Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
– A. J. Liebling
– A. J. Liebling
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
sound pretty interesting: Yahoo/Reuters
Can you imagine a Republican ever caring where the money went, or even pointing out that it was a bizarre idea to ship truckloads of cash there in the first place?
That is just bizarre. What the hell?
My mind is boggled just trying to imagine pallets of cash being loaded onto an airplane. And then ther’s this about using the money to pay ghost employees.
Apparently, the only requirement was that the money be spent, with no proof that it was spent wisely or on anythng that actually existed.
TON of money. To think there were over three hundred TONS is inconceivable! What were the repubs doing the last 6 years? Sitting on their thumbs??????
Kroft/CBS: The Mother Of All Heists. “More than half a billion dollars earmarked to fight the insurgency in Iraq was stolen by people the U.S. had entrusted to run the country’s Ministry of Defense before the 2005 elections, according to Iraqi investigators.“
Also of note: DID: Up to $750M in Weapons & Support for Iraq. In context, the requests were put in around the same time SIGIR released a special report on lack of accounting for small arms in theater.
Twisting the old saying: cash corrupts, pallets corrupt absolutely. 🙂
I wonder how much body armor that might have bought…
counseling, and getting soldiers off of food stamps, and prothetics and rehab and decent VA care.
Most people don’t know that much of the “Marshall Plan” funds were diverted to CIA operatives for unaccountable purposes. They called it “candy,” which was probably more appropriate than they knew, in that it created an addiction, was bad for them, and added to the decay of their host body, the United States.
I suspect most of that money is finding its way into private pockets. Again I cry IMPEACH!!!!!!!
(TIDBIT???) in the main diary as it is a grabber!
Hmm, looks like those tapes made things go from bad to worse for little Scooter: [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/washington/06cnd-libby.html?ex=1328418000&en=92ee3ba6c3337f1b&
amp;ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss]
Pretty major change in direction, huh? I guess they’re worried that Scooter will perjure himself some more?
And lookie who else has been a leaker…of classified docs… Wolfie!
Laura Rozen finds a ‘scooplet’
Enter WOLFOWITZ doing Libby’s bidding
May we dare say Scooter has no wheels? How many counts of treason are there attached to Plamegate?
According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer the Young Republicans convention in Cleveland last summer became a tutorial in their special brand of family values for one young woman.
It’s what they’re good at: raping the treasury, raping the middle class, raping the poor, raping the environment, raping the Constitution, raping Iraq… the list is endless. I saw Giuliani’s mug on tv this morning saying how the Republican party has to return to their core principles. The Republican party has no principles. They’re all rapists.
And drunkards. You shouldn’t get so drunk that you “drift in and out of consciousness” and then finally pass out, not when you’re out on the town, anyway.
The British have severe doubts about the commitment of the Iraqi troops they’re training for the escalation. They often don’t even show up for training.
General Pace is now saying that we don’t have enough equipment for the incoming troops, well, maybe by July.
Our own soldiers in Iraq have their own doubts about the possibility of success of Bush’s hairbrained plan.
The problems up north with the PKK in Kurdistan and Turkey are at the point where Turkey doesn’t believe a word the US says. That is another flashpoint waiting to happen.
To top the whole thing off, there are many who are fully expecting a Gulf of Tonkin type of hyped up incident to excuse starting a war with Iran.
What a mess.
I forgot this one:
A documentary filmmaker in Iraq claims that the US has been training militia members all along. They just change uniforms and hop in line. Oy.
From Juan Cole:
Researchers have proposed an experimental test for string theory, the proposed “theory of everything” that to date has resisted efforts to test it experimentally. Just as a shadow can give an idea of the shape of an object, the pattern of cosmic energy in the sky can give an indication of the shape of the other dimensions beyond our measurable three of space and one of time, due to the imprint they left on the universe at the time of the big bang.
Researchers say that video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision by 20%.
Skating has been banned on the melting ice of Beijing’s lakes, trees are blossoming early and people are shedding their heavy clothes as China experiences its warmest winter on record. The temperature in the capital hit 16 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday, far above the historical average of just below freezing for this time of year and the highest since records were first compiled in 1840. The record high was part of a consistent trend this winter, while state-run media reported similar phenomena across the country. And if that wasn’t enough, a devastating drought have left 300,000 people short of drinking water in northwest China. The drought has hit the densely populated Shaanxi province, where January rainfall was up to 90 percent below the average level from previous years.
