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September 28, 2005
About F***ing Time!
Tom Delay, the "Hammer", is INDICTED.
FINALLY.
Read about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Posted by Steven at 11:39 AM | Comments (1)
Vindicated, At Last
Over two years ago, I dumped my VW Passat Wagon for a VW Golf TDI. I surrendered what little equity I had in the Passat because I was certain that Bush's war in Iraq would catapult energy costs, and the 40+ MPG fuel efficency of the Golf (plus the fact that biodeisel can be made from food wastes) meant that I would be driving my diesel car long after the dinoSUVs weren't. Eventually, the price of fuel alone would justify the purchase.
Weeks into the war, I was proven wrong. I watched in bafflement as the price of oil went down, down, DOWN. It made no sense, until the longer picture came into focus. $28/bbl. oil couldn't, didn't last. Now, it may be that there will be another near or even longer term reduction in fuel costs, but by now, another generation of Americans have felt the oil shock and reacted accordingly.
John Mathews of Universal Toyota in San Antonio has witnessed the day that auto industry executives in Detroit said would never come."We are seeing people who are driving $40,000 Suburbans trading them in on $15,000 Corollas," said Mathews, who manages a dealership in a state where big trucks and sport-utility vehicles rule the roads. "The last 30 days have been unlike anything I've ever seen in the automotive industry."
Toyota dealers in the D.C. area say they also are seeing an uptick in demand for the smaller vehicles. But the trend isn't as pronounced as in truck-dominated Texas where people who have been buying trucks for years are rushing to get out of them. "Most of the time you come in here and you might have 80 Corollas to choose from," said Dave Reynolds, general sales manager of Jack Taylor's Alexandria Toyota. "Now you come in and you have 20 to choose from."
While small car sales are helping to lift the Japanese automakers, Detroit's General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. are sinking under the weight of large sport-utility vehicles, once the industry's cash cows. The two automakers have reported substantial slides in profits in their North American operations this year, and their bonds have junk status on Wall Street. The interest in small cars has caught the two automakers unprepared, said Dave Healy, an auto industry analyst at Burnham Securities Inc. in New York.
To hear Detroit say they were completely unprepared for this is astonishing. Certainly this scenario has been played out at the highest levels at GM, to admit otherwise is criminal neglect of a publically traded company. If I was a GM shareholder with a large portfolio, I'd be demanding these joker's heads. But they have been betting on Bush to keep oil's price down. And the fiasco in Iraq isn't going to work. We've been in there long enough to show that the oil infrastructure isn't going to come roaring back on line -- the Iraqis will not be paying for their reconstruction with oil dollars (or worse yet, oil euros).
So Detroit bet on the wrong horse, and the Japanese, forced by geography to import all their oil, have gone the hard road of developing better fuel economy. The rest of the world drives small cars, and while they have not abandoned America as a market, the Japanese don't make all their design choices based on the driving habits of suburbanites (the Honda "Ridgeline" not withstanding).
It's the second coming of the Small Car Revolution (the first happened in the mid-Seventies) and once again, the Big Three are not ready. The feds may not be able to bail them out this time ...
Posted by Steven at 10:44 AM | Comments (1)
September 26, 2005
Welcome To The Neighborhood, Indeed
Remember the "reality" (or perhaps in this case, "realty") television show, Welcome To The Neighborhood? Possibly not; it never was broadcast. Some of the nuttier members of the religious right raised their usual indignant hue and cry and got ABC to kibosh it. The show was officially cancelled about a week before it was scheduled to premiere, though the production was finished.
The premise was typically simple -- it was a competition. The production company bought a house in the Circle C development on the outskirts of Austin. Three neighboring families on the cul-de-sac were conscripted as the judges, winnowing seven candidate families down to one, which was awarded the house. The upshot? Circle C has the reputation (not unfairly earned) of being affluent, white, broadly Christian, and uptight, and the seven families were all demographically unaligned. Among them: a Latino family, a Korean family, a Wiccan-practicing family, a pierced and tattooed family, a white gay male couple with an adopted black son, a black family, and a family with a stripper mom.
This is no spoiler: the gay couple won.
One of the loftier outcomes from the show was that the judging families learned a great deal about these many people so different in some ways, so alike in others, and became better, or at least deeper, people for the experience. Some of them found their lives to be better afterwards; one neighbor, in particular, was able to more closely reconcile with his son, who came out to him a few years ago:
Jim Stewart, one of the Circle C residents on the show who helped select the Wrights, says he used to be "fearful and ignorant of gays" but has undergone a dramatic change as a result of filming the series last January. Now, he not only embraces his new neighbors, but he also has opened his heart to older son Jason, who — unknown to neighbors and producers during filming — is gay.
Oh horrors, cannot expose America to that sort of thing!
