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—Ambassador to Iraq Khalilzad
The White House claims the press exaggerates Iraqi problems, but a leaked memo from our Embassy to Sec. of State Rice shows that in private the Administration confirms the press reports and more. If you want z Facts, read this memo.
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Comprehensive oil-industry study finds Arctic oil reserves are only about one quarter the size previously thought, and that Alaska is not of strategic importance to the US, but is a lucrative niche market for "established players" who should earn more than a 20% annual return because of low competition.
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 Rumsfeld
"Six days, six weeks, I doubt six months." —Rumsfeld more
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Can Cheney's neocons fix Iraq? Check their track record. Then look at what they're up against. Maliki, the "Islamic Revolution" party and Sadr have Bush arming and training them and the US army doing what it's told. Bush has lost Iraq, not to the Sunni insurgents, but to Maliki and the Shi'ites backed by Iran. (You read it here first.)
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Emperor's new clothes (for the election). He's got new tactics and a new timetable! But, Bush has said time and again "We're constantly changing tactics." And, we had a timetable for their constitution, their elections, their new army and new police, their oil production. Bush is steering a course for the impossible, oblivious to the storm that blows us ever further from his "unchanging goal."
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"GOP pressure growing for Bush to change course in Iraq"
From a far-right Dallas conservative, who calls Iraq a "quagmire." It used to be that if you didn't want to "stay the course" you were a cut-and-run Democrat.
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zFact:Hostile fatalities are now running slightly higher in year 4 than in year 3 (on a per-day basis). 94% of hostile fatalities have occured after Bush declared "major combat operations have ended." zFact:In June, 55 times more Iraqis were killed in their civil dust-up than in our war on terror. zFact:The FY 2006 (though Sept.) cost of the war to the U.S. comes to $3,801 per Iraqi—more than twice Iraq's annual GDP. Get the report. Click the graphs.
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Law enforcement? Not for the rich.
Better than another tax break, the federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of the wealthiest Americans.
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The Generals have a common theme: "incompetent strategically," "gross errors in strategy," "strategic blunder." The blunder, inadequate troop strength, was a direct result of his faith in shock and awe. [A 9th General joins the ranks] Media coverage is part of shock & awe strategy.
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Libby said Bush via Cheney authorized him to tell NY Times reporter Judith Miller that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium. Had the public needed this information, the leak might be excused. But they knew the information was wrong and wanted Miller to deceive the public.
"Well, when the president does it, that means that it's not illegal." —Nixon
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Bush came to office opposed to nation building. The neocons, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc., used 9/11 to steer him into Iraq, but have failed him at every turn: WMD, Abu Ghraib, and oil to pay for it. Iraq is sliding into civil war. There is only one appropriate next step ...
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zFact:Fukuyama, explains that the hopelessly unrealistic neocons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) have turned Iraq into a "base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at." (2/9/2006)
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zFact:: Bush did not dream up the Iraq war; his foreign policy was hijacked. Read key excerpts from America Alone. Fortunately, Bush is starting to change course, but neocons are stil a major force.
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zFact: With Wilma, 2005 tied 1933 for most storms. But 1933 had no category 4 or 5 storms. After Wilma came alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon and finally Zeta. What's going on ?!
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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 administrations.
In 1999, DOD foresaw chaos following the removal of Saddam; but in 2002, serenity was predicted.
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zFact: In November 2001, the President's Council of Economic Advisors predicted 147.5 million jobs for July 2008. Now they are predicting 139 million. They had expected the payroll jobs we had before the recession to return.
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 While Katrina strikes
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Kissinger explains how Bush/Cheney/Neocons lost Iraq
(1) Didn't send enough troops. [Took 4 years to figure that out.]
(2) Held sectarian elections which led to civil war.
(3) "Deflected US forces from their military mission."
(4) Trained Iraqi forces fighting under the wrong "banner". [Under Sadr & insurgents.]
This covers their invasion strategy, political strategies, and exit strategy.
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Why Wages Fall: Lack of Jobs
November 7th, 2005 3:34 am by Steve Stoft
"Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before." So reports the Christian Science Monitor.
They present a laundry list of explanations, some of which make sense—globalization and weaker unions—and some of which don't—for example, inflation. Inflation raises all prices, including the price of labor. Sometimes wage increases go first and other prices follows. The question is why is wage inflation slower than cost-of-living inflation, and the answer cannot be just "it's inflation."
The right answers mostly feed into one central issue that is at the root of the problem and is not even mentioned. Job growth is still way behind where it should be and getting further behind all the time. Administration economists were shocked and embarrassed three years running, but finally caught on. We are now 7.5 million jobs behind what they predicted in the fall of 2001 and getting further behind. There are two reasons for their mistake.
First, they believed the supply-side nonsense about tax breaks for the rich making more jobs for the poor. None of those showed up and the first half of the recession went just the same as Papa Bush's when there was a tax increase. But then things changed. Since the recovery started, its been slower on job growth. Normally after a recession job growth takes off and plays catch up for years. This time, there has been almost no catch-up.
