According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.
That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.
"I don’t want to prejudge him and my hope is that Tom will be able to prove his case," said Gingrich, who engineered the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. "But I think the burden is on him to prove it at this point."If Delay doesn't see the handwriting on the wall, he's not as smart as I think he is. On the other hand, if he IS as smart as I think he is, he has files and photos on all the guys that matter. It worked for J. Edgar.
Is he doing that? "I don’t know yet. I think the jury's out," said Gingrich.
"DeLay's problem isn’t with the Democrats; DeLay's problem is with the country," Gingrich continued. "And so DeLay has a challenge: to lay out a case that the country comes to believe, that the country decides is legitimate. If he does that he's fine."
Oil prices raced to all-time peaks on Monday, climbing above $58 a barrel, while OPEC producers said they had begun discussing a second output rise to try to quell the market's rally.Since SOB has been concerned about the implications of "peak oil" recently, every jump in oil prices drives the implication of the coming oil decline more sharply into focus.
U.S. light crude for May delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit a record $58.18 a barrel, up 91 cents on the day. London's Brent crude traded oldman Sachs bank that prices could spike above $100 as global demand growth strains supply capacity. . .
U.S. oil prices have surged by more than 30 percent this year, with big-money speculative funds buying heavily on signs that robust demand growth in Asia's emerging economies and the United States would strain world supply.
Non-OPEC producers are pumping at full tilt and have little spare capacity to offer the market. Russian data released on Monday showed the world's second-biggest exporter pumping 9.33 million bpd in March, steady from February.
It was the sixth month in a row that output had failed to rise and another sign of a slowdown in Russia's industry.
Concerns about the adequacy of U.S. gasoline stocks ahead of the peak summer demand season have also driven price strength after a handful of refiners have had production problems.
U.S. gasoline futures struck an all-time high on Monday of $1.7491 a gallon, later easing slightly to $1.7470, up 1.60 cents.
So, we are dealing with a very powerful constituency of religious nuts now doing the muscle work for a criminal political gang. And it would appear that nobody is safe, not even those who sign the blood oath to the Republican Party. The slimy criminals and the self-righteous religious zealots have formed their own power center right smack dab in the middle of the Republican Party.We can only hope. Things tend to go in cycles but there is no reason to assume that the pendulum is yet ready to swing leftward - but maybe. As noted in LancasterOnline by Gil Smart:
I say let the games begin. This has been brewing for quite some time. This undemocratic streak in the GOP waxes and wanes but it has been dramatically on the upswing for the last decade or so. But this time the radical Republicans are piping their revolution straight into homes and cars and offices all over this country and it's starting to freak out the normal people.
this is what conservatism has become in this country. No more is there a dedication to the traditional principles of limited government and fiscal restraint; as John Danforth, a former Republican senator and an Episcopal minister, noted in the New York Times last week, the Republican Party “has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.”And they are certainly calling the shots today; but I suspect that more and more responsible conservatives are having a hard time going along with this. There is no way to predict how things will play out but it sure looks as though it will not be the way Bush and company predicted.
“As a senator,” wrote Danforth, “I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.”
And in this, I suspect we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the conservative movement. For American politics is cyclical; what goes up comes down. And the descent generally begins when extremists start calling the shots.
Insurgents fighting to overthrow Iraq’s U.S.-backed government frequently target Iraqi police and soldiers.Where to start? First, the term "inusrgents" as used in this sentence - and this is typical of stories about Iraq - is used incorrectly. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines "INSURGENT" as "a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government". There is neither civil authority nor an "established government" in Iraq. Thus, the second part of the sentence that refers to attempts to "overthrow Iraq's U.S. backed government" is total wishful thinking. The U.S. has tried - and failed - to create a government that our military occupation could hide behind but all we have done is provide for an election of disconnected individuals who can't even agree on how to begin the process of creating a government. There is no constitution - hence no governmental structure of any kind. Iraq is still under the authority of rules promulgated by Paul Bremer as head of the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) - a totally bogus entity put forward as a "civilian" interface between the U.S. military and the hoped for tame Iraqi front. Their banking rules, tax rates, business law and even traffic regulations were imposed by an occupying power with no input from any Iraqi, and those rules will be in force until Iraq has the prower to overturn them (and that isn't likely to happen as long as our military is occupying the country).
Although the "good news" blogs that compile instances of Iraq's progress tend to present an over-rosy picture, the consistent progress being achieved on the ground, away from the headlines, highlights one of the stranger truths about post-Saddam Iraq: the country has devolved into a set of local fiefs, each effectively administering itself. . .Our own press seems incapable of any nuanced reporting about Iraq, preferring to stick with whatever the official U.S. government line is and quoting without context whatever government figure is the speaker of the day.
Like all Arab societies, it functions best at the level of the individual street or neighbourhood, where Islamic injunctions to help fellow Muslims have real force.
Despite the destructive effects of the Baathist system, and the overwhelming chaos caused by the US invasion and the political transformations attempted in the 24 months since US troops rolled into Baghdad, Iraq remains a network of small, "high social capital" communities, well able to run itself without central leadership.
prices jumped 3.4 percent to a record yesterday, prompted by concerns over the level of gasoline stockpiles in the United States before the summer driving season.But congress is concerned about steroid use by pro baseball players and passing special legislation to "save" a single comatose patient with no possibility of a life. The rest of us can just get by as best we can.
The May contract for crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose $1.87 and settled at $57.27 a barrel after reaching $57.70 in earlier trading. The closing futures price was the highest since trading began in 1983. . . Oil markets continue to be rocked by the tightness in global production and concerns over rising demand. These issues, along with unexpected interruptions from producers like Iraq or Venezuela, have contributed to a 67 percent jump in oil prices in the last year.
The rise in energy costs is starting to be felt in the economy. Fewer jobs were created in March, according to the Labor Department, although America's unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent, from 5.4 percent in February. In addition, airlines, including Delta, United and Continental, have increased fares in response to rising costs.Well duh! For a government filled with and run by "businessmen" the end result for the country as a whole seems spectacularly inept. Increased fuel costs will mean increased prices for everthing that must be transported by train, plane, or truck - and that is almost everything bought and sold in this country; and since we no longer actually manufacture anything ourselves, most of it has to be transported a very long way - so expect major increases in prices over the next few months. And if prices rise across the board there will be no way for the Fed to keep pretending that inflation is under control - and that, of course, will mean major increases in interest rates - which is all that is needed to puncture the already over extended real estate bubble.
The gains in oil prices yesterday came after Goldman, Sachs released a report Thursday that suggested oil prices could go as high as $105 a barrel - the level that the bank analysts estimate is needed to significantly curb consumption.
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.The full book length treatment of this subject is due out May 15th - just in case you need to be depressed any further.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion. . .
No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements. . .
If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.
The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. . .
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose and gasoline and heating-oil surged to records on signs that U.S. refineries lack capacity to make enough fuel and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts predicted that oil could touch $105 a barrel.To recap: oil supplies are finite; demand is ininite. Train wreck for sure - the only question is when.
Record prices have failed to curtail surging fuel consumption, the Goldman Sachs analysts said in a research note. The firm's upper limit was $80 previously. U.S. supplies of gasoline and distillate fuels, such as diesel and heating oil, fell last week, according to an Energy Department report yesterday.
``Concern is growing that there will barely be enough fuel to meet growing global demand,'' said Michael Fitzpatrick, vice president of energy risk management at Fimat USA in New York. ``The world had cheap oil for years and the chickens are coming home to roost. Investment was deferred and China and India are now major users, which isn't going to change.''
