April 29, 2006

One of the reasons why a growing legion of top Republican lawgivers are hysterically demanding that Bush “do something” to lower soaring gas prices is that in the event they lose either or both Houses at the mid-terms in November, the Democrats will then be in power and are guaranteed to vigorously pursue them for their appallingly rampant thievery and corruption.

An article in the Wall Street Journal on last Thursday is the growing tip of a huge, submerged iceberg that will sink the Republicans as surely as the real iceberg sank the Titanic. The article reported that federal investigators are now very actively investigating repeated allegations that a U.S. defense contractor, Brent Wilkes, obtained DC prostitutes, luxury hotel suites and transportation by stretch limousines for not only the jailed and disgraced former Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, but also other senior Republican congressmen and numerous members of their senior staffs.

It is well-known inside the Beltway, and the White House, that these physically unattractive, aging and flabby legislators eagerly solicit Washington’s legions of crooked lobbyists for favors such as drugs, sex with whores, both female, men and boys (but as far as is known, not animals…yet) and as many free trips and visits to expensive resorts as possible. The legend that the lobbyists go after the Congressmen is not true; it is the other way around. In this case, it was pathetic paid sex for votes and nothing more. The great number of these eager petitioners are, most unfortunately for the President, all Republicans, including some very important Committee Chairmen.

Cunningham, who is suffering from an onset of Alzheimer’s Disease, was sentenced in March by U.S. District Judge Larry Alan Burns in San Diego to eight years, four months in federal prison for taking more than $2.4 million in bribes and cheating on his taxes. Cunningham is now in Federal facility in North Carolina undergoing mental and physical evaluation. Parenthetically, both the House and Senate have more than a few members who could never pass a psych review unless the doctor was a cousin. There are more doddering and senile twits staggering around the sacred halls of Congress than you can find in a good nursing home. Jesus, when you think of the power these flakes hold, you start getting travel brochures on Costa Rica.

According to the Journal article, federal investigators are looking into the degree and extent Wilkes and former Washington defense contractor Mitchell Wade may have provided the Republican legislators with the illicit services of whores at Washington's luxury Watergate Hotel, of other corruption scandals, and at one other site, and that federal agents removed room records and other documents from the Watergate hotel.

Wade has pleaded guilty to bribing Cunningham and faces up to 11 years in prison and has been identified by sources close to the investigation as the other defense contractor who is stated to have bribed Cunningham.

In February, Wade went before a federal judge in Washington and pleaded guilty to bribing Cunningham with more than $1 million to secure lucrative defense contracts for his firm, MZM Inc.

In August, agents with the FBI, the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the IRS raided Wilkes' Poway, California, home and the offices of his company ADCS Inc.

Cunningham weepingly admitted, to the television cameras, funneling contracts to the co-conspirators through his role on a different panel, the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

The Armed Services Committee's review is far from over, however, as staffers have been asked to research the panel's records stretching back to 1991, the first year Cunningham took office.

We do a good deal of private polling here in the White House. Public polls reflect what those who commission them want to see. A pro-Bush site would show him at 36% popularity rating while our polls (conducted almost daily and covering a much larger body of the civic population than the public ones cover) show him at 32% and falling.

The idea of a sudden ‘terrorist attack” just before the mid terms is being spoken of here more often. One of my friends, who reads official reports, says a study has been made, and submitted, both to the White House and the Pentagon, concerning the sinking of a cruise ship full of granny ladies and kiddies. Would they actually let this happen? Oh yes, they would, but only if they have plausible deniability to hide behind. None of the frightened Republicans here, in the government and Congress, want to be indicted for their blatant thefts and peculations and will <>do absolutely anything<> to keep from going the way of Libby or DeLay. (And probably Rove.)

Big oil has posted its first quarter figures for 2006 and ExxonMobil made an $8.4 billion profit, Chevron $4 billion and ConocoPhillips over 3 billion. The public is starting to get really nasty but there is nothing Bush nor his crooked Republican friends can do about it. The oil companies have been accommodating to Bush’s requests to “keep prices down,” but now that peak driving months are coming, the companies have told the Bush people to stuff it. Bush and his crime partners will never, under any circumstances, take on the oil people. There are billions and billions of dollars at stake here and if Bush were to get up on his hind legs and bite them, he wouldn’t see next Christmas. A newly-minted Cheney, on the other hand, would give them the keys to the Mint the day he took over the job.

With a barrel of light crude oil approaching the $100 level, a $5 per gallon charge at the pumps over in the next two months is a very reasonable assumption at this point. Hotels and the tottering airlines will take a terrible beating this year as gold and gas soar upwards.

