Blame

In environmental news, the Japanese failed to overturn the ban on whaling, so they’ll just have to keep breaking it.

In other environmental news, Britain opens the first cow-shit-fired power station.

Bush should have greeted the independence of East Timor with a hearty apology for the US giving a green light to Indonesia to invade in 1975, but .... say, 1975, wasn’t his dad in charge of the CIA in 1975?

Britain legalizes adoption by gay couples, as couples, and other unmarried couples together for 2 years or longer.

Followup: the guy sent to jail for stealing golf balls has had his sentence over-turned.

Bush’s nickname for Vladimir Putin is Pootie-Poot. We are governed by a five-year old, folks. I have a theory about W. Remember Tom Hanks in “Big”?

Condi Rice said that the warning Bush got on 8/6/01 was vague and only 1 1/2 pages. Whose fault is that? Bush made it clear early on that he didn’t want to be given any report longer than 2 pages.

The first head we need on a platter over this is John Ashcroft’s. His sole interest was the drug war, including, you’ll remember, raids on medical marijuana farms in California. For example, he sent up a proposal to Bush, on Sept. 10, calling for increases in the funding of 68 programs, none of them counter-terrorism. Being briefed by outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh, he didn’t want to hear a thing about that subject. And he sent a memo to department heads, I think also Sept 10, listing his top priorities, none of which were terrorism. However in July, he did take action on threat assessments: he stopped flying commercial airliners and started taking chartered private jets.

Everyone in the admin had higher priorities. You’ll remmeber that Ashcroft’s pro-gun fanaticism was such that he had records destroyed after 9/11 that might have helped in tracking terrorists. And Treasury Sec Paul O’Neill hampered efforts to track terrorist money by his concern to help his friends by stopping efforts to stop money laundering and tax havens. Donald Rumsfeld refused to shift budget monies from his beloved Star Wars to anti-terrorism, and evidently stopped flights by the CIA Predator spy-plane started under Clinton to try to track Bin Laden---because of a turf war between the Pentagon and the CIA.

You’ll notice that with all the Bushie efforts to scare us this week, the Tom Ridge Color of the Day hasn’t moved off yellow.

Speaking of colors, did you know that carrots weren’t orange until the 16th century? It was an ideological thing in the Netherlands. Someone is now selling purple carrots, the way God intended.

I could make a joke about Stephen Jay Gould here, but I won’t.

One point about the pre-9/11 intelligence failures is that the Bushies have been insisting that to fight terrorism properly they needed to rip up the Constitution, but in fact they had about as much evidence as they really required well before they started pissing on the Bill of Rights.