Advanced Electoral College Prognostications: Get Ready for Bush-Edwards

Confused about the electoral college? Read this article to discover how its myriad vagaries could, in fact, lead to a Bush-Edwards administration.

Bush Wins Coveted Kaddafi Endorsement

A rather amusing read from Newsweek:

Lobbying for Libya—and Bush

"A former administration official is raising eyebrows in Washington by working as a lobbyist for Kaddafi at the same time that she’s trying to drum up Arab-American support for the president

Oct. 28 - A last-minute endorsement of President George W. Bush by a hastily formed coalition of Arab-Americans was coordinated in part by a registered lobbyist for the Libyan regime of Col. Muammar Kaddafi -- a government formally branded by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism."

Must read: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration

Fence-sitter? Try this article from The Nation out for size:

100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration

A few highlights from the article:

7. Vice President Cheney said that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." The bipartisan 9/11 Commission found that Iraq had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks and no collaborative operational relationship with Al Qaeda.

24. The Bush Administration granted the 9/11 Commission $3 million to investigate the September 11 attacks and $50 million to the commission that investigated the Columbia space shuttle crash.

31. The Bush Administration told Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan about plans to go to war with Iraq before telling Secretary of State Colin Powell.

34. The Bush Administration installed as top officials more than 100 former lobbyists, attorneys or spokespeople for the industries they oversee.

37. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge awarded lucrative contracts to several companies in which he is an investor, including Microsoft, GE, Sprint, Pfizer and Oracle.

44. The Bush Administration gave Accenture a multibillion-dollar border control contract even though the company moved its operations to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes.

46. In 2000, candidate George W. Bush promised to pay down the national debt to a historically low level. As of September 30, the national debt stood at $7,379,052,696,330.32, a record high.

56. The nonpartisan GAO concluded the Bush Administration created illegal, covert propaganda--in the form of fake news reports--to promote its industry-backed Medicare bill.

64. The Bush Administration went to court to block lawsuits by patients who were injured by defective prescription drugs and medical devices.

72. The Bush Administration gutted clean-air standards for aging power plants, resulting in at least 20,000 premature deaths each year.

85. President Bush's top legal adviser wrote a memo to the President advising him that he can legally authorize torture.

88. President Bush opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission before he supported it, delaying an essential inquiry into one of the greatest intelligence failure in American history.

98. The Bush Administration spent $120 classifying documents for every $1 it spent declassifying documents.

Read the full article...

Deep Doo-doo in Al-Qaqaa

Those of us who have been conscious the past three days have now heard all about the 380 tons of high explosives that were, despite being well known to international weapons inspectors, ignored by Coalition forces and allowed to vanish into the hands of any enterprising black-market arms dealer who wanted them during the chaos and security nightmare that has been post-invasion Iraq.

American troops had not been given orders to secure the munitions site, it seems. Not surprising, really, what with a vastly underdimensioned invading army and higher priorities such as the protection of the oil ministry and the preparation of maps and PowerPoint presentations for potential foreign investors.

Here's a follow-up article by the New York Times on the looting of Al-Qaqaa.

Most striking in the cacophony of spin that now enshrouds this issue is that it has led Bush to begin spouting (and repeating ad infinitum, as is his wont) some of the very first non-lies of his entire campaign – or, for that matter, his presidency:

"A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief"

Seems pretty fair. Would you care to comment on your reasons for invading Iraq, Mr. President?

Oh yes, you already did.

From President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002 seeking UN endorsement of the invasion:

“In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.”

From the Transcript of the Second Presidential Debate, October 8, 2004:

“…And I saw a unique threat in Saddam Hussein … because we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. And the unique threat was that he could give weapons of mass destruction to an organization like Al Qaida, and the harm they inflicted on us with airplanes would be multiplied greatly by weapons of mass destruction. And that was the serious, serious threat.

…We all thought there was weapons there, Robin … I wasn't happy when we found out there wasn't weapons, and we've got an intelligence group together to figure out why.”

Why weren't you happy when you "found out there wasn't weapons", Mr. President? A little sore from the jump?

Update: and now there's video...

My favorite bit:

"

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.

