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VOTING, FORECLOSURE AND THE LAW
In response to rumors that the GOP would use a list of foreclosed property to challenge voters, Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer said, "The right to vote, no matter how hard you have been hit in this economy, is just too important for claims like these to go unanswered."
Questions and answers for Michigan
Q: If you're being foreclosed on and are forced to leave your home, what are your voting rights?
A: If you move to another house or apartment in the same city or township, you can vote at the old address one more time, no matter when you move. When you vote, you will automatically change your address and register at the new address.
If you move to another house or apartment in a different city, but within Michigan, you can vote at the old address one more time if you move within 60 days of the election (Sept. 5 or later).
Q: If your house is in foreclosure, but you still live there, what are your voting rights?
A: You are entirely eligible to vote. The law requires that you have a place where you usually sleep, keep your personal things, and have a regular place of lodging to be an eligible resident.
GOP statement
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Alberto Gonzales has resigned from the Justice Department.
The man who helped shape the war on terror, the Patriot Act, the immigration brawl, and define torture standards, arrange the running a warrentless wiretapping operation is, Bush says, “a man of integrity, decency and principle.” story
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PRESIDENT BUSH: Karl Rove is moving on down the road. I’ve been talking to Karl for a while about his desire to spend more time with Darby and Andrew. This is a family that’s made enormous sacrifices not only for our beloved state of Texas but for a country we both love.
We’ve been friends for a long time and we’re still going to be friends. I would call Karl Rove a dear friend. We’ve known each other as youngsters interested in serving our state. We worked together so we could be in a position to serve this country.
And so I thank my friend. I’ll be on the road behind you here in a little bit. I thank Darby and I thank Karl for making a tremendous sacrifice, and wish you all the very best.
MR. ROVE Today I submitted my resignation as deputy chief of staff and senior adviser effective the end of the month.
Mr. President, I’m grateful for the opportunity you gave me to serve our nation and you. I’m grateful for being able to work with the extraordinary men and women that you’ve drawn into this administration. And I’m grateful to have been a witness to history. It has been the joy and the honor of a lifetime.
I’ve seen a man of far-sighted courage put America on a war footing and protect us against a brutal enemy in a dangerous conflict that will shape this new century. I’ve seen a leader respond to an economy weakened by recession, corporate scandal and terrorist attacks by taking decisive action to strengthen the economy and create jobs. I’ve seen a reformer who challenged his administration, the Congress and the country to make bold changes to important institutions in great need of repair.
Mr. President, the world’s turned many times since our journey began. We’ve been at this a long time. It was over 14 years ago that you began your run for governor, and over 10 years ago that we started thinking and planning about a possible run for the presidency. It has been an exhilarating and eventful time.
Through it all, you’ve remained the same man. Your integrity, character and decency have remained unchanged and inspiring. Through all those years, I’ve asked a lot of my family, and they’ve given all I’ve asked and more. And now it seems the right time to start thinking about the next chapter in our family’s life.
It’s not been an easy decision. As you know from our discussions, it started last summer. It always seemed there was a better time to leave somewhere out there in the future, but now is the time. I will miss, deeply miss my work here, my colleagues and the opportunity to serve you and our nation, Mr. President. But I look forward to continuing our friendship of 34 years, to being your fierce and committed advocate on the outside and to the next journey we might make together.
At month’s end, I will join those whom you meet in your travels — the ordinary Americans who tell you they are praying for you. Like them, I will ask for God’s continued gifts of strength and wisdom for you and your work, your vital work for our country and the world and for the Almighty’s continued blessing of our great country.
Thank you again for this extraordinary opportunity.
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MORE Weapons for Iraqis Are Missing, Study Says
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 — The Defense Department cannot account for 190,000 weapons, including more than 110,000 AK-47 rifles, issued to Iraqi security forces, a new report by government investigators says.
The study, issued last Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, also said that because of missing and incomplete records, the United States military cannot confirm that Iraqi security forces received 135,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 helmets.
The report is not the first to criticize Defense Department procedures for tracking equipment distributed to Iraqi forces by the department. A report last October by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found major discrepancies in American military records involving hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces.
Since 2003, the United States has spent about $19.2 billion to equip and train Iraqi forces, the G.A.O. report said, and recently the Defense Department requested another $2 billion.
