Posts Made By: Rod Kaufman

The exit strategy was specifically stated? I guess that depends on what you consider by "specifically". If it's dependent on the Iraqis assuming the security of their country, we have a long, equivocal way to go before the US "exits" Iraq. The Iraqis have not shown the capacity to engage in a firefight other than the first gulf war when they were commanded by SH! On the other hand, the insurgents clearly have the willingness to continue to fight(not to mention the testosterone) and, today, the consensus of the Sunni clerics is that the election was not legitimate. Of course, the thought of a timetable is out of the question for Bush and Ms Rice as the latter descibed a timetable as "artificial". What about a timetable to bring home a minimum of troops such as 10%? What's "artificial" about that?
And Bush's plan(s) for social security? Which one? Door number one: Divert payroll taxes into private accounts.
Door number two: limiting benefits for wealthy retirees. Door number three: indexing benefits to prices rather than wages. Door number four: increasing the retirement age. Door number five: discouraging taking social security benefits early.
All of the above "doors" have advantages and disadvantages and nothing is likely to pass without bi-partisan support and the republicans recoginize the need for it as well as having to face the music with the voters whereas Bush does not in the next election..

Hmm, if the trend continues, it appears the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani will become the next leader of Iraq, displacing US-backed secular prime minster Allawi.
Hmm, I wonder how long it's going to be before George and Laura invite the grand ayatollah over for dinner...

Jim,
An interesting commentary and perspective on the budget.
Another perspective overheard on the news during the morning commute is that the budget-spending will not be reduced but the increase in spending will be reduced, ie a program anticipating a 3% increase in federal funding will get a 1.5% in spending, when all is said and done.
As far as the military spending for Iraq not being figured in the budget and the biggest military outlays being in the Kennedy years with the soviets, well we are not facing a superpower these days, are we?...

"It's For The Troops!" That's the justification we have all read for the increase in spending in addition to our ever-increasing budget deficit.
The trouble is nobody ever says WHICH troops they are talking about. Billions of the 82 billion that Bush is proposing are going to the Iraqi troops. I found it disturbing to learn that at any given time, 50% of the Iraqi armed forces are on leave.(Well, it's not as if THEY are in a war zone.)
That goes along with the general manner in which they fought a war with Iran: they fought a 9-5 war and went home for the evening.
Hmm, I wonder what our reservists think about the option of being on leave 50% of the time while in Iraq. Oops, I almost forgot, our troops don't have THAT option...

CNN reported the same conservative group that brought you the debunked swift boat vets against Kerry horse and pony show is now spending ten million to advance Bush's plan to privitize social security.
Hmm, I seem to recall Bush condemning the actions of this particular group during the campaign.
Looks like it's desperation time so here come the heavy hitters...

USA Today.com is reporting tens of thousands of Shiites were in the streets of Baghdad demanding the US leave Iraq. This appears to be about the only thing they and the Sunnis agree upon. The recently elected speaker or president or whatever he claims to be of the Iraqi assembly is a Kurd who reserves the "right" to create an independent Kurdish country, carved out of Iraq, a kind of a Kurdish-Iraqi-stan. Swell.
Today, The LA Times is reporting the US state department has ordered a "major re-evaluation" of the troubled 18.4 billion Iraq reconstruction effort, blaming problems on early decisions to hire US firms for major infrastructure projects.The report lists problems with the performance of some firms, most notably (you guessed it) Halliburton.
Last week saw a major insurgent attack on the Abu prison, a heavily US guarded and defended position with a US commander stating," We have not seen anything like this before" and he further noted how well thoughout and executed the plan was. Think of it as a kind of a minature Tet offensive.
Of course, the US continues to spend 4.4 billion PER MONTH in Iraq and when we leave, the place will fall like the house of cards that it is...

Maurice,
I reported quite a while ago about a CNN article describing how and why the US government "looked the other way" while the US and other countries knowingly participated in oil purchases that were prohibited by the embargo. Nobody responded so I guess they just don't care...

