Entries from August 2003 ↓

Maybe I’m just dense, but I don’t understand the point of the article in yesterday’s LA Times, in which one “senior U.S. intelligence official” reports that the entire intelligence community is looking into the possibility that “false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it.” The information on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction supposedly came from Saddam Hussein via double agents, pretending to be defectors and from legitimate defectors who were provided with access to phony information before they defected.

Why? Why would Saddam want the US to think he had bio and chem weapons? Why would he want to give the UN further reason to maintain sanctions on his regime? Why would he want to invite an attack in which he could not help but lose? I’m not a monomaniacal dictator, so I can’t think exactly the way he does, but from what I know of such tyrants, survival seems to be their main objective. How would threatening the rest of the world enhance his safety and longevity?

Not only is that dangerous, but it also doesn’t explain why, if he wanted us to believe in the existence of his WMD programs, some of the documents provided as evidence were such poor fakes. The Niger letters, for example, were such crude forgeries that the IAEA was able to determine their lack of authenticity in just a few hours.

In my view, the only ones who stood to benefit from the bogus evidence was Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and the PNAC crowd in the Pentagon. That would make sense.

Thank goodness for a little common sense! According to Reuters, Fox News (along with “Bill O’LIE-lly” as Al Franken refers to him) has lost the first round in its suit to silence Al Franken and his new book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them“. Ruling from the bench, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said

Obviously not a Bush appointee, Judge Chin made one honest mistake when he said:

The problem is that the people who are buying the book might be sophisitcated, but the morons who watch Fox and listen to the drivel spewing from their semi-literate “newscasters”, are obviously very easily confused and might purchase the book by mistake.

Oh wait: My bad… those ditto-heads would never buy the book if Rush or Bill or Anne didn’t order them to buy it. What was I thinking?

[Via TalkLeft]

Kate Seelye writes in today’s New York Times about the Bush Administration’s decision to gut the Clean Air Act. After all, the poor downtrodden utility companies might have to actually invest a significant amount of money in the modernization of their physical assets. What a unique concept! As Seelye reports:

I’m sure we’ll hear the energy industry continuing to cry to their best friend, Dick Cheney, that anything less than the 50% threshhold, which was the Administration’s first proposed interpretation of “routine maintenance”, will drive them to the poorhouse. Umm… guys… on this planet, an oil change in your car every 3000 miles is routine maintenance; replacing the engine and transmission, say, is NOT routine maintenance. Oh, and there doesn’t seem to be any limit on how many times they could use the 20% exemption. Let’s see… 20% x 5 equals…

In typical BushCo disdain for the public’s voice

It seems, however, that the entire Justice Department hasn’t been compromised by Brother Ashcroft’s Holy Rolling: Further down in the article, Seelye mentions that some factions in Justice have continued to prosecute violators of the Clean Air Act despite the objections of the Man From Halliburton. Just recently

And coincidentally — or maybe not so coincidentally — Seelye neglects to mention that Ohio Edison is a wholly-owned unit of FirstEnergy. You remember them, don’t you: poorly-maintained power lines and the biggest blackout in US history?

According to the Arizona Daily Star

I doubt if any Arizonans will look back at this summer’s gas mess fondly, but — strangely enough — I have some good memories of the oil crises of ’73 & ’75.

For a couple of days during the ’75 fuel shortage, my friend David and I bought several dozen donuts early in the morning at Dunkin’ Donuts and sold them to the folks waiting on line for gas at the Hess station. Someone else had rigged up a supermarket shopping cart with a big coffee urn and a cooler with OJ and milk. We followed him up and down the line selling our donuts for 50¢ apiece and earning enough in the process for me to buy paneling for my van, which was immobile, waiting for me to be old enough to get my license.

My Dad said, “If gas ever gets up to $1.00 a gallon, I’m gonna quit driving!” It did — for a short time — but he didn’t. Gas is a lot more expensive right now than we ever dreamed back then, (I don’t think any Europeans will be shedding any tears for us) but I don’t think it’s more expensive in actual terms.

In the summer of ’75 I got a job at my uncle’s drug store — a real legitimate job, with a paycheck and everything — and he paid me the minimum wage, which was $1.85 an hour at the time. (Back then, there was a separate student wage which was 30¢ less than the adult wage. I’m not positive when they ended that provision.) Gas back then got up to around 57¢ per gallon, which equals about 31% of the minimum wage. This week, the average gasoline price nationwide is $1.63 per gallon for regular grade, while the minimum wage is $5.15 — or 32% of the minimum wage.

Of course back then, I was driving a 1973 Chevy Impala whose gasoline consumption was rated in gallons per mile; today, my Hyundai Accent gets me about 35 mpg.

According to this article in The Toronto Star, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham

Will the administration cooperate with this independent investigation any better than they’ve cooperated with the 9/11 investigation? What about when the investigation realizes that FirstEnergy, the company whose northern Ohio lines may have been the cause of the massive power failure, is chaired by Tony Alexander, one of Bush’s “Pioneers”? (Each Pioneer raised more than $100,000 for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.) What about when the investigators request the minutes of Dick Cheney’s still-secret Energy Task Force meetings?