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Kill the Messenger A House/Senate conference committee has pink slipped the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, discoverer of unrecorded weapons, construction failures and cost over runs. Funding ends October 1, 2007.
Missing: 505,093 weapons given to the Iraqi Ministries of Interior and Defense but only 12,128 serial numbers were properly recorded. The weapons include rocket-propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and sniper rifles. They didn't provide spare parts, maintenance personnel or even repair manuals for most of the weapons.
The report was provided by a federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction at the request of Senator John W. Warner.
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Defining "success": car bombs don't count.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Bush said "...The good news is that sectarian death is down in Baghdad. And remember, the mission of the surge or reinforcing is to -- is to bring that sectarian violence in the capital city down so that this government can reconcile. The bad news is that spectacular car bombs still go off, in a way that tends to shake the confidence of the Iraqi people that their government can protect them.
"Well, there's two types of basic violence. One is the sectarian violence, which is on the decline, fairly dramatically inside Baghdad. The second is the car bombings, suicide bombings. We believe most of those are al-Qaeda bombings. These are Sunni extremists." —Bush
Let's see, when Sunni extremists car-bomb Shiite markets and mosques, that's not sectarian violence that's just car bombing. Now that the Shiites know this, I hope they stop with this being mad at those Sunni extremists. transcript April 18, 2007: 183 killed in four car bombings.
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What Voter Fraud?
It isn't only scientific evidence that the Bush crowd is altering -- they rewrote the report on the lack of voter fraud to make it say fraud appeared wide spread.
Now the details come out: in five years 120 were accused, 86 convicted, nation wide. Most of those were cases of misunderstanding the rules. Some of them hadn't even voted, just filled out an inappropriate registration card. Thirty of the 86 were paid for their votes.
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Extended tours for the army were announced by the Pentagon. The army will now serve 15 month tours, up from 12. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates says, “Our forces are stretched, there’s no question about that.”
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who announced the change at a news conference at the Pentagon, said that the only other way to maintain force levels would have been to allow many soldiers less than a year at home between combat tours.
Mr. Gates said the problem was evident even before President Bush ordered an increase in troops for Iraq this year. Officials said the change became inevitable as the numbers of extra troops that were needed — and, most likely, the time the extra forces would have to stay — increased.
“This policy is a difficult but necessary interim step,” he said.
Mr. Gates said no decision had been made about how long beyond August to extend reinforcements in Iraq. The total force is around 145,000 and is building toward around 160,000 by early summer. Active-duty Army troops currently total around 79,000 in Iraq and around 18,000 in Afghanistan, along with an additional 7,000 soldiers in Kuwait, who would also be covered by the new policy. The tours of Marine units, which typically are shorter and more frequent, are not being extended; nor are the tours of brigades whose time has already been extended under previous changes to their orders.
"We're making progress," said President Bush.
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Where are they now?
Paul Wolfowitz who, while president of the World Bank, was rebuked by the ethics committee for of staff personnel policy, has resigned. As president, he distinguished himself by violating "staff rules in favor of a staff member closely associated with the president." The relationship with Shaha Riza, senior communications adviser in the bank's Middle East Department who had worked at the bank for eight years, became public when Wolfowitz took the helm in mid-2005.
The board and staff also found his high-handed management style incompatible with the consensual style of the bank. Wolfowitz was cutting off funding without consulting board members, ordering personnel who opposesed him reassigned without discussion, and, said the ex-general counsel, “He presumes that anyone who opposes him is incompetent or corrupt."
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JACK ABRAMOFF is serving a sentence of five years and 10 months at a minimum-security prison camp in Cumberland, Md., for defrauding banks. The Go-To Man is gone.
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I. LEWIS 'SCOOTER' LIBBY is not going to prison; Bush commuted his sentence, calling it "excessive." He does have to pay the fine of $250,000 -- at least for now he does. Meanwhile, the Wilsons are sueing Libby and half the White House. more
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Two views of Iraq after Saddam: The National Security Archive at George Washington University has released slide shows from two different plans and administrations. In 1999, DOD foresaw chaos following the removal of Saddam; but in 2002 serenity was predicted.
The Bush planners expected a two or three month "stabilization" period after main fighting ended. This was to be followed by an 18-24 month "recovery" phase. In less than four years after the invasion, the United States would have only 5,000 troops in Iraq.
