A continuation of the earlier blog . . . Recent White House belligerence about leaks is odd, given that one of the closest relatives of the president was involved in a corporate structure that operated for years like a swinging cat door between Kuwaiti financial investment, on one hand, and security information at sensitive U.S. sites including the World Trade Center, on the other.

 

Three interesting companies were all connected by personnel and financing. The first was a security company called Stratesec or Securacom, where Marvin P. Bush, youngest brother of the president, served as director from 1992 through ...   more »

Since 2003, I have received occasional requests for the primary sources cited in my articles about Bush family interests in sensitive security sites including the World Trade Center and Dulles Airport. For convenience, today’s blog lists several of the pertinent links in a quick historical overview. Sources linked are public record.   The president’s youngest brother, Marvin P. Bush, located in a northern Virginia suburb of D.C., sat 1993-2000 on the board of directors of a security company first named Securacom and then named Stratesec, a contractor for the World Trade Center and for Dulles Airport. Marvin Bush is ...   more »

An interesting quick overview of some down numbers for the rightwing horrids’ websites; to save time, I am passing along the site link rather than seek permission to reprint the article in full.

 

Full title of the article is "Web Traffic to Washington Times, Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh.com Is Down; Is Era of Right-Wing Site Popularity Over?," by Joe Rothstein, editor of U.S. Politics Today.

 

Intriguing items, citing alexa.com, include the following:

• Traffic to rushlimbaugh.com has declined 18% in the past three months.
• Fox News is down 13% online.
• Ann Coulter’s website traffic is down 10% in spite of ...   more »

Recent days have brought some drastic weather to the mid-Atlantic. As seen on television, much of the metropolitan Washington, D.C., region has been deluged; mud of biblical quality has invaded basements (including my own basement), walkways and streets; power outages blot the region; transportation, farming, government work and tourism have been impeded; and more rain may be on the way.

 

The worst harms have been suffered by people evacuated from their houses or trapped in their vehicles or drowned in a current. But even the lesser experiences of my own firsthand observation are indicators to which anyone concerned ...   more »

Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage “Foundation,” Fox’s “24,” and Michael Chertoff -- Has there been a lineup like this, at least since the Nixon personnel who gave us Watergate?

 

The WashPost Style section reports that the rightwing Heritage Foundation yesterday hosted a morning “forum” at the Ronald Reagan Building on Fox Television’s “24” show vis-a-vis real counterterrorism efforts.

  

The panel discussing this heady topic included actors from the show and Michael Chertoff, Bush-appointed head of “Homeland Security.” Tidbits:

“The discussion was hosted by Rush Limbaugh, who breached the art-vs.-life divide early by planting a big kiss on the woman ...   more »

Given the inevitability of exploitation of 9/11, it is somewhat surprising that asbestos champions were not more enthusiastic in claiming that asbestos could have helped. Why didn’t the industry remind the public more aggressively that asbestos could have retarded the fires and indeed did retard some fires at the World Trade Center complex?

 

And indeed, on September 14, 2001, Fox News did weigh in with a halfhearted attempt to justify asbestos.Nobody else picked up that ball and ran with it, though. Either there are some limits to exploitation, or – by far the more probable hypothesis -- the White House ...   more »

"It is as vital to understand the processes that heal political wounds, the strategies that help restore people's faith in the political system and make them feel that they have a stake in defending it, as it is to understand what causes alienation and destroys people's faith in democratic values and motivates them to take to violence.

Democracies need daily nurturing. Societies that fail to celebrate defenders of democracy and instead get obsessed with terrorist violence to the exclusion of important trends for reconciliation, and that focus their attention mainly on film stars and celebrities in sports and fashion to ...   more »

Tomorrow morning (7:20 a.m. my time) I'm scheduled to be on America's Work Force, a Cleveland, OH-based morning broadcast. Betw 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. on WKTX 830 AM and WELW 1330 AM.

Listeners can also hear it live at www.awfradio.com.

The topic is rather a huge one to cover inside of an hour, since the admin "war on terror" pretty much equates to profiteering, both home and abroad. But we can  touch on a few big subsections of the main topic.   more »

It is a measure of the demoralization of our press that none of our biggest newspapers have come out calling for the replacement of the architects of Bush's disastrous "war on terror." As this writer among others pointed out more than a couple of years ago, the chief loyalty of any Chief Executive should go to the American people rather than to his top appointees. We do not have government by one man in this country, and by virtue of the fact that we do not have government by one, the man at the top is responsible for what ...   more »

Back when Saddam's fearsomeness was being touted across the U.S., the public was given glimpses into his dictatorship including his practice of using several doubles -- men who looked exactly like him, at least to Western eyes -- as stand-ins. According to the mags, Saddam's doubles were likely as not the actual personages to be photographed waving to a crowd from a balcony, on the reviewing stand or wherever else the dictator seemingly needed a ceremonial appearance but eschewed being shot at. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

So now, where did Saddam's doubles go? In the massive manhunt that pulled ...   more »

Some people get all the breaks. Comparing timelines, it looks as though the sudden death of Stalinist FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover may have let quite a few young and irresponsible people off the hook.

 

The personal proclivities and tendency to blackmail of the late J. Edgar Hoover, Bureau “director for life,” are well known by now. At the end of his life, while his private life had not been publicly ventilated, his practice of keeping information files on prominent figures passed from open secret to open hearings in Congress.

 

On May 1, 1972, newspapers around the country ...   more »

Article recommendation of the week: "America's Untested Management Team," by Henry C K Liu, at www.atimes.com, is a very good quick overview of a few decades of U.S. Treasury overseers.

National debt, currency, budget deficit and trade issues all link up with (disastrous) foreign policy interference, insolence and adventurism. Even after Team Bush is gone, we'll have much to think about in care of future probity; in the dire time before the Team leaves, we are staring down some potentially draconian turns in the road with little explanation released in the public discourse.

   more »

Too bad it was released late on a Friday evening, but a new CNN poll confirms that a majority favors setting a timetable for getting out of Iraq.

The poll shows that 53 percent of Americans want a timetable, and 47 percent want a timetable of one year or less.

The poll, taken the week after Zarqawi's death was announced, also shows approval for the president's handling of the Iraq war up 5 points to 39 percent, and disapproval for his handling of the war down 8 points to 54 percent.

Any GOP consultant should entertain the possibility that these very slightly improved poll ...   more »

This title is in quotation marks not because any of our elected leaders said it – publicly – but because it is the reductio ad absurdum for many public pronouncements about invading Iraq.

 

(1)   During the long booster campaign for the invasion of Iraq, at no time did administration spokesmen or any prominent media figure enunciate the view that Iraqis are human beings. Consult your memory on this point. Set aside for the moment the ugly “raghead” bigotry lurking behind the neo-con POV on the Middle East. Even setting aside name-calling and obscenities against Muslims, the ...   more »

Wiretap material mishandled

WASHINGTON (UPI) — A top American Telephone and Telegraph Co. official said yesterday employes without security clearance ...   more »