licentious radio

Friday, February 7, 2003
[6:27:35 PM]

Poets Against the War: Poems.

[6:24:37 PM]

This is Day 508 of Dim Dubya's all-out, dead-or-alive man-hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Helen Thomas: This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history.

[10:14:48 AM]
Poor Colin. He tried so hard. He even got through his speech with a straight face. And then the chorus of fools asks why they didn't just attack the terrorist training camp. "We'll get back to you on that" is all the Bushies can say. It's more complicated than that, after all, right?

[10:09:57 AM]
Homeland Security reorg leaves us less secure [msnbc.com]

If we were conspiracy theorists, we'd say half the impetus to go forward was the realization that the terrorists would have a hard time attacking, now that the whole country is watching closely -- likely back when Clinton was president. With just a little tweak here or there, Dick Cheney can make sure there are gaping holes during the transition. Holes wide enough to fly an airliner through, you might say. Holes wide enough to create another post-9/11 surge in Bush's popularity.

Here's how it works: "NIPC is responsible for the Key Asset Initiative, a program staffed by 216 field agents that identifies potential physical and cyber threats to 'key assets' among the nation's most vital infrastructure, such as banks, nuclear power plants, oil pipelines, ports and reservoirs, and develops protection plans for them. But come March 1, the Key Asset Initiative will essentially grind to halt -- not one of the 216 agents in the program is transferring to the Department of Homeland Security."

Of course you would have to be crazy to think that Cheney/Bush would slack off on terrorism like they did before the 9/11 attacks, wouldn't you? And just because they got a big lift after 9/11 doesn't mean *that's* why they had protected the terrorists until then, does it?

[9:57:59 AM]
Molly discusses the right-wing loons at Conservative Political Action Committee, including various Bush-ist politicians like Cheney and DeLay.

[12:44:44 AM]
Krugman's column practically calls Greenspan out for a duel. Greenspan spent the Clinton years harping on the deficits. That's fine. But he's spent the Bush years ignoring deficits. Half a trillion dollars here, half a trillion dollars there.

Here's Krugman's point: "Mr. Greenspan must know that many people, whatever they say in public, now regard him as a partisan hack. That very much includes Republicans, who assume that he will support anything Mr. Bush proposes."

My point is that if you recognize Greenspan as just another partisan Republican hack, *then* you have to wonder again whether his assassination of the economy in April 2000 was really just totally, insanely incompetent -- the worst financial blunder since 1929 -- or whether his *intent* was to give Bush a chance of winning the election by ending the prosperity many of us were enjoying.

Yeah, I'm bitter. In April 2000, the company I was working for was in trouble. The day after Greenspan finally convinced Wall Street he was serious about crushing the bubble in the stock market, the new head of our parent company shut our business down. The parent company was dying, so our company wouldn't have survived anyway, but it makes my memory of the events and the timing quite vivid.

Over Christmas, the Washington Post had a media-whore article on Greenspan that actually managed to *praise* him for *not* crushing the bubble in the late 90s, and managed to completely ignore that he *did* crush the remains of the bubble in 2000, after it was already fading away.

Krugman previously published the Greenspan smoking gun -- the quote in which Greenspan says directly that adjusting margin rates would clamp down the bubble if he wanted to do it.

We're left with *implausible* deniability. You have to believe that Greenspan was too stupid to see that the bubble was fading. But that's a huge leap of faith, and Greenspan's 180-degree turn into a Bush deficit-monger is the nail in the coffin.

[12:03:11 AM]
We're so smart.... We know what the warmonger propagandists will spew, even before they get around to it. In our State of the Union Speech transcript we quoted Bush: "Our former allies are against the war, too, but our current allies all support us." Now Perle comes out and says: "France is no longer the ally it once was."

Perle's comment is remarkably silly, though, since France has always reserved the right to opt out of US warmongering.