No wonder Cheney Shoots His Friends at Lockheed Lobbyist's Estate

Salazar calls for Rumsfeld to be fired

U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar asked President Bush on Wednesday to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld following Rumsfeld's suggestion that questioning the Iraq war endangers American security.

How about tried in the Hague for war crimes?

Frist, wall eyed Kitten Killer to be Fined for Lack of ethics

Go Keith!

Rips Rummy's Rectum Wide

Pondering the upcoming elections

They just keep repeating the same lies over and over and a fairly large percentage of the public believes them.

Just because a lot of people who originally supported the Iraq invasion now oppose the occupation doesn't mean they oppose Bush in general. Their reasons for opposing have nothing do with sophisticated policy analysis.

People have no idea what Iraq is actually about. They just want the soldiers home. Iraq is not viewed as part of a larger policy plan. The country is tired of the "war" but the fact that they continue to view it as a war tells you they don't get it.

Yeah, large numbers of the public are disgusted by the "failure" in New Orleans, but they don't have a clue as to what really happened or why it happened. The right wing created mythology of these events stands relatively unchallenged.
Did the storm destroy New Orleans? No.
Years of failure to maintain infrastructure for POLICY reasons destroyed New Orleans. Katrina didn't do it. The levee failure did it.
Did everyone trapped in New Orleans have a reasonable expectation of help from the federal government in the form of rescue, etc? Yes.
But it wasn't there because of decades of policy shifts at the federal level.

This may be a failure to me and you, but to the people who make millions or billions of dollars from the "defense" industry, from privatizing it, from the "rebuilding" effort in New Orleans and privatizing it, it is a colossal success.

The socialist economy has been removed in Iraq and replaced with the Bremer orders. An astounding success for the right wing extremists. And we are not leaving. We have .. what? 140,000 troops on the ground, bases there and Afghanistan and and an undisclosed number of private military contractors in Iraq, Afghanistan and we don't even know where else. Iraq can have a civil war all they want.

A regional Sunni shite civil war would suit these neocons just fine. It gives them the excuse, just like 9-11 gave them an excuse.

We have ringed in Iran and we're going. Hell, they're even trotting out the creepy Shah's creepy son on CNN. He has no claim to anything at all there, but there he is. Who unearthed this spook and pushed him in front of the camera?

New Orleans is a huge success for the right wing extremists. Large numbers of poor people have been moved to circumstance much better for them, according to Babs Bush, matriarch of a (bowel) movement; real estate developers will get control of the property the poor inhabited and make millions. Oil companies are not being forced, as they should be, to pay for wet lands restoration. In fact the New Orleans destruction benefited them as they were able to raise the price of gas considerably and sort of test the public price tolerance. And look. Gas has remained high until very lately when it has begin to edge down to soften the anger for the mid term election. But after the election expect close to 4 dollars a gallon. The neocon mayor is still in control in New Orleans. Crony contracts are still being disbursed. Your taxes and mine are paying the contractors. Meaningful reconstruction and clean up is being stalled. Mercenaries patrol the area. And no levees will be adequately rebuilt until at which time a private company is paid to rebuild them.

New Orleans is a stunning success. Just because a few people are whining about it in the media is meaningless. It doesn't hurt the right wing. It doesn't stop them from continuing to profit from the same policies - BOTH PARTIES too.
It is important to acknowledge that the democrats are also part of the neoliberal policy shift.

Even if they do bankrupt the treasury it is of no consequence to them. They are "starving the beast" after all. Have you ever looked closely at how an IMF loan works? well, bankrupt the US enough and that could happen here. Or something like that.

Even if the country returns a completely democrat house and senate, the right wing will still be in power. Neo liberal policy has already won. It's won. If you ask me it won in the early 1980s and all opposition to it died when Bill Clinton was passed off as a liberal. Tell me something liberal about him. This kind of government is about

1. consolidating power in the hands of a few key industries who operate world wide
2. suppressing all their competition world wide if possible
3. stripping the federal government of the resources and apparatus to deal with domestic concerns of any kind and turning that tremendous wealth - TRILLIONS - into profit
4. suppressing the population so that they can not effectively protest or change policy or have any voice in t he government
5. taking all the productivity of everyone in the country and translating it into wealth that is always directed to the ones who run those few key industries and control the political operators.

They have their dynasty. They've had it for some time Bush is completely insignificant as a personality in this. He was chosen for power because he is so fucking stupid and lazy, he's easy for the real power to manage.
So even if the rats leave the republican party in the midterm elections - and with the kind of vote rigging we've had, and the lack of political consciousness in the country it remains to be seen if that will happen - the right wing is still in power, neo liberal policy is still winning .. except maybe in places like Venezuela where they are fighting back.

