Sent to me today by Claudia:

The Military-Petroleum Complex

The Second Iraq War and the cronies of state capitalism

BY ROBERT BRYCE

illustration by Doug Potter

Twelve years after the end of the First Iraq War, George H. W. Bush was still reading from the same script.

On March 25, 2003 96 five days after the Navy SEALs stormed aboard the Mina al-Bakr oil terminal to start the Second Iraq War 96 the former president gave a speech at the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel in San Antonio. His audience: the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.

Bush Senior was a little peeved. Not at his allies in the oil and chemical industry, of course. The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, a group whose membership includes "virtually all U.S. refiners and petrochemical manufacturers," was a friendly audience. He was angry at those misguided protesters who were staging huge antiwar rallies all over the country. Those demonstrators had gotten under Bush's skin. He was particularly inflamed by the signs that the demonstrators were carrying that said "No war for oil." Bush said he'd seen similar protests and similar signs prior to the First Iraq War. And now that the Second Iraq War was under way, he was still contending that the protesters were mistaken. "This is not about oil," he told the refiners.

At about the same time the elder Bush was delivering that message, U.S. and British troops were in a furious battle with Iraqi tank companies for control of the Rumaila, Majnoon, Qurnah, and Nahr Umr oilfields near Basra. Those four fields contain an estimated 51 billion barrels of oil. As Bush was speaking to the refiners, firefighters from the Kuwait Oil Company were snuffing out the flames at one of the seven oil wells near Basra that had been set aflame by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein. At about the same time, 1,000 troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade were being airlifted into northern Iraq. Their task was to capture the oilfields around Kirkuk. The troops were being backed up by American warplanes, which were beginning to bomb Iraqi strongholds around Kirkuk. The oilfields around Kirkuk hold about 16 billion barrels of oil.

While U.S. troops were invading the oilfields, the younger Bush, from his perch in the White House, refused to even discuss the oil question. Instead, the president's focus was on the evils of Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction program. Bush talked about Saddam's "nucular" weapons and claimed that the Iraqi dictator had huge stashes of VX, sarin, and mustard gas that had to be found and destroyed. And while George W. Bush continued his stream of rhetorical attacks on Iraq, his key aides were looking at Iraq's oil and seeing it as a massive piggy bank. They dreamt of a type of drive-through-pay-for-itself-car-wash type of war.

A Pipeline to ZionOn March 27, two days after Bush Senior spoke to the refiners, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testified before Congress about the rapidly progressing war. Wolfowitz, one of the leaders of the neoconservative movement, which believes America has a duty to dominate the world, told Congress that the Second Iraq War wouldn't be overly expensive for American taxpayers. "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon," he told Congress. Asked how much the Second Iraq War would cost, Wolfowitz stuttered out: "And my 96 a rough recollection 96 well I'm 96 the oil revenues of that country could bring between 50- and 100-billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years."

Alas, Wolfowitz hadn't done his homework. Or 96 and let's hope this wasn't the case 96 he was telling a stretcher. Even the most optimistic oil experts were projecting that Iraq's oilfields would be hampered for some time to come as a result of a lack of investment in infrastructure. At best, they estimated that Iraq's oilfields were capable of producing revenues of only about $10 billion per year.

But Wolfowitz couldn't trouble himself with learning the facts. Instead, he and his fellow neoconservatives were figuring out how they could divvy up the spoils of war. Within a few days of his outlandish estimates of Iraq's oil wealth, other pro-Israel hawks inside the Pentagon began talking to the Israelis about building a pipeline from the Iraqi oilfields near Kirkuk to the Israeli port of Haifa. A small pipeline had operated along that route in the 1940s, and the neocons apparently believed that it was time to build a pipeline from the heart of Arabia to the heart of the Zionist homeland.

Ensuring a reliable supply of oil to its ally Israel had been one of America's main obligations in the region for nearly three decades. In 1975, Henry Kissinger signed an agreement that requires the U.S. to guarantee the flow of oil to Israel during times of crisis. Kissinger was also a key architect of the plan, pushed by Donald Rumsfeld when he met with Saddam Hussein in 1983, to build a pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba.

America's oil supply agreement with the Israelis has been renewed every five years. The deal requires the United States to supply oil to Israel even if it causes domestic shortages of oil in America. Although the U.S. has not ever had to make good on the agreement, a pipeline, reasoned the neocons, could help secure Israel's energy needs, and provide another way to ship Iraqi oil to the markets and shipping lanes on the Mediterranean Sea. The pipeline would have huge economic benefits to the Israelis, lowering their oil import bills by as much as 25 percent. The Israelis even began estimating what the pipeline would cost. Unfortunately, a pipeline from Iraq to Israel also would have been a diplomatic disaster. For decades, the Arab oil-producing countries have been objecting to America's ongoing support of the Israelis. And the idea of running a pipeline through Jordan (nearly impossible from a political standpoint) or Syria (absolutely impossible politically) so that the Israelis could have cheap Arab oil, would have been met with outrage by Arab leaders 96 and a fusillade of terrorists' bombs in their countries.

When news about the pipeline project began surfacing in the British media in April of 2003, James Akins, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said the plans laid bare America's real motives. "It just goes to show that it is all about oil, for the United States and its ally," he said.

At the same time that the United States was chatting up the Israelis about a pipeline, American troops had subdued Baghdad. But the soldiers made only token efforts to secure Baghdad's cultural treasures and stop the looting that started as soon as the city fell. The result was horrifying. Government offices were ransacked. Stores were looted. Saddam Hussein's palaces were stripped of furniture and fixtures. The National Library of Iraq, the National Archives, and the central libraries of the Universities of Baghdad and Mosul were all looted and burned. Priceless manuscripts, documents, and books were lost. The National Museum of Antiquities was also looted. Assyrian marble carvings, Babylonian statues, and clay pots thousands of years old were all smashed to bits.

The Oil Ministry building, however, wasn't touched. That was not a coincidence. One of the first sites secured by American troops after they got to Baghdad on April 8 was the Oil Ministry building. For the next few days, as the looting continued all around the city, a detachment of American G.I.s with a half dozen assault vehicles stood guard at the Oil Ministry building. On April 13, 2003, the Washington Post quoted one Iraqi citizen who asked why the looting was allowed in other buildings and not in the Oil Ministry: "Why just the Oil Ministry?" he asked. "Is it because they just want our oil?" Three days later, Agence France Presse reported that some four dozen U.S. tanks were guarding the ministry building and that "sharpshooters are positioned on the roof and in the windows."

The Costs of Empire

By early June of 2003, Halliburton's technicians were clambering all over Iraq's oil facilities, assessing the damage and making repairs. One of their first stops was Mina al-Bakr. Halliburton did its job well. In late June 2003, about eight weeks after George W. Bush's May 1 "mission accomplished" declaration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," the country's black gold began to flow. The pipeline from the oilfields near Kirkuk to the Turkish port at Ceyhan began carrying crude.

But the first big shipments of Iraqi oil didn't begin until June 28, 2003. On that day, the first supertanker to load Iraqi crude in the post-Saddam era began filling up at Mina al-Bakr. The buyer of the oil was Condoleezza Rice's old employer, ChevronTexaco. A few dozen hours later, the tanker, loaded with two million barrels of crude known as Basra Light, left Mina al-Bakr and headed straight for refineries 96 in the United States. Over the next few months, dozens of other supertankers begin filling their holds with Iraqi oil, and the majority of those tankers headed for the United States.

