Dear Leader, caught once again demonstrating forcefully how little interest he has in other countries, especially when the people who live in them are poor, is back-pedaling furiously and making savage grunting noises which are being interpreted by people who don't know him as 'compassion'.

[O]n Wednesday, Mr. Bush made his first public comments since tsunamis inundated about a dozen countries on Sunday, reflecting pressure on the vacationing president to appear more engaged in what aid groups are calling one of the worst natural disasters in history.

“These past few days have brought loss and grief to the world that is beyond our comprehension,” he said at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., adding that Washington was prepared to contribute much more than the $35 million it initially pledged.

“We are committed to helping the affected countries in the difficult weeks and months that lie ahead,” Mr. Bush said. He said the United States would work closely with Japan, India and Australia to coordinate relief efforts.
(emphasis added)

The two giveaways are bolded:

1) 'appear more engaged'. Not be more engaged, just appear to be. The illusion of appearances is everything with this Admin; the reality has no meaning at all.

2) Friendly NYT reporting. The Emperor did NOT pledge $35Mil 'initially'. He pledged an even stingier $15Mil; they upped it to $35M only after being publicly embarrassed about their lame, offhand response, a response that smacked of a town devastated by a hurricane going to its richest citizen for help and having him generously offer $100 for blankets before heading out on the back nine at the local country club.

I've got 20 bucks says that in a few weeks, when the tsunami story is off the front pages, the Emperor will quietly--on a Friday afternoon, most likely--do what he did to NYC after 9/11: there, he promised $20Mil when he was standing on the WTC rubble with his arm around a fireman 'and more of it's needed.' Then, back in Washington, he cut it to $5Mil, saying 'we can't afford more.' The promise got acres of publicity; the broken promise got a mention here and there.

Anybody who expects this president to keep a promise like this hasn't been paying atention. So--any takers?

As The Emperor Bush uses his 'mandate' to accelerate the process of Sovietizing American govt, turning the cabinet into a corporate-style league of yes-men and boot-lickers whose loyalty to his limited vision and plutocratic ideals is more important than their expertise (on the rare occasions when they have any) and the Congress into a rubber-stamp Politburo that exists only to ratify his wishes and then shut the hell up like good little toadies, Iraq is in freefall, the economy is stagnant, and the US is gaining a world-wide reputation in the wake of the latest earthquake disaster as stingy, mean, and so unconcerned about the fate of anyone other than his campaign contributors' base of oligarchs and corporate honchos that our 'president' could respond to the deaths of thousands by going on vacation and watching it all on tv between rounds of golf.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a country run by a cross between Ebeneezer Scrooge, Draco Malfoy, and Don Knotts. It's beyond embarrassing. It's humiliating. The Emperor's 'war on the cheap' means sending troops into battle without weapons. It means institutionalizing torture to get 'information' (probably lousy, unusable information because most of what's gained by torture is) because developing human assets and technological intelligence gathering is too expensive. And it means relying on 'inside information' from and the help of people who 1) lie to you, 2) promptly lie about lying to you once they're caught, and 3) turn against you as soon as they've got what they wanted from you.

Case in point: Ahmad Chalabi. (Yes, I'm back on him again.)

Evidence is mounting that either a) insurgents have deeply penetrated the Iraqi police and military structures, or b) growing numbers of Iraqis in each organization are going over. The suicide attack in Mosul last week was almost certainly an inside job, aided, abetted, and even carried out by individuals within the security forces.

Sources said a strong nexus between Iraqi forces and the resistance is what allowed them to carry out the most devastating attack on US troops since the beginning of the invasion. US forces have imposed a curfew in Mosul and have launched a military operation in the city, but, the sources say, this will have little effect on the problem, for the simple reason that the US-trained Iraqi military is heavily infected with people loyal to the resistance groups.

The bureaucracy that does the vetting is controlled by friends and allies of our old friend Ahmad, who spent the first year of the Occupation using the files of the Iraqi secret police that we gave him to blackmail, extort, intimidate, and otherwise force his people into positions of bureaucratic control. His son Saleem is all but in charge of the nascent Iraqi judicial system, for example. But Ahmad's strings are embedded a lot deeper than that--the financial ministry, civil administration, and the police and military training centers are all run by Chalabi's minions.

This was noted at the time of his near-arrest and the (temporary) arrest of his second-in-command as 'a possible problem' even in the US press. So are we finding out now what they meant by that? Did Chalabi tell his employees to help JAAS out by providing them with the passwords and security schedules that made the attack inside the military compound possible?

