Bin Laden, you crafty sonofabitch

Thanks for helping get Bush re-elected!

President George W. Bush said his 2004 re-election victory over Sen. John Kerry was inadvertently aided by Osama bin Laden, who issued a taped diatribe against him the Friday before Americans went to the polls, The Examiner newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Bush said there were "enormous amounts of discussion" inside his campaign about the 15-minute tape, which he called "an interesting entry by our enemy" into the presidential race...

"I thought it was going to help," Bush said. "I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush."

Did I mention Bush's job rating is now at an all time low: 34%!

Army to reimburse Halliburton $2.41 billion no-bid contract

The Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary for nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.41 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair oil equipment in Iraq, even though the Pentagon's own auditors had identified more than $250 million in charges as potentially excessive or unjustified.

The Army said in response to questions on Friday that questionable business practices by the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had in some cases driven up the company's costs. But in the haste and peril of war, it had largely done as well as could be expected, the Army said, and aside from a few penalties, the government was compelled to reimburse the company for its costs...

The contract has been the subject of intense scrutiny after disclosures in 2003 that it had been awarded without competitive bidding. That produced criticism from Congressional Democrats and others that the company had benefited from its connection with Dick Cheney, who was Halliburton's chief executive before becoming vice president.

Later that year auditors began focusing on the fuel deliveries under the contract, finding that the fuel transportation costs that the company was charging the Army were in some cases nearly triple what others were charging to do the same job...

That means the Army is withholding payment on just 3.8 percent of the charges questioned by the Pentagon audit agency, which is far below the rate at which the agency's recommendation is usually followed or sustained by the military — the so-called "sustention rate."...

In 2003, the agency's figures show, the military withheld an average of 66.4 percent of what the auditors had recommended, while in 2004 the figure was 75.2 percent and in 2005 it was 56.4 percent...

From columnist Richard Reeves

As the admitted direct cost of the war reached $250 billion -- and the White House asked for $120 billion more [earlier this month] -- new analyses estimate that the invasion of Iraq could end up costing $2 trillion before it is over.

If you remember, the White House's own economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, was fired for predicting, in September 2002, six months before the invasion, that the total cost of the war might reach between $100 billion and $200 billion...

Estimate that the war's cost per citizen has reached $727 -- or close to $3,000 for a family of four. By the end of this year, those figures should reach about $1,300 per citizen, or more than $5,000 for that family of four.

Enemy at the gate

This story sounds unreal to me. An overly sensitive, overly trigger-happy government that is willing to put at stake our civil liberties to supposedly protect us from the enemy, is willing to hand over control of some of Americas most important ports to an ethically questionable government that knowingly harbors fundamentalists and terrorists. I guess there is no loyalty above the good business deal.

The United Arab Emirates company would control management of ports in New York and New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami.

Republican Congressman Peter King, who is chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, said on Sunday the Bush administration had failed to put adequate security conditions on the deal, which has raised concerns about the safety of strategic facilities considered vulnerable since the September 11 attacks.

King said that before the administration approved the sale of British firm P&O, which manages six U.S. ports, to Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates, it failed to determine whether the company could be trusted.

"In light of these critical functions being transferred from a private company based in Britain to a United Arab Emirates government-owned company based in Dubai ... Sen. Schumer and Congressman Peter King will announce their emergency legislation to suspend the Dubai port deal," the statement said...

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has defended the deal, saying the administration approved it after a classified review and included provisions to protect national security.

New York's other U.S. senator, Democrat Hillary Clinton, said last week she planned legislation to ban companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from acquiring U.S. port operations, and Republican Gov. George Pataki has also criticized the deal.

U.S. seaports handle 2 billion tonnes of freight each year. Only about 5 percent of containers are examined on arrival and since September 11, 2001, security experts in New York have been particularly concerned about ports' vulnerability to attack.

U.S. officials have praised the United Arab Emirates for steps to protect its booming financial sector against abuse by terrorism financiers. Money for the September 11 attacks was wired through the UAE's banking system, according to U.S. officials. Two of the September 11 hijackers were UAE citizens.

Shrouded in re-secrecy

Historical documents, which were once available to the public and to historians are now being reclassified by a covert government program. If this sort of double-secret government intelligence classification doesn't scare Americans then I guess we are really are asleep as a nation. We have been lulled into such a vegetative state that something this scary rings no warning bells for us.

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."...

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996...

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located...

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work...

What a surprise, the "No Child Left Behind Act" discriminates against minorities

Bush's signature education policy has in some cases benefited white middle-class children over blacks and other minorities in poorer regions, a Harvard University study showed on Tuesday.

Political compromises forged between some states and the federal government has allowed schools in some predominantly white districts to dodge penalties faced by regions with larger ethnic minority populations, the study said.

Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind Act was meant to introduce national standards to an education system where only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics.

But instead of uniform standards, the policy has allowed various states to negotiate treaties and bargains to reduce the number of schools and districts identified as failing, said the study by Harvard University's Civil Rights Project.

"There's a very uneven effect. There are no clear uniform standards that are governing No Child Left Behind. If one state gets one thing, another state can do something else," the study's lead author, Gail Sunderman, said in an interview...

Nearly every state has taken some action to amend the law or been granted waivers to provisions in No Child Left Behind, the study said. "The problem with this approach is that it does not affect all schools equally," said Sunderman. "No two states are now subject to the same requirements."

In one example the study cites, states in rural Midwestern regions were granted extensions to deadlines to meet requirements on teacher qualifications that were unavailable to poorer rural regions with greater numbers of black Americans and ethnic minorities in southeast and southwest states.

"The policy is essentially a product of negotiation, of power and discretion, not law," Gary Orfield, director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project, said in the report.

