July 28, 2008 archive

1. Two weeks without news and, yet, the news doesn’t change. The LA Times reports Bombings in Baghdad and Kirkuk kill 57. “Violence killed 57 people and left another 280 wounded as a militant blew himself up at a Kurdish demonstration in the ethnically-mixed city of Kirkuk and three female suicide bombers targeted Shiite pilgrims marching in Baghdad.”

   The NY Times described the attacks as “one of the bloodiest sequences of attacks in Iraq this year”. In Baghdad, the three female bombers were “apparently using their flowing black robes, known as abayas, to carry explosives past checkpoints and the Iraqi policemen”.

   While the Washington Post adds that “in Kirkuk, the tensions have arisen over a power-sharing arrangement in a draft provincial elections law that would allocate Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens equal number of seats in the governing council of Tamim province, of which Kirkuk is the capital. But the Kurds were opposed to such a distribution, as well as an item in the legislation that called for a secret ballot to decide the power-sharing arrangement. After the Kurdish lawmakers walked out Tuesday, the parliament passed the bill.”

2. Bloomberg reports the U.S. deficit to reach record $490 billion in 2009. That’s only $83 billion more than Bush said in February when he forecasted the deficit to be $407 billion.

   The shortfall reflects a deterioration of the budget over the past seven years. Bush inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion when he took office in 2001. The budget worsened almost immediately, because of recession, the Sept. 11 attacks, the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and, later, the war in Iraq that began in March 2003.

   Bush recorded his first deficit a year after being sworn in, and it widened to the current record of $413 billion in 2004.

   Five months ago, the administration projected a shortfall of more than $400 billion this year and next, reflecting a struggling economy, and forecast a recovery to a $160 billion deficit in 2010, declining to $96 billion in 2011 and finally a $48 billion surplus in 2012…

   The current projections may understate the deficit next year because the administration hasn’t requested money to prosecute the wars for the full year, leaving that to the next president. Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan now are costing about $10 billion to $12 billion a month.

   And where did our money go? Not one, but two Wars of Choice™, and according to the Washington Post, U.S. says contractor made little progress on Iraq projects. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said Parsons, a California contractor, received “$142 million to build prisons, fire stations and police facilities in Iraq that it never built or finished”. Oh and last week, after raking in millions of dollars in Bush administration contracts, Blackwater decided to get out of the “security” business.

3. So the Washington Post reports Justice officials repeatedly broke law on hiring.

   Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general’s report released today.

   Goodling passed over hundreds of qualified applicants and squashed the promotions of others after deeming candidates insufficiently loyal to the Republican party, said investigators… Sampson developed a system to screen immigration judge candidates based on improper political considerations and routinely took recommendations from the White House Office of Political Affairs and Presidential Personnel, the report said.

   Goodling regularly asked candidates for career jobs: “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” the report said.

   So what are the Democrats going to do about this law breaking? The Hill reports Leahy rips Bush administration over DoJ politicization.

   “The policies and attitudes of this administration encouraged politicization of the department and permitted these excesses,” Leahy stated. “It is now clear that these politically rooted actions were widespread, and could not have been done without at least the tacit approval of senior Department officials.”

   Yup, you guessed it. Not a damned thing.

4. And finally, the Earth says ‘do better’ to China. The Guardian reports an Emergency anti-smog plan announced for ‘Greyjing’. “Beijing’s Olympic organisers are planning a new set of emergency measures to reduce pollution after the draconian steps introduced a week ago failed to halt a grimy haze from smothering the host city.” A clean environment cannot simply be toggled off and on.

Original article via dissidentvoice.org.  Sub-headed: Interview with Mickey Z.

Very few things in life are certain….here is one of them.

It is easier to destroy than to build.

Let us take for example, the Bush Administration and rampant “Conservatism,” that have been the most destructive force loosed upon  the world since Nagasaki.

Ok, I guess you could argue that one. That one is far from certain…but it is pretty darn hard to deny it, from where we sit today, in the rubble of the implosion of America caused by the incompetence, intransigence and the willful  destruction of everything that those OTHER than the top 1% of the worlds rich held dear. The destruction goes beyond any single event or act that they have committed. The real damage that they have done, above and beyond all of the horrors that we in the blogosphere have documented, is this.

They tried…and are still trying…and will never stop trying….. to redefine good and evil.

They….Karl Rove and Fox News and the spin machine…tried to destroy objective fact.

They tried to take us back to a time before The Enlightenment before Reason was valued over Faith. A time when what was comfortable and convenient for the ruling class was more important than actual reality.  A time when reality was what we were TOLD it was.  Since The Enlightenment humans have tried to establish an objective reality based on empiricism, have tried to build a common language based on observable facts. Now, according to them, there are no facts, and thus no agreement, and  no commonality.

~ Don’t REC the pony ~

Above the fold, two surreal videos. Below, a quick mention of some of the past week’s pieces on ePluribus Media that you may not have seen and will probably find very interesting.  Opening volley: Surreal Videos — “The Googling” Part 1 and Part III:

After the flip, a brief preview of some of the great pieces currently on ePluribus Media.

The Economic

Stimulus

There Was

An

Economic Stimulus?

No One

Told Me

Iraq clings to a rickety calm between war and peace

As the last troops sent in a U.S. military buildup leave, security has improved, but Iraqis tread carefully. They know no victor has been declared in the battles that will decide the nation’s future.

By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

July 28, 2008

BAGHDAD — The departure this month of the last of the 28,500 extra troops sent in a U.S. military buildup leaves Iraq in a rickety calm, an in-between space that is not quite war and not quite peace where ethnic and sectarian tensions bubble beneath the surface.

Politicians and U.S. officials hail the remarkable turnaround from open civil war that left 3,700 Iraqis dead during the worst month in the fall of 2006, compared with June’s toll of 490, according to Pentagon estimates.

Signs abound that normal life is starting to return. Revelers can idle away the hours at several neighborhood joints in Baghdad where the tables are buried in beers and a man can bring a girlfriend dolled up in a nice dress.

Despite the gains, the political horizon is clouded: Shiite Muslim parties are locked in dangerous rivalries across central and southern Iraq. Kurds and Arabs in the north compete for land with no resolution in sight. U.S.-backed Sunni Arab fighters who turned on the group Al Qaeda in Iraq could return to the insurgency if the government does not deliver jobs and a chance to join the political process.

Worried Banks Sharply Reduce Business Loans  



By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: July 28, 2008

Banks struggling to recover from multibillion-dollar losses on real estate are curtailing loans to American businesses, depriving even healthy companies of money for expansion and hiring.

Two vital forms of credit used by companies – commercial and industrial loans from banks, and short-term “commercial paper” not backed by collateral – collectively dropped almost 3 percent over the last year, to $3.27 trillion from $3.36 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. That is the largest annual decline since the credit tightening that began with the last recession, in 2001.

USA

For Obama, Hurdles in Expanding Black Vote



By Alec MacGillis and Jennifer Agiesta

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, July 28, 2008; Page A01

MACON, Ga. — Amanda Bass, a volunteer for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, had already tried once to get Wilmer Gray to register to vote. But when she glimpsed him in a black T-shirt and White Sox cap again on a recent weekday at the main bus stop here, she was determined to give it another try.

This time, Gray, 21, agreed — but his bus pulled up before he could fill out the form. Bass jumped onboard and persuaded the driver to wait.

“He was someone I’d worked hard to get,” said Bass, 19. “I couldn’t let him go, not after seeing how far he’d come.”