fly boy's a little under the weather (i know it's the shell fish) so i went down to the lobby, grabbed some papers. no washington post, but they did have the new york times. so i called c.i. and said 'we're temporarily grounded so i'm thinking about blogging.' we'll go to the beach later today but i'm staying out of the bedroom so fly boy can sleep it off.
he's not drunk, by the way. i love shell fish and had lobster and crab but in very small quantities and with lots of water. there's too much mercury in the sea these days (thanks to our pollution) so i eat very little fish compared to ten years ago. when i do it, i eat it in small quantities. i ordered up a pitcher of ice and bottled water at five this morning, made fly boy drink it (with him protesting the whole time) to flush out his system. he's now back asleep and will probably wake up with a nasty headache but none of the nausea.
so i was talking to c.i. about what stood out in the paper today to me (new york times) and i'll be grabbing that.
david johnston and carl hulse's 'Gonzales Said He Would Quit in Raid Dispute' caught my eye. here's the backstory. william j. jefferson, democrat from louisiana serving in the u.s. house of representatives, had his office raided, congressional office, by the fbi. it's lead to an uproar all week. republicans were outraged and expressed it.
finally, bully boy said whatever the raid produced would be sequestered for 45 days and this has apparently cooled off the talk.
there are rumors, abc reported it mid-week, that house leader, republican dennis hassetert, was also under investigation from the fbi. and you can be sure that played into making the outrage bipartisan.
hulse and johnston report that attorney general alberto gonzales and fbi chief robert mueller were prepared to resign if bully boy returned whatever the fbi seized.
so here's my take on it: so what?
really.
you've had the fbi and others busting into people's homes and destroying everything in searches. boo-hoo for congress that they got brought into the real world. now, as far as we know, nothing in jefferson's office was broken. and, unlike with some fbi searches, no one got shot. (gore vidal wrote of a woman being shot for asking the fbi to not hurt her children. she died in front of her children. no weapon on her.)
the fbi is out of control and has been for years.
so now congress finds out just how out of control and all bully boy does is have to sequester whatever was taken from jefferson's office and congress is suddenly not interested in publicly debating the issue?
too bad. i honestly was hoping they all would have been raided - democrat and republican. who knows what would have turned up? more importantly, they would have grasped how invasive the fbi has become in the average person's life.
wonderful opportunity missed, if you ask me.
eric pfanner's 'Times of London to Print Daily U.S. Edition' tells you that rupert murdoch's going to be bringing his times of london to the united states (at least to nyc and dc) and using his new york post distribution system to defray costs. it's too bad the guardian never got its much hyped daily american paper beyond the talking stage. this will sell to some just because it has 'london' in the title and they'll think they're getting an alternate take. they're getting the murdoch take with the occassional story that matters.
forget the guardian, what america needs is a daily version of the indepent of london.
on the time of london, it's amazing that we can get more of the same but no new voices. that's the way the crooked system is set up.
c.i. and i are both noting something zach e-mailed to the common ills, robert parry's 'Bush's Enron Lies:'
Four years ago, when the taboo against calling George W. Bush a liar was even stronger than it is today, the national news media bought into the Bush administration's spin that the President did nothing to bail out his Enron benefactors, including Kenneth Lay.
Bush supposedly refused to intervene, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Enron had poured into his political coffers. That refusal purportedly showed the high ethical standards that set Bush apart from lesser politicians.
Bush's defenders will probably reprise that storyline now that former Enron Chairman Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling stand convicted of conspiracy and fraud in the plundering of the onetime energy-trading giant. But the reality is that the Bush-can't-be-bought spin was never true.
For instance, the documentary evidence is now clear that in summer 2001 -- at the same time Bush's National Security Council was ignoring warnings about an impending al-Qaeda terrorist attack -- NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice was personally overseeing a government-wide task force to pressure India to give Enron as much as $2.3 billion.
Then, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when India's cooperation in the "war on terror" was crucial, the Bush administration kept up its full-court press to get India to pay Enron for a white-elephant power plant that the company had built in Dabhol, India.
The pressure on India went up the chain of command to Vice President Dick Cheney, who personally pushed Enron's case, and to Bush himself, who planned to lodge a complaint with India's prime minister. Post-9/11, one senior U.S. bureaucrat warned India that failure to give in to Enron's demands would put into doubt the future functioning of American agencies in India.
The NSC-led Dabhol campaign didn't end until Nov. 8, 2001, when the Securities and Exchange Commission raided Enron's offices -- and protection of Lay's interests stopped being politically tenable. That afternoon, Bush was sent an e-mail advising him not to raise his planned Dabhol protest with India's prime minister who was visiting Washington. [For details on the Dabhol case, see below.]
Contrary to the official story, the Bush administration did almost whatever it could to help Enron as the company desperately sought cash to cover mounting losses from its off-the-books partnerships, a bookkeeping black hole that was sucking Enron toward bankruptcy and scandal.
now please read kat's 'Kat's Korner: Dixie Chicks Taking The Long Way home while NYT gets lost along the way' - it's incredible. and so is the cd!
a question came in tuesday that i never had time to answer in an e-mail. it was about my links and how sometimes they underlined link exceeds the title to include (or surpass) the parenthesis? i have very long fingernails. i try to highlight just the title. usually i try that twice. if i don't get it on the 2nd try, i just highlight what's there.
RadioNation with Laura Flanders has anthony arnove, author of iraq: the logic of withdrawal, on saturday's program so listen.
kpfa this sunday (tomorrow):
Sunday Salon
Sunday, May 28th, 09:00a.m. [pacific time, it's noon eastern time and eleven central]
This week on Sunday Salon...
Hour 1: Conscientious objectors -
Hour 2: Reduce your travel woes
reduce my travel woes? larry benksy, why couldn't you have told me how before i went on this mini-vacation! i'm joking and working in that larry bensky is the host. conscientious objectors. a topic you don't hear about on npr. if forced to cover it as a headline, they will. but an hour devoted to the topic? not while there are still half a dozen white artistes terry gross has yet to profile on not-so-fresh air. if you're a community member, you know that this is an important issue and you know that the coverage of it hasn't been impressive. it's been very small. so when you see or hear something that's going to address the issue, you need to support it.