With U.S. troops guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry in downtown Baghdad and Halliburton employees manning the controls at Mina al-Bakr and other oil facilities, the Bush administration had achieved its goal: the second-largest oil reserves on earth were under the control of the United States. Nearly 30 years after OPEC shut off the flow of oil to America in retaliation for its support of the Israelis, the U.S. had gained a measure of control over Persian Gulf oil supplies. And it had done it behind the barrel of a gun.

Governor Ross Sterling of Texas would have understood the situation perfectly. There were key differences, however, between the American invasion of Iraq and Sterling's 1931 takeover of the oilfields of East Texas. Sterling's operation came cheap: just 1,0 National Guardsmen were needed to control the region's oilfields. The cost of the campaign was less than $30,000 per week (about $357,100 in 2002 dollars). There were no casualties 96 in fact, not a single person was hurt. The Texas Rangers made only a handful of arrests. And the action was quick: all of the Guardsmen were back home with their families by December of 1932, a mere 16 months after the action began. The only casualty of the campaign occurred several months after the Guardsmen went home. In the summer of 1933, a Texas Ranger, Emmett White, was killed outside of Kilgore in an accident involving an oil truck.

Seventy-two years after Sterling's forces invaded East Texas, another Texas governor was having a far harder time gaining control of a critically important oil-producing area. To win the Second Iraq War, George W. Bush deployed some 140,000 American soldiers and 21,000 soldiers from Britain and other countries to Kuwait and Iraq.

The costs were extraordinary: during the war, an estimated 10,000 Iraqis were killed. Between the start of hostilities in March 2003 and mid-January 2004, more than 500 American GIs were killed and another 9,000 had been injured in battle, hurt in accidents or had become seriously ill. Sabotage, snipers and almost-daily car bombings were testing the will and patience of America's soldiers and their commanders.

The financial costs were mind-numbing. By the end of 2003, the occupation of Iraq was costing American taxpayers about $1 billion per week, and that figure was only part of their financial burden. Rebuilding Iraq and maintaining the peace were costing even more. Those costs were going to be huge, even though none of George W. Bush's stated reasons for going to war 96 Saddam's "nucular" weapons, his stashes of poison gas, and his links to al-Qaeda and terrorism 96 had been found. By early 2004, despite months of frantic searching, American investigators had not found any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Even after Saddam Hussein was found on December 14, 2003, and questioned by U.S. interrogators, no weapons of mass destruction were found.

The Man From Halliburton

In September of 2003, George W. Bush asked the U.S. Congress to approve an $87 billion spending package to pay for the war and for reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Not surprisingly, a big chunk of that money was going to Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton.

When Bush went to Congress, Halliburton had already been paid about $220 billion for its work in Iraq. The company had 4,500 people on its payroll, though it was hard to tell the Halliburton employees from the U.S. military. Some were working at oil installations like Mina al-Bakr. Others were delivering mail to U.S. troops. Others were cooking meals, doing laundry, and building military bases. Like the soldiers, Halliburton employees were dying. By January 2004, more than a dozen Halliburton workers or subcontractors had been killed while carrying out their duties in Iraq.

For his part, Dick Cheney went on television in September of 2003 to defend his ongoing payments from Halliburton. Cheney insisted that he had "no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind." This was incorrect: When Cheney made that statement, he still had options on about 433,000 shares of Halliburton stock. He was also in the second year of a five-year deferred-compensation deal with Halliburton. In 2002, Cheney received deferred compensation payments from Halliburton that totaled $162,392. That sum was on top of the $205,298 in deferred compensation that Cheney received in 2001. As vice president, Cheney's annual salary is $198,600.

Cheney also defended his old employer, saying he had "no idea" why Halliburton got the no-bid oilfield-repair contract. But he did say that there are "few companies out there that have the combination of the very large engineering construction capability and significant oil field services." In other words, after decades of getting closer and closer to the U.S. government and the U.S. military, Halliburton had become the Pentagon's only choice. It could feed troops, build camps, fix pipelines, repair oil wells, and do everything else America's army of occupation needed. In Iraq, Halliburton became example 1A of what the economist James Kenneth Galbraith has called the "military-petroleum complex."

In Iraq, the U.S. government, the military, corporate America, and the oil business became one.
From the book Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate by Robert Bryce. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, New York. All rights reserved.