For Ahmad Chalabi, playing both ends against the middle is a way of life. So is opportunism. If he thought helping the insurgents would either lend him some protective coloration should they win, or--better yet--make him a player in a 'new Iraq', he'd have done it in a heartbeat. Personally, I'm thinking he was--and is--in it up to his eyeballs.

At the request of people who would like to blogroll Blog Tower without having to change the address with every issue, I have created a Home page. The page has links to each issue plus short run-downs on the articles with separate links to each one for people who may be looking for or want to link to a specific piece. That should make one of the problems with issuing a monthly stand-alone zine easier.

The Blog Tower Archives

Hope this helps.

Update to previous post: I couldn't face It's a Wonderul Life again and fortunately noticed A Child's Christmas in Wales with Denholm Elliot in time to avoid that awful fate. It was a big improvement.

Merry Christmas, etc.

It was another quiet holiday. My family are all far away--brothers and sisters in northern New Hampshire and Maine, daughter in Virginia--so not much running around to do. I worked on Christmas--there was work to be had and it was welcome after the skinny leavings of the last few months--and then on Christmas night watched my favorite Xmas movies: Miracle on 34th Street, Holiday Inn, Comfort and Joy, and--of course--Die Hard 1&2. A marathon that lasted into the wee hours. I ate hamburgers and drank hot chocolate, so it was just an orgy of pitiable self-satisfaction and indulgence.

But that's not why I'm writing this. Actually, I don't know why I'm writing this except to share the disappointment. What are friends for if you can't ruin their holidays by sharing your complaints and frustrations?

On Christmas Eve, my one and only present arrived in the mail and I couldn't wait to open it. So I waited. I worked on Xmas and was too tired to do anything with it when I got home so I watched the movies and let my anticipation build to a climax. Then today, with trembling fingers, I cracked open the package.

I have wanted to get out from under MS and away from the unreliability and instability of Windows for years. A while back I tried Mandrake's Linux system but there was still too much command-line stuff for my limited knowledge and it was too frustrating. I dumped it, reluctantly. Then about 6 weeks ago I read about a new Linux OS called 'ubuntu' which was supposed to be simple and user-friendly. It was also free, what with being open-source and all. So I sent away for the installation CD and waited with baited breath. It arrived on Xmas Eve with what I thought was immaculate timing--a Christmas present! perfect.

Actually, they sent 3 CD's: one for an AMD environment, one for an Intel environment, and a 'live cd' so you could play with the system right off the CD before you had actually installed anything to the hard drive. I spent a couple of hours on that live CD, and liked what I found.

ubuntu is an amazingly simple OS to use, so simple it's almost primitive by Windows standards. The suite of utilities it comes with includes a music program, a movie viewer, and a full copy of the OpenOffice suite--wp, spreadsheet, the works. I used the OpenOffice wp for months before I discovered Atlantis and am quite comfortable with it, so this was a bonus. Unlike Mandrake, on ubuntu you get to applications through menus and icons just like you do on Windows or Macs--no command-line complexity. A kid could use it.

Convinced that I had done the right thing, I broke out the installation CD and loaded it in. I rebooted the computer, the ubuntu installer took over, and the first part went swimmingly. It identified all my devices, plugged into them, scanned the hard drives and the CD-ROM, and then--fully prepared--began to install itself. Then the install stalled.

It got a third of the way through--34%, to be exact--and then stopped. The screen flickered madly, and then froze. Everything came to a crashing halt. I tried the installation three times and it stopped at the exact same place every time, flickered madly, and froze. I cleaned the CD thoroughly--it looked dirty--and tried again with the same result. Upon closer examination, I saw what I think is a scratch on the CD--precisely the kind of thing that would cause the behaviour I witnessed. Sometimes you can force a disk beyond a thing like that, but either the scratch was too big or too deep or in the wrong place. Whatever, after trying several more times, I finally gave up.

My Christmas present was broken. So was my spirit.

In retrospect, it was probably not such a hot idea to let all that anticipation grow into such a Mighty Wind. Falling from The Heights is so much more painful than falling, say, off a bed. I was depressed beyond imagining. Years I had waited to be able to tell Bill Gates to shove it--at least once in a while--and now the time had come and it was a bust. I was heart-broken.

I've ordered 2 more CD's (in case one is flawed, what I should have done in the first place) and now will have to wait another 6 weeks to free myself of the Gatesian Monster.

I shoulda stuck with the hamburgers and hot chocolate. Now, instead of playing with my Christmas toy, I will be forced to watch It's a Wondeful Life for the 27,000th time. This time, I suspect, I will know exactly how he feels when he's on the bridge.