There is an old saying; “Whom the Gods destroy, they first make mad.” Keep that in mind over the next few months. And if you read that the ‘Vacation Princess’ is blown up off of Malaga by ’Muslim terrorists’, all passengers feared lost,’ don’t believe it.

April 28, 2006

Wonders, and the blind stupidity of the Bush White House, will never cease! Thwarted by an irate public and Congress on the Dubai port security deal, Bush is now attempting to allow that Muslim country to purchase a number of very sensitive, Defense Department contractors!

Why?

Firstly, because Congress dared to thwart him on the earlier deal and, even more important, he and his crime partners will stand to make even more money on this deal.

The smart money is on Congress putting a stop to this criminal stupidity.

And speaking of criminal stupidity, believe it that Bush, egged on by the crazy Cheney and the Neocons, has decided to threaten China! Yes, threaten China!

Why?

Because China is buying up too much oil that we need, especially before the mid terms in November. Everyone I know in the trade tells me that gas will go up towards $5.00 at the pump. I wish I owned oil stock because they are raking in billions and no one dares to stop them. If Bush tried to, Aunt Jemima would get elected in’08 and the statue of Liberty would burst loose from her base, take to the air and land on Bush while he is puffing along on his bike.

It won’t be the rampant and arrogant Republican corruption nor the idiotic incompetence on the part of the Administration…a new hurricane season is almost upon us and believe me, no steps have been taken by the Chertoff-controlled FEMA because he hasn’t a clue…. that will do the Republicans in but the high gas prices. There have been legions of terrified legislators coming and going into the Monkey Palace these days, screeching that ‘Something Has to be Done and Now…” In all probability, Rove will soon be toast and then Bush will have no one to tell him when to take a dump and he will end up, gibbering like a drunken chimp, digging holes in the Rose Garden to hide in.

The stupid China business? Bush is threatening them privately, with military action if they don’t stop buying oil we need. The Chinese, by all accounts, think he is nuttier than a Christmas fruit cake and have warned him to put a sock in it and mind his own business.

The Japanese, terrified lest the PRC attacks both Taiwan and Okinawa (full of U.S. troops), has forced the Bush people to move all American troops on their southern island to the relative safety of Guam!

The CIA is useless (not as awful as the DHS mongoloids but useless) but even some of the remaining competent ones are getting very frightened about the Action-Reaction problems being caused by our addled President.

Pray for a stroke!

April 23, 2006

I can fully understand how the remaining passengers and crew, scrambling up on the stern of the sinking ‘Titanic’ just before the final plunge into freezing waters must have felt. That’s the general attitude here inside the White House.

Andy Card was pleasant enough and approachable but Bolton is a self-important prick who is now beginning to annoy Bush Himself. It’s like the CIA when the oafish Goss took over to clean out any anti-Bush people.

At this point, there are now very few staffers really loyal to Bush. He is seen as a gross failure, not well-wrapped and liable to start an atomic war at any minute. At best, Bush was a brittle, wise-cracking retired frat rat and at worst, a shouting and vicious man who used great quantities of foul language, regardless of who was listening, shocked women staffers included.

He depended almost entirely on the plots and plans of Rove and it is now obvious to everyone that Rove will be indicted and removed from power. Since Rove is one of the most sneaky, vicious men I have ever met, no one will suffer…except Bush who won’t move without Rove’s suggestion.

A Roveless Bush will be eyeless in Gaza.

Rove has been behind the calculated leaks about a plan to attack Iran because Karl feels that the Iranians will come to heel and make Bush look like a glorious conqueror, an invulnerable ‘wartime president’ who could use the theme to crack down on anti-Republicans across the country.

I have heard Rove discuss the Vietnam war, which he calls “a Democratic war and a political failure.’ He said that he would set things up so there would be no draft riots, no student activists, no opposition in either House of Congress and a press unified behind the Christian Savoir and Protector of America.

If you’re thinking I am inventing this, I am not.

Bush is a pathetic failure (and responsible for the deaths of untold thousands) but Rove is purely vicious and ought to be removed from office, and influence, at once and then tried. Rumsfeld is getting senile and Cheney, another crook, hasn’t much longer to live, according to his last cardiologists’ reports. One more attack and we have another State Funeral under the Capitol dome and the outraged and desperate Republicans can stick someone more palatable, and saner, in the second job and groom him for ’08. I suppose that someone will get the bright idea that the dour and inflexible Cheney might suffer some kind of a cardiac “accident” but now we get into the blogger’s realm.

