Bush Personnel Announcement at 1:45
Rove? Snow? Rumsfeld?
UPDATE:
PORTER GOSS REPORTEDLY RESIGNS AS CIA CHIEF
The scandal has hit a first peak.
May 5, 2006
Personnal News
WB: What Is It About Kennedys and Cars?
Billmon:
Maybe his dad could give him some driving lessons — preferably on dry land.
Open Thread 06-39
If you comment, Fitzgerald will win …
WB: The Quality of Mercy
Billmon:
America may still be better than the 9/11 criminals (or at least, so I believe) but it’s not that much better — not so much that the neocons were willing to put our moral superiority on the line by renouncing Guantanamo. Nor would our conservative culture warriors have stood for it if they had. They don’t want to be that much better than the terrorists. Still, the Moussaoui trial at least proves that they haven’t succeeded in making us worse — yet.
May 4, 2006
Powerplay
‘anna missed’ pointed to a foreign policy piece sociology professor Jonathan Cutler published on Znet: Beyond Incompetence: Washington’s War in Iraq. It deserves some discussion, so here are the main points.
The neocons, Cutler argues, are not incompetent, but are persuing their own version of Realpolitik. He explains this by exploring the split within the imperialist camps of the rightwing policy establishment.
WB: Basket Case
Billmon:
Frist said he would fight any effort to declare his presidential aspirations legally brain dead, and would seek federal legislation, if necessary, to block his political donors from removing their feeding tubes.
May 3, 2006
WB: All That Glitters
Billmon:
The dollar has indeed been sinking — against the euro, the yen and the most of the leading emerging market currencies (although not the Chinese yuan, which is still pegged.) But the slope of the greenback’s downward curve has been nothing compared to the upward trajectory of the price of gold. Somebody out there (there being the People’s Bank of China) is still trying to soak up all that excess dollar liquidity — counterflooding, as it were. Let’s hope they keep it up.
WB: Losing Ugly
Billmon:
[I]t still makes me nervous, because I’m not nearly as sure as Steele that we’ve put our historical xenophobia — and our ability to rationalize the deaths of brown people who happen to get in our way — behind us. In fact I’m pretty sure we haven’t. Combine that with our modern taste for videogame violence, the more depersonalized the better, and our national refusal to admit that we could ever, ever be the bad guys, and our need for the oil, and its not too hard to imagine the war in the Middle East getting very ugly indeed, in ways that might give Mr. Kurtz a run for his money.
Of Jackals And Hyenas
by Lash Marks
(lifted from a comment)
Just attended an international reconstruction conference, actually, a tele-conference on my cell phone, staying late at the office and listening in to urgent young upwardly-mobile largely-white professionals ‘work the process’ around village projects in the 3RDW.
May Satan set aside a special circle in hell for those academics who taught ‘work the process’, and further bloated America’s already corpulent Politburo bureaucracy, at a time when Katrina is already eight months and $35,000M down the FEMA tubes ago, and there are still 650,000 American citizens homeless and 30,000 unaccounted for. But by God let’s earnestly ‘work the process’!
May 2, 2006
Small Potatoes
The Great Game in South America:
Making good on his main campaign pledge, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales ordered troops to occupy the country’s oil and natural gas fields on Monday and issued a decree giving the government majority control over the energy industry.
"The pillaging of our resources by transnational companies is over," Morales said in a speech at the San Alberto gas field in southern Bolivia. "From this day forward, all hydrocarbons in the country are nationalized."
Bolivian military seizes oil, gas fields, Houston Chronicle
Kudos to a politician that does hold to his campaign pledges.
Given the 300% price surge in hydrocarbons since 2001, the foreign companies hit by this will not achieve lower profit in Bolivia than they did three years ago.
The decree raised taxes and royalties on the largest gas fields to 82 percent from 50 percent.
The 50% of some $25 per barrel three years ago is less that the 18% of some $75 per barrel these companies will get now. But of course the foreign exploration companies would have prefered to take 50% of $75 instead of having to chip the spoil over to the Bolivian people.
Morales is lucky that the major foreign companies involved are Brasilian, British and Spanish. Exxon-Mobile is there too, but to them it’s "small potatoes".
Otherwise immediate regime change would be nessessary.
For now Morales will have to stay third in line behind Ahmadinjad and Chavez.
May 1, 2006
WB: May Day
Billmon:
The strikers had a committee of 56, representing 27 different languages.
WB: Joker in the Deck
Billmon:
Packing Accomplished
Three years ago …
full
INTRODUCTION
The term "packing" refers to the process of creating a male-looking bulge in one’s crotch. This can be accomplished through a home-made or store-bought pants stuffer, or through a realistic-looking prosthetic device.
[…]
PACKING DEVICES: Home-made
There are affordable and realistic looking/feeling packers on the market today, but if you are very short on cash, are just starting to pack, or simply do not want to invest in a store-bought packer, the following home-made devices can serve quite adequately, and can be adjusted to your own tastes.Socks
The use of a rolled up sock is a very inexpensive way to create a bulge. …
Packing: Creating a Realistic Bulge
Blogads
Just saw this advertisement running on Juan Cole’s website.
Somehow, this does not fit.
bigger screenshot
full screenshot
The book’s author is Matthew Levitt.
This book was written while Matthew Levitt was a senior fellow and
director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy.
Cole on the Washington Institute:
WINEP has largely followed AIPAC into pro-Likud positions, even though its director, Dennis Ross, is more moderate. He is a figurehead, however, serving to disguise the far right character of most of the position papers produced by long-term WINEP staff and by extremist visitors and "associates" (Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer are among the latter).
The "blurp" for the book is by ex-CIA director James "Worldwar IV" Woolsey. Cole once wrote:
[T]he drumbeat of the intellectually dishonest members of the war party, such as former CIA director James Woolsey, intimating that perhaps maybe somewhere there is not impossibly a possibility that it is not unthinkable that there is an Iraq-al-Qaida connection appears to be being bought by the naive.
Does the blogsphere have a credibility problem, when advertisment by "one side" start to appear on blogs by the "other side"?
OT 06-38
News & views …
WB: American Nightmarez
Billmon:
Things have been done over the past five years that can’t be undone; crimes committed that can’t be uncommitted. If Colbert faced a tough crowd last night, it was probably because so many of them understand that the Cheneyites and the Rovians really are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenberg, and that if the airship goes down in flames their own window seats are going to get pretty toasty.