Oh, and when I mentioned the other day that “I’m just waiting for the Bushies’ reality inversion field to kick in and tell us that the solution to this deregulation-driven problem is more deregulation” — well, check out this train of thought from Kate O’Beirne on Sunday’s Capital Gang

Didn’t take as long as I thought… Check out Mahablog for even more information on the Bushies connection to the Blackout of 2003.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, a group of veteran officers created a society dedicated to the ideals of the Roman statesman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus was the prototypical citizen-soldier, a Roman who left his fields to deliver Rome from rebellion, then, after 16 days in power, he relinquished his position and returned to his simple life. The members of the Society took as their credo, “…the glory of the soldiers cannot be completed without acting well the part of citizens…”

Sgt. Sean at writes

At the end of the conversation, Sean reports asking

Nothing remarkable: just a conversation between two human beings, doing their jobs, coping with a shared peaceful moment in the midst of a miserable war.

And what happens when Nasam returns home? When someone makes a disparaging comment about the “American thugs”, Nasam might speak up and say, “They’re not all bad. We shouldn’t be mad at those who are just doing their jobs. We should save our anger for their leaders. I met a very nice American today…”

Read the rest of his archives and put a face on the troops we are supporting and trying to bring home. As one of Sgt. Sean’s commenter noted, a minute-long conversation with a soldier like Sean does more to win hearts and minds than Paul Bremer will ever achieve.

I usually agree with Kos; his political insight, along with the cogency of argument presented by his guest bloggers and commenters makes him one of my “must-reads” each day. But today, in his piece entitled “Blackout? What’s the big deal?“, Kos is way off the mark.

He argues that growing up in El Salvador in the middle of that country’s civil war during the late 70s, blackouts were common and no big deal. During the recent blackout, he says,

There’s a certain amount of truth in there, but its mainly because the 50 million people affected by the blackout were lucky. As MickeyinCT, one of Kos’ commenters, points out:

We all saw the pictures yesterday morning of the hundreds of people sleeping on the steps of the Post Office, or on the sidewalks in front of the hotels they’d paid for. Where would the city have put the million or so people who come into Manhattan every day for work or play if it had been a typical winter’s night with icy winds blowing down the urban canyons? What if it had gone on for two weeks like the recent Memphis blackout? What would have happened if the blackout occurred during a massive heatwave like the one which has killed at least 3000 people in France?

Just because the power situation is worse elsewhere, doesn’t mean the people affected by Thursday’s blackout are “soft” whiners. My parents, my sister, many of my friends and in-laws were affected by the blackout, and most of them agreed that it was more an inconvenience than anything else. They didn’t whine, but my father, who lived through the ’65 blackout, wants to know how this once-in-a-lifetime event just happened again.

As power flickers back on in Northeast, finger-pointing aspects of the Blackout of ’03 are already taking center stage. Opponents of deregulation (like myself) see this as a to-be-expected outcome of turning a vital service — where reliability is the major objective — into a profit center. In fact, none other than Kenny Boy Lay of Enron fame predicted blackouts in an interview for PBS’s Frontline show called “Blackout“:

“Obviously”, that is, if you are the chairman of the company which might have engineered blackouts in New York if that pesky absolution dissolution in bankruptcy hadn’t gotten in the way. Still, deregulation has already done damage to the electrical system, even without the help of crooked power brokers. Part of the problem is that, no longer having a monopoly to produce power in a particular region, electric utilities must now compete against one another to sell the electricity they generate. Yet, at the same time they are competing, they must also maintain a complex network of cooperative interconnections to distribute the power they produce.

So, these utilities must compete for lower prices, must cooperate with their competitors without colluding, and must deliver a profit to their shareholders. Unfortunately for consumers, maximizing the profit takes precedence which also means minimizing expenses. The result: infrastructure has been neglected and blackouts ensue.

As New Mexico Governor and former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson said, “We’re the world’s greatest superpower, but we have a Third World electricity grid…” (Although, I bet the people sweltering in Baghdad’s 120 degrees would love to have such a “Third World” electrical system.)

Now, I’m just waiting for the Bushies’ reality inversion field to kick in and tell us that the solution to this deregulation-driven problem is more deregulation.

UPDATE: For the full story on the dereg disaster, read Greg Palast‘s column on Znet today.

In his bib overalls & mineral stained teeth, Gary Gardner looks right out of the movie Deliverance. But beneath the cliched exterior of a backwoods redneck, is the heart of a man who believes in the kind of justice which is blind to color and oblivious to manipulation.

As I wrote about last year, there was a great injustice done in Gardner’s hometown of Tulia, Texas, when on nothing more than the word of a shady sheriff’s deputy, 46 people wound up serving terms of up to 90 years in prison. Due in large part to Gardner’s persistence in bringing this dangerous farce to the attention of national media and national associations like the ACLU, 35 of the defendants will soon be pardoned.

Gardner is no angel: his speech is peppered with the kind of racial epithets one doesn’t hear in polite company. The words are wrong, but in this case, Gardner’s deeds go a long way towards excusing him.

[via Electrolite]

… “Napalm” is. I remember our previous president being mercilessly abused for his equivocating about the definition of “is”. It was a lawyerly shade of meaning which played terribly to the public. But no one died.

The same can’t be said for the military’s claim that no napalm was used in Iraq. In fact, they claimed that the last batch of napalm was destroyed in 2001. They were telling the truth, in the same way that this administration always tells the truth. Y’see, we didn’t drop “napalm” on Iraq, we dropped Mark 77 firebombs. Much different: see, napalm is a mixture of gasoline, benzene and a liquid styrofoam; Mark 77 firebombs use jet fuel and liquid styrofoam. So when the Pentagon denied they were using napalm, they weren’t lying. I don’t think the people with burning jellied petroleum products clinging to their skin and causing nearly untreatable burns would have cared about the distinction.