At Halliburton, the Profits Never Stop Rolling In

Must be nice, but man, does this give a whole new dimension to the term, "blood money".

WASHINGTON, July 25 (HalliburtonWatch.org) -- Halliburton announced on Friday that its KBR division, responsible for carrying out Pentagon contracts, experienced a 284 percent increase in operating profits during the second quarter of this year.

The increase in profits was primarily due to the Pentagon's payment of "award fees" for what military officials call "good" or "very good" work done by KBR in the Middle East for America's taxpayers and the troops.

Despite the scandals that plague KBR's military contracts, the Pentagon awarded $70 million in "award" fees to the company, along with four ratings of "excellent" and two ratings of "very good" for the troop logistics work under the Army's LOGCAP contract.

Kudos to Halliburton Watch for their reporting.

The Hill: FBI Analysis of WMD Forgeries Looks Like a Sham

That's what Josh Marshall writes in the most recent verion of The Hill, posted online.

A snippet, if you will:

When my colleagues and I started investigating the Niger forgeries in early 2004, the word we got from FBI sources was that the file the bureau had put together on the forgeries was embarrassingly thin. Sources can be wrong, of course. And one would expect the true details of such a sensitive inquiry to be held very tightly. So we didn’t put that much stock in those claims.

But, as we began to investigate the story ourselves, the thought that our FBI sources might be right became more and more difficult to avoid.

For instance, first we talked to Elisabetta Burba. She’s the reporter for Italy’s Panorama magazine who first brought the papers into the U.S. Embassy in Rome back in October 2002.

The FBI had spoken to Burba. But Burba described an essentially cursory interview. One prime interest of the bureau was finding a way to make contact with the unnamed “security consultant” who had tried to sell her the documents.

The agent who interviewed Burba suggested possible ways that they could communicate with this Mr. X while still maintaining his anonymity. She was asked to follow up with the man and see if any of the proposed means of communicating would be acceptable.

She did that. But, according to Burba, the bureau’s agent never followed up. The next she heard from him was a courtesy call months later to tell her he was moving on to another assignment. That’s what Burba told us.

The Scotty McClellan Show: Can Anyone Beyond Masochists Enjoy This?

The president's favorite food taster and canaries in the cave, Scott McClellan (official, White House spokesweasel), has been having some time of it.

Sure, for more than five years, Scott would open his mouth and pour out the most ludicrous, twisted, assinine, carefully constructed horse manure 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has ever seen while the only one who regularly tried to hang him out to dry on his own petard was octogenarian Helen Thomas. Even then, Scott let us know that even though Helen really, really, REALLY was pulling his hair hard and that HURTS, Scott spent most of the time ignoring and/or punishing her. The rest of the press corps just sat there in rapt adoration while text messaging with their hair dressers to get a later afternoon appointment.

Recently, however, the press corps is actually listening to what Scotty says, and tries to get Scott to admit the completely illogical nature, the hypocrisy, the doublespeak and the partisan nature of his statements. Think Progress offers just one of thousands of recent examples.

At times, I actually find myself feeling sorry for him. Here's this nice, balding, affable putz who stands out there making these dumb remarks that you figure Bush has to be sitting back in his office snickering about on commercial breaks from the "Dukes of Hazzard" marathon.

But then I remind myself: people are the messengers of cloak that protects this Administration from you are really as equally guilty as a Dick Cheney, A Don Rumseld, or a Condi Rice.

I just wish everythng in Washington wasn't so much of a lie.

Number of International Visitors

Especially over the past two weeks - but one I've noted rise over time - I've noticed a great deal more International traffic on my blog. A couple of times recently, in fact, I had more visitors in a given day from England, Singapore, Australia, China, and Arab nations than North Americans.

Maybe it's the evil medication I'm taking right now - a sinus infection has landed while I'm also suffering with a bunch of other things leaving me feeling like what happens when the government decides to try all its biowarfare tricks on you at once - but I feel strangely hopeful whenever my peers from across the sea(s) and continent(s) stop by, especially when they make return trips.

It makes me hope in some small way that people will understand we aren't just all Koolaid consumers here in the US, that many of us very much care about the damage the US is wreaking throughout the world.

Our leaders may be hopelessly corrupt, but perhaps we can reach out to one another to talk and affect change ourselves.