But America and Europe and their allies and trading partners are totally immersed in this bullshit.
You're talking about people making millions of dollars an hour in some of these endeavors. You're looking at people (Cheney, Rummy, Condi, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, etc.) who do not value life at all, only their own lives. Anyone who isn't one of them is expendable.

And the big psychological changes have been successful. The public accepts that an economy the size of this one should be steered through the stock market, that privatization and free trade are good, that unions are bad. The banking and investment laws have all been changed over the last 20 years or so, along with insurance regulations. The telecommunications laws have all been changed. The school system and the school financing system have been changed. The election system has been changed. And we have this looming constant terrorist threat that enables the government to do ANYTHING. You just name it. Every change benefits a few people only and the public accepts every change. Its like 1984 - or the matrix - they have created and sold a successful illusion.

Blogger is suppressing my blog

My blog no longer lists when I publish.

I am being forced to use word verification for every post. Some of the hard to read nonsensical phrases are 10 or more letters long.

I've been writing them about these problems for a week and get no response.

I had some snippy correspondence with them a week or so ago. That could be why. Or it could be my views on the Israeli menace to peace or the right wing threat to the world.

But I have no doubt it is deliberate.

Rodent Problem? Paste this on your baseboards and watch the critters run in fright

What Exercise of State Power isn't Legal Under Little Al Gonzales? That's riught. NONE.

They even know what you eat.

"It appears to be the largest collection of personal data ever amassed by the federal government," he said. "When they develop the capability to cross-reference and data-mine all these previously separate sources of information, there are significant new privacy issues that need to be publicly debated."

Taxpayers pay for Bush's campaign travel

Trade unlikely to top IMF meeting agenda:

British finance minister Gordon Brown, who heads the International Monetary Fund's main policy-steering group, said on Tuesday getting trade liberalization talks back on track should be a focus at next month's annual meeting in Singapore.

More IMF news

Africans oppose IMF reform plan

The IMF is due next month to discuss a package that would raise the profile of China, Mexico, South Korea and Turkey.

This is what the IMF does.
It loans the ruling class of a poor country money, then tells them specifically how to squeeze their impoverished populace.
It says, for example, even though you are a wheat growing country, you must now import expensive Amerikkkan grown wheat, and if that means you can't fund your schools, no school. So the wheat costs more, more people go hungry, the local wheat farmers can't survive and are chased doff their land to become cheap labor for some Multinational tennis show maker or some crap like that, the IMF loan is slowly repaid and more and more economic restrictions are put on the county.
In other words, it's a racket.

One of the reasons the right wing Amerikkkans hate Hugo Chavez so much is he is interfering with this system. He's happy t loan poor countries money without telling them they must screw their pay to pay their loans back. Chavez is focused on creating better life for the poor. A guy like that is a threat tot he system ad to the very way of life enjoyed buy the Amerikkkan elite.

Venezuela's power grab to erode big oil's profits, analysts say

Aw shucks. Those poor abused oil cmpanies

Venezuela seizes elite's golf courses for houses

CARACAS, Venezuela - Three major Caracas golf courses, long favored by the city's wealthy, are being expropriated to build housing for thousands of poor and middle class Venezuelans, officials said Tuesday.

The city expropriations, which will likely generate new friction between supporters and opponents of President Hugo Chavez, are part of an ambitious government effort to provide more homes amid an acute housing shortage that has driven up real estate prices.

US Funding Anti-Democratic Movements in Venezuela

But other projects remain so vague as to raise concern among Chavistas, such as a $47,459 grant for a 'democratic leadership campaign,' $37,614 for citizen meetings to discuss a 'shared vision' for society, or $56,124 to analyze Venezuela's new constitution of 1999. All went to unidentified recipients.

U.S. officials call the concerns baseless. They point to U.S.-funded programs meant to bridge the divide between Chavez's backers and opponents, such as conflict resolution workshops and public service announcements urging peaceful coexistence.

Much of the spending was for 'in kind' aid _ anything from snacks to airfare, rather than cash. And every grant requires the inclusion of people from across the political spectrum.

Even some pro-Chavez groups got support, said Russell Porter, an OTI official for Latin America.

Still, USAID said revealing more of their identities would be an 'unwarranted invasion of personal privacy' that could endanger the recipients, saying some have been questioned for 12 hours at a time by the Venezuelan secret police.

'It's simply for the security of the recipient,' Porter said. 'The only thing we've held back are the names of the groups.'

U.S. officials say they simply want to promote dialogue and strengthen Venezuela's 'fragile democratic institutions.'

But at the same time, Bush has repeatedly called Chavez a threat to democracy, and Chavez sympathizers find it hard to trust the U.S. government's motives.

'It's trying to implement regime change. There's no doubt about it. I think the U.S. government tries to mask it by saying it's a noble mission,' said Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer who wrote 'The Chavez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela,' a book that cites public documents to argue that Washington is systematically trying to overthrow Chavez.

