questioned about public opinion polls that show the president's plunging approval ratings.

A recent AP-Ipsos poll showed Bush approval at 33 percent.

Other national polls put it around 30 percent.

"Well, you know, it's interesting, because consumer confidence is relatively high."

"In fact, it is much higher than the average of the last 40 years," said Rove, who argued that typically should lead to a gain of congressional seats for Republicans in November's midterm elections.

"Their personal circumstances are good."

"They're feeling good about where they are."

"They don't like gas prices."

"Who likes having to pay more at the pump?"

"But they do feel that overall the economy is good for them, that the prospects for their family in the near term and for the future are good," Rove said of Americans.

"They're worried about the long haul."

"They've heard about the problems with Social Security."

"They're worried about globalization."

"But they're confident about where they are right now and where they find themselves," he added.

Rove accused the news media of being too fixated on polls.

"I love this mania which has swept through American media today which substitutes polls for coverage of substance," he said.

"There's, I'm sure, going to be a special Betty Ford addiction for those that are addicted to regular poll numbers, but you'll work your way through it," he said, referring to the former first lady's clinic for treating substance abuse.

Despite low approval ratings, "I'm sanguine," Rove said.

"I know our own polls."

He said that Bush's likeability, his personal approval ratings, were in the 60s in some polls.

"Job approval is lower."

"And what that says to me is that people like him, they respect him, he's somebody they feel a connection with, but they're just sour right now on the war."

"And that's the way it's going to be."

Rove spent about half an hour taking questions from the audience, including some from reporters.

end quotes

I don't like this president, Karl ....

Never have .....

I have never liked his partisanship ....

The lies .....

The HACK-O-CRACY ....

And you know something, Karl ...

I don't think too much of you, either .....

And so ...

Better put that pipe away, Karl ....

And quit smoking that stuff ...

Cause it seems to have your brain all whacked out here .....

And so .....

"Singing the blues as economy hums - Despite above-average gains, poll finds 64% feel things are getting worse"

By KEVIN G. HALL, Knight-Ridder
First published: Monday, May 15, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. economy is strong these days when measured by macro-statistics, but sluggish wage growth, rising gasoline prices and interest rates, and the gloomy background music from the Iraq war are overshadowing the good economic news in the minds of most Americans.

To be sure, corporations are raking in strong profits, which are driving the stock market near its all-time high.

Unemployment remains near historic lows.

Even a slump in home sales hasn't significantly slowed consumer spending.

But when pollster Gallup recently surveyed Americans, 64 percent said the economy was getting worse.

Only 33 percent described it as good, 40 percent as fair and 23 percent as poor.

And that survey was taken March 13-16, before gasoline prices leaped more than 30 cents a gallon to a national average of $2.92.

"When we talk about consumer confidence, or rating the economy, we're talking attitudes here."

"And if they're down on a lot of things in America, they'll be down on that, too," said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll.

Pollsters, he said, "are picking up decade-long lows" for citizen views about the White House and Congress, fueled by the unpopular war in Iraq, among other downers.

These views cloud feelings about the economy.

Experts agree that U.S. economic growth is above historic norms.

In late April, the Commerce Department reported a sizzling first-quarter annual growth rate of 4.8 percent in the nation's gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy.

And at 4.7 percent, unemployment hovers near all-time lows.

The Dow Jones blue-chip stock average closed Tuesday at 11,639.77, nearing its all-time high of 11,722 set Jan. 14, 2000.

That's lifted millions of U.S. workers' 401(k) retirement holdings.

So why aren't Americans celebrating?

"It's not showing up in their paychecks the way you'd expect," said Jared Bernstein, chief economist for the liberal Economy Policy Institute in Washington.

"The gap between the economy from 40,000 feet and on the ground level just seems to get wider with every new report."

The same week the robust GDP numbers came out, the government also reported that worker compensation -- pay and benefits -- rose in the year's first quarter at an annual rate of only 2.4 percent, the slowest rate in seven years.

That figure, Bernstein said, suggests workers' wages aren't keeping pace with wage gains during past economic expansions, or even with inflation, which rose by 3.4 percent over the year ending in March as measured by the consumer price index.

"The problem is you have faster growing prices colliding with nominal wage growth that has been pretty unimpressive," he said.

A closer look at the composition of the work force helps explain why many Americans aren't cheering all the strong economic news in the headlines.

The Labor Department said in 2004 that 51.6 percent of all workers are concentrated in five job categories with mean-average hourly wages of $15.50 per hour or less.

The national mean-average wage was $18.

These are the people most likely to suffer from rising gasoline prices and credit rates.

In fact, two government measures of workers' pay -- median weekly earnings and a broader index that adds benefits such as health insurance to compensation -- grew more slowly than inflation over the past 12 months, and two other wage indexes surpassed inflation only slightly.

That suggests that many workers' income is either losing ground or barely holding even.

The chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, Edward Lazear, acknowledged on May 2 that wage growth has lagged, but he said it would soon follow economic growth.

"As the expansion progresses, wages tend to catch up to productivity growth, and eventually the growth rate of wages exceeds that of productivity."

"... We are moving into that phase," Lazear told the Hudson Institute, a conservative policy-research center.

Productivity measures a worker's output per hour.

For the past decade, it's outpaced historic norms.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that hourly wages are up 3.8 percent over the past 12 months, supporting Lazear's view that a turn is coming.

The bureau also said average weekly earnings are up by 4.1 percent.

The Bush administration, deflecting criticism about sluggish wage growth, is talking up the economy's rebound in job creation, after years of a "jobless recovery," with 32 consecutive months of job growth and 2.5 million net new jobs over the past year.

But there were 143.7 million active workers on payrolls in April, and most of their wages have grown more slowly in recent years than they did during past business cycles.

Martin Regalia, chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said he thinks the economy will slow in the second half of this year.

Third-quarter growth numbers will be released shortly before November's congressional elections.

If they show a significant slowdown, as Regalia and most mainstream economists expect, that could turn voters against the governing Republican Party.

"How do you spin that politically?" Regalia asked.

"It's been hard to sell this economy to the general public while it's been very good."

"How are we going to sell it when it is just good?"

George W. Bush and a secret service agent are taking a stroll when they come upon a little girl carrying a basket with a blanket over it.

Curious, Bush asks the girl, "What's in the basket?"

She replies, "New baby kittens," and she opens the basket to show him.

"How nice," says Bush.

"What kind are they?"

The little girl says, "Republicans."

Bush smiles, pats the little girl on the head and continues on.

Three weeks later, Bush is taking another stroll, this time with Karl Rove.

They see the little girl again with the same basket.

Bush says, "Watch this, Karl, it's really cute."

They approach the little girl.

He greets the little girl and says "How are the kittens doing?" and she says, "Fine."

Then, smirking, he nudges Rove with his elbow and asks the little girl, "And can you tell us what kind of kittens they are?"