"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."

The Pentagon also declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.

The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives."

Kind of hearkens back to Colin Powell's scary vial of baking soda at the UN.

Discussion Question: Pre-emptive Abortion

If, using DNA analysis, it could be determined with "slam-dunk*" certainty that an unborn fetus was going to emerge from the womb armed with and ready to use a weapon of mass destruction, would Bush be morally justified in ordering the pre-emptive abortion of the fetus to Protect America? What if it required a "partial-birth" abortion?

* i.e., the same level of certainty used to justify the invasion of Iraq

Medical Coverage in Bush Country

I'd just like to briefly juxtapose two recent news items: a portion of a recent Bush litany of denial and misrepresentation (standard stump speech), and one of hundreds of news reports regarding the sorry state of medical coverage in the United States for veterans:

From Bush's "President's Remarks at Victory 2004 Rally in The Villages, Florida", October 19, 2004:

"When we came into office, we had a problem with Medicare. Medicine was changing; Medicare was not. And let me give you an example. Many here understand what I'm talking about. Medicare would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for heart surgery, but not one dime for the prescription drugs that could prevent the heart surgery from being needed in the first place. That did not make any sense for people on Medicare. It didn't make any sense for the taxpayers of the country. I pledged to bring Republicans and Democrats together to strengthen and modernize Medicare for our seniors. I kept my word. (Applause.) Seniors are getting discounts on medicine, and beginning in 2006, all seniors will be able to get prescription drugs coverage under Medicare.

We have more work to do when it comes to moving forward with health care. I have practical plans to make sure health care is available and affordable. We need a safety net for those with the greatest need. I believe in community health centers, places where the poor and the indigent can get good preventative and primary care. In a new term, we'll make sure every poor county in America has a community health center. (Applause.) We will do more to make sure poor children are fully subscribed in our programs for low-income families. "

From "1.7 million veterans lack coverage", Chicago Sun-Times, October 20, 2004:

"Nearly 1.7 million veterans have no health insurance or access to government hospitals and clinics, according to a report released Tuesday.

In Illinois, an estimated 227,000 Illinois vets and their family members are without coverage.

The study also says veterans are losing their health insurance at a faster rate than the general population, and the lack of health care is particularly acute among younger military members who served in the most recent wars...

...Robert "Lee" Newtson, 62, of suburban Elburn decided last year to drop his costly private health insurance and get his medical care through the Veterans Health Administration -- a benefit he was due because of two years of active duty in the Army in the '60s.

Newtson said it was months before he was scheduled to see a VHA doctor. During the wait, he ended up needing open-heart surgery. He said the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs balked at paying his $91,000 medical bill because he hadn't been seen by a VHA physician. Quinn's office stepped in and resolved the matter.

'I had to file for bankruptcy," Newtson said. "It's just not right. We all served our country and this is the thanks we're not getting.'"

Draw your own conclusions.

Banana Republicans Still Shredding the Constitution

In an action one would more generally expect from dead-enders struggling against a fledgling democracy still in the uneasy early transitional stages from dictatorship, a Republican-funded group has allegedly been systematically destroying democratic voter registration cards.

According to the New York Times and numerous other sources, a former employee of the group, Voters Outreach of America, “has come forward to say that he saw the company, which was being paid by the Republican National Committee, destroy Democrats' registration forms in Nevada, while it was handing in forms filled out by Republicans.”

Thousands of democrats who registered in good faith with the GOP outfit may very well show up at the polls on November 2 to find themselves effectively disenfranchised. The action by Voters Outreach of America, if true, is likely a felony, while illegal disenfranchisement is a violation of American constitutional rights.

It may be time for a new, revised and updated House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Better dead than red?

One Small Slip for Man, One Giant Flop for Mankind

Remember the Genesis space capsule? The probe that, on completing its mission and collecting scads of valuable data and particles of solar wind, was, on its return, meant to drift gently in the air like a dandelion spore until a helicopter could snatch it out of the sky, but instead plummeted into the Utah desert floor as though ejected from the explosive rump of a bombardier beetle? NASA engineers are chuckling now at the fact that the explanation for the crash appears to be just one of those quirky little bloopers than can scuttle any $264 million space mission.