Or again, maybe this is just the anti-spasmodic, the antihistamine, and the non-narcotic pain reliever talking. :)

Are Minutemen Shooting at Mexicans Trying to Come Over the Border?

Looks like.

Our President Sets One Record: Most Time Spent on Vacation; Fewest Days Working

::Cough::

Following the Congress in a midsummer exodus, President Bush plans a Texas ranch respite for several weeks, while Supreme Court nominee John Roberts has August to think about Senate confirmation hearings.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Friday that Bush will leave after signing into law the Central American Free Trade Agreement that Congress gave final approval to earlier this week.

It will be the president's 50th trip to the ranch since he was elected nearly five years ago.

I Was Wondering When Someone Would Noticeq

I've been asking again and again why the White House can repeatedly claim that the WH counsel is exclusively for the Bushies when Starr got a ruling against that in the Clinto era. Now, finally...

Here, from the LA Times:

The White House is citing the attorney-client privilege as the basis for refusing to reveal memos written by Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. when he was representing the government before the high court. At the time, Roberts was the top deputy to Solicitor Gen. Kenneth W. Starr.

But it is not clear that this legal privilege shields the work of government lawyers from the eyes of government investigators — thanks to a legal ruling won by Starr himself, when he was independent counsel investigating President Clinton.

Usually, the attorney-client privilege protects private lawyers from being forced to reveal what their clients told them. It also shields their notes and memos from prosecutors. This rule of secrecy is seen as vital to the adversarial process.

But in 1996, Starr challenged the notion that White House lawyers who worked for Clinton could invoke the attorney-client privilege when Starr sought notes they had written.

Starr argued that the lawyers worked for the people of the United States, not for the president.

Democrats are making a similar argument in Roberts' case: that the solicitor general represents the public interest.

The dispute was one of many legal tussles during Starr's six-year investigation of the Whitewater matter. It resulted in a broad appeals court ruling that held that government lawyers did not have the same right to keep secrets as private attorneys did.

MSNBC: "We're Lame and Getting Lamer"

Here's a fast way to lose dinner: be eating your meal while MSNBC announces that Faux's former - and forgive my, but Rita looks like a female impersonator far more than a woman - "Makeup by the Pound" journalist, Rita Cosby will snow start her own show.

Let's see, this means the Rightie's Lamo Network has a lineup that has:

Dan "Someday, I'd like to be a really good reporter, like Geraldo Rivera, my role model" Abrams at 6 except Dan is usually on vacation

Tweety Boy-wets-himself-thumps-himself-on-the-back Tweety Matthews at 7

Keith - a breath of fresh air - Olbermann at 8

Then a turdbowl trifecta of:

Rita at 9

Joe Scarborough at 10

Tucker "I'm just really cool and smart; Kate O'Bierne told me so" Carlson at 11

And did I mention Rita talks like Mr. Moose on those hormones they give men trying to become women before "the big snip snip"?

"Nobody Stands in the Way of the Bushies and What They Want: Those Who Stand in the Way Will Be Leveled"

From the South Carolina paper, The State:

LAST THURSDAY, Vice President Dick Cheney went to Capitol Hill to shut down three senators whose efforts were frustrating the White House. Drop your amendment, the three rebels were told, or face a veto — the first veto of President Bush’s tenure.

Who were these three vexing the White House? Not Democrats, but Republicans: John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham. The measure that prompted such indignity in the Bush administration: an amendment requiring that prisoners held by the military during the war on terror be treated in accordance with the Army Field Manual, which had been the tradition.

Never mind tradition. The administration does not want anyone, in the courts on Congress, having any say over how it conducts the war on terror. It has thrown out U.S. standards, and it does not want to be challenged by anyone.

So the administration really might use its first veto to protect its terror policy from Republican-sponsored restrictions? Not likely. Doing so would highlight how out of line the administration’s policies are. This White House is unabashed about a lot of things that would make predecessors cringe, but using its first veto, after almost five years in office, to defend its treatment of detainees would be too much, even for it.

The implausible threat must not have carried much weight; it did not deter the senators. This week the amendment was ready to be added to the defense spending bill — a bill that must be passed at some point. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist set the bill aside for now, before the amendment could be tacked on. It will have to come back up later, after Congress takes its August recess.

Sen. Graham has expressed his objections and questions about inmate detention before, but during this week’s Senate debate, he conveyed new levels of exasperation. “If you know what the rules are about interrogating anybody, come tell me, because I can’t figure it out.”

