Is Dubya Trying to Hustle the East?
Mood:  not sure
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
Watching George W. Bush's first address after Hurricane Katrina cut her swath across the Gulf Coast, I was encouraged at first by his announcement that New Orleans would be rebuilt - higher. That made sense, and moreover, it was classic Dubya - common sense response.

Then he started promising billions and billions of dollars for reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, and everything went to hell in a hurry.

Waving multi-billion dollar works projects ($60 billion, I believe was the figure mentioned) before local politicians is... the mind runs out of metaphors vivid enough to plumb the outright stupidity of the act. And to name a figure before relief agency workers have had a chance to estimate what fixing New Orleans will actually cost... the President all but invited the $240 billion counter-proposal from Louisiana's Congressional delegation... a figure magnificent in its temerity, impudence and ambition.

But Bush held out a subtlety which most people may have missed - he promised to propose these massive spending bills to Congress. Proposing massive spending programs is not the same thing as writing the checks.

Congress, especially the Democratic Congressional caucus, is now potentially in a severe bind of their own creation. Nancy Pelosi and the other members of the Hate Bush First Club didn't even wait for Katrina to make landfall before blaming George W. Bush and FEMA for every death and every dollar of damage caused by the storm, loudly demanding investigations into the incompetence.

It turns out that the incompetence which prevented the FEMA aid from getting to Jean Q. Stormvictim was mainly traceable to local people, most of whom belonged to the same party as Nancy Pelosi and friends. Oops. The press gracefully pointed their cameras elsewhere as Congress, New Orleans' loud-mouthed blame-flinging mayor, and the Governor of Louisiana rearranged their positions to cover their badly-exposed asses.

Bush also demanded investigations, and (with a mischievious gleam in his eye?) promised plenty of inspectors general to look into
- why there weren't enough buses ready in New Orleans to transport elderly citizens to prevent over forty of them from drowning in one old folks' home alone, and
- why one parish emergency preparedness official was found to have four truckloads of badly-needed emergency supplies in his home, and
- why the mayor of New Orleans was at one point inside a room at the Hyatt Regency with a couple of staffers and a laptop computer instead of his designated post, the city/parish emergency operations center.

Before Ray Nagin started blaming everyone else but himself for the events surrounding Katrina, he should have taken a little time to reflect that as the chief executive of New Orleans city government, making sure that the city emergency preparedness plan would survive contact with a category five hurricane and twenty-foot storm surges long enough to coordinate the provision of aid with FEMA was... HIS responsibility.

Not President George W. Bush's, not Governor Kathleen Blanco's (who was intelligent enough to realize that FEMA was not totally responsible for the countless glitches between federal, state and local officials in providing aid to the besieged), but Mayor Ray Nagin's.

So George W. Bush has bought himself some time by making it clear that the decision-making process surrounding both the preparations which were not made before Katrina and the provision of even the sixty billion dollars suggested for Bush's proposed rebuilding program was everyone's responsibility. Some Congresscritters took the initiative, identifying "pet projects" (otherwise known as "pork") which could be cut or deferred in order to fix what broke after Katrina and Rita.

But getting back to what I believe is a mistake the President will regret, loudly mentioning a dollar figure without having any idea of how much money will really be required to fix everything that broke looked like a phony gesture. New Orleanians and the people of the Gulf Coast in general aren't possessed of super-normal intelligence or exceptional in very many ways, but they are wise enough in the ways of the world to notice when something doesn't add up. They'll be curious about that sixty billion-dollar figure, about how it was arrived at and how much actual help they can count on from the President and Congress.

Usually, when you rebuild a house that was flattened by a storm, you get estimates, THEN start lining up financing and writing checks. The President did the process backwards, without asking the people in the area to contribute their opinions as far as I can tell. Not good.

Rudyard Kipling had a cautionary tale for those who mistake simplicity of manner for lack of sophistication:

"...And the end of the fight
Is tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear,
“A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East."

(to the Secret Service - this quotation refers to the President's possible political future, nothing else - I am actually a strong supporter of the President and wish him and his family nothing but prosperity and length of days):

While Kipling was referring to the "East," he meant Afghanistan and the rugged country around the Khyber Pass. New Orleans has often been referred to as America's "Mediterranean port" - it is on the same subtropical latitude as Cairo, and many of its inhabitants speak with an accent more redolent of Brooklyn or lower Manhattan than the Cajuns of the surrounding swamps or the Scots-Irish who live across Lake Pontchartrain in what are known as the "Florida Parishes." It is a sophisticated Eastern Seaboard city, or even, as Robert Penn Warren said, a Mediterranean one moved down to the very core of the Deep South.

And New Orleanians will be watching carefully to see what the President meant by naming a firm dollar figure for storm repairs and relief while Katrina's flood waters were still hiding the storm dead and much damage whose extent was unknown, and some of which a month later is still unknown.

The president may have been a sharp trader in the petroleum futures market, but in bandying about huge figures to repair damage whose extent is unknown, he has placed not money, but his reputation up on the trading block. Even a lame-duck President has to consider the worth of his word... at least, I had strong hopes that we have gone back to the days when lame-duck Presidents didn't wade resignedly into disgrace at the end of their terms from abusing their word. I hope I was right.

Hurricanes, Lies and the Mainstream Press
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks
The Mess After Hurricane Katrina isn't Bush's Fault.

I'm feeling like crap, but feel as though I must weigh in on the merde du boeuf emanating from the Democratic Party's designated Newt Gingrich surrogates (Pelosi, Schumer, Kennedy, et al and ad nauseam) and their groupies in the alleged mainstream media.

The Mayor of New Orleans, from his "emergency operating center" in a hotel room at the New Orleans Hyatt Regency, issued a missive blaming everyone else for the inundation of his city, especially the President of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. His analysis is a bit skewed, to say the least.

