The Madness of King George

It’s going to get worse

That’s was President Bush’s message today during his press conference.

President Bush warned Americans to expect "heavy fighting" this summer during a critical time in his war strategy.
Answering reporters' questions at a White House news conference, Bush said the developments would occur once U.S. military reinforcements are in place in mid-June.
"We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties," Bush said.

Meanwhile, there are reports that Bush is planning for a second surge later this fall.

So, to summarize, things are going very badly in Iraq. The first surge is not working. Bush is warning that we will see more casualties throughout the summer. And they may be planning a second surge on top of the first one by the end of the year.

Is Bush crazy!?! Up until now I have questioned Bush’s competence and judgment, but not his sanity. But this is truly demented if he is planning to push ahead with his war and send even more troops in the face of the highest level of opposition to the war ever recorded.

Top 100 Actors

Here is the list of my Top 100 Favorite Actors along with a representative movie that underscores why I like them. I'm working on a list of Top 100 Actresses that I will post later. I pulled this together pretty quickly so I may have some additions and deletions later on. You can quibble that it’s not necessarily the best actors by any means (Tim Conway is included but not Laurence Olivier, for example), but they are the ones that I personally like the best to date. In alphabetical order:

Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run)
Fred Astaire (Royal Wedding)
Kevin Bacon (Stir of Echoes)
Alec Baldwin (The Shadow)
Antonio Banderas (Mask of Zorro)
Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings)
Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca)
Ernest Borgnine (The Wild Bunch)
Marlon Brando (The Godfather)
Yul Brynner (The King and I)
George Burns (Oh, God)
Nicolas Cage (National Treasure)
James Cagney (Yankee Doodle Dandy)
Jim Carrey (The Mask)
John Cleese (A Fish Called Wanda)
George Clooney (Oh Brother Where Art Thou)
Sean Connery (From Russia With Love)
Tim Conway (Apple Dumpling Gang)
Gary Cooper (High Noon)
Kevin Costner (JFK)
Bing Crosby (Going My Way)
Russell Crowe (The Insider)
Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July)
Billy Crystal (Running Scared)
John Cusack (Grosse Pointe Blank)
Matt Damon (Bourne Identity)
Robert DeNiro (Taxi Driver)
Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean)
Leonardo DiCaprio (Catch Me If You Can)
Kirk Douglas (Spartacus)
Robert Duvall (The Paper)
Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry)
Erroll Flynn (The Adventures of Robin Hood)
Henry Fonda (The Oxbow Incident)
Harrison Ford (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Michael J. Fox (Back to the Future)
Morgan Freeman (Million Dollar Baby)
Clark Gable (Gone With the Wind)
Richard Gere (First Knight)
Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon)
Cary Grant (Arsenic and Old Lace)
Hugh Grant (Knotting Hill)
Gene Hackman (The French Connection)
Tom Hanks (Apollo 13)
Charlton Heston (The Ten Commandments)
Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate)
Bob Hope (The Princess and the Pirate)
Hugh Jackman (X-Men)
Samuel Jackson (Pulp Fiction)
Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive)
Danny Kaye (The Jester)
Gene Kelly (An American In Paris)
Val Kilmer (Willow)
Kevin Kline (January Man)
Don Knotts (The Incredible Mr. Limpet)
Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot)
Peter Lorre (Maltese Falcon)
Ewan MacGregor (Star Wars)
Steve Martin (All of Me)
Lee Marvin (Dirty Dozen)
Ian MacKellen (Lord of the Rings)
Steve McQueen (The Great Escape)
Viggo Mortensen (Hidalgo)
Eddie Murphy (Beverly Hills Cop)
Liam Neeson (Rob Roy)
Paul Newman (The Sting)
Jack Nicholson (As Good As It Gets)
Al Pacino (Author, Author)
Gregory Peck (To Kill A Mockingbird)
Sean Penn (Sweet and Lowdown)
Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line)
Brad Pitt (Twelve Monkeys)
Richard Pryor (Stir Crazy)
Anthony Quinn (The Guns of Navarone)
Robert Redford (Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid)
Kenau Reeves (The Matrix)
Burt Reynolds (Hooper)
Kurt Russell (Tombstone)
Peter Sellers (The Pink Panther)
William Shatner (Star Trek)
Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Total Recall)
Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump)
Will Smith (Men in Black)
Wesley Snipes (Blade)
Kevin Spacey (L.A. Confidential)
James Spader (Stargate)
Sylvester Stallone (Rambo)
Jimmy Stewart (It’s a Wonderful Life)
Donald Sutherland (MASH)
John Travolta (Primary Colors)
Dick Van Dyke (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
Eli Wallach (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)
Denzel Washington (Crimson Tide)
John Wayne (True Grit)
Orson Welles (Citizen Kane)
Gene Wilder (Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)
Robin Williams (Good Morning Vietnam)
Bruce Willis (Die Hard)