China to invest $5 billion in Venezuela energy

President Evo Morales, greeting Quechua Indians in El Alto earlier this month

Morales was elected on a platform promising to bring equality to Bolivia's indian Majority

President Evo Morales' effort to introduce indigenous Bolivian values and symbolism into official Bolivian life has been denounced by some as racial politics.

The Colonizers don't like it when the colonized fight back.
I expect Amerikkkan sponsored violence in Bolivia any day now.

After all, we oppose democratic rule every where. Morales was elected by over 80% of Bolivia. Why should the white minority get their way ?
Oh, because it costs the oil companies money!

The age-old system has kept thousands of similar towns alive for centuries. Now, President Evo Morales, who became Bolivia's first indigenous head of state last January, is holding up those values of common ownership and consensus decision-making as a model for this impoverished country -- and angering its white minority, which accuses him of playing racial politics in his self-proclaimed indigenous revolution.

Bush nominates 5 Divisive Extremists as appeals court judges

Israel engaged in "completely immoral" use of cluster bombs in Lebanon

Mr Egeland described the fresh statistics as "shocking new information".

"What's shocking and completely immoral is: 90% of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," he said.

The UN ceasefire resolution which ended the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was agreed by the Security Council on Friday, 11 August, and came into effect on Monday, 14 August.

Israeli Agressin's Aftermath aftermath: Oil slick blankets Mediterranean sea

[...]

The U.N. has said the spill could take as long as a year to clean up and cost $64 million.

"You have the bottom of the sea filled with fuel - between the rocks and little valleys. It's just dotted and covered with black tar," said Mohammed El Sarji, head of the Lebanese Union of Professional Divers.

Sarji recorded the footage, which showed oil spread four inches thick over a 100-yard-wide area of the sea bed near Beirut.

[...]

From Hype To Hysteria: Fox News Selling Preemptive War Against Iran

Downward Mobility

If you’re still harboring the notion that the economy is “good,”
prepare to be disabused.

Even the best number from yesterday’s Census Bureau report for 2005
is bad news for most Americans. It shows that median income rose 1.1
percent last year, to $46,326, the first increase since it peaked in
1999. But the entire increase is attributable to the 23 million
households headed by someone over age 65. So the gain is likely from
investment income and Social Security, not wages and salaries.

For the other 91 million households, the median dropped, by half a
percent, or $275. Incomes for the under-65 crowd were hurt by a
decline in wages and salaries among full-time working men for the
second year in a row, and among full-time working women for the third
straight year. In all, median income for the under-65 group was
$2,000 lower in 2005 than in 2001, when the last recession bottomed out.

Despite the Bush-era expansion, the number of Americans living in
poverty in 2005 — 37 million — was the same as in 2004. This is the
first time the number has not risen since 2000. But the share of the
population now in poverty — 12.6 percent — is still higher than at
the trough of the last recession, when it was 11.7 percent. And among
the poor, 43 percent were living below half the poverty line in 2005
— $7,800 for a family of three. That’s the highest percentage of
people in “deep poverty” since the government started keeping track
of those numbers in 1975.

As for the uninsured, their ranks grew in 2005 by 1.3 million people,
to a record 46.6 million, or 15.9 percent. That’s also worse than the
recession year 2001, reflecting the rising costs of health coverage
and a dearth of initiatives to help families and companies cope with
the burden. For the first time since 1998, the percentage of
uninsured children increased in 2005.

The Census findings are yet another indication that growth alone is
not the answer to the economic and social ills of poverty, income
inequality and lack of insurance. Economic growth was strong in 2005,
and productivity growth was impressive. What have been missing are
government policies that help to ensure that the benefits of growth
are broadly shared — like strong support for public education, a
progressive income tax, affordable health care, a higher minimum wage
and other labor protections.

President Bush is unlikely to push for those changes, wed as he is to
tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy. But the economic agenda for
the next president couldn’t be clearer.

Lebanese oil slick hits ancient Phoenician port

Chertoff Seeks More Air Travelers Data

Bush's secret bunker

Mount Weather is a top-security underground installation an hour's drive from Washington DC. It has its own leaders, police, fire department - and laws. A cold war relic, it has been given a new lease of life since 9/11. And no one who's been inside has ever talked.

Washington state's glaciers are melting, and that has scientists concerned

At Mount Rainier, which has more glacial ice than the rest of the Cascades combined and is among the best studied sites in the nation, the area covered by glaciers shrank by more than a fifth from 1913 to 1994, and the volume of the glaciers by almost one-fourth, the National Park Service says. From 1912 to 2001, the Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier retreated nearly a mile.

Black Holes: The Deadliest Force in the Universe

Bush Turns His Terror War on the Homeland

When I was a kid John Wayne war movies gave us the message that America was the good guy, the white hat that fought the villain.
Alas, today the US and its last remaining non-coerced ally, Israel, are almost universally regarded as the bad guys over whom John Wayne would triumph. Today the US and Israel are seen throughout the world as war criminal states.

