Office of the Independent Blogger

KSM is one of the more interesting terrorists to read about because he’s so good at evil. He, apparently, confessed yesterday to masterminding many plots

I’d recommend you all read about him and his terrible deeds to get a better look at al-Qaeda. I’ve been reading about him since I first learned about him in Richard Clarke’s book.

Briefly, let’s look at a couple of other stories that I found interesting. Barack Obama, who is very low on my candidate list, shows exactly why here, and I would call him Phony of the Month. If I had to practice a practice as stupid and arbitrary as “lying about who I really am.”

Speaking at the 42nd commemoration of the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation over voting rights in Selma, Ala., the Illinois Democrat energized a church crowd by linking the event to his birth. “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama,” he preached, “because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So [my parents] got together, and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”

It was such a spellbinding story that I almost didn’t want to wonder how the 1965 march could have led to the senator’s birth, which happened four years earlier. We might call it a story too good to allow the facts to get in the way were he not a presidential candidate.

In other news, Hillary Clinton says she’ll keep a scaled-down presence in Iraq “to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.”

I must say, I agree with such a plan — I’ve said it all along that we should’ve started heavy training of the Iraqis and then pulled out but left a few troops as advisors and deterrents. I’m glad someone else would say and do such a thing.

The story goes, Bush excited about Latin food while visiting The Mexican Countries.

While he’s stuffing his face with delicious Latin meals, he’s trying to starve the elderly.

U.S. President George Bush is trying for a second time to eliminate the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. The San Francisco Chronicle said the program, which costs $106 million, provides food boxes to about 500,000 seniors, pregnant women and mothers with children in 32 states and Washington. Congress refused to cut the program last year, the newspaper said. USDA spokeswoman Jean Daniel said the president supports shifting people on the program to food stamps or other nationwide programs. She said the president’s proposal includes money for states to publicize the changes and help people transition to other programs.

Nice.

Just so we’re clear: I love the prospect of Chicago hosting the Olympics. I don’t love it when people say, “That’s what we should fix the CTA for,” or reporters ignoring the olympian-sized bullshit that comes out of that agency.

As you’ve doubtless heard, everyone wants Alberto Gonzalez to re-sign. Don’t get too excited by the unanimity in the press. It doesn’t mean anything. Sorry to burst your bubble. I mean, Gonzalez may very well re-sign, but I doubt it. He’s the President’s dear friend and it’s not like Bush cares about this or like the American public as a whole cares about this. Even when it came to something they dearly cared about, Iraq, it took years for Rumsfeld to be forced down. Like I’ve said.

General Pace made news this week by saying that he considers homosexuality to be immoral. Now he’s saying that he should’ve kept it to himself, and he should’ve, but I must add that this whole ordeal is ridiculous. Everyone is insisting on an apology and throwing a fit. I just don’t believe that people should apologize for hurting feelings or saying something “hateful” when it’s just their opinion, just a thought, and no I’m not defending hate speech like, say, “Kill homos!” or something of the sort. I’m defending people’s right to be critical and voice unpopular, even stupid opinions, without having everyone and their mother insist that he say sorry. That’s nonsense.

Sorry.

I ride a bus, a train and a bus to get to my school and it’s a hassle. Not just because I’m traveling across the city and have to wake up extra early to get to school on-time (which I always manage) but because trains are never on time. They’re often early, and by being early, they’re late. That’s one of my gripes on the Orange Line, which is the one that leads me to school — it’s often early, and when it’s just two minutes early, but I’m there on time or a minute early, it sets me back about fourteen minutes while I wait for the next train.

That’s a problem, though it’s not as bad as, say, the deteriorating conditions on the Blue Line and the Red Line — but the thing that’s galling to me is, they have less ground than the New York transit agencies but the NY agencies do more with the same fares, and the CTA is always crying poor. Every spring, like clockwork, they cry poor and beg for money and threaten to shut everything down which they might as well do because with the success that they operate, you might never notice.

You know what bothers me most, though? I firmly believe that nobody in the journalistic world cares about CTA besides Going Public in the Red Eye newspaper and that feature isn’t so much a journalistic endeavor as it is a short column where people complain that a train smelled like urine.

They do, believe me, but I have a suggestion.
Maybe somebody at Red Eye’s daddy newspaper should research fraud in the CTA.

