Where's a tax cut when you REALLY need one ?

What has the Bush administration done for the Third World ? ....well they've created one in their back yard. It's full of the poor, the blacks, the needy, the hungry, there is no water, power, food, water, communications ... and now the Governor's arranged for battle hardened National Guards from all over to come in "with M 16's locked and loaded"

"Look up! Look up! ..is that the President flying over ? passing by ?"

How the poor got trapped in hellish New Orleans

In the months leading up to Hurricane Katrina, it became increasingly clear to local officials that in the event of a killer storm, the No. 1 problem in a city with a 30 percent poverty rate was some 134,000 residents who did not have a car. They knew these people had no way to get out of town -- and that a Category 3 hurricane or stronger would likely bring a flood of Biblical proportions.

And so the plan was...to do nothing. Click and read on….to Attytood

Guns and Prayer..help for flood victims...at last

Washington Post. Gov. Kathleen Blanco called the looters "hoodlums" and issued a warning to lawbreakers: Hundreds of National Guard troops hardened on the battlefield in Iraq have landed in New Orleans.

"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," she said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."

"I have declared August 31, 2005, a Day of Prayer in the State of Louisiana Governor Blanco is reported on the Governors Website.

"I am asking that all of Louisiana take some time Wednesday to pray. Pray for the victims and the rescuers. Please pray that God give us all the physical and spiritual strength to work through this crisis and rebuild"

Fashionista fiddles while NOLA Floods.....

Wapo’s Robin Givhan was in ecstasy at the sight of The Secretary of State when she hit Europe this February.

“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield on Wednesday dressed all in black. She was wearing a black skirt that hit just above the knee, and it was topped with a black coat that fell to mid-calf. The coat, with its seven gold buttons running down the front and its band collar, called to mind a Marine's dress uniform or the "save humanity" ensemble worn by Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix."

Long admired by the fashionistas she has always preferred the simple ( but oh sooooooooo expensive) Ferrogamo sling back pimp..

"Rice, Bush's national security advisor, is partial to the simple low-heeled Ferragamo pump and the classic Chanel-inspired St. John designer suit. In Washington, St. John, with its simply tailored box-cut suit ranging from $300 to $1200, is referred to as the patron saint of designers in the nation's capital."

Chicago Sun Times Classy Condi November 24, 2004 BY SARA FIEDELHOLTZ Staff Reporter Fashion Beauty.

Moda - Copia i dettagli del suo stile: fatti chiamare "magnolia d'acciaio" nell'intimità, segui ogni mattina il tuo personal trainer, scegli solo scarpe di Salvatore Ferragamo (meglio se su misura) e tailleur di Oscar de la Renta.
E non dimenticare mai il rossetto: Yves Saint Laurent, n° 10.

Well the spicy lady, after being booed on Wednesday night at “Spamalot” the Broadway Monty Python farce, she set off to Ferrogamo and spent several thousand dollars on some more of the strappy sling backs direct from the store. A screaming woman was ejected by security who criticized her “Neronic fiddling whilst New Orleans “ ... “My dear the people they let in these days…”

Any way the feisty (but fashionable lady) lady set off straight back for Washington where she is …” being kept aware of the situation”. No doubt sending our for some ho black thigh length fishing waders that Dick favours.

Having ensured that Sharon gets what he wants in preparing the Gaza Gulag , by masterly inaction and therby pleasing the founders and funders of AIPAC, JINSA, NDL etc., the girl deserves a break. I admire her, she is in keeping with this administration, fuck the floods, break out the fashion .. Christ after seeing the damage, the despair, we need cheering up….you can bet Dubya needs a little support right now, after draining the swamp in Iraq, he's got flood victims ..er...flooding Houston, … wait didn’t he rush back to Washington at the same time….. ?

Expect some action from Condi and Dubya. The floods won't go away but it might get a litle hot and sticky for them both.

Homeland Security

Eisenhower was right...ask the Katrina refugees..

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies,in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed.

The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers,the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States

Fed $'s dry up...NOLA floods...Iraq gets it's FREEDOM

From Attytood

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars. (Much of the research here is from Nexis, which is why some articles aren't linked.)

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:

The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.

The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them."

The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

Go to the original for the lengthy, detailed and damning report....then pass it on...

Iran's vital links for Uzbek's Karimov and family

Iran’s transit routes via the ports of Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, are of vital importance for the transit of Uzbekistan’s goods, announced I. Gasimov the third secretary for the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Tehran. He explained that some 70 percent of Uzbekistan’s cotton (White Gold – produced effectively by children and slave labour - see pic) is currently exported via Bandar Abbas Port. “We attach special importance to the port for the export of our goods,” he emphasized.