A Spurs appreciation

I'm really, really hooked on the San Antonio Spurs. They are one of the best basketball teams ever and it is thrilling to watch them play. So it really amazes me that they seem to be constantly dissed by the rest of the nation as either boring or now, in a bizarre flip-flop, as a team of thugs and cheaters.
I guess when you have a reputation as "good guys" for as long as the Spurs have had, it doesn't take much for people to latch onto to turn that around quickly. It reminds me of the political hype from presidential campaigns where sweeping judgments and stereotypes of candidates are based on flimsy and sometimes false evidence. But all it takes is for the charge to get repeated enough times and it sticks.
The Spurs remind me a lot of the 1998-2000 New York Yankees team I loved so much. They don't rely on a superstar to pull them through every game. Instead, they just play great as a team.
What is so great about the Spurs team is that they have so much depth off of their bench. The team is naturally built around their superstar Tim Duncan. But they also have two other superstars in Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili who can carry the team if Duncan is having an off night.
In addition, they have perhaps the best defensive player in the league in Bruce Bowen and then to top it off they have a whole bench full of key role players like Elston Howard and Fabarico Oberto to provide picks and blocks.
But their secret weapon is the fact that they have no fewer than five guys who are absolutely deadly from the 3-point range: Michael Finley, Bruce Bowen, Robert Horry, Brent Barry and, of course, Manu Ginobili. When they start hitting their three-point shots, it doesn't take long for a close game to turn into a 12-15 point blowout.

The Spurs just finished off the Phoenix Suns, who were probably the best team they will face in the playoffs. That means unless they fall apart and/or someone gets very lucky, they have a clear shot from here on out for their fourth NBA title.

Iraq vs. Texas

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story the other day about a dispute between the Iraqi government and a Texas company hired to build an electric utility plant south of Baghdad. The plant is currently shuttered and unused with gleaming new equipment just collecting dust.
The Texas company, Southeast Texas Industrial Services Inc., ran into lots of problems trying to fulfill the $283 million contract beginning with security issues. The construction site was the target of multiple insurgent attacks and the Iraqi government failed to provide effective security. In addition, the Iraqi government was constantly behind in making payments for the project almost from the beginning. Finally, when the Texas company was forced to spend millions providing their own private security in order to get the work done they were accused of cheating when they tried to pass those costs on to the Iraqi government.
But what I found most interesting about the story was the role of the Bush administration via their representatives at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Who do you suppose they sided with in this dispute? The Iraqi government, of course. They accused the Texas company of being “unreliable” and “incompetent.” How’s that for an ironic twist. Of course, they can’t side against their puppet regime in Baghdad and any extra money that must be ponied up is ultimately going to come out of U.S. coffers in the end. So it is really no surprise that they would give the American company the back side of their hand in this dispute.

Assault on Reason

The man who should be president has written a new book!

JFK assumptions were wrong

This is really cool!
A new study by a former FBI ballistics expert is casting fresh doubts on the Warren Commission's conclusion that John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin.

The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James...

They found that the scientific and statistical assumptions Guinn used -- and the government accepted at the time -- to conclude that the fragments came from just two bullets fired from Oswald's gun were wrong.

"This finding means that the bullet fragments from the assassination that match could have come from three or more separate bullets," the researchers said. "If the assassination fragments are derived from three or more separate bullets, then a second assassin is likely," the researchers said. If the five fragments came from three or more bullets, that would mean a second gunman's bullet would have had to strike the president, the researchers explained.