[...]

Republikkkan Party Racism and Ethnocentrism Won't Really cost votes, not With Diebold around

Kerry revives 2004 election allegations

71 year old Man arrested for complaining about Son's arrest released from Gitmo

The military said both father and son had links to the Taliban — a notion Khan once ridiculed at a military hearing.

"How could I be an enemy combatant if I was not able to stand up?" he asked, according to transcripts released to the AP.

Islamic Or Republican Fascism?

Not that the dimocraps are much better or significantly different. Both parties represent corporations.

How absurd in a country as vast and varied as the United States that there are only 2 viable political parties with polices barely distinguishable from one another.

Rummy wants Fresh Wars Despite disaster in Iraq

can you guess which country sits between the 2 countries highlighted on the map where Amerikkkans are already deployed for the sake of free trade for corporatists democracy by BushCo?

Music download security 'cracked'

DRM is used to control people's access to digital data.

It is commonly employed on music downloading sites to restrict the use of music purchased and downloaded online to ensure copyright is not infringed.

In other words, DRM means you bought it but it still isn't yours. You can only put it so many places before it breaks. I've had this happen with Itunes.

When my apple computer broke (at 5 months old from a known issue with bad capacitors, Apple didn't inform me of when I bought the machine, because the thing to do is leave the problem for the customer to deal with, not fix the computers before you sell them) I was forced to repeatedly back up Itunes because the machine was displaying error messages, spitting out the DVD's without indicating if they were finished then crashing.
I couldn't use the computer to check if the songs were actually burned, so I just rebooted and tried to burn my music library.
During this process I burned my Itunes one too many times (you're allowed 5, I think) and so lost the right to use music I'd purchased from Apple.
DRM is just another way to rip off consumers and assert corporate dominance.
My generation, who started out buying vinyl, will probably never like DRM but the kids coming up under the system of "renting" music through the computers will probably never know the difference.

Rumsfeld: Troops' families have no reason to be mad

A newly formed Alaska chapter of the Military Families Speak Out group issued a statement in Fairbanks saying it would make a public call for the Bush administration to bring home the 172nd and all other U.S. troops. It quoted Jennifer Davis of Anchorage, whose husband belongs to the 172nd.

"I am totally frustrated, disappointed and heartbroken," she said in the statement. "Just when I thought we were going to be able to resume a 'normal' life and when I thought the nightmare was over, the nightmare was extended."

Bush is an Idiot

But it's okay if an idiot is "in charge" when the real decisions are made by corporate interests.

Palestinian Death Toll Reaches 202 as 'Operation Summer Rains' Extends into its 10th Week

Kanye West Speaks Truth To Power

Top Hurricane Expert Says Officials Threatened His Job Over Pre-Katrina Warnings

AMY GOODMAN: Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The storm was the most powerful and expensive natural disaster to hit the U.S., killing more than 1,500 people in New Orleans alone, displacing some 770,000 residents and destroying over 300,000 homes. The federal government's response to the disaster was widely condemned. Images of the tens of thousands of New Orleans residents piling into the city's Superdome stadium, pleading for food, water and aid, became symbolic of the government's inaction.

In the aftermath of the storm, it became increasingly clear that the effects of Hurricane Katrina were made far worse by government incompetence and neglect. Warnings about the severity of the storm were ignored, and the levees, which were supposed to prevent New Orleans from flooding, were grossly inadequate. And, as investigative reporter Greg Palast reveals in this new Democracy Now! report, there were major holes in the city's evacuation plan

[...]
Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream Read Transcript
Help Printer-friendly version Email to a friend Purchase Video/CD

Japan Makes Plans for Greener Cars, Batteries While Bush Fiddles and heaps Money on Corporate Friends

Judge Blocks One Jeb Bush Method for Vote Fraud

Experts warn U.S. is coming apart at the seams

Brace yourself for consumer-directed health care

'Democracy is under attack': Gore

Brown says White House wanted him to lie

[...]
Also on 'This Week,' U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the administration still doesn`t understand the magnitude of the reconstruction problem; but the president`s Gulf Coast coordinator, Don Powell, said the federal government`s No. 1 priority is to rebuild the area in a businesslike way.
[...]

"Businesslike way." Ah, I see.
That means no reconstruction will occur without abundant corporate welfare, rampant cronyism, galloping corruption and mercenaries roaming FEMA trailer parks denying residents their right to speak to reporters about the BushCo ass rape they've been getting for the last year.

Then, in order to more tightly seal the ethnic cleansing delivered by God the Father as a personal favor to Pat Robertson, there is ongoing bludgeoning of labor and worker's rights (in the Gulf and elsewhere), utter disregard for the environment and tube feeding more Gulf oil revenue to Chevron, etc., and other bloated, gassy, corporatists who oppose democracy at every level and suppress competition at ever opportunity, rather than tapping that revenue to rebuild New Orleans.

