Imus said something the other day that cracked me up. He said that these days, NASCAR looks really stupid, because they pay about $9 per gallon of gas and they don't go anywhere but in circles.

It is true that there is no scenic vista anywhere that BushCo does not feel could be improved by adding some oil derricks and pumps. The best example is the one Bush keeps ranting about - ANWAR, the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Every time he mentions gas prices he pretty much blames it on ANWAR, the ONE pristine spot his oil cronies haven't (yet) been allowed to pillage.

Of course, the environment there would be degraded permanently, for all the rest of human history, but think of the benefits! That's what BushCo touts - All our foreign-oil problems would be solved! But, his own Energy Department has assessed the impact if drilling were allowed in ANWAR - Based on estimated reserves there, allowing drilling in ANWAR would indeed reduce the price of gas -- By 1/2 cent ... ten or twenty years from now.

The oil companies are sitting on hundreds of leases they could explore and drill. But they already own those - they want new goodies, wanna 'get while the gettin' is good,' while they have two obedient oil men in the White House! They want ANWAR. They want to drill inside the Everglades. They want wells offshore of both coasts of FL.

Look, we (sorta-kinda-almost) elected an oil man as President. The ties between W's family and the Saudi royal family go back literally generations, at least back to W's grampa Prescott. All of the oil that's still in the ground around the world, oil that was worth about $30 a bbl when Bush 'took' office, is today worth nearly five times that much. The oil companies got incredible value for their massive GOP campaign contributions.

But, current oil prices have more to do with BushCo's idiotic saber-rattling over Iran and the actual war in Iraq (which was gonna competely pay for itself with oil revenues flowing from that earthly Paradise, that wellspring of Middle Eastern liberality and democracy, Free Iraq - Remember that promise, several trillion dollars back? It is worth recalling that, for all of Saddam's crimes, Iraq was one of the most secular countries anywhere in the region before we invaded - It was one of the only Mideast countries where religion did not play the central role in governance.).

What markets fear most is instability - unpredictability. Estimates of how much of the current $130 price of oil is caused purely by speculation range from $50 to $80. One quick, sure and easy way to tone down speculative excesses would be to change the margin rules on oil futures. (You can buy oil futures with 5% down and all the rest 'on margin' - i.e., borrowed. For stocks, margins are 50%. So, with your one dollar, you can control either two dollars worth of stock, or twenty dollars worth of oil futures.) But, BushCo's pals now run the Energy Department, remember? And they do not like regulations. So they took the position, which is now the law of our fine land, that regulating the oil futures markets is more properly the job of the UK (and, IIRC, Dubai - or was it Bahrain maybe? One of those countries not exactly known to be relentless in their protection of consumer interests.) And that is where we stand today - The US does not even assert its rights to regulate its own markets, because we simply gave the keys to our henhouse to the most avaricious and shameless group of foxes anywhere.

When I started driving about 7 years ago it was 74p a litre now its £1.10p.

£1.18 in North London

I think it's interesting that in Bush's last months in power, he is pushing to allow offshore oil drilling, something that was banned 27 years ago.
I assume it's his final big thank you to all his backers.
Since they didn't make enough with him opening the doors to Iraq and the Kurd's oil fields.

CBS: Nine months before 9/11, Bush asked his National Security Council to FIND A WAY to invade Iraq

This is the full CBS 60 Minutes (2004) interview of Former Secretary Of Treasury Paul O'Neil and reporter Ron Suskind that discusses Bush asking his National Security Council to "find a way" to invade Iraq during their first meeting in January 2001.

Video link-

http://belowgroundsurface.org/belowgrou ... oryURL=616

Note: the video is not 60 mins long, it is just a 5 min interview.

Interesting stuff in light of the recent Scott Mcclellan thing- so seriously guys, when are you gonna impeach this fuckwad?

Never, because if you can impeach the Republican president, you can also impeach the assholes in the Democratic party who supported the war. Nobody has the guts to pull the trigger.

"Never" is the right answer, but I don't think that's the reason - There is a pretty broad moral chasm between the GOP telling lies and the Dems believing them ...

Yeah its true- I believed the lies and 'Sexed up' intel from my govenment in the run up to the war, but as soon as that the 'truth' started coming out I was horrified!

I mean you cant be held resopnsible for believing your govenement- you can be held responsible however when you find out they were lieing and you dont bring them to justice.

I was disgusted that as soon as Pelosi was made speaker she said impeachment was off the table. I mean since then it has literally been a steady stream of more and more horrors coming out of this administration each day.

Dennis Kucinich has the right idea, and by the sound of it, he is gonna keep coming back presenting the edivence until somthing is done. Good luck to him!

Ah, bullshit. The members of Congress (primarily Democrats) who gave Bush permission to wage this war had better access to the intelligence information than the media or the general public and if they dared to look into it, they would have discovered that the evidence was paper-thin.

Hillary Clinton especially should have known what was going on, given how Ahmed Chalabi and his pals in the Iraqi National Congress were already influencing the Defense Intelligence Agency during her husband's administration (refer to Uncle Bill's own saber-rattling speeches regarding Iraq).

None of them risked it, though. And now tens of thousands of people are dead. They realize that if they point the finger at the executive branch as a scapegoat for the whole thing, it would blow up to the point where they would catch the blame, too.