Just Cut Out Their Tongues

by Thom Hartmann http://www.opednews.com/hartmann_092104_tongues.htm

OpEdNews.Com

The CBS/Rather/Bush/Guard affair - regardless of how it ultimately turns out - has brilliantly deflected the issue of George W. Bush having strings pulled to get him into the Guard, and then not fulfilling his service requirements. Anytime the issue is raised in the future - regardless of facts or context - partisan Republicans will simply dismiss it by saying, "Those documents were forged." That four-word sound byte will be remembered long after the details of Bush's failures have dimmed from popular memory. Politically, it was a masterstroke. And not only does it hurt Bush family enemy Kerry, but also gets back at Bush family enemy Dan Rather, against whom they've nursed a 16-year grudge. The Bush family's hostility to Rather first broke the surface of public attention back in 1988, when Vice President George H.W. Bush was confronted on network television about his various roles in the criminal affair now known as Iran/Contra. At the time, rumors were flying that in the fall of 1980 then-VP-candidate Bush had negotiated with Iran to hold the American hostages until after the election. The hostages were not only held throughout the election campaign, but were released the very hour Ronald Reagan was sworn into office. The ongoing dragged-out hostage crisis (and Carter's failed attempt at rescue) had knocked the incumbent president down so far in the polls that the long-shot ticket of Reagan/Bush won. When it later came out, in part because of an investigation started by Senator John Kerry, that after the 1980 election Reagan/Bush were illegally selling American missiles to the Iranians "in exchange for hostages" at a time there were no hostages (the Iranian hostages had been freed, and the Lebanese hostages not yet taken), speculation intensified. The key to busting the whole deal open and indicting George H.W. Bush, some congressional investigators believed, would be Bill Casey. As the manager of the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign, he would have known of the deal, and persistent allegations floated around Washington that he'd even helped organize the initial negotiations between Bush and Iranian representatives. When Reagan/Bush took the White house, they elevated campaign manager Casey to the role of Director of the CIA. And the congressional committees looking into Iran/Contra so wanted to talk with Casey that they took the rare step of subpoenaing a sitting head of the CIA. As White House insider Barbara Honegger wrote in her groundbreaking book "October Surprise," Casey "reportedly attended meetings in Paris, France, on October 19 and 20, 1980, with Iranian officials and agents of French intelligence to arrange an arms-for-hostages-delay deal with Iran. The morning of his first scheduled under-oath testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the secret Iran initiative he was struck by seizures in his CIA headquarters office in Langley, Virginia, and underwent speech-incapacitating left-brain surgery shortly thereafter. Had he lived to testify, according to life-long friend and counsel Milton Gould, Casey would have told the 'entire truth.' He died on May 6, 1987." Since the left temporal lobe of the brain - "Broca's region" - controls speech, some "conspiracy minded" folks suggested at the time that this was simply a hi-tech version of the mob cutting out an informer's tongue. Six months after Casey was silenced, on January 25, 1988 in a CBS broadcast, Dan Rather cornered Vice President George H.W. Bush about the whole Iran issue, and Bush became furious. Barely able to speak, his face twisted with rage, Bush blurted out: "It's not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?" Bush's voice was cracking with hysteria as he added, "Would you like that?" Dan Rather has been on the Bush family enemies list ever since. But he's not alone. Another member of the Bush family enemies list is Senator John Kerry, who opened the precursor to the Iran-Contra investigations, which brought about the demand for Casey's testimony. Kerry then led inquiries into the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), which broke open a tangled web that included organized crime, international terrorists, and members of both the Bush family and the Bin Laden family. Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal noted in a front page story on December 6, 1991 ("Family Ties: How Oil Firm Linked To a Son of Bush Won Bahrain Drilling Pact"/"Harken Energy Had a Web Of Mideast Connections; In the Background: BCCI" by Thomas Petzinger Jr., Peter Truell And Jill Abramson): "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's ties were. But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken -- all since George W. Bush came on board -- likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son." This all came into the open because of the tenacious efforts of former prosecutor and U.S. Senator John Kerry. As David Corn noted in an article first published in The Nation: "In the fall of 1992 Kerry released a report on the BCCI affair. It blasted everyone: Justice, Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve, [Democrats] Clifford and Altman (for participating in 'some of BCCI's deceptions'), high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA. The report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was 'a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American...for CIA operations.' The report was, in a sense, an indictment of Washington cronyism. In the years since, there's been nothing like it." Which brings us to what may be the most recent Bush family political dirty trick. Back during the years when BCCI and the Bin Ladens were helping prop up one of George W. Bush's failing oil businesses, Karl Rove was perfecting the art of using misdirection to win political campaigns. James Moore and Wayne Slater, who wrote "Bush's Brain" - the unauthorized biography of Rove - noted that when Rove ran Bill Clements' campaign in Texas in 1986, he is alleged to have bugged his own office to distract voters from the real issues of the campaigns. "Who bugged Rove?" became the big story in the news for weeks, pushing other issues off the front page (and implying that Rove and his candidate were the victims of dirty tricks). Rove's candidate won an upset victory. Others have suggested - although there is no clear evidence one way or the other - that Rove was behind the appearance in the Gore campaign of Bush's debate prep notes. Had Bush "lost" the debates in a big way, the issue could have been deftly shifted to the Gore campaign having had advance copies of his notes. Perhaps it's a short leap from bugging your own office, to planting debate prep materials with your opponent, to placing phony documents to kill an issue. For example, Robert Sam Anson points out in a September 16, 2004 article in The New York Observer that, "Mr. Rather's report hadn't been over 10 minutes when a post appeared on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com from 'TankerKC,' saying the documents were 'not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF . can we get a copy of those memos?'" This was followed in a few hours by a detailed typographic analysis from another blogger named "Buckhead" - even though the typography had only been shown on television, not exactly a medium conducive to examining typographic nuance. The blog site that "broke" the story of the alleged forgery of the documents Dan Rather had shown the world was, to quote Robert Sam Anson, "the repository for anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual, anti-John Kerry rants by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D." For some, the name may sound familiar. As Anson continues: "And whom, you ask, is Dr. Corsi? Co-author of the best-selling 'Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,' that's who." And now we learn from CBS that "Buckhead" - the blogger who posted to Corsi's website detailed information about the memos' typography just 3 hours after the story had aired on CBS - wasn't a typesetter or typographer at all. Instead, he's a lawyer, Harry MacDougald, who the LA Times notes, has "strong ties to conservative Republican causes who had helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal" and has connections, at least institutionally, to Ken Starr and other senior Republicans. Most recently, it's been reported by The New York Times that the Texas man who may have passed the documents along to Dan Rather was Texas Air National Guard senior advisor and former Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett. In February of 2004, USA Today reported Burkett claimed to have witnessed and overheard senior Guard officers working to do a thorough "cleansing" of George W. Bush's National Guard records for a biography Karen Hughes was writing before his last run for president. If true, Burkett - another Bush family enemy - is now on the short list of potential fall guys in this case. It's enough to make you wonder who's next on the schedule for temporal-lobe brain surgery... Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

originally published in commondreams.org

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

Illegitimus non carborundum.

"A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends." Henry A. Wallace, Fmr.Vice-President to FDR

Starcats

NEWSMAKERS

September 2004

BREAKING NEWS

September 17, 2004

Election 2004 & Other Ruminations

I've gotten a lot of mail from Starcats readers and readers of Sally McDonald's Astroworld in recent days asking me to come forward with predictions for Election 2004. I am grateful for this and I thank you. I have been reluctant to write anything for nearly a year now for three reasons.

First, it became an exercise in futility to write about the daily, weekly or monthly shock and awe of the Bush adminsitration's reformist/revisionist practices. Born of the three Saturn in Taurus -Uranus in Aquarius squares of 2000 and 2001, the unchecked Uranus side of the square won out. Unbridled, unconscious, and without shame, this most important of all the political energies launched a few fanatics on a course of reckless, extremist policy making which turns out to be the intellectual product of simple-minded throwbacks to the 1950's.

What I said in numerous articles from 2000 to 2003 summed up what we all knew to be true. We were and are in great trouble because of the Bush administration. My predictions of disaster in Iraq and how Karl Rove would thrive on dark and dirty machinations have been proven true. It didn't take the mind of a Nostradamus to work all that out. It was abundantly clear which way the tide would go. All you needed to do was

1) examine the 1999 Fixed Grand Square Eclipse; the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Taurus in 2000 (also the mega line up of transiting planets in that sign in May 2000/the USA's 6th house of the military); and

2) the three Saturn-Uranus squares mentioned above: Saturn=brittle. Uranus=disruptive. SNAP! (Visualize THE TOWER card in the Tarot deck!)

Second, when the United States invaded Iraq on March 18-19, 2003, I went into a long depression that re-emerged again in February 2004 at the death of my cat, Draggie, one of the three original Starcats. Draggie sat on my feet when I coded the original "html" for the very first page that constituted Starcats.com in early February 1998. He was (and always will be) at the heart of things here.

Third, I got tired of the hate mail. Since I'm not being paid a couple hundred grand a year to write about this stuff or talk on TV about it, I couldn't come up with a sufficient reason to subject myself to it. Starcats has always been "free." It's my gift to the world. I figure if anyone doesn't like the gift, hit the back button on your browser and bug off. I don't want to hear about it.

Contrary to what you might think, dear reader, I got as many hate letters from the so-called "peaceful Left" as I did from the vitriolic Right. The Left lambasted me because it thought me "dark," "pessimistic" and "unspiritual." That would be as if politics and the realm of "saturn" (earth) were actually compassionate and uplifting. Politics isn't, and only a very few beings in history have really been transcendant, so let's move on.

Both the Right and Left went into paroxysms over the article I did on Karl Rove. At this juncture, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame In GOP hack Robert Novak's newspaper column (Fmr. Amb. Joe Wilson's wife), the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry; Zell Miller's ugly McCarthyite speech at the GOP Convention; and Dick Cheney's intimating that a vote for Kerry is a vote for death and terror should be enough to prove the point. That's Karl Rove's "vision" for America. He is the orchestrator of the aforementioned and that's just some of his side work. That is true whether you're on the Right and love Karly boy or on the Left and think me "grim." (See, Starcats' June 10, 2003, "In Defense of Mundane Astrology"

I know you're hoping that I'll predict a victory for John Kerry on Nov 2. You will probably be disappointed at discovering that I don't see that happening. GOP Right Wing extremists dominate the United States. The fanatic wing of the GOP controls all three branches of the government. More and more extremist judges are being appointed to the federal bench. All bets are off. There are numerous planetary patterns that show a deepening fissure in American politics both in the short and the long term. For now let's look at:

1) Bush is coming upon the first hit of his Saturn return (26
Cancer), a point that rolls over the USA's Mercury and opposes this USA's Pluto.
Saturn opposite Pluto is probably the most savage and brutal alignment of what
we classically call "malefics." You will recall that Saturn's transiting
opposition to Pluto from Gemini in 2001 led to the attacks of September 11,
2001. The attacks were the physical manifestation of cosmic powers locked inside
the two planets. The dialogue between the two is dire. Saturn is unyielding.
Pluto is Shiva, the destroyer. The most brittle the condition, the more violent
the resistance causing Pluto to act more lethally.

