Category Archives: News and politics

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

08/04/2006  Maxine Gauthier doesn’t own a computer. She doesn’t know the first thing about Web browsing or sending e-mail. She’s not even sure where to find a computer’s "on" button, as she describes it.

Yet for the past nine months, she has been fighting one of the most persistent and some say irritating institutions in cyberspace: AOL, formerly known as America Online. "They just haven’t wanted to let go," the 55-year-old St. Louisan said. "I don’t think they’ll ever really let go."

Her struggle has involved about a dozen phone calls often ending with an AOL customer service representative or manager hanging up on her. She even tried impersonating someone else in a couple of the calls. The giant online service provider wouldn’t budge. Advertisement

The problem? An AOL account once held by Gauthier’s late father still showed billing charges accumulating against it. The account had been dormant for months; the credit card he used for it was inactive at least as long.  Nevertheless, AOL kept charging $25.90 each month for dial-up online access. Late fees for non-payment accumulated on the credit card, too.

Gauthier even offered to send a copy of her father’s obituary as proof he truly was dead. AOL was unmoved.

"An AOL service guy told me to stop complaining and learn to use a computer," she said. "Then he hung up."

Now I know why it’s called AOHell. 

08/05/2006(REUTERS)  LONDON – Hundreds of Britons are being urged to attend what is being branded as Europe’s first "masturbate-a-thon," a leading British reproductive health care charity said Friday.  Marie Stopes International, which is hosting the event with HIV/AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust, said it expected up to 200 people to attend the sponsored masturbation session in Clerkenwell, central London, on Saturday.  "It is a bit of a publicity stunt, but we hope it will raise awareness," a Marie Stopes spokeswoman told Reuters.

"We want to get people talking about safer sex, masturbation and to lift taboos."  Participants, who have to be over 18, can bring any aids they need and can take part in four different rooms — a comfort area, a mixed area, along with men and women only areas. However, the rules on the event’s Web site states there can be no touching of other participants, nor are people allowed to fake orgasms. "The amount you raise will be determined by how many minutes you masturbate and/or how many orgasms you achieve," the Web site said.

The Marie Stopes spokeswoman said local religious groups had been initially outraged, but after people had heard what the event was about, most had approved it. Police had also given it their approval. Similar events have been staged in San Francisco for the last six years raising $25,000 for women’s health initiatives and HIV prevention. If successful, Marie Stopes said it could take place elsewhere in mainland Europe next year.

We suspect the winner will be a twelve year old boy with a copy of Maxxim Magazine’s Swimsuit issue.

08/06/2006 ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – In a sudden blow to the nation’s oil supply, half the production on Alaska’s North Slope was being shut down Sunday after BP Exploration Alaska, Inc. discovered severe corrosion in a Prudhoe Bay oil transit line.  BP officials said they didn’t know how long the Prudhoe Bay field would be off line. "I don’t even know how long it’s going to take to shut it down," said Tom Williams, BP’s senior tax and royalty counsel.  “We do know that our customers will be paying for this until we see blood come out of their eyes and they have to sell their children to refill the family car.” 

A spokesman for the White House said that President George Bush was on vacation in Crawford, Texas and was showing as “Away” on his AOL Instant Messenger.

Before the mass media people would read the paper to catch up on what happened in the previous week and month.  If the local hardware store burned down, they might see the smoke, or get the news from their neighbour Fred:  “Hey, did you hear, Clarke Hardware burned to the ground last night?”  Occasionally, they would tune up the Philco and listen to the radio news, if they had a station within listening range that gave news any more than a cursory nod.  Television reassured the viewer that the world still existed in a fifteen minute talking head program that you observed, but never really looked at. 

Our generation realizes that what is presented as ‘news’ is slanted in too many ways to count.  It isn’t limited to political slant, as there have been political newspapers for centuries.  Ideally, news would be the first draft of the history textbooks, with the least coloration possible, but it doesn’t work that way.  For instance, the essential news slant for the media of television are pictures that are striking, compelling, emotional and available, with the emphasis on available.  If there are no pictures, then the item is a talking head and might as well be dead on arrival. 