I guarantee you all that there is major embezzlement and fraud in that organization and I only wish that someone would go out and expose it instead of writing puff pieces or the opposite: minor criticisms about petty things. You don’t go after a murderer for stealing shoes: you go after him for murder. You don’t go after crooks because their cars stink — you go after them for being crooks. And please do not let me see anymore news like this about how the CTA and Chicago plan to make great changes for the Olympics.

How about we make changes for Chicago? And for journalism.

This article is an interesting one about the Libby trial, Patrick Fitzgerald and Cheney’s office. First, it mentions that Libby acted calm and easy throughout the trial, often joking with his aides and I’ve got to wonder: how could anyone take it easy while being prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald? I’m madly in love with the US Attorney, to be sure, but I just don’t understand how any objective person can take it easy or even appear to take it easy during a trial against him. It would be like a criminal facing off with Vincent Bugliosi and pretending he were just a scrub.

I found this interesting, too, about Patrick Fitzgerald:

The verdict may be in, but the saga is far from over. On June 5, Libby will return to court for sentencing by Judge Reggie Walton, a no-nonsense jurist who metes out tough prison sentences and cuts no slack for white-collar defendants. Libby could get two years. His lawyers will ask that Libby be allowed to remain free while his appeals work their way through the courts. As he has in past prosecutions, Fitzgerald is likely to press for Libby to go straight to prison. “Fitz is so by-the- book he would send his own mother to jail,” joked a veteran federal prosecutor who asked not to be identified talking about his colleague.

That’s the way it should be.

The article closes by mentioning that Bush is unlikely to pardon him until after the 2008 elections, which I predicted, but blames the Cheney office for the whole ordeal saying that they “crossed the line” and Rove merely tip-toed it.

With that kind of camaraderie, I can’t imagine what staff meetings are like.

Money ($$$) in politics is integral to a campaign. Besides the fact that he’s a pompous liar and a prick, Newt Gingrich’s lack of financial support from the Republican elite will keep him from doing anything in 2008, but you don’t have to lead the world in fundraisers to win a campaign, although it does help. Money in politics is typically used for media blitzes and grassroot organizing, to rent out buildings, things of that sort, but Mitt Romney is taking a cue from the nineteenth century with his personal money by buying support in the most literal sense.

Last December, a foundation controlled by Mr. Romney made contributions of $10,000 to $15,000 to each of three Massachusetts organizations associated with major national conservative groups: the antiabortion Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Massachusetts Citizens for Limited Taxation and the Christian conservative Massachusetts Family Institute. Mr. Romney and a group of his supporters also contributed a total of about $10,000 to a nonprofit group affiliated with National Review. Over the past two years, he contributed $35,000 to the Federalist Society, an influential network of conservative lawyers. And in December 2005, he contributed $25,000 to the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative research organization.

The recipients of Mr. Romney’s donations said the money had no influence on them. But some of the groups, notably Citizens for Life and the Family Institute, have turned supportive of Mr. Romney after criticizing him in the past. Coming on the eve of his presidential campaign, Mr. Romney’s contributions could create the appearance of a conflict of interest for groups often asked to evaluate him. All the groups said he had never contributed before, and his foundation’s public tax filings show no previous gifts to similar groups. Its 2006 contributions will become public with its tax filings later this year.

He’s buying off think-tanks, Christian abortion groups and a newsmagazine. He’s pretty damn serious about this campaign for a guy who probably won’t do anything in the campaign considering his shoddy credentials, his single-term, his religion in the Republican Party and the state he governed.

On corruption, some say that there’s a “trifecta” of it in the US although I’d call it a square, adding Nevada to Illinois, New Jersey and Louisiana. Well, here’s a good piece on Illinois corruption with a rather thoughtful ending.

I asked Sabato, assuming that Illinois and New Jersey are among the most corrupt states, why is that? What is different about them? “Corruption is nurtured by the political culture . . .” he said. “Through the generations, corruption has become strongly associated with politics [and] people just expect the two to go together like love and marriage.” Let’s hear from a real insider. Richard Juliano, former deputy chief of staff for Ryan, spoke at the Minneapolis ethics conference.

If not the unsung hero of the Operation Safe Road probe of Ryan’s terms as secretary of state and governor, Juliano comes off looking better than most of the other 75 people who were convicted or pleaded guilty in that investigation. He cooperated with the prosecution even before being indicted and was sentenced to four years’ probation and a $10,000 fine. Juliano said Ryan’s operatives were “conditioned” to “consider all of these [corrupt acts] to be minimal transgressions . . . as long as the media didn’t find out about it, in which case we would have a political problem, it would be OK . . . the goal was to win the election. As long as we win the election, everything else will take care of itself.”