Add to foregoing that the USA's Mercury of "the message" (24
Cancer) in opposition to the USA's Pluto (27 Capricorn conjunct Bush's natal
Saturn) becomes one of utter disdain for what we refer to as "civilized." Pluto
is savage. It (and the other outer planets) care nothing for social convention.
Saturn, stern and punishing, shows itself as a crushing force when in
confrontation with light-hearted Mercury and seething Pluto. This is a recipe
for a political warmongering blood lust. The transiting Mars cycle is the
detonator. Both, Mars and Uranus (recently in dialogue across the Virgo-Pisces
axis) are explosive. With Mercury, it's a "take no prisoners" propaganda blitz.
Mars's position in the "information" sign of Gemini in the USA's 7th house is
the resounding phrase: "You're either for us or against us."

Karl Rove's tactics, for example are a savage assault on
truth and decency. His style of undermining (Pluto) the perceived enemy (Mars in
the 7th house) by lies, rumors and inuendo hark back to one of the seminal
identifiers of the Bush "presidency." Neptune of propaganda and scandal sits in
the 10th house of the 2001 Inauguration chart. Sadly, Neptune is again in the
10th house of the Inauguration 2005 chart. Using Koch houses, Neptune is
intercepted in the 10th drawing Chiron at 27 Capricorn onto the Midheaven of the
chart. The scandals become more subtle (the interception) but the wounds will be
crushingly (Chiron opposite Saturn in the 4th) obvious.

The election contest then is blood sport between the
Democrats, who abjure anything dirtier than a wine glass, and the Republicans
who thrive on rolling in the gutter (Ann Coulter is a good example of a gutter
fighter). Our civil discourse and society has become more coarse and vulgar
(Saturn-Pluto). The election campaign seems more gladitorial games than a
grappling with the issues that confront us at the new millennium.

2) John Kerry's decision to run for the presidency (official
announcement) on September 3, 2003, 10:15 am, Charleston, SC, Asc: 22 Libra, has
Mercury retrograde in the 12th house. Mercury retrograde is tantamount to a
message that keeps getting revised and can't be heard (buried in the 12th house)
because of the din of Right Wing propaganda.

The Kerry "Announcement" Ascendant at 22 Libra will be hit
by the October 13th Solar eclipse (21 Libra). This eclipse will have an effect
on the presidential debates during the run-up to the election. John Kerry could
be helped if Bush slips and falls on his own tongue. Since eclipses are wild
cards and, like Uranus, are unpredictable in nature, something more dreadful
than the rising blood tide in Iraq, a terrorist attack on our own soil, or an
assassination attempt (on either Bush or Kerry) will further skew the process.
The Lunar Eclipse of October 27th (Moon 5 Taurus, Sun 5 Scorpio) directly
affects the military and centers around Iraq but also the ongoing debate about
Bush and Kerry's participation (or lack of it in Bush's case) in the Vietnam
War.

The Saturn Return of Nixon's resignation of the White House and the planetary patterns in play 30 years ago could easily indicate that Bush will get the White House again and lose it during his second term.

If he's allowed to finish his second term he will be the most reviled and "crippled" president in American history. (At this point, greater minds than mine will ever be have said that Bush is the worst president in American history). His administration will unravel like a ball of yarn in a cat's paws. Bush himself will descend a mental slippery slope while living in seclusion and paranoia. It's is what Richard Nixon did when the lid exploded off Watergate.

George Bush does not have the strength and fortitude that characterized Richard Nixon's generation. Nixon went bad, yes, but he at least started out as a humble man who worked hard. He developed his intelligence by excelling in academics and by cultivating a naturally curious mind. He was the last Republican president to have a social conscience. Nixon believed in helping the poor. He believed that tax dollars should be appropriated towards social services for the less fortunate. By contrast, Ronald Reagan's presidency in the 1980's steered the GOP to the Right and into the "greed is good era," of gilded age politics. Nixon sacrificed reputation for power. Bush sacrifices the very little he is on the alter of dirty mammon.

Will the Bush administration, if it secures a second term go down just like Nixon? Well, something fairly close to that scenario seems likely. As Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself; it rhymes." Planetary cycles reveal to us the rhymes of history.

From what I've analyzed in numerous charts (and assimilated from my reading), I postulate that Kerry will the popular vote by a narrow margin (a narrower margin than Al Gore's in 2000) and that Bush will win via the electoral college. This, of course, will be another fraudulent electoral win but this time it appears Bush will not have Nino Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court to rescue him from those evil-doer Democrats.

The Bushies will take a swing state or two (or three!) and use the close voter margins as challenges to "recounts." Imagine the irony.

I gravely suspect that there will be election machine rigging (Diebold electronic voting machines are owned by a Right Wing Republican in Ohio who has sworn "to do whatever it takes to re-elect [what, he was elected??] George Bush). JEB is already busy purging voter rolls in Florida (again) and Johns-Hopkins University has already proved that Diebold voting machines can be hacked by high school students. I think we'll see brute force used at the polls by way of intimdation and beatings may be the order of the day in some districts across the country.
This scenario sounds more like a CIA set up in Nicaragua or Argentina than a U.S. election, but that's what we've come to.

Election 2004 is another "practice session" for how far the Right Wing can push the United States towards the creation of a "Christian constitutional dictatorship." If that sounds weird, or like an oxymoron, just think about "compassionate conservatism." The concept is so mind bogglingly Orwellian as to give one a migraine. The Right Wing propaganda machine has been perfected and the past four years have provided enough time for the Right to plant sleeper cells in all 18 swing states for voter intimidation.

Assessing the upcoming election astrologically means letting go of the idea that this is "politics as usual." The above-mentioned planetary themes that spell out a rebirth of fascism means viewing current politics through a different lens.

The rise of reactionary fascism in the United States is coupled with a Christian fundamentalist "true believer" obsession:

Pluto transiting Sagittarius; Uranus's past transit through "one-world, one-mind" Aquarius; and its current mutual reception from Pisces to frenzied Neptune in Aquarius. A glimpse at transiting Pluto's opposition to the USA's blood thirsty Mars in Gemini (the enemy within and without: Castor &
Pollux/Cain & Abel) forming a t-square to the USA's Neptune in Virgo (purity of the nationalistic/puritanical vision) is chilling. It is no wonder that the paranoid Right wing finds an antichrist under every rock.

The re-emergent "purity of the puritanical vision" was ripe to explode long before September 11th.
America's need for an enemy/antichrist "out there" has been made manifest via the genocide of the American Indian; the demonizing of the "Liberals;" the Joe McCarthy era of "Are you now or have you ever been a communist?" The hunting and savaging of President Clinton; the internment of the Japanese in camps in the USA during WWII; Abu Ghraib prison torture in Iraq and Guatanamo Bay; the ongoing "culture wars" where gays, blacks, women's rights, immigration, religion and stem cell research are used to whip the uninformed and terrified into a froth of reptilian brain reactionism.

Conditions as they now exist in the USA reveal many of the earmarks of a country ripe for dictatorship. There is deep fear. A deep existential anxiety. These fears are fed by the Bush Administration's constant fanning of the flames of religion, smarmy patriotism, anti-intellectualism, culture war, class war, and other related forms of demagoguery.
The consequences are that frightened people inhabiting the "Red States" vote their own economic and social suicide by swallowing the apocalyptic pronouncements of Fallwell and Cheney. The GOP extorts votes from the distressed then loots the treasury by transfering the country's wealth to upper one percent of the country. That's was the plan all along.