I have observed civil defense and emergency preparedness operations for many, many years, and have some observations about the mess post Hurricane Katrina:

- In peacetime and the absence of an immediate disaster or crisis, FEMA and Homeland Security basically write checks to state and local governments, trusting the local agencies to prepare for floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc., as each agency perceives its needs. Not much checking up on how the money is spent happens unless an extraordinary cock-up or scandal occurs.

- The Levee Board of New Orleans is infamous for scandals, misappropriation and outright stupidity in its operation. Last year, they spent $2 million dollars of money which might have been used to buy concrete, aggregate and labor to shore up the levees near the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish on a statue. A statue.

Before then, there have been a regular succession of low-key scandals involving defrauding of gun companies and such at the Levee Board.

- Not much clarity of thought is used to determine where emergency operating centers (basically bunkers or other facilities used to coordinate emergency action during a disaster). The practice has been to bury the things in basements of tall buildings, assuring that

(a) the Governor, Mayor, whoever would be entombed under many tons of rubble in the event of nuclear attack and

(b) in the event of a flood, these people would at the very least be driven from their emergency operating center by flood waters (I've seen it happen personally at the Louisiana State Emergency Operating Center after unusually severe rainstorms).

Perhaps the most cheering part of the President's speech tonight is the promise to send inspector generals to audit how the sums we've spent to date to assure the people of New Orleans failed to do so - and possibly to arrange the relocation of those responsible across the Gulf Coast to the Federal Prison for political crooks in Eglin Air Force Base known as "Club Fed".

Again, out of respect for states' and municipal rights, FEMA and the Federal Government basically wrote checks to local governments and told them to go forth and make their people safe. If FEMA had sent people down to assure that this really happened, there would have been sharp words about the Federal Government's interference in local affairs.

In New Orleans that approach failed dismally.

Another encouraging statement by the President was the announcement that emergency operations would from now on be coordinated from the top down, with Federal confirmation of state and local actions.

I believe the investigations into what happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will show that this Federal oversight is badly needed in many local government emergency preparedness agencies.

The Democratic flakmeisters on Capitol Hill tried to blame President Bush for something which was mainly local responsibility. They are going to wind up with plenty of egg on their faces, God willing.

Just don't hold your breath waiting for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and PBS to report on it when it happens, because they prostituted their journalistic integrity in exchange for a chance to be king-makers, trying to shoe-horn their favorite party back into power last year.

They just don't get it - no one believes them any more.

"Hello, Mrs. Matt, I am Mrs. Zacarias.... " or, "Al-Qaeda Goes to Flight School"
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: No Truce with Terror!

This article (from intelligence analyst and famous "Sovietologist" Daniel Pipes) came in the digest from the "open source intelligence" group on Yahoo.

It shows how clumsily the "20th 9/11 hijacker" went about getting flight instruction - clumsily enough that you'd think he'd have tripped an alarm somewhere.

"Zacarias Moussaoui Asked, Can an Airplane Pilot Shut off Oxygen to
Passengers?

by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
April 29, 2005
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2564
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17894

Zacarias Moussaoui, 36, a French national of Algerian origins, pleaded guilty on April 22, 2005, to six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism. He says he intended to take part in a post-9/11 air attack on the White House. "I came to the United States of America to be part, O.K., of a conspiracy to use airplane as a weapon of mass destruction, a statement of fact to strike the White House, but this
conspiracy was a different conspiracy than 9/11."

He never got to hijack a plane because two of the staff at the flight school where Moussaoui was enrolled, Tim Nelson and Hugh Sims, smelled something fishy and alerted law enforcement. In their first public interview, with Greg Gordon of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the two men tell a fascinating, sinister, and instructive tale.

Moussaoui initially wrote to Matthew Tierney at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in May 2001, using a Hotmail account with the name "zulu mantangotango." His English left something to be desired:

'Hello, Mrs. Matt, I am Mrs. Zacarias. Basically I need to know if you can help to achieve my "goal" my dream. I would like to fly in a "professional" like manners one of the big airliners. The level I would like to achieve is to be able to takeoff and land, to handle communication with ATC [air-traffic control]. ... In a sense, to be able to pilot one of these Big Bird, even if I am not a real professional pilot.'

(Blogger note: and if he'd given up at this point, I'm sure Lorne Michaels could have found a job for him on the writing staff at "Saturday Night Live...")

By a "Big Bird," Moussaoui meant a 747-400, the latest model Boeing wide-bodied jumbo jet that seats more than 500 passengers. He wanted to fly a simulated journey from New York to London. Admitting to limited flying time in a single-engine Cessna, he wrote, "I know it could be better but I am sure that you can do something. After all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible."

The Pan Am academy accepted him for instruction and Moussaoui turned up in early August 2001, at its school in Eagen, Minnesota, not far from Minneapolis. Nelson and Sims each found nearly everything about Moussaoui to be suspicious.

* He was a solitary student coming in on his own tab, whereas students learning 747-400s normally come in groups sent by an airline.
* He'd flown mainly a single-engine Cessna, yet he wanted to be trained to fly the largest aircraft in the commercial fleet. Sims asked him, "Why would you spend that much money?" Moussaoui replied that he wanted "a joy ride" or "an ego trip." To his instructor Clancy Prevost, he said it was "an ego thing" he would brag to his friends about.
* He claimed to be an international business consultant in the export-import business but did not fit the part. He lacked a credit card, paying $8,300, most of it in hundred-dollar bills. He was
dressed poorly, turning up in a T-shirt, jeans, baseball cap, and tennis shoes. Nelson observed, "OK, ratty jeans, ratty shirt, ratty
hat. If he's dropping that kind of money to play, I'm expecting to see Rolexes and Guccis."
* He was a couple of hundred dollars short in paying his bill to Pan Am, undercutting his claims to be a rich businessman.
* He lacked a pilot's license of any sort.
* He had flown for 57 hours at a flight school in Oklahoma, but had yet to fly solo, pointing to a severe incompetence that should have caused him to give up his "dream" of flying.
* Prevost found Moussaoui reluctant to talk about himself but turned the discussion to an aircraft accident involving a flight carrying pilgrims to the hajj in Mecca. Casually, he inquired about Moussaoui being Muslim. An FBI affidavit takes it from there: "Prevost described Moussaoui's reaction as being one of surprise and caution. …
When he recovered, Moussaoui informed him that he was not a Muslim."
* When Nelson discovered that Moussaoui is a native speaker of Arabic, his response was, "Oh great, one more strike."
* Moussaoui asked about the possibility of the pilot shutting off oxygen to the passengers.

