June 30, 2006

There has been some weird funny business over at the Treasury department. There seems to be some kind of a fear that there might be an outbreak of an unspecified “deadly disease” in the United States,

The U.S. Mint, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the Federal Reserve are busily engaged in producing a record number of banknotes and coins so that, “we can ensure that banknote and coin inventories would be adequate if financial institutions need extra supplies.”

The rumor is that this is supposed to be in anticipation of “bird flu” but a contact tells me that this is a cover for something much bigger. We know that Congress has appropriated over $6 billion to prepare for a “flu epidemic” but no one I know believes that this will happen and there is no proof that the flu has moved from birds to people in any significant numbers.

Anyone who looks at the CDC and WHO websites can verify what I am saying and yet there is considerable concern over something in the health field. There also has been some heavy duty activity over in Maryland where Cheney lives, according to a loose-lipped Secret Service fellow but other than that, there is nothing concrete. I will dig into this story and see if there is anything there, other than some scare crap designed to get out a frightened vote for the Protectors of the Republican Faith come November.

June 25, 2006

The recent exposure of American spying on international bank transfers only touches the tip of a very volatile subject.

This spying operation was given the code name, at one point, of <>Xystus III<> and here is a capsulated background of the current operations of a massive, global American spy program that eventually has been turned back onto its creators.

The original concept, as set forth by Vice President Cheney, was to investigate large transfers of money connected with possible terrorist activity and was officially promulgated at the beginning of 2002. All American banking systems were requested, then required, to make all of their records “fully available” to U.S. investigative bodies, without subpoena and that under no circumstances would the targets be informed by the bank system involved.

All the major American banking systems: Bank of America, Bank One, Chase-Manhattan and others, were involved. After the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, this project was turned over to them.

Through the wholehearted assistance of one Lenny Schrank, who set up, and currently runs, the Belgian-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication or S.W.I.F.T., the Cheney people got a foothold in the world of international financial trading.

Initially, this was a legitimate exploratory operation, designed to track funds to and from Muslim countries, and entities, who practiced or tolerated terrorist activities and this included: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Somalia, the UAE, the Russian Republic, Ireland, the United Kingdom, India, Indonesia and the Philippians. I wondered about the addition of Saudi Arabia to this but I learned that the CIA believes that the Saud family is losing its grip on this very valuable oil-rich country and has struck a deal with the opposition Wahhabists. They now know, thanks to the DHS diggings, where the Saudi royal family has been stashing all of its money and they assume the fundamentalist Wahhbists will foment revolution (which they will become interested in helping) and their payoff will be the US forcing the banks to disgorge the Saudi funds. These will then be used to pay off the Wahhabist leaders, saving the US a great deal of bribe money. Later, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Costa Rica, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and France were added to the list.

The DHS has stations located in various cities in the United States who are responsible for specific areas of financial interest and they worked, and have worked, closely with the Department of State who have been called upon to apply “extreme diplomatic pressure” to countries whose banking systems are reluctant to cooperate with this program. In addition to the S.W.I.F.T people:

SWIFT: Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
Avenue Adèle 1, B-1310 La Hulpe, Belgium Tel: 01132-2655-31-11

List of Offices: who were informed by their pro-Cheney CEO that the U.S. spy program was a “highly limited and temporary” program for the interdiction of global terrorists. Later, when the executives in this organization began to have concerns that this program had grown to complete surveillance of any and all transactions, their objections were dealt with very severely by the Department of State through the Embassy in Belgium.

In addition to the Belgian clearing house, the following other bank transfer systems were also used to track the flow of money. Some of these were entirely willing, in the beginning, but later started having regrets and others had no knowledge that their systems had been penetrated by computer hackers in the paid employ of the DHS (a central California branch has been responsible mainly for these break-ins)

These now consist of:

BOJ-NET: Bank Of Japan Clearing House

BOJNET: Electronic wire transfer system overseen by the Bank of Japan.

CHAPS: Clearing House Automated Payments System (Operated by the Bankers Clearing House of London)

· CHAPS: Clearing House Automated Payments System. Operated by the Bankers Clearing House of London, CHAPS is used for interbank messaging and wire transfers involving British Pounds.