Eventually, the house of cards that the Warren Commission based its conclusions on will collapse and the officials who have been propping it up all this time will be forced to admit that there was more than one gunman (i.e. a conspiracy).

This can’t be good

An area the size of California in Antarctica melted in 2005.

Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface, NASA said on Tuesday.
A new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze -- the most significant thawing in 30 years, the U.S. space agency said.

I’m sure this is just more global warming alarmism. Nothing to see here. Not to worry. Go back to what you were doing. Never mind.

Express-News publishes inaccurate editorial

The San Antonio Express-News published an outrageous and inaccurate editorial yesterday attacking Democrats over ethics reform.

I suspect the editorial was written by Jonathan Gurwitz since it contains the same error that appeared in his column that same day. But that is still no excuse to publish false information.
They have the gall to use the fact that more Republicans keep coming under scrutiny from the Ambramoff lobbying scandal as a springboard to attack Democrats over ethics reform. Here is how they try to accomplish this:

House Minority Leader John Boehner forced the two congressmen to resign key assignments on the Intelligence and Appropriations committees.
That's more than can be said of the Democratic leadership. Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., is the target of an 18-month bribery probe that uncovered $90,000 in cash in the lawmaker's freezer. Yet Jefferson still sits on the Homeland Security Committee.

The problem here is that the Democrats DID take action to discipline Congressman Jefferson after the FBI probe was revealed last year. The whole gist of the editorial is false.
The Democratic leadership stripped Jefferson of his seat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
It was only after he was re-elected to his seat in November, despite strong national Democratic support for his primary opponent, that he was grudgingly allowed to take a seat on the Homeland Security committee. What more could the Democrats do? He is the legitimately elected representative for the people of the 2nd District of Louisiana and they still deserve representation in Congress even if they have poor judgement in who they send to represent them. Until the Justice Department gets off its duff and pushes forward with an indictment of Jefferson or something, the Democrats’ hands are tied.
And as I mentioned earlier, I suspect the reason the Justice Department is sitting on this investigation is because they know that it looks bad for Democrats to have Jefferson in their midst and allows Republicans to continue to claim that the “culture of corruption” in Washington is bi-partisan. That is the result of Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales’ politicization of the Justice Department.

I’m curious if the E-N will run a correction once this is pointed out to them. We shall see.

A convoluted column

Jonathan Gurwitz’ latest column in the E-N is a partisan screed that veers off in all kinds of strange directions.
He starts off by setting up a classic strawman argument:

Invariably in politics, someone comes along to declare that his party has a monopoly on virtue while the opposition has the sin syndicate.

And who would that someone be, Jonathan? Nobody in particular? Just a nameless strawman that you can proceed to knock over?

He jumps off from that to create a bogus presumption:

And invariably in public discourse today, the presumption is that conservatives are dirty, rotten scoundrels while liberals are pious, incorruptible angels.

That’s funny. I always thought that liberals were supposed to be the dirty, unpatriotic hippies - moral degenerates, spaced out on drugs, etc. Now we are pious angels. Interesting.
I think Jonathan may be spending too much time reading liberal blogs or something. It has certainly put him in a pissy mood.

Jonathan goes on to acknowledge the Republicans’ overwhelming complicity in the Abramoff scandal, but then dismisses it as only being representative of the DeLay era, as if that were some brief period long since forgotten on Capitol Hill.

Then, suddenly, he veers off to rant about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 15 years ago complaining about the “smears” that “continue to dog him today.” He implies strongly that Democratic objections to Thomas “conveniently fit some stereotypes about race.”

I take offense at this suggestion. I remember the Clarence Thomas hearings quite well and even wrote several letters to the editor of my local paper protesting his nomination. My complaint had nothing to do with “personal peccadilloes” or “salacious gossip,” but rather with the fact that he little more than one year’s worth of experience as a jurist. I compared the situation to a rookie baseball player in his first season in the Major Leagues suddenly being enshrined in the Hall of Fame and I noted a number of African-American judges with far more impressive credentials and lengthier resumes who were far more worthy of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. But it was clear from the start that Thomas had been selected chiefly because of his extreme right-wing political views and nothing else.

But why we were suddenly talking about Clarence Thomas was unclear until this line:

They forget that his chief inquisitor in Senate confirmation hearings, Joe Biden of Delaware, has a verifiable history of dishonest and unattributed scholarship.

