It’s from the first, but stories like this one about undeclared sarin gas shells turning up in Iraq strangely don’t seem to be making news. Yes, it’s potato/potato, but that these shells which were supposedly all accounted for keep turning up in useable condition leads to the conclusion that Hussein was actively trying to keep WMD capability despite sanctions and inspections.
Then there’s also the US’s transfer of two tons of slightly enriched uranium; but that’s just something the IAEA should have done long ago, like 1991.
Open question: What kind of proof would be needed to show that Hussein was indeed trying to maintain at least chem/bio weapons capability in spite of over a dozen UN resolutions and thousands of Iraqis dying due to sanctions? That shells keep turning up, even old shells that should have been destroyed after GW1 is enough for me…
A great Op-Ed in the Post about the abdication of responsibilities by the legislative branch.
This is directly linked to John’s earlier post about the results of the administration investigating itself.
Key quote:
Compare the following: Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.
What to do? Is this just fodder for the Democratic-President-Republican-Congress theory?
I consider myself to be fairly knowledgable about “country culture”. My grandfather would pick on me saying I was more coon-ass than cajun — a fairly typical taunt for people from North Louisiana — and I came to wear it as a badge of honor. It was a way to seperate my identity from the masses of yuppie liberals in Austin. I’ve even read several of the Foxfire books that my family kept around for reference material. However, I must admit that the fashion of racoon penis bones is new to me. Maybe it was too pagan a topic for my Protestant upbringing.
Today’s reason: helping to make lying legal.
In a feat of fancy footwork — would Daniel Webster work with John Ashcroft? — it was decided that threatening to fire the chief actuary of the Medicare program if he revealed the truth about it’s costs was legal.
… A report on the investigation, issued Tuesday, says the administrator of Medicare, Thomas A. Scully, issued the threat to Richard S. Foster while lawmakers were considering huge changes in the program last year. As a result, Mr. Foster’s cost estimate did not become known until after the legislation was enacted.
But neither the threat nor the withholding of information violated any criminal law, the report said. It accepted the Justice Department’s view that Mr. Scully had “the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress.’‘ Moreover, it said, the actuary “had no authority to disclose information independently to Congress.’‘ …
It’s a cheap hobby, but a rather OCD oriented one. Check out Andy’s Tessellation Page to see examples and find further info on folding paper into shapes that don’t seem possible.
Pshew… I think I’ve stopped laughing.
The UN has vowed to stop spam in the next two years.
Oh, yeah. If I were a spammer, I’d be just as worried as the folks commiting genocide in the Sudan. My guess is that like UN efforts to eliminate hunger, poverty, disease, and rudeness, this will be a slam-dunk success. But, just like UN efforts on Human Rights have included stalwarts like Syria, Lybia, etc, my guess is that they will bring the global telemarketer cabal on board, and pass leadership on this crucial task to a country with extremely lax privacy and data transfer laws.
But it’ll be all right – they’ve got the model down pat from Oil-For-Food – the spammers will just bribe the appropriate UN member nations, and the status quo will continue.
Heh. I’m laughing again.