Also being surveilled are banking systems in the PRC, South Korea, Singapore, Mumbai, Australia, Canada, Spain, Italy and Turkey. Another excellent DHS source of information are the FUNDS WIRING SERVICES: Although there are many wire transfer services, they must each use the basic services such as Fedwire, S.W.I.F.T, or BOJNET. Examples of wire money transfer services are Western Union, Moneygram, Eurigro, Sterling Draft Service, and the <>various payment services available on the Internet such as Paypal<>

One of the prime aims of the current Administration is to prevent Americans from shipping money to overseas banks, to purchase and hold foreign currencies such as the euro, and to invest; most especially, in Russian businesses. Cheney is a die-hard Cold Warrior who still hates the Russians in general and Putin in particular. He has said, in my presence, that Putin, once a colonel in the KGB, was a “retread Commie shit” and he, Cheney, was the one behind the régime change in the Ukraine. Cheney isn’t the brightest boy on the block and has a huge opinion of his cleverness but Putin trumped his ace over the Ukraine. Cheney was hoping to put in an anti-Putin government in the Ukraine and then grab off the oil and steel mills. Unfortunately for Tiny Dick, the Donets basin borders on Russia and has a very large Russian population.

As the Ukrainian constitution allowed a region to withdraw and form its own government, the Donets area immediately proclaimed they were going to drop out of the Ukrainian Union and petition Russia to let them join the Russian republic. This marked the end of the Cheney dream and he has now lost all interest in that country, stating that “who needs more fucking farmland?”

From a co-worker who works in the Vice President’s circle, we learn that Cheney was in such a rage about the <>New York Times<> exposure of the Schrank business that he was turning bright red and banging the furniture. As Cheney has a very bad heart, his staff have tried to calm him down, fearing the worst.

While these bank surveillance programs initially dealt only with <>genuinely suspect groups and individuals<>, Cheney and his party saw this as an excellent opportunity to “get a handle” on any individual or organization that they viewed as possible present or future domestic (and foreign) political opposition.

DHS now fully monitors any unusually large amounts of money transferred, among many others, to the ACLU, P.E.T.A., MoveOn.org, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Defenders of Wildlife, and EarthJustice, as well as contributions of any size to Antiwar.com, Greenpeace, Cindy Sheehan's Gold Star Families For Peace, and any of the Muslim organizations, regardless of their nature, found on the DHS/governmental hit list, as well as any American, or foreign, citizen found on the “secret” (it has been published on the Internet!) ‘no fly list.’

What this means is that any American citizen who contributes money to what the Cheney people deem to be “subversive” groups will, without a doubt, have their private lives quickly and thoroughly invaded and any information gleaned from the many sites like ‘Choice Point,’ ‘TRW’ or Wackenhut added to the huge, and growing, ‘enemies list’ of the Republican Administration.

Unfortunately for the security of this massive intrusion program, the United States has made the colossal error of informing their opposite intelligence numbers in Israel with the result that while we were sharing requested information with Israeli Intelligence, they, in turn were initiating their very own program directed against the United States. The following American financial institutions have been the subject of on-going Israeli surveillance:

· CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payments System
100 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004 (212) 613-0188

· CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payments System. An interbank payment system related to international trade, CHIPS is used for the transfer of international trade dollars. CHIPS is used by both Fedwire and S.W.I.F.T.

· FEDWIRE: Operated by the Federal Reserve Board of the USA


· ACH: Automated Clearing House of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY

What the Israelis are looking for is not information on Arab terrorists because they currently have a huge data base on this subject, (much of which they have not shared with their American counterparts), but to locate damaging information on Americans of influence, such as Congressmen, high level U.S. officials and leading American business and religious leaders, who have been suspected of hiding large sums of illegally obtained money (from bribes mostly) in foreign/offshore banks and who could be considered as being subject to effective blackmail.

Unfortunately for the United States, a number of former Russian citizens now work for Israeli intelligence and at least a few of them have been sending all the Israeli information straight to Moscow.

Much of this highly damaging political fiscal information has also been sent by Israelis to an American political group. This is a group that are fanatical supporters of Governor Dean, and others of his kind (of the Gene McCarthy stripe) now head of the Democratic Party and once a candidate for the Presidency. Dean has an excellent computer and internet network that initially was developed by his people for his failed campaign and it is with them that the Israelis have been cooperating .

The reasons for this cooperative friendliness? Dean and his internet supporters are <>extremely<> pro-Israel (Dean’s wife is Jewish as are the head, and many members, of his Internet group) and Israel feels that if Dean had sufficient damaging material on the current leadership, great pressure could be placed on them, via threatened exposure on their website, to permit Dean to have another, and this time, successful, run at the Presidency in 2008.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America and a provable pro-Israeli president would be of great value to Tel Aviv.

