The Reagans

[gldstwmn]

Originally posted by dissention
Have you read Molly Ivins' column today? Good stuff!!!

Where is it?

[gldstwmn]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...=1008596981749

Report: Rumsfeld considers striking Hizbullah to provoke Syria

"US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is considering provoking a military confrontation with Syria by attacking Hizbullah bases near the Syrian border in Lebanon, according to the authoritative London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest.

In an article to be published on Friday, the journal said multi-faceted US attacks, which would be conducted within the framework of the global war on terrorism, are likely to focus on Hizbullah bases in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon..."

[dissention]

Originally posted by gldstwmn
Where is it?

Right here.

AUSTIN, Texas -- My fellow Americans, the state of the union's finances is enough to make an Enron accountant gag. When George W. Bush took office, he was handed a going concern. Projected annual surpluses from 2002 to 2011 were $5.6 trillion. In its most recent projection, the Congressional Budget Office says it expects $1.4 trillion in total deficits from 2004 to 2013. Bush's new future spending proposals -- including everything from the goofy manned-flight-to-Mars to the promotion of marriage -- already total an additional $2 trillion.

When Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion and his first budget proposed to reduce it by $2 trillion over the next decade. Today, the debt is $7 trillion. Last year, Bush predicted a deficit of $262 billion. According of the CBO, the deficit is currently $480 billion. Bush plans to cut biomedical research, health care, job training and veterans funding, and that still leaves a projected deficit of $450 billion.

It is unclear to me why anyone would believe anything the president says about our fiscal situation. Keep in mind, this is a man who took three Texas oil companies into bankruptcy.

I anticipate a painful skewing of the statistics on jobs, but there's not much even the finest spinners can do with the basic problem. Under Bill Clinton, the economy gained an average of 236,000 jobs every month. Under George W. Bush, the economy has lost an average of 66,000 jobs a month. Nor is the news getting better. Last month, the economy, supposedly in full recovery, added 1,000 jobs. The economy needs to generate 150,000 jobs a month just to absorb new workers.

Not only are the 2 million jobs we have already lost not coming back, but the trend will continue. The lead story in Monday's Wall Street Journal is about IBM's plan to shift 3,000 high-paying jobs overseas, known as "off-shoring." We are not just hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs. As the Journal reports, "This ‘off-shoring' process has raised fears that even high-skill jobs that were supposed to represent the U.S.'s future are being lost to countries that have already taken over low-skill factory work." In the other words, your nice, middle-class butt is on the line here.

There are, of course, some jobs that cannot be exported -- farms cannot be moved to another country, nor can restaurants. So the president proposes a giant new bracero program to import foreign workers legally to fill those jobs. As Jamie Galbraith wrote in Salon, the online magazine: "There is no reason to believe the Bush administration's hand-wringing over its pathetic record on employment. The president's backers want a stagnant job market -- it keeps the help from getting uppity."

In another sign of how deeply Bush cares about workers, the plan to end overtime pay for millions of workers is back. You may recall this little charmer from last year, the Bush proposal to "update" the Fair Labor Standards Act. Both the House and the Senate nixed the idea by passing an amendment proposed by Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, but in the magic way of the Republican-run Congress, the amendment was later dropped from a spending bill after heavy pressure from the White House.

Now, in another move typical of the administration, they plan to bypass Congress altogether and issue the new regulations as an "administrative rules change," to go into effect in March. The administration claims the new regulations will extend overtime pay to an additional 1.3 million low-income workers. That would certainly be a good thing, except for the fact that it would exempt another 8 million workers from getting overtime by reclassifying them as management or professionals. Another great deal for the corporations -- they get to cut overtime for a lot of higher-paid workers and only have to add a few lower-paid workers. Do you really have any doubts about whom this administration is being run for?

We will of course have to listen to the president tell us how wonderful his Medicare drug coverage bill is. I thought there could be no more masterly dissection of that fraud than the one in the current issue of Harper's magazine, in which Lewis Lapham takes the repulsive thing apart. His incisive essay is a model of legislative analysis that should be studied by all political writers. But he actually missed one item found by The Wall Street Journal.

Bush said late last year, "If there's a Medicare reform bill signed by me, corporations have no intention to dump retirees (from existing drug coverage). ... What we're talking about is trust." The bill includes a special tax subsidy to encourage employers to retain prescription drug coverage for their retirees. But, oops, the Journal reports the White House quietly added "a little-noticed provision" to the bill that allows companies to severely reduce or almost completely terminate their retirees' drug coverage without losing out on the new subsidy. And guess what? The major backers of that "little-noted provision" are all major donors to Bush and the Republican Party. It's not about trust, it's about money.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

PS: I love the new sig!!!

[dissention]

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/7765415.htm

CIA warns of Iraq civil war
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.

The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.

The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.

Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before."

These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity.

Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.

Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit strategy after concluding that Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by June 30.

Bremer would then hand over power to the interim government.

The CIA hasn't yet put its officers' warnings about a potential Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior official said he expected a formal report "momentarily."

