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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