...
Military slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act outline the command’s PowerPoint projection of the stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq that was to be.
...
August 2002 was an important time for developing the strategy. President Bush had yet to go to the United Nations to declare Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons programs a menace to international security, but the war planning was well under way. The tumultuous upheaval that would follow the toppling of the Hussein government was known antiseptically in planning sessions as “Phase IV.” As is clear from the slides, it was the least defined part of the strategy.
...
The Bush administration put aside the idea of establishing a prewar provisional government for fear it would marginalize Iraqi leaders who had not gone into exile. Colonel Agoglia said he did not begin to get a sense of what the postwar arrangements would be until Jay Garner, a retired three-star general, was tapped by the Bush administration in January 2003 to serve as the first civilian administrator in postwar Iraq.
As it turned out, the assumptions on Iraqi and American forces were quickly overturned, partly as a result of new American policy decisions. Instead of staying in garrisons, many of the Iraqi soldiers fled after the war began. Senior American commanders hoped to quickly recall the Iraqi troops to duty anyway, but that option vanished in May 2003 when L. Paul Bremer III, Mr. Garner’s successor, issued an edict formally disbanding the Iraqi Army.
The message that the United States should gird itself for a substantial multiyear occupation seemed to be superseded when General Franks issued new guidance to his commanders a week after the fall of Baghdad on April 9 that they should be prepared to reduce the American troops in Iraq to a little more than a division by September 2003 — some 30,000 troops.
...
Almost four years after the invasion, however, the “stable democratic Iraqi government” the United States once hoped for seems to exist only in the command’s old planning slides. NYTimes 2/14/07
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360 TONS of Cash
The US Federal Reserve sent...more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before control was handed back to Iraqis. The money...came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the UN-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime. Bills weighing a total of 363 tonnes were loaded onto military aircraft
...
On December 12, 2003, $1.5 billion was shipped to Iraq ... It was followed by more than $2.4 billion on June 22, 2004, and $1.6 billion three days later. The Coalition Provisional Authority turned over sovereignty on June 28.
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Paul Bremer, who as the administrator of the CPA ran Iraq after initial combat operations ended, said the enormous shipments were done at the request of the Iraqi Minister of Finance.
...
The special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, said in a January 2005 report that $8.8 billion was unaccounted for after being given to the Iraqi ministries.
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POLICY TRUMPS SCIENCE Agencies which protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy must now have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. A new executive order signed by Bush the end of January, gives the White House greater control over rules previously generated by civil servants and scientific experts.
The White House said the executive order was not meant to rein in any one agency. But business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. history
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| Packing Up |
Bechtel is Leaving Iraq |
| Citing frustration from security failures that undid much of what they accomplished and cost many lives, Bechtel is out. |
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The Pentagon is wire tapping and searching financial records.
domestic spying
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President's Statement on H.R. 6407, the "Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act"
"Today I have signed into law H.R. 6407, the "Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act." The Act is designed to improve the quality of postal service for Americans and to strengthen the free market for delivery services. ...
"The executive branch shall construe subsection 404(c) of title 39, as enacted by subsection 1010(e) of the Act, which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection, in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection."
White House; December 20, 2006
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A new UNICEF report says on the status of women and children says that many more Iraqi children are dying now than under Saddam.
The heart of the report is the data, page after page of sobering statistics about women and children in every country. Comparisons with past studies can be illuminating. In 1995, for instance, UNICEF found that 54,000 Iraqi children younger than age 5 died. At the time, dictator Saddam Hussein was in charge.
Last year, though, with Hussein gone and the United States occupying the country, 122,000 Iraqi children younger than age 5 died.
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Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a
troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be
left to irresponsible action. -George Washington, 1st US president
(1732-1799)
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Walling people OUT is IN this season. The Saudis, now building one on the Saudi--Yemeni border, propose adding a 900-kilometre, $700 million high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour, Iraq.
"The feeling in Saudi is that Iraq is way out of control with no possibility of stability," said Nawaf Obaid, director of Saudi Arabia's National Security Assessment Project. "The urgency now is to get that border sealed - physically sealed," Outwardly the great desert wall will appear mundane, with two metal barriers running 100 metres apart, lined with barbed wire at the base and top.
