Darth Cheney Wants a Hot War with Team Xinhua

Now you know why Robert Gates, the Secretary of Carlyle Asset Defense dumped the head of the Air Force who wanted war with China as the Pentagon's top priority.

The fourth branch of government's spoiling for a fight. Or to drill for oil in your backyard. Maybe both.

Big Time Dick:

...oil is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida. But we’re not doing it, the Chinese are, in cooperation with the Cuban government.

It's interesting how the shock of the run up on oil prices, driven by speculation as much as demand, is allowing the Sith Lord to reasonably (according to the main$tream) suggest making the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico provinces of Exon-Mobil. Of course, Halliburton would be right there doing the drilling for them, and Blackwater would doubtless provide the security.

Unfortunately, some people can do the math. Daniel J. Weiss at the Center for American Progress:

...in the wake of these near record prices, oil industry allies are likely to haul out the lobbying equivalent of a Christmas fruit cake. They will once again push for more oil drilling off U.S. coastal areas and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These tired proposals have been rejected time and again because they would do little to reduce the price of oil in the short run or offset higher demand in the long run.

First off, additional offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, would not produce any oil for five to seven years. It would take at least 10 years to produce any oil from the Arctic. Such plans will not reduce the spot market price for oil. In fact, we already tried this and it failed to reduce prices. In December 2006 Congress and President Bush opened new areas to drilling off the Florida Coast when the price of oil was $62 per barrel. The price is one-third higher today.

Second, oil companies hold over 4,000 undeveloped leases in the western Gulf of Mexico. If oil companies want to increase oil supplies, it would be much faster to develop these leases rather than plod through the laborious process to get Congress to approve offshore drilling in currently protected places. Interestingly, the Big Five oil companies—BP plc, Chevron Corp., Conoco Phillips Inc., ExxonMobil Corp., and Royal Dutch Shell plc—have been spending a huge amount of their half trillion dollars in recent profits buying back their own stock. Perhaps they should invest some of their record profits in developing these leases before they greedily ask for access to more protected places.

Most importantly, the U.S. oil supply-demand balance is insurmountable. We have less than 2 percent of the world’s known reserves, yet use 25 percent of its oil. Even if we drilled off of every beach, and inside every national park, refuge, and forest, the United States does not possess enough oil to significantly offset our growing demand...

And damned sure not enough to mollify the speculators, who have seized upon the fact that we're in the final 50 years of fossil fuel with a vengance. And who are doing everything in their power to lobby to make sure alternative energy isn't developed.

About as Likely to Pass as Dear Leader's Impeachment

Strangely enough, many members of the Company realize there are some things the Establishment just shouldn't do. Or admit it does, anyway.

Congress is finally moving to ban one of the Bush administration’s most blatant evasions of accountability in Iraq — the outsourcing of war detainees’ interrogation to mercenary private contractors.

Operating free of the restraints of military rule and ethics, some of these corporate thugs turned up in the torture scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison and walked away with impunity. Others are now believed to be in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency at secret prisons that remain outside the rule of law, exempted even from the weak 2006 rules on interrogating prisoners.

Civilian interrogators are part of the broader pool of hired guns that the administration has deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other spots around the world. Their actions regularly enrage Iraqis, most notably last September, when a phalanx of trigger-happy contractors assigned to protect American diplomats sprayed a crowd and killed 17 civilians.

These depredations continue to undermine the United States in the eyes of both citizens of war zones and the watching world. Their use as interrogators are a symptom of the administration’s ducking accountability under international law by concocting ersatz redefinitions of civilized behavior and undermining legitimate intelligence operations.

In the current military budget debate, both houses are proposing an outright ban on the use of contractors as prisoner interrogators. They also would order the Pentagon to finally rein in its use of tens of thousands of contract guards as laissez-faire warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon would have to write rules specifying which security operations are military missions that cannot be outsourced.