America is far from the "New Jerusalem" envisaged by the pilgrims drummed up the Mayflower Compact and the founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The country has a dark side that the somnambulant electorate would rather not face. Hence, the constant focus on externals, the hype of "optimism," the derision of the poor, and obsession with the fiction of "our blessed way of life." It is as if our excesses can be equated with the goodness of Jesus on credit card binge.

The "blessedness" of our way of life (Ari Fleischer) will not spare us from old age and death. It will not save us from a world gone mad with fanatics and warmongers.

The Greek gods themselves could not triumph over death and often declined, or were powerless, to assist humans who remained stuck with their own bad luck. By contrast, the world embraced "salvation" through the New Testament --A Good Daddy who sacrificed his Dionysius-like son so that our sins could be washed clean. If we're "good," there is hope of resurrection from the dead. These factors, and the rescuing of widows, divorced women and children, were major selling points for early Christianity.

It's religious (Neptune) archetypes, and the Barbarians (terrorists) at the gates of Rome, overtook the Empire. Uranus in Pisces is a cosmic/religious reversion revolution. Uranus's transiting square to the USA's natal Uranus in intellectual/rational Gemini is involved in a struggle between rational, scientific advance (stem cell research, anyone?) and an anti-intellectualism that favors religious reform that leads us toward the disaster of more closely merging of church and state.

Keep in mind that we're still under the planet rays of the Uranus Return of the formation of the Nazi Party, created on February 24, 1920, 7:29 pm CET -1:00, Munich, Germany, Asc: 24 Virgo, which conjoins the USA's Neptune. The Uranus Return of the Party's founding occurred on April 18, 2003, 4:29 pm, CEDT -2:00, Munich, Germany, Asc 28 Aquarius. The Ascendant conjoined the USA's Natal Moon. Uranus is in very early Pisces is in mutual reception with anti-intellectual Neptune in Aquarius -- the one-world/one-mind sign. What we have going on now is an international nervous breakdown.

The USA is not immune to collective psychosis. Its in the throes of one. Pluto's transit through the USA's first house (identity) shows its dark side. It so terrifies the nation that it would rather stay alseep than admit that its pious fictions, hallmark greeting card patriotism and surpressed psychic contents have ushered in a plutonic decline and fall of the American Empire. Pluto, Mars, Neptune and Uranus (whether transiting or studied in their natal positions in the USA's chart) have America lurching in blood lust to vanquish every terrorist "antichrist" by smoking them (Neptune) out of their caves (Pluto and Saturn). That, unfortunately, extends to any American citizen who disagrees with George Bush and Dick Cheney.

The USA's Sun progressed to zero degrees of Pisces on October 29th, and therefore becomes supersenitized to the Uranus-Neptune mutual reception just four days before the presidential election of November 2nd. (See Election 2004 Headquarters for lots of Chart Data

Suffice it to say, that America is playing out long planetary cycles where this election and the next one to come in 2008 are part of a global contest for power, the kind of power, and who wields it. Globalism is fueling a world revolt of the poor and oppressed (Arabs, among other groups) against a tiny minority that posseses the bulk of the planet's resources. As the philosopher Hegel said, it's always been a battle between the haves and the have-nots. He further said that he had always been astounded that the many could be convinced to sacrifice themselves for the very few so that they (the rich) could have it easy.

We are on the threshold of a world struggle that marches straight up to the USA's Pluto Return in 2022. New religions, new politics, and a terrible Jihad will define at least the first half of the 21st Century. The Inauguration chart of 2005 (you'll find it in Election 2004 Headquarters) tells the tale of the USA's next presidential administration. If Bush wins, he's a wounded creature for as long as his presidency can prevail over scandal and indictment. If Kerry wins, he will be crippled by the catastrophe Bush leaves behind in Iraq. He will also be hounded by the fanatic Right Wing of the GOP who will make what they did to Bill Clinton look like kindgergarten.

This is what I see. This is what I read in the sky.

Starcats -- September 17, 2004.

He Sure Wsn't, lol.

Far graver than Vietnam

Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 16, 2004
The Guardian

'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.

But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.

"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."

General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."

He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."

General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com

sidney_blumenthal@ yahoo.com

http://www.eagleherald.com/olyo0903.asp

Gene Lyons: 'Catastrophic success' spurs chaos

Published Friday, September 3, 2004 12:06:56 PM Central Time

For a man of limited verbal ability, President Bush occasionally gets off an unforgettable line.

In keeping with his new campaign tactic of admitting mistake (singular) in Iraq, Bush recently told reporters that U.S. forces had advanced so quickly that Saddam Hussein's army "laid down their willingness to fight and just dissipated into the countryside."

He said it twice. He probably meant "dispersed." "Dissipated" perhaps better describes his own missing time from the vaunted Flying Playboys unit of the Texas Air National Guard.

But that's not the epigram I had in mind. Asked to name his worst mistake, Bush confessed kicking Saddam's butt too hard.

"Had we had to do it over again," he said, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy ... escaped and lived to fight another day."

People, I think we have a winner. Just as destroying a village to save it summed up Vietnam, so "catastrophic success" may come to symbolize America's ongoing misadventure in Iraq. Remember "shock and awe"? Well, forget it.

There was never any doubt that the U.S. military would easily defeat Iraq's Third World army. Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, tried to warn that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure the peace. For this offense against neoconservative dogma, Shinseki was forced into early retirement.

Now comes the bitter proof. For the second time in months, determined U.S. Marines have fought Iraqi militiamen to a bloody standoff, this time in the Shiite stronghold of Najaf. Once again, as in the Sunni city of Fallujah, a deal has been cut to prevent an even bloodier battle, possibly involving the destruction of the tomb of the Imam Ali, one of Shia Islam's most revered holy places, an event sure to inflame the Muslim world. Many think the big winner is "radical" cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who protected the shrine from U.S. "infidels."

Meanwhile, back in Fallujah, The New York Times reports, Sunni fundamentalist militias have assumed near-total control of the entire province. Apart from occasional armored convoys and bombing raids that strengthen the guerrillas by killing civilians, U.S. forces remain inside fortified compounds as grisly videos documenting the torture and beheading of its Iraqi allies are sold openly in the marketplace. The capture and execution of several key leaders of the pro-government Iraqi Fallujah Brigade installed months ago has led to its near dissolution.

"Marine commanders," the Times reports, say that the city "has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States."

Anybody who really wants to understand the Iraqi chaos must read Naomi Klein's "Baghdad Year Zero" in the September Harper's magazine. With extraordinary clarity, Klein documents the Bush administration's madcap efforts to turn Iraq into a corporate paradise by seizing its assets and selling them to foreign (mostly U.S.) investors.

If you're curious exactly what so-called rebel clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr are rebelling against, Klein's article, subtitled "Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neo-con utopia," makes it appallingly clear. Under Saddam Hussein's Baathist rule, see, Iraq's non-oil economy functioned as a kind of Arab socialism. About 200 state-owned companies made everything "from cement to paper to washing machines" corrupt, inefficient, but the only paying jobs hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had.