Prevost described Moussaoui as "just a weird duck," and said "there's really something wrong with this guy." Gordon reports that Alan McHale, Pan Am's manager of pilot training, put all these factors
together and called Pan Am's headquarters to vent his suspicions, but a company salesman replied, "Alan, he's a paying customer. He paid. Leave him alone."

Official channels thus closed, Nelson and Sims separately decided to go the unofficial route and on their own initiative each called the FBI's Minneapolis office. Nelson reached Dave Rapp, a counterterrorism agent. "Here's my position," Nelson recalls telling Rapp, "I'm calling on a customer. I'm sticking my neck out. I'm going to either be a hero or a goat. ... If I'm wrong, it's probably going to cost me my job."

He said he would "rather call and be wrong than not call and be right."

An hour or two later, FBI agents were at Pan Am's Eagen facility, inquiring about Moussaoui. He was arrested on August 17 on immigration charges. None of the other Al-Qaeda operatives was apprehended and
Moussaoui alone sat in jail as his fellow pilot trainees hijacked four airliners on 9/11.

Comments: (1) How can one overlook this little touch, when Moussaoui wrote to the flight school, "After all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible." Or that he denied being a Muslim. The
cynicism and falsehood of the Islamists knows no bounds.

(2) In retrospect, it is awfully convenient that Moussaoui had immigration irregularities; how would law enforcement have kept him from his appointed rounds had he been legally clean?

(3) "I'm sticking my neck out. I'm going to either be a hero or a goat," said Nelson. He was perversely lucky that Moussaoui turned out to be an apprentice terrorist; for had he not been, Nelson could well
have lost his job. But the rules need to change so that a person who suspects terrorism in the making does not pay such a price if his hunch turns out wrong."

In response to Dr. Pipes' point #1 above, it isn't the cynicism or falsehood of these people that gets me, but the hypnotic combination of lameness and chutzpah. Moussaoui reminds me of Beldar the Conehead - "Alien... I don't know what you mean - we're from Remulac, a city in France...."

This also should refute the charges that Muslim detainees in the US are routinely mistreated - Moussaoui sat in his cell without saying a damn thing, when in many countries he'd have been strongly "encouraged" to tell everything he knew about the conspiracy of which he was part.

"The Wall" in Berlin, 1990 - Anti-American Postmodern Nostalgia and PBS Fund-Raising (...spooky)
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Stupid PBS Tricks
While I'm writing this, several civil-service suits from PBS's Boulder, Colorado affiliate are urging me to give them lots of money in exchange for videos, CDs, and DVDs of Roger Waters' multimedia performance of the rock opera the Wall on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If I had lots and lots of spare change (I don't) and were inclined to support what I consider the morally bankrupt political agenda followed by PBS (I'm not), I'd pop for the package that includes ALL of the Wall Berlin 1990 multimedia stuff, and a Dark Side of the Moon CD and a "Making of" documentary on "Dark Side," having been idiot enough to miss Pink Floyd when they did a concert at Louisiana State University and I was there anyway trying to get through a pre-med degree.

But enjoying Pink Floyd and at least some of Roger Waters' dark vision doesn't mean I've gone out and had a lobotomy. I've seen this video four times now, thanks to Boulder PBS (and every time they say it's the "Colorado Broadcast Premiere") and each time, a little of the glamor flakes off, revealing the shoddy thought processes behind it all, masquerading as moral insight.

Somehow, shoehorning Cyndi Lauper and Sinead O'Connor and Bryan Adams and Jerry Hall and Thomas Dolby and the Scorpions and the Hooters and Marianne Faithful and the Marching Band of the Combined Soviet Forces in Germany (I kid you not) and Van Morrison and Alan Parsons (as sound engineer) into this production diminishes it. Too damn many cooks...

Cyndi Lauper's bogus Cockney accent and capering around the stage kind of screwed "We Don't Need No Education (Leave Those Kids Alone!) up beyond saving. Not to mention the weird overtones caused by Sinead O'Connor singing "Mama," asking if her new girl would break her balls... a moment only Melissa Etheridge or k.d. lang might fully treasure.

And the macabre irony of bringing the damned Red Army - who helped throw the Wall up and mine a quarter mile on their side of it and set up machine gun nests to kill any poor East German ungrateful enough to want to get away from the Workers Paradise - to do the orchestral backup only throws the utter stupidity of the people who so fatuously praise the Berlin 1990 performance into razor-sharp relief.

What the perky PBS lady just called a "conceptual masterpiece" may in time become known to historians as a piece of dark, pro-totalitarian propaganda (those poor, poor Soviets - damn our forces for humiliating them, anyway) which rivals Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" for technical virtuosity in the service of the enemies of democracy.

Roger Waters is protesting the choking, corrupting power of a State which controls every facet of its people's life with the help of... a state which used choking, corrupting power to control every facet of its people's lives - until the money to do it with ran out. I wonder how much Waters or his backers paid the Russians to stop threatening West Berlin for an evening and do a bit of orchestra playing.

And if enough people had succumbed to Waters' vision for the strong Western states which held Communism at bay to have let down their guard and lay down their guns, how many of Waters' fans would have survived either the resulting war of Soviet conquest or the purge that followed?

But the audience was sure pumped at the end of "I Want A Dirty Woman," when the plaintive "Mrs Floyd" and a nasal operator introducing herself as "the United States" gets hung up on... twice. That showed us nasty Yanks, didn't it? We'll sure think twice about taxing our own economy into several recessions to defend Europe from invasion next time, huh?