Assholes, all of them. Fire them all.

Really? I was under the impression that Bush ( and his cronies) controlled all the intel that they feed to all the other memebers of congress? meaning that the decision to go to war was based on this edivence- I thought they were fooled like the rest of us?

This whole thing is such a fucking mess.

I don't know how it works in England, but members of Congress and other government personnel have all sorts of access to military and government agencies. They had their own avenues of investigating this, they just didn't bother to do it.

Incidentally, one thing that I've observed here is that when it comes to this subject, everybody is very quick to define a very small group of "bad guys" and paint everyone else (including themselves) as a victim. To me this "us vs. them" mentality and the seemingly arbitrary declarations of black and white sound very similar to the ones that got us into this war. Maybe this is just human nature.

In my eyes, most of our politicians are at fault, and the D or R next to their names really doesn't make a difference to me. They were the ones we trusted to look out for us and they failed us. And then they have the nerve to come back to us and say "don't blame me, I was fooled, and could you please elect me President?" Sorry, that doesn't cut it with something of this magnitude.

Im not entierly sure of the process in England either, but it would make sense that when these issues come to a vote in Parliment they wouldnt just be on the grounds of the intel produced by the govenment higher-ups, so I would assume MP's have access to much more stuff on their own also.

Yeah I think I agree with you now, everyone that didnt make some effort to check the edivence for themselves wasnt doing their job properly- and by the sounds of it, around the time they wouldnt have had to go too far to find someone else within the intelligence community who disagreed with the govenment stance.

It like the whole 9/11 thing also- the media are greatly responsible for selling the war and the fake edivence and everything. They are complicite and it would seem, in many cases little more than a mouth piece for promoting govenment properganda- I understand a lot of this was proven in the Scott Mcclellan also. It seems the blood is on everyones hands.

Yeah your absolutly right- I do even feel personally responsible for this mess on some level, but really what can you do? I mean you are suspose to be able to trust your govenment- at least with somthing as important as this.

I think realistically the best you can hope for in a situation like this is that it is never happens again or is never allowed to happen again, although we all know history has a habit of repeating itself.

Still regardless of us all being involved on some level- Bush and co were definalty the ring leaders and instigators who did make this nightmare happen- they need to be bought to justice.

lol

Hard to argue with the facts there - Senator Bob Graham (one of the few who took the opportunity to review the evidence) even told Sen. Clinton she should look at it before voting. (OTOH, the GOP did not exactly make it easy for them to review the evidence.) The Dems were running scared at the time though, no doubt - I mean, their thinking was no mystery -- "If the GOP can use the the Swift Boat attacks to turn the public perception of a genuine war hero like John Kerry into that of a Brie-eating, windsurfing, flipflopping liar, and (successfully) attack the patriotism of a man like Max Cleland who lost 75% of his limbs serving his country, what would they do to a Democrat who votes against this war?"

It's impossible to defend that vote -- Its utter spinelessness is exceeded only by its horrific results. I do wonder though -- What would have happened if that authorization bill had failed? I don't believe for a moment that would have been the end of it - Bush was determined to attack Iraq since literally his first week in office, and he would have done so somehow. Remember, Congress never declared war in Korea, either. Maybe this experience will actually have some silver lining, and Democrats will hereafter be less concerned with the 'wimp factor.'

The whole mess is also complicated by Saddam's own deception - Even fooling his own officers. Remember that President Clinton (and most European intelligence agencies) also believed Iraq had or was trying to develop WMDs, as did most of the Iraqi generals - Each of the Iraqi generals seem to have simply believed the WMDs were positioned at the next base down the line. W's great sin was using this broadly-accepted belief to rationalize an entirely unnecessary war - To fraudulently paint this long-term low-level concern as some sort of new emergency requiring action NOWNOWNOW. Did you see the clip where W is asked "Was Iraq a war of choice, or a war of necessity?" He first claims not to understand the question (!) - Then (perhaps realizing that his lifelong reputation as someone who is so shockingly dense that light actually bends around him would not allow even him to get away with this degree of pretense), he chooses 'necessity' (with that smarmy "You must be a congenital idiot, let me explain the real world to you" face with which we have become so familiar, as it is the one he tends to wear when he lies).

Kucinich may be making the Dem power structure in Congress crazy with the impeachment articles, but he is absolutely one of the smartest and most forthright politicians in the US. He'd make a truly great President, though sadly he'll never be elected. If we never let our politicians be seen or heard during campaigns, but we were required to vote based only on candidates' written position statements, he would probably win.

Finally - In a new development which gives hypocrisy a bad name, the source of most of the US's bad intelligence, the tellingly nicknamed Iraqi 'Curveball,' is the subject of a new LA Times story this morning, which quotes him as saying "For what I've done, I should be treated like a king." (I might agree - So long as I get to choose which king! Maybe Midas, or Charles I, or Faisal II, or Louis XVI ... ?) Instead, he's in a crummy apartment in LA, washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant, working at McDonald's and Burger King, etc. It shows (again) how incredibly easy it would have been to determine this bozo's complete unfamiliarity with the truth - He fled Iraq only to avoid arrest, he'd been fired from two jobs for dishonesty - Even his co-worker at Burger King says "He always lied." Now, his position is "I never told anyone that Saddam had WMDs."