I’ll give you an example:  The Gulf War I coverage of John Holliman, Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett on CNN, from their hotel room in Baghdad.  The second is the Camp David accords, signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978.  One was a landmark geopolitical healing of ancient wounds.  One was a bombing run phoned in with occasional video snippets.  One story had night scope camera footage.  One had a picture of three world leaders shaking hands.  Which one do you remember?  Of course you remember the Gulf War stuff.  In the grand scheme of things, the Camp David accords are much more important that bombing Baghdad. 

The news is full of the Middle East right now.  Networks have their meat puppets on the ground looking all stern and frowny.  If one were to go by TV news, it would seem that everyone in Iraq has dropped tools and is watching a “Dynasty” rerun on TV.  Peace has suddenly broken out in the Korean peninsula.  This is the normal course of media events in our world and Marshall McLuhan would be doing his happy dance, if he were still alive.

News networks don’t like stories without good pictures.  Karl Rove coming out of a courtroom is not a picture.  Dubya signing a bill is not a picture.  A 105 mm artillery piece going off is a picture.  A dweeby looking American student lined up in Beirut to get on a helicopter in the US embassy courtyard is a picture.  Even better is an interview with the student and a follow up interview of the student’s parents from Buttscrape New Jersey.  Naturally, shots of artillery-devastated urban landscapes are really good pictures, along with frenzied crowds screaming in a foreign language.  Destroyed cityscapes and limp, bloody bundles in blankets are even more fabulous to the news desk. 

There is the problem.  News is gathered for the most sensational pictures that will lead to higher ratings and more advertising revenue for the news outlet.  Newspapers have played the circulation game since a week after Gutenberg figured moveable type was fun.  The internet is a huge news pipe.  The blogosphere, with big quotation marks around the word “news”, even more so.  We have forgotten that the idea of news is to give people information that will allow them to exist in their reality.  Or, at least that was the original intent behind news.

I was in Seattle last week at a corporate convention.  On Friday afternoon last week, a bent and twisted fellow walked into the Jewish Federation in downtown Seattle and shot six people.  I was about five blocks away, in my hotel room, when I heard a few too many sirens and the constant whomp of a helicopter hovering over a building a few blocks away.  Both those things twigged me that something was amiss.  I turned on the tube and live from the helicopter I could see from my hotel room, was a shot of people running out of the Jewish Federation and hot-footing it to the police lines. 

Moments later the suspect came out of the building and lay down for handcuffing.  That particular clip, shot from a helicopter 500 feet over the scene, was played at least forty-five times in the next hour.  I counted. 

Interspersed between replays of the arrest, were ground level shots of fire, ambulance and more police vehicles rolling up to the roadblocks.  There was the occasionally breathless reporter telling me that there had been an arrest and the suspect had been taken away.  I figured that one out the first time I saw the clip of him being cuffed.  But, no, I had to be told it several dozen times. 

Along with endless repetition, I got to hear some truly wild speculation, that there was a bomb in the building, there was another shooter, there was a team of shooters, it was a Hezbollah attack, it was a deranged individual and so on.  The reporters didn’t bother to follow even the most rudimentary research rules.  They just heard some wild-ass comment from a passer-by and reported it as an ‘unconfirmed report’ live from the scene.  Bouncing between the three local stations, each was striving mightily to bring the viewers as much data as possible, each trying to get cameras closer, or to be the first to report the more outlandish of claims. 

Eventually, after the police and fire departments held press conferences, did the three local stations settle on the bare bones of the actual story:  Nutjob with grudge against Jews decided to pop a bunch of folks at the Jewish Federation offices to protest the usual Israel-World Zionist rap with two parts Pan Arabic Islamic Jihadist crap.  No bombs, no gas, no other shooter, no WMD, no other parts to the story, except one dead and five wounded.  Play that helicopter clip of the arrest for the forty-sixth time.