Abuses by mercenaries operating beyond the reach of criminal and military law have been an outgrowth of the administration’s failure to adequately staff its military invasion force. The most notorious of the favored war contractors has been Blackwater Worldwide. But numerous other bidders have been awarded plums to amass “private security” stealth forces estimated to total near 50,000 fighters.

The White House, of course, is threatening a veto, citing its all-purpose plaint that the interrogator ban would hobble the nation’s “ability to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack.” In leading the House to passage of the ban, Representative David Price, Democrat of North Carolina, laid bare the folly of using for-profit gunslingers to undertake the highly sensitive task of handling and questioning detainees.

Anyone interested in protecting America, Mr. Price pointed out, must see the wisdom of using interrogators “who are well trained, who fall within a clear chain of command and who have a sworn loyalty to the United States” — not to some corporate bottom line.

Congress should stand up to the veto threats and go even further: approve measures to make war-zone contractors liable for criminal behavior and to assign the Federal Bureau of Investigation to on-the-scene inquiries into contractor crimes. The way out of the Iraq fiasco must include an end to the outsourced shadow armies.

Because, you just never know who the wrath of thethe shadow government will fall upon next. Or maybe you do know:

...This morning, during a 100,000 hit-per-hour crush of visitors seeking information about the articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush, the campaign web site of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Cleveland) began to suffer irregularities involving protected codes used to format information and to create links, which site administrators deemed suspicious and possibly indicative of external tampering...

How to end the Inflationary Spiral

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — As gasoline prices soar to new records, America's president — and the two men who hope to succeed him — are offering only partial or long-term solutions and ignoring three steps that many experts say could bring some relief now.

Americans began this workweek by crossing a dismal threshold, paying a once-unthinkable nationwide record average of $4.02 per gallon Monday for unleaded gasoline, with the prospect of even higher prices in months ahead.

On Monday, President Bush said one answer is to increase oil drilling in Alaska and offshore. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain's chief economic adviser renewed McCain's call to suspend the 18.4 cent-per-gallon federal gasoline tax. Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

Independent experts, however, said that government could take at least three other steps that could force oil and gasoline prices down immediately. Neither Bush nor McCain nor Obama endorse any of them.

Perhaps the quickest action, the experts said, would be ordering curbs on financial speculation. Financial industry heavyweights have acknowledged in recent testimony before Congress that such speculation is driving oil prices higher.

Pension funds, endowments and other big institutional investors are pumping big money into index funds linked to commodities, including oil, driving up demand — and prices. The popular Goldman Sachs Commodities Index attracted $260 billion in investment last year, compared to $13 billion five years earlier.

Complicating any effort to harness that, about 30 percent of the trading in crude oil is done in "dark areas" — markets in London and Dubai — that aren't regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

President Bush could order the CFTC to regulate U.S. investments in those markets with a snap of his fingers, said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a former director of trading for the CFTC.

"Essentially this could be ended this afternoon if the Bush administration had the stomach to do it," he said. "Those abdications of responsibility and allowing these exchanges to trade in 'dark' markets ... provides an environment for speculators to thrive."

The CFTC is investigating the link between speculation and oil prices but hasn't scheduled any action.

A second partial solution would be to boost the supply of oil available on the market by releasing as much as 1 million barrels a day of oil now held in the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That step is being pushed by, among others, the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank run by several former Clinton administration officials.

Do that for 90 days — through the summer driving season when consumer demand for gasoline is highest — and the reserve would lose less than 15 percent of the oil held in case of national emergency.

"Put that on the market, and the price of oil will fall," said Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow at the center.

It's not entirely clear that U.S. refineries could handle all that extra oil, but it would signal to traders of oil contracts that the U.S. market is adequately supplied.

Finally, the Federal Reserve could act to boost the weak dollar, which has led oil producers to demand higher prices for oil, because oil generally is traded in dollars. Oil producers want higher prices to offset the cost of converting dollars into euros and other currencies that have grown stronger against the dollar.