Apparently it never will broadcast, but maybe we'll see a DVD release someday.
The Austin American-Statesman had a long article about it this past Sunday. It's really good. I like this story because it's in Austin, but it's closer to me. The Wrights' son, Eli, is a classmate of my daughter at her daycare. I've been able, sketchily, to watch Eli evolve from a nervous li'l guy (and they're pretty much all nervous in the early days -- new environment and such) to an open, playful, rambunctious tyke. I'm sorry to see him leave (he'll be attending a daycare closer to his new home). I've had the opportunity to talk with his papa, Steve, and the story is even better in person (I've suggested they write a book, but they're under nondisclosure agreements for two years). Welcome To The Neighborhood tells a good and positive story, and it is a damn shame that ABC totally caved to the religious right's narrow-minded, hateful agenda.
When I was a child, my father had a former student, Mike, who became his lifelong friend. Mike, an only child, was gay. His father took his coming out pretty hard, but eventually paternal love won out over bigotry. Now, granted, I was sufficiently young that Mike being "gay" meant practically nothing to me -- that someone would "like boys" was immaterial, since the complimentary notion of "liking girls" was inconceivable (cooties! ick!). Anyway, Mike never scared me, frightened me, weirded me out. He was a gentle, thoughtful man. He was also something of a doofus, but those come from all walks of life. My parents did not raise me to hate, and by knowing Mike, my lack of hatred (for gays, at least) was completely validated. I've known a number of gay people, some in college who fairly could be considered "flaming". Many have been doofi, but none have been despicable.
I'm pleased and proud to know Steve and John, and wish them and Eli well in their new home. We'll try to keep in touch.
Posted by Tom White at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2005
Did We Attack Iraq to Strengthen the Petrodollar?
Oil is traded in American dollars, regardless of where it is produced or refined. This fact alone gives the United States a huge currency advantage, as our currency reflect the base-price of energy around the world. What if that were to change? Not a few number of economists have noted that a shift to euros would destabilize the USD tremendously, possibly leading to a currency crisis. Most of our foreign debt is to non-energy producing nations, who would have to start translating dollars into euros to buy energy, which would smash our bond market.
An analysis of this is found in this month's Media Monitors online magazine.
It is now obvious the invasion of Iraq had less to do with any threat from Saddam's long-gone WMD program and certainly less to do to do with fighting International terrorism than it has to do with gaining strategic control over Iraq's hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintain the U.S. dollar as the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market. Throughout 2004 information provided by former administration insiders revealed the Bush/Cheney administration entered into office with the intention of toppling Saddam.[1][2] Candidly stated, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' was a war designed to install a pro-U.S. government in Iraq, establish multiple U.S military bases before the onset of global Peak Oil, and to reconvert Iraq back to petrodollars while hoping to thwart further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency ( i.e. "petroeuro").[3] However, subsequent geopolitical events have exposed neoconservative strategy as fundamentally flawed, with Iran moving towards a petroeuro system for international oil trades, while Russia evaluates this option with the European Union.In 2003 the global community witnessed a combination of petrodollar warfare and oil depletion warfare. The majority of the world's governments – especially the E.U., Russia and China – were not amused – and neither are the U.S. soldiers who are currently stationed inside a hostile Iraq. In 2002 I wrote an award-winning online essay that asserted Saddam Hussein sealed his fate when he announced on September 2000 that Iraq was no longer going to accept dollars for oil being sold under the UN's Oil-for-Food program, and decided to switch to the euro as Iraq's oil export currency.[4] Indeed, my original pre-war hypothesis was validated in a Financial Times article dated June 5, 2003, which confirmed Iraqi oil sales returning to the international markets were once again denominated in U.S. dollars – not euros.
The tender, for which bids are due by June 10, switches the transaction back to dollars -- the international currency of oil sales - despite the greenback's recent fall in value. Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar. [5]
The Bush administration implemented this currency transition despite the adverse impact on profits from Iraqi's export oil sales.[6] (In mid-2003 the euro was valued approx. 13% higher than the dollar, and thus significantly impacted the ability of future oil proceeds to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure). Not surprisingly, this detail has never been mentioned in the five U.S. major media conglomerates who control 90% of information flow in the U.S., but confirmation of this vital fact provides insight into one of the crucial – yet overlooked – rationales for 2003 the Iraq war.
Posted by Steven at 01:07 PM | Comments (1)
September 22, 2005
Rita Watch #1
If you are in Houston or Galveston, get out now!