Bush-appointed emissary Paul Bremer set about to change all that with revolutionary fervor by holding what Klein calls "the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union." He pronounced a set of radical economic "reforms," lowering corporate taxes to virtually nothing and allowing Iraq's putative new owners to export 100 percent of their profits. Exactly what gave American true believers the right to sell what they never owned troubled them not. Alas, however, the U.N. Security Council resolution empowering the Coalition Provisional Authority to make laws specifically forbade seizing captive nations' assets -- as international law has done for almost a century.

Plan B was to strong-arm the newly appointed Iraqi Governing Council into writing said reforms into its constitution. After al-Sadr's al Hawza newspaper objected, the government shut it down. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men saw no recourse but armed rebellion.

"Labor relations, like everything else in Iraq," Klein writes, "has become a blood sport." Iraqi collaborators are kidnapped and murdered, along with foreign businessmen seen as thieves. Insurance companies have quit writing policies for Iraq. Multinational corporations are pulling out. The Bush administration, Klein writes, has transformed the country "into the mirror opposite of what the neo-cons envisioned, not a corporate utopia, but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded."

In two words: catastrophic success.

©2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040907/D84V15AG0.html

Cheney Warns Against Vote for Kerry

By AMY LORENTZEN

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday warned Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another terrorist attack.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign immediately rejected those comments as "scare tactics" that crossed the line.

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

If Kerry were elected, Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach. Instead, he said Bush's offensive approach works to root out terrorists where they plan and train, and pressure countries that harbor terrorists.

Cheney pointed to Afghanistan as a success story in pursuing terrorists although the Sept. 11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, remains at large. In Iraq, the vice president said, the United States has taken out a leader who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and harbored other terrorists.

"Saddam Hussein today is in jail, which is exactly where he belongs," Cheney said.

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards issued a statement, saying, "Dick Cheney's scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs. Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that."

Edwards added that he and Kerry "will keep American safe, and we will not divide the American people to do it."
The candidates are campaigning hard for Iowa's seven electoral votes. Democrat Al Gore narrowly won the state in 2000. Bush has campaigned in the state five times in the last month, and Cheney has made three stops.

Hours before Cheney spoke, the Congressional Budget Office said this year's federal deficit will hit a record $422 billion. Cheney, in praising Bush's tax cuts, noted that the CBO said this year's projected deficit will be smaller than analysts had expected.

September 04, 2004

Susan Estrich goes nuclear
Well, you can't say Bush and Rove didn't ask for it.
Bush's return to drinking is apparently common knowledge in DC, though it seems unlikely anyone will talk on the record.

The abortion story is old news, but seemed to be solid, at least by Swift Boat standards: the woman in question denies it, but the two then-friends who drove her to the (illegal) abortion mill have supposedly signed affidavits.
It's Stevenson's challenge to Nixon: if you don't stop telling lies about us, we're going to have to start telling the truth about you. Bush has been asked politely, and he hasn't. Now it's our turn.

Lies move Democrats to dig up dirt
SUSAN ESTRICH
My Democratic friends are mad as hell, and they aren't going to take it any more. They are worried, having watched as another August smear campaign, full of lies and half-truths, takes its toll in the polls.

They are frustrated, mostly at the Kerry campaign, for naively believing that just because all the newspapers and news organizations that investigated the charges of the Swift Boat assassins found them to be full of lies and half-truths, they wouldn't take their toll. The word on the street is that Kerry was ready to fire back the day the story broke, but that his campaign, believing the charges would blow over if they ignored them, counseled restraint.
But most of all, activist Democrats are angry. As one who lived through an August like this, 16 years ago - replete with rumors that were lies, which the Bush campaign claimed they had nothing to do with and later admitted they had planted - I'm angry, too. I've been to this movie. Lies move numbers.

Remember the one about Dukakis suffering from depression after he lost the governorship? We lost six points over that lie, planted by George W.'s close friend and colleague in the 1988 campaign, Lee Atwater. Or how about the one about Kitty Dukakis burning a flag at an anti-war demonstration, another out-and-out lie, which the Bush campaign denied having anything to do with, except that it turned out to have come from a United States senator via the Republican National Committee? Atwater later apologized to me for that, too, on his deathbed. Did I mention that Lee's wife is connected to the woman running the Swift Boat campaign?

What do you do, Democrats keep asking each other.

The answer is not pretty, but everyone knows what it is.

The trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we're not mean enough. Too much is at stake to play by Dukakis' rules and lose again. That is the conclusion Democrats have reached. So watch out. Millions of dollars will be on the table. And there are plenty of choices for what to spend it on.

Will it be the three, or is it four or five, drunken driving arrests that Bush and Cheney, the two most powerful men in the world, managed to rack up?

After Vietnam, nothing is ancient history, and Cheney is still drinking. What their records suggest is not only a serious problem with alcoholism, which Bush but not Cheney has acknowledged, but also an even more serious problem of judgment.

What if Bush were to fall off thewagon? Then what? Has America really faced the fact that we have an alcoholic as our president? Or how about Dead Texans for Truth, highlighting those who served in Vietnam instead of the privileged draft-dodging president, and ended up as names on the wall instead of members of the Air National Guard.
Or maybe it will be Texas National Guardsmen for Truth, who can explain exactly what George W. Bush was doing while John Kerry was putting his life on the line. Perhaps with money on the table, or investigators on their trail, we will learn just what kind of wild and crazy things the president was doing while Kerry was saving a man's life, facing enemy fire and serving his country.

Or could it be George Bush's Former Female Friends for Truth. A forthcoming book by Kitty Kelley raises questions about whether the president has practiced what he preaches on abortion. As Larry Flynt discovered, a million dollars loosens lips. Are there others to be loosened?

Are you shocked? Remember Dukakis? Now he teaches at Northeastern University. John Kerry has been very fair in dealing with the Swift Boat charges. That's why so many of my Democrat friends have decided to stop talking to the campaign, and start putting money together independently.

The arrogant little Republican boys who strutted around New York this week, claiming that they have this one won, would do well to take a step back. It could be a long and ugly road to November.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:53 PM TrackBack (0) Thread: Election 2004

Contributed by:

Claudia D. Dikinis http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Bush by numbers: Four years of double standards

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=557746

By Graydon Carter
03 September 2004


1 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.

104 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.

101 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned missile defence.

65 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned weapons of mass destruction.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses.

73 Number of times that Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his three State of the Union addresses.

83 Number of times Bush mentioned Saddam, Iraq, or regime (as in change) in his three State of the Union addresses.

$1m Estimated value of a painting the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States and Bush family friend.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned Saudi Arabia in his three State of the Union addresses.

1,700 Percentage increase between 2001 and 2002 of Saudi Arabian spending on public relations in the United States.

79 Percentage of the 11 September hijackers who came from Saudi Arabia.

3 Number of 11 September hijackers whose entry visas came through special US-Saudi "Visa Express" programme.

140 Number of Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, evacuated from United States almost immediately after 11 September.

14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents assigned to track down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries where al-Qa'ida is active.

$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.

$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.

$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS's existing terrorism budget.

$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.

$5m Amount a 1996 federal commission was given to study legalised gambling.

7 Number of Arabic linguists fired by the US army between mid-August and mid-October 2002 for being gay.

George Bush: Military man

1972 Year that Bush walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas National Guard, Nearly two years before his six-year obligation was up.

$3,500 Reward a group of veterans offered in 2000 for anyone who could confirm Bush's Alabama guard service.

600-700 Number of guardsmen who were in Bush's unit during that period.

0 Number of guardsmen from that period who came forward with information about Bush's guard service.

0 Number of minutes that President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the assistant Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the former chairman of the Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle, and the White House Chief of Staff, Karl Rove ­ the main proponents of the war in Iraq ­served in combat (combined).