"In the discussion with Bremer in the last few days, several very bad possibilities have been outlined," he said.

Bush, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, insisted that an insurgency against the U.S. occupation, conducted primarily by minority Sunni Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein, "will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom."

"Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility for their own security and their own future," the president said.

Bush didn't directly address the crisis over the Shiites' political demands.

Shiites, who dominate the regions from Baghdad south to the borders of Kuwait and Iran, comprise some 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people.

Several U.S. officials acknowledged that Sistani is unlikely to be "rolled," as one put it, and as a result Bremer's plan for restoring Iraqi sovereignty and ending the U.S. occupation by June 30 is in peril.

The Bremer plan, negotiated with the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council, calls for caucuses in each of Iraq's 18 provinces to choose the interim national assembly, which would in turn select Iraq's first post-Saddam government.

The first direct elections wouldn't be held until the end of 2005.

In an interview with Knight Ridder on Wednesday, a top cleric in the Shiite holy city of Najaf appeared to confirm the fears of potential civil war.

"Everything has its own time, but we are saying that we don't accept the occupiers getting involved with the Iraqis' affairs," said Sheikh Ali Najafi, whose father, Grand Ayatollah Bashir al Najafi, is, along with Sistani, one of the four most senior clerics. "I don't trust the Americans - not even for one blink."

If the United States went ahead with the caucus plan and ended the military occupation, the interim government wouldn't last long, he said.

"The Iraqi people would know how to deal with those people," he said, smiling. "They would kick them out."

U.S. and British officials hinted Wednesday that they might bow to the demand for some kind of elections, after saying for weeks that holding free and fair elections in time for the handover of sovereignty would be impossible.

"We've always favored elections," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said after he and other top Bush aides briefed senators. "The only question is - the tension was, if your goal is to get sovereignty passed to the Iraqis so that they feel they have a stake in their future, can you do it faster with caucuses or can you do it faster with elections?"

Rumsfeld was responding to comments by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who opened the door Wednesday to elections in Iraq earlier than planned.

"The discussion, which has been stimulated by Ayatollah Sistani, is whether there could be an element of elections injected into the earlier part of the process," Straw said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"We have to work with great respect for him and similar leaders," he said. "We want elections as soon as it is feasible to hold them."

Shiite clerics have become more forceful in their denunciation of the caucus plan and have organized increasingly large, albeit peaceful, demonstrations demanding elections.

State Department officials said no changes to the Bremer plan are being formally considered. They said much depends on the findings of a U.N. assessment team that the Bush administration has asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send to examine the feasibility of elections.

One option being informally discussed is to delay the transfer of power until later in 2004, which might give the United Nations time to organize some sort of elections, said one official.

But that is almost certain to be opposed by White House political aides who want the occupation over and many U.S. troops gone by this summer to bolster Bush's re-election chances, the official said.

"It's all politics right now," he said.

Other options are to go ahead with the June 30 turnover as planned, whatever the fallout, or to accelerate it by handing over power to the Iraqi Governing Council in March or April, he said.

[dissention]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar..._as_extensive/

Infiltration of files seen as extensive
Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/22/2004

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.

The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.

Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.

Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.

Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.

"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."

As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.

Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.

The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.

Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.

"They had an obligation to tell each of the people whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it was an accident -- that that was going on so those people could protect themselves," said one Senate staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just beyond the pale."

But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.

And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."

After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."

Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he said was being placed on leave and who sources said has since resigned, although he had apparently already announced plans to return to school later this year.

Officials familiar with the investigation identified that person as a legislative staff assistant whose name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill directory. The staff member's home number has been disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.

Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary staff may have been involved." Many news reports have subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda, who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff communications.

Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand and said he did not distribute the memos to the media. He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.

"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."

Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official business will be a central issue in any criminal case that could result. Unauthorized access of such material could be punishable by up to a year in prison -- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate non-disclosure rule.

The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.

A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.

[gldstwmn]

Again, with Novak? This guy is a regular mouthpiece.

[gldstwmn]

http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/23/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes
Halliburton blows whistle on kickbacks

Oil company says a unit may have accepted kickbacks for sub-contract to Kuwaiti company.
January 23, 2004: 11:07 AM EST

NEW YORK (CNN) - Officials of a Halliburton subsidiary contracted to provide services to U.S. troops may have accepted kickbacks from a Kuwaiti company subcontracted to provide the services, the company said Friday.

Kellogg Brown & Root fell under harsh scrutiny last year when allegations surfaced in a Defense Contracting Audit Agency's draft audit that it had overcharged the army by as much as $61 million for gasoline by buying it solely from Kuwait instead of Turkey, where it was cheaper.

KBR denied those allegations, but said the services contract contained an "irregularity" that violated the company's code of ethics.

"The key issue here is self-disclosure and self-reporting," said Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall. "We found it quickly, and we immediately reported it to the inspector general. We do not tolerate this kind of behavior by anyone at any level in any Halliburton company."

