Pet Food Recall

If you own a dog or a cat, I highly recommend you read this about a huge recall.

I unfortunately served my dog a serving of one of these listed products today an hour before I saw the article. I'm worried.

Khalid Sheikh Muhammed Was One Busy Boy!

I was going to write up something similar to what Jon Ponder already did, so let me bring you this from Pensito Review:

Facing scandals and controversies everywhere it looks, the Bush Administration released a confession yesterday made over a month ago by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — one of dozens of Osama bin Laden’s “number two” men:

“I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.” He also confessed orchestrating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid’s December 2001 bid to “down two American airplanes.” Many of the plots Mohammed … took credit for planning never occurred, but were of a similarly grand scale as the September 11 attacks. Mohammed said that he plotted second wave attacks targeting U.S. skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Sears Tower, as well as the assassinations of Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Pope John Paul II, and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

Other crimes he confessed to, according to humorist Don Imus, included the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and the character of J.R. on the soap opera, “Dallas,” in the 1980s. Another cynic suggests he also confessed to the Watergate burglaries, stealing all the “W” keys off White House computers in the early days of the Bush Administration, killing Chandra Levy, causing the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, as well as forcing Scooter Libby to lie to the FBI, firing eight U.S. Attorneys last December and being the “third party” who has caused problems in the Bushes’ marriage.

What? KSM hasn't yet admitted to:

• the anthrax scare?
• the Y2K virus?
• Microsoft Bob (now there's a reference few will know!)?
• Britney Spears shaving her head?
• the success of Paris Hilton (ick poo)?
• Bush's failure to satisfy his National Guard requirements?
• Bush choking on pretzels, falling off scooters and bikes, et al?
• the success of Wal-Mart as a way of costing American jobs?
• most of Imus' pathetic material?

Cartoonists Get It!

This great cartoon on the U.S. attorney firings, complete with Karl Rove and Bush, by Mike Luckavich, just arrived in email from the Center for American Progress.

"What 'Israel's Right To Exist' Means to Palestinians

Although I read the Christian Science Monitor online several times a week, thebhc, posting here in comments, points out an excellent summary of what we "miss" in the way Palestinians and their Arab/Muslim sympathizers interpret "Israel's Right to Exist" vs. "Recognizing Israel's Existence."

It's quite smart analysis; I highly recommend it.

We really must look behind the rhetoric used by lawmakers and others regarding the Middle East problem, where Israel is always the good guy and anyone we looks like a Muslim the bad guy. In truth, both Jews and Muslims in the Middle East have the right to exist and the U.S. and Great Britain, among others, have made the situation since we established (carved out) the state of Israel much worse, almost guaranteeing the hatred and bloodshed we've seen for years.

Until America can stop taking sides, we help guarantee there will be no Middle East peace.

Veteran Dies After Refused Treatment At VA Facility

Monty at Buzzflash brings us this terrible story from Democracy Now about just how well vets - and active duty soldiers - get (mis)treated under the Bush Administration.

"Impeach Bush" Bumperstickers Everywhere

I mentioned back in early January that someone had peppered the area across from the federal building in Burlington with "Impeach Bush" stickers. But now, in fairly heavily Republican neighborhoods here in north central Vermont, and on cars of people that back in 2000 sported "Bush Cheney 2000" stickers (few seemed to boast Bush-Cheney 2004 stickers), I'm seeing "Impeach Bush" stickers everywhere.

Many, interestingly, have the "Impeach Bush" sticker right next to the yellow "Support Our Troops" ribbon sticker (I do not have such a sticker; I try to support troops more directly and not through some company that gives a fraction if any of the sales to troop organizations).

Replace AG Alberto Gonzalez with Federal PlameGate Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald

Steve at The Carpetbagger Report brings us this, by way of WaPo:

a crazy thought: replacing Alberto Gonzales with Patrick Fitzgerald. The WaPo’s Andrew Cohen writes, “Can you think of a better candidate to restore honor and integrity to the Justice Department than the man who just took on the White House, and won, with the perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby? Can you think of a person more likely to erase the standing charge of cronyism that seeps through the current administration like a stink bomb?” (thanks to B.P. for the tip)

It's a thought, sure.