Cheney Wants in on Action Himself, Shoots Friend in Face

Of all vice presidents to be involved in something like this, figures it would be Cheney. While on a hunting trip this past weekend, Cheney managed to shoot one of his friends in the face with a small gauge shotgun. While the victim is alright, some interesting tidbits came out of this Washington Post write up:

"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been," she said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came."

[Thanks to Turbo for the tip]

[2/14/06 Update]

Word on the street is the White House tried yet another cover up by delaying news of this story for about 20 hours. Why?

McClellan said yesterday he did not even learn the vice president had been the shooter until Sunday morning. Even the normally docile Washington press corps wasn't buying that line. Angry reporters repeatedly demanded to know exactly when Bush learned about Cheney's errant shot.

Later in the day, the White House revealed that deputy chief of staff Karl Rove was the first to know. Rove spoke by phone with Armstrong on Saturday evening, then informed Bush around 8 p.m. of the vice president's role.

In other words, both Bush and Rove knew the essential details within hours of the incident, yet the White House kept things quiet until the next day.

The budget proposal nightmare continues...

If you've been keeping track so far, the White House has suggested slashing Medicare but increasing defense by a record breaking amount. Now art and education, the most often neglected but arguably most important aspects of a thriving and relevant society, are getting trimmed down as well:

Bush proposed slashing funds to public broadcasting by more than $150 million. In the president's 2007 budget request, funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be cut by $53.5 million in 2007 and $50 million more in 2008. Those cuts don't reflect others made in funding at the Education and Commerce departments and the elimination of specific programs for digital TV conversion and satellite delivery system. Public broadcasting officials estimate that the entire budget cuts run $157 million over the two-year period...

The cuts in public broadcasting are part of an attempt by the White House to reduce the country's red ink as the administration seeks more money for the military and seeks to make Bush's first-term tax cuts permanent.

And what about those tax cuts? The one's we all know will benefit only the rich while the services the rest of us depend upon are being taken away one by one:

The Treasury says making permanent expiring tax breaks for dividends and capital gains, which expire at the end of 2008, would cost the government $7.74 billion in 2008 and $37.02 billion in 2009...

Extending lower marginal tax rates for individuals, which are set to expire at the end of 2010, would push foregone tax revenues to $119.39 billion in 2011, Treasury said.

From the New York Times:

George W. Bush ran for office as a "compassionate conservative," arguing that Americans did not have to choose between huge tax cuts and a government that would do its part to address social needs like education and health care.

Now into his sixth year in the White House, Mr. Bush offered a budget on Monday that showed more clearly than ever the inexorable limits of that political promise.

Mr. Bush is asking Congress, first and foremost, to make his tax cuts permanent and to increase spending on national security, while looking for savings in popular domestic programs like Medicare and vocational education. The tradeoffs, to his critics, are achingly clear, and unfair...

From the New York Daily News:

New York City took a hit yesterday in the new White House budget, suffering cuts to Medicare, housing, anti-poverty and first-responder programs.

Congressional analysts projected a $30 million cut in the city's Medicare funding, hurting many of New York's 1 million recipients.

The city also could lose $32 million in first-responder funding, $30 million in anti-poverty programs and $9million for housing.

"The message to children and families could not be clearer - you are on your own," said Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) at Union Settlement, an outreach center on Manhattan's lower East Side...

Less medicine, More bombs!

President George W. Bush's proposed 2007 budget seeks to squeeze $36 billion in savings from the U.S. Medicare plan -- coming mainly on the backs of hospitals, nursing homes and other health care service providers.

Bush's proposed savings over five years mostly come from trimming payment increases to hospitals while freezing payments to nursing homes and some home health services.

Companies that run long-term acute care hospitals like Kindred Healthcare Inc. will fare worst of all -- having their payment rates frozen for patients in Medicare, the federal health insurance program for 42 million elderly and disabled...

But here's the good news, if you like your death with a side inhalation:

Bush on Monday proposed a record $439.3 billion defense budget for 2007 aimed at fighting both unconventional terrorism and major conflicts with other nations if necessary.

The Pentagon budget sent to Congress represents a major increase over current defense spending of $410.8 billion as the White House seeks cuts in domestic spending. It does not include tens of billions of dollars in proposed new financing for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...

That's what you get for playing "Guess What's Under My Vestment"

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Spokane, Wash., one of three in the country to have filed for bankruptcy in the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandals, agreed Wednesday to pay nearly $46 million to settle claims by 75 people who allege abuse by priests, lawyers involved in drawing up the settlement said.

If approved by a bankruptcy court and the plaintiffs, the agreement will provide one of the largest payouts per victim of any of the settlements reached across the nation since the church encountered crisis in 2002 with disclosure of abuse in the Boston Archdiocese...

Among those concessions is an agreement by the diocese to stop referring to "alleged victims" of priests' abuse rather than simply "victims," said Tim Kosnoff, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers. The victims, Mr. Kosnoff said, are to be allowed to return to the parishes where they came into contact with their molesters and possibly face them, a provision that victims' groups said appeared to be a first. They will also be permitted to write about their experiences in the diocesan newspaper, with a full page devoted to that purpose each month for the next three years.

Further, Mr. Kosnoff said, the bishop will lobby state lawmakers to abolish statutes of limitations on child sex crimes and will go to every parish where any plaintiff was abused, tell the parishioners that an abusive priest had ministered there and encourage them to report any suspicions of abuse...

Oh what a tangled web we've weaved. Not only a sex scandal, but now money problems. Jesus would be so proud of the Catholic Church. Tell me again, oh most Holy Church, about how God hates gays and how contraception is sinful. And explain to me again why women can't be priests?