C
Chad Harris
Any store that has anything remotely to do with Office supplies.
Home Depot, Circuit City,Comp USA, Costco, Staples.
All of 'em have websites that wag their tails when ya google or use that
search engine that is way less used MSN Search from somethingsoft--Dr. Gary
Flake, the Distinguished Search Scientist in Redneck, Washington
You won't see a price difference, although some stores give low end printers
with them, or USB drives.
Good luck,
CH
CBS Radio News this morning in the US and I quote:
"There has been a Bird Flu outbreak in Suffolk, England. [Without Skipping
a Beat] Michael Irwin has been inducted into the Hall of Fame." (Probably
for the most cocaine and hookers every assembled in one room the night after
losing a game or perhaps for assembling more birds with H5N1, hookers, and
cocaine in one room the night after losing a game."
Follow the Scooter Libby bus to prison. Will the psychotic Dick Cheney and
sociopathic Karl Rove be on it as well? The next two weeks will tell.
Congratulations to the Wall Street Journal for pretending the trial isn't
taking place by banning its reporters from covering the trial or putting one
nano-line of print in the WSJ. LOL If you don't report on it, it isn't
happening. Old Conservative Proverb.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
FRANK RICH: Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
IN the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation's armchair shrinks
have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of "enormous successes" in
Iraq and barked "hogwash" at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been
roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But
what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.
The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent
public flare-up.The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview,
which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr.
Cheney's former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's on-camera
crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was
crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would
reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take
the country into war in Iraq.
He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House's current
campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran.
Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath
himself.Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses
to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the
start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as "a
tempest in a teapot," as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just
five months ago.
When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable
because the consequences are not that great," Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or,
as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson's identity
as a C.I.A. officer in his column, "weapons of mass destruction or uranium
from Niger" are "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the
people." Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to
other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson's
identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove)
to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt
Cooper) has always been a red herring. It's entirely possible that the White
House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to
unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.)
The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr.
Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check
out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since
Mr. Wilson didn't make that accusation in the first place.) But if the
administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little
to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode
was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else.
According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when
Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what
he didn't find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both
Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about
them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally
discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying
landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was
terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a
C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr.
Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the
president's men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson's modest finding in
Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still
far more damning evidence of the administration's W.M.D. lies lurking in the
bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has
slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen
instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence
agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq's purchase of uranium in
Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines
at frankrich.com/timeline.htm.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in
January 2003, the same month as the president's State of the Union address,
when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council,
the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally
that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful "uranium from Africa" in
his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.If the war
had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the
administration's
deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article
appeared - some five months after the State of the Union and two months
after "Mission Accomplished" - there was something terribly wrong with the
White House's triumphal picture.
More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the
end of "major combat operations" by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No
W.M.D. had been found, and we weren't even able to turn on the lights in
Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington
Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was "unacceptable." It was
urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson's
revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to
be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial
boondoggle arranged by his wife.
The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be
strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of
the Union speech. What we are learning from Mr. Libby's trial is just what a
herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr.
Wilson's article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7
campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with
Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby's lawyers are now
arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to
shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was - and still is - a stooge for the
vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of
his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they
are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The
administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being
retrofitted to expand and extend it.In a replay of the run-up to the
original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by
Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was
mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his
surge.
Even the declassified passages released on Friday - the grim takes on the
weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence - foretell
that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications
aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases
bad news on Fridays because "fewer people pay attention when it's reported
on Saturday.") A Pentagon inspector general's report, uncovered by Business
Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more
American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops
lack the guns and ammunition to "effectively complete their missions." Army
and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and
trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that "five brigades
of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky."
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell's notorious W.M.D.
pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a
Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving
the same script to rev up the war's escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq
connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections. In his Jan. 10 prime-time
speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying "advanced weaponry and
training to our enemies," even though the evidence suggests that Iran is
actually in bed with our "friends" in Iraq, the Maliki government.
The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too
has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls "a continuing
debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration's
case." Call it a coincidence - though there are no coincidences - but it's
only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E.
Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate
break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency
two years later.
Still, we can't push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This
time around our country can't wait two more years for the White House to be
stopped from playing its games with American blood.