Posted by Steven at 10:56 AM | Comments (1)
September 20, 2005
Conservative's Kiddie Books
 | The one thing you must never do in a culture war is let down your guard. So, the good folks in Values Land have put together a wonderful example of children's mind fuckery: Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed" is the latest salvo from the Powers That Be, to warn the children of the Red States to fear, literally fear, the Left. |
Although its official publication date is still a week away, "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed" has already made waves in the typically staid world of children's publishing. The announcement of the book caused an uproar among liberal commentators, with many claiming the book teaches children to hate. The full-color illustrated story tells of two brothers who open a lemonade stand only to encounter a Ted Kennedy character who taxes away their profits and a pants-suit clad Hillary Clinton look-alike who outlaws sugary drinks."Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed" will be available in bookstores nationwide on September 20.
I guess this posting constitutes promotion of a stupid book, but for goodness' sake, don't actually buy this piece of shit.
Posted by Steven at 09:56 PM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2005
John and Judith, Sitting In Jail
Why is John Bolton, Bush's embattled U.S. Rep. to the U.N., visiting New York Times' jailed reporter Judith Miler? Could it be that he has some role in the Valere Plame affair?
“Bolton's visit raised some eyebrows in Washington,” the Post said. “A vocal defender of administration claims in 2003 that Iraq was seeking weapons of mass destruction, he could have had access to a State Department memo, parts of which were classified, that detailed Wilson's trip to Niger to determine whether Iraq was seeking uranium there and identified his wife as a covert CIA operative. Who saw or discussed the memo has been a central question for Fitzgerald.“Bolton declined through a spokesman to discuss his visit to Miller or his reasons for going. ‘This has nothing to do with his job here,' the spokesman said. 'He doesn't want to talk about it.’”
Miller will remain jailed for another month or more, when the grand jury investigating the Plame/CIA leak will probably disband.
Milner, it should be noted, wrote most of the NYT stories about WMD in Iraq. She's not on our side, folks, so don't feel too bad about her jail term (yes, it's bad for journalism that she's locked up, but she's a bad apple in the whole Iraq affair and may be one of the few Bush allies who does actual jail time).
Posted by Steven at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
Teacher! I Have To Make #1
Posted by Steven at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)
September 10, 2005
A, B or C Players
Steven P. Jobs (of Apple Computer) is (in)famous for saying, "A players hire A players. B players hire C players." (The Machintosh Way, Guy Kawasaki, p. 31).
Looks like George Bush is a B Player.
Posted by Steven at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2005
TRMPAC Indicted
Tom DeLay's PAC was indicted today in Travis County.
The illegal corporate cash Tom DeLay used to build new protective political levees for the GOP has led to five more indictments from a Travis County, Texas, grand jury this morning. If only Bush/DeLay would have put a similar effort into real levees to save real lives rather than enhance and protect their own lust for power.Indicted was Tom DeLay’s political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, for the illegal use of corporate money in its campaign to win a majority in the Texas House of Representatives and pull off an unprecedented mid-decade Congressional redistricting plan. A state group, the Texas Association of Business, was also accused in four indictments.
That plan, widely criticized, might now help Republicans avoid voters’ wrath for Katrina’s devastation, the war in Iraq, and the sacking of the U.S. Treasury by the rich, the trashing of public education and the crisis in public health care.
DeLay was not indicted. But he’d better delay any celebration. DeLay was not exonerated. He’s avoiding prosecution (for the moment) only because of a quirky jurisdictional issue. He lives in another county in Texas. If his residence in Austin or D.C., like those indicted, he would be toast.
Make no mistake: the committee DeLay founded and controlled, day by day and minute by minute, has been formally accused of violating the law in service to DeLay’s pursuit of power. He is culpable.
If New Orleans levees had been necessary to DeLay’s power grab they would have been the strongest in the world. The sad truth is that corruption at the heart of Bush/DeLay Republicans has rendered them incapable of using the power they seek for anything but its own reinforcement.
One more brick in the prison wall that will eventually hold Tom "The Hammer" DeLay.
Posted by Steven at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)
"What Didn't Go Right?"
In Salon Sidney Blumenthal has penned a scathing essay on the Bush Administration's failure to deal with Hurricane Katrina.
Even as the floodwaters poured into New Orleans, unimpeded by any federal effort to stanch the flow, the White House mustered a tightly coordinated rapid response of political damage control. Karl Rove assumed emergency management powers. The strategy was to dampen any criticism of the president, rally the Republican base, and cast blame on the mayor of New Orleans and governor of Louisiana, both Democrats. It was a classic Bush ploy against the backdrop of crisis. The object was to polarize the nation along partisan lines as swiftly as possible. While policy collapsed, politics reigned. Once again, Bush the divider, not the uniter, emerged.The White House released a waterfall of themes. No matter how contradictory, administration officials maintained message discipline. The first imperative was to disclaim and deflect responsibility. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan admonished the press corps, "This is not a time to get into any finger-pointing or politics or anything of that nature." The president down to the lowliest talk show hosts echoed the line that criticism during the crisis and reporting its causes were unseemly and vaguely unpatriotic.
