Monthly Archive for July, 2003
The Knesset plenum on Thursday approved by a majority of 53 to 25 with one abstention on the final readings of a bill that would prevent Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from getting citizenship or permanent residency status.
Also in the article;
Bill supporters noted that Palestinians who received Israeli citizenship by marriage were playing a growing role in terror attacks, a phenomenon that Shin Bet head Avi Dichter described in a closed session on Tuesday. Opponents of the bill – Knesset members from Labor, Meretz and the Arab parties – called it racist and inhumane.
I’m sure Tom DeLay is jubilant.
I’m no economist. My knowledge is so lacking in that department I rarely make a personal comment on it.
But in this article the following numbers are cited among the reasons the GDP is reporting gains.
Defense spending rose 44.1 percent, the largest increase since the third quarter of 1951. Consumer spending rose 3.3 percent, and investments in equipment and software rose 6.9 percent.
I’m particularly not impressed that defense spending is booming. And I don’t think it should impress anyone else unless they enjoy living in a country that intends to wage perpetual war and have stock in the industry, no?
Consumer spending would be expected to rise this time of the year as well, right? Considering the cost of getting kids back to school and summer vacations for those lucky enough to afford them.
Equipment and software…unless the goods are poorly made how often would you expect to see such sales adding to the overall picture?
Also in the article…
Bonds remain a worry. “The sell-off in the bond market is reaching epic proportion – the 10-year yield is up over 131 basis points in just 33 trading days. The last time we have seen a rise in yields this far, this fast, was May 1987 – 16 years ago!,” said Bianco Research.
Isn’t this the real story and a source of great concern? When you put all of this information together, aren’t we being told the United States has made a giant step towards becoming an even larger military presence while at the same time having its financial autonomy pulled out from under it?
MB posted some thoughts on second quarter corporate earnings here and along with Max, looking for the new July unemployment numbers.
My friend Trevor tells me when he downloaded the recent DirectX ‘critical update’ from Windows his firewall prompted a puzzling message.
I’m going to pass his inquiry along as I’d like to know the answer as well.
If you choose to install the update you download a setup file from download.microsoft.com (nothing abnormal about this), this setup file then runs and downloads the various components that make up the upgrade from www.fbi.gov
I only realised this when my firewall asked me for permission to connect to port 80 at www.fbi.gov
Why is the FBI acting as a download source for a Microsoft program?
A quick search of google didn’t help.
Does anybody know why the FBI is acting as a fileserver for Microsoft? And just how far does this relationship extend?
During the same press conference that Bush accepted personal responsibility for everything he says he boldly asserted WMD will be found. He said this knowing that to this date, not one scientist has supported the belief. This suggests a man who has no remorse for passing on faulty intelligence and instead will continue to buy ‘good press’ for his beleaguered administration by spinning whatever information they’ve gathered.
Adding to suspicions of his insincerity are the methods by which these scientists are being gathered and held.
The article reports arrests made after scientists initially offered to come in voluntarily, people being held incommunicado, and signs these scientists are being held in solitary confinement as well.
Amir Saadi, ‘Iraq’s 65-year-old chief liaison with United Nations weapons inspectors since last year’, has been detained over three months now, his status ‘yet to be determined’;
His wife said she suspects her husband is being held out of sight because “he is telling the truth. . . . They have realized there are no weapons of mass destruction and the quagmire they have created. They want to hold someone as a scapegoat.”
[LINK]
From my e-mail;
WASHINGTON (July 30, 2003) A U.S. Senate Committee last night released a report finding that the World Bank and U.S. government institutions financed questionable payments by Enron for a Guatemalan power project. These payments, according to the investigation, were disguised as add-on fuel charges in order to conceal them from U.S. and Guatemalan tax authorities.
The Senate Finance Committee report was completed in March 2003 but was only released to the public last night. It concludes: Enron benefited from taxpayer support and multilateral organization support to extend its international reach, including the Guatemalan power project with its questionable payments. The report further notes that US government agencies have failed to pursue evidence of tax evasion and foreign corrupt practices associated with the scheme.
The Senates report on Guatemala confirms our earlier findings that government agencies turn a blind eye when corporate crime occurs, and that public banks are actually facilitating Enrons shady deals overseas with taxpayer money, charged Nadia Martinez, a Latin America specialist with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), and contributor to the IPS report, Enrons Pawns: How Public Institutions Bankrolled Enrons Globalization Game. (SEEN) IPS researchers and others have uncovered numerous allegations of fraud and corruption swirling around Enron projects abroad, including the following:
Continue reading ‘WB, US AGENCIES SUBSIDIZED CORRUPT ENRON POWER PROJECT’
Matthew Reimer writing for Yellow Times had this to say about Clinton’s defense of Bush’s lies:
[YellowTimes.org] — Undoubtedly, all the die hard political partisans were shocked this week when Bill Clinton came out and essentially exonerated the Bush administration for its manipulation of critical intelligence and lying to the world in support of its drive to war.