And don't forget the "colonial" and "plantation" pipeline crowds - owned and operated by giant oil conglomerates, by the way - they profit too.
How quaint - those names which explain the lack of meaningful response to Katrina better than anything else I can think of, summing it all up so succinctly and imagistically.

Those names evoke the colonizer and the colonized, the master and the servant, the stern, empowered, righteous, blessed-by-god superior and the dumb, knuckle dragging inferior, dark skinned people with whip marks on their backs, and the none too bright white skinned poor who crack the whip because it is better to oppress than be oppressed . The designers of the Amerikkkan system grasped that fully and were smart enough to figure out how to factionalize the growing bottom class and keep it eating its own rather than purging the masters from power.

Our current plantation house of slavers don't need chains because they have ESPN and HBO and FX and gas gulping Chevy Tahoes and Faux news and an enormous, privatized tax payer supported military that can be turned on the public in a heart beat with the cry of "terrorism". Chains enough right there.

And gas prices continue to fall even though tall the conditions that ostensibly drove them high still prevail. That's what happens when there is an election coming. Washington want to show us just how goddamn dumb and incapable of acting in our own self interest we really are. because if we were capable of acting in our own interests we would be assembling the guillotine in the public square.

Many in New Orleans can't afford insurance

Blogger Forcing me Use Word Verification, claiming I am a spam blog

I've also had posts simply vanish and I'm repeatedly experiencing connection reset errors. I notified them days ago. So much for the 24 hour response time.

Or maybe someone there doesn't like my politics.

Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity

FACTBOX-Katrina by the numbers

Sisters blew whistle on crooked Insurance companies involved in Katrina

The sisters, who managed teams of State Farm adjusters, say the documents show that the insurer defrauded policyholders by manipulating engineers' reports so that claims could be denied.

"I think we've given him the smoking gun," Cori Rigsby, 38, told The Associated Press during a recent interview at the home she shares with her sister near Ocean Springs.

State Farm spokesman Phil Supple said the Bloomington, Ill.-based company is reviewing the sisters' allegations but hasn't been allowed to question them.

Storm Approaches New Orleans, Levees May Not Hold

Ernesto strengthens into Category 1 hurricane

4 years ago Seattle Firm Warned BP About Oil Pipeline Problems

Israeli Strike Hits Journalists

Ahmadinejad: We are Not a Threat to Any Country, Including Israel

[...]
He says he doesn't want violence against Israel, despite its own acts of enmity against Middle Eastern neighbors. I interpret his statement on Saturday to be an endorsement of the one-state solution, in which a government would be elected that all Palestinians and all Israelis would jointly vote for. The result would be a government about half made up of Israeli ministers and half of Palestinian ones. Whatever one wanted to call such an arrangement, it wouldn't exactly be a "Zionist state," which would thus have been dissolved.
[...]

Israeli Army Shoots Civillians at Checkpoint, Destroys Houses in Nablus

Israeli air force shells a house in Gaza, five residents injured

Cleanup of Lebanon's massive oil spill has barely begun

Separated at birth

Old Soldiers Never Die

Good News. GOP's Engine Sputters in Michigan

Chad expels oil firms

Head of GOP women's group arrested on voter fraud charge

New Yorker arrested for broadcasting Hizbollah TV

Bush Inc. doesn't even pretend to respect the constitution. Anyone, at any time, can be designated a terrorist entity under the new Amerikkkan monarchy.

And anyone can have their rights taken away by King George's decree, including the right to free speech described in the link at the top of this post or the right of a citizen to move freely across our borders as described in the story in this embedded link.

I grew up in an America which tolerated dissent. Okay. Not really. There were the shootings of students at Kent and Jackson State, the beatings and fire hosing and phone tapping, the illegal search nd seizure. But compared to Bush and the current jackasses in congress the sixties and seventies seem quite liberal.

After 26 year of right wing, neoliberal abuse, I feel like I've always lived in a totalitarian state run by corporate interests who grant just enough freedom to keep the dazed cow-citizens rumbling toward bloody death in the corporative slaughterhouse.

The so called war on terrorism, a terrorist endeavor in and of itself, is used to justify removal of our civil rights, squash populations around the world who won't cooperate with American colonization of their economies and make us much less safe. The war on terrorism increases the likelihood of a terrorist attack so the fear becomes justified and the public remains complacent while the scum in Washington destroy any semblance of democracy.

The very same war on terrorism used to terrify the general public has enriched those who own the Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed, Exxon, Pfizer, etc., by clearing the way for them to operate with out regulation or any kind of accountability while filling their coffers with the dollars of working people who are getting less and less in return for their labor.