Jim Gilcrest is the gentleman who founded the minutemen. According to Jim, anywhere from about three hundred to eight hundred minutemen patrol the border in Cochise county, Arizona. He stated today on KNX news radio that a border patrol official visited with him and confidentialy stated( because he would be fired for talking about it) that the efforts of the minutemen have reduced the illegal crossings in their twenty mile range from about a 1000 per day to around 20-30 per day. Jim acknowledges the fact that illegal aliens are probably finding other access routes but the point is his efforts are having an impact on slowing the flow where little has been done in the past forty years to do so.
Jim is a vietnam vet from Orange county California and states he has a dedicated group of ex-army rangers and recon marines who routinely patrol the border and evidently do so in an effective manner. He notes truck loads of drugs had passed the border on a daily basis but now that appears to have slowed as well. One has to wonder why they have been effective while our government has not...

"The market is behaving as if we are going into a recession." So says Ram Kolluri, chief investment officer at Global Value Investors.
Let's see, the trade deficit is going ballistic and the Bush administration, as usual, does nothing about it.
Oil prices have moderated a bit over the past week or so. Did the Bush administration do anything to help in the decline? Absolutely not, their actions have actually driven-up the cost of oil. How, by ignoring the pleas of democratic senators, Bush has refused to stop competing with the rest of the country by buying tons of oil everyday and dumping it into the strategic oil reserve lest those nasty terrorists under all of our beds get to it before we do. The democrats, noting Bush Jr won't release oil from the reserve as his father did in order to reduce gas prices and save failing airlines from bankruptcy, asked that Bush at least stop the government practice of buying oil at whatever high cost it may be on a daily basis, and wait until prices drop, thereby saving the taxpayers millions of dollars.(Not to mention the Americans currently paying through the nozzle to buy it now.)Speaking of oil, almost all of the recent run-ups have been on the basis of FEARS. Fears of wars in the middle east. Fears of refinery shortages. Fears of unusually cold winters. Fears of increasing demands on oil production. NONE of these fears have been realized. Saudi Arabia flatly stated it alone can supply all of the worlds demands for oil, including anticipated increases from China and India. The Saudis increased production by 2% and when that didn't work, they raised it another 500,000.00 barrels per day. The US consumes 11% of the oil compared to the rest of the world and isn't the glutton everybody believes it to be. The drilling in the wildlife reserves, if successful, won't be productive until 10 years from now. So what has the Bush administration done to help? Well, it brokered back-room deals with vice presidents of energy companies with Dick Chenney and established energy policies without the input of public opinion resulting in rigs being carved out of places like Pinedale Wyoming and in areas around Mt Rushmore where the resulting pollution has been reported to be so bad that you can't even see the monument on some days.
To top it off, we now have interest rates rising with every meeting of the Fed. I recall when similar economic circumstances happened under the Clinton administration, Clinton called Greenspan to the white house and demanded an explanation. Although a president can't order a revision in the rates, it doesn't hurt to convey his concerns to Greenspan. Sadly, Bush as usual, does nothing....

CNNs' Lou Dobbs had a report on the tube last night regarding the activities of the minutemen which can best be described as "expanding." Jim Gilcrest, leader of the group, now has two additional major goals: 1.Observation/protection of our northern borders.
2.Targeting enforcement of laws invoking penalities on employers who hire illegal aliens. Along the same lines, preventing cities from creating day centers for illegals.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can believe the ten million illegal aliens living in the US are all benevalent, upstanding citizens. These are all people who KNOWINGLY commit an illegal act to enter this country and you think it stops with that one illegal act? The next step is phony documentation: drivers licenses, social security cards, birth certificates and the like. Along with the phony identifications comes the ticket to vote and the ticket to endless public services paid forever by the taxpayer. A congressman from Florida explained how illegal aliens are on the verge of closing hospitals in his state because they will not pay for services they receive. Along these lines, legal immigrants from countries with known high incidences of tuberculosis are required to have chest x-rays, both pre and post entry, when receiving permanent residency visas in the US. Illegal migrants from Mexico have a high incidence of TB but have no such screening process as they dart across the border.
Perhaps the people get their positive views of illegal immigrants from immigrants rights groups. Er, ah, excuse me, don't you mean illegal immigrants rights groups?...