This is where we have to be intelligent consumers of information.  Know that the electronic media needs pictures and will juggle the news lineup to fit the pictures, not necessarily the news value of the item.  If I see a news report that says something truly outrageous, I want to see corroboration by some kind of mainstream news outlet, like Reuters, AP, Canadian Press or the BBC.  Not that those outlets are impartial or unbiased, but at least they know where unbiased and impartial are located in the dictionary. 

What it comes down to is media literacy.  A wise consumer of ‘news and information’ should have one eyebrow perpetually raised in question of the veracity of the story being told:  News is supposed to be the first draft of history, but too often the media itself skews the needs of the media to the story.

Let us debunk a myth or two here:  Scientists are not cruising the city streets in blacked out vans looking to abduct pregnant women, forcibly abort their babies and steal the cells in the fetus.  There is no farm in Romania with hundreds of pregnant women lined up to have their fetuses harvested for money.  There is no Island of Doctor Moreau where crazed scientists are creating humans that lactate tomato juice mixed with vodka and can zap death rays out of their eyes. 

That is the Great Fear that Dubya has just saved America from by vetoing a House bill expanding embryonic stem cell research.

Stem cells are the undifferentiated blobs in an embryo that will eventually become bones, skin, eyelids, arseholes, twats and Presidents.  At that very, very initial point of cell division, between 50 and 150 cells, the cells have no idea what they’re going to become:  They are raw cellular material. 

By tweaking the genetic and chemical controls, you can, so the theory goes, turn them into nerves, or pancreas cells, or bone marrow, or brain cells.  Those who research human conditions, like spinal cord injuries, or brain injuries, work with human cells.  You can’t use plant or animal embryo cells on humans.  You need human cells to plug into humans.  The source of these human cells has most often been the microscopic blobs that result from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) of human eggs. 

Here’s the general mechanics of IVF.  Doctors harvest a couple of dozen eggs from the woman, by stimulating the ovaries to super-ovulate, meaning produce a lot of eggs, rather than one at a time, as is the nominal 28-day human ovulation cycle.  The eggs are collected by basically, washing the fallopian tubes and uterus with saline and filtering the stuff that washes back out.  The eggs are put in a lab dish under a microscope and sorted.  Some will be fine, ripe and ready for dancing.  A few will be odd, dead or generally off.  These are sorted out and sold as Human Caviar to the extremely wealthy.  This is just a rumor, of course.    

The man who is going to be the donor of the male genetic material, goes into the restroom with a copy of Penthouse.  He whacks off into a test tube and hands the gooey goods over to a lab tech.  The tech takes the ejaculate and centrifuges away the semen, leaving just the sperm.  Take a pipette and mix the shiny fresh eggs and nice squeaky clean sperm together.  Don’t hiccup using the pipette.  Let them roll around for an hour or two in a lab dish.  Back under the microscope and you’ll see several eggs and sperm have joined up and started cell division.  Siphon off the three or four most promising-looking and squirt them into the female’s uterus, where hopefully, one or two will attach to the uterine lining, thrive and 40 weeks later become a human infant.

There are often leftovers in the dish.  These might be dropped down the sink, or frozen and saved for future use by the couple.  Some are donated to science for stem cell research.

In the Big Shiny World of the Future, the lab coats would take these cells and through some wondrous science, grow new nerves that could be implanted in a paralyzed trucker and presto-chango:  They get up and walk to the 7-11 for a Big Gulp Mountain Dew Code Red.  We could cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Diabetes, Cystic Fibrosis, Heart failure, Crow’s Feet and Saggy Tits in an afternoon.  The problem is that nobody knows for certain that it will work.  It is a SWAG, a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess. 