On the Iraqi side, alarms will notify patrols if an intruder attempts to scale or cut through the fence. Between the two fences will be yet more barbed wire, piled in a tall pyramid. Under the baking sand will be buried sensor cables relaying a silent alarm to monitoring posts at regular intervals along the border. At the posts, face-recognition software will process pictures relayed from cameras, which will also be able to operate at night. Behind the line of the fence, command and control centres with heliports will provide bases for troops to respond to any alert.
Saudi officials are worried about so-called "blowback", in which Saudi insurgents in Iraq bring jihad back to the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah. But they are mostly concerned that an Iraqi civil war would send a wave of refugees south, unsettling the kingdom's Shia minority in its oil-producing east. Sydney Morning Herald
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Questions about the corrosive potential of E85 are slowing conversion to the fuel blend. Some oil companies question the safety of E85 pumps on the market. Underwriters Laboratory has withdrawn certification of the pumps until additional testing can be done.
The dispensers, it turns out, were modified from regular gasoline dispensers and were certified only for a maximum of 15 percent ethanol concentration; U.L. said it had never certified any E85-specific pumps. This means that the pumps currently dispensing E85 do not meet some state and local fire codes that require certification from U.L. or another independent tester.
Ethanol is primarily used as a 10 percent additive in gasoline, but in higher concentrations like E85 it can corrode some types of metal and even make some plastics brittle over time.
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The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who
believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of
the people all of the time. -Franklin P. Adams, columnist (1881-1960)
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Budget Fantasy The 2006 budget contained $20 million “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The money has now moved quietly from the military budget of FY 2006 to that of 2007.
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The Deutsche Oper Berlin production of Mozart's Idomeneo provoked threats of violence from Muslim extremists for a scene in which severed heads of prophets are shown. The heads displayed by Idomeneo are Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and Poseidon. No other group has complained. more
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| IRS Contractors |
Expensive tax collection |
| The private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, with the collection agencies keeping about $330 million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar. By hiring more revenue officers, the I.R.S. could collect more than $9 billion each year and spend only $296 million — or about three cents on the dollar — to do so, Charles O. Rossotti, the computer systems entrepreneur who was commissioner from 1997 to 2002, told Congress four years ago. |
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NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet
From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can.”
In early February, the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”
The line about protecting the earth was added to the mission statement in 2002 under Sean O’Keefe, the first NASA administrator appointed by President Bush, and was drafted in an open process with scientists and employees across the agency.
When the National Aeronautics and Space Act established the agency in 1958, the first objective of the agency was listed as “the expansion of human knowledge of the earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.”...
Andrew Revkin, NYTimes, 7/22/06
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“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” James Madison
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"I would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers." Thomas Jefferson
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"Our liberty depends on freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost" Thomas Jefferson
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http://zfacts.com/p/367.html | 01/18/12 07:16 GMT
Modified: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:27:04 GMT
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Eye openers
1,900 soldiers, security officers and civilians were killed in the insurgency in Iraq in January. Chart.
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I'm The Decider
I'm the decider.
I pick and I choose.
I pick among whats.
And choose among whos.
And as I decide
Each particular day,
The things I decide on
All turn out that way.
I decided on Freedom
For all of Iraq.
And now that we have it,
I'm not looking back.
I decided on tax cuts
That just help the wealthy.
And Medicare changes
That aren't really healthy.
And parklands and wetlands
Who needs all that stuff?
I decided that none
Would be more than enough!
I decided that schools
All in all are the best.
The less that they teach
And the more that they test.
I decided those wages
You need to get by,
Are much better spent
On some CEO guy.
I decided your Wade
Which was versing your Roe,
Is terribly awful
And just has to go.
I decided that levees
Are not really needed.
Now when hurricanes come
They can come unimpeded.
That old Constitution?
Well, I have decided-
As "just Goddamn paper"
It should be derided.
I've decided gay marriage
Is icky and weird.
Above all other things,
It's the one to be feared.
And Cheney and Rummy
And Condi all know
That I'm the Decider -
They tell me it's so.
I'm the Decider
So watch what you say,
Or I may decide
To have you whisked away.
Or I'll tap your phones.
Your e-mail I'll read.
'cause I'm the Decider -
Like Jesus decreed.
By Roddy McCorley
___________________________
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