After many hours of reading, copying-and-pasting, and a few minutes of editing, Issue 2 of Blog Tower is on the block, ready to be ignored until the holidays are over. *sigh* Really, I've got to do something about my rotten timing.


BlogTower 02

Still, if you find yourself with a spare moment or two, there's an awful lot of good stuff in it. This time around BT has been expanded--at readers' requests--to include four new sections: Science, Philosophy, Society...and Wal-Mart Watch. Yes, that's right, campers: tearing WM a new one every time a blogger goes after them is now a regular feature. I can think of no non-governmental entity that more deserves careful and consistent tagging (except maybe the media, and we're considering that). This issue, in The Great Wal-Mart of China, the indefatigable Eric Martin of Total Information Awareness does an exhaustive study of WM's impact on the economy. The news, I don't need to tell you, ain't good.

But it hardly stops there. There's an important post from BOP's Ellen Dana Nagler, The Constitution v God; a lovely essay on The Heart of the Dream by lars of Spurious kicks off the new Philosophy section; Nick Lewis of the Progressive Blog Alliance contributes his own recording of the Ossia Cadenza from Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto (thus taking BT multi-media for the first time); BlondeSense's pissed-off patricia lives up to her handle and cuts to the chase in Greedy Hogs in Angel Costumes; and in the spirit of the Season, our Feature is a series of posts wherein andante of Collective Sigh takes us through the typical madness of Christmas pageants with Spare A Kind Thought for Christmas Spirit Makers (she survives, in case you were wondering).

There's lots more, too, so when the madness is over--and it will be--take a look. There's something for everyone.

BTW, if you'd like to call my attention to a post you especially liked--even if it's one of your own--email the link to it to mick.arran@gmail.com.

Somebody--god bless em--has posted what various corporations have donated to the respective parties and it's a bit of a shock occasionally, I must say. I'm sure that the fact that Wal-Mart donated 80% to Republican candidates won't come as a surprise, but amazon.com gave over 60% of its political contributions to the Pubs. Did you know that? Or that Circuit City gave 96% to the GOP? Or that the May Dept Stores chains (Filene's, Lord & Taylor, Hecht, et al) gave 90% to Pub-slugs?

buyblue.org and choosetheblue.com have the skinny online where its easy to see.

It's also easy to see where I'm going with this. I'll let Mark Morford explain it since he's the one who turned me on to it.

And then what? Just what are you supposed to do with this information? Well, like any good American living in a gutted economy that's trillions in debt, all while a massive bogus unwinnable war is being waged by the most irresponsible cadre of pseudo-leaders this nation has ever known, you go shopping.

But maybe, just maybe, you shift your choices just a little. Maybe you change where your weakened and abused dollar goes as it slowly dawns on you that you might not be as powerless as you might've thought.

And maybe you recognize that if there's one thing that corporations absolutely goddamn never fail to respond to in a million years, it's the bottom line, consumer satisfaction, the almighty but increasingly limp dollar. You think?

Because I don't care how shriveled the souls of a given company's GOP-lovin' board of directors are, if they see profits dropping because all the shoppers in the huge and culturally potent blue cities -- the shoppers, in other words, who don't live in the red welfare states and hence who actually have a shred of disposable income and maybe a modicum of concern and integrity regarding who profits when they spend it -- if they notice that those shoppers are suddenly skipping nasty little Circuit City (98 percent to Repubs) and instead buy their compressed-plastic Japanese-made landfill-ready electronics at monstrous Price Club (98 percent to Dems), well, it sends them a message.

And the message is, in a calm and respectful nutshell, "Bite me."

Now that's a message I'd enjoy sending. I can't though--without a car, around here it's Wal-mart or nothing. So you do it for me: turn right around in the Wal-mart parking lot and head straight for Costco (98% to Dems) instead. And when you're going through the check-out line, tell em why you're there. If enough of you do that, the tale will be told in the lunchroom and at the weekly 'associates' meeting and from there will go upstairs where, before you know it, some VP will call a buddy at WM and brag on you.

Ain't that worth a little extra driving?

Contrack International is pulling out of the reconstruction effort in Iraq because it's too expensive--they're not making any money.

WASHINGTON — For the first time, a major U.S. contractor has dropped out of the multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild Iraq, raising new worries about the country's growing violence and its effect on reconstruction.

Contrack International Inc., the leader of a partnership that won one of 12 major reconstruction contracts awarded this year, cited skyrocketing security costs in reaching a decision with the U.S. government last month to terminate work in Iraq.