Not in Dubya’s world.  The science is a done deal, just waiting on fresh white fetuses.  He’s saving the unborn.  In Dubya’s World, these are fully developed humans that could vote if only the menacing hordes of traveling abortionists could be stopped by legislation.  It plays great with the religious right wing determined to insert their meddling fingers into things they don’t understand and can’t appreciate.  It is fear-mongering for votes.

A working, effective, stem cell based treatment is probably a generation away. There are too many unanswered questions in the science to be answered.  Let’s say we can grow spinal nerves for our paralyzed trucker.  How do we insert them?  How long until the nerves start working?  Will the body reject them as foreign objects?  How long will the rehab be until the patient gets up and goes to the 7-11?  We do not have the data to even make educated guesses.

The same holds true for the cure for Parkinson’s.  We don’t know 1/12^th of 1 percent of what we think we know about the brain.  Ask a neurologist or a pharmacist to explain how Aspirin works in the brain.  They can’t tell you, because they don’t know, except to say, it works and has worked since 1899.  We’re not even at the point of saying we might be able to grow one neuron cell to replace the billions of neurons that make one neural junction in one tiny area of the brain that might have something to do with Parkinson’s.  We do not know. 

The bioethics are another matter.  I figure let the lab coats work with the best material they can get their hands on, if only to see if they can make it work.  I believe this for one simple reason:  I am a Type II diabetic.  If they can come up with a treatment, preferably a pill, (I’ll settle for a suppository) that will cure my diabetes then I’m all for it.

Just remember that the opponents of human embryonic stem cell research are against it for religious grounds, not scientific grounds and the science is at best, a long shot.

Another open microphone caught another world figure today.  A couple of weeks ago Condi Rice was overheard calling some Russian diplomat a melonhead. Today, in St. Petersberg, Dubya was caught by another open microphone saying "What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit." The comments were part of a conversation with Tony Blair regarding the Middle East insanity.  

I’m certain that the right-wing nuts will have a field day with the President cussing like a schoolyard punk.  I’m certain the left-wing nuts will demonstrate this as symptomatic of cowboy diplomacy and the failure of same.

For the rest of us in the middle, it is just the way Dubya talks.  He has a very narrow, black and white world view.  He’s a C-grade draft dodging Harvard grad for heaven’s sake.  This means he truly is an inbred idiot who knows next to nothing at the best of times, but has a good rolodex of similar inbred idiots who don’t know much more.

The shame of it, is the American people elected him a second time.  I’m not going to dig up the first theft of an election:  You already know that story and Bush got away with it without so much as one Democratic Senator agreeing to sign his/her name to dispute the results.

However, in the interests of keeping Dubya from putting both feet further into his mouth and inadvertently starting a nuclear war, a simple primer:

Microphones are always on.  Even if the red light is off, they are always on.  Ask Daddy about that, he used to head up the CIA.  The same is true with those cameras before the State of the Union address.  They’re turned on and can show you mugging like you’re at a Skull and Bones Skit Night. 

Cameras will always catch you picking your nose, or scratching your ass.  Don’t pick your nose or scratch your ass, or adjust the jewels (Johnson) or talk into a pocket memo device for “history” like Nixon.  Cameras will catch you doing it and you will look like you’re inflamed, suffering from prickly heat, or just plain crazy. 

Reporters are interested in having you mess up:  Ask Karl how to bust their balls and get them back in line.  Foreign reporters are worse, in that they don’t listen to Karl and you can’t bust their balls:  They actually report and investigate things.  You can always get their local secret police to bust their balls on your behalf.  I hear Romania does some good work for the CIA. 

The stuff they serve you at state dinners is good food. I know it isn’t coleslaw, mac and cheese, WonderBread and smoked hot links, but try to use at least one of the fancy forks.  The little bowls?  They are not for drinking out of and the lemon slice is not for your sweet tea.

Condoleeza Rice’s name was made up by her parents.  It is based on the musical term con dolce, meaning sweetly.  Her name is not Condi, or Candy, or Connie. She is a legitimate, degreed Doctor of Political Science who has actually worked a day in her life.  You might be the President, but when it comes to brains, you couldn’t cut it as the yardboy who cleans her garbage cans. 