The best way to bolster a currency is to boost interest rates, but the Federal Reserve has been reluctant to do that with America teetering on the brink of recession. The central bank in Europe, where growth is more robust, is poised to raise rates, however. That could weaken the dollar further, and drive oil prices even higher.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday will try to muster 60 votes to allow a vote on legislation that could significantly affect the oil industry and oil prices. The legislation would, among other things, instruct CFTC regulators to require investors to plunk down more of their own money if they want to speculate in oil markets.

Instead, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's chief economic adviser, told McClatchy that a "holiday from the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gasoline tax has lowered prices every time it's been tried "and it is felt all through the economy..."

Obviously some of the commentors are using Occam's razor:

Instead of regulating the speculation that is driving up gas and food prices, Congress and the CFTC have decided to LOOK into it. I think our government already knows what’s going on, the only thing they have to LOOK into is their personal investment results.

You got that right.

The Problem with Pravda

Alex Thurston:

The difference between these two headlines could hardly be starker:

The New York Times: "Rivals in Somalia Sign Peace Deal"

Al Jazeera: "Somali Leader Rejects Peace Deal"

And just for perspective, the BBC says: "Somali Islamist Rejects Ceasefire..."

There's apparently something of a general realization that the people who run the media have been running interference for the warmongers for the last 8 years or so.

Imagine that.

The Once and Future policy of those who would rule an Empire.

Comment on the Intraterrestrials

On the lovely Dr. Oliva Judson's post:

In Frank Herbert's Dune the spice that ran the Empire was produced by sandworms, something that the people who ran the Empire really did not want generally known.

In the reality-based world, the hydrocarbons that run the Empire may be produced by the intraterrestial bacteria. Something that the people who own the Empire definitely don't want generally known. Incidently, there's a trillion tons of methane ice on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico that is known to be made by bacteria:

Beyond the geological “cooking and squeezing” processes that produce petroleum and gas, large quantities of gas also are being produced biologically. Many gas hydrate accumulations and ocean-floor gas seeps consist of methane largely derived from microorganisms.

Bacteria living in oxygen-poor areas beneath deep-sea sediments on the seafloor produce methane as a major product of their metabolism. Some models suggest that bacteria in sediments may account for 10 percent of the living biomass on Earth. In addition, microbial communities beneath the seafloor, whose numbers are entirely unknown, may also be producing vast amounts of methane.

High octane, too? Well, show me one geochemist who would know how to look for a bacterium that explodes at the low pressures of the surface world. I do know nobody would have believed in the bacteria that makes Taq DNA polymerase 50 years ago.

Count on It

Articles of Impeachment

It looks like Congressional DINOcrats have managed to move the Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment into committee, where they are expected to die. Again.

But just in case you haven't downloaded the .pdf, here they are.

Like Barbed Wire on the Great Plains

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint would "shut down major sources of online child pornography."

What Cuomo didn't say is that his agreement with broadband providers means that they will broadly curb customers' access to Usenet--the venerable pre-Web home of some 100,000 discussion groups, only a handful of which contain illegal material.

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

It's not quite the death of Usenet (which has been predicted, incorrectly, countless times). But if a politician can pressure three of the largest Internet providers into censorial acquiescence, it may only be a matter of time before smaller ones like Supernews, Giganews, and Usenet.com feel the squeeze.

Cuomo's office said it had "reviewed millions of pictures over several months" and found only "88 different newsgroups" containing child pornography.

"We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers to ensure they do not play host to this immoral business," Cuomo said in a statement released after a press conference in New York. "I call on all Internet service providers to follow their example and help deter the spread of online child porn."

That amounts to an odd claim: stopping the spread of child porn on a total of 88 newsgroups necessarily means coercing broadband providers to pull the plug on thousands of innocuous ones. Usenet's sprawling set of hierarchically arranged discussion areas include ones that go by names like sci.math, rec.motorcycles, and comp.os.linux.admin. It has been partially succeeded by mailing lists, message boards, and blogs; AOL stopped carrying Usenet in 2005, but AT&T still does.