And the Red Army was there in full force for "Bring the Boys Back Home," the early parts of which were performed against comic-bookish drawings of wartime tragedy (one of which was helpfully labeled "Vietnam" - for which the Red Army did more than its bit, equipping North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners and interrogating downed American airmen in shithole POW camps, not to mention egging North Vietnam on to invade neighbors at which it was at peace, initiating the hostilities which inspired that comic book page against which Waters emoted so brilliantly). How many Vietnam veterans did Waters check with before using their war - their blood, and anguish, and sweat and valor - as a fig leaf for Communist expansionism?

But Roger Waters is apparently irony-proof, and his audience for the Berlin 1990 concert were apparently just too stupid to see the cognitive dissonance of using a military orchestra that under other conditions might have been marching down that same Potsdamer Platz in triumph as West Berlin and the rest of Europe were crushed under Stalin's (or Brezhnev's, or Gorbachev's) heel.

I have to admit to massive emotional conflict. This music formed a large part of the soundtrack against which my life has played out, and I have watched this production four times now because it is so brilliant, possibly one of the finest pieces of art to which the term "rock opera" has been applied.

And yet it was used to condemn militarism when the only militarism in any way responsive to Waters' arguments - Western militarism in all its efficient and deadly and civilian-controlled panoply - was the only thing defending Europe and Western Civilization from being destroyed by the soldiers of the very same totalitarian monster whose orchestra played so lustily on stage.

Replace the US Army in Europe and Canadian Forces and the British Army of the Rhine and France's forces in Germany, and the West Germans' own army from Germany at any point during the Cold War with Roger Waters and his brilliant conceptual work and all the jerks who condemn militarism by reflex, and the Soviet Army would have been staring across the English Channel at their next conquest a week later.

It would have happened, because the Russian economy never got out of trouble, all the time they were pointing missiles at us and keeping dozens of army divisions just on the other side of the Iron Curtain poised to roll all over Western Europe the minute we became weak enough to make that move worthwhile. All that time, they were hoping to be able to loot Western Europe to balance their checkbook and save their politicians' worthless asses.

Roger Waters - splendid musician, immortal composer and conceptual artist - and complete idiot where geopolitical and moral analysis are concerned.

What the hell, we play Wagner again and again and again even though we know that he had no problem whatsoever with German militarism and German adventurism and the whole line of immoral crap that compelled German armies to tear Europe apart in 1870, 1914 and 1939 - where all that was concerned, Wagner apparently had no conscience.

Their music is just so damn cool.

Jon Stewart as Rather's "permanent replacement" - who does that ding worse?
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

I inadvertently left my TV tuned to the local station that broadcasts "Access Hollywood" tonight and learned something valuable, just as inadvertently - 53 percent of their viewers think Jon Stewart should be Dan Rather's permanent replacement on the CBS Evening News. I think it was a "Yes/No" question, but I try not to allocate valuable space in my asymptotically shrinking middle-aged memory to things like whether that poll may have mentioned an more appropriate choice - Chevy Chase, maybe.

Think about it, though. Even CBS president Les Moonves (in an interview I referenced a few months earlier in this blog) thinks Jon Stewart might be a reasonable choice for the job. His network's competitors probably think Jon Stewart looks good for the CBS Evening News, too - which goes to show that Moonves and the people polled by "Access Hollywood" may not know the crucial difference between a comedian and a joke. (I'm willing to give Moonves' competitors credit for having a sly sense of humor and a morbid curiosity as to how long it would take the CBS Evening News to self-destruct - further - under a Jon Stewart regime).

Jon Stewart is rumored to be a comedian (I don't see it) and does, in fact, portray a television journalist on what is purportedly a comedy show (again, I don't see more than sporadic comedy in the little of his show I've watched). As a television journalist, Dan Rather was undoubtedly a joke on what is purportedly a news program (one which spends up to half its air time editorializing against the party which more than half the voters choose every time they get a chance. That Rather, his producers and their bosses hate the President and the Republican Party is not news, believe me, which means that much of each episode of the CBS Evening News is not, in fact, spent on news).

But to proceed from there to saying that Jay Stewart would actually make a good television journalist is like saying that when Bill Cosby was playing Dr. Huxtable on his 1980s feel-good prime-time comedy show, he should been licensed to practice medicine in real life on the strength of his performance and ratings.

Or is it?

Journalism is not to comedy as medicine is to comedy.

You don't have to:
- go to college for four years of pre-journalism training in some allied but less rarefied field (which is a good thing, because contrary to popular myth there aren't enough credit hours offered in basket-weaving at most universities to fill up a four-year degree program since the NCAA tightened up its rules);
- then take a special Journalism College Admissions Test and compete against thousands of other would-be journalists for a place in a School of Journalism in which you are worked twelve to sixteen hours a day for four years;
- then compete all over again for an internship and residency, for a total of eight to twelve years of post high-school education... just to work at a local paper or radio station.

You don't have to have one hour of post-baccalaureate/graduate school education in order to work as a journalist.

You don't have to pass a state-administered licensure exam and/or a nationally-standardized journalism board exam in order to practice journalism.

If you got your journalism training overseas, you are not required to pass a Examination for Foreign Journalism Graduates before being allowed to practice journalism in this country.

There are no significant barriers to Jon Stewart's crossing over from playing a journalist on television to being a journalist on television. He is not obliged to make the stereotypical disclaimer from cold medicine ads, "I'm not a journalist, I just play one on TV."

I just can't decide who should be more offended by the breathless buzz that Jon Stewart might make the transition from mediocre comic manque to journalist manque - real journalists or real comedians?

The People's Republic of China and the United States of America now have interlocking directorates
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dumb Bipartisan Tricks

Useful Phrases for the World of 2015:

That kick in the ribs was wonderful, Sir, may I have another?

That's my last kidney. Please consider not harvesting it.

My home is your home - shall we sign the deed now, Comrade?

 

Of course I'm not resentful because you nuked the West Coast! At least you got Hollywood.

