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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

It all started as I was grinding my teeth yesterday, listening to RWR (right wing radio). Senator James Inhofe was a guest on the Sean Hannity program. Inhofe is the "flat earth" senator from Oklahoma. He was saying environmentally-oriented people worried about global warming "want us to give up our cars, stop building new homes and buildings, sacrifice our way of life for this hoax they call global warming." Etc. So I was thinking, what's an uninformed person to think? Probably "Is this true? Damn those lefty tree huggers." I mean he IS a U.S. Senator. Would he lie? Well you betcha, but unless you know his history, how would you know? Can you believe, for instance, when a critic of the Iraq war says there has been huge fraud and theft by war profiteers? Maybe they are all liars, righties and lefties, saying whatever it takes to make their points. I still believe that solid Journalism is the antidote to this kind of debilitating cynicism. The Wall Stre...

[From Reuters.com] 440,000 Deaths per Year By Jason Szep BOSTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) - The amount of nicotine that smokers typically inhale per cigarette rose by 11 percent from 1998 to 2005, perpetuating a "tobacco pandemic" that makes it harder for smokers to quit, a Harvard study said on Thursday.……….. "Cigarettes are finely tuned drug delivery devices designed to perpetuate a tobacco pandemic," said Howard Koh, the school's associate dean for public health practice and former Massachusetts commissioner of public health. …………. "The end result is a product that is potentially more addictive," the study said. …………. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers cigarette smoking the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. About 440,000 people die each year from lung cancer and other diseases related to tobacco use. Whole story at: http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=...

HOORAY FOR THE SENIOR GENERATION A very self-important college freshman at a recent football game, took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his own. "You grew up in a different, actually almost primitive, world," the student said loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. "We young people today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon, our spaceships have visited Mars... We even have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light speed processing ....and uh.." Taking advantage of a pause for breath in the student's litany, the "wize senior citizen" said, "You're right, Son....We didn't have those things when we were young........so we invented them...... you arrogant little shithead!!!

(From The Wall Street Journal – my favorite newspaper) "...The worried industries and their trade groups are responding by hiring new lobbying talent, planning mass-market ad campaigns and, in some cases, focusing on getting goodies attached to legislation that they would rather see killed but know they can't stop. The petroleum industry, for example, is preparing an ad campaign that seeks to justify oil companies' huge size -- and profits. The drug industry is weighing a mass-media counterattack of its own, emphasizing the good performance of the Medicare prescription-drug program. Student-loan titan Sallie Mae is rallying grass-roots support from college administrators. Small-business representatives are talking up tax breaks to offset what appears to be an inevitable increase in the minimum wage...." That excerpt from: Business Mobilizes to Defend Turf Firms Plot Campaigns to Counter Effects of Democrats' Agenda (I’m not sure if you can li...

Just had my first yesterday. Very high tech; very expensive. 893 bucks for 24 minutes in the chair. But think of the fringes I received. 1. Good looking people - handsome young dentist, gorgeous young tech. 2. Great ambiance - Japanese decor, snow falling on bamboo garden with smiling Buddha . 3. High tech stuff - digital X-rays, fast acting anesthetic. The dentist was charming but very succinct - after all, at $37 a minute, one mustn't dawdle. The practice "Advanced Endodontics " has two dentists, two techs, two receptionists and does nothing but canal roots and coin money. My tooth is "calming down," still painful but a helluva lot better. The only moral to the story is "Get dental insurance."

The “We stand down when they stand up” slogan has bothered me for some time, especially in the light of all the news reports about how inadequate our training efforts have been. Why the heck haven’t we done this right? Suddenly an argument broke out in my brain – the left side against the right side, the optimist against the pessimist – I don’t know. I do know that in this little colloquy lies the seed of inaction: W E SPOKE.... Put more and better military and police training personnel to work training the Iraqis. (Shoulda been doing that for two years.) WON’T WORK. THOSE PEOPLE ARE LOYAL TO THEIR MULLAHS & THEIR MILITIAS, NOT TO THE “UNIFIED GOVERNMENT.” Equip them better. Give them decent body armor, vehicles and communications gear. WON’T WORK. THEY WILL JUST USE THE GEAR IN ATTACKS ON US. Get them paid their salaries on time – might win a bit of the loyalty back to the government. WON’T WORK. THEY WILL FUNNEL MUCH OF THE MO...

From today’s (12/06/06) Wall Street Journal Online (my favorite newspaper): WASHINGTON -- Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month. Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare. The collapse of the appropriations process will be felt soon in the Justice and Commerce departments, food-safety agencies and veterans' health care. "It's not just a mess. It's a mountainous mess," complained Wisconsin Rep. Da...