She replies, "Democrats."

Abashed, Bush says, "But three weeks ago you said they were Republicans!"

"I know," she says.

"But now their eyes are open ..."

And then ....

There is the weather .....

"Rains pummel New England - States of emergency in New Hampshire, Massachusetts"

By DAVID TIRRELL-WYSOCKI, Associated Press
First published: Monday, May 15, 2006

CONCORD, N.H. -- Torrential rain forced hundreds of people from their homes in parts of New England on Sunday as water flowed over dams and washed out roads.

The governors of New Hampshire and Massachusetts declared states of emergency, activating the National Guard to help communities respond to the storm.

Maine's governor also declared a state of emergency for one county.

"It's a very serious situation," said New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, adding that forecasters were predicting 12 to 15 inches of rain by the end of the storm in parts of southern New Hampshire.

"It continues to change and the situation continues to worsen."

A dam in Milton, N.H., was in danger of failing, which could send a 10-foot wall of water downstream, the National Weather Service said in a bulletin.

People downstream were being evacuated in the town.

The state Office of Emergency Management said at least a dozen dams were being closely watched.

In Massachusetts, cars were pulled from flooded streets in downtown Peabody, about 20 miles north of Boston, and about 300 people were evacuated from an apartment complex for seniors.

About 150 residents in Melrose, Mass., had to leave their homes after sewage lines were overwhelmed, backing up into houses, said Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Some parts of New Hampshire had seen 7 inches of rain by midday Sunday and forecasters said up to 5 more inches might come during the day.

About 100 residents were evacuated from their homes in Wakefield, N.H., because of concerns about two dams in the area.

Officials also reported a railroad culvert and embankment washed out in Milton, with train tracks suspended in midair.

And the local emergency management office in Hooksett said the town essentially was closed because so many roads were flooded.

And then ....

There is America's Dick .....

"Cheney remains linked to CIA leak case - Prosecutor files notes suggesting aide acted at vice president's behest"

By PETE YOST, Associated Press
First published: Monday, May 15, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The prosecutor in the CIA leak case said more than six months ago that he was not alleging any criminal acts by Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the leak of agency operative Valerie Plame's identity.

Today, the prosecutor is leaving the door open to the possibility that the vice president's now-indicted former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, was acting at his boss' behest when Libby allegedly leaked information about Plame to media.

A new court filing presents handwritten notes by Cheney.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is using them to assert that the vice president and Libby, working together, were focusing much attention on Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a Bush administration critic.

Cheney's notes ask whether Plame had sent Wilson on a "junket" to Africa.

Plame's supposed role in her husband's trip to Africa allegedly was later leaked to the media by both Libby and by presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Cheney's notes on the margins of Wilson's opinion column in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, reflect "the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president," Fitzgerald said in the court filing late Friday.

Wilson's column "is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant's immediate superior, including whether Mr. Wilson's wife had 'sent him on a junket,' " the court papers say.

Cheney's notes "support the proposition that publication of the Wilson op-ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant -- his chief of staff -- on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions," according to the filing.

In the column, Wilson recounted how he had been sent by the CIA in 2002 to Niger to assess intelligence that Iraq had an agreement to acquire uranium yellowcake from the African country.

His conclusion: It was highly doubtful that such a deal existed.

And getting away from the stench of politics for a moment ....

"Long-ago eyes on skies"

Los Angeles Times
First published: Monday, May 15, 2006

Archaeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the oldest celestial observatory in the Americas -- a 4,200-year-old structure marking the summer and winter solstices that is as old as the stone pillars of Stonehenge.

The observatory was built on the top of a 33-foot-high pyramid with precise alignments and sight lines that provide an astronomical calendar for agriculture, archaeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri said.

The people who built the observatory -- three millenniums before the emergence of the Incas -- are a mystery, but they achieved a level of art and science that archaeologists say they did not know existed in the region until at least 800 years later.

Among the most impressive finds was a massive clay sculpture -- an ancient version of the modern frowning "sad face" icon -- flanked by two animals.

The disk marked the position of the winter solstice.

But these days ....

You can never get far enough away ....

For very long ....

And so ....

"Army Reserve bars officers' departures - Policy revealed during litigation over practice similar to stop-loss"

Washington Post
First published: Friday, May 12, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The Army Reserve, taxed by recruiting shortfalls and war-zone duty, has adopted a policy barring officers from leaving the service if their field is undermanned or they have not been deployed to Iraq, to Afghanistan or for homeland defense missions.

The reserve has used the unpublicized policy, first adopted in 2004 and strengthened in a May 2005 memo signed by Lt. Gen. James Helmly, its commander, to disapprove the resignations of at least 400 reserve officers, according to Army figures.

"I don't think during a time of war you would want to let people go when you have a shortage of people," Army Reserve spokesman Steve Stromvall said when asked to comment on the memo, which surfaced during litigation over the policy.

At least 10 reserve officers have sued the Army, saying they should be allowed to get out because they have finished their mandatory eight years of service.

Blocking reserve officers' resignations is one of several steps the Army has undertaken in recent years to keep soldiers beyond their original terms of service, as today's wars place unprecedented demands on the all-volunteer force.

Under another practice, known as "stop-loss," thousands of active-duty Army and reserve soldiers have been temporarily prevented from leaving the military, either because their skills were needed or because their units were going overseas.

As of January, more than 13,000 soldiers were being kept under stop-loss, a policy criticized by some as a "backdoor draft," which the Army says it seeks to end.

Sunnis rescued from militia

U.S. and Iraqi forces rescued seven Sunni Arab men seized by suspected Shiite militiamen near Baghdad, part of a campaign to suppress sectarian death squads responsible for hundreds of deaths this year.

More than 30 people were taken into custody, Iraqi police told The Associated Press.

Some of the suspects told police they belong to the militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Elsewhere, three U.S. soldiers were killed when roadside bombs hit two U.S. Army convoys southwest of Baghdad, the military said.

It was also announced that a U.S. soldier died Tuesday from non-combat related wounds.

Their deaths raised to at least 2,430 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

2007 homecoming forecast

Rep. John Murtha, a Vietnam veteran, says American troops will be brought home from Iraq by 2007.

Either President Bush will bow to public opinion or Democrats will have won control of the House of Representatives and increased pressure on the White House, Murtha, D-Pa., said to the Associated Press Thursday.

Murtha, 73, a retired Marine colonel, shocked Washington in November when he said the war could not be won and it was time for troops to come home.

Actually, Karl .....

Every time I have to buy something ....

And the price of it keeps rising ...

From what it was the last time ....

While quality goes down ....

I feel like I'm really getting screwed by this economy of yours ....

But what the hey, Karl ....

Mid-term elections are in November ....

And so ....