And this has what to do with Thomas’ fitness to serve on the high court?
No, wait, what Jonathan is upset about is the different treatment that Thomas and Biden recieve today:

Thomas is greeted with derision when he speaks at law schools across the country. Biden is once again a Democratic candidate for president. Why the differing treatments?

Is Thomas really greeted with derision everywhere he goes? I find that hard to believe.
And Biden being a presidential candidate again, so what? He still doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of winning. He hasn’t been taken seriously as a presidential candidate since the Neil Kinnock plaigirism charge clobbered him in 1988.
I fail to see some great disparagement in treatment here. So what is next?

Jonathan then returns to his bogus presumption:

Because in this partisan tale, conservatives are dim bulbs and moral hypocrites while liberals are imbued with an endless reservoir of virtue — and the grace of never having to say you're sorry.

Yeah, whatever. So what’s next?

According to this presumption, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales must resign, though no one can point to any law that was broken in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. But Rep. William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, in whose freezer the FBI found $90,000 in marked cash last year, occupies a seat on the House Homeland Security Committee.

What?!!? This is ridiculous! Talk about comparing apples and oranges. Does Jonathan expect anyone to take this lame argument seriously?
Gonzales has been called on to resign by Republicans and Democrats alike because he either lied to Congress or failed to peform his job adequately in overseeing the U.S. Attorney offices under his direction. Heck, even the editors at the National Review have called for Gonzales to go. We don’t have to wait for a criminal indictment or conviction before we can expect to have honest and competent leadership at the Department of Justice.
And Rep. William Jefferson? Every Republican partisan’s favorite Democrat? Sure he is on the Homeland Security Committee. But Jonathan fails to note that he is no longer on the powerful Ways and Means Committee after Democrats stripped him of that role when the whole FBI sting operation was first revealed. Democrats also withdrew their support for Jefferson during the mid-term elections and supported his primary opponent instead. Unfortunately, Jefferson won re-election regardless.
So now, what would Jonathan have the Democrats do? Refuse to grant him committee assignments? Does Jonathan think the people in Jefferson’s Louisiana district are not worthy of full representation simply because he does not like the person they picked to be their representative? Personally, I wish the feds would hurry up and throw the book at Jefferson so that he can be forcibly removed from the House and replaced with someone without the taint of corruption.
But after hearing about recent revelations of the politicization of the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales, I can’t help but wonder if they are purposefully sitting on this case because they know it helps Republicans to keep Jefferson around so that they can continue to claim that the flood of corruption and scandals in Washington are “bi-partisan.”

Sheesh! But Jonathan is not through. He goes on to whine about a bogus Internet story that alleged that George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any president, not that such a study is needed to give people that impression.
What this has to do with anything is unclear, but a few short paragraphs later he seems to imply that the people behind the bogus Internet story are responsible for the tough questions being faced by the marriage-challenged Republican presidential candidates this year.

Now the purveyors of this brand of hypocrisy are taking their wares on the presidential campaign trail. The Republican front-runners, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, face persistent questions about their personal and professional lives.

Still following Jonathan’s logic here? Yeah, neither am I.

But wait, now it seems that this whole line of thought was meant as jumping off point so that Jonathan could raise all kinds of spurious accusations against the Democratic presidential candidates:

the Democratic candidates have to worry about more than just perceptions of the two Americas — the one where multimillionaires like John Edwards get $400 haircuts and the one inhabited by the rest of us common folk.
Depending upon what the meaning of the word "is" is, personal life is a serious problem for Hillary Clinton. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's embellished Major League Baseball résumé is a character issue, as are Sen. Barack Obama's real estate deals.

What fun! He got to put in the dig about John Edwards’ expensive taste in hair salons and raise the old “meaning of the word ‘is’” canard to smear Hillary. In addition, he gets to whack Gov. Richardson for an old resume snafu and he gets to make a shady reference to some obscure real estate deal that involved Barak Obama. Nevermind that the same stories that exposed the transaction also noted that “there have been no allegations that Obama ... broke the law or committed any ethics violations.”