Clinton told Larry King: “You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. I mean, you can’t make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in awhile. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now. That’s what I think.”
The former president also went on subtly to bolster the Bush administration’s case for war: “People can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”
I mentioned here it amazes me that the same people who vilified Clinton aren’t also accusing Bush of “wagging the dog” and by this I mean the voters, not the pundits or the gov’t hawks. If the people in the street listening to Limbaugh or praying at the altar of the DLC are who Reimer refers to, I agree. They’ll never attempt to examine anything that might crack the walls of their partisan enclosures.
The upper echelon die-hards and their detractors weren’t shocked at all. Clinton and the DLC are very much in keeping with this reordering of the Middle East as bad cop Lieberman dutifully demonstrated when he scolded the antiwar candidates this week for their attacks on the Bush administration [via Best of the Blogs]:
Lieberman’s comments came one day after he delivered a foreign policy address accusing his antiwar rivals of sending out a message that they “don’t know a just war when they see it.”
Bush in turn has taken yet another page from dear old Bill:
President Bush on Wednesday accepted personal responsibility for a controversial portion of last winter’s State of the Union address dealing with claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear material in Africa.
“I take personal responsibility for everything I say, absolutely,” the president said at a White House news conference where he sought to quell a controversy that has dogged his administration for weeks.
Good! If memory serves me right impeachment hearings are just around the corner.
The move to pull air marshals from any flight requiring them to stay overnight is particularly disturbing to some because it coincides with a new high-level hijacking threat issued by the Department of Homeland Security. That warning memo says that at least one of these attacks could be executed by the end of the summer, according to a source familiar with the document.
This simply has to be a major screw-up on their part. I can’t think of any explanation for it that would afford them a soft landing or deliberate intent worth the negative feedback.
If you missed it, an article by Jim McDermott was published earlier this month in The American Prospect about the Bush administration’s “dangerous manufacturing of post-9-11 dread.”
[Update 4:11 p.m.]…Flip-flop.
If they were ‘working’ on this ‘all weekend’ why hadn’t anyone informed the marshals of it?
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“Our intelligence sources tell us,” President Bush told to the nation on January 28, “that he [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” The claim, paired with the alleged uranium buy, painted a damning picture of Baghdad’s atomic ambitions.
Mother Jones has a well-researched timeline showing how this less-reviewed, equally relevant ‘lynch pin’ of disinformation came to be part of the Bush administration’s ‘faith-based intelligence.’
Wolfowitz made the Sunday talk-show rounds defending the use of ‘murky’ intelligence in the decision-making process of pre-emptive strikes.
At the same time he condemned al-Jazeera. According to Wolfowitz they “ran a totally false report that American troops had gone and contained one of the key imams in the holy city of Najaf.”
Al-Jazeera station manager in response to the charge;
Adnan al-Sharif said the station had never reported the arrest, though it did carry reports from other agencies – which later proved to be untrue – that Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr’s house had been surrounded by US troops.
Editor-in-chief Salah Negm in response to Wolfowitz’ naming of al-Arabiya as another that “incited hatred and violence by “slanting news incredibly” about events in Iraq.”
…al-Arabiya’s coverage “reflects the truth even if that angered some people”.
The detention in the northern city of Mosul of al-Jazeera journalist Nawfal al-Shahwani is mentioned in that article, a report that had been denied by U.S. military officials.
Yet according to this BBC report;
The Arab television station al-Jazeera reported on Monday that US troops had released its reporter Nawaf al-Shahwani and his driver, who were detained after filming an Iraqi civilian vehicle coming under fire from a US military patrol.
Mr al-Shahwani was said to be in good health after his release but the tape, which the station wants back, remains confiscated.
Still in the news today are reports of the efforts of Arlene Walters.
Mrs. Walters is the mother of the soldier whose combat efforts were somewhat applied to Pfc. Jessica Lynch by the American press and hardly disputed by the military until much later.
It was, fellow soldiers have told her, Sgt Donald Walters who performed many of the heroics attributed to Pte Lynch in the fanfare of publicity designed to lift the nation’s morale, and Sgt Walters who was killed after mounting a lone stand against the Iraqis who ambushed their convoy of maintenance vehicles near Nasiriyah.
Yet few, if any, of the Americans watching Pte Lynch’s homecoming last week have even heard her son’s name. “The military tell us that everyone who was in her unit was a hero,” Mrs Walters told The Telegraph. “In fact they have singled out Jessica Lynch as the hero, and they are not giving the recognition to my son that he deserves.
Mrs. Walters has an opinion as to why her son is not receiving the recognition he deserves;
“Perhaps the army don’t want to admit to the fact that he was left behind in the desert to fight alone,” she said. “It isn’t a good news story.”
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