"Drivers shift their gears in response to gas hikes - Prices inspire many in the Capital Region to change their ways"

By MATT PACENZA, Staff writer, Albany, new York Times Union

First published: Monday, May 15, 2006

Bob Wishnoff is the kind of guy who likes fast cars.

But when the price of a gallon of gasoline soared 60 cents this spring to $3, the Albany man decided he wanted a car that burned less fuel.

Last month, he traded his BMW Z-4 roadster for a MINI Cooper, picking up about 13 miles per gallon in the process.

"I decided to save some gas, be a little environmentally conscious and save a little money," Wishnoff said.

Many drivers across the Capital Region report they are taking modest steps to save gas -- sharing rides, minimizing unnecessary errands and adjusting vacation plans.

But more than a few, like Wishnoff, are considering changing the cars they drive.

It's behavior that's been predicted by economists who study how drivers across the world react to increases in fuel prices.

They have found that people make small changes at first.

But in the long run, if prices stay high, they'll take dramatic steps: getting a new car or even giving up driving altogether.

The phenomenon is of interest to those who want to see a sharp reduction in the use of gasoline and other fuel -- to curb global warming, reduce air pollution and help the United States reduce its dependence on energy from the Middle East.

Those achievements will be closer if many people do what Christine Hanson of Clifton Park is on the verge of doing.

She and her husband want to trade in their SUV for a hybrid sedan.

"Why not do something, not only for the environment but to put a little extra money in my pocket?" she asked.

"I don't foresee gas prices going down."

Consumers do need to know prices will stay high before they'll take big steps, experts say.

Lately, they've been up and down.

Gas prices shot up to $3.41 a gallon immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast last year, but then dropped to $2.30 within three months.

"What's very important is to achieve a degree of stability in price," said Therese Langer of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

How do you keep prices stable?

Government could ensure gas remained at at least $3 a gallon by boosting taxes when the prices goes down.

But most experts have thought that any elected official who proposed such a policy would be committing political suicide.

Langer isn't so sure.

"The public seems to be quite a bit ahead of the politicians," she said.

"A couple polls show that people are at the point of accepting the notion that a gas tax would be palatable if it could guarantee some kind of stability."

How people respond to a change in price depends on how badly they need something.

If a ticket to the River Rats suddenly cost $200, the Times Union Center -- er, Pepsi Arena -- would almost certainly be empty for their next game.

But it's hard for people to stop buying gas: they can't just suddenly quit their jobs, or move to a new place right near school.

And even if they want to drive a car that gets better gas, most people only get a new car every few years -- or even less frequently.

Economists actually have a formula that predicts what they call the "elasticity of demand," or how people behave when prices go up.

For gas, in the short term, studies show people reduce their consumption by roughly one-tenth as much as the percent increase.

So if gas goes up 50 percent, for example, people only cut their gas usage by 5 percent -- at least in the short term.

Interviews with area residents show that people are reducing their gas use slightly.

They're trying to consolidate their errands -- going to the doctor, the grocery store and the mall in a single trip.

They're doing their best to travel with family members or friends on outings, rather than taking separate cars.

Sara Blake of Albany has figured out how to walk to some work meetings -- across the Hudson River.

She works at a branch office of the state Office of Children and Family Services in downtown Albany.

At least twice a week, she has meetings in Rensselaer.

Driving took about half an hour, by the time she got her car and found parking across the river.

So now she ambles across a pedestrian walkway on the Dunn Memorial Bridge.

It's a lonely walk.

"For the most part I'm the only person on the bridge," she said.

Some even report that $3 gas has them thinking twice about working -- because of the cost of getting to work.

Tom Wargo of Middleburgh works in the winter as a ski instructor.

In the summer, he often finds seasonal jobs, such as a tour guide.

Maybe not this year.

"I have to think twice about taking a job where I have to drive any amount," he said.

Most people can't change where they work, but they can change where they go for fun.

No one knows yet if $3 gas will cut short summer vacations.

Jay Buhr's family has actually decided to drive to visit his family in Missouri -- because expensive gas has driven airfares out of their reach.

It used to cost $800 or $900 for the Glenmont family of four to fly to St. Louis.

This year, it would be about $1,400.

"It'll obviously take some more time," Buhr said.

"But it will only be about $100 in gas for one way."

"We have a Honda Civic."

"That helps."

The price hike for gas also applies to other fuels, like home heating oil.

Debby Fellows of Porter Corners has recently decided that she and her family will switch exclusively to burning wood.

A back injury has disabled her.

Her partner has a good job with General Electric, but after he pays taxes and child support, they have relatively little money left.

Buying oil was a major burden this past winter.

"We're not adjusting," she said.

"We're really suffering."

So they'll harvest wood for heat from their land, so their little cash will remain for the true essentials.

"If I have to make a choice between heat and eat, it's going to be eat," she said.

Pacenza can be reached at 454-5533 or by e-mail at mpacenza@timesunion.com

Some of the feedback used is this article came from you, our readers, in the form of responses sent to the Times Union Reader Network.

It's your turn.

Go to http://timesunion.com to sign up.

As to "exporting" democracy to IRAQINAM .....

I came across these words attributed to Colin Powell .....

During BIG BUSH's war ....

Back in 1991 ....

To put the sybaritic EMIR of Kuwait back on his throne ....

When BIG BUSH'S "COALITION" ......

Included Syria .....

As one of BIG BUSH'S allies ....

This being before "CON-JOB CONNIE" Rice, of course ....

And SMALL BUSH .....

And his AXIS OF EVIL .....

These words come from a time ...

When Colin still had some integrity .....

Which, in my opinion, he later squandered ....

When he joined up with SMALL BUSH ....

As a civilian .....

To help him and "CON-JOB CONNIE" and Francis Frago Townsend ....

Peddle the profusion of lies ....

That have us presently mired in the QUAGMIRE OF IRAQINAM ....

Where SMALL BUSH ....

Don't know if it is night or day ....

These words ....

Or perhaps "sentiments" would be the better choice ....

Attributed to Colin Powell ....

Came from that time in his life ...

When he was still serving in "uniform" ......

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ....

Before he shed the uniform ....

And what it stood for .....

To become a BUSHCO ....

In the HACK-O-CRACY .....

Of the American king .....

GEORGE THE VERY SMALL ....

This is from page 452 ...

Of the book CRUSADE .....

By Rick Atkinson .....

A staff reporter for the Washington Post ...

Who wrote the Post's lead stories .....

During BIG BUSH'S WAR ....

And so ....

Powell's voice had been among the loudest arguing for limited - and military expedient - war aims.

He wanted no part of a war that required an extended American occupation or a protracted hunt for Saddam.

HE RIDICULED SUGGESTIONS THAT THE U.S. ARMY PRESS ON TO BAGHDAD TO IMPOSE DEMOCRACY ON IRAQ, AS IF "LOTS OF LITTLE JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRATS WOULD HAVE POPPED UP TO RUN FOR OFFICE."