Only two major points bother me about the idea. First and foremost, I felt like Fitzgerald kept the investigation and the resulting indictments and later prosecution pretty limited when it's clear that the corruption related to the leak of the name of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame as political payback to her husband, Joe Wilson. Why was Karl Rove not called to account when his name appeared all over the damned place, for example.

Second, he was a major prosecutor in a region that seemed to be caring and feeding - and not prosecuting - one of the assassins of Sadat who also factored into 9-11 and more. Granted, it was the CIA who let this guy in, but Fitzgerald and his then-colleague Rudy Giuliani (ah, there's a name) may have been really cozy with this fellow.

Still, I wouldn't exactly jump in front of a train racing to shed Gone-Gone-Gonzalez and substitute Patrick Fitzgerald in his place.

Valerie Plame: "I Was Outed For Purely Political Reasons"

If you didn't happen to catch former CIA covert operative Valerie Plame - the woman Scooter Libby and perhaps also Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush's Brain, Karl Rove exposed by leaking her identity to the press - testify on Capitol Hill today, you can read the transcript at Think Progress which also has the video of Plame's testimony (I'm sure Crooks and Liars also has the video available - yup, click here).

Here's a sniplet:

I’ve served the United States loyally and to the best of my ability as a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

I worked on behalf of the national security of our country, on behalf of the people of the United States, until my name and true affiliation were exposed in the national media on July 14th, 2003, after a leak by an administration official.

Today I can tell this committee even more.

In the run-up to the war with Iraq, I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified. I raced to discover solid intelligence for senior policymakers on Iraq’s presumed weapons of mass destruction program.
While I helped to manage and run secret worldwide operations against this WMD target from CIA headquarters in Washington, I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.

Meanwhile, far right wing and rabid anti-Clintonite Victoria Toensing (the voice of authority pretty much exclusively for Geraldo) is pissing all over herself insisting that even the head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, is wrong to admit Plame was a covert spy. Toensing has the ethics of a Bushie and is truthful just about as often (meaning, less than 0%). However, Henry Waxman was ready to grill her most ably.

Valerie Plame: "I Was Outed For Purely Political Reasons"

If you didn't happen to catch former CIA covert operative Valerie Plame - the woman Scooter Libby and perhaps also Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush's Brain, Karl Rove exposed by leaking her identity to the press - testify on Capitol Hill today, you can read the transcript at Think Progress which also has the video of Plame's testimony (I'm sure Crooks and Liars also has the video available - yup, click here).

Here's a sniplet:

I’ve served the United States loyally and to the best of my ability as a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

I worked on behalf of the national security of our country, on behalf of the people of the United States, until my name and true affiliation were exposed in the national media on July 14th, 2003, after a leak by an administration official.

Today I can tell this committee even more.

In the run-up to the war with Iraq, I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified. I raced to discover solid intelligence for senior policymakers on Iraq’s presumed weapons of mass destruction program.
While I helped to manage and run secret worldwide operations against this WMD target from CIA headquarters in Washington, I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.

Meanwhile, far right wing and rabid anti-Clintonite Victoria Toensing (the voice of authority pretty much exclusively for Geraldo) is pissing all over herself insisting that even the head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, is wrong to admit Plame was a covert spy. Toensing has the ethics of a Bushie and is truthful just about as often (meaning, less than 0%). However, Henry Waxman was ready to grill her most ably.

Videotape Proof of Attorney General Gonzalez Flat Out Lying To Congress

And the White House scoffs of Senator Patrick Leahy's insistence that the Senate Judiciary Committee will subpoena and force these Bushies to testify under oath (not that an oath and a pledge to God not to lie will ever stop the Bushies from lying):

As ThinkProgress noted earlier this week, on Jan. 18, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that the Bush administration never intended to take advantage of a Patriot Act provision that allows the President to appoint “interim” U.S. attorneys for an indefinite period of time, without Senate confirmation.

I am fully committed, as the administration’s fully committed, to ensure that, with respect to every United States attorney position in this country, we will have a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed United States attorney.