Many of Usenet's discussion groups are scarcely different from discussions you might find on the Web at, say, Yahoo Groups. Because there's no central authority, however--Usenet servers exchange messages in a cooperative, peer-to-peer manner--politicians are more likely to look askance at the concept. (For that matter, so is the Recording Industry Association of America.)

It's true that of the three broadband providers Cuomo singled out, only Time Warner Cable will cease to offer Usenet. Sprint is cutting off the alt.* hierarchy, Usenet's largest, which will primarily affect its business customers. A Verizon spokesman said he didn't know details, saying "newsgroups that deal with scientific endeavors" will stick around but admitted that all of the alt.* hierarchy could be toast.

Yet Usenet's sprawling alt.* hierarchy contains tens of thousands of discussion groups--one count says there are 18,408 of them--including alt.adoption, alt.atheism, alt.gothic, and alt.tv.simpsons. Ditching all of those means eliminating perfectly legitimate conversations...

So with the awesome powers of the NSA, anyone posting on Usenet- or anywhere else- can be tracked. Since Usenet's always been a public forum, anyone posting child porn has committed a felony, and can legitimately be tracked and arrested. Case closed.

You would think a real law enforcement agency would want to let the idiots expose themselves. So they could be caught. But porn's not really why big telcoms like Verizon hate Usenet.

Big telcoms want to end net neutrality by 2012.

Bell Canada and TELUS (formerly owned by Verizon) employees officially confirm that by 2012 ISP's all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These 'other' sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet...

Now the politicians really like this one. The big reason the Republicans face the boot this year isn't because FOX has been Fair and Balanced. It's because a few dozen heavy hitters outside the main$tream and thousands of smaller sites like this one have been tracking every dirty deed since 2000.

It's a natural alliance. The main$tream media wants to kill the independent media. The politicians want their pie.

If CNN or any handful of telcom friendly sites become the sole source of news on the web, then Big Brother (or Sister) has won.

Haven't we always been at war with Eurasia? And aren't the choco-rations better this week?

"V"

Avedon sez Cylon.



I know Cylons. Some of my best friends are Cylons. Cylon babes are hot.

She's just another man-eating Reptilican with a pricey wig.

Bug in the Program

Vonnegut:

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't' know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Try to get past the ego, and read Silber today. Your next President will be a white man:

...let us draw a distinction between the candidates' biological identities and what we might term their functional identities. McCain is a white man; no issue arises there. I am well aware that Hillary Clinton is biologically a woman, as I know that Barack Obama is biracial in hereditary terms. By "functional identity," I refer to the role all these candidates have chosen to play, in cultural and political terms... Because all three of these politicians have chosen to engage in national politics at the highest level, they have no choice about enthusiastically adopting all the indicia of the ruling class, for indeed they are the ruling class. That is, they have no choice if they want to win. And all three of them assuredly want to win (even if one of them seems to be out of the running for the moment, but much can happen between now and November, and even between now and August).

Reflect for just a moment about what it is they want to win so desperately. Each of these three persons wants to be the most powerful ruler in the world. Given the nature of the weapons that will be at their disposal, they want to be the most powerful ruler in all of history, with the power to fundamentally transform human history and perhaps even to end it in significant part. Even if you believed that you acted righteously, with justice and truth on your side (let us set aside for the moment how one can believe that the power to murder millions of innocent people can ever be thought to be right or just, although I do not believe such considerations should ever be set aside), would you want power of that kind? If you would, I hope never to meet you. For any person who actively seeks the power of life and death over just one other human being, let alone millions of people, is deeply, irrevocably damaged in psychological terms. If we use the term "normal" to designate those goals and motives that can generally be described as supportive of individual life and happiness, no one who wants to be president of the United States is remotely close to normal. When you consider the years of relentless, soul-destroying ambition that are required to approach the office of president, together with the indefensible compromises, the endless lies, and the constant exercise of power over others in less extreme forms, anyone who deeply desires to be president verges on a constant state of insanity.