Rove is supposed to run the Republican campaigns for the mid terms in November and as his techniques consist of blackmailing anyone (via FBI files) who dares to get in his way, it will be a really disgusting blot on the democratic process.

I shudder to realize that there are three more years of this.

How far down into the septic tank of political oblivion can Bush go during this time if he has fallen so badly to date?

And I know enough people to state that if the Democrats take control of either or both Houses, criminal investigations are guaranteed to be launched, that will make Watergate look like a church picnic.

This is another reason why certain Very Important Republicans are wearing dignity pants these days. And if the public had any idea how much in taxpayers’ funds were stolen via the Halliburton deals, and the FEMA “relief programs” in Jeb Bush’s Florida, they would realize that these outrageous thieves make Boss Tweed look like Mother Theresa.

April 20, 2006

The White House is now a mixture of hope and fear: hope that the Bush people can pull off an ‘October Surprise’ to rebuilt Bush, and the Republicans, collapsing public confidence numbers (32% as of today.) and fear that not only will the GOP lose complete control of both Houses of Congress in November but the victorious Democrats would, without a doubt, go after the unbelievable corruption and lawbreaking now rampant here.

The sacking of the poor press chief, who was way out of his depth dealing with the fanatic and duplicitous Bush people, and the “demotion” of Karl Rove are only band aids on a severed leg.

Right wing fanatics, to include the utterly pro-Israel neo cons, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove are costing the Republicans all of their power so they are determined to pull off something “big” just before the election.

One of the clerk/typists who has top level security clearances and has been preparing meeting memoranda, told me, in a whisper, during her lunch break today, that she was terrified at the casual way the leadership is talking about rigging a faked “terrorist attack” on the United States or that Bush, in his utter desperation, will decide to drop nuclear bombs on Iran.

This is rampant insanity, of course, but Bush could do both if he wished and while future historians might speak of him with contempt and anger, we will all live in the present with the results of his mindless actions.

Bush does not live in our world. He lives in a world of his own, thriving on the trappings of power (motorcades, rigged public appearances, saluting guards, sycophantic aides) and a man who absolutely will not acknowledge that his actions might be wrong.

To a man like Bush, he is always right (and this view is reinforced daily by a parade of butt-kissing advisors who would never dare to suggest that a Bush view or action might not be the right one.)

There has been tentative talk about a seizure of domestic power using the military because of a faked “emergency” but Bush and his cronies can no longer rely on the military.

At this moment, it is a toss-up between a nuclear war with Iran and a faked “terrorist attack” on American territory.

They have spoken about blowing up an American Embassy, Ambassador, staff and all, in some other country. Italy has been mentioned as has Greece but the logistics of accomplishing this without detection are immense.

Another, far easier to execute, ploy would be to blow up an American cruise ship filled with old ladies and children somewhere in international waters. That way, Rove has reasoned, we don’t have to threaten some other country, like Italy or Greece, with punitive action, something an outraged American public would demand. The blowing up of small children would be a must for the fury it would engender in the soon-to-be-voting public.

This type of thinking belongs in a nut house and not our White House.

This sort of action has edged out, in the minds of some of the top brass, an attack on Iran. While the Jews pray daily for this removal of their enemies, the military cannot support such an action and if the American public is getting more and more angry over the failed Iraq business, they would lynch Republicans at the really high casualty lists such an Iranian attack would engender.

And this afternoon, there was an emergency meeting here with top brass over the skyrocketing gas prices. The oil companies, recognizing that summer driving is peak gas use time, have jacked their prices up (just as they jack up heating oil when it is needed in winter) and have refused to listen to pleas by the Bush people to keep prices “more acceptable” until after November. Rove has said, in print yet, that if “we can’t bring prices down” soon, the abyss of political disaster has opened at their very feet. There has also been talk of Bush “nationalizing” the American oil industry in a ploy to regain his vanished public support but the negative side is that the oil industry would pay a hit man (or men) to take Bush out.

These things do happen. All it takes is enough money to pay for it.

God must hate Bush because He has dealt Bush a terrible hand which no sane person could be expected to play. Bush should take a leaf from Nixon’s book and fold while he still can, and his head is still firmly fixed on his shoulders.