The Washington Post published a front-page story yesterday on these remarks. ThinkProgress has located video of Gonzales apparently lying to Congress.

You can watch the video of the AG's lies under oath (caught on tape) ... er.. testimony at Think Progress.

Gee, a Bush Administration bigwig lying. That NEVER happens (more than 100 times an hour).

Yet More Damned Lies The White House Told Us: Bushies Never Investigated PlameGate

Remember how many times they told us that the White House was aggressively investigating the CIA covert operative leak case and would FIRE anyone they found culpable? Well, as always, this was another lie the White House told us, just like the leak of Plame's name was NOT political playback for the exposing of earlier lies by Plame's husband, former Iraq ambassador Joseph Wilson. From Think Progress:

Dr. James Knodell, director of the Office of Security at the White House, revealed today that to his knowledge the White House has never ordered a probe, report, or sanctions as a result of the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. “I have no knowledge of any investigation in my office,” he said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said he was “shocked” by Knodell’s testimony, adding that the White House’s lack of action was a “breach on top of a breach.”

Knodell claimed the White House did not investigate because there was an outside investigation taking place. But Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) noted that the investigation “didn’t start until months and months later, and [only] had the purpose of narrowly looking to see whether there was a criminal law violated.” Waxman asked, “But there was an obligation for the White House to investigate whether classified information was being leaked inappropriately, wasn’t there?” Knodell answered, “If that was the case, yes.”

So nobody got investigated there and sure as hell, no one was ever fired for it.

Also, the White House SAID it was investigating BEFORE the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation and THEN, when the Fitzgerald probe came about, tried to STOP it.

From Siberia To Mud Season To Blizzard Yet Again?

For the first time in three months, temperatures here in Vermont hit above freezing which was great cause for celebration. However, we hit aboving freezing here in South Woodbury with well more than two feet of snow still in place from the St. Valentine's Day record blizzard and a big snowstore after that, which meant that Mud Season (one of the two additional seasons Vermont boasts besides the standard four; Black Fly Season is the other one) commenced.

Now, after days of trying to move along dirt roads where the ruts are two-feet or more deep, in a ride that was FAR more harrowing than anything any amusement park can or would dream up, we're back to just over single digit temps, the mud has frozen and now, we're told to expect a possible blizzard starting before midnight.

Oh goodie. More snow. More stuff to melt next time temps hit the seasonal average of a day-time high of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. So we can either stop freezing our asses off or be forced to stay home OR risk a bad accident OR have frozen toes while you're able to get out of the driveway in the car.

Oh joy. Oh bliss. Oh $@*$!

Bob Herbert: "Indentured Servants In America"

Don't think for a minute that this abuse of poor, often immigrant, workers is few and far between. We have very rich folks, for example, who hire these folks only to then treat them like very real prisoners, locking them into the homes, forcing them to pay extravagant prices for small amounts of food and cigarettes, and making up phony "tax" and other charges along with lies to make sure their "employees" feel their very lives are endanger if they so much as walk out the door on their own.

Read all of Bob Herbert's column here or content yourself with my byte:

A must-read for anyone who favors an expansion of guest worker programs in the U.S. is a stunning new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that details the widespread abuse of highly vulnerable, poverty-stricken workers in programs that already exist.

The report is titled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.” It will be formally released today at a press conference in Washington.

Workers recruited from Mexico, South America, Asia and elsewhere to work in American hotels and in such labor-intensive industries as forestry, seafood processing and construction are often ruthlessly exploited.

They are routinely cheated out of their wages, which are low to begin with. They are bound like indentured servants to the middlemen and employers who arrange their work tours in the U.S. And they are virtual hostages of the American companies that employ them.

The law does not allow these “guests” to change jobs while they’re here. If a particular employer is unscrupulous, as is very often the case, the worker has little or no recourse.

One of the guest workers profiled in the report was a psychology student recruited in the Dominican Republic to work at a hotel in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The woman had taken on $4,000 in debt to cover “fees” and other expenses that were required for her to get a desk job that paid $6 an hour.

But after a month, her hours were steadily reduced until she was working only 15 or 20 hours a week. That left her with barely enough money to survive, and with no way of paying off her crushing debt.