Since early August (1990), he had argued that it ran counter to American interests to eviscerate Iraq and leave a power vacuum that strengthened Iranian or Syrian influence in the Middle East.

Ah, yes ....

The BUSHCOS ....

Before they were for invading Iraq ....

To remove Saddam Hussein from power .....

So as to allow them to impose democracy on the people of Iraq ....

Despite any thoughts that the people of Iraq may have had about it ....

The BUSHCOS were against it .....

Invading Iraq, I mean ....

To remove Saddam from power ....

So as to allow them to impose democracy on the people of Iraq ....

But what the hey .....

These BUSHCOS are the FLIP-FLOPPERS PAR EXCELLANCE, here in OUR America ....

And that is a fact ....

But enough about the BUSHCOS ....

For the moment ....

And Eliot Spitzer, too ....

What's doing with all this rain?

It's getting wet up here ....

"Rain swallows New England - After record downpour, flooding routs thousands"

By KATIE ZEZIMA, New York Times
First published: Tuesday, May 16, 2006

BOSTON -- After days of record rainfall, rivers in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire have spilled over their banks, causing thousands of residents to flee their homes and brace for what could be the region's worst flooding in 70 years.

Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain throughout the region since Friday, with at least another inch expected by this morning.

According to The Associated Press, the National Weather Service predicted that rain totals could hit 15 inches in some places.

No deaths were reported, but the Coast Guard was searching for two people who were seen floating down the Merrimack River in Amesbury, Mass., on Monday afternoon after a floating bridge broke free of its moorings.

On Monday, as the rains continued, residents were evacuated and floated through towns in canoes; cars were submerged up to their roofs; major roadways, including Route 1 in Massachusetts, were closed; sewage systems were failing; and residents tried to come to grips with flood damage that, despite four days of rain, seemed to come out of nowhere.

In Massachusetts, tens of thousands of gallons of sewage were spewing into the Merrimack River after the city of Haverhill's main sewage line broke and the city of Lawrence's sewage treatment facility flooded.

Lowell's drinking water plant is in danger of shutting down.

"We're under siege -- water is coming out everywhere," said Frederick Laskey, executive director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which provides water and sewer services to 43 municipalities.

"This is overwhelming."

"No system in the country is designed to handle this kind of rain."

"I don't think anybody anywhere expected what hit us," said Yetta Chin of Kennebunk, Maine, whose three-bedroom ranch was destroyed by the flooding Mousam River on Sunday night.

Chin, her husband, Stephen, and their three children were ordered to evacuate at 2:30 on Sunday morning, when the water in the backyard was chest-high, she said in a phone interview.

The family does not have flood insurance, she said.

"It's a nightmare," she said.

Schools in the region closed on Monday, and some were to remain closed today.

St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., an Episcopal boarding school, suffered extensive damage after the Turkey River spilled its banks.

"This is certainly the worst flooding we've had in our history," the rector, Bill Matthews, said of the 150-year-old school.

The Merrimack River in Massachusetts crested on Monday afternoon at 6 feet above flood level and is expected to stay that high until Wednesday, the National Weather Service said.

A number of its tributaries in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including the Spicket River in Methuen, Mass., and the Shawsheen River in Billerica, Mass., were beyond flood stage and had not yet crested.

Officials were particularly concerned about a weak dam on the Spicket River.

If it fails, downtown Methuen could flood.

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch declared a disaster in eight of the state's 10 counties, and called out more than 400 National Guard troops to assist with evacuations and to guard the more than 600 roads that have closed.

"You can go to a town in any of those eight counties and find flood damage," Lynch said.

The governors of all three states plan to ask for federal disaster declarations, officials said.

The first part of the storm system, which hit the area late last week, was fed by tropical moisture that came up from the Gulf of Mexico and sat off the shoreline.

The second wave came from a system stuck in the Ohio River Valley.

The two essentially set up a conveyer belt of moisture that will not be gone until Wednesday, meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass., said.

Catherine McKinnon awoke Monday in Lowell, Mass. to find the swollen Merrimack River raging just inches below her bedroom window.

"I didn't even have to lift my head off the pillow to see the water," she told The Boston Globe, weeping just hours before she was evacuated from her riverfront apartment.

"It's usually 20 feet away."

The flood's ferocity Monday became apparent to Linda Comeau of the U.S. Geological Survey as she watched her floating radar unit ripped apart by the swirling waters of the Merrimack.

Ray Brouck, 78, of Methuen, who lived through the Great Flood of 1936, said Monday's flooding was nearly as dramatic.

"Except that great flood, I've never seen anything this bad," he said Monday.

Not all is necessarily as it appears to be .....

" Verizon: NSA Didn't Ask Us for Records"

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer

41 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Verizon Communications Inc. on Tuesday joined fellow phone company BellSouth Corp. in denying key points of a USA Today story that said the companies had provided records of millions of phone calls to the government.

Verizon has not provided customer call data to the National Security Agency, nor had it been asked to do so, the company said in an e-mailed statement.

The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. made a similar denial.

"One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls," the statement read.

The denials leave open the possibility that the NSA directed its requests to long-distance companies, or that call data was collected by other means.

Long-distance calls placed by BellSouth and Verizon subscribers can traverse the networks of other carriers who collect a variety of information for billing purposes.

A story in USA Today last Thursday said Verizon, AT&T Inc. and BellSouth had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the 2001 terror attacks.

The report sparked a national debate on federal surveillance tactics.

The newspaper story cited anonymous sources "with direct knowledge of the arrangement."

"Sources told us that BellSouth and Verizon records are included in the database," USA Today spokesman Steve Anderson said.

"We're confident in our coverage of the phone database story," Anderson added, "but we won't summarily dismiss BellSouth's and Verizon's denials without taking a closer look."

An attorney for the former chief executive of Qwest Communications International Inc., on Friday lent support to USA Today's story.

He said the Denver company had been approached by the government, but had denied the request for phone records because it appeared to violate privacy law.

Qwest is a regional phone company with a substantial long-distance business.

It was not clear if the government's request applied only to Qwest's long-distance business.

Verizon's statement suggested that USA Today may have erred in not drawing a distinction between long-distance and local telephone calls.

"Phone companies do not even make records of local calls in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not billed per call for local calls," Verizon said.

Tuesday's denial did not apply to MCI, the long-distance carrier Verizon acquired in January.

In an earlier statement, Verizon said it is in the process of ensuring that its policies are put in place in the former MCI business.

Three smaller phone companies, with mainly local business, contacted by The Associated Press on Tuesday also denied being approached by the NSA.

Representatives at Alltel Corp., Citizens Communications Co. and CenturyTel Inc. all said they had no knowledge of NSA requests to their companies.