It is nuclear, pronounced noo-Klee-ur.  Not nuk-erLer.  That big book over in the corner is a dictionary.  Get Mommy to read it to you, or The First Lady, Peggy Hill.  She’s always goin’ on about Reading being Important.

Syria and Hezbollah aren’t doing ‘shit’:  They’re trying to kill a lot of people.  They’re launching big, explosive, nasty rockets at Israel in an attempt to kill as many Israelis as possible.  Israel is trying to kill as many Lebanese and Palestinians as they can. 

It is called a war Dubya.  Like Iraq, except both sides are the bad guys and you don’t get to have Rummy put up a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier for your photo op. 

You are the one who is doing ‘shit’ as in ‘jack-shit’, by sitting on your butt and letting the military and the arms industry sell the guns and rockets and weapons to both sides in this moronic confrontation. 

You could actually do something useful at the G8.  Talk to Red Putin, TonyB, Yertle Merkel and Elvis Koipond.  See if you can cut a deal to get Bobby Assad to cool his jets.  Get Herm Olmert to cool his jets too.  Just have them come to Crawford for a barbecue:  Your treat.   

Do the beef by the way, not pork. 

The UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution today, spanking North Korea for firing off missiles into the Sea of Japan.   It took ten days to cut the deal, but the resolution essentially says:  “Smarten the hell up, dickhead!”  

The North Korean ambassador to the UN had the reply ready in under an hour.  It read:  “Blow it out your ass.”  I am simplifying a bit.   

The reply wasn’t quite as pithy as the “Nuts!” from General McAuliffe at the siege of Bastonge during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, or the banging on the desk of Nikita Khruschev in the 1960’s but it will have to do for now. 

The dialogue is also continuing in the Middle East.  Israel is sending messages to Beirut, via helicopter gunship and strike aircraft.  Hezbollah is replying with artillery and using Katyusha rockets from Iran.  The shortened form of the dialogue is “You suck!  No, you suck!  No, you Suck.  You Suck more!  No you Suck More!”  

The diplomatic rapport seems a little stilted right now, as all either side can do is plug their ears during the explosions.  After they run out of ammunition, perhaps they will try talking.  Oh, actually, they can’t run out of ammunition:  Most of the members of the Security Council are selling arms to all sides in this fruitful, important and meaningful exchange of ideas in the Middle East.

We can only hope they don’t blow the entire world to pieces.

What do you like for breakfast?  I have a warm spot for the elemental bacon sandwich.  White bread and five or six strips of crisp bacon.  Eggs are not required, but perfectly welcome. 

I have drunk my share of spirituous liquor and have some vague, but fond memories of Vietnamese rice moonshine, American white lightning and Greek raki that made my elbows stop functioning.  Scotch, however, I remember almost every glass. 

I don’t remember having a bacon sandwich and a glass of moonshine together, but it is possible.  The beauty of that meal is it is a closed system.

Take some corn, add a bit of water, mash it a bit and add yeast.  The little yeast creatures eat the naturally occurring sugar in the corn.  Since the yeast do not have cable, they do the cell division thing.  Wait a week.  You get partially digested corn mixed with very valuable yeast poop:  Alcohol.   

This how humans have made beer and wine since the dawn of time, except for beer we use barley malt with hops and crushed grapes and juice for wine.  Naturally brewed beer usually comes in at 5% alcohol; Wine generally comes in at 10% alcohol.  These are good numbers that mean if you’re in a country with bad water, drink beer or wine.  The alcohol kills the bacteria that could give you the Screaming Uranus.

However, we were talking corn originally.  It is important as you shall see.  Heat the corn slops to get the alcohol to boil off, then condense the steam and you have moonshine:  Raw, 80% ethanol. 

Do the same thing with vintage grape wine in a very specific area of France and you’re making the beginnings of Cognac.  Barley and Oats will eventually become Scottish Whisky using the same process. Potatoes will make Vodka.

