Armed Guard Found Asleep at Nuke Plant

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A federal inspector found an armed guard asleep at a gate inside the Indian Point nuclear power plants but officials said Monday there was no security breach.The inspector spent two minutes trying to rouse the unnamed guard Sunday afternoon before the guard “stood up and opened his eyes,” said Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.He said other security measures at the gate remained in operation during the guard’s nap and tapes showed there was no breach, “but that doesn’t make it any less serious.”

What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy.

Continue with The Great Iraq Swindle. Be warned, this is ugly stuff.

My old buddy, Max Cleland, tells it like it is:

Max Cleland: Americans are rejecting ‘Karl Rove politics’

A chuckling former Democratic Senator Max Cleland responded to a question by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this morning about claims by Karl Rove made in reference to the 2002 election ‘dirty tricks’.

“That’s it.” responded Cleland with a big smile on his face.

Maybe Trading Up Soon at Justice

The buzz among top Bushies is that beleaguered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally plans to depart and will be replaced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Why Chertoff? Officials say he’s got fans on Capitol Hill, is untouched by the Justice prosecutor scandal, and has more experience than Gonzales did, having served as a federal judge and assistant attorney general.

Almost anyone- including my obese, blind in one eye pug -would be a better AG than Alberto the Moron. This grouping, however, doesn’t include one of the villains of Katrina, Michael Chertoff. He’s an ass-smooching Bushie with no qualifications other than looking like the grim reaper and seemingly being able to marchstep along with King George’s orders. And don’t forget, his cousin at Popular Mechanics was the editor on their whitewash 9-11 issue. We need less of all of these people, not more.

This is definitely worth a netflix. Loyal TTPers might not find anything new here, but the presentation is first rate, and the interviews- ranging from Vermont congressman Bernie Sanders to Mark Crispin Miller, Michael Moore and many others- paint a grim picture of the medias overreaching, not in the public interest influence. Watching Michael Powell (son of Colin) blandly lie about the FCC plan to relax the laws concerning media concentration is chilling. These guys are more than willing to sell the fourth estate down the river - and democracy with it. A good resource to sling at your “That damn librul media” spouting Neo-Neighbor.

“By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody.”

The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it. But this was not just any source. The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.

They say the monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and children, and the bolder ones throw stones and chase the women from their farms.

“The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts.

Oh, Britney lives in Kenya now? Who knew?

While Rove might be the “genius” behind the kind of winner-takes-all dirty politics that won the Republicans a majority in Texas The vice president is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today. Not Osama Bin Laden. Not the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Not Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung Il. Not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Jose Padilla himself. Not even George W. Bush can lay claim to this title. It is Dick Cheney’s alone. Operating in a never-never land of constitutional ambiguity which exists between the office of the president and the Congress of the United States, Cheney’s office has made its impact felt on the policies of the United States of America as had no vice president’s office before him. Granted unprecedented oversight over national security and foreign policy by executive order in early 2001, many months prior to the terror attacks of 9/11, Cheney has single-handedly steered America away from being a nation among nations (albeit superior), operating (roughly) in accordance with the rule of law, and toward its present manifestation as the new Rome, a decadent imperial power bent on global domination whatever the cost.

More from Scott Ritter here.

Picked this up recently, On The Road, The Original Scroll:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…

Sitting in traffic yesterday, it finally became clear what so annoys me about those ubiquitous magnets you see plastered on cars everywhere. The statement “Support our troops” is so universally accepted, that everyone who reads it instinctively places themselves in that group- you know, the people who care about the welfare of our armed forces.

In fact, that sentiment is so obvious- similar to posting a “I like puppies” or “Ice cream is swell” sticker on your car- that it stops your brain from actually seeing what it really says, which is this:

Support Our War

Everyone, even the most die-hard pacifist, supports the troops. As well we all support the police, the fire department, EMS teams, the whole brave lot of them. Sure, we can find fault with the actions of individuals in those ranks, but as a rule, we support them all. We all understand the need of a society to provide socialized, tax supported defenders of our life, liberty, and property.

But how many people would allow you to swap out their yellow ribbon for this?

Support Our War?

I don’t think so.