These corporations are breaking unions, denying health care, refusing to meet their pension obligations, decimating the environment, outsourcing to India, Taiwan, Honduras etc., while the government they control takes less from them and proportionately more from the middle class in income and property taxes, surcharges, escalating costs for everything and young people as cannon fodder.

Black students ordered to give up seats to white children

Head of GOP women's group arrested on voter fraud charge

There's Medication for This

100 tons of U.S. milk powder rejected in China

Developers Illegally Bulldoze National Park Service Land at Harpers Ferry

US Smuggling: Cargo found arriving at Caracas airport included parts for military aircraft ejector seats and chicken meat

How do the very wealthy spend their money?

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Private jet owners have an average annual income of $9.2 million and a net worth of $89.3 million. They are 57 years old. And 70% of them are men.

The average jet setter spends nearly $30,000 per year on alcohol (wines & spirits). Grove and Prince note that this amount is about two-thirds of the median household income in the U.S. And that's the smallest category of spending they surveyed.
The next smallest was "experiential travel," which includes guided tours, such as photographic safaris, or hikes to Machu Picchu, or eco-tours to the Brazilian rainforest, or kayaking in Baja California during the gray whale migration. For these experiences, jet setters spend an average of $98,000 per year.
But these journeys are small potatoes when compared to how much these wealthy individuals spend on hotels and resorts ($157,000 a year), or events at hotels and resorts ($224,000 a year). Spa treatments even fetch more jet-set dollars than wilderness tours. The average jet setter spends $107,000 a year at spas around the world.
Not that many of these "global citizens," as they like to be called, would know: Just 34% of jet owners open their own mail and only 19% pay their own bills, Grove and Prince found. This results in a sort of detachment from the world and creates "the low level of awareness that most jet owners have about their finances," they say.
Indeed, it would take a curious psychological composition to comprehend spending $147,000 a year on watches, as the jet set do. Or $117,000 on clothes. Or a whopping $248,000 a year on jewelry.

Well, they can afford it, what with the tax breaks Bush has given them. Afte all, they obviously need the money far more than the government needs it to meet its obligations or fund education or health care or clean air or alternative energy sources.

Katrina's Damage to Bush's Standing Still Haunts His Presidency

Although much of Bush's relief plan was based on conservative principles -- local control, regulatory easements, tax-advantaged opportunity zones, aid vouchers -- Republican fiscal conservatives cringed at what they deemed was a blank check. They saw it as an open-ended commitment that ran counter to the free-market principles of a president who took office in 2001 pledging to play a ``limited'' role in people's lives because ``too much government crowds out initiative and hard work, private charity and the private economy.''

What about conservative values of corporate welfare, racism, theocracy, class conflict and oligarchy. Those run counter to free market too yet are cherished by repiglikkkans as much as they cherish that first 10 bucks hey made selling grandma to slave traders.

Halliburton snags multimillion-dollar contracts

Blogger is Vanishing Posts and Not working Correctly in General. Sorry

Study: Millions wasted in Katrina contracts

WASHINGTON - The government awarded 70 percent of its contracts for Hurricane Katrina work without full competition, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the process, says a House study released Thursday by Democrats.

The report, a comprehensive overview of government audits on Katrina contracting, found that out of $10.6 billion in contracts awarded after the storm last year, more than $7.4 billion were handed out with limited or no competitive bidding.

Bush and Saddam Should Both Stand Trial, Says Nuremberg Prosecutor

Theocratic loon Katherine Harris Brays to religious Rag

The Bible says we are to be salt and light. And salt and light means not just in the church and not just as a teacher or as a pastor or a banker or a lawyer, but in government and we have to have elected officials in government and we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended. So it’s really important that members of the church know people’s stands.

Global Drowning

SHANGHAI, China -- Communities in southeastern China are straining to resettle more than 15 million people left homeless by four devastating typhoons in recent months, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.
[...]

Ford

Management intends to clear out its bloated inventories of 2006 model-year cars and trucks by targeting buyers with lousy credit histories. Ford intends to offer everyone, including so-called "subprime" borrowers, 0% financing for up to six years.

For those of you keeping score, automakers Ford and GM (NYSE: GM) first introduced the concept of large-scale 0% financing in response to flagging sales trends in the wake of the twin disasters of the 2000 bubble burst and Sept. 11.
[...]
In a May column from The Wall Street Journal, analysts from Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC), First American (NYSE: FAF), Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH), and Credit Suisse (NYSE: CSR) were unanimous in blaming the "relaxed" lending standards and "aggressive" extending of loans to subprime buyers for the rise in residential mortgage delinquencies to 4.7% in Q4 2005. (That may not sound like much, but it's a significant rise from 4.38% in Q4 2004; what's more, the Bear Stearns analyst noted that certain categories of high-risk loans were showing year-over-year increases in delinquency of as much as 208%.)
[...]