To quote Sabato once more on the culture of corruption: it “depends heavily on what average voters will tolerate from their elected officials.”

The feds are vigorously investigating the administrations of Gov. Blagojevich and Mayor Daley. We just re-elected them by landslide margins.

That’s very, very true.

Good morning, new FEMA — say hello to the old FEMA.

OFFICIALS AT the Federal Emergency Management Agency are patting themselves on the back for a deal they reached with Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe (D) to give some of the agency trailers that have been rotting in the great outdoors in Hope, Ark., to people displaced by tornadoes that ripped through the state 14 days ago. Spokesman Aaron Walker told us that this was “indicative of the new FEMA.” He’s got to be kidding.

Mr. Beebe asked for emergency relief in a letter to the president three days after the Feb. 24 twisters, and all he heard back were the sounds of crickets. This was especially galling since Alabama and Georgia, also ravaged by tornadoes on March 1 and 2, got federal disaster designation within 48 hours. So, Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.) began making some noise. He took to the floor of the House three times this week to decry the lack of federal response and to call on FEMA to make 150 of the 8,420 never-used, post-Hurricane Katrina trailers in Hope available to families in nearby Dumas.

When we reached Mr. Walker on Thursday to ask what was up, he had news to share: 23 refurbished trailers and seven “travel trailers” (something like campers pulled behind a car) would be made available to the state. And that underwhelming generosity came with a catch: Arkansas was on the hook for hauling and installing the mobile homes. Mr. Beebe has budgeted $100,000 in state funds to bring the trailers from Hope to Dumas and set them up with electricity, sewer hook-ups and other necessities.

Meanwhile, late Thursday, the agency rejected Mr. Beebe’s request for emergency relief. Among the reasons cited for this action, including the Dumas disaster being deemed “small,” was the state’s $844 million budget surplus. Never mind that Alabama and Georgia also have multimillion-dollar surpluses. We give you all these details of one state’s tussle with FEMA because it suggests that the “new” FEMA is no better than the old one. The agency that bungled the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and that promised to step up its game is giving itself high-fives for nickel-and-diming people in need.

Bush should bring back the legend of James Lee Witt. Barring that, Congress should tear FEMA down from the ground up and rebuild it.

No surprises here.

The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday. And for three years the FBI underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over the customer data, the audit found. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he was to blame for not putting more safeguards into place. “I am to be held accountable,” Mueller said. He told reporters he would correct the problems and did not plan to resign.

I don’t imagine that it’s that bad in the FBI. The agencies that I believe have been given free rein to maul the American Constitution are little-known and in the Pentagon. Not that I don’t believe the FBI has abused its powers in the last few years. I’m just pointing out what should be obvious, but besides that, I think Mueller should re-sign for being an all-around poor Director. His agency is a bureaucratic mess. Has been for years, to be sure, but after 9/11 it became imperative that he fix it and didn’t.

But while we’re under the Attorney General’s jurisdiction, let’s look here, where Arlen Specter says that we may have a new AG sooner rather than later. I doubt that’ll happen as I don’t imagine that King George wants to fire a) a dear friend, or b) the first Mexican Attorney General, and it isn’t as if the American public considered him the liability that they considered, say, Donald Rumsfeld to be.

Besides, Bush shares Gonzalez’ flippant nature.

Democrats say we should leave Iraq by fall of next year; the military says we need to keep our “surge” of troops until next February; George W. Bush says we’ve got to stay the course.

I can’t believe it’s come to this, but let’s talk about something else as there’s precious little newness to say about Iraq right now. So let’s turn here.

President Bush was ready to challenge a widespread perception in Latin America that U.S. neglect has empowered leftist leader Hugo Chavez as he left Thursday on a five-nation tour of the region. Bush argues that strong democratic governments hold the promise of prosperity. He hopes his trip will resonate with the one in four impoverished Latin Americans, who live on less than $2 a day and wonder whether democracy will ever deliver them a better life.

“The trip is to remind people that we care,” Bush said in an interview Wednesday with CNN En Espanol. “I do worry about the fact that some say, `Well, the United States hasn’t paid enough attention to us,’ or `The United States really isn’t anything more than worried about terrorism.’ And when, in fact, the record has been a strong record.” But Bush, with just two years left in his presidency, has a weak hand. Anti-Americanism and Bush’s poor image, tainted by the war in Iraq, have only fueled Chavez’s influence in the region and beyond.