The woman and her fellow guest workers had hardly enough money for food. “We would just buy Chinese food because it was the cheapest,” she said. “We would buy one plate a day and share it between two or three people.” She told the authors of the report: “I felt like an animal without claws — defenseless. It is the same as slavery.”

The rest is available here.

Sheik Mohammed And The Beheading of Journalist Daniel Pearl: How Do You Trust The Confessions Of The Tortured

Today, the Bushies purposely let slip that Sheikh Mohammed, whom we've had in custody for more than a few years and whom we apparently torture on a near daily basis (Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld both noted he was an excellent candidate for "waterboarding" torture to find the truth, has claimed he was responsible for the kidnapping and videotaped execution of American journalist Daniel Pearl. They also claim he's admitted to being one of the masterminds behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Reports AP:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's capture four years ago didn't shut down al-Qaida or bring the Americans to Osama bin Laden. But if his mega-confession is to be believed, his arrest was a crushing blow to bin Laden's plans for even more deadly attacks in the wake of 9/11.

But after more than four years in custody, and exposed to torture-torture-torture, how can we be sure what he really did or didn't do? That's one of the huge problems with torture; the information you get is notoriously unreliable. I don't buy that these admissions are true when they were elicited so very long after his capture.

Actually, I can say that there have been at least four or five separate statements/alerts offered up by Sheikh Mohammed in the past that turned out to be completely false, including some of the silliest possible attack on America scenarios. Yet now, the Bushies insist we believe him. Right.

Was Corruption And Extreme Human Rights Abuses Reason For High Profile Soldier Suicide in Iraq?

I recommend everyone read Greg Mitchell's latest "Pressing Issues" column at Editor and Publisher because it casts light into some very dark and murky corners of the whole Iraq war and the Bush Administration's management of it:

Col. Ted Westhusing, a West Point scholar, put a bullet in his head in Iraq after reporting widespread corruption. His suicide note -- complaining about human rights abuses and other crimes -- was addressed to his two commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, now leader of the U.S. "surge" effort in Iraq. It urged them to "Reevaluate yourselves....You are not what you think you are and I know it."

Israel Refuses To Work With Palestinian Coalition

I hear what Israel says about the Palestinian groups not fully recognizing the Jewish state, but at the same time, Israel does not recognize them so we'll continue to see the same cycle of violence. From AP:

The Islamic militant Hamas and its Fatah rivals forged a unity government Thursday to end a year of political wrangling, isolation and bloodshed. Israel quickly rejected it, saying it failed to recognize the Jewish state.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas said he hoped the new government would "launch a new era" for the Palestinians, putting an end to bloody infighting while satisfying international demands ahead of a crucial Arab summit in Saudi Arabia at the end of the month and a visit to the region this weekend by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Israel urged its Western allies to maintain an aid embargo imposed after Hamas won election in January 2006 and set up a government by itself.

Initial U.S. and European reaction to the new Palestinian team was cool, while Russia was relatively upbeat.

The West cut off aid to the Palestinians a year ago, labeling Hamas a terror group and forcing it to agree to bring Fatah, the movement of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, back as a junior partner. Both sides said the main goal was to stop clashes that have taken more than 140 lives in recent months, but restoration of aid and resumption of the peace dialogue with Israel remained high priorities.

A dormant Saudi peace plan from 2002 is expected to resurface at the March 28-29 Riyadh summit, putting pressure on Israel to respond. The plan offers Israel recognition if it withdraws from the West Bank and east Jerusalem and refers to the right of Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 Mideast war and their descendants to return to their homes.

We've heard rumblings that Condi Rice is having her first real fight with George Bush because she supposedly feels that Israel is deliberately blocking peace efforts while Bush just says, "Anything Israel does is great with me, no matter how extreme!"

Beware The Ides of March

Ah, but too bad that President Bush today didn't have his Julius Caesar moment, where two of his own cut him to the quick while he lay dying and uttered, "Et tu, Brute?"

So More Than A Million Documents Go In The Deep Freeze?

