Billmon:

Hizbullah Cheerleader Watch

A year ago Billmon wrote: When the Levee Breaks

As a living, functioning city, then, New Orleans has ceased to exist. Even if it can eventually be resuscitated, the patient’s long-term prognosis is grim. Just as yesterday was a catastrophe in slow motion, the future of the Crescent City is likely to be a slow, lingering death by drowning: the environmental equivalent of pulmonary edema. In that sense, New Orleans is the canary — peacock might be the more appropriate bird — in the mine of global climate change. If melting ice caps continue to push sea levels rapidly higher, its death may also await many of the world’s other low-lying cities.

The death will not only come to such cities.

Global warming will induce huge migration waves away from the low-lying coasts and new deserts. For Katrina refugees the experience and situation is sad and uprooting. But there are means for them to survive without violence. The conflict for and over Katrina refugees is a soft one.

The skirmishes resulting from desertification in Darfur are deadly. A one meter rise in sea levels will result in a loss of 16% of land, densely populated, in Bangladesh. Whereto will those people flee? Throughout this century hundreds of millions will have find new homes.

The levees the U.S., the EU and others are building on their boarders will break when that wave arrives. Populists will declare this new migration period to be an invasion of barbarians and the fighting will be fierce, deadly and on a very large scale.

Billmon:

Mark Twain himself couldn’t write a satirical finish that clever.

Unintentional Irony Department

DIWANIYAH, Iraq — When the Bush administration talks about the progress it is making in Iraq, it points to places like this provincial capital about 100 miles south of Baghdad. The population is overwhelmingly Shiite, and the region is fairly calm by comparison with the capital. But even here in Qadisiyah province, the transition to full Iraqi sovereignty is taking longer than it should.
[…]
The situation in Iraq is difficult, but the sense of panic in the
Washington debate just doesn’t match the situation here. It’s bad, but
it’s not hurtling out of control.
Iraq: Still Worth Some Waiting, David Ignatius, WaPo, August 27, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 29 — At least 27 people were killed today when a leaking pipeline where they were siphoning oil exploded outside Diwaniya, Iraqi officials said.

[…]
One official said that the looters had taken advantage of the turmoil that engulfed the southern city on Monday when Iraqi Army soldiers clashed with members of a militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric. At least 28 people died during the fighting.
[…]
Gasoline has been chronically in short supply in Iraq, and its price
has skyrocketed, from about 4 cents a gallon to about 67 cents a gallon
now at the official price, as part of an agreement with the International Monitary Fund.
Pipeline Blast Follows Clashes at Iraqi City, NYT, August 29, 2006

Some news & views:

The NYT has a long piece about the British "moisture on planes" terror scare.

Cont. reading: OT 06-82

This story on Venezuela is quite weird and I do not find any source to point out what really happened. But what is told here is pure spin:

Government officials from the United States and this country are intensifying their verbal sparring after Venezuelan customs authorities this week seized diplomatic baggage from the United States that contained military hardware.

Why would diplomatic baggage contain ANY legitimate military hardware?

Cont. reading: Diplomatic Baggage

The NYT headline writer had trouble to express the truth, so it went with this:

Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity.

But the simple truth is, real wages not only do not rise with productivity, sea levels or the number of bad TV shows, real wages are falling. From the article:

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

The trick is bargaining power. How can that be reestablished?

The NYT is back to spread disinformation about a perceived U.S. enemy. NYT staff reporter Michael Slackman writes: Iran Opens a Heavy-Water Reactor

On Saturday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a provocative, if symbolic, gesture by formally inaugurating a heavy-water reactor. The Iranians say the plant would be used for peaceful power generation. But nuclear experts note that heavy-water facilities are more useful for weapons because they produce lots of plutonium — the preferred ingredient for missile warheads.

That paragraph hardly includes a relevant fact:

Cont. reading: Heavy Water What?

Billmon:

Having the U.S. government investigate Israel’s use of cluster bombs is like having the Unibomber investigate the London subway bombings.

Cluster Fuck

Enjoy …

There are many known facts to support these four thesis:

• Israel claims a historic right to conquer and to ethnic cleanse the Jordan West Bank – the Bush administration does support and furthers this;
• the Zionist lobby in the U.S has achieved an extremely high influence level;
• Israel is nurtured as a strategic asset for U.S. interests in the Middle East;
• the U.S. administration did recommend and expected Israel to "crush" Hisbullah "without inhibitation".

If a critic of AIPAC’s role in U.S. policy would say such, the AIPAC and the ADL would be  quick to brand that person as a defaming anti-semite.

But what do they say about a Jewish attorney from Maryland claiming the above in a Haaretz OpEd?

Cont. reading: “Crush … Without Inhibitation”

by James Parker & beq

beq wrote yesterday:

My SO, James, and I have been working together on a project all summer.