June 23, 2006

The futile and debilitating military campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq are having a terrible toll on the more fanatic of the Republicans. The public is growing more and more unhappy so we now have Bush and his people frantically trying to drum up support for the continuation of the war.

Bush doesn’t want to lose face and the Neocons are still frantically trying to support their very own precious Israel.

It’s a poor idea to beat the war drums in Congress and this will have a very negative response in the vote in November but frightened people show little common sense. We can expect more of the ‘Fright Quotient’ propaganda. (‘We Republicans are all that stand between the beloved American people and utter destruction by huge armies of Muslim terrorists!) They point out that if it weren’t for the presence of George W. Bush at the helm, our cities would already be smoldering rubble and every women between 6 and 60 would be gang raped by raving Arabs.

Actually, the Muslims are much too busy cutting our throats in Iraq (where the death tolls are not coming down) to come over and stick pipe bombs in milk trucks in Dallas but the absence of any unexpected explosions is explained as a great Bush triumph.

I get to read all kinds of reports from the FBI and the DHS and believe me, if the Muslim terrorists wanted to blow things up, put chemicals in our water supply or otherwise behave in an antisocial way, there is nothing at all to stop them. The only ones who are inconvenienced by the burgeoning prying, snooping, phone-tapping, bank box break-ins, library surveillance and a host of other useless nonsense are the rest of us. Surely, an overview of the readers at the public library in Des Moines, Iowa, is not going to uncover an unsuspected cell of deadly turnip assassins.

Also, the agencies (and their leaders) have an excuse to get huge appropriations of cash from Congress, cash they don’t have to account for because, my dear, it’s SECRET! BMW and summer home dealers are the ones who profit from all of this massive FEMA-like thievery, not us.

Once-upon-a-time we could trust our elected and appointed officials to be honest and sincere men but now they all steal everything in sight, stash it in offshore banks and snigger around the Beltway like a whore with a drunken millionaire trick.

June 19, 2006

An article in the NYT today about a former senior Coast Guard officer, now a “consultant” for both the DHS and a private security firm. Seems he has been pushing the DHS and Congress to install a super expensive detection system in all of our ports to look for explosives. Also turns out that his other job makes the very equipment he is pushing. Who cares if the equipment works? There is always the Biblical exhortation about no man being able to serve two masters.

I have said it many times before that corruption is so bad in Washington that even Third World countries are shocked. One gets arrested for this while hundreds keep right on going like the Energizer bunny. The wholesale thievery by FEMA people, the utter corruption in Florida and other states boggles the imagination. Sleazy “contractors” have made more money than the national debt of Cambodia in a two week period.

Cheney claimed to have divested himself of his stock in Halliburton as the law required. The law did not require him to dispose of his stock options and Cheney has huge options on Halliburton stock which his actions have boosted into the stratosphere. When he retires, he can exercise the options and will become richer than he is now.

If some huge chemical complex is in deliberate violation of various environmental laws, they only have to call upon Bush and remind him of how much money they have put into his, and the Republican Party’s, coffers to get a presidential order nullifying any law they want.

Here is a fictional story but one that is absolutely true: The government of Taiwan wants special favors from the White House. How do they get this? By dragging in a mattress cover stuffed with hundred dollar bills and dropping it on Bush’s desk in the Oval Office. The next day, Taiwan gets what it wants. Is this the end of the story? No. The PRC gets wind of this and a week later, one of their people drags in two mattress covers stuffed with hundred dollar bills and dropping it on Bush’s desk in the Oval Office. And the next day, Taiwan is s.o.l.

June 15, 2006

There are a number of interesting matters to attend to but first off, a brief discussion of Ann Coulter. The publication, by Random House, of her latest rant, caused quite a backlash, even among Republicans. Coulter thrives on what she calls ‘Controversy” but everyone other than a Republican right wing nut calls bad taste. This backlash is all over the Internet and the article by the TBR contributor, Harry Brunser alleging that Coulter is actually a man (long suspected but certainly not proven) has added fuel to the fire.