Yet one of these terrifyingly deranged people will, in fact, be the next president. Many Americans are excited, even thrilled, about the prospect, which tells you a rather important fact about most Americans, actually many important facts...

But the only thing I think it really tells you is again, another Vonnegut observation:

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

That's why I'm a progressive.

They'll hand us roses, roses I tell you...

Ah, there's nothing like True Love...

BAGHDAD -Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed "status of forces" agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.

"The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation," said Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. "We were occupied by order of the Security Council," he said, referring to the 2004 Resolution mandating a U.S. military occupation in Iraq at the head of an international coalition. "But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far."

Other conditions sought by the United States include control over Iraqi air space up to 30,000 feet and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private military contractors. The agreement would run indefinitely but be subject to cancellation with two years notice from either side, lawmakers said.

"It would impair Iraqi sovereignty," said Ali al Adeeb a leading member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Dawa party of the proposed accord. "The Americans insist so far that is they who define what is an aggression on Iraq and what is democracy inside Iraq... if we come under aggression we should define it and ask for help."

Both Saghir and Adeeb said that the Iraqi government rejected the terms as unacceptable. They said the government wants a U.S. presence and a U.S. security guarantee but also wants to control security within the country, stop indefinite detentions of Iraqis by U.S. forces and have a say in U.S. forces' conduct in Iraq.

The 58 bases would represent an expansion of the U.S. presence here. Currently, the United States operates out of about 30 major bases, not including smaller facilities such as combat outposts, according to a U.S. military map...

The top U.S. Embassy spokesman in Iraq rejected the latest Iraqi criticism.

"Look, there is going to be no occupation," said U.S. spokesman Adam Ereli...

Heavens, no. We'd never call it anything as crass as that, especially if a big part of it was done by our mercenaries private contractors. It's the Free Market.

But there's a reason for the urgency:

...U.S. officials in Baghdad say they are determined to complete the accord by July 31 so that parliamentary deliberations can be completed before the Dec. 31 expiration of the UN mandate.

The agreement will not specify how many troops or where they will be deployed, said a U.S. official who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject, but the agreement will detail the legal framework under which U.S. troops will operate. The U.S. official said that in the absence of a UN resolution authorizing the use of force, "there have to be terms that are in place. That's the reality that we're trying to accommodate."

Iraqis are determined to get their nation removed from the purview of the U.N. Security Council under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows the international body to declare a country a threat to international peace, a step the U.N. took after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraqi officials say that designation clearly is no longer appropriate.

But even on that basic request, the U.S. has not promised to support Iraq, Saghir said, and is instead withholding that support as a pressure point in negotiations.

U.S. demands "conflict with our sovereignty and we refuse them," said Hassan Sneid, a member of the Dawa party and a lawmaker on the security committee in the parliament. "I don't expect these negotiations will be done by the exact date. The Americans want so many things and the fact is we want different things..."

Yes. The "Amerikans" want the Iraqi oil in Halliburton Patriotic hands. The "Iraqis" want Iraqi oil in Iraqi hands.

The Iraqis, of course, are a good dozen or more ethnic groups in Iraq, and their bankrollers. Like the Saudis, or the Iranians. Or Russia. Or China.

Or every other international criminal cartel specializing in drugs, prostitution, money laundering, and manipulating energy futures.



Like Al Qaeda, or the Bu$h family.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Strange

Spocko's looking for a good flux capacitor, as no doubt some Air Force brass are doing as well. Gates says if they can't keep track of their nukes, they can go spend some time with their families.

According to John Titor, it's field strength application, with a dual particle singularity field generator, not size or intensity that makes a good time travel machine.