You feed the leftover mash to pigs, or cows as there is still enough usable nutrition in the mash to act as a major component of livestock feed.  Cow, Pig, Ostrich, Llama or Moose:  Doesn’t matter much to them.  Most commonly it is fed to pigs.

Livestock manure, what is left of corn after being fermented, boiled and run through an animal is used add nutrients to fields to help the plants grow better.  This means more plentiful crops, which means more moonshine and bacon eventually. 

This is a good, natural, closed system.  We can have a pleasurable beverage in the evening and grow some bacon for breakfast, or yogurt or corn bread.  Except I live in a fourteenth floor highrise apartment.  I can’t have a cow and a pig up here, or grow enough corn to make it worthwhile.  Then there is the whole illegal-still-moonshiner-arrested-in-Mississauga headline in the Toronto Star. 

Alcohol is a basic organic solvent for chemists.  It can sterilize things for medical use.  It can get you so drunk you wake up three days later in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia wondering why you are not wearing pants and have a wad of Turkish money in your shirt pocket.

It is also a fuel for internal combustion engines.  As the price of oil goes up, it looks better and better to “grow” our own fuel.  We don’t have to be beholden to foreign governments, don’t have to dig it out of the ground and as long as we can grow, ferment and distill stuff, we can make more of it.  It is not ‘finite’ like oil or coal.  It is a biofuel.

The problem is the rest of the world.  They need our grain as food.  Farmers, being farmers, look at which pays better.  Corn for ethanol pays better than corn for export to the other 95% of the world that doesn’t have enough to eat. 

We can make alcohol from things other than food grains.  Wheat straw works fine.  Corn stalks will do.  Wood chips, stems from dope plants, just about anything with cellulose or starch will work.  Add some enzymes to break down the cellulose in the plant to make elemental sugars, then add the yeast.  Iogen Corporation in Ottawa is a world pioneer in efficiently producing ethanol from the stuff farmers toss away at harvest time. 

Where it falls over is in the money:  Oil companies, who are leading the production of ethanol, don’t want to make it from less than ideal things.  They want to make it out of corn or sugar cane, or beets, as that is the cheapest and fastest way to get from biomass to gas.  It costs them less to produce.  They can mark it up insanely, blame farmers for being greedy and wrap themselves in a big ol’ Green flag at the same time.

Biofuels from organic sources are going to be critical in the next few years.  We need the petroleum left to make important things, like medicines or specialized plastics that can’t be made of anything else.  Substituting biofuel for transport, heat and electricity generation is generally good.  So is solar and wind generation, as well as conservation.

There is no rational reason to take perfectly good food and make ethanol out of it to power a Chevy Suburban.  Especially if that Chevy Suburban drives from the parking garage of an 11^th floor condo in West Van to the Whole Foods store on Main.  I bet the driver feels all warm and fuzzy about using ethanol blended fuel to transport themselves and their organically grown hemp fiber reusable grocery bags to buy unbleached flour and fair-trade coffee beans.  They are doing a couple of slightly good things, but a bunch of bad things.

Food made into moonshine and bacon sandwiches is good.  Food for the rest of world to eat is even better.

Use ethanol fuel, absolutely, but question where the ethanol comes from.  Fuel from Food is almost a sin. 

On CNN right now, the Secretary General of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, is saying “Bring it, Bitch!” to Israel.  This is not a good thing.  We now have two bent and twisted parties, with weapons, getting all snotty with each other. 

They’re at it again.  The kids are acting up, jumping on the bed, punching each other and throwing things around the bedroom.  The grownups are in the living room, trying to read, against the counterpoint of bumping and banging upstairs, waiting for the inevitable “Mommmmmm!”  

Every sensible parent of more than one child that I know says they don’t worry if the kids are beating the crap out of each other.  Noise is good and as long as the children are not using chain saws, they tend to ignore it as best they can. 