I have just added a new topic category, "Dumb Bipartisan Tricks," to this blog because the White House has really done something dumb, had bipartisan support for it on the Hill, and I just found out about it. I'd feel worse about missing this story when it might have made a difference (a blogger storm during the confirmation hearings, for example), but I made the mistake of thinking that something this heavy would have made the major network news shows. It didn't, that I can tell.

Consider Elaine Chao for a minute. Her father, James S.C. Chao, is chairman and chief executive of Foremost Maritime Corporation of New York. He ships goods to China and buys ships from the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Mr. Chao and Chinese President Jiang Zemin were college classmates in Shanghai and have kept in touch ever since. Chao, his daughter Elaine Chao and her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell visited China and met with Jiang in 1994. In 1995, Chao returned to receive an honorary professorship and presidency at the Shanghai Maritime College, and his daughter went with him then, too.

Now, if you were President of the United States, charged by law and obliged under oath to a God with Whom you're supposedly on good terms with defending the Constitution and the People of our country, and you were choosing someone to be Secretary of Labor - to protect American workers and defend them from unfair competition from overseas, and really do it, not just go through the motions - and along with the President, defend the Constitution and the people of the United States, would you pick this lady?

I have never as much as Emailed, much less met Elaine Chao. I confess that I don't know what she would do if placed in a position where the business and political interests of her father and her husband were to conflict with the good of the workers of the United States and its people in general.

The problem is, it doesn't look good, folks. The People's Republic of China and the United States of America now have interlocking directorates.

Chao has real conflicts of interest and has used her political contacts to get an analyst at the Heritage Foundation (which used to be a conservative think tank, but should be registered as an agent of the Chinese government) fired for saying that the United States should hold up on approval of enhanced trade relations with China until national security issues relating to China were resolved.

Why? Apart from this guy's reports being a large part of the supporting documentation for the Cox Report (which, you may recall, blew the covers all the way off the stories about Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, the transfer of ICBM design information by Loral Hughes to the Chinese Army, and the sale of supercomputers with nuclear weapons design information still on them to China).

It must be hard to see a family friend like Jiang Zemin have his most favored nation trading status and World Trade Organization membership held up because he turns out to have authorized massive spying against our country - spying which had as its object improving Red China's ability to kill Americans. But she got her revenge on that Heritage analyst. And now she's in the Cabinet.

It could also have something to do with Heritage donor Hank Greenberg (who gave Heritage $180,000 in 1998 and at least $100,000 a year for more than a decade) communicating his displeasure with the analyst's reports. Greenberg does a lot of business with Chinese clients through his insurance company AIG (American International Group), and presumably would have to keep Chinese regulators happy to continue doing so. Greenberg and AIG have also been good to Chao's husband Mitch McConnell's Senate campaigns through their PAC. AIG also does a lot of business with Henry Kissinger, who (through Kissinger Associates) has been a tireless hired gun for American companies wanting better access to Chinese markets, and for huge Communist dictatorships wanting better control of Congress. Conversely, Greenberg, who has been a staunch lobbyist for China on the Hill through his US-China Business Council in the past, is rumored to be a prime source of funding for Kissinger's firm.

I don't know who I'm angrier with:

- Bush for nominating someone with a number of clear conflicts of interest (as Secretary of Labor, Chao automatically gets a Top Secret clearance, something someone with her family connections might otherwise have trouble getting, being family friends with the leader of a major military threat to the United States whose generals have threatened to drop a nuclear weapon on Los Angeles if we defend Taiwan independence) or

- Congress for rolling over on her nomination, or

- the mainstream media, who should have been squawking about this incredibly bone-headed move from the word go, drumming the facts I have just outlined into our brains, as they tried to do with those faked Air National Guard memos.

What gives? Bush puts a family friend of someone who had his finger on the button controlling a nuke aimed at L.A. (among other places he is sworn to defend) in the Cabinet and Congress and Big Media give him a pass on it?  I had to get this information from World Net Daily, which is very far from being part of the mainstream media.

Weeeellll, part of the problem is that China has been very bipartisan in how it doles out political contributions.

We all know about how good the Chinese Army (whose Second Artillery Division would be in charge of vaporizing the greater Los Angeles area in the event that we decide to make the Taiwan War a contest) were to Clinton and Gore's campaigns. We aren't as hip to the fact that (for example) Senator Feinstein's (D, Calif) husband is on the board of COSCO [The Chinese Army's Chinese Overseas Shipping Corporation] and has other investments in China. Because of this, Feinstein, who is energetic in drawing attention to Bush foibles that pale in comparison to this, has remained mum. By contrast, the late Paul Wellstone, Senator, renowned liberal Democrat and all-around good guy apparently either didn't drink from the Chinese cup or didn't let it affect him, because he was one of the people who was instrumental in getting Chinese labor camp survivor Harry Wu before Congressional subcommittees to testify about the people we were about to give "normal" trade status to.

I think if it were any other country in the world, except possibly for Russia, the very fact that they have what can only be described as a gulag more horrible than the Soviets' - Stalin, at least, never made side money by harvesting his prisoners organs - would have derailed their chances of getting any trade status with us. Instead, we (and I'm just as guilty here as anyone else) buy tons and tons of things which, for all we know, may have been made by those very prisoners while they wait to die from hunger, disease, or... one organ harvest too many. If Wal-Mart were a sovereign state, they would be China's fifth largest trading partner. How many other Senators, Republican, Democrat or Jim Jeffords, are in China's deep pocket? And why aren't we, the voters aware of this?

When Big Media wants us to know something, we bloody well know it - not only through the news, but what is loosely called the entertainment media. David Letterman has taken the at times lonely position (say, during the Oscars or when the weather's nice in Malibu) of Bush-Hater of the Night, while Jay Leno (who at least is somewhat bipartisan with his jokes and has Dennis Miller over to do stand-up dissections of the Left) also manages to get the Democratic party line out there in his jokes - but they're not plausible jabs at Bush, just the sort of stuff you might expect to get if you're mildly dyslexic or whatever the President is.