Wages, Unemployment, Jobs, Outsourcing
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To Bush: You Need to Take Out Cheney
November 4th, 2005 1:59 am by Steve Stoft
ou're in a hole and Cheney's just digging it deeper. He's at 19% and headed for 9. Nine is the number of Senators who voted for torture and Cheney's siding with them. But ninety Senators sided with McCaine and against "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Cheney's trying to end-run the 90 by getting the CIA exempted. Mr. President, this is not the time for you to come out for cruel and inhuman treatment.
Just watch Cheney dig. Fitzgerald relieved him of one of those neocons who tricked us into the Iraq quagmire. So what does he do? He picks Addington who recently "bloodied" a guy from the Pentagon for explaining that the Pentagon was leaning towards prohibiting "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, humiliating and degrading treatment." This is not the direction America is going and it can only hurt you.
But you're in luck Mr. Bush. You know Cheney was in on the Libby/Plame thing. Libby and Cheney both asked the CIA about Plame; they talked it over. Libby tried to protect Cheney. From what? From himself obviously. Now your daddy said these kind of guys are "the most insidious of traitors." All you've got to do give him a choice: Come clean or resign. You know what he'll do. He pull a Spiro T. Agnew faster than greased lightning.
Bush, Cheney, Plame, Libby, CIA, Addington
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Born-Again Torture?
November 2nd, 2005 4:46 pm by Steve Stoft
Dear Mr. President,
Your base favors law and order. You're a born-again Christian. Ask yourself--did Jesus teach torture? Does my Christian base want America to dodge the law and set international precedents for torture? That doesn’t sound right Mr. President.
So why can’t you get Dick Cheney to go along with the Defense and State Department officials and senior military lawyers who side with the rest of the civilized world and want to rule out "cruel," "humiliating" and "degrading" treatment?
And what’s this about the CIA’s torture center in a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe?
Besides, it doesn’t work. We haven’t caught Bin Ladin or al-Zarqawi. We’ve just played into their hands—providing them the best anti-US propaganda they could ever have dreamed of. And it doesn’t just turn Arabs against us. A friend just returning from a month-long trek through Spain following a popular, thousand-year old religious route. Everyone she talked with simply could not believe the U.S. was talking about “bringing democracy” while torturing Iraqis in Saddam’s old torture house.
We fought the German Nazis, and the Italian and Japanese fascists and suicide bombers all at once without adopting such a policy. Now we've got cruise missiles against improvised car bombs. Surely we can win this one without defiling America's honor and that of our Armed Forces. But, if you need to be inspired to do the right thing, read this letter from a Captain in the U.S. Army Infantry who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iraq, Iraq war, Cheney, Bush, CIA
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Libby’s Motives
October 31st, 2005 4:35 am by Steve Stoft
Libby a neoconservative, has worked hard for the Iraq war for over a decade. Wilson was threatening a core justification—Saddam's nukes, and one that Cheney and Libby knew was bogus and thus vulnerable.
Cheney and Libby had equal motives to put a stop to Wilson's criticism. Those two go back at least to 1989 when Cheney was Defense Sect. for Bush I, Wolfowitz was undersecretary, and Libby was his assistant. (Libby and Wolfowitz go back to 1973 when Libby was his student.) Libby and Wolfowitz were disgusted with Bush I's failure to take out Saddam. Their first chance to start working towards this goal came in 1992 when they were asked to draft the "Defense Planning Guidance." That draft included "preemptive" wars (like the Iraq war), and when this leaked, it made a splash in the NY Times and Washington Post. (Read these on zFacts.)
That "Guidance" got modified before it was approved. But it later became a basis of the founding principles of "PNAC", the neocon think tank and lobby. Cheney and Libby signed on as founding members in 1997, and the first public act of that group was to lobby for the Iraq war in January, 1998. By July 2003, they were both proud of their war, and did not want Wilson undermining its "justification," especially before their mission was complete.
Libby, Cheney, neocons, neoconservatives
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Greek Hurricanes
October 29th, 2005 9:20 pm by Steve Stoft
Wilma tied the 1933 record of 21 named storms and ran us out of English names for the year. Now we're into Greek. Alpha, Beta, ... that's it so far—Beta. Just two more than the record since 1851. But what about strength?
1933 brought no category 4 or 5 storms. This year, we had two category 4's and three category 5's. The three 5's set another all-time record. Now it's true that we are on up-side of a long-term hurricane cycle and the national hurricane center loves to tell us that's all it is.
But just because we're on the up-side of a cycle is no evidence that we are not also on a man-made global warming up-swing. Of course setting two 150-year records this year doesn't prove it's global warming. But it's time for our government scientists to stop saying it's not. They have no proof it's not and only a shred of evidence. The scientif position is "We don't know." Time they started talking like scientists instead of politicians.
There's no proof it's not and a lot of new evidence that global warming is playing havoc with the normal cycle. Check it out at zFacts
Hurricanes, global warming
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http://zfacts.com/p/940.html | 01/18/12 07:16 GMT
Modified: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:31:58 GMT
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