The issue of detention is especially important to Sen. Graham because he is a reserve officer in the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General corps. JAG officers have been vocal opponents of the changes in detention rules, but mostly in private. This month, Sen. Graham took those objections public, adding to the Congressional Record memos from JAGs to their service chiefs that the administration’s policies were not on solid legal ground. A Marine JAG officer raised the specter that military personnel could be charged with crimes in other countries for following the administration’s policies on interrogation.

There's much more. Go read it.

Another Strong Editorial from Star Tribune on The Abuses of the Bushies

You have to read this in total; just a snippet is here. More and more, newspapers are finally standing up, with Editor and Publisher often in the lead. I applaud those that do. While at one time, this was what should be expected from the news media, the Bush years have changed that all, hasn't it?

From yesterday's Star Tribune:

Disclosures that the FBI has been building files on Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union and other law-abiding critics of administration policy are a shameful affront to American notions of political freedom.

So where is the outrage?

Thus far, the FBI has declined to state its reasons for gathering some 3,500 pages of documents on Greenpeace and the ACLU, or to describe the contents of the files -- although some bureau officials used the cover of anonymity to float the idea that they might consist largely of routine correspondence. As if this should somehow make their collection less offensive.

And the bureau's overseers in the Justice Department are resisting legal moves to force a speedy turnover of the files, saying it will take up to 11 months to gather and copy so many pages. The process could be expedited if the Justice Department considered the matter urgent, which it does not.

For a long time, a wide range of groups at odds with Bush administration policies have believed they were subject to special attention from the FBI and other police agencies, especially after the post-9/11 Patriot Act loosened restraints on investigations. Greenpeace, the ACLU and several other organizations filed a lawsuit to find out if that was so.

This forced the FBI to acknowledge its files on these two groups, as well as the considerable attention its counterterrorism specialists paid to a coalition of small and seemingly innocuous antiwar outfits that planned to protest at the Republican and Democratic national conventions last summer. Parallels to the bad old days of the Nixon administration are plain, if inexact.

Richard Cranium of All Spin Zone on Latoyia Figueroa

Genia notes that Richard at All Spin Zone actually wrote to Graceless Nancy Grace about the missing woman, Latoyia Figueroa.

Non-White Women Go Missing, Too

Genia at SistersTalk makes a most-needed point:

Ya know, I've grown rather bored of the full hour stories on CNN and Fox News about that blonde white girl missing in Aruba. Yeah, she's pretty and all. And yeah, I feel for her family. But geezus fuckin' sakes, the media really ought to be ashamed here. It couldn't be more obvious that if Natalee Holloway were a Black American woman who went off to Aruba and partied -- then disappeared -- she would've been written off ages ago. They certainly wouldn't spend hour after hour -- day after day -- talking about her.

Audrey Seiler, another "missing" white woman, received an enormous amount of media attention. She wasn't really missing. She lied. And then, let's not forget the white runaway bride who also received an enormous amount of media attention. She lied, too.

But, there's Latoyia Figueroa, a missing non-white pregnant woman, has received very little media attention. Now why is that? Laci Peterson was pregnant when she disappeared and she received lots of media attention. Oh wait. She was white.

Downing Street Memo Still Gets Coverage

As it damn well should.

Raw Story links us to this Times-Standard piece about one of the most important - and heinous - stories of our lifetime: the cooking of the Iraq war as evidenced by the Downing Street Memo.

Shuttle Stupidity

I'm raging mad about this whole shuttle debacle. NASA never learns from its lessons because, at its heart, it always has a bureaucrat/politician at its head. It's very clear they fixed NOTHING regarding the system that ended up with the last crew blowing into thousands of pieces. Instead, they acted mildly embarrassed when a fuel gauge made them scrub last week's launch so they then rushed the crew up as soon as they could.

The result? Well, the International Space Station is pretty crowded with three people and it's got to be even more crowded with nine or so onboard.

People do NOT have to do space travel. The only reason we are not further into exploration is because of the insistence on having a human payload. It used to be pure PR and chutzpah that insisted humans ride. Now, I fear it's more about Bush's plans for the militarization of space, coupled with his light aptitude on the issues of human flight.

