Date: Monday, September 25, 2006

Brussels, Belgium

Leftists will call me a softy for not wanting to trash the White House but there are some fine works of art in there that I rather like and we should remember the lesson of Baghdad and a culture far older and more refined than the American one. So persuading gun happy high school students to move to D.C. has its ups and downs. Like what’s more fun, taking out your classmates or politicians?

Remember Joseph Wilson, the diplomat and ambassador who served both Republican and Democratic presidents during a distinguished career? Coming out of retirement in 2002 Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to Niger to investigate the selling of yellow cake to Iraq. Wilson had once served as the ambassador to the African country and Bush was keen on linking Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, to weapons of mass destruction. Uranium is made from yellow cake and there were documents circulating that allegedly incriminated Saddam. However, Wilson didn’t find any evidence and returned to the States.

In his 2003 state of the union address, Bush suggested that Saddam may have purchased yellow cake from Niger as he prepared the American people for war. He was always pressing the fear button. Wilson accused the administration of exaggeration. Then the documents appeared in the press and were declared to be fake. Originally those documents were reported by the London Sunday Times to have been fabricated by Israeli intelligence which made sense but some months later Italian intelligence was fingered which didn’t make any sense unless you suppose the neocons thought the Israeli connection was a Jew too far.

Little did Wilson know that his report would be spun upside down. Now the liars were calling him a liar. Dick Cheney was pissed off and the mean bastard had his revenge by leaking illegal information to neocon journalist, Robert Novak, that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. That ruined her career too. Once you are exposed you’re out. Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby took the fall and was charged with five counts of alleged felonious misconduct, one count of obstruction of justice, and two counts of perjury. The case has lingered in the courts but was scheduled to be heard in 20007. Odds are that this neocon will get pardoned for crimes his boss committed. However, Cheney and Bush aid in charge of dirty tricks, Karl Rove, may still face questioning before a congressional committee. Cheney too. 20061020-0.wog dateline: London, England

What’s wrong with London? A banker collects a hundred million pound bonus for the year. And, there are millions more for other bankers. How did they manage that? They ripped off their customers. The Labour party has become so right wing you might as well call it Old Tories. Following the American model established by the Bush government hasn’t helped much either. The prisons are full and now they want to jail journalists who spy on the government.

If you have 5-10 million pounds in a London bank you can’t even make the Sunday Times Rich List. Ordinary investors in insurance and pension funds don’t see profits because fund managers are hoarding all the cash. Trickle down doesn’t work, never did when the profits aren’t shared and the last time that happened was two centuries ago. The parasites take it all, the Thatcher legacy left no sense of community sharing.

Russian oil barons are in town too. At the Movida nightclub, jeroboams of Crystal champagne are going for 4,500 pounds a pop. Loose change for the Ruskies.

Education? Its difficult to justify the American liberal view that the English have made quantum strides in education and economic reform when they have adopted American models. College tuition costs continued to rise and the rich continue to get richer at the expense of the poor. Only in 1999 did the Labour party pass a minimum wage law and since then they have been promoting faith based education and a policy of dumbing down. Really, when you watch a BBC program on TV it is like listening to reality illiteracy. They are presumably speaking English but you can’t understand it. Some foreign lingo. Grammar when it is understood sounds like me and them. As for news presenters, they are readers, not journalists and their incredible dumbness is clearly audible. Program hosts too, dumber than door nails. At least three of them, BBC personalities, were dumped before dumbing down. Now they have been re-hired. Gloria had a weekly religious program and I recalled that she had a racist streak in her. Bill mumbled on about nature like a creaky old gate and Jonathan stammered arrogantly like Elmer Fudd. And while the BBC was complaining about being underfunded, they gave Jonathan an 18 million pound pay packet.

The English kitchen used to be awful, probably still is except for desserts but now there are fabulous and expensive foreign restaurants in the county. Rich bankers drive the prices up. There is even a posh restaurant called Bank. How many fish will be left in the seas before the Brits are back to eating beans on toast with an egg? Ask a cod. Meanwhile, a UNICEF table of the world’s richest countries in the world placed Britain last as a place for children to grow up.