Jonathan finally concludes this convoluted mess of a column with the observation that “voters have a way of sorting out the hucksters in both camps.”
Let’s hope they can also sort out the B.S. from the wisdom in columns such as this.

50 ways to lose your money

The E-N reported this weekend that the Texas Lottery has a new $50 scratch off game for gamblers who just can’t seem to throw their money away fast enough.
The odds for winning the million dollar prize are astronomical — 1 in 618,000. You have a much better chance of being killed in a car wreck on your way over to cash in your winning ticket.
But what people don’t seem to realize is how bad their odds are of winning anything. The odds to just break even (i.e. to win $50) are greater than 1 in 6. That’s crazy!
Imagine walking up to someone and handing them $50 for the chance to roll a six-sided die. Let’s say you are trying to roll a six. If you don’t hit it on your first try, they put your money in their pocket and walk away. If you do luck out and roll a six, then you get your money back. Whoop-de-doo!
In order to double your money and win $100, the odds are 1 in 20. As an old D&D player, I’m very familiar with 1-in-20 odds because a 20-sided die is used quite a bit in fantasy roleplaying games. Needless to say, I would be extremely poor if I had to shell out $50 everytime I missed rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die. Try it some time!

Conservatives are no longer influential

Time Magazine has just come out with its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and just looking at the cover of the issue I can tell it is sure to infuriate my conservative friends.
There are practically no conservatives in the list at all, but lots of liberals and Democrats.
Most prominently topping the list this year is Democratic presidential contender Barak Obama. Hillary Clinton is in there too. But you won't find Rudy Guiliani and you won't find John McCain.
George W. Bush isn't in there either. In fact, the only member of his cabinet to make the list was Condolezza Rice.
Nancy Pelosi made the list, and so did Al Gore. But the only Republican politicos are Michael Bloomberg - the liberal Republican mayor of New York - and Arnold Schwarzenegger who is lauded for his environmental advocacy.
The closest thing to a conservatie in the list is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts - and quite frankly I think Anthony Kennedy deserved that spot more since he is obviously the influential swing vote in every major decision now.
But as if this sparcity of rightwingers weren't bad enough, Time rubs salt in the wound by adding a whole host of liberals certain to make the rightwingers' blood boil inlcuding Rosie O'Donnell, George Soros, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney and Michael J. Fox.
And while rightwingers will surely be outraged and will dismiss the list as liberal bias by the so-called MSM, I think it is just being honest about the current predicament that conservatives are in. Thanks to four years of broken promises and false optimism in Iraq, the public no longer trusts what most Republicans say. I mean, who else on the Bush team has a shred of credibility left these days? Dick Cheney? Karl Rove? Alberto Gonzales?
So I think the Time list is just being honest about the wingers current and future predicament.

Isn’t this a democracy?

President Bush carried through with his threat to veto the Iraq spending bill because Democrats included a timeline for withdrawing troops by October. This was no surprise.
What disturbed me, however, was this quote from Bush’s speech in which he tried to justify his veto:

Bush said the legislation was dangerous because it “substitutes the opinion of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders.”

Excuse me, but I thought this was supposed to be a democracy. Aren’t the politicians the ones who represent the people, while the military commanders are supposed to be working for the people?
In any other country where the military commanders were allowed to overrule the elected representatives of the people it would be rightfully criticized as a military coup and not a democracy.

Of course, Bush is an elected politician exercising his legitimate authority to veto the legislation and Republicans still have enough votes in the Congress to sustain the veto, so we are still operating in the realm of a democracy. But his explanation that military leaders should hold sway over political leaders is disturbing nonetheless, especially in light of the right wing’s recent flirtations with the idea of a military coup in this country.

Mission Unaccomplished

Happy Mission Accomplished Day!
It's been four years since President Bush strutted across the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq. If he had had the good sense to start pulling troops out of Iraq at that point he would probably be a very popular president today and Republicans would still control both branches of Congress. But he stubbornly decided to press on with the most definitely unaccomplished mission and is now four years later he is preparing to veto a $124 billion funding bill because it includes non-binding language setting up a timetable to begin withdrawing troops in another year.
Bush passed up many more opportunities when he could have declared victory and gone home to the point where we are mired in a no-win situation that is hopelessly spiraling more and more out of control.
U.S. casualties in April were the highest for 2007 and I'm afraid they won't be the highest for the year. Meanwhile, our economy is beginning to buckly under the dead weight of so much deficit spending and our military has been stretched far past its limits. Recently it was reported that the U.S. chose not to confront China over a recent anti-satellite missile launch because we knew we couldn't back up our threats with our military mired in Iraq.
Have I mentioned before that Bush is the worst president ever?