The denials by Verizon and BellSouth leave AT&T as the sole company named in the USA Today article that hasn't denied involvement.

On Thursday, San Antonio-based AT&T said it had "an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare," but said would only assist as allowed within the law.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said Tuesday the company had no further comment.

AT&T Inc. was formed last year when regional phone company SBC Communications Inc. bought AT&T Corp., the long-distance and corporate carrier, and adopted its name.

BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T are facing a number of lawsuits by customers who allege violations of their privacy.

On Monday, a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission said the FCC should investigate whether the companies violated federal communications law.
____

AP Business Writer Harry Weber in Atlanta contributed to this story.

And here is a "blast" from the past, alright ....

"1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill still a threat: study"

By Deborah Zabarenko

Tue May 16, 1:05 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Oil spilled 17 years ago by the tanker Exxon Valdez still threatens wildlife around Alaska's Prince William Sound, scientists reported on Tuesday, a finding that could add $100 million to cleanup costs for Exxon Mobil Corp.

ExxonMobil has already paid $900 million to help recovery from the 1989 spill, the worst in U.S. history.

But the state of Alaska and the U.S. government could ask for up to $100 million more if they can show there is substantial, continuing environmental damage caused by the spill, and that the damage could not have been anticipated when a settlement with Exxon was signed in 1991.

A study by researchers at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Juneau, Alaska, indicates about six miles of shoreline around Prince William Sound is still affected by the spill, with 100 tons (101.6 tonnes) of oil remaining in the area.

Mark Boudreaux, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, questioned the study's findings, and noted the oil company had previously responded to this research, which was based on field work done in 2003.

Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999.

"We disagree with their conclusions," Boudreaux said by telephone from Irving, Texas.

"We've done 350 peer-reviewed studies of Prince William Sound, and those studies conclude that Prince William Sound has recovered, it's healthy and it's thriving."

The study, which is to appear in the June 15 print edition of the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science & Technology, said oil from the Exxon Valdez remains on shorelines of Prince William Sound.

SEA OTTERS AND OIL

Some is on the surface and has weathered to a hardened, "asphalt pavement" state, while some is hidden under the surface in the inter-tidal area of local beaches, research chemist Jeffrey Short said in a telephone interview.

"The subsurface oil is typically liquid, smelly oil," Short said.

"It looks like crude oil."

Sea otters and sea ducks -- both species that forage for food along the tide line -- are most likely to be affected by this, he said:

"There's a clear link for ongoing exposure for animals that disturb sediments while they forage for prey."

Sea otters dig pits at high tide when the inter-tidal zone is covered with water, then they dive down and disturb the sediments as they look for clams.

If they encountered spilled oil in the process, they would probably get it on their fur and likely ingest some of the oil as they groomed themselves -- an essential habit for otters, which rely on their fur for warmth.

"Our study suggests that they would eat some of this stuff several times a year," said Short, one of five authors of the study.

He said little is known about any toxic effects to mammals which ingest oil, but circumstantial evidence implicates oil exposure as a possible cause of the lack of recovery of sea otter populations in the most heavily oiled parts of Prince William Sound.

ExxonMobil's Boudreaux noted the research was being released about two weeks before a June 2 deadline for Alaska and the federal government to seek additional payments from ExxonMobil in a provision that allows this part of the 1991 settlement to be reopened.

ExxonMobil has 90 days to evaluate any request; the provision expires September 1.

Neither the United States nor the Alaska government has ever invoked this provision in any past settlement of environmental damage.

And then ....

There is this, of course ....

Where it now looks like George W. Bush never was Kenny "BOY" Lay's best buddy, after all ......

But was really out to get him, instead ....

For something or other, anyway ....

That the defense says was all trumped up ...

And so ....

"Defense: Gov't Manufactured Enron Case"

By KRISTEN HAYS, AP Business Writer

1 hour, 36 minutes ago

HOUSTON - The government bore down on Enron Corp. as it would the Mafia, intimidating top lieutenants into pointing fingers at their bosses because someone had to pay for crimes that preceded the company's stunning collapse, the lawyer for former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling said Tuesday.

"This was all manufactured after the fact," Daniel Petrocelli declared in an impassioned plea for jurors to acquit his client of all 28 fraud and conspiracy counts against him.

"Because it's Enron."

"After all, somebody has to pay."

"It's Enron."

In a searing closing argument, Petrocelli sought to drive home the defense theme that neither Skilling nor Enron founder Kenneth Lay perpetuated an overarching fraud at the company because none existed.

But prosecutors, unable to dig up tangible proof, found mouthpieces in a string of ex-Enron executives "robbed of their free will," who pleaded guilty to crimes they didn't commit, Petrocelli said.

He said fear of lengthy prison terms and expensive legal battles drove those witnesses to say whatever the government wanted them to in testimony against Lay and Skilling.

"That's how they take down Mob kingpins," Petrocelli said.

Lay lawyer Bruce Collins, the first of several attorneys on his legal team to address jurors, said his client has accepted "full responsibility" for Enron's failure —but Lay committed no crimes.

Collins said another judge presiding over numerous Enron-related lawsuits in another courtroom will decide whether Lay is liable for losses suffered by investors after the company sought bankruptcy protection in December 2001.

The current jury's job is to decide if he is guilty of the crimes alleged by the government.

"Today you decide if Ken Lay is locked in a cage for the rest of his life."

"Today you decide if Ken Lay is a criminal."

"Today you decide if Ken Lay committed any crimes," he said.

Tuesday's lengthy closing arguments were the last opportunities for the defendants' lawyers to address the eight-woman, four-man panel.

Prosecutors who made their closing arguments on Monday get one more chance in a rebuttal argument on Wednesday.

Then, jurors will begin deliberations in the case that began Jan. 30.

The trial is the premier case to emerge from the government's 4 1/2 year investigation into Enron's collapse in one of the biggest corporate scandals in U.S. history.

More than $60 billion in market value, almost $2.1 billion in pension plans and 5,600 jobs were lost by the time the energy trading company started bankruptcy proceedings.

The government alleges Lay and Skilling repeatedly lied to investors and employees, touting Enron's financial health when they knew accounting trickery hid failing ventures.

Speaking softly, Petrocelli started by telling jurors that he has "had Jeff's life in my hands" for two years since the ex-CEO was indicted.

On Wednesday, "his fate's in your hands."

"Look into his eyes."

"Look into his soul."

"See if you see a criminal."

"See if you see a man with criminal intent," Petrocelli said.

Jurors listened intently, but most didn't laugh when Petrocelli made lighter comments.

A female juror repeatedly looked at Skilling's three children — a daughter and two sons aged 22, 19 and 15.

The daughter, seated near her mother and Skilling's first wife, Sue Lowe, at times sniffled and dabbed tears.

Petrocelli conceded on Tuesday that Skilling, during his six-month tenure as Enron CEO in 2001, made many mistakes, and said Skilling was far better at building the company in the years before that than he was at running it.