"We reached a point where our costs were getting to be prohibitive," said Karim Camel-Toueg, president of Arlington, Va.-based Contrack, which had won a $325-million award to rebuild Iraq's shattered transportation system. "We felt we were not serving the government, and that the dollars were not being spent smartly."

Although a few companies and nonprofit groups have pulled out of contracts in Iraq because of security concerns, Contrack's is the largest to be canceled to date, U.S. officials said. The move has led to fears that Iraq's mounting violence could prompt other firms to consider pulling out, or discourage them from seeking work in Iraq, further crippling reconstruction.

U.S. reconstruction officials said the termination of Contrack's contract, which was not previously disclosed, would not hamper rebuilding. They said they were planning to put the contract up for rebidding, a process that could take months, and were hopeful that Iraqi firms would participate. So far, most major contracts have been won by U.S.-based multinational firms.

Uh, not 'won' exactly, Mr Miller--'awarded'. There's a difference. And Iraqi firms have tried to 'participate' before and been shut out by an Administration that has preferred hiring companies by executive fiat that were run by members of that same Administration that those same members were in charge of choosing to fulfill the contracts.

This is called a 'closed loop'. Only 'insiders' are allowed to play, and the heads of Iraqi firms aren't.

But not to worry. Halliburton and KBR are still involved and will be to the bitter end--as long as there's a chance they can continue to de-fraud the govt of $$$BILLIONS$$$, they'll be in there pitching. The Bush Administration is lucky that way.

FLASH!!
PRESIDENT BUSH ALLOWS REALITY TO CREEP INTO HIS VISION OF IRAQ!

In an extraordinary display of acknowledging a tiny chunk of the reality of the situation in Iraq, a display the likes of which we haven't seen since the campaign when he allowed as how putative PM and accused murderer Iyaad Allawi 'might not be perfect', Dear Leader yesterday admitted that Iraqi forces aren't quite up to snuff.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - President Bush acknowledged Monday that the United States had achieved only "mixed" success in training Iraqi troops to secure the country, and said that it was "unacceptable" that some Iraqi units had fled as soon as they faced hostile fire.

With the first elections in Iraq six weeks away, Mr. Bush's public criticism of how the Iraqis had performed reflected mounting concern, voiced from the White House, the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, that the strategy for training 125,000 Iraqi forces to secure the country is failing.

Failing? FAILING? The Emperor never said that word, guys. He said its success was 'mixed'. That's what you call it when they run away: a 'mixed' success. I don't want to have to explain this to you again.

FLASH!!
BUSH SAYS RUMSFELD 'ANGUISHED' OVER SENDING MEN TO THEIR DEATHS

You don't have to give our troops the equipment they need, Dear Leader says, as long as you feel bad about it (after it's been noticed by the press).

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - President Bush gave full-throated support on Monday to Donald H. Rumsfeld, his embattled defense secretary, saying that beneath Mr. Rumsfeld's "rough and gruff" demeanor was a compassionate man who anguished over the nation's losses in combat.

Then presumably Rummy's total incompetence is therefore no longer an issue. After all, he's in 'anguish'. Although we are entitled to ask--as Dorothy Parker did after being informed that Calvin Coolidge had died--' How can you tell?'

FLASH!!
DAVID BROOKS HAS ANOTHER MOMENT OF BRILLIANT INSIGHT: SAYS 'SOMETIMES GOOD THINGS COME FROM BAD DECISIONS'

Whoa! I never thought of that. What brilliant casuistry! See, everything is really going swimmingly in the Middle East, see (that's the first part you have to believe or the rest of the column makes no sense), because that war-monger Sharon was elected and then war-monger Bush was elected and in spite of the fact that they were wrong about everything and did everything wrong, everything worked out just fine and the Middle East is more peaceful and more democratic, and, oh, just more of everything good anyway now, see? In fact, in the World According to Brooks, this is 'a hopeful moment' and Bush is a Great Man who 'understands the situation' better than anyone. It is a 'hopeful moment' because Egypt's Mubarak is saying what he has said for 20 years: that Arab states ought to open talks with Israel. That proves Everything Is Alright Now. OK, so it didn't cut much ice 20 years ago and it doesn't cut much ice now. That's not important. Brooks noticed it this time and that makes it special.

Thanks, Dave, for setting us straight.

(Oh, wait--was that supposed to be sarcasm, Dave?)

FLASH!!
LYNNE CHENEY UNCOVERS THE TRUTH ABOUT WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE

it was cold! There was ice!! The soldiers had no boots! It was Christmas!

(Subtext: 'So quit complaining because the troops in Iraq don't have armored trucks.')

