SeniorJunior

Here's another brilliant idea from the W. Bush- leaguers . Make up for the billions blitzed on Iraq and the further billions foregone in the upper crust tax cuts by selling off big pieces of our national forests! Did you hear about that? Probably not unless you are in a Knight Ridder Publishing city. Note: Published on Friday, February 10, 2006 by Knight Ridder Bush Administration Moves to Sell National Forest Land by Seth Borenstein Feb 10... and very little national pick-up of the story. I found it because one of Netscape's newshounds noticed it on CommonDreams .Org and posted it yesterday. The full story is at: www.netscape.com today (Sunday 2-25-07) Here are a few excerpts: WASHINGTON - The Bush administration will unveil a proposal Friday to sell up to 200,000 acres of national forest land in "isolated parcels" ranging from a quarter of an acre to 200 acres, much of it in California. "I am outraged, and I don't think the public is ...

I had never seen the political cartoon showing George W. holding a homeless "will work for food" type sign saying "Will Kill For Oil" until today. It illustrates a powerful argument against the standard Cheney- esque position about Iraq. It's all in a great blog I just discovered http://www.theoildrum.com/ Please check it out (even though my blogging skills make you have to paste the URL in your browser). Briefly put: "The idea is that, although Bush was wrong to get us into this war, we are there and we cannot simply pull our troops out. If we do so, then Iraq will collapse into civil war and Iran could very well take over the whole country, including its oilfields." Those are Allen Pfiefer's (the blogmeister ) words. His concise rebuttal goes like this: "This seems plausible. But when you look closely at this argument, you will see that there is nothing to support it other than the delusion that the US is fighting the good fight. ...

How much can they screw up? Let me count the ways. Even a news hog like me can miss an important apple now and then. The one I missed this time was how our new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is apparently trying to re-light the cold war flames. Brilliant! I've missed all the tension about imminent nuclear conflagration. It sort of keeps the worry about imminent terrorist attacks in perspective. Just putting some of our flawed "missile defense shield" in ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe was enough to crank up the Russian defense spending. Check this paragraph from the Feb 9 edition of the British Guardian Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2009339,00.html In his speech to Russia's parliament, Mr Ivanov (Russia's hawkish defence minister, Sergei Ivanov) announced that the military would get 17 ballistic missiles this year, compared with an average of four in recent years. The plan envisages the deployment of 34 new silo-based Topol-M missil...

I hope you have read – or heard about in detail – the marvelous reporting by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post on the miserable way nearly a thousand U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are being treated in and around Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It’s a horror story in many ways, but it is especially slimy considering the responsible party has made “support our troops” its mantra. Something about hypocrisy makes me madder than just about any human weirdness. I don’t mean The Republican Party either. This is the George W. Bush Administration failing our vets. Republicans in general are one helluva lot better that this administration. Of course we can’t let the Republicans off the hook, because they let this gang of two-faced incompetents and their cynical ideologues take control of the G.O.P. The inhumanities at Walter Reed are just part of the story, of course. The under funded, understaffed, overworked and totally inadequate-to-the-task Ve...

GOODBYE, MOLLY Witty to the point of hilarious. Bright to the point of genius. Tough to the point of nails. She'll be missed. And missed. Not a great picture. It is the one she chose for the dust cover on Bushwacked . If you haven't Read it, and understand why George W. is like he is . RIP