April 17, 2006

One of my best sources for Asian/PRC information is the bureau chief of a major international news service, now stationed in Beijing. He sent me. this morning. a thirty page email containing his views on the current Sino/US relations, both economic, political and military. Because of its length, I cannot publish it and because I never surrender a source, you won’t get his name so please do not try the usual stupid approaches. (Government agencies must teach their agents classes in ‘How to trick information from stupid people through your own brilliance’)

The Chinese PRC has grown tired of trying to make any sense of the weird Bush foreign policies, let alone try to come to reasonable grips with them. These two countries do an enormous amount of profitable business with each other. The PRC holds billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury notes and if they became angry and disposed of them at cheap prices on the world bourses, the result would be an economic catastrophe. China has a huge population and an enormous military establishment. China has atomic weaponry and the means to deliver them. China has no oil and needs it badly for its burgeoning economy. China buys oil from Venezuela and Iran. The Bush Administration has clearly indicated their strong desire to oust both governments by internal (read CIA) subversion or, as a final resort, threats of military action. The US has interfered with PRC/Taiwan relations, threatening the PRC with vague military action in the event of hostilities between the two entities. Now, China has determined to draw a line in the sand between themselves and the unstable Bush people. They are going to say, in public, that the PRC will certainly offer support to any other country (read Iran and Venezuela) who feel themselves physically threatened by the Bush people. Beijing has told Bush to butt out of their economic business or China will consider this continued mindless nonsense as a threat to China and act accordingly.

Egged on by the powerful Israeli political lobby and the violently pro-Israel neo cons (who basically influence Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East to the point of absolute control) Bush has leaked information that the United States “may well” resort to nuclear attacks on Iran because of their alleged building of atomic weapons (that can only threaten nearby Israel and not the United States.) There is no doubt that such military plans exist. They were drawn up before the 9/11 disaster by the American military, at the request of Secretary Rumsfeld and the Vice President with the full concurrence of Bush. Staff talks between the IDF representatives and American military planners were instituted and the final plans were put into a safe in the Pentagon in the event that they were needed.

Bush’s growing fury with the government of Iran, for ignoring his bluster and threats, caused him to order the leakage to the US media of the Iranian Solution. There is no doubt this is a genuine plan but there is serious doubt if it will ever be implemented. From a strictly military logistical point of view, it is impossible of effective implementation. From a domestic, and foreign, political view, it has proven to be a public relations disaster.

Bush is seen by an increasing number of domestic and foreign leaders as mad as Caligula and someone who will lead this country into a hecatomb from which it might never recover.

The Italian prime minister is now afraid to leave office because there is a very probable criminal indictment waiting for him once his immunity has been lifted. A number of the Bush people, viz Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove and the leadership of the neo cons strongly fear that some such public vengeance will be wreaked on them if and when Bush leaves the scene. This is the main reason why ultra-right Republicans introduced a measure in Congress to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution that limits a president to two terms. This failed to loud laughter but the idea is still there.

Bush, who is a terrible physical and moral coward, has similar fears of retribution for the enormous death tolls he has become responsible for plus the incredible looting of the public treasury and embezzlement of public funds by his loyal, and greedy, supporters.

Men afraid of retribution can be very dangerous and now that China is calling Bush’s bluff, it will be interesting to see what he and his poison dwarves will do next.

April 13, 2006

Here is a lot of input for your information. I have always known, as have many others in a position to be aware of the facts, that Israel has built up her position in this country to one of disproportionate influence. She has used the large and financially influential American Jewish population, fake sympathy for the slaughter of thirty millions of their co religionists during the Second World War (the number, like Topsy, just keep on growin') financial and political power through Jewish ownership, or direct control, of most of the American print and television media and the natural greed of American politicians.

Israel attacked an American ship, the Liberty, inflicting great damage and many casualties but attempts on the part of the U.S. Navy to go to her rescue were immediately halted by a specific order of President Lyndon Johnson.

Modern Israel occupied ancestral Arab lands that were blatantly stolen by genuine terrorists in 1946-1948 and has brutally repressed these people whenever and wherever they can be found.

They have attacked other countries without legal cause but their insidious infiltration of the United States intelligence organs (they hold almost all the key positions in the CIA) and the fact that their Mossad or foreign intelligence, operates freely in this country against what they state are "enemies of Israel" is shocking to those who are aware of the degree and extent of it.

Israel is afraid Iran will attack it. Iraq attacked Israel during the Desert Storm campaign, attacked it with missiles that our vaunted Patriot missiles were helpless against. Israel was a prime mover in pushing the Bush administration into attacking Hussein whom they viewed as a prime enemy. Note, if you will, that there are no Israeli troops co-joined with the famous, but rapidly shrinking, Coalition forces. Now, Israel wants America to destroy Iran before Iran is able to assault their country with nuclear weapons.