Did you know that Britain spies on more of its people than any other county in the world? They have 4.2 million cameras on the streets and they must have several thousand photos of a lone walking tourist looking around town for five days.

Now get me outa this country before I catch a rainy day cold

Date: Monday, October 30, 2006

Dateline: New Orleans, Louisiana

I’d suspect that 80% of Americans have a voodoo doll of Dick Cheney and they stick him with pins every night before they go to bed. My mother who is 90 has a little rubber Bush on the fridge in the kitchen and she punches him every morning then scratches off a number leading to his last day in office.

During the month Bush announced that CIA secret prisons around the world had been shut down but the list of prisoners transferred to Guantanamo Bay was far short of those known to be in detention. So what happened to the other prisoners? ‘We don’t do torture,’ he lied. At the moment they are among the disappeared.

Then notification arrived that Operation Oasis outside Baghdad had been shut down. My colleagues reported that, alas, what went up in the beam, never came down. That included a cat and several wristwatches. I don’t know if the watches were attached to wrists but they were expensive, top of the line. More importantly, most of the dollars that disappeared in Baghdad, 360 tons, about 2 billion, was stolen by a clever Iraqi defense minister and not as we suspected, by Halliburton directors. The anti-gravity equipment and misters were shipped to a warehouse in Morocco.

About Hurricane Katrina, it seems like a distant memory because most people want to forget it but not in New Orleans. In some wards nothing has changed since 2005, you could as well be in Baghdad for all the destruction. Nearly 2,000 people died and damage was put at 1.2 billion. So what happened to the money for reconstruction? It either disappeared are never materialized. Another botched job by the Bush administration.

Date: Thursday, November 30, 2006

Dateline: Washington D.C.

November got wore before it got better for Americans. President Bush signed into law a bill passed by Congress that legalized the torture of detainees suspected of terrorism. That law went against every international treaty on the treatment of prisoners that ever existed and destroyed the world image of America.

The mid-term congressional elections put the Democrats back in power but other than the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld there was little elation. Bush and Cheney & Co. had made a mess of everything. With Robert Gates set to replace Rumsfeld, let’s have a look at the Company and try to imagine what closet all these right-wing idiots came out of and what we are going to do with them when the regime changes.

Let’s start with some of the unmentioned unmentionables: Ann Coulter, the Rev. Pat Robertson, and Rush Slimeball. All they have in common is Rush’s last name. Coulter is a writer and in one of her books she calls for the assassination of Bill Clinton. Had this motormouth fingered Bush for assassination she’d be in jail. Coulter also attacked a group of 9/11 twin towers widows for being greedy and unpatriotic. Robertson is a flaky evangelic and asked his congregation to pray for the deaths of two elderly women on the Supreme Court and called for the assassination of Argentine socialist leader Hugo Chavez. Rush is a radio talk show host who hates liberals and although he is Jewish must be a secret admirer of Hitler. Let’s throw in John Bolton who was a budget director in the Bush administration but when he bungled that job his mouth got him set to the United Nations as a representative to the U.S., an organization he openly despised. Fortunately everyone despised him too and he resigned his post and left the government after 16 months

Now in distorted dreams I see Ann being drawn and quartered by two of the world’s strongest men on tricycles. Oh, Al Gore, come back. The Rev. Pat would be housed in a cage of rattlesnakes and Rush, well, he’d be gassed with nitrous oxide. John Bolton? He’s a very stupid man with a loud mouth and a dyed white mustache. He would do jail time with his mustache super glued to his lips. Robert Gates remains to be tested. br>
Karl Rove? That’s easy, put a garden hose in his mouth and when he’s pumped up, you and a friend can teeter totter on a board on his bloated belly. The Supreme Court is due for a stitch up too but that will have to wait until I sort out some of the new right wing members.