The Pentagon has not responded to the news.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle addressed the issue on the on the Senate floor Friday morning, saying it was "disturbing" and calling for Senate hearings to find out how it happened and why there wasn't better congressional oversight of the process.

Halliburton said the officials involved in the allegations "are no longer employed by the company" and "no senior officials were involved."

Hall said the Department of Defense's Office of Inspector General is reviewing the allegations. KBR is also investigating, she said, and will cooperate with the DOD investigation.

"We can't discuss the specifics of the case because we don't want to say anything that would harm the IG's review," Hall said.

"It is the combination of these audit services that provides our customers the confidence to award and re-award such significant government contracts to our firm," she added. "As a company with a successful history of government contracting, as well as a dedicated set of corporate values and ethics, we continue to uphold honesty and integrity throughout our business practices."

The allegations involved a contract competitively awarded to KBR in 2001 and do not relate to the gasoline contract, which was a no-bid contract. The Pentagon ended that contract on Dec. 31.

Vice President Dick Cheney headed Halliburton from 1995 until he became George Bush's running mate in 2000, leaving the company with a $34 million retirement package.

[strandinthewind]

I just always find Powell the voice of reason in this admin.; to wit (from CNN):

Last year, Powell presented evidence to the United Nations that Saddam had such weapons. President Bush used their alleged existence as the primary rationale for the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

"I think the answer to the question is 'I don't know yet,'" Powell told reporters. "Last year, when I made my presentation, it was based on the best intelligence that we had at the time. It reflected the National Intelligence Estimate that the intelligence community had presented to all administration officials and had briefed to the Congress. And it was consistent with the views of other intelligence agencies of other governments, and it was consistent with the body of reporting over the years."

Powell said the United States had demanded of Iraqi officials a full accounting of what had happened to the nation's weapons, "and all they did was make statements without proving it, proving it to our satisfaction."

Go here for the full article:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/01/24/pow...gia/index.html

[gldstwmn]

According to the O'Neill book, Powell was startled when Bush told him they were going to disengage from the Arab Israeli conflict and focus on Iraq. "Powell said such a move might be hasty. He remarked on the violence on the West Bank and Gaza and on its roots. He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army. 'The consequences of that could be dire," he said, "especially for the Palestinians."
Bush shrugged. "Maybe that's the best way to ge things back in balance."
"He turned to Rice. "So Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What's on the agenda?"
"How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr. President," Rice said in what several observers understood was a scripted exchange."

My favorite part so far is when Bush and O'Neill sit down to have lunch for the first time and after about fifteen minutes, when their cheeseburgers hadn't arrived yet, Shrub looks at Chief Of Staff Andrew Card (a veteran of both the Reagan and Bush I administrations) and says impatiently, "You're the chief of staff. You think you're up to getting us some cheeseburgers?"

[jwd]

Yea O'Neill, the guy who was spewing that Bush was disengaged in meetings. Whatever happened with the disgruntled former employee of Bush's and his alleged taking of classified documents/information that he revealed on 60 minutes? Anybody heard anything more about that?


Joe

[dissention]

Originally posted by jwd
Yea O'Neill, the guy who was spewing that Bush was disengaged in meetings. Whatever happened with the disgruntled former employee of Bush's and his alleged taking of classified documents/information that he revealed on 60 minutes? Anybody heard anything more about that?


Joe

He said a lot more than Bush being "disengaged."

Nothing is going to come of that investigation; they were just investigating him in an attempt to cast public doubt on what he said.

Did you hear that two anonymous White House officials backed O'Neill up?

[jwd]

dissention:

Did you hear that two anonymous White House officials backed O'Neill up?

How can one give any credibility to two "anonymous" sources? And I've also heard people making statements refuting what O'Neill said. I guess there are two sides to every story. Everyone has a different way of looking at or interpreting things I suppose.


Joe

[dissention]

Originally posted by jwd
How can one give any credibility to two "anonymous" sources? And I've also heard people making statements refuting what O'Neill said. I guess there are two sides to every story. Everyone has a different way of looking at or interpreting things I suppose.


Joe

Well, I would certainly give some credence to coroboration from White House officials. That's like saying an anonymous source told the government about the 9/11 attacks in advance but they chose not to even look into it.

As for hearing people refute what O'Neill said, what do you expect? For the government to say, yes, folks, he's telling the truth?

[jwd]

dissention:

Well, I would certainly give some credence to coroboration from White House officials. That's like saying an anonymous source told the government about the 9/11 attacks in advance but they chose not to even look into it.

To ME, those are vague statements. For myself to make judgment on them I would need something more credible than the term "anonymous sources" to prove it to be true. I'm not saying it's not true, it'd just be more credible to have some names.


Joe

[gldstwmn]

Originally posted by dissention
He said a lot more than Bush being "disengaged."

Nothing is going to come of that investigation; they were just investigating him in an attempt to cast public doubt on what he said.

Did you hear that two anonymous White House officials backed O'Neill up?

Yep. My guess is Powell and Christie Todd Whitman.