Ad of the Day

is the dancing office supplies done for target stores. i like the beat.

when you think bush administration , you think liars

A front-page USAT piece reminds that Congress has set some particularly fuzzy accounting rules, and when more realistic number-crunching is done the federal deficit is—depending how you count it—twice the amount publicly reported or 10 times so.

Quote of the Day

"Nobody wants us here, so why are we here? That's the big question,. If we leave, all the attacks would stop, because we'd be gone."
--Maj. Brent Lilly.

--source

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

when you think bush administration , you think liars

A front-page USAT piece reminds that Congress has set some particularly fuzzy accounting rules, and when more realistic number-crunching is done the federal deficit is—depending how you count it—twice the amount publicly reported or 10 times so.

this must be stopped in its tracks

doesn't this remind you of germany in the 1930's?

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such "commissions" to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.

--source

i didn't know this

The Post says inside that Pentagon officials seem to have lied to the 9/11 commission about whether fighter planes scrambled in time to chase any of the hijacked planes. (They didn't: The military didn't even know about Flight 93 until after it crashed.) Some commission staff members were so ticked off about the whole thing they wanted to refer it to the Justice Department for potential prosecutions. "We to this day don't know why [the military] told us what they told us," said the Republican chair of the commission. "It was just so far from the truth."

Letter Of The Day

It’s shocking that another taxpayer-funded director would get caught funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into his wallet. But, according to Clark Kauffman’s July 23 article, “Anti-Drug Charity Gave $315,732 to Its Boss,” that’s exactly what is happening.
Rock In Prevention (RIP), a taxpayer-funded, nonprofit organization, gave its director, Pat McManus, more than $315,000, $123,000 of which was salary; the remaining $192,000 McManus used to pay his own for-profit company for CDs produced for RIP last year.

RIP would be worth every penny — even the inflated salary — if it worked to keep kids off drugs. But a federal study more than five years ago failed to find any scientific data to back up RIP’s claims and also resulted in the federal funding being pulled from the organization.

Since then, the state has been the largest supporter of RIP. The largest private donor to RIP has been Don Lamberti, founder of Casey’s General Stores and father of state Senate Republican co-president Jeff Lamberti of Ankeny. It is no surprise that Lamberti pushed the state Legislature to give $600,000 to RIP. It is his father’s favorite charity.

Lamberti’s actions allowed RIP to avoid the usual state grant-application process — which likely would have provided the state with the information to make a more informed decision about its investment. Thirty-nine percent of the entire annual budget of Rock In Prevention was spent on one person. The Register knew this, why didn’t Lamberti?
— Ben Foecke, Des Moines.
attribution

it's magic i tell ya

HERE

ahhhhh, so now we know why rice left abruptly

Rice had been scheduled to travel on from Israel to Beirut, but after the bombing the Lebanese prime minister told her not to bother coming.

--source

the massacre of Qana

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa called on Sunday for an international investigation into an Israeli air strike in the village of Qana that killed at least 40 Lebanese civilians, including 23 children.

--source

i hope what happened in Qana is investigated by the UN.

go figure

the timing of this just seems weird:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is abruptly breaking off her diplomatic mission in the Mideast and returning to Washington after Israel's deadly attack on a Lebanese village, a U.S. official said Sunday. Rice, who planned to head back to the United States on Monday morning, had hoped to leave the region after concrete progress on ending the fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon. But her work was hampered severely by Israel's missile strike early Sunday that killed more than 50 people, including many children.

--source

and then this:

JERUSALEM, July 31 (Reuters) - Israel has agreed to suspend its aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon for 48 hours, starting immediately, to allow for an investigation into Sunday's bombing that killed 54 civilians, a U.S. State Department official said on Monday.

--source

what's going on?

my daily meds

1 bactrim
2 epivir
2 viramune
2 ziagen
3 neurontin
45 methadone
9 senna
1 zyprexa
1 xanax

talk about a mouthful, no wonder i run a blog called fields of poopy.