“Thanks to its special geographic location and its access to free waters, Chabahar Free Trade Zone is one of the shortest routes connecting Uzbekistan to the other countries of the world.”

White Gold transport is closely associated with both the smuggling of acetic anhydride (2.5 Kg required per kg of heroin produced) a precursor chemical used in the extensive heroin laboratories in Afghanistan and the onward transport of the refined heroin to Rusia and Europe.

On Jan 5th 2005 the Trans-Afghan Corridor Council met for the first time in Taskhent, and recommended construction of a 2400km highway linking the Uzbek capital to Bandar Abbas in Iran, via Mazar-e Sharif and Heart in Afghanistan.

The Ferghana Valley contains 25 percent of the people of the Uzbek Republic and 38 percent of its arable land, it grows the bulk of Uzbekistan‘s cotton, now the fifth largest cotton producer and second largest exporter. The government holds the export monopoly on cotton mainly through Karimov’s close family. Inefficiency and corruption leads to substantial smuggling across the borders to Kyrgyzstan the reason why border bridge were closed when the Anijan refugees sought help when fleeing from the massacre in May.

Old, old story about the New World Order.

In 1991 Glock made a 1000 off limited edition series of specially engraved Glock 17 handgun. A list of names of all the coalition countries is engraved down the top of the slide; "Operation Desert Storm/January 16-February 27, 1991" is engraved on the right side. On the left side is "New World Order/Commemorative".



No 1 went to Dubya's Dad. No 2 to Stormin' Norman Schwartkopf etc.,

Hmmmm, New World Order.Parvez Musharif moves nowhere without his personal, loaded Glock sidearm. It is said de Menezes' assassins both used Glock pistols, the preferred choice of many special services.

Reasons to be in Iraq No 17

Against the backdrop of the huge (1,092-foot ) new aircraft carrier “Ronald Reagan”(CVN 76 see pic ) at Naval Air Station North Island,San Diego, the Texan Terrorist addressed a crowd celebrating the signing for General McArthur by the Japanese leadership of a Peace Treaty to on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, to formally end the war in the Pacific, which had actually ended two weeks previously on August 14th.

“Now, as then, our enemies have made their fight a test of American credibility and resolve. Now, as then, they are trying to intimidate free people and break our will. And now, as then, they will fail.

They will fail because the terrorists of our century are making the same mistake that the followers of other totalitarian ideologies made in the last century. They believe that democracies are inherently weak and corrupt and can be brought to their knees. They looked at our response after the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole.

They concluded that free societies lack the courage and character to defend themselves against a determined enemy. Hear the words of Osama bin Laden that explain why he believed he could get away with the attacks of September the 11th, 2001: "We've seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars and unprepared to fight long wars. . . After a few blows they ran in defeat. . . (They forgot) about being a world leader."

Bush curiously lists these events as evidence that the US “cut and run”. A strange message for a military audience. Reagan faced with the instant death of over 250 Marines in the Beirut bombings, prudently saw that the fight wasn’t worth the prize. The Mogadishu killings presaged the futility of fighting the savage warriors who controlled no vital assets the invader wanted, the first World Centre bombing, as those of the US African Embassies and the SS Cole eventually resulted, directly in the rain of missiles ordered by Clinton at pregnant (!) moments in his defence of impeachment for whoring with an intern and ultimately in invasion. The newly leveraged war by remote control, perfect by Wesley Clark in his bombing from 20,000 feet of Serbia.

Now the Commander - in - Chief has a newly minted motive, which he outlined today …

“The terrorists and insurgents are now waging a brutal campaign of terror in Iraq.
1.They kill innocent men and women and children in the hopes of intimidating Iraqis.

2. They're trying to scare them away from democracy.

3.They're trying to break the will of the American people.

4.Their goal is to turn Iraq into a failed state like Afghanistan was under the Taliban.

5. If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, Saddam the evil mastermind busy arming with weapons of insidious and sinister purpose to gas, destroy , maim and infect with deadly disease, has morphed into a multi headed hydra of scheming “insurgents”, fuelled both by Iraqi oil receipts –( perhaps funded in Euros as Saddam did, to finally seal his fate as a US ally), and by Anti - American hatred.

As Justin Raimondo says at Anti War today.

…… the party line will change, once again, as we fight a monster of our own making – and that, in a nutshell, is the whole story of this endless "war on terrorism": it is a self-renewing monster that can, in theory, never die. We slay it and it keeps reappearing – and how convenient is that?