Also, Titor suggested (with his device, anyway) true time travel was impossible, but you could slip into the past of a very similar universe- and return to another very similar to your own.

You can see the problems with this approach: the returning time traveller isn't exactly the same one that left, nor is "home" really ever quite the same.

Perhaps this is another case where the bug may turn out to be a feature of the program.

Similarly, the data suggest the nuke bug may have just been a good excuse for Secretary Gates, Poppy Bu$h's man at the Pentagon, to re-establish a little tighter rein on the big brass. You see, Gates likes the Cylon fighters patrolling the oil fields. Secretary Michael W. Wynne and General "Buzz" Moseley want a fleet of stealth fighters because they're chafing for Star Wars with China.

Which is presented- via the Wired.com blogs- as the real reason Gates played the Terminator on these two careers. Mr. Gates and his Carlyle bosses like wars small and simmering and producing a nice steady cash flow. A war with China is a very different monstrosity.

But if anyone really believes the Republicans will ever really be for smaller militaries and less war, may I suggest they may have accidently enountered two top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard off-set Tipler sinusoid.

The conservatives may have Really been that way in the universe of your birth, but in this one they've always been money-grubbing warmongers.

Both Clueless, Both Wrong

One Historic Night, Two Americas
by FRANK RICH
Published: June 8, 2008

When Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.

On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington...

Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama’s epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.

Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama’s insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama’s clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of “change” 33 times in his speech.

Mr. McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs. Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means. “No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically,” he said on Tuesday. He then grimly regurgitated Goldwater and Reagan government-bashing talking points from the 1960s and ’70s even as he presumed to accuse Mr. Obama of looking “to the 1960s and ’70s for answers.”

Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it’s not your boomer parents’ liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right’s cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.

He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in “The Audacity of Hope,” where he described himself as aloof from “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation” with its “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.

The selling point of Mr. Obama’s vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington’s gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what’s-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country’s rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas...

Now where have we heard this before?



Don't get me wrong. I'll vote for the Unibama over Mc$ame any day. But I'll also remember who brought HHHillary and the Unibama together.

None of the Above

The New York Pravda sets up straw men to knock down on either side of the War on Terra:

WASHINGTON — A bitter personal struggle between two powerful figures in the world of terrorism has broken out, forcing their followers to choose sides. This battle is not being fought in the rugged no man’s land on the Pakistan-Afghan border. It is a contest reverberating inside the Beltway between two of America’s leading theorists on terrorism and how to fight it, two men who hold opposing views on the very nature of the threat.

On one side is Bruce Hoffman, a cerebral 53-year-old Georgetown University historian and author of the highly respected 1998 book “Inside Terrorism.” He argues that Al Qaeda is alive, well, resurgent and more dangerous than it has been in several years. In his corner, he said, is a battalion of mainstream academics and a National Intelligence Estimate issued last summer warning that Al Qaeda had reconstituted in Pakistan.

On the other side is Marc Sageman, an iconoclastic 55-year-old Polish-born psychiatrist, sociologist, former C.I.A. case officer and scholar-in-residence with the New York Police Department. His new book, “Leaderless Jihad,” argues that the main threat no longer comes from the organization called Al Qaeda, but from the bottom up — from radicalized individuals and groups who meet and plot in their neighborhoods and on the Internet. In his camp, he said, are agents and analysts in highly classified positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation...

Lots of noise and pontification from two camps equally eager to keep you from thinking about the real nature of international terrorism. Al Qaeda as a private contractor. Al Qaeda as a Murder, Inc. working for the Saudi Royals, the CIA, the international heroin and white slavery traffic industry, or whoever needs a job done that fits in with their world view.



Their world view? The fundamentalist jihadist jive is a slick cover to bring in the Faithful willing to do whatever it takes for the Cau$e.

The Tell

When a Bu$hCo beaurocrat denies something is going on, you can count on it.

