You can't throw money at this problem and expect it to be fixed.

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Updated in light of today's news that kangaroo centers, petting zoos and ice cream parlors are included in Homeland Security's list of vulnerable terrorist targets:

If Its Broken, Why Haven't They Fixed It?

Fort Knox is robbed in an unusual way. Burglars break in through an air conditioning vent and shine a laser at the video cameras to blind them. Billions are stolen.

The head of Fort Knox (let's call him the Chief) announces that no one could have foreseen this type of burglary.

The commission investigating the robbery -- stacked with the Chief's business partners and friends -- finds that the break-in was unexpected. The commission makes numerous suggestions on how to thwart similar burglaries by installing motion detectors in the air conditioning vents and main vault.

Independent researchers, however, discover that there have been many previous break-ins at repositories of valuable items where the burglars crawled in through the air conditioning vents and shined lasers at video cameras.

They also discover that the Fort's security system would normally have caught the burglars in the act and alerted the military in time to stop the burglarly, but the system was undergoing a series of safety tests that night -- including some that were similar to what actually occurred -- and so the military assumed that the alarms were part of the test.

There had been safety tests before, but never so many at the same time. The Chief personally scheduled multiple, overlapping tests for the night of the robbery, and then oversaw the operation of the tests and the Fort's reaction to those tests.

Years pass, but the Chief does not follow the commission's recommendations. He fails to install any motion detectors.

That's circumstantial evidence that the Chief was in on the heist. Why? Because if the robbery really had not been foreseeable and if he was innocent, he would have a very strong incentive to install motion detectors to prevent further robberies at the Fort. His personal reputation, the government's reputation, and its gold reserves would all depend on it. You can bet that he'd shore up the Fort's defenses.

Perks

Let's take it a step further: the Chief's personal bank account has suddenly gotten alot bigger after the heist. That helps to prove he was in on it, right? But it also shows that one of the reasons the Chief is leaving the Fort's defenses in a compromised state now is so that additional heists can occur, and he'll get more loot.

9/11

Similarly, the 9-11 Commission -- stacked with cronies of the Bush administration (like executive director Philip Zelikow, who is very close to administration hawk Condoleeza Rice, and steered the Commission away from the most important lines of inquiry) -- found that the attacks were unexpected, despite very strong evidence that they were not, and despite the fact that the government scheduled numerous, overlapping war games for 9/11 -- some involving a plane flying into a building and others involving hijackings.

And while the 9-11 Commission made numerous recommendations on how to prevent future terrorist attacks -- many of them simple and inexpensive to implement -- the Bush administration has failed to do so. Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security, instead of protecting vulnerable targets, has instead randomly made up lists which include kangaroo centers, petting zoos and
ice cream parlors as high-priority terrorist threats.

Just like with the Chief, the current administration's failure to make the recommended and preventative changes -- many of them cheap fixes -- despite billions being spent on supposed homeland security, is strong evidence that the administration was in on it.

This is especially true because the administration has recieved so many perks from 9/11: justification for wars in Afghanistan (where a huge oil pipeline benefitting American companies was being held up by the Taliban) and Iraq (one of the world's largest oil producers), permanent military bases in the Middle East, and consolidation of power at home.

And by failing to implement the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission, the administration keeps open the possibility that another terrorist attack will occur which will whip the now-dissenting American public into line, justify the invasion of Iran, and allow for the suspension of our remaining constitutional rights.

The bottom line is that the administration's, like the Chief's, inaction to fix the alleged holes in security which allowed supposedly unforeseeable crimes to occur shows that they are guilty of the crimes, and hope to benefit from additional crimes in the future.

And if foreign terrorists really had carried out 9/11, why is the government using all of its resources spying on innocent people who obviously have never met a terrorist in their life?

You guys really do need to bring in some credible sources. The reality is that companies don't like unions, not because unions put them in a financial hole, but because they cut down on the profit margin (aka CEO wallets). Again, the republican goal is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. This is a perfect example of that. You guys gripe about the CEO payoffs from the 700B bailout, but support an idea (killing unions) that essentially does the same thing.