History of Nation Building (Part (23)

When George Bush was a fresh faced, eager beaver, candidate in 2000 he claimed that, if elected, he would not allow U.S. military forces to engage in "nation building." No Sir. The Texan terrorist wasn’t going to follow the false footsteps of Slick Willy in the Balkans (Just point out where they are Condi?).

Well, having laid waste to what we used to call Iraq, we are busy building a nation (or maybe even several) , a constitution and a post propter hoc rationale for starting the whole damn thing.(Maybe we can blame Blair and the Brits ????)

Before the Coalition of the Willing hit the streets of Baghdad , (and many of it’s defenceless citizens) Iraq was a secular nation. Highly westernized, with a well educated elite, but under the iron fist of the US aided Dictator Hussein . Iraq had one of the best water systems in the Middle East. The “socialist” regime provided free education, which according to the UN was the best in the Middle East and there was access for all to a high standard of health care.

Dictator Saddam ? You remember him ? He was the guy who told US Ambassador April Glaspie he was going to invade Kuwait, and she couldn’t get through to the State Department to tell them. Maybe their 'phone service was none too good back then.

Well it wasn’t the only mistake Dubya’s Dad made. Bush's pledge (you may remember) to avoid nation building, was at a debate with Internet Developer, Democrat Al Gore, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Oct. 11th, 2000. At the time the race was neck-and-neck race for the White House (although the Supreme Court was ready to declare the winner) . Bush, short of the kind of overseas experience, short of support , short of foreign policy ideas, tried to turn this to his advantage by identifying himself as a Washington outsider and by branding Gore a member of the capital's entrenched liberal political class.

Bush recalled Daddy’s U.S. humanitarian mission in Somalia -- had "changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong."

He remembered the deaths of 18 U.S. Army rangers killed in Mogadishu on Oct. 3-4, 1993, after a gun battle and dragged in Victory through the town by what we now have now learnt to call terrorists or insurgents.

"The mission was changed, and as a result, our nation paid a price," Bush said. "And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building."

Bush said those who live in the liberated lands should rebuild them and if elected, would "absolutely not" indulge in nation planning….following on the successes of such efforts in Afghanistan – remember. The military action in Afghanistan was intended not only to bring bin Laden to justice but also to topple the Taliban from power. Now the US is (attempting to ) running the place.

Maybe he has forgotten, but Bush also pledged during that debate "It really depends upon how our nation conducts its foreign policy. If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, they'll respect us."

Remember the deal he brokered with Stalinist Dictator Karimov of Uzbekistan that committed the United States to protect the security of a former Soviet republic? That agreement (long forgotten) shielded the Uzbek government, which permitted U.S. aircraft to operate from its airfields, from retaliation by the Taliban regime. Now Karimov is kicking the US out and handing over the bases to the Russians.

Well, Afghanistan is back in the hands of the warlords and a resurgent Taliban, Somali is a basket case where the Chinese have snook off with the oil, and the US are mired in Iraq, having drained the swamp and are having their ass chewed off by the crocodiles.

George was right, the US should stay outta nation building.

UPDATE

For some reason Google continues to return this site as one showing US soldiers dragged through the Mogadishu Streets, the original source -http://www.masada2000.org/mogadishu.jpg
has long since disappeared. Thanks for your interest go here

Mission not accomplished... in fact falling apart.

Fresh from a 10 minute flight in an S-3B Viking, that he co-piloted but did not land and donning a flight suit, Mr. Bush strutted triumphantly aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 2nd 2003. He stood at the podium and declared, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country."

This modern wannabe Alexander relished the smell of triumph, welcoming the tired and toiling troops who had wrested such a victory. Behind him the Red, White and Blue banner concocted by Ari Fleischer and his White House crew signalled a self satisfied, smugness that was quickly to disappear.(..as did Ari)

“Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war. Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent."

What was the Mission ? What has been accomplished ? Well the the first question the answer slips by, changes, and like a mirage dances on a distant and deserted horizon.The country is not, as the Commander –in-Chief said 30 months ago claimed, neither secure nor re-constructed.

To the second question, the absurdly named “Coalition of the Willing” have succeeded like Hannibal at Carthage,” that which he did not lay waste he destroyed”. The nation they have “freed” is on the brink of war with itself, ready to fracture…as foretold by many before the first”precise” bombs were dropped and the first shots fired.

Barzani and the Kurds have, quietly and effectively carved out their own autonomous region, which the US have no chance of wishing away or destroying.

The Sunnis, so long the allies of the US, are an embittered but nonetheless powerful and well armed and financed minority.

The Shias, are divided within themselves but control the oil rich south regions which they will not soon or easily be deprived of.

What was the Mission ? What has been accomplished ?