Why don't we know about the hijacking of our Government by the Communist Chinese from these guys, or one of the always politically-aware prime-time shows, like Law & Order, whose screenwriters managed to call the President a liar on WMD in Iraq in dialogue between the detectives on the show, or ER, which basically insinuates the Democratic Party's platform into their plot a plank at a time? Oops, I forgot - their advertisers might want to sell stuff in China, too. Isn't the subornment of BOTH major political parties in this country by a foreign power that spies on us intensively, has forced an aircraft of ours down over international waters, and declared its readiness to use nuclear weapons on American cities, AND is in the midst of the greatest military build-up (for any country) since World War II a story for the big mainstream media?

Why haven't even Frontline or Bill Moyers' show NOW run features on this? I always thought the virtue of PBS was its independence from corporate funding (that's baloney - they depend on money from corporate charitable foundations, which means a corporation - ExxonMobil, for example - offended by something they saw on PBS would have to make a phone call to someone else who would make a phone call to PBS.... ) but it seems that even they don't see this elephant pacing around the room - which, again, says loads about the priorities of the foundations which prop PBS up.

The Eleventh Commandment of PBS must be "Thou shalt not make a liberal Democrat look like a unprincipled crook." Especially Senator Hillary Clinton (D, NY), who sits on Wal-Mart's board of directors and whose husband Bill Clinton made sure the Chinese got up-to-date nuclear weapon and ICBM designs in the 1990s, or Senator Barbara Boxer, (D, CA) or Senator Diane Feinstein, both of whom have gotten much more than fortune cookies from the People's Republic of China.

I guess THAT'S where Hitler and Tojo screwed up - they didn't buy the major political parties and the press of England and America off with trade and bribes while they were re-arming for Round Two. The Nazis could have pretty well ridden the Channel ferries into England unopposed. Meanwhile, the Western Continental Divide might have had new significance as the postwar border between Japan and Nazi Germany.

But Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, William Shirer and Andy Rooney wouldn't have been able to say anything to the people had they wanted to, because their bosses, or their bosses' bosses would have been afraid of offending those famous contributors to both parties' political campaigns, Krupp and Mitsubishi.

How's your Chinese, everybody?

WILL SOMEONE INVOLVED WITH THIS MESS GROW A CONSCIENCE, PLEASE? OR A BRAIN, A BRAIN WOULD BE NICE, TOO.

From an editorial page in Romania...
Mood:  surprised
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
Lately, and especially during the election, we were force-fed information by our news media about how the rest of the world despises us because of things like the war in Iraq. To hear them talk, no one over there ever disagrees with the people who have nothing to do but show up at street rallies to burn the President in effigy and trample and spit on our flag.

Well, this came in my Email the other day. It's an editorial in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei (which translates to "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day"). A fellow over there named Cornel Nistorescu sent in a letter and the paper ran it. So much for European opinion being solidly against us. Then again, the Romanians can probably remember being oppressed by Muslims recently enough that they aren't interested in having it happen again.

"God Bless America
We rarely get a chance to see another country's editorial about the USA.
Read this excerpt from a Romanian Newspaper.

The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title "C"ntarea Americii, meaning "Ode To America") in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day".

An Ode to America~

Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color!
They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.

Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, and the secret services that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about. The Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!" I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours.

Listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people. How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being?

Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion...Only freedom can work such miracles.

Cornel Nistorescu"

Thanks, Mr. Nistorescu. And good luck with your country's own democracy. We appreciate the help your people are giving us in the Coalition of the Willing, and appearances to the contrary, we don't forget our friends.

The last one out of NORAD, please turn out the lights....
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Take THAT, you...

(the following post is based on the text of a letter to the editor of the Weekly Standard regarding the Canadian Prime Minister's paranoid rant about US military forces using Canadian airspace to intercept inbound enemy missiles. It remains in the form of that letter for readability's sake but has been edited somewhat from the version sent to the Weekly Standard) Editor, the Weekly Standard Dear Editor, Jonathan Karl, in his excellent "Condiplomacy," brings up Canadian prime minister Paul Martin's contentious statement regarding our return to an active missile defense strategy without asking permission from Ottawa first -- "This is our space, our airspace. We're a sovereign nation and you don't intrude on a sovereign nation's airspace without seeking permission." The sudden procedural issues which soon afterward prevented a scheduled meeting in Ottawa between the Secretary of State and the Canadian government might have given Prime Minister Martin some time to consult the treaties under which the air defense issues common to both Canada and the United States have been managed for the past forty-seven years. What is now formally called "the North American Aerospace Defense Command" was formed on May 12, 1958 under the name "North American Air Defense Command," which most Americans and Canadians recognize under its popular acronym "NORAD." According to the article on NORAD in wikipedia, the US and Canada already know who's flying in whose airspace - "Aerospace warning or integrated tactical warning and attack assessment (ITW/AA) covers the monitoring of man-made objects in space, and the detection, validation, and warning of attack against North America by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles. Aerospace control includes providing surveillance and control of Canadian and United States airspace."

This function of NORAD implies that Canada and the United States are continually aware of all military and commercial traffic (regardless of nationality) in their respective airspaces and in space. Mr. Martin may simply have been ignorant of this - or when he made his intemperate remarks, he may have intended to mislead his audience into believing that there was a significant danger of US aircraft or spacecraft entering Canadian airspace uninvited. Canadian representatives in NORAD (which has command and control facilities in Colorado, Alaska, Winnipeg and Manitoba) are presumably as aware of aerospace traffic as the agency's American contingent. They would be well-positioned to detect and report to their own government the supposed violations of Canadian airspace that their head of government tried to imply were a significant problem between our two countries in his petulant outburst.

The issue Prime Minister Martin raised is a bogus one - Canada doesn't own the space (defined at various heights above ground for various uses) above her territory and has no standing to ban us from destroying inbound enemy missiles in that space. Even if the World Court were to rule that, for the purposes of American missile defense, the galaxy was divided into nationally-controlled cones of space projecting from Earth infinitely outward, shaped in cross-section like the geographic borders of the Earth's nations, the United States would have an excellent defense from charges of trespassing into Canadian - what should we call it, "space" space? - in that millions of human lives were at risk and exigent measures - even smacking an inbound nuclear weapon into pieces 108 miles over Canada's sacred soil - were in order to save them.