It appears that the gravity switches that were meant to trigger the parachutes' release on the Genesis’ return were installed, in a word, upside-down. One can infer that, had the capsule been swooshing rapidly upward rather than plunging to its doom, the chutes could probably have deployed just fine. Unfortunately, on Earth gravity tends to pull objects in a downward direction, with the tragic result that the chutes did not deploy and the probe, along with most of its solar wind particles, was demolished.

Oops.

How did the switches get installed upside-down? Simple human error, one would think. I sometimes put the batteries in backwards in my son’s subsequently inert Choo-choo, after all, so why should NASA be any different when constructing a $264 million space probe?

But NASA rests the blame for the failure squarely on the shoulders of Lockheed Martin, the outfit that has also been fingered for the failure of two previous Mars missions and that ranks as the number one defense contractor for the United States, with over $30 billion in defense revenue in 2003. Lockheed is also one of the top contractors responsible for developing Bush’s revitalized Reagan-era "Missile Defense Shield".

NASA claims the switches were installed precisely as indicated on Lockheed Martin’s design drawings. Lockheed Martin’s design, in other words, indicated one should install the gravity switches upside-down. The difference is illustrated schematically below:

( gUP <-> gDOWN )
where g = gravity

I don’t know about you, but I see no reason that Lockheed’s failure to grasp a pesky little detail such as which direction gravity works in should undermine one’s confidence in a missile defense system that’s supposed to do the equivalent of hitting a bullet with a bullet – only much moreso, as the first bullet’s trajectory would be unknown and extremely variable. But it does make one scratch one’s head in a thoughtful manner and muse whether the billions in taxpayer money they're getting for the system are being used quite as wisely as they could be. Perhaps the money would be better spent training and equipping a crack task force of deadly accurate, airborne anti-ballistic bombardier beetles.

Fox v. Mackris v. O'Reilly

Those who follow the sleazy, smarmy, spittle-flecked underbelly of commercial infoganda will be interested to note that Fox News has enlisted the aide of a judge to help fire the producer who has accused little-known but much-reviled pseudo-journalist Bill O'Reilly of some really stomach-churning sexual harassment.

The accusation has been leveled by one Andrea Mackris, who asserts that O'Reilly's behavior "included telling her to use a vibrator, tales about his sexual conquests and his 'amazing' endowment, and three phone sex calls in which he told of fantasies involving her." O'Reilly was apparently Mackris' boss at the time. Here's the Mackris vs O'Reilly lawsuit (portions may be Rated R), courtesy of The Smoking Gun.

Fox responded to the complaint in its trademark fair and balanced manner by hiding a process server in Mackris' apartment building and having him pop out with a wad of legal papers informing her of her termination. Apparently, Fox is suing its own employee in a chuckleheaded attempt to suggest her dismissal is not in spiteful retaliation for the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against O'Reilly.

Perish the thought. Given Fox's stellar reputation for journalistic integrity and commitment to ethical behavior, however could one dream the two events are related?

Here's the full story from the New York Daily News.

Bush: The King of "Borrow and Spend"

Fiscal conservatives of all political stripes should be equally appalled by the Bush administration's latest spasm of fiscal recklessness. The New York Times summed it up about as succinctly as one could wish:

"Less than a day after President Bush implied that Senator John Kerry lacked "fiscal sanity," the Bush administration said on Thursday that the federal government had hit the debt ceiling set by Congress and would have to borrow from the civil service retirement system until after the elections."

Borrow from the civil service retirement system? Borrow from the pathetic little federal pension funds of postal workers and tired, toothless CIA operatives?

This will be the fourth time during Bush's tenure that he has bonked his "small government" forehead against the debt ceiling. This requires a certain stature, as the debt ceiling is currently set, following three previous increase requests in the past three years, at $7.4 trillion dollars. Bush has increased the national debt by $2.1 trillion dollars during his tenure. A lame duck Congress is expected to raise the ceiling yet again in November. Cracking open the civil service pension piggybank is just a stopgap.