I met Coulter once at a Republican function and did not like her at all. Scrawny, naturally flat-chested (What Nature Has Forgotten, Ann will Remedy with Cotton!) with the ugly, skinny legs of a crane and a huge adams apple, she does not show her 53 years, mainly because of her ongoing bulimia coupled with the attentions of a cosmetic surgeon. Her long blonde hair is obviously dyed (the roots show clearly up close) and a slight thickening of the lesser alar cartilage of her nose was a sure sign of “cosmetic surgery.”

Some have called her, not in jest, a Poster Girl for the far right and in this, based on my observations of the latter, is right on. The members of the far right, who idolize Coulter, are small-minded, racist , viciously intolerant of anyone who is not a northern European Protestant, black-despisers (‘Welfare Whores!’) and in general, creatures with hearts the size of mustard seeds. Coulter is a perfect icon for this group, which now wants to completely control the United States and continue to receive enormous tax relief from the Bush people, but to the rest of the country, she is an evil, supercilious elitist with genuine delusions of grandeur and reference.

Coulter is a lawyer and when the old question is asked, “What is black and brown and looks wonderful on a lawyer?” no one is offended when the answer is, “a Doberman.”

Now on to other issues: Now that Karl Rove is no longer under threat of indictment (not innocent <>per se<> but the charges are not sufficiently substantiated to bring him to trial) he is running around the country, bragging that we are winning in Iraq and that Bush will “stay the course” until the end. No one ever doubted Bush would hold out in Iraq until the end and that if, by some sick chance, another idiot like himself got into the White House by the by-now commonplace voter frauds (see below) that they would keep Americans in that country until Hell froze over. The Bush people are now believing their own lies and for some reason, having removed the head of one terrorist group (there are hundreds of other groups but never mind that) we have won. No military leader believes any of this political puffery for a second but that doesn’t matter to Bush. He will strut his skinny body around the country (at taxpayers expense, naturally) crowing like a drunken rooster while more soldiers and (unimportant) civilians die or are maimed for life. Reality will set in after a time and as the mid terms approach, the Republican leadership will become even more frantic to keep power.

The story we reported about the Bush people using the Canadian arrest of (suspected) terrorists as a goad to terrify the American public seems to have come a cropper. Even the media is laughing at the invented stories about cutting off of the head of the Canadian Prime Minister so this one, like so many other Republican games, has gone away.

One of my co-workers showed me a paper indicating that the Bush people, outraged that the various states are passing laws that annoy Bush and thwart his evil designs on control, are planning to initiate “pre-emption” laws that would, in effect, override any State legislation with a Federal law that would simply quash any state legislation the Bush people did not like. The case made in the paper was that the fact that many states were passing laws against gas guzzling motor vehicles had enraged both the oil industry and the automotive industry. As both of these regularly send huge bribes not only to Congress but to the Bush people personally (Karl Rove has had special deep pockets sewn into his suits to hold the money he gets) it is seen as vital for Bush to stop this trend.

From a political, socio-economic and moral point of view, Washington has become a Third World country like Mexico or Egypt where bribes are the rule, not the exception. Since the beginning of the Republic, dealing in favors in Washington has been relative common but now, the arrogant and thoroughly corrupt Republican administration has raised bribery and blatant corruption to a major national art.

Another matter Rove is attending to, with his well-honed expertise, is to see how the mid terms can be stolen. Rove was the driving force behind the obviously rigged Florida elections in 2000 and the Ohio debacle in 2004. The problem seems to be that the cooperative Diebold people, whose voting machines are as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, are being thrown out of many states as ‘being susceptible to deliberate interference’ from unspecified but obvious outside parties. When a criminal act is performed, the police always try to find out who benefits from it.

June 11, 2006

The national flap over the genuinely nasty Ann Coulter is actually a tempest in a teapot. Coulter represents, very clearly, a portion of the Republican Party that delights in executions, torture, physical control of minorities, special economic privileges, total support for Israel, gross religious intolerance for everyone not a white-bread right winger, and anyone not white. Coulter is cold and calculating (and a great deal older than she lets on…one more face lift and she’ll have to shave every day!) People like Bush and his trained dwarves love her because she so clearly articulates their own wizened souls. Like the crazy DaVinci Code novel, Coulter has her circle of devoted followers and delights in making vicious jabs at widows and mourning mothers that would make even Cheney wince. Most of the decent people on the White House staff have left the Monkey Palace quite a while ago and they have been quickly replaced with the Coulter types. What, one wonders, will happen when the giant Permanent Republican Control shatters to pieces? Where will these shallow, vicious people find work? Gassing kittens at the ASPCA? Masked pedophiles lurking near playgrounds in unmarked vans? We ought to stuff the lot of them in the torture cells at Gitmo and give them all sharp razor blades with the hopes they will use them. Gitmo is America’s Auschwitz in all its fascistic glory. And creeps like Cheney and Rumsfeld won’t be able to make huge, illegal profits from their various under-the-table investments in government supported companies. In the meantime, we have to deal with Coulter, the latter-day Bitch of Belsen.