No one actually knows where the Iranian atomic facilities actually are or whether or not Iran has managed to either make or, more probable, obtain from other sources, enough atomic weaponry which it now had in its growing arsenal of weapons.

We know that a top agent of the CIA, Colonel James Critchfield, along with another CIA operative, James Atwood, sold former Soviet artillery shells with atomic warheads to a Pakistani group for an immense sum of cash. Could one of these have ended up in Tehran?

Russia still has tens of thousands of weapons, including many with atomic warheads. No one disputes this whatsoever. Who is to say with certainty that elements within the Russian government have not given threatened Iran at least one of these weapons and a mobile and very easy to hide, portable launching system?

It does not take a nuclear scientist to determine or predict that if Iran feels it is under a genuine and growing U.S. threat to bomb it, it can, and certainly will launch a preemptive strike.

The two main targets of opportunity within the range of any such weaponry can be clearly identified as the mass of American military personnel and equipment concentrated (against all common sense) in the so-called 'Green Zone' of Baghdad or any target, such as Tel Aviv, inside an equally threatening Israel.

If Bush is playing high-stakes diplomatic poker with Iran, he does not hold any kind of a winning hand.

The immigration mess, mass meetings, liberal outrage and all, is not going away and, if they have their way, neither are the tens of millions of completely illegal aliens now fattening at the public hog trough. What we are now facing is what can best be called a manifestation of the old States Rights concept wherein states can, and should, pass and enforce laws in the best interests of their citizens. It is obvious that a corrupt Congress, ever attuned to the cash contributions of agribusiness and other members of the American economic community in the furtherance of more and more cheap labor, will do the best it can to accommodate, in spite of the long-term economic and social damage to the rest of the country. Arizona, Illinois and several other states are now preparing legislation that will remove these parasites from the public tit. Legally, they can do this and legally, they will.

An article in a recent Chicago Tribune aptly pointed out that, deprived of generous welfare and unfettered access to public education, free medical assistance and other benefits intended solely for American citizens, they will remove to other states who do not have any such restrictive, but entirely legal, laws. Hopefully, the states will circumvent the greedy and disruptive policies of a remote and corrupt Congress and we can see a return to responsive local representation, so sadly missing.

Our battered, depressed and demoralized troops in Iraq were never very good to begin with. Well-equipped, yes, but their training lacked a good deal of substance and included no morality training whatsoever. ( Do not rape women, little boys or pets; do not shoot the wounded; do not use flame throwers on children; do not run over small children with armored vehicles; do not use government issue pliers to tear gold teeth out of your dead civilians.) Summer soldiers, they attended monthly meetings and finally had found a way out of social and economic ghettos and permanent mediocrity but when faced with a very prolonged, destructive and unwinable war, they started out by terrorizing, and then slaughtering, civilians (who had no weapons and couldn’t fight back) and then sent complaints to their families Stateside via email (which were quickly intercepted, censored and blocked by the authorities there) and now we have a sharp increase in desertions, self-mutilations, aggravated mental problems, growing sullenness and the beginning of mutinous behavior.

And Bush wants to use <>these<> shopworn and growingly unreliable men in another, probably far more serious, war in Iran? The senior military, some of whom are old friends, tell me without reservation, that there is a <>coup d'etat<> mentality building in the Pentagon. Rage is directed at Bush himself, Rice, Rumsfeld and the detested and vicious Cheney.

Now, I have been informed from a reliable source, the CIA is talking about the New Bush Plan for Permanent Presidency by getting an "Arab Coalition" made up of 250,000 Arab military units from: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and other countries to occupy civil war-ravaged Iraq while he takes his troops and sends them into Iran.

He is also talking about using nuclear weapons, mass carpet bombing of Tehran and <>any city with a population of over 10,000<>. These plans have been formulated via staff talks with an eager Israel and diplomatic one-on-one talks between neutral Arab states and the stupid and shallow Rice (but totally sycophantic in her slavish catering to Bush's paranoid dreams) and there has been sufficient leakage (some planned but some in earnest) to convince most of the media (except for the speaking fecal matter on FOX) that Bush is a nut and, as some talking heads are starting to imply, one who ought not to be in the White House.

This dissatisfaction has extended to Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld. There is also a growing, and very serious, wave of anti-Semitism welling up in top business, military and political circles. The brayings of the Jewish Neocons have done terrible damage to the Jewish community of the United States and, in strong probability, to the future of the U.S./Israeli relations.