After establishing that line, the White House laid out other messages to avoiding responsibility. Bush declared, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." From his bully pulpit he intended to drown out the reports trickling into print media that he had cut the funding for rebuilding the levees and for flood control. Then Bush assumed the pose of the president above the fray, sadly calling the response "unacceptable." Meanwhile, he praised "Brownie."
The mendacity and sheer selfishness of the GOP has never been cast in such bright light. They are shameless, and will never accept the "blame" that they struggle to shift to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. They are the worst sort of people this nation breeds.
Posted by Steven at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2005
Nice Shoot'n, Tex
FEMA sent evacuees to Charleston today. Officials in Charleston, South Carolina, scrambled to get ready for them.
They arrived in Charleston, West Virginia.
Nice shoot'n, Tex.
Posted by Steven at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)
Katrina Timeline
Here is an excellent Katrina timeline, for those wondering who said what to whom, first.
Thanks to Lane for providing this link.
Posted by Steven at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)
Trapped
Posted by Steven at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)
Lawyers, Guns and Money
Alas, Warren is not alive to re-write his anthem to George W. Bush. The song, obstensibly about a rich-kid partying in Central America, piteously calls for his dad to "send lawyers, guns and money. The shit has hit the fan."
Sound familiar? As we all read in Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of G. W. Bush, our chimp-in-command is famous for his "bail me out, Daddy!" plea. Every single business or venture that this guy has had the reins has failed (he never had any control of the Texas Rangers Baseball team, not that they've done spectacularly well under Tom Hicks) and now the United States itself is has been brought to it's knees by this master of disaster. Even his closest friends created Enron and nearly destroyed the economy of Houston.
I'd love to hear Warren's updated version of Lawyers, Guns and Money, but I dread the final bars of this Bush Administration.
Posted by Steven at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2005
Satellite Pictures of New Orleans
Google Maps has added a special Katrina button when observing New Orleans. Instead of the old (and likely permanently obsolete) database of NOLA, we're treated to very recent images showing the destruction and flooding. Sobering stuff, but worth checking out. Behold the Superdome:
Posted by Tom White at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2005
A Disturbance in the Force
Rhenquest died yesterday, at the age of 80. His "leadership" of the court has been during one of the most fractious eras of the SCOTUS, and he will most definitely not be missed by humanists, liberals, moderates, and other citzens of planet Earth.
We can only wonder (with dread) what monster President Bush will nominate to take the fallen Sith Lord's place.
Posted by Steven at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
Need More Proof?
How about this, a naval vessel floating off the coast of New Orleans, completely immobile pending orders to actually start helping Americans on their homeland, for almost a week.
The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.
But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.
Jesus Jumping Christ! Thousands have died in New Orleans for lack of a decent hospital bed, and here lies the Bataan just offshore, equiped for just such a situation.
Still not convinced?
Impeach the whole damned lot of them.
Posted by Steven at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
Congress: Reject ALL Bush SC Nominees
Here's a staggeringly good idea: reject all Bush Supreme Court nominees. The man has shown staggering incompetence in selecting individuals for high office, why let him destroy the SC for the next thirty years?
Posted by Steven at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
Levee Repair Effort Merely a Photo Op for Bush
Bush toured (with LA Sen. Landrieu) the 17th St. levee two days ago, and showcased what looked like a major repair effort. A day later, the hardware was gone, gone gone.
"But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast -- black and white, rich and poor, young and old -- deserve far better from their national government.
It takes balls to start a fake repair effort and then remove it during a national crisis. Fortunately, VP Cheney has those balls, as does tax dodging mastermind Karl Rove.
Update
Icing on the cake -- when Bush was in New Orleans, the Secret Service cancelled all air traffic, effectively halting the evacuation effort. That probably cost a few more lives right there.
Posted by Steven at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)
Utter, Staggering Incompetence
The Washington Post and almost all major media outlets are offering stories detailing the incompetence of the "Homeland Security Dept.", one of the Bush Adminstration's greatest cock-ups since the Iraq War.
Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.
Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.
But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the "ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwater breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic bomb had been dropped."
If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."
"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.
Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.
But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.
"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official whose office took on some of the preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and where the funding has been directed. The message was . . . we need to be better prepared against terrorism."
Words fail me here. These people let thousands of mostly poor and infirm Americans die while they waited for President Bush's handlers to tell them when to act to make the President look his best. Instead, they lost New Orleans through systemic depletion of funding to improve the city's chances against a hurricane, and then they lost thousands of lives for a political show that it appears the Mainstream Media is going to shove in their faces, finally.
Impeachment and firings are too good for these incompetent monsters.
Posted by Steven at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2005
Gas Blows Past $3/gal.
Today in McKinney, TX, the price of regular gas hovered around $3.07 and premium $3.27. The weekend has not even started yet, folks.
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