Update
ThinkProgress has an excellent chart showing the "progress" in Iraq since Bush declared Mission Accomplished.

Worst President Ever

The evidence just keeps pouring in.
Here is the latest example:

The Bush administration killed a proposal to clamp down on the student loan industry six years ago following allegations that companies sought to shower universities with financial favors to help generate business, according to documents and interviews with government officials.

The proposed policy, which Education Department officials drafted near the end of the Clinton presidency and circulated at the start of the Bush administration, represented an early, significant but ultimately abortive government response to a problem that this year has grown into a major controversy.

....the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry faces an array of investigations into questionable business practices that some officials believe could have been curtailed by the 2001 proposal.....

The abandonment of the 2001 proposal underscores what some consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers believe is lax federal oversight of the financial aid system by a department they say is too cozy with the industry. More than a dozen senior department officials either previously worked in the student loan business or found high-paying jobs in the sector after they left the agency.

Severe failure

A government commission in Israel has issued a report that is highly critical of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for his retaliatory invasion of Lebanon last year.

A government commission that probed Israel's summer war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday of "severe failure," saying he hastily led the country into the conflict without a plan.
A copy of the report obtained by The Associated Press cited a "severe failure in the lack of judgment, responsibility and caution."

Wow! That sounds awfully familiar. Do you suppose Olmert was following the Bush administration’s playbook a little too closely?
It’s refreshing to see that people in Israel are just as critical of Olmert as I was.

Wasting our money

It could not be more painfully obvious after reading this NYTimes story that we are just wasting our money in Iraq.

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.
.....
At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

I would imagine that the projects in the areas now deemed "too unsafe to visit" are probably not faring much better and most likely are doing far worse.

most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security emsituation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.

And we can't even blame the problems on the terrorists. Apparently it is just plain old incompetence - a hallmark of the Bush presidency - that is at fault here.

OSHA gone AWOL

From the New York Times yesterday:

Seven years ago, a Missouri doctor discovered a troubling pattern at a microwave popcorn plant in the town of Jasper. After an additive was modified to produce a more buttery taste, nine workers came down with a rare, life-threatening disease that was ravaging their lungs.

Puzzled Missouri health authorities turned to two federal agencies in Washington. Scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, moved quickly to examine patients, inspect factories and run tests. Within months, they concluded that the workers became ill after exposure to diacetyl, a food-flavoring agent.

But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing workplace safety, reacted with far less urgency. It did not step up plant inspections or mandate safety standards for businesses, even as more workers became ill.

On Tuesday, the top official at the agency told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing that it would prepare a safety bulletin and plan to inspect a few dozen of the thousands of food plants that use the additive.

That response reflects OSHA’s practices under the Bush administration, which vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers. Across Washington, political appointees — often former officials of the industries they now oversee — have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers.

Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.

The agency has killed dozens of existing and proposed regulations and delayed adopting others. For example, OSHA has repeatedly identified silica dust, which can cause lung cancer, and construction site noise as health hazards that warrant new safeguards for nearly three million workers, but it has yet to require them.

“The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,” said Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University who has written extensively about workplace safety. “If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

Agency officials defend their performance, saying that workplace deaths and injuries have declined during their tenure. They have been considering new standards and revising outdated ones that were unduly burdensome on businesses, they said, adding that they have moved cautiously on new rules because those require extensive scientific and economic analysis.

“By the time the Bush administration is done — we have a good record already — we will have a better record,” said Edwin G. Foulke Jr., the agency’s head, in a recent interview.

On diacetyl, Mr. Foulke said “the science is murky” on whether the additive causes bronchiolitis obliterans, the disease that has been called “popcorn worker’s lung.” That claim is echoed by some industry officials, but a number of leading scientists and doctors agree with scientists at the national occupational safety institute that there is strong evidence linking the additive to the illness.