If you want something racier than global warming yada-yada today, here’s a story for you: Female butterflies become sexually promiscuous in the presence of a bacterium that fatally targets the male offspring of their species, a new study shows. However, the few males that survive become fatigued by the increased sexual demands of the females, and so release fewer sperm in each mating.
New evidence has linked a commonly prescribed sleep medication with bizarre behaviors, including a case in which a woman painted her front door in her sleep. UK and Australian health agencies have released information about 240 cases of odd occurrences, including sleepwalking, amnesia and hallucinations among people taking the drug zolpidem, sold as Ambien. The US Food and Drug Administration says it is continuing to “actively investigate” and collect information about cases linking zolpidem to unusual side effects. The Ambien label currently lists strange behavior as a “special concern” for people taking the drug. “It’s a possible rare adverse event,” says Sanofi-Aventis spokesperson Melissa Feltmann, adding that the strange sleepwalking behaviors “may not necessarily be caused by the drug” but instead result from an underlying disorder. She says that “the safety profile [of zolpidem] is well established”. The drug received approval in the US in 1993.
I wish I had thought of this first! The government is selling household dust for $450 a sample. The dust is a thoroughly homogenized and chemically characterized material for use in scientific research, hence the price tag. It’s available as SRM-2585 (standard reference material) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a U.S. government agency that provides standardized measures, which are samples used to calibrate instruments and data collection equipment in industries like manufacturing, chemistry, environmental monitoring, electronics and criminal forensics. [Reminds me of the true story of a catfish farmer a number of years ago who found out his operation was contaminated with PCBs. He thought he’d go bankrupt, until he discovered he could sell the fish as – you guessed it – a SRM for environmental and toxicological research…]
…And along the same lines, Indonesia, which has had more human cases of avian flu than any other country, has stopped sending samples of the virus to the WHO, apparently because it is negotiating a contract to sell the samples.
The tropical forests of South East Asia, important for local livelihoods and the last home of the orangutan, are disappearing far faster than experts have previously supposed according to a new Rapid Response report from The UN Environment Programme.
I’m surprised Ambien hasbn’t been taken off the market yet.
And those poor exahusted male butterflies… 😉
Link
Democrat Rush Holt, NJ, has reintroduced a bill in the House that would insure a paper trail for all voting machines. This bill has wide bipartisan support, as did his last attempt. Back then, Republican leadership kept it from a vote. Keep your fingers crossed.
What scares me most about the process is that the electronic voting machine companies are so heavily against paper trails. That doesn’t make economic sense, providing a paper trail just means they get to sell lots of special printers to go with the voting machines, which means they obviously have another reason for being against accountability.
Sadly, a number of e-voting activists seem hell-bent on sinking Holt’s bill as well. I’ve told people it’s time to look for HOLT PLUS. Meaning, pass Holt’s bill, take the minimum protections it offers, and then fight for the rest of what you want. They seem to think they can get a perfect bill passed. NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
Incrementally. That’s how you get the legislation you need. Always. Argh, it makes me so mad. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
MSNBC just had one of their little pundit debates, on the subject of the Senate’s futile effort to vote on a non-binding resolution. The interesting thing about this one was that the combatants were a “Republican strategist” and a “former Lieberman aide”. It’s like they don’t even realize Lieberman voted with the Republicans, or don’t expect us to realize it. Couldn’t they have at least called the guy a “Democratic strategist” and kept us in the dark about the obvious lack of balance? It’s like we’re back in the runup to the Iraq war when their idea of good TV was a pro-war Republican “debating” a pro-war Democrat.
Yes, I know former aide doesn’t necessarily agree with his former boss on this, but he didn’t put up any kind of argument against the stupidity the Republican was putting out (it didn’t matter whether they passed the resolution or not because it was trivial, which was obviously not the administration’s belief since they seem to have called in every chit they had to kill the thing). The former Lieberman aide mostly made intelligent but irrelevant comments about the procedural process itself.
You’d think the real Democratic strategists would recognize this problem and take steps to address it. Why do the Repubs have so many people at the reay to appear on these cable news shows? Because they feed their young by giving them internships and financial support on the way up, that’s why. And the Dems have historically been more concerned with consolidating their ‘power’ in the hands of a few, rather than multiplying their power by distributing it among many.