Year: 2007

Border Fence Set to Destroy Habitats That Have Cost Millions to Preserve

Jon Ponder

Los Angeles Times:

The lush, meandering lower leg of the Rio Grande is one of the most biologically diverse places in North America. More than 300 varieties of butterflies and half the bird species in the United States can be spotted here. So can two endangered species of wild cats: the ocelot, which resembles a miniature leopard, and the jaguarundi, an otter-faced relative of the puma.

Over the last 30 years, ranchers, conservationists, and state and federal officials have strung together a delicate necklace of nature sanctuaries along the river’s final 275 miles. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alone has invested more than $100 million to buy land and restore it to its native state, creating a riverside corridor called the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

Now the new federal directive to build 21 fence segments here threatens to trample the lands the government and private groups spent decades nurturing. A Fish and Wildlife analysis found that up to 75% of the nature corridor could be harmed, for just 70 miles of fence.

“In this little area, you will find more species in four counties than in all but three entire states,” said Martin Hagne, executive director of the Valley Nature Center in Weslaco, a vacant lot that was transformed into an educational park filled with malachite and pixie butterflies, Texas tortoises and cottontail rabbits.

“Now they’re going to spend billions of dollars to undo the work that cost millions of dollars. These are your tax dollars at work,” he said.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent people are so full of doubts.

— Bertrand Russell (1972-1970) British philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, pacifist, prominent rationalist

Borowitz Says Democrats Will Find a Way to Screw Up; Republicans Say They Already Did

Trish

Andy Borowitz needs to come to Florida. His parody column isn’t a spoof here — it’s reality.

Like manna from heaven, the Democratic presidential candidates’ boycott of Florida’s Jan. 29 primary has state GOP leaders giddy.

Amid a growing belief that there is no way the Democrats can blow the 2008 presidential election, Democratic National Committee chief Howard Dean sought today to reassure the party faithful that the party was “doing everything in its power” to uphold its losing tradition.

At a top-level summit called “Defeat: 2008” being held in Boston, the former Vermont Governor gave a rousing speech to concerned Democrats, bringing his audience to his feet by vowing, “I can assure each and every one of you, we will find a way to screw this up.”

Actually they already did. And while Democrats don’t acknowledge that banning candidates from campaigning in Florida to punish the state for moving its primary date is the dumbest thing they’ve ever done, the Republicans do.

Sure Republicans head into 2008 with an unpopular president, an unpopular war and no consensus on their best presidential candidate. But like manna from heaven, the Democratic presidential candidates’ boycott of Florida’s Jan. 29 primary has state GOP leaders giddy.

“I cannot imagine any candidate for president ever signing (such a pledge), but they have,” a beaming state Republican chairman Jim Greer told party leaders at the Presidency IV convention Sunday in Orlando…

“Our party, because of what the Democrats have done, has an opportunity that it has never had before…” Greer said. “Rules are important to any organization, but no one should be a prisoner of the rules.”

Even a Republican makes sense every now and then. Or, as Borowitz imagined it:

“Folks, let’s not forget, we’re Democrats,” Mr. Dean said. “If there’s a way to lose, we will find it.”

Bush Won’t Pay for Kids’ Health Care But Flew Billions in Shrink-Wrapped Bundles of Cash into the Iraq War Zone – a Fortune That Can’t Be Accounted for Now

Jon Ponder

Mid-2003: A reporter in Iraq stands on a pallet filled with shrink-wrapped bricks of C-Notes

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?” — Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Pres. Bush said he vetoed the Democrats’ expansion of the SCHIP children’s health insurance program because it was too costly. This confirms what we know about the president’s priorities. But the cost to cover 10 million additional children would be $35 billion, Democrats have pointed out, which is roughly what it takes to run Bush’s war in Iraq for 41 days.

An even more apt example of the misplaced values of Bush and his party is the story of the $12 billion or so that was flown into Iraq in 2003 and then went missing and will never be recovered. It sounds like a financial scandal of historical proportions, and yet it is one of the most under-reported story of the war:

The United States flew nearly $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a U.S. congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tons, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22, 2004, six days before the handover.

After this was revealed in an investigation into Bush’s handling of his invasion of Iraq, Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee was prompted to ask:

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?”

Security in the war zone was so lax as to be non-existent:

“One [Bush Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)] official described an environment awash in $100 bills,” the memorandum [on the investigation for Waxman’s committee] says. “One contractor received a $2 million payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.

And:

“They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division’s vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75 million in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.”