I work for MQ. If we had had a union for MTs, then we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.

While it's impossible to be completely prepared for a downturn of this magnitude, we began priming ourselves for a weakening economy earlier last year. We implemented strict cost cutting measures across all our operations. We reduced head count in individual businesses where appropriate and we scaled back on capital expenditures.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/118935-news-corporation-f2q09-qtr-end-12-31-08-earnings-call-transcript?page=3

cabbages and rotten eggs at the guy. Where do you get the 'nads to stand up there and keep sellin' when the customers just ain't buyin'? And whether he's one of the 'good ones' or not, he sounds just like every other politician, doesn't he? 'I've devoted my life to service.....You're mad. I hear you and Washington hears you.' Riiight! I hope we don't lose our fury and momentum before next year. A good out with the old/in with the new dustup in 2010 would have them shaking in their shoes for 2012.

Maybe we should acknowlege that whoever volunteers for the job has ulterior motives.

What if we then select our candidates at random, like we do jurors for jury duty. We select a slate of candidates that are average people with average lives, give them the chance to decline or get excused for good reason, then give them time to present a platform and vote on which one of them gets the office. Derails the good old boy network completely. We couldn't guarantee the new candidates wouldn't be greedy, but their greed would at least be less organized and not part of the sophisticated behind the scenes network that exists today.

out the tests for those firerighters who studied hard and earned those promotions and didn't get them merely because they were all white with one hispanic man. To me...that is racism right there. They didn't get the promotions because of their skin color. Had they been a more motley crew of races, they would have gotten those promotions. It is truly a sad day when hard work and studying doesn't benefit you because your skin color isn't that of a minority.

I'm all for equal rights between the races and all of these firefighters were given the same studying materials and the same amount of time to study. How can you take away those promotions from the people who studied hard and scored the highest merely because most of them are white?

This doesn't present a very good opinion of this judge so far to me. She also made a comment about how with her experience and her being a latino women, she could make better decisions than a white male. Racism? Hello? If a white man had said that he could make better decisions than a black man, woman, or latino.....OMG.....the race card would have been thrown out and that would have been the end of his career. Why is it that minorities are allowed to say racist things and be racist and that is okay, but the moment a white person says something remotely racist.......that is the end of that person's career. More double standards.

With all the hoop-lah about Obama "refusing" to submit to interview with Focks, seems McCain is throwing another temper tantrum (which I did see on CNN, but could not find to include in this post. He cancelled his scheduled appearance on Larry King over what he considered to be an "over-the-top" inerview between Campbell Brown and Tucker Bounds.

Here's a link to an article about the cancellation. I could not get good audio on their link to the interview video, so I am providing this second link where I could:

There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on The Early Show on CBS. Last week the setting was Today on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.

As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts, Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in Psycho. Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the �ber-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group.

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that the intelligence and facts about Iraq's W.M.D.'s were being fixed around the policy of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in A Pretext for War, writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage.

The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's escalation of nuclear rhetoric could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about uranium from Africa in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took responsibility for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

It was not until the war was supposedly over - with Mission Accomplished, in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were not involved with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as Bush's brain, he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

Bush's Brain is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in Bush's Brain, bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by a layer of operatives from any ill behavior that might implicate him. There is no crime, just a victim, Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another victory for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

Didn't realize you cornered the market. But, hey, if you want some Bible verses, I can pitch a few of those too.

Sorry if I offended you, but I imagine the OP was perhaps a little offended at your insinuation that she was a paranoid lunatic. Well, as momma always said, if you can't take the heat...

FOR SURE. I would expect anyone, especially someone proclaiming to be a Christian, to deny this fact emphatically.

give me enough to pay off my mortgage or feed my family for 4 years, so I'll just hope for the gas money and the flat screen TV.