NORAD's existence dates back to a time before the ABM Treaty, when the United States did, in fact, own a multi-layered, complex and potentially very effective active missile defense system (if it had been fully implemented and not traded away in a fit of Kissingerian realpolitik that gave us nothing in return). The ABM Treaty adopted in the early 1970s was one of the most tangible features of the "Mutual Assured Destruction" (MAD) rubric under which US and Soviet nuclear defense policy was supposed to work - in which protection of the national populaces was deliberately neglected and only a limited attempt made to destroy enemy missiles aimed at a few specially-designated sites in both countries. To suggest the cooperation between Canada and the United States in NORAD is somehow affected by our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty is disingenuous. The ABM Treaty did not exist for fifteen years when NORAD came to be, so NORAD could not in any way have been predicated on American participation in the ABM treaty.

Thus Paul Martin is either misleading his people on purpose about the significance of the US's missile defense program or he is massively ignorant of the issues at stake there - while we were a signatory to the ABM Treaty, we and our allies were the only signatories to the treaty committed to adhering to its terms. Martin's friends in Russia cheated on the ABM Treaty in a way that effectively invalidated the treaty and would have tilted the strategic table in Russia's favor had a nuclear war actually happenned. All signatories to the ABM Treaty have the right to withdraw from that treaty after giving 90 days' notice if they consider that their overriding national interests were harmed by the treaty. Our formal withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in order to legally pursue active missile defense only incidentally redressed a major imbalance in Russia's favor while protecting our own national interests. As I have explained earlier in this letter, Paul Martin's bellicose admonition to the United States to avoid infringing on Canadian airspace is either - deliberate buncombe intended to pander to the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping Canada or - a signal of the Canadian government's desire to withdraw from collective efforts to defend North America from missile attack or significantly modify its participation in those activities. Perhaps the United States of America should re-examine our current level of comfort with having Mr. Martin's sworn subordinates in Canadian Forces walking around our high-value defense installations. Since the Prime Minister of Canada routinely deprecates the defense policy of the United States of America and has indicated a willingness to seek military cooperation with China - a government which has threatened to use nuclear weapons on American cities over the Taiwan issue - it may be prudent to reconsider Canada's place in our strategic defense.

Suddenly, PM Martin's reluctance to have intercepts of incoming nuclear missiles happen anywhere near Canada makes sense - if one takes Canada's announced support for the "one China" policy under which China has stated they will take Taiwan over one way or another, then it would be impolitic for Canada to help us defend ourselves from a Chinese missile attack launched because our government obeyed the US-Taiwan Relations Act and defended Taiwan from Communist invasion. Nothing else really accounts for the strength of Prime Minister Martin's reaction to our work in missile defense as well as an awareness that such defense may have near-term consequences and may (from the Chinese perspective) involve Canada whether she actively participates in our missile defense or not.

The Chinese may be placing strong behind-the-scenes pressure on Canada to participate in the international campaign against the US missile defense program and to use territorial considerations (valid or not) to further impair our missile defense, making an American defense of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion more likely. This would fit the recent Chinese pattern of bullying or pressuring potential allies of countries they intend to attack. Relying on a sycophantic courtier of the country launching nuclear missiles at Los Angeles or Seattle (in the event that the Chinese are as good as their word in the event of a conflict over Taiwan) for crucial data and analysis regarding those inbound missiles may not be the most intelligent thing for us to do. It may well be that the Canadians have also been quietly "counselled" by China that fulfilling their obligations under NORAD in the event of a Taiwan War would pull Canada into war with China. It may be the sad duty of the United States' government to regard Canada as an untrustworthy ally - owing to its Prime Minister's recent statements - which should not have access to information regarding the defense of the United States from air and space-borne attack - and act accordingly. We should be developing intelligence resources independent of our NORAD assets in Canada to inform us of indications of space or air attack by nations toward which Canada has made strong political overtures. Our participation in UKUSA and other intelligence-sharing activities involving Canada may also have to be re-evaluated, given Prime Minister Martin's attitude toward the United States.

For example, the US and Canada have been "guests" in Chinese signal intelligence (SIGINT) facilities during the Cold War (when the UKUSA countries and China shared a requirement for SIGINT on the Soviet Union), but tension resulting from Chinese military moves against our allies Taiwan and Japan (both of whom we are required by treaty to defend from the sorts of attacks China seems to be preparing to make) will certainly result in modifications to those arrangements as far as the US is concerned. Where will Canada stand on issues like these under Paul Martin's leadership? Will they feel compelled to continue sharing SIGINT with China under memorandums of understanding to which the US no longer subscribes? It may be that NORAD and UKUSA may have both been overtaken by political events, at least where Canada and her Prime Minister are concerned.

New Democrat Power Blocs/Bumper Snickerz
The Democrats only did as well as they did (they took the State Assembly back here in Colorado for the first time in many years) because they've discovered new blocs of voters previously unavailable before it became possible to vote without photo I.D. if someone "vouches" for you:

The bumper stickers shown above aren't my work - they can be purchased at www.bumpersnickerz.com.

Just in case you thought we didn't need nuclear bunker busters...
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Instant gratification is not something I'm used to, but

- just last night I posted a blog entry castigating Rep. David Hobson's (R, Ohio) choice to withhold funding for development of advanced design nuclear weapons, some of them known colloquially as "nuclear bunker busters," potentially capable of digging through even deep and well-armored bunkers to destroy enemy leadership targets or special weapons by bottling it up in his House subcommittee.

- this morning, this article appears in the Yahoo osint ("Open Source Intelligence") group mail digest:

"The Associated Press - Vienna, Friday, March 4, 2005. "Facility would be resistant to an attack":

"Iran is using reinforced materials and tunneling deep underground to store nuclear components - measures meant to make the facility resistant to "bunker busters" and other special weaponry in case of an attack, diplomats said Thursday.