Giving the Finger to the Press

Cookie Jill at Skippy points us to one of many videos and stills in which Bush gives the finger - which is open to speculation - as his "victory" on forcing passage of CAFTA.

It's been hard for me to get worked up about this, because Bush has been flipping us off since before he was installed by the Supreme Court.

What the Senate Tells Us: the Gun Vote Matters More than National Security

They've sold out Americans again and again, but I think this issue reaches a new low.

WASHINGTON - Until lawmakers vote on a top-priority gun rights bill, nothing else happens in the Senate. And that includes Congress' prized monthlong vacation.

That's the way Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has toughened up his style in the final days before the August break was to begin, learning from last year to leave no room for gun control advocates to derail legislation limiting lawsuits against the gun industry.

Frist, R-Tenn., used Senate parliamentary procedures Wednesday to keep Democrats from dooming the measure with an amendment that would offend the National Rifle Association.

Last year, the NRA abruptly withdrew its support from a similar bill after Democrats succeeded in adding a measure that would renew the expiring assault weapons ban. Frist took the bill down.

But emboldened by a four-seat GOP gain in last November's elections, Frist this week cleared the floor of the $491 billion defense bill and replaced it with the gun liability bill sponsored by Sen. Larry Craig (news, bio, voting record), R-Idaho.

The bill would prohibit lawsuits against firearms manufacturers, dealers and importers for damages resulting from the unlawful use of a firearm or ammunition. It provides for some exceptions.

Was CAFTA Vote Rigged?

Or shall I say it more accurately, rigged more than usual by this lying, miserable crew?

MyDD has the story here:

A disgusting development on the CAFTA vote is that it appears the vote was actually 217-217, which would have resulted in its defeat. However, apparently, the clerk did not record one or two of the "no" votes, thus stealing passage of the legislation. If we can prove this, it is is 100% grounds of impeachment for both Hastert and DeLay, even aside from DeLay's other ethical troubles. Fixing a vote in the House is without question a high crime against the Constitution. Of course, if this isn't true, then Charles Taylor is lying, lying, lying.

Update: OK, apparently Jo Ann Davis really wasn't there, maing the final 217-216 vote tally accurate, as she was stuck in traffic coming from a memorial service. That just puts more blame on the 15 sell-outs.

Wow. Newsflash: John Bolton Lies! Be Still My Breaking Heart!

Am I being sarcastic? Quite possibly.

From Wired:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department reversed itself on Thursday night and acknowledged that President Bush's U.N. ambassador nominee gave Congress inaccurate information about an investigation he was involved in.

The acknowledgment came after the State Department had earlier insisted nominee John Bolton's "answer was truthful" when he said he had not been questioned or provided information to jury or government investigations in the past five years.

At this point, it's only breaking news when anyone of the Bushies ever tells a hint of the truth.

Is Santorum Under the Wrong Impression Someone Actually Wants Him in Politics?

Gee, Santorum is such a nice man: he realized I was losing sleep worried that he would NOT run for president in 2008 so he's clarified that he still might.

Hey, Santimonious. Let me make something perfectly clear. Get out!

You are not a public servant: you're a servant of your own interests. You think you help America by sponging off the state of PA - and your elderly parents' who have to supplement your $200K income as a senator - and riding around on the Wal-Mart corp jet?

No one will miss you. You're a bit player.

Standard of Living Under Bush Rises Dramatically

That is, if you're a multimillionaire or someone who has risen to the level of billionaire as with the military industrial complex taking full advantage of the US's national message of "Terror! Terror! Fear Everywhere!" Followed by more and more discussion of what else we can fear topped off by a field-trip to a college where Young republicans dressed up in manipulative "Heathen Dems for Satan" t-shirts to show their support for Tom "Justice" DeLay(ed)".

From Skippy:

report says childhood poverty rose between 2000 and 2003 - the annie e- casey foundation says a half (m) million more american children were living in poverty in 2003 than in 2000.

in addition, the percentage of low-birthweight babies increased and infant mortality was up for the first time in 40 years.

the study also finds an increase in families where no parent has a full-time job, and a rise in the teen death rate.

hey kids, it gets better. via digby, we learn that awol has successfully pressured the credit card companies to double mom and dad’s monthly payments. this was after he gave his friends pay raises and signed the legislation which makes it really hard for mom and dad to file for bankruptcy. but before he got the legislation that would save himself, and his buddies in the cabinet $344 million in estate taxes.