The Bush team — many of whom were inexperienced Republican Party operatives, cronies of the president and their twenty-something kids — lost or ripped off millions of dollars from the UN that was intended to feed Iraq’s poor people:

On April 12, 2004, the [CPA] in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people.

The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, “there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.”

Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad … kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

To get a sense of the Bushies’ attitude about the loss of the money, here is retired Admiral David Oliver, who was Bremer’s financial advisor, on the loss of billions of Oil for Food dollars:

“I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t – nor do I actually think it’s important.”

Q: “But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace.”

Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?”

The reason Adm. Oliver should have cared — aside from the fact that finance was his purview — is that some of this cash very likely fueled the insurgency that ensued a few months later. It is also likely the money ended up in the hands of terrorists who used it to buy weapons to kill our troops.

Limbaugh Caught on Tape Mocking Speech of 12 Year Old Graeme Frost

Jon Ponder

Rush Limbaugh phoned into the Oct. 18, 2007, edition of “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News to deny charges he’d attacked 12-year-old Graeme Frost, the boy who dared to speak out against Pres. Bush’s veto of the health insurance program for children. But in denying he attacked Graeme, Limbaugh trashed him again. He imitated the boy’s speech, even appeared to mock Graeme’s slight speech impairment (his vocal cords remain slightly paralyzed) — but you be the judge.

The mockery gets underway on the video at the 5:54 minute mark but, depending on your intestinal fortitude, you may not want to miss the ass-kissing Sean Hannity lays on Rush at the start of the tape. Boys, get a room!

Transcript via Newshounds:

LIMBAUGH: No, Alan, that’s an interesting question. I never once attacked this family. I attacked the Democrats for exploiting them. I attacked the Democrats for putting lies into the head of a 12-year old. A 12-year old they send out before microphones and cameras, to sit there and say, [mocking Graeme Frost, age 12, who suffered brain damage in an automobile accident] “I only want health care for the rest of American children like I got and George Bush is against it.”

A 12 year-old can’t write that garbage. The fact of the matter is, Graeme Frost was covered and got the health care he and his sister — both got the health care they needed under the current circumstances of the program. …I never attacked this family. I simply reported what their financial circumstances are. I actually feel sorry for ‘em to be used… I never once attacked — I wouldn’t attack a 12 year-old kid. I feel sorry for the fact that the kid is having words put in his mouth. He’s sent out before the whole country to lie, when he can’t know any better because he’s 12 years old, simply to advance another lie that the Democrats want to put forth.

This is not the first time Limbaugh, who went deaf reportedly because of the mass quantities of OxyContin he consumed, has mocked someone who is disabled. In October 2006, Limbaugh did a takeoff of Michael J. Fox’s loss of motor control as a result of Parkinson’s disease. Fox earned Limbaugh’s derision because he appeared in an ad for Claire McCaskill, a stem cell research supporter who was running for the U.S. Senate in Missouri.

Here’s Keith Olbermann’s take, including video of Limbaugh imitating Fox’s disability and an interview with Michael J. Fox:

Rep. Pete Stark Blasts Bush on Children’s Health Insurance, Iraq War – Hangs Tough Against GOP Onslaught

Jon Ponder

Pete Stark, Democrat of California, speaking on the House floor yesterday:

First of all, I’m just amazed that they can’t figure out — the Republicans are worried that we can’t pay for insuring an additional ten million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you gonna get that money? You gonna tell us lies, like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have the money to fund the war or children, but you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people, if we could get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.

This bill would provide health care for ten million children and, unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care. Six million are insured through the Children’s Health Insurance Program and they’ll do better in school, and in life. In California, the President’s veto will cause the legislature to draw up emergency regulations to cut some 800,000 children off the rolls in California and create a waiting list.

I hope my California Republican colleagues will understand that if they don’t vote to override this veto, they are destroying health care for many of our children in California.

In the previous job as an actor, our Governor used to play make-believe and blow things up. Well, [the] President and Republicans in Congress are playing make-believe today with children’s lives. They claim we can’t afford health care. They say the bill will socialize medicine. Tell that to Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley and Ted Stevens, those socialists on the other side of this capitol. The truth is: [The] CHIP program enables states to cover children primarily through private health care plans. But, President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up… in Iraq, in the United States, and in Congress.

I urge my colleagues to vote to override his veto. America’s children need and deserve health care, despite the President’s desire to deny it to them.

Stark’s assertion that the troops die in Iraq for Bush’s “amusement” gave Republicans ammunition, and House Minority Leader John Boehner fired back:

[…]