Without an OSHA standard, which would establish the permissible level of exposure for workers, companies can set any limit of exposure they want.

Instead of regulations, Mr. Foulke and top officials at other agencies favor a “voluntary compliance strategy,” reaching agreements with industry associations and companies to police themselves.

Administration officials say such programs are less costly, allowing companies to hire more workers and keep consumer prices down. The number of voluntary agreements has grown in recent years, but they cover a fraction of the seven million work sites that OSHA oversees, or less than 1 percent of the work force. Sixty-one food plants out of the tens of thousands across the country participate; industry representatives say other businesses are taking steps to protect workers on their own.

Critics say the voluntary programs tend to have little focus on specific hazards and no enforcement power. Because only companies with strong safety records are eligible, they argue, the programs do not force less-conscientious businesses to improve their workplaces. A 2004 study by the Government Accountability Office found some promising results from such programs, but recommended against expanding them until their effectiveness could be assessed.

“OSHA has been focusing on the best companies in their voluntary protection program while doing nothing in the area of standard setting,” said Peg Seminario, the director of occupational safety and health at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “They’ve simply gotten out of the standard-setting business in favor of industry partnerships that have no teeth.”

While labor organizations and public health experts argue that the agency has been lax in recent years, some industries have applauded its efforts. Construction companies, for example, are pleased that OSHA recently decided to relax the standards for handling explosives.

The agency had long been the target of businesses that criticized its rules as arbitrary, costly and confusing. Three of the biggest industries regulated by OSHA — transportation, agribusiness and construction — have given more than $630 million in political campaign contributions since 2000, with nearly three-quarters of that money going to Republicans. The Bush administration has promised to address their concerns.

This is so typical of Republican politics today. Dismissal and denial of science — it’s “murky” — and total subservience to the needs and wants of industry and big business, which just happens to foot the bill for their political campaigns.
We might just as well shut down OSHA for the remainder of the Bush administration. It’s clear that public health and safety would be no worse off with its absence.

I would like to try an experiment. Lets take a big batch of diacetyl and send it to all the Republican politicians. We can explain that scientists have linked the substance to bronchiolitis obliterans, but not to worry because some industry hacks and a Bush appointee have said that the “science is murky.” So, go ahead, take a big whiff!

A hostage situation

The Shrill One turns it up a notch in his New York Times column today.

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

I have been saying for sometime that the proper name for the current mission in Iraq should be Operation Cover Bush’s Ass and I believe that moreso now than ever. There is no reasonable expectations of turning Iraq into a pro-Western democracy at this point and the sole purpose for our troops to stay in Iraq is to keep the country from spiraling into total chaos before Bush finally leaves office. The only problem is that the difference between “total chaos” and the current situation will be hardly perceptible.

A dilemma for the NRA

Virginia’s “liberal” gun laws made it perfectly legal for Cho Seung-Hui to purchase a semi-automatic handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition despite having been declared "an imminent danger to himself because of mental illness" by a judge in December 2005.
This news must surely pose a dilemma for the NRA. Will they support efforts to restrict gun sales to mentally deranged people? After all, such a law could concievably impact the vast majority of their membership.

Boris Yeltsin memories

I remember quite vividly where I was when Boris Yeltsin became a household name in this country. It was the morning of August 19, 1991 and my wife and I were in New Hampshire at a quaint little bed & breakfast in the White Mountains where we were celebrating our first anniversary which had been on Aug. 18.
While we had been at the B&B we were essentially cut off from the world - no TVs, no radios, no newspapers - nothing to distract from the beautiful mountain scenery that was surrounding us. But on the morning of the 19th when we came down for breakfast we found the proprietor of the B&B in the kitchen intently listening to a radio. We were shocked to learn that there had been a coup in the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev was under house arrest. And as if that wasn’t frightening enough, we learned at the same time that there was a major hurricane bearing down on us just off the coast of Rhode Island. Yikes! You take a few days off from keeping up with the news and all heck breaks loose!
By the time I saw a newspaper there were pictures of Yeltsin astride the tank outside the Kremlin and it was clear that a new star had been born. The coup turned out to be the final death throes of the old Soviet system and it all turned out for the better. But for a short time there it seemed like it could have been a lot worse.