I guess the next time Junior inveighs against 'frivolous' lawsuits, we're going to have to ask him which ones he's talking about: the Democratic kind where people have been hurt? or the Republican kind where profits have been hurt?

On top of the, shall we say, original, argument in the Custer Battles case (see previous post), we can now add a $$$millionaire$$$ developer of luxury condos who's suing the Forest Service under the RICO statute. That's right, kids, he's accusing the US Forest Service of racketeering because they stopped one of his projects before it could decimate a bald eagle habitat. It's as if The Onion has been feeding the Republicans ideas and they don't get the joke.

San Diego businessman Irving Okovita, who filed the suit, alleges that the Eliasons, Zimmerman and Sandy Steers, a local environmental activist, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to block the Marina Point development, a luxury condominium project Okovita wants to develop with an Arizona company in this hamlet on the north shore of Big Bear Lake.

Okovita sued under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a statute originally passed in 1970 to strengthen the government's arsenal against mobsters and drug lords. As time has passed, the law has been used against a variety of individuals and groups. Legal experts, however, said they believed this was the first time the law had been targeted at Forest Service employees.

The three Forest Service employees and Steers said the charges against them are patently false. The government workers maintain that they were acting in their official capacity as Forest Service employees and have done nothing wrong. Steers said Okovita's suit was brought partly "to intimidate other activists from speaking out. That won't work," she said.

Oh yes it will, you wait and see. In a BushAmerica ruled by fear inside and out, intimidation works just fine. Especially since the US govt isn't a party to the suit--the defendants have had to hire private counsel at their own expense because the Justice Dept won't defend them.

But more than a month after Okovita filed his suit, the U.S. Department of Justice, which routinely represents federal employees accused of wrongdoing, has not moved to defend the three Forest Service employees, even though an attorney from the Forest Service's parent agency, the Department of Agriculture, recommended to Justice that it provide lawyers for the employees, according to sources close to the case.

Now whose decision do you suppose that was?

This kind of hyperbole has been swimming along just under the surface of the hysterical right's characterization of the EPA as 'jackbooted Nazi thugs' and 'stormtroopers' for twenty years. Every time a Republican businessman's plans for quick profits at the public's expense gets stymied by watchdogs doing their job, the GOP starts screaming about how environmentalists are ruining the country by protecting us from them. Here's the Republican Rule:

Nothing living must ever be allowed to stand in the way of the accumulation of dead capital.

Nature is a resource to be exploited, and any animal, bird, vegetable, or human that gets in the way should be run down like a rabbit. No exceptions. Now they're trying to bring this 'legal theory' into the courts.

Okovita's suit accuses both Eliasons of providing false information to government agencies in an effort to halt the development and to help the Forest Service acquire the land cheaply. Moreover, Okovita alleges that by killing the project, the Eliasons sought to increase the value of their nearby residence.

The suit further contends that the Eliasons illegally used their government computers to communicate with opponents of the project, thereby engaging in mail and wire fraud.

Zimmerman, the forest supervisor, "knowingly agreed to facilitate this scheme," the suit said.

Okovita's attorney, S. Wayne Rosenbaum of San Diego, said his client had lost millions of dollars because of delays in the project, which would include 132 condominiums, a 175-slip marina and tennis courts.

The Marina Point development would be on 12.5 acres on Grout Bay on the north shore of Big Bear Lake. Okovita bought the land, once the site of a trailer camp, in 1981.

The plans call for 338 trees to be cut down. For years, the area has been known locally as "Cluster Pines" because of the dense stands of trees. Bald eagles spend winters in the area, perching in pine trees and swooping down to the lake to feed on fish.

Steers' attorney, Jim Wheaton, of the First Amendment Project in Oakland, called the RICO case "a classic SLAPP [Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation] suit. It has been filed to retaliate against people who had the good sense and strength to stand up for what they believe and to punish them for taking advantage of their constitutional rights."

This is practically the definition of a "frivolous lawsuit': one where the law is stretched past the breaking point--waaaay past it--in an attempt to construct some sort of legal rationale, no matter how loopy, to further the cause of the plaintiff. Worse, it's anti-public interest as well as silly. It should be--and probably will be--thrown out of court, but in the meantime the defendants will have to put out thousands of $$ to defend themselves because the Bushies want to see somebody besides corporations and rich developers suffer from being sued. And Bush is willing to help--thus, no DoJ lawyers for them. The Grand Old Oligarchs' Party is on the attack, and we're the targets.

Altogether now: (singing) Here we go loopy GOOP to lie....