What frightens parents is silence.  That spooky suspended-reality sound of nothing happening between the siblings can mean only two things, both of them bad.  The first bad thing is there has been significant bloodshed and the siblings are trying to stop the nosebleed and clean the shirt without anyone in authority findng out.   

The second bad thing is they have found/obtained/discovered the magnifying glass, or lighter fluid, or your wedding pictures.  Something very bad or personally embarrassing is now underway.  

Perhaps this is what is needed in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Gaza and the rest of the Middle East.  Personally I’d just stop coverage in North American media with anything more than a five second blurb every couple of hours:  “Those crazy buggers in the Middle East are still at it.  Now the overnight lottery numbers….”  

I hate to say we should ignore them, as that is wrong and hurts all kinds of innocent people.  However, both sides won’t listen to reason, common sense or even appeals to humanitarian aid for the innocent on any side.  Revenge is all they know. 

Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist, has finally admitted he testified in an investigation about the outing of Valerie Plame.  I have some grudging admiration for Novak, despite his politics.  He’s a little too right wing for my tastes, but he’s thorough and has a pragmatic streak in his suggestions that I can at least appreciate.

Novak admitted to releasing his sources to the investigation.  His sources confirmed that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative.  That Valerie Plame was married to Joe Wilson was immaterial or perhaps not as we will see.

The backstory is important.  Joe Wilson was an ambassador.  Wilson went to Niger before the Iraq war to see if there was any truthiness to rumors that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy nuclear materials on the black market for a weapon of mass destruction.  

The allegations were that Valerie Plame wearing her CIA hat, suggested her partner Joe, go to Niger and get the goods.  Joe did, the goods were bullshite and Joe said so out loud.  

Think back to Dubya and Colin Powell, specifically a State of the Union address and Colin at the UN:  Hell, yeah he’s doing it.  We got proof!  Pictures! Pie Charts! Graphs! Illustrations! Axis of Evil!  Al Qaeda!  Wilson’s comments at the time were emphatically unwanted by the Administration.

The proof, we found out later, was based on unverified and fabricated British and CIA sources.  The evidence fell apart faster than a Wal-Mart dress shirt in the dryer once US soldiers started walking around in Iraq, actually looking for WMD’s.

To slap Joe Wilson, someone decided that outing his wife, Valerie Plame, would be appropriate.  Not only does it blow Wilson away as a credible source of any valid criticism, but it also gives the CIA one up the side of the head for not delivering perfect WMD evidence and botching the discreet overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the 90’s.

Outing a CIA agent is illegal in the US and carries some serious penalties.  Telling nose-stretchers to a Grand Jury is also illegal.  This is why Scooter Libby is in a world of hurt.  Scooter lied to a grand jury about outing Plame to a reporter, Judith Miller, of the NYTimes.  Judith Miller spent 85 days in the can for refusing to reveal her sources.

Novak was one of the other reporters who were told about Valerie Plame.  The sources, according to Novak were Karl Rove and Bill Harlow, an ex-CIA spokesperson.  There was one other human that Novak will not name publicly, as his primary source.  Rove and Harlow confirmed the primary source.

The reason Novak gave up his sources to Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald are easy enough to understand:  Novak was going to get his financial and professional nuts cut off and served back to him on a plate.  Confronted with financial ruin and jail time, Novak reluctantly caved and gave up all three names.

What does this all mean?  It is a chain of things that are suggested or inferred.  

Things point back to the Executive branch of the US Government as the most likely source of the leak:  Clerks and receptionists don’t have that kind of data or are too scared to open their mouths.  Only those who feel they are immune from prosecution would consider leaking that kind of information to a journalist.

It suggests that Joe Wilson might have been right about the WMD/Iraq/Saddam Hussein evidence, as why else would they out his wife, but to muzzle Wilson?  It would also show anyone thinking of varying from the speaking points should think twice about opening their mouths.

