meehawl

Karl Rove, the power behind the throne, is
being
blamed for the treaso
nous smear campaign
agains
t the CIA
investigator J
oseph
Wilson who
called him on hi
s
Iraq-Nig
er-Uranium
fantasies. I
t seems Rove’s been in trouble before for dirt
y tricks, and ba
ck in 1992 he even use
d the same propagandizing journalist, Robert Novak, as he did for the recent CIA outing.

Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.

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The focus on Rove brought an odd twist to Bush’s travels. When the president boarded Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, he walked up the steps and waved — and not a single camera followed. He looked perplexed. All lenses were trained on Rove at the bottom of the steps.

How things change… From Altercation, I note that his Dad himself once said:

I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.

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How rigged is the bidding process in Iraq to reward almost exclusively US companies with tens of billions of dollars of cash? Very, according to Iraq Revenue Watch. Time and again the bidding qualifications have been constructed to shut out non-US companies, and especially local Iraqi and Middle Eastern companies. Iraq’s mobile phone mess is a case in point. A Bahraini company was able to set up a high-volume cell phone network within days of the US occupation of Baghdad, but being GSM (and not Qualcomm’s CDMA) and local, the occupation regime hated it and ordered it closed.

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Eating red meat introduces a potentially dangerous molecule into the body tissues … Humans cannot produce the molecule - a type of sugar - but it occurs at high levels in lamb, pork and beef … because the molecule is not naturally present in the body, it is viewed as an invader by the immune system.

An alien sugar molecule that gets into human cells from eating red meat and dairy products triggers an immune system response that could lead to the inflammation believed to be involved in heart disease, cancer and other illnesses

Not produced in humans, Neu5Gc occurs naturally in lamb, pork and beef, the so-called “red meats”. Levels are very low or undetectable in fruits, vegetables, hen’s eggs, poultry and fish.

Ajit Varki has found that this nasty complex sugar, Neu5Gc, is probably toxic, possibly carcinogenic, and most interestingly, that human sensitivity to this red meat-associated chemical happened quite recently in human evolutionary history.

Humans are genetically deficient in the common mammalian sialic acid N-glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc) because of an Alu-mediated inactivating mutation of the gene encoding the enzyme CMP-N-acetylneuraminic acid (CMP-Neu5Ac) hydroxylase (CMAH). This mutation occurred after our last common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees, and before the origin of present-day humans.

The human cDNA contains a 92-bp deletion resulting in a frameshift mutation. The isolated human gene also shows evidence for this deletion. Genomic PCR analysis indicates that this deletion does not occur in any of the African great apes. The gene is localized to 6p22-p23 in both humans and great apes, which does not correspond to known chromosomal rearrangements that occurred during hominoid evolution.

Interesting… It seems that modern humans are in fact less suited to eat red meat and dairy products than our ape ancestors. Evolution in action?

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You must make voters hate the government. There’s a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don’t pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these “lucky duckies.” (Yes, that’s what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as The Journal said, to get their “blood boiling with tax rage.”
…
If Grover Norquist is right — and he has been right about a lot — the coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians — in the name of fiscal necessity — to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.

In Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

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Clever idea - make an ugly SUV with more faults out of the factory than any other available consumer vehicle, name it after a slang term for blowjobs, then ensure it qualifies for a special “heavy as fuck” tax dodge.

“Allow me to introduce you to a fabulous opportunity,” Chris Thorpe, a sales representative for Hummer of Alaska, writes in a promotion letter. “A tax ‘loophole’ so big you could drive a Hummer H2 through it! Imagine being able to purchase the #1 large luxury SUV in America today . . . and receive a deduction for the entire purchase amount from your taxes this year!” “How is this possible?” … “Thanks to the Bush administration’s recent economic stimulus package, small businesses and the self-employed are eligible to deduct the entire purchase cost of new equipment up to $100,000 the year of the purchase.” … “The Hummer H2 qualifies for this IRS Sec. 179 deduction by its gross vehicle weight of over 6,000 lbs. Cars and medium sized SUV’s don’t qualify for this deduction,”

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Discovery of such remnants of Iraq’s drone program since U.S. forces seized Baghdad in April has left Air Force officials feeling vindicated. They argued before the Iraq war that the drones were never meant to spread toxins but to fly unarmed reconnaissance missions.

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Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime last April, Iraq’s resuscitated oil industry has been unable to produce enough gasoline, cooking oil and other petroleum products to meet the country’s needs. Houston-based Halliburton Co., the contractor hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to repair the dilapidated energy infrastructure, has been ordered to bring refined products into the country. So far, U.S. taxpayers have spent some $562 million under the Halliburton contract to bring in gasoline and other fuels.

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The descent into barbarism in the Middle East proceeds apace.

A Palestinian gunman killed two people, one of them a baby girl, and wounded two more when he opened fire tonight on an Israeli family celebrating the Jewish New Year.

I’m with Michael Moore on this one. As he pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, how can you teach children to grow up with empathy and accommodation for others when they see the Great Powers in the like the US promote not negotiation and restraint in the Middle East but instead violence, warfare, and rapine as a way of “solving” disputes. A “Partner for Peace” my arse.

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One of the most astute commentators on the Middle East, Edward Said died today of leukemia. I will miss his insight, and the looney racist desperation of his detractors.

Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being ill for a long period of time fills the spirit with a terrible feeling of helplessness, but also with periods of analytic lucidity, which, of course, must be treasured. For the past three months now I have been in and out of the hospital, with days marked by lengthy and painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless tests, hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at the ceiling, draining fatigue and infection, inability to do normal work, and thinking, thinking, thinking.

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