This is a piece for an outdoor sculpture show in an industrial area of Richmond
that is slowly becoming a gallery/artist’s community and there is a successful
micro-brewery in the district as well.

We installed it a little over a week ago at the brewery and the opening is
tomorrow night. I’ve been trying to get good nighttime photos of it because it
is lit from outside and within. It’s hard because it’s basically colorless and
the etched glass panels are very subtle. It suggests an urban kiosk and we are
making a statement about the environment and human effect and the risk to the
future.

The website for the exhibition is here. I warn you that it is interactive and tedious.

There is bigger version (150kb) of the picture available and a detail view (240kb).

So why did they release this stuff?

Laura Rozen yesterday linked to a report (PDF, 700kb) titled "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States."

Cont. reading: Why This Report?

News & views …

The U.S. housing bubble is popping. Interest rates are up and will not go down soon. Many people who recently signed Adjustable Rate Mortgages will learn that they can not afford their houses. But by then housing markets will be down and foreclosure will come. More offers will further turn down the market prices. Construction workers will lose their jobs. Homebuilders will shut down.

This will get really nasty next year when $1 trillion in ARMs are in for readjustment. Finally the Bush boom party is over.

The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes and condominiums dropped by 4.1% in July from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.33 million – the lowest level since January 2004. Economists were forecasting the pace of sales to fall to 6.55 million.
The fragile housing market…. 
Resource Investor

Some illustrating headlines:

Cont. reading: The Bush Boom Party is Over

Upcoming donor meetings to raise funds for rebuilding war-damaged Lebanon could be an opening for Western lenders to look for fresh commitments from Beirut to resume politically difficult economic reforms.

[…]
Western lenders are signaling they are willing to help with overall economic support if Lebanon agrees to adopt reforms, possibly seeking an International Monetary Fund program as a signal of its commitment to reform and to frame how donor money could be best used.
Donors may insist on Lebanese economic reforms

Good luck with that. The few hundred millions the west will pull out of its backpocket to salve its bad consciences are not needed. Saudi Arabia did come up with a gift if $1 billion alone. Other Middle East countries did or will follow – no strings attached.

Adding insult to injury, Wolfowitz’s(!) Thiefdom Central also tries to get into the game:

The World Bank will reallocate $40 million in previously approved loans for post-war rebuilding in Lebanon and will help verify immediate reconstruction needs as donors consider how much aid to give, a senior bank official said on Monday.
[…]
Saba said the bank would also conduct an economic and social assessment for Lebanon that would review expenditures and budgets for sectors such as health and education.

World Bank moves to help Lebanon rebuild

Let me guess the gist of that World Bank assessment: Hospitals should be privatized, an urgent need to introduce school fee and a Neocon approved Israel friendly curriculum.

The Hisbullah will chuckle and send them back to New York.

George W. Bush, Sep 20, 2001:

Either you are with us, or you are withl the terrorists.

Doing a bit of Kremlinology I come to the conclusion that Rumsfeld will be fired as soon as somebody else is found to take the job.

It took more than a year to find anyone willing to take the job of Secretary of Treasury John W. Snow, so it may well take a while a find a replacement for Rumsfeld.

But the case here is much more urgent than the Snow replacement ever was.

Rumsfeld is a political liability for the current administration AND he now did get into the way of the neocon’s plans.

Those Republican politicians who will have to fight to get reelected need him to leave immediately. The neocon warmongers need him to get out of the way in time for the next cakewalk. But those two timelines differ and that ensures a conflict within the administration.

Cont. reading: Rumsfeld Out – Who In?

In the Middle East the battlefields of Lebanon and Iraq are deeply connected.

BLITZER: In today’s "Welcome to the Future" report, is a show- down looming with Iran over its nuclear program? And are Tehran’s missile tests an ominous sign of things to come? CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr has the latest — Barbara?

[…]
STARR: Analysts say support for a strike against Iran would be tough. U.S. forces in Iraq would have to be protected from Iranian retaliation. U.S. military assets such as tanker aircraft and ships must be put into position. A U.N. peacekeeping force first must be deployed in Lebanon to protect Israel.
CNN – The Situation Room, August 21, 2006 (emphasis added)

Cont. reading: Connecting the Battlefields

Billmon:

[S]o far I haven’t seen anything that looks even remotely like accountability — just the by-now familiar mixture of Orwellian lies, PR spin, carefully rigged investigations and phony rhetorical tricks (like Olmert’s, which could have been ripped right from the lips of Donald Rumsfeld).

If Israel is still different from America, it sure the hell isn’t apparent in the behavior of its political and military elites, from the Prime Minister on down.

Package Deal

Billmon:

[F]or Shrub to argue that being the former colonial power in Lebanon makes France the ideal candidate to pull quasi-occupation duty there now says a lot about the character of the "new" Middle East.

A Close Relationship