But mistakes are not crimes, the lawyer said.

But Petrocelli's closing argument mostly attacked the way the government handled the Enron case.

He turned a prosecutor's suggestion that the case was about "lies and choices" back onto the government itself.

Petrocelli accused federal prosecutors bent on winning convictions of criminalizing innocent comments, honest mistakes and normal business practices.

"They had their eye on the prize."

"The prize was Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and that's why we're here," Petrocelli said.

"Documents don't lie."

"People do."

"So you create evidence."

Petrocelli also beseeched jurors not to broker any deals during deliberations, such as finding Skilling guilty of some counts and acquitting him of others.

All other allegations of fraud, insider trading and making false statements to auditors stem from the single conspiracy count, and it's all or nothing, the attorney said.

"Do you have any hesitation at all about him?"

"If you do, you must acquit him."

"Don't negotiate with his life."

"Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty — 28 times," Petrocelli urged.

Skilling faces 28 counts of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors related to his activities from 1999 to August 2001.

Lay faces six counts of fraud and conspiracy stemming mostly from the period after he resumed as CEO upon Skilling's departure.

On Thursday, Lay will be on trial again — before U.S. District Judge Sim Lake, but without a jury — in a case related to his personal banking.

In that case, the government contends he obtained $75 million in loans from three banks from 1999 through 2001 and reneged on agreements not to use the money to carry or buy margin stock.

He is charged with one count of bank fraud and three counts of making false statements to banks in the case.

Lake plans to issue his verdict in the banking case, which is expected to last several days, after jurors in the larger conspiracy case render theirs.
____

AP National Writer Erin McClam contributed to this report.

And as it is a "slow news" day right now ....

And since I find it directly relevant to the various discussions and "currents" that are swirling around in here ....

Vis-a-vis the WAR IN IRAQINAM .....

Which we are bound to hear much more about ...

In these months leading up to the November 2006 CONGRESSIONAL elections ...

Where the Republican strategy is to make us think the Democrats are "weak" when it comes to "national security" ....

Whatever on earth that term might actually mean ....

I want to once again return to Rick Atkinson's book CRUSADE .....

Which was about BIG BUSH'S WAR against Saddam Hussein back in 1991 .....

Where we find at page 488 .....

Some relevant AMERICAN HISTORY, as follows .....

In the three months since the war had ended (March of 1991), peace had taken an ugly turn.

George Bush (BIG BUSH, father of George W.), in mid-February (1991) had urged the Iraqis "to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside."

But the anticipated coup by Saddam's vanquished army failed to materialize.

Instead, bloody rebellions erupted in the Kurdish north and Shi'ite south, where the people were FOOLISH ENOUGH to take Bush's counsel.

THE STRENGTH OF THE INSURRECTIONS IMPERILED NOT ONLY SADDAM BUT ALSO THE IRAQI OFFICER CORPS - PREDOMINATELY SUNNI MUSLIMS ALIGNED WITH THE RULING BA'ATHIST PARTY - WHO RALLIED TO SADDAM, THOUGH MORE FOR SELF-PRESERVATION THAN THROUGH LOYALTY.

Here the Americans and their allies made several miscalculations more significant than the question of whether the cease-fire should have been delayed another day or two.

Fearful of a Shi'ite victory that would strengthen pro-Iranian Muslim fundamentalists in the Persian Gulf, WASHINGTON FAILED TO RECOGNIZE that most Iraqi Shi'ites were a different faction from those in Tehran.

NEITHER BEHOLDEN TO AN IRANIAN AYATOLLAH NOR INCLINED TO POLITICAL SEPARATISM, THEY ASPIRED CHIEFLY TO RIGHTFUL REPRESENTATION IN BAGHDAD, WHICH HAD LONG FAVORED THE COUNTRY'S SUNNI MINORITY.

Saudi moderates like Prince Bandar, the ambassador in Washington, recognized this distinction but failed to convince the White House (BIG BUSH) that the Shi'ites were worthy of support.

Bandar soon regretted not passing a sharper warning to Tehran - through the Syrians - to keep a discrete distance as the insurrection unfolded; consequently, Iran's overt support further galvanized the Iraqi army to unite around Saddam and reinforced the impression that Shi'ite rebels were Iranian stooges fighting to create another Islamic republic.

THE SIMPLEST COURSE FOR WASHINGTON WAS TO DO NOTHING.

To be continued .....

Ahhh ....

How do you say "HICCUP", Karl?

"Dow plummets 214, Nasdaq declines 33"

By CHRISTOPHER WANG, Associated Press
Last updated: 4:35 p.m., Wednesday, May 17, 2006

NEW YORK -- Wall Street skidded lower Wednesday after an upswing in consumer prices intensified investors' fears that the Federal Reserve will extend its nearly two-year string of interest rate increases.

The Dow Jones industrial average suffered its biggest one-day loss in three years, and the Nasdaq composite index turned negative for 2006.

Investors were spooked by a Labor Department report that its consumer price index swelled 0.6 percent in April, topping forecasts of 0.5 percent.

But core CPI -- without food and energy -- also gained 0.3 percent, ahead of estimates and adding to worries that soaring oil prices have begun to lift prices elsewhere.

The inflation data dragged bonds lower and overshadowed solid earnings from Hewlett-Packard Co. and cooling oil prices.

Wall Street has been extremely anxious about economic news after the Fed last week said more rate hikes could be needed to battle inflationary pressures from record commodities prices.

"The CPI data really kicked the market in the teeth today," said Ken Tower, chief market strategist for Schwab's CyberTrader.

"So the question now really is where can we find some support?"

As the Dow came within 80 points of its best-ever close of 11,722.98 last week, many analysts felt the market was overbought and would soon see a correction.

But Tower said stocks are now oversold after several days of steep losses, suggesting that investors may start looking for positive signs to spur buying.

According to preliminary calculations, the Dow sank 214.28, or 1.88 percent, to 11,205.61, a one-month low.

The Dow slid as much as 245.51 points earlier and logged its biggest single-session slide since falling 307 points on March 24, 2003.

Broader stock indicators declined.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index lost 21.76, or 1.68 percent, to 1,270.32, its lowest since finishing at 1,262.86 on Feb. 13; the Nasdaq fell 33.33, or 1.5 percent, to 2,195.80, showing a loss for the first time in 2006.

Declining issues led advancers by nearly 5 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume of 2.1 billion shares topped the 1.7 billion shares that changed hands Tuesday.

The prospect of higher interest rates hurt bonds, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note surging to 5.16 percent from 5.1 percent late Tuesday.

Last Friday, bond yields reached a four-year high of 5.19 percent.

While Wednesday's retreat reflected Wall Street's ongoing nervousness about interest rates, investors may have gotten ahead of themselves before last week's Fed meeting.