Assuming Joe Wilson was right, why wouldn’t a government want the truth to come out?  That’s easy enough:  The decision to fight a war was already taken.  The speaking points were already written.  The public hadn’t quite fully swallowed the meal, but it was in their mouth.  Dissent would cause the American public to spit it out.

Now, the troubling question:  When was the decision taken to start some kind of issue with Iraq and Saddam Hussein that might lead to a war? 

The implied story has logic to it:  Someone wanted to solve the Iraq problem once and for all by getting Saddam Hussein, a loose cannon, off the Baghdad big chair, leaving a legacy of Middle East Peace in Our Time.  The Legacy Someone.

Something was needed to push the Iraqi population into overthrowing Saddam Hussein.  The CIA tried a couple of times in the 90’s to tip it over and failed.  Problem:  Saddam Hussein had layers of secret police burying dissenters and all their relatives in unmarked mass graves.  The population couldn’t rise up.  The Oil for Food sanctions were starving them to death slowly, while the Ba’ath party and the Iraqi army were eating fine.

This Legacy Someone needed a provocation.  The UN weapons inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors said something was smelly in Iraq, but they had nothing that could be pinned to a wall, despite trying hard. 

The UN wasn’t willing to step it up a notch into a police action.  It would take at least two years to pull together a coalition like 1991.  That wouldn’t happen until the UN had exhausted every diplomatic possibility including Rock, Paper, Scissors with Tariq Azziz.

Iraq shooting at Israel might, or might not, do as a reason to invade Iraq.  The implied danger being Saddam Hussein is capable of popping a few at Israel and just to be pissy, adding chemical weapons to the ends of a couple of Scuds, like 1991. 

Israel might respond by turning Iraq into radioactive ashes.  That wouldn’t play in the US homeland:  Too foreign, too dangerous and too abstract the preventing of something that might not happen.  It would position Israel as a bunch of nuclear crazies with itchy trigger fingers.

Defending Israel also opens up the question of who actually supplied weapons to both sides in the Middle East.  It would be very embarrassing for France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia and the United States to have it well known that they play all sides against all sides, as long as the cash comes first.

Shooting at US aircraft in the No-Fly zones didn’t play.  A starving Iraqi population, with desperate humanitarian needs, nope.  Afghan drug lords?  Nope. 

Ensuring the US oil supply?  Too Imperialist and it would annoy Saudi Arabia.  The House of Saud is in trouble with local loons who think the Royal family is too cozy with the US as it is.

It had to be something to get the population of the US onside for a short, fast, war against Iraq:  An obvious black and white event that everyone could get behind. 

The calendar turned over to September 11^th 2001. 

The Legacy Someone linked it together:  A Saudi cement-head, Osama Bin Laden (Shhh..He’s not Saudi, he’s a terrorist hiding in caves) is being supported by Afghani Taliban cement heads and (wait for it…) Saddam Hussein who will sell them Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Outing Valerie Plame was nothing more a slap to keep a few people in line.  It is barely a parenthetical footnote that Novak gave up his sources.

The real story, where an unmuzzled Robert Novak should now spend time, is when was the decision to attack Iraq taken and who called it.

This just in from the Associated Press  “(Washington) by Ted Bridis:  The State Department is recovering from large-scale computer break-ins worldwide over the past several weeks that appeared to target its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, The Associated Press has learned.” 

“Investigators believe hackers stole sensitive U.S. information and passwords and implanted backdoors in unclassified government computers to allow them to return at will, said U.S. officials familiar with the hacking. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the widespread intrusions and the resulting investigation.”

Every nation considers information warfare to be a cornerstone of warfighting.  Take away the communications and you take away the ability to react quickly or tactically to something.  In older conflicts it was cutting down telephone and telegraph wires.  Today, the telephone technology is internet-based:  Western Union doesn’t do telegrams anymore.  

So Who Done It?  The list is as long as your arm, but the two areas the hackers wanted to get into was the China and North Korea desks at the State Department.  This makes me think it wasn’t the Jamaican National Security Service.