Cry Baby Ann Coulter gets her freak on

Israel Buys 2 Nuclear-Capable Submarines

The latest submarines not only would be able to carry out a first strike should Israel choose to do so, but they also would provide Israel with crucial second-strike capabilities, said Paul Beaver, a London-based independent defense analyst.

Israel is already believed to have that ability in the form of the Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, which are buried so far underground they would survive a nuclear strike, he said.

Israel appoints coordinator of possible war with Iran: newspaper

Scholars, Spike Lee Discuss Katrina

Vigilante Nation

Attacks on homeless rising
In cases where the perpetrator of attacks on homeless people is known, 76 percent are people 25 or younger, Stoops said. About 80 percent of attackers are white, he said.

26 years of right wing governance

Health-care debts typically play a role in about half of the approximately 1.5 million bankruptcies filed in the United States each year, according to Harvard researchers Elizabeth Warren and David U. Himmelstein. And, like the Jacksons, 75 percent of those who declare medical bankruptcy have health insurance at the onset of the illness that failed to prevent them from being pushed over the financial edge, according to the Harvard research.
[...]
"With each passing year, the coverage people are receiving requires more in premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs ... Employer-provided coverage is increasingly requiring workers to pay larger portions of the costs and provides fewer benefits."
[...]
Today, 46 million Americans are uninsured. And 53 percent of adults who were uninsured at any time during 2005 reported medical debt or bill problems, according to a Commonwealth Fund Health Insurance survey this spring. But medical debt is not limited to the uninsured. One fifth of working-age adults, both insured and uninsured, currently have medical debt they're paying off over time

(those covered under state Medicaid programs are not counted in the numbers of uninsured, even though they are not insured within the private health care system so vigorously promoted, defended and profited from by the right wing, so ought to be counted as uninsured for purposes of a discussion such as this).

Straight Woman Wants Gay Partner Benefits

Honeywell denies that it discriminating, noting that same-sex couples are unable to marry in the state while opposite-sex couples can.

Bill Maher

Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.
[...]

Students cannot simply list something else on an application form, said Mr. Nassirian of the registrars’ association. “Your declared major maps to a CIP code,” he said.

Mr. Nassirian said people at the Education Department had described the omission as “a clerical mistake.” But it is “odd,” he said, because applying the subject codes “is a fairly mechanical task. It is not supposed to be the subject of any kind of deliberation.”

“I am not at all certain that the omission of this particular major is unintentional,” he added. “But I have to take them at their word.”

Hizbollah's reconstruction of Lebanon is winning the loyalty of disaffected Shia

Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination? By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

The occupier defines justice

17 Palestinians killed, 61 injured and 99 arrested in the last week

Dead Sea project may start soon, says World Bank

The Dead Sea has been shrinking because of increased use of water upstream from the Jordan River, the Dead Sea's main source.

Palestinian Companies Forced to Buy Israeli Products

Oil, Gasoline Decline on Report of U.S. Fuel Inventory Gain

I don't believe the information in this news bit and you shouldn't either.

Gas is falling because midterm elections are coming. Once the elections are over price will rocket up like never before.

Diebold can only do so much. It is far easier, less likely to attract attention, to commit election fraud when opposing candidates are close in the polls. With around 70% of the public wanting the republikkkans out on their asses, vote fraud committed to reinstate them will get attention.

The fascists who run Washington are taking pressure of the incumbents who serve them by easing down gas prices.

We have a soviet style economy here, centrally controlled, but to the benefit of only a relatively small group of corporatist pigs in oil, pharma, media, etc.

Housing is in a free fall and is pulling the economy down with it, Roubini says

"This is the biggest housing slump in the last four or five decades: every housing indicator is in free fall, including now housing prices," Roubini said. The decline in investment in the housing sector will exceed the drop in investment when the Nasdaq collapsed in 2000 and 2001, he said.

And the impact of the bursting of the bubble will affect every household in America, not just the few people who owned significant shares in technology companies during the dot-com boom, he said. Prices are falling even in the Midwest, which never experienced a bubble, "a scary signal" of how much pain the drop in household wealth could cause.
[...]

Housing has accounted, directly and indirectly, for about 30% of employment growth during this expansion, including employment in retail and in manufacturing producing consumer goods, he said.

After all , the housing bubble was engineered by the Clinton administration and uber creep Alan Greenspan to hide the failure of that administration's neoliberal, imperial policies.

No, he wasn't as bad as Bush, but he was bad and not liberal at all.
When your local repiglikkkans start jawing about Clinton's liberalism, assume you are in the presence of a dangerous, frothing , delusional, indoctrinated fool and put your kevlar on.

The housing market DID successfully tow the economy though. And now that the tug boat is sinking while energy costs are escalating like mad and Bush has emptied the treasury, cut back social agencies and done all he can to trigger a costly world war, it will get very ugly.

People made money in housing, engineered or not. Some people made a lot. However, many individuals bought in at too high a price and are trapped with high mortgages and property they will never sell at what they bought it for.