June 5, 2006

An interesting report I read yesterday, for want of anything better to do, tells us that of the circa 150 oil drilling platforms (out of 2,000) in the upper Gulf of Mexico that were completely flattened by Katrina and Rita, only 25 have been put back into operation. The very present fear is that another season with some Force 5 storms could easily roar up into the Gulf and take out more platforms. If our industry can only get such a small number of wrecked oil platforms up in a year’s time, think of the disaster if, say, sixty or seventy more platforms were dumped this summer. If you think the price of gas is bad now, wait until then. Bush has been talking about releasing the official U.S. oil reserves but this wouldn’t cover thirty days of domestic consumption.

And the CIA sent over a report on rumors that Russia was going to move its Black Seas Fleet to a port on the eastern Mediterranean (Syria) It seems that the Bush people (read CIA) have been pressuring the Ukrainians to kick Putin out of the Crimea. After all, the CIA bribed dissidents in the Ukraine to change the pro-Moscow government there and are now following this dubious victory up with more mindless mischief. If Putin actually does move the fleet down to the Med, he will be accomplishing something the Tsars tried to do for centuries; get a warm-water port. That Stalin and his successors did not do this is because the U.S. would have once threatened Russia with immediate military retaliation.

Now, with our military power in shambles, we can only get Congoleeza to screech at them and the obnoxious and ineffectual Bolton to stick out his tongue at the UN. Our present serious weaknesses, both economic, political and military, are emboldening our many, and growing, enemies to ignore what they all see are empty threats.

I only hope those who voted for Bush are happy with the outcome of their bad judgment.

It is interesting to note the sudden interest Bush and his people are expressing in the so-called "gay marriage" issue. Considering the slipping economy, the soaring (and permanent) gas prices, the growing death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan, the obvious corruption at the highest levels, the revelations of torture and murder of civilians by the U.S. military, the down-played high death tolls of U.S. servicemen and other matters, the "gay marriage" issue is a very crude attempt to deflect attention to Bush's sinking approval ratings (26%) and the desertion of the Republican and Christian right. In upper establishment circles on the East Coast, it is generally known that Bush himself led a gay-lifestyle while at Yale and has surrounded himself with gays such as Rove, Mehlman, the awful "Gannon" and others. This is typical of Bush who is vicious and small-minded. An unloved and unpleasant child, he has been supported by his family and high-level Republicans, the latter seeing in him an easily-controlled cipher to launch and support their far-right programs. Now, even these fanatic hopefuls have deserted him. Perhaps his mother can get him a job representing Mobil/Exxon oil company as their Moscow representative. The Russians do not suffer fools gladly and would make short work of him.

June 3, 2006

An interesting report I read yesterday, for want of anything better to do, tells us that of the circa 150 oil drilling platforms (out of 2,000) in the upper Gulf of Mexico that were completely flattened by Katrina and Rita, only 25 have been put back into operation. The very present fear is that another season with some Force 5 storms could easily roar up into the Gulf and take out more platforms. If our industry can only get such a small number of wrecked oil platforms up in a year’s time, think of the disaster if, say, sixty or seventy more platforms were dumped this summer. If you think the price of gas is bad now, wait until then. Bush has been talking about releasing the official U.S. oil reserves but this wouldn’t cover thirty days of domestic consumption.

And the CIA sent over a report on rumors that Russia was going to move its Black Seas Fleet to a port on the eastern Mediterranean (Syria) It seems that the Bush people (read CIA) have been pressuring the Ukrainians to kick Putin out of the Crimea. After all, the CIA bribed dissidents in the Ukraine to change the pro-Moscow government there and are now following this dubious victory up with more mindless mischief. If Putin actually does move the fleet down to the Med, he will be accomplishing something the Tsars tried to do for centuries; get a warm-water port. That Stalin and his successors did not do this is because the U.S. would have once threatened Russia with immediate military retaliation.