0 Number of principal civilian or Pentagon staff members who planned the war who have immediate family members serving in uniform in Iraq.

8 Number of members of the US Senate and House of Representatives who have a child serving in the military.

10 Number of days that the Pentagon spent investigating a soldier who had called the President "a joke" in a letter to the editor of a Newspaper.

46 Percentage increase in sales between 2001 and 2002 of GI Joe figures (children's toys).

Ambitious warrior

2 Number of Nations that George Bush has attacked and taken over since coming into office.

130 Approximate Number of countries (out of a total of 191 recognised by the United Nations) with a US military presence.

43 Percentage of the entire world's military spending that the US spends on defence. (That was in 2002, the year before the invasion of Iraq.)

$401.3bn Proposed military budget for 2004.

Saviour of Iraq

1983 The year in which Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, gave Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs as a gift.

2.5 Number of hours after Rumsfeld learnt that Osama bin Laden was a suspect in the 11 September attacks that he brought up reasons to "hit" Iraq.

237 Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq made by top Bush administration officials between 2002 and January 2004, according to the California Representative Henry Waxman.

10m Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets on 21 February 2003, in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the largest simultaneous protest in world history.

$2bn Estimated monthly cost of US military presence in Iraq projected by the White House in April 2003.

$4bn Actual monthly cost of the US military presence in Iraq according to Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in 2004.

$15m Amount of a contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq.

$80,000 Amount an Iraqi firm spent (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build the same factory, after delays prevented the American firm from starting it.

2000 Year that Cheney said his policy as CEO of Halliburton oil services company was "we wouldn't do anything in Iraq".

$4.7bn Total value of contracts awarded to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan.

$680m Estimated value of Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded to Bechtel.

$2.8bn Value of Bechtel Corp contracts in Iraq.

$120bn Amount the war and its aftermath are projected to cost for the 2004 fiscal year.

35 Number of countries to which the United States suspended military assistance after they failed to sign agreements giving Americans immunity from prosecution before the International Criminal Court.

92 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2002.

60 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2003.

55 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who were unemployed before the war.

80 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who are unemployed a Year after the war.

0 Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender in May 1945.

37 Death toll of US soldiers in Iraq in May 2003, the month combat operations "officially" ended.

0 Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home that the Bush administration has permitted to be photographed.

0 Number of memorial services for the returned dead that Bush has attended since the beginning of the war.

A soldier's best friend

40,000 Number of soldiers in Iraq seven months after start of the war still without Interceptor vests, designed to stop a round from an AK-47.

$60m Estimated cost of outfitting those 40,000 soldiers with Interceptor vests.

62 Percentage of gas masks that army investigators discovered did Not work properly in autumn 2002.

90 Percentage of detectors which give early warning of a biological weapons attack found to be defective.

87 Percentage of Humvees in Iraq not equipped with armour capable of stopping AK-47 rounds and protecting against roadside bombs and landmines at the end of 2003.

Making the country safer

$3.29 Average amount allocated per person Nationwide in the first round of homeland security grants.

$94.40 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in American Samoa.

$36 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in Wyoming, Vice-President Cheney's home state.

$17 Amount allocated per person in New York state.

$5.87 Amount allocated per person in New York City.

$77.92 Amount allocated per person in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, Bush's alma mater.

76 Percentage of 215 cities surveyed by the US Conference of Mayors in early 2004 that had yet to receive a dime in federal homeland security assistance for their first-response units.

5 Number of major US airports at the beginning of 2004 that the Transportation Security Administration admitted were Not fully screening baggage electronically.

22,600 Number of planes carrying unscreened cargo that fly into New York each month.

5 Estimated Percentage of US air cargo that is screened, including cargo transported on passenger planes.

95 Percentage of foreign goods that arrive in the United States by sea.

2 Percentage of those goods subjected to thorough inspection.

$5.5bn Estimated cost to secure fully US ports over the Next decade.

$0 Amount Bush allocated for port security in 2003.

$46m Amount the Bush administration has budgeted for port security in 2005.

15,000 Number of major chemical facilities in the United States.

100 Number of US chemical plants where a terrorist act could endanger the lives of more than one million people.

0 Number of new drugs or vaccines against "priority pathogens" listed by the Centres for Disease Control that have been developed and introduced since 11 September 2001.

Giving a hand up to the advantaged

$10.9m Average wealth of the members of Bush's original 16-person cabinet.

75 Percentage of Americans unaffected by Bush's sweeping 2003 cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.

$42,000 Average savings members of Bush's cabinet received in 2003 as a result of cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.

10 Number of fellow members from the Yale secret society Skull and Bones that Bush has named to important positions (including the Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. and SEC chief Bill Donaldson).

79 Number of Bush's initial 189 appointees who also served in his father's administration.

A man with a lot of friends

$113m Amount of total hard money the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign received, a record.

$11.5m Amount of hard money raised through the Pioneer programme, the controversial fund-raising process created for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. (Participants pledged to raise at least $100,000 by bundling together cheques of up to $1,000 from friends and family. Pioneers were assigned numbers, which were included on all cheques, enabling the campaign to keep track of who raised how much.)

George Bush: Money manager

4.7m Number of bankruptcies that were declared during Bush's first three years in office.

2002 The worst year for major markets since the recession of the 1970s.

$489bn The US trade deficit in 2003, the worst in history for a single year.

$5.6tr Projected national surplus forecast by the end of the decade when Bush took office in 2001.

$7.22tr US national debt by mid-2004.

George Bush: Tax cutter

87 Percentage of American families in April 2004 who say they have felt no benefit from Bush's tax cuts.

39 Percentage of tax cuts that will go to the top 1 per cent of American families when fully phased in.

49 Percentage of Americans in April 2004 who found that their taxes had actually gone up since Bush took office.

88 Percentage of American families who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes.

$30,858 Amount Bush himself saved in taxes in 2003.

Employment tsar

9.3m Number of US unemployed in April 2004.

2.3m Number of Americans who lost their jobs during first three Years of the Bush administration.

22m Number of jobs gained during Clinton's eight years in office.

Friend of the poor

34.6m Number of Americans living below the poverty line (1 in 8 of the population).

6.8m Number of people in the workforce but still classified as poor.

35m Number of Americans that the government defines as "food insecure," in other words, hungry.

$300m Amount cut from the federal programme that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes.

40 Percentage of wealth in the United States held by the richest 1 per cent of the population.

18 Percentage of wealth in Britain held by the richest 1e per cent of the population.

George Bush And his special friend

$60bn Loss to Enron stockholders, following the largest bankruptcy in US history.

$205m Amount Enron CEO Kenneth Lay earned from stock option profits over a four-year period.

$101m Amount Lay made from selling his Enron shares just before the company went bankrupt.

$59,339 Amount the Bush campaign reimbursed Enron for 14 trips on its corporate jet during the 2000 campaign.

30 Length of time in months between Enron's collapse and Lay (whom the President called "Kenny Boy") still not being charged with a crime.

George Bush: Lawman

15 Average number of minutes Bush spent reviewing capital punishment cases while governor of Texas.

46 Percentage of Republican federal judges when Bush came to office.

57 Percentage of Republican federal judges after three years of the Bush administration.

33 Percentage of the $15bn Bush pledged to fight Aids in Africa that must go to abstinence-only programmes.
The Civil libertarian

680 Number of suspected al-Qa'ida members that the United States admits are detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

42 Number of nationalities of those detainees at Guantanamo.

22 Number of hours prisoners were handcuffed, shackled, and made to wear surgical masks, earmuffs, and blindfolds during their flight to Guantanamo.