And lot's of shitty, shoddy energy inefficient construction by non union labor went on all over the country as a result of Greenspan's interest rates and easy credit. But no more.

Thanks Bush. You're batting a thousand, Monkey Lips

O'Reilly swiftboats judge who ruled against NSA wiretaps

Conservatives try to curtail hotel porn

Conservative priorities invariably astonish me.

The planet is dying, people are suffering, wars and violence are accelerating and conservatives, who are completely sex obsessed, spend their energy fighting pornography in hotels.

What I'd like to tell conservatives is GO FUCK YOURSELVES which, if only they would, would perhaps relieve some of the pent up hostility they have toward all and any manner of sexual behavior.

Scientists scared to speak out on climate

Nagin: Red Tape Slowing Recovery

Katrina recovery has "gross inequalities" -Oxfam

Greedy, Creepy, spying Fascists at Verizon Impose New Broadband Surcharge Then Whine Pathetic Excuses

There's no Help from heaven either

Bush to raise cash for racist pig Allen

AT&T Follows Bush Monarchial Law, not constitution

James Cicconi
AT&T lobbyist and scum bucket

Good Riddance to Bad Trash

Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski, stung by accusations of arrogance and stubbornness, lost his bid for a second term Tuesday after polling last in a three-way GOP primary.

Electoral battle in Mexico turns to its poorest state

Mexican Teachers take over radio stations

Lebanon's development 'annihilated': UN

LEBANON: Leftover Israeli cluster bombs kill civilians

"I have never seen anything like it before. It is far more widespread than in Iraq," said Sean Sutton, spokesman for the Nabatiyeh office of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a UK-based NGO.Sutton said the group was struggling to cope with the quantities of cluster bombs lying around Nabatiyeh. "We've got a team working around the area clearing at the moment but there is such huge contamination that teams are just clearing inside houses and pathways. Fields and gardens are a second priority." The leftover bombs are hampering the delivery of relief food. "The threat is enormous," said Matt Hollingworth of the United Nation's World Food Programme. "We have to take MAG people with us for on-the-spot assessments before our convoys can travel some roads."

Israeli army fired artillery into a disputed border region

Lebanese security and military officials said there had been no fire by either Hezbollah or the Lebanese army in the region. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with reporters.

Iran 'boosted by war on terror'

"We've seen really since 9/11 that the chief beneficiary of America's global war on terror in the Middle East has been the very country that it considers to be a major part or a founding member of the axis of evil.

"And that basically tells us that there's an enormous incoherence in American approach to the Middle East.

"They simply haven't managed to work out a strategy and a policy that will work and will achieve results."

Israel War Crimes in Lebanon

- Amnesty International on Wednesday accused Israel of war crimes, saying it broke international law by deliberately destroying Lebanon's civilian infrastructure during its recent war with Hezbollah guerrillas.
[...]

FAQ on Palestinian prisoners

As of August 8, 2006, there are 9,273 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons or detention camps. (2) Of these prisoners, 351 are children under the age of 18, (3) 75 are women and 42 are over the age of 50. Of the total number of prisoners, 433 Palestinians, who were imprisoned prior to the signing of the Oslo Accords, remain in prison despite the Accords’ call for their release. (4) The prisoners include members of the elected Palestinian Legislative Council.
[...]

Indiscriminate Bombardment

Human Rights Watch investigated some two dozen bombing incidents in Lebanon involving a third of the civilians who by then had been killed. In none of those cases was Hizbullah anywhere around at the time of the attack.

Grover Norquist “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Nola. The Fema Evacuation Plan

Nola

Reports document failures post-Katrina

Many of the reports focus on the failure of federal dollars to reach their intended targets. Oxfam's report points out that although $17 billion has been approved by Congress to rebuild homes in Louisiana and Mississippi, not one house has been rebuilt with that money in either state.

17 billion? Is that a JOKE?
How much has BushCo blown in Iraq? Close to a trillion dollars. unfuckingbelievable.

Impeach these useless bastards now then try them for crimes against humanity.

La. lawmakers frequent link to FEMA

Evacuees: Where Are They Now?

Rabbi leads unofficial peace initiative

A bold peace initiative by an Israeli rabbi to free the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and renew the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is close to achieving a breakthrough, but is being obstructed by Israel's ongoing reoccupation of the Gaza Strip.

Sneaky Ass Republican Run Draft

Control of regional water and inciting war for Bush is their main objective

JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday that Israel has no plans to lift its air and sea blockade of Lebanon takes up positions along the Syrian border and at Beirut's airport.

After the aggression Israel just pulled, Hezbollah will NEVER disarm. Everything they say about Israel has been validated by Olmert, who has the leadership skills of a lobotomized donkey.

Judge Nixes Logging in Sequoia Monument

But BushCo will try again, betcha.