Many traders were betting that the central bank would pause its two-year streak of rate hikes, and catapulted the major indexes to fresh multiyear highs.

The Fed boosted rates to 5 percent and left flexibility to pause its rate tightening.

However, the Fed cautioned that soaring oil and gold prices pose a threat to inflation and could warrant higher interest rates to stifle demand and keep prices from escalating.

The CPI report and Tuesday's producer price index reading reinforced that warning.

Gregory Miller, SunTrust Banks' chief economist, said the market was still largely split on whether the Fed will increase the key short-term lending rate by another quarter percentage point when policymakers meet on June 29.

"It won't surprise me if this is when they decide to start the pause and allow data to accumulate," Miller said.

"I suspect what they'll find is energy prices will stop trending higher, and the slower growth numbers will accumulate."

The U.S. dollar continued losing ground to the Japanese yen and weighed on the market's mood, CyberTrader's Tower said.

The dollar's retreat could propel inflation since more of the U.S. currency will be needed to purchase foreign-made goods.

"The dollar has depreciated quite sharply since the Fed started talking about stopping its rate hikes," Tower said.

"It's not so much that the dollar is depreciating -- it's the speed of the depreciation that is worrying the currency market."

"The dollar is down 6 percent in one month, which is a lot."

Crude futures dipped on data showing U.S. gasoline reserves grew for a third week in a row.

A barrel of light crude dropped 84 cents to settle at $68.69 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

HP was the Dow's sole winner after saying improved sales boosted its profit by 51 percent last quarter.

The company also announced plans to consolidate its global data centers in an effort to trim $1 billion of expenses.

HP climbed $1.05 to $32.16.

Applied Materials Inc. fell 92 cents to $16.93 despite posting a sharp rise in quarterly earnings, handily beating Wall Street expectations.

The chipmaker also forecast results ahead of current estimates.

Xstrata PLC offered to pay $14.5 billion for the 80.2 percent of Canadian mining company Falconbridge Ltd. it doesn't already own, topping Inco Ltd.'s $17.7 billion advance.

The $47.19-per-share bid sent Falconbridge shares up $1.16 to $49.94.

Honda Motor Co. plans to build a new U.S. plant -- its sixth in North America -- as part of $1.18 billion expansion to meet surging demand for its cars.

Honda slipped 83 cents to $34.25.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies tumbled 11.62, or 1.58 percent, to 725.85.

Overseas, Japan's Nikkei stock average added 0.92 percent.

Britain's FTSE 100 lost 2.92 percent, Germany's DAX index sank 3.4 percent and France's CAC-40 was lower by 3.18 percent.

------

On the Net:

New York Stock Exchange: http://www.nyse.com

Nasdaq Stock Market: http://www.nasdaq.com

Say "HACK-O-CRACY", Karl ......

Look in the mirror this morning ....

And say the word "HACK-O-CRACY" ......

And when you do ......

Look around in there, Karl .....

Inside the mirror ...

And see what you see ...

Staring right back at you ....

And then, Karl ....

You just might have a clue ...

As to what more and more Americans are seeing ....

When they look at you .....

And so .....

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 17, 2006

President Bush has slipped in one recent poll to a 29 percent approval rating.

Frankly, I can't believe that.

Those polls can't possibly be accurate.

I mean, really, ask yourself:

How could there still be 29 percent of the people who approve of this presidency?

Talking World Affairs

Personally, I think the president can reshuffle his cabinet all he wants, but his poll ratings are not going to substantially recover — ever.

Americans are slow to judgment about a president, very slow.

And in times of war, in particular, they are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But I think a lot of Americans in recent months have simply lost confidence in this administration's competence and honesty.

What has eaten away most at the support for this administration, I believe, has been the fact that time and time again, it has put politics and ideology ahead of the interests of the United States, and I think a lot of people are just sick of it.

I know I sure am.

To me, the most baffling thing about the Bush presidency is this:

If you had worked for so long to be president, wouldn't you want to staff your administration with the very best people you could find, especially in national security and especially in the area of intelligence, which has been the source of so much controversy — from 9/11 to Iraq?

Wouldn't that be your instinct?

Well, not only did the president put the C.I.A. in the hands of a complete partisan hack named Porter Goss, but he then allowed Mr. Goss to appoint as the No. 3 man at the agency — the C.I.A.'s executive director — Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose previous position was chief of the C.I.A.'s logistics office in Germany, which provides its Middle East stations with supplies.

Mr. Foggo has spent almost his entire undistinguished C.I.A. career in midlevel administrative jobs.

He ingratiated himself with Mr. Goss during his days as a congressman by funneling inside dope about the C.I.A. under George Tenet to Mr. Goss, Newsweek reported.

When Mr. Goss was tapped by the president to head the C.I.A., he plucked Mr. Foggo from obscurity to handle day-to-day operations at the agency, where he immediately made his mark by purging the C.I.A. of veteran spies and managers deemed unfriendly to the White House.

I feel safer already.

Mr. Foggo resigned, along with Mr. Goss, after the C.I.A.'s chief internal watchdog opened an investigation to determine whether Mr. Foggo had helped steer a contract, apparently involving bottled water, to a company run by his old friend Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who has been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case involving the corrupt San Diego congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who is now in prison.

Mr. Foggo is not an expert on Iran or Iraq or Russia, but rather on Perrier, Poland Spring and Fiji water.

That is the guy the Bush team chose as its chief operating officer at the C.I.A.

Is there no job in this administration that is too important to be handed over to a political hack?

No.

In his excellent book on the Iraq war, "The Assassins' Gate," George Packer tells the story of how some of the State Department's best Iraq experts were barred from going to Iraq immediately after the invasion — when they were needed most — because that didn't pass Dick Cheney's or Don Rumsfeld's ideology tests.

And that is the core of the matter: the Bush team believes in loyalty over expertise.

When ideology always trumps reality, loyalty always trumps expertise.

Yes, Mr. Bush has seen the error of his ways and has sacked the Goss crew, but we just wasted a year and saw a number of experienced C.I.A. people quit the agency in disgust.

It's comical to think of this administration hoping to get a popularity lift from shaking up the president's cabinet, considering the fact that it has kept its cabinet secretaries so out of sight — even the good ones, and there are good ones — so the president will always dominate the landscape.

When you centralize power the way Mr. Bush did, you alone get stuck with all the responsibility when things go bad.

And that is what is happening now.

The idea that the president's poll numbers would go up if he replaced his Treasury secretary is ludicrous.

Replacing him would be like replacing one ghost with another.

I understand that loyalty is important, but what good is it to have loyal crew members when the ship is sinking?

So they can sing your praises on the way down to the ocean floor?

I just don't understand how a president whose whole legacy depends on getting national security and intelligence right would have tolerated anything but the very best in those areas.

What in the world was he thinking?