You can count on what's denied being part of the reality-based world, that is. Especially when the offspring of Enron and Halliburton can make a buck off it:

Investors' Growing Appetite for Oil Evades Market Limits
Trading Loophole for Wall Street Speculators Is Driving Up Prices, Critics Say
By David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 6, 2008

Hedge funds and big Wall Street banks are taking advantage of loopholes in federal trading limits to buy massive amounts of oil contracts, according to a growing number of lawmakers and prominent investors, who blame the practice for helping to push oil prices to record highs.

The federal agency that oversees oil trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has exempted these firms from rules that limit speculative buying, a prerogative traditionally reserved for airlines and trucking companies that need to lock in future fuel costs.

The CFTC has also waived regulations over the past decade on U.S. investors who trade commodities on some overseas markets, freeing those investors to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purchases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges.

Over the past five years, investors have become such a force on commodity markets that their appetite for oil contracts has been equal to China's increase in demand over the same period, said Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager who testified before Congress on the subject last month. The commodity markets, he added, were never intended for such large financial players...

Even as record oil prices translate into staggering increases at the pump, some regulators, including Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., say investors are not to blame. These officials cite supply and demand as a far bigger factor.

Since last year, this was also the position of the CFTC. But agency officials have recently signaled greater concern, saying they want to collect more data to determine whether speculation might be a significant factor. That information can be difficult to obtain because commodity trading often occurs through private, unregulated transactions and on overseas exchanges.

Walter Lukken, the acting chairman of the CFTC, acknowledged in an interview that his agency has had a hard time keeping up with the sector it oversees. Commodity trading has exploded in complexity and popularity, he said, growing six-fold in trading volume since 2000. That was the year a handful of giant energy companies, including Enron, successfully lobbied Congress to ease the regulation of energy markets.

Meanwhile, the CFTC's staffing has dropped to its lowest levels in the agency's 33-year history...

On commodity markets, buyers largely purchase futures contracts, which determine the price goods will fetch on a particular date in the future. Unlike commercial businesses that are trying to lock in prices for coming orders, speculators have little interest in taking actual delivery of oil or other commodities. Instead, these investors trade the contracts like stocks. These investments can be very attractive because there are only light restrictions on whether they can be bought and sold using borrowed money...

The recent craze in commodity investing is partly due to the emergence of commodity index funds, which act like mutual funds except they hold futures contracts rather than stocks. Such funds have made commodity purchases far easier for a wide range of investors, including hedge funds, investment banks, pension funds and university endowments.

George Soros, one of the nation's leading investors, testified in a Senate hearing this week that index funds were contributing to the rapid rise in commodity prices and were possibly creating a bubble. If it were to burst, sending prices tumbling, the fallout could wreak havoc on banks, retiree funds and colleges across the nation...

Information on commodity trades can be hard to come by. Some contracts are exchanged privately between two parties who do not have to disclose the transaction. There are also two exchanges that trade oil and other goods in the United States. One, the New York Mercantile Exchange, or Nymex, is closely regulated. The other, Intercontinental Exchange, has set up a market in London, where trading can occur beyond the purview of U.S. regulators.

Nymex is now setting up its own market in Dubai, which the CFTC has given permission to trade oil destined for delivery in the United States. The CFTC has stated that it would not place restrictions on U.S. investors who exchange oil contracts in Dubai but rely on foreign regulators...

Dubai, of course, being the new worldwide headquarters of the Halliburton corporation.

Their Kind of Guy

Amerika, Land of the Bravos, home of the Free Market:

Indicted Saudi Gets $80 Million US Contract
The Financier Has Been Indicted For His Alleged Role in a Scandal Costing US Taxpayers $1.7 billion
By Gretchen Peters
June 4, 2008

The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.

The Saudi businessman was also named in a 2002 French parliamentary report as having links to informal money transfer networks called hawala, known to be used by traders and terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

Interestingly, Pharaon was also an investor in President George W. Bush's first business venture, Arbusto Energy...