Everyone I know who is in a position to be aware of such things (and I know quite a few...many are new information sources who read my site) that Israel has been forcefully counseling Bush to attack Iran and remove it as a specific threat to that bloody state.

As far as removing the Bush cabal, it is now at the "who-will-bell-the-cat” stage.

It is inevitable that such circumstances will always produce a man of action who will say, and do, what is necessary to restore order and public confidence. Will he go away if he is successful? Hardly. Look at Kemal Ataturk, Mussolini, Augustus, Hitler, Franco and many, many other Men on White Horses. Weak men like Bush always create situations where eventually someone puts a stop to their Caligula-like madnesses.

All of these matters are well-covered in history but the present rulers do not read history and if they did, are utterly incapable of understanding it.

We always get what we pay for. Josef Stalin best summed it up beautifully when he said, ‘No man…no problem!’

April 10, 2006

Bush's approval polls are tanking. Republicans are terrified lest, as they now believe, they will lose both the House and Senate in November. (Really major felonious activities would certainly be revealed by Democrats in control of either, or both, houses.)

There certainly have been prepared, at the Pentagon, plans to attack Iran. They were only plans for possible future actions. There are also current plans, on file, to attack Lebanon, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba (again!), and Mexico. Not to forget Dubai and Saudi Arabia in the event that Muslim fundamentalists gain power in those states. These plans are kept in the Big Safe over at the Pentagon in the event they are needed.

Now, the evil Karl Rove, terrified that he might be indicted and have to go to jail (and as a chubby invert, repeatedly raped by blacks...in his fevered imagination) and seeing the coming destruction of his Imperial Republican Reign Grand Design, has been pushing Bush to make a new war. Rove points out, one learns here from those who have read reams of notes and memos, that these slimy shits believe that Bush can regain his lost popularity in a wave of wonderful American patriotism, the military will be enhanced by a public-demanded general draft, we can at once, (when the new military is in place), invade the evil leftist Chavez (and guarantee his oil production for the United States and not the PRC) and put an end to the Castro government, not to mention all kinds of things designed to flatter the idiot Bush who does not want to seem weak (he is) or a failure (which he certainly is.)

Believe me, Bush wants to do this and Karl, with his connivance, has "leaked" this to a number of “friendly” media people.

If this action (the leaking) was not approved by Bush, the public revelation of a Top Secret military action under contemplation would be greeted by shrieks of "treason" from the Bush staff toadies followed by orders to the FBI to "locate the source" of the leak, just as they are frantically trying to find out who leaked the NSA phone tapping project last year..

The smug silence from the White House tells it all.

The departure of Card and now, Treasury Secretary Snow, (who had financial interests in the failed Dubai deal) from the Inner Circle is most interesting. No one walks away from their kind of power without either being sacked (as Ashcroft was for refusing to go along with Bush's completely illegal domestic phone tapping schemes) or being privy to the inner secrets, finding a way out now so as to avoid having to explain their actions to a Grand Jury later.

A personal friend in the Pentagon (War Plans Division) tells me that we simply cannot maintain any further military activities in that region. Bottomed-out morale, suicides, desertions, self-mutilations to get a discharge and such like would make any more expanded activity a disaster of the first magnitude. Also, a report tells us that many West Pointers, considered to be the elite of the Army’s officer corps, are leaving the service in droves when their enlistment period (5 years) is up. Also, the Pentagon is now taking young men with criminal records who have never gone to high school or who, if they have, have not graduated. This is the real bottom of the barrel, believe me, and we are scraping it even as I speak.

Many senior military personages are beginning to say that Bush should be physically removed from office lest he utterly destroy the United States., and similar sentiments are being expressed in different influential quarters.

Let's hope they are successful!

