Month: July 2003

From Slate’s Today’s Papers: the Transportation Security Agency, facing a budget crunch, is laying off security screeners and other personnel. According to an e-mail the Post nabbed, one official TSA ordered some air marshals to skip some flights, due, he wrote, to “monetary considerations.”

Apparently the Bush administration can…and it’s not very high. Quick, roll out some more uncessary tax cuts. Maybe then those rich suckers can buy their own private planes, be secure, and leave the rest of us to fly in the “death traps”.

Ok, so this isn’t even an attempt at a creative title, but that’s because for some reason this topic just bothers me. I was out for a walk last night, and I saw that my neighbor had on a sprinkler and was watering the lawn. Talk about a waste! Is it really necessary? We’re hardly in a drought, not that you would be allowed to then. Your grass is green regardless. There have been thunderstorms rolling through just a few days ago. And what kind of ego issues do you have that you need to have a perfectly green lawn anyway? I’ve read enough articles about how there’s speculation that fresh water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource and will likely lead to political, and potentially physical violence (i.e. war), that to see someone waste it like that strikes me as wrong. There should be some kind of luxury tax on water being used for this purpose.

Some water disputes that have been in the news:
California and its use of the Colorado River
Water in the Middle Easter
Central Asia Water Dispute
An Internal India water dispute

These are just the results of about 5 minutes of searching on Google. I can only imagine what I would come up with if I really looked. And the jerk down the street is worried about his grass being all soft and green…

I found a corrected version of the UPI story I quoted from a few days ago. Apparently the 9/11 report makes no reference to an Iraq-AQ link, which only makes one wonder where exactly the whole story came from in the first place.

I read this in an article on “Family.org”:

LaBarbera added: “I think it’s kind of sad that New York City schools can’t protect all kids without creating separate schools that validate dangerous homosexual behavior.”

It’s a shame we can’t set up a Universie where we can send those dangerous intolerant conservatives. But then we might be validating them.

This morning at work I attended a presentations seminar, where all of us attending were to give a presentation we had prepared over the prior two weeks. Of course, being the first one there, I was also the first one to present. Somehow when I’m doing these presentations, my mind has a tendancy to go blank. The funny thing is, in being critiqued, I was told that I was enthusiastic and I have a love of the stage. Love of the stage? Yeah, right, when other people are on it, maybe. It is true that I don’t mind presenting as much as I once did, but I’m still quite nervous about it. Maybe if my mind didn’t go blank it would be a whole other story.

I’m pleased. Now we’re getting closer. A very well-written, detailed article from the Washington Post takes an in-depth look at Condi Rice’s role in the garbage spewing from the Bush administration regarding Iraq. Cutting through the spin and lies, they highlight in the article Condi’s seeming incompetence.

These are two qualities I don’t think anyone wants in the U.S. National Security Advisor:

The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.

This passage, then, strikes me as making it all the more clear:

One person who has worked with Rice describes as “inconceivable” the claims that she was not more actively involved. Indeed, subsequent to the July 18 briefing, another senior administration official said Rice had been briefed immediately on the NIE — including the doubts about Iraq’s nuclear program — and had “skimmed” the document. The official said that within a couple of weeks, Rice “read it all.”

So, according to sources from the WP, our National Security Advisor read the documents detailing objections and concerns surrounding the Iraq intelligence, yet allowed it to go through. If someone wanted to write an editorial saying Condi must go, I could support that. But all the “Tenet must go” crap really needs to stop, because as the details come up, this is, amazingly enough, one time the CIA didn’t screw up.

After a little downtime this weekend, thanks to my incorrectly modifying a properties file that connects to the database, I’m finally back up this morning.

Thanks to Bryan for a nice evening down at his place in South Jersey. It was great to see him and his fiance, Jen, as well as our other friend Jenn, on Saturday. It was also my mother’s birthday, so a Happy Birthday to her as well.

In other news, I’m excited to report that my new project is up and running. Well, almost, anyway, since the url was still giving me a 404 error message last I checked. It shouldn’t, but it is. Hopefully it will fix itself soon and my new project really will be up and running.

First, I’ll lead off with another false State of the Union accusation that’s not getting enough press. The recently issued 9/11 report has determined that there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaida. As former Democratic Senator Max Cleland puts it,

“The administration sold the connection (between Iraq and al-Qaida) to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war,” said Cleland. “What you’ve seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends.”

That’s the second piece of misinformation used by the Bushies to justify an invasion of another country.

Of course, Cheney came out in defense of the war, swaddled in a big American flag, labeling all those who dare disagree that they’re unpatriotic. It is hard to see what is so strong, as CNN calls it, about Cheney’s defense of the Bush lies.

Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday made strong defenses of the war, with Cheney telling a conservative think tank in Washington it would have been “irresponsible” not to take on Saddam Hussein.

Is it more or less “irresponsible” to recklessly send American troops to bring down a foreign government which, as far as anyone has honestly been able to tell, appears to pose no immediate threat to the United States? There are no WMDs to be found, thus far. There were, in fact, weapons inspectors in Iraq, and for all intents and purposes, the inspectors plus sanctions appear to have been doing the tricks.

As a humanitarian crisis, I wholly agree that Saddam should have been toppled. But then, it shouldn’t have taken weeks to agree to send troops to Liberia. And certainly, far fewer Americans, particularly the conservative isolationists, would have supported the Iraq invasion, had it been pitched solely in humaitarian terms.

In an unsurprising announcement today, I read that electronic voting machines based on Microsoft’s Windows CE OS are a security risk.

I had heard about this yesterday, but wouldn’t it be a bummer if there is a reocurrence of SARS? Especially with my trip to Hong Kong little more than a month away. Though if it drives down hotel prices, maybe it’s not so bad.