Mind you, for the record amounts - in the hundreds of billions - spent on so-called homeland security, we KNOW we aren't any safer (in fact, with Bush's charge, likely far LESS safe) but these bozos pull all these documents anyway:

More than 1 million pages of historical government documents — a stack taller than the U.S. Capitol — have been removed from public view since the September 2001 terror attacks, according to records obtained by The Associated Press. Some of the papers are more than a century old.

In some cases, entire file boxes were removed without significant review because the government's central record-keeping agency, the National Archives and Records Administration, did not have time for a more thorough audit."We just felt we couldn't take the time and didn't always have the expertise," said Steve Tilley, who oversaw the program. Archives officials are still screening records, but the number of files pulled recently has declined dramatically, he said.

The records administration began removing materials under its "records of concern" program, launched in November 2001 after the Justice Department instructed agencies to be more guarded in releasing government papers. The agency has removed about 1.1 million pages, according to partially redacted monthly progress reports reviewed by the AP. The reports were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The pulled records include the presumably dangerous, such as nearly half an enormous database from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with information about all federal facilities. But they also include the presumably useless, such as part of a collection about the Lower Colorado River Authority that includes 114-year-old papers.About 80 cubic feet of naval facility plans and blueprints — on microfilm, about 200,000 pages — were withdrawn since the agency said it didn't have time to go through each individual document.

With Friends Like "Friends of Israel", Does Israel Need Any More Enemies?

The previous post re: Israel and civil rights reminds me of this scary story in Talk2Action, one of those evangelical fanatical rightwing groups "dedicated" to the Israeli state in a way that only sees Israel as a necessary component in their rush to "End Times/Rapture":

"Christians United For Israel" founder John Hagee blames Jews for the Holocaust, says the Nazis worked for God, and warns of an "Illuminati", international banker "One World Order" conspiracy. "Friend of Israel" Hagee got a standing ovation from Senators and Congress members at AIPAC last Sunday. Here's what some of his allies envision for Jews.

So senators and congressmen just love this "final holocaust" scenario as they brown nose for votes and donations? Doesn't matter that in the "Friends of Israel" scenario, they don't want any Jew left standing; all must convert to Christianity or perish forever.

Sickening. Beyond sickening.

"Civil Rights Under Siege In Israel"

This letter from Mark Hage of Montpelier in the Time Argus, I believe, states some excellent points:

Thank you for your editorial ("Israel's Dilemma," Feb. 23) on the controversy in Israel over a manifesto that calls for the country, officially a "Jewish state," to become a bi-national state with full equality for all citizens.

Since the mid-90s, Palestinian citizens have intensified their political and legal efforts to achieve the same rights as Jews. There are more than one million Palestinian citizens in Israel, and they live under apartheid-like conditions. Hundreds of rural communities have been established since Israel was created in 1948, but are closed to Arab citizens. For 60 years, vast tracts of private Arab landholdings have been confiscated by government authorities to benefit Jews exclusively.

Most Palestinian children, prior to the university level, attend segregated, inferior and under-funded schools. Arab towns, the poorest in the country, are short-changed annually when it comes to municipal budgets and funding infrastructure projects.

Palestinians are no strangers to police brutality, and Israeli cops, like Jewish soldiers, are prone to being trigger-happy when their weapons are aimed at Arabs. In October, 2000, police shot dead 12 unarmed Palestinians and a man from Gaza during protests against Israel's repressive measures in the occupied territories. No Jewish officers were indicted for this atrocity.

Job discrimination against Palestinian workers is widespread, and substantial sectors of the Israeli economy are off-limits to them. The civil service is the country' largest employer, but in 2004, just 5 percent of its 55,000 workers were Palestinian. Islamic and Christian holy sites get a pittance of their funding from public coffers, and according to English journalist Jonathan Cook, "almost all of the Muslim and Christian holy places that existed in Israel before 1948 have been destroyed, fenced off, locked up or converted for the use of Jewish communities."

Israel is confronting a civil rights movement within its 1967 borders, and a national liberation struggle in the West Bank and Gaza. Both challenge the fundamental tenets and structures of Zionism, which elevate Jewish blood, privilege and religion over democracy, equality and the rule of law.

Mark Hage

Montpelier