"Ghaith Pharaon is an FBI fugitive indicted in both the BCCI and CENTRUST case," said Richard Kolko, a spokesman for the FBI. "If anyone has information on his location, they are requested to contact the FBI or the US Embassy."

The US military purchases jet fuel from Attock through the contractor Supreme Fuels, according to a US government website. The $80 million contract for 2008 was posted this week on a US government website [.pdf] . Attock supplied the US military more than $40 million in jet fuel in 2007, according to another spreadsheet [.pdf] posted on the site.

An official at Attock, who did not wish to be named, confirmed the refinery was supplying thousands of tons of jet fuel to the US base at Bagram Air Base every month.

The US military has not responded to requests for comment.

Pharaon could not be reached for comment.

Indeed. But bear in mind, if you visit those .mil sites, you will be noticed.

There's another person it might be interesting to ask about this contract.

$ecurity $tate

He's doing it all for you.

Seeing as how you never know when Murder, Inc. the Islamic version of Blackwater the private contractor arm of the Saudi Royals Al Qaeda might decide to team up with Iraqiranistan, hijack Indianapolis, and fly it into the party of Barack Osama. Obama.

WASHINGTON — A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.

And if Mr. McCain is elected president, Mr. Holtz-Eakin added, he would do everything he could to prevent terrorist attacks, “including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.”

Although a spokesman for Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, denied that the senator’s views on surveillance and executive power had shifted, legal specialists said the letter contrasted with statements Mr. McCain previously made about the limits of presidential power...

Ah, there's nothing like consistency, and Mc$ame is nothing like consistent. Follow the money: he'll do it every time.

This is only a test

Doubtless for when the next Category 5 hurricane hits the coast of Indiana:

Under the guise of urban warfare training the 26th Expeditionary Unit an elite group of U.S. Marines will conduct a martial law training exercise at 26 “surrendered” locations in central Indiana from June 4th thru the 17th. While state officials and media are doing their best to assure the public that this military takeover of civilian property is somehow a good thing, ignoring the Posse Comitatus Act which fundamentally prohibits these types of exercises. These two weeks of training are also a contradiction of military tradition against deployments among the civilian population dating back to the end of the Civil War. Why then are the citizens of Indianapolis and six other Indiana towns being made to take part in two weeks of patrols and ambushes...?

Because the Republican machine is a little, how do you say, out of control in the Hoosier state?

Perhaps this is due to the fact that the state of Indiana claims to have more terrorist targets than any other state. More than New York. More than California. More than anywhere.

Obviously when Indiana Rethuglicans rig their presidential vote yet again this year, they're expecting the black and Democratic communities to riot in the streets. Or try to examine the voting machines. Or something UnAmerikan.

The Cowboy reminds us of what happened in Tianamen.

But it couldn't happen here, right?

Bringing Baghdad to the Homeland

Lanier plans to seal off rough ’hoods in latest effort to stop wave of violence
Jun 4, 2008 3:00 AM (18 hrs ago) by Michael Neibauer and Bill Myers, The Examiner

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

Lanier has been struggling to reverse D.C.’s spiraling crime rate but has been forced by public outcry to scale back several initiatives including her “All Hands on Deck” weekends and plans for warrantless, door-to-door searches for drugs and guns.

Under today’s proposal, the no-go zones will last up to 10 days, according to internal police documents. Front-line officers are already being signed up for training on running the blue curtains...

So what do they do when the local insurgents start planting IEDs in retaliation, open up one of those Halliburton-style corporate-run gulags in Georgetown?

Your candidate still sucks

I tend to agree with Woody.

It's a problem when you run an actual human being for President instead of a God-bothering Annointed of the Faithful.

Real people have real faults, but then again they have a greater tendency to really do the job.

Anyone but a Republican.

Close ranks and quit the in-fighting, people: the robber barons are going to try to steal this one again, count on it.