The diplomats spoke as a 35-country meeting of the UN atomic agency ended more than three days of deliberations focusing on Iran and North Korea, another nation of nuclear concern.

An agency review read at the meeting faulted Tehran for starting work on the tunnel at Isfahan without informing the International Atomic Energy Agency
beforehand.

The review said Iran, following prodding by the IAEA, has over the past few months provided "preliminary design information" on the tunnel in the central city that is home to the country's uranium enrichment program, and said construction began in September "to increase capacity, safety and security of nuclear material."

The IAEA also said Iran was ignoring calls to scrap plans for a heavy water reactor and continuing construction. Commenting on that Thursday, a diplomat
said satellite imagery had revealed that work in the city of Arak had progressed to the point where crews "were pouring the foundations."

Spent fuel from heavy water reactors can yield significant amounts of bomb-grade plutonium.

Asked for details on the tunnel, a diplomat familiar with Iran's dossier said parts of it would run as deep as nearly one kilometer, or about half a mile, below ground and would be constructed of hardened concrete and other special materials meant to withstand severe air attacks.

Other diplomats said such moves were motivated by Iranian concerns of a strike by the United States or Israel; both countries accuse Iran of trying to secretly build nuclear weapons. All of the envoys spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Hundreds of bunker busters were used in U.S. airstrikes on hostile fortified underground command centers, living quarters and storage areas in Afghanistan and Iran.

Last year Israel said it was buying about 5,000 smart bombs from Washington, including 500 1-ton bunker busters capable of destroying concrete walls as thick as two meters, or six feet, fueling speculation of possible preparation for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

While not ruling out the possibility of a U.S. attack, Washington has toned down its rhetoric against Iran. Washington is awaiting the results of
European negotiations aimed at getting Tehran to renounce all plans to enrich uranium in exchange for economic concessions and other forms of support - and is even considering backing such incentives.

Uranium enrichment is "dual use," which means it can generate fuel for nuclear power as well as form the core of warheads."

(BLOGGER NOTE: However, there are plenty of enrichment facilities that would sell Iran fuel rods which are not easy to re-manufacture into primary fissile elements for nuclear weapons.

Once upon a time, Iranian power plants were going to get their fuel rods made in Russia, but we're not hearing that story lately. Now the Iranians are enriching their own uranium - supposedly to make fuel rods, probably to make nukes. What a surprise. - Dr. Truth)

"President George W. Bush said fears that Washington was preparing an attack were "ridiculous," but he also said last week that "all options are on the
table."

Iran links its fear of an attack to a decision, made during a debate at the Vienna meeting, a gathering of the board of governors of the IAEA, to bar UN
nuclear inspectors from some sensitive sites.

Suggesting that leaks could be exploited by Iran's enemies, a senior Iranian envoy, Sirous Nasseri, said Tehran's worries about "confidentiality of
information" gathered on such visits "are more intense in view of potential threats of military strikes" against facilities visited by the agency.

Earlier, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, said outside the meeting that the "ball is very much in Iran's court to come clean" by cooperating to clear lingering suspicions about possible nuclear weapons ambitions. Still, the agency has not been able to support U.S. assertions
that Iran's programs are aimed at making nuclear weapons."

(BLOGGER NOTE: Iran's just spending a lot of money for special plants to do reprocessing they'd get done for much less money by shipping their fuel rods to reprocessing facilities in Russia or France or Britain or Japan or the US.

The only difference is that by doing their own re-processing, they get to keep the plutonium produced in the fuel rods, which is useful mainly in... nuclear weapons.

And the clincher is that they're putting money into heavy water reactors, which traditionally, from the time of the Manhattan Project, have been used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons - Dr. Truth)

So there we have it - a short-term requirement for the nuclear bunker busters that Rep. David Hobson has bottled up in his House subcommittee for reasons not adequately explored either:
- in open House debate or
- open discussions with personnel from the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos or Livermore, or
- even in news documentaries (where Rep. Hobson would likely find sympathetic ears for his assertion that we don't need advanced nuclear weapon designs).

The problem with conventional bunker busters is that they will break through two meters of concrete reliably. The Iranians know this, and can count up to three, and even beyond, and pour their concrete accordingly. If they pour thicker concrete walls around their special nuclear material storage rooms, we will have two choices:

- accept the fact that Iran, which quasi-openly supports Al-Qaeda and is the wellspring for terrorism from Hezbollah, will have nuclear weapons shortly.

Since the religious fanatics running Iran feel threatened not only by the US, but by their own democratic opposition and even from their traditional apologists in Europe, they may decide to, as Emeril LaGasse might say, "kick it up a notch" and give Al Qaeda nuclear weapons with which to finish the job they started on September 11th, 2001, or to flatten every major city in Israel and kill off the moderate, Western-inclined Arabs in Jordan and Iraq with nuclear fallout in the bargain, or

- bend every effort to destroy all Iranian special nuclear material and production facilities. If we were to do this effectively and with total assurance that nothing was left to threaten us with, we'd have to go with strategic nuclear weapons - 170 kiloton "silo busters" delivered by Peacekeeper ICBMs. We'd probably have to use several of them to get the job done, but that would probably only require the launch of a single ICBM, since the Peacekeeper has a MIRV bus and can hit several different targets with a single missile. We've got plenty of them, though.

And if we didn't do it, Israel would, out of a desperate impulse toward self-preservation. Remember that the fanatic present rulers of Iran and their rumored guest Osama bin Laden don't feel that Jerusalem absolutely must be preserved in any war to destroy the Jews in Israel. And remember that this apocalyptic rhetoric is backed up by many years of violence directed against the United States, Europe and Israel. We can't just roll over in bed and ignore this.

We might have been well on our way to a third option by now, except for Rep. David Hobson's determination for some time now to privately and personally dictate US nuclear policy by cutting off funding for the development of alternatives to the two options I've just mentioned. I don't remember electing him to do that.

Great work there, Einstein.