SSSSSSsssssshhhhhh, Snuffysmith .........

It's a secret .......

I don't think we're supposed to know ....

And I'm pretty sure nobody else can know, either ...

Unless you are an administration official authorized to leak ...

Or a press poodle authorized to take the leak ...

And report on it ...

As if it were news ...

Rather than BLATANT POLITICAL PROPAGANDA ......

And so ....

By all means, Snuffysmith ....

Don't say a word about it .....

And don't even imply to anyone that I might know something .....

Or that I might have spoken on the phone to someone ...

About something .....

Or even anything ...

Which I didn't ...

Because I'm too scared to use the phone .....

Because in OUR America ...

The only ones who use the telephones ...

Are the TAY-RISTS .....

And so ...

It wasn't me that said a word ....

Just in case the NSA and that weird general think I might have said a word ...

Which I really didn't ...

I didn't say nothing to nobody ...

And that is a fact ....

And so .....

But, hey, Snuf ...

Do me a real favor ...

And keep that a secret, too ...

Don't tell anyone that it wasn't me who was talking on the telephone ....

Because these days ....

Not talking on the telephone ....

Might be just as suspicious and UN-AMERICAN an activity ....

As talking on the telephone is ....

And so ....

You just never know .....

When the knock is going to come on the door ...

In the middle of the night .....

Because you either might have done something ...

Or maybe you didn't really do nothing at all ....

Which is also suspicious ...

And UN-AMERICAN .....

IF George W. Bush decides that it is ....

Which then causes him .....

To send out the PARANOIA POLICE .....

With their guns ....

To take us away ....

Because we thought that the TRUTH was really just POLITICAL PROPAGANDA ....

Or maybe ...

Just plain, old, garden-variety BULL **** .....

And so .....

And, of course ....

In a nation like the present-day America ....

Overwhelmed and stifled as it is by PARANOIA .....

Which has certainly struck deep into the heart of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ....

A nation where everything is a secret .....

And where nobody is ever "authorized" to say anything .....

Even in response to a question about where the public restrooms might be located .....

This following is a SECRET, too ...

So, please ...

Don't tell anyone that I might know something about it ...

Because I sure don't want to get in trouble, me .....

And so .....

If somebody does ask you where you heard this .....

Just mumble .....

And turn ....

And walk away, rapidly .....

And maybe you'll be safe ...

But then again .....

Well ...

You just never know, anymore, these days ....

And so ....

"Power vacuum in Iraq already exists"

By H.D.S. GREENWAY
First published: Thursday, May 18, 2006

With the war in Iraq well into its fourth year with no end in sight, exit strategies are springing up in the gardens of op-ed pages like peonies in May.

Sen. John Kerry, quoting generals that the war cannot be won militarily, wrote last month in The New York Times that Iraqi politicians should be told that they had until May 15 to "put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military."

If Iraqi politicians comply, Kerry argued, American combat forces should be out of Iraq by year's end.

"Only troops essential to finishing the job of training Iraqi forces should remain."

"For this transition to work," Kerry said, there needed to be a "Dayton Accords-like summit" to knock heads together, the way Richard Holbrooke did to end the war in Bosnia.

In the meantime, American troops would be redeployed to "garrisoned status," sallying forth only on special ops against al-Qaida.

This month, Sen. Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, also referred to Dayton in their op-ed for the Times, saying that it kept Bosnia whole by "paradoxically, dividing it into ethnic federations, even allowing Muslims, Croats and Serbs to retain separate armies."

As in Bosnia, each Iraqi ethno-religious group should be allowed "room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests," Biden and Gelb argued.

The Shiite south, the Sunni center, and the Kurdish north would run their own affairs, with the oil-poor Sunnis being compensated "to make their region viable."

The rights of women and minorities would be respected and protected "by increasing American aid to Iraq but tying it to those rights."

Under the Biden-Gelb plan, troops would be out by 2008, leaving a "small but effective residual force to combat terrorists and keep the neighbors honest."

Also in The Times, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said breaking Iraq along ethnic and religious lines would bring only further disaster.

The populations are too intermixed, he said.

Dividing the country would mean dividing the army, which would strengthen the militias, "all of which would lead to more violence ..."

"And, of course, there is no way to divide Iraq that will not set off fights over control of oil."

Neighbors would jump in to support factions friendly to them, and religious extremism would flourish, according to Cordesman.

The division of Iraq would "convey the message that America has been defeated and abandoned a nation and a people," Cordesman wrote.

Having broken Iraq, the United States has a responsibility for its people and cannot leave a "power vacuum in an already dangerous region."

It has become clear that the Bush administration is looking for a way out of what has become the worst U.S. foreign policy mistake in living memory.

Biden and Gelb are probably right when they say Bush has no clear strategy, and hopes only to hang on until he can pass the whole mess off to the next president.

The critiques of Kerry, Biden, Gelb and Cordesman are constructive and thoughtful, but are they still relevant?

I fear the failures of the past three years have lost us the ability to dictate to Iraqis how to organize their society and their governments, or to tell them how they should proportion power among their regions.

I fear that, in that sense, Iraq is already all but lost to us.

The United States is not going to be able to control the course of events in Iraq.

Whether there will be accommodation or civil war is no longer up to us.

Cordesman may be right when he says that having broken Iraq, we have a responsibility, but wrong when he says we cannot leave a power vacuum.

The power vacuum is already in place.

We cannot fill it, and Iraq is pounding down the road toward a failed state -- a state in which jihadis now train for service in Afghanistan, and Americans, more and more, stay in their fortified and isolated bases.

It may be irresponsible to leave Iraq in the lurch, but one day I fear we will do just that because the irresponsibility of how and why we went in will be the determining factor, and the bankruptcy of policy will make the burdens of Iraq no longer sustainable at home -- a "barren outcome" to occupying a "bitterly hostile land," as President Bush's father foresaw so clearly 15 years ago.

H.D.S. Greenway writes for The Boston Globe.

end quotes

Iraq is "lost" to us?

How exactly is that?

WHEN IT WAS NEVER "OURS" TO BEGIN WITH?

Talk about ARROGANCE .....

And GROSS STUPIDITY .....

And HUBRIS .....

This present-day version of somebody's America sure does take the cake ...

And so ...

There's something happening here .....

But what it is ......

Ain't exactly clear .....

There's a man with a gun, over there ....

And his name is George W. Bush ....

But outside of that ...

It's kind of hard to figure .....

Because outside of raving .....

And spouting some kind of really dense dialect of GIBBERISH .....

That continues to elude me .....

I can't fathom ....

What George is raving about ...

And I sure am not going to try and get any closer .....

To try and find out ...

Because in my experience .....

Raving lunatics with guns in their hands are the most dangerous thing there is on the face of this earth ...

And so ....

If you want to know where I went ...

Look the other way .....

And so .....