April 6, 2006

With Bush and the Republican’s poll numbers on a slow but inexorable slide downwards, (one poll has Bush at 36% and another at 32% with similar numbers for Republicans in general. Cheney is now at 16%!) the President is frantically trying to shore up withering public support by “town hall” meetings. He has been face to face with brutal reality when he gets rough questions from the floor or gets booed. The effective but nasty DeLay has gone to his maker and Rove is reported next to be indicted so the White House is full of people filling out new job resumes. The True and Loyal are becoming comically not so and the American media, other than the pathological O’Reilley and other nutties at Fox, are engaging in a feeding frenzy, ripping pieces out of the thrashing Bush carcass. There is a time bomb ticking away that will do little to assist Bush in regaining political heaven and that is the treatment of the dead GIs. It seems that the faulty electrical power at the Baghdad morgue means that many of the corpses of the fallen are badly rotten when they get back to the states and the DoD is now forbidding families to open the caskets. Of course they can’t do this but that doesn’t stop them from trying. Also, the desertion rates are skyrocketing, and former military personnel are refusing to be recalled in huge numbers. They can harass and arrest a few but not a few thousand. Some of these soldiers are talking at length and in public about the horrible, deliberate atrocities they and their fellows are wreaking on Iraqi civilians and all of this is being covered by the foreign, but not the domestic, media. Bush could care less if the dead soldiers were put into a wood chipper and used as fertilizer, has never gone to any military funeral and never will. The dead were merely a means to an end and nothing more. The struggle over illegal immigrants heats up and this time, there will probably be no general amnesty for the millions and millions of illegals now on the state welfare rolls, in jails across the country and taking jobs from tens of thousands of young Americans. Bush will leave a legacy of division and hatred behind him that is redolent of the Reconstruction in the post-Civil War period and in the end, there will be Republicans hanging in trees and from lampposts and freeway overpasses all over America. (In effigy of course, the real ones having fled to Costa Rica in droves).

April 2, 2006

There would be considerable political and business oriented consequences of rounding up and deporting over 12 million people.

Those consequences - for U.S. businesses and consumers and the illegal workers who provide a consistent source of cheap, dependable labor - are impossible to deny.

That point has been largely overlooked as congressional lawmakers clash over proposals to step up enforcement and legalize foreign workers. But, regardless of the measures they devise, the economic forces underpinning illegal immigration will be exceedingly difficult to alter, experts say.

‘If we enact a law that makes clear we're going to dramatically increase enforcement without allowing greater legal flows, employers and illegal immigrants will find ways around it,’ said Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California at San Diego.

The last time Congress overhauled immigration laws in 1986, the rhetoric was at least as heated and sentiments were largely the same. Illegal immigration was alleged to pose a threat to national security. Critics said unauthorized workers were taking good-paying American jobs. Foreign workers were accused of taking advantage of the nation's generosity by soaking up public benefits.

In the end, lawmakers passed a bill that granted amnesty to workers already here, while promising to clamp down on the flow of new arrivals. Congress ordered employers to require documents from their workers, and said there would be consequences if they didn't.

Illegal workers, though, kept coming.

In the twenty since, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has grown from about 4 million to between 11.5 million and 12 million, according to the Pew Hispanic Center or twenty to twenty-two million according to other sources. More than 40 percent - about 4.4 million people - have arrived within the past five years.

They account for about one in every four farm workers, hold 17 percent of all jobs in cleaning and building maintenance, 14 percent of all construction jobs and 12 percent of food preparation jobs, the center says.

Would tough new laws change that? The 1986 reforms failed because border and workplace enforcement were both weak, experts say.

Some lawmakers are calling for all employers to screen workers through a national computer system designed to catch those with fraudulent documents. A bill already passed by the House would require much more aggressive border enforcement, including an extensive fence along the frontier with Mexico.

Unlike the enforcement-focused House measure, a bill from the Senate Judiciary Committee calls for offering workers who are already here a chance at amnesty and citizenship over an extended timetable. At the same time, it would create a guest worker program to allow a continued flow of temporary workers, a response to intense lobbying by business groups.

But experts say that while the provisions in some of the bills might slow the steady stream of arrivals, that would only be temporary.

‘When all the dust clears, we're going to have higher levels of legal immigration and lower levels of illegal immigration, but within a few years we'll return to the levels that we've seen,’ said Peter Schuck, a Yale University professor specializing in immigration law and policy. "Immigrants will figure it out. The zeal of enforcement will wane."

The problem is that enforcement is no match for potent underlying economics, experts say.

More than half the illegal workers in the United States are from Mexico, where the past decade's currency devaluation and debt crisis have created tremendous economic volatility. At the same time, the Mexican labor market has been fed by a baby boom a generation behind the one in the United States. The combination has created tremendous economic pressure, pushing a surplus of workers to seek out opportunities better than those offered at home.