The president’s message: “Regardless of what Hugo Chavez says about us, we’re not the bogeyman,” said Russell Crandall, a former Western Hemisphere director at the National Security Council who is now at the Center for American Progress. Bush has packed a suitcase of strategies for nurturing trade, fighting drug-traffickers and curbing poverty and social inequality for his trip, which also will take him to Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil, where protests on Wednesday preceded his visit.

Protesters, most of them women from the Via Campesina farmworkers movement, briefly shut down an iron ore mine, invaded an ethanol distillery and took over the Rio de Janeiro offices of Brazil’s National Development Bank. Fresh graffiti reading “Get Out, Bush! Assassin!” in bright red letters popped up along busy highways near the locations in Sao Paulo where Bush will appear as he kicks off his Latin American tour.

Protest organizers denounced foreign investment in the vast sugarcane fields that are used to produce Brazil’s ethanol. Bush and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are expected to sign an accord to develop standards to help turn ethanol into an internationally traded commodity, and to promote sugar cane-based ethanol production in Central America and the Caribbean to meet rising international demand.

Beyond the obvious little things — like the War — the Latin public despises George Bush because he pays absolutely no attention to them and that goes for most Presidents. If you act like a good neighbor you’ll be treated like one.

And let me say: if Bush wanted to turn the Latin world away from Chavez, he’d lift the embargo on Cuba and start trading. Chavez would never know what hit him. But to paraphrase Richard Gere to Andy Garcia in Internal Affairs, “You know what they say about Presidencies? They’re too fucking macho. Don’t know when to back down, so they’re used up young.”

Scooter Libby was found guilty yesterday. I hope he gets to prison soon enough.
I’m not one to fight on the behalf of criminals, but I do believe they should be allowed some sort of civilized fun, and in that vein I hope they get to ride the Scooter and reclaim their childhood days.

The big question now is, If Scooter doesn’t find himself set free by the appeals process, will Bush pardon him? I say, No. He won’t. At least, not until the 2008 elections have passed, if then.

Rudy Giuliani says: stop reporting on my family!
Welcome to Presidential politics, Rudolph. You should’ve never got in; you could never win.

On a completely unrelated note, look here to see that the Administration is cutting food safety inspections.

And on another unrelated but apolitical note, let me link you here, dear reader. It’s a fascinating article about the body’s natural resistance to AIDS, something that might someday be of good for a cure.
And here, too, to a dear friend’s blog. It’s a great read.

Found my cat, by the way. It was a great adventure finding her, following footsteps in the snow.

As you may know, Walter Reed Army Hospital has unleashed a frenzy upon the politicians of Washington. You see, the medical and housing facilities for our veterans were piss-poor and now everyone is indignant and predicting that things’ll get worse, things need to change, and so on.

The only thing missing in this righteous display of indignation is an article from the Republicans blaming it all on Bill Clinton.

What are my thoughts? Two — when will they start blaming Bill? and I hope this gets fixed and then we can turn our attention to healthcare for every American, something that I believe should be classic Federalist in execution. I believe that the states should each have their own healthcare programs that cover all of their citizens, that they should fund it for the most part, and that the federal government should provide a fund with grants to supplement their programs.

Would work better than whatever the hell’s going on in Washington now, and it’s better than anything national.

It took the Mississippi River 6,000 years to build the La. coast. It took man 75 years to wash away a third of it. Experts agree we have 10 years or less to act before the loss becomes irreversible.

That is the lead in to this story.

The satellite map in Kerry St. Pe’s office shows the great sweep of marshes protecting New Orleans from the Gulf in bright red, a warning they will vanish by the year 2040, putting the sea at the city’s doorstep. Coastal scientists produced the map three years ago. They now know they got it wrong.

“People think we still have 20, 30, 40 years left to get this done. They’re not even close,” said St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, which seeks to save one of the coast’s most threatened and strategically vital zones. “Ten years is how much time we have left — if that.”

That new time frame for when the Gulf could reach New Orleans’ suburbs sharply reduces projections that have stood for more than three decades. Unless the state rapidly reverses the land loss, coastal scientists say, by the middle of the next decade the cost of repair likely will be too daunting for Congress to accept — and take far too long to implement under the current approval process. Interviews with the leading coastal scientists, as well as state and federal officials, brought no disagreement with that stark new prognosis. And while the predictions stand at odds with nearly a decade of official optimism, scientists said the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina prompted them to voice private concerns that have been growing in recent years.

