October 31, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

RUDY SHOULDN'T THROW STONES

To hear him tell it, Rudy Giuliani has been aware of the terrorism threat for years and only he can really protect us from terrorists. But in testimony before the 9/11 Commission Rudy was fairly clueless about terrorism. This commentary by Joe Conason is at www.observer.com:

Although cable channels and newspapers devote endless amounts of space and time to consider the authenticity of Mrs. Clinton’s laughter, they seem unable to cover an extraordinary scoop that raises questions about Mr. Giuliani’s authenticity.

Published in the Oct. 23 issue of The Village Voice—the New York alternative weekly that has excelled in covering the former mayor for many years—that scoop revealed the contents of his private testimony before the 9/11 Commission. The previously sealed memoranda summarizing Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, obtained by reporter Wayne Barrett, show profound contradictions between his stump speech and what he admitted to the commission behind closed doors.

For reasons that remain unclear, the minutes of his private testimony, marked “commission sensitive/unclassified,” were nevertheless to be locked away until the convenient date of December 2008. According to Mr. Barrett, nobody associated with the 9/11 Commission could explain how or why that decision had been made.

The Voice article discloses the embarrassing contents of a 15-page “memorandum for the record,” prepared by a commission attorney on April 20, 2004, which quotes Mr. Giuliani explaining that he knew little about Osama bin Laden’s organization until “after 9/11,” when “we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda.” He recalled no such briefing earlier, which was “a mistake,” he acknowledged, since “if experts share a lot of info,” that would mean a “better chance of someone making heads and tails … [of the] situation.”

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN GOES THE BUSH ECONOMY

Consumer confidence is down. Home prices have dropped to a 16 year low. Some corporate behemoths are seeing their quarterly profits down. See what happens when you transfer almost all the wealth to just a few people at the top? This article by Francesco Guerrera, Jonathan Birchall and Daniel Pimlott is at news.yahoo.com:

A raft of bearish data fuelled fears of a US economic slowdown on Tuesday as consumer confidence slumped to a two-year low and house prices in major cities suffered the biggest drop in 16 years.

The growing evidence that the credit squeeze and housing meltdown are spreading to the rest of the domestic economy will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to set aside concerns over rising inflation and cut interest rates on Wednesday.

Blue chips such as Procter & Gamble and US Steel added to the gloom with results that disappointed investors and contributed to a 0.3 per cent fall in the S&P 500 in New York midday trading.

The negative reaction to earnings by two companies with global operations reflects deepening investor concerns that the weak dollar and solid global economic growth might not be enough to help corporate America offset a US slowdown.