_________________
Home Depot, Circuit City,Comp USA, Costco, Staples.
All of 'em have websites that wag their tails when ya google or use that
search engine that is way less used MSN Search from somethingsoft--Dr. Gary
Flake, the Distinguished Search Scientist in Redneck, Washington
You won't see a price difference, although some stores give low end printers
with them, or USB drives.
Good luck,
CH
CBS Radio News this morning in the US and I quote:
"There has been a Bird Flu outbreak in Suffolk, England. [Without Skipping
a Beat] Michael Irwin has been inducted into the Hall of Fame." (Probably
for the most cocaine and hookers every assembled in one room the night after
losing a game or perhaps for assembling more birds with H5N1, hookers, and
cocaine in one room the night after losing a game."
Follow the Scooter Libby bus to prison. Will the psychotic Dick Cheney and
sociopathic Karl Rove be on it as well? The next two weeks will tell.
Congratulations to the Wall Street Journal for pretending the trial isn't
taking place by banning its reporters from covering the trial or putting one
nano-line of print in the WSJ. LOL If you don't report on it, it isn't
happening. Old Conservative Proverb.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
FRANK RICH: Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
IN the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation's armchair shrinks
have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of "enormous successes" in
Iraq and barked "hogwash" at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been
roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But
what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.
The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent
public flare-up.The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview,
which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr.
Cheney's former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's on-camera
crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was
crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would
reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take
the country into war in Iraq.
He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House's current
campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran.
Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath
himself.Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses
to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the
start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as "a
tempest in a teapot," as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just
five months ago.
When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable
because the consequences are not that great," Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or,
as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson's identity
as a C.I.A. officer in his column, "weapons of mass destruction or uranium
from Niger" are "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the
people." Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to
other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson's
identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove)
to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt
Cooper) has always been a red herring. It's entirely possible that the White
House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to
unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.)
The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr.
Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check
out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since
Mr. Wilson didn't make that accusation in the first place.) But if the
administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little
to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode
was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else.
According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when
Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what
he didn't find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both
Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about
them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally
discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying
landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was
terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a
C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr.
Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the
president's men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson's modest finding in
Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still
far more damning evidence of the administration's W.M.D. lies lurking in the
bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has
slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen
instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence
agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq's purchase of uranium in
Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines
at frankrich.com/timeline.htm.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in
January 2003, the same month as the president's State of the Union address,
when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council,
the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally
that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful "uranium from Africa" in
his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.If the war
had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the
administration's
deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article
appeared - some five months after the State of the Union and two months
after "Mission Accomplished" - there was something terribly wrong with the
White House's triumphal picture.
More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the
end of "major combat operations" by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No
W.M.D. had been found, and we weren't even able to turn on the lights in
Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington
Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was "unacceptable." It was
urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson's
revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to
be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial
boondoggle arranged by his wife.
The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be
strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of
the Union speech. What we are learning from Mr. Libby's trial is just what a
herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr.
Wilson's article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7
campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with
Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby's lawyers are now
arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to
shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was - and still is - a stooge for the
vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of
his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they
are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The
administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being
retrofitted to expand and extend it.In a replay of the run-up to the
original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by
Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was
mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his
surge.
Even the declassified passages released on Friday - the grim takes on the
weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence - foretell
that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications
aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases
bad news on Fridays because "fewer people pay attention when it's reported
on Saturday.") A Pentagon inspector general's report, uncovered by Business
Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more
American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops
lack the guns and ammunition to "effectively complete their missions." Army
and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and
trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that "five brigades
of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky."
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell's notorious W.M.D.
pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a
Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving
the same script to rev up the war's escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq
connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections. In his Jan. 10 prime-time
speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying "advanced weaponry and
training to our enemies," even though the evidence suggests that Iran is
actually in bed with our "friends" in Iraq, the Maliki government.
The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too
has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls "a continuing
debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration's
case." Call it a coincidence - though there are no coincidences - but it's
only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E.
Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate
break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency
two years later.
Still, we can't push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This
time around our country can't wait two more years for the White House to be
stopped from playing its games with American blood.
_________________