Numbers like $7.4 trillion and $2.1 trillion are rather hard to picture. Too many zeros. It's like trying to count the atoms in a block of cheese.

Here's one way to look at it. The current population of the United States is, for simplicity's sake, about 300 million people. Since Bush took office, he has increased the national debt by, let's see... 2.1 trillion divided by 300 million. Lots of zeros. Hmm....

greenbacks: 2,100,000,000,000
_____________
people: 300,000,000

= $7,000 more debt per sentient biped in America

Another way to look at it is that $2.1 trillion is about 4% of the 2003 gross world product (purchasing power parity) of $51.48 trillion, according to the CIA. Another couple dozen Bush terms and the United States would owe more than the entire world, including the United States, generates in income.

Another way to look at it is that $2.1 trillion would buy a full four-year private university education for 184,840,519 beer-swilling, Ramen-crunching students.

It would also buy a 50 million dollar Van Gogh self-portrait for every single one of the 42,000 residents of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, assuming Vincent stashed a few extras away somewhere. Nice for the rumpus room.

In the same article, the Times reports the official federal budget deficit for the 2004 fiscal year was $413 billion. This is the largest budget deficit in American history.

Fiscal sanity? You're through the looking-glass, George, and there's a tea-party waiting for you.

Third Presidential Debate Fact Check

The Washington Post, among numerous others, provides an excellent fact check of the many inaccuracies, misstatements and pure, unvarnished untruths uttered by the President during the third presidential debate.

While there's no need to recount them all here, one, in particular, stuck in my craw. Later mentioned by Al Franken on Air American Radio (he was apparently channeling my thoughts through the radio waves), the one that stuck was Bush's implication that Kerry's claim that Bush had said, six months after 9/11, that he wasn't particularly concerned about Osama bin Laden, was a lie.

Here's the Kerry statement during the debate:

"SCHIEFFER: Anything to add, Senator Kerry?

KERRY: Yes. When the president had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, he took his focus off of them, outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, and Osama bin Laden escaped.

Six months after he said Osama bin Laden must be caught dead or alive, this president was asked, "Where is Osama bin Laden? " He said, "I don't know. I don't really think about him very much. I'm not that concerned. "

We need a president who stays deadly focused on the real war on terror."

to which Bush replied...

"SCHIEFFER: Mr. President?

BUSH: Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."

Gosh. What doesn't come across in the transcript is that Bush stretched the word "ex-ag-ger-a-tions" to about nine syllables, each one accentuated with his characteristic smirk and bovine stare. What occurred to me at the time (and what was later echoed by Al Franken via his telepathic channel) is that Bush appeared to have been experiencing a flashback to the 2000 campaign, when he and his spin mill did everything they could to paint Al Gore as a "reckless exaggerator". Problem is, no one's ever accused the current candidate, John Kerry, of reckless exaggeration. The other problem is, Kerry's quotation of the president's words was practically verbatim.

From the Washington Post:

'Bush said Kerry's comment about Osama bin Laden was "one of those exaggerations," but in a news conference on March 13, 2002, Bush said when asked about the search for the al Qaeda leader: "So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him. . . . We haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

In a way, Bush was right. Whereas Kerry accused Bush of saying "I'm not that concerned", what Bush actually said was "I truly am not that concerned." Thank you, Mr. President, for pointing out the exaggeration.

Daily Gnus Mission Statement

Most days, I start the early portion of mid-morning -- post-tea, but pre-shower -- by opening Google News, a.k.a "Gnews", and performing a quick layman's diagnosis of the world's mental health. Most days, my conclusion is that the world is being managed by a flock of deranged wildebeests, more colloquially known as gnus. Occasionally, ideas stemming from this conclusion burble through to my conscious mind under the intellectually stimulating effect of the shower -- ideas that on rare occasions may even prove suitable for temporary cyber-immortalization. And thus was a new addition to the blog tundra, the Daily Gnus, spontaneously calved, recursive links and all.

This blog will likely offer a series of rants and musings on the fact that much of the world appears to be stampeding toward the nearest cliff, hooves pounding clouds of prion- and depleted uranium-filled dust around its lolling eyes and flapping tongues. I hope you will find it uplifting.