Now, with our military power in shambles, we can only get Congoleeza to screech at them and the obnoxious and ineffectual Bolton to stick out his tongue at the UN. Our present serious weaknesses, both economic, political and military, are emboldening our many, and growing, enemies to ignore what they all see are empty threats.

I only hope those who voted for Bush are happy with the outcome of their bad judgment.

It is interesting to note the sudden interest Bush and his people are expressing in the so-called "gay marriage" issue. Considering the slipping economy, the soaring (and permanent) gas prices, the growing death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan, the obvious corruption at the highest levels, the revelations of torture and murder of civilians by the U.S. military, the down-played high death tolls of U.S. servicemen and other matters, the "gay marriage" issue is a very crude attempt to deflect attention to Bush's sinking approval ratings (26%) and the desertion of the Republican and Christian right. In upper establishment circles on the East Coast, it is generally known that Bush himself led a gay-lifestyle while at Yale and has surrounded himself with gays such as Rove, Mehlman, the awful "Gannon" and others. This is typical of Bush who is vicious and small-minded. An unloved and unpleasant child, he has been supported by his family and high-level Republicans, the latter seeing in him an easily-controlled cipher to launch and support their far-right programs. Now, even these fanatic hopefuls have deserted him. Perhaps his mother can get him a job representing Mobil/Exxon oil company as their Moscow representative. The Russians do not suffer fools gladly and would make short work of him.

June 1, 2006

Memorial Day usually marks the beginning of America’s summer vacation season but this year is not like any other. Gas prices are soaring at the pump because the actions of the Bush people have, directly and indirectly, forced the price of imported oil into an upward spiral from which it will not come down. Hotels, eating establishments, air lines, amusement parks, and their interconnected businesses are starting to hurt very badly. Hotels are offering rebates to guests who drive but their occupancy rates are still starting a long, downward slide. We can attribute some of this to the oil companies who are making obscene profits and the balance to the Bush administration whose insane policies have led directly to this serious economic crisis.

You might be overjoyed to lean that Bush has now called on Americans to conserve gasoline by doing less driving, because of the current increase in imported oil which is now inching upwards from $75. a barrel of crude. This is being reflected in the nation’s pump prices which now are over $3.00 a gallon and in some states, over $3.50. Initial views that this jump in price, which has allowed major American oil companies to reap billions of dollars in profits, was only a “fluke” and would soon come down, just in time for the peak summer vacation travel season. This has not happened and the industry now believes that, “given the present state of the market, we can expect retail prices of between $4 to $5 a gallon.”. Bush also issued a directive for federal agencies to reduce energy consumption, urging employees to share cars or use public transport!

Bush has said that it was up to all Americans to "pitch in" by being better conservers of energy

“If it makes sense for the citizen out there to curtail non-essential travel, it darn sure makes sense for federal employees ... We can encourage employees to car pool or use mass transit, and we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation," he said.

Typically, our Beloved Christian President says one thing but does another. Note that Bush's motorcade, which typically has dozens of motorcycle outriders, several gas-guzzling vans, SUVs, Bush's heavy, armor-plated limousine, and an identical limo put in as a decoy, sucks up an enormous amount of gas. Fuel consumption is even higher on Bush's cross-country travels - which include flights on Air Force One as well as helicopters for the president, his staff, secret service agents, and the press corps that accompanies him. The air force recently estimated fuel costs for Air Force One at $8,219 per hour. Bush was also said to be reminding his staff to turn off lights! One of my co-workers read this and asked me if that was the reason Bush turned off the lights in his Oval Office lavatory when he and Jeff Gannon were practicing Hide-the Zucchini last year. Probably.

Hopefully, Fitzgerald will do the right, Christian, thing and bust Fat Karl the Eunuch in the near future and with that evil toad out of the White House, most of his sly innuendos, threats of blackmail and general viciousness will fade away, leaving a whimpering Bush weeping over the loss of his beloved Turd Blossom. (That, by God, is really Bush’s fitting nickname for Rove!)

Why not stay at home this year? So many are going to (but not out of choice) and the NYT reports that people are having to sell their vacation homes because it costs too much to drive to them. All across America, I can see millions of happy Americans, sitting in darkness (because of rolling power shutoffs due to oil shortages) but with candles lit in front of a picture of the President. They are drawing spiritual warmth from his kindly, Christian countenance and, because the dollar has tanked, warming their hands over a fire made with worthless dollar bills. Have a happy vacation, friends, and remember all of this misery, and who is responsible for it, in November.