One part of me thinks, “This is all just a part of nature and the Earth will survive it, like it always does,” but then I think, “We need to stop destroying our environment just because we can and because it will survive.” That’s just not an acceptable standard. And I’m looking at the President who doesn’t just ponder that but lives it, following Rush Limbaugh’s famed declaration that humanity can not destroy what God created.

Politicians are getting creative about raising money from the regular public. They’ve long been creative about the bigwigs and bigshots, but now they’re gaining on them with the Everyday Citizenry. Take John Edwards, for instance, who is looking to raise a hundred thousand dollars from people by claiming that he needs it because Ann Coulter called him a fag.

Coulter is hideous.
But her comments aren’t worth the money. Gotta give Edwards points for trying, though.

Lost my cat today. One of the three — it is the biggest bummer. I’m real upset by it and I’ve spent much of the day searching for Lina. My toes are cold accordingly.

Look.

An elite team of officers advising US commander General David Petraeus in Baghdad has concluded the US has six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.
The officers - combat veterans who are leading experts in counter-insurgency - are charged with implementing the “new way forward” strategy announced by president George Bush on January 10. The plan includes a controversial “surge” of 21,500 additional American troops to establish security in the Iraqi capital and Anbar province.

But the team, known as the “Baghdad brains trust” and ensconced in the heavily fortified Green Zone around the US embassy, is struggling to overcome a range of entrenched problems in what has become a race against time, said a former senior administration official familiar with their deliberations. “They know they are operating under a clock. They know they are going to hear a lot more talk in Washington about ‘Plan B’ by the autumn - meaning withdrawal. They know the next six-month period is their opportunity. And they say it’s getting harder every day,” the former official said.

By improving security, the plan’s short-term aim is to create time and space for the Iraqi government to bring rival Shia, Sunni and Kurd factions together in a process of national reconciliation, us officials say. If that works within the stipulated timeframe, longer-term schemes for rebuilding Iraq under the so-called “go long” strategy will be set in motion. But the next six months are make-or-break for both the US military and the Iraqi government.

The main obstacles confronting Gen Petraeus’s team are:
· Insufficent numbers of troops on the ground
· A “disintegrating” international coalition
· An anticipated upsurge in violence in the south as the British leave
· Morale problems as casualties rise
· A failure of political will in Washington and/or Baghdad

“The scene is very tense. They are working round the clock. Endless cups of tea with the Iraqis,” the former senior administration official said. “But they’re still trying to figure out what’s the plan. The president is expecting progress. But they’re thinking, what does he mean? The plan is changing every minute, as all plans do.” The team comprises an unusual mix of combat experience and high academic achievement. It includes Colonel Peter Mansoor, Gen Petraeus’s executive officer and a former armoured division commander who holds a PhD in the history of infantry; Col H R McMaster, author of a well-known critique of Vietnam and a seasoned counter-insurgency operations chief; Lt-Col David Kilcullen, a seconded Australian army officer and expert on Islamism; and Col Michael Meese, son of the former US attorney-general, Edwin Meese, who was a member of the ill-fated Iraq Study Group.

Their biggest headache was insufficient numbers of troops on the ground despite the increase ordered by Mr Bush, the former official said. “We don’t have the numbers for the counter-insurgency job even with the surge. The word ’surge’ is a misnomer. Strategically, tactically, it’s not a surge,” an American officer said. According to the US military’s revised counter-insurgency field manual, FM 3-24, authored by Gen Petraeus, the optimum “troop-to-task” ratio for Baghdad requires 120,000 US and allied troops in the city alone. Current totals, even including often unreliable Iraqi units, fall short of that number. The deficit is even greater in conflict areas outside Baghdad.

Why are we waiting six months for something that we tactically can not handle? How does anybody expect this to work when even with the “surge” we aren’t doing anything different? I don’t mind hoping for the best but I don’t like to see someone do the same thing over and over and over and over and over hoping for different results. And over.

Can’t say I’m holding out much realistic hope.

John McCain said this week that American lives have been wasted in Iraq. Everybody reacted as if he’s spent far too much in the Arizona sun but I’ll say this: it isn’t an insult to the troops to say that their lives and efforts were wasted. If we spend 400 billion+ on a war and lose three thousand lives and have nothing to show for it but death and debt and civil war — the lives of our soldiers will have been wasted.