Illegals are quite willing to work at almost any wage: one couple both in this country illegally, who work at a restaurant in nearby Belvidere, Ill., for $3.50 an hour - well below the federal minimum wage of $5.15 and Illinois' $6.50 hourly minimum. This means that young Americans, coming out of high school, find it impossible to earn any kind of a living wage because they could not survive on such low wages. Especially hard hit are American blacks, already disadvantaged. Illegals have driven this group of American citizens completely out of the entrance level jobs, forcing them onto the welfare rolls and producing a huge, indigestible, and unemployable mass in the body politic

Even as overseas economics have pushed workers to leave their home countries, the rapid growth in the U.S. economy during the 1990s fueled huge new demand. It took a while for the boom to reach California, long home to the nation's largest immigrant population, where post-Cold War cuts in defense spending prolonged a downturn. But robust economic growth elsewhere drew large numbers of new immigrants to states that had previously seen relatively few, and into new industries, too.

Illegal workers flocked to factory jobs in Illinois, to clean hotel rooms and work in restaurants in Georgia, and to build homes in North Carolina and Colorado.

.While illegal immigrants currently play a crucial role in the economy, their importance is sometimes overstated. Foreign workers account for less than 5 percent of the nation's labor force. They are concentrated by industry and geography in ways that would cushion the larger economy should they removed from it. While their labor affects the prices consumers pay for some goods, it is but one component.

Proponents of tougher immigration laws argue that the country has workers capable of doing the jobs done by immigrants, but that businesses must pay more.

‘At what point in the last 20 years did Americans wake up and say `I no longer want to work in construction for $17 an hour?'’ said John Keeley of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates stricter controls.

But business groups make the specious excuse that growth in the number of workers in the United States is slowing, that most young workers do not want jobs that are often seasonal and temporary and involve tough manual labor.

That having been said, given the motivations of the businesses and workers at its center, regulating the flow of workers at the periphery of the economy will be very difficult, whether or not immigration is legal, experts say.

The major hurdle to Congress legislating a working solution to the enormous mass of illegal aliens now in the United States is the tremendous economic demand for illegal immigrants as cheap, off-the-books workers in the American business community. Frustrated by union-mandated high wages, American business eagerly welcomes illegal immigrants who will work for a small fraction of American union wages, not protest dangerous working conditions and increase corporate profits. Even now, corporate America is doing its level best, through the ever-active lobbyists, to arm twist Congress into permitting both increased immigration and the continued use of existing illegal workers.

And , finally, there is a very easy way in which this devastating problem can be legally and ethically addressed and implemented. That would be for the individual states to address this issue at the economic levels. More and more, the States are defying a useless President and thoroughly corrupt Congress. In one instance, the Bush administration, catering shamelessly to the Christian Right, declined to support any but the least objectionable stem cell research. There would be, he mandated, no Federal financial assistance to these programs, so detested by the right-wing Christians. A number of states, recognizing the vital importance of stem cell research, passed their own laws permitting such research in their own states. The Federal government cannot interfere with these new laws and therein lies the solution to the mass of illegal immigrants that Congress will do nothing about.

States most heavily impacted by these millions of immigrants should consider:

· Banning any state welfare payments of any kind to illegal non-citizens. This prohibition ought not to impact any legal immigrants.

· No citizen of that state should be permitted to operate a motor vehicle on the roads of that state without a valid state driver’s license and proof of insurance.

· A state driver’s license can only be obtained by the presentation to the motor vehicle department in charge of driver’s licenses of proof of citizenship that must be verified by said agency prior to issuance of any license.

· No citizen of that state should be permitted to vote unless they are able to produce a valid and legal state driver’s license at the voting stations

· No medical facility should be compelled to treat indigent and illegal persons without their possessing a valid state driver’s license.

· No person should be permitted to attend any public school in the state without their parents being able to produce valid state driver’s licenses.

· No business in the state should be permitted to hire, either as temporary or permanent employees, any person who is not in possession of photo ID, or a valid Social Security number and that businesses that do hire persons without such identification, shall be subject to an immediate heavy fine on the first instance and the jailing of their CEO on the second.

· Contractors of any kind who persistently hire such illegals should have their state contractor’s licenses permanently revoked.

· Any illegal operating a motor vehicle on public roads, if apprehended by law enforcement, should have said vehicle impounded and held until proper identification can be produced. If such identification should not be forthcoming, the said vehicle should be auctioned off to the public and the proceeds placed in a special educational fund for state residents in need of public aid.

In summation, if you keep your food in sealed containers and the floors and counters in your kitchen cleaned, the cockroaches will go elsewhere to feed. The enforced rounding up and deportation of millions of people is simply not possible, much to the joy of the mass of illegals now in the United States. They are well aware of this logistical nightmare and bask in the realization that they are hopefully untouchable. If, on the other hand, economic freeloading becomes impossible, they will voluntarily go elsewhere to feed in another public hog trough.