32 Number of confirmed suicide attempts by Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

24 Number of prisoners in mid-2003 being monitored by psychiatrists in Guantanamo's new mental ward.

A health-conscious president

43.6m Number of Americans without health insurance by the end of 2002 (more than 15 per cent of the population).

2.4m Number of Americans who lost their health insurance during Bush's first year in office.

Environmentalist

$44m Amount the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and the Republican National Committee received in contributions from the fossil fuel, chemical, timber, and mining industries.

200 Number of regulation rollbacks downgrading or weakening environmental laws in Bush's first three years in office.

31 Number of Bush administration appointees who are alumni of the energy industry (includes four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful White House officials, and more than 20 other high-level appointees).

50 Approximate number of policy changes and regulation rollbacks injurious to the environment that have been announced by the Bush administration on Fridays after 5pm, a time that makes it all but impossible for news organisations to relay the information to the widest possible audience.

50 Percentage decline in Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against polluters under Bush's watch.

34 Percentage decline in criminal penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.

50 Percentage decline in civil penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.

$6.1m Amount the EPA historically valued each human life when conducting economic analyses of proposed regulations.

$3.7m Amount the EPA valued each human life when conducting analyses of proposed regulations during the Bush administration.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned global warming, clean air, clean water, pollution or environment in his 2004 State of the Union speech. His father was the last president to go through an entire State of the Union address without mentioning the environment.

1 Number of paragraphs devoted to global warming in the EPA's 600-page "Draft Report on the Environment" presented in 2003.

68 Number of days after taking office that Bush decided Not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases by roughly 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States was to cut its level by 7 per cent.

1 The rank of the United States worldwide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

25 Percentage of overall worldwide carbon dioxide emissions the United States is responsible for.

53 Number of days after taking office that Bush reneged on his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

14 Percentage carbon dioxide emissions will increase over the next 10 years under Bush's own global-warming plan (an increase of 30 per cent above their 1990 levels).

408 Number of species that could be extinct by 2050 if the global-warming trend continues.

5 Number of years the Bush administration said in 2003 that global warming must be further studied before substantive action could be taken.

62 Number of members of Cheney's 63-person Energy Task Force with ties to corporate energy interests.

0 Number of environmentalists asked to attend Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings.

6 Number of months before 11 September that Cheney's Energy Task Force investigated Iraq's oil reserves.

2 Percentage of the world's population that is British.

2 Percentage of the world's oil used by Britain.

5 Percentage of the world's population that is American.

25 Percentage of the world's oil used by America.

63 Percentage of oil the United States imported in 2003, a record high.

24,000 Estimated number of premature deaths that will occur under Bush's Clear Skies initiative.

300 Number of Clean Water Act violations by the mountaintop-mining industry in 2003.

750,000 Tons of toxic waste the US military, the world's biggest polluter, generates around the world each Year.

$3.8bn Amount in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 1995, the Year "polluter pays" fees expired.

$0m Amount of uncommitted dollars in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 2003.

270 Estimated number of court decisions citing federal Negligence in endangered-species protection that remained unheeded during the first year of the Bush administration.

100 Percentage of those decisions that Bush then decided to allow the government to ignore indefinitely.

68.4 Average Number of species added to the Endangered and Threatened Species list each year between 1991 and 2000.

0 Number of endangered species voluntarily added by the Bush administration since taking office.

50 Percentage of screened workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from long-term health problems, almost half of whom don't have health insurance.

78 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from lung ailments.

88 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who Now suffer from ear, nose, or throat problems.

22 Asbestos levels at Ground Zero were 22 times higher than the levels in Libby, Montana, where the W R Grace mine produced one of the worst Superfund disasters in US history.

Image booster for the US

2,500 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further the image of the US abroad in 1991.

1,200 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further US image abroad in 2004.

4 Rank of the United States among countries considered to be the greatest threats to world peace according to a 2003 Pew Global Attitudes study (Israel, Iran, and North Korea were considered more dangerous; Iraq was considered less dangerous).

$66bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 1949.

$23.8bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 2002.

85 Percentage of Indonesians who had an unfavourable image of the United States in 2003.

Second-party endorsements

90 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2001.
67 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2002.
54 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 30 September, 2003.

50 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 15 October 2003.

49 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president in May 2004.

More like the French than he would care to admit

28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2003, the second-longest vacation of any president in US history. (Record holder Richard Nixon.)

13 Number of vacation days the average American receives each Year.

28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2001, the month he received a 6 August Presidential Daily Briefing headed "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike US Targets."

500 Number of days Bush has spent all or part of his time away from the White House at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, his parents' retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, or Camp David as of 1 April 2004.

No fool when it comes to the press

11 Number of press conferences during his first three Years in office in which Bush referred to questions as being "trick" ones.

Factors in his favour

3 Number of companies that control the US voting technology market.


52 Percentage of votes cast during the 2002 midterm elections that were recorded by Election Systems & Software, the largest voting-technology firm, a big Republican donor.

29 Percentage of votes that will be cast via computer voting machines that don't produce a paper record.
17On 17 November 2001, The Economist printed a correction for having said George Bush was properly elected in 2000.

$113m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, the most in American electoral history.

$185m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign, to the end of March 2004.

$200m Amount that the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign expects to raise by November 2004.

268 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Pioneer status (by raising $100,000 each) as of March 2004.

187 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Ranger status (by raising $200,000 each) as of March 2004.

$64.2m The Amount Pioneers and Rangers had raised for Bush-Cheney as of March 2004.

85 Percentage of Americans who can't Name the Chief Justice of the United States.

69 Percentage of Americans who believed the White House's claims in September 2003 that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 11 September attacks.

34 Percentage of Americans who believed in June 2003 that Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" had been found.

22 Percentage of Americans who believed in May 2003 that Saddam had used his WMDs on US forces.

85 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map.

30 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the Pacific Ocean on a map.

75 Percentage of American young adults who don't know the population of the United States.

53 Percentage of Canadian young adults who don't know the population of the United States.

11 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the United States on a map.

30 Percentage of Americans who believe that "politics and government are too complicated to understand."
Another factor in his favour

70m Estimated number of Americans who describe themselves as Evangelicals who accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour and who interpret the Bible as the direct word of God.

23m Number of Evangelicals who voted for Bush in 2000.

50m Number of voters in total who voted for Bush in 2000.

46 Percentage of voters who describe themselves as born-again Christians.

5 Number of states that do not use the word "evolution" in public school science courses.

This is an edited extract from "What We've Lost", by Graydon Carter, published by Little Brown on 9 September

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For a former college drop-out from Ontario and, briefly, a lineman stringing up telegraph wires on the railways of Canada, Graydon Carter, 55, has risen to impressive heights. The editor of Vanity Fair since 1992 ­ after succeeding Tina Brown ­ he is one of America's celebrity editors with clout, glamour and a nice line in suits.

It is hard to imagine Carter doing physical work of any kind, beyond exercising his thumb on his silver Zippo lighter. His labour is restricted to rejigging headlines in his magazine ­ he is a self-confessed failure at delegation of duties ­ and swanning to Manhattan parties. Martini in hand, he cuts an almost princely and dandyish figure, with billowing shirts and similarly billowing silver hair.

The spotlight on his activities has never burned brighter. In recent months he has transformed the regular editor's letter at the front of the magazine into less of a chat about its coming contents ­ the spreads of Annie Leibowitz and rants of Christopher Hitchens ­ and more a full-bore diatribe against the world of George Bush.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com/ >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." -- Lord Edward Acton
Madness takes its toll.
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Illegitimus non carborundum.